September 16, 2025

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1 hour 49 minutes

Episode Transcript

Hey there I'm Scott and this is Tangents

Well, I recorded one of these yesterday the

14th of September and today is the 15th of September

I'm not sure I'm going to do

this every day for the remainder of my time here in Tokyo but I have a bunch of stuff

I want to talk about and not a lot of time and I have this opportunity where I'm

just kind of sitting here with the hotel room to myself

I don't know give

him a current situation when I'm going to have like my own space again for a while

So I'm

going to take advantage of the opportunity and also you know like the last week I didn't

record any and also also between the last one that I did and a few things that I was

talking with a bunch of people about I have a lot of stuff that I want to add or

embellish or you know just elaborate on and I also have some things that are completely unrelated

that I want to talk about and I think what I'm going to do this is not going to be hard and fast

it's not going to be you know always consistent but many kind of alternate between

more serious stuff like the last one and some kind of popcorn stuff like this one and in particular

what I'm going to talk about today is is that be just not entirely popcorn it actually has I

think some value and I'm saying things that I think are worth listening to and considering

and hopefully things that maybe you'll learn from and expand upon but I want to talk about

travel and in particular how to travel where you should go why you should do it and especially like

the house and the practical stuff and kind of you know obviously like I'm not an expert I'm not

there are people who do this professionally there are people who have done it for much longer

and more extensively than I have but I have traveled a bit and I have some thoughts and maybe

be in a year or five or ten my thoughts will change but I'm giving you the current snapshot of

my understanding now as as I as I see it I would also say and I think this is an important

note to consider that all of these answers all of the things that I just mentioned they're very

personal and they're highly dependent on a lot of factors particularly things like where you are in

life you know are you with somebody you have a partner are you solo are you what is your job

situation do you have a job that doesn't afford you much vacation yeah if you live in the U.S

travel is an extreme luxury because in the U.S people get ridiculously little vacation time

compared to you know just the basic bare minimum in say Europe people in the U.S get like

sometimes a week a year sometimes two weeks it's very rare to have four or five weeks a year and

there are people in lots of parts of the world and you should be pissed off about this if you're in the

U.S there are people where like the baseline is five weeks a year and they're also like it's

understood that you're going to take those time and then maybe that the whole five weeks directly

at or eight weeks whatever you happen to have not necessarily going to take that as one big chunk

but you're allowed to and you might take you know take it in two or three fairly decent sized chunks

whereas a lot of people I know in the U.S they might have a week or two off but they're not allowed

to take it consecutively and they have restrictions on like when they can take it around holidays

and what they can do with it and a bunch of other like horrible stuff that the U.S is a very

dystopian hell-skate place and when you live there especially if you haven't gone outside

or talked to people outside it's easy not to understand that and I think I think this is

this is actually getting to the wise um this is this is a number one why you should leave

and I'm not saying you should leave and never return although personally

personally if I had the resources and I could get my mom and sister to either leave or visit

me outside I don't know that I would go back I'm not a huge fan there it's not to say that I

hated there um I like a lot of the people I like you know the there are things that are nice about

it but there aren't just so many things outside of it that are so much better ridiculously

better and I think these are things that you know you you don't necessarily

see until you see them and then once you see them it's hard not to out on air it's hard to

unsee them as basically what I'm trying to say so one of the things like this this actually

goes into a bunch of categories so some of it is stuff that is going to be very hard to actually

feel if you're traveling uh casually so by casually I mean like you're on vacation essentially

you're going places and you're not really deeply embedded uh in the place that you're going you're

not you're certainly not living there you're not necessarily spending a lot of time with locals

talking to people uh things like healthcare like you're probably not going to encounter the healthcare

system in a lot of countries although you may and it's interesting because I've heard so many

stories of people from the U.S

going someplace else and something happens and they have to go

see a doctor in my case I didn't have to go see a doctor but my dog had to go see a doctor

of that she did a couple times actually and she needed emergency on the weekend surgery in

in France and that surgery uh was significantly more expensive than if it wasn't uh emergency

but it was 300 maybe 350 euros which is damn near 350 bucks and this was not in the like the

1970s but way before the euro existed this was you know maybe a decade ago um and at the time

when she also had emergency surgery and the U.S

and that was thousands and thousands of dollars

for actually you know like not that significantly different uh of an operation so

it's one of these things like that you might not actually see it but you might happen into it you don't

plan on breaking a bone or any of this kind of stuff but it might happen and I know a lot of people

who have gone places and something happened and like they're they're freaked out because it's like

oh shit somebody's called the ambulance because in the U.S

being a health scape that dystopian

health scape uh calling an ambulance is one of these things where it's like dude it's a massive

luxury like it's gonna it easily will cost you thousands of dollars staying at a hospital

easily can cost tens of thousands of dollars like it's it's completely just ridiculous and

as an act of health care in the U.S

sucks in so many different ways and in so many

different layers and it's it's one of these things actually like uh this is not a health care episode

but I'm gonna put a button on this pretty soon and then get to the next thing but this is one of

these things that like like education and like uh pretty much any industry right now whether it's

food service or you know manufactured goods or whatever what has happened is that we've got a

bunch of finance pros so people who really don't have any skills or education beyond just moving things

around in a spreadsheet and they have sort of taken these positions of leadership

they're the administrative class essentially the CEOs the VPs all of all the people if you're in

Arizona State the University that I went to and worked at these are the people in the foundation building

these are like Dr

Crow president Crow these are people like kind of think of some of the other

names I'm not gonna name names but they're like all of the people who are not professors they're not

actually you know teaching they're not doing research and they are getting paid

hundreds of thousands of dollars a year at the very least for things that really are adding

between zero and negative value to the University and they're a growing class like more and more

people are up there at the same time people who want to teach and want to do research are finding

it harder and harder to do that and there are fewer and fewer jobs like that so things are getting

very top heavy and beyond that the people who are running everything are not really interested in

education or healthcare or anything like this they're just interested in making money and part of

the interest of making money is like at each layer you find out how can I maximize my revenue

and minimize my costs and that means you're adding up a perfection it means you're doing things like

cutting out things that are essential or that you really should be taking care of it means that you're

charging more and more and of course everything is not just like one layer we don't have

direct what whether it's healthcare or you buy a widget a pen it's not like you're just buying

that thing and one person one step has gone from raw materials to the finished product

you buy that pen you have the layers of drilling for the the oil and gas that went into

baking the plastic and then refining it and then making the plastic and then injection molding the

plastic pellets and somebody's designed it somebody has made the if it's a ballpoint pen they've

made the machined balls for it they've done all this kind of stuff and you know there's assembly

and there's packaging and distribution and all of those layers have these finance bros getting

involved and adding not just like a reasonable amount of profit but massive ridiculous amounts

and it drives up the cost of everything by a massive ridiculous amount and it also decreases the

quality because any place they can cut corners they absolutely do and they think that's a good thing

they see you know in healthcare there's will be the last thing to talk about healthcare for a little

while but they see in healthcare that you know like excess capacity like having empty beds

that's just a cost why are you why are you gonna pay for empty beds that you're not using why are

you gonna pay to have doctors and nurses on staff that you're not actively using right now and the

answer of course is what if shit happens what if there's a catastrophe what if there's a pandemic

you know something bad happens having that excess capacity there gives you resilience there's

really good reason to have excess capacity there's really good reason you know if you're at a

restaurant like taking everything up a notch you get like oh you buy the best ingredients and

sure it costs an extra couple of cents or maybe even an extra couple of bucks but it's massively

better and you do that at every level and you actually take pride in it and you care about the

person that you're delivering the thing to and all this stuff and everything is just better and

you can tell helpably that everything at every layer is just a fucking scam and people are making

it shitty or inshitter and that you get food that's basically filled of sawdust and it's

ridiculously expensive too and that they simple example of this I used to love going to Chipotle

and the reason I did it wasn't that Chipotle was good but it's kind of like Starbucks and the sense

that it might not have been great but you could go to a Chipotle almost anywhere and they

granted the Chipotle and Paris the veggies would be overcooked it wasn't exactly the same thing

but it would be similar but anywhere in the US go to a Chipotle and the veggies were actually

pretty decent you get a lot of them if you ask for them and it was it was pretty consistent and pretty

well controlled then the former VP I think it was a VP of Taco Bell took over I can't

see you and he didn't immediately fuck things up but over time you know the price kept going up for

everything and then he started cutting costs and the first one that I noticed and this one I feel

simultaneously I feel a little bit of a little bit proud that I walked this because at the time I

didn't realize what happened I just go into Chipotle and I get it and I have the tomatoes and the

tomatoes had a very distinctive shitty taste a really not even a shitty shitty taste would be

something this is that Taco Bell tomato there's nothing to it like there's not really any flavor

there it looks like a tomato and it has kind of like the vague hint of tomatoness to it but it's

eerily not there all that there's no substance to it it doesn't taste good and they were the same

tomatoes and I've never had that kind of tomato outside of Taco Bell which incidentally and then

this side from the the food I'll get into the food actually next but aside from um yeah not being a

huge fan of Taco Bell

Taco Bell is nice because if you are going around the US and you want

something that's kind of vegetarian or even vegan you can very easily just order whatever

helps that you black beans for beef and presto vegetarian and you can also like not have the sour

cream and cheese and I got vegan it's not that hard it's a pretty it's not great but it's pretty decent

for what it is Chipotle was like a tear above that and I get those tomatoes and like what the

fuck is going on here then I searched and shockingly the guy who was I discovered you know like a

year or two prior the guy who was the VP or senior VP of Taco Bell became the CEO and it's it's

telling and this is what these guys do to by the way they fuck stuff up one place and then they go

off to the next thing and they get you know essentially fall upwards that hospitals this will be the

health care thing and then I'll get to the food but at hospitals you'll have a CEO come in

and he raises the price of aspirin by a couple bucks and finds new ways to fuck over the patients

and to not help people as much as they could and to cut staff and to do x-fly and z that all

make things worse and then gets a big bonus and gets hired someplace else getting paid even more

the fuck things up there even more and somebody else comes in and fuck things up on top of the the

fuckery the previous guy did and there's not really any pressure and a lot of these things to improve

things so it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and more expensive and you can again you

can just tell it's palpable in the US everything is very expensive and everything like kind of tastes

like shit this is another reason why I think you should travel because one of the like don't

he was not a cheap city by any means but one of the things that you do notice here is you can eat

really cheaply like for I'm terrible at the conversion but there are ramen shops that will be like

350 yeah which I I should know that conversion but it's it's not a lot of money it's actually

two two bucks and 30 cents that today is current conversion great so two and a half bucks

you get a big bowl of ramen that actually tastes better than most of the ramen that you probably

had in the US for a lot more money for like almost ten times as much money and of course there's

no tax on top of that which is really nice the taxes in most countries are there you know there's

sales taxes a thing that exists in a lot of places but they're baked into the prices so whatever

the price that you see is the price that you pay and of course like here and it's a lovely thing

people actually get paid decently so tipping and there there is no tipping culture really

but tipping is not a thing that you have to do so whatever you go to the menu you see the price

that is the amount that you're going to pay and it is lovely it's fucking awesome

experiencing the food though and this is a thing again I'm not trying to make this whole thing

about ways to see how shitty the US is but definitely in my experience a lot of this stuff

shines a light on how shitty the US is the food and this is kind of weird I noticed this

when I first started traveling and this was probably like a decade and a half maybe even two

decades ago got time flies but I go and just go to like a corner stop that corner shop not a great

place not like you just just like the equivalent of a of a seven eleven type shop and you get an

orange I don't remember why I just am walking someplace get an orange now orange doesn't necessarily

look as beautiful as the orange that you're going to get at safeway or Albert Sins or wherever you're

going not Ralph sir whatever but crack into it and first off it was cheaper than the oranges that

you're probably getting and in second it's delicious it's amazing it has it's fragrant like it has

as flavor to it and in a way that like even if you go to like organic shop pay a lot of money

and you get like heirloom oranges it's not the same it's not as good I'm not saying like every time

uniformly they're always better like I had the shittiest espresso that I've ever had I had in the

the airport in the wrong terrible espresso but generally speaking go anywhere in Europe and you can

miss espresso and it's pretty good especially in Italy and you know like as a general rule most other

countries that I've been to the produce is just better and not a little bit better but massively better

and it's cheaper at the same time and of course you do have to consider like what is how much

people making versus like how you know like what percentage of their income does that orange

account for it might not be as good of a deal when you factor that in but still they're not that expensive

relatively speaking and they will be better and I guess that I think I'm not sure but I think

the difference there is basically in the US these things are all you know they're certainly going to

be full of pesticides and herbicides and all that kind of stuff but really more than anything it's just

optimized to kind of look good so selected for looking good and you know things are done to make

it look good and get to the store looking as good as possible and you know you and the US you will find

like perfectly spherical oranges and they look amazing they really they definitely do but they

taste like shit or they have very little taste it's I did not realize what an orange could taste like

really until I went to Spain for the first time and I got fresh squeezed orange juice

stayed with my friend Alberto and his wife and they had an orange juice squeezer they made

us breakfast or they made me breakfast I guess I was alone and it was like the best orange juice I

had ever tasted in my life and just from like random Valencia oranges that they had and it just like

you can't it's hard to understand it's hard to express it sounds like a ridiculous thing that I'm

saying but I really think a lot of this is like the difference between optimizing for maximizing

profit versus at each level you have somebody who actually cares about growing good produce

and giving you like buying produce the taste good and selling produce to people that taste good

at each level if you do that and you have people that care and they're trying obviously still

everybody's making money at each level I'm not a huge fan of that picture you know that's it's

under that sort of system so it it makes sense they're making a little bit but they're not making

all the money you know they're not and they're not destroying the cost and making it as cheaply as

possible to get something that superficially looks as much like the product you're trying to buy

as possible but it's shitty or I mean they're not so like to be fair they're not like trying to make

it shitty but it's just when you don't have selective pressure in a certain direction it's there's

nothing that keeps it getting shitty and it's just going to drift into shittyness it's like if you are

a moral that is to say you have no morals and you're an ethical which is to say you have no ethics

then inevitably you are going to do things that are immoral because again you have nothing

pressing you to be moral you have no moral framework at all and it's going to press you

well again it's not that you're driven to be unethical it's just you're going to drift there

because you have nothing keeping you from it and often those things are easier or they're more

expedition they're expedient or they're you know there there are things that will drive you

in those directions not always but even if there's no pressure at all just I chance you'll drift in

those directions but if you have moral and ethical standards then that kind of keeps you out of it

if you have the idea that you know you want to give people good produce you want to you're

you're a farmer and you want to grow oranges that taste fucking amazing and you're putting all

your work into making oranges they're just you know mind blowing and you're selecting for oranges

the taste better maybe they'll you know you probably select for like look decent too and all

this other stuff but that's what you're working on and you know then you're the person who is like

the supplier and you're gonna know like you want to to sell the best oranges you find the

farmers that are making the best oranges and you you know are the distributor and you go through

the whole list from this and if everybody is kind of driving towards something that's better

everything gets better if everybody at every level of healthcare is driven not that I want to keep

getting back to that but if everybody was trying to actually make people healthier and do the best

they could there you're gonna find that healthcare is better you end up having better outcomes you end

up having increasing longevity you end up having better standard of living and better quality of life

and you also don't end up with people going bankrupt and being financially destroyed by medical

that because you know it's just a way to make money for people and so they've raised the prices

to the point where you know kid gets leukemia and it's like millions of dollars to treat it's

treatable but or probably but millions of dollars to save a life or whatever the thing is that's

what you end up with so I think tasting the food going places seeing what it's like and especially

you know when you're someplace getting that experience and and also like you know seeing how people

actually eat another country is an interesting thing seeing the relationship people have with food

and with you know like are they eating just as sort of like a perfumptory mandatory thing that you

have to do just to survive and then that's like yeah or are they going to do a nice casual leisurely

lunch having a good time enjoying themselves eating slowly trying to eat at least decent food

and all of this kind of stuff it's interesting now of course it just gets to sort of the how

you're traveling and what you're doing if you are like the sort of gold standard for this would be

your an exchange student living with a host family and then you really get to see how people live

and you really get to experience that that is like I didn't start traveling until after

I had already graduated undergrad and grad school and so I missed out on being an exchange student

and it's it's not exactly like a regret but it is one thing where I kind of if I had a kid or

if I knew somebody who is young enough to do it and every time I talk to people that are of the

right age for this I tell them can indulge them in the direction try being an exchange student

something it doesn't really matter where go to another country for a semester or two live some

place else see what that's like and it will never be the same kind of experience because once you get

out of school you're not going to be with people who are in that same position in life you're

not going to be meeting people as easily you're not going to be with a bunch of people who are

ready and willing to travel every weekend you're going to have higher standards for your travel

probably I mean that necessarily you could be my age or older and still be okay with staying at a

hostel but if you're if you're younger going to a hostel not a bad thing like and this is one of

the things in the how if you go someplace and like the first time I traveled I was trying to be

fairly cautious with money I didn't have very much I still don't have very much but you know I've

gotten to the point where I'm just not comfortable staying in a hostel and some of the

hostels actually have age limits and most of those I'm probably over but you can find ones that go

like I've been to hostels where you see guys that are like much much older than me and so

it does it does exist you can do that but the thing is like a hostel is sort of like a hotel

but you'll have bumps instead of a room and instead of like a desk or anything like this you have

some shared spaces the nice thing about it is it's very cheap often it'll be located in some place

really close to public transit really close to activities and things like that probably really close to

to bars and things as well the sort of if you're into that kind of stuff which I never have been

but you know if you are it's a good thing to do you go in you stay there are a bunch of other people

were probably at a similar stage of life as you staying there and they're probably similar socioeconomic

status similar ideas about things and you talk to them and then you end up going on adventures

with them just like when you're in school on that exchange program you'll end up finding other

students and then you decide oh we're gonna go to Germany this weekend we're gonna go well

