Make Money Online

So, Kai, you and my way of life is being threatened. Good. It’s being threatened. It’s not good. Oh, it’s actually bad. Yes, thank you. Okay, that’s the word I was hoping for. It was bad. It’s being threatened by a credit card. I’ve never had that happen to me before because I usually don’t carry a balance. I pay off my credit cards on time, but this is a different kind of threaten. It’s being threatened by something called the Chase Sapphire Reserve. Have you ever heard of this?

Yo. Do you own a Chase Sapphire Reserve? I do. Yo, fuck the Chase Sapphire Reserve. I was at Gaslight the other day, which is one of my coffee shops. And I was next to a table of like seven like well-heeled looking like preppy millennial types And they all had like really nice skin, like the kind of skin that you’re like, I want that skin, and I didn’t even realize I needed that kind of skin, but I can’t rip it off your body because that would be inconvenient and messy. Like that kind of skin, right? And they’re all fucking talk all of them, all seven of them got the Chase Sapphire Reserve with a 100,000 mile bonus, right? And they’re all like rhapsodic about it. And they’re all talking about how hard it is for them to find business class round trip tickets on award seats. Because all of the mileage partners that work with Chase are just swamped with people who are taking the 100,000 mile bonus and cashing it in just immediately. So if you have a Chase Sapphire Reserve, fuck you, because I use United as my carrier and they’re one of the mileage partners. And you know when they inevitably devalue their miles by like a tenth next year. That all of the other carriers are going to follow suit. And my strategy to get to Hong Kong for $42 is fucked. I hate all of you. I hate, hate, hate you. I’m holding the microphone and just. I hate you like my partner hates Duke. It’s a real thing. I want you to play. North Carolina in basketball and lose by 70 points now. Oh my God. I’m so irked about this. You know, you know, the other shoe is going to drop. I know the other shoe is going to drop. I know it’s going to be bad. I know. And we’re all complicit in it. Like, Everybody who tried to travel hack like Leia, I’m gonna tell Leia to listen to this episode. Leia is the only person I know who travel hacks harder than me and is still one of my closest friends. And she got to like Barcelona and spent like five nights in the Ritz Carlton for like twenty dollars. Oh my God. Right. Right. Leia, we got found out.

How many, how many, like my entire generation who makes over $100,000 a year is a washing free miles right now, and it sucks. It’s and this is, I know the first worldiest problem. You’re listening to a podcast called Make Money Online. Get over yourself. Like, come on. I know. Oh my god, my microphone just fell over. I’m so angry at the microphone. Like it just dropped dead on my boom stand. Oh my god.

Yeah, so there’s a lot. There’s a lot, right? Like, there’s, and Your credit score, so FICO and by proxy, the three credit reporting agencies, don’t punish you for opening a lot of credit cards if you have a history of paying on time. So, you can do like 20 hard pulls, and theoretically, I’m being very simplistic here. I know a lot of people are like, actually, Nick D, but I know. But, like, yeah, so with that in mind, I don’t know how you fly anywhere anymore. You might have to pay money for tickets. You might have to like, yeah, and like fly and coach. I’m so sorry. Like your seat might not flatten. I Yeah.

