So one of the most common questions I've gotten throughout
my career, for lack of a better term, is people asking me how
the hell do you know all this stuff?
I'm not a psychologist, I don't have a PhD, most of my personal
stories involve me being drunk or doing something stupid.
And one of the things that I have not talked about a whole
lot publicly but has been massively influential on me is
the fact that I've spent about 1/4 of my life living abroad
outside of the United States. And one of the interesting
things as well is that a lot of the the classic tropes that
people associate with World Travel, you know, things like,
oh, everybody's so happy and we're all one and people all
want the same thing. Like, yeah, that's kind of true.
But if you actually spend a lot of time in different countries
or cultures outside of your own, there's actually a lot more
counterintuitive takeaways that I've found.
For example, I would actually say that living outside the
United States for 10 years, it actually made me more
conservative in my political views.
It actually convinced me that money is actually more important
than I used to believe. And in some ways, I feel a
little bit more disconnected from the rest of the planet.
So it's in a way I came back with, completely the opposite of
what most people would expect when you go live abroad.
But at the same time, my time abroad made me a lot more
confident, maybe more self assured, maybe more realistic
about the world and the people in it.
And I think it's informed a lot of the philosophy that I've
written about over the past 10 years.
So we're going to take this episode, and we're going to
break down some of the biggest takeaways that I got from my
years living abroad, some crazy personal stories and some
unexpected breakthroughs that happened along the way.
Cool. Let's just start this right at
the top, then. Mark, what's the Mark Manson
kind of travel origin story? When did you leave?
What was your motivation for leaving to where did you go?
Just just kind of frame it for us at the beginning here.
So I read Tim Ferriss's 4 hour work week in 2008 and I was
working a bullshit desk job in a bank and I couldn't wait to get
out. I had built a website, I was
doing some blogging, and when I read that book, Tim talked about
how he automated his online business and moved to Argentina
and learned how to tango. And I was like, fuck yeah, I'm
going to do that except for tango.
I'm just going to drink beer and party and quit my job in the
bank. And it took about a year.
But by the end of 2009, I took off for Argentina and I was 25
years old. I was single, I was broke, but I
also didn't have any debt. So the whole goal was just like
go live in South America, live super cheap, spend all your
money on beer and chasing girls. And that's essentially what I
did for the first year. And Latin America became my home
for about four years. I lived in a number of different
places. I lived in Argentina for about a
year, Colombia about a year, Brazil for about 2 1/2 years.
And for me, Latin America was very intoxicating because
there's an emotiveness or a passion that comes with the
culture that most people recognize as soon as they see
it. I think for the the initial year
or two, I kind of convinced myself that this part of the
world's got it figured out, man. Like it's this is where you got
to be. This is home for me.
This is going to be it forever. And I think this happens a lot
when people travel to another culture that shows them a part
of life or has maybe a value that they didn't grow up with
that they they really love that's really powerful and
impactful for them. They kind of convince themselves
like oh these people get it. Like this is the country that's
got it all figured out. You the same way, when you're
young and you, you like, meet your first crush and you, like,
convince yourself that they are the perfect human, that has no
flaws whatsoever. I I feel like a newbie traveller
does the same thing with cultures, the first culture they
come across that they love, they're just like this is it
never going home. But when you spend a little bit
more time in Latin America, you realize that there is a cost to
the passion and the emotion that people can be can be very
dramatic. They can be surprisingly
selfish. They can be volatile,
unreliable. They show up two hours late for
something that is rather important.
As I spent more time there, I realized that it's it's not that
this country's got it all figured out, it's that all
cultures have a trade off of values.
And I guess this is my first big take away from my time abroad is
that everything is a trade off. Every country makes a trade off
in its systems and its laws. Every culture makes it a trade
off in terms of like what values it prioritizes, what social
expectations it puts on its people, and whatever makes a
place great is also likely the same thing that makes it suck.
So with Latin culture you have this passion and emotion that
cuts both ways. It makes it a very fun place to
be, but it also makes it a little bit unreliable and
unsafe. Some cultures are very family
oriented and what I discovered after a number of years is that
it's the most family oriented cultures that generally suffer
the most corruption. Because people who commit
corruption, whether it's in the government or a business, they
justify it by saying that they're helping their family.
You know, yeah, I'm going to screw over some strangers, but
it's going to help my kid go to college.
So it's it's OK, it's worth it. I noticed that places that lack
crime tend to have insane draconian laws.
