2022-08-17_882-Reflections_on_3.5_Years_of

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00:00:30.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:34.000 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while

00:00:38.520 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm

00:00:42.200 | your host, and today I'm going to do a show that I've frankly put off doing for quite

00:00:45.800 | a while. We're going to call this Reflections and Comments on Three Years of Expattery,

00:00:52.880 | but in reality I could also title this episode My Updated Thoughts and Perspectives on My

00:00:58.860 | Native Country of the United States of America. Long-time listeners know that I have been

00:01:05.080 | an expat from the United States for more than three years now, about three and a half years,

00:01:08.680 | and along the way I've shared some of the lessons learned with you here on this podcast.

00:01:14.880 | But I struggle sometimes to want to talk publicly about my personal life for various reasons,

00:01:20.200 | and so sometimes I don't update my perspectives and opinions very frequently in public, unless

00:01:25.840 | someone calls me on a Q&A show. That's usually where you can get me to spill the beans, but

00:01:31.040 | I don't eagerly run towards these particular shows. Recently I've spoken to a couple of

00:01:36.160 | listeners who basically said, "Oh, well, you think such and such," and I said, "Well, no,

00:01:40.200 | I don't think such and such," and I realized that I have a duty to you to speak clearly

00:01:45.320 | and honestly on things that I have learned along the way. And so I want to share with

00:01:50.200 | you some reflections from my own journey of three years of expattery, having lived as

00:01:57.080 | an expat for, again, three and a half years now. And I'm doing this because I know that

00:02:02.080 | this is something that many people consider. It's not something that many people do, but

00:02:06.880 | it's something that many people consider. There's been a significant uptick. I hang

00:02:11.240 | out on Reddit a decent amount and look around and poke around in some of the expat forums

00:02:16.220 | and other places online where people hang out, and I use that as a good way to listen

00:02:20.040 | to people. And there's been a significant uptick of Americans over the last months saying,

00:02:24.520 | "Well, I'm going to leave the United States and go elsewhere," and I read their reasons

00:02:27.960 | and listen to what they have to say, and I encourage it to some degree. But I also frequently

00:02:35.120 | speak to people who are thinking about leaving the United States, and I myself wind up telling

00:02:39.760 | them I don't think it's a good idea, and I explain why. And so today's show is going

00:02:44.320 | to be an extended discussion of these topics. At the beginning, I want to lead with the

00:02:50.800 | lead, which is simply I believe that the primary reason you should consider leaving your home

00:02:59.320 | country, be it any country in the world, or including the United States, is based on culture

00:03:08.600 | and opportunity. What I mean is, if you like the culture where you are from, I think you

00:03:15.520 | should stay there. If you don't like the culture where you're from, I think that's a very good

00:03:20.320 | reason for you to leave. And as with most things, I don't think that you should generally

00:03:27.400 | be trying to run away from something, but rather I think you should be running to something.

00:03:35.980 | This is my very best effort to encapsulate what I have learned over the last three and

00:03:42.200 | a half years of living the international lifestyle. When I see people successfully expatriate

00:03:49.680 | from their home country, move to another country, and be there happily, I think they do that

00:03:58.600 | most effectively when they find a good cultural fit. I myself will, in my best guess, probably

00:04:08.380 | wind up moving my family back to the United States in the coming years. And the reason

00:04:13.020 | I think I will wind up doing that has to do with culture, the fact that I'm comfortable

00:04:19.540 | in the American culture, that culturally I reflect in my own being many American values.

00:04:27.820 | Now if the American culture continues to change and that culture doesn't reflect who I am,

00:04:33.420 | then I probably won't do that. But this issue of culture at its core is, I think, one of

00:04:41.060 | the most important things to consider. Years ago I asked Andrew Henderson, the host of

00:04:49.060 | the Nomad Capitalist platform and business, and I asked Andrew, I said, because he talks

00:04:55.540 | about leaving the United States. And if you listen closely to his story, his story, grew

00:04:59.740 | up in the United States, lived there, went abroad, traveled for many years, and eventually

00:05:04.260 | wound up fully expatriating to the point of even renouncing his US citizenship. And I'm

00:05:07.860 | using him because he's a public figure and he talks openly about his experience. But

00:05:11.820 | if you listen to him, Andrew didn't leave the United States to save money on taxes.

00:05:17.460 | Andrew didn't renounce his citizenship to have a simpler life. Those are ancillary benefits.

00:05:23.220 | Andrew's primary motivation for leaving the United States and eventually for renouncing

00:05:27.100 | his citizenship is simply that he never felt comfortable as an American. He never felt

00:05:32.780 | culturally American. So because he never felt comfortably culturally American, for him to

00:05:39.900 | leave the United States and eventually end even his citizenship provided him with a greater

00:05:46.380 | feeling of freedom. And there have been times, and the times that I've been most happy to

00:05:53.100 | not be in the United States has been when I've seen things in the culture that don't

00:05:57.100 | reflect me or my values. But the times when I most want to be in the United States are

00:06:03.420 | when I feel a sense of cultural longing for the things that do reflect me and my values.

00:06:08.700 | So I think that culture is the driving force for most people. And then I think that if

00:06:12.940 | you're going to leave, you want to be going to something. You want to go into something

00:06:17.180 | that you think might be better for you. And that may be a temporary job posting in another

00:06:25.020 | place. That might be a tremendous opportunity. It might be going to a land of opportunity

00:06:29.820 | or going to pursue something. It might just be wanting to have a cultural adventure for

00:06:34.060 | a time and enjoy something different. But you want to be clear that you're not really

00:06:38.140 | running away. You're going to something. And again, these things are applicable to

00:06:43.260 | people from any country, but I'm very heavily speaking to Americans. As I'll talk later

00:06:48.780 | in the show, I believe that most of the things that people are looking for, especially Americans,

00:06:54.700 | most of the things that Americans are looking for from another country, are better answered

00:07:00.460 | by another region, another state, or another city. This is when I think about the questions

00:07:09.060 | that people ask. I read Reddit posts, or I read blogs from people who are leaving, or

00:07:12.660 | I work with consulting clients who are leaving the country. In many cases, my answer is not

00:07:19.180 | you should move to another country. It's simply move to another state. Move to another

00:07:25.340 | city. And the United States especially is so large and has such diversity of culture.

00:07:32.620 | Your experience of life will be very different depending on which corner of the country you

00:07:36.980 | happen to be in. And it'll be much simpler and almost certainly better for you to simply

00:07:41.540 | relocate within the country than to try to move to an entirely new country. More on that

00:07:48.180 | later. As I begin my story, I want you to also adopt this framework for yourself. And

00:07:56.260 | it's the Plan A, Plan B framework. What I mean is, when people think about expatriating,

00:08:03.420 | they often think about that in terms of a permanent thing. But it doesn't have to be

00:08:11.300 | that way. And I think the best language for this is what's commonly used in the international

00:08:15.940 | industry of Plan A versus Plan B. Let me define the terms. Plan A is a complete and total

00:08:22.460 | change from one thing to another thing with the idea that this is a permanent change going

00:08:29.460 | forward. So I live in Miami, Florida. I have decided to move to London, England. And so

00:08:36.940 | I get a residence permit for London, England. I pick up my family and I move to London,

00:08:41.700 | England. And my plan is to be in London for the rest of my life. That's a Plan A change.

00:08:47.580 | Plan B is I want to have a backup plan to be able to go somewhere if I want to. So using

00:08:54.500 | those same countries, perhaps I live in Miami, Florida, but I'd like to have the option

00:09:00.580 | to go to London, England in the future if I wanted to. It just so happens that my grandmother

00:09:05.220 | is British. And so I'm going to make sure that we go ahead and file for our British

00:09:09.260 | citizenship all down the line. Now I hold a British passport and now I have the opportunity

00:09:14.380 | in the future if I want to move from Miami to London. I can do that at any point in time

00:09:19.880 | as a British citizen. Or a Plan B could be, again, we usually come down to passports and

00:09:26.840 | residency documents because that's often the necessary thing, but Plan B could be something

00:09:30.860 | like this. I live in New York. I love my life in upstate New York. It's a wonderful fit

00:09:36.100 | for me. But you know what? I'd like to have a backup plan in case New York weren't a good

00:09:40.640 | fit for me for any number of reasons, things that could happen to me. There could be reasons

00:09:45.580 | why I find myself facing persecution, why I find myself facing prosecution, some issue

00:09:52.420 | in my life and I decide it's better. So what I'll do is I'll go ahead and I'll purchase

00:09:56.860 | a second citizenship for myself. I'll go to a Caribbean island and purchase a citizenship

00:10:02.440 | from one of the Caribbean nations that will sell it to me. It costs about $150,000 for

00:10:06.420 | an individual. And then I'll go ahead and set up, you know, I might not necessarily

00:10:11.620 | want to live in the Caribbean, so I might set up a residence permit in Europe. There

00:10:15.220 | are many countries in Europe that will give me a residence permit for buying property.

00:10:18.840 | And so I'll go to Europe, I'll purchase property and they'll give me a residence permit. So

00:10:22.780 | now, if at any point in the future I had to, or I chose to, or I wanted to leave New York

00:10:29.180 | and go abroad, I have everything set up. That's a good Plan B.

00:10:34.740 | When you think about these as Plan A versus Plan B, you'll immediately notice that there's

00:10:38.460 | not an obvious demarcation between them. What is today a Plan B can become a Plan A, and

00:10:45.980 | what is today a Plan A can become a Plan B. You can go back and forth between these. But

00:10:52.740 | when I'm talking about my comments, you'll hear me talking primarily about the idea of

00:10:58.620 | people choosing to leave as a Plan A, meaning I'm just done living in the United States,

00:11:03.900 | I'm going to go live somewhere else and I'm never coming back. That is a big commitment

00:11:08.200 | and I think it's a commitment that's ill-suited for most people. Not all, but most.

00:11:13.820 | However, establishing a Plan B for yourself, which is largely what I have done, is, I think,

00:11:20.780 | a wonderful plan and strongly recommended. And so as I talk about the lessons that I

00:11:27.380 | have learned, recognize that this may all be well and good and true, but you may still

00:11:31.620 | choose to pursue a Plan B. You may still choose to go and live abroad for two or three years,

00:11:37.460 | set up a Plan B, maybe get a second citizenship somewhere, establish a residence permit, learn

00:11:42.740 | a new language, travel the world, expose your family to some interesting experiences, and

00:11:47.740 | then you may go back to your home country with a much greater appreciation of that home

00:11:52.120 | country. And that's largely what I have experienced with my time being gone from the United States.

00:11:59.200 | In some ways, well, in many ways, I appreciate the United States more than I ever did. And

00:12:05.500 | I'm going to elaborate some of those things that I appreciate towards the back half of

00:12:09.020 | the show. In some ways, I've never felt better than being gone in the United States. And

00:12:13.500 | it's that mixture of emotions that I think is common to most expatriates, that you can

00:12:18.580 | see things with a little bit more clarity, and you can appreciate the good things that

00:12:22.600 | each place has to offer. Let me share now, with that line of thinking, a little bit of

00:12:28.100 | my backstory and tell you why I myself left the United States. Originally, I simply wanted

00:12:36.700 | a Plan B. And there were two aspects of my desire for a Plan B that were important. They

00:12:43.740 | were avoiding negative outcomes, of which there were three basic outcomes that I was

00:12:49.180 | worried about, and also preparing for positive outcomes. There were some things that I really

00:12:55.500 | wanted that I felt could be well positioned for on the positive side. Let me begin with

00:13:02.660 | the negative outcomes. And as I elaborate on these three issues, you'll hear me say

00:13:08.980 | in a moment that on most of these issues, I'm not nearly as worried as I once was. And

00:13:15.060 | so while I would do it over again, because I could be wrong, it's actually, I've become

00:13:19.700 | much more optimistic about each of these three factors. Let me go over them. The number one

00:13:24.940 | reason or the number one negative outcome that I was seeking to solve for myself and

00:13:30.140 | my family by leaving the United States and establishing a Plan B was the potential negative

00:13:36.060 | impacts of excessive government debt. I looked around and I observed for many years that

00:13:45.460 | the United States government continues to in debt itself to a staggering degree, and

00:13:53.060 | there is no real plan for any reasonable way to minimize that debt or to make any measurable

00:14:02.380 | progress towards paying it off. And since I don't know what the long-term consequences

00:14:09.060 | of that might be, I worry that I'd like to have a plan to insulate myself and my children

00:14:15.140 | from any negative long-term consequences. People, when talking about government debt,

00:14:22.140 | many responsible people say, "We are indebting our grandchildren. We're borrowing money that

00:14:27.900 | we're going to expect our grandchildren to pay back." After many years of hearing that

00:14:32.340 | and thinking about it, I thought to myself, "Why should my grandchildren have to pay back

00:14:36.180 | money that their grandparents borrowed? That doesn't make any sense." And what if that

00:14:41.020 | were significant? As a financial planner, clients have expressed to me their concern

00:14:46.380 | about the risk of increasing tax rates due to this high level of government indebtedness.

