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Digital Nomad with Mitko Karshovski · Humanity Working

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: I think the best talent wants autonomy.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: The best talent doesn't want to be told what to do when.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: They want to, you know, be essentially trusted.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: They want to, you know, do work when they want to do the work.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, there's this like we've kind of accepted this idea that everyone's time is worth the same amount, or that like, you know, an hour equals an hour of your time equals an hour of your time equals an hour of your time, which is not true.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: Today's episode is a really interesting discussion with Mitko Krasovsky.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Some of you might know Mitko from his own podcast, That Remote Life, and if you don't know it, I'd highly recommend you check it out.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Mikko lives what is known as a digital nomad lifestyle, which basically means that he does great work from all around the world while never setting foot in a formal office.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: But not only is he a digital nomad himself, he's also a subject matter expert and thought leader on the topic.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now, whether you're an employer who is interested in employing remote workers, or just somebody who likes the idea of working from Bali one week and Lisbon the next, I think you'll get a lot out of it.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: I hope you enjoy the episode.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Alright, Mikko, it's great to have you on Way Too Busy today.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining us.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm happy to be here.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me on.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Alright, so we got a lot to talk about today.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's interesting.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I met you first um on a on a platform that who knows if it'll exist in about a year's time.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: I met you first on Twitter and seeing after uh uh seeing some of your posts on there.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we got talking about obviously a strong shared interest that we have um in the if you like remote work lifestyle, you can call it that.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we've had several interesting discussions since then, and it came very obvious to me that uh we wanted to have you on the on the pod today.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um got a ton to talk about, as I say.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's go straight into it.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: I know that you've been personally working outside of an office setting for some time.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: So help help our audience understand when that journey began for you when you realized that you were not somebody who was gonna be sitting in a in a cubicle from nine to five every day.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so this is an interesting conversation because I've never worked in an office.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I've actually asked this question before of some people where I'm like, should I go work in an office so that I can better talk about like why it's not a good thing?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know what I mean?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: Or do I just sound like, you know, maybe I would love to work in an office.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: I have no idea.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but no, I've never worked in an office.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: So um I dropped out of college in 2014 and then immediately started working in startups.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so I got my quote unquote degree of uh, you know, not from college, but from working in startups and and had a lot of failures, had some successes, uh, some even bigger failures, and then eventually kind of discovered this remote work world and visual nomad world, so to say.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I kind of figured out that I was probably gonna have to go down this path because so uh I need to go back a little bit further to high school.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: And and so obviously from my name, uh Mitko Karshowski, I was not born in the United States.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: I was born in Bulgaria.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: And when I immigrated to the United States, I was 10 years old.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: And growing up in the US, I kind of never quite felt like I fit in because I was always not that I not that I wasn't welcomed in some way, but I was always known as the Bulgarian kid, right?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: And then I'd go back to Bulgaria and everybody would know me as the American kid.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I wasn't just, I was just kind of like, nowhere was I just like a kid, nowhere was I just like a part of the like, you know, a perfect part of the community.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: I almost always existed a little bit on the outside looking in in some way.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so growing up, I never quite felt like I could see this world in which, hey, I'm just gonna live here and you know, occupy this a hundred mile square radius, square, you know, whatever of land and like never really leave.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: I always wanted a life that was like more global in some sense.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so um in high school, I was actually really focused on sciences.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I was a biotechnology student.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: I was in a very competitive biotechnology program through high school, worked on a lot of a capstone project and stuff like that.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: And that was my plan.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: So I went to college.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: I was a microbiology and biotech major in college.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: And um, I was really into biotech.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: And when I got to college, it was literally like day two.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: I was sitting in a lab and I was like, oh my God, I hate this.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and it was shocking to me because this was something that I really enjoyed.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I had this realization, you know, I kind of struggled through this period of why do I not like this thing that I really liked before?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: And what I realized was that my biotech program in high school was very entrepreneurial.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: It was very like you make your own schedule, you work on what you want to work on, like figure out the problems that you want to work on.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: And it kind of was a much more entrepreneurial setting.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: And what I what I experienced in college was like sit on this chair, do these lab exercises, uh, and do XYZ.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so that was like the closest, you know, when you ask, like, how do I know that an office life isn't for me?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's because I sat through those labs and I was like, okay, something else, like this is not the way that I want to work.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so that's kind of like how I, you know, the the long story of how I uh ended up doing what I do now.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: Living the life that I live now.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: That is truly fascinating, and there's a lot that resonates with me personally there.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: I I I also am a uh am an expat, and I've having spoken to a bunch of expats about this issue, what I've come to the conclusion of is that that if you are an expat, you are you can be kind of at home almost anywhere, but you're never fully at home anywhere because you've gone through that experience, the exact experience that that you're talking about, right?