But okay, so there’s there’s a there’s a silver lining to this. There are a lot of carriers. So if you use there are a lot of like flight deals where you can’t use miles and you end up in coach, but you end up in coach for like $500 round trip to Europe. There are a million of those. So if you go on, I only know the Twitter account Shy Flight Deals, C H I Flight Deals, because I live in Chicago and I really only fly out of O’Hare, so that’s really useful for knowing. And it’s literally just like Chicago to X. So occasionally you get Chicago to horrible places like Dubai or Manila where they’re killing everyone and you don’t want to go there. But then sometimes you get Chicago to Copenhagen. Or, like other liberal democracies, where you can figure out how actual civilized people live. And it’s thrilling. Oh my God. I’m going to Copenhagen in November again for 10 days. And I’m taking my partner this time, and we’re going to eat all of the s’more abroad and drink all of the coffee and go to all of the McKellar bars. I only went to two last time. That’s egregious. There are five McKellar bars in Copenhagen. That means I still have a failing score, and I’m going to fix it. I’m going to fix it big time. Story about flying. So I flew to Hong Kong. You all know about the Hong Kong thing. One thing you don’t know about the Hong Kong thing is I get up to the the the baggage person, the the baggage handler who like takes your luggage and then you go into security. And uh uh she’s like, Oh, you have one bag? I’m like, Yeah. And she’s like, You don’t have any other bags? I’m like, No. Why would I have any other bags? She’s like, Okay, well put the one bag on there. And I put it on there and she’s like, Is there anything in this bag? And I’m like, Yes. Yes, there is. In fact, there’s supplies and clothing for 10 days in Asia. And she’s like, this bag weighs nine pounds. I’m like, yes. That’s because the actual bag weighs four pounds and then the rest of the stuff inside of it weighs five pounds, and that is enough to sustain me for five days in Asia. And she’s like, Are you okay? I’m like, Yeah, I’m fine. I’m excited to go on my trip to Hong Kong. She’s like, You sure you don’t have anything else? How much does your backpack weigh? She sees my backpack and I put it on. I’m like, well, I’m not like bluffing you by bringing like a 90-pound backpack on. I put the backpack on and it’s like three pounds.

Yeah. So um I’m gonna list a few brands ‘cause we’ve already done the minimal packing bit and then we’re gonna move on to like what happens when you’re actually there and like how to travel well, ‘cause I think that’s more important and a little bit more like on topic for this. Eagle Creek for packing cubes and dop kits. They are the absolute best for it. Git, the lightest one. I believe it’s called Spectre. And You get packing cubes in order to pack more clothing. You roll your clothing and put it in. Take enough for about three days of travel, regardless of how long you are traveling. The next thing that you need to get is soak laundry detergent. That is it is basically no rinse No, like and you can air dry your laundry. And then you need to be wearing only clothing that you can do that to or wear multiple times. I wear smart wall socks multiple times, so I end up bringing only two pairs, and then I bring four pairs of underwear and four pairs of shirts. That is it. Again, take the Konari approach. Like, I don’t sleep with pajamas unless I’m in a guest house with 10 other people. If I’m just in a hotel room, no need to sleep in pajamas. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We had a ton of show notes on how to pack if you’re a lady from a bunch of different sources. We’re both dudes, so consult those. Solid cleaning products. I use J. R. Liggettz bar soap for shampoo. I take a thing of a bar soap of uh Brahmer’s Bronners the the all one hippie stuff. I take a bar soap of that and I literally cut it in half. And then I bring, and then I fill in a normal soap case. Half of it is the ligates, that’s the shampoo, and half of it is the soap, and that is everything that I need. You can probably condense that further into like a bottle of body wash that goes into the TSA limit and a bottle of shampoo. However, I try and travel with as few liquids as humanly possible. It’s really just toothpaste. Compressible water bottle. That’s another really big one. Compressible secondary backpack. If I’m traveling for a really long period of time, I use Sandquist’s Ultra Light. And a foldable toothbrush. You don’t have to think about a brand on that one. Use only the travel size of toothpaste that your dentist gives you. They are saleable on Amazon. Beyond that, I have a folding comb. So everything is like folding and compressing, and I just have a whole second set of stuff. If you are taking stuff out of your shower and then bringing it on a trip, you have fucked up. The largest single object is actually, no, this is not the case anymore. It used to be my underarm deodorant. I got an alum block for underarm deodorant that’s called crystal. And now I just use that. And it’s maybe the size of a thimble. So like I get the smallest Dop Kit from Eagle Creek that they sell and have a lot of spare room left in it. I put everything in tiny one-ounce bottles. Kai, you and I were in a Mooji store together in Hong Kong. And you watched, you watched some like a deep cut Nick D moment where I was at the bottle section vetting the like structural integrity of the tiniest bottles they have.

