Now I'm planning my move to my eighth country. So I've lived in seven countries. I'm going to Paraguay at the end of the month. So while I'm working online, I'm traveling the world. Welcome back to the Art of Connecting Podcast. This is your host here, Haydynn Fike, back with another episode for you. And Haydynn today we have someone who I was actually just recently introduced to, which is Alek. And, Alek, we're super excited to have you here today. How are you doing? Thanks so much. I'm doing great. How are you? Good. You can't see it on the audio here, but Alek is, you're in Brazil, right? It's like dark there. Yeah, it's seven o'clock in the evening and here we're in the middle of the spring. We're about to enter the summer. It's still cold. Keep in mind that this is the Southern Atlantic Ocean. So it may seem like good idea if to go in there, but it's really not. As you can tell, there is nobody in the water because the water here is choppy and cold, and you, you'll feel like there's a thousand needles piercing your skin if you there because now it's meant to be a hot time. But Haydynn really the Southern Atlantic Ocean is not your friend. So, Alek, why don't you go ahead and just introduce yourself to the audience and tell people a little bit about who you are and what you do? Well Haydynn my name is Alexey Bashtovenko. I'm originally from Russia. I was born in the Soviet union in 1987. I moved to the United States in 1998 with my parents and I became an American citizen in 2007. Two years later, I graduated from college. I majored in philosophy, and as you can tell, in 2009, I had nothing going for me economically. The economy collapsed, I lived in Detroit, there was no, nothing to celebrate there, nothing to smile about, so what did I do? I went on craigslist. org, and I used the only skill that I had, academic writing. I just began literally posting ads, saying like, I will write your papers for you. I will do your homework for you. And the business really took off by 2014. I ended up meeting another fellow blogger. Fellow writer Aaron Clary, who calls himself Captain Capitalist, and he really helped me promote my business. He connected me with a lot of excellent clients, a lot of potential writers. I've been in lots and lots of podcasts, and one of these podcasts that I've been in is called The Stark Truth. with Robert Stark. That's where I met Keith Preston, who was the top writer in my company at Academic Composition. Keith Preston is a professor of sociology and he owns a blog called attackthesystem. com. I've been working with Keith for the last 10 years. I've hired many different people that we then And now it's been 10 years since I found Keith. In 2019, I have expatriated. I have left the United States. I went to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. I learned some basic Spanish. Then I went to Spain where I spent the pandemic. I went to Spain at the end of 2019. I, I then Haydynn spent a year and a half there. Could not get residency there because Spain is just not a country that easily accepts newcomers, but not especially, not if you're not willing to pay taxes. Spain is a very high tax country. And then I left Spain. I went to Rio de Janeiro. I been there for six months. I did not like it a whole lot. And so I decided to go back to Europe spent three months in Serbia and Montenegro each. Thereafter, I realized that the former Yugoslavia was just not the place to be, that too many people support Putin and his war on Ukraine. And by the way, this is a symbol of Ukraine, Ukrainian Trident, the three people, the three founders of Kiev. I came back to Brazil. I went to Santa Catarina where I am now. This is Florianopolis, Kanesverus, north of the island. I found my dog here on the same beach. Kanesverus. Now I'm planning my move to my eighth country. So I've lived in seven countries. I'm going to Paraguay at the end of the month. So while I'm working online, I'm traveling the world. I am I'm learning foreign languages. I've become fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, and Spanish much more so than in Portuguese. And I'll be living in Paraguay, starting November 26th. We'll see what that has in store for us. So I want to talk a little bit about the business and you kind of talked about it a little bit. It sounds like you started many years ago. So I guess in 09 is when you started, correct? Correct. Yes, 2009. So what did that look like when you first got started, right? Like the, I guess there was no prospects for work, but like, what, what was the thought that went through your head to start the business? Yes. Well, there was a reason why I did that, and in 2008, I was got friends with a Romanian friend of mine, who was a preacher at a Pentecostal church. He was a philosophy student with me. He was 15 years older than I was. And he was a very image conscious guy, charismatic speaker, entertainer, chatty as ever. He knew how to talk, he did not know how to listen, and of course he cared about his image, but he did not care about his intellect or his brain health or anything of that nature. So he hired me to do his work. He hired me to do, to get his master's degree done online. And he was the owner of his image. He was doing it to appear smarter and more accomplished than he really was. And then I realized, huh. So this friend of mine is a real, let's just call him by what he is. He's just