MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

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theanimal
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MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by theanimal »

http://tim.blog/2017/02/13/mr-money-mustache/

Haven't had a chance to listen yet. I'm looking forward to it though.

It seems the whole notion of FI is getting more and more awareness each year. Though I can't say that the level of acceptance by mainstream society seems to be increasing in tandem.

Dragline
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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by Dragline »

It's good, although drags at points, probably because most of it wasn't new to me (and won't be new to you, either).

One of the things that struck me was the discussion of the importance or intrinsic value derived from physically building or creating something with one's own hands. MMM mentioned this in the context of building a house, but we see so much of that also described and pictured in the the blogs and posts here.

OTOH, he also spoke of balance -- he got himself into essentially an "unwanted construction business" soon after early retirement, but extricated himself from it after a few years. I always learn more from talk about the stuff that did not go quite right than the stuff that did. It's good to remember that changing direction is often the right thing to do, even though I probably don't do it enough myself.

They wax on about a book called "The Magic of Thinking Big", which you can find here as a free pdf: http://tim-halloran.com/wp-content/uplo ... ng-big.pdf

It's worth reading, but I did not get as excited about it as they did.

Has anyone read the Joel Greenblatt book "You Can Be a Stock Market Genius" that they also mentioned? I had not, but put it on a list.

Gilberto de Piento
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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

I listen to most of Tim Ferriss' podcasts and I am a MMM fanboy so I liked this. That said, I think someone who has never listened to Ferris will find his interview style disjointed and it also didn't seem like a great introduction to the concept of early retirement.

For the average Ferriss listener who won't be familiar with FI it should have had more detail on the finances behind early retirement. That's how all the Ferriss podcasts are though, and maybe why he has his own niche rather than being just another "interviewer asks questions/guest answers them with talking points" podcast.

I'm always a little annoyed when MMM gets press. FI my thing and I don't want to share it.

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C40
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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by C40 »

I get annoyed about MMM also. I don't entirely understand why. I'm jealous of his success in the personal finance world. I don't desire that kind of success myself, which is why I'm a little confused on the source of my jealousy. Maybe it's because I'm much more "Jacob's ERE cult" and Pete's message is basically the same as Jacob's but dumbed down and made more universally appealing.

About the actual podcast: I've listened to most of this podcast, and I think it does a poor job of introducing FI to the masses. Given the length of the episode, it's horrible at it. But - generally the point of Tim's podcasts aren't to explain the guest's art or profession, it's to talk about how they are so good at it. They do talk about that a bit with the "cult" part of the discussion. Maybe Pete just isn't very good at public speaking, or maybe he just had sort of an off day, or maybe Ferris' order of questions didn't fit well, or maybe it was difficult because they weren't in person (It sounded like they must have been on skype or the phone when Tim spoke about how he has a copy of the book they were discussing in the room he was speaking from). Maybe it's also just that I already know basically all the stuff he's talking about so absence of learning anything new makes it seem boring.

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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by Dragline »

Ferriss did struggle, which is one of the reasons his podcasts are often too long. But from listening to his other podcasts, I get the feeling that he is more used to interviewing people who he already knows and/or are these "super performers" that can do things most people just can't do.

MMM is different precisely because his story is so pedestrian and the idea is that most people can do something like what he did with a bit of discipline.

As for our sometimes collective annoyance with him and his seemingly unjustified out-sized success, I attribute this larger to a hidden form of cognitive dissonance that we all suffer from in Western society and an innate desire to believe in the "Just World Hypothesis". One of the things we have ingrained into us is that to become famous or "great" as the great-man theory of history holds, we have to be extraordinary and superlative. This is largely an illusion -- many people achieve a measure of greatness or fame simply by being persistent at whatever they are doing and then being in the right place at the right time to capture a "zeitgeist" of the moment. MMM is probably one of those people. Being able to retire early and create a nice blog was within his control, but the fame and fortune probably had as much to do with chance as anything else. (These two alternatives are explored in the book "Ubiquity" by Mark Buchanan -- pitting the "great man theory" of history with the "complexity" or "sand-pile" theory of history, which I think is likely more accurate.)

