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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. 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'm your host.

And on today's podcast, I'm going to introduce a series here called Why I Left the United States. But don't worry. I'm not just simply sharing my story or just telling tales. I'm going to be teaching you a series of lessons that I think are useful and appropriate as to think about.

And these lessons are going to be intensely financial. My two of my three reasons as to why I left the United States almost five years ago and why I've stayed gone for most of that time are specifically financial. And so I believe this is appropriate content for a personal finance podcast.

You might think that I've talked a lot about internationalization, but long-term listeners of the podcast will know that I've never really shared a lot about my own personal experiences and feelings here in this public format. In a couple of my courses, I've shared more. But here in this format on the public podcast, I've not shared a lot of my own personal experience.

I've done that for the privacy of my family and more than anything, just simply because I want to test things. I think one of my own virtues and also challenges is that I don't want to say things that I'm not confident are worth saying, that I'm not confident are true.

And so that's kept me from probably speaking about things that I should have spoken about earlier because it takes me time to become convinced of something. When I left the United States five years ago, I, of course, shared here in the podcast that I was doing so, but I didn't say to anyone else that you should leave and here's why, because I wasn't confident in that opinion.

And I still would never say to someone flat out, "You should leave a country." It's a very nuanced discussion that has so many different levels and layers. But I do sometimes fear that I've not been a good leader by waiting so long to be sure of something. Kind of the same way, if you remember my Bitcoin Apology podcast where I talked about how Bitcoin probably could have and should have been a central part of my personal finance content from the beginning.

But I don't like to be one of those guys that just gets into something and starts blurting out things and then turns around five years later and says, "Oops, I was wrong. Sorry, guys." And that slowness is both a benefit, but it's also a disadvantage. And in many ways, some of the internationalization stuff that maybe some of the lessons that you'll learn today are more relevant than they ever were.

When I left the United States five years ago, the world was peaceful. The country was doing really well. All the trends were pointed in the right direction. I didn't leave in protest of a political administration or anything like that. I just said, "Hey, things are really good in the United States right now, but there's a possibility that in the future they may not be." And so I want to be prepared for that.

And as I talked about in a recent podcast episode, I believe the time you prepare for bad times is easiest when there's simply no clouds of bad times. Whereas today, I think many more people are interested. And that interest is fine. It's not too late. And I'm not advocating just leaving your country.

I'm going to talk about this in a thoughtful and nuanced way and bring in some current events as indications of what I saw five years ago as concerns for me. But it's not too late. There's plenty of preparation that could be done. And I'm going to be doing this series and also promoting heavily my upcoming event.

Remember that in January of 2024, I am co-hosting an event in Panama City, Panama. It's a one-week event talking about internationalization broadly in Panama, specifically that I'm hosting with my friends Mikkel Thorup and Gabriel Custodiat. And I want to urge you to sign up for that. We're down to the final days for registrations.

This is the time. Go to – if you want to sign up now, I'll get into more details. Just go to expatmoney.com/radical. The URL slipped me for a moment. expatmoney.com/radical and sign up today. It's a great event, great price. Come spend a week with me talking about this stuff in person.

But let's get to the meat of what I want to share with you. Before I go into the details of why I left the USA, I want to make a few comments on current events and current events in my own life. Thank you for your patience with the paucity of podcasts that I have released over the last two weeks.

The reason there have been no shows during that time is that my family and I have been traveling. And we're on the tail end of a six-week world tour that I dreamed up as part of my attempts at world-schooling my children. I don't know about you, but I've always been fascinated with the topic of world-schooling as a great – someone who has great interest in education broadly, schooling specifically, homeschooling, et cetera, and has the resources and time and interest and inclination to try to give my children everything I possibly can give them.

I've always been fascinated with this term, world-schooling. It's such an evocative term. It immediately pictures something in your mind that I think most of us would say, "Yes." If you've traveled abroad, no matter the age, no matter the format of your travels, I'm certain you've learned something. Foreign travel is one of those things that has a tendency to open our eyes in a way that few other things can and broaden our horizons, broaden our perspectives, challenge our concepts.

And when you compare that to the almost certainly dull experience that you had in school, there's just a sharp comparison and contrast there between the evocative nature of world-schooling and government-schooling. One is dreary and dull and death by lecture. The other is exciting and innovative and imaginative. But I myself have always been a cautious implementer of world-schooling versus a full-throated supporter of it.

I respect a lot of people and a lot of the different theories that people have in the homeschool community, some of the different things that people are testing. I think it's lovely to have these things tested and tried. And one of the more interesting segments of the population of home educators that I've studied a lot has been those of the so-called unschoolers, those who basically try to throw out everything associated with formal forced schooling and substitute something else that is frequently dubbed "unschooling" for lack of a better name.

