#475: Mr. Money Mustache — Living Beautifully on $25-27K Per Year (Repost)

Mr. Money Mustache (@mrmoneymustache http://twitter.com/mrmoneymustache/ — Pete Adeney in real life) grew up in Canada in a family of mostly eccentric musicians. He graduated with a degree in computer engineering in the 1990s and worked in various tech companies before retiring at age 30. Pete, his wife, and their now eleven-year-old son live near Boulder, Colorado, and have not had real jobs since 2005. This begs the question of “How?” In essence, they accomplished this early retirement by optimizing all aspects of their lifestyle for maximal fun at minimal expense, and by using basic index-fund investing. Their average annual expenses total a mere $25-27,000, and they do not feel in want of anything. Since 2005, all three of them have explored a free-form life of interesting projects, side-businesses, and adventures. In 2011, Pete started writing the Mr. Money Mustache blog http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ about his philosophy, which has grown to reach about 23 million different people (and 300 million page views) since its founding. It has become a worldwide cult phenomenon, with a self-organizing community and incredible news coverage. This episode explores his story, philosophies, and routines. Please enjoy! This episode originally aired in 2017. You can find the show notes here: https://tim.blog/2017/02/13/mr-money-mustache/ This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * This podcast is also brought to you by 99designs http://99designs.com/tim, the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together to create designs they love. Its creative process has become the go-to solution for businesses, agencies, and individuals, and I have used it for years to help with display advertising and illustrations and to rapid prototype the cover for The Tao of Seneca. Whether your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99designs http://99designs.com/tim. You can work with multiple designers at once to get a bunch of different ideas, or hire the perfect designer for your project based on their style and industry specialization. It’s simple to review concepts and leave feedback so you’ll end up with a design that you’re happy with. Click this link and get $20 off plus a $99 upgrade http://99designs.com/tim. * This podcast is also brought to you by The Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach http://thereadystate.com/tim. The first person I call for help with my athletic recovery or mobility training is Dr. Kelly Starrett at The Ready State http://thereadystate.com/tim. Kelly is a mobility and movement coach for Olympic gold medalists, world champions, and pro athletes. Kelly created a program called Virtual Mobility Coach http://thereadystate.com/tim. It’s like carrying a virtual Kelly Starrett in your pocket. Every day, Virtual Mobility Coach gives you guided mobility videos. It walks you step-by-step through Kelly’s proven techniques to relieve pain and improve your range of motion. Right now, listeners of this podcast can try Virtual Mobility Coach http://thereadystate.com/tim totally risk-free for two weeks without paying a penny. And after that, you can get 10% off for life. Just go to TheReadyState.com/Tim http://thereadystate.com/tim and use code TIM10 at checkout. Relieve pain, recover faster, and improve your performance in the gym with The Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach http://thereadystate.com/tim. Visit TheReadyState.com/Tim http://thereadystate.com/timand check it out. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to dig around, find world-class performers of all sorts of stripes and breeds and species and deconstruct what they do. How do they make decisions? What do they do first thing in the morning? What are the habits, routines, details that you can apply to your life? And this particular episode was very much an in-demand, requested episode. And the guest is Mr. Money Mustache, @MrMoneyMustache, Pete Adeney in real life. He grew up in Canada in a family of mostly eccentric musicians, then graduated from

• 0:41Tim Ferriss?

  computer engineering in the 1990s and worked in various tech companies before retiring at age 30. Pete, his wife, and their now 11-year-old son live near Boulder, Colorado, and they've not had real jobs since 2005. This begs the question, of course, how? How did they do that? They accomplished this early retirement by doing a number of things, but in effect, optimizing all aspects of their lifestyle for maximal fun at minimal expense and by using basic index fund investing. Their annual expenses on average total a mere $25,000 to $27,000, and they do not feel in want of anything.

• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  So again, since 2005, all three of them have explored a free-form life of interesting projects, side businesses, and adventures. In 2011, Pete started writing the Mr. Money Mustache blog about his philosophy, which has grown to reach about 23 million different people and 300 million page views since its inception, since its founding. It has become a worldwide cult phenomenon with a self-organizing community and incredible news coverage. This episode explores his story, philosophies, and routines. So please enjoy my conversation with the one and only Mr. Money Mustache, Pete Adney.

• 2:04Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, the global creative platform that makes it easy for you to find and work with amazing graphic designers online. Longtime listeners of this podcast know how much attention I pay to detail, how obsessively I approach nearly all elements of my work, because the small things often end up being the big things. So whether it's your logo, your business cards, website design, even your email templates, all of these visual elements tell your customers, tell your users who you are and what you're about. So I think it's worth sweating the details. I've been using 99designs for years now to ensure that many of my creative projects, whether big or small, are as cohesive, professional, and beautiful as possible. I've worked on draft

• 2:45Tim Ferriss?

  mockups of book covers, I've worked on all sorts of things. Most recently, I've been working with a designer at 99designs to update the illustrations and layouts for all of my downloadable eBooks. I've developed a really great working relationship with the designer who goes by the username Spoonlancer, and I intend to continue working with him to bring ideas to life, one project at a time. I've also used 99designs for all sorts of high-end illustration for different books, like the Tao of Seneca. You can see a bunch of examples on my Instagram that I've put up, and they've turned out better than I possibly could have hoped. So, from logos, to websites, to packaging, to books, 99designs is the go-to creative resource to build your brand on any budget.

• 3:27Tim Ferriss?

  So check them out. Right now, my listeners, that's you guys, can get $20 off, plus a free $99 upgrade on their first design contest. A contest is a great way to get started and find the right designer for long-term work. You can also book a free design consultation with a brand expert at 99designs to receive personalized branding advice over the phone. Their hands-on team has helped thousands of business owners at this point. It's a great way to get the most out of your experience with 99designs. So, take a look. Head to 99designs.com/tim for your discount and to sign up for design consultation today. That's 99designs.com/tim.

• 4:08Tim Ferriss?

  This podcast is brought to you by The Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach. What on earth is that? Well, let me back up. The first person I personally call for help with my athletic recovery or mobility training is Dr. Kelly Starrett at The Ready State. I've known Kelly for more than a decade. He's a good friend, but he's also a mobility and movement coach for Olympic gold medalists, world champions, and pro athletes. You might recognize the name because Kelly was in The Four Hour Body. He was in Tools of Titans. He also nursed and coached me through the Destroy My Body for Entertainment TV show that was The Tim Ferriss Experiment. Now Kelly has created a program called Virtual Mobility Coach. It's like carrying a virtual Kelly Starrett in your pocket because most people are not

• 4:52Tim Ferriss?

  going to have direct access to Kelly, but now you do. Every day, Virtual Mobility Coach gives you guided mobility videos, walks you step by step through Kelly's proven techniques to relieve pain, improve range of motion, improve performance, on and on and on and on. If you're in pain, you can pull up a picture of the human body, click on what hurts, and from there, get a customized regimen to help find relief. If you are working out or playing a sport, Virtual Mobility Coach offers all sorts of pre and post exercise mobility sequences for more than 50 sports and activities, actually. And right now, listeners of this podcast get a special deal. You can try Virtual Mobility Coach. You can get the Kelly Starrett in your pocket, totally risk-free, for two weeks without paying a penny.

• 5:37Tim Ferriss?

  Try it completely free for two weeks, and if you decide to continue, you can get 10% off for life using promo code TIM10. That's T-I-M-1-0. Simply visit thereadystate.com/tim to check everything out and use code TIM10 at checkout. Again, that's thereadystate.com/tim and use code TIM10 when you sign up to get 10% off for the life of your membership after your 14-day free trial ends. Thereadystate.com/tim.

• 6:10Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first

• 6:50Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out. The dude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  No, we're just sitting at the table, Tim.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 7:28Tim Ferriss?

  Pete, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tim. It's an honor to be on here. And you are, I would say, in the top five most requested guests for this podcast that I see on the internet and beyond. I had somebody come up to me recently in New York City of all places. He said, you know, you should have on the podcast, and it was you. And so I'm really excited to dig into all sorts of stories and conversations and discussions, because I'm thinking through many areas of my life in which I think you are an expert, or have certainly spent more time ruminating on these things. But I thought we could start with your experience getting groceries.

• 8:11Tim Ferriss?

  Could you describe for people what your experience looks like getting groceries?

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Uh, well, it's kind of varied, but I feel strongly about groceries. So in an ideal like utopian grocery day, I would throw my bike trailer onto the back of my single speed bike and roll down to like the local kind of hippie natural grocery store and then just load up with like 150 bucks of awesome stuff and then pedal it back up the hill and then unload it and then have people show up and a giant barbecue that night and feast.

• 8:46Tim Ferriss?

  So if that's the utopia, what does the, what does the compromised utopia look like?

• 8:53Speaker 03

  Well, it's usually pretty close to that, but sometimes people don't come over or sometimes there's some reason I have to use the car and maybe I'm taking, taking it past the grocery store. So I rush in and get some stuff, but I think the, you know, the thrust of the question is like, does this guy really get groceries by bicycle? And it's definitely true. I kind of do everything by bike here in Long Mark in Colorado, like at least 99% of my trips away from the house here are human powered. And that's just the way I've figured out makes me happiest to live.

• 9:24Tim Ferriss?

  And at this point in time, you have a household of three. Is that right?

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true. One boy.

• 9:30Tim Ferriss?

  One boy.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  One girl.

• 9:32Tim Ferriss?

  And got it. All right. And, and what, uh, what is the, cause I think this is, this is, uh, this is going to be a core piece of the discussion. What are your average annual family expenses at this point, would you say?

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Right. Well, we've been adding this up ever since I started writing a blog. We never really added it up before, but it always comes out around 25 to $27,000 of annual expenditures, with the notable exception that we don't have any kind of mortgage or debt or anything. So that's all on purely stuff that we want to buy.

• 10:05Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. And maybe we'll, we'll, this is going to be memento style in terms of chronology is a lot of my conversations are, it's just a quirk of my brain that I'm trying to, a bug I'm trying to turn into a feature of this podcast.

• 10:22Tim Ferriss?

  What was the blog post or the day that you realized Mr. Money Mustache had a cult-like following? Was there, and I use that in a complimentary way, by the way. You have some of the most diehard fans I've ever encountered. Was there a particular piece or moment when you realized how strongly and devoted your fanbase was?

• 10:51Speaker 03

  I think it's kind of been like one of those frog in hot water situations where it just gradually happens and then occasionally, especially when my friends stop in on a like a Money Mustache event, they're like, dude, you're a cult leader, did you realize that? But it didn't really happen any specific time. I would say the first time I was really surprised by the effects of blogging was when I had a guest post on this awesome previous blog called Early Retirement Extreme and a whole bunch of this Jacob bloggers fans came over to mine, my blog, and just flooded it and just crawled and read every single article and started putting in all these comments and then it was really a rewarding thing and it just kept going from there. It's sort of a self motivating thing.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  And then the other incident was probably we had a party once, a blog related meetup in Ottawa, Canada, which is kind of one of my homeland, hometowns. And all these people came, like 200 people, and it overflowed into the backyard of this like unwitting host's place and it was a little weird because I didn't even get to meet anybody. And that was the first time I became uncomfortable with like, oh, well, I didn't want to be one of those people where you don't even meet everybody who wants to meet you.

