2020-11-09_How_to_Leave_a_Bad_Government_When_Your_Guy_Loses_the

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00:00:30.360 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,

00:00:37.160 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:39.800 | My name is Joshua. Today is Monday, November 9, 2020.

00:00:42.300 | And today we're going to talk about how to leave the country because your guy lost the election.

00:00:47.380 | Now, I originally recorded this show in similar form to what you're going to hear today on Election Day this past Tuesday, 2020.

00:00:57.120 | However, after I published the show, I decided I wasn't really happy with how I had done it, and I decided to pull it.

00:01:03.120 | I'd wanted to publish it on Election Day prior to our actually knowing who seemed to have become victorious in the races across the United States,

00:01:12.340 | because I want this show to be very bipartisan in the sense that I'm not making a statement about Republicans or Democrats in this show.

00:01:21.600 | But of course, now as I rerecord this on Monday, November 9, it seems evident that the next president of the United States is very likely to be President Joe Biden.

00:01:30.240 | We know something more about the Senate races, the congressional races, even the local races across the country.

00:01:37.040 | And so at this point, the election results are not a mystery like I kind of had wanted them to do before doing this.

00:01:43.180 | But I still want you to listen to this show. I'm not going to engage in partisanship of Republicanism or Democratism.

00:01:48.880 | And although I'm titling this "How to Leave the Country Because Your Guy Lost," I think that you should, if your guy won, you should think of this "How to Leave the Country in Case My Guy Loses,"

00:02:00.960 | because that is completely a relevant thing for you to do. And in fact, in some ways, that's what I have done personally.

00:02:08.320 | Towards the end of this show, I'll share a little bit of my personal story leaving the country of my birth, the United States of America.

00:02:15.440 | And a lot of it was related to some of these issues. I'll share that towards the end of the show.

00:02:19.760 | But I think that if you recognize how close, if your guy lost and you're frustrated, you should consider leaving the country.

00:02:28.400 | It's a big step. I don't think it's a good step for most people, but it's something that you should consider if your guy lost.

00:02:34.480 | However, if your guy won and you're currently happy, you should recognize that you came pretty close to your guy losing.

00:02:43.200 | And in the future, it's very possible and even probable that your guy will lose.

00:02:49.440 | So if you'll take steps today, you'll be in a better place if and when your guy loses.

00:02:55.680 | This show, I'm going to present to you in three basic parts, three large sections.

00:02:59.040 | The first section, we're going to talk about leaving as a philosophy generally, some of the advantages, which are many, and some of the disadvantages, which are many and strong.

00:03:10.560 | Number two, I'm going to talk to you about how to leave a country.

00:03:13.680 | If you want to leave your country and go somewhere else, how do you actually do that?

00:03:17.600 | And then in the final part of this show, I'll share with you a little bit about my personal story and how I've experienced recent political elections after having left,

00:03:29.040 | and how I look at things now from an outside perspective when I think about going back, et cetera.

00:03:33.760 | I'll share some of that at the end of the show.

00:03:36.080 | So let's talk in part one now about the philosophy of leaving.

00:03:42.400 | One thing I think is underappreciated is how many of the restrictions under which we live are of our own choosing, and how many things can change with a simple change in physical location.

00:03:59.600 | Now, as I share some of these ideas, I think they will sound fairly obvious, but I know from personal experience that they were never obvious to me in the beginning of my life.

00:04:12.720 | I've always been interested in political theory.

00:04:14.960 | I've always been interested in philosophical issues.

00:04:17.200 | That's no surprise to you.

00:04:18.960 | But it took me many, many years before I realized how elegantly I could improve my life, how simply, how peacefully, how powerfully I could improve my life by simply making a decision to change my geographic location.

00:04:34.480 | And I've since come to believe that leaving is one of the most peaceful things that you can do, and yet most powerful things that you can do to change the authorities that are in your life.

00:04:43.680 | And this applies at the most local of levels and also at the most international of levels.

00:04:51.280 | Let me give you some examples.

00:04:53.840 | Most of us have things, ideas that we believe in, ways that we think the world should be.

00:04:58.880 | We have a mental concept of how everything would be if it were perfect.

00:05:04.080 | And frequently, we go out into the world trying to impose our view onto other people of how we think they should be.

00:05:11.920 | And often, this brings us into conflict with other people because they don't agree with the way that we think things should be.

00:05:19.280 | This especially often brings us into conflict with people who have authority over us because although we think that things should be a certain way, they also have their way that things should be, at least in their opinion.

00:05:31.440 | And so usually, this results in arguments, debate, fighting.

00:05:37.120 | Sometimes, this is settled through discussion, communication, maybe nonviolent communication, consensus agreement.

00:05:44.480 | These are the outputs of a healthy process of finding out ways to get along with other people, which is the essence of politics.

00:05:52.160 | Sometimes, these things are solved in more forceful and yet what we would call democratic methods, things like taking votes, having referenda on a certain subject.

00:06:03.920 | Sometimes, those systems fail and the conflicts are solved using force, violent war, snipings, killings, marches in the street, burning down buildings, staging widespread protests, etc.

00:06:19.600 | And usually, when something is not how we want it to be, our natural instinct is to try to change it.

00:06:25.760 | And so we engage in some of those things, again, perhaps a continuum there of healthy, for example, nonviolent communication and seeking consensus with other people, moving down the road to voting, the difficulties of the democratic process of voting, all the way to the difficulty of war and violence and rioting and looting, etc.

00:06:47.120 | And so there's a spectrum there.

00:06:50.800 | And that's where most of us spend our lives.

00:06:54.240 | But we don't often recognize that if things aren't how I like them to be, it might be very wise for me to simply recognize I'm probably not going to ever successfully change another person.

00:07:08.400 | When we're young, we think we can change another person.

00:07:10.560 | We think, "If only I just overwhelmed them with the power of my arguments, with my brilliant intellect.

00:07:15.920 | If only I just showed them why they were wrong, then they would all of a sudden come to agree with me."

00:07:21.520 | And then as we get a little bit older, we get a little bit more mature, we have a little bit more life experience, I think most of us come to realize little by little that we almost never can persuade another person of anything.

00:07:34.640 | We can almost never convince another person of anything.

00:07:39.200 | And so in all of these things, meaning all of these ways we try to change other people, there is an opportunity cost, another choice that we don't often think about, which is simply, "What if I just left?

00:07:53.600 | What if I just moved?

00:07:56.000 | What if I just went away from people who don't like me, who don't think like me, and I went somewhere better, somewhere different, somewhere where I didn't have those issues embedded in my life?"

00:08:09.120 | This can be applied on many levels of life.

00:08:14.560 | You're at a job and you think, "This is a really tough job.

00:08:18.400 | It's not really working for me, and yet I really want to make it better."

00:08:21.920 | Well, that's a worthy thing.

00:08:24.960 | There are times in which you buckle down and do it.

00:08:28.000 | But sometimes a simple decision to go from that job that's not a good fit for you to go to another job that is a good fit for you can make all the difference in the quality of your life.

00:08:38.000 | I don't know who to credit this saying to, but it's a saying that when I heard it, it made a deep impact on me because I realized it expressed something that I really cared about, really liked.

00:08:46.800 | And it was simply this, "Go from where you're tolerated to where you're celebrated.

00:08:52.880 | Go from where you're merely tolerated to where you are celebrated."

00:08:59.120 | And if I reflect back on the times in my life using jobs, for example, where I was tolerated, appreciated, but tolerated, and then I think about the times where I was celebrated, where my skills, instead of being things that other people had to look over or work around or make do in spite of, and, "Okay, well, that's just Joshua.

00:09:19.920 | Joshua just does these certain things."

00:09:21.680 | If I went to a different forum where those skills were genuinely useful, then it made all the difference in my own personal experience.

00:09:30.640 | You can apply this philosophy on many different levels.

00:09:35.760 | People are often confronted in their life where they're confronted on different things.

00:09:40.560 | Perhaps, I don't know, maybe people are being racist against you, and you're confronting on a daily basis racism, racism, racism, racism.

00:09:48.160 | That's really, really hard.

00:09:50.320 | It's really hard to be in that situation.

00:09:54.000 | And one very valid and perhaps worthy thing that you can do is to continue to press forward

00:10:00.560 | in your life, even in the face of all of that hostility and all of that hate.

00:10:07.840 | But another choice that you always have is simply leave or from the place that people

00:10:12.280 | hate you and go where people love you.

00:10:14.840 | Go where something that you are experiencing is a benefit.

00:10:19.200 | Go where the color of your skin, instead of it being something that people look down on,

00:10:23.120 | is something that people celebrate.

00:10:25.320 | And this applies at almost every level of human experience.

00:10:31.080 | We all have different beliefs.

00:10:32.240 | We all have different things that we, ways that we act, types of behavior, skills, et cetera.

00:10:38.120 | And if you go from where those things are a detriment to where those things are celebrated,

00:10:44.240 | things become simpler for you.

00:10:46.360 | Now we know that when it comes to personal issues, lifestyle choices, et cetera.

00:10:52.760 | But what about when it comes to political issues?

00:10:55.520 | I think this is one of the simplest ways to improve your life.

00:10:58.760 | And it starts at the most micro or local of levels.

00:11:02.880 | Let's say for example, that you are a young adult and you're living in your parents' house.

00:11:09.000 | But for whatever reason, your parents and you don't have a healthy, productive relationship.

00:11:15.500 | Maybe your parents are difficult people.

00:11:20.240 | Maybe they're not good role models for you.

00:11:22.240 | Perhaps the rules that your parents have imposed on you because you live in their house are

00:11:26.360 | rules that you don't agree with, that you don't think you can abide by.

00:11:29.360 | And you decide, I need to make a different choice.

00:11:32.560 | Well, many young people don't fix that conflict.

00:11:38.640 | Rather they engage in the conflict.

00:11:41.080 | They fight with their parents.

00:11:42.280 | They rebel.

00:11:43.680 | They break the rules.

00:11:44.800 | They flaunt it.

00:11:45.800 | They argue.

00:11:46.800 | It goes on and on and on.

00:11:47.800 | And then finally, in a worst case, knock down, drag out fight, they finally admit defeat

00:11:52.600 | and then they leave.

00:11:54.880 | Unfortunately, all of that stress, sometimes it kills your parents.

00:11:59.060 | Sometimes it kills you.

00:12:00.160 | Sometimes it sickens you.

00:12:01.320 | Sometimes it poisons a relationship for life.

00:12:03.880 | And if you look back on it at a later date and you recognize it would have been better

00:12:07.560 | if I had simply left in the beginning and gone from where I didn't agree with the rules

00:12:12.160 | to where I do agree with the rules, things would be better.

00:12:16.560 | Let's branch out a little bit from the individual house though.

00:12:19.840 | Maybe you live in a place where your neighborhood imposes certain rules and restrictions on

00:12:24.680 | you.

00:12:25.680 | This is common through things like homeowners associations.

00:12:28.200 | You choose to live in an apartment complex or in a neighborhood where there are certain

00:12:31.680 | rules imposed upon you by the homeowners association.

00:12:35.060 | You can paint your house one of these four colors.

00:12:38.720 | You can plant trees in your yard and bushes in your yard based upon this list of approved

00:12:45.280 | species.

00:12:46.320 | You can have this type of vehicle in your driveway.

00:12:49.740 | You can have a pickup truck if it doesn't have any commercial insignia on the side,

00:12:54.700 | but if it has a sign or a placard of some kind, you can't have that kind of pickup truck.

00:12:59.040 | Or you can have this kind of car, but you can't have this in your yard.

00:13:03.160 | And so sometimes people move into these neighborhoods and then they realize, "Wait a second, I don't

00:13:07.720 | like these rules."

00:13:08.720 | And so they say, "I'm going to take on the HOA association."

00:13:12.600 | Sometimes the HOA association genuinely, legitimately needs to be taken on.

00:13:18.000 | It should be taken on.

00:13:19.600 | But often people will invest years of their life into fighting with their neighbors for

00:13:25.160 | no result or for a very modest result where we get this one rule changed.

00:13:31.840 | It's much simpler if you recognize, "I don't like these rules," and you simply move from

00:13:36.880 | that neighborhood to another neighborhood that doesn't have those same rules or has

00:13:40.300 | rules that you like.

00:13:43.280 | Moving out.

00:13:44.280 | This happens with regard to the city that you live in.

00:13:46.680 | Many cities impose certain restrictions, but perhaps if you simply move out of the city

00:13:52.180 | and move into the unincorporated county, then you can do away with those restrictions.

00:13:59.960 | County by county, you find different rules across these United States.

00:14:04.760 | You find some counties that have very stringent building codes, some counties that don't.

00:14:08.440 | Some counties have very stringent rules for the ways that you can keep your lawn or the

00:14:14.560 | zoning regulations.

00:14:16.480 | Some counties don't have any of those things.

00:14:18.720 | And then state by state.

00:14:20.200 | Every state has a whole different set of laws.

00:14:23.120 | And if you're living in a state where you don't like the laws, you can certainly dedicate

00:14:27.240 | yourself to changing the laws in that state.

00:14:29.440 | That is a choice that you have the right to make.

00:14:33.700 | But you should always count the cost and recognize, I could simply leave and I could go where

00:14:39.520 | things are better.

00:14:41.600 | And you should understand that that will probably mean that you're not going to change things

00:14:46.680 | there, but at least your life won't be so filled with conflict.

00:14:50.160 | Your life might be a little bit more peaceful and you might be able to just move on and

00:14:54.440 | do what you want to do.

00:14:57.440 | And then when you bring this down to the national level, right, the nation state level, the

00:15:02.400 | same thing applies.

00:15:04.680 | At any point in time, if you don't like the politicians who have decided, who either have

00:15:10.040 | decided of their own accord or have been decided by your fellow citizens, if you don't like

00:15:13.640 | the politicians that have been imposed over you in power and authority and control over

00:15:19.160 | you, you don't like their laws, you don't like their rhetoric, you don't like whatever

00:15:23.600 | they're doing, you always have the choice to leave.

00:15:30.000 | And sometimes staying is the right move.

00:15:34.000 | Talk more about staying in today's show, but sometimes leaving is the right move and you

00:15:40.040 | can choose.

00:15:42.280 | Now leaving comes with a heavy cost, but I want to emphasize that it is the one thing

00:15:48.480 | that does actually work.

00:15:52.000 | In the wake of the 2016 presidential election in the United States, when President Trump

00:15:55.600 | won, there was a big movement that organized itself under the not my president hashtag.

00:16:02.400 | And as it went, those who were displeased with the election of President Trump simply

00:16:06.680 | noted, "Hey, not my president.

00:16:07.680 | You know, he's not going to be my president."

00:16:09.680 | And I kind of marveled at that because while you could certainly understand that somebody

00:16:15.200 | feels frustrated, emotional, that their political side has lost an election and that they don't

00:16:20.160 | like the person that won, right, we've all been in that situation.

00:16:24.920 | Very few of the people that were engaging in that actually took any practical steps

00:16:29.680 | to make President Trump not their president.

00:16:33.960 | Almost nobody left the country.

00:16:36.520 | Almost nobody renounced their citizenship.

00:16:39.680 | Of course we know why they don't, but that's the way that you can actually make him not

00:16:44.720 | your president.

