Rolf Potts - The World's Best Traveler
00:00:00.000 | Oftentimes, we think that travel is something that we buy rather than give to ourselves.
00:00:04.000 | If we can figure out how to travel within that local economy, how to travel in a way similar to
00:00:09.120 | how people in the country were visiting travel, then I'm sure that's how you were able to get
00:00:13.680 | seven and a half months for $7,500. It's not by the big flashy stuff that you see advertised in
00:00:20.400 | glossy magazines or even on Instagram feeds. It's the quieter, humbler, more interactive places
00:00:26.400 | where the people in West Africa or the people in Southeast Asia or wherever, South America,
00:00:31.200 | travel, and it pays off in time. That chicken bus probably goes slower and has less air
00:00:38.320 | conditioning than the nice tourist bus, but it puts you into a culture in a way that the tourist
00:00:42.400 | bus doesn't and it costs a lot less. It goes a lot slower and it pays off in that time wealth
00:00:47.600 | that we're talking about. Yeah, I could talk about time wealth all day. It's really worth thinking
00:00:52.400 | about in the context of we have a limited wealth of time in life and we should really take advantage
00:00:58.000 | of it and not put off our best self to another time of life. We should grab this time and let
00:01:03.520 | it enrich our lives. Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading
00:01:08.240 | your life, money, and travel. If you're new here, I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm a diehard optimizer
00:01:12.720 | who loves doing all the research to get the best experience in life without an expensive price tag.
00:01:17.760 | Today, I couldn't be more excited because I'm talking to someone who's had a huge impact on
00:01:21.600 | my travel life, Rolf Poth. If you're not familiar with him, you should be. He's an award-winning
00:01:26.640 | travel writer who's been published in almost every publication, but I came to know him from
00:01:31.040 | the book he wrote almost 20 years ago, Vagabonding, an Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World
00:01:36.560 | Travel, which became a classic of travel writing. It has been an international bestseller. In fact,
00:01:41.920 | I stumbled upon the book in 2009, and it played a huge role in Amy and I taking a trip for eight
00:01:48.080 | months to backpack around the world. It was also part of the inspiration for my friend Tim Ferriss'
00:01:52.720 | book, The Four-Hour Workweek. Needless to say, it's a must-read for travelers, and maybe even
00:01:57.440 | more importantly, people who don't necessarily travel but want to. Just this month, he followed
00:02:02.960 | it up with a new book called The Vagabond's Way, 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the
00:02:09.200 | Art of Travel. It is filled with stories of travel and journaling, quotes for each day of the leap
00:02:14.800 | year, important note, from centuries of philosophers, authors, poets, and travelers, all paired with
00:02:20.640 | reflections about the wonder and importance of travel. I found it to be fabulous, especially for
00:02:25.920 | someone like me who struggles, find the time to sit down and read a few hundred pages at once.
00:02:30.480 | In this conversation, I want to talk about time wealth, why that's such a vital topic in life,
00:02:36.160 | how it transforms travels, and what anyone can take from the concept to travel in a richer way.
00:02:41.360 | How we can adapt to the changes of travel technology and still have amazing adventures.
00:02:46.320 | Why he once traveled for six weeks without luggage, and what you can learn from that
00:02:49.760 | experiment. How leaving your phone behind or getting lost might create richer experiences.
00:02:54.400 | Why he thinks that as you get older, you can still have more richer and fulfilling travels and so
00:03:00.080 | much more. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Good to talk to you, Chris. I'm happy to
00:03:10.160 | talk about this. Yeah. I have a lot of questions. Big fan of yours. It's the book I've gifted more
00:03:17.200 | in my life than any other book, which someone always asks you, "What's your favorite book?"
00:03:21.040 | I was like, "I don't know, but 'Vagabonding' is the book I've purchased more to give to others."
00:03:24.960 | We can make this a conversation because I've tried to live a lot of the spirit of what you've
00:03:29.440 | written. I will kick us off and ask, what do you think one of the biggest misconceptions
00:03:34.800 | the average person has about travel as you believe it is and you embody it?
00:03:40.320 | Well, that it's expensive, for one thing. I think that for generations, this is something I talk
00:03:45.120 | about in the new book, "The Vagabond's Ways," for generations, it's been seen as this indulgence.
00:03:49.520 | It's been seen as this thing that wealthy people do to showcase their lives. When in fact, I think
00:03:54.480 | people of all backgrounds have always been able to travel if they've made it a priority. I think
00:04:00.560 | expense is a big one. Of course, hacking is something that you focus on. We can talk about
00:04:05.920 | different hacks. You talked about time wealth. That was the huge hack for me from the beginning,
00:04:10.480 | realizing that time is more important than wealth in a certain sense, that creating time
00:04:15.520 | is really what you need to do to create a dream experience like travel.
00:04:19.120 | There are other things too. There are fears. There's this notion that the world is more
00:04:22.480 | dangerous than it is, partly because it used to be that the old headline, man bites dog
00:04:28.480 | media environment. Well, now it's clickbait, that bad news clicks better than good news.
00:04:34.800 | Fear is another thing. Then I guess just difficult, but I think it's easier and easier these days,
00:04:41.280 | especially in the world where so much information is available, whereas sometimes there's too much
00:04:45.440 | information, but there's enough information doing at least to encourage us that there are people
00:04:50.000 | who are not that different from us traveling in a very rich and slow and long-term way.
00:04:54.720 | It sounds like it's been something you've been thinking about for a long time because 2008,
00:05:00.240 | 2009, that's pretty early in the life cycle of my first book, Vagabonding.
00:05:04.480 | My wife and I, we had to do jobs and I got laid off and I was trying to find some freelance work.
00:05:10.400 | She didn't love her job. We were like, "Let's take a trip." I didn't have work. She quit her job.
00:05:17.280 | We're like, "Let's take a trip before we find new jobs." We started putting pins up on a map
00:05:21.040 | of where in the world we wanted to go. We didn't really know that traveling for more than a vacation
00:05:28.400 | was a thing. We'd never been told that. We'd never heard of the gap year. I read your book and I was
00:05:35.200 | like, "Oh my gosh, why a month? Why a week? Why not just go and see what happens?" We ended up
00:05:41.360 | buying, or I guess technically in our case, using points to get a one-way ticket to South Africa.
00:05:46.480 | We had a rough idea of where we were going to go, but we certainly didn't have anything more
00:05:51.040 | than a couple of nights booked and we just went. It lasted about seven and a half months.
00:05:57.360 | It ended up costing about $7,500, which I think adjusted for inflation. Who knows what that is
00:06:03.120 | today? But I think it's a whole lot less than most people spend on an eight-month trip if they take
00:06:08.640 | it. I think the slow travel, which I want to get into, is probably the thing that made that
00:06:14.080 | possible, not trying to rush from place to place. Then obviously, staying with locals helped also.
00:06:19.760 | Yeah, that's awesome. It's funny. Seven and a half months is exactly how long my first
00:06:23.840 | vagabonding trip was. In 1994, it cost me $5,000, although this was back when gas was as low as 79
00:06:30.960 | cents a gallon in the United States. Of course, this is before #vanlife. I was just living in a
00:06:36.560 | van. I was just dirtbagging it. But that's really cool to hear. It's also cool to hear that you'll
00:06:44.000 | lost your job or you had a disruption in your life, and so you responded by doing something
00:06:47.760 | you dream about. I think sometimes people, they put off their dream life to some undefined time
00:06:53.440 | in the future. Often, retirement in the United States is a huge one because really nobody is
00:06:57.760 | saying that you can travel more than a vacation. Until you're retired and you have more time for
00:07:01.760 | that, well, you can create time. You can look for time wealth. That's really cool that you responded
00:07:06.000 | to a disruption in your professional life by just sort of creating a little, what Tim Ferriss would
00:07:10.640 | call a mini retirement, but just an opportunity to embrace the world and live those travel dreams
00:07:16.400 | now because you can. Even if you can't live them this second, you can start saving money and make
00:07:21.840 | them happen much sooner than American society tells you you can take that dream trip.
00:07:26.720 | I think that the cost to fly internationally and the cost of expensive lodging that you can confirm
00:07:34.720 | right away and you don't have to walk around a town to find is such a huge piece of the expense
00:07:39.600 | that if you say, "Okay, well, we're going to go and stay," and you're willing to stay and you're
00:07:44.480 | willing to find local accommodations, everything gets a lot cheaper. Then my hack for your fear
00:07:50.160 | thing was that I always told people, they were like, "Oh, is this country safe? I've heard it's
00:07:55.600 | dangerous." I always pointed to this one. I don't know if it's still in there, but there was a
00:07:59.600 | lonely planet for New York City a long time ago, probably at least 15 years ago. If you looked at
00:08:05.280 | it under the safety section, it said, "Well, if you're going to New York City, you should carry
00:08:09.120 | a money belt and you should make sure you put all of your money and your passport and your money
00:08:12.720 | belt and tuck it in your pants in the front." I remember money belts were like a travel thing for
00:08:18.080 | safety and I would show this to people. I literally ripped the page out and I would show people and
00:08:22.320 | they'd be like, "Well, I've been to New York. You don't need a money belt. I don't carry a money
00:08:25.600 | belt in New York." I'm like, "Exactly." If they're telling you New York isn't safe and you know it
00:08:30.400 | is, do you really need to believe that everywhere else in the world isn't safe? That was my mindset
00:08:35.600 | shift that I gave people was everyone's going to say everything's dangerous because it's clickbait.
00:08:41.120 | If you can get over that, the whole world can be a lot more opening to you.
00:08:44.880 | I think that there is, to be somewhat facetious about it, a money belt industrial complex.
