- Welcome to Radical Personal Finance. My name is Joshua Sheets and today I'm joined by Andrew Henderson of Knowbad Capitalist. Andrew, welcome. - It's good to see you here in Bogota, Colombia. - Absolutely. Andrew, I am an enormous admirer of your entrepreneurial journey. I was a financial advisor for years and I had this idea that somehow, if I could just teach people to buy stocks and fund their retirement plans, they would become wealthy.

And then over time, I learned that that wasn't actually true but in reality, the people who became wealthy were those who built either a large income or a large business. And having been a close follower of yours over many years, you've done exactly that. I'd love to hear a little bit of background on your entrepreneurial journey, especially how you've grown over the years to run, how big is Knowbad Capitalist now?

- We've got about 70 people. - Amazing. - We got into the, I mean, I guess, multi-figure company. And what I'm really excited about now is we put in place a vision, not to reduce the number of Americans and North Americans that we have as clients and as guests of the event that I know you're gonna be speaking at, Knowbad Capitalist Live, but to focus all of our efforts on growing all the other markets.

And so the big thing we've been doing in the last, probably close to 12 months, is getting people from Turkey, getting people from Brazil, getting people from Vietnam and like all over the world. I mean, clientele from all over the world, from race car drivers to tech startup guys who IPO'd, to people who sold businesses.

And it's been incredible. And it shows me what's been really exciting is you have guys in Vietnam with a hundred million dollars, self-made guys. - Amazing. - And they're much, what's very interesting for our point of view is they're much more in demand with banks and investment opportunities because they're from places that are much less regulated than let's say an American.

And so for me, the journey is I come from the United States. I left the United States long ago. I haven't been back. And fortunately we're here in Bogota where there's lots of construction and things are happening. But no, that's been the journey. And I ran a business, a couple of businesses in the United States for close to a decade before I left.

And that was instructional. But I think that 100X the experience when you're hiring across different cultures, when you're doing business across cultures, when you're working while traveling and you have different homes, this is like learning how to run a business on steroids. - When you began in business, you were an entrepreneur from a very early age.

Went to college, dropped out to run a business. What was your primary motivation in pursuing the entrepreneurial path? - I never liked the backstory idea. A lot of people have the backstory. It seems very well-tuned. I think that some of the great entrepreneurs, it's a calling, it's almost a sickness, really.

And I think that you're gonna see that eventually come out with this kind of new generation. I don't know about you, but when I was growing up, it's like, you wanna be an entrepreneur? Girls looked at you weird, and guys kind of made fun of you. That's kind of like, what?

Like, you're gonna be like Bill Gates or something? That guy's weird. Now it's cool. And I think that too many people are doing it because they have this idea that it is what it's not. It's tough. And I was just watching Howard Schultz over the weekend on an interview, a founder of Starbucks.

I was watching the guy who basically formed all the hotels that became Marriott. They even, as multibillionaires, have some very serious issues. If you're gonna get past that, you've gotta be nuts to a certain extent. And I don't know that I ever thought about it. I don't look at a lot of things as risky as most people do, but I never even considered the risk profile of starting a business at 19 years old.

I just didn't. I just said, I have to do. Do, do, do. My father says, American football. Analogy is to block and tackle. And that's what I did. - You began in the radio business, right? How, was that something that you had contact with, or how did that idea come to you?

- My father was in business, but his side hustle was on the radio. So we had a show when I was between eight and 13. He was like the guy after Rush Limbaugh, where we grew up. And he had the money show. Back in the day when radio stations were more of a public service, you'd have one company that went on eight radio stations, two in Cleveland, two in Milwaukee, two somewhere else, two somewhere else.

And he got 500 clients for his financial services business from a radio show. They paid him to do the radio show. Well, over time, radio consolidation came into play. You had more licenses issued. There's something like 13,000 radio stations in the US, the peak. And so you had a lot of radio stations that were failing, like little AM stations that didn't have the great power.

They didn't have this historical thing. And they went into kind of the paid programming model. And so I found an opportunity. I kind of did some work at night for some guys who were doing that locally, kind of learned their systems. They had a pretty good marketing system. And they said, how do I expand this on a more national basis to work with radio stations that are in the dumps?

So we'd go into somewhere in California, they're making $10,000 a month. They can barely pay the rent. They go up to $60,000 a month. We kind of change things around. And so we did that all over the country. That's where I kind of got the, I still love radio.

I'm still, I'm probably the foremost. I probably think more than any other living human being about American radio legal IDs and imaging. I still think about it to this day. And it's taught me a lot about marketing and branding and all that, and just kind of what things look like.

But that's how I get into it. And ultimately it's a dying business, but it was something that ultimately, I mean, you went on to work with some very big names in the direct marketing space, televangelists, people selling health products. I mean, it was nice to help out struggling stations.

I enjoyed being in the business, even though it's kind of like these stations are not putting out the best programming. But ultimately I just said to myself, I don't want to be in the US. And I just, I mean, radio is a sinking ship now. It's just, I mean, it's terrible.

I had a friend who just bought a radio station for $50,000 in Chicago. - You were still running that business when you started expatriating or your process of expatriating? - I pretty much got out of it in like 2012. So I've been traveling a lot. And so my initial thought when I started, block and tackle, 2006, I had a Vonage phone.

Remember Vonage, this voiceover IP phone? And I said, I could just take this phone with me and plug it in anywhere in the world. Why am I here? And I think a year or two later I started traveling and it just became a lot, a lot, a lot more to where I was often traveling.

I remember one time I went to Beijing for three weeks and I had a partner on a project. And I said, I'm gonna go and like see if he notices that I'm not even there 'cause I'll just work at night and all that. And so I had been traveling a lot.

I kind of saw like, you know, this radio business is gonna get tougher. I had got a side hustle business. I had a couple of side hustles. The biggest, most successful was a swimming pool business that was kind of like, I need this service. I'll just, all right, sell me a business.

I'll build it up and I'll sell it. And so everything was kind of like, I wanted to get in everything and I wanted to move full time. I think I had the same problems that a lot of entrepreneurs have where they have a business they don't have to be there for, but they kind of feel compelled.

