5 Life-Changing Lessons From Visiting 75 Countries

If you’ve ever been stuck working some BS desk job thinking there’s got to be more to life, then you were right. There’s travel. High-quality, intentional travel is one of the most transformational experiences a person can have. Without a doubt, my 10 years living abroad made me more confident, more self-assured, and ultimately more educated about the world and the people in it. It also informed a lot of the philosophy that I've written about over the past 10 years—the counterintuitive approach that so many people have come to love. This episode dives into the key takeaways I got from my years of traveling. I can’t be sure, but I think they might inspire you as much as they have me. Enjoy. CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:42 How it all began 00:04:18 Lesson #1: Everything is a trade-off 00:08:48 Lesson #2: Happiness is cheap, dignity is expensive 00:16:52 Lesson #3: Solo travel is great for personal development 00:22:07 Lesson #4: Most people are good 00:28:27 Lesson #5: Some cultures produce better outcomes than others 00:36:32 Mark’s travel tips ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁩⁠⁠⁠ ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://bit.ly/4w46FMH⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  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 a quarter of my life living abroad, outside of the United States. And one of the interesting things as well is that a lot of 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

• 0:44Mark Manson?

  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, made me more self-assured, made me 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,

• 1:28Mark Manson?

  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.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Cool. Well, 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 kind of frame it for us at the beginning here.

• 1:53Mark Manson?

  So I read Tim Ferriss's Four 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 gonna do that. Except for Tango, I'm just gonna drink beer and party. And I 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

• 2:36Mark Manson?

  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 two and a half 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 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 gotta be. This is home for me. This is gonna 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

• 3:21Mark Manson?

  they didn't grow up with, that 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 feel like a newbie traveler 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's a cost to the passion and the emotion that people can be, can be very dramatic. They can be surprisingly selfish. They can be...

• 4:04Mark Manson?

  Uh, 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 takeaway 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.

• 4:45Mark Manson?

  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, uh, but it's going to help my kid go to college. So it's, it's okay. It's worth it. I noticed that places that lack crime tend to have insane draconian laws.

• 5:30Mark Manson?

  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, uh, 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. 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 is zero crime. You could leave a $2,000 laptop on a table in a cafe and leave for an hour and come back and it'll still be there. There's just, there's,

• 6:11Mark Manson?

  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.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  This also, it really reminds me of the conversation you had with Oliver Berkman around cultures that are present-focused versus future-focused. You used 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-focused, 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?

• 7:11Mark Manson?

  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-focused. And so 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 gonna build and the new company that we're gonna come up with and all the money that we're gonna 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 gonna go wrong or they're not gonna go as expected. If you wanna see people with like, the least amount of self-consciousness possible, go to a beach party in Brazil. It's just, everybody's dancing, everybody's

• 7:53Mark Manson?

  singing. Nobody is even for a second worried about what anyone else is gonna think or say about them. And it's because 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 gotta be present like that. That solves, that gets rid of all your anxiety. It solves all your insecurities, 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 cultures are very past focused.

• 8:33Mark Manson?

  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 you.

• 9:04Mark Manson?

  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 travelers have, especially people who travel to say 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.

• 9:47Mark Manson?

  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 countries 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?

• 10:29Mark Manson?

  Like, maybe we should downgrade our, our estimation of happiness in the equation. Cause 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.

• 11:12Mark Manson?

  You know, the research of the Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, one of 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 diluting 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.

• 11:53Mark Manson?

  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.

• 12:07Mark Manson?

  And be content like that's, I don't think we should celebrate that.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Definitely. You finished writing the subtle art of 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 influenced the subtle art of 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 and your books?

• 12:43Mark Manson?

  So this was hugely influential on subtle art, you know, subtle art, pretty much all of chapter two, and I think chapter three 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 are 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.

• 13:24Mark Manson?

  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 was 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 were still all these railroads that kind of crisscrossed the country, but nobody uses them anymore. This guy took me to this old train station and it had closed down in, I think the mid 90s. And the train station 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.

• 14:09Mark Manson?

  I'm like, okay, 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 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.

• 14:52Mark Manson?

  And he looked at me and he said, why do they need a table? What are they gonna 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 uh, 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.

• 15:35Mark Manson?

  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. Uh, but that's another conversation. The point is, is that we should be focusing on more important things than just feeling good.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  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 uh, 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.

• 16:29Mark Manson?

  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.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  No, for sure. Yeah. How much of this, Mark, when you were traveling, how much were you traveling alone versus with other people?

• 16:56Mark Manson?

  I would say probably 50/50. 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's 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.

• 17:37Mark Manson?

  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 1,000 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. 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.

• 18:19Mark Manson?

  And then all the locals that I tried to talk to, to go to a doctor, 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 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.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 18:54Mark Manson?

