Full Transcript
Curtis Duggan: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Remotely Serious. My next conversation is with Vance from My Latin Life and the My Latin Life brand is something you may have already encountered on social media. They post consistently and have their own podcast about life in Latin America. And Vance has interviewed hundreds of people on his podcast about their travels and their journeys, getting to South America and traveling throughout Latin America, so South and Central America, and even, Portugal and Spain.
In some cases the Latin Life brand encompasses a lot of places in a lot of countries. So he's got a very wide breadth of knowledge on a lot of things. So I'm excited to jump in and yeah, here's the conversation with Vance:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Remotely Serious Podcast. I'm here with Vance from my Latin Life. And My Latin Life is a growing brand. It's been around for a while. It's a — you stated it as the trusted guide or your trusted guide to traveling and living in Latin America since 2014. I actually think the, since 2014 part is — therein lies a tale.
There's a story there, because I was listening to, I've been listening to a lot of episodes of My Latin Life. So I'm glad to have you on the pod, but there was one episode. Oh, no, you're welcome. No I'm a long time listener. One time caller when we did an episode together, and but I started to hear something, I was vaguely aware that this was a great brand that you had taken over, but then I heard something when you were talking to one of your guests about the "OG Vance" or the "other Vance", and I was like what is, what does that mean?
And then I actually went and heard an episode that's out there for everyone to listen to, which is your, My Latin Life episode with quote unquote, as I learned when I listened to it, the original Vance.
So I was like, I became aware maybe later than I should have. I was like, oh, okay. This is — it's like James Bond, that certain actors play the Vance, but then, there was a Sean Connery, now there's a Pierce Brosnan, like it passes down through the generations. So I was just curious, it looks like you took it over recently in the last couple years, but it's been around since 2014.
So I just thought it'd be a, a good place to start to understand. My Latin life, but also your custodianship of it when you took it over and the details you're able to share about how that came to be.
Vance: Yeah. That's funny and very observant to you. Yeah. I guess as you can discover there, there's layers to this.
And most people don't know that there is an OG Vance and a newer Vance. And I suppose I would be the newer Vance, and I very much like the James Bond analogy because I guess the idea is that there's a little bit of Vance in everybody, there's a little bit of James Bond in everyone, and it's a character that is assumed by a couple different personas and maybe they'll, I've even had ideas of having a female co-host and having her have a different code name and just bring a new dynamic to the podcast Vanita.
Exactly. Vanessa
Curtis Duggan: Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Vance Nessa. But yeah your podcast, it's built up a really great reputation. I actually do think, I think you do something that's really interesting. So the brand is about empowering, educating, getting people excited about, and informing people about all kinds of opportunities to live, work, and immigrate and move and find residencies across the Latin American universe.
And even in some ways incorporating some of Spain and Portugal and the Mediterranean but mostly with a focus on Latin America. And I think something you do that's really interesting with your podcast is you have a very broad spectrum of guests. I listened to several different remote work/sovereign individual podcasts and creators and properties. And you'll have everyone on from like the hardcore libertarians that are like, I've created my own nation state to get some crypto to, I never want to pay another dollar to Uncle Sam. But you'll also bring on like Chase Warrington, who's yeah, man, I just work for a remote startup and remote work is cool, man.
And it's not, and not so political, a little bit more political. And then just people that are like experts on where to put gold bars. And it's not just passport bros. It's not just digital nomads. It's. The broadest range of guests I think I've ever seen in a podcast in this wide genre.
So I'm just curious, have you ramped up how many guests there were, like pre and post 2022. But I guess I'm giving you a layup on Hey your guest strategy is awesome. Why are you so awesome? But that's the layup question for you to oop, like, how did you
Vance: Yeah, no, thank you.
I appreciate that. And I think we do take pride in having a interesting range of guests. I think everyone is tangentially related to the themes that you mentioned, remote work or Latin America, investing in Latin America things like that. Just, different angles. It's good to have some days have some guy that went to every country in the world and then the next week you have a tax advisor that's sitting at home in New Jersey, but he does the taxes for all these crazy expat adventurers.
So I. You get everything on the spectrum of la of expats, so to your question about the frequency I actually picked that up from our mutual friend, Miko. I was asking Miko, I was like, Hey, how are you growing your thing, your podcast? So showed out to MIT CO's podcast that remote life, but he said, amp it up from one a week to two week.
And I was like, you know what? I could totally do that. I have a massive backlog. Anyway, I. So here we are two a week.
Curtis Duggan: That, that often seems like a genre of business advice in terms of, I'm getting some success, I'm starting to grow, and I'm starting to see things are working, Hey what should I do?
And the answer is often just like from a mentor or something, or someone that had some experience, it's just, oh, if something's working, just do more. Yeah. Double it, triple it. And as simple as that is, it's often just getting that kick to be like, oh yeah, okay, I'll just do twice as much and then I'll grow faster.
It's as simple as that. Sometimes I, I think it's, you gotta be onto something first, it's gotta be working for one, for it to work for two. But I definitely, yeah I listened to my Latin life at the gym and I noticed that oh, I've got more queued up. Than usual. At some point whenever you made that switch, I was like, oh, I got a backlog here.
And they're, and you're often in the two hour range you'll take people on a long journey in a very fruitful journey across all aspects of your guest. So it's definitely it's like a nice long steak dinner.
Vance: Thank you. No it's great hearing this feedback.
And sorry if this is a boring introduction to everyone for the podcast, but we're just jamming here. It's great to get this feedback because none of my real life friends really listen to the podcast and I don't really overly solicit feedback on the episodes all that much, be it on Twitter or from hardcore listeners or anything.
I just put it out and the numbers are pretty good and. So I'm like low-involvement, in my own podcast. It's funny.
Curtis Duggan: What is the media company or the business model of my Latin life? I'm literally just thinking, do I hear ads a lot on my Latin life? And I've, I don't think you, you're not, it's definitely not packed with ads.
Vance: So we do have ads now recently. We have two sponsors as of the recording this, we have language blend and Bit refill. So one language blend is for learning Spanish, and then Bit Refill is for buying gift cards with crypto which is a pretty cool tool for digital nomads. And yeah, we've had some sponsors Which you could say keeps the light on.
It's not nothing groundbreaking, but it's cool.
Curtis Duggan: So what originally motivated you to create a Latin American focused media brand as opposed to just living the life and making, doing some other wifi money business? Yeah.
Vance: It's not my, it's not my primary business. So I do other stuff and then this is just the hobby thing.
Oh, nice. So it's been about a year and a half now that I've been doing the podcast. So we're up to about 90 episodes published the time of this recording. And, there's another like 10 in the backlog already recorded. Did one earlier today with Wealthy Expat, who's pretty well known from YouTube.
So I was pretty happy about that. He is a pretty sought after guest. I would like to thank so, Happy about that. But yeah, man, I think it's coming from a place of passion and fun. I've been doing the Latin America thing and full-time digital nomad life for a long time longer than most people.
And I think we have a pretty unique kind of positioning in terms of Latin America and digital nomads and expats, and we're gonna mature over time as well. I think we're gonna be, we're constantly professionalizing more. I recently went to the I m I conference in Malta, the investment migration in, what's the, I final I for insider the, anyway, the I m I daily conference in Malta and it's all the.
I go there like a month ago, and it's like all the bigwigs and the heads of the investment migration companies. These are the people that sell the multi passports for a million bucks. They sell the Caribbean passports, they do residencies, all over the world. And the, the firms that facilitate investment migration in golden visas all over the world, including Portugal and the rest of it.
