Bankless - Why You Should Leave Your Country | Andrew Henderson

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

Is it a good idea to diversify your citizenship given the current global landscape?  We brought on Andrew Henderson, an entrepreneur, a global citizen to nearly a dozen countries around the world, and the founder Nomad Capitalist - a company that helps people maximize their freedom by getting multiple citizenships and passports. Hear why considering a second or even a third citizenship might be beneficial, the most crypto-friendly jurisdictions, and what an exit tax entails. Andrew also shares why he renounced his US citizenship and provides insights into the costs and process of obtaining a second passport.  ------ 📣DEBRIEF | Ryan & David Unpacking the Episode:  https://www.bankless.com/debrief-the-andrew-henderson-interview  ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/28  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance    ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku  ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 6:04 Where Is Andrew? 6:52 Andrew’s Citizenships? 8:26 Audience Overview  10:47 Andrew On Multiple Citizenship? 14:41 Option To Exit  21:17 Why Multiple Citizenship? 29:01 Is Multiple Citizenship Urgent? 35:20. What Is Exit Tax? 41:32 Regaining US Citizenship 46:20 Andrew’s Top 5 Citizenships 51:36 Dual Citizenship: Factors & Process 54:30 Who Is It For? 59:31 Lifestyle Trade-Offs 1:03:51 Crypto-Friendly Jurisdictions? 1:06:02 Digital Citizenships? 1:07:19 Is This Unpatriotic? 1:10:54 What If There’s No Option? 1:15:47 Is This Unfair? 0:23:30 Summary & Resources  1:27:21 Closing & Disclosure  ------ RESOURCES Andrew Henderson https://x.com/nomadcapitalist  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures   

Welcome to bankless, where today we're exploring the frontier of second passports and second citizenships. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. There's a rabbit hole we're diving into today. Given the state of the world, the question is, is it a good idea to diversify your citizenship? We're talking about your nation state citizenship, of course, and we've seen some recent crypto hostility in the West. The question is, what if it gets worse? Should you have a backup plan, a place to immigration, great. Andrew Henderson on the podcast today. He's an expert in this. A few questions we ask. Number one, why should people think about a second or third citizenship? What are the benefits? Number two,

what are the most crypto-friendly jurisdictions? What does he recommend? Number three, what's an exit tax? What does that mean? And why did our guests choose to renounce his U.S. citizenship? Number four, how much does all of this costs? And how do you do it? How do you go get a second passport? It's worth asking the question, why are we doing this episode? My answer for this is because the idea of like sovereign as an individual from your own nation state that you're born in is interesting. And without endorsing it, we want to understand this like activity that one can do. There's a book that we have cited in the past many times, the sovereign individual. And there's a lot of content in there that aligns with some of the ideas here,

that you are a sovereign individual and you can choose to be like independent from the nation state that you just happened to be born in. And so this is what we are exploring as an idea here today. It's just worth knowing that the strategies that our guest Andrew illustrates on this episode is a possibility for you whether you enjoy it or not. So that's kind of the motivation here. We're here to learn. Yeah. And let me expand on what David said.

Just give you guys a trigger warning and then the disclaimer. So the trigger warning is this. This episode might rub some of you the wrong way. You might hear some of the claims Andrew's making and just think, oh, my God, this is peak selfishness. This is unpatriotic. This is just another example of the rich elites, getting on the license. boats and leaving everyone else behind. So we talked about some of those critiques toward the end of the episode. And I think, David, you and I will be talking about some of those critiques in the debrief

that we're about to have, too. So if this is not your thing, of course, feel free to skip the episode. There's lots of episodes on the bankless podcast. And then lastly, a disclaimer. None of this is an endorsement of Nomad Capital Services. This is the company that Andrew founded. We don't know what they're like. Neither David or myself have used them. Do your own research. Price it out. This is something you're interested in. They're just the guys to talk to. that we discovered. This episode is really, it's just like a case for a second citizenship, not a case for a specific service provider.

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Bankless Nation, I'm very excited to introduce you to Andrew Henderson. He is an entrepreneur. He is a global citizen at home in nearly a dozen. countries around the world. I'm actually not sure where he is today. Maybe we'll ask him that question. He's also the founder of Nomad Capitalist, which is a company, an organization that helps people maximize their freedom by getting multiple citizenships and passports. And that's what we're here to talk about today. Andrew, welcome to bankless. It's good to be with you and hopefully reduce their taxes too, because they're going crazy in some of these places. But it's good to be They really are. And, you know, there's some crypto hostile jurisdictions out there, too, that we probably

want to talk to you about because we got a crypto audience. But I have to ask the question. So what citizenship are you logging in from today here? Like, what jurisdiction? Well, I'm sitting in Ireland doing meetings with some people who work for me. It's actually interesting. I was on the radio in Ireland a couple days ago. And she's like, well, how do I move somewhere and get a citizenship? I'm not an Irish citizen. So you want to go some places as a tourist. You have a residence permit in some places. Maybe some places you go, you are a citizen. You want to mix it up a little bit and you want to, as I say, go where you're treated best. If citizenship is the best in a certain place, that's one you want to hold. If it's better to be a

resident, then that's better. Better to be a tourist. Sometimes that's better in places like in Europe. It goes a tourist. So I am in Ireland. We've got some great people here. Does that mean, are you a citizen of Ireland then, Andrew as well? No, okay. So this is a resident tourist. Do you consider yourself, like, do you identify with any country that you are a citizen in particular, or are you more of just a global citizen? You're a citizen of the world. Don't actually have any sort of meaningful alignment with any country. I mean, I have five citizenships. I might, you know, work on one or two more. Certainly there's ones that I've spent time in that I've come to appreciate the people.

I also understand, you know, for me, I think you should judge yourself by your accomplishments and your identity. And when I look at, you know, we've got a YouTube channel with about 2,700 videos on it. I've been doing this for a long time. And, you know, one of the biggest retorts we get from people who watch our stuff for the first time is, oh, well, if the U.S. is so bad, you know, why are people moving here? Well, the difference between a multimillionaire leaving and people, you know, coming who are in search of, you know, kind of low wage, you know, service work, a lot of respect for people who come and want to work hard. But, you know, it's not a one-to-one comparison. And so for me, I think if you're at a level,

where you are an entrepreneur, you are successful, you're firing at all cylinders. It's probably harder to be identified with a lot of places. That's how I look at it. I mean, I can go to any country, no matter how much I like it, and say, yeah, there's still a lot of people that I probably don't really identify with that much. And so for me, you know, being born in kind of the edge of the United States, I find it hard to understand how, you know, how is it someone born right over there as Canadian and I'm American? I mean, it's just a very weird concept that I think people in the bankless audience understand. Probably, yeah. Yeah, I think they do. I think we have some nomads in the bankless audience, like, both from a, like, they travel all over

the world. They, you know, don't necessarily have one residence as their home, but, but certainly we're financial nomads in that we have like already exited our existing financial system to some extent, kind of the fiat system, and now we're doing more on crypto. Maybe just to give you a quick overview of, of the audience and who you're kind of addressing today. So, A lot of people listening are, they're definitely into crypto, right? And so they probably have assets on the blockchain so that they actually own. That's kind of in the jurisdiction, the property rights system of the blockchain. So call them kind of nomad investors.

And they certainly know about concepts like tail risk events. They know and acknowledge we've done so much content on this. Empires, fiat systems, they all have finite lifespans. So they don't take it for granted that the system that they were born into is going to be the system that is alive and well in the future. And, you know, also, also, I should say, probably most of them, almost all of them, I would say, don't have a backup to their Fiat citizenship yet. Probably most listeners of bank lists, I'm just assuming here, we've not done the surveys, but they probably only have one citizenship. So, David, I know you have one citizenship, right?

You're American. I have two citizenship, but it's only by virtue of the fact that I was actually born across the border, as you said, on the Canadian side and my mother's American. So I managed to kind of get too in the process, but I haven't gone through the process of collecting it. I think you're probably addressing a lot of people here who are like, what? I mean, I was born a citizen of ex-country. Why do I need a second citizenship? And there's also, I would say, a group that you're addressing of, like, there's definitely millionaires and billionaires that listen to bank lists. Like, there just is. They've done well in crypto. They've done well in life. But there's a lot of people who haven't made it financially yet that listen to bankless as well. They haven't achieved financial

freedom. And so they're probably thinking like, cool. I mean, the rich people get multiple citizenships, but this sounds like some kind of a yacht club that I'm not a part of I can't join. Anyway, that's some context in terms of who you're addressing on the podcast today. Is that helpful? And I've seen your show for years. And I think, you know, it's an important message. I mean, I've worked with a lot of folks over the years at Nomadic Cowplice, who are in crypto. It's a great audience. I mean, for me, I think why you want to have a second citizenship. And I would even argue now, you probably need a third citizenship. For me, I kind of want to have plan F, G, maybe even H.

