Who is Ryan Li?
Ryan Li is a Texan who has spent the last twenty years in Asia. His friends call him an egg: white on the outside, yellow on the inside. He got there without a plan. At nineteen, he sold his car, gave up his apartment, and flew to Japan for three months. Two weeks before his flight home, he answered a newspaper ad, landed a job at a small conversation school in Gunma, and never moved back. Since then, he has lived in a dozen countries and taught himself Japanese, Mandarin, and Khmer, mostly through karaoke lyrics, notepads, and stubbornness.
He builds things for a living. In 2010, he co-founded a creative agency in the US with a friend from his anime store days. Grew it to thirty people. He also opened a second company in the Philippines to support it. Along the way, he has run VR startups in Taiwan, a Web3 company, and a small mining farm in Singapore. Now Ryan's building an AI startup. Additionally, he's serious about privacy. GrapheneOS on the phone, Qubes OS on the laptop, and a habit of taking malware apart. Just to see how it works.
Ryan Li and his projects
- LinkedIn — the only social network Ryan consistently uses.
- X (Twitter) — account created for the Solvegent project.
- EggBanana — Ryan's podcast with Marc and Edward, one "egg" and two "bananas". Talking about life in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and beyond.
- Going Borderless — Ryan's newer podcast series on being born in one place and choosing to live in another. Side project, not a business.
- Ilfusion — Texas-based digital marketing agency co-founded by Ryan run since 2010
- Solvegent — Ryan's current AI project focused on securing agents on the Internet.
Identity and culture
- Egg and banana — an egg is white outside, yellow inside. A banana is the reverse. Ryan and his co-hosts wear these labels on purpose.
- Anime — Ryan's entry point was the art and design, not the fandom. Japan was also my first pop culture window from Poland, and my first trip outside Europe.
- Japanese domestic market cars — the shared obsession that kept Ryan connected to his Texas friends across an ocean.
- Subaru — the specific brand behind those junkyard phone calls from Japan to Texas.
- Eikaiwa — Japanese conversation schools. His first position in Japan was with a petite school that had three educators.
Languages and learning
- Hiragana — the first script Ryan learned from a book handed to him in an anime store in Texas.
- Katakana — also the source of the pronunciation problems his students had. Table becomes teburu.
- Kanji — Ryan studied 300 characters from a book called Kanji Power, writing them daily.
- On'yomi and kun'yomi — the dual readings of Japanese kanji. Learning Mandarin partly overwrote them for Ryan.
- Traditional Chinese characters — Ryan's preference. He argues simplified loses meaning and pronunciation clues.
- Simplified Chinese characters — he learned traditional, switched to simplified, then went back.
- Bopomofo (Zhuyin Fuhao) — Taiwan's phonetic system. The reason Mandarin was harder for him there.
- Pinyin — the romanization he expected in Taiwan and did not get.
- Khmer — Ryan's most recent language, picked up in Cambodia.
- Karaoke box, KTV, noraebang — how Ryan actually learned to read Mandarin. Song lyrics on a screen.
- Pimsleur method — I brought this up because Ryan's school independently built the same thing. Repeated native audio until the sounds stick.
Places
- Gunma Prefecture — where Ryan was staying when he found three job ads in a newspaper.
- Narita International Airport — he cancelled two interviews and bet everything on the one closest to his flight home.
- Kansai region — part of his first three-month trip, along with Kyoto.
- Taiwan — four months on the first attempt, then back to Japan. He returned later for a VR startup.
- Singapore — Web3 startup and a small ASIC mining farm.
- Philippines — the internet cafe and design shop that taught him what an unsustainable business looks like.
- Kuala Lumpur — where we first hung out and where I noticed we have many common interests.
- Pantip Plaza — most likely the Bangkok IT mall Ryan describes, now closed, where he bought the CDs that started his security curiosity.
Money, visas, and banking
- Tax residence and the 183-day rule — the threshold that shapes how long countries let you stay before things get complicated.
