Good Life Project - Rolf Potts | What if You COULD Take that Dream Trip?

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Traveling the world, especially for an extended period, may be a luxury you only dream about or can only do every few years. But, what if there was a way to make it happen? And, way sooner, and for less money than you ever imagined? Or, what if there's a way to evoke that sense of wonder and curiosity that travel brings out of us without leaving our immediate neighborhood? What would it look like to keep the spirit of the journey or travel alive at home, using it to engage with and learn from the community that's right in front of us in a new and meaningful way? My guest today, Rolf Potts, is a firm believer in the life-altering benefits of travel - even if that means driving heading just a few blocks outside your normal routine - and how we can use adventure as a metaphor for life itself, and I'm excited to dive deeper into his philosophies and stories about life, travel, and wonder. Rolf has shared much of his wisdom and travel stories in his books Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel and his newest release, The Vagabond's Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel. In our conversation today, we explore Rolf's strategies for doing immersive travel in a meaningful way, uncover the ways anyone, even those who can't travel, can use the vagabond mindset to disrupt their routines at home, and we touch on a few moments of adventure and curiosity that have shaped and inspired us.  You can find Rolf at: Website | Instagram | Deviate with Rolf Potts PodcastIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Tim Ferriss about centering humanity and love in work and life.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes.Indeed: Connect with your talent audience so you can make more quality hires faster. Start hiring NOW with a $100 sponsored job credit to sponsor your job post at Indeed.com/GLP. Offer good for a limited time. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed.Cozey: The comfortable sofa made for modern living. Cozey is a Canadian company that makes modular sofas-in-a-box that are shipped fast and for free across Canada. Design the perfect sofa for your space and have it shipped to your door for free. Assembly is tool-free and super easy. Visit Cozey.ca to start your 30-day risk-free trial.Shopify: Try Shopify FREE and start a business or grow an existing one. Get more than e-commerce software with tools to manage every part of your business. Sign up for a FREE trial at Shopify.com/GOODLIFE to start selling online today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

travel in a big way really becomes about the conversation with home and what it could be. It allows you to see new potential, ultimately, and new potential about how you can live at home. You don't have to travel for the rest of your life. Some people will, most people won't, but travel allows you to reinvent the conversation that you have with your own community in a way that is beneficial for yourself, but also for that community. So traveling the world, especially for an extended period of time, that may feel like a luxury you only dream about, or maybe you can only do every few years or longer. But what if there was actually a way to make it happen and way sooner and for less money than you ever imagined? Or what if there was a way to evoke that sense of wonder and

curiosity and discovery that travel brings out of us without even leaving your immediate neighborhood? What would it look like to keep the spirit of the journey or travel alive at home, using it to engage with and learn from the community that's right in front of us in new and meaningful ways? Well, my guest today, Rolf Potts, is a firm believer in the life-altering benefits of travel, even if that means heading just a few blocks outside your normal routine, and how we can use adventure as a metaphor for life itself. And I'm excited to dive deeper into his philosophies and stories about life and travel and wonder. And as a travel writer and author, Rolf's adventures, they've taken him across six

continents, over 60 countries where he's reported from major outlets like National Geographic Traveler, New Yorker, The Guardian, NPR, so many others. He even spent six weeks traveling around the world without a single piece of luggage once. Rolf is perhaps best known for promoting the ethic of independent travel, and many of his essays have been selected as notable mentions in the Best American Essays, the Best American Non-Required Reading, and the Best American Travel Writing. And he's shared much of his wisdom and travel stories in his books, Vagabonding, An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, and his newest release, The Vagabond's, An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, and his newest release,

The Vagabond's Way, 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel. And in our conversation today, we explore Rolf's experiences and also strategies for doing immersive travel in a meaningful way, uncovering the ways anyone, even those who feel like they can't travel or those who legitimately cannot travel, can use this vagabond mindset. It's almost like a philosophy of living and exploring and discovering to disrupt their routines at home. And we touch on a few moments of adventure and curiosity that have shaped each of us and inspired us as well. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Charge time and actual results will vary. I'm curious, actually, what the last couple of years have been like for you, because, I mean, so much of your time for so many years have been spent on the road, living, traveling,

writing, reporting. What has it been like, dramatically limited in your ability to do that for a pretty serious chunk of time? Well, I feel like the luckiest guy in the world. I already felt lucky for being able to travel the world before. But during the pandemic, I actually met my wife. When nothing was happening, before she was my wife, she was home from Europe. And she was on a dating app. And I met her. And I met my wife and got married during the pandemic. So that's one thing. Another thing is I wrote my new book, The Vagabond's Way.

Had I been traveling around, I might not have gone back to these 25 years of travel notes and travel readings that I call on for the vagabonds way. It just fell into my lap. My new book and my wife, it feels like, I don't know how I earned it, but I will take the luck that the pandemic gave me. It is interesting, right? So many people have experienced the last couple of years so differently. I have friends who feel like they have just been locked down, well, physically and emotionally and psychologically, concerned for their health and for their wellbeing. And others feel like they've almost been given permission to enter a mode, which is fairly cloistered and just like gone deep into a creative cave often and generated

some incredible work. I'm actually so fascinated about how people have experienced it differently. Obviously beyond, yes, there's been tremendous healthcare and medical and personal trauma that I don't want to diminish in any way. But outside of that, I'm fascinated by how people have stepped into this moment. So nice to hear that some good things have come out of it for you. Yeah, no, I think people, they sort of gave themselves permission to do things that they might not have done had their routines not been completely upended. And that, you know, travel is a great upender of routines and permission is a huge part of the freedom to travel. So there's a lot of parallels here. And again, I don't want to diminish the seriousness

of the pandemic. I just, I just feel like it sort of put me in a new headspace. And even my wife is a walker more so than me. And so during the pandemic, she's like, well, we can't socialize too much, but we can go for a walk. So we walked as much as 20 miles together out here because it was something we could do. In a way, I wasn't traveling in an exotic way like I am in other countries, but I was seeing the landscape around my house in North central Kansas in a way that I had never given myself permission to do before. So that was fun. That's a really interesting point also, right? Because, and I want to dive into a lot of the bigger scale travel that you, and some of the ideas and the seeds that you plant, but also the notion of, you know, I often wonder if sometimes we have in our mind this thing that like to feel the way

we want to feel, to break out of a sense of like, this is just the way things are, to step back into a place of wonder. We have to make these big disruptive things. And sometimes those can be incredible. But what you're describing also is something that I've wondered about a lot, which is can we actually access those states? Can we have those experiences in the world that has been surrounding us almost on a micro scale and get the same feelings that we so yearn for? Yeah. Well, I think sometimes we choose unhappiness over uncertainty. And it's not until we embrace uncertainty that we sort of propel ourselves into new ways of being, new ways of seeing, new ways of paying attention to our own

lives, regardless of whether it's travel or something close to home. And so I think disruption can be a good thing. Again, I don't want to diminish the disruption that everybody's been going through recently, but travel is what I always end up talking about. Travel is this disruptor. You're not beholden to your home routines. You can't carry everything from home when you travel. You have to take your possessions and put them in a little bag and take them with you. And suddenly you've given yourself permission to experience each day in a new way. In a way, you're giving yourself permission to be a child again and to not really know what's happening. And I feel like at home, we don't always give ourselves permission to be a beginner, to be a not expert. We sort of have to pretend to be an expert, even if we aren't.

