Ricky Shetty – A Traveler and a Digital Nomad

Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Outsource Accelerator Podcast.  this is Episode No. 198, and my name is Derek Gallimore. So today we have a very special guest, his name is Ricky Shetty. He is best known for his blog, Daddy Blogger. And he also has the, digitalnomadmastery.com, podcast and website.

So Ricky Shetty is all about digital nomadism. He started long before that was even a…you know, term, and he really optimizes the whole thing. Derek started travelling when he was a single guy. Things were easy back then but he now has two beautiful children and a wife, and they are now travelling across the globe as a family.

So he blogs all about this, and his blog, which is Daddy blogger, this one of the early day blogs sites out there. So it’s got quite a following now and also, he has digitalnomadmastery.com and the podcast for that, and interviews feed into his podcast, so super exciting.

What we’ve got in common? We’ve got a lot in common. Ricky is actually in the Philippines now, travelling to the Philippines. He is married to a Filipina but also, he is very accustomed to working remotely and running businesses remotely and also, he has an outsourcing operation. Just a young one but based in Venezuela. So he has a lot of insights into working remotely and how you can run businesses differently. So I have a brief conversation and I’m sure you will enjoy this one. So if you want any of the contact details, or if you want to know any more about Ricky or any of his businesses’ office, go to our show notes which is at outsourceaccelerator.com/198. Enjoy!

Hi and welcome back everybody. Today, I’m really excited to be joined by someone’s slightly different but actually very close to home here in Manila, in the Philippines. And we actually met through mutual contacts, and you know, we share a lot of similarities even if our ways could have been slightly different sectors. So I’m super excited today to be joined by Ricky Shetty of Daddy Blogger.

Hi Ricky, how are you?

Ricky: I’m okay Derek. So grateful to be on your show today.

Derek: Yeah, absolutely. I’m super excited to have you. You’re almost a celebrity in the blogging space, and you’ve been doing this a long time. Now, our similarities you know, you talk about and I bet you can introduce yourself better than I can. But you talk a lot about travelling around the world, about digital nomadism, about remote work. And you know I have also embraced that lifestyle I supposed without knowing and you know petty much since 18, for the last 22 years. I’ve been on the brood you know, in various countries, travelling and living in different countries. Now, I think more, it’s becoming more popularized and there’s so many more resources out there to help people on this journey. And one of the resources obviously is digitalnomadmastery.com, which is your website, your product and also you have a podcast called digitalnomadmastery.com.

Yes, super excited to have you and I supposed do you want just to introduce yourself to the audience?

Ricky: Absolutely, absolutely. So my name is Ricky Shetty. I’m from Vancouver BC, Canada but currently we’re here in the Philippines visiting my wife’s parents. So my wife’s actually Filipino and we have three wonderful kids together and they are of course beautiful because they’re mixed. My ethnic origin is Indian and her ethnicity is Filipino. So we have Indian-Filipino kids, were all born in Canada. We have a six-year-old daughter, a four-year-old son, and then a two-year-old son. And we’ve been traveling around the world for the last year and a half. I’ve been to 81 countries on six continents and my big goal is to visit every country in the world and be the first family to visit every country in the world.

And I work online. I do several different things online. I have the whole multiple streams of online active income, active income and passive income model. Primarily I’m doing private coaching, so I do business coaching, particularly around the topics of social media, blogging, how to become a digital nomad, how to make money online. So I do private coaching. I also have several different online courses. I have about 12 of them right now in Udemy which is a great platform to sell your online courses. And then I have a six kindle books and counting. I’m actually in the middle of releasing a book a month about the seven continents. I’ve released my first three books on North America, South America and Europe. The next ones will be on Asia, Australia, Africa, and then the last one would be Antarctica. So seven books about the seven continents in seven months. And besides that, of course, have a blog at daddyblogger.com. We get a lot of sponsors. So we work with hotels and resorts and we worked with sightseeing attractions and travel companies. So it’s been, it’s allowed us to travel the world and obviously save money by cutting costs through getting sponsorships and of course, promoting those companies to an audience of fellow families and fellow moms and dads. So that in a nutshell is a little bit more about myself, Derek.

