I love podcasts—not quite as much as books—but they accompany daily tasks from driving, to cooking, to working out in the most engaging, fruitful of ways.

As but one human, I’ve only listened to a tiny fraction of all the podcasts ever recorded. However, I’ve scoured the web for quality conversation for half a decade now, and for perspective alone, consider each episode below well worth the time investment.

I could write about how valuable podcasts are for expanding awareness, allowing one to choose their influences, and how this list is just as much as a study of my own choices, but these things are easily inferred.

Let’s dive right in.

A mile outside the northeast entrance of Yellowstone National Park, at the bottom of a glacially carved valley 7,389ft in elevation, sits Silver Gate, Montana — an island of humanity among a sea of mountainous wilderness. At the height of summer, the population can swell to perhaps two hundred. However, only eight residents call Silver Gate home year-round and the town’s unanimously elected mayor is a dog named Rommel. Besides a handful of privately owned cabins, the town consists of two small general stores, two lodging businesses, and a restaurant.

Bigger towns surrounding Yellowstone, with large advertising budgets and shorter drives to world-famous “Old Faithful,” attract a vast majority of the park’s visitors. To this day, Silver Gate and Cooke City (its neighboring town three miles up the road), remain less trodden outposts of the little-known Yellowstone High Country. Rather than geysers, Silver Gate is about wilderness, wildlife, and mountains.

Last week, I was talking on the phone with my brother. Discussing my personal selling points for a book proposal I’m working on, he told me that whenever he describes me to someone whom I’ve never met he tells them:

“He does what he wants with his life and somehow seems to not feel the pressure that everyone else does to do certain things.”

Self-awareness is difficult. I never really thought of myself in such a way. My ego held onto the compliment like a pretty pebble from a stream, taking it from my figurative pocket and turning it over and over in my hand for it’s smooth, pleasant feel.

I do feel a lot less pressure to do “certain things” than I used to and suspect most people do. In reflecting upon it, I began to recall other instances of this curiosity.

This afternoon, I’m getting paid to sit under an umbrella next to a pool, read books, and write these words in Flagstaff, Arizona. 

It’s a spectacular summer day. Upper seventies. A slight breeze. Overplayed but otherwise decent music sounds from the speakers that surround. A couple of kids are shooting each other with squirt-guns in the pool while their moms chat at a table under an umbrella. A man that looks like a walrus is turning red with sun in a lounge chair. Thunderheads grow off on the western horizon, but the sky above is a pale blue canvas.

As I plan to go to flight school this fall, I’m particularly aware of commercial airliners silently drawing white streaks across that pale blue canvas and the smaller planes that buzz by in approach to the Flagstaff airport. I’ve been projecting myself into the cockpit of every plane that passes by.

I don’t believe that I’ll live to grow old. 

It’s not that I think I’m going to die young or burn out before thirty because I’m living so hard or something. I just know all too well that life could end at anytime.

When I was sixteen years old, a mosquito bite nearly killed me. A few weeks after this unbeknownst bite, I went to bed with a piercing headache. If it wasn’t for my mom’s investigation of “strange noises,” I would have been dead the next morning.

This mosquito, it transferred a virus to me. A virus that infected the fluid surrounding my brain, causing it to swell and squeeze. The result: many grand mal seizures, four days in a coma, a stroke, and a damaged brain.

For the past five years, I've been doing my damnedest to avoid paying rent. Given, I'm quite nomadic and largely avoid leases for the purpose of geographical freedom, but you might be surprised just how much time rent can cost you in a year.

I don't particularly love articles full of numbers and perhaps you don’t either, but these are eye-opening numbers. Bear with me as we begin with a little math.

For the purposes of this article, let's say your rent, utilities, and other housing expenses total $800 a month. This is a pretty frugal figure, as the average cost of rent alone for one bedroom apartment in the United States these days is over $1,000. So, at $800 a month, you're well under that mark, and you managed to work your utilities into that number too. Well done.

Nepal and its Himalayas are a place I have long wanted to experience. A poor country rich in culture, the birthplace of Buddha, site of Peter Matthiessen’s excursion in The Snow Leopard, and home to the world's highest mountains, many an aspect might draw one there. Not unlike my aforementioned author/hero, both a cultural pull and a curiosity for the Himalayas themselves drew me in. I wondered what might I find in the Himalayas, in my experience of the mountains and the people who live in the foot of the grandeur.

I also had some questions which required space. Space I knew I would find out there. I’ve struggled with this clash of eastern and western values lately, especially since a ten-day Vipassana meditation course last October.

A nomad for the better part of the past five years, I sought to answer the question of "Why I travel?" in a notebook from the window seat of a Boeing 737 last December.

Late one night, I recorded that answer.

While I am no videographer and the majority of my moments go intentionally uncaptured, I did have enough footage from five years of travel to span four minutes. Backed by M83's Outro, this is the "why" behind my last five years of venturing out.