How to Work Remotely with Badass Digital Nomad Kristin Wilson

Kristin:    00:00:07    Hello everyone and welcome to the first episode of Badass Digital Nomads to be published as a podcast.  

Kristin:    00:00:20    Thank you so much for being here. My name is Kristin Wilson. I am a long-term digital nomad, expat world traveler and what have you, and I'm also your host for this show. I'll tell you guys a little bit more about me later, but first, I wanted to share what Badass Digital Nomads is all about and who it's for. So, you know, if you should keep listening or go do something else, <laugh>. So I'll outline the type of guests that we have and why and how it can help you in your life. Um, I hope that this content is life-changing for you in a positive way. This podcast is a bit different because we've actually already filmed or published about 15 episodes, and I say filmed instead of recorded because this podcast actually originated as a YouTube show and it still is a YouTube show. So you can actually join me live every week at 12:00 PM Eastern over on youtube.com/digitalnomad.  

Kristin:    00:01:29    And you can ask my guests and I questions in real time so you can listen live or you can also catch the replay later on YouTube or you can listen later here, wherever you get your podcasts. So it's kind of a fun format just doing something different because this show is all about the people who watch and listen to it. And I've actually had some of my guests, um, as listeners and vice versa. So I really just want to encourage live participation and engagement because the purpose of the show is to help people transition from a conventional life to a location independent remote lifestyle. So the content, the guests, everything is really driven by the the viewers and the listeners. So you can actually submit a request for a future guest that you think would be a good fit for the show, and you can submit that through the link in the show notes or also in the YouTube description.  

Kristin:    00:02:38    So it's a live video podcast that you can listen to in a different way every week depending on what's going on in your schedule. If you wanna be there live, watch the replay or just listen as an audio podcast. So what is it <laugh>? Badass Digital Nomads is is my weekly show featuring, I like to call them movers and shakers in the remote work industry. So the purpose is to again, help you transition away from a job that's no longer serving you and provide examples of what you can do instead, whether that means working in a remote capacity as a full-time employee or working for yourself or freelancing or starting an online business or really anything. So the guests that we have on this show are from very diverse backgrounds, from all over the world, different industries, different age groups, because I think that digital nomads are a reflection of the global population.  

Kristin:    00:03:44    And I always say that there are as many paths to achieving location independence as there are people in the world because we're living in a time that is truly unprecedented, where we can work and live from anywhere in the world with just a cell phone or a laptop and an internet connection. So everybody has a different path to how they can get to this point of being a remote worker, but there are some structures and concepts and frameworks that can definitely speed things up. And I know that I personally have always learned really well through practice and examples. So I like to see an example of someone doing something, take what serves me, um, use a certain amount of inspiration from what they're doing and then make it my own and just take those pieces and integrate them as I see fit into my own life.  

Kristin:    00:04:51    So I did not have the benefit of having a role model in my own path to location independence, which started some time ago, back in 2002, 2003. And so I feel like after so many years, something like 15 years in more than 60 countries and starting multiple businesses, I have a lot of insights and shortcuts and examples to help people achieve a life of freedom faster without having to spend like 10 years figuring it out. So that's why we're here. So really like why digital nomads? It's such a buzz word right now. So why digital nomads? Why now? Why is this something that is trending? And you know, we can talk about the stereotypes of digital nomads later, but I'm just going to use the word or the term digital nomad to encompass all the different types of people who are leveraging technology in their lives and in their careers to get out of a office and get out of a nine to five. So this could be digital nomad location, independent remote worker, online entrepreneur, perpetual traveler. There's a lot of different ways to describe ourselves and I just did a poll in one of my, uh, Facebook groups the other day, and everybody seems to want to be known as location independent, but the pop culture, uh, recognition of this right now is digital nomads. So we're just gonna go with that.  

