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

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 00:00:45 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

Starting point is 00:01:38 about 23 million different people and 300 million page views since its inception, since its founding. It has become a worldwide cult phenomenon with a self-organizing community and incredible news coverage. This episode explores his story, philosophies, and routines. So please enjoy my conversation with the one and only Mr. Money Mustache, Pete Adeny. This episode is brought to you by 99designs, the global creative platform that makes it easy for Pete Adeny. of my work because the small things often end up being the big things. So whether it's your logo, your business cards, website design, even your email templates, all of these visual elements tell your customers, tell your users who you are and what you're about. So I think it's worth sweating the details. I've been using 99designs for years now to ensure that many of my creative projects, whether big or small, are as cohesive, professional, and beautiful as possible. I've

Starting point is 00:02:44 worked on draft mock-ups of as possible. I've worked on draft mock-ups of book covers. I've worked on all sorts of things. Most recently, I've been working with a designer at 99designs to update the illustrations and layouts for all of my downloadable eBooks. I've developed a really great working relationship with the designer who goes by the username Spoonlancer, and I intend to continue working with him to bring ideas to life one project at a time. I've also used 99designs for all sorts of high-end illustration for different books like the Tao of Seneca. You can see a bunch of examples on my Instagram that I've put up, and they've turned out better than I possibly could have hoped. So from logos to websites to

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Starting point is 00:04:08 This podcast is brought to you by The Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach. What on earth is that? Well, let me back up. The first person I personally call for help with my athletic recovery or mobility training is Dr. Kelly Starrett at The Ready State. I've known Kelly for more than a decade. He's a good friend, but he's also a mobility and movement coach for Olympic gold medalists, world champions, and pro athletes. You might recognize the name because Kelly was in The 4-Hour Body. He was in Tools of Titans. He also nursed and coached me through the Destroy My Body for Entertainment TV show that was the Tim Ferriss experiment. Now, Kelly has created a program called Virtual Mobility Coach. It's like carrying a virtual

Starting point is 00:04:49 Kelly Starrett in your pocket because most people are not going to have direct access to Kelly, but now you do. Every day, Virtual Mobility Coach gives you guided mobility videos. It walks you step-by-step through Kelly's proven techniques to relieve pain, improve range of motion, improve performance, on and on and on and on. If you're in pain, improve range of motion, improve performance, on and on and on and on. If you're in pain, you can pull up a picture of the human body, click on what hurts, and from there, get a customized regimen to help find relief. If you are working out or playing a sport, Virtual Mobility Coach offers all sorts of pre- and post- exercise mobility sequences for more than 50 sports and activities, actually.

Starting point is 00:05:25 And right now, listeners of this podcast get a special deal. You can try Virtual Mobility Coach. You can get the Kelly Starrett in your pocket, totally risk-free for two weeks without paying a penny. Try it completely free for two weeks. And if you decide to continue, you can get 10% off for life using promo code TIM10. That's T-I-M-1-0. Simply visit thereadystate.com slash TIM to check everything out and use code TIM10 at checkout. Again, that's thereadystate.com slash TIM and use code TIM10 when you sign up to get 10% off for the life of your membership after your 14-day free trial ends. TheReadyState.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement

Starting point is 00:06:14 that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one,

Starting point is 00:07:00 drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Pete, welcome to the show.

Starting point is 00:07:32 Thanks, Tim. It's an honor to be on here. And you are, I would say, in the top five most requested guests for this podcast that I see on the internet and beyond. I had somebody come up to me recently in New York City of all places. He said, you know 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?

Starting point is 00:08:17 Well, it's kind of varied, but I feel strongly about groceries. So in an ideal utopian grocery day, I would throw my bike trailer onto the back of my single speed bike and roll down to the local kind of hippie natural grocery store and then just load up with like 150 bucks of awesome stuff and then pedal it back up the hill and then unload it and then have people show up and a giant barbecue that night and feast. 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 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.

Starting point is 00:09:12 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 happiest to live. And at this point in time, you have a household of three. Is that right? and that's just the way I've figured out makes me happiest to live. And at this point in time, you have a household of three, is that right? Yeah, that's true. One boy.

