A broke twenty-something ducks into the New York Public Library for the air conditioning, wanders to the end of the stacks, and — for the first time in his life — turns left, toward history. Thirty years, seventy countries, and a thousand hours of television later, Neil Laird has filmed crumbling tombs and lost cities for Discovery, National Geographic, the BBC and nearly everyone else — and written himself into a trilogy of comic novels about a feckless TV crew that keeps messing up the ancient world one episode at a time.

In a conversation that runs everywhere neither of us planned, Neil talks about the father who bet he'd fail, the morning he woke up feeling like he was floating on air on a road near the Iranian border, what he quietly gave up to become "the suit," and the feeling he's been chasing ever since.

A few things we get into:

• The library book that rerouted his entire life
• The life-insurance policy his dad bought on only one of his three kids — and why
• Monkey porn, a grizzly bear, and getting arrested as a pirate
• Why Egypt "did it first and best" — and why Derrik said no to going back
• Becoming a network executive, and what it cost him to stop being the guy in the tomb

Neil Laird is a multiple Emmy- and BAFTA-nominated documentary producer who has made over a thousand hours of television across seventy-plus countries — history, archaeology, science and adventure for Discovery, National Geographic, the BBC, PBS, History, Science Channel and more, including launching Brain Games and Border Wars. After decades on both the production and network sides, he now writes the Prime Time Travelers series — comic novels about a TV crew that time-travels into the ancient world — and lectures on cruise ships and at festivals. The trilogy's third book, Prime Time Troy, is out now, alongside Prime Time Travelers and Prime Time Pompeii.

• Website: https://www.neillaird.com/ — books, films, talks, and tours
• Books: Prime Time Travelers, Prime Time Pompeii, and Prime Time Troy — search Neil Laird on Amazon
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0481987/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neillaird/
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gay_history — ancient queer history
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61557422344116

Good Grief Travel is a weekly conversation with people who made a real, costly change — and found a way through. Hosted by Derrik Dyka, author of the travel memoir Good Grief Travel and the novel Greg: He's Fine.

• Website: https://www.goodgrieftravel.com/
• The memoir: Good Grief Travel by Derrik Dyka
• The novel: Greg: He's Fine (under the pen name Beau Griffin)

It started with a four-month childhood road trip and one question to her father — can we just keep going? — and she's spent forty years answering it. We get into how she actually funds a life of travel, why the trip you're sure you can't afford is usually the cheap one, why she writes her disasters down while they're still happening, and the Miami hurricane that taught her how to get herself out of trouble.

If you've ever talked yourself out of a trip because you "can't afford it," this one's aimed at you.

Website: https://www.thesmarttravelista.com/

Books (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/author/kinglin — the Smart Travelista guides (travel for less) and the Antics from Abroad series (the disasters; newest is Hot Mess)

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesmartravelista/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linda-king-81541523a/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thesmartravelista

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thesmartravelista

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Thesmartravelista

X: https://x.com/the_travelista

Good Grief Travel is about movement, reinvention, and the trips that change a life. Follow or subscribe so you don't miss a conversation. More at goodgrieftravel.com.

If this one put the itch in you — that's the idea. I wrote about where mine led in Good Grief Travel.

In her first-ever podcast, Dianna and Derrik — both widowed young — trade the opposite ways they survived the same loss: she couldn't stop moving, he couldn't start. A conversation about motion and stillness, about being the steady one for everyone else, and about what she actually needed when no one told her to need it.

Find Dianna:

CuraVela Global — https://www.curavelaglobal.com

Instagram — https://instagram.com/ddgermany

LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianna-germany/

When Mark Simon flew to Beijing in 2006 to teach English, he didn't even know there was hockey in China. Thirteen years later he'd helped grow the game from four clubs to a national scene — coaching in Beijing and Shanghai, working with the KHL's Kunlun Red Star, and watching a wave of Olympic money reshape the sport before the 2022 Games.

Then the pandemic stranded him mid-flight, and he went home to Canada — carrying two hockey coaches' suitcases he never delivered and leaving behind two cats he paid rent for, six months, from the other side of the world.

Six years later, he's going back — not to the mainland this time, but to Hong Kong, to build it one more time. This is a conversation about hockey in the unlikeliest place on earth, the money and ambition behind China's ice boom, and the harder question underneath it all: what makes a person keep leaving the thing they built?