00:08:50.960 | There's a lot of things that people would sell you to assuage this fear when, in fact,
00:08:55.840 | you just put a couple of bucks in your sock or just put it in your pocket and odds are
00:09:00.480 | New York is full of New Yorkers who don't typically get pickpocketed. A lot of times,
00:09:04.080 | the pickpocket economy focuses on the most obvious touristic part of a place, that most parts of any
00:09:10.240 | city in the world are going to be places where pickpockets aren't going to hang out because
00:09:13.920 | there's not that many tourists to pick their pockets. Sure, I'm sure that there's a few
00:09:18.800 | picked pockets a day in Times Square, for example, but New Yorkers don't go there.
00:09:22.880 | That area is interesting for a while, but then there's more interesting parts of the city after
00:09:28.160 | you're done. Yeah, no, I agree with you that I think sometimes just showing up and figuring
00:09:34.880 | things out can do you a lot. I think sometimes we feel like we're hacking something like hotel
00:09:39.920 | expenses. You get online, you do some comparison shopping, you find an "bargain" and then you get
00:09:45.440 | to the city and you go straight to the hotel, not realizing there might be entire blocks of hotels
00:09:50.560 | where people in Thailand stay that cost a fraction of the big international hotels that you're
00:09:55.040 | shopping for online, for example. Again, one hack might be simply the willingness to not plan too
00:10:00.480 | much in advance because, as I say in the new book, you get smarter every day of your trip.
00:10:04.560 | Whatever deals you found while you're sitting in your home office, and sometimes there's
00:10:08.800 | fantastic ones, and I'm not going to fault the cool deals that the travel industry has,
00:10:13.200 | but sometimes you're not going to know that this cool mom and pop beach hut in Indonesia
00:10:20.640 | that isn't online, but is in the lexicon of every traveler who's been through that part
00:10:25.600 | of Sumatra, that that is going to cost you $12 instead of the $50 that seemed like a bargain
00:10:30.160 | before. I think that confidence and savvy that comes with just each day of being on the road
00:10:37.600 | of a long trip really is one of the best hacks out there. I got a call this week from a reporter at
00:10:43.280 | the Washington Post who asked my opinion on this TikTok video that she was writing a piece on.
00:10:47.520 | It's like, "Oh, this is 2022 at its finest." There's a woman saying, "Before you book your
00:10:52.160 | flight, before you book your hotel, what you should really do is create a Google map and put
00:10:56.640 | a pin on every single thing you want to do and see and eat and drink. That way, you know exactly
00:11:01.760 | where to book your hotel, and you can plan it all out in advance." A quote of mine that ended up in
00:11:06.400 | the article was that, "I really worry in today's day and age that we're creating a checklist before
00:11:10.960 | we even leave, and we've got a map, and we plot everything out." It's like, "What kind of
00:11:14.640 | experience are you going to have?" I'm not opposed to trying to flag some things you want to see,
00:11:22.240 | but I would encourage people to leave most of your time unplanned. Have the list, maybe. Maybe
00:11:27.520 | you could write a list of what you want to do, but don't commit to, "I'm doing this this day,"
00:11:31.200 | and set yourself in stone that that's the plan. I'm sure, as you've seen, most of the most
00:11:37.600 | memorable experiences I've had traveling are not the experience that I put on the list before I
00:11:43.440 | went. It's a random person you met at a bar that I invited you to come have dinner with his family.
00:11:49.920 | And then the list goes on, a random place you just wandered down a street.
00:11:54.640 | Yeah, I don't take fault with that list, be it with pins on a Google map or just on a piece
00:11:59.280 | of paper you keep in your pocket, but I think you really have to inbake a willingness to throw it
00:12:03.520 | away if you find something more inspiring. Because in a way, there's almost like a speed dating
00:12:07.520 | analogy here, that we're going to go on all these set dates with all of these people or places with
00:12:13.360 | certain categories that we've defined in advance when maybe you'll fall in love with the person
00:12:17.680 | you meet in the lobby. What happens if you've overplanned everything and you don't leave
00:12:21.280 | yourself open to the spontaneous and literally or metaphorically falling in love, if not with
00:12:26.000 | a person in a place and staying longer than you had planned on staying? And I think that's a big
00:12:30.160 | problem that people have. I understand why you have a giant checklist of things you want to do
00:12:34.800 | in a place, but sometimes you're racing around so much trying to get to the checklist that you don't
00:12:40.400 | give yourself time to slow, to relax and look and just savor a place. I think savoring is something
00:12:46.640 | we don't yet have an app for, right? That being able to just be happy that you're on the other
00:12:51.840 | side of the world, you're sitting on this beach and looking at the Indian Ocean and just being
00:12:55.520 | grateful for this moment and not worrying about what you're going to be doing tomorrow, that's a
00:12:59.680 | great gift of travel. And I think allowing yourself to set the itinerary aside when you really respond
00:13:05.280 | to something on the road, that's a great non-planned plan to have, just the willingness
00:13:11.520 | to improvise as you become inspired and more knowledgeable. Yeah, I've heard you tell a story
00:13:16.560 | that I'm going to hope you repeat, which is about someone you were speaking with, I think, that was
00:13:21.440 | frustrated that they didn't get a chance to go do everything they wanted to see in Paris because
00:13:25.920 | they were stuck at a cafe and all they wanted to do was experience Paris and they felt shackled to
00:13:30.560 | the cafe. Yeah, well, actually, that's more than one person. Initially, that was me. The first few
00:13:36.720 | times I went to Paris, I was just so frustrated that the restaurants are slow. America was very
00:13:41.280 | efficient. They can churn people through restaurants. They find your table, they bring
00:13:45.600 | your bill. In Paris, it was just so comparatively slow. And then in time, I realized that that was
00:13:50.720 | just part of the pleasure of being there. And so I had students and friends who would come and visit
00:13:54.400 | me in Paris. I teach a writing class there every summer. And I realized that for all the people who
00:14:00.880 | are sitting worrying about their bucket list of things to do in Paris while they're waiting for
00:14:04.960 | their creme brulee to come, they're looking for an experience of Paris that is abstracted from
00:14:10.240 | the actual experience of Paris. Parisians don't have a checklist of things. They actually enjoy
00:14:14.960 | the three-hour lunch. They enjoy being able to just savor each aspect of the meal and talk to
00:14:22.240 | the waiter not as just sort of another pawn in their game who's looking for a tip, but a guy
00:14:25.760 | who really knows the food and that's conversing with this person will help them have a better
00:14:29.440 | meal. And the tables outside in French restaurants face out into the street so that you're sitting
00:14:36.560 | next to your companion side by side, sort of interacting with the street and observing it.
00:14:41.440 | And so I think if you don't allow yourself to just enjoy that three-hour lunch, even though it's way
00:14:46.240 | less efficient than an American lunch, you're not allowing yourself to enjoy Paris. In America,
00:14:51.360 | and I'm guilty of this, sometimes we eat lunch standing up so we can get on with our day.
00:14:54.800 | But actually the experience of Paris is being able to savor a lunch in the way that French people do.
00:14:59.600 | And if you don't allow yourself that experience, you're sort of cheating yourself out of a core
00:15:03.120 | experience of being in a place like France. I want to jump back. We skipped through a bunch
00:15:07.440 | of things. You talked about time well. So can we talk a little bit more about, you said it was this
00:15:12.800 | major unlock for you. How can people take that concept and improve their mindset and improve
00:15:18.000 | their travel? Well, I think it's a core shift in what you consider wealth is. I think it's a matter
00:15:24.800 | of letting what wealth you have serve you instead of shifting your existence to serve a certain idea
00:15:31.520 | of wealth. I think oftentimes we go through all this trouble to reach certain goals, not realizing
00:15:40.240 | why we want them. And I think wealth is a big one, that there's certain metrics we use to judge
00:15:44.560 | wealth. And one is money, one is possessions. But I think the truest expression of wealth is being
00:15:49.600 | able to use this limited amount of time you have in your finite life. We're all born equally rich
00:15:54.400 | in time when you think about it. And finding ways to let that time enrich your life in a way that
00:16:01.360 | makes your dreams come true. I mean, I talk about travel all the time. So often I talk about time
00:16:05.120 | wealth in the context of travel. It could be about spending more time with your kids, for example.
00:16:09.680 | I meet travelers who go to the other side of the world and realize that very poor countries,
00:16:13.760 | comparatively poor countries like Uganda or Cambodia, being a father in those places is much
00:16:18.480 | more interactive with their kids. They don't compartmentalize their fatherhood in those
00:16:22.160 | parts of the world like they do back home. So they learn almost by accident this idea of wealth as a
00:16:28.560 | manifestation of how you spend your time. And one interesting person I talked to is Kevin Kelly. I'm
00:16:33.680 | sure you're familiar with his work, a co-founder of Wired. He talks about how young people are
00:16:39.680 | richer in time than money and older people are richer in money than time. And I think one reason
00:16:44.240 | why young people are stereotypically more given to long-term travel is that they're in that
00:16:48.560 | situation. They don't have more money than older people. They have less responsibilities. They have
00:16:53.600 | more of a willingness to forego certain comforts to get more time out of what money they do have
00:16:59.200 | in their wallet. And so it really comes down to spending what money you do have in such a way that
00:17:04.320 | it makes your life more fulfilling. And I think oftentimes we think that travel is something that
00:17:09.200 | we buy rather than give to ourselves. And if we can figure out how to travel within that
00:17:13.840 | local economy, how to travel in a way similar to how people in the country were visiting travel,
00:17:18.800 | then I'm sure that's how you were able to get seven and a half months for seven and a half
00:17:22.960 | thousand dollars. It's not by the big flashy stuff that you see advertised in glossy magazines or
00:17:28.720 | even on Instagram feeds. It's the quieter, humbler, more interactive places where the people in West
00:17:34.720 | Africa or the people in Southeast Asia or wherever, South America, travel and it pays off in
00:17:41.360 | time. That chicken bus probably goes slower and has less air conditioning than the nice tourist
00:17:46.880 | bus, but it puts you into a culture in a way that the tourist bus doesn't and it costs a lot less.
