RPF-0067-Interview_with_Andrew_Henderson_Nomad_Capitalist
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00:00:15.120 | Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast on today's show.
00:00:19.600 | What factors should internationalization play in your plans?
00:00:40.880 | Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. I thank you for being here. My name is Joshua
00:00:44.720 | Sheets and I'm your host. Today's show is going to be an interview with Andrew Henderson, founder
00:00:50.400 | of Nomad Capitalist. And today we're going to stick with the theme of the show and move over
00:00:56.560 | to the more radical and I call it juicy side of talking about finance. I hope you enjoy.
00:01:14.080 | You know, there's a an interest that I've had for a very long time of looking at the more
00:01:18.480 | hardcore people who are willing to actually put their money where their mouth is and pursue some
00:01:23.120 | of the more radical sides of personal finance, which is clear if you've listened to even a single
00:01:27.680 | instance of the show. And there's nothing that I consider to be more interesting and more radical
00:01:32.160 | than talking about some of the the ways that you can move internationally and getting outside of
00:01:37.440 | the context of the US American reality. But it's an area that I have almost no knowledge in, other
00:01:45.280 | than just simply casually reading a little here and there. And so I've gone out and brought to you
00:01:50.080 | the very best person that I could find on it. And it's a man named Andrew Henderson, who writes over
00:01:55.440 | at Nomad Capitalist.com. He has an excellent website. And so we brought him on to teach me
00:02:00.640 | and teach all of us some of the places to start when it comes to internationalization. Andrew,
00:02:06.320 | welcome to the show. Joshua, thank you for having me. I have to tell you,
00:02:10.640 | that intro music is way too hip and way too laid back for me.
00:02:14.480 | You know, I ran I found that so randomly when I was I did I had to get intro music,
00:02:20.800 | I got to get into music and I found it out randomly found it on a website for somebody.
00:02:25.280 | And I just it gets me dancing. So it usually gets my gets me my energy up when starting the show
00:02:30.720 | off. And so I figure it's a win win if it gets me energetic, so I'm glad you like it.
00:02:36.080 | I'm ready to roll. So let's start with just give us a little bit about your story.
00:02:40.320 | Where did you are? Have you always been Mr. International Man of Mystery, Mr. James Bond,
00:02:45.360 | living abroad, growing up abroad as a foreign expat or share with us a little bit about your
00:02:50.160 | story and background? Well, you know, I've shared this story. I'm glad you asked. I grew up in Ohio
00:02:57.120 | of all places. I grew up in the Midwest. It's a place that has a lot of advantages. But also,
00:03:02.880 | I think a lot of people, they just kind of it encourages people to kind of nestle in and just
00:03:07.040 | kind of look within rather than externally. I was always a little bit different when I was 12 years
00:03:12.880 | old. My parents unwittingly taught me. We were driving around and they taught me what I now call
00:03:19.440 | the five magic words. And that is go where you're treated best. They said, listen, we see the
00:03:24.480 | trajectory that this country, the United States is heading in. And we believe that there will be a
00:03:29.200 | time that people like yourself who want to be successful, who want to accomplish something,
00:03:33.040 | who want to be leaders will no longer be welcome here. They'll no longer be able to do what they
00:03:39.920 | do and just to be kind of to be left alone. And obviously, they were very, very right. And so,
00:03:46.480 | you know, I took that advice to heart. I did not travel or live all over the world as a kid. I did
00:03:51.760 | go to different places in Europe. I saw some of the things that were happening there when I was
00:03:56.720 | 9, 10, 11 years old. And I realized some of the problems that were happening there. But I never
00:04:01.440 | entirely knew what direction that my life would take. And so, it wasn't until my early 20s, I just
00:04:07.760 | started traveling and experiencing these things and realizing that there is a reality outside of
00:04:13.360 | the US propaganda machine, outside of the US financial system, that there are opportunities,
00:04:19.680 | there are different ways of thinking, and that you actually can make a living, can survive.
00:04:23.760 | You're not going to get eaten by crocodiles if you set foot outside of the arbitrary lines that
00:04:29.680 | our government establishes for us. I feel like I've learned some of my
00:04:35.120 | most important lessons from traveling. And you're totally right about, you have a lot of times you
00:04:41.280 | have these misconceptions that I don't know why they're built into us, but they certainly seem to
00:04:45.520 | be part of the US American culture. I know we have some international listeners as well, so I don't
00:04:49.600 | want to be too US American focused. But we have this idea that somehow we're the best, we're the
00:04:54.320 | best in the world, and everywhere else is just scary and dangerous. Until you actually go travel,
00:04:59.200 | then you find out that, A, we may not be the best in the world, at least at some things.
00:05:05.520 | There are lots of places that are cleaner, that are more modern, that are more amazing to be,
00:05:09.760 | that seem like more fun, and that have way more opportunities. And I don't know why that,
00:05:15.200 | it seems to be just a hallmark of so many people that if they go on walkabout, as the Australians
00:05:20.800 | would say, if they go on walkabout, they get exposed to a whole new way of thinking. I know
00:05:24.720 | travel certainly did that for me. Well, and here's the problem. You see stuff
00:05:30.560 | posted all over Facebook and everywhere else that talks about, "Oh, the US is the wealthiest
00:05:35.600 | country and here's why." There's a total disregard for statistics in the Western world, and in the
00:05:41.760 | US in particular, because the US is so geographically isolated from other countries,
00:05:45.920 | that the United States is not the wealthiest country in the world. By some standards,
00:05:50.320 | it's 12th, it's 13th, whatever the case may be, but there's this need to be number one.
00:05:54.800 | No one wants to pay attention to statistics. I'm a numbers guy. I want to go, as I said,
00:06:00.080 | go where I'm treated best. Where are the best banks, the most stable banks? Where is the best
00:06:05.680 | place to set up a company? Where is the most free economy? And even for entertainment, where is
00:06:11.600 | the best classical music? Where's the best place to live? I don't want to be in the 12th or the 13th
00:06:18.400 | best place merely because I need to satisfy some kind of propaganda. But even if it was,
00:06:25.360 | here's the important distinction. Even if it was the wealthiest country in the world, I was just
00:06:29.600 | in Hong Kong hosting an event for members of my private club last week. And we had a guy who's a
00:06:34.320 | venture capital guy there talking about the difference between hiring in New York City
00:06:39.440 | and hiring in Hong Kong, both highly international financial centers, great places to live.
00:06:44.080 | But Hong Kong's way better, in my opinion. I haven't lived in New York, I haven't lived in
00:06:48.320 | Hong Kong, but I would move to Hong Kong in an instant before I moved to New York.
00:06:52.400 | You're absolutely right. The weather's better, the gambling nearby is better,
00:06:55.920 | a lot more diversity, better. I'm 100% with you. But you hire a guy in New York, fresh out of
00:07:01.760 | college, average salary, 60 grand. You pay 20 or 30 grand in payroll tax, because of other nonsense.
00:07:07.840 | He goes out, the government takes 20 or 25 grand of his check, then he goes and tries to find
00:07:13.920 | an apartment for rent in Manhattan. Well, he's got 36 or 37 grand left of that money. He's
00:07:20.160 | working in Manhattan. Well, guess what the cost of rent in Manhattan just so happens to be?
00:07:25.200 | 36, 37 grand a year to live near his office. Isn't it interesting how water seeks its own level?
00:07:30.640 | Sure.
00:07:30.960 | You go to Hong Kong, you hire a kid out of college for 45 grand, you pay like $1,000
00:07:36.640 | in social costs. He goes out, he pays very little tax. He's got more money left over than the kid in
00:07:42.560 | New York. The employer's happier, everybody's happier. It really comes down to those kinds
00:07:48.240 | of things. Where can you go and be treated best? Where is your money treated the best?
00:07:53.920 | That's the reality that Western countries don't want to understand, Joshua, is that
00:07:58.560 | capital is very fungible. It goes where it is treated best. That's why it's all in Hong Kong,
00:08:03.840 | it's all in Singapore. It's leaving places like New York, like London, even Switzerland,
00:08:08.320 | because it's found a better place where it's more well-respected.
