Today on Radical Personal Finance, we talk about the financial lessons that you and I must learn from Russia. 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 Joshua Sheets. I am your host. And today we continue with part two of our three-part series on Russia. Part one was talking about the financial lessons from Ukraine. Part two is the financial lessons from Russia. Part three, well, wait and see. I won't make you wait too long.

I just was hearing my cue with the music and I needed to finish. Part three is going to be the financial lessons from the United States. We're going to talk about the current situation in the United States. I am proud to announce that today's podcast is brought to you by InternationalEscapePlan.com.

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And so a bunch of you actually jumped into the course already. But it is phenomenal. And you're going to hear me talk about how it's why I created this after watching the situation is what I've been watching for years all around the world. But in today's episode, we're going to talk about the lessons from Russia, not just about leaving.

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We're talking about this series of collapses, these series of crises, because I believe that they give us good lessons from each one. Part one was Ukraine. And Ukraine is a war zone. Now, I'm trying not to overstate how much of Ukraine is at war. Of course, there is a lot of it, meaning, of course, the whole nation's at war, but where the actual action is.

I know people in Ukraine right now and I'm getting kind of on the ground reports. And you can be even in big cities in Ukraine and things are still working. But the point that I made in part one is that when you're dealing with the potential loss of life due to an active war, it's not a risk worth taking.

You must get out. But what about Russia? Russia is extremely different than Ukraine because of what's actually happening. And I am coming to think that for those of us who think about carefully the concept of disaster preparedness, for those of us who advise people on their money and diversification, etc., I'm coming to think that the situation in Russia is going to be our most important lesson because there are a lot of lessons for you and for me.

The challenge that we have, and I say we because most of the Radical Personal Finance listening audience is from the West. By far, the vast majority of us in the audience are Americans, followed by Canadians, and then it's people from the UK and from Germany, a little bit of us and Australia.

Those are the top five countries that are represented. And so for most of us, the problem with thinking about big scale disaster scenarios is often we look and say, "It can't happen here. It's not going to happen here." After all, places with hyperinflation are always either very old, like Weimar, Germany, or very foreign to us, like Zimbabwe.

So we say, "Even though it was recent, it's not going to happen here." And I think there's good reasons to believe that this makes those examples not real great examples that we should look to. You don't hear me talk a lot about the hyperinflation in Zimbabwe because I don't in any way compare Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwean currency to something like the US dollar.

It's just a very poor comparison in my estimation. But Russia is different. Russia is very, very different. And I think you see that in terms of the way that Russia has captured the world's attention and this current war in Ukraine has captured the world's attention. It's not that there haven't been lots of other wars, right?

Tons of them over the last year. It's active right now, but this one is different because of the scale. So I want to begin by making two points that will seem like a paradox, but I believe it's important to consider both of them. Number one, Russia is worth paying attention to because it is one of the clearest examples of what is going through.

It's one of the clearest examples that you and I have of a large modern nation state going through massive stress. Many people don't understand just how large Russia is. You may be familiar with the idea that Russia is the largest country in terms of geographic territory in the world, which is true.

I think pretty sure continental Russia crosses 10 time zones, which is just enormously large. So we know that Russia is geographically large, but Russia is very large in terms of its population as well. Russia has something like 145 million people in its overall population, which is huge. In terms of population size, that would put Russia ninth in the world, right between Bangladesh and Mexico.

The largest population in the world, of course, is China with 1.4 billion people, India 1.3 billion. They're the two huge winners in population by a factor of three, followed by the United States with about 332 million people. Indonesia is in number four place with 272 million people. Pakistan 225 million, Brazil 214 million, Nigeria 211 million, Bangladesh 172 million, followed by Russia with 145 million people, Mexico 126, Japan 125.

So Russia is on the top 10 in terms of population. A very large country geographically, a very large country measured by population as well. In addition, Russia has the capital city of Moscow, which is certainly the largest city in Russia, but more importantly, it is the most populated city in Europe by a very good margin, and it is really the only true mega city in Europe.

The city population is a little bit harder to estimate because you have to talk about the city limits or the urban area or the metropolitan area, but Moscow, Russia has something like 17 million people in the overall city population, which of course is not nearly as large as Tokyo with 40 million or Guangzhou with over 40 million or Shanghai or Jakarta, etc.

Delhi is of course a huge city, but it is very comparable in some ways to New York City in the United States or to Osaka, Japan, Los Angeles, almost very similar to Los Angeles, a little bigger than Buenos Aires, a little bigger than Istanbul. So a huge world city and the only true mega city in Europe, which is I think extremely important by context.

If we go with the official population and city limits, Moscow has 12.6 million people in city limits. The city of London in the UK has 9 million people, so a very large city. And what's more important is that it's a very advanced city, beautiful skyline, sparkling skyscrapers, highways, malls, everything.

From a cultural perspective, Russia of course has such an ancient culture. Good friend of mine, a Canadian who travels all over the world, used to work for the United Nations. His comment to me, his son was, I almost went to Russia last year to see his son's, among other things, using it as an excuse, his son was graduating with a PhD from the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Russia, which is a quite star-studded music conservatory.

His son actually had gone from, had declined a scholarship to Juilliard in order to study at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. And so we were talking about it and his comment to me, after traveling all around the world, all around Europe, he said, "I think that Moscow is the most cultured city in Europe." He says, "Of every city, it's the most cultured, the best city in every way." And of course that's one person's opinion, totally subjective.

But to give you an idea that we're not talking here about the kind of culture or the kind of city that's foreign to you and me. We're talking about a huge city and a huge country. Now that's the strong case. And I want you to recognize this because this is something that we often don't think enough about when it comes to collapse.

I've made this point again and again with regard to Venezuela. When I was in college, my leftist college professors were continually trumpeting Venezuela as the paragon of success, pointing out how this is the richest country in South America. And look, they've been able to balance progressive values of caring for people with business success, et cetera.

