Alastair Humphreys is a 47-year-old British adventurer, author, and speaker who has cycled around the world, rowed across the Atlantic, busked with a violin across Spain, and made a career from telling his stories and encouraging others to live more adventurously (alastairhumphreys.com).
Alastair talks about the “push” and “pull” factors that drive certain people toward lives of wanderlust and adventure. At age 24, he couldn’t imagine becoming a science teacher and decided to embark upon a very long bike trip instead. Four years later, his round-the-world cycle tour only deepened his thirst for adventure, prompting him to turn it into a career: one he sustains through writing, speaking, filmmaking, podcasting, and brand sponsorships.
What motivates Alastair? Initially, it was the desire to make the most of life—it drove him crazy to see how many privileged people squandered their opportunities. Now he’s less manic and more fired up about thorny environmental problems. Most consistent is Alastair’s “complete aversion to a high-stress life.”
Is adventure only for privileged people? Alastair takes a nuanced position, both admitting the reality and encouraging a proactive, opportunity-focused mindset. He also discusses how adventures are different from vacations—because they necessarily involve uncertainty, risk, and discomfort—but emphasizes that they come in all sizes, and it’s not useful to compare your own adventures to those of others.
In the early 2000s, Alastair scraped together £7000 for his round-the-world trip and made it last for four full years by living like a total dirtbag. He then set himself a goal of earning as much from adventure as he might as a teacher. Now that he’s achieved a reliable income, he works less and spends more time as a stay-at-home dad. Eventually he hopes to earn his living entirely from writing.
Alastair’s passions have mellowed with age, but he still finds himself yearning for raw, uncertain adventure at times: impulses that he channels into a curiosity for his local area (a “mundane, suburban corner of England”) and discovering unexpected pockets of wildness and solitude. His advice for adventure-curious young people is almost always “Go!”, even if it doesn’t make sense or fit neatly into a life plan.
Spiritually, Alastair describes growing up Christian-curious but finding “no evidence of higher powers” on his cycle journey. Now he’s an atheist with a deep interest in awe, grace, and mystery.
Find Alastair Humphreys on every online platform except TikTok. He’s currently finishing up a children’s book about the Lewis & Clark expedition.
(I was looking forward to interviewing Alastair for a very long time. You may detect this in my gushing praise and rambling questions.)
Full transcript: dirtbagrich.com/alastair
Recorded in November 2024.
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Summary
The interview features Alastair Humphries discussing his life centered around adventure and how he transformed it into a sustainable career. He explains that adventure-seeking individuals are driven by both positive pulls (nature, excitement, adrenaline) and negative pushes (reluctance to conform to normal life). Humphries shares his journey from being a potential teacher to becoming a full-time adventurer, starting with his four-year cycling trip around the world. He discusses how he developed multiple revenue streams through speaking engagements, writing books, and brand ambassadorships. The conversation covers his evolution from pursuing grand adventures to finding meaning in local exploration, his approach to work-life balance, and his current focus on writing children’s books and environmental themes. Throughout the interview, Humphries emphasizes the importance of making adventure accessible while acknowledging privilege, and how he’s managed to create a sustainable lifestyle that balances adventure with family responsibilities.
Chapters
Origins of Adventure Obsession
Alastair Humphreys discusses the common traits among adventure enthusiasts, highlighting a combination of positive pulls towards nature and excitement, as well as negative pushes away from conventional lifestyles. He emphasizes the struggle with authority, the desire for autonomy, and the appeal of wanderlust as driving factors for those drawn to adventure.
Personal Turning Point
Humphreys shares a pivotal moment in his life during his final year at university. Faced with the prospect of a teaching career, he realized the potential monotony of a conventional life path. This realization led him to reject a job offer and embark on a cycling journey around the world, marking the beginning of his adventure-focused lifestyle.
Evolution of Adventure Perspective
The interview explores Humphreys’ changing views on adventure over time. From initially seeking extreme challenges and uncertainty, he has evolved to appreciate smaller, local adventures and find wonder in everyday surroundings. This shift reflects a balance between his younger self’s desire for grand experiences and his current appreciation for simpler pleasures.
Financial Journey as an Adventurer
Humphreys details his financial evolution, from saving for his first major adventure to establishing a career as a self-employed adventurer. He discusses the challenges of earning a living through speaking engagements, writing, and brand partnerships, and his current goal of sustaining himself solely through writing. The conversation also touches on balancing work with family life and personal fulfillment.
Spiritual and Philosophical Outlook
The adventurer shares his spiritual journey, from a Christian upbringing to becoming an atheist with a deep appreciation for awe and wonder. He mentions finding value in stoic philosophy and maintaining a love for spiritual places despite no longer identifying as religious. This section provides insight into how his worldview has been shaped by his global adventures and experiences.
Current Projects and Future Directions
Humphreys discusses his ongoing work on a children’s book about the Lewis and Clark expedition and his plans for a new adult book focusing on nature and environment. He reflects on his decision to abstain from certain social media platforms like TikTok, marking a shift in his approach to self-promotion and audience building as his career evolves.
Transcript
Blake Boles 00:00
Alastair Humphreys, welcome to Dirtbag Rich.
Alastair Humphreys 00:02
Thank you for having me.
Blake Boles 00:04
You’re an adventure guy. You’ve built your life around the concept of adventure, both big and small. And I would like to start by asking, where does your obsession come from? And the other people you’ve met who are similarly fascinated and thralled by adventures, where does it come from for them?Like what’s the common thread between adventure people?
