The 4-Hour Workweek

Michael. Peter.
What do you know about the four-hour work week? All I know is that the only reason I'm letting you do another productivity book is so I can get an update on your household chores. You know, as we've sort of progressed through the first year of the podcast, I feel like the books we cover have sort of started to divide themselves into some distinct categories.
And there's only a few, right? There's like the relationship books, the politics books, the social science books, and then finally the financial self-help books. The guru books.
The rise and grind shit. Yes.
This is one of the most influential rise and grind books of the last 20 years. If he brings it back to birth rates, we're really going to have some synergy for this podcast.
I thought like, who better to review this than a podcaster? You want to teach me about four hour work weeks, buddy? I'm the world's foremost expert. The Peter story.
Yes. So Timothy Ferris, the author, he publishes this in 2007 when he is a 29 year old tech entrepreneur.
entrepreneur. This is the mid-aughts.

So we are experiencing a bit of a tech boom.

Like Facebook and Twitter are just getting off the ground.

There's sort of a rush of capital into tech for the first time since the dot-com crash.

Ferris himself was an employee at a digital storage company for a bit.

And then he had launched a startup hawking some scammy neurotropic supplements that he called Brain Quicken. So it's also an accounting software when you want to stay up all night typing in your expenses.
The original title for this book that he had pitched was Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit. Wait, really? Yeah.
Okay. You can sort of tell that Tim is annoyed that he didn't name the book that because he has brought that up in like so many interviews.
Oh, yeah. He just wants to get it out there.
Like I had a cool title for the book, by the way. Yeah.
It's like the guy who directed The Professional who just calls it Leon for the next like three decades. That's right.
Still mad about mad about it still mad about it so he's doing like the right wing podcast supplement grift but in the mid-aughts so he's he's a pioneer you know yeah none of this pans out quite like he had hoped um he's sort of doing well but he's worn out and he sets out to restructure his life entirely so that he can make as much money as possible while working as little as possible, or at the very least, start prioritizing the things in his life that he wants to prioritize. It is funny how all of these books start with like someone who doesn't have a normal job.
They're always like an entrepreneur or like some sort of innovator or something, something basically somebody who like can disappear for days on end. Yeah, I think it's important to understand this book as the product of a guy who basically has everything he thought he wanted, but is still disillusioned, right? He's an entrepreneur.
He says that his supplement company was making him about 70 grand a month. But he still feels trapped, right? He's sort of worn down by the grind.
He's overworked. He's miserable.
And he plans a big trip, a sabbatical year traveling the world. And he has all of these apprehensions about it, but he does it anyway.
And as a result, he sort of has a variety of revelations about how to optimize his life. Wait, so is this Eat, Pray, Love for like San Francisco tech bros? There's a long section about carbs.
So the subtitle of this book is Escape the 9 to 5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. Okay.
So I'm going to send you his little definition of the new rich. I like how you say his little definition.
His little definition. It's actually quite a lengthy definition and I've cut out parts.
The new rich are those who abandon the deferred life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the new rich, time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as lifestyle design.
My journey from grossly overworked and severely underpaid office worker to member of the new rich is at once stranger than fiction and, now that I've deciphered the code, simple to duplicate. There's a recipe.
From leveraging currency differences to outsourcing your life and disappearing, I'll show you how a small underground uses economic sleight of hand to do what most consider impossible. He is making it seem as if anyone can do this.
And in fact, it's something that a 29-year-old tech millionaire can probably do relatively easily. This is like the rich dad, poor dad guy being like, okay, step one, buy an apartment building in buy an apartment building experiencing a housing boom i also want to point out that you you read uh the new rich and lifestyle design but he immediately starts using acronyms for these things so it's nr and ld it's so fucking i know this this is something that we come across in academic articles all the time it's like you're making up acronyms and then by the time you get to the end of the abstract, it's like the TMLR doesn't match the ADT.

Right, right.

Oh my fucking God.

Now, I bring that up because the entire book is also built around a dumb acronym deal.

And this is his step by step process for becoming a member of the new rich.

D definition.

This is the section where he defines the new rich and explains how they operate. E, elimination, where he shows you how to eliminate the notion of time management and all of the other things that are extraneous to your success.
A, automation, where he teaches you tricks to automate your work and income. And L, liberation, where he explains how to liberate yourself from a single location and travel the globe while maintaining your lifestyle.
He will not, however, liberate all of the slaves that he's going to hire over the internet to do his work for him. Oh, you've read the book? That's book two.
That's the sequel book. Okay.
So let's start off with D, the D in deal for definition, where he sort of talks about the new rich versus who he calls deferrers. A big theme of the book is that you can live like the exceedingly wealthy without being exceedingly wealthy.
He says, quote, I've chartered private planes over the Andes, enjoyed many of the best wines in the world in between world-class ski runs, and lived like a king lounging by the infinity pool of a private villa. Here's the little secret I rarely tell.
It all costs less than rent in the U.S. If you can free your time and location, your money is automatically worth three to ten times as much.
This has nothing to do with currency rates. Being financially rich and having the ability to live like a millionaire are fundamentally two very different things.
Wait, is he just talking about like going to Costa Rica and getting like a cheaper hotel room or something? Because it sounds like he's explicitly saying that's not what he's saying. He is explicitly saying that that's not what he's saying, but it is what he's saying.
Now, I'm not talking about going to a cheaper country, but if you go to a cheaper country, it is cheaper. I feel like we're also adding to our sort of like glossary of things that show up in all these airport books.
And I feel like one of them is dressing up something totally unexotic as like forbidden wisdom.