And one segment of that is often world-schoolers. And I just imagine a kid sitting under a palm tree in Nicaragua eating coconuts, surfing on the beach every day, and his mom saying, "Well, we unschool our children." I'm not pillorying this. This is truly what many people talk about. And I've always been quite skeptical of the educational value of pure traveling, pure going around.

A museum is great, but a museum does not substitute for a well-written book explaining things at a level of understanding and depth that a well-written book, even a textbook, can provide. And I think that a lot of times what I observe that many world-schoolers do is they substitute laziness for depth of education.

And I myself think that academics are very important. But I do think that so-called world-schooling can be and probably should be an extraordinarily useful tool in the hands of a thoughtful educator. Because I'm convinced that the simplest way to think about learning is simply the process of making connections.

And those connections, I mean that in a metaphorical, abstract sense, but I also mean it in a quite physical sense of connecting neurons in your brain. The more layers there are to our knowledge and to our life experience, the more we can learn because the more connections we can make.

And so the process of forming connections to information, to knowledge, is the simplest understanding of education. And the process of forming connections is best done when we meet ideas in a variety of contexts rather than always in the same context. Learning researchers, for example, have done some experiments and they claim that your learning of new material will be more effective if your physical place of study changes at different times.

So this is obviously hard because we all know that having one place that we study every day at one desk and a good routine is probably the cornerstone of good learning, having a good routine. But the truth is if on Monday you study at the desk in your home and on Tuesday you study at the desk or the table in your backyard, and on Wednesday you study at the local library, and on Thursday you study at grandma's house, and on Friday you study at school, then you'll retain information more effectively because there's variety and diversity in your study location.

And so you want to have variety. And I've found this so frequently with my own study of things like foreign language vocabulary. If you just have a word printed on a word card that you're trying to learn, you could see that word card 20 times and it sometimes just doesn't sink in.

But then the instant you see it in the wild or the instant you hear it in a movie you're watching or a book you're reading, then immediately that word is cemented on your brain forever and you never need the word card again. And so seeing things in different contexts is very, very impactful.

And this is, I think, the opportunity of world schooling. If you are an educator of significant motivation and significant financial means and you can employ the world as part of your educational process, then I think your ability to build connections to knowledge and to experience it to meaning in your students' lives is going to be so much more powerful.

And I think that is something that those of us who care deeply about these subjects should experiment with and should work on. And so this six-week tour has been part of my own efforts to do that. I've dismissed the idea at this point of the value of a lifestyle of nomadism.

When I was younger I wanted to be a backpack worker, a digital nomad traveling around with just a backpack. Maybe that's appropriate for a single guy. I still don't think it's very effective as a lifestyle. But maybe that's appropriate as a single guy, but that's too much work for parents.

And I don't think that long-term constant nomadic travel adds much of anything positive. I think having relatively modest trips done frequently but having a good solid home base where you can build academic connections on a deep academic level and then reinforce those connections with experience and then go back and reconnect them with deep academics, to me that seems the ideal way to approach a topic like world schooling.

And maybe in some other format I'll share more of what I've done to try to make good use out of it. We've tried to read various books, living books, about each of the destinations that we've had in mind. The destinations have all connected to something that we've studied. And then we've tried to really embrace all of the world schooling opportunities along the way, etc.

So I'll share some of that at another time. But the relevance at this point in time has to do with the importance of internationalization. So my family and I recently found ourselves caught up in the events, the tragic events happening in Israel. We weren't personally in danger in any way, but we were scheduled on this trip to travel to Israel.

That was a core component. I myself have never been to Israel. I have been wanting to go for many years, but it has not worked out. And so finally I worked it out. I said, "OK, we're going to go to Israel." And I had everything planned, everything booked. It was going to be a great trip.

So we went to Italy first, and our plan was to fly from Italy to Israel. Italy is important because obviously with our studies of the Roman Empire and Latin language and classical history, etc., Italy is a core component of that, and it's just very powerful to be in some of the Italian cities where so much happened and see those things to provide relevance to your studies.

But then along the way, lo and behold, all the events in Israel unfolded. And challenging, a horrific situation. And I had to decide, "OK, what do we do? Do we continue to go?" After all, I'm not that concerned about my own safety in Tel Aviv. We're probably pretty safe in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem, etc.

But the logistics of travel were insurmountable. Airlines canceling flights, etc. So I canceled the Israel trip. And instead of that, we went to England. And I was struck by how easy that decision was, based upon all of the modern tools, all of the modern implements, and simply being able to travel the world freely.

And then along the way, as you'll hear as I talk about in this series of "Why I Left the USA," I've worked with so many people who simply don't have that privilege, don't have that easy time of coming and going. As a U.S. citizen, I just canceled my flights here, booked some cheap flights, flew from Italy to England, and, "OK, here we are in England.

We'll go ahead and do this portion of it," and quickly adapt and adjust. No prior planning necessary. Nothing other than grab a few airlines, charge them with a credit card, book an Airbnb. Boom. Done. As an American citizen, I can enter England for six months. I can come back and forth.

