@IronEdithKidd The purpose of this interview series is to make you think about your assumptions! I highly recommend reading the actual text of the interviews and posing specific questions.

@IronEdithKidd It’s very sad that you couldn’t find anything useful AT ALL in the interview.

@anon #20 Your opinion matters! Change can take a long time, but you should never stop persisting.

BTW, I RTFA. I want my 5 minutes back.

And: many, many factors are left out by that simplistic analysis. Furthermore, the sample is too focused… you’d need population from all across the “richness” spectrum in order to make a significant statement in that matter.

Quite easy to answer : look at the 5% poorest and 5% richest and look who has college degree or not.

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but Christ, make it an informed one.

He’s also very transparent and INCREDIBLY GEEKY. This is why I think BoingBoing did a good job interviewing him, and I think folks could benefit from his suggestions. He didn’t learn yabusame to get rich, he did it because he wanted to figure it out. This is how all his stuff works. He suspects something’s awry in the way society teaches us things: high school language classes, weight loss plans that don’t work, MBAs etc.

I don’t blame people for being skeptical of his “hacking” but I also think most of the naysayers here are calling him a scammer instead of admitting their own jealousy. I’m jealous I’ve never lived on an island in Panama, and I’m jealous I don’t speak German. What I like about Ferris (unlike snake-oil salesmen) is that he’s transparent about his methods and his goals. He’s not claiming he’s magical or better than the average guy. He’s actually sharing his methods for hacking pretty much anything anyone would like to do in life. What’s wrong with telling people to figure out how much their “rich person dreams” actually cost? What’s wrong with telling people to eat protein in the morning to help build muscle? What’s wrong with all of you guys who say he’s try to pass one over on us, when he’s actually sharing his geekery with us?

You also miss out on networking with people who will be autoscreened by resume sorting software or a random HR employee for management and better paying positions and can then hire their old friends with someone else’s money.

College privilege is like white privilege, it allows those who are already in power, money, or good position to network and meet each other keeping the culture of institutions of learning and positions requiring college and able to afford college for their offspring reasonably stable demographically, it typically even keeps mating patterns within the group.

A little more closer to home (and I realize it’s anecdotal), my grandfather emigrated from Europe to America in the 60s in the typical storybook fashion (going on ahead of his wife and young daughter to lay the groundwork for a new life, nothing but a suitcase full of clothes, 100 dollars in his pocket, and not knowing a word of English) and retired a millionaire. He did it all with a fourth grade education.

What’s interesting about Ferris is the odd honesty of them.

Early in 4 hour work week, for example, he explains how it’s not literally a 4 hour work week, how he’s referring to the fact that you can trim fat from your enterprise to cut the drudgerous, administrative, micromanaging parts down to maybe a day or half day (if you’re lucky and have a certain type of business model) *thus freeing more of your time to do what you started the business to do* — be that more time off or more time in the lab/workshop/studio.

He talks about the value of cachet, about the ethics of marketing, about the way he almost evolved his ads in the wild by doing essentially live testing – and it’s very interesting content. Fascinating, brilliant content, in fact. But it’s not really a set of direct, how-to steps…more principles.

Four hour body, in the fullness of its text, is much the same – it’s more of a “I tried a bunch of the shit you’ve sort of maybe heard about, some of it worked some of it didn’t much of it hurt” kind of offering than the workout manual its being billed as.

I found the supposed debunking screed linked above interesting – Ferris’ real point is, in fact, that there are few actual shortcuts, and most people need to have a long look in the mirror, quantify and think about their goals, and devote their work toward them instead of toward activities that barely advance them.

I mean, why don’t we all herald John Edward as a huge business success from all that talking to the dead busines?

I do it because he sells vitamin suppliments. AKA Snakeoil.

He’s like a modulated version of Aleksey “Impossible is Nothing” Vayner.