00:14:52.580 | And they've basically, almost unanimously said, "I think tax rates are going to go up

00:14:57.740 | because we're borrowing money and at some point it's going to have to be paid back."

00:15:02.220 | And so if you think about that, wouldn't you like to have an option to not have to pay

00:15:07.340 | high tax rates if you didn't want to? Well, as an American, you have to do some extra

00:15:12.820 | planning in order to get yourself that option. And I wanted to have in place a system where

00:15:19.660 | I and my children could be free of any future encumbrances if we wanted to or if we chose

00:15:27.620 | to. I didn't feel it was fair for my children that they would be obligated to a lifetime

00:15:32.100 | of servitude for the foolish decisions that their grandparents and their great-grandparents

00:15:36.740 | made. And so I wanted a plan B. I wanted a second citizenship. I wanted the chance for

00:15:42.620 | them to live abroad, be citizens of other nations, so that if they didn't want to have

00:15:46.660 | anything to do with the United States, they could make that choice in the future.

00:15:52.300 | Now on this issue, let me talk about it for a moment. I don't think, you might share this

00:15:58.300 | concern but you might not be willing to actually go through and set up a plan B. And I don't

00:16:05.140 | think it would be foolish of you to ignore this issue. Let me explain. At this point

00:16:11.940 | in time, it's my opinion that the debt will never be paid back. The operating assumption

00:16:17.820 | of those who believe that taxes are going to be raised to pay back the debt is that

00:16:21.940 | the debt will be paid back. And I now don't believe that the debt will be paid back. I

00:16:27.940 | could be wrong, but let me explain why. First, all of my experience in life has shown me

00:16:34.540 | that paying back national debt or running a budget surplus is simply not a priority

00:16:39.900 | for government. There's only one time in my entire lifetime that I'm aware of where there

00:16:45.140 | has actually been a government surplus, and I believe it was one year under President

00:16:49.700 | Bill Clinton in the mid to late 90s. I remember it because that was a time where I was starting

00:16:54.260 | to get involved in politics and I would read US News and World Report every week and listen

00:16:57.700 | to NPR every day on my way to school. I remember all the stories about what are we going to

00:17:02.540 | do with this budget surplus? How are we going to spend the money? And nobody in that conversation

00:17:08.620 | seriously said we should use the money to pay down the national debt. It just wasn't

00:17:14.020 | really a thing. It was all about how could we spend the money otherwise. And my entire

00:17:18.620 | lifetime the government has run in the red and they borrow the money, borrow more money.

00:17:24.060 | And those numbers just increase and increase and increase. So there are a couple of outcomes

00:17:29.140 | that are possible. One outcome that is possible is what many of the modern monetary theorists

00:17:36.100 | believe that government, because of its unique role, can basically do this forever. You get

00:17:42.660 | the, what's her name, the girl that wrote that book, Stephanie Kelton. She wrote the

00:17:48.260 | book The Deficit Myth. And basically those proponents would argue that hey, the government

00:17:54.820 | can just borrow money indefinitely. Maybe they're right. I always wonder if they're

00:17:59.020 | right then why do they think we need to raise taxes? And so basically nobody believes in

00:18:04.180 | the extreme form because they somehow think we still need to have tax revenue. So there's

00:18:09.380 | a balance somewhere, but who knows what that balance is. Nobody predicts a specific number.

00:18:13.620 | Nobody predicts a certain thing. We just don't know exactly what the number is. Maybe it

00:18:17.220 | can happen. It can go on indefinitely. On the other hand, maybe the catastrophists are

00:18:21.940 | correct. Maybe the catastrophists are correct that everything's going to implode. The massive

00:18:29.100 | national debt is going to lead to untold money printing and economic collapse. And basically

00:18:35.140 | our entire modern economy is going to collapse and we're going to return to horse and buggy

00:18:41.100 | and plowing in the field with a single bottom plow to feed our families and basically shooting

00:18:46.740 | each other in the streets. It's possible. It has happened, meaning civilizations have

00:18:52.140 | collapsed. It's hard to imagine a civilization collapsing quite so spectacularly, but it

00:18:58.060 | has happened and very well could happen. So those are two extreme cases.

00:19:03.700 | Are there some moderate cases? Well, I think the moderate cases are, we of course have

00:19:08.660 | the example of Japan, which has had the great economic malaise going on three decades now,

00:19:15.380 | two decades, three decades. And so we could have a situation of just massive economic

00:19:20.260 | malaise due to plummeting population figures, due to an upside down economy. Maybe that's

00:19:26.740 | a figure, that's something that could happen. What I think is probable, in my opinion, if

00:19:33.620 | I had to put money on it, is what now deceased economist Gary North calls the "Great Default."

00:19:42.380 | And basically that the obligations are so large that eventually the government will

00:19:47.220 | default on those obligations. So we can call this the "Great Default." Basically a form

00:19:51.280 | of bankruptcy. To me this seems probable. And so I expect the government of the United

00:19:57.620 | States and the government of many countries around the world to simply default on their

00:20:01.100 | obligations. I don't think that will be a sudden thing of one day we're just going to

00:20:10.140 | stroke a pen and ignore all of our obligations. I think that's unlikely. I think it's more

00:20:15.820 | likely that that will look like a multi-year, who knows, multi-decade process of basically

00:20:25.460 | government entities simply not following through on their promises. And I think that there's

00:20:31.340 | good historical precedent for this position. If we look back we see, for example, Social

00:20:37.380 | Security. Social Security has been bankrupt multiple times. And the Social Security organizers

00:20:42.260 | have defaulted multiple times on their promises. They said, "We're going to start this at 62."

00:20:47.740 | Then they changed the ages. "Then we're going to give this money to you tax-free." Then

00:20:51.180 | they start taxing a portion of it. And so these are examples of defaults. But they're

00:20:55.860 | not sudden precipitous things. They're things that everyone looks at and says, "Oh, that's

00:20:59.460 | a reasonable normal thing. Obviously we don't have the money, so we're going to go ahead

00:21:02.780 | and change these benefits." And so if you look at the entitlement programs of the United

00:21:06.780 | States, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, then this is likely to happen. And some of

00:21:11.500 | that default is public. "Well, we're going to institute means testing on Social Security

00:21:16.220 | now." Well, it's public. "Now you're not going to get the money that was promised to

00:21:19.060 | you. That saves us some money. Helps us to milk things along for a few more years." Some

00:21:23.180 | of the default is circumstantial. Several years ago I did an essay, or did a podcast,

00:21:29.460 | highlighting a news story from Maine. And it was an example of the broken Medicaid system

00:21:35.180 | in Maine. The news report profiled how there are many residents of Maine who are fully

00:21:39.540 | entitled to Medicaid benefits, things like home health care, but that they simply aren't

00:21:45.620 | able to collect on those benefits because there are no workers who are willing to provide

00:21:50.460 | the services at the rates promised by the government. And so effectively those people

00:21:57.060 | can't collect their Medicaid benefits because they're choosing to live in the state of Maine

00:22:02.180 | and the system is broken. Even though the government will write the checks, the whole

00:22:07.380 | labor supply is simply non-existent. And so that's a form of default. I think if you look

00:22:13.180 | across the economy, that's a very likely outcome, especially for the unfunded liabilities. Now

00:22:21.300 | for the on-budget liabilities, who knows what will happen. The reality is sovereign governments

00:22:27.380 | default on their debt frequently. Usually it's not the United States. Usually it's Argentina,

00:22:34.700 | perhaps Russia in coming weeks and months. But it's not usually the United States. But

00:22:40.300 | there's no fundamental reason why it couldn't be the United States. And so if we look at

00:22:44.900 | inflation as a form of default, if we look at rebasement of currency as a form of default,

00:22:49.900 | you go back and you look at how the US has handled its money supply, if you look at how

00:22:54.300 | the currency has changed several times, you have the first national banks in the late

00:22:57.660 | 1700s that collapsed, and then you have all of this. We look at it and when you live in

00:23:03.660 | a time of stability, it seems hard to imagine. But if you look at history, you recognize

00:23:09.340 | this default has happened many times before, it can happen again. And what exact form it

00:23:13.340 | will take, I don't know, but it's happened quite a lot. What about raising taxes? Well,

00:23:21.180 | it's certainly possible that taxes could be raised, but here is my observation. First,

00:23:27.020 | since World War II, tax revenues in the United States have never gone above 25% of GDP. They're

00:23:33.180 | actually, they have actually been remarkably stable. You can go through history and you

00:23:38.220 | can find some periods at which the marginal tax rates were truly astounding. Go back to

00:23:44.540 | the 60s, 70s, you find 90% marginal tax rates, it's astounding. But realistically, those

00:23:51.580 | tax rates were never levied as directly as it would seem by the number itself. Because

00:24:00.140 | there were far more loopholes, there were far more exceptions, etc. So the trend of

00:24:04.700 | the last several decades has been generally declining tax rates mixed with generally closing

00:24:11.900 | out any loopholes or exceptions. It's very difficult to find any truly spectacular tax

00:24:18.620 | loophole in the US tax code today. My whole life, I've pretty much been looking for them

00:24:24.620 | as a financial planner. What are they? There just aren't that many. There really aren't.

00:24:29.420 | There used to be a lot more, but they've been steadily closed by legislation. And so,

00:24:35.580 | if you look back over the last 10 to 20 years, you see a striking stability of overall tax rates

00:24:43.500 | and tax collections. And it's been my observation that politicians talk about changing taxes,

00:24:51.180 | in order, tax rates, in order to curry political favor. But when elected, they don't actually

00:24:58.300 | change much. Republicans generally seem to talk about lowering taxes. They gain in office,

00:25:05.100 | well, they lower it 3%. We go from a marginal bracket of 39.5% to 37%, top marginal bracket.

00:25:10.860 | Okay, big deal. Democrat comes into office, we go from 37% to 39%. Whatever, big deal.

00:25:17.900 | They're just generally small changes on the margin. And I have also observed that during

00:25:25.340 | times of economic uncertainty, there is a strong bipartisan willingness to not raise taxes and

00:25:35.820 | often to cut taxes. So this shows me that regardless of what they say, politicians understand

00:25:44.460 | that heavy tax rates tend to minimize economic activity. So I think that the United States,

00:25:51.820 | being one of the most sophisticated governments in the world, from the perspective of good,

00:25:58.060 | reliable data, good understanding of the numbers, the trends, etc., I think the United States is

00:26:05.820 | pretty well locked in its ideal position on the Laffer curve. The Laffer curve is an idea

00:26:14.220 | expressed by economist, Art Laffer, I think, that basically argues that if you raise tax rates too

00:26:21.660 | much, people minimize their economic activity and your tax collections go down. If you lower tax

00:26:27.020 | rates too much, then the government doesn't get the maximum amount of tax revenue that it could get

00:26:32.540 | by charging a higher rate. And I think that the United States has pretty well optimized its Laffer

00:26:37.500 | curve. And I say that largely from simply personal experience, meaning you very rarely meet an

00:26:44.140 | American who will actually follow through on leaving the country in order to change tax rates,

00:26:49.740 | in order to eliminate taxes or lower them. The US taxes are not low, but they're also not

00:26:57.420 | excessively high. It's kind of that really awkward, lukewarm middle ground where getting

00:27:03.820 | out is not really worth it, but staying in and really going is not really worth it. And so

00:27:08.700 | it's hard for Americans to give up on the United States just to save on some taxes. And on a global

00:27:16.540 | basis, the United States is pretty competitive. And so I think that's an expression, a natural,

00:27:20.620 | practical expression of the Laffer curve, that we've pretty well dialed in where we need to be.

