The Tim Ferriss Show - #221: Mr. Money Mustache — Living Beautifully on $25-27K Per Year

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Starting point is 00:02:57 that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. 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, at Mr. Money Mustache, Pete Adney in real life. He grew up in Canada in a family of mostly eccentric musicians, then graduated from computer engineering in the 1990s and worked in various tech companies before

Starting point is 00:03:51 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. So again, since 2005, all three of them have explored a freeform 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

Starting point is 00:04:45 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 without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with the one and only Mr. Money Mustache, Pete Adeny. 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

Starting point is 00:05:26 in New York City of all places. He said, you know who 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. Could you describe for people what your experience looks like getting groceries? Well, it's kind of varied, but I feel strongly about groceries. So in an ideal, like a 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

Starting point is 00:06:18 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. So if that's the utopia, what does the compromised utopia look like? 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 it past the grocery store so I'll rush in and get some stuff. But I think 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 Longmont, 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

Starting point is 00:07:05 happiest to live. And at this point in time, you have a household of three. Is that right? Yeah, that's true. One boy. One boy. One girl. And got it. All right. And what is the, because I think this is going to be a core piece of the discussion. What are your average annual family expenses at this point, would you say? Right. Well, we've been adding this up ever since I started writing a blog.

Starting point is 00:07:32 We never really added it up before, but it always comes out around $25,000 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. And maybe we'll, this is going to be memento style in terms of chronology as 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. What was the blog post or the day that you realized Mr. Money Mustache had a cult-like following? 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

Starting point is 00:08:25 piece or moment when you realized how strongly and how devoted your fan base was? 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 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 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

Starting point is 00:09:10 all these comments. And then it was really a rewarding thing. And I just kept going from there. It's sort of a self-motivating thing. 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 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

Starting point is 00:09:43 where you don't even meet everybody who wants to meet you. 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 quite a large company now called Shopify. Shopify. Oh yeah, I knew that. Yeah. And the beaver tail, that's the right way to do Ottawa is skating and beaver tails. Now beaver tail is, I don't even remember exactly what it is, but it's a pastry, right? I mean, what is it exactly? It's like a chocolate covered pastry. And for those people who've not been to Ottawa, you can skate for hours. I mean, it's this gigantic, 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'm remembering correctly.

Starting point is 00:10:35 Yeah, that's right. It's pretty awesome. But to get back to the blog, what do you think has, what are the aspects of your philosophy or your writing or your persona that have struck such a chord? Well, it's funny you should ask that because the first time I ever did a talk, like a big public talk, it was to a conference of bloggers. It's called FinCon and I just stopped by because it was in Denver. And 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 just because that's my idea of a sense of humor is, 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 them, you know, like, oh, we're an oppressed people,

Starting point is 00:11:29 and the rest of the world doesn't understand us. And a couple 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 yeah, so if you look at all the cults, including informal ones like Star Trek or 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. So for those who are part of the us in your case, what's the belief system? What are the tenets? Right. So the belief system, which I jokingly call mustachianism, it's kind of like a lifestyle and a fake religion.

Starting point is 00:12:11 And the beliefs are that the United States especially is the ground zero of this consumer 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 the same thing applies to the health their health and their their sanity and their mental health their 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

Starting point is 00:12:55 each time that you spend something. And applying this, you just end up a lot healthier and wealthier 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. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but you retired effectively at age 30. Is that right? Right. Yeah. This is perfect reverse chronology, just like you planned it. yeah now we're back to the year 2005 and um after working about a 10-year career in software engineering my girlfriend who is now my wife and i uh determined we had enough money saved up to live off the investment returns forever

Starting point is 00:13:37 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, when you get paid as much as we do, 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. 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 things you had said over, and I always ask guests for potential prompts for topics that could be fun

Starting point is 00:14:25 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 you arrived at that number? Because I think this is a useful exercise for people to hear. 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 rich world's population. So 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,

Starting point is 00:15:22 oh darn, 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 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 were to ever quit work early and they haven't really done the math on how easy it really is. Are there any assumptions embedded in that in terms of percentage, annual yield, and so on? Whether historically based or otherwise, are there any other assumptions embedded in that? It is, yeah. 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.

