Steven Moody on Building Remote Teams and Hiring Developers in Argentina | Nearshore Cafe Podcast

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**Brian:** Welcome to the Nearshore Cafe podcast, home to the most interesting stories and people doing business in Latin America. Welcome everyone to the Nearshore Cafe podcast. I’m Brian Sampson, your host. I want to give a shout out to our sponsor, Nearshore Direct. That’s gonearshoredirect.com. They provide non-IT marketing, designers, SDRs, all sorts of roles for U.S. companies that are growing. I’m very excited about our guest today. Welcome, Steven Moody, to the pod!

**Steven:** Yeah, thanks, Brian. Happy to be on here.

**Brian:** Yeah, great to have you. Well, Steven, we’ve got all sorts of fun stuff to talk about: everything from your travels and work in Asia, obviously the States, but you’re in Latin America today in Argentina. Tell us more specifically where you’re calling from.

**Steven:** Yeah, I’m in Buenos Aires. I’m in Palermo, which is the place where most tourists stop when they come to Buenos Aires. It’s very full of tourists and people from all around the world. A lot of Russians here, a lot of people from Brazil, as well as the U.S. It’s a very cosmopolitan city, about three million people.

**Brian:** Yeah, right on. And I think when we spoke, so today you’re specifically in Palermo, and I think you’re living in the north suburbs, like suburban Buenos Aires, is that right?

**Steven:** Yeah, I’m trying out Olivos, which is like near the coast. I actually, when I look at the map of Argentina, Buenos Aires, I thought that looks—the capital looks really close to the ocean, so there must be a beach here. It’s so close, and it turns out it’s technically the river, so there’s water, but it’s not what you imagine when you think about—you know, I was born in California, so I have specific, spoiled standards of what I expect when I see the ocean.

**Brian:** Yeah, the coastline is a little bit different, a little browner, right? From the set of it, but that’s okay. But I’d say most people aren’t going there for the river; they’re going there for other stuff. What brought you there?

**Steven:** Yeah, so I originally was going to come here when I first started traveling in 2008, and just by circumstance, by chance, I didn’t come here. I went to Costa Rica instead, because it was a little easier at the time and convenient for what I was doing. So, in 2018, I had been around the world and traveled dozens of countries, and Argentina was the last place I wanted to go. And so, I got a flight, and I thought, “Okay, this is it. Once I go to Argentina, I won’t want to go anywhere else. I’ll never really have a need to travel again.” I came here. I loved so many things about it that I wanted to decide to move to South America and start my business. And I knew I wanted to be in this time zone, in this region. So I came here first, not really knowing anyone, but knowing that there are things about it I loved. And about two weeks after I was here, I was like, “Okay, I don’t need to try anywhere else. This is the right place to be.”

**Brian:** That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, let’s just hear a little more about the perspective you’re coming from. You know, you’ve worked in tech a long time. If you don’t mind, just giving the audience a little bit of background, like what kind of work have you done, your education, stuff like that?

**Steven:** Sure. Well, I’m actually on my third career right now. My first 10 years, I worked in restaurants, and I got my way through college by mostly working in Domino’s, McDonald’s, and all the fast food possible. And then, after finishing college, I found my way into tech, and I was very, very fortunate to get there. Around the same time, I was also lucky to get into a company that was doing remote work, and I wanted to be remote, and so I started out remoting very early in 2008.

**Brian:** Wow, that’s very early for remote work. Not everybody was so enthusiastic then.

**Steven:** Yeah, for me, it was just working from cafes, and I still had the student mindset where, “Of course I worked from a cafe. Work is a thing that you do; it’s not a place.” And so I just kind of adopted that. And once my boss knew that I was going to respond to messages at any time—you know, at 8 PM I’d respond to a Yahoo message—it was really easy to build trust, and it just kind of evolved into a natural thing.

**Brian:** Yeah, and where were you when you were doing this remote work back in 2008?

**Steven:** So, my first job was in the Bay Area, in San Jose. And remote, at the time, for me was just, “Oh, I can go to a cafe. I’d rather be there.” And then I negotiated working from San Diego. At first, I made an agreement that I would drive up, so that was about an eight to ten-hour drive. I would drive to San Jose for meetings every two weeks. And about two, three months in, one day I got there, my boss said, “What are you doing here? You don’t need to be here.” And it became really obvious that that travel time was not really helping anyone, that everything we were doing was online. And then I just stayed in San Diego and went as fast as I could.

