With the Planet Fitness Black Card, you don't just get a great workout, you get a great perk out, because your membership is packed with perks. For zero enrollment and $24.99 a month, you'll get perks like access to any of our 24/7 clean and spacious locations. Bring your friend anytime and both workouts with tons of equipment that'll give you that big fitness energy, relaxing at Black Card Spa and more.

Workout and perk out with the PF Black Card. Join today for zero enrollment and $24.99 a month. See Home Club for details. Today on Radical Personal Finance, part one of a three-part series. Today, financial lessons learned from Ukraine. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Josh Raschitz, and today we're going to talk about financial lessons learned from Ukraine. Our TV screens, our mobile screens have been filled with lessons, and I want to categorize them and archive them and get them into your and my head, so at least we can gain some good from the suffering of our fellow humans.

One of the most important things about when bad things happen is learning from them, because so frequently things happen and they're awful, but at least if you can gain some lessons from your own suffering and from the suffering of others, then we can minimize human suffering in the future.

So let's do that today by talking about Ukraine. Before we begin, though, today's podcast is brought to you by BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. This is a brand new course that my friend Gabriel Custodiat and I have developed, which basically seeks to answer this question, the question of the dream of Bitcoin. Listen, if you were cut off from your money, if banks were collapsed, if everything stopped and you were totally cut off, could you still gain access to spending power?

If you had to flee your country because of war and run away with nothing but the clothes on your back, could you go into a foreign country, sit down at a computer and with nothing more than a simple passphrase stored in your head, access your life savings? This is one of the goals that we have for Bitcoin, but in the modern world, even though the market has developed, it's actually harder to achieve this goal than previously thought.

So at BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com, we have developed a course teaching you how to anonymously, privately and securely buy, own and use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for yourself and for your family. That sounds like the kind of thing you're interested in. Trust me, it is not easy to figure out how to do this.

Go to BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com, sign up for the course there, BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com, and you'll want to do it as quickly as possible within the next 12 days before the course goes live because the first version is going to feature a live Q&A, so you'll have a chance if you're signed up by then to participate in the live Q&A and make sure that all of your specific questions are answered.

Go to BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. We go to Ukraine. In this series, we're going to have part one is financial lessons from Ukraine, part two is going to be lessons from Russia, part three is going to be lessons in the United States. What you'll observe as we build is you'll observe the increasing financialization of my advice.

I'm titling this "Financial Lessons from Ukraine." These are financial lessons, but what you'll notice as I go through these is how non-financial markety they are. We're not going to talk about stocks, bonds, even insurance policies because what you see is there are things that can happen that cause all of the financial stuff to basically disappear in importance.

Let's begin with lesson one. When your life is threatened, your physical security is threatened, everything else disappears in importance. Here, I always think of the classic Maslow's hierarchy of needs. At the bottom of the pyramid, those fundamental foundational needs, we have physical needs, the needs of your body. Then we have safety needs.

Then we build up to love and belonging and esteem and self-actualization. What happens is most of us spend most of our time thinking about the fact that we want to self-actualize. How can I express myself more fully in my career? This particular job doesn't bring me pleasure. How can I become financially independent so I can experience what it truly means to be an independent and self-directed person?

Hey, that's important. I'm all for it. But what happens is we take for granted the fact that all of our basic needs are met by a functional society. And because of our recent experience, for most of us, we think that a functional society is the normal way that life is experienced.

That's actually not really true. Throughout virtually all of human history, uncertainty about those basic level needs has been the key feature of life. Uncertainty about what am I going to eat tomorrow or today? Will I be cold tonight? Will my neighbor come and try to steal from me? Will a neighboring village try to invade our village and take our stuff and steal our women and kill us all?

That's the normal feature of life. That's the normal way that life has been experienced by virtually all of our fellow humans through virtually all of human civilization, or I should say human existence. So civilization is actually a gift. It's an accomplishment. And we need to stop and ask ourselves, how did that happen?

How did we build civilization? How did we build a civilized world where so many of us give virtually no thought to what we're going to eat, what we're going to drink, how we're going to afford it, etc.? How does that happen? Because that's the aberration in human history. Now it's my hope and prayer that in the fullness of time it will not be the aberration, that will become the norm.