Starting point is 00:16:11 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. We've gotten you through a lot of the worst case scenarios. There were some situations when you could have spent up to 5% or 7% 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 a huge amount of risks. 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. 95% of people still have a lot of interests and passions, and then they're pretty good at making money if they managed 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

Starting point is 00:17:14 pumping out dividends and returns just adds extra confidence so they can have more fun in the process. Well, I've read two different definitions of retirement, or maybe they're 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, retirement or financial independence simply means that you have your living expenses covered by non-work income, part one. 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, say, the age of 30, 40, 50, whatever it might be. How do, let's say,

Starting point is 00:18:09 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, 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? 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,

Starting point is 00:18:57 hey, there's this crazy guy and he's just a lifestyle guru, just like another junior Tim Ferris trying to get everybody excited about his crazy ideas, and he's not really retired. Or they say, yeah, he made so much money, but that doesn't apply to the regular person when they're trying to make it on like $50,000 a year salary. Or what about people with more kids? So the media don't understand. They often assume some kind of extreme frugality that would be undesirable to live under. And that's really inaccurate. And I work 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

Starting point is 00:19:39 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 non-media world, they're a little bit more suspicious. Like they just think I'm making everything up 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 the comment section of MSN, which you should never do.

Starting point is 00:20:17 But you do have, and I think this is part of the reason I wanted to bring it up very early, by most standards in the United States, a low household annual expense, right? Right. And it might be helpful here to talk about, because I asked during our sound check what you had for breakfast. So could you repeat your answer, please? Oh, yeah. Well, my breakfast was a fancy black espresso with foamed milk and coconut oil foamed into there too, and then some dark chocolate, like 90% dark chocolate, and some nuts, almonds,

Starting point is 00:20:56 and cashews and stuff. And it's not exactly related to low expenditure, but- It's indirectly related. I'm going to come back to it. What type, but since I love the particulars, what type of coffee, what type of chocolate, do you recall? Oh, yeah. Well, right now my coffee is some kind of organic-y fair trade thing, but bought in

Starting point is 00:21:17 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. The reason I bring it up is that I think Stumbling Upon Happiness or Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert is a good exploration of this. Oftentimes, what we think will make us happy does not make us happy. We should dig into what happiness is for you because I think it can be a dangerously nebulous term. But the point being that 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.

Starting point is 00:22:06 But to go from a good chocolate to an excellent chocolate to world-class chocolate, it might only be the difference of $10 or $12. So there are places where you can optimize without being obnoxiously or frugal or frugal to 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 optimizing for happiness as opposed to

Starting point is 00:22:56 succumbing to internal or external pressures to remain on this treadmill of overconsumption? Yeah, right. And this might actually be a better answer for your earlier question too, because as an engineer, I was kind of born part engineer at least. And for me, optimization is really, really fun. It's 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, I'd probably make me about this happy. And this car would make me this much happy. Whereas if I

Starting point is 00:23:35 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 And then all these categories can become super efficient where you end 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.

Starting point is 00:24:03 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 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 at the most, unless you're at least 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

Starting point is 00:24:50 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 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, 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

Starting point is 00:25:35 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 give up the cage of the car. It's such a huge thing. And it's such an overlooked thing in our country. I couldn't agree more. And I think it forces you to make other decisions like you pointed out.

Starting point is 00:26:02 I haven't had a car for close to three years i want to say now that does not mean i don't spend time in cars i do so 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 percent of my locomotion that sounds great 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 types of leverage that don't require or replace the need for

Starting point is 00:26:54 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 audio books. I can take time for that type of enrichment in the process of moving from point A to point B. So true. Walking is so powerful and so underrated. 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 on that shoe.

Starting point is 00:27:44 Exactly. 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? 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. 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. One book that 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.

Starting point is 00:28:39 So that's for urban planning nerds and fixing the world nerds. 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 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 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 going to 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. And finally, a really, really old fashioned book. If someone just wants to wake themselves up

Starting point is 00:29:32 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 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. So I can't comment on the first two, but I have to comment on The Magic of Thinking Big. So I have

Starting point is 00:30:16 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 Junger, 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 said, I mean, it screams cheesy at you.