I'm pretty much footloose and fancy free. And what an amazing circumstance to be in. Now contrast that with the challenge just of this very day. This very day, we see the video from Dagestan, Russia, something like that, where the local population of, I think, Russian Muslims, finds out that there is a plane flying from Tel Aviv to their city, and they go and they stop the plane to basically waylay anybody who has an Israeli citizenship.

And here they are, taking away a guy with a mob, baying for blood, a guy who's got an Israeli passport. Unbelievable. And so this stuff hits close to home in terms of your ability to come and go internationally, your ability to move around the world freely. And there have been many times, while right now, it's easy for me to travel with a U.S.

passport, and I'm grateful for that, there have been many times in which that's not the case. Just recently, I was reminded of the story of the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 back in 1986. And there was a heroic flight attendant named, I don't know how to pronounce her name, Nirja Banot, who, she was, she had to go, she was told, she did a bunch of things, but she was told to go and collect all of the passports of all of the passengers, because the hijackers there in Pakistan, the hijackers were hunting for Americans, and she hid the passports of the Americans and saved many, many lives with her bravery.

She was killed protecting the lives of, I think, three children later in the hijacking. And just, you know, one among many stories of times when your American passport can have you being hunted. And so this is not something that is only applicable to Israelis in the current world. So my summary simply is to say that this stuff matters, and it matters in all times, but especially in these times.

And so when I share with you why I left the United States, I just want you to think about your own situation and think about what that would mean to the specifics of your life and how you could increase more resiliency in your international plans. And I want to share with you my reasons to why this became important to me.

And as always, even as I teach in my international escape plan course, just know that you don't have to, you don't have to move abroad. Let me share a little bit of that back story with you to set the context for my reasons. When I chose to leave the United States, it was not part of a long-term plan.

I didn't plan to move abroad and stay abroad. I was not looking for, you know, a new home. I didn't have a list of all the countries of the world that I was going to go to. It was much more spontaneous than that. As it so happens that my wife and I had reached a point in our lives, we'd lived in one place for a long time, we had a bunch of babies and we hadn't traveled much and we decided, you know what, let's go travel around the United States.

And part of it is we were open to, there was nothing wrong where we lived from, where we were from. I just couldn't see the long-term future. I couldn't see my life, you know, 30 years later living in that place and I wondered if there was something else or something different that I should be pursuing.

So we got rid of our stuff, bought a camper, started traveling around the United States. All of that is chronicled here in the Annals of Radical Personal Finance. And on that trip, we were open to moving to different places. We found some places that we thought were interesting, cultures that we liked, specific things we were looking for.

I had a list of places that I wanted to go and check out. But along the way, there wasn't any specific kind of urging that we had to choose this particular place and set up shop there. Along that trip, we conceived a baby and we needed to be somewhere for the birth, didn't want to have a baby in an RV.

And so we were heading back towards Florida and then I was thinking about birth tourism and I said to her, "Hey, you know what? We should do this," because I had grown uncomfortable with the idea of relying solely on one country. Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County, get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

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Offer in soon. See dealer for details. The United States, as I share my reasons, and I thought, "You know what? Let's do this." We went abroad for birth tourism. When we went abroad, I didn't know if we'd be gone a few months or if we'd be gone a few years.

I didn't have any strong commitment to it. I didn't see how it would be possible for me to make those kinds of plans. And so we went abroad, had a baby. Things worked out, so we were there for a while, and then COVID hit soon after we had the baby, and it just was easier to stay where we were.

We had a good living situation. We had everything we needed. We had a good network. And so we stayed where we were. After a couple years abroad, we went traveling again. Unfortunately, those travels ended prematurely because I underestimated the COVID closures in the world. I thought that COVID was done.

We went traveling, discovered that most of the world didn't agree with me, and traveling was very unpleasant. And so we moved back to the United States. I had the intention of staying for a while, and then for a variety of circumstances, it turns out that about three months later, we left again and moved abroad again.

And so in that kind of--in those wanderings, I've gone through a lot of the emotions, a lot of the experiences that many of you have not, and that's the perspective that I'm sharing this from. And if I had to guess, I would guess that in the future we'll wind up back in the United States, but I don't have a clear plan for that at the moment for reasons that I'll share with you in this series.

So let's get to it. Before I get to the three reasons why I left the United States, I'm going to begin with some of the reasons that are not part of my reasons, but things that I hear frequently. There are various things that I frequently hear from others as good reasons to leave the United States or good reasons to leave Great Britain or wherever you happen to be from and go abroad, and these are not my reasons, but I want to talk about them.

The first reason that I did not leave the United States was for a lower cost of living. Many people who live in a wealthy, developed country believe that if they just go to another place, if they just move to Mexico or move to Costa Rica or move to Panama, then they'll just have a lower cost of living and everything is going to be great.