Kristin:    00:06:34    So why now? Why, why should we have a podcast about digital nomads and why should we be talking about remote work? So growing up, I always had a really hard time figuring out what I wanted to do. This was like a major source of anxiety for me, which I'll talk about a little bit later in my personal story. But, um, it's something that is not talked about enough in my opinion. I don't think that in the traditional school system, kids are prepared to make the decision to choose a major or choose what job or what career that they want to have for the rest of their lives, which obviously things have changed now and we aren't having one job for the rest of our lives. We're having many, many jobs in different capacities and different ways of earning revenue, and it's just really, it's like a sink or swim.  

Kristin:    00:07:33    Every man for himself, every woman for herself type of situation right now, because we are all a product of an antiquated industrial education system that is preparing us to go into the workforce as if we were cogs in a wheel, you know, numbers, employee numbers at a company, and that just doesn't work anymore. So I think that I grew up during that time, I was born in that period, like I think it's between 1978 and 1982, where we got to experience what it was like in the old way and what it was like in the new way. So growing up, we went from rotary phones to iPhones, we went from typewriters to MacBook Pros, like we kind of saw that evolution in a very short period of time during our childhood and our youth. So when we got to the workplace, we were kind of the first generations to be like, Hey, this isn't working anymore.  

Kristin:    00:08:37    What worked for our parents doesn't work for us anymore. So some statistics for you. We spend something like 90,000 hours or one third of our lives at work. And for the average person in the the US that's an average of, uh, a thousand. I think it's over 1,800 hours per year spent working. And there are a billion full-time workers on the planet, and a large portion of them are dissatisfied with their jobs in some way. You could say everybody <laugh>, whether it's your boss, your open office floor plan, or your job itself. There's a lot of conflicting statistics out there, but I've seen numbers of up to like 85% of people hate their jobs or hate their boss or whatever. And then there's also these other studies that kind of spring off from that number studies that say that people only work two to four hours per day at their jobs, or that only 15% of people are actually engaged at work.  

Kristin:    00:09:54    Everyone else is distracted. And of course, the more hours you work somehow the worse it gets. So in workaholic countries like Japan and the US the numbers are actually the worst. So this to me just doesn't make sense. We're spending all of our time at work and while we're at work, we're not engaged and we're not happy. So what's the problem? And I think it's that we're still stuck in that industrial model and the mad men age of management practices and company culture. And of course we've made some marginal gains. You know, women can, can be CEOs of companies and in a couple hundred years we'll achieve <laugh> parody and our paychecks. Well more on that later. I think we can speed it up with remote work, but basically it's not enough. We can't keep repeating the past and the system is still, has not changed enough to accommodate for the position that we find ourselves in today as human beings on this planet at this point in time in 2019. And technology is just increasing at an exponential rate. So it's only going to keep getting worse. So what is the answer? What is the answer to, you know, stop hating your job, stop commuting, stop wasting so much time because nobody has enough time either. And I think that the answer to all of this, which is going to happen whether people want it or not, is a huge global shift to remote work.  

Kristin:    00:11:45    I research this a lot, uh, on a day-to-day basis. I've written a book about this. I write on medium Quora, I publish videos almost every day on this topic. And what I found when I first started researching this absolutely shocked me. And it was that the technology to telecommute to work had already been around for 50 years. 50 years. I'm 36. So before I was born, people could already telecommute to work and work remotely. But now 50 years later, companies are finally, finally starting to come around to the concept of remote work, but it's just not happening fast enough. And in the meantime, people hate their jobs. They, um, are stressed out, they're overweight, they're unhealthy, they're wasting hours and hours. I think it's about one day per week that they waste commuting. And then that commute has a direct impact on their mood when they get to the office on their mental health, on their energy levels.  

Kristin:    00:12:58    I mean, people don't wanna spend another day doing this. People don't want to wait for permission to be able to work remotely. They want to do it today. I think it's absurd that we go our whole lives in school and then as soon as we finish school, we just go directly into the workforce without ever having a sense of true freedom and true autonomy. So on the flip side of those statistics, there are others, 84% of people want to work from home. 90% of people who have already started working from home or working remotely say they never want to go back to an office environment. I, and I just, I don't think that's a coincidence. Working from home or working remotely provides a lot of freedom and flexibility and it solves a lot of problems. It doesn't solve every problem, but it solves a lot of them.  

