This is Suckers. I'm Bell, I'm Dean Bell, and I'm Jared haven An.
iHeartRadio podcast.
Hello world, Hello Nation, Hello Kaitlin, Hello listener. Thank you so much for joining us on this very first the inaugural episode of what I think I'm going to call Dean's Lounge. Oh, lounge Dean.
I like Dean's lounge.
What what? I was kind of trying to play with some ideas of what I could call this, but I don't. I don't know if I really like either of those enough. But they were the two best that I came up with.
That's all. That's what you came up with. Those are the only two lounge Dean or Dean Slug.
I've been working hard on this.
What I'm just kidding.
I love this because it's you're at an airport, you go to the Centurion Lounge or the Capital one loge.
Oh oh interesting?
Did you not put that together?
No?
Oh my wait you must have. Oh so what did you think it was? Then?
I don't know. I'm just in your cute little asses lounge and yeah, this like velvety voice so on, So I'm like, oh, I'm in Dean's Lounge.
Well, it's nice recorded to play, you know. It is currently eight pm in Colorado and normally recorded in the morning, and i'd just a little grumpy goose in the morning so I can turn on my sultry voice at night.
At least you always turn on your soultry voice, but you do have more energy at night. You're a little Yeah, grumpy Goose is correct.
Yeah, thank you? So So Lounge Dean is the is the working title of this spinoff.
I like Dean's Lounge podcast. Now that I get it, I guess I Lounge Dean is good.
Lounge Dean. It's just there's It leaves something to be desired and I don't know what yet, and I haven't cleared this with iHeartRadio, so none of this is official. It's just me and my thoughts mostly. But you might be asking yourself, what am I even listening to right now? Why am I here? And that's a really good question. So what we've done. If you haven't already gone back and listened to Kaylen's podcast, the pop culture podcast Kaylen's Pop I love it. If you haven't listened to that,
go back and give that a listen. She's going to be updating the pop culture every single week on our own episode separate from our main podcast with Jared and Jared's gonna be doing his daddy talk talk Daddy to me.
Great, you're really good at this.
I'm good at you guys. I'm not good at myself. I guess I like Launchdeen and my thing. It was hard harder for me to think of something for me to do because Jared's great father, Caylen, she's got her she's got her hand of the pulse of pop culture, so she's pretty perfect for that.
I have more interesting things about me than just being obsessed with pop culture. It makes me sound a little uninteresting, so I know, I know you weren't trying to say that. It's just you know, my own insecurity.
No, you do have very many amazing things that you could have talked about, but you chose to talk about that.
Yeah, it's just fun to talk about.
It's good and it's it's it's not I don't want to say easy. Easy is not the right word, but it keep you always have something to talk about, which is good. That's true some weeks more than others, obviously, but you know, you're always gonna have topics and you're always gonna have to touchdown. So if you haven't listened yet, go listen to Kaylin's episode on under the same podcast Umbrella Suckers. Is that what we are now? Suckers?
We are suckers?
Yes, And I wanted to do travel and it took a lot of It took a lot of convincing to the higher ups ade iHeartRadio to let me do travel, because they're like, Dean, what are you gonna what do you have to offer here? And I was like, just give me something, just give me one thing, and that one thing can be travel, and they graciously accepted that idea,
and so now here we are. So what I'm gonna do this first episode, We're just going to kind of lay a baseline, lay a little of a foundation for the future episodes, and just kind of see where it goes. You know, I'm not expecting much. I hope you don't expect much out of me either. Not you, Kaitlin, you the listener. I hope the listener doesn't expect much out of me. I'm going to do my best, but we'll
see how it goes. I feel like sometimes on our main pod, I don't get to talk enough about my experiences. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing because I don't really like to talk about my experiences all that much anyways, but this could be a good a outlet for that.