Starting point is 00:09:31 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. 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 is a lot of my

Starting point is 00:10:13 conversations are, it's just a quirk of my brain that I'm trying to, a bug I'm trying to turn into what was the blog post or the day that you realized Mr. Money mustache had a cult like following was there. And I use that. I use that in a complimentary way, by the way, you have some of the most diehard fans I've ever encountered. Was there a particular piece or moment when you realized how strongly and how devoted your fan base was? I think it's kind of been like one of those frog

Starting point is 00:10:53 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 happen any specific time i would say the first time i was really surprised by the effects of blogging was when i had a guest post on this awesome previous uh blog called early retirement extreme and a whole bunch of this uh jacob bloggers fans came over to mine my blog and just flooded it and just crawled and read every single article and started putting in all these comments. And then I, it was really a rewarding thing. And I just kept going from there. It's sort of a self-motivating

Starting point is 00:11:34 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 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.

Starting point is 00:12:22 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, it's, what is it exactly? It's like a chocolate covered pastry.

Starting point is 00:12:38 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. 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

Starting point is 00:13:12 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.

Starting point is 00:13:36 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 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

Starting point is 00:14:26 lifestyle and a fake religion. And the beliefs are that the, you know, sort of the United States, especially is the ground zero of this consumer 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 their health and their sanity and their mental health. Everyone's very inefficiently going about their life. So the correction through mustachianism

Starting point is 00:15:05 is just being a bit more thoughtful about this stuff and seeking efficiency in the way that you spend your money and make sure that you get fun out of it each time that you spend something. And applying this, you just end up a lot healthier and wealthier 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. So now we're back to the year 2005. And after working about a 10-year career in software engineering, my girlfriend, who is now my wife, and I determined we had enough money saved up to live off the investment returns forever.

Starting point is 00:15:55 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

Starting point is 00:16:39 for potential prompts for topics that could be fun to explore. And one of them was you only need to accumulate 25 times your annual spending to retire forever. Could you elaborate on that and how 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

Starting point is 00:17:23 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 to $30,000 to live on, multiply that by 25 and oh darn, I'm giving myself a tricky math question. I think, you know, it'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. And are there any assumptions embedded in that in terms of percentage, annual yield, and so on?

Starting point is 00:18:11 What are the, 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. 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 are 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

Starting point is 00:18:56 that went on for a long time. But most people don't like taking a huge amount of risk. So the 4% or 3.5% if you want to be extra conservative with today's stock market valuations, that's more of a safety net. And it's really just a mental crutch because what I find is that when people retire early, almost everybody, like over 95% of people still have a lot of interests and passions. And then they're pretty good at making money if they 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 pumping out dividends and returns just adds

Starting point is 00:19:35 extra confidence so they can have more fun in the process. Well, I've read two different definitions of retirement or maybe their characteristics that are, I think one was attributed to one was written by you, both of which I thought were very helpful as a orientation for thinking about the subject. And the first is retirement or financial independence simply means that you have your living expenses covered by non-work income, right? 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 media, not to cast dispersions

Starting point is 00:20:29 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 did they get it wrong? Where do people get you, your message, your principles, philosophies wrong? Well, the misconceptions are sort of two different things.

Starting point is 00:21:07 From the media side, they often assume, well, I mean, the ones that aren't complimentary, they assume, hey, there's this crazy guy and he's just a lifestyle guru, just like another junior Tim Ferriss trying to get everybody excited about his crazy ideas and he's not really retired or or they say yeah he he made so much money but that doesn't apply to the regular person when they're you know when they're trying to make it on like fifty thousand dollar a year salary or what about people with more kids so um the media don't understand they they often assume some kind of extreme frugality that would be undesirable to live under.

Starting point is 00:21:47 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 amount that I can possibly spend and get value out of it 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 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

Starting point is 00:22:22 that I say I did in the first place so then it's more of a conspiracy theory if you're reading like the comment section of msn which you should never do uh you have but you do have uh and i think this is why this is part of the reason i wanted to bring it up very early a by most standards in the united states a low household annual expense right right and uh it might be helpful here to talk about because i i asked during our sound check what you had for breakfast so could you repeat your answer please oh yeah well my my breakfast was a fancy black espresso with foamed milk uh and and coconut oil foamed into there too. And then some dark chocolate, like 90% dark chocolate and some nuts, almonds and cashews and stuff.

