Expat Empire Podcast 13 | From Music School to Social Media in Japan with Benny Rubin

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Episode Description

Today on the Expat Empire Podcast we will be hearing from Benny Rubin. Originally from the U.S., Benny spent nearly a decade in Japan leveraging his music background, Japanese language abilities, professional network, and unique insights as a foreigner living in Tokyo into building a successful social media business. After selling the company, he moved with his wife to New York City to focus on exciting new ventures.

In this episode, you will learn:

• How to become proficient in Japanese in under a year
• Tips on starting your own B2B company in Japan and on getting your very first business contracts
• When you should actually set up a corporate legal structure (hint: it’s much later than you think!)
• How to find freelancers to work for you so that your business can remain small and nimble
• What factors to consider (and not to consider) when picking a new place to live

…and much more! You can reach out to Benny at b@bennyrubin.com. Eli Hermit edited and produced the music for this episode, please check him out on Bandcamp at elihermit.bandcamp.com/. Learn more about Expat Empire at expatempire.com!

Episode Transcript

Intro

Welcome to the Expat Empire Podcast, the podcast where you can hear from expats around the world and learn how you can join them.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining us today for the 13th episode of the Expat Empire Podcast. Today we will be hearing from Benny Rubin. Originally from the U.S., Benny spent nearly a decade in Japan building a social media agency where he could leverage his music background, Japanese language abilities, and unique insights as a foreigner living in Tokyo. After building the agency into a successful small business, he sold it to another company and moved with his wife to New York City to focus on exciting new ventures.

In this episode, you will learn how to become proficient in Japanese in under one year, hear tips on starting your own B2B company in Japan and on getting your very first business contracts, and much more.

Without further ado, let’s start the conversation.

Conversation

David McNeill: Hey Benny, thanks so much for joining us today on the Expat Empire Podcast.

Benny Rubin: Yeah, my pleasure.

David McNeill: It would be great if you could tell us a little bit about your background — where around the world you have lived so far, where you are currently living, and what kind of work you are doing.

Benny Rubin: Sure, I could start where I’m from. I’m from Southern California. I lived there until I was 18 and then I went to school in Boston — I went to music school at the Berkeley College of Music. I liked music school a lot, I liked playing music. I like friends that are talking about music all the time. That’s still pretty much my life right now. But I didn’t like living in Boston that much, not that anything particularly wrong with Boston.

I think that my personality is, and I think a lot of people share this, they don’t like in-between phases and basically, after the first year of college, it was all centered around what you’re going to do after college. And I thought, “Well, I don’t really want to live my life thinking about what I’m going to be doing after college — I just want to finish college.” So I finished college as quickly as I could, finished it in three years. And then I moved to New York City for a year and I interned at a studio here that worked in music for TV commercials. As well as did a little bit of, what you call, production assisting, P.A., which is TV commercials are happening and there’s basically gophers and people that have to stand around and tell people not to walk in front of the camera and stuff like that. So I did that for just a couple of shoots, which was nice. That’s actually where I met the woman that later became my wife. She was a photo assistant on the same shoot that I did, right, or worked on right after college and I was a production assistant. And then, many years later we ended up getting married. That was a year in New York.

And as soon as I got to New York, I knew I didn’t want to be there for very long at that time because I was already obsessed with Japan. Like I already had the Japan bug. I’m not sure exactly when it came about. I remember traveling after I was 18, between 18 and 19, and reading books about Japan on my travels and thinking like, “Oh man, that sounds amazing. That sounds really cool. I should move there.” But I had never been there before. So then as soon as I could, I took a short trip to Japan and this was during college. It was kind of like a little, like a mini-study abroad. I didn’t do any Japanese studying at all, really. I wasn’t like really ready for that at the time, but I really love being in Tokyo. My mind was sort of like, “Wow, this is amazing.”

So I had that in mind when I finished college and I came to New York and I thought, “Okay if I’m going to go to Japan, I got to figure out how to go.” So I started to study Japanese really aggressively then and sort of plotting my move to Japan and I figured out that I wasn’t eligible for something like a Fulbright because you know I study abroad grant or that kind of thing because of the timing of my graduation. At the time, at least, they had very strict guidelines about what months you’d graduate and whether that would make you an undergraduate or not. And I think I just sort of like missed the deadlines because I graduated a little weird time, so my only option was either go and do something that would give me a job or do something that was actually official studying.

So I ended up applying for a program in Yokohama called the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, which we can dig into later. I ended up applying there and there’s a proficiency exam so you have to pass this proficiency exam. I think at the time at least, it was an equivalent of two university levels of Japanese studying under your belt in order to get into the program. In my case, I had not studied at university at all. I had just studied on my own and using them friends to help me. So I remember having to study a lot. I was like in the little tiny back room in the apartment that I have like my room is like little apartment. Basically, it was like the size of a closet. Anyone who’s lived in New York knows what that’s like studying Japanese and kind of not having that feeling of, “Oh, this is the set path. Like, this is the university professor showing me how to study Japanese.” Just me being like, “Nope, this is how to study Japanese ’cause I got to test it a few weeks, and if I don’t pass this, I’m not going to be very happy.” I ended up passing that test and getting into school in Yokohama, which was my way to move to Japan.

Well, I lived in Yokohama for a year and then seven so years in Tokyo and that’s where I started my business and I worked and did all that stuff and then I moved to San Francisco for one year. Then I moved back to Tokyo for maybe six months or so where I planned my move to New York City where I am now.

David McNeill: So, digging in a little bit, how did you actually start studying Japanese, especially in the United States, and then how was it to study it full-time in that immersion program that you were in?

Benny Rubin: I have always been a very intense person with my interests in high school. I was obsessed with music stuff and I played violin, viola, electric bass, and I practiced like crazy. I’ve never really had that much natural talent in the sense that I have friends that you’d give them a random instrument and in 10 minutes you’re like, “Wow, you’re pretty good with this.” It’s sort of like we all have friends that are really good at sports. The first time you give them a cricket bat, they’re just amazing. Like they don’t even, like, I don’t even know how to play cricket, but somehow they’re already good at this. So, I never really had that kind of feeling with music. And again, when I started studying language, I didn’t have that feeling with language at all. I just looked at it like everything else that I’ve found interesting, which is I guess I’m going to have to put the time in. There’s not going to be like an easy setting for me to figure this out. There’s not going to be any shortcuts for me figuring it out.

