Travel Wisdom Podcast -travel and learn languages for success and money

Jasper Ribbers is the author of Get Paid for Your Pad which is all about how to make money by renting your place on AirBnB. In March 2010 Jasper gave up his finance career to pursue a lifelong dream: to travel the world full time. To support himself, he runs several online businesses. He shares his adventures with the world through his blog, The Traveling Dutchman, which he also wants to use to inspire others to live their dream.

In this episode we talk about his journey to start listing his apartment in Amsterdam on AirBnB. By doing this he was able to earn over $200 a day all while travelling the world. This money was more than enough to cover his expenses while travelling, especially in cheaper countries. We talk about the importance of having good trustable staff to take care of the place while you are away. Keyless entry, talking to the landlord, telling your neighbors, and listening to your guests.

It has been an absolute headache getting settled in India! I hope that the things I share here will be the worst of anything you will ever experience when moving to a new country or city, it certainly has been for me.

Anytime I move, I always try to remember that things are not the way as I am used to and that I cannot expect immediate results. When I moved to Germany I was frustrated at finding a place for so long and some other differences in the ways of doing things. However, it seems like now in India the struggles are much higher. Although I was warned about this and had done a bit of mental preparation, actually being inside of it has proven to be frustrating and kind of makes me never want to move again.

When we first came to Bangalore we stayed with some friends of my gf from a few years ago. They were very nice in letting us stay at their apartment and we had a nice bed under the foosball table. It was honestly quite comfortable but I wanted to get out because I felt I needed my own place to start getting settled in. I was anxious to move out also because the place I was going to work was a 2 hour bus ride from where we were located. But looking back, it was still a good location and we could be happy to be living there.

After many days of deciding where we wanted to live, either close to work or close to the nightlife, we decided to stay at the Guest House on campus. This was a price friendly option and the living there was quite nice. It also satisfied my curiosity about having a maid clean the house and change the sheets, a potentially expensive option if we did this ourselves. We were sold on the idea the second that we saw it. It being only a few minutes walk from where we were going to do our work was also a big plus. However, it seemed to take a long time to get all the paperwork done for this. Perhaps I was just anxious to get out on my own, but every extra day felt like an eternity.

Finally, after a week we were able to move in. This was about two weeks after we had come to India, honestly we thought this would be much worse! The place was furnished but we still had to get the small things that make it comfortable for living: refrigerator, stove, dishes, utensils, and other small stuff like this. This honestly added up and took considerable time to track down. Since we are students and are both cheap at heart, we wanted second hand items which was a bit hard in our neck of the woods. After about 3 weeks of living in the apartment we had collected everything that we needed.

Another issue was internet. Did I mention I am a podcast host and I need Skype quality internet to work? Our internet was based on a wireless one for the whole Guest House and was only available in certain positions through the window. It was extremely difficult to get things done and Skype was out of the question. We eventually tracked down a wireless router after two weeks and set it all up. But it still didn't work! We had to do some fancy configuration and the guys from IT department came to our apartment to set it up. This was a frustrating extra week while we tried to make it work. I was fine without steady internet for the 3 months prior, but now that I was expecting to have good internet, not having it was really aggravating!! Finally it was fixed about 3 weeks after we came and has been good ever since.

The hardest thing we had to deal with so far was getting SIM cards and replacing my stolen smartphone. This is also something that is incredibly important especially when you have gotten settled in a place and want to do more than just wander around. When you want to be in contact with people it becomes much more necessary. Since a residence permit is required to get anything done, it was absolutely horrible that the Guest House didn't provide ours. We honestly spent maybe 20 hours walking around and asking places if we could get it there. We tried all sorts of documentation that could be accepted, followed people's advice which led to a dead end on more than one occasion. Finally, I bought the used phone I wanted and got the SIM card a full month after arriving in India. Since in Germany a SIM card is something you can buy as an afterthought in a supermarket, I never thought it would've taken 20 hours and one month to get this done.

