Hello everyone, hola, ciao, Gruizzi, willkommen, bonjour. My name is Simon Fox, I am a developer and designer and I am a digital nomad. Today I'm going to talk to you about travel, work and WordPress. I'm going to cover why and how and also take a look at some tips and techniques that we can use working with and around WordPress to enable a digital nomad lifestyle. As a digital nomad I have worked in all of these locations. I started my career in the tech sector in the early 90s. I worked in infrastructure for 17 years as an IT manager and a solution architect, but it wasn't making me happy so I changed gears, quit, started my own company focusing on my passions of development and design. That was 11 years ago, I've been building WordPress sites ever since. WordPress makes up 80% of my income and has enabled me to travel the world whilst developing. What is a digital nomad? It is someone who can and does travel whilst working. Just a thought exercise to start things off.  I want you to pick one place and focus on that and picture yourself there, not just as a tourist but working there for a week or a month or a little bit longer. As we talk through today, I want you to keep focusing on that place and picture yourself there. I'm going to start with the why question because it's important to frame things. Sometimes we can live a little too close to our screens. There's a lot of really good quotes out there of the benefits of travel. For me as a WordPress developer, the biggest benefit has been the people that you get to talk to. It expands your network to a global reach of friends, colleagues and clients and I think it's important to talk to people not just in our field but out of our field. Talking to non-wordpress developers has made me a much better WordPress developer and the same thing applies with design. Talking to architects, musicians, baristas, doctors all of these people have a unique perspective that we can take on board if we have an open mind, take creativity, inspiration, become better people and do better work. Never before in human history has there been an opportunity quite like this for so many people and we are the beneficiaries of this. We work online and that means we technically can work anywhere. We have a freedom that other career paths often don't have and WordPress is a huge part of that. My parents travelled in their 20s like a lot of people in that generation. Australians loved to travel. They went over to North America, lived in Canada for a while, travelled around Europe as well and it's interesting to reflect on the cost of travel which hasn't changed all that much. When they came back to Sydney probably because I put a baby-sized dent in their travel plans they bought a house. That is something that has changed a little bit and to put that into perspective we need to add in the salaries so that we can take a look at the relative cost and we can see that we have an opportunity when it comes to travel that other generations haven't had. At the same time as economies have been changing the internet has been changing. It's been getting faster and more prevalent. It's interesting to see that Australia is beating Kazakhstan and Guam. I'm not going to talk about the NBN today because nobody likes an angry presenter but if you can work in Australia today the point is you can work elsewhere. I've had faster internet in Cambodia, Peru, Serbia and many other places than I often get in Australia. A lot of people I talk to are jealous of this opportunity that we have. Life's short, let's make use of it. So that's the why, that's the lens through which I want to take a look at the how and some of the tips and techniques. I think it's important to ease into a digital Nomad lifestyle. I started with two and four-week trips which are pretty common for most people. Then six-week trips, four-month trips, consecutive round-the-world trips, that was working pretty well. Come back to Sydney, reload, reset, get family and friends, get a little bit more work going and eventually people get used to the fact that you are consistent and reliable whilst you are remote and longer becomes possible. Conferences are a really good way to anchor such trips because they're fantastic for networking but they're also tax-deductible and they make a portion of your trip tax-deductible. So contact an accountant or the ATO for that for some more details. The one city that you've got in your mind and many of that, for me that's Florence and Italy.   So it's important to think about that when we're planning our travel as digital Nomads. For me that ended up being three to four weeks per location, ideally. Minimizing that travel between location and scheduling certain blocks of work like maintenance, for example, in your calendar. For example, first or third weekend of every month. Traveling solo is fantastic.  It can be a bit of a double-edged sword. The flexibility is where this really becomes a strength. It is a little bit lonely and that's why it's character building. But you can chop and change the way that you travel. Change your locations every couple of days if the work gets a little bit light. Ideally if you're doing this you're only booking your travel a couple of days to a week in advance so that when the big projects do land you can set yourself down in a nice place and actually do that. What's interesting is in the last four or five years there's been an increase in the number of companies that target and serve as digital Nomads. These are companies like Remote Year, Unsettled, Nomad Cruise. There's a lot of workspaces, for example, in Ubud and Bali that will also provide packages including accommodation. These companies take a lot of the problems and time cost out of organizing your travel. Let's take a look at one of those. Remote Year. The reason I've chosen this company, I'm not sponsored by anyone today by the way, if I mention a company or a product it's just enthusiasm or experience. Remote Year is the program that I did last year in 2017. There's a company that organizes your travel for you and you travel in a group. There's a group that leaves every month. You live in