So, and very much for me, I looked at language learning as a solo pursuit. Yes, there’s this idea that it’s a social thing. You talk with people, they talk with you, but I knew from studying music that you don’t join an ensemble before you can play. You don’t say, I want to learn how to play, let’s say jazz guitar. And then you get a guitar and you show up to the jam session at the jazz club on the Monday night and you’re like, “I’m ready to play.” That’s just not how you do it. You start in the bedroom… Sorry, that sounds oddly sexual. You start in your study room, you start at the desk, you start in the library because honing your craft to figuring out what is the language, how does it work, how do the textbooks say the language works? What does it seem like?

The reality is one thing that I also didn’t do, just partially because I didn’t have any interest in it, really was read forums and online stuff about people giving advice about how to learn language. That seemed a little bit silly to me when there were textbooks that just started at basics and went to a preset amount of learning and they had vocabulary and grammar and everything in there. So it didn’t make sense to me to like, “Oh, I’ll go to the internet and I’ll read a bunch of random people talking about how to speak the language.” I was like, I’ll just start with the textbooks.

David McNeill: It’s definitely true in my case as well where there can be a tendency for new language learners or even experienced language learners to spend a lot of time looking at tools, resources, hearing other people’s stories, maybe even comparing your fluency with somebody else, or, you know, just always looking for sort of the next big thing in terms of maybe the silver bullet to be able to learn a language. But at the end of the day, what you’re doing is spending time around language study but not actually spending the time studying the language. And I think that’s not the most productive use of time. If you have a few tools that work for you, then you might as well just put the time in because, at the end of the day, that’s what it’s going to require.

Benny Rubin: Yeah, oh, absolutely. I’d say that when I was younger I was much more anxious and I was so eager to learn Japanese that I had a lot of anxiety around ideas about whether or not I’d be able to achieve learning the language. I think that my feeling is people who study Western languages like, let’s say, Spanish or French, already can get to a point where they can communicate pretty well with very minimal study and they don’t have that much anxiety. For them, it’s a very simple equation. Well, I only studied for 40 hours, but I can already string a sentence together. My assumption is if I studied for 400 hours, I’ll be that much more amazing.

Well, the Japanese probably Korean and maybe Chinese and other languages — maybe Arabic, I’m not sure, depending on those other languages — the wall to just being able to say the simplest thing is so high, at least for me because I was so interested and so eager to learn the language. I was so anxious about it and I think oftentimes that anxiety can lead people two directions. One is to study, you hit the books, you memorize all the vocab. You try really hard to learn everything you can in language. The other side is the forums and the reading about the language, and reading about reading about the language. And reading about what people who are advanced people do and didn’t do and all that kind of stuff. There’s almost no substitute for just that first path. Luckily for me, because I have experienced doing these other solo pursuits, as I’m sure many of your listeners have as well, my first instinct was ignore everything else and just study.

David McNeill: So once you went through that process, you got a good textbook that worked for you and you actually managed to essentially get the equivalent of two years’ worth of Japanese in college setting to be able to make it into this program. How did your studies change from that point? And from what I understand, it was basically an intensive course or an immersion program of some sort — what was that experience like for you?

Benny Rubin: I was probably the worst person. There were two people that were really bad at Japanese who came into the program. It was me and Connor. Connor and I were pretty terrible at language. I don’t think it was sort of our fault we just hadn’t had as much study or maybe we weren’t as smart as the other people coming into the program. So immediately you get corrected all the time. It’s not like a pat you on the back type of program, where they’re like, “Wow, you’re great, you’re really speaking the language.” Because it’s a program designed for intense language learning, it was set up post-war basically to train diplomats who needed to become proficient in the language very quickly to go to work. Making sure that Japan was rebuilt in the way America wanted to be rebuilt, and the program evolved from there. They have their own textbooks, which you can buy if you’re interested. They have their own teaching method, which is very intense, very small classes, a lot of attention from teachers and basically every single error you make being corrected, no-holds-barred. Classes are maybe four hours a day and then depending on how committed you are, there’s anywhere from, you know, four to six hours of homework. I just studied, that was basically my entire life for about 10 months.

David McNeill: Yeah. What was the experience like just being corrected and all of those occasions? Pretty much whenever you open your mouth. I mean, obviously a very effective way to learn a language arguably, but also it’s got to be a bit demoralizing along the way.

Benny Rubin: When it came to language learning particularly, it wasn’t demoralizing at all because it’s relatively absolute. In other words, with music school and art school in general, there’s always that story of “Blah, blah, blah told Matisse that his work was crap.” And he’s like, “Ha, ha, who got the last laugh? Matisse is one of the artists that we will remember forever, that professor no one will remember him ever again.” That’s sort of like, an old thing, but in language learning, if you make a grammatical error, you just made an error. If you use the wrong word, you just used the wrong word. That said, there is a place where it can become very tough and it’s not really in school or in class. That’s a safe environment. Where it gets tough is when you have a significant other who speaks that language natively and they are or you are incorporating language correction in your interactions with them.

David McNeill: Yeah, I mean, in terms of that, being sort of a difficult situation to become accustomed to, how did you sort of negotiate and manage that situation?

Benny Rubin: That’s an everyday struggle. I think that most people who are in multilingual or multicultural relationships are in. Because, did I leave my t-shirt on the bathroom floor? Yes. Is it appropriate for language to be corrected in one scolding the other person for that? Perhaps, no. Those scenarios can get very, very tough.

The other way where it can get very tough is in sensitive situations. Like, let’s say you’re meeting a potential client with someone, and you kind of misspeak or you say something a little bit too glibly or too accidentally rudely and you don’t notice it at the time, but then afterwards you get scolded.

David McNeill: Yeah, definitely.

Benny Rubin: That can be very hard and very humbling. But in school, it did not feel that way at all. It just felt like there was a lot to learn, and I needed to learn it. One thing you definitely learned in school, and most people in any sort of intensive study environment, whether it’s for music or language or math or whatever, you can learn an incredible amount in 3–10 months with actual genuine focus. I hunkered down in this Japanese program and I thought, okay, I’m still interested in Japan. I’m in Yokohama, away from anything that makes sense to be, I really want to learn this language. This is how I’m going to do it. I’m taking this opportunity to really study.