Alastair Humphreys 00:25
This is something I probably can broadly generalize on. Of course, it’s quite risky to lump an entire group of people together. But I think there’s probably some commonalities between all the people I know who love adventure and certainly myself included in this, which is a sort of push and pull combination.So I think there is the pull of nature and excitement and adrenaline and peace and quiet and fun and sports and physical and mental time in nature in the wild and all these sort of good positive things that draw us towards adventure.And then I’d say, certainly for myself and definitely a bunch of my friends in the adventure world, there’s also a push factor, a running away, a reluctance, a fear of or inability to get on with normal life the way that most of our normal friends in our normal peer group do so. So for me, that’s a real reluctance to just do a job that doesn’t excite me.And it seems like a very long time till my retirement if I did that and this may be a struggle with authority and people telling me what to do and the appeal of being my own boss. And perhaps a reluctance or a inability or a struggle to settle down on the endless temptation of wanderlust and horizon.So I think there’s some positive pulls and some perhaps slightly more negative or unconforming pushes in there as well.
Blake Boles 01:58
Can you talk a little bit more about the push stage and especially like when in your young life, maybe even choose a year or an age, you know, did you feel that most acutely and what did it feel like? How did it manifest in your life?
Alastair Humphreys 02:12
A very good example of this would be my final year as a student at university. So I was 23, 24 and all of my friends were getting jobs and careers and professions and I was looking towards becoming a teacher, a high school science teacher and I really enjoyed that.I really enjoyed working in schools, I was good at it, I had a sense that if I stayed in teaching that I would do pretty well and I’d probably become a head teacher and that seemed quite appealing to me. So they were also positive sides, thought yeah this is a good job that I’m up for.But then I’d also look around at the other teachers, when you’re training a trainee teacher you get put into schools and they throw you into the lion’s den of some kids and off you go and do your best.But then you’d meet at lunchtime with the other teachers and there were teachers there who were 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 maybe even 45 years older than me doing exactly the same thing I was doing and this was what started to freak me out a bit.The thought that crikey, I could be teaching photosynthesis and then coming back to eat coffee and cheap biscuits and grumbling about children or being happy about children but doing the same thing for decades and decades and that sort of threw me into a panic of thinking crikey there must be more to life than just doing this one thing.I shouldn’t say just because I’m not trying to demean it in any way but to only do this one thing. So that got me thinking wow I need to do some other stuff before I settle down to a grown up sensible life of being a teacher and that was what pushed me out of the door to go and have my first big adventure. And the final catalyst to that was the the head teacher at this school offered me a job.He said when you graduate at the end of this university year please come be a teacher at our school and that was great that’s a it was quite a compliment and it was reassuring it was a career yes but that was my tipping point moment if I said yes to that invitation then I’d go on and be a teacher and maybe in 20 years take over the guy’s job but I thought this is now and ever so I wrote back to him and said thank you very much for the job offer it’s very kind you but I’m gonna go and cycle around the world instead and that was what put my daydreams and vague adventure hopes into an actual concrete say this out loud it’s gonna happen go bike around the world and what was really reassuring was he wrote back to me and he said you’re making exactly the right decision go have this big adventure it will make you a better teacher one day so that was quite that was great to have his his backing and his endorsement and then off I went and I still haven’t yet got around to being a proper teacher.
Blake Boles 05:05
Yeah, I want to ask you about your role as an educator. I also thought I wanted to become a high school science teacher.And there was this weird contradiction between how I imagined my life as maybe a really good teacher, but then looking at the reality of most teachers who did seem to be very obsessed with tenure and security and kind of just dialing in their algorithm, there’s always the exceptional teachers. And we’d like to believe that we can become the exceptional teacher.But the system itself seemed to really crank out. I’m trying to choose my words carefully here. It seemed to crush a lot of the hopes and ideals that young teachers go into the system with. And yeah, your books, The Moods of Future, Joys, and Thunder and Sunshine, which are the travel narratives you wrote about your four years of cycling around the world, those are excellent, excellent books.I read those when I started cycling to arena. I still recommend them to everyone I meet who even considers riding for more than a few days on their bike. And I learned through that, that you were probably in San Francisco when I was in university at Berkeley around 2004, giving a talk. And I remember hearing your name and learning that you were near the end of this great adventure.And I did not come and hear you speak, probably one of the greatest regrets of my life. Can you just tell everyone what happened when you came back from that first adventure? A lot of people would say, OK, I did the thing and now it’s time to get on with the rest of it. How did the adventure infection continue to gestate in you?
Alastair Humphreys 06:57
Yeah, I was, I cycled away from my front door and from the teaching job and my perfectly nice normal happy life and didn’t come home for over four years. And I set off when I was a 24 year old, I came home, I was about 29 and there’s a lot of life lived in those years.And so it was quite strange to get home from this epic journey, four years on a bike far further and harder than I’d ever imagined I’d be able to stick it out for. So I’d done this massive thing and then I was expecting that I would just drop straight back into my real life exactly as I’d been before.And in some ways I did, it was really, it’s really weird actually how quickly you come back home and you see all your friends and your family and everyone goes, oh, you’ve cycled around the world and you go to the pub and you have a drink and you talk about it. And then after about 10 minutes, they’re like, yeah, that’s enough about that talk adventure chat.Let’s get on and talk about something else. And then real life just carries on again. And in one sense, that was lovely. It was really nice to reconnect with my life and settle down again. But on the other hand, I think I’d been affected by a lot of stuff from spending four years on my own out in the wild places of the world. And I found it hard to settle down.I think I’d imagined that going all the way around the world would scratch the itch because I’d have seen everything and done everything and therefore there was nothing else to do. But actually going all the way around the world really just showed me how little of the world I’d seen and how much there was out there and how many different things might be interesting and exciting to do in life.And so it didn’t at all dampen down my wanderlust rather inflamed it. But nonetheless, I did try to settle down to real life. I hung out with the same friends as I did before, did the same sort of social things, and I got a job as a teacher. So I spent a year teaching in a school in London and I enjoyed it very much.About two thirds of the way through the year I thought, oh man, there’s another 44 years of this ahead of me. I should go do some more adventures before I become a teacher forever. So I quit that job after one year and then I thought, right, I’m going to try and see if I can make a career out of adventure. Can I somehow turn all of this adventure stuff into a way of life?And I’ve been doing that ever since. That was in 2008, so crikey, 16 years of avoiding a proper job since then.
