Ep 20: Running a location-independent real estate firm, building a popular podcast and traveling for 6 years with only carry-on luggage

Sean Tierney: 00:02:25 All right. Welcome to the nomad podcast. I am your host Sean Tierney and I’m here today with Matt Bowles. Matt owns a real estate brokerage called the maverick investment group. He helps people get invested in cash flowing properties and that allows them to get all the advantages of owning real estate while simultaneously collecting checks. And it’s all turnkey. So Matt is a full-time nomad. He’s extremely well traveled, having been to 51 countries in the last five years. Uh, he’s spoken at nomad summit. He hosts the maverick show podcast, which you should definitely check out. And I was just with him on the nomad cruise and he gave a talk there and we’ll probably get into that as well as an awesome talk on minimalist luggage. A. So without further ado, Matt, welcome to the show

Matt Bowles: 00:03:09 my man. So good to be here and I am so impressed with this studio set up. You are rocking here in Lisbon, man. This is, this is awesome. We’ve just opened a bottle of wine. So I am a pumped for this interview.

Sean Tierney: 00:03:22 It has been a long time coming. This is not the first time we did. We tried this once before. So let’s, let’s actually set the stage here. Uh, I’ll let you tell it. Where were we?

Matt Bowles: 00:03:31 Well, I mean, first of all, you and I initially met each other, at least I want to say it was about a year ago through our good mutual friend Trevor, who was episode a one interview on nomad podcast in fact. And he was like, Yo, you gotta meet my boy, Sean, you two are going to like connect, uh, you know, immediately. So you got to meet him. So I think you and I first met in Lisbon when I swung through on a layover and then we reconnected in Barcelona with when you were with Trevor and I was with a couple of my remote year homeys, uh, Erica and Magoo and we all hung out there for a bit. And then you and I hung out in Brazil last December for about three weeks. And that was where I interviewed you for the Maverick show and that you attempted to interview me for the nomad podcast. We had some audio issues. So, uh, we’re revamping and back here in Lisbon about to lay it down. So I’m excited man.

Sean Tierney: 00:04:28 I’m excited too. And this is also the reboot. So Matt is a, my podcast is my longtime listeners all know that was on hiatus for a bit and Matt convinced me to revive it and so we just came off the nomad cruise and it was a good opportunity to interview some people. So this is the reboot to ignition right here, the reboot.

Matt Bowles: 00:04:45 Man, I am so excited about this too. The studio is completely professional. We’ve got an entire microphone set up, studio monitors. You would just bumping some Biggie to show me the base and how it works on these speakers. And I’m a, I’m impressed with everything man. So season two of the nomad podcast kicking off. I can’t, can’t wait to hear it man.

Sean Tierney: 00:05:02 Okay. I want to, I want to set the stage now in terms of uh, what I hope that we can get out of this podcast because I am so excited that we have, we have so much to talk about. Um, for my listeners, like my goal is to help get people on stuck. And like my, I went through the Simon Sinek program and my mission, my why statement out of that is to literally help others beat gravity so they can be free to do what they’re born to do. That is my why. And so just keep in mind whatever we talk about, if you can just like think how do we extract that and help others. I think my listeners are, are people that, you know, see what we’re doing and are just very eager to be able to travel in this kind of lifestyle. So, uh, I know we’re going to have a lot of value for him, so, okay. So let’s just start at the top. You’ve been traveling for a while. How long have you been on the road?

Matt Bowles: 00:05:47 I have, I love, last time I had a permanent base was the summer of 2013 in Los Angeles. And so it’s been, when we’re, as we’re recording this now, it’s probably been about, I want to say six years coming up to summer of 2013. So yeah, about six years. I’ve been full time itinerant nomad with no base and I have lived in 51 countries in the last six years. Yeah, that’s an incredible travel log right there. So what is it, I guess my question is what it is that motivates you to keep doing this? Yeah, well you know, it’s interesting because I actually didn’t have this entire plan to become an itinerary digital nomad when I left. So I got into this, you know, I didn’t plan to get into this. And so what happened was I was in a relationship in La and my partner was doing a phd at UCLA in Egyptian history and one day she comes home and she’s like, so my dissertation research period is coming up.

Matt Bowles: 00:06:50 I got to go to Cairo for a year to do my dissertation research. I was like, cool, I’m location independent. I can work from anywhere I could wear from Cairo, let’s do it. So we got rid of all of our stuff in La, got rid of our apartment, I sold my car, you know, put stuff in storage. And we went to Cairo for a year. And at the time that I did that and I left, I was just thinking it was going to be a year. That was all it was in my mind at the time. But then when we started thinking about it, you know, we’re going to give up our apartment, going to give up our car. I was like, you know what? We don’t need to be in La for the summer, right before, you know, for these three months before you get to Cairo, why don’t we go somewhere on the way to Cairo?

Matt Bowles: 00:07:29 And so we’re like, okay, we’re in the world where we want to go. We’re like, when was Irish? Was our top city on the way to Cairo from La, isn’t it? So it’s a great city. It’s an amazing city. So we went there, we went to windows size for three months, and then we went to Cairo for the rest of the year. And she did her dissertation research and all that. And then when she was finished with her dissertation research, you know, we had traveled like Cairo was our base. Right? But we hit, we would take excursions to go to like Istanbul, Turkey and to go to like, I mean, you know, Barcelona and leg is the first time I’d been to Barcelona and first time been to Istanbul and like all these amazing places where when you’re on like, you know, right near the Mediterranean Sea, you all of a sudden have easy access to these places.

Matt Bowles: 00:08:06 And we’re like, wow, that was amazing. I wish we could spend more time there and more time there and you know, all this stuff. So when her year was up of the research in Cairo, we basically said, listen, you know, you’ve now, now she had a year to write her dissertation, which sharing hell her research. So she could do it from anywhere and I could work remotely. So we said, why go back to La, let’s pull out a world map, pick the top five places in the world that we most want to live and go to each of those for rent and Airbnb for like two months in each one. So we literally pulled out a map and were like, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, South Africa, definitely want to go back to Barcelona and live there for a month. And we just, Elizabeth was one of them actually, uh, went to Lisboa for a month my first time there.

Matt Bowles: 00:08:51 Amazing. Of course. Um, and so we just did that and that actually ended up going for about a year and a half, you know? And so all of a sudden now, my one year thing had extended into two and a half, you know, and got up to three years. And then at the, at about three years into it, she and I ended up breaking up. And so the relationship ended and I was then at this crossroads in my life where I just got out of a very longterm relationship and I had to go through all of the stuff that anybody needs to go through when you know, you get out of a relationship that’s long and you’re starting to plan the rest of your life and your next steps forward. And one of the things I said to myself is two things. I said, first of all, I definitely want to keep traveling cause it’s like this lifestyle has been insanely epic and amazing and inspiring and invigorating.

Matt Bowles: 00:09:36 But I urgently need a community. You know, I need people I need, you know, cause even when you’re traveling with one of the person, if you don’t have a community and you can really meaningfully plug into and you don’t have that social sustainability pillar, longterm travel gets very lonely. Right? And that had happened to me even in the relationship. And so I was like, man, I urgently need a community so I can either move to a city and try to ingratiate myself into a community there, which is the traditional model that everybody knows kind of about how to do. Or I heard about this program called a remote year where you go and you’re join a community and you’re travel together as a community.

Sean Tierney: 00:10:15 And I said, that’s, I think got my movie is going to be. So literally I went to, I was in Cyprus when we broke up and I just flew to Athens. And just posted it up in an airbnb in Athens, Greece for like a week and I just applied to remote. You’re right then immediately. And just that was my next move. Yeah. And I think what’s interesting is like so remote, yours as you said, how we met, I came at it from a different angle. I’d never done the no matter traveling. I don’t know that I would have, that’s what’s interesting is I don’t think in looking at how daunting it is to get into it, had there not been something like remote you, I don’t think I would have made that transition. Um, but you came out from the reason of, I’m just looking for a community. I know how to do this. I can travel on my own. I’ve been doing it, but I just want the community.

Matt Bowles: 00:10:53 Yeah. 100%. And when I started traveling in 2013, none of these work travel programs existed. You know, there’s now a handful of them, um, that exist. But none of them existed then. And so it’s been amazing to see the proliferation of these types of programs that are catering to these needs. Right? Which are first of all, handling the logistics of facilitating your ability to travel the world and provide accommodations and coworking spaces, access with Wifi and excursions to do on the ground and you know, all that kind of stuff. But to solve for what was my biggest challenge, which was the social sustainability pillar, and to actually provide a community to do that. Traveling with that for me was the primary value proposition and the thing I was more than happy to pay for it.

Sean Tierney: 00:11:41 Definitely. Can you, can you back up one, one chapter before the nomadic stuff and talk about, I know you are in a corporate job and you have an interesting story in terms of how that materialized and then ultimately translated

Matt Bowles: 00:11:54 to you becoming location independent. Yeah, so for me, all of my academic background, including my graduate work and all of my professional work experience, office experience up until the age of 30 has absolutely nothing at all to do with what I’m doing now. So I have a bachelor’s degree in sociology. I have a master’s degree in international peace and conflict resolution. And I worked in the nonprofit space in Washington d C primarily for my entire, I mean that was my professional work experience, right? And I was doing international human rights works, domestic civil liberties, advocacy work, things like that that were really important to me. Um, really positive affecting positive change in the world, making meaningful contributions. It was very, very fulfilling job and really significant. And it was really, really great for years, right up until it wasn’t a, we had all of a sudden the change in management and what was, you know, one day, a super supportive organization that really valued me and was supporting me and was a great place to work.

Matt Bowles: 00:12:56 All of a sudden management changes and boom, I find myself, I’m on the outs, I’m not supported by the management and I’m basically, they’re trying to squeeze me out. Right? So long story short, one day I walk into work and I get notified that I have to attend a meeting. Didn’t know there was a meeting. What? Oh yeah, you’ve got to go to this many. I said, okay. And basically that very day they said he has not working out. So you’ve got to get out by five and you know, you should sign this resignation thing if you want to severance or you know, kind of thing. And it was just like, whoa. So my head was spinning. So I literally in those couple hours negotiated a severance agreement. But then I had a hand in my company phone, I had the handle like all of my stuff.

