CG2 - GTFO FTW: Hacking Your Lifestyle for Fun and Profit - Beau Woods & Taylor Banks

all right all right so welcome to the talk um much anticipated when you've all been waiting for the reason you're in Vegas to hear how to leave Vegas uh and go do whatever you want um so this is my co-presenter Taylor banks on Bo woods and we' both pretty much made the last couple of years about uh getting out traveling the world becoming independent of location as well as uh some income and thank you for being in our talk instead of the other two or three talks that are going on at this very moment yeah so why might you want to GTFO um probably lots of reasons uh for for Taylor and I we each had our own

which you'll hear about um the question is can you do it can you reasonably do it probably don't think you can or maybe you do and you want to hear like how we've done it which is cool but we hope to show you at the end this how we did it and how you can probably do it too probably got more ideas than we do on some of this the group collected you'll hear what worked for us as well as what didn't as well as what didn't the face palm wall moments uh and we'll also tell you about a framework we've come up with that we call the advanced persistent traveler um because you've got to have a

three-letter acronym if you're going to present in Vegas and be taken seriously we've been told by security companies who they might play we didn't think acony was used to no no so and I'll I'll jump straight in so I'm Taylor Banks and I guess I'll come over here and get on camera since we're recording um I'm Taylor Banks and the the short introduction the short version of my story uh is that essentially two years ago I basically stopped doing the work that I had been doing before I stopped doing consulting I stopped doing trading I launched an e-commerce site on a whim um fast forward to today that eCommerce site despite uh my expectations to the

contrary is now doing rather well in fact I would say without getting into Revenue numbers it's doing well enough uh that it can easily sustain a lifestyle in Costa Rica pretty much entirely on its own and fast forward to a week ago my wife and I went out and bought a motor home in cash and are putting our house on the market to begin the process of going anywhere in everywhere so as we go through the uh the next several slides as B and I kind of talk through some of the stories and talk through what we've done I I'll kind of explain how this process came about and uh and some of the I guess the steps

along the way that were the uh the tricky steps for us and and how how we made this happen so Taylor what's the name of your e-commerce site so the e-commerce site that I run Bo is called Ace hackware got for those of you that haven't heard of it uh so I'm Bo woods and a few years ago um I kind of got back to my regular life after having traveled around the world and took about three months off went through uh China Tibet Mongolia Russia you know got shaken down by the Russian mob a couple of times when I was traveling uh lived in a yurt for a couple of nights and and drank Mongolian

vodka um I realized that that was awesome but the basement office that I was in without a window kind of sucked so I was thinking how could I do the awesome and less of the suck um so what I really needed to do was was figure that out to to come up with a plan so I could enjoy my life to do something where I could travel around fulltime which is what I wanted to do not have to worry about money not have to worry about the other things that were getting in my way of of GTFO um so fast forward to today and I'm traveling around the world in the last 12 months I've lived in several different places

uh Armenia London um Korea SP month in um Mexico City spent a couple weeks in Nicaragua uh and it's really pretty cool so hopefully you'll learn how to how to do whatever it is you want to do from our talk so there are a whole bunch of reasons that we have personally uh seen as kind of the the main motivations for us to do this and presumably some of you have some of the same ideas in mind uh you know we've we've kind of gone back and forth and and as you'll see as we go through the the next 35 40 minutes uh bo and I have actually gone about this rather differently but I think a lot of

the the driving uh reasons remain the same so one that I really keyed on and I'm going to steal the focus from Taylor because I like that uh is something that a guy in Dan pink talks about it's called autonomy master and purpose right autonomy kind of being Your Own Boss calling their own calling the the shots uh Mastery is being good at what you do or feeling like you're good at what you do and improving having the challenge to keep you grow in the game and then purpose what's the reason why you're doing it right are you just like banging out firewall rules so that your boss doesn't yell at you because that's not

really a purpose that's just kind of something that somebody tells you to do the purpose is like why you're out there doing it why you're living what you're doing for some people it's one thing for some people it's another um this is what I actually refer to as I'm [ __ ] bored of my life yeah uh then there's there's also the idea of living large and working less so if you go to someplace like Thailand where an apartment all the food you can eat housekeeper is like $1,000 do a month all in um you don't really don't have to make that much money right so if you think about it the US there's some people who their car payments some

people in this room your car payments probably $1,000 a month well if you ditch that and go someplace else you can get away with doing a lot less so how much do you have to work to make that, especially if you can do remote work like most of us in here can uh you know hacking into into companies you can do from anywhere so you can make a thousand dollars in a few days and that'll allow you to live for a month and this was this was a big motivation for me I this to me is the I'm tired of working so hard uh you know scenario here I for me it wasn't really so much

about living large but living differently and not working as hard to do it I mean you know I don't know I imagine many of you in the audience for this talk like Bo and I probably would have considered ourselves a couple of years ago you work at least an8 hour day and you you go through a 40 or 50 or 60 hour week and you may love you may enjoy what you're doing but you bust your ass you work all week and at the end of the day you know you've got an apartment in Buckhead or you've got a a house in some you know uh suburban area close to targets and chipotes all over the place

and you say maybe this isn't exactly what I really signed up for working this hard so that I can be in a a major developed uh sprawl is not really my idea of good time so there's also the kind of the Apocalypse Now approach which is see the world meet interesting people and hack them right traveling around for me is a Liberation in a lot of ways you know I get to see different cultures I get to understand their perspectives I get to live a different lifestyle you know you kind of feel like Jet Set man of international mystery uh James Bond you be anything you want just traveling around having the freedom to do what you want uh and getting out