a different city every month with like-minded people. I started in Kuala Lumpur in February, did four months in Southeast Asia, four months in Europe, four months in South America. It's a fantastic program. The people that come out of that are like family. They're partnerships and partnerships that open a world of opportunity for us. And they're not just developers and designers. That made up about 40 to 50% of the people that were in my group. But you get some really interesting people that you get to travel and collaborate with. I had in my group a nurse who was studying for her master's degree and doing that remote. There were people in accounting, property management. There was a guy who sold a vaping business in Florida who was looking for his next opportunity. So it's absolutely fantastic. It's also very interesting to note that more than 50% of people that do these programs have full-time employment. That might be surprising to a lot of people. What is a program like that cost? Again, not sponsored. A lot of the competition is very similar in pricing. About $2,000. U.S. per month. It's actually $27,000 for the whole year when you're out in the deposit, which when I sat down and did the calculations the total cost of living in Sydney. So it is affordable as well. So that's the why and the how. Let's start taking a look at how we can start to pay for that and we'll get into some WordPress details as well. If you are a full-time employee, it is worth your time to talk to your employer. You may be surprised at how many of them are open-minded when it comes to remote work. Highlight the benefits. You're not going to take up much space in their office. That might be a benefit to them. You may not be taking up valuable bandwidth that other people in the office can use to be more productive. They can attract global talent that they may not be able to attract locally. And they are perceived as a forward-thinking company.  You can prove that it works if they're still on the fence by working from home. Ease them into it as well. And if they're still not up for a lot of companies that advertise those sorts of jobs and support it. If you're a freelancer, I sincerely hope you do already know how to win business. That's the ideal way of doing it. I'm not going to tell you how to run your business, but time is an interesting way that we can take a look at things because that's common across all of our businesses. Time is something that is important because if we can work twice as fast, we can do twice as much work or spend some of that time that we're in. So, efficiencies. When we're building themes, building themes is a huge topic. I could talk for days on this stuff, but I just want to cover a couple of different points. A lot of us, when we build sites, we use frameworks. These are things like Divi, Genesis, etc., etc. Some of us buy themes on marketplaces like Themeforest and we'll use those. Absolutely fantastic. I highly recommend that as developers and designers if we're working with these, we try as many of them as possible. I'll buy all of them, regardless of whether or not I have a project that uses it, because I think it's important to see how different theme frameworks work, how they think. Because all of us solve problems differently, whether we're a developer, a designer, or a content manager. We all approach our work differently. What we're looking for is the path of least resistance here. The approach that most closely aligns to the way that we think and the way that we want to work. Because the ultimate goal, after going broad, is to narrow down, find the one that actually closely aligns to us and get really master it, because familiar equals fast. Please, if we do use frameworks, and a lot of us do, I hope that this is a point that no one is going to be surprised about. Please use child themes. I'm still finding clients out there that come to me and say, it's a site that's been built by someone else, and they've put the changes actually in the parent theme and not used a child theme, and that locks us out of updates. That is a security risk to our clients. Please use child themes. If that's a scary concept, and I understand that it might be, maybe we don't want updates applying to our themes being controlled by a third party. Starter themes are another way that we can look for efficiencies by time. These are theme frameworks that don't have updates built in, but they give us a rolling start for our development, and they can help with speed. Ultimately, you may reach a point, like I did, where you decide to build your own, and you may decide to leverage a starter theme framework, kickstart your own framework, and take inspiration from some of the other frameworks that are out there. The end goal here, ultimately though, we still need to do our research and go broad to make sure that we are going down the right path. Consistency when we develop. We roll out our sites and we give those to our customers, and they log on to the back end, they edit their content, and ideally, if we've done a really good job, we get repeat business. We do multiple sites for these clients, sometimes over a decade or more. I think it's important that when they access these sites, they're in the user experience. That reduces support calls, makes us faster when we provide the support, and it makes them comfortable and confident when they edit their content, and familiar equals fast does not just apply to us, that also applies to our clients. If we do incremental improvements over, say, for example, a decade of development with one particular client, consider rolling those incremental improvements back to the other sites that are already live. Plugins. Get two or more WordPress people in a room, and eventually, the conversation is going to come down to, hey, what plugins do you use? We've all done it. It's worth talking about this feature, because sometimes it's overlooked and it's worth reinforcing if you do know it. If you go to WordPress.org, sign in with your username and browse the plugin repository, you can favorite a plugin and that stores to your user profile as part of your curated list. Then