I Walked Across New Orleans With No Car

00:00 - Plod & Ponder EP1: Walking With No Car & Heat Defense

What up, Ken Barnes?

All right, this is the first shot of trying out the Meta glasses. Basically, the thought behind this is a concept called Plod and Ponder. The idea being I'm in a pretty cool city, New Orleans. I moved here just a little over a year ago at this point, and I'm definitely a homebody.

This is just an exercise in walking around a lot more. I also had a car when I moved down here, and I don't anymore. Let someone borrow it, and they wrecked it. I've been walking around a lot more and taking public transportation, which actually New Orleans public transportation is pretty decent.

I feel like I've been able to absorb more about the city this way because, when you're walking, it really forces you to slow down and look around your surroundings more than you might otherwise. Which you definitely need to with the drivers in New Orleans. They treat stop signs like they're optional. I've never been in a city that does it the way New Orleans does. But not all that bad not having a car.

We started off walking in the wrong direction, which actually, the whole point of Plod and Ponder is that you're taking new directions, discovering different things. I walk that street a lot, and the GPS is telling me to go that way, but I'll take a couple side streets. Why not? See some stuff I haven't seen before.

Which also, I've slowly started to improve my grab bag of things I bring with me. For New Orleans, definitely an umbrella is essential. It rained pretty much every day for the last two weeks. And then also being pretty hot, I have this little workout towel kind of thing that I have added to my kit.

And I've always been someone that kind of burns easily, but I've been a bit of a homebody. Pretty much I'm either gonna have to start wearing sunscreen or wearing long sleeve shirts. I have fishing shirts, but I don't really love those. I'd probably go for linen or something more athletic that keeps you dry, because even though I have ones that are UV protective, it's terrible when you're sweating.

Anyways, onwards and upwards, I think. The cafe I have in mind is about an hour walk in this direction, generally speaking. But if something else is more interesting on the way, we'll stop and take a break.

02:29 - Junk Hauling Business Idea & Enclave Arbitrage

I've seen some trucks like that in a lot of different places. I think junk hauling can be a pretty good business to get in, especially if you know how to flip and sell stuff. I used to be in a much wealthier neighborhood around high school, and that's when I did electronics repair, and I still remember, we did this one guy's house on the lake.

Once you're kinda the trusted provider, they tend to call the same people. This guy that wired up pretty much all the houses when it was new construction. And once you're in the Rolodex of wealthy lake people, they want stuff done, they want it quick, and they don't really care what it costs.

I got in with him, but he kinda gave me a chance because he threw his back out. But it was crazy what happens is, on the outdoor areas, like there's not a good example out here, the screened in porches that they'll have, especially on the lakes, is if you have the outdoor speakers that are waterproof, squirrels will get up in there and chew through all the wires.

He was fixing that, but they wanted just like one unit, new TV, but they swapped all the TVs through all the different rooms, how you would hand me down with audio visual equipment and none of it was probably older than two years old. And then at the end of it, they're just like, "Take it away."

That is to say one man's trash is another man's treasure. Same kind of thing. Some people just want stuff gone and the more upscale the neighborhood, you get better thrift stores, better kind of street finds. Especially, some of the best ones are rich college towns.

I've always thought doing junk hauling would be interesting, but I don't know. I don't have a truck. I don't have a car, like I said, at this point. And you need to have storage space. I feel for it to work well, you need to have really cheap real estate where you can store stuff, a space to kind of refurbish stuff, do reupholstery and clean up woodworking and stuff like that and be able to resell it probably primarily online or through Facebook Marketplace.

But I'll add that to my list of ideas because that's about half of what the pondering is about when I'm plodding. Is what is this person doing to make money? How can I make money off of this? Money, money, money, Mr. Krabs. It's just the capitalism in me. But, grind never stops.

