Hey parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host, Joshua Sheets.

This is a special sick day edition of the show. If you're not a normal listener, please check back for some of the more "normal" shows if you'd like to get a flavor of the show. This is just a special sick day version where I'm releasing some content that I think will be thought-provoking so as to make sure that the audience has something to keep them going each day.

If you're a daily listener, you'll notice that this was actually released out of order. That's because I was flat on my back and unable to record the show. Today I want to bring your attention to a piece of audio that I recently heard when listening to Tim Ferriss' interview with Kevin Kelly.

Kevin Kelly is the founder of Wired Magazine. I had known him as that, but I had no idea how interesting his life was until I listened to this interview. Again, this is on The Tim Ferriss Show, which is a podcast that Tim has started, which is really quite enjoyable.

I haven't listened to all of the episodes, but the ones that I've listened to have really enjoyed the interviews that he's conducted. What I was struck by in this selection of audio is I was struck by hearing somebody completely independently talk about some of the concepts that we've talked about here on the show, specifically about designing your own path and also about figuring out how to cut the fear out of financial insecurity.

I think you'll find some of these concepts interesting. This is a nine-minute piece of audio. I encourage you to check for the link in the show notes or just go over to the fourhourblog.com/podcast, which is where Tim hosts his show, and look for the three episodes with his interview with Kevin Kelly.

I don't know much about Kevin, or Mr. Kelly, I guess I should call him. I don't know much about him. I haven't read any of his books before, but I have certainly put him on my list now as someone that I'm interested in getting to know a little bit.

Usually I mean that in the reading his work and studying his work sense, although I'd be honored to meet him at some point. He sounds like quite the Renaissance man, and he sounds like somebody who probably, if my gut instinct is any indication, probably embodies many of the ideas and the ideals that I think we strive for.

In the interview, you'll hear that if you'll go and listen to the full show, I'm only excerpting a nine-minute section. In the interview, though, you'll hear he's quite the Renaissance man, interested and involved in many unique things. It just seems like he's built a life out of doing things that he loves.

I don't know anything about his financial situation. I would imagine that he is living well comfortably. I don't know if he is wealthy or not. He and Tim later in the interview that I've not excerpted, but they talk some about the values of being rich and the values of not being rich.

It's also an interesting part of the show. He really just sounds like someone who's built a life and a lifestyle that he loves to live. He sounds really unique. He sounds like a neat guy. I'm definitely going to go and start reading some of his books and getting to know him a little bit more as a person through his work.

Nothing else for right now. Enjoy this nine-minute excerpt of the interview and consider some of the personal finance lessons in this nine-minute excerpt. If you're interested in more, follow the link through or go over to the 4-Hour Blog or look up the Tim Ferriss Show on iTunes or on whatever podcatcher you use.

I hope you enjoy that. I'll be back as soon as I can with normal shows. Thanks for listening. You do have, of course, a background. A lot of people are familiar with your background with Wired, but perhaps you could give folks a bit of background on yourself. Is it true that you dropped out of college after one year?

Yeah, I'm a college dropout. Actually, my one regret in life is that one year that I gave. Oh, no kidding. No kidding. Yeah, I wish I had just even skipped that. I do understand how college can be useful to people. My own children have gone through, but for me, it was just not the right thing.

I went to Asia instead. I like to tell myself that I gave my own self a PhD in East Asian Studies by traveling around and photographing very remote parts of Asia at a time when it was in a transition from the ancient world to the modern world. I did many other things as well.

For me, it was a very formative time because I did enough things that when I finally got my first real job at the age of 35— Wow. Which job was that? I worked for a non-profit at $10 an hour, which was the Whole Earth Catalog. Which had been a lifelong dream.

If I said, "If I'm going to have a job, that's the job I want," it took me a long time to get it. But in between that, I did many things, including starting businesses and selling businesses and doing other kinds of things, more adventures. I highly recommend it. I got involved in Starting Wired and Running Wired for a while.

I hired a lot of people who were coming right out of college. They were internists. They would do the intern thing. They were good, and we would hire them. After 10 years, this was their first and only job. I kept telling them, "Why are you here? What are you doing?

You should be fooling around, wasting time, trying something crazy. Why are you working a real job? I don't understand it." I really recommend Slack. I'm a big believer in this thing of doing something that's not productive. Productive is for your middle ages. When you're young, you want to be prolific and make and do things, but you don't want to measure them in terms of productivity.

You want to measure them in terms of extreme performance. You want to measure them in extreme satisfaction. It's a time to try stuff. Explore the extremes. Exactly. Explore the possibilities. There are so many possibilities. There's more every day. It's called premature optimization. You really want to use this time to continue to do things.

