Note: Transcript fully created by automated AI
[00:00:00] Jesse Lin: Hello everyone. My name is Jesse Lin.
[00:00:03] Angela Lin: And I’m Angela Lin. Welcome back to another episode of, but Where are You really from Today? We’re talking about. Digital nomad slash remote work and what we speculate the future of all of that is since it became more of a potential reality for a lot more folks since Covid kind of shook the entire world and the way that a lot of people work.
So I thought we’d start out this topic by kind of recapping my own personal additional nomad experience, just in like a nutshell of. what my life’s been like because covid kind of like turned the world upside down. So I have been like officially homeless in like the most crude way, homeless since like, um, Memorial Day of 2021.
It
[00:00:57] Jesse Lin: feels like it’s been longer.
[00:00:59] Angela Lin: No, because we were chopped in our apartment for a year and shutdown was March, 2020 for most people. Right. And our lease was up a year after that point. Okay. Like we renewed for a year, so May of 2021 is when we like officially left San Francisco. And then we had just been hopping from like Airbnb to Airbnb from that point.
Although countries were not open yet, like. Most international travel was not a possibility at that point. So we were domestic digital nomads for like the first year until Korea, like this past spring where we spent the last three months. So yeah, it’s, uh, it’s been interesting kind of like living out of, living out of a suitcase and like working from cafes.
And Airbnbs and uh, yeah, I don’t know. There’s like, there’s good and bad, I think, but it, it’s cool that you do have this like, flexibility to choose if you wanna like just plant yourself in one place. Yeah. Or if you want to go other places. So that’s been cool. That was me. But yes. Let’s speculate on the future.
The realities of a lot of, like, the way things have changed is that a lot of c. . Well, a lot of places like governmental bodies, whether it be like country level or like city level, county level, have been making bids to attract these digital nomad, like remote worker folk. Mm-hmm. , because especially places that are not necessarily like the hottest destination.
Uh, for like longer term folks, they realize like, hey, if we can like incentivize people to move here, at least for a year up to like multiple years, they’ll spend money in our economy and like help bolster that. So there have been so many countries that have been like coming out with digital nomad visas.
Um, What I find interesting is that most of these, cuz we both look this up ahead of time, there’s like a pretty long list of countries that are offering these kinds of things, but most of them are like minimum one year visas, which is like really generous for like very minimal requirements for a lot of these places.
[00:03:26] Jesse Lin: I even saw domestically there were like a lot of cities and counties that were doing promotions about like, Move here and like, we’ll pay for your relocation cost. And there’s like this program for people who move here using this program where like we take you on trips and like see the best of the local sites.
So yeah, I feel like a lot of, not even internationally, but even just locally, a lot of different places try to like grab onto that and like grab hold of that because they already saw so many people were like moving out and were open to moving out. what we would previously call Podunk places. They’re like, oh, we have people who are gonna wanna come here.
All right, cool. Like, we’ll give you a little bit of incentive so that you’ll pick our Podunk place versus like wherever Podunk place you were gonna go, um, to begin with. Which I think is like really, really interesting form of like drawing people to work there that hasn’t existed domestically before. I feel.
Internationally, maybe like something like that has existed in some form for some of those countries already on the list, like drawing workers out there. But yeah, domestically, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. I
[00:04:32] Angela Lin: definitely saw at least two or three different domestic campaigns for like Rando cities.
I would’ve never considered ,
[00:04:39] Jesse Lin: West Virginia. I got one from West Virginia. I was like, I’m not moving there.
[00:04:43] Angela Lin: I think I also got one. In Kansas or like Kentucky or something like that. Mm-hmm. and I was like interesting. Mm-hmm. . And we like vaguely considered it for a little bit because we were like, I mean when we were domestic digital noes for a while.
Yeah. I was like, if they’re gonna pay us and we don’t need to be anywhere, we just didn’t end up happening. But yeah, it is cool. I think there are like slightly different reasons why, um, domestic versus international. Are offering the incentives though, or what is interesting for the remote workers for of those cases?
Absolutely, because domestically, like they’re hoping you like live there and like, just like essentially like move out of these like very dense. Few cities that most of us live in and like spread out, um, and help again, like jolt the economy. So then like housing prices go up, everything becomes better, blah, blah, blah.