Whereas travel, it's like, yeah, I don't know this language. I'm going to try my best. I'm going to pay more attention. I'm going to embrace my sense of smell because I can't read the signs. And that's a great thing that doesn't completely apply to travel. Just travel is something that can compel ourselves to embrace those states in a way we might not at home. Because as I say in the new book, we have permission to do that at home too. We just do it less often sometimes. Yeah, I think we just habituate to what's around us, you know, and it just becomes normalized. And we assume it's kind of always the same.

And so many of us are creatures of habit and ritual and routine. But there is so much grace and so much beauty and so much amazingness around us. So part of that also, I think, is just learning to see. The fundamental skill of learning to see is something that artists are taught the first year of art school if you go to a formal education. But outside of that, I'm not aware of a liberal arts class or a high school class or an experience that most people say yes to,

which just says, okay, let's walk through a process that teaches you how to actually see what's in front of you rather than the representation you have in your mind of what's in front of you, which is generally always the same. Yeah. When you were talking, I was thinking of an Annie Dillard quote. She says that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we see them. The least we can try to do is be there, right? So she's talking about that spiritual space of awareness. And I like that you used the word process because artists have a process. Artists have to pay attention to a certain thing. In the new book, I talk about flow as a state, like mountain climbers have to stay in a flow. Even though their goal is the top of the mountain, they have to get in this state where

the flow is just each new step. Dancers get into flow. You're not thinking about the end of the dance. You're not thinking about your goals of the dance. You're thinking about every moment of that dance. And travel is a situation where you're allowed to put yourself into flow and just be aware of your situations. And I think ideally, you're not thinking about what you're going to be doing at the end of the day or whether your restaurant reservation has been accepted, but you're just in this new place and you're not really sure what's going on and you're accepting your ignorance, but you're engaging with it in a way that allows you to pay attention, you know, in that way that, like you said, that an artist would do. Yeah. Flow and attention. Those are great gifts of travel.

Yeah. And it's interesting that you bring up flow also, right? Because if you look at the research around flow, Mihalyk Semyiha was well known for sort of like documenting the elements of flow. It's been built upon by a bunch of other people since then. But part of the assumption is that you are challenged with a task that's immediately in front of you that is hard, but you have the capacity to actually fully solve or fully address. But you might not know it in the moment, but there's something about it that is doable for you. And I wonder how that translates to the world of dropping into someplace that you've never been before,

having a certain amount of intentionality around it, but also saying like, okay, so there's gonna be great stuff, but it's also gonna be hard, but there's something inside of me that says I can do this. Yeah, I think sometimes we don't give ourselves credit for being human problem solvers. We think we need to micromanage our travel itinerary, for example. So we sort of, we know the flow chart of what will happen if this happens or that happens.

But I often say that you get smarter as you go for all the planning you do before your travels, after you're in a place for three days or three weeks, suddenly you know a ton more than you did at your home office or you did for all of those apps you read on your phone, right? And so just being willing to go through that trial and error process, be it with the language of a place or the bus route of a place, or just being in a cross-cultural moment that you don't quite understand, but you think maybe you will better understand it eventually, that resembles that flow state where you're not, where you sort of let go of the framework of this experience and you're just in it. And through the very challenging aspect of the experience. And, you know, I think travel isn't necessarily full of mountain climber type

challenges, but it's full of these cross-cultural challenges where you're not really sure what's going on. But if you're just patient and if you wait and you play the fool a little bit, then you can sort of immerse yourself in a situation and through the very process of admitting your ignorance, be alive in a way that maybe you don't allow yourself to be when you're in home surrounded by routines and familiarity. Yeah. Now that makes a lot of sense to me. So I want to dive into this notion of a word that I think has become synonymous with a lot of your work, which is vagabonding. But before we get there, a curiosity just about you personally, like you spent so much time now, years and years and years traveling the world,

60 plus countries, six continents, reporting from so many different large media outlets, writing, video, all the different stuff. But writing seems to really be the central, certainly primary form of creative expression and observation, certainly translating observation for you and sharing it with the world. I'm curious for you, what came first, the impulse to write or the impulse to wander, or was it sort of like this back and forth mechanism? Ooh, they fed into each other, I think. When I was seven, I wrote a book about dinosaurs. It doesn't hold up as a scientific document, but it does show that I was really into that imaginative world. In a way, it's more impressive as an imaginative document as a seven-year-old

than it was as a scientific document. But then also at the same time, I'm from Kansas, which is maybe the least exotic state in the US. People don't usually go on vacation here, but my dad was a science teacher. My mom was a farm girl. We did a lot of close to home travels and my immediate surroundings, though they were not exotic, captured my imagination around that same age. We drove up to Kansas City from Wichita, my hometown, which seemed like a long ways at the time when I was about six or seven years old. And there's a road in Kansas City called State Line Road. And one side of it is in Kansas and one side of it is in Missouri.

And it just blew my mind. I was so excited that we could go back and forth between Kansas and Missouri. And so I think that imaginative impulse that underlies creativity or writing and travel have always been in dialogue in my life. And then, you know, you mentioned Vagabonding. In some ways, Vagabonding is my first book, which came out almost 20 years ago. In a way, I wrote it to my teenage self who dreamed of travel, but didn't think it was possible. You know, in a way, Vagabonding is a lot, a lot of my readers tell me it's about permission.