when you are installing WordPress or managing any WordPress installation, you can go to plugins, add plugin, go to favorites, put in your username, and see your curated list, activate and install from there. That's public. You can give out your username to other people, but please, if we're giving out usernames, make sure we use a password management system and we have unique, secure passwords everywhere. WP FAVS is another alternative for lists and bulk plugin installation, but that does require a plugin of its own to do that. When we're coding for the developers, local development is a fantastic thing that we should always look at when we're traveling. Wamp, Zamp, Mamp. No, I don't have a stroke. Those are the acronyms. And the guys from Flywell with their local tool. There's plenty of others out there. We need to take a look at those and see where we may not have connectivity. A flight from Sydney to Dallas is 20 hours. I built a site on that flight. Last year in November, I was on a Russian icebreaker from Ushuaia in Argentina to Antarctica. Built a site on there. Local Dev, that's how we do it. Portable apps. I love portable apps. These are apps that you don't actually install so much as extract to a file system. You can run them from a USB key, move them around. I like to run them from within cloud sync between all your devices. In that way, if you lose your laptop or there is equipment failure, your development suite is back up and running instantly. CSS Compilers. Any developers in here that we should all be aware of CSS Compilers. These are languages like SAS and LES, which is basically CSS with variables, programming, logic, functions, et cetera. You can take a color and darken it by a certain percentage. Traditionally, use alongside local development because you need to compile them into CSS, but they speed up our development enormously. We should all be taking a look at using those. And there are tools like pre-pros, grunt, gulp that can help automate the way that we do the compilation. They will watch our projects for changes in the files and they will auto compile. I like to pair that, for example, with Sublime Text, which has a nice extension that will save when the program loses focus. Tap it away in your SAS file, tap to the browser, Sublime Text auto saves, pre-pros auto compiles, and you're looking at your changes in a minified CSS. What's interesting about CSS Compilers is I'm starting to see these in themes, either as part of their source files to help you make modifications, or as actual PHP compilers built into theme frameworks. And that's really interesting when you couple that with, for example, the WordPress Customizer API. You can expose options to your clients using the Customizer, and when they publish the Customizer options, you can write that out to a SAS variable file, trigger a compile, and again, you're spitting out a single minified CSS for your clients. That's a nice, exciting option. Again, all of these are just looking at ways that we can build efficiencies into the way that we do our work so that we can actually enjoy the Pisteca Fiorentina when we're in Florence. This is a personal one. Not everyone's going to agree with me on this one. I expect WordPress by default installs in the root directory. I like to install it in the sub-directory. Always. I find it to be neater. Yes, that's a slide OCD thing. But it enables me to have files in the root directory, for example, holding pages, Google verification things that aren't actually stored and backed up with the WordPress installation. You can have multiple instances of WordPress in the same hosting environment, Dev site and old backup site, and it's very neat when you actually work with that, and when you use backup systems, like backup buddy, and you're doing your backup inside a WordPress instance, you don't need to remember to add exclusion directories to your backup system, you're just getting that instance. That's been a nice efficiency gain for me over the years. TinyMCE Advanced is a fantastic plugin in the repository that enables you to customize the toolbars in your editor. I like to do that to provide a consistent and customized UI to all my clients, and you can export the settings. Export those settings, store them in a library, similar to how designers have a design pattern library. Do that with any plugin that allows you to export those settings so that you can reduce your repetitive tasks, provide a faster build time and consistency across all of our sites. Anything you can apply to page builders that allow you to export things, always be looking for those efficiency gains with everything that we do. We can sync those via Dropbox, for example, great when you're working with the team for that consistency across multiple people. Another way that we can take a look at helping to fund things is with multiple income streams. We'll take a look at a couple of those options. Every site needs hosting. I used to go to my clients and say give me the hosting. You organize the hosting. It's your relationship. You just give me the username and password and I'll take care of the rest. What would happen is that they would go out and get the cheapest, nastiest hosting possible. Often that was in the United States even though their entire client base and focus was Australia. Caused nothing but problems for them and for me. So this is an opportunity for us. You don't need to know anything about hosting or there are plenty of companies out there that provide reseller hosting. All you need to do is create the account. That's a fantastic way of speeding up the way that we build our sites from start to finish. We can be the domain registrar as well. Register the domain, set up the account, have WordPress auto come into the file system via a C panel skeleton directory which is just a template directory. Auto come in and we're up and running in five minutes ready to do our content editing or building. It also enables us to choose the hosting company with the best reputation, the best support and that's really important when we travel. You don't want to be on the phone for an hour waiting for