there living it and using the skills that you've acquired over the last several years or couple of decades for some of us um to live that life and and to me this is what I refer to as the if I see one more [ __ ] chipot right so this is by extension just beyond live live large worth less U you know until you until you get out and you go other places where things are different not just sites and scenes but culture and language and and pretty much everything you're used to and everything you know until you've done that I don't know you live a very myopic life so it's not until you really just jump out and you

start seeing places where people do things completely different than you're used to that uh to me life becomes pretty interesting yeah um and you know a lot of people that I've run across in my past 18 months or so traveling around they've gone out because they they had that real purpose drive right they started an NGO you know met several people Armenia who were doing an NGO in Nicaragua you know a couple of folks and guys in our community like Johnny Long uh he started an NGO he's out in Africa doing his thing uh and for some people that's just what pulls them they feel compelled to get out to GTFO agreed and I'm going to say I think most of the

people in this room probably already have some of these ideas in mind so I'm going to fast forward as to what's holding them back yeah before we do that let's do a game we like to play called shirt shot or shirts so if you've got some motivation and I know pretty much everybody in here does otherwise why would you be in this talk um what is it that's driving you why is it you came here today what do you want to talk about you come up and get either a shot of kudzu Soju which is a Korean liquor homemade um you can you can take it we do check ID so make sure you're over 21

or you can get a nice shirt either a glorious Ace hackware shirt or one that I've got here uh hemosexual so shter shot anybody have a a specific reason or purpose or desire to get out and do something different that is not addressed within our passion passion shirt or shot shirt shirt all right so is hackware hemosexual hemosexual win win if that's not the right size consum so so passion uh expound on that just a little bit so what do you mean you have to follow what your heart tells you what what draws you and like what's the point of living if you're not follow your passion yeah I agree completely yeah so what's your

passion everything you want everything you want it all yeah I definitely understand that awesome so now let's move on to what is holding you back and as I was kind of thinking about this what was holding me back and the people that I've talked to what's been holding them back and it's really it's it's three things that we know very very well in this industry fear uncertainty and doubt the fear of like okay I'm afraid that maybe I won't won't be able to get there and have an income stream or or the doubt of like look I've got a house what's going to happen to my what's going to happen to my house it's uncertain or the clip side

of that where am I going to live right okay I want to go somewhere but I have no idea what it's like I don't know how much it costs I don't know which areas I'm safe to live in and depending on where you're going you also may ask yourself at some point in time am I going to survive this am I going to be kidnapped am I going to be the outsider am I going to be hated by the locals and the community and the population so there is a lot of fud uh and I think that's one thing that hopefully most in the room AR at least familiar with yeah and I think it's interesting too to me

because if you look around you talk to the people who are in this room the security guys we all bash food right we're not flood Merchants we don't sell it we're not marketing people hopefully most of you aren't uh but we're still susceptible to it so you can see how effective it really is you know the societ pressure the social uh Norms that we all have in our in our heads just from growing up in the cultures that we've grown up in keep us locked in this idea that we have to do this certain thing that we have to go about it a certain way and if you get outside of that then all of a sudden

you're in this unknown territory there's uncertainty there's fear you doubt yourself so then how do you get over that I think that there's three key elements to this I think confidence experience and planning you know you have the confidence to say look I've got a good good skill set I'm in an industry that's growing faster than we can hire people to fill the jobs that we have I've got people recruiters calling me every single day saying hey do you want to leave your job and get paid a lot more yeah who doesn't want to respond to that but maybe you don't jump for one reason or another it's also the confidence to say I'm doing the right thing right this

is what I actually should be doing not just the self-confidence which is obviously very important especially if you're going to leave everything behind to another country or somewhere that is completely different but also the confidence to say this is the right move and and something we'll we'll talk about a little bit more as we get further into the slides um you know you you you got to ask yourself questions like hey you know uh what's the worst that can happen and so these are some of the things that are going to help you build the confidence to overcome some of that fear and that uncertainty yeah experience to me is it really helps people who are

like well I've never traveled internationally I can't just like jump out and go do this no you're right we can we can do Little Steps along the way like one of the things that that I did is I have a little hostel in Atlanta and so I was like what's it like living in a hospital for a week so I just went and lived in the hosital in Atlanta for a week if I needed anything I could always drive back home right it's not that far but that gave me some experience to say okay I can actually get through this or you can take two weeks uh and travel around go to some place um get location

independent if that's what you ultimately want to do and you don't necessar have to tell your boss if you work from home regularly anyways um so I'm not saying that I did this or I didn't do it but I might have gone to October Fest for a couple of weeks and just worked in internet cafes so I'm sorry about the loud audio in the background um and that worked for me and I was able to pull it off and until now nobody knew about it interestingly as well I mean we live we live in a time now where area codes don't really matter anymore I mean frankly you know half of the people in the room probably have a

phone number whose area cod make may or may not even be the place where you live so frankly uh you know when I'm doing consulting when I'm when I'm doing training I get a call from a client or a customer I pick up the phone on my phone number they don't have any idea where I am you know as long as I answer the phone at a a reasonable time during the time zone that I'm expected in somebody's going to assume I am where I've always been but there's no reason that I might not be in California when I am expected to be in Atlanta and ultimately at the end of the day it doesn't matter I say I go pretty much