But the international ones I saw there’s kinda like two different waves of like programs that they’re running. So the country level, I think it’s largely like, , um, take advantage of our, like lower cost of living compared to wherever you are from and spend your money here. Um, at least for a year. That’s kind of like most of the country level stuff.
But then I did see similar things for like rural cities within European, uh, countries, and it’s places where their like fertility rates are so low. Oh, that it’s. You have to move here for 10 plus years and will pay you per family or per person, per baby, and we’ll pay you more money per baby. Oh my God.
Yeah. It’s like literally like we have a hundred people in our town. We need you to like repopulate, our town. So it’s, it’s kind of interesting to see like all these d. , like I said, like governmental bodies. Right, because it’s like from country level down to like city level. Yeah. All trying to like vibe for this group of new like potential people that they can draw
[00:06:45] Jesse Lin: in.
It’s so interesting because I’m curious as to whether these incentives will continue and actually changing the form of labor competition because for a while before the feds started pumping the brakes on the economy and like people were like, blah, blah, blah, blah. I felt like it. The whole, the talk track was that it’s a hiring bonanza.
There’s a dearth of talent. Like you can’t find people to fill the role even though you have the role open. So I’m curious like coming out of this, assuming that there’s no crazy recessionary situation or even if there is like coming out of that, whether or not they will still be like global competition for talent.
Our company was hiring like really crazy and for a while they. . Not saying it, but they were like, we wanna hire as many people as possible. Try not to hire anyone that’s like shitty . No, it wasn’t like that. It was basically like, we wanna hire as quickly as possible, but like, please make sure that you’re still submitting people who are like qualified for the position.
Like we really, really want them as opposed to like they can just do the job and you know, blah, blah blah.
[00:07:48] Angela Lin: Interesting. Yeah. I noticed at the end of my time at Yusof that because we. Multiple, um, locations of offices and North Carolina is another like big hub for their domestic stuff. And it’s obviously a lot cheaper to live in North Carolina than it is in San Francisco.
So there were definitely a lot more North Carolina hires because. They as a company, essentially, were like, uh, why would we hire more expensive San Francisco peeps? We can hire cheaper North Carolina peeps. So let’s name drop a few countries in case people are interested. Let’s, let’s look at the list, baby.
Yeah. There’s a whole, there’s honestly a, so many lists. My countries. Yeah. Um, The, the first one that like stuck out to me because it was actually one that we considered when we were still kind of like plotting out where we might go is Portugal. Mm-hmm. , because they made a pretty big splash during like the initial nomad, digital nomad phase because they announced that like, , you could not only get the one year digital nomad visa like very easily, but then if you wanted to stay longer, it could very easily transition into a permanent residency visa and then eventually like legitimate.
Permanent residency. So I originally thought about it cause I was like, that might even be easier for me to become like an EU citizen eventually. Yeah. Than through marriage be, just because of all the like red tape around like getting citizenship. Um, so yeah, Portugal definitely was like very high up there for like super remote worker friendly and like pretty relatively easy, um, steps.
[00:09:32] Jesse Lin: That’s what my friend did. Uh, she and her husband moved to Portugal. at the time with their newborn, and I think they have another baby now. So, and that baby was, I believe, born there. Some apparent that, that’s nice. I think they’re making it, I think they’re staying for the. for the long haul. Kind of like what you said, that’s pretty dope.
[00:09:53] Angela Lin: Yeah, it is pretty dope. I noticed that most of the list, though, a lot of them are like, you know, islandy type places like Bali I, or like I see Barbados and Grand Cain and stuff, which is like, for me, thinking about those places as like for additional nomad life, I personally wouldn’t wanna stay there for that long.
Like it’s nice if I wanted to go for like a few. But I think those places get a little boring after like too many, too many days in the sun. Yeah. And by the beach. I’m just like, what else is there gonna do? So for me, I’m like a year. A year or more. I don’t know. , I feel like if
[00:10:35] Jesse Lin: I could do that, I mean the rankings, I feel like the most part never taking into account like, are you gonna have fun here?
It’s kind of just like, does the infrastructure support it? Like are, do you actually have like streaming fat, high speed? Um, is there like a government that doesn’t suck? Like is there like turmoil in the economy and then that’s like kind of it, where it’s like you can, you can work, you can be safe and there’s not like a huge unrest in the the country, but I don’t know if they take into account like qual like quality of life.