Starting point is 00:23:16 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 large quantity from Costco, which is obviously a lot cheaper than getting a Starbucks equivalent every morning. And yeah, the nuts are from Costco as well, now that you mentioned it. So the reason I bring it up is that,

Starting point is 00:23:49 and 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. 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 in an industry 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

Starting point is 00:24:54 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 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, like I was kind of born part engineer at least. And for me, optimization is really, really fun. It's like beautiful. And when something is not optimized and when something's inefficient, I actually find it offensive and ugly. So I had a lot of joy. I get a lot of joy from looking at each of my life spending decisions and 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 ride my bike, it does this other thing.

Starting point is 00:25:55 And you apply that to food and housing and transportation and clothing, travel, exercise. And then all these categories can become super efficient where you end up getting incredible happiness out of them. And the cost can sometimes be not only low, but sometimes you'll get paid for doing stuff that other people spend tens of thousands of dollars to do. So if you're a beginner at this sport of optimization, you can just start with the stuff that costs you a lot of money. So my favorite one to be a bit repetitive is the car because the average middle income American spends like $12,000 per household, which is just on driving around in these like gas powered racing wheelchairs. And that's more than they even invest

Starting point is 00:26:38 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 like a single millionaire, preferably multimillionaire, because you can get a great, perfectly great car that'll be trouble-free for 10 plus years for under $5,000. So the reasonable ceiling would be 10. And that's already going to be a pretty giant thing for people. And then number two is don't use that car a lot.

Starting point is 00:27:08 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 i will optimize away car dependence and uh yeah just start with that one and then you can move on

Starting point is 00:27:51 you can read stuff on my blog and figure out how to cut your grocery costs down and your housing and everything like that too but i really like the mobility because there's fitness involved too you know and there's there's happiness of forcing yourself out into the fresh air every morning as soon as you 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. I haven't had a car for close to three years. I want to say now, uh, that does not mean I don't spend time in cars. I do. Uh, so I, I tend to use, whether it's a get around for trips to Tahoe or things that are further away that require some travel or Uber, but I probably walk,

Starting point is 00:28:38 walk. I tend to walk more than I bike, uh, for whatever reason, but that's typically, I'd say, 70%, 80% of my locomotion is walking. 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 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. Like your brain just goes into overdrive. All of your problems sort of start to solve themselves in the background. And for people who don't do it regularly, like an hour a day of walking to

Starting point is 00:29:50 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 around that shoe. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. I ran that shoe. insurance. I recommended it, in fact, in the 4-Hour Body. This is more than 10 years ago, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food-sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense and comprehensive formula on the market. It has multivitamins, multimineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, adaptogens, and much more. I usually take it once or twice a day just to make sure I've covered my bases if I miss anything I'm not aware of. Of course, I focus on nutrient-dense meals to begin with. That's the basis. But Athletic

Starting point is 00:30:57 Greens makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. From travel packets, I always have them in my bag when I'm zipping around. And right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience, that's you guys, a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So particularly in the winter months, adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. So, make an investment in your health today and try the ultimate all-in-one wellness bundle. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash tim.

Starting point is 00:31:37 You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D for free with your first subscription purchase. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Tim. 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. So, but in recent months, three books that have had a pretty big impact on me that I'm about to recommend to people, it really depends on who you're talking to. So, if you're into changing the world for the better, one book that's spectacularly opened up my

Starting point is 00:32:23 mind is this one called Happy City by an author called Charles Montgomery. And it kind of just pulls back the curtain on how we're wasting most of our resources and our human and money resources on building up the country into a spectacularly inefficient asphalt jungle. So that's for urban planning nerds and fixing the world nerds. 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 it he has this feeling where the world is incredibly illogical and no one's listening and he just wants to just fucking change it like

Starting point is 00:33:16 I'm just gonna do everything myself then and I can really everything except for the fact that he actually does it and I don't I can relate completely to the feeling of that book. And finally, a really, really old-fashioned book, if someone just wants to wake themselves up and start turning into more of like a positive, less depressed person, is this 1950s classic called The Magic of Thinking Big. I've recommended that to like so many friends because I stumbled across it when I was like 15 years old and it was really, really old even then. And it's like this 1950s cheesy, stereotypical like man's world has some flaws in that way,

Starting point is 00:33:58 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 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

Starting point is 00:34:31 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,reek and less is more which is an anthology of writing on minimalism and uh the magic of thinking big by david schwartz this book despite the title which like you said i mean it's it's it screams cheesy at you and it was that's why it's good though it is cheesy it's like gorgeously delightfully cheesy and you're like yes i am a powerful 1950s man as well. I'm going to conduct some business. No, exactly.