an utterly morally deplorable individual, preacher, hypocrite, sanctimonious as ever, and he was trying to squeeze me, he was trying to pay me five dollars a page. So I told him that he was done. That I have nothing more to offer him. And then I realized, huh, since he sees talent in the academic talent, who else does? So let me just go on craigslist. org and let me go offer that service. And surely enough, I got plenty of interested customers who are more than happy to pay me much better than. So I went to college and college was a tough time for me because I, I do not enjoy sitting down and doing assignments. It's just very much something that I don't like doing. So, I use a lot of different resources to get through school that many different teachers would consider cheating. So like, is what you do, like, is it considered cheating? Like if you have someone else help write your paper for you? Pretty much, but the reality is that professors would like to think of themselves as the modern day Catholic preachers of our society. They were sanctimonious, they were pretentious, they were preggish. They're here to tell you that the, they're, they're going to impose their woke morality upon you, that they will tell you who, who you are, that your gender fluid, that race is a social construct, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And society has given on the middle finger. The recent elections have shown that the recent elections are shown more and more, that professors are not the moral authority on anything. And that yeah, they say it's cheating, but it's not a crime. You'll never have problems with the police for that. And guess what? Should you feel guilty about it? Well, no, you should not. Because 99 percent of the stuff that you're supposed to study in college has zero relevance for your practical life. We have a lot of clients who are nurses, who are doctors, who are lawyers, who are civil engineers and most of what we do is stuff related to what now? History, English, literature, political science, woke indoctrination, propaganda for why the Democrats are wonderful and Republicans are horrible. So yeah if you think that this stuff is a waste of your time and you do not respect the moral authority of your professors. And you think that cheating on them is not such a bad thing? Look up www. academiccomposition. com. Is it cheating? Yeah, so they say at the universities and so on. Who cares? That's very funny. Yeah, I made it through college with a lot of different resources. That, you know, would probably be considered cheating by some of the professors that I had, but I was just talking with a very successful business founder here in the office that I work in. And he was talking about, he went to Alabama and he was like, we were just chatting. I was like. Did you go to college? And he was like, yeah, I went to college. It's like, it was like, it was, it was a four year vacation, but he was like, it taught, it gave me enough time to be able to, I guess, decide what I wanted to do. I told him the same thing. It was kind of like, I learned, I actually did learn a little bit in college, but I feel like I could have done what I did in a year or two rather than four. So I've had this similar experience. Mark Twain famously said do not ever let your your school and interfere with your education And that's the point that real the real education comes in college from network And if you if you're lucky enough to go to an elite college, you'll meet a lot of people who truly do belong to the upper class and then if you're that lucky you may end up in DC Where I lived for 10 years And there, I've met a lot of lobbyists, government regulators, bureaucrats, the unions, and that's the point of college, to get you the right connections. That's what education is actually about. Now, if you think that your education has something to do with what now, how well you write your academic papers, no, that's a mistake. That's something that you need to outsource. Do you think that a congressman or whatever that you admire and look up to actually writes his own speeches? No, he uses ghostwriters. That's what we are, ghostwriters. Do you think that, that he came up with all these great ideas that you associate with him? Say, Ronald Reagan government is the problem, not the solution. Did Ronald Reagan write that? No. Ronald Reagan is a trained actor. He, he knows how to take credit for the things that he says. But the reality is that somebody else does the thinking for him, the writing. Especially after he suffered the second assassination attempt. So, whatever it is that you may associate with, say, Bill Clinton, who said, Oh, it's the economy stupid. I guarantee you that Bill Clinton did not come up with that phrase. That whatever comes out of Donald Trump's mouth has been written by a ghostwriter. And not just one, a team of them. And that's what we're here for. We're here to get people through these unnecessary hurdles. Unnecessary interferences. Unnecessary bureaucratic roadblocks. That bureaucrats themselves put on their place to exploit you. Oh, cheating. Who are they to say what's cheating and what's not? I just don't, don't buy that. So you mentioned something that perfectly aligns with really the reason my podcast exists, and you talked about how college is really about Just going and building your network. It's not even really about what you