And so I was very clued into Venezuela early on and then watching Venezuela collapse utterly over the last 15 years and become a nightmarish place to be has shown me that, "Hey, if it can happen there, it can happen here." Similar thing with Moscow, right? We're dealing with a huge country and a huge city, very modern, advanced, the kind of society that you and I would probably be very comfortable in, if we had some language proficiency at least.

We're not dealing with a grimy 1960s Soviet Union. We're dealing with a modern, well-developed city and infrastructure. Now that's the strong case. The flip side is important to comment on. I think that while sometimes we underestimate Russia and Moscow, et cetera, I think we often overestimate Russia and Moscow with regard to their overall economic situation.

Now when we look at the... try to find comparisons of Russian economic strength to other countries in the world, it's a much more sobering picture. Because of the massiveness of the Second World associated with the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union was truly a superpower for so long, and because Russia has inherited some of the legacy of the Soviet Union, some of that reputation, we often, I think, overestimate the size of the Russian economy.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was completely decimated and extremely poor. To put it into context, Russia has an annual gross domestic product of something like 1.6 trillion. That's certainly about 20 times smaller than the US gross domestic product, with about 23 trillion of gross domestic product.

And it's comparable in some ways to Canada, 2 trillion dollars of gross domestic product, Korea 1.8 trillion, Russia 1.6 trillion, I think Spain would come next. So in some ways, economically, from a total GDP perspective, Russia is analogous in size and strength to Brazil, Canada, Korea, et cetera. However, if we divide that into Russia GDP per capita, meaning how much per person, Russia is extremely low on the list, with friends like Malaysia, Bulgaria, China, just extremely low with the GDP per capita.

Let's see, the UN estimate is about $10,000 per year. The IMF estimate is about $11,200 per year. So much, much less prosperous per capita than any of the leading wealthiest countries in the world. So let's not overestimate Russia, but let's not underestimate Russia. As we go through this current crisis, I hope that you see that while Russia is not a perfect parallel for necessarily what you and I could theoretically face in the United States or in Germany or Russia, it's a pretty good place for us to learn our lessons.

In the next episode in this series, I'll talk specifically about the United States, but we can learn something from Russia. So let's talk about what has worked and what is happening in Russia. First of all, what Russia is experiencing is all out economic warfare. The sanctions levied against Russia by so many of the leading countries in the world are the heaviest that I have ever seen of any country in my lifetime.

And those sanctions have been made even stronger by the voluntary actions of many companies to simply withdraw or shut down their operations or personally boycott Russia, even if they weren't officially sanctioned by a government. This is something that is going to bear very careful study in the years to come.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is so universally condemned on a global basis that individual companies are taking actions beyond what is required of them by their government. And these individual actions are potentially in some ways way worse than anything done by government. Let me give two examples that I think are going to prove to be devastating in the days and months to come.

Many countries around the world have completely closed their airspace to Russian airlines and airplanes. That's devastating to the ability of these airlines to run various routes. For example, you can no longer fly directly from Moscow to London. That's a big deal, right? Because I would imagine that a lot of these big international flights were very significant in terms of profit centers for Russian airlines.

The loss of airspace is a big deal. There used to be a flight from Moscow to Cuba, to Havana. But of course, that flight now, if it were to happen at all, has to take such a circuitous route to avoid all of the closed airspace that is just not really profitable and not feasible anymore.

To have that aeroflot flight from Havana to Moscow. That's just the start of it, though. There's all the other news with countries around the world repossessing airliners, actual airplanes that release to Russian airlines. What Russia has done, if my memory is right on the figures, they have something like 700 to 800 airplanes that are registered to Russian airlines.

But about 400 or 500 of them are leased. In order to keep their airplanes from being repossessed internationally, they've had to readjust all of their airplane fleets and designate those specific airplanes to domestic routes instead of international routes so that there's no danger of the airliners being repossessed by the leasing company due to that leasing company facing either government sanctions or facing an internal decision simply to not do business with Russian companies anymore.

So, this is a big deal. But what's a bigger deal is that it's my understanding that Boeing has not only said, "We're not going to supply spare parts. We're not going to support these things." But they've even taken an action such as closing Russian access to the Boeing repair manuals.

When I saw the news of it, I thought, "Wow, I had never even considered that." But it makes all the sense in the world. If you think of an airplane, you have an extremely complex piece of machinery that will have a very detailed repair manual, a very detailed system for going through and fixing it.

That repair manual can of course be more efficiently delivered and delivered at a higher quality if it is electronic in nature rather than a physical paper book because then it can be updated from a central source and the information in it can be more easily accessed. I've never been in an aircraft repair manual hanger or seen those systems, but it makes all the sense in the world to me that Boeing would say, "If you're going to be a mechanic working on our airplanes, this is the system," and they would charge some kind of licensing fee to keep it up to date, make sure that people have the best information, and that each airplane, each individual aircraft would have its own maintenance schedule, its own logs, everything maintained there in the system.

That makes all the sense in the world to me. But then there's a massive vulnerability where now Boeing has cut off the Russian airlines and the Russian airplanes from access to that system. Some analysts posit that within a period of months, most of Russia's air fleet will simply be inoperable or at least it won't be able to be operated safely.

That's a staggering impact when you think about it, not being able to gain access to parts, not being able to gain access to a repair manual. I want you to think about a situation in the West. Think about the car shortage that has happened over the last year and a half because of not being able to gain access to computer chips.

Think about how massive the impacts of that have been on your ability to buy a new car, used cars, et cetera. The whole market has been changed. That market that has been changed in many other industries as well. Now crank that up by about five or 10, and of course I'm just making those numbers up, but much, much more severe, and that's the market that virtually every industry in Russia is going to be facing, meaning a complete disruption because of the inability to get spare parts, keep things going, et cetera.