Maybe that's a little bit extreme. But for the same reasons you want to be in crypto. I mean, the government's done a pretty bad job managing the money supply and look at inflation, look at all the things. I mean, look at the countries that we're from and all the upheaval these days where people can't afford rent. They can't afford groceries. And that's going to have meaningful consequences on people who are citizens.

of those countries. Why? Because if you want to live overseas, if you're an American, you already are wed to the U.S. tax system. So you need the second passport to potentially exit the U.S. And if you're in crypto, unfortunately, it's harder to get out of the U.S. tax system while staying a citizen. I guess there's places like Puerto Rico, but, you know, it's harder to get at the U.S. tax system than it would be for an entrepreneur because you're engaged in what they consider, generally speaking, a passive activity. Passive income for Americans abroad is not taxed that favorably. So, you know, having a second citizenship, number one, allows you to get into that system. I think Canada or Australia is slowly moving.

Maybe that's the front door, through the back door, to a kind of system where, hey, you can't leave. You know, Australia gave some guidance last year, basically, I'll short-handed. If you don't live overseas the way we want you to, yeah, maybe you'll remain an Australian taxpayer. Right. And so, wait a second. I was born in Australia. I live there and paid taxes. I wasn't, but let's just say that says you.

You pay your taxes for as long as you can in Australia. And then he said, you know what? I'm sick of this. I'm going to leave. There is going to be an exit tax to get out, which is actually why if you're just starting out, if you're pre-got club levels, you're actually in a good position to go and do something before they get you for a big chunk on the way out. But, I mean, for the same reasons the government shouldn't be trusted to do anything else.

You want to have second citizenship. And what I've argued, and this is one of the hard things for people. who are new to this concept to understand, I'd rather be St. Lucian than American. If I can make money on my own terms, what do I need the United States for? The U.S. citizenship is great that I can move to the, I can live in the United States, that I can get a job that requires me to be a U.S. citizen and I can work physically on U.S. soil. Well, increasingly, I bet any of us could go and work somewhere else in Dubai. We could get a job there somewhere else.

Or we could get a remote job from a U.S. company that doesn't care where we live. If a nomad capitalist hires people all over the world, we don't have any Americans, which maybe tells you something about the way the world's going, but we don't have any Americans. But, you know, we could theoretically hire an American if they didn't live in the U.S. And if you're in crypto and you make your own money, what do you need? So I'd rather be St. Lucian because guess what? St. Lucia's not going to impose a bunch of dumb regulations. They're not going to try and tax me if I don't live there. If I'm, you know, St. Lucian, I can also choose live in St. Kitts and they don't tax me even if I do live there.

You know, so I want more freedom of movement. I want a passport that's agnostic. I mean, look at the Julian Assange news in, you know, more recent times. You know what? I'm a former U.S. citizen. I'm just just proud of not having to be associated with that kerfuffle and not having to have that on my hands. You know, so this is why you want a second passport. You're detaching from the system the same way you did from credit.

And I love how you call it Fiat citizenship. I mean, it's, I just think. think that economically, and from a freedom perspective, countries like the U.S. are going to be much more aggressive in the years to come, taking your money and taking away your freedoms. We could go into any of that, but that's why you need it. And I don't even think two is enough. Listen, you should get your Canadian passport, but Canada and the U.S. have become more like the same country. I mean, Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet, Singh up there, it's not heading in the right direction. Yeah, they certainly feel like a very

similar country. Let's talk a bit more about why people are getting second citizenship and third citizenship. And you listed a whole bunch of reasons. I just want to set the context for this. So some people hearing that might be cheering you on and being like, hell yeah, Andrew, that's right. Like we're nomads. We want to live in different jurisdictions. Others might be listening to that and like might be squirming a little bit because they might be thinking about, well, is this just running away? Is this like unpatriotic, that kind of thing? We'll get to those critiques at the end. I don't want to address that yet. But like we'll get to those critiques for people who are interested in it. What you basically said kind of reminds me of

a book long hallowed by folks in crypto called The Sovereign Individual. I'm sure have you read this book? Yeah. Okay. So the basic premises, you know, governments may in the future provide a deteriorating quality of goods for their citizens and kind of like an economic mix that just like isn't worthwhile. And they'll begin to kind of capture their citizens and and trap them in the systems. Like Fiat is maybe one example of that, right? And there's this classic choice type of theory. And I forget who wrote this in the 1970s,

but basically, if you are responding as an individual to a deteriorating set of goods and services, you have three options, right? You can use your voice, try to change that. And so the example of this would be political action, right? Getting involved in politics, trying to move the system in a different direction. or loyalty. So you've got voice, loyalty as another example, which is you just remain loyal

to the system that is not providing you the benefit. You just kind of like take it on the chin and you'll keep at it. Or exit is the third option. So these are your options, voice, loyalty, and exit. And with Nomad Capitalist, what you're doing with the second passport is having the option to exit, which is like a valid choice when there is a deterioration in the goods and services. And this is very much what we do if say a you know your isp is not providing you good service and like the internet sucks and you switch to an isp that does provide good service and you're getting you know value for that dollar so exit is really the choice that that you're emphasizing do you have any reflections on just like that in general before we further establish why people want a second citizenship

listen i i went to a restaurant not that long ago and it used to be one of my favorite restaurants and i went and they were always so nice to me and i don't know what happened to the the the one or two guys who are always so nice, but now they're not so nice and the food's not quite as good. So guess what? I'm probably not going to go back, at least not as often. And so I'm exercising my power of choice. He's fleeing the restaurant. He's running away like a coward from the Indian restaurant. It's a travesty. No, it just, it sucks. And I decided not to go back. And I think, you know, I look at this much like relationships. One of the faults that, I mean, I don't know if it's mistakes that I've made in the past in, you know, kind of personal relationships.

And probably with some employees, too, is you spend too much time like you see the good in them. And you want it to work out. I'm a person. I'm successful. I want other people to be successful. I see, you know, hey, here's your skill. Let me help you. And sometimes they've got a bad attitude or sometimes they won't, you know, put in the effort or whatever.

They just can't. Maybe you, you overestimated their skills. And you keep, like, lecturing them like, okay, like, I'm going to give you. But eventually it loses its input and it's not going to work. Or you have a relationship where it's just like you're not going to change the person due to any number of factors. And I would argue it's increased competition among countries as the sovereign individual talked about. You know, we have an event called Nomad Catholic Live. It's hosted in Kuala and Poor Malaysia, where I spend my winter as I've been going there for 10 years.

It is as good as many U.S. cities, in my opinion, one of the probably the best value city in the world. you would not think about going there 25 years ago. Never would have thought about it. The reason you don't go there today is because 25 years ago isn't enough time to build a brand like the United States that people flock to like Coca-Cola. So maybe 75 more years from it, they'll have that Coca-Cola like brand and people will realize Malaysia punches well above its weight. But it hasn't developed that brand yet. And they haven't probably done a good enough job marketing it in talking about how free it is and everything else. but to me you go to the places where they offer you the opportunity and you walk away from the relationships, the bad relationships.

I mean, how many, we've all been in some relationship, could be a friendship, could be a love relationship, where the person thought they were going to shame you or manipulate you into doing what you wanted to. Right. And some of us probably stuck around longer than we should have and like try to like come to some agreement, like the political process you're talking about. Like we try to come to some agreement with the people. And it's like, no, this person's a manipulative person. They're not looking to come to an agreement. They're looking to dominate.

They're looking to win. They're looking to be selfish and have it their way. That's the U.S. And by the way, I got some comments from people that if you have the passport, you should pay, that's the privilege. So what you're seeing is a shifting of obligation onto citizenship, where it used to be benefits. Back in the 90s, when Kuala Lomba,

poor wasn't the competition of the Western world, when Dubai wasn't the competition of the Western world, when nobody was moving to Panama to retire, when everyone just kind of stayed in the Western countries and they'd all the power. Yeah, citizenship is all about you're one of us. Look at all the privileges you get. Now that there's competition, now people are leaving. They want to beat you over the head with it. And so to me, that's an abusive relationship. Would you stay in that in your personal life? Well, you know, in your personal life, you have sex with a person, you have a nice, you know, you talk about you. You don't have any of that with the government. You just pay them and they shame you and bully you. And then it's, you're running away

like a coward. Well, you know, you're one of 330 million people in the United States. If the culture is shifted, it doesn't matter what you think because there's probably already a place where they agree with what you want. And these, I'll tell you what, I'm going to say, just for people who are watching. The AirPod Pro, it was a real downgrade from the regular AirPods. They fit in so nicely. These AirPods pros, I'll tell you what, they've got to bring Steve Jobs back on these. Did they just fall out of your ear? No, they consistently fall out. You can get multiple sizes. You know, there's like some size choice there too. I got some thing that goes in the bin. I don't know whether this is my Larry David-ask ramblings on AirPods. Well, okay, so let's talk

some more about the second citizenship. You know, like one point just to reinforce what you're saying for a minute. Again, we'll get to some criticisms toward the end of the episode. But just, there was a time in a place where the U.S. very much was that upstart country to flee to. It's a country that's very much formed by immigrants from the old world to the new world, like the land of opportunity meme. That was very much born in the U.S. So at some level, this type of countries competing for citizens and talents on its goods and services and on its opportunity has always been in play, right? And so it remains in play right now.