wherever there's an International Airport easy enough yeah um and the last point is planning right the act of just sitting down and coming up with a plan even a rudimentary plan kind of deconstructing reverse engineering to steal some under later what what you're going to have to do like look get on the internet what's it cost to to move to Costa Rica flame ticket is like 500 bucks you know you can run a house for like 500 bucks a month somebody delivers you groceries for like 20 bucks a week okay that's not much now that you've got that knowledge you started doing some of the planning it's more about how do I get myself out of where I am today than

it is how do I get myself into the next thing and I think that those three things confidence experience and planning helps you overcome the fear uncertainty Dev and this is where I think you're also going to see a little bit of a different you can hit the next slide but you're going to see a little bit of a different in mindset as Bo and I approach this you know one of the things uh that you you may have gotten from our our intros but you'll certainly get as we tell a little bit more of our stories in a few minutes is that Bo and I have actually approached this process very differently and it's funny because

you know we put together this list of fears uncertainty and doubt so this Bud column on the left hand side we put together U you know together but as we did it you know we looked at the structure of the fears and the structure of the the uncertainties that we have and it's funny we're both thinking about things very differently you know Bose fear is I have a house uh what am I going to do with my house me I said sell my house I don't give a [ __ ] that I've got a house like to me I have no fear or uncertainty about having a house my fear is where the hell am I going to live

where am I going to am I going to get an apartment am I going to buy a house am I going to stay in somebody's room so it's funny as we approached these challenges we realized that we both had very different mindsets and we focused on different sides of the same coin or different sides of the same problem and I think that was it's also evident in the past we took um I think Bo you know arguably is a bit more of a planner than me and I'm I'm a bit more of a reverse engine so you'll see you know well I don't know more of but my style is more reverse engineering so that was kind of

how I fell into this is I I ended up in circumstances and I said wow holy [ __ ] this is where I want to be how do I work backwards from here right I didn't really start with a plan I started with ending up the place I wanted to be and realize wait a second why am I not here all the time so but in all the cases I mean I think ultimately and we h on a couple of these in the previous slide pretty much every fear every uncertainty and every doubt that we've encountered we've also conquered or we've at least addressed we've at least managed to convince ourselves that it it's of you

know either limited importance or it's something to which we'll find the solution right A lot of these things the decisions you make about where you want to go what you want to do or how you want to gtf FW they make these problems not exist anymore which is kind of a cool approach when when you start doing it you find that so this is our advanced persistent travel um again the theore framework that we came up with just kind of back of the napkin sketch of like what is it that you need to be able to do to get out and to do this so we came up with three primary elements and you can see why we we relate this to

advanced persistent travel the AP because it's kind of like a reverse advanced persistent thread and if you're playing buzzword bingo there you go you can drink down but the first step is really to exfiltrate it's What would normally be the last step step right we're describing kind of a more typical uh you know AP but but in our case that was the first step the the hard part and really frankly as I'll point out you know this presentation today if you guys like our presentation please let us know but this presentation today is really about fastest path to extration um you know we this was this was the the first and the hardest step for us is getting to the

point where we could say I'm free of all of the things that hold me back so but but again as you see you know this is kind of it it turns the model on its head yeah and so for me my exfiltrate was getting out of the country like becoming location independent for Taylor it was becoming career inde so getting out of the job I you know I mean admittedly I worked for myself before I work for myself now but I worked for myself before spending 60 hours a week doing you know expensive Consulting and high-end training and now I don't now I spend five hours a week pushing buttons and running reports from an e-commerce

site so so you know as Bo pointed out you know his his process was to get the hell out of the the country the location mine was to get the hell out of the circumstances that were holding me back and the interesting thing is is despite that pretty distinct difference in our approach the model that we've kind of applied to this we think applies pretty well to to both of our our methods yeah then the second step of persist is like what are you going to do how are you going to do it to keep this thing rolling so in my case location Independence I would take small project that may be you know a month long but

they would they would pay me enough because I was working like 8 to 10 hour days just like you normally do in in this industry for like a month and then I could live for like two or three months and I didn't have to worry about money so I could just do whatever I wanted during that time I could hang out I could travel around a little bit I could uh enhance my location and dependence even more I can CL for my next St um whereas Taylor for me it's been more about um about taking that fledgling e-commerce site that you know initially started out as a domain name and some Amazon Arbitrage right what do people want to

buy oh [ __ ] somebody bought one I better use my Amazon Prime to ship it to me so I can turn it back around without the door fast enough right and and moving from there to wait how do I grow a customer base how do I Market what it is I'm selling how do I build a profitable business around actually doing this and and I'll touch on that a little bit more because for me I mean it was mostly it was more about attitude and and indeed persistence I mean I I had to I had to continuously tell myself okay these you know the growth I'm seeing is very small and very slow but the fact that I'm

seeing growth is enough to inspire me to believe that if I continue to do this and I learn more about what I'm doing then maybe I can pull this off and maybe within some reasonable time frame this might actually be in a place where it's going to pay my bills and allow me to go be where I want to be without having to work a 40 50 60 hour work week yeah and so then the last step in this theoretical frame work and I'll admit this is something we came up with in the last two or three weeks but it seems to work and so this is this is this is the last step right

now but we're still in the process right we haven't figured it all out so as we go along we might find that there's more steps after this but the final step that we've got here is to expand right now that we are somewhere else and we figure out how we can make sure that we stay here how do we move to other places right how do I jump from one country to another country or how do I get into another business line so that I don't have to work quite as much do more detailing or whatever um how can I expand my perview you know get more familiar with the people that I'm hanging out with with the expats in the

