How to Build the Bridges: A Journey Through Intentional Living
Evangelos Taxiarchis, conscious living advocate and email marketing innovator, transforms digital communication through cultural immersion and human connection. As the creator of No Limit Emails, he merges cutting-edge strategy with purposeful living. From his global cultural explorations to empowering expats and intentional communities, Evangelos inspires others to overcome fear, embrace change, and build meaningful lives rooted in authenticity, balance, and growth.
In this inspiring episode of Age of Reinvention, host Emily Bron delves into the remarkable life journey of Evangelos Taxiarchis. Known for his groundbreaking work in email marketing strategy and his innovative platform No Limit Emails, Evangelos shares how his philosophy of conscious living and cultural immersion has shaped his success.
From his early adventures exploring new cultures to his efforts in creating meaningful digital communication tools, Evangelos offers a wealth of insights.
Learn about his practical advice on overcoming fears, embracing new cultures, and the importance of human connection in both personal and professional life. Ideal for anyone interested in eco-living, intentional communities, and the broader expat experience, this episode offers valuable perspectives on living a life full of purpose and intention.
**You can find out more about Evangelos on his website – https://evangelostaxiarcis.com/ and https://meet.nolimitemails.com/
TIMESTAMPS:
02:26 Meet Evangelist Taxi
06:05 Evangelist’s Philosophy and Early Adventures
08:47 The Italian Journey
15:41 The Move to England
24:04 Settling in England
26:10 Navigating Citizenship and Family Travel Challenges
28:23 Embracing New Cultures: From England to Portugal
30:50 The Allure of Rural Life in Portugal
34:16 Experimenting with Technology and Communication
38:41 Creating a Privacy-Centric Communication Platform
46:13 Balancing Privacy and Security in Digital Communication
54:06 The Rise of Digital Nomads and Intentional Communities
Emily: If you’ve ever felt inspired by the idea of building bridges, whether by creating global connections or intentional living spaces, this episode is for you. Hello and welcome to another episode of Age of Reinvention, eco Living Experts and Intentional Communities. I’m your host, Emily Braun at the Age of Reinvention with delve into the lives of inspiring individuals, redefining what it means to live with purpose in our ever changing world.
Today I’m delighted to introduce you to evangelists. Taxi Evangelists is a remarkable soul whose life journey has traverse the landscapes of conscious living and vibrant cultural immersion and experiences. Evangelists Taxi, a visionary singer, and solutions provider with unique mission to uplift others.
To empower communities and create authentic connections in everything he does. Evangelists or Evans, as he warmly known between friends, is not just an expert in email marketing strategy. He’s someone who sees technology as a tool to foster human connections with his signature offering, no limit emails.
He has reimagined what is possible in the digital space, creating bespoke email solutions that are as personal as they are effective. But what even more remarkable is how deeply Evan’s philosophy penetrate his work, enabling and uplifting people and creating bridges between them, whether through his innovative services or his meaningful online.
With over 996 million emails delivered. It’s hard even for me to imagine, and 2000 educational videos shared on YouTube. Evan has demonstrated not only expertise, but also a deep commitment to empowering individuals and businesses. Today’s conversation goes beyond the technical. We’ll explore how Evan’s personal journey values and love for connection, shape his work, his priorities, and his enduring purpose of helping people thrive both digitally and in real life.
Get ready for an open conversation about meaningful connections, people-oriented businesses and practices, and the beauty of living a life full of purpose. Let’s dive in. Hello Evan. I am really happy to welcome you to my studio and I’m looking forward to the conversation.
Evangelos: Thank you so much, Emily, for having me.
I really appreciate you and your time and thank you for that amazing introduction. Yeah, absolutely. As open as can we get for sure. Let’s have open conversation. I like to thank you for having time for me and making sure that at least some people here, literally my story, my life doings to help them out.
Yeah, absolutely.
Emily: We clicked very quickly. We just know maybe week we met the first time we clicked very quickly. But I understand, people have different personality and even I still don’t know you enough, but I knew that I’m meeting this person today who is open to the conversation like I am usually So evangelists, oh, sorry, Evan, to be friendly.
Your journey spans several different industries and roles. What foundational principles or personal philosophies have guided you through the such diverse experiences?
Evangelos: Very big question and really is just main principle of nature itself. I really believe what visually I see around me it doesn’t have lack of anything.
Doesn’t Christ say help me like many million peoples do? And is abundance of the nature itself is really in main core of the philosophy of my own life. Implementing it from early age of my life, experimenting the exact same philosophy in different places in the world. Just taking off not knowing people, not knowing languages, not knowing anything from anything, and dropping myself into the hotpot basically of the different culture and different experiences.
And I really believe in that philosophy, when you really activate it and you really follow it, you really believe in it doesn’t matter which part of the world you go, you don’t go in a mindset of what can I take, what I can I take, what can I take? Is you go in a mindset of what can you give, what can you give, what can you give without asking nothing back as nature does that.
In front of all of us you can work on orchard or a farm or any by the river. You see it with your own eyes. So there is nothing there is asking anything else for help. But human beings are being put in different situation. We always need help from somebody else. So abundance of the philosophy of the nature is usually just five principles, five simple principles.
Anyone witness, anyone can observe, anybody can activate any moment of their life. Literally looking at the things is without basically having a limitation for them. So the five principle is basically production, recycle, distribution, and obviously a regeneration as just like normal fruit tree would.
So I grew up in a farm very small age and a fruit farm. And one day in early age, I was about my teens, 12, 13, I was climbing trees, collect fruits and all that, and literally hit me one day in that age that I climb up this beautiful, wonderful tangerine tree as absolutely loaded with fruits.
I’m looking drops in the floor literally tree doesn’t care how many I collect, how many discharges? But has this cycle of reproduction, redistribution without asking anybody anything. And of course dealing with the weather and condition on the planet, which is, we could compare that to our human emotions.
Literally. It’s a similar thing to us. Then what happens to the tree, and I seen this really remarkable you could say, start with a point of true philosophy of the nature without having somebody else to tell you or learn from the books or copied someone else is visually you observe observe and you visually follow along and you see the season changes, the time changes.
This specific fruit tree philosophy is innately as part of all living nature, including business and including in personal development. I didn’t have a coach to show me how to develop my philosophy or personal kind of teachings. Literally everyone in the world was my teacher. So everything around me is my teacher.
I didn’t separate anything from anything to learn from. And that’s basically where the core philosophy comes in, is about being the bridge between literally anyone in the world, any place that can do this kind of things for themselves and improve their situation through their lives. For me, it’s been very.
Really interesting life and I’m no different than any other human being. Obviously we move around the world if you are lucky. So in my case, I would say I was a bit lucky to be able to move around the world and experience different part of the world. When I was 14, literally I just wanted to get outta my comfort zone, see the world, and see the world different way.
I was only 14 and a half, 15 years old and I didn’t know where I’m going. There is absolutely no plan, no nothing, no map, no money. And I just went to the kiss. My mama says, I’m going to stay with my friends and please do not go report me to the police or anything. I’m not lost. I will be back. And then I went to the harbor, just jumped on the ferry.
I didn’t know where it’s going. Literally, I didn’t know anything. And
Emily: your mom, poor mom as a maza.
Evangelos: Yeah. So I didn’t want she to be upset, to be honest. So I didn’t want her go to the sleep every night. Think, what’s happened to my son. So first thing I went is I told her that maybe I will not come back few days I’ll stay with my friends anyways.
So I just went to the harbor, jump on this ferry. I really didn’t know where it’s going. Could go to the next island or could go somewhere else. Anyway, I jumped in and the ferry asked people, where is this going? They said, oh, we go in Italy. I said yeah, I heard of Italy. I met a lot of Italian people.
Come in, visit us in the summer as a tourist. I’m interested, it is be great to see what’s going on in there anyway. Most kids in my age would be scared really not to do this kind of thing, which is I think is normal. And anyway, I was really excited internally. I was very excited.
I was excited that I’m going to this new place. There is gonna be so many people and I at least gotta find one or two people I can help with all the skill I already have by selling stuff, by basically being useful person. Anyway, I was excited and this very ended up in Italy. I didn’t know the language.
I didn’t want to steal from people. I didn’t want to break things. And I didn’t know the language. So I could not really just go say, could you gimme job to anyone? I’m only 14, 15 years old. Nobody would even bother. So I end up basically creating the jobs for myself at that time. So this job was, I was searching for someone that is someplace that I know that my effort, they will appreciate.
So I walk street by street. I see this nice little street with a bakery, with a shoe shop with few things, but one thing I instantly noticed there is lots of rubbish in the streets. So what I did in the morning, I wake up and went and street clean the street and put it everything in a bin, tidy up without nobody asking me anything.
And I did this for several weeks anyway, and then suddenly the guy owned the bakery that noticed me.
Emily: Where did you live at this time? During this time, first,
Evangelos: I am living basically into the tree on a beach towel. That’s the only thing I have. So most of the times I’m walking around basically normally probably sleep two hours or three hours maximum.
And and I was waking up before almost everybody that in the city wake up, just really still dark. I used, I go and clean the street, put everything in the bin, and long behold, after a while this guy been observing me for a while and then has a bakery and asked me to come in, give me cake, gimme bread, and looking me obviously what is this?
Like the suspicious, who is this kid and why is he suddenly appeared in here anyway and I don’t know how to speak the language. So I basically went in, he’s had a table with Stefan. I draw the map of the grease, I draw the map of baited seed. I drop draw him a boat. So I says, I came from here to here, so I’m from here.
And the guy visually understand it, even if I could not speak any words. So he visually understood what I have put it in front of him. And he’s basically like really little bit shocked. Who is why this guy’s kids run away. And I said, look, I really didn’t run away. I’m not like, being trafficked or anything.
I just wanted to come and explore and I end up in here and I don’t want to steal from anything, from anyone and I don’t want to break anything and I just want to be useful. Anyway, this guy understood me. He’s given me the place, he’s given me literally a job. I didn’t know the language. It says I can be here how long you want me?
Anyway, in the end, I end up negotiating my wages or work days with him as I put it on the table. Six minus one painlessly, six days I can be here, do all the things. And the one day I need for myself type situation. And the guy is shaking his head. Literally we are just talking with.
Pictograph and body language. So took me three, four months to start understanding odd word Italian from him and understanding basically what he’s saying and all that. Anyway, I end up staying there nearly eight months. So after that I wanted to go back and go to school, obviously finish my school.
I was still in school and all that. And back to Greece
Emily: you mean,
Evangelos: did you when Yeah, I went back to barista after the nine months and basically experiencing this kind of really pretty amazing you could say like amazing journey. Journey of young guy. Yeah. Experience. It’s opened my eyes to be honest.
It is opened my eyes that under made me understood that is bigger world out there than there. Just where I was, like in a small island, very minimal amount of kind of people. There is not much really happens in the winter. You just become like a cabin fever basically. And this few months of the summer you will have some tourists coming in.
And that was not really life. I wanted to have, to be honest, my parents choose that, but I didn’t want to choose same life as my parents had. And I think that was the one of the bigger drive. And it wasn’t about my parents having a bad life. They had a wonderful life. They had a place to land and everything working, but I wanted to experience the world and I was really interested in people and I really was interested in language and I wanted to experience it myself, immersing in them.
And this was first kind of experience. I did go in Italy. I went back to home, stayed as, basically finished my first round of schooling and I was 18 and a half, 19, and I decided to go in England. Basically, I jump take my ticket again. Don’t know anybody in England, don’t know, have any family on there, don’t know the language, and just jump in airplane and go,
Emily: why did, why you selected the England this time?
Evangelos: I really want to learn English.
Emily: Immerse immersing yourself in new country.
Evangelos: The, this is what I really believed in. If you really want to learn the language of the people, you have to be with the people.