00:16:46.520 | Just stating not my president is kind of like putting your fingers in your ears and saying,

00:16:50.800 | "I'm not going to listen.

00:16:51.800 | I'm not going to listen."

00:16:52.800 | It doesn't change anything.

00:16:53.800 | But getting up and walking away actually does change something because now you actually

00:16:59.520 | aren't listening or you can actually make somebody not your president.

00:17:05.600 | What is often underappreciated about the power of leaving is how immense it actually is.

00:17:13.280 | See, when you argue, arguing often has the opposite effect of what you intend.

00:17:20.280 | I notice this a lot.

00:17:21.960 | I spent a good amount of time on Twitter.

00:17:23.440 | I find it to be a very useful tool for me.

00:17:25.840 | And I'm always interested when somebody tweets something, often it's a politician.

00:17:31.160 | A politician will tweet something controversial.

00:17:32.880 | They make a statement.

00:17:33.880 | This is the way it is.

00:17:34.880 | And then that person's opponents will take that message and they'll amplify it with their

00:17:39.320 | own comments saying how wrong the original person is.

00:17:43.760 | We all understand why that is, but I wonder when I'm watching this happen sometimes, why

00:17:49.160 | do people actually spend so much time retweeting their opponent's message?

00:17:53.440 | You know that when that person sits down and writes that provocative tweet, you know that

00:17:57.400 | they're expecting that their opponents are going to jump on it.

00:18:00.240 | You know that they're expecting that their opponents are going to say how wrong it is.

00:18:06.360 | And they're counting on that to amplify the message.

00:18:10.420 | And so this same thing happens when you get involved in politics a lot of times.

00:18:14.520 | "We're going to change this local thing."

00:18:16.080 | And so sometimes you can be effective with that, right?

00:18:19.320 | The city council is doing such and such a dastardly thing and we're going to sit down

00:18:23.120 | and we're going to organize our neighbors against it.

00:18:25.120 | That works.

00:18:26.120 | At the local level, you can influence politics.

00:18:28.840 | But sometimes that backfires on you because what you wind up doing is you wind up actually

00:18:33.540 | amplifying the message of your opponent.

00:18:37.280 | Doesn't always work, but it often does.

00:18:41.320 | I personally became attuned to this many years ago when I started the book After the Ball

00:18:45.680 | – it was called After the Ball, How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in

00:18:51.320 | the 90s.

00:18:52.320 | It was written by Professors Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen.

00:18:55.960 | And they laid out this elegant and elaborate plan as to how they were going to advance

00:19:00.440 | the cause of homosexuality in the American culture.

00:19:04.360 | And this was at a point in which homosexuality in American culture was resigned to the shadows.

00:19:09.720 | And the very first part of their plan, the most important part of their plan as the first

00:19:13.640 | stage was not to change anything with the law.

00:19:17.200 | It was not to change anything with any actual legislation.

00:19:21.480 | The first thing was to keep homosexuality from being resigned to the quiet corners of

00:19:26.880 | society and bring it onto the front stage.

00:19:29.380 | And one of the major parts of ways that they accomplished this, genuinely accomplished

00:19:35.280 | it, was they encouraged people who were homosexuals to run for public office.

00:19:41.200 | And the goal was to bring visibility to not only the homosexual cause, the arguments associated

00:19:47.360 | with that political movement, but also for the individuals involved.

00:19:53.320 | And so they said, "It's better for us if you are openly homosexual.

00:20:00.080 | It's better for us if you appear on the debate stage, even if everyone's laughing

00:20:03.360 | at you, because you're normalizing your presence."

00:20:06.860 | And I see the same thing happening on many political issues now.

00:20:09.720 | It was something that I had never thought about how effective that was as a political

00:20:12.760 | technique, and now I see it.

00:20:14.760 | So sometimes when you...

00:20:16.000 | The point is, when you take on a political issue sometimes and you say, "I'm going

00:20:19.680 | to fight this thing," sometimes you wind up undoing your own position.

00:20:26.500 | So even when you're fighting, that's often not the most powerful thing you can do.

00:20:31.920 | But when you leave, you withdraw the resources that politicians depend on for their very

00:20:39.680 | literal existence.

00:20:42.760 | This has virtually no influence on an individual basis, but it has massive influence on a collective

00:20:52.480 | basis.

00:20:54.760 | Two reasons.

00:20:55.760 | Number one, leaving often changes representation.

00:21:00.760 | Number two, leaving removes money, which is fundamentally the substance of life for politicians.

00:21:11.240 | Does change representation, especially in a place like the United States.

00:21:13.560 | Let's talk, for example, about congressional representation.

00:21:16.320 | If enough people leave a highly populated state, now after the next census, things get

00:21:22.080 | redistricted.

00:21:23.760 | Congressional represent... the count of congressional representatives is changed based upon the

00:21:27.880 | lower population, and that power then flows to a different place.

00:21:32.440 | That voting power then flows to a different place based upon the number of people in that

00:21:37.760 | place.

00:21:38.760 | You see this with things like the Electoral College with presidential politics.

00:21:42.640 | You see that the power flows based upon population flows.

00:21:46.880 | So the people's ability to elect the president flows based upon where they're physically

00:21:52.760 | located.

00:21:53.760 | Now, those changes are very slow, very difficult.

00:21:57.200 | They do happen, but they're very slow and they take time.

00:22:00.160 | What's most impactful though is that when you leave, you take your money with you.

00:22:05.960 | And politicians' entire job is spending other people's money.

00:22:12.080 | And when you stop giving them money, they wind up eventually to some degree out of work.

00:22:20.040 | Now I'm not... let's not be too grandiose in our ambitions.

00:22:22.640 | I don't believe it's possible to completely defund all politicians, but you limit their

00:22:27.080 | power when you eliminate their ability to spend your money.

00:22:31.600 | Let me give an analogy here that I think illustrates this.

00:22:35.240 | It's not a perfect correlation, it's an analogy.

00:22:37.280 | Many years ago, I read a book by Tyler Cohen called The Complacent Class, and he made a

00:22:41.200 | statement in that book that influenced me.

00:22:43.560 | It pointed something out to me.

00:22:44.880 | And he talked about the shift in the national budget of the United States and the percentage

00:22:52.680 | of the national budget that US presidents could impact.

00:22:56.240 | I don't know the exact numbers, but what he illustrated was if you were to go back, say,

00:23:00.520 | 75 years ago and look at the national budget of the United States, a president had control

00:23:06.880 | over a huge percentage, a massive majority, call it off the top of my head, 75%.

00:23:13.200 | Again, I don't know the exact number, it was just to illustrate the change.

00:23:19.560 | So when one new president came in after another, you would see major changes in their ability

00:23:28.140 | to impact the government because they could control the budget of the vast majority of

00:23:32.920 | government operations.

00:23:34.800 | Now if you were to fast forward to 2020, the incoming president of the United States will

00:23:40.720 | have virtually no, comparatively no control over the budget of the United States because

00:23:48.080 | the vast majority of the budget now is made up of things that were committed to many,

00:23:53.080 | many decades ago that cannot be changed simply by presidential decree, namely, Social Security,

00:23:59.080 | Medicare, Medicaid, and military spending.

00:24:02.080 | There can be slight adjustments on the margin.

00:24:04.600 | There can be a little bit here where we're going to slightly defund this program here,

00:24:08.240 | but even those adjustments are almost nothing because you have these massive bureaucracies,

00:24:15.040 | the administrative state that basically exists to promulgate itself, and any changes that

00:24:20.920 | are made are basically inconsequential when looking at the broader scheme.

00:24:27.820 | And when I reflected on it, again, that's an analogy.

00:24:30.660 | It's one of the causes of frustration in the US American system where people get frustrated

00:24:34.820 | where you have president after president, administration after administration, and there

00:24:38.220 | are only small changes on the margin.

00:24:39.940 | There's no major change because you have this Leviathan that's not susceptible now to political

00:24:44.180 | influence.

00:24:45.360 | But the analogy is simply intended to point out that you limit a politician's power when

00:24:50.500 | you take away the control that they have over money.

00:24:55.220 | So perhaps you can do that in the way it previously is described, or perhaps you can do it by

00:24:58.780 | simply eliminating your money, pulling your money out.

00:25:03.340 | It's powerful.

00:25:06.820 | One final thing I want to emphasize, leaving is ultimately peaceful.

00:25:14.240 | Leaving and walking away is ultimately peaceful.

00:25:18.020 | I use that word intentionally because if you care about peace, you recognize that peace

00:25:25.820 | is hard to manage in many kinds of conflicts.

00:25:30.420 | Now we can use it to the perspective of absolute actual violence.

00:25:35.180 | You can say, well, fighting and shooting each other in the streets, that's violence, but

00:25:39.860 | voting is not.

00:25:41.100 | Okay, that's fair.

00:25:42.100 | I acknowledge there's of course a massive distinction.

00:25:45.340 | But even when you get to things like democratic process and you get to those kinds of things,

00:25:50.780 | you got to recognize that when you vote, you're exerting your will and your influence over

00:25:56.900 | your neighbor.

00:25:57.900 | Now, that's not wrong.

00:25:59.380 | I don't believe that's wrong personally.

00:26:01.300 | Some people do.

00:26:02.300 | I don't personally believe it's wrong, at least not right now.

00:26:05.100 | But it ultimately does impose a form of control over their life.

00:26:10.460 | Whereas since you can't control their life, if you just simply choose to leave, you're

00:26:16.260 | now affecting nobody but yourself in terms of your actual action.

00:26:20.660 | Your family will miss you, your friends will miss you, et cetera, but you're not affecting

00:26:23.300 | other people.

00:26:24.540 | And so at its form, at its core, it's a fundamentally peaceful thing that you can do.

00:26:30.080 | So when you're dealing with a political victory or political defeat and you don't like it

00:26:35.220 | or you recognize that you might not like it in the future, you should seriously think

00:26:39.180 | about leaving.

00:26:40.180 | I think it's a powerful thing that you can do.

00:26:45.220 | I don't believe that everyone should leave.

00:26:49.100 | I do believe that virtually everyone should have the option to leave.

00:26:54.360 | There's a big difference between these two.

00:26:57.300 | There are many good reasons why you shouldn't leave.

00:26:59.900 | And I think the vast majority of people should not leave, especially over things like political

00:27:05.860 | issues.

00:27:09.180 | Politics is not ultimate, and especially not national politics.

00:27:14.020 | Politics should not have a premier place in your life.

00:27:18.180 | You can live a wonderful life under a horrible political system if you simply ignore it.

00:27:26.380 | At the end of the day, politics is not ultimate.

00:27:29.340 | I think that the importance of your local family, your local community, these things

00:27:35.340 | are far more important to your life than our politics.

00:27:42.180 | You can genuinely ignore politics to a very high degree and get on with your life.

00:27:49.600 | And the politics that's most likely to affect you is not national level politics.

00:27:54.840 | It's more local and regional politics.

00:27:58.120 | If you feel like politics is intensely affecting your life, it's either because there are some

00:28:04.560 | very difficult issues on a local basis that are applying to you, or more likely it's because

00:28:10.740 | you're spending an inordinate amount of time focusing on politics.

00:28:15.200 | I've been there, I've done that.

00:28:16.380 | It's very hard for me to stay away, but I try really hard.

00:28:19.640 | And I see the result in my happiness when I focus on politics versus not.

00:28:24.480 | So I don't think that everyone should leave.

00:28:26.920 | I think that if you're part of a local community that you appreciate, if you have local infrastructure

00:28:31.300 | that is appropriate for you, you live in a place you like to live, if you have the ability

00:28:36.400 | to ignore the politics and it just doesn't affect your life that much, then go for it.

00:28:40.480 | I also think that many people should intentionally choose to live in a place that they don't

00:28:47.840 | want to live in because they are there to make an intentional difference.

00:28:52.920 | If you have the faith to live where you are as an evangelist, as a missionary, either

00:28:58.560 | in an actual religious sense or in a metaphorical sense, and you say, "I'm here because I want

00:29:04.440 | to change this community," I think that's highly commendable and worthy of respect.

00:29:10.120 | If that's your perspective, you say, "I'm in this place that I don't like, that I don't

00:29:14.480 | want to be because I want to change it.

00:29:16.640 | I am an evangelist of these ideas, or I'm a missionary for this philosophy, for this

00:29:21.800 | religion, for this way of life," I think that's very commendable and worthy of respect.

00:29:29.040 | But if that's you, I urge you this.

00:29:34.320 | If that's you, you don't need to moan and whine constantly about what you're going through

00:29:39.280 | because you chose it.

00:29:40.780 | You made an intentional choice, and your language should reflect that.

00:29:47.160 | Your happiness should reflect that.

00:29:50.240 | So I don't think that everyone should leave.

00:29:52.560 | I do think that everyone should have the option to leave.

00:29:56.480 | This has been a little bit of my experience.

00:29:57.760 | Again, in the third part of the show, I'll share with you more of my experience.

00:30:01.000 | But when I think about moving back to the United States, it has nothing to do with who's

00:30:06.560 | president, it has more to do with what I want in my life and the benefits of living in a

00:30:11.000 | place like the United States.

00:30:13.080 | If I ever go back to the United States in the future, which is a very distinct possibility,

00:30:17.060 | if I do that, I will be going back not happier with the world that I come back to.

00:30:24.320 | On many fronts, things have gotten much worse over the last couple of years.

00:30:28.720 | But I'll be going back with greater peace of mind, knowing that I'm making the choice

00:30:34.120 | to go there because I want to be there, not making the choice to go there because it's

00:30:40.440 | the only place in the world that I can go.

00:30:42.960 | That's a big difference.

00:30:43.960 | There's a big difference of being somewhere when you know you have the option to not be

00:30:48.840 | there versus being somewhere when you feel like you're stuck there.

00:30:53.760 | I've experienced this with work.

00:30:55.640 | If you're choosing to work, you have some financial freedom, you have some savings,

00:30:58.640 | maybe you're totally financially independent, and you're still engaged in work, you're going

00:31:02.880 | to enjoy that work a whole lot more.

00:31:04.400 | It's going to be more meaningful to you because you know you're making a choice to do that

00:31:08.120 | work.

00:31:09.120 | You're doing it because you want to, not because you have to.

00:31:11.120 | That, I think, is powerful.

00:31:13.280 | So I don't think that everyone should leave.

00:31:14.640 | In fact, I think that very few people should leave because many of the problems that you

00:31:19.840 | have in your primary place, you'll have in another place.

00:31:23.000 | But you'll have a whole new set of problems that you're not accustomed to, that you don't

00:31:26.320 | know how to navigate.

00:31:28.280 | But I think having the option to leave is really powerful.

00:31:34.480 | Let's pivot now to part two where I'm going to talk to you about how to leave.

00:31:38.380 | How do you actually leave a place and go somewhere else?

00:31:40.640 | I'm going to be mixing a number of different things because leaving can be local, one town

00:31:45.960 | to another, one county to another, regional, around a few states, or it can be international.

00:31:51.320 | The requirements are different for each of those.

00:31:53.720 | Some are common, some are not.

00:31:56.640 | Generally the most important thing that you need to leave is a way to support yourself.

00:32:04.640 | Most likely a job or money saved.

00:32:09.240 | If you have a job, you can almost always work out everything else.

00:32:15.240 | People do this all the time.