learn. It's about who you meet. What, what has your experience been with, you know, networking and meeting the right people? Well, like I said, I have a client, my first client that I met, I'll call him Marius, who's from Romania and that's his actual name. He was a preacher at a church. He was the biggest hypocrite I've ever met, but he was my first customer and see, I'm thankful for my college experience. There I met Marius, and Marius was the co author of my first book, as Marius believed in me. That I was a great thinker, that I was an intellectual that he admired and looked up to. And he hired me. He taught me how to make a living. He paid me little, but he showed me the door, and I walked through. And then I thought, well, since Marius is such a shyster, with his usual shyster grin, he likes to manipulate audiences, and he talks a lot of drivel for the sake of talking. Huh, why don't I just use what he gave me and move on with my life? And I'm thankful for him. He was the one who helped me unlock the door to my academic potential. Without that friend that I met in college, academic composition would not exist. And what are, what are some other relationships that you've seen in your time of being in the industry of like Maybe some examples of people meeting other people at a, at a high level college where a lot of big networking goes on. Well, I'll tell you that when I was in DC I lived in DC for a whole decade. I met a well-known reporter at The Intercept named Alex Hammonds. I was the captain of a chess team on the DC Chess league, and Alex Hammonds was one of my top players I've played with, with him on the same team for a whole for like three years. And Alex graduated from Yale that he was definitely a very bright guy, that he has gotten far in math. He was a government major. I think he's now a function a, an attorney in the state. I believe it is in the state of New Hampshire, if I recall correctly. And I've noticed how Alex began parroting a lot of the things that I've been telling him. That although he hated my job, he hated the industry that I'm in, that he's, he began telling me he began talking in tropes that Mark Twain articulated. That don't let college, don't let your education, your schooling interfere with your true education. Alex got into the D. C. community by virtue of his education in Yale. He knew lobbyists, politicians, regulators. He interviewed a lot of the high profile people in D. C. And he did this because he went to Yale. He had all the right connections. Now, if you ask Alex, well what, what about the quality of your education? You'd say, no, it's the quality of the indoctrination. It's the quality of putting me through the ringer. That's the quality of making me suffer. It's the quality of, of screwing over my brain. But I tolerated that I put up with this. I suffered to get the right connections. And so at the day, Alex quit the intercept, stopped being a journalist, went back to the Yale school of law to become an attorney. I believe he got his degree finally, but for him the education as he saw it was just about connections. It's just about meeting the right people who help you get ahead of you. And as far as his actual education, you'll tell he was a great math student. He got far ahead of math by virtue of his talent. He is quite articulate. The reality is that he could have done all this without any classes that he took. The real value of him going to Yale. Was getting the right connections. That's what got him into the Washington D. C. community with all the right and powerful people. Yeah. My my friend went to Yale as well he's, he's a little bit younger than I am and just recently graduated. And it's really, really fascinating because he ended up going into real estate and working for one of my other friends, Ben, and he runs their real estate management company and people told him that he was insane for wanting to go into real estate investment. To not take the hedge fund job where you can go to Yale and with the right connections, you just get three, you know, get paid 350, 000 a year, moved to New York or San Francisco and you're set up. And all these people were like, why are you going to go work for somebody for 80 grand a year to go and bust your butt when you could go and get a hedge fund job? And it's just really, really fascinating because all these kids made fun of him and it's going to be really interesting to watch Mike run circles around them as he invests in real estate and actually builds his wealth instead of just buying fancy cars and fancy houses. Well, I'll tell you something about that. And I see a parallel to an experience I had recently here in Brazil, I met with a young lady who told me all about how her whole goal in life is to be a government bureaucrat. A lot of people in Brazil south Americans think that way, that they want stability and security. AndHaydynn she sent me a message saying, hopefully we can continue talking. I said, no, I don't think so. And why is that? Well, the reason is that I've always been an entrepreneur in my whole life. Do something productive in my life. I want to make a positive difference in this world. And you're, you want to be a faceless bureaucrat, so I have to say to you, see, so your friend who was bowing out at a 350, 000 job, I think that he's making the right decision. You gotta take a risk, you've gotta, you've gotta be open to