Getting more onto the. Professional side of the industry and the real estate investment side of the industry. That's where we're going a little bit more. Got it.
Curtis Duggan: Maybe let's dive right into that as a topic. Investment migration, you can correct me, but I assume that it refers to all of the various programs where there's some form of financial investment or purchasing a real estate property of a certain valuation that leads you to get either residency or citizenship very quickly or faster than you would through some other means.
$135,000 or euro property gets you Portuguese residency or citizenship later, or St. Lucia or some Caribbean island, right? They can happen very quickly that's what that conference is that's what investment migration refers to.
Vance: Yeah. Pretty much. I think that was a, an excellent Wikipedia definition of it.
Curtis Duggan: Is there — that's the Wikipedia definition, but like behind the scenes or down on the boots on the ground it's something else or it's different or there's more to it.
Vance: It is kinda like that. It's a very it's a very boutique industry where no one player has significant market share.
There are a couple big names like Henley and Partners, Arts and Capital. So there's a couple players that have been around for 15, 20 years, maybe longer, that have shaped the industry and actually helped in some cases helped these governments create their own immigration processes and systems and incentives.
So some of the companies actively help the government. And then of course, other people are just like facilitators, and things look a little bit different on every continent. The global landscape is always changing in terms of migration, as you might expect. In Latin America. It's a little bit different than Asia and Europe and stuff.
And I guess all the differences is what keeps it fun.
Curtis Duggan: Yeah. What I'm wondering and this is somewhat from an outsider's point of view, but with all of the various remote work visas, which, they're they have pros and cons and they're inadequate in some ways, but there's, they're starting to exist more and more.
I'm wondering about the next five to 10 years where there was a situation where you can, you need to buy a 250,000 minimum Euro property and then you get residents your citizenship. Now there's more programs, more flawed programs, but there's more programs where it's just, hey, prove you can make $2,000 a month on a nomad visa.
You also get residency, and I'm just wondering if the lower stakes remote work visas that are just like, yeah, just prove your income. And people's great, that now I don't have to pay 200 grand to buy a condo or something in Montenegro. I can just prove two grand a month and still get there. Does that change the dynamic of these, this era of the investment migration real estate, or is it bigger than ever?
Is that, are they not as related as I think?
Vance: Yeah, there's definitely a bunch of ways I could answer that, but I would say that most countries have an option to buy real estate or otherwise invest a lot of money and get residency that way. And then most countries have other options where it's more you get a job in the country and so you need a visa to, accept the job or.
Retirement visas also known as Pendo visas or independent means visas, non lucrative visas. Of course, there's digital nomad visas and these ones that you're not really investing a lot of money. I would say they're, they're they're certainly related, obviously. And I would say that they're different tools that.
Governments and economies in different places in their economic cycle are gonna use at different times. So for example, a country like Portugal, which had like a terrible drop in real estate prices and stuff like that, they imp, they wanted to incentivize real estate. They do the golden visa, buy the house, 250 k, get the visa cool.
But once a economy gets overheated like we've seen in Canada or like we're seeing now in Ireland and in Portugal, it becomes less politically popular to have golden visas where you're just buying houses. Because basically what happens is just deep pocketed Chinese and East Asian people come in and it's, nothing for them and they're just getting these visas, but they really have no intention of actually spending too much time there.
It's just like a plan B, or maybe they send their kids there for college or something like that. And so I think what you're seeing is I. There will always be certain countries that will incentivize golden visas that way, but we're finding that it's a little bit politically unpopular and what we're seeing is more of a push towards the type of visa where there's more physical presence and where, you're spending time in the country to maintain the visa and work towards citizenship that way.
At least that's the mindset in the eu is they just they think that citizenship is something that's more cultural and should be earned and not something that you can just buy basically.
Curtis Duggan: Got it. So a lot of your guests are people who have experience maybe broadly across Latin America, but often.
They staked out a claim, I guess is the right way to put it on a certain country. So there might be a Paraguay expert or there might be a Brazil expert. And then I'm not saying everyone's like this, but there are certain people that have promoted a certain country. Argentina, is another one.
Botta, Argentina Lawrence the various people that you've had on your podcast. I encourage people to go check out the back catalog. You get to have this broad. Index of talking to everyone and you have a claim or you put out a brand on the Latin part. But you can, look, hear from everyone in all of these countries.
So in 2023, after several cycles of, Latin American immigration, Latin American adventure and exploration, and now a very, a growing and established culture around exploring sovereign movement. The opportunities in the sovereign individual movement and residencies and passports.
Is there, are there certain countries that are better than others now, right now, in 2023 across Latin America that just stick out? Like you've heard it all such and such country or another is definitely more attractive than others? For the immigration movement, the passport movement, the residency movement?
Vance: I think it depends on a couple things.
Of course, it depends where you're coming from and what passport or citizenships you have already and where you have residency already. So obviously for an American, the. Opportunity set is gonna be a little bit different than even for a Canadian, largely due to citizenship based taxation.
But then also they might just have little quirky differences, like Americans have certain treaties with the Netherlands and things like that. So the opportunity set that you have is a little bit different. Like you have a different chess board to play with depending on what your job is, what citizenships you have, how you earn income, what type of income or savings you're able to demonstrate or move around, right?
Because for example, there's ones you can get with a investment in bonds or like certificates of deposit. Long story short, the chess board looks a little bit different for everyone but everyone's gonna have commonalities as well. And I think a base in Latin America, meaning getting a residency permit in at least one Latin American country is a good idea.
I think the Latin American countries have pretty much no downside, and there's really quite a lot to choose from. Central America is attractive to a lot of people, and then South America is attractive to a lot of people, the Caribbean as well. But I think at least one residency permit in somewhere in Latin America is a good part of anyone's strategy.
Curtis Duggan: Where does Mexico fit in all of this? I, is it because of its size? I'm just wondering about the ability to get back to places. There, there are places like the Southern Cone that are, I'm sure wonderful, but they're further away from Europe and Asia, North America, and then Mexico. In, in some cases it's like an hour and a half away from certain American cities.
Is it kind of Mexico is. Gas giant. That's like 50 to 60 to 70% of the interest and then everywhere else compares to Mexico. I've brought, I've built that up in my mind, like Mexico is huge and everywhere else there's lots of great opportunities, but they all in aggregate are about equal to this amazing interest in Yeah.
Playa, Mexico City, et cetera. And you gotta
Vance: re remember that, that's Mexico is really for Canadians and Americans. 'cause it's not as easy for Europeans to get there in a lot of ways. It's actually easier for a European to get to Brazil than it is to get to Mexico just in terms of direct flights and so forth.
They've opened up more to Cancun, but like flying into Mexico City from Europe is traditionally like pretty expensive. That's one thing is that Mexico's more of a play for Canadians and Americans. But that being said, obviously if the direct flights, whatever's in the big deal, Mexico's really great for everyone because it's a very easy residency to get.
It's, and it's also very easy residency to maintain in terms of low physical presence requirements to maintain it. So it's easy to get, easy to maintain, and there's really not much downside to having it. Mexico is a good base for everyone, for sure. In
Curtis Duggan: 2020, 2021 and going into 2022, the Western world or the G7 world itself was having an insane tech money, internet money, internet business, internet marketing boom through and crypto boom.
