Charles-Louis Allizard (Digital Nomadism, the future of education, France's legacy)

Download full episode here

In this episode of The Judgment call Podcast Charles-Louis Allizard and I talk about:

• What distinguishes 'Digital Nomadism' and tourism?
• Why personal travel is way to 'world peace'.
• What are the positives and negatives of 'Digital Nomadism'? Is 'Digital Nomadism' an expression of the reduced entrepreneurial opportunities in many developed economies?
• Is loneliness a necessary downside of travel? What role does fulfilling your own purpose play in that?
• What is the future of education? How does the concept of 'atomic knowledge' shape learning?
• How languages shape our thinking and awareness of things around us.
• France's legacy in Europe and in the world.
• And much more.

View this episode on Youtube in 4K resolution.

Charles-Louis Allizard is a web developer, entrepreneur, digital nomad, lecturer and is directing web documentaries in his free time.

You can reach Charles via his website.

Welcome to the Judgment Call Podcast, a podcast where I bring together some of the most curious minds on the planet, risk takers, adventurers, travelers, investors, entrepreneurs and simply mindbogglers. To find all episodes of this show, simply go to Spotify, iTunes or YouTube or go to our website judgmentcallpodcast.com. If you liked this show, please consider leaving a review on iTunes or subscribe to us on YouTube. This episode of the Judgment Call Podcast is sponsored by Mighty Travels Premium. Full disclosure, this is my business. We do at Mighty Travels Premium is to find the airfare deals that you really want. Thousands of subscribers have saved up to 95% in the airfare. Those include $150 roundtrip tickets to Hawaii from many cities in the US or $600 life lead tickets in business class from the US to Asia or $100 business class life lead tickets from Africa roundtrip all the way to Asia. In case you didn't know, about half the world is open for business again and except travelers. Most of those countries are in South America, Africa and Eastern Europe. To try out Mighty Travels Premium, go to mightytravels.com slash MTP or if that's too many letters for you, simply go to MTP, the number four and the letter U dot com to sign up for your 30 day free trial. I'm here today with Charles Ali Zard and Charles is a web developer, a digital nomad and if he has time left over, he fills his time filming documentaries or being a lecturer at the Essex Business School in Paris. Welcome to the Judgment Call podcast, Charles. How are you? I'm fine. Thanks, Dustin. It's great to be here. Thanks for the advice. Thanks for coming. I appreciate you taking the time. I realized you just went to back to France after spending quite some time in the Ukraine and I really appreciate you make this happen. I introduced you as a digital nomad and it's something that a lot of people don't really know what it means. So the definition in popular culture is still pretty open. And I was talking to a prior guest, Niels Fligging, I think it was episode 10 and Niels was very dismissive. Niels was basically saying, well, digital nomads are kind of the worst. They go everywhere. They expect everything to be like in America after two weeks of partying and using the free wifi and not talking to any locals, not learning any language. They kind of leave. So those are kind of divorce tourists because they are eternal tourists, so to speak, right? I think you see this topic quite different and I know you've had quite a journey as a digital nomad. Could you tell us how did that start? How did you get into being a digital nomad and what do you think this label, what happened to that label? Well, there's so much things going on here. I mean, digital nomad is something, it was kind of something a few years back, I would say, up until 2016, 2017, and then it went lost. I mean, the meaning of this word is kind of lost. To me, I mean, it's very easy to be referred to as a digital nomad because, like, as you say, not everyone knows what it is, but more and more people understand what it is. And when you say, yeah, I'm traveling with my computer and I've been to, I mean, I don't know, Bali or Thailand or Portugal or South America, then people are like, yeah, you're a digital nomad. But at the same time, it doesn't convey any meaning about what you do and what you are. I mean, digital nomad is like, it's not even a lifestyle that encompasses everyone's, everyone, because it's so broad, I mean, it's probably fine for a caricature of 28 years old white male from a Western country, traveling with a computer and working from a beach and moving from places to places every other month. That would be a caricature of digital nomad, but I don't think anyone wants to be described as a caricature. And yes, to some extent, if we keep using the term, my answer is kind of schizophrenic, because at the same time, I'm telling like, don't use this word because it doesn't bring any meaning. And at the same time, I'm saying like, what is a digital nomad? I think, yeah. I feel there's so much in it, you know, that's what we were kind of, we're kind of haggling over this. I feel there's so much in it. And for me, digital nomadism is a very different definition than probably what is reality. And I think that's why I'm also struggling with this. I feel there's a lot of jealousy from people who don't get to travel or didn't get to travel. So that's kind of the problem number one. Problem number two is that for me, it's driven by curiosity and really making the most of your time that you have to put into work. Like we all have to do work for better or worse, right? I think it makes us a better person over time, but it will also need the money. Most of us, unless we have a good trust fund, we can lean on. So we can use the time that is kind of, that usually happened in an office and we can move it to a place that allows for way more curiosity. And I've been basically being a digital nomad for the last 10 years, been to a lot of places that I could have never either afforded or would be interested in or did we're not at all touristy at all. So I went to pretty much any country in Africa and I worked from Africa for a couple of weeks. I went to South America. So I went to 130 different countries in a way that you can't do, you can be an explorer photographer, right? But then you don't, you can't have a family. You can't have a career. So I took my children, I took my girlfriend. So we traveled as a family. It's something I could have never done being in a regular job, so to speak. It's something that I could never done as a tourist because I only get that amount of time off. I could have done it maybe as an explorer, then it would have been on my own, right? I could have been on a film project, for instance, and get into all these countries. But still, my dream was always to see the world and compare the world and see how other people live. And for me, that was a golden opportunity. And I know this is not how a lot of people behave. I mean, I have, when I went to Thailand, I always get shocked. I went back in. That was the first time I went in the 90s. I thought it's awesome. Then I went back in 2005. And I already felt like, oh my gosh, most of the islands, it's not worth going anymore because it's gotten really weird. And then the Chinese arrival has gotten even more weird, I feel, in Thailand. And now they're kind of retreated from tourism. But I feel like this also spread to Bangkok. And I think this is the way the world works. Tourism grows so much, and people move and work so much, and the wrong people go to the wrong places. Let's put it this way. And that's where this strange perception of digital nomadism comes from. I think it's a fantastic initiative. But I agree with you. It didn't really pan out so well in terms of public perception. Maybe on the ground, and you knew who you have more on the ground experiences. Maybe it was actually different. I mean, the issue I was trying to raise with the way I