How to Be a Better Human - How to travel without even leaving home (w/ Saleem Reshamwala)

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Whether you’re going somewhere new and exciting for the summer or taking a well-earned staycation, there are endless ways to venture into our world and plug into wonder. Saleem Reshamwala is a filmm...aker, journalist, podcaster – and an expert world traveler. And even though he’s been to far and wide places, his hyperlocal and unique style of traveling will change the way you plan your next trip. If you want to keep traveling with Saleem after this episode, you can listen to Far Flung, Saleem’s travel podcast with the TED Audio Collective. You can listen to Far Fung wherever you are listening to this. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel like time is just moving so quickly. Days blur into weeks, blur into months, and all of a sudden I'm like, it's summer again? How could it be summer again? We skipped a season, didn't we? Something has gone wrong. One of the only surefire ways I know to slow down time, to make it not just
Starting point is 00:00:26 all blur together, is to travel. And I know that travel isn't something that we can all do, but I will say that for me, the ability to experience a perspective shift, to see things through someone else's eyes, to walk in someone else's shoes, that has been life-changing. Sometimes that can be a perfect moment, like hearing a brass band play inside of a bowling alley in New Orleans, a memory that comes up every time I see someone do a little victory dance after bowling a strike and every single time I've seen a tuba. Or it can also be when things go horribly awry, like when I got food poisoning right before a transcontinental flight and I was pouring cold sweat in the check-in line, just murmuring to
Starting point is 00:01:05 myself over and over, you can do this. You will survive. You can do this. You will survive. That is a flight that I will never forget for the rest of my life. Other times, it doesn't even have to involve leaving the city that I live in. Like when I was walking around downtown Los Angeles and stumbled across a street where every single store sold hundreds of different pinatas, every size, shape and design you can imagine. I love the adventure of discovering an unexpected pinata district that forever changes my mental conception of the city that I call home. Today's guest, Salim Rashamwala, is an expert on how to make your life memorable by filling it with journeys both short and long. He's a filmmaker who's made award-winning music videos.
Starting point is 00:01:47 He's a journalist and he's a frequent world traveler. Here's a clip from his podcast, Far Flung with Salim Rashamwala. Right now, you're hearing the streets of Caracas, Venezuela, specifically inside a bus. And like a lot of buses around the world, you're gonna hear everything on a bus. And like a lot of buses around the world, you're going to hear everything on this bus. Street vendors, poets, comedians, rappers.
Starting point is 00:02:11 There's definitely commuters. But on this bus, you can also watch the news. There's no actual television, though. At the front of the bus, there's just two people holding up a giant square of cardboard that's decorated to look like a TV. It's just cardboard. They cut out a square in the frame, and they're sticking their heads through the opening while they're narrating the news, as if it was a broadcast. The folks doing this, they call themselves El Bustebe, bus television. And they're doing this because in Venezuela right now, undeniably, things are really rough.
Starting point is 00:02:54 And one of the things that people say is not helping is that they don't have access to the news. What they have in a lot of cases is government propaganda. What they have in a lot of cases is government propaganda. In today's episode, we are going to take you on a journey with Salim. But first, we're going to take a quick detour into some ads. Don't go anywhere. Thank you. and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology, it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors. For details, visit uvic.ca slash future MBA.
Starting point is 00:03:54 That's uvic.ca slash future MBA. We're talking about travel, culture, and how to bring a sense of adventure into your everyday life with Salim Reshemwala. Hey, I'm Salim Reshemwala. I'm a journalist and filmmaker. I've been to over 50 countries for a variety of reasons, and I am super happy to be here. Salim, early in your career, when you were first starting out, you spent a lot of time traveling around the world on a boat. That's a very unique experience. Can you tell us about that?