Kristin:    00:14:03    I wrote an article this year about the just draw jaw dropping amount of time that you can save by working from home. According to my calculations, it's anywhere from 1,750 hours per year to 2,650 hours per year, which is as much time as you spend working <laugh>, it's 20 to 30% of your overall time. So one of my fellow digital nomad and startup founder comrades, his name is Peter Levels, he's calculated that there could be 1 billion digital nomads in the next 10 to 15 years. So if there are a billion full-time workers now and there can be 1 billion remote workers in the next 15 years, then that is an equivalent shift in the workforce population. And it's not, we're not the only ones who are figuring this out of course, but I think that more people need to bring their voices into this discussion to, um, to give people more options and more permission and more paths to see how they can take action now without having to wait until their company decides like, okay, yeah, you can live life the way you want. You can work from home. You don't need to ask permission to go to lunch or to go to the bathroom or to take a vacation. You can work different hours. You don't have to work eight to five or eight to eight or nine to nine or whatever.  

Kristin:    00:15:58    But the companies know it's just that, like I studied international business, I went to business school, I understand that it's hard for companies to change. They're slow to adapt to their environments and corporate culture. It's like the path of least resistance. So even though the HR departments themselves, HR managers say that remote work will have a bigger impact on how people live and work than artificial intelligence, they still don't know what to do because these are the same HR departments that have been in place learning the same thing from antiquated educational systems for decades. And so I've never had a traditional conventional job. I've been working for myself online in different countries since 2005 and studying abroad and living abroad since 2002.  

Kristin:    00:17:00    I know what the <laugh>, what the benefits are to working from home because I've done it for over a decade and through my company and my consulting clients, I've helped over a thousand of them do the same. And the most common reaction I hear is I should have done it sooner. And so that's when I started thinking about how I can help more people do this and spread the word faster. And that's why I started this podcast in two YouTube channels traveling with Kristin and Digital Nomad tv. So yeah, the future of work is happening now. It's happening now and there is no roadmap because as I mentioned, HR departments and HR professionals know that remote work is having a huge impact. Companies are starting to wake up to this, but they don't know what to do. They don't have flexible work policies in place. They don't know how to tell their employers or their employees how to thrive in this environment.  

Kristin:    00:18:12    They don't have a training in place for training remote employees and they've, they're distracted with other things. And I just think that this global shift from the traditional nine to five structure to remote work is one of the most underestimated and underrated things to happen in human history. And it's just going to have such a massive impact on our world now, not even just in 10 years or five years, but like now, this is happening now. And so we're really far behind. We're 50 years behind on the remote work movement. And so my mission as an online entrepreneur and someone who has lived and worked in 60 different countries over the past 15 years is to help people and also companies to make a mindset shift and transition quickly to this new way of living and working. There's no need to keep dragging our feet.  

Kristin:    00:19:21    So one of the ways I'm trying to do that is by creating pretty much daily content about everything related to remote work and how you can use it to change your lifestyle. So topics like just how people can become digital nomads, how people can find remote jobs or create their own job. How to succeed as a freelancer in the remote economy. How to thrive in any position of the remote economy, whether you are a remote worker, um, a small business owner, an online business owner, or another type of employer. So on both sides of the coin, there's not much guidance out there, whether you are the employer or the employee. So everybody needs examples of how this is playing out in real time. So what are the, what are the companies and the brands and the services that are really redefining work and giving solutions to remote workers?  