Matt Bowles: 00:13:33 Right. And this was my whole world, my whole identity, not just my place of employment, but something that had meant a lot to me personally. You know, that I was contributing meaningful things to the world through this organization. And so, you know, that my head was just spinning. I was in like a wall. It was like this massive life transition. And so I literally left the office with no phone, couldn’t even call anyone cause they took the phone. So I was literally had to, I’m out in the parking lot and I’m like, okay, what am my next steps? Like, what am I next steps? So I’m like, step number one, drive to the Verizon store to buy a phone so that I could call my mother to tell her I was fired. Right? So on that drive to this, to the phone store, I am thinking about what is going on, what’s happening, what am I going to do next?

Matt Bowles: 00:14:14 And I said, okay, I am making this decision here and now today this is a sign. This was the kick in the pants that I needed, uh, to basically raise my consciousness to the fact that this could happen again. Either in the corporate world, the nonprofit world, or anywhere else that I have a supervisor, I could at any given moment be fired, be, you know, not appreciate it and, and, and booted out. Right? So I said, I today am going to start my own business. That’s what I’m going to do. There was only one problem. I had no idea how to start a business. And so after I drove to the phone store, I drove directly to Barnes and noble and the Grove in La. And I started reading books on how to start a business. Now the one thing that I did have knowledge in, because I had been doing it on my own while working at my job as I had been investing in real estate.

Matt Bowles: 00:15:05 And so I figured if I’m working on a nonprofit, I’m never going to get a very high income so I should learn how to invest. And so I started buying rental properties. I started reading everything I could read about a rental properties and an income property, investing in all of that. And then what happened was is I was buying investment properties that had all my friends started asking me if I could help them to do what I was doing cause they saw that I was doing. And so I had been helping all my friends to do this and buy the same rental properties I was buying. What I noticed as I was doing this is that the brokers that were helping me to do it, we’re making money off of the properties that I bought and they were making money off the properties. I referred my friends to buy and they were making a whole bunch of good money and they’re providing value by introducing us to these properties.

Matt Bowles: 00:15:46 But I didn’t have to pay them anything, which was cool because in the United States the sellers pay 100% of the broker fees. The buyers don’t have to pay anything. So I said, well that’s cool. They’re willing to like help me and I don’t have to pay and help my friends and they don’t have to pay. So that was the business model that I understood. I understood the product and instead the value of investment in real estate and how that could help people, you know, build their wealth and take control of their financial future. And that. Then I also understood the business side of that cause I was a customer. I understood how to, how the broker side worked and how I could make money without having to charge anything to my buyers. And I was like, that’s cool. You know what I mean? I don’t have to like sell somebody something with a pay me.

Matt Bowles: 00:16:22 If I can provide them value and help them find what they’re looking for, then I get paid but not by them, by somebody else. I was like that’s cool. Like I’m really into that model. Kind of like selling stuff to my friends. But I like helping my friends. Right. So so that I was like, okay so that’s going to be the model cause that I understand. And so then I just started reading books on them. How do I build that business around that? Right. And as I was reading those books one day I literally just drove into the bookstore everyday cause I know jobs. So I just grew up in, I sat at Barnes Noble all day drinking Espressos, reading books, and one day I walked in this 2007 and there was a new book on the bookshelf. I looked at the new business books everyday was the first thing I did and it was a new book.

Matt Bowles: 00:17:00 And I looked at the title, it was called the four hour work week by Timothy Ferris. I said, Huh, that’s interesting. Picked it up, looked at the back cover, read the entire book today that it came out. And I said, that’s what I’m doing. Because what that book did, the biggest light bulb that that, that book gave me was the concept of that the freedom of mobility, the location, independency, ability to control your location, to control where you live and to travel at will is a currency which is as valuable or more valuable than the currency of money, of income. And that when building a business, the business plan should not only be geared towards how are we actually gonna make money, but how are we going to create location independence and build in the freedom of mobility. So the business can facilitate our ability to design our lifestyles with control and freedom.

Matt Bowles: 00:17:56 So that was the big revelation from that book. And I said, okay, um, that’s how we’re going to design our business plan. Right? So that’s basically where, where, where I went from there. I mean I needed to recruit two business partners cause I realized I didn’t have most of the skills required to start the business. So I went out and uh, and I had identified two people specifically in mind that had the perfect complimentary skill sets to me and uh, got them on board for the business and then we designed reverse engineered basically that business plan so that we could build a business with a location independent infrastructure from day one.

Sean Tierney: 00:18:30 Okay. So you were very intentional from the start about, you know, retrofitting it around this idea of being able to work from anywhere. So what types of things are we talking about here? Like what, what designed decisions were made based on that?

Matt Bowles: 00:18:42 So the first thing is that we didn’t want to make any geographically restrictive mistakes from the beginning. So what I think a lot of people would do is say, oh, you know, we’ll just have an office for now. You know, we’ll just meet in the office and we’ll do this kind of stuff. And then later on we’ll figure out how to make it location dependent. What we basically did was we said, okay, from day one we got to figure out how to build an entirely location independent infrastructure. We want to be able to meet with our buyer prospects, people that are going to buy the real estate from us in a totally virtual manner. So we’re going to set up these, you know, Skype consultations or phone consultations structure for that instead of having an office like in person meeting thing. And then we’re going to be, you know, in terms of our managerial communications, my business partners and I have never, since we founded the company, never lived in the same city for a single day.

Matt Bowles: 00:19:30 So all of our managerial meetings and subsequently meetings with staff and subsequently hiring decisions were never based on anything geographically specific. So we just forced ourselves that all the communication infrastructure with our supply side, with our buyer, you know, client prospects with our managerial stuff and with our staff was all going to be location independent and we forced it to be, we literally didn’t physically live in the same city, so we had no choice and we just build the business and all of our business decisions were based on maintaining that and ensuring that that never was compromised.

Sean Tierney: 00:20:03 So you never even had the opportunity to get addicted to the an officer. Develop habits that may have precluded you from later splitting it off and going remote. That’s

Matt Bowles: 00:20:11 right. And very much on purpose. I mean we just said from the beginning, this is what we want and therefore we’re going to reverse engineer a business plan. So everything we need to do, okay, we need to meet with clients. How do we meet with clients and build a meaningful relationship with clients without doing it in person, right? Yeah. So we would always ask ourselves that question, okay, we need to have do this. How are we going to do it with, with a virtual infrastructure? And then we would ask that question and we would build that system out.

Sean Tierney: 00:20:36 So, okay, so how do you stay in sync with your partners? Or do you guys all have such different jobs that it doesn’t really matter, but like the way Paisley does it, we have like, you know, a weekly stand up, zoom all hands, everyone sees each other face to face. And then we’re talking on slack, but like what’s your guys’ methodology for,

Matt Bowles: 00:20:53 we do, so we have, we use slack for internal communications and then we also use Trello for project management. And so we’re able to have all of our team members participate in Trello boards and the relevant people are participating in the relevant Trello boards for project management on different projects. And then we have different communication channels on slack that we’re able to do that for. And then we have video calls periodically, you know, with people that want to do that, you know, to maintain a little bit of a, you know, the video kind of in person ish, you know, sort of friendliness. So we do that. And then we also aim to have a leadership retreat in person about once a year, just so that we can do team building and fun stuff. And then a couple of days of in person business meetings.

Sean Tierney: 00:21:34 Yeah, that, that was gonna be my next question is do you guys have some type of annual retreat or some way of getting together?

Matt Bowles: 00:21:39 We do, but we also try to make it pretty epic in the theme of the Maverick Maverick, uh, ethos of our company and the whole lifestyle design nature of what we’re doing. So, uh, I think one of our most memorable ones, we took our core team, you know, four or five people kind of thing, leadership team. Um, we went to ski matter Horn in the Swiss Alps and so we went, we went to Zermatt, uh, and for a week our team came for about four days. We did two days of skiing and two days of business meetings. And then my partner, Valerie and I, my business partner, Valerie and I met about three days earlier to do our executive leaderships, our one on one executive leadership meeting for the year. And instead of sitting in, uh, you know, uh, officer or room for eight hours a day to do that, we’re like, you know what, let’s get a three day Swiss rail pass and say, just get seats by the window on the trains and just ride around through the Swiss Alps and do our meetings on the train. So we’ll do very, you know, maverick, sort of creative, fun travel lifestyle design and stuff like that. That’s awesome.

Sean Tierney: 00:22:51 It spices it up and you know, who else likes their motto is Trevor Trevor’s a big fan as their mind.

Matt Bowles: 00:22:55 It’s amazing. It’s really amazing. I mean, once you ski Matterhorn, and I’m not a serious skier like Trevor. I mean Trevor is a really good skier. I just do a lot. I’m like an intermediate skier. I do like the blue squares and once in a while a black diamond maybe, but like the scenery in Zermatt when you’re, when you ski Matterhorn, it is unbelievable. I mean just going up in those Swiss g, you know, glass gondolas. And if you go all the way up to the top, it’ll take you hours to get all the way up to the top of matter and like a couple of hours to get all the way up. But then once you’re at the top, first of all, you have runs metal horn is right on the border of Switzerland in Italy. And so you literally have, when you’re deciding which runs to go down, they have flags, either the Italian flag or the Swiss flag on the run.

Matt Bowles: 00:23:41 So you know what country you’re going to end up in if you choose to go down that run. So you can like ski down in Italy, have lunch in Italy, you know, Espresso and this and speak some Italian, you know, and then back up and then ski back down into Switzerland and have dinner in Switzerland. And it is wild. But when you’re at the very top of Matterhorn, if you chose to take like the longest run and go all the way down into the bottom, you know, which is what I love to do. I just like this scenery. Right? They have ski runs that are 11 miles long, one ski run. Yeah. It’s insane. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Sean Tierney: 00:24:15 What does, it sounds like to me, Killington Vermont was my first experience with this kind of skiing where you take a Gondola and you ride a 15 minute Gondola and then you ski for an hour and so it sounds very similar. It’s like this just epic long, long runs. That’s dope. Well I want to get into your travel stories cause you have some seriously incredible travel stories. But to wrap up on the business stuff, just maybe like reflect in hindsight, would you, if this thing had not happened that at the time was so devastating, this, you know, getting laid off, which actually sounds like it was a blessing in disguise because I don’t know that you would have rerouted the way you did. Um, but maybe can you talk about like did that kick in the pants for those people that are listening who are in a cubicle job that is comfortable but that desire, this lifestyle, it’s almost like you have to manufacture some kind of emergency to make you, you know, put the fire under you to do it.