tackle digital nomadism is it's very broad to be understood when you don't know what it is. And the way I'm trying to go with that is the way you are a digital nomad is not the same way. I mean, you are a digital nomad, and I am a digital nomad in some ways. And yet, the way we do it is very different. My point was when you introduce yourself, you introduce yourself as an estate entrepreneur, a podcaster, and I'm going to introduce myself in my own way as well. But many people introduce themselves as digital nomads, say, hello, I'm a digital nomad. Or I want to become a digital nomad, and that's where I think this is very limited. Because it's way too broad to be defined using only one word. But when the other issue we were talking about is the impact of us, because let's include ourselves into digital nomad, if we go that route, is that as soon as you enter a place, you're going to impact that place. And yes, you have many people behaving in a way that is lacking respect. But you've seen that with tourism as well. People going into some countries and not leaving the resorts or abusing their economic power. Because when you make money in a Western country, and you're going to spend it in a place like Indonesia, Thailand, Africa, or South America, then you're going to have an age in terms of economies. But it doesn't mean you're a better person. And many people behave as if they own the place, but they don't. And that's plain wrong. But that's plain wrong whether you travel and work or you just travel. That's a good point. If I may interject. I was recently in Mexico, and the place I was at, the road, let's just look dirty, and I was like, well, this is really a poor area. And I realized how many people will drive by because it's in a resorty area, on the way to resorts in Las Cabas. And I realized how many people will look down and say, oh, my gosh, they don't even have roads. They don't even build real houses. So those would be verbatim statements. And when you ask the real, these same people, yes, so how do you build an economy? How do you actually distribute the wealth within the economy? How do you create economic growth that gives us all these things, right? That gives us roads. It gives us modern buildings. It gives us modern health standards. And most people would come up empty and say, actually, I don't know. Nobody really knows, right? So there's a bunch of economists, but I have Mark later today on the show. And he's had a strong opinion about that. So the economists have moved far, far out from the place where they can describe you how the economy actually works. They look at certain symptoms. But nobody actually knows how this, the invisible hand, actually started, right? And we don't really know why it works in certain countries. And in other countries, it never takes off, right? There is countries that say Korea, that was really poor and is really rich now. But in other countries like Myanmar, which isn't that far away, it didn't really take off. And nobody really knows why, right? We have this attitude of using, as you say, our economic power and our experience. But we understand like 0.001% of the system. But we make it feel like our ego makes it feel like, oh, this is, I'm kind of representative of all this wealth and all this good that I created. But actually the person itself created almost nothing. That's kind of how the game works. But that's not how we often transport ourselves in a different country, which is really strange. Yeah. And I think like whenever we try to analyze that, we do it, we are with our own prison. So you're going to have people who say like, digital nomadism is bringing some value, any kind of big value to such and such place. And some other are going to say like, digital nomadism is bad because those people are taking the plane. I'm going to be the devil's advocate for just a few seconds or maybe one minute or two. When you consider a place like, and the place I know better is Bali, Indonesia, because I spent a few years there. I'm not saying I understand the place because I don't think anyone can, because when you're not from Bali, you can just grasp a little bit. I believe that if you ask the taxi driver, the barbershop, the guy who sells house and can maybe make some like a different living, what he thinks about all these expats and Westerners coming from abroad, spending their money, I'm not sure that they're so unhappy about it. Yeah. They're not. That's what we see in Thailand. That's why nobody wants their tourists to return. It was already bad. And then the Chinese tourists, I think they were even worse. Let's put it this way, because they didn't have any ton of social manners to bring with. That's going to change. But it's just the way it is so far. And I think this really broke the camel's jaw. And I was really surprised how Thailand was being in the middle of this for so long. And they kept accepting it and there was never a major revolt against foreigners or tourists in their country. It was seen as something you couldn't revolt against. It was just too big. And now I think we see the opposite. I wouldn't be surprised if Thailand will be closed for long, long time, at least for short term arrivals and way beyond any real corona danger. And I don't know how individuals deal with this, but I definitely feel it adds to strain and it kind of feeds on its own popularity. So if a country is not very popular, say many places in Africa, don't get a ton of tourism. There's exception supply in South Africa, Morocco, certain else, Kenya, Tanzania and certain areas. But if you go outside of those, you see a natural curiosity. You see natural friendliness that people have towards other people. And I don't know what it is, it's a certain quantity that's naturally in all of us. But once you extend it, you turn really better. And that helped. How it kind of happened to me too. I live in the tourist area in San Francisco. And the amounts of tourists and the way they behave, even if you don't know the individual, you think you do because you think, oh, it's the same class, right? It's the tourist or it's someone who should behave that way. You kind of turn against them because there's always someone who messes it up for everyone else. It's kind of like the terrorists on a plane. They only need one in a million flights and flying is certainly dangerous. Human psychology is not good with this. And I think we are too, our filters are so broad that we just assume, oh, there's one tourist and he messed it up and we actually maybe observe this. So it's not a super rare occasion, but it's or it's something that we see in the press. And then we really turn against people. And I don't know if there's an easy way out of this. So I don't know. I was a couple of years over the side of Thailand as an example, that kind of we're overcoming this psychological barrier, but I don't think they ever have. They just, they were good at ignoring it. So I don't know if there's something you can really do that is this tribe, this feeling of a tribe that people have, right? And as a digital nomad or as a tourist, you kind of violate this. Or even as an immigrant, you know, I'm an immigrant in the U.S. and I had the same problem, right? You don't belong here. You, there's always this feeling in the U.S. is one of the best places to immigrate. It still is. But there is this natural aversion to, we don't want to talk to you because you have a name you can't pronounce. So that's the end of story. That wasn't a real big deal, right? Where a few people really brought me that reaction. But I'm saying, I don't know if there's a way to overcome this on a global scale. I don't know, maybe advice people to mind their own business. The only thing I could think of, I'm joking, but I mean, all these judgments is coming from maybe some, you've mentioned jealousy, or people thinking that money would be better spent in your home country, like economic patriotism, why not, protecting the planet without like taking the plane. Again, I mean, it makes