Emily: I fully agree with you, but sometimes it’s not possible or people prepare themselves in advance by learning.
I know from books now you, you have different apps and speaking with people. But Okay. And what year it was Yeah, when it was before internet. Yeah.
Evangelos: Remember like them days, literally there’s, then there’s no internet. Yeah. So it was before internet, really. Only thing that you could get is maybe like from phone book or in local newspapers, but I really had this fascination for languages and also really the people itself. So I found really the British people was very interesting culture, very interesting people. And in my interaction with them in the summer and the kind of holiday places as a tourist, so one side of me seeing, oh yeah, they are here, they spend a lot of money, but I don’t understand the other side of the life.
I didn’t know the guy actually working 13, 12 months in a factory. Then I just have two weeks on holiday that he can live and spend and enjoy. I didn’t understand that side of it till I caught them myself. Then I saw they, these people are very workaholic. Literally like basically work work, work like 11 months of the year and then have a couple of weeks off.
And to me it was eye-opening. To me it was very interesting because culture is very occupied. Everyone’s almost working. And the point at the point of time, literally like you look in early eighties, late eighties, mid mid nineties things are very different. Like literally there was no internet that you could learn or you could hire somebody remotely to actually learn the language.
So anyway, I got my ticket. I landed up in January in Hiro airport, still with t-shirt and shorts on, and people looked at me that funny at, were like, what is this? Anyway, I landed in there, not much money in my pocket, not knowing anyone, not knowing the language, not even having place to go.
Literally didn’t have nothing. So I landed up in there and first thing I asked one of the security guard that says, is there any place that I can rent the cheap room?
Emily: Security guard you ask.
Evangelos: Yeah. Like on the airport when I’m going out, I’m asking security guard. He says, I’m new here, I want a place to stay.
The guy didn’t understand a single word. I said, I’m talking to him Greek, and he’s an English guy. So he realized, ah, this is foreign guy just landing in here. He’s talking me to the desk that somebody could translate what I’m asking. Anyway, and this other person was there. He’s translated what I was asking.
This security guy literally give me a number to call and says they can give you the room and all that kind of stuff.
Emily: Look, there were good times today. You would be turned off or put to the prison maybe. With such a question of for security.
Evangelos: Yeah, absolutely. So at that time, people were genuinely, if you are really asking like for help, people would give you help.
And today’s unfortunately is not like that. Anyways, this guy sent me to this family. I went to this family. I’m knocking door, nobody’s answering. Obviously I didn’t know maybe they were working or something. I didn’t get angry or anything. I was just basically exploring the London and walking around and seeing things.
Anyway. But time passed, I found this piece of corner. I was just basically so tired, put my bag down and sitting on my bag and basically sleeping like crowded up in the corner of the street somewhere. And I tried to choose places to be quiet as possible. I didn’t want many people see me or anything like that.
I just didn’t want to really disturb anybody else. It was not about me, it was about me disturbing someone else. So I find a little place. Basically I was having a little bit ki and one thing I noticed there was some noises going on. There’s group of people going to this place. They all like a bar and a pop.
Anyway, I didn’t really, at that time, I didn’t know what it is, so I just ignored it. I walked away, I says, this is really little bit bad energy. And I just walked away far as I can from the place. And I found loosely dis abandoned property, like almost basically being destroyed type of thing.
Anyway, as I went there, I stayed in that property for about four or five days, and every couple of days I went and knocked this door apparent. One time lady opened the door and obviously I don’t know how to speak English. Like literally stuck. Imagine like what’s the difficulty if I didn’t know how to speak your language that I gotta ask you something.
Anyway, I give I showed her the number and she’s looked at, that is her number. And I basically do know body language. Say I went to the bed and sleep and she instantly just got it. Oh, okay. And then she’s took me to the other side, showed me the room, gimme the key, and asked me for money.
I says I took all out. I said, this is what I have. She’s took some money out of it, left some with me, didn’t take everything, the lady. Anyway, I stay there for about nearly month. In this period I’m all walking around and try to basically find things to eat. I’m looking for a river.
There is no river. Even London is built on a river, but there is no river. So by the river there is literally nothing that grows that you could go and forage. And then I realized, oh, okay, this is really, is not the place to survive in the wild. You need to find people in work. Yeah. Basically that led me again, once more.
I started basically searching, try to find a place that I could contribute, help clean, do whatever. I didn’t want really, again, principle is I didn’t go there to take anything from anyone. I go there to give them basically myself, my time. And what I could do for them. And one morning I walked to this building site and the guys are mixing some cement and stuff and I asked him if they need help can I work in that again don’t know the language.
So it was, this big barrier really is huge. And I don’t know the language, so I asked them by a little bit, like body language and I showed them that I can do some certain things. Maybe they need my help. And the guys look at me first, they thought I was a bit crazy. Basically, they just want to kick you out because you wasting their time.
Anyway, I waited all afternoon till they go and have a lunch. When they have a lunch, I went and pick the mix up and I build the wall half a meter high before they come back from the lunch. And when they come back, the guy’s looking at, yeah, the guy’s looking at all the cement mixes finished. Like all the bricks they had in there is finished.
And then they look in a wall and then I’m sitting on that corner. The guy shouted me, says, what’s happened? Did you see? And I says, yeah, it is me. I did that. The guy’s shaking his head. Okay, show me like ly, we are just talking body language. There is no words. So guys point in his eyes and show it.
Point to me. Says, okay, show me. I end up like helping him mix the cement again. I put the bricks up and the guy looks at me, how on you like, you’re too young, you, how do you know this? Really questions he’s asking. I says, look. Yeah, I says, I grew up in this kind of thing from early, literally age of eight, nine.
I was helping my family build walls, build fences, farm, you build things. Even that age, I could really drive a car and trucks and everything else. The guys didn’t believe me ’cause I didn’t have really no license, no nothing, anyway, and I showed them, the guy told me, okay, you come back tomorrow, like showing me like seven 30 in the morning.
I gotta be there and I’ll start with them. I says, okay. In the morning I went there and I worked that day, first day, getting a job. I didn’t ask for pay. I didn’t ask anything. I just want to be occupied with other people anyway. And I work with them. Come end of the week, the guy came to me and gimme envelope.
I didn’t ask for wage, I didn’t ask price, I didn’t ask anything. Basically he says, okay, this is for you. And I said, thank you. And that was it. We never discussed anything and I stayed with them for about two months till they finished this building. And after that I start learning a little bit, few word English.
So I start asking, where is the Greek communities? Where is the kind of, foreign communities in the country? Where can I find somebody that really know my language and what are the places these people live anyway, I am whoever I’m asking, they say you gotta go to fish and chip shop. And I’m saying, what is this fish and chip shop?
I don’t know anything about them. Anyway, he says, oh, they are like English British takeaways. You go in there and majority of them, either the Turks or the Greeks or the Broan, like
Emily: today, they would say Uber Eats.
Evangelos: Anyway, this has led me to find a Greek family, Greek separate family. They have several shops and I went and I says I wanted to do the studies, but I really do not have a job.
In order to sustain myself. If it’s not, I have to go back. I’m looking for a job. Doesn’t matter really what job it is. I can do if you want me to clean the bathroom, I can clean the bathroom all day long. There’s no problem. Anyway, the guys look at me first. Obviously they don’t trust you. You just appeared in there.
You asking somebody job and I says is there any churches around where you guys go for pray and all that kind of things? And he says, yeah, we have the church, we have the community. If you are wanted the meeting people, this is the day they meet. I said, okay, I’ll go there. And those days, see what happens.
Anyway, I showed up in there. Again, I’m just making myself useful. Everybody throwing rubbish in the floor and picking them up and putting them in bins.
Emily: Can I ask you, sorry for interrupting. There were some other cases when you explore the new culture or new country this way after then.
Evangelos: Yeah, absolutely. I stayed in England for a while, obviously set, established and had a family and all that.
And after that I moved to Portugal.
Emily: Oh, after many years,
Evangelos: yeah, after many years
Emily: being already British expert.
Evangelos: Yeah. Basically, not just that there are certain things happened. I got basically married, I have three children, and when we were tried to travel through the airports and everything else, my passport is different in a Greek passport and my children passport is British and always had some issues like, who is this kid?
Emily: Why you didn’t became, sorry, British citizen over the years.
Evangelos: Initially I didn’t. Initially I didn’t, and I didn’t see the reason to be anyway. Then I had the kids and the kids every time that we got to travel from one country to the other, basically we go through the airports. People think that I’m stealing somebody else’s kids because my name’s different and they passport’s different anyways so through, because of that, I end up applying, become a British citizen, and I got accepted.
Obviously being in there for quite few years, paying my taxes, employing people, setting off several businesses. Obviously having nothing to start off with is very difficult and very scary. I totally understand that. And, but if you don’t try, you don’t get it, to be honest. So I tried my best to be a useful individual when I went to England.
That one thing, let the other one thing, let the other, till I met somebody I really cared about, I say, okay, I really never planned to go England and marry someone I have a children.
Emily: No, at 18 you didn’t think about it like you had different driving force. First of all, as far as I understand, it’s a big curiosity to the world actually.
What is over there? What kind of people, how it works like you to explore something new and after then jumping to this water and learning to swim.
Evangelos: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the, that’s really what happened. Obviously now is three times in my life. So doing that in England, obviously it is different time.
It was early eighties and mid nineties. When you look at that and now it’s conditions are changed all over the world has changed. Maybe it’s very difficult even myself to do that. But generally speaking, I did again and from England, I moved to Portugal again. Didn’t know anybody, didn’t know language
Emily: why you decided.
So can I ask you?
Evangelos: Sure. Like literally I wanted experience the stuff that I really wanted to experience in life, to move on another place to move to the, another culture, to experience the culture and to submerse myself to that culture. To actually survive in that culture. Also, not just survive, help whoever you could help wherever you’re going
Emily: and your wife and your family was agree with you.
Like actually it’s,
Evangelos: oh no. Initially they didn’t initially they thought, oh, you got a businesses in EU employing people this is crazy. Why are you gonna do this and all that. Right? Crazy. Obviously they, they didn’t want basically what we already have in that to be destroyed. I understand that, but in my brain, in my head is not about destruction of that, is about can I leave that to someone else to basically be it business, I sell the business someone else can take over is already good established.
They can basically scale it up. And also like for me was why should really I continue not to have the other experience that I always imagined, even if I’m late in my kind of like age. So I did this trip basically when I was in my fifties forties. To move to Portugal. So it is like coming to the Portugal, another really big challenge.
Absolutely same struggle as before, but this time a little bit different. Obviously this time I didn’t come, you
Emily: could have select Spanish Spain because as for me, Spanish, it’s a easy language comparing to Portuguese, but you always took the most, I would say, maybe hard option in between the available.
Evangelos: I went to Spain, I could really choose Spain, but I look the culture in Spain or the actual community Spain had it was not really rural, the people, it was mixed up. Like literally you go bedo, Bedo, just like a Blackpool in England, like all British and everything else, British and all that.
You go algal and Portugal is very similar. I didn’t want to really experience the tourist life because I did experience that all my childhood and I wanted to really experience the village life. The village life, the rural life of the poor guy, the poor family or that’s the thing I want to receive, feel, and live in it.
And that’s basically why I choose Portugal and not. Basically not knowing anything in the country this time round, I didn’t came to Portugal, totally broke, obviously. I bought property, I paid everything for my my myself. I don’t own anything to anyone. So it was a little bit different than me moving basically to England, me moving to Greece.
But from Italy, going back to the Greece, the culture of Portuguese culture is very close to the Greek culture versus Spanish or Italians. This is my own experience. So when I came to Portugal, literally I had a feeling. I came home internally, I had that feeling as if I came home, literally is like that.
