Nomad setups that work everywhere. Host of the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
New episode every Tuesday →
Joined May 2010
- Tweets14.9K
- Following557
- Followers616
- Likes16.2K
Pinned Tweet
As a teenager in post-communist Poland, my life was already mapped out. Good grades, office job, settle down. I rejected all of it.
5 USD for two days of work. That was Dima Pashutskii's first Upwork job, taken only to get a review. Then three to four months and a cap of 60 applications a month before a real client. He would not recommend Upwork. How did you land your first remote client?
Dima went from stationary sysadmin to nomad software engineer. His full story: nerdontour.net/dima-pashutsk…
How do you pick the next city? Four of my guests use very different rules.
John Ho picks by people, not sights. A local who shows him their life beats Paris or the pyramids.
Fajar Siddiq has three rules: somewhere in ASEAN, halal food easy to find, and one person he already knows there.
Ramón Morcillo stays in Southeast Asia because it is life on easy mode: warm, great food, fast internet. A stranger once returned his dropped phone five minutes later.
Benjamin Lupton did the math: about 1,250 USD a month for a dingy flat in Sydney, 500 USD in Kuala Lumpur for a new one with gym and pool.
What is your first rule?
Anne Kuppens was promised fiber when she bought the Nine building in Tenerife. The day after she got the keys, the installer told her the historical street was not connected.
Founder of Nine Coliving, on the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
What did a landlord or seller promise you about the internet that was not true?
#digitalnomad #coliving #tenerife #wifi #nerdontour
Ramon Morcillo on Southeast Asia: warm all year, great food, internet crazy good compared to Europe. Keys left in the motorbike, laptop on a cafe terrace, and a stranger returned his dropped phone five minutes later. Life on Easy Mode.
Mapmelon co-founder, on the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
Where is your Easy Mode?
#digitalnomad #southeastasia #slowtravel #remotework #nerdontour
In Jordan, at age 18, on his first solo trip. Muhammed Alard carried 4,000 USD meant for his university tuition.
It was stolen. He went home depressed and enrolled at a university in Saudi Arabia instead.
Today he runs Arab Nomad Fest. He grew up with a Syrian passport most borders treat as a problem, and he still built a life on the road.
What went wrong on your first trip, and what do you do differently now?
Muhammed on a Syrian passport, Arab Nomad Fest and life in Vietnam: nerdontour.net/muhammed-alar…
Ryan Li researched a Bank of America branch in Tokyo. He arrived to find it closed. The money came as a cashier's check in the mail, he deposited it in a Japanese bank, and he never banked in the US again.
20 years in Asia, on the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
Which bank account do you regret closing?
#digitalnomad #expatlife #japan #banking #nerdontour
Seven screens around his desk. That was Ryan Li's setup before he started moving every few months. Now it is one MacBook, one laptop running Qubes OS, GrapheneOS on the phone, and work kept apart from personal. How many devices do you travel with?
Where my guests live is often decided by a visa, not by the city.
Ramón Morcillo: Thailand's DTV, about 100 USD for five years, leave roughly once a year. He showed about 15,000 USD once and a portfolio instead of a job contract.
Dima Pashutskii on a Russian passport: 90 days at a time in Europe, an Australian visa refused, and Japan only through an application from home. So Southeast Asia most of the year.
Guillaume Lorain: working holiday visas end at 28 for the US and at 30 for Australia. At 29 it was now or never.
Benjamin Lupton built a spreadsheet of visa and tax rules for every country he considered. Kuala Lumpur won with three-month entries.
Mateusz Urbanowicz could only quit his anime studio job once he married. Until then his Japan visa depended on that job.
Rules change, so check the current ones. Which visa decided where you live?
Ana Baute, born in Tenerife: we need fewer tourists and more quality. People who stay, go to local places and learn the culture, not sun-and-pool tourism driven by cheap flights.
Bencomo Coliving owner, on the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
Do you stay long enough to be the good kind of visitor?
#digitalnomad #slowtravel #overtourism #tenerife #nerdontour
Piotrek Bodera retweeted
TrustMRR a year ago:
- a vibe-coded leaderboard
TrustMRR now:
- 4,000,000 visitors
- 208 startups acquired
- $427,610 in revenue (90% margin)
- several multi-million acquisition offers rejected
Happy 1st birthday, TrustMRR.com 🎂
Bye Bye fake MRR screenshots 👋
I built TrustMRR.com, the database of verified startup revenues.
1. Upload a read-only Stripe API key
2. Get a free page showing your verified revenue
3. And a nice dofollow backlink as a bonus
There's no way to game the system. It's all running on my server, and users can't edit the revenue data.
+ It comes with the leaderboard of startups with the most revenue in the last 30 days.
Go get verified!
Piotrek Bodera retweeted
No matter how good your job is, you are always one meeting away from your entire life changing without your permission.