Matt Bowles: 00:25:09 I mean, my ideal recommendation for people is that they try to build up a side hustle while they’re at their main job and get that to a sustainable position and then make the leap and make the transition and leave their job when they have a reasonable amount of infrastructure built up. I think that’s the most, I never like to use the word conservative, but I think, I think that’s the most sort of responsible and least stressful way to do it. Which should be ideal if you were planning that. I didn’t have any time to plan. Right. And to answer your question, you know, I don’t know if that hadn’t happened to me where I would be right now, to be very honest. You know, it did happen to me and I said, okay, I am taking this as a very clear sign that this is a life pivot moment and I’m going to do a radical pivot and I’m just going to go from zero to you know, as fast as I can, you know, just starting with no infrastructure in place.

Matt Bowles: 00:26:03 Ideally if you can build something up on the side, that’s the best way to do it. Cause I think the danger is getting comfortable and getting into a situation that is mediocre. Like the worst thing is if your job is like, okay, you know what I mean? It’s okay. It’s kind of boring. It’s not really fulfilling. I’m making enough money. I can just go to the office, I can get by, I can do what I need. It’s like this sort of not really fulfilling, but it’s okay. It doesn’t, isn’t that hellish and horrific and terrible. That’s the most dangerous thing in the world because you might stay in that thing forever and then you wake up into 65 and your entire life was just mediocre and kind of boring and kind of okay and you just went with it. Right. So like to some extent for me, I’m kind of glad I am very glad now this dramatic thing happened, right?

Matt Bowles: 00:26:42 Because it kicked me into doing this. But I think ideally if you want to transition, I would just say hustle as hard as you possibly can as soon as you get home from work and just work all the evenings at all the weekends and just build something on the side and then just move into it as soon as you can. That’s the ideal way. But then I recommend, because it’s the way that I did is not unstressful, but, but for me it worked. I mean that that was the motivation, right? Like there was no other choice. I was relentlessly committed to doing this and there was a 0% chance I was going to accept anything less than succeeding. I just wasn’t going to do that.

Sean Tierney: 00:27:12 Yeah. Well. Awesome. It definitely seems to have worked out. Um, I’m jealous of your 51 countries. I will get there eventually. Um, so let’s, yeah, let’s shift gears and talk about some of these travel stories and I’m like, I want to get some of the photos, I want to hopefully put them on the site, but you’ve got photos of like sandboarding and the white party in France and just like these epic locations, like tell the one about, uh, the Corsica, the [inaudible].

Matt Bowles: 00:27:37 Oh, well, well, so we did, so we did. So my, uh, one of my best friends in the world, uh, Jim McGee, you know her well, we call her Magoo. Uh, she’s amazing. She did a remote year with me. She’s an insanely brilliant, talented entrepreneur who runs also her own unbelievably incredible location, independent business. I interviewed her in the maverick show as well. Um, but she’s one of my best friends. And so she, and uh, oh. And my other friend Erica, so the three of us did about Dan and I did about six weeks through France. Erica joined us for about three of them. You’ve met, you’ve hung out with, uh, Jen and Erica and Barnum. Rouser Fernet and coke and, uh, McGoo Magoo and Erica shout out. Um, so actually

Sean Tierney: 00:28:18 the bears mentioning Magoo is your guest, what six or five or six?

Matt Bowles: 00:28:22 She’s episode five in the Maverick show. Yeah. She runs an architectural design company and has fortune 500 clients, you know, Barnes and noble and Saks off fifth avenue and of sharper image. And she designs their retail space. She did an award winning project. She designed the duty free shops at JFK airport in New York City and she does it all remotely while traveling the world. I mean, it’s like unbelievable. And she’s an angel investor and she does, she’s brilliant. She does epic stuff, but she’s also just one of my favorite people to just travel and do fun, adventurous stuff with because that’s what she does

Sean Tierney: 00:28:51 walking through the airport and she’s like, Oh yeah, I think I, this looks familiar. I guess I did that

Matt Bowles: 00:28:56 over there. Yeah, exactly. No, that’s right. That’s exactly right. Um, so, but these are the kinds of people that you meet, know many, like she was on my remote year group, you know what I mean? Erica was on my remote, your group. So like these are the kinds of people that you meet in these circles and then you connect back up with them and your friends for life and you just decided to do epic stuff together. So it was like, you know, she’s the type of person, you know, she’s one of my best friends. She’s the type of person I can, you know, reach out to and say, Hey, do you want to go and spend about six weeks together and just go through the French wine country and just go and do the stuff that got this festival and board dough, this happening once every two years.

Matt Bowles: 00:29:28 We could go and hit that. There’s wine festival and you know, my birthday’s coming up. We go out to the, the ASRS, you know, which are this insanely gorgeous, um, a volcanic archipelago that are Portuguese islands, the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. She was like, yeah, let’s go do it. Um, and then our friend Erica tells us about this DNA on blank event, uh, in Paris, which has been going on for 30 years. I had literally never heard about it until a year ago. Right? And it’s like this clan best line pop up, white elegant white party for dinner. So it’s basically like a flash mob, but it’s like an elegant dinner party where everybody wears white dress code is super strict, right? Has to be elegant. It cannot be off white, cannot be ivory, cannot be eggshell, has to be white, everything shoes, the whole thing, right? And then people meet at the secret locations.

Matt Bowles: 00:30:16 Participants don’t even know where it’s going to be up until a few hours before the event. And You bring a gourmet picnic basket and then you’re the wine or champagne, no beer or liquor aloud. And then, and then everyone converges on the same place and it’s just a, you bring a table and two chairs and you’re with one other person. So me and Magoo go and we pop up chairs and a table. And then in, this was the 30th anniversary of the event in Paris that we went for 13,000 people on this massive won in Paris, in the middle of the city pop up at eight o’clock you know, seven 30 there’s nothing there. It’s totally green space. Eight o’clock there’s 13,000 people dressed in elegant white eating out of gourmet, pick me baskets on their table and then by midnight everything is broken down. It’s gone.

Matt Bowles: 00:30:59 As if it never happened. Is it, is it clean destiny in the sense like they don’t get a permit or do they like clear it with the city? I hope that seems like a huge thing to re. So it’s a little bit unclear how they do those logistics. But the, it’s been going on for 30 years. It’s proliferated all over the world. There’s motion, the major US cities have them once a year and cities like all over around the world have them. And so it has such a high reputation for the decorum and the nature of the event. I mean it’s so classy. It’s incredible. Right? So, I don’t know exactly how that works, but literally the participants don’t know where it is. Like if you’re participating in it, you have to go meet your table leader at like this street corner, you know, with your table and your chosen, you’re putting your basket and then they’re going to lead.

Matt Bowles: 00:31:44 So only the table leaders know where it is. And then they lead groups of like 25 people are coming in from all around, and then you just converge on this place that you didn’t even know where you were going. So it’s certainly known to very few people. I don’t know exactly how they do it with the permitting, but, um, it’s a, it was an extraordinary event. So like we did, we did the DNA on block in Paris and then we did this wine festival in board know, and then we’re like, you know what, let’s go out to the island of Corsica. Right. Which is a French controlled island. Right. Um, so I think as a semiautonomous, you know, island course, again, people live there, but it’s a, it’s a French controlled island in the Mediterranean Sea and we’re like, oh yeah, we heard that really beautiful island.

Matt Bowles: 00:32:24 Let’s go take that out. We’ll go for a week. So me, Jen and Eric could go and, um, you know, get an airbnb in the major city, um, for week. But the thing is that with his island, if you want to see any other parts of the island, which there’s lots of very different beautiful of the island, you have to rent the car to go there cause you can’t, like there’s no public transportation that’s easy to get around. So we’re like, okay, let’s rent the car and let’s drive to this, these different places. We’ll see the stuff’s, we planned this whole trip. We’re like, okay, we’re going to rent a car. And whose credit card gives us the best terms for like renting the car that includes, you know, there’s different stuff. So Magoos credit card was the best one to do and on. So she rents the car on her credit card, but I was going to drive.

Matt Bowles: 00:33:04 So we have me as a driver and Magoos going to nap. Magoos navigating in the front seat. Eric is in the back seat. So we started off on our journey. We’re driving, driving, and of course we’re talking about different stuff and this and that. And so as we talking about things, you know, we miss a turn that was supposed to go on. So we went right instead of laughed and or straight instead of turning left. And I was like, oh, should I make a u turn and turn around here? I can just go right back. It’s literally like this, you know, 60 seconds behind us. We’ll be back on the road.

Matt Bowles: 00:33:30 Well, cause like, no, no, I like the Google map here says you can just keep going straight and it’ll loop around and get right back on the road. I like, okay. So we keep driving and um, all of a sudden the rose does getting narrower and narrower and narrower and there’s like nobody around, right? I was like, um, are you sure this is going to be looping this back around to the road? She goes, it says right here on Google maps, you know, you just keep going. Should be right around the bend. So we turn and then we start continued to go. All of a sudden the road changes from a paved road into a dirt road. I was like, are you sure this is gonna get us back on the road? She’s like, yeah, just keep going and shit. It looks like, like just right out here.

Matt Bowles: 00:34:07 Probably once we get through this thing, it’ll be just dumped back out onto the main road. I was like, okay, so we’re following the dirt road and then all of a sudden there’s just like, it’s really clear that like this dirt road is getting extremely narrow and they are bushes like dense bushes on either side of it. Whereas if you continue to go forward on this dirt road, there is no way that you are going to be able to get back out. You’re not gonna be able to reverse you not delving. I can build to new attorney and I can be able to do anything. I was like, this is a one lane thing, totally block alien on either side. If we go forward, there’s no way we go back. Are you sure? And she goes, yeah, yeah, I think it’s just straight out there and she just sit.

Matt Bowles: 00:34:42 The road is literally like, I think as soon as we make this turn we’ll be on the road. I was like, okay. So we go forward and we go through these bushes and we turn around to the right and all of a sudden there is like a the steepest road, I mean I’m talking like, I dunno what the degree here would be definitely more than a 5.5 to 70% 70% grain where you just are going almost straight down the hill. And then as soon as we start going down there is on the lefthand side, the bushes have opened up and there’s now a ravine where we’re in a one car length road and there’s a ravine on the left hand side. So if you go a couple inches too far to the left, it appeared like the car could just fall off the ravine and go in.