Kristin:    00:20:31    So what are the, the companies that are hiring remote who starting co-working and co-living models, who's creating services and tools and gear for people to travel and work remotely for people to be more productive. Um, what are the software solutions for fully distributed companies that have employees all around the world? And what do individuals need to know if they want to start this process of going remote? How do they, you know, how do things work in day-to-day life? How can they start their own companies? How can they advance in their careers? How can they communicate well on remote teams? I mean, there's just infinite questions and the school system can't help us. Employers can't really help us. We can only help ourselves. This is a bottom up shift. This is like a revolution. So in order to help with this, I have interviews and stories with real people from all different countries, as I mentioned in all different age groups from like teenagers, like 18, 19 years old, um, to people who have already retired and they just wanted to start a new chapter of their lives. So it's how people changed pace, changed path, got out of the rat race and got into this more natural sustainable location, independent way of living.  

Kristin:    00:22:16    And I think that the number one thing holding people back from working remotely is just enough examples of other people who have done it. Because fear is part of it too. Fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of quitting your job, fear of changing careers, but it's also being able to model your life after other trailblazers in your industry. So it really doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what your background is, what your industry is, what your job title is, everybody can, everybody who's interested in working remotely can do it. I think everybody already has enough skills that they can monetize those and work from home in some way. Whether you just wanna work from home and your bunny slippers or you wanna travel around the world like jet setting and like working from an island somewhere, like it's all possible. <laugh>  

Kristin:    00:23:26    I always show in my presentations, I always show this photo of, um, of me like an Instagram post sort of, but from 2007 before Instagram and I'm like sitting with my laptop under a PPA in Nicaragua and um, you know, some <laugh>, some people want that, even if it's not the best work environment to work on a beach with your laptop. But it's not just about the perfect Instagram post or going to Bali or going to Chiang Mai or going to these digital nomad hotspots to hang out with other digital nomads. It's about having more time for yourself, having more time for your family, having more time to sleep, just having a more natural work life balance where you don't have to take a bunch of hours out of your day spending it with people that you don't like doing work that you don't care about and sitting in traffic or sitting on the metro or whatever.  

Kristin:    00:24:29    So as I mentioned, the world's unprepared for this shift and I just wanna help people know what to do and what their options are because the educational system, the government companies, like nobody's adequately prepared and nobody's out there telling people what they can do and what they should do and how they can take advantage of this amazing unprecedented time in history. So we're all the beta testers, right? All of us, we're still the early adopters, but I'm here to provide some context, some perspective and some answers to the questions that almost a billion people are going to have <laugh> in the upcoming years if they don't have it already. And to help people take advantage of this power structure that's kind of flipping around from the employers to the employees so that you guys know what you can ask for, you have more room at the negotiating table, or you can just leave, you can leave those companies and you can work for yourself and you don't need them.  

Kristin:    00:25:39    So a little bit about me. Um, I'm from Florida originally. I grew up with a very all American lifestyle, um, like very, I guess like southern white picket fence sort of lifestyle, Friday night lights sort of lifestyle. Um, parents were still married, are still married. We would like go to church on Sundays. Um, I went to like bible study and uh, field trips and summer camp and was the cheerleading captain and all of that stuff. Like I did everything very like American pie style I guess you could say without all the crazy, not, not that much, not that crazy. But yeah, just grew up in Florida and a nice middle class life and things were good. But one of the, the stressors and anxieties that I always had growing up was figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. And I never felt like I really wanted any of the jobs that I saw on the, on the like list of jobs, you know, like firefighter, um, park ranger, doctor, lawyer.  

Kristin:    00:27:01    And so this was always in the back of my mind and it got worse when I got to middle school and high school, um, because like my little brother knew that he wanted to be a photographer and my sister knew that she wanted to be a lawyer and I felt like all of my friends knew what they wanted to do. And I was taking these, those career inventory tests in school with like a personality test and like a career matcher. And mine would literally come back with an error, like it was like two. Um, like I had two diverse interests. I was like a jack of all trades, master of none. And so I just never really felt like even though I fit in in school and with my friend group and you know, in society, like I never felt like really an outsider, but I also never felt like I knew what I wanted to do in my career.  

