M&R Episode 010: Meet your host Chapin Kreuter and hear how he's designing his life.

In Episode 010 I talked about the creation of Misfits and Rejects, why I called my podcast Misfits and Rejects and my life before Misfits and Rejects. Enjoy!

Show notes: Get a Misfits and Rejects T-shirt or Tank, Support Misfits and Rejects on Patreon

Hello and welcome to Misfits and Rejects, a podcast about expatriates and the artistic way they've styled their lives around the world.

I'm your host, Chapin Kreuter. Enjoy.

I didn't fit in America.

Find yourself shipwrecked in a far-off place, and Dale, welcome to the show.

Try not to plan too much at all, you know, just be spontaneous.

I quit the limiting story, really try to overcome that fear.

I'm going to sail again, and we've got one more, I've got one more sail in.

Love her to leave her while.

But it didn't work for me, the American dream wasn't going to work for me because I didn't fit in the American dream.

I had respect, I was a young star, and now I'm an old guy, and I have respect for myself.

You know what, Chapin, I'm a secret friend, and I prefer just to be secret, and if you can figure out who Dale Daggers is, then figure it out.

And if you can't, then go.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Misfits and Rejects.

I'm your host, Chapin Cruder, and today we'll be discussing me, and why I started Misfits and Rejects, and why I call it Misfits and Rejects.

And the places I've been and the things I've seen, and what motivates me to keep going and keep trying to shape the life that I've always wanted.

And why this project is so important to me and what I'm trying to accomplish with this project of Misfits and Rejects.

So with that said, I'd like to get started with, I guess, a little bit about my past and where I grew up.

I grew up in Southern California, Orange County, Costa Mesa to be exact.

Two loving parents, a sister, athletic childhood, did okay in school.

I don't think I would have ever been labeled as an intellectual, but got by and did a little bit of traveling.

My parents were always good about taking my sister and I on little holidays here and there, mostly around California, or we were fortunate enough to get to Hawaii a little bit.

And really fell in love with the island.

Always thought I would have moved there straight out of high school.

And felt that I always really wanted to become a professional surfer.

So at about age, I'd say eight or nine, I discovered surfing.

How I discovered it, I couldn't really say.

It was something that is hard to trace back.

It might have been a friend's dad that got me on my first board.

And then my dad got me a board, but there wasn't really anybody in my family that turned me on to the ocean.

It was kind of something that came out of nothing, I guess.

And I just fell in love with it.

But at an early age, I realized that surfing was something that I was extremely passionate about and wanted to dedicate myself to.

So I spent a lot of my developmental years down at the beach, surfing with friends.

Trying to reach a goal that I don't know if I was ever super committed to, but something I thought would be really cool was to become a professional surfer.

And then I would say about towards the end of my high school career, my dad took my sister and I on a trip to Europe.

And that really changed things for me.

That gave me a perspective on life that I had never seen before.

And to go back a little bit and I guess elaborate on that statement, a perspective on life, I would say in hindsight, my perspective on life growing up was more slanted towards the negative side of things.

I don't really think that I was somebody who had a positive outlook on life.

I don't know why that is.

I haven't dug too deep into that aspect of my life.

But it was definitely something that I think looking back shaped a lot of my perceptions about my surroundings and where I found myself growing up because I didn't necessarily ever feel super connected to the place that I grew up.

It wasn't a place I ever saw myself living long term or trying to make a life for myself in the future.

It was always a place that I knew I had to get out of and move on and see something new.

And that desire really continuously grew inside of me from a very early age.

I knew I just always wanted to get out and see the world.

So when my father finally took my sister and I on this three week holiday to Europe, there was a very specific moment in time that I can remember having one of the most profound effects on me and still was probably the thing that shaped my life in the most profound way thus far,

which was he took my sister and I to the Louvre in Paris.

And I remember standing in the Louvre at some point and having this really beautiful, overwhelming feeling come over me of just like peace and calm and just being surrounded by all this art,

this sort of beautiful perception of my surroundings and the world started to take shape where I started to see this beauty in the world that I had never seen before.

And my dad actually saw it occur.

He knew something was happening in the moment.

And my sister was super bored.

She wanted to go back to the hotel.

So my dad asked her, she was a little bit younger.

She's like 13 at the time or something like that and said, can you find your way back to the hotel?

Because I think I'm going to stay here with Chapin and he and I just walked around the Louvre for like the next five hours.