Matt Bowles: 00:35:26 So I am way over to the right hand side and as a result of being way over. So there’s not the fall off into the ravine. The branches are just scar. I mean, just cranking against the car, you know, they’re just, you know, just, you know, hitting the car and, and, and it just, we’d have no idea how much scratches were going to be on the car, but it was just the branches just kept pounding the right side of the car. And we are going down this crazy steep, steep grade. And then all of a sudden at the, towards the bottom, we start to see the bottom of this steep, uh, road that we’re on. And it’s, there’s just a reservoir of water there. And it’s one of those reservoirs of water where you have no sense of how deep it is, right? So it fits deep and you choose to go through it slow.

Matt Bowles: 00:36:09 You could just stall out and get stuck in the water and get out. And then we’re in the middle of nowhere. There’s no human beings around it. We’d be stuck in the water. But if you go too fast and it’s like a super shallow thing and you’re coming down at a 70 degree grade, you can just plow the front of the car into the ground. Right. It was literally like that. So I was like, guys, we’ve gotta make a choice. Do we go slow through this thing or do I gun it? Because either way it could have a really bad effect and well that’s like, we’ve got to make this decision together. What do I do? And they’re like, gun it. So I just floor it and we just like pound into the water. It sprays up, goes everywhere. It was the right choice because it was pretty deep.

Matt Bowles: 00:36:46 And if we didn’t gun that we probably wouldn’t have stalled out and not gotten through it. The car is completely covered with mud. We get through the water out of the other side and eventually we make it around and back onto the road. And Magoo is just like, this car is on my credit card. Those branches scratching on the righthand side. I don’t even want to look. Okay, I think I should look, let’s fall over and we pull them over. The car is so covered with mud that you can’t even see anything. I mean you can’t even tell how scratched it is. This is whatever. So we’re like, okay well we got to wait til we get to a car wash then to assess the car. So we’re driving, we basically did like we got my car washed and we washed the stuff off the car and sure enough, I mean it is the right hand side is just branch scratches like all over the place.

Matt Bowles: 00:37:29 Right. So we tried all this stuff cause I go out there, you got an idea. I think we’d go to home depot and we get this thing and we’ll touch it up. We can just buff this stuff out. I got this, you know, so we go to home depot, which, and it just, I mean, no effect at all. Right? So we’re like, oh man. So we had to return this car. Magoo is just, she’s just shaking her head. She’s so nervous about this thing and being, being a hundred credit card and we just scratched up those out of the car. So what I do is when we pull into the car rental, return plays a, we pull into the parking lot and I park it with the branch sides, the right side passenger side. They had the branch scratches on it as close as possible to another car.

Matt Bowles: 00:38:05 Right. Then the car rental, I mean, not like four inches from like another car. So then the uh, the woman comes out of the car rental place and she comes out and she’s like, okay, um, yes. Let me just inspect the car. And I mean, Magoo just puts her hand over her eyes like this. She’s just like, kind of like hoping, hoping, hoping. And a lady walks around and it’s so close to the other car, she can’t walk down that side rest as you’re walking around the background, the fat around the driver’s side, around the front, looks at the, it looks at the, um, gas mileage, read some notes, I this going and stuff.

Matt Bowles: 00:38:36 She’s like, okay, you’re all set in. McGoo Lego was your eyes. And she’s like, can I get that in writing please? Just a little document, you know, signed by somebody that everything’s okay with this car. We returned it on, attach a snoot that from my records. Thanks. And so she gives it to her and be like, let’s book the book that out of the airport. So, yeah, man, amazing. But, um, so that was, you know, so, but, but France was amazing. It was just a really, really epic month. We ended up going up to Burgundy, went to the burgundy wine country, drove the route that ground crew through the Pinot noir vendor years in Cote, the Bun and cooked in the weekend. I mean, it was just some of the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever seen medieval towns with might have like 400 residents, but 40 wineries. And you’re like doing wine tastings in these sellers that are like 2000 years old and they get cobwebs on the bottles. I mean, it’s just, it’s crazy, man. It was such an amazing experience. So France after that really moved up my list of favorite western European countries for sure.

Sean Tierney: 00:39:37 France actually, ironically. Uh, so my own experience with France was Paris and then I actually last year went to OSA Gore on the West Coast and did some surfing. But other than that, I’ve never been around France and Paris. Honestly, I don’t speak French and it was a fairly negative experience when my brother and I backed back there. Um, but sitting next to this guy on the boat yesterday, he’s talking about all these coastlines and all the people and even inland the places, it sounds amazing to the mountains, right? They’re like, it sounds like an incredible country. It’s definitely, uh, in the last 24 hours has kited it up on my list as well. For sure. Yeah, it’s really, really, really a special place. Nice. Cool. Well, speaking of the cruise, let’s talk about the nomad cruise. What a, so this was not your first you’ve been on how many now?

Sean Tierney: 00:40:25 My third man. Yeah. Yeah. I was on nomad cruise number six, number seven. And this was number eight. So the first one was a Mediterranean cruise. We went from Spain through the Mediterranean Sea over to Greece. And then the second one was Barcelona to Brazil. It was a transatlantic cruise. And then this one was just a canary islands up to Lisbon stopping in Morocco on the way. Yep. And I hadn’t met you in Brazil. That’s where we to did take one of this interview with the failed take. Um, and it was that experience really meeting all those people that came off the boat that I think that sold me on it because the idea of being locked up on a boat with nomads, I dunno. It’s like you got to hope that they’re like really good people, but like, man, this was just incredible energy. Incredible people that came off that boat. And I was just a hundred percent sold after that experience.

Matt Bowles: 00:41:15 Yeah. I mean, the only way you’d ever be able to get me on a cruise boat is to put at least 200 digital nomads on it. Yeah. There’s no other way that I’m going to voluntarily get on a cruise ship. Right. But if you put 200 nomads or more on the boat, we had 500 people going from Spain to Brazil. That was incredible. What you have is a building opportunity because you’re in such a confined space together that the community bonding and the community building and the relationship building is so it’s just facilitated by the enclosed environment. Yeah. You know, so it’s, it’s amazing. And basically what it is for people that don’t know or haven’t heard of the nomad cruise, it’s basically a business conference on a boat where there are talks and workshops and presentations and meetups about a whole range of things ranging from entrepreneurship and business skills to personal development skills to, you know, travel hacks and strategies for nomadic. And, you know, there’s a whole different range of people that are there from fulltime itinerant nomads to people that are trying to get into the nomad game and you know, get into the lifestyle and that kind of stuff. So it’s a really, you know, I think we had people from 38 different countries that were on this last nomadic cruise. So you get people from all over the world.

Sean Tierney: 00:42:29 Yeah, that’s right. 222 nomads from 38 countries and it was a good mix of the aspiring nomad and then some of the veterans and like people like yourself who have been on multiple cruises. So I thought it was a really interesting mix. Uh, and man, just the energy of that boat and the takeaways. Some of those talks, um, David v was talk just hands down that was worth the price of admission right there. What, what ideas, I mean, is there anything in particular that you took that was a particularly salient takeaway or um, you know, an idea or you know, you did that workshop you did not just to talk on the, the minimalist luggage, but you did the, the kind of the ad hoc workshop on the cash flowing properties, which I thought you had kind of an epiphany there. It sounded like in terms of how to present that.

Matt Bowles: 00:43:15 Yeah, I think, you know, one of the, the way that it’s set up is, so I was a featured workshop presenter, so I was on the formal itinerary for the nomad cruise and part of the advertised, you know, list of presenters there in terms of the content that was going to be available on the ship. Um, so the workshop that I did was on minimalist packing strategies. So it was how to travel the world for a year plus with carry on luggage only and look good while you’re doing it. Right. Which is the kicker, because you know, it’s not actually that difficult to be a backpacker and just travel the world with a few pairs of shorts and a couple of days shirts and flip flops and just go around to different beaches. But what I do is I travel the world with a Hugo boss suit. I travel with dress shirts, I have Ferragamo shoes, I have, you know, a podcasting studio and espresso maker.

Matt Bowles: 00:44:03 I bring all of this around the world with me in my carry on luggage, right? And so that is a little bit of a different style of a presentation and it took me a lot of years to figure out how to do that. Right? And so I did a whole presentation on that. Everything from, you know, why to do it, how to think about it, and then what the principles are that different people can apply to themselves in their own packing, whatever their fashion and style is. Not to say that there’s has to be the same as mine, but whatever theirs is and can. We went through and I did a whole luggage audit of exactly what I take in why I take it, but I also went through the principles of minimalist packing that other people can apply to their own fashion style and basically get their own luggage down to this size if they choose to.

Sean Tierney: 00:44:48 Yeah, so I was front row seat at your talk. It was a great talk. Um, can we maybe link to the slides in the show notes? Do you still have those available?

Matt Bowles: 00:44:55 Definitely. And in fact I’m going to do better than that. I’m going to give you a link to the video, a presentation, because I actually have a voice over the slides as well, so they can actually hear me talking through it over the slides. And so I actually put together this website called maverick nomad life where I am compiling resources for digital nomads. So all of the stuff that I’ve learned about packing is going to be on there. So there’s a video of this minimalist packing thing that I presented on nomadic groups. People can go and watch that. Then I also have all of the gear that I use and the travel brands that I personally liked the best and recommend, I have links to all of them there. So that the stuff that you’ve seen me talk about in the presentation right below that you’ll be able to click on the links if you want to go and see it. Um, the specific gear items or the larger kind of brand, you know, and then look through all their stuff and see what might be right for you. So I’m putting all that stuff together. And then other stuff that’s on the site, like include sort of the work travel programs that I patronize and Co living spaces I use and like all that kind of stuff. So basically how I do everything I do is all going on to the site, maverick nomad, life.com and saw, definitely give you the direct links to that. Nice.