00:17:51.600 | It goes a lot slower and it pays off in that time wealth that we're talking about. Yeah,
00:17:55.840 | I could talk about time wealth all day. It's really worth thinking about in the context of
00:18:01.440 | we have a limited wealth of time in life and we should really take advantage of it and not put
00:18:06.080 | off our best self to another time of life. We should grab this time and let it enrich our lives.
00:18:11.760 | One fun anecdote, which is my wife worked early at Lyft and the origin story of the company was
00:18:18.480 | before it was Lyft, it was a company called Zimride. And before it was Zimride, the name
00:18:22.640 | hadn't existed and one of the co-founders was in Africa riding one of those slow buses.
00:18:28.400 | And that was the inspiration for starting Zimride, which became Lyft. So you say,
00:18:32.240 | the luxury bus might've been more fancy. But in this particular random case, taking that one bus
00:18:40.240 | ended up building a multi-billion dollar company. So there is one anecdote of even that cheaper,
00:18:46.480 | slower, maybe sweatier bus can pay off for some people. I generally think travel is an opportunity
00:18:56.160 | to see people doing different things, different ways around the world. And that makes you a more
00:19:01.200 | creative person, makes you a more curious person and leads to all kinds of things.
00:19:06.240 | So funny that you use the one example that I happen to know ended up becoming a wild success.
00:19:11.760 | But I think it's a fun story. I also think I had a conversation with my wife the other day,
00:19:18.480 | and we were talking about goals. And we haven't really gone through this process
00:19:22.400 | of what are our goals for our family, for our finances, for our health. But we thought,
00:19:26.720 | "We have two daughters now, maybe we should." And my wife had this financial goal. I want a
00:19:32.400 | net worth financial goal. And I pushed back to her and this connects back to time wealth.
00:19:38.720 | But she said, "I would love to hit this milestone." And I said, "Okay, well, we could hit it. But
00:19:43.680 | would you be okay if that meant either one of us was working a lot more and not spending as
00:19:50.400 | much time together?" And she's like, "Well, no, I wouldn't want that." And I was like, "Well,
00:19:53.040 | would you be okay if we moved to a different part of the country that was cheaper,
00:19:57.280 | or we cut back on some of the things we do?" And she's like, "Well, no, I wouldn't want to
00:20:00.560 | sacrifice those things." And we had this conversation where in our minds, and this is
00:20:04.640 | purely part of the society we live in and the expectations we set on people,
00:20:10.080 | she had felt like we needed to grow our net worth. And in a way, through this conversation about what
00:20:16.880 | we actually wanted to spend our time doing, we left being like, "Actually, maybe we need a smaller
00:20:21.840 | net. Maybe we need less." Bill Perkins wrote this book, Die With Zero. And the premise is like,
00:20:27.680 | "Why are we trying to amass all this money? We should be trying to take the money we have and
00:20:31.600 | optimally use it to have the most fulfilling life." And in some cases, that might be actually
00:20:38.000 | not trying to grow and grow and grow your wealth, but maybe to find more creative ways to spend it
00:20:42.880 | or unlock time. Yeah. No, I love this example. Actually, I love the shared taxi from Africa
00:20:48.560 | example too. But I think wealth is an abstraction. It's often future-oriented. And one thing,
00:20:53.520 | using children as a great example, because oftentimes we think of children in terms of
00:20:59.840 | them being potential adults, when in fact, the blessing of having them as children is having
00:21:04.640 | them right where they are, right? And so, sure, it's good to create security and create good
00:21:09.520 | habits for your children. But part of the pleasure of being a parent is like having them being a
00:21:16.080 | newborn that is gripping their finger with their whole fist, right? And just being able to enjoy
00:21:21.200 | that moment regardless of what your net worth is in 20 years. I think one danger of having
00:21:27.520 | arbitrary goals for net worth is that you become focused on those goals rather than that very
00:21:32.400 | transient experience that is parenthood, that each phase of your kid's life, it can be exhausting,
00:21:38.720 | of course. But it's so special. It's just so exciting. And then I think there's a different
00:21:46.080 | dynamic. I remember sort of when I shifted from being this kid that was being raised by my parents
00:21:50.560 | to this traveler who was sort of hosting his parents and sort of being the expert and that
00:21:54.880 | they were the young, curious, naive people, even though they were my parents in a place like China
00:21:59.040 | or the Czech Republic. And so, I think, yeah, nothing against having goals or thinking about
00:22:06.000 | net worth or creating safety nets or steering children in such a way that they will become
00:22:11.840 | productive adults. But just that blessing, I think often that cliche is, "Enjoy them while
00:22:18.880 | they're toddlers, that'll be gone. Enjoy them while they're infants. Enjoy them while they're
00:22:22.400 | in grade school because you'll miss that." Well, you really do need to embrace that. And that
00:22:26.480 | sometimes if we're making decisions that are based on 20-year goals rather than just looking at our
00:22:32.880 | kids or looking at our life or looking at our travel, looking where we are, then we are relegating
00:22:37.280 | our lives to an abstract future instead of embracing the beauty of the moment.
00:22:41.600 | You mentioned moving to another place. I'm based in Kansas, which is a much less fashionable place
00:22:46.960 | than the Bay Area where you're based. But one nice thing about that is that it just pays off.
00:22:52.480 | I'm not a parent, actually. I'm an uncle. I love being an uncle. But it just costs less to get
00:22:58.880 | through the day, to achieve certain goals in life. And that pays off in free time. And so,
00:23:04.400 | I'm not saying that everybody needs to move to Kansas or to a cheap part of the world like
00:23:07.760 | Columbia. There's a lot of places where digital nomads go because they can save money. But there
00:23:12.960 | are different tools, hacks, if you will, to take what money you do have, to take what income and
00:23:18.240 | interests that you have and loves, be it from family or activities, and find a way to make
00:23:23.840 | them a more active part of your life. I've talked about it on my own podcast that people will often,
00:23:29.600 | they love the mountains, but Oregon is hard to afford these days. So, they move to Tennessee,
00:23:33.920 | and they can hike three times a week in Tennessee for a quarter of the price of Oregon.
00:23:39.760 | So, I think that there's a lot of ways that if you can embrace the concept of time wealth and
00:23:46.320 | realize that there's different ways of freeing time up in your life, then you can really focus
00:23:52.160 | your life on those present moment goals that make life richer and more enjoyable and more fun and
00:23:57.920 | more rewarding and more likely to give back to things like family and community.
00:24:02.000 | Is there a process or a framework that someone listening to this is thinking, "Gosh, I really
00:24:06.160 | wish I could figure out what that means for me"? Are there questions you would propose someone
00:24:10.960 | think about to kind of figure out what they want? I would say that there are some questions like,
00:24:16.080 | "What makes me happy in the course of a given day and in the course of a given week? Where is my
00:24:20.560 | happy time?" And if I'm so stressed out, it's watching cat videos on social media, then maybe
00:24:27.600 | you should get a cat. I think sometimes we assuage our stresses through distractions rather than
00:24:34.080 | passions and loves. I think sometimes we don't know our passions, and I have nothing against
00:24:38.720 | college. My father taught college, my sister teaches college, and I think it's a very noble
00:24:43.840 | vocation. But sometimes we go to college without even knowing what we like to do. And other
00:24:48.080 | cultures have gap years. In the UK and Australia, they have places, the gap year where you take a
00:24:54.080 | year off after secondary schooling, but before university where you travel or you work.
00:24:59.040 | And that allows you to find out what you really love to do and where your passions are before
00:25:03.280 | you spend all this money going to university. And so weirdly enough, I think that travel
00:25:08.160 | and maybe traveling for seven and a half months or whatever is a great way to find out what you
00:25:12.400 | love. I think there's what your parents think you should do, there's what your counselors think you
00:25:17.360 | should do. I think oftentimes young people, but even older people, it's the same way, that until
00:25:22.320 | you are off into the place completely away from the pressures and routines and constrictions of
00:25:30.240 | living at home, you can really find out where your heart lies. That you might sit in a village
00:25:36.320 | for a day and watch people build a house and think, "Gosh, I want to build my own house,"
00:25:41.520 | or study architecture or something like that. That's just a random example.
00:25:46.960 | One thing I talk about in the new book in the context of a couple monks from hundreds of years
00:25:51.600 | ago, the young monk talks to the older monk. The older monk asks him a question about life and he
00:25:56.560 | says, "I don't know." And the older monk says, "Very good. Not knowing is most intimate." I
00:26:00.240 | think it's good to embrace not knowing yet, not just how to live our lives, but what our goals
00:26:05.280 | are of just sort of being the person who's traveling through the world without not a lot of
00:26:10.720 | plans yet, but having the faith to think, "Eventually, I'm going to really wander my
00:26:17.360 | way into something that makes my heart sing, that makes me fall in love with some aspect of life,"
00:26:23.840 | and that's going to be focused on it. That could be any number of things, including family.
00:26:28.320 | For years, I lived next door to my parents. My parents are now in assisted living. They're not
00:26:36.080 | far from me now. The whole lesson of living next door to one's parents, which is not a very common
00:26:42.000 | American thing, is very common in almost every other part of the world, in Southeast Asia and
00:26:45.920 | Africa, pooling your resources and getting land. That paid off not just in the fact that I was able
00:26:51.360 | to save money, but I was able to spend some quality time with my parents at a really cool
00:26:55.440 | time in life. I think there's a lot of different strategies into creating either on purpose or by
00:27:01.920 | accident. This whole familial thing was an accident. It was an idea about how to live as a
00:27:06.240 | family that I didn't get until I was overseas, but there's ways to allow yourself to grow into ways
00:27:11.520 | of being that you might not seem now. You just need to allow yourself to sit still for a while
00:27:16.800 | and stop distracting yourself and start embracing things in life.
00:27:19.680 | It seems like spending a lot of time with family, you picked up quite easily because it's so common
00:27:26.080 | in the rest of the world. Are there other major things that have affected the way you live your
00:27:30.560 | life now that are themes that travel has brought you, aside from just traveling?
