How to THRIVE During International Trips | 13 Minutes in Malaysia with Evan

Hey, it's Evan. I am here in Malaysia. It is 8 in the morning. I'm here for Social Media Week in Malaysia, and I want to take you with me today. So this is my first full day. I arrived last night, and this is my hotel room. It kind of looks like a rock star came through and trashed the place. It took me 23 hours to get here, and before that I had only slept for 3 hours out of 48, so I was exhausted. I came here and basically just crashed. It is super hot here today. It is 37 degrees Celsius, which is 98.6 Fahrenheit. The good news about that is I get to wear my 5-toe shoes, which I love wearing. It is too cold in Toronto, -20 to wear now. And I get to wear my 5-toe socks. So I'm excited to go out on the town with these. I bought a few random snacks to sample out some local things. I don't really know how good any of these are, but we'll see. Uh, they've got fish snack, cuttlefish, some random chocolate bars, these cow cow snacks. These were actually really good last night. Kind of like crackers, barbecue crackers. What does Evan Carmichael read with him? I have brought with me for this trip The King Years by Taylor Branch, some good reading material on the flight over. I've got my Believe shirts, my standard issue uniform for the week, some clothes, and let me show you the bathroom. You gotta do the full tour, right? Now the bathroom, there's this little ledge here that I trip over every time I come into the bathroom. So I got to be careful about this ledge. But typical bathroom, you know, shower, sink, toilet, all that fun stuff. So I'm gonna go get some breakfast and I'm gonna take you with me on my day today and hopefully you guys have some fun. So it's breakfast time and here are my options. So I've got this whole buffet. Congee with condiments, Hong Kong style dim sum. Basically I get to pick whatever I want here for breakfast. Not sure what that is. Continental. Tropical fruits. I think I'm going to be full by the time I go through all this stuff. Don't know what this is. And the fried egg station. Hmm, I might start here. So I just finished my breakfast and I realized there's a whole entire section on the other side that I didn't even show you guys. And I'm super full. But the cool thing about this convention center here where my hotel is, is connected to a convention center and a mall. And this mall I had a chance to quickly look at yesterday, but it's humongous. It's humongous, it's crazy. So one of my favorite parts here, I'm going to show you, it's coming up right here. I never expected to find in a massive mall, but I'm going to show you guys right here. It's a skating rink in the middle of this huge mall. There's this giant skating rink. This was packed last night. This is a huge party. I was kind of shocked to see it. Anyway, one of the things I love to do when I come to a new country is meet up with my fans. And so I sent an an email out to everybody on my newsletter who's from Malaysia and said let's go meet up and I'm gonna go to the Starbucks. So there's a Starbucks here in the mall that I'm gonna find and meet up with some Evan Carmichael newsletter fans and we'll see how it goes. I'm at Starbucks, a humongous Starbucks, and they were surprised that I ordered a hot drink. I guess most people here when it's 100 degrees outside they're ordering the cold drinks. One of the cool things they have here is sugar syrup. We don't get that in Canada and their packages of sugar are these little pull-out So I don't think sugar syrup is going to taste too good in my cappuccino, so I'm going to go with some of these sugar packets. So I had a great time at the Starbucks. I met up with 6 different entrepreneurs from my newsletter list, and it was awesome to connect with people local in the city. And now I'm meeting up with a couple other entrepreneurs. We came to the Petronas Twin Towers, so I'm standing here. This is one of the— used to be one of the tallest buildings in the world. I guess it still is one of the tallest buildings in the world. It used to be the tallest for a while, and there's this crazy skybridge across right in the middle. And apparently to get in, you've got to line up at 6 in the morning and stand in line for an hour to get tickets in. So I'm just hanging around here on the outside for a while, and we'll see how it goes. We have some more fun to do here before I start speaking tomorrow. I'm here at the Twin Towers with Scott and Leon. Scott encourages people to go all in, and he's one of my fellow speakers at the event. Scott, tell us about yourself. I'm from Miami, but I've lived overseas since '99 doing all sorts of business. Anything from music industry to investment banking. And now I fell into starting a digital agency in Bangkok last year and we're doing cool stuff. Everything digital, all social media, things like that. What do people have to know about going all in? Something inside you, definitely. You gotta just look in the mirror and say, you know, what is the worst-case scenario? What's the worst thing that could happen? People say no You fail. You learn something. You get yourself up. You brush yourself off and you do it again. Period. I like it. And your website, people to learn more? Or your Twitter account? What do you want? How do you want people to find you? Find me on Twitter. It's easier. @MrScottEddy. So I'm Kam Geng. You can call me KG. And I own an internet podcast station in Malaysia. It's on www.inspire.fm. And he's my tour guide for now. So he's showing me around. Stand in. Alright, we're off to enjoy more of Kuala Lumpur. Alright, I'm leaving the Petronas Towers now and I'm on a hop-on hop-off bus. This one is indoor. We're gonna try to get an outdoor one on the way back. And I have a new tour guide. I have a new tour guide who's helping me along. Hi. Tell us about yourself. I'm