• 12:03Tim Ferriss?

  So Ottawa, I've actually spent a decent amount of time in Ottawa and I had a Beaver Tail for the first time while ice skating or planning on ice skating in Ottawa due to a startup there, well, it's a quite a large company now called Shopify.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Shopify, oh yeah, I knew that. Yeah, and the Beaver Tail, that's the right way to do Ottawa is skating and Beaver Tales.

• 12:27Tim Ferriss?

  And now Beaver Tail is... I don't even remember exactly what it is, but it's a pastry, right? I mean, it's, uh, what is it exactly? It's like a chocolate-covered pastry. Uh, and for those people who've not been to Ottawa, you can, you can skate for hours. I mean, it's this, this gigantic, uh, I guess they lower the water level or maybe they raise the water level so that you can skate effectively around the entire city, if I, if I'm remembering correctly.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. It's pretty awesome.

• 12:55Tim Ferriss?

  The, uh, the, but to get back to the blog, what, what do you think has, what are the aspects of your philosophy or your writing or your persona that have struck such a chord?

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Well, it's funny you should ask that because the first time I ever did a talk, like a big public talk, it was, uh, to a conference of bloggers. It's called FinCon and I just stopped by because it was in Denver and, uh, I'd realized that this blog was kind of behaving like a cult. And then I looked up like, what are the properties of a cult? And then I read some articles and maybe a book or two on cults and I realized, man, I've accidentally done it. And, uh, and just because that's my idea of a sense of humor is, uh, so it turns out if you want to start a cult, you need to just have a few key elements, like a recognizable leader, need to have a sense of us versus Zen, them, you know, like, oh, we're an oppressed people and the rest of the world doesn't understand us.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  And a couple of other things that helps to feel like you're virtuous and have some kind of like good, changing the world and the rest of the world needs your help. And, uh, yeah, so if you look at all the cults, including informal ones like Star Trek or uh, Apple, there's always these same kind of characteristics and I accidentally emulated those and in retrospect realized, hey, well, I guess that was a pretty good idea.

• 14:12Tim Ferriss?

  So for those who are part of the us, in your case, what is, what's the belief system? What are the, the tenets?

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Right. So the belief system, which I jokingly call mustachianism, it's kind of like a lifestyle and a fake religion. And the beliefs are that the, you know, sort of the United States especially is the ground zero of this consumer.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Insanity that has overtaken all of our minds and it's just causing people to behave in an irrational way and sort of sabotage their own ability to have a good life. For example, they work way more years than they have to because they're consuming a lot more crap than they have to without actually getting any life benefit about it over and then the same thing applies to the health, their health and their sanity and their mental health. Everyone's very inefficiently going about their life. So the correction through mustachianism is just being a bit more thoughtful about this stuff and seeking efficiency in the way that you spend your money and make sure that you get fun out of it each time that you spend something. And applying this, you just end up a lot healthier and wealthier

• 15:19Speaker 03

  and able to retire from mandatory work at a much earlier age in your life, which a lot of people are drawn in by the prospect of an extra four decades of freedom that they wouldn't have otherwise gotten.

• 15:32Tim Ferriss?

  Correct me if I'm wrong here, but you retired effectively at age 30, is that right?

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Right, yeah, this is perfect reverse chronology, just like you planned it. So Yeah. Now we're back to the year 2005 and after working about a 10-year career in software engineering, my girlfriend, who is now my wife, and I determined we had enough money saved up to live off the investment returns forever. So we just quit our regular cubicle jobs and just in time to have our baby boy at the time. And that was, of course, about 11 years ago. And we didn't even know this was a weird thing to do. We thought, oh yeah, well, of course, you know, when you get paid as much as we do, like it only takes so long until you don't need to work anymore. And it was only after several years of retirement that we noticed that we were kind of oddballs and everybody else who earned the same amount of money was still broke.

• 16:23Tim Ferriss?

  Broken in probably more way than one. And I want to dig into some of the numbers related to this. So as a discussion point, one of the, one of the things you had said over, and I always ask guests for potential prompts for topics that could be fun to explore. And one of them was you only need to accumulate 25 times your annual spending to retire forever. Could you elaborate on that and how, how you arrived at that number? Because I think this is, this is a useful exercise for people to hear.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a core piece of math that is very, it's widely known if you're a financial independence enthusiast, but it's almost completely secret to most of the of the rich world's population. So if you have a, if you have a handle on your annual spending and you know how much you need to live on, all you need to do is save up 25 times that amount. And on the very, very conservative side, let's say 28 times that amount in conservative investments, like a giant Vanguard index fund. And that's enough to fund you with passive income with a high degree of safety for the rest of your life. So if you have a, to just keep the number simple, if you need $30,000 to live on, multiply that by 25 and, oh darn,

• 17:40Speaker 03

  I'm giving myself a tricky math question. I think that's like $750,000 you'd need saved up or something like that to, to quit forever. And that's a lot less than most people think. Most people, at least in my age group, they're shooting for the tens of millions type of range if they, if they were to ever quit work early and they haven't really done the math on how easy it really is.

• 18:04Tim Ferriss?

  And what are, are there any assumptions embedded in that in terms of percentage annual yield and so on? What are, what are the, whether historically based or otherwise, what are, what are the, are there any other assumptions embedded in that?

• 18:19Speaker 03

  It is, yeah. There's, it's kind of based on a really long-term study of the stock market dating back to the 1920s or something like that, or maybe even earlier. And the idea is it goes up some years, it goes down some years, consistently pays dividends. And in the worst case scenario, you want to still not run out of money. So that's where the 4% comes from, who have gotten you through a lot of the worst case scenarios. There were some situations when you could have spent up to five or seven percent of your portfolio every year and still not run out if you had happened to retire just before a big stock market boom that went on for a long time. But most people don't like taking

• 18:59Speaker 03

  a huge amount of risk. So the 4% or 3.5, if you want to be extra conservative with today's stock market valuations, that's more of a safety net. And it's really just a mental crutch because what I find is that when people retire early, Almost everybody, like over 95% of people, still have a lot of interests and passions. And then they're pretty good at making money if they manage to save up that much in the first place. So they still make money in their, quote, "retirement." They just have a lot more fun doing it. And that nest egg that's pumping out dividends and returns just adds extra confidence so they can, they can have more fun in the process.

• 19:38Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I've, I've read two different definitions of retirement, or maybe their characteristics that are, I think one was attributed to, one was written by you, both of which I thought were very helpful as a orientation for thinking about the subject. And the first is, you know, retirement or financial independence simply means that you have your living expenses covered by non-work income, right? Part one.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:04Tim Ferriss?

  Part two is definition of a modern retirement, the activities you pursue once you are done searching for money. And I think that's a very useful framework, if, in particular, you're considering an early retirement, at, at say, the age of 30, 40, 50, whatever it might be. The, how do, let's say, media, not to cast aspersions on everyone who is part of the media, since I suppose that's what I am right now at this moment, but you've been covered a fair amount. And I know, like, everyone who's been covered a fair amount,

• 20:43Tim Ferriss?

  you get misquoted, or people get the message wrong, or they just take snarky, cheap shots. Occasionally, it doesn't happen all the time. You've actually had some of the most complimentary profiles I've ever read. But where do they get it wrong? Where do people get you, your message, your principles, philosophies wrong?

• 21:02Speaker 03

  Well, the misconceptions are sort of two different things. From the media side, they often... Assume, well, I mean, the ones that aren't complimentary, they assume, hey, there's this crazy guy, and he's just a lifestyle guru, just like another junior Tim Ferriss trying to get everybody excited about his crazy ideas, and he's not really retired. Or, or they say, yeah, he, he made so much money, but that doesn't apply to the regular person when they're, you know, when they're trying to make it on like $50,000 a year salary, or what about people with more kids? So, um, the media don't understand, they, they often assume some kind of extreme frugality

• 21:43Speaker 03

  that would be undesirable to live under, and that's, that's really inaccurate, and I, I worked pretty hard to fight it because I don't have my spending set up for the minimal level, I have it set up for the maximum amount that I can possibly spend and get value out of it, you know, because it's easy to make money. So I set my spending at the maximum happiness level, and then stopped spending when I stopped getting more happiness. So that's the, that's really the fundamental mistake. And then as for the, the non-media world, they're a little bit more suspicious, like they just think I'm make every, making everything up, and, and I don't even, you know, I never did any of this stuff that I say I did in the first place. So then it's more of a conspiracy theory if you're reading like the comment section

• 22:29Speaker 03

  of MSN, which you should never do.

• 22:35Tim Ferriss?

  You, but you do have, uh, and I think this is why, this is part of the reason I wanted to bring it up very early, a, by most standards in the United States, a low household annual expense, right?

• 22:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:48Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, it, it might be helpful here to talk about, because I, I asked during our sound check what you had for breakfast. So could you repeat your answer, please?

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, well, my, my breakfast was a fancy black espresso with foamed milk, uh, and coconut, coconut oil foamed into there too, and then some dark chocolate, like 90% dark chocolate, and, uh, some nuts, almonds and cashews and stuff.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  And it's not exactly related to low expenditure, but

• 23:20Tim Ferriss?

  It's indirectly related. I'm gonna, I'm gonna come back to it. What type, but since I love the particulars, what type of coffee? What type of chocolate? Do you recall?

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Well, right now my coffee is some kind of organicy fair trade thing, but bought in a large quantity from Costco, which is obviously a lot cheaper than getting like a Starbucks equivalent every morning. And yeah, the nuts are from Costco as well, now that you mention it.

• 23:46Tim Ferriss?

  So this is the, the, the reason I bring it up is that, uh, and I think stumbling upon happiness, stumbling on happiness by Daniel Gilbert is, is a good exploration of this. Oftentimes what we think will make us happy does not make us happy. And we can talk, we should dig into what happiness is for you because I think it's, it's, it can be a dangerously nebulous term, but the point being that to, to have a functional car and then to have what society tells you is the optimal car, say some type of sports car. There's a massive delta in price and you pay some severe penalties for that. But to have a, to go from a good chocolate to an excellent chocolate to world-class chocolate, it might only be the difference of

• 24:32Tim Ferriss?

  ten or $12, right? And so there, there are, there are places where you can optimize without being obnoxiously or frugal or frugal in a disabling extent and derive maximal pleasure. That's the point I was trying to make is that, and what I would love to hear from you is for those people out there who are spending far more, multiples more than you are per year, who don't know where to start. Are there any easy optimizations that could have a dramatic impact on their ability to get closer to

• 25:10Tim Ferriss?

  optimizing for happiness as opposed to

• 25:14Tim Ferriss?