And they sit down and look at the cost of buying a house or the cost of renting a house or the cost of having a maid, et cetera, and they say, "This is going to be fantastic. I'm going to do this. I'm going to go and have a lower cost of living." And that you can go and get a lower cost of living, and there are some limited circumstances in which I myself would recommend this, but those circumstances, I would say, I would recommend them generally for a short time, a limited duration, and I don't think that moving abroad is strictly necessary for them.

And done poorly, moving abroad can do very poorly for you. So, for example, I've commented that if I found myself wanting to start an Internet business and I just lost my job, I was broke, I want to start an Internet business, one thing I would consider would be hopping on an airplane, going to Thailand and finding a place I could live for under $1,000 a month so I could start my Internet business.

And there are many people who have done that. I say Thailand specifically because, interestingly, there's been quite a community of digital entrepreneurs who've gotten together in various places in Thailand and built kind of an incubator ecosystem where they support one another and engage with one another. Bali is quite popular for this, other little hubs around the world that you can plug into.

And many times people go and they celebrate the fact that they don't need much money and it sounds like a dream. Here we are making money online, hanging out in a beautiful place, spending only a little bit of money and it sounds like a dream. And I think in some cases that can be appropriate.

But there are a few big cautions that I have observed that you really want to be thoughtful and careful about. Caution number one is this, when one category of expenses goes down, it's frequently the case that another category of expenses increases significantly. So the guy who gets on an airplane and flies to Thailand so that he can live with living expenses at less than $1,000 a month will not infrequently find himself on an airplane flying back to the United States for family holidays or for an important connection with somebody and spending thousands of dollars a year in airfare that he wouldn't otherwise have spent.

I'm not saying that the living expenses are not lower, they can be. But often you wind up spending more money on another category. And so you want to be really thoughtful about this. It's a big concern. The second thing is that in lowering expenses, especially if you're trying to be hardcore frugal, when you lower your expenses frequently, the actual lower costs come from a downgrade in lifestyle.

So, yeah, I moved from a place where it was super expensive to a place where the rent is cheaper. But in reality, I'm taking a big downgrade in terms of moving from a tier A city to a tier B city. I'm moving from a big comfortable apartment to a small apartment, downgrading my appliances, downgrading many things.

And this is much more palatable to some people in an international context than it is in a domestic context because it feels exotic. If you could live in Louisiana or Mississippi on the beach and not have an air conditioner, it would feel like you're suffering because you know the American culture and you're suffering without an air conditioner.

But on the other hand, if you move to the beaches of Costa Rica and you don't have an air conditioner, then you say, "Well, this is exotic. This is what the locals do." You have the same experience, but because it's exotic, it's different, you're more willing to accept hardship.

You're more willing to accept a downgrade in lifestyle, and that's fine. And in fact, this is a strategy that I frequently recommend to people as a way of getting out and a way of resetting. But you should face it honestly. And I'm not denigrating the strategy. I do frequently recommend this.

You'll have a family that's kind of stuck in their lifestyle, and they've got a certain house at a certain cost of living. They've got a certain neighborhood, a certain set of friends. Everything's basically locked in. And then for whatever reason, it could be on the downside, there's job loss.

It could be on the just we're not getting ahead, and there's no career prospects or something like that. We're not saving any money. We're not making progress. We're just treading water. And yet the family is unwilling to make any significant changes because of the fact that we're kind of just stuck in this lifestyle.

It would feel like deprivation. Well, one of the strategies I turn to in situations like that is to say, "How can you make it exotic? How can you move into a motorhome? How can you move abroad and in so doing transform your entire budget?" But due to the fact that it feels exotic and you're substituting all these other kinds of life experiences, you kind of cut yourself free of this and you embrace the hardship as, "Hey, this is fun, and this is different." And then you cut your expenses in half so you can finally start to get ahead and make progress towards your financial goals.

This is a useful tool, but it's also one of those things that people don't think about. They don't recognize that, "Hey, I'm saving money, but I'm saving money because of a lifestyle downgrade." So let's approach it open-mindedly. One of my other big concerns with people who move to a lower cost of living place is many times that causes them to stop being productive.

And this is a big concern that I have for young men especially, and I've seen it even in my own life. I'm very sensitive to this because it has affected me personally. If you need to make $15,000 a month, $10,000 or $15,000 a month in the United States to live a great lifestyle, and then you say, "I'm going to check out and I'm going to go where it's cheap, where I can live on $3,000 a month or $5,000 a month," and you go and you start living on less, then you drop your income down from $15,000 a month to $8,000 a month.

And you say, "Look, I don't have to work so much." The problem is then you get used to not working so much, and your skills start to atrophy, and your motivation starts to wane, and it gets easier to drink beer and sit on the beach at 3 o'clock in the afternoon instead of hustling.

Do that for a decade, especially during the decade of the most important building years of your own life. All of a sudden you wake up and you look around and you say, "I'm not where I should be. I'm not where I'd like to be. I'm not where my peers are." And that's really concerning.