00:32:16.520 | You live in Massachusetts and you want to move to New Hampshire.

00:32:20.360 | You often need a job.

00:32:21.360 | You live in New York, you want to move to Florida.

00:32:23.240 | Get a job and everything is simple.

00:32:25.240 | A job, a source of income, allows you to arrange all the other details.

00:32:30.440 | And all the details that seem overwhelming, for example, high cost of housing or high

00:32:35.960 | cost of taxes or low cost, whatever it is, those things are often worked out simply by

00:32:41.240 | getting a job.

00:32:42.820 | You can sit in Kansas and think about moving to California and if you don't have a job

00:32:48.600 | that's paying you a decent wage, then it's going to be hard to imagine.

00:32:52.920 | How am I going to pay $3,500 a month in rent?

00:32:56.480 | But if you can get a job in California, most jobs are calibrated to the expenses of the

00:33:00.720 | region where the job is available.

00:33:02.800 | And so you'll likely be able to pay the expenses.

00:33:05.920 | A job in a lot of ways is even more powerful than having some savings because our whole

00:33:10.820 | world is oriented around people who have jobs.

00:33:14.100 | Having a job allows you to borrow money to fund a move if you need to.

00:33:18.840 | Having a job allows you to pass a financial check to rent an apartment.

00:33:22.980 | Having a job allows you to be confident that, "Hey, I can work this thing out."

00:33:28.400 | That's usually the basic thing that is necessary.

00:33:32.280 | On an international basis, having a job usually means that you can get the necessary paperwork

00:33:38.480 | that you need to work in another country.

00:33:41.240 | Not always, but almost anybody in the world, if you can get a job in another country, generally

00:33:47.200 | that company will be able to hire you and work out the necessary paperwork for them

00:33:52.640 | to hire you legally.

00:33:55.080 | The lack of paperwork may be an impediment to you in an interview process.

00:33:59.760 | The lack of paperwork might mean that you can't get the job.

00:34:03.160 | But if you can successfully get the job, then most of the time the paperwork can be arranged

00:34:09.800 | for you to legally live and work in that other place.

00:34:12.980 | And so if you're sitting in the United States right now, and you're looking around, or you're

00:34:17.160 | sitting in a certain state in the United States, and you're looking around and saying, "I don't

00:34:21.480 | like this.

00:34:23.160 | I want to go somewhere better."

00:34:26.480 | Go and get a job in another place that you think might be better, and almost everything

00:34:31.160 | else can be worked out.

00:34:34.600 | It's really, actually, genuinely about that simple.

00:34:41.480 | The getting a job even takes care of a lot of personal details for you.

00:34:45.740 | It takes care of conversations with your current employer.

00:34:48.180 | "Oh, why are you resigning?"

00:34:49.420 | "I got a better job."

00:34:50.660 | Well, they understand that.

00:34:51.820 | That solves the problem.

00:34:53.260 | With your friends and family, if you tell your friends and family, "I'm moving from

00:34:57.060 | such and such a place to such and such a place because it has a better political system,"

00:35:01.300 | a few of them might understand, but a lot of them won't.

00:35:04.220 | But if you say, "I'm moving because I got a better job," virtually the vast majority

00:35:08.300 | people will understand.

00:35:09.300 | "Oh, that makes sense.

00:35:10.300 | People move all the time for a job."

00:35:11.300 | It's one of the primary reasons why people move.

00:35:14.340 | If you choose to move to another country, you can defend it very simply, and it solves

00:35:18.980 | all your problems to simply say, "I got a job."

00:35:23.100 | Getting a job even solves a lot of the financial things.

00:35:25.860 | For example, in a moment I'm going to talk about moving your money.

00:35:28.100 | I think one of the things you should consider doing is moving your money from the place

00:35:30.960 | that you don't like to a place that you think is better.

00:35:33.460 | But that can actually be a little difficult.

00:35:34.980 | If you don't have ties to another country, many countries won't allow you to bank in

00:35:38.060 | that country.

00:35:39.100 | You may want to go and open a bank account abroad, but often if you can't demonstrate

00:35:44.100 | a connection to that country, then that country's laws will not permit you to use their banking

00:35:49.420 | system.

00:35:50.420 | So the job solves virtually all of those things.

00:35:52.960 | So think very carefully about that.

00:35:56.260 | In order for you to move for a job, you're generally going to need a high-paying and/or

00:36:01.500 | specialized job, especially in an international context.

00:36:04.820 | Certainly doesn't apply from state to state, but in an international context, you generally

00:36:08.420 | will need a specialized position of some kind, and often you'll want a high-paying position

00:36:14.400 | of some kind.

00:36:15.900 | Why?

00:36:17.180 | Well, politicians, in order to maintain their power, they need to be seen by their constituents

00:36:25.180 | as looking out for the best interests of their constituents.

00:36:30.020 | And one of the most fundamental needs of most constituents is work.

00:36:35.200 | And so although some of us really want and appreciate the concept of free movement of

00:36:41.340 | people around the world, open immigration systems, et cetera, that's an extreme minority

00:36:46.620 | position in the world, because protecting people's jobs is generally seen as job number

00:36:52.580 | one for a politician.

00:36:54.120 | If your constituents believe that their economic hardships are caused by your letting other

00:36:59.300 | people from other countries in, you're probably not going to be able to keep your position

00:37:03.940 | as a politician very long.

00:37:06.620 | And so governments generally impose rules, and they generally require companies to hire

00:37:11.580 | from the local population, the local citizens, before they can hire from abroad.

00:37:17.260 | And virtually all – I would guess, I don't know that, but almost all governments that

00:37:22.140 | I've interacted with – if they're going to hire a foreign citizen, they need to demonstrate

00:37:26.680 | to the government to at least a small degree that they've actively tried to hire a local

00:37:31.400 | citizen first.

00:37:32.960 | But for some reason, they couldn't find someone with those capabilities, with those

00:37:36.100 | talents, with those abilities from the local citizenry, and for that reason, they need

00:37:39.340 | to bring in a foreign national.

00:37:41.700 | And so if you're going to actually get a job at a high level, especially the kind of

00:37:46.100 | job that allows you to move across international borders, you need to be working in a specialized

00:37:50.940 | higher position.

00:37:53.180 | So that means if you can't get that now, you've got work to do.

00:37:57.900 | Might mean a degree.

00:37:58.940 | It might mean additional degrees.

00:38:00.540 | It might mean certain levels of certification, certain qualifications.

00:38:04.380 | It might mean specialized areas of study.

00:38:06.540 | But you've got to transform yourself from a commodity into a specialty.

00:38:11.180 | That's your basic job in order for you to open up those doors to you.

00:38:16.920 | Priority number one is getting a job.

00:38:19.640 | If you have money, that's another big benefit.

00:38:23.400 | Having money will open up many other doors.

00:38:25.180 | So if you're living based upon the income from your investments, that in and of itself

00:38:29.380 | will also open up many doors.

00:38:31.380 | But in some ways, not quite as many as getting a job.

00:38:34.400 | There are many countries in the world that you can go and get a work permit to live there

00:38:37.340 | and work there, but you've got a few million bucks stashed away and the country says, "Well,

00:38:41.580 | we don't need people with a few million bucks.

00:38:43.140 | We've got lots of millionaires."

00:38:45.280 | And so that in and of itself is not necessarily enough to make things open up for you.

00:38:51.440 | Now if you're trying to change across national borders, next thing you need is a passport.

00:38:57.140 | You need that little document that allows you to cross international borders.

00:39:02.460 | So if you don't have a passport and you've ever made a threat to leave or you think you

00:39:05.700 | might ever want to leave in the future, that's step one.

00:39:07.800 | Get yourself a passport.

00:39:08.800 | Get yourself a passport so you can physically go.

00:39:12.520 | You actually don't need, if you have a strong passport, a passport like the US American

00:39:17.240 | passport where you have visa-free access to many countries, you actually don't need almost

00:39:23.780 | anything except a passport.

00:39:25.540 | You don't actually need residency papers for many countries in the world.

00:39:30.100 | You don't need a right of residency.

00:39:32.140 | You actually don't need much of anything.

00:39:34.940 | My three, my big three, if I could only have three things, I would have a passport, I would

00:39:39.020 | have a credit card, and I'd have a cell phone, a mobile phone that'll work around the world.

00:39:42.840 | With those three things, I can arrange every other detail.

00:39:45.900 | Need a place to stay?

00:39:46.900 | Boom, Airbnb or hotels.com app or whatever.

00:39:49.580 | I can do it all right from the tarmac.

00:39:52.220 | Need clothes?

00:39:53.660 | Credit card.

00:39:54.660 | Need anything else?

00:39:55.660 | Passport, phone, credit card.

00:39:56.860 | I can solve the vast majority of my problems with those three things.

00:40:01.340 | But the passport is essential.

00:40:02.340 | Now, why do I say you don't need residency papers?

00:40:04.820 | Because you could just go as a tourist.

00:40:06.180 | If you had a job, you can't work as a tourist on a job.

00:40:09.500 | But if you have money and you just want to go somewhere as a tourist, you can do that.

00:40:12.720 | If you have a business that you run, you're a remote worker, you're a digital nomad, you

00:40:19.900 | can do that in many other countries.

00:40:21.380 | Let's say you're in the United States.

00:40:22.620 | Well, US American citizens can have visa-free access as travelers, as tourists to Canada,

00:40:28.900 | and they can stay in Canada for up to 180 days.

00:40:32.060 | You also get visa-free access to Mexico for up to 180 days.

00:40:36.300 | So with those two things right there, 180 days in one, 180 days in the other, going

00:40:41.020 | back and forth, maybe a few days of transit in the United States on the way through, you

00:40:45.460 | can pretty well live in two other countries and you can do that virtually indefinitely

00:40:52.300 | without a whole lot of problems.

00:40:54.820 | Global pandemic that shuts down the borders, that's a problem.

00:40:57.820 | But short of that, you can do it without a whole lot of problems.

00:41:01.740 | Some countries will allow you to live as a tourist virtually indefinitely.

00:41:06.540 | I've met people all over the world.

00:41:08.540 | Depends on the country because there's a big difference in the policy of the country, but

00:41:11.420 | there are many people who live in one country, maybe they have a 90-day tourist visa.

00:41:15.940 | They get to day 89 and they do a visa run.

00:41:18.300 | They go to the border, take a bus to the border, go across, have a cup of coffee, and then

00:41:21.780 | come right back in and renew their tourist visa.

00:41:23.820 | People can do that for years and years and years.

00:41:25.980 | So if you have the ability to work over the internet or you have some savings to live

00:41:29.140 | on, that's also a solution.

00:41:30.620 | Now, you do need a place to go and here's where you can get a little bit more official,

00:41:35.580 | is you might want a place that you can actually settle down.

00:41:40.020 | You can travel as a nomad in today's world extremely comfortably.

00:41:45.260 | I used to think that things like residency paperwork, well, that was job number one.

00:41:49.780 | That was what you needed to get.

00:41:50.780 | You had to get the right of residence in a place.

00:41:52.660 | And no longer think that.

00:41:54.400 | With tourist visas on a powerful passport, with good visa-free access to the world, with

00:41:59.340 | an Airbnb app on your phone, and with a good international cell phone, you can travel the

00:42:03.900 | world and live virtually indefinitely.

00:42:06.780 | Airbnb has been a total game changer.

00:42:10.340 | Most people aren't going to live in hotels.

00:42:11.500 | It's too expensive to live in a reasonable hotel.

00:42:14.740 | But you can rent so easily a long-term rental through the Airbnb app, right from your phone,

00:42:19.140 | right from your computer, that it solves those problems really, really elegantly.

00:42:24.220 | I use Airbnb for many things, but I have stayed for many months at a time in Airbnbs.

00:42:30.100 | And I use Airbnbs as a way of even just understanding what the costs of living in a place are going

00:42:34.880 | to be.

00:42:35.940 | The nice thing about Airbnb is generally all expenses are included.

00:42:39.820 | So when you reserve a place through the Airbnb, you can often get a major discount by doing

00:42:44.100 | a month-long rental or a multi-month rental.

00:42:46.420 | That's often 50%, sometimes 60%, 40% off of the stated nightly rate.

00:42:52.060 | Also it does it down with cleaning fees, convenience fees, booking deposits, et cetera, when you

00:42:57.420 | rent for a longer period of time.

00:42:59.500 | But that rental fee includes everything.

00:43:01.140 | Includes electricity, usually water.

00:43:03.220 | It includes trash service.

00:43:04.460 | It includes internet generally, cable TV.

00:43:07.340 | Whatever comes with that place comes with your rental fee.

00:43:10.140 | And so Airbnb is, if you're trying to get a sense of the cost of living in different

00:43:13.420 | places, Airbnb is a wonderful way to do that.

00:43:16.300 | I'll use Airbnb and say, "What's the cost of living in a three-bedroom, two-bath house

00:43:20.220 | in Ontario?

00:43:22.180 | What's the cost of living in a three-bedroom, two-bath house in Uruguay?

00:43:26.440 | What's the cost of living in a three-bedroom, two-bath house in..."

00:43:31.220 | You insert your place.

00:43:32.580 | And Airbnb gives you a good proxy for the relative cost of living.

00:43:37.160 | You can generally, if you decide to stay in a place, you can of course generally reserve

00:43:41.380 | a place for cheaper than you would pay through Airbnb by doing a private rental.

00:43:46.980 | But what you give up on that a lot of times is flexibility and I guess hassle.

00:43:52.060 | A lot of times you go and do a private rental.

00:43:53.740 | Well now you've got to bring your own washing machine.

00:43:55.700 | You've got to go and get the lights turned on in your name.

00:43:57.700 | You've got to go and put the internet account in your name.

00:43:59.380 | It's a hassle depending on the customs and the place that you're considering doing.

00:44:04.020 | And then you're generally committing to a lease, generally committing, making a security

00:44:09.620 | deposit of some kind.

00:44:11.180 | With Airbnb, you can live on a credit card, totally.

00:44:13.980 | You can live on a credit card and you can just simply be in a place and when you want

00:44:18.300 | to go, you go.

00:44:19.340 | Even if a long-term rental, I've done multi-month rentals with Airbnb.

00:44:23.100 | Let's say you do a four-month rental on a property through Airbnb and then you decide

00:44:27.180 | you want to leave after two months.

00:44:28.420 | Well, the cancellation policy is 30 days.

00:44:31.260 | You're only paying...

00:44:32.260 | You're 30 days away from breaking your lease.

00:44:34.060 | So maybe you pay off one month that you didn't use and then you switch to a different place.

00:44:38.660 | It's a wonderful solution.

00:44:40.560 | So that's worth considering.

00:44:43.300 | Now with regard to residency papers, to get residency papers, generally you need a job,

00:44:48.540 | right, what we talked about, or you need a business or you need money.

00:44:54.180 | No country in the world wants uneducated, broke people coming in who are going to be

00:44:57.660 | a burden on the state.

00:44:58.660 | They don't give you residency paperwork if you're uneducated and you're broke and you're

00:45:01.980 | coming in to be a burden on the state.

00:45:03.740 | So if you're uneducated and you're broke and you can get a job, you can get a job as a

00:45:07.060 | migrant worker.

00:45:08.060 | You can get a contract to go to a migrant...

