When I give up stuff and when I give up bills, I gain in purpose, in the ability to do what I want to do when I wake up in the morning. Because if I don't have a $100 cell phone bill, which is $1,200 a year, that means $1,200 for the work that I don't have to do, which means I can be doing what I love to do.

Hi, I'm Willow Belden and you're listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories in the outdoors.

The man you just heard is Rob Greenfield, and almost everything he does is a bit atypical.

He lives on just $5,000 a year, voluntarily. He has no bills to pay, and he does things like bicycling across the U.S. generating zero waste.

His story comes to us via another podcast called Wild Ideas

Worth Living. They ran an interview with him a few months ago and it was such an

inspiring conversation that we wanted to share parts of it with you. To give you a

little background, wild ideas worth living is a show about people who have a wild

idea, an idea that

everyone thought was crazy, and made it happen. And this particular episode of theirs, the interview

with Rob Greenfield, really stuck with me after I heard it. It's an interview that delves into questions of

what we actually need in life in order to be happy, and how depriving ourselves of things that most people see as necessities

can actually end up leaving us more fulfilled.

Before we get into Rob's story, though, I want to introduce you to the host of Wild Ideas Worth Living.

Her name is Shelby Stanger, and I spoke with her this past fall.

I've just always been attracted to people who are

especially adventures and have done something a little more wild. So I interview people who've

sold across the ocean, broken records, started businesses. And the goal was to tell these stories

so that you two listening, wherever you are in the, on a run at work, would be able to pursue your own wild ideas.

So how did it get started? Tell me a little bit about the backstory here.

Well, I've been a journalist for about 20 years. And also, you know, I started at age 16 writing about real issues. Like I interviewed one of my mom was a professor at San Diego State and I interviewed one of her students who was date raped. And then I interviewed or I did a story about a family member's battle with alcoholism. And those stories changed lives. Like Kids wrote in saying that the stories I wrote

really affected them and they were going to quit alcohol and they were really moved. And so I

...