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

Transformations and personal phases

0:00I am going to just hop into it. Take advantage of everybody being here.

0:30Thanks for joining. There are a lot of questions submitted, hundreds upon hundreds, narrowed that down to a few dozen, and I will answer a handful and then we'll hop to the live feed and answer questions there. So the first question is from Christine. Over the years, we've watched you going through quite a transformation from a driven, hyper-optimized, logical business investor to a grounded, relationship-focused man talking openly about trauma, mental health struggles, and meditation. What are your comments on the transformation? And for someone who is still stuck in the driven, hyper-optimized, logical phase and sees that they need to change

1:03something, what advice would you give? So the first observation or perhaps question I would pose in response to that is, are you stuck? Maybe you're not stuck. And I say that because my shift certainly eventually, and it took me decades to get there, focusing on addressing childhood sexual abuse and so on, which I've written about extensively, so I won't belabor it here and drag people into that, was because I recognized over time that the 17 separate problems

1:38I thought were separate were in fact all stemming from this unaddressed elephant room that required some, I don't want to say handling, maybe it's metabolizing, maybe it's revisiting, maybe it's recontextualizing as an adult. So that was a necessary step for me. I couldn't proceed past go without addressing that. I don't think everyone requires that. And there are tools I think that almost anyone can benefit from that may steer you towards introspection or more internal validation

2:14versus external validation. Like some of you will recognize this, the book Awareness by Anthony DeMello. I still read it at least once a year. There are frameworks that I think nearly anyone can benefit from like IFS, internal family systems. And I did a live session on this podcast with the founder of IFS, Richard Schwartz. I would caution though, that just as you frame the question as being stuck in a driven, hyper-optimized phase, it is just as easy, if not easier, to get stuck in doing the

2:51quote-unquote work. And you only have to visit Austin to see what I'm talking about. There are lots of people who can't seem to get past a hyper-reflective, never-ending cycle of polishing the self. And I think that any obsession with the self, whether that is validated by others through your bank account or achievements, or getting pats on the back for doing the quote-unquote work, is poisonous and

3:26excess. The dose makes the poison, and I think it applies here. So I would say maybe you're not stuck, number one. That deserves some examination. But I do think Awareness, IFS, there are a handful of things that anyone that I know certainly has benefited from or can benefit from. So I would start there. So I'll leave it there for now. The next question is from Mike R. Much of your work focuses on reversible experiments, but the stakes of reinvention rise in your late 40s, when career,

3:56family, health, plus financial responsibilities make big moves harder to test. How would you distinguish a genuine next chapter from an impulse to escape your current life? Would you use a 30-day experiment, or is there a better framework for evaluating a major career-slash-life pivot? So I'm going to try to keep this short, but I would say read a blog post by Derek Sivers that is titled, There Are Always More Than Two Options. And you can find that very easily, but it is S-I-V-E dot R-S slash options. And let's see if I can pull this up for a second.

4:36And in effect, he says, when people say they only have two options, it means they got stuck. Once people get two options, they start comparing pros and cons of those two and forget to think of more. As an example, a friend was trying to decide whether to stick with this frustrating job or quit and start his own company. I suggested some other options. This is all reading from his blog post. Bullet number one, build your new company outside of work hours. Do this until the income from the new company is 50% of your salary, then quit. Bullet two, show up to your job, but secretly just work for your own company all day. Do this until you get fired. Bullet three, bring your new company idea

5:07to your boss and propose it as a division of their company so you can stay on salary. Last bullet, do neither and move to New Zealand to be a tour guide. After exploring more options, my friend realized that he didn't actually want to start a new business. He was just avoiding fixing his current situation. All right. I'm not saying that's the case for you, Mike, but I would say that you probably have a lot of options you could list out if you took the time. And we all fall prey to the A versus B trap, but there's, you can always come up

5:37with C, D, E, F, and G. So that would be step number one for me. And then beyond that, I would say write down all the things that you find might lead you to want to escape your current life, right? What are those? And I think a lot about something that Chris Bosch shared in a conversation with me on this podcast. He's an 11 time NBA all-star. And he talked about in the context of gratitude, metaphorically, if you were to sit around a table and he might've been crediting someone else,

6:12but if you had five people and they all put all their problems on the table, you would pick your problems right back up. So sometimes your problems seem really bad because you are most intimate with what you experience. But if you were to take all of the insecurities and friction and challenges and relationship woes of your five best friends, put everything on a table, you might rush to pick up your own problems again. So I would say that as a thought exercise, that is also valuable. 30 day experiments. I'm always a fan of two to four week experiments, but you don't have to make

