SNM125: Staying Alive when you Travel Abroad

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staying alive when you travel abroad on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Social Pilot. The social media and marketing tool for bloggers and small businesses joined over 20,000 social media pros at serve. No master dot com Backslash social pilot today Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams. Now thin, you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. It's been another week of excitement where I live on my islands, and a big part of it started with a 6.7 earthquake. And if you know anything about earthquakes, it's pretty high up the scale. They rarely go higher. I think the highest number is nine, and I believe we'll only have a 10 when it's in the world. This earthquake was a couple nights ago. It was bad enough that the airport, all the hotels and the immigration in the passport office on the neighbouring island where I do most of my business. The larger island next door. They're all broken and clothes the airport runway so damaged planes can't land there. In order to deal with the situation, I have to adapt in a bunch of ways. The first is I'm flying to America very soon. And I had to change all my flights around and fly from my island, which has less flights, A lot more complicated. But I was able to change everything around so that my flights from the mainland to America didn't get changed. I'm still gonna be there, which I'm very excited about. But while all this is happening have been constant. Ransom has been kind of hard for me to record these episodes. My throat has been bad. I'm if you can tell I'm still sick in the back of my throat. There's like, ah frog living there. I take medicine yet yada. Sometimes you just get something. You have a bunch of kids. You keep bringing stuff home from school. All of these challenges have been entered my life and then yesterday something happened even more intense. My wife is looking out the window. The front of her house faces the beach with the back of our house faces basically the only road on the island and outside she saw on accident. Two motorcycles crashed in a girl was beautiful before the crash afterwards, not so much. And while this is really sad and also reminded me of one of the big dangers of where we live the main way people actually get hurt here. The only danger here is accidents. Every couple of weeks, a couple months there's, Ah, motorcycle accident, and it's almost always the same story. It's either at night or someone's been drinking or someone driving too fast. It's always someone being irresponsible crashing into someone else and the people, especially foreigners. We've have this feeling that when we're abroad, the laws of physics don't apply to us, and we're just like people think I can't get arrested in a foreign country because I'm not from there. We have this magical believe, but when foreigners commit crimes in our country, we definite want arrested and deported. So we have this idea. Oh, I'm in Japan or I'm in India and nothing could happen. But I can't get arrested in the laws of physics. No longer apply Now I live on a trump of island and you get used to driving on the scooter. I don't even have a motorcycle. What I have is a moped head, so it's an automatic. Your feet sit in front of you inside the bike. It's not a motorcycle. We have the pedals outside and you have a manual gears any of that stuff, but it's still easily goes 100 120 kilometers per hour. Now, normally, I've never been above 60 on. I've never been above 16. We'll be driving your scooter. You think all this isn't such a big deal going 50 or whatever you want 50 kilometers per hour, which is around 30 miles an hour that fast? If you're not wearing a helmet when you crash, it could be real bad. And that's what happened yesterday. The girl lost. I didn't see. Fortunately, my wife didn't, she said. The girl lost her front teeth and a lot more. That's horrible on the half. You know what? That we both have helmets, and it was an odyssey to my helmet for me and my wife and my daughter exactly had to buy them in three different locations because people here you don't take safety very seriously. And also most people can't actually afford Helms My helmet, which is the biggest, the most expensive one because I have the biggest dumb dumbhead costs as much as many people on the island making a single month. Not as much as I pay my employees who live on the island, but as much as most other places do so, people simply can't afford the safety and security that they need. And so foreigners come here and they ran a motorcycle ride a scooter all the time. They've never driven one before. So if you think it's like driving carts, not when I first moved to Asia and started driving scores, it was a nightmare. It took me about a month to learn, and it was a very, very rough month, and I could already ride a bicycle, so don't think it's that it's totally different. And I'm sure going from school to the motorcycle's not that easy. So people come here, they're on vacation and they can if it'll happen or I can't get hurt and in fact, my wife, her helmet, It's red. And so people make fun of her and call her the Red Power Ranger when she rides her bike. Now, When I was at a town recently a couple of months ago, about two months ago, she was in a little accident. She was wearing helmet. She was just driving from our house to a yoga class, which is about 300 yards away. It's about two minutes on the motorcycle on the scooter, and she fell and hurt her arm. Don't you want me to know about it? Shouldn't