But let's talk about specific. So why should an individual listening to this who has a citizenship in one jurisdiction, why do they need a second citizenship or like what factors go into? What are the common reasons? So you mentioned a few and then I just want to dwell on this a little bit. Is it about a backup plan? Is it about like if shit really hits the fan in the country that I'm in and I need to pick up and move, then I already have that way established?

Is it about tax, like lowering my tax burden? Is it about additional property rights or culture? Like what are the main reasons when you talk to people at Nomad that people like why they go through the process and the pain of getting a second citizenship? You make a great point just real quick on the part of people moved if you're from the U.S. or Canada. People fled where they were from to move to where you live now at some point. And it's an issue of empires never last forever. So I think that's one reason why you want a second citizenship. If you're in the dying, you know, last gasps of an empire, that sounds to me like a tiger.

You've backed into a corner. I mean, they're not going to just, oh, you know, what, we had our time. And, okay, that's great. Now China's going to run things. So, okay, everybody, you know, you're free to do what you want. Of course, they're not going to do that. So, again, I mean, a lot of the people we work with are from countries that are heavy. handed. If you're from Liechtenstein, I'm a little bit less worried than if you're from the United

States. I mean, I would only be protected no matter what. But, you know, I've interviewed, you know, presidents of countries like Georgia, you know, four million people. He's like, you know, when you start to shake things up, people come up and tell you because it's a small enough place. You fired someone they know. They're pissed off. Like, you know, you get more of it. Is anyone really think that the U.S. or Germany or the U.K. or Australia that anyone's listening? I mean, look at how many countries are now moving their capital into these brand new middle of nowhere areas like South Africa has, Australia has now Indonesia, Egypt where I just was, they're building a brand new capital. Why? One of the things that they talk about is they want to be far away from the people.

They don't want the protests to come to their door. You know, Tahrir Square in Cairo back in the Arab Spring, that's pretty close to the government. If the government's 80 miles east, hey, all as well, let the peasants riot. So you want to be protected from that, that they can't do whatever is heavy-handed. I prefer a plan A personally, but I understand not everyone's ready for a plan A, so that's plan B. If plan B is, I like where I'm living, I'm happy to pay tax, and we see in the tax journals all the time, they're coming after people with crypto more and more. That's, I mean, I love everything crypto stands for. My one frustration is, you know, the people who have billions of dollars at their disposal to go up to people who don't pay their taxes, whether you think it's fair or not,

that's their job and they're looking increasingly at crypto. So if you're willing to live in a place and you accept the tax rate that comes with that and you accept that there could be an unrealized capital gains tax to pay when you decide to leave and that the lower the better, then fine, have a second passport. And I would say psychologically you want to start spending time either in that country or you want to have a residence permit somewhere as well and you want to spend time there Because to your point, I mean, if we all said, I'm going to leave when things get bad enough, have you been watching the news the last 25 years?

I mean, there was no time in there that you would have said, hey, back in 1999, I would have said this is bad enough. But, you know, we're the frog in the boiling pot. You know, we've grown used to the fact, oh, the government's reading my mail. I saw that come out the other day in the news. They're listening to our call, you know, whatever, you know. We get accustomed to things and our freedoms get eroded slowly. And we just say, all right, I'm never going to leave. So my philosophy is if you say, all right, I'm going to get a residence permit in some country.

And I'm going to go there in winter break or I'm going to go there on summer break or I'm going to spend my, whatever you want to do. I'm going to be comfortable. Maybe you buy a property even. So I own a property. I have a residence permit. Maybe I have had a citizenship or I'm working towards citizenship, something like that. I'm going to be better equipped to leave if I'm taking that plan B route because I'm going to be color. comfortable where I'm going. I think that's a big psychological point. That's why we have our event

in Kuala and poor and not, you know, Orlando or something. So I want people to come and see what it's like, oh, this Malaya, this is pretty good. This is pretty livable. What a great city. I think the biggest problem that people in the Western world have is, you know, they're from the U.S. and, you know, they went to the U.K. Well, the U.K. is essentially the same country. It's trending in the same, you know, bad direction. You know, if you haven't been to some places that you're not almost uncomfortable with, you probably haven't seen all the opportunities that are out there. I could afford to live in Monaco. It doesn't work for me. I could afford to live in, you know, Paris or something. That's not what I'm interested in. I want to be in places that are moving in the right

direction. And that probably means places that have some more room to grow. That means a bit more emerging places where I'm more personally free. The taxes are lower or non-existent. And it just feels better. And so if you are going to be forced to, hey, things are terrible in the U.S., go to some place you've never heard of before. You're going to push back on that. So I think having the plan B is the first place to start. Get comfortable with one or more places. Start traveling.

If you have dual citizenship and you haven't claimed your other passport, get it. See what it feels like to travel on that Canadian passport in your case. Because, hey, you could decide not to be a U.S. citizen. You could still come to the U.S. and all likelihood is a Canadian pretty easily. You can travel without some of the tax restrictions. You could live overseas without those restrictions. The embassies are nicer to you.

So see what that feels like to get ready. For me, you know, I decided to move overseas immediately. I think, you know, you learn a lot by doing that. I ultimately, you know, got comfortable enough to give up my citizenship. And, you know, I think plan A is the better way to go. Because, you know, when something bad happens, it's too late. Robert Kiyosaki came to one of our events and he said, where can you get in three days? Well, part of Robert Kiyosaki's plan, to your earlier point is, hey, I've got a jet ready to charter, right?

I mean, what if you're fighting to fly commercial? You couldn't fly commercial during the COVID, for example, if you're Canadian, you couldn't leave. You could only fly if you weren't vaccinated. You could only fly private. So, like, my thought is when things get too bad, there's times when they pass a new tax law. and you have seven days before the law kicks in. If you're still here, it affects you. I mean, there's literally been the case in some places.

It comes up. Nobody thought it was going to pass. You've got seven days. Are you going to relocate your entire life in seven days? No. Are you going to, like, move when the next pandemic happens or move when the next whatever happens? Probably not.

You're going to sit there and you're going to just kind of, you know, okay, it's not that much worse. So I want you to have multiple places you're comfortable with. So like Ryan said, we have a pretty wide audience here at Bankless. We have billionaires who live inside of the U.S. who have like already made it, but perhaps they only have one citizenship. And then we also have listeners who intend to become millionaires at the very least. But also, but I'm going to go ahead and guess at the general, the general case for most of them, most listeners, is that they haven't really considered this possibility. And maybe it's because they haven't had the motivation to yet. They haven't like decided that it's. it's worth the time, the resources, the research to in order to make this happen. Maybe you could also give the case about why this might become more relevant in the future, why the motivation to become, you know, dual citizen, triple citizen was going to become more and more useful as time goes on.

Like, is this crescendoing? Is this getting worse? What are the catalyst for this? Well, my parents and I, we talked to this around the kitchen table when I was in the late 90s when I was a kid. And my father would say, look, here's the economic freedom rankings, the years. US just went down one or here's, you know, we would, he would read different statistics. I think the U.S. is like the 25th freest economy in the world.

So that's not Somalia levels. Let's not, let's not, you know, devolve ourselves to like, well, they just moved to Somalia. But there's 24 places, including some ex-Soviet Union states that are now more free. It's that got the 44th best passport, according to the index that we put out. I mean, go where you're treated best is you find the best. You don't settle for 44th place. You deserve better. So, you know, I've been talking about this stuff since 2012.

And I will tell you over the last, what is that, 12 years ago. So I went to public school. It was hard for me. You know, 12 years, it is a lot, there's a lot more Westerners who get it. We have a lot more people coming for Plan B. And we've had some of the, you know, centi-millionaire and billionaire people coming and saying, I don't just want a second passport. I want every passport I can get my hands on.

And they'll usually walk it back to like four. when they realize what's involved in the work and all that. But, I mean, the trend is dramatically up. We get people all the time. I never thought I would call you. It was kind of a fun thing to watch on YouTube. I don't know where my country has gone. I never thought they would lock us inside.

I never thought I couldn't leave my country or come back to my country. I never thought they would think that two-thirds of my wealth should be taxed. I never thought this. I never thought that. I think it's only going to get worse, quite frankly. I think more countries are going to tax people the way the U.S. does to where you basically can't leave without giving up your citizenship. And again, I think that goes back to people are hurting. And so the guy who wants to live overseas with his crypto millions is not going to be a very sympathetic political target.

And so the best system there is to exit. If your government comes and says, hey, you know what? We need some extra cash. And we figured out that even though an extra $123 million a year, isn't that much extra money for the budget, doesn't move the needle? It sells politically. And hey, some crypto fat cats that we don't really understand and they bought some coin. I don't know how it works. They're probably laundering money.

Yeah, take their money so I can get my free health care. There's going to be more of that. I mean, there wasn't that desperation 25 or 30 years ago in the Western countries, but there increasingly is. And so you want a passport to be able to remove yourself. Now, if you choose to move overseas now, the residence and or passport reduces your taxes now. And I think the one thing your audience can take away is if you're trying to become a millionaire, or if you're trying to make more money no matter where you're at, many countries have an exit tax.

