Latest / Curiously Guided Podcast / Ep.65 | From Dropshipping to Stoicism, Behind The Scenes of The Digital Nomad Lifestyle, with Brendan Hogle, Business Development Consultant

Transcript

Ep.65 | From Dropshipping to Stoicism, Behind The Scenes of The Digital Nomad Lifestyle, with Brendan Hogle, Business Development Consultant · Curiously Guided Podcast

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the Curiously Guided Podcast, the show for intentional business owners and curious minds looking to combine the inner work and outer work to create a life, business, and career that feels deeply fulfilling and wildly aligned on all levels.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: We're your hosts, I'm Shay and I'm Mariah.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_03: We're two business strategists passionate about rewriting the rules to success in a way that combines both strategy and energetics.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_03: So this podcast started with both of us being in the online business world, craving more deep, meaningful, and transparent conversations.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_03: So we decided to come together and create a space to do just that.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_03: Our guest interviews highlight cool humans doing cool shit, chasing their dreams, and going down their own rabbit holes to create a more sustainable and fulfilling life in whatever way that means for them.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: We see this podcast as everything that people won't share on social media.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: We don't give a fuck about highlight reels or proven frameworks.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: We love getting in the weeds, asking the tough questions and doing the work to create a life and career we love, all while committing to ourselves and our personal growth.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: Because only through that lens can we truly create a lifestyle that feels good from the inside out.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to the Curiously Guided Podcast.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_03: Are you ready to trust the nudge and let curiosity guide the way?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: Because we're excited to shake shit up and live outside the box with you.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: All right, you guys, I am so excited to share this episode with you.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: We are interviewing Brendan Hogel, who also goes by Boggles.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: He's a digital nomad, which is something that I personally have done and am very curious about.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: Brendan's story is really cool because he um got into drop shipping, which is something that I think a lot of us in the online space hear about and have heard about for years, but feels for me felt a little like sketchy for some reason.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: So the first part of this episode, and to be honest with y'all, we had a lot of trouble titling this episode because we cover a lot of bases.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: But in the first part of this episode, Brennan's just going to share more about how to build a drop shipping business in the current world, what that looks like.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I really enjoyed his honest perspective.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: And it's hard to learn about dropshipping online with a lot of like, without a lot of like broy type tactics.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: So Brennan just has a really down-to-earth.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he really pulled the curtain back kind of approach to drop shipping and telling us his secrets.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: So that first part of the episode was incredible.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: But what I really took away from this episode was um Brendan's work with stoicism.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: So Stoicism is um an old philosophy concept that's something that I've really gotten a lot out of in my life.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there's a guy named Ryan Holliday, who we reference a lot in this episode.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: He's really taken the stoic ideas and written books that apply them to the modern world.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: And um, Brendan's really been affected by Ryan's work, and he's actually started his own community of people who meet every day and talk about stoicism.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: So we actually recorded this episode quite a while ago, and I think about it regularly.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: I really um just was inspired by Brynn's story, but also his commitment to building community outside of his business.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: And um he talks a lot about how he uses that community to really fill his own personal cup, which is something that we mentioned quite a bit on the podcast.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: So excited to share this episode with y'all.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's a little different from what we normally do, but I think you'll get a lot out of it.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and it's interesting because when I pitched Brendan to come on the podcast, it was mainly because one of my previous clients was like, Mariah, what the fuck is drop shipping?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: Like she had this question about it, and I was like, Oh, like I worked with a client and his business model, e-commerce, was a drop shipping model.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, Oh, I didn't realize that people had such this big question mark around it because I guess I didn't really understand drop shipping at like a more broad level.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_03: So that was what initially sparked my curiosity about Brendan's story, is because I worked with him doing SEO for his e-commerce drop shipping business.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_03: But then also it was this conversation about stoicism, which like I didn't know jack shit about really before this episode.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_03: And when we recorded this episode, we really did it before finding the golden thread of this podcast that we really were able to iron out in between seasons of like combining the inner work and the outer work.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: And not ironically, this episode fits so perfectly into it because it truly all is connected and the conversation really went there.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: So, as Shay said, Shay said, we kind of started out with like the outer work of just like what does this look like on the physical plane, like the physical reality of owning a business.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_03: And then we dove into like the inner work of like, but how do you stay grounded as a digital nomad?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: And like, how do you stay grounded while having this drop shipping business and all of that?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_03: So this conversation is really good.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_03: I think you guys are gonna get a lot out of it.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_03: And when I relistened to it, it was just it's really perfect because right now I'm in the middle of moving from North Carolina to Tampa for a few months and everything's felt really chaotic.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: But listening back to like Brendan's insight about stoicism and about like how he views it and how it's really helped him, it's really allowed me to ground back into myself and regulate my nervous system in a way that I really wasn't expecting.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_03: So, Brendan, let me just read his bio really quick.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_03: So, Meet Boggles, a stoic philosopher, devoted husband, business development consultant, and e-commerce entrepreneur.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_03: Hailing from Jacksonville, Florida, Go Jags, he pursued an education at the University of Florida.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_03: Transitioning from his corporate role, he established Eagle Rock Consulting, guiding small and medium-sized enterprises towards growth.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_03: With his consultancy thriving, Boggles and his wife Kara embarked on an awe-inspiring journey, trading possessions for global exploration.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_03: Their first stop was Medeen, Columbia, where Boggles delved into crafting drop shipping websites.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_03: Currently, he's over, he oversees very goodfireplaces.com and collaborates on tapejungle.com with his business partners.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_03: So, with all of that, let's just dive into the episode.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_03: Brendan, welcome to the podcast.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_03: I'm super excited to have you on here.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_03: So a little bit of backstory.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_03: Brendan was one of my SEO clients.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_03: And to be honest, when we connected and I learned about his business and like drop shipping and like everything that he was doing in the online space, I've been a little bit fascinated by it.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_03: And especially recently, I had another SEO client and she was like, Mariah, what the fuck is everybody talking about?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_03: Like with drop shipping?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I don't even know how it works.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_03: Like, what is happening with this?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: And you were the first person to come to mind.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, oh shit.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: I feel like this is a conversation that we should have on the podcast because I feel like in the online business space, there's like different pockets to like make money online.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I feel like drop shipping is one of those paths that like lure a lot of people in, or like they find like themselves getting hit with like a like a YouTube ad, like somebody telling them that they can make all this money online and drop shipping and whatever, whatever.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_03: But and my assumption is that I think you started drop shipping in order to support you being a digital nomad.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_03: Is that true?
