2023-11-22_Why_I_Will_Probably_Move_Back_to_the

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00:00:22.640 | Today on Radical Personal Finance, I want to share with you why I will probably go back

00:00:29.360 | to the United States in the future. Why I'll probably move back to the United States. I've

00:00:35.680 | been doing this series and this show is, I plan for this show to wrap up the series.

00:00:40.320 | I've done four podcast episodes on why I left the United States, sharing quite sincerely and sharing

00:00:45.440 | many of the most important reasons as to why I myself left the United States and moved abroad.

00:00:51.520 | But the capstone for this series is going to be today's show, which is why I will probably go back

00:00:56.240 | to the United States. Now, if my language sounds wishy-washy, it's because it reflects reality.

00:01:02.720 | Meaning that I have not moved back to the United States at the moment. I do not live there and I

00:01:07.200 | don't have any specific plans to move back to the United States. But that has more to do with the

00:01:13.040 | fact that I've built a great lifestyle and a great situation for myself abroad that has many good

00:01:18.320 | advantages at this phase of life. But looking down the road, I think that those advantages will

00:01:24.000 | change in the future. And I want to share with you some of the reasons why I think my circumstances

00:01:31.760 | probably will change in the future. And this is one of those shows where if you've ever felt guilty

00:01:37.440 | about not moving abroad and not leaving the United States or any country, I think I'll help you give

00:01:42.240 | you some good rational reasons as to why you'll want to stay. And at the end of the show, I'll

00:01:46.720 | share with you why I'm actually quite happy about the path that I've taken and how it has helped me

00:01:51.440 | personally and why I still recommend that other people pursue your own internationalization path.

00:01:57.600 | Let's begin by defining some terms. I want to share with you how things have changed.

00:02:02.320 | When I say I'll probably go back and live in the United States, these terms don't mean what they

00:02:09.520 | used to mean for me, nor do they mean what they used to mean for other people. I think one thing

00:02:14.960 | we can begin with and should begin with is simply how the concept of living somewhere changes. It

00:02:22.160 | changes when you yourself have moved or traveled a lot. It changes in our society as our society

00:02:29.840 | has changed and the technology of our day and age has changed. It is a concept that has changed.

00:02:35.600 | And I want to begin by sharing a simple story. In 2018, my wife and I were considering

00:02:43.840 | getting rid of our stuff and going full-time traveling. At the time, we were going to buy an

00:02:48.240 | RV. That was the plan. And we were just talking about it, thinking about it, etc. But prior to

00:02:53.360 | that time, I had lived for all of my life in one place in Florida, one town in Florida. That was

00:03:01.360 | where I was from, where all of my connections were. It's where I had built my life, my businesses,

00:03:05.680 | my loved ones. Everything was in Florida, in one town in Florida. And as I was considering going

00:03:12.800 | on this trip, it took us quite a long time to come to the decision to pick up and go.

00:03:18.320 | For many months, we were considering, "Well, should we go and do this? Should we travel?

00:03:22.640 | Should we not?" It was difficult for us to come to that decision. We spent a lot of time thinking

00:03:27.920 | about it, a lot of time talking about it, a lot of time questioning, "Is this what we should do?

00:03:32.400 | Is this something that is good for our family?" etc. And it took quite a while until we both came

00:03:37.920 | to the confidence and we were in agreement, "Yes, let's go ahead and do this. Let's go ahead and

00:03:41.760 | sell our stuff and put the rest of it in storage and buy an RV and go travel around the United

00:03:46.000 | States." Months to come to that conclusion and then months to prepare. Well, fast forward a

00:03:52.080 | couple of years or a few years later, my wife and I were having a similar conversation. This was now

00:03:57.760 | in 2021 and we were considering going full-time traveling again. As I recall, the second time

00:04:05.520 | around, it basically took us about one evening of conversation and a day to sleep on it to come to

00:04:10.320 | the decision to go full-time traveling again, even though the actual transition was much bigger.

00:04:16.640 | So the first time around, we were going to buy an RV, put our stuff in storage, etc. Second time

00:04:21.840 | around, we were just going traveling in suitcases, put the rest of the stuff in storage, but we'd

00:04:26.000 | slim things down a lot and we weren't even going to have a vehicle. We were just going to go live

00:04:29.360 | in Airbnbs and travel around the world. Plan was to spend six months in Europe, spend six months

00:04:34.080 | in Asia, etc. But the second time around, even though we had more children and everything was

00:04:39.360 | in theory more complicated, it took us about one night of conversation, another night to sleep on

00:04:44.720 | it and talk about it again, and we were decided. It only took me a few weeks to handle all the

00:04:50.560 | logistics of the stuff. Stuff got rid of quickly. It was just done. The reason was simply that it

00:04:56.960 | was no longer unknown. We had been there, done that. We knew what needed to be done. We knew

00:05:01.600 | what it was like. I knew what it would be like to travel, in that case full-time. I knew what

00:05:08.160 | needed to be done and I knew how relatively easy it would be to switch back and to change.

00:05:13.680 | That was something that I learned by experience, but it has been something that impacted me and

00:05:21.440 | changed how I think about things. I think another person might have experienced this with, say,

00:05:26.800 | moving. If you've ever moved from the town that you grew up in, the first time you move away,

00:05:31.600 | there's a lot of thought that goes into it, a lot of difficulty of that decision. The second time

00:05:37.120 | you move from that town somewhere else, it's easier to make that decision because you know

00:05:41.840 | what's involved. This is one of the experiences that I've had with the concept of living somewhere.

00:05:47.680 | Now, there's many of my fellow countrymen who move frequently around the United States. For

00:05:51.760 | better or worse, we're a very nomadic culture. We move a lot and most people don't think a lot

00:05:56.400 | about changing cities, changing houses, changing towns, but where the line is often drawn is that

00:06:02.000 | of changing countries. Yet, what I've experienced is that changing countries is not particularly

00:06:07.920 | different than changing towns. It just means that you're less likely to drive a U-Haul truck with

00:06:14.160 | your stuff in it and more likely to ship a pallet with an international shipper or ship a container

00:06:19.520 | or something like that. It just changes the logistics a little bit, especially once you

00:06:23.040 | deal with the paperwork and all of the details. Once you go through a residency program, once you

00:06:27.440 | get a visa, once you get another citizenship or something like that, then that all changes as

00:06:31.440 | well and you realize, "Okay, I've been there, done that. It wasn't all that difficult."

00:06:34.640 | The concept of even living somewhere changes when you've traveled a lot.

00:06:38.880 | I would highly recommend, if you've never done it, that you go through the exercise at some point of

00:06:43.440 | getting rid of all your stuff, selling it all, and then buying it all back again because it

00:06:49.440 | changes the kinds of things that you buy and it gives you a chance to reset. Once you realize how

00:06:54.400 | easy this is to do, then it changes your perspective. Today, the idea of moving back

00:07:00.800 | to the United States, for me, is not that big of a deal. Just like the idea of moving outside of the

00:07:07.120 | United States is just not that big of a deal. It does come with downsides. I'll address some

00:07:12.000 | of the downsides in a few minutes. But in terms of the logistics, once you've done it, it's not

00:07:17.520 | that big of a deal. So if I sound somewhat cavalier or flippant with how I'm talking about this,

00:07:23.200 | it's because I understand that it's not that hard to do. It's not that hard to change. It's not that

00:07:28.880 | hard to move abroad. It's not that hard to move back. And you don't have to make long decisions.

00:07:33.440 | You don't have to necessarily commit yourself and say, "I've got to be here for 40 years." You can

00:07:38.000 | actually come and go and change with frequency. Now, there are other changes that do affect this

00:07:44.560 | as well. So for me, one aspect of it was going through the process of moving my family from one

00:07:51.760 | country to another country. Then we moved back to the United States. I'll tell that story in a

00:07:55.840 | minute. Then it moved abroad on me almost immediately again. And so having done it and

00:08:01.760 | traveled a little bit does change. By the way, I think this is also due and important that we note

00:08:06.720 | that it's due to technology. And by technology here, I don't mean digital anything, although

00:08:11.040 | we'll talk about that in a moment. I mean, just simply the technology of travel. We are living

00:08:15.200 | in a day and age in which the world is very, very small. I was reading Adam Van… I don't know how

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00:09:03.600 | Today, you're closer… meaning, so today you can fly from the city that you live in to Pakistan

00:09:13.920 | in less than a day. He said, "Today, a guy living in New York City is functionally closer to

00:09:19.680 | Pakistan than 100 years ago you were if you were living in New York City to someone in Los Angeles

00:09:26.080 | or San Francisco." In terms of the technology of travel, I don't think we've caught up with what

00:09:30.800 | that means. Basically, today, you can be from anywhere to anywhere, more or less, at least from

00:09:38.080 | any major city to any major city, within about 24 hours or so. And you can do that pretty

00:09:44.640 | inexpensively, all things considered. Even if your ticket is a few thousand dollars, still,

00:09:49.120 | it's pretty inexpensive compared to what it used to cost to travel from one place on the planet to

00:09:54.960 | another place on the planet. And this is one of those things where once you do something,

00:09:59.520 | it changes your perspective. I remember when I first started booking my own airplane tickets,

00:10:04.000 | and I remember how I would agonize for weeks over airplane tickets. And I would plan a trip,

00:10:08.560 | and I would agonize, and I would buy. And the first few times I bought a ticket abroad for

00:10:13.040 | myself to go travel by myself, I remember it was a huge decision for me, even if the money,

00:10:18.080 | the actual money involved wasn't necessarily all that big. I always wondered with every trip,

00:10:22.000 | "Should I go and do this?" Well, today, I've bought so many airplane tickets over the days,

00:10:27.280 | over the years, that buying an airplane ticket is not that big of a deal. I bought 56 of them

00:10:34.320 | in the last couple of months. We had eight on my most recent trip. We had eight different airline

00:10:39.680 | legs, and I have seven tickets each, so I bought 56 airplane tickets. And so the idea of buying an

00:10:44.880 | airplane ticket is no big deal, especially if it's for one person. I mean, when I go to buy an

00:10:48.400 | airplane ticket, and I just have to buy a single ticket, man, it just feels the cheapest thing in

00:10:51.840 | the world. Fly across the country, fly across the world, one person for a meeting, I'm sold.