Oh, it was like less than an ounce. It was like 0. 75 ounces. Yeah, like 0. 75 ounce. And it was like a very enough for a seven-day trip. You just refill it when you get home.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you’re figuring out optimizations to it. So if you aren’t coming back with a list of three or four things that you screwed up on your trip and that you’re going to try and fix next time. You’re not paying close enough attention to that experience, right? There are always friction points. And so, you know, the same with your business. Um what are the goals? Not just minimize the amount of packing room that you have and maximize the amount of space. I fly with pretty much empty luggage and I come back with extremely full luggage on international trips and then I give gifts to everybody. including and especially myself. And there’s another thing to keep in mind, though, is maximizing the experience that you are getting. Travel time is special time, right? You do not want to spend your travel time doing any of the following if you can avoid it. Poking around in a grocery store. Because I tell you, man, I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve been to basically every continent except for South America and Africa. And tons and tons of different cultures, huge variety. The grocery stores in Sweden look exactly like the grocery stores in the United States of America. You are not enriching your experience by going to a Stockholm grocery store. So maybe don’t do that, right? Maybe don’t spend 30 minutes on a wild goose chase in like a bottle shop somewhere unless it has a specific reason for an outcome.

Yeah, and I mean, when you’re doing those sorts of things, like try and be focused, like if you’re going back to your If you’re going back to your hotel room for nap time, be very intentional about when the nap time ends so you don’t just waste an entire afternoon of vacation time. Because vacation time is sacred time. You are probably like the majority of humans in spending the vast majority of your time in the same environment every day, you know? I think about how last year I spent, oh gosh, 10, 12 weeks on the road. Okay, that means I spent 42 weeks in Chicago every single day. I should not be doing anything on my travel that passes for the quotidian experiences that I do in my day-to-day life in Chicago, right? And that includes, unless I have a very good reason to maximize my experience, things like sitting in a grocery store or napping or waiting for a train. You know, like. You have to make sure that you’re maximizing your wait time, right? So that’s another thing. Like, I bought, if you can buy VIP tickets to skip the line at any museums, my God, do this at the Louvre or the Uffizi. My God. But if there are situations where you can’t avoid skipping the line, then and this is especially apparent in a place like Tokyo, where A line is a sign of a good place. So you’re going to be waiting in line a lot. Figure out ways to maximize your experience while you’re in line. So you’re going to be probably traveling with companions if you’re in Tokyo. Bring a little game to play with them. Spend some time like having somebody else hold down the line while you wander around the neighborhood and then a specific time that you come back. all of those things are really, really valuable. And making sure that you’re maximizing your experience also comes in the form of like wayfinding, right? So it’s very easy to sit in Uber all the time and do that. You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to sit in a cab. You want to try and travel by train or bike whenever you possibly can, or by foot especially, because you can see more of the city. And another rule that I follow around this is never take the same route twice.

Yeah. And I it’s so simple though, right? Like most cities are on a grid, or there’s multiple ways to get around side streets. And so. You know, if you have to take the same route twice, like you’re in Boston or London and there’s no grid and you don’t know how to get around, like fine, do it. But like, The majority of American cities are on a grid, and the majority of Asian cities are on something approaching a grid enough that you can probably get around doing weird stuff. Those are, I don’t know, those are a few tips that like the goal is to maximize new things coming into your face, right? And so doing the same thing twice is not something that I do terribly often on a trip. And when I do do the same thing twice, it is because it is hyperbolic excellence. Unbelievable hyperbolic excellence. The best quartado of my entire life to this day. I got in Toronto. And I ordered the same quartado twice in a row. And Aaron and I call it the John Peel Cortado because If you know the BBC DJ John Peel, he like played teenage kicks on repeat and broke down crying on the air. So, yeah, that’s one of those things. Like, you should be very, very careful and intentional and lucid about the things that you’re doing.

Yeah, absolutely. Like, by doing this, you’re not adhering to a rigid schedule. In fact, you’re kind of doing quite the opposite. Isn’t that the way? Like, you have a place you might need to be at a certain time, but then there’s a lot of gap time, and then you’re following this weird winding route to get there. And so you just know, okay, by this point, I have to be there. So you can hurry eventually. But yeah, we like ran into this one random temple on our way to like lunch or something or coffee. I don’t even remember. And it was awesome. And I did that because I deliberately did not overpack the day. Right? Like, I know that I’m going to be finding a lot of weird random crap because I’ve never been to a city in mainland Asia before. Right, like and so I know, and I also don’t really know fully how to get around yet. I don’t know how often the MTR runs, and I don’t know how long it takes to get to a place, and I don’t know how, like Vertical or horizontal or diagonal, I have to go to get to a place, especially in Hong Kong, where like you might be going to a bar on the 50th floor of a building. There’s a lot of vertical, there’s a lot of vertical. Right. So, and you, you know, I was warned of that. Um, but yeah. Um, the goal The goal is to seize it. The goal is to know that you are privileged and lucky to be doing this, even with your stupid fucking Chase Sapphire Reserve card that I hate. And to seize every second of it because when are you going to be back?