Things
[00:11:07] Angela Lin: like that? I don’t think so in these rankings. Um, there were a few that stood out to me because I didn’t know that they had these kinds of visas. So like, technically Spain has one of these. Yeah. Which I was like, oh, okay. And Taiwan has one. It’s um, You can stay for up to like three, three to five years, something like that.
Hmm. Um, but it’s mostly for richer folks. It’s like an investor type. Oh, I see. One investor, entrepreneur, type one. Um, and there are like, different types. Um, when it gets to that kind of level, because I noticed some of the ones that were like surprising to me. I was like, oh, I don’t know if I would count this as like remote worker just nomad.
Because for example, like Switzerland has it, but I saw that their minimum salary requirement was like really high. I was like, I don’t know that like most people. Prove like this amount of salary. Oh. But I guess it’s very expensive to live in Switzerland. Yeah. So they make sure, just wanna make sure you’re not like homeless.
Yeah, that makes sense. And then taking their tax dollars to, honestly,
[00:12:09] Jesse Lin: some of these programs I’ve probably been around for a while and like they probably, like most people don’t even know that they exist. I remember at the last company I worked at when I onboarded there was. Canadian guy that was joining at the same time, but he was gonna be working in the Polish office.
I worked at a Polish company previously and I was like, how are you working here? Like it, I don’t, didn’t think it was that easy to just be able to like land in Poland and work and he was like, oh yeah, like the Canadian government in like polish gov government have this like exchange work visa program that’s like very.
like hidden. He was like, I found it, but it took me a while to apply because no one actually knew what the program was, , but it’s like probably something. Not peop that people don’t use very frequently and probably wasn’t super popular until people were like, oh fuck, I don’t really like stuck here in my country when things are nicer in this country and it’s cheaper and you have the same quality of living.
La la, la, la.
[00:13:10] Angela Lin: Related to that, let’s get into pros and cons for remote workers to live abroad. I know we talked about their domestic incentives too. Mm-hmm. , but I think the, like most commonly talked about is people that are moving abroad so, Pros, because we’re coming from the US almost everywhere, has a lower cost of living than we do.
Even places like at most European countries, barring places like Switzerland, which is like kind of crazy. Mm-hmm. . Um, but like for example, we lived in Japan for a little bit and Korea just recently. We’re going back to Japan soon. And those are places that like, or at least Japan, It’s a place that people calmly think is like very expensive, but actually when you live there, like once you get past the cost of flying there, it’s very cheap to live as long as you’re not going to like crazy, fancy places every night.
So you save a lot of money, literally just on like rent, for example, like even Airbnbs where there’s a premium added to whatever the locals are paying, but it’s a lot cheaper than, for example, like San Francisco or New York rent prices. Eating and just like everyday costs a lot lower. The other main incentive, obviously getting to travel and see the world.
Absolutely. See different things, have that flexibility. Learn a new culture, like try different things, meet new people. I don’t know, all the like main things that come with travel, I guess.
[00:14:34] Jesse Lin: Yeah, I think it’s, it’s all of those things and for me, I, I think it helps you. In your professional pursuits to have a wider experience in terms of interacting with other people, understanding different work styles.
Because I mean, for me, I’ve had to work with a lot of people from around the world, and I’m sure it would be very helpful to actually be there with that person to really understand like their workday looks like this, their challenges look like this, their incentives look like this, and that would make that kind of cooperation like a lot easier.
So that’s definitely like, I think personally a professional. Pro as
[00:15:10] Angela Lin: well and learning that culturally there are different reasons why people, mm-hmm work differently in those offices, not just because you’re like on video versus in person. It’s like literally, for example, like I would never have known really how the Japanese work culture was until I sat in that office and like interacted with them every
[00:15:31] Jesse Lin: day.
I’m curious, would you say that generally speaking, the work culture outside of the US. More easy, more relaxed, or less.
[00:15:44] Angela Lin: I don’t think you can really answer that question in such a general term because it totally depends on which country. And it depends on what kind of company. Like if it’s like a very traditional conservative one or like a more progressive tech, you know, startupy type thing.