And you look at it and say, "Well, but wasn't I better off?" Well, sort of. But you walked away from the hustle and grind way too early, and now the idea of going back to the hustle and grind is very--it's just not as appealing. You don't have as much energy.

You've got more demands on you, et cetera. And so I get really concerned about people just pursuing low cost of living for its own sake, especially on a long-term basis, versus buckling down and improving their skills and increasing their earnings, working hard, building the connection, building the business, et cetera, that can support a higher cost of living.

And I keep a sign on my wall. I'm not in front of my wall right now, but basically it says something like, "It's not expensive. You just can't afford it, and that's your problem." It's not expensive. You just haven't made it cheap, and it's your problem. So fix it.

Fix that. Don't complain that it costs too much money. Be upset that you don't have more of it. Money is relatively straightforward to come by. And so if you can go get some, then you can fix some of those issues. And so I don't want to labor on that today, but it is a concern.

So lower cost of living is not one of the reasons that I myself left. There are benefits to it, but I've probably experienced more of the downsides of lower cost of living than the upsides. I think the best way to handle lower cost of living is if you need it for a specific period of time.

So you say, "I'm stuck where I'm at. I need to reset. I'm going to move abroad for one year. And during that year, I'm going to do A, B, C, and D. I'm going to enjoy the lower cost of living. I'm going to stash money, and after one year, I'm going to go back and do this." Or, "I need relief until I can get out of debt or until I can get this Internet money going," et cetera.

But lower cost of living for the long term I don't think is a great goal. It should be a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself. You don't want to get accustomed to low earnings, low productivity, relaxed lifestyle, et cetera. I don't see that stuff as being positive, and you want to be really careful about putting yourself in that.

It's kind of the same problem with welfare. We know that welfare damages men. When you're given free money, easy money, easy life, you lose your motivation. You lose your motivation, and yet the same thing happens when you set yourself up on easy street. All of us would much rather sit on the couch and eat salty foods, salty high-calorie fake food that somebody else paid for for us.

But if you start sitting on the couch and eating salty high-calorie food that someone else bought for you, then a few months later, you can't get up off the couch. And so most of the good things in life worth having require you to go out and do something hard, to face something difficult.

And yet in so doing, that changes you for the good and makes you capable of going and doing more things. So lower cost of living is a useful tool, but it's not a goal. Another comment on lower cost of living is that what I've frequently said to many people who I've consulted with, et cetera, is before you necessarily move abroad, look for lower cost of living in a context you know.

I think the cheapest possible lifestyle you could live would be to get yourself a little single wide in Mississippi somewhere, Alabama, some rural part of southern or western United States out in one of the desert places. I think you live there cheaper than almost anywhere else in the world with a higher degree of safety, higher degree of security, higher degree of convenience than most places.

Speak the local language, it's all easy, everything is great. I think you should really consider those kinds of things before you just jump and move abroad. Moving abroad solves a different set of questions for you. And the biggest one that it solves in that situation is the exotic nature and the challenge.

And so that can be a great tool for that. But lower cost of living was not one of my reasons. Second reason that I want to discuss that is not one of my reasons was concern about the collapse of the United States or various sub-collapses within that, right, a collapse of the dollar, collapse of the economy or hyperinflation, etc., things like that.

I believe that these are all real risks and threats and they are worth preparing for. And internationalization is an effective way of preparing for many of those things. But that's not why I specifically left the United States. The reason for that has to do with my inability to accurately time any particular catastrophe such as that.

I grew up and for whatever reason I was always, I guess probably the sensationalism, I was always interested in the collapsed people and whatnot. And so I've read a lot of literature from probably about the 1970s where it really got going in the United States. But at the end of the day, very few people want to face the fact that the collapse has been predicted for 50 years and it hasn't happened.

Now, that doesn't mean that it won't happen. After all, anything which cannot continue will eventually stop. So we know that anything that will cannot continue will eventually stop. So some form of collapse or crisis or whatever is inevitable. But we don't know when. And what I came to the realization of in my own life is he is a fool who gives up that which he can never get back, meaning the time of his life, to pursue something that he doesn't want.

And so because of my interest in preparedness and survivalism over the years, I've watched a lot of people that seems to me they walk away from really good life out of a hardcore extreme fear, go and put themselves in a situation where their life stinks, but they're in it only works if everything goes wrong.

And they wind up in some cases miserable or they wind up just doubling down and a few decades later ask, "Are you really living the life you want? Wouldn't you rather go back and do something different with those decades?" I think where this impacted me the most was when I, a number of years ago, I followed quite closely a lot of people in the preparedness space where they were focused very much on move out of the cities, move to a rural place, etc.

And there were three leaders in that space that I looked up to. I appreciated some writers, some content creators, etc. And I'm not going to name their names. It's not important, but there were three of them. Fascinating thing to me, all three of them moved from the city out to the country because of collapse of society, blah, blah, blah, the imminent catastrophe situations.