Starting point is 00:35:12 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, 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 2004, which was just before I took my walkabout

Starting point is 00:36:10 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 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

Starting point is 00:36:47 was just as good i just love the create the you know the overly simple examples like imagine that there's two little gentlemen in your head there's mr success and mr defeat mr defeat always wants to throw some oil and sand into his your crankcase of your mind And it's just like these, you know, I find that most, maybe this is my engineer's brain handicap again, but I really get annoyed by overly flowery language, like kind of Harper's Magazine, Atlantic stuff where people just go on for like eight pages to cover something that could have fit in a couple sentences. And Dr dr schwartz doesn't do any of that shit and uh in fact his writing style really inspired me and like when i write as mr morning mustache i'm thinking i'm like channeling david j schwartz and he always starts off every story with this little anecdote

Starting point is 00:37:36 like this makes him sound like casual and powerful he's like i was relaxing in my lounge one day when a few of my employees came in for questions. You got to read it again. I'm going to 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, uh, fallen prey to over-calendaring myself, uh, and for fun things in, in many cases, but nonetheless over-calendaring. So I don't have as much, uh, slack in the system, uh, empty space as I would like. And, uh, I've been meaning to, as part of my self-imposed curriculum, reread The Magic Thinking Big. So I will jump into that. How are you different from

Starting point is 00:38:33 Mr. Money Mustache, if at all? Well, the lines are pretty fine. Pretty, you know, 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, wah, wah, wah, the world is being mean to me. But in general, like because I read Magic of Thinking Big so long ago and internalized it so much and I kind of ran my work career and my you know my international adventures of moving to the U.S. and everything under those assumptions I feel like you know I'm pretty I'm fairly Mr. Money Mustache I'm more sensitive here's the thing like I don't lecture people in real life

Starting point is 00:39:24 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 this stupid off-road diesel thing. But I think it, and I write it. So yeah, the Mr. Money Mustache is a little more violent 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 to come to you. And when you're running a blog, they have come to you by definition, which means they're a lot more open to having their faces punched in a literary sense.

Starting point is 00:40:11 Right. To get pros mugged while you're shaping their behavior. 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

Starting point is 00:41:05 you're doing it and you can have a giant company before anyone's even noticed and it's just the entrepreneurial and the optimism and the lack of rules is kind of it goes along with my personality personality because I hate rules I'm really in favor of people self-regulating in the sense that don't be a jerk to your neighbor and don't pollute the world and everything like that, which is the part that annoys me about some of the 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 00:42:01 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 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. Thanks to you, I think on Twitter. I did. I might've driven some traffic there, which I was happy to do and also hesitant to do because I know that there are, I'm for sure there are things that are at the best incomplete and

Starting point is 00:43:20 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, 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, although I'm not sure I want to reopen the wound. I was misquoted. Even after correcting fact checkers,

Starting point is 00:43:54 I was misquoted. And a number of people were misquoted probably half a dozen times in the piece that I had in the New Yorker, which really rankled me because of course it sits at the top of Google with PageRank, but water under the bridge for now. I'll put that aside. The piece I wanted to read though, I don't think is 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 $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

Starting point is 00:44:43 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, but these are the types of things that I think about constantly. how many of these rote decisions, common decisions, are burning up the non-renewable resource of time in the interest of some perceived marginal utility in terms of dollars and cents. But I'd love to hear any thoughts or elaborations that you have on this,

Starting point is 00:45:45 because I love this example. Yeah. Well, it's, it is the math, sometimes explicit like that, and sometimes more implicit, um, that drives most of my decisions. And that's why I 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? 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 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 00:46:29 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 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 00:47:16 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.

Starting point is 00:48:11 Yeah, I had Will McCaskill on the podcast, the co-founder or maybe founder of that movement. Yeah, and I think one of those two founders sent me an email after I sent my donation to them. And they seem really, really, really sharp people. So that's 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,

Starting point is 00:48:53 um, I would, I would like to create kind of like one of those tipping point effects in the U S that might, for example, tip us 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 a town within a town based on the ideas of co-housing

Starting point is 00:49:40 or something like that. So these guys ideas are still swimming around in my head. I haven't solved the problem of how to deal with a 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 how 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.

Starting point is 00:50:18 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 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 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. I don't drive really. So obvious stuff gets shut off.

