So one of the most common questions I've gotten throughout my career, for lack of a better term, is people asking me, how the hell do you know all this stuff?

I'm not a psychologist, I don't have a PhD, most of my personal stories involve me being drunk or doing something stupid.

And one of the things that I have not talked about a whole lot publicly, but has been massively

influential on me is the fact that I've spent about a quarter of my life living abroad

outside of the United States.

And one of the interesting things as well is that a lot of the classic tropes that people

associate with world travel, you know, things like, oh, everybody's so happy and we're all one and people all want the same thing.

Like, yeah, that's kind of true, but if you actually spend a lot of time in different countries, of For example, I would actually say living outside the United States for 10 years,

it actually made me more conservative in my political views.

It actually convinced me that money is actually more important than I used to believe.

And in some ways I feel a little bit more disconnected from the rest of the planet so it's in a way

I came back with completely the opposite of what most people would expect when you go live abroad.

But at the same time, my time abroad made me a lot more confident,

maybe more self-assured,

maybe more realistic about the world and the people in it.

And I think it's informed a lot of the philosophy that I've

written about over the past 10 years. So we're going to take this episode and we're going to break

down some of the biggest takeaways that I got from my years living abroad,

some crazy personal stories and some unexpected breakthroughs

that happened along the way.

Cool.

Let's just start this right at the top then Mark.

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