Derek: Wow. Well done. You’re busy going out with your kids. It’s not just traveling around the world and sitting on a beach, is it? You’re actually a hugely productive in your time.

Ricky: You know what? Like even today, it’s a beautiful sunny day here in the northern Philippines where I am right now, but I’ve actually just been, I had a coaching call early this morning. Then I had a podcast interview, then I had went for lunch, came back and doing the podcast with you and then I have a new recording a new Udemy course. And then I have a coaching client later on today.

So I’m sitting in my hotel here working most of the time and you have to, as part of this whole digital lifestyle that the perception of all, you always at the beach, you always on vacation. Is not a correct one because a lot of the time you are actually working more than you are actually sightseeing? And I forgot to mention that I’m actually doing a little side hustle outsourcing business as well. So I have a team in Venezuela and we can definitely get into that as well because I know that’s one of your main passions and focal points. So I am doing a lot. In the midst of that, of course, having a marriage and raising three wonderful kids. So work life balance is key for me right now.

Derek: Yeah, you must be a busy man. So I wanna talk to you a little bit about the sense of remote working and the world being really your playground and marketplace. I left, I grew up in a small town in New Zealand with about 100,000 people and I think there’s risk, you know, these towns are beautiful, but there’s a risk that when you grow up in these towns you have quite a myopic view of the world. And really your marketplace is those 100,000 people. I think it’s changing a lot now with the Internet, but I noticed that as soon as I left, my horizons were instantly broadened. And then when I went traveling to South America, they would broaden it again. And then when I moved onto London they were broadened even further. And I now run my life with a perspective of I can go anywhere in the world and if I’m going to start a business then the world is my clientele.

And then all of the world, potentially my employees and candidates. I’m so amazed that there are so many people that really don’t quite connect in this way. I promote outsourcing and a part of that is educating people that there are so many vast resources out there and it’s really such an opportunity to go explore and to look for outsourcing in Venezuela or Eastern Europe or have a look at the capacity of people in the Philippines for example. And what got you started with your travels and your sense of adventure and I suppose, how did you then start work that lead into your career.?

Ricky: Great question. Great question. I love when they get asked that why question. Well, my early twenties and then, actually most of my twenties, that whole decade of my twenties, I was a traveling and working. I was using the strategy called a working holiday strategy and you as a Kiwi, you are qualified for that as long as well as these Kiwis…

Derek: Yeah, very common.

Ricky: … very Irish, Canadian, a lot of financial used around the world. They qualify for this as long as you’re under 30 and you can work in a different country and get paid. So I was doing that a way before the Internet got invented and way before this whole digital nomad term became fashionable. And I was going around the world working and traveling. So I actually spent a year in Europe and I spent six months working in lab and then I saved up enough money and then I was able to backpack around Europe, just staying in hostels and doing the URL and hitchhiking and doing it very much on the cheap.

Then I taught English in Japan and then I was able to travel around Asia. Then I actually did a working holiday in Sydney, Australia. Then I traveled around Australia and New Zealand. Then after all those three major continents, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania, I ended up broke. So I went back to my parents’ house in Vancouver and I’ve stayed with them and that this was in my early babies. So broke 32 years old, old guy with no future prospects, definitely not marriage material, right Derek! So what happened is at the time when I was broke and ain’t sure what I’m going to do with my life, I ended up meeting my wife. And when you’re looking for your wife, you usually don’t end up meeting her when you’re not looking, when you’re more like in this phase of, okay, now it’s time to focus on myself, my career.

