I.V.M. It feels like everyone's searching for the secret to living longer these days. Better health, sharper minds, stronger bodies. This is the John T.
and the Doc podcast. I'm Dr. Marcus Rani, and I'm joined by someone who understands performance and resilience better than most, international cricketer, John T. Rose.
In this show, we explore the science of longevity, from how our bodies age, to the everyday habits that help us stay strong, sharp, and resilient as the years go by. Catch full episodes on the I.V.M. podcast's YouTube channel and on all audio streaming platforms. Hello, Simplified listeners.
This is Chuck here, one-third of your hosting Triumvirate. So as you might have imagined, we do not have an episode this week, but aha, we are not going to re-broadcast an episode like we usually do. We are going to do something a little more creative this time. But let me take a step back.
Travel is what opens up our minds to the world and empties our bank balance, usually. I travel myself a lot, usually from going out where I stay to the I.V.M. studio in car. Clearly, I did not make that trip this time, which is why you are hearing this episode.
But one such time when we did travel, we had Utsav Mamoria on our podcast when he was talking about budget travel, slow travel, how to travel, and in another episode, market research. But let's focus on the travel part of things. Utsav came on to a show and got so enamored of talking in front of a mic that he ended up having his own show on the I.V.M. network, and it's called Postcards from Nowhere.
And I'm pretty sure you've heard of this because Postcards from Nowhere has quickly become one of the most popular shows on the network. And if you haven't heard it, you really should. It's an absolutely fun podcast on slow travel and how to get the best out of every place that you visit, really. And it might give you a few new travel tips.
And each episode is pretty short, which is a complaint of mine. I wish they were a little longer. What's fascinating is that a lot of the concepts that Utsav spoke to us about have been polished and they've been turned into full episodes on his podcast. So we'd actually like to do a sort of like a crossover episode where we play bits from the initial interview which we had and then that fully fleshed out story, which is on his show, Postcards from Nowhere.
And we'll obviously play some bits from his episodes on Postcards from Nowhere on this show. And if you like it, you should check it out. It's a really, really good show. Congratulations to yourself for starting your podcast and for making it to the iTunes top, whatever, whatever.
And to everybody else, we hope you enjoy this special crossover episode. And yeah, happy travels, I suppose. And we'll see you next week with hopefully an actual simplified episode. In Armenia, I lived with the last remaining Aryan police of the country.
And in the backdrop of the violent nationalism my own country is going through, it forced me to ask the most fundamental question. Who am I and what is my identity? I spent almost three weeks in Armenia. Again, not the most obvious.
But by the way, for the first time in my life, I went into a museum abroad and saw a pamphlet in Hindi. I was shocked. In Yerevan, that was a national museum, fantastic museum. If you ever go to Yerevan, please take half a day to see that museum.
There's so much about the world we don't know. And there was a pamphlet in Hindi. And I had to ask the curator sitting there, how do you even have a pamphlet in Hindi? So apparently Indians are the sixth most visited tourist country.
Tourists of India go to Armenia. And I was like, I have no freaking idea. I don't even know one person who has gone there and a lot of people who travel. And it was really nice to see an Indian language out there.
There's something similar to this. So I grew up in Bahrain, it was a small country next to Qatar in the Middle East. And there are so many of us Malialis over there, that the official forms come in three languages. In order, there's Arabic, then there's English, and then there's Maliali on their official state forms.
But so yeah, I get it. Yeah, and very interestingly, I also want to share a small piece of history, which, especially to Bombay and Yerevan, what connects to Bombay and Yerevan, is that if you go to South Bombay, there is David Sassoon Library. And David Sassoon is actually Armenian. And when I told that to my walking tour guide, he was completely blown up.
He had no idea that someone even knows David Sassoon back in India. You're like the richest man in the world. I don't know. So I've got to know much more about David Sassoon much later.
Unfortunately, most people, most troublemakers in Bombay know David Sassoon Library because of London Broccoli, which is above it. In June 2018, in a much less ambitious journey, I slipped into a new existence as a traveler. I took a three-month sabbatical to travel the less explored parts of the world, looking to experience emotions which often desert us in our everyday lives. And through to Bosnia and Hasgovina, in a heartwarming encounter with the Pakistani, I grappled with the idea of home, the adopted lands we physically live in, and the motherlands we mentally inhabit.
On a back-breaking hike to Lukomir, the remotest village in Bosnia and Hasgovina, I dwell in the phenomenon of aging, a reality which we hate to accept, but is more of a mental block than a natural problem. In a secret bunker in the heart of former Yugoslavia, I understood the true nature of intrinsic fear, both of the past and the future, and how it destroys a potential deliverable life. In Nagorno-Karabakh, a country that exists on the map but the world doesn't recognize, in an active minefield, I understood the true nature of forgiveness from people who have lost everything. I want to talk about one specific story which probably has been my most intense experience of traveling in 10 years.