That's a big deal. The other one was that there are a lot of companies that produce equipment needed for the maintenance and repair of pipelines. Russia's primary source of income right now is selling energy products to the world, especially to Europe. Well, those pipelines are still flowing in order to supply Europe with gas, but they may cease to function simply due to lack of spare parts, or they may be severely hampered because you see this kind of dual fold set of sanctions.

You see the official sanctions, and then you see all of the unofficial voluntary sanctions being exercised by individual companies. Now why am I laboring this point? It's because I think that when we consider situations that can affect us, in some ways we need to be more creative than we often are.

I have a hard time being an American, talking from an American perspective and saying, "Oh yeah, there's going to be economic crisis in the United States on a severe level," because of the economic powerhouse that is the United States. It's just a world of different economy versus any other place in the world.

And so I have a hard time being a doom and gloomer and saying, "Hey, there's going to be massive levels of disruption." But what's interesting to me is observing how it's not just nation state actors who have power now, that if a country develops a bad reputation, that country can face significant problems by the private sector as well as by governments.

I think this is important because, and I'm not going to labor on the United States, but when I think about the United States, I often wonder, okay, you have this mega power that basically in some ways controls the whole world. What will happen when other countries that are often embittered about what the United States does, how it throws its weight around, et cetera, what could happen if some of those countries start responding in a similar way to the United States or to Canada or to smaller countries that you and I might live in?

It's interesting to think about. And I think that this will be a long-term trend as we're going to see more nationalism expressed. It seems to me that countries all around the world, or at least if I were the emperor of a middle-tier country, I would be looking at what's happening to Russia right now and say, this very well could happen to me.

And we've got to make sure that we build our own national companies that aren't so dependent on the global markets, because if Boeing can cut them off, Boeing can cut us off. And since the way that this is done is not very predictable, we see these political winds changing frequently, the issues changing, we're in a kind of an unstable environment, I think there's going to be a rise of nationalism and people building companies and things that are more nationalistic, focused on the domestic market for national sovereignty and security.

So we'll see if that comes to fruition or not, but I think it will probably happen. Let's now pivot and say, what is happening to you and your money if you are living in Russia? Because that will teach you and me what to do. So first of all, you're living in a society where things are not collapsing precipitously, but yet the long-term trend is not great.

It's very important to note that the current crisis in Russia is not in any way a total collapse. It's not a total economic collapse. It's not Mad Max in any way. It's severe, but it's not riding around and shooting people in the streets and stealing what they have. And this is important to me because to me, what you see in Russia is a much more realistic disaster scenario that can happen in so many places.

I have a fondness for dystopian fiction, apocalyptic dystopian fiction. I enjoy it. One of my favorite books is James Wesley Rawls' Patriots novel, a novel of the coming collapse. I enjoy a lot of the modern prepper novels that people write about. I find them interesting and enjoyable to read.

But what I realized so clearly in the COVID, the economic crisis associated with COVID, the current crisis in Russia, the crisis in Venezuela, and studying more and more historical accounts is that you cannot take your expectations of reality from a novel. It sounds silly to say it outright, like of course you can't, but you've probably done it just like I've done it.

In order to keep a novel or a movie interesting, the writer of that story has to keep the plot moving. Reality is much more mundane, much more banal, much more dreary and boring. And the collapse is not instantaneous. The collapse takes a long amount of time to happen. I point this out because in my experience, some people have a strange idea that they're going to know that the collapse is definitely here and they're going to race out and stock up at the last minute.

There was a number of years ago, James Rawls, the author of that novel, he's been on the show a couple of times and I like Rawls. He wrote a course just basically designed around the idea of, hey, if you knew the collapse was happening tomorrow, what would be your last day shopping trip?

Where you'd rush to the store and you'd stock up on, what would you do? And I thought it was a great, it's a great idea. If you knew there was a collapse happening tomorrow and you just had to go to Costco for one last trip, what would you do?

What would you get? And it's fun to think about, but I don't think it's realistic that it actually happens. It does happen when there's a natural disaster or something like that. But an economic crisis, you're never quite sure that the crisis is happening. You're never quite sure that the collapse is actually coming on.

And that's what you see in Russia. I've been following closely a number of Russian vloggers and YouTubers who are showing the situation. And from the outside, you're reading the news and you're saying, this is a collapse. But from the inside, you're looking at it and saying, well, it's not so bad.

And the reality is it's not so bad. Similar things with COVID, right? You're looking at the news and saying, oh, it's bad. But then you go to your local store, you're like, it's not so bad. Things are happening, but it's not so bad. And it's important because I view this as a lesson to say, you're probably never going to be quite sure that the collapse is here until it's gone.

And then when you're in it so deep that you're sure it's there, it's probably too late to do much of anything. So the Russian collapse is not a total collapse. Even something like Venezuela. This really sobered me when I started looking at Venezuela. You had a country that had a million percent inflation in a year, hyperinflation.

And everything fell apart, except everything didn't totally fall apart. People lost weight, stuff became unavailable. They lost all the value of their money, but it didn't totally fall apart. And so recognize that you're always going to face this problem. The vast majority of Russians have not fled their country.

In my newest course, I talk a lot about this. Why don't people leave when they should? As we'll talk about, every single asset in Russia is imploding in value. You say, well, why didn't people leave? Why don't they leave? Well, because it's hard to know for sure if the collapse is coming.

Just like prior to the Ukraine invasion, it was hard to know for sure if the army was going to invade. There was a long point where the world's intelligence, the US intelligence agencies and others were saying, they're going to invade. They're going to invade. We watched the news stories.

All of the insight was there. They're going to invade. They're going to be pulling up for weeks at a time. And then we're not sure. And very smart, well, you know, smart thinking analysts up until the very last minute were predicting that, no, they're not going to invade. And all that changed when they invaded.

And then within a couple of days, it was illegal for men, fighting age men to leave the country. Everything started to shut down, et cetera. So recognize that here we are watching a collapse of Russia. But you can go on YouTube and you watch people showing the videos that it's not a collapse like in the movies.

