The Adventures in Greece: Part 1

0:00Hello, it's Sean and you're listening to the three-month vacation. This is the story about Greece, our trip to Greece via Singapore. I haven't told it before, so here we go. We've all run into the safety videos and planes and most of us seem to ignore it. On a journey you might watch one, a second one, and then maybe start to ignore it. I'd watch it but not carefully, but one point stuck in my head because it only showed up on a Singapore Airlines flight. They seem to emphasize that if a phone slipped and fell in between the seats, you should not try to retrieve it. Instead, they suggested you should call a crew member. I don't know why that point stuck in my head, but it all boils down to the power of lithium batteries. One of the things that aviation safety authorities lose sleep over is a lithium fire. Normal fires need oxygen and once you smother them, the fire goes out.

1:02Lithium batteries are quite different. They produce oxygen internally through a chemical reaction, so you can't easily put out a lithium fire. You may try to cover the battery, but it doesn't stop the chemical reaction. And let's get a teeny bit technical here. When lithium batteries ignite, it creates an unstoppable chain reaction. This chain reaction is called a thermal runaway. One battery cell tends to overheat, which then in turn triggers the next cell and so on. It starts at a cascade that begins to accelerate and there is no way to slow it down or interrupt it. And cool it temporarily, but inexplicably, it can reignite hours later. This fire burns at 600 degrees centigrade and you can't use water to put out the fire.

2:05Lithium reacts aggressively with water and creates even more chaos. A standard fire extinguisher doesn't achieve much either. It may quell the fire for a little while, but the internal thermal mass is still alive trapped at hundreds of degrees. Almost without warning, the chain reaction can erupt hours later. Now you're in the confines of the plane and in that cramped space and uncontrolled fire can become catastrophic in barely 20 minutes. Let's say you dropped your phone in between your seat and you were in the economy class. Well, none of this matters very much. Economy seats moved by mechanical action. A button releases a ratchet and then your body weight does the rest. There is no motor or compression force, so a phone that is wedged within the seat gets slightly pressed, but usually doesn't cause much damage. Business class is different. Business class seats operate with actuators.

3:07An actuator has enormous mechanical power, so much so that it can puncture a lithium battery without too much difficulty. And it's not a sudden jerky reaction. It's a slow, relentless movement. It compresses the battery. It's the slowness itself that's the biggest headache. It crushes the device with hundreds of kilograms of force, thus creating not one but multiple short circuits. I was having an app when I set my phone down on the seat and I fished around from my headset and then the phone disappeared. I knew exactly where I left it, so it was clear that it had just slipped over the edge. But if I hadn't known, it was like a ZIFT-A-Fone had vanished in tin air. That's when I remembered the safety video. Instead of fiddling with the seat controls, which is what I would have normally done, I stopped,

4:10and I went and found one of the cabin crew. The moment I told him what happened, his face went grim. This is one of the last things I want to hear, he said. I thought he was joking. It was just a phone stuck on the side of the seat. But his face stayed serious. He came to my seat. He carefully dug through the side and Valla. We had my phone back. If I hadn't known the phone was there and had simply pressed the recline button, there was a decent chance that the actuator could have crushed it. We had taken out from Auckland and instead of landing in Singapore, we would have been on an emergency diversion back to Sydney or Darwin or perhaps Jakarta. But that wasn't the only drama on the flight. Shortly after retrieving my phone, the same crew member was called to economy. There was an emergency that took the better part of an hour and a half. When he returned, he looked relieved but still unsettled.

5:13The plane landed and we would soon be on our way to the hotel and dinner. But as we disembarked, the pilot announced that we could not leave the airport. We were all being moved to a restricted area. We looked outside on the tarmac. There were two or three ambulances, a fire truck and at least one civil defence officer in full gear and with a gas mask. No one told us what was happening. Were we yet again in the middle of a contagion? Was it some crazy crisis? We never got to know. We were kept in the waiting room for about 60 minutes and then allowed to leave. And that was the start of our trip to Athens Greece. Where something went wrong and Renuka and I didn't sleep a wink. I've been to 42 countries, so the taxi driver. Did he mean 42 countries, 42 cities or 42 places? I wasn't sure.

6:14And it didn't seem what debating as we made our way through Friday traffic in Athens. It was the last day of school before summer break and the normally busy day had just gotten a tiny bit worse. Were we concerned? No. There's nothing on a trip. At least the trip we do. But to eat, drink and sleep. Except Renuka couldn't sleep. The moment we arrived in Athens, both her nostrils were completely blocked. It was probably an allergy, something in the air. But she could only breathe through her mouth. She had had allergies before, but this was strange because no allergy had affected her in over a decade. We didn't know if it was pollution, pollen or something else entirely. And so it began. Every day that we were in Athens, she walked around with her stuffed nose. At night, however, it got a lot worse. Her breathing was troubled. She'd prop herself up on a couple of pillows.

7:15Yes, she started snoring loudly. If we were in a house, this would be a minor problem. I could always escape to another room. But in a hotel room, you know how it is. Choices are limited. We assumed it was just something in Athens that caused a sudden allergy. But in a while, we were headed to the island of Syrus. The air would be cleaner, the pollution a lot less. Even the rooms would be a lot more spacious. But no. The allergy hopped on the ferry with us and to the next destination. Both of us were getting no sleep at all. And since I'm a light sleeper, the only recourse is another room. In yes, I did find another room. The bathroom. It was a luxuriously large bathroom, but what made it special were the heated dials.

