Menu
Transcript will be available soon, stay tuned!
0:03
Chase Warrington
Hey, what’s going on everyone, welcome to another episode about abroad where it’s my job to introduce you to people who have built amazing lives for themselves in various foreign corners of the globe. We’re talking with expats and thought leaders about moving abroad, remote work, visas, and all the fun and practical knowledge that you need to know to follow in their footsteps. If you’ve ever dreamed of making a life for yourself overseas, maybe working remotely or embracing long-term travel, retiring or studying abroad, or even just taking a peek inside life beyond your borders, you’ve landed in the right place.
This episode is brought to you in partnership with wonders of wealth, one of the greatest challenges, and also one of the greatest opportunities for digital nomads, and expats who are building businesses abroad in the world of international taxes. It’s not the most fun subject to talk about. But it’s one of the most important and confusing that I hear about all the time from those of you in the audience. So I had Kathy on the show before she was the CEO of wonders wealth, and afterward, I became a customer of hers because her global tax strategy design course is incredible. It walks you through all the steps that you need to take to take advantage of the international tax system that is set up to help those of us that are living this international lifestyle so highly recommended, you can find the link in the show notes for her global tax strategy design course. Check it out. And let me know what you think. My guest today is a true pioneer of remote work and slow Matt ism as he refers to it. Liam Martin is the co-founder and CMO at Time Doctor, one of the leading remote-first companies out there with people spread across the world. He’s also the co-founder of running remote, which is the largest remote work conference in the world, which I was fortunate enough to attend in Montreal a few months ago. And he’s also a new author of a book called running remote, which we talk a little bit about today. So as someone who has traveled around the world both by himself and also now as a family man with a young child, he can share a lot with us from digital nomad visas to running remote teams and everything in between. So it was a lot of fun talking with Liam today. I enjoyed this one, and I hope you will as well please help me welcome Liam abroad.
2:33
Liam Martin
A couple of weeks ago, it was amazing. Because I put up a story, me and my wife and my almost two-year-old daughters could get her on for free. We went to Lisbon for about two weeks. And there were like eight people that popped out of Instagram and my social saying, Hey, I’m in Lisbon here too. And it’s awesome. Because you get that alone group of digital nomads, where if you are tied into this community, you’re never going to have a lack of friends. Yeah.
2:56
Chase Warrington
So I mean, that’s one of the things that I think a lot of people are afraid of when they try to venture out beyond their little community where they’ve lived their whole lives or where they’ve settled down. For the time being, they’re afraid that they’re going to lose that community. And I’ve always found that super interesting because that’s one of the great myths, right is once you step outside that circle, you find this whole wide world of a circle that it can be inclusive and connected across the entire globe and you show up to you know, show up to one place and you’re like, you instantly have a community around you. And I’ve never really fallen into the trap of thinking like, Okay, well, I’ll just be alone. If I go to this place. Like there’s always somebody around. Yeah,
3:33
Liam Martin
I’ve rarely had an instance in which I’ve put out like, Oh, I’m going to Barcelona or I’m going to Lisbon, or meta gene. And I haven’t had at least half a dozen people that have reached out to say, Hey, what’s up? The other thing that’s cool too, is even if that doesn’t happen for you, you can go to some of these digital nomad or expat meetups. And you’ve got a network of people that are in the same kind of tribe as you and are excited about, you know, the same type of things as you are. So for those people that are thinking to themselves, Oh, this is scary. I don’t want to kind of make that initial jump to me. I don’t think you have any excuses.
4:08
Chase Warrington
Yeah, I agree. Do you recall when it’s funny, you mentioned that because do you recall when you and I met for the first time I do.
4:14
Liam Martin
It was both a horrible and a fantastic thing. At the same time we were going to a conference, I’ll tell the story. We’re going to a conference and I told this conference, we need Wi-Fi, I need Wi-Fi. I’m going to be making a call today. That was when I was synchronous. And in part, you guys helped me move more to an asynchronous perspective towards my work, but I said listen, I need to do like eight hours of zoom calls every day. And if those zoom calls break down, I’m screwed. So they put me about a mile and a half away from I don’t know if I told you the first part of the story. I went half away from the venue and it was out in the countryside at this beautiful old Villa and they forgot about it. I messaged them because I had no access to it anywhere and I’m looking on Google Maps. I mean, Spanish didn’t even work. I downloaded Spanish but it didn’t work. because we were in northern Spain, which was Catalonia and I knew that Igor, who is the organizer, and co-organizer of the running remote would peak there in four days. So I just thought to myself, Okay, this is a good opportunity for me to not eat anything for four days. Try that out. So that was the longest period in which I didn’t consume anything. And it was a, it was a cool experience for me, but then I’m like, okay, four days equals here. I’m like, Igor, don’t even talk, get right back in the car. Go somewhere to get something to eat. And so we get to this place, the venue, and I’m in line to be able to get some pizza. And then like three people before me, they ran out of nowhere, and I was like, I need to go somewhere else immediately. I gotta go get a burger. Like, I can’t, I can’t deal with that. And then long term, we ended up grabbing a whole bunch of people going back to that Villa we like cooked up a ton of barbecue. Amir ended up being almost a little kind of scared of Emir because I got like two to fours, Canada, we call them two fours, like a 24-pack of beer. And then he’s like, no, no, we need way more than that. And I was like, There’s 10 here. And he’s like, no, no, we need way more than that. And he grabbed like, over 100 beers. And I was like, how drunk do you think that we’re supposed to get pretty drunk?