someone because the hosting company has decided to do their upgrades at a bad time. That's another bad problem with hosting in the United States by the way. They do all their updates out of hours which is our business hours. If you're targeting Australian customers, please use Australian hosting. If you have clients that do not pay their invoices, they drag their feed, you can suspend the accounts because you control it. We have a vested interest in our sites continuing to function. Our responsibility does not end when a site goes live. Case in point, I built a site for a very large prominent Australian company many years ago in the 3.x days, well before WordPress was doing their auto updates, etc. The site went live, the client was very happy but they didn't want to make any changes. Zero changes were made for three years and they didn't want us to make any changes either. So we just sat there. Every now and then I'd check on it and one day I came back and had a look and there was an awful lot of Arabic on the screen and a guy with an AK-47. What's the first thing you do when you see that? You call the client and make sure they haven't changed their branding. They had not. I reverted from backup. I found the vulnerability in WordPress core in the file editor and I tracked the threat back to a hacking school in Syria. WordPress is open source which is fantastic, it's free, we get to the benefit of that but we're not the only ones taking a look at the source code. Hackers are doing this as well to track the vulnerabilities make it very easy for them. We need to do WordPress maintenance. I believe that is our responsibility and it is also an opportunity. This should be a line item with all of our clients it should be part of the conversation from day one should be hosting, domain registration, site build, maintenance. Completely separate line items in our invoicing. We should be providing backup within WordPress storing those backups off-site securely we should be testing those backups making sure that we can restore and migrate very easily. Update responsibly, what do I mean by that? Read the change logs. Read the change logs on every plugin update. There are a lot of companies out there that provide managed WordPress hosting and they will update the plugins for you. I guarantee you this they are not reading the change logs on the plugins and saying I built the site I know that's fine. They may roll things back and do some nice things but we are the ones that have the ability to manage this a lot better and that is an opportunity for us to have another income stream and a relationship with the client that continues. We can value add to the maintenance product by buying premium plugins and including that in the cost. We need to look for opportunities to buy developer licenses that can be installed on unlimited sites lifetime licenses wherever possible and include those. It's nothing worse than a site having plugins that are way out of date and causing major problems because the client has forgotten to update their credit card details on the 13 to 20 different plugin sites that we've got. We can include some nominal time for fixing certain things. Sometimes a widget author may change the class names from underscores to dashes and all of your styles break. Include a little bit of time to actually fix these things in the WordPress maintenance contract. We can speed up the way that we do this WordPress maintenance with bulk tools. InfiniteWP, ManageWP, IthemSync they're all good tools. They allow us to see all of our sites that we've managed from a single dashboard and push out changes. Take a look at a plugin. The only thing that's in the changelog is Romanian translation. Bam! Push it out to every site with a single click and record that change in the database so that we can do client reporting and prove to our clients what the value is of this WordPress maintenance contract. They're also very nice because they actually plug into the websites that track vulnerabilities and they can highlight them to us. So even though we may be doing WordPress maintenance at a certain schedule, whether that's weekly, monthly, etc., we should be checking dashboards like this regularly to look for zero-day vulnerabilities and patching those immediately. This is a screenshot of the upcoming InfiniteWP 3.x release that I'm looking forward to. Clearly showing plugins, themes, WordPress core and translations that you can push out and mass. It also shows you what versions are coming up need to be updated and you can click on those to actually get hot links straight into the changelogs. All these things speed up the way that we do our maintenance, allowing us to enjoy the places that we are in as we travel. Plan for the worst. Hope for the best. A little bit of paranoia is healthy, I think. What's the worst that can happen? Probably what happened to me in December in Santiago. I was having dinner and drinks with a very good friend and a little bit distracted and everything was gone. Laptop, mobile phone, wallet with cash and cards, passport, mouse mat. I really miss that mouse mat. I've got nothing. So we need to have some paranoia. I was back up and running within five minutes. There's a lot of good ones out there. I like LastPass, they've got an emergency access feature, so if I get hit by a bus I can have someone I trust gain access to my password vault. My clients are not at risk. You can also share password vaults amongst your team. Encrypt our drives when we have laptops. We must encrypt all of our drives. Not just our laptops, our mobile phones. Make sure that's happening and enable two-factor authentication on every system that supports it. And we also need to remember that there is a big difference between Cloud Backup and Cloud Sync. Cloud Sync is things like Dropbox, Google Drive. These are not dedicated backup systems and we should not rely upon them in that function. An example of a backup like a proper backup program for Windows might be Backblaze, for example. So today we've talked about the opportunity that we have as WordPress people to travel the world. We've taken a look at a couple of ways