Time Is Wealth - Interview with Rolf Potts, author of the book Vagabonding

I haven't really had to be materially wealthy to have a really interesting life and a really relationship rich and experience rich life because I have and continue to seek wealth through time instead of arbitrary things like money and status. The trip itself was just memorable. I was 23 years old and I will never have a trip like that. I've been around the world, but like emotionally that was such an exciting and important trip.

Hi guys, my name is Donnie and you are listening to the podcast One Life. I'm here today with Ralph Potts, author of one of my favorite books now Vagabonding. Ralph, say hello.

Hey guys, good to talk to you here from the, from the isolation of the Kansas prairie.

So we were actually funny enough, we weren't intentionally going to do the podcast today. We were having such good conversation and we figured what the heck, why not? And if you want to tell give a little background to people listening about your life. What got you into traveling?

Yeah, well, gosh, I've been doing it for so long now that what feels like happened like some of the, some of the conflicts that brought me into wanting travel long term feel like they didn't happen that long ago, but they were actually more than 25 years ago. I'm from Kansas, from a pretty provincial part of the United States. I always dreamed of travel, but I assumed that travel was something you long term travel was something you did when you were retired. You know that you worked hard your whole life, you retired and then you traveled the world with the money you've saved from working your whole life. And then when I was quite young, because of different circumstances in my life, including the fact that my Kansas farmer grandfather had retired and couldn't really enjoy his retirement because my grandmother had Alzheimer's disease, made me realize that life doesn't just reward you with free time. You have to find your own free time and you have to reshift your life so that even when you're young you can find ways to travel even if you don't think you're rich, that travel is more affordable and it's safer and it's easier than you think. And so more than 25 years ago, I took my very first vagabonding trip and long term travel through my book. Vagabonding is sort of what I advocate for. And as we were talking about before we started recording, we had a nice 40 minute conversation pre podcast. My central philosophy is the idea that time is your truest form of wealth. Really, that you're given so much time in life and you should live it in a thoughtful way and that sort of. I use travel to do that. People come to me to find out how to live travel in a way. But there's other, there's other ways through which you can be rich in time. Another thing we were talking about before we started recording was just that family is a way to make yourself rich in time. So it's a very nuanced philosophy of time wealth that I like to promote. But people would love to talk about travel with me. I presume that you want to talk about travel a fair amount with me right now. And so I'm here to answer what you're curious about.

Well, travel and like, like I said, how we were talking your perspective on life, which I find so refreshing. And when I was working in the restaurant industry for a while doing waiting tables, this was after I quit my corporate job. And one of the things I'd always, I'd always would ask people, I'm like, well, you know, what is your experience? What is your. If you can give me one tidbit of advice on life, what would it be? And everyone said travel. I would have traveled more. That came up. It was the most frequently come up thing that people would mention. And I realized it was similar to what you're saying. It wasn't so much maybe about travel, but it's so much about taking the time to do the things that they wanted to do. And that was one of the things for me is that life is happening now. There is no time to waste. You have to plan for the future, but at the same time, don't put off the things that are, that are really important to you. And so your first trip was across the United States?

That's right. I kid it. Now they call it van life. Like now it's this lifestyle. I actually did a podcast with a friend of mine who I did that trip with. And it's just amazing how, you know, you go to vanlife on Instagram in the year 2020 and it's all about the craftsmanship of the vans and building a toilet. And it's like, dude, we just, we just slept in the van and we got out and we just had adventures. Like, the craftsmanship of our van was terrible, but the trip itself was just memorable. I was 23 years old and I will never have a trip like that. I've been around the world. But like, emotionally that was such an exciting and important trip because my whole life people said, oh, don't travel, it's dangerous, don't travel, it's expensive. You know, don't travel. You know, there'll be problems. And it's. And it's just like, no. I would wake up in that van every day and just be so excited to be doing it. And by the time that trip finished, I realized it didn't have to be my last trip. I didn't have to scratch travel off of my bucket list that I could find ways to travel for the rest of my life. And so that was such a turning point for me and for your listeners. That first trip when you just decide, I'm going to do it. I'm not going to spend my time talking about it or bragging about it. I'm just going to quietly put a date on my calendar when I have enough money to leave. And I'm going to learn by making mistakes, you know, because in these days, you can plan your whole. You can, you can travel for a year and have every day planned if you want. But I tell people that after a week on the road, you're so much smarter about travel than any Internet research you could have done, in part because you mess up all the time. You make these mistakes and you learn from them. And that's really what that first trip taught me, that you can dream about travel, but then just doing it is just so rewarding. And it's hard sometimes, but it just teaches you lessons that you need to learn. And I think there's a corollary. And what we're going through now, we're recording this during a time of coronavirus quarantine is that humans are adaptable. You know, that we find ways to deal with our quarantine time. We find ways to go into the center of the city in a way that doesn't get us infected. Well, those are travel lessons. You know, that you. You go to a place and you don't know the language, you don't know the bus system, you don't know anything. And then you just quietly learn it. And travel as a practice and as a metaphor is just such a useful thing to embrace in life.

One of the. That excitement that you feel when you book that trip. I get it pretty much every time I book and I'm visiting a new place or even if I'm visiting a place I've been to before.

It's.

I mentioned I do two trips. I usually do one in March and I won in November. I was talking with a girl I met at the library. She was doing something called. It's called Death Cafe. And I thought it was when I went into it. I thought it was kind of like, live your life now because you know what, you may die. You won't want regrets. When it was really about funeral planning, when I was talking with her and she was saying how she'd, you know. But I'm just so afraid to travel. It scares me to the idea of going to a place I don't know and just booking the trip. And I thought to myself like, that I get that every time when I come back from my trip in March. That March, November, it's so easy. I have a habit of booking those two trips, those two time periods. But it's that in between time where if I don't book, like, I'm not booking anything, I'm just working where I get complacent, I start to get nervous. And then when I book that trip in November, I actually start to get nervous. And like, I'm hesitant. And I usually will look at flights five times before I end up booking. And then once I book it, I'm like, oh my God, thank God. Sometimes I like, I think I should cancel, but I never, never cancel. I always move forward with it. So what do you want to say to the person? So the idea that it's so dangerous and you've been around the world, we've been to a lot of places. And the idea that somewhere foreign is more dangerous than being here at home. I read. I know what you mentioned your book, but I wanted the listeners to hear what you have to say.