I'm gonna Munich and if you're in Europe going from London to Munich is not a big deal like

it's an easy cheap thing to do for a weekend especially if you stay at a hostel or or similarly

like if you're here yeah I mean Tokyo you could take Shinkansen and go to Kyoto go to Osaka

go to some other city Nagano or whatever and it's a little more expensive but you could also stay

in a capsule hotel which is sort of like a hostel but instead of well I guess it's it's a version

of a hostel in some sense but basically and I stayed I've known about these for a long time

the first time I've ever stayed at one was about a week and a half ago and it was just I got in

I was in Bangkok and I flew I did a overnight flight for two reasons one because I was gonna

save a night of hotel and two because for some reason all the flights from Bangkok to Tokyo were

red eye flights and so I flew on that and it was a six hours as a long flight but it was a six-hour flight

and I came in and I got here I think like four or five hours before my friend was coming in

and so I I didn't want to leave or go to the hotel or something like that and also I was so

fucking tired I'm not somebody who sleeps on flights so I get there and I'm thinking about it my

original plan was just to sort of hang out at a coffee shop and do some work or something like that

you know brought my computer I always bring my computer and I got stuff to do and I thought that

was what I was gonna do ended up I was so fucking tired that like I was just struggling to keep my eyes

open and I'm in terminal one and I'm searching and I looked around and I saw there's this

I can't remember what it's called like nine hours I think capsule hotel in terminal two slash three

and I thought about it I looked at the price and it was like 25 bucks or something I don't remember

exactly what but it was it was pretty cheap and you could go in there and you could stay

not just overnight but you could rent it for a few hours and so I had like again five hours or so

took some time to get there and took some time to get back but in the end I ended up staying there for like

three hours and I was able to sleep for like three hours I also have hours and other things

you can do you could even just go in and use the shower and pay for that but it's actually a really

nice kind of cheap way to do stuff and it turns out like for that I mean it would be weird to rent

the whole hotel room for a few hours I'm sure there are places that like you do that but this was just

to yeah this was not for like having sex or something it was just for me to sleep so yeah and also

I would feel weird renting a hotel room for a few hours but never mind that now but that's a thing

you can do and you could also stay in the same kind of hotel overnight and it'd be super cheap

if you're somebody who doesn't care that much about like when I travel I really want to be able

to work in my hotel room because even if I'm not like right now I don't have a job but I still

have a lot of projects of my own that I want to work on and it's nice to have a desk it's nice

to have a place where I have some privacy and can record one of these and you know it's more expensive

but it's kind of you know I don't want to say that I'm in a position where I can do this because

I really can't afford it but I'm still doing it and I'm inclined to but if you're younger or if you're

more costs sensitive look into the hostels and the hostel just like just like being an exchange

student you meet people you go out to dinner you'll go find activities together

yeah we'll go go to the museum tomorrow we're all going to go to

Fontambu or whatever the fuck and you end up meeting people and connecting to them and maybe

you just have dinner with somebody or maybe you actually end up making friends that way and

when you make friends that way especially like if you're like I'm going to go back to Europe

because that's where I have the most experience with this kind of stuff and it's really easy to travel

around yeah like ridiculously easy so they're you meet people and these are people who are

traveling and they might be backpackers from Australia who are just going around for like six months

or taking a gap year or there might be people who are like you exchange students in different

country and they happen to be in the same country as you and then yeah a week into two go buy

and now you want to go to you you were in Italy and now you're going to go to Spain or whatever

and you can coordinate that and then you start having friends and in that work that you build

people that are kind of wanting to do the same stuff it's kind of it's kind of cool it's kind of

awesome and when you do that of course you're probably not getting the sort of local experience

as much as you would be with the the exchange student thing but you're still getting you know it

taste of the places and you're getting yeah you can sort of sampling platter wherever you're going

I think that's I think that's worth doing I think it's something that I would really encourage

anyone in the position to do to do and actually also I mean not just an exchange student but

like I ever friend who got her PhD in Germany and Munich and actually when I went to Munich

I stayed with her and they're I assume that they're married by now I don't know her partner at the

time I have no idea if they're still together but they they seemed to to be on that direction

on that trajectory either way whatever they're doing now I kind of lost touch with her I should

actually I wonder if I'm still connected to her on Facebook I haven't seen that I'll

career them there keeps fucking things up and I keep I see like the same two or three people

over and over and over again and I never see or hear from any of the other people but I used to

be connected to but anyway however whatever's going on with her now I stayed with her, stayed with

her and they set up stuff like activities to do I got to kind of see what it would be like to

live there I got to see you know like what the stores are like it's it's really good to go

you know just go grocery shopping if you are in a place where you can cook that's kind of nice

you know you can kind of feel what things would be like and even if you're not in a place where

you could cook you could still just pop into the store see what people are buying see what the prices are

for things see what's available and what's not which is equally interesting see how people are

living see you know like our people going to coffee shops are people is that a thing that exists

is that and when they're going to coffee shops are they going to coffee shops like in the morning

or is it something where they have lots of coffee shops but they don't even open until like 10 or 11

that I'm thinking specifically there of at least parts of Seoul I went there and they had so many

coffee shops ridiculous number of coffee shops and I I really struggled to find one that was open

before I think like 10 so it's it's interesting to see like it's not a morning thing it's more like a

dessert thing and yeah you look around and you see oh but they this is how people go to restaurants

this is what you do and just going to a restaurant going to a pub seeing how that's different

in different countries and how they handle all the stuff like getting a seat do you just sit down

do you have to put your do you go to a little kiosk and put your name on a queue or a piece of

paper or do you just go up to a matter day or do you just you know what what do you do how does that

work do you have to make reservations some countries like in the US reservations are completely

archaic like they they do exist but I basically never would have to make a reservation unless I was

going to say cheapo or something in downtown Phoenix and even then you don't have to you could walk in

in Tokyo there are a lot of places where if you don't make a reservation you're not going to go in and

some places are like you have to get a reservation like months and advance and then some places

have a long queue so you go and there's like a little iPad or a piece of paper you put your name down

and there'll be a line of people and you just have to wait in that and then they'll call you

eventually and just seeing how like little stuff like that goes it's interesting it's cool and I think

just as importantly a you start kind of seeing how other people think about things how other people

exist and all this but also and I think this is the thing isn't one of the reasons why I think you

should travel just selfishly look at what people are doing look at how they're getting around

look at how their health care system is look at how their employment is and you might go

well shit the the way that they work there is ridiculous I'm really glad that we don't do it that way

or you might go oh you know if you go to almost any other city in the world other than other than

like New York City and I guess Washington DC has an okay metro system Chicago

San Francisco kind of an ELA surprisingly has an okay one if you're staying in the right places

but most of the US does not have a great health they're a great public transit system and most

cities around the world have some kind of public transit they have like I'm in a hotel

I'm on one set of Tokyo I can get pretty much anywhere in Tokyo with either one train or maybe

with it and a transfer or two and I can also walk like I can walk across the city I have walked

across the city I've I've gone all over and in Phoenix you could walk too I've walked from

from 10 feet downtown Phoenix and and back and and a bite to that as well but it's it's a very different

experience like it's not it's not very safe you feel I don't mean like you're going to be in danger

of somebody robbing you but I mean like just in terms of basic safety like you can get hit by a car

very easily there might not be a sidewalk some places there might be you know like no stoplight

and you just have to dodge traffic and also for some reason there you can feel like almost like

some of the drivers are trying to hit pedestrians like they hate pedestrians they hate bikers

bicycle let's not yeah motorbikes all of that you hate those as well and you know just like

here I can walk and it's glorious it's fucking awesome if I want to go do something I like I don't

know what I'm going to do for dinner tonight and I could I could go to a convenience store and get

something or I could decide to go to a restaurant and that restaurant could be in Genza and if it

was I could walk over there or I could take a train a few stops or I could go you know to

Tokyo station or someplace else in the city Genzuku or whatever and you can go find a restaurant

there and you don't even necessarily have to know where you're going like you might have

place where I look through the city and you go on like this is another thing that is interesting

when you're traveling how do they find places here taboo log is a common thing but you know it's

kind of like yelp but at least used to be a better rating system because I guess people here are

more critical I feel like a lot of Americans and other people have figured it out and then they've

kind of like fucked up the rating system because this trip I've gone to a bunch of places that have

been highly rated now more highly rated than they even used to get to because they used to be like

three four was a really good rating like a three six was like mind blowing and if it was in the

four's it just was unheard of but now I'm seeing a bunch of them that are much higher rated

and I've gone to a couple of them and they're a few kind of shitty kind of shitty so I I feel like

people have figured this one out which is unfortunate it's an interesting thing too though because

if you go places you know you travel a few times you can see how things change over time you can see

what improves and what gets worse and you can you can learn about all these things and

you know like the public transit and walkable stuff and especially accessibility

those kinds of things to the extent that they exist those are things that you should be stealing

those are things that you should go outside of the US and I don't care if you're

and this is this is good to do another thing that you know you could go to Paris

and stay in a resort and basically never talk to anyone French never go to a obligatory

petisserie never walk to streets never go on the metro you could do that but why

what would be the fucking point of that you might as well go to Vegas or some you know like

Epcot Center go there stay you I mean you could still stay on your resort if you have the money

and yeah and I wouldn't stay someplace in a nice area as nice of an area as you can or at least

close to a metro station and you know assuming that you are able to walk walk go around go to the

petisserie and you know find the the one that's the best in the neighborhood do where people are

going see what people are eating that all that kind of stuff to help people go to work and what

time they go to work and how they get there and think about what it would be like to live there

I think that kind of stuff is it's really like I don't want to say interesting because I keep saying it

but it's it's something that you can learn so much from and it's something also where if we had a

country of people who like the whole thing that you're trying to do is make everything better

trying to figure out better ways to do stuff and you go around to different places and you see

this country really has nailed this or like you go to a country where public there are places where

public transit is by token there are places where public transit is like three incomplete systems

and they have different cards for each one and it's kind of a clusterfuck there are places where

there is no public transit or the public transit barely exists and there are places where it's

extremely refined there are places where it's free and you can just hop on and hop off anywhere

and you see that and you kind of look at how that works and figure out like how do they make this

work how does how is that even possible to do and it turns out actually that even in like places

like New York it actually costs money to charge and they have enforcement for the fairs and all

this kind of stuff they make a nominal amount but they spend much more money than it costs and

you could make the New York subway system free if you wanted to and it wouldn't cost that much money

and if you took that money out of the police budget which you absolutely should do then

a you would get better ridership b you'd have more safety and and you absolutely would have

more safety than if you have the cops there who are not actually helping and then see you could

actually just have a public transit system that that works better and you're not doing this

like weird fair thing you can make things because these are these are truck points these are

bottlenecks it's a whole like the layers of systems you have to build in order to collect fairs

are ridiculous and you can see like oh well this city is doing this thing but that turns out

that's really expensive and that's kind of silly it's nice but it's expensive or maybe

like they're doing this and if you cost a little bit of money but it actually pays for itself

massively that that kind of stuff is stuff that you should look into one thing that's cool is like

I like walking around some cities are on a really nice grid Phoenix for all of its faults

has an extremely nice grid and you can be anywhere you can almost always orient yourself on the grid

and if you want to walk around the block it's a thing you can do like you might be lucky

and be someplace where they're like parks and things to walk around or like tempy beach park or whatever

stuff to like downtown you get to walk a little bit and there are restaurants there

that really the density that you get in a nice older city in your upper Asia or wherever but

yeah you can get like a taste of almost what it would be like or maybe the thing that I think of

is like I go to like oh there and I'm like not there yet the light real kind of sucks and it's

this one line and all of this but I can imagine like in 50 years if assuming that it's still

habitable and there's nothing truly kind of close to happens which is maybe unfortunately a bigger

assumption than I would like to make but assuming assuming that I do think Phoenix will have

a pretty decent public transit system and I don't know that it will have the density that

takes to really be walkable but I could see it having you know like a lot of because if you look

around on the freeways there's so much room they could add train lines like all around those and

if you make those automated train lines which again they've been able to do for a very long

time and that again from this episode but I've talked about that before you do that and you can have

a train come every three minutes every two minutes and once you start getting high frequency

trains with a lot of capacity people start using them it starts being like oh I don't even

have to wait I don't have to figure out if I get to the station I'm going to be waiting there for 15

minutes no you can just walk to the station maybe you wait a minute or two hop on the train and then

yeah the light rail is okay but the light rail goes really fucking slow and it drives in traffic

and that today literally today uh i guess it's probably the 14th there because I'm past the

international date line but basically uh there was a tractor trailer the crashed into the light rail

and the big fire and always kind of stuff because it's on the road it's it's it's it's it's not an

tunnel it's not on the fucking elevated platform it's just on the road and that means it goes slow

and that means you know it's it's only a couple of cars so it's not moving that many people and

it's also only like every 15 minutes so it's really not moving that many people and yeah it's it's

it's okay it's okay it's got some stuff to it it's better than nothing and if you're taking

it certain places from certain places to certain places yeah it's it's it's serviceable

but you can imagine what it could be that's all I'm saying and if you go other places you can see

why that's so nice and you know don't go someplace and take it and again I'm saying this

to just I don't want to be ableist and I want to make it very clear if you need to take a taxi

you know like you can't just walk around and take this up way I'm not I'm not speaking to you here

and I'm not trying to be little that obviously I'm trying to be considerate of it but it's

assuming that you're able to walk assuming that you're able or or you're in a city that's

preferably accessible um take the fucking subway take the take the metro walk around if you can

because the the scale that people walk in a lot of these cities it's just it's night and day

versus Phoenix like I when I'm when I'm traveling you know I mean I'm a person that walks a lot

anyway I'm on a sort of slow day I usually I'm walking like 12 13000 steps and then I've

if I'm traveling I will more often than not end up walking you know 15 20 sometimes sometimes 30

and no you just do that kind of stuff and you can go like oh there's a grust front that we're going

to we're gonna meet there and it's it's 15 minutes if you take the train or it's a half hour walk

and sometimes you'll do one one way and then like after dinner you go for a walk and just walk back

or you walk your friend to their place and then you take the train back from there or you know

you it gives you so many options that you don't have um from if you have compared to the

also like I'm not a I'm at a person that really likes drinking but a couple of times when I was in

Paris I went with some friends and either went to Apparo or a bar slash for us front or whatever

and if you do that in the US how are you gonna get home and you drink how are you gonna get home

are you gonna drive yourself probably hope not if fucking hope not I know a lot of people that do

and I understand why they do it I'm not saying that it's okay to do I'm not encouraging anyone

to do it but I do understand why people do it but if you're someplace like Paris it's easier

to take the metro it's easier to walk and it's kind of fun and it kind of you know it's a it's a

nice part of the the whole experience of going someplace you can walk someplace and then you stop by

flower shop or a place and buy a like a bottle bring it to your friends place and you know

do dinner there whatever it's going to be it's it's a very different sort of way of doing things

and existing and you can see that kind of stuff and you can sort of realize or at least the

thing that I would hope that you do and the the sort of selfish reason that I want you to be traveling

is you start seeing like a we're getting fucked by not getting these things b this is what it

could be like see these are a bunch of different things that different people do and this is the best one

this is really just unum or or maybe nobody's doing it the right way but you see oh this all of these

people solved this problem this way and that way and this other way and I think we could actually

solve it this new way and it would even even be better now if that new way happens to be like

Robo taxis I please no no it's a ridiculous idea individual Robo taxis are not a great

they're good for like the last mile stuff if you have a city that has kind of a sparse

public transit network or you know it's yeah and Phoenix I can understand like the last you go to the

the metro station and then you take something five minutes to your home which would have taken you

a half hour to walk or five but don't go from point to point with that it's not it's not a good

system but you know there are lots of things that you could do that could be better and when you

start seeing these things it really sparks your imagination and it also gives you a little bit of fire

that just sort of start going like why don't we have this and it makes it you know like you start

researching that and you look at the history of what happened to the trolley systems that used to

to be in every u.s city and used to be actually pretty decent used to be in fact world class

and now you don't have that and you look at like oh I mean I'm not saying you know it's a

certainly are going to automatically just discover why our cities are not walkable but you might

happen to read the color of law and you start reading that and you start learning about oh they put

a freeway here deliberately to segregate these two neighborhoods or oh they they built this road here

and didn't give it a crosswalk because of this or you know similarly uh car companies

lobbied to to take their roads from pedestrian the roads used to be primarily like four

pedestrians long ago and I mean at a certain point there it was just pedestrians and like carts and

things and then cars started to appear and the cars were like the second class citizens of the road

but the roads were still for people and then you start getting this push for like J walking laws

and you know all kinds of stuff where like people were not able to walk in the streets anymore

and things just started really sucking that in someone way that's one reason why it also goes to

racism a lot of stuff in the U.S

if you ask like why don't you have universal health care

racism it's a big factor can't can't have Black people getting universal health care so we're not

going to have them all why don't you have public pools racism why do you why do you not have

walkable cities racism why do you not have you know in the fact like public transit why don't

you have it and you just keep going down the list um it's it's at the heart of a lot of things

and I don't mean but I I don't want to get into the the heavier stuff there I'm going to make

another one soon on that subject but that's not going to be my primary thing here so I'm