00:08:12.480 | I learned this in two ways that I found interesting, and I'm sure you would have
00:08:19.040 | experience with both of them. One of them, I live in West Palm Beach, Florida, and I
00:08:23.600 | worked professionally as a financial advisor here locally for about six years. As part of that work,
00:08:30.080 | I had opportunity to sit with a portfolio manager for a private family office for a Palm Beach
00:08:35.920 | family. I used to walk across Palm Beach through the financial district and around Worth Avenue
00:08:41.840 | when I was growing up in college just for the evening walk to get to the beach. I got to meet
00:08:47.760 | a few different people that work in some of the local family offices for some of the wealthy
00:08:54.240 | families. I got to be closer with this one person, again, who was part of about a five-person team
00:09:01.040 | for this private family office for one individual family. He shared with me some of the projects
00:09:06.720 | that they were working on. This was during the real estate bust in the United States
00:09:11.120 | about four or five years ago. They were actively building a bunch of real estate projects, but all
00:09:18.080 | of them were condo projects in India. It opened up. It's something that most people, the average
00:09:25.360 | client on the street would talk to and say, "Well, real estate's a terrible investment."
00:09:28.240 | Well, wait a second. Real estate's not necessarily a terrible investment. It's just you might not
00:09:32.560 | want to be building condos in Miami at the moment. That's a glutted market. But there are some very
00:09:37.040 | smart people, very sophisticated, building some amazing real estate projects in India.
00:09:42.160 | You just have to have your eye open to it. I always think of that example when I read your
00:09:49.280 | work because it seems like that's what you're heavily focused on.
00:09:52.080 | Boy, you're exactly right. You know the phrase, "There's always a bull market somewhere." People
00:09:57.680 | get so bogged down. For years, I was bogged down with this minutiae as well, where you live in the
00:10:04.560 | United States and you say, "Boy, I hope Mitt Romney gets elected and he solves all the problems and
00:10:09.440 | he's going to make it great for business again." It's like, "Great." Look what happened the last
00:10:13.600 | time. You elected a guy and you lowered tax rates from 39.6% to 35%. Like, woo-hoo, pop the champagne.
00:10:20.800 | You still have Bibles upon Bibles upon Bibles of regulations just from one agency to where you can't
00:10:28.560 | build your company's warehouse on somewhere where there's a spotted sparrow that used to live and
00:10:33.760 | lay eggs in the 17th century. That's not gone anywhere. But somehow, if we elect the right
00:10:38.480 | people, that's going to solve all of our problems. So rather than get bogged down on that, I finally
00:10:42.800 | realized, "Listen, there are places where you can go and not only do they treat you better,
00:10:47.840 | lower taxes, lower cost of living." You and I were talking before the show how I had to go to the
00:10:52.800 | hospital today here in Malaysia. It cost like a tiny fraction of what it would cost in the United
00:10:59.840 | States. On top of that, yes, there's always a bull market somewhere. So I'm looking at places like
00:11:05.280 | Cambodia. I'm looking at places around Asia, some places in Eastern Europe, Colombia, Panama,
00:11:12.640 | Nicaragua, a lot of countries that used to be communists or socialists or have dictators that
00:11:18.240 | have learned their lesson and they understand now where their bread is buttered. Joshua, just look
00:11:24.000 | at where I'm at in Kuala Lumpur. You go down 45 minutes by air to Singapore, a country that just
00:11:30.400 | celebrated what, almost five decades in existence. They broke away from what was then Malaya, now
00:11:37.680 | Malaysia 50 years ago. Look at what they've done in 50 years. Look at what they did. Nobody thought
00:11:44.560 | they stood a chance, 236 square miles of land in the middle of the ocean on the tip of Southeast
00:11:51.520 | Asia. Now that Britain was gone, who was going to help them? What was going to happen? Well,
00:11:56.880 | they realized we know what motivates people at their core, not government, not taxes, not, well,
00:12:03.600 | you should just pay your fair share. No, they understood that bringing business in, bringing
00:12:08.080 | capital in, having people store their gold there, having people bank there, that's what would
00:12:12.720 | generate wealth for the people who live there. They understand what really motivates people.
00:12:17.280 | And that's what you have to understand. And when you understand that, you can figure out where
00:12:21.040 | are people moving, where are people becoming middle class, where are the middle class becoming
00:12:26.720 | upper class, where are people becoming new consumers? And you can go there and invest
00:12:30.880 | your money. And the average person will think that you're insane, that, oh, Colombia, that's like,
00:12:35.440 | you know, the drug hotspot. But, you know, in my mind, that means that you're doing something right.
00:12:40.720 | Right. I have a question about Singapore. I haven't been there yet.
00:12:44.720 | And, but my dad says it's his favorite city in the world.
00:12:49.360 | I've been to Disney World before.
00:12:51.040 | I have.
00:12:51.920 | It's the same thing, but with more banks.
00:12:53.680 | Okay. I believe that because I've been to Hong Kong. And I know that at least
00:12:57.680 | on Hong Kong Island, that's kind of how I picture much of Singapore being,
00:13:01.040 | except prettier, probably, and greener, if that's possible. How, in your experience being there,
00:13:08.640 | because my understanding is that Singapore is incredibly liberty-minded, economically speaking,
00:13:15.600 | but incredibly dictatorial when it comes to how they govern the populace. And it seems to be
00:13:23.440 | this, almost like the brilliant success of a benevolent dictator. I don't remember who the
00:13:28.320 | guy is. I've got his biography on my reading list of the guy who was, I don't remember the name,
00:13:34.160 | but the person who kind of was single-handedly responsible for that transformation. How does
00:13:39.040 | Singapore integrate that personal liberty and economic liberty balance and do it so well?
00:13:45.280 | Well, I mean, it's a great question that you asked, and it really comes down to the concept
00:13:50.080 | that we talk about on Nomadic Capitalist, which is flag theory. And again, diversifying your
00:13:54.640 | different affairs around the world to benefit from the best that each place has to offer.
00:13:59.680 | I mean, listen, I personally would not live in Singapore. I don't think. It's expensive. It's
00:14:06.240 | almost too clean for me. I like a little bit of grit. I like in Hong Kong where guys are throwing
00:14:10.480 | fish across backs, alleyways, and there's some grit, even amongst the great wealth that's there.
00:14:17.440 | But in Singapore, you're right. People are very restricted. They don't sell chewing gum there,
00:14:22.160 | for instance. If you drink bottled water on the subway, it's a $500 fine.
00:14:28.400 | How do they manage that? I mean, again, listen, at the end of the day, I mean, I sound like,
00:14:34.480 | what's the guy in The Simpsons? I don't watch TV, but Mr. Burns, is it? Because it's all about the
00:14:42.000 | money all the time. But in reality, when it comes to economics, it is all about the money all the
00:14:47.120 | time. They're not, you know, it's not so anti-liberty that you can't live there, but it's
00:14:52.880 | not a place that I personally would want to live. So how do they manage it? Well, I mean, people
00:14:57.520 | there, they're perfect for the banking and the financial services industry. There is a growing
00:15:02.080 | bed of entrepreneurship, but it's not the most entrepreneurial country because it is kind of
00:15:07.360 | robotic in that sense. But I mean, the answer to that is not to think of it in the way that
00:15:12.640 | my parents wanted me to do when I was 12 years old, where they said, "Well, go to New Zealand,
00:15:17.600 | that's the next best place." No, you go to New Zealand and you cherry pick the best parts. You
00:15:22.080 | go to Singapore and you cherry pick the best parts. Then you come here to Malaysia and you
00:15:25.360 | cherry pick the best parts. So you diversify your affairs to where you're only keeping your money in
00:15:30.720 | Singapore, but you're not living there. You're not paying $5,000 a month for an apartment.
00:15:35.200 | You're not paying $80,000 a year to register your car, or I guess $80,000 once to register a car
00:15:40.400 | every time you buy one. I mean, you're not doing any of that. So listen, every country on earth
00:15:47.040 | has the benefit of a certain number of tax slaves living within its borders that largely are just
00:15:52.400 | going to stay there and do whatever they're told to do. If you want to be different and you want
00:15:57.360 | to escape that system and you want true personal and economic freedom, you have to know how to
00:16:02.240 | harvest the best things that each place has to offer. Explain the concept of flag theory and
00:16:09.280 | share as far as where you see some for instituting for each flag, where you see some of the global
00:16:14.880 | opportunities in today's world. It started out a number of decades ago as three flag theory.