I remember I was on a train once to Singapore.
I was coming from Malaysia and we were crossing the border from
Malaysia to Singapore. And the Border Patrol guys got
on the train and we're kind of going through and checking
everybody's passports and they handed you this card And the
card said at the bottom, drug traffickers will be punished by
death. Oh God.
And I was like, holy fuck. Not fucking.
Around. Yeah.
Wow. Where am I going?
Oh my God. And of course you go to
Singapore and it is absolutely incredible.
There's zero crime. You could leave a $2000 laptop
on a table on a cafe and leave for an hour and come back and
it'll still be there. There's just there's there's
zero anxiety or preoccupation about safety whatsoever, but
it's because they'll fucking kill you for having drugs.
So things cut both ways. Everything's a trade off, and
this was particularly helpful for me with my relationship with
my own country, realizing that a lot of the things I don't like
about the United States, it's because a trade off was made to
achieve something that's also great about the United States.
This also, it really reminds me of the conversation you had with
Oliver Berkman around cultures that are present focused versus
future focused. Use the example of Latin
American cultures, Brazil in particular.
They're more present focused, very in the moment, have a lot
of fun like you were just talking about, but things tend
to not get done over a long period of time because they
don't really have much of A future orientation.
Contrast that with like the United States, where we're more
future focus but we tend to be more miserable in the moment.
How do you apply that here? What's that trade off?
Is there a balance to strike? How does that work, do you
think? Yeah, I think that's absolutely
another trade off. There's a great book called, I
think it's called The Culture Code.
I forget who it's by, but they talk about how each culture is
present focused, future focused or past focus.
And so I I think they said that, you know, like the United States
is very future focused. Everything's about the great new
thing that we're going to build and the new company that we're
going to come up with and all the money that we're going to
make. And the side effect of being
future focused is you generate a lot of anxiety because anxiety
is essentially just uncertainty about the future.
It's it's a fear that things are going to go wrong or they're not
going to go as expected. If you want to see people with
like the least amount of self consciousness possible, go to a
beach party in Brazil. It's just the everybody's
dancing, everybody's singing. Nobody is even for a second
worried about what anyone else is going to think or say about
them. And it's because they're they're
so present in the moment. And as somebody who read a lot
of like Eastern spirituality as a teenager, I kind of glorified
that I was like, man, you just got to be present like that.
That solves, that gets rid of all your anxiety.
It solves all your insecurities, you all your preoccupations.
Well, yeah, it does. But you also need to keep a job
and you need to like save for retirement and you know that
bridge over there, somebody should fucking finish building
it. So it's the present focus.
There's a there's a trade off as well.
I believe in In that same book they talk about how Asian
culture is a very past focus. So there's there's this emphasis
on tradition, history, lineage, and how that can be cumbersome
in its own way as well. So again, everything is a trade
off. But there's one thing that's not
a trade off. And I want to talk about
happiness because I think one of the things that I kind of made
my name on was shitting on happiness early in my career
and. That's what drew me to you.
That's what drew me. To you, I know it's it's
absolutely magnetic my my inability to enjoy happiness
whatsoever. No, but seriously, you know, I
think again, one of the classic experiences that a lot of
travellers have, especially people who travel to say a a
poor country for the first time. They'll go to Africa or India or
or some other developing nation and and they'll see that like,
wow, these people are so poor, they have nothing but Oh my God,
they're they're still happy. The kids are playing the the
people are laughing, everybody's getting along fine.
And I think people from wealthy countries, there's a tendency
that we take everything for granted.
We take the fact that we have running water, we take for
granted the fact that electricity is relatively cheap.
We take for granted the fact that I can drive down to the
grocery store and I'm not going to get robbed or mugged or my
car is not going to get stolen. We take for granted and people
from wealthy country see all those things and they think,
wow, you don't need all this stuff to be happy.
We should just get rid of it. We shouldn't worry about it so
much. And I think that's completely
the wrong lesson to take from this experience.
I think the right lesson to take from this experience is, wow,
happiness isn't worth very much. If you can be happy like
drinking slum water and playing in a ditch and like watching
your siblings get typhoid, how valuable is happiness?
Is that really worth a whole lot?
Like, maybe we should downgrade our our estimation of happiness
in in the equation because ultimately people who live in
poverty, they suffer a great amount.