Like the idea that you can go to like Thailand or India and like live at a much higher standard of living than you can in the United States. It's like really basic and banal to point out.
I got sort of intrigued here because I was like, oh, is he going to like, is there going to be some kind of cool trick here? Yeah. But no, there won't be.
So don't get excited. A lot of the opening sections of the book are just him sort of setting the table, providing guidelines and themes that he hits throughout.
Many of them are sensible and inoffensive. Like a big one is to stop using the excuse of the timing isn't right to put off big moves in your life from like business decisions to vacations, because he says the timing never feels feels right and you'll never make the big moves if you think that way.

That actually sounds like reasonable advice to me, honestly.

Totally.

Do stuff.

He also says that people tend to want to increase their income when they think about becoming more successful, but it's just as valuable or can be just as valuable to just reduce

the number of hours you work.

OK.

There is some weirder stuff.

He says ask for forgiveness, not permission, which is, of course, like a common saying. But in this case, he's talking about like making large life decisions without telling your boss or life partner.
Oh, wait, like he explicitly says this? Quote, people, whether parents, partners or bosses, deny things on an emotional basis that they can learn to accept after the fact. Oh, so we're at another major theme of all these airport books, toxic masculinity.
That's right. Don't tell her what you're thinking and doing.
So one of the big underlying ideas behind the book is that people are scared of change and will choose unhappiness over uncertainty. That's actually kind of wise.
Yeah, no, I agree. And it's, you know, sort of it's on theme with the, you know, the timing is never right idea.
Yeah. But it's also, you know, this is where you start to realize that he's about to give you a lot of advice that is very applicable to a 28 year old with seven figures in the bank.
Right. You know, like when he is considering his big year long sabbatical, he's weighing the

downsides.

And he's like, look, even if everything goes wrong and my business collapses, what's my

worst case scenario?

And he's like, look, I have the experience and the resume to get a job and get back on

my feet and it won't be great, but it'll be fine.

Yeah.

He's like, what's the worst that could happen? I'm already earning $70,000 a year in interest from my accounts that I have. Right.
Yes. People that that does, in fact, give you a lot more options.
True. So, yes, many people do choose unhappiness over instability.
I agree with that. But that's because the risks of instability for many people are extremely high.
Yeah. How many fake gurus are there out there advising people to like leave the rat race and pursue whatever makes you happy? Right.
Move to Costa Rica and give surfing lessons. Right.
Yeah. Now, Ferris is giving that same advice, but without the tradeoff where like you abandon your dream of material wealth.
Right. You can go teach people to surf in Costa Rica for a living, but that requires some level of comfort with poverty.
Right. Yeah.
And this book is fundamentally about not wanting to make that tradeoff. Right.
Because, yeah, the ordinary advice would be like, yeah, go bum around Southeast Asia for a while and like you're just going to be broke and sleep in like youth hostels and stuff. Right.
Which is great. And like a super formative and awesome experience.
But also you're not going to like earn money doing that. Like that's not a path to riches necessarily.
It's just like a nice thing to do when you're young. Right.
And so what we're getting, what we're building towards is that he's going to show you how you can do all that while still being a little bit rich, right? While being part of this new rich club. Yeah.
The last part of the opening section is about the practice of dreamlining. This is where you create a clear outline of what your dream is.
Okay. And he provides like worksheets and shit.
Okay. Those worksheets have examples and I'm gonna, I'm gonna read off some of those examples to you.
He says, let's say in six months I want to have an Aston Martin, a personal assistant and be a bestselling author. And then he lays out the cost for the Aston Martin.
It's two thousand dollars a month. He prices the personal assistant at four hundred dollars based on 80 hours a month at five dollars an hour.
Wait. A rate that was below the federal minimum wage.
Yeah. At every point after 1997.
He prices becoming a bestselling author at $0 because the only costs are A, your time, which is free, and B, three unpaid interns to handle promoting the book. Okay.
This is a turning point in the book because it's the first peek at the actual secret behind the four hour work week. Child slaves.
We're back to child slaves. Well, we are.
This is the first time he touches on a significant, maybe the most significant material component of the strategy, which is identifying sources of cheap labor to do the work for you. Hell yeah.
Again, not exotic advice. This is, this is pretty standard advice of like, if you want to be rich, like find people willing to work for you for like almost nothing.
Yeah. And it's interesting because it's like, okay, yeah.
Four hour work week for you. Yeah.
Full time job for your slave wage. Right.
All right. E.
Elimination. He says to forget about time management.
He thinks that people focus on busying themselves too much without thinking about being effective with their time. OK.
about identifying and eliminating time-wasting or time-consuming habits. He suggests limiting your email use so that you have a dedicated email answering hour every day, thus avoiding constant email interruptions.
That honestly seems like very good advice. Yeah, I agree.
He says, have a second phone number so that you can have one dedicated to urgent matters. That's what Hillary Clinton did and the country never forgave her.
Interesting. Interesting he goes there.
He also gives advice for being effective on phone calls. And I'm going to send you some templates.
Read the intro and I'll be John and you'll be Jane. If someone does call your cell phone, it's presumably urgent and should be treated as such.
Do not allow them to consume time otherwise. It's all in the greeting.
Compare the following. And then I'm Jane receiving a call.
Hello. Hi, is this Jane? This is Jane.
Hi, Jane. It's John.
Oh, hi, John. How are you? John will now digress and lead you into a conversation about nothing from which you will have to recover and then fish out the ultimate purpose of the call.
There's a better approach. This is Jane speaking.
Hi, it's John. Hi, John.
I'm right in the middle of something. How can I help you out? That's not in the screen drive you said.
That's you. We're now in full improv.
That's that's me john panicking jane's got me in the spotlight i better act fast this seems like reasonable advice get to the point of phone calls i guess this is one of my favorite parts of the book because he's basically advising you on how to save four seconds off of every phone call and it's like okay i guess that's part of the 36 hours that i will gain every week during this. But it seems like we're going to need to do a lot more work.
It's funny to me that usually we try to be meticulously fair to these books. And like we we dove right in on like roasting this fucking guy.
We didn't. It's very hard not to.
You know, the one thing I will say in defense of this book is he gives the full scheme like he lays out the full vision. So we'll give him credit for being kind of upfront about this deranged plan, but the plan is still deranged.
Next section is A, automation. And the first chapter of it is called Outsourcing Life.
Okay. It begins with an account that's not written by Ferris.
It's written by A.J. Jacobs at the time, an editor at Esquire.
Okay. One second.
I'll send it to you. Oh, my fucking God.
He says, it began a month ago. I was midway through The World is Flat, the bestseller by Tom Friedman.
I like Friedman, despite his puzzling decision to wear a mustache. Ooh, got him.
Burned. His book is all about how outsourcing to India and China is not just for tech support and carmakers,