sense, but it's always only one very tiny part of what's happening when people decide to travel with the computer. Well, so one thing that I haven't mentioned here yet, but it's really important to me, I think digital nomadism itself and all kind of travel is kind of my way to world peace. So I feel like if everyone out there would travel to 200 countries, well, it's somewhat voluntarily, you know, but maybe as part of the military, whatever it is, you don't come back from 200 countries and say, oh, we have to go to war with pretty much all of them. Maybe one or two, because they're really regimes and you hate them for whatever reason. But generally, you discover world peace in your own journey because you discover yourself and you discover a lot of friendly people out 99% are really extremely friendly people, especially outside of touristy places. So I think we need that travel and we need people to get out of their, you know, basement where they sit right now, because that's where you get better. But if you get new experiences where you get out and see other people, you will come back happy. I mean, not every trip I did was happy. But when I look back, I was like, I can't really memorize a single trip where I felt really super disappointed. It wasn't maybe disappointed compared to my expectations, but it was never that I felt oh, I should have stayed home in my basement and save the money. That's never happened to me. I cannot agree more. I think that the beauty of it is by mixing, but again, it comes back to what you as an individual, you put into your travel, what's your intention behind it. If you travel with your computer being like, boom, I'm going to behave like a king, like spending what's little money in my country is going to make me a king wherever I'm going to travel and behave as if I'm owning the place. That's only what you're going to get. But if you travel with the intention of discovering and opening yourself and discovering yourself then that's beautiful and I think even if you can travel to a broader range of countries or you can travel to some hubs into which you're going to meet many people from different parts of the world and that's like in terms of warfare, no, it's becoming very hard to think at least of that country and its inhabitants as enemies because you've got friends from that country and that's for the mixing up and the tolerance and for the economics. I think it's not really evening things out, but by making money here and spending it there, you're breaking the market in these places because the real estate is climbing up, but at the same time it brings capital and this capital no runs into this country with new shops and new businesses and I'm not an economist, I'm not qualified at all, but my intuition tells me that it's not only a bad thing I would say in terms of economics. So I want to find out what motivated you to go on your journey in the first place. So you grew up in France and then you went to Thailand, Bali, last time we spoke you were in Ukraine, what made you go in the first place and what kind of was really the highlights of your experience and I know you like to stay longer in most places, what were the highlights of your experience? When I was interviewing people, maybe we're going to talk about it later on, but I've been interviewing a couple of people for remote mentors, a documentary I've been shooting about remote work and it's a couple from the States, Rachel and Rob and they've been writing a book about digital nomads in Bali and what they came up with is you have push factors and pull factors and that thing that's what happened for most of the people who live their home country to travel and work at the same time. So my story is back in 2016, late 2016, after 10 years of living in Paris and I had my studio doing design and development from Paris for different clients, I was moving a little bit at that time, been to Berlin, Canary Island, Morocco mostly for surfing, not to Berlin, but mostly for surfing, I was short term gymnast into which I would take my computer and go surfing with friends on my own and I was very well versed into books like remote rework from 37 signals, I was very excited about a year without pants as well and all these books were really fitting my enthusiasm about traveling and working, I was craving for it and just doing it a little bit, I was collaborating with people who I've never met but I was based in Paris and after 10 years of relationship and living in Paris, break up and then I decided to pack everything and I was supposed to travel to Bali for a month and a half, shoot a few videos, go to New Zealand but then what happened is that I got hooked with, I got really hooked to Bali, met a bunch of people there that I was very excited with what I found, I was in Changu mostly and I just couldn't leave so I was postponing my flight to New Zealand and then I realized wait, I'm going to spend 2 weeks in New Zealand, I've got so much work to do, why am I going to spend 2 weeks in New Zealand when it's cold and it's more expensive to be locked down in a flat for work, let's just stay in Bali and so I stayed in Bali, flew back to France for Christmas in 2016 and then a guy I met in Changu, we began like friends and he offered like, next year I'm going to take a villa, do you want to be in my house with that, let's do that and then came back to Bali and spent most of the last year there, I've been bouncing sometime for a week, sometime for a weekend after that but based in Bali for most of the time until COVID happens and early last year I found myself in Odessa and Ukraine, as you say and I was supposed to be there for only 3 weeks and then the love don't happen and I decided to stay and then I spent most of the last year in actually the entire part of the last year in Odessa by the Black Sea. Yeah, that's pretty much my story of how and why I became kind of a nomad and you said I was, yeah I'm not really considering myself as a digital nomad why because I like to spend a lot of time in some places, I want to be based somewhere, I want, I mean in the beginning I had the feeling that I should be bouncing every of the months or every other term but now I really feel like I need some encouragement, I need to call up some place for, I have a freedom to move but that's healthier for me, I really enjoyed being anchored at least for a little while so yeah, not so much nomads like I did, kind of free but not so nomads anymore. Well yeah but everyone creates their own journey and that's absolutely in the cards, I totally understand the, and I didn't get the attractiveness of Bali, I've been there 20 years ago and I thought it's quite overvalued, very touristy and it's difficult to get around, I was like well why would anyone ever choose to live there and then I went back a bunch of times and it gets better as more you learn about the place, as more you discover and especially Changgu is a very special area, it's very pretty, it's a very good climate, it's fantastic, it's very, very cheap to live, it's a very high quality of food and just, there's a lot of, you can kind of choose what the crowd you want to hang out with, there's a bunch of Europeans, there's a bunch of Americans, there is even a few Indonesians today, actually further away, they don't really live in Changgu that much, there is a population but it's not very considerable and it's just a beautiful place to be near the ocean all the time and just basically don't worry about anything. And I always feel the rise of digital nomadism, there's two things, one was you can work from anywhere, there was one driver, do only a few jobs really allowed that pre COVID now, it's like pretty established everywhere, as long as you can make the time zone work. And then the other place, the other thing that came in was the, a lot of developed economies don't really have the opportunities for younger people and younger people is everyone under 60 now, so it's a white swath of the population, but the opportunities for younger people, especially