Finally the traffic here is horrible! This is literally the worst traffic I have ever experienced or even heard about! Since we live in the Northwest side of the city and all the cool events happen in the Southeast side of the city, we have to travel across the city to do anything fun. Since rush hour is all day, we have to spend two hours in a bus to go each way. Four hours of transportation really puts a damper on anything you really want to see. This means that our nights out end up being mostly being in a bus and hanging out with friends for a short time before heading back. We want to buy a motorbike which could speed things up but the current monsoon season is slowing that idea down.

Other than that we have mostly gotten settled into our new home until the end of November. It is starting to be more comfortable with all the luxuries of a real home. Now that all of the hassle is behind us we can focus on our work, meeting with friends, exploring southern India and learning Hindi. This feels nice :)

So after all this complaining about the negatives of Bangalore, I have to say that it really is a very nice city. I honestly want to live here for a good part of the year. I recently heard about the 7, 3, 2 way of living where you spend 7 months in one place, 3 months in another, and 2 months in the last. I really like this idea and am currently thinking about doing 7 months of every year in India, 3 months in Germany, and 2 months in the US.

The biggest plus on the side of Bangalore is the price. As a Westerner coming in the cost of living is really nice. Although there are many places where you can still end up paying western prices for a plate of food or beer, most places are very reasonably priced and you can get a plate of food for $1-2 and a beer for $1.50. With rent for the both of us being less than $150 per month and food being our main expense, it is easy to imagine that each of our monthly expenditures for EVERYTHING being less than $300. I had never been in a place that was so cheap and we can live quite well on $300 a month. If we wanted to really pinch pennies (or paisals here in India) we could probably even get that down to $100 a month and still live quite well with restaurants every day.

Another great advantage here is the entrepreneurial spirit. This city is often called the Silicon Valley of India as it is home to many tech companies such as HP, Microsoft, Oracle, various biotech companies, and aeronautical companies. It really seemed that every Indian I had talked to either in the US or Germany had lived in Bangalore for some time. This is because it is so attractive to young educated people as the place to get your foot in the door on a successful career. The environment here certainly reflects that! I attended many MeetUps and it no longer came as a surprise when people said they had lived in the US or that they worked with companies there. Everybody has dreams of going abroad to make 5x more money.

The startup scene is also quite alive. When you get young, intelligent, scrappy people together ideas start to form and dreams of making big businesses bloom. There are dozens of startup events to teach people how to do the founding process and get people thinking. This is a great interest of mine and am excited to be among the next Indian Steve Jobs, founder of Apple. It really was a welcome relief after being in Germany where the startup scene was not nearly as lively, with only about 20 people in my city interested in this sort of thing. Here, there were about 10 events per week, each with at least 30 people attending each of them!

Finally the weather is quite sublime. It is a constant 60-90F (15-30C) throughout the year and is mostly sunny. We did come at a bad time, during the monsoon season where it rains the most but even this is not bad. The rain, although strong enough to need an umbrella, never lasts more than an hour and you can soon get along with your day if you happen to be stuck out at that time.

So in the end, although it was quite a pain in the ass to get setup, it has been starting to pay off. I hope that being around this entrepreneurial spirit will infect me with some good business ideas. I like to say that Bangalore is a combination of the three main Californian cities: San Francisco for the tech startup spirit, Los Angeles for the infrastructure and traffic, and San Diego for the weather.

Hope to see you here soon!

Chris Christenson is the host of the Amateur Travel Podcast which talks about different locations around the world and what to do and see there. It is essentially an audio travel guide to help plan your trip. This gives the best long term value and is evergreen content.

In this show we talk about Chris's travel experience and experience working in Silicon Valley. He started doing a show just on his own travels and then to get more material by interviewing people about different cities and countries. He also talks about how he makes his work coincide with his travels. He also talks about how even when he is offered free trips he sometimes rejects them because it is not a good fit. Then he talks about his motivation of doing the podcast and the great stories about different cultures especially in places that you have never gone to before.