  Succumbing to internal or external pressures to remain on this treadmill of of overconsumption.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. And this might actually be a better answer for your earlier question, too, because as an engineer, like I was kind of born part engineer at least, and for me, optimization is really, really fun. It's like beautiful. And when something is not optimized and when something's inefficient, I actually find it offensive and ugly. So I had a lot of joy. I get a lot of joy from looking at each of my life spending decisions and being comparing it like, okay, if I get this car, it probably make me about this happy and this car would make me this much happier. Whereas if I ride my bike, it does this other thing. And you do you apply that to food and housing and transportation and clothing, travel, exercise, and then all these categories can become super efficient where you end

• 26:04Speaker 03

  up getting incredible happiness out of them. And the cost can sometimes be not only low, but sometimes you'll get paid for doing stuff that other people spend tens of thousands of dollars to do. So if you're a beginner at this sport of optimization, you can just start with the stuff that costs you a lot of money. So my favorite one, to be a bit repetitive, is the car, because the average middle income American spends like $12,000 per household, which is just on driving around in these like gas powered racing wheelchairs. And that's more than they even invest in in their future. Like, that's more than they're spending on their freedom. So step one, don't have a car that's worth more than about 10,000

• 26:46Speaker 03

  bucks at the most, unless you're at least like a single millionaire, preferably multimillionaire. Because you can get a great, perfectly great car that'll be trouble free for 10 plus years for under $5,000. So the reasonable ceiling would be 10. And that's already going to be a pretty giant thing for people. And then number two is don't use that car a lot. So everybody assumes that, you know, a short drive to work is anything under an hour. Whereas I think I encourage people to take a really, really hard line approach on that. Because it's a giant factor in life happiness and fitness and money. And my rule is you should never get a job, you know, unless you're at gunpoint that requires you to drive to it like either find a new job,

• 27:31Speaker 03

  find a place to live near that job. I mean, even if it requires moving to a new city or a new country in the long run, you just got to keep that nagging thing in your mind like, okay, I drive to work now, but this is not optimal. In the long run, I will optimize away car dependence. And yeah, just start with that one and then you can move on. You can read stuff on my blog and figure out how to cut your grocery costs down and your housing and everything like that, too. But I really like the mobility because there's fitness involved too, you know, and there's, there's happiness of forcing yourself out into the fresh air every morning as soon as you, you give up the cage of the car. Such a huge thing and it's such an overlooked thing in our country.

• 28:11Tim Ferriss?

  I couldn't agree more. And I think the, um, the, it forces you to make other decisions. Like you pointed out, I haven't had a car for

• 28:24Tim Ferriss?

  close to three years, I want to say now, uh, that does not mean I don't spend time in cars. I do, uh, so I, I tend to use whether it's a get around for trips to Tahoe or things that are further away that require some travel or Uber. But I probably walk, walk, I tend to walk more than I bike, uh, for whatever reason. But that's, that's typically, I'd say 70, 80% of my locomotion.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  That sounds great.

• 28:48Tim Ferriss?

  Walking and it's, it's helped me to make other decisions to optimize for say, having people come to me as opposed to having to constantly bounce around a city or travel around the environs and think about how I can better use the capital I have for, uh, types of leverage that don't require or replace the need for bouncing around continuously and wasting that time in transit. And also I've found for me at least very slow or very fast in terms of transportation work well, it's in the middle that I get very frustrated because if it's very slow, I can also say batch phone calls. I can listen to podcasts, listen to audiobooks.

• 29:29Tim Ferriss?

  I can take time, uh, for that type of enrichment in the process of moving from point A to point B.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  So true. Walking is so powerful and so underrated, like your brain just goes into overdrive. All of your problems sort of start to solve themselves in the background. And for people who don't do it regularly, like an hour a day of walking to genuinely go somewhere, they just discount it because they haven't even experienced this incredible power. So I'm glad we're both on that train or in that shoe.

• 30:04Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it, in fact, in The Four Hour Body. This is more than 10 years ago, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard pressed to find a more nutrient-dense and comprehensive formula on the market. It has multivitamins, multimineral, greens complex, probiotics, and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, adaptogens, and much more. I usually take it once or twice

• 30:47Tim Ferriss?

  a day just to make sure I've covered my bases if I miss anything I'm not aware of. Of course, I focus on nutrient-dense meals to begin with. That's the basis. But Athletic Greens makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. From travel packets, I always have them in my bag when I'm zipping around. And right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience, that's you guys, a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So particularly in the winter months, adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. So make an investment in your health today and try the ultimate all-in-one wellness bundle. Support your

• 31:32Tim Ferriss?

  immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D for free with your first subscription purchase. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 31:48Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the books that have, and this could be two different lists, but some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you? Or books that you most frequently recommend to your readership?

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't have the ultimate, I'm not the ultimate book connoisseur. I don't spend as much, I don't burn through as many books as some people. So, but in recent months, three books that have had a pretty big impact on me that I'm about to recommend to people, it really depends on who you're talking to. So if you're into changing the world for the better, one book that's spectacularly opened up my mind is this one called Happy City by an author called Charles Montgomery. And it kind of just pulls back the curtain on how we're wasting most of our resources and our human and money resources on building up the country into a spectacularly inefficient asphalt jungle. So that's for urban planning nerds and fixing the world nerds.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  But for people who feel like they personally want to, they're wondering why they're such a weirdo, I'm a big fan of the book on Elon Musk by the author Ashley Vance. I think it's called Elon Musk and Musk and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. That book I read and it talks about Elon as a little kid and growing up and it's like, that's exactly how I was as a kid and I thought I was the only one. And it, he has this feeling where the world is incredibly illogical and no one's listening and he just wants to just fucking change it like I'm just gonna do everything myself then. And I can really, everything except for the fact that he actually does it and I don't, I can relate completely to the feeling of that book.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  And finally, a really, really old fashioned book, if someone just wants to wake themselves up and start turning into more of like a positive, less depressed person, is this 1950s classic called The Magic of Thinking Big. I've recommended that to like so many friends, because I stumbled across it when I was like 15 years old and it was really, really old even then. And it's like this, this 1950s cheesy, stereotypical like man's world has some flaws in that way, but that just makes it more funny. And it's a great way to just remind yourself like, oh, when you think big and act confident and sparkly, then it's amazing how much stuff actually goes better for you. So those are my three.

• 34:10Tim Ferriss?

  So I can't comment on the first two, but I, I have to comment on The Magic of Thinking Big. So I have a copy, my original copy of The Magic of Thinking Big, about 15 feet to the side of me right now in my living room. It is one of the books that has traveled with me and it's face out. So I see it every day when I'm sitting on my couch, along with a handful of others. Tribe from Sebastian Younger, Dune, Frank Herbert, that's a bit of a long story. Gratitude, Oliver Sacks, I'm looking at them right now. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, Zorba the Greek, and Less is More, which is an anthology of writing on minimalism. And The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz. This book, despite the title, which like you

• 34:54Tim Ferriss?

  said, I mean, it's, it's, it screams cheesy at you and it was-

• 34:58Speaker 03

  That's why it's good though. It is cheesy. It's like gorgeously delightfully cheesy and you're like, yes, I am a powerful 1950s man as well. I'm going to conduct some business.

• 35:06Tim Ferriss?

  No, exactly. And it was, it was introduced to me by a man named Stephen Key. Stephen Key, fascinating guy. He lives in, I think it's Turlock, California, middle of nowhere, and has built this, this fantastic career for himself, developing products, a lot of toys, and licensing them to gigantic companies, whether it's Disney or Nestle, Coca-Cola, you name it. And he, he makes these incredibly simple prototypes out of construction paper oftentimes, and then will license these ideas for, I'm assuming hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars over time. And he was given The Magic of Thinking Big at one point

• 35:48Tim Ferriss?

  by, I believe it was a Fortune 500 CEO. So the lineage, at least, or the path that the book took to me was, was fascinating in and of itself. And I read it, I would say around 2003, 2004, which was just before I took my, my walkabout.

• 36:11Tim Ferriss?

  And did all the experimentation with my business at the time to either redesign the business or shut it down. And that was the journey that then precipitated the writing of The Four Hour Workweek. So, The Magic of Thinking Big, I've been meaning to reread it. And part of me, I don't know, tell me if, I'd be curious to get your opinion. So, I read it so long ago, and I have such a high opinion of it, that I'm worried I will read it now and it will not age well when I read it a second time. Have you read it recently?

• 36:43Speaker 03

  Last time was probably about five years ago. And I found it was just as good. I just love the, you know, the overly simple examples, like, imagine that there's two little gentlemen in your head. There's Mr. Success and Mr. Defeat. Mr. Defeat always wants to throw some oil and sand into your crankcase of your mind. And it's just like these, you know, I find that most, maybe this is my engineer's brain handicap again, but I really get annoyed by overly flowery language, like kind of Harper's Magazine, Atlantic stuff, where people just go on for like eight pages to cover something that could have fit in a couple of sentences.

• 37:21Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  And Dr. Schwartz doesn't do any of that shit. And in fact, his writing style really inspired me. And like, when I write as Mr. Money Mustache, I'm thinking, I'm like channeling David J. Schwartz. And he always starts off every story with this little anecdote, like, that's makes him sound like casual and powerful. He's like, I was relaxing in my lounge one day, when a few of my employees came in for questions. And, you know, like, it's just, you know, you gotta read it again. I'm gonna read it again.

• 37:48Tim Ferriss?

  All right. It's been on my, it's been on my to do list for January, because I've set aside, we're doing this interview in January 2017, and I've set aside the first two weeks minimum to simply consider options. Because I've, in the past, fallen prey to over calendaring myself. And for fun things, in many cases, but nonetheless, over calendaring, so I don't have as much slack in the system, empty space, as I would like. And I've been meaning to, as part of my self imposed curriculum, reread The Magic of Thinking Big. So, I will,

• 38:29Tim Ferriss?

  I will jump into that. How are you different from Mr. Money Mustache? If at all?

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Well, the lines are pretty fine, pretty, you know, I, I don't know if there's like a really formal difference, but um, he's probably a bit more perfect than me, like I, I'll complain occasionally, and if I don't catch myself, and you know, I won't, I don't actually complain on the blog about, you know, wah wah wah, this, the world is being mean to me, but in general, like, because I read Magic of Thinking Big so long ago, and internalized it so much, and I kind of ran my work career, and my, you know, my international adventures of moving to the US and everything, under those assumptions, I, I feel like, you know, I'm pretty, I'm fairly Mr. Money Mustache, I'm more sensitive, here's the thing, like, I don't lecture people in

• 39:23Speaker 03

  real life, about, you know, like, I don't actually smash my fist through the driver window of pickup trucks and honk the horns with their foreheads and tell them they shouldn't be going through the drive-through with a stupid off-road diesel thing, but, but I think it, but, and I write it, so, yeah, the Mr. Money Mustache is a little more violent in, in his writing, and, and confrontational, and I enjoy that, because it helps me remain more calm in my real life, because nobody wants to be lectured in real life about, even if you have some ideas you want to share with them, you have to wait for them to come to you, and when you're running a blog, they have come to you by definition, which means

• 40:04Speaker 03

  they're a lot more open to, uh, have their faces punched in a literal, uh, literary sense.

• 40:11Tim Ferriss?

  Right, to get, to get prose-mugged, uh, while you're, while you're shaping their behavior, uh, the question of the US, so the, I've spent a little bit of time in China, and even as a, as an American who's somewhat desensitized to consumption, I think that China is, it appears to be 10 times more materialistic and, and driven towards overconsumption, but the, that's not really leading, I don't want to lead us necessarily into a conversation about China, the, the question I was going to ask, and this might have a very simple answer, why did you decide to stay in the US?