And I think when you travel to these places, you don't really
see that if you're just passing by or spending an afternoon with
people, like once you actually really spend time there and get
to know people, you see that they suffer very, very
intensely. And that the human mind is
actually incredibly resilient. And that resilience shouldn't be
used as a justification to not be grateful for all the amazing
things that we have. In fact, it should just be a
reminder to be fucking grateful for all the things that we have
and put them to good use. You know the research of the
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert.
One of the the the most mind blowing things about some of the
stuff that he worked on is that he found that there seems to be
kind of a set point of happiness and people will, regardless of
what environment you put them in or what happens to them or you
know how rich or poor or safe or insecure they are, they will
tend to gravitate back towards that set point of happiness.
And he even calls this the psychological immune system that
people will start deluding themselves and warping their
perceptions of the world around them to make themselves feel
content with whatever they have. And I don't think that should be
something that we optimize for. Like, to me that's actually
something that's probably holding us back from doing good
things in the world. Like if if, if you're able to
psychologically adjust relatively quickly to poverty
and be content like that's, I don't think we should celebrate
that. Definitely.
You finish writing the subtle arm not giving a fuck.
Kind of on the tail end of your long term travel, right You
were, you were kind of wrapping it up around that time, this
idea of kind of happiness being ubiquitous and maybe not
necessarily easy to achieve, but it's it's achievable in just
about any situation, whereas there's this missing component
of human dignity. How much of that influence, the
subtle art of Nick not giving a fuck?
And I think that's kind of a key theme of yours.
How did that come about and how did that work into your your
writing in your books? So this was hugely influential
and subtle art, you know, so art, pretty much all of chapter
2, and I think Chapter 3 is about how people overrate
happiness. It was funny because at the
time, positive psychology was the big thing back in the
States, there were tons of books coming out about happiness.
There was like, the How of Happiness and Happiness
Hypothesis and Stumbling on Happiness, All these other
books, and there's a million articles being written about how
to be happy. And meanwhile, I'm like, in
sub-Saharan Africa, hanging out with people who, like, don't
know how to read, and they're happy.
I'm just like, what the fuck? This seems to me like the wrong
question here. Like, we should probably be
thinking about, you know, some more important things.
So I was in rural Tanzania, East Africa, and I was staying with
this older German couple. They owned like a bed and
breakfast, really nice, and they took a day and they were like,
giving me kind of a tour of the region.
This was near the base of Kilimanjaro.
There's a town called Moshi. And the interesting thing about
Tanzania is the Germans used to be there.
They built a bunch of railways and stuff, basically took all
the natural resources and then left.
And so there was still all these railroads that kind of
crisscross the country, but nobody uses them anymore.
This guy took me to this old train station and it had closed
down and I think the mid 90s and the train station, it was just
basically kind of this like little ghost train station in
the middle of nowhere. So we're like walking around
looking at everything. You know, the tracks are
overgrown with grass. I'm like, OK, this is pretty
cool. And then the guy looks at me and
he's like, you want to see something crazy?
I'm like, yeah, sure. He says, look in the windows.
So I walk over to the window and I peek in and everything is
still there. All the desks, the papers, the
pens, the chairs, the tables, pencils, everything, It's all
still there, like left in the exact same spot that the Germans
left it when they left the country.
And he told me he's like, that's been sitting there like that for
20 years. And I looked at him and I was
like, why didn't people take it like there's like a good table
in there, right? Like take that home, use that
shit. And he looked at me and he said,
why do they need a table? What are they going to write on?
He said that the people who live around that train station are
their economy is so underdeveloped that they they
see a table and a chair and they don't know why they would use
it. They can't read, they can't
write. They cook on the floor.
Why do you need a table? Why do you need a pen?
So they they left it there for 20 years.
Blew my fucking mind. So that stuff like that.
I've had a few stories like that over the years that were
incredibly impactful and just made me realize like it's
happiness is a state of mind. It's a choice.
It's choosing certain perceptions over others.
You can be happy in any situation you want.
You can be unhappy in any situation you want.
Ideally you want to choose happiness more often than
unhappiness, but I I don't necessarily think you should
always choose happiness, but that's another conversation.
The point is, is that we should be focusing on more important
things than just feeling good. I had that thought in the back
of my mind especially. I started traveling just a few
years after you did and kind of came across the same thing.
And the thought occurred to me, and it's been in the back of my
mind ever since. It was like, is happiness even
the point? That is a a loop in my head that
comes up every now and then. And I joked about it that, you
know, you you were the happiness grumpy guy, right?