But we're in a transition point. We're in a transition point in human history. And at this time it's important that we stop and recognize that when your life is threatened, everything else disappears in importance. So we need to actually think carefully about security, both the security of our bodies, not to be impaled from above by a bomb or hit by a piece of shrapnel or shot by some dude with a gun, and then also the greater extension of that, our security of our basic needs.

We need to make plans for those things. This is, I think, one of the interesting differentiating factors of radical personal finance, is that I always saw as a financial planner, professional financial planner, I always saw the usefulness of modern financial instruments in most circumstances. But I always felt that fundamentally at its core, financial planning should encompass these basic needs.

And because of the specialization of labor and the economies that most of us live in, we don't think much about those things. And yet they're fundamentally part of it. When we think financial planning, we fundamentally at its core, always consider the things that the financial industry can sell a product to.

That's what we're trained and conditioned to believe is the most important. We're fundamentally trained and conditioned to believe that financial planning means having a budget, life insurance, making sure we put money in our retirement account, et cetera. And that's good. That's well and good. We're never going to get, nor should financial planners be necessarily comprehensive.

But for you and me, I want us to think about financial planning beyond that. I always think about the fact that my physical health is what allows me to make money. And yes, I want to have disability insurance, but I also want to focus on my physical health. Because while I appreciate the fact, the miracle of the modern financial world that I can buy a life insurance policy for a few shekels per month, and then wind up that in the fullness of time, my family is cared for if I'm dead, I have a greater interest in actually not being dead in the first place.

And so my financial planning needs to include taking care of my physical health. My financial planning needs to take care, make sure that it includes taking care of my physical security. And what happens is when you come back to an acute circumstance, that it becomes obvious. In the same way that when a guy gets diagnosed with cancer, he'll spend every dollar of his savings to try to get free of cancer.

Or a guy has a heart attack, he'll quickly recognize, "Man, I got to get this cared for." And all of a sudden, the $200 or the $1,000 a month nutrition coach and personal trainer, et cetera, all of a sudden now it feels like a steal of a deal. Whereas before it felt like, "Oh, I got to be frugal.

I don't want to spend the money on that." Well, in the same way that that applies in more ordinary circumstances, things like war come in, and that lesson is magnified times 10. When your life is threatened, everything else disappears in importance. So always make sure that your financial planning doesn't ignore those basic things.

Financial planning in an intensely financialized manner with financial instruments is good, but it needs to be built on a strong foundation. And again, you'll hear that emphasis expanded. Ukraine is the tip of the spear right now, quite literally. And our friends in Ukraine are facing a complete obliteration of all the normal stuff.

And you see how in these most desperate of circumstances, it goes back to those fundamentals. Number two, war is hell. War is absolute hell. And I know that sounds like, "Obviously," but I mean it. Like war is awful. I think it's important that we recognize this. It's important that we teach our children this.

I remember when I was a young boy, you think about war, you hear about war, and it sounds exciting I guess to boys. That's why they let young boys, teenagers, 18-year-old, 20-year-old men sign up and fight war. They're the ones who fight most wars. Sounds exciting. The reality of war is hell.

It is absolute hell. And to expand that, you cannot... Let me say it in this order. First, you definitely cannot thrive in war. And you can't survive in war. War is not really survivable. Now I understand you say, "Yes, well if you make it through, you make it through, yeah, and you physically survive." But what happens is even that, even the very best case, right?

You're living in a city where it is under war, under siege from an invading army. In the very best case, this is going to be a nightmare that will haunt you the rest of your life. Even if you can physically maintain your breath and your beating heart, physically alive, this is a nightmare that will haunt you the rest of your life.

You'll have trouble sleeping because you worry about, "Is a bomb going to come in and obliterate my house?" You have trouble trusting. You have trouble thinking long-term. When you go through war and you experience the trauma of wondering if today my life ends, when you experience the trauma of killing somebody, even if you're fully justified in the defense of your home, this destroys your life.

And it takes your capacity as a human being, which was very high, and it brings it down to something significantly less than what it was. War is not really survivable. You certainly are not going to thrive. Thriving means that you're going to make progress on long-term goals. But what you see when war comes is that immediately everything shortens up to today, to literally today.