And I was just in awe of all this beautiful artwork.

And I wanted to know where it came from.

And I wanted to know who created it.

And I wanted to constantly be surrounded by this type of feeling.

And it wasn't in that very moment.

But that experience soon thereafter, I'd say within the next week, really started to shape my life in a way where I started to have goals and things started to become clear in me of what I wanted out of life.

And what I wanted was to constantly feel that and be in that sort of environment and try to get back to that place that I was stood in the Louvre.

So I concocted a plan to really take soccer seriously.

I had played soccer on and off my whole life, but never taken it very seriously.

And surfing was always at the forefront of what I want to do.

And from the day I landed after that trip, I more or less quit surfing and dedicated every moment to developing my soccer into a performance level that could possibly take me to the professional levels up in or over in Europe.

And I started.

I had another experience, actually, while I was in high school, about six months prior to this event happening that definitely, I can say, contributed to this overall shift and change in me.

And it was just one of those fluke things where friend and mentor, a soccer coach of mine, Ziad Khoury, at the time, he was my high school coach, said something to us after a soccer game, after we had lost and everybody was moaning.

And bitching about, oh, the ref didn't make the calls in our favor.

It's his fault.

And he basically just laid it out and asked every single one of us to take a look at ourselves and take a look at the role that we played within that game and take responsibility for the outcome of that game and individually take responsibility for that loss.

And that for me was one of the most eye opening statements anybody ever said to me.

And it just happened at the right time where I was able to conceptualize it, internalize it, feel it.

And I realized I hadn't been taking responsibility for my own life.

And from that day forward, I was going to start and begin to try to shape my life in the way that I really wanted.

And the European experience mixed with that statement really flowered into this whole shift of me becoming completely dedicated to this goal of becoming a professional athlete and moving back to Europe and trying to play professional soccer.

So long story short, as I worked really hard for the next five years, trying to develop my soccer skills, which were far beyond or far behind all of my peers at this point and get to a place where I could compete at the highest level and possibly and possibly give myself a shot at recapturing that thing I'd fallen in love with in Europe.

And it was a beautiful experience, extremely difficult and frustrating and fun and all the things that come with, again, taking responsibility for yourself, setting a goal and moving towards it.

And in the end, I was quite proud of what I had accomplished, which was essentially, I was a walk on at UCLA.

And although throughout my two year career at UCLA, I didn't play a whole lot, we still managed to win a national championship, which I felt I at least to make a long story short, I feel like I did contribute to that win in a significant way.

And although I didn't have anybody knocking on the door for me to come play professionally for them in America or abroad, I decided to pack my bags and move to Belgium, where I had a contact and started just cold calling teams in Belgium, asking for a tryout.

To which I got to within the first month, tried out for two Belgium professional soccer teams and didn't make either of them.

I had a rude awakening in one sense, but also a great sort of understanding of where I was in life and what I wanted out of life and was quite proud of my accomplishments, but decided that this wasn't necessary to life for me anyways, after that experience and decided to hang up my boots and move on.

And I didn't want to go home.

I still had this really huge desire in me to remain in Europe.

And I started traveling around Europe by myself and didn't have much money.

I had burned through pretty much half of my cash while I was trying to play professionally there and finding it very difficult to get around, realizing my budget was running out way faster than I wanted it to.

And I knew I wanted to be away from the States for at least a year and found myself just constantly feeling like I still wasn't experiencing the thing that I was hoping to.

So I called my best friend and he said he'd be willing to drop everything he was doing and come have this adventure with me.

And we both agreed that trying to travel for as long and as far as we could on as little money as possible is a great idea and adventure we both were willing to have.

And we decided that heading towards Asia would be the best place to go to make our money last.

And so he met me in Copenhagen and we started hitchhiking from there.

And what happened after that was, again, another tremendously valuable, profound experience in my life where I really got to experience the trials and tribulations of living really scarcely on very little.

We weren't paying for places to stay.

We were camping primarily.

We got to experience the open generosity of people and their willingness to help in any way possible by taking us home without us even knowing them, offering us places to stay, which happened more often than not.

I mean, there was quite a few nights we did sleep on the streets or camp in the hills somewhere, but most places there was a kind soul willing to take us in and feed us.

We were living on very little food.

We were spending maybe a dollar a day on food.

And again, just trying to stick to the goal, which was get as far as we could on as little money as possible.