Cuz for example, like, I was working a tech company when I went to Japan for the, the two months I lived there previously. And I would say the office was still a little stuffy, like a st still kind of, you know, like more rigid than I would’ve expected for a tech company, especially coming from like literally like the same company but in the Bay Area where it’s like very chill and waves.
But one day I like got off on the wrong floor and I was like wandering around and it was. Gasoline company, like one of the, like major, for example, if it was like ExxonMobil or whatever, but like their, their corporate offices and I walked around. I was like, where am I ? Like, it was so, so stuffy. It was like you could hear a pin drop like everybody was wearing like, Suits and like, just like dead pan, like very focused.
And I was like, oh, let me find where’s supposed to go cuz this is not it. So I, I still think there’s like variance. But for example, like, I don’t know that you could say the same thing about like Spain or whatever, . Like, I don’t think everyone has the same, every country has like much more stringent or much more relaxed than the us.
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And if you feel so inclined, we’re also accepting donations at buy me a coffee.com/where are you from? Thanks y’all. Well, we said prose. Yeah. Cons. Cons. I can speak for myself. Um, two main cons. Unless you’re in an English speaking country. or you are descendant of whatever culture you are have immersed into.
Language is probably a barrier for you for some of these places. Mm-hmm. , like I would say a lot of the countries on the list have like tried to tout like English friendly, but like that’s probably in pockets, you know? It’s like the places that are like really trying to attract this money. Not having English be like super easily accessible to you is going to be a reality you have to face.
So either you have to like just be okay with kind of like having misunderstandings all the time, like stumbling your way through. Or you need to start learning the local language, at least bare minimum stuff so that you can like skate by a little bit better. And then related to that, it’s, I think it’s fairly easy to have a little bit of a.
Identity crisis or like anxiety kind of around not being able to fully express yourself because you don’t speak the language and depending on if you’re there to like try to make friends or anything. Like if you can’t speak with most people, like that’s gonna be really difficult unless you go to places where they, there are lots of expats or like there are local folks that are like interested and able.
Speak with people that only speak English. So that’s just a reality. It’s like you might find that there is a bit of like loneliness attached with it. Yeah, because you cannot fully like communicate
[00:19:28] Jesse Lin: well associated with that. I think probably there’s definitely some like home sickness, missing your friends, missing your family associated with traveling.
Cuz I’m sure it’s just not as easy to keep in contact with everybody or like make a phone call whenever you want, given the time.
[00:19:44] Angela Lin: Lots of avenues for home sickness, right? Mm-hmm. , like you’re never gonna find like every single type of food that you’re used to eating or like products that you’re obsessed with that like my suitcase was filled with like specific, you know, like toiletries that I was like, I know I’m not gonna be able to get this in Asia.
It’s just like you’re just gonna like get used to not having
[00:20:04] Jesse Lin: that kind of stuff. Yeah. I remember. So this is not really a work abroad situation, but I remember when I stayed abroad in Spain, and I probably have told you this story. One of my friends, actually the one that’s in Portugal now, she’s Indian and there’s no spices in the food there and there’s no sriracha stocked in the store there.
So like we literally spent an entire day just looking for spicy food and finally she found sriracha at a, like a Asian restaurant and just ordered like a bowl of rice and poured like sriracha in it. It was so funny. I was like, you did tell me that, you did tell me that. It’s, it’s crazy the things that like you miss when.
Like live abroad for an extended period of time. But actually I wanted to ask, I also assume that working abroad, the tax situation becomes more complicated.
[00:20:49] Angela Lin: Yeah, it is more complicated. I think going back to pros and cons, a pro is that usually when you’re on these like digital nomad visas, you don’t owe taxes to.
Country that you are in. Okay. Where, um, but speaking as an American, you still owe taxes to the country that you are from. Mm-hmm. , that is not the case for every country. Like Spain doesn’t collect taxes from from Ramon when he’s not in Spain, but the US go, money grab you until you’re dead. So it is more complicated.
There’s like a potential for you to get at least part of your taxes, like prorated where you don’t necessarily owe like all of the year if you’ve spent over, I think over 180 days outside of the country. So there is some like technicalities, but like. Your domestic US taxes do get a little bit more complicated when you live abroad, but most of these countries you don’t then owe them taxes.