00:45:09.560 | Work on a farm and harvest vegetables.

00:45:11.120 | Well, you can often get in.

00:45:13.480 | But without that job, it's going to be really tough.

00:45:16.320 | If you have money and you can demonstrate, "Look, I can live on my assets," most people

00:45:20.480 | will give you...

00:45:21.480 | Many countries will give you residency.

00:45:23.080 | Or if you have a business, you can live all over the world.

00:45:25.520 | You want to live to move to Europe, you can get a freelancer visa.

00:45:28.600 | Europe is full of freelancer visas.

00:45:29.900 | They give you the opportunity to live in Europe full time.

00:45:32.640 | You want to move to Latin America, you can do that if you're self-employed and you have

00:45:35.880 | a certain amount of income.

00:45:36.920 | You can do it if you have money coming in.

00:45:39.820 | Even countries that are relatively hard to get in.

00:45:42.280 | If you can say, "Look, I'm going to build a certain business of this size."

00:45:46.000 | The United Kingdom has this great entrepreneur visas available for you right now.

00:45:50.960 | Canada, if you start a business in Canada, they'll give you a few extra points.

00:45:55.480 | Everything improves if you have a business of some kind.

00:45:58.680 | So if you have money, a business, and a job, you can get residency paperwork worked out.

00:46:03.140 | If you don't have those things, you got to get a job.

00:46:05.320 | If you don't have a job, you're not going to be able to go other than as a tourist.

00:46:10.080 | If you have a second passport, a second citizenship, that's obviously a solution, a really wonderful

00:46:14.480 | solution.

00:46:15.480 | So we'll encourage you if you haven't done it, search your family tree.

00:46:18.840 | Say, "Was my grandfather Italian?"

00:46:21.200 | "Was grandma born in Hungary?"

00:46:24.120 | "Did my dad naturalize in Mexico at some point in the past and I just forgot about that and

00:46:30.000 | it was no big deal?"

00:46:31.360 | And see if you have access to a second passport through something in your line of descent.

00:46:36.680 | But you can move your physical person out of your country to another place if you have

00:46:40.840 | that stuff available.

00:46:42.520 | You definitely want to think about moving your money.

00:46:45.160 | Now moving your money, in some ways it's simple.

00:46:47.720 | You just go to another country, you open a bank account, you put your money in it.

00:46:51.280 | Simple.

00:46:52.280 | But there can be varying degrees of complexity depending on how much money you have and how

00:46:56.640 | it's held and where you actually want to move it, et cetera.

00:47:00.080 | There are also increasingly major reporting requirements for moving your money.

00:47:05.760 | But it's still worth thinking about.

00:47:07.480 | If you're living in a country where it looks like the tax regime is going up, looks like

00:47:12.080 | taxes are going up, looks like regulation is going up, better to get out early.

00:47:16.880 | You might need to make some defensive moves.

00:47:18.760 | You might want to start liquidating real estate.

00:47:21.100 | You might want to sell a business when the selling is good, where you know what the taxes

00:47:25.640 | are instead of some future unknown.

00:47:28.440 | That's where you need some good individual advice, but there are very good reasons to

00:47:32.760 | start on that process.

00:47:35.080 | It takes time to be comfortable moving your money around the world.

00:47:37.640 | It takes time to get all the accounts open so you can actually make the transfers.

00:47:40.640 | A lot of times you have to go in person to physically open the accounts, and that can

00:47:44.600 | be hard, especially in a pandemic world.

00:47:46.720 | So making plans to be able to move your money I think is an extremely wise idea.

00:47:52.680 | And what I often encourage when I do consulting on this, I often encourage people to have

00:47:56.280 | a kind of a staged plan, a multi-step plan.

00:48:00.880 | Number I guess a year or so ago I was consulting with a client.

00:48:03.560 | The client told me about a family member who was from Venezuela, and the story really inspired

00:48:09.200 | me.

00:48:10.200 | But I think it was his wife's father.

00:48:13.200 | He was Venezuelan.

00:48:14.200 | He was a real estate investor.

00:48:15.880 | And this was a number of years ago when Venezuela was really booming, but Venezuela was starting

00:48:19.120 | to turn in the direction that it has since turned.

00:48:21.760 | I think maybe Chavez was in power, or had come to power, and everything looked like

00:48:27.120 | it was going to go in a leftward direction, socialist, et cetera, and he had concerns.

00:48:32.040 | And so he systematically started selling all of his properties.

00:48:35.440 | He sold all of his property in Venezuela.

00:48:37.440 | I don't remember if it was rental properties and a primary house, but he sold all of his

00:48:40.680 | properties and he moved his money to the United States, the world's largest tax haven.

00:48:46.160 | Moved his money to the United States and rented his primary house.

00:48:49.560 | And he lived there in Venezuela in a rented house for a number of years.

00:48:53.080 | And everyone around him said, "What are you doing?

00:48:54.680 | You're crazy.

00:48:55.680 | You're foolish.

00:48:56.680 | Why are you renting the house?"

00:48:57.680 | He said, "This is what I think is going to happen."

00:48:58.680 | And he stayed committed.

00:48:59.680 | Well, lo and behold, things happened as he thought.

00:49:03.420 | Who knows what his expected timeline was, but when that happened, it was relatively

00:49:06.840 | simple for him.

00:49:07.840 | He gave the keys to his landlord, got on an airplane, flew elsewhere, and everything was

00:49:12.120 | saved.

00:49:13.120 | He saved his family's fortune because he moved in advance.

00:49:15.560 | And so that's the kind of thing that you should be thinking about.

00:49:18.560 | You should be looking at your investment assets, at your savings, and trying to figure out

00:49:22.040 | what risks am I exposed to?

00:49:24.520 | Many real estate investors are finding how difficult this is right now.

00:49:27.320 | All of their real estate has been concentrated in one area.

00:49:29.520 | The governor of the state prohibited evictions.

00:49:31.860 | That's a real problem for a real estate investor.

00:49:34.900 | Many people are finding this out with regard to laws on sales, when certain assets are

00:49:40.960 | not allowed to be sold at some point.

00:49:43.540 | You can't take more money out of the bank.

00:49:45.120 | You can't make transfers.

00:49:46.360 | Everything starts to slow down.

00:49:47.360 | It's a major, major problem.

00:49:49.000 | So think about it.

00:49:50.000 | You can do this in phases.

00:49:51.320 | I've often recommended to people that they start by keeping their assets, but just strip

00:49:55.080 | some equity.

00:49:56.120 | So maybe you have a bunch of, let's say you have four paid off houses in one place, and

00:50:01.040 | you think, "I'm not so sure that the future of this place is great," but you're not ready

00:50:05.040 | to sell.

00:50:06.040 | You don't want to incur the tax.

00:50:07.040 | You're not ready to sell.

00:50:08.040 | Well, what do you do?

00:50:09.200 | Well, you could start by putting mortgages on those properties, or putting liens on them

00:50:14.040 | in some way, and stripping the equity.

00:50:16.280 | So maybe you put mortgage on the property, you take that money, and you move that money

00:50:19.120 | abroad.

00:50:20.120 | And then you wait, and if things start to get worse, then you start to sell in the future.

00:50:23.780 | So there are many creative ways that you can do this without freaking out and just selling

00:50:27.280 | everything and running for the hills.

00:50:28.920 | You can make a plan that's a staged plan.

00:50:30.760 | If I see this, then I'll do that.

00:50:32.760 | For right now, I'll set up this infrastructure, but if I see this, then I'll do that.

00:50:36.200 | I think that's a really wise way to do it.

00:50:39.460 | If you're running a business, you can do the same thing.

00:50:41.840 | Maybe you say, "The future is not real bright for this particular business here, but let's

00:50:46.520 | start by opening a branch in another place."

00:50:49.200 | My hometown in South Florida is becoming very quickly an investor hotspot.

00:50:55.040 | Many, many hedge funds are moving down from New York to Palm Beach County, to Delray,

00:51:00.600 | to Fort Lauderdale, to Miami, and they're doing it for many reasons, but it's usually

00:51:04.600 | a slow process.

00:51:06.100 | They start by opening a branch in South Florida, and they allow people to work there.

00:51:09.320 | And then they go back and forth, back and forth.

00:51:11.080 | And then in time, they go ahead and say, "Well, we're moving headquarters down, but they're

00:51:14.160 | going to keep an office open in New York for those who want to stay there and who want

00:51:17.280 | to keep working there."

00:51:18.640 | And so think about that with your business.

00:51:20.740 | Your business might be the kind of business that if you just simply put a beachhead in

00:51:24.480 | another place, plant a flag in another place, then that gives you the ability to move there

00:51:28.880 | in the future if you want to.

00:51:31.200 | If you have a flag planted in a new place, and you have the ability to go there in the

00:51:35.800 | future, that will put you far ahead of everyone else who's clamoring when all of a sudden

00:51:41.000 | some law changes.

00:51:43.600 | This is just a very short introduction to how to leave a place, but I'm trying to focus

00:51:47.540 | on the basics.

00:51:48.540 | I teach a whole course on this, which is hours and hours of instruction, but this is just

00:51:52.200 | an overview.

00:51:53.200 | If you have those basic things, you can start to leave.

00:51:55.120 | Now, again, leaving is a big cost.

00:51:57.960 | The most important cost is generally to relationships, family, friends, loved ones.

00:52:03.680 | It's very difficult to leave because it changes the nature of those relationships.

00:52:07.880 | And so for that reason alone, I think most people shouldn't leave.

00:52:11.760 | It's a very significant cost.

00:52:14.000 | But if you have the infrastructure in place, and you have the choice to leave, if at some

00:52:17.600 | point in time you determine that that's what you need to do, then you'll have the ability

00:52:21.720 | to do so.

00:52:23.680 | So I hope those thoughts and those ideas help you.

00:52:27.120 | Now here in part three, I want to talk to you a little bit about the recent presidential

00:52:30.560 | elections, because of course a majority of my audience is in the United States.

00:52:34.080 | I'll tell you a little bit about my story of leaving the United States and some of what

00:52:37.920 | I've learned from that experience.

00:52:42.200 | To begin with, in some way this previous election seems to be a bit of a mixed bag.

00:52:53.160 | I think you can make a very strong argument that this election, this recent election,

00:52:59.400 | the results of this recent election, is the worst possible outcome that could have been

00:53:04.880 | achieved.

00:53:06.120 | The worst possible outcome.

00:53:08.200 | And I say that because you have a close election, and you have a disputed process.

00:53:16.080 | And as I see it, that's bad for the stability of a society.

00:53:21.360 | Close elections are not always bad, but they certainly put a bad taste in people's mouth.

00:53:28.000 | Even if in the end you look and say everything was done that was right, there are a whole

00:53:32.120 | lot of people that look back and say, "It's just not legitimate."

00:53:36.640 | You think back to the 2000 election of President Bush to the US presidency and how many people

00:53:42.880 | throughout his presidency, "Oh, he won by an arbitrary court.

00:53:47.000 | He shouldn't have won.

00:53:48.000 | He shouldn't have won."

00:53:49.120 | Or more recently with President Trump's election in the Electoral College, you have a wide

00:53:54.400 | swath but losing the popular vote, winning the Electoral College.

00:53:57.160 | You have a wide swath of US Americans who are just furious, "Oh, he shouldn't have won.

00:54:01.520 | Not my president.

00:54:02.520 | Doesn't reflect the people.

00:54:03.520 | We've got to scrap the Electoral College," etc.

00:54:05.960 | So close and hotly contested elections are difficult.

00:54:10.240 | But they're horrible if there are questions about the legitimacy of the election, if there

00:54:15.720 | are questions about fraud, if there are questions about was this actually done in an appropriate

00:54:21.200 | way.

00:54:22.200 | There are many people who live in countries where they have elections and everyone knows

00:54:24.440 | the elections are a scam and nobody bothers because, "Okay, well, the elections are a

00:54:27.520 | scam."

00:54:28.600 | But there's a change happening right now in the United States of America where both political

00:54:32.920 | sides – I hesitate to use both because, of course, it's hard to capture things in

00:54:36.920 | two – but both political sides feel disenfranchised and that's really bad.

00:54:43.840 | And I would say you see a couple different levels of disenfranchised feelings.

00:54:48.840 | You see people feel disenfranchised because of things like districting, districting agreements

00:54:55.400 | and who is responsible for setting up districting of different political entities.

00:55:00.600 | You see people that feel disenfranchised because the United States is a constitutional republic,

00:55:04.960 | not a democracy.

00:55:05.960 | So you have systems like the Electoral College rather than a direct election based upon popular

00:55:10.600 | vote.

00:55:11.780 | You see major arguments where people feel disenfranchised because of voter ID laws or

00:55:16.560 | voter suppression efforts or foreign election interference or Facebook not cracking down

00:55:22.120 | on the people we want them to crack down on.

00:55:24.280 | There are people that feel disenfranchised because of laws, right?

00:55:28.240 | So when certain people are not allowed to vote, you have felons can't vote or these

00:55:32.360 | people can't vote.

00:55:34.820 | People then feel disenfranchised, especially in this most recent election, over allegations

00:55:39.720 | of fraud.

00:55:40.720 | Vote wasn't fair.

00:55:42.720 | People are making up votes.

00:55:43.880 | Things are happening.

00:55:44.880 | People are screwing with the computer systems, et cetera.

00:55:46.880 | This is all bad, very, very bad.

00:55:48.840 | I think it's important to emphasize that it doesn't matter when you have these things,

00:55:55.960 | like, for example, someone feels like fraud has been committed.

00:56:00.400 | It doesn't really matter whether or not an election was actually fraudulent.

00:56:07.880 | It really only matters whether people perceive it to have been fraudulent.

00:56:15.220 | It does not really matter whether or not an election was actually fraudulent.

00:56:20.320 | It only matters whether people perceive it to have been fraudulent.

00:56:25.880 | Or to use another example, it doesn't really matter whether the electoral college system

00:56:33.480 | is better than a direct democracy.

00:56:37.000 | All that matters is how people perceive it.

00:56:39.960 | It doesn't really matter whether people have been actually disenfranchised of their vote

00:56:43.560 | due to voter ID laws.

00:56:45.840 | It only matters how people perceive that.

00:56:48.920 | Facts and evidence and arguments are increasingly totally useless in our world.

00:56:55.780 | We're living in an emotional world where facts and reason and philosophical arguments just

00:57:01.760 | don't matter.

00:57:02.760 | What matters is what people believe and how hotly they believe it.

00:57:05.780 | And so this is a very bad sign for the stability of the country, because in my perception,

00:57:14.960 | the legitimacy of the American government is increasingly coming into question.

00:57:20.120 | And that's a bad sign.

00:57:22.440 | If you have the legitimacy of a government fail, again, it doesn't matter what people

00:57:28.080 | actually do.

00:57:30.400 | The politicians may or may not be corrupt.

00:57:32.440 | The politicians may or may not have done things that are in the best interest of the citizens.

00:57:36.400 | What matters is people's perception.

00:57:38.800 | Perception is reality.

00:57:41.240 | And so on that basis, the most recent election in the United States here was probably the

00:57:45.160 | worst possible thing that could happen.

00:57:49.000 | Close election, disputed process, many irregularities, many things that cause people to say, "Hmm."