I met her and at the time I didn’t know much about entrepreneurship, but I got introduced to, like I started as a network marketer. I know no judgment here and now I no longer do MLM or network marketing, but that’s how we started. And there’s sort of amazing MLM companies in network marketing, no bad fashion here. But that’s how I started. I just started reading about, okay, but running your business, improving my mindset, and learning about products and sales. And then from there I started doing event production and I was organizing social media conferences, blog conferences, inter-marketing conferences. So my skill set was like community building and running events. I started doing that, but then I made a big realization that if I kept doing events, I would be tied down to my hometown for the rest of my life.

So, while I was doing my events, I was already starting to build up my travel blog. And because I built up a successful travel blog, people asked me, “okay, how would you do this? How do you grow such a big social media following? How you get engagement and how do you get the conversions?”

So I started coaching people about that topic. So I was already starting to that mainstream marketing business at the same time. And in the last two years I went through a little bit of a depression too, as feeling like it was just all the history life staying here in the suburbs and not showing my kids the world and losing my sense of adventure that I had as a single guy. Now I’m married with kids, I’d become domesticated suburbanized. So that depression that kind of suburbanization alongside with my zest for adventure travel prompted me to ask my wife what do you feel about traveling the world?

And my wife, after many, many reluctant conversations, she finally agreed and she said, “Okay honey, we’ll do this for you here. And if any point during the year we don’t like it, we come back to our hometown”. So here we are, a year and a half later, obviously we both have been a lot of yet. And our kids have been loving it.

And of course, we’ve had struggles and challenges, struggles financially, struggles with the WIFI, struggles with socialization for ourselves and the kids. And obviously the tiredness and the burnout or associated with travel constantly. And checking in, checking out of hotels and every beach, and forget the busters and learning the language and so on and so forth. So that in a nutshell has a little bit of the backstory for why and how we started traveling. And we intend to keep being nomadic, so to speak, but more set up basis. So now we’re set up a base here in the Philippines until December. We’re looking into Africa next because that’s one continent I haven’t explored as well as the other continents. So that’s the story of how we got here, Derek.

Derek: Well done. We probably share similar experiences when I was backpacking through South America, there wasn’t really the opportunity to be a true digital nomad and really earn an income on the road. I did a little bit of English teaching as a foreign language as a lot of these people did, but back in 2000, I knew one guy that had an early stage laptop. No one had laptops, no one had mobile phones. So there just wasn’t the connectivity. But now, and I suppose, you could, you could speak to this with a lot of expertise. There’s just incredible opportunity to be able to be on the road and still be connected to the information superhighway and literally visit the world economy. So you have seen that open up a lot, but also, how does it balance? Are you really having a holiday or are you really working hard and, is it sort of all it’s cracked up to be kind of working on the road than having to get on a bus and then having to sort of get to your work, whenever you can fit it in?

Ricky: Yeah. What you see on social media, Derek, and to all of your listeners, isn’t reality. Social media, it’s the good stuff. It’s a very unbalanced view of a person. And not many people are going to share. I went through a difficult day. I had a fight with my spouse and my kids threw a tantrum. We’re struggling to pay our bills this month. We have to borrow money like, who’s going to say that on social media? Not many people. I asked actually gave a big Kudos to those who are more open. I know Derek, your story, you’ve been very transparent and very open with your whole journey and obviously you shared on your podcasts, but I love people like yourself who are vulnerable and, I attempt to be more vulnerable on my blog.

I’ve shared about the divorce of my parents and how that left me quite broken. I’ve shared about my difficulties with my father and my lack of a relationship with him. I’ve even shared about the fact that, me and my wife, we had to go to counseling to help deal with the fighting and not go around the divorce a rabbit

hole. So we’ve actually got counseling to help us along and even that as a dad now, I always struggled with, okay, how do I balance my life between being the provider and the protector? Now, building my business while at the same time, obviously investing time with my kids. And that’s always going to be struggle and then you parent, your mom and dad who is listening here today, we’ll be able to relate.