**Brian:** Yeah. Now, with your background, you mentioned restaurants, but as you got into tech, you’ve had these different parallel paths of software development, but then also marketing and growth. Just tell us a little more about the types of projects and things you’ve worked on.

**Steven:** So, I studied philosophy in university, but mostly because it was the foundation of computer science, and I actually wanted to study computer science. But I needed to finish university and get into the working world, and I was fortunate to meet some architects from AT&T that actually had studied philosophy, so I had some confidence that that would be okay. Then, working in restaurants, I learned a lot about the systems that run the restaurants and the business. And so I had a familiarity with the point of sale and ERPs and everything these companies were running. So, with that combination, I ended up in marketing, but within a year, I was implementing systems for marketers: the marketing automation systems and lead management. Because most people go into marketing because they failed at math or they really wanted to be an artist, and that was the next closest thing. And so, because I just had a little bit of knowledge about the foundations of the math and logic, I was able to, in many cases, run circles around them.

**Brian:** You know, that’s really interesting. I actually started in restaurants as well, in the Chicago suburbs. And it is really hard for me to go into any restaurant nowadays and not try to analyze the whole system and the processes and the flows and what’s wrong and how I would fix it. I don’t know, do you have the same thought?

**Steven:** Absolutely. I was working at Denny’s when I started there when I was 16. And my second Denny’s, I started when I was 18. And I went back to my first one, and in the first shift, I wrote down a list of 90 things that they could change to make it better.

**Brian:** I love it. Yeah, I still refer—even 20 years later, I still refer to a lot of the things that I learned as a teenager. And I also worked my way through college, working in restaurants, everything from like leadership frameworks, the systems and processes, and bottlenecks. Yeah, it was great training, and also the polling, too, dealing with the public.

**Steven:** I mean, one of my hiring rules now, to that point, is I almost don’t want to hire someone who hasn’t worked in a restaurant or retail because there’s so much learned knowledge there. And especially the established companies, I still remember learning that you should never criticize someone in public; you should praise in public and criticize in private. I think that was like standard operating procedure at most multinational restaurants. Most non-restaurant managers never learned that. It’s like, how is that possible? It’s so basic, it’s so foundational.

**Brian:** Yeah, if you can motivate a bunch of 16-year-olds, you can motivate anyone.

**Steven:** That’s that…

**Brian:** That might be the quote of the day. I like that. Well, fast forward us to Asia. What brought you to Asia? Where did you go? What were you doing out there?

**Steven:** So, after I was working remotely from San Diego, still in California, and I’d read *The 4-Hour Work Week*, I caught the idea that I could outsource my job. So I actually ended up outsourcing my job to a VA in the field.

**Brian:** No way! Wow.

**Steven:** And this was early before this became a thing, like 2010. And I actually had it down to a four-hour workweek. I spent two hours talking to my VA to make sure things were working right, and then two hours making a presentation to the team, like, “Look, it’s working.” That was the job. And I was making a very good salary doing this. And that lasted about eight weeks before I realized I was so bored. I didn’t want the four-hour workweek. I wanted to actually do stuff myself. I also discovered that there were a lot of VAs that were actually subcontracting their work to another person, and this could go on five levels.

**Brian:** Oh my gosh!

**Steven:** Especially the people on sites like Upwork. The one who could write the proposal on Upwork, they were the one who spoke English, and they all read *The 4-Hour Work Week* too; they knew the game. And it just surprised me that the trust was so low, and there were all these things that just didn’t feel right. And so I decided to go to Asia to actually try to hire myself, to figure out who I could hire that would actually not be as obvious, that they wouldn’t be on Upwork. I had this intuition that the best people are probably not in the popular swimming pool.

**Brian:** Yeah, there’s probably another pool that’s worth visiting.

**Steven:** So, that kind of took me there, and I fell into living in Vietnam and built out the agency there for about four years. I learned how to hire and do all those things locally.