00:27:25.980 | And the United States has maximized, government is maximizing its revenue, while trying not to

00:27:32.220 | overplay its hand and suppress economic activity too much. So all of that said, that I don't,

00:27:40.860 | I'm not that worried about the situation that my children will face. I'm very happy that I built a

00:27:46.460 | plan B for them, but I'm not that worried about it economically. And I think that if we bring into

00:27:52.940 | the conversation other macroeconomic trends, which I will talk about in the back half of the show,

00:27:59.020 | I think there are good reasons to believe strongly in the economic future of the United States,

00:28:04.300 | and not to be excessively pessimistic. So the first reason I wanted a plan B was to avoid

00:28:10.700 | the negative outcome of excessive government debt. The second reason I wanted a plan B

00:28:18.940 | was to avoid having to pay immoral taxes for myself. I had a strong desire to be able to

00:28:26.780 | legally avoid paying immoral taxes without running the risk of imprisonment. Let me explain, because

00:28:34.780 | here I'm not arguing from the perspective of, "I don't want to pay taxes," as meaning selfish,

00:28:40.140 | I want to keep my money. It's perfectly fine. Tax avoidance is a perfectly reasonable activity.

00:28:45.420 | Rather, I was very concerned about being able to look myself in the mirror and feel proud about

00:28:50.460 | the man staring back at me, simply based upon what the money is used for. And there were two issues

00:28:56.780 | that have bothered me for years. The first is simply war taxes. I'm not a pacifist,

00:29:03.580 | but I do believe that warfare should only be waged in moral circumstances, which is self-defense.

00:29:13.020 | I do not believe that military power should be used to try to make more money or expand empire.

00:29:20.940 | I believe that's dangerous and immoral. And since that's something that my own native country has

00:29:26.700 | done repeatedly and regularly for a very long time, I've often felt very guilty of participating

00:29:36.780 | in that system in any way. If you've never thought about this, let me give a modern example.

00:29:42.300 | I think sentiment is pretty, not universal, but pretty strongly united that the actions of the

00:29:51.580 | state of Russia invading its neighbor, Ukraine, are immoral, that it's an immoral invasion from

00:29:59.340 | one nation state to another. I want you to imagine yourself as a Russian citizen, living in Russia,

00:30:06.860 | paying taxes to the Russian government. I want you to imagine that you believe

00:30:12.300 | that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is immoral. And now ask yourself how you feel supporting

00:30:21.020 | that government and sending tax money that is being used to murder innocent people in a

00:30:25.980 | neighboring country. How would you feel about that? If you can imagine yourself in that situation as a

00:30:36.700 | Russian and then bring that back to your home country, you can see some of the discomfort that

00:30:42.220 | some people have. Now, there are a lot of Americans who don't reflect on the behavior of their

00:30:48.140 | government in that way, and there are a lot of good arguments to look at where you say, "Well,

00:30:52.780 | maybe it's different." For example, a Russian could look at the situation and say, "The only

00:30:59.820 | way that my country can be protected from foreign invaders is for us to control a significant amount

00:31:06.300 | of territory so that we can have defense through depth. After all, we as Mother Russia, we have

00:31:13.180 | been invaded how many times? I mean, five times, something like that. We've lost hundreds of

00:31:17.980 | millions of people in these vicious wars, and we've learned that the only possible way for us

00:31:23.500 | to protect ourselves is to basically keep our nation with borders that it had when the Soviet

00:31:29.820 | Union was intact." It's my understanding, I'm no expert on Russian history, but it's my understanding

00:31:34.860 | that basically the Soviet Union was the first time where Russia could actually control and protect

00:31:40.700 | itself from external invasion because of controlling all of the strategic geography.

00:31:45.820 | So you could argue that Russia's actions are a result, or excuse me, you could argue that

00:31:55.500 | Russia's actions are morally defensible by providing for the defense of Russia. This is

00:32:02.460 | where you go and you say, "Look, NATO has aggressed upon us. NATO is expanding at our flank, and the

00:32:09.260 | United States and its allies and all the NATO allies are messing around, and they're meddling

00:32:13.900 | in our elections and all kinds of things." And that's basically what people have pointed to,

00:32:18.060 | to say that this was inevitable. And you could look at that and you could believe it, but you

00:32:22.860 | could also pull back and you could say, "But what's the actual effect of this? Like, the actual effect

00:32:27.500 | here is this is not right." And thus, should you pay taxes to your government that are being used

00:32:32.540 | to support that war effort? As I record this in mid-August 2022, it's basically the one-year

00:32:39.020 | anniversary of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. As perhaps a very good recent example, I want you

00:32:45.980 | to think about what happened in that withdrawal. Think about, especially, the lives of the 10

00:32:53.420 | innocent people that were lost when a US drone fired a missile at their car and at their compound.

00:33:00.220 | If you or I go out and kill 10 innocent people and then say, "Oh, it's a mistake," you or I are

00:33:10.780 | held morally accountable for it and legally accountable for it. Saying it was a mistake

00:33:15.420 | doesn't mean we won't be held accountable. But look at what happened. Look at what the US

00:33:19.020 | government did with impunity a year ago. Killed 10 innocent people, most of them children,

00:33:23.260 | and said, "Well, it was bad intelligence. We got bad intelligence." And some random officer in the

00:33:30.140 | army comes out, makes an apology, but that's it. Nobody faced any legal problems, nobody was

00:33:36.540 | prosecuted for war crimes, nobody was held accountable for the innocent loss of life of 10

00:33:41.500 | innocent people. So you can argue against it, say, "That's the fog of war," and it is, right?

00:33:48.140 | That's what happens. But why was there the war in the first place? So that's the war tax issue,

00:33:54.700 | and I've always felt uncomfortable with supporting the violence and contributing in any way to the

00:34:01.100 | death of millions and millions of people around the world. But that's never been a big, huge

00:34:05.820 | motivation for me to actually act, because although what I've said is true, it's just kind of the way

00:34:10.380 | it always has been, right? I've never not grown up and I've never not lived in the empire, I've never

00:34:16.300 | not lived in a situation where it could happen all around the world. And for every issue that you look

00:34:21.740 | at, you can argue your way through it. You could say, "Well, those people, the reason those 10

00:34:28.140 | innocent people in Afghanistan were killed was because all of the American soldiers were

00:34:35.420 | attacked the day before, and there was a soldier killed, and so that was fair and just arguing

00:34:41.660 | back." And you say, "Well, why were the soldiers there in the first place?" Well, the reason the

00:34:44.700 | American soldiers were there was because — nobody even remembers, right? There were weapons of mass

00:34:48.540 | destruction. Oh, no, there weren't. Oh, they're harboring Osama bin Laden. And so you can argue

00:34:53.180 | your way back through, but at the end of the day, you basically get to a utilitarian view,

00:34:57.740 | ethical view, that says, "The reason the soldiers are there is because we felt it was better to

00:35:02.860 | fight a war on the other side of the world than to worry about people sending soldiers to our

00:35:06.940 | borders." So the war taxes thing is a big deal for some people, but it's just not — it's always been

00:35:13.020 | that way, and it's really hard to say, "I'm going to change things significantly." What finally

00:35:18.460 | caused me to act, however, was the 2015 political season. Specifically, prior to the 2016 presidential

00:35:28.620 | election, then frontrunners Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunners for

00:35:36.220 | the candidacy. Eventually, it was Hillary Clinton that won the Democratic nomination.

00:35:40.620 | Both of them pledged that if elected president, they would end something called the Hyde Amendment.

00:35:47.580 | And the Hyde Amendment is an amendment that happens in — I think it's the budget, annual budget,

00:35:53.420 | that basically, ostensibly, prohibits the use of federal taxpayer dollars to fund abortion.

00:35:59.900 | For me, abortion is a very, very serious and important moral issue.

00:36:06.780 | I understand abortion to be the intentional killing of an innocent baby, which is murder.

00:36:19.900 | And when I look at that, and I think about my money being used to pay for the murder of the

00:36:27.740 | most innocent and the most helpless among us, the people who have genuinely never done anything

00:36:34.380 | wrong, that makes my blood run cold, to think that I would be complicit in that financially.

00:36:43.340 | Now, in many ways, I'm complicit by allowing it to happen, but it's very hard to know what to do

00:36:49.900 | and how to keep this from happening. But to say that I'm now actively supporting this

00:36:56.460 | with my taxpayer tax dollars is utterly repulsive to me personally.

00:37:02.860 | And I thought, "How on earth could I live in a country where I'm using my taxpayer dollars to

00:37:11.740 | support this? This is awful. How do I look at my children and be proud of their father

00:37:17.820 | for doing that?" And so it seemed inevitable to me, and I had no idea what to do.

00:37:23.340 | It's a great, great moral crisis for many people. I'll explain the moral crisis in a moment.

00:37:29.580 | So in 2016, when the presidential election happened and Donald Trump won an upset victory,

00:37:38.700 | an unexpected victory, I felt like I had gotten a major reprieve. I felt just this incredible load

00:37:45.580 | go off of my shoulders, where I thought, "Wow, I was just released from this incredible moral

00:37:51.980 | quandary." And I made myself a promise on election night 2016. I promised. I said,

00:37:58.300 | "By the time the next election happens, I will not be so

00:38:08.860 | exposed to the vagaries of modern politics. I will not be so vulnerable to this."

00:38:16.940 | Because I felt such an intense wave of relief. I didn't expect President Trump to win.

00:38:22.300 | I expected Hillary Clinton to become president. And so I felt this intense wave of relief wash

00:38:28.300 | over me that I had gotten a reprieve. And I promised myself that I would never be as vulnerable

00:38:33.100 | again on the outcome of a political election as I felt I was in 2016. I didn't have a clear plan

00:38:39.260 | of exactly what to do, but it was a strong personal commitment. And I felt that way because

00:38:44.540 | I didn't see how... I didn't think that... I never trusted Donald Trump. I thought he was a liar

00:38:52.060 | through and through and a man of low moral character. And as such, I felt, I believed that...

00:38:57.980 | I was shocked that he won the presidency, and I thought that his presidency would be a disaster.

00:39:02.220 | And I didn't see how he could win again. And so I felt like I had been given four years,

00:39:05.900 | and that I shouldn't presume upon anything after that. And so that was a big influence for me.

00:39:12.220 | Let me explain why I said I wanted to be legally able to avoid immoral taxes without running the

00:39:16.460 | risk of imprisonment. When you look at tax resistance or tax protesting, not paying taxes

00:39:24.620 | because you're upset about the tax collection, it takes many forms, right? If you go back in

00:39:29.340 | Radical Personal Finance, I probably first talked about this when I interviewed David Gross of the

00:39:34.460 | Pickett Line back in the first couple dozen episodes of Radical Personal Finance. There's

00:39:38.940 | nothing new here to the show. But if you look at it, you have basically a couple of roads that you

00:39:44.620 | can go down. Let's assume that you don't want to pay taxes for whatever reason. Let's assume,

00:39:50.380 | though... No, I can't say for whatever reason. Let's assume that you don't want to pay taxes

00:39:54.140 | because you feel like the payment of taxes is morally abhorrent to you for some reason.

00:39:59.660 | You have two directions you can go. You can go down the illegal tax protesting direction,

00:40:07.420 | where you're consciously breaking the law, or you can go down the legal path of tax protesting.

00:40:13.100 | Let's start with the illegal path first. This is the thing that most people think of first.

00:40:18.540 | Government shows up, says, "Here's a tax bill. You owe us this money." And you say,

00:40:21.580 | "I ain't gonna pay it. Stuff it. I'm not gonna pay it." That's illegal tax protesting.

00:40:27.340 | There are many people who have done it, do it, and have done it. It's happened all around the

00:40:34.060 | world. You see these revolts where people come in. I remember a few years ago, I loved it. My

00:40:40.140 | family and I were driving through Mexico. We passed through a toll plaza. All the farmers were there.

00:40:44.940 | They had shut down the toll plaza. They'd opened things up, and they were just staging a protest at

00:40:48.620 | the toll plaza. Basically, the central federal government of Mexico City wasn't listening to them.

00:40:53.260 | They regularly go in. They storm the toll plaza. They open it up to try to get the government to

00:40:58.380 | pay attention by the government losing revenue. All around the world, there are examples of this,

00:41:03.020 | and there have been many examples throughout history. Read David Gross's book called "The

00:41:07.900 | 99 Lessons from Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns," or something like that. You can

00:41:12.620 | find all kinds of examples of this in history. The challenge with this line of tax protesting

00:41:19.580 | is that it's very hard for Christians to argue that they should participate.

