I understand exactly what you're talking about. I genuinely can't listen to ideological podcasters who are shitty people. I don't mean ideologies I disagree with, I mean people with no compassion who try to tell you how to live.
Good example: Tim Pool. He's ideologically pretty close to me, but I can't stand him as a person. No thanks.
How is Tim Ferriss ideological or a shitty person? I think he’s trying real hard and doesn’t stomp on people. His success is also quite hard earned IMO.
His business was selling generic "herbal remedies" IIRC. Which is bad/predatory IMO. And going further to meta-hustle that this is salutary enough to recommend to others without any seeming compunction is meta-bad.
(I know it's bad posting something this dismissive in deeply nested comments, but I believe it is relevant information to the discussion which hasn't been mentioned elsewhere. I tried elaborating but the elaborated versions of this comment were more cynical/uncharitable, not less, so I'm keeping it short instead).
Are you referring to BrainQuicken? They sold regular supplements, mainly B vitamins and alpha lipoic acid, marketed as nootropics (which they are). I can't see what's wrong or unethical about that. Unless you think all kinds of resale are unethical?
It appears my recollection was incorrect, and I retract my initial claim. Yeah, it was more nootropic than herbal. Yes, th "neural accelerator" that is "100% guaranteed to work within 60 minutes of the first dose." (http://www.blackhat.be/toxic/brainquicken.html is the closest thing I can find to what looks like the original marketing blurb). One should be highly skeptical of such claims, but frankly it's not as bad as it was in my memory (though still outlandish/over the top), and I'll make a note to not be quite so mean about him in future. Thanks for your comment.
I've not read the book, but IIUC _The Four Hour Workweek_ has as its central idea that you can outsource most of your actual work to other people while accruing most of the wealth those others are creating.
Not exactly a mark of great compassion or kindness, if that's actually what's presented.
It goes deeper than that. He encourages this behaviour in all aspects of interactions - getting other people to look things up for you etc, while firewalling yourself from other people's requests for assistance, finding ways to be more efficient at your job and hiding this from your boss so you can use the time saving for your side hustle.
Well you can't scale a business if you rely on only yourself as the workforce, so you will at some point have to outsource work to other people. It doesn't matter where those people are located. It's certainly unkind to overwork or underpay people, no matter where they are in the world (which must be looked at relative to local salaries). But that's not at all what the book recommended.
We all profit off other people's work, and are profited off of. I personally don't find this inherently problematic, since it's not a zero sum game.
To reiterate my point: I think it's not per se unkind to profit off other people's work. It's all about _how_ it's done.
right, profiting from other people's labor is certainly not inherently wrong.
Collecting most of the income from a project while putting very little effort into it feels kind of skeezy to me, but I'm not sure I can tell you precisely what bothers me about that. There may not be any actual problems with it.
I have no idea what you are hinting at. Making guesses at other people‘s intentions and spewing one-liners doesn’t exactly invite a discussion. If you don’t like to discuss, why post here?
Good example: Tim Pool. He's ideologically pretty close to me, but I can't stand him as a person. No thanks.