Sean Tierney 2:22
All right everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I’m your host Sean Tierney and I am here today with Arthur Worsley. Arthur is a performance coach and founder of faster to master which is an academy that helps you become a productivity powerhouse beat procrastination destroy distractions and get big things done. Or there’s well traveled location independent entrepreneur having traveled to over 100 countries. He has a degree in psychology, physiology and philosophy from Oxford. He previously served as strategy consultant consultant for McKinsey. Arthur has learned seven languages to fluency and is currently arguably conversational and four of those right now, but I cannot wait to dive in this conversation. I am a huge fan of Josh waitzkin and meta learning and all these topics. And I think you know, we’ve been talking a little bit about force multipliers and all this stuff. So welcome, Arthur, I’m excited to have you here. Thank you very much. I’m excited to be here.

Arthur Worsley 3:11
Thank you. Cool. All right.

Sean Tierney 3:13
So let’s dig right into it. I guess I started watching your webinar. I haven’t gotten it admittedly all the way through the whole thing. But I did one of the early slides it, it just grabbed me because you’re talking about all the different things you’ve tried in the past with getting things done and konban and pomodoro. And one thing and all these different productivity methods, what led you to do what you’re doing now with this faster to master? I mean, like,

Arthur Worsley 3:37
like a lot of businesses with faster Master, it kind of just ended up pivoting that way. But productivity has been something I’ve been interested in, I think when I was 18, and I just got to university, I had all of this energy and I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I read the four hour workweek and I was trying to do my business. I was actually trying to run two businesses and pass my degree at Oxford. And I’d bought a house and was managing that, and I just was on the verge of collapse. And then I read getting things done, and it changed my life. And, and that really helped. I mean, I’d read a whole load of things by Brian Tracy and other things in that company, my job then in finance, and then as a consultant at McKinsey, and I kind of honed those over the years. And then what I realized, so that was the productivity element. And then when I left McKinsey, what I realized is that what I really loved was the learning component. And so that’s how I got into the accelerated learning and started learning languages and things like that. And then faster master began, it’s just an exploration of those themes, the books that I love the learning tricks that I’ve learned both learning some skills, I did a couple of skill learning challenges and, and then also the productivity stuff that I’d learned over the years and was sharing in my own journey to find you know, balancing meaning in my life to take all of the productivity time and task management that I learned and, and turn that into something that you know, could get me excited to wake up every single day and and get on with something that I love. So for the people that aren’t familiar with the term meta learning, can you define what that means? Well So meta learning is really learning about learning. It’s like them that step back from learning, which I love as an idea in and of itself. Whenever people are like, I’m going to learn a skill. What’s the first thing I should do? I say the first thing. So let’s say it’s learning a language that you want to learn Mandarin, the first thing I say is read one book about learning Mandarin, like a specific book, then take the meta step back and read one book about learning how to learn, and then take the step back, also one book about learning languages, and then take a step back and read one book about learning how to learn and at that point, you’ve captured, like the three meta levels out from the skill you want, and you’ll learn a huge amount in the process. So that’s what meta learning is. It’s like how do we learn more effectively? How do we learn faster, whether it’s knowledge or skills, and how do we apply that knowledge effectively?

Sean Tierney 5:42
And so can you break down so you the faster to master is basically this all this stuff that you’ve figured out how to do broken out into a kind of a linear course that people can go through and acquire all the skills are

Arthur Worsley 5:54
what is it so so the overall site content, there are kind of three main areas there’s The three big themes, right, the first one is how to read more. And that splits into a whole load of book recommendations. So I have this, you can take the boy out of McKinsey, but you can’t take McKinsey out of the boy, I built this crazy Excel model. Every time I get book recommendations, it goes in there, I tear all the data out of it. Anyway, it comes out with this, like, I’ve got three and a half thousand books. And it ranks every book recommendation I get from like, top to bottom in terms of which ones I should read first. So I share those recommendations across different themes. So that you can own if you can only read 1000 books in your life, you want to read the best ones. The second half of that is around reading, like reading more. So I write some Book Summaries and I share those. And that’s also sort of ties into the learning because for me, writing Book Summaries was a great way to learn some of the stuff that I was reading. So the second big theme of the site is learn more and I wrote a whole load of stuff on meta learning whether it’s learning skills or languages or, or anything else, any knowledge, whether it’s Anki, SRS, Spaced Repetition systems, things like that. And then the main to the course is really in the third theme which is around productivity. Which is how to Nailed things like task and time management, how to find more balance and decide what you actually want in a whole lot of different areas of life and how to find that big picture idea of meaning, you know, what is your life about? Like, why are you here? And what do you want to get out of the, you know, the time that you’re, you know that you’re here and the gifts that you’ve been given?

Sean Tierney 7:16
And so this so McKinsey did the methodology and McKinsey then kind of inform some of how you’ve structured the course or what it what what is the influence of McKinsey on this.

Arthur Worsley 7:27
So So McKinsey was more like, like a really strong finance, it honed everything. And there’s two things I learned at McKinsey one was like to be incredibly productive and to really go after the one thing because unlike some jobs, for example, in investment banking, where you’re, you know, you have one, you have one outcome and the only goal is to get there as quickly as possible. When you’re dealt a problem at McKinsey. There could be a million answers. You could put three McKinsey teams on the same question and come up with different answers for each one. It’s all about prioritization. It’s also a hectic, incredible Work Environment full of amazing people. And you work with these incredible clients. So it was great for productivity and growing that productivity beyond just what can I do to how can I make the people around me more successful? And the last thing, which I think everyone comes away from McKinsey with is this way of breaking down problems. So McKinsey, you’ll notice that often during this podcast, I’ll be like, it’s this one thing. The second thing, this third thing, and it’s just a relentless way of looking at every problem and going, this is a really tough, big problem. How do I break it down into manageable areas? So so for example, traction, which is the system of balance that I teach my clients, you know, most people when they mask a task and time management, they feel very frustrated. Okay, well, what next? How do I get more out of life? And that’s a really big problem. So most people get scared about that. And they run away from it, because it’s just I get it. It’s like, it’s a huge problem. But what I did is I broke life down into eight different areas, and then across five horizons, and that sounds like a lot, but when you see it on a screen, you’re like, Oh, I can work out what I want from health and vitality. Like that’s an easy question to answer. I can work out What kind of partner I want in my life, I can work out, you know what great growth and learning works for me. And so you break those problems down and each individual element becomes solvable. And that’s how you solve the big problem. So that’s the biggest thing I

Sean Tierney 9:11
do. So let’s continue. Yeah, so I and by the way for the people listening, so I first learned about you on my friend Matt Bowles, his podcast which he didn’t interview and I highly recommend if you’re listening to this, you know that Matt and I have shared some guests in the past and I highly recommend you check that episode out. So this method of deconstructing almost like the Russian dolls, it sounds like you just continuously deconstruct whatever the problem is, is that a metal learning skill like that can be applied in pretty much every scenario hundred percent?

Arthur Worsley 9:40
I think, I think that’s enough, like the ability to break problems down like that as a force multiplier. So I did a thing where I went from zero to ski instructor over the course of four months, right. And the way that I did that is I just broke skiing down into like the three components skills. And then what you do is you just work on each one individually, and then you bring them all back together with tennis, which is what I meant Learning or getting back into at the moment is similar, you can break everything down into small problems. The the time when people get overwhelmed solving a problem is they just probably haven’t broken it down into a problem that’s small enough to actually solve, right? And the same is true if you’re hiring someone, right? If you have a job, and it’s defeated, this is a, I just read the effective executive by Peter Drucker and he says, if you have any job and you put two competent people on it, and it’s defeated both of them the chance that high chances, you just need to split that job into two smaller jobs, which are more specialized right, so that they can get to it. So being able to break stuff down is an incredible way to avoid getting overwhelmed and to then solve these problems, which on the surface look like they have no solution whatsoever. But when you you know, when you eat the elephant piece by piece, suddenly it becomes easy.

Sean Tierney 10:44
It what point so you were solving problems from McKinsey and reading books. And then at what point did you make that leap to start thinking about the act of solving problems as an art form itself? Because I think that’s super interesting that not many people you know, people can are capable of figuring out solutions, but abstracting yourself one layer above that to them think about the building the machine for solving solutions, or, you know, that type of thinking. How did you arrive at it?

Arthur Worsley 11:10
I mean, I think it’s just it was a question of solving a problem, right? That meta learning is and in and of itself, like a way to break the problem of learning apart, right? So I talked about, you know, you want to learn a skill, you need to learn about the skill, but you also need to learn about how to learn that skill. And you also need to learn about how you learn. And so and I, you know, I had some background from Oxford when I studied a lot of neurophysiology and memory and memory systems. And, and so it was just a, when I left McKinsey, it was because things were getting, they wanted me to specialize, you know, and I was like, I don’t want to specialize. Like I love doing different projects. You know, I did stuff in defense in consumer goods in farmer and I was with a different team in all different parts of the world. And then they were like, Hey, you need to pick one thing and focus on it. I was like, no way. I don’t want to do that. And then when I left, I started picking up language learning and I was like, Okay, I started thinking more systematically about how can I actually learned this stuff faster and better. Because not because I care about learning things fast. But because I wanted to speak to people around me like I was driven by the problem of like talking, you know, I was in Germany and I wanted to talk to everyone around me. And then I was in China. And I was like, I want to talk. I want to understand everything. And so that’s it was that excitement that drove me to try to understand more about how to learn fast rather than it’s not a like a compulsion to always abstract, if that makes sense.

Sean Tierney 12:25
Yeah, well, that’s pretty consistent with the thing that I call punching past the board. Like, this is I’ve mentioned this on a couple episodes. But it’s this thing in martial arts, where if you’re just aiming squarely for the board, you’re going to break your knuckles. But if you’re aiming at a goal beyond the board, that’s where you just power through it each time. So yeah, I think that’s super fascinating. If you’re confronted with a novel situation, what then is your approach? Let’s say there’s like a piece of software that you want to learn and you have no familiarity with it. Like, what is like step one, what do you do when when you have that new situation?

Arthur Worsley 12:56
Yeah, I have I have a post on how to learn any skill in 10 steps to that. Like what I would follow, but I think the first, the first thing that people can get too worried about is trying to make a plan before they have any information, right? If I was going to learn a new skill, let’s say was a new sport or something like that, you know, a lot of people were like, Oh, you need to make a plan, you need to set a goal. Usually these things I was like, No, just show up for two weeks, and just do it, you know, just rock up with no expectations, and gather data, right? You know, so you actually have something to work on? Like, do you even love this sport that you’re learning? Do you even love this language? I get a feel for it. You know, do you love to dance salsa, you know, don’t, don’t make it into a big project. Then when you’ve gathered a little bit of data, that’s when you can start setting some goals because then you you’re already going to have this idea that you could, you’ll be able to see, okay, I kind of see it splits into these areas. Then you go, okay, maybe I’m gonna read a book about it. And then once you’ve kind of understood a, the, you know, the, the actual problem, you’ve broken it down and also, you understand how other people have approached solving it. Then you can start saying, Okay, well, maybe I’m going to try and pass my B two exams, my fluency exams in Germany. Five months time, because that’s a realistic goal. So many people The reason that they, they give up on these, these, these new things that they try and take on is they, they set goals super super early and those goals are totally unmanageable. And they feel like they’ve committed to it and they can’t get out of it. And the more they learn about the skill, the more unmanageable that becomes. And so learning actually becomes a negative experience where they’re like, the more I learned, the more overwhelmed them because I’ve set this unrealistic goal. So the first thing is always to just work out if you love something, and just get some data and experience on it. So if I had a new piece of software, I would just jump into the new piece of software. And just just explore it right be like is do I even do I like the way this looks? Do I like the way it feels to act? Does it make me feel great when I use it, like just this journal, you know, if you have one, and when I open it, I like the way it smells like all those things. And then the second thing so I used to teach the Excel modeling classes to the new analysts at McKinsey. The second thing is always have a real and interesting problem to solve. So people who just sit down at home and go I’m going to learn Mandarin, almost never learn math. In, right, but people who have to learn Mandarin because they’re planning to travel to China in six months time, or because then they’re working in an environment with Chinese speakers, those guys have picked it up in seconds, we have one friend who does shark conservation out here. And she’s picked up Indonesian in less time than I could ever imagine, because she has to learn Indonesian to speak to the local fishermen, right? And so having a project like a real product you actually care about is a huge part of being able to take that theory and see how it fits into practice.

Sean Tierney 15:28
Got it so yoking, the Learn the active learning, if it’s in pursuit of some bigger mission or something that’s important to you, then that’s going to just strengthen the for sure something

Arthur Worsley 15:37
you want to achieve. People are like, I want to learn how to code. You know, my brother wanted to learn how to code just and he wasn’t sure why he was just like, I just want to know, this guy’s like, he just picked a problem that you have, that you think could be solved better with learning to code. He’s a helicopter pilot. So he was like, Hey, I’m gonna design an app for helicopter pilots that helps them do some of the things that I’m frustrated with. He learned to code so much faster because he actually was doing and creating something meaningful. To him, then if he just tried to learn so meta learning what I’m trying to get at is meta learning is interesting, but not in and of itself. It’s only interesting if you have a problem that you care about solving fast. Right, right.

Sean Tierney 16:11
Totally. And like I learned to play guitar at a pretty young age, but the way that I learned is also very consistent with this was that like, I just had certain songs that I really wanted to be on the play. You know, if I had sat down and just tried to play scales and learn the theory, it wouldn’t have stuck. But when it was in pursuit of playing that Motley Crue song or whatever, then Okay, now I have a goal and I can pick it up.

Arthur Worsley 16:33
I tell you, I had it. I had a similar experience with piano, where I used to play a lot of musical instruments. I was younger, but I wanted to take up piano because I heard Chopin’s fantasy, impromptu, and C minor, which is a beautiful canopies. And I took it to my piano teacher and I was like, This is the piece I want to learn to play. And she just laughed at me. She was like, there’s no way you’re going to learn that like let’s start with like, you know, the easy stuff. And I was like, No, I’m gonna learn this and I just went away and I improved for exactly the same reason you improve that guitar because there was something I wanted to learn that there was something I was passionate about, you know, learning in and of itself at the Chinese say that wisdom without industry leads to futility, right? You know, there’s no point learning if you’re not actually going to apply, that doesn’t necessarily mean everything has to be practical to make money or do something like that. But there has to be an inner joy, some kind of internal motivator that makes you want to do it.

Sean Tierney 17:16
Right. Okay, so that sounds like the steps are kind of like a feasibility assessment, like a pre assessment where you go scope out the size, and

Arthur Worsley 17:24
I say, like a first date, right? You know, you don’t like you don’t like before you rock up on your first date, go do I think I’m gonna marry this person, you know? Like, you’re like, I’m gonna go on a date or two and see how I feel about this. And then you then you start thinking later on about like, the next step, you know, but if you go straight in with like, the creepy like, Hey, I’m gonna go you know, you have your first question when you meet up for the data stage. So are you interested in marriage? They’re gonna be like, four. Yeah, so I think people put too much pressure on themselves too early. And the second thing is to actually have something that you really care about. And then there are a whole load of steps in between, like breaking the problem down setting good goals, all that kind of stuff. But those are kind of like meta meta points. And I think, later on, it’s also like there’s a whole load of, we could get into this a whole load of points around, you know, expecting, like, understanding how we learn and how quick and how slow it is understanding that you’re always going to have plateaus and that you’re always going to have setbacks because there’s that, you know, there’s reorganization in your brain is like the concept to break out of the initial models that they have, like learning all of these things. And being prepared for them makes you a much better learner, because then when you have a regression, you don’t panic. You’re like, Oh, this is part of the process.

Sean Tierney 18:30
Yeah. Well, that was something I took from maths episode with you when you talked about the permission to do understanding that, that you’ll have these breakthroughs and fallbacks and that the permission to know when Okay, this is like a learning collapse.

Arthur Worsley 18:42
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s actually and it’s not a learning collapse. It’s an important imagine, it’s like a crab leaving its shell, right. So imagine you have a hermit crab, and it has a shell. That’s what your brain has this concept of how big the problem is. And then you stuffed it with all of this information and suddenly it’s a are this overall model that I had done before. fit anymore because I have these data points which are point near poking out of the shell in weird places. So you have to kind of crawl out of the shell and be vulnerable for a little while. And then your brain reforms a slightly bigger shell, and then you crawl into your head, I kind of all makes sense, you know, in this context, and then the same thing will happen. So you’re always going to have regressions, where you know, you’ll you’ll be learning a language and then suddenly, for like, three weeks, you’ll forget all of the vocab, or you’ll forget all of the genders of the nouns that you’ve learned, because the way that you were remembering before doesn’t make sense in the context of all the new words that you’ve learned, right? And knowing that’s going to happen to you and expecting it is then not going to put you off when you’re you know, tackling a difficult problem. When you go out and have a bad day of skiing. Well, you have a crappy run or whatever it is.

Sean Tierney 19:39
Yeah, it’s just it’s funny, like so I have my degrees in psychology and these little snippets of things like john Piaget is assimilation and accommodation, you know, that idea of you’re kind of constantly ratcheting up your worldview, and assimilating new information into what your current schema is of the world while then but you’re then also accommodating, so you’re kind of adjusting the schema to match. It’s like this constant ratcheting up for sure.

Arthur Worsley 20:02
Yeah. So yeah, yeah, it’s like the hermit crab, as long as you’re growing. Like, it’s gonna be an uncomfortable truth that as long as you grow, your old hermit crab shells will look kind of awkward and weird. And you’ll have to find new ones. You know, I think I learned photography at one point for a few years when I was traveling and some beautiful areas and, and I remember looking back at my photos that I’d been forcing people to look at six months before and being mortified by how awful they were. And that is part of learning as well. Like, you should always be slightly embarrassed by the person you were a year ago or you’re kind of not growing.

Sean Tierney 20:32
Yeah. Like is Reid Hoffman that LinkedIn guy says like, if you’re not completely embarrassed by v1 of your product, you’ve waited too long. too long. Yeah. Yeah, cool. Well, so people that like, do you you have the blog, and I know you’ve done a lot of like in depth book reviews on your site, you have like an A, we’ll link to all this in the show notes. Where do you send people like what is the linear path to starting to learn this stuff like What is the place to start in acquiring metal learning skills is with the problem in front of you is the place to start like, honestly,

Arthur Worsley 21:09
you know, if you have a if, let’s say, let’s say you need to learn a programming language, but actually what you want to become as a programmer, and therefore you need to learn multiple languages later on, I would start with reading a book, like make it you could take any skill and create a little micro version of F what I do with F to M for that skill, right? So I would make a list of all of the best books on learning how to program and I would read the top one or two, or learn the language that I want, then I would read make a list of all the best books on programming, learning how to program and I would read that one and then I would make a list of all the best books on learning, there’s actually one on F two M already and on memory. And I would read a few of those books. And but I would start programming while you’re doing all this and you’ll find that you just cut like huge chunks, your odds of success will just go up just by by solving the problem that’s in front of you and just abstracting away from it.

Sean Tierney 21:56
And so if you’re interested in acquiring the skill of meta learning itself, you’re saying that the best way to do that is to actually pick a problem domain and start with that. Yeah. But then simultaneously you read about the art of learning and then apply it in that scenario learning 100%

Arthur Worsley 22:12
Yeah, if you sit down and go, I just want to get really good at learning, you’ll get like three books and and you’ll be bored to death, right? But if you go like so. So the best way to get really good at learning is to learn many things, you know, learn languages, learn some skills, like go play some sports, or tackle some like interesting philosophical problems, if those are the things you know, think about. And then as you’re doing that, start reading books. So you’ll get a lot. There’s this thing called domain specificity, right? When you want to break out of that as much as possible, which is where you learn lessons in one area and then fail to apply them to others. But you could read a great book on learning guitar, and then read a wonderful book on learning how to paint and I bet you you would learn things about learning guitar from the book on learning how to paint right. So so so like, do many things and you and you start to pick up the general patterns of what’s you know, what is it that makes a good learning experience and you’ll be then able to generalize that to new things that you pick up later on.

Sean Tierney 23:03
Can you talk about like so at that dinner party the other night, we were talking about the idea of the pegboard and throwing bang and Velcro and like just explain what that’s all about. Because there’s a fascinating like, I’ve always, not placed a heavy emphasis on, like rote memorization, because I feel like we live in an age where we can just open up Google and like, I’m far more interested in having an index to things not necessarily like the things themselves stored in memory. But you kind of brought me around to seeing like, oh, there’s actually some value in like, doing spaced repetition and it’s just like filling your brain and like memorizing stuff.

Arthur Worsley 23:35
Yeah, hundred percent, I think. So I think that what you’ve described is very common people go I’ve got Wikipedia now I’ve got Google Translate. I’ve got all these things, you know, I can easily I don’t need to memorize anything anymore. Why learn anything when it’s just at my fingertips? The problem is, is that looking stuff up, you’re only able to feed your like linear conscious mind. You know, it’s kind of like imagine having a conversation with someone where you had to type everything. In this is a language learning example, you had to take everything that you ever wanted to say into Google Translate, right? It would be incredibly frustrating. And the ability to hold complex ideas in that language in your head would be totally impossible, you would not be able to do anything beyond basic logistics, right? But once you learn the language, once it’s in your memory, then you can have creative thoughts using those words, you can even abstract the rules out to new words that you’re learning or understand things that you wouldn’t necessarily understand as by breaking. So so the same is is true with and I kind of learned this with language learning but the same is true of anything so I love learning art history, because I love studying history again, you know, kind of tip is if you love history, studying data is all well and good but what we really relate to objects and people, you know, the things around us that we can touch and handle right so I love learning the history of things, and I love learning the history of people. So if you’re learning art history, you’re getting this microcosm this like glimpse at everything going on. Now I could just learn, you know, by rote like what’s the story around how You know, in the 19th century progressed through like French Impressionism into you know, folk ism and expressionism and post Impressionism. But then all I’m able to do is internalized like a, a single linear argument. And then I can trot that out, you meet people like this all the time, they read one article on something or one book, and then they just repeat that argument, as if that’s like the be all and end all. But if you learn all of the pieces of art, which is something that I’m doing, like if you have, you know, 500 pieces of art in your head, from all across the world across different times, you know, different styles, different artists, and suddenly, instead of having to rely on someone else, you know, making sense of, of all of the data, you can have creative thoughts about the whole thing yourself. And the second thing we talked about, so with the pegboard is like, I kind of see like every little data point that I learned, so if you and I went to an art gallery, and we were having a tour around the art gallery, there are two things would happen. One, I would experience so much more meaning. I actually don’t know if you’ve studied up or not, but

Sean Tierney 25:55
But

Arthur Worsley 25:56
yeah, if you went let’s say two people, one person who hasn’t studied anything One person who studied a lot of art history, right? The person who studied a lot of art history is going to have a totally different experience than the person who studied no art history at all. The person who studied art history is going to experience on a very shallow level, the person who’s experienced art history is going to see all the influences how it all links together what was going on in different parts of the world at the same time. So one, you’re going to experience this like, enormous wealth of meaning. The second thing is that let’s say you have a guide who’s explaining a whole load of stuff to you, the person with with no learning whatsoever is kind of we talked about this pegboard analogy or Velcro, right? The person with nothing on it, it’s kind of like throwing stuff at the pegboard. And it’s really slippery, like everything’s just gonna fall off and imagine like that, that guide is, you know, weaving a rope of narrative, and they throw it at the board because there’s nothing for that rope to hook on. It’s just gonna fall off. The person who’s under suit who has learned a whole load of stuff is memorize all this stuff is it’s almost like they got pegs nailed into the board. They might be disconnected, but they’re going to be able because they can associate the new information with something they already know. They’re going to retain that information so much faster. So the more You learn the easier it in fact becomes to learn because you have so much more stuff you can relate it to right? You can suddenly, like, create narratives in your own head about how things fit together and you’re gonna remember all of that stuff that you otherwise wouldn’t.

Sean Tierney 27:12
Yeah. So this is also where it seems like most of the greatest leaps in terms of people synthesizing ideas that never belong together, but they suddenly have like this massive like, I don’t know, maybe the biomimicry comes to mind this idea of like studying something science and then like studying biology and seeing how a snail solves a calcification problem, and suddenly being like, oh, Eureka, like, that’s what I learned and like, you know, so, so these disparate, you’re saying, like learning things of decidedly disparate fields, helps you put more pegs on the board. And let’s start to

Arthur Worsley 27:49
Yeah, I think I think there’s actually I think that’s to say there’s two things I mean, everything is an abstraction, right. So if you zoom right in just learning within a topic area, the more you learn in a topic area, the more you’re going to be able to learn about that topic area because you can have more you know, when someone you’re going to acquire stuff faster, because you can just associate it with more things you already know. So so. So memorization is kind of like a snowball, the more it rolls, the more you’re able to pick up as you roll, you build this ability to just pick stuff up really fast. Then there’s the there’s a second point, which is around like, the more that you learn in different areas, the more you’re able to abstract and look at general rules. So imagine, like you’d only ever seen one table in your life and it was red, and it had three legs, right? And I was like, this is a table for the rest of your life. You’re going to associate tables with things that are red and have three legs. But the more tables you see, suddenly you start to go, Oh, actually, that one’s black, and it has five legs. And suddenly what happens is you start to see what like, what is it that that table is and what is it that it isn’t and you started create that general idea around, you know what tables aren’t. So there’s a very prosaic example, but it’s one of the reasons that I love traveling because the more countries you go to, the more you’re like, wow, I thought this was a human truth. And it turns out, it’s just a couple norm in a small part of the world, right? And suddenly it not only tells you what is general, but also what isn’t general. And, and the same is true then for then applying those lessons and thinking creatively across different fields because you start to be able to go, Oh, actually, maybe I can apply some of these general lessons that I’ve learned in, you know, in biophysics to this problem that I’m doing in you know, optimization of logistics transport, and that’s what we do a lot of that at McKinsey, you know, like we take how do we take operations lessons from optimizing a factory and apply it to optimizing a hospital and you cut waiting times to nothing? Right, you know, it’s this ability to learn lessons and then take them across different borders.

Sean Tierney 29:37
Yeah, I’ve called it parallax in the past like to me that one of the benefits of travel is by moving around and getting exposed to different cultures and things that are just you never even thought they were different. Like they just assumed that that’s how it was done. And you see like a weird they do it a completely different way to show it’s, it’s taking the fixed stars of the background and then moving slightly and realizing that some of those are closer than others. Yeah, some of them are moving Against the backdrop.

Arthur Worsley 30:00
That’s a really nice way of looking at it, I think. Yeah.

Sean Tierney 30:03
Cool. All right. Well, there’s three. Actually, I do want to talk about Spaced Repetition for a second because I know that you do some form of that. How do you do and maybe just define what space repetition is for people that are unfamiliar with that term.

Arthur Worsley 30:54
This is space space. Rapid repetition is just if I imagine you have a flashcard and has a piece of information, a question on one side and an answer on the other. It comes from this idea that basically if you, if you show yourself if you test yourself on the flashcard, just at the time when you’re about to forget it, then it’s more likely to stick in your memory. Like at its simplest, it’s just like rote repetition. But actually, if you if you look at it, if you time it, so it gets increasingly long, then you get a bigger and bigger memorization benefit because you create surprise, and it sort of really triggers the brains go, Oh, this is something I need to remember. So spaced repetition, you do that with one, you know, one flashcard or you Spaced Repetition systems enable you to do that with lots and lots of information. So they would schedule instead of having you know, let’s say it’s a vocab word instead of having one vocab word and and you would see it okay, if I get it right, I see it tomorrow. And if I get that right, I see it in three days. And if I get that right, I see it in 10 days, and if I get it wrong, I see it you know, it repeats the process but changes the the latency of the reviews. It enables you to do it with thousands of flashcards, so I think I have like 60 or 70,000 flashcards in my system now across a whole load of different topics and it tests me on them at random and I learn new ones. All the time and

Sean Tierney 32:00
how much time are you allocating to that practice? Like daily? Are we talking like in your morning routine? or What is this? What are we talking? It’s really

Arthur Worsley 32:07
up to like it. So my right now Personally, I spent an hour every single morning reviewing and learning new flashcards because it’s it covers a whole lot of areas I mentioned. So I’m studying Indonesian using it, but I’m also learning Mandarin and German and studying art history and politics and world history and quantum physics and like all these random things that I’m interested, just I’m learning geology at the moment, I’m learning about igneous intrusive, an extra piece of rocks, right? Like, it’s like, it’s weird stuff, but it’s what I find it fascinating. But you can do it in 10 minutes a day, or you can spend at one point I was spending three hours a day on it, right? So you just have to make sure that, you know, it’s it creates a workload and you have to make sure that you’re prepared to work that load of reviews down.

Sean Tierney 32:47
And what is the tool that you’re using to do that?

Arthur Worsley 32:49
I use Anki because it’s free, and it’s incredibly powerful. It has a whole load of add ons. I’m pretty sure it’s open source. And if you’re going to download it in the app store, you have to be careful. There’s a couple of different variants You want the blue one, the Anki SRS so that you have to pay for the app because that funds the development of the app, but the stuff on the desktop is totally free. And it’s just a wonderful tool. Cool.

Sean Tierney 33:10
Yeah, I have it on my phone, but it’s an orange one. So I think maybe I got the wrong.

Arthur Worsley 33:14
No, it’s not the right. The orange one is also good, but it’s not as powerful. So that so for example, the thing that I love about the Anki SRS, the blue one, and we can link to it in the in the show notes, is I’ve also installed an add on for something called incremental reading, which is something we talked a little bit about last time, so that I can actually read documents that say, I want to study a topic like philosophy, Greek philosophy, right? So what I would do is I would take the Wikipedia article for Greek philosophy and I would also take skepticism, epicureanism, epicureanism, stoicism, you know, cynicism, and instead of reading the whole Greek philosophy article, I would read the first one or two paragraphs, then I would switch to the first one or two paragraphs of cynicism and epicureanism. And so what I would do is it’d be like peeling an onion, like I peel all of the articles of narrative. Time. And what you’re doing is because most articles move from very simple to very complex, what you can do is read a whole load of articles simultaneously, but get a broader understanding of the topic and progressing complexity throughout the articles as you go. So that’s the kind of thing you can do with the Anki SRS, you can you can kind of upgrade it to, you know, however you want to use it.

Sean Tierney 34:17
Yeah, that’s fascinating. And we will link to everything we’re mentioning. It’ll be in the show notes if you guys want to download that. So yeah, so the the role of memorization I think, like I think in terms of a computer, I know we were talking about this analogy the other night, like I have tried to emphasize like CPU and extensibility of like things that I can add on and like tuning applications like that’s the level I think about but you are bringing me around to see the value of just like pure memorization in terms of being the fodder for like this pegboard.

Arthur Worsley 34:49
I think you have to I think there’s there’s also like a balanced medium. I don’t think there are some people who think you should memorize everything, but I don’t go that far. Like I don’t memorize all the phone numbers in my contacts because I know Never gonna have to think creatively about my contacts, phone numbers, you know, so there’s stuff that I do like to keep it just in a filing system because they’re things that I’m going to process linearly. And so it makes sense. But anything that I want to think creatively about anything that I want to understand, rather than simply know, those are the things that I want to learn and memorize, like a language, right? Like, you know, you could know what words mean. But if you want to understand how the language works, and create an app, then you need to memorize the vocab.

Sean Tierney 35:26
How what defines to you good instruction, like because what if the people who preceded you, you go you try to find like the top three books on a subject, and those people just happen to have all kind of got hive mind or whatever, you know, like they got the echo chamber and they all kind of wrote the same thing, doesn’t it kind of, depending on others interpretations of a subject, it’s not reasoning from first principles and like actually getting down to it like a true understanding of it. Like, how

Arthur Worsley 35:54
do you deal with that for sure, I mean, I think again, it all it all comes down to like abstraction depending on the level at which you’re trying to solve a problem, right? I need to ride my motorbike every day to get from A to B, I do not need to become an engineer that learns how motorbikes work. And I also don’t need to know how to machine fabricate the parts that the engineers use to make the motorbike that I then ride, right? So I think you have to, you have to understand at what level you want to interact with a problem like, do I want to be able to speak a language conversation with a guy on the street? Or do I want to be able to write an analytical paper on the like the the origin of this language and its influences on other languages around the world. And then you know, the deeper you want to get them the more back towards first principles you have to go. But most problems if you want to use them practically you don’t have to go quite as deep as that.

Sean Tierney 36:42
How are you deciding what you learn next? Do you have goals that dictate that or what’s your your method for that decision making?

Arthur Worsley 36:49
So I used to have and I kind of still do have a system of you know, what is it that I mentioned? So I have broken down you know, for example, that there are different their skills and knowledge right? So when I If I was working out, okay, I want to have a general level or arts and liberal arts education, I actually want to have like a general education on every major academic discipline, I want to understand the top layer of it. You know, I love that in school that we all learn, like biology that we’ll never use again. But actually, it’s fascinating when you walk around, and you kind of understand how flowers work and insects and but you know, so So I took the, the index out of Wikipedia, and I also took the Dewey Decimal System, which is the system that libraries used to index books. And I went through that and I created again, I broke the problem down into like, here are the like, 30 or 40 topics that I’d like to learn about. So step one was gather the data and break the problem down. And then I kind of just, you know, you either have a problem that’s really pressing that you want to solve, or you just go for what excites you and interests you, you know, there’s that, you know, that great quote, you know, live like, you’ll die tomorrow and learn like you’ll live forever, right? So if you’re going to live forever, you’d probably start with either the things that are going to make your world better, all the things that you just friggin love, you know, and those are the two main criteria that I Picking up on

Sean Tierney 38:00
what was if you’re able to talk about it, what was the most interesting problem that you tackled at McKinsey when you’re there? I don’t

Arthur Worsley 38:08
know what I can and can’t. But I think the so I love, I love date, I can talk about the kind of problems. So I’m a huge data monkey, not in a, like, I don’t have a dashboard, where I record, I do record, you know, at least five metrics at every point. It’s part of the attraction planner, which is one of the productivity planner, which I give to my clients and I use every single day, you know, there’s space there to record five metrics. But I think that there’s a huge universe, we’re moving on to AI and all these things in a business saying, there’s so much I’m using, in my experience, there’s a huge amount of opportunity, just teaching 99% of people how to use Excel, like how to analyze data, how to like learn lessons from it, and what I loved where the problems were, I would work with a senior client team, these guys who was you know, they know their business and they’re incredibly good at their business. They, they’ve obviously done incredibly well, and you would show them this cut of data that told them something about their world that they never knew. And they were their eyes would get all big and they’d be like, Oh my god, this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. And what you were enabling was them to make incredibly powerful decisions by giving them the data they need. And that kind of translates to what I do with. So the reason that traction, which is the productivity system that I teach, the reason I called it traction is because people are really, really smart. But what people are often missing is a the ability to break down a problem all the time, not even the ability, people just don’t have time to think about this, right? That’s why you hire someone else to do, but it’s also the data to make good decisions off, right? If you said one of my favorite productivity tips, if there’s only one thing that anyone ever does, it’s track your time over the day, not with an app where you track every single second you know, just get a piece of paper write the hours from like, whenever you wake up to whenever you go to sleep and in half hour increments or like 15 whenever you finish a task, write it down, because suddenly you’re gonna see I spent 35 minutes a day on the toilet watching YouTube. Like that wasn’t productive or actually, you know, when I when I first met Aaron She thought she was pretty productive. She started tracking her time she was she was only spending an hour a day on the things that actually move the needle. You know. And suddenly, by seeing that data, she instantly made changes in her life to totally transform the way that she thinks and the way that she works and what she works on. So anything at McKinsey that involved sharing data in a way that inspired people and gave people the ability to make better decisions was always a really powerful experience.

Sean Tierney 40:25
Awesome. There’s a it makes me think of a book that I just recently read over the holidays. The one thing which I noticed was in your slides, but Gary Keller guy who did Keller Williams, to me of the books I think I’ve read in the last year that’s up there with in terms of being just super simple, yet profound, is this notion of almost like fractal at 20 of continuously deconstructing things and then asking that question, what is the one thing I can do next, that will make all these other challenges either easier or irrelevant? and continuously asking that question?

Arthur Worsley 40:58
I do. I do love I do. Idea is essential and super, super important. But I think one of the things that I miss is this idea, this essential component of exploration and play, right? When you’re starting entrepreneur, you have to try a whole, like, if I’m like, hey, you’ve just started your business, what’s the one most important thing you should be working on people? Like, I literally have no idea, hey, how can I pick my one thing, and to specialize too early is actually a bad thing. Because you’re going to pick the wrong one thing, right? So step one, this is why like, when I tell people go, don’t stress about stuff, go out and just try it. Like if you’re an entrepreneur, just, you know, take two years to try learning a whole load of different stuff, because that’s the only way like, only by gathering the data, you then going to be able to be like, Oh, I know, this is my one thing and make a good decision of it.

Sean Tierney 41:40
Right? It’s like, I don’t know if it’s the right term, but like divergent and convergent, you’re almost like it like expand out, blow it out and then converge like otherwise you end up with that local maxima, like you end up on the small hill instead of the big mountain. 100%. Yeah. Cool. So there was three things you mentioned before the interview, read more books. Learn how to extract faster and get, like more productivity out of it. Can you just like kind of briefly touch on each of those and like what those components are?

Arthur Worsley 42:08
Yeah, sure. So I’ll just super recap cuz I think we talked a little bit about it before, but the the like so the three things that I love doing are reading books, learning new stuff, and putting that stuff to use in a way that that helps me be a better person for the people around me and also solve the problems which I care about and which I find meaningful. So the first one was around reading more, I was like, Okay, well, you know, if I only have time to read 1000 books in life, I want to read the thousand best books. So how do I find the best books? And how do I make sure you know, on the different topics that I’m interested in? And then I was like, okay, I’ve found at the start of my journey, there is reading a whole load of books, but maybe retaining one important point from each book, you know, or two important points. I felt like a lot of it was slipping through. So I was like, how can I? How can I retain this stuff? And that’s why I started writing books on reason. I think Book Summaries are a great thing to read. If you’re deciding what you Want to read. So to get an overview of a book, and a great way to recap some of the lessons that you’ve already got from a book, anyone who thinks that reading Book Summaries is an alternative to reading a book is greatly mistaken. blankest is not an alternative to reading books. But it is a great way to do one of those two other things. If you want to get really good at books, read the book and write a summary. And even better teach that summary in a way that you know, someone else is going to learn from it. So every book summary I write, I kind of picture my sister, I’m like, how would I teach these ideas in a way that she would understand or find interesting, and that helps me teaching those ideas helps me to internalize them much, much faster than if I just read those books. You know, if I read four times as many books, I wouldn’t learn as much as I do from reading one writing one summary, right? And then there was the learning faster section which kind of comes out of that it’s linked to it, but it’s also broader. So it’s all of the other random skills and things that I’m interested in that I’ve learned. And then it’s the idea of, okay, you know, you’ve you’ve read a whole load of books. You’ve learned a whole load of stuff like how do you actually put that to work in a way that’s meaningful and productive. So within productive I think of it. In three horizons, there’s competence, which is what most people think of is productivity, which is task and time management, like how do I get stuff done, right? The next thing that happens is people get very, they often they get good at tasks and time management, they’re running a good business, you know, they, I have clients who, who are, you know, running, you know, businesses turning over 100 million dollars a year, but they’re frustrated because they can’t manage their own lives, you know, they’re like, I don’t have time to be home with my kids, or spend time with my wife or go to the gym or read books. So that’s the next the second horizon after competence is balanced. It’s like how do I take what I’ve learned, usually and nailed in business and career and how I apply that across all of my life so that I actually feel great about everything that’s going on in my life. And then what happens is most people reach this like eight out of 10 across the different areas, and they’re like, okay, I kind of nailed all of the basic problems, like why am I here? Like, what am I here to do? And what am I going on? To do so those are the, the three areas of the productive side says competence, balance and meaning and I help people through those things. So the site normally helps people to To find great books to learn from the Book Summaries to learn about meta learning and learning in general, in any you know, I’ve got a language learning guide up there. From the three years I spent learning languages. And then the most of my effort right now is going on the productivity thing, because I think that’s where I can help people the most.

Sean Tierney 45:14
Cool, cool, cool, cool. Yeah. And you’ve got some great just downloadable, free content, like I started going through your stuff and you sent, you know, some 25 thing right off the bat. Yeah, super valuable.

Arthur Worsley 45:26
I’m much better at breaking down problems than I am selling solutions. So I’m working. I’m working like I that’s the problem that I’m not the problem. That’s the thing I’m working on right now is like, how do I, because selling isn’t just about making enough money to pay my team. It’s about how do you get people to commit to taking the next step? And putting lots of interesting information out there. I was finding a lot of people reading it, but not enough people taking action. So that’s the thing I’m really passionate about is how can I get people to really subscribe to actually like, take action on this stuff that they’re learning and make it make a difference? Yeah, there’s a lot of free stuff out there. I enjoy

Sean Tierney 46:01
it. Okay, so here’s a question on the topic of education. If you are in a position like we’re in Indonesia right now, if you were the Minister of Education for Indonesia, what could you do that would put Indonesian youth, you know, way ahead of everyone else? Like what what changes structurally would you make to the system?

Arthur Worsley 46:20
I’m not I’m not I’m an expert on learning, but I’m not an expert on teaching, and therefore I would be horribly unqualified to weigh in with my my amateur opinion on the topic. I do think that my experiences at school the subjects which I loved and I enjoyed, and I’m still pursuing To this day, were the ones where I had fun and my teachers made them exciting and interesting to me. How do you how do you I that’s an easy thing to say we should make all subjects exciting and interesting. When you’re actually trying to do that with you know, millions of teachers and manage everything. It’s a it’s everything, I think. I think the internet is a wonderful, a wonderful thing. I wish there was a way To encourage people to spend more time enjoying all of the free content there is online, you can learn anything online these days and less time on Netflix and you know, and playing computer games and things like that. But

Sean Tierney 47:12
for sure, I will say I got sucked down the rabbit hole with the Khan Academy. So Khan is the guy who like just famous hedge fund guy just started recording videos, and I guess Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation, they, they saw what he was doing and like just made it a whole thing. But like, this guy’s literally just trying to teach every single subject and make all of the greatest teachings free, and does an amazing job. Like he’s wonderful. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Easy to go down that rabbit hole.

Arthur Worsley 47:37
Yeah, so I mean, that’s the thing we talked about earlier, though, where, you know, I think another thing we can all do is tie those problems back to real world problems. I think when we’re at school, so much of what we learn can feel, you know, abstract, you know, we learn a language but not because we ever have any interest in going to that country or we learn math, but never in a way that actually is interesting or relevant. When you get older you suddenly realize everything’s connected. You know, like math is important to biology. And whatever you’re interested in, you can find a way to tie every other subject that ever existed back to what you’re interested in. And doing more of that like working out what it is that a child loves, and then explaining the subject to them in a way that appeals to the home. Maybe it’s tennis, like if that if that kid loves tennis, tightened Thai history, biology, physics can tie everything back to tennis, right, and that kid will love every second of it, and change it. I think there are some schools that are trying to do more of that. But yeah, having a practical problem is again, it comes down to that’s a really strong motivator.

Sean Tierney 48:35
Nice, random aside. The other day in the sauna here there’s a mo spa, and we ended up sitting next to this movie star I have to look up what his name because I don’t remember it but his link to his IMDb and he’s talking about like the Green School in Bali and like this whole other method of education that they have here. It’s not the Waldorf system, but it’s something kind of similar to it, which is very just, you know,

Arthur Worsley 48:56
there’s a Montessori school here, which may be the one he was talking about. And there’s also they’ll go Cisco does things in a different way as well.

Sean Tierney 49:01
Yeah, yeah. But I mean, it just seems like these alternate, like the system we have now is producing like, they were it was a legacy system. It was designed to produce factory workers. And at this point, it’s like, we’re going to be faced with some pretty epic problems in our lifetimes. And we’re going to need people who are like, just creative and like, find the genius of these children and nurture that and like, have weird, like, not even what we would consider normal subjects. But you know what I mean, like develop that child who happens to be fascinated with tennis, and if that’s his thing, or her thing, then go in there and like, build that person up because it’s only through developing them almost like they’re an athlete in their their interest that we’re going to have the next Einsteins necessary to solve these societal everything that kid

Arthur Worsley 49:49
learns about tennis, if they take they maybe they get to, like 30 and they’re like, Oh, I don’t like tennis anymore. I’m actually interested in cars, but all of that physics and mechanics are gonna have learned it’s applicable. You know, I think it’s, it’s You know, we live in a world where you can cost it’s all about framing, right? Like how do you frame what people are learning, so that it’s useful to a problem they’re trying to solve Aaron Aaron’s my my girlfriend, she’s an amazing entrepreneur, she also did a podcast with Matt. And it’s, it’s a, she’s done incredible things. But she was struggling with this idea of hiring a general manager, which is something she’s really wanted to do for a long time. And she thought the whole thing was like a chore. And what Aaron really believes in is empowering female entrepreneurs to live a life where they can have financial freedom and also not feel like they have to give up their family and that they can, you know, actually still be women at the same time as being great at business. And I was like, hey, well, what if you just look at that problem, instead of seeing that as a, like a problem that you need to solve? Why not see it as like, this is an important thing that I need to learn so that I can help other women who are going to be in my position data in order to do it. And so she was like, wow, that like it’s just a total. It’s a total reframe, Islander, another great one, just for you. I’m summarizing atomic habits at the moment, and just Look, flicking through the index. This is one of my things I do to read books faster. And there’s this idea of like reframing everything from an I have to to an I get to, you know, I don’t have to hire a general manager, you know, that’s a negative way, I get to hire a general manager so that I can help other people with this problem and so that I can enjoy my life. And the moment you reframe anything, whether it’s a learning problem or a productivity problem in that way, that solves a problem that you care about, suddenly, it feels like a totally different kettle of fish.

Sean Tierney 51:28
That’s awesome. Cool. Well, I think this is probably actually want to talk about the traction planner, before we wrap up, can you what is the structure of that? How does it work? Why does it work? Like what is the action plan?

Arthur Worsley 51:38
So the action plan is just it’s a productivity planner, habit tracker, it’s really a daily planner, habit tracker, and it has daily reflection pages in it. I use it every day. It lets me plan my day. It lets me track my time. It lets me set my important things. I guess it’s the pointy end of a bigger stick. It is usable on its own. So the whole thing starts with a winner. With the eight areas from traction, and what it does is it forces you, you rate your satisfaction each of those areas, and whichever one scores the lowest, you not only have to make that your so you can track you track habits, character traits and metrics. So a habit is a yes or no thing a character trait is some kind of trait that you want to develop. A metric is anything you can measure or count, right. And the first habit trait or metric that you track has to link to the lowest scoring area on your wheel of life. And then on your you set weekly goals, realistic weekly goals in each area of life. But your daily goal, the number one thing that you do every day has to relate to that lowest area. And what that does is the number one daily priority helps over 30 because you focus on one area for 28 days that boost that up and have focus so because you know you’re taking affirmative action every single day to improve that one area of life. And then building the habit tracking the habits. The character traits in the metrics helps systematize ritualized behaviors that are then going to help to sustain that movement from like a four out of 10 you know, maybe gets to a six or a seven out of 10. And then the new habit is going to help sustain that when you switch to the other area of life. So maybe you switch from health and vitality, you’re like, Hey, I actually I did something everyday towards it, I feel great about it. And I built a running habit. So I feel good that it’s gonna stay at a seven out of 10 for a while, then you switch to maybe growth and learning it might be Hey, like, I’m gonna read up, you know, 10 pages of a book every day, whatever it is. So that’s the it’s not only the pointy end in terms of like, how do I get stuff done every day, but it leads into this question of both balance and also doing the right thing.

Sean Tierney 53:28
So I’ve heard just, I guess, a devil’s advocate position, I’ve heard this idea that you shouldn’t focus so much on your weaknesses that you should focus on develop, like, rather than compensating for where you’re knowingly weak, you should instead focus on your strong suit and boosting that more, but it sounds like you’re smoothing over the gap.

Arthur Worsley 53:46
So I think this is a great a great example of like, not good domain specificity or domain generalization like that is 100% true for your career or you know, in within a The domain, right? If you are excellent analytics, but you’re horrible people present Yes, you can try and improve that. But actually, you should just probably focus on the opportunities and strengths, that being a wonderful analytical person brings you and use that as your spike to then frame everything else that you’re doing. Instead of seeing then, like, becoming very charismatic, and something you must do you can see it as like, how can I become more charismatic so that I can focus even more on being more analytical? Like how can I get rid of the things that are holding me back so that I can work on this spike? in life? That doesn’t work? Right. You can’t just be like, I’m going to be really good at health and vitality for the rest of my life. And who cares about friends and love and partnership and all of those other things? Like we as human beings need all of those things. You can’t just be like, I’m going to be really good at meditating and terrible at making money because it will be like you just can’t have a holistic, well balanced life like that. So, so yes, doubling down on strengths is a really good thing to do and using, not seeing weaknesses as weaknesses but as things that you can work on that are holding back your Strength is a really powerful thing to do within an area. But when you’re looking at life in general, there are no you can’t just focus on one area and just focus on strength, you have to work on everything because whatever your weakest areas will hold everything else back and will basically be like blowing up in the background and effectively dragging you down. So

Sean Tierney 55:17
cool. Awesome. Well, I think this is probably a good time to break into the last part of the interview. So this is rapid fire tactical thing we do. It’s called the breakdown. Are you ready for the breakdown?

Arthur Worsley 55:27
I’m ready, let’s break down the write down,

Sean Tierney 55:28
break down, baby. All right. What is one book that has profoundly affected you? Of all the books you’ve read it and you know, you’ve read a lot.

Arthur Worsley 55:39
I going super matter. I could pick I think I could pick hundreds of books. But the one which I always wish that I’d been given earlier was how to read a book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren like that says matter as you get on reading, you know, I can’t believe that so many of us go through life thinking that we can read books, actually, there’s like to read a book effectively and read it. And this isn’t about increasing, you know, decreasing decades and increasing, you know, increasing words per minute. This is like how do you internalize and get on the same level as an author? How do you have a conversation with an author so that you can almost like absorb their mind through the book and do that in a way that’s also not going to mean you study the same but for, you know, 30 weeks so, so how to read a book is a wonderful book, if you love reading, and even if you don’t, it’ll change your life.

Sean Tierney 56:22
Cool. corollary question to this speed reading your thoughts on speed reading?

Arthur Worsley 56:26
I think, I think

I think I think effective reading it is possible to read faster than most people read, but the answer is not just to see how high you can get your words per minute. That’s like, I mean, I have some some analogies, which I probably can’t bring out here. But like, you know, that’s like saying that, you know, eating a meal, like the efficiency of eating a meal or cooking a meal is like how many mouthfuls you can get in your mouth at a quick period of time. It doesn’t actually it’s not, it’s not a right way to think about it. What you can do is you can break reading down so you can just read smarter. So you can make you know, you build this by reviewing the whole book in advance. And by working out what question is trying to answer and what questions you have and, and how the overall framework works and what the overall conclusions are, what you can do is then read through the book very fast, because you’re putting flesh on the bones rather than trying to discover everything as you go. It’s kind of like an a book, an internal book version of incremental reading, where instead of trying to get through the whole onion in one go, you peel it off layer by layer. And that means you can actually get to extract the most important parts of the book in a very, very short period of time. And so from a words per minute point of view, I would never read a nonfiction book from page one to the end of the book. But if you worked out how long it took me to extract the most important lesson from a white fiction, but my word per minute would be very, very high. So it’s one of those things where people want the effect and so they’ve gone Okay, so I need to read books fast. So what I’m going to do is just read read words quickly. That’s a horrible way to read books. But there are ways to read faster. I just the idea of speed reading is kind of like it’s kind of Data idea, I don’t really like it.