00:41:24.300 | One of the things that is unique about the teachings in the New Testament, the teachings

00:41:29.900 | of Jesus, the teachings of the early apostles, is that there is a unanimous agreement that

00:41:35.900 | Christians should pay their taxes. Jesus said, "Give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.

00:41:41.340 | Give unto God the things that are God's." When there were various tax issues, Jesus specifically

00:41:46.860 | at one point made a coin appear out of a fish's mouth so that his disciples could pay the temple

00:41:51.180 | tax. Paul, Peter spoke very, very clearly about taxes, paying taxes. And so it's very, very hard

00:41:59.740 | for a Christian to argue from a biblical basis that he shouldn't pay his taxes. You say, "Well,

00:42:05.980 | maybe the government that they were under was not as wicked as the government of our day."

00:42:12.140 | And I've just always found that risible. Think about this. Jesus said, "Give unto Caesar the

00:42:18.780 | things that are Caesar's. Give unto God the things that are God's," knowing full well that he was

00:42:23.740 | going to be murdered as an entirely innocent man by the government of his day, to which he was

00:42:30.540 | saying, "Pay taxes." You think about Peter and Paul saying, "Pay taxes." Their compatriots were

00:42:39.900 | being dunked in oil and stuck on sticks to be used as human torches in Nero's garden,

00:42:45.900 | and they still said, "Pay taxes." So you say, it's just hard. You can't argue that the government

00:42:54.540 | was any better than today, and you can argue in many ways it was significantly worse. So it's just

00:43:00.140 | hard to make that argument. Then the practical effects of not paying taxes is imprisonment. If

00:43:05.420 | you care about freedom, you've got to avoid imprisonment. Imprisonment always comes with

00:43:09.260 | all kinds of knock-on effects. I just imagine myself with my children, and I'm stuck in prison

00:43:15.500 | for being a tax protester. And, "Mommy, why is Daddy not here?" "Well, Daddy's in prison." "Why

00:43:20.300 | is Daddy in prison?" "Because he didn't want to pay taxes that funded foreign wars and abortion."

00:43:25.820 | "Well, Dad, but what about me? Do I not have an obligation to try to stay out of prison for my

00:43:32.060 | children? If I'm put there through no fault of my own, if I'm unjustly imprisoned and I've done

00:43:37.820 | nothing wrong, okay, but don't I have an obligation to try to care for my wife and care for my

00:43:43.660 | children and care for my community by following the law?" To me, it seems you do. So I can't,

00:43:49.900 | in good conscience, go down the illegal side of tax protesting. What about the legal side of tax

00:43:55.580 | protesting? So you can be a tax protester by simply changing behavior and following the law.

00:44:02.380 | You don't want to pay the toll on the toll road? You can go on the other road. You don't want to

00:44:07.900 | pay the gas tax? You can not drive a car. You don't want to pay the war tax? You can lower your

00:44:14.860 | income below the taxable threshold and simply not owe any taxes. And in the United States, you can

00:44:21.180 | do this and still live a very agreeable lifestyle, depending on the personal deductions and credits

00:44:28.060 | to which you're entitled. The number of children I have, I could earn about $100,000 a year and not

00:44:34.140 | pay any federal income taxes. So I could do fine and not pay federal income taxes if I run a

00:44:41.180 | business. Perhaps I put together a couple of good businesses. I take the appropriate business

00:44:45.340 | deductions. I make contributions to a retirement account. I take my child tax credits. I can take

00:44:49.820 | any deductions to which I'm entitled by law, and I just intentionally keep my wages below the tax

00:44:54.300 | threshold. I can do that, and I can wind up paying a zero dollar tax line for many, many years. So

00:45:01.900 | that's one form of tax protesting. The problem for me is also back to that, I imagine, my children.

00:45:08.940 | "Daddy, why are we poor?" You know, like, "Well, we're poor because I don't want to pay taxes."

00:45:13.020 | "Why don't you want to pay taxes?" You know, blah, blah, blah, because of these reasons. "But,

00:45:17.340 | Daddy, aren't you supposed to be a financial advisor? Why are we poor? Like, aren't you

00:45:21.020 | supposed to know what you're talking about?" And that's just always bothered me. So along the way,

00:45:26.700 | I realized at one point in time that there was a solution to my moral quandary, and the solution

00:45:33.100 | was to change who had taxing authority over me. I don't believe that I'm obligated, morally

00:45:42.380 | obligated, as a free man in a free condition, not living under slavery, not living under a system

00:45:48.380 | where I have to make the choice to stay put, not morally obligated to remain in the United States

00:45:54.540 | and to remain as a U.S. citizen. And I realized I could solve my moral quandary by leaving,

00:46:02.540 | and that by doing so, I would be behaving uprightly and righteously in my actions,

00:46:09.260 | haven't broken any laws, I would be able to maintain my integrity,

00:46:14.140 | but I would also not be burdened by this idea that I couldn't live up to my potential.

00:46:20.940 | Very simple. I could leave the United States, go to St. Kitts and Nevis, buy a citizenship from St.

00:46:31.900 | Kitts and Nevis. I don't even need one for my whole family, I just need one for me. $150,000.

00:46:38.700 | I could purchase a home and set up a lifestyle on the island of St. Kitts and Nevis. I can earn

00:46:44.300 | $100 million a year and pay $0 of income taxes. St. Kitts and Nevis taxes based upon

00:46:50.540 | import fees and duties, they don't tax wages, profits, etc. And I could live legally,

00:46:58.620 | completely tax-free. I could even go back to the United States as a tourist, go back for three,

00:47:04.140 | maybe three months a year, sometimes up to four months per year, be a tourist,

00:47:08.940 | have no tax obligations, visit my family, visit my loved ones, and have resolved the moral quandary.

00:47:15.100 | And I thought, I don't know that I want to do that, but I want to have the ability to do that

00:47:22.540 | if I want to. So let me put this in place. Because I imagined, I thought, you know,

00:47:30.060 | President Trump probably president for four years, Republicans wound up doing what they always do,

00:47:34.620 | lose the Congress, lose the Senate, etc. But I thought, after President Trump, what if it's

00:47:42.460 | Hillary Clinton again, or Bernie Sanders, or in this case, Joe Biden? I don't want to be dependent

00:47:47.980 | on the government and them removing this law and my facing this moral conundrum. So I started taking

00:47:56.220 | action to make sure that I wasn't in that situation, to where if the day that a new president

00:48:01.180 | was elected, or the day that a new Congress proposed a law that I disagreed with, I could

00:48:06.860 | renounce my citizenship and be completely free. That was a huge deal for me. May not be for you,

00:48:13.420 | but it was a huge deal for me because it resolved my problem in what I saw as an honorable way.

00:48:21.340 | Number three is simply that I was concerned about my potential loss of

00:48:26.220 | personal and physical freedom. One of the court cases in years that really hit me hard was

00:48:33.580 | when Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to two life sentences plus 40 years for building a website

00:48:40.380 | that enabled commerce among unknown individuals. That court case struck me to the core.

00:48:49.820 | And I had grown up believing in the legitimacy of the court system, believing in fair jury trials

00:48:57.340 | and all that. I still hold out hope that that is the best provider for freedom. I believe a jury

00:49:03.820 | trial is the ultimate bulwark against tyranny, because any juror on a jury trial can exercise

00:49:13.820 | his discretion to rule on the guilt of the subject and also on the validity of the law.

00:49:21.020 | That's jury nullification. And so you can nullify as a juror, you can nullify any law that you think

00:49:30.140 | is immoral. So I believe that that is helpful, but it's really frustrating when you see great

00:49:36.700 | injustices like Ross Ulbricht being done. It's just a scandalous, scandalous scenario.

00:49:45.420 | And on the one hand, I generally try to stay optimistic about the future of the United States,

00:49:50.780 | and I genuinely am optimistic. What I mean is, let me slow down and explain some background.

00:49:56.940 | If you were to go back in the history of the United States, you have a very stark difference

00:50:05.180 | between what I'll speak widely as the first hundred years versus the second hundred years.

00:50:10.780 | Now, of course, I know that the nation has been around for more, but just want to highlight this

00:50:15.980 | hundred-year distance. Go back just over a hundred years ago. Go back to just before World War I,

00:50:23.420 | U.S. involvement in World War I, 1914 to 1918. Go back to the year before World War I, 1913,

00:50:30.620 | just over a century ago. The average citizen in the United States

00:50:36.140 | had no contact in any way, shape, or form with the federal government of the United States

00:50:45.980 | on a daily, weekly, monthly, annual basis except for the Postal Service.

00:50:55.340 | It was literally the only federal agency or federal body that the average citizen had any

00:51:01.100 | contact with. No income taxes, no EPA, no Department of Education, no anything except

00:51:10.460 | the Federal Postal Service. That was it. Since that time, and even like travel restrictions,

00:51:21.900 | I often get accused by my Republican conservative friends of being a liberal Democrat because I

00:51:28.220 | support open borders. I don't believe that the United States or any country should have

00:51:33.180 | restrictions on who can and can't enter the country for non-criminal persons. I say, "Well,

00:51:38.940 | you liberal. I just want to go back to the world that existed up till World War II. Prior to World

00:51:44.780 | War II, with the exception of a very short time in the Civil War and World War I, prior to World

00:51:50.940 | War II, the United States never had passport controls. Anybody could come into the country,

00:51:55.340 | anybody could leave the country, no passport controls, no restrictions on immigration,

00:51:59.580 | anybody could come. Since then, what do you have? You have the growth of the welfare state

00:52:07.100 | and you have the growth of tyranny. So you didn't have to have a passport to come and live in the

00:52:13.020 | United States or anything prior to that point in time. And so I consider that to be, in many cases,

00:52:19.820 | an ideal situation, is that we should have freedom. But if you look back in the last 100

00:52:27.180 | years and you reflect on what I just described, no income tax, no giant federal government invading

00:52:33.340 | every aspect of your life, various state and local governments engaging in the principles

00:52:39.100 | of federalism to run their societies how they believed, people able to access and influence

00:52:43.900 | those governments because they were more to a human scale. But you compare that to the last

00:52:47.980 | 100 years, the trend is, in many cases, at least legislatively, universally bad for freedom.

00:52:53.820 | Today, you and I commit on estimate three felonies a day in the United States, we just have no idea

00:52:59.740 | what they are. And you have this ever-growing body of laws that just grows and grows and grows,

00:53:06.780 | what, 60,000 pages a year, something like that, of new laws to which we're subject and we don't

00:53:10.380 | even know what they are. It's so bad that when Congress passes laws, which is rare enough,

00:53:15.900 | they pass laws they don't even read, multi-thousand page laws, the legislators have a couple days to

00:53:22.060 | read them. And so it's just a farce, it's a joke. So that's the negative view. And I am concerned

00:53:27.740 | about the negative view because those laws do have long-range impact. On the other hand,

00:53:34.380 | the positive view that I do subscribe to is that on a practical basis, an individual today

00:53:43.500 | has far more ability to live freely than really ever before in human history. But this is not due

00:53:52.220 | to a increasingly free government, this is due to increasingly free technological connectedness,

00:53:58.700 | increasing technology of transportation, technology of communication, etc. And so on a

00:54:04.940 | practical basis, any one individual can be more free today than the freest person out there 100

00:54:10.220 | years ago. But there's two separate trends, so I choose to focus on that. But I get really concerned

00:54:18.460 | about some of the trends. And right now, I think the United States is one of the best in the world

00:54:23.740 | for some of the things that matter to me, but that's not to say that it will still be that way

00:54:27.660 | 15 years from now. I think about educational freedom, the freedom to educate your children

00:54:33.100 | as you desire. I think about medical freedom. We've seen that collapse around the world over

00:54:38.460 | the last few years. You see laws passed in Canada as horrific with some of the recent laws they've

00:54:44.940 | passed related to parents and parental rights with their children, etc. And so that could happen in

00:54:49.820 | the United States as well, and so I was concerned about that. I thought I needed a solution. Those

00:54:55.180 | were the negative outcomes that I was seeking to avoid by building a Plan B. What about positive

00:55:00.300 | outcomes? I don't think that negative planning is ideal. There may be times in which it's relevant,

00:55:05.820 | but I don't think it's ideal. There were some positive outcomes that I wanted from going

00:55:12.700 | abroad. One was just simply the fun and the adventure, right? I enjoy being able to thrive

00:55:18.620 | in an increasingly interconnected, international, multicultural lifestyle. I enjoy that very much.

