The ‘Nomad Skeptic’ platform has finally launched

For a long time it has been my intention to separate my DN/travel stuff from my JLB/Skepticism stuff.

A lot of the audience of johnlebon.com are interested in both, but no doubt some people here really couldn’t care less about the DN/travel stuff.

Moreover, there is a potential audience of people out there in the DN scene who might like my DN stuff, but are simply not ready for the real skepticism stuff (and in most cases, probably never will be ready).

Well, I have finally created a website specifically for my DN/travel stuff, and over the past few days I’ve populated it with a written piece, a YouTube video, and a podcast.

Today I also created the Nomad Skeptic Discord server, which you are all most welcome to join. Link here.

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What are the plans with the Nomad Skeptic platform?

I explain all of this in the podcast, which I will also embed here to make it super easy for you to listen to (or download for later).

Basically I am hoping to do two things:

a) Document my experiences with the DN lifestyle for my own benefit. Kind of like a journal I can look back on in the future.

b) Document my experiences with the DN lifestyle for the benefit of others. I’ve gotten a lot of good information, ideas and motivation from other people who have written blogs, produced videos and released podcasts.

For one example, tomorrow I fly to Kuching, which is a city in Malaysian Borneo. I’ll be there for a month. I was inspired to go there when I first read about it months ago on a blog, which led me to (or I had been led there from) this other blog. Both authors, guys I’ve never met, took the time to share their experiences in Kuching, and their work put the idea in my head to go there myself, which now, months after I first read these guys’ blogs, is what I will be doing at about midday tomorrow.

The point being that if we take the time to share our own experiences, this can help others, now and into the future. The internet is a fricken amazing tool in this regard. I might upload a podcast tomorrow which helps somebody in ten years time; I might listen to a podcast next week which helps me, but was recorded by somebody who is no longer on this earth. With the assistance of this magical thing we call the internet, we can all help one another in ways which not long ago were merely the realm of ‘science fiction’.

I love being part of that.

Perhaps one day, if I continue on my DN journey, and continue to release content on Nomad Skeptic dot com, it might grow to be something even bigger than merely a personal blog. But that is a long way down the line, I have no intention of monetising the site any time soon. It took literally years of work before the JLB platform was ready for monetisation, and I was working on it full-time for free for years before I turned over a red cent from it. I don’t plan to put anywhere near as much time or effort into Nomad Skeptic, so it will be a long time before I try to make it more than a personal blog — if ever.

With that said, I’ve already begun the process of trying to find fellow DNs to interview. You can read a thread I posted to the digital nomad sub here. We’ll see how it goes. The DN scene is crying out for a balanced and honest take on the lifestyle and subculture, and nobody is better equipped to provide that kind of platform than the World’s Leading Skeptic.

Amirite?

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What if I’m one of those people who has no interest in your DN stuff?

Well then this is good news for you because, like I said, I’m planning to separate the DN/travel stuff from the real skepticism stuff.

JLB.com will be relatively DN/travel free from now on. I say ‘relatively’ because this is a huge part of my life now, so a complete divorce between the primary JLB website and my travels is virtually impossible. After all, if it weren’t for this website, I wouldn’t even be overseas right now — and if it weren’t for the carrot of an overseas adventure dangling in front of me, I would never have put in the effort to build this website into what it is in the first place.

But yeah, in short, if you are sick of the DN stuff, this is good news for you. Just ignore the Nomad Skeptic website.

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What if I’m one of those people who has heaps of interest in your DN stuff?

Here’s what you should do:

1) Join the Nomad Skeptic Discord. That’s where I’ll be focusing my DN/travel stuff.

2) Sign up to the Nomad Skeptic mailing list. You can find it on the right-hand side of the main page.

Note that I am not going to be migrating the JLB Mailing List to the NS Mailing List. I’m starting from the ground up.

3) Subscribe to the Nomad Skeptic YouTube channel.

4) Subscribe to the JLB Podbean account on iTunes. I haven’t set this up yet, but stay tuned.

I plan to use the JLB Podbean account to host my Nomad Skeptic podcasts, reason being that I am already paying decent money for unlimited hosting on Podbean, and audio hosting is surprisingly expensive. I have taken the time, and put in the effort and/or money, to create…

*A completely different website (with a separate webhost)

*A new YouTube channel

*Unique branding

…for the Nomad Skeptic platform, but the JLB podbean is the one area where there will continue to be overt overlap between the platforms — at least for now.

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Will this affect your content production for johnlebon.com?

No. Not negatively, anyway.

You all know that the volume of content production on this site has been lower over the past few months than it was for most of 2018.

I would suggest that the quality of content in 2019 has been high enough to offset the lower quantity, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Tomorrow I land in Kuching where I’ve booked an Air-BNB for a solid four weeks. A whole floor to myself, in a place advertised as having outrageously good internet.

This should give me a good chance to get back into a routine for a while and try to release a heap of content.

Also, I’m 15 days sober as of today, and it goes without saying that excessive alcohol consumption was slowing me down for the first month or two of this trip. Can you really blame me? So many cheap cocktails…

I’ve committed myself to staying sober for as long as possible and this means less socialising/partying, and more time spent alone at home.

You know what this means? More content creation! Woot.

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Huge thanks…

…to all of you who have helped to make this possible.

A few years ago I had a dream, and now I’m living that dream.

It hasn’t all been sunshine and rainbows, but it has been life-affirming, something I had to do, and now I’m doing it. I’m typing this very post from a cafe in KL, as a tropical storm rages outside the window next to me.

This could all come to a sudden end, and maybe one day it will, but even if that happens, I’ve already seen and done enough to say, ‘it was worth it’.

As I move on to the next phase of my journey, and begin building an all-new platform, I hope you guys are as excited as I am about what the future holds.

There’s no kosmic force trying to stop any of us. Not me, not you. This outrageous time and place to be alive is ours to do what we want with it.

If you’ve ever considered starting your own platform, on any topic or field or niche, NOW IS THE TIME.

I’m having to revise and re-learn how to build websites and it has reminded me that it can be daunting for n00bs.

Well, if you want to start your own platform, I will help in any and every way I can. Just get in touch with me. We can do it together: build our new platforms from the ground up, learn from each other’s successes and failures, and maybe in a few years we will be looking back at May 2019 as the time it ‘all began’.

And for those of you with no interest in starting your own platforms, you can watch on in comfort as I go through the process all over again.

A lot of people said johnlebon.com would never work. They were wrong. And now, as I begin building Nomad Skeptic, you get to be here from Day One.

Let’s see where this goes. Anything is possible. Especially because there are dozens of people around the world who support what I am doing.

Thank you, all of you.

JLB

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Post #52. Published 14-May-2019. 1,500 words. Available publicly.

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