Blake Boles 09:46
I want to go back to what you said about thinking that you would scratch the itch, but really it just fan the flame. And I think that families that feel concerned about their, their young adult children going off to do some sort of adventures because they say, well, maybe you’ll never rejoin this path to safety and security. I mean, they have a point, right? You just illustrated this.Do you feel like you’re like recruiting for a cult when you go out and promote adventure and, and you say like, Hey, don’t wait. Go do the big adventures or the small, just do any form of adventure now instead of postponing it to the future.Like you are, you are potentially radically shaping people’s lives in a way that they are departing from this path of normalcy and ostensible security and they might never go back. Like, how do you feel about that? How do you feel about your role in the world promoting these kinds of ideas?
Alastair Humphreys 10:44
I guess I haven’t really thought about that to be honest, I suppose there’s a few things. I certainly would encourage anyone young who gets the opportunity to go on an adventure and travel and explore. I’ve met very few people who’ve regretted going on an adventure in their life, but I’ve met plenty of people who’ve regretted not doing it.And I think if you go off on, go off traveling and exploring, doing some volunteering overseas, something like whatever it is, it doesn’t really matter.I think the worst thing that’s probably going to happen is you just think, oh, man, I don’t like this, I don’t like traveling, I don’t like adventuring, I like my normal life back home and you go back home and that’s great because you’ve scratched the itch, you’ve got it out of your system, you’ve had a new perspective on your normal life and you realize you like it and that’s great, fantastic, nothing lost there.What happens if you go off and have a wonderful time and a wonderful experience and you realize this is an interesting way to self-development and maybe doing some good for the world and making the world and yourself better, that’s also a good thing. I think it would be an odd thing for parents to not want their young people to want to live a life full of purpose and adventure and meaning.And then I think there’s actually very few people who would actually try and go down the route that I’ve gone down and a lot of people go off and big adventures come home and they have scratched the itch and they are able to settle down and enjoy real life and that’s fantastic.And then of those very small percentage of people who still want to just keep doing more and more and more of it, I imagine there are very few who actually successfully managed to pay for their entire life out of doing adventures. Most people will get some sort of quote normal job, I mean being a high school teacher is perfect for this.You get long, you get paid alright, you get long vacations, that’s a perfect combination for going off and having adventures. So I think to actually then do the sort of things I’ve done of speaking and writing and all this side of things, that’s actually quite a different creative career on top of the actual travel thing.So I think most parents should be encouraging young people to go and push their limits a little bit when they’re younger.
Blake Boles 13:04
For those who are not familiar with you, can you just quickly summarize the many different ways that you, you’re offering things to the world, what you’re putting out there, how you’re making money.
Alastair Humphreys 13:14
So once I decided to quit being a teacher and commit to trying to pay the bills through adventures, one was trying to write articles for magazines, travel magazines, adventure magazines, newspapers, stuff like that. And you get paid a bit of money for every time you write an article.And then secondly was giving talks, talks about adventures, uncomfortable phrase for it would be motivational speaking of some sort. But essentially, you’re giving talks, which are hopefully entertaining and interesting, but with a bit of a message in there as well.And that’s what I really began doing in earnest to pay for my life because I started doing that in schools, elementary schools, senior schools, then anyone who’d have me go talk to a bunch of kids, tell them some stories, and the school pays you a bit of money.And what’s great about that is that there are an infinite number of schools and every year, all the, let’s say, 12 year olds have moved on so that next year you can go back to the same school and to talk to all the 12 year olds again, and on and on it goes.And so I managed to build up giving talks in schools into pretty much paying for my life and gradually moved from talking in schools into corporate speaking events, which has the singular benefit of paying considerably better. And that was a really important hustle phase of wow, I now need to earn some money this week, what am I going to do? So that was giving the talks at schools.And once I laid down the foundation of doing loads and loads and loads of talks, I then had enough breathing room to start writing books, which I really enjoy. And then over the years, I’ve moved from writing books to making small films, doing podcasts, growing on online audience through newsletters and social media, and just building up multiple revenue streams.But essentially, writing and speaking are the key things that have paid my life for the last 16 years or so.
Blake Boles 15:09
You have an incredible amount of stuff out there. Just anyone who visits your website sees a long history of blog posts, all these movies, so many books. You have your active newsletter shouting from the shed, but you also have these kind of standalone newsletters that are delivered automatically. You have multiple podcasts that are there waiting for anyone to listen to.And you seem to run your own online store, which is now totally based in the UK. And do you fulfill your own orders?
Alastair Humphreys 15:39
For many years, many, many years, I sent all of my books out myself. We can talk about money and percentages as much as you like, but essentially when you write a book and someone buys one of my books on Amazon, I would get between 5 and 10% of the cover price. So let’s say it’s a $10 book, I get 50 cents up to $1 for that book.If I buy hundreds and hundreds of those books and I sell them from my own store, I get roughly 50%. So suddenly getting $5 on a $10 book. So selling books myself has been quite a useful thing to do.And for a lot of years, I also used to sell my books at Torqued, which involved turning up at a venue with a huge bag of heavy books and then hoping that at the end of the evening you walked out of the door with an empty bag.Sometimes it was quite depressing, you’d get on the train with a massive bag of heavy books and then that evening you go home with another, with an almost equally massive bag of unsold books, which is quite depressing.So yeah, my selling of books has been an important thing for me and for many years I would send them all out from home, from boxes under my bed and what was nice about that was I could sign all the books and I could, if someone said, hey, can you put a note in the book to little Jimmy and it says, birthday, I could do it.And this was really important in terms of trying to build up a loyal audience of people who care about you. So I did that for years, but as you can imagine, it’s also quite a hassle. And also taking a pile of, let’s say 50 or 100 books down to the post office to send in the weeks before Christmas, and then you end up with a queue of people out of the post office door.Everyone staring daggers at you and hating you was a bit tedious. So I’ve now outsourced my shop to some warehouse company that does all that for me, which has simplified my life, but lost a bit of the personal touch.