Don't expect a collapse to be like what's in the movies. It's not going to be like that. The roads are still working. People are still going to work. Nobody's having all their credit card debt canceled in Russia. You know, you got these preppers who go out and say, well, I'm just going to take up hundreds of thousands of dollars of credit card debt, and then I'm just going to not pay my debts in the collapse.

It's not happening. It's not going to happen. So it's not a total collapse, but it is severe. Now, what is being affected? I would say all financial assets in Russia are being affected. So if you were a Russian and you were a wealthy Russian, let's not go to the level of an oligarch, somebody who was a billionaire who had built wealth after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Let's just say you were a hardworking, upper class, upwardly mobile Russian citizen. Tell me what plan worked for you. Was it money in the bank? Well, what we see is an absolute collapse in the value of the ruble as measured against other currencies around the world. So money in the bank has not worked.

And when you needed to go and get the money out of the bank, it's very hard to get out. You have a very significant loss of value. Not a total loss of value, but a very significant loss of value. You've had long lines at banks, ATMs. I was going to play a clip.

Maybe I'll do it at the end. We'll see. But I was going to play a clip from a news story, and it's showing on the PBS news story from a few days ago, showing a line at a city bank. And then here they are in the middle of the day, and they have to come out and close the bank because they ran out of cash.

So you can't even get your rubles out of the bank in that situation. And those rubles have massively devalued compared to other things. So the money itself is not stable. What about the stock market? Is the stock market in Russia a good source of value? Well, the answer is no.

Obviously, depending on what company, you had a complete collapse in the value of shares. You go and you look at the value of the shares, you get a complete collapse. Then the market was closed. So the market has been closed for weeks now. There's no clear plan of it reopening.

We'll see if and when it does reopen. But your shares are not saleable. You might have an account statement that says you still own these shares, but the market is closed and your shares are worthless. What else? What about hard assets? Well, real estate is something that many people would think would protect them.

One of the things that I observe about real estate is, although it's a better store of value, it's still not great in the current environment, at least in the short term. Why? Well, number one, there's a massive increase in the supply of houses for sale all across Russia because many people are trying to liquidate their Russian assets and get out.

In addition, this is driving a decline in demand. Russia has a major demographic problem. Like many countries that we're from, Russia's population is shrinking and it's predicted to shrink significantly. This is one of the reasons why I think President Putin had to act now if he was going to accomplish his ambitions of expanding and rebuilding and fortifying the Russian empire, is that he's facing a demographic crisis.

And if he waits much longer, he's not going to have enough soldiers to populate his armed forces to go and successfully invade his neighbors. But what this is also showing is that there is a decreasing demand in housing because you have a country that is difficult to immigrate to, not friendly to immigrants, has not tried to attract immigrants outside of the Eurasian economic zone anyway, and a declining population.

And so the actual fundamental demand for real estate is significantly lower. Another reason the demand is low is, as I said, that people are leaving now. And now the prospects for success in Russia have massively diminished. Thus, in the long run, there's going to be even lower of a demand for real estate.

If people wanted to immigrate to Russia before, which was not unknown, I've known people who I myself have thought about moving to Russia, not taking serious action on it. They've got a great tax program. They had a 13% flat tax. They've got a lot of things, as I said, cultured city, lots of opportunities, reasonable prices, nice people, lots of good reasons to consider immigrating to Russia and using it as a base to be based from.

But now, based upon the Russian actions, the vast majority of people who ever considered it will simply not consider it now for very good reason. They're not going to go to Russia. Other problems with the real estate. Well, in the middle of the crisis, you have an absolute collapse in the employment market.

As the country, as the companies pull out, you have tens of thousands and tens of thousands and tens of thousands of people who are now out of work. What do those people do? Well, they don't have any money, which means they're going to be spending less money. The economy is going to shrink down.

They're going to be depending more on family members to support them in their time of need. So those family members, previous luxury spending that they would have given is now going to be dedicated to more essentials to support their family members. And you're going to continue to have a massive contraction of the economy, which means that in and of itself, you're going to have less demand for real estate.

People are going to be sharing more housing, moving in together, trying to cut costs in every way possible. And part of that is going to mean not having your own apartment. So even real estate, though it's a hard, tangible asset, even real estate in and of itself is still not, it's not performing.

It may preserve some wealth, but it's not performing. So what can work? What is working right now in Russia? The first thing that is working is geographic diversification. Any Russian who didn't have all of his chips in Russia has been able to keep his assets that were outside of Russia pretty much as things were.

So any Russian that had a bank account in the United States, in Switzerland, in London, in the Caribbean, any Russian who had a bank account, especially and most importantly, a bank account in foreign currency, has been able to maintain his bank balances because of his foreign currency exposure. As long as he hasn't been targeted by an oligarch and had his stuff forcibly taken, any normal Russian has been able to maintain at least the value of his wealth in bank accounts abroad.

Notice that there have been sanctions on Russians. And most of these sanctions at the moment have been kind of high level targets, but there have been major new restrictions imposed on ordinary Russians, ordinary Russians with nothing to do with the Russian government, with the oligarchy, etc. So if you can avoid that, which is a big if, if you can avoid that, then you have been able to maintain some of your assets held abroad.

So bank accounts in other countries have been fine. Notice that it hasn't really mattered what country your bank accounts were in. So it's not like, as the Russian ruble has collapsed, there has been no knock on contagion that has affected every other European country. A bank account in Jersey or in Switzerland has been just as, or in Portugal, has been just as good as a bank account in the United States or in any other place.

It's just a bank account. And if any other foreign currency has been fine, it's just the ruble that has collapsed. So people often get bent out of shape and they say, well, Joshua, what country has the best banking in the world? Well, you can answer that objectively, but depending on where you are, it really doesn't matter.