Even now, what I've had to avoid with Nomad Capitalist is I'll feel compelled to sit in front of the laptop for 14 hours a day, like waiting for the next email. You just feel that kind of sense of anxiety, like something could need my attention. And I think that was probably, other than the aforementioned reasons, why I just kind of wanted to get out of those and kind of start fresh.

I saw the potential of having a business that did not rely on the United States. And so in 2013, I kind of left for good. And that's kind of when I was writing Nomad Capitalist. So I would write articles about my experiences and the rest is history. - Didn't you begin doing articles before that though?

- End of 2012. So I think I left shortly after I started writing the article. - Nothing in about 2009 or so? - No. - Okay. I thought that I had first come across your brand then, but I first came across your brand when it was very early. But at that time, it wasn't a business.

It was a personal passion project, right? - Yeah, and it was, honestly, a reflection of living in the US. And I think this is probably would be even worse now. There was more anger. There was more kind of, to the entrepreneurial point, I worked in radio. I had all these talk radio stations that I dealt with.

They would invite me on the listener cruise or come and meet Bill O'Reilly and Laura Ingraham kind of thing. They're giving a speech where the station, whatever. And you'd see a lot of these people and you'd see like 65 year old people who maybe they accumulated some money. Maybe they were like your clients.

They made some good, they built up their wealth in the stock market kind of thing. But there wasn't a shred of happiness in their lives. If they had more construction in their lives, they probably would have been a lot happier. But I said to myself, some of these talk radio listeners, these kind of libertarians, I might agree with the libertarians, but honestly, the worst thing that could ever happen to them is that they become happy.

And I just said to myself, that was kind of the frame that I was in to some extent, maybe a little bit more self-aware of it. But it was like, yeah, the US government does a lot of bad stuff and they're nasty. Like, why do you want to support them?

And why do you want to live there? And why do you want to travel on their passport? And I think that it was, I mean, certainly I've had some cultural clashes in some places that I've gone. I'm still a pretty intense person. I'd say I'm a relatively demanding person by everyone's standards.

But I think there's a lot more peace being able to say that for me, it was a place I didn't feel comfortable. And now I'm not there anymore. And I think there's a lot of people who are sitting in the US or maybe other Western countries. There's young men that feel like just being a man is toxic.

And listen, there's some stuff that men have done that is toxic, but just being a man's not toxic. And I would imagine it's a hell of a lot worse now to be sitting in a Western country and feeling like I don't feel at peace here. And to me, the answer was, and you can see it over the course of how I've evolved over time, maybe I've just gotten older too, but there's been a lot more nuance to that where you realize if you want to be successful, you're not gonna do it by sitting around and complaining about the government.

And if you want to be happy, you're not gonna do it by sitting around and complaining about the government or complaining about the soup you're sitting in. Now more than ever, you can change the soup that you're sitting in. - Yeah, I noticed that I was an early consumer of your podcast.

And back in about 2016, 2017, I listened to your back catalog on both of the audio podcasts that you used to have. So I heard the transition from the frustrated, angry version of Andrew Henderson to the peaceful, more relaxed Andrew Henderson. In my own expatriation journey, I had a similar experience that when I was in the United States, I felt enormous frustration, enormous anger.

As I started leaving the country systematically, I felt more relaxed. When I first got my first, second passport, I felt enormous peace when I realized I could, I haven't done it, but I could separate myself from this country and it brought me an enormous amount of peace. - And I try and tell people that.

We've made 2,600 videos. Even people, again, Nomad Capitalist Live is coming up. Even if you come to that, even if you spend four days with us, this year in Kuala Lumpur again, I don't know that you'll entirely get it until you've done something, which is why I tell people, if you wanna experience this, one thing you can do is just get a bank account in a country like Georgia with $1 and then you're like six months later, oh yeah, I have that dollar somewhere.

Oh, it's still there. Like, oh, it's not only my country where the money's safe. Like doing something gives you that sense of fulfillment. But yeah, no, I think there's been tremendous personal growth because if you go to a therapy setting, what is anger? It's the response to a feeling of powerlessness.

I think a lot of people feel powerless these days for different reasons. Now, for people like us who just wanna be left alone and we think that we've worked hard and built something and created value, we don't wanna give half our money away to a certain government. There's other people who feel powerless that some of the opportunities, I mean, you can't live in the United States.

Everyone talks about it. It's not the '80s. You have one job. Guy only graduated high school. Spouse stays at home. Three kids, nice house. Three cars. It's not really doable anymore. Some of those people feel powerlessness. I don't think the answer is take a bunch of money from people who are already paying half their income, but they feel powerlessness.

That's the reaction. I think that guys like us have felt that in some regard. So how do you do that? Number one, you have to be attuned to the power that you have and understand what that is. But number two, you find a way to take back the power.

And I don't care if it's a dating situation. I don't care if that's a business situation, a tax situation, any kind of situation. You find a way to take that back. And I think that geographical solutions are some of the most easily implemented because you're not waiting for anybody else to change.

You're just going where you're treated best, as I would say. - I'd like to talk about your investment journey because you not only have experience in the United States, your father was a financial advisor. You also have experience looking for investments around the world. You've invested in real estate in at least half a dozen countries.

You've invested in many markets. And then you also have an enormous amount of business experience and business success, which has been, as far as I can tell, what you've shared publicly, your largest source of revenue. And you've developed a unique investment model based upon that. So when you think about investing, how do you guide people through that process?

Given that you have four distinct opportunities, put money in my IRA, buy a piece of real estate in another country, build a business, build, even recently you spoke about a dividend stock portfolio. What is your model for the progression through that wealth building plan? - I think the first thing I did was I realized that here's a problem that entrepreneurs have, maybe other people have too, but entrepreneurs have, I'm good at this thing, so I'm good at everything.

When we first started the services at Nomad Capitalist, 'cause people started asking me for help, I put a little package together. You can buy a plan, we'll make it. And that plan's evolved. I think it's the best service of its kind now. But back in the early days, we got a lot of kind of the hotshot young guys who could barely afford it, but they were very confident.

Like, I don't really need your help. I'll figure out this company. And then they call you back a year later, like, oh, I got the company open, but now I can't process credit cards. And I've basically done nothing. And it's cost me half a million dollars in taxes. And I probably should've just hired you.