I think it'll be great for you. Having three hosts is a challenge, and well maybe not so much so for me because I don't speak a ton anyways. You started it up, but it's good for us to each have our own outlets, you know, because we do get cut off their three co hosts. So it's great for us to be able to have this and talk about things that we're passionate about.
Yeah, and I often would rather have someone I'd rather ask a question than answer someone's question, you know. I'd rather kind of put the topic somewhere else and get someone else involved in a conversation than me take the reins. Self promotion has never really been my big thing. So whenever I go somewhere and do something really cool and I come back and like, I kind of want to talk about it, but if no one like brings it up, naturally, I'm not going to go out of my way to
bring it up. You know.
Well, I'm excited to hear what you have on today's agenda.
Yeah, there's there's not much. Like I said, this first episode is going to be a foundation builder. I've done enough trips internationally separately to probably have about a year's worth of content of trips to talk about.
Way more than a year a year to.
Start, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe a year might be kind of like where I'm at right now. Hopefully we can keep adding to that as time goes on. But that's just trips alone. I also want to be able to touch on things like traveling on a budget, traveling affordably, because that's kind of what I like to do personally.
And then he married me, and then huge mistake and then.
That was a big mistake. And I don't regret it one bit, but it was a big mistake.
I think that's going to be really popular because everyone wants to know how to travel on a budget.
Yeah. I did compile some stats about traveling and some barriers to entry. We'll get to that later, but but yeah, so I want to touch on some things like budgeting and traveling and maybe even like some photography tips and stuff like that, because I hope by now you all know that at least I'm interested in photography. I know I'm not very good at it yet, but I'm still
working on it. And it's good to have you here too, because I like to gas myself down, and you're pretty good at get me gassed back up.
So it's my job as your wife. I also think we should talk you, because this is your lounge, talk about, you know, recovering from jet lag, how not to get sick, because we do travel quite a bit and those are things that we have to overcome, and we are heading to Australia tomorrow, so we're gonna have to fight that jet lag real hard.
Yeah that I mean, that's just like a standalone episode of how maybe, or even just like one subject on a standalone episode of how to Fight jet lag.
But we can we can do something to give you more ideas.
No, I appreciate that. I appreciate that. So I just wanted to go back to the very beginning, to the very beginning of time, I e. When I was born. And I've talked about this on our main podcast a little bit, not too in depth, but I was born in Jersey and then this might get a little boring and monotonous, but I'm just gonna go through. I just want to. We got a walk before we can run here. So it's born in Jersey. When I was a year old,
my family moved into a converted Greyhound bus. So there are six of us in a bus and we drove all throughout the US. I always used to tell people we hit every single state in the US, But to be totally honest, I have absolute no idea.
I don't think you did.
I'm sure we didn't obviously.
Especially because you landed in Colorado.
Yeah, like we didn't go to Washington or Oregon. We're go any further west than the here. But it's just it's a fun anecdote to add, like, yeah, I've been to every state in the US. Surely I have not, And even if I have, I was too young to remember. But it did. I think it did instill a bit of a wanderlust, if you will, because it was me, my two brothers, and my sister and my two parents.
So there were six of us on this like forty foot long greyhound bus with bunk beds and a master bedroom in the back, and we were doing it on a budget. Back then, my dad was like selling temporary tattoos, doing odd jobs just to be able to afford gas for the bus that we were living in, And then we eventually settled in Colorado, and Caitlin and I just moved to Colorado actually, funny enough, just ten minutes down
the road from where I grew up. So a lot of this might be interesting for you to hear, but I don't think it'll become as a surprise for any of it. So growing up here in this area specifically, and Colorado as a whole, I feel like, is not very diverse. It's actually in the Roaring Fork Valley, it's almost exclusively Caucasian and Hispanic, like fifty to fifty split, maybe with like a couple other ethnicities sprinkled in there. But you're not going to get much diversity out here.
So growing up here, you don't get to see much, and I think I always wanted to have the chance to kind of get out and see more things. Calen, how's it going over.
There, I'm just listening.