Azrain and I'm from Kuala Lumpur and I do creative direction services and I'm taking Evan around. What's your website? www.zabalagroup.com. That's C-A-B-A-N-A-H dot com. Alright, she has been on my newsletter list for a couple years and said, "Come on out, I'll take you around the country or the city." And so here we are. Next stop I think is Central Market, which has a whole bunch of cultural things to buy, so we're gonna go check it out. So I went through Central Market, a whole bunch of stuff to buy, but looked like a little bit of a tourist trap, so we decided to keep going on, and I'm in Chinatown right now. Scott's still with me, although we lost our tour guides. They had meetings. We're gonna hook up on Wednesday. So this is our indoor Chinatown. Moving around, let's see what else there is to see. So I made it back to my hotel room, but I'm super bummed because I left my phone in the back of the taxi. I was pulling out my money to pay and we had to get change and all that and accidentally dropped the phone on the seat. Taxi, and the guy just took off and whatever, he's off to another job, but I forgot it in there, I couldn't track him down, and I don't know the license plate, I don't know anything about him, and apparently it was an unofficial taxi because they didn't get it at a stand, they just pulled them over at the side of the street. So it's a big pain because I have a lot of stuff on my phone, you know, it's the main way I was checking email and keeping in touch with family back home, and I have my laptop, so that's good, but you know, my passwords and everything, so it's such a pain. I had good pictures that I took today from the phone. I'm hoping that the front desk can pull up a picture of the license plate from their closed captioning and then maybe report it to the police and see what happens. But you know what, I'm not holding my breath on this. I don't have a good feeling about it. Anyway, it was a pretty good day, but I'm super bummed about this and not having the phone for the rest of the time. That I'm here, so I'm not sure what I'm gonna do, but they have my info. They're gonna call me at the room if they get the taxi cab number, and I'll keep my fingers crossed that something good will happen. Hey guys, it is day 2, 3, I don't remember anymore, of the conference. I did not find my cell phone, so it is gone. The good karma has not come back to save me, but I had a great couple of sessions today. I ended up with a huge fight with a blogger that I'm excited to see how it turns out on video. And I was talking about salsa in both my presentations. I wanted to go find a salsa club tonight to go and dance and practice and meet the locals. And in the audience was a DJ in the salsa community, and he told me about a club tonight, and he called the DJ who's on tonight, and he said, you gotta give this guy Evan an hour slot. So I'm going to DJ at a salsa club here in Kuala Lumpur tonight. So it's like, what time is it here? It is 6 in the morning Toronto time. I just finished my presentations. It's 5 at night here, and, uh, no, it's 7 at night here. And now I gotta make my playlist. So I'm here, gotta pick my songs. I'm gonna play some some stuff that's good in Toronto, stuff that I like, bring a little Toronto flavor to Kuala Lumpur. And I'm excited, so we'll see how things go. Okay, so I'm in the lobby of the hotel. I've got my Toronto Dance Salsa family— let's get it in here— family shirt on. I've got my playlist ready to go. It's gonna be 2 kizombas, 1 bachata, 1 salsa. I'm waiting for DJ Selva to come pick me up, and we're off to the club. Okay, we are in the heart of KL. Walking into the Havana Bar for kizomba salsa bachata night where I'm gonna do some DJing and have some fun. Here we go. Alright, I'm inside the club. I've turned on my infrared light. I'm testing out this new feature. We've got— I'm leading off with my DJ Duck track, my kizomba, my favorite DJ Duck track here. And right now they're doing a kizomba lesson. You can see here, here are my fellow co-DJs and I'm I'm DJing with tonight. And as soon as the lesson's over, we are on and going live. So I'm excited. See you soon. 30 seconds from starting my set here. I'm starting off with DJ Duck, I'm Real. Funny story, the DJ has this song already. DJ Duck is already big news here in Malaysia. So I had to add Brown Sugar to the list too. Hopefully he doesn't have that one. So we'll see what happens. 7 seconds. Here we go. Time to play. DJ Duck, they're representing Toronto Dance Salsa family. Here we go. ¡Soy de Chupacabras! So I made it back to my room. It is 2:40 in the morning. Stayed up way later than I thought I would, but it was a lot of fun and the people were amazing. It's great to see that, you know, I just said in the conference, "Does anybody know where I can go salsa dancing tonight?" And one of the guys stood up and found me after. His name is Selva. I got his card here. Selva from Lava Media. Check it out, very cool. He came, he picked me up, took me to the club, set me up, called the DJ and asked if I could play a set for them. And there's two more things happening, one tomorrow night and one the next night before I take off on Friday, and he wants to pick me up and take me there. The hospitality has been amazing. All the people in the salsa community— usually people in the salsa community are pretty fun, pretty cool, pretty chill. Had a great time meeting the people there. It was interesting that everybody smokes inside. So that's— I'm not used to that being in Canada. We've kind of banned all that stuff. But anyway, I need to wash my clothes and everything because it smells like smoke. But long day, fun day. This was great that I had this chance because it puts the lost cell phone a little bit more in the distant memory. So I'm gonna wash up, go to bed, and get ready for a new day tomorrow. Good night!