00:55:25.260 | I'm not, you know, it's funny. I think that there are people who have xenophobia, where they

00:55:34.380 | have a strange and unwarranted fear or hatred or dislike of foreign cultures, foreign persons, etc.

00:55:46.140 | I think there are also people that have unreasonable xenophilia, where they have a

00:55:51.180 | strange and weird aversion to their own culture, their own like-minded people, the people of their

00:55:59.020 | race, their ethnicity, their culture, and they have this strange love of foreign cultures. But

00:56:06.460 | I find that there's, at least for me, maybe I'm deluding myself, but I think there's a happy

00:56:10.860 | medium where I enjoy the fun and the variety and the spice of life that comes with international

00:56:17.500 | living, international exposure. It's fun to be in places that are different and to experience

00:56:22.140 | some of those things. The other big positive thing, though, was as someone who cares about freedom,

00:56:28.940 | I want the ability to live freely in an increasingly unfree world for myself. And

00:56:35.020 | along the way I came across the theory of what is now usually called flag theory,

00:56:43.420 | was formerly called PT theory, which stands for any number of acronyms, but it could be perpetual

00:56:50.860 | travel or permanent tourist theory. And as someone who enjoys pretty much being left alone,

00:56:58.220 | I looked at some of the trends that I outlined over the last hundred years in not only the United

00:57:02.300 | States, but many governments around the world, and I realized that if you're somebody who cares

00:57:05.980 | about personal liberty, it's pretty hard to fight those trends. But you may not need to fight,

00:57:11.660 | just choose to live freely. Harry Brown's book, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World,

00:57:19.740 | is a fantastic book, well appreciated by people like me who appreciate individual liberty.

00:57:27.100 | And yet it was Harry Brown and some of his friends who came up with the more powerful theory of PT

00:57:32.220 | theory. And so when I started to understand it, I realized that this is the closest that I think

00:57:38.860 | it's possible to come in our current day and age to maximum levels of personal liberty.

00:57:45.340 | For the uninitiated, let me discuss what the theory is. This was developed back in the 1980s by

00:57:50.860 | basically a handful of rich international libertarian playboys who were looking around

00:57:56.940 | at the world and trying to figure out how do we do what we want to do and live how we want to live.

00:58:00.700 | And what they realized was simply you can, if you leave one place where your actions are not

00:58:08.940 | appreciated or allowed, and go to a place where your lifestyle is appreciated and allowed,

00:58:14.300 | you can live how you want to live. So if gambling is illegal where you live,

00:58:23.100 | and you want to gamble, you can just simply leave where you are and go to a place where

00:58:28.700 | gambling is allowed and gamble your heart out. This is why in the United States you have this

00:58:34.940 | patchwork of laws where certain places you can do certain kinds of gambling. Sometimes you have to

00:58:38.620 | go to Las Vegas, you have to go to an Indian reservation. It's just a different place where

00:58:42.380 | they have different rules, and then you can follow the law. If prostitution is illegal where you live

00:58:47.260 | but you want to engage the services of a prostitute, go to a place where prostitution is legal.

00:58:51.580 | If drugs are illegal where you want to live but you want to engage in that activity, go to a place

00:58:56.620 | where it's legal. Don't run the legal risk of being tossed in prison, just go. And I think about

00:59:01.900 | this, the old example of prohibition in the United States when the United States outlawed consumption

00:59:06.940 | of alcohol. There were a handful of Americans who just picked up their bags and went to Europe,

00:59:13.980 | went somewhere else. Maybe you want to have multiple wives, go to a place where polygamy

00:59:18.700 | is legal. Maybe you want to run a certain kind of business. You see this right now where there are

00:59:23.740 | certain businesses that are simply not acceptable in certain places, you can go to another place

00:59:27.100 | where they accept that kind of business. And this strategy of "go where you're treated best" as

00:59:31.980 | Andrew Henderson has trademarked it, is a pretty effective strategy because it doesn't rely upon

00:59:41.580 | your forcing anyone else to change. It just relies upon you making the individual choice to change

00:59:47.340 | yourself. And it's one of the most effective things you can do. If you're living in a place

00:59:53.420 | where they don't have laws that you like, you can spend your life arguing for the changing of those

00:59:59.900 | laws. And if you feel that that's an effective use of your time, I honor you for that. But you might

01:00:05.180 | also just spend 20 years of your life and make no impact when you could have just picked up and left

01:00:10.140 | and gone somewhere else where they have laws that you like. And so this was the basic concept of PT

01:00:15.340 | theory. Now they took it to another extreme by using internationalization. And originally you

01:00:20.380 | had the three flag theory, then you had the five flag theory that was eventually developed. Now

01:00:24.300 | people are calling it seven and eight flag theory. But the idea is choose each government for what

01:00:29.500 | each government does best. So the five flags are these. Number one, you want to have a citizenship

01:00:37.180 | from a country that will give you a good travel document. So you can travel the world, right? If

01:00:43.740 | you reflect upon the fact that nowhere in the world basically has open borders at this point

01:00:48.780 | in time, the whole passport regime is a necessity. So you need some kind of passport document in

01:00:55.260 | order to travel with. And ideally you would get one that allows you to go the places that you want

01:00:59.900 | to go with minimal hassle and minimal problems. And so you want to get a citizenship from a country

01:01:04.700 | that gives you a good travel document. You also want ideally a country that leaves you alone and

01:01:09.340 | that doesn't impose undue burdens on you. So you want a country that doesn't tax you on your foreign

01:01:15.820 | income, income earned abroad. You want a country that doesn't impose military service on you or

01:01:21.580 | your children. You want a country that doesn't impose onerous reporting requirements and make

01:01:27.500 | you file a form every year of how much Bitcoin do you own or what kind of money did you earn or did

01:01:33.420 | you do something somewhere in the world etc. So that's your first flag is your citizenship flag

01:01:40.140 | and related to citizenship of course your passport flag. The second flag is your residency flag. So

01:01:47.100 | ideally you would have a place where you have a residence, a personal residence. And in a perfect

01:01:52.140 | world that residence would be from a country that will leave you alone, that won't give you

01:01:59.820 | laws that you disagree with. For me they won't say you can't homeschool your children or they won't

01:02:04.300 | say you have to inject your babies with an experimental vaccine or things like that.

01:02:11.100 | You want a country that won't tax you. Ideally they won't tax you on your foreign income. They

01:02:17.580 | pretty much leave you alone. They won't expose you to personal security risks, things like that.

01:02:23.420 | You want to have the right to live in that country. And ideally it's a place that you want to live.

01:02:28.460 | And then number three is your business base. And so you want to have your business flag. You

01:02:33.340 | want to have your business set up in a stable business jurisdiction that allows you to run

01:02:37.980 | your business the way that you want to run it. That gives you all the necessary paperwork so

01:02:42.380 | that you can stay on the right side of the law with your business and gives you the opportunity

01:02:48.220 | to run your affairs that are appropriate for your kind of business. And ideally it would be

01:02:55.500 | a jurisdiction that doesn't impose heavy taxes on you. They might impose some taxes,

01:03:00.460 | but if they do impose taxes, ideally it's a very light taxation, light regulation, just enough to

01:03:05.740 | have appropriate for your industry, but not heavy taxation and not heavy regulation. And so that's

01:03:11.980 | your business flag. Your fourth flag is your asset flag. Where do you do your banking? Where do you

01:03:17.420 | keep your money? And so ideally here you would have a country that allows you to have a stable

01:03:24.060 | financial system, gives you high quality banking products, high quality investment products,

01:03:29.180 | has good laws that protect you, that protect you from fraud, that protect you from creditors,

01:03:33.420 | and that basically allows you to keep your money safe so that you don't worry about it.

01:03:38.220 | And then your fifth flag is traditionally what they call your playgrounds. So these are the

01:03:41.580 | places that you enjoy spending time, and yet they may not be the places that you would want to live,

01:03:46.860 | but you spend time in those places as a tourist. And a country will generally treat tourists better

01:03:53.420 | than citizens, generally treat tourists very lightly, they won't impose a lot of laws or

01:03:58.380 | obligations on tourists, pretty much leave tourists alone. And so you choose those places that you'd

01:04:03.420 | like to be in, maybe they're places that have great shopping or great lifestyle, and you spend

01:04:08.380 | your time in those places as a tourist. And to this day I still say that for those who want to

01:04:14.380 | kind of the maximum expression of libertarianism is probably that. It's not the best lifestyle for

01:04:20.380 | most because it involves a significant degree of international relocation, but if you care about

01:04:26.380 | freedom it's probably the best lifestyle. And so I wanted to be prepared to be able to live that

01:04:30.940 | lifestyle if I chose to. It's much more burdensome to do that with children, and I think there are

01:04:37.340 | substantial downsides to doing it with children. There's the sense of rootlessness and ungroundedness

01:04:43.980 | and lack of home that I think can be pretty significant, but that's the basic concept.

01:04:49.260 | And I wanted to be prepared for that. And if you have that I think it can prepare you

01:04:55.180 | to be basically free, to be a peaceful and honorable citizen of the world,

01:05:00.460 | living in a way that you believe is right and effective. So that's the first set of reasons why

01:05:10.060 | I myself left the United States, is I wanted a plan B. The other factor was simply that it was

01:05:17.420 | convenient for me to leave the United States when I did. In 2018 my wife and I packed up our children

01:05:24.060 | and started traveling around the United States, and we wanted a break. We wanted to do something

01:05:28.300 | different. I'd always wanted to travel around the country in an RV and figured why not do it now.

01:05:32.700 | Along the way we were open to the idea of living in other places other than Florida where we're from,

01:05:38.460 | but we never really found anything that fit us, anything particular that we wanted to do.

01:05:47.020 | And we thought, and so along that way we conceived a child and we needed to have the baby somewhere.

01:05:52.140 | We didn't want to have the baby in an RV. And we'd already gotten rid of our house, gotten rid of

01:05:56.460 | our furniture, just had some things in storage. And I proposed the idea of birth tourism and she

01:06:03.180 | said yeah. And basically it was convenient for us to leave the United States. We thought okay,

01:06:07.100 | let's go and do it. Let's go and do birth tourism. Because birth tourism was a good way of

01:06:14.300 | solving some of the issues that I was working on. So when we left we didn't have the plan to have a

01:06:21.420 | plan A and not come back to the United States. It just seemed like a convenient thing. Let's go have

01:06:25.100 | a baby and then we'll figure out what the next step is. Well the next step happened to be a

01:06:29.420 | pandemic and we were doing fine. We'd found good infrastructure and we were enjoying traveling and

01:06:34.860 | enjoying it for a few years. And so we thought let's just keep this up. And then kind of the

01:06:40.220 | final reason that I left the United States is it keeps my life interesting. I enjoy the challenge

01:06:45.580 | of change. I've learned about my personality type that I'm not the kind of person that is going to

01:06:51.260 | do the same thing for 20 years. I'm the personality type that basically a few years, three, four,

01:06:56.700 | five years, and I've pretty much, it scratched whatever itch I have at the moment, I'm ready to

01:07:01.100 | move on to other things. And so having the idea of living in different places appeals to me.

01:07:08.940 | And I enjoy it. Will I stay gone from the United States? I think probably not.

01:07:15.660 | I think probably not. And let me articulate some of those reasons. I've tried to give you the

01:07:20.620 | strongest argument in favor basically of leaving at least for plan B by just simply sharing

01:07:26.300 | what things I was looking for. But will I stay gone?

01:07:30.540 | The longer I'm away from the United States, the more sensitive I am to how good things

01:07:38.380 | are in the United States. I don't believe that any one country is perfect.

01:07:45.740 | And I'm not looking for the perfect country. I think that there's probably on every issue,

01:07:55.260 | there's probably another country that does almost everything better than my own native country of

01:08:03.100 | the United States. But when you look at the overall set of basically life, the United States

01:08:14.620 | does indeed offer a very compelling value proposition, especially for those who are

01:08:20.700 | culturally comfortable in the United States, especially for people who are English speakers,

01:08:28.620 | especially for people who feel some sense of connection or appreciation of those unique things

01:08:34.140 | in American culture. On the whole, the U.S. offers a pretty good

01:08:41.500 | set of features and benefits for many people. I will compare it to my opinions on SUVs.