that that might actually be implemented for us, and then take a look at some WordPress details and ways that we can structure the way that we build working with an around WordPress to by time increase our income and see the world. I hope you've been inspired. I hope this means that you're going to go out there. And if you do go out there, where will you go? Where was that place that you thought of at the start of the presentation? How realistic is this going to be for you in the near future? I hope it's realistic. And where will you send your next postcards from? Thank you very much. Alright, time for questions. Anyone have any questions? This is a bit of a parallel question just because I'll be speaking at some of your plugins that you had installed. And I noticed you had ACF and Gutenberg. And I was just wondering how that was going for the transition because you must be getting ready for that so you're mean on the ground. So it's probably important to keep all your clients happy. Look, I think Gutenberg is going to be a really interesting development. There's going to be some pain. There's going to be an adjustment period. People don't like change. But I think that this is a positive step. It will end up being a positive step for us. It will change the way some of us will need to work. I use ACF pro extensively in all of my sites and did a little bit of testing not so recently ago. Some things didn't work but it is still undergoing development and I will keep evaluating as that goes on. The Gutenberg way of editing may completely change the way that I build my sites and the way that I work on my own framework. I think everyone, as I said, everyone thinks differently. It solves our problems differently. We need to evaluate what options are out there and see how the dust settles with a lot of these themes that we use. Maybe you're familiar with Divi really well. Take a look at how that works with their page builder in conjunction with Gutenberg. I think a lot of this stuff is going to work in conjunction. There is a plugin, the classic editor plugin that we can activate to turn off Gutenberg even in WordPress 5. That's my understanding anyway and keep working the way that we currently are with the plugin vendors get up to speed. I'm just curious where the did you get your laptop and things replaced under insurance? I had insurance. Doing an insurance claim is painful. The insurance claim is probably as painful as the loss itself. It is still undergoing. You need to provide a lot of receipts at proof of purchase and all that sort of thing and getting all of that whilst you're traveling. Six or seven weeks after four years traveling. I'm still in the process of getting all those receipts out of archive and out of storage and processing that insurance claim. Absolutely, we do need to take a look at our insurance when we travel. It is highly recommended. Not just for the theft side of things but for our own health. Especially if we're going to the United States. Question at the back. We've got one of us down here. What are the tax implications of being in Australia for a year? Good question. I actually removed a slide about tax because I was going to say it about time. When you travel if you travel for business there are things that I'm not a tax accountant by the way. It is worth your while if you don't have a tax accountant to get one and to talk to them regularly. The tax laws change not as often as web development but they do change. People would be I was doing round the world trips solo planned, anchoring in conferences and I talked to my tax accountant and I said how do I manage things he talked me through the process of recording that in a travel diary so that you can calculate what percentage of the trip and what portions of things you can claim. When I started doing the remote year program which is 12 months and it's an entrepreneur program I went and had a chat to him and I said this is going to be a lot of travel. Do I really need to have that? So he went to the ATO and he said please give us a private ruling on this one item for this one guy for a fixed period of time and they came back with a very generous deduction that quite frankly surprised me I'm not going to tell you what it is but it is absolutely worth your while to have that conversation regularly with your tax accountant. So the implication for your residency status though I mean obviously you're still an Australian. I'm an Australian I run an Australian business I have clients all around the world and I invoice from Australia that money comes into an Australian bank account and I pay Australian tax there's no problems with residency or anything like that there's no difference to you going to a conference and working out of that conference for a week you're still Australian you're just elsewhere. Are you doing any of your work then for clients overseas when you're there so if you're in Ireland or something for instance are you actually getting clients while you're there or are you still basically focusing on just your Australian clients and you're just servicing them remotely and do you get involved in things like the meetups and things like that in the places that you're going so that you're really kind of getting immersed into the business of the local area. Good question. As I travelled when I was doing my solo travel meet up groups for fantastic ways of getting out and socialising when you're in a country and you're out there seeing the sites that you work but you need that kind of social glue so they're fantastic the meetup groups didn't lead to a lot of business gain but it was fantastic just to make those connections and some of those connections I still have today when I was on the remote year program there was no need to do meetup groups because I had a family of 70 people from all around the world not just North America, New Zealand UK, Australia but Mongolia, Ukraine, France, Germany and all of these people were like a little bubble with us as we travelled made you feel very safe and you were always had someone to talk to and collaborate with as for the client side of things that can be a little