SH: Now, you're paying an employee for 40 hours a week. Some of my listeners may be a little overwhelmed, "Wow, he's paying someone," but you're deriving value from her for more than you're paying her.

TF: I'll put it this way. People need to become very astute at calculating the value of their time and you calculate the value of your time not only by your current income, but by what you could accomplish if you were able to create more time to focus on mission-critical tasks. Let's just say hypothetically I make $100,000 a year. That means I make $50 an hour. So, if I pay her $25 an hour, that means I'm making $25 an hour. No. That's the starting point, but, for example, if I spend all my time doing e-mail, I can't do anything else and I'm miserable, we didn't even get into that facet of the equation, but let's say instead I can spend two days focusing on an online educational module that then costs $99 per person and I have a 5% conversation rate from every visitor of the site and I get on national TV and I drive that to X, Y, and Z and then I'm making $150,000 a month. That pays for Amy very easily.

SH: Right. This is the thing I discovered a few years ago, which is that electrons are cheaper to sell than molecules.

TF: Yes.

SH: Sell electrons all day long.

TF: Cheaper to ship as well.

SH: Now, you have some interesting ideas around cash, cash flow specifically. I understand that you have a passion for certain kinds of cars and things that someone might think or out of one's reach when you look at it rather than holistically over a 10-year, 20-year, or 30-year period and a month-to-month ins and outs can become attainable.

TF: Sure. Absolutely. I saw an Aston Martin DB9, which is a fantastic car, with 1,500 miles on eBay, which can be financed for less than I'd say it was between $1,200 and $1,400 a month. I'll point this out. I don't have a DB9. I don't have a fast car. I drive a Volkswagen Golf because I'll tell you what's more important to me than owning a nice car is being able to park. Not being able to park, I live near San Francisco, infuriates me. So, when I can't take the train, I want a small car. Secondly, I take it a step further. Ownership is of very little interest to me generally. Like Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, what we own ends up owning us. I believe that's true. I loathe maintenance of most things that consume energy and attention and don't provide more value than they consume. What does that mean? That means that when we look to buy, because that's the usual route, a nice car, Lamborghini, Ferrari, what we want is a certain experience and we need to define that experience. Once we've defined that experience, there are much better ways of achieving it. When I go to Dubai, I'm going to spend a day at a racetrack. Let's just say that I could afford to buy an Aston Martin Vanquish. Fantastic. Great. But when I go to Dubai and I'm in the process of arranging this, for less than $1,000, by using other currencies that I have like credibility and association vis-à-vis the book, I've planned all this out, I will be able to raise an Enzo Ferrari, an F1 McLaren, a $1.2 million car, one of Larry Ellison's toys, Lamborghini Murcielago, and a laundry list of other cars for an entire day for less than $500 including gasoline.

SH: Because of the realization that it's in fact that one wants more than it is the actual physical thing.

TF: Absolutely. It's learning to define and then value intangibles because ultimately I think that most things that we pursue are intangible.

SH: Yeah. I've traveled a lot as well and I can tell obviously from the languages, you value filling your life with experience, with travel, with language, with interactions with other people. You're probably a backpack traveler and you're probably don't check a lot of bags I would guess.

TF: No. Actually, I'm going to be running a blog post soon called how to travel the world and contain your life in 10 pounds.

SH: That's awesome There are a lot of super-light hikers always trying to squeeze a few ounces out of stuff whether it be a water purifier that they can get in three ounces as opposed to six ounces. There is a big group of people on the Internet that does that kind of stuff. I did Malaysia without checking a bag for two weeks and I thought that was an achievement, but there are other guys that are pulling that kind of stuff off in a backpack.

TF: Yeah. There are some very interesting approaches and tools out there so I'll certainly be talking more about those on my blog in the upcoming weeks and months especially once I start leaving. Every once in a while I'll need make a post and they'll probably be travel-related.

SH: My brain is going a thousand miles an hour. The only thing that I've successfully outsourced at this point is the mowing of my lawn. That was really easy. Pay him 20 bucks an hour. I make more than that. It seemed like an obvious thing to do, but I'm realizing that I'm spending a lot of time answering e-mail and spending a lot of time not providing substantive value because I think I'm addicted to urgency, the classic kind of cover your urgency addiction, urgency versus importance. I'm kind of getting some inspiration here, but I'm wondering is this just simply that you are an incredibly willful individual and that you make the decision to do this and you make it so. Is this a series of techniques or is it a combination?

TF: It's a series of conditioning actually more than technique. I can prescribe the medicine, but I can't force people to take it. So, you have skill set then you have behavior that allows someone to use that skill set. Behavior is usually limited by comfort with discomfort. What does that mean? That means that each person has a comfortable sphere of action and there are a certain number of options that they have given their sphere of comfort. If you take small steps to increase that sphere of comfort, you increase the number of options you have. That's a very convoluted way of saying that you need to condition yourself to making increasingly uncomfortable decisions and redefine risk. When people talk about risk, I think they're actually talking about discomfort most of the time when they say a risk of discomfort, so they say, "Oh, that's really risky." No. It's uncertain; therefore, it's uncomfortable for you. I define risk for our workweek as the potential for an irreversible negative outcome. When you look at risk that way, you find that very few things contain any risk whether it's negotiating with a boss or implementing an auto-responder or outsourcing your e-mail. You outsource your e-mail. You try it for a day. It doesn't work. You cancel. You're back to where you were. There's a potential, let's say, negative outcome, temporary negative outcome on a scale of one to 10 of a three or a four. Perhaps it doubles your workload for one day, whereas, a potential positive outcome at a semi-permanent could be a nine or a 10. Once you start looking at decisions in those terms and you make these small steps and take experiments - and I use the word experiment a lot because the only reason that I've been able to do some of the things that I've done, which appear outrageous, is that I've built up to them over time by conducting small experiments; hence, the name of the blog is Experiments in Lifestyle Design. Almost all of these things are reversible.