community travel around the region you know whatever it is that that I prefer to do um how can you expand on that and make it more of what you do for real and the interesting thing too is you know I I think as you'll see our our efforts to persist and move into expansion have also I I think our paths have gone places that we might not have expected them to and you you'll hear a bit about this from me now as we kind of Step into the next slide I'll tell you about the you know how this started for me and then I'll fast forward to where I am today which is not where I expected to

be but it's a hell of a lot closer to where I thought I would be two years ago when I sat down and conceived this wild notion that I didn't want to work so hard to to live in a house in Atlanta so you know something that just occurred to me it's kind of neat that what I'm talking is expanding is what you doing is persisting vice versa sure so you're getting ready to go to Costa Rico which is my persist sure and that's your learn a lot from each other so and I'll trade place with you yeah so in essence what we've done is we both have kind of taken our stories and broken

them down and we tried to approach this um from the perspective that there are basically four pieces to this uh we each had a goal in mind we each had a problem uh that we were trying to solve we ended up finding a a solution and then there was ultimately a resolution for that so I I'll tell you my story a little bit and I'll keep it brief but I'm going to go into enough detail because I think in essence this was my Epiphany this was my aha moment um so I actually credit a good friend of mine who's in the room here today A couple of years ago basically invited me on literally spur

the- moment notice to join him in Costa Rica uh it was uh in case anybody who pays my expense reports is watching ostensibly a business trip um so we we end up in Costa Rica yeah indeed it was it's cheer to me there and business that it is and it actually was thanks to Spirit Airlines who I will also never fly again but nonetheless nonetheless it was actually cheaper for us both to leave our homes and go to Costa Rica than it would have been to have worked from either of our own locations or a third party location the customer from whom we were doing this job so we end up down in Costa Rica and and actually the

the setting couldn't have been more perfect the first time around we go down uh my wife goes along with me and we are literally in one of the most remote parts of Costa Rica we're all all the way down on the bottom uh the southwest tip of the guanacas peninsula uh we're pretty far remote we're like 2 hours from the nearest airport you basically have to have a four-wheel drive vehicle to get to where we're going um the place we're staying in the cabina has no TV not just no cable there's no TV there's no telephone there is literally air conditioning and actually uh much to my uh satisfaction there was good Wi-Fi but the bottom line though it was it was

very very remote uh we we had nothing but you know fresh fruit fresh food every day we were 50 yards from the beach we had hammocks and we had good Wi-Fi and it was literally everything that I could have wanted to to have and be I was like holy cow why am I not doing this every day so as I'm as I'm going through this we spend a week or however many days in Costa Rica we we we actually get done the work that we set out to get done in addition to spending some time in the water and and hiking around in the jungles nearby and I started to work backwards I said okay

what is my goal my goal is to live a life in Costa Rica I want to be here I want to live in a place where I don't care if there's a TV where I don't want a telephone I want to live in a place where I'm 50 yards from the beach I've got a nice hammock there's cool colored crabs running around everywhere and there's a good Wi-Fi connection to me that is my picture of paradise so what's the problem now in my mind the problem was the cost how can I afford to do this I've got all of these things in Atlanta am I going to be able to make enough money what will I do if I move to Costa

Rica how am I going to pay for this lifestyle and so this is where my process began I didn't really start by planning I started by working backwards and I said wait a second how much does it cost to live you and so Mark and I have a conversation and Mark goes and he finds a couple of websites and he shows me a couple of links and he says well you know it's pretty reasonable you can find a fully furnished house within a block from the beach all utilities satellite TV and internet well for between about $3 to $600 a month mindboggling $300 to $600 a month and I've got a place one block from the

beach I've got internet utilities and satellite TV included and it's a furnished place so I don't even have to bring my stuff I can show up with nothing but the clothes on my back so now all of a sudden my my my mind starts to shift and I realize what I thought was the problem which was how can I afford to live here is not really the problem at all the solution in fact is in essence and this may kind of sound ridiculous but how can I try to make less money and work Less in order to make only the money that I'm going to need to make to live in this place because if I'm going to bust my ass and

work 60 hours a week what's the point of being in a place like this southern tip of the guanacas peninsula in Costa Rica with no TV and no telephone it doesn't make sense so I began to go through this reverse engineering process okay how much does it cost for a place by the beach I can be within a block from the beach it's going to cost me let's just say 500 bucks a month right I'm going to have to get transportation in Costa Rica because that's the one thing the road roads are pretty bad I'm not going to take a car the import duties on a car are pretty high so actually renting or purchasing a vehicle in Costa Rica is a

little bit more expensive than a comparable comparable vehicle in the US so I'm going to spend a couple thousand dollars to get you know a pretty old pretty funky Jeep or dirt bike right so I'm going to spend a couple thousand dollars eating is pretty cheap I don't know if you guys have been to Costa Rica but you know if you're in the right places you can eat a really good meal for about six bucks right six bucks for meat veggies rice beans a satisfying meal and probably less especially in more remote areas and if you speak good Spanish so as I begin to go through this process I'm realizing this isn't going to cost me nearly what I thought it

would and in fact living the lifestyle that I actually think of as the dream lifestyle is probably going to cost me at most 20% of the lifestyle that I work to attain that I bust my ass to live and attain in the United States in Atlanta Georgia today so ultimately I realized that this is is attainable and I'm going to do it now admittedly fast forward you know two years later I don't live in Costa Rica yet um I I've been a few times and in fact that was ultimately the resolution here is I realized okay I'm not going to move overnight I do have a house I do have you know roots in Atlanta I've got friends I've got family