So when I first time arrived in Portugal, don’t know anybody, I just rented a car or basically lived in the car for seven, eight days drive around the country. Just experienced people and asking people, where I can find some properties to, to move to and all that. And from day one, the moment one everyone that I interacted in Portugal without really knowing the language, it was more welcoming than any other places that I previously been.
Emily: Okay, good. You didn’t land in Germany or Norway? Like with all respect,
Evangelos: I did the trip to Germany. Exactly similar thing, like when I was in England, I literally just jumped on the plane and went to the Germany for three weeks. Didn’t rent it anywhere, didn’t. I just wanted to see, definitely the culture is totally different.
I went to France, I went to Belgium. I went Spain. I went to Holland. I went to Denmark. Denmark. I went live in Norway. So I basically country jumped quite a bit. Every couple of weeks I went there all almost around Europe. I went to Far East too. I went to Asia a little bit too. So quite a few countries I have traveled, to be honest, that is very small cultural kind of connectivity.
I didn’t see it anywhere else around Europe than Portugal. I don’t know why, but
Emily: you know what? You can hear one of my personal or professional I would say. Convention as that when people, now, sorry to interrupt you, but it’s really you, your life proof of my assertion that you need to find the place that it aligned with you as a person with your particular cultural or mental expectation.
Because speaking about relocation, and I know many companies or company owners, oh, okay. They speak about taxes, they speak about cost of living. It’s all important about what countries, what climate, this and this. And I know for many people, maybe not for all, because people are different, they’re looking for different things.
But when you really preparing yourself to live in. As a place you need to click with local people and you did it authentically really taking time to jump and discover each country till you feel there is a place even you didn’t know a lot like history, but you get from your personal perspective matching to local culture because, people can pay, like know about taxes and buy properties.
What many people do by the way they buy properties, they lower this without even language after them to discover that I don’t feel I’m at home here. Or it might take 20 years, they will still not at home because initially probably it was a wrong choice. I’m sorry to interrupt, but you proved my, because when I’m people asking me how to find the best country and when I’m starting to ask question about what you like, trying to understand what kind of personality.
They why it’s so important. It’s important because at the end of the day, you’ll live there. You want to bring your family, you want to start new life, and you will, but you need like your mentality or you need to accept this mentality. It’s yours. Not impose your mentality but be part of this like society, culture group.
Only this way you’ll be happy or satisfied with your life as far as I understand. And I understand that your stories and you have many different chapters. Personal story, I even didn’t get to the point when you started to actually selected the, like it and all this professional direction to be part of what you are now.
But what I understand, listening to your stories now and actually reviewing your newsletter curate you talk about importance of experimentation, whether in personal growth or business. So experimentation for actually type of people like you, it’s a main tool of discovering world and yourself in this world.
What is the boldest experiment you have tried and how did it turn out?
Evangelos: Experiment for communication. I’ve been involved in quite a bit quite a few years. That side of it, definitely we do a lot of, i, I run experiments almost like scientific, you could call it, but I’m not scientist, so I don’t have a peer review.
But I really believe in the general human experience itself is the science itself. If somebody have the experience of something and you could share it, they could they could multiply it or repeat it or get better results or some results I think is closer the science that you could get.
So experimenting with technology is being one side is really hobby and the other side is necessity for me. Like one, the hobby side is can give you some vague ideas, but really necessity side is about dependency of your business or your existing on the digital world. And it’s be become very hard and become very expensive for many millions of people.
And we try to do something about that. We’ve been working on projects basically with groups. A group of people say, okay, let’s do this experiment together and we will do it together and let’s see if you can send million email in 30 days to million people. So normally it is not possible to do this kind of thing.
And so this is the kind of experiments we run in real life and real world with real people. And everyone has obviously different outcomes, but that’s just communication side, digital data, communication side. And then the other side, we wanted the experiment, something with the technology. How can we enable richly whole world to have a space that is belong to them, that they can talk through or have a conversation or have a connection or have a stream just like you recording this now.
And it’s very similar platform we developed for totally public and open source. Everything is there. We don’t record anything. So to experiment with global connection and be a bridge for the many millions of people in the world and every tools that are out there, somehow, somewhat is limits us or create issues.
And we try to remove all the really issues outta the way. Just make the internet. To be like outside that we could walk on the street, say hello to someone. So it is like that side of it. The experiment is now, is actually live. Lots of people using that tool and we like to share that with everybody in the world.
Emily: But sorry, you need internet to send emails. You need internet to connect people.
Evangelos: So right now, obviously we moved from VA manual to the digital, which is manual. Before we used to, I used to walk basically kilometers myself to just meet someone be before the kind I even had a bike. But generally speaking on the internet, we know with an internet is literally is joint.
Part of the human life now is you can’t separate it anymore. And because of that we cannot really separate digital stuff from the real life anymore. We need to have a systems that individually. Control. Not a corporation, not a the big boss, but as any individual,
Emily: like decentralized spaces.
It’s, and actually it’s, from what I see and listen, there are many different solutions that different people are offering in this regard how to be decentralized, but at the same time able to connect with other, or find like-minded people. It’s what actually intentional communities are. But you, as far as I understand, looking like proof of concept from the technical perspective to, to provide the tool which will help people to find each other.
Evangelos: Yeah, absolutely. Our idea is provide a table, let’s say two people. They hate each other to sit down, have a conversation.
Emily: Oh, even this extreme cases.
Evangelos: Cases, yeah. Extreme cases. Like we look at the extreme cases. What can solution we provide? Let’s say two people are the longtime enemies, but they want to speak, but they do not really have a mutual place that themself can control.
Speak like not by third party.
Emily: No. But today there is this I don’t know, some tools like WhatsApp, I don’t know, zoom or whatever. Like they if they hate each other, it’s very hard to make them, meet each other, speak with each other.
Evangelos: That’s the another really important point, is all about either side.
They didn’t have to give anyone else’s data in order to be able to speak to each other. So it’s like we can use a Zoom or many different tools like WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal. There’s many of them out there as messaging tool. But really is most important part of the equation is this face-to face.
Just like me and you now. And behind the text we can hide we can do also the crazy stuff as human beings, but face-to-face at least, you are genuine. You can detect human emotion, you can detect human movement, you can read a body language. So there’s a lot of things that you could do when you are face to face.
And we’ve made a platform literally to be a, for any individual in the world. Not even age restriction. We don’t have nothing restricted because literally nothing recorded. So it was open platform that anyone could just log in, create a room, and go live, have a live conversation. And we’ve been providing that last three years to public so far has been absolutely amazing feedback.
Genuinely, I just wanted to give something to the humanity that is genuinely is benefit for them, not us. No financial gain for, from that specific tool that is we never say, Hey, we beg or donate this or that. Literally just free ui, just like a Google. Give us a browser, say, use, and this is something that anyone could use, is out there.
And that side of experiments is very interesting because ly as human being without communication, to be honest, there’s no point. Like they’re pointless. Like anything, everything else is pointless. Without the communication and the communication being monetized and commoditized and restricted in almost all angles in our lives.
And I really believe individually we have to have a right to have a place that. I just want to be private with you. Five minutes, 10 minutes, one hour or 10 hour, like just that pri, human se, human privacy centric, basically. That’s the idea behind us releasing that kind of basically tooling for the community is already exist.
And we pay the bill, we maintain it, and we, like the whole world, basically have a open, basically protocol that communicate with the loved ones or the business or distant relatives or relatives. And so the, one of the issues for me was I have my my wife’s father in hospital, doesn’t have a phone, doesn’t have a more email and how do we speak to him?
He’s in a in his last kind of, basically times
Emily: in a different country, probably, yes. Far away.
Evangelos: Different country is about, between us is about seven 8,000 kilometers difference. And how do we really speak to this person? And he’s lost kind of moments. And the tool that we created allowed us to do that.
Simply, we just set somebody in the hospital say, Hey, do you have a mobile phone? Please open this chat up in here and could you take it to this person so we can speak to, and through that, we end up speaking. He didn’t have to have a mobile phone or a kind of email or anything else be able to speak to us.
And we decided on that is millions of people around the world, elders especially, and they are remote majority as people that work for the government institutions and all that. So there’s millions of people around the world needed this kind of tool because they don’t want to leak data anywhere.
They don’t want to give data to anybody. So it is about really personal you could say personal privacy intent tool.
Emily: And at the same time it’s boldest authentic experiment. If you see, because you didn’t plan it, but it, it’s happened just to prove that your concept ma really valuable for such situations.
Yes.
Evangelos: Yeah, absolutely. Like for me, I personally had the experience of not enabled to speak someone that is long distant that I care and love and want to speak. Two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes. Or an hour or more than hour. So we didn’t have the tools that could allow us to speak to someone for 10 hours, for example, without getting cut.
Emily: But you can use kind of WhatsApp maybe to connect with the hospital and on the same phone to be face-to-face like this camera with a person.
Evangelos: Yeah, with this is just not necessarily, you got to have a mobile phone. It could be all tablet, so the phone side, WhatsApp that you could use. But for the old tablet or something like that you could not really use.
So with this, you can, so literally just URL, just like any website like this.
Emily: Okay. You don’t need phone number. You telegram. Like Telegram. It’s based on a browser and Okay.
Evangelos: Yeah. Literally browser based can work on any browser. And whole idea was really can we give a, every individual in the planet a place as a private for them.
They are the actual controller of the ui. When they create a room there’s no one else there recording them. There’s no one else there asking them for money. There’s no one at is being published to even, let’s say trigger their mind to something. So literally we are anti all that stuff to just one simple clean UI that everyone in the world can utilize and use.
And that is, is kind of part of the mission, part of the philosophy that I have, that be it with side of the email, that helping companies literally save loss of tech issues, problems well as helping generally everyone in the world to be able to just have a dependable site that doesn’t exist one day and spear next day.
So speak for them to have some sort of really regular place that they could meet. For example, I called my wife half an hour before we meet on that tool. And I use it daily for my life, for my business, for my family, and many millions of people using it. And we are just glad that somebody like us comes along, enables technology for people, not the people that just got the benefit from the technology or let’s say commercial side of it.
The commercial side, everybody does it. But like non-commercial, human-centric side, there’s not many people doing it. And that’s why we are doing this basically for benefit everybody.
Emily: Just a moment how people can learn about it. Because even for small, but the best initiative you need marketing pr you need to reach people to use this and
Evangelos: For us, we reach people with via email shouts pretty large scale email.
We do that. But also lot of really mouth to out, like basically hand to hand and people to people sharing this tool because it’s benefits to their life, benefits to day conversation.
Emily: How many people are using now this tool? Do you have
Evangelos: currently around averaging about 300, 320 million people a month.
Emily: Really? And I just learned about it.
Evangelos: Yeah.
Emily: Okay. But so people create the count. Yes. How, you how many users?
Evangelos: No. There’s no count creation for this. So how
Emily: you detect the amount of users
Evangelos: we detect basically is like basically like a ticker on the door. If somebody open the room, the just number goes up.
It’s like a, it is like literally like a traffic coming to the website. So the clicks that you can see, or that’s it, that turns to the number, there’s nothing else being recorded. That number keep going up. Now we see it well above 320 million
Emily: and you don’t need huge server or whatever to maintain this traffic.
And because it’s all on the,
Evangelos: We do have a quite a good big server, big enough server to handle like virtually this kind of millions of people using it.
Emily: Really in Portugal?
Evangelos: It’s not in Yeah, it’s not, yeah, not in Portugal. Our servers are all over the world, like many servers we have. So because we do the email side of it
Emily: as is an email, so it’s email, it’s a chat place.
What else? This platform encompass,
Evangelos: You have a email side separate from the chat. Chat is totally free to the public to use, absolutely no payment, no account creation. Email is, gets set up privately for companies on the website. So it is not the software that you can just go make a account, log in and send emails.