6:14
Chase Warrington
It was a ton of fun because of the foot of the Catalonian hillside. I can’t believe they forgot about you, that sort of underscores. It was not the greatest of conferences I’m sure at that time doctors or dentists ever attended. But it brought us together and we built a friendship and a bond between the Time Doctor and the dentist over barbecue and beer. So these are where the greatest of alliances are forged, I guess
6:34
Liam Martin
For sure, I mean, even off of that every conference is a really interesting one because I also ended up getting a job or John from Mindvalley. I remember his name, but I mean, I’ve been on his podcast about three or four times. And we’ve built a fantastic relationship. So you know, most conferences are very rarely a waste, even if they’re not gone perfectly.
6:54
Chase Warrington
Speaking of conferences, you guys just finished running a remote event, which I don’t think I’ve had a chance to speak to since then. But I just want to take the chance to tell you what a fantastic job that was such an awesome experience and for people that think it’s weird to hear a bunch of remote work nerds are excited about coming together in person. I mean, it was such an awesome experience to get to meet a bunch of people, network, learn and just connect with all these people who I’ve gotten to know virtually. But bringing them together in one place there in Montreal was a special man, you guys did a fantastic job.
7:26
Liam Martin
Oh, thanks a lot. I feel it. A lot of people kind of poke around but it is having a physical conference about remote work, and what’s going on here, but the reality is that remote work isn’t working from home. And I love that the media is taking that term work from home because we can divide it from what I think is remote work, you need to meet in person from time to time when we go synchronous, like let’s go deep, right? Let’s go in person, let’s meet together, let’s communicate, let’s exchange information. And running remotely is just that place or hopefully the remote work community at least that’s what we built it for. As opposed to individual companies that have their team retreats we’re just kind of replicating that. But for the Raider remote work, do
8:08
Chase Warrington
Do you guys do retreats of any kind at any time, doctor, we do
8:13
Liam Martin
We do too. So we do a company retreat every year. And then we do a departmental retreat. So that’s generally the most that we want to spend. Because those ended up costing us quite a bit of money. They’re probably around a seven-figure price point when we look at once all the dust settles, which is very, very expensive. But I think that the ROI is there. You can’t directly measure it, we have looked at things like does MPs go up the quarter after having a physical company retreat or not. And it does a little bit, there are some interesting indicators. But fundamentally for us, it’s just getting everyone together. And it’s a huge perk to work in a company in which you get to go on a free vacation for a week or two and hang out with some people that hopefully you’ve built deeply.
8:59
Chase Warrington
I would like to ask your opinion, I agree with you. 100%. And you use that word perk and I’m wondering how far this will go because I kind of think like, okay, looking back a little bit like when the Googleplex became a thing, and like having a cool office and ping pong tables and beer kegs and bring your dog to work day became a like thing. This was exciting for people. And it was something that attracted and retains talent for this next generation of the future of work. Do you think the retreat off-site and doing them at a high level can be something that people look to at a company and say, you know, that’s a differentiator, or is it just too much of an add-on,
9:36
Liam Martin
You know, it’s that you bring up a really good point, which is that no one’s advertised that aggressively, saying like, do you want to go? You’ve always had a dream of traveling and this kind of communicates to the digital nomad side that there are a lot of remote workers. I think talking about the great resignation happening last year. I think we’re going to have a great migration this year when you see that all of these jobs are now truly location independent because there isn’t a scary virus that may or may not kill you, a lot of these people are going to be moving everywhere. And they want to be able to feed into that. So like we have, the way that we do it is we identify three cities as a team, and the internal prep team identifies three cities that we want to go to. So like let’s say, it’s Chang, Gu Barcelona, and maybe Abu Dhabi. And then we vote on that. And it’s an interactive process with a lot of our team members able to get everyone focused and say, Yeah, okay, well, we’re all gonna go to Abu Dhabi. And everyone’s excited about it. And they think about it for you know, months beforehand, it is a pretty cool perk, because how many people if you how many people go on vacation to really interesting exotic locations over 10 years, I bet you the average person maybe goes like, they go to Cancun, I don’t really call that something exotic or interesting. But like, you know, if you said over 10 years, working with a company, he went to Abu Dhabi, boo, boo, Barcelona, somewhere in South Africa, magazine, all these cool areas, that would be a huge perk to me. And that’s what we provide to our members every year. So it could be a good perk, but we need to have blog posts written about it. Like we need people to be like when you go to the Googleplex. And you get the free lunches, and the ping pong tables and all this kind of stuff. There were so many articles written about that. And we need to have that for work.