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_03: Can you take me through like where did you start with this drop shipping world?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_03: Kind of how did you get into the online business space?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_03: Can you just like take us back to the beginning?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, um, of course, absolutely.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so after college, I started working at the PGA tour and I was there for about five years and left that job with kind of no plan as to what I was doing.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I was, but while I was there at the tour, I was working with the tournaments um to help them just be better performers.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because at the end of the day, all the tournaments that the PGA tour runs are nonprofits, so all the revenue goes to charities.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: So if we can raise revenues, lower expenses, then there's a higher um charitable donation.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that was my job there for a while.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and when I left, I didn't really have a plan of what I was gonna do.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: And family, friends, and sort of that, those sort of folks started reaching out to me.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, can you help me?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And my background's in accounting, that's what my degree's in.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I started just helping people get on QuickBooks and set them up to just understand their financials because they were business owners in their own right and great at their passion of, you know, making things or building things or whatever they were doing, but they didn't know how to do the financial side of it.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then once I was able to get in and dig into the books, um, you know, I started to see issues.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, hey, you're spending some money here and you're not getting a lot of return, or you're not spending money here and maybe you should.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so that's where the consulting kind of came in and it just kind of became a consulting business.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so I had that, uh and I was doing that for a few years.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And my girlfriend at the time, now wife, uh, we kind of knew about this idea of wanting to travel and do that, um, but not really sure how we were gonna make it work.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I had the consulting business.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: I started doing research on you know how much money it would take to essentially survive outside of the US, where we would go.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I wanted to get contracts with clients in my consulting business that would guarantee that we had at least that amount of money for a year.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I had I, you know, I had three or four clients sign contracts with them, and we were good.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we, and that's when I started realizing, like, you know, I can't just do be a consultant forever because that ties my earning power directly to hours worked, right?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I get paid by the hour.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: I can only work for so many hours.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I need to do something that is more um that can I that I can scale and grow.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so started to find like look online, found drop shipping.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Initially thought it was really stupid and didn't want to do it at all.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then started digging more and found which is like kind of a niche within dropshipping, which is high-ticket drop shipping.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: So you look for products over a thousand dollars.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: You're not selling t-shirts and little 10 cent chotch keys, like you're selling substantial things.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so there's we can get into the reasons why I did that later, but um, that's what really drew me in.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I started once we moved abroad, I was doing the consulting thing and um started building websites, built one drop shipping website, didn't really like the product, so sold that one right away, and then built the second one.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been selling electric fireplaces for a few years now.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: And never, I've never seen an electric fireplace in my life, never seen one in person.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my God, that's hilarious! That's hilarious.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_03: That's why I think that this model is like fascinating.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_03: Can we just take it back like to the very, very basics of can you just define, obviously, in your own words, like what is drop shipping?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_03: Like, if I had to explain this to my mom and I was like, yo, I'm a drop shipper, like what would I tell her?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: So most people understand the concept of selling a product.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And okay, you have to find a warehouse and you have to store the product and you sell the product, you know, and then as you sell them one by one, you mail them out.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what drop shipping is, is kind of splitting that model into two and making two pieces.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I like to think of it, I think a good way to think of it is sort of like in the restaurant industry.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you've ever worked in a restaurant, you understand the concept of front of the house and back of the house.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Front of the house being the hostess, the servers, the people that the clients see, and then the back of the house being dishwashers, chefs, sous chefs, that sort of deal, the people that generally clients don't see.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm the front of the house.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: I do the marketing, I do the customer service, I'm I help the customers choose the product, I make sure the product gets to them and it's not broken and they're happy with it, and all this sort of stuff.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And if they're unhappy with it, I make it right.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: I partner with manufacturers in the US and they make the product, they ship the product.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: So all I do is I get an order from Mariah and I send her address and information to my partner, and then they mail you the product.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I never actually touch or see the product, I just exchange the address, and that's it.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: I have gone down the drop shipping rabbit hole myself, and I also got turned off by like um, I told Mariah the other day, like I just felt like I was in like the t-shirts kind of world, and it just seemed a little spammy and like played out, and it was hard to be unique and differentiated.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so I you kind of piqued my interest when you mentioned like I found like high-ticket um drop shipping.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm curious, how did you, if you've never seen an electric fireplace, like how did you land in this hyper-specific niche?
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: And how would one go about finding their own hyper-specific niche?
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, I mean, that is, you're definitely right, because that is the biggest problem with dropshipping and why I think it gets a bad name is most of the people you see on the YouTube ads and things like that are promoting this idea of um, you know, buy something super cheap on Alibaba and then ship it from China to the US and sell it on Instagram for maybe 10, 15, 20 bucks a pop and do that a thousand times and you make a bunch of money.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what they don't tell you is that a lot of customers are upset when it takes two months for their t-shirt to get to them.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: That was always my question.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, I don't get how I beat Amazon here ever.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: No, you will never beat Amazon.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the thing, and that's the you know, that that shows up, right?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like Amazon's changed the way we do business in the in the e-commerce world.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: So you kind of have to like meet that expectation.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but with high-ticket products, because they're so expensive, they you know, that luxury kind of feel is there.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, people are more willing to wait a week or two for their stuff to arrive.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's okay.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, but when they're buying a$10 little thing, they expect that there the next day.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so also I like the idea of having it in, you know, based in the US.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I started doing this um before COVID happened in 2019 when I started building my first store.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I was I launched my second store um May of 2020, right, when COVID was really happening.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: So um having all my suppliers in the US made my life a lot easier because I didn't have to deal with a lot of the supply chain issues and things like that.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: So it just makes the customer service side of things a lot easier uh to have US-based manufacturers or whatever country you live in, it doesn't matter, but just to have them inside of your country.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think high-ticket products are the way to go just because of the, you know, it's it's it is spammy, like kind of the goal of the of a of a drop shipping product is to get people to buy without really thinking.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and that's not anything you want because you're gonna have unhappy customers all day long.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_03: Interrupting the conversation real quick to give a shout out to this episode's sponsor, the contract shop.
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• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: All right, let's take you back to the episode.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm a little confused.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: How many stores like dropshipping stores do you have in total?
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: So right now, just the I mean, the one that I own and operate on my own is the is very good fireplaces.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I had sold one.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: I built um capstone wine coolers was another one, and I sold that.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then the tapejungle.co.uk is the one that I've started with my cousin in the UK.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I really just have two that I'm doing right now, one on my own and one with a partner.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_03: So how do you figure, like, how did you figure out to do fireplaces?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_03: Like, if I was like, okay, listen, you've sold me on doing the high ticket ones.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_03: Like I'm not gonna be selling like sneakers or something like that.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_03: Although sneakers, I mean, like, I don't know, if I'm selling like Kanye West sneakers, like they very well might be high ticket, but bad example.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_03: So if I was like trying to find a high ticket product to drop ship, I feel like that's where I would stop.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_03: I literally would be like, I have to go to Google because like Google's my main man, and I'm typing in stuff and I'm just like drop shipping high-ticket things, but then it's like you have to weave through all of these ideas and then like how how do you find which one jives and like make sense?
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: Because, like, although you're just like the front of the house for the drop shipping thing, and you don't actually have to hold the products, like a big thing that I feel like a lot of people don't realize is you have to have a killer fucking website and like a good looking website, and like be able to pass that no like and trust factor without having like your name, your face, your brand and everything kind of like front and center.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_03: So that was kind of like 17 questions into one.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_03: But like, how the fuck do you find out which product?
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so the the product searching process is the most difficult, right?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like it and you kind of do work backwards, and Google is your best friend.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I mean, originally how I started was just thinking of ideas, like let me think of some things that might be expensive, and then let me type some into Google, go to the shopping page, you know, sort high to low and see what prices are hanging out there.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I just make a ton of a huge list of every product I can think of.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: And with this one in particular, I actually started with um wood-burning stoves.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I was starting to see this trend where people were moving into doing like van life and they wanted their little cabins in the woods or their little, like that was becoming kind of a popular thing.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I was looking into actually selling more like high-end wood-burning stoves.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I did the research to verify that that is like a drop shippable product because there's a lot of times you'll encounter things like maybe Kanye West sneakers.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can't drop ship them.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like certain brands don't want to be associated with drop shipping because of what I talked about earlier, which was kind of the drop shipping having this like scammy feel to it.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know, um, so you once you verified that, I started calling the manufacturers to say, so I got my list of manufacturers that make wood-burning stoves.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: I called them and um, you know, they start bringing up the idea of being, I can't remember exactly what it was, but you had to be like had to have a special certification to advise people how to install these things because they are wood burning.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: So there's there's certain things you have to do with like basically codes for like you know, building codes and stuff like that.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: So since I wasn't certified in any of that, uh, they were like, well, you can sell electric fireplaces though, no problem.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: And most manufacturers that make wood burning stoves also make gas fireplaces, electric fireplaces, all sorts of stuff.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and electric just doesn't have any requirements as far as you know previous knowledge is concerned.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: So they're like, Yeah, start there.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Once you get an understanding of the products, like maybe we can add some, you know, gas fireplaces later and stuff like that.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how you kind of grow this, too.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's one thing I didn't like about my previous niche with the wine coolers, is it was, you know, you can add wine glasses and stuff like that, but there's not a lot of growth to the to the niche.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas this is like I can start with electric fireplaces, I can go to fire pits, gas fireplaces, wood burning stoves, like anything fire related is can kind of be all in my store.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: I'm just watching Shay's face.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: I know you guys listening can't see it.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: Shea's face is like zipping in and out, like she's following the storyline of it.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_03: She's so intrigued.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: This is so well.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: I am thinking about you actually, because so much of this is keyword driven, right?