Sean Tierney 58:02
I thought there was an idea from a guy navall Robin Khan that I follow. I really like him. He gave permission to just stop reading, like you’re reading a book and you’re not getting anything out of it. For some reason, I think through schooling or whatever, we’ve all developed this like obligation, like, we have to finish a book that we started. And he’s saying no license to just give up on and go read something better. 100%. So

Arthur Worsley 58:23
that’s like, that’s stepping back even one further. So speed reading, if you if you’re like, how can I read more, so I have a post on how to read more as like 27 steps that you know, attack all the different things that often hold people back. But like, Aaron, and I always have three or four books on the go. I always have like, at least two fiction books going at least two nonfiction books going because two things and I’m very happy to put books down and replace them with a new one. The most important thing is to be reading all the time. Right? And so if you’re not excited by the book that you’re reading, as long as it’s not you’re giving up because, you know, because it’s too hard, you know, or you know, something like But as long as you’re excited, and you’re reading all the time, and as long as you as long as you keep replacing the books that you give up with good books, you’re going to get to a huge amount of incredibly powerful information. So having multiple books on the Go at once, which is something we’re not taught to do, and also being prepared to walk away from them. Those are both incredibly powerful ways to read more. Awesome.

Sean Tierney 59:17
All right, what about what is one person you would love to have dinner with?

Arthur Worsley 59:21
Ah, and then I’d mass interview I said, it was my, my dad. You know, I think the older you get, the more you realize that you’re the You are the sum of all of the incredible people who sacrifice their lives to make you who you are all the amazing teachers who changed the way that I saw the world or the friends who who are part of my journey and allow me to be part of that journey. And I think no one is born true of that than our parents and I never really had the chance to get to know my dad, I would love to sit down with him or my granddad or my great granddad and really just understand, like, you know, where was it that I came from and why I think the way I do and and how I am everything else You know, people go, I wish I could have dinner with, you know, the Dalai Lama or Elon Musk, or we talked about this just before the podcast. If you wanted to get the most out of an hour spent with that person, don’t have dinner with them, read the book, read the book. They spent six months to a year, distilling the most important lessons they could possibly teach you into a book, right and writing it and editing it and cutting it down and getting rid of all of the like arms and ahhs and you know, getting to know you, you know, if you want to get to know Stephen Covey read his book, if you want to get to know David Allen, read his book, read someone’s book, even if they’re a fiction writer, if you if you want to work with it, read their literature, right? That’s going to tell you who that person is, you know, they poured their souls into those books. That’s the best way to spend an hour with them, you know,

Sean Tierney 1:00:47
read the book, then have dinner with a really interesting dinner. Cool, what is one tool or hack that you use to save time, money or headaches? Uh, wow.

Arthur Worsley 1:01:01
That is a tough one. Because that was not because there’s just so many, right? I’m just trying to think of like, what’s the one that I would recommend? I mean, books are like a small investment upfront, but a big payoff. I think my traction planner, I, it’s been a total game changer for me. So again, like I created it, as part of my process and my journey for learning how to how to optimize my time and my learning and, and anyone listening to this, who thinks productivity is about just doing more and more, that’s not true. One of the things I love about productivity is that it gives you permission to just totally down tools and be like, hey, this evening, I am actually going to go and have dinner with this wonderful person I just met because I’m making a choice. I know what I’ve got on my plate, and I can walk away from it instead of just like worrying or through dinner. And so that’s why I think a productivity tool is is so valuable. The tool that gets you gives you clarity and makes you feel peaceful about everything that you’re working on and what you’re going to work on tomorrow and how you’re doing and the different and that you’re working on what’s important, because then you can actually When I’m sitting down for dinner with my friends with Aaron, I can be fully present rather than worrying about that stuff.

Sean Tierney 1:02:05
Yeah. Now, I took that from David Allen’s book, getting things done about the trusted system. And if it is truly trusted, then once you’ve done the brain dump and you’ve gotten everything into it, it’s like you can sleep easy. There are no more open loops running at that point, because you know, that it’s all captured.

Arthur Worsley 1:02:19
Yeah, I think so I think where I GTD was, as one of my top picks on productivity of all time, along with the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey. But But I think where he misses that is that it’s not just about brain dumping and feeling comfortable. You also have to feel comfortable that you’re working on the right stuff, right. And that’s where GTD kinda he talks a little bit about it at the end, where he talks about the different horizons, but that’s where I think that’s what I missed from it. And that’s why I created traction was not just the idea that Okay, I’ve got everything that I must, could or should do in a system that I trust, but also that those are the right things that I’m working on stuff that’s important,

Sean Tierney 1:02:54
right. So, to me, that’s kind of what the Gary Keller book provided that GTT was missing. So it’s almost like ggd is about doing things right and Gary Keller one thing is about doing the right things

Arthur Worsley 1:03:05
true everywhere. So So what Gary Keller is great on the one thing he’s great on what? Right? Yeah. So he’s great on how you need to pick the one thing, but what he doesn’t do is he doesn’t provide a system a framework for what, like, how do you actually like break down? Okay, well, you know, these are the again like, these are the eight areas of life that I think like what’s the one area of life I need to work on? And within that area, what’s the within there? Like, what are the eight things that I need to work on within that area? Like what’s the one most important one there? So again, Gary Keller, like the idea of simplifying down to one thing is super powerful, but you still also need the framework for like, what am I simplifying from like, what I’m picking the one thing from what

Sean Tierney 1:03:43
does your does faster to master help you figure that out? Or that so

Arthur Worsley 1:03:47
again, that’s that’s exactly the problem that I try to solve for myself. And it’s like, there’s no, no one could ever claim that one system is perfect, but I’ve been using it for years and it it fills me with an incredible sense of peace and clarity. Admission emotive. That’s very there’s a difference between being people always go are you you know, you live abroad you do all these things you must be happy all the time this I’m sure everyone who’s listening to this is familiar with that. And you’re like, you know, your Sunday’s you woke up and you’re sad, right? You know, but I think what’s changed is that I There’s not a day that I don’t wake up and I don’t feel fulfilled. I’m like, Yes, it’s gonna be a tough day. Yes, I slept badly last night. No, I probably shouldn’t have had that fifth beer. But I’m, like, really excited by what I’m working on. And there’s nothing that I’m doing today. That isn’t something that I would choose to be doing if I had that choice, right. So So being able to find that is something that’s very powerful.

Sean Tierney 1:04:34
Very cool on the topic of sleep. I’m glad you actually just brought that up. So I struggle with sleep. I literally like I don’t know if you have this, but I have just like a hyperactive mind where it doesn’t end up shutting off at the end of the day. I don’t know if you have any tricks to wind it down, or I did.

Arthur Worsley 1:04:50
I have two tricks. So the first guy David Allen doesn’t recommend doing this. But I always recommend one of my core processes I recommend to clients is doing an end of workshop down which is like A mini review where you get everything out of your head where you kind of review it, you know, you put it all down on paper, you update your plans, and it gives you permission to just switch off at the end of the day, you’re like, I’m done, everything that I was working on, I’ve got like a next action for it, I feel good about it. And when you do that, you’ll instantly be able to step back and relax a little bit. The second thing is just not to work too late. Like we’re always so we’re always in ideally in bed an hour before we go to sleep. And we I read nonfiction. Sorry, I read fiction, I definitely don’t read nonfiction. You know, or we’re chilling out or whatever it is. But, you know, setting sleep up for success is so, so important. So making sure that you’re not on your foot, you know, it’s so easy to you know, jump on YouTube or just browse a new site, you know, what’s the latest on Corona virus, blah, blah, blah. And then before you know it, you’ve been on your phone for 15 minutes before sleeping and your brain is like going going going right? So

Sean Tierney 1:05:51
yeah, for sure. I read a book recently called why we sleep Walker and what an eye opener like just, it made me realize just how incredibly important It is and how incredibly deficient I am in it. And also using the aura ring. So I’ve been tracking my sleep and listen, I don’t even want to I don’t want to tell you what it looks like. Cool, but what is moving on what is one piece of music that speaks to you lately, or a musical artist?

Arthur Worsley 1:06:18
So I’m, I don’t listen to music ever. And it’s a really weird it’s a really weird thing not because I don’t love music, I love music, but it’s just not a part of my day. And so if I occasionally I get emails from people, especially so there’s the outer journey of productivity, which is how do I get more stuff done? How do I get more balanced? How do I find more meaning? And then there’s the inner journey, right? Which is like how do I realize that no matter how much I get done, and how much balance and meaning I have, that where I am, Wherever I am, that’s where I am right and that I can perfect just as I am now, and I get a lot of people who email me on that and I always send them to Baz lemons. sunscreen song, I don’t know if you know, it’s like yeah, I did it. For me, like whenever I’m feeling like internally, it just gives me perspective. It’s like, you know, maybe you’re married, maybe you won’t maybe you’ll, you know, Die Young, maybe you won’t maybe. And he’s just so full of great advice that just puts everything in perspective. He’s like, enjoy your body while you’re Yeah. And it’s just put to this really great beat and it’s the kind of you can listen to it. It just always resets me and makes me happy and smile. So that’s a good one.

Sean Tierney 1:07:19
I will link to that. I do love that someone showed me that and there was another one like it. I’ll find them I’ll dig them up. But that’s a wonderful piece of me. That’s awesome. Oh, it was a Steve Jobs one. Oh, yeah, it was the Steve Jobs speech set to this music and it just perfectly melded. Really cool. Awesome. All right. What about what is what what important truth do very few people agree with you on?

Arthur Worsley 1:07:43
So as you You gave me time to prep on this.

Sean Tierney 1:07:45
You’re the first guest I’ve never told anybody.

Arthur Worsley 1:07:51
I didn’t really do any prep, but I just I was kind of like mulling over in my head. I think I wrote I wrote

an email out to my main This couple of months ago which really one I got the most responses to out of any email and it was this idea that whatever problem you’re facing right now, the real problem you’re facing is a productivity problem right the people People often go I you know, I can’t get my business working right I can’t like I can’t get it it’s it’s comes down to the one thing you’re just not focusing on the right thing you’re not focused on the one thing and maybe it’s that you don’t have a system like maybe the whole business itself is the wrong thing. So trying to focus on the one thing in the wrong thing is the wrong thing to focus on. Right? So whether it’s like your so a lot of people are struggling with the how they just can’t sit down and be disciplined, they can’t you know, all it takes to be successful is to sit down every single day and put in the work right if you show up every day if you start you know wherever you are with whatever you have, you know and you’ll find better tools as you go along right but that’s the how component like how do you get stuff done? And then there’s the the wat which is like what’s the right thing to do? You know, am I even I’m even climbing the right ladder my working on the right problem, am I solving an obstacle that doesn’t need to be solved, right, you know, so that’s the what? And then there’s the why, like, why are you even doing all of this stuff in the first place? What is it that motivates and excites you? We talked about the importance of excitement in learning and, and productivity. And so most people, they’ll go on, Oh, you don’t understand I don’t have a productivity problem. I have this problem. I’m like, how many hours a week you’re actually working on that problem? And they’re like, ah, like, 30 minutes a week. I’m like, well, there’s your problem, right? It The problem is not the problem. The problem is the way that you’re approaching the problem. So it’s, again, it’s stepping back on that meta thing. And at the center of everything life is all about, not about not about how can you be as productive as possible, but it’s like how can you go through life in a way that helps you be a great person, help the people around you and be constructive to society, solve your problems, solve other people’s problems, you know, and and discover your independence and move through the interdependence. And those are all productivity problems, right? in a in a broader sense of the meaning than the typical task and time management. It’s all like, like, how do you live a good life? Right? That’s the question that all philosophers have been trying to work on. So helping People understand that suddenly they’re like, wow, if I step back and solve this meta problem, then maybe I don’t even have to solve that problem that I was struggling with, you know, maybe I can solve it a different way. Maybe Actually, it’s that I, I know that it is the right problem, but I’m just not solving it properly, or I’m not sitting down and tackling it. So that’s the one truth, I think, is that productivity is kind of at the center of everything and productivity in the way that I define it. Not in a, you know, tasking Time management is the most rudimentary at an office.

Sean Tierney 1:10:27
Yeah, well, I think what’s interesting is your definition incorporates that notion of are we working on the right problem to start with? Because whereas I think, usually productivity, I’m saying, Well, no, it’s it’s, it’s actually not a productivity issue. It’s a matter of like, are you even doing the right thing? Yeah. But your definition of it encompasses that.

Arthur Worsley 1:10:44
Yeah. And are you doing it for the right reason? Yeah. Right. And and that leads into the inner journey. So a lot of people are solving problems, because they don’t like themselves, right, because they don’t feel happy with who they are. A lot of people. I’m sure a lot of people in here are into self improvement. I was 100 Present like this, like we try and improve because we’re like, I need to be better. You know, and that’s all in the language I need to be better. Right? You know, and that comes from like that what you’re trying to do craving? Yes. And it’s an internal, it’s an internal thing that you’re never going to satisfy. And also, it’s like, you know, it’s like when you walk into the sweet aisle or into a supermarket, when you’re really hungry, you always fill your cart with crappy stuff, right? Because you have this craving and you make bad decisions when you have a craving, when you learn to love yourself, when you learn the why the real Why is to help other people. And that comes from a place of, of abundance within yourself of being like, Hey, you know what, even if I never improved ever again, that would be okay, I am great. I’m good enough for me. I’m good enough. Like there are people who love me, I’m a good person, productive, like all of this entropy and chance and odds and, and that’s awesome. It doesn’t mean you can’t then self improve, but the reason you self improve will be for a totally different reason. Instead of being like I need to improve because I’m not good enough. It’d be like, hey, there’s this problem that I’m actually quite interested in solving, but I’m missing these things. Which I need these skills or this knowledge so that I can help it so that I can help other people and you’ll still self improve it, it’ll come from a place of outwardness rather than a place of humaneness So, so that every all of that income is encompassed within productivity. For me that idea of doing doing things right doing the right thing and doing them for the right reasons. And you know, all of that coming from an internal place of love and abundance.

Sean Tierney 1:12:21
That’s awesome. There’s a guest I think four or five on my show was Matt Dunsmore this guy from start with y which is Simon cynics program. And he talks about just this idea of like in service to others and like when you frame everything, and you get really concrete on your why, but you also then rooted in some notion of service to others that that just like, once you can do that it magnifies your potential, but you have to be slightly careful.

Arthur Worsley 1:12:45
So yes, on the outside, that’s one 100%. Right. But a lot of people then go to they try and make it an outer journey thing. They’re like, Oh, if I just changed my mission statement or my vision, so it’s about other people, then that’s all I need to do. That’s not true. That’s gold plating attached. Right, you still are doing it because you’re trying to help other people so that you can feel better about yourself. That inner journey is like it. Yes, that knowledge is important. But that’s actually it’s kind of like meditation, right? You know, there’s a difference between between knowing and knowing, you know, and that’s a journey we all go on. And it’s a hard one to go on. Like, yes, you need that top level theoretical component on the outer journey. But you also just have to go through this process of being like, I’m okay. I’m cool. You know, that’s I’m great. Even if I’m, even if I got worse than I am right now. Like, I’m perfect, just as I am.

Sean Tierney 1:13:34
Awesome. All right. Last question here. If you could go back into time machine to your 20 year old self. And give yourself one bit of advice. What would you say?

Arthur Worsley 1:13:44
I think I love that we’re sitting here in Bali right now. And we you know, we’ve got a view over the rice paddies out of our window in the villa and I have a wonderful girlfriend and amazing friends and I work with people who I love and care about and I wouldn’t. I would be worried about saying anything. Yes, I changed the

Sean Tierney 1:14:01
outcome. That’s a perfect response. Just be like, you’re good dude.

Arthur Worsley 1:14:06
Yeah, you know you may be you may be fucking it up, you may be upsetting a lot of people you may be like a horribly conceited 20 year old boy, by the way, we all like that, blah, blah, blah. But you know, it’s all gonna be okay, you’re all going to end up in the right place and, and even if it doesn’t, maybe it all goes to shit in in two or three weeks, you know, as long as I I’m okay with that. You know? That’s okay.

Sean Tierney 1:14:28
Cool, man. Well, this has been an epic conversation. Arthur, where can people go? Which I signed them? Where can they learn more about what you’re doing? Get involved in the course take the traction planner, what?

Arthur Worsley 1:14:38
Yeah, I just had to faster to master.com you’ll find the all the different sections of the site. If you sign up to the mailing list, and I run through a lot of what we’ve talked about today. So I give people a guide through the read more, learn faster, wake up productive like that. You get a five day sequence which will take you to all the best articles and tips and things like that. But even if you just go to the blog, and hit The articles button at the top of the page, you’ll see all the reading there. So the Book Summaries or the article is a couple of interviews I’ve done like things like that. So that’s the best place to start

Sean Tierney 1:15:08
is the traction planner. I know you have the physical bound version of that, is there a digital version available or there is so if you

Arthur Worsley 1:15:15
buy the physical version, you get a free PDF that comes with it. So that’s the way to get hold of it.

Sean Tierney 1:15:21
Cool. All right, my man, epic conversation. Good luck with the tennis and everything else. You’re learning and Keyshia. We’ll see you soon.

Arthur Worsley 1:15:27
Thanks. Take care guys. Bye

Sean Tierney (02:00):
All right. Welcome everybody to the podcast. I’m your host, Sean Tierney and I am here today sitting across from Pale Bo. Palle is founder, owner and CEO of radio guru, a production and consultant company where he develops radio campaigns, runs courses and workshops for radio stations and does lectures on podcasting and creativity. Radio guru one the Danish Capri radio awards five times between 2010 and 2015 they were a finalist in the Cannes lion at 2011 and won the prestigious national creative circle awards in both 2012 and 2019 poly is co co owner of 17 radio stations in his home country of Denmark. And in July, 2016 he started his life as a digital nomad, selling his house, car and furniture and setting out to do a question around the world to visit every country in the world. And the plan is to continue traveling nonstop for the next 10 to 15 years. Welcomen Palle. Did I say that right there? Almost? Yeah. I don’t know what’s German or Danish or anything anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Well we didn’t say Buchanan. We’ll go with it. That was good. I’m impressed. So let’s start with the radio stations that you have had a long illustrious career in radio. Can you just kind of take us back to like how did, how does one come to co and 17 radio station?

Palle Bo (03:23):
Well, it’s, it’s not, it did not start out like that, that not in a long shot. I know it was, it was when I got into radio as a hobby in 85 back in the day when everything was black and white. And and, and we were at this communal radio station where eh, there were all kinds of programs going in all kinds of different directions and it were a lot of political programs. Then Fiddler came in and did a program about traditional Danish fiddling music and somebody did something about with country music and then there were Housewives coming in. And not, not to say anything bad about that. And then there were me and a bunch of other young guys who just enjoyed Stargate, can Waterman pop music and wanted to do a pop radio. And it was not good. So at some point, me and the, another of the cofounders looked at each other and said, Hey, do you want to start a radio station?

Palle Bo (04:27):
And then we got to more ball on, on, on board. And it wasn’t because we wanted to build a company, it was more like we wanted to make the kind of radio stations that we wanted to listen to and, and maybe our friends wanted to listen to. And that was about it. So for a few years it was still a hobby pond project. The station had only had a few hours of broadcast, so we were able to do our regular day job in the day and then go and do some broadcasting at night. And eh, yeah, it was just, it was just a fun hobby. And then it grew from there. And, and, and lo and behold, so many years later, we have 17 local regional stations in in the country. And now it is a company. And

Sean Tierney (05:14):
Yeah, so with no background, you just basically you guys kind of banded together and decided to just buy a radio station

Palle Bo (05:21):
We apply for a license. And got that. And I, I liked so many other people. I had a mobile discotheque. So I was getting into the whole playing music and talking into a microphone and I just thought it was so fascinating. And it was, it was really my passion. I lived and breathed radio. I w I was thinking about it constantly and and I, I think that’s also one of the reasons because I was working as a graphic designer at the time. I think that was one of the, because I was so focused on radio that they eventually fired me. They said, Oh, we are, we’re restructuring the company and that just no room for you now. But I think that was a lot of it had to do with that they could feel that my passion was more into, into radio.

Sean Tierney (06:15):
Interestingly enough, I just left my job last week of five years to pursue my passion as well. It’s just, yeah. Charity make-over just a little side project that I started that I just kinda realized five years into it that like, this is where my heart is now. So, yeah. But I think it’s, it’s kind of a blessing in disguise when these things, I kind of nudge you out of the neck

Palle Bo (06:35):
To hear more about that. And on that note, I’ll be interviewing you on my podcast,

Sean Tierney (06:40):
But we’ll get into that. That’s right. That’s right. I’m looking forward to it. So with the radio station, so this is still running, is this what funds you at this point or no,

Palle Bo (06:51):
So it gives me a, I, I own 10% of the company now and it gives me a little passive income every year which is nice. But for me it’s more like a, it’s, it’s my retirement fund. It’s, it’s worth some money. And maybe at some point we decide to sell the company. We’re all about the same age. So I can easily see that in in 10, 15 years, we might want to find a buyer for the company and pass it on to the next generation. And and then I will have a little coin for my retirement because I’m not saving up for that. If not, if not, I’m gonna die with a microphone in my hand to do the microphone drop

Sean Tierney (07:37):
Somewhere in one of the many countries in this world. Right. Yeah. So what was it that inspired you to go nomadic in 2016?

Palle Bo (07:47):
It was actually I could, I lived in, in Denmark all my life in the same rule, not in Copenhagen, in a rural part of Denmark for, for 50 years. And I could, I could see that in a few years, my, both my daughters would have grown up and graduated and would probably move out, move out of the house. So I was sort of toying with the idea maybe I should go and live a couple of years abroad. So I was, I was playing with that idea. And in 2013, I went to to Cape town because I thought that might be the place. They are very much into radio. They do great radio and especially radio advertising. They’re really, really good at that. And so I went there to, to feel what that was like when I was still living in Denmark. I said, no, I’m going to month.

Palle Bo (08:39):
And that was in 2013. And that’s where I realized that my clients, which at that point were mainly Danish agencies and brands, they didn’t care where I was. And I thought, Oh, I could work anywhere. So I thought, there’s so many places I want to see, so why not just live out of the suitcase and do that? And then the whole idea grew from that. I was still thinking I’d be traveling for two years, but now I’m three and a half, almost four years in and and I’m, I’m, I’m still enjoying every single day. I have no plans of quitting anytime soon.

Sean Tierney (09:19):
What was that like? Because I think everyone who does this comes to a point where you kind of have to acknowledge that yeah, this is real. Like I’m actually selling all my stuff and I’m now buying a plane ticket and I’m packing, you know, closing the door for the last time on this place. What was that like?

Palle Bo (09:33):
That was scary. That was so scary. Well, I, I was very public about the plan for a long time. I was talking about it on Facebook that in the summer of 2016, I’m going traveling and and now I’m selling my house and now I’m selling my furniture and come to my garage sale. And I posted plans or where I would go and yeah, talked a lot about it. So I actually met a lot of people six months before I left. Oh, I thought you were traveling, but that was something I did because there was part of me getting ready for it and putting a commitment in there that I S I said it out loud and, and publicly and and then I, everything was fine and I sold my house. And then I started selling my furniture before I had to hand over the keys.

Palle Bo (10:27):
And I remember a couple of months before I had to leave, I was in my living room and the room was getting more and more empty. So more and more echo. And I thought, what the hell am I doing? Because I was crossing the point of no return. I thought, this is this a mistake. At that point, I did not want to go anywhere. I just wanted to be in my own house, in my own couch watching Netflix and not go anywhere. But then I, I, I sold, I went left the house had one more month. So I, I, I stayed at my parents’ house that was empty at the time. And and ever since the day I left, I haven’t looked back. It was, it’s, it’s the best decision I ever made. But I was going out of the comfort zone and that’s, that was scary.

Sean Tierney (11:22):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s very resonates with me. I did the same thing with remote year, packed up everything, put it in storage, didn’t actually sell it, but like subsequently sold it. But yeah, I just remember leaving like that last time when you lock your apartment and you’re like, I’m not coming back to this place and potentially this country ever again. Like this is really weird. Yeah. Cool. let’s talk about some of the companies that you’ve worked with. You’ve done some really big projects. Can you maybe mention the Lego stuff? Anything that you’re comfortable

Palle Bo (11:54):
Talking about? Okay. Yeah. I’m working on a new project for, for Lego right now that I can’t talk about obviously. But in, in 2018 I did the Lego technique podcast when they were making them an ultimate project. They did a a model of the Bugattis Huron, the, the, at that time, the fastest and most expensive supercar in the world. And they wanted to it’s, it’s something that would take the customers weeks to assemble. It’s very complicated. So they wanted to put an extra layer to the building experience saying, Hey, don’t, why don’t we do a podcast? And then I was in Denmark visiting a Lego and going into the secret rooms behind closed doors where they, they have a ton of grownups. And I like to tease them and say, they are, you’re here you are playing with Lego.

Palle Bo (12:53):
And they just look at me and say, be careful what you say. We’re designers. Oh, sorry. Well then we’ll, we’re making this. And, and then I also went to Multimin in France at the Bugatti factory. A small plant. They only did 500 of the brigands Shiran. And also to both broken in Germany where they have a, a test track and they, they do the engine there and it’s part of the fork truck and group. So I was following that. So one episode is about the engine. So I S I speak to the guy who, the Dutch guy who did the real engine and develop this special system where it can go super fast. And then I spoke to the designer at the Lego at Lego about how he react, recreated it there. So one episode is about the engine, but this one about the design and one about the special features and all that.

Palle Bo (13:49):
This thing is functional. You can actually drive. Now this one was a one to eight scale model and and I also got to drive it so that was awesome. Or sit beside the driver going super, super fast. No, but then they, then they decided to do a crazy, insane project where they did a one-to-one scale model of the [inaudible] really truly one to one scale. And so I went to a clap, no, in the Czech Republic, just outside of Prague where they have a plant where they do the big scale model for all the flagship stores and the Legoland parks around the world. And they decided to recreate this also in Lego technique, these tiny, tiny bricks not using glue. And the most crazy thing was they wanted it to drive as well, using only the tiny Lego technique, power function motors.

Palle Bo (14:47):
My leg was used to break, forget driving, like, and just playing with them, holding in my hand. I can’t imagine driving a car made of Legos. It was, it was crazy. It was crazy. So they, they did that and then they transported it back to Volksburg where they have the official test track and the longest piece of straight road anywhere in Europe in a, in a, in a closed area. And they had this side by side with the original and it was awesome and they actually made it drive. So I was following that process or being in Denmark and Czech Republic and then finally in, in, in, in, in Allsbrook. But imagine having moved, moved it with the shaking and the, anything gone loose on that. Mm. Yeah. So it was, it was, it was tricky and it, it, it nearly failed.

Palle Bo (15:36):
And then it started raining and everything that possibly could go wrong went wrong. But at the end they, they managed to get a driving, not fast, not Bugatti fast, but but they had, they had a driving and then they did a movie, a film about it as well. So you should definitely check out the film. It’s an awesome, insane project. And when they did that, they decided to do a second season. So we did three episodes about the one-to-one scale model. Cool. Yeah, I was such a Lego freak growing up. I ha like all of us. Yeah. But I mean you ask my parents, like I, my room was covered. Those little boards you’d have like the space Legos and I probably had like 40 of these things all stitched together with basis and whatnot. And I tell you what was in episode one.

Palle Bo (16:21):
We were talking about the history of the two companies and the Lego historian in Denmark took me down to what they called the volt. It’s a, something that’s not open for the public. It’s in the basement in one of their buildings. And they have a lot of shelves where they stick us on with years of when the products came out and then they have all the products so I could go back in time and then go back to when I was like six, seven years old and see what was on the shelves. And it was just goosebumps because I was there with a friend of mine who works at the Lego, one of the, the, the creative directors. And we were about the same age. And when we came to that shelf, he started crying. Is that I’ve never been here before. This is just amazing.

Palle Bo (17:12):
I feel like I’m seven years old again. You would, you would enjoy that. And I I wrote a blog post on my dad’s blog for father’s day, maybe two years ago about this experience. And you know, how like there throughout your life you can kind of name the two or three, like very crossroad moments that kind of develop you or you know, make you into what you are. I had this experience. I remember building a Lego, the most complex thing I’d ever built, it was called the galaxy explorers. This one. And I remember that I got close, but that just, it didn’t have the right pieces. And I’m following the instructions in like, as a very analytical like nerd kid know, I was very like

Sean Tierney (17:49):
Precise and I couldn’t build this thing because it didn’t have the right pieces. And I just remember like just sobbing and going to my father and being like, I can’t do it. It’s just not possible. Like they didn’t give me the right pieces and him saying, you know, that’s just a suggestion of how you can build it. Like you can probably build a better one. And it was like that license to just create and go outside the lines. And that was just that moment was such one of those like, Oh, I don’t have to build with the instructions. Tell me the real answer. Yeah. It’s just,

Palle Bo (18:16):
Yeah. And I think that’s a, that’s something that’s is so unique about Lego that it, it’s, it inspires people to be super creative. And I got to learn a lot about the company since I’ve been working with them. And they have a lot of hardcore fans sending in suggestions and building stuff and they end up hiring a lot of them as well. And for those people it’s a, it’s a dream job.

Sean Tierney (18:43):
I haven’t followed since they added, I know they have now like robotics and mechanics, like the Mac stuff, but so I know it’s come a long way since the old days. Like the ones that I played with were just no little plastic pieces that fit together, but still just like imagination expanding like, Oh wow, you can create anything. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. okay, well I was going to ask you how your radio career sucks. So you’re now podcasting the vagabond. Can you talk about what the vagabond radio is, what the theme of that show is?

Palle Bo (19:51):
Yeah, the radio vagabond is a podcast about my journey. So I, it’s, I started in radio and audio production because it’s my passion and it’s still my passion and still my hobby. And I just dotted it. I think mostly for myself when I’m 95 years old and not probably not traveling so much anymore. It’s my memories. It’s my, my photo album, eh, and I, I record all the time and record on, on street corners and talk to people. I, I meet and Uber drivers and tour guides and yet try to get a sense of the place I’m in and and it’s, it also gives me an excuse to talk to people and and meet people. So I, I, I really, really enjoy doing it even though it takes a hell of a long time. I published an episode today that took me most of a week of just editing a, which is insane for a 30 minute episodes and

Sean Tierney (20:56):
Put extraordinary production quality into your episodes. Like you’re doing what I would consider like NPR level, like very like art for art’s sake. A lot of edits and stuff in there.

Palle Bo (21:08):
Yeah. That’s what I tried to do. Thank you. Thank you so much for saying so. Yeah, it, it, it is a lot of work, but I can’t, I can’t not do it. I have to. Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Tierney (21:18):
Well I listened to the Becky Gillespie episode and you’ll be happy to know on one ex, not my normal 1.7 eggs. Cause I know that you said it was like, it’s about like, you know a painter. Like if you, I don’t know if you’ve watched it, if you look at their painting through sunglasses or something

Palle Bo (21:35):
Or if you, if, yeah, I had, I had a friend of mine, even a friend of mine, I like to say, a former friend of mine say that he always listens to my podcast in double speed. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, but it saves me time. Yeah. But do you listen to music in double speed? It will save you a couple of minutes every time you hear a song. Yeah. It’s not the same, but for me it is. So if you listen to my podcast and doublespeak please just don’t tell me if you want to maintain the relationship.

Sean Tierney (22:05):
Yours is the only one. My over overcast. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Fair enough. How has your career in radio mapped over to podcasting? Like what have you, what did you take from that experience and how has it, how has it, how a lot, a lot,

Palle Bo (22:23):
A lot. I th I th from, for me, it’s, it’s, it’s just the platform it comes out on it, I, I try to do the same kind of work that I did when I was on the radio, even though I didn’t do much of this montage editing when I was in radio. But I, even though it’s, it’s, it’s quite different having worked with the radio advertising and, and have to create small 30 or 62nd audio theater it has given me a lot in terms of radio drama and how I, how I put things together and sound effects should be there, but not too much. And yeah, the way I use music and stuff like that. So it’s, it’s given me a lot in, in that sense. But for me, it’s, it, it, it could be on the radio and in, in fact it, eh, it also is I, it’s, I am, it’s a part of the, the programming on the, a station in London called podcast radio. So a shout out to to those guys. So I’m actually on the air on, in, in, in, in London and, and, and that area and, and, and online. And I used to do also a shorter version of the radio vagabond for a national Danish radio in the first part of my, my journey on until they ran out of money because of budget cuts. So it’s, for me, it’s, it’s still radio. It’s still audio. And you can, it just happens to be available as a podcast.

Sean Tierney (24:05):
Yeah, for sure. I just, I remember when we were in Dubai dune bashing and you guys get a flat tire and we’re driving up behind you and Pally is sitting out there next to the guy changing the tire with the recorder, recording an interview with him. Right. It’s just asleep. And we were, we were

Palle Bo (24:21):
Dune bashing and you were in another car. And I, I tried to record inside the car as we were driving nuts, but it was a, it was a lot of fun. So this probably, I haven’t even started listening to yet, but then we had a flat tire after we went out onto the regular road. And yeah, I think that it’s, it’s always an interesting story when something goes wrong. So that’s something I try to appreciate whenever something goes wrong or I get scammed. I I think, Oh at least I have a good story for the podcast.

Sean Tierney (24:52):
Well I love this thing. Bad decisions make great stories. Exactly. Can you talk about that train? So that’s another one that I was listening to on your show was that that Sri Lankan train, which was fascinating cause you’re interviewing the guy with the block and how they, you know, make the train like this very old school method that they have for ensuring that the train can’t possibly ever be like having a head on collision with another train. Yeah. Like, what would, so just maybe tell people about that experience. I mean, that sounded like a really cool,

Palle Bo (25:20):
Yeah, it was, it was super cool. Also, I’ll, I spent, I spent a, I was on a 10 day press trip to Sri Lanka invited by Srilanka tourism because of the podcast. So it doesn’t give me a lot of money to do the podcast about the, it does give me press trips here and there and and, and one of the things we did was to go on this scenic train ride in the center of the Island through some of the most amazing landscapes. And we started out at on this train station in Candi, in Sri Lanka where they have this old school system that the British brought there a long time ago and they changed it in Britain, but not in Sri Lanka. So it just it’s, it’s, it still works. And I, I, one of the other bloggers is, and and an English guy who knew a lot about it. So I spoke to a travel, Dave about this and how the whole system worked. And it was fascinating. So to watch you kind of like a time capsule and then we went on the train, which was stunning. They say it’s one of the most scenic train rides in the world. And I could totally see why we’d go through this beautiful, beautiful landscape and and there are no doors in the train. So obviously we had to hang out at the doors which was probably not the safest thing to do, but yeah,

Sean Tierney (26:40):
There’s a picture of you hanging off the side of it. Yeah, we had to get that Instagram moments wa yeah. Right. And if, if I’d fallen off that would make a great story. Yeah. We will link to that episode cause I was a particularly good one and there were some amazing photos from that. Very cool. Okay, well let’s, let’s shift gears. You and I met via the nomad cruise and a mutual friend Matt bowls. Shout out to Matt who has his own podcast. You’ve been on it. I’ve been on it. He’s been, I’ve been on it twice, so I’m a little bit jealous technically three times. I just, he reused one of my episodes as me as being the host for him.

Sean Tierney (27:20):
No, but like so Matt introduced us, I’ll never forget, we were in a, I think it was Porto gay Galena’s in Brazil. And you’re standing there with a recorder, you just brought it out with you or kind of out in the streets and you’re, when we met in Portugal in say that was after nomad cruise and you weren’t, which I was not on yet. Not on that. Well, I was a, not a stowaway, but I don’t know what she call it. I flew to where the crews docked and then I kind of, everyone got off and they thought I was just part of it cause it was so many people on it. And so I’m going to blend it in. And that’s where I realized like, Hey, this is a really good group of people. I think I want to do this myself. And I was kinda thinking, I don’t remember seeing him. But then again, we were 500 nomad say on the ship. So plausible deniability. Yeah. what were your thoughts on the cruise, cause you’ve been on a couple of them.

Palle Bo (28:09):
Yeah, I went on six and seven and then we were both on a normal cruise 10. I just love it and I’m, I’m going to keep coming back and I, I love the community and it’s so happens right now. We’re in a jangle Bali and I think we’re around 50 Noman cruises here right now. So we have we’ve had a few meetups and it’s, it’s been super, super nice and I feel like I have I become part of a family and I really, really, really enjoy that and a part of that community. And when you’re in the alumni, there’s always a good chance that there are somebody where you are and through their Facebook page, you can always paste a post. I’m, I’m here now, anybody here and I haven’t done a remote the year and wifi tribe that you and, and, and Matt has. But I, I, I could, I could see myself doing something similar because I enjoy being, being a solo traveler. It’s nice to have a community here and there.

Sean Tierney (29:17):
Yeah, yeah. Well I always think of it like it’s, it’s great to, you can, you can be in one of these travel groups and go solo and go off on your own and that’s totally fine, but then you always have something to come back to if you choose to, but you can’t really do the reverse when you’re just going by yourself. You can’t manifest a giant community instantly and have that kind of safe base to come back to you. So you can go to a cowork spaces

Palle Bo (29:42):
And the [inaudible] and stuff like that. But it’s, it’s different. It’s different. And also, I, I try to go to a lot of a travel blogger or travel content creator conferences. I’ve been to traverse in, in Europe and travel con in the U S and and, and also tea bags. I also produce the tea bakes podcast. So there you, you, it’s, it’s kind of the same. You, you, you meet my people. But it’s different when it’s a conference on lamb than when it’s a conference on a ship because you’re stuck on that boat and, and you eat together, you drink together, you dance together, you do all kinds of meetups and you, you really become bonded in a totally different way when, when you’re on a ship. So yeah, that’s, that’s one of the reasons I really love it and keep coming back.

Sean Tierney (30:38):
I agree wholeheartedly. That captive audience thing and there’s just something special about a, it’s like no other conference that I’ve been to in that regard. So did they know my crews tend to live up to your expectations? Yeah, I really liked it. It was much different than cause I’d only been on new my cruise eight before that, which was like a six day cruise. So this was a 17 day. So very different. But far more sustainable pace in my opinion. Like, because the other one was so short, it was just like, go, go, go, go. I just remember just feeling, so just, just depleted after that one. Whereas 10 was like the right pace. It’s kind of slow.

Palle Bo (31:14):
I think that’s one of the reasons I decided to skip Noman crusade because I that we’re going to be in land almost every day and yeah, that’s going to be nice and exciting. But what I value the most is the time and the community on the boat where we’re, yeah. The sea, the sea days where we just stuck there.

Sean Tierney (31:35):
Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Cool. Well, yeah, I definitely highly recommend wifi tribe. Remote year was awesome. I think they’re kind of changing now a bit. That’s a whole nother discussion, but yeah, highly recommend checking out wifi tribe. And can you talk about how did these deals, so the Srilanka deal, how, how do those things come to fruition? They, do they contact you? Are you out there pinging the different convention V visitor bureaus or how does that work?

Palle Bo (32:05):
And it varies. It’s, it’s all through networking and the travel conferences I’ve been to when I was invited to go to Antigua and Barbuda that came from traverse events, which is they do events in Europe. So I’ve been to their conference, also spoke about podcasting and at one of them, and they were asked by a Antigua and Barbuda tourism to get a a great group of content creators together for four, for a press trip. So when that came totally out of the blue, I didn’t, didn’t see that coming. But that was really, really great with the Sri Lanka. I also at, at different conferences, I’ve, I met the guys from Sri Lanka tourism. So they got to see me as a familiar face. So when they were planning to, to bring a a group just re Landcare, they they, they asked me if I’d like to join but I also go look for it.

Palle Bo (33:11):
I am I go to a WTM world travel market in London every year if I can. It’s in November. And then I, I go to ITB in in Berlin where you get to meet all, I think at WTM there are about 5,000 travel ban brands and destination. So you go around networking and pitching yourself and set up meetings and tell them who you are and what it is that you do. And then they will hopefully come back to you and say that they are, they’re inviting you on a, on a, on a trip somewhere. And that’s a, that’s a big debate in the in the travel blogger community. I’m calling it travel blog. It’s, even though it can be a YouTube person, Instagrammers and podcast is like me, but just a, in lack of a better word, your influencer.

Palle Bo (34:08):
Now we don’t use the word influencer. It’s got a battery, but the concentrators, eh, where Wars, I know there’s a big debate among these people that should we get paid as well and not just create content for a free trip. And it’s, it’s something that’s that’s hard to balance because I see it. I see. Obviously, obviously we should get paid for good quality work because I spend a lot of time working on, on, on, on, on what I do and it is my profession. But at the same time, I wanted to go to Antigua. I wanted to go to Sri Lanka and and, and they, they pay all expenses. I didn’t get paid for it, but they paid all the expenses and took me on tours and yeah, really planned out. So not even the flights to and from.

Palle Bo (35:04):
So it, I, I, I get to save a lot of money because I wanted to go anyway. So in that sense, I am getting paid. What, what would be the argument against getting paid? I mean, to me, the market will dictate, like if what you’re doing is valuable enough to them where they can justify paying you, then why wouldn’t they? Yeah. And then that’s, that’s the whole debate because they would pay for an advertorial in a newspaper or a, or another medium. And and there are just so many like me that would go on a free trip. And it’s, it’s also about how big you are. I, I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling that one or two of the Srilankan trip were paid as well. And maybe somebody from the and, and Tega trip were paid. And not just they were paid a salary, a fee for, for their work, but they’re in a different level than my podcast is, is at the moment. So I’m, I’m considering that’s totally fair. I just want, it gives me something to strive for and grow my, my audience and the be even bigger even though I am quite big, but, but not when you’re talking, eh, YouTube subscriber numbers and some of them are really, really big and some app have some really, really successful travel blogs.

Sean Tierney (36:33):
I think there’s a rule about disclosure. I don’t recall what it is, but I think like if you’re a blogger and you’re receiving free stuff, you just have to disclose that it’s being provided for free. But there’s no rule against getting paid for your work. I feel like that’s, that’s just [inaudible]

Palle Bo (36:48):
I think then it’s called a sponsored post. I think you still have to disclose it. So I, I, I, I was, I was very clear on, and this is [inaudible] this is paid for by Sri Lanka tourism, but everything I say is totally my own genuine opinion. And I was actually on, in one of the episodes, I, I’m, I’m actually quite critical about something with the elephants and writing elephants and and struggling, should I say that or should I, am I offending them? But I wouldn’t be true to myself if I, if I just talked about it as if it was all good. I had to to say that and they totally respect that. I even went and did an interview with the, one of the guys from Sri Lanka tourism about the whole thing and the, and the difference in culture and the way it’s done and yeah, and all that. Yeah. So I was, I, I am being myself, even though I I get a paid trip.

Sean Tierney (37:50):
Yeah. Yeah. I guess number four, a good friend of mine, Andrew Hyde he actually got kicked out of Tibet for posting photos of the child labor on the roads. I guess there was, you know, they, they really exploit children and they use them to build the roads there and there’s like casualties and stuff. And so he did a photo piece on it and was basically told leave you need to leave the country. And yeah, so that’s episode four for anyone who wants to check that one out is pretty amazing. So yeah, if that happened to me, I would start recording immediately as it, as I was about to be kicked out. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and in full disclosure, palliate is paying me to be on this episode. Cool. well let’s,

Palle Bo (38:36):
I think this is probably a good place to wrap up, but I do have a, a little kind of rapid fire round that we end with. So are you ready for the breakdown? Oh yeah. Break down baby. All right, let’s do it. What is one book that has profoundly affected you? Makin pounding. Yes. Roth pots and pots. And I actually had him, he obviously he inspired me for the name, the radio vagabond, that book and I, I bought the audio book first. I’m more into audio books, but then I liked it so much I had to have the paper version as well to make small notes in. So I have both. And then I actually met a, Rolf Potts said at one of the conferences I was attending in a, in Austin, Texas and had him on my show as well. So it was like meeting my hero.

Palle Bo (39:23):
Yeah, it’s an awesome book. Yeah, I read that one a number of years ago or about the time when I read the four hour work week, cause I know Tim Ferris had cited that one. His play as being very powerful one actually it’s in Ferris was inspired by AMAGA bombing, not the other way around. Yeah, exactly. No, no, that was the like a seminal work then in the four hour work week at this point. It’s funny. That’s what everyone knows. But if you trace it all the way back, Vagabonding is kind of like that. And actually the audio book of Vagabonding, Tim Ferris, I think he produced it. His company produced it and he a, he did the, the forward and the intro. So, yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Good choice. What about, what is one person you’d love to have dinner with? Living or dead? Doesn’t matter. Nelson Mandela. Yeah. Cool. Why?

Palle Bo (40:09):
I might be one of the obvious choices, but I am, I’m particular from fond of South Africa and the whole history of the country. And I’ve been to Robin Island twice and so I, I just find the whole history of the company and of the country and what he did for the country’s so fascinating. So if I could go back in time and, and, and medium, I would, I would really, really enjoy that. Cool.

Sean Tierney (40:40):
The answer, what is one tool or hack that saves you time and money or headaches?

Palle Bo (40:47):
I’m, I’m, I’m tempted to mentioned hotels 20 five.com. But that would be probably why you asked me to, for some money because no,

Sean Tierney (40:58):
I mean, if it’s a good service, either you’re repping that service. So maybe if I talk about it,

Palle Bo (41:03):
It’s a, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a search site that’s searches a lot of the big hotel search sites in like Goda hotels.com and 15 others in, in one search and compares the prices and and yeah, so, so that, that works. And it’s, it’s not only hotel rooms, it’s also for hostels and guest houses and, and stuff like that. So that’s, that’s the thing I use a lot. But eh,

Palle Bo (41:35):
Yeah,

Sean Tierney (41:36):
Don’t really know. Was it travel hacks that saves me money or money or headaches? Yeah.

Sean Tierney (41:45):
I don’t w when I, when I started for flights, I, I use the simple Skyscanner, but I love the option that you can search from here to anywhere. Yes. So sometimes it’s not the neighboring country that’s the cheapest. And then I just, yeah, I haven’t been there, so let’s go there. I am actually glad you brought that up. I just learned about the everywhere search recently and it’s, it’s great. Basically what it is, is you’re like, let’s say you’re trying to go from here in Bali back to Lisbon where I’m going. So you, what you do is you search for everywhere in the flights and it’ll, it’ll show you kind of sorted by price all the places you can go and you just keep scrolling until you get close and then you do that last mile. Maybe it gets you to Barcelona and then you do the last flight at some $45 a Ryanair flight and you’re good. But yeah, it’s pretty amazing. You get really cheap deals that way. So that’s a good one. All right. What is one piece of music or musical artist that speaks to you lately?

Palle Bo (42:46):
Hmm. Well, I’m,

Sean Tierney (42:49):
As we’re recording this, I just published a episodes about searching for sugar man and the whole story about that. And that got me listening a lot to Rodriguez as well. I don’t know if you know the guy, I don’t know him. I’ve seen the movie and it’s amazing. And the music is just so amazing and it’s, it’s, it’s all, it’s recorded in the early seventies, but it’s, it’s still, eh, yeah, it’s, it’s still really, really good.

Palle Bo (43:21):
I listened to a lot my musical taste, I kind of say that it starts with our three and then fire and then just go from there. And I, I like a lot of the new stuff as well, so yeah.

Sean Tierney (43:35):
Rodriguez for the people listening, this guy is, I think everybody’s good as Bob Dylan. It just blew me away that he did not become more popular than he was. But this movie, not to spoil it, but there’s, he had a huge following in South Africa and his produces superstar superstar. Yeah. Like he was, he was big needles. Bigger than Elvis. Yeah. Then any of those people, everyone had his album and he was like impoverish living in Detroit or something and his producer had hidden this fact from him. And of course, now that the internet exists, it’d be really hard for this type of thing to happen again. And also South Africa was very close to at the time during apartheid. Right. But this movie, if you have not seen it searching for sugar man they’d put like his face on a milk crate or something and they go in search like the to find this guy cause they just thought he had died and sure enough they find them living somewhere in Detroit. And then it’s like the story of how he comes back and plays like five sold out shows too. Yeah. In

Palle Bo (44:32):
98. And actually when I was, I heard about their story in 2013 when I was there the first time. And and then the guy who told me the story, I was just, Whoa, God, how come I have not heard of this? And then, Oh there’s a movie out, you should see it. And actually he’s going back on tour here in Cape town in two weeks. I’m still here. Yeah. But it’s probably sold out. So I, after that dinner I went back to my room and started searching for this for the concert. And sure enough, all the concerts on that tour was completely sold out. But because there was so loud, they published an extra extra concert that happened to be the first. They just started the tour earlier. And I think I was the first on the website and without having heard a song, I bought the ticket, the best ticket I could find, which was center front row.

Palle Bo (45:27):
In fact, my ticket was seat a one. So I went to a concert with Rodriguez and Russ a few feet away from him. Hearing this and, and watching the audience go crazy. It was, yeah, it was insane. Yeah. Just imagine the biggest superstar you can and whatever that person is to South Africa. Rodriguez more than that. And then when I was a, one of the guys that found him was the owner of a small record vinyl shop, a vinyl record shop called Mobby, right. Vinyls. And he, he actually, his nickname nickname is sugar, a name from the song, his name, his real name is Siegelman, but he, they, people always called him his sugar man. And then it turned out to be sugar and now he’s just sugar. And in, in the episode that I just posted, I get to meet him, I was, he was an invited me to his house and we were sitting in his basement a room and talking about the whole experience and what happened. So yeah, I got, I got to meet sugar, man.

Sean Tierney (46:28):
We will link to that episode in the show notes so people can check it out. What is, what is, what important truth. Do very few people agree with you on?

Palle Bo (46:41):
The best thing I can come up with is that the world is not such a dangerous place as people tend to think.

Palle Bo (46:54):
Again, going back to Cape town, when I was going there the first time, a lot of people said, Oh, it’s so dangerous. It’s so dangerous. And I, I don’t, I don’t see that. I obviously you need to have your common sense and not walk down a dark alley in the middle of the night. But that goes from most biggest cities around the world. So I’ve been traveling to a lot of places and, and as long as I bring my two favorite weapons, my common sense and my smile it, it’s, it seems to go well so far. And so a lot of people, they would probably disagree with me in that the world is not a dangerous place and yeah. Yeah. That’s the best thing I can come up with.

Sean Tierney (47:44):
No, I, I think that’s a very true statement and I think that I experienced that firsthand when I was in Columbia. A lot of my friends were saying, Oh, you know, it’s Pablo Escobar, so dangerous, all the drugs and guns and whatnot. And it just, I found it just such the opposite. Yeah. Never felt safer. Yeah. Cool. All right, last question. If you had a time machine to go visit your 20 year old Palle Bo self, what would you say to yourself?

Palle Bo (48:12):
When I was on Matt’s podcast, he also asked me that question and, and can I give the same answer? Sure, sure. I would say to myself, dude, that haircut, it’s not doing you any favors.

Sean Tierney (48:27):
Do you think you were handicapped by your haircut?

Palle Bo (48:31):
Oh, I see. Oh yeah. That’s great. That’s, yeah, that’s why I went into radio, not TV, so yeah. So then I decided to cut it off.