00:27:35.760 | Right. Travel is so much a part of things. If we can see this, travel is more than a consumer act
00:27:43.920 | that are certain commonalities that we see again and again. Family is one of them. I've often said
00:27:52.000 | that when I was traveling through Southeast Asia, I was 27 years old, people would say, "Oh, are you
00:27:56.320 | married? Do you have kids?" I said, "No, no, I don't." They're like, "Oh, I'm sorry." It was such
00:28:00.320 | a core value in this part of the world. I got the sense from them that their happiness was so tied
00:28:06.480 | into family, into marriage and children and relationships with family, that it seemed weird
00:28:12.000 | that I, this very rich and comparatively rich and mobile guy, would not have that as a core value.
00:28:17.680 | I think food, another one, to be very simple, like in France, that's not the only place where
00:28:22.320 | meals are much slower and more communal than we have in our standing up, posting to Instagram
00:28:27.840 | while we're sipping our latte, first world society. I think it's really these basic
00:28:33.680 | building block things that travel has taught me to come home to. Another great thing about France,
00:28:41.600 | but it's also something that you'll see in Africa or Asia, is eating food that was obviously grown
00:28:47.280 | within 20 miles of where you're eating it, of biting into a cherry in France and feeling cheated
00:28:53.280 | because you didn't realize cherries could taste that good. It's not some magical French thing,
00:28:57.360 | it's just that French place value on seasonal fruit, produce. They're not flying in cherries
00:29:03.280 | from Chile in the middle of the winter. There's a certain time in late June, early July when it's
00:29:08.720 | cherry season and that's when you eat your cherries. Weirdly enough, obviously, travel has
00:29:16.560 | given me philosophical perspective with things like time wealth, but it's often these basic
00:29:21.360 | building block themes, love for family, concern about food that I bring home and try to bake into
00:29:27.280 | my travel life. And then also just not rushing and multitasking things, being able to slow down
00:29:33.280 | and let a day happen instead of micromanaging and trying to rush through it to be somehow
00:29:39.040 | ahead of your competitive neighbor at the end of the day. I think that not to fetishize other
00:29:45.040 | cultures, because I'm a big fan of American culture, but I think sometimes we are doing
00:29:49.760 | too much, we're throwing too much at life and not sitting still. It's just another great lesson I've
00:29:56.080 | had from travel is the ability to sit still and let a day happen in a way that really enriches it.
00:30:01.360 | And that can happen in a comparatively wealthy country like Norway, where I went for the first
00:30:05.680 | time this summer, or a comparatively poor country like Indonesia, where I went a few years ago.
00:30:10.640 | It's really fun to intertwine one's home life with lessons learned from travel. And I'm sure you
00:30:16.000 | discovered a lot of things on your own journey and the journeys you've had since.
00:30:19.600 | Yeah, I mean, so many. I'd love to talk a little bit about how you have the kinds of experiences
00:30:26.080 | in a new place. Obviously, we mentioned, look, if you land in Paris and you go straight to a hotel,
00:30:31.360 | and from your hotel to the Louvre, and then from there to a reservation, you're going to kind of
00:30:34.560 | miss it. But are there things that you try to do and how you structure your time in a place,
00:30:40.160 | how long you're there, what you do first that kind of allow you to immerse yourself in a new place?
00:30:46.000 | Well, one of the catchphrases from Vagabonding that I refreshed in the new book, The Vagabond's
00:30:49.600 | Way is, "Walk until your day becomes interesting." And I think we often don't give ourselves credit
00:30:53.760 | for just showing up in a place and walking around without really knowing where we're going or having
00:30:59.520 | any goals or checklists and just sort of walking until you sort of get a sense for the pace of a
00:31:05.520 | place. And instead of sightseeing, maybe smellseeing, follow the smells around a neighborhood
00:31:12.480 | and just find ways to slow down and realize that quotidian things are as amazing as sightseeing
00:31:21.760 | places. To use Paris as an example, they have a convenience store. It's an equivalent of 7-Eleven,
00:31:26.720 | it's called the Carrefour. There's also a Monoprix. And just realizing that it's a little
00:31:31.040 | bit different than the American equivalent. Another thing I write about in the new book
00:31:34.480 | is getting a haircut in Egypt on Zamalek Island in Cairo, which took an hour and had 23 steps and
00:31:40.480 | cost $6, including tip. One, it was the best haircut of my life, but it was just a haircut.
00:31:46.640 | It also gave me perspective on the meticulousness of Arab masculinity as pertains to appearance.
00:31:54.480 | And so, I had this wonderful experience just by willing myself to get a haircut in a foreign place.
00:31:59.360 | So, I have nothing against sightseeing. I have nothing against tourist districts. I think it's
00:32:03.280 | pretty normal to go to places you've dreamed about. If you're in Egypt, sure, go to the
00:32:06.720 | pyramids. It'd be silly not to go to the pyramids, but get a haircut. Go to the local market, go to
00:32:11.440 | a sweet shop. A great thing about Egypt specifically is that they take their sweets very seriously.
00:32:17.200 | And just like way more than your average hostess ding dong, they have these handmade sweets that
00:32:23.280 | are amazing and dirt cheap and really fun to see. And so, I'm sure I'm curious, what strategies...
00:32:30.720 | You had a seven and a half months around the world. Did you have any go-to strategies when
00:32:34.720 | you landed in a place after you were a little bit salty as a traveler?
00:32:37.360 | We tried to always, no matter what the purpose of the trip was, we try to always
00:32:43.200 | walk towards the food market or the market. It doesn't have to be a food market. It could be,
00:32:48.400 | you know, in Turkey, there are more markets. In a lot of Arab cultures, it's just like everything's
00:32:53.280 | going on in the market. There's food stands, there's shopping. In some places, it's really
00:32:57.440 | more of a food market and you go early. I think in Indonesia, the food market's closed by 10,
00:33:04.160 | 11 in the morning because everyone's there right in the morning to get food.
00:33:07.200 | And that's a place where I think definitely you could smell sea and all the senses are kind of
00:33:13.280 | a part of a food market. But it's also true in the fish market in Tokyo, it's like just people
00:33:19.440 | running around, bumping around, what's going on. I feel like that is my favorite place to kind of
00:33:24.480 | get my bearings of a city. It's like, what are people eating? What are they drinking? Are they
00:33:28.720 | negotiating? Are they a yelling culture? Are they a friendly culture? You could see it all in this
00:33:33.520 | one place. And you could eat. You could do it on your own. Recently, I kind of love just going on
00:33:40.720 | a tour somewhere with some local of a food market and getting a lay of like, what do we eat in this
00:33:45.920 | culture? How do people shop? How do people buy? I don't know how you feel about hiring tour guides
00:33:51.840 | versus just walking solo. I think there's room for both for me. But that's where I start almost
00:33:58.000 | everything. I mean, we went on our honeymoon to the Seychelles, but we still went to the food
00:34:02.160 | market. The market, I think it was a fish market downtown because we were like, we just want to
00:34:07.600 | feel a place. Even if the goal is to relax, we still want to feel the culture here.
00:34:12.080 | Yeah, I love that. And I think sometimes travelers will go to a market and they'll
00:34:17.680 | walk through the whole thing, but they'll only go to the jewelry stand or the brass figurine stand
00:34:23.600 | or whatever, the obviously souvenir thing. But I love the idea of getting ingredients for a meal,
00:34:28.800 | even if this vegetable, you don't even know what it is yet. It helps to have a place with a kitchen,
00:34:33.520 | of course. But there's just so many times where tourists will spend like an hour in one of the
00:34:38.640 | most famous markets in the world and then they'll go to a restaurant. It's like, no, no, buy food,
00:34:42.400 | just get a picnic, get those figs and that tea or whatever and have an adventure of it.
00:34:48.880 | And you mentioned a guide sometimes, like early in the travels, like in your first days in a place,
00:34:53.120 | I don't often get guides, but I'm not opposed to it because sometimes the guides can help you
00:34:58.240 | negotiate things and they can explain like, oh yeah, no, actually this isn't a fruit, it's a
00:35:02.240 | spice and we use it in this soup for this reason. And it gives you a headstart. It's worth the
00:35:08.640 | monetary investment because it gives you a headstart on understanding how life works there.
00:35:13.360 | And I love market cultures. I also love market squares too, because oftentimes there's like a
00:35:19.600 | soccer game or people are playing foosball or basically it immediately insinuates yourself
00:35:25.200 | into the daily life of a place. Because again, Parisians aren't usually standing in line for
00:35:29.680 | the mosque. Egyptians aren't usually taking a tour bus to the great pyramids, they're doing
00:35:33.520 | different things. And both Cairo and Paris, two of my favorite places in the world, really reward
00:35:39.680 | that walk through the market. And like in Paris, for example, different markets will be open on
00:35:43.760 | different days. In Cairo, the best oranges I've ever had, I've gotten in a market in Cairo for
00:35:50.880 | pennies. Who would have guessed, but I was just wandering around and it's like, yeah, I'll get
00:35:54.320 | this orange that's half the size of my head, why not? And it was delicious. And I think those are
00:35:58.240 | the surprises that you can't really, there's no app for that. There's no micromanaged way to wander
00:36:05.440 | into those awesome market moments where suddenly you're eating this fruit that you didn't realize
00:36:10.480 | existed. And now you're on your fifth one, because it's amazing and you're in Indonesia and it's a
00:36:16.560 | lot of fun. So yeah, I'm with you. That was jackfruit for me. I had never heard of jackfruit
00:36:21.040 | my whole life. I tried it now. I love it. My daughter is two and she's obsessed with jackfruit.
00:36:25.760 | So I'm finding myself trying to find the Asian grocery store to go buy more jackfruit. And I
00:36:31.760 | didn't even know it was a thing. I just saw it and I was like, "What is this?" They're like,
00:36:34.240 | "It's kind of like a banana, maybe a pineapple, a little bit mixed." And it's my favorite.