• 40:48Speaker 03

  I just love it here, it, it goes, uh, it's kind of like the furnace of the world, like- Many of the problems in the US that stem from under regulation are also its strengths in the sense that you can just start stuff up and then nobody even notices that you're doing it and you can have a giant company before anyone's even noticed. And it's just the entrepreneurial and the optimism and the lack of rules is kind of, it goes along with my personality, because I hate rules. I'm really in favor of people self-regulating in the sense that don't be a jerk to your neighbor and don't pollute the world and everything like that, which is the part that annoys me about some of the US business

• 41:33Speaker 03

  culture. But in general, I just love it here. And I love the giant range of geographies too compared to Canada, which is kind of just a string of cities along the border. In the US, you have a grid of cities and islands that range from like Arctic tundra to tropical islands and coconut, you know, coconut shell tops and everything like that. It's just a lot more variety and excitement here.

• 42:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there is a lot of variety here. And I've actually decided that this year will be my year of exploration in the domestic United States. And I've realized that my default and the default of many people, I think, when they have their designated time for travel or vacation is oftentimes to fantasize about the trips overseas. And I've realized I've neglected to explore so much diversity in the United States itself. So I'm planning on somehow transporting me and my pooch around the country, which I am very excited to do. And the next thing I'd like to do is read something and get your comments on

• 42:44Tim Ferriss?

  it. So this is, this is from a piece, a profile of yours in the New Yorker, which, congratulations, I guess it's one of the top 16, is it? Most read of the year profile, something along those lines?

• 43:01Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I saw that. Thanks to you, I think, on Twitter.

• 43:05Tim Ferriss?

  I did, I might have driven some traffic there, which, which I was happy to do and also hesitant to do because I know that there's, I'm for sure, there are things that are at the, at the best incomplete and maybe completely off base at worst, but that's just the nature of the beast when you're dealing with these types of profiles.

• 43:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did a snarky responses section for that, like complete on that genius.it website. So if anybody-

• 43:34Tim Ferriss?

  Your inline responses?

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, because that, that way you can, the writer can write his story and then I can add my stuff right on the side and that kind of corrects for the one-sidedness of normal New Yorker journalism.

• 43:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I might have to do that myself, although I'm not sure I want to reopen the wound. I was misquoted even after correcting fact checkers. I was misquoted and a number of people were misquoted probably half a dozen times in the piece that I had in The New Yorker, which really rankled me because of course it sits at the top of Google with PageRank, but water under the bridge for now. I'll put that aside. The piece I wanted to read though, I don't think is, is going to push those buttons. Let me start with the following. So being an engineer, he runs the numbers. Once after his bike was apparently stolen, he ruminated on the wisdom of locking one's bike. And this is, this is then to your writing, "This was the first theft in many, many years of very carefree living.

• 44:32Tim Ferriss?

  The Craigslist replacement value of that bike was probably around $500. What value do I place on a decade of the fearless freedom of leaving shit happily unlocked and not worrying about it? How about the value of my time saved in not spending my life fumbling with an enormous keychain? 90 seconds a day for 10 years is 91 hours or at least $4,500 of my time at $50 an hour. I was still coming out way ahead." And you concluded, "If you can't afford to lose it, you can't afford to buy it yet. Otherwise, the object owns you rather than vice versa." And-

• 45:02Tim Ferriss?

  There are plenty of folks out there who who think we are more opposed than I think we are, because the type of math that you did here, and I'd love to get your thoughts on it, but these are the types of things that I think about constantly. Because the how the in the how many of these rote decisions, common decisions are burning up the nonrenewable resource of time in the interest of some marginal utility, perceived marginal utility in terms of dollars and cents. But I'd love to hear any sort of thoughts or elaborations that you have on this, because I love this example.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it is the math, sometimes explicit like that, and sometimes more implicit, that drives most of my decisions. And that's why I'm surprised, like anybody who says that Mr. Money Mustache and Tim Ferriss are opposites in any kind of way, I think they're not really understanding the picture, because it's really just an optimization process, right? Like, I'm not opposed to spending money. My only limitations on spending money are, number one, it has to make me happy, and number two, a factor in my personal happiness is like resource consumption, because I kind of know the numbers behind all the costs to other people, like into the earth or everything that I buy.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  So that kind of rules out certain types of spending that other non-sciencey, non-environmentalist people might feel okay about. But if you push that bit aside, it's all just about having the maximum amount of fun. So, and if you have limited money, then having to go to work for a longer time is a genuine source of non-fun, and thus, spending less money is going to give you more of something that's more fun, which is time, and then you're all set. So that's a win. And then now, in this post-work world, where I've stumbled into more money than I could have imagined having, my spending hasn't changed, and that's just a sign that I got some of the decisions approximately right to begin with.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  And if I had started buying more stuff afterwards, that might have been a sign that I didn't really do the math right to begin with.

• 47:18Tim Ferriss?

  What do you do with the, and I apologize if this is a simplistic question, but what do you do with the money that you have as a surplus in this post-work life? What happens to, if the expenses aren't going up or nominally go up and down by a few thousand dollars a year, how do you allocate the surplus?

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's some, that's another thing that has to be optimized because I feel that money is such a valuable resource. So I'm still working on it. So I try to, you know, I've, I've been doing small donations, like paying for more stuff when other people I know can't afford it. And then I did a medium sized donation with the effective, under the effective altruism movement that I know that you've covered at one point in your Tools of Titans book.

• 48:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I had Will McCaskill on the, on the podcast, the co-founder or maybe founder of, of that movement.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think one of those two founders sent me an email after I sent my donation to them and they seem really, really, really sharp people. So that's, that's one useful thing to do with surplus money. The only reason I have some of it still sitting in my investment accounts and it's still rolling in, of course, because I still have this unexpected blog income is I feel like I can leverage the attention of all these people for something good. And that would be bigger than just donating like, you know, a million dollars per whatever period to, to standard causes. I think I would, I would like to create kind of like one of those tipping point effects in the U S that might, for example, tip us

• 49:02Speaker 03

  more towards bike-based transfer temptation instead of car-based, you know, and potentially save like. Billions or trillions of dollars of society's wealth and have it go somewhere better. If the whole society got more excited about a different way of living. So that's why I haven't just given away all the money yet because I feel like, for example, what if I could start like a little mini town where we do things really awesomely? And this of course, sounds a bit like a cult, like, oh yeah, we have to start a commune. But uh

• 49:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it also sounds like Singapore, right?

• 49:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 49:35Tim Ferriss?

  In a sense.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  So a town within a town, based on the ideas of co-housing or something like that. So these guy ideas are still swimming around in my head. I haven't solved the problem of how to deal with surplus money efficiently. But once I do, then I will start having some fun with it. And then I'll probably also start trying to make more money, like have the blog make more money, because then I'll have a use for it.

• 49:58Tim Ferriss?

  And the, I'd love to hear more about how you, your decision-making process or thought process or internal dialogue when you are considering buying something. What are the questions that you ask yourself? And if it's related to happiness, I want to define that. And maybe a way to do that is, you know, how do you know when you're happy or unhappy? But I'd love to just maybe take those in either order really. But what's the, what's the thought process like or the internal monologue slash dialogue when you're considering buying something?

• 50:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, usually I try to start with like, no, you weenie, what do you think? What kind of consumer are you? You know, like just a little bit of mental beat down to shut off the easiest things. That's what keeps me from buying like, like a Tesla Model S or something like that because even though I think it's a great car, I support it, I know for sure that wouldn't make me any happier because I don't even have anything to do with it. Like I don't drive really. So, so obvious stuff gets shut off. But then when you get into like, things that you're pretty sure you want, then you just think about it for longer, procrastinate a little bit, see if the desire goes away a bit. And then consider how much space that thing is going to take up in my, my limited space of my studio, for example.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  And then imagine how I would feel if it broke, because a lot of stuff does break, even if you have high quality gear and it's really annoying to deal with things that break. And if you have to warranty fix it. And finally, I ask myself, is this removing a negative in my life? Because it's pretty well studied that happiness is not very much affected by adding positives to your life. It's mostly, especially in a rich world environment like we live, it's mostly accomplished by removing things that are a strong negative to every day. So getting myself like a remote control photography drone is unlikely to make me happier because my life doesn't currently suck due to the absence of photography drone quadcopter thingies.

• 52:02Speaker 03

  So that's, you know, and whereas if there's something that every day I'm like, damn it, I just wish I didn't always trip over this, you know, broken dishwasher or whatever. Then replacing your dishwasher is, is probably going to be a happiness boosting proposition.

• 52:18Tim Ferriss?

  What, what purchases or productions for that matter, I know you make a lot of things, but what purchases, just to, to stick with one category, that come to mind have most improved your happiness by removing negatives?

• 52:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that's a perfect follow-up question because I'm talking to you right now in this studio building that I made over the process of the last year. It's kind of, it's roughly like a 400 square foot modernist thing with a lot of windows and, and overlooking this nice forested park behind my house. So I had a consistent problem after I moved to this current house we live in in 2013. It's a bit too small for our style of living. So I was genuinely tripping over stuff a bit and always having to move things around. And I had some of my equipment out in the back, like my table saw, I would have to live under a tarp during the rare Colorado precipitation events. And I realized, you know, more space would actually solve this problem.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  And I always wanted to have a detached studio anyway to play music in because I don't want to have to like drown out my family's ears when I'm playing bad rock music with my friends. So I built the studio and I did it all myself because I know from experience that This manual labor and solving physical problems is one of the happiest things I can possibly do, just like, you know, hundreds of hours of lifting and sweating and digging and, you know, all these amazing useful outdoor things with friends. And now I'm, I'm in it, you know, I'm recording a Tim Ferriss podcast in my studio, surrounded by drums and bass and guitar and watching the trees sway outside.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  So this has been a really, a genuine happiness boosting expenditure of money. And it's brought me happiness pretty much from the day I broke ground on this, you know, this piece of dirt. So, so no regrets there, even though that was a lot more than, than a few dinners out that I spent on this thing.

• 54:19Tim Ferriss?

  I've been, I've been hoping and wishing and fantasizing at some point about building my own structure. I have not done this and I've thought about it ever since I had Kevin Kelly on the podcast, founding editor of Wired Magazine, incredible guy, I mean, really the real life world's most interesting man in so many ways, you know, a, an impeccable technology futurist who has an Amish beard and spends time with the Amish. People can listen to the episode, it's a long story, but I asked him what every person should do at least once in their lifetime and he said, build a home, build a house. And I've, every time, this is a lesson I need to relearn over and over again.

• 55:04Tim Ferriss?