6:45it binary. You could do it after hours. You could do it on the weekends. This is something that I've recommended in the four hour work week with respect to developing your own businesses or lifestyle muses. And I still think it applies to many, many, many different things. And coming back to dose, there may be something that you really enjoy in small doses. And this also harkens back to a story in the four hour work week, which dives into, let's just say surfing. If you love surfing,

7:17maybe on the weekends, because it is an alternative, a contrast to what you do throughout the week, that does not mean that you would enjoy surfing as your job if you had it as an obligation from Monday to Friday. So you want to expand the volume of something like that to test the hypothesis before you jump from A to B. So I'm not sure if that answers your question super directly, but that's how I might try to think through it. All right. Next question is from Nathan B. And he talks about,

7:49you know, his father watched electricity reaches community and these various technological changes over time. And then I'll hop to the crux of the question. So in effect, AI feels different. And I would agree with that. Not merely another tool, but that, that, that, that, that five-year predictions now seem almost unserious. So here's my question. If you were a capable, but non-famous intellectually curious person responsible for protecting and providing for a family determined to remain useful, healthy, financially resilient, and morally grounded, what concrete practices,

8:24skills, relationships, and experiments would you prioritize during the next 12 months to prepare for the coming decade? So that is a tall order. It's a very good question. I don't know if I can, and I don't think it would be helpful actually maximally for me to try to parse that into each bullet point, but I can tell you how I've been thinking about this with respect to teaching children or upskilling yourself or maybe creating a flak jacket of sorts. And I have approached this from

8:57dozens of different angles and I keep coming back to learning, asking questions, written and verbal communications, and negotiating. Those are a handful of skills that I think will remain constant. And I could defend each of those, but I will say that with AI and certainly with so many people having their massive bank accounts and net worths tied into this, there is a lot of selling of all of the

9:27change that is coming. And there is a lot of change that is already here and it's going to accelerate. But the more things change, the more certain things I think remain constant. The necessity of in real life, close human relationships is not going away as a prerequisite for mental and spiritual health, that social component. We can just call it social health, which includes all of that. But I would focus on learning and this is going to sound like I'm shilling my own bags here, but the meta learning section of the four hour chef, I think the four hour chef is a book who tried to do too much,

10:00but the very first section, which is something like 80 pages on meta learning, I do think is worth a revisit if you haven't in a while. And learning once you try to break it down into its constituent building blocks really comes down in many cases to asking questions. And the asking of questions is important, not just for interviewing other people or asking questions of other people to try to separate fact from fiction. It's equally important for asking yourself questions. And this is where all things are

10:35interrelated and awareness by Anthony DeMello and so on will tie into this 80-20 analysis. It's really a collection of questions for examining your assumptions and separating signal from noise. So we come down to asking questions and then we have written communications and verbal communication. I think in many cases, and Kevin Kelly, for instance, the founding editor of Wired Magazine would say that he doesn't write what he knows. He writes in order to better understand what he thinks, to figure

11:09out what he thinks. And I don't think these are going away. Sure, you could try to just walk and talk into an LLM and I do that as well. But there's a lot of bias built into that, not just by the people who design systems, but by the force of memory function across different chats and threads, you're going to get a lot of self-reinforcing feedback. So I do think getting offline, like I did today, I spent 90% of my day today with pen and paper. Maybe that just dates me as a boomer, but I don't think so.

11:41It removes distraction and I'm able to be much more non-linear off of a keyboard where I have to hit return. I really like to use arrows and so on. So anything that will improve written comms, there are many books on this, certainly on Writing Well by Zinsser. Verbal comms, it's going to sound so antiquated, but like join a local Toastmasters or something like that. Get used to standing up and talking. And that would be on the group side and then separately negotiating. That's not going anywhere. So learning how to propose and craft deal structure for, in most cases, ideally win-win

12:20outcomes, but that's not reality 100% of the time. But negotiating, whether that's, and these are some older callbacks for me, but I think it's The Secrets of Power Negotiating by Dawson. I remember had a huge impact on me. Getting Past No had a large impact on me. There are other books that provide frameworks, and I've interviewed a lot of these people. So you can also look at the archive of the podcast for people involved with the Harvard Negotiating Project. And I actually interviewed one of the co-authors of Getting to Yes. I think it's William Urie. And those are all worth jumping

12:51into. But learning, asking questions, written comms, verbal comms, and negotiating is really where I would focus. I think that those are meta skills that can be applied across disciplines to almost everything and anything. That's probably where I would focus. In terms of morally grounded, I mean, man, read philosophy. Philosophy is not for people in academic ivory towers. In my opinion, if you look back, it's learning how to live. And I think that you can establish consistent moral codes.