for under 30, they were just not there, there were some opportunities, not that there was nothing, but it was way lower than you would expect in a healthy economy where everything builds on each other and there's opportunity as a balance everywhere. Like the first time I came to the US in the 90s from Europe I felt like, oh my gosh, there's so much opportunity, you can do 20 jobs and there will still be stuff left to be done. This has kind of gone away in the last 10, 15 years and for a lot of people the opportunity was why don't I take my life the way it is, lower my income probably because I go somewhere else where I don't have, where I'm not in the ranks of a company, where I'm not having the same visibility, but for $2,000 in Bali, I can live fantastic and that is pretty miserable living for $2,000 in France or in the US, it's possible, but it's pretty miserable in Bali. It is something you probably will back your whole life and say, wow, that was the best time of my life. If you can make the steady loneliness work, that's a lot of people struggle with this. We include it, you got to go into these, especially if you travel too much, you got to go into these bouts of loneliness that mostly kills it for people. They come home after like, for some this is a week, for some it's a month, for some it's a year, they come back and say, well, I couldn't make that work, I couldn't find the friendship that I find valuable enough to share cultural values with or share anything with, doesn't have to be a cultural value and they come back slightly disappointed from that journey. I think this is something that is often the biggest challenges for people now, you can take your work, you can take your money, you can take anything else, but you lose that sense of what's my purpose here, what am I doing here, what is my social network, so to say, that keeps me, it keeps me in the sense of purpose, one is I'm entertained, one part of loneliness is I'm not entertained, I'm bored, you watch Netflix, most people watch Netflix not home, anyways, what I'm saying, the other part is it gives you this purpose, it gives you validation from other people that are important to you that say, oh, you're doing something useful with your life, and once you miss that and you have too much enjoyment, like on the beach in Bali, I think a lot of people get lonely for that reason, not just because they don't have friends, it's because they feel, man, this purpose of my life, I'm not fulfilling my potential, I'm here and it's great, but I can't do this for a long, which is the art, right, because your actual living quality is by any means probably higher than anyone else. It's very personal, I think that you're really onto something, but it's not true for everyone, I mean, some people can't decide to actually like really settle down at least for a very long time, maybe not forever, but for five years of an old decade, because I think that it gives you back what you put into it. So if you spend some time somewhere and you create meaningful relationships with people who do the same, then you're going to find yourself with the same people three years on the road, but true, that's true that one of the biggest problem of this, and I mean, I've been interviewing probably like, at least for the documentary, officially 45, 50 people, everyone came with biggest concern, the social aspects, and the best thing about being a digital nomad, the social aspects, one, the positive thing is that you get to meet amazing people from all walks of life, and the drawback is loneliness is always lurking. And you cannot be a meaningful relationship when you move from one place to the other, every other month or every three months, I don't think so. And even if you put one, two, three years in a place like Changu or anywhere else, even if you stay, great chances are the relations that you've been building are going to move at least 50% or maybe 40, 60% something like this. And saying goodbye is a big part of that life. So that's why yes, sometimes it can take a week, it can take a year, it can take three or four years. At some point we'll be like, okay, this is very nice, but what's left of it, I'm not talking about real estate, I'm talking about like meaningful relationships that you can really let that kind of last for a lifetime or for a decade, for instance, I was spending a week in the Alps last week, lucky enough, with a bunch of friends with like 10, 10 guys. Some of these guys I know for 30 years. And that's, that's something that I'm really grateful for. And I'm going to always take a plane to, to be with them. I mean, it's kind of like, I mean, and I'm not talking about family, which is even beyond that. But I think like, yeah, once you, you, you have like these long lasting relationship, and you're, you want these, and I think most of us need this kind of like something you want to feel some kind of security, security in terms of where do you live, when you belong and what's your relationship. And, and yes, I think when you move too much away, where you live in a place where things are very transient, and that's really hard to get. And that can be a problem, definitely. Yeah, I learned that from, from Naval from Naval, he was making this comparison, I think it's pretty, pretty, pretty slick. He said, you know, relationships are kind of like investments, like a Warren Buffett investment. They do give you compound interest over time. So you get in certain amount of interest every, every year, but it really only starts compounding after 20 years. So it takes a very long time for these things for trust, right? And what's the essence of its trust? You don't have to question people motives as much. And people keep telling me that they say, Oh, you question people's motives all the time, you have all this psychology background now. And you question people's motives so much that for, for, for someone else, it's hard to, to build that form of trust because there is, how do I say that? You know, trust in relationship is often self fulfilling prophecy, right? It's something social that you create. And you create it out of, out of nowhere, out of, there's nothing there, right? You, you, you create it because at both parties seem to be genuinely interested in creating this trust and it needs to compound over a long period of time. But if you know too much about the true nature of people, then you're too hesitant to create it, right? You, you're not putting in your part of that. So you, you, you will be disappointed, right? Because nobody else will, because it's got all via reciprocity, nobody else will put enough trust in it because they all feel or this person doesn't really trust me. So I don't really trust that person because maybe there's something I don't see. So I think as you get older and that's something we, we, we look back in our teenager years or in the early twenties, we don't have any of this. We are completely naive. We, we, we just go out there and we befriend everyone we can, right? We basically take anyone's, anyone's love. And if we get lucky, then there is a certain number of people who just stick around and then over time, this will compound on us. Like you say someone, I know a couple of friends for like 20 years, not 25 years. There's a whole different way I can communicate with them than with anyone else because I know exactly what they're going to say next, right? They're kind of, I fully predicted how they would react. But in a sense, it's not just comfortable. It's, it's something where I know exactly that they don't, they don't screw you over, right? They, they, they, it's, it's not just the result you predict. It's, it's a positive result that you predict. And I find that pretty, pretty interesting that this, the way, the world we are building and the way that we, we, we, we count success these days is often more short term. It goes from investing. It goes on social media. If you don't have 5,000 likes or you don't have 5,000 followers, you're nobody. But if you say something