♪ California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamaha Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamaha.com/palms to discover more. ♪ Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Josh Rasheeds, I am your host, and I am here today with my friend Steve Aronson. Steve, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. I'm so glad you're here. - Well, thank you very much for having me. - We are here in San Jose, Costa Rica, and the reason I point out where we are is because I'm very excited to bring your story to my audience, because if anyone has visited Costa Rica, if anyone has passed either in or out of the airport or practically anywhere in this country or many other Latin American countries, they have seen the brand Cafe Brit.

Coffee, gift shops, cafes, and you've expanded far beyond that, and that is your business baby. You are the founder of Cafe Brit, and so I'm so glad to be able to bring a little bit of your story to Radical Personal Finance. Thank you for being here. - Well, thanks for the introduction.

- So I would like to go back a good number of decades. You, as I understand it, are not originally from Costa Rica. You weren't born and raised here, is that right? - Nope. - Where did you grow up? - I grew up in New York City in the Bronx, and then a little bit later, high school, I lived in Connecticut.

As most people sort of, when parents make some money, they want to go to the suburbs. - Right. - And then I wanted to get out of the East Coast, so I went to school in the University of Michigan. - Okay. - And became an economist and always dreamed of traveling.

So I figured that I better learn something that would allow me to travel to warm countries. And so I did an apprenticeship as a coffee taster in New York City. And that's sort of how I ended up. To make a long story short, that's how I ended up in Costa Rica, because at that time, Costa Rica was sort of considered to be, and I guess it still is considered to some extent to be the Bordeaux of coffee-growing countries.

At that time in my travels, what I became was sort of a quality controller of coffee exports, and then ultimately a buyer for a big trading company. But at that time, and I'm talking about the '70s, what we really did was what we were buying were ingredients, because you have to sort of put yourself back past and before the era of Starbucks and coffee shops and all that sort of stuff, and think that at that time what people thought of as coffee were cans.

Cans that were, cans were maybe instant coffee jars, but they were cans that had a brand, and that's what you knew. You didn't know that coffee came from any particular country or anything. You just thought of it as being something that you put milk and sugar in and you...

And also the other interesting part about it then was that marketing for coffee at that time was basically being a loss leader. So what that meant is that you knew that the housewife, who was the only person who went to the supermarket, would have to buy coffee. So coffee companies compete by having a lower price so that they would go to that supermarket to buy everything else, because they bought, because the coffee was cheaper, because that's something that was like the staple that they had to buy.

So our job as coffee traders and suppliers of ingredients were, and as a coffee trader is also like a, as a taster, but also a blender, our job was to figure out how to allow the brand to have the taste that people wanted in the cheapest possible way. And what that means really is understanding the crop cycles of different countries.

And, you know, coffee is a one-year crop, but it's harvested at different times in different places. And also you wanted to know about sort of relative pricing of places. So that was sort of the skill that I acquired. And Costa Rica was a really great place for that because, and that's why I say it was considered to be the Bordeaux, is Costa Rica was the place which had, for some reason, had the characteristic of producing a coffee that smelled as good as it tasted, or tasted as good as it smelled, which if you stop and think about it is actually pretty rare.

You actually think that, "Oh, it really smells good." And you taste the coffee, say, "Hey, I better put some milk and sugar in it, right?" - Cover it up. - Yeah, so Costa Rica was a pretty cool place like that. And so people would, you know, coffee roasters would buy Costa Rican coffee in order to sort of upgrade their blends or to get that smell.

We always thought one of the funnier ones was the whoosh. You know the whoosh when you open up the coffee can? - Yeah, it would pop out. - That smells Costa Rica, you see? - Right. - You know, who cares what else you put? Ah, wow, that really smells good.

So that's sort of what brought me here and what got me, and I became a coffee exporter and a miller and doing things that, and ended up supplying coffee to people, green coffee to people all over the world. - But a question. So you were in your early 20s, it sounds like.

You had gone to college, studied economics, and then you'd gotten a job working as a taster for a coffee company. So were they sending you to Costa Rica to be a buyer? - No, I sent myself. - Okay, so there was an entrepreneurial aspect to the kind of-- - Oh yeah, no, I just went, I printed a business card.

- You printed a business card, you got on an airplane, flew from New York to San Jose. - Actually, I flew from New York to Mexico and met my wife, met a lady who became my wife, and we just started to travel together. And we ended up saying, "Here, this is where we wanna be." - How did you meet her?

- She was sitting on the grass in Mexico talking to a nice-looking lady, and I actually wanted to talk to that lady. And she sort of bawled me out, and I was sort of attracted to that, to her personality. (laughing) And yeah, it was pretty, it was random. - Okay.

- It was random, I mean. - So did you have savings? Were you a penniless hitchhiker, or did you have some savings from your jobs? - No, no, I was pretty, I had about $1,000. - Okay. - Yeah. - Okay, so this is the 1970s. You had $1,000 or so saved.

- 1973, exactly, yeah. - And you go to Costa Rica, you print up some-- - Well, I go to Mexico. - To Mexico, and then you meet your wife, and you-- - And I had a business card, and so the first job I got was as a consultant to the Mexican Coffee Institute.