And so if you leave a country like Canada or Australia or if you give up U.S. citizenship, they're going to say, how much unrealized capital gain do you have? And we're going to tax you on that because, hey, we're not going to chase you down. We're not going to have any mechanism to know when you sell that stuff in the future. So you could just pay us on the paper gain now. And there was just actually a Supreme Court ruling on something kind of related where they're like, yeah, we can bring out wealth taxes. We can tax you like that.

Yeah, no problem. So I guess I say it this way very simply. I prefer everybody to leave right now, lower your taxes, and make sure that you're somewhere safe when the fur starts flying or somewhere multiple places safe the way I have. But I think that the ability to turn on or turn off a residence or citizenship when they come down the pike and say, hey, effective next week or next month, we're doing this thing, you don't have time to respond to get a second citizenship.

So my initial point was I feel like I'm Noah building the arc here. People laughed in 2012. What is an American in another passport? Some still laugh now. But I feel like, you know, it's going to be only become more and more. And I don't say this because I hate the U.S. I could probably run many other businesses that actually made more money. This is a relatively niche business.

We're very good at it. But, you know, I could find something else to sell if I wanted to. I've run other businesses in the past. I fundamentally have believed my entire life that the Western world is going the wrong direction. And I just think it's a good thing to be prepared. And I think that if you're in crypto, you're going to have to take a hit of one, two, five percent to protect the other 95 to 99 percent. Because I just don't think that your government's going to play fair. You're not a politically sympathetic, you know, group, neither am I.

and they're just going to be more and more desperate for cash. And you want to be ready. I think people can kind of understand that narrative. I've always considered my citizenship of Canada and the U.S. as kind of an asset. And like for most of my life. And I still, I think I net believe that. But there have been times, you're like just speaking on behalf of crypto natives where you're like, wow, look at this list of blocked countries for this cryptoirdrop

or this defy tool that I want to use. it's like Iran, North Korea, and the United States of America. And you start to kind of wonder, like, am I the one living in a financial prison? So you're telling me if I use a VPN from another country or am I citizen in another country, then I can access this air drop, free money basically, but because I'm in the U.S., then I can't. These types of things are like, I guess, part of the frog boiling maybe, mini wake-wake-up calls, let's call them. But let's talk, actually, I just want to emphasize what you just said, because I think a lot of people are actually unaware of exit taxes because they've not even considered exiting.

You mentioned Canada. You mentioned Australia. You mentioned the U.S. Just like, can you clarify once again what an exit tax actually is? So if I choose to leave the U.S., does that mean if I assume residency in another place or if I get a second passport, then am I taxed at some level? Or do I have to actually renounce my citizenship? And you said the exit tax is a tax on unrealized gains? Let's just make sure people are clear on what an exit tax actually is and the implications of it and how you sort of plan for that. This is the reason I think plan A is better because if you're planning and becoming wealthier, you know, it's always easier to say, hey, 25% will be more comfortable when I have more money. 25% or whatever the rate is, is always 25%. It's going to sting.

So what it happens is when you change your tax residence status. So getting a second passport doesn't change things. Now, I have seen with some of the, you mentioned a cryptoirdrops where someone gets a second passport, and I guess some of those projects, they said, hey, if you can show us the other passport, we're cool with that. I'm not sure if that applies to all of them, but I know we've had that call. Where it wasn't, we don't give it to Americans. It was, you need to have some other passport. Bank accounts don't work that way. If you're an American, you're an American, you're an American, you're an American, you can have 100 other passports. So the getting the second passport doesn't change the tax status, doesn't trigger the exit tax. If you were to move overseas, as an American, that also generally won't trigger it. Now, you could go to Puerto Rico and there's some interesting, you know, things with how that works, and that could kind of be a pre-exit tax plan. But then you're living in Puerto Rico, and you've actually got to live there. So let's just take that out of the equation. When you end your tax residence in a country, as an American, is a U.S. citizen or a long-term

green card holder, you have to do that by renouncing or relinquishing. everywhere else, you just become a taxed on resident. So if you leave Canada and you go through all the proper channels, now they are checking more and it is more difficult than it was 20 years ago because more people are doing it. But if you go through all the proper channels, if you cut your ties, if you minimize your time in the country, if you do all the things you're supposed to do, you're out of the tax system. And now you can keep your Canadian passport and you can go and live wherever you want. Now, if you go and live in France, then obviously you're going to become a tax resident of France. So you either want to move to a tax-friendly or tax-free country or you want to move to a series of countries and then have a tax-friendly tax-residents where you spend, let's say, a month in the tax residence, and then you spend a couple months each and the rest. Anyway, that's where you're going.

So obviously you can't choose anywhere to go because other countries you can become a tax resident as well. But just leaving where you're from, Canada, Australia, Germany, what have you, keep the passport, leave the tax residence. You'll have certain restrictions on how much time you can go back and visit. all of that. But any country with an exit tax, they're basically going to say, yeah, what haven't we taxed? They're all a little bit different. But the general principle is, well, you're no longer a taxpayer. So you're like, you're dead to us. So pay us what you owe and then go and be free. And so generally, that's a capital gains tax rate. If you're an American, it takes giving up your citizenship to do that. You can lower the tax burden by living in Puerto Rico. You can lower it if you're an entrepreneur running a business by living overseas. But if you want to fully get rid of the tax burden, you have to renounce U.S. citizenship because they have what's called citizenship-based taxation. A Canadian will pay tax as long as they live in Canada. It's called residential-based taxation.

You're taxed based on where you live. Most Canadians do, ironically, live in Canada. Most Australians live in Australia. So the U.S. has the disadvantage. I think other countries might eventually follow suit in some way. We're already kind of seeing moves in that direction. But it's about changing your tax. tax residence. And when basically once you're off their books, they're like, well, hey, I mean,

if you didn't leave, you would have had this capital gain accruing. So it could be an interesting companies. We had a guy, he hired us twice. And the value, I don't remember how much, but the value of his company went up dramatically where he was actually raising money, where it was easily provable what his company's worth. He couldn't afford to renounce because he just didn't have enough money to pay the capital gains bill because he couldn't sell any more shares yet he would be bill charged with his company worth hundreds of millions of dollars uh he would have like a hundred million dollar bill and no way to raise the cash so he was he was literally couldn't um and and so you know that's why i think you want to you know get out first if you're in the u.s there's a two million dollar

marker that as long as you've been tax compliance and you haven't had like a ridiculously high income and a federal tax to match, you get up to $2 million. So that's kind of the marker. You get up to $2 million, you know, like, of gains that are basically tax-free if you renounce or if you exit? You're not a covered expatriate. Right. So you're not.

And so, yeah, you're not liable for all the hoop-a-law. If you're over the $2 million, you still get an exemption and it goes up every year. But, yeah, I mean, it's better to be under $2 million in the U.S. And that's a big decision because you're choosing to renounce. Now, if you're Canadian, you know, they probably let you come back. If you choose to be St. Lucian or something and you have to go and get a visa, you know, I mean, it's not guaranteed, right? There's no guaranteed right to return to the U.S.

So, I mean, that's why I think getting comfortable. We've had people come to us who are in crypto. Hey, I've got $600,000. Okay, find a few places that are affordable. Get comfortable with them. See how you feel living outside of the United States. And when you hit that $2 million number, then, you know, make a decision. But don't get to $2 million.

And I'm like, holy cow, do I want to never come back to this place? I mean, you're not going to make that decision. Yeah. And the U.S. kind of like, I guess, presses you into a very high stakes sort of, like, situation. Not only do they tax you if you are a resident of another country, but kind of like the exit tax and exit criterion is somewhat harsh. And I'm not sure what it looks like to ever try to change your mind if you kind of like exit the U.S. then you want to come back if that's an option, but I would imagine that's not an option.

That's right. I mean, I did renounce my citizenship in 2017. I mean, I could come back the same way anybody else could. Now, I'm a, I've got a loud mouth and I make YouTube videos about how, you know, we host this event and we talk about it. I think the U.S. is going the wrong direction. So, you know, the people who issue visas are humans. I probably have a lesser chance than someone who just, you know, quietly. You have to wait in line, basically, in the immigration process. If I would, you're right, if I don't have an Irish passport or a Canadian passport or whatever, there's 42 or so that you can just come back. Even if you can come back, those conditions, have you been to Iran, have you been to Cuba,

have you, you know, done this, if you've done that. But if I ever wanted to move back, yeah, I mean, I can get an E2 visa, which means starting a business, but they don't have to give you that. And depending on which passport you have, you know, they may be harder. I could get a green card by investing, but now I'm a taxpayer again. I guess you could get married to someone. but so I mean all these things have some level of human involvement. I know people who've renounced and they don't have great passports and they get U.S.

visas and they came back and his wife gave birth in the U.S. so all of his other children would also be American because his first one was born before he renounced and they literally came back to give birth on U.S. soil just so their kids were equal with the citizenships. But he had renounced and he and his Filipino wife got visas. But anyway, you know, if the issue always always is, are you going to be a sympathetic person when you go in to say, hey, I'm getting married to an American. Can I please apply for a green card? You know, I mean, depends on where you go.