04:53 - Litter, Neutral Grounds & Mardi Gras Cleanup

One thing that's funny to me, not funny I guess, but I see a lot more of these shooter bottles out. It's a lot more common, and I think most cities are pretty conscious about littering and stuff like that, and actually... Oh, there's another one. I feel like generally speaking, New Orleans actually does a pretty good job of cleaning up, especially around Mardi Gras. They get that stuff off the streets pretty quickly.

But because they have the ability to do that, and it's expected, especially around Mardi Gras, that people just throw stuff all over the streets, I think it continues throughout the year. I think there are a lot of people in New Orleans that aren't necessarily as recycling conscious as some other cities I've been to, because they do such a good job of cleaning it up that you wouldn't notice.

But when you go to some of the back roads, that's where you kinda see it not getting cleaned up, and in some of what they call in kind of the middle areas, I don't know if this one qualifies 'cause I'm not a local, but typically they would call it the neutral ground. Everyone knows what that is in New Orleans, but it's not necessarily a term you might have heard of if you're visiting for the first time.

05:57 - Being Open-Minded & Historical Markers

Something that I wanna try to get more comfortable doing, this is part of a Plod and Ponder exercise. I talk to a lot of people. I would say this is more when I was growing up and I like to be more argumentative. I would typically tell people, it's not that I always think that I'm right when I'm arguing with people, it's that I tend to not argue with people unless I'm pretty sure that I am right.

I like to always have my thoughts together and have a well-reasoned argument. And part of this is to be a little bit more open-minded. Of course you can have that tour guide vibe where everything I look at I know immediately the history behind it and everything that's going on.

Part of Plod and Ponder is a little bit of stream of consciousness. It's observe something, either I know something about it or I don't. Then maybe I can look it up later. It's like one of the things coming from Charleston, South Carolina, that's so interesting to me is like how brightly painted a lot of buildings are, even residential buildings.

Like a good example there, it says, "In 1832 on this spot nothing happened." Maybe that's the case, maybe it's not. I don't know the history behind it at all, or any of these buildings, I'll look them up afterwards, and if I'm not too lazy, I'll find more information and splice it with this video maybe. Or maybe I won't, because the objective is to ponder, not necessarily to be right or wrong, to explore. That's what I'm going for at least.

The music that I listen to in between these are pretty funny because I don't know if I'm gonna end up adding music or not. Maybe if I turn these into live streaming. Historical signs are always interesting. French impressionist, masters edited here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm reading this, but you can pause it and read it if you want.

Okay. I assume that's this house, which is cool. I'll look more into that. I've walked past it a few times. I don't know the history at all. And I think that says the same thing or close to the same thing. It's a great garden there.

Anyways, one of the things that I think I would like to explore and look more into, maybe compared to Charleston at least, 'cause that's really the only other similar city that I've lived in that has the same downtown. It's like King Street, French Quarter, has similar histories, similar vibes. Obviously very different cultures, but there's a lot of these big houses, and my understanding is that they're mostly merchants, but not necessarily all of them were plantations. But like I said, something to look into.

08:35 - Katrina Trauma Etiquette & The Expat Dilemma

I think this is about the closest school next to me. It's a high school. Let's see... I'm gonna butcher that name probably. John McDonogh. Anyways, what I've already figured out is, that's a big, are you an authentic New Orleans person versus a transplant? People will ask you where you went to high school. But I think what's also I guess not complicates it, but just an interesting fact that I've heard is, from Katrina, there were a lot of people that went to Texas or surrounding areas.

I suppose that kind of complicates it a little bit. But there's very specific era markers. And I think another thing that I've realized since moving down here, not realized, but just that I've encountered, I'm from Florida, I've been through a lot of pretty strong hurricanes in my life. Like I think actually even Hurricane Katrina, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, I was in Florida around then. I think the closest thing we've had to anything catastrophic is really just a tree going through a neighbor's house. It didn't hurt anybody, caused some property damage, you'd wake up from the storms and the whole street would be covered with trees and branches and things like that.