00:36:38.800 | Well, that's something you can take home too. You were talking before just like,
00:36:41.120 | what attitudes do I take home? Well, sometimes the simplest one is food. For my birthday last
00:36:46.400 | year, my wife took me to a Korean restaurant way out in probably an hour from here. Well,
00:36:50.720 | I was so excited because every time I eat Korean food, it reminds me of being back in Korea. In a
00:36:54.720 | way, I can always take a little bit of my heart back to Korea when I'm eating kimchi and bulgogi.
00:36:58.800 | And so that's a big part of it. It's like suddenly these places are in conversation
00:37:03.920 | with each other. I'm curious, do you have any rituals that are sort of born of travel? Do you
00:37:08.960 | have any things at home that were sort of baked in by your journeys in other places?
00:37:14.720 | Gosh, I'm trying to think through. I mean, I know when it comes to food,
00:37:20.240 | I'd say 50% of the foods that we cook are not traditional American food. We cook a lot
00:37:26.000 | of Korean food because we just love Korean food. And so when we go to places, the gifts I try to
00:37:32.560 | bring people, I'm like, "Oh, let's bring some smoked paprika from Croatia." I can't remember
00:37:38.160 | what country, Budapest, Hungary. Hungary, I think has a lot. I could be totally wrong here,
00:37:41.760 | but I think it was Hungary has a lot of paprika. So I brought home everyone paprika and I want to,
00:37:47.040 | I try to... The things we bring people are things to help them experience something
00:37:53.840 | kind of satiating, like a drink, an alcohol, a spirit, a spice. I don't know. That's one.
00:38:01.280 | I remember, I can't remember where I was that I experienced raclette and we bought a raclette
00:38:07.760 | grill. My wife has since, it's been this sore subject in our house, which is like,
00:38:11.680 | "We never use this thing." And I'm like, "No, but one day we will." And she's like,
00:38:15.200 | "We've got to get rid of it. It hasn't been touched in two years. It's caked on with dust."
00:38:18.320 | But I think food is something that when we're in another country, it's like,
00:38:23.040 | "I only want to eat local." In India, it was like, "I will risk sickness to be able to eat the food
00:38:30.400 | on the street, drink the chai tea from the cups from a person." That's travel a lot for me is
00:38:37.120 | kind of understanding that. And ideally, talking to people about it. I think the experiences that
00:38:43.360 | have happened once we've come home are always being able to connect the dots in strange ways.
00:38:50.000 | So a great example was we were in the park, just a five-minute walk from our house the other day,
00:38:55.680 | and all these people are dancing. And I was like, "Why is everybody dancing?" This is not a park
00:39:00.160 | where there's normally dancing, but there's a bunch of kids and adults all dancing and eating.
00:39:04.560 | And I asked them, I said, "What's going on?" And they're like, "Oh, we're celebrating because it
00:39:08.240 | was the Lebanese festival last weekend, and all these kids danced in a parade. And so now we're
00:39:12.800 | kind of celebrating here." And my daughter runs up to the middle of the group. A woman picks her
00:39:17.840 | up. And it's funny because I think many Americans would be terrified if a random person in a park
00:39:24.560 | starts picking up and dancing with your kid. But we're like, "Oh, I've been to Lebanon." And the
00:39:28.800 | culture is just so welcoming. We ended up spending two hours there having meals, talking about our
00:39:33.440 | trip to Lebanon, and having a way to connect with people. And I think it turns out we live half a
00:39:40.560 | mile from a Lebanese church. And they're like, "Come on every second and fourth Sunday is when
00:39:45.680 | we have all the families there, and we do all these events and gatherings. We don't care if
00:39:49.200 | you practice whatever religion, just come. We love meeting people who understand and are excited to
00:39:55.360 | learn more about our culture." And so I think one cool thing to take away, and depending where in
00:40:02.080 | the country you are, it could be harder or easier, but you don't have to go halfway around the world
00:40:06.640 | to have a really immersive cultural experience that's far different from where you are.
00:40:10.480 | And so I think we try to have those experiences when we're traveling, but we also try to have
00:40:14.560 | those experiences here and find the pockets of a city that are lots of Korean restaurants or
00:40:22.240 | lots of people doing XYZ and try to do that while we're here. Because for us, we can't always be
00:40:28.160 | traveling. And with two small kids, it's hard. But it's not hard to necessarily go to a local
00:40:33.360 | Korean restaurant or meet a bunch of Lebanese people dancing in the park.
00:40:37.040 | That's awesome. And that's great that you had a kid that was just completely fearless and just
00:40:42.160 | ran in and sort of insinuated in that situation. Kids are actually a great travel tool. I have a
00:40:46.160 | lot of old traveler friends who, they get married and they start to have kids and they're worried
00:40:50.240 | that it's going to cut into their travel experience. You know what I can, because
00:40:53.280 | kids need a certain structure and discipline on the road. But I've found that people around the
00:40:57.520 | world love kids and they don't really need a common language to pick up a kid and admire
00:41:02.080 | how cute it is. And so, kids can really be a window into a place. And when they get to a
00:41:06.880 | certain age, not only are they fearless, but they have no preconceptions about what is or isn't
00:41:11.840 | important. I have a chapter in The Vagabond's Way about I went with my nephew to Père Lachaise
00:41:16.000 | Cemetery in France, and he was 14. And usually, you go there and it's like, "Oh, here's Jim
00:41:21.440 | Morrison's grave," or "Here's Oscar Wilde's grave," or "Here's Abelard and Eloise." Well,
00:41:25.280 | he was 14. He didn't know who any of these people were. Jim Morrison died the year I was born. So,
00:41:30.800 | he barely knew who the doors were. But he just was curious about everything. He's like, "Well,
00:41:35.520 | why are there all these flowers on this grave? His name is Frank Alamo." It's like, "Well,
00:41:38.800 | I don't know." And he's like, "You don't know who Frank Alamo is?" It's like, "I've been here for
00:41:42.000 | 10 times, but I don't know." So, we looked it up and Frank Alamo is like this sort of Elvis-style
00:41:46.400 | pop star who just died in France. And there's this other grave in the cemetery that had all these
00:41:51.520 | hammers and weasels carved into this giant grave. And it was this Russian princess whose fortune
00:41:56.880 | was made on iron and fur, hence the hammers and the weasels. And it's just sort of this strange
00:42:02.400 | mystery that basically all he brought to this place was his imagination because he was a 14-year-old
00:42:07.120 | kid. And suddenly, I was learning things in a cemetery that I had been to several times.
00:42:11.600 | And so, I think kids can be a great travel tool because not only are they just excited that people
00:42:16.640 | are dancing, but also they humanize you to other people. It's one thing to be a couple of outsiders
00:42:22.800 | in a group, but outsiders with kids who are excited about things, then suddenly, you're one
00:42:27.360 | of them in a certain way. A family is a very recognizable unit around the world. And it's a
00:42:32.880 | great window into places. I know you don't have children, but you've got your nephew. I'm sure
00:42:38.400 | you've had more travel conversations than probably anyone listening. Are there tips that you've
00:42:43.200 | picked up from others that you'd give to people with kids trying to think, "Gosh, travel can be
00:42:48.320 | stressful with children. It seems like too much. How to make it easier? How to make it feel more
00:42:53.360 | approachable?" Well, again, structure is something that they need more than your average dirtbag
00:42:58.400 | traveler. They need a sense for how each day works. But maybe also take them into environments
00:43:03.920 | that do capture their imagination, maybe environments where there are other kids.
00:43:07.600 | We default to museums and cathedrals way of travel, which is fine and interesting,
00:43:14.800 | but it's more abstracted. It's more tied into things like history or religion or wherever.
00:43:19.520 | We're sometimes just a random park. Now, I feel like if somebody is in the Bay Area,
00:43:23.520 | they should go to this park where you found that dance. Basically, any park where people are having
00:43:27.520 | fun is a window into a place. And kids, at the end of the day, love to run around. And there's
00:43:31.840 | so many places, preferably away from heavy traffic, where kids can run around and suddenly,
00:43:37.120 | you're hanging out and your kids are opening doors into a place that you wouldn't have noticed
00:43:42.240 | before because kids don't need to have a common language to run around and have fun.
00:43:46.160 | And sometimes they'll talk to each other and have perfect conversations without realizing
00:43:49.840 | they don't really speak the same language at a certain age. And so, I think just sort of that
00:43:54.160 | openness and realizing that it's a lot simpler than you think. I think we can sometimes
00:43:58.880 | micromanage parenthood in the United States. We have our special backpack full of the sippy cup
00:44:03.680 | and then the iPad and all these things that we feel like we need to keep a kid occupied,
00:44:09.360 | when in fact, a green space where they can run around with other kids is great.
00:44:12.720 | Actually, that market, I'm sure kids would be really excited visually and centrally by a market
00:44:20.880 | just because it's like, to use a metaphor that would make sense when I was a kid, it's like
00:44:26.560 | something from Star Wars. It's like the cantina scene from Star Wars where the music is different
00:44:31.280 | and the food is different. And in this kid-like way, it's like you're on another planet. And so,
00:44:35.680 | I think allowing your kids to engage their imaginations in a way that we as parents and
00:44:40.560 | elders sometimes have ceased to do is a great way to make them great travel allies and to sort of
00:44:47.920 | follow their example of being kid-like in a place that we don't understand but we can be engaged by.
00:44:52.160 | I want to talk a little bit about slow travel, but I think that is also a big
00:44:56.720 | thing. I haven't done this yet. Our kids are two and four months, but we thought about travel.
