One example: His 4 Hour Work Week book really was on the New York Times Best Seller list for a long time like he brags about in this post, but he has also bragged in other contexts about all of the manipulation and engineering (including mass purchasing books to artificially inflate sales numbers) that goes into gaming the New York Times Best Seller List.
On the topic of being famous, he’s not typically famous like a celebrity. He built his career around being a self-help guru who will bring you the secrets to success in business, life, relationships, and even cooking. He’s talked about how he selects his writing topics based on how to present solutions for people’s inner desires, like financial freedom or impressing people for dating success. He puts himself at the center of these writings, presenting himself as the conduit for these revelations. He was even early in social media and blogging and experimented with social media engagements and paid events where you get to come hang out with Tim Ferriss and learn his secrets, encouraging his fans to idolize him and his wisdom dispensing abilities.
So his relationship with his fans isn’t typical fame in the style of a celebrity or actor. He’s more of an early self-help guru who embraced social media and blogging early on. His experience with uncomfortable fan obsessions is therefore probably on the next level, but not exactly typical fame.
EDIT to add why I know this: Tim Ferriss literally wrote the book on how to abuse remote work. His Four Hour Work Week book encourages readers to talk their boss into working remote then to outsource their work to low paid overseas assistants so they have more time to travel the world. It encourages things like setting up an e-mail auto responder and only responding to your coworkers once a week whine you’re “working remote” and setting up your own side job while traveling the world. If you’ve ever had a remote work job get ruined by people abusing it, chances are good that those people had read a Tim Ferriss book somewhere along the way.
However, I don't think this is unique to Tim Ferriss. I think this is the dynamic behind fame itself. People who are really secure in their worth don't spend their time looking for casual external validation from strangers, and they also don't spend their emotional energy idolizing strangers and distant figures. They spend it on their family and close friends, and seek it in return from those same people.
It's been interesting watching myself drop out of the popular discourse as I got more secure in myself and more inclined to spend time, money, and energy close to home. Pop culture isn't made for us, because who got time for that shit? Crass consumerism isn't made for us, because we don't spend money on things we don't need in an effort to feel better about ourselves. Most of the transactions that make modern America go don't make us go, because, well, if you're happy with yourself then why do you need them?
But I'm glad I realized that before getting famous. Because there was a time, in my teens and twenties, when I wanted nothing more than to be adored by the masses. And like Tim Ferriss says, there isn't always a reset button where you can suddenly become un-famous if it becomes too much of a drag.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you...
Mainly, I can accept literally everything you say is true (and to be clear I don't know, but they all seem quite to be reasonable assertions), but more importantly, I think they're pretty irrelevant to the point of this blog post. Yes, Tim Ferris craved fame (he literally says that in his post), and I'm sure he tried to "hack" his way get it, but I still think his experiences and lessons about the pitfalls of fame are informative and interesting. I also don't agree with your statement "His experience with uncomfortable fan obsessions is therefore probably on the next level, but not exactly typical fame." His post goes in detail about a number of colleagues, especially women, who were stalked, one of whom had her house broken into by an intruder who tried to murder her husband before he was killed in a shootout with police. So yeah, I think his warnings about fame can apply to a broad swath of people who aren't self-help gurus.
If your comment was in response to a "4-hour work week"-y type post, and you just wanted to point out it was BS by highlighting specific problems with its advice, I'd agree. In response to this post, though, it just feels unnecessarily and deliberately schadenfreude-y.
That doesn’t mean all of the advice in the post doesn’t apply to other forms of fame, but I do think it’s helpful context for the writing.
I also think it’s helpful to attach context to certain authors who functions as gurus/influencers because their writings like this aren’t entirely selfless acts of standalone advice. Every piece of writing is meant as a hook to potentially get readers to also subscribe to their podcasts, their e-mail list, or buy their books. Delivering the big picture in parallel with the hook can help people make better informed decisions.
It’s pretty cynical but there is a strange truth to it, even this comment is an ad in a way.