Man, it’s tough. So we’ve had challenges. I find the biggest challenge for us has been our kids in terms of schooling. We’re doing world schooling and homeschooling and now we’ve put them in private schools here in the Philippines because we’re going to be here for about six months and it’s really good for them to learn about their Filipino ethnic identity. But that’s been the challenging part because we’re traveling. We were in South America and Central America last year and they were always constantly making new friends and they’d go to playgrounds, make new friends and then having to make new ones. So that’s been challenging. And it goes with the territory. If you’re traveling, as adults, we’re okay with that. You make a friend and you connect with them on social media and you still maintain the friendship. And kids, I think they need that little bit more of a stability. So we realized that and we have adapted our style to meet their needs and even me and my wife were a little bit different in our styles.

I’m more for fast traveler. She likes more slow. I like a lot of places. She likes the less places. So we’ve had to find that balance too, right? So it’s very important to kind of figure it out that the needs of each person, especially if you’re traveling as a family unit. And my wife’s been super amazing in terms of helping, giving me the space I need to, so because the Internet isn’t very good here in the Philippines, sometimes I’ll just go check myself into a hotel and stay there for a few days and just being away from the kids and I need that time and space and that kind of silent zone. Whereas there’s no kid screaming and there’s no demands on my time and I just get it to work zone, do all the projects that have deadlines and I need to get done. And then I go back and I’m a much better Dad, and a much better husband. So that’s really helped as well. Doing this kind of mini Ricky Retreats and the RR hashtag, Ricky Retreats, that’s helped a lot. So yeah. Hopefully those tips and strategies will help your audience out there.

Derek: Yeah, it’s fascinating, isn’t it? For anyone that hasn’t really traveled extensively, had been on the road for maybe more than two months or something. You really do get to know yourself and your travel partner after an extended period of time. But I knew there’s nothing kind of that drills down to the basic fundamentals of people when you’re on the road and having to go through all these different challenges daily. I really don’t know how you do it with the whole family in tow. Must be quite a feat.

Ricky: Yeah, I mean, you have the blessings and the challenges. Like, I talked about some of the struggles, but there’s so much incredible blessings. Like back in Vancouver, we go about working. My wife worked for a corporate Canada. She was working for Best Buy[?] and Accenture. I was doing my event production business, so we’d been so busy. She’d be working nine to five. I’d be working like evenings, running my events so we would just meet in that crossroads time in an hour where we hand off the kids to each other and say “Bye, bye! Yes, the kids are fed, yes, yes, bye, bye!” And boom and then we were off on our merry ways and then we’ll do the same thing day in and day out and then the kids, they do avoid daycare. And the daycare is, we’re raising our kids instead as parents were raising them.

So now we’re spending our quality time with them. We have created a digital marketing online business which allows us that opportunity to work from home. And you don’t mind, marriage is much better than it’s been back in Canada and our family unit is much better as well. So yeah, you definitely have to weigh the kind of both the pros and the cons of this lifestyle and any lifestyle. And no matter what lifestyle we choose, there’s going to have both the good and the bad.

Derek: It’s a crazy grindstone. I mean, I don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but the kind of western, I supposed to read about whole, all of the civilization is, has gone down or going down, you kind of trade a higher quality of life in inverted commas, but really you, you sort of sacrificing every, every minute or you dive[?] into the unsure and then sacrificing kind of access to your, your family and children just to have the kind of SUV in the driveway. It’s, and I think a lot of the digital nomads can kind of relate to a life where they’re looking for something, maybe a little bit different or alternative. And in terms of your remote working, so I spoke earlier that back in 2000, there was no real access to any kind of online commerce or sort of a world marketplace. Now there’s an abundance of online marketplaces and access to all of these things. So again, I encourage all of my listeners to really look at the resources available out there in the world via online. I’m kind of marketplaces and portals. But how do you find it? So all of a sudden there’s a lot more opportunity, but there’s equally so much more competition online. How have you seen this market evolved over the last kind of 10 years that you’ve been doing it?