GUEST LINKS

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bingqiumark
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marksimonhockey/
• Currently: Director of Player Development / Head Coach (U13–U16), China Hockey Group, Hong Kong
• His charity: Hockey Hands — teaching hockey and English to kids in orphanages and migrant schools

FROM THE HOST 

Derrik's memoir Good Grief Travel and his novel Greg, He's Fine are linked at goodgrieftravel.com, along with every episode. 

Chanoa Inez flew to Montenegro to start a life. Her partner was from there, and the whole plan — a new home, a new career on the coast — was built around his roots. They'd been in the country only a matter of days, everything still in storage back in Miami, when she woke one morning to find he had died in his sleep. She spoke barely a hundred words of the language. Most people would have flown home. She stayed — not for a week, but for nearly seven years.

In this episode she tells Derrik what that morning actually took: opening the balcony to shout for help in English over a square full of holidaying families, the neighbor's teenage daughter who spoke enough English to come up the stairs, a funeral to navigate in a country that wasn't yet hers. She talks about why she didn't go back to Miami, what it meant to rebuild a life in the place where she lost him, and — nearly seven years on — why she finally left all of it for Los Angeles.

The conversation turns on identity. Chanoa describes feeling like "less than one person" afterward, her sense of self so bound up in the relationship that losing him left her completely unanchored. Derrik, who lost his wife of twenty-four years, admits his own experience ran the opposite way — a rare, honest divergence between two people who have walked through the same kind of loss and come out understanding it differently. Her book, Dream On, grew out of everything that came next.

Find Chanoa

• Book — Dream On: How to Create the New Life of Your Dreams After Upheaval or Loss (2025): https://www.chanoainez.com/
• Website: https://www.chanoainez.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chanoa/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chanoainez/
• Substack: https://substack.com/@chanoainez

Episode description:
In 2017, Matt Savino left a stable software career to drive the Pan-American Highway toward Ushuaia, the southernmost city on earth, in a silver FJ Cruiser. He never made it. Plantar fasciitis, thinning money, and a nationwide uprising in Nicaragua turned the quest into a detour — and the detour became Land Without a Continent. Matt talks about talking his way through student roadblocks on cold beer and respect, why he's felt more alone in London than in any war-adjacent backroad in Latin America, and the running list of reasons — COVID, the book, a wedding, his dad's health — that keep the trip in "bust mode" seven years on. A quiet, honest one about the difference between the leap you take and the one you keep putting off.

Chapters:

• 00:00 — Two FJ Cruisers and a T-boned car
• 01:49 — Physics, poker, and the $13-a-credit-hour career
• 09:35 — Broke in San Francisco, and a moment of joy that stuck
• 13:30 — Derrik's turn: leaving, loss, and landing in Bangkok
• 15:30 — How a Patagonia photo trip became a drive to South America
• 19:40 — Plantar fasciitis, running low, and shipping the car home
• 22:25 — Teaching himself to write, four and a half years, one book
• 30:00 — Into Nicaragua as the uprising spreads
• 34:30 — The roadblock: beer, a homemade rocket launcher, and the crux of the whole trip
• 44:20 — Seven years in bust mode
• 48:20 — Less alone in Latin America than in London
• 52:00 — The five-dollar bill that came back
• 58:14 — Rapid fire: Vietnam, Antigua, and what's always in the FJ

Links — Matt:

• Book: Land Without a Continent — via bookshop.org
• https://bookshop.org/p/books/land-without-a-continent-a-road-trip-through-mexico-and-central-america-matt-savino/fa4ab18a23d67b8a?ean=9781959099727&bkshp-astro=t
• Website: mattsavino.com
• Instagram: @ushuaia_or_bust · YouTube: @suzzer99 · Facebook: /MattSavinoAuthor · LinkedIn: matt-savino-7021ba8

Links — the show:

• Good Grief Travel and Greg: He's Fine — goodgrieftravel.com

Forty years later, she did it again — sold everything she owned and left. This time it was her idea.

Alison and her husband Dan have been sailing around the world for eight years now: fifty countries, four oceans, one forty-three-foot boat named Equus. She writes books out there — two sailing memoirs with a third on the way, plus fiction and children's stories — and posts from ports most people will never see. She's watched manta rays swim up to the hull while her grandkids cheered over video from California. She's also hand-steered a broken boat 680 miles across the Pacific and lives with the fear that never quite leaves after your first ocean nearly kills you.