00:16:21.440 | And I believe that the three was, you have your business based somewhere, you have a residency
00:16:27.040 | in a country with low taxes, you have citizenship in a country that doesn't tax your worldwide
00:16:31.200 | income. And so basically what you do is you basically work as this perpetual tourist where
00:16:36.080 | you're not really a formal resident of wherever it is you live. So I mean, if you're running a
00:16:42.000 | business that is global in nature or online in nature, you can have that business in a place
00:16:46.960 | like Hong Kong or Singapore, which is low tax and very well developed. You can have it in a
00:16:52.640 | jurisdiction that's no tax like Nevis, Seychelles, there's all kinds of them popping up now. Gambia
00:16:58.480 | is trying to become an offshore financial center. So you have your company there and then you live
00:17:03.440 | in a country, for example, where I live in Malaysia, where income I earn outside of Malaysia
00:17:10.240 | is not taxed. They have a territorial tax system. If I were to get a job here, I would pay tax.
00:17:14.800 | But if I have money from a Hong Kong company, that money's not sent to me here in Malaysia,
00:17:19.920 | I don't pay any tax. Then if you can get a citizenship that doesn't tax you based on where
00:17:25.200 | you live, for example, anything other than the United States, basically, then you don't have
00:17:30.640 | to report any of your income overseas to that country. And so those are some of the ways that
00:17:35.680 | people do it by getting second passports, by getting residencies in low tax countries,
00:17:40.480 | moving their business offshore, moving their banking offshore. And there are so many other
00:17:45.440 | flags that you can do from the location that your website server is in for greater privacy.
00:17:51.360 | I mean, there's so many different things that you can do from banking, where you store your gold,
00:17:59.360 | a country that respects gold ownership. I mean, you can think of any number of different things
00:18:04.320 | to protect yourself, all the way down to, as I said, we do have a Philharmonic here in Kuala
00:18:10.400 | Lumpur. But when I want quality classical music, quality opera, I go to Vienna, I go to Riga,
00:18:15.840 | I go to Budapest. So figuring out how to make that work for you can really enhance the quality
00:18:21.680 | of your life and put a lot more money in your pocket to where that 60 grand a year that you
00:18:25.680 | might make in New York, it all becomes your money to do what you want and make the change that you
00:18:30.960 | want to make. We spend a lot of time on my show talking about the nuts and bolts of good planning,
00:18:37.120 | especially good tax planning, how to legally avoid as many taxes as possible through effective
00:18:44.400 | planning. And I don't even mind going over to the tax evasion side. I've interviewed
00:18:49.280 | one person on that, and I find it a topic of great interest. But I do certainly think sometimes about
00:18:55.760 | the value of just simply saying, "Why don't we just dispense with the whole US-American tax code?
00:19:01.200 | If I don't like it, why don't I just go somewhere else?" But the problem is that the US, is it the
00:19:07.360 | only country in the world that taxes your income, or is it just one of the few that taxes your
00:19:11.280 | income no matter where you are in it, no matter where you are, that basically as long as you're
00:19:15.120 | a US citizen, you've got the hooks in you. You're a slave, you're a tax slave.
00:19:21.840 | It is basically the only country where you are a slave until you cease to be a United States
00:19:26.560 | citizen. There are some countries that make it a little bit harder where you have to cut
00:19:29.920 | all of your ties, Canada, Australia, where you actually need to prove certain things
00:19:35.520 | in order to get off the hook. But other than the war-torn country of Eritrea,
00:19:40.160 | which was a breakaway state from Ethiopia, it was in civil war, in a bloody coup for years,
00:19:46.000 | other than Eritrea, which doesn't even enforce their policy, the United States is the only one
00:19:51.120 | that does tax people based on their worldwide income, and that makes it difficult.
00:19:54.080 | There are ways to get around it, and I'm not a tax guy. I go around the world and spend all
00:20:00.800 | the money I have to meet all the experts and to bring together their knowledge and aggregate what
00:20:06.160 | they know, so I'm not the tax guy. But if you live overseas and you're spending all of your time
00:20:11.040 | out of the US, even as a US citizen, you can exempt about $100,000 a year from US income tax.
00:20:17.520 | If you set up some of the offshore structures that we talk about, there are different ways that
00:20:20.880 | you can do that, and you can get pretty intricate. You don't really need to in most cases, but you
00:20:24.480 | can. And you can exempt more of that money to where-- I mean, look at what Google and Apple
00:20:29.520 | and Facebook and all those companies do. They make money. They run it through Ireland. Then
00:20:33.920 | they bounce it to the Netherlands, down to here and over there, and then they pay 2%, 3%, 4% in
00:20:38.800 | the EU. They park it there, or actually, they move it down to the Caribbean and park it there.
00:20:45.040 | And then as long as it sits there, hey, that's how it works. You can use a much simpler version
00:20:51.040 | of that structure to essentially live tax-free. And I think that you're exactly right, Joshua.
00:20:56.080 | I mean, look, people are in-- they're outraged right now in the United States. All the politicians,
00:21:02.160 | all the socialists are all shooting their mouths off about how evil it is that Burger King or
00:21:08.160 | Walgreens wants to leave the country. Who forced these companies to be there? Who forced any of
00:21:14.080 | us to pay a tribute to the mafia merely because we were born within their borders? I mean, if you
00:21:22.240 | live in Compton, if you're born in Compton in California and you're in some drug gang's
00:21:29.520 | neighborhood, do you have the right to leave and not have to pay them to, quote-unquote,
00:21:33.600 | "protect you" anymore? Of course you do. But somehow when it comes to countries and governments,
00:21:38.560 | it's considered unpatriotic to leave, and it's your lifetime obligation to pay,
00:21:44.240 | something that you never signed up for. And that's where I say, no. You have the ability
00:21:50.080 | and the right to go wherever you want to go where you feel is right for you and play by
00:21:54.880 | their set of rules, because one mafia set of rules isn't better than the next.
00:21:59.600 | It seems so strange to me, because when you actually look at the whole tax debate,
00:22:06.400 | you have basically two camps that are at least—the two camps that are giving media exposure in our
00:22:11.840 | country is, A, people who say, "Listen, everybody should pay their fair share," and fair share is
00:22:17.200 | defined as more for the rich, so therefore raising taxes isn't going to hurt revenues,
00:22:21.600 | and so we should just simply raise taxes and tax everybody and have the services and benefits we
00:22:27.680 | need. On the other side, you have people that say, "Listen, everyone's paying too much in taxes. We
00:22:31.600 | should lower taxes across the board, and then that will stimulate economic activity." And so depending
00:22:37.440 | on where you are in the political cycle, you have this constant battle where people are going back
00:22:42.400 | and forth and saying—the people who say, "Hey, listen, lower tax rates. That'll stimulate economic
00:22:46.480 | activity." The other people saying, "No, it doesn't work. Trickle down doesn't work." But then what
00:22:50.720 | happens is that everyone seems to acknowledge that it works when it's politically convenient.
00:22:56.320 | So that means that if your municipality is run by a very confiscatory person, a left-leaning person
00:23:06.720 | who says, "We're going to get the money," well, as soon as we have an opportunity to attract a
00:23:10.000 | major sports team, then the first thing that we do is we say, "Well, we're going to give you a tax
00:23:13.920 | holiday. We're going to waive these taxes to attract the sports team." Or you have, what was
00:23:18.400 | it, Obama with the, "Well, we need to stimulate the economy, so we're going to lower employment
00:23:24.240 | taxes. So we're going to drop the Social Security tax rate by two points for individuals, and that's
00:23:30.080 | going to stimulate." And so you look at it and you say, everyone is lying through their teeth,
00:23:36.800 | and it's almost like there's an entirely false argument where everyone acknowledges that a
00:23:41.520 | complete laissez-faire trickle-down theory, yes, it certainly has perhaps problems. There are
00:23:47.360 | certainly things that need to be accounted for, and it's not quite as simple as the people who
00:23:51.360 | espouse that theory would say. But on the other hand, everyone, when you need growth, everyone
00:23:56.480 | agrees that, "Well, we've got to cut taxes." I don't understand why we don't just simply
00:24:00.800 | transform the entire system. And one of the things I'm most excited about is the news that
00:24:06.080 | the corporate inversions are getting right now, like you said, with Burger Kings, with Walgreens,
00:24:09.680 | because this is another one that is so blindingly obvious, is that there is so much money on the
00:24:16.320 | large U.S. corporate balance sheets that just sits abroad. And unless there's another
00:24:21.120 | repatriation holiday, the money just sits abroad, and they never bring it back to the U.S.