For some additional context:
Mr. Ferris was a trust-fund kid (East Hampton, St. Paul's prep) and inherited multi-generational wealth (Ferris family real estate companies) before becoming a "writer".
His "career advice" was only ever applicable to those who could afford NOT to work.
LLMs aren’t great at separating out high quality and low quality sources for things like minor celebrities. They end up reciting narratives that people want to push for themselves.
There’s a semi-famous tech person who has been claiming to have “invented” a common concept for years. It’s a false claim on every level, but they’ve been repeating it so widely that when you ask any of the LLMs about it you usually get it to say they were the inventor. The person has, in turn, started citing ChatGPT as confirming their version of events. It’s wild to see it happening in real time.
That is, Ferris's family was undeniably well-off. From some quick research it looks like his dad was a pharmaceutical exec, his mom was a small gallery owner, he grew up in East Hampton and went to an expensive prep school. But I couldn't find any evidence that he received a large inheritance or had a literal trust fund. So yes, like a lot of people who become rich, it looks like he could afford to take risks, but his financial success flows from his own work and investments.
People have to stop believing Google's AI overview - it can be a useful pointer to other sources but it still makes shit up all the time. In this specific instance, the overview says "Father's Philosophy: His father, a high school graduate, emphasized simplicity in business, famously describing it as three shoeboxes: money in, money out, and profit." Except the link there goes to a page where Ferris was quoting someone else (Nick Kokonas) about Nick's father, not Ferris' own dad. It's flat out wrong and typical AI slop.
The fact is that if you want to live a good life, you have to grind it out in your early years. Not saying everyone has to grind the startup culture or 80 hour week but thinking that you can swing a 4 hour workweek at 25 is just idiotic and not realistic.
You can if you're making upwards of $40k a month by scamming people on the internet with "brain supplements".
> that if you want to live a good life, you have to grind it out in your early years
I think if you have to “grind it out” you should probably look for something else. Meaning if your job feels like a grind don’t waste your life on it.
Having money is good but it’s not the most important ingredient to a good life
I eventually gave up when I realize that my colleagues were paid 20% more only to procrastinate that additional time at the workplace.
Afaik we didn't even have what could be considered work until agriculture.
But then the examples he gives about going remote, manipulating your boss, outsourcing your work to assistants, and setting up a T-shirt drop shipping company to replace your income reveal the reality of his advice. Just imagine having one of those people as your team member and you realize how much it becomes about offloading work to the team and performing poorly, even though the headlines are feel-good advice about simplifying your life.
Even the title becomes part of the double-speak. He writes about how it's not meant to be taken literally because building your lifestyle requires hard work, but then he'll share anecdotes and stories from "readers" who are living their dream lifestyle while only spending a couple hours per week responding to e-mail.
EDIT to add: He wrote another book about fitness that does the same thing. It has basics about eating healthy and exercising that make a lot of sense, but then it also includes completely unrealistic scenarios about putting on impossible amounts of muscle in short periods of time using his techniques. It’s the kind of content that sounds like you’ve been given the secrets to beating the system by a guru who learned it all if you’re unfamiliar with the topic, but leaves anyone educated in the subject rolling their eyes at the impossible results being promised.
The last time he popped up on one of my feeds he was talking to someone about the benefits of sobriety and moderating alcohol consumption, so he might be pivoting toward the next wave of reducing drug and alcohol use, though I don’t know.
Literally every business is based on the idea of tacking on a margin onto someone else's work and profiting from it. Markets are based on imperfect information distribution at the end of the day.
It's likely the very company he'd be doing that too is already doing the exact same thing with their customer support (or "success" as they call it now), and their subcontractors themselves outsource various jobs. But I guess we've been conditioned to accept that as good because the boss is pocketing the difference, vs the lowly employee.
> only responding to your coworkers once a week
I struggle to think there is a company in the world where this kind of behavior would fly, but if there is then they must be satisfied with the work (or lack thereof I guess) and so in that case is it any worse than just slacking off at work and browsing HN for that matter?