11:22
Chase Warrington
Yeah, I think it’s one of those things that are like remote teams and yourself like you’re, you know, you’re a world traveler as we’ve, I’m coming to you today from Germany and traveling around a good bit myself. Like, I think we can kind of take it for granted sometimes, like, it’s just part of it’s baked into the fabric of our life now, right? But for a lot of people, that’s not necessarily the case. And it’s pretty exciting to think about joining a company and getting a salary having fully remote work. And then also Oh, yeah, by the way, you get to go on these badass trips a couple of times a year, I think it can be a cool selling point.
11:52
Liam Martin
Yeah, well, particularly for people that have the travel bug. And I think that is, there are a lot more people that have it or don’t have it. I think that digital nomadism is going to be on an exponential growth curve over the next 36 months. So much so that I ended up actually investing in a co-working space during the drop pandemic, because I just believe that when you think about the infrastructure that’s required, or you know, pre-pandemic, there were 5 million digital nomads. And now the estimates are that there’s about 50 million, and I would probably, I would probably think that there’s going to be about 250 million of them with the next five, there are some restrictions, right? Like you have a first-world passport. Are you able to do this legally? A lot of people are not. I think these digital nomad visas are doing great things to be able to make it easier to work legally in these locations, and particularly get large corporations working into the process. If you can get like the world will change when IBM says you can be a digital nomad, and I think inside of the digital nomad community, that should be a really clear focus. How do you get I was talking with EVO from a remote, how because he was in Lisbon when I actually flew in and it wasn’t quite clicking for him? And then I kind of told them, like, do you need to have KPMG, Deloitte, IBM, you know, Microsoft, the old, old tier guys to say, digital nomadism. And remote work is something that we’re okay with doing. They’re okay with remote work in a hybrid situation right now, which is great. And that’s a huge step forward. But once you get to location independence, you’re going to see a massive, massive influx of people what I am going to call us have called Rich dumb nomads, as opposed to the previous tier of nomads, which weren’t making that much money, but they didn’t need to because they were happy, right? If you’re traveling on $20,000 a year, but you’re in a lot of countries, you don’t need that amount of money. You’re very, very happy. But if you’re making 250 to $500,000 a year, you’ll show up in Bali and say Wow, $2,000 for like a four-bedroom villa with you know with a housekeeper. Yes, please, because I’m paying $12,000 a month for two bedrooms in San Francisco. So I think that that is just and I’m seeing it already happening qualitatively just no one’s following that dataset. So I think once we do start to see that I think that’s going to be pressed for the coming probably in the next
14:08
Chase Warrington
12 months. Well, but yeah, I mean, that’s, that’ll be here before we know it. Like things are moving so quickly now in this space. And I think so much faster than we could have imagined five years ago, pre-pandemic. You’ve been doing this for a long time. You’ve been leading remote teams traveling around as a digital nomad and such, but I mean, I don’t even I don’t know if you could have foreseen 510 years ago, where we are today, where we’re talking about in 12 months, that kind of reality could be in front of us.
14:33
Liam Martin
Yeah, I mean, so in February of 20 24% of the US workforce was remotely, and by March that was forced by like, snap, just boom, and just everything changed beyond my wildest expectations, to be completely honest. But the issue is that people got a taste of remote work in the wrong context. And I think this is actually why there’s this big pushback towards remote work. I don’t know if you saw the newest data that just came out from the US government and Uh, you know, you can use the US numbers as a really good corollary to most other Western countries. But we’re at 7% of the US workforce currently working remotely. But if you include hybrid, right 30, and those numbers are now making their way back up. So we’ve hit basically remote work like solidity point, or back to Office linear point. And now we’re pulling ourselves right back up into that curve. They were good at running remote conferences, and there were these guys that slack wrote this book, how the future works, which they handed out at the conference. And they have this awesome dataset where they query 10,000 companies every quarter on remote work. So they’re now starting to see the numbers pull back up, which is really interesting and cool, we’re past I think, the back-to-the-office wave. And now there’s going to be counter-culture. I don’t want to work in an office. It kind of dragged me here the entire time. I’m pretty much done, I’m gonna go find a job somewhere else.
15:52
Chase Warrington
There’s so much that we can do, I think, to help nudge it along. And that’s exciting to hear that we’ve kind of hit that I think we had that spike, you know, right after the pandemic began like you mentioned 45%. Now we’re at 7%. And now climbing again, and what I think it does there are the basics, you know, people have access to work when they may not have if they’re living in a rural area or something like that. But also for people that are listening to this podcast and are really interested in location independence, digital nomadism, traveling being an expat living in another country for some time, it opens up so many doors for them. And one of the things that I am always really interested to learn from people like yourself, who have been doing this longer than most is what can people do now and in today’s environment to prepare themselves for that kind of lifestyle. And maybe you could provide some context about your history as a nomad, as, as a founder, as someone who’s been doing this for a long time from various corners of the world?