Starting point is 00:30:57 That's why it's good, though. It is cheesy. It's like gorgeously, delightfully cheesy. And you're like, yes, I'm a powerful 1950s man as well. I'm going to conduct some business. No, exactly. And 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 fantastic career for himself, developing products, a lot of toys, and licensing them to gigantic companies,

Starting point is 00:31:27 whether it's Disney or Nestle, Coca-Cola, you name it. And 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 by, I believe it was a Fortune 500 CEO. So the lineage, at least, or the path that the book took to me was fascinating in and of itself. And I read it, I would say around 2003, 2004, which was just before I took my walkabout 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 4-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

Starting point is 00:32:30 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? Last time was probably about five years ago and I found it was just as good. I just love 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 i find that most maybe this is my

Starting point is 00:33:06 engineer's uh 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 sentences right 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 let's make some 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. You got to read it again. I'm going to

Starting point is 00:33:47 read it again. All right. 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 jump into that. How are you different from Mr. Money Mustache, if at all? Well, the lines are pretty fine. I don't know if there's like a really formal difference, but he's probably a bit more perfect than me. Like I'll complain occasionally if I don't catch myself. And, you know, I don't actually complain on the blog about, you know, the world is being mean to me.

Starting point is 00:34:59 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 international adventures of moving to the US and everything under those assumptions, I feel like I'm fairly Mr. Money Mustache. mustache i'm more sensitive here's the thing like i don't lecture people in 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-thru 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 uh in his writing 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 have come to you by definition, which means they're a lot more open to having their faces punched in a literary sense. Preston Pyshko Right. To get pros mugged while you're shaping their behavior.

Starting point is 00:36:19 The question of the US, so I've spent a little bit of time in China. And even as an American who's somewhat desensitized to consumption, I think that China appears to be 10 times more materialistic and driven towards overconsumption. But that's not really leading. I don't want to lead us necessarily into a conversation about China. The question I was going to ask, and this might have a very simple answer, why did you decide to stay in the US? I just love it here. It's kind of like the furnace of the world. 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 uh it's just the

Starting point is 00:37:10 entrepreneurial and the optimism and the lack of rules is kind of it goes along with my personality personality because i hate rules um i'm really in favor of people self-regulating in the sense that don't uh 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 U.S. business 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 Arctic tundra to tropical islands and coconut shell tops and everything like that. It's just a lot more variety and excitement here.

Starting point is 00:38:00 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 it. So 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? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I saw that.

Starting point is 00:39:01 Thanks to you, I on twitter i did i might have driven uh some traffic there which which uh i was happy to do and also hesitant to do because i know that there's i'm i'm for sure there are things that are at the best incomplete uh and 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. Yeah. I did a snarky responses section for that, like complete on that genius.it website. So if anybody... Your inline responses. Yeah. Because that way 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. Yeah. I might have to do that myself,

Starting point is 00:39:48 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 page rank, but water under the bridge for now. I'll put that aside. The piece I wanted to read though, I don't think 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 then to your writing. This was the first theft in many, many years of very carefree living. The Craigslist replacement value of that bike was probably around

Starting point is 00:40:34 $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 and not spending my life fumbling with an enormous key chain? 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 there are plenty of folks out there 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, are burning up the non-renewable resource of time in the interest of some perceived marginal utility in terms of dollars and cents.

Starting point is 00:41:38 But I'd love to hear any thoughts or elaborations that you have on this, because I love this example. 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.