tell me first about it because she knew I'd be match was wearing a helmet and I said, Well, look at this. We have a baby, we have a toddler. What will happen if you get hurt? And she learned her lesson then had been raining a little bit that day, so it was even slipper, and she was, You know, you're right. I'll wear my home all the time. And now she does. Even though people make fun of her. Talked about yesterday, after she saw the accident, she said, You know, I'm so glad that you bought us those helmets. Now. It's so even a slow, small accent right in front of our house where you think you're totally safe. You really, really hurt. And when you're traveling abroad, I don't want to think that the laws of physics no longer exists. The island I live is significantly safer than most of the places in the world. Very rarely do people die of unnatural causes. But often when people get hurt, it's because of stupidity. I'm in a foreign country and into our seatbelts anymore. Laws don't apply here. I'm in a foreign country. Rain can't hurt me. I'll go for a 10 mile walk in the rain at night and get hypothermia really common way that people dropped. Not here, fortunately, but in a lot of Costa places I've lived is night swimming when they're drunk. I don't even know who assembles thes ideas. But I remember when I lived in England, it happened a lot. A couple other places. Every once in a while you're here. Someone got drunk at a party, went swimming and then was it. Sometimes it's in the ocean. Sometimes it's in rivers and lakes. I've heard in all different types of ice water. My brother in law for a very long time was a public defender, and what he told me and this was his vice is science was never commit Su crimes at once. Is that most people? It's not the first crime that gets you. It's the second. It's when you start calm pounding, and it was very interesting. I mean, obviously you're telling people what crime isn't great, but least this town do less. But if you think about it, it's what happens when you steal a car. You get in trouble when you also start speeding. It's when you add in that second car because that's you speeding when they check the plates and the car stolen. As soon as you start adding in other crimes, things magnify. For example, if you're robbing a bank and shoot someone, it's a whole different crime. Now you're looking at felony murder. It's a federal crime, not a state crime. What that means is federal prison, FBI, whole different ballgame, because you've done two crimes once. Now I'm not suggesting you become a criminal, but I am saying it's when you do multiple dumb things at once that life gets worse when traveling abroad, and this is what happens here. First of all, you're driving something. You don't drive or you're driving a place where you don't know the way around. You don't how things work. You're already doing something a little bit rescue, adding an additional factors like saying, First of all, people come in, they go, you don't have to wear a helmet. They actually that's not true. It is the law. You have to wear a helmet here. They just don't force it very well because most people can't afford once you can't really enforce it. People can't afford helmets also can't afford fines. But when they catch foreigners, they certainly do it. And if you go to the big cities, any sitting and you're not wearing, how about they'll grab you right away? It's just because we live out in the sticks that people think magically things don't happen. And guess what? There are a lot of times when you can drop a motorcycle or a scooter without anyone there to have an accident. This is just one type of accident could have another type of incident people have here is occasionally about once a month. There's a robbery. It's a hope someone's house. We get robbed, but it's always people come here and they rent a house that's like 75 cents a night and then leave $10,000 worth of stuff. And I love my iPad, my expensive digital camera on my lenses, My GoPro and people took it. I can't believe it. So why are you in a house that costs a dollar? Was stuff so expensive? People make the decision to stay somewhere very unsecure, with very expensive stuff. And when you put something that valuable in front of people they know they can use to get it, you create a lot of temptation, which is unfair in my family. We've never had a problem with any of that type of stuff because we don't safe somewhere. That's disproportionately cheap compared to the stuff we have with us now. When I was backpacking in my mid twenties, I traveled with basically nothing except for my phone, and this was before iPhones. I had a what have I think the time I had, like a Japanese Toshiba flip phone, something you can't even get outside of Japan. It's what I live in Japan. I traveled and backpacked around Cambodia and Thailand, and I did enough research to never have a problem. So I stayed in places that were two and $3 a night. But the only thing I had of any value is always in my pocket. No, I had a couple of other things that were okay in my back entertainment. And when I went on a bus trip, I knew because I looked online. I read in this book It's a no when you take this bus trip from Bangkok to where you catch a boat. They're pretty notorious for going through all the bags under the bus and people get stuff. Stone and I'm on this bus with all these hippie Backpackers, and I put all my nice stuff, anything I don't want touch in my backpack. I can't marry that. Who was that? It's been a long time ago. Maybe had a laptop. Maybe it didn't can't member. It's more than 10 years ago, but I