but is poised to transform every industry in America from law to banking to accounting.

I don't have a corporation.

I don't even have an up-to-date business card.

I'm a writer and editor working from home.

Then again, I think, why should Fortune 500 firms have all the fun?

Why can't I join in on the biggest business trend of the new century?

Why can't I outsource my low-end tasks?

God, I actually remember this, Peter.

There was like a brief period of hype around like ordinary people outsourcing aspects of their lives to like personal assistants.

Because whenever something is like great for giant corporations, there's always a giant PR push to be like, this will be good for you too.

Yeah, this is going to change life for everyone. But then my understanding is that it completely fizzled out because once you actually get down to it, there's not that many tasks in your life that you can outsource.
Like it would be kind of nice to be like, hey, can you call a restaurant and like make a reservation for seven for me and my friends? Great. But then by the time you tell someone in India to do that and then you probably have to clarify with them like, wait, which restaurant? Oh, yeah.
Oh, here's the number. It's not saving you that much time.
And then how many tasks can you really outsource to someone who like doesn't know your life very well? You know, like respond to my Tinder messages for me. And a lot of tasks are also in person.
A lot of the things that take up people's time are stuff like, you know, getting your kids ready for school or whatever. I do want to say that this builds toward my theory that there will eventually only be one book, right? And we're working toward the single book.
So the basic principle is that you use assistance to free up your time to do work, which gives you more money for assistance, which gives you more time. You know, it's the cycle of glory.
This is when the vision of the book sort of came fully into focus for me because it starts off with this very relatable disillusionment with the workplace grind and a desire to escape it and focus on the more important things in life. But then you get to the core of the book and you realize it's not really about escaping the grind per se.
It's about offloading the grind onto someone poorer than you. Right.
It's basically I want to escape the rat race by no longer being a rat but becoming like the rat master. Like I'm the one building the maze.
Transition from exploited to exploiter. So Ferris gives a bunch of tips about managing your assistance.
Like he says to be specific when you're delegating. Otherwise, you lose time later trying to clarify.
Oh, don't you hate that? He also talks about, like, the limits of delegation. And I'm going to send you a bit.
First, I try to delegate my therapy. My plan is to give Asha a list of my neuroses and a childhood anecdote or two, have her talk to my shrink for 50 minutes, then relay the advice.
Smart, right? My shrink refused. Ethics or something.
Fine. Instead, I have Asha send me a meticulously researched memo on stress relief.
It had a nice Indian flavor to it with a couple of yogic postures and some visualization. Oh my God.
Bro. This honestly reads like satire.
This reads like an argument against being able to outsource this stuff. This like a description of like why this would never fucking work.
I mean, look, there might not be a better summation of this book than Tim identifying therapy as the least important use of his time and then trying to offload it onto an outsourced wage slave personal assistant who's Indian. So of course, the recommendation is yoga.
That's what they do there but then yeah this is this weird like capitalistic understanding of like your own personality and relationships because at this point you're like oh i'm gonna catch up with a high school friend of mine well why don't i outsource that and like asha can go and she can give me like points so like what's greg up to these days yeah right right like that's this is the point of life it's as if the dream is just being plugged into the matrix and you're just like a twitching little

corpse while while your personal assistants handle everything for you it's it's bizarre

he also goes through the concerns that you might have about this sort of arrangement

not the moral concerns he says that the number one fear is that someone within your army of