Starting point is 00:42:28 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. 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'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. And if I had started buying more stuff afterwards, that might've been a sign that I didn't really

Starting point is 00:43:15 do the math right to begin with. 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 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. Yeah, 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'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 under the effective altruism movement that I know that you've covered at one point in your Tools of Titans book. Yeah, I had Will McCaskill on the podcast, the co-founder or maybe founder of that movement. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:44:16 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 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 um to standard causes i think um i would i would like to create kind of like one of those tipping point effects in the u.s

Starting point is 00:44:59 that might for example tip us more towards bike-based transportation instead of car-based and potentially save 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 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, something also sounds like Singapore, right? Yeah. Right. In a sense. So town within a town based on the ideas of co-housing or something like that. So these guys ideas are still swimming around in my head. I haven't solved the problem

Starting point is 00:45:43 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. And I'd love to hear more about 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 thought process like or the internal monologue slash dialogue when you're considering buying

Starting point is 00:46:32 something? Yeah. Well, usually I try to start with like, no, you weenie. What do you think? What kind of consumer are you? 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 limited space of my studio, for example. And then imagine how I would feel if

Starting point is 00:47:20 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. So that's, you know, and whereas if there's something that every day I'm

Starting point is 00:48:05 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. What, what purchases or productions for that matter, I know you make a lot of things, but what purchases, just to stick with one category, that come to mind have most improved your happiness by removing negatives? 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 overlooking this nice forested park behind my house. So I had a consistent problem after I moved to this current house we live in

Starting point is 00:48:58 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. And I always wanted to have a detached studio anyway to play music in because I don't want to have to 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

Starting point is 00:49:39 physical problems is one of the happiest things I can possibly do. Just like hundreds of hours of lifting and sweating and digging and all these amazing, useful outdoor things with friends. And now 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. 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 piece of dirt. So no regrets there, even though that was a lot more than a few dinners out that I spent

Starting point is 00:50:17 on this thing. I've been hoping and wishing and fantasizing at some point about building my own structure. I've 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. 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 every time, this is a lesson I need to relearn over and over again. I use my hands in that capacity,

Starting point is 00:51:07 that manual labor reward, like you said, it's just unbelievable. Even yesterday, I was purging, donating a bunch of stuff that I just don't need. I was getting rid of a bunch of stuff. And 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 a 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. 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 infinite money typing shit into the computer and publishing it

Starting point is 00:51:58 to the cult following. I hardly do that at all because it 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 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. I tore it down to like a brick shell and then rebuilt it to a different shape. 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

Starting point is 00:52:41 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 carpentourism 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, Tim Ferriss studio, then I'm, I'm making this offer now. It'd make it quite an interesting story. I could, I could be a, like an operating room assistant of sorts. You'd be like hammer,

Starting point is 00:53:21 hammer, screwdriver, screwdriver. I think I'd be more of a liability otherwise, but- Wow, 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. You know, I might take you up on that. I love Colorado. I've been spending more and more time in Colorado. Well, I was assuming we would build something at your pieces of the world where you need a structure because you don't need to build stuff for me. That's not... No, not for you. I was thinking about the people in need, but maybe they don't want some horrible, atrocious Picasso painting of a table where they're like, I didn't really want some abstract,

Starting point is 00:54:03 weird thing, Ferris. If you could use parallel lines next time, please. In this case, you were the person in need because you're this accomplished guy who has yet a hole in your life where you haven't actually built a house yet. So I felt sorry for you. That's all. All right. I will put a bookmark in that. I may take you up on it. Here are a few questions related to consumption because 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 talk to you about it or seeing billboards or seeing announcements and so on related to some type of conservation or curbing consumption. But a few questions for you. The first is, and this is related to kids, so I don't have kids.

Starting point is 00:55:01 One of the considerations has been a 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? Oh yeah. Kids are definitely a huge form of consumption. Like if you're a rich world resident and you have a kid, you know, that's another hundred years of rich world lifestyle going on there. But I'm not a pure person. I strategically indulge in fun stuff. 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 against other people. But I think it's just good.