In the same vein, I said to myself, I think I see macro trends because I'm divorced from the dogma of any country. So, you know, Bank of Georgia stock, it's up like 109% in the last year. I got in somewhere in the middle of that because I said, you know, this is a good dividend paying stock, but it's a great growth stock as well.

You know, like all the metrics. This is a company that's gonna do well. I know it. Kind of a Peter Lynch philosophy. I know it. I think it's the best bank in Georgia today. It'll do well. And, you know, I'm not a stock picker. We don't help people pick stocks.

But anyway, so the point is I'm an entrepreneur first. I'm an investor because I have investments, not because I'm a great investor. I have friends who are the exact opposite. They're not great entrepreneurs. Maybe they started a business, they hire one or two people, but they're great traders. I think you have to pick one or the other.

So for me, I looked at it as my growth stock is my business. That's the ultimate growth stock. I mean, we can bring in certain people and they'll figure out, unfortunately in our business, maybe not to huge scale, we can get a 20-fold return on $10,000 a month and spend on something.

And then you can go over there and do something a little bit different. You can get 15 X on 20 grand. Like, that's better than buying Nvidia 'cause you're in control. Right. And that scales a lot better. So that was the growth stock. For me, you know, for any stocks, I look for yield.

I look for tax-friendly yield. I'm not a US citizen. So if I go to Hong Kong or Singapore and there's no dividend tax and there's no capital gains tax, I don't have dividend tax or capital gains tax. So, you know, 6% on DBS Bank looks better than, you know, 5% on a US REIT where I'm paying 30% because of my structure.

And so I think that, you know, I think you're gonna see, I believe you're gonna see a lot more growth in other parts of the world. I believe in owning personal real estate. So I have a number of properties around the world. To me, it's like a nice hedge.

It's not zeros and ones on a computer. It's property in the ground. It's more secure. You know, I'm a believer to some extent in gold, have some Bitcoin. I mean, I think it's kind of a whole diversification play because, you know, Warren Buffett would say, "Don't diversify." I was never interested.

Maybe you can help me explain. Berkshire Hathaway is a very diversified collection of companies. I mean, just say, "Oh, I buy Berkshire. "I have one stock. "I don't diversify." I think you have to diversify because who knows what could happen in any one country. The US might ban TikTok.

If your entire life is based around I make money off of TikTok, guess you're screwed. Maybe you should have diversified, all right? And so my investment philosophy is I don't trust any one country. I trust the government of St. Lucia more than I trust the government of the United States.

But I want to have property that I can use and I can enjoy that funds me being comfortable and working in my business and doing well. I want to have, you know, dividend stocks that allow me to eat so I don't have to dip into my business, which is the ultimate growth stock.

And then I'll have some stocks and other growth assets that are well diversified around the world. 'Cause I think that the story of the 21st century is going to be away from the West, I do. - When you think about the business culture that you grew up in, I have five children and my eldest is 10.

The thing that I'm most obsessed with at the moment is trying to understand how do I impart a positive culture? And one component of that is a business culture. Not the only component, but it's an important component. In traveling the world, do you think that it's easier for people who grow up in the affluence of the United States to absorb the business culture and then be more successful?

Or do you think that those, do you think otherwise? Do you think somehow those experiences are now universal and a child growing up in another context can be just as successful? - Well, personally, what I've always said is if I were to have children, I think if you can afford it, the worst thing you can do is to send your kids to the public school system or even a private school system.

I went to private school for three years. They were the worst three years of my schooling. I was treated the worst in those cases because they're smaller private schools. You're more of an outlier if you come in later. I've always said, you have tutors. And I saw an article, I forget, maybe the Wall Street Journal recently, where that's a trend.

There's people, 100,000 bucks a year and they follow you around the world. And it's like, yeah, I've been saying that. And I met a pretty famous entertainer last year. He's like, "Yeah, that's what I do." So if you do that, you're giving your children, in my opinion, speaking as someone who doesn't have children, the best experience because when you send them off to school and they make friends, who knows what they could be?

I have three adopted sisters. And there was a time in high school when two of the younger ones, the twins, they went to a new school and they got in with a crowd that could have had some damage to them. How do you control that to some extent? You can give them all the values and you can give them all the morals and you can give them all the things to look for, but you don't control that.

I think, in a sense, you wanna, I would say you want social interaction with kids that you understand how those kids are, but that there's more about shared values than about shared geography. I mean, if I grew up in Avon Lake, Ohio, like that's the thing that ties us together?

We're all from Avon Lake, Ohio. We must all be the same. It's like, maybe in some ways we're more similar than someone in Bangladesh or something, but like, do we really all have that much in common? I think, and I was asked recently, are you grateful for the United States?

And I said, no, I'm grateful for certain people who are from there who helped me. I also think that if you're a great entrepreneur, and again, just listening, I've listened to tons of interviews at the time. It's very cathartic. I haven't heard a single great entrepreneur who didn't have some kind of personal trauma in their lives.

They may have grown up wealthy, but they were bullied, or maybe they grew up poor and people made fun of them, or some rich guy said, "You can't date my daughter," and something that drove them. I think the affluence part, I don't know why people tie that to the geography.

I've said recently, if I had the choice to give my child one citizenship, US or Mexican, I'd choose Mexican, okay? 18 years from now, they'll be an adult. Think Mexico's gonna be in a better place. Are they gonna be wealthier on an individual basis? Maybe not yet, but it's moving in the right direction.

Everything's moving in a direction. The US is moving in the wrong direction. Mexico, for all of its problems, I think is somewhat positive, but I think I'll probably always be an affluent person. To your point, I'm gonna teach them the lessons that I learned, which are geography agnostic. It doesn't matter if I teach them in Avon Lake, Ohio, or if I teach them in Mexico, or if I teach them in Ireland, or here in Columbia, or anywhere else.

Those are my lessons. That's part of me. But anyway, my child is gonna have those attributes. They're gonna get that training. They're gonna be able to go to schools, or whatever it is that they need. And I think people push back on that as, like, "Oh, that's stupid. "The US is so much wealthier." But I'm wealthier than the average American.

So therefore, that's not gonna change. That's why I have the dividend stocks and everything else. I'm not putting it all on red. I wanna make sure to some extent the business gets to grow as much as it can, but there's a thing like, I'm not going back to working at a supermarket.