I'm going I'll leave that here but that's it's an interesting thing if you start looking into it

that color of law book it's worth reading or at least you know read a summary of it at the very

least so getting getting back to sort of like the the more general like how you can do it

or how you should do it the first time that I traveled what I did was I basically I had a pretty

decent job in terms of like vacation time so I didn't take it very often but I had about a month

a year I think and so I decided okay I'm going to take a few weeks and go to Europe it was my

first international trip I went solo and this is a question are you going to go solo or

you're going to go with friends or you're going to go with your partner it's it's important to

consider and there there are advantages and disadvantages to all of those and there are things

that you might consider because like if you're a woman traveling solo and certain places might be

more of a pain than you know you're comfortable with although I would say a lot of cities

a lot of places in the world are much safer than the US but still you know it's a thing that

you have to think about if you're traveling with a friend are you going to want to walk the same

places are you going to want to go like do you want to go to the same museums and if you go to a

museum how long are you going to spend looking at each thing how long are you going to want to

are you the kind of person that wants to rush through that museum and just like scan everything

really quickly and maybe check a couple things out or he's a kind of person that stops at everything

and really deeply like soaks it all in are you the kind of person that is going to want

to sort of go to a neighborhood and then spend a lot of time there are you know the kind of person

that wants to just like hit as much as you can and check all the boxes that's going to matter that's

going to make that's very heavily going to influence things and it makes it difficult now because

like even if you get somebody who's very similar to you in a lot of ways that actually have

somebody who is like they want to do exactly the same things for the same amount of time and everything

is perfectly aligned or they're willing to make compromises and you are too um that means you

ever we all have to compromise but there are some things that get really annoying and really tired

like if especially if you're kind of in very different bins and any of those things so yeah

traveling solo actually pretty nice I have mostly traveled solo um I would say

especially if you are single it's a great time to do it it's because you know if you have a dog

it's very hard to travel um you can find somebody to watch your dog but it it sucks right you

know you want to pay for somebody and even if you don't have to pay you want to be away from your

dog for a long time how much time off can you take can you take can you take a month I would

personally say if you're going someplace and it's like a 10 plus hour flight you really ideally would

want to stay at least a week or two that that's the way I see it I know people who don't like

yeah they get very homesick and I think it's natural to get homesick I'm a little weird I feel

I feel out of place in the US so like when I'm traveling I don't feel I don't feel any more

out of sorts here or in in Paris or in Spain or whatever I don't feel that different in

other countries I feel as much of an outsider there as I do here but if you have like a close

friend group is that gonna are you gonna want to travel with your friends there's the thing also

and if you do that are you gonna you know like do you want to go one place or do you want to

coordinate like traveling around and you know that again back to the first time I went I went to

I think I started in London because there was a direct flight from Phoenix to the London by British

and I started there I decided to take the and it actually like it's kind of depressing but the

trains are expensive enough and the flights are cheap enough in Europe that you know you're probably

better off flying most of the time although I would still I like trains and they do the high

speed trains are pretty nice but when you start going long distances it starts end up

earning up being you know making more sense to fly although although the things like Ryan air

they'll end up leaving from Lutin the 10 Lutin I don't know how you say it or Gatwick or something

which is a pain in the ass to get to relative to say Heathrow or yeah as you go further you go like

off the the underground and yeah it makes it take more time and cost more whereas if you take

euro star you can just that it that is like the the channel thing you could just go to

I think it's same pancreas I can't even remember which station does but it basically you just go

in central London there's a terminal there and you get to Paris and it's a gardener and like

central Paris and then there's a metro station right there so it's pretty it's it's not the cheapest

thing you could do but it's pretty nice and I highly encourage it you have to figure out of course

you know like budget and all those kind of stuff and no matter what you do probably can

spend more money than you want I you know just be mentally prepared for that try to try to keep

it within reason but yeah it's it's just a warning like I I'm not a person who really is good at

budgeting just in general but I will say like every time I've traveled I've always always ended up

spending more money than I expected and every part of it is just here I like you want some

flexibility or your someplace and if you don't plan even if meals might be cheaper if you're

local um you need a tourist places you're going to end up being expensive or you end up doing

activities that end up being expensive or you decide you want to go to a show or whatever you're doing

it's very easy to spend a lot of money be be mentally okay with that to some extent like and

I will say this I spent a lot of money on a lot of things in my life and you know like I bought

my ex-wife a Tiffany ring because it was important to her personally I don't you know I'm having

fan of diamonds I think they're a just like SP3 hybridized carbon is not a thing that I'm very impressed

with like it's something you can easily mass produce it's something that yeah and you think about like

where are those coming from and what are the ethics of it and what is it actually worth this is

not an actual rare stone at all like there are planets where it's just raining diamonds and

there are places where you just have like huge ones that are very perfect and there's there's

nothing magical about it it's just a shiny stone that's kind of hard um yeah I don't understand

what but I she it was important to her so we got uh Tiffany ring for her and I did that as a

grad student and it was like I was seven or eight grand and I think we put pretty sure we put

that on a credit card and I'm pretty sure I was still paying that one off after we got the

forest which was I let's just say I regretted that I I didn't feel great about that purchase

if I spent that much money on travel I don't think I'd mind it you know I it would hurt don't

get me wrong it would definitely be like ow like a little bit of gut punch a little bit of like

before dropping out from under you but you feel like it's something where you know you're putting

money into it but at least you're getting something out right you're getting an experience

that you're getting memories out I don't I'm not saying you're not getting anything out of her

but fucking ring but you know a little piece of metal with a little shiny stone on it it's like

what what what what what the fuck is that doing like and and especially what is the difference

practically between that and a much cheaper version the or something else you know I

did just I'm not the bitch about that but there are purchases that I've made like that that I

regret and then there are purchases that I've made like traveling and I can't think of a time

when I've really regretted paying to travel ever I just I can't and I don't I kind of don't think

you will either it's interesting also like if you travel however you travel whether you're going

alone or with people it's very jarring and you'll have you certainly will have some form of culture

shock probably because you know you are used to things being in a certain way and no matter

how flexible you are some things are going to be different and you have to deal with that you have

to deal with not knowing how to do things you have to deal with not being in your element you have to

deal with maybe hopefully you're going someplace like if you're traveling to the UK the language is a

little different but you know basically you could just get by any English right but if you travel the

friends and especially like you try to actually do a little bit of French you learn and I encourage

you if you're going someplace and you're able to learn bonjour learn merci merci beaucoup a

for some pre you know learn learn how to order things I'm trying to learn how to

pardon yeah excuse meません excuse meません learn how to say just like basic stuff and

if you if you really want to be clever learn more than that learn how to do like basic conversation

and start talking to people with that she was got with this uh bonjour from a pelscott

olad joesfissqat anyhow nijia fjema watch us got yeah you learn stuff like that learn how to

have a little conversation and work on it and if the language it has a different character system

maybe even try to learn some of that you know that kind of stuff the thing about it is it's going to be

very hard but it's so rewarding when you start to get it and when you start like unlocking you know

my experience at kind of it is like hard and then things click and then they become easy I am really

convinced that a lot of things in life are either completely impossible or trivial and they can

make the transition from one to the other very smoothly and abruptly and so like you start learning

this kind of stuff and it might be hard at first and especially if you're someplace like you're

in a kind of your your in Japan for a week the first couple of days it gets very uncomfortable and like

as long as I've spent here my Japanese stocks right it is it is kusu it is shitting so

in fact I'm sure that I just mispronounced that but you know if you work on it then one day you'll

go to a coffee shop and you'll realize you just ordered in French and you're going to a patee

and you'll have the whole interaction in French or maybe even you'll be walking down the street

and two French women will come up to you and they're from the south of France and you're in Paris

and they ask you how to get someplace and not only can you answer but you actually know the answer

and you feel cool a shit for it that that actually happened to me but I stole to this day

this is like a decade ago I feel awesome because of it like you know I pay the fact that they just

saw me and decided this is a person that I'm going to ask in French how to get someplace

they just assumed that I might know and then I was able to answer that was fucking awesome that was

fucking awesome I you know anyway I'm just like thinking back to that I have to say like that

kind of stuff like learning your way around learning like you go someplace and you don't know how to

get from A to B and then you figure it out you figure out how to get the metro card

at most places that have a metro they have a squeaky card or they have the oyster card

or navigate or you know whatever figuring out how to get that and you start getting to the

point where you just have that and you can like swipe in and out of the stations or that are

the stations that are just you know like free but very few of those are actually free you start doing

that and you start feeling very cool I used to start feeling and I don't mean that you feel like

oh I'm so cool but I mean it just feels good it's very rewarding and that jump from I can't do this

thing to I totally got this it's I think it's an essential part of I don't want to say growing up

because you could you could be 60 and still do this it's one of these things it's just like

you're expanding your universe you're getting that much more comfortable with things you're getting

better able to deal with the unexpected you're you have kind of learned that you have

sea legs and you know you might not be able to figure it out immediately some things might not work

you might go to the wrong line or go you know down the wrong path or whatever but you'll figure

it out and then you'll go to the right place and by the way now next time that this happens you

can just go to the right place in the first place and you might even have learned how to ask for it

or learn how to figure it out you learned oh this is how I navigate here this is how I get around

and once you start getting that it unlocks so much because you know everything is different everywhere

but things somethings are kind of similar so if you figure out how to navigate Tokyo you can get

around London you can get around Paris you can get around Madrid it's remarkable actually how

much as different as things are things very similar and that feeling and that sort of understanding

that about yourself I think it is it's just amazing it feels great and you know but it's practically

also something that tells you I can put myself into a situation where I might not be comfortable

I might not be able to do it right away and I might look a little bit foolish doing it and it might

be embarrassing even but I will figure it out and I will actually start being able to do it and then

I'll just have it and once you get that a few times it gives you so much more confidence it gives you so much

just more I don't know trust and faith in yourself and your ability to figure shit out

and it which again goes back to one of the reasons why I think traveling solo is kind of nice

and again it's it's nice traveling with a partner but if you're someplace and you know you get lost

and it's like what the fuck where am I I don't know how to get the fuck out of here I don't

know how to get back here and it's really stressful or you get trapped in the first time I went to Paris

got trapped in garden art I for some reason the ticket systems were down and so got the

Charlotte go and there was a woman there who was an American who spoke French and we were getting

on the trains trying to get the tickets for them and she was able to talk to somebody and they said

you know like well the system is down so go to this station and you get off there and you buy a

ticket and then go to a garden art and you'll be fine and she got that I didn't hear that part

which she conveyed to me and a few other Americans so I got on the train and I just wrote all the

way to garden art and when I got there I'm inside of the thing and I'm looking around and now I

can't get the fuck out because you you need the ticket to get out of the area and I couldn't figure

out of I couldn't figure out how to get a ticket out of the area and going through and

figuring that out and then eventually getting out and seeing that oh he's not that big of a deal

it seemed very stressful at the time I have to say but I ended up not being a big deal and now I

could totally do it and now I'm just a pitiful, pitiful, pitiful, pitiful, pitiful, pitiful I can

understand and speak a little bit and I could probably navigate a lot better now

but going from one to the next it's pretty fucking cool it's pretty I know I keep saying cool

but it's just it feels so good it's something I really I want to share with you I want you to share

with other people I want you to try it if you're able to and I understand also it's very expensive

to travel although some things some things are very expensive and they're very time consuming

but they're also kind of worth it and if you can find a way it's kind of worth it and you

can also I don't know that there are things that you can do to make travel a lot cheaper like I

know I used to know somebody I want to say I know somebody but I don't think I've seen her in my

a thousand years another one of these people that I was connected with on Facebook and I haven't seen

forever probably could look her up but anyway she used to just like go look it down because if you

if you follow like cheap airfare things everyone's in a while there will be ridiculously cheap

flight someplace and she would just do that and then she'd be like oh well for like 80 bucks I can

go to Norway or you know like something ridiculous like that and it might be the most comfortable flight

it might be a long thing but she would do that and she traveled all the fucking time and it wasn't

that expensive you know you can trade expense for convenience if you're rich you don't even have

to pack your bags you can just have somebody else do it you can have somebody deliver your bags to you

although I ever discovered this trip that you know I always knew well I didn't always know

at some point long ago my first or second I guess it was my second trip to Japan I saw these

all these boxes and like people with a cat dragging a box and like what the fuck is that

and I didn't know and then a couple of times ago I realized or I looked it up and I found out oh

this is I can't even think of what it's called yeah my note too I think this is not the only one

but this is one of these things and like the last time actually I was here I wanted to I had too

much stuff this is another thing I don't want to get too much into it because it's like

40 an hour 15 minutes or hour 13 minutes but pack light the name of this thing is pack light

the thing that I I'll get back to the packing thing and it's like it's it's much easier on you

if you don't bring that much and you know try and no matter how light you think you packed

you're probably taking more stuff than you need trying to go to places where you'll be able to

to do laundry because then you can take less stuff it's different obviously like if you're going

someplace in the winter or where it's raining probably going to want a few changes of clothes

probably going to want more stuff that's going to be heavier and bulkier but you know you go

someplace in the summer you might you might be able to just take a backpack I have a friend

and she travels and the backpack the cheat takes is like I know people who have a backpack

that they use as a purse and there's is not that much smaller than the backpack that she takes

when she travels anywhere and you know she can just walk anywhere with it and it's so light

I'm I'm nowhere near that I'm a spire to be but I have too much stuff and I do have some

stuff that's like you know because I have some eye stuff so I there's stuff that's attached to that

and then I I still could pack a lot lighter and I'm constantly working on this but you know

the lighter you pack the easier it is to go places and the less bullshit you have to deal with

and it's just it's exponential like every little extra bit of weight you add is exponentially

more misery for you and exponentially more pain in the ass that you have to deal with

Hacklight

maybe don't pack as light as she does although if you can do that if you can get away with it

it's fucking awesome um figure out like what is the stuff that you actually need like do you really

need to bring a toothbrush or you're going to use the toothbrush and the hotel

Personally I

like an electric toothbrush I don't like the mechanical ones and you know so even though most hotels

will have a toothbrush for you I want to bring my but you know and and I if I don't use the kind

of the right kind of shampoo I will get dandruff and so I bring that but you know like if you're

you in body wash or something like that most hotels will have body wash

If you if you have a

laundry in the hotel then especially if you are you know partially luckily and partially clever

about it and you get a room like the one I have that has a laundry machine in the room you can just

wash your clothes and then you don't have to take that many changes of clothes and it makes things

a lot lighter and makes things a lot easier um if you could do that kind of stuff you do you really

need to bring your computer I always bring my computer I'm attached to my computer I could travel

without it I will say I recently switched to a much lighter computer and I'm so glad that I did

and I even am slightly thinking I should have gone like one steps but like because you can get

the equivalent of like a 13 inch I have a 15 inch back book air you can get the equivalent of a 13

inch and today the performance on that thing unless you're doing like a lot of you know heavy

rendering or compiling or anything like that and and a lot of those things you could do remotely if you

wanted to but unless you're doing those things you don't really need like the giant MacBook Pro that's

fully loaded and saving that little bit of weight a kilo or two makes a huge fucking difference

saving the bulk makes a huge buck fucking difference and then you have something you know do you

really need to bring that extra iPad do you really need to bring whatever it is and you know and for

some reason on this trip I thought that I was going to go hiking and so I brought my my chemical

pack pouch and I've got used at once I brought my slippers um I apologize and

incidentally all the time well I bought them in like a year they are one of the best made

shoes that I've ever had and I highly recommend um buying them because I don't I want them to stay

in business because it's one of the few things that you can get that's actually like high quality

and they last and I feel bad that I'm not buying them more often because they last and I don't

want them to the suffer because they're making good stuff and our economic system encourages people

to make a crap that you have to keep rebuying and most stuff is getting crap-ified and yeah anyway

the best that's like you know pack light so coming back to like what you can do with your

your bags and this one saw these young and they would say things and I was in Osaka with my friend

and I kind of mentioned you know they have the service where you can you can send your bags

ahead of you to the next hotel and she started like you know you're as perked up a little bit

and she's like what is that how does that work and I'm like oh it's kind of expensive but you know

it's it sounds actually really convenient and really awesome um and in my defense I looked at

the Yamano tape races and I think it was like 50 bucks or something so a bag which is not you know

it's not expensive expensive but it adds up a few of a few bags and also yeah it's it's

enough where it kind of hurts unless you have a lot of money but we still look then do it I

just sort of decided like that let's think about this maybe even even if it's that expensive

maybe we'll just try it because it sounds awesome and it's a pain in the estage love your

shit and went in and it ended up being like 10 bucks a bag 10 bucks a bag to go from

Kyoto back to Tokyo which is wild wild it would be the next day but you know I mean it's worth it

and so we sent our bags and then we were able to go from Kyoto to Osaka without any bags at all

which made it so much better it's meant like massively massively more comfortable and again if you're

like rich rich you could just have the bags show up someplace or you could have them shipped or whatever

I don't think that's really exactly the right that's not the person I'm talking if you're the

person who can just afford to whatever or especially if you're the person that has a private jet

you can just take all your shit and have people deal with all your bullshit for you that's a very

different kind of thing than what I'm talking about I'm not the target audience although if you are

please you know the comma patron I don't have a Patreon thing but you know like let's

message me and then find a way to have you pay me because something that's going to be a nominal

amount for you would be enough to get me by I'm I'm really at this moment trying to figure out

like how can I how can I exist without having to you know have I mean it's not that I don't

want to have a job it's not that I don't want to work but I really don't want to have that

gun to my head that like you have to do this job that you hate in order to survive in order to

have shelter in order to do the things you want to do especially and I don't know maybe that's a

way to do it maybe that's a thing but other than that I'm not really talking to you so I'm talking

to the person who yeah they not have that much money may not have any money may be just a student

and again like if you're a student going to Germany to to get your undergrad degree or your graduate

degree can be damn near free and you can even work while you're there to pay for other expenses

and then you go and you have no student loan debt which I assure you is a thing that you don't

want to have I have like a house oh I guess houses are a lot more expensive now than they used to be

but I still have like 160 grand or something left over and student loan debt it's even more than

I don't even know it's such a big number I can't I can't even think about it but whatever it is

you don't want that and you can find other ways to get it to get around it and you can also

do that summer abroad or I would say semester abroad or even Europe abroad and also also also

when you do that understand you're going to be very uncomfortable you're going to want to go home

you probably I'm not saying that's a guarantee but there there will probably be times

where you're like fuck this I'm done I just want to go home and if you power through that it will

get better especially you know like maybe you're someplace and you don't have any friends and you're

not you know you don't have people to do stuff with and you're just kind of everything is frustrating

and you really want to to get that burger or whatever your favorite food is and you just are like

kind of stuck um if you power through that you'll find a I mean it is kind of interesting like when