it. Possibility that you're going to have to sacrifice your security for your freedom and there is nothing more important in this life than freedom. I agree completely. So, when you, so you started your business and you, you met this friend that, Helped you write a book you said? Did you end up writing a book together? That's right. Yeah, the book is called Poverty of Conventionalism. It's a rather terribly written book. It was published in 2007 when I was 19 years old and this friend came up with the idea of just making the argument that you should, instead of following a religion, you should study philosophy. So we did that, we critiqued various books and philosophy together and I did most of the writing and then he just had the brilliant idea that he's just gonna pay me slave wages to get his whole master's degree and he almost got there until I offloaded him and told him, you know what, I think you can find better paying customers because you are here the parasite of me and take advantage of me as you do so many other people. That's who you are, and I'm moving on. So, what does business today look like for, like, what you guys are doing, and how many customers you're helping, and things like that? Well, it's looking well, surprisingly. I thought chat GPT was going to bore us out of business. The reality is that it's not so easy. If you're going to use AI to do academic writing, you're not going to get far. First of all, you'll get busted for AI use. You'll have a lot of problems with it.HaydynnUh, you willHaydynn not understand what your professor wants. And what does business actually look like? Well, what we do is that we log into student accounts all the time. And we, we log into clients classes and we do them and we have a weekly program. We're at 70 a week, theacademiccomposition. com. We have that two classes we can do for a little less 125 a week. We do entire dissertations and how's business different from the way it used to be. Well, now our clients are much more hands off. If our clients don't even own laptops anymore, if they do own laptops, they do not bother using them at all. They, they just log into their, on their phones, and they do not even care to check to see what their professors want. They do not even know what classes they're enrolled in. Most of the time, they just want us to log in and take care of it all for them. And they just want to pay a small weekly fee, and voila! Or if they want magic, they get magic. So I'm assuming that you've created a lot of enemies out of the system and doing this like because When I hear that Haydynn and some of my people that listen may even be in academics, I don't know you know, a lot of, a lot of my professors would look at that and be like, well, you just don't want to put in the work. Right. And I see both sides of that, right? Like you signed up to do this whole college thing and arguably, you know, you're assigned to do the work, but what is it? Have you, have you created some enemies? Have you had people that have tried to come after you for this? The reality is that no, I always thought that I'd be an enemy of the academic establishment, but they need people like us. What is the academic establishment really about? Well, money. What they want is for people to take out lots and lots of student loans that they will never be able to pay back so universities can jack up their prices boost them to the hilt and they know that they would, that the majority of the clients, the students, they accept are totally unfit to be at the university. For example, the university that I graduated from 2009 had a, had a really high acceptance rate by the standards of the time, like 35%. When I first enrolled back then in 2005, it was 25%. And by the standards of time. That was quite high. Guess what, now they accept 90 percent of the students who apply. If you look at George Mason University, they accept over 80%. University of Maryland University College is now an open admission college. George Washington University probably accepts over 60 percent of students. So, the reality is that they don't really care about academic standards. You know, what they want is to engage in virtue signaling, and posture, and to get as many minorities there, because that's what earns them brownie points with the Democrats. That's what they want and they want to have as many poorly qualified students as they possibly can. And in fact, a lot of my clients have been, have told me that they're a guidance counselor, told them to, to look for a company like mine. In fact, I'm on a short list for a lot of these guidance counselors that I have relationships with a lot of these counselors who refer a lot of their underperforming students to, to me. So if you think that professors hate me. Professors hate what we do, what we do, there's some moral authority and something. No, that's nonsense. No, we're allies. We're not enemies. They, they, they back me from my work and a lot of them have gone to work for me. For example, a lot of the writers I have are, in fact, professors at the university. There is no cognitive dissonance, a moral contradiction, there's just no such thing. So some of, some of your writers are professors at universities? Yeah, exactly. In fact, my main writer is a professor of sociology at a community college Most, like 90 percent of my writers were professors at the university. Wow. How crazy is that? So