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Now should you do this? No, but not because you should feel bad for anyone. You should not do it because it's really hard to find someone good enough (and cheap enough) to deliver the same kind of quality you do and worthy of trusting them with your reputation. But if you know a magical place where to find such unicorns, go right ahead!
Which is fine if everyone knows what’s happening. Nobody assumes that their grocery stores or Best Buy are operating as charities that take 0% margin.
What’s not okay is signing up to a company as an employee, being given access to their Slack and Git, and then handing those credentials and source code over to someone you hired on Fiverr so you can go vacation more. The numerous problems with this should be obvious.
> I struggle to think there is a company in the world where this kind of behavior would fly, but if there is then they must be satisfied with the work (or lack thereof I guess)
That’s the thing about most Tim Ferriss advice: Much of it is fanciful and unrealistic. The takeaway isn’t literally that you should be responding to email once a week, it’s that you need to be pushing the limits of how much you can get away with not responding to things and ignoring conversations with your coworkers. The email autoresponder is held up as a North Star ideal of what you’re trying to do: Hide from work and avoid contributing to the team you’re on.
As for companies being happy with it: They’re generally not! The story in the book is to gradually push the limits of what you can get away with. It suggests working extra hard when you know your boss is watching and doing things like sandbagging your productivity before you go remote. The book has this whole idea that your job is only temporary anyway until your side hustle takes over and replaces your income (dropshipping T-shirts is the example used in the book) so being a productive employee isn’t a priority.
Oh no, someone dared to lie to a business, the horror! Only the reverse is acceptable.
You should not do this because you haven't found a unicorn that is both cheap and worthy of entrusting with your reputation. If you find such a magical unicorn, you should absolutely do this and nobody will notice since the unicorn is upholding your standards.
How much of a "unicorn" this is depends on your own reputation, the work quality you're expected to do, and so on. If you're that stupid to hand over credentials to a bottom-of-the-barrel gig worker website, you would've lost those credentials in the next phishing campaign anyway, so the outcome for the company isn't any different - they made a stupid hire (whether said stupidity is done by the employee or the subcontractor is of little consolation).
> pushing the limits of how much you can get away with
Again that's literally what every company does - with raising prices, reducing quality (doing their own outsourcing - which this place considers ok because the boss is pocketing the margin) all the time. Every A/B test is a test of how much they can get away with.
But again we seem to have this double-standard where businesses are given leeway (and even applauded for) for a lot of noxious behavior while individuals are punished. Of course businesses have an outsized ability to control the narrative so no surprise there.
> They’re generally not!
A company is never happy though. In their ideal desires you would work 24/7 for zero pay, and even then they would not be happy that you are human and physically limited in how much output you can produce.
I've seen all the behaviors you mention in people that are working in the office - and worse, some are actually working, but so bad at it it would be better if they were actually slacking off; at least they'd enjoy themselves.
> your job is only temporary anyway
In tech it kind of is though? See layoffs and such.
Again I'm not defending the practice and I'm the first one to loathe the enshittification of everything. But if shit behavior appears to be profitable and the local maximum the market has settled on, I don't think it's fair for individuals to be held at different standards.
I never said businesses lying to employees is acceptable. You seem to be arguing something else that I haven’t written: General class war content where everything is viewed through the lens of business versus employees, and since businesses are bad then anything employees do is fair game.
The reason I know so much about Tim Ferriss’ remote work garbage isn’t because I was on the business side of your simplified view. I was a coworker of someone trying to practice these techniques.
The fatal flaw in your line of logic is that it can only view interactions as 1:1 between employee and the business. What you’re missing is that these workplace games punish the team members most of all. When you’re on a team of 3-4 people and 1 of them is gallivanting around the world, responding to messages once a day if you’re lucky, and submitting PRs produced by the cheapest overseas “assistant” they can find (modern version being ChatGPT, obviously) then you start to realize the problem: When the team has an assignment and one person is playing games instead of doing work, the rest of the team has to do more work.