8:19I have no problem sleeping on hard surfaces as long as it's not freezing. This bathroom made the perfect bed. I slept, she slept. Yes, we were still a bit groggy, but maybe things would get better as we move to our next destination, Manny. The best way to describe how we travel is to imagine a saucer. We land in the middle of the saucer. So the center of the saucer is usually the main city, like Athens. We try to find a place that's on the circumference of the saucer and then we move around that circumference. So we're always 100, 200 kilometers away from main cities. Instead of going to all the tourist spots which we hate, we head way out away from everything. And so we headed to Manny. Hours away from Athens. It's a rustic, southern part of mainland Greece, and this is where locals occasionally

9:21go to escape Athens. But there were several things that were making me a little nervous. In New Zealand we drive on the left-hand side of the road. And now we head to flip sides. I don't usually have a problem driving on the right-hand side of the road, but from time to time I'll get it wrong, just for a fraction of a second. But that was not my main anxiety. We had to pick up a car and we were landing in the ferry jetty at 3.30 in the afternoon. The drive was supposed to take us four hours. That would get us there at 7.30, right? We had some light, but it would still be getting dark. We had been warned that the hotel didn't have any parking and we would need to arrive with time to spare. And I had been planning for this drive. I knew that we'd have to keep the GPS on. I was not familiar with the roads, the destination, absolutely nothing. But I'm a bit of a maniac where it comes to planning. So I charged the iPad, both the phones.

10:24Still, I wasn't sure that we'd make the whole journey with that single battery. Cars have USB, but it's USB-A, my phone is USB-C. It's just a different connector. But there is no navigation with the dead phone and we have all become hopeless at dealing with maps. This meant that we would have to drive in unfamiliar conditions on the wrong side of the road. And arrive in the dark only to find there was no parking. As I mentioned before, I had charged the iPad. So we was going to serve as a good backup. I could keep an offline map, load it, run the phone for two hours, switch to the iPad, and then we'd still have Renuka's phone in reserve. We planned for three devices to make this simple journey. Timing was everything. If we managed to move quickly, we could still get there and have some light, but Greek fairies don't usually go by the clock.

11:27By the time we landed at the ferry, we were already in our late. All of this was happening around the Easter weekend, so lots of Greeks were traveling back and forth, but we made sure that all of those 300 people on the ferry were behind us so that when we landed at the jetty, we dashed towards the arrival gates in Kachataxia. Anyone who travels knows that the worst place to Kachataxia is right outside the arrival gates. I was know that you were tired, they know that you need to get somewhere, and the better move is to walk about 500 meters, find a taxi, or use an app, but we were pressed for time, so we went straight to the taxi rank. You probably guessed what happened next. Once the bags went the boot and we were ready to go, the driver insisted on 20 euros. The distance was barely a kilometer or two, which was about a five minute drive.

12:29Without the luggage we could have hiked it in about 10 to 15 minutes, but with the pavements being what they were and time not being on our side, we gradually gave in to the hostage demands. Not that this speeding up helped us in any way. When we got to the rental car company, we had to join a queue. There was a loud American who insisted on having things her way. She went on and on about how she had points and she wasn't going to pay an extra 60 euros. When the person behind the counter spoke to her, she would start the story again. We had this story five times at least. On the other side there was another client who wanted explicit instructions for every left and right turn, despite already having a GPS on board. So we had rushed madly about and it was all for nothing. But then our luck turned for the better. The car rental guy gave us a USB-A connector.

13:33We didn't have to bother with the phone anymore because now it was connected to CarPlay for the entire drive. We'd probably worked ourselves more than we needed, because at that point we realized that it wasn't a four hour car drive. It was barely two hours and we arrived with lots of daylight to spare. Parking was a bit inconvenient but not too bad. There we were at our destination, a lot less frazzled than we thought we'd be. It was time to relax, take a shower and get that dry skin moisturized. I have particularly dry skin. This has been a problem since I was a child, which means that I need a specific kind of cream after a shower. Before we were left New Zealand, Renew Tomato decision. We always stayed good hotels and these hotels would have cream. There was absolutely no point in lugging another large bottle halfway around the world.

14:38Okay, so I left my cream at home. In Athens, the hotel cream didn't work on my skin. I had to use a lot more than usual, but I assumed that it was the climate or maybe the water. When we moved to the island of Syras, it was the same problem. A much better hotel but with the same result. The cream seemed to sit on the surface of my skin rather than sinking in. By the time we reached the last destination, money, that was pretty much the end of our trip. And I had resigned myself to indifferent cream. At each stop, Renew Coward still asked me, is the cream working today? One morning I said yes. I told her that it had worked exceedingly well. She took me back to the bathroom and showed me what I'd used. It was the conditioner. I had rubbed conditioner all over myself. Yeah, I know you're laughing.

15:39And with that, our trip to Greece was more or less done. Next up, Frankfurt and the meeting with Keanu Reeves. And that brings us to the end of this podcast. Let's find out what's happening in PsychoTactics Latin. We're going to be away for a month in September, in Taiwan and Hong Kong. And if you're there, you can meet up with us. But when we get back, we'll be announcing the ProJay course. And this, it's going to be a six month session where you start to improve your business, grow your business. And this is a sort of consulting session, but it also has elements of how to create leverage. Because eventually, you can only do so much consulting and maybe a bit of training, but it is the leverage that counts. If you have to be in your business all the time, it just drains you. Since we launched the Brain Audit way back in 2002, that's been the way that we've run

16:42our business. Use the system that has enabled us to travel, to sit at the cafe and do nothing. But work when we need to, not work because we have to. It's enabled us to pick and choose the clients that we work with. You can say it's a good way of living a life. So if you'd like to be part of the ProJay course, there's more information coming up. You'll find out in October. I'll say bye for now. And we'll see you in 5,000 BC. So and check out 5,000 BC today. Bye bye.