Well, yeah, statistically, you know, oftentimes, if you live in any major American city, statistically, like crime is bad. And then people say, oh, well, I don't go. I don't go to the neighborhoods where crime is bad. It's like, well, there you go. When you're overseas, don't go to sketchy neighborhoods. And so, But I think this is hardwired. It's almost human that we're sort of evolutionarily, we're hardwired for self protection. And sometimes there's a social aspect to that. And so we, we develop fears that are irrational, but they're sort of rational at the same time. It's like being afraid of snakes. There's a reason why probably the human population that has survived in the 21st century has learned to be a little bit careful around snakes. So I get it. I understand why people are a little bit nervous about faraway places. The fact is, and it is a fact that that's not really statistically true and that people, you know, as you were talking about Finding this in Italy, I was talking about finding it in places like Sumatra. People are just generous and they're curious everywhere in the world. And so if you realize that you don't have to see the world as a geopolitical entity, that we're all just sort of people who are curious about each other. And that odds are, if you're an American standing in a street in, you know, Ethiopia, then you're probably the most exciting thing that's happened on that street this week. Unless the city is really cosmopolitan, that basically you have something to give through your American ness and these other places as well. And there's sort of this shared excitement. I guess here's a way to frame it. If you can just stop being a consumer of travel and just sort of be where you are, then suddenly you realize that it's not about getting things right or wrong but, but just sort of being in a place and meeting the people who are there, you realize that yeah, the world is this very welcoming and an open place. I mean the amount of the places that are literally dangerous right now are what, war zones and some ill advised neighborhoods. Other than that, those cross cultural fears that we have are just basic nervousness. And I'm not going to knock people for having them, but the best way to cure them is just to go overseas and try it out. Know.

And how about the other. If I have talked to someone the second. So the first thing I'll usually hear is like they're afraid, they don't think it's safe. And the second objection they get is ah, but it's, but it's too expensive. I can't, you know, I don't have the money to travel overseas, especially for an extended period of time. And I always say, well that's not true. Well one, I guess it depends on how you want to travel. I mean if you're, if you want to live in, you know, $300 a night hotels and then it's a very different type of travel. But if you're really interested in seeing it, then, I mean I've traveled, I've traveled places where in two weeks I've spent a total of $600. And even traveling Europe, which is more expensive, I can do it on a very small budget and still have all the same experiences. So for the person who says, you know what, you must be, you must have a million dollars in the bank, you know, your luxury. I mean, you're lucky to be traveling. I don't have that lifestyle. What do you have to say to them?

Well, again, it doesn't need. Travel isn't something you buy. You know, travel is something that you give to yourself. And so if you see travel as a consumer product, you know, then, oh, the plane ticket is this and the hotel is this. And then this meal that I want to eat is this. And it's like, you know, guess, you know, that meal, that Thai food that you're eating in the $300 hotel, it's available for 65 cents on a street five blocks away, so.

True.

Yeah. And it's interesting, before we started recording, you were talking about. I was talking about how I love Italy, but I haven't really traveled there as much as I wish I could. Well, part of the reason is when I was young and had less money, I would travel in places where the dollar went further. And so I was going to places like Thailand or like Egypt or something like that. It's funny, I was on a zoom call with a class full of Kansas students the other day, and I was talking about Sumatra and this beautiful beach, and I just sort of casually tossed off that this beach hut. And all three meals a day was $18 a night. And people like, whoa, what, were you in a slum? It's like, no, it's like basically it's the sort of beach hut that people think you have to rob a bank to escape to live in. And it's just like the Indonesians, the Sumatrans are like, yeah, you know, that's making good money. It's $18 a night. It's not that complicated. And so I think one, there's these economies of travel where if you don't travel in the industrialized world, then you can actually benefit local business people by paying local prices that are much, much cheaper than the United States. And then I was researching a trip to go to Italy that I can't go on now with my nephew. And I was studying the history of youth hostels, where travel, a certain conception of travel to Americans used to be an upper class thing. And even among Europeans, the aristocracy traveled for long times unless they were working full time. Well, the Germans sort of invented this idea of youth hosteling. You can't have a hotel with a lot of amenities, or you can just put 20 bunk beds in a room and have the person pay a dollar.

The Germans came up with that. Really?

Yeah, I think so. The Germans popularized the idea of the hostel about 100 years ago. And it's just the idea that you don't have to be upper middle class to travel. That travel actually is a Good education. I think the Europeans figured out a lot of this stuff earlier than those of us in North America, in part because all these countries are bumping up against each other. And so I recently read this book for the idea that after the Cold War, that it was actually backpackers and young people who brought in the idea of a unified Europe. You know, the idea that we don't have to be Germans and Italians and French and English people, that we can be a unified Europe. And of course, that's sort of falling apart right now politically. But part of the reason that happened is because you had Germans and Italians and Spanish and Swiss people sleeping in hostel beds together, getting drunk together, getting lost together. And so it's this great concept that started with the idea that you don't have to spend a lot of money to travel. And maybe I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit, but pretty soon, not only are you in Italy in a bunk room, but you're with an Israeli guy and a woman from Brazil and a dude from Arizona, you know, and not only are you traveling in the place where you are, but you're saving money and you're interacting with people from all over the world. And it's the kind of experience that you just. You can't get online, you know, you can't get at home. And I don't want to knock online or being at home, but it's like, just don't buy the experience to travel. Give it to yourself. So spend a couple bucks, stay in a hostel, put up with the dirty feet smell, and meet the best friends you'll ever find.

On that cue, we'll transition to one of my favorite chapters in the book, which is the People youe Meet. And you went on to give the Indian parable about a king who sends out two of his couriers, one who is more generous, the other one who is. How would you say. Who.

Maybe self absorbed and suspicious.

Yeah, and negative. They had two different outlooks on life. And when he sends them out, they don't know that they're going to the same city, but when they come back to report, they had two different accounts. And it was that the idea that we bring to travel what we. The lens in which we see the world is what we bring to our experiences. And so the people we meet are one of the most important aspects of travel for me, because the friends I've met, I have friends all around the world that I spend one day with, and they're. They're friends for life. And the idea that that doesn't have to cost anything. And that is one of the highlights of a trip anywhere because they're what you, what you learned.

Yeah. And I think it's, it's, it's sort of the condition of travel where you're so grateful and you're so happy and you're so engaged by everything you see because it's new. And in a place like Italy, it's delicious. You know, everything you eat and drink is wonderful. And then like the three people you're sharing a dorm with or you're sharing a place at the bar with or sharing a cafe with, they're also open hearted in a way that they also aren't at home. And pretty soon you're talking about this person that you didn't know two days ago. You're talking about your own life and your own passions in a way that you're too guarded to do at home. And for that reason, these people become really dear friends to you. I was just communicating this morning with my friend Dan, who's from Arizona but married a Kiwi and is in New Zealand now. And he's a really, really close friend that I met in a hostel in Egypt 20 years ago, literally 20 years ago. And had he been like a college classmate, I would have thought, yeah, Dan is sort of loud and too confident and arrogant, you know, but we bonded over travel in this hostile in Egypt. And now, like, I would, you know, I would entrust any secret to that guy, you know, that basically we encountered each other without those lenses of suspicion and, I don't know, status and social circle that you might have back home. And then suddenly you're seeing somebody, you know, for their, for their heart instead of, you know, what other categories you might judge them for. And travel is really a great pretext to interact with people in that way if you allow yourself to do that.