Kristin:    00:28:00    And so this has kind of been like a topic that has plagued me my whole life and makes a lot of sense in hindsight now that I'm doing what I'm doing. But the one thing that I knew that I liked to do was travel. I knew that from the time I was in elementary school going on field trips. And I think part of it is genetic because my grandparents worked for Pan Am back in like the golden years of flying. My grandfather, both of my grandfathers were pilots. My dad had a pilot's license as well. Um, the first time I actually left the country. So every summer my parents would take us on like, uh, a Griswold family vacation <laugh>. So I wouldn't say that that necessarily sparked my love of travel, but the first time I left the country for when I graduated from high school for my senior class trip to Mexico back in the year 2000.  

Kristin:    00:28:58    And then also I went to Italy that summer with my mom. It was like my eyes were opened and I just never looked back. So I also, even though I al always liked school, I was always a straight A student. I was also an athlete and I wanted to be a pro surfer. So in college, trying to navigate school with travel with not having any money. So I've managed to travel ever since I was 17, even when I didn't have a job or I would save all my money from like lifeguarding or working at a surf shop to go travel. Um, but I was just trying to balance that and I found myself in like the stereotype. You know, there's a surfer stereotype of like a surfer bomb. So I was like a surfer bomb <laugh> who also made straight A's and loved school. So I was doing well at school, but my dream was to be a pro surfer.  

Kristin:    00:30:08    Um, so I would study abroad. I studied abroad in Costa Rica and Australia to places where there's really good waves and I could still go to school. And then when I graduated college, even though I had enough credits for two college degrees, like two separate diplomas, I had only one major international business and no minors because I didn't know I changed my major so many times that I ended up with enough college credits for two college degrees and only one major. So I still, upon graduating, didn't know what I wanted to do, didn't know where I wanted to work, and so I did the only thing I knew, which was to go back to school. So I entered an MBA program, an accelerated MBA, still surfing was like my best year surfing. I won the East coast championships and the national championships in the same year and was like, okay, I'm just gonna get my MBA and then I'll go be a surfer and then maybe I'll work for a surf company.  

Kristin:    00:31:22    But I burnt out at 21 and I couldn't surf anymore. Like they took away my driver's license, I couldn't drive, I couldn't swim, I couldn't surf because I had a seizure in an airport and was diagnosed with epilepsy. And so like my whole life just kind of crumbled because if you can't swim or surf you can't become a pro surfer. So that forced me to kind of change gears and like reflect on on what I was doing. Like what is the point of life if you're burning out already at 21 from lack of sleep, lack of food, too much caffeine, too much sugar-free Red Bull. I don't know. It was a combination of things. But then I noticed that the next semester, even though I was riding my bike to school, I was sleeping more, I was taking better care of myself and I did better in school, I got better grades.  

Kristin:    00:32:27    I ended up graduating like the top of my MBA class. So I was like, wait a second, I worked less, I stressed out less and I did better. So this made me think, did I really want to then go directly into a corporate job where everyone talks about burning out and having a midlife crisis? And you know, that was a scary thought and I was like, I already have a propensity to do that and legitimately have a quarter life crisis or before even a quarter life crisis. So should I take a cubicle job in Orlando and just start working a bunch of hours per week? And like in this office and even the interviews I went on and I was already depressed, like going into the offices, these corporate offices for interviews, I was like, how am I gonna do this every day? And so I decided to go back to Costa Rica and take a job for a thousand dollars a month working in real estate.  

Kristin:    00:33:38    And it was there that I learned the value of the side hustle. So in the first year, I ended up making six figures. I worked, I started as a surf instructor, a real estate agent, a bartender and a waiter or a waitress at a, um, bar and grill. So I had like four, what else did I do? I had like five jobs, but I actually made probably three times more money than my entry level salary would have been if I had taken a corporate job, an entry level job. So I worked well that first year. I probably worked the same amount of hours, but I definitely spent less money. I had a better quality of life, I made more money and I got to pay less taxes because I was out of the country for so long.  