bit sporadic it's surprising how much work you can make in terms of clients while you are travelling but often that can be stuff that takes some time to develop sometimes that's a connection that you make a conversation that you have you have a coffee with someone and then a year or two later out of nowhere you get a work contract I had been travelling with the remote year program I was living in Portugal for the month I was in July last year and a client called me up in Washington DC and I said hey where we've got your name from X and Y we'd like to talk to you about this project and this is the scope do you think this is going to work? I said no your whole thing is going to come crashing down that could be a disaster so they flew me to DC and paid for me to live there for seven weeks helping them do consulting this thing sometimes can be a surprise when you are out there travelling it's important to have an open mind talk to people make those connections and don't be afraid if the work doesn't immediately land keep being open minded, keep being open with your relationships as a digital nomad do you use VA's and would you recommend using VA's? VA's like virtual assistants so overseas for example for our work week have you read that? no so for our work weeks basically about pretty much optimizing your entire life using VA's so optimizing efficiencies and stuff like that in business look I personally don't but I don't see why that wouldn't work it all depends on what kind of person you are and how comfortable you are with delegating certain tasks for me I'm able to I run my business I am a developer I am a designer, I can do all of that work I know my account system which is accessible online I use zero, I can do my BAZ statements while remotely I can do my personal income tax because my accountant can get in there remotely so there's not a lot of tasks that I would actually need a VA for especially when I'm doing a program like remote year and they organize all of your travel all of your accommodation workspace, et cetera, meet you at the airport here's your welcome kit, here's your SIM card with your data for the month here's the welcome pack, these are the languages common phrases you might need and good restaurants and stuff like that so I didn't need a VA but thanks for giving me an idea very good Simon how do you deal with time zones with clients all around the world and you being all around the world and disciplining yourself not to go exploring through the rainforest because it's a beautiful day and just staying in your hotel or wherever you are yeah, good question much like being a freelancer and working from home there is an element of discipline that we must have in order to meet our commitments regularly that doesn't change when you travel there are so many cool things out there to do yeah I find that the time zone stuff is manageable when I'm a freelancer because I can schedule those calls with the client get on there, go through the brief work through any change request that might happen to do and the client is happy at that point they get off the call I can schedule the work whenever I need to do the work doesn't need to happen in their time zone I only need to communicate in their time zone so it's not that bad for the people that travel with me who are full time employees that was a little bit more tricky for example the people who were from North America especially on the east coast when we were living in Kuala Lumpur and Southeast Asia for four months we basically called them the night's watch and you often wouldn't see them they'd wake up, come for breakfast as we went for dinner we'd socialize and they would go do a night's work we went to bed or partied so that was a little bit difficult for them for four months but they got their revenge when we got to South America so I think it's manageable and there's a lot of good tools out there for helping you manage that time zone stuff I think we have four minutes left for questions if anyone else has one for Simon any softballs I've got a question so when your bag was stolen quickly did it take you to get set up with another laptop do you carry two two laptops with you I don't so what you had to go and buy a new one that was normally yes you would need to I was lucky in that I was still on this remote year program I was in Santiago we were in our eleventh month and we all knew each other very well so I had a team of people around me people who were able to give me a loan a laptop the workspaces that we used that were 24 hour 7 day week biometrical control workspaces often had a spare computer that you could use and because a lot of my data and my environment is cloud synced and backed up I had no problems restoring and getting everything back up and running almost immediately I still miss that laptop this is not that laptop I'm sorry but the other one was better so yeah it's not too bad the mobile phone situation obviously you can just go to a local vendor and get a mobile phone it's not too bad I don't travel with two laptops because I like to keep the weight low I like to travel with 20 kilos or less ideally because whilst you might have 30 kilos on international long haul flights domestic flights and short haul international flights will only give you 23 kilos one question over here just a question about tools like in my office I've got three monitors and quite a good setup I really enjoy that going to a cafe with just a little MacBook Air presents some sort of challenges with it I would imagine that traveling overseas as well there are some other challenges like telephone calls like so how do people get hold of you in terms of a phone number so what are some of your favourite tools when you're travelling that actually helps with your work and workflow good question first of all in terms of the environment I have a really nice 30 inch screen and a very expensive ergonomic chair that I've missed enormously while I was travelling so it's been fantastic to sit on that and work in that environment again now that I'm back in terms of things like phone calls and those sorts of things there are some really good tools