You're not thinking about, "What am I going to do when I retire?" You're not thinking about, "What are we going to do for vacation next year?" You're not thinking about, "How can I expand my business and improve my profits over the next quarter?" You're wondering, "Can I survive today?" And what happens is this takes an intense toll on a man.

This hurts you. You start to make very short-term decisions. You start to think about today because it's all you have. We always see this in the classics of war movies. "Okay, well, I quit smoking, but give me the pack of cigarettes because I need that release today." Very passionate love affairs, stupid decisions that people make because life is reduced to the here, to the now.

This is really bad for your long-term success because one of the success markers for those who build empires and legacies is always the ability to think long-term. People who go through war get scarred and they lose a significant part of their long-term thinking and planning capacity. If at all possible, always avoid war.

You cannot thrive and you cannot really even survive in war. Now the number three lesson is this, prepping works, sort of. And here I mean the traditional sense of prepping. When you look at prepping, just like financial planning has its blinders, I love the world of preparedness, prepping, survivalism, but it also has its blinders.

But there are some senses in which prepping in the traditional sense works. Here's what has worked thus far. Having a plan to get out from where you are, and especially to get out of the cities to a safer, more rural destination, that has been unbelievably important. I think you see here that while we usually lean on cities as a fundamental part of our careers, our family life, et cetera, right?

You see the growth all over the world of mega cities and everyone moving from the country to the city. You see also how cities are basically unsurvivable in difficult times. And again, war is a perfect example. Why? Well, number one, they're targeted. You see, what is the Russian army targeting?

They're targeting the cities. They're targeting the places where the people are, where the infrastructure is. And they're obliterating it. You get a much more bang for your buck in terms of the effectiveness of your munitions and your gunpowder if you target them to cities where they can destroy massive amounts of infrastructure versus out in the country.

And in addition to that, that's where the people are. If you had a little country retreat in Ukraine and you could get out of the city, you're in a much better situation today. Your family, if you could get your family out, even if you need to come back and fight in the city because that's where the soldiers are, if you can get your family out to the city, they're in a much better situation.

In addition, modern cities are just not survivable if the infrastructure goes down. And what do invading armies tackle? Either on a physical attack or a cyber attack, they tackle infrastructure. If you have a flat on the 10th floor of an apartment in downtown Kiev and your electricity goes out and your municipal water supply goes out, your apartment quickly becomes a health nightmare.

You may be able to stay there for a few days, but you're not going to make it being there week after week. Your apartment will become a disease infested hell hole. And so you need to have a plan. If you live in a city, you need to have a plan to get out of the city.

And so that should be a fundamental part of your preparations. At the very least, think about where you could go and how you could get there. Maybe you have a country cousin you could go and see, a relative. Maybe you have a little piece of land that you put a camper on.

Maybe you have a little vacation house out by the lake. But what you see is that almost any vacation house, lake house, little rural retreat is a better place to be than in a city. What about a stockpiling of supplies? Having a plan to have supplies stockpiled is extremely important.

And you see the impact of it right now in the Ukrainian situation. Now the amazing thing is to see that it seems that many of the Ukrainian systems are still working. Stores still have food. I've seen interesting videos of people going around showing the shelves in the supermarket and you hear shells going off and being dropped outside and yet you see that hey, the supermarket still has provisions.

It's wonderful. But I think you see that the stockpiling of provisions is a really, really important deal. Making sure that you have supplies of food, supplies of medicine, medical equipment is a big, big deal. So preparedness has worked and is working. And those who are well prepared in Ukraine are going to be able to protect those that are closest to them.

They're going to be able to help their fellow citizens to rebuild, et cetera. I think I even extend this to the military aspects. I've always enjoyed the gun thing. I enjoy shooting. I always have. But I've often wondered, is it really worth it to prep for military invasion? And it just seems so far-fetched to me that it's just not been that big of a factor.

But when you watch in Ukraine, you watch them handing out AK-47s on the street to whoever will come, and you think about all the second-order effects of that, you all of a sudden realize, yeah, those martial preparations are really valuable. And so recognize that prepping works. But I think the bigger plan is next, number four.

Having a plan to get out of the country entirely is still the best possible thing that you could do. In my course that I first started teaching a couple of years ago, which by the way, it's not been on the market for the last year, I'm revising it and splitting it out.