Starting point is 00:50:59 But then when you get into things that you're're pretty sure you want then you just think about it for longer procrastinate a little bit see if the desire goes away a bit and then consider how much space that thing is going to take up in my my limited uh space of my studio for example and then imagine how i would feel if it broke because a lot of stuff does break even if you have high quality gear and it's really annoying to deal with things that break and if you have to warranty fix it and finally I ask myself is this removing a negative in my life because it's pretty well studied that happiness is not very much affected by adding positives to your life it's mostly especially in a rich world environment

Starting point is 00:51:45 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 like, damn it, I just wish I didn't always trip over this, you know, broken dishwasher or whatever, then replacing your dishwasher is probably going to be a happiness boosting proposition. 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,

Starting point is 00:52:45 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 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 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.

Starting point is 00:53:31 So I built the studio and I did it all myself because I know from experience that this manual labor and solving physical problems is one of the happiest things I can possibly do. Just like, you know, hundreds of hours of lifting and sweating and digging and, you know, all these amazing, useful outdoor things with friends. And now I'm 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 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.

Starting point is 00:54:50 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, 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. 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,

Starting point is 00:55:53 even though I can make infinite money typing shit into the computer and publishing it 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 physical and mental and problem solving. It's like what a human was made to do. So Kevin is right.

Starting point is 00:56:18 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 system that I designed pumping water under my floors and heating up my feet I'm like this is the most satisfying thing I could possibly experience so yeah you should figure out a way to build something at least like a shed quarters or like a man cave type thing in your backyard and I have this thing called carpenturism where I go out to people in need and build fun stuff with them and teach them how to build. So if you ever want to do a teamwork, Tim Ferriss Studio, then I'm making this offer now. It would make quite an interesting story.

Starting point is 00:57:16 I could be like an operating room assistant of sorts. You'd be like, hammer, hammer, screwdriver, screwdriver. I think I'd be more of a liability otherwise. Well, that's how you learn though. I'll give you the nail gun and then you'll make some mistakes and we'll bring a welder and then you'll explode some stuff. But later you'll be making fine welding lines. 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...

Starting point is 00:57:51 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, 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

Starting point is 00:58:42 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. 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. So, but I'm not a pure person.

Starting point is 00:59:33 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. It's one of the things to throw into your equation of like child raising, like, should I have one or maybe 13? And we're like, well, if consumption of natural resources is a factor,

Starting point is 01:00:01 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 into and what kind of stuff you buy them and how you train them as well. If you train them like, hey, we're rich and rich people get to buy whatever they want, then you're going to raise a super consumer and more the richer you are. Whereas if you teach

Starting point is 01:00:35 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. If 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 01:01:20 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 I just give him little payouts. And then we've got a spreadsheet where we keep track of his money. He's 11 years old, by the way, and that earns interest. So he has a comparison of 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.

Starting point is 01:01:55 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 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

Starting point is 01:02:41 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 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

Starting point is 01:03:19 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? 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.

Starting point is 01:04:13 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, like enjoyable old man's tales explanation of how why you should invest in index funds. And so that's another idea, but much more important than how to invest. as long as you don't screw up your investing, like leave your money in a checking account or buy a shifty life insurance, whole life program or whatever, 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. It'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

Starting point is 01:05:19 happy, buying yourself treats. And it's quite easy to become financially independent as soon as you modify your spending in that way. So a huge surplus of money 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.

Starting point is 01:05:55 I've heard of it. 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

Starting point is 01:06:31 if a company actually is a good deal to buy. And that helps put a regular, you know, like a sober shell around investing instead of the ridiculous speculation, like technical chart investing, I think is kind of universally proved to be bunk, but people are still doing it like, oh yeah, the Bollinger Bands are wild this week. I'm 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 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 he acquired the entire company. And that type of emotional detachment is also exceptionally, exceptionally rare.

Starting point is 01:07:52 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 capacity, I do very poorly emotionally with those fluctuations and I make bad decisions. But if we're talking about something like an index, then I'm fine. If it's 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 01:09:03 Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It was really interesting. And it was a little book, which is perfect for my short book attention span. 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

Starting point is 01:09:27 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, 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,

Starting point is 01:10:14 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 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

Starting point is 01:10:58 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, 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

Starting point is 01:11:41 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. 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, 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, uh, I was someone's guest, which was great because I, 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. And I said,

Starting point is 01:13:12 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, 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

Starting point is 01:13:59 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 on to 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. And life, you're not really optimizing. You're not supposed to optimize for money. You're supposed to optimize for happiness, which has a lot of dimensions. So you should really 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

Starting point is 01:14:49 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 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.