I first when I first started traveling to Europe I wanted it was in I actually when I lived in

Paris which wasn't even that long ago I wanted a bagel it was there for like a few months

and I'm not somebody that has bagels like bad often but every once in a while I like a bagel

and at a certain point as much as I like a quesson and baget I wanted a bagel you know and I made

a trek like halfway across the city through the only place I could find that was anywhere near

that had bagels and I got like the shittiest like endomins kind of bagel from someplace that they

cooked like a panini for for some fucking reason I'm a panini press and I was happy for it I was glad

to get you know you can find stuff that's like an approximation of the thing that you're missing

um they when I was first living there they didn't have to put me and I messed it I actually

researched the people that to put me asking them to do it and they ended up like years later opening

one and I went back later and it was it was not the same but it was something it was not bad

but now actually you can go the last time I went to Paris the bagel shops all over the

fucking place it's kind of it's kind of annoying actually but you can go and get a bagel

it's not a big deal when I lived there getting a mocha was really hard the only place that had

a mocha that I could find was either Starbucks or there was an occasional like coffee shop that was

doing some weird shit and they would have a mocha and if you go there now you're gonna mocha

fucking everywhere like they're all over the place it's kind of it's kind of sad in some sense

that you're not losing that but it is also really nice just that a lot of the things that you

might have missed you're not gonna miss anymore depending on where you go there there are certainly

places where you're gonna go and especially if you have very like American or defined tastes you're

gonna have trouble yeah then it even if you are fairly flexible and you're willing to do

different stuff and work it out you're gonna you're gonna want your thing right you're gonna

whatever your little comfort food is you're gonna want it I mean actually similarly like Mexican food

yeah I I really like the Arizona version sort of Gringo version of sinor in Mexican food

that really seems to only exist in basically that part of the Southwest and I like it a lot

I don't get me wrong I like street tacos I like a lot of other stuff too I like different regions

in Mexico but that's the one that I want yeah it's not that I want all the time but you

I wanted sometimes and when I first lived there it was very rare to find places that did tacos

any kind of tacos and then I found a place that was from actually people from Mexico City

lived and it was not too far from Garden Lord it was expensive but they had street tacos

and they were very authentic and very good other than being expensive and that was nice

that was a nice little and now if you go there they're actually a decent number of Mexican restaurants

it's amazing how quickly that kind of stuff has changed but you can go and find your thing

or you can find an approximation of it or you can just you know suffer without it but it's

frustrating you know you could figure out okay the first time I was there I got desperate enough

that I ended up getting what is that stuff called the the sort of taco hardshell tacos or

or chips or whatever that are from I can't think of the fucking sick the most American

westernized bullshit version of it I got those because I just really wanted it and it's

satisfying you it wasn't perfect it did a good job but anyway anyway I have a lot more stuff I

could probably talk about but I think this is the sort of broad strokes of what I wanted to hit

you know the where to go like you know go wherever you're interested in honestly go almost any

place you know there's something there I personally have discovered about myself that I'm much more

of a fan bum it's not that I like cities necessarily but I like I love public transit I love walking

more than anything actually like the thing that I like about traveling is just being able to walk

places and then when I get there you know like the thing that I normally do and the thing that my

friend and I did this last week was basically and this is like rough approximation you know you can

you could dial it in due different stuff but basically we would kind of say okay we're going to

go to this thing and we want to want to go to this botanical garden so we'll find our way out

there take the metro whatever go to that and then the next thing we're going to do is go

to this imperial palace and the distance between them is very easily walkable so you just walk

between them and that is a afternoon and you do that and then it's like well okay well now we're

done here walk we'll get coffee and we'll walk back to the hotel and in the process of doing that

you're seeing a lot of stuff and you can kind of figure out yeah where you're going where you want to

go and maybe along the way you find a really cool restaurant maybe you're along the way you

find a place you're like oh we're hungry we'll stop in here or maybe you find a temple that you

didn't even realize and you didn't know that you wanted to go to so you go to a big or some kind of

park and you decide you're going to go to some other place and while you're going there you

pass some really cool shit that you didn't know was there you didn't know you should have been interested

in and you go someplace else and you find that kind of stuff it's awesome that's my favorite thing

and yeah I don't give me wrong I love museums I love a lot of the other stuff but that's

that's the one that I think it's made the most it's kind of nice also like figuring out

but again the first time I was traveling I spent two or three days and again two or three days

in London I probably spent like three days in Paris I think I went to niece and where else did I go

oh I took I went to niece I took the tissue bay there and then I went to what Milan

and Pisa Florence I don't remember if that's the right order and then to Rome on the train

and yeah you do that and you kind of make your way I spent a couple days in each hit the

the major bullet points I've sort of landed on and again this is all very personal depends on

where you are in life and what you're doing all I kind of stuff I've sort of landed on you know

like two full days someplace you go to a new city you have the day of travel which is still

be able to do dinner or something when you get there probably if it's not too late and then that

overnight and then you got one full day another overnight you got another full day and you'll leave

the next day and that seems to if you can manage it be a really good amount of time like longer

than that I'm not saying you're going to get bored with places but yeah it's it's easy to especially

if it's a city where there's not that much stuff there are certainly cities but I guess any city

you could spend and you could just live in people live in them but there are places like Pisa

I really did not need a full day there I could I could get there you look around hit a couple

things and then you're like okay I don't even need to stay overnight here or if you do stay

overnight you know just leave the next day and you're fine and I'm not necessarily saying

that for you Pisa will be that but I'm just for me that was an example and then there are places

where you're like I could stay here indefinitely I could stay in Tokyo indefinitely I could stay

I could probably stay actually in Kyoto indefinitely Osaka I mean I could stay anywhere but

there are places that I'd rather be and Tokyo and Kyoto are probably higher on there

I went to Nagano it was nice but I really probably if I stayed a week there would just be like

losing my mind I wouldn't want to stay there for that long especially you know like there

there is a train but it's like a super slow train and it doesn't really do that much for you

unless you're getting in and out and it was like taking the Shinkansen up to basically where I was

going and then getting to the monkey park I think the from the Shinkansen station there

there are two that from Tokyo took about the same amount of time despite being much much longer

than it took to get from that Shinkansen station to the right can that I was staying at

near the monkey park or whatever it's called it the stone monkey park it was it was

interesting actually just how different that was like figuring out the amount of time if you have

the time to do it it's nice to stay places longer and again if you're in a place where you can do

the semester abroad then you got a semester or two semester is someplace if you want to do

your undergrad in Germany I keep going back to Germany because it's one of the like there are places

where it's free basically free like Germany or way a lot of places in Europe are examples of this

then there are places where it's much cheaper but not free and then there are places where it's

and not necessarily US price but very expensive if you look at those places that are not too expensive

and you stay there for a while and especially if it's someplace like Germany you can travel a lot

and you can sit there and you really get the feel what it would be like to live there

and even if you're only staying like again if you're staying two full days like I'm talking

about in which for most cities I think is you're not you definitely have to understand you're

not going to do everything in two full days like especially if it's a city where there's a

shitload of stuff you'll get like a sampler palletter you're getting like the flight

of activities to do there and the nice thing is then you have a reason to come back

I on my first trip and it wasn't exactly intentional but it was kind of my thought process

go to a bunch of places see what it's like in Athens for a couple days see what it's like

in Munich for a couple days see what it's like in Rome for a couple days and then later on you can go

well I'm not really that interested in going back there or maybe I want to go back for a long time

and like there are some places like London I could just keep going back to or I could live there

very easily money permitting and all that Paris similarly unique like I would go back to Munich

and spend some time there I wouldn't want to live there I don't think it's just it's not my

is that it's not a nice place it wouldn't be my first first Athens nice to visit probably

wouldn't want to live there Rome they don't probably I don't know I'm not and I'm not saying that these

are for you but you know just just kind of my experience and you know figuring that kind of stuff out

is very cool so I feel like I'm rambling a little bit at this point which I do tend to do

but I I really hope that you will think about this if you don't have that the first step

first step that you can take if you don't have a passport already is to get a passport it's not very

expensive it's not that difficult to do literally just have to get your picture taken you get two

passport photos fill out a form send it in and you know I I don't even know what the fee is but order

of a hundred bucks it's it's it's a decent amount of money like it's an annoying amount of money

but it's not like it's so much money that you can't do it hopefully and you do that and now you

get a passport and now that you have a passport say you don't have very much money there are places

you can look where you can find ridiculously cheap flights I'm not going to give you directions on

that because I I'm not a person that wants to take all of those because A like I hate layovers

but I like I like traveling but I don't like the active traveling so much especially like long flights

and especially some of those ridiculously long flights are just less comfortable you're trading

comfort for price some of them are not bad though there are some where it's just like a direct flight

and it's just like a no frills airline and you know you're going to be on that plane for a little while

but it's going to be so cheap and then you just have to figure out the the board like where you're

staying and how you're eating and all that kind of stuff and so you can get someplace pretty cheaply

and you can day there if you don't mind the hostel or the capsule hotel or something like that

you can stay pretty cheaply if you have more money take a nicer flight if you have a lot of money

take one of those flights with the lay flights I I aspire to that it seems like such a ridiculous

waste of money but also like if I was going from LA to Sydney which is a flight that I've never

done and it scares the shit out of me because it's so long because you know you take the flight

that's like Phoenix to the London I think it's like 10 and a half hours I don't remember exactly

how long it is but it's it's similar we LA to Tokyo is about 10 and a half hours and

you're on there and you bring your entertainment or you watch movies or whatever and let

movies are a nice example because you can you know how long a movie is yeah hour and a half

two and a half hours right and so you get on there is that you're reading a book and you know

like how long is it going to be or doing other stuff different but there's a movie is an example

you get on there and you get kind of situated you have your meal and you watch a movie

and you watch a movie and then you watch a movie and you still have four hours to go and it's like

holy shit how the fuck is this taking so they could just feel like it's going to take forever

it feels interminable and it feels much more so like when you first do it and then after a while

you kind of know the deal and you kind of you understand this is going to suck but it will be over

I don't have the it's not like I'm stuck here in prison forever I will say

as I've gotten older when I was younger I could sit much longer and now I have a walking disorder

like I have to walk it's almost a compulsion and be you know I just like it hurts to sit on my

ass for that one and it's physically painful I think you're probably doing some damage and then I know

like my mom um she's a lot older still and it's really hard for her to travel anymore now because

you know just sitting that long and it's in fact it's dangerous too because you can get

get an embalism or something you can get you can do some best and that's not an embalism

from Vosis what am I saying but you can do some bad stuff and you don't want you don't want that so

figure that out understand how to deal with it but even if it's just discomfort figure out ways to

be more comfortable and get it over with and hopefully stay longer because then you can but you

know again you could be like my friend who would like she would fly out and then just do like a long

weekend and spend a couple days in some other country you can find these super cheap flights you can do

the summer abroad you can do a week away you can do month away all of those things they're they're

very cool you can get it like it takes more time and coordination but you could teach English

someplace I understand that China is particularly interested in that it's much easier I know a lot of

people like to do it and say Japan I know people who do it and let's see I know people in a bunch of

different countries but like Taiwan or other places teaching English not like getting paid like

massive amounts of money but it's enough you can get by Japan is very in demand and if you come

here I think people end up usually in some tiny tiny little village someplace which is probably not

you know become to Japan at the very least you're in on one of visit Tokyo probably and if you're

me you want to stay here so you're if you're teaching in some rural place not be the most exciting

thing and the teaching is a lot but you can still do it you can get the experience of living

someplace and if you really wanted to be here that's maybe a path I don't know I know it's very

difficult to to go from that to actually like living living here you know it's kind of like

I mean I'm saying it's like a dead end job but there are certain things where it's easier to transition

and that's a very difficult one to transition from that to just something but it's some if you want

to spend some time someplace else it's a way to do it you can be if you're younger there are

a bunch of things where you can like be in a pair for a while and like take care of somebody's kids

and I've known people who've done that and I've heard like two distinct kinds of not I don't know

that many people live have done it but the the experiences why I guess there are three like there

it's it's fine it's not a great thing but it's not terrible level of love but the ones that I

really remember are one was amazing like it was very little effort and she was with a really

wealthy family and the kids were well behaved wasn't a lot of work they gave her lots of time off

and it was just and and also like you know she's staying in their house in a room and situation

that was just fucking awesome like a luxury hotel level of awesome and they're traveling also

and she gets to travel with them so it's the care of the kids and they're paying for her

that's that's like don't count on that being the case and then I I know somebody else who got

in one which was just a nightmare and you know horrible kid and really trapped and not able to do

anything and you know like really just assholes doing the thing and then I know people in between

so there's a range you could do you could try finding a job that works some place also

you could find a job I do think like anything that you do for work ends up being work at the end of

the day so as much as I like travel if I had to travel for work I know I would fucking hate it

and also the people that travel for work they're not like chilling places it's just

visiting and learning what it's like there they're kind of like constantly traveling and getting

the worst part of travel over and over again I friend with a tiny single bag she was just like a

couple weeks after I was in Shenzhen she was there I think she was there last week and she sent me

a message and it's like hey are you and are you still there you're coming soon because I'm here

for a couple days and she flew from San Francisco over there and spent which is a long fucking

flight and spent like two days doing some stuff and then work obviously and then flew back and

yeah that to me it's like the worst part of the travel and then also when she's working there she's

working the whole time and doesn't have much time to really spend and you just just like the hotel

or the factory and then you're gone and that's that's not the ideal that's not hopefully although

it's still nice it's still an experience you could still maybe get little tastes of stuff but if you

can take it as a vacation if you can wander around you know have a lot of maybe have your things

that you want to do but make a small number of them don't try to overdo it give yourself some unstructured

time and again if you are physically able then especially your places where you can do it walk

walking is awesome walking around places is awesome take the metro also awesome so anyway

I think trying to see if I'm missing something and and look into that baggage thing that I mentioned

you know again track pack light but even when you're packing lightly if you can have your bags

delivered to the next hotel and it doesn't cost that much money you can spend a lot of money on

that too by the way so I'm not saying you know just do it and expect that the work well or to be cheap

but if you can find a situation like the one that I did where it was literally like 10 bucks to send

your bags the distance from Phoenix to LA and they get to the next day and the morning do that it's

so much better it's it's ridiculously better and you know it gives you a lot of freedom not having to

carry your bag like as nice as the train the high speed trains are not having to carry your bag on them

is like a massively better and then when you carry your bags whether you're on the train or the

plane you're going to have the distance from the airport to the hotel which I would also encourage you

you know you could imagine you have money and it's not a big deal you could take a shuttle you could take a

a van or a cab or whatever take the public transit route if they have it which again you know

maybe get your bags delivered because a lot of these delivery services if you have the money to do it

we'll do it from the airport to the hotel the same day but if you can't do that you're still

stopping your bags but everybody on the train from the airport is going to be doing the same thing

it sucks you get to the hotel you drop them off maybe you take a shower and now you're there

and then it's yeah it's a very big relief it's kind of part of the initiation into wherever you're

going and now you can just do your stuff and I hope you do that and I hope don't just go some place

and like live basically as you would kind of try to experience it a bit and see what you can steal

and I don't mean like physically steal but like see what ideas people have see how people are doing

stuff see the way things work and you know improve things take that take those ideas back with you

take you know or look at how people are doing stuff and sometimes some ways you'll be like

that's really terrible we don't want to do that it's good that we don't do that

yeah you can learn hopefully also like I know a lot of people this will be the last thing that I

say that I know a lot of people who the classic one is they think they're going to go to Paris

and they have some weird romantic notion of it and then they end up hating it and I never had that

but I also had zero expectations and I definitely never had a romanticized vision of what Paris was

and it ended up being one of my favorite cities I actually love the city but I never had like oh it's

the view I don't even know what they call it the view demore or whatever you know

view demore I don't know what you actually call it but whatever people call Paris they have

an idea of it and you go there and it's it's just a city there's a place and then they're like

ah this sucks if you have no expectations it's actually really lovely you know and if you have

just sort of the um I don't know that I'm just thinking right now about how nice it is

to be there and walk around and it turns out of course if you look at the history of

horsemen and how it got to be such a nice place to walk around there's some

great shit there but nonetheless um if you're there you can wander around the city and I've

walked around that entire city too and you do it and it's fucking beautiful there are some like

a weird areas but with very few exceptions if you're in the anywhere in any of the major on

these moments you're walking from one to the next it's lovely like it's it's beautiful like

even the shitty year places it's kind of nice looking and you take the metro and it's it's really

like the metro's you know kind of smells like this not the greatest thing is that very clean

and blah blah blah I still like it I still like you know every time I ride the metro my friend while

we were riding the train was just like you kind of smiling when you're on the train to do like

it's fucking awesome this is so fucking nice and also like just the feeling of wherever you are

you can be walking around and in a city that has a good metro system wherever you walk to

if you get tired you're like five minutes from a train station and if you're going someplace

and you have some time you can walk to the next train station and the next one's still

and usually they're a few minutes apart so you know they're like just close enough that it's

not like they're right on top of each other but it's fast for if you take the train but you can

still walk it pretty quickly and comfortably and if you do that and walk another one or you're like

okay this is bullshit it's hot it's raining and I'm tired and I just want to get on the train

and sit and maybe you can sit to be camp but hopefully you can anyway with all of that go get your

passport and try if you can if you're in a position too I know you know again this is a lot but

think about it think about how you might be able to do it and understand that it will

I'm not guaranteeing that you're going to love it or that you'll consider it to be worth it

but in my opinion it's worth it and I think it's something that everyone should do at least a little bit

and especially if you do it and you do it in a way that's not

I don't know how to say it but you know it's not like overly sheltered and isolated

and you're actually kind of exposed and going through not necessarily getting the experience of what

it would be like to live someplace but at least getting the experience of some of the parts of that

yeah it's kind of nice it's kind of worthwhile anyway with that the next one of these will be

more serious but I think I enjoyed this and I hope you did too take care and see you again