useful, like say in Nasim Talib's books, and he describes a Lindy effect. So it's something that you shouldn't worry about what is popular now. You should worry about why Nietzsche made it, right? He wrote books that nobody cared about and nobody read during his lifetime or almost, right? He became famous in the English speaking countries much more than in the German speaking or French speaking. They mostly ignored him for his lifetime. And then the next 200 years, nobody can stop talking about him, right? So this is actually what you should focus on. If you want to create some value, the wise men of the Renaissance, you should make sure that you compound enough trust, but also enough knowledge and, and visit them to create something that has long lasting value. And the question is if digital nomadism is, or once we feel this loneliness, I fully agree with what you, what you describe, once we feel this, is, is this a good or bad signal for us, right? Is it something where we feel like, no, we're going to be going to be pulled back to, to something, what I said earlier, to realizing our potential, or is it maybe the other side where we feel like, actually, we should do something that fulfills our potential, but it has nothing to do with the people around us, right? So the people around us are just the people around us and they're great. But we actually need to, you know, what do you say, geniuses are created in loneliness. Maybe it's necessary to go through this wall of loneliness, being lonely, to create something that actually matters. And you told me that last time you were really happy to be in a place for a long time, that small bleak. And, you know, I know the Ukraine is very bleak. It's the most great country I know. And my, my, I was in Russia a lot when I was a kid. I know it's a bleak country and it's different, right? It focuses you on this less destruction. What do you think is the impact on this? Did you feel happy in the Ukraine that you could focus on something much better than about it? I think I still need some time to process this. But in a nutshell, I would do it again, and again, and again, and again, and again. And I, my way doesn't change. I mean, I was saying this already a few months ago and I'm, I still feel that I'm not sure it's for everyone. So I'm not going to recommend doing this for everyone. But I think that there is, just to put things back in context, I was like, I've been spending, so as I've said, like 10, 10 months. So let's say eight, eight or nine months really on my own, pretty much on my own. Not really looking after social connections, just a little bit. And it was kind of a habit for me to be with myself. I've been always kind of attracted to experience this. I don't think it would be lasting for so long. I think the context and the world, the way the world works at the moment, I mean, kind of made it look as the best, best thing I could do. It was pretty challenging to go back to Bali. It was not very exciting to come back to France, to be locked down in France. And I found myself right in between. And back in January 2020, so a year ago, I was doing a, how do you call that? Collecting a bunch of pictures that you throw on the map, I think it's vision board, a vision board. So I was doing my vision board. And so on this vision board, I was in Bali and France, and I was, because the shapes kind of overlap like this. So we're overlapping and just cut them around. And then what happened is I just really found myself right in the middle, not in Bali, not in France. You don't have to choose. You just stay where you are. And I think that was very interesting. It enabled me to build stuff I would probably never have been doing so much work if I was staying in Bali or if I was in France or anywhere else, because I was just doing this. And my days were filled with journaling, working, playing guitar, going to the gym because the gym was open. And then I took a personal trainer. So I've been, I've had the chance of having a personal trainer for more than six months, five days a week, something I wouldn't have, probably I wouldn't have done anywhere else. And, and the solitude. And this is what I wanted to say when, when you were talking about loneliness. First, there is a difference between being alone and being lonely. And I think being alone can be a very big opportunity. And I think we're not, we're not used to be alone anymore. And that's a big problem. Because you want to be with others because then you bring something and they bring something. But you don't want to be with others too much so that you're not bored, or so that you feel valued. And I think, yes, we need each other. And I mean, life is meant to be enjoyed with others. And it's good to have people as a newer, but not to be too much dependent is a good thing as well. And, and this solitude can be very interesting to explore things as well. It's more like an inner travel than, than digital nomadism. But it's, it's very interesting as well. There's a couple of things that come up in you when, when you say that one, I always felt is we take this for granted that we are kind of built as a, as a social, social being. And we just say, oh, we need social people around us. The real reason is why was that an advantage surviving before? And one is obviously you come in protection and common security. But the other one is also we, and now we see this with a hive mind, what people say, there's so much little innovation going on. And so many things that, that could change the world, literally one guy and Reddit can change the world. That's what happened last week. There was a guy who wrote a post a couple of months ago about GameStop and it changed the world four months later, which is literally almost the Wall Street fell apart. And it's one dude on his, in his home, writing it three paragraph article, which was brilliant. But it wasn't out of like a lot of people could have written this one, hundreds of thousands of people with the similar insight. And he actually did it at the right point of time and we're correct analysis, so to speak. So I think going back to what drives us to more social interaction these days, but in a weird way and in a more, they call it sometimes to be connections. It is this, we have to see where the hive is at, right? Because when when we add value, or we feel we can only add value if we don't repeat someone else's work. But so many other people do useful work. So we first need to check, has it been done before? And we've done this, we are like on a base level, right? But you don't look on Twitter for a couple of days and you're like, Oh, my gosh, the world has changed, you know, the capital was overrun by people in the US, which is a big deal hasn't happened in, I don't know, 200 years. So we have a lot of things that we felt could never happen. And now they happen on a weekly basis, because there's so much innovation. I mean, I don't want to use that word, but just things going on, a shit going on. And if we set out to do something, we always fear that someone else is doing the same thing and our whole effort is worthless. And I think this is also correct. So we want to do something unique. But finding an area that's really unique, we need to know what the hive is at. And so we continuously bounce, I think I have the same problem, we continuously bounce between things where we just want to find out what is going on. Then we decide we do something and two months later, we realize, Oh, man, this changes everything like COVID literally destroyed hundreds of thousands of businesses, not just existing ones, also entrepreneurs coming up with new businesses, they completely had to change track. And that is why we get we almost like an addict, we go between the hive mind where we just, you know, level up and try to find opportunities short term, and then we go back to our long term opportunities. But these long term opportunities, they get changed so quickly, you know, in a two month a startup can now go to like signal in a couple of billion