personal assistants might decide that it would be more profitable to just steal from you. But does he talk about how hard it is to find people now that quiet quitting is such a big problem in our society? Ferris gives some tips for suppressing these wage slave rebellions.
He talks about like background checks and NDAs and like encryption and VPN. Oh my God.
And he's like, I only provide sensitive information to my most trusted assistants. I don't know, man.
When I, when I worked in human rights at one point, I had a team of like five people that I was managing and it was so much fucking work to manage people. I mean, all you're doing is you're basically turning yourself into like a middle manager of your own life.
I mean, look, by the time you're getting someone to sign an nda for four dollars an hour like what are you fucking doing here you know all right the next few chapters we we move away from the indentured servitude okay and toward income autopilot uh which is about creating streams of passive income by starting a business. Another theme for the show.
This is all these books promise passive income. Now, he says the ultimate goal is to have a business where you can remove yourself from the org chart and put yourself in a position where you're essentially in an oversight role.
He does this primarily by relying on trusted contractors and giving them leeway to make decisions as they deem fit. Oh, I'm going to send you a little bit.
He says, I'm more like a police officer on the side of the road who can step in if need be. I check reports from fulfillment each Monday and monthly reports from the same the first of each month.
The latter reports include orders received from the call center, which I can compare to the call center bills to gauge profit. Otherwise, I just check bank accounts online on the 1st and 15th of each month to look for odd deductions.
If I find something, one email will fix it. And if not, it's back to kendo, painting, hiking, or whatever I happen to be doing at the time okay so he's working this is like just being a boss just being a boss yeah although i this is another one of those things where i um this is the second time i've said this on this podcast but this is another place where i would pay a million dollars to watch carl marx read this just like how do i maximize my rent seeking like how can i maximize my lecherousness vis-a-vis labor right there's something deeply disturbing about being like i still get the money but i try to do as little as possible i like i i don't know i hear that i read this and i hear the international i also feel like look man if these books are going to recycle their little lessons we're going to recycle jokes we're just going to keep doing it every episode.
We're going to make the same Marx joke. If they're building towards one book, we're building towards one episode.
Also, the rich dad, poor dad guy also said this of like, be the head of a company and like just receive passive income. But like, that's hard.
It's hard. It's easy to start your own successful company that you can then completely bow out of.
More people would fucking do it. Like the whole point is that it's not easy to do this and often requires massive startup capital and like some sort of specialization and all kinds of luck and shit.
Well, Mike, not to cut you off, but Tim Ferriss has a plan for you. Oh.
There are steps towards starting a functional business that provides you passive income in this book. He got a little ahead of himself talking about the org chart, but he's like, all right, so what's the real question, right? You want to know how to create a product that you can sell passively without handling much of the day to day.
It's 2007. So is it just bubble tea? It's going to be bubble tea.
No. He says you don't want to provide a service because that means you get paid by the hour.
Yeah. Right? You want to provide a downloadable or shippable product.
Okay. So he says, think about markets that you know, industry groups that you associate with, for example, social groups you associate with.
Figure out which of those groups have magazines with large circulations that you can advertise in. Again, this is like almost 20 years ago, right? Yeah, fair enough.
He says, one, pick an affordably reachable niche market. Two, brainstorm a product to sell to that market.
Step one, come up with a great business idea. Step one.
Step two, sell. He says, look, you can try to sell a a physical product but the simpler route is to sell an informational product like an instructional dvd course oh no oh so he's turning you into a fucking self-help guru like all these guys do eventually that's right uh he's saying look these are harder for competitors to replicate oh my god they have lower upfront costs higher margins, all the good stuff that you want in a business, right? And then he's like, eventually write a book giving some fake plan and sell it to a bunch of fucking suckers.
You know, I was about to say this. This is not the first time that we've seen one of our authors advise readers to do scams.
But this is, I think, the first time we've had one explain the scam that he's running on you right now. Yeah, you are now the product being sold.
Like, you are the sucker. Right.
It is so fascinating to me how many of these guys are basically just, like, training you how to become a guru because they're like, well, I can make up all this shit. Why don't you start making up a bunch of shit and then sell it to other people? Our listener at home is like, but Peter, how can I sell an informational DVD when I am not an expert in anything at all? And Tim's got you covered.
So I'm going to send you something. He says, if you aren't an expert, don't sweat it.
Expert in the context of selling a product means that you know more about the topic than the purchaser.