00:57:58.040 | And it doesn't much matter whether there's perfectly reasonable explanations or not.

00:58:01.800 | What matters is what people perceive.

00:58:04.840 | Now that's one line of thinking you could go down.

00:58:07.000 | I think you can also make the exact opposite argument.

00:58:10.120 | For example, I would make a good argument that the results of the most recent election

00:58:15.880 | are probably the best possible outcome.

00:58:19.200 | If we assume that President Biden winds up being President Biden, if we assume that the

00:58:26.560 | Senate stays Republican, right?

00:58:28.640 | Maybe a little bit of a question, but let's assume that for a moment.

00:58:31.200 | And that the House of Representatives went a little bit more Republican but is controlled

00:58:36.520 | by the Democrats, you have a divided government.

00:58:38.800 | And you basically have nobody who has any kind of widespread mandate.

00:58:43.720 | I don't think that anybody is coming into office saying, "Look, our ideas were just

00:58:48.200 | totally successful."

00:58:50.360 | And in my opinion, that's probably one of the best possible outcomes that you could

00:58:54.160 | get.

00:58:55.160 | A divided government is generally good for freedom because you get gridlock.

00:59:01.100 | And since really no political party other than the Libertarians, which are basically

00:59:06.600 | politically irrelevant with regard to actual power, but since neither the Republicans nor

00:59:11.560 | the Democrats in the United States actually do much in the direction of freedom, then

00:59:16.200 | about the best that you can hope is that they stay in gridlock and then they don't pass

00:59:20.080 | any new laws and you can kind of continue with things as they are.

00:59:24.200 | So I think that's a pretty fair argument.

00:59:26.520 | Pretty fair argument.

00:59:27.940 | You know, I felt a major sense of relief with the most recent election because, again, divided

00:59:32.860 | government means, okay, we have opposition parties, people go through, but not a lot

00:59:36.060 | gets done.

00:59:37.060 | But the flip side of that is there are a lot of things that do genuinely need to get done.

00:59:42.300 | And the US government is increasingly dysfunctional.

00:59:45.300 | And I mean that in its fullest sense.

00:59:46.660 | It's just dysfunctional.

00:59:47.660 | I'm not talking about gridlock.

00:59:49.340 | I mean, it's not doing the job that it was designed to do.

00:59:53.620 | I think the two important things to point to on this, two important trends is number

00:59:58.080 | one, the use of executive orders rather than congressional action for almost everything

01:00:03.140 | in government, it seems.

01:00:04.580 | And number two is the use of the courts to try to decide the most contentious issues.

01:00:09.840 | And both of these trends are really bad.

01:00:12.720 | In my understanding of the US constitution and the US governmental framework, the US

01:00:18.920 | government was designed to have a very strong executive.

01:00:22.640 | So that's good.

01:00:25.520 | But it was also designed to have a really strong Congress and a really strong Senate.

01:00:29.920 | So you have the Senate that's supposed to be the deliberative body.

01:00:33.100 | The Senate is supposed to be not very responsive at all to the political passions of the day.

01:00:37.880 | And then you have Congress, which is supposed to be very responsive to the political passions

01:00:41.880 | of the day.

01:00:42.880 | You're supposed to have big changes.

01:00:44.400 | But it's Congress who's supposed to initiate legislation.

01:00:47.160 | It's the Senate that's supposed to initiate legislation.

01:00:49.480 | But what you see in the current environment is very little meaningful legislation actually

01:00:53.800 | getting through.

01:00:55.360 | I don't follow politics on a daily basis.

01:00:57.640 | But if I were to reflect back, what meaningful legislation got through Congress during President

01:01:03.120 | Trump's administration?

01:01:04.760 | I would say the criminal justice reform bill.

01:01:09.320 | Beyond that, I can't really think of anything.

01:01:12.160 | What meaningful legislation got through in President Obama's administration?

01:01:16.460 | The Affordable Care Act?

01:01:18.460 | Beyond that, I can't think of anything.

01:01:20.280 | I'm sure there were bills passed, but I can't think of anything.

01:01:23.520 | Now, I'm not the world's most involved political pundit.

01:01:26.360 | That's just me as a layperson who probably consumes more than the average person of political

01:01:30.720 | news.

01:01:31.720 | I can't think of anything.

01:01:32.720 | And so there you have a total of 12 years, George Bush, the Patriot Act, Medicare Part

01:01:39.000 | D. What else got through during the George W. Bush administration?

01:01:43.920 | I mean, not a lot, right?

01:01:47.160 | I don't see any groundbreaking legislation.

01:01:51.400 | So why?

01:01:52.400 | And then when legislation gets passed, unfortunately, it's often very one-sided.

01:01:57.160 | So the criminal justice reform during President Trump's administration, that was very well

01:02:01.760 | – that was a good bipartisan effort there.

01:02:08.340 | That was, I think, well needed and a good bipartisan effort.

01:02:11.320 | I guess you had the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act.

01:02:14.560 | That was pretty partisan, but it didn't really make – I mean, a few changes, but

01:02:17.560 | no major changes.

01:02:21.400 | The Affordable Care Act pushed through by one party, right?

01:02:24.440 | Very much a Republican – sorry, a Democratic effort.

01:02:27.760 | And so this is – Congress is not legislating, and this is bad.

01:02:32.940 | It often seems to me, as again an interested political observer, it often seems to me that

01:02:39.320 | congressmen and women are more interested in being public political figures than they

01:02:43.600 | are in actually legislating.

01:02:45.560 | And I don't know that the framers of the Constitution could have ever imagined that.

01:02:51.640 | If you listen to the inside rumor mill and people who claim to know, it seems like often

01:02:56.280 | congressmen will go to the president and say, "President, go ahead and do such and such.

01:02:59.560 | We don't want to be on the record for it.

01:03:00.740 | We don't want that on our record."

01:03:02.500 | And so you have a completely dysfunctional Congress, which brings us to the courts.

01:03:07.640 | And so you have a system where major, major issues are not being decided by a body that

01:03:13.080 | is politically responsive and politically relevant, politically representative.

01:03:19.240 | You have the courts, which you have nine unelected lawyers deciding these things that are massive

01:03:25.480 | and wide-sweeping.

01:03:27.160 | And so when political decisions, major, massive, wide-sweeping political decisions are being

01:03:33.960 | made by nine unelected lawyers, this now is, I think, majorly leading people to believe

01:03:41.800 | that their voice is not heard.

01:03:44.120 | Many of the most sweeping court cases over the last couple of decades, especially on

01:03:50.000 | social issues, have been made in the courts because there was no chance of getting them

01:03:55.500 | through Congress, which makes people feel like, "Well, we're battling this court system,

01:03:59.800 | which is run by insiders.

01:04:03.880 | These lawyers are appointed by the president and you have this highly political process,

01:04:08.480 | and it's not by politicians who are actually responsive.

01:04:11.240 | I've never voted in my life for a Supreme Court justice.

01:04:13.400 | I've never voted in my life for a Supreme Court justice, and yet my life is majorly

01:04:17.800 | affected by the decisions of those justices."

01:04:21.280 | So to the extent that those justices are just simply doing their job of being a check and

01:04:26.240 | a balance on congressional power, then you say, "Okay, that makes sense."

01:04:29.440 | But I think those are two very dangerous trends to kind of go against the concept of gridlock

01:04:34.440 | being good for freedom.

01:04:36.240 | So things are questionable.

01:04:39.760 | Looking forward, it's hard to see how things improve in the short term.

01:04:45.280 | Looking forward, it's hard to see how do you reconcile these things.

01:04:48.800 | People talk about polarization.

01:04:50.260 | Political scientists talk about the polarization of the American electorate, as they should.

01:04:54.520 | The thing about that, though, is that polarization, you could say, "Well, people are just more

01:04:58.080 | polarized than they were 50 years ago."

01:05:00.440 | But I would say that there's a good reason for that, that the political platforms of

01:05:05.320 | the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, that the political platforms themselves are

01:05:09.840 | more polarized.

01:05:10.840 | And so you see increasingly a world where it's hard to be friends with someone who thinks

01:05:16.800 | differently.

01:05:17.800 | It's very hard to be...

01:05:18.800 | People are going to be in a romantic relationship with somebody who doesn't believe what they

01:05:21.380 | believe about politics.

01:05:23.140 | And this is difficult, because we're going into some very difficult years in the coming

01:05:28.480 | decades in the United States.

01:05:30.940 | You have an economy that is a mature economy.

01:05:34.000 | It's hard to look around and find a big growth industry.

01:05:36.880 | You have a mountain of government debt.

01:05:38.740 | You have major demographic problems.

01:05:41.600 | You're going to have major funding problems with governmental programs.

01:05:46.980 | There are significant challenges ahead in the coming years and decades.

01:05:51.080 | And so when you get a very divided people, then even relatively small, simple issues

01:05:57.480 | are hard to settle.

01:05:58.480 | Think about something like the coronavirus pandemic.

01:06:01.040 | I think it's very enlightening and illuminating about when we look at what happened with the

01:06:05.920 | coronavirus pandemic.

01:06:08.020 | Many of the things...

01:06:09.760 | If we were to go back, I think there have been times in American politics that have

01:06:13.840 | been very divided, much more charged than today.

01:06:16.880 | I think it's a total fallacy to think, "Well, things are worse now.

01:06:19.360 | People are more divided than they were a time before."

01:06:23.200 | But I don't want to overstate my case.

01:06:27.200 | When I look at the coronavirus pandemic, I see so many ways that it could have been solved

01:06:31.720 | simply.

01:06:32.720 | All the medical stuff, all the spending stuff could have been solved very simply and in

01:06:36.120 | a bipartisan way if it were just approached differently.

01:06:40.640 | But as it is, it became a very obvious outward symbol of the political dysfunction in the

01:06:47.960 | United States of America.

01:06:49.160 | So it's just an example that we can think about what could have been done differently

01:06:53.440 | if you had a political system where there was more consensus and less argumentation.

01:06:59.480 | I don't know.

01:07:00.480 | I don't know.

01:07:01.480 | So going forward in 2020, I'll tell you a little bit of my story of internationalization

01:07:07.720 | over the last few years.

01:07:12.680 | Growing up in the United States of America, I have always identified very deeply as an

01:07:18.480 | American.

01:07:20.240 | The culture, I love a lot of things about America.

01:07:23.600 | I love a lot of things about it.

01:07:24.840 | I've always identified as American and been proud to be an American.

01:07:29.280 | It was always a kind of a central part of what I cared about.

01:07:32.320 | I wasn't raised in a particularly political family.

01:07:34.480 | My parents don't get involved in politics, but I always cared a lot about the issues.

01:07:38.600 | And so I always appreciated so many things about the United States of America.

01:07:44.720 | But there have been a number of times, things over the years that have adjusted things.

01:07:53.540 | With various political movements, various campaigns, I learned a lot.

01:07:58.000 | And as I've matured and grown over time, I saw how when I was younger, I had become

01:08:03.120 | so - I didn't see things from an outside perspective.

01:08:06.160 | I think probably the best example was when I was in college, I knocked on doors for George

01:08:11.760 | W. Bush briefly.

01:08:13.640 | And not a lot, a couple of days.

01:08:14.640 | I manned a phone bank on election day calling people for George W. Bush.

01:08:17.720 | And it was mostly because it was fun and my friends were doing it.

01:08:20.520 | I was like, "Ah, let's go and hang out with the Republican Party."

01:08:23.440 | But I was identified as a Republican at the time.

01:08:27.440 | I was like, "This is what I want to do."

01:08:29.180 | And so I did that.

01:08:30.320 | I was involved in that.

01:08:31.520 | And then later, I remember distinctly the invasion of Iraq and the Patriot Act.

01:08:37.360 | And at the time, I got sucked into like, "Oh, we need the Patriot Act."

01:08:41.160 | Like, "Absolutely.

01:08:42.160 | It's the Patriot Act.

01:08:43.160 | You have to support this if you're a patriot."

01:08:44.560 | I had no idea what I was doing.

01:08:46.840 | And then in hindsight, you know, years later when I understood what the Patriot Act was,

01:08:52.360 | I was horrified that I had ever - I didn't vote for anything.

01:08:55.920 | I guess I voted for Bush.

01:08:56.920 | But I didn't - it was just me driving in my car thinking about it.

01:09:00.760 | But I was horrified that I had ever thought it was a good thing.

01:09:03.360 | And then the invasion of Iraq.

01:09:04.880 | I remember, "How can anybody oppose this?

01:09:06.680 | And absolutely we should invade Iraq."

01:09:08.040 | And then in hindsight, I thought, "What was wrong with me?

01:09:10.240 | How on earth did I get so hoodwinked into that?"

01:09:12.940 | And it caused me to go back and start to question a whole lot of things and think about a lot

01:09:16.920 | of stuff and try to find a place to put my feet.

01:09:19.400 | But at the end of the day, politics - national politics doesn't matter that much to your

01:09:24.920 | local level.

01:09:27.920 | I thought the Obama administration was interesting.

01:09:30.600 | In 2004, I went to Boston for the Democratic National Convention.

01:09:37.760 | And I remember very distinctly, I actually - the day before the day of Obama's coming

01:09:43.000 | out speech at the Democratic National Convention, I went to a speech that he gave in a little

01:09:48.920 | commons park or something there in Boston.

01:09:52.360 | And I spent quite a bit of time talking to one of his campaign managers.

01:09:55.040 | And I'd never heard of him in my life.

01:09:57.040 | And I - so I talked to him.

01:09:58.200 | I was like, "Oh, this guy's really interesting."

01:09:59.560 | And then I remember I was on the floor of the Fleet Center in Boston, Massachusetts

01:10:05.600 | in 2004 on the night of Obama's speech.

01:10:08.720 | And I remember how utterly electric the environment - the whole room was.

01:10:16.040 | It was one of the most amazing things ever.

01:10:19.120 | And I was - when I - just in terms of this sense of electricity in the air of, "Wow,

01:10:25.040 | that was something different.

01:10:26.440 | There's somebody who's got some political magnetism and some political dynamism to them."

01:10:35.000 | And then of course I left the convention and went to all the after parties and you get

01:10:38.440 | back and turn on cable news in my hotel room and of course everyone's talking about it

01:10:42.360 | as they should have been.

01:10:43.360 | It was a remarkable moment.

01:10:44.600 | So watching the Obama administration was a remarkable moment.

01:10:49.760 | But of course politically I didn't particularly align with a lot of things that Obama - that

01:10:53.560 | President Obama did and engaged in.

01:10:57.160 | I remember there were just a number of distinct points during his presidency that I just felt

01:11:03.280 | this distinct sense of shame.

01:11:06.760 | Several unique events that - things that he said, things that he did.

01:11:10.480 | And I just felt this incredible sense of shame.

01:11:13.480 | I thought, "Is this who the United States of America is?

01:11:16.400 | This is genuinely what you're going to say and what you're going to do as the president?"

01:11:21.200 | And it really - it was hard of course because on a personal level, President Obama is just

01:11:30.120 | such a likable guy, a family guy and you appreciate so many things about him.

01:11:33.960 | But yet the things that he would say and do just caused me to be so - feel so ashamed

01:11:38.720 | of being an American.

01:11:41.080 | And I remember distinctly in - I'll just share a couple of specific examples.