But in that course called How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis, what I did was I talked about basically the two aspects of how to survive and thrive during the coming economic crisis. Part number one is what I just talked about, what we call preparedness. And basically, preparedness involves stockpiling supplies, making preparations to do without systems of support, infrastructure.

It's everything from having a couple of solar panels so that you can have some electric light in your house if the grid power goes down, having water, water purifier so that if the grid water goes down, you can have access to clean drinking water for your family and water for sanitation.

It means having supplies. But then the second part of the course has all been about getting out, getting out of the disaster zone. I have for years, I've watched, you go on YouTube and you watch people do tours of their bug out bag. And you know what I almost never see in those bags?

It's these things, passport and a credit card. To me, that's number one, passport and a credit card. Give me a passport and a credit card and I'm going to the airport and I'm out of here. Because the best way to do well in a crisis is not to be in that crisis place at all.

I want you to think about those things that I articulated a little bit earlier about the damaging effects of war. Imagine how destructive it is to you, to your family, to watch, to be involved in war. Even if you personally escape with your life still technically going, the psychological destruction and trauma that you experience being in a war zone will haunt you for the rest of your life.

Now imagine that you can avoid that. Imagine you can protect your children from that. Imagine you can get your family members out of that. It's infinitely better to be in that situation than to experience that trauma for the rest of your life. Now I think one of the things that's so fascinating about the Ukrainian situation is you see such a clear and obvious example of a war defense that is actually morally justified.

The majority of the wars that my own nation has been involved in over the years have been very difficult to justify ethically and morally. But it is absolutely justified ethically and morally for you to defend your own home, for you to defend your own village from invading attackers who are coming in and destroying and stealing and killing and raping and looting.

That is absolutely morally justifiable. So here's what's amazing to me to look at and to think about. Even in that situation, the most morally justified war effort, defense of your own village, your own home, is it better to be there and fight it out or is it better to not be there?

And I think that although when I was 20 I would have said, "Fight it out," today at 20 plus a decade and a half, I look at it and I say, "I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it." Now on the one hand, that can be seen as a point of cowardice, right?

And I've asked myself even thoroughly, searched, like, "Okay, Joshua, you're a coward. Are you scared to do it?" I just look at it and say, "What is it for? What is it worth?" Right? If my children grow up as orphans, why did they grow up as orphans? What was the benefit of that?

If my wife is widowed because I'm killed, what is the benefit? If I had the choice to get out of the way. So why not start with what is better, which is to make sure that my children don't grow up fatherless, to make sure that my wife is not widowed, and make a plan to leave.

Having a plan to get out of a region that's under severe effect is the very best plan possible. It's the best thing that you can possibly do. You must have a plan to get out, to escape your country. Coming up soon. Internationalescapeplan.com. That's the newest course. I've got it three quarters done.

I'm filming, editing, etc. But it should be live here within a couple of days. But that's my newest course. Internationalescapeplan.com. You need an internationalescapeplan.com. You need an international escape plan. Marketing speak got all mixed up there. You need an international escape plan. You need a plan to get out of a war zone.

You can always come back if you decide that's the right thing to do. But you see these heartbreaking videos of men putting their wives and children on a bus. You've got to have a plan to get out. And that's what my newest course, which should be live in hopefully just a very couple of days, will teach you how to do.

Simple, straightforward, actionable, totally doable. More about that coming soon. Having a plan to get out of your country entirely is the best possible thing you could do. Even if you yourself choose later to go and fight, that's fine. But you'll be in a much better situation doing that from a place of strength, knowing your family at least is safe and secure, minimizing the trauma that your family faces, knowing at least that your grandparents are perhaps out of danger.

Then you can go in yourself and fight. But you've got to have a plan to get out. You see so clearly right now in the Ukrainian situation that every Ukrainian family that has gotten out of Ukraine is not facing those same horrific situations that those who are still in Ukraine are facing.

And it's indescribably better for your long-term success, for the long-term thriving of your family, for the long-term strength of your community for you to be out. Lesson number five, pay attention to the warning signs. Leave early when leaving is easy. Leave early when leaving is easy. I had a regular listener of Radical Personal Finance know that in several previous Q&A episodes over the last couple of months, I've had a Ukrainian listener who called and inquired my opinion on whether or not his parents who were living in Ukraine should leave.