- Okay. - You know, 'cause I had a business card from New York, right? So that was-- - Right. - Coffee taster. - Big shot, right? - Yeah, and I had a New York address, so they thought that was cool. And yeah, so I worked for the Mexican Coffee Institute for a while, and then since I had already been an apprentice, you know, I mean, I had already worked in New York as a coffee taster, and I'd worked on the exchange, but as an apprentice, I mean, I was working, I was making $800 a month or something.

I think the highest salary I had was $1,000 a month. And it was, you know, because I was like the low man on the totem pole, I was a young guy, you know, I'd take samples to different coffee trading companies. At that time, the center of the coffee trade was in lower Manhattan, where the South Seaport is, Seaport Mall is right now, that was sort of the center of the coffee trading world, actually.

So yeah, when I, so after, since I knew companies and they knew, you know, they knew that I was a cheap guy, a cheap guy that nobody was doing, I ended up getting hired by one of them to be their sort of outside man to check on shipments and ultimately become a buyer.

And I did that, and I sort of moved up the totem pole in the company until they wanted to give me a real serious promotion and let me go and live in New York and work on the 25th floor of a building and take the subway and live like a normal person.

And I said, "Nah, I think I'll stay here," which is where you are right now. - Right. - And I told the fellow who offered me the job, I said, "Well, you know, can you give me this lifestyle?" And he said, "No, but you'll live like I do, you know, "you have two vacations," and all sorts of cool stuff like that.

So, and make a lot of money. - Right. - So, yeah, so then I started my own business with two other partners, and it was, and the business at that time, because of the situation, the way the industry worked at that time, the way for somebody who's starting a business was to do something different.

And there were a lot of people doing things different then, when there were guys that started, the guy who started Pete's in Berkeley, or actually in Emeryville, but it was one store and a couple of hippies from, who worked for him, went to Seattle and started a coffee shop there, these guys who started a place called Starbucks.

And then there was another fella that worked for, in a coffee shop in Los Angeles, who started something called Seattle's Best Coffee, and they were all like that. They were all young guys that were doing something else, that were selling coffee for what it tasted like, and where it came from, and things like that.

But they didn't, you know, they didn't have the training, the industry training that I did. So I became a supplier to a lot of those guys. So that was our business. - So when you say supplier, you're physically here in Latin America. Are you going out to the plantations, the farmers, and sorting through the green beans and saying, "Okay, we're gonna send these beans to this guy up there." - Yeah, yeah, I used to have, I had a motorcycle.

I'd go visit people all over the place, yeah. I mean, I visited every quarter of this country, sure. That's what, I mean, you didn't only sort the green beans. We would actually buy the cherry. - Okay. - Which, coffee's the product of a cherry, right? So we'd buy the cherry, and then either, I mean, ultimately I became partners in mills, in a couple of mills, but-- - So you developed your own sources of collecting, 'cause the way, my understanding of the way the coffee business works, I've spent a total of one day harvesting coffee.

It was one of the hardest days of work of my life. Those guys are amazing, the harvesters. But my understanding is, it seems to me, like most of the coffee growers, and maybe it's different today versus how it was, most of the coffee farms are independent. Guy has his own crop.

Then a team of pickers will come through, usually migrant laborers. They'll pick, and then there seem to be now a good number of co-ops that will bring the beans together. Was it that way back then as well? - Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. - Okay, so then you would set up the relationship with the co-op, and come and buy the co-op's beans.

- Yeah, or I would have a relationship with a grower, and tell him what co-op to go to. - Got it. - Because it's sort of, we have this little saying, is that what you do in the coffee mill, or in the, what's called the beneficio, can add or subtract 200 meters from the coffee.

'Cause one of the characteristics that you look for in coffee is the height at which it was grown. And you can add or subtract height by the way you treat it after harvest. - Got it. - So a lot of what we were doing, a lot of what, especially since I was supplying or buying coffee for people who really cared about it, who were selling coffee for two, $3 a cup, or $8 a pound rather than $1.99 on sale in a supermarket, they really knew their stuff.

And they wanted to, they really knew what they wanted to buy. And so I had to give them the stuff that they wanted to buy. - Right. - And so yeah, so that was sort of the expertise that we, that me and my partners developed at that time. So what we did is really translated the expertise of commodity suppliers to the expertise of finding the finest coffees.

And so these oddball guys that were very, very marginal. I mean, these were very small companies and sort of oddballs outside of the coffee business, right? Until they became the coffee business. - Yeah. - Whereas now, most of people I know, I'm the weirdo who I will still, I can still drink a cup of Maxwell House or Folgers coffee and enjoy it.

But I know almost no one who does that, at least in my social circles. - Yeah, it's a very interesting sort of business story because the sort of the specialty coffee industry by sort of mid '90s represented about 50% of the dollar volume of the coffee world. And in the '80s, it represented like 1%, right?

So and the 50% that they took, they took it from companies like General Foods and Nestle and Procter & Gamble. I mean, so here are these gigantic companies who weren't looking out the window, right? Who weren't looking in the rear view mirror of their car because it was just coming right at 'em.