01:11:45.840 | I remember distinctly the night of the presidential election in 2016.

01:11:54.000 | And I voted third party.

01:11:55.120 | I had a very hard time.

01:11:56.200 | I couldn't vote for either of the candidates.

01:11:58.800 | But I expected Hillary Clinton to win.

01:12:01.360 | And then I remember watching the returns come in, as many of us, and when President Trump

01:12:05.240 | won, I just - I felt this incredible sense of relief.

01:12:08.800 | And I didn't actually believe - I thought President Trump is clearly a liar.

01:12:14.520 | He's not going to actually do anything conservative.

01:12:16.480 | He's just a wolf in sheep's clothing.

01:12:20.520 | But I remember the sense of relief when he won and I thought, "Wow, I avoided having

01:12:25.400 | to have President Clinton - President Hillary Clinton as my president."

01:12:29.840 | And I thought, "Why do I feel that sense of relief?

01:12:32.480 | I should not be this connected to presidential politics."

01:12:35.920 | And I determined right then and there that I was going to - I determined, I said, "All

01:12:43.080 | right, I wasn't ready this time.

01:12:44.960 | I wasn't independent of the government systems.

01:12:46.640 | I didn't have everything how I wanted in my life in 2016."

01:12:49.160 | I said, "By the time 2020 goes around, no matter who's elected president, I'm going

01:12:53.520 | to be in a position to where it's not a huge issue for me.

01:12:56.840 | I'm going to be in a position where I can pretty well ignore it because I don't ever

01:12:59.840 | want to be in a position where I feel this much relief when somebody wins as in that

01:13:05.600 | particular - as I was in 2016."

01:13:09.000 | And then in the beginning of President Trump's administration, I remember just feeling so

01:13:15.080 | optimistic about some of the things that he was saying, some of the things that we're

01:13:17.760 | doing.

01:13:18.760 | And, you know, as a Republican - I can't remember when I changed my voter registration

01:13:24.480 | from Republican, so anyway, I guess it was a Republican.

01:13:26.840 | So as a Republican, a former Republican, whatever you want to say, I remember this sense of

01:13:31.920 | just relief about, "Look, we got a Republican senator, a Republican Congress, and a Republican

01:13:36.360 | president.

01:13:37.360 | What an opportunity!"

01:13:38.360 | And, you know, as a Republican, you're not accustomed to winning.

01:13:41.400 | There's a reason why President Trump's quip about, "We're going to win," there was a reason

01:13:47.080 | why it rang true for so many people.

01:13:49.320 | Republicans just seem like they're losers all the time.

01:13:50.880 | They don't do anything.

01:13:52.200 | You put them in office and they don't do anything.

01:13:54.360 | They just sit there.

01:13:56.160 | And so we just - you know, the US government system is designed to work very slowly, right?

01:14:01.240 | If you're politically interested, you console yourself with all these good arguments.

01:14:05.960 | But President Trump came out of the gate in his first hundred days, it was - I don't remember

01:14:08.720 | what any of this stuff was now - it was boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

01:14:10.760 | It was like, "Yeah, this is great."

01:14:12.600 | And then the Republicans were going to follow through on repealing the Affordable Care Act.

01:14:16.440 | And as someone who used to sell health insurance, I'd follow that super closely and I was like,

01:14:21.600 | "This thing is a disaster.

01:14:22.600 | If we could just repeal the Affordable Care Act, it'd be great."

01:14:25.280 | And then I vividly remember the night, John McCain's thumbs down.

01:14:30.200 | And you know, there we are, right?

01:14:33.280 | On the cusp of the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the things that Republicans have

01:14:36.600 | been railing against for years.

01:14:38.960 | And here comes John McCain.

01:14:42.840 | War monger extraordinaire, right?

01:14:43.840 | The quintessential Republican of the old day.

01:14:48.440 | Thumbs down.

01:14:49.440 | And I just thought, "That's it."

01:14:55.940 | And Republicans wasted it.

01:14:58.000 | And then of course, Republicans lost the House in 2018.

01:15:03.040 | And that moment, that John McCain thumbs down was incredibly revealing.

01:15:11.600 | That was one of those moments.

01:15:13.720 | Another thing that was a big deal to me, one of the reasons I felt such a relief when President

01:15:18.600 | Trump was elected as president was because for a couple of years, I had been wrestling

01:15:25.120 | with the moral implications of the repeal of the Hyde Amendment.

01:15:31.360 | In 2015, both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton publicly stated as part of their campaign

01:15:37.320 | platform that if they were elected president, that they would repeal the Hyde Amendment.

01:15:41.440 | The Hyde Amendment is an amendment that's added to spending bills that supposedly, ostensibly

01:15:46.520 | limits the use of US taxpayer dollars to pay for abortion.

01:15:51.040 | And over the years of looking at political issues, political issues have different levels

01:16:00.740 | of relevance to moral thinking.

01:16:03.040 | But the two issues that have always been deeply important to me have been, not always, for

01:16:09.360 | a very long time have been deeply important to me, have been war spending, military spending,

01:16:16.760 | spending on immoral wars, and number two, abortion.

01:16:21.080 | And both of those things are unique.

01:16:23.680 | The war spending didn't bother me when I was young because I was caught up in the bellicose

01:16:29.000 | jingoism of, "Yeah, let's go get them."

01:16:31.160 | But as I started to see the impact of it, I realized, "Wait a second, this is wrong.

01:16:34.840 | This is wrong.

01:16:35.840 | This is absolutely immoral.

01:16:37.600 | This has to stop."

01:16:39.180 | And so then I started to think about war and what proper moral war is, what just war, and

01:16:45.280 | started to think through.

01:16:46.280 | And then I realized how much of US-American history the United States have been at war

01:16:50.320 | and how wrong many, if not most, of those efforts have been.

01:16:57.000 | And that caused me a sense of moral consternation of, "Well, how am I supporting this with my

01:17:01.080 | tax dollars?"

01:17:02.080 | There's a long and robust, and at this point pretty weak, but in the history of the United

01:17:05.640 | States, there's been a long and robust history of tax resistance due to war taxes.

01:17:11.320 | And so I thought about, "Well, am I morally complicit in this?"

01:17:14.860 | And I think the answer, you can make several good arguments.

01:17:18.280 | I think one that should be stated is that generally, no, you're not morally complicit

01:17:22.020 | in what's done with your tax dollars.

01:17:23.640 | If somebody comes to me and they point a gun in my face and they steal my car, and then

01:17:28.680 | they take that car and they take off down the road at 100 miles an hour and run somebody

01:17:31.720 | over and kill them, am I morally responsible for the death of somebody with my car?

01:17:36.880 | Well, I think, "No, I didn't...

01:17:41.880 | The car was stolen from me."

01:17:43.000 | So if you think about money, tax money, if the government comes, puts a gun in your face

01:17:46.400 | and says, "Pay taxes," then they take that money, they go and they build a tank or build

01:17:50.840 | a bomber and drop a bomb and murder somebody, am I morally responsible for that murder?

01:17:55.660 | The answer is no, I'm not responsible.

01:17:58.520 | The money was stolen from me.

01:18:01.000 | But that still doesn't feel very good, especially when you start to add a little bit of texture

01:18:05.080 | to it.

01:18:06.080 | So if I leave my car unlocked on the street in a bad part of town, right in front of a

01:18:12.520 | bar with the keys and the ignition and the windows open, and then I just haphazardly

01:18:18.240 | go into the bar across the street, and then a drunk walks out of the bar, sees my car

01:18:23.600 | there, sees that he wants to take it on a joyride, takes it on a joyride, drives down

01:18:26.640 | the road and kills somebody, well, now am I morally responsible?

01:18:30.960 | I think legally, yes, you are, right?

01:18:32.880 | There's clear negligence on your part.

01:18:35.000 | And although you may not be as responsible as the drunk who killed the guy in the street,

01:18:40.240 | you're certainly culpable for your negligence.

01:18:42.720 | And I think probably in that case, probably even legally, you're legally responsible for

01:18:46.400 | your gross negligence in that situation.

01:18:49.320 | And so when it comes to taxpayer money, well, now what's my level of responsibility?

01:18:53.460 | If I go and I make $100 million and I pay $30 million of taxes, and that in and of itself

01:19:00.200 | supports the war effort to a much higher degree, now am I responsible, right?

01:19:03.480 | So it gets a little bit tricky.

01:19:05.080 | But the problem with war taxes is that at this point in time, there's not really any

01:19:08.560 | all-consuming war.

01:19:09.560 | It's relatively been easy.

01:19:11.320 | Everyone ignored the war in Afghanistan for almost two decades.

01:19:15.000 | And it seemed like everyone starts wars, right?

01:19:16.920 | President Bush started a bunch of wars.

01:19:18.360 | President Obama started a bunch of wars.

01:19:20.240 | And one of the nice things about President Trump's administration is it's like, wow,

01:19:24.120 | somebody who didn't start a bunch of wars, wow, this is really great.

01:19:27.680 | But since war spending has always been with us, it's like, okay, it's just one of the

01:19:31.240 | things of living.

01:19:32.240 | So it's really hard to just make a stand and say, well, I'm going to do this radical thing

01:19:35.560 | and I'm going to be a tax resister.

01:19:38.720 | But abortion was different.

01:19:40.800 | Number one, although war, you can argue about just war and you can say, well, maybe I just

01:19:48.720 | don't understand.

01:19:49.720 | Maybe this war is actually morally just.

01:19:52.360 | Maybe if we are fighting them over there, then it keeps them from coming over here and

01:19:56.040 | fighting us here.

01:19:57.040 | Maybe that is actually true.

01:19:58.400 | And I'm just as confused.

01:20:01.420 | Maybe I just don't know.

01:20:02.680 | Maybe I'm not an insider.

01:20:03.760 | Maybe I don't understand what they're actually doing.

01:20:06.520 | After all, what information do I have more than a newspaper?

01:20:10.240 | But abortion is not that way.

01:20:11.960 | Morally, abortion is much, much clearer.

01:20:15.280 | People like to think that it's not so clear.

01:20:17.500 | People argue like it's not clear.

01:20:18.920 | But at the end of the day, abortion is very, very clear.

01:20:22.240 | The basic issues are these, right?

01:20:23.800 | If you're going to think it through morally.

01:20:25.040 | Number one, you have to understand and question the concept of personhood.

01:20:30.320 | Is a baby in utero, right, a fetus, is that a person?

01:20:34.880 | And how would you identify a person?

01:20:37.640 | If you believe that a baby is a person, which I think is the rational thing to come to,

01:20:44.320 | very clearly from a medical perspective, separate DNA, very clearly from a viability perspective,

01:20:49.440 | if you believe that a baby is a person, then that means that the killing of that person

01:20:55.320 | is a moral act.

01:20:57.560 | The killing of an innocent person is by definition murder.

01:21:02.720 | So if you believe that a baby is not a person, you have to say, when does a baby become a

01:21:07.280 | person?

01:21:08.280 | You have to go with some other argument about personhood.

01:21:11.920 | When does a baby become a person?

01:21:14.600 | It can't just be some magical thing that when a baby goes through a birth pathway, all of

01:21:18.720 | a sudden it magically in a very instant becomes a person.

01:21:21.080 | So you have to apply some other thing to it, right?

01:21:23.440 | You have to apply Peter Singer's philosophy to it, where, okay, the baby becomes a person

01:21:27.840 | at some point, who knows, maybe when they're able to express their preferences.

01:21:32.160 | And so the three-month-old baby is a person, but it's not a person at three days.

01:21:36.480 | It's just, it's weird.

01:21:37.720 | It doesn't hold up to any kind of, in my opinion, any kind of thoughtful analysis.

01:21:42.840 | And so now you think, well, if it's murder and I'm going to be involved in murder, what

01:21:48.640 | on earth?

01:21:49.640 | People talk about, well, there's reasons for abortion, right?

01:21:52.840 | The classic rape and incest exception.

01:21:55.640 | The rape and incest question is utterly easy to solve if you assign personhood to the,

01:22:01.840 | sorry, rape, incest, and life of the mother, right?

01:22:04.440 | Rape, just because somebody is a person through evil, an evil means, doesn't mean that person

01:22:09.560 | is no less of a person.

01:22:11.840 | You don't right one wrong by committing another wrong.

01:22:16.560 | You know, if somebody kills your sister, murders your sister, you don't make that right by

01:22:22.200 | then going out and murdering your neighbor's sister who had nothing to do with the original

01:22:26.640 | killing.

01:22:27.640 | So the baby is the innocent party in rape and incest.

01:22:30.240 | The baby is the innocent one.

01:22:32.640 | The evil person, the person who needs to be held to account is the rapist.

01:22:36.320 | And then in the case of life of the mother, medical, it's called triage, medical triage

01:22:43.840 | solves that perfectly.

01:22:45.920 | You never need to intentionally kill a baby.

01:22:49.080 | If you need to remove the baby from the mother's body because the mother is going to die, you

01:22:54.800 | don't need to physically kill the baby to remove the mother.

01:22:57.160 | You could, sorry, to remove the baby.

01:22:58.480 | You can remove the baby without killing the baby while knowing that it's going to die

01:23:02.500 | in many circumstances, right?

01:23:03.500 | If you have two people sitting in a car and they're smashed together by four trucks that

01:23:09.600 | hit them on all sides, and you have to recognize that I have to physically, surgically cut

01:23:15.240 | these people apart, and as part of that, it's very likely that this person is going to die

01:23:19.680 | and the second person is not going to die, that doesn't mean that you're physically murdering

01:23:24.640 | the first person by cutting them apart.

01:23:27.800 | It's medically necessary and you recognize that this is a risk of doing medicine.

01:23:31.040 | So it solves those moral problems.

01:23:33.480 | Forgive me, I know this is obviously a hot subject, but it's important that you understand

01:23:37.240 | that this is obviously a hugely contentious issue, but it seems fairly morally clear to

01:23:43.840 | me, fairly obvious.

01:23:45.560 | And so now, if you believe that abortion is the murder of another human being, and now

01:23:51.400 | you're going to be contributing to that with your money, what on earth do you do with that?

01:23:56.200 | That is a horrifying thought.

01:23:58.200 | You look through the ages, you look at governments that have engaged in genocide and democide,

01:24:03.200 | and you think, at what point in time do you have to stand up and say no?

01:24:06.960 | The classic Hitler thing, at what point in time do you say, "No, I'm not going to do

01:24:10.800 | this."

01:24:11.800 | That's a terrible joke about Hitler's barber.

01:24:14.440 | He did his thing, he's shaving the Führer's neck and he lets some hairs go down his shirt

01:24:20.920 | and he feels good that that was what he did.

01:24:23.200 | Come on.

01:24:26.120 | What point in time do you stand up and stand for what you believe in?

01:24:29.280 | And it's one thing to say, "Okay, I'm going to believe a certain thing," but it's another

01:24:32.400 | thing to actively, somebody take your money from you and do that, and that really bothered

01:24:37.400 | me.

01:24:38.400 | Now, the problem is that I'm basically stuck in that position.

01:24:42.120 | So let's go down the two paths.

01:24:44.040 | Let's say that you're concerned about what your tax money is being spent on, and so you're

01:24:47.880 | going to have a tax resistor.

01:24:49.920 | You're going to choose not to pay taxes.