When I finished the program, I had no connections in Japan except for one or two people that I had been introduced to in the past. I had no idea about what I wanted to do because my whole goal was to learn the language. So, it wasn’t even, I didn’t even have a dream other than I’m into music, so it’s something in the music industry would be cool or maybe I’ll start a band or maybe I’ll play music. I don’t really know, so I just was focused on studying, which is great.

After I finished, that was when I found out that there were expats in Japan that did not speak the language. I had no concept of an expat community. I think what happens a lot to people who want to move to a country like Japan, or any distant place, is that they go enough times that they start to realize that there is this big group of people that can’t really speak the language that well but seemed to get by okay. That might lessen their desire or their focus on studying the language. But in my case, I studied my butt off and I was already able to communicate at a high enough level to do things, well, like, do business. And I met all of these foreign people, fellow foreigners from all over the world that didn’t have the Japanese language ability that I have.

David McNeill: Yeah, I remember in my early days in Japan being extremely surprised because I had spent so many years studying the language, starting when I was 12 years old, and I finally made it out there, and then I looked around and realized how many people didn’t speak it. And I was really so, so surprised. And eventually you kind of come to understand why that might be the case, and different people have different reasons. Maybe they’re a senior-level executive from coming in from another country or they’re there to teach English or do something that, you know, works with their English ability. But it was surprising.

And now the tables have turned a bit being here in Germany, being in Berlin, not speaking a ton of German and being able to work and ultimately have had the life that I want to live here, mostly in English. And now I totally get why people did that in Tokyo. But at the very beginning, I was shocked.

Benny Rubin: Yeah, absolutely. So for me, from my perspective, I’m not judgmental to those people at all, for all the reasons you just described. What I figured out was, “Oh, because I speak the language well enough, I have a place on more teams than other people do.” I can be useful to a foreign person in Japan, in Tokyo, who doesn’t speak Japanese that well but needs to do things that involve Japanese people. So I started working with people that were doing things like that. And on the other side, I was useful to Japanese people for my merits. So the things that I know and the things I can do as well as for my ability to connect with things internationally, which is not a real skill set, it’s just something that you can do by virtue of being a foreign person.

David McNeill: Right. So how did you figure that out, in terms of, how long did it take and how did you make those connections? And how did you decide to actually leverage those skill sets to be able to turn it into work for you?

Benny Rubin: I started going to any networking events that were general enough. I made business cards that basically said nothing on them but my name and my phone number and I listened. I have a tendency to talk and just like to talk and I enjoy that, but I really pushed myself to listen to people: what they were doing, what they were going on? And just asking, “Oh, how’s that? Is that hard? What are your challenges? What are you working on?”

And then making sure that I follow it up. And I like having lunch with people a lot because I found that even the busiest business person, especially in cities like Tokyo, if you are willing to go near their office, they can have lunch with you between the hours of 12:00 and 1:30 or 12:30, whatever it is. They have time for a 25, 30-minute lunch. So I started to meet people follow up very quickly within a day or two. So “great to meet you, I’d love to grab lunch and chat.” I didn’t ask for anything because I didn’t have anything to ask for. But I started to navigate through that process, meeting people and sort of trying to build some sort of network. And not being afraid to just ask for the meeting as was the only thing I knew how to do. It was just like, “Oh, let’s have lunch.” And if they ignored it, fine. But most people didn’t because I was interested in what they were working on and they didn’t find it offensive that I wanted to have lunch with them.

I also took a break to go back to the States and tour playing bass for about six months, around my second year in Japan, and it was partially because I felt like I was wasting the music education and it was an interesting opportunity, but I did not like touring. And after a certain number of months, I just was like, “Okay, this isn’t good.”

And I came back to Japan, and when I came back, that’s when I got interested in social media. It was like 2009, 2010-ish. And social media was really becoming a thing and I realized that none of the record labels knew what to do with an artist like, say, Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift, who Twitter in their native language was a really important part of their way that they connect with the fans. So I started cobbled to this idea that I could get people, record labels, etc., to pay me to help them localize their social media pages. And I cobbled together enough connections in order to get meetings with the major record labels to pitch them on this idea. I was totally unqualified except for me being foreign and having some inkling of a music background. And also I wasn’t afraid to ask for it. I wasn’t afraid to say to them, “I think it’d be great if you made Japanese language versions of these artists Twitter pages.” And I have the confidence to answer very directly what I would do. “Well, I would find three posts a day that makes sense for the Japanese audience and I’ll translate them and put them up on a new Twitter page. That’ll be JustinBieber_jp.” They were like, “Okay, well what would you charge?” And I remember just sort of the first time I ever pitched a proper price for it, my rent was 84,000 Yen a month, which is like $840 a month. And an offer just turned out saying, “Well, how about I do 84,000 Yen a month?” and “Okay, sounds good. Let’s try a couple of months and see how it goes.”

David McNeill: Oh that’s awesome. That’s perfect man.

Benny Rubin: Very like, seat-of-the-pants. Like, what do you want? So, the things I learned in that really early stage were, 1) there are people who are very, very well qualified for things. Those people are relatively rare and charge a lot of money. You not being that qualified for something means you can be comfortable charging less but still get the job or still get the work. Still, pitch it. The other thing I learned is you should probably ask for what you want because it didn’t feel good the very first time when I pitched this, and I think I did it for $200 or $300 and I immediately realized that I wasn’t going to make any money. In fact, I was probably going to lose money.

David McNeill: Right.

Benny Rubin: So from that point on, right, I just said, “Well, I should just ask for what I want.” Now, one thing that I do in my business always that a lot of people don’t do is I don’t actually push my luck with pricing. A lot of people say price the maximum amount you think they could afford and then add 10% or something like that, which seems logical to get the maximum price for the offering. But for me, I’ve always priced things where I’m comfortable doing them. Where I think that the value that they’re getting equals the effort I’m putting in. And I found that sky-high pricing on anything creates a lot of tension in my mind because I’m not doing enough to justify the high price. That’s the feeling I have. And you find this all the time with people you meet and who work for a company who are being overpaid. They’re always really nervous that they’re going to be found out. And the other thing is if you’re making significantly more than your peers, you will likely be the first one fired.

David McNeill: True.

Benny Rubin: Because when a company has to undergo the process of downsizing, they say, how can we do the least damage to the company and the company culture while saving the most money? And they rarely start cutting people that are decent, hard workers who make a normal amount. So you’re like, “I’m the man, I’m making 40% more than everyone because I’m a genius negotiator.” And then you’re like, I’m the first one fired.