One of the first things that one notices when coming to India is the extreme poverty. This is a deal killer for many people and that is why they say that India is too extreme for them. However, for me it was not as bad as many people made it out to be and as I had already seen worse. I will share my thoughts on poverty, begging, and what it means to be poor in the world.

Actually, really the only place that I had seen which was in worse shape than India had been Ethiopia. I had visited in 2010 and spent about 5 weeks exploring the amazing country with tons of history. It was here that you would be mobbed by a group of children following you through the city saying quite impolitely to “give me money!” Although I had sympathy for the children in their dirty and tattered clothes, I quickly realized that even if I gave money I would not have enough for all of them. I also realized that giving one money would start a shitstorm of yelling and demands for more from the others. This eventually led to more problems for me than it solved so I ended up not giving any money to anyone.

The children might have been a sad thing to see, but what really got me was the old and the disabled. Since the social net in poorer countries relies on family and friends helping you instead of the government, many can slip through the cracks and eventually end up dead. First coming to Ethiopia and then later to India, it was heartbreaking to see old people who should be respected as bearers of wisdom within the community, cast out on the streets asking for pennies. Even worse were the deformed and disabled. Somehow, the poor communities had somehow made bodily deformations more severe. One man who was missing a bone in his arm turning half of their arm into a boneless jelly mass was among the most impactful. There was one man who had arms which could only be described as wings, the anatomy looking exactly like something you might get in a KFC bucket. Finally there were many with the same deformity shortening their legs to about 10 inches (25cm) long making them look like they were walking dogs.

But would giving these people a few cents help their problems? Would giving the man with the ongoing watermelon-sized infection on his leg lead him to buying antiseptic? Did he know what antiseptic was and how quickly his problem it could be solved? Or had he discovered a new source of income that could outcompete anything else he might earn in a day? Would he continue to keep this wound open to maintain his income? Sometimes it felt like my seconds-long interactions with some people was not nearly enough to answer the questions that needed to be asked to know if I could really help. My medical knowledge was also quite lacking in order to give anything close to useful help.

Am I cold? Am I heartless? Or would the amount of help and interaction needed be thousands of times higher than what I wanted to or could give? I became agnostic in this viewpoint and just tried to remember there were professionals devoted to this very task. Just like an inexperienced surgeon, I could cause more damage than benefit with my dull dagger of “help.” I knew that institutions would be better at solving this, but more than that later.

So when I came to India, the situation was something I had already seen. I had already had time to think about my actions five years before and I knew what to expect. Overall, the poverty seemed to be less. There seemed to be fewer people in abject poverty who looked like they were dying before your very eyes. The people laying on the streets covered in blankets now looked like they were just resting during the hot day instead of dead corpses lying everywhere. Was it the same situation and had my perspective changed so much in the last few years? Or was the actual poverty of the people not as bad as the ones in Africa those years before?

When you visit Yellowstone National Park, or any other wildlife park, they tell you not to feed the animals. The bears become dependent on the picnic baskets they steal and eventually end up starving during the winter. This is something that I noticed in some of the poorer countries as well. The more lucrative begging became, the more people saw it as a viable way to live leaving them up to the whims of those giving. It was really only in the cities where it was possible to lead a life of begging. In the rural towns it was much harder to see this way of life and therefore it seemed more peaceful for me as a traveller. Perhaps cities are an aberration and they cause some sort of weird behavior that you just don't see in villages. That is actually somewhat of a conclusion I have reached, but more on that in another episode.

And then you see other people who are also disfigured that seem to be leading normal lives. Dressed in business attire, they walk along with their crutch supporting their deformed leg. I was excited to see this, partially in a selfish way because it meant she wouldn't bother me for money! It also showed me that there was hope and there was a future for somebody like this. I appreciate this random lady in the bus for giving me hope.