And I was one of the other chapters that stood out for me or one of the sections of the book you were talking about when you're negotiating how certain places have certain places it's okay to negotiate for, you know, to bring the price down and how not to start at the half mark because they're already anticipating. I wish I knew that. Give me an experience. Obviously, I'm assuming that that was something you learned firsthand.

Oh, well, that's something. It's funny. The same hostel that I met my friend Dan in, I wrote a story about it for Salon years ago. It's in my book, Marco Polo Didn't Go There. It's called Backpacker's Ball at the Sultan Hotel in Cairo. It was so wonderful. And so there's just all these crazy young people and actually not so young people. Another great thing about hostels, that they're sort of ageless. Once my parents were in my 60s, I took them to a hostel in Beijing and everybody's just like, oh yeah, there's those Kansas people. Nevermind that they're 40 years older. Like hostels are very accepting in that way too. Anyway, they had this contest one day where they wanted. They decided they were going to get $5 of Egyptian pounds and have a contest to see who could go to the souk, who go to the market and buy the most with $5. And so it sort of forced them to be Egyptian for a while. There's an extent to which you think, oh, you're going to exploit these Egyptians? It's like, no, you're not going to exploit the Egyptians. They're the proprietors. It's up to them to give you the price they want to give.

Exactly.

And so they went out and they realized, and this is literally where I learned that don't go to half and negotiate from there, that they went and they basically had to learn new strategies, new ways of talking. Because really you go to like an Arab culture like Egypt, and you realize that it's not transactional, that in an Arab culture you'll drink tea, you'll talk about your family, you'll talk about Sports, right. For 45 minutes before you buy anything. And so again, it's just this idea of time that other cultures, they don't compartmentalize time in little transactional units, that basically it's more of a relationship business. And pretty soon you're having tea with this guy and suddenly you know about how his son wants to go to college and then you start talking about the price of whatever you're trying to buy. And then he sort of knows. He knows that you're not just the American who wants to get out of there in five minutes, that you're a guy who sort of knows the score and he has. And you have some Arab negotiation chops. And that's part of the fun. This is an aside, but I wrote a book, my fourth book is about souvenirs and I learned so much. And I wrote souvenir, like 10 years, 15 years after vagabonding came out, I wrote about souvenir. I learned so many lessons because my job wasn't just to buy souvenirs, it was to sort of interview some souvenir vendors about what they do and this was in Namibia. This is in Swakop in Namibia. They never met an American who just wanted to hang out for a couple of hours and talk to them. And so, like, their guard went down. Like their, their sort of, their hard gaming, the negotiation thing went down. And I just had the greatest conversation. And one great thing about souvenir vendors is they speak great English, right? And so I just had this conversation and it was just so much. Basically I was being African for an hour. It was about the relationships. It wasn't just about what, what is the price for this? Which sounds weird when I'm telling a story about a contest of a bunch of kids who go and try to find the cheapest price for everything. But I think the kids who won the contest were the ones that realized that in a way, it isn't about the price, it's about negotiating with people. And it's funny how the kids who won that contest, they're from Switzerland or something. They bought every broken thing in the souvenir market. Basically.

They said, sure, you have good.

Do you have a head of Nefertiti that you can't sell because it's like an ear is missing. And they're, oh, my God, yes. What do you want to pay for it? And so they came home with armfuls of broken stuff. And there's no rule in our contest.

So smart.

And again, by some standards, some Americans would say, oh, you were exploiting the people in the souk by lowballing them. It's like, no, the people in the souk were in charge. It was their prices. And actually they were sort of doing them a favor by buying the crappy broken head of Nefertiti that they couldn't sell anyway. So all these young people and some older people in the hostel had this contest. And I think it left the Egyptians in the souk charmed and it left. It taught all of us lessons, and we bought a bunch of stuff for a lot cheaper than we would have bought otherwise. And we realized that the best negotiating tactic isn't necessarily starting at half the price they quote you, but asking them about their kids, you know, or asking them about talking about the weather, you know, and making it less transactional and more relational, which is really how the world works.

Anyway, I love the. It's A one is like how you play the game. So the fact that the Swiss guys, they won because there were no rules to the game, they created their own rules which got them to get the collect the most, the most amount of items and I experienced. My first experience really bargaining and doing that was in Nepal. And one of the things I liked about your book is when you're doing it, you say it with a smile. It's not like this. This roughness that when you're negotiating, because in the end, it is a game. It really is a game, because they're just as entertained by doing the negotiating as you should be. The first time I did that, I was ready to pay for. I was buying a singing bowl and chimes in Nepal. And the guy was, oh, I can't remember what the price was. Let's say $10 for the two. And there was a girl from Nova Scotia who goes, no, no, no, no, no, no. And she went out and she. She's like, let me show you how it's done. She got them down to, like. She got him down to half, and then have them throw both of those in for that same price. And after that, I was like, oh, my God, it's a game. It really is a game. And then every time I would.

Buy.

Something after that, I was with some kiwi. It was. I did a trek. It was a base camp, and I was with some, like, one. One of the guys, he was a kiwi, and he was saying, listen, dude, he's like, you're arguing over 50 cents. I was like, that's not the point. I was like, it's the game of it. He's not gonna sell it to me for anything less than he knows he could sell it for, right? Because he knows he has to get a profit of it, and he's not gonna give it to me for anything less than the profit. He wants it, you know, that he. That he's required. And so when you realize that that's like. That is. I mean, then. Then it just becomes game. Then you're like, all right, where's the lowest point? It's like a simple act of negotiating.

Well, the funny thing is, in a way, you make yourself human to them. And that sounds weird to say, but for a vendor like that, he might see 20 Westerners in a day, and 19 of them are just a sales unit. They come in, they bargain for five minutes, and they're gone. You're the guy who smiles and makes a joke and, you know, ask him about his sandals or whatever, and you're there for 45 minutes, and you're the guy he's going to remember, and he doesn't. He's not going to resent you. It's like, he has agency. He's the one it's his goods. He's setting the price. He can accept or reject the price you're giving him. But basically you've become Nepali. You know, suddenly you're negotiating in the way that he also negotiates. Now, often we're shopping for souvenirs. And so it's like, local people don't necessarily shop for souvenirs, so it's a little bit different. Like, once I was in Myanmar during the rainy season, and so the souvenirs are just. The souvenir vendors don't make as much money in the rainy season. So, like, it was at the point of my travels where I wasn't really looking for souvenirs. And so they're coming out here, here, give me a price on this puppet head. It's like, yeah, I don't want the puppet head. And so then they. Through the fact that it was rainy season and they weren't making very much money, they just started coming down, and so the real price revealed itself. Pretty soon they hear like, yeah, $2. And it's like, that's a pretty nice puppet head. So I gave him, you know, it's not $2 equivalent in Burmese chat, but it's interesting how this dynamic plays out at different times of year. Even, you know, basically, they know their real price, but they come closer to that real price during times of year when there's fewer tourists. You could learn so much about the world and economy, and just the lessons of travel will blow you away sometimes. And then you'll go into, you know, you'll be in a place with fixed prices like the United States, and you'll start to wonder about. You can actually, if you're in a store in the US where the proprietor is actually the owner of the store, you can throw that out sometimes for sure. Or a guy comes to fix your plumbing and you say, oh, well, actually, will you do it for this much? I'm not saying that everybody should hardball the working class in America, but I think we believe in fixed prices in a way that actually, in the real world, doesn't really exist. If corporate headquarters is telling you that this bag of coffee is $6, well, then that this bag of coffee is $6. But even in the United States, this dynamic is not what you assume it is.