David McNeill: Yeah, especially in countries where there’s more of this probation period like we have here in Germany. Maybe the first three, six months, depending on your contract, but there’s at least a three months period where both sides can easily cut ties. And after that point, after you pass the probation point, then it’s much more difficult. There’s a lot more paperwork and bureaucracy involved as you might expect in Germany. But yeah, it’s like that cut off point is very important and your chances of passing that, of course, relate to the value you bring to the company, but also, you know, is the value worth what they’re paying relative to everybody else as well?

Benny Rubin: Yeah. That’s a really tricky thing to navigate, in many ways negotiating your salary or your pay for anything at the very beginning before we even start working as a little bit unfortunate because the people who are really good at negotiating negotiate a really high salary, even if they can’t perform at that level. And the people aren’t great at negotiating or don’t have the financial wherewithal to even negotiate. But if you’re, “Hey, you’re my only job opportunity right now and you offered it to me, I’ll just take it because I don’t want to risk messing it up.” Those people are getting paid less money. But then after you’ve worked for three, six months or whatever, you’ve really proven your value and then you have to sort of go back to the table.

But I just had a friend who was in a situation where he got offered a job and he just wanted to secure it. So he took the amount that he was offered and he was actually managed to get a 23% raise at this first performance review because he obviously was outperforming the lower salary he asked for.

David McNeill: Well, that’s great that they were able to give him that. But I think unfortunately those stories are few and far in between.

Benny Rubin: Yes, for sure. For sure. So back to the business stuff. So I did a couple things in retrospect, which were really smart, which I’ve replicated a few times. One, I started doing business before I worried or even Google searched anything about how to do business. I didn’t think, “Oh, I’m going to start a business. Do I need to have a legal entity? Do I have to have a D.B.A. [doing business as]? Am I allowed as a foreigner to do business?” And I didn’t think about any of that stuff. It didn’t seem helpful. I couldn’t imagine a world where the Japanese government would bar me who had a normal work visa from taking money from Universal Music to do something. It’s just like, I didn’t even conceive that that would be a problem. Sure enough, it’s not a problem.

And one thing I hear again and again and again from people is, I really want to start a business. I really have this idea or this kind of thing that I want to do and like what should I do about my identity? What should I do about this? Let’s see about that. Well, first, read the rules of your visa because if your visa says you cannot work or you cannot do side businesses, then you need to deal with that. But if you have a regular work visa and you’re allowed to accept money for doing work, you probably can accept money doing work.

David McNeill: At the beginning, you were not as focused about that point, which I think is a really great piece of advice in terms of not letting that stand in your way, but I imagine eventually you had to put something more formal around it.

Benny Rubin: I did, but the only reason why I did that was, at the time, the only reason why I did that was taking on project after project after project. I put all my effort into sales and sales meeting, setting up meetings with people, going to events where I can meet them, pitching them, making a proposal and pitching it. And at the time it was all social media content writing, which was something that was all relatively easy to execute and I could build a little bit of infrastructure around so I wasn’t writing all the content myself. Having friends helped me write it and stuff like that. And then the prices were set and they were monthly, which is nice for building a business. I mean the social media content business is one that I continue to do this day and anyone can basically do it. So it’s pretty universal, I think pretty much everyone understands what you do with social media content writing. Now it’s sort of old, at the time it was very new. I was definitely one of the first people in Tokyo that was making a business out of this.

I wasn’t charging ad agency rates — just incredibly high amounts because ad agencies tend to charge a lot for most things. To take a step back, what happened was I started taking on clients and I started to make money. I was making, you know, $2,000 a month, $3,000 a month, $4,000 a month, $5,000 a month, $6,000 a month. And I think right around like $7,000 a month, I was realizing that I could barely keep up with operations and sales at the same time and I was just sort of had piles of stuff all over my tiny bedroom and I was just like, this is crazy. At that time I convinced my friend Connor, who was with me at the bottom of our class at Japanese school to quit his job at the consulting firm he was working for in San Francisco and join me remotely to help me manage this business.

So with him, we continued to do record label work, which was really fun and interesting and exciting. And then we started to do social media content for ad agencies. Working under ad agencies was great for me because ad agencies typically are very rational in the way that they’re handling their resources. So it’s very clear why they’re hiring you to help them with social media content, and it’s very clear what they expect. And they have very high standards but always manageable standards, at least in my experience, always manageable standards, and they have the infrastructure inside their organization to check your work before it goes to the client. With that setup, I could focus my sales less on just anyone in their company who would talk to me and focus on 10, 15, 20 agencies that said, “Yeah, we will have content writing projects now or coming up, let’s talk about how we can work together.” And so for them, the same thing about your posts per month we deliver the content to you, you add the creative or whatever is that needs to happen before you present to the client. And then eventually it gets approved and posted up on the page. And so we did that for a while, which was fun.

And then we started to get this idea that we wanted to do some sort of tech product. So we looked to sell all of our contracts. We sell this content writing business and we found a buyer in Japan, one of the companies that was a bigger agency than us and we sold it. This is after three, four years of doing business. We’re not talking a huge scale business, we’re talking under half a million dollars a year in business with two full-timers, a whole herd of freelancers that were helping us write the content. And then eventually we added one software guy who was helping us build this software that we were hell-bent on building.

David McNeill: How did you end up hiring so many freelancers and finding them and also the developer that was working with you?

Benny Rubin: The developer, we found… man, I cannot remember. I think we posted on Hacker News website or something like that. And he just responded. The freelancers came from originally from knowing exactly what I wanted out of a freelancer and asking people that I’d met at the very, very early networking events that I went to. I remember one of the first people I asked to help me with the project was a guy named Owen, and I remember I met Owen at the first or second expat networking event type thing that I ever went to. So you sort of go from there and then, “Hey, do you know anyone who can help with this, you know, help with that?” And I find that people who are living in foreign countries who are young always need side income and probably it’s the same thing for people living in anywhere in the world. They always need side income and things like, “Hey, help me with Justin Bieber’s social media” is the exactly the kind of thing where they’re happy to do.

David McNeill: Yeah, that’s an easy sell.