Oh. You just, they just want your money that you spend there while you’re there. Okay. I, I think it depends on what kind of visa you’re on. Like, I think if a, it was like a business visa or something, it’s different. Mm. Okay. Next pros and cons for the local people, because I don’t think this is talked about enough.
Yeah. Um, when it comes. Subject main pro and why people, governments keep drawing the official nomas into their worlds is for the money to stimulate their economies. Um, and that helps everyone technically who lives in that country cuz you have more money to like, go towards infrastructure and like whatever else the government needs money for, however, There are definitely cons to us type of people flooding into all these countries, namely that it.
gentrifies a lot of places. Mm-hmm. that like otherwise would remain more culturally intact and like more affordable for the local people. Mm-hmm. . So like whenever you think about us saying like, it’s so cost effective for us, it’s like, yeah, but you are raising the prices for local people. Yeah. So then it becomes less cost effective for them because they already make less money than you do.
I don’t think, uh, the average. Spaniard or like the average Korean or whatever is saying like, food is so cheap. Like they’re just like this, this is what food costs. But then like suddenly if like remote workers like flood it and it’s like doubles the cost, then it’s like, wait, I can’t afford this anymore.
You know? So I, I think that’s the main one is like people are getting priced out, especially like housing and like real estate related, you know, commercial property and all that stuff. Yeah. It’s like not, not too
[00:23:32] Jesse Lin: great. Yeah. I think it’s also, well, Good of you to point out before that many of those people don’t pay taxes on their income in the country.
So I think there’s also, if not the reality, the perception that there are people here enjoying the goods and services paid for by the local taxpayers, but not contributing to that. And of course, it depends, like if you, if you. are a high worth individual. You could be bringing like a lot of money in your spend in the area that could offset, like the fact that you don’t pay any taxes.
But I think it really depends and I think it could really chafe people to know that there are like tons of rich people moving here that don’t have to pay any like income tax or anything like that. And I, I think a really great example of this. It was like very controversial, the whole like Amazon HQ two thing in New York City, and it was kind of that vibe where it was like, well, you’re gonna bring like a lot of rich workers here, but like everybody that lives here already is not really gonna benefit from it because Amazon’s getting all these tax breaks and like the local infrastructure wouldn’t support it.
Like there’s only one train line that goes there. So there are just all of these like considerations about like bringing a huge workforce. High income to a small area that’s like not prepared to support it. And I just think that it’s a planning thing, kind of like, it almost feels really sometimes shortsighted with some of the places where it’s like, okay, cool, like short term economic investment.
Great. What are we gonna do with all these people? In five years, 10 years, 15 years. Like there’s not really a thought about like what happens after that, which then really sucks for the people who are like, we wanna live here in 15 years. , like, why aren’t you thinking about like, what our quality of life and like our living situation will be like.
So I definitely feel like there’s this like tension between like making things work economically short term versus like making things. Economically long term for the people who are like residents of the area.
[00:25:27] Angela Lin: I definitely agree that it’s largely a government issue, like government planning issue as you’ve pointed out, because I read a couple articles about Mexico City because that’s a very popular remote work destination, especially amongst.
Americans, which is like comical because it’s like a reverse border situation and Californians are like particularly the worst when it comes to like making up a huge swath of this population. Of course, I personally know several people that have spent, like I saw
[00:25:58] Jesse Lin: time, so many gay people go down to Mexico, part Ofta, Mexico, like all those places.
[00:26:05] Angela Lin: Yeah. Yeah. Mexico City in particular, I think cuz it’s capital is attracting like a lot more folks that are trying to stay like, uh, longer than like a vacation stance, you know? Um, trying to do remote work there. And it was interesting because kind of the opinions of like, a lot of the local folks are like, they’re angry because they’re literally getting priced out.
One guy said he was living in an apartment. Like because the government spent money to remodel or like redo spruce up the local park or whatever near the apartment complex, it meant that it was gonna become a quote unquote better area. So then the landlord evicted everybody. so that they couldn’t turn their building into like a hotel or like tourist friendly thing, knowing that it was like the neighborhood was changing into this like more gentrified, higher end place.