It's about giving yourself permission to travel and to not use these fears that people lay on you to not travel. And I was just so grateful when I finally did travel that when I was writing Vagabonding 20 years ago, I really wanted to bake in the idea of look, this isn't just a book about how to pack your bags for travel. It's a philosophically grounded book about seeing time as your greatest form of wealth. And if you want to travel, travel is something you should do and you should give yourself permission to do it. And so that has been the core of what I've written about for a long time. And there's a lot of that in the new book, a lot about maybe things that the travel industry doesn't always promote sometimes, you know, basically give yourself permission and then

slow down, pay attention, be where you are for once and really use travel as a heightened way of being alive. Yeah. I mean, it's more of a way of life and this is some of the stuff that you actually write in the new book. So tease apart for me then the notion between, for those who aren't familiar with the word, especially the way that you frame it, the way that you tee it up, the difference between traveling for fun, traveling for, or like being a tourist versus vagabonding versus this other thing, which I think has become, you know, a phrase that a lot of people use these days, nomading or digital nomading. Like, do you see these being three different things? Is there an overlap there? There's definitely overlap. And I try not to be too snobbish in the distinctions, right? I think sometimes there's that old, well,

I'm a traveler and you're a tourist argument that's been going on for half a century at least. And that sort of this comes from this place of insecurity because as people in other places, we're all sort of, we don't belong to these places. And so instead of ingratiating ourselves in these places and learning about them, we look at the other travelers and try to convince ourselves we're better than them. By definition, vagabonding is about long-term travel. It's about taking time off from your normal life to travel the world in earnest, be it six weeks or two years or six months or whatever. Often it's tied into your dream travels. It's also dovetailed with digital nomadism in recent years because

digital nomadism is something that is more possible even when it was when I wrote Vagabonding years ago. I was literally being a digital nomad at the time. I wrote that book in Thailand. I was sort of living in the local economy and sort of living a Thai life as I was writing to an American audience. But digital nomadism is more about moving your life and working from a distant place.

It's tied in with the idea of geo-arbitrage, finding a place where you can get more from the money you already have. And that's something I do in Kansas, actually. It's a very inexpensive place to live, but some people will go to Mazatlan or they'll go to Tbilisi, Georgia or other parts of the world. And so I think these all dovetail with each other. I don't think there's any correct way to do anything. People go on vacations and that's fine. But usually I write and have been writing to people who want to dig deeper in their travels and want to travel more long-term.

And with the new book, I try to avoid the distinction. I think you can read The Vagabond's Way and sort of use its ideas for your vacation that might last a week. But I really love to talk about travels that you give yourself. I use that phrase intentionally because oftentimes people think they don't have enough money to buy their travels. Well, it's like you just shift your life in such a way that you use what money you do have to slow down and be simple and travel in a deepened way. So yeah, I think that immersive, slow, cross-cultural interaction type travel is closest to my heart. And it's what I speak to in the book, though. I like to think that the Vagabond's Way can sort of address the way

everybody travels and make them think about ways to slow down and really be present and aware when they're taking that journey, be it around the block or around the world. And I love that approach because you're taking a philosophical approach to this thing that so many of us do, whether it's, like you said, for a week or for a couple of months. And it's interesting, right? Because I think about the mood that so many people have made over the last few years also. And I'm one of those people. So after spending my entire life in New York, most of that in New York City, we picked up two years ago and went 2,000 miles across country. I'm in Colorado right now. And the original intention was to just get out of the city. Like we were just like, it was, it was a very scary time in the city. And like 2020, we kind of like got through the early part and we're

like, we just need to be somewhere where we can be outside and feel like we can breathe and be, you know, like move our bodies in some meaningful way. So we came out here originally intending just to be here for a relatively short amount of time, but pretty quickly, we kept extending and extending, extending. And eventually two years later, here we are. And it did become like, we came out here with an intention to like, we had specific intentions and amount of time. And the more we were here, the more lightly we started to hold that and just start to wonder like, well, why don't we just feel into what this is and let it inform our next steps to no small extent. But that's not the easiest thing to do. But it's interesting to

me because we've seen a level of disruption where now millions of people have made a similar decision. Oftentimes starting out with just like, let me just get out of my current moment and then I'll figure it out from there. And that's led to wholesale, either completely relocating to a different place or just literally like being on the road and trying on all sorts of different places for a while now. Yeah. And actually the pandemic has normalized things like Zoom and location independent communication. And I think for almost two centuries now, the world has been urbanizing. Since the industrial revolution, people have been moving to cities. And in fact,

I don't live in a city, I live in the countryside, but forums always say, you list your city and your address in your city. Well, I could list my city, but that's not where I live. It's just the closest place with the post office. So I think this has given people permission to sort of reinvent the idea of place and where they can live and be happy and what is considered normal. Because I think there's this idea, I'm a big fan of cities. I love cities and spent some time in some great American cities this summer. But we sort of have a city-centric way of thinking of things in the United States, and maybe it's global too. But one interesting thing is the idea that people are moving out to a quiet place in Colorado or Tennessee or whatever. They're doing the same work that they did before, but they're giving back to smaller communities. They're basically being a part of a community that is less urban, more traditional. And I like to think that this is good. This is good for the country. This is good for people and good for these smaller communities. I'm in a place like Kansas,

which has been losing population for a hundred years as the world becomes less rural, less agriculture oriented, I like to think that a place like Kansas is going to have an infusion or Colorado, or again, Idaho or Tennessee or wherever, an infusion of people who are in dialogue with cities, but also in dialogue with these more remote places. I think it's a good thing. And I think there's no longer that urban rural distinction. I think these places are in dialogue with the whole world now. I live in a very rural place, but I just got back from the Faroe Islands. You know, I got back from this very isolated Viking part of the world.

And, you know, I can speak to my experiences there, even though I'm in a very rural part of Kansas. So I like this. And I think technology is really, like you alluded to, it's changing the game so much in terms of people just feeling like they can stay connected on whatever level feels comfortable or safe for them. But also, if you're actually going to stay for a longer period of time, the notion of, oh, I can, instead of having to save up a whole bunch of money and or find work along the way to sustain myself, the portability, the way that you actually generate your money has just changed so dramatically. It just, I feel like it enables so much. But I also wonder if it also, you know, we hear about communities in different countries,

for example, where certain cities have become these really big digital nomad or expats or like places where you drop in and it's almost like you're dropping into another country, but you're dropping into a cell of people that are just like you because that's your comfort zone. And I wonder how much that really takes you out of the entire reason that you like said yes to the adventure in the first place. Yeah. I addressed this in the Vagabond's way that it's become so easy to become a digital nomad. Now you can go to the compound, to the compound in Mexico or in Kenya with the good Wi-Fi and hang out with cool people from California and England and Japan, right? But not really have an interactive experience with the place where you actually are. And so I think