Bali, by a pool near Poppies Lane. Fajar Siddiq logs into his server and finds 20,000 folders he never created. Client sites are down.
It was an SQL injection. He deleted the folders. They came back.
The fix: back up everything, delete the folders, then search until he found what had been injected into the database. It cost him about a month of the trip, and he was still cleaning up after he flew home.
What I took from it: your backups should be restorable from a hotel room, not only from your desk at home. What broke for you at the worst possible moment on the road?
Fajar went from pro yo-yo player to maker and nomad. His episode: nerdontour.net/fajar-siddiq-…
After the Camino, Dirk Delisse found his Dutch house too big for one person. He rented rooms to two friends, and now rents it to a family while he travels.
Online therapist and yoga teacher, on the Nerd on Tour Podcast.
What did you do with your home when you left?
#digitalnomad #slowtravel #netherlands #passiveincome #nerdontour
From pocket WiFi to SIM cards mailed to my hotel, I've stayed online in Japan since 2010. In 2025, eSIM finally won. Here's why public WiFi fails nomads, why you get no phone number, and how roaming hit 1.5 Mbps while an eSIM hit 106.
Piotrek Bodera retweeted
Where to live in Europe tax-optimised, and in the sun.
You can pay zero or close to it in many European countries, often with great weather. That's why in the great millionaire migration, Europe's sunny low-tax corners are attracting more and more, and together they now pull in more millionaires than Dubai.
Turkey, Cyprus, Georgia, the UK, Spain and Portugal all offer some form of zero tax on foreign income. Turkey's is the longest, up to twenty years. Ireland and Malta work on a remittance basis: what you keep outside isn't taxed.
But tax is only half of it, so I crossed it with nice days per year. The Canaries are in a league of their own, around eight months of nice weather, then Madeira, Valencia, Gibraltar, Lisbon, Paphos and Malta, all great options if you want both. In Dublin, in all frankness, you'll find a great tax regime, not a great weather.
We may like it or dislike it, but the truth is that Europe runs on two standards. Born here, you pay full price. Move in, and no country will treat you as well as the one you move into.
Of course there are strings attached: a qualifying job in Portugal, only four years in London, a minimum tax in Malta and Cyprus etc.
Which one would you pick?
ALT Map: Living in Europe, tax optimized, in the sun. Each place shows nice days a year and how its tax regime works: Canaries 240 (Beckham Law), Madeira 150 (IFICI), Valencia 133 (Beckham Law), Gibraltar 127 (no tax on interest or gains), Lisbon 122 (IFICI), Paphos 113 (Cyprus non-dom), Malta 110 (non-dom), Monaco 97 (no income tax), Istanbul 97 and Bodrum 91 (Turkey, 20 years), Batumi 90 (Georgia territorial), London 69 (four years), Dublin 30 (non-dom).
Piotrek Bodera retweeted
a very simple solution to virtually every problem would be to stop allowing people who live off taxpayer money to vote
anyone whose entire livelihood depends on the government taking money from other people will always vote for a government that takes more money
we’ve built a system where people can literally vote to give themselves more of other people’s money
the conflict of interest is beyond ridiculous and if you remove the incentive you remove the problem
The point of no return by Richard von Mises is worth reading:
"A state becomes almost unreformable when the majority of the population is financially or structurally dependent on the state (state employees, civil servants, recipients of subsidies, grants, or transfer payments, etc.). As soon as those who net benefit from or are supported by the state outnumber those who do not, the system blocks reforms, since the majority votes out of self-interest for the preservation or expansion of state services."
Does this sound familiar? Some European countries, France, Belgium, Finland are already way beyond that point, closely followed by Germany, Spain, Austria and Italy. It works for a while, as long as markets buy more sovereign debt at reasonable interest rates. The party ends when they stop though. For France, they stopped this month, Belgium will be next.
The longer the socialist illusion persists, the more painful the inevitable cuts and adjustments will be. It’s pure arithmetic. Good luck Europe, good luck Euro. Buckle up, it won’t be pretty.
Piotrek Bodera retweeted
I spent the last 48 hours rotating passwords, adding 2FA everywhere, and spawning agents to audit all my startups' codebases.
I tried to brute-force my own code, but, of course, OpenAI and Anthropic models wouldn't let me.
I also ordered a YubiKey for myself and to apply to OpenAI's Daybreak program.
I called my family and told them to do the same (rotate pwd + add 2FA).
Black October was the tip of the iceberg, I think.
Chiang Mai has been a nomad destination since the 2010s. And John Ho has been building spaces where locals and nomads actually meet. His test is simple. If you never connect with the people you share a street with, you could be doing the same work on Mars, the Moon or the Sahara Desert.
Where was the last place you actually got to know the locals?
Full conversation with John Ho on YouTube and every podcast app.