I should i in crypto. And a lot of the Venn diagram of the audience that's interested in sovereign residency in Latin America and crypto is, there's some overlap there for sure. The circles overlap and 2022, late 2022 and late '23 have seen a big retrenchment in just layoffs of the kind of remote jobs that might send people to, remote workplaces around the world.
Crypto crashed. It's having a little bit of a renaissance this summer but it's nowhere near what it was. Do you see a slowdown in The excitement of your audience. Do you hear about certain legendary bros that were killing it, but then all of a sudden it's oh yeah, they went back to Regina.
Or like legendary bros. I thought they were killing it, but they went back to Melbourne or, whatever it is. I you're much more boots on the ground in Yeah,
Vance: I got my ears to the streets of the legendary bros. The legendary
bros.
Curtis Duggan: Because I'm not gonna call anyone's name out, but I'm like, oh yeah, I heard about that.
Just some random person that was like, yeah, I go here. And then they're like, oh, yeah they got a job. They're back in Toronto at Shopify or whatever. And then, which is, there's nothing wrong with that but it's I'm just hearing these tiny little anecdotes and I'm like, is there a certain era that lasted maybe the covid gold golden years of exploring that might be on a wane?
Vance: Yeah. I think my thought, my, I think my thoughts on this is that the percentage of the US economy or the world economy that works remote is going to steadily trend up into the right kind of just like a market is gonna be like the chart of the stock market. It's gonna go down sometimes, it's gonna have down years, but it's gonna overall trend up into the right just because we're getting more technological and more work is gonna be online. What did we like over move online due to the events of 2020? And then we're course correcting. Probably, but we're still course correcting to a percentage of remote workers that's still way higher than it was in 2019.
So it's certainly grown a lot in the past number of years. And it's not going anywhere, man. Especially you see all these anecdotes about just, whether it be the Central bank, digital currencies or just carbon taxes or all these insane ways that we're losing our freedoms in Europe and in North America.
I think just more and more people are over time gonna, I. Gonna appreciate the safety or the freedom, sorry, of life in Latin America.
Curtis Duggan: You said safety and then backtracked to say freedom. That's actually a good point because I meant, yeah,
Vance: I meant safety from government. Yeah.
Curtis Duggan: The biggest stereotype though which you probably are wanting to debunk or, I shouldn't say probably.
I've heard you debunk it a bit on your episodes, but safety is the reason this stuff is so cheap, the reason everyone's not leaving to moving to Latin America is because, out of the, let's say 450, I don't know, 400 million people in North America, let's say probably 390 or maybe 350 million of them think, oh, Latin America, it's a, it's not safe like that.
That is a big sort of bulwark or dam that's stopping more people from just getting up and moving to Latin America. They believe, the safety of, their suburb in Minneapolis or Vancouver is just the First World, and down there is the Third World. I'm not saying I believe that, but yeah, I have a lot of answers to this.
Yeah. Yeah.
Vance: Take thefloor one. The first one would be the famous Benjamin Franklin or Andrew Jackson quote, which is those who will give up freedom for a little bit of safety deserve neither something to that extent. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's pretty hard to balance freedom and safety as a society, but.
I think airing on the side of freedom is probably better. Here's the thing is I think Canada, the US and Europe have become significantly less safe, even just in the past five or 10 years. Canada is way less safe. Vancouver is like a open air drug market. Toronto is homeless crazy homeless people on every corner.
Europe is way less safe than it is. Like your, your, even in Europe, your apartment's gonna get broken into, and there's like a lot more street crime, especially in like Spain and certain spots. So I think that's part of it is like that. Those, these places that used to be perfect, whether it be Northern Europe, like Sweden or Toronto or something like that, these places that kind of used to be perfect, they're really not perfect anymore and it's gonna be hard to put the genie back in the bottle.
So they're probably never gonna be perfect again. And so it's a case of the legacy brand. And the reality just not catching up on the ground where, like it still has a good reputation from 50 years of a good reputation, but it's not quite that amazing on the ground anymore.
Curtis Duggan: There's definitely a strong, I believe, and I think agree with you, that there's a strong chance that a certain kind of Ponzi scheme is gonna come to an end in the sense of, 40 years ago, I dunno, 35 years ago, going on 20 years ago, there were, as a stereotype, and maybe there was some truth to it, or there probably was some truth to it 20 years ago, 25 years ago, that there's seven or eight countries that people want to go to that are the first world that if you could just save up enough, you might immigrate and it's England.
Australia, Canada, the United States, France, and if you're from Tunisia or Serbia or Pakistan, you might go for a better life to one of the developed countries. And it's a much more level playing, field setting, even aside the multipolar ness of, US versus China and India and Russia and the Alliance is there just across the world.
I think the legacy brands, which is a good term that you've used, are gonna realize that you can't just say, Hey, we're the best. You we're luxury. C come on. And everybody wants to be here. People are, settling down in Columbia or Portugal or Croatia and dozens hun, 50, a hundred other countries start to become not exactly the same, but equally attractive or more attractive for their freedom, for their cost of living.
It's just gonna be a death spiral of okay. Oh crap. Our tax base isn't growing as much as we thought and our birth rate isn't up as much as we thought. So we're gonna need more tax or monetary based inflation to somehow pay the bills. And it's just, it's not going to work the way that the policy makers think it is.
And that's going to be difficult for to get into this sort of a bit of a fall of Rome. It's not gonna be fast, I don't think there's gonna be like an apocalypse in British Columbia and in London, but there's gonna be a slow flatlining that just not, it's not gonna return to
Vance: what it was. Yeah.
I think the thing is just life was very easy in Canada and the u Ss a and Switzerland for a very long time, where you got rich basically just existing and working like an average job and buying a house when you're supposed to buy a house and the house goes up, 15, 20% a year. And so all our parents' generation.
The baby boomers, they all got rich just working a job, getting overpaid for ABO as Seth Godin would call it, above average pay for a, for below average work. And that's basically how the economy worked in Canada and all these other places was just above, above average pay for average work. But now with globalization and kind of a much more globally competitive marketplace where for goods and services we're competing for against the world in a way that we were not 15, 20 years ago.
I think that fact alone of the increased competition, I think that alone has a lot of pressure on wages and it's going to bring down wages in the west and subsequently kinda raise wages in the east or in, low wage areas. And so everything's gonna regress a little bit towards the means It's just not as stark of a difference now and in the future as it was
Curtis Duggan: in the past.
Yeah, in, I think in general, so many aspects of the world are getting better. If you look at who's dying of malaria, how much is the, how much of a middle class is there, there's a lot. There's like a classic graph that shows a bunch of stuff getting better. But for this specific group of privileged, born in the 20th century, middle of the 20th century, it is flatlining and getting worse.
So it feels to them like there's this decline, but it's like they're in a little tiny little group that's declining and everywhere else is getting more chances. It's not gonna be equality of outcome for everybody, but they're, there's there's never been more opportunity to make wifi money from anywhere and not have to get the wait seven years for the green card to get to the United States to get the taxi driver job, to someday have your child have a better life.
You can, Most people could theoretically, open up their phone, even if they can't afford a laptop, start trying something. And there's the opportunity to make a better
Vance: life. That's the thing about remote work is you gotta be good, especially with remote work. If you're the only plumber in town, I guess you can be average.
But if you're doing something online where you're really competing against the world, you gotta be good. You gotta be unique. And it's a double-edged sword because you get that freedom of working online and you can travel the world and all these things that I wouldn't trade for anything.