Almost any other country. You just need some diversification from your home country where you work, where you live, where you make your money, and you need some, a bank account in some other country and you need some other currency. So that's the first thing is bank accounts abroad have sort of worked.

What hasn't worked about those bank accounts abroad? Well, getting the money back in. So your debit card from a foreign bank faces serious problems being used in Russia. It's my understanding, although it's been hard for me to verify all the details, Russians are doing fine in terms of using their cards inside of Russia.

They've had to adjust and change the systems. They're bringing in a Chinese system, but the internal systems are still working for digital bank management. But Russia is being cut off and isolated from the rest of the world. So by the way, forgive me if this is pedantic or too long, but I want to show you as I've been working on this stuff, none of this is new.

I've been talking about this the entire history of radical personal finance and I've worked through these problems. I want to show you the problems and show you the solutions and why I'm more convinced than ever that the solutions that I've been telling you about for years and that I teach at internationalskateplan.com, these solutions work.

They're working right now for Russians. So a Russian who had a bank account abroad was able to retain his wealth and the Russian who was able to leave Russia and use his debit card from his bank account abroad has been able to use, maintain his spending power. What about investments?

Well once again, investments in markets outside of Russia, those investments have held their power. Russian who has an investment account in the US stock market doing the same as all the rest of the people with an account in the stock market. A Russian who has stock accounts on other markets has been doing fine.

So no problems there. Everything works. And if he can get the money in and out, which is difficult, it works. Third thing that has worked, physical assets. Importantly, physical assets such as precious metals. Now here's where I think we see the problem with precious metals. In my understanding, there aren't any Russians who are currently going out and using gold and silver coins to buy and sell loaves of bread.

The ruble is still the currency of choice. But precious metals will maintain their value if the Russian can find a suitable buyer. So here, you're not really going to see precious metals used as daily currency. That is not happening and did not happen in Venezuela. It hasn't happened in any economic collapse that I've been able to find.

That's not the world that we live in. You still need the electronic money and you still wind up using the currency. In Venezuela, even though the boulevard has completely collapsed, they still use it in bundles and bundles, packed in backpacks, but you still use it or use a Colombian peso or the Brazilian real or US dollars, small denomination US dollars.

Nobody's doing business with gold and silver. But what the gold and silver can do is they can maintain value because the gold and silver can still be converted either for valuable local items. And if you're working with wealthy people, that still has value. And if you're working abroad and your gold and silver is abroad, then you can convert that into foreign currency, which is spendable when you need it.

And so I think precious metals in terms of protecting some wealth and serving as an insurance hedge for some wealth, I think they are really working and are good for the long term. They're not subject to the same stress that real estate is. And because they're much more portable, they can potentially be more flexible.

Now, again, as I point out, the best place for those precious metals to be is not inside Russia. The best place for those precious metals to be is stored in a vault in another country outside of the primary country. That's why I teach in my newest course, internationalskateplan.com, we go extensively over precious metals.

And you should have some precious metals close to you. But the majority of your precious metals, if they're large holdings, should be held in a foreign vault. What's the next thing that is working right now? What's working right now for Russians is Bitcoin. Any Bitcoin holdings, even though the Russian government has placed restriction, the Bitcoin marketplace has not collapsed because the ruble collapsed.

And yet the Bitcoin marketplace is solving the problem for getting money back and forth, especially in a time of financial sanctions. All over the world, you have the Russian diaspora. You have Russians all around the world trying to figure out how do I send money to mom and dad, or grandma and grandpa, or my distant cousin so and so.

If Western Union won't get you the money, and I can't transfer it into their bank account because all the banks are cut off, what remains? Either your mailing dollars, or euros, or francs, or rubles or something, which isn't going to work across borders. Mailing money works great inside of a country.

It does not work across international borders. Or you're finding electronic system. But how do you find an electronic system that allows you to transact when you're cut off from dollars and dollars can't flow to Russia? Well, thus you see the rise of Bitcoin, and it's working. Very important point there.

And privacycourse.com, of course, will teach you how to own it anonymously. Hope you don't mind the excessive advertisements, but I'm building out a suite of courses, which I've been planning to do for a long time, but it's solving these problems in a systematic way that I can't do in a podcast.

And I'm showing you why I'm teaching you how to do it this way. What else is working? Well, if you can maintain your business, and you can maintain your job, then you're in good shape, or at least you're in better shape. If you can't maintain your business, and you can't maintain your job, then you have to go somewhere where you can maintain your business and where you can maintain your job.

The biggest, when we get past financial assets, these are the ways that I see the financial assets being maintained. I don't see any big growth anywhere. I'm not aware of anybody. Maybe there'll be some big investment story, but we're just trying to preserve your wealth. The way you preserve your wealth is through diversification, and especially through international diversification.

So that if the country that you live in, and you work in, and you earn your money in, if that country implodes on some kind of national level, at least you're not entirely run by that country. At least you have some foreign currency abroad, some gold abroad, some Bitcoin held in a way that is safe, kind of sort of abroad, some assets abroad, et cetera.

But then fundamentally at its core, you want to be able to create income. So all over Russia, there are people who are having their income cut off. This ranges from people making their living online, cut off from Patreon, cut off from AdSense revenue. They're being cut off, and so all of their online money that they were making is being cut off, and they can't get it into themselves.

In some cases, they can still get it into a bank account in another country, but they can't really get it into Russia. That's a major problem. You have a guy who says, "Hey, I've built this great YouTube channel showing videos of Russia, and now my income is cut off.

I can't get it into the country." There may be solutions in the days to come, but it's difficult right now. So it's a disaster for people earning money outside the country. Then there are lots of people who are more normal situations. You got a guy who works as a programmer.

I've seen and followed people who just lost their jobs. "Yeah, we don't want to employ Russians right now," because you're in Russia. It doesn't matter that you have nothing to do with the government. You're a programmer in Russia. We don't want to employ you. And so you have people losing their jobs there.

