229 episodes

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?

Travel Wisdom Podcast -travel and learn languages for success and money travelwisdompodcast@gmail.com (Ladan Jiracek)

    • Society & Culture
    • 4.9 • 56 Ratings

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

    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 Room Steals 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
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    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 Room Steals?"
    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

    • 30 min
    Hiking meditation and travelling all of Africa with Francis Tapon

    Hiking meditation and travelling all of Africa with Francis Tapon

    Francis Tapon rejected his normal Harvard Business school life and instead chose to hike the Appalachian trail and travel in Africa for 5 years. He hosts the Wander Learn podcast where he talks about the benefits of being a wanderer.
    Top 3 Takeaways:
    "Sometimes I think the best way to learn is just to forego college and then just go travel the world and spend a few years going traveling around. This probably costs you even less than college." "That is a more important question than how to make a billion dollars is what you do once you have a billion dollars, because once you have a billion dollars, how you spend your time is extremely telling it shows whatever you're spending your time at that point is your passion is what you really want to do." "The protest during the Occupy Wall Street and people are saying like "the top 1%, the top 1%, top 1%." And I felt like walking into that crowd and just saying "You guys are all in the top 1%, every single one of you protesters, because compared to most of this planet, which lives in India, China, Asia, and certainly Africa, you guys are way wealthier than most people out there."" 0:45 "Do you want to do a brief synopsis of all the travel you've done and then why you think why you like this name wander learn?"
    7:45 "Have you continued doing robotic vision stuff or have you done only the travel stuff?"
    13:45 "So you haven't grown tired of this?"
    16:15 "Let's talk about Wander Learn"
    21:45 "Sounds like you like hiking"
    23:45 "So what's the point of walking so much for weeks and months? What do you get out of it?"
    30:30 "How about you for the meditative hiking stuff? Does time go by quickly?"
    38:15 " Is there anything that you wanted to talk about that you wanted to cover?"

    • 40 min
    Planning your perfect 9 day trip with David Axelrod

    Planning your perfect 9 day trip with David Axelrod

    David Axelrod is the author Get Away: Design Your Ideal Trip, Travel with Ease and Reclaim your Freedom about the best way to plan a trip. David has been to over 50 countries and has written other books about the wild situations he found himself in.
    Top 3 Takeaways:
    "They, are chasing their whole itinerary and feeling like they're never really in control of it. I've heard that story way too many times. And I think what it comes down to is insufficient planning." "Planning enables spontaneity. I think that when you have a plan that's an airtight plan you've earned the freedom to deviate from that plan without suffering"
    "Even more important than the number of companions is that you are very clear with the person you're traveling with about your goals and their goals, and trying to align as much as possible." 2:00 Tell us a little bit about your story
    5:00 "What are some step-by-step what's the step by step walkthrough for a trip?"
    7:00 "Did you see a lot of people not follow these guidelines or did you see a lot of people make a lot of mistakes or what's the motivation behind this?"
    10:15 "So how do you balance that, the planning and the not planning the fun versus structures?"
    12:30 " So you're not saying as far as go to as far as booking hotels or booking hostels?"
    14:30 "What's your kind of sweet spot. What do you recommend for going between cities?"
    17:00 "In terms of companions, what do you suggest for people?"
    19:30 "You've done a lot of travel writing and travel photography too. Did you want to talk a little bit about this?"
    23:30 " You're starting consulting doing this travel planning?"
    25:00 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you want to mention?"
    https://www.davidaxelrod.co/ 

    • 26 min
    Kathleen Peddicord on the best places to retire overseas

    Kathleen Peddicord on the best places to retire overseas

    Kathleen Peddicord wrote a book "How to Retire Overseas" where she talks about some of the research going into the best places to spend your twilight years.
    Top 3 Takeaways:
    "The average social security check right now for an American is about $1,500 a month. And that's enough budget to live well in a lot of places."
    "The best place to retire overseas in 2022 is a town called Comporta on the coast of Portugal, about an hour and a half outside Lisbon" The cost of healthcare can be 5-10x cheaper in other countries with even higher quality 1:00 "Do you want to introduce yourself a little bit?"
    2:45 "How are you covering retirement for the last 37 years? Have you been retired for the last 37 years?"
    4:30 "What's maybe the top five on the retirement index?"
    9:30 "This retirement index how focused is it on retirement? And how transferrable is it to other things?"
    11:30 Do people get bored of retirement or can they move to another place?
    15:30 "Do you find that people that have traveled before or have lived abroad maybe that are maybe more open to this kind of thing?"
    19:30 How does the healthcare cost and quality compare with the US?
    25:30 "If people are interested in living abroad retiring overseas, how do they do that?"
    28:15 "How has COVID changed everything? How has it changed the index, for example, is it still possible to go out? How does it work?"
     

    • 30 min
    Mike Bown’s Essay “Skins of Ill-Shaped Fishes” Details How Human Society and Its Core Values Have Evolved

    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 “Skins of Ill-Shaped Fishes”, 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 ne

    • 49 min
    Jake Steiner Discusses Myopia and How Habit Changes Rather than Lenses Are the Best Way to Overcome It

    Jake Steiner Discusses Myopia and How Habit Changes Rather than Lenses Are the Best Way to Overcome It

    Jake Steiner used to have severe myopia (shortsightedness) and wore glasses with a very extreme refractive power. However, he has overcome his myopia on his own, and he now teaches others how to do so as well. In this episode, he talks about how lenses can actually worsen myopia over time, and how to restore your eyes’ functionality by changing habits and lifestyle choices.
    Top three takeaways:
    The eye will adjust its axial length based on what it sees in the environment. Placing a lens in front of the eye will cause the eye to adjust and change its axial length, which will alter its focal length. In this sense, minus lenses can potentially induce myopia by causing the eye to elongate more and more. Myopia is not a medical condition, but a refractive state. The eyeball elongates because there is a lens in front of it. People who have myopia have healthy eyes whose axial length has the ability to shorten back to its normal length. The word shortsighted is used both literally and metaphorically, and when used metaphorically, it can refer to the things that can make us literally shortsighted. Due to the culture of instant gratification and quick fixes, it is easier to go out and buy a corrective lens than it is to reduce screen time and change bad habits that strain your eyes.

    • 40 min

Customer Reviews

4.9 out of 5
56 Ratings

56 Ratings

Jufish Bong ,

Great variety of travel and international content

Ladan,
Thank you for putting together such consistently great content for your listeners. I look forward to hearing more as you keep producing them.

starfishblu ,

Wisdom and Knowledge on travel and life!

Thank you for sharing your passion, wisdom, knowledge on travel, language and life.

Nicktasler ,

Fascinating series

Fascinating series on the wonders of travel, and learnings from the lives of the everyday travelers who show us how to push our boundaries and stretch our potential.

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