It is not necessary to be the best, just better than a small target number of your prospective customers. Let's suppose that your current dream line, to compete in the 1,150-mile Iditarod dog sledding race in Alaska, requires $5,000 to realize.
If there are 15,000 readers and even 50 or 0.33% can be convinced of your superior expertise in skill X and spend $100 for a program that teaches it, that's $5,000. Bring on the Huskies.
Oh, so is this just like bullshit your way? That is absolutely the point. I mean, first of all, he says, look, expert doesn't mean that you are an expert.
It means that you know more about the topic than the other guy. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Does it? This is also the career of numerous national political pundits. They don't have any actual expertise.
But you know what? Just talk like you do. It's fine.
He also suggests just like finding several books on a topic and then paraphrasing them or using content from the public domain. That's what Rich Dad Poor Dad does, too.
He's just like, yeah, just repackage stuff that other gurus are saying. This is a great like giant national game of telephone that happens with these fucking self-help books.
They're all just repackaging shit from other self-help books. There's an incredible insert in this book titled How to Become an Expert in Four Weeks.
Fuck yes. He says, quote, there is a difference between being perceived as an expert and being one and that all that matters in this context is being perceived as one.
He outlines some steps. He says, one, join a few trade organizations in the field.
Two, read the three top selling books on the topic. Three, give one free seminar at the closest well-known university using posters to advertise, then leverage that to give some seminars for large corporations with campuses nearby if you can.
Four, optional, write an article for a trade magazine and if they decline, offer to interview someone more established in the field. five, and this one's slightly outdated, but join ProfNet, which is a service that connects journalists and experts for articles.
My immediate gut reaction to this was this would work. This would work.
Yes, it's crazy. 100%.
Yeah. It felt a little bit like looking into the abyss, reading this section.
It's really wild how he's just saying it. Right.
This is the most openly I've ever seen someone like this talk about this sort of thing. It's sort of perfect that he comes out of this like health grifting sector because like the public knows so little about health stuff.
I don't know if you're getting these in your inbox yet, Peter, but like somehow I've ended up on all these fucking PR lists for like health influencers. And so I get probably like 30 to 50 emails a day from these atrocious PR firms that are like, this guru says like kidney health is the key to longevity.
And it's some random fucking guy. And they want to be a guest on our podcast.
And like a lot of podcasts fall for this. And a lot of journalists also don't know shit about kidneys because most people don't.
And so like, OK, I'll interview the fucking kidney guy. And then you start getting this like earned media.
You start showing up in media reports. And before you know it, like a large number of people think that you're an expert on whatever thing you've called yourself an expert on.
If you want to do an informational DVD that sells, you're probably doing some general wellness bullshit. Yeah.
It's either wellness or financial advice. Yeah, financial stuff.
Yeah. You know, this is one of the most rich dad, poor dad parts of the book.
And Tim Ferriss has been on Robert Kiyosaki's podcast. Perfection.
And I tried to do a full Hobbs and listen to it. And Kiyosaki might be the worst host in history.
Yes, he's tough to listen to it's real tough his questions are terrible he was completely unfamiliar with tim's work going in and i made it five minutes and i was like this has me feeling bad for tim ferris and i can't tolerate that so i have to leave all right we're we are now past the a in deal which is the uh slave labor and fraud business portion. And we are on to liberation.
Freeing myself to employ others in exploitative conditions. Yes.
What's interesting about this section is that for much of it, he actually pivots away from like this basic framework. And a lot of it is geared towards employees rather than like self-employed entrepreneurs.
Okay. The practical advice here is primarily about how to convince your employer to let you work remotely.
Which means we get to witness how a guy in 2007 thought employers would react to an employee request for remote work. Yeah, it's a little unfair to shit on him for this because like, of course, this was the framework at the time and this has all become normalized.
but it's a little unfair to it is shit on him for this because like of course this

was the framework at the time and this has all become normalized but it's also very funny to shit on him for this so maybe we should continue so he offers up uh some fake dialogue between you and your boss to sort of you know uh give you a template for how to discuss with your manager your desire to do remote work.

I love it when we do scripts.

I will be the boss, Bill.

Okay, you, Bill. Okay.
And you can be Sherwood, the employee. Okay.
This is Tim writing out the dialogue that he believes will happen when you ask your manager for remote work. Hi, Bill.
Do you have a quick second? Sure. What's up? I just wanted to bounce an idea off of you that's been on my mind.
Two minutes should be plenty. Okay, shoot.
Last week, as you know, I was sick. Long story short, I decided to work at home despite feeling terrible.
So here's the funny part. I thought I would get nothing done, but ended up finishing three more designs than usual on both days.
Plus, I put in three more billable hours than usual without the commute, office noise, distractions, etc. Okay, So here's where I'm going.
Just as a trial, I'd like to propose working from home Mondays and Tuesdays for just two weeks. You can veto it whenever you want, and I'll come in if we need to do meetings.
But I'd like to try it for just two weeks and review the results. I'm 100% confident that I'll get twice as much done.
Does that seem reasonable? Hmm. What if we need to share client designs?

There's a program called GoToMyPC that I used to access the office computer when I was sick.

I can view everything remotely, and I'll have my cell phone on me 24-7.

So, what do you think? Test it out starting next Monday and see how much more I get done?

Um, okay, fine. But it's just a test.
I have a meeting in five and have to run, but let's talk soon. Great.
Thanks for the time. I'll keep you posted on it all.
I'm sure you'll be pleasantly surprised. Thumbs up.
Yay. I fucking nailed it, Peter.
I just want some acknowledgement of how good my line readings were. No, you did great.
That was classic Sherwood. Is there like a lower form of like argument than just writing fake dialogue? Yeah, this is how it'll go like tim have you ever had a boss you know yeah like even in 2007 the idea that you just be like can i not come in monday and tuesday and i promise i'll be working and your boss would be like absolutely yeah they're not going to impose like arbitrary rules on you this is is work.
Like, come on, man. I also love that he's like promising to like do more work and be more productive, which just sounds like to prove that you're productive, you're going to be like constantly on the hustle.
Right. But then the whole point of this framework is to slack off and do less work.
Well, one thing that he makes it clear that like if you go nuts during a trial session that'll buy you a lot of leeway to slack off later yeah then okay you set it up and then once he's used to it then you hit him with the four hours a week right all right i already did something last week sherwood uh who by the way i believe is just a fictional character he's using to illustrate his points, proceeds to go to work from Oktoberfest in Munich. And it's like, how long do you think a manager is going to let you work from impromptu vacations before you're fired, you know? It is very funny how he's like toggling back and forth between perspectives.
Like in this section, he's speaking as an employee. And he's like, here's how to trick your boss into giving you leeway.
But then it sounds like in the rest of the book, he's speaking as an employer and he's like, here's how to impose controls on your employees so they don't take any leeway. Like I, I, I want him to run the dialogue again, but instead of Sherwood, it's Asha.
Like, do you let her to a trial period, Tim? I actually don't really understand this portion of the book. And it feels like someone was just like, can you put in something for regular office workers? Yeah.
Because the next section is when he sort of says, you know, I realize this isn't really realistic for most people, but that's OK because you can just quit. And also getting fired is not actually a very big deal if you've done what I've suggested so far and started a fraudulent business.
Yeah, just fall back on your supplement money, which you have. So here is his bit about getting fired.
He says, if you jump ship or get fired, it isn't hard to eliminate most expenses temporarily and live on savings for a brief period. From renting out your home to refinancing or selling it, there are options.
There are always options. If you have supplement millions, it might be emotionally difficult, but you won't starve.
Park your car in the garage and cancel insurance for a few months. Carpool or take the bus until you find the next gig.
Rack up some more credit card debt and cook instead of eating out. Sell all the crap that you spent hundreds or thousands on and never use.
OK, so we're back to like stop eating avocado toast. Look, just stop going out to fancy meals.
Also cancel your health insurance, second mortgage, go into severe credit card debt, guys. It's not that hard.
Rent out the home that you own. Instead of sailing on your yacht, lease it.
So most of the rest of this book is dedicated to advice about how to do cool shit with your newfound free time.

