TRANSCRIPT
So someone asked a question in a comment, and I would like to do my best to address it. They said, “Hey Daniel, I was wondering if you’d make a video about how you plan your trips. For example, budget. How do you find the place you’re going to go in the first place? How do you manage to convince people to stay at their houses?”
So let me give it a shot. How do I plan my trips? Well, first, how do I budget? First, I work and I save money. I save as much money as I possibly can so I don’t have to stress out when I travel. Then what I do is when I travel, I try to spend as little as possible. And not always, because sometimes I spend more. I sometimes do things like, if I see some interesting fruit at a market when I’m traveling that I’ve never seen before, and it’s perhaps more expensive than I would normally buy, I buy it anyways because I feel like this is part of my education. Because that’s how I treat my travels. They are education for me.
Now, how much money do I budget on my trip? It really depends on where I go. Sometimes places are more expensive, sometimes places are less expensive. Sometimes I stay at places where I spend nothing. I’m living with a family, for instance, and they’re like, “No, no, everything’s free.” Well, sometimes still I spend money. Sometimes often, especially if you know they come from a place that has a lot less money than the United States or New York, I’ll give a gift at the end or I’ll give someone a gift in the family or buy something that they’ll really appreciate. But often I give a gift of some money out of respect. And sometimes they don’t want it, sometimes they do, sometimes they really need it. So that’s all part of my budget.
And how do I choose where I’m going to go? Well, for me, it’s usually pretty simple. I choose a place that interests me. I choose somewhere that I really want to go. Also, nowadays, in the era of the pandemic, I choose a place that I can go to. I choose a place that feels safe to me, a place where I can get into. But mostly, I choose a place that really calls to me. Often I want to go to a place that I’ve never been to before because places I’ve never been to before tend to be places where I can learn the most, get the most education out of my experience.
I just recently came back from five months of travel in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and I was able to cross a lot of borders without too much trouble. Yeah, I did have to take COVID tests and the like, but it all worked out.
Now, another question, and this I found an interesting question: How do you convince people to let you stay in their houses? Well, the simplest things, I don’t convince anybody. I don’t try. I actually very rarely even ask. What happens is people ask me. And so I think the question more is, how does it happen that people ask me to stay in their homes? And the simplest answer that I can give is that I’ve learned this because I’ve stayed at hundreds of different people’s houses over the decades now of my travels, is that people tend to invite me home or invite me to do anything if they like me. And that’s a general rule in the world. People invite people when they like them, when they feel a sort of connection with them.
And I will say, as an exception, because I’m a man, I’m speaking as a man when I travel, that I don’t feel like I face much risk ever when people invite me home because I don’t feel like people have nefarious motives. I don’t feel like they’re trying to rob me or rip me off or do something bad to me, you know, sexually harm me in any way. But I know that women I’ve talked to who travel can get invited back a lot, and it’s because yes, the people like them, but maybe they don’t like them in quite the right way. So I don’t feel like I have to be suspicious in that way. I mean, yes, I do have radar and I use my sense of intuition if people, you know, are inviting me to do anything. But what I find is that pretty largely, people are good with me. They’re very respectful. They’re not out to hurt me.
And I’ll give the example: the last five months of my travels, nothing bad happened to me. I went to lots of people’s houses, met lots of people, did a ton of hitchhiking. I don’t know how many cars I got into—cars, trucks, and other things. I even hitchhiked in the back of a horse-drawn cart at one point in far eastern Georgia. Stupid!
[Applause]
And how did I get invited home? By making a connection with people. And I think that’s the real ingredient to enjoying life with other people, beyond travel and all of life. It’s about making friends. And when people feel that sense of friendship, that sense of kinship, that sense of curiosity in me, that sense of, “Oh, I like this person. This is a good person,” they’re much more likely to invite me home.
With one exception, and this is something that I’ve come to realize over time, especially as I’ve traveled in countries where people have a lot less money or less money than they think I have—countries that are poorer than the United States, places where people live often much more humbly—is that sometimes people really like me. They’d love to invite me home, but they’re ashamed of where they live. They think I’ll judge them, so they don’t invite me home. And I feel like we’re having a great connection, and then sometimes people even ask, “Where are you going to sleep tonight?” It’s like getting toward dark, and I’m hitchhiking. They’re like, “I’m not bringing you to a place where there’s necessarily anywhere for you to go where you’re going to sleep.” I could be like, “Well, maybe I’ll sleep in a public place,” or “I will. I don’t have a tent right now, but it looks like it’s decent enough outside. I can sleep outside in the forest.” And sometimes people then will say, “Oh, why didn’t you tell me? You can come to my house.” Or they’d say, “Well, I really don’t know if you’ll like my house. It’s, you know, not very nice. We don’t have great stuff.” But sometimes I’ll get back to their house, and I’d be like, “Oh my God, their house is nicer than where I live in New York.”