Yeah, okay, Well, I just want to make sure. I feel like, if you're not paying attention to me, then they're not going to be paying attention to me.
I know all this stuff.
Oh, but I feet like pretend to be interested thanks, and so so that's where I think a lot of the curiosity came from. We were also very poor, so I didn't travel out of the state even until I was seventeen. I went to Mexico with my friends in high school, and I had to get a passport for that, but obviously you have to get a passport at some point. And then I went to college and it was kind of more the same. I think what it really comes down to for people at the end of the day
is you need to have time or money. If you don't have time but you have money, you don't have time to go travel. If you have time but you don't have money, you can't afford to go travel. And that's I feel like encompasses most of Americans or just people in general that want to travel but can't. And so I went to college, didn't have any money. Obviously, graduated college, worked for a couple of years, didn't have any money, but I didn't have any time either. I
guess I didn't have either of those things. Then we went on The Bachelor, and then we were granted this luxury of having a lot of time, and people started paying us money for not doing really much, and so it kind of gave us money and time. It was a good thing, and that's kind of when traveling took off for me personally. I know it was kind of the same for you, right, Like you had always wanted
to travel. You traveled with your boyfriend to Japan, but other than that, you hadn't really done much before the Bachelor, I don't think.
Yeah, I had gone to the Bahamas. Was when I got my first passport, Bahamas, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, and that was.
It, And that was all with the ex boyfriends. Yeah, yeah, And that was all when you were like twenty three probably, Yeah, that's when I.
Went on the sho twenty two.
Right, So now that of us really did any traveling until we were in our twenties. I hadn't even been on an air. I didn't even see a skyscraper until I was eighteen years old, probably, So then eventually I had the ability and the luxury to start doing that.
And I never really thought it would be any kind of thing, but it was really nice when I started traveling semi frequently and I would get back from trips and I would have friends, I would have friends reach out to me and ask me like traveling tips or like destinations that they should go, or just things like that where they started to kind of see you as someone that maybe could give them good advice on those things.
I remember I did a trip once and I got back and one of my friends who I really admired, was like asking me a bunch of questions about his potential trip going out there, and I was like, oh, wow, this is cool to like actually have something to talk about because I don't. I don't know, having experiences to talk about is so much easier than so many other things where you're just basically recounting your experience versus like trying to say something thought provoking. Does that make sense?
So so then I started traveling obviously, and eventually I bought my first camera, and then it kind of just snoballed into this big thing. I still think that I have not traveled nearly as much as a lot of my peers, people that I consider peers in this space, at least do people that are like living permanently on the road. And obviously those days are kind of behind me. Now that you know, married dog house wife that kind of falls onto the umbrella of married, but but I
hope it doesn't slow down too much. You know, we're going to Australia tomorrow. As Klein said, I have like kind of talking about some trips later on in the year two. But it just has to be a lot more thoughtful now, whereas before I could just pick up and go for a week or two, but now you kind of have to like take a lot more is into consideration, you know. So that's where we're at. The foundation of this podcast is I want to recount some
of those experiences. I want to be able to hopefully help people understand things that maybe they hadn't had the chance to understand before listening to this podcast. You know, Like I spun off that travel blog and it was
kind of the same thing. I felt like I didn't really have much to offer, but I wanted to be able to give someone something, and so the only thing that I could really think of was like, well, I just can outline everything that I spent because that's what I did, and that's all I have to do is just go back and talk about the things that I
had already done. And what I hate when you see you see all these people posting on Instagram of all these amazing trips and amazing photos and like incredibly corny captions, but you always in the back of my head, at least, I'm always wondering, like how much did that trip cost? Like where are they getting this money? How could you go all the way halfway across the world and fly back and not even miss a beat? And so that's kind of where that whole travel blog thing came about.