It’s specifically build infrastructure. We build everything for that specific domain or specific need for the company or individual is again is privacy centric. Control being given to the user, not us. We don’t control anything. When we bill, we say, okay, this is your account. You can do this much. This is your account.
You can do this much. But if you have unlimited amounts, basically you do unlimited amount.
Emily: How you can ensure it’s not hacked
Evangelos: well, it cannot be hacked. You don’t collect if on the life side, normally you don’t have any data to be hacked.
Emily: No, but okay, interrupted. The connection can be interrupted.
Like technically
Evangelos: connection can be interrupted any place anything can also be hacked. But generally speaking currently what’s going on in the internet, last five, six years, we’ve been proven we’ve been more safer than 99% of the companies in the world. When it comes to the cyber side of cyber fencing, cyber protection we have around 14,000 ips currently active, and none of them has been compromised.
Emily: Why? What is the secret of.
Evangelos: Your solution? Because we do the work ourselves. We don’t hire third party to do our cybersecurity.
Emily: So you compete with big corporations in this regard,
Evangelos: big corporation. They are not, no, we don’t compete with big corporation. We do better job than big corporations.
Emily: It’s what I mean. You compete by your solution to the big corporation who spend a lot of money or cybersecurity, marketing, I don’t know, PR and stuff like that.
Evangelos: But generally speaking, when you have a business on the internet, you definitely target. It doesn’t matter which country you are living. Like every business on the internet is target.
We know that. And that’s the fact. So because of that knowing, having that knowledge, and we implement certain technologies and certain security protocols, big corporation, they don’t not if they don’t know, they just don’t.
Emily: Did they offer by the way or might offer to you like to buy your solution?
Evangelos: Yeah, everybody can buy our solution for sure.
Emily: I mean to, to incorporate your business in their like software solution.
Evangelos: No, we don’t sell that kind of stuff. We don’t give our really in-house built stuff. To any company we give individual.
Emily: Did they try to approach you with
Evangelos: sure. If they try.
Everything in this world, I really believe have a price, everything. So it’s not, oh yeah, it’s nothing for sale. Everything that we build is absolutely some is has a price. Somebody can always buy and sell. So we do certain things for different big companies for sure. Like when it comes to cybersecurity, when it comes to communication, safety communication, security, I really believe is most important thing in our world is the human dignity.
Human privacy, human humans. We do things that we have to have some certain secrets, that’s the reality. Every government has secrets. Every institution has secrets, every businessman has secrets, every bit of knowledge.
Emily: Person has secrets. It’s what is privacy about, by the way, to have some private space.
Evangelos: Exactly. And we build things We don’t want intrus basically to get in. Like we build good gating. We build good moat. You know how in olden days they used to build the castles? Unless somebody gonna come attack your castles, they have to approach so many different fences before get to you.
And it’s very similar logic. We apply to the cybersecurity of the stuff. One we build. Generally speaking, I also believe that is nothing really safe a hundred percent, but if we can get to the 98, 90 9% of the time, so you eliminate lot of headaches, and this is what we’ve been doing last five, six years.
Our own experiment are amount of data that kind of, we actually try, transmit and distribute around the world is pretty large scale. And when you distribute data on a large scale, you are always going to be like literally on a point of the dark ball. Everybody’s going to attack you and try to dismantle you and things like that, but it is really, we are doing something totally different than everyone else in the world.
Emily: Can you define your mission? What you trying to ac accomplish with your solution?
Evangelos: Number one is ourselves, save ourselves our businesses. So doesn’t get interrupted by anybody else. And then when we’ve done that for ourselves, we say, okay, we can allow few people to actually use our tools and we can do it.
Same for them. So this is basically our my own personal philosophy. Do it for yourself first. Prove it that you can do it for yourself. Don’t go out there just like basically say things that not are true. I really, I believe in truth. What is the fact? The fact is facts. And that’s how I really look things.
And we use ourself as the case study,
Emily: proof of concept actually. But you could, your concept already spread over the millions of people.
Evangelos: Yeah, absolutely. And the whole idea is about can we empower individual to be almost powerful as big corporations? If every big corporation uses data, why individual being left out?
So we try to basically platform people that can utilize the data, that can find the people that they need for their business, that can find the people they need for their connections, make it easier, make it cheaper, and make sustainable and make it under their power. That’s really our philosophy with email communications.
We didn’t create like email communication to help somebody, to spam my grandmother. We
Emily: how you would know that there is no bad people who are taking over your technology? ‘
Evangelos: cause we get reports, everything reported, everything tracked, everything. Visually we can see.
Emily: No, but you don’t know what they’re speaking about.
What kind of communication? What come after?
Evangelos: No. We don’t know how they, like on that side. We don’t know, like on the life side, we don’t absolutely know anything from anyone. But on email side, if somebody do the back acting stuff we track the email because it’s totally different tool, different kind of communication.
On the email side, we know that for somebody’s having a foul play, but on the live ui, we are absolutely 100% mutual place. We do not record, we do not detect, we do not detect anybody’s ip, anybody’s geolocation, anybody’s data. We don’t collect anything on the server side. And the reason that we don’t so that everybody in the world can utilize it and use it safely, knowing that nobody’s really spying on them, nobody’s stealing their conversation, nobody’s tried to pull all over their eyes.
So I know all other platform does this kind of thing pretty often. And we want to do something for us as a human being to trust each other when we are in one place to speak to each other without really third party being involved in. And yes, I am the third party. I set up the survey. Everything can be blamed on me.
Absolutely I put my neck on the line for everybody’s benefit and well as safety of course, when we create this kind of tool. I understand that could be bad actors in the world. And there are if somebody report us something about someone. We have abilities to track that, to block that, to geo block that IPS and all that kind of stuff.
We have technologies to do that. But we also believe there are more good people, a good usage, good use of cases from it. What we hear so far from the feedback that we have from mostly hundreds of millions of people of course bad actors always going to use technology. Anything else freely available to them to really make it bad for everybody else.
But genuinely speaking, so far we didn’t have any reports last four years that somebody misusing our tools. If they do, absolutely. If five governments, 10 government reaches us, say, Hey, we, we notice something bad going on your website, guess what guys? We will shut it down. It’s not we try to do something for everyone, not just like one group of people or the other.
So we are open if if our government turn around tell, say, Hey, you need to shut this down. It’s dangerous doing harm tomorrow, we’ll shut it down. Absolutely. So we are not like saying we are against the laws. We try to enhance the laws within our own communication tools. We are also like to remind everybody in the world as an individual, you have a right at least to have some sort of tool that you could control.
Not no one else. And so that’s the idea behind it. I pay for the domain, I pay for the ips, I pay for the hosting, for the service, for benefit to everybody else that could just basically get online, talk to your long distance family member, which is in my case, it was my family hospital.
I, I could not speak to them. And because it’s proved for myself as useful tool, we decided just give it to the public. But on the email side, we do have that as a private tool. So the get, like for example, would be installed on my website and if I wanted to send that link to somebody else, I’m tracked through my website.
So if something goes wrong or somebody misusing it, they always can get reported us. But I really believe there is more people, good people in the world using it than that bad people just because some bad usage could happen in certain things. We should not deny rest of the humanity to have at least their own privacy back, something that they could control.
Emily: A little bit segue, to the different topics, not to bore our listeners with only technical details, because I believe if they’re interested, they can reach to you personally or listen to YouTubes and to get answers to probably multiple technical questions they can have in regards, how it’s working.
Evangelos: I really try to, I really sorry to cut you out. I really try to put my philosophy of that abundance of nature to the technology and give it to people.
Emily: It’s exactly what I would like to explore now because I know you are the person to answer even some of my personal questions as someone with a global perspective and living experience you have, what trends have you observed?
Lately in the Rise Ofat movement expert living and emerging of intentional communities of different kind. It’s my main interest. And actually that’s why this podcast is created to help me to discover, the trends and educate people in this regard. Do you think that this new trends, and please tell me what trends actually contribute to the personal growth.
Evangelos: I live in Portugal last few years. We have a huge trend of digital nomads moving to Portugal. It benefits Portugal technologically in many ways and also disadvantage the zones as well. Some places generally speaking nomad are very productive people. I personally am nomad. I could class myself, nomad.
I think that movement itself is created its own culture because people are really struggling and ma majority could put it in and through the really lot of different regulations, different places. So Portugal is pretty business friendly, nomad friendly, technology friendly. So a lot of people over the year choose to move to Portugal.
But when I moved to Portugal, I didn’t really move to the Portugal as a digital nomad. I moved to Portugal as an expat to experience that over the last few years that the trends that I’ve been observing being part of as a communities there’s lots of expat communities. They like to have gated communities for themselves, like places that they build controlled by them.
And every, literally like cities within the cities type situation. Some already happening.
Emily: Actually there is a little bit different trend than I know several communities like in Portugal, eco, living outside of the city, creating your own living space with like-minded people. At least it’s what they try to do.
Evangelos: Yeah, like in Portugal, we have couple of projects like that, and I really like them. And I think instead of having a, that expect shutdown community scenario that a lot of places experimenting, experiencing, like in Portugal and Europe and us as other places around the world, but I believe that equal movement of sharing things together is the way.
And so far in Portugal we have the projects really doing well. Like people. Moving into the land to share the knowledge and experience, expertise life, basically laughing a joke together and build things together. As equal living, a healthy living all that kind of setups. Portugal is definitely one of the, you could say one of the European leading countries that least has two, three, I think it is become.
Third one will gonna be activated sometimes end of the summer. That is one is about 20 kilometers away from me is basically eco villages. Everybody’s help each other. Everybody’s plant something, everybody use the land. Everybody share things. And lots of the stuff that I personally been in experiencing in there.
That’s how we should live as a community when you’re moving one place to the other. And you should not shut yourself out, away from the community that exists there, but you should create the something that you could invite them into experience. We don’t want to say, Hey, all the Portuguese people leave your house, come live with us.
But really no is leave the gate open, let them come and experiment and experience with you. And that’s what is Portugal equals living, equal movement is doing. And I really am I’m really hopeful. And this will scale up more and more places in the world.
Emily: Are you connected with them? Some
Evangelos: I connect with them.
I do go and I do help out. I do introduce new people to this kind of wave stuff. I really didn’t want to go and live in the expat community that is close gated community and shot myself from the actual people that. Who lives in the land for thousands of years. So I didn’t want to do that.
So I went directly to buy places in a village, integrate myself into the village life.
Emily: Yeah, it’s a different model. So whatever you did, as many other experts or immigrants to the new country doing you get some time to, to learn the language, local culture and you trying to be part of this culture, being yourself.
Obviously growing, changing, like this trend a little bit different because mostly there are foreigners who are coming to the country from different countries using English probably as a language of communication. And what is important for them, similar ideas, which they need to prove they’re similar as well, because by the way, ideas, it’s one aspect, how you live together with the person with these ideas.
It’s a different experience. And we know about, collective farms, at least I know history of collective farms or communal living or even this school living, co-working. People need to get through some experience understanding how particular it’s gonna work for them. And I am very interested in this emerging
Evangelos: I think to be in this kind of like thing, you have to be very open-minded and also be flexible enough to accept a lot of different changes that other people introduce you to. Some for some people hard but really all to do is you just have to be open-minded. Experience.
Experience, every, it is not for everybody. We understand that some people really, the city people, some people really the mountain people, and so the best really thing to do, experience it for a while and see how you really like it. If you feel that you feel like home, then continue, contribute and grow with it.
But if you feel that you’ve been struggled on, then you needed really change and find different kind of groups that maybe fit you better. The eco way of sharing stuff, definitely beneficial for many people. And I’ve seen it. People in elderly, they do not have a family and they are in this eco village.