I was in one of my most recent trips. I was in Vietnam, and I was going around. I was in Da Nang, and I was trying to find this Marble Mountain place, and I was going around, and then as I was looking Google. Google Maps, I had. And, oh, let Me cancel this. Sorry about that. Google Maps pointed me to this. This place that was a lookout, like a place to take pictures. Like, this is clearly not it. And then a woman who was driving by, oh, are you looking for the Marble Mountain? I was like, yes. So she followed me. I'm following her on my scooter, and I was still lost. She told me down the street, she's like, take a left here. Go there. And still didn't know where to go. And then she ended up guiding me. So she took me to a storefront. She said, carrie, you could park your bike here. My parents own this. My parents own the storefront. She's like, when you come out, just promise.

Just.

Just take a look. All you have to do is take a look. I'm like, all right, fair enough. I go there afterward, and she's showing me all the stuff. I'm like, and it's. It's, well, marble. I'm like, you know, I don't want to. This is. I'm in the middle of my trip. I really don't want to carry any weight. I was like, I appreciate it. And she's like, no, but this is. You know, you're the first customer of the day. It's good luck. And she was going on. And there's one thing that caught my eye. It was an incense. An incense burner. I was like, oh, this looks kind of cool. I kind of like this. She's like, $50. I was like, no, you know, it's nice, but I don't need. I don't need this. She ended up coming all the way down, and we end up settling at, like, 30. I'm like, all right, well, I got a. Got a pretty good deal. 30 bucks. I don't really need it. But I helped her out, and it's from her parents, Corey. And so when I was leaving Da Nang, like, a few days later, I'm in the souvenir shop of the airport, and I'm like, what the hell? I'm like, are you serious? I look at. I find the same thing for $15. I'm like, all right, you know what? That's fine. I paid for the experience. At the end of my trip, I get home, and I unpack. I unpack it. And I realize it's like, it's broken in my bag, but it's white on the inside. It's plaster painted marble. And I was like, oh, boy, she really got me. But. But that became. Some people look like, oh, I got scammed. I was like, you Know what? I still have it. I glued it together and I put on my shelf, because that's like. That was one of my. That was one of the highlights. It was a story. So how you can take something that you would typically say, oh, this is bad. I got scammed. But then when you look at the story around it, like the experience you had just from buying that one thing, I spent 40 minutes in her store, and it was that experience that is the reason why it's still sitting on my shelf now.

Yeah. It's funny how so much of life exists in narrative, right? In stories. So she created a story that somehow had you convinced that it was her family shop, that it was real marble, that they had quarried it, but now it's become your story. Like, basically, I think there's a lot of chances for people become angry and bitter in travel, and I think that's because we're conditioned in the US to be consumers, to be outraged when something goes wrong and to demand recompense when, in fact, you had an awesome story that basically, you learned a humbling lesson about sort of being a naive tourist in a place in Vietnam. And now that story is probably better. You know, I have equivalent stories of that, and those are. I enjoy those stories better than some of the perfectly authentic stories or souvenirs that I bought in some places that it's part of. If you just realize that it's part of that game we were talking about, then you don't have to lose your temper every time that happens, you realize, okay, well, she got me. She won. That's interesting. I won't make that mistake again, but that's pretty clever. And now I understand a little bit more about how this global economy works. So it's all part of the fun. And that's one thing. It's a hard lesson to teach until travelers get on the road. But just say you will make mistakes even if you try not to. So learn how to love those mistakes and learn from them and not be emotionally attached to your mistakes, except for celebrating them as ways to learn. Definitely don't make the kind of mistakes that are offensive learning locally. But, yeah, one of the gifts of travel is that suddenly, for all of your expertise in the world, you're a noob. You know, you are a naive person who doesn't know the language, who doesn't know how to get around, and so allow yourself to make mistakes. Actually, this is another thing that these days, there's a whole new generation of traveler that's dependent on smartphones. You know, you get your smartphone, you're less likely to get lonely, lost and bored in a foreign town with your smartphone. Those used to be the windows into a place. You know you're lonely, you start talking to somebody, you're lost, you ask them for directions, you're bored, and you start looking at the details of a place that you didn't notice before. And so in a way, I'm not going to knock smartphones because I use them when I travel too, but it's one way to cheat yourself out of those windows into a place. And it's a way to fool yourself into thinking that your travels are Instagram perfect, when in fact, the best parts of travel, the most memorable parts of travel, are those moments when you're not being perfect and you're learning in interesting ways.

That's in my recent trips. That's actually one of the key differentiators. So having that smartphone versus having a phone that wasn't really that capable, is that the smartphone? I noticed that I was putting more time and attention into the smartphone and it was taking me out. It was taken away from the experience of being wherever I was, because now I was glued there trying to post something to family, friends, whereas before I never would even, you know what, they would get it. Once, if I was at the hotel, once a week, I might post some pictures or check in. And then it became more of. It was occupying more my time. But with regard to, so what you had said about going into places, and I was guilty of it, I did it and I was in Japan for a few weeks and I jumped around like 18 different cities, towns, and the idea of really experiencing something versus, versus dabbling and saying, oh, I want to see these big sites, because then you don't really get to feel what the culture is. And so I think a lot of people, they have these. When you want talk about setting up a travel or setting up a trip, there's a section of book where you say, okay, you know, get inspired, see things, but then kind of don't do too much where you're trying to plan every single step for the person who is the meticulous planner and they plan everything and has trouble kind of putting immersing themselves in that experience, what would you say to them?