Nothing wrong with that, by the way, but I'd like to stay at some certain level so that I can give any children that. And by the way, I'd rather have my children, I think I'd like to have my children out in the street selling something and learning real lessons, like the kind of forced entrepreneurship you have in some of the cultures, like here in Columbia, or in Mexico, or anywhere else, than kind of this coddled upbringing where they're playing video games.

From everything I hear, the US is very toxic these days. And I just think if you bring things to your family, they're always gonna have that. And people are so wrapped up in being American brings them something, I guess because they don't have anything else to be proud of.

If you have something else to be proud of, what does it matter? Really, what does it matter? I think you want to have a little bit of that friction where you're not just with everybody else who you think is kind of like you, but really they're not. I mean, how many people from where I'm from did anything like what I did?

Nothing wrong with that, but how were we at all alike to grow up together? - Right. I'd like, your business, Nomad Capitalist, is positioned as a high-end bespoke service that serves six and seven, or seven and eight figure entrepreneurs, high end of the market. As you mentioned, there's lots of people that came to you years ago who were just getting started and wanted simple advice.

And there's many people who try to help people go be digital nomads and make a few thousand dollars. I would imagine that learning to serve the wealthy and the very wealthy has required you to learn some new skills. You grow up in, not poor, but in a humble way as a scrappy entrepreneur, and yet you've developed this bespoke high-end business.

How have you learned to deal with the psychology of that growth process? And how have you learned to serve those clients in the way that they most appreciate? - I think my family was somewhat successful. We were not living in mansions, or we didn't have connections. Maybe my dad, from being in the radio, knew the congressman or something.

But we lived in a very nice neighborhood, but we lived in the cheapest house, 'cause that's what my parents wanted. And they were very clear. Like, my dad's like, "I'm not giving you my business. "We're not giving you, like, you have to start from zero." So I got the lessons, and I got the security of like, okay, you live in a nice neighborhood, and I get that.

And I did learn a lot. I worked in restaurants as a kid, and I look back, and I say, "Yeah, you know," 'cause, you know, maybe I knew something from that upbringing about how to, like, take care of people. I think what Nomad Capitalist has been built for, I mean, I don't care how wealthy I am, I would never call KPMG.

And we've worked with billionaires. I sat in the living room with a guy. He said, "Yeah, I hired KPMG." And, okay, that's interesting. He's like, "The first thing they asked me was, "'Have you heard of Switzerland?'" He's like, "I'm a billionaire. "Of course I've heard of Switzerland." He's like, "I think you bring something "that the other firms don't.

"It's okay, like, they have their thing. "You can kind of tell, like, this person wrote that, "and this person, they kind of jammed it all together. "It's okay." He calls KPMG. I just, I don't, I'm not a guy who ever could, 'cause I still have that scrappy entrepreneur. I think there's a lot of people like me, even in what they call the ultra-high-net-worth segment, the $30 million and up.

There's about 600,000 known people who have $30 million liquid in the world. And I don't think that they're all, I mean, it's not what you'd expect. And I'll tell you, when you go to Eastern Europe in particular, I've had some friction on this, and it's been good friction, 'cause you learn something.

I got in an argument with a guy at the burrito place once. I like to get a burrito. I like, I'm a frugal guy. I go to the burrito place. The guy's nasty. I kind of snap back at him. He's like, "Well, who are you? "You're broke. "You're eating a burrito." It's like, have you seen Michael Bloomberg eating a hot dog at 57th and Fifth Avenue?

Like, that's their mentality. And I think it's the mentality of a lot of people right now is, if you go on Instagram, oh, do you fly in private jets? Well, by the way, okay, I did a couple times. Do I like talk about it? You know, I just didn't tell anybody about it.

Like, can you take one picture? I felt embarrassed. Like, okay. But like, I don't make it my entire ethos. And so, I imagine there's plenty of people out there like, oh, how successful can he be? Like, here's what people do. They eat caviar and everything. No. There's a lot of people who have 30, 50, $100 million that's just like, I just want good service.

I want to know I'm taken care of. You know who the best clients are? Are the ones who they went somewhere else and maybe they did the process or maybe they aborted the process. And they're like, you know what? These guys didn't know anything. I went to a private bank not so long ago.

They want a million dollars minimum. They talk about, we do your tax and global tax and all this. And I said, what do you know about U.S. Citus Assets? You know, can you help me with that? Because, you know, I'm a non-U.S. person. I don't want to have U.S.

Citus Assets as an estate tax implication, other things. And he gave me the most fluffy non-answer I've ever heard in my life. You come to know my capitalist. We've got a network of people all around the world. We actually tell you what to do. And our guys tell you what to do.

But, you know, if we're not maybe giving you the tax advice in the memo, we have the professionals for that, but we're bringing it all together. So a lot of people say they provide the service, but they don't. And so I think that to a certain extent, if you are new money, maybe not quick money, you know, if you just went from a dollar to a hundred million dollars yesterday, you're probably going to not have understood the journey.

But if you've understood the journey as you have or I had, and you got to a certain level of success, I think what you want most, yeah, you want to be taken care of, but you don't want to be screwed around. And I can't tell you how many private banks and lawyers.

And I got a friend, I was talking to a guy, we call him the coach. He says, you call these guys, they can't even answer a question about their own country. He's like, I'm moving to Indonesia. I call the Indonesian immigration lawyer. He's like, oh, you know, I need to get back to you on that.

It's like, you don't know, like just, you know what I mean? I think people like the approach of multi-jurisdiction. They like being taken care of. I love like unreasonable hospitality. I love doing all that kind of stuff. That's been, I think we've done a good job because I think that my kind of natural, I guess what they would consider in some of these countries, low self-esteem, where like, you're not constantly pumping your chest, you admit your mistakes.

Like in a lot of countries like that, they see you as a weak person for admitting mistakes. No joke. Like a woman in some of these like countries would be like, he's not a strong man. Like this, he's a weak man. Like the, not the sophisticated ones, but just, you know, kind of your everyday person.

Because they just know like people who are always, I'm right, I'm the best. And so I think what they've taken from that, that was good was, hey, let's be really open to helping people because they've, in their mind, okay, like we don't have as many boundaries. We don't have as much self-esteem.