Ricky: Yeah, I mean obviously nowadays people realized the power of the Internet to make income and not just business or corporations, but moms, dads, small business owners, people who didn’t consider the Internet is a viable option. And we have, as to who are not digital natives. We have immigrated into this internet age. We have had to adjust to it. I mean, I grew up with, you know, in the day and age without cell phones, without Internet. And I was always thinking along the lines of, “Okay, I need to go to work and get paid by my employer and then, that’s how you live. And then I can make the shift from an employee mindset to entrepreneur mind set, and then there’s this other shift which I don’t think has fully being caught on at a global scale yet. This whole opportunity to make money and travel this digital nomad shift, which is just happening now in the last five years. I would say, it’s really, really taken off. But still, it’s limited to people who were, there is a traditional digital nomad stereotype. Like a male Caucasian, early to mid-20th, single on a beach in Thailand working from his laptop. And of course, there are the females who do that as well. But then there’s also people in their thirties and forties and fifties are doing it. There’s couples are doing it. These young people who are retired and then they’ve actually, they have an empty nest and they decided, “Okay, I can take my business and travel with it”. There’re people like myself, we’re definitely the minority, husband, wife and three kids traveling the world.

But I do feel that this shift is going to be much more hyper accelerated when people realize the opportunities, the fact that if you’re a coach, for example, all you need is an internet connection, your phones and boom, you can do your coaching call no matter where in the world you are. And coaching is a great time tying for dollar kind of trade. And people who haven’t made that full transition, I would recommend doing something like that if you haven’t become a full-time internet marketer. Maybe just try doing some coaching, build it up into a “side hustle”. And then when you feel you are ready, then you can take the plunge and do it full time. And Yeah. But I definitely feel that in the next decade or so, you’ll see desert nomads as more, more the norm. I don’t think it will be completely the norm, but it will be more normalized

Derek: And turn your experience and of kind of, I suppose I’m wondering the international marketplaces. You recently started, I suppose an outsourcing service provision in Venezuela. Can you maybe just, if my audience have already been introduced enough to the Amazons in concept, but what is it about outsourcing, what ae the key concepts that kind of appealed to you and why is outsourcing a good concept?

Ricky: Oh, that’s a great question. I’m so glad you have a whole show dedicated to this, to this…

Derek: Two hundred episodes.

Ricky: There you go. There you go and counting. So the fact that outsourcing is also very misunderstood and a lot of people say, I just want to hire locally. Well, I just want to hire nationally I just want to support fellow Brit. So I just want us fellows and support fellow Kiwis, or fellow Americans. Why not support fellow human beings? Because I look at outsourcing. Yes, basically, one human being, paying another human being who happens to be in a cheaper country who will do a similar quality work for a much lower price. That’s the bottom line. That’s what outsourcing is. You can argue at a different way, but it’s basically that in a nutshell and the reason I got so passionate about it is because obviously as a small business owner is looking to save money and I think the cost drew me at first, I was like, “oh, I can get stuff done like a quarter.”

The cost that a website cost, like for example, a website in Canada where I’m from, my costs about a thousand bucks, right? But I can get them done in Venezuela for about US$100 to US$200. Yes, that’s right. About US$200 for a website. I can get logos done for like US$5, right? Our logo back in Canada, if it’s done by a professional brand logo designer will probably cost a few $100, minimum. And the quality is very comparable because no matter where in the world you are, you have graphic design schools. You have all the programs like Adobe Premiere. You have all the video editing software. So what ended up happening with me, I was traveling around South America, we are family, actually did a loop of the entire continent of visiting all 12 continents and so when we are travelling, we were learning Spanish.