01:08:53.260 | I think that SUVs are pretty mediocre at most things. If you look at virtually any application,

01:09:00.620 | you can find a vehicle that's a specialty purpose vehicle that's better suited for that application.

01:09:08.140 | If, for example, you want to carry a lot of people, an SUV isn't great. A van is much more

01:09:15.260 | comfortable. If you want to go fast, an SUV isn't great. A sports car is much faster. If you want to

01:09:22.140 | be comfortable on the highway, an SUV isn't great. A luxury car will probably give you a better ride

01:09:27.260 | and a better experience on the highway. If you want a vehicle that can pull a big trailer,

01:09:32.860 | an SUV isn't great. A pickup truck is better. Basically, the place that an SUV shines is if

01:09:38.460 | you want a four-wheel drive, high-clearance vehicle to get you and six of your friends

01:09:44.060 | up to the top of a mountain on a rutted dirt road. In that situation, an SUV does shine.

01:09:50.540 | You can still modify a van to be better. You can still modify a pickup truck to be better,

01:09:54.540 | but an SUV does shine in that situation. On virtually everything else, an SUV is mediocre.

01:10:00.940 | What an SUV does is it gives you the utility of pretty much being able to do all those things.

01:10:07.900 | That's why people like it. It can hold seven people. It's not super comfortable, but when you

01:10:13.340 | need to hold seven people, you can put seven people in there. It's not great off-road, but it

01:10:18.380 | can go down a rutted road better than a car can, but it's still comfortable on the highway. It

01:10:23.180 | does most things well enough. If you want a do-it-all vehicle, with the exception of gas

01:10:29.820 | mileage, then it can do it all well enough. Even gas mileage, you can argue, "Eh, it's good enough."

01:10:36.620 | That's how the United States feels to me right now, is that it's pretty mediocre at many things,

01:10:42.540 | not everything, and I can find a country on virtually all things that is better than the

01:10:50.220 | United States. But if I'm putting together the list of benefits of things that are important for

01:10:55.980 | me, the United States has a pretty good package. While I might not choose it intentionally as an

01:11:04.780 | immigrant, since I already am an American citizen, since I already have my infrastructure there, etc.,

01:11:10.780 | since I'm already culturally American, since I already have friends, I understand it, I speak

01:11:14.540 | the language, etc., it makes a lot of sense. And I think that if you're an American listener,

01:11:20.540 | you would probably find that it's similar for you. So the United States is probably not the

01:11:28.780 | freest place in the world, but you do have a lot of freedoms, and at least for me, some of the

01:11:33.740 | freedoms that I care most about are significant in the United States. I care about freedom of

01:11:41.100 | speech, I care about freedom of religion, I care about freedom of education, I care about freedom

01:11:46.780 | of healthcare choices, you know, this kind of stuff. And I can do most of that stuff in the

01:11:53.580 | United States really well. The United States offers a pretty good lifestyle. It's not the

01:11:58.700 | cheapest place in the world, places that are cheaper, but it's one of the cheapest places in

01:12:04.540 | the world when you factor in all of the factors in terms of the lifestyle benefits. It's not the

01:12:09.980 | most, doesn't have the best cities in the world, but it's got enough good ones, just got good stuff

01:12:15.340 | all around. And especially on some of the things that make life really livable, and especially on

01:12:20.540 | some of the things that make life really livable for me as a father with children. When it comes

01:12:26.460 | to culture, there are a couple of things that are really important. Number one is a sense of

01:12:32.460 | cultural identity. And I've struggled with this one for many years, because if I live in the United

01:12:39.100 | States, I can give my children kind of a pretty decent American cultural identity. But I'm not

01:12:46.140 | myself kind of the flag-waving, like, nationalistic kind of guy. I do appreciate, it stirs my heart

01:12:54.300 | when I go to a Fourth of July parade, but I have struggles with some of the hardcore nationalism.

01:13:01.180 | But I'm also not a destroyer, right? I don't fit in well, and I wouldn't be Howard Zinn's disciple.

01:13:06.540 | And so I'm kind of in the middle, where I appreciate certain things, and I'm skeptical of

01:13:12.620 | some other things. And so I can give my children a sense of American identity, but I can't really

01:13:18.700 | ever give them an identity of another country full-heartedly, because I'm still American through

01:13:24.700 | and through, right? Country I'm living in says, "Put on a mask," and I go, "Grumble, grumble,

01:13:29.340 | I'm not gonna wear a stupid face mask. You can't tell me what to do, because I'm American."

01:13:33.020 | Just a goofy but true example. And so you have this weird third culture that you wind up making.

01:13:45.180 | But more importantly, when you think about opportunities for your children, you think about

01:13:49.260 | cultural opportunities. Some of the things that really matter to me are easier to do in the United

01:13:54.300 | States than anywhere else in the world. And the stuff that I talk about on the show. Number one,

01:13:57.980 | from an educational perspective, educational freedom in the United States is higher than it is

01:14:02.540 | in most places. And it's easier to access than it is in most places. You can do pretty much anything

01:14:09.420 | you want to do with your children's education, depending on what state you're in. And that means

01:14:13.900 | that you can be far ahead of the status quo, and you don't have to fight anybody to do it.

01:14:19.500 | You don't have to sit down and create some random set of documents to prove that you've created an

01:14:25.340 | umbrella school that allows you to pursue the things that you want to pursue. You can pretty

01:14:29.340 | much do it. More importantly, there's access available. The United States is a very egalitarian

01:14:35.500 | society, it's a meritocracy, very strong meritocracy, with a cultural resentment of nepotism,

01:14:42.940 | which allows individuals to flourish at a very young age. Recently, I was thinking about

01:14:50.300 | Cole... what was his last name? The... Summers, Cole Summers, who wrote the book Don't Tell Me I

01:15:01.420 | Can't, An Ambitious Homeschooler's Journey. And, you know, here he is, he's 14 years old,

01:15:06.140 | he tragically died a few months ago. And so this brought a lot of attention to his story. That's

01:15:11.660 | where I first heard about him. But here he is, this child of handicapped parents, and he's a

01:15:17.660 | homeschooled, unschooled child, but he winds up owning a multi-hundred acre ranch at 14 years old,

01:15:22.780 | doing incredible things simply because he had the opportunity. And you can do that in the United

01:15:28.940 | States, you can't do that in many places. I struggle with helping my children to earn money.

01:15:34.220 | In the United States, I can teach a 10-year-old how to make several hundred dollars per week just

01:15:39.100 | in his spare time, easily, without any like, not selling, just simple stuff.

01:15:45.660 | Around the world, it's much harder. You have much more significant laws, rules, regulations,

01:15:52.540 | and that stuff really chafes me. In addition to the United States, you can get the best of the best

01:15:58.460 | of equipment, right? Any book your child wants to order, wants to read, it's on your doorstep

01:16:04.860 | the next day, even if it was printed in 1937 and it's stored on the other side of the world. It's

01:16:09.020 | just amazing access to information, education. You have access to the best of the best, and easy

01:16:17.020 | access to the equipment you want, right? I'm trying to get a 3D printer for my children. In the United

01:16:21.820 | States, you can figure out what's the very best 3D printer and have it show up two days later.

01:16:26.300 | In some other parts of the world, it's much harder to access it. And I just go on and on and on,

01:16:30.860 | but that stuff really matters to me. And so the lifestyle in the United States is really, really

01:16:34.860 | great. You look at classes, you look at, meaning, you know, hobbies, classes, etc. If you're in a

01:16:41.180 | reasonably sized metro area, anything you've ever dreamed of is available. There's a parkour gym

01:16:47.340 | here, there's a BJJ gym there, there's an American Ninja Warrior course on the other side, there's a

01:16:53.260 | great world-class trainer the next lane over. And of course, you can find specialty stuff if your

01:16:58.780 | child is a very skilled athlete, but you can find all of it within the country. Best coaches in the

01:17:04.940 | world, the best instruction, the best equipment, it's all right at your fingertips. This incredible

01:17:09.820 | convenience that makes the life of a parent, especially a motivated, engaged parent, really,

01:17:14.860 | really easy. In terms of recreation, virtually any hobby that you want to do, virtually any

01:17:20.700 | thing that you want to do, there's a whole community around it. And there's that community

01:17:25.100 | is the best in the world, and all the stuff is available. And on a global basis, it's just not

01:17:31.820 | consistent. There are countries that have great opportunities, but even in the most, in the

01:17:38.140 | countries that have incredible consumer conveniences for my lifestyle,

01:17:45.020 | they're often not the consumer conveniences that I care the most about. And so you have certain

01:17:51.740 | cities and countries of the world that have better city style consumer conveniences in the United

01:17:57.580 | States, but I'm not a big city guy. Like, that's not how I want to live. I enjoy more diverse

01:18:04.700 | hobbies, etc. And then in terms of my kind of people, right, when you really care about

01:18:12.700 | in the United States, when it comes to all the freedom stuff that I said, Americans get it,

01:18:18.860 | generally speaking. Even if they don't agree, they get it. And there's a much higher percentage

01:18:24.540 | of people that feel like how I feel than what I find going around the world. And so for me,

01:18:30.620 | culturally, the United States is very, very comfortable. And I think this is the case for

01:18:37.420 | many in my listening audience. I think that if you make a list of the things that you want from

01:18:46.140 | the potential of another country, most of those things are likely met better by simply another

01:18:51.980 | region, another state or another city within the United States. People underestimate how difficult

01:19:00.540 | it is to successfully expatriate to another place. I have done this multiple times. I saw a course on

01:19:08.460 | it, I'll advertise the course at the end, but I have a fully established infrastructure for multiple

01:19:14.460 | countries with legal rights of residence, legal with bank accounts, cell phones, work rights,

01:19:23.260 | everything set up. So I've done it multiple times, more than two. And it is so much work

01:19:31.260 | to set that stuff up. And even having all the legal rights doesn't satisfy knowing the culture,

01:19:40.300 | knowing the level of personal expression in the culture, understanding all the cues,

01:19:45.180 | facing the racial discrimination that you face for being a foreigner, not having all of the

01:19:50.220 | proper level of reserve or the proper level of openness and having all of that stuff.

01:19:54.940 | I enjoy the international... I like those challenges. I like the challenge of figuring out

01:20:01.660 | how to be culturally couth in a foreign language and in a foreign culture. I enjoy that. It's fun,

01:20:08.540 | but it's hard. And I think most people it's much harder than you should want to do.

01:20:15.420 | I need also to simply talk about the future and tell you this. Let me introduce this topic

01:20:25.260 | with a letter from a listener. "Hey Joshua, I'd like to enroll in your Bitcoin privacy course."

01:20:34.700 | "One of the most impactful podcasts I've listened to was your show on why a parent should stay home

01:20:39.420 | when children are young, and that it makes more sense to invest time with children above putting

01:20:43.100 | money into a college savings account. After listening to that podcast episode twice and

01:20:47.260 | giving it quite a bit of thought, I decided I should stay at home with my children while they're

01:20:50.700 | very young." I'm thinking zero to four years old makes sense. "I gave up a very high paying job.

01:20:56.060 | I could have retired very comfortably with five to 10 more years of work and completely reoriented

01:21:00.140 | myself to a different kind of life I didn't even consider prior to listening to that episode. I

01:21:05.500 | appreciate the holistic approach you take towards financial planning and keeping an eye on the

01:21:08.780 | extreme events that occur throughout history and will probably occur in our lifetimes. One piece

01:21:14.460 | of unsolicited constructive criticism, as someone who has studied geopolitics and traveled extensively,

01:21:20.300 | I think you underestimate the role the USA plays in global security and the extent to which we

01:21:25.500 | actually have it much better here in the US. After listening to your recent post-COVID shows,

01:21:30.380 | I think you're coming around on the latter point, but probably still don't quite appreciate the

01:21:34.940 | former. As a large country with perfectly defensible borders, an ability to feed itself

01:21:39.900 | many times over, a river system that enables essentially free transport of goods, and an

01:21:45.260 | ability to generate enough energy to provide for our population, the United States dominates the

01:21:49.980 | world and, in my opinion, is the only reason we haven't ended in nuclear annihilation. If the

01:21:56.300 | United States were to fall or break apart in the age of nuclear weapons and bioweapons, there

01:22:01.580 | wouldn't be a geopolitical player strong enough to enforce world order and conflicts would once

01:22:06.300 | again flare up. Indeed, since the USA is weaker on a relative basis and more importantly just not

01:22:12.380 | interested in enforcing world order, conflicts are beginning to rage and famine is once again

01:22:19.100 | looming. I mention this because the idea of "getting out of the country" for US citizens is

01:22:24.140 | a false hope. If the USA were devastated, and somehow there were other areas of the world that

01:22:29.500 | weren't, world order would slip and it's difficult to think of places safer than certain parts of

01:22:35.100 | North America. Certainly places like South and Central America would experience conflict without

01:22:40.300 | the USA imposing order from above. This might be a borderline offensive thing to read, but

01:22:46.060 | unfortunately it's true. It's likely that peace isn't the norm anywhere, even in South and Central

01:22:51.180 | America. If you're interested in understanding this, I'd suggest the works and Twitter page of

01:22:55.420 | Peter Zaihan. His first book, The Accidental Superpower (2014) lays out this case in detail.