Depends on where you live. There's a whole lot of factors. But, I mean, they don't have to say yes to anybody. I mean, they literally said no to the guys helping them like in Afghanistan during the war, the translators. Oh, you met a guy from al-Qaeda once. Yes, sorry, you can't come to our country. Stay there and die. You think they're going to, you know, you think if they do that to their own allies in a war, they're not going to have, some of them are going to be like, this guy renounced with his Crypto millions. Let's let him come back. No, I mean, there's no way to reclaim citizenship as the bottom line. Got it. So. And I think in a few countries there are, but certainly not in the US. New projects are coming online to the Mantle layer two every single week. Why is this happening?

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those with staked CTSI can take part in the governance process and vote on whether or not a proposal should be funded. Make sure your vote ready by staking your CTSI before the vote's open. Let's talk about the U.S. examples some more. And then we'll talk about non-U.S. examples. So if a U.S. citizen is kind of listening to this and they want to think through the plan A or the plan B, but they're definitely interested in kind of a second passport somewhere. There's tons of countries, right? So, like, what should they choose? What's kind of like on your top five list of countries or jurisdictions that might be fit for a second passport? And then, like, what does that even look like? How do you apply? Does that cost money? Like, how much? Just shade in some details here.

I mean, we've helped people get a couple dozen different countries' passports. So there's a couple main things to do. The first thing that I would check is what's called citizenship by descent. Do I have an ancestor? So in your case, some people actually, you know, their mother was born in Canada, and they didn't really realize that. But like in Canada, if you're born there, you're a citizen. Same as in the U.S.

Same as in Mexico. I think we had a guy once, his parents were born in Mexico. He didn't realize he's eligible to be Mexican. So that's kind of an extreme version of citizenship. dissent. What most people do is they go through their grandparents. So if your grandparents are Irish, for example, or if you have great grandparents who are Italian, Slovakia opened it up, you can go back even further now. So certain countries go back certain, you know, distances. A lot of them are in Europe. But we had, we had a guy who his dad was from St. Kitts and Nevis, which actually

has a passport by investment program, but his dad was actually born there so he could get that or, you know, they're Mexican or their, you know, whatever. So Latin America and Europe have been the big ones for us where go back to the family tree. And if someone was a citizen, every country has their own rules of how far back you can go. You know, we're going to charge you for that. You know, if we do that for you, we're going to go through and find your documents. Maybe in some cases, we have to go digging through a church. We seem to get kind of the complicated cases because we're a bit more expensive than some of the local lawyers. But we get like, you know, we do the cases they can't handle. Like what we're digging through archives that no one, whatever could figure out.

So that's the first thing you look at. Now, it might take you. I just, I think I had a I knew a guy recently. It took him four years to get his Italian citizenship by descent. So if I wanted to get out quickly, I might pair that with something else. But that's one way to look at. You're getting a pretty good quality passport, you know, something in Europe generally. Without much money, you're just basically paying service fees and maybe a filing fee. Not that expensive.

If you don't qualify or if you do qualify in crypto and you just want to be able to be out sooner, you can go through citizenship by investment. The price is going. up. I'll let you, I don't know when we're running this. So I'll just, I'll make it more neutral. The price of these Caribbean citizenship by investments, which have kind of been the go-to is they just harmonized it, $200,000. So that's a donation you're going to make. And you're going to get a Caribbean citizenship from a country that doesn't want to bother you, probably can't bother you. It's a business transaction. They do due diligence on you. And you get a passport in, you know, these days probably call it nine months. I mean, the paperwork time has to get. get thrown in there as well. But that doesn't require you to really have any connections. You don't generally have to go there even. Other countries like Turkey have that where you buy real estate. If you want to kind of kill two birds with one stone, you buy real estate, you get the passport.

Egypt has that as well. That's probably the best second passport. You know, Vanuatu is not as good of a passport, but they've got a program that's going to stay around the $100,000 level. So you can just make donations, but what's called citizenship by investment all the way up to in Malta, They've got a program being challenged by Europe. It may not be around that much longer, but it's going to cost you about a million dollars. And that's going to get you the same European Union passport that if you're lucky enough to get through your ancestry, you can get for basically free. So whenever I see someone who like their grandfather was Italian, I'm like, you know I have clients who pay a million dollars to get that same European Union passport. Okay, one's Italy and one's Malta.

But if you have any of them, you can live in all the countries. And you can generally have pretty similar travel privileges. So those are the two big ways. You know, we have, we've had people who they go in and they hire a hundred people and they get given, you know, they're given citizenship. You've seen, you know, the president of Serbia or Russia or France, you know, give celebrity citizenship. So there's ways sometimes to do that, you know, if you're a big investor. And then the other way, of course, is you just move there. You know, if you get a residence permit somewhere, they might have a requirement to spend one day per year or six months per year or nine months per year for X number.

of years at which time you can become naturalized. You probably need to speak the language or at at least pass a test and you probably need to learn a little bit with the history. So that's kind of like someone coming to the U.S. and you see them waving the flag at the swearing-in ceremony. That's what you're doing somewhere else, except most other countries are more flexible than the U.S. in terms of how long you need to live there, that kind of thing. But, you know, that's not for someone who doesn't want to move. So you could do any combination of those, right? You could get, you know, Mexican residents spend some time in Mexico, apply in five years, while also getting St. Kitts and Nevis citizenship for 200 grand. You're covered in the next year. And then you could be digging through the archives to see if you can become Slovak. And if you got all those three, I mean, that would be a pretty powerful combination. You'd be able to go to a lot of places. So it's basically the ancestry. You should look at that. Or it's pay to play. You basically have to buy something or you have to be a resident. And it could be some combination of those three things.

as far as how you're like kind of going to get in. But it's not the case that you could just like spin, you know, a globe and like put your finger on the map and just like hit a country and you're just like there, right? You have to go through some gates and through a process. You can't just like select your country and just be like, I want to be a citizen of X. Yeah, I mean like Switzerland, you have to be voted on by the locals. You know, and so I mean, like, you know, some countries don't allow dual citizenship. So for me, lifestyle and financial opportunity costs are important. I understand that we all want to save money.

I understand that the idea of paying $200,000 to basically get a book seems silly to people, again, especially from the West. And you've been indoctrinated your entire life to think like this is as good as it gets. People often default to, you know, it sucks here, but it's still the best that there's out there. It's not. But anyway, you know, is $200,000 as a one-time cost? is that better than tying up your money in real estate in Turkey if you don't want to live in Turkey? Is that better than going and spending six months a year in a country if you don't want to spend six months there? Is it better than going and living in a country to become naturalized where the taxes may to be what you want?

I mean, some of the most tax-friendly places in the world, like Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia and Singapore, the Gulf, you know, Dubai and Qatar and all those, even Panama and Central America, they're all pretty stable. if not outright, they just don't give citizenship. So sometimes the places that are tax-friendly and good for actually living in aren't places where you can get a citizenship. I mean, I would say the citizenship through naturalization plays either in Europe where you've generally got high taxes outside of some places where they've got lump sum or non-dum programs. Those aren't always as friendly to crypto investors.

So Ireland is a non-dum program. It doesn't really work for crypto. So Ireland would be a great passport, no language to learn, spend six months or so a year. get the passport in five years, but it's not tax-friendly if you're in crypto. So, I mean, unless you're, you know, you're, you're not going to pay more than $200,000 in tax while you're living there. You wouldn't have just been better off getting the other passport. Ireland's got a great passport. Maybe you love the country. I'm all for that if it's worth it for you, but you have to balance, you know, what is it worth for, like, don't move to a country you hate just to get a passport.

And certainly don't move to a country with crazy high taxes to avoid paying $200,000 for a passport. Now, it was $100,000 in some of those countries up until very recently, and I was telling people it's going to go up at some point, and now it has, under pressure from who? The United States and the European Union, who see more people are doing this, and suddenly they have, you know, some concerns. I want to open up the lifestyle conversation in this whole campaign, because I would imagine that this involves giving up your lifestyle. And of course, what lifestyle you hop into is probably pretty different depending on where you actually end up. But I'm sure that there's some like kind of common denominators here. Like I'm sure you're more of a travel or by default in this like new life that

you're building for yourself. Maybe you can kind of unpack what this new life might look like for people or what some of the choices that they're making here. Somebody laid it out to me pretty well. He said, you know, you're more of a dopamine focused person. You like to keep moving. And so I created the trifecta approach where you could have, you know, three different homes that you spend four months a year in. And if they're all more emerging places, you might be a tax resident of no. and you might actually need to go and get a tax residence if you want to open a bank account, for example. And so you get a tax-friendly place to be a tax resident. Not everybody's like that. Some people are the opposite. And so you can move to a tax-friendly place. So whether you travel or not,

it's really up to you. I like to keep moving. I've become a bit more sedentary as I get older. But largely it's because I just, you know, I have business in different places. There's been different residents and passport deals where I've just, you know, I've bought small properties in different places and I bounce between them that especially came in handy, you know, during COVID, you could, you know, lever between those. So you can choose how much you want to travel. For me, the lifestyle of just getting out of your country, you know, I remember going in a trip when I was a very young adult. And I met a couple of girls. I'm like, this just feels a little easier and a little more comfortable and even a little bit more cerebral. Like we can have more

intelligent conversations that I'm used to where I'm living in the U.S. and just feels like better. And I've kind of proven that right in all my years of living outside of the country. I think that, you know, if you live in the U.S., that's a pretty bad place to meet, well, I guess there's people who come from all over the world. But if you're going to be traveling and meeting people, most of them can't come to the U.S. And that was one reason, you know, why didn't I want to move to Puerto Rico? At the time, one reason was I was single. And I said, I'm not going to meet anybody who's going to be able to come and live with me in Puerto Rico. The person I'm going to meet needs a visa, and they're probably not going to get one.