16:52
Liam Martin
Sure. So I consider myself a slow man. So I’m spending three months in the location at minimum, I don’t want to necessarily advertise them too much. But it is a great product. If I’m moving to a new location, I’ll usually land at Selena and their co-working hostel, high-end co-working hostel spaces, so you can get a good single room for about $100 per night. And I’ll usually take a week there if I can. I look out but work for an extended amount of time because you’ve got a massive digital nomad, as always rotating through that co-working space. And then from there, I’ll just start hammering therapies and then going into personal relations. And that’s where I’ll book along. So I very rarely book a long-term stay that sees space myself, I’ve tried that before. And it didn’t work. You know, they say we have good internet, but gotta actually run your test to be able to arm those types of things before you go. I mean, to me, you need to be able to make sure Number one, you’ve got a really good source of income. And that’s either that you have a remote work agreement lawyer, which is by far the best or you’re generating at least $2,000 US per month for you to have enough stability able to travel someplace that is that have historically been a digital nomad, so you need to be able to have that stability in place. I’ve had so many people that I’ve seen at meetups and downs. Oh yeah, I just started my digital nomad life bidden you know, they’re two months into it, and they have no job. They’re burning cash. And I know that they’re just going to bind back to wherever the hell they came from six months later because they just can’t turn this into a long-term lifestyle. And for me, that’s what I’m interested in is don’t make this a gap year thing, make this a lifestyle, right, like turn this into something that can be sustainable, because it truly is probably in my opinion, one of the most valuable things that you can do in your life is the ability to be able to travel and generate income at the same time. One of my most respected writers of the writers that I respected most is Mark Twain back in the 1800s, He was the first digital nomad he traveled to 42 Different countries which were incredibly difficult by the way at his time because there were no planes you had to jump on a bus I had to jump on a boat to be able to get anywhere and trains in it were very, very difficult for him. But his perspective was that travel enriched his mind and his body in ways that you know, other people have other experiences, so I think it’s really important to be able to do that. And there’s never been a cheap time in history to be able to get that type of edge.
19:33
Chase Warrington
Yeah, take advantage of the opportunities right, I mean, I think for myself, like I had to make so many sacrifices to obtain location independence and work that I could take on the road with me and live this lifestyle that I live now. And the very awesome thing I think is that people that are working for you, people that are working as a dualist and hopefully in the future IBM and KPMG are of the world that craves this independence and freedom. You know, I think the opportunity to do So now is just at your fingertips. And it just takes reaching out and grabbing it. And then as you said, I think taking you to know, preparing a little bit, and not just winging it completely. Another big thing that I think people often overlook is visas and how long they’re going to be able to stay someplace and what it’s like hopping from one country to another. I made some mistakes in the past. And so anyway, I mean, I think just doing some prep work ahead of time can go a long way.
20:23
Liam Martin
Yeah, well, you want to get into that side of it. Generally, I would stay in a location for less than three months, not anywhere. If you haven’t set up an EMR, which lawyer record would you work with to be able to make sure that you’re legally allowed to work in that particular area? That’s super important. But then I also think so there’s this debate right now or do we go with EMRs? Or do we go with digital nomads? I think that digital nomad visas are a better long-term solution for the massive, inflexible people that are interested in becoming digital nomads, as yours costs money, and an employer is a person that has to pay for it, not you. And you could voluntarily be asked, Oh, yeah, I’m gonna pay $500 a month to have a car so that I end up here, but lawyers are pretty terrified of this stuff. Like I’ve been in rooms with large corporations. And when they talk about their remote work agreements, it’s rarely about like, oh, well, how should we work remotely? It’s like, can we work remotely legally, because we have a billion dollars worth of payroll tax issues sitting above our head that we have to figure out, as you know before we can even start a conversation so that the digital nomads angle, I think, is the best way to do it. And they’re all firing up right now. Super cool. Some of them are kind of dumb. I looked at the Bali one, and it’s a five-year visa, but I think you have to hold like $100,000 Bro, I don’t know how many people have 100 grand in escrow for like, you just literally give the government of Indonesia 100 grand. And that’s basically to ensure that if you get in a car accident or hurt yourself or anything like that, they can stabilize you and get you out of the country. That’s not a problem. And that’s still so much money that can’t very, very few digital nomads can actually afford that. So they need to kind of make switches to that. But once they do, the world is going to be your oyster and you’re going to be if you have a Western passport, yeah, you’re going to be able to travel wherever
22:15
Chase Warrington
it’s funny you mentioned but I mean, Bali in that particular instance seems so funny to me as well. Because I mean I think you spend a lot of time there if I’m not mistaken and we know people that spend a ton of time there. So I don’t understand why people would go that route, like why the government even thinks people would go that route when people already know it and I mean, it’s a nomad Mecca.