13:26Religion would be another option, certainly. Not averse to that. There are many different paths to the same goal, which is having rules that you follow consistently that allow you to view yourself as a morally grounded person.

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16:06All right. Next is from Mason H. When you returned from your sabbatical in 2024. So FYI, on the 10th anniversary of the podcast, some of you might remember I took a four-month hiatus where we republished episodes. I didn't record or publish any new episodes. And part of this was to experiment with killing the golden goose. Does the world end when I bench the goose for a short period of time? And I had a lot of fear around that. Turns out, as with most

16:38fears, it was ungrounded and it was fine. Here's the question. When you returned from your sabbatical in 2024, you set a new set of rules for the kind of podcast you were going to do moving forward. Which of those rules have made it in the last two years? And which do you discard? Any generalizable insights for those of us trying to stay in blue oceans in our own endeavors? So the last part about generalizing, I would say, if you haven't read it, read the blue ocean strategy. It is going to be increasingly critical and important. And

17:11certainly for a lot of businesses existential in the coming years, this is going to become more and more valuable real estate to figure out how to navigate. All right. So the blue ocean strategy, the other generalizable insight would be fear setting. Use that exercise. You can find it for free online. I did a Ted talk about it. You don't have to buy anything. Use that to stress test your fears related to any action. What is holding you back, right? What are the costs of an action? It's all laid out very clearly. So look at that. But to answer your question, I thought, why rely on my recollection?

17:46Because sometimes our own assessments and recollection, memory is an act of creating or recreating might be self-serving. I might hallucinate to look at things more favorably. So I asked one of my key employees what his answer would be. And the rules that stuck, which ended up being very gratifying, number one, no book launching episodes. So changing the rules around book launches, that was probably the biggest change. Just did not want to be in the podcastosphere rotation of the

18:18same guests being on 20 podcasts at a time. Number two, living legends. I wanted to interview people who are older, who perhaps had either not been on podcasts or might not be on many podcasts before they could no longer do that and operate at a high level for a few hours. So we had Andrew Wylan, 84, Richard Thaler, 80, Tish Robbie, 74, Wade Davis, 72, David White, Frank Miller, Danny Hillis. There are many examples. And whether or not these episodes had maximum downloads, I would not expect

18:53them to because a lot of these names are relatively unknown compared to celebrities, certainly. And everything is being pushed to short clips with name recognition or sensational stuff. And I try to avoid both of those. I really enjoyed doing this. And the only way I'm going to have any endurance in playing any game I choose to play, which includes podcasting, is if I enjoy doing it. Because if I enjoy doing it, I have this prerequisite foundational layer of energy, which allows me in turn to have tension, which allows me to take advantage of time and outlast trends. And I could still be a fatality,

19:29right? If everything gets pushed to LLMs or whatever, but you get the idea. Number three, experiments. So co-hosting episodes with like Nick Kokonis, Kevin Kelly, I should do more of that. And so it was nice to do this review. Thank you for the question. Guided meditations with Henry Shookman, the Meditation Mondays. If you haven't had a chance to check those out, go check them out. You will feel better if you incorporate them. Tim's Founder Kitchen, haven't given up on that one. I'm going to do more of that. That actually had a lot of impact pie in the scenes, but again, wasn't one of the most downloaded episodes of the last year. But in terms of impact and a few very

20:05important ways that we were tracking that are not reflected on Spotify or Apple podcasts, very successful. And then the Simplify Your Life episodes, which I really, really, enjoyed doing those compilations. Then we had a couple of household names, right? We had a handful of household names, Tim McGraw and so on, which were fun. So that 90-10 split, meaning I'm going to interview people in a barbell strategy who are either relatively unknown, like Tish Robbie, who is the heir apparent of Dr. Seuss. Amazing story. You should check it out. Last name is spelled R-A-B-E or

20:40Tim McGraw, right? Almost everybody, let's just say within certain demographics, knows who that is. A lot of fun. And people also who have just not been on podcasts, like Steve Young. So that is the answer to that question. And I'm going to do one more, and then I'm going to hop into the live questions, and we'll grab a couple. So I will hop in in just a second. All right, the next one is from Alec B. And my answer will be pretty short to this. Then we'll hop into the live chat in a second.