But I think there's a... I don't know if I wanna call it a trend, but I guess maybe something that is becoming more popular, maybe through the tornado chasers, and there's people who like to really visit areas that might have had a pretty bad natural disaster recently, or a natural disaster which was devastating while people who are residents are still alive. It's still in their recent memory.

And I think a lot of people, they'll come to New Orleans for the first time and they'll just without really thinking about it, ask people about their experience through Katrina. And obviously, I wasn't here at that point, and I've never really asked people unless they just brought it up or where it was already bubbling up in the conversation, and they're willing to share it. But man, I've heard some really horrific stories for sure, which is just to say, it's one thing if you're a tourist and coming through, but I know even from living here just for a year, it was more horrific than you could have imagined. And generally speaking, it's not really the type of thing that you should ask your waitress or staff unless they volunteer that. Maybe a tour guide because they probably have that built into their tour, and they're kinda signing up for all those questions. But I think in general, unless someone here brings it up, it's probably best not to ask.

I think one of the other things that I've kinda realized too, maybe this is like a newer transplant and maybe touristy observation is when I first moved down here, I was in the Ninth Ward on Desire. And it's really funny because every time I tell that to a local, I just get this like shocked reaction.

And I think one thing, this is the case, it can be for locals even within their own city, but it applies to immigrants to a country as well. And I didn't really have a good sense for this until I lived in Hong Kong for about two years, and then I also travel a lot internationally, is typically the people who are immigrants a lot of times don't really have a favorable opinion of their home country.

I think this applies to Americans who move abroad too. I think there's been an uptick for a lot of different reasons. I think for a lot of people it's mostly political or ideological in terms of the reason why they might expedite it. But if you run into the average American who moved to Canada or Germany or Ireland, they're probably gonna say, "Oh yeah, America was going to hell in a hand basket, and I got out of there. I love it so much better here." And that's probably true for them, and maybe it's true writ large, depending on the beliefs that you hold.

I'm not really at all ashamed to say I'm definitely more Democrat, liberal leaning. I think there were people when Biden got elected, there was a bunch of Republicans talking about moving to Canada, although Canada is way more liberal except for Alberta potentially, which again, this is the pondering part where I'm speaking on something I don't really know a whole lot about. They have their own version of Texas or something out there, moderately separatist movement that gets taken semi-seriously. Again, I don't know to the degree, but maybe they would've moved there and said, "I hate the way that the US is going with its current leadership, and I'll move to another place that's more in line with my beliefs."

Sometimes it really doesn't work out. Like I remember there was a conservative, I don't think they were influencers, but I know it was a conservative family that moved to Russia. And I think the guy had some promise of some kind of job, maybe as a mechanic or something like that, and they sent him straight to the front lines.

I think the conclusion to that pondering is it's important to understand the context of when an opinion was shared and by whom and what their lived experience was. Because, going back to the Ninth Ward, I had a great experience there. I felt perfectly safe. It was pretty much, at least Desire was the one road that was actually well-paved in that neighborhood, so it didn't even have potholes. At the end of the street, there was this little kind of convenience store. Got a little bit rowdy sometimes, but nothing crazy. I think the craziest thing was just someone doing a burnout at an intersection once.

15:55 - Safety, Statistics & Solo Travel Privileges

It's important to consider statistics. You can manipulate them. You can have it tell a story that might not actually be in line with what's actually happening. But I think anecdotally, you can either have an experience like me, which, I will say I'm white and I'm a guy and I'm six feet tall, about two fifty pounds, and I know how to fight. Perhaps I'm not such an easy target.

And I hear that a lot, especially around solo travel type channels, which I think is true. There's different considerations when you travel. You might have different experiences in different places based on how you present yourself outwardly, whether you're LGBT, a particular race, particular religion, particular sex, or even if you're non-binary or transgender, which kind of fits back into LGBT.