Starting point is 00:04:29 You know, I was living in Japan, had been living in Japan for, at that point, probably five years. And a friend reached out and he was like, they're looking for people who can teach English and some Spanish and who are game for being involved in shipboard entertainment. And I think you should apply. I was like, okay, that sounds super unusual. And so I essentially, you know, worked for room and board, which sounds so like Moby Dick, but got around the world twice on that ship while teaching English, teaching occasional Spanish classes. And then eventually as the shipboard reporter. So you've been to a bunch of different countries for your work as a filmmaker, especially making music videos and working as a journalist, but you also travel for fun and for pleasure. So what types of trips are most rewarding to you?
Starting point is 00:05:21 Yeah. You know, it's so hard to predict before a trip, what kind of trip is going to give you what kind of feeling and leave you with what kind of memories. I love stuff where I have something to do on the ground. And so whether that's work where it's super clear, sometimes I'm working on a film crew or reporting in a port. But if I'm not, if I'm just sort of trooper fun, I also like to make little missions for myself. Give me an example. What's an example of a mission? I really like getting a haircut when I'm on the road. I don't know the real origin story, but this is like hard to figure out one's own psychology. But when I was a little kid,
Starting point is 00:06:03 I did get a haircut where the barber nicked my ear oh that's a great fear for me oh yeah drew blood also my dad used to tell me a story about an indian barber who like murdered the emperor with a razor while he was giving him a haircut don't't count that as history. That's like some fairy tale. My dad used to tell me when I was little, I don't know if it's true. Sweeney Todd exists across cultures. Yeah. Yes. It's an intercultural meme. So really anytime I have more than a few days someplace, I try to get a haircut in that place. And it's kind of a, almost like a micro version of everything I love about travel. So one of the things I love is just getting in a different headspace, you know, and sitting in a barber chair, you're like super vulnerable. Sometimes, you know, people have sharp objects, they're doing like
Starting point is 00:06:54 odd things to your beard, you know. And then the other is just seeing the wild range of variables, even in kind of mundane experiences, depending on where you are in the world. So my dad's from India. I most recently got a haircut internationally on the block that he grew up in. When you get a haircut there on that street, there's a barber who, when you finish with the haircut, he gives you a head massage. And one of the things he does is he puts these like steampunk looking vibrating metal devices on his hands and rubs your head. And then at the end, he cleans your ear and it is like the most inside of your skull feeling I've ever experienced in my life. One of the things that people really want out of travel, I think often is to get an experience that's more than superficial to not just see, you know, check off the things, but to have like, quote unquote, a real experience.
Starting point is 00:07:51 And it seems like for you, getting a haircut there is one of the ways in. So can you talk about how to get more than superficial, both abroad and actually at home as well? actually at home as well. For me, the coolest thing about traveling is, like I said, just opening up all those variables, all those little ways that a thing can be distinct. And one of the ways that things get, for me, deeply surprising is when I don't have clear expectations of them. So if you go to the Taj Mahal, you've seen photos of the Taj Mahal from every angle before you go, you should definitely go. It's beautiful building. If you haven't been totally check it out. But to some degree, you know what that experience is going to be like before you go, right? With something that you normally do at home, like supermarkets are another one where you go to the grocery store and the way the machine distributes peanuts or the packaging or
Starting point is 00:08:53 the flavor of Kit Kat in Japan is a super famous one is just a normal everyday thing for you, but tweaked in a way that's super interesting. So much of, you know, for me, happiness is related to what's expectation. So if I go into a spot where I've got minimal expectation, the chances of being pleasantly surprised or having my mind changed or entering into a conversation that I completely was never expecting just feels higher. It's interesting because, you know, sometimes travel can feel like it's only for people who have a lot of money and can buy a really expensive plane ticket to go halfway around the world. And I think that the way you're framing it, a really interesting part is you can have
Starting point is 00:09:37 a travel experience without even leaving the place that you live. Totally. During the pandemic, especially, I started taking these super long walks, like three hours. And, you know, you don't have to get too far in most places to get to some place that you have never seen. Also in those places,
Starting point is 00:09:58 you can kind of test out things that people think of doing while they travel, a thing that you associate with a trip. So if you're down the street from your house and you see someone opening their store in the morning, you might feel like kind of awkward taking a picture of them, or you might not. It's totally up to the individual. But I think it's really interesting to recognize even with hyper-local travel, what our codes of ethics are when we're near our house and what our codes of ethics are when we're far away from our house and how they're different and why.