Basically whole village becomes their family. And that to me, what we supposed to do as a human being. So it is very valuable
Emily: intergenerational communities. It’s what you’re saying. Yeah. Yeah. And I am like my two hands for this when it happened. If this senior person, by the way cannot adjust himself to this kind of certain circle of unknown people at the beginning to feel that it’s part of his village family, actually it’s part of his life for the next chapter.
Yes.
Evangelos: Yeah, absolutely. That is very helpful because we know we are human beings. Many of us will be in our lives with no families. So having this kind of set up as a community I think is very important and helpful. And of course we know when we have seniors and some seniors, they will, they have a good working brain and they have a good life experience.
They can teach a lot, they can help a lot to the younger ones. And I seen that myself basically. But when we look really this kind of setup as an expat, when we go move into places, I think lots of people, generally speaking, they try to find a place that is on they click, so they don’t look at the actual whole picture.
Of the whole ecosystem they are going to adapt themselves to. And they kind a little bit like on the edge when they try to find the right kind of like situation for the expats for example, if they are struggling as, if you are an expat, and I guarantee you’re gonna struggle in many ways be it like a law of the country that you moved in rules of the country, the tradition of the country, the tradition of the local people where you gotta move in and as many challenges
Emily: and lack of language in many cases.
And when you are older, it’s much more, I would say, devastating when you are 80 19 trying to fight. There is difficulties at every age, but when you already adult to feel like you are baby making your first steps trying to explain your intention and actually what you need, it’s it’s hard.
Evangelos: Yeah, absolutely. Like for me, as I traveled quite a lot places in the world as an as in a kind of let’s say one of my eyes is as observer and the other eyes is as an experiment and experience gathering like journeys. I know as a living being. We are not free. We’re supposed to move around and we’re supposed to experience the world around us.
So going different places just don’t have a really, have a fear in you. Long as really you have a good heart to give and good heart to share what you know, what you have. Most communities will welcome you, especially in Europe or South America or anywhere. I personally believe as long as you go in and with no bad intention in any place, you’ll survive.
But if you go in, try to mold things the way you want, it’s not gonna work out. So as collective think, my own experience shows me that I never went to any place thinking, Hey, I’ve gotta go there, inject my idea to these people, or inject my way of life. I went there to learn their way of life. And that has been absolutely like one of the key you could say one of the key stones that you could just trust it and always will work out.
Essentially have a really good clean car to go. Do not have a harm in your heart or wherever you’re gonna travel. It doesn’t matter. Like sometimes we as human being, we hold a history too dear to our hearts and that create a conflict. The new places that we go in, and I looked at things, it says whatever you go, please leave your own family history back home and start a new life and started a new chapter for yourself without that history.
Emily: And here, I need to interrupt you because I think even we mentally can prepare ourselves with best intention to jump to the new culture to learn. We are still trees, which were born on some soil, and we have roots, and even we don’t recognize it. Maybe after living in two, three different cultures, we are product of our culture.
And here I have a question I was waiting to ask you. You lived across different cultures and all this requires adaptability, which you, I would say, succeed you, whatever you became. It’s part actually of you growing and adapting to the different cultures. How has your background Greek heritage. It’s part of us, whatever we think about it.
Oh, don’t think about your international work experience. You travel to the different places and cultures influence your personal philosophy and relationships.
Evangelos: Very obviously, it’s very deep question and I will be as simple as possible. So I totally agree with you. Like we are born in a place that, that place, you cannot really just go with a sponge and wipe out of your heart.
Emily: You don’t need to, by the way.
Evangelos: So it is always going to stay there. Exactly. But what I believe, I also wanted to experience the other, the actual other and obviously time permit with experience, you end up like trickling little bit of yours to them over a period of time. Not by basically forcing people to understand you or where you come from, but really try to understanding where they coming from.
What is it like they set ups. So on the cultural sense is very important really to learn. Quite really basic stuff that culture does or accept or doesn’t accept. If you just like knowing a little bit of those things before you go places is advantage. But I really didn’t know anything.
I didn’t have the books to study, for example, to come. And Portugal was, Portuguese culture is I wanted basically experience myself to learn the people. So when I did this stuff is about really going there and learning people about learning how these people really interact with you and as well as with each other.
Are they different interacting with you than they with each other? Especially when you are stranger just dropped into the pot, so to speak in this very uncomfortable situation. Absolutely uncomfortable for many millions of people and it was for me. So really how do we get over this is about really proving that you are there to benefit them, to not destruct them.
And that’s one key element, like for really survival of the cultures. And my own experience has been, is about really going there and accepting them and helping them to scale that up or grow that, or whatever problem you could actually help to solve. You do. If you have a good skills, you show it with your skills.
You don’t have to sell anything to people, you just show it. You just do it. You just basically build it so they can physically see it with their own eyes. And that’s the basically one thing that I learned is important. If you go in there with already has absolutely different things in your mind. You try to do, convert different things to different things as it will become difficult because literally is difficult.
Every country that I went is not easy to get a job. It really isn’t. They just doesn’t exist. And also most places that I went, there is no place that you can go outside the river to Farage basically to feed yourself when you are homeless. But generally speaking, that didn’t put me off because I knew that if you can provide the true skill that you have to benefit the other without shortcutting them, without misleading them, without lying to them, and over a period of time that proved to be a kind of good fruit between two of you and you gain trust is really all falls down to trust.
Can somebody trust you to do something? Can somebody really trust you? And that takes time. It is not instant thing really. You have to prove yourself over and over to, to even, let’s say your own family. I have brothers, I have sisters. Some of ’em will not really trust you, right?
Because they say you didn’t promise, you promised them gift card. You didn’t give them gift card. So like this, the kind of scenarios you’re gonna come across over and over when you really try to be part of different communities. And one rule that you should never break people’s trust.
Emily: What would you foresee the AI kind of torpedo in our life might bring people? Because here there is again, we hear the story of, falsification of the voice by the way interaction. And from one side, you cannot stop technology. Whatever we are thinking. It’s already working and invading like workplaces and actually future work, the definition of purpose for people who want and young people who need to find the purpose and the skills and cannot just compete.
Let’s be with AI tools who are mushrooming now in every. Industry
Evangelos: as a technologist myself one side of me love ai and the other side of me really despise. So the side that I really love is about giving it ability to many people, which is really fits my philosophy, I, that side of it I really love.
And de spy side is the obviously bad actor of the world utilizing to prey on the good people of the world. That side I really despise. And I really believe as a technologist myself, every technology company who’s developed ais, they should clearly label as being produced by ai by the a, some sort of AI tool, so should be labeled so that as human being, we know what is made by the human, what’s made by the machine.
So right now we lost that. Unfortunately, Google give up on that,
Emily: but people are losing work. What’s happening now, as I agree with even it’s labeled, but it’s more efficient. It can work 24 7. It doesn’t need, vacation special benefits. It doesn’t go, to be sick.
Evangelos: Unfortunately, forced to answer that really, unfortunately, is very similar scenario.
If the businessmen used to sell ice. In the high street when somebody decided to invent a fridge or freezer. So like that shift basically we used to go to Alaska, get
Emily: but the impact is bigger because if it’s only this kind of refrigerating industry, but now it’s
Evangelos: knows everyone.
So basically a couple of things. The danger side of the society is our younger children will grow up more dumb, more in intelligent and more in an experienced
Emily: even. They have all this information actually coming from, or ability to find information and other tools and people and communicate all over the world.
Evangelos: Yeah, because the dependency of the information itself is very high. That is current society. Like whole society is depend on the information and information itself is now being manipulated by the ai. As a human being, you really don’t know what is real, what is manipulated, what is not real anymore. And because of that, our younger generations definitely will grow up with ai.
Maybe right now we just adapting to it. But next couple of generations they will definitely grow into it for them. They don’t know anything different and society itself. Moving away from specialization as we have a society is set up in a way that everyone is specialized in certain skills and certain things, and there’s a reason for that.
Everybody cannot become a brain surgeon. That’s the reality. So with ai, now everybody class themself as a brain surgeon, as a knowledgeable person, which is false entity. And we know that like I cannot just go into the hospital, say I read ai, I am brain surgeon, the society moving.
They destructing this specific specialization that has been put in place for a few hundred years to come to this point. So every individual’s being specialized now that’s gained away. Like they wiping that out with a
Emily: and practical experience. What? It’s missing knowledge. It’s not the same as practical experience.
Years of experience.
Evangelos: Yeah, like that is the another simulation. Obviously, when you look at the practical experience, our children will play the game. They think they are doing the real thing because they physically involved pressing buttons and their fingers. They think they are involved in something physical, so they’re logically already psychologically changed.
You cannot reverse that child to say don’t play the game. So as soon as you say the child don’t play the game, parents are the enemy. So what does child do already does separation at home, right? So
Emily: absolutely. It’s what many parents already complaining. And when I think about post gap between us and our grandchildren, it’s even bigger.
Evangelos: For me, AI is really double-edged sword, but is need to be controlled in a way. You got to enhance the special specialization of individual and people instead of des spatializing them. And AI is des spatializing in all categories of business. All categories of knowledge, all categories of experience falsifying, all rewriting all depending on whoever’s coded, whatever algorithm rhythm is gotta be converted to as a translator.
So majority of it is, you could say, false or a plane. So we, we’ve seen that happen already with a lot of the AI stuff. I definitely look at AI is societal change to turn everybody to become a less knowledgeable and less experienced, especially with physical experience we used to have where myself, as a child age of 12, 13, I used to climb tree claim the fruits, and I used to take the fruits in a basket and go side of the road and sell it to the people.
So I didn’t have no AI to learn that was the physical. You could say our special human monkey climbing a tree and collecting fruit and selling. But generally now this is all disappears. Now we could have a robot to pick that robot, to do this robot, to do the every, everything. If we have the robots do everything for human beings, what we gonna do?
No. What are options left for us? Let’s say we have everything automated. Let’s say right now I have eight clones of myself around me and around the world doing things as a robot stuff. And then what are we doing? What are we going to do? So it’s really is not the way, as part of it, we could have for sure part of it for safety, for productivity, for different things that we could have AI tools.
But for human societies to become a specialized, we need to have human unions of different groups, just you do in expat stuff. So the humanity need to change a little bit. They need to be smaller groups or villages or even towns or even whole cities. They need to get involved to be trained on specialists tasks, specialist thinks physically that you need to do.
We really, on a difficult situation in the world, society Hall is absolutely this AI is turning. Like upside down, whole function of society because our children now tell the parents, oh yeah, I looked at the chat. GPT told me, what you’re saying to me is lie.
Emily: Oh, it’s nonsense. You don’t understand anything.
Evangelos: Yeah. So we literally, we have the society now. Our children lose respect to their parents. So that is huge. That’s huge downswing for society to survive. And the other thing is AI is not gonna give a birth to the human being.
Emily: Yeah. We see sees zero, zero, fertility rate in Europe and in many countries.
Evangelos: So that side is, yeah, that side’s also very difficult. I’m not scientist, but I see it visually. I’ve been a lot of places few years ago between now and then is big difference. Definitely we need to have ai, good AI to utilize, to use. It is good tool to automate certain things, but really still our brain, human brain and human hand need to literally put a pen and paper around in order for us to recollect this memories forever.
For example, we can give anybody test how many pages of chat GPT you read what you remember and what you read in school. Do you remember? So most people will remember what they read in school, what they wrote in the school papers, if, when even they were child. But with AI you can’t say, Hey, you read this on Chachi PT yesterday because your memory’s already overloaded, wiped out.
So that’s the dumbness of the society that we are facing. Nobody really mention about,
Emily: and you don’t have time even to digest all the information or put it in perspective in Correct. I would say parts of the, your brain or how it works, all this connection. When you experienced, and I see myself, I was really big kind of book reader from childhood and now it’s hard for me to read like people I like big books, like after then, like only small kind.