- Right. - Because it's sort of the beginning of disruption, right? Of the small company with the guy in the, or the apples of the, it was sort of the apples of the coffee industry in a certain way. So that's, so then it sort of occurred to me that it was probably a good idea to start to do that here.

And well, I'll just tell you a little. An anecdote which I always think is sort of cool is when I was 40, I went back to college and took my whole family to California, went to Stanford for a year. And was, and the goal was to get a master's in agricultural economics 'cause I thought, well, I should really understand a bit more about what I was doing.

And so we bought a house in Palo Alto. And then we decided to remodel the kitchen. And as we were, guy who came to remodel it, to do the work, the guy, the plumber actually, who put in the sink, asked me, "Well, what do I do?" And I said, "Oh yeah, I'm in the coffee business." He said, "Well, you know, I really like Ethiopian Yirgacheffe but sometimes I blend it with Kenya." And I said, "Whoa, this guy's a plumber." (both laughing) I said, "There's something going on here.

There's another conception of what coffee is." And so that was, so when I came back, I said, "Well, I think I should start to do that. I think you should start to think about what my customers are doing." And at that time also Costa Rica was getting on the map because Oscar Arias won the Nobel Peace Prize.

And there was peace in Central America and people wanted to go to a place that was peaceful. And people were starting to become conscious that coffee's some sort of a cool thing. And so here's a place that's peaceful, has nice weather and coffee grows here. Well, maybe we should start to give them the type of coffee that they think is really good and they're buying in the States.

And that's sort of how Cafe Brit started. So it really started as a small subsidiary of a coffee trading company that was supplying green or that is unroasted coffee to coffee roasters, sort of specially coffee roasters around the world. So it was like a little tiny, you know, we had a little tiny roaster and we did that.

We roasted coffee for hotels and places where tourists went. And then it just started to grow because really our customer base started to grow. And really, I guess what really gave it its first big push was what I was telling you earlier was mail order. Which was at that time was mail order.

You actually sent stuff by mail and people sent you a fax or sent you a letter in what's called snail mail now with a check in it. And then you'd put coffee in an envelope or in a box and take it to the mail, take it to the post office and send it to them.

That was mail order. And then we realized that in Costa Rica, if we took the coffee to the post office, the post office would try to figure out how to send it to the United States. And this is a Latin American country. So it took them a couple of weeks to figure that out.

And so we figured out is that once they figured out that, they would take it to the airport and send it as a package. And so then we went to the post office and said, well, what if we become like a subsidiary of the post office and you can give us a stamp machine and we'll take it to the airport ourselves.

And the post office said, nobody's ever told us that before. And then they said, yes. So all of a sudden we cut two weeks out of the trip because somebody said, we want coffee. We just took to the airport and sent it to them. And then the internet came and then mail order became online ordering and e-commerce.

And we ended up with a warehouse in Miami so that then people really could get their coffee within a day when they ordered it. And that was sort of the beginning of... So little by little, I got out of the green coffee supplying business and started the coffee roaster.

And that coffee roasting company also became sort of a traditional, specially coffee roaster, which meant that we got the representation of espresso machine companies and commercial grinder and brewery company. So we would go to hotels and say, here you go. You got your coffee, you have your machines. We'll put the little coffee maker in the rooms and all those things that didn't exist because this was a country in which the tourism industry was just starting.

And so we were at the ground floor of that. And the end of it is a story that you started this whole thing about is that they first started to privatize the airport here and that happened in all sorts of other countries in Latin America. And we set up stores in the airports, in the airport here, and became part of that industry of what's called travel retail.

Which in effect, again, it's sort of a luck thing because as in the specially coffee industry, we happen to be around at the ground floor, right? And the same thing happened with travel retail. That is that travel retail really started to develop seriously as the airport business became a lot more than just planes flying in.

It became sort of malls. And when the sort of the ground services became more and more important, now you have lounges and you have all sorts of things. You have spas and churches and all sorts of things at airports. We think of this as being the normal thing, but that was very new.

I mean, the first place that did that was Dubai and everybody, and people would go to Dubai to watch it, to look at it, say, wow. There's all these things you can do in the airport. But it really became important as international tourism grew and as countries began to realize that they really couldn't run airports as well as airport operators could.

And they found out that when they gave the airport, when the contract to the airport operator, the government actually made more money. And the airport operators realized that they have real estate that they can use and they have a captive audience, the real estate. So they had the best mall in the world because people didn't have to go, you didn't have to ask them to come.

They were there anyway. - Right, and they were there with an hour on their hands and they're probably affluent buyers who are traveling. Most people who travel are probably more affluent than many non-travelers. And Brit has become a powerhouse of a brand. I mean, it began in Costa Rica, but even in the airports, I think, I've seen it in Colombia.

I've seen it in Mexico. Where else have I, I mean-- - Peru, Chile. - Peru, yep, yep, I saw it in Peru. Yeah, and so-- - Curaçao. - All over the place. And so it's just become an amazing brand. Now I wanna go back for a second 'cause at this point, your children are involved in the business.