I was in this region, which is a disputed region between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It's called Nagorno-Karabakh, or Artsakh. Now, by the way, because I went to that place, I can never enter Azerbaijan again, however, because I have a visa for Nagorno-Karabakh on my passport. So I'm barred from entering Azerbaijan now, for life.
I was just going to that region because I just wanted to be interesting enough. I was trying to book an accommodation, and every single booking website in my life I have known showed me zero availability. When I had to put the place on maps, I could not find it, because since it's not officially recognized, it is actually called by the name what the Azerbaijan side calls it. So I managed to find something on Airbnb, got and booked it.
And one day I was just walking, and I was reading my guidebook, I read something about an organization called the Halo Trust. So the Halo Trust works worldwide towards demining conflict zones. And I'd seen that work about 10 years ago in Cambodia when I was traveling, make a drop, make a small donation, because I think it's a really, really difficult job to do. And when I entered their office, they were so surprised to find a tourist who came because this never happened with them.
And they sat down to me and had a conversation, how do you even know about us? And when I gave them the entire background, they said, if you are free tomorrow, we will take you to an active landmine site. They drove me two hours to an active landmine site, and the region is a hilly region. They drove me, I was going through areas which were demined.
I could see rocket fragments lying next to me. And they took me off the top of a hill, which is basically a monastery, right? And the entire hill was landmined. And that's why I got the idea of getting the name of my book.
It's called Monastery in a Minefield. And they actually took me down to the hill. And imagine, it's a good city green line. Imagine the entire hill mine.
So there are workers who dig every square centimeter of their hill to local landmines. And they took me and showed me the entire process. And what the interesting part of this, most of these deminers have actually lost their own family members in conflict. And they knew that some of these landmines have been laid by their own people.
Because the hill has changed hands over walls. And I was talking to one of them, and I was trying to understand that how do you deal with something which has taken the life of someone who's your own? And I wrote a very, very simple thing. They said, you have to learn to forgive and move on.
Because that hate will eat you from inside. It's a very, very simple thing. It's a very profound thing when you think of it. You know, whatever is happening around us, we get so caught in our petty battles of I don't like this person, I have ego issues, this colleague is shit.
But if you look at it, people who have seen real loss are the people who can really teach us about how to live. And that experience was not... Rise above pettiness and... Yes, it's a well-paying job.
But it's an extremely dangerous job. Two years ago, they unfortunately had an accident. And they lost a person. Wow, okay.
So it's not... I cannot imagine how anyone does this safely. I mean, at the end of the day, you put your shovel to the mine, it's going to explode. What's the procedure?
Because the mind gets triggered by weight, it gets triggered by a certain force. There are tank mines and there are person mines. So not everything is a trip by which you've seen Hollywood films. I think that's another great travel advice, sir.
Don't... Don't experience basis for Hollywood. Especially Hollywood. And you know, I was talking to that...
the program manager for Helo Trust. And we were just talking, I remember a very famous African proverb. It says that when elephants fight, it is a grass that suffers. And if you go and talk to people of the region, they have forever lived in the...
this whole space of... there could be a concrete anytime. Right? How do you live with the amount of stress?
And you know, if you feel that you don't need to go to Armenia, I generally feel go to Kashmir. There are a lot of people living under stress every single day. Because they're sandwiched between two forces. Right?
But we don't think of these things, right? I mean, we're too comfortable in our lives. This whole thing of slow travel is like... very interesting actually.
And it's something I've been seeing. I think... So there are two parts. I think one, I think a lot of people, when they feel that they are spending a lot of money traveling to a particular location, you...
It's so close by, let's do that also. I think that temptation is always going to be there. I don't think it's going to go away. So you couldn't get the same kind of wow if you went and said that I really looked at cleaning tower from inside out or right, left, everything.
I know everything, there's no body. But if you did see Eiffel Tower, it would be like that, yeah. So there's a very small thing on that. If you're really into history of architecture, let's say, and you really admire a building, you want to see this building forever.
If you really want to etch it in a memory, sit down under the building, you can take a thousand pictures. No matter how bad you are sketching, sketch it. The amount of detailing you will see, you will notice. That's great.
I'm going to do this. I always want to do this. We spent some time in Vienna and Prague. And there were these lovely castles and everything.
And I was like, I should sketch. And I bought a pad, I took a pen. But I never seemed to have the time. I never did that.
Because you probably had to get to somewhere. Yeah. What happens is when you have two or three days in a city, you're trying to pack in as much as possible. Because realistically, you're not going to come back.
It's a city you absolutely fell in love with. You're not going to come back to the city. Right? So the thing is that, if you think of your vacation, the ones you took very, very quickly, you have very, very faint memories.
Yeah. Right? And that's fundamentally become the problem. That we have all the resources to travel as much as we want, but we don't have the senses to do it anymore.