It’s outsourcing your work to your teammates, basically.
The obvious rebuttal is that managers need to stop this, and they do. It takes time, though. At some companies it takes 6-12 months to build a case to fire someone. The Tim Ferriss book also has defensive advice about working extra hard to impress your boss and taking steps to avoid having your lack of work discovered by your boss. Notably absent is content about being respectful of your coworkers.
So before you jump in and defend everything any employee might do to be selfish, remember that it’s not just the company they’re extracting from. It’s their coworkers. And being on the receiving end of this behavior as a coworker sucks.
Not necessarily to employees, but in general - could be customers or other businesses too.
> everything is viewed through the lens of business versus employees
Not business vs employee but business vs individual. There's a lot of shit in the business world that is considered good when done by a company, but bad when doing by an individual.
Corporation-on-consumer fraud has been normalized. Outlandish claims in advertising are even enshrined in law so that you can't even sue for that (not that it would go anywhere either way).
It sometimes correlates with class but has nothing to do with class per-se (in fact it's very cheap to set up an LLC and engage in a lot of dubious practices that would land someone in jail if practiced under their personal capacity).
> I was a coworker of someone trying to practice these techniques.
I've been a coworker of some incompetent employees too - in fact it's even sadder that they didn't practice those techniques because at least then someone would benefit - in their case nobody was benefiting, not even them.
I'm not blaming them though; they match what is expected of a "senior" developer nowadays and passed all the interviews. It's the same reason my coffee is now both smaller and more expensive, but applied to employment. Companies are welcome pay more to get better talent.
The other employees who take on the slack without extra pay are engaging in philanthropy so the company has no reason to fire the slackers and hire more expensive talent if ultimately everything works out anyway.
The company could of course preemptively compensate them for the extra workload, but if you believe this actually happens I have a very nice bridge to sell you.
> At some companies it takes 6-12 months to build a case to fire someone
That sounds like a hiring or performance management problem. In the meantime, if someone can pocket 12 months of salary as a result of such incompetence, more power to them - it ain't my problem to solve unless I get a cut of the savings!
> being on the receiving end of this behavior as a coworker sucks
It gives the few that actually do work more leverage to negotiate higher salaries/fees/benefits. But of course you have to capitalize on it instead of engaging in charity/volunteering.
Edit: funny thing about ChatGPT and LLMs, companies are intentionally encouraging and tracking their usage, thinking more slop is somehow going to get them out of the hole they dug themselves in.
Exactly. All of your comments are built upon the mindset that employees cannot be held accountable for their own actions. Even when those actions impact a peer, blame must flow to management.
Which is why this conversation isn't going anywhere. You're off on tangents raging about businesses, but every time the topic comes too close to admitting that employees can do bad things too, you pull out mental gymnastics to blame the company or change the subject to something else you want to complain about.
I'm the first one to complain about enshittification and bad work. But if it's the new normal and very much rewarded in the current business world, I think employees should make the most of it and A/B test how much they can get away with just like the company does.
Practiced long enough this should push wages up for those who do actually work and benefit us all, or at the very least redistribute some of the wealth from the boss to those slacking off.
In reality, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. I would draw the line before outsourcing my own job, but I’ve definitely sandbagged my own productivity after being poorly treated by a company in the past and still have no regrets about it.
If you’re looking for common ground with who you’re speaking with rather than trying to make your point so firmly, I think you’d also agree there is a level of meeting in the middle that is totally reasonable in how hard you should push such things, depending on who you work for and how they treat you.
I just have a knee-jerk reaction to the double standard between companies and individuals. Enshittification appears to be the new normal, no reason they shouldn't get a bit of their own medicine.
> meeting in the middle that is totally reasonable
Yes of course - employee-owned companies and the occasional outliers that give employees a tangible stake in the outcome. But those generally would not be vulnerable to this attack to begin with since employee effort is appropriately rewarded.
But for the average company, doing the bare minimum to keep your job is the winning strategy since doing more will not result in a proportional reward.