再见

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smenor/tangents

By Scott Menor, PhD

September 16, 2025

Pack Lightly

Listen Later

1 hour 49 minutes

Episode Transcript

Hey there I'm Scott and this is Tangents

Well, I recorded one of these yesterday the

14th of September and today is the 15th of September

I'm not sure I'm going to do

this every day for the remainder of my time here in Tokyo but I have a bunch of stuff

I want to talk about and not a lot of time and I have this opportunity where I'm

just kind of sitting here with the hotel room to myself

I don't know give

him a current situation when I'm going to have like my own space again for a while

So I'm

going to take advantage of the opportunity and also you know like the last week I didn't

record any and also also between the last one that I did and a few things that I was

talking with a bunch of people about I have a lot of stuff that I want to add or

embellish or you know just elaborate on and I also have some things that are completely unrelated

that I want to talk about and I think what I'm going to do this is not going to be hard and fast

it's not going to be you know always consistent but many kind of alternate between

more serious stuff like the last one and some kind of popcorn stuff like this one and in particular

what I'm going to talk about today is is that be just not entirely popcorn it actually has I

think some value and I'm saying things that I think are worth listening to and considering

and hopefully things that maybe you'll learn from and expand upon but I want to talk about

travel and in particular how to travel where you should go why you should do it and especially like

the house and the practical stuff and kind of you know obviously like I'm not an expert I'm not

there are people who do this professionally there are people who have done it for much longer

and more extensively than I have but I have traveled a bit and I have some thoughts and maybe

be in a year or five or ten my thoughts will change but I'm giving you the current snapshot of

my understanding now as as I as I see it I would also say and I think this is an important

note to consider that all of these answers all of the things that I just mentioned they're very

personal and they're highly dependent on a lot of factors particularly things like where you are in

life you know are you with somebody you have a partner are you solo are you what is your job

situation do you have a job that doesn't afford you much vacation yeah if you live in the U.S

travel is an extreme luxury because in the U.S people get ridiculously little vacation time

compared to you know just the basic bare minimum in say Europe people in the U.S get like

sometimes a week a year sometimes two weeks it's very rare to have four or five weeks a year and

there are people in lots of parts of the world and you should be pissed off about this if you're in the

U.S there are people where like the baseline is five weeks a year and they're also like it's

understood that you're going to take those time and then maybe that the whole five weeks directly

at or eight weeks whatever you happen to have not necessarily going to take that as one big chunk

but you're allowed to and you might take you know take it in two or three fairly decent sized chunks

whereas a lot of people I know in the U.S they might have a week or two off but they're not allowed

to take it consecutively and they have restrictions on like when they can take it around holidays

and what they can do with it and a bunch of other like horrible stuff that the U.S is a very

dystopian hell-skate place and when you live there especially if you haven't gone outside

or talked to people outside it's easy not to understand that and I think I think this is

this is actually getting to the wise um this is this is a number one why you should leave

and I'm not saying you should leave and never return although personally

personally if I had the resources and I could get my mom and sister to either leave or visit

me outside I don't know that I would go back I'm not a huge fan there it's not to say that I

hated there um I like a lot of the people I like you know the there are things that are nice about

it but there aren't just so many things outside of it that are so much better ridiculously

better and I think these are things that you know you you don't necessarily

see until you see them and then once you see them it's hard not to out on air it's hard to

unsee them as basically what I'm trying to say so one of the things like this this actually

goes into a bunch of categories so some of it is stuff that is going to be very hard to actually

feel if you're traveling uh casually so by casually I mean like you're on vacation essentially

you're going places and you're not really deeply embedded uh in the place that you're going you're

not you're certainly not living there you're not necessarily spending a lot of time with locals

talking to people uh things like healthcare like you're probably not going to encounter the healthcare

system in a lot of countries although you may and it's interesting because I've heard so many

stories of people from the U.S

going someplace else and something happens and they have to go

see a doctor in my case I didn't have to go see a doctor but my dog had to go see a doctor

of that she did a couple times actually and she needed emergency on the weekend surgery in

in France and that surgery uh was significantly more expensive than if it wasn't uh emergency

but it was 300 maybe 350 euros which is damn near 350 bucks and this was not in the like the

1970s but way before the euro existed this was you know maybe a decade ago um and at the time

when she also had emergency surgery and the U.S

and that was thousands and thousands of dollars

for actually you know like not that significantly different uh of an operation so

it's one of these things like that you might not actually see it but you might happen into it you don't

plan on breaking a bone or any of this kind of stuff but it might happen and I know a lot of people

who have gone places and something happened and like they're they're freaked out because it's like

oh shit somebody's called the ambulance because in the U.S

being a health scape that dystopian

health scape uh calling an ambulance is one of these things where it's like dude it's a massive

luxury like it's gonna it easily will cost you thousands of dollars staying at a hospital

easily can cost tens of thousands of dollars like it's it's completely just ridiculous and

as an act of health care in the U.S

sucks in so many different ways and in so many

different layers and it's it's one of these things actually like uh this is not a health care episode

but I'm gonna put a button on this pretty soon and then get to the next thing but this is one of

these things that like like education and like uh pretty much any industry right now whether it's

food service or you know manufactured goods or whatever what has happened is that we've got a

bunch of finance pros so people who really don't have any skills or education beyond just moving things

around in a spreadsheet and they have sort of taken these positions of leadership

they're the administrative class essentially the CEOs the VPs all of all the people if you're in

Arizona State the University that I went to and worked at these are the people in the foundation building

these are like Dr

Crow president Crow these are people like kind of think of some of the other

names I'm not gonna name names but they're like all of the people who are not professors they're not

actually you know teaching they're not doing research and they are getting paid

hundreds of thousands of dollars a year at the very least for things that really are adding

between zero and negative value to the University and they're a growing class like more and more

people are up there at the same time people who want to teach and want to do research are finding

it harder and harder to do that and there are fewer and fewer jobs like that so things are getting

very top heavy and beyond that the people who are running everything are not really interested in

education or healthcare or anything like this they're just interested in making money and part of

the interest of making money is like at each layer you find out how can I maximize my revenue

and minimize my costs and that means you're adding up a perfection it means you're doing things like

cutting out things that are essential or that you really should be taking care of it means that you're

charging more and more and of course everything is not just like one layer we don't have

direct what whether it's healthcare or you buy a widget a pen it's not like you're just buying

that thing and one person one step has gone from raw materials to the finished product

you buy that pen you have the layers of drilling for the the oil and gas that went into

baking the plastic and then refining it and then making the plastic and then injection molding the

plastic pellets and somebody's designed it somebody has made the if it's a ballpoint pen they've

made the machined balls for it they've done all this kind of stuff and you know there's assembly

and there's packaging and distribution and all of those layers have these finance bros getting

involved and adding not just like a reasonable amount of profit but massive ridiculous amounts

and it drives up the cost of everything by a massive ridiculous amount and it also decreases the

quality because any place they can cut corners they absolutely do and they think that's a good thing

they see you know in healthcare there's will be the last thing to talk about healthcare for a little

while but they see in healthcare that you know like excess capacity like having empty beds

that's just a cost why are you why are you gonna pay for empty beds that you're not using why are

you gonna pay to have doctors and nurses on staff that you're not actively using right now and the

answer of course is what if shit happens what if there's a catastrophe what if there's a pandemic

you know something bad happens having that excess capacity there gives you resilience there's

really good reason to have excess capacity there's really good reason you know if you're at a

restaurant like taking everything up a notch you get like oh you buy the best ingredients and

sure it costs an extra couple of cents or maybe even an extra couple of bucks but it's massively

better and you do that at every level and you actually take pride in it and you care about the

person that you're delivering the thing to and all this stuff and everything is just better and

you can tell helpably that everything at every layer is just a fucking scam and people are making

it shitty or inshitter and that you get food that's basically filled of sawdust and it's

ridiculously expensive too and that they simple example of this I used to love going to Chipotle

and the reason I did it wasn't that Chipotle was good but it's kind of like Starbucks and the sense

that it might not have been great but you could go to a Chipotle almost anywhere and they

granted the Chipotle and Paris the veggies would be overcooked it wasn't exactly the same thing

but it would be similar but anywhere in the US go to a Chipotle and the veggies were actually

pretty decent you get a lot of them if you ask for them and it was it was pretty consistent and pretty

well controlled then the former VP I think it was a VP of Taco Bell took over I can't

see you and he didn't immediately fuck things up but over time you know the price kept going up for

everything and then he started cutting costs and the first one that I noticed and this one I feel

simultaneously I feel a little bit of a little bit proud that I walked this because at the time I

didn't realize what happened I just go into Chipotle and I get it and I have the tomatoes and the

tomatoes had a very distinctive shitty taste a really not even a shitty shitty taste would be

something this is that Taco Bell tomato there's nothing to it like there's not really any flavor

there it looks like a tomato and it has kind of like the vague hint of tomatoness to it but it's

eerily not there all that there's no substance to it it doesn't taste good and they were the same

tomatoes and I've never had that kind of tomato outside of Taco Bell which incidentally and then

this side from the the food I'll get into the food actually next but aside from um yeah not being a

huge fan of Taco Bell

Taco Bell is nice because if you are going around the US and you want

something that's kind of vegetarian or even vegan you can very easily just order whatever

helps that you black beans for beef and presto vegetarian and you can also like not have the sour

cream and cheese and I got vegan it's not that hard it's a pretty it's not great but it's pretty decent

for what it is Chipotle was like a tear above that and I get those tomatoes and like what the

fuck is going on here then I searched and shockingly the guy who was I discovered you know like a

year or two prior the guy who was the VP or senior VP of Taco Bell became the CEO and it's it's

telling and this is what these guys do to by the way they fuck stuff up one place and then they go

off to the next thing and they get you know essentially fall upwards that hospitals this will be the

health care thing and then I'll get to the food but at hospitals you'll have a CEO come in

and he raises the price of aspirin by a couple bucks and finds new ways to fuck over the patients

and to not help people as much as they could and to cut staff and to do x-fly and z that all

make things worse and then gets a big bonus and gets hired someplace else getting paid even more

the fuck things up there even more and somebody else comes in and fuck things up on top of the the

fuckery the previous guy did and there's not really any pressure and a lot of these things to improve

things so it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and more expensive and you can again you

can just tell it's palpable in the US everything is very expensive and everything like kind of tastes

like shit this is another reason why I think you should travel because one of the like don't

he was not a cheap city by any means but one of the things that you do notice here is you can eat

really cheaply like for I'm terrible at the conversion but there are ramen shops that will be like

350 yeah which I I should know that conversion but it's it's not a lot of money it's actually

two two bucks and 30 cents that today is current conversion great so two and a half bucks

you get a big bowl of ramen that actually tastes better than most of the ramen that you probably

had in the US for a lot more money for like almost ten times as much money and of course there's

no tax on top of that which is really nice the taxes in most countries are there you know there's

sales taxes a thing that exists in a lot of places but they're baked into the prices so whatever

the price that you see is the price that you pay and of course like here and it's a lovely thing

people actually get paid decently so tipping and there there is no tipping culture really

but tipping is not a thing that you have to do so whatever you go to the menu you see the price

that is the amount that you're going to pay and it is lovely it's fucking awesome

experiencing the food though and this is a thing again I'm not trying to make this whole thing

about ways to see how shitty the US is but definitely in my experience a lot of this stuff

shines a light on how shitty the US is the food and this is kind of weird I noticed this

when I first started traveling and this was probably like a decade and a half maybe even two

decades ago got time flies but I go and just go to like a corner stop that corner shop not a great

place not like you just just like the equivalent of a of a seven eleven type shop and you get an

orange I don't remember why I just am walking someplace get an orange now orange doesn't necessarily

look as beautiful as the orange that you're going to get at safeway or Albert Sins or wherever you're

going not Ralph sir whatever but crack into it and first off it was cheaper than the oranges that

you're probably getting and in second it's delicious it's amazing it has it's fragrant like it has

as flavor to it and in a way that like even if you go to like organic shop pay a lot of money

and you get like heirloom oranges it's not the same it's not as good I'm not saying like every time

uniformly they're always better like I had the shittiest espresso that I've ever had I had in the

the airport in the wrong terrible espresso but generally speaking go anywhere in Europe and you can

miss espresso and it's pretty good especially in Italy and you know like as a general rule most other

countries that I've been to the produce is just better and not a little bit better but massively better

and it's cheaper at the same time and of course you do have to consider like what is how much

people making versus like how you know like what percentage of their income does that orange

account for it might not be as good of a deal when you factor that in but still they're not that expensive

relatively speaking and they will be better and I guess that I think I'm not sure but I think

the difference there is basically in the US these things are all you know they're certainly going to

be full of pesticides and herbicides and all that kind of stuff but really more than anything it's just

optimized to kind of look good so selected for looking good and you know things are done to make

it look good and get to the store looking as good as possible and you know you and the US you will find

like perfectly spherical oranges and they look amazing they really they definitely do but they

taste like shit or they have very little taste it's I did not realize what an orange could taste like

really until I went to Spain for the first time and I got fresh squeezed orange juice

stayed with my friend Alberto and his wife and they had an orange juice squeezer they made

us breakfast or they made me breakfast I guess I was alone and it was like the best orange juice I

had ever tasted in my life and just from like random Valencia oranges that they had and it just like

you can't it's hard to understand it's hard to express it sounds like a ridiculous thing that I'm

saying but I really think a lot of this is like the difference between optimizing for maximizing

profit versus at each level you have somebody who actually cares about growing good produce

and giving you like buying produce the taste good and selling produce to people that taste good

at each level if you do that and you have people that care and they're trying obviously still

everybody's making money at each level I'm not a huge fan of that picture you know that's it's

under that sort of system so it it makes sense they're making a little bit but they're not making

all the money you know they're not and they're not destroying the cost and making it as cheaply as

possible to get something that superficially looks as much like the product you're trying to buy

as possible but it's shitty or I mean they're not so like to be fair they're not like trying to make

it shitty but it's just when you don't have selective pressure in a certain direction it's there's

nothing that keeps it getting shitty and it's just going to drift into shittyness it's like if you are

a moral that is to say you have no morals and you're an ethical which is to say you have no ethics

then inevitably you are going to do things that are immoral because again you have nothing

pressing you to be moral you have no moral framework at all and it's going to press you

well again it's not that you're driven to be unethical it's just you're going to drift there

because you have nothing keeping you from it and often those things are easier or they're more

expedition they're expedient or they're you know there there are things that will drive you

in those directions not always but even if there's no pressure at all just I chance you'll drift in

those directions but if you have moral and ethical standards then that kind of keeps you out of it

if you have the idea that you know you want to give people good produce you want to you're

you're a farmer and you want to grow oranges that taste fucking amazing and you're putting all

your work into making oranges they're just you know mind blowing and you're selecting for oranges

the taste better maybe they'll you know you probably select for like look decent too and all

this other stuff but that's what you're working on and you know then you're the person who is like

the supplier and you're gonna know like you want to to sell the best oranges you find the

farmers that are making the best oranges and you you know are the distributor and you go through

the whole list from this and if everybody is kind of driving towards something that's better

everything gets better if everybody at every level of healthcare is driven not that I want to keep

getting back to that but if everybody was trying to actually make people healthier and do the best

they could there you're gonna find that healthcare is better you end up having better outcomes you end

up having increasing longevity you end up having better standard of living and better quality of life

and you also don't end up with people going bankrupt and being financially destroyed by medical

that because you know it's just a way to make money for people and so they've raised the prices

to the point where you know kid gets leukemia and it's like millions of dollars to treat it's

treatable but or probably but millions of dollars to save a life or whatever the thing is that's

what you end up with so I think tasting the food going places seeing what it's like and especially

you know when you're someplace getting that experience and and also like you know seeing how people

actually eat another country is an interesting thing seeing the relationship people have with food

and with you know like are they eating just as sort of like a perfumptory mandatory thing that you

have to do just to survive and then that's like yeah or are they going to do a nice casual leisurely

lunch having a good time enjoying themselves eating slowly trying to eat at least decent food

and all of this kind of stuff it's interesting now of course it just gets to sort of the how

you're traveling and what you're doing if you are like the sort of gold standard for this would be

your an exchange student living with a host family and then you really get to see how people live

and you really get to experience that that is like I didn't start traveling until after

I had already graduated undergrad and grad school and so I missed out on being an exchange student

and it's it's not exactly like a regret but it is one thing where I kind of if I had a kid or

if I knew somebody who is young enough to do it and every time I talk to people that are of the

right age for this I tell them can indulge them in the direction try being an exchange student

something it doesn't really matter where go to another country for a semester or two live some

place else see what that's like and it will never be the same kind of experience because once you get

out of school you're not going to be with people who are in that same position in life you're

not going to be meeting people as easily you're not going to be with a bunch of people who are

ready and willing to travel every weekend you're going to have higher standards for your travel

probably I mean that necessarily you could be my age or older and still be okay with staying at a

hostel but if you're if you're younger going to a hostel not a bad thing like and this is one of

the things in the how if you go someplace and like the first time I traveled I was trying to be

fairly cautious with money I didn't have very much I still don't have very much but you know I've

gotten to the point where I'm just not comfortable staying in a hostel and some of the

hostels actually have age limits and most of those I'm probably over but you can find ones that go

like I've been to hostels where you see guys that are like much much older than me and so

it does it does exist you can do that but the thing is like a hostel is sort of like a hotel

but you'll have bumps instead of a room and instead of like a desk or anything like this you have

some shared spaces the nice thing about it is it's very cheap often it'll be located in some place

really close to public transit really close to activities and things like that probably really close to

to bars and things as well the sort of if you're into that kind of stuff which I never have been

but you know if you are it's a good thing to do you go in you stay there are a bunch of other people

were probably at a similar stage of life as you staying there and they're probably similar socioeconomic

status similar ideas about things and you talk to them and then you end up going on adventures

with them just like when you're in school on that exchange program you'll end up finding other

students and then you decide oh we're gonna go to Germany this weekend we're gonna go well

I'm gonna Munich and if you're in Europe going from London to Munich is not a big deal like

it's an easy cheap thing to do for a weekend especially if you stay at a hostel or or similarly

like if you're here yeah I mean Tokyo you could take Shinkansen and go to Kyoto go to Osaka

go to some other city Nagano or whatever and it's a little more expensive but you could also stay

in a capsule hotel which is sort of like a hostel but instead of well I guess it's it's a version

of a hostel in some sense but basically and I stayed I've known about these for a long time

the first time I've ever stayed at one was about a week and a half ago and it was just I got in

I was in Bangkok and I flew I did a overnight flight for two reasons one because I was gonna

save a night of hotel and two because for some reason all the flights from Bangkok to Tokyo were

red eye flights and so I flew on that and it was a six hours as a long flight but it was a six-hour flight

and I came in and I got here I think like four or five hours before my friend was coming in

and so I I didn't want to leave or go to the hotel or something like that and also I was so

fucking tired I'm not somebody who sleeps on flights so I get there and I'm thinking about it my

original plan was just to sort of hang out at a coffee shop and do some work or something like that

you know brought my computer I always bring my computer and I got stuff to do and I thought that

was what I was gonna do ended up I was so fucking tired that like I was just struggling to keep my eyes

open and I'm in terminal one and I'm searching and I looked around and I saw there's this

I can't remember what it's called like nine hours I think capsule hotel in terminal two slash three

and I thought about it I looked at the price and it was like 25 bucks or something I don't remember

exactly what but it was it was pretty cheap and you could go in there and you could stay

not just overnight but you could rent it for a few hours and so I had like again five hours or so

took some time to get there and took some time to get back but in the end I ended up staying there for like

three hours and I was able to sleep for like three hours I also have hours and other things

you can do you could even just go in and use the shower and pay for that but it's actually a really

nice kind of cheap way to do stuff and it turns out like for that I mean it would be weird to rent

the whole hotel room for a few hours I'm sure there are places that like you do that but this was just

to yeah this was not for like having sex or something it was just for me to sleep so yeah and also

I would feel weird renting a hotel room for a few hours but never mind that now but that's a thing

you can do and you could also stay in the same kind of hotel overnight and it'd be super cheap

if you're somebody who doesn't care that much about like when I travel I really want to be able

to work in my hotel room because even if I'm not like right now I don't have a job but I still

have a lot of projects of my own that I want to work on and it's nice to have a desk it's nice

to have a place where I have some privacy and can record one of these and you know it's more expensive

but it's kind of you know I don't want to say that I'm in a position where I can do this because

I really can't afford it but I'm still doing it and I'm inclined to but if you're younger or if you're

more costs sensitive look into the hostels and the hostel just like just like being an exchange

student you meet people you go out to dinner you'll go find activities together

yeah we'll go go to the museum tomorrow we're all going to go to

Fontambu or whatever the fuck and you end up meeting people and connecting to them and maybe

you just have dinner with somebody or maybe you actually end up making friends that way and

when you make friends that way especially like if you're like I'm going to go back to Europe

because that's where I have the most experience with this kind of stuff and it's really easy to travel

around yeah like ridiculously easy so they're you meet people and these are people who are

traveling and they might be backpackers from Australia who are just going around for like six months

or taking a gap year or there might be people who are like you exchange students in different

country and they happen to be in the same country as you and then yeah a week into two go buy

and now you want to go to you you were in Italy and now you're going to go to Spain or whatever

and you can coordinate that and then you start having friends and in that work that you build

people that are kind of wanting to do the same stuff it's kind of it's kind of cool it's kind of

awesome and when you do that of course you're probably not getting the sort of local experience

as much as you would be with the the exchange student thing but you're still getting you know it

taste of the places and you're getting yeah you can sort of sampling platter wherever you're going

I think that's I think that's worth doing I think it's something that I would really encourage

anyone in the position to do to do and actually also I mean not just an exchange student but

like I ever friend who got her PhD in Germany and Munich and actually when I went to Munich

I stayed with her and they're I assume that they're married by now I don't know her partner at the

time I have no idea if they're still together but they they seemed to to be on that direction

on that trajectory either way whatever they're doing now I kind of lost touch with her I should

actually I wonder if I'm still connected to her on Facebook I haven't seen that I'll

career them there keeps fucking things up and I keep I see like the same two or three people

over and over and over again and I never see or hear from any of the other people but I used to

be connected to but anyway however whatever's going on with her now I stayed with her, stayed with

her and they set up stuff like activities to do I got to kind of see what it would be like to

live there I got to see you know like what the stores are like it's it's really good to go

you know just go grocery shopping if you are in a place where you can cook that's kind of nice

you know you can kind of feel what things would be like and even if you're not in a place where

you could cook you could still just pop into the store see what people are buying see what the prices are

for things see what's available and what's not which is equally interesting see how people are

living see you know like our people going to coffee shops are people is that a thing that exists

is that and when they're going to coffee shops are they going to coffee shops like in the morning

or is it something where they have lots of coffee shops but they don't even open until like 10 or 11

that I'm thinking specifically there of at least parts of Seoul I went there and they had so many

coffee shops ridiculous number of coffee shops and I I really struggled to find one that was open

before I think like 10 so it's it's interesting to see like it's not a morning thing it's more like a

dessert thing and yeah you look around and you see oh but they this is how people go to restaurants

this is what you do and just going to a restaurant going to a pub seeing how that's different

in different countries and how they handle all the stuff like getting a seat do you just sit down

do you have to put your do you go to a little kiosk and put your name on a queue or a piece of

paper or do you just go up to a matter day or do you just you know what what do you do how does that

work do you have to make reservations some countries like in the US reservations are completely

archaic like they they do exist but I basically never would have to make a reservation unless I was

going to say cheapo or something in downtown Phoenix and even then you don't have to you could walk in

in Tokyo there are a lot of places where if you don't make a reservation you're not going to go in and

some places are like you have to get a reservation like months and advance and then some places

have a long queue so you go and there's like a little iPad or a piece of paper you put your name down

and there'll be a line of people and you just have to wait in that and then they'll call you

eventually and just seeing how like little stuff like that goes it's interesting it's cool and I think

just as importantly a you start kind of seeing how other people think about things how other people

exist and all this but also and I think this is the thing isn't one of the reasons why I think you

should travel just selfishly look at what people are doing look at how they're getting around

look at how their health care system is look at how their employment is and you might go

well shit the the way that they work there is ridiculous I'm really glad that we don't do it that way

or you might go oh you know if you go to almost any other city in the world other than other than

like New York City and I guess Washington DC has an okay metro system Chicago

San Francisco kind of an ELA surprisingly has an okay one if you're staying in the right places

but most of the US does not have a great health they're a great public transit system and most

cities around the world have some kind of public transit they have like I'm in a hotel

I'm on one set of Tokyo I can get pretty much anywhere in Tokyo with either one train or maybe

with it and a transfer or two and I can also walk like I can walk across the city I have walked

across the city I've I've gone all over and in Phoenix you could walk too I've walked from

from 10 feet downtown Phoenix and and back and and a bite to that as well but it's it's a very different

experience like it's not it's not very safe you feel I don't mean like you're going to be in danger

of somebody robbing you but I mean like just in terms of basic safety like you can get hit by a car

very easily there might not be a sidewalk some places there might be you know like no stoplight

and you just have to dodge traffic and also for some reason there you can feel like almost like

some of the drivers are trying to hit pedestrians like they hate pedestrians they hate bikers

bicycle let's not yeah motorbikes all of that you hate those as well and you know just like

here I can walk and it's glorious it's fucking awesome if I want to go do something I like I don't

know what I'm going to do for dinner tonight and I could I could go to a convenience store and get

something or I could decide to go to a restaurant and that restaurant could be in Genza and if it

was I could walk over there or I could take a train a few stops or I could go you know to

Tokyo station or someplace else in the city Genzuku or whatever and you can go find a restaurant

there and you don't even necessarily have to know where you're going like you might have

place where I look through the city and you go on like this is another thing that is interesting

when you're traveling how do they find places here taboo log is a common thing but you know it's

kind of like yelp but at least used to be a better rating system because I guess people here are

more critical I feel like a lot of Americans and other people have figured it out and then they've

kind of like fucked up the rating system because this trip I've gone to a bunch of places that have

been highly rated now more highly rated than they even used to get to because they used to be like

three four was a really good rating like a three six was like mind blowing and if it was in the

four's it just was unheard of but now I'm seeing a bunch of them that are much higher rated

and I've gone to a couple of them and they're a few kind of shitty kind of shitty so I I feel like

people have figured this one out which is unfortunate it's an interesting thing too though because

if you go places you know you travel a few times you can see how things change over time you can see

what improves and what gets worse and you can you can learn about all these things and

you know like the public transit and walkable stuff and especially accessibility

those kinds of things to the extent that they exist those are things that you should be stealing

those are things that you should go outside of the US and I don't care if you're

and this is this is good to do another thing that you know you could go to Paris

and stay in a resort and basically never talk to anyone French never go to a obligatory

petisserie never walk to streets never go on the metro you could do that but why

what would be the fucking point of that you might as well go to Vegas or some you know like

Epcot Center go there stay you I mean you could still stay on your resort if you have the money

and yeah and I wouldn't stay someplace in a nice area as nice of an area as you can or at least

close to a metro station and you know assuming that you are able to walk walk go around go to the

petisserie and you know find the the one that's the best in the neighborhood do where people are

going see what people are eating that all that kind of stuff to help people go to work and what

time they go to work and how they get there and think about what it would be like to live there

I think that kind of stuff is it's really like I don't want to say interesting because I keep saying it

but it's it's something that you can learn so much from and it's something also where if we had a

country of people who like the whole thing that you're trying to do is make everything better

trying to figure out better ways to do stuff and you go around to different places and you see

this country really has nailed this or like you go to a country where public there are places where

public transit is by token there are places where public transit is like three incomplete systems

and they have different cards for each one and it's kind of a clusterfuck there are places where

there is no public transit or the public transit barely exists and there are places where it's

extremely refined there are places where it's free and you can just hop on and hop off anywhere

and you see that and you kind of look at how that works and figure out like how do they make this

work how does how is that even possible to do and it turns out actually that even in like places

like New York it actually costs money to charge and they have enforcement for the fairs and all

this kind of stuff they make a nominal amount but they spend much more money than it costs and

you could make the New York subway system free if you wanted to and it wouldn't cost that much money

and if you took that money out of the police budget which you absolutely should do then

a you would get better ridership b you'd have more safety and and you absolutely would have

more safety than if you have the cops there who are not actually helping and then see you could

actually just have a public transit system that that works better and you're not doing this

like weird fair thing you can make things because these are these are truck points these are

bottlenecks it's a whole like the layers of systems you have to build in order to collect fairs

are ridiculous and you can see like oh well this city is doing this thing but that turns out

that's really expensive and that's kind of silly it's nice but it's expensive or maybe

like they're doing this and if you cost a little bit of money but it actually pays for itself

massively that that kind of stuff is stuff that you should look into one thing that's cool is like

I like walking around some cities are on a really nice grid Phoenix for all of its faults

has an extremely nice grid and you can be anywhere you can almost always orient yourself on the grid

and if you want to walk around the block it's a thing you can do like you might be lucky

and be someplace where they're like parks and things to walk around or like tempy beach park or whatever

stuff to like downtown you get to walk a little bit and there are restaurants there

that really the density that you get in a nice older city in your upper Asia or wherever but

yeah you can get like a taste of almost what it would be like or maybe the thing that I think of

is like I go to like oh there and I'm like not there yet the light real kind of sucks and it's

this one line and all of this but I can imagine like in 50 years if assuming that it's still

habitable and there's nothing truly kind of close to happens which is maybe unfortunately a bigger

assumption than I would like to make but assuming assuming that I do think Phoenix will have

a pretty decent public transit system and I don't know that it will have the density that

takes to really be walkable but I could see it having you know like a lot of because if you look

around on the freeways there's so much room they could add train lines like all around those and

if you make those automated train lines which again they've been able to do for a very long

time and that again from this episode but I've talked about that before you do that and you can have

a train come every three minutes every two minutes and once you start getting high frequency

trains with a lot of capacity people start using them it starts being like oh I don't even

have to wait I don't have to figure out if I get to the station I'm going to be waiting there for 15

minutes no you can just walk to the station maybe you wait a minute or two hop on the train and then

yeah the light rail is okay but the light rail goes really fucking slow and it drives in traffic

and that today literally today uh i guess it's probably the 14th there because I'm past the

international date line but basically uh there was a tractor trailer the crashed into the light rail

and the big fire and always kind of stuff because it's on the road it's it's it's it's it's not an

tunnel it's not on the fucking elevated platform it's just on the road and that means it goes slow

and that means you know it's it's only a couple of cars so it's not moving that many people and

it's also only like every 15 minutes so it's really not moving that many people and yeah it's it's

it's okay it's okay it's got some stuff to it it's better than nothing and if you're taking

it certain places from certain places to certain places yeah it's it's it's serviceable

but you can imagine what it could be that's all I'm saying and if you go other places you can see

why that's so nice and you know don't go someplace and take it and again I'm saying this

to just I don't want to be ableist and I want to make it very clear if you need to take a taxi

you know like you can't just walk around and take this up way I'm not I'm not speaking to you here

and I'm not trying to be little that obviously I'm trying to be considerate of it but it's

assuming that you're able to walk assuming that you're able or or you're in a city that's

preferably accessible um take the fucking subway take the take the metro walk around if you can

because the the scale that people walk in a lot of these cities it's just it's night and day

versus Phoenix like I when I'm when I'm traveling you know I mean I'm a person that walks a lot

anyway I'm on a sort of slow day I usually I'm walking like 12 13000 steps and then I've

if I'm traveling I will more often than not end up walking you know 15 20 sometimes sometimes 30

and no you just do that kind of stuff and you can go like oh there's a grust front that we're going

to we're gonna meet there and it's it's 15 minutes if you take the train or it's a half hour walk

and sometimes you'll do one one way and then like after dinner you go for a walk and just walk back

or you walk your friend to their place and then you take the train back from there or you know

you it gives you so many options that you don't have um from if you have compared to the

also like I'm not a I'm at a person that really likes drinking but a couple of times when I was in

Paris I went with some friends and either went to Apparo or a bar slash for us front or whatever

and if you do that in the US how are you gonna get home and you drink how are you gonna get home

are you gonna drive yourself probably hope not if fucking hope not I know a lot of people that do

and I understand why they do it I'm not saying that it's okay to do I'm not encouraging anyone

to do it but I do understand why people do it but if you're someplace like Paris it's easier

to take the metro it's easier to walk and it's kind of fun and it kind of you know it's a it's a

nice part of the the whole experience of going someplace you can walk someplace and then you stop by

flower shop or a place and buy a like a bottle bring it to your friends place and you know

do dinner there whatever it's going to be it's it's a very different sort of way of doing things

and existing and you can see that kind of stuff and you can sort of realize or at least the

thing that I would hope that you do and the the sort of selfish reason that I want you to be traveling

is you start seeing like a we're getting fucked by not getting these things b this is what it

could be like see these are a bunch of different things that different people do and this is the best one

this is really just unum or or maybe nobody's doing it the right way but you see oh this all of these

people solved this problem this way and that way and this other way and I think we could actually

solve it this new way and it would even even be better now if that new way happens to be like

Robo taxis I please no no it's a ridiculous idea individual Robo taxis are not a great

they're good for like the last mile stuff if you have a city that has kind of a sparse

public transit network or you know it's yeah and Phoenix I can understand like the last you go to the

the metro station and then you take something five minutes to your home which would have taken you

a half hour to walk or five but don't go from point to point with that it's not it's not a good

system but you know there are lots of things that you could do that could be better and when you

start seeing these things it really sparks your imagination and it also gives you a little bit of fire

that just sort of start going like why don't we have this and it makes it you know like you start

researching that and you look at the history of what happened to the trolley systems that used to

to be in every u.s city and used to be actually pretty decent used to be in fact world class

and now you don't have that and you look at like oh I mean I'm not saying you know it's a

certainly are going to automatically just discover why our cities are not walkable but you might

happen to read the color of law and you start reading that and you start learning about oh they put

a freeway here deliberately to segregate these two neighborhoods or oh they they built this road here

and didn't give it a crosswalk because of this or you know similarly uh car companies

lobbied to to take their roads from pedestrian the roads used to be primarily like four

pedestrians long ago and I mean at a certain point there it was just pedestrians and like carts and

things and then cars started to appear and the cars were like the second class citizens of the road

but the roads were still for people and then you start getting this push for like J walking laws

and you know all kinds of stuff where like people were not able to walk in the streets anymore

and things just started really sucking that in someone way that's one reason why it also goes to

racism a lot of stuff in the U.S

if you ask like why don't you have universal health care

racism it's a big factor can't can't have Black people getting universal health care so we're not

going to have them all why don't you have public pools racism why do you why do you not have

walkable cities racism why do you not have you know in the fact like public transit why don't

you have it and you just keep going down the list um it's it's at the heart of a lot of things

and I don't mean but I I don't want to get into the the heavier stuff there I'm going to make

another one soon on that subject but that's not going to be my primary thing here so I'm