Starting point is 00:55:49 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 consumption of natural resources is a factor, you might not have 13. But if it's 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,

Starting point is 00:56:35 then you're going to raise a super consumer and more the richer you are. Whereas if you teach them that there's a balance and give them a little bit of biology and science in their upbringing, then they're going to have a value system that prevents them from being nearly as destructive. And yet they'll probably still have more fun in the world as well. Is it true that you paid your son per mile ridden on his bike at one point? Yeah. We still do that. There's just kind of a... I like this, by the way. This is not in any way a criticism. 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

Starting point is 00:57:19 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 then just give him a 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 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, 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 makes it more thoughtful. Now, you are an engineer, and it seems like you have a strong

Starting point is 00:58:06 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 tinker with his odometer? Or I guess, is he so good that perhaps you wouldn't have noticed? Yeah. I mean, you never know. He might be hooking it up to a cordless drill and spinning that front wheel. But no, I don't think he's not, that's not in his personality. Like he's not into really cheating on anything. Plus it's 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 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

Starting point is 00:58:56 that he's earning is close to funding his video game needs. Either that, or he's got the best long con in history. He's been conning you with his good behavior for 11 years just to tinker with this odometer, which I don't think is the case. But 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 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?

Starting point is 00:59:43 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. 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 that's your idea 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, which is just sort of like a even simpler, more story-based, enjoyable old man's tales explanation of why you

Starting point is 01:00:32 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, 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. And if you just get 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

Starting point is 01:01:25 in that way. So a huge surplus of money on a weekly or monthly basis is the real solution to your financial problems rather than becoming a super kick-ass investor. 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 Solon, the smartest investment book you'll ever read. Oh yeah, I've heard of it.

Starting point is 01:01:55 And 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? 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,

Starting point is 01:02:43 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 going to, you know, I see a support level at 53.5 unless something happens. 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. It would probably be less than one in a thousand people that could do that.

Starting point is 01:03:19 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, the ups and downs of any given company that he may have bought in the form of shares or outright if you acquired the entire company. And that type of emotional detachment is also exceptionally, exceptionally rare. Yeah. And that goes without saying, to me, that's a prerequisite. I don't have that at all. Well, no, in the sense that if I'm going to be active, it is very hard for me to be an active investor in publicly traded equities. 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 publicly traded equities, if I'm trying to be active in any capacity, I do

Starting point is 01:04:26 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 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. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Since I don't do active stuff anymore, then I totally would agree with you on that in agreement. The book you mentioned, was that by Joel Greenblatt, The Little Book That Beats the Market?

Starting point is 01:05:02 Yeah, that's right. It was really interesting. And it was a little book, which is perfect for my short book attention span. He is. Yeah. Joel is an exceptionally smart guy. And he has a fascinating track record because he can teach and he has taught in classrooms in New York at universities. He can write, and he's also very, very well respected as not only a value investor, but also 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 little book that beats the market makes more sense as a first reader,

Starting point is 01:05:51 maybe his later book, The Big Secret for the Small Investor. But a book with the title that is sort of blessed and cursed in the same way that The 4-Hour Workweek just sounds so schlocky as if it's going to appear at three in the morning on an infomercial, 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 interesting stuff out there. Yeah. I'm going to check that one out for sure since I like Joel Greenblatt's writing a lot. And I still follow, I read investment and finance books all the time. I just try not

Starting point is 01:06:38 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 I do read like the Timothy Geithner book, Stress Test. I read that 800 page description of the financial crisis and I 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. 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,

Starting point is 01:07:14 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 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 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.

Starting point is 01:07:59 And it will give you a very good idea of who you're competing against. And 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, 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&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.

Starting point is 01:09:11 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 will be long-winded, although they very seldom are, especially if Charlie Munger's 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,

Starting point is 01:09:48 you had say $500,000 to a million dollars in savings. 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&P 500 or in an index fund and get back to work. That was it. That was the end of the answer. And Charlie, do you have anything more to add? Nope. And then onto the next question. Yeah, it's good advice. It is because there's so much more to work on in your life. 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 maintaining good physical fitness. 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.

Starting point is 01:10:38 So you should really take the four-hour investor approach and be like, everyone says this is good. I'm just going to do it. And I'm going to work on all the other stuff in my life that also needs to be addressed. Yeah. Well, let's jump into 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 asked 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? Yeah, I've racked my brain over this question because I know it's a standard Ferris podcast question and I don't have an answer that anybody

Starting point is 01:11:21 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 and handed off a lot of responsibility to their employees. And they kind of pay them more because there's so much

Starting point is 01:12:03 surplus anyway. And they'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 mustachioed lifestyle. And this is probably because I met these guys through the blog. And then they both have kids and they have a fairly mustachioed 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 children, their semi-adult children and their wife and basically just really good shape, physical shape.