  I use my hands in that capacity, that manual labor reward, like you said, it's, it's just unbelievable. Even yesterday I was, I was purging, donating a bunch of stuff that I just don't need. I was, I was, I was getting rid of a bunch of stuff and the, but the, the simple visual reward of the before and after, using my hands to move a bunch of stuff around and have that before and after was so much more rewarding than some of the biggest things I've done on laptop or on the web in the last few months. I felt ashamed in some ways. It's such a menial, mundane set of tasks was so rewarding.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  Dude, yeah, Kevin Kelly is right. And this is why, as a fellow lifestyle guru, admittedly a junior lifestyle guru, I spend most of my time doing manual labor, even though I can make, you know, infinite money typing shit into the computer and publishing it to, you know, the cult following, I hardly do that at all because the- Not doesn't work for everybody, but certain people get incredible satisfaction out of building because it's like the Zen aspect of it. There's like physical and mental and problem solving. It's like, it's like what a human was made to do. So Kevin is right. In fact, the house that I live in, I also built before I built the studio. I built as a slight exaggeration because there was a bit of a shell.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  I tore it down to like a brick shell and then rebuilt it to a different shape. But um, and every time, like every night, especially in the winter here, when it snows, I look up at the trees and like the snow falling on the roof that I made and the fireplace that I put in there and the heating system that I designed, pumping water under my floors and heating up my feet. I'm like, this is the most satisfying thing I could possibly experience. So yeah, you should figure out a way to build something, at least like a shed quarters or like a man cave type thing in your backyard. And I have this thing called carpenturism where I go out to people in need and build fun stuff with them and teach them how to build. So if you ever want to do a teamwork,

• 57:10Speaker 03

  Tim Ferriss studio, then I'm, I'm making the software now. It'd make a quite an interesting story.

• 57:16Tim Ferriss?

  I could, I could be a, like an operating room assistant of sorts. You'd be like hammer, hammer, screwdriver, screwdriver. I think I'd be more of a liability otherwise, but uh,

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Well, that's how you learn though. I'll give you the nail gun and then you'll make some mistakes and we'll bring a welder and then you'll like explode some stuff, but later you'll be making fine welding lines and yeah.

• 57:38Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I might take you up on that. I love Colorado. I've, I've been spending more and more time in Colorado.

• 57:43Speaker 03

  Well, I was assuming we would build something at your, one of your pieces of the world where you need a structure because you don't need to like build stuff for me. That's not,

• 57:51Tim Ferriss?

  No, not for you. I was thinking about the people in need, but maybe they don't want like some horrible, atrocious Picasso painting of a table where they're like, I didn't really want some abstract weird thing Ferris, if you could, if you could use parallel lines next time, please.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  In this case, you were the person in need because you're this, you know, this accomplished guy who has yet a hole in your life where you haven't actually built a house yet. So, so I felt sorry for you. That's all.

• 58:23Tim Ferriss?

  All right, I will, I will put a bookmark in that. I may take you up on it. Here's, here are a few questions related to consumption, because I think about, I do think about consumption a fair amount. Living in San Francisco on some level helps because you can't walk five or 10 feet without having someone to talk to you about it, or seeing billboards, or seeing announcements and so on, related to some type of conservation or, or curbing consumption. But a few, a few questions for you. The first is, I, and this is related to kids, so I don't have kids. One of the considerations has been a

• 59:04Tim Ferriss?

  concern for consumption. So how do you reconcile kids with consumption? Or do you not see them as dramatically increasing the sort of consumptive burden?

• 59:19Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Kids are definitely a huge form of consumption. Like, if you're a, a rich world resident and you have a kid, you know, that's, that's another 100 years of rich world lifestyle going on there. So, but I'm not a pure person. I strategically indulge in fun stuff. And, and my wife and I knew we wanted to have kids. And we just happened to feel that one was the right number for us. And I'm not judgmental of, against other people. But I think it's just good. It's one of the things to throw into your equation of like, child raising, like, should I have one? Or maybe 13? We're like, well, if, if consumption of natural resources is a, is a factor, you might not have 13. But if it's

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  not a factor, you know, no judgment from me. And so we got one. And then you can have probably like a 4X, you know, 400% difference in the amount of consumption you do on behalf of your child, just depending on how you raise them, depending on what activities they're into, and what kind of stuff you buy them, and how you train them as well. If you train them like, hey, we're rich, and rich people get to buy whatever they want, then you're gonna raise a super consumer, and more the richer you are. Whereas if you teach them to the balance, and give them a little bit of biology and science in their upbringing, then they're gonna have a value system that prevents them from being nearly as destructive.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  And yet they'll probably still have more fun in the world as well.

• 1:00:50Tim Ferriss?

  Is it true that you paid your son per mile ridden on his bike at one point?

• 1:00:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, we still do that. There's just kind of a

• 1:01:00Tim Ferriss?

  I like this, by the way. This is not in any way a criticism.

• 1:01:04Speaker 03

  Right. Every parent, many of them like to find excuses to give their kids money in order for them to figure out how to manage it at a young age. So I didn't want to just hand over money like here. Money comes from nowhere. So I thought that bicycling would be kind of a little income system for him. So he has an odometer on his bike. So it automatically tracks the miles. And then I just give him 10 cents a mile, which adds up pretty fast if you're an all bicycle family. So and just give him little payouts. And then we've got a spreadsheet where we keep track of his money. He's 11 years old, by the way, and and that earns interest. So he has a comparison of like, if I keep my money in the bank of dad, then I'm going to earn interest. Whereas if I spend it,

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  my capital decreases and then that interest bearing piece of like my little green employees are gone forever. So he still spends his money, of course, but he just knows everything's a trade off, which is makes it more more thoughtful.

• 1:02:02Tim Ferriss?

  Now you are an engineer and it's, it seems like you have a strong

• 1:02:09Tim Ferriss?

  engineer genetic through line in your family. Has your son tried to Ferris Bueller, the odometer at any point? Of course, doing the opposite. Has he figured out how to how to tinker with his odometer? Or I guess, is he so good that perhaps you wouldn't have noticed?

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you never know, he might be hooking it up to a cordless drill and spinning that front wheel.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  No, I don't think he's not. That's not in his personality. Like he's not into really cheating on anything. He's plus is kind of an abundance. Like he has more money than he can spend. The little dude has like a thousand bucks in his spreadsheet now. And the only thing he really wants to buy is is the odd video game, which might be like 20 or $30 once every few months. So he's pretty much retired already because the passive income that he's earning is is close to finding his video game needs.

• 1:03:03Tim Ferriss?

  Either that, or he's got the best long con in history. Like, he's been, he's been conning you with his good behavior for 11 years just to, just to tinker with this odometer, which I don't think is the case. But for, for those people who are listening, and I'm sure you're asked this all the time, but books on investing or personal finance, are there any go-to recommendations? They don't have to be books, they could be resources, but for people who want to self-educate, it could certainly be one of your top, you know, one or two blog posts as well. But if you were to pick from potentially your own stuff, but also from other work that's out there, where would you direct people?

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  I think it depends on how interested in investing you are. One of the key nice things about the world, especially the US financial system, is you don't have to know much to be a very good investor. Like, you can be a top 10% investor by just buying one Vanguard fund and leaving your money, just putting all your extra money in there forever. So if you're, if that's your idea of, of good enough, which it should be for most people, then you can just read any book by Jack Bogle, John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard is one good example. A friend of mine, who's a blogger named Jim Collins, wrote this book called The Simple Path to Wealth,

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  which is just sort of like a even simpler, more story-based, like enjoyable old man's tales, explanation of how, why you should invest in index funds. And so that's another idea. But much more important than how to invest, as long as you don't screw up your investing, like leave your money in a checking account or buy a shifty life insurance, whole life program or whatever, you know, the, the things that swindle people out of their money, you're going to be fine on the investing side. So the other side of that equation is a book. And I really want to write a book myself, so then I can just recommend my own. But for now, there's a really great one that's called Your Money or Your Life that everybody's heard of.

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  And if you just get your, get the, whatever the latest edition of that book is, it really teaches you a philosophy that's pretty similar to mine, which is... That consumption is not really what's making you happy, buying yourself treats. And it's quite easy to become financially independent as soon as you modify your spending in that way. So a huge surplus of money is on a weekly or monthly basis is the real solution to your financial problems rather than becoming a super kick ass investor.

• 1:05:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's a book that I read, I don't know if you've ever read this book. It does primarily focus on low cost index funds, if I remember it correctly, but by Daniel Solin, the smartest investment book you'll ever read.

• 1:05:55Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I've heard of it.

• 1:05:55Tim Ferriss?

  And I had, I quite enjoyed that book. It was a little more nuanced, certainly anything by Bogle is fantastic. For people who want to dig deeper, are there any additional books that you would recommend or that you've enjoyed yourself?

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you want to get deeper, like for example, more into the Warren Buffett side of things where you're an active investor. One really interesting book that I read a few years ago is called The Little Book That Beats The Market. And it's really a lesson on investing, value investing fundamentals, how to understand if a company actually is a good deal to buy. And that helps put a regular, you know, like a sober shell around investing instead of the ridiculous speculation, like technical chart investing, I think is kind of universally proved to be bunk, but people are still doing it like, oh yeah, the Bollinger Bands are wild this week. I'm gonna, you know, I see a support level at 53.5 unless something happens.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  Like all that stuff is statistically, it keeps being proven wrong and people keep doing it. So don't do that. If you're going to be an active investor, then get really good at understanding companies rather than technical fluctuations. And that's why Warren Buffett makes a lot of money above the rocket returns is because he's a savant in understanding business. And some people genuinely are that. Like maybe it would probably be less than one in a thousand people.

• 1:07:19Tim Ferriss?

  He's also, he's also a savant in emotional detachment in the sense that I'd love to talk to you a bit about stoicism and so on at some point, but he is utterly unaffected by what he would call Mr. Market, right? The ups and downs. Of any given company that he may have bought in the form of shares or outright, if he purchased the entire acquired the entire company. And that type of emotional detachment is also exceptionally, exceptionally rare.

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that goes without saying, like, to me, that's a prerequisite.

• 1:07:56Tim Ferriss?

  I don't, I don't have that at all. So I mean, well, well, no, in the sense that if, if I'm going to be active, it is very hard for me to be an active investor in publicly traded equities.

• 1:08:07Tim Ferriss?

  For whatever reason, I can do highly speculative startups and that's a disturbingly high percentage of my portfolio because I can't balance a portfolio with illiquid assets. It's very challenging, certainly. But with, with publicly traded equities, if I'm trying to be active in any capacity, I do very poorly emotionally with those fluctuations and I make bad decisions. But if we're talking about something like an index, then I'm fine. If it's, if it's, if it's entirely hands off and I have other people or in some type of say automated fashion with whether it's a wealth front or something else, then I don't have any trouble with it.

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's, since I don't do active stuff anymore, then that's, I'm totally with agree with you on that in agreement.

• 1:08:58Tim Ferriss?

  The, the book you mentioned, was that by Joel Greenblatt, The Little Book That Beats The Market?

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it was really interesting and it was a little book, which is perfect for my short book attention span.

• 1:09:08Tim Ferriss?

  He is, yeah. Joel is exceptionally, he's an exceptionally smart guy and he has a fascinating track record because he, he can teach and he has taught in, in classrooms in New York, universities, he can write and he's also very, very well respected as not only a value investor, but also in an, in what you would call an event based investor. So his first book, I think it was his first book, is perhaps the most sophisticated of them all, which is where people can make the most mistakes. So I think the, the little book that beats the market makes more sense as a, as a first reader, maybe the, his later book, The Big Secret For The Small Investor.

• 1:09:49Tim Ferriss?

  But book with the title that is sort of blessed and cursed in the same way that Four Hour Work Week just sounds so schlocky as if it's going to appear at three in the morning on an infomercial that it's, but it's highly memorable. So it's been. Helpful and punishing at the same time. He has a book called You Can Be A Stock Market Genius, which is actually really sophisticated. I've met some of the most successful and most of, by the way, hedge fund managers are not successful, but the handful I've met who have been exceptionally successful. This book, which is intended for novices effectively, is one of their favorite books. So lots of, lots of, yeah, lots of interesting stuff out there.