Sean Tierney (48:43):
Cool. All right, well, Palle, anything else for listeners, people that are contemplating this crazy existence that we have, thinking about doing it themselves? Any, anything you’d want to say to them?

Palle Bo (48:57):
May take a decision and then say it out loud and but be aware it’s not for everybody, so don’t be afraid if you start doing it and, and just think, this is not for me. I need a home base. Then you can stop or, or go slower. It’s not for everybody, but if, if, if you’re like me and you, you would, you would love it and just, just go out and do it. Make it work. Cool. All right, well

Sean Tierney (49:30):
Where can I send people Palle? Where? What’s the best website or social media or what’s, how can people get in touch with you?

Palle Bo (49:37):
Well my, my website’s called the radio vagabond. That’s also what you S the radio vagabond.com. And that’s also what you search for when you, when you search for the podcast. And remember the, the, remember the radio vagabond. Otherwise you get the Danish version. I do two versions and you probably won’t that I don’t want, I don’t want that, eh, eh. And then it’s on all the different platforms. It’s the radio vagabond as well. Cool. All right, well

Sean Tierney (50:04):
We’ll link to the website and then people can, I think you’ve got the subscribe links to the various platforms there, so we’ll do that. Cool. Well, polys thank you so much. I’m glad we finally got to do this. It’s been a long time coming. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for having me. All right. Cheers.

Sean Tierney (01:54):
All right. Hey everybody. Welcome to the podcast. My name is Sean Tierney. I am your host and I am here today virtually with Chris Backe. Chris has been living abroad now since 2008 where he met his wife and they have been nomadic since 2013 haven’t gotten their start in the nomadic lifestyle where Chris was teaching English in South Korea, has since traveled to 39 countries. He recently sold his travel blog, one weird globe, and now designs board games under the name intro games and has a new travel blog entitled or the go. Chris is author of the book becoming a digital nomad, which is now in its third edition. Welcome Chris to the show. Hello. Thanks for having Sean. Awesome. so Chris, why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you got started. You said you’ve been abroad for quite awhile now. How did this journey begin for you?

Chris Backe (02:43):
Sure. So I need to rewind the clock back to 2004 actually, this is kind of where the story starts. I am a graduate of college and I’m living in Lexington, Kentucky. Kind of the big city near where I went to school. And I have to say the job prospects don’t look particularly good or particularly interesting. I was a accountant with the Kentucky state government for a few months. I sold mattresses for a little while. I delivered newspapers finally got a job teaching computer classes at the local library. And these started with let us gentlemen welcome. My name’s Chris. This is a keyboard and I’m holding up the keyboard to the class. This is a mouse and again, doing this with adults here. So I never really found a job that seemed to fit my interests or whatever. So this is now three years, three and a half years after I graduated college.

Chris Backe (03:45):
And is this really what life’s supposed to be like? Just, just eking out some, some basic wages to, to make a life and yeah. So December, 2007 ish, I learned about people teaching English in South Korea and my first thought was, can I do that? Is that possible? You know, at the time you needed a bachelor’s degree in any discipline you needed. A some, some teaching experience of some kind and you needed to be really needs to like kids, be good with kids. And once that’s done, you know, just kind of be willing to go through the process and spend a year in South Korea. So I felt like, okay, let’s, let’s check this out. So I sent him my application and resume and the next day I got a call from the recruiter who asks more questions. We did a little interview and finally he said, okay, I think I can get you a job.

Chris Backe (04:44):
Hold on. And so a few days later we had a formal phone interview with the, was the principal of a school and everything from there was just a matter of getting the visas in place and the usual stuff like selling your car and getting a passport ready and all that other stuff. So I left the U S for South Korea in March, 2008 and it’s been kind of a whirlwind ride since then. Before I left, I started a blog on Blogspot, which is now blogger, I think. And blogs at the time. Weren’t these like over elaborate things that were more like journals for friends. So I told the people that knew I was going was like, Oh, you’ve gotta, you gotta send me pictures, you get to tell me the stories. What’s it like over there? It’s so amazing that you’re doing that. Okay, sure. So one friend became five friends, five friends became 10 friends.

Chris Backe (05:39):
And eventually I just said, look guys, I can’t email all of you individually. I’m going to start a blog. Read it if you want, don’t read it. If you don’t want it will be there for anyone to read at any time. So so I had started this blog as a way of kind of documenting the adventure and yeah. So when I got to Korea I realized I saw a lot of people going to the same, the same few bars, the same few places. And I didn’t want that. For me, I wanted to do something different. So from the very beginning, I said to myself, I want to go to at least one new place every single week. And this might be a new place in a city, this might be a new city altogether or what have you, but somewhere new every week. And that gave me plenty of content to work with and has been a big interest ever since.

Sean Tierney (06:34):
Yeah. So what’s interesting is you did this, but then I kind of think of it like, you know, blazing a trail through the, you know, the wooded part and then turning around and laying a road so other people can do the same thing, which is interestingly enough, exactly what I did with my course. So my question would be, what, what, what possessed you to write this book and why do you want to help other people do what you did?

Chris Backe (06:59):
Okay. so the book is called becoming a digital nomad. It is a seven step process to go through the, basically it’s a, it’s a, it’s a great thing, checklist if you want to think about it that way. It’s a way of making sure everything gets done as best as possible and it really talks you through every element of probably the biggest transition of your life. So I wrote this book because I didn’t know of another book that talked about this transition. And it is a scary transition for some folks. It can look like you’re giving up your home, you’re giving up your car and you’re giving up everything you own for what to sit in a beach chair and Bali and you know, SIPSA mojitos and work on a laptop. It feels really scary to do anything that big especially in what might feel like a very short period of time.

Chris Backe (07:55):
You might go from your ordinary life to a digital format in a matter of a few months, maybe even over, maybe even over the year you’re transitioning towards it. But most of the time the transition itself happens fairly quick and big, quick transitions are probably the scariest ones of all. So with that market, with those people in mind, I wanted to, wanted to create the guide I wish I had when I first became a nomad. I wish I knew what to expect. And in the book I go on a bit more about the, the physical things you’re thinking, like in terms of what you do with your stuff. I talked about the emotional aspects. How do you handle being away from the familiar? I get into some of the psychological aspects as well. And one part of it really comes back to a, just a rule which is just to be proactive.

Chris Backe (08:55):
This is, this is a, a founding statement of the journey. You know, as a nomad you are in control of every aspect of your journey. You know, there’s no one telling you, Oh, you should go here or you should stay here for this length of time. You know, most of the time, like in terms of tourist visa, the government, the government will say, yeah, you can be there for 90 days, but there’s usually way of staying for longer if you want to deal with the bureaucratic red tape or work out another type of visa, there’s ways to to do that. And it starts with what you want out of your journey.

Sean Tierney (09:30):
Okay. So the book you wrote, the book and this is a 247 page book, it’s available on Amazon. We’ll give you guys the link there at the end. So this, I reviewed it. It’s pretty extensive. And as you, as you know that I have my own course, but this is like a deeper dive into some of the topics that I cover in my online course. You use this presumably as a lead magnet for then consulting with people. I noticed on your website you have like a, a one on one consulting practice where you actually work with folks who are trying to make the transition. Like what, what have you seen, what is the most common issues you see with the people that you work with?

Chris Backe (10:09):
Sure. So I don’t mind the term lead magnet, but basically I want the book to be a $10 standalone thing. It’s good for most people in most situations, in most most lifestyles. It’s meant to be used by virtually anyone. That said, the, the circumstance, the ability to put all the answers to every single person is impossible. So the consultations are really there as a way to give even more personalized advice to someone looking for the specific advice to their specific setup, their unique needs, whatever. It’s, it’s more of a buy the book, read the book if you still have questions, let’s talk. And some people, I’ve, I’ve actually had some people message me through the site and they’ve said, we, we bought the book half expecting it to just be a lead magnet that we, that we’d still have lots of questions. We’re, we’re writing to let you know that we’re thankful that’s not what you did. We, you answered all our questions. We will probably still consult you at some point in the future, but we don’t feel the need to. So in terms of setting you up for success, everything you need is in the book. And if you want a little bit more help or a little bit more personalized help, then the consultations are there as well.

Sean Tierney (11:30):
I got it.

Chris Backe (11:32):
Yeah. So the most common things that come up with consultations tends to be the feeling that I’m leaving my family, I’m leaving my friends. It becomes more a fear of the unknown. How do I do this? How do I react to this? And part of that advice comes back to this, your journey. This is your opportunity to proactively live your life your way. So my job is not to tell you what to do. My job is to help you feel comfortable in telling yourself what to do. And when people realize how empowering the lifestyle can be, you are in control of where you go, how long you stay, how much stuff you bring with you. That’s all on you. It’s all your choice. And it goes eventually from somewhat terrifying to incredibly freeing. And that’s a, that’s that’s a mindset change that does take some time to get to.

Sean Tierney (12:34):
So without giving away any of the secret sauce, you know, obviously we want people to pick up the book, but can you just step someone through that decision tree of what, you know, what types of questions should they be asking themselves? I noticed in the book, you know, you say what’s your goal of travel and what’s your why and these these types of questions. But like, how do you approach, like when you, when you work with someone, how do you approach it and what are the kind of initial questions that you work with them on?

Chris Backe (12:58):
Sure. So Oh man, secret sauce. I love that term. So one of the first things I’m asking them is like, how did you hear about it? Everyone, like by the time you’ve gotten to meet, you’ve heard about the digital med lifestyle, you’ve made, it sounds interesting or appealing. It does not sound like the sort of thing that you can just leave tomorrow quick job and jump on a plane to Thailand. You know, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. So you’re still in this stage where you don’t quite know what you don’t know. And my job is to help you understand, kind of get you from don’t know what you don’t know, to know as much as you can to make an informed decision. And my first, my, one of my goals for a first session with someone is really to get to that informed decision.

Chris Backe (13:51):
And with some folks, it’s not my job to tell you you can’t do it. It’s not like I have to tell you you shouldn’t do it. But sometimes a person will not be ready. And over the course of a session they will learn that maybe this lifestyle isn’t for them. And if that’s the case, I tell them, well, you’ve spent 60 bucks on a session here, you’ve saved a bunch of time, you’ve seen that you saved a plane ticket only to get to the country and then realize you hate this lifestyle and I to come back and try to restart your life however you’re living for. So really it comes, it starts with, is this the right lifestyle for you? Is this what parts of it feels scary? What parts of it feel interesting? Where do you want your life to be? How do you want to live your life? What do I feel is missing in my life? What would I change about my life? And I really encourage people to be as narcissistic here as, as they want to be. Because this is about you. This is about your journey and whether that’s for enlightenment or education or just to get a bunch of stamps in a passport, it’s your dream. Let’s, let’s make it happen.

Sean Tierney (15:07):
And would you say like, of the people that come to you, what percentage end up actually pulling the trigger and doing, you know, making the transition and becoming nomadic?

Chris Backe (15:16):
The vast majority of them, 75, 80%.

Sean Tierney (15:19):
Okay. Wow. I mean, that’s, if anything that’s a Testament to your book. If you’ve given some really valuable information, like I see a far less percentage of that in terms of the people that go through my course and the ones that ultimately finish and do it.

Chris Backe (15:31):
Yeah. No, I should, I should also mention that part I, like I said, part of my job is not to tell someone they shouldn’t do it, but my hope is that as we’re, as we’re discussing things, they’ll realize they’re not quite ready. So they might take six months to save up some more money or they need, they need a longer transition period than others might. So this is not me telling them, no, you should not be a nomad. This is me telling him this is me asking him the questions that makes them think and they themselves come to that decision. I have had some fun, I’ve had at least one person that we had a couple of sessions, they sounded like they were really interested in it, but they were had some other things in their life they had to deal with first and the, and I told them, well, you know, take six months, figure out what you really want that apply, figure out what’s working or not working for you.

Chris Backe (16:24):
And if you want to talk again, I’m, my door’s always open. You know, the, the, the notion here is not, it’s not a one and done thing. This is the, this is a relationship we’re building that can be as long or as short as you want it to be. I’m somewhere between guy at the bar and professional. I don’t have like a professional psychiatrist title to my name, but I do speak from experience and I hope that when people finish a session with me, they’re able to use my experience to help them create a better life for themselves.

Sean Tierney (17:02):
Nice. I noticed in the kind of the preparatory section of the book, you’ve got a question where you ask what’s your why? And I don’t know if you’re referring by chance. Is that in reference to Simon Sinek and the start with why? Or is that just more generically? What’s your why?

Chris Backe (17:19):
It’s more, it’s more generic. I don’t think I’ve read Simon’s cynics book. But everyone has a reason for what they do and it’s very easy to forget what that reason is. In my psychology one Oh one class that professor talked about, everything that we do comes back to seeking pleasure or avoiding pain. So on those, on, on some basic level, everything we do comes back to seeking pleasure or pain. And a lot of times it’s very easy to get stuck in a routine because that’s what, that’s what is less. That’s what is least painful or it is it, it, cause it does give us some pleasure. So we go to work because we need money and if we don’t go to work, we might have more pleasure in the short term, but then the bank account goes dry and we in pain.

Chris Backe (18:15):
So seek pleasure, avoid pain, that sort of dichotomy. Really understanding the why is important to understanding the rest of the story. If you’re doing this to, to travel and see some cool places, amazing. If you want to settle into a different sort of lifestyle, you want to get up at noon and go to bed at 4:00 AM okay, that’s fine. You may not need to be a nomad. Do that. You might just need a different job. So that, that’s part of the questioning that kind of comes into plays. There’s something about this, the digital nomad lifestyle specifically that that interests you.

Sean Tierney (18:52):
So what would you say your why is with writing this book? What was your goal?

Chris Backe (18:58):
My why was a, well, to make money on one level of course. But at some level, again, going back to my needs, right? This book is I want to show my expertise. I want to use my expertise to help other people. And on some level at the time I wrote the first edition, this would have been mid to late 2017 which came out in early 2018. I did not know of another book like it. And so my thought was that you’ve got all these people trying to become a nomad, but there’s no guide. There’s no tool really tells you how to do it. So my why was to put out good information from someone that wasn’t trying to sell you a, a fit, a $5,000 course or create a, create a system by which you are, you’re living the digital med lifestyle in their way, you know, Oh, the book is to get you living the nobodies lifestyle your way.

Sean Tierney (20:02):
Yeah, no, and I definitely appreciate that you didn’t you know, impose one particular approach here. You kinda more play the role of just asking the right questions to get people to think about, you know, what they need to consider to be able to do this, which is you know, hats off to you for doing it that way. So I wanna shift gears a little bit. You had a travel blog. Like what, tell me about what happened with this. How did you sell it? What did that, how did that come about? You know, it’s a pretty crowded space. There’s a lot of travel blogs out there. So what, how did that play out?

Chris Backe (20:33):
Sure. So so to go back to Korea in 2008 when I started traveling around the country and making it a point to go somewhere new every week, I also made it a point to, to write about it. And about six months after arriving in Korea, I installed a hit counter on blogger because that was a thing people did before Google analytics came along and I had like 5,000 people coming to this site every month. And my first thought was, Whoa, I was just writing this for friends and family. Who are these people? And I learned later on that some, quite a few people from Korea, other ex-pats, other teachers that were in Korea. They looked to it as a site to learn more about travel and stuff like that. So that was definitely a lot of affirmation that I was doing something that people were interested in.

Chris Backe (21:31):
So I kept doing it over time. I connected and networked with other bloggers, other travel bloggers in Korea and up at one point, the blood was at about 50,000 hits a month. So 2013, I leave Korea. I’ve gotten married and my wife and I have moved to Thailand and I realized I can’t keep writing a blog about Thailand on a site called Chris South Korea. So I started a new site, Chris and thailand.com. Same same original naming scheme there. And after some more trips around Southeast Asia, I realized it shouldn’t, right. We’ll blog about, of lug posts about Lao on a thing called Chris in Thailand. So I rebranded to one weird globe. And the focus also changed a put bit. I wanted to focus on the weird, the off-beat, the unusual, the bizarre the sort of places that tourists may not hear about or may not know much about.

Chris Backe (22:33):
And that was my focus from about 2014 to when I sold it. And 2019, mid 20, 19 after a decade plus, I was getting a bit for our town. I wasn’t really putting in as much time into that project as I should have. And I was also getting really busy working with game stuff as well. So, Mmm. A person I know who has asked to remain nameless mentioned that, that they were buying blogs and I told him about my blog and said I could be persuaded to sell if the price was right. He took a good look at the statistics and the content and came back with an offer. We negotiated a little bit more and we eventually came to an offer week of both live with and once that, once the payments were made, we begin the process of getting everything transitioned over.

Chris Backe (23:37):
So if you’re looking at one weird globe today the site’s going to look very different from what it used to look like. I can’t say really thrilled with a lot of the changes, but it is someone else’s property right now and I don’t have the right to tell them how to run their website. So one thing that came out that came up pretty early in that process was, was my books. I’ve written a couple of dozen travel guide books and itineraries. And as soon as, because the books were not part of the sale, it was just the blog and the, and the website that was for sale. Because the books were not part of the sale. I needed to rebrand those books to something else fairly quickly. So as to avoid any confusion with directions and whatever. So in time I chose the name where they go because it kind of reflected a change in what my wife and I were interested in seeing when we traveled.

Chris Backe (24:41):
We were seeing some places were very mainstream and very good. They’re definitely worth seeing definitely a thing that should be enjoyed. And we also saw that just because a place was off beat did not make it a better place to see. Sometimes they’re off beat and they’re unknown and for a reason. So the, so the focus changed from being about weird stuff to being about worthy stuff. I still have a soft place in my heart for the unusual, the bizarre the offbeat. And it’s also kind of been tempered by looking for what is genuinely good out there in the world. Just because the place has 10,000 TripAdvisor reviews. Does that make it a good place or an interesting place? It just means it’s a popular place and there’s a world of difference between popular and good. So

Sean Tierney (25:36):
Sure. I mean Shangu Bali now and it’s maybe epitomizes that idea. Like you can get a ton of reviews and turn it into like a nomad hotspot, but that doesn’t necessarily speak to you know, it, it’s an echo chamber of sorts. I had another guest, so a question for you. So I had another guest, the founder of nomad summit, Johnny FD, I think he was guest 16, and he wrote a book, but the way he got started was by doing a blog first and then he eventually converted his blog into a book. Was that kind of your process or was the blog independent of the book altogether?

Chris Backe (26:13):
Okay, so what’s on the blog is mainly destinations. Places we’ve been around the world. The book content for both the guidebooks and itineraries and becoming the doula that are all different. So becoming a digital event has one goal, which is to help you become a nomad. The other guy, books and itineraries, the goals here are a little bit different. The itineraries what’s happening with the itineraries, they’re either three or seven day guides. It’s like having a virtual guided tour. So instead of just telling you, here’s a lot of places in a city, good luck. I say, go to this place first, then jump on bus one 45, go, five stops, get off when you see the big white thing, you know, then go to this place. And then when you’re done there, get on the subway, go get online to the subway, go four stops, get off at this place, take this exit to the street level and then go to the next place and so on. So step by step directions from one place to another to get to the best a city has to offer. So each book has a slightly different purpose, but none of it is just repeating blog content.

Sean Tierney (27:29):
Gotcha. But did you, did that help give you an audience though such that when you unveiled the book you now had some people to sell to or was it just purely unrelated?

Chris Backe (27:40):
I wouldn’t say they’re completely unrelated, but writing that, writing the book, writing the books has only partially been about marketing to, to current readers. I’m hoping that books find an audience of their own beyond blog readers. And I, I’m hoping that one builds the other. I’m hoping that as someone discovers the blog and like the style, they like the advice, then they’ll find the books helpful. At the same time, if someone has written or has discovered the books and they like the tone there, then they’ll tune back into the blog to see what’s happening there. So I do hope one builds each. I hope. I do hope each one builds.

Sean Tierney (28:23):
Cool. so something you talk about in the book flag theory, this has come up a number of times for the people who are not familiar with that term, can you just speak a little bit about what that is?

Chris Backe (29:13):
Sure. So flag theory is this term based back to a 1964, I think. And it’s basically coined by a guy named Harry D. Schultz. He was a novelist and this unfunded, and it’s like theory is a diversification strategy to protect your money, increase your privacy, pay fewer or zero taxes and retain as much of your freedom you can. So you look basically it’s kind of like giving your government a report card on what it’s doing well, what is not doing well and then using other governments, other entities to get what you want in a legal way and goes from there. So for example, he might look at, if you have an LLC set up in the U S you might ask, how much am I paying in taxes there? How much am I paying in account fees? And then zero fees, am I getting the best service?

Chris Backe (30:15):
The other phrase that’s commonly thrown out is to go where you’re treated best or to, to stay where you’re treated best. So it kinda, it does, it’s the same mindset of proactivity. You’re looking at what is available, what is on offer. And we’re not just, we’re not, we’re not just allowing a nurse shot to, to tell us or dictate to us where we keep our money or what passport we have. You might be under the impression that my passport is only available from your home country, the place where you grew up or whatever. And I’m here to tell you that if you have a significant amount of money and you want a passport from another country, you can get one. And this is part of what flag theory can get into. You might have a passport from a country that lets you travel even better or even easier than you currently can. You might need a passport or a residency in a certain country to open a bank account there. But once you have the bank account, the fees are lower. It’s easier service, it’s friendlier service, things like that. So yeah, just in a sentence, flag theory is looking at governments as how they serve you

Chris Backe (31:32):
And

Sean Tierney (31:33):
Yeah, I mean we’re all familiar with diversification. I think in the financial sense, you know, it’s like why is to not have all your eggs in one asset class? It’s just, it seems to me that flag theory is basically taking that concept to a geo political level and not putting all your eggs in so to speak in that one basket, which is very interesting. It was a new term. I’d never heard it before, but it makes complete sense. And I’m actually doing that myself with I have residency in Portugal and that’s the intent is that all stay there long enough to eventually get the passport.

Chris Backe (32:07):
Yeah. So yeah, so and just to, just to bring it even more home, you might have a passport from one country, you might be a resident in another country. You might have a bank account in a third country and you might incorporate your business or have the legal framework for your business in a fourth country. You know, you’re making each of these choices based on how your taxes are handled, how your money is treated, if you get a better interest rate, what the tax rates are, what kind of red tape there is and so on. So this is the sort of thing that if you’re listening to this and you haven’t yet made the transition to become a digital nomad, this is way down the road for this is over the horizon. This is just a thing to think about way down the road for now knowing that you have the ability to go where you’re treated better. You don’t have to stick with the, your, your home country’s bank account. And that you do have many other options that are available. The exact options are going to be based on your goals, your country, your nationality how much money you have. And this is the sort of thing where consulting with people that do this for a living is, is going to be helpful.

Sean Tierney (33:24):
Yeah. And for sure.

Chris Backe (33:25):
And that’s not me by them. I’m not plugging myself to that one.

Sean Tierney (33:27):
Yeah, no, there’s, there’s other sites out there. We’ll link to the one the main one. It just like put yourself in the shoes of someone living in let’s say Argentina or Venezuela. And imagine had you diversified and not had all your money in the local currency. I think you would be a lot happier. So this is just another strategy of how to make yourself more resilient, more immune to issues and like you said, optimize and get the best utilization of your resources. Cool. All right, well let’s shift gears yet again. So you have lived on the road married. So can you talk just a little bit about what that’s like, you know, traveling with your significant other and your, your wife you know, is it challenging? How have you guys made that work?

Chris Backe (34:15):
Sure. So traveling with your partner is fucking amazing. It opens so many doors and allows you to delegate some different stuff. From, from the very first dates we had four, we got married. Travel was a really big part of our interest in a part of our lives. So it was a really, it was really important that I find someone that also liked to travel. And since then yeah, it’s, it has been like nonstop flowers and rainbows, but we have our fights like any couple does. But traveling with your partner makes, makes some things easier and it makes some things a little bit more challenging. If I was by myself then needing to choose where to go next is just, okay, I feel like going here, you know. So when you’re married or traveling with the partner, you are, you must absolutely must consider their interests, their needs as highly as yours, if not higher.

Chris Backe (35:23):
In some cases this comes down to, well, we both want to go to country X, but we, because we have different interests, we’ll go to different places. A great example of that. We are, so we’re in Warsaw as we’re recording this and there’s a lot of lots of Nazi stuff. Let a concentration camps, a lot of fairly depressing history. I’m not personally all that interested in. So yesterday last weekend she decided she wanted to go to one and that became sort of an operation separate ways sort of day. So instead of traveling to the same place, she’ll go her way. I’ll go my way and we can come back for dinner and talk about what we saw. In other cases, it’s just easier to have a person that’s in your life that you to know and love and trust to do anything from like watch your luggage at the airport where you go to the bathroom to just buying and looking at stuff. So looking at Airbnbs, we can both put our own set of eyes on it. We can both see if a place would be a good fit. And one of us might catch something the other person missed. So it comes down to making it a little bit easier to create the life we want. And

Sean Tierney (36:45):
Yup. And I noticed in the book you talked about like the importance of allowing space and like, you know, getting places sometimes where it gives you your own personal space or like you said, branching off and doing two separate activities in the day and not constantly spending all your time together. I think that’s a pretty good tip for sure.

Chris Backe (37:04):
Yeah. So when, when you’re thinking about living spaces obviously the husband and wife or partners, you’re living with them. But I need, you still want your own space. You don’t want to be physically next to them all the time. So one thing we learned pretty quick was that we needed to have at least one and ideally more sets of doors that we could close. So I’m recording this podcast in Warsaw again, and we’re in an Airbnb with two bedrooms. So my wife is in the living room because there’s more natural light there and she loves the natural light. And I’m in one of the bedrooms, which has a nice door. I can close and I can record in relative peace. So she doesn’t have to listen to everything I say. So allowing for some space, allowing for some privacy. I can watch a movie on my computer without disturbing her. She can watch whose line is it anyway on her computer without disturbing me. And when it’s time to, to come together we can meet each other in the middle and you know, it put the clothes on and get ready to go wherever we’re going.

Sean Tierney (38:12):
Cool. Yeah. No, it’s, it’s, it just seems like a crucible. Like if you make it work, it’s probably a really fantastic way to build a relationship. I just know from experience that on the road, the highs are super high, the lows are super low, but if you, you experienced that with someone else I’m sure that it’s just, you couldn’t be closer, so. Very cool.

Chris Backe (38:35):
Oh yeah. And and a lot of times I, I should also mention if you’re traveling, if you start single, if you start the Nevada requests, they’ll single and you’re hoping to meet someone along the way. That’s an awesome and amazing goal. And I wish you the best of luck with it. It is hard to date as a nomad than it is probably anywhere else. Any other type of dating in the world. Part of that is because you’re moving around a lot and you need to create that, connect someone pretty quickly. So my free piece of advice here is to again, make your lifestyle work for you. If you find yourself ready to ready to partner with someone, if you’re ready to get married you know, don’t feel like you have to rush this, don’t rush this period. If the timing of it doesn’t quite work, then maybe that’s fate.

Chris Backe (39:33):
Maybe that’s a sign that you need to chase them a little bit. And they want to be chased. Of course. You know, I’ve, I have heard some success stories of, of nomads that met in the same hostel and then they traveled for a few weeks and then they decided to change their plans and travel together. And whether, whether, whether they’re a union is done or created by an I, a church or a proper wedding or whatever is not as important as you might think. We are married as husband, wife because when we were getting started leaving Korea we were hearing from how in some countries, some hospitals will, like if you’re in an emergency room, they’ll only let the husband or the wife or the spouse, they may not recognize a common law partnership or just life partner. That’s a really backwards view of things, but you don’t want to be denied the ability to do that. There may be some tax benefits if you’re quote married versus just, you know, not traveling together. But you know, consider that for yourself. Consider whether marriage is the best answer for the two of you. And again, you know, you’re traveling, making your life, you’re weighing. This all comes back to the same same mindset. You know, you’re making your life the way you want it to be. And for a lot of people it’s going to be better with someone in it. Sharing it with you. Mmm.

Chris Backe (41:12):
Yeah. So

Sean Tierney (41:15):
Cool. I want to ask you, so you’re in Warsaw, Poland right now, but I noticed from your submission there, your guest emission, you’ve been all over yet. Serbia, Slovakia, Macedonia, Turkey, Ukraine, a lot of Eastern Europe. What is it about Eastern Europe that appeals to you so much?

Chris Backe (41:32):
Sure. So I, I could probably write a book on this or give a Ted talk. The, the simple answer is that Europe has a ton of history, a ton of culture, a ton of things to see. Eastern Europe is a little bit, unexp is comparatively less explored from Western Europe. There are two other main reasons for this. One, in Western Europe you have what’s called the Schengen zone. The Schengen zone is the area of the region of Western European countries that has no internal border controls from one to the next. So when you go from France into Germany, you’re not stopped at the border and check your passport and getting it stamped in and stamped out. There’s no, there is still a border, but there’s no border control. So you get 90 days. If you have an American or Canadian passport or other first world passport, you get 90 days in the country or in the region, and then you have to leave for nine days.

Chris Backe (42:30):
For Europeans. This is amazing. Just having, having fewer borders makes it easier to travel and get around for everyone else. It means you can stay open only for three months, then you have to leave for at least three months. This makes life a little bit more challenging to, to be a nomad in that region. So the suggestion that I, that I send to myself people is look at Eastern Europe. If, assuming you still have a first full passport, you are getting into each country for their own visa requirements. So most countries will just give you three months on a rival, no paperwork, nothing to fill out. Just present your passport once you, once you land and you’re good. Mmm. I know Georgia, actually the country, Georgia, not the state. Georgia gives you a year up to a year on a tour as a tourist on a tourist visa with no like paperwork required.

Chris Backe (43:32):
At least a couple of people I know have said the act, they also give you a small bottle of wine for free at the airport when you arrive. And I thought fucking amazing. So but yeah, Eastern Europe it’s relatively easy to get around. Because you get three months in this country, you can then go to the next country for three months. You can string them along to be in the region for as long as you want. And if you want to go back into Western Europe, you can tend to ping pong back and forth from Western Europe to Eastern Europe. The other big thing is price. Here in Poland, it’s actually a little bit more on the expensive side compared to the book arrests in the key of the world. But still you know, alcohol’s cheap food is pretty cheap. If you’re coming from a, let’s say somewhere in the U S where you can’t leave a restaurant without paying about 25 bucks a person, you’re going to be floored when I, when like we went to a, to a burger place close to home no better example, we went to a milk bar, which is kind of a Polish cafeteria and I think our, I think it was about 25 zlots for each person.

Chris Backe (44:48):
So about six bucks, you know, food, drink, everything. Yeah. So the, the prices are a little bit cheaper or the standards are still pretty high. Poland has a ton of history here and yeah, lots of, see, lots of do.

Sean Tierney (45:05):
Yeah. I have not been to Poland. I did a month in Belgrade, Serbia that was part of our remote or remote, your experience and yeah, it was amazing. Super cheap. Really had kind of an up and coming, you know, gritty feel to it and I can highly recommend it. We did not make it to Turkey. We were supposed to go there, but that was right around the time when they had the airport bombings and so they actually ended up rerouting. Yeah. Cool.

Chris Backe (45:33):
Yeah. So, yeah, but really, and it kind of does come back to what you want to see, what you want to do. If you, if you’ve been dying to live in Paris, for example, let nothing stop you from enjoying that goal. In terms of in terms of a longer term mindset, right? This is our life. This is what we, this is how we do. And you know, you got to live somewhere and every few months we go to a new country. That’s how we do.

Sean Tierney (46:04):
Cool. All right. Well, Chris, I think this is probably good time to wrap up. I do have a last little part called the breakdowns. Are you ready for the breakdown?

Chris Backe (46:11):
I’m ready for the breakdown.

Sean Tierney (46:12):
Break down, baby. What is one book that has profoundly affected you?

Chris Backe (46:19):
Seven habits of highly effective people.

Sean Tierney (46:22):
That’s a good one. I don’t disagree with that. All right. What is one person that you would love to have dinner with?

Chris Backe (46:29):
Hmm Jesus Christ. Not because I’m religious, but because I’m curious to see what the man himself was like, not what history claims, not what a Bible claims.

Sean Tierney (46:43):
Cool. What about, what is one tool or hack that saves you time, money or headaches?

Chris Backe (46:51):
Google docs? So basically everything that I, everything that I wrote in terms of books was Google docs. You’ve got the collaboration, you’ve got the download as a document, downloads a PDF, just makes writing texts and working with texts. The Latins here.

Sean Tierney (47:08):
Fair enough. Have you played with a tool called Scrivener by any chance for book writing?

Chris Backe (47:13):
I have a Scribner is actually a really good tool for fiction writing. And part of what it does is it helps fix your writers because you tend to write a bit differently depending on the genre and the type of book. So Scribner is actually really in terms of offering a lot of tools that a nonfiction writer like me hasn’t really needed.

Sean Tierney (47:34):
Cool. All right. What about, what is one piece of music or musical artists that speaks to you lately?

Chris Backe (47:41):
Oh, I don’t really listen to a lot of music to be honest. If I ever need to relax and versus kind of need to zone out something I can put on the Moonlight Sonata. That’s a classic piece of classical music or whatever. But I’m sure it is a, it’s a very relaxing piece.

Sean Tierney (47:59):
That’s the, the piano. The Ta-na na-na na-na-naa. Yeah,

Chris Backe (48:04):
That’s, that’s fairly Moonlight Sonata. It’s, it’s a Beethoven piece. It’s, it’s, it’s one of the, it’s one of those pieces that has like three different movements. Each one has a very different sort of sound multi time. You want to relax. You put on the first one. The second one is a bit more upbeat and the third one, the third one I could almost see like being remixed by out by a metal band.

Sean Tierney (48:28):
All right, well we’ll link that in the show notes. Clearly. I need to listen to it cause I got it wrong. What about two more? What important truth. Do very few people agree with you on

Chris Backe (48:39):
Being proactive, consciously choosing everything is incredibly important and remains even a decade later. Very difficult. Sometimes.

Sean Tierney (48:51):
The difficulty of being proactive about stuff and deliberate choosing.

Chris Backe (48:57):
Yeah. Yeah. Deliberately choosing everything that you do of trying to, you don’t necessarily, okay. Schedules and routines and patterns. They’re not bad, but they can be, they can be anesthetizing. It’s they’re, they’re very easy traps to fall in. And before, you know, you go, how did I spend two months in this venture and I’ve barely seen anything. Or I was supposed to get something done today, but I got distracted by this other thing, you know?

Sean Tierney (49:29):
Yeah. I recently read a good one, this one thing book by Gary Keller and it’s super all about that. Like slice through everything else that you could be doing. Like how do you determine the one thing that you should be doing? I think it’s a highly, yeah. Cool. All right, last question. If you had a time machine to go back to your 20 year old self and give yourself any bit of advice, what would you say?

Chris Backe (49:53):
Buy Bitcoin.

Sean Tierney (49:55):
Fair enough.

Chris Backe (50:00):
I understand what it is, how it’s going to change the world. I don’t think it’s changed your world yet. I think it’s been a little bit misunderstood in this aligned but you look at a thing that was once fractions of a penny that is now about $10,000 per Bitcoin. It’s going to change the world. It’s going to scare the crap out of some people who are control and it’s going to be a technology that does much more than just being a currency.

Sean Tierney (50:36):
Good advice. I agree with you and I think the rough edges of Bitcoin will get worked out over time. It’s kind of similar to any disruptive technology when it first takes hold. It’s maybe it doesn’t even have parody with the experience of the incumbent technology, but it’s a completely radically different way of doing it. So I think the people who get it are overlooking the warts on it and realizing just how incredibly disruptive this is.

Chris Backe (51:03):
Yeah. Like if you look back to what the worldwide whim was before browsers came out, it was complex. It was just difficult to make a connection, difficult to find anything to do. And then the first browsers came out, the first pieces of software that let people make websites came out. So as the process of creation becomes easier, there’s more to see, there’s more to do things continue to advance, whatever. And we’re not there yet with Bitcoin, but I do see a very bright future for it.

Sean Tierney (51:36):
Yeah. For the people that are listening who are interested more in learning about that. We did have an awesome guest miles, Anthony, I think he was around 23, 24 episode, a really good conversation that goes deep into the crypto and blockchain and Bitcoin stuff. So if you want more, that would be a good one to listen to. Chris, where should I send people? Where can people get your book?

Chris Backe (51:58):
Sure. So the book is at becomingadigitalnomad.com. You can learn more with the book, you can read some of the testimonials, you can get direct links to the Amazon page, the Barnes and noble page, Apple page, whichever platform you prefer. I also write the travel blog at worthygo.com and we didn’t actually get to talk much about the games, but I also do make board games and if you’re curious about those there at entrogames.com. And what I usually tell people is that I do have some pictures of prototypes and like description on stuff. If you find a game on there, the two curious about, send me a message through the website and I’ll send you a free print and play of that game. You know, you, you, you download the file, you take it to your print shop or print it off the home do a little bit of assembly and you’ve got a game to try it.

Sean Tierney (52:56):
Very cool. Chris, thank you so much for your time and yeah, we look forward. We’ll send people there and I think we said we’re going to, we’re going to try to do some kind of discount code. I don’t know what that would be exactly. Nomad podcast. The discount code. Yeah.

Chris Backe (53:11):
Yeah. So if so, if you’ve read the book, whether you’ve read the becoming a digital and I book for a not the consulting service is a confidential one-on-one session, just talking to people on Skype or zoom or whatever. The goal here is to help you is to give you advice from the voice of experience basically, and this normally costs $60 per one hour session. For, for the listeners here, I’m going to do $20 off your first session and I want you to use the nomad podcast, coupon code nomad podcast, one word, all lowercase. Perfect. All right, Chris, thanks so much, man. It’s been great talking to you and best of luck. Thanks a lot, Sean.

Sean Tierney (02:01):
All right. Hey everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I’m your host Sean Tierney and I’m here today virtually with Matt Rudnitsky. Matt is founder of Word Shaman and Platypus Publishing where he helps entrepreneurs write unputdownable books that leave legacies. Matt is author of smart sports betting and “You are an author so write your effing book” available on Amazon, both with over a hundred combined reviews, 80% of which are four or five stars. He’s worked with Tucker Max’s company, “Book in a Box” now, scribe, media, sports grid and a number of other publications. He also recently edited and marketed ticketless, which is a book about a guy who sneaks into the Superbowl and Wimbleton and a bunch of other sporting events. And that book has been featured on ESPN radio, the daily beast, Yahoo sports, and a number of other major outlets. Lastly, Matt is author of the world famous “Rudbits” weekly newsletter, which I never failed to read. Sometimes it sits in my inbox for a few days, but I’m always savoring it when I do read it. And I am excited to have Matt on the show today because I traveled with him for a year on one of the very first Remote Year programs. So welcome Matt to the show.

Matt Rudnitsky (03:06):
Thank you Sean. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Sean Tierney (03:09):
Absolutely, man. I’m so context for how we know each other. Yeah. Like I mentioned, we met on remote year we traveled, traveled together for a year. You are in, where, where are you at right now?

Matt Rudnitsky (03:19):
I’m in Austin, Texas, in the United States of America for a change. It’s a rare, rare thing for me.

Sean Tierney (03:26):
It’s a rare thing because you’ve been all over the map prior to that.

Matt Rudnitsky (03:28):
Yeah, no, it was just in a, just in Georgia, the country. So now I have to be clear like this is Texas, the one that you are thinking of, unlike whenever in the country and not the state

Sean Tierney (03:39):
Dope. And we just recently saw each other like a week ago in New York or Northern New York. It came back. Go for the I’ll let you describe what was that event all about?

Matt Rudnitsky (03:49):
Was an adult summer camp, which was I guess like 50%, just adults having fun, you know, partying and whatnot and 50% summer camp and like playing Dodge ball and people wanting to rip each other’s throats out playing Dodge ball got a little feisty.

Sean Tierney (04:06):
Yes. those were some pretty Epic games that we, that we had there. And I have a picture of our floor when we’re playing the Codenames game.

Matt Rudnitsky (04:14):
Ah, a mess on a blast at the same time.

Sean Tierney (04:19):
Totally. all right, well, so I wanted to again we’re going to talk a lot just about writing because you’re an author and a very talented one at that. But I wanted to ask you to start this off. You know, you’re constantly encouraging others to write a book. Like what is it that you think holds most people back from doing that?

Matt Rudnitsky (04:39):
There’s so many things. I think the, the first thing is just not understanding how easy it is. So like, I like to tell people that publishing a book is quite literally as easy as posting on Instagram. Like that’s not the hard part. The, getting it published, putting it on Amazon is super, super easy. Obviously the difficult part is writing something that people care about, writing something that’s worthwhile for you, the time it takes. So that’s the first step is just understanding that you can literally just log on to Amazon right now, create your author account and publish a book within probably 10 minutes, maybe even less if you know what to do. That’s the first thing. And then once people understand how easy it is to self-publish people obviously think that there’s a big stigma behind self-publishing for, for good reason because the average self published book is garbage. But it’s not garbage because it’s self published. It’s garbage because the person wrote garbage. Right? And there’s no reason you can’t write a book that’s as good as insert whatever your favorite book is here. Self-Published. Like it has nothing to do with the self publishing itself. It has to do with what you write about, how much effort you put into it. Do you edit it yourself? Do you hire someone? Do you crowdsource it to friends, et cetera, et cetera.

Sean Tierney (05:54):
Yeah. And I know that you’re more of a fan

Matt Rudnitsky (05:58):
Of the self publishing route. What do you see as being the real problem with like the typical corporate go, you know, court a publisher and have them handle it for you? What is the issue with that approach? So I, I will preface this by saying I think there is a very small percentage of people who should do it. I imagine 99% of people listening to this should not. And the reasons are, first it’s extremely hard to get accepted. Like it’s hard to get accurate statistics on this, but the one I’ve cited is that like 96% of authors seeking agents get rejected. So first you have to find an agent and 96% of the time it’s not going to work. Once you get an agent, you have to promise, I think it’s usually like 15% of your royalties to that agent. If you get accepted, you still might not get accepted.

Matt Rudnitsky (06:43):
You can have to spend probably a month or months writing a book proposal, which is like a 30 page document, which you could have been writing your book this whole time or blogging or something. Just to get accepted. And then once you get accepted, you’ll wind up forfeiting something like 80 to 90% of your royalty to the publisher. You’re expected to come in with a marketing plan, like that’s part of your book proposal and then execute pretty much all of it yourself. So it’s like you’re doing all the work, you get very, very few benefits. Like, yes, you get to work with their editor and their designer, but those are things you can do independently, usually for cheaper and often better. So they’re just a very, very few benefits and like so many hoops you have to jump through. They also take, you know, final creative control over it.

Matt Rudnitsky (07:26):
So they might kind of make your book more mainstream or kind of dumb it down a bit. There’s just so few advantages and so many, so much bullshit you have to deal with, basically. Yeah. Well. And so the only advantages that I can think of are, you know, maybe getting the advance for the people that are cashflow constraint that want the money up front, that the dude in the event you get selected. I guess you can take the advance and then maybe just the ego of saying that you’re published by some famous publisher, but I can’t really, there’s not many advantages that come to mind of going that route anymore. Yeah. The, the advance obviously like is nice. The average, again, the average person listening to this is going to get a really, really tiny advance. So actually the, so the first book I published with smart sports betting, so just kind of like a how to guide on, on sports betting for casual sports fans.

Matt Rudnitsky (08:20):
So it did really well self-published and this was before I knew like anything about self publishing. So I did this I guess in 2014, it’s like five, six years ago. Did really well. And then I got contacted by this like imprint of Simon and Schuster. Like I think that was like two years ago. So they offered me a deal and the advance, I was offered with $6,000 and it was $6,000 to do like basically a rewritten version of my book, like slightly expanded. So it would have competed with my other book. I was only getting $6,000. They told me they were going to do it on a quote fast timeline, which was a year, it’s going to take me a year of work to make

Sean Tierney (08:56):
$6,000

Matt Rudnitsky (08:56):
And then I was going to make a, I think it was like 10% royalties on sales. So it was just like, it was absurd. Completely absurd.

Sean Tierney (09:03):
Yeah. Well, and your book has already done more than that. Like can you talk about, actually this is a perfect segue, so let’s talk about that book. Like what led you to create it and how has it done?

Matt Rudnitsky (09:12):
Okay. So I, my first real job and only real job, it wasn’t even really a real job, but as a full time job was as a sports blogger and like editor for this site called sports grid. So I basically had like a ton of freedom. It was the sports blog that reached like three to 4 million unique visitors a month. But it only had like four employees. So I basically just got to write about whatever I wanted as long as I was getting enough clicks. And I just realized the sports betting niche was very like underserved because it’s, it was technically illegal and now it’s semi legal in some places and just like very taboo. So I wound up writing about that a lot. And just realized how little people knew. And it’s like, it’s a very ripe environment for charlatans cause like there’s no regulation that people don’t know what they’re doing, so people get scammed all the time.

Matt Rudnitsky (10:04):
So I was like exposing scammers and people were all of a sudden like treating me as this like semi expert, even though, you know, I wasn’t getting rich betting on sports. And eventually I just realized like I had enough to say, like, I just have to write a book. I had no expectations. I mean, I figured, you know, maybe a few hundred people will read it, I’ll make a few hundred bucks. But it was really just like a thing I wanted to do. Got obsessed with self publishing, did all the research, realized it’s not that difficult and just kinda did it.

Sean Tierney (10:32):
Nice. And then what was the output of that? I know you, you’ve gotten quite a bit of royalties from it. How did that play out?

Matt Rudnitsky (10:38):
Yeah, so again, like had absolutely no idea what to expect. I built like a, I think it was like 46 person email list through sports grid, like absolutely nothing and just told those people about the book, asked for some feedback and stuff. And then in like the first month I made, I think it was, yeah, the first month I made it was like about $1,100 and royalty. So that’s not like sales. That is literally the amount that went in my account. And I was just like completely shocked. This thing I had no expectations for, I wasn’t even sure I could do it. Like all of a sudden it’s making me 1000 bucks a month. And this was while I was living in Prague and my apartment costs like 400 bucks a month. So I’m like, that was over two months rent, like basically paid for all my expenses. Just completely unexpected.

Sean Tierney (11:24):
Nice. So you’re throwing the Becker off, go back at that point and just like absolutely. Beyond, beyond the royalties that you’ve gotten from that, what other, like you said you’ve been contacted by so much Simon Schuster, like what other value has writing that book created for you?

Matt Rudnitsky (11:45):
So I didn’t have like any real interest in taking like the sports angle further. So I think there were a bunch of, I got whatever to go on a podcast to write for the site or whatever that I, I mostly turn those down or ignored them. Because I just got so obsessed with this self-publishing thing. And so the real benefits were, I mean obviously having a story to tell people I’m the Simon and Schuster offer and I guess beyond that it was just like having this book to point to when I started like preaching about self publishing. And the funny thing is like, I almost hate to say this, but like a lot of the benefits of writing a book will look like people will come to you and just be impressed that you wrote a book and they won’t even read it. It could be garbage. I mean I think it’s good, but like people are just impressed by the fact that you can hold a paperback book in your hand and be like, Oh this is mine.

Sean Tierney (12:37):
Yeah, I mean the, the books seems like the new business card in a way. Like people kind of throw their book around like the same way you toss it

Matt Rudnitsky (12:44):
Business card to someone. Exactly. It’s just like kind of a proof of expertise. So like if I wanted to be one of those like obnoxious sports betting charlatans, like I’m sure I could show up at events and be like, Oh, I wrote the best book ever and pay me lots of money. I didn’t want to do that. But I think I could have, if that was my personality.

Sean Tierney (13:06):
I want to ask you how you deal with criticism because I, I got about halfway through your other book and I wanted us to read some of these quotes because they’re hilarious. Like some of these are in all caps. So I’m just gonna read this like, dude, you blow at this, please just stop writing for the rest of your life. Really don’t ever write anything again. Your lack of ability legitimately makes me angry. Matt, you’re a waste of human flesh. Sad life. You live six exclamation points. Matt Riddick, Magnitsky likes penis in his pooper. And my favorite one, Matt is a Jew form Ukraine. Spelled wrong. Just like, so what, how do you deal with this type of hate and criticism and trolling?

Matt Rudnitsky (13:49):
Constantly. So, okay, so the first, first thing is I cherry picked those insults. So they’re in my book, you are an author, so write your effing book to show you the absolute worst you could possibly get. But this is like, so that was only when I was writing for the sports blog. So this is when probably, you know, a few hundred thousand people are reading by articles like every month and say, you know, 100,000 people are reading my articles about things that are semi charged, right? Like this team sucks, this team’s good, et cetera. That will upset people. Even given all of that, I would probably get a couple dozen like hate comments per month. So ever since I stopped writing about sports and if you don’t write about sports politics, something like super charged, you will get way, way, way, way fewer, like negative comments than you think.

Matt Rudnitsky (14:44):
That said, it’s still scary until you’re like out there publishing, cause you’re probably not going to believe me. You’re like, Oh, what? You know, I don’t have proof that people are going to care about what I have to say about this. Whatever. Say you’re writing about like sales or something like Abbott, I haven’t physically done this yet. Like there are these imaginary creatures in your head that disagree with everything you say, even though you’re an incredibly smart guy who’s going to have good things to say. And they’re really, there’s no way to get over it besides just like publishing constantly and realizing that it’s really not a big deal. It will hurt you the first few times and then you just realize that like, the people that care about this don’t matter, that these are the like 0.01% of people that are really vocal on the internet and just go around like clicking on things and being like, you suck. You suck. You’re the worst. You’re a Jew form Ukraine, which doesn’t even make any sense. I am Jewish and my family’s not from the Ukraine. I’m American. I don’t know what he was talking.

Sean Tierney (15:42):
It just seems like there’s always going to be haters and there’s always trolls. So, yeah, I just I tend to agree with you on that advice there. What about other challenges?

Matt Rudnitsky (15:52):
Just want to add one, sorry, one more thing is that the only way you will get like hate comments is if you’ve written something good. Like most people are afraid of, of getting negative comments at the beginning and it’s like, the truth is you’re more, you’re way more likely to just be ignored and your article or book just gets lost in the sea of millions of articles and books then to get a negative comment. If you do, that’s a sign that you’re reaching some people. And for every one negative comment there’s probably 500 people who either enjoyed it or like, Oh, that’s pretty good.

Sean Tierney (16:24):
Well, it’s funny. I know Edward Snowden just today released his book what’s it called? Whatever the book is. He just wrote a permanent record and he’s on the same day, had been sued by the department of justice for some kind of, you know, contractual thing that he breached and doing that. And he tweeted something to the effect of a lawsuit because the book is so truthful is a wonderful stamp of authenticity or something.

Matt Rudnitsky (16:52):
Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So you’re right. That’s a thing. One of our, like one of our mutual favorite authors and the same Toledo is talks about that like book, I think it’s like books or his quote. His books are antifragile like they gain strength from attacks. Like if you’re getting attacked, that’s a good sign. And the people that are going to side with the attackers are not your readers anyway. And there’s going to be someone else reading that article and be like, this person, what is this person talking about? Like they’re so wrong for going after this person. I’m going to buy this.

Sean Tierney (17:21):
Yeah. No, literally I went to Amazon as soon as I read that and I, I bought it on Kindle. I bought this note about the, actually it’s funny. What about the other challenges that you encounter? Things like writer’s block imposter syndrome. Like what, how, how do you deal with those?