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: So when I go back to the UK, I'm American, and when I'm in the US, I'm the British guy.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: Or in many cases, I don't really know your accent anymore.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: I know you're not American, but I don't know where you're from, that guy.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: But but uh but it's so interesting because it it does seem in speaking to a lot of the people that we speak to that actually do really well outside of a formal office setting, oftentimes it's connected to something like that.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: So very, very intriguing.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever heard the term third culture kid before?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: So a third culture kid, and I can't really remember who came up with this term.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um if you're listening to this, you may have to like do the research on who or where this term kind of like originates from, but it's this idea that you have as a child, you grow up outside of the culture of your parents, and then you combine your parental culture and your new culture into sort of its own mixture of it.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: So, an example of this would be, you know, I speak Bulgarian, we live in the United States, and what we've come to speak is this like mixture of Bulgarian English, because some words in Bulgarian are better to describe what you're experiencing than the ones in English, and vice versa, right?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: So you you speak this like third language, it's a mixture of the two.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I recently had um uh Matthew Grolnik on the on my podcast, That Remote Life, who is uh uh an amazing, uh an amazing guy who works for the MasterCard Foundation um in Africa, kind of doing a lot of this like future of work work over there.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: And what we talked about with him was that actually there's now, you know, growing up, I know a lot of these third culture kids because um Bulgaria, I think in the early 2000s, entered the European Union.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: So everybody that I know that I grew up with in Bulgaria ended up living in like England and Germany and Spain, and you know, they kind of all over.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but now what you're finding is that a lot of these people who are working remotely or have been nomadic for pre- since pre-COVID are having kids.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so these kids are now like third culture kids on steroids because they're not just growing up in one culture that's mixing with their parental culture, their parental culture is mixing with like a whole bunch of different cultures.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think that that's gonna be a very interesting generation.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I'm very curious to see kind of how these kids grow up and how that impacts the way they they view things.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you use the term nomad there, which I think is really interesting.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I know you you commonly on your own podcast talk about talk about this idea of a digital nomad.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: So um it's not a term we've used a lot on this pod.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I wonder if you could if you could describe what you mean by digital nomad.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then also I wonder if you could describe what it means for you personally.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: So a digital nomad is someone who generates their income remotely and chooses to not have a home base or chooses to not have one set address, so to say.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, a lot of times digital nomad are like characterized as constant travelers, you know, they're working on laptops, they're moving from country to country to country constantly, and they're never like, you know, there's some people who make travel often and they always come back to like one home destination, one address, and then travel, but digital nomads are kind of constantly moving, right?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: They're nomadic, they're like a digital interpretation of what we can think about as like hunter-gatherer or nomadic tribes.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, what that means for me is it's funny because there's been a lot of discussion of like what is a digital nomad, right?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: How often should you move to be a digital nomad?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: What if you move every year?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: Does that still count?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so for me, uh I, you know, started up moving around quite a bit.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: And then um, you know, I've slowed down, which is very common, is like nomads kind of slow down uh over time and they kind of find the place that they like and they'll go back to those places.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: So for me, like in a perfect world, um, I like to live through what I call home bases.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: So having two or three home bases around the world where I roughly know, hey, here's where this place is here, you know, kind of knowing the general layout of that destination and then using that location as a springboard to then go and visit other places if I want to.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: And those home bases can change, you know, every couple of years if I want them to.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: But that at the moment for me, I found having three home bases around the world.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: So right now, my home bases are the United States, Bulgaria, and Mexico.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then, you know, kind of like spending like four months-ish in each one of those to me feels really, really good.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: And it's it's this amount of time where um I can, you know, settle down and build uh routines in those places, but not long enough to where I'm getting like restless and I'm like, all right, like I'm getting bored, let's go to the next place.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so for me, that's kind of the way that the digital nomad lifestyle is, you know, living out in my life.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: So this is obviously a community that you know pretty well.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, would it be fair to say that a lot of the people that fit into this category are either single or married without kids or or you know, in relationships without kids?