But, there's definitely a pressure to perform or to have some sort of special skillset that can't be outsourced.
Curtis Duggan: I'm not in my twenties. I'm a little older than that. But in terms of some, I'm sure a lot of your audience are people that are, Curious. They're not necessarily already in Latin America, they're not necessarily remote workers, but they're curious and you are, they're remotely curious.
Remotely curious, and boom. And so let's say there's some remotely curious person who's one generation younger than me, and it's a, a 21 year old in Ottawa, Canada. They're sitting there listening to my Latin life and, they're talking to their friend, what are you doing? Oh, I just graduated from I don't know, McGill, and I'm gonna go work for the Ministry of Trees for the rest of my life or whatever, some job in Ottawa.
Or I'm gonna go and do this. And they're listening to my Latin life and they're thinking, you know what? I've got three K in the bank from such and such summer painting job. I'm gonna take it. Yeah. I'm going to Latin America.
Vance: Oh, the summer painting job's. Classic. That's a Canadian writer of passage.
Curtis Duggan: Yeah. Summer painting job. Taking the Go train college prop painters. College prop painters. Yeah. Yeah. Summer 2004. College prop painter signs everywhere. Listening to the white stripes. Yeah. So if they're thinking, I wanna go to Latin America, do you have opinions on okay, if you're gonna go to Latin America, you're 21, you got three K.
Where, what, where should they start? What should they do first?
Vance: Okay. I guess the goal is how long are you trying to make that three K last? Because three K is not that much.
Curtis Duggan: Let's say they're trying to, they're trying to make it. Yeah. They don't want to come back to college prop painters next summer and they don't have a lot.
So I'm just curious, is there a launching pad. That's the best for extending the runway on a absolute shoestring
Vance: budget. Basically you need to start making money online as soon as possible to extend your runway. And I remember there was a phrase that, that someone told me when I first started working remote and was much closer to paycheck than I am now.
And someone said to me in the first couple months, they said, Hey man, if you can make this work now, you can do this the rest of your life. And so I knew if is if I could just get it to start working and get the train chugging, then I could keep things a afloat basically, inevitably, or, forever.
Because I would've found kind of product market fit in terms of finding a product or service to sell into the marketplace and basically just get a paycheck. So what would I do? I would basically just start grinding on LinkedIn for remote jobs. And I would just do apply to hundreds of jobs a day.
I would be thoughtful about your resume and the story that you're telling and being able to speak well when you're getting those those phone calls. The first like filter phone call and tell a good story about how you're gonna make a difference for the company. And basically just grind on LinkedIn until you get some job offers.
And I typically recommend people start with a remote job instead of entrepreneurship or, starting a company. I think a remote job is just easier to get. It's more secure and it's just going to get you there faster compared to a job and trying to do drop shipping or, whatever.
Kind of like the business model du jour. Yeah. Is of the day copywriting agency. Yeah. There's so
Curtis Duggan: much there's so much influencer marketing around quit your job, become a nomad, move to Latin America and make money online. All at once is like the dream. It's like learning a language and getting divorced and moving all at once.
Yeah.
Vance: So I, I think about we call it monkey branching. And so you think about if you're a Tarzan in the jungle, you don't let go of the previous branch or vine until you firmly grasp the new vine. And so what I would say is to the extent that you can monkey branch into remote work, it's just gonna make things a lot smoother.
There's no reason for this to be a chaotic transition. Like I, there's no reason for this to be chaotic. Chaotic at all, because you gotta keep in mind that everyone gets paid online. Already anyway, you already get paid online, dear listener, because you know no one's giving you cash, no one's giving you a physical check that you have to bring to the bank in cash.
You're already getting paid online. You're getting paid direct deposit. The money is going to your bank account digitally, right? The only problem is that people are providing an in-person service, such as being a nurse or a firefighter, or a carpenter or whatever. That's what makes it, not remote, is that you're providing an in-person service.
You're already getting paid online, but you're providing an iner in-person service to get paid online, and so you just need to start providing a service that you can complete online.
Curtis Duggan: Makes total sense. Yeah. And I think everyone's first monkey branch may not be the same. And you don't need to look at someone else's, someone who's already a React front-end web developer.
Their first monkey branch to move from San Francisco to Latin America is gonna be a different monkey branch than a plumber that decides, okay, I've got some plumbing cash saved up. I wanna move to Latin America, different monkey branch, they're gonna need to solve something else first. Whereas the re react developer might just say, okay, I'll get a react job and then I'll move and dah.
Like it's, and so it's good to distinguish between that, and I think it was muddy and the whole space got a bit of a bad rap from the mainstream media because this was so muddy and mixed up. And I think you got it right for probably 95% of people do not become an entrepreneur. It is. An extra level of stress on top of learning Spanish or Portuguese and finding your accommodation and dating and everything else.
If you just find that remote job that's like a, that's a monkey branch that's way lower hanging than, 10 k a month in wifi entrepreneur passive money. So
Vance: it makes sense. Yeah, there's no perfect answer because you can get a job already on the ground in Mexico.
I've had buddies do it. I've changed jobs while I was, outside the US where I had a remote job and then I had to get another one. And sometimes there's complications, like I have to get a new laptop shipped to me, or maybe I have to go to the states for a week to, do some paperwork or something.
But you to, you could totally just, take the flight and figure it out on the ground, but, I don't know. I just, I don't think these things need to be overly chaotic necessarily. I think I
Curtis Duggan: saw maybe you're tweeting about it or the, my Latin Life said it somewhere. I don't know. But you mentioned that you still actually do spend some time in Europe, a month or two in Europe.
What's your actual cycle like in terms of your basis, what, where you nomad and has that changed and do you see that changing in the next couple of years? What do you actually do, January to December for
Vance: your cycle? Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's definitely changed over time.
I think I. I try to travel in a way where there's a purpose to where I travel to. Typically it's been chasing a residency where you gotta spend a little bit of time on the ground or just doing different Es basically paperwork tasks. So I try to travel with purpose generally, and I try to weave things together where I just try to like weave things together where maybe I have a business purpose, but also buddies or a hobby I want to do, or a city that I wanna check out.
So it's not too much just, eating gelato and looking at architecture. I try to travel with purpose and I think that everyone else should too, because at the end of the day, if you're gonna be spending time away from your family and stuff, or other obligations you might have somewhere else in the world, you should be doing so for a good reason.
And so I think Even something as simple as learning the language, I think is a worthwhile endeavor, but try to travel with purpose basically.
Curtis Duggan: Have you ever shared publicly your target residency strategy, the countries that interest you and where you're building out residencies and bases?
I've
Vance: definitely hinted here and there and I'll tell people offline. For the most part, I don't know if I've ever actually said A to Z. Everything I have going on put me on the spot. How much should I reveal? So I do admit that I may or may not be Canadian American dual citizen, and that I have multiple residencies in Latin America and in different places.
How much can I reveal? I was definitely one of the first people to do Paraguay before, before the pandemic to give one. Time denote, I guess so I've, I did Paraguay even before the pandemic, so long before it got super, super popular. Mexico as well. I often comment as one of my bases, Panama, I comment as well as being one of my bases.