Starting point is 01:15:36 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 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

Starting point is 01:16:15 yet somehow their businesses keep doing better because of this hands-off approach. So they're making even more money, but yet they have a fairly mustachian lifestyle. And this is probably because I met these guys through the blog. And then they both have kids and they have really, really good relationships with their children, their semi-adult children and their wife, and basically just really good shape, physical shape. They do a lot of adventures. They always say yes, if I invite them to do something, they're like, oh yeah, that's sure. We'll 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 kind of a carefree way.

Starting point is 01:16:54 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. On the flip side, we talked about what some of the critics get wrong, what perhaps media sometimes misinterpret. 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? That's pretty rare. I write a lot of stuff, right? So anybody who reads a lot,

Starting point is 01:17:40 they'll see all the little nuances and bits and what I try to express as a philosophy. But for those of them, those readers who don't have all the details, a lot of people assume that I'm very, you know, like I would be mad at them if I ever found out that they bought something luxurious, like, oh, don't tell Mr. Money Mustache I bought this $2,000 mountain bike because I really love bikes, but, you know, everything else good and like I don't I don't judge people to nearly the standards that they think I judge them to so and uh 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 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

Starting point is 01:18:31 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:19:17 But yeah, for a month or more, we'll often go. And so we spend some money on these vacations and we'll rent a nice house on a beach like in Florida or Hawaii or Costa Rica or whatever so vacations most of the money goes to rent basically like VRBO type stuff Airbnb sure 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 01:20:08 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. 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,

Starting point is 01:20:45 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. Do you have any favorite documentaries or movies? My favorite, uh, I'm actually got a huge, huge list of documentaries that I've been meaning to watch. Many of them collected from the, from the guests on your, um, tools of Titans book. But the one that I did watch and enjoy is actually a series rather than documentary, but the, um, the cosmos, the remake of Cosmos. Oh sure, with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yeah, I love Neil deGrasse Tyson and I love his awkward but scientific way and the

Starting point is 01:21:33 topics he covered in those episodes were so stunning and it was a great education for my son who is very, very into science himself. So that's the documentary that stands out in my mind. 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 him on the podcast.

Starting point is 01:22:09 If you were to give a TED Talk on something that you are not known for, what would you give it on? 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 uh yeah yeah if you had to get 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 um the other topic that i'm super passionate about is is energy and um like 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

Starting point is 01:22:59 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. 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 I've been curious about, and I know you've written about this before, but 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

Starting point is 01:23:46 outside at an outdoor squat rack. Am I making that up? Yeah, that was my most recent blog post. Okay. 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 the barbell stuff is just squats, deadlifts, clean and press a little bit of benching and stuff with kettlebells and dumbbells.

Starting point is 01:24:30 And generally using weights that I can just barely lift five times. And the total expenditure per week is only in the order of like an hour or two. So I'm not like a, a gym rat. Um, so that right now, I'm pretty happy with the way my body's working, especially for a 41 year old or whatever I am. But the strong, I was slightly stronger when I was in my twenties and it was basically the same stuff, but just going to the gym for a longer period and training, it was really just more hours put in. And that's that's when I probably had my record

Starting point is 01:25:06 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 times a day. 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 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.

Starting point is 01:26:09 So anyway, use it or lose it is the philosophy. Like brain, body, skills, friendships, relationships. Just do everything that you want to be good at as often as you can. And don't fool yourself that you're going to keep being able to do this stuff unless you continue doing it regularly. 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

Starting point is 01:26:55 as a negative obligation. They're like, yeah, we know it feels a lot better to buy yourself treats, but come on. If you can just squeeze out 5% or even 10%, then you're doing okay. they're like yeah we know it feels a lot better to buy yourself treats but but come on like if you can just squeeze out five percent or even ten percent then you're you're doing okay just do that every week and make a budget and all this stuff and uh so you're you're training people to think that saving is bad and you want to minimize it whereas i think it's a win-win and most of our spending is 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

Starting point is 01:27:28 the problem in a smarter way. Like, as we talked about earlier, it's possible to walk or bike to work, which is a physical and mental win. And it just happens to cost a lot less. So I encourage people to radically reshape their entire lifestyle to be optimized in all these dimensions. And sure, you happen to save 50 to 75% of your income as a byproduct. But the only reason that's a win is because your life is better as well.