that's absolutely wild to me because I, you know, in the environment that I grew up in, I always heard, like, don't cheat, like, don't, don't, you know, don't get help. Well, not to say don't get help. People, like, the teachers want me to peer review, but they were like, You need to put your own thoughts out there and all this kind of stuff. So it's very, very fascinating to me that some of the people that write for you are professors. Cause I would, in my head, I would imagine they would be against this. Well, you're from Tennessee, is that right? Mm hmm. So I have a wonderful professor of history, write, for me. I'm not going to mention her name, but she went to the University of Vanderbilt, where she was a professor herself. And one thing I can tell you about her is that she had a very serious problem with drug abuse. And I'll call you said to let her go because she was just too crazy But she told me over and over again how she would go to AA and NA meetings Trying to recruit people she got her inspiration from Breaking Bad as you may as a lot of your viewers may know the Jesse Pinkman Went to an NA meeting to sell drugs So she got that idea that I let me go to the NA meeting and sell my academic writing services Tell everybody, like, hey, you know I'm a professor of history from Vanderbilt University. And a lot of the people that heard Shagreen, that heard just me, have gone on there to say that, ah, ah, you are the devil, you're immoral, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and she was like, the hell with you guys. I mean, if you have that religious fundamentalist mentality, you don't understand the way life is. You don't understand academia, you don't get the system, that nowadays academics are not a moral authority on anything, they're agents of degeneracy and chaos. So, of course there will be some people in the deep south, and quite a lot of them will tell you, ah, you're a cheater, you're immoral, and at the same time they want to say, oh, I love Donald Trump because he's so anti academic. It's an obvious point of contradiction, that's an obvious point of cognitive dissonance. And if you want to say that you're a Trump supporter from the deep south, andHaydynn that you are a true Christian, and you're against the academic establishment, how, why would you want to say that they're also the moral authority? And that Haydynn when they tell you that you're cheating on their system, that you should listen to them, you can't reconcile that. That's just utterly just an utterly antithetical proposition. That's fundamentally self contradictory. Something that I always struggled with while I was in school was, you know, I felt like I was wasting my time, right? Like it's, some of these assignments that I had to do, I was like just doing the same thing over and over and over again that I'd already done and it wasn't even on the test. Like it wasn't even something that I really needed to learn and, you know, going into business now, having my own, you know, I have a few businesses and, you know, it's really just been like, like I think about my accounting class, if, if you're going to be an accountant, I think accounting class is great. I knew I wasn't going to be an accountant. I pay someone 300 a month to do all my accounting. And like, I don't think about it. Right. Like, I don't want to think about it. It's not a good use of my time to think about it. So I always struggle with that in school. Like it's, you're learning all these things that at the end of the day, it's not very helpful. And I got to ask you, so you've paid some student or some academic specialist, but 300 bucks a month to do all of your busy work and accounting. And I got to wonder, huh? What have you missed out? Well, if you cheat on something, if you defraud it. The academic establishment, what is it that they lost? Where is the victim here? Who suffered as a result of your alleged mischief? What, whom have you hurt? How is society and your stuff that you get this? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at the end of the day, I got my degree, I got my paper because it's really a societal pressure, right? Like go to college, get your degree. You know, my parents were like, it's a fallback plan and my mom might listen to this but you know, it's a, it's a fallback plan in case things don't go your way. And I was like, I, there were many times where I almost dropped out. I was like, I don't want to have a fallback plan. Like I am my fallback plan. Haydynnbut at the day, I don't regret getting my degree. I met a lot of great people through the university. And I feel like at least at this point in my life, it's kind of a fun talking points. People ask, where'd you go to school? Like, oh yeah, I went to UTC. And they're like, Oh, cool. Yeah. When'd you graduate? And it's like, it's kind of a fun conversation piece, I guess, but it's definitely not something that's centric to my life at all. Well, it sounds to me that you actually heeded. And accept that wholeheartedly Mark Twain's advice that you should not let your school interfere with your education. So whatever you did at UTC, it sounds like you got educated, you learned the way of the world. Yeah. And the school and stuff is just a nuisance, a background noise, distraction, nothing more. Yeah. When I think about the four years that I spent in college, if I had spent those four years