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm gonna check that one out for sure, since I like Joel Greenblatt's writing a lot. And I still follow, you know, I read an investment and finance books all the time. I just try not to recommend them too much on my blog because it's supposed to be about lifestyle and making your life good. And I don't want it to be all esoteric, but sure, I do read like the Timothy Geithner book, Stress Test. I read that 800-page description of the financial crisis and I was found it pretty captivating, knowing what really happened in the background. But for the average person, it's not going to help them get rich and retire earlier. So I don't talk about it too much.

• 1:11:06Tim Ferriss?

  Well, on top of that, if you want a cautionary tale. So for those of you out there who love, love, love reading, at least if a book is captivating, what you should get at the same time, if you decide to get the You Can Be A Stock Market Genius by Joel Greenblatt, which is exceptional, you should also read a book that will be a cautionary tale. And it's a cautionary tale because it it details the types of people that you are competing against. If you choose to be really active in certain respects, and it's a fantastic read. It's More Money Than God. And it is about the birth of the hedge fund model and

• 1:11:49Tim Ferriss?

  a number of the characters and most successful managers in that world. It's a bit like a liar's poker, but instead of bonds, they're talking about hedge funds. And it will give you a very good idea of who you're competing against. And when you step on, when you step onto the metaphorical golf green and you throw your money down as your participation and bet on yourself, the fact that Tiger Woods is probably two holes ahead of you becomes super, super clear. And I should also, just to

• 1:12:26Tim Ferriss?

  In a sense reinforce what you said about index funds. Say, when I went to the only time I had a chance to go to the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, and I think they've stopped doing open Q and A with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, but I actually ran in and it's insane. I mean, it is like a gigantic rock concert for investment nerds and people will camp out overnight to try to get a good seat. And I ran in and I was someone's guest, which was great because I was able to get in a little earlier than the entire stadium full of folks effectively. And I ran in and I found somebody who was volunteering or working there.

• 1:13:11Tim Ferriss?

  And I said, which microphone is the hardest to get to? Because they had microphones all throughout this venue and that's where you would be able to ask your question if they got to you. And I figured, you know what? People are going to be long winded. Maybe the answers would be long winded, although they very seldom are, especially if Charlie Munger is involved. And I need to find a mic where I can be first or second person in line. And so I ran up, went through this crazy set of staircases and found this mic that was in the middle of nowhere. And I asked Warren Buffett, if you were 30, and I said hypothetically, if you were 30, you had say $500,000 to $1 million in savings.

• 1:13:54Tim Ferriss?

  And there were a couple of other stipulations, but what would you do with the money? And he said, assuming you're not a professional investor, I would put it into the S and P 500 or in an index fund and get back to work. And that was it. That was the end of the answer. And Charlie, do you have anything more to add? Nope. And then on to the next question.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's good advice. It is because there's so much more to work on in your life. Like if you're going to become a really good investor, you're probably going to compromise in the areas of being a good parent or being a good, maintaining good physical fitness or, and life, like you're not really optimizing. You're not supposed to optimize for money. You're supposed to optimize for happiness, which has a lot of dimensions. So you should really like. Take the sort of the four hour investor approach and be like, everyone says this is good. I'm just gonna do it. And I'm gonna work on all the other stuff in my life that that also needs to be addressed.

• 1:14:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, let's let's jump into some some rapid fire questions as I call them, but your answers don't need to be short. I'll just try to keep my long winded question answer to a minimum. So outside of your immediate family, when you hear the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind for you? Or who's a person who comes to mind for you and why?

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've racked my brain over this question because I know it's a standard Ferris podcast question. And I don't have a answer that anybody would recognize because I can't judge the success of any celebrities or well known people, because success is such a balanced thing. And it depends on how happy you are at home and how nice you are to the people who are close to you. So to me, the people in my life that I've seen seem to be very high in success range are a couple of friends. These are male friends that run their own business. They basically both fit into the same description. So they run their own business. They're a little bit older than me. Their business is extremely successful, but they've scaled it right, right back in order to be a lifestyle business

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  and handed off a lot of responsibility to their employees and they kind of pay them more because there's so much surplus anyway. And you're like, okay, you deal with all the junk in exchange for you never calling me on the weekends. So both these friends work pretty minimal, like 10 to 20 hours a week. And yet somehow their businesses keep doing better because of this hands off approach. So they're making even more money. But yet they have a fairly mustachian lifestyle. And this is probably because I met these guys through the blog. And then they both have kids and they have really, really good relationships with their their children, their semi adult children and their wife and basically just really good shape, physical shape. They do a lot of adventures. They always say yes, if I invite them to do something, they're like, oh, yeah, that's sure. We'll

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  we'll fly over and meet you in that random spot for some mountain biking or whatever. So they've they've managed to combine all of these dimensions of what most people want in a kind of a carefree way and and they're not overly focused on any one of them, which allows them to be extremely fun people to be around. So that's my definition of success. And that's what I kind of hope for for myself by the time I'm like 50 years old with a pretty old kid.

• 1:17:09Tim Ferriss?

  We're we're on the flip side. We talked about what some of the critics get wrong, what perhaps media sometimes misinterpret. Where do where do your fans get it wrong? What are the most common mistakes that your readers make or misinterpretations? When do they get the message wrong?

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  That's pretty rare. I find it's a it's pretty. I write a lot of stuff, right? So anybody who reads a lot, they'll see all the little nuances and bits in what I try to express as a philosophy. But for those of them, those readers who don't have all the details, a lot of people assume that I'm very, you know, like, I would be mad at them if I ever found out that they bought something luxurious like, oh, don't tell Mr. Money Mustache, I bought this $2,000 mountain bike because I really love bikes. But but, you know, everything else is good. And like, I don't, I don't judge people to nearly the standards that they think I judge them to. So and the other thing is, it's

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  the same for people who don't know my real life. They often assume that it's pretty Spartan and and that I'm always penny pinching. And this goes back to the same answer with the New Yorker article, too. But I'm, I'm really, I'm really in favor of of celebrating and decadence and feeling like stuff is luxurious. So so I'm really not as minimalist as people, people think I am. I'm really maximalist in the fun department.

• 1:18:41Tim Ferriss?

  Besides the studio, what are some of those luxuries? And we could tie that into

• 1:18:48Tim Ferriss?

  And let's limit it to purchases that have most positively impacted your life, or that you just love because they're so damn fun for you. What are some of those things?

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  Well, some of it is vacations. So since retiring from real jobs, my wife and I have had a nice tradition of going somewhere semi-tropical every winter for a good, long period. Most winters at least. Sometimes the school schedule messes it up a bit. But yeah, for a month or more, we'll often go. And so we spend some money on these vacations and we'll rent a nice house on a beach, like in Florida or Hawaii or Costa Rica or whatever. So vacations, most of the money goes to rent, basically, like VRBO type stuff. Airbnb is one example of indulgences that I still have a lot of warm memories from. And I really like knowing that I can do that anytime.

• 1:19:46Speaker 03

  So even when I'm not on vacation right now in January, and sometimes if the cold weather blows in, I think, man, I could just press a few buttons on this computer and just fly right out to anybody's VRBO and be there within like a day or two. And just having that freedom is a form of luxury in itself. And then I can go out and shovel some snow and be happy about it. And yeah, the other purchases, nothing's really expensive. But when I built out the current house, the main house rather than the studio, I was feeling pretty rich at the time. So I went a bit high end on some of the stuff. Like I have this really gorgeous, high efficiency wood burning, wood stove fireplace thing that brings me pleasure every day,

• 1:20:28Speaker 03

  even though it was more expensive than, you know, than than just a basic fireplace. And the windows in my house, for example, are very kind of these fancy windows that cost about five times more than than it would have cost if I'd gone bare bones. So it's usually stuff related to home, vacation and food. You know, we've been known to go out for sushi a bit more than a person in debt should go into sushi. So we take advantage of our non-debt status.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  It's really not too much, though, yeah.

• 1:21:02Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any favorite documentaries or movies?

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  My favorite, I've actually got a huge, huge list of documentaries that I've been meaning to watch, many of them collected from the guests on your Tools of Titans book. But the one that I did watch and enjoy is actually a series, a documentary, but the Cosmos, the remake of Cosmos.

• 1:21:25Tim Ferriss?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I love his awkward but scientific way, and the topics he covered in those episodes were like so stunning, and it was a great education for my son, who is very, very into science himself. So that's kind of like, that's the documentary that stands out in my mind.

• 1:21:49Tim Ferriss?

  The great series.

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  Probably the most interesting thing in the last five years, anyway.

• 1:21:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a fantastic series. I've been hoping and meaning to have Neil on the podcast. We've had, I guess, some indirect email exchanges, so if anybody's good buddies with Neil, give him a poke and let him know that I'd still like to have him on the podcast.

• 1:22:09Tim Ferriss?

  If you were to give a TED Talk on something that you are not known for, what would you give it on?

• 1:22:19Tim Ferriss?

  So any kind of pet obsession or something you're lesser known for, maybe you're diehard fans who've read every single line of everything you've ever written would have heard of it. But if you had to give a TED Talk...

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  I think I do have an answer, yeah. So if you define the thing that I'm known for as the early retirement Mr. Money Mustache stuff, then the other topic that I'm super passionate about is energy and like the world energy balance and solar power and how the humans, how humans consume it and how we can basically fix our energy consumption related to climate change and all this stuff. So I'd probably write one up about that and explain how we're at this insanely close tipping point where fossil fuels are just about to be...

• 1:23:04Speaker 03

  Economically unfeasible even without regulations and stuff. And I think that can make a good TED Talk because a lot of people are, you need to popularize the ideas and right now they're kind of dry and numbers based. Like you're talking about terajoules and kilograms CO2 and all this stuff. And there's a lot more fun and emotion in that topic if you, if you package it right. So I think that'd be a good talk.

• 1:23:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. What is your, what I've been curious about, I know you've written about this before, but when you are, if you, if you were to think of when you, when you were in your best physical shape in the last five years, what did the exercise regimen look like? I saw a photograph of you, I want to say squatting outside at an outdoor squat rack. Am I making that up?

• 1:23:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was my most recent blog post. Okay. It's starting to get a little old now, but yeah.

• 1:23:54Tim Ferriss?

  So if you think back to when you were in the best shape and you can define that any way you like, what, what did your exercise regimen look like?

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, I might be in, in some ways in some of the best shape I'm in my life right now. And that is just a pretty casual program, but with really efficient barbell exercises, combined with just a whole bunch of walking and biking and construction. So, um, so the, the barbell stuff is just squats, deadlifts, clean and press, a little bit of benching and stuff with kettlebells and dumbbells. And generally using weights that I can just barely lift five times. And the total expenditure of per week is only in the, the order of like an hour or two. So I'm not like a, a gym rat.

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  Um, so that, right now I'm pretty happy with the way my body is working, especially for a 41 year old or whatever I am. But the, the strong, I was slightly stronger when I was in my twenties and it was basically the same stuff, but just going to the gym for a longer period and training. It was really just more hours put in and that's when I, I've probably had my record weightlifting and certain exercises.