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like so, in terms of finding a product, you're paying attention to like what are the bigger trends going on and what keywords are possibly like growing up.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: And then um, I'm assuming when you make the website, that again is all about positioning for what people are searching for.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm just like thinking, like, oh gosh, like there's a lot of SEO that's like wrapped into all of this.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: Can you take us to so you find a cool?
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: I think the product research site is fascinating.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I could probably talk to you about that for eight hours, but I won't bore everybody with that.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: Can you so what happens then is you get the product and then you build a website shop all for that product?
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: And then how do you get it out into the world?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Wait, hold on.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Before we jump into that, you just like straight up like pick up the phone, like back in 1999, and just like call these manufacturers.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, that's too.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Mariah and I'm trying to sell your shit online.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_03: So, like, how do I do that?
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_03: That that's literally what you do.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's no no other thing about it.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Just it's it's kind of interesting how easily you can get some a decision maker on the phone because no one else calls.
• 22:26
  unknown: Okay.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's quite a bit.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the different approach.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's the uniqueness there.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: I was wondering, like, how do you stop copycats?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I'm sure somebody figures out that you're doing well and they put up like an identical website, but the the differentiating thing is you have the relationship with these manufacturers.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: And they, you know, they once especially, I mean, I I recognized um with my first store.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: So when I sold the first store, I had manufacturers on the like I had already made agreements with the manufacturers.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: I had it, it was like ready to go.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it was a lot, it was more difficult to get those manufacturers.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: But the second go-around, of course, I can say, oh, you know, I've built a store and sold it already.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: And now, of course, I'm gonna be fine.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: So they would partner with me a lot quicker.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, you get that kind of trust and social proof and that sort of deal.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: And um, but yeah, I mean, it is it's just cold calling.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, emails never work, they never return your email.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: They never, if they have a thing on their website that says, Oh, you're interested in in being a seller of our products, you know, sign up here.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: That never works.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: I've never received uh a message back from one of those.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: But if I call, I can get the person on the phone, usually after you know, one or two phone calls.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to the Curiously Guided Podcast where we drop industry breaking secrets.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_03: Pick up the phone.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: No, but it is.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody is doing it.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone is trying to email.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's how we be.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: I always am recommending in-person networking.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, nobody is going to know, like, it's just it's like zagging, right?
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_02: If everyone is sending emails, what is the other way to do this?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's genius.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: And think about your target market.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's probably older folks that love to get on the phone.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: Is that right?
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Or um, yeah.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, a lot of the manufacturers that I'm trying to get approved with, um, yeah, definitely have that more old school kind of business.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, you get on the phone, you have that connection, you talk about your kids and your hobbies, and then you get it to business, right?
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so there's definitely some of that.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, I think it's just the difference.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, like I said, I think once, and then once you get one, once you get approved with one, then that because you'll have them ask you, like, who else are you selling?
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: And they want to know what other brands you're selling, because if that's one of their competitors, they want to be on your website.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: So then it comes becomes a little easier too to kind of get more people to sign up with you.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then once you start ranking, then people start reaching out to you.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_03: Ah, this is making a lot more sense here.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_03: So, okay, so let's say that a manufacturer says, like, yes, let's move forward.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_03: And so you're like, oh shit, now does it go into like now I need to build a website to sell this stuff?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_03: I'm assuming that's kind of where it goes.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_03: Then, like, how do you connect their system with your system?
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_03: Like, how does that connection between the front end and the back end of the kitchen kind of like work together?
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh great.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I mean, it's also I build everything on Shopify.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then, like, my first store, I won't, you know, open the store, it won't be live until I have at least three or four suppliers on there, three or four manufacturers, so that you know it looks legitimate.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then everything is just automated.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I use Zapier to automate the emails when a sale comes through and it's for this manufacturer, then the email goes to you know, Rick in their shipping department.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: And if it's this other manufacturer, it goes to Sue in the shipping department or whoever, you know, it's a because the warehouses are all over the country.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: They're in different cities and stuff.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: So um, but all the emails, everything's automated.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the other part of this, is I'm super big on my time and saving my time and making sure that my time is working for me.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I automate as much of the business as I can.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_03: Which is why this model is so helpful for like when you want to go and like travel and explore the globe and kind of just like like, yeah, like you don't want to be tied to a computer like a nine to five, or like you were saying, with consulting, where it was like your money was really attached to the hourly.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_03: But I do think, and this is kind of just what I learned through doing uh SEO keyword research for the fireplace website, which if you guys need an electric fireplace, like shameless plug here, um, go to very goodfireplaces.com because they they're beautiful.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_03: So, anyways, when I was I was taking a look at the website and I was like, oh shit, what I realized that you do really well is like you're really good at like showcasing your competitor advantage.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_03: Because I feel like the downside of drop shipping here is that like, why wouldn't they just buy from the manufacturer's website?
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_03: Why would they buy from very good fireplaces and not just like the company that sells it themselves?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_03: So, like that's something that you really have to think about.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_03: And I feel like these like YouTube videos, you know, like trying to get people to do like the spammy shit kind of, they're not focusing on kind of that, where it's like that really does matter, especially when you're trying to sell high-ticket things.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_03: So I guess like as you're thinking about this, like, how do you figure out what your competitor advantage is when it's like you versus the manufacturers?
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so uh I mean, there are two parts of this.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: One is some manufacturers don't sell direct to consumer, and those I obviously prefer because they'll they'll put on their website, hey, do you want to buy this?
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: Go to very goodfireplaces.com and buy it from them.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that helps a lot too.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: When once you start getting on manufacturers' websites, obviously that's you know free traffic.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but as far as there, I do have some manufacturers that also sell, you know, to cons direct to consumer.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, the main difference I just tried to stress is customer service.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: You call me, you get me on the phone, right?
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: You don't get uh you're not shown through a um you know a huge call center or anything like that, where which is what most of the manufacturers are doing, um, because we're just a small business, right?
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like I have a handful of employees, it's me.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like you can easily get the owner of the business on the phone.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, you're not getting Jeff Bezos on the phone if you call Amazon.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's just not happening.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that is what I try and focus on the most is like, hey, we're gonna take care of you.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna get back to you sooner than the manufacturers will because we have a direct line to them, but you're just another person on their, you know, Facebook page or whatever.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I've got a phone number.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, that's really helpful.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't realize that some of them didn't do direct to consumer.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_03: So it's like when you're doing this research phase, like, look for those people.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_03: That might be like some some gaps, gaps in the market there.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_03: So this brings me to my next question.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_03: I feel like I'm in like a research rabbit hole here.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_03: My line one human design is like getting very low.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_03: And here, and here.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_03: So, okay, nitty-gritty question.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_03: So, like, what if a customer calls?
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_03: Like, uh, Jimmy, he's calling me.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: There is either a problem with his fireplace or like something happened, like it didn't show up at his house.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_03: And then you're just like, I'm just the fucking drop ship or like it's just my website.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_03: But it's like, you can't say that to the customer.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_03: You got to be like, oh, so sorry, Jimmy.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_03: Let me figure this out.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_03: Like, what the fuck do you do when you're trying to handle like issues that stem from the manufacturer?