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: What what how how does it track to the to the nature of the people that pursue this this type of lifestyle?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's interesting because until two years ago, you know, we're recording this in 2022, um, this was definitely a very single, uh young um male mostly, even though now there's more and more women who are who are nomads, but like historically it was uh very male-dominated, uh young single males who are working in tech or had their own businesses, their entrepreneurs.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: And that has really changed very, very quickly.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and in many ways, the digital nomad community, I feel like, is like a teenager where it just had a growth spurt and it's still trying to figure out how to use it's like, you know, you see like a 14-year-old who just grew eight inches in one summer and they kind of like don't really know how their arms work, kind of thing.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's um it's kind of similar because uh now post-COVID, we are seeing more and more families becoming nomadic.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: We're seeing more and more uh families with kids.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I'm married, I'm nomadic with my wife, but even more I know even more people who are nomadic with their kids, or at least are in, you know, a slower version of a nomad, so to say.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um so it's you know, it's interesting because uh it's changing very rapidly.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, historically, I'd say it was like a young single male, you know, male or female kind of thing, but um it's changing very quickly.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Fascinating.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: So having lived this lifestyle for some time, what have been the best parts of the journey for you, and what have been the most challenging?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think the best parts are that you have this continuous like sense of energy that comes from moving and having to relearn a place.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: There's something really exciting about the very common parts of your routine feeling like adventure.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, like if you go out to the grocery store at home, you it's not it may not seem as exciting because you know exactly what that grocery store is gonna look like.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone speaks the same language, uh, most grocery stores have the exact same product.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's kind of like this thing that you're very, very used to.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: When you're a nomadic, you those very common routines feel like adventure, right?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like you go to the grocery store and you're like, oh wow, like what do they sell over here?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: And it's interesting they've set it up this way, and everyone speaks a different language, and you kind of have to like figure that out.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's the same thing to go into a restaurant or a coffee shop, or just your day-to-day life feels very adventurous, and that's really fun.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, to me at least.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure it can, and for some people, it may not be.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: So that is the best part.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: And obviously, you know, getting to travel at a young age, which is something that so many people like leave for retirement, right?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like the in the United States, at least, you have this thing of like, okay, well, I'm gonna work on them until I'm like 60, save up some money, 65, and then I'm gonna retire and live, right?
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: And they save all this travel.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: You ask people what do you want to do with your time?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone says, like, oh, I'd love to travel more.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, in this way, you're able to like not save travel for retirement and live a really great lifestyle while you're still young and can enjoy that lifestyle.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the hardest thing is definitely you have to rebuild your community.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so a lot of people will tell you that the hardest thing about being a digital nomad is a lack of community or a lack of long-term relationships.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't think that that's true.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: I don't agree with that there's a lack of the relationships.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: You simply have to rebuild your relationships in your community.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_02: So for the first two years that we were nomadic, my wife and I felt really lonely because we didn't have friends.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, uh, I don't know if you've ever seen like how I met your mother, but that was something that like I really like wanted, which is like to come down, you know, stairs and like, you know, come out of my apartment.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: There's the bar, and I know that my friends are gonna be in that bar and kind of seeing those people having that like that community uh is something that I really wanted.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: And what we found was that it takes about two years for you to rebuild your community with people who do what you do.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: So now our life is actually we do have that how I met your mother experience because wherever we travel, we're either planning our travels based around what our friends are doing, um, or wherever we go, we know there's gonna be people there.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh now we do have that community.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm we're going to Mexico, like I said, in um in a couple months, in a month or month and a half, and we're gonna be there for three and a half months.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I know a bunch of people that are there that I can't wait to see again.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: And then we're doing like a co-living experience with a bunch of our friends um in Europe in May.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, that's like that community.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: You're kind of constantly going to, you know, a community that you know exists there, but it takes time to build that up.
• 17:01
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• 17:05
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• 17:13
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• 17:27
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• 17:40
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• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now, as you're going to each of these locations, obviously you figured out how it how it works for you in Bulgaria and how it works for you in Mexico, but in general, do you do you find that some countries are really, really well set up to support even the concept of a digital nomad, and other ones it's much more difficult.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Do you see those kind of geographical variations?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, obviously you need to have good infrastructure to work.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you need to have internet.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if the internet isn't good, uh, you're not going to be able to be a digital nomad there for very long.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think um countries that have uh well-developed public transport are better because you you know you don't have a car as a nomad.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: You don't want to be renting cars constantly.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: So um being able to kind of like go get around town easily with public transport or even like visit other cities is really nice.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's why like I think uh Europe historically has attracted so many digital nomads and Southeast Asia for the same reason, but because flights can be so cheap there.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, even though like in some uh Southeast Asian countries, the actual like on-ground public transport isn't that great.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I think those are really key for digital nomads.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: Also, um, you know, Bology had this great quote um uh like a year ago where he said that historically uh opportunity is based on the latitude in which you live, and now a lot of that has shifted to it being the longitude in which you live because the time zone really matters depending on the company that you work for, right?