Matt Rudnitsky (17:35):
I think for in terms of writer’s block there are like these, these two camps where like you have one side say writer’s block isn’t real because like, and there is some truth in it. Like I like what Seth Godin about it. He’s like, there’s no such thing as talker’s block. So why is there a such thing as writer’s block? It’s not, it’s not that you can’t write. Like if you were just to sit, sit in front of your word processor and be like, I’m going to write 500 crappy words on whatever is on my mind, you’ll have no trouble and you’ll probably write 50,000 words. But it still is real. Like there is a reason that people stare at the blank page or want to write and don’t start writing. And I think the, there are two big things. One big thing would be thinking that you have to write something perfect on your first draft.

Matt Rudnitsky (18:27):
And not understanding the concept of like a shitty first draft and knowing that if you were to speak to anyone, myself obviously included who has, who writes frequently, like our first scraps are really shitty. Like even if we’re talking J K rallying Michael Lewis, like whoever insert your favorite author here, like their first drafts are really, really bad. Like, do not try to write your first draft perfectly, try to write a shitty first draft and then turn that into something good. So that’d be the first thing. The other thing is like, counterintuitively, the more the more you write and the more you write down ideas, the more ideas you will have, which sounds really weird, but it’s like when I was forced to write, it’s usually like four or five things a day. As a sports blogger, I never had trouble coming up with ideas and I never had trouble publishing. And then once I didn’t have that job anymore like all of a sudden I had writer’s block just because I got out of the habit of doing it. It’s really just a habit. And the more you publish, the more you realize that like it’s not about your one piece of writing or your one idea. It’s just about the body of work and the habit of publishing and getting out there.

Sean Tierney (19:36):
Well, I would wholly agree with both of those stances. The, the, the write drunk edit sober, which is essentially the first point you made. And the at least this maps over to music from my experience in terms of like when you just keep putting stuff out there, no matter how bad it may feel, it creates like a vacuum that then invites other creativity. So I don’t know if that’s even just specific to writing. I think that’s kind of relevant to art and music as well. Definitely are there. So is there any like resource or R or specific course or exercise you recommend or is it just literally people need to just go right, like they need to just start writing?

Matt Rudnitsky (20:19):
I mean I think the most important thing is to write consistently. I mean I think it could certainly help to have an editor too. I mean you can work with me. I have coached people on this in the past. But it’s just literally whatever will get you to be writing things consistently. And before you do that, you have to like decide like, is this really something you want to pursue because it’s difficult. Anyone can do, like I believe that literally anyone is capable of doing it, but a lot of people I’m sure are very similar to like music. Like in the back of my mind, I like want to play guitar, I want to learn guitar, but I don’t, I don’t have any real reason to, I don’t have any urgency. I don’t have a goal with it. So there’s, that’s why I’ve never done it. So if you want to write like, why do you want it? Right. do you, is this something you really want to do for your entire life or is this like, I want to get my ideas out about this one little thing, like, decide why it is decide what’s stopping you and either commit to it fully or don’t. There’s no, there’s no shame in saying like, this is really hard. I don’t want to do it.

Sean Tierney (21:26):
So. Okay. Well, so this is a good also segue. So when you sit down with someone on a new consulting arrangement and what is your process, where do you guys start that you start with a goal first or what, how do you approach it?

Matt Rudnitsky (22:16):
Yeah, typically. So usually I’m working with people who want to write books, but it could just be someone that wants to start writing and yeah, the first thing is why do you want to do this? Because most people are not clear on why they want to do it. And there, there are plenty of good reasons and I like, I outlined them probably better than I will now in my book, so like, feel free to check that out. But are you doing it to make money if you’re doing it to make money on your book? That’s a horrible reason cause you probably won’t. Are you doing it to direct people to something else that will make you money consulting and online course, et cetera? That’s a much better reason. Are you doing it for your ego? That’s not a, honestly not a horrible reason.

Matt Rudnitsky (22:57):
If you’re aware of it upfront, like this is just something I want to do to like people who want to run a marathon. I want to do it to say I was able to do it. Nothing wrong with that. But you want to be upfront about it. If you say, I want to run a marathon to break a world record. But the real reason you’re doing is just to finish, like you’re going to be pretty disappointed when you totally don’t break a world record. Are you doing it to just become a better writer? Like nothing wrong with that either. Just being super clear about that upfront.

Sean Tierney (23:25):
Yup. Okay. So you start with the objective in mind first. And what is your process like when you sit down and work with someone though? Like what do you guys focus on? Cause I know you’re, you’re concerned not just about the writing of it but like distribution and things, you know, thinking down the road of how does this actually fit in the world.

Matt Rudnitsky (23:42):
Yeah. And it all, it all ties in with like super clear about your, your goals up front. Like once you know that, then you know the end goal and you can kind of connect the dots because it changes, it changes what you write about. It changes the type of book it is, it changes the marketing strategy, it changes, you know, is this going to be a hundred page book? There’s nothing wrong with writing a hundred page book if it’s something super specific and, or is this going to be, you know, a 500 page, three year long process. Like those are two totally different things. So basically the way I do it personally, if I’m coaching someone or consulting is I just, just like I would get them to do with the writing is to get them to word vomit. Like what are all of your ideas? What are all the possible reasons you want to do this? Get that all out on paper, get rid of the ones that aren’t that important. Prioritize and keep like trimming down and down and down until we get up like the essence of why they want to do this. And then what’s the best way to accomplish that?

Sean Tierney (24:38):
And then do you put that into any like a mind map or like Scrivener or any of the tools for organizing that stuff or what’s your process from there?

Matt Rudnitsky (24:48):
I’ve done it a million different ways. Like I don’t think the tools are that important. I definitely, I’ve never played around with Scribner. I’ve never like officially used it. I’ve used Trello to organize ideas. I’ve used mine maps. Like my last book, I did start out with a mind map. Sometimes they’ll just like word vomit things into a word document. It really like, doesn’t matter, just whatever works for me or that person. But yeah, the key is just getting it all out and then prioritizing and cutting the trimming the fight.

Sean Tierney (25:16):
So don’t fixate on the tool that can actually become like a, you know, an excuse for not moving forward basically is obsessing over what tool you’re going to use. [inaudible]

Matt Rudnitsky (25:25):
Yeah. And you know, once you start writing, I mean you should, you should have an idea, like if it’s something super research heavy, you should have some sort of basic strategy, whether it’s using Scrivener, Evernote or whatever. But there’s no right answer. Cool. And if it’s not research heavy, then I wouldn’t worry about it at all honestly.

Sean Tierney (25:43):
Can you talk about the most recent book that you helped with, which is the ticketless one. Cause I watched that video the other day. I’ll link to it in the show notes, but it’s, it’s this guy basically sneaking into a stadium to put his book in the hands of a sports writer.

Matt Rudnitsky (25:55):
Yeah. So that was, that was my little like marketing stunt idea. I’m not good at making videos, but I actually somehow cobbled that Trevor forgot to. So Trevor crosses the other great guy, incredible writer, forgot to put the video horizontal. You know, what are you going to do? So it’s a long story. We worked on that for like three, four years. So Trevor has snuck into, I think it’s like I wrote, I wrote it in the video, I think it’s like 37 different sporting events now. Something like that. Well over 30. And like major ones are talking super bowl, Wimbledon final the masters world series, blah blah blah.

Sean Tierney (26:38):
I have to have inevitably like incredible security. Those are all like really big events would imagine

Matt Rudnitsky (26:45):
Most of them do if you read them. I don’t want to spoil the book. Everyone should check out. Ticketless but yes, the Superbowl was crazy. The masters was crazy. He actually didn’t get in in Buenos Aires, Argentina. That was the craziest security. But the truth is a lot of, a lot of the stories were just him kind of blending in him, like spending a lot of time like traversing the stadium beforehand and like finding a little hole in the security setup. And one of the big things is that like the metal detectors or before the ticket takers. So like they check, they know that you don’t have, you know, anything dangerous before you, they even check your ticket. So like once you’re not a threat, like they’re less concerned about you getting it right. So he takes advantage of that and he’s done it in like 10 different ways. He’s like, he’s going to a place in like a garbage bin. He was sitting in the garbage man. He just says run past people. I made a fake ticket. I mean, I’ll let you read the book if you want.

Sean Tierney (27:46):
Well, the video, the video that I’ll link to, it’s, it’s him sneaking in and he films the whole thing that puts the phone on the thing, you know, goes through the metal detector and then you see him just basically like take off through the turnstile. It’s pretty, pretty ballsy. I want to shift gears and talk about travel because that’s how we first met each other. So you were living in Prague prior to remote year and obviously when you wrote the sports betting book and you’ve traveled to a number of countries since then, how many have you been to you at this point?

Matt Rudnitsky (28:17):
It’s like, it’s like 50 ish, I think. I’m like just over 50, but it depends. Like I went on some cruises with my parents when I was younger to these like islands that I don’t even remember. Yeah. That technically might count as country. So more or less 50.

Sean Tierney (28:30):
Cool. And like what, what does travel mean to you? Why, why do you keep traveling?

Matt Rudnitsky (28:38):
I think it’s meant different things at different points in my life. So like I grew up, you know, a sheltered white boy from the suburbs of New York where there’s just, there’s just nothing, no diversity of, and I might even just talking like race, but just no diversity of lifestyle or career or thoughts. Like everyone does the same thing. Everything’s so like perfect. And it just like felt like trapped in that. And I had traveled like a little bit with my parents, but never internationally. So it was just like the moment I had an opportunity to like get out of that bubble, I just like sprinted towards it and it was like wanting to soak in everything now that I’ve seen a lot of things. I think it’s more about like just having experiences with people like building relationships. Like the reason I did remote year and the reason, you know, we connected and became friends. Like it’s more about that, just like having these novel experiences with people then like me being super adventurous and new things. Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Tierney (29:43):
Cool. Well, Austin is one of the places that if I were going to settle in the U S and I’d say between that and San Diego would be the two places that I would consider love Austin.

Matt Rudnitsky (29:53):
Yeah, it’s, it’s awesome. [inaudible]

Sean Tierney (29:55):
You may have a, a wandering Portuguese nomad on your couch for South by Southwest Mexican. You are welcome to come. If we were still here, can you tell the story? This is one of the things that you submitted in the pre interview questions. The time I found my airline no longer existed as I was about to go to.

Matt Rudnitsky (30:16):
Oh, right. I forgot about that. So, okay. So that was, so I lived in Prague for a year. I came back and I lived in Boston for like 10 months or something like that. And then again got the travel itch. So I’d never been to Asia. I really wanted to go to Asia, found this flight deal that I was super proud of. I think it was like, I want to say it was, I think it was $180 from Boston to Beijing one way. So like probably the best deal I’ve ever gotten. And I was like bragging to everyone like, Oh, I know how to find flight deals. It’s amazing. And then, and I had a bunch of plans in Asia, was visiting my next door neighbor growing up, oddly enough, moved to Beijing. So I was visiting him there. I was going to go to like Thailand and Vietnam and all that stuff.

Matt Rudnitsky (31:02):
So I had a bunch of plans, really excited, show up with just a backpack, getting to the airport in Boston and like on the, on the subway or the Metro or whatever they call it, the T it said like this airline trans arrow, which was like some sketchy Russian airline I had never heard of is in, you know, terminal two or whatever. And then I looked it up on my phone and so it was in like terminal three. So this is like red flag number one. This is odd. Like, I don’t know why my ticket doesn’t tell me where to go. And there’s some discrepancies here, but whatever, it’s probably no big deal. If you go to terminal two, don’t see anything with trans air on. It’s like, all right, it’s probably just terminal three. There’s some confusion. Go to terminal three. I don’t see, I see one little like booth that like had like a faded out, like trans arrow sign and there’s no one there.

Matt Rudnitsky (31:52):
So I was like, this is weird looking on the flight board and I don’t like see it. And I see like another flight to Beijing, but the time was a little different. And I’m like, it didn’t say trans around like, is that my flight? I’m just very confused and I’m trying to ask like employees and they’re like, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. There’s no desk to go to. I’m just like completely confused. Like I just have absolutely no idea what to do. Cause like I couldn’t find my ticket on my phone. Like it just couldn’t find anything. So eventually I went to the Aeroflot desk cause that’s another Russian airline. And in my head it’s just like, well these are the same things. Maybe they merged or something, I don’t know, like what could possibly be going wrong here? So basically just go up to the Aeroflot desk as if I’m flying their airline, hand them my passport and they’re like, what are you, why are you, you’re trying to nurture system at all. And I was like, Oh well it’s fine. This other Russian airline and I kinda just figured you guys had like merged or something. And they’re like, no, that airline went bankrupt like two months ago.

Matt Rudnitsky (32:54):
I guess what had happened is I bought this ticket, the airline went bankrupt and they never contacted me to tell me that there would be no flight. But oddly enough, this other Russian airline did have a flight to Beijing. That was like a similar time. It was like, I don’t know, 10 minutes after something, which is why I was confused. I thought maybe that was my flight, but it’s just a different one. And I basically just wound up having to buy a flight and I was freaking out cause I thought it was going to be like $5,000 or something. And it turned out it wasn’t that bad. I think it was like maybe like 400 bucks. It wasn’t like insane. So, you know, my hundred $80 flight deal didn’t really come through. I don’t even think I got my money back. But I got to Beijing and it was okay. And that was Beijing. It was amazing. But only because my friends lived there and spoke fluent Mandarin. Otherwise they would’ve been so lost. So confused.

Sean Tierney (33:48):
What about another shift of gears here. So we’ve talked about writing on the reading side of things like D, are you a believer in speed reading or what are your thoughts on, on whether that’s worth like a skill worth acquiring?

Matt Rudnitsky (34:02):
I’ve never invested in a time in learning it. It’s just, it’s like honestly just doesn’t like appeal to me that much especially. And part of that is because like when I read, I’m trying to absorb the writing and like become a better writer. I definitely understand why, like if you’re reading nonfiction with a specific intent to learn something, like I definitely think it could be valuable. I’ve just, I’ve never invested any time in it. I try to enjoy the reading experience and like really soak in the writing and the energy and how it’s changing and the, the flow of the sentences and whatever. But yeah, so it never been a thing for me personally, but I get why some people do it. Cool.

Sean Tierney (34:43):
On that topic, who do you like? I mean, not seem to lab. You mentioned we both have a mutual respect for him. Who else?

Matt Rudnitsky (34:51):
So, so, so many people. I mean, I could literally give like hundreds of book recommendations in terms of just like pure writing style. My favorites would probably be Kurt Vonnegut is like way top for nonfiction. I love Naseem to lab. Michael Lewis is like an incredible storyteller. It’s got like Charles Bukowski is crazy and hilarious and kind of obnoxious, but writes amazing novels, wrote amazing novels, rest in peace.

Sean Tierney (35:25):
What about, who is the Andre Agassi?

Matt Rudnitsky (35:28):
Yes. So one of my favorite books, it’s a quote, autobiography, but then you get to the end of the book and Andre Agassi’s like, Oh, I really want to, my co-writer who did a lot in the worst. This guy jr Moehringer, it’s like M O, E, H, R, I, N, G, E, R, I believe. Who has also written his own autobiography. It’s called the tender bar which is just like the autobiography of an ordinary dude who grew up going to a bar with, or basically was raised in a bar, like with his, I guess dad’s friends. And just like this ordinary story is so superbly written that like blew my mind. Have you read Shawnta rom? So you recommended that to me like many, many times. And every time I see you, I bump it up my Kindle list and I had not started it until I believe like three days ago. I actually started it and I’m about 60 pages through and loving it so far. I will, I wouldn’t get through this. I actually did start it and it’s great.

Sean Tierney (36:33):
Nope. Nope. Well we’ll need a comment maybe on the podcast when you finish it and we’ll, we’ll get hear your thoughts on that one. Cause that was one of my favorites.

Matt Rudnitsky (36:40):
Yeah. And like three years when I finished the 950, you know, I will, I will, I will finish it soon. I bet you within a month it’ll be, it’ll be done.

Sean Tierney (36:47):
Dope. let’s talk about your morning routine cause I know you’re a believer in morning routines. Can you just tell a little bit about what you do there?

Matt Rudnitsky (36:55):
Yeah. I have like experimented with, you know, every article and podcast that is talked about a morning routine and I think there are a million different useful ones depending on what you like. Currently now really all I do is get up like as early as possible. I’ve actually been trying to get up with the sunrise lately, which has worked sometimes. Start with like I use this app, it’s called state. It’s like a breathing exercise app. Do that for like, it’s like seven minute exercise, kind of like wake your brain up. And then some sort of meditation, which I’ve been doing Headspace recently, but I’ve tried a ton of other things. Like there’s brain.fm, there is insight timer, there’s different strategies in whatever. So those are really the only two things like doing right now. Then get my, get my coffee and try to write something as, as soon as read, then writes something as soon as possible. That’s like my like minimalist morning routine. I feel accomplished. I feel focused.

Sean Tierney (37:59):
And you write very first thing. Like, once you finish the routine, then you go right into writing or what, what’s like how do you transition and go right in

Matt Rudnitsky (38:07):
To almost always go to a coffee shop, get coffee, read for usually 15 to 30 minutes and then start writing like to like prime my brain with good, good writing. And then write on a,

Sean Tierney (38:20):
So I just have actually one last question. Who is Jim?

Matt Rudnitsky (38:24):
Oh, who is Jim? Well rest in peace shim. Okay. So I don’t know what I’m at Liberty to discuss that Jim. But basically the short version of the story is that my friends and I on remote your Mayday satirical newsletter. This, we got like a normal newsletter, like here’s what’s going on this week, this month, et cetera. And we just thought it’d be funny to make Securicor one, but we had just met everyone. So I wanted to do fuck, marry, kill. And I was like, I just met these people. I can’t kill anymore. Even figuratively. Like that’s just going to upset people. It’s not worth it. And we did it anonymously, so it’d be like, who wants to kill me? And this is weird. So there were two people that hadn’t been there the first month. This was the second month. It was like, okay, you know, fuck one marry one, that’s a positive thing. Okay, now I’m just going to make someone up to kill because they can kill a real person. So I just wrote killed Jim. But I think some people thought there was a gym and they just hadn’t met him yet. So he just kinda turned into this meme even though he wasn’t ever a real person. Maybe he is.

Sean Tierney (39:30):
I mean this spoof newsletter, if I can find it I’ll include it. Cause it was hilarious and I know you guys had to end up like apologizing for it. But like I think the vast majority of people just thought it was hilarious and that

Matt Rudnitsky (39:40):
You should just keep doing it, which is another good goes. We’ve circled back to my earlier point on like the, there’s going to be one or two vocal people that have a problem with something if you push your boundary. But like most people,

Sean Tierney (39:55):
Yeah. Cool. All right, well we’re going to go into the very last phase of this interview. This is what I call the breakdowns. Are you ready for the breakdown? I am ready for break down. Break down baby. Let’s break it down. All right. And I gotta do this and I know you’re going to hate this, but what is one book that has profoundly affected you or sculpted your thinking in some way?

Matt Rudnitsky (40:15):
Tash, tell me. I’m just going to say antifragile by it and it seemed to let cause that, yeah, probably

Sean Tierney (40:20):
Top five. Cool. What about one person you would love to take to dinner?

Matt Rudnitsky (40:24):
Okay. I’m not going to say because I just keep saying him. Who else will I say? Jim, I, I’ll say this. I really liked the same two labs work. I’m going to everyone. If you haven’t checked out step [inaudible]

Sean Tierney (40:40):
What about, what is one tool or hack that saves you time, money and headaches. Evernote. Cool. Use it myself. I’m, that’s literally what I’m staring at right now as I read these notes and talking to you. And so yeah, 100% agree there. A one piece of music or musical author that speaks to you?

Matt Rudnitsky (40:58):
So lately I’ve been listening to labyrinth a lot. L a, B, R, I. N, T, H like a British dude with an incredible soul,

Sean Tierney (41:07):
Not the David Bowie film of many years ago. Nope. Okay. All right. We’ll look at that one year is a difficult question. What important truth. Do very few people agree with you on

Matt Rudnitsky (41:24):
That writing is the writing publicly is the most valuable thing you can do for your life and career?

Sean Tierney (41:32):
Do you a, here’s a question

Matt Rudnitsky (41:34):
That you just made me think of. Do you believe that thought can exist independent of writing? Like words are decoupled from thought writing or, or like speech dislike? Well, no, clearly we can think and not right. So I guess it’s more like, is language intricately coupled with thought, with thought? I think that it’s a circular thing. Like thought shapes, language, language, shapes, thought. Yes, I do think, I think you, you know, you can think in pictures, thinking symbols. So yeah, I think it could exist, but they have the, you know, intermingled relationship.

Sean Tierney (42:13):
Okay, last question. What about if you had a time machine to go back to your 20 year old self, what is one piece of advice you would give your former self?

Matt Rudnitsky (42:21):
I’m never stopped publishing published. Way more.

Sean Tierney (42:25):
Publish more. You’ve already published a couple books. So you’re just saying up the volume shorter. Yeah. More shorter

Matt Rudnitsky (42:31):
Things. Like I’ve gone through little lapses of not publishing things regularly. And I think if you’re committed to this as a lifelong skill and thing in your career, like you need to do it more. And when I say you, I’m talking to myself.

Sean Tierney (42:46):
Cool man. Well, so where can I send people out? How do you want people to connect with you on social media? Or is there a site you want them to go to? Yeah. so if you just want to read

Matt Rudnitsky (42:55):
My writing, go to Rudd bits.com R U D B I T s.com. If you’re interested in working with me on book stuff, go to Platypus. Books.Com. and then if you want to check out my book on writing and writing books and whatnot I give the free copy to anyone that goes to Platypus. Books.Com/. Nomad. It should work. We’ll have

Sean Tierney (43:19):
Checked and it works, but it should work. All right. All right, free book. Matt man, as always, it’s a pleasure catching up. Thank you for being a guest on the show and best of luck in all the writing endeavors and whatever else you’re working on these days. All right. Thank you Sean. I appreciate it and thanks everyone for listening. Cheers.

Sean Tierney (00:02:17):
All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Sean Tierney, and I am here today with Yanir Calisar. Yanir is an entrepreneur and experienced marketing technology technologist with a track record of success. He’s worked at four different companies that went through acquisitions in Sitara acquired by Marketo, then Marketo acquired by Vista ventures, which was then required by Adobe. He also worked at op Trinsic, later acquired by Gainsight. You’re near is founder of a company called overstack IO, which has run for the last three years and as of a year ago, also a new company called Whatslly. You’re near as skilled in marketing automation and CRM, account based marketing analytics, and the customer journey has an MBA and big data and AI and focuses primarily on marketing and product management. Welcome. Yanir. Yeah. Hi Sean. Great to be here in Koh Tau with you today. Great day over here. It is a great day. And I’m going to, I’ll let you kind of paint the picture of where we’re at. I mean, so this is, how would you describe this paradise?

Yanir Calisar (00:03:15):
I think, yeah. Paradise is this is the right the right ward. I think a, it’s great being here. The weather is awesome. I just finished my first first time diving course. So it was very interesting and it’s, there are great sites over here and Koh Tau you just did a night dive last night. Last night. Yeah. It was a bit scary at the beginning, but we survived. We survived to tell the story. But definitely it, cause that was one of the awesomest places I’ve been to.

Sean Tierney (00:03:44):
I 100% agree with you. I just got my advanced as well two weeks ago. I think there’s probably no better place to, to knock it out. It’s definitely cheaper than other spots I’ve been to for sure. For sure.

Yanir Calisar (00:03:55):
And Thailand in general is awesome. I love my time over here my second time. So I guess the third time would be even Baird there. So it’s getting better and better.

Sean Tierney (00:04:06):
Okay, cool. Well, just some context for our listeners on how we met. So we both work at a workspace down the Hill here. And I think just one day I overheard you on the phone, it sounded like a, a product pitch and the stuff you were talking about, I said, I got to talk to this guy. He’s doing all the same stuff that I’m involved with it.

Yanir Calisar (00:04:23):
Yeah. It was actually a, a conference, a meeting like a, there were a hundred people on the other side of the video conferencing. And I was pitching my new solution, Watson it was an accelerator sponsored by very big companies in Europe and they just asked me to attend like physically, but then I told them, Oh, I can’t because I’m currently not in Israel. The, the funny thing is that they didn’t ask me where I’m at, so I survived that because if I would tell them where I’m at, it was a bit difficult to explain. But yeah, for sure. Cool. Dow great place highly recommended to visit here if your digital nomads and traveling around.

Sean Tierney (00:05:12):
Yeah. Cool. And also just preface in a heads up here, if you hear some background noise, we’ve got motorcycles that are me going by. It’s just this, it is what it is. It’s Thailand. So we’ll do our best. So what is, what’s like, can you just describe what that product is? Yeah, sure. So

Yanir Calisar (00:05:29):
The I think this is the most interesting product I’ve been working on for the past 10 years. Basically a year ago I identified the problem that today’s companies are communicating like they do at boffin behind to make customers happy from the service that they’re getting and then, and doing improve customer experience of course. And then customers today want, wants to use Watson for all communication that they’re having with anyone. On the other hand com customers are unable to, to communicate with customers over Watson because it’s a closed a messaging app. Like you cannot integrate it with almost anything. So then I realized that there is a way to integrate it with Salesforce where the CRM of Salesforce and this is basically the most popular CRM in the world. So once I correct this this way, then I started developing the product.

Yanir Calisar (00:06:37):
It took me 48 hours to get to the first POC of the product and within five days I got my first customer for that. So basically the neighbors customer facing agents in the companies to talk with customers the same way they’re already doing today over WhatsApp, but then just sync and copy the checks that they are having into Salesforce automatically. Then also while they’re chatting with the customers, see old and knowing information about the customer, for example job title, email address whatever they want, whatever known information they have about this customer. And so this allows someone to not even change their habits of how they communicate just to continue using WhatsApp and that get all the benefits of basically using like one of these chat clients. Exactly, exactly. And for, from the customer perspective, it’s amazing because the experience is much better.

Yanir Calisar (00:07:32):
They get better service because their agents know them better and they are using the messaging app that they want. They like most from the company’s perspective, it’s a game changer because now managers, like sales managers customer service managers are able to gain visibility of these interactions that then T today they didn’t know what’s going on there and in the future where a appending to expand our capabilities and also provide sentiment analysis and more deeper analytics about these interactions. So, yeah. Yeah. And I think this is what, and what I overheard your conversation, this is what grabbed me is because in my role at Pagely, I’ve been involved in exploring alternate mediums of communication. And we’ve gone through a number of chatbots between old arc and drift and inner column and some of these systems that you use to chat with your, your people on your website.

Yanir Calisar (00:08:30):
But in addition to that, also, you know, getting out of the email inbox. So what can we, you know, if email starts failing and they’re not responding to it, can we get them through LinkedIn? Can we get them through Twitter or Quora or however, what other handles we have to be able to go and approach that and message that person. So this is fascinating to me that you’re able to marry this and make it a seamless experience for, for the customer. And actually you mentioned chat bots and chat bots, like Watson doesn’t replace chatbots because if, for example, you are a bank and most of your customers just contacting you in like by phone or by your chat, your web chat or something. So in most cases they will ask common questions like, ah, your business hours is your nearest location and stuff like that.

Yanir Calisar (00:09:14):
And this is great use case for using chat bots, right? Just giving the same answer. But let’s say my insurance agents or like the telecom, the company and the telecom company I working on for my business, I expect my person agents to give me the answers that they need. And in this case, even without, what’s the, I’m talking to my agent directly over Watson. So like we’re not replacing these parties. We’ll continue the same as it used to be, but now it would just enabling companies to do it in a much smarter way.

Sean Tierney (00:09:54):
Well, and imagine another benefit, cause you could just connect your agent directly with the person and then now you’re having like all these one off WhatsApp conversations, but then it’s not routing through the company. So then a, they don’t have like transparency and analytics and like you said, sentiment analysis and all these benefits you get by routing it through the company.

Yanir Calisar (00:10:11):
Exactly. So I imagine that’s going to be like a really important thing. Yeah. And actually a, we’re seeing great success so far where we’re the working with the few thousands of companies around the world in 17 countries. And yeah, we’re expecting to grow very, very fast. Where now we recently became approved Salesforce app exchange partners. So soon we’ll be in there a ups store. And yeah, great. Great. Things are going on these days.

Sean Tierney (00:10:41):
I know, I think you were doing the contract for that when I was doing a contract for a very large one of our clients as well. And we were both kind of commiserating on these contracts. Can you talk about, because I think one of the most fascinating things from our conversation thus far before this was how you rapidly prototype, you know, you come up with the POC, the proof of concept in 48 hours, setting yourself very hardcore time constraints to be able to do that in the businesses. And you’ve made many businesses, a lot of these little micro niche products. Can you just talk about your approach there and how you’ve, how you do that?

Yanir Calisar (00:11:15):
So you call it I liked the name. You gave it a micro-niche. So let, let me just go back a little bit in time. So you mentioned the, the companies I worked worked for and I had when I started my career 10, 11 years ago. So I, I just to add like some background, some technical background. I used to build websites when I was in high school. And then when I started, when I joined the insight, Tara was the first employee over there. I joined the two co-founder, Mickey alone and Mike Taylor. And they told me, okay, we’re doing marketing technology. We’re developing a web personalization platform for B to B companies. And it was, it sounded like unclear to me. I didn’t know what it means, but then Mike, Mike tell him, told me, don’t worry, I will teach you everything you need to know.

Yanir Calisar (00:12:11):
We’re just, you do sales marketing, I’ll onboard you to this space. And I think that they’ll preach unity of working in a small starter from, from day one to the point where it got the choir. I think it’s a great experience. And then helped me to identify challenges and pain points that companies are having and understand the process of how to combine it out to add it into the product. So many times that pen that I went to the engineering team and told them, look, this customer and this is a very important customer. You wants the product to do also this, these things. And then like seeing how their brainstorming about how to do something like that, how they’re developing it and now they’re deploying it and then go back to the customer and explaining how we solved is pinpoint.

Yanir Calisar (00:13:11):
It was very, very interesting to see and he taught me how to out to think that way. So I don’t think you must work for Stata, but this is like even a part time work in a small startup, early stage startup gives you this kind of experience. And after, afterwards when we joined the Marquetto in 2014, it was, I suddenly saw that the same processes that happened at insight Tara also happened in big companies. Like we were 1500 people back then in Marketo. And it also had the same processes. But this time it took longer. And then I realized that even that there is some opportunity over here because big companies when on the gets great ideas from customers, it might take them sometimes six months, sometimes a year and a half. And sometimes they, it will never happen until they will get to a new feature or a new product or a new part of existing product.

Yanir Calisar (00:14:20):
So I realized there is a huge opportunity here because if you be like small company that did just develops these small features, these micro products I think this is a game changer. Yeah. And this is, this is our why what led me to think like any creative way of, okay, let’s identify more and more and more pain points that companies are trying to are facing with and let’s build these micro products and let’s do it quickly. Yeah. Because then like, even I beats larger company than, than your company cannot compete with you. So you happen to be in these companies. So you’re basically in the

Sean Tierney (00:15:12):
Firefight and like, you know, getting bombarded with a lot of feedback and you had a lot of, a source of a lot of ideas that were coming at you. I guess what I am curious about is how do you sleuth out what those problems are? You know, it seems like a, typically what happens is someone gets an idea in their head and they go and build it and they haven’t validated demand and they haven’t proven that th th a lot of people want this and they’re very motivated to pay for it. Do you have any advice for people in that situation like, that are not in a role where they’re exposed to all these challenges and they can kind of start to make patterns out of it? Yeah.

Yanir Calisar (00:15:44):
So I have three parts for the answer. So first parts, and this is something that I’ve been doing for the past 15 years I always tried to open myself to many spaces. So for example, a CRM and a sales operation solutions, and then marketing. So analytics and content and the automation platforms and BI war, like spaces. And like tools like intake, Chromat and Zapier. And then also I added the technological part. So learn how to develop Java and JavaScript and Python and CS, everything I could and no GS. And then slowly I, I started go going more to the data parts. So because I realized that CRM and marketing and automation and database, and so I started learning some data model modeling. For example I tried to play with sentiment analysis.

Yanir Calisar (00:16:52):
I tried to play with video analysis and like I just played around every time I had like crazy idea. I told him, I said, let’s just play around with it like for a day or two. And then you get more and more experiencing that. And every time I was reading a lot about new startups. I was I figured that most of the startups are not inventing something completely new out of the blue. They’re just taking one solution from one space, for example, or from customers’ success. And then just converting it funds, forming it into marketing or from marketing into sales. For example. We talked about account based marketing. So I think that the Columbus marketing, and I had the, an interesting conversation about it a week ago also with someone that is coming from the sales.

Yanir Calisar (00:17:51):
Can you just define that term for the people who don’t know what it is? I know what it is. So account based marketing means that so it will, it will be easier to say where it started. So a long time ago, and we were talking about like eight to 10 years ago sales teams and marketing teams weren’t very good friends because marketing used to work very, very hard to generate leads that they taught would be amazing. And then every quarter or every six months, they would come to the salespeople, tell them, here we’ve got two great leads, but the sales team the warrant, so happy with these leads because these are not the leads that they wanted to get. And then slowly what happened, the marketing team teams got very, very angry about it.

Yanir Calisar (00:18:44):
Then they told them, okay, so stop everything you gonna tell us which companies you want us to bring you? And then they said, okay, no problem. We have this list ready, every, every quote that we have it ready over here. We have like hundred companies that were trying to chase after this is the list. Now get us these leads. And then the marketing teams said, okay, they took the list and they started to look for solutions that will help them get leads from these companies. So I’m, I’m going back to, he say Tara, I think say Tara for example, we identified that we are very, very, the sales team identified that we’re very, very successful with specifically with Marquetto customers. So it was from that moment on, it was very easy. We just got the list of Marketo customers and we started targeting them in any way we could, emails, social media, even events.

Yanir Calisar (00:19:41):
We started going to the market, to annual events. It was very, very easy. And then suddenly we grow. And we grew very, very fast. Another segment, for example, that we had a account-based market, account-based segment that we had is like our competitors customers. So we said, okay, like they have annual subscription. So how did you get the customer list of your competitors anywhere? Any way we could. So for example, we, we searched on the website, we saw a list of 50 customers. We said, okay, if these 50 customers, we’re trying to get them another metal. Dubai by the way is to because like the T, the type of solution that we’ve developed requires a JavaScript on the website and our tools like built with and data. Nice. And that enables you to track to, to get the list of all the websites that have these kinds of pixel installed.

Yanir Calisar (00:20:41):
So we just got these lists and we started chasing them. Sometimes it was a one by one. And then we started using our own technology. So, for example, if someone from company X, which is our competitors, a customer is visiting our website we will tell them, check out our competitors a a table like a re read. I’ll wear different though. I’ll wear a better than what you’re using now. And even more advanced than that we, because we knew exactly at what dates they implemented the pixel on the website. So we estimated that there is a year until they will need to renew. So three months before, before that date we were just contacting them directly and telling them, you are about to renew your contract, check us, check out our solution before you’re doing it. Nice. And we actually worked, we were actually managed to get crazy deals that way. Yeah. so and this was in Beck in 2012. We didn’t even know that it’s called account based marketing because account based marketing wasn’t a, I real name. My real thing back then.

Sean Tierney (00:22:01):
I mean to me a company’s marketing is just starting with the end in mind. It’s, it’s like, like you said, figure out the list of the people that you want to go get. And rather than just sit here and throw off a bunch of things and hope that you get people coming through SEO and what Ryan pray spray and pray, you’re basically starting with the end in mind. Say, look, this is the Alexa list of the top hundred customers with these criteria are built with their data and eyes or whatever you, whatever source you want to use. And then you’re saying, how do we go hunt these people? How do we go, you know, what are the types of activities that will make those folks come to us? Or they will allow us to get access to them?

Yanir Calisar (00:22:34):
Yeah. And the fun thing that this approach actually works, it actually works. So today for my business, I’m doing it still manually. I’m not like I’m doing it with some hacks that I built. So for example, I know how to identify Salesforce customers and I know how to identify their communicating with customers over WhatsApp. And then I have this list of thousands of companies that I’m conducting them

Sean Tierney (00:23:04):
[Inaudible] directly. And are you using an automated outreach to do that or are you like one by one cold calling? How are you doing that? Yes, so

Yanir Calisar (00:23:11):
I’m we tried doing cold calling. The thing is that I know that to make it a worth it, so we need to contact like the larger teams, the larger companies and then it’s a bit more difficult doing this. But we have different methods. I can tell you that because we’re very lean yet. So most cases instead of just using big and very pricey, a solution where I’m just, you know, writing a few lines of codes and just ultimating it I’m a lot integral math and I’m also their partner. And I think integral Mata is a great solution. I’m just automating everything. What do you, what do you, let me ask you this, what do you like about Integra mat better than Zapier? Cause I’m a huge Zapier fan, but I’m very interested always in seeing what else is.

Yanir Calisar (00:24:03):
First of all, I think they’re a user interfaces much more friendly. It’s much easier to start with integral maths rather than a Zapier. I think it’s the look and feel. Betsy, I tried, I tried like, because I’m a technical person so I dance too. So if it’s a very technical product and you need to code and stuff, so okay, it’s fine. But if it shouldn’t be a technical product, so it needs to be super, super easy to operate. Like in a click, click of a button, you have everything set up. So like two, two par, two sides here. And I think that Zapier is Zapier folds in between. So it’s a bit technical, but it should be easy to operate. So it somewhere it’s, for example, I don’t like WordPress. I am sorry saying to say that you realize Pagely is what a WordPress host.

Yanir Calisar (00:25:00):
Yeah, I’m sorry. I like that are great solutions that work on a WordPress, but like just walking with the base basic UI. I don’t know. I personally don’t, don’t really like it. For example, my website overstock, I, Oh, I started building it with WordPress, but then I just realized, okay, I can do it with HTML and one day and that’s it. I just want to give a, go back to your original question. So I think that like combining a few spaces and then I think that’s just I voted the ward PRIs, so I learned in the past three years because I’m running as a one man show. And I have like teams all around the world. So I learned how to outsource my work. Whatever I can do or I, I can let someone else do, I’m just doing it.

Yanir Calisar (00:26:02):
Even if it costs, if it’s a bit pricey, but it’s worth it because like, it will take me two weeks to do it, but on the other hand, I can let it to someone that will do it’s two days and I’ll do more important stuff. So ward person for example, I’m just outsource it, let it someone else to do it, and I’m just fixing whatever it needs later on. Cool. Cool. So does this the WhatsApp the product, or is this, sorry, what’s Lee? Is the name of it just what’s least sustain you? Or is this kind of the big bet and you have other kind of bread and butter stuff that sustains you? Like how do you pay your way? Yes. So so basically this is the like the more sustainable company today because it’s a more mature, obviously watch.

Yanir Calisar (00:26:53):
They’re still growing. And I’m spending most of that nighttime on Watson, like 95% of my time. I just, I’ll say a few words about overstock. So the idea of overstock was exactly what I described earlier because I realized that there are many a small but very painful problems that companies are facing with specifically marketing teams are facing with these days. So I realized that if I am able to identify these painful, they S these pain points develop lean products in a very short period of time and sell them quickly in a very foldable price. So this is very interesting and do it as a one man show so I can be very, very foldable. So then I started developing more and more products. These days I have 15 products that are running. Most of these products don’t even have a UI, so these are just processes that run on a daily or weekly basis.

Yanir Calisar (00:28:04):
And I’m just sending them to companies to solve that problem. And just the process that I’m doing when I’m developing new products is in most of the cases customer is approach to me. So I work with many partners and many great companies, great customers that they have and they’re very innovative. They’re just, they have a lot. They always try new things. They always try to get better in what they do. And when you are acting like that, you will always find challenges and problems in your daily work. And whenever. And I always tell them, whenever you’re doing something twice, let me know. And every conversation, every call that I have with them, I’m in some point of the call and asking them, okay, what doesn’t work, what, what is broken, what needs to be fixed. And then this is a great approach.

Yanir Calisar (00:29:00):
And I think that’s the second thing that I would say besides like getting to know many spaces besides your specific space is to always talk to people and get a and hear what’s, what’s, what’s bothering them in their daily work. Because this is a great, first of all, it’s a great position to be at the place where you’re getting all the problems and then this is a great way to validate your products, the things that you are working on because if you just wake up and say, okay, let’s develop, I dunno something, some app for dogs. So this is nice. You talked about it. It’s okay cause you have like 10 dogs. But if you see one problem that comes from the customer and then you, the next question should be, how much are you willing to pay to solve this problem?

Yanir Calisar (00:29:53):
And I’m asking that because there are friends of mine and we’re ever good relationship, but they sometimes they say, okay, I will pay like thousand dollars per month to set to solve this problem. And then I’m saying, okay, this is, this is an opportunity. This is interesting. A song. Can you just mention what is an example problem? We were talking before over. Yeah. so I had a one customer asking me like a two and a half years ago. He told me like, we’re trying to build a data Lake for the marketing organization. And then just EV, all the information, all the data from all our platforms in this data Lake. And later on connect this data Lake, this data warehouse connected to some BI tool. In their case it was Tableau and, but the one thing that we cannot connect is Marquetto.

Yanir Calisar (00:30:47):
So what can you do to help us? And then I realized, okay, there is an opportunity because this is a common problem, a common challenge that probably many companies trying to solve. And then I just told them, okay, let’s do a project. We’ll develop beats. Both of us will have the IEP for this development. And we can do whatever we want. If you want to make the product go ahead, I will go and make it the product. And this was, this became one of my most successful products. And then I already cologne this product, this project for a few other companies. Because this is a really painful thing. It’s a problem. You cannot connect one of your marketing stack into your data Lake. And then another problem that I guess most of the marketers on the audience will, will our, our aware of is attribution marketing attribution.

Yanir Calisar (00:31:46):
So we all I’m putting a lot of efforts in tagging our links with UTM parameters and like tracking them on a, on Google analytics. This is great, but in B2B where it takes like sometimes even a year for a deal to be closed so people don’t have only one touchpoint. They have multiple touch points. Sometimes it’s hundreds of touch points and you want to be able to track everything. So you can go and buy a solution for $100,000 per year. That’s like captures these UTMs. But I have a solution that does that in a much more affordable way. And you can have all the data, like I don’t have a platform and like dashboards and reports and stuff, you will just get the CSV file that shows you all the data. And then in big companies, it’s great. This is exactly what they want. They want the role data to upload it to their very expensive BI platform. So this is a solution of mine is called the touchpoints.

Sean Tierney (00:32:51):
Multitouch attribution. Southern your website. Yeah. So this is a perfect example though, where unless you have the insight from having talked to a number of people and realizing all they want is a CSV. They just want the raw data. You don’t need to go build some complex UI to expose this and dashboards and whatnot, like you said, cause that’s not even really what they want. So that type of insight though only comes through having a lot of those conversations and really getting to understand like what they want out of it. And the other thing like, just to unpack a lot of what you said, cause there’s a couple of interesting things in there I think is that you know, a lot of times people I think start dreaming up an app and they can only think in terms of, well, what can I build that has an interface and yada yada.

Sean Tierney (00:33:32):
You know, like that’s, that’s their thought of like I got to build an app. When you said there is no UI for a lot of the products that you made, it’s just a, it’s a problem that you’re solving in the background. Right. And those likely is a lot more painful to these companies when it’s something like, you know, is important is what you’re calling the data Lake. What are, yeah, what I would call it data warehouse. You know, that is like the core, you know, what drives business intelligence for a company and making sure that data is accurate. That’s a hugely, you know, painful problem for them. And so you can, yeah, I just think it’s fascinating that people get seduced by the idea of what they can see when these little silent background micro products are actually probably you can charge a lot more for them.

Yanir Calisar (00:34:54):
Yeah, that’s right. Then actually like the problem that I’m seeing with many startups is that like in order, like once you have a nice idea, then you need like to hire developers, you need to hire marketing themes, you need to hire sales people and then your product. You cannot sell your product and affordable prices anymore because it doesn’t worth it. So like you, you must charge like 10 times more than what you would do if it was very a lean product, a micro product. And then I think that’s, and then you add like thousands of features and you becoming like these big vendors. So I think that’s the trick is to be focused on the one thing that you are trying to solve. And the one problem that is the most painful problem for the companies that you are are trying to set to sell to.

Yanir Calisar (00:35:53):
And I think that like, for example, if you go back to the attribution part the most, the difficult part here is that most cases it’s like the solutions are like one size fits all. You build some attribution model and then you put it in the platform and then all your customers need to follow the model that you’ve designed. But in most cases, it’s not like this, every company has a different way that they’re looking at the attribution. So I think that this is what’s so genius in the in touch points because I’m just giving you the, the data, just do whatever you want with it. Yeah. and I’m not spending out of money and time on developing these graphs and dashboards. And I want to mention one idea that I really believe in. So today there are like gazillions of solutions in the marketing space and like it’s very difficult to be different from other solutions.

Yanir Calisar (00:36:56):
And I’m, I’m hearing about like so many new and very innovative solutions for marketeers. And I think that today the problem is that most of the solutions are in between two, two parts of this this, this industry. So one part is a very measurable solutions and these are solutions that will always be successful. For example, Google AdWords. So in Google ad words or Facebook ads you know how much money you put every month and you know how much money you make out of it. And it’s precise. Like you can precisely measure, measure the success of these solutions and this, these solutions, like as I see them, we’ll leave it for ever. Okay. It’s very easy to use them to justify them internally. The other side of this map is solutions that are kind of utility tools. So for example, no one pays or most of the people are not paying for Google analytics.

Yanir Calisar (00:38:03):
But if you will wake up in market tier and tell them you don’t have Google analytics anymore or just pay thousand dollars, so it will pay $1,000. And, but you must have Google analytics, you must have it once you install it, you can never take it out. People like, I know marketeers that will rather like prefer to cut their, their leg or something and not get rid of Google analytics. And it’s the same like Gmail or WhatsApp, I don’t know. These are our Salesforce like companies. If they lose Salesforce one day, the company can disappear. And I think, so this is the other side of the map. So measurable and utility. And I think that’s all the companies, all the solutions that are in between that are not very clear like where they are at. I think this will be very challenging for them to succeed over time.

Yanir Calisar (00:39:00):
Because first of all, there are too many companies in this gap. And second of all, it’s very, very difficult to justify it internally and to be able to pay for it. And like in the measure measurable part, the measurable side of the map. I think the big players like have most of the markets Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and then the utility tools. This is where you want to be like, be like small smarts, automated solutions and find good niche over there. So if you find good niche in this side you can build something and something that is very easy to explain and to see the added value, like that value is like to be able to help your end user to do his daily work better. That’s it. Google analytics, I must have it because it helps me do my work, like show results, show a reports and graphs. So this is the trick and find niche over there.

Sean Tierney (00:40:10):
So yeah. Okay. So I mean, so your process, it sounds like you, you basically have some conversations. You get some signal there from people that you talk to, you, you recognize what you think could be a problem. You ask them like, how much would you actually pay for this? And then very soon thereafter, create a quick prototype in 48 hours time box it and then actually go and try to immediately sell it to those folks who said, yeah, I’d pay you $1,000 a month for this. Yeah. Brilliant. Love it. So you weren’t clot, like you’re not trained in computer science, you just picked up Java script and my SQL and Java and all these languages on your own or how,

Yanir Calisar (00:40:45):
Yeah, so I’m the fellowshipping. I’m doing tech for the past 20 years. So now, since I was 14 years old and I did work for when I worked at Trinsic, I was part of the engineering team. And also in Marquetto, I worked a lot on the tech part. Yeah, don’t have any like official, you know I didn’t graduate computer science or something, but yeah, I, I’m doing it a lot and most of my very technological work is done by technical teams around the world that I hire. And I do have on Watson and Watson. I have six advisors. Great. I, half of them are on the growth side and the half on the product and the tech side. So they’re like doing hands on hands on work and they’re helping me with development of the product.

Sean Tierney (00:41:46):
Nice. Yeah, I mean, I think the average person, it’s a very unique background that you have to be able to both been exposed to all the business challenges, but also have the programming experience and the ability to implement on your own. And like you said, you are, you know, development and then sales and then support and you basically run the full gamut. So you kind of see the whole spectrum. You’re able to stay lean and mean just yourself, which is a really powerful thing. The average person, I think, I mean, do, can anyone learn to code?

Yanir Calisar (00:42:18):
So I have two parts. So first thing so first thing you don’t need to code if you’re not talented in life, if you don’t want to. I have, for example, a good friend of mine and he’s a partner of mine as well. That has a lot of great ideas of solutions that can be built. And whenever he has an idea, he just gets, he hires a team over a Fiverr or Upwork to develop it for him. So I, his most popular product was I think 10 years ago, so a, like we talked about UTM parameters and UTM tagging. So he thought to myself, why do I need to do it manually every time? And then he just gets a team in Ukraine to develop a Chrome extension that automatically like shows you some UI that’s just you, you put in the UTM source, UTM medium, et cetera.

Yanir Calisar (00:43:23):
And then it generates the link that you can use in your posts. So I, a few days after the, they went live with it, he tweeted Hey Google did you, did you saw my new a UTM tagging to, and surprisingly Google retreated them. And in a matter of hours they got like tens of thousands of downloads for this Chrome extension. So this is a great example because the guy doesn’t have any technical skills, but he managed to do like nice money out of it. So this is one, one part. So the other side although I am, I’m technical and I always think about how you can automate that stuff with code. I think that it doesn’t matter if you have the technical skills or not. You can, the thing is that you need to combine two spaces, two walls into a niche and you need to find the pain that you can solve in a easy way.

Yanir Calisar (00:44:32):
So I specifically, I never recommend to go and do like services because services, most cases can not like you. It’s very hard to scale them up. But like for example, I’ll give you a, actually this was an example that I did recommend a to do a services company. So I knew a girl in Israel that is working for a, it cannot be a consulting fear or it’s a consulting fear that is specializing in cannabis. So I asked her how many companies in Israel are there? And Israel is like a leader in cannabis, a world leader in cannabis and medical cannabis production. So she told me, yeah, today there are not many. So I told them, I told her, so why aren’t you like doing it freelance as a freelancer? Because like the big companies will pay through this big fear, but the smaller companies are not, are unable to pay a lot of money to get these kinds of consulting. So she told me, yeah, this is actually makes a lot of sense. So again, this is not with technology, but I think like getting these, these niche, this niche and just do this due diligence and see if like I told her, okay, now go and check how many companies, how many smaller cannabis companies are there in Israel and what they do today. So these days she’s talking this kind of a business in Israel. Yeah. So

Sean Tierney (00:46:13):
I think what’s interesting is like, so it’s funny, ironically I had a similar challenge in terms of attribution with UTM parameters. And by the way, UTM for the people listening is, I think it, it’s urgent. Something, but it’s basically, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s basically a way to tracking module or something like that. Yeah. It’s, it’s the way that Google knows where someone came from. So if you can control the links that are coming into your site, you can specify these things like source and campaign and medium and whatnot. And then that allows you then to know what’s working. It’d be able to attribute and say, okay, like I’m spending money on social media or radio spots or whatever it is, and you can start to identify what’s paying off. So anyways, I had a similar challenge myself using gravity forms, which is a WordPress plugin.

Sean Tierney (00:46:59):
And it’s like, I just want to be able to cookie people when they hit the site and know that whenever they fill out a form, it’s going to grab their UTM parameters and submit that and store it with the lead and nothing like this existed. So same thing. Like I used to be a developer. I couldn’t write a line of code today to save my life, but I hired someone on Upwork, you know, 50 bucks, guy at Egypt built this plugin and I just opened sourced it, put it up there and I still to this day get the little Camtasia. You’re, you’re, your, your

Sean Tierney (00:47:30):
Video has been viewed too many times. It’s going to shut down now because it’s the little tutorial that I made on that thing that shows how it works. So I know that it’s getting a lot of usage and traffic and whatnot on get hub because it solves a problem that everyone else had. So I think Upwork and you know, for the, in the interest of helping people who are listening who aren’t technical and her trying to think, well, I’ve got this idea, how do I solve it? So hiring people on Upwork is certainly one way to outsource it. Like you said. I, I would say no code is blowing me away right now. I don’t know if you’ve played with it yet. Like what, what’s your experience with [inaudible]?