And then you have the total economic crisis of a more, what I'll call run-of-the-mill but severe economic crisis. All the stuff that we're accustomed to, high unemployment, recession, people not having work, economic malaise, no growth, too many people applying for every job, decline in the value of wages because employers have low revenue, low profitability, and they have lots of people applying for jobs, et cetera, just that general economic malaise.

So what is the best solution for that? The best solution there is to leave where the crisis is and go to a place where the crisis is not. So any Russian who has a work permit in Canada or a green card in the United States or a dual citizenship in Panama or anything else, if that Russian can go to another country that's not experiencing the severe economic crisis, then there's possibly a better opportunity to be able to earn money to support himself, to support his family, both with him and back in Russia through figuring out how to get remittances back.

But you have to have that work permission. And so that's where we get into the concept of residencies, having a residency that offers work permission in another country, multiple citizenships, having work rights due to citizenship in another country, et cetera. And what I think is so important to observe is that right now, all of the trends that I talked about where countries are opening up for Ukrainian refugees, all those same countries and all those same trends are going exactly against Russian refugees.

In the show that I did on Ukraine, I talked about how the neighboring countries of Ukraine have opened their doors just beautifully to the fleeing refugees, both at the national level with government policy, as well as even at the local level, people in a Berlin train station going down to meet the trains and holding signs saying, "I can take a mother and two babies home with me." It's a beautiful outflowing of love towards the Ukrainian refugees, and rightly so.

All of those trends are exactly against Russian refugees. Because Russia is in this context so clearly the aggressor, and Ukraine is so clearly in this context the victim, all of the same sympathy for Ukrainians is galvanized into hostility against Russians. Regardless of any individual actions on the behalf of any Ukrainian or any Russian.

Individual Ukrainian citizens and Russian citizens have nothing to say about the doings of their government, right? They have nothing to do with the war. War is a racket. It's a racket. It's a game that rich men play with the blood of poor people's children. The average Russian and the average Ukrainian have nothing to do whatsoever with the war in any sense, and they want nothing to do with any of it.

But if you are unfortunate enough to be associated or allied with that government that is currently not in favor, then your life can be affected dramatically. And so in the same way that the European Union is opening up new programs to allow temporary residents with working rights for Ukrainian refugees, et cetera, all of those same doors are slamming shut for ordinary Russians.

You've had a significant number of countries that have come out and said, "We're not giving any kind of tourist visas to Russians," which is to be expected, right? Countries don't want people coming in as tourists and then choosing to squat and overstay their tourist visas. And so you have ideological closure of visa programs for tourists as well as official closure.

What I mean is some countries... I saw that... What was it? Croatia... Not Croatia. Yeah, no, it was Czech Republic. Czech Republic said, "We're not issuing any visas to Russian citizens at all on tourist visas." So that's an administrative point. There's other countries as well. But then practically speaking, a Russian who wants to go into another country will face much more serious scrutiny.

Do you have the money? Do you have the money to support yourself? Are you sure you're not here working? Are you sure you're going to leave? Because anybody looking at that individual citizen would say, "Well, there's a much higher chance that a Russian tourist coming in now is possibly going to overstay his tourist visa and stay and squat in our country." And so you have much bigger hurdles.

And then you have a complete closing of all the doors to Russians of various immigration programs. It's my understanding that all of the Caribbean citizenship by investment programs are now said we're not currently taking Russians. Many of the residency by investment programs or residency programs said we're not taking Russians.

You had many countries that have been friendly to Russians among other as well as on the same level as anyone else specifically saying we are no longer working with Russian people. And this is really unfortunate if you wind up being a person who is from that country that's currently not in favor.

Again, don't look at Russians and think that, "Well, those Russians, of course they're in favor. They voted for Putin." Don't look at Russians that way. That's you and me. That's you and me. I find it very much within the realm of possibility that the actions of my own government, the American government, which are just horrifically immoral, more war crimes committed and more bloodshed around the world over the last couple of decades than any other country in the world, I find it very reasonable to think that I would be judged just like a Russian based upon the actions of my government.

At the moment, it just so happens that the places where all that bloodshed has, no one really cares about. And it just so happens that the United States is so big and so powerful that it's a big price for countries to discriminate against Americans. Although there certainly are certain countries that do, as is their perfect right to do so.

My point to you is, if you're that Russian and you have the misfortune of being embroiled or entangled in this unpleasant association, now everything is much more difficult. And so this is where you need multiple nationalities. You need multiple places you can go to work. And you need multiple skill sets that can be applied in different places so that you can still earn money to support your family.

Notice again that it doesn't have to be necessarily in the same way that the Russian could protect his income or his bank accounts by their being in another country, as long as they weren't confiscated, in the same way that it was almost any country was good. You have the same basic expression where for the Russian citizen, almost any other second citizenship is good.

It doesn't have to be the world's greatest citizenship. It doesn't have to be Canadian or American or German or UK. Obviously there's benefits of those big, fancy, powerful countries. But really it could be any other citizenship. Belarus. Belarus is certainly very much entangled with the Russian situation. But any person who held dual citizenship with Russia and Belarus, which was much easier than many other nations.

Belarusians, it's my understanding that Belarusians had a very fast access to Russian citizenship and a lot of cooperation. Any person who had both of those under the Belarus identity, they could escape less scrutiny. Very few people, very few employers, very few banks have a clue even where Belarus is or anything about it.

And so although the geopolitical class certainly understands that Belarus and Moscow have a very close relationship, that's not common knowledge globally. So if you had a Russian and a Belarusian passport or nationality identification, that would be pretty good. Or there's any number of other countries where there's a high degree of connection with Russian culture or friendlier to Moscow, and any one of those countries is as good as any other for a Russian who needed a second nationality.

So you don't have to just be from the UAE or Singapore or one of these from Luxembourg, right, a rich, successful country. It's almost any other country is good to minimize the stigma of that nationality. We often don't appreciate how important this is. Go back to the apartheid era in South Africa.