Yeah. Also, know who is good to travel with.

Yeah, marry someone you’re going to travel well with. Seriously. And that is. That is one of the hardest things. I tell you, one of my some of my closest friends I would not consider traveling with. Some of my closest friends I’ve had disasters traveling with, and then I’m like, nope, never again. That’s it. You wasted my travel time. One of the larger sins you can do against me is to waste my travel time. And. I yeah, everyone should have SIM cards and fuck off when they need to. Huge, huge, huge one, have a sim card with a data plan or don’t travel with me.

Yeah, no roaming. com is big. Yeah. Yeah. But like travelworthy people. I could name it on one hand and I have fingers left. Like that few number of people. And I know and I’m friends with a lot more people than that, right? And I’m married to one of them. So that should give you a sense.

And if it happens for most of the trip, that is also positive. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and one thing that I love asking is: are you okay with doing this? You know, and routinely checking in on the travel companion to make sure that they’re okay with his experience, because ultimately. You are either corporeally present in a situation or you are not. It is a binary. Okay? So keeping that in mind. One person is probably leading on exactly what the thing is you should be doing. There are certain exceptions, but even then you can get granular, right? So let’s say you’re in Paris and you’re all in Paris for the first time. If you’re not going to the Louvre, you’re fucking up. I think it’s pretty objective that you end up going to the Louvre, unless all of you somehow hate art or culture or. Like you flew 4,000 miles and you don’t want to tell your family that you saw the Mona Lisa for some reason. Like, um, so all of those things, right? Okay, well, now you’re in the Louvre. Okay, there’s maybe four of you. The Louvre is really big. And strategies for tackling the Louvre are vastly different, right? And the Mona Lisa actually sucks. So, keeping that all in mind, how, even though you are all in the Louvre and you’re all there for a few hours. One of you wants to see the Renaissance paintings. One of you is ob obsessed in ancient Egyptian stuff and you want to go to the Egyptian antiquities. P. S. The Louvre is the largest selection of Egyptian antiquity outside of Egypt.

Staggering. Staggering. And you never know that, right? Right. Or some other person wants to go see the Greek stuff. E. G. , right?

Yes, yes. And, you know. I think this is magnified when both me and my partner are very self-interested lone wolf types. Right. And I’ll tell you, good story. She never listens to this podcast, so I can talk about this. My partner, we were walking around Barcelona on of all things our honeymoon. So, like, obviously, we should be like really romantically connected and like having a great time. And we were, and it was great. We had a really great time on most of the honeymoon. And then one day, like five days in, we had spent like 24-7 around all like each other this entire time. She just looked at me and was like, I hate this. Goodbye and walked off, and then we had a separate afternoon. It was great. That’s wonderful. And you know both of us. You know that that’s like obviously a thing that can happen, right? Yes. Very much so. I’m speaking a shorthand. Yeah, it’s like, I hate this. Like, we’re doing this thing, but I hate it. Like. And great. Go away. You are not a monster, and you have a cell phone with a data plan. So you can text me anytime you want a hand. And you know what? I put out the Grimes record and just walked around like Barry Gatik and like had a blast. Went to some record stores, had some coffee. Just journaled.

Yeah. Yeah. And like, if I’m Sapping away the sacred time that you have and doing it on things that you hate or find boring or whatever. Go away, please. Let us just be with ourselves for a moment. And And take some time to like be present in our environment because when else? Agad, when else? Like you’re in Barcelona. I don’t know when I’m, I haven’t been back since my honeymoon, and I don’t know when I’m gonna go back. And it’s sad because it’s amazing. So when else?