We don’t have time, we don’t have time. Even with all these tools we have, which kind of make our life more comfortable and I see it’s debilitating to the small paragraph. Of Chad, GPT. Who’s this? Chad, GPT to give me No, if it’s some statistic, some, but when people are looking for, oh, who will who is the best candidate, for my election and what they, so you trust Chad GPT?
Yeah, because you don’t have time to listen to the, the debates and read all the articles. So you trust Judge GPT asking who will vote or who should I It’s what people are doing. It’s what I noticed. I was just overwhelmed.
Evangelos: Yeah. I think like for me, what I personally witnessing and experiencing is a period of specialization of humanity
Emily: and trust.
This chat, GPT knows better. Chad, GPT. You don’t ask your friend or several friends. It’s a lot. Again, you don’t need this time, it just chat. GPT will tell you what to do, who to vote, who to marry. I don’t,
Evangelos: yeah, to me this kind of let’s say informational tool as a template or theories. Let’s say it’s theories.
Let’s say what Chad GP just give us as a theory. It’s not reality.
Emily: Yeah. It’s how I understand it.
Evangelos: But our children is not going to grow up thinking that as a theory. They’ll think it as real as a truth. And when the childrens think of that as a truth, really you have a hard time to convince that child later on down the road, oh no, what you know is actually not true.
It was just the theory is written by the certain programs. For me, what I seen, it’s actually is deduction of the human knowledge. Dilution of human knowledge that we have compiled over thousands of years now is being diluted. Like literally, you can go research anything in the Google or any websites or any place on the internet.
The factual things are being wiped out, being replaced with non-factual stuff. And that’s danger because over the last 30 years of internet, we created human archives of things, human archive, lot of things, and the internet. And unfortunately that’s all gone, like literally being replaced with AI stuff.
And you don’t know what is really re written by the people. And I really believe as a technologist myself, I use part of the AI myself. One side of it is absolutely, we must have. But it have to be based on the true factual things, not like misconception, mistruths and all that kind of stuff have to be factual.
If the lawyer wrote a piece of paper for the law and has been accepted in a law, should be like that. That’s what I think of AI should go to. I did wrote some kind of white papers highlighting really the danger of the AI versus all of society, not just like our own global thing.
We’ve seen it like literally right now most of the schools getting closed down. A lot of teachers gonna lose jobs. Lots of lawyers gonna lose jobs. Lots of specialist people,
Emily: accountants, even developers, like developers with AI can do all this, code creation and compile different pieces.
Evangelos: Pieces. Yeah, exactly. Like literally like we des specialize in the special humanity. And that’s dangerous. It’s a big dangerous, because imagine that you take somebody like me out to the farm, the farmer boy, right? And you put him in a little canoe, tell him he’s gotta be the fisherman. This is the what we do into society.
We take in skill outta people’s hand, be given to skill, to the tools that we say, okay, tool can do this better than you. Which is, we know most cases tools are definitely, they can do better job, they can last longer. We all know that is, but because of that excuse, we cannot de specialize whole of society, whole of humanity.
Humanities always have to have a special specialty and installed in humanity. If is not, what’s the point? Having a mother and father, like why don’t we just go and create a baby tubes like two babies, but because humanity has this specialty inherited born with it, and we need that continue. We need that grow.
We need that being protected. We need protect ly true human specialty.
Emily: And I think it’s one of the reasons that people will try get out of big cities or kind of this specially developed countries spaces and to create eco living kind of people who value like nature. Nature and natural development of family and communal living will create this separate intentional communities, as I say.
Evangelos: I think that has a big pull actually. Like lots of people, they come to the certain age, they look themself, they understand they are well disconnected from the mother earth, mother nature,
Emily: It’s our generation, the young generation, I don’t know if like maybe minority, they have value of the, because they used to the technology, like it was the kind of nature that they adopted from the young age.
Evangelos: Majority of the young age of Europe, literally they do not trust their own parents, like majority. And the European children, like you go to England, you ask 2000 children in one group and ask every single one of them, do you trust your parents? Like they don’t trust their own parents. Like that’s the society unfortunately.
We got, and that is literally because of. Tooling of the society de specializing this children de specializing from education point of view, se separating from the actual knowledge and experience of the living earth that is there. But we put our children in the school class for till they are 18, 19, literally like a bird in a cage.
They don’t understand anything in real world, everything based on a, now with ai, obviously you don’t even have to have a teacher in school anymore. So this is getting worse and worse for the children and for the society. I’ve been personally noticing this by myself, being in a kind of, let’s say, case study of the humanity.
I’m human being and I’m case study for humanity and what I personally experienced. What we are going through, what would happen next, I dunno, 10 years, 20 years, to be honest, 20 years time. The next generation that come on earth is not going to accept anything that we class as a norm or normal or acceptable or even immoral.
Like they will not really accept this kind of things because education is different, technology is different, information is different for them. And so literally society have a breakaway civilization scenario. So our own children will break away from elderly, as we see it right now happening already.
And they will have a society. Basically if they have the money, they can buy everything. If they don’t, they become the worst kind of slaves that you could imagine. So last few hundred years, humanity’s been trying hard to get rid of the slavery in one way or the other, and it’s still there, but now it’s just going to get even worse for the most kind of disadvantage, obviously, and as they going to be even a worse situation that really our ancestors are.
And unfortunately this is already happening. Like Ally, if you look for example, just look United States today or look Canada or look UK or just look in France or look in Spain or looking loosely any place in the world, in a planet. You look at the culture is being dismantled from the core. All cultures, not just one side, not the other.
As all of them is being dismantled one way the other. We need to have communities. We need to have a human injection of what is can be done, what is cannot be done in the groups. And Portugal, definitely one of those places, least has a open mind for the communities to do this kind of things, like dozens express them.
And I hope many other countries will allow this happen. And of course we really don’t know what will happen. Next minute, as like loosely current situation of the R world. But don’t really look at AI as the human savior. Don’t look at Yeah loosely. I would definitely like Luka AI with caution because it has so many side effects.
We ourself maybe not going to feel it immediately, but really next two, three generations definitely will feel it. And definitely if we as adult of today allowing these things really just get outta hand,
Emily: nobody asking us, they make a decision for us. And many people asking this question, or even El Musk like year ago, was telling that we need to stop it.
And what it didn’t happen we need to have legislation like all these correct. Ideas, how to keep it under moral, but competition took over and Ellen himself is one of the kind of leader of the movement.
Evangelos: Pretty simple, right? Let’s just, as a human to human, we need to ask ourself this question.
Is it okay for me to sell you poison? If it’s not okay for me to sell you poison, why is it okay?
Emily: It’s how you think. But other people they think about, KPI and balance sheet and how much they can achieve and even not testing. I need to be first. That is important. I need to implement these nice features altogether.
Doesn’t matter what quality it really provide.
Evangelos: That’s a, that’s like the analogy really, like if we allow our children to grow up with lie, which is most of the AI that produces is currently not based on anything fact at all. So imagine that we allow our children really grow up with life just like literally poisoning our children with poisoning honey jar effect type of thing.
And this is what we’ve been doing really right now to the human knowledge. And that’s dangerous. And I think like Elon Musk know the truth. That’s why he was saying few years ago, Hey, this is danger. We should stop. We should slow down. We should really make sure that when is being used first, less do less, allow the scientists to experiment with less, allow small group of.
Individual that really importance in a human societies to experiment with let’s weight the decision, let’s see what they say in order to just release it to the mass in public. And they didn’t do that kind of stuff. So we know is literally, let’s say, genie outta the ball. So now as individually we can run this AI models and things like that, but for production side of it, I think if it is linked to the factual stuff, I think we will be great too.
Would be great advance. And then if we also allow that actually to create more specialized people instead of not specialized people in the world, that is also gonna enhance, but is right now literally dismisses these two pillars, which is we as a society, we really require in need. And for me, Elon Musk absolutely knew was the connotation and danger of AI could be into the society.
And not just for himself, but for everyone in the world. Now, AI is literally outta the box. I could go program a robot, put a gun or whatever, lazy in the hand of this robot, send them to somewhere, right? So that’s dangerous. Like for me it’s what do you do? Stop it. So it is all about really about, I wrote a piece of paper, it’s called GO Global Governance, AI governance, piece of paper.
I send it to millions of people. As idea was if we gonna develop a ai we should have a development center. And in this development center should be a representation of every single culture in the world by individual. And literally imagine you have a huge stadium filled up for one person around the world and developing AI for the society has no commercial entity side of stuff for that.
I’m definitely offered that. And we can do that kind of thing because technology exists. So you could that would be a one thing that all governments of the world, all cultures of the world has a input, has a true input.
Emily: So you are trying to propose new type of UN because UN as of today, it not just joke, it’s, sorry, just corrupting these things.
Evangelos: Yeah. Technological un yeah, technological un like the UN currently is political. One, I don’t want have anything to do with politics. It’s really technological. You could say technological Union of Humanity. All of humanity, not just one country or the other country or one side or the other. Loosely globally, if you’re going to develop something for whole world, I really believe people from that Pacific culture need to be in, like they need to be voted in.
Everyone has equal vote, everyone has equal say,
Emily: but technologically all countries should be on the same or similar level.
Evangelos: All country want to provide for generational of people education. That’s the fact. Every country want to provide education for the children and for the society.
Every country want to provide healthcare. Every country want to feed their people. Every country want their people be prosperous. Every country want their people be healthy.
Emily: Theoretically. Yes.
Evangelos: On the paper, on declaration level. To be honest, on the logical sense, they are still wanting that does happen.
Which is other ways. Imagine like we would not really have a China to survive for thousands of years, right? If we didn’t have that kind of special thing already set up in humanity. So we know there is Asian cultures existent for thousands of years and we can’t replace this Asian setup with just technology or new technologies.
We need to integrate new technologies this Asian setup, but all included. And right now it’s all separated. Everyone does different thing. Everyone. Does like for own benefit, but not for actual society. They try to basically control or help. It is loosely in my mind, in my vision, what I see, it is something like what Elon Musk does.
If it’s somebody just Elon Musk runs away from the South Africa, for example, situation in there and goes to the other country and built his dream, his imagination, his ideas and benefit, millions of people, everyone else in the world is very similar skillset and very similar scenarios. Yes, everyone’s not Elon Musk, everyone’s not me, but we all have a very similar power if we have a really collective center that we could not feel being separated from or being kicked out of it, or being disallowed, so to speak.
Technology has been disallowed for many millions of people, many million people being disallowed to use technology and over the period of time changes slowly. It’s just literally knowledge and information, always being restricted. Doesn’t matter which century you lived in, if you’re a human being and has always been restricted, always being specialized.
To the special people and that’s necessary.
Emily: Can you say it was restricted or just some people were not didn’t know to read to, like they were restricted from this perspective?
Evangelos: They were restricted one side. They just didn’t know how to read and write. That’s one side.
Emily: They were not educated to the level to accept this wisdom of whatever books, which in the monasteries they keep for themself actually, but
Evangelos: Like when we look really human history, like our information are basically, let’s say knowledge mostly being catered by the, let’s say institutional could be the priesthood or could be the whatever kind of norm is in the society. That time that is being trans transformed or transported to the people.
And the most people didn’t know the language, didn’t know how to read, didn’t know how to interpret, didn’t know how to translate to something else. So it became stagnated for many hundreds of years. And now we are not in that stage. We are really information overflow society. So there is more information available now than any given time as in society.
Emily: And it’s a different issue. And sorry to turn you for the question before I forget. People are overwhelmed, not only me, with amount of information, which are, coming from all kind of media, and sometimes conflicting people are confused like you advise or thinking in this regard, how do you balance staying informed and not getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information in today’s digital world?
Do you have yourself some personal rituals or practices that you follow?