Well, you know, I'm not going to knock people who are planning because, you know, planning solves problems at home, but really you're giving. If you micromanage your trip, you're really shrinking. You think you're making it more efficient. You think you're seeing more. But in some ways, you can shrink your experience of that place down to like 10% of what it could be. When you're not rushing off to tourist site number five on day number three and you're just relaxing. You know, we talked about Italy a second ago. Well, how do you really experience Italy? Is it rushing off to another tourist attraction or is it sipping your coffee slowly and watching life on the street? You know, I teach a class in Paris every year and oftentimes my students, they'll go to lunch and they'll be upset because the wait staff is so slow, because they want to see Paris and the food comes slower than it comes in the United States. And pretty soon they want their bill and their waiter hasn't brought their bill. And it's like, where's my goddamn bill? Because I want to see Paris. And it's like, oh, you're seeing Paris. You know, a two hour lunch is a more authentic expression of Paris than seeing the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Louvre in two hours. Right? That basically efficiency allows you to organize your day in a useful way in a work setting. Guess what? Travel is not a work setting. So if you have trouble letting go from micromanaging, maybe if you will use Paris as an example, spend your first two days micromanaging. I'm not going to fault that. Micromanage some tourist sites, but then take a daring step and have two more days that are completely unplanned where you can do. The concept of the flaneur was invented in Paris. It's the idea where you wander through the city without a goal or destination. You're just seeking experience. Paris is such a wonderful walking city. Actually, New York is a great walking city. There's so many great walking cities. Instead of micromanaging that just think, I'm going to find, I'm gonna look for the color yellow, you know, or I'm gonna look for, I'm gonna follow my favorite smells across Rome. And then suddenly, instead of micromanaging what you think you wanted to see, you're seeing things that are blowing you away that you in ways you couldn't have dreamed of when you were micromanaging your trip back home. So I'm not gonna knock that tendency to over plan things, but until you let go of that over planning instinct, you're sort of cheating yourself out of the value of, of being in another.

Place I was in. One of the things I like to do is I always kind of look curiously. And you had mentioned choosing the right travel partner. Because if you don't travel with someone, talk in advance, talk about your goals. Because some people, especially for their first trip, they're going to want to travel with somebody because it's more comforting. It kind of. It kind of like lubricates the whole experience. And then once they see that, oh, wow, after I've done this with one other person, it wasn't that bad. There's no reason I can't do it alone. But choosing, you know, and it's choosing the right people to travel with who are looking for the same type experiences, like the same things that you have. But sometimes that's not always the case, especially if you're with a significant other, you might like to travel one way and they like to travel different. In instances like that where you have two people who are. You're traveling for the first time, you have two people with similar interests. How would you navigate telling them to travel together, but at the same time without taking away from one another's experiences, Having their own experiences, but sharing the experience of the trip?

Well, you mentioned significant other, so I'll contextualize this in the significant other context, keeping in mind it can apply to anybody that basically going your separate ways for eight hours and doing different activities, Paris for a day or every day is not cause for divorce. Guess what? You're not going to ruin your relationship if you're not holding hands. Going to tourist sites together during Paris that you can actually, independently of each other, follow your own passions through Paris in such a way that it really increases the bond of your relationship when you go home. Think about that. So. So maybe the woman is sort of into the fact that the US Team is in the World cup this year, as happened when I was in Paris last summer. And she just wants to hang out in cafes and watch games on the TV and maybe get some snacks and try some food. Whereas the dude wants to go through. He wants to see the Louvre and he wants to see the Musee d' Orsay and he wants to go to the Rodin Museum. That's fine. Have a date that evening where you both gush about how exciting your day in Paris was, right? That's not cause for divorce. That's actually more interesting than the guy resenting sitting in a cafe watching soccer while he wants to be in the Louvre. Or the woman resenting all this baroque art when she'd rather just be watching soccer games in a cafe and enjoying Paris. So give yourself permission, even if you're traveling together, give yourself permission to have Independent experiences every day. So again, maybe you're just traveling with some random cool German dude that you met two cities over. We'll just salute him goodbye. During the day, you travel through the city, you have your experiences, maybe with him, maybe with not. And then you come and you hang out later in the day. Just keep in mind that it's not an all or nothing thing, that you can be socially fluid and then you can literally travel with someone and only have an hour of contact time a day. When you're having a beer at the end of the day and saying, this is the awesome thing that happened to me. What awesome thing happened to you? High five. Let's go to bed and do it again tomorrow morning.

I've had experiences most recently, I was in Italy last year and I was in Cinque Terre. I'd never been there before. And I have this. Especially in new environments. Sometimes traveling, traveling solo could be. You can get lonely at times too. And there's many times where I wish I had someone to travel with. But then I look at the experiences I have ever as a result of traveling solo and the people I've met and realized that I wouldn't have been open to some of these experiences. And I was in Cinque Terre, I was staying in Vernazza and I was hiking the Five Lands. Or I'm sorry, yeah, the Five Lands. And I met three girls from Canada. And at first I felt this, like, this compulsion to say, like, oh, maybe I should hang out with him and hike with them. But then, like, you know, but that's.

Not what I feel.

They're going to do something. I'm not going to do something out of security and safety. Then I said it.

So I said, bye.

And all of a sudden we just kept. All along the trip, I met, saw them at a restaurant one evening in Vernazza, the town I was staying at. And then I kept running into them all around the trip of doing this hike. And then we ended up having the last night we had dinner together at one of their apartments. So it's getting away from that safety and then going back to. I think sometimes with traveling, you have these itineraries where you have planned and you have all the check marks, but sometimes you just have to let it all go and you say yes to whatever comes to you. Can you think of a time where you were, where you felt like you had this. You had a plan for what you want to do, things didn't work out. And how just surrendering to that moment opened up a Completely new experience that you wouldn't have otherwise experienced had you had that. If you follow that initial trajectory of the initial plan.

Well, I have a classic answer to this. I mean, I have, like a hundred answers to this, but I have a classic one. Ten years ago, I traveled around the world with no luggage. Just sort of as a stunt, just to prove that I could travel so light that I just could put a few things in my pockets, travel around the world for six weeks with no luggage. I traveled with my friend Justin. He made videos about it. He didn't travel no baggage, but he traveled super light. Anyway, we took the ferry from Spain to Morocco, and we got off, and we were looking for a taxi. We wanted to go to Chefchaouen, which is this classic blue city in Morocco. I think Joni Mitchell wrote a song about it. It's just this beautiful place. And so at the time, I didn't know that it's pronounced Chefchaawan. I just saw it on the. On the page, and it's like, oh, Chefchun something. And so we're at the taxi. We're negotiating for a taxi, and the guy's like. And we're like, oh, we want to go to Chef Chuen. And he's here. Tetuan. And we're here. Yeah. So basically, we pronounced Chefchaouen Chefchwin. He said, oh, Chechuan. And we're here. Yeah, I guess. I guess that's how it's pronounced. So he drove us, instead of driving us three hours to Chefchaawan, he drove us, like, an hour and a half to Tetuan, which is a completely different town. And we hung out there with no luggage for like, eight hours before we realized that it wasn't Chefchaawan. So we're wandering around, sort of using the map. This map isn't very good. And it was the. There's videos of it, actually, if you go to RalphPass.com you can find the video we made at this place where basically we are exploring. What's an example. It's like going to Newark, New Jersey, and thinking that you're in New York or something. And so. So one we had this absurd experience trying to put. It's like, where this place is really interesting, but it's not what I thought it was. Well, the funny thing is that Chefchaouen is sort of a. It's sort of an iconic tourist town. It's sort of geared towards outsiders. Tetuan is just a fairly normal Moroccan town. It was market day. The Berbers were in, and so in a way, we were more special in Tetuan than we would have been in Chefchaouen, which is full of tourists. And, you know, people see tourists as a pejorative word. Travelers, backpackers are flocking to Chefchaouen, whereas Tetuan is just another random town in Morocco. And in a way, we were sort of celebrities there. In a way, we wouldn't have been in Tetuan because everybody was interested in us. And this is the thing that non travelers don't realize until they start traveling is that if you're in a place that doesn't have many tourists, then local people are just like, who is that guy? What? He's from America. America. I saw that in the movies. I saw America. Pretty soon, you are as interesting to them as they are to you. And so we got to see Tetuan, this random city in Morocco, in a heightened way, and we just stayed there, you know, instead of taking a bus to Chefchaouen. It wouldn't have been expensive or difficult. It's just like, well, heck, you know, the universe decided that we were gonna be in Tetuan today, and we had our adventure in Morocco that day accordingly. And that's just a very exaggerated version of experience that I've had a hundred times where. Where I do something slightly or something slightly turns out not to be the way I expected it to be, and I just roll with it, and it's like, wow, this was a gift. This was more awesome than anything I could have planned.