That's what's always interesting to me is to find the specific guides and find someone who doesn't look like me, doesn't talk like me, oftentimes doesn't go to the same places I go to, how their experience is, because your lived and anecdotal experience, while it's certainly valid to you, doesn't translate to society at large.

I think even in the same city, there might be an area that was pretty dangerous in the seventies, eighties, nineties, early two thousands, that a lot of times has gotten cleaned up. And I think there's a whole separate conversation about gentrification and things like that. But just from a safety standpoint, not necessarily the mix of the neighborhood, there are a lot of areas that might have been unsafe in the past are safe now. And if you ask long-term residents, maybe they got beaten up and robbed in the Ninth Ward in the nineties and early two thousands, but it's fine now, at least for me.

I heard way more gunshots and everything and had my car broken into in Charleston in the downtown area and West Ashley. I heard gunshots so close that I thought it was gonna come through my window. And I haven't heard a single gunshot in over a year since I've been here anywhere. And I've been in some pretty, relatively unsavory areas where you gotta keep your head on a swivel.

19:39 - Climate Change, Sinking Land & Insurance Insolvency

Give you a little bit of the sweating POV here, this is what this towel's for. Save the aquifers. I don't know anything about the aquifers and why we need to save-- I know about aquifers in general, but I don't know what specifically we need to save about New Orleans and Louisiana. That's something to look into.

What I have seen though is really interesting, especially once you have a local news story that starts to go viral. Now there's a study, I believe it was out of Tulane or LSU or something like that, where they said New Orleans has reached the point of no return. It's time to start moving people. Well, I can tell you for one, there's not a single person down here that's willing to do that. Jokes in the local media, or commentaries on Facebook, on TikTok, on whatever else, Instagram, and they're like, "I'll just start swimming," or, "We'll just put everything on fifteen-foot poles."

And I've lived in the South, or at least the southeast of the US most of my life, and I've seen a lot of cities that have houses sitting on stilts essentially that are a full story high or higher, you know, ten, fifteen feet. It would be billions and billions of dollars to try to do that here. I don't think you could, but I also don't think it's a lost cause.

I think broadly in my semi-informed opinion, at least from what I've heard, I think it's also with Exxon, which people miss out on that. They have had some agreement or some kind of funding through the oil and gas industry to do some of this stuff, to do improvements and shore it up. But again, my rough understanding without having done a ton of research on it is that something to do with the Mississippi River being misdirected and then also pumping water out that makes stuff settle faster and creates kind of that bowl effect.

All that to say, I hope it gets figured out, and before it becomes terribly catastrophic because the bellwether that I think ultimately shuts up both sides or validates their opinion is insurance rates. Because it's based on data. I'm not a climate scientist, and I won't pretend that I am, although I think climate change is real and global warming, I'm pretty convinced of that. That seems to be the scientific consensus.

At least from a layperson, what seems to not be consistent is the timeline with which things will happen. Is it five years, ten years, 20 years, fifty years, a hundred years? When you say the point of no return, what does that actually mean? Does that just mean it's gonna be a lot more flooding and people are gonna have to have lifted trucks and we're gonna have to move a few things around? Or does that mean this entire place is gonna be under five feet of water? And I don't think it's the second thing.

And even if we were on track for that, I think once it gets severe enough, people put their heads together, and it starts with insurance, because once there's enough flooding issues at a certain place, it's game over. You can't build there. You can't invest there. And it becomes expensive enough to where it kinda hits the radar of both political parties.

25:16 - Salary Comparisons, Regional Economics & Cafe Arrival

Just to give a frame of reference for that, I've known some people that are hourly employees, fast food workers here. Still pretty common to be, some people making somewhere between eight to twelve dollars an hour in New Orleans, in the rural areas, it's even less. And comparing that to Charleston, I don't think I knew anyone in fast food or hourly who wasn't making somewhere between probably twelve to twenty.