By the way, premature optimization is a problem of success, too. It's not just the problem of the young. It's the problem of the successful more than even of the young. We'll get to that. That's a long answer. That might turn into a therapy session for me at this precise moment in time, in fact.

Yes, exactly. When you are exploring that Slack, I would imagine many people feel pressured, whether it's internal pressure or societal, familial pressure, to get a real job, to support themselves. A lot of the decisions are made out of fear. They worry about being out on the streets, or it's a nebulous terror or anxiety.

How did you support yourself, for instance, while you were traveling through Asia when you left school? I totally understand this anxiety and fear and stuff. Here's the thing. I think one of the many life skills you want to actually learn at a fairly young age is the skill of being ultra-thrifty, minimal, this little wisp that is traveling through time.

In the sense of learning how little you actually need to live, not just in survival mode, but in a contented mode. I learned that pretty early by backpacking and doing other things, especially in Asia. I could be very happy with very, very little. You could go onto websites and stuff and look at the minimum amount of food, say, that you need to live, your basic protein and carbohydrates and vitamins, and how much, actually, if you bought them in bulk, how much it would cost.

You build your own house, live in a shelter, a tiny house. You don't need very much. I think trying that out, building your house on the pond like Thoreau, who was a hero of mine in high school, is a not just a simple exercise, it's a profound exercise because it allows you to get over the anxiety.

Even if you aren't living like that, you know that if the worst came to worst, you could keep going at a very low rate and be content. That gives you the confidence to take a risk because you say, "What's the worst that could happen?" Well, the worst that could happen is that I'd have a backpack and a sleeping bag, and I'd be eating oatmeal and whatever, and I'd be fine.

I think if you do that once or twice, you don't necessarily have to live like that, but knowing that you can be content is tremendously empowering. That's what I did. That's basically what I did. It was living in Asia where the people around me had less than I did, and they were pretty content.

You realize, "Oh my gosh, I don't really need very much to be happy." And did you save up money beforehand with odd jobs, or did you do odd jobs while on the road, a bit of both? I did odd jobs before I left. I was traveling in Asia at a time when the price differential was so great that it actually made sense for me to fly back on a charter flight to the US and work for four or five months.

I worked basically odd jobs. I worked from working in a warehouse, packaging athletic shoes, working in a technical sense of a—it's really hard to describe, but it was a photography-related job where we were reducing printed circuit boards down to little sizes to be shipped off to be printed, and driving cars to whatever else I could find.

That, at that time, made more money. I could live probably two years from those couple months of work. I didn't really work while I was traveling until I got to Iran in the late '70s. There, there was a very high-paying job, which was teaching English to the Iranian pilots who worked for the Shah.

But I had sworn I was never going to teach English, so I actually got a job in Bellahat Helicopter, who was teaching English to the pilots. My job was running a little newsletter for the American community there. I worked there until I was thrown out by the coup. That was another story.

Why did that— Now, just a couple of comments. Number one, for those people listening who are saying to themselves, already perhaps creating reasons why they can't do what you did now due to different economic climate or whatnot, it is entirely possible to replicate what you did. You just have to choose your locations wisely for that type of differential.

Yeah, absolutely. And I should also just mention to people that part of the reason I'm so attracted to Stoic philosophy, whether that be Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, is exactly because of the practice of poverty. Not because you want to be poor, but so that you recognize not only that you can subsist, but then you can potentially be content, or even in some cases be more content, with a bare minimum.

So for people who are more interested in that, I highly recommend a lot of the Stoic writings, and you can search for those on my blog and elsewhere. Let me just add to that. There's actually a New Age version of that that was popular a generation ago, and the search term there is "volunteer simplicity." Volunteer simplicity.

Right. And so the idea is poverty is terrible when it's mandatory, when you have no choice, but a volunteer version of that is very, very powerful. And I think attaching names sometimes to things, it makes it more legitimate. But imagine yourself practicing voluntary simplicity. And that, I think, is part of that Stoic philosophy.

But there was a whole kind of a movement. A lot of the hippie dropouts were kind of practicing a similar thing, and there was, you know, a whole best practices that resolved around that. You can make up your own. But I think it's, to me, an essential skill, a life skill, that people should acquire.

And when you go backpacking and stuff like that, that's part of it. That's the beginnings of trying to understand what it is that you need to live as a being. And you can fill that out in any way you want. But that's a good way to experiment. Hey, parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th, for an unforgettable Kids Day presented by Pear Deck.

Family fun, giveaways, and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones.