Travel Wisdom Podcast -travel and learn languages for success and money

Can travel be more than just a fun thing to do? Could it also provide some benefit and learning experiences later in life? I have always thought this and this is why I have relentlessly travelled the world and now have been to over 80 countries. I have always thought that I was planting the seeds of wisdom while in faraway lands. Through experiences with foreign people, cultures, concepts, and ways of doing things I learned much more than anything I could've done while at home. I interview amazing guests, bestselling authors, scientists, successful business people, dating experts, travel junkies, polyglots (people who speak more than 3 languages), and anybody who I think is interesting for the growth of our listeners and I as people. I think by doing this we can plant the seeds of wisdom which will ultimately lead to our success in career, business, money, relationships, self-worth, and generally being a more well-rounded person. But it requires you to be active making this happen. What do you think?

Nate Ritter on being a failed expat and his Room Steals booking search engine 04/06/2022

Nate Ritter on being a failed expat and his Room Steals booking search engine Nate Ritter is a failed expat who was unable to live in France. Since then he has founded a company called which is a hotel booking search engine which allows you to find wholesale prices of hotels. He has seen savings of many hundred dollars on a single night but savings are often 20%. Use the following Coupon code for 20% off your first annual fee travelwisdom Top 3 Takeaways: "The night before we left, we were like, what do we do with all this paperwork?We don't need it because we got our visa. And we literally burned all of the paperwork. It was like a book of paperwork that proved who we were and what we were doing and all this kind of stuff. So we burned it in the fireplace that night, thinking this is a fun story to tell people later" "My favorite story that we had is that we spent $250 to send four of us round trip to Europe, and we stayed for a month and paid zero on accommodations. So for 250 bucks to fly to Europe for four of us, and then stay there for a month, like it's definitely, people are spending three, $4,000, easy on that kind of a thing." "So that's Room Steals. I took that inventory source and I said, "this needs to be public." Instead of doing what everybody else does, which includes Expedia booking, they say here's what the wholesale price is, and mark it up to that and then they keep the difference. So I thought we should be a little bit more transparent than that. We make all of our money like a Costco model. We're doing a membership." 1:00 "Failed expat, how does that work?" 7:00 "What happened in between then and now with ?" 9:00 "What kind of travel hacking were you doing?" 12:00 " You found an unused inventory of rooms?" 18:15 "So what kind of savings do people usually get?" 20:15 "Do you mostly get the savings on the higher end?" 21:45 "So how do you book a room?" 23:15 "I'm also very curious about the RV lifestyle and how you transferred into this" 25:00 "Any tips that you wanna share with the listeners about RV life?" 29:45 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?" Use the following Coupon code for 20% off your first annual fee travelwisdom /episode/index/show/travelwisdompodcast/id/22691759

Hiking meditation and travelling all of Africa with Francis Tapon 03/02/2022

Planning your perfect 9 day trip with David Axelrod 02/02/2022

Kathleen Peddicord on the best places to retire overseas 01/05/2022

Mike Bown’s Essay “Skins of Ill-Shaped Fishes” Details How Human Society and Its Core Values Have Evolved 04/15/2020

Mike Bown’s Essay “Skins of Ill-Shaped Fishes” Details How Human Society and Its Core Values Have Evolved Mike Bown is the “most traveled man in the world”. He has written an essay called where he discusses how his travel across the globe has exposed him to a very wide spectrum of human life and have taught him in detail about the history and current reality of human society. In this episode, Ladan reads this essay and shares his opinion on it. Top three takeaways: It is a fallacy to assume that if everyone were to have had equal enfranchisement from the dawn of history, that humanity would be better off. In fact, the way out of societal stagnation is industrialization, which is dependent on the unequal system of capitalism. Had everyone had equal rights from the birth of civilization, we may have actually been less scientifically advanced than we currently are. Just as with the earlier industrial revolution, now that we are in the midst of a new revolution, the IT revolution, the unique facets of revolutionary capitalism are again under attack. Fascist and colonialist ideologies are resurging and reviving during this time when capitalist principles are under fire. Globalism is essentially colonialism 2.0. A lot of the problems that caused the first wave of colonialism to fail have been fixed, and colonialism is effectively being rebranded as globalism. In this sense, it is being referred to as a de-colonialism effort, with the belief that “diversity is our strength” widely spreading and influencing this new rise. An essay I recently finished: skins of ill-shaped fishes We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests, and hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been human. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality. Loren Eiseley Satisfying an interest in the process and experience of reality, and over thirty years of continuous backpacking, I’ve explored our planet’s varied and fascinating life-ways. The first 23 years of travel served to take a friendly look around every country. The last 7 years has necessarily been return visits to regions, landscapes and tribes already familiar from earlier trips. Heraclitus claimed that no man steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. In this sense, nations and tribes are akin to Heraclitus’s rivers - especially in our era of revolutionary transformation. Village and regional Feudalism gives way, painfully, to a somewhat bewildering mix of economic and political systems: cronyism, socialism, communism, fascism, market capitalism, democracy, and related doctrines not so honestly named but functionally equivalent. My wandering has exposed me to a broad spectrum of human reality, from living in leaf huts with spear-and-net hunting pigmies in the Congo rain forest and Yakuti reindeer herders in the Russian arctic; to drinking sake and enjoying gooey octopus balls with Tokyo tech specialists. Many of these niches of human development fall into categories recognized by socio-economic experts, such as nascent artisanal mining communities. Others support cultures beneath their notice, such as squatters in the liminal spaces of decaying mega cities, surviving by drug dealing and scavenging. This has induced in me a taste for the quirkiness of raw reality as opposed to euphemism, politically expedient obfuscations and outright lies. The saying goes, liars should have good memories. But, on a global scale, those who make the decisions and disproportionately benefit from the resulting doctrines can’t manage to keep their stories straight, over oceans and deserts, tundra and forests, fraught by dissension, suspicion and war. Comparative history and immersive experience unveil and embarrass these locally well-crafted fables and just-so-stories. Hunter gatherers were stable for hundreds of millennia and largely egalitarian, so had scant need to come up with new doctrines every generation. And Feudalism was likewise fairly stable for millennia despite spiraling inequality, so baffling doctrines had time to settle in to work their magic. Nowadays, however, revolutions and the doctrines that justify them are ubiquitous; a process and a dream of a swifter sort, sprinting, mind-driven, ahead of our biology toward Progress with a capital P, seemingly as sure-footed as the apocryphal fish crawling out of the Devonian ocean to stride and lord it over the land. Locally-crafted fables inveigle themselves just as insideously in Western minds, such that educated readers might wonder what there is left to observe in person on earth, and why bother. Isn’t it the case that the populace is better informed than ever and the arc of history bends toward justice? We’ve established, surely, that underdeveloped countries want to develop. So advisors and NGOs show up to assist. Sadly, progress is slow because of Western military adventures, and plundering of nature’s resources by devious multi-nationals who were complicit in colonialism that caused the poverty in the first place. Meanwhile aren’t desperate poor people thus apt to flee to the West for their own safety, although often blocked by the unenlightened politics of heartless deplorables? Marvin Harris, an eminent anthropologist and author, argued that political and social doctrines are most often crafted in subtle support of elite’s prerogatives over those of the bulk of humanity. “Doctrines that prevent people from understanding the causes of their social existence have great social value.” And in opposition to these elitist doctrines he asserts, “We must regard the expansion of scientific objectivity into the domain of lifestyle riddles as a moral imperative. It’s the only thing that’s never been tried.”(1) Makes me wonder; certainly easier said than done – revolutions in lifestyle and their explanations are neither straight nor tidy as jaunty diagrams of fish sprouting legs and sprinting up the smooth sand. In illustration and as a matter of fact, consider that ultimate chapter of the history of fish. Much of our initial assumptions need to be flipped over and re-examined after study by experts in the field. For instance, “It looks like hunting like a crocodile was the gateway drug to terrestriality,” neuroscientist Malcolm MacIver said. “Just as data comes before action, coming up on land was likely about how the huge gain in visual performance from poking eyes above the water to see an unexploited source of prey gradually selected for limbs.”(2) Furthermore, a reactionary clad of lung-sporting fish already half-way terrestrial turned tail and slithered back to the open seas. They repurposed a lung as a swim bladder, and their descendants became the spectacularly successful 28 000 species of bony fishes. Even the primordial land lubber fish had its quirks. As it was the ancestor of all terrestrial vertebrates those quirks were bequeathed to us. For instance, a strange twisted optic nerve, where right-eye and left-eye serving nerves crisscross in front of the brain to connect to the opposite hemisphere – a relic from when this ancestor dabbled in a torque-eyed flounder-ish existence only to abandon the lifestyle. Their eyes ended up ratcheting all the way around instead of simply rewinding to their previous level stare. Revolutions are no simple marches into the daylight, and are usually positively aswirl with staggering countercurrents, eddies and riptides. Without the shadow of a doubt, this latest industrial revolution is astoundingly powerful: mankind and his domesticated animals have overrun the planet, overpowered all beasts, and even harried the fish of the sea. If we consider anything chicken-sized or bigger, then our planet is now home to 300 million tons of humans, a further 700 million tons of our domesticated animals, and less than a hundred million tons of wild animals. We have taken over the earth. (3) Non-western people struggle to understand what is happening to their world, and Westerners tender self-serving or even less helpful answers. Modern doctrines are unnatural and hard to grok, in a way that simple feudal farming with digging sticks and plows was not. Anyway, what is the magic potion of development? What strange elixir takes a nation into the blessed future, or casts it back poisoned with weird visions, seeking solace in ancestral lifestyles? There have been two world-shaking revolutions among the smaller changes and revolts so far in human history. First was when hunter gathering gave ground to farmers’ superior numbers, belligerence, and penchant for harbouring contact diseases. Even here the transition was convoluted and uneven. But hunter gathers lost out and only waves of livestock herders held their own or conquered these farmers, cyclically being absorbed as a ruling class into a mixed farming sedentary economy. Their big men became chiefs and then lords, kings, occasionally emperors. Human relations adopted the characteristics known as feudalism. No scholar planned feudalism. Like other economic doctrines it arose organically, before being codified by any scholars, mostly driven by cultural evolution. It’s simply the characteristic type of stable hierarchy that arises when civilization passes the population density that allows chieftains. Of this we can be confident because feudal forms were generated planet wide. Even when agricultural civilizations developed in relative isolation, such as the Papuan highlands and Mesoamerica, they were feudal. Feudalism is characterized by a kinship-based hierarchical command and control economy. A common feature is largesse: an expectation of open-handed redistribution by the chief, enacting a primitive version of “from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs.” In practice much of the rhetoric about open-handed giving and redistribution was mere boasting, and these gifts served first to ensure the loyalty of military specialists who formed the bulk of the chief’s trusted subordinates. Important additional features in Europe and elsewhere were a caste system whereby families know their place, sumptuary laws so that people look and dress according to their caste, and a safe place for non-military specialists who are none-the-less exulted, as courtiers. These refined fellows had been schooled in exquisite heraldry, deliberately both difficult to put to memory and indispensable. This ensured that lower orders were kept in their place by their social betters. Such rentier-pandering courtiers were adept with feudalism’s manifold titles, privileges, and prerogatives, thus efficiently sorting and deciding intersecting, and potentially conflicting, claims to power and the ear of the lord. This worked well for some thousands of years. It’s a low to no economic growth strategy. But it’s predictable and most importantly, stable for the rulers and the elites who serve them, such as knights, a word originally meaning lowly servant, and of course the courtiers who loll about bespangling the palace. Many people on our planet, especially villagers, are still on this feudal stage or just beginning to climb up into the industrial revolutionary beachhead. Sometimes expats and tourists can’t internalize this zero-sum personal-relationship-based feudal mindset. When such a western luminary is giving economic advice to a feudal fellow, about what price can be allegedly obtained for selling the local handicrafts in the West, for example, I always look for the fallen face of the villager when he inevitable overhears the same tourist giving that economic speech, verbatim, to his neighbor. In Afghanistan I had many conversations with outwardly modern educated Afghans, who lamented the low yields of the family farms they are responsible for. Yet they can’t improve productivity because of the expectation that the surrounding families are entitled to wage-work or sharecrop on their lands. And by age-old tradition, this entitlement is as real as modern workers’ expectation of social services. Job-snatching machinery would create a problem for fulfilling this obligation, which is characteristically feudal and upon which the landholder’s local reputation is based. In nearby Tajikistan, I met several Canadian chicken farmers who claimed to be doing development work. At first I was perplexed: would-be developers end up stepping on toes. The toes are attached to formidable people. Development advisors are inadvertently pushing for the termination of détentes between feudal families whose warlord ancestors obtained peace only by painstakingly divvying the available trade and other opportunities. Good works don’t scale and development is a nasty business with obvious winners and losers. If you are not afraid for your life you are not doing it. In fact it pretty much has to be done by brutal conquerors or locals, given human tendencies to resent outsiders. The mystery of these “bold” developers was not resolved until they told me they were helping the largest and most successful chicken farmers in Tajikistan to be more productive. Aligning oneself with the interests of the established power-brokers is a tried and true method for a foreign advisor to meddle and escape with his life. If it’s so onerous to develop, then how did the British accomplish it? There were no NGOs in Tudor England setting the stage for an economic miracle, thank goodness. While the agricultural revolution took place in a dozen or so initial epicentres and spread from there, the industrial revolution emerged on the British Isles and somewhat more tentatively in adjacent regions of Western Europe. In A Space Odyssey, a classic film by Stanley Kubrick, an orchestral soundtrack played and a symbolic black obelisk would rise from the ground whenever human ancestors took a decisive step toward civilization. For example, when an ape-man grasps a bone to use as a club, the first use of a tool, this obelisk rises with much fanfare. Upon the advent of out first great revolution, the agricultural, we can imagine a black obelisk of Stanley Kubrick’s film rising at a symbolic scene illustrating the decision to cultivate a field of grain and guard it from rivals. But for the second, industrial, the situation is convoluted. We could have had this revolution anytime in the last five thousand years but had to wait until a few centuries ago to finally reach the tally of obligatory “obelisks.” Ironically, no metaphorical black obelisk springs up from mankind learning how to carve black obelisks, or else the ancient Egyptians would have been the masters of all creation. The study of Britain’s Industrial revolution, unlike the agricultural revolution, has benefitted from access to written history. The initial conditions and their evolution are documented in books and figures. Some of the prerequisites are reasonably commonplace: a preponderance of elites with libertarian leanings, satisfied by something like a Magna Carta, and the relative independence of rainfall-agricultural based yeomen as opposed to certain rice farmers dependent on centralized irrigation. Perhaps irrigation-based civilizations were fated to be stuck in collectivist feudal forms. Other prerequisites were geological features, such as access to iron ore and coal, and natural defence, here exemplified by the English channel, since accumulating surpluses attract predators (the industrial revolution should have started in Holland except that the Spanish couldn’t resist the temptation to seize a growing pile of loot.) Others of these prerequisites have been the show-stoppers when lacking elsewhere for five thousand years or more of pre-capitalist civilizations: rule of law; fractional reserve banking; a ban on slavery; a strange belief seldom supported by pre industrial history that the future will be better than the past; a penchant for science; and a peculiar tendency to favor the interests of ship owners over the interests of the rest of the economy. Ideally, the would-be capitalist civilization should spring from a nation of shop keepers, since the merchant class is the first beneficiary. These are well studied by historians of the industrial revolution and I’ll walk through a few of them, because it’s remarkable just how eccentric they are. First, an illustration. The astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted: “Imagine how much more advanced society would be today if women, who comprise half the world’s brain power, were socially and intellectually enfranchised from the beginning of civilization.” He’s a highly intelligent scientist and educator, but not necessarily so well read on economic history. Underpinning his question is an assumption akin to the “ladder of progress” fallacy in evolution; for it doesn’t necessarily follow that we’d be better off. Civilization tends to get trapped in hydraulic despotisms or other sorts of feudalism. From historical records, it’s clear that these forms of stagnation can last five thousand years or more. The way forth from this stagnation is industrialization, which happened only once on an eccentric island with many cultural idiosyncrasies. Among them, a personality trait of libertarianism was needed to kick start the process, or so it seems from the written accounts. Libertarianism is an odd world view, popular among some men but very few women. The reasons for this discrepancy may be rooted in the collective nature of child rearing or a woman’s smaller maximum number of children, but no matter. Suffice it to say that libertarianism is unpopular with the average woman. If women had had full influence and power from the dawn of civilization, it’s highly probable that aficionados of libertarianism would never have been able to muster the political power to help kick-start capitalism, which is, after all, a very strange, counter intuitive, and often cruel system. It could be that a history re-imagined with equal female power would be stuck in despotism or other feudal structure, with no industrialization. While there would be less climate change there would also be less science and technology. This and many other necessary prerequisites for proto-capitalism would be absent from the idealized past envisioned by Dr. Tyson as a social justice friendly royal road to progress. For example, most scholars who specialize in the industrial revolution assert that primogeniture (the idea of the eldest son receiving the bulk of the inheritance) was also an initiating critical factor. Disinherited sons had to be provided for somehow and often ended up being trained to enter the clergy and legal professions. At the core of primogeniture was a gross and somewhat cruel inequality. Younger sons had to suffer their disinheritance since it was the law of the land. But, with this in mind, these same disinherited sons were likely to be sticklers for that law when interpreting whether the elder son had properly sired an heir to take over the estate, and thus whether a younger brother might inherit instead of his nephew. This absolutism regarding the law later proved necessary for a capitalist-friendly evaluation of the wisdom in allowing, or not, innovative disruptions of an industry. What if some inventor, probably himself a younger son and so not an heir, finds some way to obtain funds to ascend into the upper classes through a productivity-magnifying invention. Should this be allowed to proceed? Wise and humane magistrates realize that productivity increases cause riots and starvation among thousands of cottage workers as their livelihoods are destroyed. This is the destruction in creative destruction. Anyone in the feudal past would answer, “good god, no,” and righteously stymie disruption. But British lawyers and clerics often held that the rule of law was more sacred than the peace of the realm and the lives of mere men. Primogeniture was... /episode/index/show/travelwisdompodcast/id/13356482