I love the idea of digital nomadism, but I'm a little alarmed sometimes by how insular people are, even though it's like they moved to another place for the weather and for the cost of living, but aren't really interacting with the place where they are. And in a way, I think vagabonding has been an influence on the digital nomad ethos. But I wrote that book, I had to negotiate with my landlord, you know, I had to find my own restaurants. I didn't, there weren't that many other expats in town. And I'm not saying that to brag. I'm just saying that I figured it out. It's not that hard. And so I think what happens is these days people think I'm going to go and be a digital nomad. So I'm going

to move to Tulum, Mexico and live in this place that I've read about. And my thought is, well, how do you know you want to go to Tulum? Why don't you travel the world for a while and go to a place and find an amazing place that you didn't know existed when you're sitting in your home office and find a way to live there. And it's probably going to be cheaper than the digital nomad compound. So in my new book, I sort of gently dissuade the idea that you need that digital nomad compound to be a digital nomad, that maybe you should travel the earth and fall in love with a place before you go there to work remotely. I think this thing is going to happen more and more. I think more and more people are going to be working remotely. They're going to be taking advantage of these interesting and

awesome places. And I hope they give themselves permission to just stumble into a place and figure out their own way, because that's good for your brain. You can move to Tulum or to, you know, Tbilisi, Georgia, and be the same workaholic you were back home. But why not just sort of get into the Georgian or Mexican rhythm? Let the place inform your work habits as well. And so as digital nomadism becomes more and more the norm, I really try to encourage these people to let it flow out of travel instead of letting it proceed travel, letting digital nomadism come out of love for a place rather than the fact that it's trendy with digital nomads. Yeah. I mean, such an important distinction,

not just because it changes the way that you step into it, but also because it changes you, you know, like as a human being, it's like, if you're going simply because it's a beautiful place, it's sunny all the time. You're like, I'm by the beach, the cost of living is low. And there are people that I know that I'll be comfortable with. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but you're stripping out so much of what you've written about for, for 20 years now, which is like the deeper reasons that you go to a place, you know, beyond just, you know, like sort of like fundamental sustance oriented reasons, which is to expand who you are as a human being to actually, to be uncomfortable. I mean, to literally be in a place where it's not your comfort zone and to see how that affects you and give it the opportunity to change you.

Yeah. It's about vulnerability really. And we, you know, since I've written the book, we now have social media, things like Instagram, which I also try to gently dissuade people from being too serious about. But we never really show ourselves being vulnerable on a thing like is being vulnerable to it and sort of making those mistakes that allow you to learn from that place. And this is even something that is economic too, that if you, I feel like I'm picking on these digital nomad compounds, but if you leave that digital nomad compound and you walk around and you just follow your sense of smell to an awesome seeming restaurant, you're paying into that local economy. You're maybe learning some phrases of language, but you're giving money to the people, to the mom and pop economy that makes that place special. Not only are you being vulnerable to a place, but you're taking out the middlemen

that would make your presence there less advantageous to the people who live there. I just love the idea of eating at that local restaurant because there are local people there. An example I use in The Vagabond's Way is crowdsourcing your eating recommendations. I went to a restaurant in Bukit Tingi, Indonesia once because it had a great Yelp or TripAdvisor review. And I walked through crowds of local people to go to a restaurant that didn't really have anybody in it because it catered to the tour bus trade.

Like it got a lot of great reviews from people on tour buses, but literally the people of Bukit Tingi, Indonesia were eating up other places and I walked right past them. So instead of, I crowdsourced instead of looking for crowds, you know, we, you know, we, this metaphor crowdsourcing is useful, but in real time, I should have just looked for crowds because the good restaurants were the places where the local people were eating. So in that digital nomad environment, look for the crowd. You can crowdsource things, but look for where the people who've been living there for generations are shopping, eating, enjoying themselves, playing soccer, having a good time. And that's a way to make yourself vulnerable to this place and really engage it in a more,

in a deeper and more significant way. Yeah. I love that. It's such an interesting commentary also, right? Because you're effectively doing the same thing either way. It's just, you're choosing the crowd that you know and trust from like locally versus the crowd or, you know, in your locality, you know, the people that you've known for a while, you're choosing that crowd over the crowd that's been on the ground, living this, eating it, like having conversations around it locally for years, which again, like it's, it's stepping into the place of vulnerability and saying like, let me just like, let me pay attention and trust, which most of us are not great at, at the end of the day.

Yeah. But trust is something that is rewarded almost everywhere in the world. I think even in places where you sort of wandered out of the part of a city or a place that cat that many tourists, you can really spark some great creative human goodwill from people who are there because it's like, I don't usually see someone like you. I'm going to see if this guy needs some help. I've been invited to weddings just by walking through a neighborhood that wasn't designed for tourists where people see you and you stand out and it's like, this guy is the most interesting person who's been here in a while, so we're going to invite him into our life for a while. And, you know, I don't want people to be so open-hearted, they put themselves in dangerous situations, but those dangerous situations in other countries are pretty rare. And usually they're parallel situations to what you would experience back home. Like if you're wandering around drunk at two in the morning in your hometown, that's probably less safe than it is when you're not.

And the same applies to the other side of the world. So common sense goes a long way. And yeah, human capital and trust is a huge, huge gift of travel. And that's why I encourage to you in that very way. So it's like, if you expect to drop down somewhere, it's like, well, I've heard it's really like everybody's kind of cold and standoffish. So you show up and you're probably going to actually be cold and standoffish yourself in which everybody's going to respond to that. Whereas the opposite, I wonder if you've sort of like thought through that, like how your expectations change the way you show up in a way that then changes the way people respond to you and can completely rewire the nature of the experience. I use this story in my first book, Vagabonding. I write, I think it's an old parable from India where the king, a couple of messengers off to report about the rest of the world.

And one messenger comes back and, gosh, everybody he met were terrible and they were cheaters and they were always looking at him funny. And the other guy came back and said, oh, I went to a place. That's too bad because everywhere I went, people were nice and friendly and they invited me in their homes and they gave me hospitality. And the king laughed because he both sent from the same place, right? And so the Buddha says, we see as we are. And so if you see a place through the lens of paranoia, sort of your own insecurity, that might reflect in your experience as a traveler. And so again, I'm not saying that we should be naively ignorant in places, but if you go into a place with a full heart and genuine curiosity about people, if you say hello and try to talk to somebody before you take their picture

or message your friend back home, invariably gives good rewards that we do see as we are. And I think if you travel with an open heart and a sincere belief in the goodness of people, then it will reflect right back on you in a way that makes travel really memorable. Yeah, I love that. Making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. As you're speaking, I'm also, what's going through my mind is like, I wonder if travel might be an interesting way to run experiments in vulnerability where you can actually take those risks socially, knowing that if it doesn't work, the likelihood of you seeing these people again, potentially, you know, like, whereas like you wouldn't do it in your local neighborhood,