All three of them, their wives left them after several years of being gone, divorced them and moved back to the city. And I thought to myself, "Isn't that the perfect example of catastrophe?" Now, none of them, as far as I know, I stopped following them at that point. A man who will destroy his family and let that happen over belief in the collapse of American society to me is not a man who has anything worthwhile to say.

So I haven't followed any of their stuff since then. But it just shows like this fundamental lack of perspective of the imminence of certain catastrophes versus others. Here you are with your wife leaving you because you moved to the middle of nowhere and you were worried about societal collapse.

And then a decade later, society is still ticking along. And yet you've had a collapse of your own society. And so all of that, much of that kind of collapse thinking and whatnot. While it may be true, it needs to be judged very carefully and held in perspective. I think the best way to approach this is using the motto of Jack Spirico, the guy who runs the Survival Podcast.

His motto from the inception of his show, his tagline of his show was "Helping you to live a better life if times get tough or even if they don't." And all of your plans should reflect the ability for you to love your life to the extent possible or to be enthusiastic about the way and the where and the how you're living now if everything is going great as well as if everything doesn't go great.

You don't want to go and do something that you would only do if there were a collapse of some kind. You don't want to go and lose years and decades of your life over something that probably won't happen because collapses, when they happen, are very slow and they're very uneven in their effects.

And so I believe in the importance of preparing for financial collapse, catastrophe, crisis, et cetera, hyperinflation. I believe that's all important. I got a whole course on it. But you don't have to go and move abroad for 35 years waiting for the collapse. And I think that thinking is poisonous to progress because what it causes you to do is to rejoice over bad news and to rejoice over conflict because it's going to vindicate you in some way.

When a man makes a commitment to a certain position, then it causes him to only see things that are going to vindicate him. And so that guy who moves to the middle of nowhere and because he's concerned that the world is going to fall apart, all he sees is confirmation of his viewpoint.

That's why he won't move back to the city to keep his marriage together because for him to do so, that would mean to admit that he was wrong and he won't do it. And so all he sees is nonstop, ever-continuing confirmation of his viewpoint. He won't see anything else because as human beings, we don't believe what we see.

We see what we believe. We all do. And so we need to be really thoughtful and careful about forming our beliefs because we're going to see what we believe. We're not going to believe what we see. It's a very unusual personality and/or skill that allows someone to disassociate himself from his beliefs and study something factually.

I believe it's something that we can develop in ourselves. I would like to think that I've done that to some degree. I don't want to fool myself because, of course, maybe I just am seeing what I believe. I believe that about myself and so therefore I see it. But I do my very best and that's all any of us can do is try to account for this weakness that we have as human beings.

But we need to be very careful and try our best to disassociate from our own interests in a scenario and study the facts as best we understand them in order to do our best to make a plan with those facts for any decision that we're making. And if we do that, then I think we can make better decisions.

If your thinking process requires you to believe something negative, be very thoughtful about that. And even if you think that's the most likely outcome, in many cases, you should reject that thinking. Let me give an example of a heuristic that I use and I teach my children that I think is really important.

I do this because in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 in the Bible it says, "Love believes the best," a once-in-a-lifetime translation of love. And I believe that I, as a Christian, all Christians, should always believe the very best thing possible about other people. And I'm imperfect at it. It's very hard to do in some circumstances, but I continually remind myself.

So let's say that something happens to you. Someone offends you, someone says something to you or whatever, someone does something. You need to always discipline yourself to believe the very best interpretation of that event that you can possibly believe. And so if somebody cuts you off in traffic and you have two choices, choice A is this guy is a careless jerk.

Choice B is this guy is driving his pregnant wife to the hospital and she's screaming, "The baby's coming," and that's why he cut me off. Then just discipline yourself to automatically choose B. "Man, that guy is sure in a hurry. He must have some good reason to do that." Now, we all know that this is probably not true in 80% of the cases.

But the beauty of this kind of thinking is it frees you from any kind of negative reaction. So if somebody cuts me off in traffic and I just say, "Man, that guy sure is in a hurry. He didn't see me. And he must have a real reason why he's got to go there," then it completely transforms my experience of that event in a positive way.

Now there's zero emotional stimulation. There's zero reason. And if I have anything negative to say, it's just gone. It's gone. Now, notice that I said we want to believe the very best possible version of anything that you can believe. So if somebody cuts you off in traffic, stops his car, gets out and starts waving a gun at you, I'm not saying you tell yourself some ridiculous thing like, "He's waving a gun in my face because his wife is pregnant and needs to go to the hospital." Believe that this guy is going to kill me, and so what do I need to do in this situation?

But at the end of the day, discipline yourself to find the best possible version of the events that you can. And so after you deal with the immediate threat of that situation, you're going to say, "What happened?" And you're going to do your best to find a way to believe the best about other people.