01:23:01.740 | His latest book, Disunited Nations, is prescient in its predictions, including Russia being

01:23:06.060 | extremely aggressive as its demography deteriorates. Though I 100% believe all of the above, you never

01:23:12.540 | know. So I want to own some Bitcoin anonymously. Looking forward to the course. So that listener

01:23:17.980 | of mine I think makes some very important and cogent points. And I want to say very clearly that

01:23:25.020 | on economic issues and security issues, etc., once again, my appreciation of the United States has

01:23:33.820 | grown over the last few years. And I don't know if I could have experienced this without going

01:23:38.460 | abroad. When you're raised or when you live in the cultural milieu of the United States,

01:23:45.180 | it's very easy to assume that things are better elsewhere. And because all you see is the problems

01:23:52.620 | of your own scenario. In some ways it's kind of like a relationship, right? If you're in a

01:23:57.580 | relationship and you see all the problems with your wife, like here's a long list of problems,

01:24:05.260 | and you assume because you only see other people at their best that other people don't have those

01:24:10.300 | same problems. But a little bit of maturity would say that while it may be true that this particular

01:24:16.940 | wife that I have has her own unique set of problems, in general other people probably

01:24:23.660 | aren't as good as I might think. We all have our problems. In the United States it's easy to look

01:24:28.780 | around and say, well, the US dollar is going to disappear. But the only frame of reference you

01:24:33.740 | have is the US dollar in many cases. And over my last three and a half years of living abroad,

01:24:40.300 | I've come to appreciate so many things about the United States. I appreciate deeply the banking

01:24:45.580 | system. The United States does not have the world's best banks, as measured by security,

01:24:52.620 | reserves, etc. But in many ways the United States has some of the world's best banks.

01:24:58.220 | And for non-Americans, my first banking haven for them that I recommend is the United States.

01:25:04.860 | The US banking infrastructure, the global nature of it, the credit card industry, the banking

01:25:11.740 | products, the low costs, the zero tax on banking profits for non-American persons, is really,

01:25:20.700 | really incredible. And while there are many good banks around the world, and I believe that

01:25:26.220 | all thoughtful Americans should have bank accounts in other countries, the US banking

01:25:31.820 | structure is really phenomenal. I continue to use the US banking system as my primary banking

01:25:38.780 | system because of its many benefits. One of the great benefits that Americans who go abroad have

01:25:44.300 | is that the United States has very different tax residency rules than any other country in the

01:25:49.180 | world. Because the United States assumes that your tax residency or their right to tax you is based

01:25:56.700 | on citizenship rather than on residency, the line of whether you're subject to American taxes or not

01:26:03.340 | is very, very clear. You are. If you're an American citizen or a US person, you are. You're subject to

01:26:10.060 | taxation. And the line of whether or not you can experience some tax exclusion for being abroad is

01:26:18.060 | very, very clear. You either qualify for the foreign earned income exclusion or you don't.

01:26:22.060 | And it's based upon your person, not based on anything else. This is different than the

01:26:27.020 | nation, the citizens of other countries. So for example, if I were a Canadian and I wanted to

01:26:32.780 | become tax non-resident Canada, becoming legally tax non-resident Canada is much more invasive to

01:26:40.780 | my lifestyle than simply going abroad. If I want to truly be tax non-resident in Canada, I would be

01:26:48.460 | very well advised to eliminate ownership of all physical property in Canada, not only real estate,

01:26:54.380 | but even things in a storage unit and physical items. I would need to end banking relationships,

01:27:00.300 | close out bank accounts, basically sever all ties with Canada and make it very clear that I don't

01:27:05.740 | live in Canada and I'm not coming back. And basically the only thing that I can keep is my

01:27:10.380 | passport if I want to truly be safe about tax non-residency. Now the benefit is that Canadian

01:27:15.900 | can keep his citizenship and go abroad and not have any tax obligation to the Canadian government.

01:27:22.220 | That's an opportunity. That's a benefit that Americans don't have. But the benefits for

01:27:25.900 | Americans are simply that if you go abroad, you can get the foreign earned income exclusion.

01:27:32.220 | And for an American, you can still keep everything in the United States. You can keep your house,

01:27:36.780 | you can keep your car, you can keep your bank accounts, you can keep your credit cards,

01:27:40.060 | you can keep all that stuff. And in fact, even if you weren't a citizen, you can pretty much

01:27:44.300 | keep all that stuff as well. So having all the infrastructure in the United States is really,

01:27:49.580 | really powerful. And so when I go around the world and I look at banking products and I live as an

01:27:55.100 | international citizen, I'm very grateful to have the US banking infrastructure and system as my

01:28:01.180 | primary scenario. My MX works in any country in the world basically. And that's a really powerful

01:28:06.460 | opportunity. Great exchange rates, no foreign transaction fees, everything is just simple,

01:28:11.580 | easy. It all works really well. The US dollar. It's one thing to say, what are we going to do

01:28:17.660 | when the US dollar loses its reserve, its status as a reserve currency in the world?

01:28:21.180 | That's a very fair question. But what's going to replace it today? This is why the US dollar

01:28:28.620 | continues to maintain its power. What's going to replace it today? There are many good currencies

01:28:35.020 | around the world. I believe in currency diversification. I think there are other

01:28:38.540 | currencies that are excellent. I go over some of those in my course. But the US dollar is still

01:28:45.820 | the safe haven of choice. And as someone who now looks at the world differently, I look at the US

01:28:52.860 | dollar as a safe haven. Because it's better than many other local scenarios. What about economic

01:29:00.380 | affairs? Could the United States collapse? Well, let's do investing first. When you look at

01:29:06.060 | investing on a global basis, I believe that there are many good pockets of the world where you could

01:29:11.820 | get high returns in investments. My dream job when I was in college, I wanted to be an international

01:29:17.420 | correspondent for a mutual fund company and be like the man in the field, knocking on doors of

01:29:22.620 | companies and writing reports and work for a mutual fund that did international investing.

01:29:26.300 | Never did it, but that was what one of my dream jobs was. Today, I think there's still those

01:29:30.860 | opportunities there. You can find countries that have exciting growth opportunities. You can find

01:29:36.300 | investments in those countries that have good growth opportunities, etc. But when you look at

01:29:40.380 | the power and the stability of the US markets, US stock market, huge, greatest companies of the

01:29:49.180 | world listed on that market. Incredibly transparent, well-regulated market, incredibly researched,

01:29:58.940 | extraordinarily efficient. And those countries reflecting the global exposure that you get from

01:30:06.460 | those companies. I misspoke, I meant to say companies. The level of global diversification

01:30:11.740 | that you get from investing in these large companies listed on American stock exchanges

01:30:15.660 | is incredible. The shockingly low cost of investment, the low fees, the great customer

01:30:22.620 | service, though it's just a wonderful market to invest in. And so while there may be pockets that

01:30:29.820 | may outperform temporarily the US stock market, today I have a very hard time believing that

01:30:38.540 | there's any better market given the totality of the factors. And I think that while 100% exposure

01:30:49.020 | to the US stock market is probably not right for people who have international exposure.

01:30:55.820 | Meaning if I were, let's say that I'm living in, you know, Uruguay, would I put 100% of my money

01:31:04.140 | in the stock market? No. But I would not do that for the same reason I don't want 100% of my money

01:31:09.900 | in anything. But do I want the bulk of my money in the US stock market? I would sleep very well

01:31:14.700 | at night having the bulk of my money in the US stock market. It just makes sense. It's just

01:31:21.180 | remarkable and powerful. And I don't want to understate that because it's very easy to go on

01:31:25.740 | and on and say, well, Cambodia has the best place in the world and the best opportunities in the

01:31:29.420 | world. Maybe. But it's very hard for me to be confident, not being Cambodian, not speaking the

01:31:35.100 | language, not having all of those resources. Very, very hard for me to feel confident in that.

01:31:40.300 | And the safety there is a big factor. You can interpret how I mean safety, I don't need to

01:31:47.900 | clarify. It's a very different scale. Now, what about personal security? The United States is not

01:31:58.460 | the safest country in the world. Certainly not. But interestingly, when you look at the totality

01:32:04.220 | of factors for personal safety and personal security, as long as you don't live in one of

01:32:09.180 | the inner city of one of the big democrat cities in the United States where there are major

01:32:14.220 | increasing levels of crime, the level of safety that you get in the United States is very, very

01:32:19.180 | high. And the level of safety that you get at a very low cost is very, very high. There are many

01:32:26.300 | places in the world that have much better crime statistics than the United States. One of the

01:32:32.060 | safest places in the world is Dubai. There are many parts of Europe that are very safe, Eastern

01:32:37.260 | Europe, etc. And you can live in those places very safely. You can live safely in many places

01:32:43.740 | of the world. But when you look at the low cost, the relatively low cost of a safe lifestyle in

01:32:48.940 | the United States for physical safety, it's much lower than many places. It's much cheaper for you

01:32:57.500 | to live in the United States than it is for you to live in Berlin, in pockets of the United States.

01:33:06.060 | Of course, I'm very conscious of the idea that I'm painting with a very broad brush here.

01:33:11.020 | But I'm trying to make the point that when you consider the total lifestyle benefits and personal

01:33:15.180 | safety, the United States is exceedingly safe. In addition, what about long-term future?

01:33:22.140 | This listener of mine talked about the future of the United States.

01:33:28.140 | And I think that his comments are accurate. He mentioned analyst Peter Zeihan. I recently

01:33:37.100 | mentioned I've been reading Peter Zeihan's newest book called "The End of the World as We Know It

01:33:40.460 | is Just the Beginning". And that book makes a powerful, powerful case for how the United States

01:33:48.380 | and the United States alone is positioned to flourish in the coming decades.

01:33:57.020 | And while I hope that Zeihan is wrong in some of his most pessimistic predictions,

01:34:02.860 | and I think there may be factors that he hasn't considered that could upset his analysis and

01:34:09.980 | predictions, his arguments for the power of the United States are really, really strong.

01:34:14.940 | And I think I'll save some of those to cover in a separate episode. But it's remarkable when you

01:34:20.780 | look at how unique, unique among virtually any other country, the United States has it all.

01:34:27.580 | The United States has it all with regard to energy independence, food independence. The

01:34:33.900 | United States has it all with regard to robust manufacturing and robust consumption.

01:34:39.820 | Natural resources and manufacturing ability, kind of finishing products as well. The United States

01:34:49.740 | has a huge and powerful country that has a big enough population to actually use it effectively.

01:34:55.820 | The United States has, I think the United States is the fourth largest landmass in the world,

01:35:00.940 | largest is Russia. I think Canada next, then China, then the US. But what problems do those

01:35:07.660 | countries have? Russia has a huge physical geography, it's a huge country, but they have

01:35:14.780 | two problems. Most of the country is unusable and unlivable, and they have a small population

01:35:20.300 | massively declining. Canada, huge country, but a lot of the population, a lot of the geography is

01:35:28.460 | unlivable because it's so northerly, so cold, and they have a tiny population and declining,

01:35:33.660 | except for immigration. China, huge country, huge population, but facing utter population collapse

01:35:40.780 | due to the effect of their one-child policy, and also massive political problems with the cult of

01:35:49.020 | the leader of China. Whereas the United States has a huge country and all kinds of physical

01:35:56.540 | advantages, well-protected oceans, protecting it from invasion from abroad, a huge northern neighbor

01:36:05.580 | with a strong ally and unhabitable area to the north of that, and the ally is small and friendly

01:36:12.460 | to the southern border, is largely defensible because giant desert, very hard to invade,

01:36:17.420 | and a pretty increasingly okay relationship with a southern neighbor and a good symbiosis. So good

01:36:24.380 | physical security, you got again cheap transportation, the river network, etc.