I don't know how to handle poverty in developing countries but I have come to the realization that I am not very interested in donations to poor individuals. The stories of the European beggar on the street then going home to their middle-class home have made me sour to this whole concept. Personal stories from friends who performed on the street earning more than $20 an hour have also made me start to believe that those begging may be better off than we expect. What I can expect from this is that a dirty beggar on the street can earn twice as much as a laborer sweating to earn their bread. I don't think this is fair and it is not something I really want to support.

I see the act of giving somebody money as a value exchange. Buying something like a sandwich is also an exchange of value. I give you this valuable money and you give me this valuable sandwich. Begging is the same way. You make me feel bad about your condition and I either pay you money to make you go away or to make me feel better as a person. There is always some sort of value exchange at play here. However, in the case of feeling better as a person, part of this depends on the idea that you did a good thing and actually helped the person. In the case of the man with the leg infection, it would mean that this money went to treating his wound and nothing else. Since this is not assured, any donation to him could lead to a false sense of feeling better as a person. Since I don't like being conned I opt to not give to anyone.

The only time I give to people on the street is when the value they give me is something which I know is not fake. For example if there is an entertainer on the street either doing a show or playing music I usually give money. I see this both as an effort on their part to be creative as well as a better value exchange for me. This is something that I will remember fondly for some time and therefore it is worth my money. One could also think of it as changing the atmosphere of the location to something more pleasant rather than unpleasant. This is also a reason to be rewarded with my dollar.

I think that poverty as we see on the streets of poor countries (or as some only see on charity commercials) is an artificial construction. Although people in the past might have been poor, generally they had enough food to sustain themselves and be happy. True, the people in villages can often look poor due to their lack of material wealth, but this is not a good measure of poverty. If counting how many shirts you own is a measure then anyone living more than a hundred years ago should have been absolutely miserable. However, going through a village it does not seem that the people are very unhappy, but rather that it is a fact of life to live the way they do. They seem to be well fed and have decent food security. This is something we have all to understand, is that poverty is not an absolute measurement but rather a relative measurement of your wealth with someone elses.

I think the same way we have gotten used to our way of life and our standards, we need to respect that it can be different in other places. A farming village may not necessarily be backwards and out of touch with technology, it could be perhaps embracing the centuries of culture and tradition preceding it. This is necessary in any society, people who move forward, and people who stay back. If everybody were to go forward and it was unsuccessful or dangerous, then at least there are those that stayed back and stuck to traditions. I think it is important in this way not to force anything. People are reasonable and have a basis for their actions. That is why potentially forcing expensive, inefficient programs onto places that don't want it can only be described as meddling.

We can do more harm than good with donations. I read a book in Ethiopia which really opened the covers on many of the actions of aid spending and what it does to communities. To really imagine it think of a scenario where a group of Chinese businessmen come to your community. They decide that not nearly enough Mah-Jong is being played to develop strategic intelligence and that this will help the local population. They then build schools in the area to teach this exact thing, pat themselves on the back for doing a good thing, and leave. What is left is a confused public wondering where to get the coaches for this and whether it is even valuable. The buildings are abandoned and used for something else which has an immediate need.

This is quite common in the area of aid spending. People with dubious degrees come into a region, stay for a few months, and determine they know exactly how to boost the local society. Often the people come with only their own background and don't know how to deal with the local conditions. Meanwhile, the local population knows exactly what they need and often can be much more lean financially when building up the project. The same can be said of any tourist or visitor coming into a new place. How are you sure that the thing you are doing will lead to an improvement or will it lead to marginal benefit which is wildly to low in its benefit per dollar relation?

This is why I see any act of donation to prevent starvation or simple sicknesses as essential, and the rest is just optional. Next I see education as important, but due to technology it can be scaled much more cheaply than even a few decades ago. Open source platforms like Wikipedia make an hour of learning almost free and available to billions. Education no longer requires expensive school and teachers, rather mentors and internet coffee shops guiding the learning process. Everything else, in my opinion, is just a nice thing to have.