Or if they're European, like, they're just, they can't be there all the time. I'm not going to probably not going to be as an American. So I think that if you look at it not as what I'm running from, but when I'm running to, I'll tell you what, I look at other people's YouTube videos. I screenshot it to comment from a guy. He said, I can only dream of having the title of husband. And he speaks for so many people, I guess, in the U.S. and I guess the Western world where I feel like so many people are at each other's throats that everything's a war, including meeting people. And I see so many people just feel locked out of having friends and having love relationships. I'm planning my 40th birthday party. I said, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to do something nice.

I've got 19 people flying in, in some cases, from halfway around the world. No one is from down the street. 19 people I've met and some people that I knew from when I was in the United States. And I, you know, don't know probably most of my friends who are in the United States, or 40 years old, don't have 19 people coming down the street to go to their party. And so I think if you look at it, what do I get, not what do I give up, but what do I get? And looking forward to that, the lifestyle piece fits a lot better. Would you say the clients that you work with or the people that you talk to who do this

activity, this nomad capitalist activity, are they like outgoing? Are they like looking for experiences? Like what's kind of like the archetype of a client of yours? I think it's all over the place. No, no strong common denominator. I don't. I'll tell you what. I mean, we have people from all over the world now.

It used to be very Western-centric, but people from all over the world see this is something that you have to do. I think we were one of the first people talking about the Western world doing it. But, yeah, we have people who are very introverted. I remember one guy told me, like, he moved to Dublin, Ireland, for tax savings. And he said, well, I didn't like it because it rained too much. I've never been in Dublin when it's raining. That maybe it's just me.

But I think that's the one thing. The weather is not as bad as people think. But, you know, he ended up moving to like a small island with like 20,000 people or something. Whereas other people, yeah, they want to be in Dubai. They want to be around, you know, those social opportunities. So I think it's all over the place. Obviously, you know, some people are single. And so that means they're looking to find friends.

They're looking to find maybe a relationship. If you already have a family, we've got a guy who's speaking at our event this year, has been a friend of mine for a year. He's got five kids. they live my trifecta approach and they don't even own the real estate. I met him in Bocata a couple months ago. He was staying in a hotel.

They got two hotel rooms for a family of seven and they just travel the world. His wife homeschools the kids. He works remotely. And I mean, they're kind of a self, you know, self-fulfilling unit. I mean, they, you know, are within the family. I was going to ask you about that.

If there's any sort of lifestyle tradeoffs that you see, like if you're, if you subscribe to the style of living, whether you can have a family, family. It sounds like there are some cases where you can. I like can you have property in the way that sort of, you know, the the white picket fence sort of idea of, you know, middle class America, if you get a garage and you fill it with stuff, you put bicycles in there and you just like have different toys. You have a lot of physical, you know, possessions. You get really plugged into your community. Your kids go to the same school. You know, they're brought up the same. Like, are these

sacrifices that you really sort of have to give up if you're going with at least, I can't remember if there's a plan A or the plan B, but whatever the plan was where you sort of like live in different countries and you kind of like exit the U.S. entirely rather than just having a second passport as a backup. Well, plan B would be, I'm going to stay where I'm at, but I'm going to have the tools to get out and be prepared if that's right. I'm going to get a second passport. I'm going to get an offshore trust.

I'm going to have a, you know, but I'm going to be ready to go, but I'm not going to go. Plan A is I'm moving out. Now, the nomad and nomad capitalist, to me, another speaker told me, he said my family moved from Sri Lanka to Australia. My parents do. And now me, I'm moving with my wife to Dubai. One generation, that's hard because I have so many clients, the one thing where they never move or they never renounce that they talk about it and then they stop at the end is

immigrant parents. I spent so much time and effort to come here for you. It's like, well, that's the sunk cost fallacy. But so many of them buy into it. This guy didn't. He said, listen, we got a generation worth it. of Australia, you know, and then I moved. That to me is the nomad. I enjoy traveling. I like different lifestyle. I like going to Colombia and having the food and I've got friends there and I like that

culture, but then I want to go to Asia. Like I like seeing different places. I like watching the world evolve and watching, you know, the emerging world and people making more money and stuff has happened. And I like that. And I've always been a believer since I'm eight years old and giving charitably to places that I wouldn't live. I mean, my charity list is develop. mentally disabled orphanages in India. It's animal shelters in Cambodia. It's that kind of thing. I like to go to Cambodia and see my investments, but I'm not going to live in Cambodia. So for me, the community and giving back was never at a place that I wanted to be. I never understood, like, you know, nobody in Scottsdale, Arizona needs charity that badly. Like, you know, and I kind of

feel like it was selfish to, like, give to people in Scottsdale, like some of the richest people in the world just so I would feel good to be part of the quote-unquote community. Like, I would rather sacrifice the sense of community and know that like people who are really much, much, much more in need are taken care of. And I played some small role in that than like, I went to the Rotary Club and we had punched together and we're all friends. But if you want the house, you can have that. I have a number of, you know, homes.

And I like having the tea kettle and I like having the clothing that I don't have to pack and I go there. and it feels like home. But if you want the stuff in the garage, then I guess you probably just want fewer homes and you can have the house with the garage. And I think, you know, Dubai is a place that if you're in crypto, it's still good.

If you're in business, they do have a new corporate tax for most people. But for crypto, it still could be good. I mean, they're doing that, right? I mean, you have these beautiful skyscrapers with apartments, but you also have lots of villas with that, you know, kind of lifestyle that you're used to. And I think that a lot of people who are Western,

who subscribe to that white picket fence, Yeah, they like to go to the Gulf. I talked to a guy who grew up in a compound in Saudi Arabia. He said, you know, it's not nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be. So I think that you're seeing, like, in that part of the world, they're kind of catering to that audience. They've got a cheesecake factory in Dubai. They like the American brands over there. You can have that kind of lifestyle.

Or you can be, you know, more of what I am where I just enjoy the rush of different places. And by the way, I'll tell you this, having a home in Colombia and going there for a couple months a year, turned me on to hiring people in Colombia. That turned me on to hearing about business opportunities. That turned me on to, let's get a person to come and do like some sales stuff. That turned me on to now we have, you know, and so like to me, being in different places shows you business opportunities. And that's part of why I like it as well, is you're seeing what's beyond your country. Off top of your head, what are the most crypto-friendly jurisdictions in your experience when you talk to people, you know, like in crypto doing that sort of thing? I mean, you mentioned

Dubai. Like what's sort of a, you know, the top five list? of crypto-friendly jurisdictions. I mean, the UAE's probably been, I think, one of the better ones. You know, at one place Belarus was talking about from a tax perspective being good. Maybe it's not a place people want to live. Although I think probably people kind of, I mean, geopolitically, you may disagree, but I think the quality of life there is actually not as bad as people would say. You know, Malta, it's going to front its head in the ring.

I think Bermuda had done some stuff. I can't say I've kept up with those as much. I will say there's certain, like among the Caribbean city, by investments, there's some that are like more open to crypto source of wealth than others. That's something we've had to kind of figure out the hard way. So it's not as easy as like, I'm going to pay in Bitcoin. So, you know, those are probably a couple that stand out to me. I think that what you're, what I'm always looking at is small countries. And so we kind of go back to where we started, which is I think too many people are proud to be from the U.S. or

from Canada. And that's too much of their identity. I meet people all around the world who come up to me and say they met the love of their life or they found happiness or they just moved overseas for more freedom and they're enjoying life because they watched me. To me, that's a much better identity to have that you made it change than a nationality that you had no control over. And I think that, you know, smaller countries are more attuned to that. And I was just in the country of Georgia recently. One where I think a lot of people were doing Bitcoin mining.

I think they were very much open to that as well. They want people to come and do that. They were crypto-friendly. Like, river state deals are on the blockchain there. They've moved over to that. So add that to the list. Whenever they're mentioned in a movie, like, the whole country comes together and, like, has a moment of national unity because, like, no one ever talks about them.

But what are the countries? They're going to be friendly to emerging technologies. The country that is the underdog that needs the attention, that needs the win. That's why I think the U.S., while there are a few people in government who seem pro-crypto, overall will probably be anti-crypto. It's a threat to them. Whereas a Georgia or a Malta or a Bermuda. or a UAE seems that it sees it as an opportunity.

