The Voluntary Life

If you are interested in minimalism or a travel-oriented lifestyle, moving to a digital-only book library is a great benefit. Even if you don't plan to travel, switching to e-books has a ton of other advantages over maintaining paper books. This episode is all about the tools and techniques for managing an e-book library, including: Making the transition from a physical to a digital library.  Choo...

This episode is about the role of rational thinking in life. Rational thinking is a discipline of self-mastery, similar to the discipline of achieving physical fitness. I tackle some misconceptions about rational thinking and answer these questions: What does cognitive science tell us about thinking rationally? What are the costs of thinking rationally, and what are the benefits? Show Notes: How T...

If you want to think rationally, what role do your emotions play? Is there a conflict between thinking rationally and experiencing feelings? In this episode, I explain the history of ideas around reason and emotion, and provide an overview of how to think rationally about feelings. Although the Enlightenment was a revolution in thinking rationally, Enlightenment philosophers never resolved their c...

So far, the Thinking Rationally series has generated more listener feedback than any previous episodes! In this episode, I respond to feedback on the topic of faith versus reason. Here are the questions covered: Can reason be accommodated within religious faith? Don't we all live by some kind of faith, anyway? Do I argue that we are "nothing more than matter in motion"? Did I present a fair histor...

Rational thinking transforms your life, by giving you autonomy and the freedom of the individual. Since it spread during the Enlightenment, rational thinking has also transformed society and created the modern world. Yet many influential philosophers explicitly rejected rational thinking, because they understood where it would lead and did not like what they saw. This episode is about anti-rationa...

The biggest challenge of thinking rationally is not learning new techniques, it is overcoming irrational and anti-rational ways of thinking. In Part 1 of this series, I talked about how religious faith conflicts with your rational faculty. This episode is about a secular way of thinking that will derail your rationality. It is a way of thinking about society that seems to be very rational, but is...

Rational thinking is the engine behind all the great achievements of the modern world. It is the vital tool for making your own choices and for freeing yourself from prejudices and indoctrination. This series of episodes summarises all the best ideas that I've found about how to think rationally. Part 1 uses the example of the history of Christianity in Europe to explain the conflict between relig...

Home ownership is often touted as a financially savvy choice, but is it? This episode explores the financial pros and cons of buying your own home for those interested in financial independence. Show Notes: The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley I'm not a financial advisor and you will need to do your own research.

As part of adopting a minimalist lifestyle and becoming expats, we sold everything that would not fit into one suitcase each. The biggest part of our downsizing was selling our apartment and all the furniture in it. This episode is about the practical and psychological lessons from selling the flat, getting rid of all our stuff, and changing from being homeowners to travelling renters. Show Notes:...

Kevin Koskella from the Freedom Lovin podcast interviews Jake about the ideas in his book, Job Free, as well as life in Panama, entrepreneurship, and the permanent portfolio. Show Notes: Freedom Lovin Podcast Job Free by Jake Desyllas (now in paperback and kindle)

Preparing for a life of travel involved getting rid of anything that I could not take with me in one suitcase. One big source of clutter to address was clothes. My clothes took up a lot of space, yet I hardly ever wore many of them.   As part of my extreme decluttering, I got rid of every item of clothing beyond a minimal set that would fit with my one-suitcase plan. The process included making an...

This episode is about how I moved all my data into the cloud. This has been an essential part of adopting a digital nomad lifestyle but is also relevant for anyone who wants a more minimalist, clutter-free life. I digitised any data that could be, such as music, movies, photos, books, and documents. Once digital, I moved all my data into cloud storage of one kind or another. Then I got rid of all...

Brian Sovryn of the Sovryn Tech Podcast  interviews Jake about his lifestyle of perpetual travel and minimalism, and the technology that makes it possible. Show Notes: Sovryn Tech Episode 165 Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i Mobile Document Scanner Calibre E-Book Management Evernote VoiceDream AirBnB Uber Google Translate Keyboard Maestro Mac Power Users Podcast TripAdvisor Offline Guides TripIt Becoming A...

The Free State Project is a social experiment encouraging 20,000 people interested in "liberty in our lifetime" to move together to New Hampshire. The idea is to create an intentional community of like-minded people who are interested in personal and political liberty. By concentrating people with similar values in one place, the aim is to have a greater impact on the local culture and thereby gen...

Brett Veinotte from the School Sucks Podcast and Jake Desyllas from The Voluntary Life discuss the process of upgrading and maintaining positive habits. Topic covered include: Habits may seem trivial, but the are the most important part of a productivity system Two approaches to change: slow and steady vs. New Year's resolution Triggers for activating habits vs. friction against habits How do we d...

This week's episode comes from Joshua Sheats, host of the  Radical Personal Finance podcast: "Most of us in the Radical Personal Finance community are pursuing our own financial independence. And most of us want to get there as quickly as possible. But, most of us only have one idea of one way to get there. Did you know there are a bunch of different ways to go job-free and gain financial freedom?...

Part 2 of the discussion between Brett Veinotte and Jake Desyllas about using Horizons of Focus for productivity and purpose. In this episode, we conclude our discussion by talking about how to identify your vision for your future, and how to find purpose in life. Show Notes: Episode 232 The Next Level — Horizons of Focus Part 1 School Sucks Podcast The Voluntary Life Productivity Episodes

Brett Veinotte from School Sucks podcast interviews Jake Desyllas about using Horizons of Focus for productivity and purpose. In this episode (part 1) we introduce the concept of horizons of focus and talk about the best ways to identify actions, projects, goals, and areas or responsibility. Show Notes School Sucks Podcast The Voluntary Life Productivity Episodes Automated Mindmaps Using OmniFocus...

Ashe from the  Liberty Entrepreneurs podcast  interviews Jake about starting a business, selling a business, and financial independence.  They talk about Jake's background, becoming an entrepreneur , selling a company, and life afterwards. In this episode, you can hear about the people and books that influenced Jake, and some hacks and suggestions for anyone interested in starting a business. Show...

I had an amazing experience getting feedback during the writing of my new book,   Job Free: Four Ways to Quit the Rat Race and Achieve Financial Freedom on Your Terms . I had 165 beta readers during development. That's a lot of feedback! This episode is about the process of crowdsourcing feedback, using the example of my experience writing Job Free . I describe the workflows, tools and benefits of...

In this interview, Tuur and Becca talk about life as perpetual travellers, living on bitcoin. They describe how they got interested in bitcoin and how it has become an integral part of their international lifestyle. They also explain how they cope with the roller-coaster volatility of living from bitcoin. Tuur was one of the first investment newsletter writers to recommend bitcoin.  He describes h...

This episode shares some fascinating ideas about how to understand culture, identity and civilization. The historian Steve Davies argues that rather than being at the end of a long story of "western civilization", we are at the beginning of something radically new, unplanned and totally alien to the historical cultures of both the "West" and everywhere else before circa 1800. I've summarised these...

This episode is a review of a fascinating book, The Better Angels Of Our Nature , by Steven Pinker. The following quote summarises the book's main argument: "Believe it or not—and I know that most people do not—violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not b...

This episode is about three concepts that I've found helpful for managing money. These concepts are about the big-picture when it comes to money, rather than the details. They express the mindset for achieving financial independence. Here is a summary of the ideas discussed: Be Your Own CFO: managing your own money as you would manage the finance of a business. Be Investment-Oriented, Not Consumpt...

Comparative advantage is a simple idea from economics, but its implications are mind-blowing. It is a process that most people misunderstand, but it is at the root of everything that we create. Comparative advantage is intimately linked to what it means to be human. Show Notes: Economist article on comparative advantage Matt Ridley on comparative advantage