intentionally networking and working in a startup business like I am now, I can only imagine where I would be at. I'm not but I also don't want to come off as like, man, I wish I could change things because I'm everything that I did in a sequence led to me being where I am now, which is a great place that I love being. So I think we all have a reason why we go through different things we do, but yeah, I definitely wouldn't say like, you have to go to college to be successful. I think it's just a complete and total myth. Like I know so many successful people that dropped out of college or didn't go at all. Well, let me tell you something, though, that a lot of what we know about formal schooling is rote learning, that I failed Spanish, and I failed chemistry because I did not want to memorize things. But now I'm fluent in Spanish in ways that I never could have become fluent had I just stuck to the plan, to the script. But now, You know, we have chat GPT, and we have a lot of AI to do all this repetitive learning. You know, busy work that they teach us to do at school. And I gotta wonder, okay, so if you're only accomplishment in life, is that you are great at busy work and roll your standardized tests. And why do we need, you know, why can't we just add chatGPT to do what you learn to do? But see, if you are truly educated. In the ways that I'd like to think that I am as a philosophy student I, I've written books on philosophy. That you're going to think outside the box and college is never going to teach you that. Unless you meet like minded people who teach you, who help you learn to think outside the box. So what all businesses is thinking outside of the box like to get an edge in business Do you think Steve Jobs thought in the box? No You think that Bill Gates thought inside the box like we need to we need to figure out a solution that perfectly meets out you know, like every expectation it's like no they're thinking outside the box. So like how do we break things to fix them? How do we how do we do something that no one else has done before? And that's the thing that a lot of the best entrepreneurs that we know of like Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, they were not successful students. They were highly educated men from start to finish. And at the same time, they would have failed a lot of the classes that I failed because they don't know how to think inside the box. That if you really want to get ahead in business, you gotta stop thinking like, okay, here is what my professor wants me to do, here are the rules of the game, I need to do this, I need to be a good dog like him, you know, I need to follow the script, well no, that's not how an entrepreneur thinks. A successful entrepreneur charts his own course, he writes his own script, he figures out what his clients want. Not only what they want, but what they will want in the future. And this is not something that you're ever going to learn at a university course, or let alone a high school course. In fact, you almost have to be a bad student. Like many of the best entrepreneurs in America to be a successful entrepreneur. What would your advice be to someone who's maybe in the midst of college right now, or they've recently started school, or maybe they're even a senior, what would your advice be to those people that are in the academic system right now to maximize the good things about it, because there are good things about it, so what would your advice be to the people that are in the system currently? Well, you know, keep an open mind. Try to talk to people who are different from you. You know well, when I was a university student, I studied religion and philosophy. And what I enjoyed the most about it is that I got to meet a lot of people who had a different background from me. I learned how to relate to people from a different point of view. You know, keep an open mind, finish your classes, do your job, but if you get a B, don't worry about it. Even if you get a C all right, well, maybe try a little harder to comply, but don't try to be a straight A student. But always keep an open mind, think like an entrepreneur, look out for opportunities. If you meet somebody whose views and politics or religion may offend you, stop. Don't get angry. You know, don't, don't try to attack them. Just try to open a respectful conversation with that person. Try to think from their point of view and I promise you most of the time they will show you respect in return. Don't be like these social justice warriors and the Republicans on campus who want to self segregate into like minded bubbles. Don't do that. When you hear somebody criticize you, thank them. Appreciate their point of view. Open a dialogue with them. And just see how you can find common ground with them. Who knows, maybe, maybe they'll convince you of something, or you'll convince them. And don't get attached to your values, don't get attached to your politics, you're 19, 20 years old, whatever it is that you think you believe, it's It's probably all conceived and it's probably based on what your parents showed you or whoever it is. Just keep an open mind and relate to people who think differently and use this as a time to find yourself. But above all, appreciate the people who are different. Relate to them. Think about things. From their point of view, don't judge them for disagreeing with you. That's great. I love