00:10:56.160 | It's easy. But that's something that just simply comes with doing it, with experience. And I've

00:11:01.280 | realized how weird that would sound to me of 10 years ago, when I had to think really carefully

00:11:06.880 | about each decision. The technology of communication, though, has changed everything

00:11:11.520 | fundamentally as well. I'm a millennial, but I'm one of those millennials who remembers how it was

00:11:16.720 | prior to the digital connection revolution. I know what it was like before the computer, I know what

00:11:22.880 | it was like before cell phones, and yet I'm also a digital native. And more importantly, internationally,

00:11:28.800 | I started engaging in international lifestyle exactly at the turning point of this digital

00:11:37.520 | revolution. And so I remember what that was. In 2005, I studied abroad in Costa Rica. And at that

00:11:42.960 | point in time, when I went abroad, we had virtually no connection back home, meaning that I was in the

00:11:50.880 | day and age in which we were fully and truly there, fully and truly immersed in the culture,

00:11:55.840 | immersed in our studies, immersed in the local environment. I was kind of on the leading edge,

00:12:01.280 | that I had a Skype account, and I had a plug-in headset, and I had my laptop. And so I could

00:12:06.160 | take my laptop and go and find some Wi-Fi somewhere, and I could plug in my headset,

00:12:11.520 | and I could call my family on Skype. But I also still used calling cards to call back home when

00:12:16.080 | I called back home. I would go and use a computer in a hotel lobby and send an email every now and

00:12:21.200 | then, but I was still away. I wasn't home. I was away. I signed up for Facebook in 2005 in Costa

00:12:29.280 | Rica. And so that was the starting point where all of a sudden I started getting in touch with

00:12:34.800 | everyone. Well, a couple years later, we have the iPhone, we have omnipresent Wi-Fi networks,

00:12:40.160 | and that was the first phase at which people were universally in contact. It wasn't inexpensive to

00:12:47.040 | take your cell phone everywhere, but you started to have Wi-Fi everywhere,

00:12:52.000 | and the consistency of that made it so that people were always in touch. And it was Skype,

00:12:56.880 | and then it was Facebook, etc. Well, that meant that when people left, not a lot changed.

00:13:04.480 | I remember when I talked, you know, back to Costa Rica in 2009, and I talked to some of the

00:13:10.080 | professors I had had, and we talked about this and about how things had changed, and that now

00:13:15.120 | students who were studying abroad were no longer fully abroad. They were still trying to be abroad,

00:13:20.720 | but they were trying to also keep in touch with their life back home. And this is one of those

00:13:25.200 | things that has changed across our society, is that formerly, if you left the town that you grew

00:13:29.760 | up in, and you moved to a town in the next state over, you had a breaking of all of your old

00:13:34.320 | relationships, and you substituted new relationships. But today, that breakage doesn't occur in the same

00:13:41.120 | way. We'll now bring in the world we live in now, where many of us have cell phone plans that

00:13:46.320 | basically work everywhere in the world, and it changes things even more. I don't even pay

00:13:52.640 | attention, I don't get local SIM cards, sometimes I'll get a local SIM, but I don't get local SIM

00:13:57.040 | cards, I just use one phone, one phone number, one phone plan, doesn't matter what country I'm in,

00:14:01.520 | it all just works. All of my financial infrastructure, it all works exactly the same. I

00:14:06.000 | swipe a credit card, and it swipes the same in Florida as it does in China. It's just all the

00:14:12.080 | same. My place is not the same as Cuba. So it just works, everything works. And so this means that

00:14:19.440 | the difference from one place to another is not as stark as it once was. And when you go through

00:14:26.320 | these changes, when you go through the concepts of you're connected, your phone is connected,

00:14:31.600 | your financial infrastructure all works, it's all the same, no matter where you are, and then you've

00:14:36.640 | moved around a lot, you've bought airplane tickets a lot, then the concept of living in a place

00:14:41.040 | changes, doesn't change all that much. Meaning that it's not as hard as it once was. Another

00:14:47.600 | big change for me that would make my comments on living somewhere sound different has to do with

00:14:52.400 | finances. Simply that when your finances are small, then your living expenses, meaning your

00:15:00.800 | cost of rent or cost of mortgage, etc., are often a very significant portion of your finances.

00:15:06.880 | But if your income grows, in many cases, your living expenses become a much less significant

00:15:13.200 | portion of your finances. And you can make that decision intentionally in a number of ways.

00:15:19.840 | And so I never understood, because I didn't grow up with having multiple homes, I grew up having

00:15:25.360 | one home, I never understood the concept of when people had multiple homes. But if you've been one

00:15:30.080 | who's had a vacation home or had multiple homes, you recognize that you can comfortably go back

00:15:34.560 | and forth between those homes. And if you stock them both the same, it doesn't make a big difference

00:15:39.280 | to you which home you're in. You just have certain things that you do in those homes.

00:15:42.960 | Well, once you cross borders a lot, and you have homes in multiple countries,

00:15:47.520 | then the same thing basically applies. And so if you ask me, "Joshua, where do you live?"

00:15:53.440 | then the question would be, "Well, how do I answer that? Do you mean what's my legal address

00:15:59.040 | where I receive mail?" Well, of course, I have a couple of legal addresses where I receive mail,

00:16:03.680 | but I don't sleep there. "Do you mean where I sleep? Well, what part of the year are you

00:16:08.160 | talking about? Are you talking about a holiday? Are you talking about a non-holiday? Is it cold?

00:16:11.760 | Is it hot?" etc. And then depending on where you're involved and your financial ability and

00:16:19.680 | what you've set up, you can pretty comfortably have multiple homes and live in multiple places

00:16:25.680 | and get around among those places without it being that big of a deal. Even if you don't have

00:16:31.840 | multiple homes, meaning you don't own them yourself, if you get a little bit of practice

00:16:38.160 | in the short-term rental market, then you'll quickly discover that you could be pretty

00:16:43.040 | comfortable just living in short-term rentals. And that also is a brand new technological innovation,

00:16:50.160 | I guess, in a few years now, but I'm just referring to Airbnb and other vacation rental sites,

00:16:55.200 | that formerly, if you went back 10 years, then if you were going to travel, you had a couple

00:17:02.240 | options. Option one was to stay in a hotel. And most of the time, you'd be staying in a nice

00:17:08.640 | business hotel or something like that that you were comfortable of. Maybe it was a brand name

00:17:11.760 | that you knew. Of course, you could stay in a local place. In many places in the world, you

00:17:15.600 | can go and you can rent a cabina or something like that. But you're staying in a hotel or

00:17:20.080 | you're going through all the difficulties of setting up a rental apartment. You might go and

00:17:25.920 | rent the apartment. Then you have to figure out how to get my utilities turned on and you got to

00:17:29.920 | do all that and you sign leases, etc. Airbnb and other sites have completely revolutionized this

00:17:36.400 | aspect of a home as well. I think many people can live very comfortably in Airbnb on long-term

00:17:45.440 | rentals, multi-month rentals. I don't think it's so great with children. I've done it a lot and I

00:17:51.360 | don't love it with children. I have a list of things I don't like about Airbnb, various things.

00:17:58.160 | The biggest annoyance is usually the kitchen doesn't have the gear that you need. But

00:18:01.760 | if you were a couple or a small family or something like that, maybe you travel with

00:18:07.440 | a suitcase that has your frying pans and your kitchen tools that you know that you need.

00:18:12.960 | You can go and do a month-by-month rentals in these properties and the price is very,

00:18:18.880 | very affordable. The price depends upon the city, obviously. It also depends upon the specific

00:18:25.600 | landlord or host. But I've estimated just off the top of my head that you probably pay about

00:18:32.640 | 20% to 30% more to rent an apartment on Airbnb than you would if you went and did it all yourself.

00:18:39.760 | Now, that may sound like a lot, may sound like a little. I consider that a bargain of a steal

00:18:46.560 | in exchange for flexibility. Think about it. You want to go to another city, almost literally

00:18:52.640 | anywhere in the world. You want to go to another city and you want to rent an apartment. You want

00:18:56.080 | to rent an apartment for a month, possibly two months. And all you got to do is plunk in your

00:19:01.600 | credit card. And when you show up to that apartment, the apartment is rented, the lights are

00:19:06.320 | on, everything is clean, the internet works, everything is ready for you. It's completely

00:19:11.280 | furnished. You can show up, you can live there, and you can leave two months later. And you only

00:19:16.560 | pay 20% more for that as compared to what you would have to go and find a landlord and negotiate

00:19:23.120 | a lease and sign yourself up for a long-term commitment and go around and get your lights on,

00:19:26.560 | get your water on, get your utilities on, buy a bunch of furniture, get it all set up, etc.

00:19:31.760 | A mere 20% more for all that convenience, it's astounding. Now, if you know you're going to be

00:19:38.400 | in the same place all the time, obviously, get your own place. But that convenience means that

00:19:43.200 | I think a lot of people can and do live fairly comfortably just in Airbnb rental apartments.

00:19:49.680 | And it doesn't cost all that much more, especially if you're engaging in some form of

00:19:55.040 | geo-arbitrage. And so when you question these concepts, the concepts of living in a place

00:20:01.760 | don't mean what they used to mean. Again, if I'm posting on Facebook and talking to my friends

00:20:08.720 | from the city that I grew up in, I can show up in the city that I grew up in and have, to some

00:20:14.400 | degree, similar relationships as to what I would have if I lived there the whole time. I can

00:20:19.600 | negotiate and coordinate activities, etc. If I got a place to stay and all that stuff, the concept

00:20:24.960 | of living in a place is just different than it once was. And so I find this a really powerful

00:20:31.360 | expression of our modern age. And it means that the way that we talk about things hasn't yet

00:20:37.520 | caught up. When we talk about, "I live here," traditionally, our language would indicate that

00:20:44.240 | I'm committed to this place. But I can live in multiple places around the world in any year.

00:20:49.680 | And I can live in multiple places around the world over the course of a few years. So when

00:20:55.920 | I think about moving back to the United States, I'm happy to consider that in a comprehensive way,

00:21:04.240 | meaning that, "Okay, I've changed from one location to the other location." But it's much

00:21:09.760 | more likely for me to be simply, "I spend more time in the United States." And the amount of

00:21:15.680 | time that I spend in the United States can vary. Do I live in a place if I spend three months there

00:21:21.520 | out of the year? Right now, I can easily and comfortably spend three or four months a year

00:21:26.480 | in the United States if I want to. That's not a problem. Or does it mean I live in the place

00:21:31.040 | eight months? Or do I have to live there 11 months, etc.? So you see how things change.

00:21:34.960 | And these words that we have, we haven't yet invented a new vocabulary to account for these.