do know I had it all up with a little bit of company. Had it between my legs. On the bus, everyone falls asleep. It's like a 12 hour buses was overnight buses, and when we get up in the morning, they unload all the backs beside this building. You have to wait for the morning boat and everyone goes inside to watch the beach on like a 12 inch TV. I'm like, Why are we watching a movie about? We're about to go. This is so dumb. Everyone's seen the beach. That's what I got on the bus in the first place. I go and look in my bag from the downstairs and there's something from someone else's bag is now in my back. Strangers back and I look around and no one else had even bother checking the back and even wanted said, Hey, guys, they went through our bags. I want to check your stuff. No one really took it seriously. And later on, when you get the boat to the other island later on, all these other people go. Oh, my God, stuff is miss and it's certainly not my fault. It's your own responsibility. Don't take responsibility for security. All the guidebooks, okay, It's right in the Lonely Planet Guide book. It said, Don't put your stuff under the bus and they're gonna go through your back. It's really common on this particular thing when you bend again, it's like a $1 bus that's like a 12 hour trip. Whatever you're on something that's super, super cheap, you have to take responsibility for your own security. We talked in the past by taking votes away from health. That's why my family has health insurance. Really fancy office. Now. My health insurance for my family covers four of us covers and anything super super crazy, and I have, ah, dearly deductible for the whole family of $5000. That's kind of what I chose because it's really for emergencies. And so if someone gets really, really hurt, if we have to go to a hospital, another country that's covered, all that stuff is covered, and it costs around $300 a month, which is less than insurance for a single person by herself. Costs in America. And it's certainly less than most insurance plans for families were out of the habit. Insurance went from four people, very contentious. It's not even that expensive to protect yourself abroad with these insurances, whether it's sports insurance, travel insurance, backpack insurance, sometimes it just makes sense to have a few things in place. I've been traveling before abroad. My friend had backpack insurance. His phone got stolen. They replaced some backpacker in terms like a dollar a day. It just depends how you're traveling in what your stuff is worth and all these other things. And if you do in a sport, whenever I go snowboarding, I definitely get snowboarder insurance. You're probably not gonna get hurt, but if you break that leg, you're gonna want that specific insurance. Most travel, insurance and medical insurance doesn't cover specific sports. There's a list of things I'm not allowed to do with my health insurance, the role things that I would never d'oh skiing off piece. Are you cheating me like that's way beyond the way. Liv. It's things like that. It's a scuba diving below, like a really low depth. What else is on the list? It was all things that, like I would never do like dinosaur fighting. But it's things they have to lift that are super extreme. So they're on their people that love to do it, so you have to get specific insurance. I can barely snowboard enough on the trail. I'm really gonna go between the tree is no way. But these little things become our responsibility. That's why I'm pretty serious about my health. Yesterday I had my first pretty bad surfing exit in a long time. I was actually on my paddleboard mean lie between the paddleboard of surfboards So said it was not my powder works, had a paddle with me and I'm going into the waves that go the way they really small the day and then a giant one comes and the last thing you want is for a wave to crash directly on top of you. That's the worst scenario of a wave crashes right in front of me. We're right behind me, all right, next week and decide. It's fine. As long as it's about three or 45 feet away. I'm fine. This is first time having in a long time. I'm facing the wave on my giant board, which is 12 feet long. It's a monster paddleboard, and the wave crashes right on top of it, lifts us up and flips a switch island. I don't even know which way it went There. I found my back in the board, Smacks smashed on me or the board flipped, and then I crashed on the board. But I ended up hitting my arm, my whole side, all the way from the top of my chest, down to my hip. It was all bleeding. Just a little bit like a light lead. Okay, Not like an open wound, but like a road rash style bleed. And the water was really cold. Not cold enough to knock you out cold enough to shock you a little bit. But I've been swimming in Wales where it's really cold out from California, where the, you know, Arctic Freeze. So I've been in colder water, but I got hurt a little bit. I'm in good enough shape. Fortunately that I was able to endure and then caught an amazing wave and they caught a second wave on the way back home. I only did one set of waves. I was like, You know what? I don't wanna go too crazy, but I'm out there by myself now where I'm sitting on the porch right now, I can see the exact way that was. So that's how close I was home. These little things could happen when you get hurt. a little bit now the reason that I didn't get more her and part of it. And I have a really good board, which means it's why didn't snap or get hurt very close to home. I do a lot of security conscious things. People see me, we have to take