- Yeah, most of them. - And so I wanna go back. So your wife was originally from Europe, right? - From France, yeah. - From France. And you met in Mexico and she said, "Hey, I'll come along on this adventure together with you." And you've built this together and you have five children.

Now, one of the things that I think is so fascinating is being here in Costa Rica, your wife saw the need for your children to have a high-quality education, but she, as I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, she was a little frustrated with some of the options available.

So she began the European school here in Costa Rica. Tell me more about that. - She was already an educator. I mean, she'd already, she came from a family of educators. Her parents had a school and she grew up in-- - So she grew up in her parents' school?

- Yeah, yeah. - And so the idea of starting a school was not a scary thing for her, was it? - No, no, and I met her in Mexico. She was actually in sort of a seminar. She was in a one-year seminar about education. So yeah, so she'd been, she was already professional in that area or had those skills and that vision.

And she waited until the kids were old enough to go to school because we had five kids. Some of them were pretty little. They were in school age. But yeah, she started the school with, in a house with a couple of kids and three of them were ours. - And today it's one of the leading private schools here in Costa Rica, right?

- Yeah, it was pretty much the first all IB school and it's bi-trilingual. There's pretty much a waiting list to get in. There are 500 and some odd kids in the school. But it was not that when it started. It was when it started, it was pretty close to a one-room schoolhouse.

It was actually a house that we bought that one, the bedroom was second grade and another room was first grade. And there was a little patio outside and that was the playground. And that was the school. - So you taught, so your children matriculated through the school, the international school that your wife oversaw.

Then did they go to university in the United States, here in Costa Rica, in Europe? How did they handle their educational process? - All of that. - All of that, okay. - Yeah, there's one that went to Europe, two that went to the United States, one that went to Costa Rica, one who sort of went from place to place.

Yeah, there was all of the above. - Okay, so what was your philosophy as a father and an entrepreneur towards the involvement of your children in your family businesses? - Well, it wasn't, I don't know if I sat down and had a philosophy, nor did my wife, but it was, there was, two of my children had a very natural connection to the school.

And everybody is, everybody's different 'cause one of our children went and studied in France and was there, and had a no natural connection to any of the things that we're doing except to the family. So I think that it's, there was, there's something organic here that went on because, for example, one of my sons who now is in, now is one of the two sons that are running the company, I remember when he was 11 or 12, he said, "I just wanna carry some," he's a very strong guy, and he said, "I wanna carry one of these bags, "these are 69 kilo bags that people, that they'd coffee," he says, "and then when I get older, "I'll do more sophisticated stuff." So he was really, and the other son also worked, worked in coffee mills and ended up working, ended up being a body stead Starbucks on Times Square, which was at that time the Starbucks that sold, that had most traffic of any Starbucks, you know, and so they ended up, without us doing very much or pushing them in any particular direction, two of them were attracted to the school world and two of them were attracted to the coffee world.

And so they ended up running things. (laughing) That's sort of the, it became fairly natural for that to take place. - Do you think, so I would say back then, right, 30 years ago, without question, Costa Rica would have qualified as, I guess, what maybe you would have called a frontier market in college, something like that.

I don't think it qualifies that today. I mean, I don't think of this as much of a frontier market, but do you think that your children, how would you, how do you think your children's experience was growing up here in Costa Rica as compared to if you had stayed in the United States or if you and your family had gone to France or to some other kind of place?

How do you think their experience compared? - Well, first of all, they grew up around, I would say that my wife and I are both entrepreneurs. We both sort of defined our lives. And I have a feeling that if you grow up in the States, it's harder to find your life.

It's harder to find your life. You end up either you're working for somebody else or you're working for yourself, but there are lots of rules and there are lots of rules that are written or unwritten. And maybe rules is a very restrictive term, but it's sort of, a lot of things have already been invented.

Whereas as you, the word that used frontier market, where you are is you can invent things. I mean, my wife invented a school. She just, she didn't go and buy somebody else's school or open up a book and say, "Well, this is how the school should be." She said, "Well, here, this is how I want the school to be.

"This is the curriculum that I want." And she actually wrote the curriculum. And these are the things that I, and nobody got in their way in doing that, and sort of the same thing that happened with us. So I think that we were lucky to be, as you say, in the frontier, in a world where, or in a country where, everything hadn't already been established.

And also, and I think I have to be fair about this also, we were in a world without YouTube. 'Cause these days you could sort of have that idea, and if you don't have the idea, you could look on YouTube, and somebody else has that idea and has put it on YouTube or put it on the internet.

So we had that advantage of being able to have an idea and turn it into something, and be an innovator in that sense. So I think, and my children are no longer children. They're in their late 30s and 40s. So they grew up still in that world of, with that level of freedom.

Now, obviously, there's another level of, there's another whole level of freedom now, which is very hard for me to understand completely, understand how one would operate in it, which has to do with the fact that information's free, and that you can end up having an idea and then finding out best practices by just looking on your telephone.

- When you think about, so I think a lot about family wealth and legacy, right? I have four children, and I think about how do I train them in such a way that they have abundant opportunities, but so that they identify with the family enterprise? I used to think, oh, the way to go is just that children have to do it all themselves, right?