  These like giant mosquito things, or maybe a thousand 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 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.

• 19:39Mark Manson?

  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, 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.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. I think there's also just a larger point to, um, 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?

• 20:41Mark Manson?

  It is a uncomfortable but very useful thing about travel in 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 to 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 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 gonna be a little bit of a weird analogy. And it's also, it's also gonna tie into the sponsor of this video, but hear me out. Cause I think this is important.

• 21:25Mark Manson?

  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 traveling on my own is a very effective way to do that.

• 22:09Mark Manson?

  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. And I think in the context of therapy, it's getting into a safe, closed, confidential environment that you are able to communicate with an intelligent person who's listening to you, what you actually think and feel about yourself. And they will actually listen and respond accordingly. Which brings me to the, to the sponsor, which is BetterHelp. BetterHelp is a remote therapy platform, which coincidentally, you could use BetterHelp while you travel by yourself. I never thought about that before, but you can. BetterHelp is awesome because you can communicate with your therapist however you prefer. You can text them, you can do phone calls with them, you could do Zoom chats with them.

• 22:54Mark Manson?

  You can do it from anywhere in the world. It's super convenient, can switch therapists if you decide you hate your first one. But yeah, it's just really affordable and convenient. So check out the link below in the description. It's 10% off the first month. And I mean, big ups on therapy. Everybody should do it. Just like everybody should travel.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Okay, so that experience you had in in India, then was that a common experience where people were kind of always giving you the runaround? Did you experience that a lot? Seventy five countries? That's a lot of opportunities for people to screw you over. Was that common in your experience?

• 23:28Mark Manson?

  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 gonna 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 takeaway. 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

• 24:10Mark Manson?

  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, 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 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, three to 5% of people

• 24:52Mark Manson?

  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 gonna spoil the entire forum for everybody. And I think this is particularly profound because Negative behavior 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 explained a lot of the incongruence that I experienced in a lot of the countries that I visited.

• 25:33Mark Manson?

  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.

• 26:17Mark Manson?

  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 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 what Putin does, but they can still be proud to be Russian. Like, there's nuance to it.

• 27:02Mark Manson?

  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?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it does. What kind of systems do you think are best for controlling those, 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?

• 27:50Mark Manson?

  Well, I'm gonna be biased when I answer this, obviously, because I'm an American. I'll caveat everything I'm about to say by noting that they're not necessarily the best. 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 managing the population as best as possible. I think a really strong legal system based on both enforcement and trust, and 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.

• 28:32Mark Manson?

  I personally think, and again, this is biased 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 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.

• 29:13Mark Manson?

  It's just that they have found, that they have refined and optimized these principles maybe better than the US has. The US is kind of a clunky mess, to be honest, in terms of its systems. Like, 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.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  I think one thing in the US is that 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. We're 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.

• 29:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I think our legal system is really strong. And, okay, so talk about examples of how living abroad will change your political views. Man, police fucking matter.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:07Mark Manson?

  It's go spend a couple of 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 last 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 belief should be honored.

• 30:50Mark Manson?

  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's, it's undeniable at a certain point. If you value minimizing human suffering and if you value prosperity and health and well, mental wellbeing, 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 think some belief systems or value systems protect the 97% from the 3% of shitheads better than others.

• 31:34Mark Manson?

  And that's an uncomfortable conclusion to come to.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  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 judgment. I'm okay with that first part, although up to the part about without judgment. 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 a thing with our generation, maybe a little bit that we're like, I don't want to judge, you know, we're very much

• 32:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Maybe we should be a little more judgmental about some of these things.

• 32:13Mark Manson?

  Well, and this comes back to 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 gonna 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 and a couple villages. And she did this for about five years. And then one day she just got fed up,

• 32:57Mark Manson?

  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 crops on the local farms. Fair enough. The second reason is she said that once the girls started hitting puberty,

• 33:42Mark Manson?

  The teachers started dating them and getting them pregnant. And she said that her NGO intervenes maybe 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.

• 34:24Mark Manson?

  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, um, 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.

• 35:07Mark Manson?

  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

• 35:50Mark Manson?

  about food, they tell the same jokes, they have the same conversations. Like, 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

• 36:35Mark Manson?

  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

• 37:16Mark Manson?

  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 traveling, there was a thing called couch surfing, and 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.

• 37:59Mark Manson?

  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 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 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.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  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 $2,000. I spent 800 of that on a plane ticket. I had 1,200 bucks and I just went to Latin America and just fucking did it. I came home with $200 in my name, but I'm still here. So, you know.

• 39:01Mark Manson?

  100%, dude. In a lot of ways, broke travel is more stimulating and fun.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Gotta get creative.

• 39:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah. 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.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 39:19Mark Manson?

  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 newsletter, markmanson.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.