some of the things that we had on our fud slide but my resolution is okay it cost $300 to fly from Atlanta to Costa Rica with one stop I'm going to do this two or three or five times a year until I figure out where I want to live how much it's going to cost and and basically where I'm going to plant my roots and so the process began so I get back home to Atlanta and I say how am I going to pay for this and enter Ace hackware I decide I'm going to build an e-commerce shop to sell toys to all of the folks who are in the same profession I'm in right we're all some uh some

extension of a pin tester a security engineer uh you know a gadget fan and I say why can't I bring all of these things together and sell pentest drop boxes lock picks bump Keys handcuffs spy cameras right every toy you wanted as a security engineer as a security consultant as a pentester I'm going to bring it together in one place and as I said ultimately um it was kind of a long process in the making in the early days aacr began as a domain name a Shopify e-commerce site and a bit of creative Amazon Arbitrage had a couple of products that I bought and kept inventory in but I literally a couple of products and only a few pieces and so in

the early days I would go find something that I thought was cool I'd slap it up on my e-commerce site and if somebody bought it I would turn around ship it to me overnight repackage it slap my sticker on it stick a a packing list in the box and send it to my customer and I quickly realized this was sustainable now again fast forward two years um a hackware I won't say it runs itself because it does require ire four to six hours of my babysitting every week but I have one full-time employee who does most of the work my fulfillment process has been largely outsourced but I do maintain inventory for everything I sell

um we've actually got a few products that are ours that we've created and that only we have and as I said at this point in time a hackware supports this lifesty so on you know six hours a week I now have enough income to basically go do this with zero changes now I'm not there but as I said at the beginning at this point in time a week ago I basically went out bought a 34t motor home in cash on the barrel head and I am hopefully somewhere between 30 and 45 days from having my house basically sold and beginning to move slowly or quickly from Atlanta Georgia to somewhere along the guanacas peninsula or who knows

where um nearby and so there's my story right uh again what I what I set out to do what I thought I could never afford to do what I thought you know I had this illusion in my mind and this doubt that I was going to be able to go live a life in a house a block from the beach because of what I thought was a cost issue turned out to be really none of the above it was some kind of preconceived notion I had some inhibition that didn't really exist and frankly all I had to do to figure that out was to to work backwards play a little bit of a numbers game in a

process that took me maybe five minutes and up at the conclusion that this wasn't really that hard so if you look at this as kind of a three or four phrase phase process for me I basically did a proof of concept I went to Costa Rica and said oh Yep this is what I want to be doing I reverse engineered it I said all right how do I get here how much is this going to cost and what am I going to have to do to get to this place I deconstructed it and said okay I know how much money it's going to make how can I do something that will allow me to make just that much money and not have

to to work any harder in order to make any more than that and then ultimately to start to to get a domain to slap up an e-commerce site and say let's do this thing so my process was a little bit different you know as I said I just got back from three months of traveling around the world and I was stuck in a basement office like ceiling didn't leak but it all it was almost like the stereotypical leaky ceiling no windows like a like a prison cell you would see I really felt trapped but I was saying to myself you know I really enjoyed what I was doing before how can I do that more do more of that and become location

dependent and just like travel around right like this is Everest M Everest TR up there I was there I didn't climb the top of it but I ran up a little Hill and you know ran out of rat and then rolled back down Moscow at night gorgeous City I highly recommend you go if you can and you know try and avoid the the Russian mafia um that's the palala Palace in in Lassa that's where the do Lama would be if the Chinese over there weren like keeping him out so like those are the things that I accomplished in three months the things that I saw the the stuff that I thought you know I could

probably never do if I took all of my life but I did and it was really easy it was pretty cheap too um so how do I get there from where I am today this is like six years ago seven years ago maybe I just started my infos career so I had like a year maybe two I didn't have the skill set I didn't know anybody other than my boss and you know she couldn't really help me go there again so I said what do I need to do to achieve this you know the Breakthrough moment was I can do that it's not going to cost you know 6080 $100,000 I don't have to wait until

I'm 70 and I retire and then I go on a cruise ship with all the old Brickley people like that's not what I want to do at all so how can I live the retirement lifestyle that I want to live now now but still afford it and and so I figured I could travel the world doing security stuff and pay for it so how do I get there well it turns out I already had a lot of the skills and a lot of the things that I needed for instance uh I already had the passion for security you know I love doing stuff I was getting more and more Technical and I could I could know pop a box with metas sploit

which back in the day wasn't as easy as it is now I think they've got like a graphical interface and I don't know but back then it was you had know the the Met exploit food to be able to do it I was proud of myself that was like the bar that I was at to give you some context of how rudimentary my skills were when I decided to do this so I need to get more skills right obviously note Brier I also need to meet more people to build that uh business Network to to make those connections where if I needed work I could call somebody up and say hey man you got anything you can throw

my way because I'm starving over here in Bulgaria or whatever um so being able to make those connections was also really important I wanted to be able to travel while I was doing it so you know how do I travel and do computer stuff and make connections the natural thing was just to become a consultant right so I had some technical skills I had some business skills I had the uh Good Fortune of running into a good job doing traveling Consulting where you know I was the guy who was like I never want to come home I want to get rid of my house right now if you could just put me on a plane and fly me around every single

week to different spot like that's what I wanted to do uh so I did that I built my skills every time I went on a gig I challenged myself like make sure you take care of all the stuff the customer wants and then give them a little bit extra right plan an extra day in there where you're supposed to be traveling but you can take in hey you you got these voice phones I noticed that they're running on void and that's a pretty new installation have you had anybody test it well how about if I do that for you you know I've got some uh vo testing equipment in my bag I don't know like laptop right everybody's going