22:36
Liam Martin
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, unfortunately, in the vast majority of digital nomadism, there’s a product Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. And the government knows that that’s the engine of their economy. And yet, they’ve set up such a stupid program off the mark that no one will be able to afford it. So I was really surprised that they went in that direction. And other countries are saying, Yeah, listen, prove to me that you make over 30 grand a year like show me your payroll slips and you’re in like, that’s good. You know, ]and you’re also the biggest part of this, which if you’re looking at digital nomad visas, we did a big video about it. 27 different ones that I think the best make sure that that digital nomad, ESA relinquishes tax authorities. So that’s super, super critical because you don’t want to go to a country for six months. And then all of a sudden, the government, the country says, Oh, well, you owe us income tax for the months that you were working there. Right. And some digital nomad visas don’t put that line in. And others do you just want to be able to go into a country where it’s like, we’re not going to tax you like, here’s your, here’s five grand, here’s my visa, I get to chill here for a year tax-free, and you got to deal with your taxes. You know, where are you where you were located? If you’re American for example, you always have to pay your taxes. But if you’re paid again, there’s like a geographic-based tax. Maybe this is too nerdy for everybody. But people must figure it out. Because if you don’t, then number one, your employer gets the brunt of this because they very rarely go after the employee. They go after the employer for payroll taxes, because they can get that money from them. And the larger the company is, the more they’re gonna go after them because they know that they have pockets. If you have 10,000 employees like Microsoft, they would be like, Oh, well, you have an office here. Katie, I’m just gonna use KPMG No, it’s not we have an office, you have an office here KPMG we’re just going to sue the office, we’re going to sue that KPMG like that employee was working for KPMG Spain as an example and wasn’t working for KPMG us and we charge more tax here and in there’s fees connected to it and because we didn’t do it properly, that way that kind of thing. So really important to be able to have that Nomad visa, we’re not going to tax you
24:53
Chase Warrington
That is so important and not something that I realized at all. I’m not having to deal with that off the top of my head so I had not thought about that lineup. We’ll be right back to the show after a quick break. For a note from our sponsor. This season is brought to you by my good friends over at insured nomads. They’re the absolute best in the business when it comes to providing health travel and medical insurance for nomads, expats, and just all forms of world travelers. I know insurance is often something that’s overlooked when we’re fantasizing about traveling the world. But it’s an absolute necessity that we address this because often the policy you have in your home country isn’t going to cover you while you’re abroad. And it’s also a requirement as a lot of people may not realize to buy private travel or expat insurance as it’s called sometimes to obtain a visa or even enter certain countries. So, fortunately, there are companies like insured nomads to help us with this. Not only do they have excellent coverage and great prices, but they’re also providing a first-class experience with additional perks and best-in-class technology via their app. It’s an amazing experience, I can’t recommend it enough. Now, this is a company that was built by world travelers for world travelers, so they know what it’s like to find yourself in a difficult medical situation abroad. And they want to keep you from having that same bad experience. So the next time you’re planning a trip abroad, whether it’s for a week or a lifetime checkout and shred nomads via the link in the show notes. If you’ve made it this far into the episode and you’re still enjoying yourself, then I would love to ask a quick favor, open up the app that you’re using to listen to this podcast. And leave a quick review. You can do this on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and just about any platform that allows podcast listening. Now, if you can’t find that in the interface of the app, then scroll down in the show notes and find this podcast.com/about abroad and you should be able to leave it from there. Thanks so much, guys. We appreciate it and hope you enjoy the rest of the show. You mentioned you made that video, it would be awesome. Well, we’ll link to that in the show notes off the top of your head. Are there any digital nomad pieces in particular that you like from this standpoint, or any state? Yeah,
26:56
Liam Martin
so Costa Rica is coming out with a good one. We have to prove income and that’s it and they are not going to tax you. But Costa Rica has 1% income tax. So you’re good.
27:06
Chase Warrington
I hope they tax me.
27:07
Liam Martin
Yeah, I made like 1% would be awesome.
27:10
Chase Warrington
Yeah, I welcome that.
27:11
Liam Martin
Yeah. And then most places in the Caribbean islands are saying we’re just going to rescind all of our tax obligations. Thailand is thinking about one from what I remember or they’ve come out with one where they’re going to rescind tax obligation. I think generally that’s the way that everything’s been right now but it is again just important to check the fine print. Oh there. Croatia is also a great location and they are on their digital nomad visa. They are receiving tax from what I remember. I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on a podcast so please speak like you do this research yourself. Do not just trust me and go for it because I don’t want you to come back six months saying hey, you told me this and it’s not true.
Do not use Liam’s caveat here; he is not a financial adviser or a lawyer. We have a really awesome episode about one of our most popular episodes from a couple of seasons back about the digital nomad visa in Croatia. Jess Romana was on here and shared her whole story about going through the process. She was one of the first people to get it and they made it super easy. I think they set the standard for like they’ve got it passed through their government super quick and made it easy for people to apply. You don’t have to prove a lot, you don’t have to pay tax, and it is all based on the first year. You know, everything in these first 12 months, but so far, that one looks great. And I’m also really impressed with what Costa Rica is doing. Costa Rica just does it right. Like I feel like they just do so many things. Right. And from an expat standpoint, from a digital nomad standpoint, I mean, they tourism standpoint, they’ve they’ve done sustainability as well as they’ve just nailed it and a lot of areas.
