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

0:00optimal minimal at this altitude i can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking can i ask you a personal question now would have seen a perfect time i'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton i 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 narrow 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

1:01logical phase and sees that they need to change something 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 versus external validation

2:15like some of you will recognize this the book awareness by anthony de mello 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 quote-unquote work

2:52and 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 excess the dose makes the

3:28poison 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 family health plus financial responsibilities make

3:59big 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 gonna try to keep this short but i would say read a blog post by derek sibbers 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

4:35and 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 to your boss and propose it

5:08as 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 with c d e f and g so that would be step number one for me and then beyond that i would say write

5:46down 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 bosh 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 have been crediting someone else but if you had five people and they all put all their problems on the table you would pick your problems right

6:17back 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 it binary you could do it after hours you could do it on the weekends this is something that i've recommended in

6:52the 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 maybe 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

7:24surfing 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 you know his father watched electricity reaches community and these various technological changes over time and then i'll hop to

7:57the crux of the question so in effect ai feels different and i would agree with that not merely another tool but dot dot dot dot dot 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 skills 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

8:32question 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 dozens of different angles and i keep coming back to learning asking questions

9:03written 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 change 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

9:38in 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 tried to do too much but 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

10:16really 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 interrelated and awareness by anthony de mello 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

10:50asking questions and then we have written communications and verbal communication and 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 out 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 the systems but by the

11:23force 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 it 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

11:57verbal 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 outcomes 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

12:31dawson 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 into 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

13:06almost 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 religion 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

13:38yourself as a morally grounded person i literally speak with founders and entrepreneurs every single week and they're so excited about a lot of things the product team the latest fundraise their next big bet payroll not so much but you really have to get it right you really really have to get it right and today's sponsor gusto makes that part easy and boy oh boy i polled millions of you guys you love gusto gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses it's all-in-one remote friendly and incredibly easy

14:12to use so you can pay hire onboard and support your team from anywhere starting with offer letters going to everything gusto automatically files federal state and local payroll taxes handles w-2s and 1099s and offers straightforward health benefits and 401k options for nearly any budget and switching to gusto is quick straightforward and painless and don't pay a cent until you run your first payroll if you need help their certified hr experts are standing by they are ranked number one on g2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026 and trusted by more than 500 000 small businesses so check them

14:48out try gusto today at gusto.com slash tim that's g-u-s-t-o dot com slash tim and get three months free when you run your first payroll that's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash tim as many of you know for the last few years i've been sleeping on a midnight luxe mattress from today's sponsor helix sleep i also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs and feedback from friends has always been fantastic it's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever i also recently had a chance to test the helix sunset elite the sunset elite delivers exceptional comfort

15:23while putting the right support in the right spots it is made with five tailored foam layers including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support right where i need it and middle layers with premium foam and micro coils that create a soft contouring feel this spring if you're thinking about upgrading your sleep helix will ship it to your door for free in the u.s let you sleep on it for 120 nights and if you don't love it they're happy with helix guarantee makes returns completely painless so check it out go to helix sleep dot com slash tim for 27 off site wide one more time

15:57that's helix sleep dot com slash tim for 27 off site wide check it out all right next is from mason h when you returned from your sabbatical on 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

16:27with 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 fears it was ungrounded and it was fine here's the question when you return from your sabbatical in 2024 you set a new set of rules for the kind of podcasts 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

17:02haven't read it read the blue ocean strategy it is going to be increasingly critical and important and certainly 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

17:35any action what is holding you back right what are the costs of inaction it's all laid out very clearly so look at that but to answer your question i thought why rely on my recollection because 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

18:09book 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 same 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 wylon 84 richard thaler 80 tish robbie 74

18:42way 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 them 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

19:13podcasting 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 attention which allows me to take advantage of time and outlast trends and i could still be a fatality right if everything gets pushed to llms or whatever but you get the idea number three experiments so co-hosting episodes with like nick kakonis kevin kelly i should do more of that so it's 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

19:47out 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 in a few very important 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 really enjoyed doing those compilations then we had a couple of household names right we had a handful of household

20:22names 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 tim 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

20:56question 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 i'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

21:30tell 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 after 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 like climbing over rocks and doing stuff that it's somewhat dangerous all of that is activities together

22:05and then late at night i think me admit 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 which 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 why also perhaps men in particular i'm not saying this is limited to men but love fire so much is no eye contact you're staring at the fire

22:38it'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 around 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