But sometimes maybe they don’t have hot water, or they don’t always have electricity all the time, or maybe there is a bathroom outside the house, an outhouse—things that they think I’ll judge them for, or if they feel ashamed of themselves. And sometimes if we have enough time where they get to know me, they can realize that I’m not going to judge them. This is very interesting to me. This is very curious. I can learn a lot from it. And I think this is the whole way that I travel, the whole way that I go into the world when I’m in foreign countries, very, very remote places from my regular life, remote from big cities, from the world that I know, is that I am very, very open—very open.
And that’s part of why before I leave for my trips, I’m extremely anxious. I go through a massive transition right at the end when I leave my little world in New York and go into a very wild, remote world in some other part of the world. It’s a very big transition for me psychologically in terms of what I eat, how I live, how I think, what language I speak. It’s very difficult. But what happens is when I come through that transition—and often it’s a transition that just lasts a couple of days—it’s like boom! Something happens in me where I become, well, very open. Asking people a lot of questions, doing a lot of very active listening, working really hard to learn their language, to learn about their culture, to eat the food that they eat, to not criticize, to really want to know more. And actually, it’s perfect for me to be that way because that’s why I’m there in the first place—to learn, to take in the knowledge about this new world.
This new land, this new culture, this new language, these people. And the people that I connect with, I make it very clear, and I know it for myself. The people that I connect with are the representatives of that world. So I really want to bond with them. Bonding with those people is the way that I get value out of my trip.
The other thing is, when I’m very open, when I’m very open and talking about my life, my history, my world, the world that I came from, my thoughts, my philosophy, people themselves become curious about me. They want to know more. Now, am I open about everything? Do I say, “Yeah, you know, I wrote a book about breaking from your parents,” and you know, I think it’s good if people get away from their toxic parents? I’m sometimes a little bit more circumspect about that. I don’t put out my controversial ideas so quickly, especially in cultures where people don’t agree with this or they’re just dead set against it.
Or sometimes what I find is the culture is dead set against it, but individuals, as they become more comfortable themselves, more willing to be open and vulnerable with me, I find out often that even though they may side with their culture in one way, in another way they actually might agree with me a lot more than is readily apparent in first meeting. So I’m slow sometimes to express some of my more controversial ideas.
But I notice I’m talking a lot about getting invited home and more so than about budgeting for my trip and more so about choosing where I go. I think the reason I’m talking about this is because I find that living with people, really living in their world, that’s the most valuable, often, often, often the most valuable part of my journeys.
I think back of, you know, my journeys over the years and over the decades. Often the things that I remember most are those intimate moments of living with people, living with families, living with couples, living with all sorts of people, multi-generational families. Often, sometimes I’ve lived with three, four generations of people in one house, in one apartment, seeing how they live, seeing how they interact with each other, seeing how they interact with me, watching them watch me, learning their language.
I think of, on my last journey, some of the children I lived with were really insistent that I learned their language. I really learned sometimes some of the most language the most quickly from children who really wanted to interact with me and were like insistent that I learn their language from them. And they became my teachers, and that has happened to me many times over the years.
So what do I say in the midst of all this about traveling, about going around the world and seeing all these new things? The value is that I learn. The value is that I grow. Also, the value is that I share, because I really want the people that I come in contact with to gain as much from the experience of meeting me, of bonding with me, of interacting with me, as I gain from them. That’s really important to me, to be generous, to be generative, to make this a mutually positive experience.
To leave with them saying goodbye and feeling really sad, and me feeling sad, “Oh my god, I have to move on, my time has come to go,” and them wanting me to come back. When that happens, and mostly it does, it’s a real success for me. I feel like I’m not just a traveler who goes and takes. I’m a traveler who, yes, I do take, I take a lot, but I also give. And I try to give as much as they give me or more, and not to give only if they give me first, but to just give to everybody, to give spontaneously, to be generous, to share what I have, to share my food, to share my music, to share my knowledge, insight, wisdom, friendliness, kindness, to share my ear, to listen to people’s life stories.
And what I find through that is that as I travel, I make new friends all over the world, make friends with my friends’ friends, expand my social world. I grow, I learn, and I feel I contribute to the betterment of this planet.
[Music]