RPF-0058-Sick_Day-Tim_Ferris_Excerpt
00:00:00.000 | Hey parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids day
00:00:04.960 | presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now
00:00:10.480 | at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones.
00:00:14.960 | Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host, Joshua Sheets. This is a special
00:00:20.320 | sick day edition of the show. If you're not a normal listener, please check back for some of
00:00:25.040 | the more "normal" shows if you'd like to get a flavor of the show. This is just a special
00:00:30.800 | sick day version where I'm releasing some content that I think will be thought-provoking so as to
00:00:35.920 | make sure that the audience has something to keep them going each day. If you're a daily listener,
00:00:42.080 | you'll notice that this was actually released out of order. That's because I was flat on my back and
00:00:45.760 | unable to record the show. Today I want to bring your attention to a piece of audio that I recently
00:00:51.280 | heard when listening to Tim Ferriss' interview with Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly is the founder of
00:00:59.120 | Wired Magazine. I had known him as that, but I had no idea how interesting his life was
00:01:04.240 | until I listened to this interview. Again, this is on The Tim Ferriss Show, which is a podcast that
00:01:09.600 | Tim has started, which is really quite enjoyable. I haven't listened to all of the episodes,
00:01:13.280 | but the ones that I've listened to have really enjoyed the interviews that he's conducted.
00:01:17.920 | What I was struck by in this selection of audio is I was struck by hearing somebody completely
00:01:24.160 | independently talk about some of the concepts that we've talked about here on the show,
00:01:29.840 | specifically about designing your own path and also about figuring out how to cut the fear
00:01:38.560 | out of financial insecurity. I think you'll find some of these concepts interesting. This is a
00:01:44.560 | nine-minute piece of audio. I encourage you to check for the link in the show notes or just go
00:01:48.880 | over to the fourhourblog.com/podcast, which is where Tim hosts his show, and look for the three
00:01:55.280 | episodes with his interview with Kevin Kelly. I don't know much about Kevin, or Mr. Kelly,
00:02:00.720 | I guess I should call him. I don't know much about him. I haven't read any of his books before,
00:02:04.320 | but I have certainly put him on my list now as someone that I'm interested in getting to know
00:02:08.480 | a little bit. Usually I mean that in the reading his work and studying his work sense,
00:02:14.160 | although I'd be honored to meet him at some point. He sounds like quite the Renaissance man,
00:02:18.960 | and he sounds like somebody who probably, if my gut instinct is any indication,
00:02:25.760 | probably embodies many of the ideas and the ideals that I think we strive for.
00:02:30.800 | In the interview, you'll hear that if you'll go and listen to the full show, I'm only excerpting
00:02:35.680 | a nine-minute section. In the interview, though, you'll hear he's quite the Renaissance man,
00:02:40.720 | interested and involved in many unique things. It just seems like he's built a life out of doing
00:02:46.000 | things that he loves. I don't know anything about his financial situation. I would imagine that he
00:02:52.320 | is living well comfortably. I don't know if he is wealthy or not. He and Tim later in the interview
00:02:58.560 | that I've not excerpted, but they talk some about the values of being rich and the values of not
00:03:03.120 | being rich. It's also an interesting part of the show. He really just sounds like someone who's
00:03:08.240 | built a life and a lifestyle that he loves to live. He sounds really unique. He sounds like a
00:03:13.600 | neat guy. I'm definitely going to go and start reading some of his books and getting to know him
00:03:17.760 | a little bit more as a person through his work. Nothing else for right now. Enjoy this nine-minute
00:03:24.000 | excerpt of the interview and consider some of the personal finance lessons in this nine-minute
00:03:30.960 | excerpt. If you're interested in more, follow the link through or go over to the 4-Hour Blog
00:03:36.640 | or look up the Tim Ferriss Show on iTunes or on whatever podcatcher you use. I hope you enjoy
00:03:43.280 | that. I'll be back as soon as I can with normal shows. Thanks for listening.
00:03:47.600 | You do have, of course, a background. A lot of people are familiar with your background
00:03:53.600 | with Wired, but perhaps you could give folks a bit of background on yourself.
00:03:59.120 | Is it true that you dropped out of college after one year?