Blake Boles 17:37
I once received that hate in a post office for filling Kickstarter orders. It was a truly unique feeling. So I want to talk about this existence you have as a content, excuse me for using the phrase content creator, as a producer of words and videos and running this online store. And the tension between that and your life and your persona as an adventure person.And I think most people are probably familiar with you via the micro adventure meme that you threw out into the world circa 2011. And you were named adventure of the year by National Geographic for this. And you have been telling people to go out there and to do this stuff. And I wonder what’s the balance of time?What I’m considering in this podcast are people who find this magical balance of money, time and purpose. And people like you who have done these huge adventures and you also do micro adventures, but you’re also doing all this stuff behind the scenes. How does it balance out? And do you actually have a sense of spaciousness? Do you have a relatively low stress existence?Do you feel like you have genuine quietness and free time? Or is every moment sucked up with like building and sustaining your empire?
Alastair Humphreys 18:55
Empire, I like that word. Um, I think there are well, it varies over different phases of my life, but I suppose Um, there’s a a few general patterns. So in the early days Let’s say when I was cycling around the world.I had literally four years of adventure 24 hours a day seven days a week That was me living 100% adventure the downside to that of course was that uh, I was basically had no money and uh and I was broke and Uh, that’s uh fun for an adventure phase, but it’s not really building of a sensible grown-up sort of life So that’s one ultimate extreme bit and then I suppose i’m now at the Furthest extreme the other way i’ve been which is that I haven’t done a a big adventure for a long time really And i’m spending increasing amounts of time in my shared writing books so Um, which means i’m doing I guess more work and less adventure so that there’s a a um Huge spectrum there and where you choose to be on that spectrum Is kind of up to you in terms of your needs and wants in life Is this a time of your life where you need to be making some money or is this a time in your life where you want to be Out riding your bike in the sunshine and enjoying that so there’s a full range in those things um, one of the great things and the very first question you asked me was about um, the the um Traits that sort of pushed you pushed me towards this Lifestyle that i’ve chosen.But one thing that’s very much in there is a complete aversion to a high stress life So there are times when my working life talks and events and things have got quite busy busy busy Which on the one hand has been good because that’s been I guess in some ways successful So earning more money, but as i’d start to find that quite stressful It’s being self-employed then means i’m in a position to just choose to Axe parts of my life to try and reduce stress So I think people are quite familiar with the notion of having a to-do list But i’ve worked quite hard over the years on having a not to-do list which is looking at the aspects of my working life Which I really don’t enjoy or thrive from and cutting them out Um, and so i’ve been able to therefore take quite good control over managing the stress levels of my life
Blake Boles 21:19
So there’s a lot of clear ways in which adventure is very sexy and fun and meaningful, but I again want to flip this upside down and ask, what is it that I’m let me just ask very straightforwardly. What is it that you hate? What do you hate seeing in the world?Maybe what is it that you hated when you were young and you, maybe you still hate today, feel free to replace the word hate with like disgust or frustrated or dismay. But what do you feel is wrong in the world that, that you leading a life centered on adventure and promoting this idea can somehow maybe rectify in some small way.
Alastair Humphreys 22:00
Well, I feel as a deeply flawed person myself, I feel very uncomfortable to sort of judge the universe that I’m doing stuff better than anyone else. But I will go along with the premise of your question, which I suppose has evolved for me again. It’s quite interesting talking about these things because my life of adventure, I suppose, has now essentially covered half my life.So it’s quite hard to generalize something which covers me as a young punk in my twenties and now an old man with a with a reading glasses and a gray beard. So there’s a neat there’s there’s again a big spectrum of things.And I suppose in terms of this question, the evolution has been at the start, I was massively, hugely, hugely motivated by making the most of my life of making the very most filling my days, making the most of my opportunities. And it drove me crazy to think how many privileged people were in my judgmental, youthful eyes, not making the most of their opportunities and their days.And that really pushed me to just be busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. And moving forward towards to now I’m far less manic like that, which is probably no bad thing. I very much enjoyed reading Oliver Berkman’s book 4000 weeks, a couple of years ago, I’m much, much more accepting of just doing what I can when I can.What I think really fires me up these days is the catastrophe of our climate and our planet, and yet our individual selfish apathy to not do very much about this and to just keeps of sleepwalking into what seems to me like a fairly huge catastrophe disaster. And that’s what really is agitating me the most these days.And hopefully, my tiny little effort towards this can be trying to somehow make living adventurously be connected to getting out there and saving the universe. Small goals.
Blake Boles 24:17
Manageable goals. Do you have any heroes in this realm of kind of environmental advocacy? Anyone who you read or you were influenced by when you were younger that made you think, okay, I need to go in this direction. I need to contribute to this somehow. Thanks for watching!