Another good reference is the movie Zelig (1983), which is a mockumentary comedy about how this one guy became famous just for showing up and mimicking people. The reason its really funny is that there is a central grain of truth to it. I highly recommend it. See https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/zelig/

For more on Ubiquity and complexity theory: http://www.prospectingmimeticfractals.c ... -lens.html

And the fascinating "Just World Hypothesis" that eerily controls why random people we don't know sometimes piss us off just because they exist: http://www.prospectingmimeticfractals.c ... -the-world

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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by halfmoon »

C40 wrote:I get annoyed about MMM also. I don't entirely understand why. I'm jealous of his success in the personal finance world. I don't desire that kind of success myself, which is why I'm a little confused on the source of my jealousy. Maybe it's because I'm much more "Jacob's ERE cult" and Pete's message is basically the same as Jacob's but dumbed down and made more universally appealing.
I have the same feeling (though I came to Jacob's ERE cult via a link in MMM). To simplify, I think of MMM as a dog: "I'm wonderful, love me, follow me as I sniff this absolutely fantastic game trail that will end with full bellies for all!" Jacob is a cat: "Food is out there, but you may or may not be up to tracking it down and killing it. Oh...are you still here?"

The funny thing is that I prefer dogs to cats in the pet world, but when it comes to ERE we need to be cats.
Last edited by halfmoon on Tue Feb 14, 2017 9:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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C40
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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by C40 »

halfmoon wrote:
I have the same feeling (though I came to Jacob's ERE cult via a link in MMM). To simplify, I think of MMM as a dog: "I'm wonderful, love me, follow me as I sniff this absolutely fantastic game trail that will end with full bellies for all!" Jacob is a cat: "Food is out there, but you may or may not be up to tracking it down and killing it. Oh...are you still here?"

The funny thing is that I prefer cats to dogs in the pet world, but when it comes to ERE we need to be cats.
:-D That is a wonderful analogy.

Did you mean for the last word of your post to be 'dogs' ?

halfmoon
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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by halfmoon »

C40 wrote:
:-D That is a wonderful analogy.

Did you mean for the last word of your post to be 'dogs' ?
Oops. No; I meant 'prefer dogs to cats in the pet world'...but we need to be cats in ERE. Corrected in edit.

I love the slavering enthusiasm of dogs as pets, but in personal finance...not so much. A relative few will have the discipline to follow Jacob's path, especially since he (cat-like) doesn't try very hard to sell it.

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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by TopHatFox »

Gilberto de Piento wrote:I'm always a little annoyed when MMM gets press. FI my thing and I don't want to share it.
Hah, you too?

I wonder if the MMM tribe jab some jokes at the ERE tribe every know and again.

Also, what are ya'lls thoughts on the Ferris tribe? He and his followers seem like the very embodiment of neoliberal capitalism to me: more productive, get stronger, get faster, more fashionable, look better, more business, more money, be the best, more more more, etc. etc.

#Jacob'sEreCult4Lyf

BRUTE
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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by BRUTE »

Ferriss is not a good interviewer, and MMM is not a good speaker. the fact that both of their successes depend on their dumbing down their messages for the proletariat in bite-sized chunks doesn't increase brute's fondness of either.

Fish
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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by Fish »

Here's the ERE mention for those who were curious but didn't want to listen to a 100-minute interview (with ads!) to find it, which starts at 8:40.

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

(MMM speaking)
I think it's kind of been like one of those frog in hot water situations where it just gradually happens and then occasionally -- especially when my friends stop in a MMM event and they're like "Dude. You're a cult leader, did you realize that?" But it didn't really happen any specific time. I would say the first time I was really surprised by the effects of blogging was when I had a guest post on this awesome previous blog called Early Retirement Extreme and a whole bunch of this Jacob blogger's fans came over to my blog and just flooded it and just crawled and read every single article and started putting in all of these comments. It was a really rewarding thing. It just kept going from there, it was sort of a self-motivating thing. And then the other incident was probably -- we had a party once, a blog-related meetup in Ottawa, Canada, which is kind of one of my hometowns, and all these people came, like 200 people, and it overflowed into the backyard of this like, unwitting host's place, and it was a little weird because I didn't even get to meet anybody, and that was the first time I became uncomfortable with like oh, well, I didn't want to be one of those people where you don't even meet everybody who wants to meet you.

(Tim speaking)
So Ottawa. I've actually spent a decent amount of time in Ottawa...