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I call the warehouse, my warehouse, my warehouse, and it's not, it's the manufacturer's warehouse.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I what's going on, guys?
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: Why isn't this ship or whatever?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: So um, you know, I do have that relationship, you know, and then some of the you know, the manufacturers that I ship more of.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: I have a I know some of their warehouse staff, I know some of their support staff, so I just call them.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, maybe that's the the the baseline of the of the the podcast episode is just get on the phone.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like seriously, seriously, and that's what I do too.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: When people like abandon carts, they don't they you know have an abandoned cart situation.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: I have an automated thing set up that comes right to my phone.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: I call them.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, I saw you didn't make that purchase.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: What's up?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like, let's chat.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_03: Do you really?
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: Hell yeah, I do.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's like my number.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_03: I know it's like, excuse me.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, put the fireplace back in your cart, Pam, and check out.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_03: Or is there any questions that you want the green flame?
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: You want the green flame in the fireplace?
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_03: I can make that happen for you, girl.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_03: That's hilarious.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: So get on the phone.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: Get on the phone.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, then my immediate question how did you without ever having seen the fireplaces, how are you able to answer questions intelligently?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like, did it take you a while to kind of like learn about everything?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh let's see.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, I do this wonderful thing, and I'm I'm letting in, I'm letting you guys into some trade secrets here.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: So don't tell anyone.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: But um, in the beginning, I had to make up staff, right?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, like Jerry, my staff person, would go ask the manager what to do.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, like it gives me a way to get off the phone and say, Oh, I'll call you back.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I get off the phone, and then I call the manufacturer and I say, Hey, I have this question I don't know the answer to.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: What do I do?
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: And they tell me, and then I call the person back.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: So it's literally just like a phone game.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's just winging it, fake it till you make it.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: Incredible, incredible.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, and and you can also like after a while, the the questions from customers start to become the same.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's not until you start getting phone calls from like the contractors where they're asking super technical stuff that you have to like be a little bit more savvy.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: But even now, like, I mean, I go and look up stuff about products all the time because you can't remember all of it.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: I sell like over 200 products.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way I could remember every dimension and every little nuance of everyone.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's not possible.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: Our brains aren't a storage device.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: That just-in-time learning idea is really relevant here.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, I think that this is so cool.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm curious about in terms of ongoing marketing, how much like I know there's the customer service piece of this, but how much like are you making blog posts every day?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how much actual maintenance when it comes to marketing do you have to do?
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one thing that's changed a lot over time.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in the beginning, I focused a lot on ads, Google ads, Facebook ads, and it just wasn't profitable.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like I was breaking even, basically, um at best, probably losing money really.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: But um, so then I actually did my SEO with Mariah, and that started to show uh I started to understand what SEO even was and how it works.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: Boom.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and then, you know, like same deal.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: Started like understanding blog posts.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: I had a um a VA the whole time, like from day one when I started doing this.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: I had a VA that would support me and help me out, but she wasn't comfortable um writing, like her just English wasn't strong enough to do that just yet.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I just never approached that doing blogs.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: I don't like writing, so I wasn't writing them.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but now I have someone that does them for me.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, she she did post one a week.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I try and get that content out.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just trying to get as much.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: I got to the point where I basically racked up too much money spending ad dollars and before I truly understood my client and truly understood the market.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so now I'm just focusing on on free traffic.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, like I said, mentioned before, being on manufacturers' websites, the SEO, the blog posts, that sort of stuff.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, eventually I'll probably bring in you know some ads because I do think the fireplaces perform well on like Instagram ads, visually appealing ads, TikToks, and things like that.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: But I just haven't had the time or the capacity with everything else.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because again, at the end of the day, this is a side job, right?
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like my main job is not this.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um, which is wild with like how in how in depth and everything.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_03: But I will say, like, if you can have a situation where the manufacturers are linking back to your website, that's also a huge thing for your SEO.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_03: So that's like bumping up your, it's called domain authority.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_03: It's bumping up your domain authority basically automatically.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's really helpful.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_03: And so I'm glad that you're taking advantage of that free traffic.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_03: And like I look at your data on SEMRush sometimes just to like see how see how things are moving.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: And like people all the time will be like, are blogs dead?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, no, let me show you very goodfireplaces.com where he understands SEO and like how to use content marketing and blog posts in a way that gets on Google, that gets clicks, but also gets sales.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_03: Because essentially what we found is that a lot of people on Google are they're looking for list posts.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_03: They want to see like a list of like, let's say in Brendan's case, like fireplaces, a list of fireplaces, like the best vertical fireplaces, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, okay, you sell fireplaces, you literally create a blog post showcasing your nine fireplaces that match this exact thing.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_03: And now you're not only like giving the best solution to the problem, but now you're helping the user make a purchasing decision.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_03: Like that's, I think, where a lot of people lose SEO is like, well, I got to create like stupid blog posts just to tell Google that like I'm fresh.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_03: And it's like, no, if you understand keywords, you understand blog posts and you understand your target market and like how you can use content, it can just continue to like circle around.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_03: And then if you wanted to add ads on top of that, you can like redirect those ads to the people that have already been on your website.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_03: And now you're paying even less money for ads because you're not putting those ads out to a cold audience anymore.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_03: Instead, you're retargeting them, which is usually cheaper.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_03: So I loved working on your website and just seeing all of this really come to life because I've never worked on a drop shipping website before.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_03: And that's why I'm selfishly very happy that you're on the podcast so that I can understand like the workings of it because I see your front end of it.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_03: But it was like the back end where even like I said, my other client was like, Mariah, give me the lowdown on drop shipping.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, that is not a thing that I have a clue about.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, I think I think all this is super cool.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, Mariah, do you have anything more like drop shipping that we want to dive into?
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_02: Or can we kind of pivot into the what is the main hustle?
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, what's the main hustle?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I mean, I I guess it would be the more the consulting side of things.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I just I do have a business consulting company where I help small and medium-sized businesses just grow and scale.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I've done since the beginning, right?
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the first thing I did.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: And and I just apply like what I'm learning in myself, like which works out really well because the drop shipping thing I've learned a lot, and it's brought me into a lot of different areas of e-com.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: And now I can apply that to my consulting business where I say, hey, you know what?
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you should check out some SEO, maybe you should start writing some blogs.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's really cheap to pay someone in the Philippines to write you a blog a week.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: And as a small little niche company, that would really, you would shoot up in the rankings a lot quicker.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like I know that information now because I've been doing this.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that's the main, that's the main hustle.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then um that's like the main way I make money.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then I spend time doing uh stuff like trying to grow my own brand on Twitter as as a stoic and a digital nomad and all the fun aspects of me.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you said something before we hopped on, which I thought was really cool about like what you're doing now is funding where you're going in the future.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: Take us into that, you know, like where do you I personally love stoicism, so I I go on a nerd out about that a little bit, but I kind of want to know like where you're heading and what that looks like.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: And just to take a step back, like I mean, I believe that that is the point of life is that the thing, the the thing you're working on now leads to the next thing that leads to the next thing.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you know you want to be somewhere, you know, dissect what those steps are that someone who's already there did to get there and see if you can like kind of model that.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, and you'll see that with my story, right?