And then professionally speaking, I'm a marketer, so I can really only speak to that. But entry-level in kind of the South, Southeast, I would say you're making fifty to seventy thousand straight out of graduation. And then that's entry level, individual contributor. Manager, you're somewhere from eighty to ninety, maybe up to a hundred. And then director level, it's a hundred twenty-five to, I guess maybe a hundred fifty, a hundred seventy-five, depending on your bonus structure, size of the company. Obviously, it can be bigger than that, but that's standard rates that I would see.

In New Orleans, though, it's like entry level is thirty-five to fifty if that. Manager is probably forty-five to seventy, and then director is seventy to maybe a hundred if you're lucky. I really kinda lucked out getting a remote job, because salaries here are just not competitive at all. The only people making serious money down here are people in oil and gas and probably some of the trades, some small business owners, and I guess maybe people who run really efficient hospitality organizations.

All right. The walk continues. I made it to my cafe, I'd say around 1:30, which is a little bit late for a brunch, but you know that's the objective here, get the blood pumping, get it going. That was close to an hour walk. I think these died about, maybe 30 minutes into that walk. Got a quick video of the outside just to show you where it was at. But yeah, it wasn't too bad. I'm a big eggs benedict guy.

One of the things I've noticed, I don't know if this is exactly it, it's like those things. I think it's some kind of power utility, but pretty much all the ones in New Orleans are painted. Some of the other ones look a little bit more like graffiti, but that one is pretty well done, well-maintained. I don't know if it's individual artists that do that or if they're contracted for that. I guess that's something worth looking up.

29:07 - Meta Smart Glasses Review & Hardware Limitations

I don't know if I really finished my thought from before the camera died, but who knows? On to a new one. The other part that I wanted to integrate, which I think these glasses can do, is you can ask it to figure out what something is in front of you. But I don't know that it actually translates to the recording experience.

Let's see. Let me see if I can test it on something. We'll find something. All right. Let's just try it over here real quick.

"Hey, Meta, what is the object in front of me?" "Hey Meta, what is the object in front of me?"

Okay, doesn't work. It was a fire hydrant, in case anyone was wondering. Seems there's a way to go.

The Meta Ray-Bans are definitely the most price competitive. A lot of the other ones that I were looking at that were more system agnostic are in the thousand-dollar-plus range, and they all seem to have an issue with battery. I've already found that there's hot-swappable batteries for these, that's probably gonna be my next purchase, 'cause if I'm trying to do two, three, four-hour walks, especially on the weekends, and film content the whole time, the built-in battery is really not sufficient if it's only gonna last about thirty minutes. And then you're just kinda wearing dead weight on your face.

And I don't really know how I feel about these yet. Obviously what I'm doing right now, where I'm just walking by myself and there's no subject necessarily, I feel fine recording, but I definitely feel weird about just walking straight up to someone with these recording. I typically try to turn it off if someone's kinda coming my way, but that's also 'cause I just look like a psychopath talking to myself.

31:23 - Design Evolution, Neo-Serif Branding & State Infrastructure

See, this is pretty interesting. A deaf church. I wonder if that's all, if everyone's deaf or if it's just welcoming to that. Very interesting. Maybe worth a follow.

The other thing I like to look at it as a marketing person, that one seems a little bit more aged on the side, but the social icons. It's always funny to me to see small businesses that have been around for a while that still have the old Twitter logo before it became X, the old Instagram logo where it looked more like a camera and didn't have that gradient.

I think it's called skeuomorphism. Just used to be more dynamic. I think we went to flat and gradient, and now it seems that some in the design world are turning back into that, I don't know the term for it, but like the serif kind of more formal font. I think you see it with a lot of lifestyle brands. It's like somewhere between Times New Roman and cursive. See it with the trendy brands.

I don't wanna turn this necessarily into something where I just ramble about politics all the time. But I will say the only thought that I have about Elon Musk is like, I don't like the guy. I think he turned himself into just this political punching bag for no reason. People have always not liked him, but to a lot of people, he used to be like real-life Tony Stark. And he actually... I think he even had a cameo in one of the Iron Man movies.