So I just started talking to my Spanish teacher and I was asking him about telling him about my business. Yeah, I do coaching. I do travel, blogging, online courses, etcetera. And then I said, “Oh, I need you to design a new website.” And he’s like, “My friends can do with that”. And then I said, “How much would your friend charge me?” He’s like, “I don’t know, maybe about US$100. I’m like, “What?  Did I hear you, right? And then he’s like, “Yes sir, is that too much?” I was like, “No, that’s actually very, very good price”. And so I was like, “Let’s do a test, let’s try designing a website. He designed my rickyshetty.com website by the way too. And he designed, my daddy blogger logo. If you have big screen[?], I can share them, but it’s a little plain logo with my family in it.

Derek: Yeah. Quick links.

Ricky: Yeah. And then what ended up happening is just through this conversation with my Spanish teacher, he, I did a test. I was like, “Okay, let’s see the quality, the speed, the communication, making sure all those variables fit. So if I decided to do this as a business, eventually it could and would work. And so it worked. It didn’t work perfectly. There was obviously issues like there were, like with anything. For example, there was some delays with the deadlines I wanted it done at this day and then they had to delay it a little bit. And then, some communication barriers because their English isn’t perfect so they wouldn’t be able to do, maybe write like a full-length novel or they wouldn’t be able to do the social media marketing side of my business because I want that done in native English level.

But in terms of website design, they could design your website without knowing English to the degree that I do. Or you do, or your listeners do. They can design a logo, they can edit a video because they have the skills of a video editor. So I did realize there are some communication barriers and what ended up happening is I started sending friends their way and I started creating a little side business. I haven’t been totally turned it into a full business but it’s been great so far and a lot of people don’t realize that Venezuela is an outsourcing market because normally when you think of outsourcing, you think of India, you think you’ll Philippines where we both are and you might think of used in Europe as you mentioned earlier in the podcast. But Venezuela, Latin America, it’s an up and coming, outsourcing market because nowadays most of the younger people can and do speak English, especially the ones who are more globally minded and are looking to work with international clients.

And obviously one of the other cool benefits as North America is on the same times zone in South America. It’s not like it is here in the Philippines, which speaking challenges has been, “Oh my God, and an incredible challenge to work with my coaching clients because I, I’m working like 9:00 AM Pacific or 9 AM Eastern, and that is like 9:00 PM Manila time or like almost midnight Manila time. So I’m doing my coaching calls between 9:00 PM and midnight my local time while my clients in North America just waking up. So there you go. Those are some kind of the history there, of how we started outsourcing to Venezuela and I would definitely encourage your listeners to maybe look at outsourcing and just try it. Maybe try it on a small project like a logo design or a little bit of a social media graphic.

And if you don’t like it, if you don’t think the quality is up to par, then you can just hire somebody and pay them higher in your local hometown. But if you see what I see and what Derek sees, you’ll realize that, “Wow, there’s an incredible power to this” and I just want to finish with this point. What we’re doing, when we from the Western world outsourced to the Eastern or developing world, it was really supporting the local economy and we’re balancing it from a one-sided rich Western continent and the poor developing continents to be more balanced because we’re distributing wealth from the rich countries to the poor country. So man, we can change the world through the power of outsourcing.

Derek: Yeah, I’m really excited and I’m a huge proponent of outsourcing and I mean it’s an absolute win-win. It obviously benefits the destination countries. But I’m also really convinced, it also benefits the home country, whether it’s US or Canada. There’s a lot of resistance to outsourcing because of these fears, but actually, what it does is it builds more stronger companies, more efficient companies, which then benefits the employees of those companies and the community around it. And the tax is paid. So, I think it is quite a limited view just to sort of see the short term as involve a potentially tech jobs, but it’s actually about expanding companies. I’m having them all profitable, creating more jobs and more high skilled jobs, you know.

Ricky: Yeah, absolutely.

Derek: So, I just want to speak as well. I’ve had a really good experience recently actually in co-living spaces. I don’t know if you’ve had any experiences with those. I stayed in Alicante, in Southern Spain for about four months and basically worked to know co-living, co-working space. Again, these are quite a new occurrence within the kind of digital nomad ecosystem. But effectively, they’re working living spaces that are shared with digital nomads. Everyone’s kind of on a shared mission. Everyone had to share their experiences. Really exciting places. Have you stayed in those kinds of environments with your family? Do you see those as a growing trend?