Alastair Humphreys 24:33
Well, my days as an eco warrior is really astonishingly recent. I mean, I think back to when I was in my 20s and I cycled all the way around the world for four years on a bicycle and I crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a sailing boat. I mean, this is a fantastic green eco warrior, environmentally friendly, low carbon adventure. Fantastic.If I was doing that now, I would be boasting a lot about how green I was. But what when I think about what really strikes me is that not once in all those four years did I ever think about the environmental impact of adventures or travels.And to be fair to me, I suppose in all the interviews I did with magazines or whatever around those times, no one ever asked me about the environmental impact of adventures. So it’s relatively new thing when we might say it is spectacularly too late. But that is what it is.But my environmental awakening has been a shame faced recent thing, but it’s something that’s very much taken over my priorities now from a from adventure for the sake of adventure towards adventurous lifestyles in order to do dot dot dot. Yeah, I’m quite I’m quite new to the world, sadly.
Blake Boles 25:47
You mentioned the word privileged people, the privileged people all around you who were not taking advantage of these opportunities. I’m sure that you have encountered the question many times over the years, you know, adventures for privileged people. This doesn’t apply to the rest of us. How do you respond to critiques of that kind at this moment?
Alastair Humphreys 26:11
I think I’d do two things on it. One is to acknowledge that I’m in about as lucky a position as anyone on the planet being a middle-class, educated, white, straight, able-bodied man. I mean, I’ve got a handful of ace cards for making my life historically easier, so I would accept that entirely.But I’ve also had the great opportunity of spending significant amount of time in incredibly poor parts of the world, sleeping in mud huts with families who have no seats, no nothing, and certainly no email addresses and cars and phones to listen to podcasts on.So that is quite a good framing of what privilege means, which then does make me start to think a little bit more on the lines of pretty much, well, certainly anybody who is listening to this podcast or reading any book I write or coming to any event that I put on is right up there in the very top 1% of people on the planet.And however hard life might be in the countries that these people we are living in, it is so much easier than it is for a lot of people in the world, which then I hope gets me starting to think about what opportunities are there for all of us to find adventure rather than what barriers are getting in the way of adventures.And this is something that I’ve really been trying to emphasize through micro adventures, is rather than looking at how your life is worse, harder, more unfair than someone else’s, try instead to flip that round and be a bit more positive to look at what opportunities there are. Okay, you haven’t got as much time as someone else. What can you still do with that time?You haven’t got as much money as somebody else. What can you do with the little bits of money that you have? So trying to look at the opportunities that we all have, rather than being too bogged down by the barriers and the obstacles of comparative privilege. Is that a clear answer or do I need to clarify it?
Blake Boles 28:25
I think that’s a clear answer and I think for me it’s always been something that’s attracted me to your writing, to your body of work, which is that you are at the same time honest about like not everyone can cycle around the world for four years or row a boat across the ocean or maybe more people can pick up a violin and travel across Spain with very limited musical abilities, but still there’s a certain kind of personality, a certain kind of background that lends itself to these kinds of opportunities and also there are so many more opportunities out there than we normally see in our vision and we just need to look with new eyes and I think that that is such an important message and in parallels other important messages I received in my life has always made me very sympathetic towards you Alistair.I wonder how you feel about the popularization of adventure and microadventure and this idea that anything can be an adventure, this kind of very optimistic cheery statement that if with just the right attitude anything can become an adventure. I personally don’t quite buy that. I think that there is a limit. I think that there’s a certain minimum threshold for something to be labeled adventure.What do you think?
Alastair Humphreys 29:47
Yeah, I think you can look at this two ways. I think you can take the word adventure literally and then less literally. So let me try and explain that. I think if you think literally of adventure, people think of mountains and deserts and rivers and stuff like that.So on that spectrum, I think that it’s important to make the distinction between are you going on an adventure or are you having a vacation? And sure, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with going on vacations and taking lovely photos of it and being a travel writer, a travel photographer.But I think to label something an adventure, you need a little bit of uncertainty, a little bit of risk, a little bit of not knowing what’s gonna happen next and being willing to have a bit of discomfort and uncertainty in that. So I think that’s a perhaps pedantic but important distinction between adventuring and vacationing.And I tend, I try not to be too pedantic about this, but I do think it’s a little bit important because I feel that adventures are really important things in people’s lives and to just label any old vacation and adventure is eroding some of its benefits. So in that sense, I suppose I do have a little bit of agency in trying to keep a distinction that adventure, not everything is an adventure.What is important on that though, is that if something feels like an adventure to you, then that’s great. Just because it would be really easy for Bear Grylls should not devalue the adventure for you. And I think this is something I’ve really tried to emphasize is don’t be put off by comparing your adventures to someone else’s.If it feels exciting and risky and uncertain and challenging to you, then fantastic. And that could be overnight microadventure. You don’t have to be climbing Mount Everest in the middle of winter in your underpants for it to be an adventure. So there’s that side of adventure.Then the other aspect of the word adventure is taking it a little bit more metaphorically, which is something that I’ve been moving increasingly towards in recent years to try to look at adventure as not just being about climbing mountains and stuff, but rather a bit of a deeper sense of what adventures are about.So if I think about why I wanted to do adventures in the early days, it was because I wanted uncertainty and a bit of risk and a bit of excitement and not knowing what the outcome was going to be and perhaps some sort of personal development through struggle, these sorts of adventurous traits. But they don’t necessarily have to just come from climbing Mount Everest.And that was what led me to decide to try and learn the violin for a few months and then walk for a month through Spain with no money, no credit card, and only my violin skills to earn some money. It was terrifying and daunting and filled with uncertainty and risk and prospects of failure. And it felt in many ways like one of the most adventurous things I’ve ever done.So increasingly I’m starting to look at being adventurous as about being mentally curious, the curiosity that you can get from trying to have an adventurous mindset.
Alastair Humphreys 33:13
So I think it’s a broad church, I think, and everyone’s welcome.