• 1:25:10Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have a quote or any quotes that you live your life by or think of often?

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  I don't really think in quotes too often, maybe with the exception of use it or lose it seems to come up at least a couple of times a day.

• 1:25:25Tim Ferriss?

  I'd say that's often enough to be a response.

• 1:25:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so short and thus memorable. You don't have to be all flowery and poetic to appreciate use it or lose it. But I think it's because in the current stage of my life, being over 40 and then having some family members with, you know, some people have died in my family and had serious health problems, like in the extended family. And it's really made me more aware of mortality and how stuff doesn't automatically stay in perfect condition. And even if it does stay in perfect condition, you're unlikely to live forever unless some really, really big medical stuff changes before I turn 100.

• 1:26:09Speaker 03

  So anyway, use it or lose it is a philosophy like brain, body, skills, friendships, relationships, just do everything that you want to be good at as often as you can. And don't fool yourself that you're going to keep being able to do this stuff unless you continue doing it regularly.

• 1:26:26Tim Ferriss?

  In the, and I don't know which label to use here, but in the, say, frugality or low-cost living world, what is the worst advice or what is bad advice that you hear given often?

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  I think the biggest issue with, that I have with a lot of this mainstream financial advice is that they're, they make you think of saving as a negative, like kind of a negative obligation. They're like, yeah, we know it feels a lot better to buy yourself treats, but, but come on, like if you can just squeeze out 5% or even 10%, then you're, you're doing okay. Just do that every week and make a budget and all this stuff. And so you're, you're training people to think that saving is bad and you want to minimize it. Whereas I think it's a win-win and. Most of our spending is a sign of weakness and it's a bunch of stuff that we do to compensate

• 1:27:26Speaker 03

  for our weaknesses because we couldn't solve the problem in a smarter way. Like, as we talked about earlier, it's possible to walk or bike to work, which is a physical and mental win, and it just happens to cost a lot less. So, I encourage people to radically reshape their entire lifestyle to be optimized in all these dimensions. And, sure, you happen to save 50 to 75% of your income as a byproduct, but the only reason that's a win is because your life is better as well. And, normal financial advice doesn't really address the life stuff. And, you know, you see a lot of these totally out of shape business guru people trying to

• 1:28:08Speaker 03

  sell life insurance at the same time as they're giving you financial advice, and they're not really, you know, they're not really in it for making people's lives better. I think that's where it falls flat.

• 1:28:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure. And, yeah, it's important, I think, certainly in almost every area, but in the world of financial planning and advice, to ensure that the person giving the advice has done what they're suggesting, or has some practice putting their words into action, because otherwise, they haven't stress-tested their ideas, or at the very worst, they're a hypocrite and they're doing the opposite of them.

• 1:28:56Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any failures that come to mind, which are favorite failures of yours in the sense that they ended up sowing the seeds of a later success? Does anything like that come to mind for you?

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have a pretty, pretty serious one that I call, I have an article called "Mr. Money Mustache's Big Mistake," and it's right after I retired in 2005, I kind of faded in. To a my first dream retirement job, which was to start a custom house building company, where I was going to make these beautiful eco-friendly houses, or did actually, we started making these houses. And and the problem was, it was way, way more stressful than than what I wanted for a retirement job. And I just had this new baby boy at the same time. And suddenly I had all these obligations and like a construction loan to build this thing. And I was doing marketing and working late and wrangling all these cats together,

• 1:29:53Speaker 03

  like the contractors to help out building the places. And it wasn't really retirement at all. And on top of that, we did it right in time for the housing crisis. So like we sold our first house into the 2006 boom market for housing. But then by the time the second one was done, it's 2007 and everything was slowing down and then starting to drop like a rock. And then I was stuck with this beautiful, ready to sell house and nobody wanted to buy it for any kind of reasonable sum. So that was kind of soiled the fun, spoiled the fun of my first three years of retirement of running this company. At the same time, though, going through hardship was was really good for me.

• 1:30:38Speaker 03

  I had to do a lot of hard stuff that I wouldn't have done. And that's how I learned a lot of my best carpentry stuff, you know, the skills that I'm most skilled, my most proud of is like I've always messed around with woodworking since I was a little kid. But by being forced into production on these expensive, modernist houses where everything has to be perfect, it really trained me a lot and I enjoy those skills now. So the combination of shittiness and skills and then then we shut this company down. And since then, I've been truly retired and had so much more fun looking back and like, wow, I'm sure glad I'm not doing that anymore. So I lost a bunch of money, you know, some of my retirement savings went up in smoke initially.

• 1:31:23Speaker 03

  And then I was started to be a bit more worried about money. That was a big part of it because I was like, oh, all my hard earned savings. And if I could go back and change that, I would probably still do it. But I would train myself to be just so much more relaxed about it and be like, dude, don't worry, you're going to have so much fun after this and you're not going to run out of money. So just have a good time with your business, even if even if it fails.

• 1:31:49Tim Ferriss?

  What was the process like of shutting it down in the sense that was there a particular dinner or conversation or bike ride or moment when you decided to start the process of shutting it down and how did that, what did that look like?

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  Well, it was pretty, it was pretty quick because I bought these two vacant lots in kind of a premium new urbanist neighborhood with my business partner and the, and the company. And then we started building the first one and it was the aforementioned stress was high and I was like, oh shit, what have I got myself into? Okay, let's just get these things done and then be done with it. So then I got the first one done and then like, woo, that was great. You know, big success. It sold for more than we were even asking for it. And then the second one got more and more stressful and I already knew before I even started that second one that I wanted to shut down the business afterwards. It just got drawn out longer and then we got into like renting it out, but then the tenants

• 1:32:51Speaker 03

  turned out to be horrible and I had these like scam artists move in that we didn't realize were scam artists and they were like, oh yeah, we got, we just sent you the rent. Yeah, it's in your mailbox. Check your mailbox. Click and they hang up and all these like little tricks. And the guy had like this, you know, fancy like brand new Corvette that he had bought and he had to hide it in the garage because the repo man would take it back if he ever saw it outside. So all he could do is like pull it out, polish it and rev it and then put it back in the garage. And these people were just really messed up and I happened to get tangled in their web for a while. And we had to use the, the full on eviction with like sheriff coming to the door to get him out of my place. And so yeah, there was some education in there.

• 1:33:32Tim Ferriss?

  That sounds like a headache. What did it feel like? When was it finally done? Shut down completely? And what did, what did that day feel like?

• 1:33:45Speaker 03

  I'd say it was shut down. One of the biggest problems with this is that the the relationship between me and my friend who started it and business partner, it just soured and it became pretty bad by the end. And we had totally different views about work and money and dividing stuff up. So we finally got him out of there by, I basically had to buy out the company. I had to put like, I'd lost all this money and I had to put like a final $460,000 into the company to pay off this mortgage that was on the house, just to kick him off the deed, the property deed, so that I could have control of it. So that day was kind of like, you know, we're like frowning at each other over the lawyer's

• 1:34:26Speaker 03

  table or whatever. And then since then, that lifted the weight off of me and then everything was so much better. And then for a while I rented out the house to great tenants and I had it in that situation. I was just using the rent for kind of our grocery money because that house was a fairly big portion of our retirement savings income at the time. And then more recently, I think just less than two years ago, I, the market in our area here in Colorado started to boom again. So I just sold it for a nice high price. And then now I've been super relaxed. And then that's kind of like another wave. And it really taught me a lot about happiness because this negativity in my life, or at least I was choosing to perceive it

• 1:35:09Speaker 03

  negatively, it was washed away. And then suddenly I was happier than I could have ever imagined being, because I'd gone through this somewhat hellish situation.

• 1:35:21Tim Ferriss?

  And then remove the negative.

• 1:35:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:24Tim Ferriss?

  Which is such a valuable question. The question to ask before purchase, this, that, that alone will return 100x the effort of scheduling and doing this interview for me. That question, is this removing a negative from my life? That's such a powerful reframe because I think that is so true. And so, so incredibly useful. But the next, which is going to be completely flipping that on its head. And this is not one of my usual questions, but I'm so curious to know how you will answer this.

• 1:36:02Tim Ferriss?

  If you had had to spend, you were given a hundred thousand dollars and they said, "You have to spend this. You have to buy something or some things. You cannot donate it to charity. You cannot stick it into an investment vehicle. You have to spend it. And it has to be on you, your family, or your close friends. But it can't be charitable in the sense that you're, say, paying for the college tuition of your friends' kids and so on. Nothing like that. How would you spend that? What would you do with it?

• 1:36:34Speaker 03

  That was my answer. You just took my answer.

• 1:36:36Tim Ferriss?

  I knew because I felt like it was coming.

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  Because I could pay off somebody's mortgage. There's still one family member in my close family that has a mortgage. But yeah, we want to consume here. Can I have more than a hundred thousand?

• 1:36:48Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, sure. No, it's not limited. It's not limited. This is just, let's just say that you took a step into Bizarro Land where everything was what it wasn't, and suddenly you are the anti-Mustache, right?

• 1:36:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:59Tim Ferriss?

  And what would you do?

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  Well, the thing is, this might actually be somewhat realistic because I still consider every day, you know, is there something I could spend money on that would be worth it? It's still an open question. You don't want to be ideological about this stuff. But so one thing I've been interested in maybe buying, and if I was forced to, I would do it quickly, is a building. I kind of want to own a commercial building on our town's little historic main street. This town I live in, Longmont, Colorado, is kind of one of these over 100-year-old things where it's all historic with big trees and the narrow main street with the tall brick buildings on it. So I could buy one of those and then

• 1:37:43Speaker 03

  set up, you know, some kind of fun community space in there where we play music and we have parties and we rent it out and do some teaching too. Because I like to do a bit of volunteer math and science teaching to kids, kind of advanced stuff that they don't get in the normal school. So I could have like Professor Mustache's School of Science in my downtown building. So that would be kind of a fun use of money.

• 1:38:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. This is more, of course, a metaphorical question. But if you could have one gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say? You know, a short message or image that you would like to impart to the world?

• 1:38:25Speaker 03

  Right, I'm picturing this in a US metropolis because that's kind of where I'm focusing my efforts right now. So I think I would say, I think it would say walk, or maybe it would say just walk, something that people can really understand quickly.

• 1:38:39Tim Ferriss?

  I like just walk.

• 1:38:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, back to our original thoughts, like it's the under, it's the best prescription medication in the world, and yet it's so underdone so far. So that's my billboard.

• 1:38:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's we've made as a species so many evolutionary trade offs to be able to walk with a level head, unlike say a pig that doesn't have a nuchal ligament, so their heads bobble over the place. We've evolved to be able to, as it would seem, a survival imperative, walk very long distances. And I just feel like humans are generally better humans and less neurotic when they walk a lot. At least that's true for me. I'll speak for myself. I'm like 10% less neurotic.

• 1:39:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:28Tim Ferriss?

  Which is, which is a win for me.

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

  So our billboard could say, just walk. You've paid a high evolutionary price for this ability and let's not squander it.

• 1:39:37Tim Ferriss?

  What, what are, what are one of your biggest challenges right now? And how do you plan to think about it or face it?