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: Some companies are asynchronous, and so they're okay with you working in very different time zones, and they have the operations and the systems to make that happen.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, however, uh I foresee a future in which there's companies that say, hey, you can be wherever you want to be, but you need to be within you know these time zones.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so depending on what you do, you may, you know, have to, you know, kind of incorporate that in your decision of where you go.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: So you mentioned about employers.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's delve into that a little bit as well.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I'm guessing that if you're a digital nomad, you obviously have a bunch of these freedoms, but there's probably some restrictions in terms of the organizations that you can work for, right?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: So um if it's one thing if you're an entrepreneur, you're running your own company, um, or if you're a contractor and contracting with multiple companies.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: But do you see a lot of digital nomads that are working for one single employer?
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: And if they are, um what is it about the employer that is okay, is okay with that, if that makes sense?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, great question.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: And again, it's something that is changing very, very quickly.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: So everyone, when I got started as a digital nomad, quote unquote, in 2016, everyone was either a freelancer or had their own business.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um they were like an entrepreneur.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: There were very few people that were actually full-time employees, and they either worked for like these very strange companies that we now view as remote work leaders, like a doist, like a GitLab, right?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: Like these companies, uh, Hopjar in there as well.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, or they were developers that, you know, I think the development, the like web dev or or uh software kind of the like the development world has always been its own category because as a talent, you're so important and you have so much leverage that you can kind of call those shots.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: And then on top of that, usually the people who are managing you understand that really you can do your work wherever.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that has always been a little bit of like a uh um a full time employment position that I've that I've met people doing that even before COVID.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: But now we're seeing a huge increase.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Increase in the number of people that are nomadic with full-time jobs.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's been very interesting.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: That is, it really is, isn't it?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I think obviously there's a couple of things that are kind of wrapped up in that.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: The the first point that you made about devs.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um devs have also historically kind of had unusual working hours, right?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's very it's been very common even before this would happen that you'd have devs who like to work in the evening or into the night or something like that.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: And employers accept that because it's just when when they do their best work.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: So there's an understanding of that there are times when they do their best work that might not map to a normal nine to five.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: So if you've got something that is already set up to support something that doesn't map to the no to the usual nine to five, then the where you're located also becomes kind of kind of less relevant.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that ties back to your to your point about longitude.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose the second thing which is is really interesting is that um with COVID in particular, um you did have a bunch of people who made a decision to move away from the place they were at.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: They moved away from being 50 miles away from their employer or 10 miles away from their employer, and now maybe they're a thousand miles away from their employer, and maybe now they're in a different time zone.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it's almost forcing employers to think about it really seriously.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: I was thinking about, you know, the the recent news about Twitter and and uh Elon saying that everybody's gonna come back to the office.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: I it makes you wonder how how even tenable that even is when the previous policy was you'll be able to work from anywhere forever.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: Some people um who potentially have not have not already made the decision to leave or have not already been let go at Twitter may have to go because they now live 3,000 miles away from their office or wherever it would happen to be.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um so have you seen situations like that where um employers, employees have made decisions based on what the employer policy was during COVID, and now they're in an interesting spot where either the employer is trying to change the policy back or or something along those lines?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I've definitely heard of situations like that.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um I don't I'm trying to think of somebody that I know personally that's been in that sort of situation.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I don't know that I do, but it's definitely happening.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um where people are just kind of saying, like, no, I'm not uh I'm not, you know, going back to the office.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah, I'm gonna, yeah, I don't live here anymore, right?
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: I bought a house in another state or whatever it may be.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so yeah, it's uh it it is it is gonna be interesting because I also I also it's tough for me because I think you know, if you have a private company that you run, you have the ability to run it however you want to run it.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: You have to consider obviously like your employees' wants and what you know, and make sure that you can get the employees that you want to get.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: But at the end of the day, you if you if you have a company and you're the boss and you, you know, you can that's one of the benefits of being a boss, right?