you wouldn't do it with like, you know, the group that you would love to be accepted by next door or at work because you're really concerned about what happens if I'm outcast or rejected. But you could take these same risks as a testing ground to just run the experiment, see how you feel and grow from it and see if you can actually gain more confidence in being open and vulnerable in those spaces, and then port that back to places where you feel like maybe like the local stakes, the social stakes are higher. Yeah. This has been a benefit of travel that goes back thousands of years. A lot of people who took pilgrimages to Jerusalem or Mecca or Bodh Gaya or places like that, they did it for religious devotion, but they loved the fact in their pilgrimage journals

that they were not beholden to the little prejudices of their home community. And suddenly they could try things they'd never tried before because they were self-conscious about it. And they could risk being a fool. I like the idea that travel allows you to be a fool because who's going to see you? This isn't your community. And you're sort of forgiven. You're given sort of a rite of passage. People understand that you're not going to completely understand everything in

their culture or their place. And so it is a fantastic time to be vulnerable. It's a great place to just sort of walk until your day becomes interesting and not really know what's going to happen. Yeah. And then port that vulnerability back home. And it's funny, oftentimes when I was young, I would come back from my travels and my friends were not really interested in where I'd been. They weren't really interested in my stories. They were more interested in the local gossip.

But invariably, they thought that I was more confident. They thought that there was something about me that had changed. And so I think if we come back, I think that's one thing that happens to travel, from travel without even knowing it, that if we're a fool enough, if we're vulnerable enough in distant places, we come back in ways, changed in ways that might be intangible, but for our new confidence and our new peace and our new understanding and our new awareness of our daily lives. And I think there's a complete relationship between that willingness to be a fool in a distant place and that newfound confidence in your home place that, again, is a great outflowing of travel. Yeah, I love that. It's sort of like you bring a bit of bravery back with you. I had, when I graduated college many moons ago, I had a little bit of money in my pocket

because I had a business in college that I sold. And so I jumped on a plane. I spent three months backpacking down the East coast of Australia. This was in the mid eighties when it was a very, very different place. I remember I flew into Cairns, which back then was this tiny little sleeper, you know, like backpacking town, jumped on a dive boat to go spend some time out on the reef. And the first day where I was sort of like in the place that was running the dive, we were like going through a classroom

experience. It's bizarre that I remember this so long ago, but it did something to stay with me. I'm a quieter person. I'm an introverted person. Like socially, especially at that age, I would not have walked up to anybody and said, hello. I would have just like kind of gone my own way. In fact, I showed up in Australia alone without any friends. And I remember like we're in the morning session at the dive place and it's time for lunch. And like, you know, everybody goes over to like a local place where you grab a tray and you grab your meals and then you go find a seat. And I remember turning around with the tray in my hands, like knowing that there were a couple of people from my class who I hadn't spoken with yet, sitting over at the table and something in my mind said, go over there,

just say, hi, introduce yourself. Can I sit with you? There was something in my mind that said, if I don't do this now, the chance of me spending the next three months alone in a beautiful place, but alone is going to go up dramatically. And if I do do this, like this tiny, tiny little move could change the context so dramatically. And in fact, it did so much so that literally like 30 years later, it's that story stays with me. I smiled when you're describing that because it's like having the lunch tray as a first grader or as a junior high student. Right. Middle school. Yeah. And you look at it and it's like, oh my gosh, I feel so, I just don't know what I'm going to do with this. This is the worst moment of my life.

I think any life experience that allows us to be that first grader with his lunch tray, trying to decide what happens, that's a good thing. And then I think travel communities are great because in situations where all people are away from home, people are just more open to each other as well as the place they are. And I write about how, you know, I think it's good to interact with the people who live in the place where you are, but if you turn to the traveler beside you and just ask for advice, odds are they'll be excited to give it to you. And one of the fun things about a backpacker community like Cairns in Australia is that there's a lot of people who've just gotten there and a lot of people who are about to leave and have been there for a long time. And the people who are about to leave love to give advice. They love to say, oh, don't go there. That's in the guidebook,

but everybody goes there, go to this place that I found. And then suddenly they're able to sort of share their travel experience in a way that deepens yours and makes you feel less lonely, right? And I'm an introvert. A lot of hardcore travelers I talk to sort of define themselves as introverts. It's not just an extrovert's art. Travel allows introverts like me to bloom and really force ourselves to make friends through our own loneliness. You know, I talk about loneliness is actually a travel virtue along with boredom and being lost. Those three I talk about a lot.

But yeah, at home, we sort of assuage our loneliness through our routines and our familiars. But on the road, loneliness just makes us be a little bit more extroverted or makes us be more approachable in a certain way. And it's a really great thing to sort of force yourself to come to terms with your introversion that doesn't make you an extrovert necessarily, but just makes you, puts you into these mental grooves that you can use back home to just be more comfortable with people.

And so over the years, in the 20 years since Vagabonding has come out, a lot of introverts come up. I should have literally addressed that in my new book, that look, if you're an introvert, it doesn't mean you shouldn't travel. It's actually great for your introversion. And introverts are actually quite observant. That mix of being forced to be more extroverted, but sort of having that observational

nature of introversion makes introverts good travelers. So, huh, I didn't think about that until just now. My next book will have to address that. We'll fill that in for a chapter there. So we talked a chunkunk about like the fact that you can, so many people can now port their living to support the thing that they want to do, whether it's in a digital nomad community or, you know, like you're just, you immerse yourself in the local culture, but you happen to have a job that makes it where you can be anywhere in the world. But what about that other group of people? I know this is something that you've addressed in the past and you speak to again, you reference in like the newer work where you can't actually do that. Money is an issue for a lot of people and a lot of people

don't have the type of job, even in the largely remote world that we live in now. A lot of folks don't have the job where they can pick up for a week or for a month or for six months or whatever it is. So there's this perception that the reason I can't do this is because of money. You have some interesting sort of like ideas and lenses around this. Yeah. Well, I think sometimes we think that travel is something we buy for ourselves instead of something that we give to ourselves. I know some very, very wealthy people who don't travel very much compared to some people who have fairly working class jobs because they just haven't figured out how to give themselves permission to travel. They sort of put money between themselves

and the idea of travel when in a way it's through simplicity, it's through traveling in these local economies. I mean, you can go to the other side of the world and take the air conditioned tourist bus from one city to another, but why not take the same train or bus that people in that country use, you know, that it's a fraction of the cost, but it's so much more immersive than before. So I think that there's a travel economy that we sometimes forget exists, which is going to other countries and traveling in the same economy where the local people do. You basically take out the middleman and you have a much more immersive experience as a result. And I don't want to diminish, you know, if you're legitimately poor,