Sometimes it's going with what you going back to the host saying yes to the. Saying yes to whatever presents or saying yes to the experience. I was in Thailand. I was in Chiang Mai, and I was going to Pie. Have you. Have you visited Pie?

No, but I know I very much know the vibe of Pie.

Yeah.

So I met, like, the Chef Cha one of northern Thailand.

Yes. I met a girl on the German girl on the plane, and I thought was like. I was. I thought it was attractive. I stopped, said hello to her. She said she was going there, gave me the hostel. I was, all right, well, maybe I'll scooter up tomorrow. Scooter ride end up being. It took me, like, six hours to get there via scooter. And I was advised by the guy who rented scooter from. He's like, if you go, something happens. He's like, we can't get you. So I was like, all right. I woke up, you know, I rented the scooter when I got off the plane, went around checking my. You Know what? I've seen a decent amount. Kind of want to take this trip. And I was so nervous to, like, to. When I woke up in that morning, I was like, literally, like, had this tremble to me. And then I asked myself, you know what if fear, if fear was not part of this, what would the decision be? I was like, oh, go to buy.

So I set out.

I was on this industrial road going out, and I was like, still, I have giant tractors and all these things on the side of me. And not to mention, you're driving on the opposite side of the road. So I'm like, all right, this is. I'm not used to. I'm not used to this. And then there was a turn off point. I remember seeing it vividly where Google's like, take a left. And it was like a delay. So I had to be very careful when a delay, when it had told me to turn and I turn off and I just see this road going all the way up into the mountains and. And I stopped and I was like, holy crap, this is so beautiful. And I'm flooring my scooter and just screaming from the top of my lungs with excitement and, like, exhilaration, because what I thought was gonna be in my experience all of a sudden opened up and there was this beautiful panoramics. The people I met, coffee vendors. I came across a coffee farm. And when I got there, the girl was never at the hostel. She probably gave me a fake hostel. She was never there. But I was so happy and it didn't even matter. I spent like a night in pie. But it was the experience of getting there and just getting out of that comfort zone and saying yes to the experience and realizing, yeah, there are, you know, there are some chances that something may happen. My bike may break down. I was on the road for, you know, for so many hours, and I didn't even know what the gas station looked like. I didn't know they were selling it in, like, plastic bottles. But saying yes to experience, I mean, that's where life starts. Life starts when you get beyond those. When you open up and you get out of that routine and you say yes if you have to. If I know we're out of the time limit. If you ever have to, if you have to go within a little bit, we'll let me know and give me a signal and we'll. We'll do, like, some quick questions to close out. But yeah, in your own experiences, like, have you had, like these times where you just felt this scaredness, where you like, you felt like it was against, maybe not your better judgment, but you realize it was a safety mechanism that was holding you back. Maybe you had a fear of taking a flight or doing a certain excursion, but when you realized that, you know what? I'm afraid, and that's why I want to do it, and you went forward anyways. Do you have any experiences like that?

Well, a lot of them. I think it's an ongoing process in travel that you think, what if I did this? Oh, I couldn't do that. Well, why couldn't I do that? You know, I mean, it can be as simple as, yeah, this neighborhood looks interesting, but I'm headed to this other neighborhood which has this museum I want to see. And then it's like, why not stay another day, go to the museum tomorrow and go to this neighborhood over here. Because you hear some singing and dancing and it's like, oh, there's a wedding. Okay. And then, oh, well, suddenly I'm invited to the wedding. Because these people haven't been interacting with Americans. You know, it's like. And it's not always that serendipitous. Sometimes. Oh, yeah, well, yeah. I mean, more than once, actually, but very vividly. One, like, I was in India and I was. I wasn't even trying. I just. I was walking down the street and I just sort of got pulled off the street, you know, to sort of be the token American at this Indian wedding. I have pictures from it. And I think in some. I think the presence of an American sort of makes any place automatically cosmopolitan. Maybe it's. Maybe it's the same if you're German or Brazilian or something too. But I'm an American, so that's what I see. That basically people say that, you know, those people could brag to their neighbors for years, you know, that, oh, well, my son got married. There's this American person there. And so obviously we are a very international family. You know, even. Even if they just are shoe repairs men in whatever city in India that is. And so it goes back to the idea of your plans and your expectations versus what actually happens when you get to a place. And so I was thinking in Pai, like, there's, you know, pai is a fairly famous. It's sort of a hipster, you know, lot of Americans have moved to pie, actually, and live in pie. But I'm sure there's a lot of people who are in pie and are thinking, oh, well, pie has a good reputation. But I was a little disappointed. And it's like, but did you Ride your motorcycle there because the things you see, smell, taste and experience on the motorcycle ride are going to blow away anything that happened before then. I spent a lot of time on a motorcycle when I was in Indonesia, when I was in Sumatra a year ago. And I was always so grateful and thankful that I chose that way to see the country. Because regardless of what happened, when I got to a place, the fact that it was so interesting getting there, it didn't matter if Lake Mananjao was disappointing when I got there because I had an awesome three hour motorcycle ride getting there. And that's easy to forget that sometimes it's that actually I was just talking to my parents who are my next door neighbors. I'm sort of keeping my eye on them. During the quarantine. We were talking about a trip that we took to New York 10 years ago and we visited Ellis island. And that was interesting. But they kept talking about standing in line for that trip and how there was an acrobat there and how in this part of the country, in Kansas, this guy is like a circus grade acrobat and he was just sort of doing street art in line and, and it was great. And we gave him a dollar and he seemed happy. And so oftentimes what you remember is not the stuff on your bucket list, but it's that motorcycle ride on the way to your bucket list attraction. It's standing in line on the way to your bucket list museum and realizing that you're paying attention to details that you didn't pay attention to before. And that's a gift. My parents are like. We'd never been in a place where it sort of felt like a canyon. It was a warm spring day, but the buildings were so tall, the wind was so strong in this little canyon of skyscrapers that it felt sort of chilly. And that as people who grew up in, who live in the wide open prairies of Kansas, to them that was just sort of a cool, interesting experience. Just sort of. And that's just something that you feel in your body. It's not even something that you intellectualize. It's just walking through a city in a way that is completely new. And that can take the form of a smell, that can take the form of, you know, music coming from, you know, a Salzburg, piano practice, anything. And those are the most exciting parts of travel. And nobody puts those on their bucket list. But that's why we have bucket lists. It's for being lost in between the data points on your bucket list.