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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by FBeyer »

Olaz wrote:...I wonder if the MMM tribe jab some jokes at the ERE tribe every know and again...
I'm not sure the MMM tribe -as a gray uniform whole- knows ERE exists. The rhetoric of MMM seems to me to have gripped his adherents to the point where they think they are as badass and optimized as they could possibly be. There are many of them and they doing better than the average citizen of any western civilization, who could possibly do them one up?

I don't follow the MMM forums really, so I can't say for sure, but my impression of 'them' is that they're even more full of themselves than 'we' are. But if ERE had as many followers as MMM we might seem the same way. Currently I think the impression of the ERE forums is greatly improved because the level of discussion is often sufficienty complex that people don't really want to chime in, lest they seem uninformed.

In other words: MMM dont act like ERE exists, but that might just be because the size of the vocal part of the MMM community regresses the level of discussion towards the mean.

Did
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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by Did »

I think it's wonderful MMM did this, and he did well. I enjoyed it. He does seem to be a good guy although I do feel some jealousy around his success - that's my character flaw, not his !

I did think it was funny Ferris kept thinking of ways MMM's son could hack/scam MMM's pocket money scheme (ride for cash, return from deposits in the MMM bank). Made me recall a certain kickboxing competition....

Did
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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by Did »

It will be MASSIVE exposure for this blog. Jacob, hope you're strapped in...

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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by PA Hiker »

Like others on this thread, I also find MMM a bit annoying. Perhaps I’m a little envious as well. Even so, I generally like the guy and enjoy reading his blog which I find entertaining and a good source of ideas. I have never really put my finger on it before but I think the “Just World Hypothesis” aptly describes my misgivings regarding MMM. It’s a particular kind of magical thinking that is very pervasive in modern society. Hollywood does this in spades, every action/adventure movie more or less follows the “Just World Hypothesis” script. This is not just in Hollywood movies, it also permeates society’s attitude toward fame and celebrity. It brings to mind the ‘Clueless’ cohort in the Gervais Principle, with their the blind belief that status is based solely on merit.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/th ... he-office/

It seems their is no place for 'Luck' in modern day story telling.
Gilberto de Piento wrote:I'm always a little annoyed when MMM gets press. FI my thing and I don't want to share it.
I’m not too worried that FI/ERE will become popular with the masses. Look at what has happened with the tiny house movement. It started out as a novel strategy embraced by a few frugal, unconventional folks. But the popular movement mostly just fetishizes the idea of ‘freedom’. It is mostly a lifestyle choice, and is not so much about frugality. When your tiny house ends up costing you something north of 40k, you’ve mostly missed the point and would be better off buying an RV or a little 800 sq ft frame house in an inexpensive housing market. By varying degrees Tim Ferris, and MMM represent a departure from FI/ERE that is more palatable to the mainstream.

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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by TopHatFox »

@ PA Hiker: You mean we get to keep our club house? :P

Dragline
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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by Dragline »

Olaz wrote: Also, what are ya'lls thoughts on the Ferris tribe? He and his followers seem like the very embodiment of neoliberal capitalism to me: more productive, get stronger, get faster, more fashionable, look better, more business, more money, be the best, more more more, etc. etc.
He's just part of the "hack your way to riches and other super successes as an internet entrepreneur!" social group that includes Ramit Sethi, Dave Asprey (on health) and that largely grew out of Silicon Valley. There is a lot of energy and good information there, but at some point you kind of have to say "enough is enough" with the "10-xing" of everything.

I've been following Ferriss off and on for about ten years and its been interesting to watch how he has matured and changed. He's much less the barker/used car salesman than he used to be, perhaps realizing that once he achieved some level of fame and success, it's not necessarily all that its cracked up to be. His near fawning obsession with Derek Sivers indicates which direction he thinks he wants to go, but he can't quite pull the trigger on just dropping out of the limelight. Its an interesting case study and I identify with some of it, particularly his college career which didn't really go the way he had planned.

Fundamentally, I think he has some personal commitment issues that he still tries to "hack" around. Getting a dog was a big step for him. I am guessing he is going to be one of those people that suddenly decides they really want to have children at around age 50. That would be a lot more challenging that the artificial stoic challenges he creates for himself.

I do enjoy a lot of the guests he has on his podcast (always skip the first and last 4-5 minutes, which are always all ads). I don't think I've read any of his books or blog material in years, though, and don't plan on reading his most recent book any time soon.