00:21:44.800 | But there are some things that I really appreciate about the United States. And those things do

00:21:49.760 | factor into my saying, "Yeah, I'll probably move back to the United States." And I have found that

00:21:55.840 | I think with children, especially children of a certain age, I don't think a nomadic lifestyle

00:22:01.440 | is ideal. One of the personal assets that I have enjoyed that I didn't fully appreciate when I was

00:22:09.280 | younger was how you can build such a richer network of relationships by living in a place for

00:22:19.280 | a long period of time. It's one of those things where you're kind of blind to it because it's

00:22:23.440 | always been the way that you are. But remember, I said I lived in a place, one place for the

00:22:29.600 | entirety of my life until I was in my 30s. And when I left that place, all of a sudden I realized

00:22:35.360 | how valuable that web of strong connections was that I had built and how integral that was to my

00:22:42.640 | life and lifestyle on so many levels. And I want my children to have a similar benefit. I want them

00:22:49.760 | to have the opportunity to build that web of connections on a deep level. And that implies

00:22:55.440 | a greater commitment to place. It doesn't mean it has to be one place. I don't think any of us

00:23:00.880 | would... Let's say that you live in Atlanta, Georgia, and you live there 10 months a year,

00:23:08.400 | but then during the months you send your children to Italy, to the old country so that they can

00:23:14.560 | connect with their family there and they spend summer vacations there. Well, you're really

00:23:18.560 | obviously connected to Georgia, but you have connections in both places. So I think it's

00:23:23.200 | more important that we have consistency over time to build those connections and build those

00:23:27.280 | resources than it is that it just be one specific place. Also, one more comment,

00:23:39.120 | I'm going to get into specifics. Your needs change at different points in your life.

00:23:46.080 | And your need and desire to go abroad or move to another place will vary. For example, as you can

00:23:52.960 | tell from the previous episodes, it was very, very important for me to have the option and the

00:23:59.040 | ability to leave the United States. It was very important to me, and I have invested an enormous

00:24:04.400 | amount of time, an enormous amount of money in building those options for myself. If I did not

00:24:10.320 | have those options, it would still be just as important to me as it was a number of years ago

00:24:16.160 | when I started to build it. So I don't regret anything that I have done. It was very important

00:24:22.240 | to me to have the option to leave, but it was never my plan that I had to leave, that I really

00:24:27.520 | wanted to leave, that that was the most important thing for me. And so you want to ask yourself,

00:24:33.120 | what do I specifically need at this point in time? Why do some people go abroad? Well, maybe you need

00:24:40.160 | tax savings. In my situation, what I described, it wasn't so much tax savings from a how can I

00:24:46.720 | keep more of my money perspective. It was more of a matter of I need to figure out how I can

00:24:51.520 | legally get out of the tax net if I need to or want to. And that can be something that is,

00:24:57.760 | that moving abroad can help a lot. But most people don't need tax savings because most people do not

00:25:05.280 | make millions and millions and millions of dollars a year. If you do make millions and millions of

00:25:10.240 | dollars a year, you kind of have this really difficult double-edged question. Number one,

00:25:16.080 | I make millions and millions and millions of dollars a year. So therefore, if I can eliminate

00:25:22.720 | or significantly reduce my taxes, I can save lots and lots of money. But also, I now make millions

00:25:29.600 | and millions and millions of dollars a year. So that means that I have complete and total freedom.

00:25:34.880 | Shouldn't I live where I actually want to live? This is why I advise people that tax savings

00:25:40.400 | should be one component of your overall structure and plan, but not an exclusive component. Because

00:25:48.880 | tax savings for the kind of, for lower income don't matter, for middle income don't matter all

00:25:55.280 | that much. And for the high income, you get to the point where it's more a matter of where do you

00:26:00.720 | want to live and are you really going to let the tax man govern that, et cetera. There may be other

00:26:07.520 | freedoms that you need. So for example, I homeschool my children. Being able to homeschool

00:26:12.000 | my children is very, very important to me. But it wouldn't be important to me if I weren't

00:26:18.000 | homeschooling my children. It's only important at a certain time in my life. And that may be with

00:26:24.320 | young children, maybe that as my children get older, I'll enroll them in different schools

00:26:28.560 | to get other things that I can't provide in a homeschool environment. Or it may just mean that

00:26:32.800 | my children have grown and moved out of my house. And so therefore homeschooling them is no longer

00:26:37.360 | a big deal. So the United States has the world's greatest homeschooling freedoms of any country in

00:26:42.480 | the world. You can homeschool in many other countries. But if you want basically absolute

00:26:47.040 | freedom to educate your children as you see fit, the United States is the best destination for you.

00:26:51.600 | There are other things that people want that don't apply to me. So for example,

00:26:58.000 | sometimes people go abroad because they want to party. They want to go where they can live cheap

00:27:01.600 | and party on the beach or do drugs or meet people, et cetera. There's a bunch of degenerates running

00:27:06.640 | around the world basically traveling exclusively to party with no long-term plans, et cetera.

00:27:12.800 | That's completely irrelevant and immaterial to me. I don't party. I don't do that stuff. I don't run

00:27:17.120 | around with those who do. And so it doesn't matter to me. So I could live in the United States and

00:27:21.760 | the ability to "party" is not important to me at all. But on the other hand, what is important to

00:27:29.360 | me is having a place where my children have opportunity and them having opportunity.

00:27:37.440 | So one guy might get on an airplane and go to Nicaragua because he can live on the beach and

00:27:43.280 | surf every day and party every night and has a whole harem full of Latinas. But

00:27:49.360 | when it comes time to actually raising children, he's thinking about a different thing. And if you

00:27:54.640 | compare the opportunity that he has, especially as an expat, as a foreigner, and his children have

00:28:01.200 | in a place like Nicaragua versus a place like Florida, there's just no comparison.

00:28:06.960 | Now, if you were from Nicaragua, if you were part of the culture, the connected class,

00:28:12.960 | the rich class you were already in, then maybe you would live in Nicaragua, et cetera.

00:28:17.920 | But in general, for an outsider coming in, it would be hopeless for you to try to build

00:28:23.520 | something big and create opportunity for your children in Nicaragua if you had the opportunity

00:28:29.520 | to go to the United States. And so your needs change over time. And for all the same reasons

00:28:35.280 | that you might live in a small town and move to a big city, then move from a big city to a small

00:28:39.440 | town, the same thing applies on a country level. And you will want to consider that personally.

00:28:46.000 | One of the first big reasons why I seriously consider moving back to the United States

00:28:50.640 | is that life in the United States is life on easy mode. It really is. I understand and I'm

00:29:00.480 | sympathetic to those who don't find life in the United States to be life on easy mode.

00:29:04.400 | But in everywhere I've gone and what I have done, I have found that life in the United States is

00:29:11.760 | life on easy mode, all things considered. I think there are things that on any particular issue,

00:29:18.640 | I could name other places that I've found that, "Hey, on this issue, I think this is a really

00:29:23.520 | great spot," or, "I really like the culture here," or, "I really like how they do this process."

00:29:27.120 | But on across the issues, life in the United States is life on easy mode. Most things work,

00:29:35.520 | and most things work pretty well, especially most of the things that matter to you on a daily basis

00:29:43.440 | in terms of building a life. Some of the simplest things, like getting a job. The labor market in

00:29:49.440 | the United States is outstanding. Anybody who wants to be employed can be employed today.

00:29:54.480 | Anybody who wants to build a career can build a career over a few years. Anybody who wants to

00:30:02.160 | live on their salary, you can live on just about any level of pay that you get in the United States.

00:30:07.600 | Certainly, if you're getting started and your wages are low, you're going to be working a lot

00:30:11.200 | of hours, but there are ways to live on the income. If you've built a lot of money and a lot

00:30:16.560 | of business and whatnot, then that is not so important to you. If you have an independent

00:30:20.480 | business you could do with an internet connection, that matters less to you. But for most people,

00:30:25.440 | that's a big deal. And recognize that I view most of my life through the eyes of my children.

00:30:31.920 | For young people, that's a big deal. The ability to simply get a job, be paid properly for the work

00:30:38.000 | that you do, and grow that job into a career is incredibly important. And in the United States,

00:30:44.080 | most things work. The job market is simple. There's not a lot of discrimination. There's not

00:30:49.760 | a lot of barriers to entry. Yes, some industries, some jobs are restricted with licensing schemes,

00:30:56.880 | etc. But most of those make mostly sense. You can work your way through them in a

00:31:02.240 | reasonable amount of time. You can get the relevant paperwork done fairly quickly.

00:31:06.400 | You want to live in a place? You can go and live in a place. You don't have to register with the

00:31:10.160 | police. You just go rent someplace. If you need a bedroom, you can go onto Craigslist or Facebook

00:31:15.280 | Marketplace. You can find a bedroom to rent. If you want an apartment to rent, you can find an

00:31:19.920 | apartment to rent today of reasonable size. You can find a house to rent, etc. There are disparities

00:31:26.800 | among cities. Many of the complaints that people make comes down to, "Well, I can't afford to live

00:31:32.320 | in Miami." Well, you may not be able to afford to live in Miami, which is why you might consider

00:31:37.040 | moving somewhere else or figuring out how to afford to live in Miami. But the cities that

00:31:41.920 | everyone complains about, you can fix that by just choosing another place. Housing is cheap in Iowa

00:31:48.320 | or Ohio or Georgia, etc. And so you can change a lot of things pretty simply. Most things in the

00:31:54.880 | United States work well. The government systems are generally fairly straightforward. As much as

00:32:00.080 | I might like to complain, just like we all do about the Department of Motor Vehicles, in some

00:32:04.000 | cases, it makes a lot more sense than some of the other ones. Over the last few years, I've built a

00:32:09.120 | stack of driver's licenses in different countries. And so I've spent a good amount of time sitting in

00:32:15.040 | motor vehicle offices, getting driver's licenses and whatnot. And the process in the United States

00:32:21.280 | is simpler and more straightforward than it is in most places, and it's more predictable.

00:32:25.520 | And so life in the United States really is life on easy mode. The accessibility that you have to

00:32:32.720 | stuff, the United States has the most resources of any country in the world. And I mean that on

00:32:38.400 | a macro level as well as on a micro level. On a macro level, the country is abundantly blessed

00:32:45.040 | with incredible fertile farmland and incredible rivers and highways for transportation systems and

00:32:51.520 | all kinds of just basic natural resources. And even just the human resources, the cultural capital

00:32:58.240 | and the people in the country, etc. is powerful. You can start a company and you can find employees

00:33:02.960 | who are qualified in most companies. And so it has the most resources from a macro level of just

00:33:09.680 | about any country in the world. But even for individuals, little things like Amazon.