**Brian:** Very cool. Where in Vietnam?

**Steven:** Yeah, in Saigon, as I like to call it, or Ho Chi Minh City.

**Brian:** Yeah, sure. And what type of people were you trying to hire?

**Steven:** So, at the time, I had this agency around this marketing software. And at the time, I found that very interesting; it was a very strategic software. You know, the idea of managing and scoring leads and sending them the right email was so novel. And so I was building a team around that, basically to scale the consult team. And I assumed, “Well, if I could do it, anyone could learn this, so of course I can hire some people to do this.” And it turned out there are so many things I knew as an American in tech that I took for granted, that I couldn’t just teach to people because it was so unconscious that I even knew these things. So, I spent a lot of time doing that, starting to hire developers to build other products because I once I realized I didn’t want to be in that business in general. So we actually built a prototype for a virtual trade show in VR for the Oculus Rift. It was this beautiful idea, and I’m amazed this still hasn’t happened. But we just take like a baseball stadium and skin all the ads for different trade show sponsors. And then, if you look at an ad for 30 seconds or 10 seconds, it’ll play their demo video on the Jumbotron. Now, these are the worst demo videos in the world, right? These are B2B marketing software videos; they all look the same, they’re awful. But when people would put on the headset, and they would explore, and they would look at something, and then they would hear an audio, and they would look at the Jumbotron, and they would just stare at the Jumbotron and watch the entire stupid video, I was like, “Wow, this is remarkable. How is this working?” So we did a lot of stuff like that. Unfortunately, nothing really quite had commercial success, and I didn’t have a co-founder, so I was going back and forth between Vietnam and California and trying to build connections and find clients. And the whole time zone and jet lag completely burned me out.

**Brian:** Yeah, and I’m sorry, how many years were you there in Vietnam?

**Steven:** I want to say it was four. I think it was 2012 or 2016.

**Brian:** Yeah, right on. What was just like the working culture like out there?

**Steven:** I was very fortunate because I didn’t speak Vietnamese. So, my subset of people I was hiring, I selected for people that spoke English. And it turned out, and I was hiring from one of the best universities, and actually had employees that had their own cars in an overall very poor culture. Someone I knew at the time was making $150 a month that was living on that. So, the culture is—Vietnam is one of the most capitalist places in the world, which is funny because it’s technically a communist country, but on every ranking of capitalism, they are the most enthusiastic country about capitalism in the world. And especially in Saigon, especially, it’s this intensely open place to other influences, because they’ve been colonized by the French and by the British and by the Chinese. Everyone’s tried and, you know, everyone’s trying to be there; Americans try to be there. And yet they beat them, they’ve won every war, they’ve beat every empire. So, they have this confidence that comes from having outlasted wars with all these major empires, combined with this openness and curiosity, not just about Americans. But my favorite Indian food in the world was in Saigon. Oh, yeah, there was this incredible Indian restaurant. And I used to get Turkish ice cream on the boardwalk in a beach town nearby. So, there are just these surprising things there. And so the culture was hard-working, but they were so far behind the U.S. There was no time for new stuff because you could take anything, at least as of 2015, you could take any idea from the U.S. 10 years ago and implement it and become rich. And so it was a culture focused so much on execution, and not really focused on how to scale things or novelty. There wasn’t time for novelty; it was just how fast can you run at this thing that is obvious. I had a friend that I remember, she started a business just cleaning offices after living in the U.S. for two years and discovered that you can make money and clean the offices. She just built a team of people that would go to offices and do the cleanup, and had better tools so they could go twice as quickly.

**Brian:** Really interesting lessons on leadership all around there. That’s awesome. Yeah.

**Brian:** Let’s go to the other side of the world, where you are today, in Argentina. Tell us a little more about what you’re doing, your company, what you’re trying to achieve here.

**Steven:** Yeah, so during the pandemic, long story short, I discovered that time zones and remote work—even though I’ve used these words for 15 years—they mean something different now. Everything from 2015, you read about remote work, most of it from Jason Fried, and about remote, and it all comes down to work asynchronously. Someone else can work while you sleep. Write better communication; you don’t have to have meetings. And so, when I visited Argentina in 2018, I was here with a group of nomads and travelers, and we could have lunch every Monday together at 1 PM, no problem. Everyone had their own schedule, and they were autonomous. I came back in October with the same group, and we had three different times for lunch because no one was able to get lunch unless their boss was online. And I was like, “Wow, that’s something changed!” So, I came here because I think there’s going to be a massive shift to the time zone here. Latin America has not been the biggest beneficiary of remote work yet. Philippines and India, I think, were the first beneficiaries because they had the biggest advantage in English, but they got all the customer service work and the low-quality work. And countries like Vietnam are getting a little bit, but the time zone is just huge. I used to get up before 4 AM in Vietnam to meet with clients in California, and that wasn’t to meet with them when they were starting their day; that was when they were five cups of coffee in. They had to keep up with that. And Argentina doesn’t have a lot of English. Latin America doesn’t have a lot of English, but they have time zone, and you can’t teach time zone. So I came here to teach English and then see what happens when more people here can have enough English to work remote jobs.