And so he was like, yeah, and you know, I couldn’t live there anymore. And. He and a couple others in this article were saying like they’re angry at tourists because they’re the one, and, and these remote workers, because they’re obviously the reason why the government is, and these like entrepreneurs are like investing in these more like foreigner focused things and taking away the local things.
However, they’re like, Logically, no, it’s not like the tourists fault, like it’s not like they did anything per se. It’s just like there was no infrastructure in place to like curb the amount that this stuff is happening or like the rate with which is happening. So they’re like, yes. We’re, we’re mostly actually angry at like the policies that are like enabling this to kind of like free for all.
Mm-hmm. . But we have no way to like really impact that. So we’re just getting angry at these people. Like, they’re literally posting signs on the street saying like, go home. Like we don’t want you here. . Yeah.
[00:28:03] Jesse Lin: Well it’s funny cuz there have been, there are cities that have been doing that. I remember. , was it before the pandemic?
It was like before the pandemic Barcelo. The mayor of Barcelona was like, tourists don’t come, we don’t want you . They’re like, is there too many people here? And there’s too many like Airbnbs that people can no longer like affordably live in Barcelona, don’t come. And I, I mean, I guess I make sense because I think if you’re, again, if you’re thinking about balancing like short term and long term, like for me, I would say, You need to think about like how long this revenue stream from the tourism is gonna come versus like a long-term resident being there, or a long-term residence being there for an extended period of time and like continuously feeding into the local taxes.
Like, I don’t know, I’m, I feel like someone has crunched that or should have crunched that, but it very often feels like there is. because they don’t, no one ever says anything about that. They, they, they never say like, oh yeah. And we have assessed that over a period of 10 to 15 years, like this will, this will still be a viable revenue stream for us versus like, this is hot right now and we know it’s a hot revenue stream for us, like right now.
But like what will happen when people no longer, like for example, a lot of people are going back to office. People will no longer. May no longer be able to remote work depending on the situation. So like what will happen to all of those areas that expanded into tourism for the excess demand when that demand
[00:29:26] Angela Lin: disappears.
I definitely think that there, you’re right, that there is like a temporal element to the policy thinking around the remote work stuff in particular because. , we, we were talking about like speculating, but like Yeah, we don’t know for sure that like as big of a population of folks can maintain a remote work digital nomad lifestyle.
For the long run because if they are dependent on like their companies making those decisions about return to office and whatever, I don’t know, that could be cut in half or like more overnight. And then you’re right. It’s like, well, they flipped all these neighborhoods, what are they gonna do about it? I think there’s another like side of that debate, which is not temporal.
It’s like just kind of a long standing. Um, debate that like, I don’t think any governments have figured out, and it’s what you were talking about with Barcelona as your example, because Kyoto is another phenomenal example of this because as we are, have been like patiently waiting for Japan’s borders to reopen.
There are so many articles about Kyoto and the reside. Opinions about tourists because mm-hmm. notoriously, they’ve hated tourists because they’ve kind of like crushed the local culture and like just flooded the streets because Kyoto is so popular because it has maintained those like traditional elements of like the shrines and like customs and the food and stuff.
And so people go there to like experience traditional Japan, but then because they’re flooding there, they’re like making it. Zen anymore. It’s like so noisy and like really, you know, it’s just like, it’s different. And so traditionally, the last like several, several years, the local residents of Kyoto are like, get the fuck out.
Like, we don’t want you here. Right? And then the pandemic happened and Japan has been the m. Barring China, who is like literally locking people up in their apartment complexes for weeks on end. Oh God. Japan is one of the most closed countries left within the global like Covid policies. So like no tourists have been in for like three years essentially.
And now the Kyoto residents are like, I still hate tourists, but we need them, man, we’re fucking dying. Because so many of. Businesses are completely dependent on tourists, and that’s from year over year of like building that up, not just like a seasonal thing like. Mexico City might be like a shorter term thing.
Mm-hmm. , but yeah, Kyoto, Barcelona, these like very popular type international cities. It’s like no one seems to figure that out because there’s this big tension. Yeah. Between like we need them, we hate them, have ’em figured out what the balance
[00:32:17] Jesse Lin: is. And I mean, it’s not like a theme park. There’s no way to stop people really from coming.