Kristin:    00:34:38    So what was supposed to be a one year kind of gap year turned into two years and then more, of course now from 2005 to 2019. But I think the turning point came in 2007 where the four hour work week came out and I was visiting my sister on the UCF campus in Orlando and we were at Barnes and Noble because she was studying and I was just, you know, walking around 'cause I could take time off whenever I wanted because I worked in real estate in another country and like it didn't matter if I took a week off or two months off, I could do whatever I wanted. So I was back visiting her and while she was studying for her exams, I was browsing through Barnes and Noble and I came across the four hour work week and I was like, I don't know how I saw it.  

Kristin:    00:35:40    It was, I remember seeing it, this is so weird, it was near the bathroom, like I was going to the bathroom and I saw the cover in the back corner of a UCF campus, Barnes and Noble. And I picked it up and I think I stood there reading it for like an hour and didn't go to the bathroom and <laugh> at the time. I, I was just shocked. I couldn't believe that there were other people kind of living a similar lifestyle that I was. And I just instantly wanted to marry Tim Ferriss <laugh>. I was like 23 or 24, 23, yeah, I was 23. I was like, this guy is my soulmate, I need to meet him. But of course it turned out that he wasn't the only one. And then many millions of people were also interested in this concept of lifestyle design and working less and having more freedom.  

Kristin:    00:36:33    So of course I kept that book with me, but it wasn't until I started my own online business in 2011 that I really experienced true freedom because in real estate in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and Panama, I still had to physically be there to sell properties. So in 2011, I saw an opportunity in the market and I started a company called Poker Refugees that was to help online poker players who were affected by regulation in their country to move to different countries so that they could continue to play online poker or bet on sports or anything in online gambling. So that's another story, but I've done that for eight years now. Um, but uh, yeah, once, once my business got off the ground, I realized why do I have to stay in Costa Rica? I can live anywhere. So I started traveling even more and in 2013, 1 of my clients told me like, Hey, you're one of those digital nomads.  

Kristin:    00:37:46    And I was like, what? What's a digital nomad? So I started researching it and realized that I was a digital nomad and these people were my tribe, they were my community and I wanted to help everyone become a digital nomad <laugh>. So before it was starting poker refugees because I wanted to help more people live in foreign countries because I thought this, this was such a transformative life experience for me that it would be for them. And many of them are still living abroad to this day coming from like their parents' basement in Kansas. I don't know if they even have basements in Kansas, but you know, coming from like never having had a passport before to living in Costa Rica or living in South Korea or all of these other places, Malta. And that was really fun. So selfishly I wanted more young people to come to the country that I was living in so I could hang out with, with more people, with more expats.  

Kristin:    00:38:49    And a lot of the expats at that time were either retired or, uh, company executives, but now you can be any age. So here we are. And so how do I help people? So I have two YouTube channels. I have one called Traveling with Kristin, which is as I like to say, behind the scenes in the digital nomad lifestyle. So it's more travel related, travel vlogs, travel videos, destination videos. It's kind of like Anthony Bourdain meets Wild on E-meets. Um, the Travel Channel meets Rick Steves, I dunno, some combination of that. And then I also have Digital Nomad TV, which is youtube.com/digitalnomad and that is more focused on how to become a digital nomad, how to achieve location independence, how to work remotely. And again, as I mentioned just people, products, services and companies that are really leading the way in this remote work revolution.  

Kristin:    00:40:01    I also wrote a book, it's called Digital Nomad 101, the Ultimate Guide to Achieving Long-Term Location Independence. And you can pre-order that at the link in the show notes. I also have a Facebook group called Long-Term Digital Nomad Success. I speak and do workshops on how to achieve this lifestyle but also sustain it and thrive in it so that you're not burning out like buying a one-way ticket to Thailand and then coming back six months later, like there's a better ways to do it. I also have a new course, it's a program called the Digital Nomad Challenge. So the main thing that people need help with when they want to become a digital, no matter when they find out that they have the opportunity to work remotely is how to start or where to start. What do they need to know, what do they need to do to kind of exit one paradigm and enter this other infinite <laugh> paradigm that we have?  