**Brian:** Yeah, and you really could have gone anywhere in Latin America. What particular specifics about Argentina attracted you?

**Steven:** We could spend hours talking about our travels, and I can tell you, name the city, I’ll tell you everything I hate about it and everything that’s wrong with it. Why I love Argentina is there’s only one problem: the economy. And it’s a big problem, right? The currency devaluation, I don’t think anyone who hasn’t been here can read about it and even understand and feel what it’s like. I can’t get broccoli in the grocery store now, and I’m pretty sure it’s frozen broccoli because I’m pretty sure it’s imported. And because of the exchange rate, people don’t want to import stuff because they don’t know what’s going to be worth in two weeks. And so there’s this scarcity mindset that comes with the hyperinflation that’s happening here. That’s not your American inflation; this is a different type, a different quality of inflation, and how it affects people. But that’s it, that’s it. When you earn pesos, you feel this every day. You can’t get the same thing; you can’t get a price quote for more than two hours to buy something. But when you earn in dollars, most of the inflation problems go away because mostly inflation increases the value of the dollar. So, there’s still a little bit, but it’s just, it’s no longer a problem. So, I think Argentina is the biggest opportunity to benefit from remote work and adopt quickly because people here don’t just want to make more money; they want to earn in dollars. And that is more—I mean, I know people who are in their 20s that talk about how their savings are in bags of 100 bills that still have the old logo because they’ve been saving them their whole life. And now they can’t exchange them in Argentina because they’re not accepted. But they’ll keep them because it’s still worth more. So, that dynamic just fascinates me. And yet, for all the challenges with that, the things here are so beautiful and amazing. There’s not a lot of violence here; it’s a very civilized country. Most people here pride themselves on being more European, and I don’t know if I agree that they’re more European or what that really means, but there’s a desire for dignity here that it’s not really Latin. And actually, I love Latin America, but from a perspective of trying to hire people to match the U.S. culture, I think that Argentina has this incredible advantage that it doesn’t exist anywhere else in modern America.

**Brian:** And maybe just to illustrate your point about inflation, at least the last time I was there, and speaking about restaurants as well, most of the food prices are in chalk because they can erase it and rewrite it two hours later, based on the cost of goods. Do you see that as well today?

**Steven:** Yeah, and it’s worse than that. I mean, if you talk to anyone in their 30s, they remember 2001 and going to a convenience store and their parents yelling at them to grab an orange before the price went up. So there’s a trauma there. I call it like anticipatory PTSD because people are so worried it’s going to happen again and that they’re reliving it. And so, there’s instability around the pricing. And I didn’t think it would affect me, but I’m seeing these shortages in foods because I think that they just can’t import them. They can’t get the right price for them. And so it’s there.

**Brian:** Yeah, you mentioned something earlier, Latin America as a whole, and then Argentina. Taking a macro viewpoint of Latin America, what is the typical U.S. person’s view on Latin America, or those that you’ve interacted with?

**Steven:** Yeah, this is one reason I’m in Argentina, because I think there’s an opportunity to establish what it means to hire in Latin America. I don’t think anyone really knows what that means. So what I considered where I would go, I thought about the perception. I think in my experience, most people that go to Colombia have just watched *Narcos* on Netflix. And I say, “Oh, cool, I’m going to get Coke.” And the truth is, they will. For five dollars, they’re going to have a 72-hour bender, and if they survive it, they’ll be happy for it, I guess. But that leads to a certain culture, that the culture adapts what the foreigners expect too, right? So that becomes the culture in Colombia because that’s what the foreigners are expecting. And I think a lot of people, when they think about Mexico, or they’re thinking about going to Ensenada and drinking the wrong water and having diarrhea, or they’re going to Cabo for spring break. They’re not thinking about Mexico City, the place with the most museums per capita in the world. They’re not thinking about Mole, this incredible food made with chocolate that you put on chicken. That doesn’t come to mind. They’re limited to a very specific idea, or they’re thinking about the drug wars on the border. And the truth is, most of Mexico is safe. But if I’m trying to build something in a place, I hope that the average American will also think it’s safe because that makes my life a lot easier. So, in Brazil, I’ve talked to a lot of people about what they think about Brazil, and they don’t know. Brazil’s a huge country, and they speak Portuguese, and they really don’t have that much reason to let anyone tell them what they should think about them. They don’t care. So there’s not really an understanding of it.