Yanir Calisar (00:48:03):
Ah, just a little bit, but I think, I think the day idea, the approach of like,

Yanir Calisar (00:48:13):
Not just before, before, like hiring like outsourcing your ideas again, just do a quick due diligence. I’m calling, I have a great, I woke up with a great idea. I’m just calling someone in this market and asking him about like, how much you will pay, not just about if it’s a cool idea or not. Are you willing to pay for it? And I’m usually starting my conversation. I must tell you about the new product that I’ve developed because like, I want to make it more a serious, like, so do you, do you need something like that? You want to see a demo? And then if I book a demo, like, okay, so sometimes as I said, it’s like very simple to develop. It’s like it takes a few days. I can already come up with a few slides and talk about the solution before I’m spending the money and the time and the efforts of developing the solution, just running a POC, like a dry POC without, before spending the time. Regarding no-code. Yeah. Again, it just

Yanir Calisar (00:49:20):
A great way to get

Yanir Calisar (00:49:24):
To stand in this 48 hours rule that I have of like getting to at first POC working POC in 48 minutes at 48 hours.

Yanir Calisar (00:49:36):
Mmm Mmm.

Yanir Calisar (00:49:36):
Before, before like

Yanir Calisar (00:49:39):
Diving into this

Sean Tierney (00:49:41):
Development. Yeah. I mean, the ultimate POC lean wise is mockups. Some screens you can even use a tool like envision, link them together, make a little clickable app that people can then use and try to sell that before you even have it. I mean, that’s the, that’s the leanest possible way to do this. I’m just blown away like in the last week, in seven days using a no-code tool. I did some research in this space and tinkered a bit. And then Tony, who was a mutual friend at the workspace turned me on to this thing called a [inaudible]. In the last seven days, I built the backend platform that I imagined for this charity makeover project that we’re doing. And it’s entirely custom. It’s entirely what we need. It, it’ll, it enables anyone to bring this whole event, you know, charity sponsorship, volunteer recruitment thing and do it their city, this thing, I just literally without a line of code, built it in seven days in my spare time while still working for Pagely. Like it is mind blowing what these no-code tools can do. And, and I just like, to me it’s the use of a developer is not best spent writing crud operations. The developer should be there to solve those really, you know, interesting edge case challenges that are hard and that are like the true meat of the app. But like just the UI and the nonsense scaffolding that you have to deal with at this point I think is completely solvable through no-code.

Yanir Calisar (00:51:01):
And I want to extend to that. So BOC is not something that you or did you only need to do at the beginning of a product that you were working on? So if I like when I started Watson, so the POC took me 48 hours. It was a very, very, very lean product. It has only like, I think 1% of what it has today. And I was able to sell it as ease like four days after I launched it for the first customer. But then the first customer that I had was amazing. It was an Israeli based Israel based company, small one, but very, very advanced and sophisticated. And they are using a lot of solutions and they are very proactive. Like they, we used to have a KOL almost on a daily basis. And they came up to me every time with great ideas telling me like, look, I have one agent, does that any, any, any chance you can add it somehow to the product?

Yanir Calisar (00:52:07):
And I said, yes. Okay, this is great. Like this does the POC for me. They are willing to pay for something for this specific feature. So today, like 95% of the product is based on customer inputs. And so today the Q is very, very long already. But yeah, for sure. I think like continuous POC like keep doing this small PLCs along the way. And this is how, like at the beginning I just thought Watson will be just like a small products that I can sell. I don’t know for $1 or $2 per user per seat, but then I realized that this can be a very, very robust products with many features but very you know, specific ones that are based on customer inputs, exactly what the customer wants. How do you go about pricing a higher dollar service like this?

Yanir Calisar (00:53:06):
How do you quantify how big the problem is to the customer? That they’re willing to pay you 1000 bucks a month instead of one or $2 a month? So B, because I said like my, most of my products are lean, so I usually like trying to I see what the competitors are or other solutions in the market and then like I’m trying to price it like 50% and, and less to like be able to grow Fest. There is not like, there are no real rules about that. And I think like three years ago when I started my first business over stuck IO. So I, I talked to a good friend of mine, guy and I, he was doing like a, you had an agency already for 10 years. And I asked them, how do you price your services? How do you decide how much to charge from each company?

Yanir Calisar (00:54:02):
So he told me like you just need to try. I mean, he told me in a boat one time that he asked for a 2000 to $100,000 for four project and they never heard back from the customer. So it doesn’t mean Hey, sometimes they will just say, okay and that’s great. Sometimes you will lose the customer. So I really believe in like starting with the range saying like where you are planning to, to, to get to. And then this is something that I’ve learned while I was doing sales

Yanir Calisar (00:54:45):
Like face to face sales like long time ago. And I learned that it doesn’t matter the product. It is what matters is how you wrap it. And if you make, it looks like it worth a lot of money and, or not a lot, but it’s worth them, the mind that you ask for. So companies will pay for it. I never charge very, very low prices because I don’t want like everyone to use it because then it will make me a lot of noise, a big rum noise. But, so I stayed at like keep it.

Yanir Calisar (00:55:21):
Mmm Mmm.

Yanir Calisar (00:55:24):
In the good range of prices. And are you so you’re able to support all this is a one man show you’re able to still make it all work and do that be doing development on a new product and supporting old products and like making all that work as one person? So I do have a small team of people that provide more support, like a backup. Because my products are zero touch, I’m always thinking about zero touch and or no touch our solutions. So yes but they have a big round backup team. And as I said, I don’t have UI for most of my platforms, so if a problem, a cure or something so it needs to just be fixed down in the background. The customer is a it seamless for the customer. If there is a problem, like a sink doesn’t work properly or I want to add something to the sink, like the customer doesn’t know about it. And it’s great because these are marketing people. They don’t want to touch technology. They have too many products and solutions that the trying to operate the same time. Of course if there is a problem or something, so I let them know, but most days is the product just running if they need some small tweaks that just being done in the background. Cool. Cool.

Sean Tierney (00:56:46):
All right, well we’ve been talking a lot about the guts of entrepreneurship and whatnot. I’m going to change gears here. You are from Tel Aviv, Israel, yes. Born and raised or what?

Yanir Calisar (00:56:56):
No. I was born in Mexico city. Okay. And after six months I we moved back to Israel. I’m Israeli, like my parents just been there for a few years. And yeah, now for the past seven years, I’m living in Tel Aviv. Recently I just left the center of the city. I needed some more quiet that it was in a bit noisy a city. So I needed that.

Sean Tierney (00:57:23):
I’ve never been, it’s very high. I’m very interested to visit Israel. Great time there. She knew [inaudible] scene over there. So that’s why I was gonna ask you is like, I’ve heard that the scene, the entrepreneurial scene in Tel Aviv is actually incredible and you guys have like a very strong investment community around it and it’s just very supportive. Can you speak about that at all? Yeah, sure.

Yanir Calisar (00:57:43):
So first of all seminar through a tau hub over here I’m working in a place called [inaudible] hub. So it’s a small coworking space over there close to where I live. And we have great community over there. Great facilities. And besides that, I think like there are a few dozens of coworking spaces instead of is relatively small city. So it’s very easy to find like a great place to work at. Besides that, they’re like accelerators. They are I think 15 places like we work and similar companies that opened the coworking spaces, which are bit more expensive, but the war because of the networking, especially if you are [inaudible] and, or you’re working by yourself. So I, it’s great. I used to work in one of the, we work spaces over there instead of here.

Yanir Calisar (00:58:46):
Besides that, I think that’s one of the most powerful things that we have in Israel. It’s a meet up scene and like there are always great meetups around, always great meetups in any, any, any topic that you can think of. So I specifically have a meetup for marketing people from marketing like more senior marketing, Mark and managers. I, it’s called the CMO confessions Tel Aviv. And like every few months are running like events in one of the local bars. We have great marketing people coming there. We have I think 2000 members in the group. Yeah. And besides that, most of the companies like the, the largest companies and the more like the sexy companies the Israeli companies are based in Delaware. So who are the other units? Ways actually, yeah. Ways. I don’t know where a guy based now we have weeks, we have ways we have Mobileye and then we have the Bula which now joined with Outbrain and yeah, we have great companies over there and

Yanir Calisar (01:00:12):
Hmm.

Yanir Calisar (01:00:13):
They are sponsoring a lot of meetups, so we can go ahead and like to one of these companies and for, for to hear to tend to meet up. Google also has their HQ, like an office over there in the center of the city. And they have the Google, the, the, the Google for startups Campos. And I’m working there every now and then.

Yanir Calisar (01:00:39):
Mmm.

Yanir Calisar (01:00:41):
And that’s it. Like that, the [inaudible], any person that you meet in Israel, like we always like we start the conversation by saying, brother, I’ll, why you like [inaudible] my Cola mania name. So it feels like a small and very a United community. So it’s very fun. And then you start like the next question is where you work at like what you do and then, ah, okay, you know, this guy and I almost worked there, so you must know this person. So it’s very, very fun. And I also, they are slowly starting to be more and more smaller communities in telophase. So for example, in the South there is a neighborhood called [inaudible] Shapiro neighborhood. So they have like, it’s almost cold living. You have like apartments that you can rent from them and then you get a coworking space and you have a GM and they are doing parties and the even ever at restaurants and bars. So if you are a community members, so you get everything almost, feel free. So this is very cool.

Sean Tierney (01:01:52):
Well it seems like one or the other. Yeah, those are all amazing components and I will definitely take you up on that offer. I, like I said, it’s very high on my list. You will get that beer on me and I’ll take you through the best homeless place over there. I am a homeless kind of sewer, so I will absolutely take you up on that. The other component that seems to me from what I understand is like typically when there’s an exit, like the ways folks, when they then become investors, you have this diaspora of, you know, folks who came into money who understand how to build

Yanir Calisar (01:02:20):
A company and who are now then, you know, turning that back in and incubating new founders and you kind of have, you get this nice like cyclical effect going on. Does it have much of that there? Like are the, are the, are the people who came out of exits now then starting to reinvest? Yes. I think besides them, the financial part of it, I think that’s getting like hearing the stories behind it from, you know, first source. Like I think two years ago I attended the meetup where ways the F the one of the co founders at ways was talking and telling the story about how they started. And it was fascinating. It’s, he told, like, he was telling about the fact that when they started, they didn’t have even one person over there that understands that knows how to operate maps because there are no maps in ways like the maps are being generated automatically dynamically by the users.

Yanir Calisar (01:03:22):
And this is very supper and one, one story that I like to to tell that I’ve heard from him. So the challenge that they had there is to know the number of the building if you think about it. So the maps are being generated automatically, but then if you’re trying to navigate to, I dunno these in street and number 55 so how would ways no to direct you to the right building. So then he said that they figure that there are like rules in every country. So we need to read it. For example, one side is a like odd or even or odd the other even. So in Israel for example one side of the suite is odd and the other side is even, so you would say that if the street starts at one and then, and a hundred, so it will be on the right side of the street, somewhere in the middle of the street.

Yanir Calisar (01:04:27):
And in the U S it’s easier because it’s blocks, right? You have a hundred to 200 and then 200 to triangle et cetera. And then in China it was impossible for them because in China, the first building in the street is the oldest one. So it’s a nightmare. So they just passed on that. In China, you cannot navigate to a specific building. I know, I don’t know if they changed it, but this is how it used to be. So again, this is, I think this is much more powerful and this is, it gives it, its inspires you because you hear these small stories and then when you do it by yourself and you’re going through these processes, you use all these experience that you acquired from listening to other entrepreneurs. Yeah. And arguably

Sean Tierney (01:05:18):
That’s more valuable than the cash that they have to invest is just that. [inaudible]

Yanir Calisar (01:05:22):
[Inaudible], You know, how do you even quantify having been through it and, yeah, I mean, of course, like getting a few millions for your startup. It’s a Kickstarter. It’s, it’s great start. I, I never raised like millions for my companies. And I think today I actually read the nautical recently about it. Today, more and more companies are trying to avoid raising mining, trying to run, bootstrap with their company because this is I think more sustainable way of building a company if you are running, if you’re chasing after like fundraising it just takes you off the focus of building a great and a sustainable company. If you’re running after making your customers a hippie gaining more and more customers building great product that actually solves pain painful problems. I think this is a great model of like building a company and this is what I’m trying to do. Yeah.

Sean Tierney (01:06:31):
100%. I, I did a company where we raised three quarters of a million friends and family and angel and then proceeded to go and do the Silicon Valley roadshow, met with 14 venture capitalists. Amazing. Well, it’s, you’re right though. It takes your eye off the ball of keeping your customers happy. And if that doesn’t work, then it doesn’t matter what money you’re raising. Like if you, if you screw that up then and you succeed in raising money, then it’s just basically kind of a, an inevitable that it will fail eventually. So

Yanir Calisar (01:06:58):
Any of the articles that I’ve read they mentioned like Uber and we will work. So these companies raised like tongs of money and then their mother wasn’t holding like water. It was just like, it’s great. We’re in the, we work. Of course they solve like very painful problems, but then building these companies a bit slower and focusing more on the added value to the customers. I think this is, this is, this is what counts. Yeah. Cool.

Sean Tierney (01:07:34):
Well we are just over the hour Mark. So I’ll start winding down here. I do wanna ask you one more question just because I happen to be wearing the shirt today, but I didn’t realize that Krav Maga, that’s a Israeli self-defense system. Do they, I didn’t even know. Yeah, I didn’t realize I was wearing it. And so then we were having the conversation. But so this is something, do you guys learn that? Like I understand like Israeli has mandatory military service. Everyone does the two years in it. Is that something like the whole society learns there or what’s the role of [inaudible]?

Yanir Calisar (01:08:04):
Yeah, we are learning it in the military, in the army in the military service. Yeah, everyone knows that were not very using it and data that they today we were very polite people.

Sean Tierney (01:08:22):
Maybe that’s why it’s so peaceful. Like, I took it for six months in the gym where I trained in Arizona, had a saying on the wall that was just like, so others may walk in peace and it’s like when you, when you have that skill then it’s kind of like there it is a lot more peaceful. And I’m just curious if, I mean, if you find that to be true there,

Yanir Calisar (01:08:41):
Yeah. Wait slots for useful in Israel, but I can tell you that again, every skill that you are having is a, is a great, is a great thing. I can tell you that’s when I had my first my first degree in the South. It was like my apartment was four kilometers from Gaza strip. So over there you are a bit more stressed. Especially in like times where it’s big, more dangerous. But yeah, it’s very quiet until [inaudible] people are living very peacefully.

Sean Tierney (01:09:25):
How so? I know Trump just revealed some grand middle Eastern strategy plan recently. I haven’t read it. I don’t know personally even what it involves, but like what’s your thoughts on how does the Gaza strip situation, Palestine, all that, how does that resolve?

Yanir Calisar (01:09:43):
I know that’s a big nodded question. I tell you. I’ll tell you my, a nonpolitical answer to that. Yes. Basically I think politic is very scramble these days in Israel. Like both old parties are like saying almost the same things. So it’s very hard to know which way you want to go. I can tell you that at the end of the day, like besides the Tel Aviv people which just work hard, like trying to enjoy their life as much as possible it’s very pricey to live in Telaviv. So like, we work more and more and more and we tried to innovate a lot and you’re trying to do great things and to improve our life and our friends and our family feminist life all the time. And I think that the venture did the end of the day. We just wanted the simple things of living together in peace, living quietly, enjoying life. And you know, we won’t, it doesn’t matter even the rights, right. 10 parties and the left hand parties and the center, we’re all one piece and be quiet like like start to squad that will EV that everyone will be happy with. So I know this is a bit vague, but I think this is, this is the main thing. We don’t want to fight anyone. We don’t want to make harm to anyone. And and hopefully

Sean Tierney (01:11:29):
We’ll get through it. Yeah. Hopefully. Yeah. Hopefully the other day other people feel the same way. Yeah. All right. Well let’s dig into, we got one last part here where we talked through basically like a rapid fire kind of question around, it’s called the breakdown. So are you ready for the breakdown? Yes. Breakdown baby. All right. What is one book that has profoundly affected you?

Yanir Calisar (01:11:52):
Mmm,

Yanir Calisar (01:11:53):
My favorite book is the Alchemist.

Sean Tierney (01:11:56):
Ditto. That’s my favorite book. I’ve read it like a five times, including one of them in English and one of them in Spanish. I tried to in Spanish was difficult, but I knew the story. So I’d give me a STEM. Sorry. This is, I took yours. Paulo Coelho, very, very near and dear to my heart. What is one person you love to have dinner with? Could be living or dead. Doesn’t matter.

Yanir Calisar (01:12:23):
Mmm.

Yanir Calisar (01:12:24):
You don’t Musk Elon Musk. Yeah. Yup. Cool. [inaudible] on my skin. Ah, I think that the way that the thinks, like even for example the example where they troll

Yanir Calisar (01:12:40):
Rocks on is a new Jeep. But did you see it? I need the new Tesla. He said that the windows would never break. There is nothing that can break a on the windows of this Jeep. So they trolled blocks or something going these rocks on, on the windows and they broke up. So he like went on a PR like a on a press release and just said yeah, he was wearing a tee shirt with the broken window. So it just took its and like turned it into something positive. Like, here we are laughing about ourself. This, this was the original plan. But the way of like, Oh, you take something bad and turns it into something. Great. I love this approach and I think like I’m tracking everything, almost everything he does. And yeah, I kind of admire him. I know. It’s like,

Sean Tierney (01:13:41):
Have you read his book? No. That’s read that. I know one is amazing. Yeah. Just a, to have the goals that that guy does when he operates. He’s not thinking about I’m going to build this company and make money. He’s thinking like, how do I improve the survivability of the human species by making us interplanetary and not dependent on coal? And like he’s just thinking it’s such an incredible level that

Yanir Calisar (01:14:05):
Yeah, this is the way he thinks. Like not what he builds. Not like I always succeeding or failing with companies and the way things I think also if I’m allowed Mark Ben Salesforce CEO also I think I recently read a few articles about like interviews that they gave the way things, the way he sees the echo system and other companies. I always sees a Facebook, for example. I find it very aligned with the way, like, I think we are a I see some of the things done in the same eyes as him. And I’ve read Jeff the book of a, about Jeff Bezos. I recently both Amazon, how they started. So very inspiring. This small it’s called a small S smart shop or something like that.

Sean Tierney (01:15:09):
Small smart shop. Okay. We’ll link that one in the show notes. What about, what is one tool or hack that saves you time, money, or headaches?

Yanir Calisar (01:15:22):
I guess everyone will say Integro motto was up here. Let me think about something else.

Yanir Calisar (01:15:28):
Mmm.

Yanir Calisar (01:15:34):
I’ll take you through the technical side. Javascript, just learn Java script. I mean it’s sometimes easier for me and quicker for me to just write a tree lines of codes to make like something to extract data from somewhere or Java script code Academy a week and a half. You learn Java script, you do amazing stuff with lace.

Sean Tierney (01:16:02):
Yeah. It’s, it’s definitely a super power. I wish that I had started with that. I learned cold fusion, so I was a developer of eight years with this kind of arcane programming language and it was enough good at JavaScript to modify it, but I never could like write it from scratch. But that’s one of those things where I feel like everything now with node and all these tools that are just basically JavaScript is at the root of everything. It’s almost like the Latin of programming languages now for the web. So. Cool. What about, what is one piece of music or musical artists that speaks to you lately?

Yanir Calisar (01:16:37):
So I have a surprising answer for this one. So when I was six years old, my parents took me to the local music school. And the manager there asked me, what do I need to, what do I want to play on? So me as a six years old got boy. I told them I want a violin. So until today, my parents deny that, but I think that they just behind my back. Like I’m told him, no way. These guys gonna play a violin at our house. So the manager told me, you and all violin, it’s a bit difficult to start with. Maybe you should start with piano and then go to violin. So I said, okay. And then to today I’m playing a piano. And then six months ago I decided to, one day I just woke up and I just went and bought it a violin and I started playing. It’s amazing instrument. I really love it. So I you recently listen to more and more like violin music. So I don’t have anything specific Tchaikovsky maybe. Cool. but yeah. All right. We’ll link to some Tchaikovsky in the show notes. What is one important truth that very few people agree with you on?

Yanir Calisar (01:18:07):
[Inaudible]

Yanir Calisar (01:18:07):
So I have a, it’s kind of a mantra

Yanir Calisar (01:18:11):
That makes me do most of the stuff like that I’m expected. Stuff that I’m doing is that I always say that these are the best years of my life. And I’m saying it for the past like 10 years. So whenever, like, I don’t know, I, I need to go to the gym and I don’t want to, so I just think, okay, these are the best areas of my life. If now I won’t do it. So when we like and then if I’m trying to convince my friends to do something so it became a joke already. It’s, these are the best years of your life. Come on, you must come with me to this party or you must go with me to do something to the restaurant or something. So the best years of your life doesn’t mean that all that you just say to yourself every day and then just get up and do whatever.

Yanir Calisar (01:19:04):
Whatever you want to do. Now you’re not getting any younger. So yeah. Don’t like the mind of like, it might be the last day overlay, live, blah, blah. I mean, now, okay. But now it happens. Like these are the best years of your life. Cool. So I love, there’s a quote from Steve jobs in his Stanford commencement address where he’s talking about like how he evaluates his, his lens for viewing. Like if he needs to change something, he says like every day I wake up, I look in the mirror and if I ask myself the question, if this was the last day I was living, would I want to be doing what I’m going to do today? And if he answers no too many days in a row, then he changes something. I think it’s very similar kind of lens to view things through.

Yanir Calisar (01:19:46):
Mmm.

Yanir Calisar (01:19:47):
Yeah. There is another technique that I used to use when I’m doing, I was doing a face to face sales. Like the end of the day when I put my hand on the, on the pillow, like asking myself if I’ve done the a hundred percent, if I took it like I use 100% of the time today and if not, so just get up, do some something and then go back to sleep.

Yanir Calisar (01:20:15):
Yeah.

Sean Tierney (01:20:16):
I was happy that they didn’t happen so many times. Cool. All right. Last question here, if you had a time machine to go back to your former 20 year old self, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Yanir Calisar (01:20:32):
Mmm,

Yanir Calisar (01:20:33):
So this is something that I learn. I’ve learned a bit after the military service in the hard way.

Yanir Calisar (01:20:41):
[Inaudible]

Yanir Calisar (01:20:42):
To always be like,

Yanir Calisar (01:20:45):
Mmm,

Yanir Calisar (01:20:46):
When you make hard decisions or you make a very important decision, you should always make the, the choice that you are, that you feel that is the most, the right one at the moment. And given the circumstances, given the, given everything that you know at the moment because later, like few years later when you’re looking back, it’s very easy that way to say I was right because the situation that I was at this specific moment, this was the right choice. And the second part of it is to always make the decision like in the shortest time that you can. Like if you just thought to think about it and think about it. And so just some things you will never do it. Like when you have an idea, when you have something you want to do, when you have something you want to change, give it a deadline, like few days and then after this deadline, that’s it. You make the decision if it’s good or bad, that’s it. But you’re taking everything you know at that moment into consideration and make the decision.

Sean Tierney (01:22:05):
Yeah. And, and you’re that kind of living proof in terms of your approach with the two day proof of concept and really living that.

Yanir Calisar (01:22:11):
Really just if I, if I may one story about this, this part. So when I traveled in South America many years ago, like 10 years ago I used to, I traveled by myself, I traveled by myself and like it was very scary. It was the first time of me traveling in the world by myself. I didn’t know the language. Like I started in Brazil so I didn’t know Portuguese and I didn’t know where going into it was like dark, completely dark. And then I learned with the time over there that nothing there is like the, the chances that something bad will happen

Sean Tierney (01:22:56):
Are super, super, super small, very super, super, super low.

Yanir Calisar (01:23:01):
And then the mantra that they had this trip was that even if something bad will happen, I don’t know, I got, I get robbed or something. This would be the day that I remember in the trip. And sometimes like these bad things change the way your life are going. Like these leaves, something that changes you. And this, I, I slowly started to be trialed by this thought. Like and I think that sometimes, like one time I traveled with four guys from Israel that I met over there and we were looking for hotels. It was like late night already and most of the hotels were fully booked. And then they told like, they started panic, like what will we do? And I told them, look, eventually we will find somewhere to place [inaudible]. Eventually we will find someplace to stay. But if not, this will be a story.

Yanir Calisar (01:24:05):
This is what the night that we will remember is this night that we walked the whole night and then eventually we just were slipping on a, I dunno, in the street. And this is something that you remember for the rest of your life when you thought, when you tell someone about your a South America trip, you will tell about this night that you were sleeping on the street. And this is something that I took, like when I started my business, I told him as if, what will, what is the worst case scenario? I’ll lose all of my mind and when I’m 30 years old, okay, bomber, but this is the bed that it can get. And I think this is what drives me in many decisions that I’m taking.

Sean Tierney (01:24:47):
One of the previous guests to you, Julia sham two guests ago talked about fear setting. And this is something that Tim Ferris advocates where it’s basically you’re imagining the worst possible case scenario and that once you can be okay with like that’s the worst, then it kind of immunizes you from all this irrational fear that is just kind of gunk when you just like go there and it’s what’s funny, there’s also, I have a similar story traveling 20 years ago in Ecuador in a group of us was going to the beach total snafu. We ended up like riding in a dump truck and like the Broan was rot washed out. We got there like because the bus couldn’t pass a road that was washed out. We had to like the getting this back of this dump truck and we like didn’t get to the beach and time we got to this little town and everything was closed. There was nothing, there was no hotels, there was nobody there. Everyone was asleep and we’re like, Frick, where do we like we’re going to be homeless. We’re literally me sleeping on the streets. We ended up sleeping in like an ATM booth. Six of us crowded in, right? Sure enough. That’s what I remember. Yeah. That’s what we remember the whole trip. You know,

Yanir Calisar (01:25:50):
That’s it. It’s amazing. This is how you acquire new experiences, how you’re like having a adventures while you are traveling and in general, whatever you do. Yeah.

Sean Tierney (01:26:01):
Awesome. Well I think this is probably a place to wrap it up.

Yanir Calisar (01:26:04):
You’re near, if people listening want to get ahold of you or they want to follow you or use your product, where do we send them? So first of all, a, if you a Salesforce customers, I don’t know how many of you are using Salesforce, but you’re welcome to a checkout a Watley. What’s the.com? If you are in marketing and you need some challenges some help with some of your challenges or you want someone to solve your painful your, your pain points. So you can check out overstock IO. And you can follow me on Twitter. [inaudible], C. L. S. R. Awesome. Cool. And the show notes for this episode. I have a feeling are you going to be extremely long? We talked about a lot of different acronyms and products and whatnot. So all of that stuff will be for the people listening. It will be on the episode, so you can go back and find all the links to this stuff. And you know, it’s been such a pleasure, man. Thanks. I got to do this. That’s great. Cheers.

Sean Tierney: 02:11 All right, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Sean Tierney, and I’m sitting across from a Trevor Wright. Trevor is founder of mile method, which is a service that accumulates clients, millions of airline miles and hotel points leveraging credit card signup bonuses. Each client receives a customized credit card application schedule that earns the miles points needed to visit their desired destinations for almost free. Trevor’s also fluent in Portuguese and Spanish having served as a medical interpreter. Trevor, welcome to the show. Good to be here. We’re in Dubai. We made it. Yeah, we did. And we did like, so let’s set the context. Are we just docked in Dubai? We’ve been coming off of a 16 day cruise, the nomad cruise and what’d you think of the cruise?

Trevor Wright: 02:51 It’s amazing. It’s amazing and exhausting. Just nonstop meeting interesting people. All the different land excursions.

Sean Tierney: 02:58 It’s, yeah, it’s just a fountain of interesting people and I think my body’s ready for this cruise to be over at this point.

Trevor Wright: 03:07 Land and sleep is what I need right now. Agreed.

Sean Tierney: 03:12 All right, so tell us about what is the model method?

Trevor Wright: 03:14 Mile method. So I’ve been doing this as a location independent business for six years. And the idea came about because I was a for about nine years traveling myself. I’ve found a system where you can basically game us credit card signup bonuses and I had been traveling basically for free. Right? Currently I’m averaging $17 per flight to anywhere in the world actually less because I haven’t updated my in 2019 travels, $17 $17. Yes. So that is airport taxes and surcharges. So when you redeem miles there are taxes depending on which routes in which airlines you reading with.

Trevor Wright: 03:57 So it’s $17 per country to 120 some countries and all of that is from us credit card signup bonuses. And I had been doing this, people were very curious like how do you do this? I started helping friends and family. It became too overwhelming. And then I just started charging and doing this as a client based business.

Sean Tierney: 04:20 And so you got into this then doing it for friends and family and it’s just the natural draw of it kind of pulled you in. You and at what point did you realize, Hey, this could be a viable business?

Trevor Wright: 04:31 Initially for myself because I’ve, I’ve been traveling basically since I was a teenager and I was helping friends and family and then like I said, just overwhelming helping people. So I had to start charging, but really the, the idea for the business came in Chiang Mai. I went to a conference, I was going to start a drop shipping store and I met a guy, he said, what you do is very unique. I think that is a better business than maybe starting something that I had no idea what I was doing.

Sean Tierney: 05:03 Right. Well, I’m almost positive all my listeners would love to fly for $17. So can you elaborate like what is the gist of this method and whatever you’re willing to share and just works that?

Trevor Wright: 05:15 Nomad cruise we’re on right now from Greece to Dubai, it’s mostly Europeans. So I’ve had a lot of conversations on this boat of Europeans asking you how to do this. Unfortunately, this is 95% of what I do is only for Americans because you need a us social security number and decent to good credit scores. You need those two things in order to be approved for us credit cards.

Trevor Wright: 05:42 So unfortunately for any non-American listeners, maybe we can get into some general information, but my mild method is us credit card us credit cards. And how it works is what I do for my clients is you have to understand how to structure the applications to do this in a sustainable way. I’ve been doing it for nine years and for a long time I was earning about 1 million miles per year. That slowed down a bit in recent years and every 90 days I apply for two to five credit cards. And then once you’re approved for the credit cards, you focus on spending the required amount per credit card to unlock its bonus. And that amount which you spend is customized to each person’s spending habits. So, I mean we can get into this, but it’s really knowing how to structure applications and then applying for two to five cards every 90 days.

Sean Tierney: 06:39 And when you say structure applications, so there’s something they want to see that makes them approve you. So I guess what makes a good application versus about applications and everything?

Trevor Wright: 06:51 I do, the reason I do this as a service and not some type of ready-made course is that it’s extremely customized to each person’s spending habits, their application cancellation history, their credit scores is, there’s a lot of details that I take in for each client. And what makes a good round of applications, again, it depends on the person, but an important part of all of this is to choose different banks. So if you’re applying for three cards at the same time, on the same day, you may choose a bank of America card, a chase card, an American express card. So you don’t apply for three cards from the same bank. You mix them up between banks and there’s also reasons for them.

Sean Tierney: 07:38 Cool. So, I mean, so let’s say that I was going to do this right now. You, what variables would you look at or what information would you request from me in order to give the most likelihood of getting approved by all these different cards?

Trevor Wright: 07:50 So also because this is such a customized service there is no buy button. I cannot just accept people. I need to prequalify them. So on my website, milemethod.com there is a survey, people fill it out, it takes about three minutes and I have all the information. How much does someone spend per month, what are their credit scores? Which cards have they already applied for? Which cards have they canceled? And based on this information I follow up and I can say you have a very good situation. I feel confident that I can earn you this amount of miles.

Trevor Wright: 08:26 And if someone has never dabbled in this, it’s fairly easy to get close to a million or more exclusively through credit card signup bonuses in.

Sean Tierney: 08:38 A million points. What does that translate to in terms of, I don’t know, average what you do travel wise? Like how, how far will that get you?

Trevor Wright: 08:46 That’s a very good question because in general, before I answer your question, people, Americans have this incredible, I think this should not exist. It just, there’s no reason I should be able to travel tomorrow to China for let’s say 20 $30 but it does because of the U S credit card signup bonuses. So Americans don’t understand how lucrative this can be. Maybe they had a bad experience with some miles. They tried to fly over Christmas, they couldn’t redeem their miles, and then they think this is all nonsense. Or maybe they had some other experience where it costs them way more miles than it should have because they didn’t understand how to redeem those miles.

Trevor Wright: 09:29 So 1 million miles and points, you can fly us to Europe for 30,001 way. You can fly from us to Southeast Asia for 45,000 or 40,001 way. It depends on which model you redeem in which route. But 1 million miles is for most people maybe who for people who don’t travel nonstop like us years and years of almost free travel flights and hotels,

Sean Tierney: 09:55 And do those typically, are they like rollover? You can use those indefinitely or do they expire in a year? How does that work?

Trevor Wright: 10:01 Another very common question, so 90 I can’t give an exact exact percentage, but let’s say 95% of miles and points. The expiration is a nonissue because if you have any type of activity on the account, say you spend $1 on a co branded credit card, so let’s say you have a Citibank American airlines credit card, American as an example, American airlines miles expire after 18 months, but if you spend $1 on that credit card, you will get one mile in your American airlines account and that will reset it for 18 months.

Trevor Wright: 10:41 So there’s all these very easy things you can do to extend your miles and points to the point where it’s really a nonissue and then those 5% of miles and points that there’s no way to extend the life of them. You just have to focus on making sure you use them within the three year or 24 month period that they’re valid.

Sean Tierney: 11:02 Got it. So here’s a question. D credit is weird and I don’t proclaim to understand it, but does this help or hurt you in terms of like if I have, let’s say a 700 credit score and I do this, is my credit score going to go up or down doing this?

Trevor Wright: 11:20 Another good question. This, this is my biggest obstacle with my particular business. People don’t understand how credit works and a lot of people I’ve noticed are just repeating something they may have heard or for example, they believe that applying for a card or or worse, canceling a card is the worst thing you can do.

Trevor Wright: 11:42 It’s not, I applied for, for nine years, I’ve been applying for two to five cards every 90 days and my scores are currently 800. That’s excellent. Yeah. So the reason this system of applying for multiple credit cards sustainably in, in a, in a certain way, you can’t just randomly apply. You do this in a certain way. It improves your credit scores because of three factors. So the number one is debt to credit ratio. Well, let me start over again. The number one rule is always pay your monthly balances in full. So you should not be doing the system. If you’re carrying balances spending more than you have, that’s the golden rule. You must pay off your balances in full every month. So that is the on time payment history. So as long as you just, you are consistently making payments on time, that’s a great factor for your credit score.

Sean Tierney: 12:41 And a real quick question on that, is there any service or way to put that on autopilot? So it’s not even something you need to think about? Like it’ll just auto draw out of your account.

Trevor Wright: 12:50 Most banks do have an auto payment feature. Yes, I don’t use that. I track it using mint.com. That way you can log in and mint.com and see your balances know that you have a certain balance with a certain credit card just going and pay it. But that is a good way. If you, especially if you say you have a reoccurring payment like Netflix, you might forget about the $5 monthly payment, just set it on auto payment and you don’t have to worry about it. Got it. The second factor about credit scores, which is not explicitly stated, if you log into credit karma for example, which is a free service to monitor your credit scores is the debt to credit ratio.

Trevor Wright: 13:32 So the reason this is so important, debt to credit ratio, if you are always paying off your monthly bills in full, you have zero debt. And as you’re approved for more credit cards, your credits, your total available credit because every new credit card approved, let’s say you, they give you a five, a $5,000 credit line, and then another card, they give you a $10,000 credit line. So your debt remained at zero. But the two new credit card approvals just gave you $15,000 more credit. So your debt to credit ratio is constantly improving as you’re approved for more cards. And another third factor which most people don’t even know about and don’t follow is you should never let any credit card balance or go over 20% of your total available credit. So I’ll explain this cause this is maybe a little bit more advanced for some people.

Trevor Wright: 14:30 Let’s say you have a credit card with a $10,000 credit line, you should never let that credit card statement close above 20% of that credit line, which should be $2,000. So if you have a credit line of $10,000, when your, your spending balance gets to two around 2000 you should prepay that so it doesn’t go over 20,000 when the monthly statement closes. So that, that might be confusing for some people. The reason you don’t want any credit card, monthly statement to close above 20% of the available credit is because banks and the algorithm, we’re talking about algorithms. So there is, there is no human monitoring this, right? The algorithms think that that’s a red flag that you may be overextended. Got it. And they, that does negatively affect your credit scores.

Sean Tierney: 15:27 Got it. So I’ve got a $10,000 limit. As soon as I get, you know, starting to near the $2,000 Mark, you’re saying either use a different credit card or prepay that one down. So it doesn’t actually jump over that 2000 threshold.

Trevor Wright: 15:39 Yes. And the most important thing to understand that this is when the statement closes. So let’s say you have a big purchase of $10,000, 10,000 of 10,000 you used 100% of your available credit. That will not negatively affect your credit scores unless you let the statement close. The statement is the, it’s on your account when you log in, usually close to the payment due date. If you pay that $100, that hundred percent use of your credit before it closes, no big deal. The only thing that matters is when that statement closes.

Sean Tierney: 16:17 Got it. Okay. Makes sense. So I guess, what are the pitfalls that you see? Where do people go off the rails when, if they’re not dealing with you and they’re trying this on their own, what are the common mistakes that you see most people making?

Trevor Wright: 16:32 There’s a lot of them. Just maybe the top three that you see. Yes, so there are a lot of blogs, people, people, I think gen Americans, even Europeans, they kind of know this exists because you could Google travel hacking, you can Google how to fly for free, all these different things. There are thousands and thousands of blogs that will give you an overview of this and even very specific articles about how to do very specific things. Google is your friend. Google is amazing. The problem with this is the business model of these blogs is to get readers and then to get them to click on their affiliate links with PA which pay them commissions so they don’t necessarily care if you do this in a sustainable way which improves your credit scores. They’re thinking short term, let’s get a reader, let’s target a certain person with SEO, with a certain article, convinced them that this credit card is amazing, this bonus, this limited time thing, all the different clickbait headlines you can imagine.

Trevor Wright: 17:37 And then once you click, you are approved. But that card may not have been the best card to apply for at that particular time. The way to do this is to understand not only the different bank rules, but also each credit cards, individual rule and do this in a certain sequence which allows you to maximize all the bonuses over a sustainable period of time. So if you’re randomly applying for credit cards, you may fairly easily get a free flight here, a free flight, they’re free, that free flight there. But let’s say at the six month Mark, you’re going to start getting denied for credit cards because you’re not doing it in the best way.

Sean Tierney: 18:24 Got it. And it sounds like you could maybe spend a great deal of time, like sleuthing all this out and understanding the rules, but why would you do that when you just pay someone like you to do it basically?

Trevor Wright: 18:38 Right. And this, there’s, there are people that believe that they can learn all those rules. This is very much an example of something that you don’t know what you don’t know. So again, I’ve been doing this for nine years. I’m very obsessed with all of this and I am still learning tips and tricks here and there, here and there. Someone who reads one of these blogs, I got this. They, they think they know what they’re doing. They don’t want to spend extra money. And by applying out of order, they may be making themselves ineligible for bonuses that are worth a thousand, 2000, $3,000, but they don’t even know that they’re doing it wrong and they’re making themselves ineligible for future bonuses. So that, that’s the major pitfall. I see. People come to me after they’ve dabbled in this and they’re dabbling for two, three, six months actually hurt them. And lost them. A lot of money in free bonuses.

Sean Tierney: 19:37 Got it. And then what are you tracking day to day or week to week to stay on top of this stuff? How do you know what the best deals are?

Trevor Wright: 19:44 I read it constantly. I know which blogs to follow. I have an RSS feed, I have my Facebook wall set up where I see all the limited time deals that pop up. I, I’m very involved in forums and different alerts set and that, that is really there. There are some programs programmers on this boat who I’ve had discussions with. I’ve explained a little bit what I do and they say, why don’t you just build some software? Why can’t you just get some software to do this? And they don’t know what they don’t know. There are so many moving parts. The only way to stop stay on top of this is to love it and be obsessed with it like I am. And to track it all the different news and that’s what I do.

Sean Tierney: 20:26 Yeah. Nice. I do not share this obsession. I think that sounds like a lot of work. So what, how does your fee structure work? How do you charge people and like what would it, what would it cost to use you to do this?

Trevor Wright: 20:38 It’s all outlined on mile method.com so I have a 24 month service and like I mentioned before, I do not have a course. This is a service. I work with my clients one-on-one for 24 months and it is nine 97 which breaks down to $40 per month I believe. And we have a, each client has a shared Google drive application schedule. So after I receive all their background information, I create a custom custom credit card application schedule, we share it and then every 90 days I update their new credit card applications with links and all they have to do, I send them a quick message saying it’s that time you’re ready to go, ready to apply.

Trevor Wright: 21:24 They log into their Google drive application schedule and they click the links that I give them. So from on their side, they really don’t have to think about anything. They click the links, they apply and then when the cards show up to their, their permanent address, they focus on spending. So I never have their social security number. I never have any of their private information. They simply click the links that I give them.

Sean Tierney: 21:50 Right. So you’re just coordinating, you’re kind of like the scheduler and yeah, they’re doing it. Exactly. Can this be done with a virtual PO box or does it require actually physically receiving the cards?

Trevor Wright: 22:04 I do have clients who live outside of the United States. A lot of them actually it’s, it’s an extra obstacle because the U S credit cards do have to be shipped to a U S address. So in my personal situation I live outside the United States. I have for years, all my cards go to my, my dad’s permanent address. He opens my mail and he emails me the credit card information. So I, when I need to complete the, the minimum spending requirement on a new credit card, I usually do that with online spending. Got it. And that’s how I received the bonuses.

Sean Tierney: 22:44 Cool. Yeah. I have a virtual PO box in South Dakota and they’re able to email the, can scan it and email what they can also forward the mail to. I’m just curious if it’s possible to execute this with no physical card. But like you’re saying, I guess if you don’t, if you don’t need in-person purchases you can probably just,

Trevor Wright: 23:02 It is better if you have the physical card because that way for all your daily expenses you can also spend on the card. Yeah. But maybe I should be looking into a, a virtual mailbox and not hassle my dad so much. He is, yeah, I tell my clients that if you send to a us permanent address, you should have a trusted person who can open your mail email that information. But just like you said, also forwarding service would be perfect.

Sean Tierney: 23:28 Yeah. Nice. All right, well it’s, yeah, it seems just like one of these things where, you know, you pay a real estate agent to handle your transaction because they can get you a better deal than you trying to for sale by owner. So, I mean this makes a lot of sense to me. A more questions. So points are transferable or how, I’ve always wondered this, like if, if I’m accruing my own points, can I then like arbitrage or like can I sell those to someone and transfer them or is it like the points of usable only by the person who did the credit card application?

Trevor Wright: 24:01 Yes and yes, and I’ll put a little asterix on, on that. Let me, let me give out a general tip because maybe a lot of your listeners have the chase Sapphire preferred or the chase reserve. These are two cards that were recently marketed very well. A lot of people have these cards, chase ultimate rewards points can be redeemed on their website for any type of travel, for car rentals, for airlines, for hotels, or they can be transferred to airline and hotel partners. So this is just a general tip. In 99% of the cases you will receive more value from your chase points by transferring to United, Singapore airlines, Hyatt. There’s a lot of different transfer partners instead of redeeming them directly through the chase portal. So we don’t need to get into that, but Google around, look into this. You will get likely three times the value, two to three times a value by transferring to United for a flight instead of booking it through the chase portal.

Trevor Wright: 25:05 Back to your question about are they transferable? Can you sell them? Yes, and I do because you can book any flights using your miles in someone else’s name. So this does create an arbitrage opportunity, but I want to be very clear, this is a gray area because you are not allowed by the terms and conditions of the airlines to sell your miles, but you can book for friends and family. Got it. So this is an opportunity, let’s say, are we friends forever? Now? We’re absolutely friends and let’s say you need a flight, a a thousand dollars one way. You tell me which flight you want to book. I can check the award availability using miles and I can come to you and say, you know what, I’ll give you that exact same flight for $800. So this is an opportunity you saved $200. I made $800. Because using leveraging credit card signup bonuses, you can get the miles for basically free.

Trevor Wright: 26:08 Yeah. So it’s a win win. And I dunno if I want to get into all the details, but I do this very often almost as a little a side thing and it works out for everybody. It’s a win win. So anybody can do this, you can book, you can use your miles and points to book for your friends and family. So even if you’re doing this system, your husband, your partner, your kids can also fly free cause they are friends and family. If you want a little side cash, you can also offer discounted flights to your friends. Got it. And be super popular cause you’re saving everyone. It’s a women. It’s a, it’s a good situation.

Sean Tierney: 26:44 Is it? I mean, do the airlines hate you or have they ever, has an airline ever said, Hey, what’s this guy spending? Like a ridiculous number of points.

Trevor Wright: 26:51 Like have you ever been investigated by an airline or anything like that? No. And the interesting thing about your question is that this has nothing to do with the airlines. It has to do with the banks. It’s the banks who give you the credit card signup bonuses. So when you redeem miles for a flight, you receive a regular confirmation number exactly as if you had paid for the flight. When you show up to the airport on a mile redemption compared to a paid fair that the every single person you have contact with at the airport has no idea that this is an award flight. Because from their screens it’s exactly the same as a paid flight. So if I redeem miles for business class or first class, I received the exact same treatment as someone who spent $5,000 $10,000 cause these flights are very, very expensive.

Trevor Wright: 27:41 But the banks, they are starting to put better systems in place to stop people like, like me because we are, let’s just be clear, we’re gaming the system. Yeah. I’ve had a hundred over 150 credit card approvals. There’s no reason that I should have 150 credit cards. There’s no reason.

Sean Tierney: 28:02 And you have an 800 credit score? Yes, yes. Crazy.

Trevor Wright: 28:05 And I’ve been doing this for nine years. So, but the, so when you applied the Dean, you briefly, right? Went for the, for just the credit lookup or whatever, but then you win that back as soon as you’re approved basically. Is that how it works? So I mean you, you can always go deeper, but I’ll, I’ll maybe explain this on this. On the surface level. Yeah. So every time you apply for a credit card, it’s a hard inquiry on your credit report. So the credit report is your overall view that banks use to know whether you are a credit worthy individual.

Trevor Wright: 28:37 So you apply for a new credit card and they pull your credit report. So that’s what a hard inquiry is. They’re inquiring, they’re making an inquiry into your credit worthiness. So that’s all that is. Each hard inquiry on your credit report. And there are three. So one, two, three Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. So that’s really not important. But there’s three different credit bureaus where each bank can pull your credit report. So of one of the three that hard inquiry temporarily decreases your credit score, let’s say one to five points per credit card application, but 90 days later due to the improved a debt to credit ratio, the benefits of having more available credit they override the heart inquiry. So you’re, when you apply for a credit card, your score may dip for let’s say 90 days and around the 90 day Mark, because the influence of the available credit acts as a positive factor.

Trevor Wright: 29:45 Your scores go up. So you apply for card, it goes slightly down, 90 days later it goes up, and then it’s this dip, swing, dip swing of your scores going down a little bit, going up a lot, going down a little bit, going up a lot. And that’s why this all works. Cool. And that’s also why you should have about 90 days between applications because not only do you need time to spend on the, on the newly approved cards to meet to unlock the bonuses, but you also want to give your credit scores time to recover from that temporary dip.

Sean Tierney: 30:19 Got it. And do you recommend, if someone doesn’t have the spending to actually exhaust that quota during that 90 day window, do you recommend then maybe instead of three cards apply for two or just only apply for what you can go through basically?

Trevor Wright: 30:32 Exactly, exactly. I think you understand the concept. So that’s why this customized service, I have some clients who spend 20,000 a month, we can go crazy, we can get a lot of cards, we can really rack up a lot of, a lot of signup bonuses. I have some clients who might only spend a thousand a month, so that means we definitely slow down the applications and also might use some spending tricks, which is basically moving money around. So it shows up as transactions, but you don’t spend out of pocket. But yes, if you spend very little, this is possible, the exact same system, you just do it at a slower rates. So anyone with let’s say $1,000 plus expenses per month can be doing this but maybe not at the same level as someone who spends 20,000.

Sean Tierney: 31:22 Got it. And I mean even someone who doesn’t travel, it sounds like with the arbitrage opportunity, is there any reason not to do this?

Trevor Wright: 31:29 There is no reason not to be doing this. This is all benefits and on on that same line, I’ll say, I always remind people that airline miles and hotel points, you should look at them as just a different currency because you can redeem these for actual flights, for actual hotels and other other travel benefits. So just like money, you don’t work the day before you need to spend money. You’re always working. You’re always trying to save and put money in the bank so that when you need to spend there, that money it’s available. So airline miles and hotel points are the same thing. Even if you only do one big trip a year, go crazy ball out, get stay in the nicest hotels, fly business class, fly first class, but don’t do that the month before you need to fly. You should be doing it now, building up your balances and then when you want to take that big trip, you can really make it special and stay really in luxury hotels and fly some of the nicest cabins.

Sean Tierney: 32:30 Nice. Does your consultation with folks, so clearly I understand how you help on the acquisition side of getting the credit cards. Do you also then advised in terms of the redemption, cause it sounds like that’s kind of a, a multiplier if you do that right, you get more out of your miles.

Trevor Wright: 32:44 Yes. You could look at it as this whole game, let’s call it has two different sides. The accumulating and the redeeming. So my service is accumulating. It’s me giving you the exact bonuses you should apply for, for your exact profile end travel destinations. And then on the redemption side, I’m always available. So my clients, I have a private Facebook group where people can ask questions. I’m always being active and answering questions there and then also clients contacting me personally. So it is a one on one service. I never log into people’s accounts and book for them.

Trevor Wright: 33:23 But if someone says, I live in Chicago, I’m trying to get to Hong Kong, these are the miles I have. How do I do it for me? Because I’ve been doing this for so long. It’s I see through the matrix so I know right away, okay, can I Chicago to Hong Kong this use this type of mile on this airline? And I can either tell them exactly how to do it or I know exactly which, how to article to send them. So often it’s as quick as replying with with a link to the best how to article, which gives them step by step by step how to book that exact route.

Sean Tierney: 33:57 Amazing. Awesome. Trevor, we have one last little part of this interview or 30 minute Mark. I’m going to switch gears here and do kind of a rapid fire tactical thing. I call it the breakdown. So are you ready for the breakdown? Oh my God, I’m ready. Break down baby.

Sean Tierney: 34:14 All right. What is one book that has profoundly affected you?

Trevor Wright: 34:19 This is going to be maybe a wild card, but there is a book called Shantara, M a. D, a Gregory, David Roberts. It’s, I’m very much still a backpacker. I’ve been traveling most of my life and this is a book that’s popular in backpacking circles. It’s incredible. It’s a long one. It’s an, it’s a long one. It’s poetic. It’s beautifully written. And it’s interesting because the author is not an author. He’s just a man who’s had an incredible life and he described his life.

Sean Tierney: 34:48 Yeah. I strongly encourage that one. It is a, I think Johnny Depp bought the movie rights is what I understand.

Trevor Wright: 34:55 And they never filmed it. Yeah. Yeah. I heard that something happened and it never got filmed.

