Ryan Li has spent twenty years in Asia and calls himself an egg. White on the outside, yellow on the inside. In this episode, we talk about how a nineteen-year-old from Texas sold his car and talked his way into a job in Japan. Why he taught himself Japanese, Mandarin, and Khmer without ever studying properly, and what two decades of chasing greener grass actually taught him.

We also go deep on visas, tax residency, and the banking mess of living in a dozen countries, plus why he runs a degoogled phone and a security-focused laptop while building companies on two continents.

About Ryan Li
Ryan is an American from Texas who has lived in a dozen Asian countries since he was nineteen. He runs Ilfusion, a creative agency in Texas he co-founded in 2010, and Sovagent, his new AI startup. Before that he built VR and metaverse startups in Taiwan and a Web3 company in Singapore. He co-hosted the Egg Banana podcast from inside VR headsets during the pandemic and now runs Going Borderless.

What we cover

• What an "egg" is and how a Texan car guy ended up more Asian at heart
• Learning hiragana, katakana, and kanji from a book handed to him in an anime store
• Selling his car at nineteen and answering a newspaper ad two weeks before his flight home
• Building English lesson material from scratch with his own voice, years before language apps
• Dozen countries, repeat stays, and why he would not recommend his own pattern
• Visas, the 183-day rule, and the ten years it took him to understand any of it
• Closing his US bank account on day one, and why Revolut and Wise changed everything
• Becoming a business owner by accident and growing two agencies to thirty people each
• Google Glass, VR, Web3, and a small mining farm in Singapore
• GrapheneOS, Qubes OS, and taking malware apart just to see how it works
• Why he thinks everyone should care about privacy, whether or not they have something to hide
• Going vegetarian at sixteen, and the loss that made him grow up fast
• Preventing burnout by running several projects instead of one
• Briefing an AI before bed and reviewing the work in the morning

Timestamps

• (00:00) - Create Your Own Opportunity
• (00:27) - Show Intro and Guest Introduction
• (02:48) - Exploring Identity: The Egg Concept
• (05:10) - Learning Japanese, Chinese, and Other Languages
• (09:38) - Cultural Connections: Bridging East and West
• (11:59) - First Steps in Japan: A Journey Begins
• (16:24) - Teaching English and Building Learning Materials
• (22:33) - The Quest for the Perfect Place: Moving Through Asia
• (29:40) - Navigating Bureaucracy in Asia
• (34:25) - Visas, Tax Residency, and Banking Abroad
• (40:15) - The Accidental Entrepreneur
• (46:18) - Exploring New Technologies
• (48:02) - Egg Banana: Podcasting in VR
• (50:48) - The Rise of Remote Work and Creativity
• (51:57) - Minimalist Tech Stack and Daily Devices
• (54:04) - The Fascination with Technology and Security
• (58:27) - The Importance of Personal Privacy and Control
• (59:57) - Going Borderless: Exploring New Horizons
• (01:01:25) - The Ideal Listener: Learning from Experiences
• (01:02:25) - Overcoming Societal Norms and Pursuing Dreams
• (01:08:37) - Self-Care and Combating Burnout
• (01:10:40) - Vegetarianism and a Life-Changing Loss
• (01:15:46) - Diversifying Projects to Prevent Burnout
• (01:18:55) - The Future of Technology and Personal Data
• (01:21:06) - Where to Follow Ryan Online
• (01:22:13) - Closing and Podcast Outro

Ryan Li and his projects

• LinkedIn — the only social network Ryan consistently uses.
• X (Twitter) — account created for the Solvegent project.
• EggBanana — Ryan's podcast with Marc and Edward, one "egg" and two "bananas". Talking about life in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and beyond.
• Going Borderless — Ryan's newer podcast series on being born in one place and choosing to live in another. Side project, not a business.
• Ilfusion — Texas-based digital marketing agency co-founded by Ryan run since 2010
• Solvegent — Ryan's current AI project focused on securing agents on the Internet.

Support the podcast
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