**Brian:** Yeah, that’s really interesting about the misconceptions. What kind of advice would you give to somebody who is—maybe I’ll use the phrase “nearshore curious”—like they’re starting to hear more about Latin America? They’re a business person. They haven’t read *The 4-Hour Work Week* yet, but they’re interested in labor arbitrage, or at least trying to understand it. What would be your top one or two pieces of advice that you’d give them when they’re exploring Latin America?

**Steven:** Yeah, so first I’d say you have to read *The 4-Hour Work Week*. Of course, I’m kidding. It’s a wonderful book that is misunderstood, and all the more because it’s out of date. The first thing I think is important to realize is that Latin America is not cheaper. Latin America is a place where things are cheaper because you don’t get things bundled into the price. So the price of things in the U.S. includes the ability to sue anybody and become a millionaire. A month ago, I was in an Uber here, and I was rear-ended, and I said to the driver, “We’re in the U.S., we’d both be rich now.” In Argentina, you just take five seconds, look at it, make sure the car is going to survive. He’s driving home with the back of the car falling off, and that’s fine. In the U.S., you’re in an ambulance, you’re getting a tow truck just because the fender’s off, right? So, if you’re visiting Latin America and you’re trying to live cheaply, you don’t get the things that you think you have. If you drink the local water or a beverage, you might get a parasite in your stomach. And it’s not that that’s the culture here; it’s that you were trying to live cheaply, and that’s the culture of the poor people here. So, I think it’s a trap that people make is that they try to come here to save money. And the more interesting thing is, what can you do if you live on the same amount of money? What’s the impact you can have with that much money? What are the things you can explore? And I think you can go a lot further with that. You also don’t get stuck with what Venkatesh Rao called the “Favela Chic,” where you’re basically living in a favela but you’re posting on Instagram, and you look fabulous while being poor.

**Brian:** “Favela Chic,” that’s interesting.

**Steven:** And that’s a trap, right? Because if you get used to living on a thousand dollars, and you can in most of Latin America, very well, even as a foreigner who doesn’t know very many people, but then you’re going to only make a thousand dollars a month. And then, what happens if you have to go to the U.S.? What happens if you have a death in the family? How are you paying for that? Where’s your security for that? So it’s much easier to live on the same salary and figure out what to do with that money and make a difference. You can hire people in non-obvious ways. One thing I’m planning to do is hire an Uber driver that will just drive me around, who’s practicing English. And find someone who could be an intern but also a driver. And that’s something that most people thinking about this could not even afford in the U.S., but that probably costs a thousand dollars a month, or five hundred dollars a month, in Argentina, and certainly cheaper in a lot of other countries. So there’s more freedom in play if you’re not trying to save money. You can only save money until you get down to zero. But if you focus on how you’re going to make money and how you can use what you’re doing to invest and build on what you have, then spending time in Latin America, spending time in these countries, there’s a lot more you can do. So I think that’s the biggest thing for me. And the second is, you just have to understand that people are coming from a different culture, and you have to learn the different patterns. One thing I love about Argentina: there’s this book, *The Weirdest People in the World*, that kind of profiles how the U.S. is actually unique. It’s “Western educated, industrialized, rich, and Democratic,” and every study in psychology and sociology is basically only on weird people, which are mostly Americans and Western Europeans. And you don’t get that culture in Latin America except for Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires is “Western educated, industrialized, and Democratic,” and it’s just not rich. It’s got everything else, right? But if you branch out much further from Argentina, you’re dealing with a culture that has completely different assumptions about the world. You’re dealing with a culture where people have not been motivated to be proactive. There’s no reward. There’s a great story about a strike in Colombia. I think it was the banana company. They had this big strike in Colombia, and they came to meet with the strikers to negotiate an agreement, and they just shot them all down. So, the real history of Latin America is a history of Europeans and Yankees coming to try to pillage. And so you have to understand, especially if you’re coming from that background, that that’s an underlying assumption in most of Latin America. Now, whether people are nice to you or not, they might be nice to you because they’re like, “Well, I’d rather be pillaged than be here,” in some places. But that dynamic is there, and they know more about your culture than you know theirs because YouTube is the same in the whole world. They’ve seen the same Marvel movies. They know Hollywood culture because that is a global culture. And it goes a long way to understand their culture and what they love and where they’re coming from, and make that connection. And it’s real easy not to. You can, these days, go to most these places, use Google Maps, go to Starbucks, get all the same things you would want in the U.S., and just be around different people and feel like you have an experience. It’s very easy to travel without traveling.

