Hanging Out With The Mad Fientist

He Blinded Me With “Fience”

Last spring I found myself at Camp Mustache, a multi-day retreat centered on the ideas of the financial independence blogger Mr. Money Mustache, who writes about financial freedom and other related topics.  I wrote about my experience there in this post.

While I was drinking my coffee early one morning I had the opportunity to meet Brandon, one of my favorite bloggers (and podcaster) in the FI space, aka The Mad Fientist. He is a super cool guy who ‘retired’ at age 34, and is someone who I would consider one of the elder statesmen of the FIRE (financial independence retire early) community. His story is worth reading, and there is a ton of useful information on his blog about financial optimization.

Anyways, over the next few days  we talked a bit, had a few beers and casually discussed the possibility of getting me on his podcast someday.  Many months went by and this idea slipped from my mind. I’m not entirely sure how things happened, but at some point one of us brought up the idea again. The details are a bit fuzzy, but after a few emails we found a time to chat and recorded a podcast. I  threw it out there on social media, but since those are often ephemeral and easily forgotten, I  thought I would formally put it on the blog and immortalize it forever for those who missed it.

http://www.madfientist.com/the-happy-philosopher-interview/

Remove Foot From Mouth

As with every podcast interview I do, after it was over I immediately thought of all the dumb things I said and other things I wish I had mentioned. But thanks to the sick editing skills of The Mad Fientist, I thought this one turned out great. Instead of being completely incoherent, I am only partially incoherent. I consider this awesome!

We discuss the challenges that physicians and others who invest a lot of time, money and energy into their careers have with early retirement. We talk about ego, identity, happiness, freedom, meditation and alternatives to full time work. Check it out if podcasts are your thing and throw a comment below and tell me what you think.

Hello New Readers

One beautiful side effect of this podcast was that after it was released I had my TWO highest traffic days on the blog ever. My email list grew 20% and I received more emails in those two days than in the first year of the blog. Thanks for all the love and kind words. This was rather shocking to me and means either:

1. The Mad Fientist is hugely powerful and influential

Or…

2. My blog is puny and insignificant

Probably a little of both. Anyways, it doesn’t matter. I’m delighted your guys are here and hope you stick around for some cool stuff I’ve got planned for the future. If you sent me a personal message I respond to most of them. If you don’t get a reply it probably went to spam or you entered your email address wrong in the contact form. And sometimes it takes me a long time to reply because…I am lazy with email.

I thought I would give new readers a few posts to get started on instead of torturing themselves sifting through the archives. OK, I lied; here are more than a few. Eleven to be exact. These are posts relevant to the podcast or ones I thought Mad Fientist listeners may enjoy the most.

But This One Goes To Eleven…

https://thehappyphilosopher.com/full-time-work/

https://thehappyphilosopher.com/single-player-game/

https://thehappyphilosopher.com/financial-independence-job/

https://thehappyphilosopher.com/alligators-and-kittens/

https://thehappyphilosopher.com/how-understanding-the-marginal-utility-of-money-will-make-you-happier/

https://thehappyphilosopher.com/a-physicians-guide-to-working-part-time/

https://thehappyphilosopher.com/happy-philosopher-the-backstory/

https://thehappyphilosopher.com/why-the-news-is-making-you-miserable/

https://thehappyphilosopher.com/how-to-live-a-life-of-quiet-desperation/

https://thehappyphilosopher.com/meditation/

https://thehappyphilosopher.com/kill-your-television/

The feedback I received from the podcast gave me a lot of ideas for future articles and some other projects. It seems the things I discussed really resonated with many people so I will explore some of those topics soon. In order to make sure you don’t miss any new content be sure to sign up to receive new posts by email. No spam, just a notification when I come out with a new article.