And so I know for me, one of the biggest influences in my travel was. Well, I mean, not one of the biggest influences, but one of the things that kind of pushed me forward in life too, is this kind of like this bumping of heads with like my home culture, like my family. Were your parents always like to have your. Were your parents travelers? And what did they think about you, you know, traveling and doing the type, especially your traveling is a very different type than most Americans would say, oh, you know, book the flight, booked a hotel, one week in Paris. Your traveling is very different. What were, what did your parents have to say about that and what was their take on it? Because I know there's, there's an influence in the, in the home culture that might deter people from, from taking that trip because, you know, they have, you know, their parent speaking, you know, shout in their ear how dangerous, how it's not going to be. Were your parents big travelers?

What did they have to say? They weren't travelers, actually. When my mom went to New York in her 60s for the first time, it was the first time she'd ever been there. She didn't have a passport until she visited me when I was living in Korea. And so a lot of their travel experiences are tied to me. And you know, I co dedicated vagabonding to my dad, not because he was a traveler, but because he was a dreamer. You know, just this idea that, yeah, there's certain things you should do, but isn't this idea kind of neat? You know, and so there's just something that he was, he sort of, even though he didn't travel, he sort of gave me permission to dream when I was young. And that was, that was key to me in a way. And so I think you, I think the way that parents push back against travel has changed over the years because when I was young there was sort of this class attachment to travel. That one, it was expensive because upper middle class young people were the only people that traveled. And if you weren't upper middle class and you traveled, then you were sort of a dirty hippie who was going to go smoke weed on the beach someplace and ruin his life. Right? That was sort of the class, middle American class assumption of how travel works. I think it's less so these days because of the ubiquity of the Internet and social media. It's obvious that you can just do a Google search and find anybody from any state in life traveling the world. But that was the parental pushback. Another thing. And actually I sort of addressed that in vagabonding the idea. Let's not see travel as a counterculture thing. Let's just see it as something that we give to ourselves. Let's see as a personal thing. Let's not categorize travel too much. And then, yeah, I think that there's other excuses that we have that we put in place to not allow ourselves to be travel. One parental worry is the idea of danger because parents worry about their kids. But there's very rational, common sense ways to keep yourself safe when you travel that can keep yourself as safe or safer than you're walking around in certain neighborhoods or riding motorcycles or whatever it is in your own home. And so I think, yeah, it's this pushback or this worry from parents can take many forms, but I guess it's something that needs to be unpacked. You can push back against it in a loving way. And so it's interesting, after years, my parents weren't. They didn't really. They weren't sort of hyper supportive of my travel, but they weren't, didn't push against it. And so I sort of know them as travelers, as someone who has talked them into meeting me someplace in the world. And my parents are good travelers. My mom is a big worrier. She's not a very good planner, but once you get her on the street, she just blooms like she has the best travel chops ever. You know, she will look at a dog and think, dogs aren't like that in Kansas. French dogs are interesting. And so suddenly she has these travel chops that your average traveler won't do that. They'll find lenses through which to see a place that are actually better than any touristic lens. Whereas my dad is a super planner. He knows all the places to go and proper names and the histories of her place. But then he gets lost and confused and tired, you know. And so it's been fun to see them develop as travelers, as people who weren't necessarily travelers to begin with, but as people who in mid to late life became pretty decent travelers. And so in a way, part of the way, specifically to argue against your parents who don't want you to travel is to sort of include them in a way and say, sorry, mom and dad, I'm going to travel. It's going to be safe. I'm going to spend my own money. You don't need to worry about me. I'm going to send you an email once a day and I'm going to do it. I'm going to get you a souvenir that's going to Blow your mind. And when I get back I might invite you on a trip to me someplace else. Basically that sort of, that loving response. I use the phrase quite a bit, but open heartedness. I think we go through life sort of categorizing and making generalizations about a place when in fact if you're just sort of patient and open hearted about even a parental relationship and just saying, well, I know you don't want me to go, but I'm going to go and I love you and I'll be in touch and we can talk about it when I get back. There's ways, actually really simple ways to solve those sorts of problems. So if you have listeners whose parents are just really pushing back against them, just save some money, give yourself permission and come back and say, mom and dad, I love you, here's a souvenir, here's an awesome trip. I missed you at this moment and your parents heart will probably melt and they'll wish you they were there with you at that time, that basically you gave yourself permission. Odds are to do something that they wish they give themselves permission to do a long time ago.

It's funny, it's so funny because my approach with my parents is I booked the trip, I'm getting ready to go and then I drop my, drop my itinerary and then like say see you later because in there's a lot of pushback. And it's probably one of the reasons why the rebel in me says, you know what? Well, screw this, I'm booking it anyways. But then when I hear, when I come back and I meet friends of my family and co workers of my mother's, it's always like those stories that I could tell, they're proud of like the trips I've done because one of the first things they say is, oh, you're the son that travels all over the world and they're proud of it. And you know, you know, and it's. I love what you said about your parents and how your parents join you because they're one of the biggest. I mean, you've impacted your parents in such a way. And I think our parents learn through us because, you know, they raise us and they kind of, there's a comfort level or routine that they get into in life sometimes. And the fact that you're able to give them experiences now where they're experiencing it with you and through you I think is a beautiful thing. One of the most powerful aspects, if people were to purchase your book and say they're like, you Know what? I don't want to read it. I just want to get the tips. I mean, your book is literally a wealth of, like, links, knowledge, places they can go to for every travel need they could possibly imagine. I was blown away by seeing all the different links you had. And like, so many websites, I didn't even know even existed. I mean, your book is. It just does such a good job at taking all the guesswork, taking all the fears out of traveling. I mean, where did you come up with, where did you find all these resources?