I think in terms of governments, I'd probably say just from a civilizational quality standpoint, I think China has surpassed the US, at least in terms of how they prioritize things: education, healthcare, investment in infrastructure, a lot of the basic quality of life stuff.

And I think one of the benefits of this system is like, I've seen it a lot recently because it's a pretty stark example. There's some major rail hub that China just created. I think they did it in, it was like a year or three years. I want to say it cost about $2 billion. I'll fact check that. They got it done, this mega project that's going to get people around quickly. It's a beautiful station.

38:09 - Above-Ground Cemeteries & Modern Collectibles

I guess I was walking through a cemetery there. Some interesting thoughts that I've had. Let's, I'll get us out of the road real quick.

For New Orleans, they have to bury people above ground because they turn into soup because you dig in, you hit the water table, and yeah, they just dissolve. And I've heard from some other people that I think it's after a period of six or eight years, you can put another body in there, which I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be cremated rather than turning into family soup over the next couple hundred years. But it is interesting to see.

And no disrespect to any of these people, of course. But you know, what's the difference between a small headstone and a big one like that when you just end up in the ground? And see that's a family tomb. That makes sense, if it's a family thing.

I used to be really into like narcos, cartel type videos. One of the most interesting things for me is like they don't even really do the mausoleum thing like that. They have basically like mansions that you can kinda live in, and I feel like that would be kinda cool. Obviously I have no idea how much these cost, but if you're in that box territory, that makes sense for a family.

Like one of the things that I've seen that I would say is relatively interesting is a lot of millennials inheriting stuff from their recently deceased parents that really they just end up throwing away because they think it's worthless. I think one of them is like Hummel dolls and things like that. Or their fine china.

It's like if you don't want to take that and it isn't necessarily worthwhile to sell, maybe you don't need to keep all of it, but if you have the front part and you have a little shelf in there, I think that's a good place for it. Fine china, the Hummel dolls, in our generation it's gonna end up being Funko Pops, Labubus, Legos, playing cards. They're worth decent money now, but I bet in forty, fifty years, with some pretty small exceptions, they're gonna be in about the same category.

43:06 - Gym Etiquette, NOAC & The Two Hookah Cultures

That's an interesting one to check out. It says it's been around since like the 1920s. And obviously Anytime Fitness. I have a membership for the NOAC, and that one's downtown. That one's really cool 'cause it's also historical. And they actually have a lot of great amenities that a lot of other places around here don't have.

But they generally have a no film policy, and I'm not too keen on being the type of guy that films in gyms. I feel like that kind of is creep territory. And a lot of people have bad habits in gyms. Even if you're on your phone and filming yourself, even if you're in your own corner and no one else is in there, people still have to walk by you for weights and stuff like that. I just feel like it's a bad look unless you're one of like the only people in the gym and you're either a personal trainer or you're sending it to a personal trainer.

I just walked past this hookah place called Haifa. And I don't know which specific Middle Eastern country that is. I'll look it up afterwards. But I feel like for me, I like doing hookah occasionally, but I feel like there needs to be a distinction between kind of a Middle Eastern chill dinner spot where you might have hookah with like shawarma or a gyro and like tea, versus a bar that has hookah.

And I've been to some other places like internationally, I don't think I've seen any in the US that do that, but they'll like add a shot of alcohol to the water. Some places, I don't know that any bars do this, but I know people who do it where you can sprinkle cannabis in the top. That's a very different hookah vibe.

Maybe Google Maps should add that of party hookah where alcohol is acceptable versus chill hookah likely in a restaurant establishment where they're probably Muslim and alcohol is generally frowned upon, and it's not gonna be a party vibe. Something to think about, or at least to create two separate lists. One place where you wanna go that's just for the tea, food, and chill. And then another that's hookah as a sideshow to like a club or section where you're getting a bottle and they're playing, this is New Orleans playing like bounce music or something like that.