dollars of valuation. And that's it doesn't really surprise anyone. Everyone is in and says, Yeah, that's kind of what I expected. And like, holy shit. So the six month is like a 12 month is like, like, like an eternity for a startup now, because nothing is stable for 12 months anymore. I mean, nothing is an exaggeration, but a lot of things change in 12 months. So the, the, the, the, the solitude experience, you have to find your field. It's certainly not, I feel it's not technology, it's philosophy, maybe it's even economics, where, where this is true, or even maybe sociology do this is obviously harder. Less and less fields allow you to be by yourself and really go deep thinking and find new solutions or tons of new solutions like NASA and talent does. There's less and less fields. So when you look at the book market, I'm trying to find some book authors coming on the show, right? So I was looking on Amazon, you know, how few people are actually going actually published as a book, you know, as a paperback. It's ridiculously small number that actually have a certain distribution in the US. It's tiny. I'm like, is literally nobody left to write books, because by the time you go through the whole process, everything you wrote about is completely gone, unless, you know, you have the marketing mechanism and you have a few, a few exceptions to it. But it's not a way to push knowledge into the world anymore. I mean, economically speaking, it seems that you have better results when you shoot videos, because perception of videos, people perceive the value delivered by videos way higher than the value they perceive as a book. And it's easier to shoot videos. I mean, I'm not saying it's easy, but it's easier to shoot videos and to actually write the books that that's pretty solid as far as I understand. I've never tried to write a book here, but it probably depends on this on the subject. I mean, I think a lot of subjects it's difficult to do on a video do. I mean, there's a ton of, and I just had two of my favorite Yale professors on last week, and they put their own lectures about a decade ago on YouTube, and now it's taken off on YouTube, like they have millions of views on their lectures, and they say they get so many emails, they don't know what to do anymore. But it was meant as a freebie that you give away, right? So then people sign up to Yale would say, well, these subscriptions, I mean, the subscriptions, they don't have subscription model yet, but the attendance for Yale, you know, it doesn't exist anymore right now with COVID. But who knows how this changes, and they have to go virtual, and they would have to find a premium model that works. And they're really at odds because professorship and the premium model and competing with all the other YouTube model, I mean, it's just, it just doesn't work anymore. Education has completely changed. And that's a good segue I wanted to talk about with you. You have a really interesting model. And I kind of stole that term atomic knowledge from you. And I talked with Kelly Perdue from Moonshot's capital about it. He's been saying there've been a couple of attempts of people doing this over the years, most of them didn't go anywhere. And I was mentioning, well, LinkedIn is now finally doing this is really catching on. So maybe the time is right, kind of like social networking, there were 100 social networks before Friendster and what Friendster came around and made it happen. But what do you mean by atomic knowledge? What's your definition and what is your company doing? What are you trying to achieve? So atomic knowledge is a term I coined because I was trying to address remote work and trying to help people going into remote work. And I've been working on this for a few years, starting in 2016 or something. And it was meant to be a web documentary. So I was trying to, I was interviewing people about, okay, hello, hi, what's your name? What are you doing for a living? And how did you become a digital nomad? And what are the pros and cons of being a remote worker? And how do you do it? And what advice do you have? And if you ask this question to a sufficient amount of people, and probably maybe even like a tiny amount, like 2050, you will already see that it's very personal. And, and today it makes even more sense because pretty much all the planet, like 80, 60, 70% of the people who actually can work remotely, I do already work remotely. And it's like a forced part in shift, maybe. But then, okay, so if you take the subject about remote work, remote work for you is not the same as the remote work for me, might be pretty close. But it's a way different from someone working from home with three kid homeschool. It's way different from someone who runs, runs a 20 people startup, and is doing product management is very different for someone who runs a 200 people startup, and is doing office management or, or CTO. And it's the knowledge about what is remote work is just very individual is very specific to the people. And that knowledge is scattered. Means there is no not really one place where you could go and tap that knowledge. So when I was working on remote mentors, which is the app I've been building to bring this knowledge to people who need it, I came up with a solution using videos to reduce the knowledge to an atomic level. So what do I mean with atomic level is today, we're doing a podcast, like, okay, it's going to be probably 40 minutes, one hour, I don't know, something like this. But it's at the big chunk of time. And if you watch the YouTube video is going to be 10, 20, 50, 60 minutes, three hours. And you would have to go through the full length of that podcast or the video to get the information that you need. But maybe you need only x person 5%, 10% of that video. So what I'm proposing was atomic knowledge and atomic video is to cut all these chunks of knowledge into atomic pieces by atomic. I mean, you cannot reduce it any longer. Okay, so it's the smallest bite, the smallest nugget of knowledge. And then plug it into a system that you can tap and you can tap in the very organic way. So if you are know, if you are homeschooling your children and working from home, as a virtual assistance, you get to find what you need. And you don't have to go through 10s and 10, like dozens and dozens of hours. And if you are a city with 200 people started, then you can find the content that you need because of this atomic and network organization. Maybe it's a little bit abstract. I'm still working on the definition and explanation, but if you can help me presenting it, I'd be happy. That's buying, yeah. I like the buzzword a lot. I think the way you describe it that you can't divide it any further is really good. And I know that Google is working on a YouTube algorithm who basically uses the transcription and then makes suggestions inside a video what is the most important section of that video. So instead of just recommending, watch this whole video of one hour, which most people won't do because it takes a lot of time, they will say, why don't you go to that timestamp and you can already link to videos. I think a lot of people don't know that. I didn't know that until a couple months ago. You can link to a video with a specific timestamp. There's like you can Google this and you can say, we can just make a deep link and then when that person opens this specific video, then only the section that you linked or like the beginning of that section actually shows up. And so that's, I think it's a sign of the times that the social networks hold so much of that knowledge. And they don't make it very accessible. Like I always joke that, you know, anyone who's active on Facebook and Twitter, they don't know what happened two days ago. And I beginning to have struggle figuring this out too. I'm like, well, what happened two days ago, right? It is, you know, there was something, but you can't really figure it out. When I was looking up GameStop, for instance, and I was reviewing that trade, I couldn't figure out