00:24:26.880 | So I don't understand why—I mean, I do understand. It's called politics, and it's called
00:24:31.520 | promises, and it's called perception. But it just seems—I scratch my head at it, and I throw up my
00:24:37.520 | hand and say, "I can't fix the system, but I can fix my situation, and I don't have to participate,
00:24:43.760 | and I can simply choose to live the good life, and I'm not interested in supporting an empire.
00:24:50.960 | It doesn't work for me." Look, you're exactly right. And the question is,
00:24:54.640 | who owns you? Are we sovereign individuals? Should we have the right to do as we please,
00:25:01.680 | provided that we're not hurting other people? Or are we supposed to be the tax slaves of
00:25:07.040 | these mafias that draw stripes in the sand and say, "This is our territory"?
00:25:10.240 | And so, I mean, you made a very good point. I was talking to some people who moved here from France
00:25:16.720 | yesterday, and they were talking about how there's not very many small businesses there,
00:25:22.000 | there's not very much entrepreneurship there. And why would there be? Because to start up a
00:25:25.840 | business, you have to pay a gazillion dollars in taxes, registration fees, go through a Byzantine
00:25:31.120 | approval process with every regulatory agency, with obnoxious bureaucrats who weigh you down
00:25:37.520 | the entire way. Then you hire people, and you can't fire them in most circumstances.
00:25:42.480 | You have to prepay salaries. You have to pay, if you're successful, if you manage to go through
00:25:46.800 | all that and have a business that people want, and you can find anyone in France with two shekels
00:25:52.080 | left to pay you to buy your product because they haven't been taxed into oblivion, then for the
00:25:57.200 | privilege of you creating jobs and a successful business, you get to pay 75% of your income at
00:26:02.960 | the high levels. And so, gee, I wonder why there are no businesses there. But let's put that aside,
00:26:08.240 | Josh. I mean, sure, that's why there's not entrepreneurship in France, and there is
00:26:13.360 | entrepreneurship in Singapore. But at the end of the day, who cares? Whose right is it to take
00:26:19.200 | your money? If the principle of slavery is that someone comes and forces you to work for them
00:26:24.720 | and takes 100% of what you earn, then does that mean that we're half slaves if we're giving the
00:26:29.520 | government 50% of our money? You're exactly right. You don't owe it to anybody to contribute your
00:26:38.560 | wealth. Now, I guess you can do the going galt route, and you can say, hey, I'm just going to
00:26:42.400 | stop producing. I believe that's also economically immoral. You have the obligation to do the best
00:26:47.440 | for yourself. So if you're capable of producing, you should not just stop and say, I'm just going
00:26:53.360 | to live under a bridge somewhere. You should go somewhere where you can do what you want to do,
00:26:58.480 | do what you were meant to do, and enjoy the fruits of your labor. And there's nothing wrong with that
00:27:03.040 | whatsoever. And of course, these politicians have a big problem with it, because they're on the other
00:27:08.560 | end. And guess what? As you mentioned, yes, they take the money and they give it to their cronies.
00:27:14.640 | You, the business guy, who has no political connections, is getting screwed against the wall.
00:27:20.160 | But meanwhile, the guy who owns the big sports team, the guy with all the money that they claim
00:27:25.600 | to hate, the evil rich guy, he's getting kickbacks from his crony politicians because they're in bed
00:27:32.480 | together. There's a word for that, Joshua. It's called fascism. Hard to admit, though, right?
00:27:39.200 | Land of the free and home of the brave. I would say with all of these things, it strikes people,
00:27:47.440 | even just when it comes to whether taxation or all these things, at least for me, my personal path,
00:27:54.480 | I'm not quite as prone to...I think a lot. I don't necessarily get upset about a lot of things,
00:28:02.960 | I just think. But the interesting thing is that I feel like I have been so conditioned that,
00:28:10.000 | just simply growing up in the US American culture, I feel like I've been so conditioned that even to
00:28:16.880 | ask questions, people jump on you. So it's interesting. When I ask questions about the
00:28:22.720 | history of education, the history of tax policy, the history of government, when I ask questions
00:28:27.440 | about the history of the big ideas, concepts like patriotism, where did this whole idea of
00:28:31.280 | patriotism come from? What does it mean? I just start thinking through it. What happens is that
00:28:35.760 | in most conversations, our knee-jerk reaction, or at least what I've experienced is that most
00:28:40.800 | people's knee-jerk reaction is to simply say, "Well, just to jump on you instead of engaging
00:28:48.960 | with the idea." And it's really remarkable to me because you start asking questions and you just
00:28:56.960 | simply say, "Well, why does this exist? Why do I give over this authority?" And like I said,
00:29:04.720 | you just get people to immediately jump on it instead of stopping and saying, "Oh, wait a
00:29:08.880 | second. Why do we do things that way? Why don't I just simply choose to do what's in my best interest?"
00:29:14.240 | >> Again, I love these countries that have overcome adversity. And it's unfortunate what
00:29:20.640 | some of these people have gone through. I mean, you go to Cambodia, it's very heartbreaking what
00:29:24.240 | they've gone through. But I think that a good reset every once in a while is important in a
00:29:30.240 | culture for people to be reminded of why things are the way they are. I talk frequently about
00:29:35.280 | the idea that the United States is the Paris Hilton of countries or the socialite of countries
00:29:40.800 | where they're kind of rich, not as rich as they think they are, but they're relatively wealthy,
00:29:45.600 | but they don't know why. And so what they do is they dump on everything that made them wealthy
00:29:50.320 | in the first place. I mean, go back 101 years in the United States, no income tax. Somehow,
00:29:56.000 | there were roads, there was a post office, people were going to school, things were being invented.
00:30:00.400 | I mean, how long ago was it that they said, "Let's shut down the patent office because we've
00:30:04.480 | invented everything that could possibly ever be invented." Somehow, all of that was done with
00:30:08.400 | no income tax. People were left alone. But everyone got away from that. They forgot about
00:30:15.520 | that. And you're right. When you mention now the concept that, "Hey, maybe this place is going
00:30:21.360 | in the tubes," even the people who agree with you, "Yeah, we've got our problems," but they'll say,
00:30:28.240 | "It's still the best country on earth." It's such an egotistical thing. Now, if you want to be
00:30:34.000 | egotistical and you want to suck off the government doll and have your job and have two cents left
00:30:39.920 | over at the end of every paycheck and be a drone, that's one thing. It's a great system for you.
00:30:45.600 | But imagine the odds. I mean, the ego these people have to think that out of 194 countries,
00:30:52.000 | they just so happened to be born in the best one. I mean, isn't that fascinating that you,
00:30:56.960 | of all people, were born in the best country? Do you think maybe it's because it's the only
00:31:01.360 | country that you know? No, of course not. Are these people doing empirical data?
00:31:09.440 | Are they studying? Like, "Hey, look at this number." No. It's emotional. It's nothing but
00:31:15.520 | emotional. Well, you see the same thing in the United States. I mean, the amazing thing about
00:31:21.040 | the United States or Canada or Europe is that—well, Europe is not a good example—but Canada, U.S.,
00:31:28.800 | Australia, large China, large individual countries where there's a huge land mass all under one flag
00:31:35.680 | is that you can live easily, easily move anywhere from anywhere in the United States to anywhere in
00:31:41.680 | the United States with the minimum of fuss. The only upset to your situation is going to be your
00:31:47.040 | social structure, your circle of contacts and the people that you are with. But if you don't like
00:31:53.120 | the city, you can easily move to the country. If you don't like the heat, you can easily move north.
00:31:57.040 | If you don't like the humidity, you can move west. But yet, how many people actually are willing to
00:32:03.680 | sit down and say, "Ah, the small town where I grew up or the big city where I grew up, what I'm
00:32:07.840 | familiar with might not be the best, and it might be simply easier just simply to move and save a
00:32:14.320 | ton. Why don't I move out of Chicago and move to Texas? Or why don't I move out of Chicago, and if
00:32:19.360 | I want to keep the same climate, move west or move east or move to somewhere else where I can get
00:32:25.520 | treated a little bit better but retain the things that are important to me?" We usually don't start
00:32:29.600 | with this comprehensive planning idea. Rather, we just simply stay stuck with what we know.
00:32:33.840 | I've been interviewed on a lot of shows like yours, both the political side and the business
00:32:41.760 | entrepreneurial side. When people say, "Well, what's your advice to the average person listening?"