**Brian:** Yeah. Now, Steven, right now you’re—if I had it right—you’re connecting developers with U.S. companies, developers in Argentina with U.S. companies. Did I have that right?

**Steven:** So, that’s the vision. So, IceHearts is focused on the main goal: to get more talent in Argentina working with U.S. companies and to build up that talent pool. And what I found is that the biggest opportunity is to improve their English. Actually, only 4% of engineers in Latin America have a LinkedIn profile in English. And so that’s approximately the percentage of developers that U.S. companies can even see, because if they’re not on LinkedIn, they basically don’t exist, right? So we built an app and a set of tools to help introverted engineers improve their English and improve their confidence and their interviewing so they can actually get the best work. And we’re focusing on the people who are the most talented engineers possible. I would love to help everyone I can, but my goal is to help the top talent get the best work, and I think that raises everyone’s position in society if we can kind of reinforce that benefit for the best engineers. So my focus is on this app, where we have a dozen students now, and helping them practice and improve and learning from what they’re doing. And then learning how can we connect with companies in the U.S.? How do we lower their risk for the hiring? And so we’re exploring what that means: what can we do to lower the risk and make it feel safer? Because it’s actually very weird to hire someone in another country that you’ve never met in person, and even stranger when they don’t speak your language. And even stranger when you give them access to your systems and say, “Please don’t steal my passwords.”

**Brian:** That’s really interesting about how you’re really increasing the total addressable market for companies looking for talent. And when you think about cost arbitrage and so forth, it’s less about that. As you mentioned today, it’s really like, if I can identify that 10x engineer and they happen to be somewhere else, there’s a lot of 10x engineers down there. And the fastest way for them to increase their salary is to improve their English, right? It’s actually not going from a 9x engineer to a 10x engineer, it’s going from 2x in English to a 10x. And that’s where they really start to get the opportunity. So, love what you’re doing. I think it’s great for the world.

**Steven:** Yeah, I love this topic. But I was talking to an agency owner this morning about this, and his team even knows that they can triple their salary with English, and sometimes they still don’t learn. And I keep telling my team here, “Our competition is not Duolingo; our competition is football,” because at Wednesday afternoon at 5:00 PM, you’re asking yourself, “Do I go play football with my friends or do I learn English?” That’s your choice. And what I’m trying to do is make that a better choice. Ideally, you’re learning English with your friends, and you’re learning the English that you actually want, not to talk about “Where’s the bathroom?” or “I want a hamburger,” but the English to argue over JavaScript vs. Python, and win your favorite debates. I think that’s what excites developers, and there aren’t a lot of tools for them to learn English, even though it’s very valuable for them. It’s more valuable for them than it is for the average person. And yet no one’s built the tools to make it possible for them to learn it quickly and for them to practice. So that’s a puzzle I’m exploring. I really enjoy playing into that.