If you're wrong in that direction, let's say that you know you're wrong in that direction. And 20% of the time, people are going to abuse you. They're going to take advantage of you in some significant way. You are so much better off having that mindset about life than you are the other, where you go through life thinking that people are out to get you.

I know some people that are like this, and I try to believe the best about them, and I also try to disassociate myself from them as much as is possible because it's toxic. They go through life thinking that people are out to do them ill, and it's like they actively choose the worst possible explanation in any situation.

The best that I can believe about those persons is that they just don't recognize what is happening to them, and they haven't asked me for my input on it. And so this is – forgive me, I've lost my train of thought. I guess what I was trying to say is that if you can – I think, forgive me – I think what I was trying to say is that if you can look at circumstances, you can possibly interpret them in a positive way, then do that.

And so look for reasons why things are getting better. Look for reasons why collapse won't happen. And then just prepare, but don't commit your life to that kind of negative perspective. Prepare for what is possible while believing in what you want to happen. And I think that even if you're wrong, it's a much better solution.

And I'm not criticizing people who genuinely believe the best that could possibly happen is total collapse. But those people will make their decisions, and they'll be happy with it. They'll live in a rural area because they love it, and they'll be thrilled with it. James Wesley Rawls, who I've interviewed various times on the show, is absolutely convinced that collapse is certain.

And he is living a great life, and he wouldn't change anything, because his day-to-day lifestyle is a lifestyle that he loves. He lives in a beautiful place, has a wonderful family, has a great business, works hard every day, enjoys the outdoors. He wouldn't change a thing, even if collapse never happened.

So I'm not accusing you of saying you shouldn't go and live in a beautiful place. What I'm saying is believe the best that you can and constantly challenge those beliefs. So I didn't leave the United States because I was concerned about the collapse of the United States. I didn't leave the United States because of my concern over growing government debt.

That's kind of a subset of collapse. I don't think that the growing government debt is likely to relate to end in so-called collapse. Now, decisions could change, but at the moment I think that that is bad, and it'll have many harmful effects. It's not great, but it's not going to lead to a two-weeks-and-the-whole-country-collapses type of scenario.

That's fiction stuff. That's not how the real world operates. That's not how countries collapse in general. If circumstances continue to change, then of course we will assess further. Those are not some of the reasons that I left the United States. Final reason I did not leave the United States is I did not leave the United States because I had some kind of beef with the culture of the United States.

I do think in many cases this is probably the best reason to leave your country, is because you don't like the culture, and you just don't fit in there with you. It doesn't fit in with it. I don't think I've said it to him, but I've mentioned this in the context of Andrew Henderson, the nomad capitalist.

I think one of the best reasons that Andrew left the United States, and he said this publicly, I've just listened to enough of his stuff to hear it clearly, is that he never felt comfortable as an American. One of the great things for him was that he has found much greater peace in his life and in his persona and his culture by leaving the United States and not being an American.

And I think that's fantastic, that if you don't fit in your home culture, in your home country, then you should leave. And some of the best Americans that I have met, the people who most thoroughly embody the American spirit and American values, etc., are those who have left their country and come to the United States because of what it offers them.

And they do not identify with their home culture and their home country. They have nostalgia over it, but they don't want to be part of it. And I think that's one of the best reasons to leave a country. But that was not my personal experience. I'm very thoroughly culturally American.

Regardless of my U.S. citizenship, I'm very thoroughly culturally American. I appreciate the United States so much, and I'll never be anything else. I can't imagine culturally how I could change to the degree that I wouldn't connect with being an American. I've always been successful in the United States. I've always felt comfortable in the culture.

And so even though that culture has massively changed, and I don't really recognize the country of my youth anymore, what I do observe is that there is another 100 million people in my home country that pretty much think and act just about like I do. And when you think about a tribe, having a tribe of 100 million people that pretty much think and act like you do is way more powerful than having a tribe of a few thousand people that think and act like you do in some other corner of the world.

And so this is my thing that when I come back to those cultural issues that affect all of us, simply that where am I going to go where I'm going to find another 100 million people who think and act like I do for the good? And for all of the frustrations that I have about "my culture," I've got more cultural compatriots in the United States of America than anywhere else in the world.

And so I didn't leave to run away from those people, etc. And I think that many people probably shouldn't leave for that reason. Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County, get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

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Offer in soon. See dealer for details. Again, I think COVID was a great example of this, that what you saw in COVID was you saw a splitting of cultures based around an issue. And while of course individuals all have their own ability to think, ability to process, ability to discern, etc., at the end of the day people split widely into several camps.

And those camps often found themselves, their lives impacted by not who their president was, but who their governor was, who their mayors were, who their county sheriffs were. And by living with like-minded people, you can live pretty well. And so on a lot of the cultural issues that matter a lot to me, I don't want to brush my hands off and walk away.

I want to stay where I've got 100 million friends. Or even if it's 30 million friends, whatever. When you recognize a country like my country that's so large, I think the third most populated country in the world, having 50 million people that think like you is going to be your biggest asset in the world.