Starting point is 00:10:31 One of the things I've been doing for the past few months, a friend of mine gave me this weird challenge. I mentioned to her that I wanted to learn how to draw. And she was like, oh, I had a professor who said, draw your left hand every day for a hundred days. No matter what else you do, you will get better at drawing. So I started doing that and I do that in a hotel lobby most days near my house, even just posting the occasional photo of that. I'd get messages from friends that are like, are you on the road? And it made me realize that I do feel a little bit like I'm on the road, just being in a hotel lobby down the way and seeing who comes in, chatting with them. You know, I think a lot about the openness to experience that happens when you travel and how some of that is due to the inputs of being in a new place.
Starting point is 00:11:16 And some of that is actually just because you're in a travel mindset, right? Like you're on the road. You, you know, have kind of like a playfulness around identity. Sometimes people don't know who you are. You have a certain anonymity. You can actually get that pretty close to your own house. If you go someplace where you don't usually hang out. You as a person in the times that I've interacted with you and in even just talking to you now, the times that I've interacted with you and in even just talking to you now, you have, you know, a real like openness. You are, you have, there's a real sense of fun around you. It's easy to see how you're like up for adventures and missions and you want to explore. Do you think that travel
Starting point is 00:11:58 has built those things in you or have you liked travel because you already have those things? It's always hard to know where our personalities come. But for me, I definitely had a lot of experience as a kid where I was uncomfortable at first. I just kind of had to deal with it. You know, I mentioned my dad's from India, my mom's from Japan. So there were a lot of kind of cultural things growing up. Like I spent a lot of time at parties where I didn't understand the language. I didn't grow up speaking Hindi or Urdu. And I spent a lot of time in those kinds of spaces. My dad's a chemist. When I was a teenager, he sent me to work in a chemical factory in Toluca in Mexico for summer. And at first I was super mad. I was like, you know, other kids are like, it's the last summer. We're going to do nothing or, you know, soccer camp or whatever. And yeah, he sent me to work in a factory just because he had a friend who worked in that factory.
Starting point is 00:13:03 son can stay with us. And it turned into an experience where I'd spend like half a day in the factory, really like the factory pet, because I wasn't very useful in a Mexican chemical factory. And then the second half of the day, I'd hang out with the senora of the house, watching telenovelas until the kids came home. I quickly realized that, you know, I didn't speak any Spanish or not much Spanish based on high school Spanish and was forced to kind of learn that way. So I do think those kinds of experiences of being in situations where I didn't really know what was going on a lot made me more comfortable in those situations.
Starting point is 00:13:36 You know, I think we all have a kind of, there might be some general tendencies in our personalities, but I do think experiences that force us out of our comfort zone, it's like exposure therapy. You just get used to more kinds of situations. I think that a lot of the things that you talk about and that I know you care about are just as applicable for someone who's been to two countries or never traveled to another
Starting point is 00:13:58 country. What are the three most important things you would recommend to a person to have better travel experiences? One, try the things that sound like they're going to be boring back home while you're in other places. This is like the haircut thing I mentioned, take public transport rather than the Uber. A lot of things that are like chores back home get really interesting when you do them in other spots. My number two would be practice everything that you're going to do on your international trip locally. Try all these, you know, check out your local hotel lobby. Do like experiment locally with going to like drive along the road, pull over to a restaurant that you're not going to yelp before you go in.