I think my travels have changed what I believe about poverty. I have gone from an idealistic kid most definitely influenced by charity commercials with their sad music and wanting to help everyone, to a more pragmatic version where I see that my help is often misguided and leads to an assumption that I am better than they are. I now see that people everywhere are very smart and can usually make the best decisions for themselves, by themselves. Donations to the right professionals making a difference can have an effect but giving to those on the street might not help much at all.

Special thanks to Gary Berrios for writing in, good luck with your languages.

Lara Loest is from Show Notes Made Easy which is a service to provide show notes which she now does for some of the biggest names in the industry. It has gotten so large she has had to hire people to keep up with demand.

In this episode we talk about what she does in her job. She says the biggest key is to know the audience as well as possibly knowing some keywords to help grow your audience. She talks about how she started about a year and a half ago for a friend which helped grow this business. Since then she has not done any advertising and has grown only through referrals. In this time she has been able to grow the business so much that she now has to hire help in order to keep up with the job demand. She then gives some her experiences having lived in Ireland after being in a writing job. There she did some schooling and was able to travel a bit which really piqued her interest. She then talks about how much she loves travel and how it should be mandatory to live abroad for some time to challenge your assumptions.

These last few months have been crazy. If I had not already been to over 80 countries and considered myself a citizen of the world I think it would have been too intense for me.

It started 10 weeks ago when I was getting ready to leave my home in Germany where I had lived for a year and a half. Germany was amazing. With a great group of classmates and friends I had many events to choose from every night and life was great! Why would I ever want to leave? And it was especially crazy to leave after enduring the cold winter, right before the amazing summer full of festivals and lounging by the river.

This is a something I have been wondering ever since leaving the US and a future with a nice paying engineering career. The itch that I need to scratch, ADVENTURE!!! It is that same sense of adventure that has driven me to explore the world, go to countries I didn't know existed, and meet some of the most interesting people I had ever seen. It was always my plan that the last semester of my Masters degree would be abroad, but I had never thought of India would be a possibility.

It all started after becoming interested in the work of one of my favorite professors that the idea started to form. He was working on the propulsion for nano robots, how could I not be interested?!!? And better yet, much of his collaborative work was done in India! He said it was done in Bangalore...Bangladesh he surely meant.

Or was it the capitol of Bangladesh?

I wasn't really sure where it was but it sounded fun!

As my date began to come closer I was able to negotiate a pause from my studies. Three months would give me enough get my things in order in Germany, travel India, and get settled into my new home in this place called Bangalore. It was a brutal last few weeks because I wanted to make sure that my podcast would keep running at my twice per week rate. That meant I had to prepare 24 interviews for while I would be gone! This together with packing up my stuff, finishing up my schoolwork, saying goodbye to my friends proved to be quite time consuming.

Meanwhile the trip to India was all that I could talk about. After talking to my Indian friends and professors who had come from there, I was getting anxious. Everyone had horror stories of the big cities losing power, not having water for many hours per day, and the extremely slow internet. Did I mention I host a podcast? Skype-speed internet is something that I depend on in order to provide the value that I do. I was starting to question whether I had made the right choice, by my wanderlust was egging me on! I will talk more about doing what you love and not being afraid to be the person you want to be in a later episode.

As a spontaneous and carefree traveller I scoffed at my Indian-German travel companion as she carefully entered all the cities we would visit in her Excel spreadsheet. I laughed at how it was such a German stereotype to be planning so much and to be so efficient but am I glad she did it! The trains in India are overcrowded and tickets are almost impossible to get. Tickets sell out about a month in advance and if you want a same-day train ticket then you have to bribe someone and pay about three times as much. I was starting to eat my words and she told me the ever hated “I told you so.”