And I gave the advice, "Yes, they should leave." I said, "If you are at all concerned that there is any reasonable threat that the Russian army next door might invade, you should leave. Because number one, it's better to be months too early than it is a day too late.

And number two, as long as the cost of leaving is not too high," right? In his case, his parents were retired, not trying to run an active business, not trying to keep a job, had a place to go. They could go with their son, had the appropriate visas and such to be able to travel to the United States where their son was, be welcomed with family.

I said, "Leave." The cost of leaving is very low compared to the potential cost of staying. But you have to get out early, so you have to pay attention to the warning signs. Now what's interesting is I gave that advice and then I went back and I started looking at the situation because I hadn't been following it closely.

And I was like, "Wait a second, maybe they're not going to invade. Maybe it's overkill. They're probably not going to invade. And maybe this is just the United States intelligence pumping this up, or maybe it's the Western media." And I was like, "Yeah, the US intelligence agencies were right.

Turns out that those that said that Russia was going to invade, they were right." And so the interesting thing was I wondered, right? And many analysts got it wrong. They said, "No, Russia's not going to invade. It's just there's no benefit for them." But still the simple practical philosophy of get out early, it worked.

By the way, if you were wondering, yes, that listener was able to get his parents out. They did leave. They left early enough. They went to the United States and they were safely there. Unfortunately, faced some other compounding difficulties, very serious medical conditions emerged. But they were at least able to get out of Ukraine.

And I think the next aspect of that is when Ukraine imposed restrictions on who could leave. What happened is the Ukrainian government, once the invasion happened, they passed a law or a policy that said that no male of fighting age was allowed to leave the country. Basically no male from say 18 to 50 something was allowed to leave the country.

And then the neighboring countries enforced that. So the Polish immigration authorities were not letting any males of fighting age into the country. And I think this is a classic example. You have to get out before you're conscripted. Now conscription is something that we don't talk much about. But conscription has been a...

because in most places in the modern world military service is on a volunteer basis. And in the places where military service is not on a volunteer basis, such as Singapore and Switzerland, they're generally neutral in Brazil. The risk of going to war is not very significant. I guess the most significant exception would be Israel that puts forced military service on all of its citizens and faces significant security threats on a daily basis.

But conscription has been something that's affected mankind throughout history. Now again we get into this interesting moral dilemma here with regard to Ukraine. I think Ukrainian military service and Ukrainian military defense is the most obviously morally justified defense in a very long time. When I was younger... well the United States had a military draft in Vietnam.

When I was younger I was not drafted, but my father would have been drafted if he hadn't been serving in the military. And I often wondered what would I do. And I grew up with a significant disdain for draft dodgers. You've got this kind of more conservative right-wing sense that I absorbed politically speaking when I was younger.

And you get this distaste of draft dodgers. I remember in presidential elections it was a big thing about well George W. Bush, later President George W. Bush, went and served in a safe place. And I knew most of my friends, my dad, most of my parents' friends, they were people who were drafted during the Vietnam War.

And after wrestling with it and after getting past the bellicose personality of a young man, I came to the point and I said, "You know what? A draft like this for a war like this, I wouldn't serve." And there was a time in which I thought, "Well, if I were drafted I would be a conscientious objector." And I eventually came to the point, I said, "If the United States imposed a draft like that for a war like Vietnam, I would flee.

I would leave. I would be the one who went to Canada." I came to the point where I realized, "Yeah, that was the better place to leave my country." And then this brought the same thing for my children. I started thinking about my children. And it was one of the things that influenced my own internationalization.

Because I thought, "Would I want my children to be conscripted for an immoral, worthless war that claims lives with no redeeming benefit whatsoever?" I thought, "No, so I need to build a plan for them so that they're not conscripted." And so I've thought a lot about conscription over the years.

And what's interesting about the Ukrainian situation is it's such a different scenario. It's such a different scenario than something like the Vietnam War that I thought a lot about. It's a justified scenario. It's a scenario in which you say, "This is our home and we're being invaded. And yes, you're going to be in the local militia.