responsibility for ourselves. We in America and a lot of Western countries. We get so used to other people taking care of everything we say, Hey, if I if that's a crime, the police will take care of it. If I get hurt, these people take care of there's a fire farmer department will take care of it and we get used to that now. Part of reality is that when bad things happen, what you expect to happen doesn't the idea that the police will always help you and solve all your problems magically is kind of unreal. When I lived in England, I was rocked on my house, robbed. Fortunately, I had renters insurance because I didn't trust my roommates. I had my turntable stone. I was a deejay. Someone stole my turntables and sold them to a pawn shop. I want the police. I did the reports. I went to my church, my insurance company. Awesome. They sent me a whole new set of here. They replaced everything with brand new, amazing, really great experience. And I said, you know what are the police gonna solve this? So I went to all the pawn shops in town. Now, if you walk out the front door, the police station, one of the nearest buildings within 100 yards, they have to cross the big intersection. Definitely than 100 yards the front of the police station and one of the closest five or six businesses is a pawn shop. I walk in the pawn shop. The closest thing in the window are my stolen turntables. And you know their mind because they were Japanese. So I'd actually brought them when I moved from Japan. And when that ship them by boat, just cheaper than buying new ones. So they had Japanese plugs, Japanese riding and were obvious and Japanese boxes. Everything on It was Japanese. They were not English plugs and not look English, literally the closest building, the closest pawnshop and nearly closest building all the police station. I walk in and it's right there and I walk in a check to make sure it's mine. I call the police. I wait now are finally Please come and look at it. They have, you know, security camera footage of the guy selling it. Obviously, the police never arrested the guy because police in England, in fact, they've even announced this. They don't have decided they're not really gonna solve robberies anymore. They made announcement England. They're more focused on cyberbullying. So you're more likely to go to jail calling someone a bad name on Twitter than you are for Robinson House. Now, you can use whatever decision calculus you made, you know that? I always use very practical decision calculus. I like to look at the numbers, if you will. I think if you go to college, you should earn the money back. You spend his investment, and I feel like a certain crimes are worse than other crimes. Uh, the U N recently published that they think of digital violence is same Israel violence. Now I've had people send me death threats by sucks. Doesn't feel very good, but I've also had a Marine beat me up and throw me down a flight of stairs And if you ask me which one was worse, I will be honest. Getting beaten up and thrown down a flight of stairs was way worse and way scarier. The idea that someone calling you a bad name on Twitter is the same as someone hitting you with a pipe in the legs. No, but unfortunately, a lot of police forces are switching that direction because it's political right now. I don't know why I don't fully understand this idea. As you know, I'm not a heavy social media guy, but the idea of someone call me a bad name is being Where is the same someone punching and they call it Cyber Violence? I do understand that having experienced real violence, okay, having a friend, someone robbed my house, I've been robbed several times in my life that the first time my apartment's rob probably the last. That's why I have insurance. That's why I do a lot of things I can to protect my family as best I can. But this idea that someone else will take care of you when things go wrong is foolish, and it's not the police's fault. It's actually because the ratio police to crime. It's wrong. There's not enough police to solve the crimes. I saw a report that said in Boston, I think 98% of gun violence where the person doesn't die, never get soft. They never arrested. You have to get murdered in Boston for them to try and solve it. That's horrifying. And again, it's not about blaming the police. It's always the ratio Every police officer I've ever known has too much to do. The other problem is it's infrastructural. It's that they make them right enough tickets. They have to write tickets to generate money. It's really tickets is traffic Enforcement is kind of a tax thing, and I know we're going down a political path. I'm just saying rather talk politics. I'm saying that they give the police assignments other than solving crime, they say, Either there's too many crimes or they say all you have to write a lot of tickets or do these other things, and also it takes a while to get good at solving crime. I think you have to be a traffic first, all that stuff, so there's other things in place, but there simply aren't enough police to do all the tasks assigned to the police. So when the ratios wrong, a lot of crimes going soft. So when you think the things were gonna happen, they're not same thing as when you have an emergency. You call the police. They're never going to be there as fast as you want. Response time in America ranges anywhere from 2 to 8 minutes. If you're lucky, most problems are over in less than eight minutes. Most rooms over in less than two minutes. So you have to. Whether you're in America, other places start taking responsibility for your safety. Starting around. Believe