01:24:51.280 | Well, there's a branch, there's a path that you can go down.

01:24:54.720 | You can either go left or right.

01:24:56.280 | If you go left, you go into the world of what we'll call illegal tax evasion, right?

01:25:02.160 | Willfully not paying taxes that you owe.

01:25:04.760 | If you go down the right, you go down the world of legal tax avoidance, right?

01:25:09.800 | Choosing to arrange your affairs in such a way that you don't pay many taxes.

01:25:13.800 | So the problem is that for Christians, people who take the authority of the Bible seriously

01:25:18.880 | and literally, it's very hard to ever make an argument to say, "Well, I'm not going to

01:25:24.280 | pay taxes."

01:25:25.280 | Now, it's not, I don't think, impossible, but it's very hard because Jesus clearly says,

01:25:30.480 | "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, give to God what is God's."

01:25:33.000 | And you think, "Well, maybe Jesus didn't know, right?

01:25:34.920 | Maybe Jesus didn't know what it was like to pay taxes to an evil government.

01:25:39.160 | Oh, come on, right?

01:25:40.400 | You got Nero.

01:25:41.400 | Here's a dude killing all of the early Christians, wrapping them in oil and putting them up on

01:25:48.600 | a wall and lighting them up on fire in his garden as human torches to illuminate his

01:25:52.720 | garden so he could wander around his garden at night and have a little light to do so."

01:25:57.560 | And you're going to say that somehow there's something magically new and wicked about the

01:26:01.320 | United States that Jesus didn't understand.

01:26:03.720 | Oh, come on.

01:26:04.720 | Like, that just doesn't work.

01:26:06.720 | And so the illegal tax evasion standpoint is a very hard thing to make, hard argument

01:26:14.120 | to make.

01:26:15.120 | And it's also very hard when you look at the actual impact of it, right?

01:26:18.120 | What does the United States government do?

01:26:19.400 | Well, every year, right before tax time, usually the beginning of the year, January, you start

01:26:23.200 | to see these articles.

01:26:24.200 | And you'll always see a few high-profile people tossed in prison for tax evasion, for not

01:26:28.880 | paying their taxes.

01:26:29.880 | It's always got to be a high-profile people because that's what the government does.

01:26:33.280 | They rule by intimidation.

01:26:35.040 | If the United States IRS actually sought out and prosecuted everybody who cheats on their

01:26:40.800 | taxes, they could never do it.

01:26:43.540 | But they maintain a high level of compliance by throwing a few high-profile people into

01:26:47.420 | prison every year.

01:26:48.900 | So it's the John McAfees, it's the Erwin Schiff, it's the Wesley Snipes, right?

01:26:53.520 | Some high-profile people that put them in prison and then they'll get everyone else

01:26:57.660 | to comply.

01:26:58.660 | It's enforcement by intimidation.

01:27:01.760 | So anyway, you could go down the illegal road, but the cost of that is pretty big, right?

01:27:04.920 | I'm a high-profile person, I'm a financial planner, I should know what I'm doing.

01:27:07.340 | Now I'm going to all of a sudden start engaging in tax evasion?

01:27:10.300 | Does it really serve my children, for me to bear my responsibility for my children, for

01:27:14.240 | me to be sitting rotting in a prison cell somewhere because I just didn't pay my taxes

01:27:17.940 | because I'm going to make my stand against abortion or war or whatever?

01:27:20.920 | Come on.

01:27:22.260 | That's not serious.

01:27:23.820 | So then you go down the tax avoidance strategy.

01:27:25.740 | You can say, "Okay, I'm going to follow the law, but I'm going to make my protest."

01:27:30.140 | So you can do this.

01:27:31.300 | You can lower your income to below the taxable threshold and you can say, "I'm going to

01:27:36.780 | only work a certain amount.

01:27:38.340 | I'm going to work and earn $40,000 a year.

01:27:40.500 | The number of children I have, I haven't done the numbers recently, but I could earn $50,000,

01:27:43.660 | $60,000 a year and not pay any legally pay and excuse me, I could earn that and legally

01:27:49.400 | pay virtually no income taxes."

01:27:52.600 | So you can supplement that, maybe I buy a farm and I produce a lot of food for our family

01:27:56.940 | so that I don't have to go out of the tax net to pay, to earn money that's going to

01:28:00.860 | be taxed to do that.

01:28:01.920 | Maybe we have a wood lot behind my house and I use that to heat my house.

01:28:05.580 | So you lower your family expenses.

01:28:07.740 | But then I think, "Come on, Joshua, you've got so much potential to make a ton of money.

01:28:13.580 | Is that really the thing that you want your children to know about?

01:28:15.780 | Well, Dad, we could have done well.

01:28:17.420 | We could have done a lot.

01:28:19.220 | We could have had a global impact, but Dad just didn't want to pay tax and so he sat

01:28:23.280 | at home and we grew up totally poor."

01:28:26.220 | That's hard to argue with and it's hard to argue that that's honoring to your children,

01:28:30.660 | to your potential, to God.

01:28:32.420 | That's a hard argument to make.

01:28:34.780 | So as I was wrestling all that through and just kind of thinking about it and thinking,

01:28:39.660 | "Okay, well, how do you rate it?"

01:28:41.180 | Here's one other thing.

01:28:42.180 | There are a lot of things that I don't like about tax money, but there's very few things

01:28:46.720 | that border on just pure unmitigated evil.

01:28:49.500 | I'm not a fan of redistributionist government policies.

01:28:52.380 | I don't think that things like Social Security and Medicare and whatnot, these redistributionist

01:28:57.460 | policies should exist.

01:28:59.220 | It's basically a matter of greed from one part of the electorate to steal money from

01:29:02.400 | some people and give it to the other.

01:29:03.400 | But I'm not going to argue that that's necessarily evil in the sense that I've got to make a

01:29:13.180 | stand against that.

01:29:14.860 | Jesus said, "Give to him who begs of you and from him who takes from you, don't ask

01:29:19.620 | it back."

01:29:20.620 | Okay.

01:29:21.620 | So if someone steals from me and steals from me and uses it to give to somebody who's poor

01:29:25.140 | or somebody who needs healthcare or whatever, okay, fine.

01:29:27.980 | That's a different level than somebody who steals from me and uses it to murder children.

01:29:33.020 | There's a difference there.

01:29:34.020 | So as I was reflecting on all this, I finally came to the point where I realized, "Wait

01:29:39.660 | a second.

01:29:40.660 | If I change my jurisdiction, I can follow all the laws, thus relieving my moral conscience

01:29:49.580 | of breaking the law, of being a tax evader, not paying taxes to those whom I owe.

01:29:55.540 | I can follow all the laws, but I can put myself where I can still either make a statement

01:30:01.280 | or I can put myself in a situation where I do what I think is right."

01:30:10.200 | So let's say, so simple example, right?

01:30:11.940 | I've talked tax planning.

01:30:13.420 | If I'm a US citizen and I go abroad, let's say I move from Florida to the Bahamas and

01:30:18.260 | I live in the Bahamas, Bahamas doesn't have any federal income tax.

01:30:20.500 | I live in the Bahamas.

01:30:21.500 | I'm there all the time.

01:30:22.500 | I qualify for the foreign income exclusion.

01:30:24.740 | I set up a foreign corporation.

01:30:26.060 | I run my business through a foreign corporation.

01:30:27.860 | I can live in the Bahamas and I can earn what, over $100,000 a year tax-free legally following

01:30:34.380 | every law and I can completely disinherit the US government as long as I don't make

01:30:37.980 | more than $100,000 a year and I can put myself in a situation where now I can follow my conscience.

01:30:45.260 | I'm not paying taxes, but I'm also not banishing my family to a lifetime of poverty.

01:30:51.220 | So it's an elegant solution.

01:30:53.540 | If I have the ability to leave, I have the freedom to leave.

01:30:55.300 | I'm not stuck where I'm at to do some other thing.

01:30:57.180 | It's an elegant solution.

01:30:58.180 | What if I want to make more money?

01:30:59.980 | Well, if I stroke a check, right, to the St. Kitts and Nevis government and I buy a passport

01:31:06.420 | from them, I become a St. Kitts and Nevis citizen and then I pay my $2,300 fee to the

01:31:14.980 | US government.

01:31:15.980 | I renounce my US citizenship.

01:31:16.980 | I move my family to St. Kitts and Nevis.

01:31:19.140 | Now I can run my business.

01:31:20.260 | I can live in St. Kitts and I can make $10 million a year, right?

01:31:23.980 | I can make $10 million a year, completely 100% tax-free legally.

01:31:29.540 | I can disinherit the US government and I can still go back and load up my family in an

01:31:35.060 | airplane.

01:31:36.060 | I can visit my family in Florida as a tourist, three months a year, four months a year, whatever.

01:31:39.980 | And I can legally eliminate completely this thing that's causing me trouble.

01:31:47.020 | And so that idea for me brought me a tremendous sense of peace where I thought if I have that

01:31:55.300 | as an option, if I know that I've done the necessary groundwork to put myself in that

01:32:00.740 | situation, if I have that as an option, then if I come to the point where my conscience

01:32:05.780 | won't allow me to pay taxes anymore because of their use for immoral purposes, if I come

01:32:14.220 | to that point, then I don't have to – my choice is not either, well, risk going to

01:32:18.100 | jail for what I believe in or give tax money to something that I think is immoral.

01:32:23.100 | I have a third choice and I'm a huge fan of the third choice, the third option.

01:32:27.500 | And leaving solved that really, really elegantly.

01:32:33.360 | It allowed me to put myself in a situation where if I felt that, okay, I should live

01:32:38.360 | in the United States, I'm not – the money may be taken from me, it may be used to spend

01:32:43.000 | on wars and it may be used to be spent on abortion, but it's all right, it's taken

01:32:46.680 | from me and I'm not morally responsible for that, but I feel like the Lord wants me

01:32:50.200 | to live in the United States for some other reason, I can do that.

01:32:54.240 | But if I get to the point where my conscience won't let me do that, then I don't have

01:32:57.040 | to just say, okay, I'm going to go to prison and leaving did that.

01:33:04.040 | I mean, it did that really elegantly.

01:33:06.920 | I think the other point, I'm not trying to make this into Joshua's political philosophy,

01:33:11.060 | but there was another really significant thing that happened over the last few years.

01:33:15.440 | When I was younger, I really believed in the ideals of America.

01:33:19.320 | I really believed in truth, justice in the American way and honesty and all of these

01:33:26.320 | things that are so amazing, like so wonderful about the ideals of America.

01:33:34.920 | And then Ross Ulbricht got sentenced to prison.

01:33:39.080 | And in the beginning, I didn't understand the case.

01:33:41.840 | In the beginning, I didn't understand what had happened.

01:33:45.760 | I remember driving around in my car, listening to NPR and here's the NPR report on Ross

01:33:52.420 | Ulbricht, Dread Pirate Roberts is locked into – he's gotten into prison and they got

01:33:57.320 | him.

01:33:58.320 | And I didn't know anything about Silk Road.

01:33:59.640 | And all I thought was Silk Road is just this – drugs, people are just doing all kinds

01:34:03.640 | of evil stuff.

01:34:04.640 | And of course, the guy who's doing it.

01:34:05.640 | And they talk about people contracting hitmen and doing this stuff and you can buy a hitman

01:34:12.600 | with Bitcoin on Silk Road and have somebody murdered.

01:34:16.680 | And so at first, I thought, of course, get – hey, Dread Pirate Roberts is in prison.

01:34:21.880 | I'm imagining this evil guy who's out – I'm imagining that the government has

01:34:28.380 | locked away some horrible guy who is this multi-murderer.

01:34:34.560 | He's sitting in his room snorting cocaine and then he goes out and does killings for

01:34:38.320 | hire.

01:34:39.320 | That was the impression I got from the NPR story.

01:34:40.880 | I still remember.

01:34:42.960 | I could tell you – for some reason, my brain works in a way that I place audio with geographic

01:34:47.880 | and geographic stamps, not necessarily time stamps but geographic stamps.

01:34:52.200 | So when I listen to an audiobook at almost every important event, I can tell you right

01:34:55.440 | where I am.

01:34:56.560 | And on this particular NPR story, I know exactly the road that I was driving on listening to

01:35:01.760 | this about Dread Pirate Roberts being put in prison.

01:35:05.360 | Then over time, I started to understand a little bit more about it.

01:35:09.800 | And I thought, wait a second.

01:35:11.800 | This is wrong.

01:35:12.800 | This is totally wrong.

01:35:14.320 | This is different.

01:35:16.040 | And then when I realized what had happened – if you're not familiar with it, you

01:35:20.200 | go to freeross.org and there you can read about it.

01:35:23.200 | That's a website that Ross's mom has put together.

01:35:27.680 | But Ross Ulbricht was a young guy who was a libertarian entrepreneur and he was totally

01:35:33.780 | convinced of the values of libertarianism and free markets.

01:35:37.280 | And so when he was 26 years old, he made the site Silk Road.

01:35:41.440 | And the basic idea was I can provide a forum for people to exchange goods in an anonymous

01:35:47.640 | way.

01:35:49.080 | And so that included things that were legal and illegal.

01:35:51.980 | It included drugs, usually marijuana, but it included drugs.

01:35:57.620 | But he clearly stated that there was nothing allowed that could harm a third party.

01:36:02.300 | So being a libertarian, being an aficionado, a devotee of the non-aggression principle,

01:36:08.860 | Ross said, "We're not going to allow anything that harms another person."

01:36:12.740 | And so here's this guy who sets up this – he basically lives up to his ideals.

01:36:17.080 | And being an idealistically oriented person, I see a lot of – I have a distinct sense

01:36:22.820 | of commonality with Ross.

01:36:24.780 | You think about when you're 26 years old and you believe in what you think.

01:36:27.760 | You believe in these ideals.

01:36:30.580 | The reason why you get young guys to go off to war, because they believe in what they're

01:36:33.740 | told.

01:36:34.740 | And they say, "Oh, we're going to go off and fight for this thing that's noble."

01:36:36.740 | You can't get 40-year-old guys to go off to war generally.

01:36:39.980 | You can't get the average 40-year-old father to leave his house and family and pick up

01:36:44.700 | a gun and go off to war unless it's actually genuinely a matter of life and death and he's

01:36:49.700 | protecting his family.

01:36:50.700 | You don't get him to go there out of some random sense of political ideology.

01:36:56.420 | And so when I understood – I mean, again, if you're not familiar with it.

01:36:59.940 | So Ross was – he never had a criminal record, first-time offender.

01:37:05.580 | All of the charges that they charged him with and what he was – he was convicted of seven

01:37:10.660 | things I think, seven different things.

01:37:12.460 | He was convicted of money laundering, conspiracy to traffic narcotics, I think computer hacking.

01:37:16.980 | I can't remember – and other things.

01:37:19.380 | So let me ask you.

01:37:20.660 | Let's say that you – let's say you're actually guilty.

01:37:23.100 | Let's say that you commit.

01:37:24.260 | You say, "I'm guilty."

01:37:26.900 | And you say, "It's all nonviolent.

01:37:29.580 | I haven't hurt another person, but I'm guilty of money laundering.

01:37:33.340 | I'm guilty of conspiracy to traffic narcotics and I'm guilty of computer hacking."