out there an example of that may be having Skype with a Skype in number in the countries where your clients operate and having that advertised to your clients that will then ring on Skype when your phone has data before you leave the country forward your mobile number to that Skype number now you are accessible not only on those local call numbers with Skype in but also your mobile phone will redirect to those and ring on Skype then while you're travelling if you don't have data you can set up Skype to go to a voicemail or to forward to an actual landline which might be the number that changes every city that you go into or every country that you go into because I like to buy, I don't like those roaming SIM cards that you know give you whole global thing you just get a different SIM card in each country focus on data rather than calls and leverage for it yeah, but it is workable and if you, for example you go to a country and you're only going to be there for a couple of days you don't want to buy a SIM card and pay for data go to a restaurant or go to cafes and as you walk around the streets have the Wi-Fi networks open and running you'll be able to guess which restaurants and cafes have Wi-Fi often they'll be password protected go have a meal, ask for the password star it in Google Maps and then every time you walk back to that place or within range you can just stand out the front of the restaurant even if it's closed get internet access and make your calls my Google Maps is littered with stars all over the world Fanta, I love Google Maps probably the best tool you can have while you travel star your locations absolutely what is the guide for when you walk a city any other questions I'll just add one extra thing I know when I travelled around and I wanted to keep my mobile number active in Australia I had to switch over to a 365 year 5-day plan because I was on prepaid so I didn't want to pay 40 bucks a month so I did the same thing I switched it over to a year long plan then forwarded to a Skype number I use a company called Amasim they have no contracts and you can change your plan any time you want you can set your plan to a pay as you go plan which is $0 per month and has a much higher call cost but you're going to be out of the country you're not going to be using it so I would do that while I travelled it would be zero cost to me other than occasional forward calls which were very very rare and that seriously reduced my mobile phone bill and as soon as I come back to the country I change the plan to one with data and unlimited calls which I think is about 30 bucks a month so that's a good option there on the Optus Network


The Glaucon tells us that we should pursue our own interests first. Now while he doesn't talk about it very much, there's something of a hidden presumption in there. And the hidden presumption is that there will always be a point where you're going to have to compete with somebody else for your interests, at the very least. Or that in order to pursue your own interests, in order to have what is best for you, you are going to have to somehow prevent somebody else from having their own interests fulfilled. So let me ask you, is this true? Is it the case that you're always going to have to pursue your own interests first? You can never ever allow for somebody else's interests to be fulfilled. Or let me ask the question a different way. Is it the case that if your interests are fulfilled, then somebody else's interests are not? Is it always going to be something like a competition? Is it always the case that at most one person or one group of people's interests are fulfilled and everybody else misses out? And then here's a question that Glaucon hasn't asked. If we really haven't investigated up to this point, what is in your interests? What is it that's beneficial to you? What is it that's actually good for you? I'm sure in asking the question, what's good for you? Some ready examples come to mind, or at least some popular ones come up first. We most often think of money. After all, without money we can't get a lot of the things that we need. Or we think that if something is good for us, then we can at least acquire it with money. We can sometimes think about a car. Cars seem to be good for us. We need to have cars to run around our society quite a lot. It's often thought that maybe money can't buy happiness, but it sure doesn't hurt. And if money can't buy happiness, they can buy us what can make us happy. So money does look like the kind of thing that is good for us. And yes, there is quite a lot of competition for money. There's a finite supply and not everybody is going to get as much as they want. Sometimes not everybody is going to get as much as they need. So in asking this question about whether you are going to have to put your interest first and whether there really just is this competition over what's in your interest. We often think of money. Yeah, sure. The first thing, the first inch you reach, most often is going to be, well, yeah. You have to pursue your own interest first because there's a competition, a finite amount of what's actually in your interest. But is everything that's in your interest a matter of competition? Well, think about some of these things that are very good for you, but it's not a matter of competition. And in fact, if you look out for yourself only, you're going to be missing out. Personal relationships are not a matter of competition. You can't just simply look out for yourself first and expect to stay in that personal relationship. And personal relationships are one of these things that, well, without them, life tends to be rather empty. There might be an ongoing debate about whether you absolutely need personal relationships. Okay, I mean, that's interesting. There are very few successful hermits out in the world. But personal relationships are one of those things that tends to bring life more meaning, not less. That tends to make life more fulfilling, not less. And you can't do this by being in competition, by placing only your interest first. There's a number of times where if you are looking out only for