Sean Tierney: 00:46:07 Nice. And I had seen your talk, I believe, is it nomad summit where you gave a talk on minimalist packing and that was the thing that convinced me to actually shed cause I had, I think we followed a similar trajectory. You should have seen the, the setup that I had, this massive Samsonite clamshell thing that was about 50 pounds. And then I had the packets over there in the corner, like a 55 liter rei pack. Um, it was, and then just, you know, you pay the baggage fees, it’s just a pain in the ass to haul around the airport. It’s all the reasons you said in your talk. Uh, it constrains what you can do. It means you got to like ditch out early on the farewell party cause you still got to go pack and it’s just like an anchor around you the whole time you’re traveling. So

Matt Bowles: 00:46:48 big time, big time. I mean that’s, you know, that’s how I learned how to do it. I departed the United States with an obscene amount of luggage. Like when I left La and I was, she’s like going to Buenos Aires. I mean, I was packing so much ridiculous stuff. It was crazy. In fact, you know this about me, I’m going to suppress a drinker, right? And I drink about three, four shots of espresso. Yeah. I mean, you know this about me, right? And so in La I had my own, you know, really nice countertop espresso machine, right? I mean been imported from Milan. It was like a manual lever, you know, real deal espresso machine. And I would use it three to four times a day. And I was like, you know what, I’m going to go to Buenos Aires for like three months and I’ll be in Cairo for at least nine months. You know, I would really like

Matt Bowles: 00:47:30 to have my espresso maker with me. I think about a pack. This giant countertop espresso machine in my luggage didn’t bring it with me. And so literally that is fresco maker. You know, I’ve wrapped a couple of tee shirts around it and that took up my entire 22 inch roller board suitcase, right? Which was goes in the overhead compartment and then, and then I packed the gigantic suitcase filled with all sorts of stuff, including stuff that I had just not used in years. You know, I’m going through my closet. I was like, oh these are interesting hiking boots. I literally haven’t worn them in 10 years, but I might need them. So I think I’ll pack them just in case. Right. So I’m packing all this just in case stuff. Maybe I wouldn’t use that even though I haven’t used it in years. I had packing it Paga.

Matt Bowles: 00:48:09 So I have this outrageous amount of luggage right, that I’m bringing with me. So I, I’ve somehow get it all down to pay of course money to check these giant bags and all this kind of stuff, get it down to Buenos areas. And it just somehow got to the place and I’m unpacking everything. And after all of that crazy arduous as I was like, oh, now I get to unpack my espresso machine and I put it on the counter in my airbnb and I’m like, man, there it is. All that was really worth it. Cause now I have my espresso machine or I can use it every day, isn’t this great. And I go to plug it into the wall and I’m like, there is a, there’s, there’s a 220 volt, uh, you know, current here in the Er versus the one 10 bolt, uh, that the Americans, uh, how, or vice versa, whatever it is.

Matt Bowles: 00:48:57 But there’s a different, uh, there’s a different voltage in Argentina than there is in the United States. And so you cannot plug an American countertop appliance into an Argentina plug or you’ll blow it up, you’ll explode it right immediately. And so the only way that you can plug an American electrical device into the walls, you have to get a transformer, which transforms the current from one 10 to two 20 volts or whatever it is. So, oh my gosh, I go here and I can’t even use it, but I gotta go, now I got to go buy a transformer. So I messaged my airbnb host, I was like, um, yeah, I need a transformer to transform the electrical current so that I can plug it into the wall. And she’s like, oh, there’s no problem. There’s a hardware store in the corner. Just go down there and you know they should have one.

Matt Bowles: 00:49:40 So I go to the hardware store on the corner and then my very, very broken Spanish. I’m asking them to have a sick. Yeah, I have it. You know how many watts is your device? And I say a meal, what a thousand watts, right for this karyotype applies. That guy looks at me and he’s like, Oh, what? He goes, are you kidding me? No, we don’t have a transformer for that size of it eyes. There’s only one store in the whole city that would sell a transformer for that. You’ve got to go downtown to this one. You know, massive store that sells is this type of thing, and they’re the only store in the city that will have it. So I’m like, okay. So I walk right, it’s like 30 minute walk. I’m like, oh, just something new to the city. I’ll walk around, I’ll see the city.

Matt Bowles: 00:50:18 I walked down this thing 30 minutes again, this door. The guy’s like, yeah, we have it. And then I’m like, okay, cool, I’ll take it. I negotiate him down in price. He started at like a hundred dollars for this thing. I negotiated down to like 50 and then he’s like, okay. I was like, okay, great, I’ll take it. So then he’s going to bring it out and he brings out this giant thing and puts it on the counter and I’m just looking at it. I was like, that’s what I need. He goes, Yep, that’s the only thing that’s going to convert a thousand watts. This things like 20 pounds, dude. I mean, it’s enormous, right? And so I pay for it and then I’m just carrying like this 20 pound thing back and I’m walking back to my place and all of a sudden it starts to rain. Now mind you, when I went on this venture, I decided to wear my hiking boots that I hadn’t worn in 10 years because I thought, you know what?

Matt Bowles: 00:51:06 I brought these things. I’m definitely gonna get some use value out of them. I’ll wear them through the city. So I’m walking in my hiking boots I haven’t worn in 10 years. It starts raining on the way back and I am walking down the sidewalk, walking, walking. All of a sudden the soul starts to come off the bottom of the shoe of my hiking boot, right. And all of that. And it’s like, you know, the soldiers is on the ground and my shield goes up, but the soul doesn’t come with it. Like that kind of thing. So I’m walking all of a sudden, literally the sole of my right shoe just falls completely off. And My sock is stepping in the puddles on the sidewalk right through my shoe. And then all of a sudden the sole of my other shoe starts coming off and then comes completely off.

Matt Bowles: 00:51:44 So I’m now walking down the sidewalk with no soles on my shoe, both of my socks directly stepping in the puddles on the sidewalk. I’m soaked all the way through. I have this 20 pound device, I finally get back to my apartment and I plug it in and it works and I’m able to make espresso and all this, you know, stuff. So victory kind of, because now in order to use my espresso machine in any other country, I now have to bring not only my giant express a machine, but this 20 pound transformer along with it. So I packed that in my luggage as well. So my luggage just, I mean, so it just, it got to the point where it was so outrageous and crazy and insane that I just said, okay, um, we’re gonna figure out how to do minimalist packing and I’m going to get my entire life into carry on luggage only where I’m not checking loads at all.

Matt Bowles: 00:52:35 And so everything from that point on was, it was a process. It took me years to find all the different pieces and all the different things and all the different strategies. But I basically condensed five years of knowledge into this video where I can now bring gear, uh, for beaches, for winters skiing, for dressing nights out, including a much smaller travel espresso maker, but makes real espresso. I was gonna say, how did you solve the, from from the giant transformer to something that fits and carry on luggage? That’s a huge change. Like how did you solve just the espresso piece of that? I assertively began shopping and inquiring around for travel espresso makers and what p if you drink espresso, if you’re a real expressive drinker, you will know that you cannot, there’s no such thing as can’t as stove top espresso. They have things that are kind of called stovetop espresso makers, but they’re not real espresso makers because real espresso requires 16 bars of pressure.

Matt Bowles: 00:53:31 Okay. Which you can’t create on the stove. And so what I was looking for as I was searching around was what are the options for travel sized espresso makers, if any. And there was one brand called hand Preso and it’s a very small, um, device and you can use either pods with it or ground espresso, right? And you can as a tamper and all this kind of stuff. But what it does is the kicker is that they have created a way to get 16 bars of pressure without using electricity, which is that there’s a bicycle pump technology. And so the handle extends out and allows you to pump it like a bicycle pump. And there’s a gauge that goes up as you’re pumping it until you get to 16 bars, right? And then it stays there. And then all you need in addition to the espresso that you’re going to put in there is boiling water.

Matt Bowles: 00:54:22 And so you can, you can ask for, you know, a glass of hot water, boiling water on the, on an airplane, you can boil water in a campfire, you can anywhere, you can boil water, you don’t need electricity, you’re going anywhere. You can boil water, you can make an espresso. So you pour the boiling water and you have these breasts or you lack the top, you’ve pumped it up to 16 bars and then you click the button and it will use the 16 bars of x of pressure to express out the espresso. And you actually sure enough make an espresso with real crema and all that stuff. So I use, you know, illy espresso or something like that. So you have ilie you know, is a brand. If people know that brand, that’s what it’s going to taste like because that’s the expressor you’re using and you’re able to express it out properly and get the boiling water and it’s just a very, very small handheld, you know, easy to travel with device. And so I basically, you know, did that with pretty much everything else that’s, you know, this, it’s in my luggage. I just thought about it that way. What is the travel conducive way to get all this stuff down minimalist but not to compromise espresso quality, not to compromise, you know, the fashion and style and all this kind of stuff. Yeah,

Sean Tierney: 00:55:25 it really was a good talk. I’m glad that you’re going to share that video. It’s worth watching. If you’re listening to this and this resonates with you, I would definitely recommend checking that out. Cool. Um, okay, well just on the cruise note, it, it just, I wanted her to kit this. Um, we’ve had a couple snafoos we’ve been a great song that you played on the career. I’ve been cashing real estate shacks,

Matt Bowles: 00:55:54 people on the careers basically thought that Sean Tierney and I wear this. I mean, I have to say, I don’t know what percentage of the cruisers, but a certain substantial percentage of the crews who was literally thought that Sean Tierney and I were the same human being. Oh Chris. So you performed in the talent show an amazing song, which emotionally moved people in was incredible. And the next day I had probably five or six people come up to me and say, that song you played in the talent show was so amazing and was so moving. And,

Sean Tierney: 00:56:24 and the next morning at breakfast I had a lady sitting next to me who said, yeah, I loved your real estate workshop, but what about the just being, you know, like we, we know each other’s stuff so well it’s like we could probably play each other if we had to, but,

Speaker 5: 00:56:38 and then you created a, uh, an image that you posted in the nomad cruise ship about how to tell Matt and Sean apart. And it was a picture of the two of us together with arrows pointing to each of us with our name and then basically the different attributes of each of us and that people can tell us apart. Real Estate Guy, minimalist backing guy and song guy know prep and Trudy makeover. Exactly. Uh, yeah,

Sean Tierney: 00:56:59 no, that was, that was classic. Amazing. Very cool. All right, well I’m not going to make you sing. You made me sing on your, don’t worry. I’m not going to make you sing, but I do want to see if you can give some advice to people, the people that are aspiring to do this in the form of a hip hop lyric because I know you’re a hip hop fan

Matt Bowles: 00:57:23 everyday. I’m hustle and hustle and hustle and hustle and hustle and I go for the Rick Ross Man. I think that’s, I think that’s really the key is is you have to grind, you have to hustle, you have to put in the work. I think the main thing that, the reason why a lot of people don’t get to this point, don’t do this. You know, either don’t start, don’t finish it, don’t get to where they want to go is because they’re not putting in the work. Right? And by the work, I don’t just mean hours. I mean doing the right things and, and then putting in the hours, right? So you need to first of all, figure out your own path and design a path. And that inquiry requires a lot of research and investigation, right? For you personally. So I mean, people should definitely take your nomad prep academy.