Benny Rubin: It’s a relatively easy sell. Everyone is interested in entertainment, so I did that. The other thing is, I would actually ask my clients or potential clients in sales meetings, “Yeah, this is what we do.” “Well, how do you get the content?” “Oh, I have a network of freelancers that I rely on.” Oftentimes the conversation can go in that direction and I could just ask them, “Do you have any friends that want to help me write social media content?” And oftentimes it would be, “Yeah, you know, my friend Nina just arrived in Japan and needs help, was looking for work and in the meantime, I’m sure she’ll do it” or, you know, “My friend Mika can help” or stuff like that. So that’s a good way to sort of build that out. And this is again, before really Elance or oDesk [now known as Upwork] or whatever, all these things were popularly being used. So it was a lot of networking and asking for introductions to build it.

So we sold the business and we were like, “We are total geniuses. We successfully built a small business. We successfully sold the small business. Holy crap, we will be successful, whatever we do next.” And that’s when we decided to software, which did not go anywhere. The only thing it did was it brought us to San Francisco, which was interesting to the extent that I didn’t like it at all. And we raised some money. We did not find the idea that would take us anywhere significant, and then we ended up having to shut it down.

David McNeill: But why did you decide to leave Tokyo to do that? Was it more about wanting to be in Silicon Valley and having, you know, as a tech product you can be in the best spot or wanting to move back to the U.S.? What was your driving force there?

Benny Rubin: So there’s a couple of layers to it. One is that I did have the feeling that San Francisco was where it’s at and I wanted to be there and sort of check that out, which in retrospect made a lot of sense to me at the time. In the grand scheme of things, it did not actually make that much sense. There was a lot going on, but a lot of it didn’t pertain to me. And I don’t think I’m going to choose a place to live ever again based on perceived hotness. In other words, I’m not really into crypto, but let’s say I was really into crypto and things are really bumping in Switzerland. I think I would really second guess a move to Switzerland because the thing I’m interested in seems to be popping over there.

I think that as I get a little bit older, and not that I’m old in the grand scheme of things, as I get a little bit older, I start to realize that you can make your own force of gravity or your own community wherever you are. So music, you might say, “Oh, all these amazing innovations are happening in San Francisco, but how can I make that kind of thing happen here?” It’s actually a pretty logical way to think. But at the time I thought Tokyo is kind of a backwater for tech. All the interesting stuff is happening in San Francisco. Connor is in San Francisco — he was my partner. That’s the place we’re going to go and like really make this happen.

David McNeill: Ah right. Yeah, he was over there. That makes sense.

Benny Rubin: Yeah, he was over there. We worked on a venture in Tokyo where he was flying in all the time. Okay, now I’ll fly out there and we’ll make this happen.

Now the sort of nitty-gritty is to how it worked didn’t work out and what we ended up accomplishing or not accomplishing actually is relatively irrelevant. Bottom line is we raised some money, we’ve earned some money, we did a really nice accelerator, we made a lot of nice connections, good friends and through that process I learned the value of doing social media content well again, and I learned the value of doing sales process stuff, which I now help companies with. And I also, I figured out that I’m not that happy working on stuff that the underlying substance is boring to me.

David McNeill: Right. That’s a big point.

Benny Rubin: So now I’m back working in the music industry, working on music-related stuff, art-related stuff, and I’m much happier and find that to be much more fulfilling than making a lot more money doing, let’s say, things that I find to be not super exciting or boring. It’s tough because, as you sort of get experience working, it’s easy to see how as you get older, things that you thought were boring before now become interesting. So for example, you’re really interested in, let’s say you’re young and you’re like, “Oh, my friend Tom is selling sweaters online and he’s making a boatload of money. That sounds awesome. I want to make a bunch of money.” So then you’re like, I really like Legos. I’m going to be a Lego reseller online. And you’re like, great. So you’re really into these Lego models. You’re collecting, you’re selling, you’re selling things are going great.

The Lego business is sort of tapering off, but now you really know how to do e-commerce really well. So you set up an eCommerce sales company and you’re still running your Lego thing on the side, and then you get asked to be a consultant on eCommerce project that’s for the next iPhone cases and you’re like, “Well, I know a lot of eCommerce, that’s pretty fun. I don’t really care about iPhone cases, but whatever.” And then one thing leads to another and you find yourself working at an eCommerce agency, setting up a machine parts eCommerce store that sells to farmers who need replacement axles for their tractors. And like the progression was very smooth, it went from, I think, you’re really interested into selling the thing, you’re really interested to the infrastructure for setting up the thing, you’re really interested to just selling for selling sake because that’s where your expertise led you and the paycheck was pretty good. That’s sort of happened to me in a way over the last few years — I was just like, “Oh, this is logical. It makes sense.” And then at a certain point, I was like, “Oh, I actually ended up floating out doing something that isn’t that exciting for me.” It doesn’t even relate to Japan, which is something that I love.

David McNeill: Yeah. Do you still miss Japan? And how do you view your time there and especially as you compare it to your life now back in New York the second time?

Benny Rubin: I want to move back to Japan for sure. I don’t have a good reason to or a good idea on what I want to do when I’m back. I have a few ideas. I could always start some sort of agency type thing because I understand how that thing works. I’m sure you could do the same thing as well. You find clients that make sense, that are interested in expanding their business in Japan. You figure out a monthly retainer that makes sense for services you can provide. You set it up and you’re off to the races.

The cost of living is much less in Japan — even in Tokyo, I could easily get by on, if I had, you know, after saving for retirement, over $4,000 a month, I’d probably be fine. In New York, I would say, depending on your situation and depending on a lot of factors, you might need as much as double that just to feel like, okay, you know, the ground’s not going to move from underneath my feet. And maybe some of your listeners would think that’s absurd — “I am sure I could do it in much less,” and they probably can. Just depends on how aggressively you want to be saving and how much risk is in your business. But in my case, it’s tough to imagine if my income slid down to $4,000 a month I wouldn’t be running for cover basically or running to a bank to get like an emergency loan or something.

So I definitely think a lot about Japan. For me, Japan is, it’s my 20’s and my feelings about Japan are mixed up with my feelings of just being in my 20’s and everything being new and exciting. So I still see Japan as like really new and exciting and a place where things can happen, and a place where I’m really comfortable and I feel like I have a lot of friends and I can get stuff done. And what I’m trying really hard to do is turn New York into a place that I feel that same way. But Japan, definitely Tokyo especially has like a very romantic hold on me, and I continue to study Japanese and I continue to plan my trips to Japan. I’m going to go again in a few months and probably again towards the end of the year. I want to figure out what my next thing will be, whether it’s continue to work in music technology stuff that I’m doing now. And my thing will be helping to grow the company that I’m working with most now. Or will it be something separate that I do.