What I find very frustrating about countries not recognizing the opportunity for a digital nomad is there are so many dollars invested instead of tourism. Every country in the world has a massive tourism board and tourism department, but digital nomads, like tourists that stay for six months, consume no government services whatsoever. They eat at restaurants, right? They don’t have the routes that they would have. If you were a citizen you go in, you spend a ton of money and also that money is coming from outside of the country. Like you’re not taking a job away from anyone else. If you’re a digital nomad that works for a company and us as an example. And you’re in Spain. And so it just still doesn’t compute, in my mind, why they’re so resistant towards this process because it’s such a net bore to our economy and I think they’re coming to that realization quite soon. But it’s still a process and I think we’re probably going to see countries like Croatia that are going to see a huge boom in their economy, maybe 5% of their GDP might come from digital nomadism future and a lot of countries are going to look to say I want to
29:48
Chase Warrington
Yeah, I think I saw some statistics the other day that said like in Bermuda, has had a relatively small number of people come through their digital nomad program. It’s already injected over 100 mils In dollars into the economy with a pretty low number as they’ve just scratched the surface. And I mean, that’s 100 mils that just flowed into the economy that wouldn’t have been there otherwise, and that without really doing a whole lot, and I think the key there is like you mentioned this earlier is to make it easy, make it simple for people to get in. And then also don’t try to complicate it with the tax bit, because that’s been a very short-sighted look at what the look of the cash injection that’s going to come. And then there’s, there’s, I mean, there’s a lot, there’s a lot of other elements we could talk about, but just from pure economics, that’s where it can make sense for these countries. And I think if they start looking at us, and that way, then it benefits all. Absolutely. I’m very curious to ask you. How did everyone ask you this for a long time? It just never popped up in conversation. How did becoming a father change your digital nomad lifestyle, if at all it did
30:52
Liam Martin
in both positive and negative waves, to be honest, so I just had my we just went to Lisbon about a month and a half ago. And for anyone interested in a little bit of a growth hack, if your child is under two take it to fly for free on most airlines, however, if you fly on points, they will not allow you to add your infant under to that point docket. So you have to do it after the fact. It was a complicated process for us. Thankfully, my assistant and I think that there are a lot of business ideas that are going to come out of this new evolution of digital nomads. The biggest one right now is education. So I currently live in Canada and live in French Canada, Montreal tech. And there’s a lot of really good infrastructure programs, there’s like $10 a day daycare as an example. And that would cost on average $100 a day if I was doing it directly without the government. So there needs to be an education system. And I’ve invested in a couple of these companies where you have the same curriculum in multiple different locations all over the world. And they’re all synced up perfectly. So if you go to if you’re getting the first grade, and you want to do three months in South Africa, but then you want to do the next three months in Bali, you can move your kid to Green School as an example in Ubud Bali that follows this program, and down to the week, they have the same issue that you’re going to provide students, this is something that parents will pay exorbitant amounts of money for so that their children can have like a good stable education. I know that. I don’t know if you’ve had co Hotjar on Yeah. But yeah, Ken’s been doing this for, you know, decades,
32:34
Chase Warrington
I met him also at the same conference I met you at, that’s where I met Ken. And yes, he’s been
on the podcast and shared his story. It’s awesome.
32:42
Liam Martin
So those are like, I think, for digital nomadism to continue to expand, you need those other aspects of infrastructure to continue with it. Because the reality is that the vast majority of digital nomads are unmarried single people that don’t have children. Like, I don’t know what the real number is. But I would probably say it’s 90% Plus, and so many people want to pursue digital nomadism. But because they have children, they really can’t do it at the same level they just need those extra years. And I take a lot of my parenting kind of goals from Ken, I’m really aspiring to go in his direction, where he was telling me his kids were learning ancient Egyptian history. So they just flew to Cairo for three months to like, go to the pyramids and check it out. That’s so cool. Like, that’s the dream, right? Like, think about that as an educational background. It’s amazing. It’s awe-inspiring. And so to me, just offering my children, my child, these types of opportunities, it’s such a huge advantage. And I think there is a huge advantage in the market too. Because if I have Stella, who’s two years old now, and she’s 20, and she’s like, Yeah, I’ve been to 40 Different countries, spent more than three months in 40 different countries, and like I can speak seven different languages. And I, you know, I know everything about it, anything that’s just going to make her so much more of an effective human being let alone an employee instead of, oh, that’s kind of where I’m at right now. It’s like, I’m a little frustrated that the platforms are not in place. And that’s the thing that I want to make sure over the next 12 to 24 months is infrastructure in place where if you have a kid that’s in the first grade, that doesn’t mean that it’ll go back.