Sean Tierney: 34:59 Yeah. What an incredible story though. It’s like you see this guy, he couldn’t have been like, he must have done the things that are in the book because there’s no way you could write it with the same authenticity that this guy has.

Sean Tierney: 35:10 So amazing. Great, great recommendation. What about, what is one person you would love to have dinner with?

Trevor Wright: 35:15 Oof. Alive or dead? Either way. These are good questions. These are coming out of the blue. I might, I might even say Gregory, David Roberts. I’m a big fan of that book and you know, you could pick any historical figure, but I like just good conversations and that guy would provide a good,

Sean Tierney: 35:38 It’s stories like that’s just the stuff that made the book. I can’t imagine what other stuff didn’t make it. Cool. What about, what is one tool or hack you use to save time, money or headaches? Not related to credit card hacking case?

Trevor Wright: 35:56 I’m starting to learn that there are people that have more knowledge than me, so maybe a few years back I would try to learn it all. Now I just try to find the person who has already figured it out and try to see what they do, what tools they use or even hire them. So this is been a mind shift for me. Don’t try to do it all. There’s so much information in this world and there’s people that are already have figured it out and just just do what they do. Copy successful people.

Sean Tierney: 36:27 Cool. All right. A one piece of music that speaks to you lately.

Trevor Wright: 36:34 All right. This is also maybe a strange one. There is a British rapper named Skepta and for whatever reason his music resonates. When I’m in the gym, I always listen to Skepta. It always makes me hyped. I just love his music.

Sean Tierney: 37:06 Cool. And last question. If you had a time machine to go back to your 20 year old self, what one piece of advice would you give yourself?

Trevor Wright: 37:14 This is going to be controversial. Well maybe not for, for your listeners, I might skip university. I believe that that was not the best use of my time and I may have tried to, like I said before, seek out these people that have very specific knowledge, especially related to business and emulate them instead of going the generic route of getting a broad education.

Sean Tierney: 37:42 Cool. I would say that’s not necessarily controversial. I mean there’s a lot of people lately. The question before is actually a question from Peter teal that I stole a super successful investor and he has a program where he’s actually encouraging people not to go to school. He’s pulling like, you know, kind of the, I don’t know what you call them, like the bright stars out early, just trying to get them to start businesses.

Trevor Wright: 38:04 But along that same line, we are in a bit of a bubble where where we believe this and let’s say I’m from Nebraska. If I go back to Nebraska and, and tell someone that same thing, they’ll say, well what about credentials? What about education? They still believe that maybe the old ways of doing things are the best ways and I clearly do not.

Sean Tierney: 38:26 Yeah, I dunno. I think all things being equal, if someone comes to me and it’s like they use three years to get the MBA or they use those three years to go and try and start their own business and Thrasher hound and maybe succeed or fail, I still would prefer to see that because.

Trevor Wright: 38:39 At the end of the day, it’s the results. Yeah. So if someone can do it self-taught and prove to you that they have the results, that’s what matters. Right. And I think going forward, even employers, they’re going to be focusing more on results and not what type of paper hangs on your wall.

Sean Tierney: 38:56 I agreed. Cool man. Well, Hey, so if people listening want to use your service, what’s the best place to send them? Just the mile method.com.

Trevor Wright: 39:03 Mile method.com there’s a contact link. You can send me a message there. I’m only active on Instagram. I do have my personal Facebook, but I’ve kind of shut most of that down. I’m always doing Instagram stories. What’s your Instagram again? Myo method also. So mile method, I’m about to spend three weeks in some very interesting and unique countries in Africa. So I’m doing lots of stories there and also send private messages. I’m always active there.

Sean Tierney: 39:29 Where are you going in Africa?

Trevor Wright: 39:30 So from Dubai here where we are, I fly to Ireton, Zimbabwe doing a couple of safaris in Botswana, South Africa for new years, and then Mozambique. Very cool. So Eritrea, Botswana, Mozambique, these are still question marks. I don’t know much about these countries, but I’m pretty excited.

Sean Tierney: 39:50 Yeah. Talk to my buddy Matt Bowles cause he’s been all over Africa and he just loved it.

Trevor Wright: 39:54 Yes, we talked a little bit. So that’s, that’s why I’m excited.

Sean Tierney: 39:57 Cool man. We’ll do, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s great to have you. It was fun. Thank you. Cheers.

Sean Tierney: 00:01:58 All right. Welcome everybody to the podcast. I’m your host, Sean Tierney and I am sitting across from Julia Shem. Julia is founder of Goldly LA promotional products. Uh, this is a business I’m actually wearing one of her metallic nomad cruise tattoos as we speak right now. Um, she grew this business to six figures a year in revenue, has automated the entire operation. Uh, she’s also founded another company shipped dazzle that she operates with her parents and they help other commerce brands save time with inventory, storage and order fulfillment. Uh, Julia is now working on her next venture with big data, piecing together disparate data sources and extracting valuable insights that help business owners make and save money. Welcome, Julia. Thank you. Thank you for the warm introduction. Absolutely. Uh, okay. So just to, to kind of paint the picture for people, here we are on the nomad cruise. We’re sitting on a cruise ship right now. Uh, we just had a day at the beach. We’re in core fuckin, I believe, which is United Arab Emirates and uh, drinking. We don’t know what this is, but it’s a glass of, of the premium wine. And, uh, and so, yeah. So we met through the nomad cruise. I’ve heard your episode previously on a mutual friend’s podcast, Matt bulls. And, uh, can you just kind of give our listeners, like talk about your backstory. You’re super interesting. You’re from Russia, but like, I’ll just let you kind of talk and tell how you can you S and started these companies.

Julia Shem: 00:03:21 Sure. Um, so it, my story has started seven years ago. Uh, I was 19, uh, and I went to the States for the first time as a work in travel student. So there was a program that allowed students in Russia, um, they studying in university and have a chance to go to the States just for the summer and work in a service industry. So like, um, housekeepers, waitresses, uh, park attendants, um, anything in a service industry. So I went to New York for the summer for the first time and it was very, um, challenging decision for me because I never been outside of the S of Russia before and never traveled. Um, I’ve always been in my hometown and that was a really big decision. And, um, also I was supposed to go to a smaller city, uh, where there was a job waiting for me and I decided that I will just do my best and try to find a job in New York.

Julia Shem: 00:04:21 Um, so I, I was able to go stay there for three months, found a job as a waitress, and that’s that, that was the time where I actually started to speak because before I was learning English at school, but it was kind of on and off, um, and spend amazing time in New York. Uh, and then I went back to continue waste indications to, I was, um, studying as a computer to be a computer programmer in Russia. And I got an internship at the best company in my small city Magnitogorsk, which is where I’m from, it’s in your mountains. And then kind of, um, mid middle part of Russia. And I realized that this is my life. This is how it’s going to be for the next 30 years or so. Um, and I decided to go back to the States just one last time and for the summer as the same, uh, program.

Julia Shem: 00:05:14 And went to Los Angeles just because I, I think the city, just because I’ve been to New York before and then all other cities were either too similar or the weather in the summer was not. Um, for example in Miami was just a bit too hot. So I went to Los Angeles and, uh, found a job as a waitress. Uh, three different restaurants. Uh, was at that time I was trying to save money cause I didn’t have much of a savings. Uh, my parents sexually give you most of their savings in order for me to go to the States. So I was leaving for $200 a month in the couch in the living room and managing three jobs and writing the buses for an hour and a half between all of them. And at some point I, um, decided why do I just put my resume online and see what happens as a computer programmers, as a database developer to be exact. And in the second interview that I went to the company hired me and then my life changed completely cause I, my income went from $8 an hour to $40 an hour or so. And um, I moved from the couch to my own apartment, got a car, um, passed with a driver test and about two weeks and drove to work.

Sean Tierney: 00:06:31 Um, and just for the people listening, you may hear some background noise. We are literally disembarking from Cora Fakan as we speak right now. So this noise would probably go away in a second, but if you’re wondering what that is, but as the jet engines of this cruise ship that we’re on right now, um, all right, so you had this incredible transition and went from $8 an hour to $40 an hour, which is quite a pay increase. And w was it really just you, you, you just threw it out there and the second interview you had just hit like,

Julia Shem: 00:06:59 yeah, I was really lucky. Um, what I didn’t realize is how, um, the process of finding a job was a bit different in the States because in Russia you are the ones who are sending the applications, going to the interviews and in the States you have the recruiters that doing all the work for you basically in the, they actually coach you on how to be your best at the interview and to be hired. So, uh, yeah, the second interview that I went to, um, I remember I showed a piece of code that I used to write back in Russia, um, to my then future boss. And then he laughed and said that, well here in the States we don’t do that anymore cause this is what I’ve been doing 10 years ago. So now thinks that I’ve been different. But I think you’ll fit in well.

Sean Tierney: 00:07:45 Saw the potential. That’s amazing. So you took this job and then at what point were you, did the tattoo business emerge, you were working at this job and then this thing kind of spring up on the side or how did the metallic tattoo

Julia Shem: 00:07:58 company come about? So I was working for about a year and a half at that point. And it was, um, I loved my job. I loved what I did. Um, I learned to actually a lot of new things, but at some point I realized that there was no more room to go further in my career, um, in that particular company. And just in general, like I was, I be bored actually. So I started to pay attention more to my hobbies and one of them were was um, just doing scrapbooking, which is, uh, this arts and crafts, uh, made of paper and I was selling, my first product that I was selling online was actually passport covers. So it would make this, um, kind of look like a card, but you would put it inside of the, um, plastic cover and then you put your passport inside. So it kind of just, I don’t know, like a beautiful little thing to use that nobody actually knew what it is, what it was at that time.

Julia Shem: 00:08:59 Um, that’s what I was selling online. And then some point I just, I came across those, uh, shiny metallic gold and silver temporary tattoos and I got very excited about it. Just, uh, I was studying to use them all the time. Um, and I noticed that on Etsy, which is where I was selling my passport covers, uh, nobody was selling tattoos, those, those type specific type of tattoos. So I found a manufacturer in the States and I said it to resell them. And at some point, um, I decided that I’m just gonna create my own designs. Um, just a better version of the original product. I found a manufacturer in China and uh, well actually that was quite a long process to find a good manufacturer. It’s probably taking me like a half a year, but eventually, um, yeah, I was able to learn illustrator and Photoshop and create my own designs and send it to Prince.

Julia Shem: 00:09:55 And as soon as the, as soon as I got the package, I put them online and the set of to sell like hot cookies and Etsy because it was such a new and interesting products that people just were finding out about. And then my customers started to ask, well, what if we can create our own metallic Setu for our wedding, for example, or for this new co corporate party? Um, just something with a logo or like just a customized version of what do you have right now? And I said it to make custom designs more and more. And at some point I had so many orders that I was working 14 hour days, I would just come from a, come back to home from my nine to five job and then fulfill the orders and then reply to all of the messages. And it was just overwhelming.

Julia Shem: 00:10:44 And, um, then I made a really emotionally difficult decision to quit my job. Uh, and that was very scary because I’ve always, I always wanted to have a steady income and that, uh, that job was actually my American dream. This is what I always wanted just to live in the States, um, have a great income and be sort of financially independent and earn a lot more than I was able to learn it in Russia. And, um, yeah, I never even thought of becoming an entrepreneur, but at that stage, um, quit my job and, uh, moved to the center of LA and just spend steady to spend all my time, um, on working, taking this business off the ground. So, because I had a lot of, uh, customer service messages and it was just, you know, taking care of many things at the same time. Um, I started to thing that I have zero time to actually spend on marketing or anything else.

Julia Shem: 00:11:52 All I was doing is just customer service. So what I did is, um, I said, okay, so what is the first thing that I can do to reduce the workload? And the first thing was to automate, um, the ordering process. So the reason why I got so was taking care of so many messages every day is because, um, most of the time the customization process would happen over email or, or phone call and we would go back and forth confirming the artwork and the et cetera. So then I found a programmer in the Ukraine, um, created the, the plan for him basically did how I envisioned my web application to work and we spend about half a year and, um, automated the process of ordering and applying the, uploading the artwork and choosing the colors and all of that. So once that was done, it just reduced 80% of my workload automatically. So prior to that, the majority of the communications was around like, Hey, I want it to look like this, send me this letter. Exactly. Sending invoices and just, yeah. Taking care of everything regarding the ordering process itself. Um, so then once that was automated, um, what was left is still, um, creating still communication, uh, with clients on, um, just approving proofing the artwork before it goes to print.

Julia Shem: 00:13:19 So then I was doing that myself and I had no problem with it and I actually loved to talking to customers. Uh, but I always wanted to travel and I think that was the time that I decided, okay, so I have, uh, a steady income. This is not as scary as I thought it would be. Um, I have time to go and finally travel the world, uh, go outside of the States. Um, but I, I was afraid to do that because I would, if the internet would be really funky, what if I wouldn’t be able to, what if I miss miss that important phone call? So, um, I eventually hired a person in Ukraine as well to take care of the, um, kind of, to be an account manager, um, to, to take care of these proofing process and then sending orders to prints and making sure that everything is working.

Julia Shem: 00:14:06 And one of the trips that I’ve taken was not my crews actually. So after I came back exactly, there is no internet. So I came back, it was really anxious and like I thought that my business is going to end and everybody would just, it would be horrible. But actually everything was working fine. Um, so then I decided that, yeah, that’s actually, it works. Um, let’s see what else I can delegate cause eh, at that point, uh, what I think what made the big shift for me is I read the book called four hour workweek. So I set it to implement the strategies to Tim Ferriss. Suppose I’m talking about in the book. And I delegated the, the customization customer process.

Julia Shem: 00:14:53 Um, then hired a designer to take part of, um, take care of the artwork design, um, and then also worked on just improving my website and, um, my SEO and I got got to a point where the only thing that I was taking care of myself is the shipping. Um, and then eventually I found a person in the States, Oh, who would take care of the shipping part as well. So then in about half a year from the point that I, where I quit my job, I automated the business and excluded myself from it basically. So I was able to go to Nepal for two weeks, uh, with no internet connection, uh, get back and then everything was working smoothly.

Sean Tierney: 00:15:37 That’s amazing. Well, and that’s really trial by fire. Like if you’re willing to do the nomad cruise, that is putting a very big stamp on, uh, I mean it has to work because, uh, our, our internet is non-existent here, so, um, well that’s really cool. How did you go about assessing what needed to be automated next? I think it’s interesting that you did all this manually. Like you Flinstone it quote unquote. Um, so you knew all the processes yourself obviously cause you had to do them yourself. But then how were you making decisions on this is the piece that I should automate next versus shipping versus website ordering with all that.

Julia Shem: 00:16:13 So I went, uh, kind of step by step. But, um, I think what I was thinking at the time is that if I can automate this by somewhat, um, using somewhat technological solution, like building a better website or um, using some of like a medium like Zapier to automate certain things or um, automate the email marketing part and whatever. I could not automate that required like human intelligence. Um, ideally gated. I found somebody who would, um, take care of that. But before I did, I absolutely made sure that I know ins and outs of it. Um, and I created the 80 pages documents, uh, of how things need to be done. What is the step by step process of, um, communicating with the client? Making sure that we are doing everything that I’m doing the artwork and printing it the way that they wanted, uh, proofing everything before we sent it to print, how to send everything to print.

Julia Shem: 00:17:11 Um, basically, yeah, everything. So, uh, everything that was in my head at the, like how I was doing things, I just made sure that I translate it to paper and then I created the videos as well of how to do certain things on a website and um, on the backend of the website. And I trained my employees to use illustrator and Photoshop and everything in between. And yeah, basically I just thought that what, what, how do I think about things and what is the process in my head and made sure that they, um, know about this and then they do exact same thing.

Sean Tierney: 00:17:46 Yeah. Interestingly, funny enough, I went through a similar, uh, step of, uh, basically similar progression with how this show gets produced. So I have a guy, Marco and Macedonia who produces every episode and same thing. I just made a giant Google doc, explained every little step that’s in there. And then for each one I linked it and made a loom video. So like a five, 10 minute screencast on it. This is exactly how I do things. And now that is just like this living document that we update. If anything changes about how we do the show, then we update that doc and it’s like anyone can use it. If he’s sick, I could hand it over to someone else. That’s really great tip. Um, all right, well can you talk, so that business now essentially sounds like it runs itself, it,

Julia Shem: 00:18:30 well it’s been an autopilot for the last four years. Amazing. Well, of course I, it’s not completely on the autopilot because the passive income is never passive. Um, so I, whenever I’m back to Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time, uh, improving the business and looking for new customers and just improving little things. Uh, they actually, uh, make a big impact, um, and sometimes putting out fires as well. So I’m, I’m, uh, whenever my, my, um, employees have any questions about, uh, or like we were handling a specific case, then I will definitely step in.

Sean Tierney: 00:19:05 Yeah. Where is your head at with that business right now? What do you, what’s the next step for it or is it just running itself sufficiently that you’re happy with it?

Julia Shem: 00:19:15 Um, the temporary tattoo part is definitely, uh, we’ve perfected it I think to this point, but I’m looking forward to introducing new designs. So we are moving slowly into the field of promotional products, um, related with paper. So we’re looking to introduce, um, custom journals and notebooks and to Southern 20. Um, so I’m really, really, really excited about this and um, it’s kind of still the same technology for foil stamping as what we use for a metallic temporary tattoos, but in a different way. And I’ve been really passionate about journals and notebooks in the last couple of years and I think that this is a really great promotional products as well because it’s something that people look at every day and then they fill out and it’s always kind of reminding them about the company. Um, so it’s an excellent promotional product. Um,

Sean Tierney: 00:20:09 yeah, especially if you’re pouring like your deep thoughts into this thing and it becomes like you’re classically conditioned. If you’re looking at their logo and you’re constantly like pouring your heart into this thing, I can imagine that’d be a really strong promotional tool. Yeah,

Julia Shem: 00:20:22 it would be. Another thing that would be really cool to do is to partner up with speakers and authors to create custom journals for them. Um, so for example, for Tim Ferriss, the bullet journal that he uses, if we could create a custom version of it just specifically for him, um, cause he has his own system of doing that. So that would be truly amazing.

Sean Tierney: 00:20:41 Cool. And so at that point you guys aren’t just designing the cover, like the journal itself, like the pages, the journal could be customized for that speaker for one total customization. Yeah. Cool. All right, well let’s shift gears and talk about the other company that you started. I think I didn’t even know about this one until 10 minutes ago. So what is shipped as a [inaudible]?

Julia Shem: 00:21:04 Um, ship dazzle is, um, a company that I started not so long ago at about a year ago with my parents. Uh, we help other eCommerce brands just like myself to store the inventory at our warehouse and take care of the orders and shipping for them. So for example, if, um, actually the story started when I was looking for fulfillment center myself. So I essentially hired someone to take care of this for me. Um, but I did that because I wasn’t able to find a fulfillment center in the U S um, it was just either cutting too deeply into my margins or the solution wasn’t right. So, um, eventually I created my own fulfillment system and, um, a year ago I decided that, um, it would be a good thing to do to take that out of the business and actually create a separate business just out of that because, um, again, I looked, I looked for a solution that would fit the best, but I couldn’t find one. So I just set out to create my own. And, uh, we are particular fillment and we’re housing center located in Los Angeles, California. Um, and we focused on helping the small businesses just like myself, uh, to save time and money on order fulfillment and shipping.

Sean Tierney: 00:22:18 What I think is fascinating is you essentially did an Amazon data. If you think about it, like you, you built some infrastructure that was serving yourself and you realize this could be externalized and let’s expose this. So you knew firsthand that other people likely had the exact same issues you did. So you kind of externalized your own solution and made it consumable by them. I think that’s super cool.

Julia Shem: 00:22:37 Yeah, pretty much. Uh, and also we help eCommerce brands that are hosted on Shopify or WooCommerce. So, um, and actually a lot of people are moving away from Amazon because of the high prices, especially during Christmas and the holiday season. And, um, we are stepping in to help them, um, kind of offer the same functionality as Amazon FBA, but for the own eCommerce store. And they also have a much better, um, visibility into who their clients are if they move away from Amazon. And it’s the, there’s a lot of benefits to that. Definitely.

Sean Tierney: 00:23:13 I mean, is that who you guys market to? I mean, it seems like that’s a really compelling story. Like, get free of Amazon and be more in control of your own destiny. I think that’s a great, great advertising or marketing message to lead with.

Julia Shem: 00:23:25 Yeah. But mostly we would just focus on helping a small eCommerce brands altogether because I, I’ve, I’ve been there and then I know how hard it is to find that perfect fulfillment solution. Um, and I’m really glad that I created something that’s valuable for others.

Sean Tierney: 00:23:41 Yeah. And you do this with your parents, you made it. So it’s something that they can do. Uh,

Sean Tierney: 00:23:46 how involved are they in the business?

Julia Shem: 00:23:47 So they are the ones who are behind the operations. Um, so, uh, they’re making sure that every packaged is as, um, every order is packaged with love and care just exactly is how you would do it if you had, if you were to package a year old yourself.

Sean Tierney: 00:24:03 Cool. Awesome. So if you want an order from mama and Papa Shem shipped out as long as your company. All right, let’s talk about, uh, the cruise. So you and I were both speakers. I went to your talk. Um, you were at my talk. Uh, I thought there was a number of things. I took a lot of notes. Uh, we’re into some, some of the similar stuff like Tim Ferris. Can you talk about fear setting and the like how you use that exercise? We were, we were talking earlier about kite surfing, so maybe you just wanted to kind of tell that example.

Julia Shem: 00:24:36 Yeah, of course. Um, fear setting is something that I’ve been doing, uh, many, many times and that allowed me to make many life changing decisions. For example, moving from Russia to the States, um, quitting my nine to five job and becoming an entrepreneur, uh, traveling the world, taking that first trip, uh, automating the business and, um, ending toxic relationships, many, many things really. Um, and I, I initially was doing something similar. I was doing a similar exercise, um, but Tim Ferris actually put it in a very good template, uh, and really easy to use. So you defined your fears first and you define your worst possible outcome. The worst thing that could happen. Like what, what is it that you imagined you had happening that kind of makes you postpone that uncomfortable action? Um, and once you do that, that’s the most important and the, the toughest part.

Julia Shem: 00:25:35 And then what happens if you actually succeed? What are the benefits of potential success? Is it temporary also? Is it permanent? And if the worst possible scenario, is that also temporary or permanent? Most of the time the, what’d we fear the most is temporary. And then you define the steps if that happened, how, what you can do to make the things go back to the way that they were before. And most of the times it’s like I said, it’s temporary. It’s you, you can still make certain steps to remedy the situation. Um, but also the one other important part that you define that’s most people are actually overlooking when they do the goal setting, for example, is the cost of inaction. So what happens if you don’t do anything? If you stay in your comfort zone and keep the things that the way, the way that they were, um, and avoid that action, what is going to happen in six months, one year and three years from now?

Julia Shem: 00:26:34 And that actually helps people to put their life into perspective. And for example, um, you can apply this to, um, ending a toxic relationship or moving to a different place or becoming a full time digital nomad or just as simple as fear of Christ surfing. Um, so what would happen if I just let it be and didn’t do anything about my fear is I would continue to have this massive FOMO with, because everybody else, uh, most of my friends do kitesurf and they go to this wonderful places. Um, and every time I went with them, I would just, I would just stand there on the beach and be like, Hey, this is great, but I’m just afraid of going to the water and like, I can’t swim. So, um, I just never did anything about it. So, and then the year from and three from there and then three years from there, I would definitely feel, um, less confident and just wouldn’t feel good about myself that I never took them taking the chance.

Julia Shem: 00:27:36 Um, so I did this exercise before going to South Africa in may. And, uh, eventually I did learn how to create surf. Um, my biggest fear was that I would just face flip multiple times. I was so afraid of that because every, I’m really tiny and the guide is so big and every time I pull it, it was just take me out of the water and just flip my face flat on it. So that was really painful. I’ve experienced that a couple of times, actually, many, many times. And I initially I saw that this is not for me. I’m just not like everybody else just seem like go up and go. And I was the one who was just, Oh my God, I can’t figure this out. Why is this networking? And then I just didn’t do anything about it for, um, half a year. And after I did this exercise, just like I did many, many times before for certain other things, um, I decided that I still should try, I hired a Chi surfing structure and the worst thing that could happen is, well, I’ll just face flip again and that this is really the worst thing.

Julia Shem: 00:28:44 Um, and the best thing is that I could finally learn how to crowd surf and just, you would like, Oh, we’re coming. Your one of your greatest fears is such a powerful thing because it makes you feel like you can do anything in the world. And so I learned, yeah, I learned in marshes and South Africa and it was incredible. I had a really good instructor and I was able to stand up and that had been fall a single time and ride for about two hours.

Sean Tierney: 00:29:13 And I think you had, so I to kitesurf and I had, uh, it was not a quick process to learn. It took me like I want to cover at the Dominican Republic and just didn’t pick it up the first time and then went elsewhere. I think I went to Mexico after that and then it took going back to Kubota at day a second time. So at this point I had done it for maybe a total of like, I dunno, 14 days when it finally clicked. So it took me awhile. And, uh, I think the same thing that worked for you. I believe we were in the radio, like the realtime instruction where they can correct you while you’re out there. And it was like, yeah. So I think it’s a, I forget who says it, but like the faster you can iterate through the feedback loop is usually like in business or in anything. Like just being able to make that a tighter loop is the thing that makes you progress faster. And so absolutely, like the real time instruction was the thing for me, but agreed. Like kite surfing is a magical sport. [inaudible]

Julia Shem: 00:30:07 yes, but you can also apply this exercise to anything else. For example, if you are in the relationship and things are not working out, but you’re afraid to make that uncomfortable action and leave, um, think about the cost of an action and not just about you but the people, the other people that have an effect in six months, in one year, in three years. And that, that really helps to make that uncomfortable action. Because otherwise you just, you realize that things just might not be good as, as you thought it would be in the future.

Sean Tierney: 00:30:36 Yeah. Yup. So yup. So emphasizing the cost of inaction while simultaneously showing the steps to mitigate it or reverse it. If it is about decision to show you, Hey, it’s not that bad, like a fatal decision, you can just undo it. Yeah. No, I think that’s a really powerful thing. I will link to Tim Ferris’s talk cause he gave a Ted talk. I saw it on fierce setting. Yeah. So we’ll put that really well. Yeah, it was a really good one. So we’ll put that in the show notes. Uh, other stuff from your talk that I took. So, uh, I too did Headspace is my method to on ramp for meditation. And then I also did Sam Harris’s program. I now kind of do my own variant of that. Uh, can you just talk about like what meditation has done for you or what it means to you?

Julia Shem: 00:31:22 Absolutely. I think it’s been one of the most important tools in my toolbox. Um, for example, whenever you are feeling stuck or you just feel an anxiety and not sure where it’s coming from, where you you’re about to make this life changing decision and it’s just driving you insane. Um, meditation is something that helped me along the way to kind of take a step aside and listen to my own inner voice that my own thoughts that are running through my head several times a day, like all the time because I sort of, I have this monkey mind that’s always trying to solve problems, especially when I go to sleep for example. This is when it just kicks in and then it’s like, Oh yeah, let’s think about every major decision and every possible problem that you have right now when you’re trying to fall asleep.

Julia Shem: 00:32:12 Um, and meditation, especially if I do this in the morning, it kind of sets the tone for my day. It puts my thoughts in the order sort of, and then I’m also able to see of where I’m, what I’m thinking about the most. Um, cause most of the time that inner voice in your head is not really helpful. Um, and it also helps to listen to how you talk to yourself. Do you talk to yourself as your best friend or you, you know, saying that, um, this is not going to work. Like, don’t even try it. You know, many, many thoughts that you don’t even notice during the day. But once you sit down and close your eyes and try to step aside and actually take this birds eye view on things, it really helps to notice this kind of things. And it really helps to also just relax and, um, it puts your thoughts into perspective as well. Cause because if something in the moment feels like it’s, I don’t know, it’s, um, very like life changing and very scary decision. Um, but once you meditate, it just, it doesn’t, after four for some reason it doesn’t seem as scary as it was before. Yeah,

Sean Tierney: 00:33:27 yeah. No, it puts it in perspective. And like you said, I, I too have the monkey mind thing. I don’t know that for different essential oils over there that I used to fall asleep at night. So it’s a, um, I agree. I think the meditation, uh, it, it allows you to, I don’t know what it is like a bird’s eye view. It’s like stepping in and kind of observing your own thoughts and to the point where, I dunno, the, the thing that I think about is like we have like this little puppy dog caged like, and it’s just running around the cage and eventually like meditation, like if you do it right, it’s like lifting the cage at some point and now the, the puppy dog just kinda like stops running around and just sits there and looks around instead.

Julia Shem: 00:34:07 That’s an interesting party. If you direct your attention onto yourself and you’re like, what, what, what w hold on a second. Where did that thought came from? Yeah. And you tried to, to kind of backtrack it and you realize that, Oh, wait a minute. Like I, I’m not even sure. Like it’s just, um, it’s like mm. Listening to your own thoughts from like, just a stepping aside. Yeah, really interesting.

Sean Tierney: 00:34:33 It is really interesting. Did you do the Sam Harris program? The waking up?

Julia Shem: 00:34:36 I did. And the most, my favorite part of it is not actually not in the meditations but the lessons. Yeah. Um, the philosophical lessons about life and how, how we view failures, um, consciousness and um, yeah, he, there’s one, uh, one important lesson about, um, death actually it’s called lessons of death, uh, where he talks about how we sometimes, um, don’t notice the beautiful things around us and just focus on something that’s frustrating. But at the same time, if we can control it, we still waste our energy on it instead of focusing on something that’s more important. For example, if you’re stuck in traffic and you’re late for this important appointment or interview, and then there’s one person in front of you just driving really slow and you get frustrated about it, it’s like, you know, thinking that, Oh, why on earth on this particular day you decided to do this? Um, but then once you focus on something that this is definitely something that you cannot control, that’s one thing. But at the second thing is like, you don’t know what he’s going through. Like, what if he just, um, enjoying this beautiful day. Like he’s not late to any anything. Like you’re the one who being laid and this is your problem. That is so kind of also puts things into perspective and I really recommend to listen to that one important lesson.

Sean Tierney: 00:36:02 Okay, cool. Yeah, no, I really dug the Sam Harris program. Um, I strongly recommended, um, stoicism is that, so let’s talk a little bit about, cause I think it was at your talk that you mentioned the daily stoic. So I just got that book cause Ben Lake also told me to get it as well. Um, I read a number of books on stoicism. We know Tim Ferriss is a huge fan of it. What, how do you use it or what does it mean to you?

Julia Shem: 00:36:30 Um, so stoicism, I came across it probably a year ago. Um, and I think it’s one of the most important lessons from it that I, I think I use in my everyday life is trying to not, um, focus on things that I cannot control only on something that I can control my own emotions, my feelings and the steps that I can take, uh, basically everything that’s inside of my control. Um, so it’s, it really helps to not waste your energy and something that you cannot change anyhow. Otherwise. Um, for example, on relationships, that’s one of the examples that I, I was, uh, bringing up in my, during my talk. So, um, if you love someone and, um, if you know, you cannot control if they, um, love you to the same extent as you love them, right? Because this is outside of your control of what you can control is your own feelings. So you can be the most lovable and affectionate person that you can be. But that’s about it. If, if, if they decide to, to stick with you, that’s great. If not, then it’s also, it’s, it’s outside of your control. So why worry about something that you just cannot control.

Sean Tierney: 00:37:48 Yeah. Yeah, it’s, um, is that the book that you would recommend if for someone that can, you’re gonna give them one thing to introduce them to stoicism? Is that the book that you would recommend?

Julia Shem: 00:38:00 That’s, that’s really great. If you just want to have this, um, one wisdom for a day, for the day to read it in the morning and to think about this and see how you can apply it to your daily life. Um, and I think a lot of lessons from sources and not just that, but um, many more. It can be applied still today. It’s really funny how it’s been written in the third century and it’s, there’s still the same, we still have this facing the same problems and um, yeah, we can, we can apply to everyday life. But another, um, interesting book, well not book per se, but um, I think Tim Ferriss, just a couple months ago, he released this three PDF, large PDF files about stoicism, which are available for free on his website. And that’s another, that’s kind of like if you want to, if once you read the daily stoic, if you want to continue exploring this, I highly recommend checking that out.

Sean Tierney: 00:38:52 Okay. We’ll find that. We’ll link those as well in the show notes. Uh, there’s one that I would recommend. It’s called a guide to the good life, the ancient art of stoic joy. I don’t remember the author, but uh, I will link that one as well as that is the book I’ve read. Like I read Ryan holiday’s one. The object is the way or the obstacle is the way didn’t it, I don’t know, it just didn’t seem actionable but the guy to the good life, I thought it was an excellent introduction to it. So yeah. So we’ll link all those resources in the show notes. And I guess the last thing I wanted to talk about from your nomad cruise talk was just automation. Like your, your, your philosophy of automation cause you’ve done it really well with your own business. But how do you think about automation?

Julia Shem: 00:39:38 I think you should definitely be careful about what you want to automate because certain things like, um, customer service for example, you need to be careful, uh, to not go over exactly to not over automate because there’s still, um, a very important part in sales for example, is the human interaction. Like there are certain things that just cannot be autumn. Well you can’t automate them, but I would just encourage you not to exactly. Because if, if there is still this human touch that, um, you would like to keep as a part of your business is definitely keep that you can also delegate this to someone else. Um, but um, in, in terms of using technology, use it to a certain extent where it’s beneficial,

Sean Tierney: 00:40:25 that harmful, right? Yeah. So the, the talk that I gave him, no, Matt Cruz related to sales systemization, uh, delegating, automating were two of the steps in the seven step process. And, uh, I don’t know, the, the analogy that I used in terms of amplifying team members is like, I think of it kind of like this exoskeleton, like this thing, you know, like the, the scene that I’m picturing is the Sigourney Weaver in alien where she’s in this little like robot thing that she fits around her and she’s controlling this massive like powerful machine and it’s like small movements. You can have massive sweeping results from tiny movements. And that’s the way I think of like automation is you, you have joystick controls, like minor tweaks allow you to do like trigger an email sequence or like automate some fulfillment actions and whatnot, but it’s still piloted by a human and there is still that human touch there. And it sounds like you kind of have a similar philosophy in that regard to how you think about it.

Julia Shem: 00:41:20 Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Cool. I’m really excited to see how our world is going to change in the next decade or so once, uh, the AI and, uh, it’s just, it’s this technology is evolving really. And, um, I think we’re on this step before we like before we be take this exponential progress towards that field, but also people need to be conscious about it and to not overdo it and let it into the direction where we don’t want to go. [inaudible]

Sean Tierney: 00:41:51 so you’re talking about like general AI at this point? Yeah, yeah. I mean there, that is the concern, right? Like how do you do it ethically and in a way where genie can’t get out of the bottle. And, uh, I mean that’s a whole episode we could do on that topic. Are you, are you doing anything with AI or are you strictly like analysis of big data but not necessarily with like machine learning and AI?

Julia Shem: 00:42:15 Um, I’m slowly getting into that field, but at the moment I’m not using any machine learning. I’m just focusing on the data analysis and using that to drive better business decisions. Uh, but a I N. M it’s, it’s definitely an interesting topic because we can just for one thing that we can use it for is, is to predict the future a little bit in terms of just inventory, quantity, sales, you name it. Um, but yeah, if it definitely like it’s, it’s a, a black box basically. It didn’t, nobody knows exactly how it’s gonna play it out in the future.

Sean Tierney: 00:42:50 Yeah. Have you by chance seen the AlphaGo documentary, the one that Google, so you, you know, AlphaGo like the one that have the AI that beat the smartest go player in the world. And so this is for the people listening. So we’ve already had the grand master of chess, right? Deep blue, they’d beat him. But that game is a bounded game where there’s a finite number of moves and so he can actually just brute force every combination and win purely by looking ahead and knowing all the paths to winning. Right. So it’s a different way. AlphaGo was like the first test of raw AI where it can’t, it has to learn, it has to like figure out strategies and methods of playing. Um, cause there’s just like some kajillion permutations of how it go. Game can go, right. So anyway, this is a brilliant movie. You should check it out and it’s talking about like, it just shows you like the smartest, best go player who this Korean guy. And he’s just like, of course I’m going to win. And it’s like just humbling to see him lose and the emotions he goes through losing to a machine and like the country that had like come to see and watch him and like gasping, you know, when this machine beats him. It’s, it is, it’s a, it’s a new, it’s a new world

Julia Shem: 00:44:02 that’s very scary. But hopefully we will be able to find a way to use it. To your benefit.

Sean Tierney: 00:44:08 I think the, uh, Peter Diamandis, do you know who that is? So he, I’m a big fan of him, uh, his podcast and he’s very pro on like these technologies are, yes, we need to develop them ethically and be, you know, not just like completely not you’ve, that nothing’s going to go wrong. Like, we have to make sure that nothing goes wrong, but at the same time, these are also the tools that can solve unsolvable

Sean Tierney: 00:44:32 problems that we don’t know how to solve yet.

Julia Shem: 00:44:35 Or just, uh, automation for example, is a tool as well. It’s a tool to allow you to save your time and stop doing the repetitive work and focus on something that’s more valuable to your business. For example, marketing and bringing new clients and increasing sales. Right? So it’s, yeah, it’s definitely a very like beneficial tool and I love technology and I love using that to, um, kind of get away from the works for work sake and, and focus on something that’s more important for your business and your personal life as well. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 00:45:07 So this is, I think, a good segue. Can you talk a little bit about this next venture that you have planned? Like what, what is it? Uh, yeah. What, what can you share about what you’re looking to do?

Julia Shem: 00:45:17 Um, yeah, so I looking to leverage my knowledge as an entrepreneur and running an eCommerce business and my kind of past life as the computer programmer or, um, database analytic analytic person. Um, so I realized that a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs are not really using their data, um, to improve their business and to, to, to drive better decisions. Um, they do look at the KPIs for example, but they’re not doing this like thorough business analysis. For example, I just recently read a book, 80, 20 marketing and it’s an incredible tool. Um, but not many people know about this. And there are several other kind of metrics that if you, um, do a thorough analysis of your own business, you kind of get a perspective of where things are working out, where you should focus and where are you, where are your inefficiencies.

Julia Shem: 00:46:18 So maybe there’s something that you should let go of. And that’s, um, at the very early stages of Goldie, uh, I was selling my own designs and I was doing the custom designs as well. And I realized that most of my revenue is actually coming from the custom designs. Um, all the biggest part of it. So I said it to pay attention to it more than, um, like selling to local stores and whatnot. Um, but also cause I’m a big fan of automation, um, I’m looking to you kind of use big data and, and um, I’m able to get the data from multiple sources and play around with it and then slice it the ways that, um, help you to kind of get a bigger perspective on your own metrics and see where you can save money, where you can earn more money. Um, and things like that.

Sean Tierney: 00:47:09 And, okay, so let’s just say that I come to you and as Pagely and we’ve got, you know, different data sources. We have our support system and our CRM and our, uh, you know, custom control panel and red shift as a bunch of advent tracking in it and just all these different data sources. What are you, are you going in not knowing what you’re looking for or do you have ideas and you’re testing theories or like what is your process to use just raw data that’s there and make sense of it?

Julia Shem: 00:47:39 Um, well, because every diff, every business is different. Um, too, if you know exactly what are you looking for or what are you trying to achieve, what’s the end goal? So you give me all the inputs and then what, what are you looking in terms of the output and I am will be able to, um, take a look at the data and then bring it from multiple sources and analyze it and kind of give you those business insights.

Sean Tierney: 00:48:03 So we might give you challenges. So we’ll say like, you know, we have higher churn than we would like on our, our SAS product. So we’d like to subscriptions people canceling too soon. Maybe that’s an issue. Maybe, uh, I don’t know. Like, um, let’s say too many credit card payments fail inadvertently or something like, so we’re giving you challenges and you’re looking at the data that’s there to solve those challenges. Or are you coming back to us and saying, you know, I think you could get more profitability by introducing a new plan type between these two tiers based on what I’m seeing. Yes,

Julia Shem: 00:48:36 exactly that. Yes. And for example, if it’s an eCommerce business, then also, um, to kind of, uh, track down that downstream effect. For example, if you run a particular promotion for free, you afford your, your product or service for free for certain car customers a year ago. Um, to see if those customers were actually are on board with you right now. Um, how much revenue did you get from those customers? Um, and if that actually that promotional worked well or not, and the general sense. Um, and then what are your top clients that you should focus all of your, um, time with? Like, well, what, what are your top clients that you should focus on, uh, building a better relationships with and um, things like that. So it actually, it’s, um, there are three things. There’s frequency, um, so recency. Exactly. Yes. Um,

Sean Tierney: 00:49:34 well, just to clarify what those are for the people listening. So recency, frequency and monetary or what’s the M money mine. Yeah. Cool. All right. So if someone is listening and has a business with a lot of data, like are you, you’re in discovery phase it sounds like. So you’re literally willing to just kind of look at people’s data sets for the sake of just kind of seeing what all you can do and what is out there right at this point.

Julia Shem: 00:49:58 Yeah. Um, I’m looking to find your inefficiencies and help you to save money with certain things and then earn more money. And maybe there’s, um, different products that you’re not offering in the moment or different price ranges where your customers can spend four X times money that you just not aware of and you’re basically leaving this money on the table right now. Um, things like that. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 00:50:21 Yeah. And you’re not necessarily even charging right now, you’re talking about just getting a couple of case study, a couple of wins under

Sean Tierney: 00:50:28 your belt just to show that you can do it.

Julia Shem: 00:50:30 Exactly. I’m just looking for more case studies to see, um, what actually I can help with because I have this, all of this knowledge and I’ve used this data analysis for myself, but it’s not necessary. It’s gonna apply the same exact way to any other business. So I’m looking to get more information, like more of the case studies of different types of businesses and see why I can help.

Sean Tierney: 00:50:52 Cool. So if you’re listening and you have a lot of data and you want some free help, basically, um, I think honestly you should just do a donation model, like charge, pay for what you think it’s worth. Like if you have a big win for someone, they should absolutely, hopefully pay you for it. So, um, awesome. All right. Um, a couple of things before we wrap up. So you did my self defense workshop. I just wanted to ask you like what was your motive for coming and what did you get out of that?

Julia Shem: 00:51:18 Uh, the motive for coming is that I’m a solo traveler and, um, in many countries, for example, Brazil that I recently been to, I was really afraid to go there because of the certain stories that I heard and actually one of my friends got mugged, um, while we were there. So it’s, it’s, uh, it’s really important to know just the basics of self defense because, um, as careful as you can be, like there’s just certain scenarios where, um, like just by being basically unlucky, you can just get into really scary situations. So it’s important to know, uh, what are your options and thank you for doing the workshop because, uh, I was able to get some of the more insights of how to get yourself out of certain situations. Um, um, because prior to that, I just, I, most of my, uh, knowledge just came down to running. Um, but what if you’re, you know, there’s other situations where you cannot run and then you have to defend yourself and then what do you do in that case, especially as a woman. Um, so that was really beneficial.

Sean Tierney: 00:52:25 Do not attack Julia if you’re listening. She is way stronger than she loves me. Like deceivingly strong for as small as you are. Cool. And then, uh, and I think that’s good. And I think my biggest outcome or my, uh, my hope for that workshop was that it just gets people thinking about it. And if like if one person decides to go maybe take a crop Magog class, then that’s a win from that whole perfect. So that was a win. I will take a crab. My guy goes, Oh, I know for a fact, actually you should go to my buddy who teaches there. Joey KoreAm was episode number six. I think you should actually see that episode. He talks to a lot of the stuff that we talked with, but he’s like next level, like Jason Bourne, reincarnated. Like, Oh wow, he’s legit. He’ll take an AK 47 out of someone’s hands before they blink.

Julia Shem: 00:53:14 So I can take that in action as soon as the next week. Once I’m back.

Sean Tierney: 00:53:18 Awesome. I will put you in touch with Joey. Um, all right, cool. And then I guess the last thing, so you were also, we were both in the talent show as well. So can we stop here and on a fun note here. So tell me about your, like your background with dance cause you were super talented, both swing and salsa dance.

Julia Shem: 00:53:33 Thank you. Um, uh, the funny thing, I never taking a single salsa class before and uh, I learned salsa and the first, none of my cruise that I went to, it was coming from um, Columbia to Portugal and a lot of people, just a lot of locals that were taking the, the, the crews outside of the my crews conference, um, for dancing, incredible salsa. And I was able to learn a lot during those two weeks that we were, um, crossing the ocean. And I do salsa a little bit in Los Angeles, just on Fridays. There’s this great restaurant and um, it’s really the play’s really fun music and sometimes life music. Um, um, but swing dance for example, I fell in love with it a couple of years ago. The first time that I went to new Orleans and I went to with a friend of mine who I knew that he was teaching some sort of a dance.

Julia Shem: 00:54:27 Um, he never actually explained what swing dance was. So I, um, I actually didn’t really realize what he’s capable of. And as soon as we, um, went to listen to the live band and he started dancing, it’s just, it was so incredible and I was sure that they, um, rehearse said multiple, multiple times and they actually didn’t. It was 90% improvisation. And in that point I was completely blown away and I promised myself that as soon as I’m back in the States, I will take the class and it will learn how to do it. And, um, two years, fast forward, I, uh, just recently, um, a year ago actually I went to, um, one of the biggest festivals in Europe. It’s go lean to shock, happens on three boats in Budapest once a year. And the most skilled dancers and teachers from all over the world just come to that event for two weeks on the boat.

Julia Shem: 00:55:26 And that was incredible. I think this, this is where I’ve taken my intermediate level to intermediate advanced and I was able to learn so much. And after that, um, I didn’t stop, I decided that I’m going to learn aerials, which is like the most fun thing to do while you’re dancing. So imagine if you designate the partner, all of a sudden you do a back flip in the dense or the lift you up and then you kind of go around them and like fly. This is the, I guess this, this, this is it. This is the feeling of just flying, I guess, in the dense. So it’s, it, it’s truly incredible. And I was in two teams, uh, for camp Hollywood competition this year and I absolutely love swing dancing. There’s so many things. There’s Lindy hop, which is a slower pace. Um, there is Charleston, which is my favorite. It’s like a fast paced jazz. And most of the time it happens when there is a live jazz band and it’s the, the energy in the room and the F the fun and just everything combined is just, it makes me feel alive.

Sean Tierney: 00:56:32 Yeah. You look like you’re having a blast up here. And I swear for a bit, it didn’t even look like you were touching the floor. You’re like [inaudible] around and somehow levitate and it was really impressive. Um, all right, well actually I do want to ask one last question. Um, and then we have the breakdown, but the nomad cruise. So what would you say, like how, how did you find this cruise and no matters in general, but specifically this cruise relative to the other ones that you’ve been on? Uh, your thoughts?

Julia Shem: 00:57:03 This particular cruise is for alumni. So if people who’ve been to the cruises before, um, and I just, this is the first, um, well the first trip that I’ve taken many, many years ago and um, this is what kind of put me out of side of my comfort zone and make me travel in the first place. Um, so when I heard about people, people that had been to the quizzes before, and then this is the event, it’s going to be once a year, um, for alumni’s and I will be able to see all of my friends then people that have met in multiple cruises, all in the same boats. I was definitely salt. And every single conversation that I’ve had on this boat up to this day has been so incredible and valuable and I’m insanely grateful for that opportunity.

Sean Tierney: 00:57:51 How would you describe the experience to someone who has never been to a conference or a cruise ship or any, like, what are we doing here? What is this?

Julia Shem: 00:58:01 Um, so during the day we have workshops and talks about important topics on personal development and entrepreneurship as well. So, um, every one of us have says the ability to offer it, talk about just something that they’re really deeply passionate about. So I was speaking about business automation and recently on this cruise I was speaking about anxiety entrepreneurially, real anxiety actually. Um, and you learn so many things during the day and then it doesn’t stop at that because then we have the meetups. So we able to take those one on ones, the people that, um, you kind of just want to brainstorm on some crazy ideas that you have or you want to just pick up their brain on some specific, um, thing that you’re stuck on. And it just speeds up the process of learning so much because you can spend a lot of time just thinking about a particular problem and trying to solve it.

Julia Shem: 00:58:56 But then once you find the person who already done that and then they can tell you how to do things in about 30 minutes, that’s just incredible. And it’s not just strictly business because we, um, we done salsa during the nights and, um, we talk a lot about just philosophical questions and, um, play certain games. But like we, we, we played for like three days in a row and it’s really fun and it allows you to connect with those likeminded people, um, with entrepreneurial background or just freelancers or people that, um, want to become digital nomads. And they’re all on the same boat from like 20 plus countries and continent, like many continents and many nationalities. And it’s just incredible. Like I said, I’ve been enjoying every single conversation so far.

Sean Tierney: 00:59:49 Yeah. And this has been a long one. This is a 16 day cruise, so we’re at the very tail end of it. But I would agree with everything you just said. It just like a mixture of personal development slash funds slash just these talks in like an unconference format where you can kind of like create, you know, I saw Wim Hof breathing stuff, which is something that I do. And just, just like, you know, anyone who has any weird idea, they can throw it up on this corkboard and like instantly there’s going to be 10 other people that want to be involved with it. So

Julia Shem: 01:00:18 yeah, I think this is the place. If, if you want to just, um, get, um, many new ideas, um, uh, or just brainstorm or something, this is the place to be because I have a long list of things that have ideas that I’ve never thought about before. Um, a long list of to do things that once I land in Dubai once a fly back to Los Angeles and what I need to do in terms of bringing my business to the next level. And just aside from all of that, aside from business, I was able to connect with people that just on a deeper level because you spent so much time together, um, this two weeks and it’s, I, I think I’ve made a really, really cool friendships during those past two weeks.

Sean Tierney: 01:01:01 Yeah. How has the, I mean it’s a force digital detox too in the sense that like the wifi is terrible to non-existent here and even if you buy it, it’s really difficult to get online. Uh, have you felt that to actually be beneficial or like the lack of connectivity I guess in, in terms of those closeness of friendships and like needing to be present? I almost feel like the fact that we can’t get online is a good thing.

Julia Shem: 01:01:26 Absolutely. It’s definitely like a thing because, um, just think about when you go to a restaurant, uh, in your city, like you see people just stuck in their phones even though they’re on a date, for example, they’re still checking their social media or like they checking their messages or something. Here, the phone just doesn’t exist and the money also don’t exist as well because everything is paid for. So it’s kind of like a mini version of the burning man. I think this is the closest thing that I can kind of connect it to where you have the money, like, um, doesn’t exist. Uh, the social media doesn’t exist and all you’re left with is just a human connection. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 01:02:05 I think that’s a perfect place to end. There’s a last little structure part of this interview. It’s called the breakdown. Are you ready for the break?

Julia Shem: 01:02:11 Alrighty.

Sean Tierney: 01:02:15 All right. What is one book that has profoundly affected you

Julia Shem: 01:02:18 four hour by Tim Ferriss?

Sean Tierney: 01:02:20 It’s a Bible for everybody who went to automate their business was just have more free time with their kids and family or just more time to travel. Yeah. I think that’s a really, that is by far the most common book that is recommended amongst my guests. So I think it’s a really great suggestion. What about, what is one person you would love to have dinner with and that could be alive or past?

Julia Shem: 01:02:43 Um, when I ask the question, I always think about my grandmother. Um, she was a very strong woman and she went through a lot of hardships. Um, she was deported from, um, her hometown and just built a life from scratch in Magnitogorsk in my hometown where I was born. Um, and she, she was the example for me to, um, just always count on yourself, not counting anybody else and be the strongest person that you can be and whatever you want to achieve. You have all of the capacity, everything that you need to have you have inside you. And um, I always think about her whenever I needed to take a life changing decision, like moving to the States. Um, cause I thought that if she would be in this kind of situation, she would definitely do that and she’d be really proud of me.