They start off from scratch, and they do it all themselves. And then I realized that I was really wrong about that. So you want to kind of balance a healthy mix of, here, we're here to support you. You don't have to come and work in the family business. You're free to go to France and build your own career as one of your children has done.

You're not under restraint. But in your case, you've built this powerful family legacy that two of your children are involved with the European School, two of your children are involved with Café Brit. As I understand it, you've ceded most of the operating control over to them, and so this can continue to be a powerful brand.

And you said that your children have massively grown the brand even beyond what it was when you were running everything, right? - Sure, absolutely. - So what advice do you have from your perspective for a young father about how to cultivate and kind of inculcate a culture of family identity with your children?

- Well, one thing is, I've never really thought through that. I've never thought of that question before. I haven't given that as much thought as you, 'cause we didn't sit down and write a series of rules. But I guess the first thing I think about is that we are a family.

That is, everything we were doing that our children knew about and were very much aware about it. And so the border between business or work and life was very, very porous. I can imagine somebody who comes home from work at night and they say, "How was work, Daddy?" And he says, "Let's turn on the TV," or something else.

Or he tries to explain what it is, but that doesn't really mean very much to a young kid. Whereas in our case, if you're now running the school where you went as a child, you actually knew what was going on. At the dinner table, your mom was talking about needing to hire an English teacher, and those teachers actually lived at the house.

What she generally did was when a teacher came from abroad before working in the school, we'd invite them to stay over. So you got to know them, and some of them stayed over, and then didn't end up being in the school too. So, and then if my older children, they'd see me, there are coffee trees right around the house and there's a warehouse down at the end of the road, and they grew up around what we were doing.

So I guess that's a long way of saying, yeah, we were a family for 24 hours a day. There weren't aspects of our lives that were not shared with our kids. And I don't, and it wasn't anything that we imposed on them. But if you think about history, think about what people did in the Middle Ages or people did in the front, and think about the American frontier, that's what happened.

People grew up and somebody take care of the, somebody built the cows, and they helped dad out in the farm, or if they're pioneers and going across the country, there wasn't that strong borderline between work and life, which is also a little, if I have one philosophy is that this idea of retirement, this is a very strange concept, it doesn't, sort of like, oh yeah, I'm gonna live once I finish working at the end, and that's usually when people die.

- So that's an appropriate transition. I was next gonna ask you, one of the taglines of Radical Personal Finance is how to build a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. And as a former financial advisor, I've spent a lot of time talking to people about retirement.

Many people have an ambition to someday accumulate enough wealth that they can choose to work if they want to, but not because they have to. I think it's safe to say you've been financially successful that you can choose the kinds of work that you do, and you've passed over operational control of Cafe Brit to your children, you're not involved in the day-to-day activities.

From your perspective now, having reached financial freedom, and thinking about your life now, and your life along that journey, what lessons have you learned that would be helpful to a younger guy like me about financial freedom and retirement? What's great about it, what's difficult about it, how your life changes about it?

What lessons do you have for someone like me? - Well, as I said before, I don't believe in retirement. In other words, I just think that you have phases in your life, and you just have to, you wanna optimize your lifestyle or your life experience in those different phases, that's all.

I didn't invent that, I mean, the Greeks did. So it's not a, and I guess, I've never really thought about financial freedom as a goal. That is that I and my wife, both of us, we've always sort of lived within our means. That is whatever we happen to have as an income, especially since we were both building businesses, which meant that we had a piece of land, and it was always mortgaged, for example.

But it's partially because we're really lucky to not have to, when I think about people who pay $5,000 for a two-room apartment in New York, so one and a half-room apartment in New York City, 'cause they wanna live in New York City, or people who right now have to really think about saving that last bit of money because the cost of living is so high.

Whereas we're living on a farm, and we bought it 45 years ago when you could do that. So there hasn't ever been a serious issue about saying, well, if we save up enough, then we don't have to work anymore because there is a sort of a continuum of activities that we're doing.

So what does that mean in terms of advice for you? I don't think I can give you any advice considering what you said, the way you're considering living your life. I think that you're thinking about living your life, if I was your age now, I'd probably do what you're doing.

I think that you don't wanna be, you certainly don't wanna, you wanna be able to be the author of your own book, right? You don't wanna have other people or other organizations telling you what you're doing. And you wanna be the, and maybe not even the author of your own book, maybe the journalist of your own newspaper, 'cause you're going to be doing investigative journalism all of your life.

You're gonna be looking and being, and enjoying discovering things that you feel that you wanna be involved in and rejecting things you don't wanna be involved in. So, and if you're, as you told me that you were, that you lived in a house trailer with all your kids and traveled around the United States for a while, I think that you also have that idea that that line between your work life and your life life is not, doesn't exist.

So, I think that probably, if I'm thinking about one bit of advice or one thing that I think was successful for us is never drawing that line. - Yeah, it's one of the things that I love the most about my current lifestyle. My wife and I are with our children 168 hours a week, right?

One of us is. And I'm not sure that we'll always do that. I think there are very good reasons to enroll a child in a school, many good reasons to encourage children to pursue their own things that might be physically separate. I don't believe that 168 hours a week is the standard, but I do love, I really love being able to have that kind of integrated life because it feels very natural and right.