Portugal as well. I say may or may not be one of my bases. Yeah. And more to come. Would
Curtis Duggan: you say that may, maybe coming at this from a more generic angle, the same topic but a little bit more generic so you don't have to say anything specific. Would you say that the reason some of the people in this space are, bow tie gentleman or Anon, whatever is that specifically to make sure that the Her Majesty's revenue and the I R Ss and the c r a can't just get information is that the main benefit of of a decent, an non anonymous strategy?
Is that the driver of that? For, for folks. Not saying you, certain folks where it's okay, they're behind an avatar and they're they have a different name or whatever. No one needs to justify what they do, but I just assume that's why, but I don't know if there were other reasons why, benefits for, for someone who's considering whether to be themselves or be a non, pros and cons.
Vance: Yeah, I think this space is tough. I think people probably aren't, no one's like super shady that I come across in the industry really. Everyone seems like pretty intentioned and above board. I think I. It's just like unnecessary scrutiny. Even like an audit, even if you've done everything right, an audit is still a huge investment in terms of dealing with an audit and presenting all the documents and just like the mental load and everything.
So people just don't wanna deal with that type of stuff. And I think it works for both people. I honestly, I don't see too many semi and non people that take it super far. I feel like most people reveal eventually. Yeah. I don't,
Curtis Duggan: it's, I don't even it know it's there if you wanna look, but they're not gonna go out their way to be like, here is my, social security number and my address and all that, obviously.
Yeah.
Vance: I was talking to like wealthy expat about this. I was, I asked him today I was like, why do you come out and say that your name is Rafael instead of just, saying wealthy expat and. He just said this is me and I wanna be trustworthy. And we're in the, we're in the offshore space, which is already very smoke and mirrors and low trust.
And so I thought, I'd be more high trust by just putting my name out there. So that's what Andrew Henderson did. That's I guess, what Rafael from Wealthy Expat did. So I think it does it, it can help in the industry. I think both are good. It just depends where you wanna send your notoriety and stuff.
It's funny because it's like I'm in a funny spot personally right now because now I'm at the place where if I go anywhere in Latin America, I can just tweet that I'm there and get like a squad to come out for for steak and cigars or even like host, like a impromptu event or. Like a summit or meetup or something like that.
I've already been doing a bunch of meetups in different cities and I could probably do 'em even bigger. But it's funny because, they're meeting up with a semi-anonymous figure. But that's the idea is it's really, it really puts the mirror back on everyone else.
If you look at my telegram groups I have a bunch of free telegram groups that maybe you can be so kind as to link up in the show notes for this. And it's just like totally everyone contributing and saying stuff and, Hey, what's up with this? I heard they closed this program. How do I cross this border if I use this bank account?
Can I use crypto with it? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm not even really engaging all that much. Like I don't really feel like I need to engage. Everyone is already contributing so much. And I guess it's more community first. This way with the semi-anonymous thing, it's really all about the community and I think a lot of people get.
A lot of good information from reading the comments on my tweets and being part of these groups and stuff. Yeah. You
Curtis Duggan: mentioned Andrew Henderson, who runs nomad Capitalist, I think for a lot of people that aren't familiar with this space, but happen to use YouTube nomad capitalists, they tend to publish a fresh video on a certain topic, like it seems every 20 minutes, all day long for years and years.
And there's tens of thousands of their videos. So they're just a high pro, they're prolific in publishing videos and they've established a brand. They're unabashedly upscale, he says, I help seven and eight and nine figure entrepreneurs, or whatever. He says, I help really rich people only 11 figures.
Yeah. I help 11 figure entrepreneurs, yeah. Get a tax lawyer or whatever. But it seems like there's gonna be so many more people that are just decent. Awesome. A hundred thousandaires and millionaires or whatever that it might be, for what they might not qualify for the prestigious nomad capitalist tax lawyer reselling program.
So do you think that there's an opportunity there or, what do you like, this is what's going on in the Telegram group. There's probably a bunch of people looking for this kind of service. Have you been to the Cat Noad capitalist event? Is it one of these things where there's a huge gap in the market for someone to come in and compete?
Are people already competing with that brand? I am being a little bit facetious about the brand, but it's only because I think I. My thesis is there's room to compete there. Like they they're established, but they've got, they're really very specific about how they present themselves.
Vance: Yeah, of course.
I think I think there's so many sub niches in this that there's definitely like a lot of nooks and crannies that people haven't even talked about yet. Even something like birth tourism it's becoming more popular, having a baby in Mexico or Brazil and, there's all these questions around, okay, so the baby gets to citizenship, the parents get maybe permanent or temporary residency and then they can work towards citizenship, blah, blah, blah.
So people know about Mexico and Brazil, but this birth tourism thing basically works in every country in Latin America, and no one's ever really compiled all the information from every country about like exactly how it works and stuff. So someone could even make a niche fully devoted to that.
And. Build a business around that, and I'm sure they do well. So there's like a million sub niches because we're just at such a very, maybe that's a bad example, but Curtis we're at such a interesting place and, pretty good timing starting the podcast. And I know you had on the Palau guy Jay.
Yeah, Jay talking about the plow e residency. We're at this really interesting time where there's all these sort of like trends and new ideas that are on a Venn diagram related, as you said. And they just over, and they're gonna overlap in very cool and interesting ways. So you have crypto, you have residency programs.
You have people having dual triple citizenship. You have e residencies, you have tax havens, you have all these crazy things. I didn't even name one fifth of the. The topics that are in my head. In terms of all these things that are really converging now in different ways, we're starting to see one of my, one of my favorite accounts, you should try to get this guy on your podcast too, I've been trying to do it for a while, is the sultan of Slow JAMA Stand.
I'm not sure if you've seen Slow Jama stand on Twitter or anything. It's just hilarious. It's like this guy who bought a little bit of an acre in the desert in California and he said, I'm gonna create a new country. It's called Slow JAMA Stand. And it's like one of the hottest micro nations.
And there's this whole idea of micro nations now that started with started with Liberland and with Sea Lands, which was like a oil rig. I think it's even still going sea land. And the, so there, there's this whole like micro nation world and slow JAMA stand is just hilarious. It's this guy's like a radio DJ that has it's Slow Jams fm or something like that.
And he just named this country slow jama stand.
Curtis Duggan: And there's a new generation too. There's like Prospera and Praxis
Vance: and Yeah, that's a whole, and that's a whole different thing. Free trade zones special economic zones. We've had a couple guys on the podcast talk about that. And so there's all these just like different things that are converging in really cool ways and it makes you start thinking like, what is a country and what is citizenship and our ideas around citizenship and what a country is in the nation state.
These ideas are probably gonna change rapidly over the next a hundred years.
Curtis Duggan: One question I had, and I, this is from a point of ignorance, but for birth tourism, it makes sense, the concept, but it's the idea that you can receive citizenships if a child is born in a certain country, but in practice is that literally okay, your wife or girlfriend is eight months pregnant.
You get a, get a tourist visa to go to Brazil, hang out in Brazil, get a nice Airbnb for two months, and then you wait. And then one day it's like, how, here we are we're visiting this country, the baby's born, and boom, a passport is created. And I'm saying is it that easy?
Not that's easy there, that's quite a little process to go through, but is it really just visiting a country when someone's pregnant so that the baby pops and then you get a passport? Yeah.
Vance: How, how far do you wanna take this back? So there's kind of two. Schools of thought around this, and it's called it's two Latin terms.