you know, I don't want to diminish that. But there are ways to travel near home if you don't have money for a plane ticket to the other side of the world right now. There are ways to sort of take that awareness of travel. I actually quote Alistair Humphreys, the British adventurer. He has what are called micro-adventures, where you do what you would do on the other side of the world, but you do it at home. You sleep in your backyard, or you go to a pub two towns down and just talk to people. That's one solution for that problem. I think really it's a matter of realizing that time is more important to one's idea of wealth than money. Finding ways to free time up in your life is more important than getting

this giant pile of money that you think you might need to travel. And so sometimes if you have a job that doesn't allow you to take it overseas, maybe negotiate a sabbatical for a while or quit and find another one or find a way to get some more free time and then specifically find ways to actualize your time wealth instead of your monetary wealth. You know, just, just slow down and travel in such a way that you are getting experiences that pay off an experience, uh, rather than Instagram pictures. Yeah. And you brought in this notion of simplicity also, which ties in with the idea of like, how much money do you actually need to do this thing, to travel in the way that you want to travel? And at the end of the day, to experience the things that you would love to

experience and to feel the way you want to feel, to have it land on you, to have it change you in a meaningful way. And I wonder if a lot of us were not super realistic about that. Yeah. Yeah. I think, again, you use the word simplicity. I think sometimes we forget how much in life, especially in American life, we don't need. How many things we can just sort of eliminate from our daily routines that will pay off in all sorts of money that we can use for things like travel or whatever makes you happy, spending more time with your family. And so I think that in a way, going back to Vagabonding, I repeated it in the new book, The Vagabond's Way, that it really, this is more about attitude than strategy. It's about mindset more than bullet point hacks to get deeper in life. It's just breathing deep, slowing down, cutting out a few

expenses, and letting the money you save pay out in free time. Just slowly and humbly finding ways to create more time for yourself to enjoy your life and to sidestep the consumer economy. Again, I don't want to knock the consumer travel industry because they get us around the world sometimes, but we don't need to play the consumer travel game all the time. We can go to a neighborhood and instead of ticking off 10 points from our bucket list, we can just walk around until we engage in a place. And those kinds of experiences, oddly enough, become more memorable than our bullet point list, than our bucket list ideas anyway. Yeah.

I think that's a powerful thing to sort of like let go and say like, what do I really want from this? And what do I need? Both when you're traveling and also everyday life, right? You do share this commentary though, in the new book, especially, which is that having money in your pocket reduces the chance that you're actually running away from something. And in my mind, I sort of like finished that sentence running towards something. I'm curious about that notion that like, why does feeling like you're actually like you have enough money to take care of yourself while you go and do this thing, help reduce the

chance that you're actually running from something when you say yes to traveling? Well, I think psychologists have determined that running toward desired outcomes is more enriching than running away from undesired outcomes, right? And so I think if we are not traveling to escape, but to engage, if we're not traveling as a getaway from a life we don't like, but if we're traveling to actively engage the life we're still in and bring ideas about that back home, then that's going to be so much more satisfying than thinking, oh, I'm going to spend two months or two weeks or two days in a place where I don't have to think about the things grim my life is at home. Well, actually you can use that time traveling to

get great ideas about how to enhance your life back home. Is that what you were getting at? Is that what you were thinking about specifically? Yeah. I mean, I'm curious about the notion of just, you know, travel can so often be about trying to transition away from somebody, some things, some experience, some entire season of life. And it can be just about fun, about breaking, you know, like a ritual or routine, or it can be a sense of, I don't know what's coming next. So maybe I can just take some time, run experiments to see like, what is it that I don't know about the way that I work and the way that the world works that might inform me that may then

be like a source of something I want to run to or walk to or ease my way to. I'm fascinated by sort of like that and like the different energies that we're just kind of talking about between running from and running to almost in everything in life, but especially in the context of travel. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that travel has almost been marketed as a running from experience. When I was young, there was a travel magazine called Escape. It was a good magazine, but I think we've almost been sort of inculcated with this idea that, well, travel is an escape. You know, life might be grim, but you can escape your life for a couple of weeks. Well, why don't you just engage your life for a couple of weeks? Why don't you go deeper? I love that you use the idea or the phrase, I don't know.

Being able to admit, I don't know, is so freeing. In fact, I quote a Buddhist monk from about 800 years ago. I forget exactly what the anecdote is, but the wise man says to the novice, not knowing is most intimate. You know, give yourself permission to say, I don't know, because if you move through your uncertainty about life and your ignorance about certain things in life, you allow yourself to grow. Again, you can become that kid with the tray in the lunchroom again, and you return to a more childlike state that allows you to come out of that experience, travel in this particular

situation, having grown and bring back perspectives on your home that you didn't escape because it's bad, but maybe because your relationship to it wasn't as deep and nuanced as it could have been. And you come back with perspective on your own home that you've won from the experience of travel. And I write about this in The Vagabond's Way when I was a kid. It was a t-shirt that said, Dear Aunt Em, hate you, hate Kansas, took the dog, love Dorothy. And so I think you can, even in more exotic places than Kansas, you can sort of resent your home for reasons that maybe you don't understand until you leave your home and then

come back and appreciate it in a new way. And so I think even the grim parts of life, you get perspective from leaving home, you get perspective from leaving your routines. And there's different ways to do that. You don't have to travel to do that, but travel is such an elegant way to completely take you out of those environments and those routines, and then place you back in them in such a way that you can see, appreciate, and adjust them in a way that you never would have been able to had you not got that travel one perspective on that place that you've known so well. Yeah. And I mean, isn't that the story of the alchemist, right?

You know, it's like the whole story talks about like a boy who like goes out into the world, has all these challenges, struggles, has the hero's journey, and then realizes at the end of it, oh, back home was actually like everything that I ever liked that I was seeking was back there. Like I just need to come back with different eyes and see it and sort of like step into it differently. Yeah. It's the T.S. Eliot line, you know, at the end of all our wandering, I'm paraphrasing here, the goal will be to come home and see it for the first time, to come to the place where we started and see it for the first time. And this is an old idea. It's the hero's journey, but like Odysseus, it's in a certain way, Odysseus is going through a travel

story. His destination is home. He's just trying to get home from the war, right? And so I think that home is always in a dynamic conversation with our travels. And if we only see our travels as an escape from home, we're sort of cheating our ability to come home and see it for the first time, to come home and really reinvigorate our relationship with home. And so, yeah, I try to really eliminate, especially in the new book, eliminate that distinction between home and travel. That when you come home, you come home with this new toolkit for experiencing home in a new way and realizing that, wait a second, really, have I been driving the same route to work for 10 years now? I'm going to walk to work. I'm going to drive through a different neighborhood or I'm going to go through this neighborhood,