We're now going back and kind of fixing that. Like, yeah, let's have some boundaries. And occasionally, you know, it's created a couple issues. But I think like it worked well from that. It kind of worked a different way than I would have expected that people really took care of the clients.

But now it's like, okay, let's have the boundaries. Let's think very high of ourselves. A lot of people love it. Just saw a guy next door coming to this interview. Oh, I love your stuff. But let's do the unreasonable hospitality and let's just help people do whatever they have to be done.

And I think, you know, I think when you do that, you succeed. - It seems obvious to me that you could retire today and live your lifestyle for a long time, whether or not you sold Nomad Capitalist and if you sold the company, then certainly you could retire at a fairly young age.

You have an enormous team, enormous pressure, enormous stress. Why do you do it? What drives you now? - I go back to the, what's the other option? I think, you know, if you're wired a certain way, what do you do? I just heard, saw Dave Ramsey clip the other day.

Someone's calling, should I sell my business for $12 million? He says, I don't know a single person over all the decades who sold their business, who kind of didn't go back and regret it. And they talked about the good old days. I know people who have sold businesses and I think that they're happy about it.

But I think there's probably a lot of people like what Dave is talking about. I would imagine, the point when I said, maybe I would do that, was a time of great frustration. And there's an Arabic phrase that I'm told, maybe someone will correct me in the comment section.

But it's like, if someone says, you know, I wanna die, I wanna kill myself. You don't wanna kill yourself. 'Cause if you threw yourself in the ocean, the middle of the ocean, you try and hang on, like you would instinctively try and grab onto something or figure out a way to save yourself.

You're trying to kill a part of you inside that you don't want anymore. And I think that probably, I would guess that some people who sell their businesses, like there's just something that frustrates them. It's, well, why don't you just sell that? And you know, that's something that I went through.

It's like, okay, like how do you keep leveling it up? We can talk about, you know, maybe there's a sense of complacency. I don't know, overseas, I don't know. But first of all, I enjoy what I do. If I weren't doing this, I'd be doing the same thing, trying to figure out like, how does that Egyptian deal work?

But now I wouldn't have the people to help me. And like, no one would care. Like, who are you? Like, Henderson, I'd never heard of, like, ah. You know, so why not, you know, have the resources to do all this stuff? 'Cause I am the living embodiment. Like, and that's why I keep mentioning it, you know, our live event.

There's people not in this exact space, but they kind of do like the doom and gloom, get out, maybe a little bit of it's like the second passport. They're telling Americans how to do that with an event in Miami. How authentic is that? Listen, if you want to learn what I'm doing, I want to actually put you in the water for a little bit.

Our event's in Kuala Lumpur. Come and see it. You'll be impressed. You're going to love the quality of healthcare. You're going to say, wow, this is much better than I've expected. I'm not going to Miami. First of all, I got people in all countries all around the world who cost a lot less and have a lot better attitudes.

They're not going to get a visa to go to Miami 'cause the U.S. government's, you know, is prejudiced against them. But why would I go there and do that, right? I'm the living embodiment of this. And so it's almost like the business kind of grew out of my own personal interest.

And other people said, hey, can you help me with that? Oh, you're doing that? Oh yeah. And I'm like the banker who just goes home at five o'clock or probably earlier. I actually want to know how U.S. CITUS tax works. So that really, that keeps me up at night.

Like I'm worried about it personally. I didn't want to give up U.S. citizenship and then let them take 45% of my U.S. stocks when I croak. So I think it's just a calling. And honestly, I think that that's why just from a relationship standpoint, you have to have someone and maybe dating all over the world opens this up for you who understands who you are.

'Cause I bet a lot of spouses are like, yeah, you have enough. You got 50 million. What else do you need? I'm 39 years old, my grandmother's 95 this year. If I live that long, that's a lot more to live. To do what? I think there's a passion about it.

That's what it has. And I think, and I often ask myself like, okay, he's not the business owner. What is Bob Iger come back to Disney? He should do a Seinfeld, go out in the high note. He left that place like in pretty good shape. And then maybe some of his policies you can argue like kind of came through like the wokes.

I don't know. But like, you could have just pinned that. What was the other guy's name? Lonnie Donegan. Who came in? Chapic, right? Long, so soon gone, so long forgotten. Why did he come back? I would guess the guys are obsessive about it. Why does Howard Schultz come back?

Why do these guys come back? They can't live without it. And I just, I don't know how else you can describe it but that. - A few rapid fire questions. In my experience, going international was not something that I could do all at once. It was something that every stage I had to try and then discover how that felt.

Remember the first offshore bank account I went and opened, I felt like a total weirdo going and doing it. And then a few weeks later, I'm like, but that was totally normal. It wasn't a big deal. So what are the first three steps that somebody should take that are simple and easy to start getting exposure to an international context?

- If the goal is you're in plan B, you're not moving yet, I would challenge why you're only at plan B. I don't care if you have kids, I don't care. You can move as you've proven, which is why I'm excited to hear your speech. I think having the bank account, having some kind of a residence permit, having a place to go.

Robert Kiyosaki said it, our very first Nomad Capitalist Live, where can you be in three days? When it hits the fan, when the first starts flying, residence permits there. The next step really depends. But I think a passport's also good. If you have ancestry, check that out. Those are things that you can do pretty quickly.

If you have gold, move some gold overseas. It doesn't matter, just any of the things that I would talk about, do it on a small level. Buy a property overseas. If you wanna live somewhere that's tax-friendly perhaps, and you wanna go there in the summer, maybe look at buying a property.

Just get some connections to start to break the dogma that hey, things only work here. And I would say maybe the very first thing to do is to be surrounded by people who are of that mind. My father now spends six months in Mexico, and he wants to get the other six months in the U.S.

down to a lot less. Why? He saw me doing it. That inspired him. He wouldn't have gone to Mexico 15 years ago. But he saw it. Okay, people are doing it. They're not dying. They're enjoying their lives. Their wealth isn't all gone. Hey, maybe I should do some of that.

So I think maybe that's the first step, then some kind of bank account, then some kind of immigration permission. - For an English-speaking audience, especially someone who hasn't traveled the world, what are three countries that from your experience with your clients, you would suggest that somebody go for a visit?

Places that seem to have wide appeal to an English-speaking audience. - It really is so different. I mean, Mexico has gotten widespread appeal. I was saying eight years ago. Move to Mexico, not Canada if your guy doesn't get elected. There's a certain kind of person who wants to go there.