David McNeill: Is it strange to go back and put yourself back in that scenario where you did spend your 20s there and you have those memories, those experiences that are so, that you’re so fond of and are so integral to your soul, to your spirit, to your personality, and then to go back and visit and realize that you’re not living there and you’re seeing the old spots and it’s cool, but it’s got that nostalgia from the old time, for better or worse? I mean, this is kind of my fear of visiting Japan again actually after having been away for, I guess a year and a half now, is I’d like to see it again, but there’s some part of me that’s a little bit not as excited about doing what I like to call the “greatest hits tour” where I just see the old spots today that I loved back in the day, if you will, which was only a year and a half ago. But, I think that the time flavors that experience in the way that you view it.

Benny Rubin: I do think a lot about that. I actually wrote a song that sums up that feeling, which I would not take the guitar and play right now, but as soon as I haven’t recorded it I’ll send it to separately.

David McNeill: Nice.

Benny Rubin: I have a slightly different feeling on it now because I have gone back and like walk the same streets and like felt that. And also I work at a company that does a lot of stuff in V.R. [virtual reality]. So I’ve just put on an Oculus [Rift] and went to Google Street View and just walked around all the neighborhoods in Tokyo that I love.

David McNeill: That’s cool.

Benny Rubin: So if you have access to an Oculus, I recommend you do it because what will happen is you’ll feel all this stuff and then you won’t build any anxiety around it. You’ll actually almost do like a therapy session where you’re like, “Here I am standing in front of my old apartment. This feels weird, but I kind of get it.” And then you sort of realize like, you know, I actually do want to go back and like, I like Tokyo for these reasons and it’ll be fun. That was actually really helpful to me.

David McNeill: Cool. Yeah, I’ll have to go out and try it.

Benny Rubin: If you can borrow an Oculus and just fly around Tokyo, you’ll get over a lot of those weird feelings and start to realize the food’s amazing. There’s so many interesting people. There’s so much weird stuff going on that’s exciting. There’s so many cool alleyways and corners and stuff that excite me. There’s so many cool bookstores that are just unlike anything I have here or whatever.

The other thing that I’ve sort of think about a lot is, I was really anxious in my 20s. I had a lot of anxiety and I was really effective work-wise. I got a lot of emails sent. I got a lot of meetings done. I made a lot of connections. I made a good amount of money. Well, I wasn’t really focused on really enjoying myself, so part of me kind of wants to move back to Japan and repeat all the stuff I did in my 20s again, but this time really enjoy it. And I’m enjoying the day-to-day life in New York much, much more. And I did in many ways of living in Japan. For example, I remember being, let’s say 25 or 26 even, which isn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but, and I think I was at a park, like Inogashirakōen [Inogashira Park] or something like that with Cheiko, who’s now my wife — I’ve been with her for 10, 11 years, so it’s always the same person — and I remember seeing like cherry blossoms. There’s something just really amazing. There’s a beautiful lake there. It’s a nice spot. There’s like a little yakitori [grilled meat] spot that’s like right by the entrance of the lake, I’m sure you’ve been there.

David McNeill: Yes.

Benny Rubin: And the middle like Kichijōji, it’s a really nice spot. And it’s not a nice spot in the sense of like manicured lawns — it’s nice in the sense that it’s a place where families will go and they’re walking around with their kids and there’s just stuff happening there. And I remember just being totally worried about like an email that a client had sent or oh, you know, next week I’ve so many morning meetings, I have to make sure that I get up early enough. And I don’t remember what but I just remember not being like, man, I’m in Tokyo, the sakura [cheery blossoms] are in bloom. But like here I am at a lake, walking between eating lunch and going to like a movie or whatever I was doing. And I have so many memories where there’s a layer of anxiety that’s layered on top of my other experiences, which I think is totally natural. I didn’t have an employer, I didn’t have time off. I didn’t have space. I didn’t have experience working in the place that I was working in. I didn’t have a financial nest egg. I had nothing. And I was like putting it all on myself to do this stuff. So, part of me can imagine the next time I am living in Japan is being much more free feeling. And even if I have a high-pressure job, I’m older now, I’m better equipped to handle pressure. I’ve experienced more being fired by clients.

David McNeill: Right.

Benny Rubin: Being hired by clients and then being fired by clients, and like all things that you worry about. Like even to the extent that if today I opened up my inbox after we talked today and every single one of my clients unceremoniously cut off my contract, I would actually know what to do.

David McNeill: Well, it’s a matter of experience. Right?

Benny Rubin: Exactly. So part of me is excited about the idea of going back to Japan or Tokyo in some extent and rebuilding a whole new set of memories and experiences better than the ones I had when I was there in my 20s. Does that make sense?

David McNeill: Yeah, absolutely. Were there any particular Japanese rules and regulations that caught you by surprise as a new business owner in Japan?

Benny Rubin: I was surprised at how many small tax filings there were. There are a lot of papers that get mailed to you, things that have to be deposited at banks at certain times. So every month by the 10th of the month you have to file this one kind of withholding tax based on how much you paid out to freelance workers and this in this way.

So one thing that I noticed that a lot of not totally small-time business people did was they had someone on staff that was basically helping them keep all these papers and stuff together. Accounting firms in the grand scheme of things are not that expensive. Maybe they’ll cost you U.S. equivalent of $200 per month and then a couple of thousand dollars for different annual filings. That stuff is really important. Not because if you mess it up, you’re going to go to jail or something. That’s not really how it works. It’s requires a lot of maintenance. It’s almost like if you had a new email address set up, but you totally forgot to check it, and three months you opened it and you realize that there was just a ton of emails and that like really had to be taken care of. That’s what it’s like if you don’t stay on top of that stuff, one day you will realize that you’re late on like seven different things and oh my gosh, like what’s this thing and what’s that thing? So that’s one thing that always took me by surprise.

The other thing that took me by surprise for many years, even though it shouldn’t have, was city tax, which they invoice you at a random time. It seemed random, at least for something like 10% of your total income for the previous year. Do you remember that?

David McNeill: Now that you mentioned it, vaguely, but I had completely forgotten about it, and I think, I mean I was only in Japan for a total of two years at the end of the day. And I think it was one of those that I did have to settle up. Like eventually I realized I had to pay it after the first year and then I had to settle up some amount by the time that I left.