when did it actually go up? When was this this real rise? And I have looked at that chart before. So I looked at it every day. And therefore the last seven days, eight days, and even before that, but I couldn't remember, despite looking at it every day, I couldn't remember when did it actually happen to break out? I just couldn't. And it was all over Twitter. And I mean, I've had this information in my hands before, but it was never stored. So the ability to memorize long things and to build common sense, I think has gone out the window and the money is now and very, very specific skills. And what's even worse, especially for the kids, they know that the value of that information won't last very long. It's, you know it now and either make money with this like GameStop, right? You make money with this in the next week, or that's it, then you can't do anything for the next two years. It's just, you need to find these nuggets, as you say, and the half time of their expiration is extremely high. And that's what I'm worried about. So I feel it's already a problem for me as a software or internet entrepreneur, whatever I do, I know is already out of business in like six months or 12 months. And that's really worrying me, because I want to create something for the next generation, kind of like this podcast, right? Do I'm not sure I want the next generation is even remotely interested in this, but I want to create something educational that doesn't feel like education eventually. And what, what this, what you describe is, I think it's, it's a wonderful level to, to spread out the knowledge and you see this with really short videos and social media and you see those, those, it's essentially relatively few people who get all these Twitter likes. I think it's 0.001% of Twitter users get almost all the likes. And they make it, they have a style and they have the amount of followers to, to create these viral posts. I always felt LinkedIn is something that, that would be the market for this because there's so much knowledge in our heads that we, we can't really have, we don't really have an outlet for this. And we can't really create a value chain to monetize it. And I think this is where the social networks are right now. And I think they're not really aware of this because this is kind of a byproduct. They just want to match advertisers and they don't really care about that revenue stream. But if you could identify that knowledge, say all of us know like 10,000 facts, right? And some of them are really valuable. It often takes two hours of an interview and then you're like, Whoa, I didn't know that. That's really interesting. If you could find a way to abstract this out and make people want to willingly share it, right? Everybody has that, but they don't even know it's valuable. If you can't find a mechanism for this, I think it's, this is a trillion dollar opportunity. Okay, I'm sure I am passing. If you can make it happen, I think it is, I can, I mean, the, the, the, the obvious issue is how do you get my people to share? Yeah, my, my dream when I was dreaming about what I've built, which is the beta version, was like, you could crowdsource knowledge from people's phone, which is already happening. I mean, that's TikTok, for instance, but organized, it takes a little bit more effort, but then organize, organize the knowledge in a way that creates a network and, and that network in turn will enable an organic discovery. And what I mean by organic discovery is the same as you go into a conference, for instance, and then every, everyone is into the, at the branch, for instance, and then you bounce into people and you like talk to this guy and go to that guy and one guy leads you to another and then you have connections and then you exchange cards and then all these connections are organic and you are the hero of your own journey because the way you discover knowledge is adapted, but sometimes it can be not the right person, but that's your very own path. And you get to decide at what rhythm you go through all of this knowledge. And I think that's, that's a meaningful way to get more knowledge in, in an efficient manner, instead of what we said before, instead of going through chapters and chapters and chapters and ads and, and filters because we Yeah, I mean, the, I think the real challenge is how do you, how do you provide enough incentive and it cannot be monetary, at least not initially to people to, to digitize these, these facts, these nuggets of knowledge as you call them. And, you know, TikTok is kind of, it's, it's evil. I feel in what it does to, to our children. But if TikTok wouldn't do it, and someone else would do it, I mean, I don't have any, any, any, any, any expectations otherwise. But I feel TikTok has the, it's kind of like the funny videos from the 80s, right? There was, there was always a TV show where you had these funny home videos and people would follow over and it was funny, right? I definitely watched it. But it was, it was just that and it was just the program of a, of a wider audience. And I think what TikTok has shown and the algorithm isn't new, it's just they have implemented it slightly better and they had more money to build it. If, if you can do the same for education that you can dive into these and it's, it's, it's a discovery process. And it's sometimes you want to go deeper, sometimes you want to go wider, sometimes you want to get out of it. I think YouTube already does that, but it's not at that level that it's so easy to digest. Maybe it is, but it definitely can be done better. If you can do a TikTok for, I don't know, one for education, one for science, one for, so every scientist in the world. And I have Mark Lado on today on the podcast and he says, you know, basically science, even in computer science, basically broken. He says he gets way more inspiration and way more effects from Twitter. And I'm like, holy smokes, how's that possible? You know, this is one of the most sciencey, you know, really rocket science things on the planet right now. All the physicists even say it is too complicated. I can't keep up. And he says, yes, the academia is basically it's so, these institutions are so useless because there's a better alternative now that we wouldn't have had 20 years ago, 30 years ago, because people started sharing these things. And do I'm not sure Twitter does a good job at discovery. It's kind of, it's, it's a boring, really stupid algorithm just to look at people's likes and then just fire up those as an engagement algorithm. I think that's stupid. And I was talking with Aaron about this, and I think this is, this is kind of evil, the, the, the old engagement mechanism. And in that sense, TikTok is an advancement. Do I don't do what I don't like what they've done to our children. And I feel that is a way to, to, to learn from this. And if you, if you want one size, so either it can be like a meta approach, right, where you feel you take existing content and just parse it into the engine, or it's something where you originally have that content. I've always felt a lot of TikTok videos, they don't originate from TikTok. They came from somewhere else. People just moved over because you, you gave them that promise. And I think that's enough to, you can have the 2000 followers, you can have 3 million views, like just like that, because the algorithm does everything. The followers don't do anything. And someone was saying that on, about Instagram, they said, once you tell an Instagram, Instagram creator, you don't need any followers and can have 3 million views. Nobody will ever publish anything on Instagram anymore. At least not first. You always release it on TikTok. And if you can do this to, to scientists, if you can tell them, why don't you give me those nuggets? And I give you 3 million impressions. I mean, you know, that's just maybe validation, but it's also your standing, your social capital. If you do this to the rest of the world, that's, I think, more than a trillion dollar opportunity. Yeah, but that's