Oh, fuck yes.

Which centers around what he calls mini retirements. He says that people have retirement backwards.
You should be looking for income that can fund adventures now rather than delaying it all until retirement. He says retirement, quote, should be viewed as nothing more than a hedge against the absolute worst case scenario.
In this case, becoming physically incapable of working and needing a reservoir of capital to survive. He goes on like a long trip to Spain and then he's like, why not take the usual 20 to 30 year retirement and redistribute it throughout life instead of saving it all for the end?

God, nothing is more annoying than someone who just came back from Spain.

Only up to 10.

Wow, Tim.

The thing is that what he describes as the absolute worst case scenario of being physically unable to work is sort of just an inevitability for many people.

Yeah. And it's weird to be like, well, let's take the money away from that and put it towards vacations now.
Right. What he actually means is like, make a million dollars a year and then you'll have enough to survive retirement when you're old anyway.
Yeah. He's trying to hedge by saying, well, look, definitely save for retirement in case something unexpected happens, but also take your retirement in little chunks now.
But what that basically amounts to is just like save for retirement and go on a bunch of vacations now, which is sort of already what everybody wants to do. Like the reason why people don't go on vacations now isn't because they don't know that that would be awesome.
He says that you should occasionally just relocate to somewhere you want to visit for one to six months. And that's what he considers a mini retirement.
Even if you have his fraud scheme working in the background. Right.
It's you hear that and you're like, how is this feasible for most people? Right.

The first concern is obviously money. Yeah.
And he says you can actually make this affordable. OK.
So he lists out his costs from his extended stays in Buenos Aires and Berlin. And I'm going to send you the pages from the book.
I thought it might be something Mike Hobbs would have insight into because you lived in Berlin.

Yes.

So I'm going to send you the pages from the book. Okay.
I thought it might be something Mike Hobbs would have insight into because you lived in Berlin.

Yes.

So I'm going to send you his monthly expenses for these trips. Okay.
So he's got a list of categories. So airfare, free, courtesy of Amex Gold Card.
enormous apartment in the trendy Soho-like Prinzlauerberg district of Berlin,