And that took us through Sweden, through Finland, through Russia, Mongolia, China, Tibet, Nepal, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia.

And after a year of doing that with my best friend and another female, Lily, who became like a sister to me for she came for part of it.

We met her on the road.

I had enough.

I was done, burnt out, ready to go home and see my family and get on with something.

I didn't know what it was, but I knew it.

The lifestyle, this type of travel, this type of lifestyle was done for me at the moment, and I needed to go back.

So after that year, I got home, got a job, but the bug had bitten me and I was ready to commit my life to life on the road after a few months of being home.

And just again, I think by being open to all possibilities and trying to continue to take responsibility for myself and move the needle towards the lifestyle that I wanted to lead, opportunities arose.

And I had a friend, an acquaintance almost, somebody I'd known my whole life, but we weren't always the closest of friends, offer me a job in Nicaragua to come work with him on a surf camp, which couldn't have been a better opportunity for me.

Because at this point in life, I was ready to start surfing again and really thirsting for another adventure.

And I had this opportunity now to go to Nicaragua and start a whole surf business.

So I took it. And it was meant to be for one season, approximately, what, seven months.

And after that seven months, I knew for a fact this was what I wanted out of life.

I wanted nothing more than to do this, which was run boats off the coast of Nicaragua with my friends on a beautiful beach that was a small little fishing village.

And we were more or less the only gringos there at the time.

And just cater to American surf tourists who they would come down as a full package guest and we would just take care of them and have fun.

And it was hands down one of the best times of my life. And it lasted for about eight years.

I was so in love with that life and that lifestyle and the people and friends I had met that I never wanted it to end.

And learn a valuable lesson from that experience of everything does come to an end.

And the willingness to accept that is something that I think I had to really come to terms with because this was, again, a lifestyle that I never wanted to end.

And it changed. People that I started with wanted to leave the environment, which I helped create.

I also helped change. And more people were coming to this beautiful sort of almost little utopia that we had created.

And for a moment in time, I felt like almost spoiling my adventure, which was arrogant and selfish of me to think.

But it's how I thought at the time. And I really didn't want that change to happen.

So I spent a few years trying to recreate it in my own way. And in the end, kind of backed myself into a corner and had to go home.

Just to kind of regroup, cash up and figure out how I was going to continue to perpetuate this lifestyle that I had started eight years earlier to develop and live.

And it all worked out perfectly in the end. I got home to a family that has always supported me and loved me and just accepted my life choices.

And at a time where I think needed me the most, we had to go through my mother getting sick.

And it was a good point in my life to be with them. And I spent a beautiful year with my mother before she passed and wouldn't have changed it for the world.

And towards the end of that year, again, had this overwhelming feeling of needing to get back out and really live this lifestyle that I had wanted to live since early 2000s.

But coming to a place where I could sustain it without having to be in one place.

And I had heard things about digital nomads and people who were able to work online and be mobile.

Location independent is a term I had heard a little bit. So I started researching different ways to do that and found a wonderful website that changed everything for me.

Made me feel like I did have a chance. It did have an opportunity to kind of continue to live this lifestyle more in the way that I wanted to.

And that website, by the way, was smartpassiveincome.com hosted by Pat Flynn, seemingly one of the nicest genuine people in the world.

And I haven't met him yet, but I hope to one day and thank him for all the insight that he's given me.

But I started then trying to figure out a way that I could make money online so I could be mobile.

And this was a good point to kind of start talking a little bit about misfits and rejects and how that came to be, which was an idea I'd come up with many years ago on the road.

When I had continuously discovered these beautiful human beings around the world who were just living life the way they wanted to on their own terms.

And they really inspired me. These were people who pushed away their society's norms and standards of what they should be and went after what they wanted, what they were passionate about.

And they were willing to do whatever it took to live that type of lifestyle, being somebody who literally would get on a boat with no money and just start sailing and finding his way to Nicaragua,

where he shipwrecked and then continued to live penniless for years just through his own ingenuity and grit, finding a way to sustain himself and growing a successful enterprise of real estate in an environment that was not that welcoming at the time to gringos.

And meeting people who are dedicating themselves to languages or to these niches that I had never even considered to be a possible way of making money or living just became this huge inspiration to me.

And I came to the conclusion that I wanted to somehow show the world that these people existed and that they had this beautiful side of them that could be inspirational and possibly be the tipping point for somebody who wants to live that life also but doesn't know how.