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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by jacob »

I think you guys are being a bit harsh!

The work is not just in exploring and mapping all the territory but also in convincing people to go where no one ^H^H^H^Halmost nobody has gone before. It was quite clear that I was never that very good at the latter---but in my not-so-humble0opinion very good (and yet to be superseded) at the former. Back sometime between '09 and '11 I said something to the effect that it would require something like a JD Roth of FIRE or ERE for ERE or FIRE to ever become popular.---That it required someone who understood the concepts and were able to relate them to a huge audience to make FIRE popular for a mass audience.

MMM turned out to be that guy!

Popularity and remuneration usually goes to where the folded overlap between the [new] concept and the mainstream distribution curves are strongest. (You can add zeitgeist and randomness/Matthew effect to that equation.) Tiny houses illustrate this presently. As does FIRE. If you want an older example, consider running. In the 1970s, running was the domain of weirdos. Nobody ran for exercise! In the 1990s, two decades later, everybody had to run one marathon. In the 2000s, a few extremists began to explore ultrarunning. Today, most of the money is in arranging once a year 5k and 10k runs charging a $50 entry fee for those who aren't otherwise in the habit of doing those on daily basis for free.

I do find it slightly amusing that 10k runners are now thought off by others and themselves as super-hero athletes ... or that people who walk 30k for breast cancer are considered warriors doing the hardest thing ever; when that distance wouldn't even have resulted in a participation award in multi-day long-distance events just one generation ago.

That's the other thing... being adopted or co-opted by the mainstream changes or at least influences the form/message. There's a difference between MMM and his average cult member just as there's a difference between "one jacob" and the average ERE forumite. Neither of us sit in the center in terms of behavior relative to those who associate.

The thing is that these events are normalizing running for the non-runners. This is much more important in the overall scheme of things than paying respect to or even acknowledging those who go much further. As mentioned above, most of the commercial potential is right in between consumers and the next step. It's obviously not in the domain far removed from consumers. You're not going to be able to sell a Couch to 5k training program if you require people run 10k first just to prove they're worthy of buying it ;-)

Also, keep the Wheaton effect in mind when grokking acolytes from respective groups. It's the standard rule that for a given point N on the table, people will always feel that they're the enlightened ones relative to those a short distance back... and so on. You know how that works. (Otherwise see any of the Wheaton threads here).

If I have one complaint, it's the lack of active promotion to the next level(*) from the rest of the FIRE community. It's lonely/unappreciated at ERE heights ... but it does seem that people find their own way [to the forum]. Maybe that's part of the "test" of having to climb the mountain first. It does bug me that a lot of followers in the current FIRE community doesn't seem to even be aware of ERE. Of course, it's not the responsibility of other leaders to mention ERE and I haven't exactly been promoting it either---indeed, I've even put in a half-assed effort to anti-promote it and resulting ERE being the "worst kept secret" in the FIRE community. And I do recall how much I hated it when I was "the famous one", so I shouldn't really be complaining.

(*) YMOYL was mentioned rather than ERE ... but while I did experience a brief "hey! what about over here?"-reaction, YMOYL is actually the next step from MMM, so that makes a lot of sense. (It could of course also be the case that I'm wrongly perceiving this whole arrangement as a ladder or table.)