00:45:02.720 | It's like, what if instead of trying to take a week trip to Italy, we take a month trip,
00:45:07.920 | we find some Airbnb, we could rent our place out here while we're gone so that the cost of the
00:45:12.160 | trip is a little cheaper. Or maybe, I haven't thought about this way, we find a family and
00:45:16.880 | stay with them or something and get to know people. But when you're there and you create
00:45:20.800 | a routine, you can create the routine there. There's not as much pressure of, "Oh, well,
00:45:24.480 | we have to do all this stuff because we're only here for four days." It's like, "Well, today,
00:45:27.760 | we're going to go to the park. Maybe we're going to sit at a cafe. We'll come home,
00:45:31.440 | you can take a nap." We don't have to get it all done. I think I'm really excited to do a little
00:45:38.400 | bit more of that style travel, which we did on our big trip, because we didn't have the money.
00:45:44.800 | We were just like, "We're going to stay in the city for a week because we can't afford to keep
00:45:48.080 | moving." But I think that could be something valuable to do with kids instead of the traditional
00:45:55.600 | late 20s trip where you're just like, "Go, go, go through everything."
00:45:59.760 | I think that's great. Experience more by doing less. In fact, you live in a very popular part
00:46:07.760 | of the United States. There's actually home exchanges. You can find somebody in Italy who
00:46:11.120 | wants to live in the Bay Area for a while. There are online sites where you can do home exchanges.
00:46:15.520 | I live in Kansas.
00:46:17.760 | Have you heard of people that have had success? I want to do a little bit of research here,
00:46:22.320 | but it's like, what are the odds that there's a person in Italy who wants to come to the Bay Area
00:46:26.320 | the same week I want to go to Italy? Have you heard good success stories from people doing this?
00:46:31.680 | Absolutely. Some of the students in my Paris class from the Bay Area have done home swaps.
00:46:35.920 | They basically find a place to stay during my class in Paris while the French family
00:46:41.040 | is enjoying a California vacation of their own. There's no silver bullet. It's not a perfect
00:46:46.720 | thing, but it's very doable, especially if you live in a part of the United States where people
00:46:51.600 | from other countries would like to live in themselves. And then the great thing about
00:46:55.680 | being with a family in a place is that doing chores, washing dishes, you're basically routine,
00:47:00.320 | you're suddenly doing it in a more Italian way. And I guarantee when you walk down the same street
00:47:06.160 | for the third day in a row with your super cute kids, the guy that owns the pastry shop is going
00:47:11.120 | to come out with a little snack for your kids. Basically, you become a part of the habit of that
00:47:15.680 | neighborhood. I think sometimes tourists, even backpackers are ghosts. They're there for a couple
00:47:21.360 | of days and they're gone. And so, you can't really develop relationships. Whereas in for a month,
00:47:25.600 | it can be really special if there's this American family that's suddenly in the village and they
00:47:30.400 | don't speak the language that well. And they're sort of cute when they order the food because
00:47:34.400 | they get the words wrong and they order a dessert food item for dinner or whatever.
00:47:42.000 | But then suddenly, you have this new enlivened empathy simply because you have joined,
00:47:48.800 | instead of being part of a touristic routine in a place, you've joined the daily routine of the
00:47:53.600 | people who live there. And then suddenly, you and your family or you and your partner or you as a
00:47:59.520 | person alone are experiencing a place in a very rich way that is not taking five countries off
00:48:05.920 | your list, but it's taking one community for example, a month. And you're really going deep
00:48:11.600 | in a way that you're probably more likely to think about it in your old age, that one month in the
00:48:17.040 | beautiful Italian village, than if you'd been racing to five different countries in that one
00:48:21.120 | month during the same time. So, I'm a big fan of slow travel. It's funny because you talked earlier
00:48:26.160 | about getting your hair cut. And I think back to our trip around the world and some of the most
00:48:29.760 | memorable moments. And mine too was getting my hair cut in Nairobi by someone who was terrified
00:48:36.080 | because they're like, "I've never cut a white person's hair in my whole life." And I was like,
00:48:39.840 | "Look, I promise you, you can't mess this up. I don't care." And we had this amazing... It wasn't
00:48:46.400 | quite as long as your experience. But it was so much fun. And we had a great conversation. And
00:48:51.360 | I remember that infinitely more than probably... I can't even tell you the restaurant that maybe
00:48:57.680 | someone recommended I go to or was the highest rated and we went to. I don't know what it was.
00:49:01.520 | I don't remember a dinner out in Nairobi, but I do remember that haircut. And so, I think
00:49:08.000 | that's interesting. You mentioned checking items off a list. I'm curious how you feel about people
00:49:13.520 | creating bucket lists or kind of... Is that something that you're like anti-bucket list?
00:49:18.640 | Do you like it? How do you feel about the concept? Well, I have a whole mini chapter about bucket
00:49:22.160 | lists. I'm not anti-bucket list, but you really have to understand that the bucket list is what
00:49:25.440 | gets you out the door. Because so many items on the bucket list, the pyramids being a great example,
00:49:30.320 | well, there's a lot of tourist buses there. There's a lot of Egyptians there who are part
00:49:35.440 | of the tourist industry and they want you to pay $100 to sit on a camel, which is fine.
00:49:39.440 | But I think five hours spent in a neighborhood market in Cairo is going to be more rewardingly
00:49:46.160 | Egyptian than you would have five hours waiting in line and going around and getting your pictures
00:49:52.000 | for Instagram at the pyramids. I'm not going to say don't go to the pyramids, but I'm just going
00:49:55.840 | to say that the things that you find by accident on the way to the various items on your bucket
00:50:01.200 | list are probably going to be the things that make you happiest. You're talking, not to make
00:50:05.920 | this all about haircuts, but I was driving in New Orleans with my friend Dan once and he just said,
00:50:10.560 | "I'm sick of my hair. I need a haircut." So, we just pulled off the road. We just happened to be
00:50:13.840 | in Canton, Mississippi. We pulled into a place, it was a black neighborhood and we go into a
00:50:17.360 | barbershop and the guy's like, "I've never cut white hair, but I got this." This is the United
00:50:21.440 | States. We sort of made the day of everybody in this black barbershop. It was sort of this
00:50:26.880 | collective effort, like let's cut Dan's hair. He doesn't have the naturally kinky black hair that
00:50:33.120 | the people in this neighborhood have, but let's figure this out because in Canton, Mississippi,
00:50:36.880 | white people never come into this barbershop. It was this funny thing. It wasn't the best haircut
00:50:41.520 | that my friend Dan ever got, but we sort of made their day because in a town where there's still
00:50:46.400 | elements of segregation and white people just don't swagger into the barbershop in the black
00:50:51.200 | part of town. Suddenly, we had this experience that whatever lack of proficiency that in the
00:50:57.760 | haircut was, it was super memorable and super fun where suddenly we were just sort of casually
00:51:01.600 | hanging out in a black barbershop in Canton, Mississippi because we needed a haircut and
00:51:07.200 | it was as memorable as anything we found on the way to New Orleans. We had a blast in New Orleans.
00:51:12.080 | I'm not going to knock that, but part of what was fun were the things that happened away from
00:51:18.480 | Bourbon Street or the other things that you're supposed to see in New Orleans or on the way to
00:51:23.120 | New Orleans itself, stopping in this town that we didn't really know much about before we randomly
00:51:27.680 | walked into a barbershop to get a haircut. I think being willing, even as you seek out items
00:51:32.960 | on your bucket list, to surprise yourself and to foolishly wander into a barbershop that isn't
00:51:39.040 | necessarily used to cutting your kind of hair, that can be super memorable. It was obviously
00:51:43.520 | memorable for you in Kenya and it was memorable for us in Mississippi. I think this juxtaposes
00:51:48.160 | something really fascinating, which is I think, "Oh, I had this experience. I had to go halfway
00:51:53.680 | around the world to get my hair cut by someone who'd never cut a white person's hair, and here
00:51:57.520 | you do it straight in the United States." I think so much of travel, and I'm guilty of this myself,
00:52:02.960 | it's like in order to have these crazy experiences or unique experiences or different experiences,
00:52:07.760 | you have to go halfway around the world. Can you help me get over that? This was one example,
00:52:12.880 | but how do you feel about the fact that I feel like there's all this pressure to have
00:52:17.440 | to travel, you need to hop on a plane and cross an ocean?
00:52:20.800 | Yeah, well, a couple of things came to mind. One is that whole concept of walk until your day
00:52:24.480 | becomes interesting. Just going for walks, counterintuitive walks in your own neighborhood
00:52:29.120 | or in one neighborhood over, and just even walking to work or driving to work in a way that you're
00:52:34.560 | not used to doing, just finding different patterns in your home environment on foot can be really
00:52:39.600 | interesting. One thing I talk about in The Vagabond's Way is how about during the pandemic,
00:52:44.160 | my wife and I were itchy to travel, but we really couldn't. We couldn't go see your cousins in
00:52:49.120 | Norway, so we decided to walk to a town in Kansas called Little Sweden. It was 22 miles from our
00:52:53.600 | front door to Little Sweden. It took us seven hours. Our feet hurt really bad, but it was so
00:52:58.240 | fun to see this little landscape of the Kansas countryside on foot through a method that we had
00:53:04.720 | never seen before, so that was really fun. Even simpler than walking 22 miles to Little Sweden
00:53:10.080 | is these food experiences. I think one fun thing about the barbershop experience in Mississippi is
00:53:15.360 | that we had broken an unwritten rule, which is white people don't get their hair cut in black
00:53:21.040 | neighborhoods. Well, oftentimes, we go to places that are "dangerous" in our own hometown, but even
00:53:28.400 | places where poorer people live, they have to eat lunch. What's it like to go to a cafeteria counter
00:53:32.800 | in a neighborhood we don't usually go to? I think sometimes we realize that there's a wealth of
00:53:39.920 | cultural options in our own town, just because we're in the habit of our own social class or our
00:53:46.320 | own bubble of familiarity in our home, and that sometimes a neighborhood that's seen as a barrio
00:53:53.440 | neighborhood probably has the best Mexican and Latin American food in your own community.