Evangelos: Yeah, I do. I actually practice what I will share, like generally speaking, I go onto the social media. Normally if I just go social media, I will post and that’s it. I don’t read any posts unless somebody send me specifically message that attended to me or read.
Emily: But you read comments on your post?
Evangelos: Yeah. Comments on my post. Obviously somebody’s like interacting with me. I do that, but I don’t go literally, I. Browse browse, spend hours. I just check it. If I get a notification, let’s say you send me notification or somebody else, I check that if it’s important I deal with it there and then I get outta sight.
Emily: But I’m not speaking only about social media, which really consume now people’s attention. Like scroll, scroll, scroll. So you don’t have time maybe to listen to wise people, but even amount of podcasts, amount of channels, amount of books now in the digital format, how to balance,
Evangelos: yeah, you have a really lot of distraction.
Literally 360, you have distractions and it is very difficult to actually not lose it, get into it and then just lose track of time. I personally looked into the things, what is really important this moment, what is important right now? So that’s how I look at the social media, the information itself for myself.
I don’t know if you are still really like reading lots of social media and acting on it. I think it should not really be it should not really be your kind of ultimate kind of place I normally look at into details of what is really important right now. What can I put my intention to, and just literally ignore lots of stuff.
And of course when you watching the social media and news and everything else, you’re gonna get upset and just focus really what you are productive about.
Emily: If there is one trend or mindset shift you wish more people embrace in 2025, what it’ll be and why? Advice for our listeners.
Evangelos: So like generally, if you are in a situation, never think that you haven’t got anyone out, is not gonna help you.
There’s always gonna be somebody in the world will help. It doesn’t matter what your situation is, just start with that point. And of course, when we try to give advice to people, I rather give a experience rather than advice is about really you as an individual, what is it really your dream? What is it you really want?
What is it do you want to get out of your life for yourself and for others around you? If you put each point to the different category, you’ll have a something called what I call blinking of eye moment. So everything blinking of eye can change and because of that. The current situation, if it’s that hard, next blinking eye can change, become good.
I really believe in that. And when you are really prepared in a sense of you going to be in a production mode for yourself and for others, doesn’t matter which part of the world you go, you’ll be able to do some great things. But for me it is just really, you are the value in the world. You are the match and you are the product of whatever it is you wanna put front of the people.
And if you bad label that. If you bad rap that yourself and it’s not going to work. Doesn’t matter what you try, just try to really be authentic as you are. You are real life, you are authentically born and you are authentic life. And if you keep implementing that authenticity, really that’s the big difficulty.
Lot of people try to cover it up is not about how good you look, it’s really about how good is your mind is. That’s how I look at it. And how good at really you can deliver that mind to benefit yourself. And generally speaking, I didn’t have a good teachers in my life. I have to learn this stuff in a very hard ways, is based on experience.
If you want to become a good baker, you got to go dedicated a lot of your time in a bakery. To mix the dough and it requires hard work and you need to do that. And for me is everything that we do as human beings, somebody else know a little bit better than you because somebody else out there actually done what we want to do and is never lack of this specific step.
Even. We talk a little bit about AI recently. My advices will be just think of yourself, blinking of eye things change. Doesn’t matter what your situation is, just next blink of eye, next breath. Everything can be totally different and switched the other way around. Long as your heart is beaten and you are a human being, you are alive.
You are not like able, really able, I mean there are disabled people in the world. I have absolutely huge admiration for those people that they are not able to and they are amazing. I have a friend of mine disabled on the chair and does incredible things that many able people can’t really do.
Like that guy itself is really good inspiration to me. So I’m looking sometimes look at him in imager in physical place. When I’m with him and I look at myself I feel shamed. I feel shamed. I say this person is on the chair, can achieve all this goodness around him, and I am on the able body. I can’t do even quarter of him.
I. So this is the kind of shame sometime you have to feel as a humble person to accept. Even somebody are basically, let’s say they are disabled on the chair, but their brain is so powerful, they mind is so powerful. So tune into the nature and business and every experience around them that they create amazing products, amazing life for themself and others.
So when really come to advice, I rather say Go experience. ’cause words are, many words are cheap. We can say many words. Whatever it is you wished and you dreamed of, there is a space for you to experience it. There is a place for you to experience it. There is a people that you could experience it with. So do not class yourself alone.
You gotta build new world. That’s doesn’t how really it works. Like the world’s already been built. There’s already millions of people here and we have some problems, but believe me, if you are a car mechanic, you can fix somebody’s car. If you are a shoemaker, you can go work on a shoe company. If you are literally thread maker, go and make a thread.
If you are a technologist, make some technologies. Give people, if you’re a good writer, write something for people. Just give it to them. So as generally speaking, it is not about really advice, it’s about really people lack experience. Experiences where everything you can put together. We could talk about building a wall, right?
We could talk all day long. We will never build any wall till we actually mix the mud and a brick and put it together. So all about falling down to real true experience that you really want and you seek it is there it is. Believe me, it is blinking of eye changes and like how we are here one moment, next minute we are not here.
Everything else is just that exists if you want it really, there is no lack of anything. And my end, I believe in really abundance of everything. Everything that we could imagine as human being is available to us. Otherwise, why would you imagine it? And so is when you’re imagining something because of something useful about that and you imagine it and you go and experience it.
I was imagining to travel around the world, meet different people, but then I realized this is actually not imagination anymore. It is actually real. I can go and experience. And that’s when you convert really the imagination, the ideas that comes to you, to the real world of experience. And for me, really do not replace yourself.
With something hypothetical. Always replace your current self with something real. In next minute or next I blink that you could experience it yourself. It’s literally like looking at little baby. Let’s look at me as a tiny child just born yesterday. We are all like that. We are all blank. We all don’t have nothing.
But over a period of time, literally like a rolling snowball goes down the hill. We collect things, we collect material, we collect money, we collect experiences, and then suddenly everything melts, summer comes everything else. So don’t look at really right current heart situation is the absolutely is gonna continue forever.
It doesn’t. So like love, love us, gets stuck in the really upset mindset when we are in a difficult situation. It is difficult. Believe me, I’ve been in very difficult situation and lot this sometimes. This is how I stop it. Basically, if anybody want to take this onboard, when you’re in hard situation, you have the best tool in the world, best tool in life, and it’s called breath.
You simply just stop yourself two to three seconds and have it two to three deep breaths. That’s all. You can switch a new key on switch of your new cell phone. I really believe as a human being, we get stuck in a, what I called the rigid avatar mode. So this is me. That’s it. This is me. Like this is me.
That’s the kind of claim we make. No, the truth is this is not me. This is just me emanating the life form that is in me is something grander than just this small body. We we need to understand this. And when you blink in your eye in just one second and you have this calm breath, you feel life, you feel energized, you feel that is really whatever difficult situation is, you could take care of it get out of it and jump over that.
And this is, for me, is like being absolutely interesting part of life, especially when you have difficult situation difficulties as a human being. If you are longest living, you’re gonna have difficult situation. Believe me, that is just given. But how do we deal with them is really difficult. There is no knowledge out there written that we could learn.
Emily: Evan, as a person who reinvented your own life several times, what you would say for people stuck in the ru, whether it’s in life, work, creativity, being in hard situation, what would be the first next step you would recommend them to begin the reinvention to start New life chapter?
Evangelos: Very deep question.
Absolutely. Yeah. There’s a couple of things. One is the fear is stopping most people general fear. So the way to deal with a fear is literally about safety mechanism for yourself. That kind of psychological thing that we carry, which is normal. And you turn this fear to the tool instead of basically have a fear of, oh, I cannot speak to this guy, or go to this place or the other, or something else gotta happen.
Do not get stuck. What if hypothesis in your head, in your mind versus reality? So reality has no fear. Literally it does, if it rains, it’s got rain rain if the snow has got snow. So reality doesn’t have fear. We create this fear because a safe mechanism for us and just jump over that literally there’s nothing out that is going to eat you life in the world.
Literally. It’s nothing unless you jump in a sea and a full of sharks. That’s another scenario. But really it’s nothing out that in the world is gonna eat you life. And that fear stops many people. And if you just jump over that and look at the reality is this playing field for you to experiment things and you should be able to really go and really survive in the world as you want, not just somebody else want.
It’s about really what you want. And when we go to the different culture, first of all, imagine this, imagine that you are the homeowner and you just suddenly had group stranger as a visitors to your home. So you are visitors to other places as like that. And as some places they are not so hospitable.
Some people they definitely not gonna be very hospitable to you.
Emily: Or maybe not open. Just not open immediately as we used me and you.
Evangelos: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The generally speaking is about really you. It’s nothing to do with the world or out there or the people is about really you. And how can you really conquer your own fear?
Turn it to the valuable tool. No one going to get rid of the fears. That is impossible. It doesn’t happen. But really, how can we reuse it in a way instead of become a fear and expresses us? Depresses us says, don’t do this, don’t do that. Don’t do this. You utilize it. Yes, I can do this, I can experiment this, I can experience this.
And it is up to me to experience it. Like literally, you got to open yourself in your roads with your own mind, with your own thinking to get, express that fear a little bit in order for you to enable yourself to do things. So it is about other thing is surviving in different culture, surviving different culture.
Definitely you need to be human skilled. You need to understand human skills yourself well as the others, and sometimes this is difficult. You don’t get teachings of this. You have to really jump into the hot end and you have to experience yourself and literally, you got to look things that you are blind and deaf in a world.
When you go to the new culture, that’s how you’re gonna feel. That’s how you’re gonna be for a while till you slowly learn a little bit of the language, the people the way they are. Then as things get improved, but till then you internally go and go through this burn stage and fear stage, oh, this is not for me.
I cannot really make it in here. This is difficult. All that kind of scenarios, you will keep playing and playing to yourself to try to disprove your situation. Really, you are there to improve your situation in the first place. So you got to use that fear really to become a good tool and good platform for you to actually experience the true reality that you’re seeking.
Moving to other culture, definitely. I don’t see why everybody’s not doing it. I hope everybody does it in the world in order to learn.
Emily: Maybe it’s not for everyone, let’s be realistic. It’s big stress, like generally to uproot yourself, especially if you have family.
You have already some assets, I don’t know, possession. You have circle of friends, family, so you need to be very curious person. You need to be fearless or, once when I just started my kind of last life chapter and I was in Mexico and basically without, sorry to interrupt you, but without language I was doing some things and my Mexican friend told me like, how you don’t afraid you going here, you going?
Then he was looking like. She’s crazy. I told, I afraid, but my curiosity is bigger than my fear. Not all people, I would say so adventurous or maybe some others would say crazy. And people are in, in different situations, are overwhelmed. And that’s why I’m looking, I’m collecting stories and advices from people like you who overcome it in different, countries and different situations because it’s not my story, it’s story of many different people who did it and what I say they did it.
They bring you the authentic stories and examples so you can do it. But some people need encouragement.
Evangelos: Yeah. For me it is very interesting yeah, absolutely. For me it’s very interesting. Just like you say, sometimes you definitely have to put your curiosities a lot bigger and you wish in your imagination a lot bigger than your fear.
Fear is always gonna stop you. But if this other two, three powerful. And notion emotions that we go through, you activate them, they become very useful. So even let’s say I was really moving to the place I was sleeping on the beach towel. My stomach’s hungry. I have no food, I have no family. I have no, and my mind, I’m in this paradise.
My stomach is really not hungry. I don’t look at everybody’s around me because they got things, they are my enemies. I didn’t look around to say because somebody’s driving a big nice car and my stomach is empty. I got to have a animosity for this. And I was admiring, okay, if he’s able to do that, I can, if he’s able to do drive that I can.
Even if you are in that really gutter, you haven’t got anybody to let’s say pull your hands and take you out. But really we have the mind is more powerful than billions of people that you could pull your hair outta that situation. So again, our thing is to do with really the mindset itself. And you got to allow your curiosity, your imagination, and your gut really instincts to guide you instead of fears.