This is how our forebears for millennia have lived, right? Children haven't been sent off away from dad and mom. There's always been an integrated family life, an integrated village life, an integrated life where there's intergenerational sharing and transfer and teaching and social interaction. And it's something I value very greatly.

Go ahead. - There's a, I was thinking about something that I read a long time ago, which is a pretty simple little aphorism. It says if you follow your passions for work, you'll never work a day in your life. - Yeah, I feel that way. And even as an entrepreneur, it's interesting the comment you made earlier about kind of the choice between, well, you can go to New York City and you can make X number of hundreds of thousands dollars a year and work on the 25th floor and have two weeks of vacation.

And you said, I'm in a frontier market, right? I'm an entrepreneur. I can enjoy a really interesting integrated lifestyle. I'm on my motorcycle traveling all around Costa Rica, visiting coffee mills, and I don't have to account for every moment of every day. I work hard, but I have a lifestyle where I'm not on the clock in that sense.

And it's interesting because I'm not as wealthy as you are. I'm a good bit younger, but because of being an entrepreneur, I am enjoying in many ways a very similar lifestyle to you as an experienced wealthy, I won't use the word retiree, but what a lot of people would say, oh, this person is retired in the sense that doesn't run this one active business.

You're involved in many things. And to me, that's the power of entrepreneurship, right? You can write your own ticket and you can enjoy from the age of 25 to the age of 75, you can enjoy that sense of control and a more relaxed and appropriate pace of your life.

If when you take responsibility for your business and for your life, and you know, if it's to be, it's up to me, right? I gotta make it happen. That also comes with it, the reward of being able to have a more integrated lifestyle and more enjoyable days, at least in my experience.

- I think you've summarized it better than I could have. - So here's my final question. I believe the strategies that you have used are very powerful strategies for other people to consider. And I'll just identify them. I don't think they're right for everybody, but I think there are strategies that are good for other people to consider.

So for example, leaving the country of one's birth and going to another place can often help someone to be an exotic foreigner, which comes with it a certain amount of benefit, of prestige, right? Your wife could be the exotic French woman who's opening the European school. And while she may have the exact same qualifications as a native born Costa Rican in Costa Rica, she'll have a little bit of that exotic ability from her being abroad.

Similar for you being the US American businessman working here. There are downsides to it as well, but you get some more valuable access. And then I think also when you go to a frontier market, a lot of times you have less competition. If you had been in that New York City office, there would have been lots and lots of people competing for that because there's lots of candidates.

But here you had fewer competitors competing for the exact thing. And so I frequently recommend to, if a young guy wants to go and make his fortune, I say, take a corner of the world that you're interested in, go and check it out and see what opportunities come along the way.

And you may look back later and say, I was really lucky because of this trend of the coffee growing and whatnot. And you were, right? But the reality is you saw something happening and you took advantage of it. And I believe that, well, I don't know what those opportunities are for me right now or for someone else.

We can be open to them and looking for them. So here's my question. If you were starting over again today, you know, a young 25-year-old guy, something like that, what are some of the regions and/or industries that you have noticed that you think, you know what, I bet there's some opportunity there, some of the countries, some of the regions, and some of the industries that you think would be worth checking out and investigating?

- Well, I mean, the industry parts, it's not gonna sound very original, but I think that it's really important to think about two things. You think about anything to do with climate change or circular economy or things like that. And you wanna think about things that have to do with people.

You know, there's this, one of my sort of mentors said, "You know, if everybody's walking north, "you should start walking south "because one day they're gonna end up there." So, you know, the standard thing to say is, "Well, the future's all about tech. "It's all about algorithms. "It's all about artificial intelligence.

"It's all about robotics and stuff like that." And I think that there's gonna be a lot of opportunities of things that have to do with high touch, with things that have to do with, you know, I have a theater, things that have to do with, instead of ordering stuff online, having a restaurant or a cafe where you don't take a iPad and order things, but you actually talk to somebody.

So, you know, so that's just examples, but I think that Evan, as I said before, anything to do, and I think that it's more interesting to think about things that have to do with circular economy than to say, "Well, I'm gonna plant more trees." - What do you mean, circular economy?

- Not throwing stuff out. - Okay, so-- - Figuring out ways to use stuff that people think should be thrown out. - Got it. - Or use, or being able to maximize resources in other ways. You know, lots of things you can do with petroleum. - Right, right. - That's not burning it.

You know, we have an economy that has to do, which is, you know, it's linear. We make stuff, and then we throw it out. - Right. - And the more stuff we can make and the more stuff we can throw out, the more the GMP grows. Well, that isn't the way-- - It's destructive, right.

- That isn't the way it's gonna be. - Right, absolutely. - You know? I'm not even putting any moral label on it. - It just doesn't make sense. - It's destructive. - It may serve you for a time, but it doesn't make sense in the long run. - Yeah, and that isn't where we're going.

And that's probably the only thing that artificial intelligence and all this handling of information is telling you, that you can optimize the use of resources and find all sorts of other uses to resources than just throwing them out. So those are the two things that I would focus on.