And and I was attracted to that. But seriously, I was like, oh
wait, no, he's he's probably on to something here.
And it's not that happiness isn't important, it's just that
it doesn't like you just said it doesn't always have to be the
main thing. Yeah.
There's something very, I think, self indulgent and self
defeating about obsessing over one's happiness.
I think if you look at human history, and if you look at
generally healthy people with good lives, they regularly
sacrifice some of their own happiness for some greater cause
or purpose, and I don't think that's a coincidence.
Not for sure. Yeah.
How much of this mark when you were traveling, how much were
you traveling alone versus with other people?
I would say probably 5050. Some friends would come out with
me for brief periods. Obviously you meet people on the
road sometimes and you, you travel a little bit with them.
I would say the first three years I did most of it myself
solo. And I have to say that solo
travel may be one of the most powerful personal development
tools that I've ever come across in my life.
The effect that it had on my confidence, self esteem, just
ability to rely on yourself, I think it it's so, so underrated
and so impactful. I think there's a little bit of
like an altitude training effect that kind of happens.
One of my worst travel experiences that I ever had, I
was in rural India. So in India, you can actually go
find the tree that the Buddha sat under.
Supposedly it's a place called Bodhgaya.
There's like, there's a Little River, It's a town of maybe 1000
people. It's out in the middle of
nowhere and then there's this big temple and a bunch of monks
hang out there and sit under the same tree that the Buddha
supposedly sat under. So anyway, I flew out there and
I'm out in the middle of nowhere and there's all sorts of like
tourist scams and charlatans and people trying to sell you
things. I got really, really bad food
poisoning, and it was maybe the worst place to possibly get
terribly sick because there's absolutely no infrastructure.
There's not really any clean water anywhere.
It's a tiny town, so everything closes at night.
And then all the locals that I tried to talk to, to go to a
doctor, they they didn't take me to a doctor.
They just like took me to their friend down the street and then
tried to charge me a bunch of rupees.
And so I'm like vomiting everywhere.
I'm, I'm, I'm a mess. So I go back to my, my little
bungalow that I'm staying in. And as I'm laying there in the
middle of the night, I'm like having cold sweats, just like
everything hurts, Vomiting, diarrhea, the whole works.
And then in the middle of the night, the whole room became
infested with some sort of bug. I still don't know what it is,
but it was like these like giant mosquito things, or maybe 1000
of them, like crawled in through the crack in the ceiling, start
buzzing around the room. I'm sitting there.
I'm like, head is throbbing. I'm horribly dehydrated.
I have no access to clean water. The bathroom's a mess.
One of the most difficult and painful nights of my life
somehow survived through it, crawled my way to a a market the
next day, bought a bunch of bottled water, found a little
bit of medicine, nursed myself back to health over the course
of three days. When you go through that and you
go home, like having an awkward conversation with your parents
is not a big deal anymore. It's not something you worry
about, you know, like feeling a little hungover after New Year's
and not feeling like going to brunch with your friend doesn't
really stop you after that. It's it's it's not a big deal.
So that's an extreme example, but I would just say that the
general experience of like being in a completely strange
environment, regularly embarrassing yourself socially,
like trying to speak to people who don't speak your language,
or trying to speak a language that people don't understand you
and screwing it up over and over again.
You know any sorts of like insecurities around, like what
people think about you, or or making a fool of yourself or
embarrassing yourself, like all that shit goes out the window
pretty quickly. So I just found that every time
I came back to the States during this period.
It felt like coming down from training at 12,000 feet and then
like running a mile at sea level.
It was. Everything felt easy.
Yeah, for sure. I think there's also just a
larger point to about travel and the lessons you learn from it.
A lot of times we have these motivations and grand
expectations of travel and that they're going to change us.
We're going to find ourselves whatever it is, and usually what
you end up doing is facing a lot of the issues that you.
Already have, right? It is a uncomfortable but very
useful thing about travelling that you remove all of the other
variables from your life. So if your life's not
particularly going the way that you hoped it would, you pack up
and take off the Bali for a month or something and you're
still miserable, Well, guess what?
The only thing that Bali and your house have in common is
you. So obviously there's some shit
that you need to start dealing with.
Travel can be an effective way of of doing that.
It allows you to see what remains constant when you leave
an environment and what changes. You know, there's there's
another thing about solo travel as well and why it's so
effective. And this is going to be a little
bit of a weird analogy. And it's also, it's also going
to tie into the sponsor of this video.