00:04:03.520 | Yeah, I'm a college dropout. Actually, my one regret in life is that one year that I gave.
00:04:08.640 | Oh, no kidding. No kidding.
00:04:09.920 | Yeah, I wish I had just even skipped that. I do understand how college can be useful to people.
00:04:16.560 | My own children have gone through, but for me, it was just not the right thing. I went to Asia
00:04:24.800 | instead. I like to tell myself that I gave my own self a PhD in East Asian Studies
00:04:32.720 | by traveling around and photographing very remote parts of Asia at a time when it was
00:04:39.200 | in a transition from the ancient world to the modern world. I did many other things as well.
00:04:45.680 | For me, it was a very formative time because I did enough things that when I finally got my
00:04:51.760 | first real job at the age of 35— Wow. Which job was that?
00:04:57.760 | I worked for a non-profit at $10 an hour, which was the Whole Earth Catalog.
00:05:03.040 | Which had been a lifelong dream. If I said, "If I'm going to have a job, that's the job I want,"
00:05:07.760 | it took me a long time to get it. But in between that, I did many things, including starting
00:05:13.120 | businesses and selling businesses and doing other kinds of things, more adventures. I
00:05:20.080 | highly recommend it. I got involved in Starting Wired and Running Wired for a while. I hired a
00:05:26.000 | lot of people who were coming right out of college. They were internists. They would do the
00:05:31.600 | intern thing. They were good, and we would hire them. After 10 years, this was their first and
00:05:39.280 | only job. I kept telling them, "Why are you here? What are you doing? You should be fooling around,
00:05:47.360 | wasting time, trying something crazy. Why are you working a real job? I don't understand it."
00:05:55.200 | I really recommend Slack. I'm a big believer in this thing of doing something that's not
00:06:05.120 | productive. Productive is for your middle ages. When you're young, you want to be prolific and
00:06:12.240 | make and do things, but you don't want to measure them in terms of productivity. You want to measure
00:06:17.680 | them in terms of extreme performance. You want to measure them in extreme satisfaction. It's
00:06:25.040 | a time to try stuff. Explore the extremes. Exactly. Explore the possibilities. There are
00:06:32.800 | so many possibilities. There's more every day. It's called premature optimization.
00:06:38.400 | You really want to use this time to continue to do things. By the way, premature optimization is a
00:06:47.280 | problem of success, too. It's not just the problem of the young. It's the problem of the successful
00:06:51.440 | more than even of the young. We'll get to that. That's a long answer.
00:06:55.520 | That might turn into a therapy session for me at this precise moment in time, in fact.
00:06:59.280 | Yes, exactly. When you are exploring that Slack, I would imagine many people feel pressured,
00:07:06.720 | whether it's internal pressure or societal, familial pressure, to get a real job, to support
00:07:12.400 | themselves. A lot of the decisions are made out of fear. They worry about being out on the streets,
00:07:17.440 | or it's a nebulous terror or anxiety. How did you support yourself, for instance,
00:07:22.640 | while you were traveling through Asia when you left school?
00:07:25.600 | I totally understand this anxiety and fear and stuff. Here's the thing. I think one of the many
00:07:31.920 | life skills you want to actually learn at a fairly young age is the skill of being ultra-thrifty,
00:07:39.920 | minimal, this little wisp that is traveling through time. In the sense of learning how
00:07:46.560 | little you actually need to live, not just in survival mode, but in a contented mode.
00:07:53.120 | I learned that pretty early by backpacking and doing other things, especially in Asia. I could
00:08:00.080 | be very happy with very, very little. You could go onto websites and stuff and look at the minimum
00:08:06.160 | amount of food, say, that you need to live, your basic protein and carbohydrates and vitamins,
00:08:13.600 | and how much, actually, if you bought them in bulk, how much it would cost. You build your
00:08:18.800 | own house, live in a shelter, a tiny house. You don't need very much. I think trying that out,
00:08:25.200 | building your house on the pond like Thoreau, who was a hero of mine in high school, is
00:08:30.160 | a not just a simple exercise, it's a profound exercise because it allows you to get over the
00:08:36.480 | anxiety. Even if you aren't living like that, you know that if the worst came to worst,
00:08:42.240 | you could keep going at a very low rate and be content. That gives you the confidence
00:08:49.600 | to take a risk because you say, "What's the worst that could happen?" Well, the worst that could
00:08:54.560 | happen is that I'd have a backpack and a sleeping bag, and I'd be eating oatmeal and whatever,
00:09:01.440 | and I'd be fine. I think if you do that once or twice, you don't necessarily have to live like
00:09:07.600 | that, but knowing that you can be content is tremendously empowering. That's what I did.