Time zones, by the way, for entrepreneurs are a big thing. So I talk about Malaysia would be my second choice. It is a terrible time zone if you're working with North America. I think Malaysia is one that really resonates with people if you're open-minded. I mean, it's not the name brand.

It's not Thailand, but I would argue it's better from a tax, lifestyle, English-language perspective. There's places in Mexico where English is spoken. Spanish is easy enough to learn. So those are two that jump out to me. I mean, Georgia, I've talked about for so many years. I think that it's not near as affordable as it once was, but there's a lot of potential there.

So Georgia's one. Here in Colombia is interesting. I don't know if it's a full-time place to live. I mean, there's something for everybody. I'll even tell you. I know there's people who watch Tucker Carlson and that's where they get all their news. And I'm sure Tucker Carlson and I agree on plenty of things, but I think Ireland is an interesting place because it's pretty close.

I would argue there's places in the United States that are culturally more close to Ireland than to wherever you're moving to save taxes and escape some crazy Democrat governor. And so that's a tax-friendly place where they speak English and the government's more efficient. It does have some of the Western problems, but not nearly as many.

It's a pretty neutral country and they're pretty efficient and the government smiles at you. So, I mean, those are some that I think are on the radar, but heck, I mean, there's people who go to Mauritius and they like it. I mean, it's 252 countries and territories. - For somebody who wants to move some money to another jurisdiction, what are three of the most useful banking jurisdictions that you find are really helpful for your clients right now?

- Singapore's, I think, the kind of high-level transaction, even in our company, we were like, okay, let's have a treasury management account in Switzerland. They really put you through the ringer. I say to myself, like, did I become successful to prove myself to Claude? It's not even Claude, by the way.

Like, they don't even have any Swiss guys working there. You know, they're, you know, listen, give me credit. Like, I'm pretty transparent. Like, I hire people all over the world and we pay some of them pretty well, but I mean, like, you know, I'm not sitting here like, no, we're fancy, we're Swiss, we're in the Rococo, building from the Rococo period, you didn't pay us very high fees.

I'm like, listen, I hire, if someone from Georgia, it's 24, they did the best job, I'm hiring that person. That's what they do, but they pretend they don't do it. So, for all those reasons, I'm not a big fan. They don't, you don't even know how much money you need to open a Swiss account.

Like, you just go in and they kind of like look around, like, you're a 5 million kind of guy to me. It's like, okay. No, I think Singapore is vastly superior to Switzerland or really most of the European. I went to Monaco and I was like, if I wanted to get residency, you get a bank account first.

And they're like, I had a weird tax residence. They're like, we kind of don't like that. And I said to myself, like, why are there so many hoops to jump through here? Like, well, that's just how it is. I said, well, that might've worked in 1962, but not when a growing number of those 252 places in the world are trying to bring in business.

So, I think Singapore is the high level one. The problem is Americans can't really invest there. You can just put your cash there. There's a couple of Swiss banks that target Americans that are more laid back. You know, the Caymans, I guess, is okay, but you have to have a connection there.

It depends how much money you want to put. I mean, Portugal, I guess, in the EU for five-figure sums works, Georgia for any kind of sum works. They're shrinking by the year. They really are. I'm a fan of having residences and citizenships and properties that facilitate that. So, you know, you can get a bank account in the UAE, by the way, probably the most dreadful banking service I've gotten on planet Earth or planet Zutron.

You can't, it's very hard to function. Honestly, try to run a company there without being there. Forget it, can't do it. So, anyway, but if you get a residence permit there, it makes the bank account opening process easier. I'm not saying the banks aren't strong. Put your money there, forget about it.

Break glass in case- - Not even you can use it. - Break glass in case, you got to fly there, you got to talk to some guy for four hours and shout at him and then, "All right, fine, we'll give you your money." But if you get other residence permits in Singapore, I think banks in Malaysia are pretty strong.

You know, if you have a residence permit, you can bank there. So, I mean, I think the number one is Singapore. If you're just starting out with like little, you know, small amounts, George is a good one. There's some, there's plenty in between, but I think that where you have a connection can really drive where you want to bank because a lot of places that are stable don't allow that.

Singapore, it's big three banks, 12, 13, and 14 safest banks in the world yet again. Probably the most accessible on that list. - You didn't mention the Channel Islands, the UK. Do they still have value, do you think? - It's tough, that's tough. It's, they're going to be, if you go to Singapore and say, "Hey, listen, I just gave up my U.S.

citizenship. I'm a citizen of, you know, whatever. I'm St. Kitts and Nevis, for example. And, you know, I have a tax residence in, you know, wherever. Georgia or Antigua, right? Get into places that are more flexible. They don't really judge you on that. Like, that's what I love about Singapore.

I went in, but I've got an African passport. I got kind of like on a lark. Someone kind of sponsored me. And Singapore, it's a visa-free country. I go in, and it's just, it's like so Singaporean, so German, the guy's like, "I don't see, you know what? 30 days, okay, 30 days." It's not like, "What is this country?

Like, I don't understand." You know, they're not judgmental. And so I think that in the Channel Islands, I mean, we looked at kind of putting part of the corporate structure in the Isle of Man. I think the Isle of Man offers a lot of benefits. But again, the answer to the question of why it's so much more bureaucratic, that's just how it is.

Get that's just how it is out of your mindset. Like, why? It doesn't have to be. It isn't anymore. That's how it is there. And if you live in the Isle of Man your entire life or Jersey your entire life, you're like, "Oh, okay, great." For me personally, by the way, there were one or two companies in one of the industries that we work in where Jersey kind of went to them and was like, "Yeah, we don't want any problems with the EU with selling passport.

Why don't you move out? Get out!" So it's like, for me, for that reason, I wouldn't be as appealing. So, I mean, I think you want places where they're like, "We don't care who you are or where you're from, as long as you love us, come on in." Whereas I think there's a lot of kind of judgment and a lot of other places.

- Two more questions. I saw your interview with Jim Rogers where you spoke quite a lot about Uzbekistan. - He likes that. - For, in your opinion, for a young aggressive man who wants to go to a frontier market where there's room, et cetera, what are two or three places that you think have good bones and good growth opportunities?