yourself, you're not going to have a good time. It's not going to be good for you. Have you ever gone to a wedding where you didn't care about the people getting married? It's not a lot of fun. You might show up if you don't care about them. You might show up and wonder why your food isn't as you like it, or whether you're wondering why there are people there who you don't like. Well, that will be a terrible time. On the other hand, if you're there to celebrate the bride and groom, which is not for you, but for them, you're going to have a good time. That's why you go to a wedding to celebrate the wedding itself, which is not about you. And that's just an example dealing with celebrating a personal relationship. How about being involved in one? I mean, imagine a date where our glau golem goes out and meets somebody. And during the process of this date, glau golem begins to explain to his date that he's the one who's important. He's the one that his interests need to be met. He's the one that needs to be focused on in the relationship. I imagine his date would not be impressed. And I imagine shortly thereafter, he will be by himself. One of you might say that glau golem has the ring and it's going to get away with it. Well, the ring only guarantees that you're not going to suffer any kind of repercussions for that sort of behavior. But I can pretty much promise you that in a healthy relationship, if only one person's needs are being met, well, you can be by yourself. What would it be like for two ethical egoists to be in a relationship? Imagine our glau golem finds his glau galina. Glau galina also has a ring and is able to escape the consequences of justice, just like glau golem. And they both have a ring. Each of them puts it on and they don't have to worry about suffering the consequences. They can each pursue only their own interests first. What would that be like? Two people not suffering the consequences of their actions still in a relationship? There would definitely be some hurt feelings. One person's needs not being met. The other person's needs not being met. They'll likely be fighting over who's going to be the important one. And imagine even in this scenario, glau golem is going to be by himself. Well, enough of fantasy or fantastical scenarios. What about a real life example of somebody being involved with an ethical egoist? I mean, suppose we have this nice young couple walking down the street and further suppose that the young man is distracted. It would be perfectly natural if the young man's romantic partner was less than enthusiastic about such a distraction. And she says, hey, what do you think you're doing?  After all, I've already put a lot of time and effort into this relationship. I really don't want to spend any more. That would be contrary to my interests. I think she or anyone who heard such a thing would be less than thrilled with such an explanation. I mean, you simply can't engage in such behavior and expect to stay in a relationship. I mean, suppose the ethical egoist and the ethical egoist was sufficiently intelligent would realize that couldn't say things like this and would probably resort to some other kind of story or some other kind of lie. I mean, I suppose in a similar scenario with our distracted young man and at the confrontation of his romantic partner, he might just simply make up a story. At her confrontation, at his behavior, he could just simply say, well, you know, I was trying to look at that dress. After all, I think that looked really great on you and I was thinking of getting in for your anniversary present. I mean, maybe somebody gets away with this once or twice, but it's certainly not going to work in the long run and even if you are able to pull it off in the long run, this is very antithetical to being in an intimate personal relationship. The very purpose of being in a personal relationship is to be vulnerable with somebody else and to be accepted by that other person.  I mean, imagine how this is supposed to work in other sorts of scenarios. Suppose we have a child and his father. Yeah, kid comes in and says, Dad, we don't have any cereal. That's okay, son. Why is that okay? Because I already ate. Okay, so that was a bit of a joke. But imagine the scenario is slightly different. Dad, we ran out of food. That's terrible news, son. So you're going to go get us some food? Yes, I am. Right away. After all, I wouldn't want to look bad in front of the neighbors. I mean, so far are these examples of a dealing with personal relationships.  And this isn't a matter of being clever or never having to suffer the consequences according to justice. It just means that in a personal relationship, ethical egoism, only looking out for your own interest, destroys personal relationships. It doesn't foster them. We haven't talked too much about impersonal ones. These relationships where you engage in and live with other members of your society. I mean, you might think that in impersonal relationships, you don't need to worry about looking out for your own interest. Those impersonal relationships can survive, even if you're only looking out for yourself. I mean, maybe that's true. Maybe it isn't. But there's at least reason to think that there's going to be problems caused if you only look out for yourself in society, that eventually society is going to suffer because of your actions. And if society suffers because of your actions, that suffering, whether it's brought about by the authorities or not, is going to come back to get you. Well, Glaucon presumes that you're always, always, always going to have to choose your interests first in order for you to fulfill your interest. When it comes to a choice between you and somebody else, you're going to have to choose yours first. But we've seen at the very least with the example of personal relationships, that's simply not true. If you choose yourself first only in personal relationships, that destroys personal relationships. And that brings a lot of loss to your own life. That's an interesting question, whether the same is true with impersonal ones. But maybe we should check that out some of the time.