So yourself has traveled quite a bit, and you know that. It is richly is very scary to just get out of your comfort, to just get out of your cycle, to just get out of your zone. Your comfort zone is very dangerous and very scary and a lot of people don’t do it. But I really believe you go in a place, you’re going to make a home for yourself.
You’re going to make a nest for yourself. So you need to go in. A mindset is like a bird migrating from one land to the other. Land doesn’t need anybody’s permission to build a nest, right? Doesn’t need anything, anyone’s permission to build that nest. And the living nature. We all have a right to have a nest ’cause that’s what living nature does.
But if you moving from your own culture to somewhere else, to build that nest, there are certain things you need to tune. There is one, you need to tune your senses towards that culture. You need tune your emotions to that culture. You need to tune your energy, living energy to that land. You need tune your respect and your love to this people, to that land.
And if you do that. Believe me, you will not have a difficulty to not create that nest for yourself. I’ve done it now three different places in my life and the principle is this, accept who you are, not someone else.
Emily: Know yourself and know yourself.
Evangelos: Know yourself, exactly. Accept who you are as a living being and what is you are here to do.
What is it really your ultimate goal? What is it your ultimate destination? What is it you really ultimately you want for the world to know about you or yourself or your family down the road? So generally speaking, you are the product of the world. You are just didn’t roll into this world that everybody else can dismiss you, right?
So you are product of this world and make sure that you really become that product of this world being accepted by whole world. Obviously many people don’t know. We don’t know how to package ourselves. We don’t know how to conduct ourselves. We don’t know how to reach out somebody to get really some understanding what’s going on around us.
And it is difficult to find somebody that you really trust to actually say, Hey. Come and trust me, I will help you. So because society’s lost a big trust to each other and is very easy to gain the trust, honestly, you have to be a useful tool. You have to be a useful tool to yourself to start off with and useful tool to the things that are around you.
So I was looking at the situation for myself, let’s say 20 years ago or 30 years ago. 30 years ago. For example, I was in England as like really young man, like literally blindfolded and dropped in this place. Don’t know, nobody, don’t know anything. And what do I really do? I really wented several levels deep to try to make sure that what I am doing in there is once is beneficial to me.
And two is beneficial to them. Is idea is not a new or an old is always is like that as a human being. We need other human beings be it to help for something, to learn something, to share something, to even have a laugh or cry or even fight. So you cannot have a fight if there was not another human. So generally speaking, so all to do human to human interaction and we are not being learned or teach by our parents.
How to deal with this. We’ve been basically not having any education, how to be human really. We don’t like human beings. We don’t have any education how to be human.
Emily: No. There is a literature, there is philosophies, there’s, smart people who were thinking about the same topic for centuries.
Evangelos: But generally speaking, like there is no kind of guidelines.
Like when we are little children, there is no type of guidelines. Say, Hey child, you just not belong to here. You belong to all of the people of the world. You’ve been separated. You’ve been separated because of family unit because the tradition become this.
Emily: Yeah, you’re part of your family after then you’re part of your kind of community.
Evangelos: So when you grow up a little bit, just like the birdies of the nest, then you see this, oh yeah, there’s wide world out there. You need to explore. And then we have this huge fears, really huge fear that expresses you to not experience it first because you got to jump outta your comfort comfortable zone.
And when you not doing that, if you are out of it and then you don’t have any help, you have to prove yourself to the world. You have to work 10 times harder than anyone else around you. Believe me, I have done that. You have to produce and produce the things that people think that, imagine that you could not.
But you, you have to, so you have to prove the society or the people that you’re moving into, that you are useful to them. Not useless.
Emily: Some people are moving just for retirement, just to, to change their life.
Evangelos: That’s beneficial thing, right? Yeah. That’s beneficial thing. So when you are moving, obviously for retirement, you are different level of life.
So you are seeking tranquility, you are seeking inclusion
Emily: or maybe to learn new cultures, to immerse yourself, to understand better yourself. Like I’ve just as how I understand, summarize how I understand this, your last answer. So in order to reinvent yourself, oh, what can help you reinvent yourself actually in life professionally when you retiring, when you relocating, know yourself, be curious, be fearless, and trust the life.
Evangelos: Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I agree. I think don’t dismiss your imagination and your instincts. They are absolutely, 100% is the tool that is born with us. So your imagination, your basically gut instinct. And as well as obviously you need to grasp the places that you go in. They are new. So in order to experience a new, you need to go on there with your new self.
So literally you have to renew yourself within your eye blink. You’re not changing your body shape, you’re not changing, basically. You’re not shape shifting, but you really shape shift your mind. You fit into the kind of equation what is facing you. And that’s what I’ve been doing personally.
If I’m in difficult situation, just take a moment, just have it two, three breaths and have a couple of seconds for yourself. Just settle yourself and then look at things around you. What is it really most danger to you or most beneficial to you and you act? And for me it is been really, I never looked.
The world is dangerous, to be honest. The world is not dangerous place at all. People make it crazy, but really it’s just crazy. People, certain places they do that, but not everyone in the world is crazy. Not every human being is crazy. Not every human being is not loving everyone that. I counter, of course someone will not accept you.
That is okay. You can move on, you can move on. And there’s plenty that can accept you. That’s how you gotta really look at it. I look at it richly, the society and the function is like you as an individual, you walk into this big shoe shop, right? Imagine that’s just really big hole is a full of shoes.
So as an individual you are going to pick in things, put things down till you find one, really fit your shoes.
Emily: Some people don’t have time to, to fit different shoes. You Evan you are full of allegories and stories and I am really grateful actually for Mario to, to give. Yeah.
Evangelos: Thank you for Mario for introducing us.
I hope that we have more of few more conversation like this. Emily, I really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you for your time too.
Emily: Thank you very much. Thank you. And today I was speaking with Evan. Remember name Evan and No Limit emails and platform, which helps people to connect, to interact with each other and to build intentional community.
Thank you.
Evangelos: Thank you to you. Thank you for your time
Emily: as we bring this compelling conversation to a close. I hope you have gained as much insights and inspiration from today, episode as I have. Thank you, Evan, for not only sharing your personal stories, expertise, but also your human first approach to business connections and life Evangelist is not just a leader in email marketing.
He’s a builder of connections in a way that both deeply personal and forward thinking. His belief in uplifting others and fostering meaningful relationship is something we can all aspire to apply in our own lives, whether through our work, our connections with communities, or our personal reinvention.
Stay tuned for the next episode of H of Reinvention, eco Living, expats and intentional communities where we bring you more transformative stories and impactful perspectives. And don’t forget to check out evangelist work. You will find the links in the show notes. Until next time, live boldly, lead with intention and never stop reinventing yourself.
Continuous seeking new ways to reinvent your life. Embrace the journey, and live purposefully. I’m Emily Braun, wishing you all the best in your path to intentional living. Goodbye for now.
Evangelos Taxiarchis
Founder of No Limit Emails
Evangelos Taxiarchis is a veteran marketing strategist with over 35 years of global experience in finance, fintech, and blockchain. As co-founder of NoLimitEmails.com, he helps businesses build private, white-label email servers with unlimited automation and top-tier deliverability. With 27+ years in email and live communication, Evangelos brings deep expertise and hard-won insights to create scalable, reliable communication systems that power real business growth.
In an era where technology often isolates and overwhelms, Evangelos Taxiarchis emerges as a visionary leader, redefining how we connect, communicate, and create meaning in the digital realm. As explored in a recent episode of the “Age of Reinvention” podcast hosted by Emily Bron, Evan’s journey illustrates the profound intersection of adaptability, creativity, and authentic human connection. His life is living proof of the belief that personal development and innovation can—and should—serve the deeper purpose of fostering unity rather than division.
The Power of Human Connection
Evan subscribes to a bold yet simple philosophy: technology, as a means to help people (not corporations), should serve as a bridge to genuine human interaction, not a wall. This foundational belief inspired the creation of his groundbreaking platform, No Limit Emails. Designed with intentionality and purpose, No Limit Emails exemplifies Evan’s vision for a digital space that prioritizes authentic connections, blending efficiency with emotion.
In an era where automation often dilutes personal touch, Evan’s platform breathes personal attention and humanity into email marketing, creating opportunities for individuals and businesses to build meaningful relationships. The focus on decentralized, safe communication practices aligns with Evan’s broader mission—to foster trust and connection in a world that values privacy.
An Adventurous Journey Across Borders
Evan’s story is not just about digital transformation; it is a tale of personal reinvention shaped by cross-cultural experiences. His journey began as a curious teenager without money and knowledge of language, running away from home on the Greek island to Italy, where he explored the new landscapes of unfamiliar land and culture. After graduating from school, he went to discover another new country – England. Later, after a continued search for a matching country, he embraced fresh beginnings in Portugal, where the blend of diverse traditions, languages, and philosophies deepened his understanding of the human spirit.
This global perspective forms the bedrock of Evan’s approach to technology—a “human-first” philosophy that prioritizes empathy, adaptability, and the celebration of coexistence with nature. His experiences as a cross-cultural wanderer not only enriched his worldview but also inspired a purposeful career as a global influencer in community building.
Building Bridges with Technology
At the core of Evan’s work lies a simple yet revolutionary idea: technology should empower and connect people rather than isolate them. In the realm of email marketing, he reinvents the traditional approach by focusing on human-centred communication. His ability to bridge the worlds of technology and emotion has transformed marketing from a transactional exchange into an art form of authentic storytelling.
Through No Limit Emails, Evan provides individuals and organizations with tools to foster meaningful connections. His platform’s emphasis on decentralized communication systems underscores his belief in creating safe, private spaces where people can connect without fear of intrusion. Evan’s work champions a future where technology enhances, rather than detracts from, emotional connection.
Fostering Intentional Communities
One of Evan’s most inspiring contributions is his focus on intentional communities—groups of people united by shared values, goals, and a desire for authentic living. His commitment to cross-cultural understanding and bridge-building invites others to examine their own relationship with connection and change.
In a world that increasingly favors isolation over collaboration, Evan advocates for resilience, open-mindedness, and the ability to adapt. His work challenges people to step outside their comfort zones, embrace new ways of thinking, and connect across boundaries to build stronger, more diverse communities.
Lessons in Reinvention
As highlighted on the “Age of Reinvention” podcast, Evan’s journey is not merely about technology—it’s about self-discovery and purposeful living. His advice to listeners is simple yet profound: Know yourself, stay curious, and lead with authenticity. Reinvention, he argues, is a practice rooted in introspection and fueled by genuine connections.
Evan’s story illustrates that innovation often arises from understanding one’s personal history while remaining open to learning from the experiences of others. His work serves as an inspiring example of how embracing curiosity and authenticity can drive transformation in both personal and professional realms.
Cultivating the Future Through Connection
Evan’s life and philosophy remind us that technology when wielded with care, can enhance the human experience rather than diminish it. By encouraging intentional living and fostering deeper relationships, Evan inspires us to use digital tools in ways that support community, trust, and connection.
Whether you are a budding entrepreneur navigating uncharted waters, a digital nomad seeking meaningful ties, or an individual striving for deeper relationships, Evan’s extraordinary journey affirms the value of reinvention. His story calls on all of us to live with intention, break down barriers, and embrace the richness of life through authentic, purposeful connections.
Closing Thoughts
Evangelos Taxiarchis’s name is synonymous with thoughtful innovation and meaningful connection. His story, rooted in cross-cultural experience and groundbreaking work in email marketing, challenges us to rethink our approach to technology and community building.
In celebrating Evan’s vision, we are reminded that reinvention is not a single act but an ongoing journey—one that begins with curiosity, is fueled by authenticity, and is propelled by intentional, heartfelt connections.