00:32:45.840 | I can't motivate people. I can't force you to make a change in your life. The answer is,
00:32:51.680 | you just have to do it. Everyone has an excuse. "Oh, I got four kids. Oh, my parents live here. Oh,
00:32:57.440 | well, in three" – whatever it is, do you want to be free or do you not? Look, I'm a pragmatic guy.
00:33:04.000 | I'm willing to make a few compromises for the point of enjoying my own life or whatever the
00:33:10.960 | case may be. But you talk about these big countries. I'd love to be from a small country.
00:33:15.200 | I mean imagine if you were a citizen of Uruguay or something. Do you think that the IRS of Uruguay
00:33:23.920 | – and I'm not encouraging people to break the law because the laws in most of these countries
00:33:27.040 | are much more favorable than where you're from. But do you think that the IRS of Uruguay is chasing
00:33:31.680 | people around the world? "Hey, you don't have a bank account in Singapore, do you? You better tell
00:33:35.680 | us. You better pay us. You better give us our cut." No. I mean being from small countries in
00:33:42.160 | many cases is much, much, much better because again the smaller countries are more responsive
00:33:46.800 | to people's needs. I mean you can't do this as an American anymore. But for years places like
00:33:53.600 | Liechtenstein and Dora were the best places for people to bank because those places had nothing
00:34:00.720 | to offer but banking. So they became the best at banking. Imagine if you were from a place like
00:34:05.840 | that. Imagine if you banked in a place like that. Imagine if you had a website in a place like that.
00:34:11.920 | To protect your privacy, stuff like that. I mean it's oftentimes the smallest countries that offer
00:34:17.200 | the best advantages to people because they understand they don't have a choice. They
00:34:21.120 | have to treat you well. Countries like the US, Russia, Brazil, I mean places like this,
00:34:27.200 | they have hundreds of millions of tax slaves. They don't – I mean they have to be competitive to a
00:34:33.120 | certain extent but they can also just milk the system to a certain extent and just suck off
00:34:38.000 | the fruits of all their citizens' labor. And as long as they can keep their citizens in the
00:34:42.800 | blissful ignorance of thinking that rah, rah America, let's pay our money to the government
00:34:49.120 | because if we didn't we would just be like those savages in Singapore where they're living in mud
00:34:55.440 | huts and walking down streets of dirt and all kinds of horrible – tigers are attacking them.
00:35:05.600 | Imagine if we didn't pay taxes, we'd be like those people, those uncivilized hunks. But that's
00:35:12.720 | what they try and convince you to do and that's why some of these smaller countries are oftentimes
00:35:17.120 | better. That's why the smaller countries like the Caribbean, what have you, are the ones leading the
00:35:21.200 | stuff that I talk about. Why did you choose Asia?
00:35:25.520 | I've been all over. And personally I think that Latin America, South America, there are a lot of
00:35:33.440 | great opportunities there. I happen to be very impatient and there's nothing better to me than
00:35:40.240 | flying into Hong Kong airport, getting off that plane, going into like the 7-Eleven and you're
00:35:45.920 | in and out of that cash register in three seconds. I mean it's just hurry, hurry, hurry, rush,
00:35:51.360 | rush, rush. I love that. I love the efficiency of it. I'm an efficiency guy which for me the
00:35:55.360 | Latin world is a bit too slow. But witnessing what's happening right now in Asia is amazing
00:35:59.760 | and I would feel like I was missing out if I wasn't being a part of this transformation because
00:36:04.480 | I really think it is one of the most significant economic transformations in modern history.
00:36:09.280 | What's happening right now in Asia and especially here in Southeast Asia where you've got
00:36:13.760 | people in China going from lower class to middle class. You've got 40,000
00:36:19.040 | millionaires being created all the time in China. You've got places like Cambodia where again,
00:36:26.480 | I mean 40 years ago the place was an agrarian utopia so they said which was as we know,
00:36:32.320 | government uses code word. That was code word for take everyone into the bush and shoot them.
00:36:36.800 | And look at what they're at now. I mean they're slowly and steadily growing and becoming wealthier
00:36:42.560 | and wealthier. Now they're buying cars. People who have motorbikes are moving up to cars. People
00:36:47.440 | who are walking with the motorbikes. There's so much happening here. There's so much opportunity.
00:36:52.640 | I love being a part of it and on top of that it's a fantastic place to live because you can live a
00:37:00.080 | New York City lifestyle in cities like Kuala Lumpur for a fraction of the New York City price.
00:37:05.360 | You get left alone. The governments here aren't perfect but you can live the kind of lifestyle
00:37:10.560 | that I talk about where you're not really on the radar. You're here as kind of a visitor and
00:37:21.280 | you can have a lot of freedom that way. Do you have to have an online business or do you
00:37:25.680 | see opportunities for people to set up local businesses that are bricks and mortar type of
00:37:30.080 | operations? I'm a big fan of bricks and mortar. I'm not really the biggest advocate of online. I
00:37:35.520 | mean obviously I think it's a great model for those who want to do that but I think that you
00:37:39.920 | can absolutely do more than that. I mean before I even realized it, I had a location independent
00:37:45.920 | business when I was very young. I ran a broadcasting business where we helped radio
00:37:50.080 | stations sell their unsold inventory and it became a rather influential company in its industry before
00:37:57.600 | I exited that company. But once I got that off the ground, I would be traveling in Vienna and
00:38:03.360 | making phone calls at night and night to guys in Chicago where it was two in the afternoon.
00:38:07.440 | So if you have a consulting business, if you have things where you sell products to other businesses,
00:38:12.000 | if you're doing import and export, you can absolutely run that location independent.
00:38:16.720 | It doesn't have to be based online and I think there are a lot of very successful online businesses
00:38:21.120 | that are merely using the online aspect or the app aspect as a conduit, i.e. Uber,
00:38:26.720 | Airbnb. Those services all deal in physical product, physical deliverables but they're using
00:38:33.040 | the online model to facilitate that. But I do think there are also a lot of opportunities. I
00:38:37.120 | mean I've talked at length about Cambodia. Columbia is another place I think where you can go and
00:38:46.480 | start a business and be very successful. It depends on how far down the totem pole you're
00:38:53.680 | willing to go. I mean Laos is a place where people are clamoring for pretty much everything you can
00:39:00.160 | possibly imagine because it's either not available there or it's super duper expensive and anyone who
00:39:04.880 | wants it flies to Thailand. That's just one example. There are countries like that all around
00:39:08.400 | the world where you can go in and say, "Listen, I'm going to deliver jeans to people's houses on
00:39:14.160 | a motorbike and that's my business." I think there are a lot of brick and mortar opportunities.
00:39:19.120 | Again, the further undeveloped you go, Laos, Africa, Myanmar, places in South America like
00:39:30.160 | Paraguay. I mean the less developed, the more opportunity, the more money that can be made.
00:39:35.360 | Mongolia was one of them at one point. But there are places that are a little bit more developed.
00:39:42.640 | Cambodia really doesn't seem very adventurous to me anymore. Places like Chile, Panama,
00:39:49.120 | there's still plenty of money being made there. I talk to guys every day who are members of my
00:39:54.000 | private club who come to my events. Some of them are doubling their money every year. They're
00:39:59.760 | starting businesses and selling them for 10, 20 times a couple of years later. I mean there's so
00:40:04.640 | much money being made outside of the US and it's so much easier to get started because you're not
00:40:09.360 | paying the higher rent in San Francisco. You're not hiring people for 60 grand a year.
00:40:12.960 | I'm glad you brought up the point about like you alluded to it more but I'd like to just
00:40:19.280 | emphasize it. Online businesses, I think, online business is in many ways becoming
00:40:24.400 | maybe a misnomer. It seems to me that in the past people would think about online as, "Oh,
00:40:32.560 | it's a separate thing." And now if your business doesn't have a strategy, online is just simply
00:40:37.680 | becoming in some ways just a communications medium. And so I think there are many, many more
00:40:43.280 | types of businesses that can be pursued, that can be run virtually that aren't traditional virtual
00:40:49.120 | businesses. The earliest example that I thought of, that I can remember personally coming across
00:40:54.400 | is I knew somebody, I think I met them eight or nine years ago, and this person was an attorney
00:40:58.720 | in Chicago and a corporate attorney so mainly involved with documents and mergers and dealing
00:41:04.960 | with all the paperwork, appropriate paperwork for on the corporate side. No litigation and nothing
00:41:10.400 | like that. And this attorney was doing well and he enjoyed spending time down in Mexico. Well,
00:41:16.880 | he wound up--he committed some crime of some kind and he could--he basically can't come back to the
00:41:24.080 | U.S. If he comes back to the U.S., he's got to deal with this crime. It's a fairly minor crime.