including phone and energy $300 US per month. And then meals, he just says Berlin, $18.
He says four or five-star restaurant meals twice daily. In Buenos Aires, $10.
In Berlin, $18. No, that's like three shawarmas a day.
I also don't understand like two, four or five star restaurant meals a day. Like what's the price of the treatment for gout? Because that's what's going to happen.
But then I will sort of defend and attack him here. I feel like, yeah, he's fudging the numbers.
Like these numbers are small, but then on some level, the numbers don't super duper matter. Cause like, yeah, could you get an apartment in Prince Lauerberg for 300 euros in 2007? Probably not, but it was significantly cheaper to live in Berlin back then than it was in a lot of other global cities, kind of like surprisingly cheap.
I'm sort of willing to forgive him on like the specifics of the numbers. But on the other hand, all he's really saying here is that like some cities in the world are cheaper than other cities.
And remember that earlier he said, quote, this has nothing to do with currency rates. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is also an area of the book where his practical advice starts to flounder out. He has like an insert about saving on airfare.
And his advice is just to use like kayak.com and break very far in advance. And it's like, OK, he goes on to list education costs, which are like language lessons and then private tango lessons, which are quite expensive.
if he starts off this book with an anecdote about being in a high profile tango competition okay he's like just one year ago i had no experience but here i was and here's and here's how i did it and it was so stupid that i was like i was like i'm not going to include this it's too mean to read out the whole book oh and then in like ber, he's taking MMA training. Yeah.
Which I have to say, he was ahead of the game here. This is like 2006, 2007, presumably.
MMA is something that tech assholes are into now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He totals up his monthly costs as $1,500 a month in Buenos Aires, nearly a third of which is the advanced tango lessons, and just under $1,200 in Berlin. And then he says, how do these numbers compare to your current domestic monthly expenses, including rent, car insurance, utilities, weekend expenditures, partying, public transportation, gas, memberships, subscriptions, food, and all the rest? Add it all up and you may well realize, like I did, that traveling around the world and having the time of your life can save you serious money.
So a few things that I wanted to say about that. One, you probably have a lot of those domestic expenses while you're abroad.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Presumably you're keeping your apartment somewhere so when you go back to the States, you're not living in a rented place.
Right. Or if like if you have a house, you're paying your mortgage.
Yeah. Not to mention that a lot of these expenses are stuff that he does not add into his Berlin and Argentina expenses.
Right. The other thing that came to my mind when I was thinking about his mini retirement scheme is like, OK, what if you have children? Yeah.
And he seems to be loosely aware that people are concerned about this. And so I'm going to send you his attempt to lay the concerns of parents to rest.
He says, The prime fear of all parents prior to their first international trip is somehow losing a child in the shuffle. The good news is that if you're comfortable taking your kids to New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., or London, you'll have even less to worry about in the starting cities I recommended.
There are fewer guns and violent crimes in all of them compared to most large U.S. cities.
Oh, so it's like your kids aren't going to die? Right. So he seems to think that the primary concern of parents is like that your kid might get lost or kidnapped or shot or something.
And it's like, bro, I don't even have a kid, but I know that what every parent is thinking when hearing this scheme is my kid has to go to school. Yeah.
Not like, oh, what if they get taken? You know, this is like how everyone says that when we were kids, we were worried about quicks we were worried about quicksand yeah it's like a child's idea of what a parent would be worried about he's like now i know what you're gonna say what about parents but i do address it in the book actually i've got you covered yeah i feel like okay this is like coming into focus for me now like he's writing this as if it's advice but what it basically is is just like a look how awesome my life is book if you're this guy your life rocks you're fucking rich you don't have any like deep ties to any particular place you can like jet around the world and write some emails and the money keeps coming in and you're like kind of sort of running this scammy company but you don't really to do that much. Like, it seems like you just wanted to write a book about how awesome your life is, but you're not, like, kind of capable of doing that as a form of public reason of, like, hey, everybody, look how great my shit is.
But, like, you are allowed to act as if your awesome life is in some way replicable. Right.
And it just isn't. So you're just telling me how awesome your life is and pretending that the reason other people don't do this is because like they don't know some secret.
Right. And I think you're right that he's just sort of bragging.
And the main reason I think you're right is because in his next book, there's a digression about how he's like an expert at giving women orgasms. Oh, wait, god it's like yeah uh my next book uh the the four hour nut uh all of these guys eventually just become like dating gurus don't they there's like a weird it's like animals evolving into crabs one of his last chapters is about how like once you've freed up all of your time to do what you want you might find yourself searching for meaning in life oh and he calls the chapter filling the void oh my god which i mentioned because tim ferris now has talked openly about how he's had like bouts of depression and struggled with mental health and stuff, but that he didn't recognize it at the time he wrote this book.
Oh, that's so interesting. You see it like peek through with like the title of the chapter where he's like, okay, you freed up your time.
Now you're going to hear the abyss calling. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're going to wonder what to do about it. And it's like, oh, Tim, you've got to do the therapy, bro.
Let's circle back to the therapy. This is the I need therapy advice book.
Holy shit. That's that's honestly the first interesting thing I've heard in this episode.
A lot of this stuff that he was doing in his 20s was him either chasing something or running away from something, which as somebody who lived abroad for a long time, like you do really see this. It makes sense in general, right? That if you did find yourself with 36 hours of free time a week, you might start thinking about what the point of it all is, right? Like, yeah, there are mental and emotional challenges that come with having the freedom to do what you want.
This is why I always listen to podcasts, even if I'm like just brushing my teeth or something, so I don't have to be alone with my thoughts. Never let the thoughts in.
Don't do it. There's also a bit where he provides his own view on the meaning of life.
He says that, quote, I believe that life exists to be enjoyed and that the most important thing is to feel good about yourself. OK.
Which is both trite and stupid, but I mostly wanted to include it because only a 28 year old Silicon Valley guy would think that he should just throw in his view on the meaning of life. Yeah.
I've also got thoughts on the meaning of life. FYI, now that I've taught you about how to do a fake fraudulent instructional DVD.
The funny thing is, I feel like the actual like low key advice the book is giving without realizing it is to try to form like meaningful relationships and that chasing money is not going to make

you happy.

Right.

And this thing of like, I'm sitting by an infinity pool is like, yeah, it's really cool.

But like that, that's not it.

Right.

Yeah.

You should do as much of this stuff in your twenties as possible.

I honestly like think fucking off to other countries and like, if you're able to do it

is like great.

And like, don't make excuses, fuck off, it whips.

But also like you need to be able to form deeper relationships and like have something

to come home to.

Well, that's what you have asha for she's sending you yoga poses my my best friend asha god now i feel so mean about the book because it sounds like he's writing this as a way of like struggling out of some sort of darkness. Don't worry.
Okay. I got you covered.
Make me feel better. Tell me something problematic he said or did.
I will not let empathy for Tim Ferriss grab a hold of you. Fix me, Peter.
So the book's a hit, of course, right? It spawns various spinoffs because they can't resist. Yeah.
It's the scam. It's the same scam, bro.
He fucking told you if you read the four hour work week where he explains the scam that he's running on you and then you see the next book and you buy that. I'm sorry, but like you just shouldn't be allowed to be alone.
It's maybe in the first book he deliberately said sell dvds as opposed to sell books to make it like less obvious what he was doing like this is what he's doing i would love it if that was a an editor suggestion tim can you delete books and just put dvds we're scamming people into buying the book tim so anyway yeah you were having Tim Ferriss. And I was like, don't worry.
His next book has rapid fat loss in the title. Did you look at it? Is it any is it just like whatever? Do a bunch of sit ups or some shit? Yeah.
So I skimmed this one a little bit. He recommends what he calls a slow carb diet.
Oh, yeah. He claims he interviewed hundreds of experts for the book, which again is just a component of that same fake expertise scam that he outlined for us.
Remember, his advice was like, interview experts, read a couple of the bestselling books, and then bang, you are the fake expert. It's what he's doing.
As you're walking me through the book, I do actually think that this is like significantly more poisonous than atomic habits for example i mean we said this during the episode but atomic habits is just like a set of tips and it's like the stakes are very low in that book you know i think it's sort of silly and it's emblematic of a certain type of bullshit but it's nothing like this yeah if someone tried, like your chance of dying on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic is skyrocketing.