which they say is dangerous and have lunch there. I'm going to use my money in the economy of this neighborhood that I'm not familiar with and just sort of have conversations there. And so I think travel in a big way really becomes about the conversation with home and what it could be. It allows you to see new potential, ultimately, and new potential about how you can live at home. You don't have to travel for the rest of your life. Some people will, most people won't, but travel allows you to reinvent the conversation that you have with your own community in a way that is beneficial for yourself, but also for that community. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. And you also talk about like this this really interesting balance between preparation and serendipity or surprise you know and you referenced it a little bit earlier in the conversation but it is interesting that i think a lot of us will step into that whether it's just taking a week off of work for a staycation at home or whether you're traveling to another country

like we pour ourselves into defining exactly what that experience is going to be. Like we're mapping it out. We're sort of like scheduling our days. We're talking about all the different things that we're going to do. And when we do that, you know, we basically eliminate the opportunity for serendipity and that's where the magic is. And yet that becomes, I feel like, and you've been in this a lot more than I have, but I feel like from the outside looking at it, at least from like when I've done it, on like on the ground, that's where the magic happens. And yet we still continually default to like, let me think about everything that might happen, plan for it and try and lock it down. So I quote, no, I'm going to have the experience I

want to have. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not going to knock travel research because travel research is fun and it's part of anticipation. And psychologists say that anticipation is part of the joy of travel. Like you actually begin to enjoy your travels when you begin to anticipate them. And if you don't have a lot of money and you're saving for two years to do your round the world trip, well, then actually it makes your work happier

because you actually have that anticipation is attached to the work and it makes your work seem more satisfying in a way. But then once you're on the road, I use a phrase, I actually took it from a woman I interviewed on my podcast. It's your mediocre now brain. That when you're doing that research, it's just your now brain. That person isn't very well traveled yet and you're getting all these options, but you're not a traveler yet. You're not in this place that you've researched. And so unless you're willing to throw away all of that research and follow your heart, follow your sense of smell,

follow your love of a place into new directions, if you're going to keep yourself a prisoner of the itinerary that you plan for yourself, then you're really going to be selling yourself short and you're going to be sort of confining your travels to the parameters of the person who planned them as opposed to the parameters of this person whose life is expanding every day and learning new things and talking to new people and learning new words and tasting new foods. And so, yeah, giving permission to throw your itinerary away. A good itinerary can be good because it sort of orients you in a place, but then suddenly you are experiencing a place in a brand new way. This summer, I went to Norway for the first time. My wife has Norwegian family

and all the travel advice that people gave me about Norway didn't really apply because we were traveling with her relatives who live in a more provincial part of Norway. And so we weren't going to the fjords and all the places that you see on Instagram about Norway. We were going to these amazing, beautiful places that were more provincial and mind-blowing and wonderful and on hikes where you could pick cloudberries and raspberries and see elk and reindeer on the horizon. But it had nothing to do with anything I would have researched beforehand. It just allowed me to fall into step with my wife's relatives and see Norway through their eyes. What better way to experience Norway through that? So I might use that as a metaphor using forward. For all the

bucket list applications of what you can do in a place like Norway, I just followed my wife's cousins and had a great time and I wouldn't trade it for any bucket list itinerary. So just as a metaphor for all of the top 10 list type attractions in a place, those random experiences must be embraced. Even if you miss the bus to the next town, like if you met somebody you fell in love with in Thailand, on the other side of the world, you meet someone from England and you fall in love with them, you're not going to leave them just because you had an itinerary that takes you to the next town. Well, love is a great metaphor for travel. If you fall in love with this certain neighborhood in

Paris, why not spend the whole day hanging out there? Why do you need to see 10 new sites in Paris when you can really get to know this one neighborhood really well? I teach a class each summer, a writing class in Paris each summer. And once I had a student who was physically disabled, she couldn't get around as fast as some of the other students. Man, the one block where our school was, she knew it better than anyone. And in a sense, she experienced more of Paris in the one block she was able to see than a lot of my other students were able to in all 20 arrondissements of Paris, because she let herself be there. She didn't let somebody else's ideas of what Paris should be get in the way of her experience of this one block.

And it was so funny because she'd walk down the street and the restaurant owners would be like, Julia, there you are. Hello. Good morning. And that was fun to see. So yeah, I'm not going to knock a well-planned itinerary, but unless you're willing to throw out that itinerary because you find something that you really captures your imagination or you fall in love with, then you're selling your travel short.

Yeah. And you use this phrase also when you're talking about your wife's family over there, like seeing it through their eyes, you know, which is so much of, I think, the experience that sometimes we preclude when we don't, when we just sort of like bake in, you know, like there are these 10 different things that I have to do and three different restaurants I have to see and four monuments that I have to go see. And it's like, end of the day, yes, geography can be stunningly gorgeous. History is really cool to learn about and interesting and useful to you as a human being.

But it's the people, you know, it's like that random conversation that you allow yourself to have with somebody who like you're sitting at a table at a cafe somewhere having a cup of coffee and somebody is next to you reading a book and somehow like a conversation starts and they've lived there for 60 years. And those are the things, you know, being able to actually understand the place and the culture and like the lived experience through the eyes of the people who've been there. And then maybe build friendships or relationships that last, you know, long beyond that. Like to me, that's always the magic of the people who've been there. And then maybe build friendships or relationships that last long beyond that.

To me, that's always the magic of it. And you're right about this, in no small way. It's really so much of it is about the interactions that you have along the way. And those are easy to encounter. You basically do what people are already doing in their hometown. You can stand in line in the tourist sites,

and I'm not going to knock tourist sites, but why not see if you can get into that soccer game or that volleyball game? I use an example in The Vagabond's Way of my sister who has a former student who lives in Moldova. No tourists go to Moldova. It's not a very sexy European place. But with her former student, she got into soups and salads. Moldovans take soup very seriously. And soup became the lens through which my sister experienced Moldova. And it was amazing because she was in the middle of these very passionate arguments that she really couldn't understand very well about soup and how soup is made because soup was important to the