You're going to be in the local militia and you're going to defend our home. And if you don't, you're not a fellow compatriot. You're not a fellow citizen." And yet even so, I still have a rough time with it. I still have a rough time of thinking, "They're going to conscript me?

They're going to say I can't leave? They're going to say I have to fight?" Now, if it were my hometown, my country invaded, I would probably be very persuaded by that general sense of patriotism, that sense of defending those that I love, that house that I've built, that land that I've cultivated, my neighbors.

It feels like that proper duty that you have to your neighbors to defend. But from an outside perspective, not experiencing those emotions of patriotism and fealty to my neighbors, you look at it from the outside and it's an astonishing thing. You say, "You're going to force me into the army?" And what we often forget is that in the modern world, conscription has been a standard part.

I've been reading a story with my children, and it's set back in the 1700s. And in the plot line, it's accepted as a normal feature that you had press gangs. Press gangs were literally groups of soldiers that would go along—usually it was soldiers, it wasn't always, sometimes it was private ships.

But they would go along in a coastal town and they needed people on their ships. And so they would go out, they would find young men, boys, who seemed like they could serve and they would literally kidnap them and put them on the ship and force them to serve on the ship.

And so military conscription is a form of kidnapping. I understand that it's a form of kidnapping that might be morally justified, as you can see in Ukraine, in this situation where you're defending your most literal neighbors. It might be morally justified in that sense, but most of the time it's not.

It's simply a form of kidnapping that the state enacts, and it's something that I don't want to be a part of. And so what's interesting is when you watched the bar come down, when you watched the boom get lowered, you saw how you needed to be out early. Any Ukrainian who was abroad, be it a 20-year-old male of fighting age, has the choice.

He can go back to Ukraine and he can fight for his neighbors, which would be an honorable thing for him to do if that was what he believed he should do, or he can choose not to. But there are a whole lot of 20-year-old men in Ukraine who no longer have that choice, who didn't get out, who couldn't get out.

And what's, to me, I think the most frustrating thing about it, and I'm trying to articulate at the risk of being overly verbose, I'm trying to articulate some of the emotions and the ethics involved in the situation. But I'm also trying to bring it back to your and my agency as human beings.

What bothers me the most about the concept of conscription is how needlessly bloody and destructive that usually winds up being. I shared a picture on my Twitter feed, which by the way, I've been doing a lot on Twitter. So go to twitter.com/joshuasheets, make sure that you follow me on Twitter, I try to keep you informed on a lot of issues.

But I've been sharing, I shared a picture on Twitter feed of some young, maybe 18, 19-year-old boys. And it's the most disheartening picture you ever see. It's kind of the class, it will become a classic picture of what you see at war, young, doe-faced boys getting ready to head off to war.

But in this situation, they've got no uniforms, just four guys hanging out, and they got a gun and basically that's it. And the problem is that these are the kinds of soldiers who are completely decimated in a war effort. And it's just a need, it winds up being a needless loss of life.

It winds up being something where they get destroyed by trained, experienced troops. And a country or an army will make up in numbers what they lack in training. But I still don't see how that's of any comfort or any significant comfort to the families and the loved ones of those who wind up dying.

And it's my contention that if I'm going to go to war, I'm going to go to war in an intelligent way. I don't want to be just part of the meat grinder. I don't see any point in that. So I want to go to war in a trained way, or I want to go to war on my own terms.

I always saw myself, I remember when I was a boy I read the biography of, I think his name was Carlos Hatcock, it was something like, I've forgotten the exact name, but he was a Marine sniper in Vietnam and I think he had something like 73 confirmed kills, one of the most decorated snipers.

And again, this is going back 20 years, more than 20 to 25 years in my memory. So if I got that data wrong, please don't hold me to it. But it was a remarkable story. But I guess for me, because I read his biography when I was a boy, I was like, I would be the sniper.

I would be the guy who's committing guerrilla attacks from afar. And that background I think just makes me so distasteful to the idea of being used as cannon fodder, right? That was the classic term, cannon fodder. Just put them out there and cannon fodder was basically, let's just stuff anything we can into the cannon, any kind of shrapnel, glass, things, et cetera, and put it in there and they'll take it.