But hear me out because I think this is important.
I think solo travel is very therapeutic in an interesting
way because I think a big role of therapy or like why therapy
works is because you need to get yourself into an environment
where you remove other variables from your life.
You remove a lot of the social pressures, social expectations,
various obligations that you feel around your community and
get into a isolated space where there's nothing pulling on you.
And you have to have that isolated space to actually
understand what you care about and what you value and
essentially like what is actually true about yourself and
your life. And I have found that when
travelling on my own is a very effective way to do that,
because when you're off in the middle of Spain by yourself,
nobody cares what you say or do. And so you have to really
evaluate what you actually want to say or do.
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And I mean big UPS on therapy. Everybody should do it, just
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So that experience you had in in India then, was that a common
experience where people were kind of always giving you the
run around, Did you experience that a lot, 75 countries, that's
a lot of opportunities for people to screw you over.
Was that common in your experience?
No, no, no, no. I mean some places you get it
more than others. Some places unfortunately are a
little bit known for it. I mean, every place has its
problems, right? So it's whether it's safety,
people ripping you off, things being being price gouged, you
know, like every place is going to have its problems.
But generally speaking, like 99% of the people you meet around
the world are really good people.
And actually this is, this is a big take away.
I think it's if you haven't been exposed to the wider world, it's
easy to be very pessimistic and assume the worst about people.
But when you actually get out there and experience people in
all these different places, you realize that most people are
really good. I think this is particularly
important if you have particularly strong political
views about certain countries or certain regions of the world.
Because when you actually go there and hang out with the
people, you realize that everybody there is kind of cool
and the system or the government that is being obnoxious or
murderous. And your government doesn't like
them or your political party doesn't like them, but the other
political party does Like, you know it.
Like, none of that shit matters. If you actually go there and
hang out with the people, you realize that they're incredibly
hospitable. You know, I I saw a study a few
years ago, it was they were actually studying, I think,
Internet communities. And what they found was that it
only takes like 3 to 5% of people in any given community to
be assholes, to essentially ruin that entire community.
So you can have 100 people on an Internet forum and 97 of them
are nice, they get along, they're respectful to each
other. But if you just have three
people who try to stir up shit, then it's going to spoil the
entire forum for everybody. And I think this is particularly
profound because negative behaviour has an asymmetric
effect on social interactions and social experiences.
It also has an asymmetric effect on groups or people's perception
of other people. So when I saw this study, for me
it was really, really important because I think it it explained
a lot of the incongruence that I experienced in a lot of the
countries that I visited. I personally believe that most
cultures and societies develop systems to try to manage those
3% of assholes as best as possible.
Some countries just lock them all up.
Some countries develop really strict social norms.
Some countries develop legal systems and strong government
bureaucracies. I think religions were the
ancient way of dealing with the 3% of assholes who were
infecting society. So when you go to each country
or each place, every place has its own systems, both political,
legal and cultural, that to try to enforce or manage the 3% of
the antagonistic people in that in that society.
So unfortunately, some systems do a better job than others of
managing that 3%. In some places, the 3% managed
to take control of the entire system.
So you can go somewhere like Venezuela, where the entire
system is completely corrupt and is screwing over 90% of the
population, but 90% of the population can still be
absolutely lovely people. So you you just quickly learn
that there's a really distinct separation between the systems
and the people. The same way, I am not always
thrilled with the US government and what the US government does,
but I'm still proud to be an American.
Most Russians are not always thrilled with what the Russian
government or the OR what Putin does, but they can still be
proud to be Russian. Like, there's nuance to it.
The human mind wants to equate the two things with each other.
They want to equate the system with the people or the
individuals in the society. And it just, it doesn't work
that way. And so it's important to try to
keep this in mind, especially in situations that are really
politically contentious or upsetting.
It's so easy to just look at the system and then blame all the
people for it without realizing that in many ways the system
might be ineffectively working for the people that are part of
it. Does that make sense?
Yeah, I think it does. What what kind of systems do you
think are best for controlling those, the the three to 5% of
the assholes? Is it like a self correcting
system that's maybe built in or is there some other mechanism
you see strong institutions maybe?
Or what do you think it is? Well, I'm going to be biased
when I answer this, obviously because I'm an American.
I'll caveat everything I'm about to say by by noting that they're
not necessarily the best. I I think of them as the least
worst. Let's just put it that way.
