> Dropshipping? ... Content farms? ... SEO arbitrage?
If these things can die, it's a good thing. I read the 4 Hour Work Week back in its heyday. I borrowed some time management ideas, but never went all in, as so much of what came out of it felt like it wasn't actually adding value to society. It was a means to extract money from people while making the world slightly worse for everyone who had to deal with the extended shipping times on dropshipped products that didn't disclose it, the websites that only exist to server ads and affiliate links which crowd out real organic results, and the SEO nonsense which often went hand and hand. In other cases, it was becoming a professional middle-man, taking someone else's work, marking up the price, and selling it for more, which just feels wrong... not to mention it being bad for the consumer, on top of paying more, they are not dealing with a company that can actually help if there is a problem.
Did AI actually kill this stuff though, or just allow for even more of it with less effort? I don't think the 4 Hour Work Week target demo is going to just decide to go to work to use AI for 40 hours per week... they're going to try and use it to scam their way to as much money as they can get in as little time as possible.
Most "passive income" is also more marketing than reality. Even Ferriss said he put in a ton of work upfront for this supplement company before he was able to optimize it down to the what he talked about in the book. Many people talk about real estate as passive income, which always felt like a lie to me after hearing nothing but horror stories from landlords I've met socially. Even Graham Stephan recently sold off all his properties and admitted it was work and stress[0], and he was mr real estate on YouTube.
> But I have a growing sense that the core argument of The 4-Hour Workweek itself - the thesis that we should be creating loops of income-generating work that remove the human from the loop - is both obsolete and dangerous.
Because of AI?
... But isn't that exactly how people are trying to get massive amounts of code out of the LLMs now?
> VA work? AI does it for next to nothing, and better than a VA used to.
Only because most VAs are just bad. The "next to nothing" AI work is still bad; if you don't believe me, just allow Youtube to show you some ads some time. And doing it properly is not at all what I'd call passive income, more like gig work.
> There was nothing passive about the godfather of passive income at all.
… Ah, okay, that addresses my last point, I guess. :) But in that case,
> The goal is no longer 4 hours; it’s 40 hours of high-leverage work that produces 400 hours of impact.
it sounds like really not that much has changed after all. It's still a "work smarter, not harder" kind of idea, just with the belief that you'll still have to work relatively hard. Which is kind of grim, really.
> Dropshipping? ... Content farms? ... SEO arbitrage?
If these things can die, it's a good thing. I read the 4 Hour Work Week back in its heyday. I borrowed some time management ideas, but never went all in, as so much of what came out of it felt like it wasn't actually adding value to society. It was a means to extract money from people while making the world slightly worse for everyone who had to deal with the extended shipping times on dropshipped products that didn't disclose it, the websites that only exist to server ads and affiliate links which crowd out real organic results, and the SEO nonsense which often went hand and hand. In other cases, it was becoming a professional middle-man, taking someone else's work, marking up the price, and selling it for more, which just feels wrong... not to mention it being bad for the consumer, on top of paying more, they are not dealing with a company that can actually help if there is a problem.
Did AI actually kill this stuff though, or just allow for even more of it with less effort? I don't think the 4 Hour Work Week target demo is going to just decide to go to work to use AI for 40 hours per week... they're going to try and use it to scam their way to as much money as they can get in as little time as possible.
Most "passive income" is also more marketing than reality. Even Ferriss said he put in a ton of work upfront for this supplement company before he was able to optimize it down to the what he talked about in the book. Many people talk about real estate as passive income, which always felt like a lie to me after hearing nothing but horror stories from landlords I've met socially. Even Graham Stephan recently sold off all his properties and admitted it was work and stress[0], and he was mr real estate on YouTube.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVnOfWW89pA
> But I have a growing sense that the core argument of The 4-Hour Workweek itself - the thesis that we should be creating loops of income-generating work that remove the human from the loop - is both obsolete and dangerous.
Because of AI?
... But isn't that exactly how people are trying to get massive amounts of code out of the LLMs now?
> VA work? AI does it for next to nothing, and better than a VA used to.
Only because most VAs are just bad. The "next to nothing" AI work is still bad; if you don't believe me, just allow Youtube to show you some ads some time. And doing it properly is not at all what I'd call passive income, more like gig work.
> There was nothing passive about the godfather of passive income at all.
… Ah, okay, that addresses my last point, I guess. :) But in that case,
> The goal is no longer 4 hours; it’s 40 hours of high-leverage work that produces 400 hours of impact.
it sounds like really not that much has changed after all. It's still a "work smarter, not harder" kind of idea, just with the belief that you'll still have to work relatively hard. Which is kind of grim, really.