And then all the troops are coming across that you see the pictures of the Civil War battlefields, line them all up up front and let's just blow into them. It doesn't make any sense to me, but that's what you wind up with in the modern era. Now those guys who survive, who are very quick-witted and very smart, they will quickly develop new tactics, new teams, and they'll develop into battle-hardened veterans who will be very effective within a period of weeks or months.

But as I think about sending my sons into that, even with the most intense sense of patriotism and loyalty to defend my neighbors, I don't want my boys being sent untrained into battle in that sense. I don't want to have empty places at my dining table and say, "What was it worth?

What was it for?" I'm not interested in that. And so what's the solution? You got to get out before you're conscripted. You got to get out before you're kidnapped by your country. If you choose to sign up and serve, and you choose to do that, that's an appropriate choice.

And I think, again, hopefully I'm emphasizing this enough, a very understandable, morally correct choice, and a very noble and laudable choice to stand up and defend your neighbors. But you got to make sure that's actually your choice, and it's actually your choice coming from a place of strength, not coming from a place of blinded emotionalism, getting caught up in the sense of, "Yeah, it's us versus them," and going out in a fit of emotion, and not getting caught up and being forced into it.

Make sure it's your choice and you're coming from a place of strength. Next lesson, when you leave, you may literally be leaving with the clothes on your back. That's it. I've watched a number of videos of refugees fleeing Ukraine. And it's so amazing in the modern world with YouTubers and et cetera.

It's just such... We live in an amazing world for access. And I watched them fleeing, and you may literally be leaving with the clothes on your back. And you may be walking away from everything you've built, the business you've built, the houses you've bought, the money you've saved, everything.

And you'll be grateful to get out with the clothes on your back. And we think often, "Oh, well, I'll just have all my money." Everything will work. And at the end of the day, quite literally when you leave, the money that you have is the money that you have in your possession, and that's it.

Or it's something that you have abroad. We'll talk about this more in the next session. We'll talk about Russia, where we'll talk more about the financialization. Because the Russians in Russia are not being bombed right now, but they're facing more financial problems. But you see people fleeing from Ukraine, and the money that you have is the money that you have.

And you might be out with just the clothes on your back. So make a plan. Make a plan for that. And again, that's where internationalescapeplan.com is going to come in. Next lesson is... I guess I beat myself up. I'm going to beat myself to it. You must have a plan to get your loved ones and your pets out.

You need a plan. You need a place to go that's far away. One of the things that is so amazing to see is the outpouring of support for the Ukrainian refugees. It just thrills your heart to see the pictures of the Germans at the train station holding up a sign.

It brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it. You see the picture of a guy holding a sign and says, "I can take a mother and two children. We have beds for a mother and two children. Come to my home." And it's just such an amazing feeling to see the outpouring of love and care for those neighboring countries opening their borders, minimal documentation requirements, giving officially refugee status, allowing Ukrainians to stay in the European Union, giving work permission.

Poland has absorbed I think something like 2 million refugees and they're giving work permission and opening up houses, etc. But here's what I think you're going to see. Massive tension is going to come. In the short term, you can open up your house and welcome somebody who would otherwise be homeless.

But I think most of us understand how difficult it can be to have those same house guests day after day, week after week, month after month. Similarly, in the short term, a country can pass a law saying that refugees from Ukraine – I'm thinking of Poland here – refugees from Ukraine can work.

But I want you to imagine a situation months from now as this conflict drags on and as this situation continues to be bad when Poland is still filled with Ukrainian refugees and the Polish citizenry that's out of work and stretched and struggling will have a much harder time maintaining that same sense of magnanimity and kindness towards the Ukrainian refugees.

The realities of life have a way of blunting the acute emotions of a moment. And so you need to have a plan and you need a place to go where you have things established. Being a refugee is brutal and even in this very generous outpouring of support, all of the refugees who are relying on that outpouring of support are going to find their lives continually very very difficult.

And so this is where I think it's so important – again, this is why I've been pouring myself into finishing the course at internationalskateplan.com. Next lesson – diversification works. Diversification works. As long as your diversification involves geographic diversification and international diversification. We are so blinded frequently by our situation, by our own personal experience, and we think "Oh, everything is great, but I'm trying not to go into the Russia stuff." But the Russian stock market has been obliterated, literally destroyed, did nothing.