Given long enough it should put pressure on paying more for actually good work (aka those who don't slack off get paid more), or at the very least move some of the proceeds from enshittification from the company's boss into the slackers' pockets.
Hm? I am in landscaping. I mow people's lawns. Sure I didn't build the machinery myself, but the main value I provide is my time for the mowing. Nobody elses.
> Markets are based on imperfect information distribution at the end of the day.
Hm? I buy a lawnmower. I have information what the seller wants for it. I buy it. There are other brands. The one I buy is because I like it and its price. That's a market. Where is the imperfect information distribution here?
I think your framing is outdated. It sounds more like his relationship with his fans anticipated how “fame” is typically thought of today. Remix this entire comment with Mr. Beast as the subject and see if that helps my point.
Edit:
He even says himself:
> [...] I’m not really famous. Beyoncé and Brad Pitt are truly famous. They cannot walk around in public anywhere in the world. I am a micro public figure with a monthly audience in the millions or tens of millions. There are legions of people on Instagram alone with audiences of this size. New platforms offer new speed. Some previous unknowns on TikTok, for example, have attracted millions of followers in a matter of weeks.
So maybe not quite Mr. Beast level even...but certainly in that vein albeit a few degrees below.
An OG “digital nomad blogger bro” that took it all the way to the top!
At the end of the day his voice is a refreshing twist and a net positive but with a ton of caveats.
Tim Ferris is known for somewhat hyperbolic self-help content. He talks about the millions of people who follow him or consume his content regularly.
I’d suggest that the audience for people who obsessively consume this kind of self-help content is probably self-selected for a high proportion of crazy people.
So, his experience is probably well outside the norm.
Absolutely not. I've been a minor OSS celebrity for a while and even on that scale, it attracted a good number online stalkers and harassers.
Basically, if you're ever "newspaper famous", there will be completely unhinged people convinced that you're the one talking to them through their microwave, as well as rational people who make it their life mission to follow your around and "expose" you / put you down, simply because they think they deserved the limelight more than you.
It scales with popularity and changes with demographic. I’ve known non-famous CEOs who needed security details when visiting any conference or public event because they had stalkers who would reliably appear and try to get close to them.
Even on HN I had a stalker. With a previous handle I wrote a long comment about a subject that someone found insightful. They scanned my whole comment history until they found a comment where I mentioned a company I had worked for, then did a process of elimination to figure out who I was, then started contacting me through email and other channels demanding more conversation and writing on the topic to answer their questions. It was very unsettling. I’m now more careful to leave out any identifying facts on HN.
I was interviewed by a semi-famous YouTuber in Taiwan (~100k subs) and reaped a ton of benefits. Had one bad encounter though: one of the viewers came into my restaurant and had a super bizarre interaction with me about it, standing next to me and talking well after close while I washed dishes, repeating talking points from the video and not getting increasingly strong hints to leave. Had to straight up throw him out in the end.
Never really felt unsafe, but it was bizarre to have such an uncomfortable interaction with someone fawning over me like that, all because they saw me in a video with only 150k videos!
Look into any kind of OSS drama and you'll realize the OSS community may have a higher proportion of crazies.
^ those are not rational people.
It makes me worry that what if my belief that I'm rational is also skewed...
Conditional probability and Bayes' theorem tell you that how given some "ground belief" and new facts, the ground belief should be adjusted to incorporate the new evidence. Making this part of your daily life and belief system is what rationalism is about.
But what happens if your ground truth is "fucked up" (in the sense of how an average person would see it)? Then it can easily happen that new evidence can perfectly explained by your ground truth/belief system and thus (in a very rational sense) actually strengthen it.
Also keep in mind that a lot of things in the world are "messy", so it's not so hard to come up with a belief system that gives an "encompassing" framework that actually "explains" more things. If this system than becomes "strengthened" by incorporating lots of additional seen evidence (again using conditional probability and Bayes' theorem), this leads to a similar situation.