34:31
Chase Warrington
I love that and I’m also a huge fan of following these companies that are trying to evolve and iterate in that space. I’ve been following boundless life, which is one in particular that I like creating these multi-month programs with education looped in and you travel as a group to different places around the world. And Ken’s story is so inspiring. I mean, yeah, like, like the Cairo one you were mentioning, he told me they were studying marine biology and so they went to row 10, one of the scuba diving hotspots in the world. and spent a bunch of time scuba diving and studying marine biology there with his kids. And you’re like, like, what? How can you argue with that experience, they’re learning multiple languages, and they’re interacting with people around the world, which is becoming a very critical skill to have to be able to communicate across cultural and language barriers in today’s workforce. So I feel like it’s like the ultimate education actually, but somehow still kind of viewed as like, alternative. And it’ll be interesting to watch how that evolves, I think,
35:26
Liam Martin
yeah, to me, I mean, I would be hiring those types of people, if they came across my desk, they just don’t currently exist in the current workforce. So I think that we’re at a massive opportunity right now. And I think that there are a lot of businesses like I believe that there will be an education program that pops up either boundless or one of these other companies that will easily be a multi-billion dollar company within the next 24 months. And so you’ve just as that influx of great migration, rich down nomads show up and say, I was chatting with a friend of mine, who’s the digital nomad yesterday, who comes to Montreal for the summers. Summers are world-class here. And he spends a lot of his other time in Thailand. So he spent the winter in Thailand and summer here, he was telling me that he spends $40,000 a year per kid for their education, right? Like, this is not cheap. Like this is expensive stuff. And so he put them into American International School. There are different there’s like the French International School bridge, International School, and American International School, and these are all just different curricula. But unfortunately, they don’t sink properly yet. And to me, they could totally solve the problem by just saying, well, there’s a timeline, and you’re not allowed to kind of just decide to teach module six first, you have to go in order because that would solve all the problems and everyone could go over that with all they wanted to go but you know that there will be a kind of Netflix of education for childhood do educational development, I’m sure
36:54
Chase Warrington
yeah, it’s gonna be really interesting to watch that unfold. Did you guys touch on this at all in the book and run remotely? I know, I told you what, like, drill you on a bunch of questions, but about this, but I mean, I am, I’m fascinated by the whole fact that you guys somehow carved out time to write a freaking book called running remote that while you’re doing the conference and running companies and trying to be a full-time digital nomad, so kudos to you for that. And I do want to take some time to learn a little bit more about what the core of the book is about and who it’s for. Because I have a feeling it’s got to overlap with the type of people that are listening, listening here today,
37:30
Liam Martin
you and Amir inspired me to a degree with regards to the amount of time that I had one of the big unlocked years ago was either you or someone else it was when I was interviewing all of these asynchronous organizations, which is a thesis of the book, basically,
37:46
Chase Warrington
I’d like to take credit, let’s just say.
37:49
Liam Martin
So the statement is you do not own a position, you inhabit a position. So I am not the CMO of the company, I currently inhabit the role of CMO of the company, which means at any moment, I should be able to delegate that responsibility to my direct boards. And effectively no one will miss actually, you know who it was it was dope from, from remote.com. When I think about it now, he was talking about his time at git lab, he left git lab because his wife was going through troubles through their pregnancy left three months, and no one knew that he had left like the systems were that good that everything just happened and a lot of people would get nervous from that. But he said, Wow, this system works like an autonomous organization. An individual is not necessarily a critical part of that entire organization. We’ve built such redundancies inside of the organization that we can pull one or two pieces out and it will still function. So that’s what I did for the book. I had an offer from HarperCollins. And so you know, it was a really good opportunity, fantastic publisher. And I said I’m never going to write a book. And the company says, oh, you know, she writes this, like, it’s really important. There are so many books that are coming out about the subject. And I said, Well, I’ll only write the book if I can write the book about remote work that’s not about remote work. And they were a little bit apprehensive about it and wanted to call the book async and wouldn’t want it to have a remote title. But it’s the thesis that there was this methodology, this way of building a business that dozens, if not hundreds of companies figured out over a decade ago, which I’m calling asynchronous management that we now are using to be able to build companies at a scale that very few other organizations match. And we interviewed a ton of companies in the book that really kind of focus on it. And we show the success stories of all of these remote pioneers. Amir is one of the people who’s the CEO and founder of the newest, recognizing that asynchronous management was a forcing function role before the pandemic because having employees in 50 different countries all over the world difficult for you to be able to have synchronous conversations with them so they had to build a new way of being Managing organizations, which just happened to be an incredibly successful way of running remote works. And that’s the thesis of the book. And I was able to take a year off to be able to do it because and not like completely off, I would say, I reduced my work hours in my regular job from about 30 hours and hours, freeing up 20 hours per week to be able to work on the book over the last like, so it is has been a labor of love for me. And we’ve always been talking about asynchronous organizations. I remember in 2018, we had a really big debate about running remote asynchronous companies, and no one’s written a book on this stuff. It doesn’t exist, right? There is no playbook outside of blog posts on you know, do this blog, there’s stuff GitLab has written a lot of great stuff. There’s some stuff on Basecamp. But no one’s written a definitive async 101 onboarding document. And I hope that there’s a 102 on 103 in the future that other people kind of pick up and move forward with. But the real goal here is there’s a way of building a business, that’s way less stressful, because you’re not constantly interrupted by people asking you questions, because the platform is effectively the manager side of the asynchronous organization. And I’m excited to be able to get it out into the real world, probably people that listen to your podcast, know of it a little bit. But in corporate America, people, you have to talk to people inside of your organization to be able to, you know, get them to succeed. They said, Well, we do talk to people, we just talk to people differently. That’s way less stressful, and weightless synchronous, then that’s, that’s the thesis of the book, I’m so excited to be able to get into the real world, it has been something that I know as a marketer, you probably haven’t experienced this yet. But for me as a digital marketer, usually, like try stuff and you fail, like try something fail and try something else. I’ve never done something where it’s like, I work on something for a year and a half, and then it may fail. Like, usually, for me the most I’ll work on something is a month, oh, we’ll try this new blog post methodology, or we’ll build this Youtube series, and then we’ll just see if it works, right?