Blake Boles 33:20
I love that. I want to talk about your evolution as a self-employed person, and as much of your financial existence and reality that you are willing to share, I would love to learn about. And maybe you can just paint some broad strokes in the beginning in terms of when was making money easy and enjoyable? When did it become a bit of a grind? When were the flush periods? When were the slim periods?And please talk about your family life also and any other sources of income that might be present from people in your life. How much help have you gotten?
Alastair Humphreys 34:02
The hardest part of money and adventure is how do you get the money together for your first adventure? So that is, I think, certainly for me, was the hardest thing. So I was daydreaming about adventure for most of my time as a student. So I began saving for some sort of nebulous, uncertain adventure through working weekend evening things when I was a student.And that then meant that when I was ready to set off to cycle around the world, I’d saved up about £7,000. £7,000, a decent amount of money to spend on an adventure, but it didn’t really feel like enough to get all the way around the world. So I decided then to just live dirt bag cheap, to live really, really cheap. And I managed to eke out that £7,000 of savings over four years.And had a great adventure. That did, though, mean that when I got back home, I was totally broke, no money at all. And so I needed urgently to get a teacher for years. And that’s teaching, you don’t get rich as a teacher, but you get food in the table and stuff like that. So I was doing that.And then when I decided to quit being a high school teacher to be a self employed adventurer, I was quite concerned about money. And so I sort of set myself a challenge that I wanted to try to earn as an adventurer, what I would have been earning as a high school science teacher.And that was my sort of personal challenge to myself to really, really work hard and give me some sort of quantifiable measurement of success. So for several years, I worked really hard and I sort of earned roughly what a high school science teacher would earn. And obviously, as a teacher, you start to get paid a little bit more each year. And I was earning a bit more each year.And that’s my sort of starting point of chasing money. And it was really stressful at first, as it is for a lot of young people when you’re just trying to start a career, earn some money, pay for life, you know, when you go to when you go to restaurants, you’re choosing food, because it’s cheap, not necessarily because it’s delicious.And a really good phase in my life was when I started to realize that when I was in a restaurant, I would choose the food that I wanted to eat because the price column wasn’t such a stress anymore.And I feel the greatest financial privilege of my life was getting to a reliable point in earning money, money through my talks and books and things that I didn’t really need to worry too much about money. I’m not not going to be retiring. But I started to feel confident that each month enough money would come in to pay for life.And I could probably buy the things I wanted so long as I didn’t want extravagant things like Ferraris or caviar. And that just felt, in terms of money, all my ambition ever was really to just earn enough. So I didn’t really have to think too much about money. And yeah, what else would you like to know? Are you asked about other sources of money?No, sadly, I don’t have any big inheritances or trust funds or lottery wins, which is disappointing.
Blake Boles 37:12
And what about your family, your partner?
Alastair Humphreys 37:21
So, I’m married, and so for a bunch of years, we’re both working away, earning our separate money, but living a joint life, and I started to do pretty well. I started to earn pretty decent money from it, but that, of course, generally speaking, if you’re earning more money, you’re working more hard, and time versus money is always a bit of a conflict in life.And we got to a bit of a point where both of us trying to work really hard was causing a higher levels of stress than the money we needed. So, we’ve got a couple of kids.So, these days, I’ve rained back my work significantly to be more of a stay-at-home parent, doing all the sort of school runs, pickups, driving kids around, taxi duties, all that sort of stuff, cooking of tea that is pushed back because it looks disgusting and green, all those sorts of delights and jobs I do these days, so my work has dropped down massively in recent years, in that sense, so, yeah, it’s a team effort.
Blake Boles 38:28
Is there any way in which your life feels like it’s, it’s still not quite working. It feels unsustainable in a way, or there’s some sort of, uh, you know, deep seated anxiety for the future, not knowing how things will turn out.And, you know, beyond, I’d say normal human existence type worries, but, but your life as, uh, as a self-employed person, uh, the different ways that you’re able to sustain your family, is there anything that still feels really unsure and that you worry about?
Alastair Humphreys 38:59
Um, no, I would say absolutely not at all, which is, which is lovely to be able to say. And I think the reason that is I’ve worked really, really hard at trying to, um, uh, one of, I mean, one of the privileges of being a self-employed person is having the flexibility in some degrees of trying to optimize your life.So I worked really, really hard chasing cash to get to a point where I had a sort of reliable annual income from, um, speaking from writing. Um, Oh, I didn’t mention earlier, but from sort of doing ambassador work for brands, getting money from brands to be an ambassador, that sort of stuff to get to a sustainable point.And then, uh, then the choice was, uh, how can I manage my stress levels in life? I’ve just mentioned that. So cut stuff back to make our life less stressful. And I suppose then looking to the future, the big challenge for me, and I suppose is, it’s a self-chosen uncertainty is that I’ve always dreamed of being a writer of nothing else to, to be able to earn my money from writing books.And even now, after writing lots of books over lots of years, I, I couldn’t really live a, well, put it this way. If I, if I was only living off my books, I’d be back to looking at the price column of the, uh, the food menu very much. So, but I’ve always wanted to be a writer.So the start of lockdown seemed like a good opportunity once adventures basically stopped and talk stopped and everything stopped. That was a choice for me to say, right. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. How am I going to be a writer? Well, I’ve just got to get on and write. I’ve got to just take this more seriously.So my challenge to myself, which is still ongoing is can I get to a point where I can be just earning my living entirely as a writer and nothing else? And I’m definitely nowhere near that yet, but that’s the, uh, the work, the pro, the, the, uh, the mission that I’ve set myself over the coming years.I need to write more books, but specifically, and I need to write better books, but I also, and this is a really important thing for writers to think about. I need to write books that there is a wider audience for. I think some of my writing has been far too niche. So, uh, I need to consider all those things.