23:12verbal social element for lots of fantastic evolutionary reasons and i think men just require and i'm talking about like i guess like uh heteronormative whatever whatever but maybe not 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

23:46build 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 fill 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

24:21evolutionarily 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 shared activities is the answer and i have some relatively new male friendships say with alan 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

24:56actually 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 what we have here thank you hannah love your episodes with women authors like ann lamott liz gilbert murder atwood and 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

25:30protocol 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 say some groups of people 70 to 80 remission in 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

26:03firing 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 with maybe 6 to 12 months ago called ampa health ampa and jonathan downer dr jonathan downer is involved with this company and they have developed a one day protocol so instead of five days

26:34which is saint 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 relief after one day which is bananas i mean it still blows my mind and i'm focused at this point more

27:06on 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 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

27:40craig 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 non-fiction space if you are contending with a 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 so don't try

28:11to 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 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

28:42somebody 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 my workout routine right now is pretty

29:15simple 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 yengar yoga specifically for alignment and use of props and so on it's very adaptable in that way

29:48and 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 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

30:25pushing 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 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 are focused on most and then booking stuff with your friend group you can identify the most quote-unquote important friends

31:03for 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 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 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

31:39many 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

32:14type of pulling movement with a five second up five second down cadence to failure 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 downloading 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

32:46made but i think simple works where complex fails a lot of the time now i guess what i did just before breakfast i did what i do every morning i took some creatine today i took five grams if i'm sleep deprived i might take 10 or 15 and i have used momentous creatine for a long time as it's been one of the highest quality creatine options available on the market that's exactly what i used this morning now momentous has taken that quality that they're already known for even further with signature spec creatine their most advanced version yet signature spec is

33:21manufactured in a pharmaceutical facility using reverse osmosis water purification you can hear those birds in the background man i'm striving for healthy over here it's verified through a six-stage testing process with four independent agencies delivering 10 times fewer impurities two to five times tighter heavy metal limits and added pfas that's the forever chemicals you don't want and microplastic screening that's the momentous standard the ultra fine powder also mixes cleanly with no grit super super easy creatine supports strength power lean muscle and recovery with growing research

33:54on enhanced memory and cognitive performance i take it mostly for the cognitive stuff but it's great for the gym too so if you take creatine every day like i do make sure it's the best do not cut corners head to live momentous.com slash tim and use code tim for 14 off that's an interesting percentage for 14 off of your first one-time order or a total of 35 off your first subscription order that's live momentous.com slash tim that's live moment o-u-s momentous live momentous.com slash tim for between 14

34:27and 35 off with code tim lately navigating the financial landscape can feel like a full-time job and it's not a very fun full-time job it's stressful but it does not have to be that way you can simplify wealthfront helps you tune out the noise and earn more on every dollar with sophisticated easy to use products like their cash account you get fee-free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts and when you're ready to invest transferring to their expert built investing accounts is simple for a limited time my listeners can earn up to 4.30 variable apy on cash what that means is on top of the 3.3 base apy

35:05from program banks new cash account clients get an exclusive three-month 0.75 apy boost on up to 150 000 then they get another 0.25 apy increase by direct depositing 1 000 a month and maintaining a funded investing account terms and conditions apply more than a million people trust wealthfront check them out go to wealthfront.com slash tim to claim your boost that's wealthfront.com slash tim this is a paid endorsement of wealthfront client experiences vary wealthfront brokerage isn't

35:36a bank base apy as of january 30th 2026 and subject to change details in the episode description 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

36:07cutting 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

36:42something 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 next one is neha g 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

37:16you 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 re or should i do a b c d re 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

37:46needing 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

38:16people 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 you can end up doing two to three weeks of damage control to reverse all the things

38:48that 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 and see what happens much like i did with my podcast sabbatical and by doing that once or twice a year

39:22you'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 mini retirement and i'm sure people have written about this online so you don't necessarily have to buy the four-hour workweek

39:54is 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

40:28in the immediate term i'll start doing tm meditation again twice a day 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 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 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

41:01to 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 uh 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 um i apologize if this is a dissatisfying answer in my part but i work in public education i've spent years in child and

41:32teen 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 gonna just hop in for a second i would look very very closely at jonathan height 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 getting back to the question

42:05you'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 social media for a period of time and then talk to them

42:41be 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 what you do with those results but let's start there

43:17and 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

43:49a 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 there seem to be some crazy longevity and cognitive benefits to language learning this is

44:25relatively 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 twelve 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.blog i think there's a section called language learning but if you just search

44:56language 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 eighty percent 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