Starting point is 00:14:46 Just do all these kind of things that you want to do on the road. Try them all locally and just get your mind in that mindset. Oh, here's a weird third. If you have an office job, change your out of office auto reply. So it looks like you're coming back at least a day or two after you actually get back. And that sounds like such a small thing, but if I were to turn it into a kind of a bigger thing, it's to try and make that travel experience as separate from your daily worries as possible. And the end of a trip where you know you're going to be in the office the day after you get back
Starting point is 00:15:22 gets a little messed up by the idea that you're going to be in the office the day after you get back gets a little messed up by the idea that you're going to be in the office the day after you get back. And I also didn't find that the day after a trip, if you have the privilege and the ability of spending an extra day of vacation or of having your arrival on a Friday, so you have the weekend to decompress a bit, it just gives me time to let the headspace of that trip seep into my daily life. Okay, we're going to give the podcast a little bit of space right now to let some ads seep in. We'll be right back after these messages. We're talking with Salim Rashamwala about travel and adventure. Salim, let's talk about those initial moments when you arrive in a new place.
Starting point is 00:16:11 Once you get past the stress and anticipation of traveling to somewhere you've never been, how do you settle into your surroundings and start to get a feel for where you are? So this is going to be different for every person. For me, some of the things I'm trying to do are slow down my processing of the place. I'm not an artist, but I really like to carry a sketch pad and just try drawing things as I travel. I find to remember those things really differently. Other stuff is the, one of the first things I do is exercise as soon as I get somewhere, whether that's like hotel, gym, if I need, if it needs to be even better, much, much better is like going on a really long walk or a run. Part of that is to get myself out of my head and just into my body, but then also just to start exploring on
Starting point is 00:16:58 foot. And, you know, I like to hand draw maps of the places I go, super crappy maps, but just ways to slow down my processing of what's happening. And then I'm always looking to try and talk to folks who live in the area as soon as possible. So often before I go, I'll try and find a friend of a friend who I can meet up with. any contact like that, I'll often, you know, try and find a cafe that I'm, I don't make the decision. I'm going to go to this cafe every day of this trip. I know it sounds weird because you're at a, in on a trip to like get new experiences, new places, but something about being a regular away from home really changes the trip for me. Like if you go to a small town anywhere and you go to the same cafe three days, they're going to kind of recognize you when you get in and they'll be much more likely to chat with you. Those are folks who now, you know, they know you're not just in and
Starting point is 00:17:56 out. So you can kind of ask them some questions about the spot. I often think about how there's only two stories in the world. A person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. And so I often think, oh, how could I be a reasonably good stranger? You're at a different spot. You're in their world. You're undeniably, no matter how well prepared you are, if you go someplace you don't usually go, you're probably violating some small cultural rule, right? You go someplace you don't usually go.
Starting point is 00:18:24 You're probably violating some small cultural rule, right? Can you tell us about a time that you have had something uncomfortable happen that has then been an okay situation, like a mistake that's okay versus like, what are the mistakes that really make you cringe? One thing is kind of like learning to eat your losses when you've made a mistake and gracefully move on to the next thing as well. Here's a kind of silly thing that happened to my brother and I. We were traveling. My brother was studying in Guangzhou and we were traveling in a Cantonese speaking region of China and neither of us could understand anything spoken to us. Okay. We were at a temple. Next to it were these boats, these restaurant boats. Tons of families are eating on the boats. We'd been living without spending much money on food because my brother was a student.
Starting point is 00:19:11 I was moving around a lot at that point. We talked to a woman who's running one of these restaurant boats. And we're like, you know, we think that we're successfully being like, hey, let's get a meal on this boat. Just like all these other people are. The price seems higher significantly than we expected. But we're like, okay, cool. We'll roll with it. She takes us around to the market.