Image

I rarely listen to podcasts (110WPM is just not my speed) but I did listen to this one because (maybe in the light of the above and given that we're both FIRE'd and run FIRE cults on the interwebs) it was interesting to me (and maybe to you) to "compare and contrast" Pete and jacob in terms of who we are, where we come from, ...
  • In both cases, there's a separation between our internet persona and our IRL person. The internet is a venue for expressing what we really feel whereas IRL we're more "civilized"... Despite that, it's also the case that ...
  • ... our internet personas are less nuanced than IRL. He talked about how he would also consider other dimensions aside from purely monetary concerns such as resource cost/waste when thinking about acquiring something. I do the same. Online we generally just talk about one world-view or framework (mostly finance and consumerism) but privately there are additional [but still compatible] considerations (such as environmentalism or beyond). See e.g. http://earlyretirementextreme.com/the-h ... treme.html
  • We're on the same page wrt resource waste, environmental concerns, regulations, ... and the resulting upsides and downsides in the US. For my part, I'd emphasize exactly the same freedoms in the US as Pete did ... and I'd be aware of exactly the same downsides. We're both immigrants from similar countries/cultures. I wonder whether he's a citizen or a greencard like me or a TN visa (subject to NAFTA).
  • When it comes to "working with one's hands", I really only enjoy the end-result whereas the process of "getting sweaty with tools" is my least favorite aspect of building anything. Pete seems to be at his happiest when in the process of building something. The podcast covers this in detail. Personally, I like that I can build stuff or repair or modify it... but the actual "doing" is not something I enjoy. I never go and build something "just for fun". I wish I could get that level of enjoyment out of building, but alas, I can not. I tried [a lot], but failed. I've accepted that I'm the happiest when I'm busy building something abstract rather than something concrete.
  • I read A LOT (about 100x more than the average person). Local librarians either recognize me by name, face, or as THAT guy. I was surprised how close to (but still above) normal Pete is. (In terms of appealing to the general reader, I leave it as an exercise for the reader to discuss the relative optical appeal between spending a year building an awesome outdoor studio in the backyard or spending that year reading more books than most people do in a lifetime.)
  • Both of us would rather do something else elsewhere than interacting online but realize that we have more impact by occasionally clacking on a keyboard ... and for whatever strange reason we feel an enduring sense of duty to act on our reach.
  • Pete likes Cosmos and Neil deGrasse Tyson. As an ex-professional scientist, I have semi-bitter sentiments when it comes to any science-popularizer :evil: ... because I suffered from the result of it. I'm not a fan of sacrificing detail and reader-effort for excitement ... which is also why the ERE book was written the way it was. Somewhere between textbook and popularization. I think it's a desert/void.
  • Pete is a technologist and a future-optimist. I'm ... not. If he's Warren Buffett, I'm Charlie Munger. If I'm Kahneman, he's Tversky. Maybe that's also a helpful way to understand the overall dynamics of needing a system of different personalities to successfully communicate any message to the general public.
  • We both maxed out our want-of-spending. I'd also struggle with the "if you had to spend much more than you currently do"-question. Ehh.. just to get this straight, Tim? You're asking how someone would raze $100k for no good reason at all [by construction]? Seems like the hallmark of decadence. Here's how I'd do it.
  • A common desire to make these ideas more real. I realized that ERE City/workshop is like herding cats ... but maybe MMM city/workshop is like herding dogs? (as per the above) Value-judgments aside, ERE city never worked out ... nor did small workshops ... but this could be a Wheaton level thing---ERE could easily be too rare/far out. I would be quite pleased if this actually turned into something. Given that those concepts have been failing for 5+ years on this forum may or may not say more about this forum than the general condition of humanity. I'd be interested to know if it actually worked out at MMM.
Tl;dr - the podcast gave me the impression that our underlying values are very closely matched up but that our personalities and backgrounds are different when it comes to implementation. This gives me some hope for the future because I think the former can be changed culturally whereas the latter are genetic, political, or temporal.

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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by cmonkey »

FBeyer wrote:I'm not sure the MMM tribe -as a gray uniform whole- knows ERE exists. The rhetoric of MMM seems to me to have gripped his adherents to the point where they think they are as badass and optimized as they could possibly be. There are many of them and they doing better than the average citizen of any western civilization, who could possibly do them one up?
I think this is what I don't particularly enjoy about MMM either. Spending 20K-24K annually just isn't that badass. It's pretty average actually.

Wheaton levels and all that.

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Re: MMM interviewed by Tim Ferriss (ERE mentioned)

Post by TopHatFox »

Now that you mention it, I'm sometimes confused with the numbers. Is the MMM tribe standard ~20-24K/person, or ~20-24K/1 couple (10-12K/person)? That's a big difference.

Also, if the reason why one is able to spend 20-24K includes a paid off house, that means that one is foregoing the many thousands from the tied up capital in that non-investment house. That would increase annual expenses even higher toward Average American standards (though done at a much later stage in accumulation and with a much higher capital base).

I suppose the idea of MMM FIRE still includes the SWR, a high Savings Rate, and life optimization, but the difference is mostly in degree and often, style.

----------------

I'm just glad I can mention MMM in finance interviews and not get a crazy look. Many of my interviewers have even heard of him, along with some of the bigger names in the PF industry.

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