that. So speaking of seeing people that are from different backgrounds and meeting new people in their travels, like what are some connections that you've made and some relationships that you can think of that, that are highlights. So when I think of when I, every time I travel. I just meet the most amazing people. It's like, God just places these people in your life, like to, to meet when you travel, at least that's been my experience where it's like, Holy crap. Like, how did I meet you? Like, it's, have you had any experiences like that as you travel where it's like, you never would have met these people if you were back in the States? Yeah. You know, when I first went to Mexico. I really did not like Mexico at all, like I told you before that I had some bad experiences with corrupt cops. And me, being from Russia, I'm no stranger to corruption. I knew how to deal with them, I just paid them a fine in cash and left it at that. But of course, a policeman had to threaten me with a screwdriver. Literally saying, I'm going to screw you. I'm going to screw your license plates off if you don't pay me that bribe. And what's more, I'm going to take your, your American driver's license, I'm going to take it to the government office. And you're not going to find it. Would you like to spend three days looking for your license? Or would you like me to hand some cash to you, buddy? All right, so this makes Mexico look really horrible, but no, that's not true. I met a lot of Mexican people who were generous, thoughtful, intelligent, well traveled even, and I, and I appreciate how some of them have helped me go to Spain. And in Spain, I had a friend from Argentina whose name is Fernando Aguirre. He runs a blog called Modern Survivalist, and he ended up being my neighbor in Malaga. And there I've learned a lot of people in Spain who are not happy with the Spanish traditionalist way of life, who are not happy with the Spanish system of education. Quite a few of them have lived outside. I've learned about the Spanish and dissonance when we say the Madrid, the government in Madrid, which is Catholic and traditional a lot of time with authoritarian tendencies, as I saw during the pandemic and the separatist movements from Barcelona, Galicia, and País Vasco. A lot of, a lot of the people in Spain, who I knew were either Latin American foreigners who had an open mind or were separatists. Then I came to the south. I've met a lot of fascinating people from Argentina and Uruguay and Chile. Uruguay is a wonderful country. Highly educated people, highly civilized. It's really pricey. More expensive than Spain, even. But I've met a lot of well educated people there, who have shown me a different way of looking at it. Who Of course, I've compelled me to learn Spanish really well, but had I stayed in the U. S., I never ever would have seen that there are just so many different ways of living life and living it to the hilt, to the maximum, in ways that the American system of education seemingly was designed to prevent me from seeing. That I've learned that travel is the antidote to all this indoctrination that I underwent in my time in academia. It was a profoundly liberating experience. Can you dive into that a little bit more as far as like, what about your travel experiences made you feel like you're living life to the max? Like what, what, what is it about seeing new places that you think causes that? Well, what causes that is when you learn foreign languages, when you not only learn to understand the foreign language, but when you get to a point where you are not even translating in your mind, you're subconsciously thinking in that language and you begin realizing, What if I were born in Mexico? What if I were born in Uruguay? What if I were born in Spain? What if I were born in Catalonia? What if I were born in Brazil? Think of things that, you know, sometimes in America, we have to confront the reality that we live in an extremely litigious society. That we had the Jerry Springer show. I grew up watching. In fact, my first three experiences coming to America in 1998 were this, the Jerry Springer show, the Rick Warren televangelist show, and the third was, of course, The impeachment of Bill Clinton, that Americans, that we as Americans love to get fired up about petty little grievances. But when you go out into the real world and you learn a foreign language and you meet people who have overcome much tougher things than, oh God, that your president, cheated than his wife with his staff assistant Monica Lewinsky. Give me a break. That somebody goes on Jerry Straynor and they're yelling about, I don't know, that somebody kicked your dog, that somebody looked at your ownHaydynn get over it. Once you go out. Get out of your bubble, get out of your shell, and you learn to think in other languages. You realize that whatever it is that made you so pissed off that you want to go sue your neighbor for a thousand dollars because of what now? They played their music too loudly? No. It's total nonsense. Get out of the bubble, get out of this big sort, as Bill Bishop calls it in his wonderful book, the big sort. In America, we love to self segregate with like minded people. That we live in these tiny little bubbles. America is a nation of thousands upon tens of thousands of little forces. Get out of that mentality, get out of your bubble, you know, learn to see things from the perspective of other people. And you're never gonna be getting so worked up about all this, all these minor nuisances that seemingly define the lives of Americans. For instance, I have a friend in America from Washington, D. C. who was a government employee for 40 years, and he spent the last 20 years of his life suing the federal government for alleged discriminations on the account of his veteran status. Really, man? You squandered how much money? 