why don't I just want a few simple tasks you know no big deal and that way you'll at least have some assurance that then you go out to the vo testing websites and like look up how to do it and run this and download those tools but they're not asking me to do it for money they're not paying me extra to do this just something I'm doing voluntarily so not benefits the customer it benefits me uh by by giving my skill sets as well as by they like me a lot now so that's how I decided to do it uh fast forward a couple of years and I've went into for the business side of it which taught me

a lot about running a business I wouldn't be here today if I didn't know business stuff uh fast forward a couple of years after that and uh I I was able to Branch out I went out lived in Armenia for six months uh traveled around the world I was able able to enable that lifestyle through the connections that I had made through the skills that I had developed um so I thought that that was uh just incredible I'm still kind of in awe that I was able to pull it off when I really didn't think I could but you know confidence uh uh planning and experience allowed me to do it so if you break mine down and kind

of a four step it would be like assess plan and then then go right go execute on that plan as three yeah well I'm not done uh and then figure out everything else later right so there's a lot of stuff you can do when you think you're going to fail um and you actually end up succeeding so for about the first six months I couldn't get any work because I didn't have the right paperwork in place with the right companies to be able to have them actually sign a contract with me of payment that process was really really painful but I got through it you know I didn't expect that but luckily I was able to get through it living in a

place that's fairly cheap uh and so you know I can tell if you if you want to get uh contracted with a company come see me I can tell you all the like little ways that you have to do it the things you have to put in place um so that was that was my four-step process I I also as you're talking through this I think this is something that you and I discussed and I don't think it found its way into our slides but I think that it's also kind of another important distinction between the ways that Bo and I approach this because again we've we've had very different um desires but for me you know I I've basically created

a circumstance where I I work a little bit either every day or every week you know every day I probably spend an hour you know looking at the site going through report pulling some data tweaking something in my accounting so I spend a little bit of time each day or each week I'll take a couple of days off and make it up on the weekend but I spend a little time each day or each week doing what I'm doing in order to enable the business that enables the lifestyle I want as Bo I think in contrast he'll spend a few weeks at a time or a few months I guess on a long project working the way that he's been

working before working every day you know approaching a project 9 to5 or whatever the customer requires and he'll do that for a month or two in order to accumulate a pile of money and then he'll go take a month or two off and not work at all presumably during that that couple of months that he's now traveling and the cool thing is neither is right neither is wrong they both work um what Bose's been doing has been working very well for him and he's been bouncing all over the place and simultaneously what I've been doing has allowed me to do a lot of things that I couldn't do and wouldn't have been able to do when I was

working 40 50 60 hours every week so two very different approaches but at the same time it it really kind of satisfied that same goal which was to really change what we were doing and how we were doing yeah so uh as Taylor mentioned this is two different ways but that doesn't mean that those are the only two ways to go so uh a couple of our friends have got some stories that we'll we'll tell really quickly uh we know one guy who's on the the loal DC mailing Defcon mailing list um and he decided he was just going to pick up and go for a couple of weeks and like fix routers at a Buddhist Monastery in Nepal

and I think they awesome yeah like they paid his way to go out there he used his skill and just went and did it and that's super cool yeah you know um similarly and and this is something that actually the wife and I when my stepson was basically considering going into the Navy and we were trying to figure out how to convince him that there were other things he could do um Beth discovered that there is a an organization I believe they're up in Maine where I can literally go up and they will teach you to build boats they will teach you to hand carve large wooden yachts and they will give you room and board while you help them build

boats because you are basically working for them throughout that process so you basically go up and you live for free while you learn to build wooden Yachts to me that is mind-bogglingly cool um we didn't do that but the fact that that exists the fact that you can say I don't want to do what I'm doing anymore and all I got to do is come up with the money to live and there is there is somewhere where you can go that they will give you a place to live and teach you a trade and all you have to do in exchange is do that trade that you were being taught I think that's amazing and

and until we started on that process until we started trying to find you know what can we do to give Jim some other options I wouldn't have believed that that existed yeah so so it's time now again for a favorite game shirter shot shirter shot so so uh yes Health Healthcare so I think that's probably that's a good question the answer to which will probably be something we will Explore More in the persist and expand phases of this conversation I mean I think right now we both have and or have been able to be within the Health Care system that you know we either have insurance for or within or we haven't encountered issues with healthare yet in

the way we're going about this although I know this is a topic that is explored in detail in and amongst the expat Community which I think we've both spent a fair bit of time pooking around and exploring and researching because you know that Community is in many regards the community that we are kind of entering into We are Becoming World Travelers I met two people earlier in this week who when we got into conversation I asked them where they lived they said we're full-time Travelers right and that's that's the bit they don't have a house they've got you know a van or a boat or they house sit or they dogit or they couch Sur or

whatever the case and so I know that's something that we will inevitably encounter but at least for me it hasn't been an issue yet anybody got a story about like where they just went out and did something crazy for a week or something they didn't think they'd be able to

yeah countes and they pay me T of money and I have right I in yeah EXA exactly short or shot I'm alol

shot come up afterwards and [Music] we'll with either one of those so uh we wanted to move into a couple of quick Pro tips and then we'll kind of wrap it up um so first one is have an opportunity radar right you're out doing these things you might have opportunity to meet somebody cool like they might be the next guy sitting over next to you maybe they run a a a company and they need some it help or some security help or whatever you may be out at a coffee shop and like the Wi-Fi is FL and so you go to the the coffee shop own you're like hey you want me to help fix your