21:13I'm a therapist, so building emotional closeness is literally my job, and it's always come easy with women. But I've never cracked male friendship. If you were a 30-something with zero old friend groups to lean on, what's the actual first move, and how do you get past how weird it feels to initiate with another guy? All right, let me tell a story first. So I was in the mountains of Montana with a small group of guys. This has shown up in some of my writing a couple months ago. And we're sitting around this fire chatting, and we're having these really deep conversations

21:46after a full day of activities together. So while we're doing the activities, we're hiking, we're carrying weight, we're tending llamas, long story. We're fishing, we're climbing over rocks and doing stuff that is somewhat dangerous. All of that is activities together. And then late at night, I think there was some tea, there might have been some whiskey, who knows. And later on, we're going to grab some really magnified binoculars and look at the full moon standing up on a rock,

22:16which ended up being incredible, by the way, if you have something with a stabilizer. But while we were around the fire, we're having this very deep conversation. And one of the guys there said, you know why this works so well? And he said, you know, I also perhaps men in particular, and I'm not saying this is limited to men, but love fire so much is no eye contact. You're staring at the fire. It's not some weird like sit down session where two guys are staring at each other, which I think activates some type of millions of year old machinery that reads as threat. We're just sitting

22:53around a fire. No one's making eye contact. It's kind of dark. And we're talking about all of this deep stuff, right? But it was a relatively small percentage of the total day. And this is a long way of saying that I think men and women are pretty different. And women are much more adept at the face-to-face verbal social element for lots of fantastic evolutionary reasons. And I think men just require, and I'm talking about like, I guess, like a heteronormative, whatever, whatever, but maybe

23:27not. That's my reference point, of course, is shared activities. Men just bond in different ways. And I've tried both. I've tried everything in between. I've tried the extremes and I would just find activities. There was another question from someone else about moving to a new city. How would you build relationships? My answer would be to really have all of it revolve around shared activities. So take your pick. Is it morning swims? I like to do something active. Is it rock climbing? Is it

24:00fill in the blank? Something inherently social where you have a partner or people you're working with. Maybe it's a run that is followed by some beers on fill in the blank place. There's a lot of this stuff out there, but those are some of my thoughts may not be the most research supported, but I think it's evolutionarily supported. And certainly when I look at all of my male friends who have the closest male friendships, whether they are from 20 years ago or from a year or two ago, shared projects or

24:35shared activities is the answer. And I have some relatively new male friendships, say with Alon Lee and like, have we had a lot of deep conversations? Yeah. But did we spend a year like building a car game together? Yes. You get to see kind of through the cracks and indirectly talk about a lot of deep stuff without actually opening the kimono and talking about it head on. And that's one example that comes to mind. All right. Long answer, but let's hop into the live questions. I'm going to see

25:11what we have here. Thank you, Hannah. Love your episodes with women authors like Anne Lamott, Liz Gilbert, Marga Atwood, and Cheryl Strayed. Yeah, for sure. Mary Carr is also just phenomenal. If you haven't heard that one, check that one out, please. All right. Looking at a couple of other things. Question about the Saint protocol. This is a TMS protocol that I've used for generalized anxiety disorder and OCD. I have actually tested a number of things since. Saint can be incredibly effective. Getting in some people 70 to, or I should say some groups of people, 70 to 80% remission

25:45in treatment resistant depression, things like that. So it's accelerated TMS. You're applying basically a paddle or a helmet to your head to affect different brain regions. And sometimes it's not so much a chemical issue. You just have anatomical structures that are kind of firing in the wrong order, right? This is if you were trying to say, drive a manual car, but you were using the clutch and shifting the gears and so on out of order. You kind of have to get those in the right sequence. And I'm simplifying, but this is one way to look at it. There is a company that I recently got involved

26:20with maybe six to 12 months ago called Ampa Health, A-M-P-A. And Jonathan Downer, Dr. Jonathan Downer is involved with this company and they have developed a one day protocol. So instead of five which is sane, you're getting 10 stimulations a day, it's pretty much all you're doing for a week. What they've done is compress that into a single day with what they call the 1D protocol. They pre-administer a drug called d-cycloserine, which is actually an antibiotic. They just give you a small amount. That induces, helps induce plasticity. So I was able to get three to four months of complete

26:58relief after one day, which is bananas. I mean, it still blows my mind. And I'm focused at this point more on these ultra condensed, possibly pharmacologically enhanced options because most people can't take five days off of work. Most people can't afford what is involved in traveling to five days of treatment. But a single day suddenly really opens up the aperture of who this could help. So I am paying a lot of attention to that area and might have more on that soon.

27:32All 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 just 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 a problem, a challenge,

28:05a dream, and you're trying to figure out how to get to that, I think the personal is the most universal. 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,

28:40this 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. Sebiot, 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

29:10cleans into shoulder pressing, 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 yoga one to two times a week. I really like a

29:41Yengar 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. 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 pushups,

30:15do 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 and 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. 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

30:47you 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 of 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 Stephen. What workouts from the four hour body are you still prioritizing in your routines? There's a lot from the four hour body.