Sean Tierney: 01:03:36 Cool.

Sean Tierney: 01:03:37 What about, what is one tool or hack that you use to save time, money, or headaches?

Julia Shem: 01:03:43 Uh, productivity tricks? I, um, let’s see. So there is one, uh, technique that’s called Pomodoro. Um, when you block out the time in 25 minutes or 15 minutes. And it helps me to not, um, spend too much time on something that’s, um, like not very productive, for example. So if I’m researching things, then I can go on and on and on reading like different books and articles about this forever and ever. Um, but if I tie myself, um, and I realized that after like 15 minutes, for example, I haven’t really progressed in like learning what, what is this that I’m trying to learn or what I’m looking for due to like what a solution, finding a solution to a particular problem that I stop, I’m going to take a break and then focus on something else. Um, but also, um, there’s this graph, uh, I forgot the name of it. There’s, when you defined, um,

Julia Shem: 01:04:40 separated the patients who four corners basically and then separate your to do list into those four chapters where

Sean Tierney: 01:04:47 urgency and importance.

Julia Shem: 01:04:48 Yes, exactly. So you kind of separate the two. There we go. Okay. So that really helps me to um, define what’s important on my to do list and what’s just the repetitive work. Yup.

Sean Tierney: 01:04:59 Cool. I used to actually have my screen so my desktop was a hand drawn version of that with like two arrows of urgent important. And I could literally like put the files that I was dealing with in the right quadrant on my desktop spatially. And so when I would, you know, when I went there I’d always looked to the upper right because it’s like urgent important and then you go to the important and then like,

Julia Shem: 01:05:20 so what was urgent and not important. This is what you need to delegate.

Sean Tierney: 01:05:23 Yeah. Or, or limit like what can real estate to say like, okay, this doesn’t really matter in the long game. Like, yeah. Yeah. Cool. Great tip. Uh, okay. What about, what is one piece of music that speaks to you lately or a musical artist?

Julia Shem: 01:05:40 Um, let’s see. I love jazz. Um, but also I love musicals, so I’ve been listening to, um, the Lala land soundtrack and I also play the piano and sing and, uh, I just have this deepest love for musicals because it’s, um, I don’t know. There’s something to it that just also makes me feel alive. And also the fact that I can dance, do it and sing and play and just all of those things altogether.

Sean Tierney: 01:06:07 What is your favorite musical? The greatest show men. Okay, cool. Absolutely not familiar with that one. We’ll check it. No, never seen that. No. Oh my God, I’m so jealous. It’s like five times already. I’m excited. I’d put it on my list. All right. Uh, what, here’s this is a difficult one. What important truth. Do you very few people agree with you on?

Julia Shem: 01:06:33 I think that focusing on something that you can control versus that you can’t control. Um, so back to stoicism actually. Um, for example, I’ve been trying to change the mindset of my parents to, um, help them see the positive things instead of the negative, not the negative per se, but something that they cannot change anyhow. Um, because I, I’m maybe it’s, um, a common mindset in Russia cause I remember myself doing that all the time as well. Um, because you’re so, I’m used to things being not good for a long period of time. The kind of just, it’s, it sets in your brain that things are always like there’s, you can always find something that’s not good, it’s not going all well. Um, so changing that mindset and flipping that inner switch into focusing on the positive instead of the negative, it’s a really, uh, important and a tough thing to do. I think it’s just because you’re not even realizing that you’re, um, just, you know, been ranting about something for a couple of minutes that you cannot even have control over. Um, so yeah.

Sean Tierney: 01:07:44 Was it, I can’t remember. It was your sock or someone else’s where they were talking about the analogy of the toboggans and the snow, like neuro-pathways being like when I met it wasn’t Nikki’s talk but about the idea that you get into these groups and when you have the same thought enough times that it actually makes like, uh, almost in the way that like a toboggan going down to the snow kind of burrows out a little tunnel and now like it wants to go there every time they’re on. So uh, yeah. I don’t know why that just popped in, but like it seems like, um, yeah. So stoicism, breaking those

Sean Tierney: 01:08:16 mental pathways. Toboggan. All right, last question. What is, if you had a time machine to go back to your 20 year old self, what is one piece of advice you would give yourself?

Julia Shem: 01:08:28 Same thing Steph. Trying to control something that he cannot control. Yeah. Step, warring too much. Because at the end, if you’re about to jump from the cliff and you don’t have a Perisher does trust yourself that you’re going to land on your feet no matter what. If you don’t know that, how things are going to play it out at the end, that’s totally fine because none of us do and it’s important to just believe in yourself and know that no matter what you’re going to be. Okay.

Sean Tierney: 01:08:54 Awesome. Julia, you are a bright star of the cruise. I am super excited that we got to have this conversation where if people want to follow you or get, you know, see what happens with your next venture or maybe even submit some data to be considered is one of your next candidates. How do they get in touch with you?

Julia Shem: 01:09:10 Absolutely. I’m, I’m on Facebook as Julia shim and um, yeah, feel free to reach out to me with any questions. I’m always happy to help.

Sean Tierney: 01:09:19 Awesome. Thank you so much, Julia.

Sean Tierney: 02:06 All right. Welcome everybody to the podcast. I am your host, Sean Tierney, and I’m sitting across from Johannes Voelkner today. Johannes is the founder of Nomad Cruise, which is what it sounds like. It’s cruises for digital nomads. I’ve actually been on two of them now and it’s basically a business and personal growth conference at sea with a sprinkle of magic that I don’t really know how to quantify it, but we’ll get into that. Johannes has built the cruise from scratch to a team of six and it has a community now of 1500 past cruise participants and alumni. And he also, Johannes started the very first Facebook group for digital nomads, which now has over 40,000 members. So he is currently scouting other initiatives now around building community for digital nomads. Johannes welcome to the show.

Johannes: 02:51 Thank you. Great to be here today.

Sean Tierney: 02:55 Let’s just set the context. Paint the picture here for where we’re at. So we’re in or I’ll let you describe it while we are in Koh Tao.

Johannes: 03:02 It’s actually a place where I did my first diving course 15 years ago, and now we suggested after our last cruise to have a reunion here because I think it’s a really beautiful place and you don’t, there’s much more in the world than Bali. So we went here to this little Island and I’m glad to meet you here. How do you like the Island?

Sean Tierney: 03:23 I like it so far. I I two to over about 10 years ago. And I just went yesterday, got recertified and had a wonderful dive here and yeah, it’s a beautiful Island. I think it’s a great choice. We had I remember Ben Lakoff and I had actually reached out and said, Hey, we’re thinking about Sri Lanka. And you said, no, no, no, hold off. We’ve got something planned and then this was a good choice. So yeah, I’ll be with it. So your language should be pretty good though as well. Yeah. Cool. Well, I’m super excited to talk about you know, we’ve been kind of chatting. We had a little mastermind session last night. So I figured we’d dive right into it. So the crews, how do you, what is the nomad cruise? How do you describe it to someone who’s never heard of it before?

Johannes: 04:03 So I think that if I would describe it and you ask 10 other people who have been on the cruise who would describe it, everyone would tell you something different because it’s really how people live throughout this experience. But basically we are meeting with around 300 to 500 people on a cruise ship. Usually we are crossing the Atlantic and at the same time we do a Skillshare conference and we really try to not just deliver valuable content but really connect the people that is actually our main objective. Because as a nomad, we are kind of oftentimes a little bit lonely or in different places. So it’s great when you are nowhere to have a great community. And that’s what we try to build in 10 days and give you friends for life when you join this course and learn things and get so inspired that afterwards you really want to make some things happen.

Sean Tierney: 04:56 So I, I’ve been to a number of conferences and I would put it in the bucket of a conference. It’s essentially, you know, it’s, it’s a, an event that a lot of people come to to get something out of it, which is what I would define as a conference. But it is a really special type of conference. It’s not just business information you’re, you’re disseminating, it’s like real community that, that bonds because at the pro

Johannes: 05:16 Conference, usually what you do is you have, you have 20 conversations or 50 but they’re all like two, three minutes. You never really have the chance to meet someone properly because you always feel like you’re missing out to meet the person, another person that could be valuable for you. And I’m here, the focus is much more on actually meeting people and because we are stuck on the same boat, we have this opportunity that basically you have no other choice then talking and meeting

Sean Tierney: 05:43 Lots of new people. Yeah, yeah. That’s a, that’s a a magical constraint that really yields a different outcome. You know, you can, you can get that from any type of land based conference. I feel like it is, you need to the boat that, that delivers that.

Johannes: 05:58 Yeah, there are not many places where you could do something similar like an Island maybe or a resort or something. But even there you could often from an Island you couldn’t run away. But it’s very hard to find similar places for that ship is actually really amazing. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 06:15 So I guess like the question I have is what was it that possessed you the first time? Usually like I’m just going to fill a cruise ship full of nomads. That’s just a random thing to do.

Johannes: 06:23 No, I never had this expectation and to be honest, this was a thing that I was thinking about for five minutes about this cruise. And then I kind of posted the idea because I was quite upset that oftentimes I have ideas and then I think about it for way too long. So I was just like, okay, let me just post this and see if people like the idea to meet on a cruise ship and go across the Atlantic there, what the normal cruise is now is something way beyond than what we had on the first cruise. We learned so much every cruise we are learning something new how people kind of take that concept and develop it further. But in the beginning it was really like a meeting on a cruise ship and then I saw like, Oh wow, there’s 100 people joining. Maybe I could actually turn this into a business. So there was not much thinking like I would take over full cruise ship or whatsoever. Maybe this will happen in the future, but I actually don’t even think so because it gets more complicated the more people you have on the ship. And I’m also you, we couldn’t give you the same rates if we would take over for ship because they, you pay for exclusivity.

Sean Tierney: 07:36 Right. Can you just, what I think is fascinating is, so I gave the keynote that opening keynote and one of the things I tried to extract a lot of lessons from the different people that I’ve interviewed. And your story is very consistent with like the remote year and the wifi Tribe story in that you just kind of threw it out there, you posted it, you posted this thing and it just kind of like you hit some kind of nerve where people immediately gravitated around it. Can you just take us back to that and just describe what that first cruise was like? How did it come together? How did it turn out and what did you learn?

Johannes: 08:07 So I think the important thing to know and why this worked and maybe there are other, so that people can maybe learn from this and think whether this applies to their current situation was I had been traveling for four years and I really tried to meet a lot of nomads and it didn’t happen, but I started in 2010 already. And at that time in Bali, there was not even anything there or there were just like the first coworking space was maybe just started, but it was really the very beginning of this whole thing. And so basically I was really, I really liked this idea of traveling and seeing the world, but I didn’t like the idea of every time having the same conversation again. And there were a lot of other people I think who had experienced something similar and this term digital nomad came up, but there were not really venues where people could meet.

Johannes: 09:03 So where do you meet online? And I had started this Facebook group, which already had 5,000 members. And basically when I, when I had the idea about the cruise, I knew like it was like I was doing the right thing at the right time because I, there were not many places where nomads could meet. I wanted to really meet people and other people wanted to meet each other as well. And maybe someone would have said, let’s meet on an Island, or Oh, there’s a cheap hotel down there in Spain. Let’s meet there. Maybe there would have been 100 people, but I just had this moment when people were so ready to meet up again. And I had organized small events before that so that then I could really capture this. But this was all based on a lot of work that I did in the past before.

Johannes: 09:52 But like if people are in the situation where they feel like, you know, I should get this people together because we don’t have our space and this could be for any type of business or entrepreneurs or like niche. Yeah, this was the right thing at the right time. So we met on the ship, we were like over 100 people and I am, I just said like one week before guys, let’s let’s do some skill sharing. Whoever wants to do a workshop or something cause we have so much time on the ship, we should do something. And then people just posted their ideas what they want to do. And we said after three days we’re going to meet. We had some, a dedicated meeting place and I talked a little bit to the cruise ship company, but it was all very random, very unorganized, organized. It was just me by myself and I was really scared actually to go on the ship cause I, I knew like 20 people of these 100 who were coming there. But in the end it all worked out and everyone was really happy about this experience.

Sean Tierney: 10:53 Yeah. Well and what, how, how crazy far it’s come at this point. Like for the people listening, they’re not going to be maybe familiar with it, but it is really well refined. It’s now run almost like it reminds me of bar camp in some senses. It’s kind of an unconference aspect. But then there’s like planned speaking slots.

Johannes: 11:11 Yeah. There was no, not big structure. And basically my main idea was not about meeting on a cruise ship. My main idea was I was traveling in South America by myself and wouldn’t it be cool to meet a lot of nomads on a ship and then we all arrive in South America at the same time and then we can travel South America together. And then if I want to go to San Diego to Shelia or two, one is Iris. I would just say like, hello, who’s down there? And then, yeah, someone is here and exactly, this is what happened. It was not really about the cruise itself, it was about what happened afterwards. So these days a lot of people join the cruise and they go home afterwards. But that’s not really the idea. The idea is that you go on the ship and then you really experience what is happening afterwards, which is what we are doing here right now. And you can see how this time actually after the cruise is also so valuable. And now you’re going to be living here in Koto for two months and was just planned for a few days, right?

Sean Tierney: 12:11 Yeah. So there’s for people listening, so we’re in COTA, but we’re not solo here. There’s probably 30 or 40 other cruisers that are holdouts now. So the cruise ended whenever that was maybe two weeks ago. Yeah. And all these people have now kind of gravitated towards this place that we’re at now. And so we’re just continuing to travel and it’s almost like this little tribe after nomad cruise that’s now going about, you know, getting a bit smaller every day. Yeah. Like whittling down. But it’s really, it’s boiling down to like really core interesting people that want to keep traveling together. So it’s, it’s super cool. Okay. Well for the people listening that want to extract, you know, ideally like the lesson here, that sounds like you’re saying that the timing was everything so, but just saying stumble into good timing, that’s not really like a, a deterministic, you know, you can’t just, you never know. How do you know when you’re like, when you hit the nail on the head for timing,

Johannes: 13:04 You never know. You try things all the time and sometimes you do it right. I tried a lot of things before and they didn’t work and this one worked. And but what I learned from this was like that you don’t need to, like oftentimes we are thinking like, Oh we need to have in order to organize this or I need to buy a house to start a co-living or I need to do this. Like there’s always like an easy way to do the same thing and you don’t even need to, I mean, working with the cruise ship industry is not easy with such big numbers. But if we just said like, let’s just meet there, that was possible to do it like this. And then they were listening to us and they’re like, I think oftentimes people think first too much about the money that they can, how they make the money. But you should first try to prove the concept or thing, like how can I actually do this? But for everything that people do, there’s usually like an easy way how you can test it and how you can do it without much budget or without much help. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 14:08 And that’s very consistent. So I used to run the lean startup for Phoenix and it’s very consistent with the lean principles of like what is that smallest MVP? How do we validate the code?

Johannes: 14:17 Yeah. And then move on to the next. Yeah. I always talk about the lean startup as well. When I, when I talk about, I think the cruise is a perfect example of lean startup because it was just, there was no website, there was nothing. It was just an idea and an idea and like, ma, let’s meet on this ship and if it’s a cool idea that is at the right time, usually like you would actually get better feedback if you just share an idea versus I’m selling this. So it’s always good to first share the idea with whatever you do, right? Because the idea, you’re actually asking people for help, but versus when you say like, Hey, I’m going to sell this retreat and people are like, Oh no, I’m not going to, Oh, it’s too expensive and I’m not going to do it. But if you develop it with other people together, then it’s kind of cool.

Sean Tierney: 15:02 Well you get their buy in, they feel like they’re co-creating it too. So that’s really important. So did you, on that first one, did you actually brand it nomad cruise or did you like midway through say, Hey, we’re a nomad cruise,

Johannes: 15:13 You said like digital nomad cruise. We just had a Facebook event and then what we did is, because I realized like, okay, well this might be a cool thing. So like two weeks before we made a website and I, Sasha, who is now here with us as well, I was like, calm, let’s do a cool logo and let’s sell some t-shirts as well. And we made one flag and basically, so kind of we created the brand, but the people did not buy into the brand. Like we just said, like, it’s like if you would say like, I’m going to, exactly. You can say like, let’s do a diving meet up here in Kyoto for digital nomads. We do a diving meetup and then like one week you’re like, Oh wow, they’re 100 people coming there. Let me actually give this a name, like digital nomad divers. And and then you have a brand and you didn’t even have this before. You just take the picture and the flag and you have the proof of concept and we use this picture to sell the next cruise where 200 people actually came already.

Sean Tierney: 16:18 So that I think is a really key lesson is that you focus first on just validating the idea and didn’t worry about anything. Like you said, like about trying to make it formal and ticket sales and brand and all that. But once you saw that you had traction, then you retrofitted a brand and like actually made it look like a real

Johannes: 16:34 In the moment I saw that there are people interested in it and I can develop this further and there might actually be a way to turn this into a proper nice business. Then I invested into the brand and I invested into more resources. But in the beginning, really this was a five minute idea because I was, I was thinking, this is really, really cool, but let me not think about this too much because tomorrow morning I’m might already be thinking like, I don’t want to do this. So I was just like, okay, let me just post it and see what happens. And then some people, it’s a shared it and it worked so fast that I had no other choice than just going for it.

Sean Tierney: 17:13 That’s awesome. So you say you had tried other things before the didn’t really pan out. Can you name any of the like experiments that you tried that didn’t work?

Johannes: 17:22 So two months before I posted the cruise, I like before I started the idea for the cruise, I actually started a coworking space in Tarifa in Southern Spain and I had already the office and everything and and I think it would have worked out, but then I basically just focused on the cruise. I did, I made an ebook for digital nomads with the destinations and it was before this all nomad list came up. And I think that if I would have attached my little ebook to a online community, I would have made something really big before even anyone was thinking about digital nomads. That didn’t work out because there was not, I didn’t have enough skills and experience. So I think a lot of the things are just like, sometimes we have good ideas, but then oftentimes we fail because we don’t have enough skills yet. We don’t have enough experience. So the idea works and even like selling it works. But then we still need to learn all the other basics of sales, marketing, copywriting, or find good people who can help us to make this happen.

Sean Tierney: 18:30 Well, the trick, it seems as always like early on, you don’t have the money to afford to hire that great staff. So it’s like, what can you get done with just your skills? And so you gotta just to the point where it was working enough where you could then justify like, okay, we have something here to do this. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. The theme it sounds like is nomads, like is there a reason that you’re all the things you’ve tried or around that space?

Johannes: 18:55 I actually had another business before that and which was card’s in therapy. That is a where I, my mum to build an online business and miraculously this worked out really well and actually I’m still making money of this even after 10 years without much work. So this allowed me, like, I built this passive income business, which allowed me to travel the world and experience the nomad lifestyle without, you know, having too many clients and to worry too much about the internet because I could just focus on this one online business. And, but that basically led me into the nomads space much earlier than anyone else. And they’re, yeah, so they’re tried a lot of different things, but I was also like very often, very often I was very hesitant to try something. I thought many times like, Oh, should I do this? Should I do this? Not like basically the, the cruise only came four years after I had basically written the first ebook and I had already a website. If you Google digital nomad, you will find my website in the top three or something. And all these things I did without ever really making more than a thousand dollars or something.

Sean Tierney: 20:14 What is that website? Just web blog. Travel. Web work. Travel. Okay. I was going to ask you about that cause I saw that in your LinkedIn. So that is the site for the ebook thing. Cool. Awesome. Do you have, so you have this working business now, like the nomad cruise. I know you’re thinking about some other things centered around community and whatnot. Like, do you have a, a goal other than making money, like is your mission it’s centric to nomads or what did, like what is your grand or vision or what are you trying to accomplish? I guess

Johannes: 20:44 So I think that a nomad life also something like a personal development. Like, so in the beginning I was just fixing my own problems. I was just like, and that’s also a good thing for entrepreneurs, right? Like when you think about something, I w I thought I want to travel with more people. How can I meet people? I made an ebook for people too who would be interested in this, that I can meet. I made a lot of things to just meet more nomads cause there was nothing really there. And so I was kind of fixing my own, my own problems. And now I think that, so I’m not 100% sure even where this whole nomad life is developing. But yeah, the what was the question again?

Sean Tierney: 21:29 I just like, do you have a, like a mission beyond making money? Is there some kind of like theme or grander goal that you’re trying to accomplish with the nomad cruise?

Johannes: 21:39 It’s personal development. Yeah. I think it’s like that people learn. I think that a lot of people become nomads because they’re, ah, you can almost say running away from something even if no one would really claim this. But like there’s some things that they’re not happy with. Like I had a very, very big breakup. I was going to get married actually. And then I became a nomad cause I didn’t know where to go. And oftentimes I feel that a nomads are in a big shift or they had a really crazy experience that made them like, Hey, why am I living this life that I’m living now? I want to make a big change. But oftentimes, so they start to travel and they start to want to see the world and do different things and that’s awesome. But I also think that many of them, I think that we are all on this path together and we need to build like a, so I want to really help them to build a location independent business. But also grow personally and not just go into like traveling and seeing Thailand or whatever. That’s not the I feel like some responsibility for this, like because we are organizing these events and my goal is that people actually end up with a cool location, independent business and that they also, but also they don’t need to travel. They, they kind of feel happy in their environment and with their connections and stuff. And I do not have yet the right answer but that’s kind of where I want to want to go.

Sean Tierney: 23:09 Interesting. So you don’t want to be a part of the problem in terms of like taking people off and like escaping and running away. It’s like you feel kind of I dunno you, you want to help them actually succeed and building their business?

Johannes: 23:23 No, I mean we are doing the, everything we do on the cruise is like encourage people to think about their, what they want to solve, what they want to. And it’s not like people running away, you can say running away, but you can just say like, yeah, you know, like I come from a small home, small town. I don’t want to necessarily live there all my life. So you just want to have some change. Right. We all went to have some, but it’s not just about traveling, like people love to travel, but there’s some other reason why people become nomads. Usually 80% I would say that that’s, I don’t know if you agree, but

Sean Tierney: 23:57 I think every, yeah, I mean I’ve, I’ve had an interesting cross section of interviewed a lot of them and I think everyone enters at a different angle. But I think that is probably a consistent theme is that there was some transformative events. Like when I look back at it, it’s usually some kind of low point or something happened. Like you say a breakup or a cut from your job

Johannes: 24:15 Almost die. Or they just, or their, their friend dies and then they’re like, Oh shit. Like life is short. It’s like a wake up. It’s oftentimes, it’s some kind of wake up a thing where you’re like, okay, I want to change something. And that’s why people start this. And that’s why they get super excited about it in the beginning. But they will also realize after a while, like, Hey, I actually need to make these connections. I need to have deeper connections. I need to settle at one point as well, but do I really want to be settling back at the place where I came from or do I want to find another home? So it’s a whole big journey and some people, I think it’s good for everyone to experience this. But yeah, it’s good and it w it’s going to be interesting. It’s super interesting to see how this is all developing and, and where this is going. But I think we all like the first real generation of many people doing this. And I’m in, let’s say in five years, we know a lot more. We can have a much better vision where the nominate thing is developing too, right?

Sean Tierney: 25:22 So, yeah, absolutely. I agree. You ended up settling in Majorca. W so you traveled around, you nod for awhile and then you picked my Orco. What was it about that place?

Johannes: 25:32 So I wanted to have a place that is easily reachable. That is I think so. I mean, I wouldn’t say settling, I would say investing time in places where I want to spend my future. And I wanted to invest some time in my Yorker because I think that this could be a place where I can spend much more time in the future. I like, like I learned, I like beaches and it’s super well connected is probably the most well connected place after Barcelona in Europe. Like I can get easily to, to Germany or to whether like some bigger cities are more better connected, but like as a small Island it’s amazing for that. It’s one of the most beautiful islands in the world. It’s actually also super affordable in some places, not everywhere. But it has everything you kind of want and need on a small Island and a beautiful place. And I also, it’s a great place for me to also on the one hand, living in a really beautiful, amazing place, but also having like friends and visited, like parents coming to visit me without having to maintain all my social social circle all the time. Like actually people come there to visit, which is also really nice.

Sean Tierney: 26:53 Yeah. Well I have a similar thing, Lisbon, like it’s definitely an attractive place. There’s no shortage of friends who want to come and stop by and see. You said it was cool for that. I got to go to, is it? Ghada is in my Yorkers at the place cause I got to go there about a year and a half ago for my buddies for it was beautiful. And they have the kite surfing, which you’re a kite surfer as well. So I don’t know if that’s an attraction for you. That was it. To have kite surfing

Johannes: 27:18 The North and they have a kite surfing in a camp ostia in the, in the South. It’s not amazing kiting, but it’s okay. But I also, yeah, so I did that. I did kinds of a lot in the past and I want to focus on more other things as well. So it’s not so important for me. But again, I want to say like it’s not necessarily settling, it’s just like investing time into certain places. And I think that that is important for all nomads actually. That in the beginning, like maybe in the first year we kind of travel a lot, but then it’s kind of important that we go back to places that we really enjoyed and really built like more meaningful friendships and relationships. Instead of just jumping around the word like crazy for forever. That’s not really healthy. Agreed.

Sean Tierney: 28:07 And do you think my Yorker might become like another hotbed, like another, I don’t even know if I’d say nomad hub, but like a place that would draw type of people. A lot of people

Johannes: 28:17 We’ll move them. It’s like the, the places and things that you can get there are, have a great price. It’s so well connected and it just makes sense for people. Like, if you went to have a your own apartment, it’s a great place to move from anywhere in Europe. And I see people already doing it. It’s not so well organized yet, but it just makes sense.

Sean Tierney: 28:43 Where, are there any other places like my Yorker that you see being similar, like potential future destinations? Or do you not want to share that? I think so for example, well,

Johannes: 28:53 I actually wrote this ebook a long time ago. You know, like my first ebook, which I think is still for sale on my website, I’m sure. I think, yeah. And all these places. So what I see is I started out as a backpacker and I was not a nomad, not at all. And there was like 15 years ago when I started to travel and really go to a lot of places around the world. And there were all these backpacking destinations like Bocas Del Toro in Panama San Juan Del suer, Nicaragua quarto here, Copan yang Krabi. Like all these places where the backpackers were, have actually been going since over 20, 30, 40 years. They were all developed, some kind of nomad hotspot. There will be coworking spaces that will be all these things and some will just develop faster and some won’t. It always depends a bit on someone who’s doing, running the community or who’s taking care of it, who’s promoting the things. But actually I think that every kind of place that is a trap attractive to millennials has got the potential to become a normal hotspot. Cool.

Sean Tierney: 30:07 I want to shift gears here. So you are going to be speaking shortly at the nomad summit in Chiang Mai. What’s your talk about?

Johannes: 30:14 It’s going to be about how to build a location independent business while traveling the world. And basically there went to share about more like some, like the, my major learnings on entrepreneurship and how you combine this with traveling because I actually think that you can’t really build a business when you’re traveling nonstop. But if you implement the right habits or the right techniques or you take it slow and you, you continue investing into learning and, and doing more things, then you, then you can do it. So, but you need to be aware, like you need to be aware of some things. I think in order to rec really build a business and not just and have the right values that you prioritize over actually traveling to do that.

Sean Tierney: 31:07 Is there any like the meat of it that you can share, the gist of that in terms of what you see going wrong with people that fail building a location, independent business, water treatment?

Johannes: 31:16 So I think that the major thing is that and that in included myself as well, is that we have as a number one priority freedom. If your priority is freedom, you want to do whatever you want to do, like live where you want, do what you want. You kind of get this mentality of, you know, you just take things very easy or you’re taking shortcuts, you’re just going to cheaper places because that’s what you can afford. And a lot of things like that, but you don’t really focus on growth. And this is what, when you versus when you’re an entrepreneur, you should have like, okay, I’m building this business, I want to do this properly and this allows me to travel the world. But this is my number one priority that if I want to do some phone calls, so I want to do this, I’m going to go there, or I will organize my life into that version.

Johannes: 32:13 I’m not going to take the cheapest accommodation, but I’m just going to make sure I’m going to earn a little bit more money so that I can afford something that is nice. And I see that a lot of people are more driven by that, by the, by the freedom versus actually saying first like, okay, business is very, very important, but I want to have a fun time building my business. So if you just change that mindset a little bit and you say like, okay, well, you know, I don’t know where I’m going to be in 10 years, but in 10 years I want to make sure that I have a really, really nice business or I’m making progress in my position, in my remote work position or as employee. But I see that most nomads are more driven by the freedom and they need to change their value. And this included myself as well, so I’m not pointing fingers. I did the same. Right.

Sean Tierney: 33:05 Well the irony is it’s like if you prioritize the financial freedom that other freedom will come about naturally.

Johannes: 33:11 Exactly, exactly. Well, it depends on if you always focus on growth then with each growing you get more problems that you need to fix. So you need to kind of, at one point you need to say like, okay, I stop now and now it’s just about having more time available and automization. But you can build a nice business or you can build your business in a way and focus on, you know, living a more healthy life or whatsoever. And then you will hit. Yeah, freedom has discipline, right? Like if you have the right discipline, then you can have all the freedom in the world that you want. Freedom is not taking shortcuts and making, living cheap for $1,000 a month. There are a few people who do that, so I’m not, don’t want to point fingers.

Sean Tierney: 33:57 Well, so are there, you’ve gotten the cruise to the state that it’s in. Are there any other optimizations you plan to make to that? Or like what’s, what’s the future? What are you working on now? Where’s your head at?

Johannes: 34:07 So we want to do, develop the cruise much further, but to be honest, there’s not so much that we want to change on this. The cruise itself, it’s more about what we do after the cruise or what we do before the cruise or whether we’re going to bring more people on the cruise. Or whether we keep it the Sam and just do a few more. But the concept of the cruise, I don’t think we’re going to do too much changes. I think it’s, it’s good and it’s just like small things that we want to change. What we want to do as well though is we want to move more on land. We don’t always want to have to meet on a cruise ship because actually cruise ships are great place to connect people. But once people are connected, which they can have like once or twice, you know, the, these connections, we can also meet in places like hotel or in or, yeah. Or in my Yorker where we’re going to have a big reunion for everyone who has been on the cruise before. That’s our plan to have a reunion. And but we also thinking about more like a membership membership, global model where we have reunions and different places around the world and, and really like make it easier for people to plug into places with ambassadors and things. But it’s nothing that something I like to think about, but we need to take things step by step. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 35:28 Do you, so just to throw out some names because maybe these are useful to people. Like I’ve done intonations, I’ve played around with that community and various, there’s the dynamite circle, which is more of like an exclusive, like higher dollar business focus thing. I’m thinking like meetup, which is generally available as public. There’s no charge to it. These are types of community things. Are you, where do you see in that landscape? What are you trying to create? Like fitting within [inaudible]?

Johannes: 35:54 I think it would be something in between international and dynamite circle. Okay. So, so and so there’s a, there’s a, it’s important to have each of these communities and it always depends on what is there. But what we want to make easy is for people to kind of really have like a face to face contact and not just something that is totally online in, but in many places around the world. And it’s not so much about like business growth, which is communities like dynamite circles or entrepreneurial organization. Many, many others, ones as well. But more about just community and connecting. And, but of course it’s important for us to bring across the growth as well. But this can be more like as part of events. Cool. Awesome.

Sean Tierney: 36:48 Well I think that’s probably a good place to wrap up. I do have a final little part, it’s called the breakdown. So are you ready for the breakdown breakdown? What is one book that is profoundly affected you?

Johannes: 37:02 Well, I’m going to say the same like most people or many people would do. It’s the fall work week. It’s what I actually built in the beginning to make all these things possible for myself and that has really impacted me. And now I really like books like scaling up. That’s, that’s another one. Scaling up. Yeah. Cool.

Sean Tierney: 37:25 Yeah, four hour work week is a given. It’s probably eight out of every time people I interview say that one. But it is, it’s a

Johannes: 37:31 When it just came out and then that’s why I’ve been quite early in this whole thing that I have been. Yeah. Like thinking about these things. Cool.

Sean Tierney: 37:41 What about, what is one person you’d love to have dinner with?

Johannes: 37:45 One person, I think Michael Jordan, because he’s been my idol when I was very young. Yeah. Awesome.

Sean Tierney: 37:53 What is one tool or hack that you use to save time? [inaudible]

Johannes: 37:57 Or headaches? I would say Asana templates. Like we have the whole cruise in one template and we make it always a little bit better and then we save it and we reuse it again and again. So like this we can try to keep the quality the same but always make it a little bit better.

Sean Tierney: 38:15 And do you, is that something you’re teaching or showing anywhere or no, not yet. Not yet. Maybe sell. Perfect. Perfect.

Johannes: 38:24 Yeah, but we, we are like making it really, really cool. We have the whole crews in different templates, like schedule a timeline in Asana with of custom fields and stuff. And I think that’s one hack that keeps me sane and makes me sure that the team is doing, running the crews and if they have questions they can ask and then the template will automatically become better.

Sean Tierney: 38:51 Cool. I have struggled. I tried to, I made an honest effort to use a sauna and I ended up just reverting to Trello because it’s easier and I don’t know, it just makes more sense to my feeble brain. But I dunno. Asana, it seems like there’s multiple ways to do the same thing and I could never quite get my head around it, but

Johannes: 39:06 Maybe you, maybe I can show you some things.

Sean Tierney: 39:12 All right. What is one piece of music that speaks to you or musical artist?

Johannes: 39:19 I like sublime, which is quite old, but I, that’s one band that I really, really enjoyed.

Sean Tierney: 39:26 All right. Before you leave. So we’ve been doing jam sessions and I play that Eleven’s what? I got something we will get a jam session before you do. All right. Two questions. What what is one important truth that very few people agree with you on?

Johannes: 39:40 Agree with me on one important truth.

Speaker 3: 39:43 Oh,

Johannes: 39:44 I don’t know.

Sean Tierney: 39:46 It’s a tough one. This is a Peter teal question, one important truth that most people disagree with me on or very few people agree with you about.

Johannes: 39:56 Mm, I would not say, I mean for me personally, I think this, I think like there’s one new thing that I really think about now a lot and it’s combining like thinking about this Maslow hierarchy of needs and the nomad life, which is basically taking us, exploring the word and then looking for belonging and safety and focusing more on business and which explains the whole reason and the whole steps of how the nomad life is from like traveling super fast to slowly to looking for your tribe, like people coming on nomad cruise and then actually focusing more on business and stuff. So I could say like actually that nomads would say like, Oh, I don’t need a Homebase. I just want to do this for forever. I’m like, well, maybe you’re not there yet, but like, look, in two years you’re going to change. So I don’t know. Cool. No, that’s a good one. I know that people will change their perspective on the life and I think it’s all very good. Like what they learned along the way. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 40:59 Cool. All right, last question. So if you had a time machine to go back to your 20 year old Johannes self and tell yourself any bit of advice, what would you say?

Johannes: 41:11 I would learn to be really more structured very early.

Sean Tierney: 41:19 Really. I, you strike me as like fairly structured. Okay. I’m

Johannes: 41:22 Not structured at all. I’m like quite lazy in a way. And I would learn to to when I do something, like if I do like I never want to do it again. Like I implement some structure or I do some research like prepare things, think about things before I actually do them. On the other end I think that starting something like nomad cruise, if I would have known what it takes in preparation to actually take this to the next level, I would have never done it. But maybe if I would have learned it already in the 20s, I could have done the most amazing crews already after one thing. So learning how to really prepare things before I actually do them and think things through and get, become like thinking in structures and developing processes and stuff. This is something that I like to do and improve a lot. Yeah. Cool. All right, man. Well, best of luck on your talk in sharing mine. Thank you so much for taking the time and they’re super busy. I’m glad we finally got this. Thank you. Thank you for not asking the same questions most people. Fair enough. Okay, thank you. Cheers. Bye.

Sean Tierney: 02:22 All right. Hey everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Sean Tierney and I’m sitting across from Ash. Ash founded the digital nomad meetup group here in Lisbon, which is currently the largest digital nomad meetup group in the world. He also, uh, this is also the largest meetup group in all of Portugal. Ash worked at an early stage startup pre-investment called Dubizzle that later became the largest classified ads portal in the middle East and North Africa and was later acquired by OLX at the ripe age of 13. Ash founded the largest retro gaming website in the world and rode that train for 18 years. His latest hustle. He’s just recently purchased a specialty coffee shop in Lisbon and is now learning the food and beverage business rapidly scaling this latest venture. Welcome Ash to the show.

Ash: 03:06 Thank you for having me here, Sean. It’s great to be here.

Sean Tierney: 03:09 Awesome. Okay, so I figured, uh, we’re doing this kind of hurry up. Offense is like my last day in Lisbon for awhile, so I’m, I’m stoked that you were able to come in and I figured we’d just kind of go chronologically through your history. Just like what you’ve been up to. Um, why don’t we start at age 13? What first off, what is retro gaming? What does that all that?

Ash: 03:25 Well, it’s these old video games that you can no longer purchase anywhere. And, um, while I grew up in India and what happened was that I hadn’t played a lot of those games because back then the video game industry didn’t use to market in India. So when I found out about this technology called emulation, I figured that I could somehow play those games and you know, catch up with global culture in a way. And I started playing those games and I realized that they would be a lot of other people like me who would want to relive those games and those experiences. So I started this website and I started, you know, uh, helping people out with emulation and stuff like that. And that’s how they got, you know, really into it. And it grew slowly and steadily, but I worked on it for 18 years and eventually, I mean, for the last eight or 10 years, it was the largest retro video games website.

Ash: 04:12 And in the world, Alexa, top 1000 and all of that. So it was amazing. So we’re, we’re talking about like these massive arcade games. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. All the favorites that you ever played, you know, all the favors that you wasted all your coins on. They are kids. All of them were there and people would really, I would get a lot of amazing feedback from people, emails from soldiers that were at war or people who were, you know, um, hospitalized for long periods that you know, that the only way they could cope with their situations was playing the games that they were, you know, into as kids. So it was a really rewarding experience in terms of just running that side and giving those experiences to people somehow. Nice and cute. Was this something where people would download these things and play them locally on their computer or is it possible to actually play these in a web browser?

Ash: 05:04 How does it work? Well, back in, so this is the thing, like I’ve been, I started the website, um, I think we had the Pentium two processor at that time. So, you know, we didn’t really have the kind of computational power, uh, you know, an iPhone is way faster than any of those computers today. So back in the day you had to download special software and download the games and you know, run them and sometimes they wouldn’t even run at full speed. But today you could play them inside your browser, you could play them on your phone, you can play them anywhere really. Probably even on an Apple watch. I never tried it, but it’s possible I guess. What’s the like business wise, how does it work? Like licensing? Did you just like, cause I would think people like Nintendo or whoever those big gaming companies back in the day, like do you have to then like purchase rights from them to resell it or are these just kind of like public domain after a certain amount of time or how does that work?

Ash: 05:55 No, I, the issue here is that a lot times these the studios, so it’s the studios that develop the games that own the rights to the games. And most of the times I’d say about 95% of the times, the studios don’t exist anymore. The companies do not even exist. So there is no provision or way of purchasing the licensing for most of these games. There are some companies today that are trying to find out who, you know, what the chain of copyright ownership was and who’s the final, you know, holder of the estate that holds this license and stuff like that and try note, we release the games, but you’re only able to track number about 5% of them. So what we did was we had games available there for free and what people could do was play them. And if we ever received any kind of issue or complaint from somebody saying, Hey, this is our game, you shouldn’t distribute it, we would take it down and that, that’s what we did for the longest time and it worked fine.

Ash: 06:45 There was no issues with that. Right? So that’s how we worked it out. Cool. So it’s almost like in the same way that like you don’t have to police a website, but if you get a DMC, I take down requests, you’ll just honor the request. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, ultimately we were in, in interested in preserving the games and not, and, and, you know, having people have those experiences. And you know, this type of stuff is very important today because if you look at the movies from the 1920s and thirties and forties, 99% of them have vanished because of lack of preservation efforts. And the same is happening with video games right now. Like games from the 70s, 80s and 90s are just, you can get, get your hands on them anymore because the physical media degrades over time and you can’t even find them anywhere.

Ash: 07:27 And then, um, you need to digitize them and store them and distribute them so that people can have those experiences in container environments. So we’ve been trying to do that, uh, and honor any copyright issues there. Never really had any trouble with that, so that’s awesome, man. Yeah, you’re like a museum preserving all these. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But, um, so it’s, it’s been a really interesting journey and it’s just amazing how much people love those games. It’s, it’s just unimaginable because when I started the website, I thought it would be people who had not played the games that would be interested in them as was I, but it was also like people that had played those games in their childhoods and often now they were fathers or mothers and they wanted their kids to experience the games that they play it as, as children and you know, like those kinds of things. So I think back to like the arcade after school and seven 20 skate or die. Yeah. Marble madness and shoplifter and these games that like, yeah, you just, it was a magical, I can see why people, like there is no substitute, like playing that again will take you right back to whatever those are. Exactly. Absolutely. And that nostalgia, I mean, nostalgia never gets old. That’s the thing.

Ash: 08:41 Never gets a hold. That’s awesome. Let’s shift to the dub ISIL startup. What was that all about? So I had moved to Dubai for a few years and because I had experience, let’s be honest, I was a terrible developer. Like I, this website that I developed, I just kind of learned how to develop it online and I kind of hacked it together, you know, using PHP and HTML and all that stuff. But, but I was a self starter and a motivate, motivated person. So, um, when I saw the Bizzle and I was looking for a job, I told them about my website and that I’d been doing this stuff and they said it was very interesting because I send them, I was looking for a job and I sent them my resume at 4:00 AM because as whatever, late night owl and um, they got in touch with me at 10:00 AM saying, Oh, we’d love to talk to you.

Ash: 09:30 So it was a really quick turnaround. They saw my resume, they were like, Oh, this guy sounds like it’d be cool to have him on our team. And they got in touch with me and I started working with them. I think I was the fourth or fifth person on the team and um, it was, we were in a small Villa that, that they had rented. And uh, it was very chilled out and unofficial and we were working on the new release of the, of the platform at the time. And then we got institutional investors in and they came in and within one and a half year, the company went from like seven people to 55 and in another six months had went to 200. So we moved from that to the 15th floor in a glass tower to the 30th floor in different glass tower.

Ash: 10:14 And then it just grew like tremendously. Yeah. But that’s what brought me to the next phase of my life where I felt like it became too corporate. There were too many processes and the impact that I was having was now too level two, you know, enjoy. So I decided to become a nomad at that point of time. Well first I said I’d like to go on a break for like four months or six months. And they were like, no, no, no. Just 20 days. We need you here. And I said, okay, then I quit and I got to go, you know. So, um, and that’s how in 2011 I became a nomad and nobody called themselves and no matter at the time, the term had not even been like, well, no match. Sure. But digital nomad, nobody said that that phrase didn’t exist back then.

Ash: 10:56 Well, I feel like even today, like people who are doing it don’t call themselves that. It’s just one of these weird terms where from an outside that’s how you have to refer to it because we need some label for what it is, what we’re doing. But yeah, absolutely. So I think at the time people would just call themselves remote professionals or location independent travelers or you know, this kind of stuff. Yeah. But yeah, but I think the term digital nomad, or maybe I’m deep inside the bubble right now, so I had no idea how it’s perceived outside the bubble. But, uh, I didn’t hear it a lot. I didn’t hear a turnaround a lot back then. But now I, I see a lot of people know what it is. And you know, yeah. So I think it’s probably a bit more common place at the moment.

Ash: 11:36 Ironically male, if I was a developer as well, back in the day, a terrible one. I worked@acompanywhereiwasemployeenumberfiveandwescaleduptolikefortyfiveduringthe.com boom. And I was good enough to make apps. I like, I taught myself the things I needed to know to make something, but you know, like horribly in elegant way. Right. And it was just enough to like get the right thing working and then it would just inevitably break because I was CS trained. But uh, I feel your pain in terms of like scaling to the point where it’s not funny anymore and now it’s like very corporate and yeah. But the good thing was that I really, um, so I used to be a bad developer, but working with the people at the Bissell, I learned a lot. Like just working full time with a really great development team. Um, very switched on people, very talented, you know, a players.

Ash: 12:25 I learned so much that I was able to at that point make a lot of improvements to my website as well. And that’s how I became like really confident that I could build any kind of platform for anybody. And that’s how when I was a nomad, I ended up becoming CTO of this startup in Chile because I was confident enough to be like, Oh you need this platform, I can build it for you and I can make a team and we can do it together. Well I think that characteristic is also interestingly enough in the space of no matter, and I feel like that’s one of the muscles that gets worked really well is when you are constantly put into these different environments of new challenges and new sets of circumstances and people and like figuring stuff out is a skill. And so it doesn’t surprise me that like you gravitated to that and then you were able to absolutely.

Ash: 13:14 I think today the world is just divided into two sets of people, those who know how to Google and those who don’t. So if you’re good at figuring stuff out, you’re so far ahead already. Yup. Yeah, for sure. So let’s talk about that transition. So you became a nomad and was that about the time when you met the people on remote year with their thing or was that before then? Um, no, I was the, no, I became a nomad in 2011 so remote here. I met in 2015 so while I was traveling in Istanbul, that’s when I bumped into this, uh, girl [inaudible]. She is from New York and she wasn’t the first remote your batch. And I think she was following me on Instagram or something like that. And she said, Oh, let’s have a coffee. And then she, I said, Oh, what are you doing in Istanbul?

Ash: 13:57 And she said, Oh, I’m in this thing called remote here. It’s a new thing that just started. Uh, why don’t you come and have dinner with us? And what they used to do back then was, I don’t know if they do it still, but back then in remote here, every, if you had your family in the city that you were in, sometimes they would do like a small dinner with your family, just like a select group of people. So I met Sam and Trish and we played some guitar and we signed some songs. And because the girl, there was a Turkish girl in the group at the time and her family was from Istanbul and her father was a famous musician. They could Turkish musician. So they invite us for dinner and then we, you know, sat around and played some music together and it was a really beautiful evening.

Ash: 14:36 So that’s awesome. Yeah, I was, I was very intrigued with remote here because I thought that it’s a, it’s a really cool concept for people to, you know, take the leap if they’re not feeling that confident about, you know, being nomadic at some point of time. So that’s how personally I waded into this lifestyle. So it’s, it’s definitely good gateway drug. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it shows you the best possible scenario in terms of community and organization and everything. And then, and then you can be like, Oh, I could also continue to do this on my own. And it kind of, you know, it’s like the training wheels. Right. So, yeah, for sure. Uh, interestingly enough, Trivor Gearhart, I don’t know if you remember him, but he was good friends with Trish. Uh, he was in that group. He was my first guest on the, of the podcast.

Ash: 15:18 Okay. That’s a crazy coincidence. Yeah, that’s, that’s funny. Cool. Um, okay, well, so in Chile, Chile has a good startup scene, right? Like I know they have that startup Chile program. That’s exactly what you were a part of. So yeah, that’s what it just happened randomly. So my first year of nomadic in 2011, I mean it was already 2012 at the time. I, after like six months, I was kind of feeling a bit like I needed to be productive again. So I was a bit concerned about doing something. And then I was in Sheila and there was this startup charity program going on over there. I just accidentally met, met a couple of people. It was a different startup. It was a startup called girl tank and they are a social entrepreneurship startup. And their mission was to empower female change-makers. So female social entrepreneurs.

Ash: 16:09 And they wanted me to build the technology platform for them, but they were not very clear about what they needed. So we tried to work out the specifics but it didn’t work out. But in the meantime I met these other guys who were building gap jumpers, which is a recruitment startup and they were pretty clear about what they wanted. So I joined them as cofounder and that kind of became a sub adventure of my whole nomad adventure. And so we founded that in Chile. And after a while we raised some money, we moved to San Francisco, we raised some more money, but we didn’t really achieve the hockey stick growth that San Francisco investors won. So I spent some time there, but we kind of like ease into a lifestyle business kind of mode. And that’s where the company’s at right now. We serve as like big clients, but it’s a very boutique kind of recruitment service and that’s pretty much it.

Ash: 16:55 Are you still involved with that venture? Have you been done peripherally? I’d say I, I left my role as CTO several years ago, but I still consult with them. They still need help because I built the entire platform, so I kind of know it best still even though they have some people working on it. But yeah, if they need something very specific, they ask me for it. So that’s how I help out with them sometimes. Would you like, what’s your big takeaway from that experiences there? Would you have raised money knowing what you know now or do you think that was the wrong decision given that business? To be honest, I, I really think that we spent a long time just dealing with our investors and their expectations. If we would have, we were able to get fairly good clients like McKinsey, Adobe, Dalby, Mozilla, you know, on our own and work with them directly.

Ash: 17:44 But our investors had different expectations of us. And to match those two sides took a lot of effort from the founding team all the time and they wanted to push us in various different directions that we didn’t feel were the right directions for us. So if you would have been like, okay, if you want a business that makes you know, 500 K to a million a year and then, you know, grow it slowly, I think that would have been much more feasible and we would have been able to do that much easier had we not taken on investment and been like, they should be a business that makes 100 million a year, you know? So I think sometimes not every business is suited to that kind of growth. So you really need to assess your market size and understand the demand and also figure out what you as a team are capable of and comfortable looking into.

Ash: 18:28 But there’s also egos involved. You know, everybody who makes a startup once it to be a unicorn or somewhere close to that. Right. So my, my co founders were like, no, we want hockey stick growth. But then three years into it they were like, uh, this has been a very humbling experience. So I think everybody really comes around to it. Eventually. We just did the long way around that said, yeah, I founded one in 2006 or cofounded one called jump box and ran that for nine years. And we did like some friends and families from angel and we were on track. We’d met with like Sequoia and about 13 other VCs in San Francisco had a verbal go ahead from Sequoia and then 2008 happened with like the whole financial collapse. So that got pulled out from under us and definitely agree. It was a humble experience, humbling experience in terms of, uh, just like realizing like going from that, that unicorn path to like, okay, no, we need to be profitable and lean and mean and like very, uh, austere in how we operated.

Ash: 19:25 Uh, it was definitely a tough, tough thing, but good experience. A good learning experience for sure. Yeah, for sure as well. For me, I just, I never realized, uh, like it kind of made me understand why shark tank is called shark tank. So know you kind of learn about how the investment environment and what your, cause I think when you read tech crunch and all these um, blogs, you have a different picture of, of what the ground reality of the situation is. How do you, how you raise money, how do you approach VCs, how do you get them interested? Like how do you court them? Really? Yeah. And I think it’s in the dynamics of their, I think the key thing for people to understand is VCs operate with different dynamics than like a founder operates with, right? You’re an N of one. This is your baby.

Ash: 20:09 You’re just trying to make this thing work to the greatest degree you can. They see it as a portfolio place. So you’re just 20 companies, right? You’re just one file on their shelf, you know, it just doesn’t matter to them. So, and they’re like, they just have a different mentality where like they’re going for broke on everything. Like we want their model is like one of these is going to hit unicorn and 19 of them are going to fail and we’re going to make it on the one that’s a unicorn. So we’re just trying to make each one of them be a unicorn. But you’re just playing the tables at the casino. Exactly. And we’re just the dice. So it’s, yeah, exactly. It’s a great way to put it. Cool. All right, well, so, um, I I think what’s interesting about the um, uh, just that

Sean Tierney: 20:48 Chile is startup. Like it sounds like it’s really like that whole program. I know it’s attracted a ton of, of talent and whatnot. Like they’re doing something right with that program. I’m just curious if you had any insights, uh, being in that ecosystem for like what they figured out that other places didn’t or if there was anything different about Chile or Santiago that,

Ash: 21:08 well, the main thing with Chile is that they, their economy is heavily dependent on copper. So copper mining and now off late lithium is like their main bread and butter. Their economy is not diversified and the Chilean government is aware of this. So they were like, okay, we need to somehow um, you know, increase entrepreneurship in our country because for every middle class to wealthy Chilean kid that grows up, they know that they have a future in the corporate industry. They know that if nothing else works out, you know, there’s copper. So the government was aware of that and they really were good at creating this. Like usually your, you know, you deal with government bureaucracy and you feel like you just want to cry, but that they develop the system fairly well and it’s fairly efficient. It’s fairly transparent. You get, at the time when I joined it was you get $40,000, um, no strings attached, almost capital to start your company.