Starting point is 01:27:58 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 better. I think that's where it falls flat. Yeah, for sure. And's uh it's important i think certainly in 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.

Starting point is 01:28:56 Are there any failures that come to mind, which are favorite failures of yours in the sense that they ended up sowing the seeds of a later success? Does anything like that come to mind for you? 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. We started making these houses.

Starting point is 01:29:33 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 like we sold our first house into the 2006 boom market for housing but then by the time the second one was done it was 2007

Starting point is 01:30:13 and everything was slowing down and then starting to drop like a rock and then i was stuck with this beautiful ready to sell house and nobody wanted to buy it for any kind of reasonable sum. So that was kind of soiled the fun, spoiled the fun of my first three years of retirement 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 you know the skills that I'm most skilled my most proud of is like I've always messed around with woodworking since I was a little kid but by being forced into production on these expensive modernist houses where everything has to be perfect it really trained me a lot and I enjoy those skills now. So the combination of shittiness and skills,

Starting point is 01:31:06 and then we shut this company down. And since then I've been truly retired and had so much more fun looking back and like, wow, I'm sure glad I'm not doing that anymore. So I lost a bunch of money. Some of my retirement savings went up in smoke initially. And then I started to be a bit more worried about money. That was a big part of it because I was like, oh, all my hard-earned savings. And if I could go back and change that, I would probably still do it, but I would train myself to be just so much more relaxed about it and be like, dude, don't worry. You're going to have so much fun after this and you're not going to run out of money. So just have a good time with your business, even if it fails.

Starting point is 01:31:49 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 quick because I bought these two vacant lots in kind of a 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

Starting point is 01:32:29 got the first one done and then like, woo, that was great. You know, big success. It sold for more than we were even asking for it. And then the second one got more and more stressful. And I already knew before I even started that second one that I wanted to shut down the business afterwards. It just got drawn out longer. And then we got into like renting it out, but then the tenants turned out to be horrible. And I had these like scam artists move in that we didn't realize were scam artists. And they were like, Oh yeah, we got, we just sent you the rent. Yeah. It's in your mailbox. Check your mailbox, click. And they hang up and all these like little tricks. And the guy had this fancy 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

Starting point is 01:33:13 saw it outside. So all he could do is 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 full-on eviction with sheriff coming to the door to get them out of my place. 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 01:33:41 shut down completely? What did that day feel like? I'd say it was shut down. One of the biggest problems with this is that the relationship between me and my friend who started it and business partner, it just soured and it became pretty bad by the end. And we had totally different views about work and money and dividing stuff up. So we finally got him out of there by, I basically had to buy out the company. I had to put like, I'd lost all this money and I had to put like a final $460,000 into the company to pay off this mortgage that was on the house just to kick him off the deed, the property deed, so that I could have control of it. So that day was kind of like, you know, we're like frowning at each other over the lawyer's table or whatever.

Starting point is 01:34:27 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.

Starting point is 01:34:57 And then now I've been super relaxed. And then that's kind of like another wave. And it really taught me a lot about happiness because this negativity in my life, or at least I was choosing to perceive it 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.

Starting point is 01:35:24 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. 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

Starting point is 01:36:26 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? 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, want we want to consume here um yeah 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 yeah and well what

Starting point is 01:37:01 would you do well the thing is this might actually be somewhat realistic because I still consider every day, you know, is there something I could spend money on that would be worth it? It's still an open question. You don't want to be ideological about this stuff. But so one thing I've been interested in maybe buying, and if I was forced to, I would do it quickly, is a building. I kind of want to own a commercial building on our town's little historic main street. This town I live in, Longmont, Colorado, is kind of one of these over 100-year-old things where it's all historic with big trees and the narrow main street with the tall brick buildings on it. So I could buy one of those and then set up some kind of fun community space in there

Starting point is 01:37:47 where we we play music and we have parties and we rent it out and do some teaching too because i like to uh do a bit of volunteer math and science teaching to uh to kids kind of advanced stuff that they don't get in the normal school. So I could have 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.

Starting point is 01:38:30 I'm picturing this in a US metropolis because that's kind of where I'm focusing my efforts right now. So I think I would say, I think it would say walk, or maybe it would say just walk. Something that people can really understand quickly. I like just walk. And without getting, yeah, back to our original thoughts, like it's the thoughts. 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 with a level head, unlike, say, a pig that doesn't have a nuchal ligament. So their heads bobble over the place.