Matt Bowles: 00:58:08 Uh, Shawn for sure. Uh, in terms of, you know, what are the actual logistical technicalities to like becoming a nomad and how do you actually do that? But then for you personally to think about, for you, what is going to be your income generating, you know, source. Do you want to be an entrepreneur? Are you an entrepreneur? Are you an entrepreneur that just needs to turn your business into something? Location independent? Are you an office worker that wants to become an entrepreneur? Are you an office worker that just wants to negotiate a remote work location with your employer? Continue collecting your paycheck, but just quote unquote work from home, which could also be working from the beach in Thailand, right? Is that your move? Do you want to become a freelancer? Right? Self employed person, which is very different from a business owner. Right? And so just kind of think in doing that self auditing process and figuring out who am I, what type, you know, am I an entrepreneur, am I not an entrepreneur, am I, what am I good at?

Matt Bowles: 00:59:03 What can I do? So depending on what stage you’re at, or maybe you’re an established business owner and you’re crushing it, but you’re just, you don’t have the location independence piece, you know, you, you feel that you need to be in one place. Are Your, your geographic are restricted for some reason. What are the obstacles that are preventing you from being fully location and running your business while traveling the world? I mean, one of the things that I’ve been trying to do with the maverick show is to highlight a lot of very interesting business owners that are running location independent businesses and spaces that are absolutely not traditionally virtual. So we just gave the example of Magoo who was an architectural design company for these major clients and she’s doing it while traveling the world, right? I mean you, Shawn are, you know, the sales director for Paisley and you also are selling and closing fortune 500 clients and doing all this stuff from, you know, Moroccan bowling alleys and like, you know, epic places around the world. Right? And a lot of people just, it’s a mindset thing where they need to think, okay, I can do all this stuff that I’m doing, but it is possible to do at location independent. So the first step is just auditing where you are and what your obstacles are and where you want to be and then the next and figuring out what your path is to overcome all those obstacles. And then it’s about really putting in the work to do that.

Sean Tierney: 01:00:19 Are you aware of any framework for doing that or is this a matter of purely of literally just like getting out, sitting in a Barnes and noble all day and reading, you know, while you’re unemployed or while you’re on your weekends. Like, how do you go about unraveling this puzzle?

Matt Bowles: 01:00:34 I mean, I think that people should talk to other people and get into spaces where they are consuming content and interacting with people that are doing what they want to do. So one of the great things about the nomad cruise, for example, which is the same with the nomad summit you mentioned in Chiang Mai and a lot of these other nomad spaces, is that people who are aspiring nomads can interact with people that are already nomads and that have experience doing what they want to do. So the first thing is, you know, the, the main thing that people tell me that you know, that really holds them back is that they’re surrounded by people that don’t do this. And people that don’t do this are oftentimes telling them, you can’t do this or you shouldn’t do this, or you’re crazy for trying to do this. Right.

Matt Bowles: 01:01:19 It’s not something reasonable. But, and that’s powerful when your family and your friends and your coworkers and your social circle tell you, nobody does this, that you know, and they, you know, you can’t do it or you shouldn’t do it or whatever. That’s a, it has a really powerful, it’s a really powerful force in preventing forward progress. And so what you need to do is just inject yourself with content. Listen to the nomad podcast, listened to the maverick show, listen to you know, content, watch videos from people you know that are doing this and get into Facebook groups and virtual social circles. If you don’t have physical social circles of people that are doing this, ask questions, engage, build relationships even if it’s virtually online. And then try to get to some of these events, right? Try to get to some of these things. Even if it’s, you can just take a week, you know where you need to take a long weekend.

Matt Bowles: 01:02:11 Just go to the nomad summit or a week and go to the nomad cruise or go on something and interact with people and immerse yourself and see that it’s possible for every type of person, whether you’re an employee, a freelancer, or a business owner, and you’re in any number of different spaces. There’s probably somebody that has overcome the obstacle and the challenge that you are facing and that knows how to do it. So I would say the first thing is really just the mindset. Convince yourself that it is possible for you now for some people, but for you, and then identify the obstacles and challenges which 100% of people have. So just figuring out what yours are and then figuring out how to overcome them and how to overcome them includes just immersing yourself in these communities and trying to build, you know, relationships and just, you know, learning and consuming content about how to do that. And then building your own path and you know, knocking it out.

Sean Tierney: 01:03:00 Yeah. Well, and you’re going to be something that just popped into my mind, Michael Fallon, who you are interviewing tomorrow. I’m really interesting guy said something to the effect of, you know, like you look, they tell you to find your passion and then make that your employment. And they’re like, go build a business around your passion. And you may not necessarily find that. You likely won’t find that, you know, that perfect alignment where it happens like that. But don’t let that dissuade you from finding some way to make money that allows you to do this. And then you can have your passion, have it as a hobby if you want. It doesn’t necessarily have to be one in the same. And the people that get fixated on, oh, I need to be doing my passion and let that be the thing that precludes them from going abroad.

Sean Tierney: 01:03:40 That’s a shame. Like I love Pagely. I love helping them. Is it like my ultimate passion? No, but it’s facilitated at this lifestyle. It’s a great group of people. You know, I’m happy to work for them and continue doing this because it allows me to do this. It allows me to grow the nomad podcasts to do what we’re doing now. So I just, uh, if that’s the thing that’s holding you back, if you’re listening and you’re, the reason that you haven’t done this yet is because you haven’t found that Unicorn idea that lets you do your passion and make that your money generator. I think that’s a shame. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Cool. All right. I don’t have a lightning round. I’m jealous that you have the term lightening round. It’s a very good name for it, but I am just going to call this the tactical point of this interview where I want to ask you some just pointblank questions and feel free to respond. So let’s talk about uh, books, top three influential books that sculpted you in some formative way.

Matt Bowles: 01:04:41 So I already mentioned the four hour work week by Tim Ferris. That is the single most influential business book that I have read in the last 10 years that impacted my business because of the way that it shaped my thinking on things. If you listen to the maverick show podcast, you will find that almost all of my guests have read and been influenced by that book as well. If for some reason you have not yet read that book, um, I would, I would recommend that book. But also subsequent to reading that book, which was Tim’s first book, I have been very closely following him. He does a podcast called the Tim Ferriss show, which is one of the most successful business podcasts of all time. He has put in a number of other books as well. So that’s a really, really significant person to follow in general.

Matt Bowles: 01:05:27 Other than that book. Beyond that, on the entrepreneurial side, I would say the Ie myth by Michael Gerber and there’s actually a sort of a series of them. So there’s a little bit more of a thorough, a little more thorough version of the book called e Myth Mastery and actually recommend them both read e Myth and an e myth mastery and really takes you through the entrepreneurial business building process from a pretty useful and tactical point. One of the main things, right when they talk about the myth that it busts, which is really important conceptually if you’re thinking about starting a business is that just because you’re good at something does not mean that you can build a business around that. Because the skill of building a business and the skill of doing whatever it is that you do that you’re good at are two completely separate skills.

Matt Bowles: 01:06:21 You might be a good business owner and a good, you know person that does that but you also might not, you might be good at one or the other. And so the really important things it gets back to that self auditing and self awareness is to really do an honest self audit about what are you good at. So when I was starting my business, I was reading through these business books about like oh these are the different pillars and the different things of starting of doing a business and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, listen, I’m going to be very honest with myself. I can, I think I’m actually good at maybe like a third of these. And at least half of them. Like I just, I can’t do them. Like that’s really not my thing and it’s really not going to be worth my time to try to learn how to do stuff that I’m really not good at and you know, don’t like either.

Matt Bowles: 01:07:01 So I’m going to find other people that are really good at those things. And so I did that. And as the entrepreneur or business founder, putting the pieces of the puzzle together and building the team, whether it’s business partners, whether it’s you know, staff that you hired to do certain pieces of it, it’s about being very honest with yourself, audit and then what you need and understanding the vision for building a team that together collectively can execute a vision. Right? So that is super important. And from the math, I got a lot of that and it really helps to break things down tactically. So I’d really recommend going through that in great detail and being very honest with yourself as you audit yourself, which of the skills you have, which of the skills you don’t and how you’re going to fill the ones that you don’t. And then after that, I guess the third one I would name just in terms of general, um, orientation towards productivity and, and really how to approach a lot of this stuff is the seven habits of highly successful people by Stephen Covey. Um, I think that’s a really, really, really good book that whether you’re an entrepreneur or even not an entrepreneur, again, it’s, it’s highly successful people in general that I think is an incredible book about, you know, habits and productivity strategies, mindset,

Matt Bowles: 01:08:16 stress, mitigation, you know, all of the things that are important for succeeding in life, especially in business. But in life in general, that’s probably the third book I’ll recommend. Nice.

Sean Tierney: 01:08:26 Okay. How about one tool, and this can be a software app. It can be maybe a mobile app or even a piece of gear, but one tool that uh, that

Matt Bowles: 01:08:37 saves you time, money, headache, whatever. So business wise, I would say that Trello, which is the project management software I alluded to earlier, has been really, really helpful for our team because we can collaborate, all of our different team members can collaborate on projects collectively from totally remote locations. And that’s a really helpful thing in running a distributed team and having different team members work on the same project when they’re not at the same location. So I feel like that has really taken our business to another level. So I think I’ll recommend that as my piece of software. If you want me to throw in sort of a cool travel app as a totally separate thing, I’ll throw in the travel app or Rome to Rio, which is one of my faves. Love it. Yeah, it’s uh, the city, Rome, r, O, m, e, the number two and then Rio, Rio, the city, Rome, two Rio download from the app store.

Matt Bowles: 01:09:30 And basically what it is is you can put in any two places in the world that you want to travel from and to, so I want to go from this city to that city. And what it’s going to do is it’s going to come up with all the different ways you can get there. You take a plane, you can take a train, you could take a bus, you can take a car or you do part one part on another, you know, trained to here and then the bus to there. And it’ll give you the pricing for all the different options, all the different routes. And then you can literally just click through and like actually buy the train tickets, buy the plane tickets. And I mean, it’s one of the most amazing travel apps. And I have used, I use it all the time.