Ricky: Yes and yes. I have stayed in those. I do see them as a globe-growing trend. Those are actually one of my favorite types of places to stay. People ask that question a lot like, “Where do you stay? Is it hostels? Is it hotels? Is it Airbnb? Is it homestays? Is it camping?”

We’ve actually done hostels too. Nowadays, hostels are becoming much more a family-friendly, couple-friendly, and private individual traveler who doesn’t like a dorm in with snoring other by packers-friendly. Hostels I would say are a great way of these living and having that community feel. Hotels, you know what you’re going to get. Hotel in Amsterdam, Netherlands isn’t going to be much different than a hotel in Tokyo, Japan. The one in Tokyo, Japan might be just a little bit smaller because of lack of space, but hotels are hotel no matter where you’re going to have your… one-star, three-star, five-star, and seven-star and like the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, right?

Then you have the Airbnb which is also like a trend that’s really picking up I would say like less than ten years. That’s basically a local person renting out their home, either their whole home, their whole condo, or a room in their condo. That’s a great model because then it empowers the local people to share their home with the traveler and you get to feel how a local person lives, which you don’t get at a hostel or hotel.

There’re also homestays which we have a bit of[?] when we were travelling in Central America and South America. We get lot of stays with Latinos which allowed us to learn the language, integrate into their family, and to see how a Latino family lives on a day-to-day basis like what do they do in the morning, what kind of breakfast do they eat, what’s their day like, what’s the role of the father, what’s the role of the mother, how are the kids behaving to each other, or you know who’s visiting, that kind of stuff. You can learn that from the Lonely Pilot. You can learn that from YouTube. You got to stay with the local.

Lastly, going back to the question you brought up, co-living. There’s a whole movement now towards co-working spaces and you can find those in all the major economic centers around the world. People realized that co-working solves the problem of people needing fast Wi-Fi and a community feel in their local environment. But co-working didn’t solve the traveler’s dilemma of coming to a new country and checking into hotel and finding out the Wi-Fi was so terrible that they wouldn’t be able to do their very, very, very important call. All of a sudden, you’re kind of stuck. What you do, for the traveler kind of person, right? So this whole movement towards co-living and co-working spaces developed and nowadays there’s actually a few branches, they called it as digital nomad houses. One is called Outsite. Not Outside, but Outsite. So, O-U-T-S-I-T-E. They have branches in Canada, not Canada, the US like the California, and coursed into Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.  There’s also the Selina’s brand. They are in Colombia, several Latin American countries.

Now some of those have expanded into Asia to places like Bali and to Thailand where there’s more of a growing need, because a lot of digital nomads, they go to where the sun is. They’re sun chasers. They chase the sun from maybe cold Europe, or cold Canada, cold North America, or cold Australia or New Zealand, and they go to hotter Bali, hotter Thailand, or in the city of eternal spring Medellin. In these nomad houses hotspots, you’ll find these are nomad houses and they definitely do feel the shift is going to occur more and more. There were more people create more co-working, co-living houses around the world. Thanks for bringing that up as well, Derek.

Derek: It’s an exciting growing trend isn’t it? I suppose just finally Ricky, the Philippines, you are obviously married to a wonderful Filipina and you’re now based here for some time. How do you see travel around the Philippines? To me it’s still a little bit off the brim[?].  There’s not really a lot of people coming here and certainly I think the digital nomad scene still has a long way to go and grow here. What are your opinions for budding digital nomads considering the Philippines?

Ricky: Derek, I feel like sometimes you and me, are the only digital nomads here, and makes me feel very lonely here. Of course, I have my wonderful wife and my kids, but in terms of people like you and me, we’ll get it right away.