So be careful before you walk away from that, especially long-term for sure. There are good reasons to live near friends. And because of the tremendous diversity of living lifestyles and living conditions and places you can live in the United States, you can get around a lot of your friends and live a pretty happy insulated life in the United States.

So that's another reason I didn't leave the United States. But I know that it's a reason that a lot of people are concerned. In the next episode, I'm going to get into reason number one, why I did leave the United States. And to be clear, this is not to invalidate any of these previous reasons as being enough for someone else to go.

At the end of the day, you choose your own life. And you don't have to give anybody any reasons for anything that you do. Just do what you think is best. You don't have to justify it. You don't have to justify it to me. You just do what you think is best.

My goal is to talk you through some of my thinking so that you can have an external mirror for some of your own thinking, and you can consider your thoughts. That's how I view content like this. I like to hear how other people think so that I can assess how much I agree with them, disagree with them, empathize, et cetera.

And this is a really good way to do that. It's a two-way conversation in which I do the speaking and you do the thinking. And so my goal is just to clarify my thinking for you so that you can use that as a foil for your own thinking. And then the last comment I want to make is that the biggest lesson I have learned in all of this has been that my own internationalization journey and what I've recommended to a lot of people is not something that is either/or.

It's not the way it was in the old days. Just with my children, recently as part of our travels in England, we were talking about Ireland, England, the Irish potato famine, et cetera. And I was just thinking about that afresh. Like here you are in a country where your food has been gone, everything's been taxed away from you, and you're starving, literally starving.

And so many Irishmen went to America for that, huge, huge waves of emigration. To emigrate in those days meant leaving and cleaving, leaving and separating, and you were done. You may find an Irish group or community in the United States for you to join in, but you weren't going back.

There was no pop on an airplane and go back. There was no people with money who could just go back and forth and visit. But my experience of internationalization had been very different. I can buy airline tickets, we can go back in 12 to 24 hours from any corner of the world.

I can be back in anywhere, anywhere. And so we have a very different lifestyle than anyone did back then. From a paperwork perspective, that means that things are in some ways harder than they once were, but in some ways easier than they once were. And so virtually all of internationalization can be done in stages.

And as I share with you, or as I already shared with you in the beginning, my own internationalization journey was, hey, let's go abroad and have a baby. And then after a few months abroad, baby was doing well, we thought, hey, things are good, let's stick it out for a bit.

I stuck it out for a bit, decided to leave, went traveling. That didn't work. Decided to go back to the United States for a variety of reasons. Decided to change again, left again. And so you can do that if you need to, and you don't have to make these long-term decisions.

So be wary of building this stuff up too big in your mind, thinking that any of this is unchangeable. It's not. And you'll learn more about it by doing it yourself, step by step. And then the same thing with all the specific steps, the legalities of getting a residence somewhere and becoming all the stuff, getting a residence, getting a citizenship, et cetera.

It's just step by step. And very rarely does it ever require you to make these huge decisions. It's just little decisions moving along the way, and every stage gives you infinitely higher levels of freedom. Step one is get a passport. If you don't have a passport from your home country, get a passport.

Do it today. Get a passport for all your children. That in and of itself gives you infinite levels of freedom as compared to people who don't have a passport. And so start the process today. In closing, I want to remind you that if you're interested in this stuff, I have a course called InternationalEscapePlan.com where I teach step by step internationalization using exactly this philosophy, phase one, phase two, phase three, phase four, and how you can start with a passport and a credit card.

That's it, phase one. So go to InternationalEscapePlan.com, sign up for that course. Huge feedback on that of how much people have learned from it. You've heard some of them on Q&A calls, et cetera. Number two is I want to encourage you, come to my event in Panama in January, January 2024.

Sign up at expatmoney.com/radical. It's going to be a great event. Even if you just come because you want to hang out with me for a week, come and do that. I'll be fully available for an entire week. It's not a family event. My children won't be there. I'll just be there hanging out with you, and we'll talk about all this stuff.

And we're using Panama as a starting point because Panama is a great solution for many things. But our conversation and our discussion and our planning is not limited to Panama. It's not just about Panama. That's just a way of having an excuse to profile a particular destination that has certain things to offer and then giving us an organizing benefit to the tour.

So sign up. Bring your wife. Bring your husband. If you're going to be at a couple's event, come hang out in Panama. All the details are at expatmoney.com/radical. It's going to be a great event. I'm working on my presentations for the event now. Mikkel Thorup is going to be there presenting.

Gabriel Custodia is going to be there presenting. We're going to have extensive time for questions, answers. We're going to be touring real estate, talking about banking options, touring a gold storage vault there in Panama. It's going to be a great event. Go to expatmoney.com/radical, expatmoney.com/radical. Sign up today. Finalizing registrations this month, expatmoney.com/radical.

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