- I mean, if you look at, you're the driver of your success. I imagine, listen, you can go to the U.S. People are still starting billion dollar businesses in the U.S. I think the kind of person who looks at an emerging market, if you're young, is maybe I'm not gonna build the next, you know, meta or open AI or whatever, but I just wanna build a nice business, make some money, and maybe grow it out.

You're gonna have an easier time building businesses that maybe don't exist yet. Africa, we've had people who go there. I mean, it's like playing on cheat mode in one of those countries. In simple businesses, I sell cement. You know, I make 100% returns every month or something. Like, you know, I like Southeast Asia.

I think there's a good consumer culture there. I think you can build teams more easily there. So Cambodia's been a place I've liked. I've got a friend who's working there and building a property fund. I think we look at Bangladesh and, well, Bangladesh and maybe Nepal as kind of the two of the next ones.

Uzbekistan is opening up, which makes it interesting. I mean, look at Georgia. You could have done real estate. You could have done a lot of things in Georgia five, 10, 20 years ago and had a proportion of return. I think here in Latin America, it could be good. More bureaucracy, I think, in Latin America.

But what you have to go in understanding is the culture. You have to be ready for that. I think we all have this idea. This is where I've kind of lacked some of the support over the years is when I'll call one of my friends in Canada who did someone's business for $100 million and I'll tell him an issue I had with someone who works for me.

He'll be like, "Oh, you're probably just seeing it wrong." It's like, no, it's a cultural difference. Like, you know, that culture functions differently. And maybe some cultures aren't as nice as other cultures. Like, you have to go in kind of understanding that and be prepared for that and being able to adapt.

I mean, as we said, if you... I remember one of our countries, the people said, I would go in, I was there for three months and I would go into the office every day and say, "Good morning." They would never say, "Good morning," ever. After a while, I started to get like really kind of angry/depressed.

And I'm like, "What the hell is wrong with you people?" And someone kind of pulled me aside. They're like, "Listen, here in our country, "the CEO is a nasty a-hole. "He thinks that you're a worthless piece of crap. "He doesn't want to talk to you. "He doesn't want to know your name.

"He doesn't even want to know you exist. "That's what we're used to." And I'm like, "But that's not how I..." Yeah, we get that, but we also don't get it. And so you have to be prepared to kind of... Now, listen, that's not every country. You go to Malaysia, you go to Cambodia, this guy, the people are too nice to him.

That's the problem. It's like, "Give me some strength." Or like in some of these Asian countries, like, "We're waiting for our instructions." Like, you know, nuance, like, you know, get it. So, but you've got to understand what you're going into. I think it's gonna build incredible character. It's gonna help you understand yourself in a much better way.

It's gonna build self-awareness incredibly faster than staying around people who are very similar to you. And I'm not trying to like unsell it. I'm just saying like, don't think it's gonna be like the U.S. Now, you go back to the U.S. Every once in a while, I think, "Oh, maybe hiring in the U.S., maybe that's the answer." And then you go and everybody's fat and happy and everybody's like, "When is my siesta?" And like, you know, okay.

But I think that Southeast Asia, Central Asia, you know, Georgia's pretty easy to navigate. Latin America is very bureaucratic, but I think that like immigrants are very well accepted in Latin America. Yeah, those are all places you can do stuff. I personally like the asset-light business where you just go overseas and you can run it from anywhere and you can pivot.

And I can say, "Hey, this year I've got more Americans, "next year it's more Brazilians." But if you want to do something on the ground, there's still incredible opportunities, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Central Asia. - You've made a public statement in the past. You said, "If I had to do it all over again, "knowing what I know now, "I could do in a year what took me five years "or 10 years to figure out on my own." - Most of it.

- Obviously you built the knowledge, but what is it that you could do in a year now with the knowledge and experience you have from an international perspective that you couldn't do when you were just starting out? - Well, part of it's just the comfort level, right? Remember when I got my St.

Lucia passport, I was dating a girl at the time and I was discussing like, "It's $100,000, a little bit of fees, okay. "I'm the nomadic capitalist. "Someone's gonna kind of help me out with the fees, "but I'm paying the 100 grand." And I'm like, "Should I do it?" No, in my case, she's like, "Listen, "it's good for your brand.

"It's good for your mastery." But she's like, "You're probably not gonna look back "and regret it 'cause you're gonna be more successful." And I think that the same thing that drives you to become successful perhaps, where you maybe don't entirely believe in yourself, you're trying to prove somebody wrong, makes you think like, "Hey, "I've fought for most of my life.

"Maybe that's the last 100 grand I'll ever make. "Maybe my talents will evaporate tomorrow. "And maybe you think like, "maybe I'm not even that talented." So I think if you get over that, that's what you're getting over. I see it now, Bitcoin is doing very well. And I say to myself, if you wanna be safe, if Bitcoin goes to the roof and it becomes a big news story, I think politicians aren't gonna attack that.

They're not gonna, "Oh, let's make sure "we go after that for the taxes." Or, "Bitcoin people can't do this." They're gonna start regulating it and taxing it more. And they have billions of dollars. I'm sorry, they're gonna outsmart you. You're not smarter than the IRS. They're gonna eventually, it might take them five years.

Eventually they're gonna figure it out. But some of the people like, "Well, "I bought it for 10 grand, now it's 70 grand. "But what's with 270 grand?" Take 2% off the table and just be done. And just, okay, that 2% is gone. But it's gonna protect the other 90% when it triples or 10Xs or whatever it's gonna do.

And I don't know that I entirely understood that going forward which is why I'm kind of passionate about talking about it. So that's a big part of it. Understanding the cultural piece. Maybe not going to certain places that weren't a fit. You know, just getting everything in order. And I think knowing, and I'll tell you something.

I remember the first time we had a bank where they didn't entirely understand our business. And we just opened it and they're like, "What's this payment for?" I'm like, "Oh, give the guy company, whatever else." And they're like, "Well, we have people "who sell offshore companies." It's like, "No, our service is different.

"It's a different kind of service." And they're like, "Okay." And I kind of got frustrated. I used to get frustrated with people more. And, you know, they didn't like that. And they're like, "All right, well, you know, "you're gonna make your life difficult." And so, you know, now I've got a finance team and they just like, they think like that.