00:09:14.480 | That's basically what I did. It was living in Asia where the people around me had less than I did,
00:09:20.160 | and they were pretty content. You realize, "Oh my gosh, I don't really need very much to be happy."
00:09:27.120 | And did you save up money beforehand with odd jobs, or did you do odd jobs while on the road,
00:09:32.080 | a bit of both? I did odd jobs before I left. I was traveling in Asia at a time when the
00:09:38.480 | price differential was so great that it actually made sense for me to fly back on a charter flight
00:09:48.000 | to the US and work for four or five months. I worked basically odd jobs. I worked from
00:09:54.560 | working in a warehouse, packaging athletic shoes, working in a technical sense of a—it's
00:10:01.600 | really hard to describe, but it was a photography-related job where we were reducing
00:10:08.480 | printed circuit boards down to little sizes to be shipped off to be printed, and driving cars to
00:10:14.720 | whatever else I could find. That, at that time, made more money. I could live probably two years
00:10:24.800 | from those couple months of work. I didn't really work while I was traveling until I got to Iran
00:10:31.120 | in the late '70s. There, there was a very high-paying job, which was teaching English to the
00:10:39.920 | Iranian pilots who worked for the Shah. But I had sworn I was never going to teach English,
00:10:44.640 | so I actually got a job in Bellahat Helicopter, who was teaching English to the pilots. My job
00:10:52.080 | was running a little newsletter for the American community there. I worked there until I was thrown
00:10:58.000 | out by the coup. That was another story. Why did that—
00:11:01.520 | Now, just a couple of comments. Number one, for those people listening who are saying to
00:11:06.400 | themselves, already perhaps creating reasons why they can't do what you did now due to different
00:11:12.240 | economic climate or whatnot, it is entirely possible to replicate what you did. You just
00:11:17.200 | have to choose your locations wisely for that type of differential.
00:11:20.080 | Yeah, absolutely.
00:11:20.960 | And I should also just mention to people that part of the reason I'm so attracted to Stoic
00:11:26.240 | philosophy, whether that be Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, is exactly because of the practice of
00:11:33.360 | poverty. Not because you want to be poor, but so that you recognize not only that you can subsist,
00:11:39.040 | but then you can potentially be content, or even in some cases be more content, with a bare minimum.
00:11:45.440 | So for people who are more interested in that, I highly recommend a lot of the Stoic writings,
00:11:48.720 | and you can search for those on my blog and elsewhere.
00:11:50.800 | Let me just add to that. There's actually a New Age version of that that was popular a
00:11:56.000 | generation ago, and the search term there is "volunteer simplicity."
00:12:00.080 | Volunteer simplicity.
00:12:02.400 | Right. And so the idea is poverty is terrible when it's mandatory, when you have no choice,
00:12:07.600 | but a volunteer version of that is very, very powerful. And I think attaching names sometimes
00:12:13.520 | to things, it makes it more legitimate. But imagine yourself practicing voluntary simplicity.
00:12:19.200 | And that, I think, is part of that Stoic philosophy. But there was a whole kind of a
00:12:23.440 | movement. A lot of the hippie dropouts were kind of practicing a similar thing, and there was,
00:12:28.800 | you know, a whole best practices that resolved around that. You can make up your own. But I
00:12:34.800 | think it's, to me, an essential skill, a life skill, that people should acquire.
00:12:40.000 | And when you go backpacking and stuff like that, that's part of it. That's the beginnings of trying
00:12:45.120 | to understand what it is that you need to live as a being. And you can fill that out in any way you
00:12:52.160 | want. But that's a good way to experiment. Hey, parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday,
00:12:56.880 | November 25th, for an unforgettable Kids Day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways,
00:13:02.080 | and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and
00:13:07.120 | create lasting memories with your little ones.