I'm going I'll leave that here but that's it's an interesting thing if you start looking into it

that color of law book it's worth reading or at least you know read a summary of it at the very

least so getting getting back to sort of like the the more general like how you can do it

or how you should do it the first time that I traveled what I did was I basically I had a pretty

decent job in terms of like vacation time so I didn't take it very often but I had about a month

a year I think and so I decided okay I'm going to take a few weeks and go to Europe it was my

first international trip I went solo and this is a question are you going to go solo or

you're going to go with friends or you're going to go with your partner it's it's important to

consider and there there are advantages and disadvantages to all of those and there are things

that you might consider because like if you're a woman traveling solo and certain places might be

more of a pain than you know you're comfortable with although I would say a lot of cities

a lot of places in the world are much safer than the US but still you know it's a thing that

you have to think about if you're traveling with a friend are you going to want to walk the same

places are you going to want to go like do you want to go to the same museums and if you go to a

museum how long are you going to spend looking at each thing how long are you going to want to

are you the kind of person that wants to rush through that museum and just like scan everything

really quickly and maybe check a couple things out or he's a kind of person that stops at everything

and really deeply like soaks it all in are you the kind of person that is going to want

to sort of go to a neighborhood and then spend a lot of time there are you know the kind of person

that wants to just like hit as much as you can and check all the boxes that's going to matter that's

going to make that's very heavily going to influence things and it makes it difficult now because

like even if you get somebody who's very similar to you in a lot of ways that actually have

somebody who is like they want to do exactly the same things for the same amount of time and everything

is perfectly aligned or they're willing to make compromises and you are too um that means you

ever we all have to compromise but there are some things that get really annoying and really tired

like if especially if you're kind of in very different bins and any of those things so yeah

traveling solo actually pretty nice I have mostly traveled solo um I would say

especially if you are single it's a great time to do it it's because you know if you have a dog

it's very hard to travel um you can find somebody to watch your dog but it it sucks right you

know you want to pay for somebody and even if you don't have to pay you want to be away from your

dog for a long time how much time off can you take can you take can you take a month I would

personally say if you're going someplace and it's like a 10 plus hour flight you really ideally would

want to stay at least a week or two that that's the way I see it I know people who don't like

yeah they get very homesick and I think it's natural to get homesick I'm a little weird I feel

I feel out of place in the US so like when I'm traveling I don't feel I don't feel any more

out of sorts here or in in Paris or in Spain or whatever I don't feel that different in

other countries I feel as much of an outsider there as I do here but if you have like a close

friend group is that gonna are you gonna want to travel with your friends there's the thing also

and if you do that are you gonna you know like do you want to go one place or do you want to

coordinate like traveling around and you know that again back to the first time I went I went to

I think I started in London because there was a direct flight from Phoenix to the London by British

and I started there I decided to take the and it actually like it's kind of depressing but the

trains are expensive enough and the flights are cheap enough in Europe that you know you're probably

better off flying most of the time although I would still I like trains and they do the high

speed trains are pretty nice but when you start going long distances it starts end up

earning up being you know making more sense to fly although although the things like Ryan air

they'll end up leaving from Lutin the 10 Lutin I don't know how you say it or Gatwick or something

which is a pain in the ass to get to relative to say Heathrow or yeah as you go further you go like

off the the underground and yeah it makes it take more time and cost more whereas if you take

euro star you can just that it that is like the the channel thing you could just go to

I think it's same pancreas I can't even remember which station does but it basically you just go

in central London there's a terminal there and you get to Paris and it's a gardener and like

central Paris and then there's a metro station right there so it's pretty it's it's not the cheapest

thing you could do but it's pretty nice and I highly encourage it you have to figure out of course

you know like budget and all those kind of stuff and no matter what you do probably can

spend more money than you want I you know just be mentally prepared for that try to try to keep

it within reason but yeah it's it's just a warning like I I'm not a person who really is good at

budgeting just in general but I will say like every time I've traveled I've always always ended up

spending more money than I expected and every part of it is just here I like you want some

flexibility or your someplace and if you don't plan even if meals might be cheaper if you're

local um you need a tourist places you're going to end up being expensive or you end up doing

activities that end up being expensive or you decide you want to go to a show or whatever you're doing

it's very easy to spend a lot of money be be mentally okay with that to some extent like and

I will say this I spent a lot of money on a lot of things in my life and you know like I bought

my ex-wife a Tiffany ring because it was important to her personally I don't you know I'm having

fan of diamonds I think they're a just like SP3 hybridized carbon is not a thing that I'm very impressed

with like it's something you can easily mass produce it's something that yeah and you think about like

where are those coming from and what are the ethics of it and what is it actually worth this is

not an actual rare stone at all like there are planets where it's just raining diamonds and

there are places where you just have like huge ones that are very perfect and there's there's

nothing magical about it it's just a shiny stone that's kind of hard um yeah I don't understand

what but I she it was important to her so we got uh Tiffany ring for her and I did that as a

grad student and it was like I was seven or eight grand and I think we put pretty sure we put

that on a credit card and I'm pretty sure I was still paying that one off after we got the

forest which was I let's just say I regretted that I I didn't feel great about that purchase

if I spent that much money on travel I don't think I'd mind it you know I it would hurt don't

get me wrong it would definitely be like ow like a little bit of gut punch a little bit of like

before dropping out from under you but you feel like it's something where you know you're putting

money into it but at least you're getting something out right you're getting an experience

that you're getting memories out I don't I'm not saying you're not getting anything out of her

but fucking ring but you know a little piece of metal with a little shiny stone on it it's like

what what what what what the fuck is that doing like and and especially what is the difference

practically between that and a much cheaper version the or something else you know I

did just I'm not the bitch about that but there are purchases that I've made like that that I

regret and then there are purchases that I've made like traveling and I can't think of a time

when I've really regretted paying to travel ever I just I can't and I don't I kind of don't think

you will either it's interesting also like if you travel however you travel whether you're going

alone or with people it's very jarring and you'll have you certainly will have some form of culture

shock probably because you know you are used to things being in a certain way and no matter

how flexible you are some things are going to be different and you have to deal with that you have

to deal with not knowing how to do things you have to deal with not being in your element you have to

deal with maybe hopefully you're going someplace like if you're traveling to the UK the language is a

little different but you know basically you could just get by any English right but if you travel the

friends and especially like you try to actually do a little bit of French you learn and I encourage

you if you're going someplace and you're able to learn bonjour learn merci merci beaucoup a

for some pre you know learn learn how to order things I'm trying to learn how to

pardon yeah excuse meません excuse meません learn how to say just like basic stuff and

if you if you really want to be clever learn more than that learn how to do like basic conversation

and start talking to people with that she was got with this uh bonjour from a pelscott

olad joesfissqat anyhow nijia fjema watch us got yeah you learn stuff like that learn how to

have a little conversation and work on it and if the language it has a different character system

maybe even try to learn some of that you know that kind of stuff the thing about it is it's going to be

very hard but it's so rewarding when you start to get it and when you start like unlocking you know

my experience at kind of it is like hard and then things click and then they become easy I am really

convinced that a lot of things in life are either completely impossible or trivial and they can

make the transition from one to the other very smoothly and abruptly and so like you start learning

this kind of stuff and it might be hard at first and especially if you're someplace like you're

in a kind of your your in Japan for a week the first couple of days it gets very uncomfortable and like

as long as I've spent here my Japanese stocks right it is it is kusu it is shitting so

in fact I'm sure that I just mispronounced that but you know if you work on it then one day you'll

go to a coffee shop and you'll realize you just ordered in French and you're going to a patee

and you'll have the whole interaction in French or maybe even you'll be walking down the street

and two French women will come up to you and they're from the south of France and you're in Paris

and they ask you how to get someplace and not only can you answer but you actually know the answer

and you feel cool a shit for it that that actually happened to me but I stole to this day

this is like a decade ago I feel awesome because of it like you know I pay the fact that they just

saw me and decided this is a person that I'm going to ask in French how to get someplace

they just assumed that I might know and then I was able to answer that was fucking awesome that was

fucking awesome I you know anyway I'm just like thinking back to that I have to say like that

kind of stuff like learning your way around learning like you go someplace and you don't know how to

get from A to B and then you figure it out you figure out how to get the metro card

at most places that have a metro they have a squeaky card or they have the oyster card

or navigate or you know whatever figuring out how to get that and you start getting to the

point where you just have that and you can like swipe in and out of the stations or that are

the stations that are just you know like free but very few of those are actually free you start doing

that and you start feeling very cool I used to start feeling and I don't mean that you feel like

oh I'm so cool but I mean it just feels good it's very rewarding and that jump from I can't do this

thing to I totally got this it's I think it's an essential part of I don't want to say growing up

because you could you could be 60 and still do this it's one of these things it's just like

you're expanding your universe you're getting that much more comfortable with things you're getting

better able to deal with the unexpected you're you have kind of learned that you have

sea legs and you know you might not be able to figure it out immediately some things might not work

you might go to the wrong line or go you know down the wrong path or whatever but you'll figure

it out and then you'll go to the right place and by the way now next time that this happens you

can just go to the right place in the first place and you might even have learned how to ask for it

or learn how to figure it out you learned oh this is how I navigate here this is how I get around

and once you start getting that it unlocks so much because you know everything is different everywhere

but things somethings are kind of similar so if you figure out how to navigate Tokyo you can get

around London you can get around Paris you can get around Madrid it's remarkable actually how

much as different as things are things very similar and that feeling and that sort of understanding

that about yourself I think it is it's just amazing it feels great and you know but it's practically

also something that tells you I can put myself into a situation where I might not be comfortable

I might not be able to do it right away and I might look a little bit foolish doing it and it might

be embarrassing even but I will figure it out and I will actually start being able to do it and then

I'll just have it and once you get that a few times it gives you so much more confidence it gives you so much

just more I don't know trust and faith in yourself and your ability to figure shit out

and it which again goes back to one of the reasons why I think traveling solo is kind of nice

and again it's it's nice traveling with a partner but if you're someplace and you know you get lost

and it's like what the fuck where am I I don't know how to get the fuck out of here I don't

know how to get back here and it's really stressful or you get trapped in the first time I went to Paris

got trapped in garden art I for some reason the ticket systems were down and so got the

Charlotte go and there was a woman there who was an American who spoke French and we were getting

on the trains trying to get the tickets for them and she was able to talk to somebody and they said

you know like well the system is down so go to this station and you get off there and you buy a

ticket and then go to a garden art and you'll be fine and she got that I didn't hear that part

which she conveyed to me and a few other Americans so I got on the train and I just wrote all the

way to garden art and when I got there I'm inside of the thing and I'm looking around and now I

can't get the fuck out because you you need the ticket to get out of the area and I couldn't figure

out of I couldn't figure out how to get a ticket out of the area and going through and

figuring that out and then eventually getting out and seeing that oh he's not that big of a deal

it seemed very stressful at the time I have to say but I ended up not being a big deal and now I

could totally do it and now I'm just a pitiful, pitiful, pitiful, pitiful, pitiful, pitiful I can

understand and speak a little bit and I could probably navigate a lot better now

but going from one to the next it's pretty fucking cool it's pretty I know I keep saying cool

but it's just it feels so good it's something I really I want to share with you I want you to share

with other people I want you to try it if you're able to and I understand also it's very expensive

to travel although some things some things are very expensive and they're very time consuming

but they're also kind of worth it and if you can find a way it's kind of worth it and you

can also I don't know that there are things that you can do to make travel a lot cheaper like I

know I used to know somebody I want to say I know somebody but I don't think I've seen her in my

a thousand years another one of these people that I was connected with on Facebook and I haven't seen

forever probably could look her up but anyway she used to just like go look it down because if you

if you follow like cheap airfare things everyone's in a while there will be ridiculously cheap

flight someplace and she would just do that and then she'd be like oh well for like 80 bucks I can

go to Norway or you know like something ridiculous like that and it might be the most comfortable flight

it might be a long thing but she would do that and she traveled all the fucking time and it wasn't

that expensive you know you can trade expense for convenience if you're rich you don't even have

to pack your bags you can just have somebody else do it you can have somebody deliver your bags to you

although I ever discovered this trip that you know I always knew well I didn't always know

at some point long ago my first or second I guess it was my second trip to Japan I saw these

all these boxes and like people with a cat dragging a box and like what the fuck is that

and I didn't know and then a couple of times ago I realized or I looked it up and I found out oh

this is I can't even think of what it's called yeah my note too I think this is not the only one

but this is one of these things and like the last time actually I was here I wanted to I had too

much stuff this is another thing I don't want to get too much into it because it's like

40 an hour 15 minutes or hour 13 minutes but pack light the name of this thing is pack light

the thing that I I'll get back to the packing thing and it's like it's it's much easier on you

if you don't bring that much and you know try and no matter how light you think you packed

you're probably taking more stuff than you need trying to go to places where you'll be able to

to do laundry because then you can take less stuff it's different obviously like if you're going

someplace in the winter or where it's raining probably going to want a few changes of clothes

probably going to want more stuff that's going to be heavier and bulkier but you know you go

someplace in the summer you might you might be able to just take a backpack I have a friend

and she travels and the backpack the cheat takes is like I know people who have a backpack

that they use as a purse and there's is not that much smaller than the backpack that she takes

when she travels anywhere and you know she can just walk anywhere with it and it's so light

I'm I'm nowhere near that I'm a spire to be but I have too much stuff and I do have some

stuff that's like you know because I have some eye stuff so I there's stuff that's attached to that

and then I I still could pack a lot lighter and I'm constantly working on this but you know

the lighter you pack the easier it is to go places and the less bullshit you have to deal with

and it's just it's exponential like every little extra bit of weight you add is exponentially

more misery for you and exponentially more pain in the ass that you have to deal with

Hacklight

maybe don't pack as light as she does although if you can do that if you can get away with it

it's fucking awesome um figure out like what is the stuff that you actually need like do you really

need to bring a toothbrush or you're going to use the toothbrush and the hotel

Personally I

like an electric toothbrush I don't like the mechanical ones and you know so even though most hotels

will have a toothbrush for you I want to bring my but you know and and I if I don't use the kind

of the right kind of shampoo I will get dandruff and so I bring that but you know like if you're

you in body wash or something like that most hotels will have body wash

If you if you have a

laundry in the hotel then especially if you are you know partially luckily and partially clever

about it and you get a room like the one I have that has a laundry machine in the room you can just

wash your clothes and then you don't have to take that many changes of clothes and it makes things

a lot lighter and makes things a lot easier um if you could do that kind of stuff you do you really

need to bring your computer I always bring my computer I'm attached to my computer I could travel

without it I will say I recently switched to a much lighter computer and I'm so glad that I did

and I even am slightly thinking I should have gone like one steps but like because you can get

the equivalent of like a 13 inch I have a 15 inch back book air you can get the equivalent of a 13

inch and today the performance on that thing unless you're doing like a lot of you know heavy

rendering or compiling or anything like that and and a lot of those things you could do remotely if you

wanted to but unless you're doing those things you don't really need like the giant MacBook Pro that's

fully loaded and saving that little bit of weight a kilo or two makes a huge fucking difference

saving the bulk makes a huge buck fucking difference and then you have something you know do you

really need to bring that extra iPad do you really need to bring whatever it is and you know and for

some reason on this trip I thought that I was going to go hiking and so I brought my my chemical

pack pouch and I've got used at once I brought my slippers um I apologize and

incidentally all the time well I bought them in like a year they are one of the best made

shoes that I've ever had and I highly recommend um buying them because I don't I want them to stay

in business because it's one of the few things that you can get that's actually like high quality

and they last and I feel bad that I'm not buying them more often because they last and I don't

want them to the suffer because they're making good stuff and our economic system encourages people

to make a crap that you have to keep rebuying and most stuff is getting crap-ified and yeah anyway

the best that's like you know pack light so coming back to like what you can do with your

your bags and this one saw these young and they would say things and I was in Osaka with my friend

and I kind of mentioned you know they have the service where you can you can send your bags

ahead of you to the next hotel and she started like you know you're as perked up a little bit

and she's like what is that how does that work and I'm like oh it's kind of expensive but you know

it's it sounds actually really convenient and really awesome um and in my defense I looked at

the Yamano tape races and I think it was like 50 bucks or something so a bag which is not you know

it's not expensive expensive but it adds up a few of a few bags and also yeah it's it's

enough where it kind of hurts unless you have a lot of money but we still look then do it I

just sort of decided like that let's think about this maybe even even if it's that expensive

maybe we'll just try it because it sounds awesome and it's a pain in the estage love your

shit and went in and it ended up being like 10 bucks a bag 10 bucks a bag to go from

Kyoto back to Tokyo which is wild wild it would be the next day but you know I mean it's worth it

and so we sent our bags and then we were able to go from Kyoto to Osaka without any bags at all

which made it so much better it's meant like massively massively more comfortable and again if you're

like rich rich you could just have the bags show up someplace or you could have them shipped or whatever

I don't think that's really exactly the right that's not the person I'm talking if you're the

person who can just afford to whatever or especially if you're the person that has a private jet

you can just take all your shit and have people deal with all your bullshit for you that's a very

different kind of thing than what I'm talking about I'm not the target audience although if you are

please you know the comma patron I don't have a Patreon thing but you know like let's

message me and then find a way to have you pay me because something that's going to be a nominal

amount for you would be enough to get me by I'm I'm really at this moment trying to figure out

like how can I how can I exist without having to you know have I mean it's not that I don't

want to have a job it's not that I don't want to work but I really don't want to have that

gun to my head that like you have to do this job that you hate in order to survive in order to

have shelter in order to do the things you want to do especially and I don't know maybe that's a

way to do it maybe that's a thing but other than that I'm not really talking to you so I'm talking

to the person who yeah they not have that much money may not have any money may be just a student

and again like if you're a student going to Germany to to get your undergrad degree or your graduate

degree can be damn near free and you can even work while you're there to pay for other expenses

and then you go and you have no student loan debt which I assure you is a thing that you don't

want to have I have like a house oh I guess houses are a lot more expensive now than they used to be

but I still have like 160 grand or something left over and student loan debt it's even more than

I don't even know it's such a big number I can't I can't even think about it but whatever it is

you don't want that and you can find other ways to get it to get around it and you can also

do that summer abroad or I would say semester abroad or even Europe abroad and also also also

when you do that understand you're going to be very uncomfortable you're going to want to go home

you probably I'm not saying that's a guarantee but there there will probably be times

where you're like fuck this I'm done I just want to go home and if you power through that it will

get better especially you know like maybe you're someplace and you don't have any friends and you're

not you know you don't have people to do stuff with and you're just kind of everything is frustrating

and you really want to to get that burger or whatever your favorite food is and you just are like

kind of stuck um if you power through that you'll find a I mean it is kind of interesting like when