Sean Tierney: 01:10:02 It’s, it’s where I start when I’m planning a trip to see what am I not, what am I missing here? Oh, you can take a ferry here and then take a car there. And it’s cheaper. Like, oh, that’s great. So yeah, it’s a shameless plug for the nomad prep. That’s a day eight in our mobile apps. Love that. Action. Love that. It’s one of my favorites. Great Call. Okay. I’m gonna throw you a curve ball. I’m gonna throw you a curve ball here. This is one. If you had to say what is your super power? And I’ll let you answer it cause I, I’ll have my own answer and I’ll tell you what that is, but I want to hear your answer. You’re going to tell me what my superpower is. What I think it is. Yeah.

Matt Bowles: 01:10:38 Oh man, that’s amazing. My superpower, Shawn. My superpower is that I make wine. Does it?

Sean Tierney: 01:10:47 You’re very good at it. So corollary, what is your favorite type of wine? Ooh,

Matt Bowles: 01:10:53 um, that’s a tough one, man. You know, we are drinking this beautiful, uh, Portuguese wine from the Douro Valley, which right now, which is absolutely lovely. And I am going to tell you that I think that Portuguese wine is probably the most underrated wine in Europe. Cause when you think the sort of the old world wines of like France and Italy, which are amazing. And then Spain also, I think it’s very high billing for wine from the, I did it’s wine tour in the Rio Ha region last year of Spain and as also very amazing. But I feel like the Portuguese wines are so less internationally known compared to those other European wine regions. And they’re so amazing. Right? Like the Doro region, the Ontario region. There’s just incredible wines from Portugal. And I think, you know, price to quality, the value proposition of the Portuguese wines is just really amazing.

Matt Bowles: 01:11:50 So, you know, I have a lot of wines that I really like, but I, since we’re drinking this and we’re here, I do want to recommend that if people have not tried Portuguese wine, start with some world valley red wines. D, u, D, O, u, r o and a that’s, I mean those are some of my favorites for sure. It’s a beautiful region too. I don’t know if you’ve been up there by Porto, but just the, the landscape itself is incredible. Well, you know, not only have I been up there, but before I went to Portugal, I was just randomly researching what are the most scenic train rides in the world. Cause I love train rides, right? So usually the number one consensus on the single most beautiful train ride in the world is the glacier express in Switzerland, which is an express an eight hour express train direct from summary to Zermatt.

Matt Bowles: 01:12:40 And it goes right through the Swiss Alps, which was one of the ones that the Valerie and I went down and when we were doing our executive leadership meetings that I mentioned, and that is just a mind blowing train ride, what you’ll see. But in the top 10 on this list that I saw is the train that goes from Porto out to Pacino and in Portugal. And what it is is, and I did this train ride as a result and it’s super inexpensive. I mean this may be like $27 or something and you go out. So Porto is where the Douro river, which, which irrigates the Portuguese wine country empties out into the ocean and the train goes inland along the door. River just hugs the river and you are just going directly through the Portuguese wine country and seeing nothing but wine vineyards on both sides of the train the whole way.

Matt Bowles: 01:13:30 It is just stunning scenery that, so I’m going to Porto on my birthday in May. It’s coming up, uh, with a friend and that sounds fantastic. I think that just got added to the list. It’s amazing. Yeah. You literally, you just go at the poster, you know where there’s nothing in this town. I mean it was like one cafe. You just have a cup of coffee and they’re like, come back on the train. Like you’re literally just riding the train for the views, but it is absolutely epic. Amazing. All right. Officially on the list for birthday trip. Deport that. Love it. Love it. Cool. All right, let’s wrap this up with one. Nope. Yeah, one last question. What Weight Unit? Sean, you never told me my superpower. I’m going to say for the [inaudible]. I’ll tell you your supervisor again, some of my super, I’ll give

Sean Tierney: 01:14:12 you a heads up. Um, but you can, you can make wine disappeared and incredibly [inaudible] that’s, that’s, that’s a secondary supervisor. Um, okay. So if you had a time machine to go back to your 20 year old Matt Ball Self, the, the DJ, we never even got to talk about your DJ stories. Can you actually, can you say, just, just give me the one story about the, the, the country bar that you guys play or the prom that you played and it was like a country.

Matt Bowles: 01:14:47 Okay. So I was a, so when I was going into high school, I really, really, I got exposed to hip hop music for the first time probably in middle school. So this would be like for me, middle school was like 89 90 like around that time period, high school was 91 to 95 then college was 95 to 99 for me. So as I was in middle school, I got exposed to hip hop music for the first time and just fell in love with hip hop music. And this just really, I was really enamored with it and interested in all the different aspects of it. I mean, this is what raised my public enemy, raised my, literally raised my social and political consciousness, you know, coming from a very white suburban upbringing, you know, I got just the beats in the music and emceeing and deejaying and the whole thing just spoke to me, you know, immediately.

Matt Bowles: 01:15:38 And so by the time I was going into high school, I said, you know what, I really want to learn how to become a hip hop DJ. So I just started asking every birthday and Christmas, I had just, I was asking, can I get, I want to turn table, I want to make sure I want to speak her. I want to, you know, I spent all the money I had. I would go to the record stores and buy vinyl records and um, DJ. And then I started, you know, just volunteering to DJ stuff at whatever I could do. And then I started apprenticing with, um, I, you know, when I would go to the DJ store where they sold DJ equipment, all the people that worked there are of course Djs, right? So I basically would just start apprenticing with them and I would say, you know, I’m a high school kid, but I want to learn how to DJ.

Matt Bowles: 01:16:17 Like, I’ll just go with you for free. I’ll carry your stuff, I’ll take requests, I’ll whatever you want me to do, just teach me how to do, let me watch you do what you do. And so they’re like, okay, kids gonna work for me for free. Like, all right, I’ll take it around and carry this stuff and whatever. Right? And so I learned how to DJ by apprenticing with the top Djs. And this was buffalo, New York, where it was in high school. And so then by the time I was a junior in high school, I knew what I was doing. And so all these guys I’ve been apprenticing with what could basically then subcontract out gigs to me. Like they’d book more gigs than they could do themselves. So they’d hire it out to other djs. They knew what I could do, cause I had been apprenticing with them.

Matt Bowles: 01:16:54 So they would hire out gigs to me. So by the time I was a junior in high school, I was literally deejaying senior proms at other schools. Right. And then my senior year of high school I was doing like all these problems and, and then the summer was also then the wedding season. So I started deejaying. So I basically parlayed my love of hip hop and hip hop DJ into a mobile business, right. Where I could then play different kinds of music and go to different, do different kinds of crowds. So, um, so then I started apprenticing for, I mean I started, sorry, I started subcontracting for like all the different DJ companies in Buffalo, like any DJ company that books and Gig and can’t do it. Like I’ll do it for them. They’ll take a piece off the top for booking it and then I’ll go do it.

Matt Bowles: 01:17:32 So I could work the whole summer, you know? And then I was also booking my own DJ gigs. Right. So my, when I came home from college, you know, every summer I’d do the Prom circuit and then I’d did the wedding circuit. And that would be my summer job. I didn’t have to work at the mall cause I could just do DJ gigs, you know, every weekend. So, which was a blast because then you’re in the middle of the party and some of these problems were like unbelievable. Like I would do all, cause I was in, I knew all the hip hop stuff. Right. And so I would do all of the city school proms, you know, and everything. And I was just, you know, it was amazing. Right. So I, and I, a lot of these problems, we’re just very hip hop centrics you know, stuff and client, you know, that’s what the kids wanted to hear.

Matt Bowles: 01:18:08 So I was just, it was a blast. But once in awhile I would get, uh, how did we get, I would get, you know, oh, you know, a different type of Gig or this or that. We have to play something else. And so the way that you handle that is, um, somebody who wants something, you know, whatever it is. Like if you’re doing a wedding, you sit down and you meet with the bride and the groom. What are your, you know, obviously father, daughter dance this song together, whatever. But then what type of crowd is it? What types of music do they like? Who are your favorite artists? And you have, you bring all the stuff that they want to hear. Then you play stuff that they want to hear and then they love you and they dance to it. And that’s how your dd you play to your crowd, right?

Matt Bowles: 01:18:42 But, uh, sometimes if you don’t, if you don’t book the Gig Yourself, you just get, uh, subcontracted out to you. And especially if it’s last minute, you don’t have a chance to do that. So I literally, I feel like, I want to say this was 24 hours notice, right? Somebody was scheduled to do this gig and was already set to do this gay. They bail on it for some reason it got sick or something happened to the last second. This guy calls me up and he’s like, Yo, can you DJ this problem for me? Like it was, it was like either like tonight or like tomorrow night. It was some super last minute thing. And I was like, yeah, sure it bro. It’s no problem. Like I actually have that night open. Like that’s cool, I can cover his. I’m like, where’s the prom? He’s like, minutes away. He’s like, it’s in Wellsville.

Matt Bowles: 01:19:21 I was like, I never heard of Wellsville. He’s like, yeah, it’s like 30 minutes dude, like from you? Like yeah, can you cover this for me? I was like, okay, cool. So I call him my buddy, uh, Seth green, who I also interviewed on the maverick show. Uh, call him up. I was like, Yo man, this last minute Gig, uh, can you go with me? You know, take requests, helped me do my stuff. I’d always, I’d always hired one of my buddies cause then it was fun to go. I’d pay them some a bit and they’d go and have a blast. So I was like, can you go with me? He’s like, yeah. I was like, okay, supposed to be like 30 minutes away. I haven’t looked it up on the map yet, but I’ll pick you up and we’ll roll. All right. So first of all, it turns out I was like two hours away.