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00:33:48.880 | quite frankly, the cheapness of life in the United States is pretty stunning once you've been out of

00:33:54.400 | it a while. I remember when I was growing up, my parents had lived internationally. And so we had

00:33:59.520 | various international friends and they traveled a good bit internationally. And people would come

00:34:03.200 | and visit us. And I distinctly remember we had this friend who would come and visit every year

00:34:07.520 | from or every couple of years from England. And whenever he would go back home to England,

00:34:11.520 | he would buy all kinds of stuff. He would buy saws and big equipment. He was a carpenter at

00:34:16.720 | a carpentry company. He would buy all this stuff in the United States and take it back to England

00:34:20.160 | as luggage on the airplane. I never got it. I was like, "Don't you sell the stuff over there?"

00:34:24.480 | And what I discovered as I've gotten older and traveled more is that the sheer volume of stuff

00:34:30.400 | that you can get in the United States at cheap prices is really unmatched in most anywhere in

00:34:36.480 | the world. There are always exceptions. There are certain electronics you can only get in Japan.

00:34:41.280 | There are certain products that you can only get in Asia or in Europe, etc. But on the whole,

00:34:46.240 | the United States is a shopper's paradise. I find myself now doing exactly the same thing

00:34:52.560 | that my friends used to do. When I go to the United States,

00:34:57.680 | the mailman knows that I'm coming because the boxes start stacking up. And I'll make enormous

00:35:05.200 | Amazon orders because I can get exactly what I want and it shows up at my door and it's cheap.

00:35:10.400 | It's just crazy cheap. I used to look at going shopping at the mall or something like that

00:35:16.720 | and look askance at that because I thought, "Well, who would shop on the mall? Don't they know they

00:35:21.200 | can save all that money and make it half price by shopping online or getting something at some

00:35:27.520 | specific store?" Well, now I go to the United States and if I didn't get something on Amazon,

00:35:32.480 | I just go to the mall and I feel like I'm getting a deal. And so the number of resources the country

00:35:37.040 | has is amazing. Even if you're not buying new stuff, the secondhand markets in the United

00:35:42.240 | States, because of the huge population and the wealth of the population, the secondhand markets

00:35:47.840 | in the United States are incredible. Just simply the stuff that is thrown away in the dumpsters

00:35:52.000 | and on the side of the road is amazing. Then you bring in the secondhand markets and cars and

00:35:57.120 | electronics and all the stuff that's available today for anybody who wants it on any secondhand

00:36:02.800 | basis is incredible. All of the built-in resources to the whole country are amazing.

00:36:08.240 | You have libraries that are stocked not only with all the books that you need and all the books that

00:36:14.400 | you want so that you don't have to buy all the stuff, but they're stocked with technology

00:36:19.040 | connections and computers for all and a podcast studio and a video studio, etc. Not only the

00:36:26.000 | government stuff, but there's all kinds of libraries where you can go and, "I want to rent

00:36:30.560 | a camera. I want to rent a lens. I want to rent all this stuff." It's available. It's amazing.

00:36:35.760 | The technology, the access to technology in the United States is second to none. It may not be on

00:36:41.280 | everything, but on the vast majority of things, the best new gear and the best new gadgets are

00:36:46.640 | released in the United States. All the best software is available in the United States.

00:36:51.360 | It's incredible. Even things like the banks in the United States, it's easy to go and get things

00:36:56.880 | done. It's annoying. I get annoyed. You have to go and fill in all your personal information,

00:37:00.720 | but compared to the process I've been in some countries around the world, it's easy. Everything

00:37:05.680 | is cheap in banking services. It doesn't cost you a lot. You have great banks. You have more

00:37:11.840 | financial privacy than you have in many countries of the world. It just works.

00:37:16.160 | Resources in terms of funding, you're trying to start a business and you need funding for it. It's

00:37:20.880 | like the money just falls out of the trees at you. You can go and borrow money in any number of

00:37:26.320 | ways. There's investors left, right, and center. Just the people that you know around you,

00:37:31.120 | you know millionaires everywhere who could if they wanted to invest in your business and invest

00:37:36.720 | $10,000 or $100,000 or a million dollars and get you going because there's just oodles of them.

00:37:43.600 | They're everywhere. Those resources mean that in many cases, if you're going around the world

00:37:50.720 | and you are trying to start something or do something, the resources that are in the United

00:37:57.680 | States are abundant. When you need money or resources, it's there. When you need to get

00:38:02.400 | stuff, it's cheap and it's available. It works so well. I think this is one of the reasons

00:38:07.600 | that perhaps Americans started to appreciate this with all the shortages that started to

00:38:12.880 | happen during COVID. We had shipping issues and all kinds of supply line issues and whatnot.

00:38:17.760 | It was one of those things where it was basically the first time that Americans had to face what so

00:38:23.040 | many people around the world live with every day. Hopefully, you appreciate that. It's hard to

00:38:29.840 | appreciate it if you're accustomed to it. All you want to do is growl and moan and groan about

00:38:34.800 | inflation and prices these days and everything is so bad, etc. Travel a little bit and learn

00:38:42.800 | to appreciate it. I remember so distinctly. Let me come back and emphasize. Friends,

00:38:49.600 | the ability to access work in the United States is so transformative. In 2012, I went to Haiti.

00:38:56.640 | I remember how much that experience changed my life because I was just surrounded by people who

00:39:03.840 | couldn't get a job because there were none. I went back to the United States and I just

00:39:10.400 | looked around and I just thought, "There's jobs everywhere. It's amazing." Access to work is an

00:39:15.520 | enormous issue. Access to opportunity is an enormous issue. That's probably one of the

00:39:22.560 | biggest things that is likely to draw me back in the future. In the United States, the diversity

00:39:29.440 | of opportunity is enormous. It just feels like it's completely untapped. Every time you turn

00:39:36.640 | around, you've got someone new, some new story of somebody who has built a business and something

00:39:41.200 | you never thought of. What happens is when you go looking for it, they're everywhere.

00:39:45.200 | You don't have to necessarily have an original idea. There's a guy that's pitching a franchise

00:39:50.560 | here. There's someone who says, "Why don't you open this store for me there?" You can become

00:39:55.040 | wealthy with all these things just through hard work and a few years of deep, deep effort. You

00:40:00.400 | don't need amazing ideas. One of the biggest things that has affected me has been trying to

00:40:08.080 | figure out how to give opportunities to my children. As I stated in the episode where I

00:40:13.600 | talked about going abroad for opportunities, there are certain opportunities that I have been able to

00:40:18.960 | give to my children by going abroad. But there are also many doors that have closed based upon

00:40:25.520 | going abroad. For example, I think that any parent of children in the United States can pretty easily

00:40:32.800 | help his children earn a few hundred dollars a week if they want to without that much difficulty.

00:40:39.680 | You can make a few hundred dollars a week just having your children bake bread and sell it at

00:40:44.000 | church on Sunday morning or put out a stand on the side of the road. Lemonade stands don't work

00:40:49.440 | anymore, but selling fresh homemade bread to your neighbors does. All the stuff that is built into

00:40:56.400 | the US experience is still there. It's so easy to do if anybody wants to do it. But that's because

00:41:02.720 | there's plenty of money and there's plenty of support. The entrepreneurial spirit in the United

00:41:07.360 | States is something that extends down even to children. We admire children who go and bake

00:41:13.440 | bread and sell it. We admire children who learn how to tie balloons and go and tie balloons at

00:41:18.480 | a local festival. We admire people who dedicate themselves to these things and do it. And so it's

00:41:24.880 | not that difficult for a 12-year-old to make two or three hundred dollars a week in, I don't know,

00:41:30.320 | 10 hours of work per week on a consistent ongoing basis. That doesn't exist in many parts of the

00:41:36.560 | world for various reasons, but it doesn't exist in many parts of the world. And before you cry

00:41:42.400 | about "it used to be better" and they're going to call the health department, yeah, sure. But

00:41:46.160 | there's a culture in the United States of basically thumbing your nose at the health department.

00:41:50.720 | And if the health department shuts down your baked bread that you

00:41:54.960 | trundle around the neighborhood and sell to all your neighbors once a week,

00:41:59.680 | and they actually shut that down, you'll have twice the number of customers next week when it

00:42:04.880 | gets printed up in the newspaper because everybody hates the health department, broadly speaking.

00:42:09.440 | As Americans, we just despise government officials sticking their nose in where it

00:42:14.560 | doesn't belong. And so there'll be more support than ever. And when you look through the levels,

00:42:19.760 | the opportunities that are there in the United States are a big deal. Even simple things like

00:42:23.760 | right to work. The most discriminated against classes of people in the world today are the very

00:42:30.800 | young and the old and very old. And they are the most discriminated against people, legally speaking.

00:42:37.440 | All of the laws around the world that were designed, in theory, to protect children from

00:42:43.360 | being exploited as workers have become an extreme weakness in helping children to develop their

00:42:52.160 | skills in the workplace. And so many places in the world, you can't get a job legally of any kind

00:42:58.640 | until you're 18 years old. In the United States, most states, you can start working legally

00:43:04.400 | in various capacities, certainly by the time you're 15. In many places at 14 and at 13,

00:43:13.200 | and you can always work in some capacity in either a family-owned business or in your own

00:43:18.480 | business of some kind. And so even if you may not be able to go and get a job at 12,

00:43:23.040 | you can still work at 12. And not only is it legal to do, but the culture supports it.

00:43:29.440 | And so there are lots of people who will hire a 12-year-old and pay cash and be happy to do that.

00:43:34.080 | There are lots of business people who will support a 12-year-old entrepreneur, etc.

00:43:37.600 | And so that level of opportunity is hard to match in many places of the world.

00:43:42.320 | And because that opportunity is so broad, you don't need a lot of training. There's just

00:43:48.560 | businesses left, right, and center. Now, there's lots of opportunity in many places in the world

00:43:53.680 | for you to go and build yourself after professional formation. You can make piles of money living and

00:43:59.920 | working in Hong Kong. You can make oodles of money living and working in Dubai, etc.

00:44:05.680 | After you've had training and formation and licensure, etc. But to make a ton of money as

00:44:10.640 | a 12-year-old in Hong Kong, that's really hard to do. And that's why their systems are so

00:44:16.720 | focused on academic proficiency and you just live, breathe, need school all the time.

00:44:23.840 | Whereas in the United States, a 12-year-old, you want to start a business,

00:44:27.120 | again, a couple of hundred bucks of investment, boom, you're in business.

00:44:30.720 | And that's so pervasive across the culture and so widely accepted that it means huge

00:44:37.120 | opportunities for children. And I genuinely think this is one of the biggest advantages

00:44:41.600 | growing up in the United States, that the access to these things can help your average 18-year-old

00:44:48.480 | or your average 20-year-old to have such a deeper level of experience of working for others,

00:44:53.840 | of earning money, of having his own sense of freedom, that from a maturity perspective,

00:44:58.880 | it can put a child far ahead of many of his peers all around the world.