She calls herself the bravest chicken in the world. Terrified of the storm, sailing through it anyway.

This one's about what you carry when you make the big move — whether you jumped or got pushed — and how the person you become keeps changing with every mile.

That close echoes her own line ("we are different, and we're still on the journey") without quoting it, and lands on the "edge of an unmade change" listener. Short paragraphs, honest early, understated out — your house style.

Where to find Alison

Books & author site: https://alisongieschen.com/

Sailing blog: https://sailmates.org/

Socials

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoWlRF2iuCXPNG8AkiYW-aA

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sailmates_on_equus/

Her three kids grew up between two hemispheres, went to boarding school in Australia, and are now in Sydney. She's in Hong Kong. Two and a half weeks in, she hasn't found a coffee place yet.

Paula runs Truly Expat Travel, hosts a podcast of the same name, and takes small groups of women — Sri Lanka, Morocco, South Korea, Taiwan — on trips designed for people who spent twenty-odd years waiting for someone else's schedule to clear.

This one goes to the arithmetic of a life like that. What it costs, what it gives back, and what her father would have made of it.

GUEST LINKS — PAULA BARNES

Website: https://trulyexpattravel.com/

Podcast: https://podcast.trulyexpattravel.com/

Expat lifestyle site: https://trulyexpatlifestyle.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/trulyexpattravel/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@trulyexpattravelpodcast

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@trulyexpattravel

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/trulyexpat/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulabarrecabarnes/

Host

Website: https://goodgrieftravel.com

Bill Mullen made the opposite bet. A Thai friend called him out on his excuses and found him a $619 flight. Three weeks later he was sitting on a beach in Koh Samui looking at a bill so small it rearranged his retirement plan. He flew home, walked into his boss's office, gave three months' notice, and sold everything he owned.

That was eight years ago. He's now spent those years getting deliberately lost in a country most visitors see about four percent of — mountain villages where he counted exactly one Westerner in three days and it was him, long-tail boat rides that cost ten dollars and take all afternoon, and the parallel Thai economy that most foreigners never find the door to.

He's also the reason this show exists. I'd been sitting on the idea for a long time. He told me to stop talking about it and do it.

We get into the resident versus the rover, why "where do I want to go" is the wrong question, how a Westerner pays 300 baht and his wife pays 40 for the same waterfall, and what he'd say to someone who's been calling Thailand a someday for years.

This is the first episode of Good Grief Travel. Thanks for being here.

IN THIS EPISODE

• The $619 flight that dismantled eight years of excuses
• A beach in Koh Samui, a bar bill, and the moment Key West got scratched
• Why his Plan B — teaching English — turned out to be the whole game
• Butapu: three days, five thousand people, one Westerner
• The two-price system, and why the real value of Thailand is on the other side of it
• Uncle Young, a hammock, a tarp full of fish, and the best ten dollars in the country
• Why "where do I want to go" is the wrong question to plan a trip around
• The tuk-tuk tailor shop, told at his own expense
• 800,000 baht that lived in a bank account for five minutes
• Getting told to go buy pants, mid-appointment
• Resident vs. rover — and the word I'm stealing from him
• Book two: circumnavigating the Gulf of Thailand on an 18-foot Hobie Cat named the magic carpet
• What to do if Thailand has been a someday for you

FIND BILL
Website https://www.thailandadventurenetwork.com
Podcast: Thailand Adventure Secrets
Book: Getting Lost in the Magic of Thailand: Island Hopping Down the Siam Spice Route — released September 8. Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

His standing offer: Bill does free Zoom calls for anyone planning a trip to Thailand,

MENTIONED
On IHG points and five-star mornings in Asia — Bill and I both turn out to be Intercontinental people. Here's the long version of how that works: https://goodgrieftravel.com/2026/01/28/why-ihg-points-changed-how-i-travel-in-asia/

On the Thailand LTR visa — including the part where I got sent out mid-appointment to go buy pants: https://goodgrieftravel.com/2026/07/24/the-thailand-ltr-visa-what-i-wish-id-known-and-why-i-now-own-parachute-pants/

goodgrieftravel.com