Well, you know, I wrote that book mostly in 2002. Of course it's been updated. It was updated in 2016. And so I think it was sort of a synthesis of that desire to research your trip and know everything and then also that important duty to sort of ignore a lot of that when you get to the place and follow the place when you get to the place. But I think all that research I did beforehand was not lost because it allowed me to know that what resources were good, which resources were maybe less than good. And so, yeah, every chapter basically has resources. They're available online. If you go to vagabonding.net I should probably. I haven't updated that in a few years now, but. But without even buying the book, all that stuff is available for free online. And then also I tell people not to be afraid of Google. If you're really curious about something in a specific place, just Google it and fart around. And after a couple hours, you'll probably have more nominal information about that place and you'll have a better sense for it than if you'd started in. Also, get reports from travelers, too oftentimes places are reported about by journalists whose job is to report news. And travel isn't about news. News is man bites dog, whereas travel is much more about interacting with normal life. And so see what other travelers are getting excited about. See what other travelers might have a perspective about. See about, you know, if you're going to Naples, see what the American who's been living in Naples for a year says about it and what he's learned. And it's just a resource that we didn't have a generation ago, just all of these online resources. So you can start@vagabonding.net, you can get my book if you want to. And of course, I should probably be trying to sell my book right now. But you don't have to get the book necessarily, that you can actually just realize that find the person who might sort of be an avatar for yourself, Go around online and see what they're saying about this place rather than sort of the scary headlines about how dangerous the world is.

I mean, I highly. Even if you're a well versed traveler, I highly recommend the book because when I read your book, I found myself. I was getting excited. I mean, there are certain things, like, certain lessons that I knew intrinsically. I knew that. Right. This is how to travel. Sometimes I don't. So just reading over your words and your experiences and it got me excited now. Like, I'm like, I'm itching to travel in all of this. I'm like, oh, my God, I can't wait to get back out there. And what you just touched upon, like, the one watching the news, like, the mass media, how they're reporting, feel like so many people, they don't understand that, like, when you're watching the news, the news reports the negative stuff for a reason. Right. Because that's what the survival instinct. That's what the animal instinct is. Like, all right, we need to survive. I need to know what the danger is. What's the danger? And it paints this picture that wherever it is in the world and you touched upon this already, that you can find that you could find that trouble anywhere you go. The. Since I can't even. But like, making the hype behind making the danger seem so much bigger than it really is. Yeah. Oh, my God. I'm like. I mean, I'm wanderlusting right now.

Well, sometimes you can be in the. Like, you can be in the city of Barcelona if there's some sort of violent strike going on, making headlines. Well, it's happening in a specific neighborhood. You know, I was in southern Lebanon when there was fighting in southern Lebanon. Well, it wasn't happening in my part of southern Lebanon. And so I think it's easy to forget sometimes that it's a big world and what's making the news in a given place. Like, I remember I was in Paris three summers ago, four summers ago. And friends of mine from, like, I had a friend of mine from Dallas, there was a terrorist attack in Nice. You know, a friend of mine from Dallas texted me and said, oh, my gosh, are you okay? And it's like, well, there was a shooting in Shreveport the other day. Did I text you and ask you if you're okay? Nice is like hours and hours from Paris. And so you're hearing about a tourist attack that just happens to be in the same country as the city you are. Odds are, even if I was in Nice, I wasn't where that terrorist attack was happening. You know, those things are serious, but those are the headlines that grab a place when in fact, in any given city, in any given day, 99.99% of life is life as usual. You know, the odds that something historical happening when you're in a certain neighborhood in a negative way are pretty low unless you're in the middle of a pandemic. But that applies to everybody, right? So I really think that news is a bad travel research tool. You know, read the news, that's fine. But if you really want to know what's happening in the country, see what other travelers are saying, you know, see what the infrastructure is like, what's happening there. There's just so much more information that's available now, and there's no excuse to be arbitrarily scared of a place in a far side of the world. By the way, I should probably. I should probably. I should definitely be back to work at the top of the hour. So if you have your.

So one of the closing. One of the closing questions I wanted to ask you is kind of what you touched in the very, very beginning is if you had one year to live, what is that message that you would want to share with the world? What is that reason for being the thing you would want to impart for the rest of humanity?

Yeah, well, it's a tough question in a world because it's like a lot of pressure, well, what do I know to impart for the rest of the humanity? So I would communicate something that has worked for me well over time. It's philosophy suffuses vagabonding, and it's a way of sort of centering yourself and centering your values in such a way that you can figure out what's important, not based on what society is telling you what's important, but on what you think is important. And that's time, wealth. That's the idea that your true wealth, that literally you are your richest in time. You're given so many hours on planet Earth, and if you sink all of your time into acquiring things or status or other things that don't mean a lot, maybe you should reconsider that. That oftentimes that old thing that we've touched on before, the idea that travel is an expensive thing, it's like, well, is it. Do you need to throw a lot of money at travel? Or can you find a way to save money in such a way that you can just throw a lot of time at travel? You know, I have met Travelers overseas. I met this guy in Cambodia once. He was volunteering there and you know, he was an engineer. He was, he was actually giving to Cambodia. What blew him away about his village in Cambodia is how much time the fathers spent with their kids in Cambodia. And he basically said, I had this super organized life. When I go home, I'm going to spend more time with my kids in the way Cambodian people do. You don't have to have this schedule where their kids are, soccer practice here and doing this there. Then there's a reason why I do that. But these fathers, they just make time and there's no separation between the way they relate to their kids. These people are literally poor and they have a much richer relationship with their kids than I have with mine. And that makes me sad. And he was talking about time, wealth, that basically this guy didn't realize that for all of the money that he thought would enrich his life, there's some things in life that he just had to give to himself to that. I suspect he was a good father because he noticed that. But he realized that he was just going to give more of himself to his kids. You can give more of yourself to your dreams of travel. You can give more of yourself to interacting with your neighbors. There's all sorts of things that don't carry a price tag. And I think when you realize that time is what wealth is, there's this idea that time is money, right? Well, actually, no, time isn't money. Time is wealth. It's not a currency with which you buy things. It is the wealth. Right. So that would be my soapbox to other people because I'm just grateful that I have been able to develop my own concept of that is that I haven't really had to be materially wealthy to have a really interesting life and a really relationship rich and experience rich life. Because I have and continue to seek wealth through time instead of arbitrary things like money and status.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's any kind of follow up questions I could even. I mean that, that's the perfect ending note for it because. Yeah, I mean, that's it. That's, that's what life is about. Life is health and wealth. I mean, health is wealth and time is wealth. That's one thing we all have in common. We all. The one resource, we all have equal of. So, Ralph, thank you for this interview and thank you for your time, your generous amount of time. I really appreciated and loved talking to you because you kind of like, you add fuel to that fire in me. And I'm sure that you will, to everyone who's listening, and if you haven't checked out his book, please, I highly, highly, highly, highly encourage you to do it. If there's that little inkling of, like, a spark that you want to travel, it'll fan those flames and pull them into a raging fire. So, Ralph, thank you so much for coming on. I wish you the best in all of your travels and everything going forward, and hopefully we'll cross paths again soon.

Yeah, it was fun to talk.

Pleasure, my friend.

Yeah.