Right? I'll just take your sketching tip and I'll try to offer a compromise for people who don't have the time to sit and do that. So I carry my SLR with me everywhere. And after one particular vacation, I forgot which it was.
I just had a horrible time going through photos. Because my logic was I'll edit it later. We'll fix it in post, as they say. So what I would do is I would take 300 photos of the same thing.
And then it'd be a massive nightmare to fix it later. So then next to the event, I said, okay, this time I'm going to make life for myself easier. And what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to take only like two photos of it. That'll force you to think about what you're going to take.
And when you do that, you end up noticing a lot of things that you spoke of in your sketching. It won't give you the full experience of your sketching. But the idea is the same. And then you say, oh, wow.
I'm going to show that. You're not behind it. So there's more quality into what you're doing. But if you have the time, obviously, you're like sketching.
The other thing, of course, is if you want to write about it. I prefer writing because my sketching skills are shit. And I like writing. So that's what I do for it.
The other thing also is that once you spend time thinking what you want to frame in a photograph, a desire generally is that you capture everything. You really want to go back and recreate what you saw. That's not ever going to happen. And as you rightly said, once you say about this particular thing, is it the water, is it the mountain, is it the lighthouse?
You focus on that. Because once you go back and look at that picture, it will trigger a massive set of memories which will really leave you on a very happy space. And how many of these photos do you go back and see in any way? This side on your phone, on your Instagram feed, whatever.
Like I have an Instagram feed. If you go and look at a follow, it's a complete shit. I have only 250 followers on Instagram. It's quality.
I have doubts about that. But yeah, I realized that you can post a thousand pictures, but ultimately what you retain from the pictures is what really matters. In June 2015, I moved to Shanghai. Excited to be living in an alien country.
In a bit to further push my new experiences, I started hosting people on couch surfing. What is couch surfing, you may ask? It is a simple idea. If you have some free space at home and would like to meet travelers passing through the city, you sign up.
You can list your place on the website and travelers can request to stay. So what makes it different from Airbnb? Well, there is no money in work. A host cannot charge the guest.
The entire premise is based on the idea of kindness. So I knew my experience of couch surfing. I had never couch surfed until 2014. And 2014, I moved to China for a six-month stint at work.
And I was living by myself. And it was a completely new country. I probably knew one person at best. So I thought that, you know, why not host people on couch surfing?
Shanghai is an expensive city. So there are more than enough people wanting to stay free. And I was hosting close to 30 people over six months. Right?
And that experience was so enriching for the simple reason that we have stopped thinking about that life can mean so many different things to people than what we think of. There are so many ways to live life. And I met the most interesting people from that space. I met a musician who has been able to make more money than he was making at Wall Street by living in some obscure corner of the US.
I met a student of anthropology who had never been off to the United States. And he felt that he was living a very fake life because you can't be an anthropologist in your own country. So what happens in couch surfing essentially is to those who may not be aware of it is that you don't pay for stay. You write a request.
You create a profile at a request and the host is a choice to accept it. And they will come and get up under this living condition, this living space, these are rules, households and everything. Now what happens is and I will speak from the perspective of being a man because my concerns about safety are much, much lesser than women. So because of the fact that I was able to host so many people, they would leave references.
Right? So next time if I have to send a request to someone, the fact that they will see so many positive experiences of people, they will look at me in a positive light. And there's no other way to judge. Right?
So if, and that's completely free. So I have not, I've hosted a lot, I have not stayed with someone yet. But one good way for you to subsidize your travel is that if you have your space, maybe just one bed you have free and you're willing to talk to people who are from different parts of the world, get a profile in couch surfing. Fill the people.
Don't let everyone in. Don't be stupid. Don't let everyone in. Look at their profiles.
Look at, are they verified? Have they been through a lot of couch surfing experiences and they've come out positive? What happens is that that helps you build a profile. So next time you travel in, it's not a request, you're far more likely to get accepted.
The second thing which you will learn is the way a local can show you a place, nobody can. And I think that's, I don't think that's even up for a bit. Right? And I had a Chinese student come and stay with me.
She was a student of ancient Chinese art and she was in town for some work. And she took me to places in Shanghai I had not even heard of. I was living there for six months. Right?
So that became a very great experience for me. So look at couch surfing, it's free. It's a great way to understand people and cultures. And it's a great way to look at how people live their lives.
How does couch surfing hold up with visas though? Because you're technically paying. No. So what you do is basically you get a visa regular way.
And then I talk to people in advance. Because you're not white, we can't just land up in a country and go to a lot of visas. So it works very well for white people. But it works for us as well if you're willing to be a little smart about it.
The only thing I would recommend is that if you're fussy about staying, please don't take a couch surfing. Right? Because someone is doing you a favor. So you can't go with the expectation of I will get X and get Y.
But trust me, you will get more than you can ever think of. Sure. Wow. I think that's all that we could ask for from stay.
Yeah. That's fantastic.