00:53:57.680 | It might just be a storefront that's next to a television repair shop, but odds are
00:54:04.960 | that food is really great. The price of doing it is just being willing to go to that part of town
00:54:09.520 | where maybe not as many people speak English as they do in your own neighborhood, and going to
00:54:14.080 | a place where people who might have a generation ahead of them still living in Mexico, and suddenly
00:54:18.880 | you're eating food in a context. Actually, speaking of Mexico specifically,
00:54:24.000 | my sister who teaches college in the little Sweden town here in Kansas, she realized that
00:54:29.840 | most of the Mexican people who worked at local restaurants and stuff didn't just come from
00:54:34.560 | Mexico, but they came from Zacatecas. They came from a place called Fresnillo. She realized that
00:54:39.680 | there were buses that go from central Kansas to Zacatecas. For 10 or 20 bucks, you can go to Mexico
00:54:45.760 | on the same buses that migrant workers go to see their family. Just by pushing the envelope,
00:54:53.120 | not just going to the Mexican restaurant, by saying, "Where exactly in Mexico are you?
00:54:56.960 | How often do you see your family?" Really, there's a shuttle service that goes to Wichita that takes
00:55:00.720 | you to a bigger bus that goes to Dallas. It takes you to an even bigger bus that takes you to the
00:55:04.080 | border. Then you take Mexican buses home. She actually was able to create an adventure to
00:55:08.320 | Mexico with her family that cost nothing. They were able to, instead of hanging out with tourists
00:55:13.120 | going to Mexico to Cancun, nothing against Cancun, but basically they took a bus full of people who
00:55:18.480 | work in the service economy of central Kansas, and they were able to get to see a part of Mexico
00:55:23.680 | that they never would have otherwise seen because they were willing to see a part of Kansas that
00:55:27.440 | they had never otherwise seen. I think food in immigrant communities is a huge
00:55:33.040 | window. Even if you don't end up on a minibus to Mexico, being willing to just unfold the layers
00:55:39.120 | in immigrant communities in your own hometown is a great way to experience travel while you're
00:55:42.480 | still home. There are a few things we haven't touched on that I'd love to talk about briefly.
00:55:47.520 | I know you took this trip about, I don't know, a decade ago, where you just literally had no
00:55:52.000 | bags. First off, that's wild. We did no checked bags, which I think is doable. TBD on how doable
00:55:59.440 | it is to small kids. What did you learn from going on a trip with no bags, and what does
00:56:04.800 | that change now? What do you not take on trips now? One thing I learned almost immediately that
00:56:10.960 | this big central core conflict in telling a story about traveling the world with no luggage
00:56:16.560 | became pretty easy pretty fast. I was traveling with a sponsor. I had a vest full of things where
00:56:23.360 | I could put things in my pockets. I got used to that system very early, and people would often
00:56:28.480 | say, "Well, gosh, I wouldn't want to sit next to you on an airplane. You must smell bad." It's like,
00:56:32.320 | "No, I actually showered every day, and I washed my clothes every day." Basically, at the end of
00:56:37.840 | the day, I would take off the clothes I was wearing, shower with them, dry them up for the
00:56:41.200 | next day, and I would just rotate two sets of clothes. I was actually very clean. Once I got
00:56:46.480 | used to it, it was pretty simple to do. Early on, my sponsors are saying, "Should we contact the
00:56:52.800 | Guinness Book of World Records? I don't think this has ever been done." It's like, "Have you
00:56:55.520 | heard of refugees? Have you heard of merchants that have been traveling the world forever?"
00:57:00.160 | The idea that you have to travel the world with a bunch of giant bags is pretty new in a certain
00:57:06.080 | sense. Yeah, I guess the first lesson I learned is that once I got into my meticulous cleanliness
00:57:13.360 | routines, I didn't really miss my bags that much. Now, this has not made me a full-time,
00:57:19.120 | no-baggage traveler, but what it did make me realize is that it's not that hard to take a small
00:57:25.200 | day pack or like 30-liter or less backpack with you that you can put in the overhead bin,
00:57:29.440 | because at the end of the day, really, what I was most relieved not to have were the giant bags that
00:57:36.640 | I had to check under the plane or drag around over the cobblestones or to grunt through the
00:57:41.440 | tropical country with sweat dripping down my brow. I realized that my kit, whether it be in pockets
00:57:46.960 | or in a relatively small bag, you don't really need that much to have a great time when you
00:57:53.280 | travel. In a sense, our best travel memories aren't about the crap that we put in our backpack.
00:57:58.720 | It's about this awesome thing that we found in the village square. It's about these people we met,
00:58:02.640 | or it's this experience we had, or at the very least, it's about something that we got and we
00:58:06.320 | put in our backpack and brought home from the other side of the world to commemorate this
00:58:10.160 | memory of a great experience we had before. It was such an instructive trip. To this day,
00:58:16.400 | I haven't really done anything that compares to going literally with no baggage for six weeks
00:58:21.520 | around the world. It was a blast to do, but it's really leavened me. Three years ago,
00:58:26.480 | I traveled around the world for three months with one 30-liter bag, and it was easy. In fact,
00:58:31.280 | I still felt like sometimes I was overpacked. At the end of the day, it just didn't take that much
00:58:36.400 | for me to have a great time and have everything I needed. One final thought about that, it's even
00:58:41.280 | easier these days with so much on your smartphone to help guide your trip from GPS maps to language
00:58:47.040 | translators. There's fewer things that you do have to pack in your bags. Of course, this brings up
00:58:52.800 | the can of worms of your phone can actually distract from your travel experience too.
00:58:59.840 | But no, there's really no longer any reason to take a bunch of stuff around the world. Just
00:59:04.560 | discipline yourself into taking the bare minimum and letting the world provide the rest,
00:59:09.600 | including experiences. Are there any items that you're like, "This one particular brand of shoes
00:59:15.600 | or sweater is the thing that I always bring now." Is there anything for you that's your go-to travel
00:59:20.720 | item? I think besides my Kindle, and I don't want to sing the praises of Kindle too much because I'm
00:59:26.960 | a big fan of independent bookstores, and my new book is out in hardcover. It's my fifth book,
00:59:31.040 | but it's the first time I have a book in hardcover. But the Kindle allows me to take my
00:59:36.080 | library with me. I love it. There's certain clothing items. I'm a fan of merino wool,
00:59:40.320 | for example. I'm a fan of my 30-liter pack. I'm a fan of Blundstone boots. They're not a sponsor.
00:59:46.160 | Actually, my merino wool and my pack are sponsors because
00:59:49.600 | Vagabonding is such an old book. People have actually started travel product companies
00:59:54.560 | and said, "Look, Vagabonding inspired this." So it's like, "Oh, y'all wear it. This is pretty
00:59:57.920 | good." Blundstone boots out of Australia is not one of those companies. I think they've
01:00:01.840 | been making them since the 19th century. I love Blundstones. They don't have laces. You can slip
01:00:06.160 | them on and slip them off. They're very sturdy. They look as good in a nightclub as they do on a
01:00:11.600 | mountain trail. So I'm a big fan of that, but it's not that many things. My Kindle, my boots,
01:00:18.080 | a few toiletries, my merino wool, and I'm a pretty minimalist traveler, and I'm happy traveling that
01:00:24.960 | way. Well, you brought up the phone, so I feel like it'd be a good place to go. I thought about
01:00:31.200 | the first international trip I took that I remember. I took some as a young kid, but the first
01:00:36.480 | one that I was on my own without my parents. I went to Taiwan when I was the first freshman or
01:00:43.200 | sophomore in college because I'd gone to boarding school. My roommate in high school was in Taiwan.
01:00:48.160 | I was like, "I want to go visit him." I was like, "Gosh, we didn't have iPhones." So I was thinking
01:00:53.920 | about this trip and all the things we did. I was like, "Well, I guess we just relied on locals and
01:00:58.000 | instincts and it didn't matter." Now I think about trips and the way technology has changed,
01:01:04.400 | both for the better and the worse, the experience of being somewhere. I know you've challenged
01:01:10.400 | people to leave their phones behind at different parts of trips. How do you think technology has
01:01:15.360 | changed things, and how can we still have the kinds of experiences that we all want to have
01:01:20.960 | and not get distracted? Well, I remember that first wave of technology that really allowed us
01:01:26.000 | to travel in a different way. In fact, my example is my first vagabond trip was 1994. I was living
01:01:32.560 | in a van, and I would call my parents once a week with my calling card. This is before I used email.
01:01:37.440 | Five years later, I was living in Asia, and it felt like a luxury to be able to email my family.
01:01:42.880 | I was in closer touch with my family from Mongolia than I was from Oklahoma,
01:01:46.880 | right? Just five years earlier. Around that same time, that was 1999, I remember there were some
01:01:52.000 | articles, I think in the San Francisco Chronicle, about how virtual reality will allow you to travel
01:01:56.480 | the world without leaving your home, right? Well, now that we have the smartphone, now that we have
01:02:00.640 | this little black mirror in our pockets, we can be traveling the world without really leaving home
01:02:05.520 | in the habit sense. We're still sending text messages to our friends. We're still looking at
01:02:10.080 | our social media feeds. We're still reading. Instead of picking up the local newspaper,
01:02:14.000 | we're reading an online newspaper or an online social media feed that we still do back home.
01:02:19.440 | In a sense, smartphones have made travel easier. They've made it harder to get lost and harder to
01:02:24.880 | get bored, but they've also sort of trapped us into those same insipid habits that we have back
01:02:30.000 | home. I've literally met travelers who, even on the other side of the world, the last thing they
01:02:34.960 | do before they fall asleep is look at their phone. The first thing they look at when they wake up is
01:02:38.480 | look at their phone. It's like, "Guys, you paid all this money to go to the other side of the
01:02:41.520 | world. Do you really need to put a phone between yourself and what you're experiencing?" That's
01:02:45.680 | why I'm a big fan of encouraging people to use their five senses, to not just look and listen,
01:02:51.360 | but to smell and taste and feel their way around the world. Really, you don't have to travel without
01:02:57.440 | a phone at all, but maybe leave it in the room for a day. My wife and I did this in Paris and
01:03:02.400 | Norway this summer. We found all the cool places we wanted to see on our computers and phone when
01:03:07.600 | we were still in our lodging, but we would mark it on a paper map and use that paper map to explore
01:03:13.760 | the city. That allowed us to not fall back on our phone every time we thought we were lost,
01:03:18.800 | not to fall back on our phone every time we wanted to send that cool picture of the cool
01:03:23.040 | dog to our mom back home. Basically, it just forced us to be unconnected for a while.