00:41:28.400 | I think it was a non-violent, some stupid drug crime or something like that. And he--all what
00:41:34.000 | he chose to do is this was back when, what was that, Vonage was brand new and he just got a
00:41:39.440 | Vonage phone number for Chicago area code, got a decent access internet connection, and he
00:41:46.880 | continued to simply run his entire law practice just simply from Mexico, working with the Chicago
00:41:51.840 | clients. They didn't care if whether they saw him or not. They just needed the documents to be right.
00:41:55.840 | And he's able to do the entire thing from abroad and multiply the effect of his income because of
00:42:01.200 | living abroad, spend less time at work, and have a better lifestyle. And even in the six years that
00:42:07.040 | I was doing financial planning, working with clients, I noticed a--and this was from 2008 to
00:42:12.240 | 2014. I noticed a dramatic change in people's comfort level with virtual connection. When I
00:42:20.320 | started working as a financial advisor, A, the technology was still a little bit clunky and you
00:42:25.360 | needed to do in-person meetings. You needed to establish rapport. You needed to have that
00:42:30.000 | face-to-face connection. I switched to where in 2013, I almost never left my office. And I preferred,
00:42:37.120 | as long as a client had some connection with me previously, I preferred to never meet in person.
00:42:41.840 | And they preferred it because our lives are so busy, so hectic, and so it was easier for them
00:42:47.280 | to schedule an hour, sit in front of the computer, do an online meeting, and a phone presentation,
00:42:52.080 | and it was actually more effective than being together in person. Well, there's no reason why
00:42:56.320 | I can't do that from the Cayman Islands. There's no reason why I can't do that from anywhere in
00:43:00.240 | the world. And everything, it seems, is going that direction more and more, with the exception
00:43:04.880 | of something where you need a physical service provided or a physical--yeah, a physical service.
00:43:12.000 | And even that, there are ways to improve that process with the virtual environment. I mean,
00:43:18.800 | it just opens up a world of possibilities for any attorney, any CPA, any financial advisor,
00:43:24.000 | things like that, as long as you can deal with the regulation. And that's what always happens,
00:43:27.760 | is the regulation gets in your way. But smart people have been getting around regulation since
00:43:33.040 | regulators first started making it. And that's the point. Of course, that's the point. I mean,
00:43:37.440 | right. I mean, just get rid of the whole bunch of it, nothing would change. But you make a very
00:43:41.520 | interesting point. Listen, there are always going to be guys who they want to move to
00:43:45.360 | Cambodia and they want to spend five grand or open a bar on the beach. The good news is you
00:43:49.280 | can do that there. And when you ask people, "What about minimum wage? What about regulations? What
00:43:53.040 | about permits?" Huh? So, I mean, that aspect is easier if that's the kind of life you want to
00:43:58.080 | lead. But let's be honest. I mean, you have to have the confidence to say, "Here's who I'm
00:44:03.440 | targeting," and not be everything to everybody. In my business, in Nomad Capitalist, we do have
00:44:09.440 | some guys in my club called the Nomad Society that run eight and nine-figure businesses all
00:44:15.120 | around the world. But that's not really my target market. I'm glad they have them. They contribute
00:44:20.400 | a lot. I mean, the members get a lot of value from them. But the reality is I'm someone who's
00:44:25.760 | trying to reach out to the digital nomad, the younger guys, the entrepreneurs, people who have
00:44:30.480 | half a million dollars, a million dollars, and they need to protect it and they need to grow it.
00:44:34.960 | That's my niche. So if you're the family office, look, I practically flunked out of a party school,
00:44:41.440 | please. I mean, no family office wants me advising them. They want guys with better
00:44:45.280 | pedigrees than I have. So I have the confidence to say, "Hey, here's my market." And that's what
00:44:50.240 | you can do too. There are, I mean, how many guys out there, how many people like me who are
00:44:55.920 | entrepreneurs living all around the world here in Asia, in Bangkok, in Vietnam, all over, need help
00:45:00.800 | with their taxes? To them, it's a commodity. They just need someone who knows it. If you set up a
00:45:05.440 | website and say, "Hey, listen, I got the gold, the silver, and the platinum package. Pick which one
00:45:09.600 | you want. Send me your documents. Scan them. I'll review them and I'll send it back to you." I mean,
00:45:14.880 | what do they care? You just have to have the confidence to say, "That's my market. I'm going
00:45:19.840 | to be the guy for that group of people." And in a world of essentially 7 billion people,
00:45:26.400 | when you're essentially opened up over the coming decades, granted many billions of those don't yet
00:45:31.600 | have internet connection and many billions of them are going to speak other languages, but
00:45:35.680 | in a world of 7 billion, if you only need one in a million to be your client, you have a huge
00:45:41.280 | marketplace and you really can specialize. And when you take instead of the search function,
00:45:47.520 | I went out to my driveway yesterday and somebody had dropped off the local yellow pages,
00:45:54.800 | but they hadn't tied the bag well and it rained. And so the thing was soaking wet anyway. And so
00:45:59.920 | it made the decision easier instead of thinking for a moment, "Oh, maybe I should keep this thing,"
00:46:03.760 | which I have never used. It made the decision easier to simply toss it right in the recycling
00:46:08.000 | bin and it didn't even go into my house. So… How did you find me then, Joshua?
00:46:13.440 | Exactly. I mean, your marketplace with a few keywords and some expertise and then building
00:46:21.520 | it up, you really can build a huge, huge attraction marketing for anything that you're doing. It's an
00:46:28.800 | amazing world we live in. And again, I mean, listen, if you're the guy who is the buy here,
00:46:36.240 | pay here car lot or the ambulance chaser targeting the Hispanic community, like maybe you need a
00:46:41.680 | physical presence. Although I do think that some of those companies are going to be innovated
00:46:45.840 | in the same way that every other industry has seen innovation. And there'll be someone who comes in
00:46:51.360 | and says, "We're the ambulance chaser. You don't even have to come in and see. We'll just handle
00:46:54.880 | your case remotely." So I think that'll happen. But there's so many opportunities to also just be
00:47:02.400 | the kind of me too and run businesses. And again, I mean, I just flew the other day. I try and avoid
00:47:09.360 | them because I like to fly a little bit more class. I'm kind of a snob in that way. But I flew back to
00:47:15.360 | Kuala Lumpur from Japan the other day on AirAsia. It cost me 83 bucks for a seven-hour flight. I
00:47:21.520 | mean, think of how far away these two places are. Eighty-three bucks. What's one of the secrets that
00:47:26.800 | AirAsia uses to keep its fares amazingly low? One of the secrets is they're incorporated in
00:47:34.240 | Labuan, which is the low-tax hub here in Malaysia, where you can basically cap out your entire
00:47:40.480 | company's tax at about $6,000 a year. Now, if you're running a very small online business,
00:47:46.080 | that's $6,000 too much in many cases. But nevertheless, imagine the advantage that
00:47:50.960 | AirAsia now has against United Airlines, which flies from Japan to Singapore, who has to pay
00:47:58.160 | U.S. tax and deal with all the regulations and have U.S. flight crew and seniority and labor
00:48:03.280 | unions. Who do you think is going to win? I mean, if you had to choose which airline you wanted to
00:48:07.120 | fly in, forget about the fact that AirAsia has 23-year-olds in tight red skirts and United has
00:48:12.880 | women who are 63 years old and barking at you with a megaphone. Forget that. Who's going to pay five
00:48:20.000 | times the price to pay for United's obligations to labor unions and big government? I certainly
00:48:25.920 | am not. And the market is saying that because United and other American carriers are retreating
00:48:30.640 | from this market largely. They may be flying more flights from San Francisco to new cities,
00:48:35.680 | but they're not flying any of their older routes largely from point to point within Asia,
00:48:41.200 | because they can't compete, because they have this burden. And so, I mean, if you're a guy who says,
00:48:46.400 | "Listen, I see an opportunity for something that's already being done well by another business,
00:48:52.480 | but they're based in San Francisco. They're hiring guys for 100 grand a year. They're paying
00:48:56.560 | California taxes," which I call brutal prison rape. I mean, you can come in and just by the
00:49:05.760 | virtue of setting up shop in Labuan, for instance, you can shave 30 percent off right off the top,
00:49:12.640 | probably more. Right. And for anybody who's never flown a non-U.S. airline,
00:49:18.080 | once you fly a non-U.S. airline, you will never ever want to fly a U.S.-based airline again.