Starting point is 00:19:37 We choose the ingredients for the meal they're going to cook. We're super excited. We get on the boat. As we're getting on the boat, that is half full of families at this point, right? They're all sitting down. All of the families get off the boat. They're not angry. They're incredibly abused and they're getting off the boat. Then they set out a table and me and my brother sit down at the table. We're trying to figure out if we did something offensive or, and we realized we accidentally rented an entire boat. And we then had this like romantic dinner for two on a lake that was completely not what we intended to order.
Starting point is 00:20:16 Right. We felt incredibly silly, pretty embarrassing, pretty goofy. But at that point, pretty embarrassing, pretty goofy. But at that point, you know, it's, I think it would have been wrong in that situation to be like, Hey, this isn't what we wanted. Let's renegotiate. Let's get the cheaper thing. Like you got to just be like, at that point, you just got to be like, okay, we screwed up. That's incredible. Okay. So that's like kind of a fun mistake or misunderstanding. I think a thing that people have a lot of concerns about, especially if they haven't traveled very much, is what to do when you're in a situation that might be unsafe. Can you give an example of a time that you've felt unsafe or general, how you handle situations to avoid feeling unsafe when you're traveling? There's some things that are, you know, outside of one's control, your gender, your physical
Starting point is 00:21:04 strength, like all these kinds of things play into how one feels safe and in what situations one feels safe. So I certainly would never pretend to speak for how everyone should handle different kinds of unsafeness. Here's something that's actually changed in how I've traveled. So two things that have changed. Sure. So my dad's block in India where he grew up, my cousins are constantly negotiating prices while they're there. And I learned to negotiate prices while I was there. And I think when I was first traveling around India outside of my cousin's block, I was in that constant negotiation
Starting point is 00:21:39 mindset. And now I look back on some of those times and I feel pretty embarrassed because I think it wasn't bordered on unethical. Some of the things that I would negotiate for price on kind of regardless whether that was the right or wrong cultural thing to do. Like, you know, if we traveled around in kind of the foothills of the Himalayas and I remember negotiating the price of like a knitted cap and it was already quite cheap. And in retrospect, like that's pretty silly at that particular point in time, the dollar was very strong. I was in a better economic position almost definitely than the person selling me this object.
Starting point is 00:22:19 I had fun and felt like a little sense of victory at like having successfully negotiated another culture. But in that particular instance, that's something that like I wouldn't do now. It kind of doesn't really matter whether I'm paying a quote unquote fair price for the thing. What matters is that this is like not anything significant financially for a traveler, most likely in this situation and might be something significant for the other person. To jump to your question about safety, I will say one thing that's changed. I used to, you know, almost take a kind of silly pride in not hiring tour guides ever, but now for a couple reasons, I'll often hire a tour guide on day one, even if it's just a tour of a museum or whatever, because, you know, people often when
Starting point is 00:23:06 they're traveling, they're afraid of asking stupid questions or looking dumb. A tour guide is basically paid to field all your dumb questions, right? Like, so often now I'll hire a tour guide on day one and ask a lot of dumb questions and ask about, you know, different regions and safety. And that's one way to kind of learn about what might be good travel practices from someone who's, you know, not going to be annoyed by your questions. It's kind of related to like, what are my favorite questions to ask, which is just straight up asking people. So what annoys you about travelers here? What do people who travel here do that kind of ticks people off locally? And so often you'll get answers that are pretty simple things to avoid, but that you might not have foreseen before asking the question.