01:37:38.020 | Let me just ask you.

01:37:39.020 | What do you think would be a just sentence in that kind of scenario?

01:37:44.540 | What would be a proper prison sentence or a proper punishment for somebody who says,

01:37:50.100 | "I'm guilty to breaking these laws"?

01:37:54.060 | Well, here was what the court said.

01:37:58.380 | A sentence Ross to two life sentences plus 40 years without parole.

01:38:08.540 | Two life sentences plus 40 years without parole.

01:38:13.420 | I repeat.

01:38:15.980 | Two life sentences plus 40 years without parole.

01:38:26.700 | Two life sentences plus 40 years without parole.

01:38:30.140 | He's been in prison now.

01:38:31.540 | I've got free Ross open here.

01:38:33.180 | Been in prison now for 2,596 days in prison.

01:38:36.620 | And as his mom wrote, you can read the case overview.

01:38:39.220 | You can check it out.

01:38:40.460 | But Ross Ulbricht is condemned to die in prison for creating an e-commerce website called

01:38:44.900 | Silk Road.

01:38:46.020 | An entrepreneur passionate about free markets and privacy, he was 26 when he made the site.

01:38:50.620 | He was never prosecuted for causing harm or bodily injury and no victim was named at trial.

01:38:56.860 | Users of Silk Road chose to exchange a variety of goods, both legal and illegal, including

01:39:01.180 | drugs, most commonly small amounts of cannabis, prohibited was anything involuntary that could

01:39:04.980 | harm a third party.

01:39:06.620 | Ross was not convicted of selling drugs or illegal items himself, but was held responsible

01:39:10.740 | for what others sold on the site.

01:39:13.940 | None of the other defendants related to the case received sentences above 10 years, including

01:39:18.220 | those behind Silk Road 2.0, a larger replica.

01:39:21.180 | Some of them are already free today.

01:39:23.500 | Ross's judge used uncharged allegations that were never ruled on by a jury to justify her

01:39:27.340 | sentence in violation of the Sixth Amendment.

01:39:29.700 | She also violated the First Amendment by sentencing Ross in part on what she believed was his

01:39:33.940 | political philosophy.

01:39:36.140 | Such a sentence, well, it goes on.

01:39:38.980 | So Ross was smeared with false unprosecuted allegations of planning violence that much

01:39:43.800 | of the media amplified through inaccurate and sensationalized reporting.

01:39:47.500 | The allegations were never charged at trial, never proven, never submitted to or ruled

01:39:51.940 | on by a jury and eventually dismissed with prejudice.

01:39:56.740 | Ross consistently denied the allegations, which relied on anonymous online chats never

01:40:00.140 | proven to have been authored by him, and those who knew him never believed them.

01:40:04.700 | Even the only alleged victim ever identified, Curtis Green, is a fervent supporter of Ross's

01:40:10.020 | clemency.

01:40:11.380 | So I always saw, ever since I understood more of the real story behind it, I always saw

01:40:18.880 | a lot of myself in Ross.

01:40:20.700 | I mean, I pray for him.

01:40:23.300 | He seems to be doing all right in his prison sentence.

01:40:25.460 | He's got a good healthy self-attitude and I hope that President Trump pardons him.

01:40:31.900 | That would be a wonderful thing.

01:40:34.140 | But I doubt it'll happen.

01:40:36.380 | But that just, that was like the, it was the last, not the last straw, but it was, it was

01:40:40.540 | one of those last straws that broke my belief in the propaganda of the US American system.

01:40:53.060 | When that travesty is allowed to happen, don't tell me that politics is about anything except

01:40:59.120 | power and money.

01:41:02.060 | Don't tell me that anybody believes that crap they say about freedom and ideals and justice

01:41:08.220 | and liberty.

01:41:09.220 | It's nonsense.

01:41:10.220 | I think people believe, I think the individual citizens believe.

01:41:13.980 | And I'm trying to find the right tone here, but I think the people believe, right?

01:41:19.140 | I still believe in those things.

01:41:21.860 | I just don't think that's reflected very much in the United States of America, which is

01:41:26.500 | very sad to me.

01:41:29.100 | So when I think about leaving, I miss a lot of things about the United States.

01:41:35.260 | I may move back, right?

01:41:36.260 | My wife and I talk about it regularly.

01:41:37.460 | I may move back.

01:41:39.420 | I love many people in the United States.

01:41:41.940 | I love many personal friends and acquaintances.

01:41:44.020 | I love you, right?

01:41:45.780 | I love, most of my listeners are from the United States and I love you, right?

01:41:49.500 | Just somebody's birth of a word or birth or country of birth is not a marker of who they

01:41:55.980 | are.

01:41:56.980 | It's who they become.

01:41:58.220 | And I love, I love so many people in the United States.

01:42:01.100 | I miss so many things about the United States.

01:42:03.540 | I miss so many cultural things, so many things.

01:42:10.020 | I think the United States is a wonderful place to make money.

01:42:12.260 | If I went broke, I would go right back to the United States because it's a wonderful

01:42:17.580 | place to make money.

01:42:20.020 | You can live more cheaply in the United States than almost any country in the world.

01:42:23.700 | And you can make more money more easily in the United States than almost any country

01:42:27.460 | in the world.

01:42:28.580 | I think there are some freedoms that make life very livable in the United States.

01:42:33.780 | Some.

01:42:35.820 | So many times during this coronavirus pandemic, I have very much thought about moving back

01:42:40.620 | to the United States because the United States passed through the lockdown stuff more quickly

01:42:44.900 | than a lot of other places.

01:42:46.540 | And even during the depths of the lockdowns, you could move back more quickly in the United

01:42:50.540 | States.

01:42:51.540 | But I got scared watching people being arrested, right?

01:42:53.740 | There was the video of the mom getting arrested in Idaho for her kids playing on the playground.

01:42:59.180 | I think, what on earth?

01:43:02.540 | What police officer would ever do this?

01:43:04.140 | It's insane to me that any police officer would ever make those arrests.

01:43:08.620 | But thankfully, the lockdown stuff passed more quickly in the United States than other

01:43:11.740 | places while the rest of the world is still going through it.

01:43:15.780 | And so I'm not committed to not living in the United States.

01:43:20.020 | The end of the day, just because you have frustrations, everybody has frustrations with

01:43:23.380 | their government.

01:43:25.820 | What I want to close by is just simply saying that four years ago, I looked at the situation

01:43:33.700 | and I said, I don't have any options.

01:43:36.260 | I'm stuck here.

01:43:38.220 | And that could be bad in the future.

01:43:40.860 | I felt tremendous relief when President Trump won.

01:43:44.020 | I was concerned.

01:43:45.020 | I don't know anybody, anybody who wasn't concerned at the time and what a rocky ride it has been

01:43:51.960 | over the last four years with deep passions and people who see things very differently

01:44:00.300 | on all sides.

01:44:02.660 | But it was just a sense of relief where I thought, wow, I was given a reprieve.

01:44:07.140 | And then I thought, I'm not going to waste it.

01:44:08.940 | I didn't make a plan that night to leave the United States.

01:44:12.460 | But over the next few years, as I realized what I was, why did I feel that great sense

01:44:16.580 | of relief?

01:44:17.580 | I realized that some of the things that I wanted to change could be fixed by leaving

01:44:23.760 | and by at least establishing the option to live in another place, the option to go abroad.

01:44:29.360 | Now, since then, I've studied pretty deeply, PT theory, et cetera.

01:44:32.800 | And I've become convinced that for people who are libertarians, I think the only practical

01:44:37.520 | way in the modern world, there are a few actually practical things that you can do.

01:44:42.700 | One of them is international nomadism, PT theory.

01:44:45.600 | It works.

01:44:46.600 | There are a lot of ways that can live the freest, but I'm trying to avoid getting too

01:44:49.120 | deeply into that already at an hour and 45 minutes in.

01:44:55.300 | If your guy won this last week, great.

01:44:58.560 | All right.

01:45:00.320 | Congratulations.

01:45:01.880 | Recognize that 50% of your neighbors are pretty stinking frustrated right now.

01:45:06.840 | And so be cautious about what you say and do, because you can torch a whole lot of friendships

01:45:12.120 | pretty quickly and that seems a high price to pay for a political act.

01:45:18.040 | But if your guy won, recognize that your guy may not win next time.

01:45:22.240 | And so what you do right now will make a big difference in your experience next time when

01:45:26.080 | your guy doesn't win.

01:45:27.720 | If your guy didn't win last week or whenever you're listening to this, okay.

01:45:34.680 | Recognize that the way you act is going to have a big difference on your relationship

01:45:38.080 | with your friends and loved ones.

01:45:39.240 | Be careful about how you act.

01:45:41.760 | But recognize that you're not, you're not stuck in a place.

01:45:46.800 | You can unstick yourself if you want to, want to, there are options.

01:45:51.920 | So if it's that big of a deal to you, I think that apathy is a very defensible thing.

01:45:57.880 | Political apathy, just saying, I'm not going to pay attention to it.

01:46:00.680 | I think it's a very good thing.

01:46:02.960 | On my Twitter at this point, I have blocked the words Trump, Biden, Kamala.

01:46:10.560 | I don't want to hear about it.

01:46:11.560 | I don't want to know about it.

01:46:12.560 | It's not going to matter to my life.

01:46:14.920 | And I'm not going to waste my time getting involved in things that I can't affect because

01:46:18.600 | that causes me to stop doing, being involved in things that I can affect.

01:46:23.800 | Not interested.

01:46:24.800 | I'm interested in being involved where I can be effective, not on national or international

01:46:28.280 | politics.

01:46:31.680 | But recognize you're not stuck.

01:46:34.800 | I think the vast majority of people, if you make a statement like I'm going to move to

01:46:39.000 | Canada when I, if so-and-so loses, I think the vast majority of people shouldn't follow

01:46:43.560 | through on that statement.

01:46:45.320 | But if you're genuinely in a situation where you're concerned about it, recognize that

01:46:50.520 | you could move.

01:46:52.880 | You could do it.

01:46:53.880 | If you don't like your HOA, you can move.

01:46:57.600 | And instead of losing several years of your life, fighting your HOA over some silly thing,

01:47:02.720 | if you just move, you can have your life back.

01:47:05.320 | If you don't like your county or your neighborhood, your city, you could move.

01:47:11.240 | And instead of losing the next couple years of your life engaging in political activism,

01:47:15.280 | which may or may not work, and if it does work and it's good for you, you could just

01:47:20.360 | move.

01:47:21.360 | If you don't like your state and the direction your state is going, you can move.

01:47:25.520 | You can find a job in another state, you can go.

01:47:27.880 | If you don't like your country, you can move.

01:47:31.080 | You can find a job in another country and you can go.

01:47:34.680 | I don't think most people should move, but I think most people should, if possible, put

01:47:40.200 | themselves in the position where they could move in the future if they ever decided that

01:47:45.000 | that was what they needed to do at that point in time.

01:47:48.960 | Having options is not a bad thing.

01:47:51.580 | Having options has saved people's lives, has saved people's consciences.

01:47:55.760 | Having options has been a major, major benefit for a lot of people throughout history.

01:48:01.760 | In closing, I would say to you two things.

01:48:03.480 | Number one, I haven't given you a lot of personal advice in today's show.

01:48:07.680 | I haven't talked about any particular countries.

01:48:11.320 | I actually do quite a bit of consulting on this.

01:48:13.120 | I never intended that to be, but I found that a lot of my clients talk about this with me.

01:48:17.000 | So I'm offering again, for the first time in six months, I'm offering again consulting.

01:48:21.940 | If you would like to consult with me personally, privately, you can do that by going to radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult,

01:48:28.360 | and you'll find me there, and you can book the appointment online.

01:48:33.320 | It's one of the most private, effective things that you can do if you want to get a specific

01:48:38.560 | game plan.

01:48:39.560 | I routinely talk individual countries.

01:48:41.440 | I go over immigration options.

01:48:43.280 | I talk about banking issues, et cetera.

01:48:45.160 | I can help you with that personally if you go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult.

01:48:49.720 | Number two is I teach a course on this.

01:48:51.960 | If you want something cheaper that has a lot more information than a personal consultation,

01:48:56.080 | then check out my course, which you can find at radicalpersonalfinance.com/store.

01:48:59.120 | It's called How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis.

01:49:02.520 | That course has a major component of internationalization in it.

01:49:06.720 | I'm going to be going through and updating that.

01:49:09.040 | Price will probably go up when I update it, but if you've got it now, you'll get the updates.

01:49:13.120 | But I'm going to add a whole bunch of stuff that I've learned from my own personal experience

01:49:16.680 | and add a bunch more details on some stuff that wasn't there in version 1.0 of the course.

01:49:23.000 | When I started studying the topics of financial collapse, one of the things I realized in

01:49:27.920 | studying that was one of the best ways that you can protect yourself from the downsides

01:49:32.580 | of an economic collapse is by simply not being where there is an economic collapse.

01:49:38.020 | If you live in a little town in rural West Virginia that is collapsing economically and

01:49:42.140 | you moved from that little town to Dallas, Texas, you didn't have the economic collapse

01:49:47.520 | that your friends and neighbors did.

01:49:49.260 | If you're living in a country that is headed for an economic collapse and you simply leave,

01:49:53.980 | you leave, you take your money and you go before the collapse and you go to another

01:49:57.200 | country that's not in a collapse, you can avoid the collapse.

01:50:01.560 | When I realized the power of that, it gave me even more benefits and more reasons to

01:50:05.740 | some of the relocation stuff that we've talked about here.

01:50:09.080 | If you're interested in that, in excruciating detail, I go through that at radicalpersonalfinance.com/store.

01:50:13.520 | Again, sign up by the class called How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic

01:50:17.760 | Crisis, you will love it.

01:50:19.760 | Thank you for listening.

01:50:22.080 | Please let's all work hard to maintain good relationships with our friends and neighbors

01:50:27.680 | at this time when passions are high.

01:50:30.280 | Let's work hard for peace in our culture, in our society.

01:50:34.680 | Nothing gets solved by war, nothing gets solved by war.

01:50:38.120 | And finally, I would say that if you are where you are, and you may have said, "Okay, I've

01:50:45.040 | got the option to move," you should be where you are with a good attitude.

01:50:49.600 | And one of my favorite passages of scripture, "Seek the good of the city where you are."

01:50:55.760 | Seek the welfare of the city.

01:50:57.120 | God's instruction to the children of Israel when he sent them into, he banished them into

01:51:01.720 | captivity in Jeremiah.

01:51:04.440 | If you're in a place of captivity and you're stuck there, don't do it with a bad attitude.

01:51:10.000 | Learn to be content in it, do the best you can and seek the welfare of the city.

01:51:13.640 | Because those who seek the welfare of the city, those who seek to improve things, those

01:51:18.240 | people in time, in the fullness of time, are able to develop leadership.

01:51:22.520 | And if there are political solutions on a local basis, on a national level, those solutions

01:51:28.920 | are going to be borne out by people who have been faithful to encourage, to help, to shine

01:51:34.360 | the path, shine the light on the way, on the way forward that we should go.

01:51:38.240 | Thank you for listening.

01:51:41.600 | Thank you for listening.

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2020-11-09_How_to_Leave_a_Bad_Government_When_Your_Guy_Loses_the_Election