Matt Bowles: 01:19:52 Is that 30 minutes away? So we’re going, we’re late. I mean, we’re just like, you know, mob and bomb and down to the something. I’ve got my regular kind of array of like, you know, stuff with me or whatever. No idea, haven’t talked to these people, don’t know anything about this school where it is. I’m going and we’re going, we’re driving. All of a sudden we’re just out and we’re in the middle of corn fields. I mean, there’s like nothing we are in like, you know, agricultural, like country land. Okay. So I mean, we’re late. We’re, you know, it’s, it’s approaching the time. They’re going to start having dinner. This, this, and we were late. We’re late, we’re late, we’re late. Oh Man. So I had four flying down the street. We get pulled over by the cops. Of course. I mean, it was just like everything that could go wrong, kind of went wrong. Finally, we get there, we’re super late and we’re setting up our stuff and it’s like 24 kids, they’re all wearing cowboy hats and cowboy

Speaker 5: 01:20:48 record, skip a red flag. And I’m like, Oh man, I don’t know if I have the right stuff for this crap. So you know, we’re like, well maybe they like the mainstream kind of like stuff that I’m playing at the other browns, which is like, you know, pop top 40 this guy stuff. They did not like that stuff. And so, you know, I had a minimum, like literally,

Matt Bowles: 01:21:14 literally they’re promptings long. I’m not even kidding you. The prom theme was the sound, the, the, the opening number of the dukes of hazard

Speaker 5: 01:21:25 television show the theme song for the Dukes of Hazzard. I’m not even kidding you. That was literally the prompting. Just the good old boy is, oh man. Never mean to no harm. I’m not even kidding you. There was a bomb theme. So, the, so this is literally, and then, and then the plate. And then they had, I didn’t have that, they had the CD there. So I play their prom theme and the crowd goes wild, right. He are probably, and then I’m like, what country stuff do I have? I have this like damn, play it like Achy breaky heart by Billy Ray Cyrus. I’m like, I have, I think I have friends in low places by Garth Brooks. I’ll play that. And I played it, you know, like whenever it was at the time I was like pulling out these like compilations that might have a country song on them.

Speaker 5: 01:22:02 And I’m like putting it in and playing it and they’re going, you know, but eventually we’re able to kind of like figure out, you know, what it was that they kind of wanted to hear. And I like pull out everything and like variations. And I’m like mixing stuff in, which is like a country kind of theme and it’s like this. And I’m like, you know, so eventually it was amazing we won them over. But the, I told you the, um, the analogy that I said, I kid that I couldn’t stop thinking the whole night is a scene from the blues brothers when they’re driving around for like two hours and all of a sudden they pull into Bob’s country bunker and they go in and, you know, they’re looking around and Elwood says to the woman, uh, ma’am, oh, what kind of music do you usually has here? She goes, well, we got both cans, country and western, and then they get the chicken wire and they start playing a blues music and everybody’s firing the bottles in the throne and stuff. Man, I’m, and it’s like, man, we gotta figure out something to these people, like in fast raw being from the DV show, rawhide.

Speaker 5: 01:23:06 Well then they eventually went over the ground and then this man has the bone, the best musical dad in here and so long we want you guys to come back and all this kind of stuff. And so it ended up the same way where they loved us and we were able to figure out what they want and kind of do a nice kind of dynamic with them and like, you know, but that’s a really anonymous,

Matt Bowles: 01:23:22 well I think to be very honest, like that was, you know, that whole deejaying experience was an incredible business lesson in so many different ways, which is, I mean, one, it gave me all this experience being sort of the, you know, the Mc as well of the event and being able to like speak in front of a crowd and like, but also try to understand what it was the crowd wanted to hear and what would positively impact them and move them and like get them, you know? And so you really have to kind of know your crowd and then play to your crowd and then move the crowd and then have them come out with an amazing experience based on what you did. And that’s the same thing with public speaking or with podcasting or with like anything else is I feel like that, you know, my experience in that space really gave me a lot of the sort of business skills that I was then labeled later able to apply in in different ways to a other things in my life.

Sean Tierney: 01:24:12 That’s awesome man. That’s awesome. All right, so this will be the last question then.

Matt Bowles: 01:24:17 It was a long answer for a lightning round question.

Speaker 5: 01:24:20 There’s nothing I can do the layering out. We’re going to have to come up with a better, better name for this. It doesn’t have a name.

Matt Bowles: 01:24:25 This is the to be named round right now. Uh, the last question of the to be named round

Sean Tierney: 01:24:32 top five hip hop artists.

Matt Bowles: 01:24:35 All right, so I’m going to say, I’m going to put, I’m going to put, I’m going to put Chuck d from public enemy and my top five in part just because that was the group that really, really influenced me early on, both in terms of hip Bob as well as terms of raising my social and political consciousness about a lot of stuff that put me on some really important directions in life and really helped me to develop my worldview in important ways. Um, and so I’m going to put Chuck d in the top five. I, all my stuff is going to be New York City by the way, and it’s all going to be from the 90th so just, I’m just putting that out there, which isn’t a, you know, in the disrespect to any other region or rappers cause there’s a lot of great people that I appreciate and respect, but from me, just in terms of the love and from the heart, it’s all going to be New York City stuff from the nineties so I’m going to say, uh, I’m going to say Biggie for sure. I think biggie probably from me, it was the greatest of all time. I’m going to say Nas is going to be there. That’s three. I’m going to put probably guru from gang starr would be in the top five I think. And then number five, I’m probably gonna. I feel like Jay z deserves to be there, so I think I want to put Jay z as my, as my five, so I’ll leave it at that. Good choices my man.

Sean Tierney: 01:25:57 Dig It. All right, well I’m sure we could, we could probably talk for another three hours and it’d be hilarious. We can just keep going, but I think we’ll, we’ll, we’ll call it a wrap there. I will tell you what I think your super power is. Okay. I love it. I think you have an insane ability to make people feel comfortable and in a way that really brings them out. Like, I don’t know if it’s like your smile or the vulnerability or you’re just always like anywhere in a room on the nomad cruise it guaranteed people want to be around you. And I think like, uh, my buddy ed always has this phrase that says, you can’t see the water in your own fish tank. I don’t think you can see how much of a connector you are and how people truly gravitate to you for that. And so in my opinion, not as your super power.

Matt Bowles: 01:26:47 So that means the world to your brother. Thank you for saying that insurance to you as we finish our bottle of Portuguese wine. But that really means a lot to me, man, especially coming from your brother. So thank you for that

Sean Tierney: 01:26:56 dude. There’s, there’s no one, I would rather be [inaudible]

Speaker 6: 01:26:59 fuse to 50% of the people on a cruise. Think that’s your super power as well. So, you know, my super power is super, super bad. MySuper Paris, a superpower. I mean, you go, Gosh, and we’re just going to see that.

Sean Tierney: 01:27:16 All right. We’ll wrap it up there. So if people listening, they want to get in touch with you, obviously listen to the show that that story that you just heard was hilarious and it’s even better on the Seth green episode. Green

Matt Bowles: 01:27:26 tells from his perspective. Um, yeah, so people can get in touch. So first of all, um, the podcast is just the maverick show.com and you can find the maverick show with Matt bowls anywhere that you listened to podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, stitcher, wherever you listen to it, you’ll find it there. But if you just go to the maverick show.com, they’ll have direct links as well to where he can listen. And it’s also gonna have all the show notes. So, uh, interviewed Sean, episode 21, the Sean Tierney episode. It’s amazing. It’s one of my top episodes, uh, that I have put out. It’s an incredible pillar episode on sales strategy. Also some amazing stories about when Sean hike the highest volcano in South America and fell over the edge and uh, uh, some things like that. So you’re going to get to hear some really awesome stuff, uh, on that episode.

Matt Bowles: 01:28:13 So definitely check out Sean’s and then some amazing other people, uh, on the maverick show, the maverick show.com. If you want to check out the minimalist packing stuff, as well as how I do everything. I do the the remote work travel programs I use, um, all the packing strategies, all this stuff that I use that is all in one place on maverick nomad, life.com and then if you’re interested in the real estate investing stuff, the real estate investing company is Maverick Invest Store group.com. So that is our real estate investing website and you can get free reports. There is a bunch of really cool free educational content if you want to learn about how to buy turnkey rental properties in the United States from anywhere in the world. So they’re already fully renovated a cashflowing. They already have tenants in place, they already have local property managers in place that are collecting the rent and handling the maintenance so you can own the actual deeded real estate.

Matt Bowles: 01:29:06 You own the hard asset yourself, but you don’t have to be anywhere near it. You don’t have to manage it or deal with the tenants or do that headachy stuff because you’ve got a professional property manager do that for you. So you are the investor. You’re going to be the one that makes the decisions in cash. Is the checks, not the one that’s dealing with the tenants. So if you’re interested in that@maverickinvestorgroup.com and if you want to follow me personally on Instagram, it’s at Matt Bowls, Maverick, m a t t bow les m a v E R I C K at Matt Bowls Maverick on Instagram. So that’s how you get ahold of Matt. Matt, any final thought for someone listening who is in that cubicle right now who’s like, maybe they got this in their ear buds and they’re like, man, that sounds awesome. Like what’s my next step?

Matt Bowles: 01:29:48 Like is just the main thing is to convince yourself that you personally, you can do it. Not other people could do it, not some people can do it, but you can do it because I guarantee you whatever you are, whatever you do, whatever your situation is, however much money you have, whatever kind of job you’re in, whatever your talents are, someone in that exact same position has done it. And I’m pretty sure I know them like, because I know a lot of nomads that are come from extremely disparate places. Um, so if you want to do it, you can. And it’s all about designing your path from where you are now to where you want to be. So what I would recommend is identifying that vision and clarity and actually physically writing down and maybe even creating a vision board with, with images of where you want to be and specifically where you want to be in terms of your lifestyle design stuff.

Matt Bowles: 01:30:40 If you want to do the digital nomad thing, how you want to do it, what your dream locations would be, how you want to travel, how often all that stuff create and design and physically write down your dream lifestyle and then work backwards and say, how do I get from where I am now to this dream lifestyle that I’ve just envisioned and articulated and what are my obstacles standing in my way of doing it immediately? Like, do I’m doing it tomorrow? What obstacles do I first have to overcome? And then itemize those out and have a strategy plan for overcoming each one of those obstacles. I guarantee you you’re not the first one that has had those obstacles. And I guarantee you that someone else has overcome the same obstacle. And so if you get stuck and you can’t figure it out, reach out. Listen to podcasts with other people that have done it.

Matt Bowles: 01:31:34 Join Facebook discussion groups. This amazing Facebook group, uh, that, uh, my good friend, Christian Wilson, who was also interviewed on the Maverick show, uh, runs called longterm digital nomads success on Facebook. It’s literally a form of thousands of digital nomads. They help each other. They answer each other’s questions where people are, how to get into the lifestyle. Like this is possible. You need to take the initiative, you need to do it. And, uh, just convince yourself that you personally use specifically. You can do it if you want to. We’ll end it there. Thank you so much for being on the show, my man. That’s awesome advice. It’s been such a pleasure. Amazing to be here, my man. Thank you.