Wi-Fi and you just give me a month of free coffee right barter right it's about having a you know the the the eyes to see opportunities where they exist and you may run into just an opportunity where somebody's like oh yeah I've got this IT company and I need need somebody to do security for me can you do that it's like a you know some companies uh out there just need a security guy like a week a month so maybe you could do a week a month where you're their security guy and then the rest of the time you're doing something else maybe that week a month is enough to enable whatever you want to do maybe it's not even about

security I mean who knows it's it's whatever you you see that that really Falls within your wheelhouse I mean frankly now it's like my radar is tuned a little bit differently I've been in security for 15 years but at the same time I'm somewhere and I hear someone say I've got a shop and oh I wish I could set up an e-commerce shop and ding ding ding ding ding ding all right hey I know how to do that I've done I've done that from scratch and learned a whole shitload of ways to do it wrong in the past two years so I can probably show you how to not do it wrong the same way

I've done it um and again it's basically just about kind of Shifting your focus those are the types of things where two years ago if I was traveling and sitting in a coffee shop and I heard somebody wishing they could have started an e-commerce shop I probably would have gotten up and moved to a different seat right so but now instead I'm actually going to engage that person in conversation and say hey you know what um the right opportunity the right circumstances let's chat maybe I can help you out with that so um another one is your gear really matters when you're traveling fulltime so one of the first travels that I had internationally I went to Barcelona and

I was going from a plane to a boat and I was running down the the streets of of Barcelona Los rless with this stupid roller bag and the wheel busted and You' ever been on the the streets of Spain they're all cobbly and and bumpy and long story short I didn't make my boat so I had to go back to the airport again dragging this bag that was now an anchor uh and finally I got there got a flight and made it across so roller bags suck bring backpacks backpacks are easy to carry you know you can put them somewhere if you need rollers most places you go where you would need the rollers have a roller for you um over

the shoulder bags work well too I actually have a really good over the shoulder bag that you know basically just kind of hangs on my side and frankly you know there are a couple of additional benefits number one um running through an airport with a roller bag is very dangerous both to you and everyone around you and likely someone will fall running through an airport with a bag that's securely strapped over your shoulder well you might bump into somebody but you're not as likely to ball uh but the other thing too you know depending on how much you're able to get rid of your stuff rer bags they add like 20% weight and reduce the capacity of

your bag by like 20% more because of the ridiculous frames and stupid little wheels that they put in these things anyway so get an over the shoulder bag or backpack and you'll you'll save yourself a lot of trouble when you're actually spending time on the road yeah and does anybody have a gear bag that looks like that like all full of the wires and dongles and like all the things that you think you need to right that's not really compatible with the travel everywhere and carry everything on your back lifestyle I mean I did that for a long time too and it sucked and I had this big bag of stuff that was heavy and I carried it around and I ended up

using it like one out of every five gigs so what I realized is that there's shortcuts you can take like one of my secrets I'll tell you real quickly is when you go in and do a wireless pin test right you do the W driving and you walk around and you get all the wireless access points and you go to the guy and you say hey look you know I can sit here and spend the next two days trying to crack your Wi-Fi password but you're not going to get as much value out of that is if you just like think about how strong it is and I'll give you the rules of strength of

Wi-Fi and like you can judge it for yourself and then let's like go into to kind of the open Bo the white box method and say what are the other controls we've got because the password isn't going to keep a bad guy out for long right he can spoof your Wi-Fi access point capture an active directory credential do all kinds of things especially if he's got a rudaba device from as.com device from as.com so so you can simplify what you're doing and that'll simplify your your kid and don't be like the guy in the right hand picture where he's got the TV and speakers and satellite television up on his backpack and his dogs loaded down

like just you look like a a dork doing that not a dork in a good way well and I I'll admit I absolutely was the guy with the gear bag in the middle or not that bag with a variation thereof and I actually uh only on my second trip to Costa Rica that I forced myself to take one bag I decided I am not going to take a suitcase and a bag and a backpack and a laptop bag and everything else and I literally got everything that I would need for six days into a single backpack that I took with me and I I have to admit despite the the gear Gadget freak that I am and have been for a decade it

was actually the most liberating experience I can't tell you what it was like to not have to wonder where my other bags were or not have to worry about all the other [ __ ] that I had everything I had literally fit into something I was carrying on my back mindblowing and when you get to a new place try and integrate a little bit I mean you're not there to sit in your hotel or your your apartment and like stare at the walls all day right so getting out getting into the community walking out of the coffee shop meeting expats meeting people you know grab somebody off the street or or go to a a

restaurant or you know put up a flyer somewhere that says I want to learn to cook this this meal and have somebody just come to teach you how to cook Indian food or Malaysian food or a South American Cuisine like that's pretty awesome um I've learned some really cool ways to cook stuff that uh now I can cook those I think I think part of it's also just about living like a local and I I guess I have the benefit you know my wife and I as long as we've traveled this has kind of been our travel style we're not the the couple that's likely to go down and stay in a fancy room at

the resort hotel we're going to find somebody's house to stay in um we're not going to go and hang out on the sherian one mile you know mixed use Community we want to go frankly find the seed parts of town where the locals hang out I want to find the restaurants where the locals eat um where we're not going to find other people that look like like us and I don't know we we learn a lot we have a lot of fun and it's it's much quicker and easier to to figure out what what the community is like when you actually immerse yourself in it rather than sit back at a distance and and see what you

