Ryan Johnson is a Harvard dropout who now is the co-founder and CEO of the nation's first car-free neighborhood built from scratch.

There was a long and varied path that got him there, and at some point along the way he was a reader of

get rich slowly the original personal finance blog of the internet which was written by

J.D. Roth and so in today's episode, I and J.D together will be co-interviewing Ryan about the crazy

adventures that led him to where he is.

Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything but not

everything. Every choice you make carries a trade-off and that applies not just to

your money but to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention to any limited resource

that you need to manage. Saying yes to something implicitly means you're saying no to alternatives.

So what matters most and how do you make decisions accordingly?

Those are the two questions that this podcast is devoted to exploring. My name is

Paula Pan, I'm the host, and J.D. Roth, the creator of Get Ridge

slowly, is sitting across the table from me. Hello, J.D. Hello, Paul. Welcome. And let's get

right to it. So Ryan, you're in the hot seat today.

J.D. and I are both going to be grilling you. Let's go back to the Harvard dropout.

You are a Harvard Business School student. You did your undergrad here in Arizona, which is

where you're from.

What led to the decision to leave?

So first, thanks for having me on, and welcome to Tempe.

A friend that I'd been doing real estate with going back to undergrad now almost 20 years ago was starting a company called

Open Door. I started working on it the first semester at school and just had a lot of conviction that there was a huge

need for the service Open Door provides and it was going to succeed and so wanted to be part of it.

...