We have the same mindset. We can talk about our entrepreneurship and telemarketing. We can talk about our difficulties with the Wi-Fi issues and all these kinds of issues that maybe a local person or like a person who’s not in telemarketing won’t be able to understand as easily.  And so, in terms of how I look at the Philippines, I definitely feel that it has a lot of potential firstly because a lot of people go into the trees and back like a root which is Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia into Malaysia, Singapore and then down into Indonesia, maybe into East Timor, then maybe down into Australia. But a lot of people skip on Taiwan. I feel that’s a kind of skipped-out territory or island and of course, they skipped-out in the Philippines. Probably it’s because of the island geography, right Or the fact that if they do come here, there are no ferries, they always see those cargo ships that the typical Filipino seaman go on, but they’re not open to tourists or travelers.

You have to more or less fly here, unless you do what I did. I actually was crazy enough to take the ferry from Sandakan to Zamboanga for my bases from Borneo to Southern Philippines. But that is a sight. Philippines has so much natural beauty. You got the incredible beaches. You got the incredible turquoise waters. You have so much history and culture. If you’re interested in the colonial history, you have the influence of the Spaniards, the Americans, and then you have the influence of the Japanese and the other Asian countries here as well.

And then you have the delicious food. Filipino food hasn’t hit the global scene either compared to Japanese food, Korean food, Thai food, Indian food, or Chinese food. Filipino food, most people when you ask them outside of Philippines, “What’s the most famous Philippine dish?” They’ll give you a blank stare because they don’t know anything about adobo, sisig, Bicol express, kare-kare, or some of the delicious foods found locally. Best of all here in the Philippines, is the people. Man oh man, that’s why I married one, because my wife’s a sweetheart. The people here are so hospitable, so kind and no government is paying me to say this, no tourism board, my wife’s not paying me to say this either, I really feel that the Filipinos are some of the most hardworking people in the planet, but also some of the most hospitable, kind, sincere, and genuine.

I love the people. And I really feel, and people like me, I’m a travel blogger. I’m obviously documenting a lot of my stuff on my blogs, social media, on my YouTube channel, and I’m promoting the Philippines as a travel destination, as a food destination, as a digital nomad destination. Hopefully, people like myself and what you’re doing as well, Derek, are going to help boost the tourism economy and then the Tourism board to stop paying us, because we brought in literally hundreds or, millions of tourists into this amazing country called the Philippines.

Derek: I couldn’t agree more actually, and I’m waiting for the check from the tourism board. Yeah, it’s an amazing place and I think tourism could grow, I don’t know what figures are, but at least 10 times to equal that of Thailand. It has at least the beauty and the kind of intrigue of Thailand. I think we’ve got a long way to go, but it’s certainly an exciting journey ahead. Thank you so much Ricky. And if anyone should get to know more about you and any of the products that you offer, how can they do that?

Ricky: So you know, what I’m best known for is daddyblogger.com. I have special passion for dads, and that I’m empowering them to be the best fathers, the best husbands, the best leaders[?] there can be, the best entrepreneur, etcetera. And obviously in this whole nomad side of thing, the thing that we cover the most in this show, make sure to check out digitalnomadmastery.com, where it’s viewed by almost 500 different guests, and there actually one of the newbies and click out the link below to this absolute notes to the show as a whole, so digitalnomadmastery.com, and I do private coaching and training, and online courses on all these things that were talking about. So if you need further help, I would be happy to help you, support you, and equip you anyway I can.

So Derek, I just want to thank you again for having me in your show today. It is an honor and a pleasure.

Derek: You really opened my eyes to the rest of the Philippines, and nomadism. So thank you so much for your time.

Ricky: Your welcome.

Derek: Okay. That was Ricky Shetty of daddyblogger.com and, digitalnomadmastery.com. So if you want to reach out to Ricky or want to know more about anything he does, go to our show notes, which is at outsourceaccelerator.com/198.

And as always if you want to ask us anything then send us an email to [email protected].

See you next time!