Welcome to a special bonus episode of This Is Money Podcast. I'm Simon Lambert and joining me on the show today is Alistair Humphreys, author, adventurer and a star about four years ago of a special This Is Money podcast when we did a series called Making the Money Work with Andy Peters, of all people.

I interviewed Alistair with Andy and he talked about his life as an adventurer and how you structure your personal finances to deal with such an odd job.

I recently read Alistair's new book, Local, where he explores the area around him

rather than travelling to far-flung corners of the world.

And I thought it would be a good idea to get back in touch and catch up with him and find out a bit more about local, about what he's been up to,

and about the interesting thing that he told me in one of his emails when we were corresponding recently, but he's become a fan of index investing

funds. Alistair, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. I'm not a normal

visitor to money type podcast, so I'm looking forward to the chat. Okay, and first of all,

Alistair or Al? Which one should I call you? My friends call me Al.

Go for that. Okay. I'll call, you can call me Al. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, bet you haven't heard that

joke for. So first off, tell us a bit about local. It's a bit different to your usual books,

isn't it? What was the idea behind it?

I think to explain local, I should probably very briefly explain that my earliest adventures and books and life have all been about chasing huge adventures.

So I've cycled around the world for four years. I've rode across the Atlantic

ocean. I've crossed deserts, walks across India. There's some big, big kind of expeditions and

journeys. And they're all fantastic. I love them. It's a real privilege to do trips like that.

But we can't all be just jetting off and having the trip of a lifetime all the time.

What do we do to try and live adventuously in normal times? And then also, I suppose, in there

was my word jetting off. Increasingly, there's a concern or a terror of the catastrophic impact

that we're having on the planet. And it started to just feel

inappropriate to me as a lover of wild places to be trashing them by jumping on planes and

flying off to these different places. So a few things were percolating in my head to start me

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