But I do think that as a tourist it sucks, but certain policies that I’ve seen in place make sense. So. in Barcelona. I went back there I think in 20 summer of 21 and at Park, well they were enforcing basically like a ticket to enter the park and then there was another ticketed line for like the most popular parts of it.
So the like arches under, near the fountains. I had been there and done that experience when it was like you just had to like reserve a time. It was free. You just to reserve a time. Um, now. Double pay. You have to pay to get in, and then you have to pay to do the popular things, which sucks with the tourists.
But on the other hand, like it kind of makes sense. Like if you want your cultural attractions to last for a long time and you want your tourism to be sustainable and you want the experience to be nice for everyone, you have to start like limiting who can have access to it. Um, or like how many people can be there at one time.
Yeah, it’s interesting to think about like different places and how they’re trying to like manage the influx of remote work and people who, who are in like local resident.
[00:33:26] Angela Lin: Yeah. It’s also is like just tied to the larger topic of gentrification, which I don’t really know how governments really like tackle that problem because it, it just keeps happening and it’s like, like you said, you can’t exactly stop it.
There’s like free market going on and stuff, but there’s so many pros and cons to it, right? Like, because even in that Mexico City article, the guy who’s complaining was. simultaneously saying like, I can’t totally complain because these neighborhoods that used to be like really dangerous Oh, proof are now safer.
Yeah. And like more pleasant for everyone to be in. So, and there’s more art and like culture from these people coming in. So he’s like, it’s not all bad, it’s just like, Our stuff is getting like bulldozed . Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, uh, there’s a lot to chew on there. We’ll move on over to our fortune cookie closing section.
Jesse, you would be interested in living abroad at some point? Oh, certainly, yes. But what’s like the longest amount of time that you would consider? Living abroad and potentially being additional now mad or maybe settling, but like being abroad,
[00:34:38] Jesse Lin: it’s honestly, it’s so hard to say and I really think it depends on if I can land there and find a good group of friends, like in the first year or so, because I think that that really can, and I’m assuming in this situation that I am, uh, solo and not with a partner.
I just think that I wouldn’t be able to tolerate a situation with no friends for like one in a year. I think that would be really challenging. But in terms of how long I would stay there, it really depends. Like I didn’t come to New York with a plan to stay all the, all the time that I have. Like it’s just happened year after year after year that I’m like, There’s nothing else calling out to me.
Like I don’t feel compelled to go anywhere else. Like I like being here and I think that would be very much the same for me if I moved abroad. Like if I moved abroad, found a good group of friends, like really vibed somewhere, and I had no reason to leave, like it’s a better experience than I had in California, or a better experience than I had in New York.
Like I’ll stay as long as I can. What about
[00:35:36] Angela Lin: you? I can’t make those same calls.
[00:35:39] Jesse Lin: You have
[00:35:39] Angela Lin: different life plans. Yeah. Yeah. I can’t pretend I’m not married and I can’t pretend like we’re not gonna have kids in the future. So, um, no, I mean, our plans, because we literally have been doing and are doing the digital nomad life right now.
Her current plan is to continue with this life until like summer of next year because. I mean, our original plan was to live in Japan for like a year essentially. And we’ve had to keep pushing that because of their, their borders. So we’re, we want to go for hopefully six months. Obviously we’ll have to like hop in and out to make the visa situations work.
But, uh, next summer is probably like the last of it. And then I don’t think we’ll be like living abroad again until we’re retired probably, cuz I don’t think. Would necessarily retire in the us It’s just like better . But you’re gonna
[00:36:38] Jesse Lin: retire at like 45, right? I
[00:36:40] Angela Lin: mean, maybe. Yeah. I don’t know. Well, basically it’s like after a kid’s no longer need us at all.
When, when can we swing? It made sense from there. Sense, you know? Yeah. How about you listeners? Let us know on the comments. Mm-hmm. , would you want to be a additional nomad? Are you a digital nomad? So are you a digital nomad? And if you are aware, where have you been? How long have you been one? If you aren’t.
Where would you wanna go? How long would you think you could stay abroad, um, mentally, emotionally, financially, ? Let us know in the comments wherever you are watching this, and let us know what you thought about this episode, things we might have missed about pros and cons for both the remote workers and the local people, because I think we just kind of scratched the surface on this topic and let us know what you.
And come back next week because we will have another fresh episode for you then.