01:36:28.300 | And the US population is large, large, dynamic, and not collapsing as precipitously as the

01:36:39.100 | populations of many countries in the world. The demographics in the United States are not great,

01:36:43.900 | but they're not horrific, they're better than many other places. And so going forward, these are very

01:36:50.700 | good reasons to believe that the US has a very strong and powerful future. So when you're looking

01:36:59.740 | for areas of the world, and then I mentioned famine, right? I'm very concerned about famine

01:37:04.460 | right now, very concerned. Week by week goes in, the news doesn't get better. I keep hoping it's

01:37:09.580 | going to get better, the news does not get better on the global food situation, the global food

01:37:14.140 | supply. It just seems at this point, put it this way, if we avoid, I don't want to say the number

01:37:23.260 | of hundreds of millions, but if we avoid tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people dying

01:37:28.060 | in the next couple of years due to global famine, I don't know how, I don't see the solution at the

01:37:32.860 | moment. And that's going to lead to tremendous unrest, tremendous problems on a global basis.

01:37:40.060 | But the United States and North America are best positioned to be protected from those things.

01:37:45.900 | So all that to say that while I currently live outside the United States, I'm still working on

01:37:51.180 | some immigration programs, I'm still enjoying my lifestyle, living well with my family, I've got a

01:37:55.740 | great living situation, etc. I keep my American passport secure, and I keep all the infrastructure

01:38:03.980 | set up, and I keep an eye on the news. And if things got bad, then my plan B, my bug out plan,

01:38:11.820 | is to go back to the United States. Because I think that these are compelling reasons to

01:38:17.980 | appreciate the potential for the future of the country. And I think that in terms of actionable

01:38:26.220 | advice, I think the United States as an immigration destination makes a huge amount of sense for many

01:38:41.580 | people in the world. I'm not sure that it makes the most sense for the highly educated or the very

01:38:47.900 | financially sophisticated and very wealthy of the world. If I were very wealthy, had a big business

01:38:53.500 | already, I would not choose to go to the United States. But that's largely because the tax and

01:38:58.540 | regulation burden is really entangling at that level. If you're looking to get ahead, I don't

01:39:04.700 | know of a place that's easier to get wealthy than in the United States. I haven't found it yet.

01:39:08.940 | But if you are already wealthy, I wouldn't pursue the United States for that reason. But I would

01:39:15.100 | definitely have bases there. I would definitely have a visa there. I would definitely have a

01:39:21.820 | second spot there. I believe that it's just too important in the global affairs of the moment to

01:39:28.620 | speak lightly of it. I hope that I've done an accurate job in this episode. It was clearly a

01:39:39.100 | lengthy episode. But I'm trying to articulate in a way that is accurate the way I see these factors.

01:39:50.860 | Meaning, if I were creating a five-minute YouTube video, it would be easy to make a trite statement

01:39:57.820 | say, "US is the best country in the world" or "US is the worst country in the world."

01:40:01.740 | I don't believe that's accurate. And I think it's irresponsible to paint with such a broad brush and

01:40:09.580 | stereotype so significantly. It's important to have texture and nuance to these discussions and

01:40:18.300 | to these conversations. And I hope that I provided some texture and some nuance so that you could then

01:40:24.620 | factor this into your own life and to your own lifestyle. If you're an American thinking of

01:40:30.300 | going abroad and you have a culture that you think is better fit for you, for example,

01:40:35.420 | one of the biggest reasons that Americans leave the United States and go abroad is because they're

01:40:43.740 | looking for a progressive culture with features like national health care services, things like

01:40:49.100 | that. If you're looking for that, I think that's a good reason to go abroad. I've known loads of

01:40:56.220 | Americans who've moved to other cultures that reflected their values and they've loved their

01:41:00.620 | lifestyle. They moved to downtown Amsterdam and they can enjoy pedaling the streets of Amsterdam

01:41:07.340 | on their bicycle and enjoying all of the lifestyle that comes with the European welfare state model.

01:41:13.820 | They don't mind the high taxes because they feel like they're getting good benefits from that. I do

01:41:18.380 | think, by the way, this is going to be an increasing issue of political instability in the United

01:41:22.860 | States. The United States taxes can be high, not in all cases, but they're high enough and yet people

01:41:28.460 | feel like they're getting ripped off. The health care situation and the health care cost is a major

01:41:32.300 | issue in the United States right now. And I don't know how it'll be resolved, but I do think it's

01:41:37.420 | inevitable it'll be resolved in the next decade or so. But I think that you can thrive in that

01:41:43.740 | situation. You may love moving to Canada and enjoying the Canadian experience or something

01:41:48.940 | else and there are ways to do that. But if you generally feel culturally American and you've got

01:41:54.780 | a pretty good thing in the United States, I think before you go through the difficulty of fully

01:42:00.380 | expatriating and doing that as a plan A, your better, easier move is just to relocate inside

01:42:06.700 | of the United States. Because virtually anything that you're looking for by nature of simply the

01:42:12.060 | geography of the country and the demographics, virtually anything that you're looking for,

01:42:17.100 | you can have inside of the United States. Even on the health care perspective, right, you can move

01:42:23.660 | to Massachusetts, you can move to California, you can move to Oregon, you can move to a place that

01:42:29.020 | reflects your progressive liberal values. If you're a conservative and you're looking for more freedom,

01:42:35.020 | you can pick up and you can move to a place that reflects that. You can move to Florida,

01:42:39.500 | to Idaho, to Texas, to South Dakota, to some place that reflects that. And that transition

01:42:45.740 | will be vastly easier and much more comfortable for you than moving to Ecuador or moving to...

01:42:52.540 | I'm not sure what examples to insert.

01:43:03.100 | Be careful when you think of just simply saying that it's all bad in the United States

01:43:10.700 | and I'm going to go abroad. If I had to sum up my experience over the last few years,

01:43:15.340 | I am now much more relaxed and much more sanguine about all the events. I didn't

01:43:22.300 | even talk about politics. I guess I'll take a moment to talk about it.

01:43:26.620 | One of the things that I most appreciate about my time abroad is I think that I've finally severed

01:43:33.420 | the emotional ties that I've had to politics my whole life. I was a political junkie from the

01:43:38.780 | time I was a young boy. My grandfather subscribed to US News and World Report and that was what got

01:43:44.380 | me interested in politics. I would read it every week. I just thought it was so interesting.

01:43:48.140 | And then I used to listen to NPR every day, every single day on the way to school and on the way

01:43:53.180 | home. Probably one of the very few high schoolers that would come in morning edition on the way to

01:43:57.900 | school and all things considered on the way home by myself in the car listening to NPR.

01:44:02.220 | Did that for years. And so I was super into politics. I listened to Rush Limbaugh when I

01:44:07.740 | was in high school and got super into politics. And I always cared a lot about politics.

01:44:12.220 | But along the way I woke up and I said, "Well, I believe politics matters. I don't think that

01:44:16.460 | politics is an effective thing of my life. This is just making me... it makes people unhappy."

01:44:21.340 | And maybe because I was such a junkie at an early age, I became very sensitive to how destructive

01:44:27.820 | excessive political involvement is. But I didn't understand how people could sever their psychological

01:44:32.620 | connection to politics. I thought, "This stuff matters. This stuff is worth arguing about. And

01:44:37.260 | I believe it matters. I believe it's worth arguing about." But I was excessively devoted to it.

01:44:43.820 | And along the way I came to the point where I said, "I think it matters, but I can't let it

01:44:49.740 | control my life because my life doesn't change much depending on who's in president. My life is

01:44:54.940 | pretty much the same under all the presidents and no matter what. It doesn't change much. So I can't

01:45:00.780 | let this control my life." But I still struggled with being addicted to the junkie side of it,

01:45:06.540 | arguing about it and telling people on the internet that they're wrong. And I moved abroad.

01:45:11.660 | And I started... I said, "Let me get into politics in wherever I happen to be." I said, "Go find the

01:45:18.540 | talk radio station and use it to get involved. What are the local issues?" And you leave your

01:45:24.060 | home country and you go to a completely different place and you listen to different language

01:45:28.780 | sometimes and you listen to different arguments and you think, "This is a waste of time. What are

01:45:32.700 | you guys arguing about this stuff over?" And over the years I just got to the point where I don't

01:45:37.980 | care. I don't care about your local politics. And of course also here you have the great joy of being

01:45:44.220 | an expat where you just don't have to care much about it. You have this sense of freedom, right?

01:45:49.500 | That's what you get with PT theory is you don't need to worry too much about what any one government

01:45:53.580 | does because you're not beholden to the government. And it gave me this intense sense of freedom.

01:45:58.140 | Then going back to the United States, I still have my political opinions and whatnot, but I just am

01:46:01.980 | not going to bother arguing about them at this point in time. It's not profitable use of my time.

01:46:09.420 | And it helped me to feel free. And so if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a

01:46:15.740 | thing that I've done over the last few years. It has been much more disruptive, much more expensive,

01:46:20.620 | much more difficult than I ever thought it was going to be to set up all the plan B's. Today I

01:46:25.580 | could do it faster, easier, cheaper, but it was a painful learning experience. But having the plan

01:46:32.700 | B is really, really awesome. Knowing that I'm not beholden to any one country, knowing that my

01:46:37.660 | children aren't beholden to any one country is really awesome. But now I can appreciate much

01:46:42.700 | more the things that are really wonderful about the United States. And I don't want to pat myself

01:46:51.180 | on the back too much, but I think that's the healthy perspective. Appreciate the things about

01:46:54.940 | the country that you are in. Taking action can help you to feel better and then appreciating

01:47:01.260 | things about the country that you're in is I think the right scenario. So I hope that this

01:47:07.340 | in-depth nuanced discussion gives you what you need. I think that if you are inclined in the

01:47:12.940 | direction, set up a plan B. I don't think you'll regret that. If you are frustrated with where you

01:47:18.940 | live, I think look for a better place. And in some cases that better place will be outside the country,

01:47:23.980 | but in most cases I think the better place is probably just going to be a different city,

01:47:27.420 | different town, different state, different region than where you are right now. Because the United

01:47:33.100 | States has so much going for it that it's a probably 20% of the people who want to leave

01:47:39.020 | that probably should leave and 80% who should stay. And I hope this helps you to understand

01:47:44.140 | some of the benefits and some of the reasons why. I do conveniently enough have more help for you. If

01:47:50.700 | you are a person who still wants to have a plan B or even to have a plan A, I do have a course that

01:47:58.460 | I wrote that is available for you and you can get that at www.internationalskateplan.com. You've heard

01:48:05.340 | me discuss in detail my philosophy, what I've done. What you haven't heard me do is give any discussion

01:48:11.100 | of the details of practical details in this show. And I wanted to create a product that would help

01:48:20.220 | you with the practical details of knowing what to do and how to do it. And that product is

01:48:24.380 | www.internationalskateplan.com. If you buy that course, I will walk you through a four-phase

01:48:30.460 | approach to leaving your country. And I am agnostic about which country in the course.

01:48:36.060 | Of course, I'm an American so I talk some about that, but it can be any country. And I go through

01:48:43.340 | the different phases. Everything from just planning to be a tourist where, "Hey, I gotta leave because

01:48:47.820 | there's some inflation crisis going on or hyperinflation or something bad and I'm just

01:48:51.420 | gonna go be a tourist with a passport living on tourist visas," all the way through to being a

01:48:55.740 | complete expat. And I do it in a phased approach, extremely sensible. And I talk you through the

01:49:01.100 | good money and the bad because there are some things that you can do that are really inexpensive

01:49:05.180 | and there's some things that you can do that are expensive. And I give you good sound advice in that

01:49:08.940 | course on how to think about the cost of what's right for you, what's not right for you, etc.

01:49:13.500 | And in my opinion, it's probably the most level-headed, honest discussion of these issues

01:49:18.380 | that you will find. So if you're interested in practical advice on how to do it, go to

01:49:23.340 | internationalescapeplan.com and buy my course, internationalescapeplan.com.

01:49:29.900 | Don't just dream about paradise. Live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji

01:49:36.860 | Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale. Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep

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01:49:59.980 | (swooshing)

2022-08-17_882-Reflections_on_3.5_Years_of_Ex-Pat-tery