#861: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show. This is a shorter episode, and by request, many of you have asked for more 4-Hour Workweek case studies. These are conversations with people who have read the book, applied it, and built lives and businesses that certainly I never could have imagined.
Brian Dean is the focus of today's conversation, and his story starts exactly where a lot of great stories start. Broke, directionless, and eating canned beef stew in his dad's basement during the 2008 financial crisis. He picked up a copy of the 4-Hour Workweek, he read it, which is not that uncommon, and then he took action, which is less common. As is nearly always the case, his path wasn't a straight line going from bottom left to the graph to the top right, but a series of winding turns all fed by experiments, and he has learned a lot. He has done a lot. His episode covers geo-arbitrage, testing assumptions cheaply, building a muse, automating income, and also filling the void. That's a chapter that a lot of people skip over. His journey includes failures, two successful exits, and a hard-won answer to the question that most people don't think to ask until it's kind of late in the game. What do you actually do with more time once you have it? Good problem to have, but quality problems can still be pretty gnarly if you don't think about them in advance. So before we get to the conversation, a little more on Brian. Brian Dean is the founder of Backlinko and Exploding Topics, both acquired by Semrush, which itself was recently acquired by Adobe for $1.9 billion. His work has reached millions of readers and has been featured in outlets like Forbes, Fast Company, Bloomberg, and The New York Times. You can find him on LinkedIn.
Brian E Dean, that's B-R-I-A-N, middle initial E, last name Dean, D-E-A-N, and you can find him on YouTube at Brian Dean. And last but not least, a very special thank you to Elaine Pofelt for getting Brian's story on my radar. Elaine is the author of The Million Dollar One-Person Business and more recently, Tiny Business, Big Money. She is fantastic. You can also, if you want, search her name on tim.blog and a couple of episodes that feature her will pop right up. So, that all said, without further ado, please enjoy this 4-Hour Workweek Case Study with Brian Dean. Optimal, minimal.

**Brian Dean** (2:30)
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:34)
Can I answer your personal question?
Brian, nice to meet you finally. Thank you for taking the time.

**Brian Dean** (2:57)
Hey, great to be here.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:58)
Brian, where should we begin? I'm thinking maybe because the impetus for this is somewhat around the connective tissue of the 4-Hour Workweek. Can we just begin with how on earth you and the 4-Hour Workweek intersected? Maybe we start there?

**Brian Dean** (3:16)
So it intersected at a really weird and sort of low time in my life where I had started a PhD program at Purdue. And it was just overall not a great experience. I went in gung-ho. I'm going to be a scientist and all this stuff. And then the hard reality of pipetting in a lab and having an advisor breathing down your neck is like, I can't do this anymore. I'm out.
So my plan was to get a job because I had a degree. I was like, let me get a job as a dietician. Unfortunately, that didn't really work out. And I ended up in my dad's basement.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:48)
What was the timing of this? This was what year roughly?

**Brian Dean** (3:52)
This was 2008 So I think the book was relatively new then.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:56)
Yeah, 2008 That would have been a year after publication, let's just say. And also not exactly the hottest job market for people who may not recall. It was a tough time overall because of the financial crisis.

**Brian Dean** (4:07)
Totally unbeknownst to me as going to graduate school, spending most of my time at bars drinking. The great financial crisis was like over my head. Never heard of it until I tried to get a job. And suddenly it became very real, very fast. I was in my dad's basement, broke, no girlfriend, obviously. No real prospects, like I'm just kind of lazily applying for jobs every morning and just sitting around and watching Jerry Springer in the afternoon. That's pretty much my day. And then one day I have an idea, I'm like, I should start something.