00:49:22.800 | I was on a low-cost carrier flying from Hong Kong to Vietnam last year,
00:49:27.360 | an hour and 45-minute flight. I got two meals. And they're like, "Oh, can we get you anything
00:49:34.640 | else, Mr. Henderson?" I mean, the service is amazing. And then you get into Turkish Airlines,
00:49:40.720 | Singapore Airlines. I was in the Istanbul lounge waiting for a business class flight,
00:49:44.560 | the guys playing a piano next to the brick oven cooking pizzas.
00:49:48.160 | That's amazing. I'm going to give you one of my projects, and I'm interested to hear where you
00:49:55.040 | would go with it. I think a lot about the idea of how to get a world-class education. And I do not
00:50:01.680 | care about certification. I care about education. If you were to design an international MBA
00:50:08.240 | project, and this is an entirely self-designed education in international business, and I'm
00:50:16.080 | going to give you a $60,000 budget, and you can have anywhere from two to four years,
00:50:22.400 | and if you need to stretch the budget a little bit beyond that. We're going to take care of all
00:50:26.720 | of the academic knowledge with books and actually spending our some time reading and learning.
00:50:30.720 | If you were going to go back and, knowing what you now know, encourage someone on how to develop
00:50:37.040 | a knowledge of international business, what course of study, where would you encourage
00:50:41.440 | them to go? How would you approach that project? Again, remember you're talking to a guy who at 18
00:50:47.760 | years old said, "I slept through much of high school. I should have done much better, but now
00:50:54.000 | my grades are such that I can either go and start a business right now, or I can go and hang out
00:51:01.840 | with girls who wear shorts with one-inch seams, and that's why they moved to Arizona. I'm the
00:51:06.800 | guy who flunked out of that school practically. International MBA, I'm like a scrappy entrepreneur,
00:51:13.280 | Joshua. I don't design a program. How your brain works.
00:51:18.640 | Here's what I tell people all the time when they say, "Well, what should I do to find an
00:51:25.680 | opportunity?" Let me tell you. I was just meeting with about a dozen guys who were in my club in
00:51:31.680 | Hong Kong last week. I came out of there with a dozen different business ideas. I was in Cambodia
00:51:37.360 | for a week last month, and I probably had a dozen different business ideas that could all probably
00:51:41.760 | be pretty successful. When people say, "Well, what should I do?" 60 grand. What is this? Donald
00:51:48.080 | Trump overlanding helicopters in the top of buildings, Joshua, please. Save up five grand.
00:51:53.840 | How badly do you want it? Go and live in—I mean, save up three grand. Go and live in a place with
00:51:59.440 | no hot water if that's what it takes, and just live and move through some of these emerging
00:52:04.960 | economies. You won't need two to four years. You might need two to four months. You might need a
00:52:10.320 | year. Obviously, not every venture is successful. For me, I'm all about results. That's all that
00:52:18.000 | matters to me. I went to the school of press one for sales because sales matters more than
00:52:22.880 | everything else. If you don't sell, you can't do anything else. My MBA program is get on a plane,
00:52:30.720 | do whatever it takes, live as cheaply as you have to to make it happen, and figure out where do you
00:52:37.840 | want to focus. Do you want to focus in Asia? Do you want to focus in Latin America? Do you want
00:52:43.360 | to focus in Africa? What is it that you want to do? You go there, and you just kind of—it
00:52:51.600 | sounds like management by walking around, but it's kind of like learning through osmosis. You
00:52:56.800 | just kind of sit, and the opportunities just kind of come to you in these places. I mean,
00:53:01.120 | it's really that easy. From there, I'm all about intuition and instincts. You got to try something.
00:53:08.480 | You got to get on the ground, try something. Start a bar with $1,000. See what happens. See
00:53:14.160 | how you can—see how to market. See how to—what different things drive sales more than others.
00:53:20.720 | You'll begin to develop this entrepreneurial intuition to understand what it is that drives
00:53:27.680 | sales and drives consumer behavior. From then, once you have that, I mean once I developed that,
00:53:33.440 | I could be in radio. I could be in home services. I could be in financial services.
00:53:37.840 | I've started numerous businesses in each of those industries and helped people start other
00:53:42.320 | businesses as well because I had that basic intuition that could only be gained not in a
00:53:46.960 | classroom, not from books, but from actually being there, doing it, seeing what worked,
00:53:51.920 | and seeing what smacked me in the face. That's an excellent—I agree with you 100%.
00:53:59.520 | It's an excellent non-answer.
00:54:00.720 | No, I'm glad you went that way. I see so many times—I see these threads, and you see so many
00:54:08.320 | people, not everybody, but so many people. They just go and spend some time traveling.
00:54:13.200 | I read a book in high school called Adventure Capitalist, and this was by Jim Rogers. Jim
00:54:18.240 | Rogers made his mark as an investor, and then he sat down, then he went, and he built this ridiculous
00:54:23.600 | four-wheel drive Mercedes convertible and hooked a trailer to it and then drove around the world
00:54:30.080 | with his girlfriend and just talked about—in that book, Adventure Capitalist, talked about
00:54:36.240 | what he learned from that trip. You're exactly right because we place such a precious—we
00:54:42.480 | place too little value on experience and too much on book knowledge. I'm a victim of this myself,
00:54:49.520 | is that a little bit of experience brings a lot more actual knowledge sometimes than all of the
00:54:56.480 | book learning put together, so it's a good answer. Here's the other thing. Listen, you see this
00:55:02.960 | frequently discussed on, for example, the TV show Shark Tank. I enjoy this show. It's becoming too
00:55:07.680 | Hollywood, but they talk about the concept that if you don't create a business that sells,
00:55:11.680 | you can't help anyone. This speaks to what I talk about in the offshore world. You see these guys
00:55:15.520 | who come on, and they say, "I'm not willing to manufacture this product in China." They say,
00:55:21.200 | "Why?" "Because I want people in Lebanon, Tennessee to have jobs." "Well, what if you're
00:55:26.880 | priced so uncompetitively that no one wants it and you can't create any jobs?" "Well,
00:55:30.960 | that's the way it goes." You're an idiot. You have to create wealth. You have to create success
00:55:37.120 | before you can enjoy this other stuff. I'm not opposed to book learning, but I think that
00:55:42.560 | having accomplished what I've accomplished now, I'm in a much better position to go out and say,
00:55:46.400 | "You know what? I'm going to go out, and I'm going to study Buddhism," or "I'm going to go
00:55:50.560 | and learn from a master tea expert in China about how the tea is steeped and how to enjoy the tea
00:55:57.680 | and how over each course of drinking the tea, the flavor changes." Right now, I'm seeking out an
00:56:02.720 | expert on scotch for when we do an event in Ireland. I'm going to fly over to Scotland.
00:56:07.760 | There's a lot of book knowledge that I'm interested in learning about how different
00:56:12.320 | things in the world work, but for me to go to some program and learn how that stuff works and
00:56:17.680 | have it forced down my throat, I don't think it helps anyone. To me, it's really the same thing
00:56:21.360 | as saying, "You have to learn philosophy alongside learning business or else you'll never be a
00:56:24.960 | successful business person." Total nonsense. Learn what you want to learn. It's the true
00:56:31.840 | free market of knowledge. I love it. Last question, and then with the last question,
00:56:37.520 | I'll give you a chance to mention your site and any resources and things that you would like
00:56:41.040 | people to know about. The last question is this. The reason I live where I live is because of the
00:56:48.160 | social environment that I'm engaged in, and I think that's probably the same for most people.