It's like Judas Sanus, which is citizenship by blood, and then Judas something. And that's citizenship based on place of birth. And I'm the worst you're bringing
Curtis Duggan: the Latin into my Latin life
Vance: for sure. Yeah. I'm not doing this super well. But basically, long story short, in the in the Americas we have this system of citizenship by place of birth.
So if you're born in a country, you become a citizen there. That's not necessarily the case in Europe or Asia. Just because you a baby is born. Germany does not necessarily make it German, or just because a baby is born in Japan does not necessarily make it Japanese. If the parents haven't accomplished, five years of residency, or they're not both citizens or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, any amount of complications.
And so the world is actually quite cleanly split in terms of the Americas, the Western hemisphere being citizenship by birth, and then the rest of the world being more about kind of bloodline and where the citizenship of the parents are from. So I think that's one of the things that's actually attractive about Latin America.
Just another plus in the long list of pluses about Latin America is that you have all these opportunities around birth tourism that oftentimes don't exist in the old world.
Curtis Duggan: We'll link the map in the show notes, but I've seen it, and if you literally look at it, it's exactly like you say, the Americas are colored almost entirely one color, and then most of the rest of the world is colored.
Another way. It's choosing my Latin life and Latin America as the place to promote. I know. You do more than promote it. You educate about it. But, there's other places in the world that are interesting. Nomad hotspots. Southeast Asia has a reputation going back at least several decades.
But there is something that I've heard that's just a, it's a core reality. It, I don't consider it xenophobic or racist when people say it, but it's just that, moving to Latin America, it is multicultural and people from around the world can integrate there. Something that is for non. Thai people for non Vietnamese, for non-Japanese, non-Chinese.
That is harder to do when you go to some of the Asian countries, whether they're Asian remote work or nomad or backpacker hotspots or sovereign individual hotspots. There's just something about Latin America in the nature of it, being part of the Americas and having its certain history, somewhere like Brazil, there's no way, nobody looks like a Brazilian in a way that's not gonna be quite the same if you are in love with a beautiful place like Thailand. You're not gonna, even if you learn Thai, even if you're, you've got the cahones to learn a different script and a harder language for someone who speaks English or a romance language, it's still gonna be a much longer journey or never to become Thai, where I don't feel the same way about
Vance: Latin America.
There's no way, there's, I don't even think it's possible to become Thai. Even if you marry a Thai woman and your kids are a Thai I don't think it's even possible to naturalize at this point in time. It's it's pretty crazy. The thing that's, the thing about Asia as a whole is you can't really naturalize as a citizen in East Asia, with rare exceptions.
Like maybe in Cambodia, maybe in Taiwan, I think maybe in Philippines. Not sure about that, but. The other countries, you just, you can't even naturalize, you can't even become a citizen. And it's harder. And also they don't really give permanent residency out that much either, so you're just gonna be on this perpetual, temporary residency.
And so just, as a human it's very tough to mentally commit to life in a place where you're not a permanent resident. You'll never become a citizen and you'll probably never master the language. So I think Asia's maybe cool for Australians or cool in your twenties and stuff, but long term, I don't think it makes sense for most people.
Obviously there, when you go to these places you'll meet some old alcoholic British veteran or something like that, and those guys are always fun to be around. But I think long story short, Asia is just it's harder to set, settle and build roots. And compared to, I.
Latin America and maybe Europe. I've
Curtis Duggan: already said this a couple times, but you've had an amazing breadth of guests and all kinds of different stories have been told on your podcast. One that I thought was, it was funny, inspiring, surreal, and a bit zany all at once was there's a story of Dylan Madden trying to meet Andrew Tate for the first time.
Okay. Which I just thought was like like it was like a tale. It was, it's like I heard he was gonna be in Washington DC and then Dylan, drove in a car to meet him, and he was like, it was just, it's like a. I didn't, I'd never thought I would hear, this kind of story about a, controversial but very popular public figure and someone that was close to him.
So there's all kinds of stories embedded. Do you have any, do you have any favorites or kind of things you learned or thought were like highlights? If someone was gonna go back and they say, okay, I've got five episodes in me. Oh man,
Vance: Tell me more. Because I enjoy hearing it from you. 'cause I, I don't really have people tell me that often.
As I said before, I don't like when you say, you listen to that. I think that's epic and people don't tell me it enough, like anything else come to mind? Maybe you had Jay from Palau because I think I was like the first one to have him on a podcast. It was the inspiration
Curtis Duggan: for me knowing Jay even better and inviting him on this pod.
The great thing about Jay, which is another one I enjoyed, was it really solidified for me in your conversation with him. It's it's like this insider thing where if you were talking to the lead, and I think this is a this is a kudos to Jay and big ups to Jay. If you were talking to a director of a ministry, of a program from like the British Ministry of Immigration or the Canadian such and such in Ottawa, and you had them on the pod about some program, they'd probably be like we're very excited about our new S four visa and we believe it will help All Britains.
And the Canadian thing would be the same. It'd be like, oh, all Canadians need a chance to grow and prosper.
Vance: Wow, that's a good eng Canadian accent. You can just turn that
Curtis Duggan: on and off. I had a startup that we built and sold a startup in the 2010s. And over, over that time I moved to New York to run it and to raise VC money and build out the market.
And for the first two months actually going, even before that, when I was just on the phone trying to talk to customers, we had us customers, it was like a US healthcare market. Yeah. And they're like, are you from Canada? Are you from Minnesota? Are you from Canada? And I got so tired of that.
That was like the third thing they would say. So I just slightly altered my voice. To be a little bit more American and it stuck with me. But, I can always turn on, there's a Canucks game coming, we're gonna go get seats. Hey, get a co, get me a Stella, get a Coke need, need Meyer at blue line's.
Funny.
Vance: That's funny. I've never heard someone like really put it on like that. It was funny. I can't
Curtis Duggan: really do that. And you know what? Canadians will always say it like, this is, so this is this is Vancouver BC too. There's a different kind of, Montreal thing and the Ontario thing, but they'll always say oh, we don't have an accent.
It's just the California accent. And it's no, it's, no, it's fucking not. The California accent is Hey man, let's go to Newport Beach and do this and that. And the Canadian accent's oh yeah, I was driving up to Nanaimo, and I'm going, Tofino. It's it's not the same accent.
You're lying to yourself. Yeah. You're full of it. No you just can't, you're a goldfish that doesn't know you're in water in a goldfish bowl. It's like there's, there is 100% in accent.
Vance: I also thought that maybe my Canadian esque tendencies would be a bit of a detractor on the podcast as well.
And I definitely wish I had a bit more of a graveley radio voice, but such is Canada.
Curtis Duggan: I don't, it's a very it's a weird thing you would never get. I don't know what it's, maybe it's like someone from the north of England trying to get rid of the North England thing to, to work in London, but what other country is someone saying oh, I want to be, I, I changed my accent.
I guess that probably happens all in all kinds of places, but I don't think a British person that comes to work. America from Britain doesn't like, okay, I need to put on an American accent and change, like a Hollywood actor, like C
Vance: Christian Bale. When I started spending more time in the States, I definitely made some a adjustments to my English.
Like we, we used to say in Canada we would say Southern. And then you go to the States and you learn that it's Southern, not Southern. And I had to change that one just to not get ridiculed. Yeah. There's
Curtis Duggan: Little things like even just in Canada people might say like, where have you been?
But in America it's like, where have you been? And like even just, I think that there's just things you don't even know about where Yeah. Yeah. If you're gonna say, I'm not, I won't, you might say I'm not gonna that might be something I hear someone like, hear someone say in Vancouver Island, I'm not gu.