know the uh the large Hotel companies have planned out for you yeah so action what's the next action for here you guys probably all are sitting on the edge of your chairs like all right how do I do that well as we said in the abstract anybody that jumps on a cab from here to the airport like we pay the C through your fair down there skip Defcon right it's 20,000 smelly [ __ ] people at a hacking conference you're not going to get into the the talks you want to go to the rooms are going to be full you're going to be mad the goons are going to yell at you go now yeah or or sit down

um someplace and do some research right do some of the exercises uh that we've got on one of those slides and we'll make that available for you but like sit down and look at what it's actually going to cost for you to get there for you to live for you to do something uh a little bit different and just get a little bit of planning or go you know check out of the the hotel go home and then go live in a hostel for a week um but but kind of practice or do an exercise that gets you more comfortable that gives you confidence experience or planning so you can get over the fear uncertainty of doubt and take the big

obstacles and turn them into small obstacles I mean for me it's like I don't know I I was amazed I I had this Revelation when I realized all of the things I thought were pretty much right wrong when I when I stepped back and looked and I broke it down into very small costs and very small little you know dipping my toe in the water I realized it's not going to be expensive to do what I want to do it's not going to take a lot it's going to be pretty easy for me to generate income in my spare time to fund this and and life B said when you go and you look it up

online and you realize oh wait here's this place that I've been dreaming of going and [ __ ] it's only going to cost me 300 bucks to get there and I if I go on vbo I can stay in a you know a private room in somebody's house for 150 bucks for for the week what's holding you back 450 bucks to go spend a week in the place that you really want to go that you might want to live that you could fund on a website you could put together in a weekend or an afternoon don't let that stop you break things down into the smaller bits and pieces and I think you'll find the big the big

Obstacle of getting the [ __ ] out and figuring out where it is you want to go and what you want to do it's really just a bunch of small obstacles that are Loosely changed together and they're pretty easy to tear apart yeah so uh with that we'll take some questions for a couple of minutes until uh you know the next speaker is ready to go yep so in our industry quite a number of people are rather introverted to least and that I can see being a serious stumbling block to a lot of the things you suggested um how would you go about having people who have those problems um hope with them if they wanted to move

into this lifestyle I'm actually an introvert myself so you you got to take it in small steps break it down kind of systematically and for each person I think it's different right what are you comfortable doing like if you're hang com comfortable hanging out with folks like this uh in a place like this maybe go do that and maybe stretch your boundaries a little bit more um but I think you've got to you've got to figure that out for yourself a little bit and make your lifestyle around that I think it's partly about where you go too I mean and just by way of example like the the place that I went to where I had

this Epiphany and said holy [ __ ] I want to live here I can tell you I I I know for a fact that I could go there and as long as I wanted to I could avoid actually talking to anybody else except using the words like cesa and guacamole and I could get by comfortably for years that way so I mean you know I'm not quite as much of an introvert but I mean there are a lot of places where you can go and frankly you can be as private or as public as you want to and still be accepted still be able to to exist within a lot of these communities and and I would also add to that that um if

you if you seek out a little bit of the expat communities and the place you want to go I think in a similar manner you'll find a lot of introverts there who are you know willing to get together and kind of share tips and secrets about living in places without having to change your whole social Dynamic you know what I mean yeah and I think you had a question too and then we'll turn it over to the next speaker Who coming on absolutely um some of the places that you've been mentioning are places that are cheaper to live my idea that I want to do would be to live in southern hemisphere part of the Year northern hemisphere the other

part of the year and never have to experience winter again right I'm from Canada um I like being um and I'd like to be in um New Zealand which is not a cheap place to live sure so you know when I look at this like oh yeah and it's like wait I can't live there for fig break it down what is it going to take we can take this into the Q&A room too but I'll point this out you're right because I've looked at New Zealand too New Zealand looks freaking amazing and I haven't been there yet what's expensive is getting to New Zealand but you know when you get to New Zealand if you buy a

cheap used RV which you can probably get for under 10k on most of of the southern island you can travel around and stay in an RV in the parks for almost unlimited periods of time without paying hookup fees without paying overnight fees I mean it's a difference in lifestyle it's not the same as having a big house on a lot in a gated community or suburb but that is to say that you know yes our notion my notion of New Zealand is expensive if I go do in New Zealand what I've done in Atlanta but if I want to go to some place like New Zealand I'm going to do it differently I'm going to figure

out what I want to do and I'm going to go hiking and live in an RV and rent somebody's house and like like Bo and I talked about opportunity radar I'm going to wait until I hear somebody at the coffee shop talking about how they wish they had Wi-Fi and ding ding ding ding ding you got an extra bedroom I bet we can probably hook you up with Wi-Fi so it's it's just about looking around and finding the opportunities to to to kind of it's rethinking things in a lot of regards yeah so due respect for whoever is speaking next I think we should we should wrap this up but I'm happy to to dialogue more and hear about

what you guys want to do and and and even sit in the other room in the Q&A room I'll sit with a laptop and I will figure out how much it costs and I will help you plan out how to get there if that's what you want to do because it's [ __ ] amazing and liberating and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else than where I am today podcast yeah podcast yeah we're doing a podcast podcast plug uh G gtf outcast. right now with the placeholder but um we've actually dialogued on this a number of times uh we've done it in Google Hangout there's some videos on YouTube they will all be collected and posted at gtf Outcast or

we also hope to continue this conversation on a regular basis uh into the foreseeable future now it's time for us to GTFO here yeah exactly thanks everybody w