31:17In the reversing injuries chapter, you have 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 to 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

31:49invested. 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. So that would be reminiscent

32:20of 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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35:42description.

35:46This 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

36:19thing 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.

36:52What 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. 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,

37:28then 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? 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 4-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

38:06routine 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. 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'll be tempted to hop in and put out small fires before they become big fires. And when you come back,

38:41you 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. 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

39:16and 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. So the benefit of a

39:47mini 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

40:20would 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. Arnold Schwarzenegger found this. A lot of problems tend to glom onto 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 Schuchman 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

40:53lots 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. 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 it's a simple response is McKinley W. And I

41:27apologize if this is a dissatisfying answer on my part, but I work in public education. I've 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? 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-state basis for restricting phone use in schools. And I think it's very, very interesting. So take a look at that.

42:05Getting 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? And that this could be a digital mini retirement. I would try to get them off of

42:37social 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. And then we're going to look at it afterwards and no expectations, no pressure on

43:14what you do with those results, but 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

43:45that I love. This is from Sebastian and I'm going to abbreviate this a little bit. 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.

44:19There seem to be some crazy longevity and cognitive benefits to language learning. This is relatively new. 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. 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

44:52lot 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. 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

45:25of 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 limits of our world. 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

46:02Japanese, 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. 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

46:36location 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. You'd be

47:10able 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

47:42owl 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

48:16for some magical biological intervention that all the billionaires are funding to live forever, probably not going to happen anytime soon. 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.

48:49There 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? 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

49:19listening 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. What native content can I

49:55aggregate 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,

50:28I would imagine that within a year, AI will be able to create that for me. 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

50:59spaced 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. 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.

51:32However, 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. It's one of my favorites, the born identity, whatever, where, you know, the dialogue snatch, whatever it might be. And then just turn on the subtitles in your target language. So now I'm watching Parks and Rec and we're going

52:08to 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. All right, let's hop into, and my laptop battery is doing so well. I

52:42can't believe I've ever recorded podcasts indoors. Ludicrous should always do it outside with nice weather like this. All right. I'm 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

53:15recorded himself, which I think are French, Spanish, Italian, maybe certainly German, are world-class. But 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

53:48my 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. And it's been different movies for different books. But I mean, I've seen Babe like a thousand times. I've seen The Bourne 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

54:21purchase under a hundred dollars 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. 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,

54:55you 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 with my lady. And we just watch one episode every night, one or two. So good. And that's literally months and months of payoff because

55:28they 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. So I'm looking at the

56:02new, 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

56:33me. 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 from working on a book, might be listening to an audio book, might be doing phone calls, but walking, walking, walking. 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

57:07minutes, once a day, I 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

57:40water. 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. 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

58:10look 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 I think in modern environments and modern life, it's very easy to do what? To suffer from a

58:45deficiency 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.

59:16This is a question. Let's see if I can answer this. 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,

59:50I 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. 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

1:00:25the 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 up 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

1:00:58to 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. 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,

1:01:36your 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. Government doesn't like private money,

1:02:07even 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 in that stuff. All right, let me answer a few more and then we'll

1:02:37hop off and I'll let everybody get back to their lives. 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

1:03:10had 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. 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

1:03:46constellation 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,

1:04:20a 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. 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 New 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 already, I always use and a bunch of the stuff

1:04:55that 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. 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

1:05:29cases, 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. 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

1:06:01an 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 2am 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, it's like having a very safe car. Even if you never get into a head-on collision, I've got forbid, there's a reassurance that comes with having a very,

1:06:32very 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 Neko health, which is expanding to the U S very soon. It's already in the UK and

1:07:03Sweden. If people want to check it out, 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

1:07:40Alzheimer's right now. I would say that if I had to pick one thing, it would be the exercise. Okay. So if I had to pick one thing for cognitive health, it is the exercise. And my conversation with Dr. Tommy Wood gets into specifics around this, but I'll give you one example, doing something called the Norwegian four by four, which is the 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.

1:08:12And 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

1:08:44and 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, the 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.

1:09:19But 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 there's a barrel sauna over there. Sauna use is very interesting, heat shock proteins, et cetera. 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

1:09:53never doing any type of intermittent fasting. 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

1:10:28what I'm doing for preserving cognitive health and function. Again, not that I'm a doctor and 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

1:11:00therapeutic. 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. 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

1:11:34people 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. 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

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1:12:42these 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. Thanks for listening. As many of you know, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a midnight luxe mattress from

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