your stops, they take themselves of your health. This is not a political episode. This is an episode about personal responsibility. It's an episode about understanding that a lot of the piece of infrastructure that we assume er there when we actually need them, they're not. We make a lot of assumptions when we're at home and when we're abroad and they turn out to be false. When I was in high school, my friend drove his car without his seatbelt on. My friend is now gone. He made the assumption because he was driving the big older car. There was a six year seventies large car like a big saloon car. He assumed. You know what nothing will ever happen if it does the means to get there in time. He was wrong. And when I was 18 I lost my best friend. When I was in college, a lot of people made fun of me for being obsessed with seat belts. And they call me Judge Green and coming because I don't I'm really against drunk driving. I'm really against Dr Without Seep out. And they're like, Oh, you're just trying to force all the rules. It's like, Look, these rules are not about limiting your fun. I don't make my wife where, How mother motorcycle? Because I think she looks like a dumb dumb. I don't call her red power injured that people don't even call it that in English. The caller that another language, I'd ask her whatever was laughing about. She told me, I don't do things to limit my family's fund. I do things to keep my family safe, and this is something I've moved into more more as I become a father and fill this extra weight of responsibility and This is why I want to share with you some of the lessons I've learned because sometimes when we've never encountered the need for help from different service is or we haven't traveled abroad had a problem. We don't realize that sometimes there's been luck that's kept us safe. Accidents happen. It's just the nature of the world. Motorcycle accidents will never stop happening just the way it is. People drop motorcycles all the time. A lot of people here drive motorcycles about speedometers. Without headlights. It doesn't mean you're safe when people are out there with broken equipment. When people don't wear helmets, it doesn't mean you shouldn't as well. So when you're making decisions about your life, whether it's about protecting your home, locking your doors, your family's health care, all of these different pieces, you can always depend on someone else. Now look, the police do their best. I work, I am. It's for a long time, and you do your best on ambulance. But you can't always do everything when you work. For these service is there all overtaxed and usually when you need them the most is when there's the biggest problems. There are people who call ambulance is all the time when they should. We had a list of people in the district where I lived, where you knew it was a fake call when they called, and you have to respond. You can't unfortunately gets a hair off the list. People will call and your show, but they have a packed suitcase and they gotta have a cold. They have taken the hospital, and I've had some of the ambulance when that happened, and then someone got shot and we couldn't help the person who got shot. So the next nearest table it's had to go help them people take advantage of emergency service is all the time and another way that the people who are supposed to help you want to help. You can't because someone else is literally in the way blocking them from helping you. And it's unfortunate. But it happened, and it's always in every analyst district. There's certain people to do it, and I don't want to go into the nicknames that we have for those people. But I remember it very vividly. Whenever you get a call from one of the certain numbers you like, man, every week, this person called everyone we have to drive in the hospital, and they are. Anyone who already has a suitcase packed should not be calling 9 11 that's what. If you have enough time to pack a suitcase, you have enough time to drive to the hospital because I've been on calls when we get there, and we saved the person when that about 10 seconds to go I've been on ambulance calls were for another 15 seconds, like they would have made it. So there's people to take advantage of. Service is they slow down. Service is more and more knowing how to do things. That's very important. One of the big projects I'm working on right now is a parental safety project. Teaching parents had to be prepared for every type of at home emergency. There's not a lot of universal guides, and there's many parents who don't know howto handle different types of emergencies. Whether it's drowning, whether it's fires, what do you do how to amber alerts work? All these things can become critical. You think they won't happen to you, and then what it does. So being prepared was a Cub Scout for a long time it all the way up to well below highest level before you become a Boy Scout are No. Yeah. Before you become a Boy Scout, I only did. Cops got the little ones. Always be prepared. Take a little bit of responsibility. Realize that whether at home or abroad you're responsible for your family. You're responsible for your safety, your response before understanding things. And remember, the laws of physics don't change because you're abroad. And if you take responsibility for these things, you can stay alive wherever you go in the world. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No, Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listen to this episode of the serve. No master podcast. Join me on my Facebook page at facebook dot com Backslash Serve no master