Blake Boles 41:05
And before we started recording, you told me you’re working on a new children’s book. So you are really out there. I know you’ve written other children’s books before. You’ve written all sorts of books and it seems like you’re well on your way. And thank you for this unintended transition, because I actually wanted to to read something from one of your first books, Moods of Future Joys.This is a quote that I took, I took down and I have shared with many people. It’s when you’re in South Africa, you’re about to sail down the highest road in Africa and you you said, I began because England was too easy. The days were not full enough and the nights were not full enough. And life slipped by like a field mouse not shaking the grass. That’s a quote.I wanted something that I wanted, something that I did not know I was capable of. I would never know unless I tried. I wanted unpredictability. I wanted to demand more of myself than I could demand from others. I wanted open space. I wanted anxiety and insecurity, storm and strife, even if I did not always have the courage to cope with them.I wanted to strive to seek and to see whether or not I would yield. I wanted to overload my senses. I felt that I would only know my strength if I took the strain that I needed to taste blood to know I was hurt, needed to be thrashed by a gale to accept that it was windy, needed to taste lung to believe I had pushed myself hard. I needed to confirm that I was alive.Holy crap, Alistair, like your powerful writing and the bridge into the question here is when do you feel feelings this strong now, today, in your current age, when you have the security, you have a more predictable income, you’re running kids to school and back, do you still feel these moments of beauty or meaning or transcendence?And if you can name a specific one that’s happened in your life in recent weeks or months, I would love to hear about it.
Alastair Humphreys 43:06
That’s so weird to hear you reading that, because once I finish writing a book, I literally never ever look at it ever again, because if I did so, I would just want to immediately start editing it and changing it, and also have a terrible memory. So I don’t remember writing any of that, but hearing it’s interesting, because that sounds so much like the young me.And I guess I look at this in two ways, and the one way I think, wow, that is great, that is a guy who is really desperate to chew the marrow out of life and to really live it to the fullest. And then another part of me thinks, crikey, no wonder I was just so continually striving and pushing and yearning and struggling for so many years.And thank goodness I finally made myself chill out a little bit and calm down and just accept life and relax a bit. So a work in progress, plus, I suppose, the mellowing of age. These days, it’s a mixture of things. Sometimes I really yearn for that wildness and freedom of the open road and the uncertainty of those sorts of long journeys.And other times, I’m glad that I calmed down enough to be able to just sit on a log in a woodland just outside London and find beauty in the colors of the leaves and the breeze and the sunshine and things like that, and slowing down a little bit. The young version of myself would have sneered and scoffed and said that I’d given up and compromised and was living a mere shadow of a full existence.But maybe the older version of myself is happy with a cup of tea and a bit of sunshine. So yeah, I’m not sure I’ve answered your question there, but an evolution and a work in progress.
Blake Boles 45:03
I’d still love to hear if maybe the cup of tea in the sunshine or sitting on the log is the moment, but are there any moments that you consider particularly representative of the beauty of your life right now? And these higher order feelings, more in the self-actualization category, something more like a transcendent moment, is there anything that stands out?
Alastair Humphreys 45:27
That book you quoted from was about me cycling around the entire planet on my own for 46,000 miles, a massive journey, almost literally as big a journey as it’s possible to have barbing an astronaut. I applied to be an astronaut once, but I wasn’t clever enough. Going around the world is about as literally as big as it can be. Fast forward to today, my most recent book is called Local.That’s about spending a year exploring just the one single hiking map that I live on, a very small map covering about 12 miles by 12 miles, 20 kilometers by 20 kilometers. I spent an entire year deliberately limiting myself to only this tiny local area where I live.There’s lots and lots and lots of reasons why I wrote this book, but the one that’s relevant to your question now is that quite often I feel frustrated about having a comparatively sedentary and a tied down life, and I yearn for some of the stuff that was in that first book.What I wanted to try and do through this local project was to see if I could live more deeply and more richly by paying more attention to what’s right here on my doorstep and by doing more of the metaphorical adventuring that I talked about a little bit earlier, by really trying to fire into my curiosity to go on the idea that if you’re curious enough about anything, then anything becomes interesting and the more interested you are, the more interesting something becomes.So I went out to just really pay attention to my local area and try and find tiny bits of ore and tiny bits of wonder. What really struck me was that I managed to find little bits of ore and wonder almost every week of the year, even in a pretty mundane, almost suburban corner of England. What those mostly came from was finding tiny pockets of wildness and solitude.So tiny little scraps of woodland or sometimes maybe behind some abandoned crumbling factories, a sense of solitude that, wow, nobody on the planet knows where I am. It’s a silent morning. This is pretty cool and peaceful. So it’s microscopic little moments of ore and wonder that I’ve been getting.But if you accumulate those regularly enough, then they’re an interesting alternative to going for the epic stand on top of a mountain and howl at the moon sort of stuff.
Blake Boles 48:14
It seems like you’ve never left your role as an educator. You’ve just found your own very niche way to go about it and to have much more control over the process. I know that you get emails from all sorts of people reaching out to you, asking for advice. When you have young people, I’m thinking early or mid twenties who are asking for some sort of guidance from you.It could be older teenagers too, but I imagine it’s more people in their twenties. What do you say to them? I’m sure you point them to stuff you’ve written podcasts, but when someone is reaching out and asking for real genuine life direction advice and you don’t know this person, how do you respond to those inquiries?And do you have any general statements, general advice that you offer to young people?