And if no one would say that in, the East coast of America, I'm not gu That's funny.
Vance: By the way another random question I was gonna ask you is eh, tell me if I'm remembering this correct, but do you have Irish citizenship by
Curtis Duggan: descent? No. My last name is Irish, but the Irish person would be like from the 1830s if there was one.
Okay. Duggan is a fairly common Irish clan name. It is. It's too far back, I think. I think. Potato famine or something. Yeah. Gotcha gotcha. It'd be nice to just get automatic EU citizenship. I remember when I was a teenager hearing about someone, it's my grandma's British, or my grandpa's Portuguese, so I got EU passport.
I'm like, you're so lucky. Whatever. I didn't even know why I thought they were lucky. But yeah.
Vance: Another random theme for you podcasts. There's talking amongst each other is you talked a bit about just my guest strategy or, and that kind of thing. I would say that it's been so natural, man.
I've never been at a point where I've been like, oh my God, I need to start reaching out. I don't have enough guests. I need to fill the spots, dude. It's just, I, without even reaching out, really, almost just by inviting on people I'm already talking to I just say, Hey, you opened a guest thing on. They're like yeah, when, and then I just send them to the link.
And they they sign up and I've never really done any serious outreach. So it's been all pretty normal. And so I think that's probably contributes to the range of guests. I think about the order too. Like I think about, okay, if the last two or three guys have been like real estate bros, I need to switch it up and get, someone from a different background on the podcast.
And so I try to not have more than two in a row that are super similar. And so maybe even if I like the order that they're published in might not be the order that I film them in, just because I wanna have every single episode be a little bit different after each other. I think I, I didn't do a good job in the some of the most recent episodes 'cause I had a bunch in a row about real estate.
But we're trying to do that. We're trying to have one episode's, an adventure, and then one episode is a tax professional, and then one episode is a YouTuber and just constantly kind. Work around the the mil of different people that we can get. And so I've never had to I'm at like a hundred episodes and I've never even had to really do any outreach which is interesting.
Yeah, I've
Curtis Duggan: heard that. I've heard that a in a few, at a few junctures in a few places that after a reasonable. Amount of success and not a giant amount of success, but a decent bar. The strategy often just becomes about triaging all the inbound requests.
Vance: I would say though that I'm not just letting people in off inbound.
I think I've only, I actually don't even receive that much inbound surprisingly. I don't have too many people that hit me up or have an assistant hit me up and say Hey, this person would be excellent for your podcast. I actually don't receive all too much of that. It's happened a couple times and like one or two I had that recently with actually David Les Baras, who's like a Canadian, very famous Canadian tax lawyer who speaks about Canadian American cross-border issues and, for like dual citizens living in Canada, that kind of thing. So he's like super well known. He goes to conferences. And I got a letter from like a middleman like podcast scheduler company like totally unrelated. And they're like, Hey, like David Les Bros wants to go on your podcast if you be so kind to have him.
And I'm like, what? That's crazy. That gotta be like a dream guest. Yeah. I would've reached out to him anyway. And so I said yes to that. So that's one. But really, I would say 90% of the guests or more are like straight from Twitter and maybe a couple Instagram where I like maybe DMM the person or something.
But it's really almost all like Instagram and Twitter, mostly. Twitter. It's good that
Curtis Duggan: you clarify that. I actually would say that the genesis of this podcast I might be embellishing it a little bit, but it's partially. For some reason in the course of going to a few remote work events and talking to people and like meeting up with people, meeting up with people in a city I'm not like as big on Twitter about Hey, I'm in this city.
I don't think I'm that popular yet to do what you do. But at certain times I've talked to people about a niche ss e o side I have that's about remote work blogging. And at some point it's almost like they misunderstood that. It's like prior to this podcast launching six weeks ago, they're like, oh yeah, I should come on to your podcast.
Like when it was just a site, like there was no podcast. And I was like yeah sure. And I said that enough times, and like one time I actually like committed to it even though I don't have one. So it's oh, okay, I guess I need to make a podcast now. So I'm embellishing the story, but there was almost an element of it happens naturally and then.
I also like you're way, ahead in terms of volume and quality and maturity of what you've done. But I do start to see how, I don't know about the second two. Yeah. In a certain way, maturity of of the length, the amount of episodes. I've got stamina for an hour where at the hour mark here.
I know you got, you probably have more stamm me. I don't, I feel like if I hit this is just I'm switching gears here. Just riffing. But I think what I don't know how to do yet is sustain two hours the way you do. So I feel like, yeah, we'll be wrapping up in five or 10 minutes and I'll be like, okay, I need to go get a go hydrate, go do some hot yoga and lie down because that hour takes a lot outta me.
I'm thinking on the spot. But you've got the rogan stamina to go for a decent length. So I gotta work on that. I think,
Vance: yeah, I try not to I don't want to take, I wanna be respectful of my guests and I don't wanna make them Rogan episodes, but almost no one needs to or wants to hang up after just an hour.
I think everyone's pretty chill about. And I don't know, but yeah, all the episodes end up being like an hour and a half to two hours. I
Curtis Duggan: had that with an episode that just got recorded. It's not out yet. And it was booked for an hour where, one or both of us had to stop and it was an hour.
And when we got to 55 minutes, we were getting heated, not with each other, but emo like about a certain topic, about the community. Getting it. And it was like, okay, now we're just getting started. We got to know each other for 40 minutes and now we're just getting started.
So I, I might have to adjust this. I've been being re respectful, conservative, and cautious about how good I am at podcasting to make, to, to book hour long slots and not, Drag someone along for two hours if I'm not ready to be the leader. The leader's, the thing about
Vance: only scheduling it for an hour, and I only schedule for an hour too, is then my calendar looks open and try, someone tries to schedule something right after, and I'm like, let's be serious like this.
This is not, I'm not gonna be able to make this. There's no way I'm doing this podcast in an hour. I think there's only been one that's been less than an hour, which was lattice last, the wandering investor, and it was like 38 minutes or something. I'm sure I could get him. Like we're, we have a better relationship now, so I'm sure I could get him on and do a Joe Rogan one with him, but that's how it was a year ago.
But yeah, they're pretty long. I think there's a lot of value in like the transcripts and stuff. If once the AI gets good enough, they can just go through the back catalog and do some stuff with it that's strategic.
Curtis Duggan: That's thinking ahead of 10 steps ahead of everyone. Yeah. I wonder, I've actually been.
Learning how to call the a p i, some of the I'm not like a, I'm not a coder by background, but I put a solid six months into trying to understand how AI tools are gonna affect both entrepreneurship and consulting and jobs. And just like thinking about the next 30 years and making money and getting ahead of things.
And it's gonna be, it's gonna be wild. It is gonna be wild in the next couple of years. How marketing works, how content creation works. I look at the AI tools and it's yeah, there's a lot of the robot, the robots are here and it's not a joke. It's not for nerds. It's like the, they're powerful tools for doing things.
And I, I don't know, I probably a topic for another episode with maybe a good idea. Actually. I should, bring someone on that knows, like really in depth about all this stuff. But I wonder what wifi money is gonna look like in five years with AI as a bit of a non-sequitur.
Vance: This is related and you're closer to this than I am, but I started going on LinkedIn more with my Latin life and I made up my Latin Life LinkedIn and I started connecting with investment migration professionals and remote work people, and Chase Warrington and this and that.