Starting point is 01:12:37 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 fly over and meet you in that random spot for some mountain biking or whatever. So they've managed to combine all of these dimensions of what most people want in a kind of a carefree way. 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 myself by the time I'm like 50 years old with a pretty old kid. So 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? They'll see all the little nuances and bits in what I try to express as a philosophy. But for those readers who don't have all the details, a lot of people assume that I'm very,

Starting point is 01:13:54 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, you know, everything else is good is good. And I don't judge people to nearly the standards that they think I judge them to. And the other thing is, it's the same for people who don't know my real life. They often assume that it's pretty Spartan and that I'm always penny pinching. And this goes back to the same answer with the New Yorker article too. But I'm really in favor of celebrating and decadence and feeling like stuff is luxurious. So I'm really not as minimalist as people think I am. I'm really maximalist in the fun department.

Starting point is 01:14:42 Besides the studio, what are some of those luxuries? And we could tie that into, 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? 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.

Starting point is 01:15:29 So vacations, most of the money goes to rent basically like VRBO type stuff, Airbnb. Sure. This 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 at any time. 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.

Starting point is 01:16:08 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, even though it's 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. 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. It's really not too much though, yeah.

Starting point is 01:17:01 Do you have any favorite documentaries or movies? 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 rather than documentary. But the Cosmos, the remake of Cosmos. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yeah. I love Neil deGrasse Tyson. documentary but the um the cosmos the remake of cosmos neil degrasse tyson yeah i love neil degrasse tyson and uh i love his awkward but scientific way and the topics he covered in those in those episodes were like so stunning and it was a great education for my son who is very very into science himself um so that's kind of like that's the documentary that stands out in my mind.

Starting point is 01:17:48 The great series. Probably the most interesting thing in the last five years anyway. 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 them on the podcast uh if you were to give a ted talk on something that you are not known for what would you give it on so any any kind of pet obsession or something you're lesser known for maybe your diehard fans who've read every single line of everything you've ever written would have heard of it. But yeah, if you had to get

Starting point is 01:18:29 that, 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 the world energy balance and solar power and 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 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.

Starting point is 01:19:19 And there's a lot more fun and emotion in that topic if you package it right. So I think that'd be a good talk. Yeah. What is your, what I've been curious about, I know you've written about this before, but when you are, if you were to think of 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?

Starting point is 01:19:49 Yeah. That was my most recent blog post. It's starting to get a little old now, but yeah. So if you think back to when you were in the best shape and you can define that any way you like, what did your exercise regimen look like? Yeah. I might be 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 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.

Starting point is 01:20:36 And the total expenditure per week is only in the order of like an hour or two. So, I'm not like a gym rat 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 um but the the strong i was slightly stronger when i was in my 20s 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 probably had my record weightlifting and certain exercises. Do you have a quote or any quotes that you live your life by or think of often? 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.

Starting point is 01:21:29 I'd say that's often enough to be a response. 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 so anyway use it or lose it is is the philosophy like brain body skills friendships relationships just do everything that you want to be good at

Starting point is 01:22:18 as often as you can and uh don't fool yourself that you're going to keep being able to do this stuff unless you continue doing it regularly. 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? I think the biggest issue that I have with a lot of this mainstream financial advice is that they make you think of saving as a negative obligation. They're like, yeah, we know it feels a lot better to buy yourself treats, but come on. Like, if you can just squeeze out 5% or even 10%, then you're doing okay. Just do that every week and make a budget and all this stuff. And so 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 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.

Starting point is 01:23:39 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 see a lot of these totally out of shape business guru people trying to sell life insurance at the same time as they're giving you financial advice. And they're not really in it for making people's lives 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 test their ideas or at the very worst, they're a hypocrite and they're doing the opposite of them. Are there any failures that come to mind, which are favorite failures of yours in the sense that

Starting point is 01:25:01 they ended up sowing the seeds of a later success? Does anything like that come to mind for you? Yeah, I have a 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 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 I did, actually.