So you could say "I have the most diversified strategy being in Russia, that I own dozens and dozens and dozens of different companies." But if all of your investments were in the Russian stock market, then you got destroyed. Your life savings gone, everything gone. Ukraine, similarly. If all of your stuff was in one place, meaning your physical possessions, if all your physical possessions were in one place, you may have been very well prepped in your apartment, and you've got some food and water and you've got some plastic bags and chemical treatments so that when your toilet stops working you can dispose of your family's waste, etc.

But if your apartment building is one that's leveled in a cluster bomb attack, you're done. Even if you get out with your life because you were in a bomb shelter, you're done. So apply the concept of diversification to every area. Make sure that your physical supplies are not just in one place.

Make sure that you have other options. Same things with your money. One of the things that you have seen so much of over the last days is picture after picture, video after video of Ukrainians and Russians standing in front of ATM machines and ATM lines. All of the time that you spend standing in front of an ATM waiting in a line is time that is being wasted in your attempt to cross borders.

So if all of your money is not in your country, if all of your assets are not in the country, if all of your investments are not in one country, you have other options all around the world. And this is the point about diversification. If you were physically present in France right now, if you have assets in the American stock exchange, you're not destroyed.

But if everything is in Ukraine, it's pretty well destroyed. Or at least even if it winds up maintaining some semblance of order, even if it's not as destroyed as the Russian markets, you're still not going to be growing. You're lucky to walk away with something. But any Ukrainian that had money in the American stock market, yeah, there may be a decline, but it's nothing catastrophic like you are experiencing right now in Ukraine.

Diversification works. So pay attention to this stuff. When things go sideways, the money that you have is the money that you have. You don't want to be standing in that ATM line if you can avoid it. Have a plan for getting money out. All your paper money, all your banking institutions in Ukraine, all of that stuff, they're going to work, they're going to do their very best to provide the most basic of services.

But in terms of any kind of reasonable service, reasonable safety, reasonable security, it's destroyed for a very long time. Study Ukrainian situation. Think about what you would do. Remember, it's totally fine for you to make different choices than I would. I was touched, there was that MMA fighter from Arkansas who had the viral video clip over the last week talking about the Ukrainian situation.

He said, "If this war comes to Arkansas, I will die for this piece of ground in Arkansas." If that's you and you will die for this piece of ground, be it in Arkansas or in Kiev, fine, fair, wonderful. Think it through, though. Learn from the lessons. As I stated at the very opening of this show, one of the worst things that you can do is experience suffering yourself and not learn a lesson from it.

One of the worst things you can do is observe others experiencing suffering and not at the very least learn a lesson from it. If you have the ability to help, then help. If you have the ability to give, give. If you have the ability to support, support. But at the very least, learn from the lessons of others because it is your duty to yourself, to your family, to your neighbors.

It is your duty to be strong and to be prepared. Don't think it can't happen here. Friend, it is happening here. Now, we'll make this point quite convincingly in the next episode when we talk about Russia. But one of the things that I've struggled with to get people to understand when I teach about these things is simply how it does happen here.

It doesn't just happen to people on the other side of the world. It happens here. It doesn't just happen 100 years ago. It's happening now. So prepare accordingly. Russia, Ukraine, these are sophisticated, very sophisticated, very cultured, very historic civilizations with knowledgeable, connected, intelligent people. Take the lessons to heart for yourself.

Remember, as we go, go to bitcoinprivacycourse.com. Sign up to figure out if you had $5,000 of Bitcoin abroad, it solves a lot of problems. But you had a few hundred thousand dollars of Bitcoin tucked away abroad, it solves all the problems. Bitcoinprivacycourse.com. And again, internationalescapeplan.com. Talk with you soon.

Do more together this holiday in a new Chevy. Take on more adventure in the strong and capable Chevy Silverado. More confidence in the Chevy Equinox. Winner of the JD Power Award. For initial quality among compact SUVs, two years running. And more value in the all new Chevy Trax with an available 11-inch diagonal touchscreen.

Bring the holidays together in the new Chevy. Click to learn more. Chevrolet, together let's drive. For JD Power 2023 US Initial Quality Study Award information, visit jdpower.com/awards.