Benny Rubin: In other words, you have to take care for the money that hits your personal bank account, especially that you have some amount of savings devoted to taxes. And it can be as much as 10% of all the money that you’re paid. That kind of thing is one that going in, just keep in mind that Japan is basically a socialist country and there’s a lot of social services that you’re afforded, many of which you don’t really access that well as a foreign person but are part of the social safety net. And taking 10 or 15 or even 20% of all the money you earn and saving it, not for your retirement or anything, but basically just to cover unexpected tax things is probably a good idea. And of course, now that I’m older, I know that already because there’s always surprising things that I have to pay for my business that I started in New York as well. Just because I’m not used to the ebb and flow of things yet, but that definitely always took me by surprise.

Full-time employees versus contractors, that’s also another big one. If you’re starting a business and you’re not fully confident with the way that you think it will flow and run, try to keep people on contracts to protect yourself from employees that you can’t let go of or have trouble with. So that’s not the most friendly way to run a business, and people really want to be full-timers with full employee benefits, but that can also weigh on you heavily.

The other one is leases in Japan are a little more flexible than they are in places like New York. But there are share offices and things like that, too, so those can obviously be a good deal. I definitely borrowed — I’ve made friends with people who had extra office space and always rented extra office space so I wouldn’t have to have a whole lease for my office.

David McNeill: Are there any things about setting up a business or actually running a business that you’ve found to be perhaps more difficult as a foreigner than if you were a Japanese citizen or local Japanese person?

Benny Rubin: In Japan particularly, you likely won’t be able to get a business credit card. The way that we got around this was very simple. I applied for a credit card separate from the one that I normally had. And I just use that for business stuff and I just told my accountant, like, “This card is only being used for business stuff, so if it’s on this card, then it’s for business stuff.” There’s nothing wrong with that and it’s totally acceptable to do that.

The other thing is that if you have experience running a business or dreams and ideas about running a business in the States where you hear about CEOs who cut themselves huge bonuses or CEOs who basically empty the bank account at the end of the year into their personal bank account, that’s not how it works in Japan. As CEO or president or whatever you want to say, the head of the company — the daihyōtorishimariyaku, the shachō you set your salary once per year and you cannot change your salary. You cannot give yourself a bonus. If you do give yourself a bonus, it is then taxed at an incredibly high rate. So the way that most businesses in Japan operate is the president is allowed to expense a lot of things — a lot, a lot, a lot of things. So your apartment might be expensed or paid for directly by the company. If you have an automobile, it may be your food, etc. all the way up to a very, very high amount would be paid for by the company and you would be paying yourself a salary. If you set yourself, you can only, I think you typically could only set your salary once per year, so basically you have to do some pretty serious financial planning, at least cash flow planning if you want to be able to maximize how much money you’re taking out of the business and making sure you have enough money in your business to make it function. So that’s definitely something that I am really grateful that in the States we don’t have to worry about. If I have a total windfall year this year with some minor ramifications, but very few, I can take a big chunk of money out of my business and put it into my personal savings and pat myself on the back. That’s a lot less easy to do in Japan.

David McNeill: In terms of setting up your business when you’re registering it, did you spend a lot of time about if it would be a kabushikigaisha or goudougaisha or, I don’t know, any other no particular ways that you thought about how you should organize or incorporate your business?

Benny Rubin: So, I didn’t. From when I was younger, I knew that the simplest way to operate a business when you’re getting started is a sole proprietorship that has no structure. You just charge money, you get paid, deal with it. So that’s how I started.

When I went to form a company, I just wanted to be able to have a stock split that made sense and one of the most flexible kind of company I could have. We ended up transferring ownership of our company to a U.S. entity that we set up. And then we ended up selling the Japanese branch of the company to another company in Japan. So we ended up setting up a K.K. or kabushikigaisha and not thinking that much about the differences between the other kinds of companies. The truth is, at the time — and this is something you should definitely check with an accountant if you’re going to be setting up a company — they told me that there would be no tax difference between $300,000 of revenue, whether you have a company or not. So until you earn $300,000 a year there’s almost no difference between running it as a sole proprietor. “I’m Benny, here’s my business card” and “I’m Benny CEO of blah, blah, blah, here’s my business card.” Beyond that, then I guess the tax is getting lighter if you are a company, that’s what I was told. It might be different now, who knows, tax laws change all the time. If you’re really just a guy who’s really good at doing something and you can do it well, you probably don’t need a whole K.K. to do it.

David McNeill: Okay. Yep. That’s really good advice.

Benny Rubin: You can get your business pretty far along before you roll it into a K.K. with very few implications. Now, if you want to take investment capital, if you want to do this, that’s the other thing, okay, then maybe you need a K.K. But you can basically wait until the very last second to form your K.K., you can even have investors lined up, clients paying you all this stuff. And then right when you’re ready to take the investment money at that exact moment, you go to your company’s set up expert and you get it set up. Now you can do it on your own, I did not want to deal with that. I don’t think that I would, even now, I think I would hire an expert on that.

David McNeill: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you mentioned that there are a lot of other expats in Japan that are able to do business, whether that’s their own or perhaps you know, working for their company in English or primarily in English. What sort of businesses do you think make most sense in that scenario given that in your case you’re actually able to utilize strong language skills to be successful?

Benny Rubin: There’s two types of businesses that generally make sense. Any sort of skills you have from your home country or that you learned elsewhere you can use in a setting in Japan. So in the case of you and I, we sort of have the marketing skills. We might have editorial skills, we might have actual nuts-and-bolts, social media management or advertising, you know, digital advertising skills. All those skills are useful to every international ad agency, every company that’s internationally-minded. A layer on top of that might be, well, most of our company operates in this other language. So you need to operate in that language or you can’t do it. There’s always companies that, “Oh, it doesn’t matter if you don’t speak the language. Actually it’s run by a guy named Benny who, you know, they communicate with you as long as you know how to do digital advertising in a pretty high level. You can operate here fine.” That’s an example of jobs that I fine to do without a high level of language skill.

Now, using that in a very domestic setting, that’s when language skill becomes very, very important. In other words, if you want to be a marketing director of a domestic Japanese company, you probably need to speak it really well. If you want to be the person who’s doing the international advertising, who’s reporting to an English speaking marketing director, maybe your language skills aren’t that important.