- Are there any particular regions or countries of the world that are interesting to you? Or that would be in the way that I laid it out? - Well, this is gonna get into sort of personal, personal preferences, right? So, I mean, and you can put it two ways, right?

There are people who really like risk and there's probably a good return if you can handle a lot of risk. But if you're gonna have a family, you sort of wanna look the other way. You wanna be in a place which is relatively safe, which has a social contract that's working.

And maybe that may end up being places that have actually had a war and are now recovering from it because they know. We were talking earlier about former Yugoslavia and Bosnia may be a place like that. But there's other places that have had a war and haven't figured it out yet.

Nicaragua was a good example of that, a place that it went through a very nice period of saying, well, you were tired of having wars and then things are going up again. So, but that's a little side thing. But I do think that, or I was gonna say, I was pretty impressed with, I was sort of hired as a consultant in Rwanda for a while to take a look at the coffee industry there.

And I was really surprised at how well things worked in Rwanda. One of the things that they, one of the first things that I saw was I went to the Rwandan agency that handles foreign investors and the lady sent me down and she said, "I really wanna apologize because it only takes six hours "for you to start a company "and do all the steps to start a business.

"We've really wanted to get it down to two, "but we haven't been able to do that." And all the offices were in the, it was a three-story building, you could do everything you needed to do to start a company. So it takes about, in Costa Rica, it takes about two years.

(both laughing) Minimum, and a lot of help. And in the United States, it takes a while too. And it costs you a lot of money per hour to people. So Rwanda may not be a really good example right now because it's gone through, it's recently gone through a lot of problems.

But I would, I'd sort of look at that list and there's those lists are all published about how easy it is to start a business. And that would be another, so that I'd, instead of, as I pointed to individual countries, I'd look at those types of characteristics. I'd look at a social contract that seems to be working, that there's some level of safety.

And that it is, and that whatever it is, the government, or whatever the, or even the culture, because sometimes it's not the government, it's culture that says, that's friendly to people from outside who have ideas. And I'm saying that because, you know, you have, there are cultures which think that it's really a bad idea to make money.

You know, it's, ah, that's sort of, it's sort of contrary to their thinking. Or there are cultures that have very, very strong elites and say, you know, I just wanna keep it. If anybody wants to try to make money, we'll-- - It's just gonna be us. - Yeah. So that's why I'm saying that it's not only the rules and regulations, it's also the cultures.

So you put that in some sort of a, you put, you have to put that in some sort of a sieve and sort of look through it, and you'll, probably some countries might pop out. You know, Estonia might pop out, or Bosnia might pop out, or Mongolia. Mongolia probably won't pop out, but it could.

- Right. - It could. But, you know, Georgia, they do that too. The only problem is, you know, I'm talking about ex-communist countries, the problem is that you do have, in some of these places, you have some really strong elites, new elites that really, they haven't quite, not as good as old elites, but they're getting there.

- Right, right. - So. - No, I agree. I think that it's one of the things that makes me a little sad about our home country, United States, just feels like sometimes there's been so much success that it just feels to me like the way that we got there has been kind of forgotten about.

But I often don't get that same experience and sense in a place that remembers pretty recently how rough things were. It's like, well, we did that socialism thing. That was pretty rough. We're pretty glad now to have this opportunity that we have. And it feels like those memories are a little fresher, and it inspires more confidence, more of a desire to work hard, more of an appreciation of opportunity than sometimes I sense in some of the other places that we're from.

- Yeah, and it changes, right? I was gonna, what you just said occurs to me that an experience that we had in Café Brit is that we opened this representative office in the EU. And you know where it is? It's in Riga, Latvia. - Yeah. - And it was quite successful, quite successful because of our partner who was an entrepreneur who actually made his money by building gym equipment, by importing gym equipment.

And right when the wall came down, he said, "I gotta find something. "There's gotta be some things that are gonna happen here "that didn't happen before." And he somehow came on the idea of gyms and hotels. And he noticed that in the West, people that all hotels had machines in them.

So he got the representation for machines. And now in Latvia, not only do hotels have really good machines, but you see gyms on the street. - Right. - Walk on the street, see it. So it's in a certain way, that may be the idea of walking South when people are walking North.

But the other way, the other part of that story is to say you're probably be more successful doing things that other people are not doing. - Right. - Maybe what you wanna do is sort of, consultants will do things like that. People will say to you, well, let's see what's the 90%, let's look at that bell curve and say, here, these are areas that have really been successful.

And so really what you really wanna do is say, well, look at the tails of the bell curve. Say, let's look at the ones that people haven't looked at. Or maybe the ones that haven't been successful, why? - Right. - There's probably a bigger return to that. - Yeah, I think, what's the old joke, right?

Invert, always invert, right? I always think of the nation of Bhutan. From a tourism perspective, as I understand the story, I can't confirm this firsthand, but I understand the story. Bhutan was trying to figure out, how do we appeal more on the tourist market? And so they hired consultants, and those consultants said, well, you need to go ahead and make it easier for people to come and build more tourist infrastructure so you can have more people come.