00:56:54.000 | What have you learned? Let me not prejudge. It seems to me that you've had to
00:57:00.000 | change your social environment as far as who you're spending time with and where you're
00:57:06.880 | spending time in order to live the kind of lifestyle that you live. What have been the
00:57:10.480 | good things about that? What have been the tough things about that? How have you handled some of
00:57:14.080 | that? How would you encourage somebody who is seriously considering making a dramatic change
00:57:19.360 | in their lifestyle in order to pursue a more off-the-beaten path, but they're worried about
00:57:23.520 | their social environment? It's one of those things that I don't know that I can talk to you about
00:57:29.680 | how you should deal with it. You just have to deal with it. I look at, for example, when I was in the
00:57:35.920 | radio business, the talent side. So many people said, "I would love to be on the radio, but I live
00:57:42.480 | here in Los Angeles. How do I get started?" The answer was always the same. You need to move to
00:57:48.160 | the middle of nowhere in West Virginia, work at a 500-watt AM radio station broadcasting the
00:57:53.680 | agriculture report, and you need to work your way up. Now, with the internet and all that,
00:57:58.480 | that's becoming an antiquated model and then we can have a podcast. For years, that was how the
00:58:02.320 | model worked. Everyone said, "Well, what am I going to do about my friends?" Well, apparently,
00:58:07.520 | you don't want to be on the radio that badly. There's a mantra that I use in my life. It's a
00:58:12.960 | great success tip. The people who are successful do things that unsuccessful people aren't willing
00:58:18.960 | to do. Do you want to be successful or not? How badly do you want it? So I can't tell you
00:58:24.800 | that your social life won't change. What I can say is I personally enjoy and I've been able to meet
00:58:31.920 | people from all around the world and see so many different cultures and have a greater understanding
00:58:35.920 | of why things work the way they do. To me, that's much more valuable intelligence because you can
00:58:41.040 | always make new friends. I mean, you really get to choose where you want to go. I'm a big city guy,
00:58:46.640 | so I'm not going to go and live in the rice paddies of Laos like one of my friends does.
00:58:50.800 | That's the social circle he wants to be in. I want to be with people from all over the world.
00:58:55.280 | I live in Kuala Lumpur. It's a very diverse city. So you can recreate the social structure anywhere.
00:59:01.520 | Obviously, with today's technology, it's not like I've told all my friends, "You're dead to me,"
00:59:07.120 | and I never speak to them again. I speak to them frequently on things like Skype.
00:59:11.280 | But I mean, the question really boils down to, I mean, do you want to make excuses or do you want
00:59:17.200 | to take action? Which is more important to you? If living in your town is more important than
00:59:24.880 | saving money on taxes or seeing the world or marrying a Filipino wife or whatever the case
00:59:32.560 | may be, then that's your personal decision. Everything has consequences. But I can tell
00:59:37.680 | you that I think that the payoff is much better in terms of knowledge, in terms of freedom,
00:59:42.480 | in terms of wealth. You just have to decide which of those things is more important to you.
00:59:47.920 | It's certainly easier today to keep contact with people than it was five years ago. It's
00:59:57.280 | an amazing world we live in. Andrew, thank you for coming on. Any last words?
01:00:02.240 | Mention your websites and feel free to plug anything that you would like to plug,
01:00:06.320 | any resources that you have that would be helpful to people who would like to get to
01:00:11.040 | know more about you and your work, any products that you have. Feel free to
01:00:14.240 | share any of that with the audience. Nomadcapitalist.com, we've got all kinds
01:00:19.040 | of daily field reports. We've got, I think, more words than the Bible now in terms of
01:00:23.040 | information on how to go offshore, how to get second passports, how to do all the stuff I'm
01:00:27.920 | talking about, live a more free life. What I'm doing in January of 2015 is I'm putting on my
01:00:34.800 | second big event. We're doing a live event in Cancun called Passport to Freedom, which is an
01:00:41.280 | encore presentation to the first one we did in Las Vegas, where I had Peter Schiff and a lot of
01:00:45.040 | other names come together, and it was a great event. We're doing the second event next January
01:00:49.760 | in Cancun, PassporttoFreedomevent.com. You can get all the details. This is basically the Woodstock
01:00:58.080 | of internationalization, where we're going to have 30 guys dealing in foreign real estate,
01:01:02.560 | foreign investments, moving your gold overseas, opening offshore bank accounts, second passports,
01:01:06.880 | second residencies, how to start an online business, how to move your business offshore,
01:01:11.280 | all that and a lot more. Basically, ways to grow and protect your money outside of your borders
01:01:18.560 | by using the world as your oyster. We're going to have all those guys together in Cancun.
01:01:21.920 | PassporttoFreedomevent.com is the website for that. It's a very limited 150-seat event,
01:01:28.160 | because I want everyone to be able to have the chance to interact with the speakers personally
01:01:32.800 | and actually take action, not just to come and just to learn everything and then go home and
01:01:38.240 | not do it, but to be able to come and actually open an offshore bank account before they even
01:01:42.960 | get back on the plane. That's going to be a great time. If someone's serious about doing
01:01:49.280 | some of this stuff, the networking opportunities are amazing, because we've got so many
01:01:52.640 | highly successful guys who are going to be there, and girls too, of course.
01:01:56.080 | I'd love to see some of your listeners in Cancun.
01:01:59.440 | That sounds like my kind of event. Who knows? Maybe I'll show up. I would enjoy it.
01:02:05.200 | I'd love to have you.
01:02:06.160 | Andrew, thank you for coming on. Keep doing the work that you're doing. Also,
01:02:08.720 | I just want to mention you do have a podcast, right? I don't know how regularly you release
01:02:12.560 | that show, but if anyone's interested, you do have it as a podcast listener.
01:02:16.320 | You're available in the podcast directories?
01:02:18.240 | We do have a radio show on iTunes and absolutely, the Nomad Capitalist Report. We're putting that
01:02:24.160 | out every week now. It's my latest rants and raves on the madness that's going on,
01:02:28.880 | but we throw in some good actionable information too. We just talked about, interestingly enough,
01:02:32.880 | New York real estate, how CNBC is saying how it's going through the roof,
01:02:38.400 | and I called them out on how full of crap they are. That's what we talk about on the show.
01:02:42.480 | I appreciate you mentioning it.
01:02:44.640 | Awesome. Thank you for coming on. We appreciate it.
01:02:47.360 | My pleasure, Joshua.
01:02:49.680 | Well, I told you it'd be interesting. Hopefully, you found some ideas that will be helpful to you
01:02:56.240 | in your life. What I'd encourage you to do is not think so much about the specifics of what
01:03:02.640 | Andrew and I talked about, but more think about the general ideas. You may not be interested in
01:03:08.480 | moving to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I certainly don't plan to move there today, although you never
01:03:13.680 | know. But no, it's not on my list right now. So don't worry too much about the specifics,
01:03:19.920 | but consider for yourself, is there a way that you can implement the ideas in a way that works
01:03:24.560 | for you? For some of you, that very well may be moving to Southeast Asia or moving to Central
01:03:29.440 | America or moving to an insert place that you want to move to here. For others, maybe it's just
01:03:34.560 | simply changing states. There's no reason why you have to be in a high-tax state or setting up your
01:03:42.640 | own version of flag theory here in the United States, living in a state with no state income
01:03:48.400 | tax, doing business. You get the idea. Now, the other thing is you've got to figure out what's
01:03:56.960 | appropriate to you at this point in time. If you are just getting started, you're not earning a
01:04:00.240 | huge amount of money, then maybe this is all unnecessary. You've got to look at the cost versus
01:04:05.840 | the benefit. And that cost versus benefit analysis will change over time. So consider what you can
01:04:12.080 | implement in your own planning, but don't be scared of some of the ideas. Check out Andrew's
01:04:16.960 | stuff. I hope you'll find it interesting and helpful. I know that I enjoy reading and at least
01:04:21.840 | just considering some of the information. He's got resources about getting second passports. He's got
01:04:26.960 | resources about offshore banking, offshore trusts, setting up offshore companies. Again, depending on
01:04:32.240 | where you are in your wealth journey, if you have a higher level of wealth, then that type of
01:04:36.800 | resource may be more substantial for you. If you're just getting started, it's probably not worth
01:04:41.680 | percent spending time pursuing a second passport, but if it's something that you can fit into your
01:04:48.720 | life, feel free. Hope you enjoyed the interview. Thank you so much for being here. Be back with
01:04:54.320 | you tomorrow.
01:05:22.000 | Thank you for listening to today's show. This show is intended to provide entertainment,
01:05:26.880 | education, and financial enlightenment. Your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any
01:05:36.000 | actionable advice without knowing anything about you. This show is not and is not intended
01:05:44.160 | to be any form of financial advice. Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be
01:05:53.760 | caring, competent, and trustworthy, and consult them because they are the ones who can understand
01:06:01.280 | your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions.
01:06:08.960 | Hold them accountable for your results. I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate
01:06:14.480 | in today's show, but I'm one person and I make mistakes. If you spot a mistake in something I've
01:06:20.000 | said, please come by the show page and comment so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow,
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