Now, depending on your ability, age, ideas, etc., there are a lot of international companies in Japan that are less language-sensitive that you could work in. In other words, there are companies like Nike, Adidas, Puma, etc., where they ended up having a lot of people coming and going from the company, from overseas offices, etc. And the most important part of your job might not be your ability to communicate well in Japanese. The most important part of your job might be your ability to liaise with international artists or sportsmen as they come through town. And in that case, then no one’s going to really say, well, he can’t speak Japanese that well. So that’s in the early days, and as you want to move up in a company, your ability to speak the language will increase in importance. You’ll likely hit a wall where your lack of language ability will hurt you. And don’t underestimate how hard it is to learn a language when you’re working full-time, to learn a language to proficient level while you’re working full-time.

David McNeill: Absolutely. That’s a different story as well. No doubt.

Benny Rubin: You and I both had the luxury of getting a lot of our studying done before we started working.

David McNeill: Yeah, that’s absolutely true.

Benny Rubin: Which is a true luxury.

David McNeill: Yep.

Benny Rubin: So if you’re a student right now and you’re listening to this and you’re really interested in a certain foreign country and you think their language is going to be key to unlocking opportunities in that country, take full advantage of your time now to study. Take full advantage of it because the second you really start working, work stress and that balance could make it very difficult to progress as quickly as you want to.

David McNeill: Absolutely. Well, do you have any other advice for people that are interested into Japan?

Benny Rubin: I hear a lot of people complain about Japan while they’re there as if there are doors that can’t be opened, opportunities that can be unlocked, things that can’t be experienced because you’re not Japanese. In my experience, I have not felt that in my experience — this idea that Japan is a monoculture. It’s been debunked many times.

But the thing that strikes me most about living in Japan is how unique the experience of everyone there is. And something pervasive, especially in a place like Tokyo, is the feeling of isolation from the things around you. In other words, everybody walks through the department store every day because it’s attached to the train station. There is a boardroom in the mall that manages the mall and you might want to do a project with the people who own that mall. You being born or not foreign is not the determining factor whether you one day make a right instead of a left, take the executive elevator up to the 8th floor and go and have the meeting with the head of the mall to sell them whatever it is that you’re trying to sell them or work with them on whatever you’re trying to work on. It’s not your foreignness or not foreignness that’s preventing that from happening. Some might argue that it is. In my experience, that wasn’t the determining factor. I’ve never found myself in a scenario where I couldn’t get into somewhere that I want to do something, but when I used my Japanese coworker, I was magically able to. There are scenarios where there’s just obviously like, “Oh, you’re foreign. Sorry, you’re not welcome here.” That happens often in housing and other places like that, but when it comes to business, I found it to be a relatively level playing field.

David McNeill: That’s great to hear. How can our listeners find out more about you and what you’re currently up to?

Benny Rubin: If listeners have any specific questions, they can email me directly. That’s totally fine, I’ll do my best to answer. My best email is b@bennyrubin.com. Send me emails, questions, etc. Try not to send me questions of things that could easily be Googled to be found out. There’s sort of a tendency of people to do that, which is kind of funny. I mean, I understand the urge to do that.

I would say that if you haven’t been to Japan, you should go. You can go for a lot cheaper than you imagine. Airbnb is a thing now and you can find pretty relatively inexpensive lodgings, you can even find relatively inexpensive tickets to get to Japan from wherever you are because now the Chinese airlines and other airlines have these like crazy long flights that will get you there. So it’ll be like $800, but it’ll take you like tons of hours. Definitely go and check it out.

Don’t be afraid to talk to foreign people. Don’t be afraid to tap someone in the shoulder and ask a question. Don’t afraid to reach out to people like me and say, “Hey, I’m really into anime, do you know anyone in the anime industry that will talk with me?” I probably, I might. Yeah. “Hey, I’m really into music, are there music people I can talk with?” Probably there are. “Hey, I’m learning advertising in the university and I want to get a job at agency. Is there anyone that I can talk with about that?” There probably is. Don’t create structures in your mind that are insurmountable.

David McNeill: Right. Just go after it.

Benny Rubin: Yeah. Just go after it, and you can send me an email anytime to ask. Worst case scenario, I’ll respond with a short, terse answer. Best case scenario, you know, I can figure out a way to help you in some way.

David McNeill: Yeah, and people are really willing to help. And I think your point before about following up with folks after you meet them after you interact with them in person online, whatever it might be, is really important. And that’s, to me, that’s the biggest part. And I made a point to do that in my career, it’s helped out a lot. And now whenever I help out other people I say, yeah, I’ll definitely help, here’s my connection or whatever I need to do to help them to get to the next step. But please let me know how things turn out because you just, you know, as the person who’s trying to help someone else, you also want to see how the story works and keep that relationship strong. Right?

Benny Rubin: Yeah. And another thing because like people like you and I, we’ve been around a while. My hunch is that there’s a lot of young people who probably have relatively high language ability or the ability to learn language pretty well because of YouTube and all these things that help them out. Soft skills — I don’t know if they’re called soft skills anymore — the ability to write a short email that’s clear, don’t overlook things like that. The ability to ask someone for something in a very clear, direct manner. That’s not too rude and not have an air of entitlement. That’s pretty important. If I got an email from someone who listened to this and said, “I’m going to be in Japan from this date to this date and I’m really into the arts, is there anyone I can talk with that you think would be great? Attached is my C.V., I’m studying Art, History at Northwestern University.” That’s a very easy thing for me to help with. Sure. You should. You know what? You can talk to my friend, blah, blah. I’ll put you guys in touch if the time works out you guys could get coffee or get lunch or connect via phone or whatever. That’s super easy, nine times out of 10 a request I get or a question I get, not because I’m like super important, just because you know a question, it’ll be very convoluted and very confusing and it’ll be really difficult for me to just forward it on to someone and say, you know, meet up.

David McNeill: Yeah. The “forwardability” of the email is vital. That’s a good way to put it.

Benny Rubin: For sure. And a clear ask. So with that in mind, like, you know, if you’re going to be pursuing, reaching out to expats in whatever world you’re going after, just learn to make a really clear ask.

David McNeill: Thank you so much for talking to us today, Benny. I really appreciate your insights — I am sure our listeners do as well — and look forward to hearing from you soon. Benny Rubin: Thank you.

Outro

Thanks to Benny for sharing his story with us. You can find the full transcript from today’s episode at expatempire.com.

Music on this episode was produced by Eli Hermit, please check him out on Bandcamp and Spotify.

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Originally published at https://expatempire.com on November 4, 2019.