Kristin:    00:41:10    So the Digital Nomad Challenge is a 30 day challenge of one exercise per day to help you start getting momentum and getting into the habit of thinking about what you can do and just make a ton of progress on becoming location independent. So instead of thinking about it for a few years and reading online and Reddit and Twitter and Facebook posts and things like that and watching videos, which you can also do, this is like a more structured way to make to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time. So you can connect with me there to get resources for working remotely. And also I am Traveling with Kristin, K-R-I-S-T-I-N on all of the social media platforms, most of them, and also on Medium at Kristin M Wilson. I love to write, so I love to talk and I love to write and I love to make videos so you can find me there and these days, why not?  

Kristin:    00:42:16    You can do, if you can, you should. Right? So what about this show? Um, as I mentioned, there are already 15 episodes that have either been filmed or published. I think there's, we've published 14 so far, and the next one is coming next week. So what are the types of episodes that you can watch now or you can listen to later? So the ones that are already available on YouTube and that will be available here as podcasts once per week. We're, we're starting with I think three or four episodes and then one per week after that and we'll catch up eventually. So the first episode was with Medium blogger Tom Kugler, who grew his following online from zero to over a hundred thousand people I think in just a couple years. Um, he's now also vlogging on YouTube. He has a, a big following on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Facebook and on Medium.  

Kristin:    00:43:24    And so we talked with him about how to make money as a blogger, how to grow an online audience and how his personal experience has been, as he likes to say, he's unemployable. So how did he go from unemployed to writer to influencer? So in each episode we're looking at the person and their personal journey and then also their professional journey and what they've been able to accomplish in their area of expertise because that really encompasses what everyone's experiencing right now. Your career is tied with your, um, set of skills, your experience and your personal brand, and people are really using their personal brand to create online businesses, make money online, but then there's also ways to do it completely disconnected. So we wanna talk to everybody about how they've been able to achieve location independence no matter what they're doing, whether they just have a storefront with, with products that are being drop shipped or whether they're using their identity as as part of an online business model.  

Kristin:    00:44:43    So Tom's living in the Philippines right now, we have him as our first guest and then it just gets really, I mean we cover everything. Uh, episode two is with TEDx speaker, author, comedian and self-made corporate humor engineer  Drew Tarvin. He's hilarious. And yeah, he has a book out now on humor in the workplace and his TED Talks have been viewed like millions of times, so definitely wanna see that one or listen to it. Episode three, we have a stay at home mom who became a YouTuber and an online entrepreneur. She lives in Germany and her name is Freya Casey. In episode four we have a young British travel filmmaker, also self-made named Anthony Knowles, who went through a lot of hardships, including his brother passing away and had to kind of build himself back up and went from like living at his parents' house with no money to now being the filmmaker for one of the biggest travel bloggers in the world. 

Kristin:    00:45:55    And he's, um, usually based between the UK and Chiang Mai. And then episode five we had a Facebook ads and funnels expert and also a content creator from Scotland named Gavin Bell. He's been on shows like Entrepreneur on Fire and he's just so smart and so resourceful. He went from working at a call center to having a very successful online business and so he tells us how he did that. In episode six, we have the founder of CoLife.io, which is a co-living company. His name is Vlad Glebov and he's partly from the US and partly from Russia. And we talk about what it's like to be a citizen of the world and his perspective on, on asking people where they're from. You know, how we can shift from a border and country-based mentality to a very collective integrated mentality to remember that we are all citizens of one planet and we talk about how game theory and different things have governments, wars and the industrial revolution has and advancements in technology have changed our perspective.  