I wasn't really very motivated to write very I'm not very good at it, and or motivated too, I guess, And I still write sometimes, but not as often as I should. But that's where we're at now. And so I have a couple of stats that I want to ask you real quick. So I look these up just before we recorded the podcast, and they're kind of trivia. No, it's not really trivia, but just kind of interesting stats of Americans and traveling. And it's not like super well
researched or that in depth or anything. It's kind of just shout surface level. But if you were to guess between men and women, who do you think travels more men or women outside of the country, Women you do. Yeah, I was surprised to learn that women do thirty two percent of women. Thirty two percent of women are more likely to travel out of the country than men, which is only twenty two percent of men.
I think women are more curious than men.
Yeah, I could see that. I've always just kind of like through through my perspective of seeing your experience with travel, like it's just a little safer for men to travel, definitely.
And and I've it's funny that you say that because when we first started dating, you didn't totally grasp that that it's safer for men to travel solo than it is for women. But I also grew up with a mom who's like scared of everything, and so I was scared of everything, and then going out into world, I'm like, the world, isn't that scary?
Yeah? And do you still feel that way that the.
World isn't scary?
Yeah? Yeah, yeah. And that's one thing I've always encouraged too, is solo trips. I think are maybe the most important thing someone can do for themselves.
Book to trip to Paris in May or July is something. Yeah, you didn't tell me that I did because I had that credit that was excired.
He said, you were thinking about it.
Yeah, that's great.
Yeah, yeah, so women on average are more like almost one and a half times more likely to travel than men, which I thought was really interesting. And then another thing that I thought was interesting what we touched on this a little bit earlier about price or I guess finances. Survey results showed seventy six percent of the respondents wanted to travel more than they do, but they can't because of a lack of finances or just feeling underprepared or
ill equipped to travel. And more specifically, sixty three percent of Americans who have never left the country said an international trip would be out of their price range. And for me, that totally strikes home because before going on on television, I couldn't even dream of spending an extra couple thousand dollars to go on a trip because I needed that money to eat and to pay my rent and all that stuff.
I think that's something you could touch on too in future episodes, is like, I am such a planner, and since being married to you and being with you for five years, it's made me have to be more lax. Like I thought. You have to travel, you have to book your flights, you have to book every hotel, you have to plan every single thing out and you kind of fly by the seat of your pants in the best way. And that's like a topic in affordable traveling too.
It's like, if you block these dates off for work, you can buy a cheap flight like the day before, a week before, you know, and there's ways to cut around that, and you can just go somewhere and not have anything booked and it becomes the best trip ever, like we've done.
Yeah, and there's certain areas that obviously that's better, and like these d Asia you can get away with that a lot more South America, it's harder to do that in like a lot of the Western European countries.
I was thinking it's pretty easy in Europe. Oh yeah, I did it in Europe this past summer with MK.
Yeah, that's true. I guess you could always find cheapccommodations, but I also think that there are options to have very lavish accommodations, which that's kind of what I associate at Western Europe with. But you're absolutely right. I think you could find hostiles for twenty thirty bucks at night, and
just a matter of getting there is the biggest thing. So, like, if you book out a flight even like five or six months in advance, just get it super cheap, and then just block those days off just getting there.
Because MK was back to MKA was telling me she just flew to Paris, and she's like, if you book a flight like the week of or a few days before, it's actually really cheap.
Yeah, you can get lucky with that, But I would never bank on that.
No, I'm saying, if you block those dates off and you get lucky, yeah, it's a good way to travel cheaply.