A few folks in my social circles are _very_ minor public figures, more in the vein of "occasionally does a talking head segment on CNN" than "wins an Oscar" and even many of them have had to deal with obsessive attention from the unwell, threats, and people assuming they're rich and begging for money.
Glad to hear other commenters are pushing back against this proposition that Ferris is somehow a special case, because it's a story I've heard from lots and lots of people in the public eye, regardless of their area of expertise.
This article always strikes me as insane because he -- a famous person with a history of serious mental illness and suicidal thoughts which he's discussed publicly -- has a moderately bad encounter with a person on the internet and decide that he now needs to purchase a firearm and carry it with him in public.
As was mentioned in another comment, there have almost certainly been more cases where women have had serious/scary issues than men.
There are also a ton of people who have never especially groomed the mass market though they're pretty well known in their industry.
Like John Lennon just made music and he got shot and killed for it. Jodie Foster naively signed up for an erotic role in a movie and was stalked for it.
Becoming well known even in a smallish circle of a few hundred or thousand people will likely immediately lead to stalkers and crazies coming out after you. My theory is they are directly drawn to people who make some sort of splash, for whatever reason, even if it’s local and small.
In 2018, after the news picked up my story, I met the "true" inventor uber. This guy emailed 100s of documents as proof, newspaper clippings, a bunch of pictures with people circled in red, after all that I said "I'm not entirely sure which part you invented." This man "randomly" bumped into me in a cafe to explain it to me. He had driven hundreds of miles to be there.
On my second stint a few years later, I went to a Dan Lyons' book signing with my wife. Dan spotted me in the audience and asked me to come up on stage and tell my story to the audience. I was completely unprepared.
Later a lady accosted me to get my address and phone number so she can send me stuff. She was persistent, so I said I can give her my email so we can communicate further. It didn't sit well with her. A few days later I got an email from her. It was a few thousand words of threats, and I was going to be reported for violating Australia's laws. She had contacted ABC Australia to get my story retracted. I'm in California...
It was insane. It was full of people randomly asking to meet up with him in tons of different cities, people asking him to review their movie scripts/theatrical projects, people asking him for money, and women either offering to have sex with him or asking him to marry them. All in public, and just day after day like that.
- Being under the public eye—all the time—is one of the top reasons to not be famous. Famous people must constantly self-monitor what they say and do because casual mistakes can trigger disproportionate backlash or headlines.
- You lose the ability to have genuine, equal interactions—people treat you differently, with deference or expectation, rather than as a peer.
- Privacy disappears as curious strangers can easily discover where you live, details about your family, and how much wealth you have—information you'd normally share only with people you trust.
- Strangers form opinions about you before ever meeting you, based on whatever fragments of your public persona they've encountered.
- A public persona can become a cage, limiting your freedom to change, experiment, or reinvent yourself.
Or did Hoffmann steal from Ferriss?
The long and full apology is inserted below. [...] He (?) also says he suffers from schizophrenia.
I’m happy for “Al” that he’s getting help and tries to move on. For me, this apology at least finally proves that this threat is over and in fact never was intended literally. I hope I will never receive anything close to that again.
The apology in full
I am Al Nocai. When I contacted you initially, I believed you to be a Dan E., from texas, or a Dan S from delaware or a Dan from Minneapolis. I didn’t do my research, and when I found it was actually you and you had nothing to do with my situation, I became indignant and even more of an asshole. You had every right to be mad, and publish as you did. I’m not trying to justify what I did, there is none, I should have been a lot more cordial. I just want to provide context around what was happening, I believe I at least owe you why.
I had to retire from my career do to schizophrenia. Again, I should have not let my delusions go to the point they did nor should I have acted the way it does. My illness doesn’t detract from the rashness of my actions.
(Think whatever you want about the author; the observation is correct.)
Just the fact that complete strangers were recognizing me and chatting to me like I was their best friend while I had no clue who they were was a really uncomfortable feeling. It was one of the multiple reasons I didn't tried to be a professional in this sport.