I first when I first started traveling to Europe I wanted it was in I actually when I lived in

Paris which wasn't even that long ago I wanted a bagel it was there for like a few months

and I'm not somebody that has bagels like bad often but every once in a while I like a bagel

and at a certain point as much as I like a quesson and baget I wanted a bagel you know and I made

a trek like halfway across the city through the only place I could find that was anywhere near

that had bagels and I got like the shittiest like endomins kind of bagel from someplace that they

cooked like a panini for for some fucking reason I'm a panini press and I was happy for it I was glad

to get you know you can find stuff that's like an approximation of the thing that you're missing

um they when I was first living there they didn't have to put me and I messed it I actually

researched the people that to put me asking them to do it and they ended up like years later opening

one and I went back later and it was it was not the same but it was something it was not bad

but now actually you can go the last time I went to Paris the bagel shops all over the

fucking place it's kind of it's kind of annoying actually but you can go and get a bagel

it's not a big deal when I lived there getting a mocha was really hard the only place that had

a mocha that I could find was either Starbucks or there was an occasional like coffee shop that was

doing some weird shit and they would have a mocha and if you go there now you're gonna mocha

fucking everywhere like they're all over the place it's kind of it's kind of sad in some sense

that you're not losing that but it is also really nice just that a lot of the things that you

might have missed you're not gonna miss anymore depending on where you go there there are certainly

places where you're gonna go and especially if you have very like American or defined tastes you're

gonna have trouble yeah then it even if you are fairly flexible and you're willing to do

different stuff and work it out you're gonna you're gonna want your thing right you're gonna

whatever your little comfort food is you're gonna want it I mean actually similarly like Mexican food

yeah I I really like the Arizona version sort of Gringo version of sinor in Mexican food

that really seems to only exist in basically that part of the Southwest and I like it a lot

I don't get me wrong I like street tacos I like a lot of other stuff too I like different regions

in Mexico but that's the one that I want yeah it's not that I want all the time but you

I wanted sometimes and when I first lived there it was very rare to find places that did tacos

any kind of tacos and then I found a place that was from actually people from Mexico City

lived and it was not too far from Garden Lord it was expensive but they had street tacos

and they were very authentic and very good other than being expensive and that was nice

that was a nice little and now if you go there they're actually a decent number of Mexican restaurants

it's amazing how quickly that kind of stuff has changed but you can go and find your thing

or you can find an approximation of it or you can just you know suffer without it but it's

frustrating you know you could figure out okay the first time I was there I got desperate enough

that I ended up getting what is that stuff called the the sort of taco hardshell tacos or

or chips or whatever that are from I can't think of the fucking sick the most American

westernized bullshit version of it I got those because I just really wanted it and it's

satisfying you it wasn't perfect it did a good job but anyway anyway I have a lot more stuff I

could probably talk about but I think this is the sort of broad strokes of what I wanted to hit

you know the where to go like you know go wherever you're interested in honestly go almost any

place you know there's something there I personally have discovered about myself that I'm much more

of a fan bum it's not that I like cities necessarily but I like I love public transit I love walking

more than anything actually like the thing that I like about traveling is just being able to walk

places and then when I get there you know like the thing that I normally do and the thing that my

friend and I did this last week was basically and this is like rough approximation you know you can

you could dial it in due different stuff but basically we would kind of say okay we're going to

go to this thing and we want to want to go to this botanical garden so we'll find our way out

there take the metro whatever go to that and then the next thing we're going to do is go

to this imperial palace and the distance between them is very easily walkable so you just walk

between them and that is a afternoon and you do that and then it's like well okay well now we're

done here walk we'll get coffee and we'll walk back to the hotel and in the process of doing that

you're seeing a lot of stuff and you can kind of figure out yeah where you're going where you want to

go and maybe along the way you find a really cool restaurant maybe you're along the way you

find a place you're like oh we're hungry we'll stop in here or maybe you find a temple that you

didn't even realize and you didn't know that you wanted to go to so you go to a big or some kind of

park and you decide you're going to go to some other place and while you're going there you

pass some really cool shit that you didn't know was there you didn't know you should have been interested

in and you go someplace else and you find that kind of stuff it's awesome that's my favorite thing

and yeah I don't give me wrong I love museums I love a lot of the other stuff but that's

that's the one that I think it's made the most it's kind of nice also like figuring out

but again the first time I was traveling I spent two or three days and again two or three days

in London I probably spent like three days in Paris I think I went to niece and where else did I go

oh I took I went to niece I took the tissue bay there and then I went to what Milan

and Pisa Florence I don't remember if that's the right order and then to Rome on the train

and yeah you do that and you kind of make your way I spent a couple days in each hit the

the major bullet points I've sort of landed on and again this is all very personal depends on

where you are in life and what you're doing all I kind of stuff I've sort of landed on you know

like two full days someplace you go to a new city you have the day of travel which is still

be able to do dinner or something when you get there probably if it's not too late and then that

overnight and then you got one full day another overnight you got another full day and you'll leave

the next day and that seems to if you can manage it be a really good amount of time like longer

than that I'm not saying you're going to get bored with places but yeah it's it's easy to especially

if it's a city where there's not that much stuff there are certainly cities but I guess any city

you could spend and you could just live in people live in them but there are places like Pisa

I really did not need a full day there I could I could get there you look around hit a couple

things and then you're like okay I don't even need to stay overnight here or if you do stay

overnight you know just leave the next day and you're fine and I'm not necessarily saying

that for you Pisa will be that but I'm just for me that was an example and then there are places

where you're like I could stay here indefinitely I could stay in Tokyo indefinitely I could stay

I could probably stay actually in Kyoto indefinitely Osaka I mean I could stay anywhere but

there are places that I'd rather be and Tokyo and Kyoto are probably higher on there

I went to Nagano it was nice but I really probably if I stayed a week there would just be like

losing my mind I wouldn't want to stay there for that long especially you know like there

there is a train but it's like a super slow train and it doesn't really do that much for you

unless you're getting in and out and it was like taking the Shinkansen up to basically where I was

going and then getting to the monkey park I think the from the Shinkansen station there

there are two that from Tokyo took about the same amount of time despite being much much longer

than it took to get from that Shinkansen station to the right can that I was staying at

near the monkey park or whatever it's called it the stone monkey park it was it was

interesting actually just how different that was like figuring out the amount of time if you have

the time to do it it's nice to stay places longer and again if you're in a place where you can do

the semester abroad then you got a semester or two semester is someplace if you want to do

your undergrad in Germany I keep going back to Germany because it's one of the like there are places

where it's free basically free like Germany or way a lot of places in Europe are examples of this

then there are places where it's much cheaper but not free and then there are places where it's

and not necessarily US price but very expensive if you look at those places that are not too expensive

and you stay there for a while and especially if it's someplace like Germany you can travel a lot

and you can sit there and you really get the feel what it would be like to live there

and even if you're only staying like again if you're staying two full days like I'm talking

about in which for most cities I think is you're not you definitely have to understand you're

not going to do everything in two full days like especially if it's a city where there's a

shitload of stuff you'll get like a sampler palletter you're getting like the flight

of activities to do there and the nice thing is then you have a reason to come back

I on my first trip and it wasn't exactly intentional but it was kind of my thought process

go to a bunch of places see what it's like in Athens for a couple days see what it's like

in Munich for a couple days see what it's like in Rome for a couple days and then later on you can go

well I'm not really that interested in going back there or maybe I want to go back for a long time

and like there are some places like London I could just keep going back to or I could live there

very easily money permitting and all that Paris similarly unique like I would go back to Munich

and spend some time there I wouldn't want to live there I don't think it's just it's not my

is that it's not a nice place it wouldn't be my first first Athens nice to visit probably

wouldn't want to live there Rome they don't probably I don't know I'm not and I'm not saying that these

are for you but you know just just kind of my experience and you know figuring that kind of stuff out

is very cool so I feel like I'm rambling a little bit at this point which I do tend to do

but I I really hope that you will think about this if you don't have that the first step

first step that you can take if you don't have a passport already is to get a passport it's not very

expensive it's not that difficult to do literally just have to get your picture taken you get two

passport photos fill out a form send it in and you know I I don't even know what the fee is but order

of a hundred bucks it's it's it's a decent amount of money like it's an annoying amount of money

but it's not like it's so much money that you can't do it hopefully and you do that and now you

get a passport and now that you have a passport say you don't have very much money there are places

you can look where you can find ridiculously cheap flights I'm not going to give you directions on

that because I I'm not a person that wants to take all of those because A like I hate layovers

but I like I like traveling but I don't like the active traveling so much especially like long flights

and especially some of those ridiculously long flights are just less comfortable you're trading

comfort for price some of them are not bad though there are some where it's just like a direct flight

and it's just like a no frills airline and you know you're going to be on that plane for a little while

but it's going to be so cheap and then you just have to figure out the the board like where you're

staying and how you're eating and all that kind of stuff and so you can get someplace pretty cheaply

and you can day there if you don't mind the hostel or the capsule hotel or something like that

you can stay pretty cheaply if you have more money take a nicer flight if you have a lot of money

take one of those flights with the lay flights I I aspire to that it seems like such a ridiculous

waste of money but also like if I was going from LA to Sydney which is a flight that I've never

done and it scares the shit out of me because it's so long because you know you take the flight

that's like Phoenix to the London I think it's like 10 and a half hours I don't remember exactly

how long it is but it's it's similar we LA to Tokyo is about 10 and a half hours and

you're on there and you bring your entertainment or you watch movies or whatever and let

movies are a nice example because you can you know how long a movie is yeah hour and a half

two and a half hours right and so you get on there is that you're reading a book and you know

like how long is it going to be or doing other stuff different but there's a movie is an example

you get on there and you get kind of situated you have your meal and you watch a movie

and you watch a movie and then you watch a movie and you still have four hours to go and it's like

holy shit how the fuck is this taking so they could just feel like it's going to take forever

it feels interminable and it feels much more so like when you first do it and then after a while

you kind of know the deal and you kind of you understand this is going to suck but it will be over

I don't have the it's not like I'm stuck here in prison forever I will say

as I've gotten older when I was younger I could sit much longer and now I have a walking disorder

like I have to walk it's almost a compulsion and be you know I just like it hurts to sit on my

ass for that one and it's physically painful I think you're probably doing some damage and then I know

like my mom um she's a lot older still and it's really hard for her to travel anymore now because

you know just sitting that long and it's in fact it's dangerous too because you can get

get an embalism or something you can get you can do some best and that's not an embalism

from Vosis what am I saying but you can do some bad stuff and you don't want you don't want that so

figure that out understand how to deal with it but even if it's just discomfort figure out ways to

be more comfortable and get it over with and hopefully stay longer because then you can but you

know again you could be like my friend who would like she would fly out and then just do like a long

weekend and spend a couple days in some other country you can find these super cheap flights you can do

the summer abroad you can do a week away you can do month away all of those things they're they're

very cool you can get it like it takes more time and coordination but you could teach English

someplace I understand that China is particularly interested in that it's much easier I know a lot of

people like to do it and say Japan I know people who do it and let's see I know people in a bunch of

different countries but like Taiwan or other places teaching English not like getting paid like

massive amounts of money but it's enough you can get by Japan is very in demand and if you come

here I think people end up usually in some tiny tiny little village someplace which is probably not

you know become to Japan at the very least you're in on one of visit Tokyo probably and if you're

me you want to stay here so you're if you're teaching in some rural place not be the most exciting

thing and the teaching is a lot but you can still do it you can get the experience of living

someplace and if you really wanted to be here that's maybe a path I don't know I know it's very

difficult to to go from that to actually like living living here you know it's kind of like

I mean I'm saying it's like a dead end job but there are certain things where it's easier to transition

and that's a very difficult one to transition from that to just something but it's some if you want

to spend some time someplace else it's a way to do it you can be if you're younger there are

a bunch of things where you can like be in a pair for a while and like take care of somebody's kids

and I've known people who've done that and I've heard like two distinct kinds of not I don't know

that many people live have done it but the the experiences why I guess there are three like there

it's it's fine it's not a great thing but it's not terrible level of love but the ones that I

really remember are one was amazing like it was very little effort and she was with a really

wealthy family and the kids were well behaved wasn't a lot of work they gave her lots of time off

and it was just and and also like you know she's staying in their house in a room and situation

that was just fucking awesome like a luxury hotel level of awesome and they're traveling also

and she gets to travel with them so it's the care of the kids and they're paying for her

that's that's like don't count on that being the case and then I I know somebody else who got

in one which was just a nightmare and you know horrible kid and really trapped and not able to do

anything and you know like really just assholes doing the thing and then I know people in between

so there's a range you could do you could try finding a job that works some place also

you could find a job I do think like anything that you do for work ends up being work at the end of

the day so as much as I like travel if I had to travel for work I know I would fucking hate it

and also the people that travel for work they're not like chilling places it's just

visiting and learning what it's like there they're kind of like constantly traveling and getting

the worst part of travel over and over again I friend with a tiny single bag she was just like a

couple weeks after I was in Shenzhen she was there I think she was there last week and she sent me

a message and it's like hey are you and are you still there you're coming soon because I'm here

for a couple days and she flew from San Francisco over there and spent which is a long fucking

flight and spent like two days doing some stuff and then work obviously and then flew back and

yeah that to me it's like the worst part of the travel and then also when she's working there she's

working the whole time and doesn't have much time to really spend and you just just like the hotel

or the factory and then you're gone and that's that's not the ideal that's not hopefully although

it's still nice it's still an experience you could still maybe get little tastes of stuff but if you

can take it as a vacation if you can wander around you know have a lot of maybe have your things

that you want to do but make a small number of them don't try to overdo it give yourself some unstructured

time and again if you are physically able then especially your places where you can do it walk

walking is awesome walking around places is awesome take the metro also awesome so anyway

I think trying to see if I'm missing something and and look into that baggage thing that I mentioned

you know again track pack light but even when you're packing lightly if you can have your bags

delivered to the next hotel and it doesn't cost that much money you can spend a lot of money on

that too by the way so I'm not saying you know just do it and expect that the work well or to be cheap

but if you can find a situation like the one that I did where it was literally like 10 bucks to send

your bags the distance from Phoenix to LA and they get to the next day and the morning do that it's

so much better it's it's ridiculously better and you know it gives you a lot of freedom not having to

carry your bag like as nice as the train the high speed trains are not having to carry your bag on them

is like a massively better and then when you carry your bags whether you're on the train or the

plane you're going to have the distance from the airport to the hotel which I would also encourage you

you know you could imagine you have money and it's not a big deal you could take a shuttle you could take a

a van or a cab or whatever take the public transit route if they have it which again you know

maybe get your bags delivered because a lot of these delivery services if you have the money to do it

we'll do it from the airport to the hotel the same day but if you can't do that you're still

stopping your bags but everybody on the train from the airport is going to be doing the same thing

it sucks you get to the hotel you drop them off maybe you take a shower and now you're there

and then it's yeah it's a very big relief it's kind of part of the initiation into wherever you're

going and now you can just do your stuff and I hope you do that and I hope don't just go some place

and like live basically as you would kind of try to experience it a bit and see what you can steal

and I don't mean like physically steal but like see what ideas people have see how people are doing

stuff see the way things work and you know improve things take that take those ideas back with you

take you know or look at how people are doing stuff and sometimes some ways you'll be like

that's really terrible we don't want to do that it's good that we don't do that

yeah you can learn hopefully also like I know a lot of people this will be the last thing that I

say that I know a lot of people who the classic one is they think they're going to go to Paris

and they have some weird romantic notion of it and then they end up hating it and I never had that

but I also had zero expectations and I definitely never had a romanticized vision of what Paris was

and it ended up being one of my favorite cities I actually love the city but I never had like oh it's

the view I don't even know what they call it the view demore or whatever you know

view demore I don't know what you actually call it but whatever people call Paris they have

an idea of it and you go there and it's it's just a city there's a place and then they're like

ah this sucks if you have no expectations it's actually really lovely you know and if you have

just sort of the um I don't know that I'm just thinking right now about how nice it is

to be there and walk around and it turns out of course if you look at the history of

horsemen and how it got to be such a nice place to walk around there's some

great shit there but nonetheless um if you're there you can wander around the city and I've

walked around that entire city too and you do it and it's fucking beautiful there are some like

a weird areas but with very few exceptions if you're in the anywhere in any of the major on

these moments you're walking from one to the next it's lovely like it's it's beautiful like

even the shitty year places it's kind of nice looking and you take the metro and it's it's really

like the metro's you know kind of smells like this not the greatest thing is that very clean

and blah blah blah I still like it I still like you know every time I ride the metro my friend while

we were riding the train was just like you kind of smiling when you're on the train to do like

it's fucking awesome this is so fucking nice and also like just the feeling of wherever you are

you can be walking around and in a city that has a good metro system wherever you walk to

if you get tired you're like five minutes from a train station and if you're going someplace

and you have some time you can walk to the next train station and the next one's still

and usually they're a few minutes apart so you know they're like just close enough that it's

not like they're right on top of each other but it's fast for if you take the train but you can

still walk it pretty quickly and comfortably and if you do that and walk another one or you're like

okay this is bullshit it's hot it's raining and I'm tired and I just want to get on the train

and sit and maybe you can sit to be camp but hopefully you can anyway with all of that go get your

passport and try if you can if you're in a position too I know you know again this is a lot but

think about it think about how you might be able to do it and understand that it will

I'm not guaranteeing that you're going to love it or that you'll consider it to be worth it

but in my opinion it's worth it and I think it's something that everyone should do at least a little bit

and especially if you do it and you do it in a way that's not

I don't know how to say it but you know it's not like overly sheltered and isolated

and you're actually kind of exposed and going through not necessarily getting the experience of what

it would be like to live someplace but at least getting the experience of some of the parts of that

yeah it's kind of nice it's kind of worthwhile anyway with that the next one of these will be

more serious but I think I enjoyed this and I hope you did too take care and see you again

再见

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