SH: Yeah. I like that Experiments in Lifestyle Design. One of the things that struck me about the blog when I was poking around, I didn't expect to find before and after pictures of you working out. I'm a type 1 diabetic on an insulin pump and I'm always trying to, this sounds silly, but I'm always trying to gain weight because as type 1 diabetic we tend to just kind of drip weight off of us. The way that you approached this pretty dramatic weight gain over a pretty short period of time was very, it felt very experimental. It felt like very scientific. It wasn't necessarily that you knew you were going to succeed, but you knew something was going to happen. You shook things up. You kept track of it at every point and made small adjustments as you went along.

TF: That's exactly right and I ended up gaining 34 pounds of muscle in four weeks, but what's more noteworthy is that I spent two, I had two workouts per week each of 30 minutes or less. What that means is I gained 34 pounds of muscle and lost three pounds of fat. I recomposed my body entirely with four total hours of workout time in one month. Part of the reason I was able to do that is I harvest data compulsively. Every workout I've done for the last six years I have recorded in detail. I can look, for example, at a photo of myself from three years ago and I can see the exact date and say, "I want to look exactly like I looked then." I can go back in my workout journal and repeat four weeks prior to that photo and look exactly the same. It's about the intelligent use of data. That's all it is. I think that's something that anyone can duplicate. You don't have to necessarily create that data yourself. You can borrow it from other people.

SH: That's huge. Now, at this point, some of my listeners may have said, "Well, what is this? This is not the typical Scott Hanselman podcast. It's usually about programming and development and stuff like this, but the idea that there is data out there whether it be click stream data, how people are moving around the Web, the kind of stuff that my listeners do in their everyday job, whether it's blood sugar information that I'm storing because I've got all my blood sugar going back 12 years, I've got recipes, I have the same experience. I have blood tests going back six years and I can look at diet and I can say, "This is why my blood sugar was great for this one-month period," or "This is why it wasn't," and I can repeat those things. I've been a type 1 diabetic for 12 years. I recently had my very first non-diabetic blood test where you could not tell if I was a type 1 diabetic. Now, to be clear, I'm on an insulin pump and it continues and I check my blood sugar 20 times a day and da-da-da-da, but on paper, on this one blood test, which is now up on my refrigerator with the number circled, I'm not a diabetic. Now, I've got my success point. I just need to repeat that every month of my life until I'm dead.

TF: Right. I think that one important point to mention is that people who are very analytical and logical in one area of their lives like programming are very often completely neglectful of data and other areas. You'll have someone who will sit down and clean up spaghetti code for 20 hours, just a logical machine streamlining it, and then they'll go into the gym and they'll pick up the latest issue of Muscle & Fitness, which says, "How to Turn Your Calves into Cows" on the cover and they'll do three sets of 15 because the big guy taking steroids says do three sets of 15, but they never stopped to ask themselves why three sets and why 15, why not four sets of 12, why not 20 sets of two. The same logical tools of critical thinking and lateral thinking tools that they apply in one area should be and can be applied in all of those areas.

SH: This is very interesting. A lot of programmers I know spend a lot of their analytical power analyzing two things, their financial life and their programming life, but very often they spend little time on things like diet, personal happiness, free time, allocation of free time, what they ultimately want to do with their life, how they want to spend their time. You are working few hours a week. I assume you're filling the rest of your time with things that you enjoy.

TF: Yeah, absolutely. The challenge is taking something that's not obviously binary or numerical like finance or programming and converting it into numbers. That's all you have to do. That's the most time-consuming step. Once you do that, it's easy. I do spend my time doing things that either I enjoy or that I derive benefit or fulfillment from. I don't necessarily enjoy going to the kickboxing gym and getting punched in the head, but I find that the exercise, so to speak, the conditioning effect of that has a positive carryover to other areas, so I find it redeeming. I find it valuable. It may not be enjoyable as laying on your stomach on a beach getting a massage, but on some level it's valuable. I think that once you take these very fuzzy qualitative terms that people don't stop to define like success, happiness, and if you can't define them, you scrap them. It's a very simple solution. I wanted to be a comic book penciler for about 10 years. Actually, I was an illustrator for a period of time and had the same graphic editor position as Jim Lee did. Jim Lee used to be a very famous penciler. One of the mandates or principles that a lot of pencilers use and inkers in comic books is when in doubt, black it out. I think that if you apply that to most of your life as opposed to trying to simply reorganize everything, you can get very, very far very, very fast.

SH: I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down with me. The book is The 4-Hour Workweek and the blog is also www.thefourhourworkweek.com.

TF: It's either www.fourhourworkweek.com or www.thefourhourworkweek.com and that will lead straight to the blog there.

SH: Cool. Thanks a lot. This has been another episode of Hanselminutes. We'll see you again next week.