I think ultimately some sort of free market system is undeniably
necessary to let a society thrive.
I think democracy is also pretty fundamental to to managing the
population as best as possible. I think a really strong legal
system based on both enforcement and trust.
And I I guess those two things kind of go together like you
can't really build trust in a legal system if there's not good
enforcement and you can't really enforce very well if there's not
trust. I personally think, and again
this is bias because of my cultural background, but I think
that individualistic cultural values produce better results on
average than other cultural values.
Again, obviously there's a trade off, but I do think ultimately
prosperity is good, economic growth is good, innovation is
good. I think working is good and
being rewarded for that work is also good.
I I just think these are fundamental extensions of human
psychology and the places I've been in the world that like
really impressed me or I feel like have figured out something
that the US has not. They're generally not doing
something completely different. It's just that they have found
that they have refined in an optimized.
These principles may be better than the US has.
The the US is kind of a clunky mess to be honest in terms of
its systems. Like some of some of the systems
here work really well and some of them are just a fucking
dumpster fire. So there are definitely
countries in the world that have taken the principles that the US
is based on and I think done it better than we have.
I think one thing in the US is that I I heard it put this way
recently. We have a relatively weak
society in terms of just kind of like social cohesion and all of
that, or a multicultural society and all that.
But we have very strong institutions too and I think
that goes back to the trust thing you were talking about,
so. Yeah, yeah.
I think our legal system is really strong.
And OK so talk about examples of how living abroad will change
your political views man. Police fucking matter.
It's go spend a couple years in a country that don't have an
effective police force you you will fucking notice really fast
and it's strong. Policing is really really
important and I think that's that is maybe a an undersold
policy in the US lately. I guess this gets into the the
last and and maybe spiciest take that I have of of the time
abroad and that is that I think some cultures and systems
produce better outcomes than others.
I think that's undeniable. And when I was young, I was a
bleeding heart lefty. I was very like, you know
everybody's different and special and everybody's beliefs
should be honored and there's no right or better way.
And yeah, you spend 10 years in 50 different countries and you
start to notice there are better ways than others.
And it it's it's undeniable at a certain point if you value
minimizing human suffering and if you value prosperity and
health and well, mental, well-being like some systems
work better than others. I think it's really important to
not make that a taboo statement and and to be able to talk about
the systems in, in clear terms without, you know coming across
as judgmental or bigoted. To put it another way, I I think
some belief systems or value systems protect the 97% from the
3% of shitheads better than others, and that's an
uncomfortable conclusion to come to.
You can contrast that I I think one of the reasons it's kind of
become taboo in some circles at least, is this idea of cultural
relativism, right where the idea is that we should, you know,
honor and respect all cultures and understand them without
judgement. I'm OK with that first part all
the way up to the part about without judgement, because if it
is producing these outcomes that are terrible for the vast
majority of people in a society, maybe we should be a little more
judgmental. I think that's the thing with
our generation, maybe a little bit that we're like, I don't
want to judge, you know, we're we're very much that.
Maybe we should be a little more judgmental about some of these
things. Well, and this comes back to the
the fragility or needing to feel good all the time.
It's like, oh, don't judge me. Well, it's if you have a stupid
idea, yeah, I'm going to judge you.
I think you can acknowledge and honor a culture's belief system
without necessarily condoning it.
I'll give you an example. So a good friend of mine worked
in the NGO world. I'm not going to say where she
worked, but it was a poor country and she worked with an
organization that built schools in the rural rural parts of this
country and she was very passionate about it.
She worked her ass off one of the smartest people I've known
and she built some schools in a in a couple villages.
And she did this for about 5 years.
And then one day she just got fed up, quit and took like a
cushy corporate consultancy job or something like complete 180
like just went completely the other direction.
And I remember talking to her and being kind of shocked and
talking to her and asking why. And she said that she built five
schools and in this country and she said that she's very proud
of the schools, but none of them were really doing anything.
When I asked her why, she said that there were two reasons
fundamentally, she said the first one was, was that during
harvest season most of the students couldn't come every day
because they had to help their parents harvest the the crops on
the on the local farms. Fair enough.
The second reason is, she said that once the girls started
hitting puberty, the teachers started dating them and getting
them pregnant. And she said that her NGO
intervenes maybe a a dozen times to try to stop this.
They talked to village elders, they talked to mayors, they
talked to government officials, they talked to the girl's
parents. And she said nobody saw it as a
bad thing. Everybody was like, Oh, well,
he's the teacher, That's what happens.