300, 000 because he was suing and suing and suing people over something totally trivial, and then you lost. I mean, how do you travel? How do you how do you spend more time outside of your bubble? You would have never done that. America is just too litigious. We as Americans have to think outside the box and I thoroughly applaud, wholeheartedly applaud the digital nomad movement. I appreciate that more and more Americans live outside the U. S. and find common ground with foreigners. And that's a wonderful thing. I think that it's a trend. And I'm very much positive direction. That's awesome perspective. So I would love we're coming up on our time here. So I'd love to ask you our final question here. And that is what is the connection to a person or maybe a group of people that really changed the trajectory of your life or business? When I was in Spain, I lived in Malaga and we had among the harshest lockdowns. So, Google it, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez had a brutal lockdown and I was alone for two, three months. I was in a very unsatisfying relationship and I began reading a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hundred Years of Solitude. And I understood the true meaning. of solitude, how in Spain you could live there for your whole life as a foreigner and be totally disconnected from them. Spain is a very rigid and xenophobic society and there was just something exclusionary about the Spanish speaking mentality that Gabriel Garcia Marquez has documented. In a hundred and one hundred years of solitude and when the pandemic ended, I felt truly liberated. You know, one reason I left Spain is that I am still looking for the antidote to the profound solitude that the pandemic has taught me. And I believe I found it. I believe that I'm in the most exceptional place, most warm hearted, the most tolerant place that there is, Latin America. And there is no country in my judgment that loves foreigners, that will cure you of this pain of a hundred years of solitude in Paraguay, which is where I'm going next. So you've already visited Paraguay. How did, how did you decide on Paraguay? I've never, I haven't heard too many people really talking about Paraguay. Oh, that's Asuncion the capital of Paraguay. Has actually grown quite a bit. It used to have a reputation for being a place that did not have much, life did not have much to do, but now it is. I mean, there are wonderful bloggers out there. They have a wonderful connection, profound connection to the German speaking people. For example, Gerald Summer of the Nomad Elite is there and there are, there are just tens of thousands of Germans speaking people who also speak English. There, there is more Americans going there than ever. And I'm already fluent in Spanish and I, and I thought, huh, it's a very affordable place. Technology is super cheap. I mean, you can get an iPhone, a quality iPhone for less than half price of the U. S. And you can live there indefinitely. They're very flexible and patient about your immigration status. Of course, you don't want to break their laws. You do want to get your residency papers, but it's just so much easier to do it there. And say in Brazil or Chile or even Argentina, which has a fairly relaxed policy. I want to give them a chance. Paraguay is a country that truly does love foreigners. Unlike Mexico. In Mexico they have a saying that we're so far from God or we're so close to the US In Colombia there is a grown hatred for the gringo that if you start dating a local woman, I promise you half of your friends will think that she's a whore. You're never gonna get such xenophobic treatment in Paraguay. In Spain, you're All of my friends are either Latin American or Spaniards, or Northern Europeans who have ties to the English speaking world. Spain is just not so nice to be. For a foreigner. In fact, they have protests against tourists. Yeah, they're writing on their walls, tourists go home. This is terrible. You're not going to get that attitude from Paraguay. Paraguay is a country who appreciates people from different points of view. And that's, and they want to give me a chance, and I want to give them a chance. That's amazing. Well, I'm excited to get to follow along with your journeys and speaking of following along is there anywhere that you post online about like your travels and what you're doing? Or do you still keep a pretty low profile? I have a blog under my name, Alexey Bastavenko on YouTube, that I have a travel blog that I film videos on a regular basis I offer consultations. For expats who want to relocate, you can follow me at www. academiccomposition. com. You can email me at academiccomposition at gmail. com. And if you look me up, they look up my name, you'll find my travel blog, and I'll be posting much more content from Paraguay and beyond that. Awesome. Well, I'm excited to get to keep up with you. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me.