And the way that that came about is basically South Africa became a global pariah on the world stage, and South Africans faced severe opposition and discrimination based upon the system of apartheid that was in the country. In the same way, it didn't really matter if they had the world's best second nationality, it just mattered that they had something else.

So if you don't have a second citizenship, a second nationality, you see now why it matters. More importantly, I think for most people, or at least more accessibly, not more importantly, but more accessibly, notice again, residency visa. Residency visa with right of employment and the skills to go to another place and earn a living.

Today, you and your country, as long as it's not Russia, you have the world's options available to you. So many places that you can go, you can get a residency visa, you can have the right to work there, you can establish connections to the country, etc. And even if you never used it, knowing that you could go to another place and legally earn a living for your family is such a valuable thing.

That's what I want you to see is how it works. Even if your whole wealth was destroyed in Russia, if you have the ability to go somewhere else and work, then you are in pretty good shape. Or if you had skills that you could figure out how to market, then you can get through this thing okay.

The third and final thing that I want to point out is that prepping works in Russia. All of the basic preparedness system, it works. I don't think it works as well as the idea of going to another place, but I think it does work. My favorite pithy example of this comes from a YouTube channel that I have started watching to try to get an idea of what's happening in Russia.

The channel and the host of it is named Dan Shekoz. He seems like an ordinary everyday Russian guy. He says I'm just an ordinary Russian guy and that he learned English from watching American movies and so he and his wife speak English. And soon after the imposition of sanctions, he posted a video.

And the video title was called this. It said how are Russians going to survive under sanctions. The basic plot of the video was him driving to his parents-in-law's, wife's parents' house in a more rural country town and they spent a couple of days planting potatoes. I thought isn't that a perfect example?

We're going to go plant potatoes. Potato is a miracle food, a miracle food that you can live basically exclusively on potatoes. It's amazing. It's easy to grow. You basically just pop potatoes in the ground and if the conditions are right, they grow, you harvest them, they store. It's just a wonderful food.

And it was the perfect example of how are Russians going to survive. We're going to plant potatoes. The idea is if you have a house that doesn't have a mortgage on it that you can't pay because you lost your job. If you have a house. If you have the things in the house that you need to be comfortable, furniture, source of heat, source of cool, source of light, etc.

You can probably figure out a way to make it even in a collapse. You can figure out a way to pay the power bill and if you got a little backup battery, a little kind of a secondary power system, you're in pretty good shape. If you've got a way to cook some food, you're in pretty good shape.

You can find food. It can be grown in perhaps your backyard or there's somebody who will start growing it. And so that's where practical preparedness, meaning having things that are not connected to the financial system, can allow you to come through a crisis, a financial crisis and collapse in pretty good comfort.

Although the value from a financial perspective of your real estate might decline due to the sanctions, due to the people leaving, etc. Meaning measured in financial terms. Again, I want to repeat so you understand exactly what I'm saying. Although the value of your real estate that you own might decline in dollar terms, in ruble terms, in euro terms, in whatever, peso terms, whatever.

The value of your house that you live in does not decline just because fewer people want to buy it. You can have a complete evaporation of your currency value today. And the house that you live in will be just as valuable in terms of sheltering your family, keeping your family warm, keeping your family cool, keeping your family safe as it would be yesterday.

So when I talk about preparedness, I always position it in this way. Financial preparedness is usually your best way because money works in all situations up until money doesn't work. And I know it sounds silly, but I mean something by it. That money works until money doesn't work. A financial collapse is not a societal collapse.

It's a financial collapse. A financial collapse doesn't have to mean that your marriage collapses. Your marriage and your finances are two separate things. They're certainly correlated and interrelated. You might have more difficult marital discussions if your finances are collapsing, but they don't have to be. You can have a financial collapse and come out the other side with a stronger marriage.

So look at the world not just through a financial lens. How is this Russian family going to survive under sanctions? Well they're going to plant potatoes. And in that video they went to his in-laws house and it's just so funny because it's just a beautiful domestic scene of this elderly grandmother and grandfather and they're sitting at the table having their breakfast and their tea and then they go out and grandpa is drinking and then they go out and start planting potatoes and grandpa does what he can but then he has to stand back and watch and so you have this, Dan, you have him being the younger, healthier guy out planting and his wife is taking care of the baby and basically the point is that life goes back to the way it's always been.

That even if there's a financial collapse, if you're prepared for that financial collapse then you don't have to flee. You don't have to go and try to figure out how to get out. That might be the best plan. I think in many cases it will be the best plan for many people but it's not necessary.

You can stay put. And what's so amazing about the world that we live in, more and more every day, you can take money of which its value is unstable, unpredictable, subject to international sanctions, subject to foreign currency risk, etc. and you can turn that money into useful goods. You can turn that money into sticks and bricks that keep your family warm and sheltered from the storms and you can pay off those sticks and bricks with the exception of your taxes.

You can take your money and you can turn it into light. You can do that of course by paying your power bill but you can also do it by purchasing some things that run on batteries. I'm an aficionado of cool gear and we're living in a time in which you can get just amazing lighting systems with amazing batteries that last for years and are just wonderful.

I have a backup lighting system in my house that means that if the lights go out and there's no electricity, we can live not quite as bright as we live on a daily basis but pretty close to it just on battery power. You can buy these nifty little things called solar panels that recharge those batteries from the sun that falls on your house and it's not that expensive to do.

You can have a way to put water in your house. You can put a tank up so that you can fill up the tank and you have a water source and have a filtration system so your house can still work even if the grid goes down. It's pretty uncommon that a water grid goes down.

You go through the list and you can put in place the systems so that your family can be well fed, food storage, gardening ability, maybe some animals for those who wish to take on that responsibility. You can make sure that your family is warm, backup sources of heat, etc.