I see people getting like digital citizenships, I think, from like jurisdictions like Estonia. Is there anything to that? Like, what is up with that? Why was I seeing this? We have, we actually have the former president of Estonia speaking at Nomad Countless Live this year because he did two things. He was part of the team that did taxes on a postcard, like this one page, do your taxes in three minutes, which a number of other countries have done.

And he helped introduce e-residents, which was basically, get like an ID that you can open companies, you can open bank accounts. And then what happened was this is the problem. And this may not impact you if you're all crypto. But if you run a business as I do and people want to pay you in Fiat, the banks in these countries often say, well, that's great, but we don't want the risk of opening accounts for people who've never been here who got this e-resident card through an embassy. So you could use it like set up companies and like validate that you're who you say you are.

It didn't work as well. And like Palau is, you know, giving away like, these residence permits for like digital nomads that are, you know, more easy. I'm a fan of kind of traditional stuff. I want a real residence permit that leads to permanent residence or leads to citizenship. I want citizenship. The E stuff can be, you know, interesting at times, but I don't think it moves the needle that much for the stuff we're talking about.

All right. Well, so I promise at the beginning we'd get to some of the criticisms here. So let's dive right into the criticisms of people who've hung with us this far and maybe are still of questions. their blood's boiling for some reason or another. So let's just address them head on. So like the first is this. Is everything that you're just articulating, Andrew, is this unpatriotic?

Is this kind of like running away? Like why not just instead of exit take the time to make the place that you live better and use voice and, you know, have some national loyalty here, Andrew? What like, what do you make of that criticism? Well, I think loyalty has to be two ways. If you go back to a personal relationship, you can be apologetic, you can want to improve, you can want to do all the right things despite being imperfect. If the other person just digs their heels in, what's there to do with that? And so again, yeah, you know what?

I am more understanding of the person in Liechtenstein that says, I'm going to stick around. Why? Well, Lichtenstein essentially functions like a small town in the U.S. I don't think that many people are angry with the mayor of their town, right? I mean, I don't know who's, you know, really upset about the mayor of the mayor. of Avon Lake Ohio where I graduated high school. There's 20,000 people there. People get together and they do stuff in their community. But in the United States and in some other countries, that is overshadowed by the state government and by the federal government. And the federal government

gets to trump all that. They set the tax policy. You can move from one state to another to lower your taxes, but just by little. And I guess what I say is, whether you look at where your tax money goes and what you get back for it, whether you know, you look at how the government treats you, are they loyal to you. I mean, what, what, I mean, you know, I'm thankful for my dad for having these conversations with me. I'm thankful for the lessons I learned growing up. Yeah, I had a couple of good teachers that impacted me. But for me, it's people that make the difference in your life because, yeah, there's some other successful people from Haven, like Ohio. Why aren't they also successful? If it's just, if the government, you know, merely being there is, is what makes them successful.

I mean, I heard, sadly, a couple of people died of drug overdoses. I've never done a drug in my life. You know, why is those two different outcomes? Maybe it's much more about, you know, the family and the people who are in your community. And so, yeah, I'm loyal to my dad for that reason. I, you know, inviting him to my 40th birthday party. Hey, come and speak at the event and hang it with Nigel Farage and all that. I don't understand why there's kind of nameless, faceless entity that's called a country.

And again, the bigger the country, the more nameless and faceless it is. what exactly do I owe them? And by the way, it's the extent that, yeah, I did go for many years to public schools, my parents paid a boatload of taxes. And I lived in the U.S. and I paid a lot of taxes for a while. And so, you know, if you're a productive citizen at a certain point, you know, it's like it just becomes too much. You know, listen, I'm not all for paying zero tax, by the way.

If you live a lifestyle where the net result is zero tax, well, we have statistics. Almost no one's volunteering to pay more tax. But I'm willing to pay something. I just happen to think that I shouldn't be a political pawn because I've chosen to be successful based on things less related to my country and more related to the people that I was around, that, you know, I shouldn't be the political pawn to say, well, now you should pay 70% so that everyone else can get free stuff while the government continues to mismanage the money. Again, less of an issue in Liechtenstein or Andorra, but big issue in the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia.

What about this idea that if we are making sure that we have dual or try citizenship in order to just like prep for some sort of event where we need to exit? Well, everywhere, all countries are a fiat regime. And fiat regimes kind of suck no matter where you are. So what about this idea that if shit really hits the fan just like there's no place to actually. run. Like, sure, you've built your arc, but where are you going to dock the boat? And so it kind of, what about this idea that it only really works if you're accepting this lifestyle while there are also good times. But in the event that there are bad times, like, well, it's bad universally. Well, I think there's good times in some places. Well, there's bad places and others. This idea

that the world is all in one state at any one given time. This to me is kind of a North American almost pornography where I think, you know, Ronald Reagan said, oh, if everywhere else falls, Well, maybe more relevant back then. Look at what's happening with bricks. Look at what's happening. I mean, multiplicity is a big thing now. I think that it's hard for people who have accepted their nationality. That's such a big part of who they are.

It is hard for them to accept that just being American, in the grand scheme of things now, nobody cares. When I talk to my banker in Singapore, she manages a lot of money. I said, would you either have an American or an Indonesian client? She said Indonesian all day long. And we have Indonesians with $100 million net worths. There's plenty of rich people in these countries. These countries are becoming richer. Not the average, I mean, the average person is, but you're seeing some people becoming really rich.

They come with far fewer regulations for that banker. It's so much easier to service them. They're more profitable customers. So this idea that like, I'm an American, I'm sorry to tell. And I'm not saying it's because I hate anybody. But it's just the truth. Nobody cares. You know, Americans, you know, they, it's like, oh, well, I'm sure that the Caribbean will want my money.

They don't care. You're, you're 8% of the clientele. And I think that it's a reality now, you know, the dollar is becoming a smaller percentage of the World Reserve currency pie. You know, it's becoming smaller. I'm not saying the U.S. is irrelevant, but I'm saying it is less and less relevant. And I think that's an adjustment. And so I can tell you this, in terms of what I call hard freedom. is the U.S. government following the Constitution? Are they doing everything that's written down?

Are they like, oh, we have this constitution. Well, that's great. If the people in charge don't follow it and no one can force them to follow it. That's great. You have some words on a paper, right? I, you know, I've got someone who's going to speak at my event. They signed a contract. I'm not coming, they said. And it's like, okay, well, what am I going to do? What's that worth? Now, there's soft freedom where it's just like no one's ever been in the business of screwing with people. it's more of a live and let live mentality. And if that's the culture, that's a hard culture to change. You know, when I talk to my friend in Montenegro who helps me pay my tiny property tax bill, she goes in on a Tuesday at 1 p.m. And there's some guys smoking at a card table. These guys are not, you know, you pay, you don't pay, you're six months late, whatever, right? There's not a formal system there.

And I think that, you know, if you get out of a handful of Western countries, you will find things are pretty darn informal and people don't want to bother you. And yeah, I guess what? I guess if Malaysia dominated the world tomorrow, maybe they'd get their fork and knife out and start, you know, ripping into people. They're not going to do that. And I think even then it would take a while because the culture is just live and let live. And so if you want to be free, I think that's worth something. Now, depending on what you want to be free from, there's different places that are better.

I mean, in Asia, they're not going to respond as well to a, you know, to a pandemic if your goal is to be walking around outside. They're very, you know, health and safety kind of minded. But, you know, they're going to leave you alone in the streets every day. I'll tell you that. So this idea that there's nowhere to go, I've, you know, kind of debunked this on a couple occasions. But I guess having, you know, been to all these countries, it just feels to me like a nice

thing to say to reassure yourself that I don't need to get a second passport. I'll be fine just here. And if you want to, if you're fine, just that's great. That's great. But you've got to own what comes with living in a place. And again, I'll say this. If you're in crypto, I get the libertarian argument. I never signed the social contract to pay tax.

Well, listen, whether you sign it or not, if you don't pay your tax in crypto, they're coming for you. They're beefing up their enforcement. They have a target on your back. And again, I don't believe in these high tax rates. But they're like, you live here. So take the good with the bad or understand there's a place that in every value you have, probably better represents you than the place you happened to be born. What about the fairness argument here?

And maybe this is the last critique that will levy at you, Andrew, to get your response for. It's basically like kind of like a populist type of movement, but just like basic fairness, which is like we talked a lot about these citizenships. They cost money. Even going through nomad, getting consulting. If you have ancestry, it still costs money. But in some cases, it's explicit.

100k to a million dollars to go buy your citizenship somewhere. So some people listening to this might be just like, okay, this does not seem fair at all. Even if they are wealthy, they might have a moral issue with the rich people getting the lifeboats and the Titanic is sinking and kind of the poor people all go down with the ship. Yeah, what's your take on that critique? That this is just like not fair, not the way it should be. And so if you're wealthy, you shouldn't take advantage of this. and if you're poor, you can't.

And so it's like not fair fundamentally. I don't know how many wealthy people are saying that. I think that people who have opportunities, whatever they may be, take them. I mean, you know, it's not fair if you're a beautiful young person to maybe take advantage for those opportunities. But I think many people do. I think that, you know, first of all, one of the things that I push back on is, oh, I can't afford to do this.