00:45:03.600 | I'm not saying anything against academics, etc. Super important. But it's not that hard to put

00:45:08.560 | those two things together. I've known homeschool student story after homeschool student story

00:45:13.520 | after homeschool student story of teenagers who have, they do three to four hours of school in

00:45:20.000 | the morning. They get twice or three times the level of academic results that people get in

00:45:24.480 | the government schools just due to efficiency of time. And they work three to four to five hours

00:45:28.800 | in the afternoon. And they make basically a man's wage, sometimes it's doing their own thing.

00:45:34.080 | Sometimes it's something as simple as doing bookkeeping or tech support or something like

00:45:38.240 | that. Again, you don't have to come up with some great new idea. All you got to do is learn a skill

00:45:42.960 | and apply it. And you can just do it consistently. And so a teen in the United States can get above

00:45:49.440 | average academic results, can save 20, 30, $40,000 a year through part-time work, and still have

00:45:57.760 | plenty of time to hang out with his friends, to goof off, to work on personal hobbies, personal

00:46:03.600 | skill development, etc. Whereas around the world, that's much, seems to me much harder to do. Not

00:46:09.920 | only do you face much more significant issues with homeschooling in many cases, more legal hoops to

00:46:15.760 | jump through, more worries about government agents sticking their nose into your business,

00:46:20.800 | but the culture doesn't have the same opportunities. The jobs aren't as abundant,

00:46:26.160 | they're not as easy to get. And so there are standout exceptions. There are entrepreneurs

00:46:30.560 | who are above average ability who can put their free time and make it. You can make it in any

00:46:36.640 | country in the world. But the depth of being able to make in the United States is really unique.

00:46:42.240 | So average people can make it big in the United States if they simply apply the right techniques

00:46:48.160 | consistently over time. And so I think that's a big deal. The USA has huge opportunity.

00:46:55.120 | The United States broadly has extreme stability. Now, I understand it may not feel that way. It

00:47:02.080 | has not felt like the country is particularly stable over the last decade or so, because we

00:47:08.240 | are in a time in which it's probably not stable. But what's interesting about that is that the vast

00:47:14.400 | majority of people, if they turned off their access to social media, if they turned off their

00:47:22.640 | Apple News or Google News accounts and they stopped getting notifications on their phone,

00:47:27.440 | and they turned off their NPR and radio news and they turned off all the news,

00:47:31.680 | that stability isn't so visible on a daily basis. I'm not denying that there's more instability than

00:47:41.280 | perhaps there has been at different times. But the perception of instability is something that

00:47:46.800 | we do to ourselves based upon what we consume. And perhaps as a political junkie, I'm very more

00:47:54.400 | sensitive to this than many people, but it doesn't have to be that way. Broadly speaking, the United

00:48:00.960 | States is very, very stable. And what's interesting is that even though our current national politics

00:48:06.640 | have become very extreme, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, whoever comes next, and the

00:48:14.000 | back and forth, the actual system itself continues to work broadly pretty well. Politicians bark a

00:48:21.040 | lot, they say a lot, but they don't actually change much. They don't legislate. Congress is

00:48:26.480 | not passing laws. Politicians are not actually changing much from a legislative perspective.

00:48:31.760 | You could see that as a positive thing or as a negative thing. I can make both arguments.

00:48:37.040 | But the system itself is designed to suppress extremism and to be very slow to change.

00:48:42.880 | And that leads to an overall sense of stability in the country that doesn't exist in some other

00:48:48.720 | places. There are many other stable places. And I would say this is one of the least important

00:48:53.360 | place things. But it is still important to recognize that the USA broadly has stability.

00:48:58.960 | The basic institutions across the land, the institutions of government, the institutions

00:49:04.880 | of our civic life, et cetera, while changing, right? Yes, we are bowling alone. Those changes

00:49:12.400 | are important. And in another context, we can look at those because they're important and we

00:49:18.000 | should deal with them. But they change very slowly. And so there's broadly stability. And

00:49:23.200 | within that stability, there's enormous opportunity for individuals to be successful.

00:49:29.600 | I think the bones of the United States are really good, and they continue to be really good. I

00:49:35.200 | appreciate more than I ever did the basic strength of American geography, the basic physical

00:49:42.160 | wealth that the country has, and the basic protection that it has from outsiders, the basic

00:49:47.760 | wealth building features that the country has. I think it's fantastic. I think the governmental

00:49:53.760 | system matters enormously. And while politics is often chaotic, and while there's many abuses that

00:50:01.440 | have happened and are happening by government, the basic protections for individuals in the

00:50:07.760 | United States continue to be some of the strongest in the world. The First Amendment, man, if you

00:50:13.360 | don't think the First Amendment matters, just go and hang out in England for a while. It's crazy.

00:50:18.720 | You think, oh, well, we broadly have these same traditions. The United States was birthed out of

00:50:22.400 | the English tradition. The English-speaking peoples of the world come together. The First

00:50:27.120 | Amendment is a big, big deal. And the basic… And so you have two components of that. Number one,

00:50:35.040 | you have the law itself. And number two, you have the broad civilizational support for the spirit

00:50:44.160 | of the law. And in order to have a functional society that operates according to its principles,

00:50:50.960 | you need both of those things. You need the law, but the actual application of the law

00:50:55.840 | doesn't happen all that much. You need the culture to enforce the spirit of the law.

00:51:02.160 | And when the culture supports the spirit of the law, you have the true impact of the law.

00:51:07.920 | When laws are established, they are basically a virtue signaling device. They're trying to tell

00:51:13.760 | you what to do and what not to do. And many people who break the law will never get caught or punished

00:51:20.560 | by the justice system. But the impact of the law will work broadly across a society. And so

00:51:27.520 | something like the First Amendment is enormously important. The Second Amendment, enormously

00:51:32.560 | important. It has been one of the biggest victories for those of us in the conservative

00:51:37.120 | sphere of politics over the last 30 or 40 years. When I was younger, I was very worried about the

00:51:42.320 | right and the freedom to keep and bear arms. And I was very worried that things are difficult

00:51:46.160 | and whatever. This has been one of the biggest political successes that we've had that I can

00:51:50.560 | point to. And that revolution has been happening step by step over time. It's been amazing.

00:51:56.320 | Once again, it's not just the law. The law itself has been strengthened. We've had just consistently

00:52:01.840 | fantastic court cases across all of the relevant issues related to the right to keep and bear arms.

00:52:08.240 | But it's more important, the actual practical outgoing of it. So not only is the law,

00:52:14.400 | does the law there, but there's a culture there. And not only is there a culture of

00:52:19.360 | common gun ownership, but there's a culture of 3D printing, of having printing parties where you

00:52:26.080 | get your friends together and you either mill out your 80% lowers or whatever you're doing,

00:52:32.240 | or you build firearms. It's just the culture is there supporting it. The culture of modification,

00:52:38.240 | et cetera, it's enormous. And so it's hugely impactful. And the Second Amendment has an

00:52:44.000 | enormous positive influence on suppressing all of the things that can't be suppressed by the First

00:52:52.160 | Amendment, by simply speech. And so having that as legally rock solid, as well as culturally rock

00:53:00.880 | solid in the United States, is an enormously positive thing. Thankfully, it's mostly symbolic.

00:53:07.040 | I think that the best way to view the Second Amendment and the broad ownership of firearms

00:53:14.080 | is in a symbolic manner. One of the reasons I didn't talk about this, because I have a long

00:53:19.360 | list of minor reasons in my notes, but one of the reasons I left the United States was because

00:53:24.240 | I became convinced that I would never be involved in an armed revolution of any kind.

00:53:29.680 | And one of the safety valves is that when people don't feel like they have another choice,

00:53:37.280 | then they often participate in some kind of armed revolution or insurrection or something like that,

00:53:43.200 | because they just don't feel like they have another choice. And I decided that I'm firmly

00:53:47.200 | opposed to revolution, especially armed revolution, because of the inability that anybody

00:53:52.000 | has to control the direction of that revolution. And it often will result in something far worse

00:53:57.680 | than was behind. But I realized that it would be much safer if I had the release valve and I knew

00:54:04.880 | I never had to stay in a particular country. And so that was one of the reasons why I left.

00:54:11.040 | So, you know, right, people, broad scale firearms ownership is not a practical thing. Nobody's

00:54:16.960 | going to pick up guns and go and, you know, storm City Hall and whatnot. But it's a very symbolic

00:54:23.600 | thing, because knowing that you could do something at any point in time, puts a little bit of spine,

00:54:29.360 | spine in your back, a little strength in your spine. And it has an effect across the society.

00:54:34.880 | And it's enormously impactful. And if there ever were military invasion of some kind,

00:54:41.840 | or if there ever were military issues, it could go very badly. But I think more likely,

00:54:49.280 | it would be it basically doesn't exist. And you look at places around the world,

00:54:54.800 | you look at, I guess, the most recent kind of big name wars have been Israel and Ukraine.

00:54:59.360 | And you look at how, I mean, Israel itself had all these just crazy gun control laws,

00:55:05.120 | when you've got enemies on your very border, and thousands, hundreds and hundreds of people

00:55:08.960 | are dead because of it. And so just knowing that that is, it's a very impactful issue.

00:55:14.160 | Third Amendment doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter right now.

00:55:17.680 | US Army can't even recruit enough soldiers, let alone quarter them. But Fourth and Fifth

00:55:22.560 | Amendments, hugely impactful in terms of the basic bones of the country. And what's important

00:55:29.520 | is that while there have been abuses, the courts have consistently found that these laws are

00:55:36.240 | binding. And what has happened is that there has become a culture of obeisance, of complying with

00:55:44.000 | those laws. So in American policing, etc., respect for the Fourth and Fifth Amendment privileges,

00:55:54.320 | it exists as a matter of culture. And that's an important thing. Incidentally, policing issues

00:56:00.080 | is one of the things that has made me just hang my head because try as I might, I cannot find a

00:56:04.800 | solution to the woes and the difficulties going on in policing issues. But I'm grateful that there

00:56:11.120 | is a culture of respect for the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Sixth, Seventh, Eighth Amendments,

00:56:16.720 | all of the criminal justice stuff, this is, I think, a big weakness in the United States right

00:56:24.160 | now. But thankfully, it's one of those things where light has been shined and is being shined.