Got to get lucky, though, which is fine. If you're willing to take that risk, that's totally fine. I remember I did a trip once where I flew I circumnavigated
the world as my plan, I flew west. I just kept flying west until I got back to Los Angeles, and the only flights that I had really booked were LA to Japan and then Japan to Indonesia, and then from there I would just like two days before I wanted to leave Indonesia, I'd book a flight, book to flight to Malaysia, spend a couple of days there, booked to flight to Singapore. And that's kind of how I
did that trip, and it worked out. I got you know, some of the flights ended up being kind of expensive, but I would say majority of them I got at a pretty fair rate. And then like, once you get
to Western Europe you can fly really cheaply. I was really surprised to see how expensive, for lack of a better word, domestic flights in South America were, because you can fly from like Germany to Greece for thirty bucks, but then flying from Argentina to Brazil is four hundred dollars, and it's like it's basically the same distance and it's within the same continent. You'd think it'd be a little cheaper, but it's not. Sometimes what else did I want to
touch on before we say goodbye? Because we're gonna keep these quick, We're gonna keep them light, and I wanted to say there there was this quote from that geo. Oh I was. I was researching a little bit about like why do people travel? Like what is the what is the reason that we have such a yearning to want to travel? What do you think yours is?
I just want to see and experience other cultures and meet people. I don't know.
There wasn't interesting that. I didn't great food, I didn't write this down to talk about specifically, but I do remember reading about it just recently was college graduates are more likely to travel than non college graduates, which which kind of makes sense. But I I, you know, I didn't think there'd be such a drastic correlation between those
two things. But I do think, like, you know, if you do have a yearning for higher education, maybe that kind of comes with an excitement to explore a little bit.
I wonder if that'll change them because less and less people are going to college because it's not as necessary.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, and I feel the same way too,
But I mean, you can't argue the stats. You know, there it was like almost like triple whatever a non college graduate wanted to travel was college graduate and here I am a college you graus, but not even knowing how to talk that, as you were saying, not that really makes a difference anymore, but but yeah, but the according to this nat Gio article I read, it says moving to a neighboring band is always an option to avoid brewing conflict or just for a change in social scenery.
The great affair is to move, so like even back to the roots of when we were way underdeveloped and like, just like foraging and hunting, we would move around a lot more than I think people gave us credit for. Obviously we're not going quite as far because airplanes didn't exist way back then, but you're still moving around a lot. And I do think that that urge to move around has kind of been instilled in us for a long time.
Airplanes just kind of shook the shook the ground because now we can jump on one and be somewhere else in ten hours, somewhere all the way across the world.
Uh.
And then in that same article, I was wondering, like the psychological benefits of traveling, because you think there's got to be some and there was some stats and some analytics to back this, but they did say traveling is good for you, according to science to science, they did scientific studies and it actually does benefit your mental health,
which makes sense. Every time I'm traveling, you know, you get excited, you you're optimistic about what the new place might be, You're you're curious about new experiences, and then when you come back, you're still kind of beaming a little bit from it. You get to share that experience with all your friends, which I think is really cool. And fun and that's a big part of it for me as well. So that's basically that's basically what we're
going to talk about here. Traveling hopefully doesn't get stale. I feel like it's already gotten stale.
No no, no, it won't get stale.
It's not stale, I do. So what we're gonna do is, like next week, I want to talk in great depth about let's say a trip that I took to Argentina seven years ago, and I can hopefully kind of go through like my experiences there, and if you're planning a trip similar to that, you can use that hopefully as a resource.
But also people should write in if there's a place that deems visited that caught your eye or or something you want to learn more about, just email us dm US.
Yeah, dm us dm our Instagram page. It's still help. I suck at dating, but we're working on that.
I'm trying.
Yeah, So that's going to do it. I know this is kind of like a whole This is a quick run through, and it's kind of a half biged idea at this point. But I hope you guys keep listening, and I hope you guys can hopefully just learn. I hate saying learn something. It makes me feel so freaking snooty, but but I want to be able to help people, and so hopefully this can help people. Maybe that's what I'm trying to say. So yeah, stay tuned. This is just week one. We got a lot of kings to
work out. I'm going to keep doing my best to prepare and hopefully, hopefully, you know, this turns out to be good for people, myself specifically.
Yeah, I thought you were going to lead into and maybe next week will suck a little bit less.
There we go. Why would I need to lead into it when you do it all on your Maybe next week will suck just a little bit less. Should we change that? Maybe next week we'll travel just a little bit more