This is the best. Part of this episode, I am HO. So it’s not just restaurants, but I separate it into categories. There is And this is these are my categories. So, like, whatever. But, um, there are uh brunch, dinner, brunch/slash/lunch dinner, coffee shops. Um Cultural things, boutiques, uh parks, um bars I think that’s it. I’m sure I’m going to remember one or two others. But anyway, I find these broad categories, right? And then I kind of schedule out: okay, well, in the morning, we’re going to end up going to a coffee shop, and in the afternoon, we’re probably going to get tired, so we’re going to go to coffee shops. There’s two coffee shops per day. And then I tell as many people as possible that I’m going places and can I get recommendations. I take the recommendations of natives the most seriously. I take the recommendations of people who have massive connections to a place, like my friend Kim. Her dad grew up in Hong Kong and she’s been back every year her entire life. So, yes, I take her recommendations quite a bit, seriously, more seriously than other people. People who have vacationed there And then I look at like online recommendations. So those are the ones generally online or travel guides are like the most like, this is the obvious thing, right? So if you, like in Tokyo, Sutaya Books and Teesside Garden, the one that, not the Sutaya that’s on like Shibuya Square, but the one that’s three buildings in this amazing park. I don’t know anyone who didn’t recommend that to me. And that includes all of the travel guides. Of course, I went there, and of course, it was stunning. It’s one of the best bookstores I’ve been to in my entire life. But like if there are repeats, you know, if it’s like a long time institution in family run, I tend to favor it, those sorts of things. And then I sort by neighborhood. Yeah, so this is another thing. I group everything by neighborhoods. Outliers are usually discarded unless I get utter hyperbole about it. And then it’s like, okay, well, this is a day trip, right? So for example, in Paris, there’s a park. You have to like travel transfer to like three different metro trains to get there, and it’s called Parc des Butte Chamont. It is a fairy tale. It’s not real. It’s just unbelievable and worth the like our commute in each direction that we did to get to it. So you’re weighing that, right? And people were pretty hyperbolic about it at the time, etc. , etc. , etc. So I grew up by I grew up by neighborhood, and then the week before the trip, it is what I call recommendations week or rec week. And that is Every night of that week I spend, I block. You cannot hang out with me the week before an international trip. It is sacred. Like, unless it’s like a birthday of a close family member and I’ll be there for like a half hour and then I’ll go back to rec week. I spend all of that time planning out what’s good. Because I’m usually sorting through like a couple hundred things in each neighborhood. And realistically, I’m only going to end up at like six. What wins, right? And then what happens in between. So another thing is the things that don’t win in a neighborhood, often they’re like boutiques that are on the route from point A to point B, and I don’t realize it. And so they get cut, but I keep them around because I know that eventually I’m just going to wander past it and it’s worth the two minutes of my time and not the half hour of my time. Recommendations week is it’s a real thing. Oh, two months beforehand. Survey restaurants that need reservations and try and get reservations there. Two months is usually. The time when you can at least set dates on your calendar to remind yourself to get reservations at restaurants. But if you’re going for the like fancy Michelin shit, like two months, two months, everywhere. So I, you know, and that goes for you visiting Chicago, Kai. I’m calling Cuba. You’re going to parachute. And I need two months’ advance notice. But yeah, so that’s pretty much it. Like I’ll buy tickets to museums two months in advance sometimes. Like I need you need that for like the Louvre the Uffizi to get the like VIP shit. Or shows, like I’ll check what bands are touring, but like rarely does that ever actually turn into something because like what bands are in Hong Kong? Like, come on. And they’re bands that I’m usually seeing at home. That was not the case when I found out gas was touring New York, you know. Like, I was like, well, I’m there. Good.

So another thing is flag carriers, especially in Europe and Asia, have a thing where you can bid on business class seats after you book coach. And then they’ll fill out business with the highest bids. So you can usually get business class for pretty cheap. That’s how I ended up getting Amsterdam to O’Hare for, I think. I think it was $130 or something cheap. It was because they had a really undersold business class and I had flown a lot. So that’s always an option. But yeah, yeah. So sacred time. It’s all travel time is sacred time. It is you time. And you are the things that you put in front of your face. And you should do what you can to have agency around that and have fun.