00:56:31.200 | And that light, I think, has the opportunity to serve as a disinfectant. I'd love to see some

00:56:36.960 | big activism for some more activism. I think one of the great things, the development of YouTube

00:56:45.840 | law has been great. We've seen that in some high-profile cases over the last year or two,

00:56:50.960 | where the ability of people to get inside high-profile cases with the lawyer of their

00:56:56.560 | choice commenting on it has been fantastic. I would love to see some kind of initiative where

00:57:04.000 | definitely I would love to see all federal courts televised. I don't see any good argument as to why

00:57:10.960 | all court trials should not be televised. And so I'd love to see some success of that. And maybe

00:57:17.200 | over the next 10 or 20 years, we'll do that. We'll see that some of the justice projects and things

00:57:22.560 | that have come to help people advocate for people who have been unjustly imprisoned, etc.,

00:57:29.040 | has been useful. And I think the ability of the average individual citizen to air facts of a case

00:57:34.880 | and have that go broadly has been a really good move. And it's been really, really good.

00:57:41.600 | And so criminal justice systems are hard to get right, but I think there's progress in the right

00:57:47.360 | direction. So I'm optimistic. I'll stop. I'm not going to go all through all the amendments. 10th

00:57:51.840 | Amendment is a big deal, etc. But the point is that those legal bones of the country are pretty

00:57:55.920 | good. And I think they matter. I think they matter and they impact things. More importantly,

00:58:02.560 | for me personally, is that the legal environment of the United States, for me to do things that

00:58:08.080 | are important to me is stronger than it is in many other places in the world. I remember this.

00:58:14.000 | So where I've really noticed this big time is in 2021, I took my family to Costa Rica. And we were

00:58:25.040 | on a ferry to, I think it's at the, I can't remember what it's called, the peninsula that you

00:58:31.360 | go across from the, towards the beach. And we were on this ferry and I started talking to this German

00:58:37.200 | woman who was on the ferry that had a couple of children with her. And I was, as parents do,

00:58:41.920 | you talk about children and whatnot, and she looked like we'd probably have something in

00:58:45.840 | common. So we just started talking. And her story was that she was a former school teacher, and she

00:58:52.720 | and her family had fled from Germany because they were concerned about, number one, she didn't have

00:59:00.720 | the right to homeschool her children. And number two, they were concerned about their children

00:59:05.040 | being forcibly vaccinated, especially during the COVID pandemic, against their will. And so she and

00:59:11.840 | her children had fled from Germany to Costa Rica because they felt that even though they were

00:59:17.680 | tourists in Costa Rica, that at least they could homeschool their children, and at least they would

00:59:23.920 | be free of forced vaccination. Her husband was still working at a company in Europe, and he was

00:59:30.080 | going back and forth as much as he could, but they had decided that they were going to try things in

00:59:35.600 | Costa Rica. As I was talking to her, it was interesting to me is, you know, it's like the

00:59:40.480 | best place in the world for you would be the United States, because freedom to make your own

00:59:46.080 | health decisions, and especially to keep needles out of your arms and out of your kids' arms,

00:59:49.920 | stronger in the United States than most places in the world, or at least anywhere that I know of,

00:59:53.920 | and freedom to educate your children is stronger in the United States than any place I know of.

00:59:58.640 | And so it was one of those things where I realized, "Huh, if those certain things are

01:00:04.160 | important to you, the United States is fantastic." I was a little concerned in the beginning of the

01:00:09.840 | pandemic as far as what the United States would do, but ultimately it kind of pretty much did

01:00:15.040 | what I thought it would do, which could mean that it could be either uniquely bad or uniquely good,

01:00:19.840 | but it pretty much did what I thought it would do. And so some of those things, your ability to raise

01:00:26.720 | your children the way you want to raise them, to live a life where you're left alone, to educate

01:00:31.280 | your children, I think that those are some things that are very important to me, and especially as

01:00:36.960 | my children get older and become adolescents, will be increasingly important to me. And I also take

01:00:44.320 | an enormous amount of comfort from the fact that I believe that these are things that are strong

01:00:50.400 | and powerful. So for example, right now, I'm an enormous advocate of the homeschool movement.

01:00:56.000 | Basically, I try to be in the same way that C.S. Lewis was an advocate for mere Christianity

01:01:01.600 | without getting involved in the specifics of which particular variety of Christianity was superior

01:01:07.920 | to another one, at least in his popular comments. In my popular comments, I've tried to focus on

01:01:13.120 | basically any thoughtful decision made by parents that doesn't involve plunking your kids in a

01:01:18.160 | government school without careful thought and consideration as to whether that industrial

01:01:23.120 | school system is correct for you. But right now, the homeschooling movement in the United States

01:01:28.160 | is enormous and growing enormously. The classical school movement in the United States, enormous.

01:01:34.480 | Every classical school out there has waiting lists a mile long, and so that's going to bring an

01:01:38.080 | enormous amount of response from the market to increase supply. Montessori schools, basically

01:01:46.720 | every alternative form of education is thriving right now in the United States when compared

01:01:51.600 | against the government school system. And if you believe, as I do, that the government school

01:01:56.080 | system is one of those root causes of a whole lot of issues in American society, a whole lot of

01:02:01.280 | stupidity in the population, then I consider this to be one of the most exciting things that can

01:02:08.240 | happen. And you just imagine where we've gone from a society where maybe some tens of thousands of

01:02:14.480 | children were homeschooled to now we've got hundreds of thousands per year graduating from

01:02:21.040 | homeschools with strong educations and clear, good, critical thinking skills and deeply informed

01:02:28.400 | perspectives and whatnot. It's exciting. It's genuinely exciting. And when you recognize that

01:02:34.080 | these are young men and women who have been equipped with the skills of knowledge to teach

01:02:41.440 | themselves, these are young men and women who are accustomed to earning their way. They're living in

01:02:47.920 | a world where a young person of today is more empowered than ever he has been. It's just

01:02:54.320 | incredibly exciting. And so I think some of these things are going to have a tremendously positive

01:02:58.720 | influence on American culture. And I think one of the things that has also happened for me

01:03:04.720 | uniquely is that I've gotten old enough to recognize that if something cannot continue,

01:03:12.400 | it will eventually stop. That's something that I've newly grasped on an emotional level as I

01:03:19.120 | approach my fifth decade of life. As I start, I've seen now, I've lived enough to see so many

01:03:25.440 | movements that at one time seemed so powerful and so strong, and I've seen them collapse.

01:03:31.600 | And you go back in hindsight and you analyze those movements and you recognize that for an

01:03:37.680 | experienced observer, the ultimate collapse of that movement or the ultimate success of another

01:03:43.680 | movement was predictable. It would be like the simple impact of character and virtue.

01:03:52.080 | If you are a grandfather and you see a young man or a young woman of character and of virtue,

01:04:00.560 | you know that in the fullness of time, those basic innate qualities that are being expressed

01:04:08.320 | in actual observable truth will eventually lead a young man or woman to a successful lifestyle

01:04:16.720 | in the fullness of time. And so even if that young man or woman faces a setback of some kind,

01:04:21.920 | an injury, an unfortunate event, et cetera, you know that character and virtue in the fullness

01:04:28.720 | of time will take that young man or woman to success. On the other hand, you know if you see

01:04:36.080 | a young man or woman who does not have character or is not practicing virtue and developing virtue,

01:04:42.000 | but rather is showing the exact opposite, you know that in the fullness of time, that life

01:04:46.960 | will collapse and be destroyed. You don't have to know specifically what it will be or what the

01:04:52.400 | specific cause will be. And you're not particularly worried just because you might see short-term

01:05:03.920 | results. Maybe the young man or young woman is very good-looking and so is the popular kid,

01:05:10.240 | and then the person of virtue is not good-looking. Well, you know that high school is not life.

01:05:16.960 | And so eventually, these underlying characteristics of virtue and character will eventually

01:05:22.480 | lead to success or failure. And you don't have to predict what specific circumstances will be

01:05:29.040 | the proximate cause of success or failure. You just know that in the fullness of time,

01:05:33.360 | this is the way life goes. That's not to deny that people can change. You, of course, would

01:05:37.520 | accept that people could change. But absent change, you know where things are going.

01:05:42.880 | And so I look at the world very much like this now, is that I've lived long enough to look at

01:05:49.600 | an institution. And if my analysis is correct, I know that this institution will either succeed

01:05:56.160 | or fail based upon the underlying characteristics. I could be mistaken. We all have to question

01:06:01.920 | things. But in the institutions that I care about or the causes that I care about,

01:06:06.560 | I know fundamentally that in the fullness of time, this position or that position is going to succeed

01:06:14.560 | or is going to fail. Ten years ago, I did not have that confidence. Even five years ago, I did not

01:06:19.840 | have that confidence. I was too consumed by the news of the day and the frustrations, et cetera.

01:06:26.160 | Today, I have that confidence. I've seen enough rise and enough fall for me to recognize that

01:06:33.120 | if something cannot go on, it will eventually stop. And so that has filled me with a sense of

01:06:38.880 | optimism that I now look at some of the things that annoy me or that have annoyed some of my

01:06:44.960 | friends and things that people hate about the United States, and I look at it and I say,

01:06:47.760 | "This is going to stop. One way or another, it will stop." And all I need to do is be faithful

01:06:56.080 | with the perceived solutions that I think are worth considering so that when that particular

01:07:03.120 | movement starts hemorrhaging disciples, that there's a superior option available for them,

01:07:09.600 | and they can latch onto that. And in today's world, social change can happen faster than ever before.

01:07:16.640 | And that can be both dangerous, but it can be incredibly positive.

01:07:20.560 | And so when I think about the United States, I think about it as a country whose bones are

01:07:26.720 | really good and who is going through some enormous turmoil. I've also spent enough time

01:07:34.000 | spending time with geopolitics to recognize that where we are right now in the decade of 2020

01:07:41.520 | is a unique decade. And by the end of this decade, a lot of things will be different.

01:07:48.560 | There will be a changing of the guard, and there are several significant financial aspects,

01:07:55.040 | political aspects, demographic things that are changing. And so I think that there are reasons

01:08:01.680 | to believe that this decade in the United States is probably particularly dark. And I think there

01:08:07.520 | are good reasons to believe that in the next decade in the United States, there will be

01:08:13.200 | enough changes and enough transformation on various levels of institutions and economies,

01:08:20.160 | et cetera, to think that it'll be a much different time, a much brighter time.

01:08:24.080 | And so I don't feel particularly bad about sitting out some or all of this decade abroad

01:08:30.400 | while raising young children, because virtually none of the issues that I've described

01:08:35.520 | affect my life with young children. By being outside of the United States, I find enormous

01:08:41.520 | detachment from the culture, both for me and also for my family. So my children don't have to face

01:08:46.960 | the sordid daily kinds of things that many parents in the United States do have to face.