42:04
Chase Warrington
And it’s iterative, right? Like, you can take baby steps and you can use
42:09
Liam Martin
It is the definition of the waterfall. It’s not agile marketing, you know, the methodology at all, because you have to build this thing that just takes like a year out of your life to write and get right. And then it may completely fall on its face. I don’t mean, I think it’s going to do okay, the bulk sales have been pre-orders have been pretty nice as it stands now. But the reality, the biggest thing that I need to figure out for people is how they can get their heads around asynchronous management, because as of right now, it is such an alien concept that, you know, when I, when I tell people async did a, I did a conference with Nacho in, in the Canary Islands, and I was talking about asynchronous management. And I’m like, halfway through the presentation. And I’m seeing a lot of like, weird looks in the audience. And I had to pause and I was like, How many of you guys have never heard about asynchronous work, and half the people put up their hands, and I thought, Oh, crap, I just spent a year writing this thing. And the one group that I would think would be understanding of what asynchronous work is, is asking them not to put their hands up. So we’ve got a lot of work to do, unfortunately, hopefully, the book,
43:18
Chase Warrington
we’re still educating the early adopters, which is cool to be at the front, you’re at the front of that wave and have been for some time. I’ve heard people say that writing a book is the hardest thing they’ve ever done. And you know, you’ve done, you’ve done some challenging things, business-wise in your life. Would you agree with that or disagree? Yes. Yeah. wholeheartedly.
43:38
Liam Martin
You could, if you pay me 3 million, I’d read another book. Okay. Like me, it is very stressful. I remember having a meeting actually, with my copy editor. And we work on our Google Docs. And he was a layman towards asynchronous work. So I had to educate him on how to actually write the book asynchronously. We were working on this, I was working on this one page all day where I was trying to break down the concept of the platform as the manager. And he pinged me. And he’s like, Hey, dude, I’m working on the same page all day, like, what’s going on? And he’s seeing what I’m doing. We jumped on for a sink call, which is why I think actually shouldn’t be 100% asynchronous. There are times that you should jump into the synchronous conversation, and then describe the problem to him. And then he said, Oh, well, isn’t it kind of like a platform, the manager? And I was like, of course, yes, that is. And he said, listen in the future, just describe it. And then I’ll process that through and turn to something that you know, is a lot more so very, very difficult for someone who writes emails all day long and processes documents. It was a very difficult way to write but I hope that everyone
44:41
Chase Warrington
And I’m sure people will. I mean, I think it’s like you said you know, you alluded to this we’re still even the people that have been doing this a long time are still educating themselves on how to do this correctly, and the doors that it can open for all of us. Some people are listening to those who want to be digital nomads, some people are wanting to convert their bit businesses to remote or take their business offline and on the road with them. It’s books like these. It’s great blog posts out there. It’s great videos out there of this building in public that are allowing people to start living this dream. And so it’s super important that these kinds of stories are shared and I’m excited to check it out myself, where should people go to find the book like where’s the best place for them to buy it
45:22
Liam Martin
easiest places to go to running remote book.com They’ve got all the links there. And if you buy through there, you’ll also get access to a digital course, a bunch of really great free pieces of software from companies like the train you will and fellow and get a lab and a bunch of other companies. So definitely check out runningremotebook.com And then outside of that if you can’t afford the book or go to the conference, just go to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/runningremote all the talks are up there for free including chases, so you can go and check them out. It’s, I think, a masterclass in remote work.
45:57
Chase Warrington
Yeah, there’s, I mean, there’s so much awesome content, I learned a ton being there in person in Montreal, and then Do peruse through the catalog that you guys have built up there. There are just so many nuggets of gold. So yeah, highly recommended for anybody wanting to adopt more of a running remote style to their business, whether it be large, small, or whatever, it applies to a lot of different sizes and genres. So, Leo, man, I gotta get you out of here. This was awesome. I loved learning a little bit more about your past and the book. huge congrats. It’s awesome to see that it’s finally coming out. And I can’t wait to read it myself. So thanks again. And where is there anywhere else that people should go to find out more about you? Well, we’ll put all this in the show notes. But while we’ve got them
46:40
Liam Martin
No, I’m going to be providing this book for the next three months. @liamremote is generally what I’m on all the socials. So you can grab me there.
46:48
Chase Warrington
Okay. All right, perfect. Well, we will link all of the above in the show notes. So feel free to click around and find out more mainly, go find the book and support. Awesome, man. Great to see you. Thank you as always, and we’ll catch up again soon.
47:02
Liam Martin
Awesome. Thanks for having me.
47:07
Chase Warrington
Thank you for tuning in today from wherever you are in the world. Once again, I’m Chase and this has been another episode about abroad. For those of you wondering how you can best support the show, I have made it super simple for you. Just go over to the show notes of the episode that you’ve just finished listening to and click on one of the two following links about abroad.com/newsletter to get our monthly newsletter, no spam guaranteed, or rate this podcast.com/about abroad where you can quickly and easily leave a review for the show. It’s not just important to me it also helps more wonders just like you find us. Finally don’t forget to subscribe on your podcast platform of choice. And we will see you again next week. Thanks again. Hasta Luego Amigo!