At last, my girlfriend and I were finally on a plane. Off to India we were going! We had planned 6 weeks of travel around India before finally getting settled into our home in Bangalore. We arrived in New Delhi at a friend's house. There we got adjusted to the food and prepared for the inevitable 'Delhi belly' which never came. At that point we headed overland to Nepal, a grueling 24 hours of busses away from Delhi. For whatever reason, we decided to do this instead of flying. I guess there was a bit of a masochist in us both!

We first went to Lucknow, the home of the most pure Hindi language and a city with very few tourists. Next we went on through many small cities and finally ending in Kathmandu, Nepal after many uncomfortable bus rides. Actually I was doing fine but Sonya was taking it a bit harder. I guess I am used to long bus rides after going across the African continent so 8 hours in a bus is not problem. Also I had podcasts downloaded to my phone so I had educational material to entertain me the entire way. This is something I highly recommend this because during these 8 hours it is as if I had read 2.5 books. This means that bus rides can become very educational!! Be sure to download 'Travel Wisdom' to learn even more! :P

Nepal was amazing. It was so cool to just be there and the prices were even better than India. Did I mention India was cheap? Food was about $1-4 per meal and the bus ticket all the way to Nepal was around $20. In Nepal the prices were even lower and it was possible to live quite well for almost nothing. I saw Nepal as a outdoor-lovers paradise! Mountain biking, hiking, river rafting, trekking, and anything else you could imagine was all being taken care of right there! I knew that the week our spreadsheet allowed us in Nepal would not be enough, that we would have to return. After Kathmandu we went to the beautiful city of Pokhara and vowed to never leave, 3 days later we crossed the border back into India again.

We then went to the holy city of Varanasi, where they burn the bodies in the holy Ganges river. Everyone had always said it was a disgusting river with intense people who would fervently practice their environmentally damaging beliefs...I liked it. I found it no different than any other Indian city and the water was pretty clean by Indian standards. I found it kind of a Venice meets Morocco, all set in India. No disembodied limbs floating in the water, tea stalls pulling from the same water they soaked the dead bodies, or hawkers selling anything more aggressively than anywhere else in India. Honestly, I could see myself living there!

And then we felt the earthquake. We were in a market stall and I felt some movement which everyone discounted as crazy. I then pointed to the dancing ceiling fans and we rushed out into places we wouldn't be crushed. Stories from the 2010 Haiti earthquake were bouncing in my head and I didn't want to be part of another story on the other side of the world. True, the shock was small but I was still scared. When we got back to our hostel we checked the news as to what happened and found out that Nepal had a huge earthquake. We had left only 2 days before and now it was destroyed! We thought about the people we had met and wondered if they were among the thousands dead.

What better than to contemplate your own mortality and the impact of a natural disaster on millions of lives than going to a freaky sex temple a few days later? Our next stop was Khajuraho where they have temples with intricately carved figures on the outside of their temples depicting various kinky sex positions. They have sex with horses, an 8 person orgy, and my favorite a headstand threeway. Its good to know that no matter how crazy your sexual fantasies are, there are some more perverted Indians that lived a long time ago. I will talk about sexuality a bit in later episodes as well.

Our next stop was Agra, home of the most famous symbol of India, the Taj Mahal. It was incredibly touristy but the prices still felt very reasonable. The building was nice I guess. Having taken decades to and thousands of people to complete I guess I was expecting something a bit better. This started my whole series of ideas about money and how to use it which I will mention in later podcasts.

Then we went to Rajasthan and saw all that there was to see in this desert state of India. This is the real location of the movie 'Aladdin!' I had always thought it was in the Middle East but it it would be firmly in India. I guess the name Arabian Nights always threw me off. This place was just as amazing as the children's show. Orange sand, towering forts and temples, camels roaming in the street, and sweet lassi offered everywhere. There is also a nice story about getting high on edible weed, Bhang, and going on a camel safari through the desert which I will talk about in a later episode. Although we had reached Rajasthan during the hot season it didn't feel that hot for me. I never was actually sweating, I would just come home with my neck being very sticky. Since it was so dry, the sweat would cool me down instantly.