And she said she got so fed up with it that she just left.
And I don't know what you do with that.
And I'm I I'm not. Maybe I'm not open minded
enough, but call me crazy, I don't think that's a good thing.
So if you do travel far and wide enough, you know it's easy.
If you're an American or European and you're sitting in
some beautiful resort in Thailand or something, you know,
eating pad Thai and sipping fruity drinks, it's easy to be
like, man, this culture is great.
But if you travel far and wide enough and get into the nitty
gritty and get into the the underbelly of places, you start
to see things that really force you to stand on one side of the
line or the other. Like, there's not really
ambiguity around it, or at least there shouldn't be.
And I think once you have enough of those experiences, it teaches
you something about yourself. Like again, when I was young, I
was like man, everybody's great. We should all just accept each
other, listen to each other, love each other.
You know all that the typical naive fucking 20 year old
bullshit. When you see enough of this
stuff you realize like oh wait, I do have core values.
I do have things that I will not negotiate.
And yeah I'm there's not really anything you can say to change
my mind. And so that that's ultimately
where I landed in it and I guess it fundamentally changed my
perspective on the world and and many things in it.
All that said, you know the starry eyed, young, naive,
hippie thing of like, you know, everybody's the same.
Everybody just wants the same thing.
Like, that is true everywhere you go.
People generally care about the same things, You know, they
worry about their family, they worry about money, they think
about food. They tell the same jokes, They
have the same conversations like it.
It is. Humans are strikingly similar
most of the time, wherever they go.
But Freud had this great term, he called it the narcissism of
the slight difference, and I think it's the slight
differences between people and cultures where wars are fought
and civilizations collide. And I think that's also just a
fact of human nature. It's also something that we all
have in common is that we we overlook the massive amounts of
commonality that we have and we focus and fight over the slight
differences because ultimately those slight differences are the
things that we won't compromise on.
I do strongly believe everyone should solo travel at some
point, and when you do it, try to make it extended and try to
do it in as much of A grassroots way as possible.
Like save the resorts and stuff for when you're on vacation or
your honeymoon or something. Like really try to ingratiate
yourself into a culture and a group of people as much as
possible. Do the touristy stuff, but batch
it in a couple days. Like if I go to a country, say
for 10 days, I'll try to like batch all the touristy stuff in
the first two or three and then have the back seven to explore.
Try local things, meet local people, do some interesting kind
of spontaneous stuff. I think it's really important to
bake into your travel ways to interact with locals in some
way, whether that's finding groups, language exchanges,
activities, joining networks. Like back when I was travelling
there was a thing called couch surfing.
I don't know if it's still a thing anymore, but you could
basically any major city or country in the world.
You could jump on couch surfing and find a bunch of local people
who are interested in meeting foreigners, try to plan ways for
you to integrate a little bit and and experience the culture
from the from the inside. Always try the food.
Like, I don't care if you're a picky eater, try the fucking
food. Because it's not just about the
food. It's not just about, like
discovering new food. The food teaches you a lot of
stuff, like it teaches you about the geography, about the
history. You also find a lot of
similarities between food. There are parts of the world
where people have been fighting wars for hundreds of years and
they eat the exact same food, and it's really interesting to
to think about why that is. And then finally the a rule I
have for myself is anywhere I go, I try to read at least one
book about that place either before or while I'm there.
So I recently went to Korea and I I read a bunch about Korea
while I was there and it was super interesting.
So just some ways to enrich your travel a little bit.
I think that's all the takeaways I got.
One I would throw in is like just fucking go for it.
Just fucking go for it. I waited for far too long to do
it and it's because I didn't have any money and I finally
just said fuck it and went. I think I saved up like $2000.
I spent 800 of that on a plane ticket at 1200 bucks and I I
just went to Latin America and just fucking did it.
I came home with $200 in my name, but still, I'm still here,
so you know. 100% Dude in In a lot of ways, the broke travel is
is more stimulating and funny. Got to get creative.
Yeah, yeah, I anybody under 30, if you're on the fence, just
fucking go. Just do it.
Find a way to do it. Don't think about it too much.
It's one of the best things you'll do.
That's it for this episode. Hopefully you guys got something
out of it? Check out the
newslettermarkmanson.net/newsletter. I send it out every Monday with
different life advice and tips and Drew and I will be back next
week with another episode, so stay frosty.