But they looked at it and they decided, you know what, we're gonna go in the exact opposite direction. And so Bhutan is, the kingdom of Bhutan is incredibly difficult to get into. Everyone has to get a visa. You can't come in without a tour. You have to book a tour guide.

You have to commit, I think a minimum tour is $250 a day for a person. And so all the tourism is high-end. And so what they have done is built this tourist infrastructure that's all very high-end, very high-dollar tourist infrastructure. But it's allowing the kingdom of Bhutan to be a very exotic and unique destination.

And when travelers go there, they find, hey, we're not overloaded with $1 T-shirts and people hawking cheap stuff to us. This is a really beautiful, amazing tourist experience that we're having. But it's because Bhutan chose to go to the opposite end. And so as you say, in a world in which you can order your food so easily through an app and it'll show up a few minutes later, all of a sudden now, having a nice experience in a cafe becomes that much more powerful.

It's not to say you can't get wealthy selling food through an app. You can. But you can always look and say, all right, if the market is going this way, can I serve that market? Or maybe I can go the other way and find a market that I can serve effectively.

- Well, I'll tell you another little anecdote from our past, which is one of these little anecdotes. Anecdotes that you use to live by, they get a little bit more sort of fairy tale-ish as you think about them. But when we started Mail Order, we had this consultant who was the fellow who was doing the, it was a company that sent out flyers and had mailing lists and stuff like that.

'Cause there was a whole world out there of mail order prior to online e-commerce. And so we started to talk about, well, which coffee products would be best and where they should be, and let's look at where everything is and what people are buying. And let's look at what's the most popular stuff and look at the different areas.

And he said, "Wait a second. "All you guys need is one suburb of St. Louis "to sell your whole product. "So why don't you just think about being sharpshooters "rather than dropping Adam Bobsog things?" And he was right. That's a very, it's, you wanna do your own thing and you wanna be an entrepreneur and be successful, you don't have to be Bill Gates.

You just have to be who you are and maximize who you are. - I love it. Steve, thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything you'd like to promote as we go? Obviously, the Cafe Brit is there. Anyone who goes through an airport in Latin America can enjoy some Cafe Brit.

- No, I'm fine. - Yeah, any other products or projects that you'd like to share with my audience about what you're working on right now? - Well, I'm working on a whole series of circular economy ones. Actually, the coolest thing we're doing, the coolest thing that I'm involved in as a minority shareholder is a company that collects used oil, that is used lubricant.

It's when you change lubricant in your car, most of it gets thrown away or burned, ends up being carbon. And actually, there are processes that you can re-refine that lubricant and get out of the 100% lubricant, you get 80% of base oil, which you can then just add additives to and then you have lubricant again.

And the other 20% is asphalt. So that what used to be just thrown into the rivers or burned actually just becomes something that can be reused. - I love it. I am convinced that 30 years from now, maybe it's 30 years, 50 years, I don't know. But I am convinced that over the next couple of decades, to your point about circular economy, as you say, we're going to solve so many of these problems in the next couple of decades.

So many items of pollution. Just yesterday, a couple of days ago, I saw this amazing video of this young Kenyan engineer. And she had invented and is working on perfecting a process of turning plastic garbage into bricks. And she had created these really high quality plastic bricks with a very simple thing and she spent years working on it.

But when you can go into a nation like Kenya or Costa Rica or anywhere and take all that plastic, and even though Kenya now bans plastic bags, but there's still just everywhere, take that plastic and turn it into high quality bricks for pavers, high quality bricks for building, it's phenomenal.

So whether it's lubricants or really anything, I'm convinced a few decades from now, we're gonna see a massive transformation where a lot of these lines of waste are gonna be cut off. And much of the waste that is there already is going to be upcycled. And we're gonna figure out how to use it more effectively.

Because whenever there's a resource like that, someone's gonna find a way to use it. - Yeah, you just reminded me of something that I think is really cool that I'm involved at a national parks NGO. One of the things that we do is we replace some of the railings and the wooden lookouts that you use, which in the tropics don't last very long.

And we replace them with plastic wood. And plastic wood is wood, looks like wood, acts like wood, but it's made out of the caps of all. And we collect caps all over the country. You probably have seen even these things. We collect the plastic caps and you can also use things, like there's other very strange things, like hospitals.

In operating rooms, people use plastic aprons and things. And they use them once, they throw them out. Well, you can turn that into wood. - Awesome. - So there's national parks in Costa Rica that have lookouts made out of plastic wood. - Perfect, yeah. With human engineering, all of these problems are solvable.

I mean, even every ecological problem, like all of these things are solvable, but it takes smart men and women to buckle down and do the work and find it. So Steve, thank you for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it. - No, no, it was fun, thank you.

- Have you experienced Slotzilla? The world's ultimate zip line is at Fremont Street Experience in fabulous downtown Las Vegas. Enjoy the thrill with two ways to fly. Take off on the lower zip line from seven stories high and fly three blocks down Fremont Street. The upper zoom line launches flyer superhero style from 11 stories, traveling five blocks under the world's largest video screen.

Come zip or zoom Vegas style. Vegasexperience.com for tickets.