Alastair Humphreys 49:10
Well, I always caution seeking advice from people whose lives on the internet looks great because it’s quite easy to paint a polished picture of yourself and your life on the internet. And I think that’s a valuable thing for everyone to bear in mind, but definitely for younger people to bear in mind. And then I’d caveat that I certainly don’t have any questions and any solutions to life.But I think what has stood me quite well, relatively speaking, is getting on and beginning stuff. So when I have an idea that I’m excited about, I try and look at the good opportunities, the ways that I might be able to do this, the possibilities for it.And I try not to get too bogged down in the problems or the difficulties or the fact that I don’t know where this might lead in one year or two year or 10 years time. I just try and choose it, what feels important and meaningful and fills me full of life right now. And then what I do is take the very first little step to get out the door and begin that.And I think for younger people, that would definitely involve trying to encourage as many people as possible to go as far away from their home as they possibly can, given the constraints of their lives for as long as possible and to do something adventurous. And different. So I’d certainly be encouraging people to go have some sort of adventure.And I wouldn’t worry too much if that doesn’t fit into some sort of clearly defined future life plan. I suppose an example from my life would be that I went on a bicycle ride because it felt like an exciting thing to do and then assumed I’d get on with normal life. I’ve essentially made an entire career now after going on that bike ride.Then a bunch of years later, I thought, oh, it might be interesting to start sleeping on a few local hills in and amongst the big adventures, the beginning of micro adventures. I didn’t really think there was particularly much mileage in someone sleeping on a hill just outside a big city. But to my surprise, that was also gone on to be a huge part of my money earning career.And then the third example of that would be walking across Spain, playing the violin. Seemed like a one off fun little adventure, but has had real benefits for my corporate speaking work, something that I hadn’t really anticipated when it when I began. So you don’t really know what the longer term consequences are.Just kind of choose what feels right and meaningful now and then focus on the opportunities and the positive side of it rather than the barriers and the obstacles.
Blake Boles 51:49
One more question for you before I ask how people can find your stuff online. Are you spiritual or religious? Do you have some sort of developed, you know, higher order philosophy that you follow? Do you pull from lots of different traditions? Are you straight up atheist? Tell me.
Alastair Humphreys 52:08
Okay. I grew up with a pretty solid Christian upbringing, going to church a lot through my life till I was, till I finished high school really. And then at university, I was curious about Christianity and I would say I was almost a Christian when I set off on my bike ride around the world.Four years of cycling around the world on my own in the wilderness, that’s my own version of my 40 days in the wild. I saw no evidence of anything, any higher powers. I also spent a lot of time in Muslim parts of the world, Buddhist, Shinto, all sorts of different parts of the world.And the upshot for that was that I came home thinking, how can I choose the Christian team rather than say the Muslim team or the Buddhist team? How can this seems not right to me? And having seen no evidence of anything, I lost really any semblance of faith.So now I feel that I’m in a position where I’m an atheist who is filled with awe and wonder and very much interested in grace and mystery, but from a pretty atheistic background.And this certainly isn’t a spiritual thing, but in terms of a way of living life, I’ve found in recent years, reading quite a lot of stoicism to be quite helpful for me in choosing direction and purpose and getting my head straight. So yeah, I may, I may, and also I love churches, mosques, places like that.Whenever I’m out exploring my local map, when there’s small little village churches, I love going in and sitting there. So I very much enjoy these spiritual places, but I’m not a spiritual person anymore.
Blake Boles 54:00
What are you working on right now, Alistair? What are you excited about putting out in the world and what do you want people to know about and tell them how they can find it?
Alastair Humphreys 54:09
I’ve been writing a children’s book loosely based on the Lewis and Clark expedition across America and it’s been really doing my head in because it’s long and turgid and boring and I’ve been tearing my hair out but I finally think I’ve made a bit of a breakthrough so I’m now on a mission to try and get this finished in the next couple of months and I want to get that finished because it’s time for me to start to write a new book for adults.My most recent book is called Local about exploring the local map and that was a really big pivot for me from writing about adventure towards writing about nature and environment and I want to get on and write another book based on that but I’ve been struggling for almost a year to think what sort of direction I should write about but I think I now have an idea and a plan so I just need to get Lewis and Clark and Sakagawa safely to the Pacific Ocean and then I can launch onto writing a new book.People can find me jeez I’ve spent 20 years putting far too much stuff on the internet so you can find me wherever you choose to find anything on the internet books podcasts social media all those sort of places you’ll find Alastair Humphries.
Blake Boles 55:20
All too easy, although I don’t think you’re on TikTok, Alistair.
Alastair Humphreys 55:23
That is actually, geez, that’s a very interesting conversation because when all these new fangled things come out, e.g., Facebook, Instagram, all these things, when they started, I’ve always thought, right, I’ll get on this and I’ll run with it and see where it goes, see if I can build an audience.So I’ve worked hard over the years on blogging, social media, YouTube, all these things that come and trying to build up a thing. When TikTok came out, I made a really conscious decision of, I am just too old, too jaded, too bored of self-promotion, whatever, I’m too something to get involved in TikTok. So that was a really conscious choice of me to say, no, enough is enough. I’m not going there.So make of that what you will. But geez, it’s certainly a fantastic place to sell books.
Blake Boles 56:16
That’s fascinating. I made the same, I drew a line in the sand similarly to you, but for Instagram, and then I never developed a presence there, but then I found a TikTok to be strangely charming and somehow more acceptable, which I understand is a weird thing.
Alastair Humphreys 56:33
My absence of being on TikTok is absolutely nothing against TikTok whatsoever and my presence on the other platforms is not an endorsement of those. All of these things have been just me trying to grow an audience in them and they’re all fantastic in their own way. So no, I have nothing against TikTok per se. It was more just if it had come along 10 years earlier, I’d been all over it.It’s more of a reflection of my state of my life rather than anything to do with TikTok itself.
Blake Boles 57:03
Alistair, thank you so much for coming on Dirtbag Rich.
Alastair Humphreys 57:07
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.