WanderLearn Podcast

• Podcast

After graduating from Harvard Business School and working a bit, DJ Didonna embarked on an improbable quest: helping people take months or even years off work.

There's nothing wrong with working nonstop for 40 years. 

However, paradoxically, taking a sabbatical may be the best thing for your career.

DJ wants to help you do what most Harvard Business School graduates don’t know how to do: get off the treadmill.

We chat face-to-face for 80 minutes, discussing:

• His first sabbatical was in 2017. He walked all around Japan – going from temple to temple, hardly speaking to anyone for 6 weeks. How was that like?
• What percentage of companies have sabbatical programs?
• How does a company gain from letting their employees go on sabbaticals?
• What surprised him in his research?
• How can you take a sabbatical when you don’t have a guaranteed job?
• What is the future of sabbaticals?

DJ gave a TEDx talk at the same venue as I did. Watch it:

Learn more about DJ's research at The Sabbatical Project.

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• Podcast

This is one of my favorite podcasts this year. I admire Mike Spencer Bown. He's been traveling for the last 25 years. He's been to every country. He's the author of The World's Most Travelled Man.

Does he deserve that title?

He didn't even pick that title. His publisher did.

We discuss whether that topic as well as these topics:

• How many Canadian provinces are there? He didn't know, even though he's Canadian! Sacrilege! Answer: 10. Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and Saskatchewan.
• What does he have to do to claim that he's been to a country?
• How's Saudi Arabia now?
• We discuss Travel's Century Club. 
• How was it like to be in the first tourist in Somalia?
• Would he go to the moon or Mars?
• How's Antarctica?
• What about Kazakstan? 
• How are his language skills?
• How does he finance his travels?
• Why did he spend $50,000 in chickens?
• How much would it cost to reverse engineer the brain?
• Could the USA and Canada unite?
• How do you get a gun in Canada?
• In 300 years, is it better to live in Canada or the Sahara?
• What does he think about Bitcoin?
• What does he think of the future of Africa?
• If he were a time traveler going into the future, what would he expect to see?
• How was it like to go for months without speaking?

You can follow Mike Spencer Bown on Facebook.

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• Podcast

Lauren Kahn has done 72 home exchanges!

One way to immerse yourself in a foreign environment is to do a home exchange. 

Lauren's blog offers plenty of advice on how to do a home exchange.

This podcast comes in two parts.

Due to a technical snafu, Lauren thought she lost our first interview. So I interviewed her twice, thinking that we lost the original recording.

We managed to recover it. I took some of the highlights of the original interview and appended it at the end of this podcast. Therefore, if you're seriously interested in home exchanges, make sure you listen to the bonus interview in the second half.

Homelink and Intervac are her two favorite sites, even though HomeExchange.com is the most popular. 

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• Podcast

Over 2.5 million people have read my article, "10 Reasons Why El Camino de Santiago Sucks." One of those people is Susan Alcorn, who has hiked to Santiago, Spain 16 different times over 9 different routes.

Instead of taking offense to the article, she took it as constructive criticism of the article. We've had a civil discussion about El Camino ever since. 

One of my central points is that the most popular Camino trail (El Camino Frances) is crowded and has few wilderness experiences. I encouraged people to explore other Camino trails. 

That's exactly what Susan has done.

Susan Alcorn has even written a couple of books about El Camino. Her first book was Camino Chronicle: Walking to Santiago.

She also wrote We're in the Mountains, Not over the Hill: Tales and Tips from Seasoned Women Backpackers.

Her newest book is called Healing Miles: Gifts from the Caminos Norte and Primitivo.  

Most pilgrims hike El Camino Frances.

About 5% backpack El Camino Primitivo and another 5% hike El Camino del Norte. 

In this conversation, we focus on these two lesser-known trails. I ask her:

• What was one of the most unusual paths she has taken?
• What percentage of pilgrims are hiking purely for religious reasons? (The answer is surprising!)
• How many pilgrims get to Santiago every year? (You won't believe it!)
• Has she camped on the trail? 
• What advice would she give to first-time pilgrims of El Camino de Santiago?

 You should learn more about Susan Alcorn. 

Susan added these points after listening to the podcast

"First, that the mileage from Porto, Portugal to Santiago is more in the 140-150-mile range rather than the 200 I stated. And I meant to emphasize the tremendous difference in the number of people on the various routes. Whereas the Frances can be very crowded (meeting up with dozens--maybe even hundreds--per day), the route from Vezelay, FR (that we have been doing in sections the last couple of years) is very isolated. We are lucky to see a couple of dozen other pilgrims in a two-three week walk."

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• Podcast

Boyd Varty's TED talk about "What I Learned From Nelson Mandela" made Varty famous. His talk has nearly two million views.

His newest book came out this week. It's called The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life.

Varty is a fourth-generation custodian of the Londolozi Game Reserve. Unlike his ancestors, he's never hunted a lion. Now he just tracks them for eco-tourism. I ask him:

• What would his lion-hunting ancestors say about his conservation efforts?  
• Does he think that hunting helps or hurts animal conservation?
• What does having a "sit spot" mean and how can it help you?
• How exactly does a male lion's mane protect the lion?
• What's the first story that we told ourselves?
• What can we learn from tracking a lion?

 Listen to the 60th WanderLearn episode!

This episode is also important because it marks the one-year anniversary of the WanderLearn podcast, which has gotten 20,000 downloads since we started!

That makes me happy because few podcasts achieve that audience in one year.

So THANK YOU to you, my wandering listeners and to my sponsors! 

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