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: Is you can say, I want to run the company this way.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I do think in tech, you're gonna have a very hard time to force these people to come back to the office because they have the leverage, like we talked about.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, tech there's so many devs out there, yet we still have a massive dev shortage.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and so that's why you know you're able to charge such high rates in that field, and and that's why you have so much leverage.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I think the best devs are gonna go to the companies that allow them to do what they want to do.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's my concern with these companies that are forcing people back into the office is I worry that they're going to lose the best talent.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um best talent's gonna go wherever they can have the best lifestyle and get paid, you know, at the best rates.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, totally agree.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: All right, let's go back to your own uh your own journey.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um we talked about the good things and and the not so good things, but I'm guessing you probably made some mistakes along this route as well, things that you know now that you didn't know then in terms of how to make this lifestyle work.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: So so can you think of mistakes that you've made where whereby if people are listening and thinking themselves they'd like to pursue this lifestyle, what would you do differently?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, the biggest mistake I think is a lot of people start out traveling really quickly, right?
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: So they try to like move around every like two weeks or so.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think that is just unsustainable.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's not enough time for you to like set up a routine and be productive, and it's not enough time for you to, you know, if you're working full-time hours, it's not enough time for you to get to know that destination, um, that place as well.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so you kind of can can develop this like level of burnout because you feel like you don't have enough time to get your work done, and you also are like, well, I'm just stuck inside this like you know, co-working space or this place working here, like I might as well just be like stuck at home working.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you you really need to slow down a little bit so that you can have enough time to do it all, so that you can have you know enough time to get out on the weekends and explore or take a long weekend and go visit uh, you know, a nearby city or whatever it may be, and also develop the routines that you need to stay productive and to get work done.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I also think staying longer um is better for the local uh population economy as well.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you stay longer, you're usually not creating these hyperinflations of housing prices that we've seen so much in cities like Mexico City and Lisbon.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if you stay longer, you can also develop friendships with um, you know, locals, which I think, you know, there's this joke about like digital nomads who think that they're helping the local economy, but they are just kind of like traveling around and not really like, you know, incorporate, you know, not really like taking the extra step of getting involved in the local community.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I think staying longer allows you to do that as well.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_02: So that's definitely important.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think trying to think about other things.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_02: I I definitely think that if you're just getting started in this life, I would in this life, in this lifestyle, um, I would recommend uh maybe doing some of these more organized digital nomad trip kind of things.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's a lot of companies out there where you can join and travel with a group, right?
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: Where like every month, it's like Hacker Paradise, for example, where like every month you can go to a different city.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a really great way to hack a community and sort of maybe take that two-year period of building a community down to like a year or something like that.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: I also think hitting those digital nomad hotspot locations like a Chiang Mai, like a Playa del Carmen, like Bali, um, Lisbon, um, Mexico City, going to those places early on in that lifestyle can help you also meet more people and kind of develop that community.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_02: So that then when you go to other places, maybe there's someone there that you met in Chiang Mai.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: But like those cities tend to be kind of like magnets for digital nomads.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so going there, you can kind of hack and shorten the time it takes to build up a community.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um okay, so I you mentioned you kind of touched a little bit on overall overall trends and and kind of how the landscape is changing a little bit.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that there are some macroeconomic things that are going on.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: We've um you mentioned a little bit earlier about the uh the inflation that's happening in Mexico City.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: Also interesting right now, I think, is the number of job uh number of job roles whereby their advertising remote explicitly is an option.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: That appears to be going down as well.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm just curious as to what you're seeing overall, what trends there appear to be, how sustainable you think those trends are, and uh are there things that that I've not seen or that our audience have not seen that would be really interesting?