45:31of 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 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

46:05heard arigato 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 location dependent like rain at a specific place

46:39all 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 able to say yes they're different but if you went on

47:12a walk as i will do with say a botanist or somebody who works at a local plant shop 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 percent 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

47:45this 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

48:19are 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 there may be some ai native companies that approach it but i do think duolingo is probably ahead of the

48:54game 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 listening to myself but because i knew the content of that conversation i was able to improve

49:26my 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 aggregate that will be interesting

49:58to 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 gonna 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 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

50:33for 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 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

51:11watching 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 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 phrasebook intended for travelers about italian they give you

51:44like 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 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

52:16and 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 can't believe i've ever recorded podcasts indoors ludicrous should always do it outside with nice weather like this

52:48all right i'm gonna hop back into the live chat and see if we got anything i can hop into also some of you've 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 the korean that i went through i was

53:25very 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

53:57feel 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 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 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

54:29and 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 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

55:03positive 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 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

55:36said 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 new new new new new thing i pay more attention to the old old old thing and evolutionary drives that have withstood

56:12millennia 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 audiobook might be doing phone calls but

56:47walking 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 it's 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

57:22pretty 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 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

58:00tms has just been remarkable for that so people can look up ampahealth 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 seeing 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

58:32it sounds so ridiculous for me to say but it bears repeating because it i think in modern environments in modern life it's very easy to do what 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

59:03do 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 uh let's see if i can answer this i didn't have immediate thoughts this is a question from oxana 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

59:38publishers 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 but if i could hit you know control z there are times when i would be tempted to say yes

1:00:09i 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

1:00:44doing 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 but yes i am paranoid and

1:01:17incredibly 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

1:01:52survival 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 nine thousand dollars you're going to get cross-examined 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 uh lead you into dangerous

1:02:23waters 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 hop 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

1:02:57therapy 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 have 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

1:03:36the 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

1:04:07minutes 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 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

1:04:37was 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 already 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

1:05:09and 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 health care 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

1:05:44million 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 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 a hold of somebody at 2 a.m on a wednesday

1:06:16a 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 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

1:06:49sometimes 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 people want to check it out co-founded by danielek the co-founder long-time ceo of spotify going to be doing some very interesting stuff so i'm hoping to make world-class preventative health care available to millions of people that is just the

1:07:20basis 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 okay so if i had to pick one thing for cognitive health it is the exercise and my conversation

1:07:53with dr tommy wood gets into specifics around this but i'll give you one example doing something called the norwegian 4x4 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 and zone 2 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

1:08:29doctor 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

1:09:00disposal 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

1:09:30sauna 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 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

1:10:05glycogen 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 again not that i'm a doctor and md but frankly a lot of those folks are

1:10:38so 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

1:11:11guys i think that's all i have for right now i'm gonna hop off and get a bite to eat since i haven't had anything since a small breakfast and i think we're gonna 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

1:11:46would 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 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

1:12:20basically 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 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

1:12:51again 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 today's sponsor helix sleep i also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs and feedback from friends has always been fantastic it's something they comment on without any prompting from me

1:13:23whatsoever i also recently had a chance to test the helix sunset elite the sunset elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots it is made with five tailored foam layers including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support right where i need it and middle layers with premium foam and micro coils to create a soft contouring feel this spring if you're thinking about upgrading your sleep helix will ship it to your door for free in the us let you sleep on it for 120 nights and if you don't love it they're happy with helix guarantee makes

1:13:56returns completely painless so check it out go to helixsleep.com slash tim for 27 off site wide one more time that's helixsleep.com slash tim for 27 off site wide check it out i literally speak with founders and entrepreneurs every single week and they're so excited about a lot of things the product team the latest fundraise their next big bet payroll not so much but you really have to get it right you really really have to get it right and today's sponsor gusto makes that part easy

1:14:28and boy oh boy i pulled millions of you guys you love gusto gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses it's all in one remote friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay hire on board and support your team from anywhere starting with offer letters going to everything gusto automatically files federal state and local payroll taxes handles w-2s and 1099s and offers straightforward health benefits and 401k options for nearly any budget and switching to gusto is quick straightforward and painless and don't pay a cent until you run your

1:15:01first payroll if you need help the certified hr experts are standing by they are ranked number one on g2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026 and trusted by more than 500 000 small businesses so check them out try gusto today at gusto.com slash tim that's g-u-s-t-o dot com slash tim and get three months free when you run your first payroll that's three months of free payroll at gusto.com