So like many travelers, you talk about, I'm going to write a book one day or I'm going to write a screenplay and sat down many times on the computer with a pencil and tried, but the reality was is that I didn't have the patience or the skill set to do something like that.

So after a few months of researching how to create an online business, I kind of honed in on an aspect of working online that I might be able to capture, which was this like surf consulting thing that I thought would be a kind of fun little niche to work towards and maybe make some money in where people could send me their

surfing footage and I could analyze it and then send them something back that helps them progress at surfing. And by sheer default, I had to get all the equipment. I had to get a computer, a microphone, all the things necessary to kind of produce these little videos for people.

And I had an opportunity to go visit a friend in Chile. And when we were down in Chile together, I had the idea of maybe using all this equipment that I had purchased for these little surf videos to maybe just interview him and find out a little bit more about his story and see how it sounded and see if it would kind of capture that spirit and essence of misfits and rejects.

A name again that I had come up with based on just all these characters I had met around the world. And although I think for some misfits and rejects has sort of a negative connotation, that's never been my intention with it at all.

I really see misfits and rejects as people who stand up, make a choice to not live like the norm, not live by the status quo and go out and really chase their hopes and dreams to become and do what they want with their lifestyle creation.

So we did it. We sat down and we had my first interview with them and I really loved it. I loved the experience of sitting, talking to somebody and realized that on the road, I would ask the same type of questions that I was asking him.

And it would be easier for me to just ask the questions and record it, letting people more or less tell their own stories rather than me trying to create a fictional tale about these characters that I had met around the world.

And that's more or less how misfits and rejects was born, was just me having this desire to share with the world the beauty of these people that I continuously encounter on my travels and hoping that their stories inspire people who are starting to question their lives and what they're doing with their lives.

And maybe taking that risk to go out and do something that a lot of people in their lives are telling them is too risky or they could never do.

And it is uncomfortable when you are faced with these sorts of desires and nobody is supporting them.

I was always fortunate enough to have a family that always just said yes to these sorts of lifestyle decisions that I made and didn't ever really give me any grief about it.

They were always happy to drive me to the airport and wish me luck.

And I know for a lot of people and families, that's hard to let go of a child or to say goodbye to your family for a period of time to go chase your dream of living abroad or even starting a business abroad.

It takes a lot of emotional strength and commitment to what you want and believe in.

That's going to be best for you.

And a lot of times people feel like for them to be a good person, they have to make sacrifices for their family because their family has made so many sacrifices for them.

And I don't necessarily have an answer to that statement, but I think that you can probably find some kind of balance.

I think, you know, even though my mom was sick for quite a few years, I didn't have to be at home for the six years of her being sick with cancer to feel that we shared enough time, valuable time together before she passed away.

That year before she passed away that I got to spend with her was super beautiful and profound and fulfilling to where I was able to let her go when it was her time.

And I didn't feel that I had missed out on anything because I think she was super happy for me that I was chasing my dreams and living this lifestyle in these foreign countries.

And I would always call and fill her in on what was going on and she'd be excited for me.

And I think in many ways that was beneficial for her too.

So all I can say is that this podcast is meant to inspire people to take a look at their lives and question it and ask yourself, are you doing the things that you want to be doing with your life at this moment in time?

And if you aren't, you get to either accept it for what it is and not question it anymore.

You get to change your immediate situation, hopefully for the better.

And if you can't change it, the only other option is to walk away and walk away into the unknown, but onto a path that potentially could be the most fulfilling path that you've ever experienced in your life.

And open doors that you never thought could have been opened and you can meet people that you never thought you could have met and shape your life the way you want.

Lifestyle creation.

So with that said, I hope that gives you better insight into me, your host, Chapin Cruder, and why I started this podcast.

A little bit about the travels I've had over my life thus far.

Still a young man and know I'll have many more to come at this moment in time.

I'm recording this in Scotland on the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland, staying with a friend that I met on my travels and continually trying to shape my life in the way I want.

So thank you for listening and best wishes on your adventures to come.

Thank you for listening to Misfits and Rejects.

I hope this inspire you to think about your life situation, where you're at, and possibly make a big decision to choose something different for yourself if you're unhappy with where you're at in life.

I hope these people that I interview inspire you to go out and spread your wings and try something new.

To live a different lifestyle that maybe your whole life people were telling you was the wrong one, but when in fact it's the perfect one for you.

And I'll see you next time.