Ash: 22:06 You get a visa for one year to work in Sheila to hire a team or do whatever you want and yeah, that’s all. You just gotta make it work. It’s literally, here’s 40 K make this work. And they are just hoping that looking at all these people, you know, the Chilean applicants to the, to the program will be more inspired to also be entrepreneurs and at least if that’s their end goal, they’ve been really successful because in the beginning it was just foreigners. Like most of the people who participate in the program were coming from abroad. But five years into it, a lot of the startups in there allow Chilean. And so they’ve really been successful and in encouraging that kind of entrepreneurship and you know, that kind of ecosystem in their own country. And the only thing where I think the SF system is better is just because investors are more ready to put cash into startups over there.

Ash: 22:58 So the, that’s the same reason why we ended up in San Francisco is because you just, it’s really difficult to raise money in Chile. And I have heard from European startups as well that it’s fairly difficult in cities like lesbian or Paris even compared to San Francisco. So, um, investors are much more likely to take risk in, in San Francisco versus in Sheila ever. They’re very conservative. And so that’s something that they’ve been trying to address by also introducing further rounds of investment straight from the government as well. So you could apply for up to 120 K, you know, so to like just kind of take you to the next level before you need that series a round or something of the sword.

Sean Tierney: 23:36 Yeah, well cause otherwise it’s just a brain drain. Like they’ll, they’ll incubate the startups there but then they’ll just inevitably lead.

Ash: 23:42 Exactly. So, but they’ve been really good at doing that. So that’s that. I would really recommend that program in terms of just getting your feet wet and you know, maybe having a shot at making a really good product because you have everything available to you to do that. And I traveled a lot and she lands beautiful country and Santiago is a great city to be in as well. So, you know, so definitely worth it.

Sean Tierney: 24:03 Did you ever make it to them and dosa

Ash: 24:05 yes, I actually did a huge road trip, uh, after the program finished and I had a little bit of time, um, before we moved to SF. I did a huge road trip, like I drove from Santiago all the way to Patagonia. So you have to cross the Andes and to Mendoza and then drive down along the route of Quanta and then keep like criss crossing between Sheila and Argentina. So probably the most beautiful road trip of my life.

Sean Tierney: 24:29 That sounds amazing, man. I, uh, I did a wine tasting tour in Mendosa when we were coming from [inaudible] to Santiago and learn incredible place, man. It’s just gorgeous.

Ash: 24:39 Beautiful. Yeah. With the Andes there. And the wines are really tasty too. Yeah, really good wines. I, um, I didn’t use to drink wine before I moved to Chile, but often when I would go out for lunch, the wine was cheaper than the waters, so I just drank a lot of wine and I started, I became a wine drinker in Chile. Um, let’s talk about, so when did you go to Lisbon? When, when did that move happen? So I had been to Lisbon a few times during my while. I was a nomad and I really loved the city, you know, the weather, the people and everything. And I thought that it was a likely spot for me to eventually move to. But you know, when you’re a nomad, you’re always thinking that, okay, at some point I’ll see this amazing place that really makes sense and I’ll just move there and it’ll be my new home.

Ash: 25:23 But often for most nomads, that doesn’t exactly happen. You just kinda keep moving from place to place. But after six years of traveling in 2017 I was like, I really need to be in a place at this point. Like I just need to have some roots somewhere. I need to have an apartment. I want to have my own couch, my own bed, you know, all those things. Right. Have a fridge full of Euro groceries and stuff like that. So I moved to Lisbon and I initially was very, very nervous about it. I was like, okay, if it doesn’t work out, I’ll leave in like three months, you know? But three months came and went and it was working out. I still traveled a lot, you know, I did, but the three months became six and six became a year. And so I’ve been living here since 2017 now. So it’s almost three years at this point of time.

Sean Tierney: 26:11 Yeah. And did you start the group when you got here as like a way to meet people or what was the motive for that?

Ash: 26:17 Yeah, pretty much. I was, so one of the things that I was, when I was on the road, I was very lonely. Like it was really hard to meet people who kind of understood what you were doing or why you were doing it. So I tried meeting people while I was traveling and tried to understand meetups and stuff like that, but nobody would really understand like, Oh, so you’re here for like two weeks and then you’re leaving like, okay, see you, you know, whatever. So when I moved here, I wanted to meet people. I also wanted to meet people who were kind of travelers but also like somehow digitally inclined. So that’s when the group was kind of good idea. And that’s how I started the first meetup in January, 2017 that I did. And it was really, um, really successful. I mean, I did it in Casa independent day.

Ash: 27:06 It was about 42 people or something like that. So I didn’t do any promotion. I just found this meetup group and I started doing it over there and a couple of meetups had taken place before this over here, but nobody had done it consistently. So I thought, let me try it. Like I live here now, so let me try and do this like every month. So we started doing it once, I started doing it once a month, but it grew really fast. Like the next meetup was like 80 people, you know? So it just kind of skyrocketed from there. And then I was like, okay, I don’t have venues big enough to have 80 people, so I need to do it more often. So I thought, let me do it twice a month, but every time 80 people would show up. So I was like, what do I do now?

Ash: 27:49 So eventually, like the summer came around and Rosanna came back to Lisbon and she was super excited that I was doing this regularly now. And she was like, Oh, let’s team up and let’s work on this together. So we started doing it once a week. So now we had a once a week, every Thursday, no mat meetup and still 80 people showed up. So, but luckily it was summer so we could like kind of spill out of bars and beyond the streets drinking. And it was just the most magical summer ever. Summer 2017 we spend a lot of time outdoors, you know, just meeting people, getting to know other nomads and building the community over here. And how big is the community at this point? Um, well on meetup it’s about 8,000 members. And on Facebook it’s about 12,000 members. So it’s really huge at this point.

Ash: 28:35 Usually at a time, of course, most of them are nomads, so they’re in and out. But at the time we have about two to 3000 people in the city. And so we have an event at this point, almost every day we’re doing like comedy nights. True story, true, true story events. We’re doing workshops, we’re doing sports events like volleyball and hikes and stuff like that. And it doesn’t matter what you post, like people will be, most of our events are free. So it doesn’t matter what you post, people are up for it and they want to do something and they want to meet other people and it’s been a great way for people to meet other people and to create community and connection in the city.

Sean Tierney: 29:11 Yeah. Well I think that’s what’s really interesting is because of the transient nature of the people that come in and it seems like every group that I’ve gone to has been, it feels like about half fixed people and half kind of new people. So it’s this really nice like reoxygenation of the group if you want to think of it that way. But then all those people are also circulating and you see faces that you know, have gone elsewhere that have since come back. And so it’s this really just a, I don’t know, fountain of interesting people just constantly circulating.

Ash: 29:38 Yeah, it’s been really interesting because what, I don’t know what, but perhaps the mind works like this, but the first few meetups that I did, like January, February, March, April, 2017, I kind of almost remember everybody who came to them even today. So sometimes people come back to Lisbon like three years later and I’m like, Oh Hey, yeah, you’re Patrick from Germany, you did this and that. And they’re like, Oh, do you remember me? I mean, nowadays I don’t remember everybody because I met so many people already. Like I think my databases, my mental databases overflowing at this point. But I remember the people from the first few meetups very well. They’re always freaked out. Like this dude is like creeping on me.

Sean Tierney: 30:16 Didn’t, uh, if I remember correctly, meetup themselves, sent some delegates here to just see what you guys are doing because it’s so successful.

Ash: 30:23 Yeah. They actually were, were quite curious about like what was going on over here and they invited us for a dinner. Uh, unfortunately I was out of town, but I think, uh, two of our organizers, so now we’re a team of 11 organizers. So we grew the team as well to handle all these events and everybody brings their own kind of, you know, twist to it. Everybody has their own passions. So it’s really nice. Some people like to do charity events, some people like to do sports events, some people like to do like productivity, like talks and workshops, those kinds of things. I personally love to do comedy. So, you know, there’s a lot of different things happening. And so yeah, the, the meta people were here and they invited us for dinner and two of our organizers went for it and they were just curious about what’s going on over here and how we’re, you know, doing so many events and what’s our revenue model? And we were like, we don’t have a revenue model, which is to a volunteer organization. And they’re pretty shocked at that.

Sean Tierney: 31:15 Well, you’re doing something right, man. So kudos on that. Uh, and I agree. Like it’s, uh, it’s very cool to see the different organizers. There are different spin that they put on events. Uh, Olivia helped us, actually you guys co promoted the charity make-over that we did here, which was very cool of y’all. [inaudible]

Ash: 31:29 Hey, that’s a cool event. I mean charity makeover is, uh, you know, when I was traveling I had this idea, um, which was, um, it was a skills like skill based volunteer platform. Like, so I, I was working with a charity and she lay for a couple of months where we were trying to build a technology product for them but they didn’t know what they wanted. And I was thinking that often charities need technology skills or they don’t need money all the time. They need people to volunteer their skills sometimes. Right. And not just skills where they’re, you’re like feeding people or something, but maybe design skills or maybe planning skills or maybe coding skills. Right. And so when I heard about charity make-over I was like, this is it. This is the way you can mobilize people to volunteer their skills. Like, cause you packaged it into this hackathon platform and it works really well because you can really like get a group of people together like a really strong team and then do something really quickly that, you know, kind of elevates a charity and their output. So I was really like, that’s cool man. That’s a really cool idea.

Sean Tierney: 32:29 Exactly the vision. Well ironically by the time this airs we will be on the boat. So we’re there. We partnered with nomad cruise for this time and they’re letting us conduct a charity make-over during the entire cruise. Oh

Ash: 32:40 wow. People and we’re, we have a pretty ambitious vision for what we’re trying to do there. So that’s really, wow. That’s amazing. Yeah. Cool. Um, all right, well let’s talk about your latest venture, the coffee shop. What, uh, how did that come to pass? Are you just buying a coffee shop? Yeah, that was uh, even unsurprised to be honest, cause it wasn’t really like I had this idea in the back of my head like yeah, I would love to own a coffee shop or some like a small like you know, this kind of business, a bar or a coffee shop at some point. I just didn’t think I’d be doing it when I’m 32 like you know, I was just kind of, so this coffee shop was across the street from my house and I would go there every day. It’s a specialty coffee shop.

Ash: 33:19 They serve specialty coffee and it’s really good and very, very reasonably priced. Great environment. Everything was great. But one day I walk in there and get my cup of coffee and they’re like, Oh this we’re going to be shutting down in five days. And I said why? And they were like, Oh because the owner, he doesn’t have time to run this business. The owner is like a famous DJ in Portugal. So I was like, okay, can I talk to the owner about the, about this? Cause I just wanted to beg him to not close it down. But yeah. So I was like, please. So I, and I mean this guy’s a DJ. So I messaged him on Instagram, he didn’t reply to me. And then I told the barista there again, like, uh, the next day, like, Oh, I messaged this guy, he didn’t reply to me, could you please ask him to reply to me?

Ash: 34:07 And so then we got to talking and then he said, Oh, I’m willing to sell it. And then I said, Oh, okay. Interesting. And then I kind of messaged my friends who live in El Contra in the same area. We have like a little chat group, which I created called the Alcantara Contra crew because it’s just people who live in that neighborhood. And we sometimes hang out together in the park or you know, do barbecues or go out for a movie or whatever. Right. Just for a walk by the waterfront. So I messaged the people in that group and I said, Hey, this cafe is up for sale. Um, and two of the people from the group messaged me and said, I’m interested in partnering with you if you want to buy this cafe now. I’ve never bought a food and beverage or bought or run a food and beverage business before.

Ash: 34:50 So the first question was, how do you value a business like this? So we had like be starting from scratch. We don’t know anything, so all right, Google it. Right. How do you value a business? We started there, right? But I mean, in 15 days we closed the deal and we bought the shop. So, uh, in 15 days we actually reopened. So what happened was July 15th, they shut down. First August we were open again. So, um, and it was like a kind of stealth mode because we didn’t know anything about this business. Luckily we managed to retain the manager. She was going to leave and we managed to retain her. That was my first challenge and then came like so many more challenges I think since, so now it’s November. Since August, I think. Yeah, my brain could have exploded at least five times with all the information.

Ash: 35:36 It’s been, you know, pumped into it, but it’s just maybe just two or two or three of like the top challenges that you’ve dealt with. Would you say? Well, staffing is a big one because when you, so I’ve worked in software teams before, I know very well how to motivate a well-paid, you know, um, employees that are working on creative or you know, coding kind of projects when you’re working in a kitchen. Uh, and it can get very stressful in there. When there’s a lot of customers, it’s a whole different ball game. How you motivate these people, how you operate. You almost have to operate it like a basketball coach. So I play basketball and I’ve had a few coaches. I mean, you know, throughout my, the history of my basketball, I wouldn’t call it career, but just experience playing basketball. And um, our coaches are pretty tough on us.

Ash: 36:23 You know, coaches are, or sports coaches are not easy on you, but if you watch any shows on Netflix about chefs, you’ll see that there’s very much the same. We’re not that kind of establishment, so we don’t have to be that strict. But I think you really need to train people constantly on how to do things. And this is something that, um, I had to learn because I was used to a very Silicon Valley kind of approach where it’s like, you know, everybody gets free time, everybody gets to relax and you know, uh, but you really have to be on the ball in a cafe kind of business. Yeah. So that’s something I learned. Then there was other stuff about, you know, um, just inventory management. How do you reduce wastage? Because we liked, we’re very conscious about our, our wastage and we don’t want to waste any food or throw away anything.

Ash: 37:06 So we try to manage our inventory in a way that we’d never have any wastage. And that takes constant attention every day. You have to know what’s coming in, what’s going out, you know, how many things you’re baking, how many things you’re selling, and you have to constantly adjust every single day based on that. Are you guys just using spreadsheets for that or do you know? We just use our eyes for action. All right. We have four cakes left. We’ve got to make two more. You know, it’s just this, it’s really, but you really have to be paying attention. Luckily we’ve trained our staff to do it at this point of time. So they’re very good at it and are very, stars are stellar. Like they are so conscious about the environment. They are all vegetarian. They’re very, you know, almost like they, they sometimes put pressure on us like the other day.

Ash: 37:48 Um, so we started avocado toast cause you know, that’s what hipsters love and that’s where the money’s at, right? But our, uh, our barista who prepares the toast as well was like really upset. And I, you know, so managing people is sometimes a challenge because you’ll see that they’re upset, you don’t know what they’re upset about and you’re trying to get to the bottom of it. And I’m like, Oh, what happened? Or you’re having a bad day, are you okay? You know, can we do something to help? And she was like, no. And then, then she started talking about the avocados and she said, I hate ordering these avocados. And I was like, why? And she said, cause I saw that there’s a mafia in Mexico that’s forcing farmers to grow up. And I was like, I could ever imagine that somebody in our cafe would be upset about that issues of all the issues that come up.

Ash: 38:31 This is one of them. But then I just looked at the avocados and I was like the carefully try and research where they’re from. And then I told her, now these are from Spain so you don’t have to worry about that. And then she was like, okay, that’s good. So it’s a lot of different things that come up and you just cannot imagine every day is different. Every day something new comes up, you just don’t know what’s going to happen. Let’s kind of go though, like in terms of a departure from a software based business, uh, I too have thought about like just a physical, in-person, lots of face to face and just, yeah, people are into business. Yeah, it’s a really cool experience for me. I’ve been learning so much. Every day I learned something new and it’s just so hands on compared to just sitting at a computer and typing that I feel I kind of feel healthier in my body as well because I’m moving around all day long.

Ash: 39:14 I’m not like behind the counter but not always. Sometimes I do help out behind the counter, but just because I’m moving around, looking at things, talking to people, talking to customers, doing other stuff, it’s just a kind of more, it’s a different approach to at least how I used to live before. At least my posture is better. I feel like I’m a bit taller even, I don’t know cause I’m not hunched over a keyboard I guess little firsthand, it’s really timely. You mentioned that. Um, I have recently learned that I have a [inaudible] herniation in my vertebrae, likely just because it’s 25 years hunched over your computer. Every job I’ve ever had has been computer-based. Um, so it’s really like I’m very much all about solving this and like mixing in more healthy like less computer time or just moving around time. Yeah, exactly. I was trying to be conscious about it the last few years that I was working with computers.

Ash: 40:03 But for some reason, once I started looking at this screen, I lose sense of time. Like I just can’t track what’s going on. I just, once I’m absorbed in it, I’m just into it. Yeah. It just sucks me. And so now with the cafe I’m kind of moving around all the time and you know, dealing with people, drinking a lot of good coffee too. I enjoy that. So that’s good. But um, I have, I have, so I don’t drink coffee and it’s one, it’s the thing that I constantly wonder if I should try to like get into it because I feel like it’s such a, you know, like the people that drink coffee have, it’s such a cool culture around it. Yeah. It’s quite a, I think it’s, people really love their coffee and we get, because we are a specialty coffee shop that’s under challenges to, you know, keep our customers happy.

Ash: 40:43 They are very picky. Coffee shop customers are known to be the most picky consumers out there. Another thing I learned in the last three months. So you know, these are all things that I didn’t know, but if you don’t get their coffee right, they’re going to leave you a bad review immediately. So in what they consider, right, quote unquote, right, right. Like we were talking like Portugal seems to like kind of a more burnt uh, air on that side of the coffee versus like how an American likes coffee. So what’s right for one group of people may not be not be another. And that’s where I think our staff is training your staff to really remember people’s names, to really remember their preferences to, you know, we really have to keep telling them, okay, you got to remember what this person likes. And they are very good at it.

Ash: 41:23 Actually. I’m really grateful to them because they work really hard behind the counter so I don’t have to, and I’m always very grateful to them for that, but they’re fantastic remembering what the customers want and what they’re like. They know immediately, like they’ll see a customer, they’ll be like your usual and they’ll just do it. And that’s just, it makes a customer’s experience so much better when they’re just like, okay, people here know me and care about me. Oh, that’s what makes it your coffee shop versus a coffee shop. I’m going to go to my coffee shop. Exactly. Got to keep them coming back that way. And I think the thing is we talk very passionately about our coffee. So we always tell our customers that this is going to be different from what you’re used to having, you know, at a Portuguese cafe. So we do specialty coffee over here.

Ash: 42:06 It might have a different type of taste profile and you know, this is how you should really make coffee. Uh, and it’s very interesting because also when we rebranded the cafe, we went through this, these questions as, as the founding team, we were like, how do we place ourselves as a brand? And it was very interesting because, uh, we did this Google branding sprint that’s available for free online if you want to look it up. And you can actually, it takes you through all these different steps and questions that help you position your brand relative to other brands in the same space. And it also helps you like with decide whether you want to be authoritative but they want to be playful or boring or serious or you know, all those different things about your brand. And so when we did this, these types of conversations uncovered a lot of, um, you know, preferences amongst the founders and how we wanted to position this brand.

Ash: 42:58 And one of the things was that we wanted to be a little bit authoritative about, you know, what we’re selling so that we can educate our customers, right? So because of that, we tell our customers that, you know, this is good coffee and you know, this is what it is supposed to taste. Like, tell us what you think. And most of the times, 90% of the times they’re like, Oh yeah, this is really tasty. So I think getting clear on those, on that brand like you, like what are the core values of this coffee shop and what do the founders want it to be. And then permeating that and making sure that the employees understand that that’s like so critical, so important and we got so much value out of it and it’s just a free thing you can find online. And it’s incredible how we were able to figure out, you know, the good news is that we were all pretty much in sync about it.

Ash: 43:44 So that was great. We pretty much chose the same things on all the questions that were there. Um, and but what’s really great is that we got confirmation of what our values are, you know, sustainability, caring about the environment, caring about customers, caring about the experience, caring about coffee, all of those things. So I think it was really useful for us to do that. Very cool. I will link to that in the show notes. So if people listening want to go through that, it’s a, we are going through a bit of this ourselves right now with Pagely the company that I work at, um, basically auditing our existing messaging and brand and all this stuff. So, uh, I’ll, I’ll probably get our team to go through it as well. Yeah, it would probably be really, it’s a, it’s, it was designed by Google ventures for the companies that they invest in. So it’s available on I think the Google ventures website. I’ll probably find it over there. Very cool. Well actually I know you got to get back. You just hired someone so you gotta go train.

Sean Tierney: 44:32 But there’s one last part of this interview that I’m going to run you through. It’s called the breakdown. So are you ready for the breakdown?

Ash: 44:38 I’m sure. I don’t know what it is, but let’s do it. Okay.

Sean Tierney: 44:44 What is one book that has profoundly affected you?

Ash: 44:48 Well, recently I read this book called the untethered soul and it’s about, it’s mostly about spirituality and the self. And I was going through a rough patch like earlier this year because of a breakup and stuff like that and I was kind of trying to figure out, you know where I stand and this book really helped me understand to be more accepting of things that come your way. And it was really strange because to be honest, I realized that most of my life was lived that way. Like things just came to me and I just wrote that, you know, wave and something else cool happen and something else really cool happened and you know, yeah, I think it, I think acceptance was basically the message that I got out of it. But this book really breaks it down beautifully for you. Like you just, it kind of just makes sense.

Sean Tierney: 45:32 Yeah. Michael singer, I 100% agree. I read, I actually heard his interview with Anthony Robbins on his podcast and just phenomenal interview. I’ll link that as well in the show notes, but that got me to read the book and 100% agree. It’s a, it’s a game changer for sure. Definitely. What about, what is one person you would love to have dinner with? Can be living or dead.

Ash: 45:52 Huh? Interesting. I mean there’s so many, how do you pick one? This is like, Oh my goodness, the Vinci, you know, that guy was the, he was thinking like, you know, in a different way for his time. He was doing all kinds of stuff. He was just, you know, really out there and of course persecuted for it. But you know, I mean we talk about, you know, abstract thinking and out of the box thinking and design thinking and all of these things and that guy did all of it at once. You know, he was able to do all of those things at once. That’s genius. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 46:25 Who a corollary to that, do you think there’s a DaVinci of our day who’s under represented who

Ash: 46:30 underrepresented? I mean I find it hard to imagine like there’s so many. I think now we suffer from information overload so it’s really difficult to narrow down like one person who might be that way. Of course you have like game changers and paradigm shifters, like Elon Musk or bill Gates with his charity initiatives and even stuff like the giving pledge that bill Gates and Warren buffet are in. And you know, those things were never are unprecedented. You know, they never happen before in, in at least recorded history. So those are pretty big game changers but still DaVinci seems like he was a man with few resources but great ideas and a lot of outputs. So I, I don’t know if you have somebody like that right now, uh, what is one tool or hack that saves you time, money or headaches, tools? There are plenty. Um, I, you know, I, I went through phase where I was into a lot of productivity enhancement and you know, finding ways to be more productive and stuff.

Ash: 47:28 I did that for while I tried all kinds of different tools, but ultimately I realized that discipline is the best tool and it’s free. And so I was like, you know, discipline routine and just forming a good habit is, it’s, you cannot replace that. It’s just, and so I decided to, I’m a morning person, so I’ve been, so I bought a coffee shop. Now I wake up every morning and it’s great. So I do things in the morning and it’s great. And I think there’s a lot that could be said about, you know, uh, enhancing productivity. I’ve, I’ve done a few like simple techniques, like being really focused through meditation and stuff like that. And that really helps me also free. I’m a fan of free tools. Is there any form of meditation or how did you learn the skill? So I kind of got on the meditation bandwagon at about the same time as Headspace came out.

Ash: 48:20 I did that for a bit and, but I couldn’t really stick with it because that guy, Andy, his voice would irritate me after awhile and I just was like, I liked it initially. I loved his voice for like 20 hours of it, but then I was like, okay, like I can’t do this anymore for some. But that was the first version of the app. So maybe they changed that. I don’t know if it changed multiple speakers. Yeah. But I, I can sit and meditate quietly now cause I trained for that. And also there’s this Isha cria form of meditation, which I really enjoy. Uh, you tell me what it is. Only two. Yeah, it’s like a, it’s like a specific school of meditative practice and yoga practices and stuff like that. I came across it also in one of Michael singer’s books. I think the surrender experiment is where he talks about this form of meditation and that’s how I got into it. And that really helps me improve my focus. So usually before a comedy show, I do that and then I’m just in zone. Yeah. That’s awesome. All I will lead to that and surrender experiment is actually on my list. Uh, I want to read that one next. That’s a good one. Um, okay. Here’s the tough one. What important truth. Do very few people agree with you on?

Ash: 49:30 I think I, so it follows from my experience in the last couple of years and also with, you know, I think a lot of people think about controlling outcomes. Like a lot of, a lot of people are all about, you know, controlling how they live their lives and they want to customize everything they want to make. Really. They want to make the right choice all the time. But this leads to a lot of, you know, decision fatigue. You’re always trying to figure out what’s the choice that maximizes my happiness or whatever your end value is that you want to maximize. Whether it’s money, happiness, love, fame, whatever it is. And I think I just started living in a way right now where I just kind of take each day as it comes and accept whatever happens and I’m really happy these days. So I think that’s something that really changed was the game changer for me.

Ash: 50:19 I’m not so good at explaining it to people, so everybody always disagrees with me on it. But that’s what it sounds like very much the message of like surrender experiment. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So that’s how I’m trying to live my life. I wasn’t a stoicism a lot as well, which kind of says the same thing. It talks about, about circle of control and all these things, but somehow when I read these books and the message just rang true to me through them and I just was like, I’m going to try and live this way. Let’s see what happens. And I’ve been doing it for like a couple of years now and it’s really helped me live better. And that was the cafe as well. The cafe just showed up on my doorstep literally up for sale. My favorite coffee shop. Let’s do it, you know, and here we are right now.

Ash: 50:58 So there you go. I love it man. All right, last question. So if you had a time machine to go back to your 20 year old Ash self and give yourself any bit of advice, what would you say? Uh, ironically I would say don’t know, mad for too long. Like I think, uh, it’s, I think I pushed the, I pushed it too hard for too long. I was too tied to being a nomad and I couldn’t give up that piece of myself to be honest. If I ever moved to Lisbon after three or four years of no matting, it would’ve been fine. Really. I didn’t need to go the extra two years. Yeah. So I’m glad you bring this up because we actually were, I wanted to talk about this notion you mentioned upstairs a little bit ago about like making your identity too closely coupled to nomadism and how dangerous that can be.

Ash: 51:45 Yeah, I mean I, the reason, I mean I was tired, I was lonely. I really wanted to have like a house and then, you know, just the general set of activities or routine that I could do every day for like a consistently long period. I wanted to have deeper friendships and connections with people, but because I was like, no, I’m this nomad. I have the freedom. Why should I give up my freedom? You know? The truth is that even if you go and start living in a place, as long as you stay location independent, you still have the freedom. You can still leave when you want. Yeah. But I think for me personally, it kind of shifted slowly over time. Like I moved here in 2017 and I still felt like I was a nomad and they needed to travel a lot and I did it.

Ash: 52:25 I spent almost six months away in 2017 in 2018 I perhaps spent four months away, but in 2019 I’ve pretty much been here the whole year saved for maybe one month or six weeks or something like that. So I’m more and more non-numeric. Like I wouldn’t even call myself a nomad at this point of time. So I think we’ll thankfully, because we need someone to run the Novak group. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. I got, I gotta be here to run the group and to have all those events connecting fearful. But I think what I really learned was that I waited for too long to move here. I should’ve just moved here in 2015 or 2016 you know, and it would have been fine. Like I could’ve always become nomadic again and I can still do it. I mean, maybe not now when I have a cafe, maybe in a couple of years I’ve been stable, but you can still do it. So it’s not really you gotta you gotta be aware of what you need in that moment and not be too worried about how you see yourself or how people see you. You just have to know what you need and just do that because I think it’s really important to take care of yourself. I think that’s amazing advice. I think

Sean Tierney: 53:25 what’s ironic here is like I run a nomad podcast, so in some ways my identity is now coupled to this, but I don’t know, there’s a phrase that I like. It’s a strong opinions, loosely held. And so I reserve the right to change and say, Nope, I think I’ve gotten what I need. I don’t know about as I’m done for awhile. But yeah, I think that’s, that’s a very good advice and something that for whatever reason in this world, people seem to adopt the identity and then be unable to relinquish it. So

Ash: 53:54 I think that’s, uh, that’s the same with any big change in our lives. Right. And I think it’s just, um, also I think with nomadism, um, some of us sometimes feel like if we give it up, we fail somehow. And I don’t think you should feel that way because nobody says it’s forever. Like, you don’t have to do this for the rest of your life. You can do it for as long as you feel comfortable doing it, then stop doing it, then do it again. If you wanna you know, it’s all up to you. Independence means, yeah, you can be somewhere fixed and still be location independent. Exactly. And then just leave after a year or six months, once you’re feeling refreshed and energized and, you know, just do it again if you want to, but don’t push yourself to the point where you’re just kind of, you know, in a bad state of mind. Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 54:38 Well, I think that’s amazing advice. Ash, I’ll let you go. I know you’ve got to get back to the coffee shop, but, uh, how can people connect with you on social media or find your coffee shop? Where do we send them?

Ash: 54:47 It’s Silva Lisboa on Instagram. Um, you can find me there, or a lesbian digital nomads or lesbian comedy. I’m all of those people, like all that stuff in the show notes. Ash, thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks a lot, Sean. I was pretty excited to be here. Cheers. Cheers.

Dori: 03:16 This person I know here chroma the grievous cruises. He’s a, an entrepreneur or business rent, and he has a podcast where he’s interviewing nomads so far and he’s reviewed SUNY for nomads talking about their life, their challenges. And now he’s here to share the 10 insights that you learned from them. So whack on one stage. Sean

Sean: 03:51 Great. Thank you very much. My name’s Sean and like she said I have a podcast for nomads that is aptly named Nomad Podcast, so you won’t forget it. And yeah, I’m super excited to lead things off. So I want to do a quick poll before we get started. Raise your hand if you’ve been itinerary. In other words, you’ve been doing your job around the world for a year or more and you consider yourself a long time nomad. Okay, awesome. That’s a good portion. About 20% of them. Raise your hand if you are a fixed, you work in a, you have a home base and you’ve been working from one place. Okay. And then have you put your hand up, keep your hand up if you would say you’re an aspiring nomad, you’d like to try out this lifestyle of bouncing around the world.

Sean: 04:34 Awesome. Okay, cool. So hopefully this is gonna be useful, not just for you guys, but also for the people who’ve been doing it for awhile. Like my man Matt up here. [inaudible] But yeah, what I’ve done. So let’s see this down. There we go. So let me give you some stats first off. So as Dory mentioned, I’ve interviewed 34 guests so far on the show in the last year. It’s about over 200 hours of work into this project. It’s generated 776 pages of audio transcripts and that’s just over 400,000 words, right? And so my challenge here in the next 20 minutes is to distill all of this into 10 actionable lessons for you guys to help you have a better life. I think it’s useful to understand the why anytime you’re digging into something. So I’m going to quickly give you my personal why.

Sean: 05:27 My why is very simple. You guys, my why is to help others be gravity so that you can be free to do what you’re born to do. I went through the Simon Sineck process. This has been like crafted over a number of years, but this is my why help others be gravity’s can be free to do what you’re bored with you. So everything I do is couch around that. So I’ve been a nomadic for the last three and a half years. I’ve been remote for four and a half years working for a company called Pagely is the director of sales. And the first year before I was remote, I was working out of my apartment in Phoenix, Arizona. And you know, I was making good numbers, but I just was not thriving. I was not, I just felt like like slumbering through life. And I feel like this is not an uncommon thing.

Sean: 06:07 Like we kind of get winnowed in through like a series of career choices and whatnot and you kind of just get reminded, let you, they wind up in a rut basically. That’s how I was in that rut. And it took discovering the nomadic lifestyle to eject me from that. And I had a pretty awesome result. My sales numbers went up 70% the year that I went abroad. Social life just, you know, flourished. And just all these things just started clicking. My health got better. So no matter travel was like this kind of miraculous like shot in the arm of inspiration. It just like revitalize me in every possible way. And so this is my, why is this like why I’m spreading it. And to understand why is, I also think you’ve got to ask the why three times. So why is this important? So I read this article in the New York, Texas called the lost Einsteins.

Sean: 06:53 And the premise of this article was that at any given moment in the world were deprived of, would be Einsteins, in other words, kids that would been the next time sign and share these amazing inventions and creations just like their natural talents were flourished, but they’re not there. And that flower will never bloom because they were not given the same nurturing experience, the same opportunities as people who have higher socio economic status. And when I read this article, I got goosebumps but for a different reason. And that’s because I do believe that this is a true phenomenon. I believe that this is something that’s actually happening, but I also believe it’s happening in adults. I believe that there’s this adult slumber and that it’s more common than we think and that no matter travel could do for other people. What it did for me is that it can reawaken it, just bring people back to life, almost like a defibrillator just shock you out of whatever celebrity you’re in.

Sean: 07:47 And so that’s, that’s why I engaged in this project and then to ask the why that third time. Why is that important? It’s because I believe that the problems that we’re going to face as a world in the next decade are only going to be solved by creative inspired individuals. It’s not going to be people that come through an education system, which dulls, you know, basically rounds the edges and kind of like makes cookie cutter factory workers. It’s going to be people that are traveling the world exposed to all these amazing cultures and ideas and studying different fields and then coming into contact with other people that, you know, it would have been an improbable thing that these two people ever met, but it’s going to be this diaspora that creates the next crop of Einstein’s that we need to solve. The problems are going to face us.

Sean: 08:30 So this is ultimately the root cause of why I believe this is important and why I’ve dedicated so much time to this effort. All right, so with that setup let’s talk about the methodologies I used. So 400,000 words, and it’s a lot. It’s half a million, almost half a million words. I wanted to make sense of this. I wanted to do it in a methodical way. You know, I’m all about data science. Like how can we do this methodically? So so I thought, what have I fed all those words into a tag cloud and it made just one big word cloud out of this and say, okay, what’s the most used words in these interviews before I unveil it? Anyone have any guesses as to what words you’ve used to shout him out? If you do freedom could guess. Optimism, creativity, those are all great guesses in that I would say traits that are very common to the people I interviewed.

Sean: 09:20 Here’s the answer. This is the word cloud that came out of it. There’s a lot going on there, so I kind of added some emphasis to see the big ones, but we have to think really kind. No, we’re go right people. Yeah, so all very positive words. But it’s hard to draw any kind of conclusive themes from this, right? So clearly we need to go deeper. And the way that I did that, this led to the next thing which actually solved it is I went through every episode and the show notes, these are the show notes at the bottom. It’s basically a table of contents for the episode. Went through all 34 episodes, scour the show notes, and I started making linkages and I just went through because I had all these conversations so I know we said, but this helped me jog my memory and remember what we talked about and then I was able to start circling things and drawing patterns and from all of that process and merge these 10 things.

Sean: 10:09 So let’s without further ado, here is number 10 okay, imposter syndrome, you guys, we all suffer from this. This was a critical insight like this is Danielle Thompson. She’s a 25 year old entrepreneur from Canada currently living in Bali, but she’s been all over the world. I met her in Lisbon a few years back and then recently again randomly ran into her there, which is when we recorded this interview, which is 25 years old. She’s built a very successful business. She’s a freelancer and basically built a virtual agency. She got so much business, but she started farming it out, hiring people, turn it into an agency, and then went a step further and actually built online Academy and call it the freelance travel network to teach other freelancers what like the lessons that she had learned along the way. So interesting. Like 50,000 Instagram influencers. It’s ridiculous. So by any stretch, like this person is very successful.

Sean: 11:03 You can’t argue that a 25 year old, she’s very accomplished and yet she feels imposter syndrome. So this is something that just we all suffer from. And I think the key insight, and this is just a theme across most of the guests I interviewed had the same thing. So I think the takeaway here is that recognize that you guys recognize that this is not unique. Like I’m looking out over a sea of humans. How big, what am I doing here? Like I, I’m, I’ve never had some massive successful company or anything. Like I just interviewed a lot of successful people, right? So I feel like, well, what I know does ever be here, but I think this is like the insight is that we all have this no matter who you are, this, you know Danielle has this. So just recognizing, I think the key is recognize it.

Sean: 11:45 Say I hear you imposter syndrome, I hear you talking. I’m not going to listen to you. I’m gonna put you in this little box over here and say that’s nice, but I’m going to go about my wife because that listening to that voice will Rob you of giving your true gift. So that’s imposter syndrome. That’s number 10. Number nine, has anyone seen this? The last lecture? Randy posh. Raise your hand. Yes. So this is like a really good thing. I would like write this one down and put this on your list for something to watch. It’s like amazing talk. This Carnegie Mellon professor who is unfortunately no longer with us, but he gave a terminal cancer and gave a last lecture, which is brilliant. It’s amazing talk. But this is one of my favorite quotes from, he says, brick walls are not there. Keep, keeps out there.

Sean: 12:29 Just give us the chance to show how badly we want something. And so there’s another thing that I noticed is that many of the entrepreneurs that I interviewed would hit a brick wall. It’s like we all hit this low point and it’s not something to hold us back. It is that actually like the instruments that forges us, that allows us to prove how badly we want something. And I think perhaps no one epitomizes better than this guy. This is Christianne [inaudible] that’s a guy I met, a Dutch guy in Lisbon. Long story short, he’s tried to start up, ran out of money, didn’t have any money to pay anything. The 34 Euro insurance on his scooter is at his girlfriend’s house. One night cops come arrest them, pull them out of the house and he ends up winding up in prison and it’s in prison.

Sean: 13:16 And he’s reading this book by Richard Branson and he gets like this epiphany is like, no one’s going to solve this for me. Like I clearly have some limiting beliefs that have gotten me here. So I’ve got to figure out the neural hacking to get myself right. And he pulled himself out by his own bootstraps. He’s a professional speaker now, just ran a marathon and Elizabeth in three and a half hour marathon having never run before. This guy used his own techniques to teach himself how to run a three and half hour marathon, having never run like a five K. And so, so I think the lesson here is that these brick walls, you guys that we all inevitably face in hindsight it’s always easy to say like, Oh, that’s what that was. But it’s like when we encounter them in real time, you’re just like fuck this massive challenge and like this is terrible.

Sean: 13:58 But like just slightly tweaking your mindset and realizing that that is like kind of a gift in the skies to help you prove how much you want something. That’s what the brick walls are for. Okay. So number eight, hustle till it hurts. I don’t know if anyone remembers on the race from the last cruise. Awesome Panamanian guy just has more hustle in his little pinky than I think most of us do in this room. But he’s written his bike all over Panama has this really creative business. He’ll make these promotional campaigns and he’ll actually kind of put the cart before the horse. We’ll make a promotional campaign and then sell it to these major brands like under Armour and Nike and whatnot. So this guy is just like the epitome of hustle. I can’t tell all his stories, but if you listen to his episode, it’s just a mile a minute about all the stuff he’s done. And he’s incredible. Another person, I think Johnny FD, I’m sure a lot of people know this guy. You know, hustle till it hurts. Literally this guy went to Thailand, taught himself movie Thai fighting and which is getting hurt every night, but was making it work, was at least earning enough to then become a stupid diver instructor to then start a blog and write a book and a course. And he had now has like 18 streams of passive revenue, but that is just like just hustle man. Just made it happen.

Speaker 4: 15:13 And this is a public [inaudible].

Sean: 15:24 All right, so that was number eight. Let’s go to number seven. Start small. Let’s start. So this is Diego [inaudible]. We may meet him, I believe he’s, I know bond actually with wildlife tribes so we might get to actually meet him there. He started wifey tribe. It’s one of the most popular tribal programs out there. The way he did it, he didn’t come with some elaborate business plan and raise a bunch of money like the way he did it was literally just sending an email to a hundred of his friends and said, Hey, I’m going to go to Bolivia. Does anyone want to go and work with me just to try this out? And literally that’s how the whole thing started. They’ve got like five chapters now around the world. I just did one with them in Barcelona last month. But like that all emerged from just that one little step of sending that email to a hundred close friends and doing that.

Sean: 16:06 Similarly, this is Greg Kaplan is the co founder of remote year, which is arguably the largest travel program out there. Myself and Matt looked at it. This is same thing. You got started in a different way though. He put it a just a crappy landing page up and then closed, posted it to hacker news and within a month they had 50,000 signups to the program. Right? But it was there just like one little small step after another. They didn’t go out and raise it, touch, you know, a bunch of money, although they have sense, but it’s just the idea is you guys start small, don’t try to boil the ocean, start small, but start number six, ditch the anchors. So my man Matt bulls by the way, but we often get confused for one another. The other tall white guy with a podcast for nomads on the boat.

Sean: 16:52 So this is the kind of thing that to the extent you guys can go carry on only in the, for the people that are trying to travel a lot and go around the world, this has a huge impact aside from the tactical advantages, like physically being able to move through security faster and not worry about like, you know, the exposure of having lost luggage and all that. But I think Matt would attest that there is a larger factor that the eclipse is all those importance. And that is psychologically the lightness of being like deliberation from stuff that you have. Once you’re able to put everything you own in a backpack and just walk around the world with that, like you’re living proof at that point that you value the experiences more than you do this stuff. And so I highly recommend if you can get all your stuff into a backpack and just sell everything else, it is quite the way they do it.

Sean: 17:41 So Disney angers. Number five, trust your heart and immerse yourself in positivity. So this is another common theme across the people that I interviewed is that your ability to decouple this from this and to recognize like this can fool you, this can lead you astray and rationalize things that you think you should be doing and it gets this an audit mess, but these things can quiet this and then focus on this. You will be better served. And I think Marissa Medin, she was on the last cruise. She’s also involved with wifi tribe. She embodied this. She was working at Pepsi, had arguably a dream job working in the music promotions department for them. People like Beyonce, Jay Z going into, he’s like gala red carpet events. They’re like amazing job by every standard but was not fulfilled and did not necessarily have the supportive network. Her friends were like, well, why would you quit that?

Sean: 18:32 That’s amazing. Like you’re crazy. Don’t, don’t put that job right. But she wanted to do something else and did not have the support network. So you know what she did? She made it in the form of podcasts. She surrounded herself. She listened. She picked the podcasts and had them in her ear buds every day, giving her the support she needed to then eventually go and do what you wanted to do. So creating the network if you don’t have it. The other example of this, this is Kevin Bailey and Lisbon he worked for another big company. You may know Apple as the global risk assessor. He was traveling all over the world, same thing, arguably a dream job, but wasn’t fulfilled. And he found his supportive network in fiction. This guy was able to like the movies that spoke to him and the fiction, those works. He was able to find support in those characters, in this dialyze and have that be the supportive network to then turn that into a system.

Sean: 19:22 And now he’s actually helping others through this methodology. But again, like decouple this list of events. Cut number four, prioritize your health. The people that I interview all seem to have a focus on health. And this is my man Trevor Gearhart. He was the very first participant of remote year, first group. And he is just a CrossFit fanatic everywhere he goes. He finds a CrossFit boxes, the first thing he does in any city same thing. Someone you may know sitting up here, Ben Laycock does the same thing, right? I’ve been with this guy, he will pick an Airbnb based on the proximity to a CrossFit gym yesterday. I’m with him and we’re literally buying a kettlebell walking around here at a rock land and to find a 16 kilo kettlebell in his backpack. So, but he knows he prioritizes health and he puts that above everything else because he knows he needs to get a good workout it.

Sean: 20:16 Right? So if fitness and exercise is one pillar, I would say the other pillar is diet. This is Kara [inaudible]. She’s a certified nutritionist live a decade on exclusively plant based diet and she’s run 26 marathons, right? So she knows a thing or two about health. And her episode is amazing. It’s nomads I think were particularly afflicted with not necessarily having access, you know, and it’s like just more complicated to eat healthy, right? We don’t always have a kitchen if you don’t know where the health food store is. And it’s just harder. It’s tricky. But that’s why it’s up to us though, to take ownership to study enough of nutrition so we know that we can make it work wherever we are. All right, so if exercise diet are the pillars, what do you guys think is the foundation of health? There you go.

Sean: 21:05 Sleep. This is Bernie Miller. He’s a sleep specialist and MD for the Mayo clinic in Phoenix, Arizona. And this guy has been treating sleep disorders for two decades. I had him on the show because I wanted to learn more about what’s involved there. I’ve subsequently read a book. Has anyone read why we sleep by Matthew Walker? A couple of people. That is an awesome book. I would write that one down. If this is important to you. Really recommended. He was also into the Joe Rogan podcast. It’s an excellent podcast episode. But anyways, sleep you guys very important. It’s like everything else. If you’re, if you’re not getting good sleep then it’s going to unravel whatever you try to do in these other capacities. So it is literally a bell foundation. And I would argue there’s one more thing here with health is my man Rob price from Sydney, Australia stress, let’s say stress is like if the pillars, you know, exercise, diet and foundation sleep, the ability to mitigate stress consistently is like working with good building materials.

Sean: 21:59 And so he has a whole strategy for doing this. He spent like most of his life studying stress and developing a program called power of calm. But anyway, whether you use meditation or whatever your method is, you need a reliable method to combat stress gut. So it’s help clarity on your why is my man Matt Dunsmore, he is a facilitator for Simon Sinek. That’s the program that I mentioned that I went through. But gaining clarity on your, why you use or why is like your, just your essence, your internal, the just the thing that makes you who you are and getting more clarity on that just is like a force multiplier. It just gives you such more power over everything. And I think the guests who most epitomize this is this Andre Raasch, he’s the founder of safety wing. Some people may be using that insurance here actually for travel shirts, but he got very clear on that.

Sean: 22:49 You know, you face challenges both as a nomad, as an employer about just travel insurance. It was just a mess. And so he set out to solve it and to make it so that you could have that feeling of security, that safety net and feel supported as if you were in your home country no matter where you are. Right? So getting clear on your why is important multiplier. All right, number two, we’re almost there. Create 10 X more value than you harvest. This was a subtle shift. This is something that’s very consistent across the entrepreneurs that I interview. And it’s the idea that you know, when you think about entrepreneurship, you think about like creating a product and it’s selling it and then that’s the name of the game. But it’s subtly different than if you think about it more like creating massive value and then just harvest a small fraction of that.

Sean: 23:34 You will be successful. And so this is Alex helmet. I think episode 14, he created something called a 30 by 500 Academy where he actually gives you a framework for doing this. And sales Safari [inaudible] bonds, like his whole methodology for how you do this consistently. But this is something that was just consistent across all the entrepreneurs is they focused on this creative massive value and then just sipping a small sliver of that for themselves. Okay. Number one, you get a little like drum roll for this one as the final one here. All right, so number one, you guys, the number one lesson from all this fog regret, like this is a, this is something like just truly making decisions on what you’re going to regret at least down the road. And this is Krista Romano. She’s been, I think she’s on nomad cruise nine right now, but I think more so than anyone I interviewed, she has a really touching story.

Sean: 24:26 You guys, you’re more than a pretty face on Instagram. She’s actually a really sweet person and she had an an accident a week before in college. The week before she was scheduled to go on a study abroad program. She actually had a diving accident, dove into a pool, hit her head on the bottom. And luckily at that pool it had been like half a foot more shallow. She could’ve been paralyzed or worse, right? So she did not guys and not get paralyzed had vertebrae fused and recovered from it. And now Lynn’s very much carpet diem like bucket list everywhere she goes is all about like seize the day ready. But it’s that idea that you make decisions based on, I don’t want to regret this down the road. I don’t want to be on my deathbed and be like, I wish I had tried that business or I wish I had asked that girl out or I wish I had done whatever.

Sean: 25:12 Like you just want to live without regret. So actually I want everyone to just basically extend your arm right now. Everyone did this with me extending your middle finger and a count of three. Plug regret. Two, three. All right, you guys in summary here to wrap this all up? Oh yeah. By the way, regretted it. There’s actually like a legit decision-making theory called a minimization of maximum regret. You can look it up, it’s on Wikipedia. But in summary, recap all this imposter syndrome. It’s real. Don’t fall victim to it. Understanding what the brick walls are, whether therefore hustle until it hurts. Start small, but start ditch the anchors. Go carry on. Only trust your heart. Surround yourself with positivity, prioritize your health, diet, exercise, sleep and stress reduction. Declare you on your why. Create 10 X more value than your harvest and fuckery. Greg, you guys, we’ll skip the visualization exercise cause I think we’re just about out of time here.

Sean: 26:14 But these resources that you might go to nomadic podcast.com, all these stories and more are there no matter prep.com I actually, this was just one project. I actually put all of this into an online course and I know David Danker is probably going to kill me for this, but I made a coupon code. It’s totally free. Anyone in the room who wants to do it NCX rocks. You can just use that. It’ll be good for the rest of the crews. So you can do the whole course for free and get all that there. And if you are a longterm know about it, there’s a good chance that I want to interview you. So see me at some point. We can also talk about making you an advocate. I have a fairly generous affiliate program and so that’s me scrolling on dubs almost social media. You guys, thanks for listening. Any, I don’t know if we want to do questions now or what do we open it up for questions? Is there a time a few minutes later? Yeah, we got time. All right, so anybody have any questions about this stuff? No questions. Oh yeah. Josh,

Sean: 27:13 Have you used these lessons to change the way that you live and have you seen a difference in the way that your life unfolds because of that? Yeah, absolutely. So in every way, like the health stuff was super important. Meditation has been pretty profound in terms of like presence and awareness and just like centered prioritizing health. Like for me, it kind of all, like I mentioned, like when I went abroad, I think it was a combination of things like being exposed to a lot of creative stimuli. Like I had been working in my apartment and it was just literally like I forced myself to go to a cafe every day just to see another human, like to get that interaction. But then like swing that pendulum swings too far the other direction and now you’re all over the world. You’re meeting amazing people.

Sean: 27:57 You know, I did remote year, so I was with the community of 75 people. And so I also had the other one plate, consistent tribe, but also exposure to everyone there everywhere else where I went. But yeah, no everyone of these things, I think the imposter syndrome recognize it like, again, cognizant of it, but afflicted behind it. So yeah, I think each one of these lessons has been very powerful. So how long did it take you from the podcasts or, yeah, so I just kind of did it. I don’t know, I just fumbled my way through the first. You’ll see like the early episodes are kind of a different format. And so I just started doing sort of recording on zoom and release them and then kinda got more professional and Matt actually getting a lot of good advice on terms of the format, how to refine it and be more professional about it.

Sean: 28:53 But again, that starts small, but just start. I think if you’re thinking about doing a podcast, the key is just to start, just like literally take your phone, you use the voice recorder. I know Paulette Bo rolls around with equipment. He’ll just like grab him ad hoc on the moment. I think it could is just do something, get going, and then once you’re in motion, it’s easier. Once you have that inertia of moving, I think it’s easier to refine it than it is to like the whole perfection is the enemy of good enough. Right? Like so.

Speaker 2: 29:22 Anyone else?

Sean: 29:26 Okay, cool. Thank you guys for listening.

Speaker 2: 29:32 [Inaudible].