Starting point is 01:25:30 We started making these houses. And the problem was, it was way, way more stressful 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 like a construction loan to build this thing. And I was doing marketing and working late and wrangling all these cats together 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 we sold our first house into the 2006 boom

Starting point is 01:26:09 market for housing. But then by the time the second one was done, it was 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 kind of spoiled the fun of my first three years of retirement of running this company. At the same time, though, going through hardship was really good for me. 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. The skills that I'm most proud of is, I've always messed around with woodworking since

Starting point is 01:26:51 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 it lost a bunch of money. You know, some of my retirement savings went up in smoke initially. And then I was started to be a bit more worried about money. That was a big

Starting point is 01:27:26 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 it fails. 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 what did that look like? Well, it was pretty, it was pretty quick because I bought these two vacant lots and kind of a

Starting point is 01:28:12 premium new urbanist neighborhood with my business partner 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 renting it out, but then the tenants turned out to be horrible. And I had these scam artists move in that we

Starting point is 01:28:55 didn't realize were scam artists. And they were like, oh yeah, we just sent you the rent. 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 uh the full-on eviction with like sheriff coming to the door to get them out of my place. And so, yeah, there was some education in there. That sounds like a headache. What did it feel like? When was it finally done,

Starting point is 01:29:40 shut down completely? And what did that day feel like? I'd say it was shut down the 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 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

Starting point is 01:30:19 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 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, 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

Starting point is 01:31:02 about happiness because this negativity in my life, or at least I was choosing to perceive it 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. And then remove the negative, right? Yeah. Which is such a valuable question. The question to ask before purchase, that alone will return 100x the effort of scheduling and doing this interview for me.

Starting point is 01:31:40 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 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. If you had to spend, you were given $100,000 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?

Starting point is 01:32:33 That was my answer. You just took my answer. I knew because I felt like it was coming. Because I could pay off somebody's mortgage. There's still one family member in my close family that has a mortgage. But yeah, yeah, we want, we want to consume here. Um, can I have more than a hundred thousand? 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? And what would you do? Well, the thing is, this might actually be somewhat realistic because

Starting point is 01:33:06 i still consider every day you know is there something i could spend money on um 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 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 set up 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.

Starting point is 01:33:51 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. 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? A short message or image that you would like to impart to the world? Right. I'm picturing this in a US metropolis because that's kind of where I'm focusing my efforts right now.

Starting point is 01:34:30 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. I like that. 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. Yeah. We've made, as a species, so many evolutionary trade-offs to be able to walk

Starting point is 01:34:58 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, which is a win for me. So our billboard could say, just walk. You've paid a high evolutionary price for this ability and let's not squander it. What are one of your biggest challenges right now? And how do you plan to think about it or face it? I think my biggest challenge is the over-satisfied rat-in-a-cage syndrome, where

Starting point is 01:35:53 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 got to accomplish more. I have all these gifts 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, 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

Starting point is 01:36:43 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 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. How do you think you'll explore that in the coming year, testing that balance or trying different things to try to find it?

Starting point is 01:37:49 Or maybe it's a matter of just oscillating between the poles, and that's how you achieve balance. 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 are you thinking about that? Because I'm also thinking about the same thing in 2017. Yeah. Well, it's a continuing series of experiments and it's always changing. 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

Starting point is 01:38:23 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 amount of like nitty gritty construction and design and just hanging out and having unplanned, spontaneous people coming over for a party or a barbecue or whatever.

Starting point is 01:39:02 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 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 I'm going to 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 news headlines about yourself, 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

Starting point is 01:39:42 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. 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? 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. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 01:40:41 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 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. 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 parting thoughts before I ask you where people can find out more about you and so on? Right. Well, if you are new to this stuff that I talk about, then I would suggest, and if

Starting point is 01:41:54 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. Put 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 the voluntary hardship is the gateway drug to the rest of mustachianism and thus being 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

Starting point is 01:42:51 you feel, and then just keep pushing yourself a bit further. And I would echo that and spin it slightly differently. These are complimentary viewpoints. But even if people listening, those folks out there 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 find it in Tools of Titans in a slightly edited fashion, but on festivals and fasting, it's letter 13 from Seneca uh seneca the younger to lucilius the moral

Starting point is 01:43:48 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 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, 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 written a lot. Where should they start also? So where can

Starting point is 01:44:40 they find you on social? Where can they say hi? Where can they read your stuff? And where should they start if they're just opening the doors to your writing? 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.