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I definitely think an i a very interesting trend uh has been this shift out of major cities and towards smaller towns.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and specifically this those smaller towns like being very uh specific and very organized in their attempt to attract remote workers.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there's a really great platform called Make My Move that is actually helping to facilitate that in the United States, where um if you are a small town, you can go and uh you know create a program on Make My Move and essentially advertise, it's a marketplace where you know you can say, Hey, this town in you know West Virginia is offering$8,000 for you to move there.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_02: Here's what you can uh receive, um, which is very interesting.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, I know you know about Tulsa Remote.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they kind of like you know, we're the the poster child for that program.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but it's also happening outside of the United States.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you have Gonzalo Hall, who's been on my podcast several times, who, you know, during COVID, he started uh the Madeira Digital Nomad Project, which is um a project in which they took uh a town on the island of Madeira, which is a Portuguese island in the middle of the Atlantic, and they turned it into a digital nomad village.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and essentially rerouted um a lot of the tourist dollars that were like regular tourism.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_02: They rerouted them through digital nomads and kind of helped keep that um at the economy of that town alive during COVID.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_02: And now that was so successful that he's been hired by governments uh all over the world, including like Brazil, uh he uh to do the same.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the the Digital Nomad Brazil project just uh Digital Nomad Brazil Village project just launched as well.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: So that's very interesting.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, the number of jobs open to remote workers is going down, but we're seeing a majority of of the job applications going to those remote, um, to those remote jobs.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I think I I just think that's gonna bounce back.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: There's no chance.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, the the the statistics all point that it's gonna bounce back.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um there's also something that um, you know, maybe listeners of this aren't familiar of, but aren't familiar with, but there is a very interesting project right now called Plumia.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: Have you heard of this?
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: So Plumia is a project launched by Safety Wing, which is um one of the biggest uh travel health insurance providers.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: They provide health insurance for digital nomads and for remote work companies.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: But um, what they've launched is this project called Plumia, which is attempting to become the first country on the internet.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_02: And the first part of that is they're attempting to launch a nomad border pass, which will hopefully provide um digital nomads with a visa to like let's say 10 countries, and you get and you apply and you get one visa, which then lets you into like 10 different countries for some amount of time in each country, uh, which is a stark contrast to what we've seen with these other digital nomad visas, which are essentially just uh a route to residency and a way for countries to uh attract more taxpaying citizens.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so they've kind of labeled them as digital nomad visas, but 99, if not 100% of those visas are not actually like for digital nomads, they're for expats.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so those are a few of those really interesting things that I'm keeping my eye on.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, that is fascinating.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: The Plumia thing um is so interesting to me because uh it's standing on the shoulders of certain things.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, um Estonia um many years ago now, they were one of the first countries to basically make all aspects of becoming an Estonian citizen electronic so that it was extremely easy for anybody who was um who had not uh got any direct connections with Estonia to pass by the series of checks they needed to in order to become, if you like, a virtual citizen of Estonia.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then of course, if you think about the whole aspect of the European Union to allow kind of freaks, you kind of take that idea of what was going on in Estonia and then what's going on in the European Union, munge those things together, and it almost sounds like you end up with with something like Plumia, where you're getting all the all the benefits associated with that without potentially some of the some of the costs.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: Really, really fascinating.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um the other thing, a couple of the other things that you kind of touched upon there, which I think are fascinating.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: When you say that, you know, this is a this is a thing right now whereby people are pulling away those um the remote work aspect of the job description, but you think it's gonna snap back.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: We totally agree with that.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, when did anybody ever get rich betting against giving people more freedom?
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it just it just generally doesn't happen over time.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you're exactly right.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think employers are kind of they they think that the balance of power has shifted somewhat with some of these layoffs, particularly in tech, etc.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so they're they're kind of testing testing the waters.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: But it's pretty obvious already, based on what you've talked about in terms of the number of applications for the for the ones that are remote, um, that that will be a temporary thing and the long and the long-term trends are are gonna go in uh in the other direction.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um but on that topic of of employers, um what do you what do you think an employer needs to do to create a really, really healthy remote work environment for employees to get that that community of people?
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think what's so fascinating about everything that you've been describing here is you're describing a group of people that are very innovate innovative in terms of how they how they pursue their own life, right?
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: They're demonstrating uh innovative skills just by virtue of the fact they're living this digital nomad lifestyle and making it work.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: They're pretty entrepreneurial in nature, by definition.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: They've got a bunch of transferable talents, these are the people that you want inside forward-looking organizations.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: So what do if if employers are gonna capture these people, they can't capture them by virtue of having, you know, free lunch in the company cafeteria because nobody's gonna visit the company cafeteria.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: So, what can they do to attract and retain those employees and create a really effective remote work culture inside those organizations?
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I think the key word there is autonomy.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: I think the best talent wants autonomy.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: The best talent doesn't want to be told what to do when.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_02: I promise you.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: I will bet my career and name on that.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um what you need to do, I think, as a company is to embrace what's happening and look to the future and say, okay, how do we how do we change the way that we work so that we win in this new reality of work?