Starting point is 01:39:05 Like 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,

Starting point is 01:39:26 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 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

Starting point is 01:40:13 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 to myself. And one of the differences is that I chose to have a? And I have a lot of these same questions to myself. And one of the

Starting point is 01:40:45 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.

Starting point is 01:41:34 And so I'm craving to get back to work on something hard. How will you, how do you think you'll explore that in the coming year, testing that balance or trying different things to try to find it? Or maybe it's 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.

Starting point is 01:42:10 And it's always changing. Like I've been at this for a long time. It's been 11 years since I had a real job. And I've done a lot of hard stuff and then a medium amount of laziness in this time. So I keep trying stuff to see if I enjoy it. So like last August, for example, I wanted to see if I enjoyed the TED Talk kind of public speaking. And I did a whole bunch of traveling around that as well. And I found it was a bit too much. 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

Starting point is 01:42:54 design and just hanging out and having unplanned, spontaneous people coming over for a party or barbecue or whatever. So I need this village life. If you imagine a primitive man living in a village where he spends half the time hunting, some of the time like building stuff and some of the time reveling around the fire, that's kind of my core of happiness. And when I get too much into lifestyle guru activities, like 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

Starting point is 01:43:41 actually kind of the least happy thing that I do. It's the least satisfaction bringing. So I have to balance that with these much more villagey type of activities. But if I totally neglect the internet world, then I'll feel like I'm letting the world down because you can actually create good positive change that way that you could never do just in your own village. 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 uh the high fat low carb eating on a whim after reading some books and uh i'm really really

Starting point is 01:44:34 happy with that whereas before when i was a teenager i was the ultimate low fat because i read all these bodybuilding magazines back then and oh yeah 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 um the biggest change i've had though is more in my understanding of happiness uh i thought that happiness came from from maximum achievement and maximum wealth and 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.

Starting point is 01:45:21 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 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

Starting point is 01:46:13 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 that 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 um so yeah find some things that are hard even if it's just skipping the elevator and and taking the stairs like up to the 15th floor or whatever um just if the people are not doing it, then that's probably a sign that it's something that you should do. And just record your results, see how much better it makes you feel, and then just keep pushing yourself a bit further. And I would echo that and spin it slightly differently. These are complementary viewpoints,

Starting point is 01:47:03 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, Seneca the Younger to Lucilius, the moral letters to Lucilius on festivals and fasting. And it talks about setting aside

Starting point is 01:47:53 a few days per month, let's say, to experience voluntary hardship in different ways. And it is such a fascinating psychological trick in many respects with all sorts of beneficial side effects like cutting down on expenses that I think allows you to realize it is possible to recalibrate yourself to experience greater happiness and well-being without simply adding more, 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 they find you on social? Where can they say hi? Where can they read your stuff? And where an introductory article and then the design of the website to the limited extent that it has a design is just to poke around

Starting point is 01:49:10 and follow links to other links and or you can start at the beginning and read all the 400 plus articles dating back to 2012 or 2011 and yeah that's how most people do it and then you can read it if you get really into the rabbit hole, then there's a forum where all these users discuss their intimate problems with each other, and it's got tens of thousands of members that spend all day on there. 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,

Starting point is 01:49:55 books and otherwise at the show notes, which is for this episode and every other episode, 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. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email

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Starting point is 01:50:59 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 podcast is brought to you by the Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach. What on earth is that? Well, let me back up. The first person I personally call for help with my athletic recovery or mobility training is Dr. Kelly Starrett at The Ready State. I've known Kelly for more than a decade. He's a good friend, but he's also a mobility and movement coach for Olympic gold medalists, world champions, and pro athletes. You might recognize the name because Kelly was in The 4-Hour Body. He was in Tools of Titans, he also nursed and coached me through the

Starting point is 01:51:46 Destroy My Body for Entertainment TV show that was the Tim Ferriss experiment. Now Kelly has created a program called Virtual Mobility Coach. It's like carrying a virtual Kelly Starrett in your pocket because most people are not going to have direct access to Kelly, but now you do. Every day, Virtual Mobility Coach gives you guided mobility videos and walks you step-by-step through Kelly's proven techniques to relieve pain, improve range of motion, improve performance, on and on and on and on. If you're in pain, you can pull up a picture of the human body, click on what hurts, and from there, get a customized regimen to help find relief. If you are working out or playing a sport, Virtual Mobility Coach offers

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

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

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