Starting point is 00:24:02 I love that. I think that's a really smart way to both make sure that you're safe and also to make sure that you are being respectful of the place that you're in. So you are an award-winning music video director. You're someone who has documented hip hop all over the world. And I know that you personally like love music. What role does getting into the music from the place that you're traveling to play in your preparation or your appreciation of travel once you're there? Yeah. You know, it's great to have some reason to be the fly on the wall, right? I consider myself a guest in hip hop culture in the U S I didn't grow up deeply embedded in a culture that was full of hip hop. It's something that I came to were like culturally raised in are some of the same skills that I think are really useful in travel. An obvious one is humility, recognizing that the
Starting point is 00:25:11 folks around you have deep cultural knowledge of something that you don't inherently have. Coming at things through the music is great though, because lots of times you're filming people who are able to connect across cultures. So there might be a hip hop culture that transcends location where there are certain ways that rappers might enter a cypher or that b-boys might step into a battle that are actually culturally common among two totally different groups. So it's things like music or coming in through an angle like art are really fun ways to be able to get to see a country. You've also hosted the podcast more than a feeling, which is about dealing with emotions. So I wonder what are some of the main emotions that you associate with traveling, both positive and negative? Yeah. I mean, it's funny now I have kids. So the first word that honestly came to mind was exhaustion.
Starting point is 00:26:05 Okay. Yeah. Because traveling with kids is very different than traveling solo, even though I love traveling with my kids. What was your favorite thing about traveling solo? And what's now your favorite thing about traveling with kids? My favorite thing about traveling solo is wandering a city at sunset and not knowing what your next two hours are going to be like, not knowing who you're going to see, just that complete freedom. That's something that's very, I think, tricky to get when
Starting point is 00:26:30 you have responsibilities in a place, right? So if you work a gig, it ends at 5 p.m., you can just wander safely in the streets for two hours, your head goes into another space, it feels amazing. amazing. Traveling with kids, my favorite thing actually has been seeing how different kids are integrated into lives of people around the world compared to the US. At least in the US, there's often like age segregation, like kids of a certain age hang out with only kids of that certain age. In other countries, there's just way more ways often to have those kids hanging out with adults. They're not seen necessarily as like separate from adult activity all the time. Obviously, the identity of, you know, father of a parent is going to stay the same when you're traveling with your kids. But are there other ways in which your identity shifts when you travel? in which your identity shifts when you travel? Yeah, you know, I think a lot of people experience speaking in a language and saying things
Starting point is 00:27:28 with a kind of freedom that they wouldn't normally have. So like, I feel like when I'm traveling a lot, I'm more likely to like strike up conversations with strangers and all those kinds of things. When I'm on the road, I'm just especially conversational with folks. It's interesting that there's that kind of tension of travel, having that freedom associated with your identity. And that's like one of the, one of the coolest things is you could go someplace and be a slightly
Starting point is 00:27:54 different person. And then the tension of like trying to retain some form of your ethics and your, who you are when you're at another place because that could certainly that can certainly go in another direction that's not great you know one of the things i asked the question of folks in easter island rapanui as they call it there what kind of tourists do you want here and a few people said something similar to like we don't want people who are here just to party we want people here who respect us and are interested in our culture and so there can be a thing that happens when you get maybe a lack of accountability as you're traveling that kind of gets back to being a regular someplace it's a way to just remind yourself that i'm here in this place these people are people who
Starting point is 00:28:42 will continue to exist after i'm gone and will remember things I've done. I think that tension is really interesting when thinking about travel. On the show Far Flung, you are seeking out, quote, the world's most surprising and imaginative ideas, whether on that show or just in other travel experiences you've had. What's one thing that you've discovered that they do differently in another country that you've then adopted in your own life? We spent a lot of time talking to producers and reporters in Caracas about a program they have there called El Bus TV, which is just bus television. Okay. And it is experienced reporters who, when their TV channel got shut down, they started carrying a cardboard
Starting point is 00:29:27 cutout of a television and going on the bus and just putting their head in the cardboard TV cutout and delivering the news. So, you know, people would ask questions about the news, which obviously doesn't happen when you're a TV announcer. People would ask for hyper local news. So they'd like start giving like movie listings of places they're driving by. And it got me thinking so much about like, how can we make information presentation more interesting here where I am in Durham, North Carolina. I actually talked to some folks at the bus stop. It was like, how would you feel if we did this? You know, if I like cable and people were like, oh, like, I think if you were talking about good things in the community rather