01:03:30.000 | We could have those experiences. Sometimes, there's this little pencil for a restaurant
01:03:35.360 | that we wanted to see in the 20th arrondissement, but suddenly we found a place in the 11th arrondissement
01:03:39.920 | that was cooler and completely caught us by surprise. This cool fromagerie was next door,
01:03:45.840 | and we got some cheese for the next day. I think allowing yourself to have experiences by chance,
01:03:53.280 | to use the information that is available through our phone, but not to drown ourself in all these
01:03:58.480 | options so that we're always questioning the moment we're in. I think, again, going back to
01:04:03.520 | the idea of living so much of our lives in the future, even as we plan and try to be responsible
01:04:09.120 | individuals, we cheat ourselves so much out of what is in the present. It's actually an old
01:04:14.400 | phrase now, FOMO, fear of missing out. Sometimes, if we have our phone, we could be having this
01:04:18.720 | amazing experience in an amazing city, but our phone is telling us that, "Oh, maybe there's a
01:04:23.120 | better market that's five minutes this way," or, "Maybe there's a better restaurant that's 10
01:04:27.840 | minutes this way." Actually, no, it's amazing you found this place by accident. Embrace that while
01:04:32.560 | you have it. Give yourself permission to trust your instincts, to trust your nose and your palate
01:04:38.240 | as much as that smartphone app, because those are the things that you're going to remember,
01:04:41.920 | that you're really allowing yourself to travel as a pilgrim instead of as a consumer,
01:04:46.720 | and to wander yourself into a deeper understanding of what that travel experience can be.
01:04:51.200 | A couple of things I want to hit before we wrap. I found that one of the greatest ways that I
01:04:57.360 | lighten the cost of my travels is to play the travel hacking points and miles game. I know
01:05:02.960 | you're not as deep in that world as me, but I'm curious if there are any cost-saving travel
01:05:07.920 | hacks that you like that we can share with people listening.
01:05:11.760 | My old one was just fly into a place and then take it from there, that regardless of the
01:05:16.720 | multi-itinerary you could do, there might be a train that crosses an international border,
01:05:20.080 | there might be buses, there might be shared taxis that could inspire the next Lyft or Uber
01:05:25.280 | in some part of the world that you didn't even know existed, but suddenly it's a really cool
01:05:28.960 | way to travel and the people are just delighted that this awkward, sweaty American is in this
01:05:33.680 | shared taxi in Laos or Senegal or some other part of the world.
01:05:38.880 | So I'm a big fan of overland travel and flying into a place and winging it from there. Oftentimes
01:05:45.680 | too, you go into the neighborhood in Bangkok or the neighborhood in Nairobi where local people
01:05:50.400 | find their plane tickets, and oftentimes those onward flights are cheaper than if they had been
01:05:54.640 | done internationally through a middleman. What I've done as I've gotten older, I'm not the best
01:05:59.280 | flight travel hacker in the world. I can probably learn from you and other people who've done that
01:06:03.040 | quite well with credit cards and miles and things like that. In part, I got so insinuated in the
01:06:09.680 | overland travel into the point-to-point sort of bucket shop travel, bucket shops are places where
01:06:16.080 | in immigrant communities or in local communities where you buy discounted tickets, but I've often
01:06:21.120 | found that more recently I've taken a lot of trips through flight aggregators like Airtrex,
01:06:26.240 | airtrex.com, that allows you to plan multi-stop itineraries under one umbrella that you can fly
01:06:32.640 | around. I think they do itineraries up to 25 stops, but I usually do it usually four to eight
01:06:40.320 | stops. I've done it around the world, but this summer, for example, I went from Denver to London
01:06:45.680 | to Paris to Norway to Faroe Islands, back to London and Denver. Just under one umbrella, I was
01:06:52.000 | able to have them put together the best flights possible. There's two ways you can do it with
01:06:56.640 | Airtrex. One is that they have an online widget that you can go in and one fun thing is you can
01:07:01.520 | waste half a day just doing a sample trip that you don't actually plan on taking, but just seeing
01:07:06.880 | how much would it cost for me to fly from New York to Brazil to West Africa to Italy and take
01:07:14.800 | a train to Moscow and then take another train to the Pacific and then fly to Bangkok. You can waste
01:07:20.400 | a day just doing trips that are absurd and just to see if it works. They also have a number that
01:07:25.520 | you can call and talk to a person. I usually use them in tandem and the person will help you put
01:07:30.240 | together this trip and they might give you some advice like saying, "Well, actually the cheapest
01:07:34.240 | way to fly from Los Angeles to Australia is through Singapore and maybe you can just stay for a week
01:07:39.680 | in Singapore on this cheap trip and get another experience out of that trip." What I do with
01:07:44.800 | Airtrex is usually I'll tinker around with their online widget and then when I think I know where
01:07:50.560 | to go, I'll call the representative. It's like a travel coach and they help you design that flight.
01:07:56.480 | I'm not saying it's always the best way to hack flights, but my gosh, if you have an extended
01:08:02.080 | multi-stopper around the world flight, it's a great way to go because it saves money and then
01:08:07.040 | you basically have everything is under one bucket and you basically have an advisor that can give
01:08:12.000 | you that great advice saying that, "Yeah, you'll save $200 going through Bangkok and actually
01:08:17.360 | Bangkok's pretty cool. Why don't you stay there two weeks and save another $100?" It's not technically
01:08:23.520 | a hack, but it's a great service, Airtrex.com. Cool. And then the last other question I always
01:08:29.200 | like to ask everyone, is there a city in the world you know well enough to leave anyone listening who
01:08:34.400 | might be heading there with a few unusual or fun recommendations for whether it's a meal,
01:08:39.360 | a drink or some unusual activity or experience? Wow, let me think. Immediately it came to my
01:08:45.200 | Paris. I'm not even that much of an expert on Paris. I've been there many, many, many summers
01:08:50.240 | in a row to teach English. And so, my French isn't even that good. I'm there teaching classes
01:08:54.240 | in English. And the Parisian, this is sort of cheating on the answer, but it's a good answer.
01:08:58.640 | It's an old French technique of the flaneur. Do you know what a flaneur is? A flaneur is,
01:09:03.920 | this is Baudelaire sort of invented the idea in the 19th century. It's a person who walks
01:09:08.000 | through the city, not in search of things, but just in search of experiences. They don't see
01:09:12.960 | the city as this utilitarian route between point A and point B. It's a person that realizes that
01:09:19.040 | wandering from point A to point B is full of experiences that you don't know about yet.
01:09:23.680 | And so, you can use it as, it's technically a male verb, but you can be a flaneuse or you can
01:09:29.040 | be a female flaneur. But it's a noun, but it can also be a verb. I'm going to flaneur my way through
01:09:34.880 | this experience. It's very baked into the Parisian way of seeing the world. You can practice it in
01:09:39.840 | any city in the world. And you probably don't want to go through a dangerous neighborhood drunk at
01:09:44.000 | night, but being a flaneur who just sort of wanders through a city, not quite knowing where you're
01:09:48.640 | going to go, but knowing that something awesome is going to happen. Again, based on something you
01:09:53.200 | smell, something you see, or somebody you bump into, that is a great strategy for seeing a place.
01:09:58.960 | And I'll have an aside story. I talk about it in the Vagabond's way that I used Trip Advisor to
01:10:04.000 | find Trip Advisor's best rated rendang restaurant in the Indonesian city of Bukit Tinggi. I went
01:10:10.000 | there and it was fine. But what I realized, I'd gone through a market, again, going back to markets,
01:10:14.320 | through of people who lived in Bukit Tinggi, eating dinner, and they weren't going to this
01:10:18.640 | place. They didn't use Trip Advisor. They lived in Bukit Tinggi. They're eating in the market.
01:10:22.560 | And so, I realized that I had used this, instead of just flaneuring my way through the market and
01:10:28.080 | seeing what was delicious, I'd use Trip Advisor to go to a place that was outside of the market.
01:10:32.320 | So, that has only reinforced the idea that wandering through a place, just sort of being
01:10:37.200 | hyper aware, not to your phone, but to the environment in the manner of a flaneur who's
01:10:41.920 | just seeking experience and is seeking surprise, that's probably better than any single recommendation
01:10:47.920 | I could give you in Paris. And if I do, my wife is the foodie. She could give you
01:10:52.240 | restaurant recommendations, but she's out of town today. So, be a flaneur.
01:10:56.240 | That's okay. I'll take it. That's a fair answer. And the book, the book's out. You can get it
01:11:02.080 | where books are sold. I picked up a copy at a local bookstore. So, thank you for writing it.
01:11:08.240 | It was fantastic. Where could people stay on top of everything you're doing, all your writing,
01:11:13.200 | and everything you're up to? I'm an old school website guy. I've had it for almost 25 years,
01:11:17.600 | RolfPotts.com. It connects to all my socials, which I use from time to time, but really,
01:11:22.560 | it's a good starting point for all the books I've written, for all my podcasts,
01:11:25.680 | my Deviate with Rolf Potts podcast, with articles I've written back into my dirtbag days in the
01:11:30.480 | 1990s. For all things Rolf Potts, it's a good place to start. Awesome. Well, Rolf, thank you
01:11:36.560 | so much for being here. Yeah. It's good talking to you, Chris, and it's fun to hear your stories.
01:11:39.840 | Good luck with your next adventure with your kids.