• 1:39:46Speaker 03

  I think my biggest challenge is the over satisfied rat in a cage syndrome where it's a fine line between being too satisfied with your life and not doing enough so that you feel like a bit of a weenie at the end of the day for squandering one of the few days of your life versus overdriving yourself to be like, well, I gotta accomplish more, you know, I have all these gifts and, and great situations and I have to make the most of it. And taking either of those two extremes can lead to a pretty unsatisfying life. And this often, I often compare myself actually.

• 1:40:28Speaker 03

  Because this is a little bit weird, but to you as Tim Ferriss, because I've read some of your books and I see some of your self-reflection in there where you have some of these battles. You're like, well, should I be perfectionist or should I relax? And I have a lot of these same questions to myself. And one of the differences is that I chose to have a kid and I focus a lot of energy on that, which by definition subtracts a lot of the other stuff I could do. Like, why am I not running my own kind of Tesla-type company or whatever? So that's my challenge is trying to walk the line and have the, at the end of each day, be satisfied that I've created the right balance of like stress and accomplishment

• 1:41:08Speaker 03

  versus lazy decadence, which is part of the fun of really being early retired is that you generally can like just smoke a bowl and have some fun with your friends on a Wednesday and like sleep in and it does not matter. And you still are going to have all the money that you need no matter what. So, and it's still, yeah, I still have trouble. I've been a little bit on the lazy side in the last couple of weeks because of family conditions here at home. And so I'm craving to get back to work on something hard.

• 1:41:39Tim Ferriss?

  How will you, how, how, how do you think you'll explore that in the coming year? Testing that balance or trying different things to try to find it? Or maybe it's, maybe it's a matter of just oscillating between the poles and that's how you achieve balance. It's not like you're never, it's not like you're ever 50/50 for a long period of time. You just oscillate between the poles. I don't know. But how, how are you thinking about that? Because I'm, I'm also thinking about the same thing in 2017.

• 1:42:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it's a continuing series of experiments and it's always changing. Like, I've been at this for a long time. It's been 11 years since I had a real job and I've done a lot of hard stuff and then a medium amount of laziness in this time. So I keep trying stuff to see if I enjoy it. So like last August, for example, I wanted to see if I enjoyed the TED Talk kind of public speaking and I did a whole bunch of traveling around that as well. And I found it was a bit too much. Like, I enjoyed the actual stuff that I did, but I was craving being at home. And then that's made me realize that most of my joy comes when I'm actually creating something. And this is why I'm less travel oriented than other people, because I can't really create while I'm traveling. So I need to do a certain

• 1:42:51Speaker 03

  amount of like nitty gritty, construction and design and just hanging out and having unplanned, spontaneous people coming over for a party or barbecue or whatever. So I need this village life. If you imagine a primitive man living in a village where he spends half the time hunting, some of the time like building stuff and some of the time reveling around the fire. That's kind of my core of happiness. And when I get too much into lifestyle guru activities, like, oh, I'm gonna publish more articles or get this book done quickly, or say yes to all these interviews so I can have more and more fans and page views. Those things sound, actually, they sound dumb when I say it like that, but when you look at, you know, when you look at news headlines about yourself,

• 1:43:35Speaker 03

  you're like, that's successful. Or you look at page views or money, you go, yeah, that's success. But it's actually kind of the least happy thing that I do. It's the least satisfaction bringing. So I have to balance that with these much more villagey type of activities. But if I totally neglect the internet world, then I'll feel like I'm letting the world down because you can actually create good, positive change that way that you could never do just in your own village.

• 1:44:06Tim Ferriss?

  Right. What have you changed your mind on in the last, say, handful of years? Is there anything that you've done an about face on in any way or modified substantially in your thinking?

• 1:44:20Speaker 03

  There've been a few little things, like what type of eating is healthy. I kind of switched to the high fat, low carb eating on a whim after reading some books. And I'm really, really happy with that. Whereas before, when I was a teenager, I was the ultimate low fat, because I read all these bodybuilding magazines back then. And they were always telling you like, oh, yeah, 10 grams of fat would be way too much to have and all this stuff. So that was a change in a little way. The biggest change I've had, though, is more in my understanding of happiness. I thought that happiness came from

• 1:44:59Speaker 03

  From maximum achievement and maximum wealth. And as I got into experimenting with those things, sounds too much like my other answer, but I learned much more about the balance that's required for happiness. So it's changed my goals for the rest of my life is that there's a lot more to happiness than just being maxed out in one dimension.

• 1:45:21Tim Ferriss?

  So I only have a few questions left. I'm having a lot of fun. I mean, we could keep going for many, many hours, but do you have any ask or request of my audience? Any experiment you'd like them to do, exercise, anything? It could really be anything, but any, any parting thoughts before I ask you where people can find out more about you and so on?

• 1:45:48Speaker 03

  Right, well, if you are new to this stuff that I talk about, then I would suggest, and if anything that I am advocating sounds crazy, like for example, not using a car to get your groceries, or not using a car to get to work, then try it and think of the idea of voluntary hardship. Like put this, that phrase into your mind and then see where you can apply it through the day. And then you're like, hey, that looks hard. I think I'm going to do it. Instead of that looks hard, I'm going to try to avoid it. And voluntary hardship is the gateway drug to the rest of mustachianism and thus being

• 1:46:28Speaker 03

  able to save 75% of your Silicon Valley income while everyone else is still broke. So yeah, find some things that are hard, even if it's just skipping the elevator and taking the stairs like up to the 15th floor or whatever. Just if the other people are not doing it, then that's probably a sign that it's something that you should do and then just record your results, see how much better it makes you feel and then just keep pushing yourself a bit further.

• 1:46:55Tim Ferriss?

  And I would echo that. And spin it slightly differently. It's not, these are complementary viewpoints. But even if people listening, those folks out there are listening, if you do not want to focus on saving, even if that is not the objective per se, voluntary hardship is a fantastic way to short circuit hedonic adaptation, where you need more and more and more, almost like an opiate, to satisfy your need for X. And I would highly recommend everybody read a letter. You can find it in the public domain, online. You can also

• 1:47:36Tim Ferriss?

  find it in Tools of Titans in a slightly edited fashion, but on Festivals and Fasting. It's Letter 13 from Seneca, Seneca the Younger to Lucilius, the Moral Letters to Lucilius on Festivals and Fasting. And it talks about setting aside a few days per month, let's say, to experience voluntary hardship in different ways. And it is, it is such a fascinating psychological trick in many respects, with all sorts of beneficial side effects, like cutting down on expenses, that I think allows you to realize it is possible to recalibrate yourself to experience greater happiness and well-being without simply adding more,

• 1:48:22Tim Ferriss?

  more, more, more, more, whether that's page views, money, fancy shit you don't need or otherwise. So I definitely want to second that notion. Pete, where can people find out more about you? And you've, you've written a lot. Where should they, where should they start also? So where can they find you on social? Where can they say hi? Where can they read your stuff? And where should they start if, if, if they're, they're just opening the doors to your writing?

• 1:48:53Speaker 03

  I'm a big fan of old fashioned websites, so there's always MrMoneyMustache.com and you'll see a start here button on there that takes you kind of to an introductory article. And then the design of the website, to the limited extent that it has a design, is just to poke around and follow links to other links, or you can start at the beginning and read all the 400 plus articles dating back to 2012 or 2011. And yeah, that's how most people do it. And then you can read it. If you get really into the rabbit hole, then there's a forum where like all these users discuss their intimate problems with each other. And it's got like 10s of thousands of members that spend all day on there. And

• 1:49:35Speaker 03

  or you can just for keeping it really light, you can just go to Twitter and look up MrMoneyMustache and say, hey, I enjoyed the podcast.

• 1:49:45Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect. Well, Pete, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate you taking the time. And to everybody listening, as always, you can find links to everything we discussed, books and otherwise, at the show notes, which is for this episode and every other episode, fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, all spelled out, fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And as always, until next time, thank you for listening. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before

• 1:50:29Tim Ferriss?

  the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 1:51:15Tim Ferriss?

  This podcast is brought to you by The Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach. What honor is that? Well, let me back up. The first person I personally call for help with my athletic recovery or mobility training is Dr. Kelly Starrett at The Ready State. I've known Kelly for more than a decade. He's a good friend, but he's also a mobility and movement coach for Olympic gold medalists, world champions, and pro athletes. You might recognize the name because Kelly was in The Four Hour Body, he was in Tools of Titans. He also nursed and coached me through the Destroy My Body for Entertainment TV show that was the Tim Ferriss Experiment. Now Kelly has created a program called Virtual Mobility Coach. It's like carrying a virtual Kelly Starrett in your pocket because most people are not

• 1:51:58Tim Ferriss?

  going to have direct access to Kelly, but now you do. Every day, Virtual Mobility Coach gives you guided mobility videos, walks you step by step through Kelly's proven techniques to relieve pain, improve range of motion, improve performance, on and on and on. If you're in pain, you can pull up a picture of the human body, click on what hurts, and from there, get customized regimen to help finally. If you are working out or playing a sport, Virtual Mobility Coach offers all sorts of pre and post exercise mobility sequences for more than 50 sports and activities, actually. And right now, listeners of this podcast get a special deal. You can try Virtual Mobility Coach. You can get Kelly Starrett in your pocket, totally risk-free for two weeks without paying a penny.

• 1:52:43Tim Ferriss?

  Try it completely free for two weeks, and if you decide to continue, you can get 10% off for life using promo code TIM10. That's T-I-M-1-0. Simply visit thereadystate.com/tim to check everything out and use code TIM10 at checkout. Again, that's thereadystate.com/tim and use code TIM10 when you sign up to get 10% off for the life of your membership after your 14-day free trial ends. Thereadystate.com/tim.

• 1:53:14Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, the global creative platform that makes it easy for you to find and work with amazing graphic designers online. Longtime listeners of this podcast know how much attention I pay to detail, how obsessively I approach nearly all elements of my work, because the small things often end up being the big things. So whether it's your logo, your business cards, website design, even your email templates, all of these visual elements tell your customers, tell your users who you are and what you're about. So I think it's worth sweating the details. I've been using 99designs for years now to ensure that many of my creative projects, whether big or small, are as cohesive, professional, and beautiful as possible. I've worked on draft mockups of book covers. I've worked on all sorts of those.

• 1:53:58Tim Ferriss?

  Most recently, I've been working with a designer at 99designs to update the illustrations and layouts for all of my downloadable eBooks. I've developed a really great working relationship with the designer, who goes by the username Spoonlancer, and I intend to continue working with him to bring ideas to life, one project at a time. I've also used 99designs for all sorts of high-end illustration for different books, like the Tao of Seneca. You can see a bunch of examples on my Instagram that I've put up, and they've turned out better than I possibly could have hoped. So, from logos, to websites, to packaging, to books, 99designs is the go-to creative resource to build your brand on any budget. So check them out. Right now, my listeners, that's you guys, can get $20 off,

• 1:54:41Tim Ferriss?

  plus a free $99 upgrade on their first design contest. Contest is a great way to get started and find the right designer for long-term work. You can also book a free design consultation with a brand expert at 99designs to receive personalized branding advice over the phone. Their hands-on team has helped thousands of business owners at this point. It's a great way to get the most out of your experience with 99designs. So, take a look. Head to 99designs.com/tim for your discount and to sign up for a design consultation today. That's 99designs.com/tim.