01:08:52.880 | And while there will be a time in which I will bring these things to confront them,

01:08:56.880 | and they will understand, being outside the United States has been a nice thing. And it's

01:09:01.120 | been a nice thing for me to get all the other advantages that I've said in previous episodes.

01:09:06.160 | And then we'll see what things look like in the years to come. At its core, in the same way that

01:09:13.440 | I've said publicly, I think probably I have more of my people in the United States, broadly speaking,

01:09:21.360 | people who see the world something like I do than I do in probably any other country in the world.

01:09:27.280 | There are other large countries, China, India, both have enormous populations. But what they

01:09:34.720 | don't have is the cultural heritage that I have. They don't have the way of seeing the world

01:09:41.360 | that binds me together with those who do. When you get outside the United States,

01:09:47.120 | you have smaller countries where there's much smaller populations of people who see the world

01:09:53.760 | as I do. And so that, I believe, makes an enormous difference. And you should pay attention. Because

01:10:01.200 | if there are a large number of people who see the world like you do, and if you care about being a

01:10:06.080 | builder of society as I do, then you should pay attention to where you can go and where you can

01:10:13.600 | build with people who see things the way that you do. There are big objections that people have to

01:10:22.960 | leaving your country and going abroad. And I think that some of them are valid.

01:10:27.680 | The two things, or I guess I would just say two things that I have thought a lot about over the

01:10:32.880 | years. I've thought a lot about the negative impact of being a wanderer, of being a nomad.

01:10:39.280 | By nature, I've always been attracted to some sense of wandering or nomadism. But I've always

01:10:46.720 | been conscious of the fact that that's probably not the best thing for the long term. In the book

01:10:53.600 | of Genesis, when Cain kills Abel, God's punishment for Cain is to damn him to be a wanderer on the

01:11:00.560 | earth. And I've always thought a lot about that. That here your punishment is that you have to be

01:11:06.000 | a wanderer on the earth. Now, wandering the earth was a much bigger deal for Cain than it is for me

01:11:11.520 | in terms of the connectivity in the world, the ancient world versus today. But the point remains

01:11:17.040 | that God punished Cain for killing his brother by punishing him to be a wanderer. And over history,

01:11:24.320 | wanderers or nomads have not generally been broadly appreciated by other people. They're

01:11:30.320 | not usually lauded or praised for their lifestyle. The second aspect, though, of being a nomad is,

01:11:37.440 | is it possible to build as a nomad? When I was younger, I would read these blogs of travelers

01:11:43.920 | who would move three months in this country, three months in that country. They only owned

01:11:47.840 | the things that they had in their backpack, et cetera. What's interesting to me is that over

01:11:51.680 | the years, as a lot of us have kind of tried this out, the basically universal consensus,

01:11:58.080 | whether you have children or don't have children, whether you're single, whether you're not,

01:12:01.920 | has been that a wandering lifestyle is probably not a productive lifestyle, that you need to have

01:12:09.760 | a base that you work from, or you need to have a couple of bases that you work from.

01:12:14.480 | So you might have three bases, you might have two bases, you might have one base,

01:12:18.720 | but living in hotels and bouncing from Airbnb to another Airbnb does not build. And I had to go,

01:12:25.760 | and it's not a good thing to do when building. You don't build something that lasts and that

01:12:30.960 | impacts. And I had to go and experience that for myself to be convinced of it. I am now convinced

01:12:37.200 | of it, that I like to travel, I like to move, I enjoy that, but it is not productive. It's

01:12:43.520 | especially not productive with children. It's just not productive. Having a base that you work from,

01:12:49.920 | or bases that you work from, is core and fundamental. And again, that should be obvious.

01:12:57.200 | You're listening, you're saying, "Of course, Joshua, did you not know that?" Well,

01:12:59.760 | there's a difference between knowing something intellectually and knowing something by

01:13:04.400 | experience. One of the great problems of the English language is that we don't have multiple

01:13:08.560 | versions of the verb to know. Many languages have multiple levels of the verb to know.

01:13:15.920 | In Spanish, it's the difference between conocer and saber. In French, it's the difference between

01:13:20.800 | connaître and savoir. In German, it's the difference between kennen and wissen. In Latin,

01:13:25.360 | it's the difference between nosco and skio. In Greek, it's gnosko versus aidenai.

01:13:32.400 | And so, this is the distinction between knowing something with facts or information as compared

01:13:40.800 | to knowing something with experience, personal acquaintance, personal familiarity. And so,

01:13:46.800 | I knew that intellectually in times past. I now know it from experience. And that changes things.

01:13:52.240 | That level of knowledge is important. It's important. By the way, I think this is something

01:13:58.240 | that makes it in the English-speaking world, because we don't have this texture in our

01:14:01.840 | language that we should have, it causes us to be a little bit blind to the differences that

01:14:07.840 | we should note about the need to go and experience something. And so much of our education is just

01:14:17.520 | knowing something intellectually versus experiential. And in cultures where the language

01:14:22.240 | itself includes normal everyday distinctions among these kinds of knowledge, it makes a big,

01:14:29.760 | big difference. The second big objection to the idea of going abroad would involve something like,

01:14:36.240 | "Don't you have a duty or a responsibility of some kind to stay and fight?

01:14:41.760 | Shouldn't you stay and fix things?" And this is one of those things that has always bothered me,

01:14:48.960 | because I believe there's an element of truth in it. In the Gospels, Jesus talked about the

01:14:56.640 | difference between a hireling as compared to the shepherd, the true shepherd. He talked about how

01:15:02.960 | the hireling or the hired man, when the sheep come, then – or sorry, when he's guarding the

01:15:08.160 | sheep and the wolf comes, then the hireling runs away, and the wolf comes and gets the sheep.

01:15:13.120 | But the shepherd doesn't do that. The shepherd stands up and he protects the sheep.

01:15:16.640 | And I've thought a lot about that, because don't those of us who have a care and a love for other

01:15:23.920 | people have some measure of responsibility to care for those people? Or to put it differently,

01:15:30.240 | don't you have a responsibility to stay and fight? Short answer is yes and no, in my opinion. No,

01:15:37.600 | meaning that it's a choice that you make. It's not something that someone can impose upon you.

01:15:44.080 | No, because I think if you're going to fight, you should believe that fighting

01:15:53.760 | has some chance of success, and you should have a plan to fight,

01:15:58.000 | a plan for success. Otherwise, you just die a pointless and futile death. Remember here,

01:16:03.440 | of course, that while this could be taken in a physical sense, I'm speaking metaphorically.

01:16:08.880 | If you're going to stay and fight, quote unquote, you need to have a plan as to what you're doing

01:16:14.560 | and a reason to stay and fight, and a plan as to how you're going to have success.

01:16:19.120 | And I think most people who say, "Well, you should stay and fight," don't have anything like that.

01:16:24.320 | They just don't have the guts to get up and leave, and they want to impose that same kind of thing on

01:16:30.000 | you. And so I believe that you're far better off if you have the option to leave and you choose

01:16:38.000 | not to leave than if you don't have the option to leave at all. And so basically, in the world of

01:16:45.600 | internationalization, in my mind, it has come down largely to if you have the option to leave,

01:16:54.320 | then you can make an actual true decision about whether you should, quote unquote,

01:16:59.760 | stay and fight and improve things where you were from, or whether you're better off in another

01:17:04.560 | place. And that's a personal decision that only you can answer. But I think all of us are better

01:17:10.320 | served by having the choice, because then we'll feel confident in our decision. The guy who winds

01:17:17.040 | up fighting in the army because he got drafted, because he couldn't leave, I don't think he makes

01:17:21.760 | as good of a soldier as the guy who could have left and said, "No, I believe in the cause,

01:17:26.320 | and I'm genuinely going to give myself for it." And so for me, it has seemed better for me to

01:17:33.920 | create the optionality of being able to leave and then go back if that's the right choice,

01:17:40.400 | rather than to just not create those options. And I don't think this is something that anyone

01:17:47.520 | else can say to you. You may have a strong and clear conviction that I was put here,

01:17:53.840 | I was planted in this place by God himself, and live free or die doesn't matter. I'm going to

01:18:00.960 | stay here and I'm going to do my job and duty. And if you have that, then there's no question,

01:18:06.080 | you're not questioning that. But someone else doesn't have that, and that person should also

01:18:10.880 | be free to make his own choice based upon his unique circumstances. That's the basic essence

01:18:16.480 | of liberty, is that you have the liberty, the freedom to make your own choice. I've found a

01:18:22.960 | lot of mental freedom from the frustration that a lot of Americans experience simply by being abroad.

01:18:30.000 | And I think it has dramatically improved my own, I hate the term, mental health,

01:18:35.680 | but I don't know what else to say, my own psychology, my own way of thinking. By being

01:18:40.320 | distant from it, I look at so many people that I have known, that I probably had a lot in common

01:18:46.400 | with five years ago, and by being distant from it, I'm not old and bitter. I didn't let the

01:18:56.400 | vinegar of my frustration express itself on my countenance. And I've lived a happy and free life.

01:19:04.720 | I've lived honorably before men and before God, and I have, I'm raising my children and loving

01:19:11.440 | my neighbor and living a good life. I see nothing to be ashamed about in that. And this time abroad

01:19:19.360 | has been good for me. I've stated many times though, my appreciation of the United States

01:19:25.360 | has grown enormously. And while I don't have any plan to move back today, I certainly don't

01:19:31.360 | mind visiting and getting benefits from the country. I keep my flags planted there. And

01:19:37.520 | I look at the country much differently than I once did. And I feel like if I went back,

01:19:44.480 | I would go back with a much better understanding and a much clearer appreciation of the good,

01:19:51.680 | while also a clearer knowledge of the things that I would like to change. And I would feel much more

01:19:56.720 | willing and able to roll up my sleeves and work at those issues that I think I could affect

01:20:01.680 | than if I was doing it from a sense of desperation or something like that.

01:20:06.320 | I think in some cases, it may be how people feel after they divorce. You see someone who's in the

01:20:13.520 | midst of, or just initiating divorce or in the midst of divorce, and often they're just filled

01:20:18.720 | with bitterness and it's all his fault. It's all her fault. And they can't see things clearly.

01:20:24.640 | They can't say anything good about the spouse that they're divorcing. Let some time go by,

01:20:30.960 | five years, 10 years, they go through some experiences. And it seems to me that most

01:20:35.600 | of the time I talk to people who are 10 years out from a divorce, they have a much more balanced

01:20:40.160 | perspective. They can acknowledge the truth about their ex-spouse, and they can also acknowledge

01:20:45.920 | the truth about themselves, and they can acknowledge the good things about their ex,

01:20:51.040 | and they can acknowledge how, you know what, this could have gone different directions.