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like I was working in accounting and studying books, and then I used that to apply to like consulting to grow and scale, and then I started growing and scaling.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: And um, so I'm just continuing to do that.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, on as far as like you know, on on Twitter and what I'm doing there with Stoicism, I have a space uh twice a week, which for those who just aren't on Twitter and unaware, a space is like a live podcast.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: You go into a you know a room like a zoom, almost like a Zoom room that you would imagine, but there's just no pictures, it's just audio, and you just talk about whatever.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so on Tuesdays and Thursdays, um, I have a community that I've been building since about October of 22.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we talk about the daily stoic reading from the day.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, whatever that reading is that day, I read it, give my two cents.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: I have a co-host that they do the same, and then we just let anyone come up and talk about it and connect that way.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: But it's been interesting to, you know, I was always someone that my socials kind of reflected my business life, my, you know, traveling or my business.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: And now just to bring in like stoicism, which is something I've been doing for six, seven years now, but it was very personal, like, but to bring that into like my digital persona, so to speak, was um has been really interesting and really fun to like connect with people and find like people that I had been friends with for years, but they're like, Oh, I also read the Daily Stoic every day.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: And we've never talked about that.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: So it's been really fun.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's just really enjoyable.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_03: What I love about this is like I feel like you set yourself up in order to have like little pockets of time to get like joy out of different arenas in your life.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_03: Like me and Shay kind of talk about this on the podcast where it's like your business can't check all of the boxes in your life.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_03: Like it can't be like the source of all of your creativity, all of your connection, all of your financials, all of your self-expression.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_03: Like it can't be all of it.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that like your story and the way that you have put these pieces together that kind of reflect all of the things that you give a shit about, or at the very least, like support the life so that you can spend more time giving a shit about certain things.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: I think that that's such it's such a beautiful reminder.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, are you still like I know that when we were working on SEO, you were still kind of traveling around, like you still travel like the globe, like digital nomad stuff.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and actually, like that is one area where I started to realize.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: So, of course, when we started traveling, um, my wife and I left the US, we sold everything, um, our condo, our cars, everything in uh 2019 and moved to Colombia.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and since then we've been moving around.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't had a, you know, we haven't had a lease since then.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so and it was all through the pandemic and all through that, it was it was difficult.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: But um yeah, we still do that.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: We have started to settle down in Panama.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: So now we're in, you know, we came to Panama with the intentions of staying for just six months, but just love it.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna stay here now.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we're in, you know, we're in the process of probably buying something the next year or two, and and this would be like our hub, but we'll still travel, you know, we'll still travel around and just not as much.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: But when we started traveling, everyone was trying to push us to like, well, you should travel blog, you should do this, you should make an Instagram page and da-da-da-da-da.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we thought about it.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: We did it.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I think we actually still have a website somewhere that is floating around.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but we just realized, you know, we would especially, you know, when we're traveling, we go around and we see these influencers out.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: You can spot them when you're at the the museums and the places because they've got all the camera equipment, they're doing all this weird stuff.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: And like, I was like, oh, so they travel like for a living, so they don't actually get to enjoy it.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like they're constantly busy, they're thinking about content, they're thinking about how this can be led into that.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: And like, I get that.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's you know, that's how you grow and build something.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I didn't want my hobby, so to speak, my travel to be muddied up with trying to make money.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that's been like kind of the joy, too, with the be stoic space that I'm doing is like I know from Jump Street, I decided like this will not be uh, I'm not trying to monetize anything here.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not trying to make money off of this.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is just to foster a conversation about philosophy and our challenges and how we deal with them and just to like so people can be better.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so and that's been like really a relief because I all I think about on my other side of life is like, okay, how do we make money?
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: How do we maximize profit here?
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: How do we get the most out of this investment?
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: Blah, blah, blah.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: So then I have these other sides where I just get to do whatever the fuck I want.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_02: I think that is so um insightful.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_02: And it took me a really long time to learn that that um just because you have a hobby doesn't mean you need to monetize it.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_02: I have a brain where I always am seeing ways to make money.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_02: So it's very hard for me to turn that off.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_02: But the problem is, is when you try to monetize all your hobbies, you suck the joy, or sometimes, not all the time, but for me, it sucks the joy right on out of it.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_02: And it turns into something that I'm doing 24-7 and there is no separation or balance.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_02: And and so I think that was really insightful that you noticed that about travel.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't know that I had ever put two and two together like that.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, would you I'm just curious myself, where all have you guys gone and like why do you love Panama or um like what were some of your favorite places?
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I could talk about this all day.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we've lived in like 20-something countries.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: Cool.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, like I said, Colombia was the first one.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then we actually had to come back to the US for a little bit.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then we were supposed to do a trip with um my wife's older sister and her husband in Eastern Europe, going to Croatia and Slovenia and stuff.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we actually went over to Europe uh first with the intention of meeting them uh a month or so later.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: But that's when COVID started.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that didn't happen.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: We arrived in Greece uh three days before they shut the country down.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: So we get there, and our host at the Airbnb is like, You guys need to make some decisions because they're going to shut the country down and you guys aren't going home.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we stayed and we were we were locked down in Greece for six months.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then once the first lockdown lifted in Europe, like we were able to travel around a bit.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we went to Croatia, Montenegro, Albania.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um we were in, we went to Turkey.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, Georgia was by far one of my favorite countries I've ever been to.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's a little country by Russia that no one really knew about until the Ukraine war started, and then people started remembering that Russia did the same thing in 2008 in uh in Georgia.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: But um, we spent a lot of time there because they give US citizens a year visa.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: So when this Yeah, it's and just for walking, you just walk in.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to like fill any paperwork out or do anything, you just go.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um so when the second lockdown in Europe happened, we were like, okay, let's go to Georgia because we know we can stay there for a year, because we overstayed our visa in Greece, and it was a little like we were concerned that they were gonna like kick us out or fine us or do something crazy.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: So um ended up being okay because of COVID, but Georgia, then what came after that?
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um oh well, we I don't know if I was doing this all in order exactly, but um yeah, Georgia, and then we were in um we did a big trip in Germany.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: We did um we were in a we did a van trip in Germany for like 15 days all around Germany, and then we lived in Berlin for about a month and a half.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and then we were in Amsterdam and Paris.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, let's see, we spent some time in Spain and Portugal.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm definitely like leaving something off.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_03: So if anybody has any questions about traveling literally to any of these countries, just reach out to Brendan and he'll he'll give you like the the four in one, not just on drop shipping, but digital nomadic.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, my husband and I have done this for a while, and I really struggled with um like being out of my routine and like bounce how to work and travel.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_02: It was like I was traveling well, but I was not working very efficiently, or vice versa.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how how have you found a nice balance with that?
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_03: That was my question that I wrote down.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks so much for making mine.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_03: No, thank you.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's been it's been such a journey.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I feel like we're still my my wife and I we talk about this all the time.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what's our routine?
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: So for a while we tried to maintain the exact same thing and it just didn't fucking work because time change occurs every three months.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: We were moving to a different country, unless we were locked down.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: But for the most part, every three months we were moving to a different place.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so the time change happens, so that shifts everything around.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like, because we were still working US hours, even we were in Europe, we were working like the kind of standard nine to five.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, at the beginning, my wife had a job with a US company where she had to work nine to five um Eastern hours.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we would work until like when we were living in Georgia, we'd work till 10 or 11 o'clock at night.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because they're like six, seven hours ahead.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: But um yeah, I mean, uh I forgot where I was going with this.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_03: The balance of traveling and walking, like how, yeah, how do you do that?
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: So trying to balance those two things is is tough too.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like I said, with mentioning like the fact that you do have the time change and just stuff changes, and and every time we move to a new location, like you know, our grocery store situation changes, our you know, our where our we go get coffee changes, like just things about our life change.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: So we were trying to keep a consistent um, you know, uh routine and it just wasn't working and it was causing a lot of problems.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: So we started to just realize that if we can just get a few things that we do consistently, whether that's daily, weekly, whatever, and just those kind of be our anchors, and then we can build around it.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: So, like I like to go on walks, I try to walk every morning.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I try to build that in.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes my my wake up changes, you know, right?
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like sometimes we're working late, so we wake up late.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: So sometimes the walk happens at six in the morning in certain countries, and other times that walk off happens at nine or 10 in the morning in other countries, just kind of depends on where we are.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, my wife's very into yoga, so she was like, I gotta do yoga every day, I'm gonna do that, right?