Starting point is 01:45:22 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 tens of thousands of members that spend all day on there. And, or you can just for keeping it really light, you can just go to Twitter and look up Mr. Money Mustache and say, hey, I enjoyed the podcast. 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,

Starting point is 01:46:00 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out, 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out, 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. And as always, until next time, thank you for listening. 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 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.

Starting point is 01:46:39 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 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.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. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront.

Starting point is 01:47:15 Wealthfront is the future of financial advice. They've become incredibly popular among my friends in Silicon Valley and across the country because they provide the same high end financial advice that the best private wealth managers deliver to the ultra wealthy. among my friends in Silicon Valley and across the country, because they provide the same high-end financial advice that the best private wealth managers deliver to the ultra wealthy, but for any account size and at a fraction of the cost. For instance, they monitor your portfolio every day across more than a dozen asset classes to look for opportunities to rebalance or harvest tax losses. Now, would you do the same? Are you doing the same? Probably not. And the power is in the software. Wealthfront now manages more than $4 billion in assets, which is up from around $2.5

Starting point is 01:47:53 billion when they started advertising on this podcast. They're growing incredibly quickly. Unlike old-fashioned private wealth managers, Wealthfront is powered by innovative technology, making it the most tax-, low cost, hassle free way to invest. They don't have bloated sales teams or retail locations, so they can deliver all of this sophisticated financial advice and these services at a fraction of the cost of a traditional financial advisor. So at the very least, go to wealthfront.com forward slash Tim and take their free risk assessment survey. It only takes a couple of minutes and Wealthfront will recommend a personalized portfolio of investments. In other words,

Starting point is 01:48:28 they'll tell you exactly where they would put your money. So even if you don't use their service, you have a huge leg up and you have additional information for making good decisions. They use investment theory to automate good financial behavior and decisions that people typically don't make, but should. So go to wealthfront.com forward slash Tim to get your first 15K managed for free, or just to get more details. Check it out, wealthfront.com forward slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Veridesk. And I'm actually standing at my own Veridesk right now recording this. You've probably heard of research that shows how sitting all day is terrible for your health. Sitting is the new smoking, etc. But standing all day isn't necessarily the answer for everyone. Sometimes you

Starting point is 01:49:11 just want to sit down. And that's true for me as well. The middle ground is Veridesk. Veridesk's height adjustable standing desk solutions allow you to stand when you want to and sit when you need to. And as an example, I had this set to the lower position. This is a large model and it took me clickety-clack two seconds to raise this thing up. And it feels like it has hydraulics effectively because I didn't have to use any muscle to do it. Veridesk converts your existing desk, for instance, if you want to get a tabletop version, which you can put on, which is very, very cool, or cubicle into a sit-stand workstation and allows you to raise your desk from a seated to standing position in just seconds.

Starting point is 01:49:47 Chip's fully assembled, so there's no Allen wrenches, screwdrivers required. Pull it out of the box, put it on your desk in the case of this particular model. No installation or fastening required. There are a bunch of different options. Models start at just $175, so check out Veridesk.com to see what model might be the right fit for you. And my assistant now has one. I have one.

Starting point is 01:50:08 We've really, really been very happy with it. So if you're not sure if it's right for you, that's fine. They have a 30-day risk-free guarantee, which lets you try it in your own home or office. And if you decide it's still not for you, you want to get rid of it, they arrange to pick it up. No hassle. So check it out. Veridesk.com.

Starting point is 01:50:22 That's V-A-R-I-Desk.com.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #221: Mr. Money Mustache — Living Beautifully on $25-27K Per Year

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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #221: Mr. Money Mustache — Living Beautifully on $25-27K Per Year

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.