- Foreign Earned Income Exclusion — why US citizens file forever but often owe nothing. Ryan puts the current ceiling around 120,000 dollars.
- Revolut — one of the two apps Ryan credits with ending the local-bank-account-per-country era.
- Wise — the other one. Both come up constantly in our circles.
- Mizuho Bank — his first bank account in Japan
- Bank of America — closed out of spite in year one. After the Tokyo branch he had researched turned out to be gone.
- Traveler's cheques — how he actually moved money around Asia before neobanks existed.
- 401(k) — still running through his US company payroll, alongside a maintained US address for credit score reasons.
Technology and security
- Google Glass — Ryan owned three pairs and wore them full time. He is an early adopter.
- GrapheneOS — his degoogled Android operating system.
- Qubes OS — the security-focused Linux distro on his work laptop.
- Tails — the run-from-a-flash-drive OS he also experimented with.
- Signal — where our group chats live, with disappearing messages on.
- ASIC — the mining hardware behind his Singapore farm, back when mining still paid.
- Web3 — Ryan's draw was sovereignty over your own money, not speculation. It grew directly out of his banking frustrations.
- Social engineering — attackers cloned his employees' Telegram profiles to target him as a Web3 founder.
- GoDaddy — the domain registrar he used as a reseller behind his first failed business.
- Anthropic and OpenAI — the APIs he combines with local LLMs. He briefs his AI at night and reviews the work in the morning.
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons — I mentioned this as the other pandemic recording studio. People conducted full interviews inside the game while Ryan and his co-hosts moved to VR.
Health, work, and mindset
- Vegetarianism — Ryan went meat free at sixteen, after losing his mother to a sudden heart attack.
- Burnout — his defense is diversification. Several projects are running at once, so he can pause one and pick up another.
- Serial entrepreneur — the label he has been given. He says he never set out to be a boss; it just happened over the years.
Timestamps / Chapters
00:00 Create Your Own Opportunity
00:27 Show Intro and Guest Introduction
02:48 Exploring Identity: The Egg Concept
05:10 Learning Japanese, Chinese, and Other Languages
09:38 Cultural Connections: Bridging East and West
11:59 First Steps in Japan: A Journey Begins
16:24 Teaching English and Building Learning Materials
22:33 The Quest for the Perfect Place: Moving Through Asia
29:40 Navigating Bureaucracy in Asia
34:25 Visas, Tax Residency, and Banking Abroad
40:15 The Accidental Entrepreneur
46:18 Exploring New Technologies
48:02 Egg Banana: Podcasting in VR
50:48 The Rise of Remote Work and Creativity
51:57 Minimalist Tech Stack and Daily Devices
54:04 The Fascination with Technology and Security
58:27 The Importance of Personal Privacy and Control
59:57 Going Borderless: Exploring New Horizons
01:01:25 The Ideal Listener: Learning from Experiences
01:02:25 Overcoming Societal Norms and Pursuing Dreams
01:08:37 Self-Care and Combating Burnout
01:10:40 Vegetarianism and a Life-Changing Loss
01:15:46 Diversifying Projects to Prevent Burnout
01:18:55 The Future of Technology and Personal Data
01:21:06 Where to Follow Ryan Online
01:22:13 Closing and Podcast Outro
Quotes
I tend to not stay anywhere for more than a year at a time. I can't say that I would necessarily recommend that to people. I think it would be better if you could stay somewhere longer.”
— Ryan Li
“It was mostly through trial and error, because I think I was in Asia for ten years before I started really fully understanding visas and all this stuff.”
— Ryan Li
“Why do you need to look for a job? Why don't you create a job?”
— Ryan Li
“You don't have to be somebody of importance to care about your own security. It's not about whether you have something to hide or not. It's just our right to our own data.”
— Ryan Li
“The key to preventing burnout is to have more than one project that you're working on.”
— Ryan Li
Transcript
Read the full transcript on nerdontour.net
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