And also it's like, it's not even that the tips in this book are useless.

It's like many of them are like actively harmful, not only to yourself because they're not going

to work, but also to society.

You're just like, oh, telling lies about shit and becoming yet another fucking wellness

guru.

And then also the epilogue is that like none of this made him happy right right so right the fact that right now he's like in the last couple years he's like sort of re-envisioning how he conceives of his life just goes to show how hollow this shit is yeah exactly like what i've dedicated my whole career to and like the way that i made my millions is basically just like bullshit he also publishes the four hour chef the simple path to cooking like a pro learning anything and living the good life um couldn't even skim this one i have to be honest um he's obviously building around the four hour brand but it's also funny because you can see the allure of it decreasing like four hour work week incredible 90 reduction in my work hours right four hour body and it's like okay that's we're talking about working out four times a week for an hour that's just sort of like a standard recommended exercise regimen and then it's like four hour chef and it's like that's kind of a lot of cooking tim i don't also wasn't he an early pioneer of podcasting this is like mostly how i know him is that his podcast was like wildly successful his podcast was very very successful um he's also like um the book made him a hit in silicon valley and so like his company gets bought by a private equity firm in 2010. He's sitting on a small fortune and becomes a seed investor and has like struck it huge with various massive companies.
He's now extraordinarily wealthy. And all of it sort of underscores even he was not doing this, Right.
He's just working 70 hour weeks writing books and doing TED Talks. Yeah.
And taking meetings with Silicon Valley assholes. And what he would say to that is like, well, look, the whole point is not necessarily that you only work four hours.
It's that you do whatever you want and you don't need to work. Right.
Right. But if the idea is like you should be pursuing what makes you happy and like what makes him happy is just working in the same exact way that he worked before.
Right. Then perhaps he wasn't actually pursuing what made him happy.
And I think I think that his change of heart over the last few years sort of bears this out. Like he says now that he's less focused on material success and productivity and is more focused on psychological well-being and he's gotten very into psychedelics and meditation and spiritual retreats and shit like that the full silicon valley dipshit life cycle right like how every like every time you look at jack dorsey he looks like he's living deeper in a sewer but then it's not even like the Silicon Valley life cycle.
It's just like the aging life cycle. Like as you become older, you start to think about like what is meaningful to me in my life and what do I want to leave behind, which is totally fine.
I don't think it's just that. I think what makes it particularly Silicon Valley is that at every stage you are incredibly confident that you have found it.
Exactly. This is the thing is that you're immediately selling back like these little epiphanies that you had like 15 minutes ago.
Right. You're like, hey, traveling is really great when you're in your 20s.
I'm going to write a book about how everybody should go travel. And it's like, I found out in my 40s that meditating is really cool.
I'm going to write a book about how meditating will save you. Meditation and spiritual retreats are changing my life.
And it's like, bro, you're having a midlife crisis. Yeah, it's fine.
Like you're in your 40s. You've attained what you've defined as success and it hasn't made you happy.
Right. And like, yeah, that's a lot of people when they're in their 40s, man.
Yeah. And a lot of other people don't get to like, nope out of the structures that they're in and just like take a break and go do ayahuasca in Arizona.
Not everybody gets to do that. But you're just again repackaging this shit as like, no, no, I've got it figured out.
You know, not to brag, but I was doing shrooms when I was 22, okay? So I'm ahead of the game, Tim. And also I had like a black abyss in my heart when I was like 17.
Yeah. Tim, join me.
That's right. Some of us knew that it didn't mean anything.
You rented the dark. I was born in 10 years he's gonna like in 20 years he's gonna be writing a book about like the joy of grandkids or some shit like that 100 prostate health with tim it's very interesting how this book starts versus how it finishes because like it starts off fairly relatable it's a common experience to feel like you're doing okay doing what you're supposed to doing, but you're just working a lot and sort of looking around and wondering, like, is this the rest of my fucking life? Yeah.
Maybe the existence of this book speaks to how beaten down the spirit of the American worker is, because like this is a structural problem. Yeah.
Right. Like the problem that he sees but can't really identify is probably that America is the only industrialized country on Earth without mandatory paid vacation for workers.
Right. Yeah.
How bleak is it that to Americans structural change is so unthinkable that Timothy Ferris thought it would be simpler to employ a small army of third world wage slaves in order to like loosely replicate what people in Spain get as a matter of legal right. And he's like, all you have to do to avoid all these like structural disadvantages of working in the United States is just like be fabulously wealthy.
It's like, yeah, great. Be the one percent.
Awesome. Try to step atop the structure of oppression using fraud to employ people so that you can do more fraud and then travel.

The sequel to this is going to be called The 80-Hour Workweek by Asha.

Ooh, Asha. Bye.
Thank you.