Moldovans she hung out with. And what an amazing experience and memory for her that basically through soup, like she can't eat a soup now without thinking of her travel experience and these people who made her experience in Moldova even better. And so I think sometimes again, we have our top 10 must-see, must-do lists in other places and they serve a purpose. But if you can see a place through soup or through a game of soccer with a bunch of kids in the town square, or through this art performance that you're invited for, but you didn't know that existed before you got there. And they're just trying, they're giving out tickets to a play that they're giving in the local theater. Well, maybe that's the reason why you should be there. Maybe that is what has captured your imagination. And at the end of the day, it's those experiences that you're going to remember more than waiting

in line for the Louvre to see a picture of paintings that you've already seen on the internet. Again, not to knock the Louvre, but those serendipitous surprises are really so rewarding. I mean, you mentioned Cairns as this early time in your travel experience that still means a lot to you. A lot of these experiences come from my early career when I went through this process of realizing that it's the serendipities and the vulnerabilities that make travel special more so than ticking items off your bucket list. Yeah, no, so great. And it also kind of like brings it around to a notion that you share kind of reference in passing earlier in the conversation, which is the speed of travel. And when you're on that sort of like itinerary driven type of thing,

like I got to get this in and this in, this in, this in, there's a pace that build into that, right? Not because it's in service of the way you want to feel, but because you've got to get the thing done. Like that's part of it. You know, like we're coming here to do these 25 different things. And if we leave having only done 20 of them, well then it's not an entirely successful trip. But in fact, it's like the pace that you travel, the pace that you allow for experiences, the pace that you allow just for space, like slowing down. It's so counterintuitive to so many of us. And yet again, that is so often where the things that we yearn to do and actually feel, that's where it actually emerges when we give it time.

Yeah. There's an old 60s movie I referenced in The Vagabond's Way called If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, which is sort of a joke about those old 1960s group tours of Europe where people wanted to see 20 European capitals and they were traveling so fast that they didn't even know where they were. It's like, I think this is Belgium because it's Tuesday, but I'm not really sure where I am. Well, that was sort of a comic movie from a long time ago, but I think this is Belgium because it's Tuesday, but I'm not really sure where I am. Well, that was sort of a comic movie from a long time ago, but I think sometimes we still adhere to these abstractions that we think we should see. And so we're rushing around trying to experience more when in essence, we're experiencing less. We're seeing, we're going to more places, but we're experiencing them less. I quote a philosopher, a Swiss-Korean philosopher named Byung-Chul Han, who talks about how he has a book called The Scent of Time. He can't speed up smell, right? And he says, it's not the number of experiences that count, it's the experience

of duration. And so if you can slow down, again, I teach classes in Paris every summer, and I used to be this person. My friends or my students will come and say, gosh, the waiters are so slow at lunch. They didn't bring me my food very fast. It took forever for them to bring the bill. And I wasn't able to see all these things because lunch took three hours. And I learned over time that no, no, the three-hour experience of lunch is the experience of Paris. One of the best ways to experience Paris is to relax and observe and savor that food and to know that by his own trade, the waiter does not bring you the bill immediately like in America where you feel rushed out of the restaurant. Part of his métier is waiting for you to ask for the bill because this is your experience. And so that three-hour lunch

is the experience of Paris that's more meaningful than those 10 things you would do if you had a 30-minute lunch experience of Paris. And so there's so many travel experiences that we really, really need to experience the duration of. We really need to slow down in such a way that we can breathe in and taste and smell where we are instead of checking things off a list, because that is what we will come to savor when those travels are over. That is, those are the experiences that will help us understand our home place a little bit better. We'll eat a little bit more slowly when we're home. And we'll go for long walks more often when we're home because we allowed ourselves to do that

in a distant part of the world. Yeah. I love that. And I mean, and in no small way, like what we're really talking about is creating the space for wonder, you know, like, and the notion that wonder is a slow roll may seem a little foreign to us because like, we need to rush to get like the big things happening to us where we can like have our model of the world exploded. And it's like, but actually just sitting there and like, like slowing down and allowing yourself to see like how much wonder is actually around us in the smallest, the micro moments, like all the little things, the conversations on the side. It's like, you don't have to go searching for the huge things.

Like maybe like, like the fastest path is just to slow down and pay attention. So I love these ideas. I love so many ideas that you referenced in the bag mountains way, because a lot of what you're talking about here, you can reference travel to faraway places. But what you're fundamentally talking about is really just a way of, it's a philosophy of living, you know, that you can experiment with and play with and get skills with, you know, like when you're away and then bring back. But fundamentally, everything that we've talked about, slowing down, preparing, but also allowing space for serendipity, focusing on the human being, simplifying. What I feel like you're really offering is this is just a way that you step into your everyday life if you want. We can talk about it on the road, but what if this can just be the way that you live every day, no matter where you are? Yeah. I quote the poet Ross Gay in The Vagabond's Way. He talks about

how he doesn't understand how loitering is a criminal act in the United States. To his mind, loitering, like sort of doing nothing for a while, that's a good time, right? Well, in travel, we're given permission to loiter. In fact, rich people fly to the other side of the world to sit in the sun and do nothing for a while. That's loitering, right? How does that differ from loitering back home? And so sometimes those great travel experiences, I remember I traveled, my first big vagabond experience was living by van and traveling America for eight months. One of my favorite days was in the Utah mountains of Utah, where I just allowed myself to just sit in the sun and read a book and go on little hikes. It didn't mean anything. It was

so pleasurable because I had sort of learned to let go of my goals. And it's intangible. If somebody said, what did you do in the Yuntan Mountains? Where exactly did you go? I'll say, I'm not sure. I was by a lake. I was in some trees. I just loved that day. It was a great day. And that's something you can definitely port back home because again, we're a culture that has criminalized loitering, which means that you're standing someplace and not being productive. Somehow loitering is a bad thing. When in fact, even at home, spending a day just sort of enjoying the sunshine or reading a book or giving yourself permission. Again, there's that word permission.

Giving yourself permission to just let a day play out without worrying about how it's going to add up in the sum total of your life, but just living it and being with the people you love or spending time with people in your community. It's a great thing. And again, I've talked about home more than I expected to in this conversation, but it's a great reminder that home is so much the end destination of any journey. And a deepened understanding of home and how you can experience it is. It makes me want to go sit out in the sun after we're done with this interview, just so I can bring that wisdom from my early vagabonding in the Utah mountains back to my home here. Love it. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well.

So in this container of good life, Roger, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? That's a good question. I think it is being aware and engaged and realizing that time is your truest form of wealth and realizing that time is something you already own. It's something that you give to yourself. And we're all born equally rich in time and find a way to give it to yourself in a way that makes your life richer. And it might not be travel. For me, it often is travel. It might be spending more

time with your family or more time with your passions at home, but give yourself permission to live that time-rich life so that every day counts in its own way and that you can be fully aware and pay attention because life is the moment we have right now and paying attention and being grateful for the life we're living is important. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you will also love the conversation we had with Tim Ferriss about centering humanity and love in work and life. You'll find a link to Tim's episode in the show notes.

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