After a quick stop off in Delhi, we boarded our 46 hour train ride down to Bangalore in southern India. We chose to do this instead of a flight because of all the trinkets and clothes we bought along the way costing us lots in baggage fees. The ride was actually quite comfortable and they served 3 meals per day which was included in the price. This was a great time to read lots of books and to catch up on my podcasts. As a person that doesn't much like flying, this might be a preferred way of travel in India.

We then arrived in Bangalore. It was a completely different feel than any other city in India, palm trees, comfortable weather, and a completely different alphabet. But more on this in a later episode...

Kristina Crowley is an Search Engine Optimization master at Harlo SEO who helps get your website noticed by Google. This can improve the visibility of your website by increasing exposure which can increase revenues. She is also the host of the Inspiration Morning podcast which helps give you positive thinking linked with action.

In this episode we talk about how Kristina got into SEO and how she was able to grow her skills. She talks about how its important to maintain the basics when having a website so that the Google spiders can go in and rank you well based on having good content. There are many penalties but generally it is logical and you can get benefits by having good content which talks about what your site is about. The importance is to stay in it for the long game and not just try to cheat the system, although things can be done quickly. She also talks about the need to protect yourself from attacks from others who might want to knock you down. Finally we talk about how important it is to travel because you can start to see that we are all similar.

Alex Rawlings was voted the most linguistic youth in England in 2012 having been tested in 11 languages being under 20 years old. Now he teaches Polyglot Workshops which helps people interested in learning lots of languages do this more effectively.

In this episode we talk about the language learning process and how he got started with this addiction. After realizing that other languages existed when he was young, he saw how useful they were while growing up in London around many different languages. He thought he was strange until being showcased in a BBC video about his abilities and that is how he found the polyglot community. Now he no longer thinks he is strange. We then talk about what it actually means to speak a language and the differences between 'functional' and 'fluency.' We then talk about how travel makes you reexamine your cultural assumptions.

James Woosley is the writer of Conquer the Entrepreneur's Kryptonite and the host of the podcast of the same name. He coaches entrepreneurs and business starters through the difficult processes they might go through. He teaches about the 3 P's of Profit: Product, Process and People. He can take you through the sweet spot of planning, not too much and not too little.

In this show he talks about the power of adaptability especially in this increasingly changing world. He talks about the importance of having a bedrock like family especially when you are moving around the country or generally travelling. He talks about his shift into the coaching field after some mentorships and a particularly impactful conversation with a person he respected. Then about a year ago, he decided to go coaching full time after being layed off from his job. After this we talk about the importance of different types of partners you do things with. Even if you things DIY (do it yourself), you still are essentially partnering with someone to get something done, even if you do most of the work. You can't be a hermit and be successful. You also need to have a purpose, know your limits, and keep reserves otherwise you will likely fail.

Omar Zenhom is the host of the $100 MBA podcast which was voted to be a best of 2014 podcast by iTunes. On this show Omar gives short 10 minute business guides to help people already in business or those wanting to start a business take the steps they need in order to get started. He is also the co-creater of the $100 MBA program which tries to teach all the essential things that are taught in a typical MBA program but without the $50k price tag.

In this episode we talk about Omar's path to starting the $100 MBA by first being an educator in Dubai and not liking it. He talks about his father's outlook of having a stable job and how it affected his goals for his career. He chose education but soon found that there was lots of bureaucracy and improvements in the education system are very slow coming. He ended up leaving that and doing a string of start ups from auto sales to clothing before finally getting started on his Business Republic project to teach business lessons for a fraction of the price. He also talks about the importance of writing in order to clarify your ideas and to become a better communicator. Finally he talks about how travel can make you question your beliefs which can give you opportunities to grow.

His joke "Why don't seagulls fly by the bay? Because then they would be bagels"