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: So, like we just tried to find the things that we knew we could fit in um to just keep that consistency.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so like reading the Daily Stoic was my thing.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like I read that every morning.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, and then work too, with with us being entrepreneurs, like you get to decide your schedule.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like, that's the joy of it, um, and the fear of it too, I guess.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know, that's you get to decide.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: So we're able to move things around.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_00: So some countries, I was more adamant about having my meetings in the morning, and then others it might be in the afternoon.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: So just you just kind of have to be in touch with your body and understand yourself, uh, which takes a while.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: But once you do, then you can apply that knowledge to how what's gonna fit best for me, what's gonna work best for me.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_03: I think that that's like an often overlooked area of being a digital nomad, because like you, it's essentially creating new neural pathways.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_03: Because like when you learn new things in your brain, it takes like a lot of energy like from your body in order to create these neural pathways, in order to create habits.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_03: That's why habits are such a pain in the ass in the beginning, because it's like you have to change your brain and like allow it to reconnect things.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's like if you're hopping around all the time and like maybe you're uh energetically exhausted or like you have brain fog or you're just like feeling a little like unstable or ungrounded, it's like giving yourself a little bit of grace because you're like, your brain is actually doing a lot more than you think it's doing.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_03: When if you were to just like explain this to somebody, like, damn, like I couldn't find the coffee shop.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_03: And it's like they'd probably be like, okay, well, like just fucking Google it, dude.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_03: Like, what's the issue?
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_03: But like your brain is actually like, well, wait a minute, the thing that we got so used to just completely shifted.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_03: And now we're back into like this research and finding area.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_03: And like, that's why I think when I was younger, I wanted to do like digital nomad stuff.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_03: And I still want to travel around and all of that.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_03: But I don't think that I was emotionally or spiritually at a place where I could hold all of that and create a business that like felt really good for me.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_03: So it's like kudos to you for being able to like keep walking and like essentially, just like this podcast, like being curiously guided.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I'm sure you guys didn't have this like full out plan of like, we need to hit this place and this place and this place and this place.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_03: You're essentially like, like you said, like a listening to your body on like both a um micro scale and a macro scale.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_03: Like, micro scale is in terms of like, how am I feeling today?
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_03: What do I feel like I need?
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I need this routine, I need to do yoga, I need to go for a walk, but also on a macro scale of like, how are we feeling energetically like in this space?
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_03: Like, do we feel like we're outgrowing it?
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_03: Do we feel like we're getting curious about something else?
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_03: Do we want to extend our time here so we have a hot second to like fucking ground myself?
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_03: Because I feel like that would be an issue that I would have if I'm just like, you know, putting myself in this situation.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's like there's no way that I would be able to focus on work like consistently.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_03: Like me and Andrew, we we literally just went up to Buffalo to visit family.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_03: And then we ended up going to Virginia Beach.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_03: And so this whole thing was like 10 days.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_03: I could like barely open my emails.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, oh my God.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, and I'm like trying to do, I was like hiring somebody on Upwork to do the side project.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_03: And like, I just I couldn't do it.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_03: I couldn't focus.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_03: And then where we were staying, I'm used to having my own office with a closed door.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_03: We were staying in an Airbnb where there was no other room.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_03: So now Andrew's watching some dumb shit on YouTube, and I'm trying to like get this shit figured out with work, and it was like, yo, I just I give so much credit to people that can like pick up their laptop or in your case, pick up your telephone and like go and like work wherever the hell you want.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_03: Like that's it's wild.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's not like it's it sounds easy like with saying it right now, but the the whole journey to get here was fucking hard.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_00: And like looking back, you know, maybe compartmentalizing things and building the business first, and then you know, kind of going out on the journey might have been, you know, better.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_00: But um, we started to realize a lot about, you know, and I know I like it.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_00: I like the kind of pressure cooker mentality of like just fucking figure it out and like throw you in the deep end and just swim.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but like, yeah, we started to realize stuff about ourselves, like the week leading up to a move, we would be at each other's throats all the time.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: And like because we're like stressed out and our brains are currently getting ready to like do the fucking thing over again, to do the research phase and stuff over again.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that week leading up and then the week, you know, afterwards, we'd always move on a weekend usually.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the week leading up and the week we are we're first in a new place.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: We will, I like after a while of realizing this, three or doing this three or four times, is like, I gotta like change how I do my schedule.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: So that week leading up to a move, like I'd always, you know, work 20 hours.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't work a full week, I'd work half, you know, and I would do it the following week too, just to be like, okay, you know, give myself enough time, feel comfortable.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it's inevitable, like with travel, something will go wrong every single time.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: It is a part of it.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_00: So to build time in my schedule for that thing of like, oh, we're gonna get to our Airbnb and the key's not gonna work and we're gonna have to wait four hours for someone to come get us.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I built time for that so that because it's so many times it occurred where I'm like stressed out and miserable because I'm trying to do all of it.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, like being honest with myself about like I can't do everything.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then at the same time, there were weeks, like especially during lockdown, where it's like, okay, we can only go outside to run.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess I'll just work 50 hours, 60 hours this week.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like I've got nothing to do.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, it's just that's and that's my favorite part about being a digital nomad and doing what I do is that I can uh adjust our my life and our life to fit whatever's going on in that season of our life.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we did the same thing with countries.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, like when we're looking for the next country to move to, it's like, well, what's the financial situation?
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_00: Where are we at right now?
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like Berlin's a lot more expensive than Tbilisi, Georgia.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, we were we spent two weeks in Amsterdam, which is one of the most expensive cities on earth.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what we spent in two weeks there, we could have lived in another country for three months.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, like those those decisions are also impacted, and we're able to fluctuate them off, you know, business is doing really well right now.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go live in Amsterdam.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, we're gonna tighten the belt a little bit this month.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go back to Croatia for a little bit.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it's also the just the flexibility of it is really great.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I love all of this.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so you've given us a lot of good frameworks about like how you're taking care of yourself and like you're I like how you have like, I need the walk every day, or your wife needs yoga, and like building around those things that kind of nourish you and fill your cup.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so the question that's been popping up for me as you've been sharing how has stoicism come into all of this and kind of helped you more on a um philosophical level, kind of navigates life challenges.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um Can you tell us what stoicism is first?
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_03: Can you just like give me a definition?
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_03: Because you guys are throwing this around in even like I was reading it on your forum and I was like, I gotta Google this.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I don't even, I'm not clear.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, just the basics real quick and then hop into Shay's question, if you don't mind.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, stoicism, the the main tenant that you'll hear is that to you focus on what you can control and ignore everything you can't control.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: And when you start to understand that, that sounds simple, but at the end of the day, there's very few things that you actually control.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like your opinions of things is one, and then your actions.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the two main ones.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_00: So everything that you do, everything that happens to you, you get to form an opinion on.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_00: When someone's pissing you off at you know, at work, you've decided to be pissed off by that person.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_00: You can decide not to be just as easily.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that's like the part of it that I that I fell in love with is the control, the power, like I'm in control.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: I am and and also like accountability.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like everything that happens is like I am complacent in it in some way.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's not this idea of life's unfair.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, I I made choices that brought me here, and now I have to, now I'm here.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: So now I need to make the best decision moving forward with the tools that I have available to me.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um that is nothing like I don't know why.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my god, this is like hilarious.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_03: In my head, stoic was literally like being a statue.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_02: In my head, it was like being that's how we use it.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like when you're cut top saying someone is stoic, it's like they're quiet and statuesque, I guess.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_03: So but like didn't have like but like didn't have like facial express.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_03: Like I my brain was taking it to the extreme where it was like absolutely not no.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm glad that I asked your definition and just like what it means, because like it makes a lot more sense now.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_03: So I appreciate you.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and so that actually is a is a very common misconception because there's up what they what you know, what those in the field would refer to uppercase stoicism, the philosophy, and then there's lowercase stoicism, the adjective, like the word that's used to describe someone.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in modern day language, you're right, that is what stoic is.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you describe someone as a stoic, they're you know, usually stone faced, emotionless, like you can't really tell what they're thinking.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're those people that you can't, they don't wear their emotions on their face or their sleeve, right?
