Most of his reasons are related to “you have to deal with crazy people who focus their crazy on you”.
Tim Ferris is known for somewhat hyperbolic self-help content. He talks about the millions of people who follow him or consume his content regularly.
I’d suggest that the audience for people who obsessively consume this kind of self-help content is probably self-selected for a high proportion of crazy people.
So, his experience is probably well outside the norm.
> So, his experience is probably well outside the norm.
Absolutely not. I've been a minor OSS celebrity for a while and even on that scale, it attracted a good number online stalkers and harassers.
Basically, if you're ever "newspaper famous", there will be completely unhinged people convinced that you're the one talking to them through their microwave, as well as rational people who make it their life mission to follow your around and "expose" you / put you down, simply because they think they deserved the limelight more than you.
I was once in a high up position for a somewhat popular project. I can confirm that it attracts obsessive people with anger issues.
It scales with popularity and changes with demographic. I’ve known non-famous CEOs who needed security details when visiting any conference or public event because they had stalkers who would reliably appear and try to get close to them.
Even on HN I had a stalker. With a previous handle I wrote a long comment about a subject that someone found insightful. They scanned my whole comment history until they found a comment where I mentioned a company I had worked for, then did a process of elimination to figure out who I was, then started contacting me through email and other channels demanding more conversation and writing on the topic to answer their questions. It was very unsettling. I’m now more careful to leave out any identifying facts on HN.
Wow, this makes me glad to not really be involved with anything publicly, not interact with the media, and not run popular web site or manage social media. The only thing I participate with under my real name is HN. In probably over a decade here, I got a grand total of one unhinged, threatening E-mail over something I posted, and no IRL stalkers. Looks like I've been lucky so far.
This would be a much better comment on the top of the thread, rather than the current ad hominem.
This is why you throw in false details every once in a while online, to throw people off.
> Basically, if you're ever "newspaper famous", there will be completely unhinged people convinced that you're the one talking to them through their microwave
I was interviewed by a semi-famous YouTuber in Taiwan (~100k subs) and reaped a ton of benefits. Had one bad encounter though: one of the viewers came into my restaurant and had a super bizarre interaction with me about it, standing next to me and talking well after close while I washed dishes, repeating talking points from the video and not getting increasingly strong hints to leave. Had to straight up throw him out in the end.
Never really felt unsafe, but it was bizarre to have such an uncomfortable interaction with someone fawning over me like that, all because they saw me in a video with only 150k videos!
> minor OSS celebrity
Look into any kind of OSS drama and you'll realize the OSS community may have a higher proportion of crazies.
nit: "rational people who make it their life mission to follow your around and "expose" you"
^ those are not rational people.
I find it fascinating that people can be convinced that they are very very rational, but they can also be convinced about crazy things, things like that the Earth is a flat disc, or that Bill Gates and the rest of the secret cabal of elites are going to put 5G receivers through a mandated vaccination, or that races other than their own need to be eradicated...
It makes me worry that what if my belief that I'm rational is also skewed...
In my opinion the explanation is easy: it comes all down to conditional probability and Bayes' theorem:
Conditional probability and Bayes' theorem tell you that how given some "ground belief" and new facts, the ground belief should be adjusted to incorporate the new evidence. Making this part of your daily life and belief system is what rationalism is about.
But what happens if your ground truth is "fucked up" (in the sense of how an average person would see it)? Then it can easily happen that new evidence can perfectly explained by your ground truth/belief system and thus (in a very rational sense) actually strengthen it.
Also keep in mind that a lot of things in the world are "messy", so it's not so hard to come up with a belief system that gives an "encompassing" framework that actually "explains" more things. If this system than becomes "strengthened" by incorporating lots of additional seen evidence (again using conditional probability and Bayes' theorem), this leads to a similar situation.
Plenty of celebrities that have nothing to do with self-help also attract their share of mentally ill folks, so I'm not sure that he's as far out of the norm as you think.
A few folks in my social circles are _very_ minor public figures, more in the vein of "occasionally does a talking head segment on CNN" than "wins an Oscar" and even many of them have had to deal with obsessive attention from the unwell, threats, and people assuming they're rich and begging for money.
When you make self-help content don’t be surprised when you attract people that need help.
I think the general idea is sound, although I have changed my mind with our current economic system where one needs to fend for his own with no safety net. I mean upon seeing Chris Rock say in an interview saying that he would be willing to kill to become famous, I am reconsidering this issue.I refused once an opportunity to act with some big shot crew saying that I would not tolerate people and the way they deal with well-known, famouse people. I could not imagine how I could deal with the pressure. Now after 60 I am just looking back at missed opportunities but still content that 'I did it my way', and hope my children would have better future.
I think it's a pretty safe assumption that all the comments here about "normal non-self help guru celebrities don't get stalked as much" are from men. I think literally every woman who is even semi-moderately in the public eye has stories about stalkers, regular death threats and rape fantasies, etc.
Glad to hear other commenters are pushing back against this proposition that Ferris is somehow a special case, because it's a story I've heard from lots and lots of people in the public eye, regardless of their area of expertise.
Even men will get the stalkers. maybe not as many, but they get them.
Dealing with crazy people must really cut into his four hour work week.
I make content and have a following that's ~1/10th the size of what he claims to have in this 2020 post, and I have had, within a rounding error, zero percent of the crazy encounters he had. YMMV. If I were a political influencer or a self-help guru, yes probably that would be different, but audience selection effects are a real factor here.
This article always strikes me as insane because he -- a famous person with a history of serious mental illness and suicidal thoughts which he's discussed publicly -- has a moderately bad encounter with a person on the internet and decide that he now needs to purchase a firearm and carry it with him in public.
A lot of people are reasonably well-known in certain circles because of some show, podcast, book, etc. that's become something of a hit often with some calculated controversy. And, as you say, collects something of a following.
There are also a ton of people who have never especially groomed the mass market though they're pretty well known in their industry.
Run any popular web community and you’ll see the amount of craze. Got some random guy sending 100+ emails that will sue and will talk to USA gov because I break the law - for putting ads on my website.
Nope.
Becoming well known even in a smallish circle of a few hundred or thousand people will likely immediately lead to stalkers and crazies coming out after you. My theory is they are directly drawn to people who make some sort of splash, for whatever reason, even if it’s local and small.
Even just being a starter on a high school sports team will get stalkers once in a while.
What is the normal experience for a famous person?
While it’s possible that being famous for producing self help content does draw more crazies to you it certainly seems like crazies are drawn to famous regardless of what people are famous for.
Like John Lennon just made music and he got shot and killed for it. Jodie Foster naively signed up for an erotic role in a movie and was stalked for it.