And I noticed that there's so many of these, like remote work advocate. People, and I can't quite figure out what they actually do other than You're talking about me? No, I'm just, other than advocate, but like in a corporate environment type of thing. No, I know what
Curtis Duggan: you mean. It's like a they write in that copywriting style but it's within a company and it's I'm trying to think of an example, but it might be something like remote work is not just a phase, remote work is this, here are the six best practices of remote work.
And it's is this a job? Is this just an opinion? Is this just a hobby? What is the, I know the flavor of what you mean. Are you saying that it's interesting to you off-putting to you? Is it like, do you resonate with this or do you feel like it's alien to you?
Like what's your reaction to seeing all this content like that? I don't know. I just feel like
Vance: it's missing some kind of oomph, it's just like content for content's sake or
Curtis Duggan: something? Yeah, there's definitely I think there's, I'm even jealous or envious a bit of some of the more I've written about stuff and I'm I like to think about trends and technology, what's gonna happen.
But there's that kind of there's that kind of Hunter s Thompson esque, journalist in the middle of the jungle type of writing that some of your guests are really good at. Yeah. That is very different from the LinkedIn crowd, and I think it's just it's where to place that needle.
I think if you're, it's where to be on that spectrum. I definitely could write something that's about I was in this neighborhood and was drinking on a Saturday night, and then this is what happened at two in the morning. I don't, I'm older now. I don't do as much of that, but there's, there's some stories that could be told.
But it's I'm yeah, I don't go there. I'm a, I'm like a Jerry Seinfeld. I'm not a Dave Chappelle or whatever, I just I just skip that part, but then, I get jealous and envious where I'm like, oh yeah, okay. These guys are going hard into that aspect of it almost.
That's the entire thing. And that's, it's very compelling in a way that plain vanilla remote work advocacy content is often not compelling at all.
Vance: Yeah, I think what I would say is that, My guests don't talk about how, the world of work is changing. They're actually actively changing the world of work themselves.
Yeah. By, by living interesting lives and doing stuff like dude, like my friends just can't understand how I do what I do. I am hitting up like a new waterfall or volcano or whatever every single day and somehow getting all
Curtis Duggan: my work done. I was just gonna say maybe on that front when you think about communicating what you do, and then there's an audience back home or whatever that doesn't get it, what is it that you think that they don't get?
We're, it's still, it's, this is still niche. The vast majority doesn't get it. Do you have any psychological theory on the average Ian being like no. I need to buy a house in a Toba Coke and get a variable rate mortgage and I'll. I won't lay on the Canadian accent too thick, but there's just, the vast majority of people still don't
Vance: get it.
Yeah. There was something I wanted to mention earlier when we were talking about mon monkey branching, which is that if you want to do like a slow monkey branch approach where you know you're gonna wait till you get to the remote job and then go remote after you get the job, more conservative approach, what I would suggest is to do a recon mission of a week or two and go to Columbia, go to Argentina, go to Mexico, whatever Brazil, and just take it all in and take notes.
Maybe visit a couple cities that are at the top of your list that you think maybe have the right mix of amenities and stuff that you're looking for. Maybe you want to check out Florian Opolis. Maybe you wanna check out Buenos Aires. Who knows? But go do the recon mission. 'cause it's just going to it's really just gonna concretize it in your mind more and make it more real and make, and just basically, Sustain your motivation while you're doing all the trials and tribulations of all the job interviews or all the other, random things that need to happen to set up your life in a more remote focused way.
'cause it's a bit hard to be like, okay I'm gonna switch my whole life up to be remote. I'm gonna get the remote credit card and the remote health insurance and this and that with without having, tasted from the fruit. So definitely go check it out first just so you know what you're missing.
And I think that gives you like a much, much better idea. You know what I mean?
Curtis Duggan: Yeah, no I think that's a great approach and can't stress enough how the, consider a remote job. Take baby steps, grab the monkey branches, do a recon mission is a great approach. I think I hear my girlfriend's home and I'm 15 minutes are my standard one hour slot.
So I might have to move to wrap up here, but just like we discussed, once you get going it's like you got enough to talk about for two or three hours effortlessly. So we'll have to do another episode again soon. I'll, we'll trade, trade back. I've been on your podcast once, but whenever the rotation opens up and the long list of people on your podcast for a repeat episode on my Latin life, I humbly offer my services to come back.
But I'm sure you've got an endless queue of people that wanna come on there. But yeah, one way or another, let's do it again in another hour or two.
Vance: Absolutely. What's the the game plan for remotely serious? Tell me a little bit about like the guests
Curtis Duggan: and this and that. Game plan is the most entertaining remote work podcast in the world.
It may not be the most informative, it may not be the most focused on Latin America. It may not be the most, best practices for enterprise teams, but I just wanna build the number one most entertaining remote work podcast in the world and find advertisers that want to go along on that journey.
I've already, identified a few. I've got some friends, and former, business partners on my niche, ss e o site wavier that I've advertised before that are great candidates for this kind of thing. But I'm focused on the vision of something that is, Entertaining for people that are interested in remote work, you know that's a hard thing to do.
What does that mean? Funny? Does that mean charismatic? Does that mean I don't know what it means yet, but I'm just putting that up on the whiteboard. No,
Vance: I like that. It's an attention economy.
Curtis Duggan: Yeah. I'm an avid listener of other remote work podcasts. I, it's almost 50% of my podcast feed, my Latin life, that remote life about abroad.
I listen to all of them. I love all of them. So
Vance: are there any other ones you wanna sh shout out? I'm just curious. So we got Chase, we got Miko yourself. I
Curtis Duggan: don't know how often he publishes, but I do enjoy Gonzalo Hall's podcast. I think it's. Remote work movement. I'll get this all correct in the show notes.
I don't know, I think he publishes not on a weekly basis. It's every once in a while, but I often, I love anytime Liam Martin and the running remote folks they're a little bit more focused on running remote, what companies can do and like the, and companies going remote. So it's more on the corporate side.
But I still, I'm still interested. I, again, I don't know the publishing schedule for that. And it may be offline right now. In terms of an actual podcast. This is not specifically Remote work podcast, but I listen religiously to Richard Beckon's, number one, Costa Rica Real Estate and Investment Podcast.
It's very focused on Costa Rica, so if that's not your thing, you might not be interested. They don't talk about all of, central America. It's Costa Rica only. But he, we did a crossover episode that's coming out. It's gonna already have come out when you listen to this right now if you're listening.
So you can go listen to it now. And I think that's just the number one Costa Rica Real Estate and Investment podcast. That's a bit more niche.
Vance: No, that's cool. That's like the perfect type of stuff I like, so I'll take a look out for that. Dude, I'm I know you wanna wrap up. I'm just super jealous of the name remotely serious.
I think it's an excellent name. Very well done on that, whoever came up with that.
Curtis Duggan: Thanks. And I wouldn't say this just to return the compliment if I didn't believe it, but I think my Latin life nails it too. There's no question what you're gonna get when you subscribe. Especially with the pink background, the palm tree, the font.
I think you're doing all right with your own brand for sure already. So I appreciate the
compliment.
Vance: Sick man. I'm glad we got the chance to catch up.
Curtis Duggan: Yeah. Thanks Vance. Let's do it again sometime and yeah, I hope to see you I r l at one of your one of your events sometime when I can, we can make it down there.
Yeah, it'd be great. Sweet.