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Reconnecting to Nature with Adventure, Purpose, Fun, and Travelers’ Curiosity with Alastair Humphreys

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What if the travel mindset you bring to far-off places is exactly what’s needed right where you live?

Alastair Humphreys is a British adventurer, bestselling author, and speaker named National Geographic Adventurer of the Year. He spent four years cycling 46,000 miles around the world and has since canoed 500 miles down the Yukon River, rowed across the Atlantic, walked the length of India’s Kaveri River, and crossed Iceland on foot and pack raft. In recent years he has become one of the most well-known advocates for microadventures and local exploration, and his newest book is Unwilded: Finding Our Way Back to Nature.

Alastair joins me to unpack the ideas in his book, including why our growing disconnection from nature matters personally and planetarily, and how a travel mindset and nature connection can be tools for changing both.

Alastair has made this case before on the show, but Unwilded takes it somewhere new. This isn’t just a conversation about microadventures or getting outside more. It’s about a specific kind of blindness that builds slowly across generations, and what it costs us without anyone quite noticing. Alastair brings the same practical, adventure-first framing he always does, but this time it’s in service of something bigger: a way to take the traveler’s curiosity you feel on the road and put it to work where you actually live. The episode ends with a surprisingly simple exercise that can help you turn the world’s overwhelming problems into something personal, actionable, and genuinely fun to pursue.

What’s one small thing in your immediate environment that you’ve stopped really noticing? I’d love to hear your thoughts, and I hope you’ll share by sending me an audio message.

Tune In To Learn:

  • Why the traveler’s curious, enthusiastic mindset is exactly what’s needed at home, and why most of us leave it at the border
  • What “shifting baseline syndrome” is and why understanding it changes the way you see the world around you
  • How two apps transformed Alastair’s relationship with his daily run, and how to try the same thing
  • Why spending 15 minutes in nature daily is harder than it sounds, and why that’s actually the problem
  • How connecting with even a tiny patch of local nature can deliver the same buzz as a far-off adventure
  • What the Overton window has to do with how we approach climate change, travel, and everyday behavior
  • Why Alastair stopped flying and moved to a vegan diet, and the surprisingly positive effect it had on his life
  • What the 5-25 exercise is, and how it can help you identify the issues closest to your heart and take action without burning out
  • How the Netherlands transformed its streets in a generation, and what that says about what’s actually possible
  • The vision Alastair wrote for the world 25 years from now, and why it’s closer to reality than it might seem
  • And so much more

Resources:

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