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_00: They they hide everything.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_00: But stoicism, the philosophy, it's quite the opposite.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're supposed to like welcome in the emotion, sit in the emotion, and and then you guide the emotion, you don't let the emotion control you.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, like anger is the easiest example, right?
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like someone makes you angry, you can lash out at them and yell at them.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_00: But if you take a pause and you realize that maybe the thing they're doing right now that's really annoying to me, I did that two weeks ago.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe I should have some empathy here and calm down for a second and just let them do their thing in there.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, like stoicism, the philosophy is very different than stoicism, the description, which is always kind of a misconception.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_03: That's where that's coming from.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, where did my brain fucking connect this from?
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, because I feel ridiculous, because like what I was like in my brain connecting it to is like not what you were saying.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm glad that there's like two different definitions and we kind of went there because that's really helpful.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm I appreciate you asking that because that's one of the biggest things.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like when people come into the space for the first time, they're like, What is this stoicism?
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_00: You guys are talking about emotions a lot.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's weird.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so yeah, we get that all the time.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_02: I came because I didn't want to have to talk about emotions.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_02: I was am I understanding you correctly?
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_02: Ryan Holliday wrote the daily Stoic, or he pulled like a bunch of passages and put together kind of like a year-long 365 days every day.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_02: You wake up and you read like um a passage from one of the stoic philosophers.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, is that right?
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it's a quote from one of the old Stoic philosophers from you know 2,000 years, 2,500 years ago, more or less.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then he kind of gives like his little two cents on the quote or the passage that he selected.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, but there's one every day.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the space that I do on Twitter is just me reading that, and then I give my kind of two cents on it, and then we have a discussion.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, what have you found to be the most helpful?
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I I'm curious how long have you been doing the Daily Stoic?
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_02: And like what was the doorway for you?
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what kind of piqued your curiosity about it originally?
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I've been reading the Daily Stoic for the last five years, so every day for the last five years.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_00: And um I think I actually someone people ask me this a lot, and I think the best thing I can remember is I'm pretty sure I heard Ryan Holiday on a podcast um talking about stoicism.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_00: I have had no idea what it was before.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then this, and he was talking about that idea of focus on what you can control and like, you know, what's the point of getting upset because it's raining outside unless you can control the rain.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that idea like just made a ton of sense to me.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I like anything that makes I like any decision that makes a million decisions for me.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if I decided that I'm gonna follow that idea of only focus on what I can control, well, that eliminates a shitload of decisions that I have to make because I can, well, I can't control that moving on.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that really helped with with Kara and I when we were traveling, is especially with COVID and all the changes and restrictions and each country being different, was like, we can't control this.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: So at the last minute, when our flight gets canceled because of some whatever reason, well, we got to just move forward from here.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_00: We can't do anything about the past, right?
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think that's where I found it.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_00: I heard him the first time on a podcast.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then the Daily Stoic, I think, is a great place to start because it's super short.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's one to two minutes, you know, reading per day.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't have to do it in order.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: You can literally just open the book willy-nilly and just start reading.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they are dated, so you or there is a reading for the day, but you can do whatever you want.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think Ryan Holiday does a good uh job at making stoicism more approachable because it is it is an ancient philosophy.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_00: So the original writings are sometimes a little weird to read until you get used to it.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but he makes it a lot uh a lot more approachable.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then I just love I like history too.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_00: And in his books, um, so the two biggest ones are The Obstacle is the way and Ego is the enemy.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, he does a lot of historical references.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: So he'll talk about a thing and then he'll say, Oh, like when Abraham Lincoln did that in the Civil War, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he gives like a little background.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I like the history aspect of it too.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the books are fantastic.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_02: I really recommend them to anybody.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I liked what you said.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_02: Like, there's a couple concepts that really are guide, like, obstacle is the way is something I am helping, I tell myself daily.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm getting wound up because something isn't going my way.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, oh no, this is the obstacle and this is the path, right?
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, and stillness is the key, is another one.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_02: We talk about the importance of stillness on the podcast a lot.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's just a lot of like just wonderful tenets that you can, and they're simple and straightforward, and you can really like use them to anchor yourself.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_02: Or for me at least, I use them to like really ground and anchor myself when I'm getting a little wound up about things.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that's so cool.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really looking forward to.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_02: I if I can figure out Twitter, I'd like to join the space at some point.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think I'd love to talk with you about that as a side conversation.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_02: But I really appreciate um, I don't know, I think it's really inspiring that you're letting yourself like that.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_02: To me, I'm like, wow, this is such a big commitment.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_02: You're showing up for these people on top of everything else you're already doing.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_02: But it sounds like it's giving you a lot of like nourishment and energy as well.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it is, it is the best part of my of my week.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I there's consistently been weeks where I'm like, I feel like a failure in every other aspect of my life.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_00: But then I go into the B Stoic space and like someone comes in, they're like, oh my God, this is the conversation I needed to hear today.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like, thank you for having this.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it really is like I'm getting a shitload of enjoyment from it.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it started, it's the funniest part about it is like, um, so I like said I've been reading the Daily Stoic for a while now and I'm digging really into stoicism for the last couple of years.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, my wife Kara got into it as well, and she would read the Daily Stoic.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I would always try and talk with her, be like, Hey, did you get the reading today?
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what did you think?
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you like what about this idea?
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_00: And like I'd ask her all these sorts of questions and shit.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_00: She'd be like, Brendan, I don't, I don't want to do this shit.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_00: Go away.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just like, oh, all right.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: And she's like, Why don't you find some friends on Twitter to do this with and stop bothering me?
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I did.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_00: I literally sent a tweet out, I'm like, hey, who wants to talk about stoicism?
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like, here I am.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how the space started.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so it just started as that you know, your your wife is yelling at you.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_03: Like, my my wife is yelling at me because I won't stop picking her brain about this.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's hilarious.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I was gonna ask, like, with I'm I'm sure that A, it's cool that she was interested enough to like pick it up and learn about it.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_03: So it's like you guys can kind of have that common ground because I find that sometimes in couples, it's like when you get really into something and they're like not interested in like even hearing about it or like exploring it, it it makes it really hard to grow together.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_03: But I feel like when you can kind of share in these similarities, even if it's like she's not all in like you are, but you can have a conversation about it.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_03: I feel like that kind of helps you grow together.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_03: And like I'm just seeing the connection and like how fucking helpful this must be, like you mentioned, for traveling, because traveling on its own can put like a whole lot of pressure on one person, let alone a relationship, like two people doing it together.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_03: You're living with each other all of the time and like trying to problem solve.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_03: And like they're like we said, there's always problems to be solved.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_03: And so I feel like when you kind of connected those, I was like, yo, that I feel like all digital nomads need to like find some philosophy like this just in order to decrease the amount of stress that can happen because everything that you're sharing, I just wrote down, it's like all the shit that you won't see people saying on Instagram, all the shit that like you won't see digital nomad people sharing on YouTube and stuff like that.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_03: Like, so often it's like, look at me, I have my laptop on the beach and I'm working on the beach.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_03: And it's like, bitch, have you ever tried to work outside in the sun?