01:20:55.520 | And so that's how I feel, is that I feel like I see more clearly the good things about the country

01:21:02.560 | of my birth. I appreciate many of those things. And I see how I could move back there and be

01:21:07.680 | perfectly content there for many good reasons. I also see that all good things are not confined

01:21:15.120 | to the borders of the United States, but in fact, they can be experienced in many other places.

01:21:20.160 | And I can see how it's one of those things where this guy is probably better off abroad. This girl

01:21:25.520 | is probably better off in the United States. This guy is better off in the United States.

01:21:29.760 | This guy is better off abroad. This guy should go back and forth. This guy should renounce. This

01:21:34.000 | guy should not renounce. Seems stupid for me to even say that out loud, because I'm just,

01:21:38.080 | I'm making one of those statements that's not much of a statement, but that's real life. It's one of

01:21:42.560 | those things where going through the exercise of building options for yourself and internationalization

01:21:49.920 | to some degree, solves some enormous problems. And I think it's an enormous win if you move abroad

01:21:56.400 | and recognize that, you know what, it's much better for me outside of the United States.

01:22:01.840 | It's also an enormous win if you move abroad and recognize, you know what, actually, it was much

01:22:07.440 | better for me inside of the United States. And is that not an expression of life? Life is, we go

01:22:13.520 | through experiences, we make the best decisions we have based upon the knowledge that we have,

01:22:18.960 | the information that we have at a certain time and the cold calculation. Then we go through the

01:22:24.480 | actual experiential knowledge process. And with that experiential knowledge process, our knowledge

01:22:30.000 | is more fully formed. And we recognize that the experiences of our life influence what we actually

01:22:37.120 | do in the long run. Let me conclude with a story. I think this will be a funny one. I kind of buried

01:22:44.400 | it here at the back intentionally, but it'll clear up questions. I know that I'm fairly circumspect

01:22:50.240 | and it's a little weird where I don't say, well, I live here and let me tell you about this and

01:22:53.360 | whatnot. I do that because I just want the protection for my family. When you spout off

01:22:57.600 | on the internet, like I do, there's a bunch of internet weirdos who can make your life nasty.

01:23:02.480 | And I just try to make it slightly difficult that if they want to make my life nasty,

01:23:06.560 | they have to work just a little bit harder to do it. I don't expect that they couldn't find me,

01:23:13.200 | but I just don't want to give them an easy pickings. So forgive me, but for the love of my

01:23:17.520 | wife and the love of my children, that seems like the right decision for me to make at this point

01:23:21.120 | in time. But I'll tell a story from a few years ago. And it's a story that brought confusion to

01:23:27.520 | a lot of people because like, what on earth? Where's Joshua? What's going on? So a few years

01:23:32.160 | ago, I had moved outside the United States, lived abroad for a few years. Then I decided we went

01:23:36.480 | traveling. And while we were traveling, everything collapsed. We were in Europe at the time. We'd

01:23:41.760 | spent three months in Europe. And my plan was, as I said, spend six months in Europe, six months in

01:23:45.680 | Asia. And this was 2021. And I thought the world was done with COVID. That was why I went traveling.

01:23:50.160 | I discovered the world was not done with COVID. And I was not having a good time. Nothing was

01:23:54.960 | working. We were in France. I spent a month in France with my family. And I thought, this is

01:24:01.680 | going to be great. We're going to have a great time. We rented a great house in the French

01:24:04.400 | countryside. It was going to be an amazing experience. But France was still doing COVID.

01:24:08.560 | And I didn't have the barcode. And so we couldn't go out to eat. And so quite literally, the entire

01:24:13.200 | time we were in France, we were able to eat at one restaurant with my family where they didn't

01:24:17.280 | check for our passe sanitaire. And it just annoyed me. We weren't having fun. So I was like, that's

01:24:22.000 | it. Let's go back to the United States. We've been gone for a while. So we decided to move back to

01:24:25.520 | the United States for various reasons. And I moved back to the United States. I rented a house.

01:24:30.720 | I signed a one-year lease. And my plan was to live in the United States for a year and then

01:24:34.400 | kind of reassess and figure out because I hadn't been in the country much and been abroad. And

01:24:38.960 | I thought, OK, let's go back and check it out. So we moved back to the United States,

01:24:43.120 | rent a house, et cetera. I'm fully in the mode of set up a household, set up everything. So I move

01:24:49.600 | into this house. One week later, I've gotten sick. And I find that the house is full of mold.

01:24:54.480 | So I immediately called the landlord, immediately start filing claims and whatnot, and decided that

01:25:00.000 | instead of trying to live there and deal with mold remediation and whatnot, that we would just move

01:25:05.200 | out and I'd find a different house. So I moved in, signed a one-year lease. Months later, I moved out,

01:25:10.320 | took a couple of weeks to get rid of some stuff and figure that out. And I was planning to rent

01:25:14.160 | another place. But the rental market in Florida where I was was pretty crazy. And I was like,

01:25:18.400 | I really want this. And so we decided to go travel for a while. So I loaded up my wife and children.

01:25:23.200 | And we started traveling around the United States. We traveled around the United States for about

01:25:26.960 | three months, living in Airbnbs, doing month-long rentals, and traveling and visiting family and

01:25:31.760 | whatnot. And while we're on the road, I realized, you know what, if we could find the right place,

01:25:37.600 | living abroad, there could be some benefits from it. And long story short, we found a great house

01:25:42.960 | in another country and moved abroad again. And so that experience, I've never been a wishy-washy guy.

01:25:50.160 | I'm a guy who tries to move with purpose and clear goals and a clear plan, et cetera. But that

01:25:55.600 | experience once again showed me that these decisions, they're sometimes only big in your head.

01:26:03.920 | And that for an outside observer or someone who has not been through what I've been through,

01:26:12.160 | those decisions can cause whiplash. It's like, well, you go here or there, et cetera. If you're

01:26:17.040 | just imagining loading up the moving truck and moving five times over, it just seems stupid and

01:26:22.640 | crazy. But if you minimize your stuff and you have a little bit of experience moving here and going

01:26:29.200 | there and traveling here, et cetera, then it doesn't seem such a big deal. And while I don't

01:26:34.480 | recommend that lifestyle as a good long-term perspective, my family and I enjoyed it. We had

01:26:38.320 | a great time. We were together all the time. I think my children have great emotional stability

01:26:44.720 | because we're always together. We have the same basic daily routine no matter where we happen to

01:26:50.720 | be in the world. And so here we are in multiple countries, left, right, and center, making

01:26:57.680 | multiple decisions. But it just shows me that a lot of these decisions you can change. And what's

01:27:02.800 | interesting is that when I was younger, life didn't seem like that. It seemed like you made

01:27:07.200 | your choice and that was it. And what I've realized is that there are few decisions that are permanent.

01:27:16.880 | Your choice of career when you're young, it's not permanent. You can change. You can change it every

01:27:23.280 | few years if you want to. You may be able to change. Some people can change it more frequently

01:27:27.120 | than that. Your job, you can change it. You can change it whenever you want. Change every year,

01:27:32.720 | change every few years, not a big deal. Your location, your living location, you can change it.

01:27:38.640 | I don't think it's smart to change it very much, but you can change it. What country you live in,

01:27:46.800 | you can change it. You can change it every few years. You can change it every few months. There's

01:27:50.400 | no one to tell you you can't do it. There are some things I think you shouldn't change. I don't think

01:27:56.080 | you should swap out your wife. I don't think you should swap out your children. Some people

01:28:00.240 | disagree with me and they swap out their wives and they got a few families and children here and there

01:28:05.920 | and I don't talk to them and whatnot. I don't think that's smart. But other than your wife and

01:28:10.640 | your children, pretty much everything else in your life, you can swap in and out whenever you want to.

01:28:16.880 | And there's an element of inconstancy to that, but there's also an element of freedom to that.

01:28:23.120 | And I would encourage you, if you feel like you're stuck where you are,

01:28:26.480 | just take a little bit of a change, do something different than you're accustomed to,

01:28:31.200 | and build those muscles that would help you to change frequently because it makes you a stronger

01:28:38.560 | person. Then you'll appreciate also the many benefits of consistency, the many benefits of

01:28:47.200 | living in one place for a long period of time, working in one job, having one career for a long

01:28:53.520 | time. Don't take those changes lightly. They are important and they should be considered.

01:29:00.800 | But if you're the kind of person who, personality-wise, is attracted to that,

01:29:05.120 | check it out for yourself. Try it out. Try it out a couple weeks, a couple months, a couple years,

01:29:08.960 | couple decades, and you can consider and you can always change.

01:29:14.720 | Plane tickets are crazy cheap these days. All you got to do, hop on an airplane,

01:29:18.960 | sell your stuff in one country, buy it in another, and you can set things up.

01:29:22.640 | Legally speaking, you do sometimes need to set up some legal stuff. And that's where the

01:29:26.960 | internationalization stuff comes in. And so I would commend to you, set up the legal stuff,

01:29:31.440 | but all the rest of it can be done. If you have a country that you hold a passport in,

01:29:36.720 | then you're golden. You might want to just keep a driver's license for a local place. You might

01:29:42.560 | want to keep a local phone number. You might want to have a mail drop of some kind. Set that up.

01:29:46.480 | You can move in and out at will. And that's one of the great things about the world that we live in.

01:29:50.960 | Whereas we're not living in 1900, where moving from one country to another

01:29:57.280 | meant you're never coming back and you're never going to see your parents again.

01:30:01.200 | I respect those people like crazy. We don't live in that world anymore. You can go back whenever

01:30:05.760 | you want. You're an airplane flight away. You can change. And so take advantage of it if it's

01:30:10.880 | something that is appealing to you. In closing, if you want more on this, remember I do have a

01:30:15.600 | course, a huge Black Friday sale, internationalskateplan.com. Also, I'm hosting an

01:30:20.880 | event in Panama in January. Go to expatmoney.com/radical, expatmoney.com/radical for all

01:30:27.840 | the details. I would really love for you to come and spend a week hanging out with me in Panama.

01:30:32.560 | We'll talk about every country in the world. I'll probably tell you where I live. I'll probably tell

01:30:36.320 | you the good and the bad about it. I'll probably go deeper with some of the stuff that I haven't

01:30:39.120 | talked about here publicly. Go to expatmoney.com/radical. Sign up today.

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2023-11-22_Why_I_Will_Probably_Move_Back_to_the_USA