I mean, you can get a remote job. there's plenty out there. There's companies like ours all the way up to big companies. You can be in freelance. You can be in crypto and build your own independent, you know, passive wealth. You can find a way to support yourself. I mean, my goodness, the cost to live in a place like a Kuala and poor, which is I think the best value city again in the world.

You could, I mean, you could live there in $2,000 a month. I'm not saying you're living like a king, but you could live a nice lifestyle there for $2,000. If you're from a Western country and your country's so great and all this stuff you're paying taxes for all the education and everything they gave you and you can't scratch out $2,000 a month on your computer. How great was that country after all? You know, like people who are like yell at me that like they can't afford what I'm doing, but they're 65 and they live in what they call the greatest country in the world and they

couldn't save a million dollars. Go back for your S&P 500. You would have had to, I think we calculated if you saved $180 a month for 40 years of working, you'd have a million dollars in the United States. your country's not that great if you couldn't have afforded $180 a month. So that's the first thing. I think everyone can do this. There's digital nomad visas.

Latin America has very affordable residence permits. You can work your way towards citizenship by living there. Some of them are even tax-friendly, if that matters, if $2,000 a month, it doesn't that much. But what I also say is what's the fairness to the countries you mentioned citizenship that are offering that? I think self-determination, sovereignty are important. You saw a number of these Caribbean countries.

They broke away from the UK back in, remember the 70s. The first pitch was, be a banking sector. Well, they had agriculture, but okay, that often didn't work out. Then the pitch was,

okay, be a banking sector. Like, we want you to have some money so that you're not a basket case, you know, do offshore banking. Then they came and cracked down on that.

We're tired of offshore banking. And then it was like, okay, how do we make some money? Let's do citizenship. I'll tell you what. I'm proud. When I watched the

St. Lucia Prime Minister's address a couple of years ago. What do they talk about? I mean, my wife and were joking about it. We're like, we built a road. You know, I come from the U.S. You know, here she is. She comes from Moscow. I was like, we built one road, but it's a tiny island. They got, you know, 175,000 people. That's the biggest of the islands that do this, you know, or in Dominica, we're building low-income housing with the money. And, you know, you've got a lot less bureaucracy. I mean, heck, even France has less bureaucracy than the U.S. these days for building stuff. But imagine Dominica St. Lucia, I'm sure they have a little bureaucracy, but nothing compared to it. You get, you know, a thousand people chipping in 100 grand, 200 grand.

They go for their small population and they do things, basic, you know, human services that, you know, they've had one thing after the other, perhaps, that didn't work. And I think sometimes it was a Western country like the UK kind of rug pulling them on, oh, Well, that industry you have no longer serves us. I mean, how fair is it to a small country that wanted its sovereignty to be told, you know, we like what you do one day and not the next. They found a commodity they have. They're peaceful countries. They leave people alone.

They do due diligence on people. And it's one way to get citizenship. You know, I think that that's good for those countries. And that's one thing that I'm proud of with our employees around the world. I'm proud of with our charity. I'm proud of even with the citizenship process. I like watching people who came in, you know, in some of these countries, they get a $600 a month job. And in three years, they got the same opportunities at Westerners would.

And now they make $6,000 a month. That makes me proud, seeing that people from places where they never thought they would reach that level, got it. And I'm never going to be happy people are hurting. I'm not. But, you know, the arrogance of folks in the United States who thought just because we're American, there should always be a gravy train. Where's our three cars in the garage and one of us works and one of us stays home and it just should always be that way? Well, it's not. And I think that's why, again, there's this kind of frustration among people in the West right now, but it's not as easy as it

once was. And that's partially because you can come and work for me and you can go from $600 a month to $6,000 a month because the best talent should win. I don't know what's anything less fair than that. And I think it certainly has not been fair to some of these smaller countries that they've been held back. I'm happy they can take my $100,000 or now $200,000 and do a lot more than dropping bombs on people or paying off three seconds at the national debt's interest. Probably not even three seconds, probably 0.03 seconds. I mean, like, you know, at the end of the day, I want my money to go to good causes. If like when I, when I reduced my taxes by living the country, not by renouncing it, but just by moving, I, I'd always. always been, you know, somewhat charitable. But when you go from paying 43% to like zero,

hey, I'm going to give more to charity. I can tell you what, the impact of me given 43% of my income to the United States government is a lot less than, you know, given 50 grand to some charity and 100 grand over here and, you know, whatever. Andrew, I think you've got to given a lot of bankless listeners from some cause to thought and for thought on this episode. I'll say for myself, I've definitely part of the reason I wanted to have this episode is because I'm thinking about the chaos of the 2020s and sort of the decline of empires. And I'm sort of like reminded of all of the chaos that happened, you know, in the 20th century and how cataclysmic that was and how quickly it sort of, you know, like jumped on people's radar. And like a little bit of preparation can certainly help. I was, you know, thinking of that this is one. conversation with the Jewish lady I saw a Holocaust a Holocaust survivor and she said

this about Nazi Germany. She said the pessimists left but the optimist stayed and that kind of stuck with me. It's just like man if it's your family or if it's your life you want to have a backup plan to all of this

because things can change in a hurry in the circumstances you were brought up with so maybe this gives some folks some cause for thought of how to have a plan B or maybe a plan A. I'm going to ask you to do this. So kind of summarize all of this for us, if you will, particularly for crypto listeners. And if somebody is interested in finding up more, going through a next step to seeing if like a second passport is good for them, what should they do next? Like, what's the first thing they should do? I'm a fan of having a holistic approach.

The service that I built in our business at Nomadic CalPELPELP, this is built around, I wish this were there when I started. But I'll tell you, we're talking a lot about passports. We've had people call us. They won't work with us. They go out and they get a passport from someone who just say, which beach do you like the best? We'll get you that passport. And then they're like, what did I just solve?

You have to look at what are my goals. I look at it as finance, freedom, and lifestyle. And what I'll ask people is, if you've got 100 marbles in those three buckets, which go where? During COVID, a lot of folks were saying, I don't care that much about taxes. I want freedom. I'm putting most of my marbles in freedom. And obviously, I want a nice lifestyle.

else, there's some going in there. You know, we have people who run big businesses, the financial parts, more of it. Asset protection, tax production, all that. You've got to ask yourself that question. And that's the basis on which you should move forward. So if you go to nomadcapitalist.com, you can learn about our services. We have, I wrote a book. It's on Amazon.

It's called Nomad Calpest. It's a collection of stories that kind of prepares you for what you should be asking. That's a good start. We have an event called Nomad Calpoulist Live. It's four days, about 800 people from around the world. world where we talk about this stuff, we bring in actual business owners from around the world. We've got crypto people. We've got Bitcoin people. That's a place to come and feel it. Or we just offer a service people who just want to hire us and they want us to figure it out.

But I don't think it's about just getting a passport. It could be a combination of residence permits and passports. Sometimes we talk people out of getting a passport. Someone that says, oh, I'm Australian. I need a second passport to stop paying tax. Wrong. That's It's not correct, right? Canadian, wrong. You don't need it. You may need it one day, but right now you don't need it. Okay, I won't pay the 200,000. Thank you. Okay, let's get your residence permit. My approach has been we have dozens of different citizenship options, dozens of tax-friendly countries to move to. If you want a bank account, we have banks all over the world for all different price points. I never want to be the person who buys into Dubai is the answer. It's still good for crypto, but for entrepreneurs, there are better options, I think, now. If you like the lifestyle, fine, that's worth it. But I think you want to know all the options. And so just to go out and talk to someone who's in Dubai or Cyprus or Panama, if there's only one thing to recommend you, you're probably not going to be served and you're probably going to come out of it thinking, did I solve a problem?

The goal was not to move somewhere. The goal is to solve a problem. And everything you asked about the lifestyle, I've plugged into this. I want you to be happy where you go. I'm happier now than I was in the U.S. There's still bad days as there would be anywhere, but I'm happier. And I think understanding what motivates someone as a human being is important to where the things that you're bringing up don't become an issue. Because I do see a lot of expats just moving around the world that they go and do it for three years and then they move back.

And nothing wrong with that. But if the goal is to have a permanent improvement in your finances and your freedom, you're probably not going to get it by going back to the frying pan. I think that you go back to the frying pan because you didn't prepare well enough and you didn't take everything into account. and you just got a passport. And then you're not quite sure what to do with it. And maybe you've paid too much for one you didn't need. That's my approach. So nomadiccapitalist.com is the website.

And by the way, we've got 2,000 articles there you can read. We've got the YouTube channel with 2,700 videos. But we do help people with this every day. It's the most holistic service, I think. It's not for everyone. But it's designed for what I wish existed. That's funny. That's what we say at the end of every bankless podcast.

It's not for everyone. but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. And I think if our episodes are our podcasts and our movement is about going bankless, yours is probably about going stateless and having some more autonomy in the nation state selection here. So, Andrew, thank you so much for coming on bankless today and explaining how all of this works. It's been super helpful. We'll include some links in the show notes as well. We appreciate you.

Thank you. Got to end with this. Of course, you know, crypto is risky. So is your nation state in lots of various ways. you probably don't understand right now. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone.

But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.