Your life can continue on even if there is a financial collapse. I think this is what most of us want. We want a life that is limited, where we don't have just constant worry. My emphasis here is to say that all of these things are accessible to you. If you look at Russia, I think you see a perfect example of how a financial collapse is simultaneously totally shocking and a big deal and not as big of a deal as I feared.

It's a paradox. The sanctions and the effects on Russia right now are huge from an economic perspective. For those who have wealth and are trying to preserve the value of their wealth, I've tried to show you how you do it. But then for those who don't have wealth, you can still preserve your living ability by recognizing that you need to diversify out of exclusively financial assets by building in local community, having relationships, by building in terms of physical structures, and then by making sure that you're insulated against the worst-case scenario.

I don't rush out to tell people they should pay off their mortgages quickly because as a financial advisor, when you've got mortgage rates at 3%, it's kind of hard to believe that you should rush to pay that off. On the other hand, when someone says I want to pay off my house, I've almost never told someone not to pay off a house because you can build more stability in your life and that stability can be very valuable in good times and in bad times.

I can't put that into an interest rate. The financial world should work the way that it is now, but if it doesn't, think about how to protect these other things. In closing, I would say that I've tried to point out what I see working in Russia, what I see not working.

If you would like to be prepared for a situation like you have right now in Russia, I've spent the last week putting all of this into a very careful, systematic, organized structure which is now available for you to buy. If you would like to do that, go to www.internationalscapeplan.com and let me explain to you what I have built there.

Most of the time when I do these ads, I'll make them fairly short, but I want you to know what's there. First thing I put is a very careful, phased approach into a plan. I've taken all the stuff that I've taught and that I've done for years and I've said, what is the most accessible way to do this with a minimum amount of time and a minimum amount of effort?

Genuinely, I believe that the first step that you need is just to be able to walk out your door with a passport, a credit card, and a cell phone. That's phase one. The idea is you're going to walk out your door with a passport, credit card, and a cell phone and you're going to board a train to the next country or a flight to the next country and you're going to get out from a time of trouble.

You see when I talked about Ukraine, you see how much of a big deal that is to make sure that you're protected so that if the bombs start falling or the tanks start coming in, you can say, "Guys, we got to get out and get out fast." You don't need much, a passport, a credit card, and a cell phone.

That's phase one. I give you some more detail of some other ways to make it better and more comfortable, but there's nothing more necessary than a passport, a cell phone, and a credit card. Then I say, "Well, let me tell you about that I think this will work in the most situations, but let me tell you about the times when I think this might not work and how you can make it more robust." Phase two, we talk about things like having a foreign residency.

Instead of being a tourist in another country, you have a country that you can go and you have the legal right to live in, to work in. We talk about setting up bank accounts abroad. You can go with a credit card, but if your credit card is drawn on a Russian bank and you're a fleeing Russian citizen, your Russian credit card is now going to have trouble working in the global financial system.

It would be a lot better for you if in addition to your Russian credit card, you had a debit card or a credit card from a UK bank or from a Canadian bank or from some other country in the world. Then we go through about how to make it more robust.

In phase two, I'm still not going to ask you to go abroad or to move or to leave or anything like that. It's just a matter of how can you put more redundancy in place. Then in phase three, we talk about how could you actually have another home. Because one of the things you can do if you're willing to invest the money and the time into it is go ahead and set up another home.

I think right now, if you look at the world, you can see how nice it would be to have a home in another country that you could go to. Imagine you were a Canadian, you got sick and tired of living under these draconian COVID stuff that the Canadian government did because of their own incapacity and lack of hospital capacity and the collapsing medical system.

Wouldn't it be nice if you had a second home in the Bahamas and you could go and live with relative freedom as a Canadian abroad? Wouldn't it be nice if you were in a scenario where you said, "Hey, I'm not so sure if the Russians are going to invade or not.

But I'll tell you what, let's go to our vacation house and let's just be out for a while, maybe go for a couple of months and let's wait and see so we don't get caught in some kind of back last minute thing." Phase three is all about setting up a second home abroad.

I think this is one of the best things that you can do for those with money. You can start to put it together in different ways. Now you have a second home, a place that you like to go. You can use the second home to get your residency permissions.

You can use a second home to get your citizenships. You can use a second home as a base of operations for your financial infrastructure. This allows you to get out and go to another place. I always remember years ago, I used to love listening to talk radio. I think the best example of this would be when you've got a job where you've got to keep going, you need to get out of a disaster zone.

I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh had his famous Southern Command down in Palm Beach, Florida where I lived. When there'd be a hurricane coming, Rush would never stay in the hurricane zone because he's got to be on the air. You get on an airplane and you leave and you have a second studio set up and another place that you can just go to and you can work and you have a second home set up.

Although you or I might not be Rush Limbaugh, I think that should be our basic idea of how to approach things. If we have the money and are willing to dedicate the money, big if, then we should put ourselves in a situation where we can live and work and function relatively seamlessly in multiple countries.

Then the fourth phase is, "All right, I'm going to be an expat. I'm actually going to get out." That's a step that I think most people should not do, but I explained to you how to do it if you think it is and how to really profit from it.

The course is just under eight hours. It might be more than eight hours if I add more bonus content in the future, but right now it's just under eight hours. Very carefully presented, tight video presentation, audio is available as well, and careful notes, working it through in a phase-by-phase approach with detailed action steps, laying it out to you.

What I want to do is that I have done every single one of these. I have spent the last years of my life testing this stuff, proving this stuff out, systematically putting it in place. It started for me when I looked at the situation in the United States and I said, "I'm not going to say that there's a big risk right now, but I think that there could be risk in the future and I don't have a plan B." I started putting in place the plan B.

I have gone through every single one of these phases, one, two, three, and four, tested them, learned what works, what doesn't work, and put that knowledge into a course for you. That's interesting to you. Go to internationalescapeplan.com. Thank you so much. I'll see you back soon for part three of this series where we talk about financial lessons from the current situation/crisis in the United States.