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: So I think figuring out how to work asynchronously is really key so that you can allow your employees to work when they feel like they can get the best work done, whether that's at 9 a.m.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_02: or 9 p.m.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, also so that they can work from wherever they want to work from, whether that's in the United States or in Thailand.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and also as a company that figures out async, you have the benefit of then being able to hire from anywhere, right?
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: You no longer have to hire somebody from the United States if someone from you know Romania is actually the best fit for that job.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you you do get that benefit by being async.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_02: I also think being a company that understands that what matters most to this is the value that someone creates, not how long they work is really key as well.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because that's all that matters.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_02: How much value do you create?
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: And if you can do it in less time, I don't really care.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like, good for you.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: You figured something out, you know, enjoy the time off that you have now.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_02: You're being rewarded for the fact that you're more efficient.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: I really like what Liam Martin from Time Doctor has to say about this, which is that um if you can figure out a way to get something done quicker than you know what we like think is gonna take you, then that's great.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: But you have then the responsibility to teach everyone else so they can benefit from that as well.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I think those are some of those things.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_02: I really think autonomy is gonna be the word uh for like the rest of the century in terms of the future of work.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, because we're even seeing this, you're talking about trends.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there was a really great paper in 1934, if I'm not mistaken.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_02: I might be wrong about that, called the Nature of the Firm.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: It was uh written by a um Nobel Prize-winning economist by the name of Ronald Coase.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_02: And what he talks about in this paper is how um a company wants to be as small as possible, but grows when the cost of doing work with outside talent becomes too great to essentially like uh to facilitate that.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: So uh if you work with a lot of outside talent, it can have a lot of transactional cost, and because of that, it's actually cheaper for a company to hire that outside talent, even though a company wants to stay as small as possible.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_02: What's happened with the internet and technology and the and now the number of companies that are comfortable with remote work is that it's become really, really cheap and really, really easy to work with freelancers and contractors.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_02: So I think what we're gonna see over the next 50 years is this contraction of the size of companies where you're gonna have a core team that is needed to work there along with like some automation to kind of keep the company going 80% of the time.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then some amount of time, hey, we're gonna need this expert to come in here and develop a project or something like that.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_02: And you're gonna hire that person out, comes in, works for six, eight, uh, you know, 12 months, and then goes on to the next project.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_02: So um I really think you know, autonomy and this like fractionalization of careers and uh this like shrinking of the company is gonna be the really interesting thing going forward.
• 42:30
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• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: So exponential organizations are are interesting.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: They use a bunch of the of the concepts that you're that you're talking about, but at the heart of it is the idea that um there's a lot of these more modern companies are tapping into uh to abundances, if you like, that didn't really exist before, right?
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so there is the abundance of um, for example, if you were to look at uh the a traditional taxi firm as an example, right?
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's you're restricted by the number of taxis that are there, right?
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: But if you flip the script on that and you think of yourself as Uber, for example, then there is an almost infinite amount of Of car hours that are out there that can be tapped into.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so you're tapping into that abundance in order to allow you to grow more quickly.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you're taking uh and you're taking things that were restricted by the number of taxi drivers, for example, and getting rid of that at the same at the same time.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so they have this theory that there is like this abundance of human ingenuity that you can tap into if you are not um like restricted to the 20-mile radius or the 50-mile radius or whatever it happens to be.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: And we fully agree with that.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, we formed our uh formed our own company based on those principles as well.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a really interesting problem that has to be solved, though, before this is um the absolute de facto norm.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that is that particularly if you go through um organizations in order to be able to reach these resources, then it's super easy, for example, to get a set of sales resources and outsource that.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's super easy to get a bunch of developers and outsource that.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but what you have to do, what you really have to do is you have to make sure that the trust is there between you and those people that you don't have any measure of control over, and that the incentives are aligned as well.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, in other words, if you're working through an organization, uh your incentives more aligned, uh are fully aligned with their incentives.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: And what we see right now, which is really interesting, is that in many cases, the incentive of the organization is to pre-sell you on a$20,000 gig or something along those lines, right?
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: And once they've done that, they've met their, they've met their goal, which is to collect your money, and then they don't actually need a renewal from you.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: They can go get the next one and the next one and the next one.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's like, how do you create that continuing enduring relationship based on trust when you don't have the traditional employer-employee mechanism to do that?
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: Because why do employees stick with employers?