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_03: That's just brutal.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_03: Fan gets everywhere.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I hate those took it.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_03: Like you can't even see your screen.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_03: And so I just appreciate like how real you've been with like the experiences of everything.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_03: You've been super transparent with everything.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_03: Not that I thought that like you weren't gonna be, but the conversation, yeah, this is like wildly helpful and in a way, like opening up doors that I've never opened myself.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_03: You know what I mean?
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_03: Like I've never opened up drop shipping or stoicism or any of this shit.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_03: But I'm finding myself like very much enjoying this conversation and just learning so much from you.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_00: And like from a from like a couple standpoint, I mean, especially with a philosophy, like, I mean, if Kara didn't get involved in it and didn't understand it, she was gonna learn because like it's how I it's how I make decisions, it's how I function as a human.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_00: I do everything through a stoic lens.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: So she can now, even if she's not, yeah, like you said, as like in it as I am, because she has her own sort of way that she makes decisions and lives her life.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: And while it's influenced by stoicism, it's not exactly the same as as me, but um, she needs to understand that as like my partner to know like how I function and tick.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think just you know, yeah, like our whole process of yeah, like you said, problem solving, dealing with issues, dealing with challenges, all that sort of made a uh a nice shift when we were both aware of the stoicism.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_00: Cause I think she started to become aware of why I make the decisions I make or why I am the way I am in some regard, because of lack of control or controlling it, right?
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, it was it was really good that that she got involved and it's always been something that we've been able to connect with.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then it's good too, because when I'm struggling with things, she's obviously my sounding board, right?
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_00: She's the person I go to and talk to.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_00: So she can be like, well, you know, maybe you should consider this Seneca quote or this Marcus Aurelius quote.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_00: And she'll like rattle it off because she knows it and she knows that that's what I need to hear.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's kind of cool.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, Brendan.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we think you're fascinating.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I have like a million other questions I want to ask you, but we're running out of time.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_02: So you tell us where are your curiosities lying these days?
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_02: We always like to finish the podcast by asking, like, what rabbit holes are you finding yourself going down recently, or what's kind of piqued your interest?
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, my my next kind of phase of my life, it will be involved in like the NFT blockchain space.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think NFTs are extremely powerful and the blockchain technology is just going to be something that anything that gives information access to more people, I think is always a good thing.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so I mean, that's where I'm definitely curious.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I love, you know, I kind of started in in the beginning of 2020 with NFTs.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously you had the whole like market where it was going crazy for a while, and that was fun and exciting.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_00: And but now to see it where it's just plummeted and it's like, you know, almost people, so many people are gone.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's fun too, though, because you have these like real people that are there that are actually trying to like impact change and make things better for society as a whole.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's I and I think it will.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_00: I really do think that as we decentralize things a little more, it uh will get a lot better.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, NFTs are definitely kind of my my thing right now.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_00: The community aspect of NFTs is is really interesting.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_00: I find, and that's what I've been doing with the Be Stoic space is is building a community, which is something I've never done.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_00: I've always considered myself sort of a solopreneur or like a you know a guy on his own who just might have my backpack and I'm ready to go.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but this idea of building community, I think is really powerful.
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I I believe that's the direction that businesses are going to move to.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that people are going to be aligning themselves with brands anymore.
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think people are going to be aligning themselves with people, and then those people are just going to happen to buy certain brands.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so I think that's the other part of the idea with NFTs is community is such a big aspect of it.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_00: So anything that gets me more knowledge in community building and understanding that dynamic is, I think, is going to be powerful as this sort of digital world becomes more and more involved in our lives.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_03: Well, cool.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_03: I can't wait to have you back on the podcast to talk about that because, like, we thought that I had the wrong definition for stoicism.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_03: You don't even want to hear what I think like NFTs are.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_03: So we'll save that conversation for a different day.
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but yeah, I agree that I think we're leaning deeper and deeper into community.
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_03: And so I'm excited to be connected.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_03: I'm excited to watch all of this unfold.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, can you just tell our listeners where they can find and connect with you?
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_03: And if you have like anything that you want to share with them?
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm my main platform is Twitter.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's Boggles the Stoic.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_00: So B-O-G-G-L-E-S, The Stoic.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then Boggles the Stoic on Instagram as well.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then as of today, Threads.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm also there, Boggles the Stoic.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then I also in my Twitter, um, I have a link tree there, and you can go to my calendar link.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you have any sort of like business development questions, digital nomad questions, NFT questions, I can sit there and chat with you for hours about that.
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I have my calendar link in there.
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_00: Feel free to book some time with me.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm happy to meet you and connect in any way.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, if you want some free consultation on your business, I give an hour for free.
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I'm here.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Brendan, one thing I've really appreciated about you is um you have a commitment to building community.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_02: You've touched on it in a lot of different ways throughout this entire episode, from picking up the phone and talking to people.
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_02: There's a real desire for human connection, human relationship that's woven throughout everything you're doing.
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_02: But what I find particularly interesting about that last piece you left us with, um, did y'all see that the Surgeon General just issued an advisory in the US?
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_02: There's an epidemic of loneliness and how a detrimental loneliness is to your health.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_02: They say it's worse than smoking like a crazy amount of cigarettes a day.
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so I do think there's something about, and we talk about this on the podcast a lot, the importance of community and how we're all so hungry and craving that.
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_02: And then us as business owners, exactly what you said, Brendan, we can know that, know how helpful it is for us as humans, and then think about how we can cultivate communities, whether it's through your business or through your philosophy or whatever you're doing, like how important that is, especially right now, like in the current climate.
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_02: So I do think communities that it that's where it's heading.
• 1:12:27
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we're all like desperate, even if that turns online, like what that will look like and how we can all be kind of agents of facilitating our own communities, I think is really, really powerful.
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_02: So thank you so much for your message and just the human connections that you're spreading around.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's all really powerful and inspiring.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's a no, that's a great point.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_00: I love that because you know, that's that's what it is.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I think if people, I mean, we do it now in business where we think of like our KPIs and things and what's our audience persona and all this stuff.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_00: All that is is understanding, like if you understand your community, you don't need those things.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you just give your community value, they're gonna keep coming back to you.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's no doubt about it.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_00: And not only that, they're gonna tell other people about you.
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't advertise the B Stoic space at all, but we get consistently 40 people in there every day or every Tuesday and Thursday.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, it's so it's it's just I don't do anything, I don't let that out be known.
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_00: I let the community do the work because if you provide value to the community, they're gonna provide value right back to you.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_03: Oh shit, and what a perfect place to end this episode.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna leave it with Brendan's mic drop.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much, Brendan, for coming on the podcast.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_03: And uh yeah.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_03: Fuck we're gonna have to cut that part out.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_03: Uh we're done.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's funny because like we're we're trying to do a new ending.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_03: How do we want to end these?
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_03: Just let's just do the old one.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, do you have the notes pulled up?
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_02: Just do all right.
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_03: So, all right.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_03: I think we're gonna close this episode down.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_03: If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to share it with somebody that you think would love it or on social media.
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_03: If something really popped out to you, totally DM us.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_03: We love connecting with you.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_02: And as always, thank you so much for listening and for your support.
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_02: If you haven't yet, subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review so we can all continue to grow together.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_02: And until next time, remember you have the power to create whatever the fuck you want.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_02: Brendan was an excellent example of that.
• 1:14:24
  SPEAKER_02: You can really create whatever the fuck you want in this world.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_02: Follow the nudge, ask questions, and let curiosity guide the way.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_02: We'll see you in the next episode.
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for tuning in and listening to this episode of the Curiously Guided Podcast.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_03: We appreciate you so much for being here.
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_03: Truly, this podcast is such a joy for us to create.
• 1:14:53
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• 1:15:07
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• 1:15:15
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• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_02: Reviews go a long way in helping us reach more listeners, so even if it's just a quick one, it helps us all continue to grow together.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_02: We'll see you in the next episode.