They kind of empathize with the banks almost. I'm like, "No, see it from my perspective. "Like, we understand the banks have a lot of questions." And so they handle that. It's like, I would have put some of that infrastructure in place. I took way too much on on my business which prevented me from doing some of this stuff.

Like we didn't have good HR until not that many years ago. We didn't have a finance team. It wasn't that long ago I was making the payroll. Like it wasn't yesterday, it wasn't last year, but like sooner than I wish it would have been. And, you know, I think that that's kind of stuff all gets in the way.

You know, you should understand that like HSBC in Hong Kong, they have plenty of money in Hong Kong. They don't really want foreign customers who have Hong Kong companies. They're gonna de-risk. Like all that kind of stuff I would have known. I would have just, you know, avoided. So what I did many years ago is I just kind of over-corrected by saying we're gonna have 12 bank accounts.

And now we've been going through kind of in the last year, I just closed like six personal bank accounts recently. Like why do I need three accounts in Armenia? You know, but I've been closing a bunch of accounts in the business too. 'Cause you build the relationships and that can only happen over time.

But obviously if I was working with myself and I already had the guy here and the guy there who was the good banker or the good whatever, you would get the stuff done. So there's just so many mistakes. Even I remember it was in Nicaragua that I tried to get residence like 11 or 12 years ago.

And I made the mistake in some, like I gave the guy the payment in full 'cause it was so low. And someone's like, you should never do that in Nicaragua. The guy's like, he has no more incentive now. You know, so I never got that done. I just kind of gave up.

You know, it's all those little things. At times a thousand, you know. - You have an enormous wealth of content at nomadcapitalist.com. You have over 2,600 videos on YouTube. I don't know if your podcast is still out there. It's probably a little dated at this time, but. - They put the, I think they put the YouTube up as like the Nomad Capitalist audio experience.

- There you go. You have thousands of articles and Nomad Capitalist Live in September. I'll be there speaking in Malaysia. Really looking forward to that. Two years ago in Mexico, I spoke there and it was a great experience. - Yeah. - Is there anything that you just wish people would ask you about as we close?

Anything that you would love to talk about that doesn't fit your brand and your media team says, no, don't talk about that Andrew. - Listen, I think unfortunately I'm still like the media team, but we have some great people. Listen, the five magic words are go where you're treated best and I think you have to take an entrepreneurial approach.

You've got to take action. You know, how do you move overseas? Like how do you make money overseas? You just do it. And that's why Nomad Capitalist Live, Kuala Lumpur. I live there. It's the longest base that I've ever had. One of the first places I went in my tour around, I went to every country in Southeast Asia.

Not to backpack, but like I interviewed, you know, the president of Standard Chartered Bank Vietnam to like, you know, what's going on in these countries. I just connected with Malaysia. And I, and listen, to your question of where's people go, you have to go and feel it. You know, I'm here in Columbia.

I'm walking around with one of my guys the other day. He's like, you can just feel it. Yeah, this feel. I go to Panama City. I don't feel it. I'm like, I don't get it. If you feel Panama City, you should go to Panama City. But I want to show people Kuala Lumpur.

Prince Court Hospital, one of the best hospitals. I took the entire staff who was there in time. I think we paid like a couple grand for like 12 people to get screened. Soup to nuts. Amazing, amazing service. Amazingly affordable real estate there. We do it because you have a five-star hotel.

It's like 130 bucks a night, you know, tip to toe, everything included. And I just think like people should look at places that are off-brand. Malaysia has not spent as much time, at least in the Western world, building that brand that Thailand has, for example, or that Singapore has for different reasons.

I'm a big believer in being a little bit of a contrarian, but I think that, you know, once something gets saturated, to me, it just kind of goes the wrong direction. So anyway, I think that's something people should consider. And that's why we decided to do it for the second time, our live event there.

I'll tell you the other thing I'm really, again, it's really been a thing in my life in the last year. I clung a little bit to like, okay, let's have American clients. 'Cause I like talking to them. I don't do all the client work anymore, but like, you know, they're fun to talk to.

It's harder to talk to somebody from certain countries. But we found some great people from all around the world. And the same thing for the event. I think only like 40% of last year's audience was North American, which is still a pretty big number, considering it's so far away.

But like, it was great to have people from like so many other countries and you learn something. And I think that even for me, sometimes it's just easy to kind of like cling on to like, okay, I'm overseas, but like, let me keep all the Americans. And I think there's gonna be a lot of changes.

I mean, look at this TikTok thing. I think that's a slippery slope. I think you wanna be diversified outside of your country. And I think you wanna go to the places that aren't as well known. And if you're saying, oh, I'm an American, I went to the UK on vacation and they're no better.

Yeah, they're kind of the same in some ways. You wanna go somewhere that's different. That's why I talk with the places that I talk about. It's not because, you know, it's not because I'm scraping by on two grand a month. It's 'cause I enjoy being in Columbia, not full time.

Like I genuinely enjoy it. And I generally watch all the construction that we've been hearing. Like they're building stuff. You know what I mean? Like are they building anything in San Francisco? No. So I don't know. I mean, all that to say, obviously I wanna, you know, promote the events.

Now you're gonna be there and I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. Look at the CEO of AirAsia. What a success story that's been. A million dollars he took that over for. It's like the biggest airline in Asia. You wanna hear, like who's heard of Tony Fernandez in the Western world?

- No. - A million to billions to your point. Now listen, no one gets rich doing the same thing twice. You're not gonna start a search engine and become a multi-billionaire. Like that ship has sailed. But learn the lessons from a Tony Fernandez, for example. And I'll give you one more point.

I'm trying to go more capitalist, a little bit less nomad. I'm a little bit more sedentary. I think the nomad people associate also with some of the doom and gloom stuff. Capitalist, guy built an airline from a million dollars to billions of dollars. I wanna hear from that. I don't, you know, God bless Jordan Peterson.

We know what Jordan Peterson's gonna say. Why don't we learn how we can actually do something? 'Cause I think optimizing for happiness is kind of the core of the second half of my life. That's a key thing for me. And I think that all that together helps you get there.

So there's a lot of different kind of points there, but I think people need to get in the comfort zone. It's what I'm trying to do. And I hope that our live event will do that. - Andrew, thank you very much. - Pleasure.