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: They stick with employees, uh, with employers oftentimes because the cost of switching is high for them, because um they have some loyalty that they've that they feel to uh to uh to the employer, and hopefully that is reciprocated in some way in terms of the rewards that they're getting.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: If all of that becomes much more transactional, the question then becomes how do you create that set of aligned incentives to make sure that as a business, you're getting the results that you need from the employee when you don't have those sort of more traditional long-term relationship things in place.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I think that will get fixed.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think it I think we're probably not that far away from it being fixed.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you need to be able to do that so that the trust is inherently there.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: And once the trust is inherently there and the assumption is that people will do great work, but most of the time that they do, right?
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: And if you do that, then in balance, that is a much better situation for both the employer and the employee for all of the principles uh principles that you're talking about that are laid out in that uh in that paper.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I I read that paper too, actually.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I firmly recog strongly recommend that people do read it.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's fascinating.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of those things where it's like you almost wording aside, where you almost feel like it's it's like it could have been unlocked from a time machine or something like that.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's very forward-looking, isn't it?
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's I'm trying to remember that other book that like uh gosh, what was uh the the book that's been like really big in the crypto space is just completely I'm I'm blanking on the name right now, but that's one of those ones where they describe cryptocurrency in like 1997, and you're like you're not working using the word cryptocurrency, but it's basically exactly what you're talking about.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_02: But it's it's an interesting um transition because you're talking about trust in how do you trust that they're gonna get their job done?
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_02: How do you you know establish that?
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I actually think the future of work in many of these scenarios is actually going to be based on the blockchain.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_02: So at the moment, I know of two projects that are developing the marriage between an upwork and an asana, if you might, where the idea is that a company can go on this platform, create the you know, project, and kind of like uh split up the project into separate tasks and then put those tasks out on the open market and allow bids for who is gonna get that that those you know, the the opportunity to work on those tasks.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_02: And the way that you select those people that work with you is really exciting because it's not, you know, uh Joe from wherever, it's user number, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so you actually might be hiring somebody uh from Namibia, you might be hiring somebody from Thailand, you might be hiring somebody from England.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_02: And it doesn't matter because you don't know.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_02: They charge what their work is worth, um, not uh based on some sort of like conception of like, you know, how much you should pay someone from wherever.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that to me is really exciting because um that is true equality and opportunity.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the really exciting thing about remote work is that it decentralizes opportunity.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I often think about how my parents moved to the United States from Bulgaria, and one of the reasons why they did that was to look for more opportunity.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, now today they could have been, they could have had the option of staying in Bulgaria and working for an American company, right?
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I think that we're more and more head in that direction.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_02: I'm very excited to see what this new age of remote work tools uh that do use the blockchain as a build like a uh to build on top of.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think it's gonna be very exciting.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely fascinating.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you uh for for sharing that.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: All right, let's uh let's finish off then with the question about you.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you've been doing this, this is what you do.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: You are, you're living the life.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but what's next on this journey for you?
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so it's an interesting question.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, uh the podcast is one of my main things.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's called That Remote Life.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's one of the top podcasts in remote work.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um so that's something that I'm very focused on, and just trying to grow it and and you know, um reach as many people as possible and to really uh explore more of these concepts that we discussed today.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um so that's something that I'm very focused on.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_02: And then also um I'm very interested in uh I used to be the head of operations for a digital agency before COVID.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh I had the opportunity to kind of figure out how do we run this company remotely?
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_02: How do we actually do this when we have 15 employees across 11 different time zones?
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_02: And post-COVID, you know, obviously there's been a lot of articles about uh what is this new position that's being formed that kind of looks at operations from the remote first point of view.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Chase Warrington just had a really great article called uh Do You Need a Chief Remote Officer that I recommend people check out.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's something that I'm focused on as well, where I've started offering kind of like fractional ahead of remote services for companies that uh maybe don't, you know, they don't need to hire somebody full-time to do that, but they would like someone to come in and take a look at their operations from that point of view.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so those are the two things that I'm uh at the moment most focused on.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I know you're gonna have a really interesting guest on your uh on your podcast pretty soon, aka me.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that's right.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, you're coming to the podcast very soon.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_01: So that'll give us the opportunity to talk about a bunch of these things uh in more detail.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Mikko.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: I really, really appreciate it, and I know our audience will too.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks again.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: The Way Too Busy podcast was presented and produced by me, Matt Neal, and was brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to get in touch with us, tweet us at Rising Billion or email us at WayTooBusy at BillionMinds.com.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds, creating practical tools for our way too busy lives.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you're enjoying the Way Too Busy podcast, please consider leaving us a rating and review on iTunes so that others can find us as well.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.