I'm pleased you found the advice on foreign travel helpful, I'll have to give that another look. Like I tried to say, I did find some useful nuggets in the book, but overall, it violated my ethos in a way that made me uncomfortable enough to want to say something … somewhere.

Thank you for providing a forum for some forthright and objective discussion. I'm honest enough to realize that a straight-up blog post on my part would have been more than a bit one-sided.

You said, “I'd be interested in your experiences in Mexico and how much you paid for what.” If you read the remaining articles in this series, you'll get exactly that. Look for the Mazatlan category and read on. I have scheduled a couple more to publish over the next two weeks, so stay tuned.

Incidentally, if one only travels to where “English is common” then one misses out on a lot. I daresay, that even misses one of the main points of traveling the world.

I find his advice on foreign travel quite good, even for us, who already spend so little to live at home. We found one part of the world with a similar cost of living to home where we really enjoyed living (Mazatlan), and we've started looking for the next one. I've seen a variety of comments about Asuncion and Montevideo, with some claiming high rates of petty crime there. I need to find out more before we jump in to staying there for months. Ferriss mentioned Berlin which, I've seen with limited research so far, costs much less than you'd expect. I don't recall Ferriss claiming one could travel “anywhere” so cheaply, but he did mention several locales, including South and Central America, Berlin, Thailand and the Philippines, of which only Berlin surprised me. A quick look at wikitravel.org confirms how easily one can live in the other locations quite cheaply. Of course, finding a cheap, suitable place to live provides a challenge almost anywhere in the world, and even moreso when you don't know the area.

Like most such books, Tim provides a formula that one can follow thoughtfully to lead to good results. Unfortunately, like most such books, Tim sensationalized to boost sales, and unfortunately, too many people will read it thoughtlessly and try to use the formula without thinking about what they really want from life and without thinking about how to adapt his ideas to their context. Of course, you and I know how widely the disease of thoughtless action spreads.

You did a good job explaining some of the high points of the book, but I thought I would share some of the things I picked up on from the book.

1) He makes a lot of really hard to substantiate claims, like he appeared on foreign soap operas, or did Mixed-Martial-Arts in Japan, or “advised” thirty Olympic level athletes. A lot of these claims are very, very hard to substantiate; if you check out his wikipedia page, lots of people have tried, with limited results.

2) But I think that would be no surprise, because finding ways to win by doing things people don't quite expect is his Modus Opperandi – the way he gets things done. This is a guy who one a kickboxing championship by exploiting a loophole in the rules that allowed him to gain weight between the weigh-in and the competition, then exploited another where he basically pushed his opponents out of the ring three times, forcing them to lose. Likewise, he won the world record for tango spins in one minute by basically re-defining the spin and “turning around on your heel” (You can watch the video on youtube). He also introduces himself as a guest lecturer (or professor, or faculty) in entrepreneurship at Princeton, when, from what I can tell, he gives /*one guest lecture a year*./

So I expect that may be did give some advice to a group of people at the US Olympic trials for some sport, maybe thirty of them, and handed out business cards. Maybe he did once show up to a Mixed-Martial Arts contest in Japan, or have a guest spot on a soap opera once. The point is, he's done just enough to be able to make a credible defense if he was ever called on his claims. (I think he claims to be fluent in thirty languages, and I expect he likely /can/ say hello, goodbye, where is the bathroom, and a half-dozen phrases in each language, or could at one point. I mean, define “fluent”, right?)

3) His book is a hodge-podge of ideas, almost all of which are telling people what they want to hear – how to 'make money without working.' If I wanted to be critical, I'd call this pandering, but i don't want to go there just yet.

4) The advice he gives on foreign travel seems simplistic to me. I mean, JB, you've done a lot of travelling. In the book it sounds like anyone can travel anywhere, Jimmy Buffet Style, really cheap, because “developing nations” have weaker dollars than the United States.

The conclusion I came to was that if you want clean water, sheets, air conditioning, and a safe environment, especially one where english is common, well … you're going to pay for it. I'd be interested in your experiences in Mexico and how much you paid for what.

So I find that advice Naive at best, pandering at worst.

5) Likewise we have the advice to hire personal assistants. Well, local personal assistants cost money, and ones that are far away have limited things they can do. The examples he gives, like shopping on amazon … well, think about it. Say you want to buy a digital camera. Unless you know what you are shopping for (in which case, why hire an assistant) that process is going to be a discovery process. Any requirements doc you start out with is going to be obsolete within an hour of shopping. So how long is it going to take to write, and what kind of camera will your personal assistant from Malaysia final purchase for you?

6) Likewise, I found the advice to outsource your day job, or at least parts of it, a bit silly. It sounded pretty conceptual, and from Tim's life story, it sounds like he hadn't actually done it much.

All that leads me to ask: What would happen if everybody did what Tim is recommending? Well, do you remember the early dotCom era, when people thought they would outsource order-entry, fufillment, and supply, so they could ship wine by a fire while someone else did the work? It turns out that those companies didn't add a lot of value to the economy and didn't last very long.

Now, Tim does provide a few specific pieces of advice for finding a niche where you can have large gross margins – like dietary supplements advertised in a muscle/fitness magazine – but these are basically techniques to charge 10x as much for products that aren't really any better than what you buy off he shelf.

All in all, I don't see people following this advice to be making a better world. If Tim had just spent a little bit more time talking about the risks of his ideas, or setting reasonable expectations for what someone can earn, I might feel differently about the book. What I see isn't something reasonable, it's out and out pandering. He uses different rehetoric, but it sure comes out feeling like the pyramid sales pitch I heard years ago, or those late night infomercials about using real estate to generate “positive cash flow.”

So while I might suggest the four hour work week as a book for your bookshelf, I would say take it with a grain of salt, and it shouldn't be the /first/ book on your bookshelf.