not the problem is it's not entertainment. And I mean, with TikTok, I'm not sure everything is entertainment, but it works because it's entertainment. So it's not very hard to go from one guy swimming into minus 18 degrees climate in Russia and saying, welcome to Russia. And then you just stumble upon a puppy doing something like this. And then you go to someone like, like putting an ice cream on his face. That's, that's, that's dumb. But that's not a problem because it's like Benny Hill on screen. It's like, I mean, you don't have to have a connection because it's entertainment nuggets, but doing this for, for science of tech. Well, if it would be easy, it would, would it be done already? Right? I'm not saying, I'm not saying it's easy and it's more contextual. It's more complicated. AI needs to be much more clever of figuring out these threats. Even the YouTube algorithm is kind of stupid at this right now. And so yes, you need to understand the content to an extent, not fully, but you need to have a hunch that AI is good at this, right? So it has a lot of hunches now about understanding content. And when I think further, this is the future of education. I always talk about that. I think the future of education is more like TikTok or YouTube, because that's the only thing our kids are interested in. And kids are always gravitating towards knowledge, maybe socialized knowledge, right? Not like hardcore knowledge. They don't want to read the science book because they feel it's, they do a lot of work that's actually not rewarded because nobody cares about it. But they gravitate towards what is the knowledge that has a, has, that gives me any advantage in society relatively soon. Right now it's TikTok and it's the silliness on TikTok, but it doesn't have to be. If you, if you do, I don't know, machine learning in a TikTok format, and kids would adopt this because it's fun enough, you know what you can do to the world? You can change the world and you can triple the GDP in a couple of years. I mean, the impact would be enormous because we would have AI for pretty much anything we do in life. And all we do is sit at home, collect our $5,000 check, you know, $5,000. It would be such an enormous impact on people's lives. And if you can turn this into the future of education, which is a real problem right now because they're all falling apart, they have no place in society anymore. They don't, they don't want to admit it yet, but, or some of them do, but a lot of professors on YouTube do a much better job than any professor at any college you go and pay $100,000. So there's no need to do this anymore. And if you could just put this in an app and say, oh, I've learned, and this is what I've been doing, actually, I tended to drive a lot the last couple of years, because I really wanted this time to learn. It relaxes me, it gives me, I don't want to sit at home and stare at the wall. But if I look at the outside and listen to podcasts, lectures, I did a lot of psychology courses. I was like, man, this is fantastic. I learned a lot. I'll drive around. I see the world. This is almost better than travel. Yeah. But I think it comes to that the tricky part of that is it's more expensive in terms of it puts more effort on the creator and it puts more effort probably on the the person who is watching. Because again, like you have to, if you take atomic learning and then, then let's say the biggest piece of information is five minutes, which is already big at the moment. It means that every five minutes you need to make a decision. Unless the algorithm is the machine does it for you. And if the machine does it for you, it means that you need to give the information to the algorithm beforehand, which needs someone needs to fill in all this metadata to make the algorithm do the work instead of the human watching. This is where I see the biggest challenge. And one of the one of the limitation I've seen so far with atomic videos is this effort. You have to click to go to the next stage, which is clicking and that's that's not right. Yeah, this can't be happening. It can't be no manual effort. Yeah. And you don't have it with TikTok because you just you don't you just scroll down and it's very satisfying. That's why it's addictive because you have a satisfaction. Watch video, watch video, watch video, and then you're ticking the boxes. That's satisfying. If you have to break concentration, because each time you finish one piece of information, you need to click to get the other one. The stakes need to be very hard to match that effort. So the information you get need to be like, yeah, from a very, need to be very hard. Or we need to build something that kind of automatic and know you it's more like a mind value approach, I would think, where there is one producer of the content. It's probably different model than TikTok. I think that's very successful, but probably not at the same scale as TikTok. Economically speaking, I think in terms of bringing value to the world, I think it's pretty, pretty high level. But in mind value, you have one entity responsible for shooting everything and then shopping it down and creating relationship between all of these pieces of content so that as a user, you don't have to make that work. You can choose which interview you want to watch, but you don't know. It's curated. I want to try that out. Do I think it needs to be curated by an algorithm, so to speak? One thing I just wanted to add, what I feel always changed the game for me was I didn't like chemistry in school. I loved physics and biology. I hated chemistry. I don't know why. Do it very similar. I love math. One thing that turned it around for me was experimenting with actual chemicals. I'd seen things blow up literally. I was like, man, this is awesome. I don't care about the math anymore. I really just want to experiment with this stuff. So if you can go that far with AI, there's a bunch of abstraction layers, but in the end, it's very easy to just run it and nothing happens when you run it on your local machine or some other cluster and you see what happens and then you validate the results and you're like, whoa, this is really cool. So it's very easy to experiment with AI. Understanding it is hard, but playing with it, like I do this in my own spare time, I think this is very rewarding. There's just one topic. I mean, there's hundreds of topics, but even with history, instead of just, and I don't know what the answer is obviously, but just learning about the facts, you can learn, you can see into people's lives, you can have videos, obviously, their remakes, how it felt to be in the 16th century in a chip all right, or what did discussion be about in the 16th century England. I read a book for the 16th century Scottish book and I was surprised how different the language was. Like the English at the time was quite different than the current English. It was understandable, but you're like, interesting. I never knew that. I just learned that now. It's not too late to learn. Probably with the French, it's the same. I know it's the same with German. It's quite different from 400 years ago. I want to move to a slightly different topic and that I mentioned French. I always felt and you know, you're the closest I can torture with this topic and you can tell me if you go into a direction that you don't want to. I always thought about the French exceptionalism in the last couple of hundred years. France has been a republic pretty early. It was one of the earliest ones to have a democratic revolution. It didn't turn out that way, but at least people tried. It had something of a leadership role in the world I would say for a long time and now definitely in Europe. What I always feel when I go to French speaking colonies in Africa, there's a really good civil society, like institutions built. The basic of civil society works so well, even if it's just projected into Madagascar, which is a really poor country, but the city and the way it's built looks beautiful. There's an enormous amou