Starting point is 00:30:09 than just negative things, like they'd be receptive to it. So I haven't quite figured out how, but I want to figure out how to transport that idea of bus TV into whatever the locally appropriate version of that is for, for North Carolina. When people visit North Carolina and your home, what behaviors do you find disruptive and which do you appreciate? Like what makes someone a good visitor to your home? Yeah. I mean, I think just being open-minded about what the South is makes a huge difference. What I love is when folks come through and they're like, let's do some Southern stuff. Like that's actually super fun for me. Like we go to the state fair, we catch a demolition Derby. We, you know,
Starting point is 00:30:53 eat deep fried Oreos. We go see some, there actually is like banjo music that I can take folks to. There's going to be some amazing Southern gospel happening somewhere near me. But I also like surprising folks and being like, cool, we're going to go to what might be the first Indian Chinese suburb in the South that you've ever been to. And the food's going to be amazing. Let's drive 30 minutes over there. You know, we've talked a lot about travel, like once you get to a place or even when you're at home, but we haven't really talked that much about selecting a place. One of the big issues that can come is with places that are over-touristed and where there's too many visitors and their popularity is part of their burden, but there's also a reason why they're so popular. So I know it's a big
Starting point is 00:31:43 question, but how can we choose destinations without contributing to ruining them or overrunning them? The thing that's going to trump everything is finding ways to get information about what people from the area want folks to do. If you can find that information firsthand, that's huge. Things I've heard from folks are paying attention to seasonality and noting when the heaviest seasons are and that you can decrease your impact a bit by not coming during the heaviest seasons to some place. If you really want to see a place that is heavily
Starting point is 00:32:18 traveled, others are finding out about some of the specific issues. So in Rapa Nui, for example, which Easter Island, which is a heavily touristed area, and there's a lot of people trying to figure out what best to do about the tourism and its effect on that island. One thing that we saw was that they were at, when I first visited, garbage was a huge problem and continues to be a huge challenge there. And so just realizing that things that are made on that island, of materials from that island, are not a problem in the garbage dump there.
Starting point is 00:32:58 It's completely things that are brought in for the entertainment of foreigners or for the comfort of foreigners or often for that are brought in by folks, you know? So just being aware of things like, Oh, how much trash am I bringing into a place? All those kinds of things are stuff that I think with some research, you can find out, you can also, you can also ask directly. So many, there's so many points of ways that you can ask. if you don't see the information. You can just write a tourist board and ask like, what can I do to be a better traveler here? What's the best way to have a low impact here? You know, those are really complex questions.
Starting point is 00:33:34 A lot of them are like so many things in life. They're a scale and you just try to figure out how to do better than you were originally going to do. You know? Well, thank you so much for being here. It has been a true pleasure talking to you. It's always so great getting to hear? Well, thank you so much for being here. It has been a true pleasure talking to you. It's always so great getting to hear your thoughts, Salim. Thanks for being here.
Starting point is 00:33:50 Thank you so much for having me. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Salim Rashamwala. You can find out more about his work online at kidethnic.com. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find out more about his work online at kidethnic.com. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and information about my live comedy shows at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by Daniela Balarezo, Alejandro Salazar, Whitney Pennington-Rogers, and Jimmy Gutierrez, a group who, as far as I know, have never accidentally booked a private boat when they were trying to go out to a work lunch. But that is something that could happen one day. Every episode of our show is professionally fact-checked. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas,
Starting point is 00:34:33 who helped me to book a one-way ticket to Truth Town. On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team that makes the normal feel extraordinary and the extraordinary feel normal. Morgan Flannery, Rosalind Tortosilias, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this all possible. If you're listening on Apple, please leave us a five-star rating and review. And if you're listening on the Spotify app,
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Starting point is 00:35:10 We'd love to have you plan a trip near, far, in the city, across the world, and then tell us about it. We're so curious to hear where you get inspired to go. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Thanks again for listening. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable
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