**Brian:** I think that’s great. Just a few fun questions, Steven. The best meal you’ve had in Latin America?

**Steven:** I mean, I have to promote La Cabrera Steakhouse here. This place is my favorite because I’ve been there. It’s such an institution. Most people have dinner at 9:00 PM in Buenos Aires. And when I try to get people to go to dinner before nine, they drag their feet to at least eight; they might find excuses to avoid. And La Cabrera opens at 6:30, basically just for tourists. And they have a 40% discount; the place is already a very good price. It’s a 40% discount, so you show up, no reservations, in one of the top steakhouses in the city, and suddenly the place goes from empty to full, and they’re cooking all this food so fast. And it’s the only place in Argentina that will actually give you your check when you want to leave because they want you to leave. They have a reservation at eight. So it’s a really exceptional experience. And I found there’s a lot of food in Argentina, and Asian food, that is exportable anywhere in the world. Indian food, you can really kind of have anywhere in the world because it’s mostly just spices. But some foods, like fish in Japan and steak in Argentina, you can’t really get it anywhere else. The freshness is the thing. So I was told this, I didn’t really believe it until I got here, but the steak here is so exceptional, it kind of ruins eating steak anywhere else in the world.

**Brian:** I concur with that. I have yet to have anywhere near as good. And I think a lot has to do with how precise they are with the fire and the temperature, and just tinkering with that all day. Whereas, at least in the States, we just kind of throw our meat on the grill and hope for the best. What’s your best purchase in Latin America for under fifty dollars?

**Steven:** Best purchase in Latin America? An electric mosquito swatter!

**Brian:** Ah, that’s great!

**Steven:** No one here had ever had one. I’ve never seen a Chinese product. Oh, it’s amazing. There’s a mosquito problem here. And Buenos Aires in January becomes like the hottest version of Miami—just complete humidity and heat and sweating, combined with the rain. So, there are so many mosquitoes here that I’m playing with the idea that if I’ve ever had a religion, one of the first rules is that you can never use the word “should,” and every time you use the word “should,” the next person who dies gets reincarnated as a mosquito. And people say “should” here so much that that’s why there are so many mosquitoes here.

**Brian:** I like that. I like that.

**Steven:** And huge savings! It’s a joy. And also, what’s really cool is just giving someone the electric swatter and seeing them have the empowerment that they can actually do something about them.

**Brian:** That’s amazing. That’s amazing. I wish I had that when I was there, January a few years ago. That’s great. The pizza in Argentina is different from most places. Are you pro-Argentine pizza or against?

**Steven:** Hey, I’m against the official pizza, but actually the best pizza I’ve ever had in my life was just like a barbecue pizza someone made. I don’t know what they did, but it was like they made a flatbread pizza on the grill.

**Brian:** Nice.

**Steven:** And it was amazing. I worked at Domino’s for a long time. I’ve developed a lot of ideas about pizza, but this was really, really exceptional. Whatever they did, I’m still not sure. But the average pizza is a lot of deep dish, so I think a lot of people might not be their style. And it’s a lot of cheese. It’s not what I’m used to.

**Brian:** A lot of cheese.

**Steven:** A lot of cheese.

**Brian:** Yeah, they love their cheese here. Last question for you, Steven: What is your favorite Spanish word?

**Steven:** Favorite Spanish word? Well, the one in my mind the most is *confianza*. So, growing up, I heard this idea a lot about how Latin languages are so much more complicated; they have all these words for love, *amore*, and we only have one in English. And that’s actually fairly true. I discovered a couple months ago that in Argentina, there’s only one word, *confianza*, which means “confidence” and “trust.” But there’s no real word—for me, I’m looking for a word that translates to “confidence with faith.” There’s no word that combines trust and faith here. So *confianza* most closely means, like, “Oh, someone has confidence,” or there’s not really an explanation that you can trust somebody, and there’s not really a language for that. So I think that says a lot about the culture, about how they relate to strangers and how they connect and build. And because you don’t need a word for that if you’re used to most of your world as people you’ve known your whole life.

**Brian:** Yeah, you don’t need a word for trust.

**Steven:** That’s right.

**Brian:** If you don’t distrust anyone.

**Steven:** That’s right, that’s right. So I’ve been puzzling over that a lot.

**Brian:** I like it. I like it. Well, that’s all the time we have today, Steven. It was a blast, learned a lot, I had a lot of fun. I want to thank our sponsor again, Nearshore Direct. That’s gonearshoredirect.com. Steven, hopefully we can have you back sometime. This is great.

**Steven:** Yeah, I’d love to interview you next time. That sounds fun.

**Brian:** Yeah, we have a lot of similarities in our backgrounds and stories. Well, thanks again to our listeners and Nearshore Direct. And we’ll see you again soon. Thanks for joining us at the Nearshore Cafe podcast. Tune in next week for a new episode featuring another special guest.

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