Kristin:    00:47:18    And now how we're reverting back to our roots as being nomadic and being part of like one common tribe or one community. And in this case it's global. On episode seven, I had Pale Bo. He is the radio vagabond and he has his own podcast called The Radio Vagabond. And I interviewed him on the beach in Brazil about how to become a digital nomad in your fifties. Episode eight was also filmed in Brazil with real estate entrepreneur, investor and podcast host of the Maverick Show, Matthew Bowles. He started his digital nomad journey after getting fired from his job in social work and he went straight to Barnes and Noble, started reading books, picked up the four hour work week and the rest is history. Now he has his own remote real estate investment firm that's fully distributed and their products are four digital nomads. So four people who want to make passive income from real estate investments so that they have more financial freedom.  

Kristin:    00:48:29    And that is a really great episode. Then on episode nine we have IRS enrolled agent and accountant Grace Taylor from Canada. She's based in Dublin and we talk about US taxes for digital nomads. She gave a great talk at the Nomad Summit last summer on how you can legally pay zero tax or legal loopholes for digital nomads. And so I had her on the show. And then episode 10 is with Christine McDannell. She's a serial entrepreneur and a startup founder and the founder of kndrd.io Co-Living management, uh, co-living management software that she's currently developing in the Amsterdam Techstars Accelerator. Christine is also an author. Um, she's written a book called The Co-Living Code. She also has her own show on YouTube and she has founded and sold eight businesses in 15 years. So we talked to her in episode 10. And then episode 11 is with Johnny FD Johnny Jen.  

Kristin:    00:49:42    He's the founder of the Nomad Summit Conference that happens twice a year, either in Vegas or this year in Cancun, Mexico and also in Chiang Mai. He is also a serial entrepreneur, a blogger, um, an influencer and the host of Travel, like a Boss podcast and also Invest like a Boss podcast. He also has courses on Udemy. He's very experienced with drop drop shipping and Amazon FBA and he's just a wealth of information for anyone who's interested in working remotely. And then we had Jari Roomer, he is a self-made personal finance expert writer and the founder of the Personal Growth Lab. He specializes in helping people overcome procrastination and he shares his own story of how he hated his nine to five job, left, it went broke, and then lost all of his savings, gambling, and then finally started his own online business, got his life back on track and now has been a successful entrepreneur for four years and he's based in the Netherlands.  

Kristin:    00:50:55    And then recently we had Kanika Tolver, who is a also one of the 85% who hated her job <laugh>, um, and quit and decided that she would only work remotely for the rest of her life. She's an IT consultant, a speaker and a career coach, and she's at the author of the upcoming book Career Rehab. And then the most recent episodes we've had are an interview with, uh, two of the guys from Nomad Hub, which is the first co-living space in Argentina. And then an episode with the founders of Common Grounds, which is a really innovative co-working membership platform, an app in Sweden and the Netherlands, and they're expanding worldwide. So I had the founders of Common Grounds, um, on site in Amsterdam on my show, and there's just many more amazing people on deck. So get excited and if you want to recommend a future guest again, you can submit a que a request through the link in the show notes or the link that's in all of the YouTube video descriptions. So again, just to sum it up again, how can I help you become a digital nomad or help you become a remote worker or location independent through this weekly podcast? That's every Tuesday at 12:00 PM through the Digital Nomad Challenge 30 day Jumpstart to working remotely. My book, Digital Nomad 101, my Facebook community, Long-Term Digital Nomad Success, and my YouTube channels, Digital Nomad TV, and Traveling with Kristin. And then you can also connect with me Traveling with Kristin on social media.  

Kristin:    00:52:53    I'm just, I'm so excited to share this podcast with you and help you all on your journeys to becoming location independent. You can listen to the first few episodes today, and I hope to see you over on YouTube or here every Tuesday at 12:00 PM Eastern. So feel free to connect. I look forward to meeting all of you guys and cheers to your future and your location, independent Journeys. See you next time.