Easy Money, No Sweat is a book about refusing work without refusing money. It takes the form of a staged conversation between a human and an AI, but that framing is a misdirection. What unfolds is not a transcript, not a novelty, and not a tech demo. It is a deliberately constructed performance that uses AI as both collaborator and antagonist to interrogate the fantasy of passive income, the cultural obsession with productivity, and the quiet desperation that underwrites modern labor. The premise is blunt and intentionally crass: how can I make enough money to survive without having to work? Not optimize work. Not find fulfilling work. Not “do what I love.” Just stop working as much as possible. Ideally, almost entirely. The AI is asked to solve this problem, again and again, from every angle. It offers strategies, systems, efficiencies, and loops. Some are practical. Some are hollow. Some begin to feel unsettling. None deliver salvation. As the conversation progresses, the book slowly reveals that this failure is the point. Rather than presenting a single solution, Easy Money, No Sweat exposes the machinery behind the promise of effortless wealth. It shows how automation, hustle culture, self-help language, and AI optimism all recycle the same moral demand: that time must be earned through labor, even when the labor itself becomes increasingly abstract, automated, or meaningless. Formally, the book slides out of its own genre. What begins as an interview becomes something closer to theater. The human narrator flattens himself into a caricature: lazy, blunt, unambitious, allergic to effort. This is not a confession. It’s a strategy. By presenting himself as one-dimensional, the book clears space to examine the system without psychologizing it away. Laziness becomes a critical tool rather than a flaw to be corrected. The AI, meanwhile, is not treated as a magical oracle or a villain. It is credited as a collaborator and allowed to speak at length. Its confidence, repetition, and procedural logic begin to resemble ideology. Over time, its advice starts to sound like liturgy. Efficiency becomes a mantra. Optimization becomes a ritual. The conversation takes on the rhythm of a séance, or a customer service call that never quite resolves. Despite its conceptual structure, Easy Money, No Sweat is not an abstract cultural object. It contains real, usable information. The income strategies discussed are viable. The systems described can work. The book does not sabotage its own utility. Instead, it insists on showing utility and absurdity at the same time. The reader is invited to learn how the machine functions while watching it function on them. Humor is central. The tone is dry, skeptical, occasionally hostile, and often funny in a way that sneaks up on you. Jokes land sideways. Repetition becomes comedy, then discomfort, then meaning. The book is irreverent without being cute, critical without being academic, and serious without pretending seriousness is a virtue. At its core, Easy Money, No Sweat is anti-capitalist, but it is not utopian. It does not imagine a clean exit from the system. It operates inside the contradiction: needing money while rejecting the moral framework that justifies how money is distributed. The book doesn’t argue for dignity through work. It argues for dignity through time, rest, and refusal. This is a book for people who are exhausted by ambition, suspicious of motivation, and unconvinced that suffering is evidence of character. It’s for readers who want practical leverage without ideological consolation. It’s for anyone who has sensed that the future of work is already broken and would like to stop pretending otherwise. Easy Money, No Sweat plays the passive-income game seriously enough to reveal its limits. It treats AI not as a savior, but as a mirror. And it asks a question that most systems work very hard to avoid: What if the problem isn’t that we haven’t figured out how to work less but that we still believe we should have to earn the right to stop?
Easy Money, No Sweat is a staged conversation between a human and an AI about making a living without working. It’s a real guide, a satire, and a performance that plays the passive-income game while quietly dismantling it.