1173: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian | How Wealth Hacks the World

22:29Yeah. You know, it's pretty near North Korea. near China, you know, heaven knows. I haven't been there. I don't really know too much about it. And I think that the plan to make a big scale free port didn't work out. They didn't pursue it. But yeah, Russia has definitely been curious about this for understandable reasons. They're under sanction all the time. Yeah, you would think that if you're under sanctions all the time, maybe they don't need it because the whole country is sanctioned. It's like you don't need a carve out of Vladivostok. We're just going to say that you can not pay tariffs on anything unless we decide we want to make you do it.

22:59Yeah. The other thing is the kind of archetypical Russian oligarch also has Cyprus passport, Malta passport, Swiss bank account. They've diversified and it's not as easy as it used to be for them to transact, but they have the right accountants and they know how to do things. Yeah, they've shell companies and they have, they'll say like, oh, this symphony conductor who knew Vladimir Putin growing up in this one town is somehow a billionaire. And it's like, well, he's a wallet for Putin. And until they can sort of prove that, that guy's not sanctions. They really don't even need to worry about this.

23:29He can just call that guy's accountant and say, wire me$100 million, and it happens anyways. Yeah. I think they'd prefer not to have the sanctions, to be fair. Yeah, for sure. But you know, there's always, every time you put up a wall, there's a way around it. Yeah. What about North Korea? I know they have special economic zones there because I've been offered to go to it. I declined. I'd imagine they'd be all over this because they are desperate for cash and they have zero rule of law. There's no moral compunction around doing something like this in North Korea? Yeah, North Korea, the last I checked, and I'm not up to date on this, they were planning on creating some zones where you could own property and there would be more tourism.

24:05This would be a zone where tourists could come in a little bit more easily. And I think that the goal was to have them be outposts for trade with Russia and China. And then, you know, maybe some propaganda, like people can come and check it out. I don't think that they've been as successful or flourished necessarily, But that was the idea that you could have a space in communist country where you could own some property. And that is actually probably directly in the footsteps of what China has done. So China has loads of these free zones. And it's worked really well for China because it allowed them to both maintain their communist regime and also open themselves up to foreign markets, to foreign companies, to exports, to a lot of manufacturing.

24:47So Shenzhen is the most famous one. And that's a free zone. Right next to Hong Kong, which had a different status for a while, as people probably know. There was something fascinating about Mauritius, essentially. This is an EPZ, like a processing zone. Tell us about these, because I find this kind of nerdily fascinating. I'm glad you think so. Mauritius, and disclosure, I was not able to go to Mauritius. I would love to go to Mauritius. It looks awesome, actually. Oh, my God. I would love to go. So after decolonization in the late 60s, early 70s, Mauritius was looking to be in really bad shape.

25:18Economists visited. They were like, this is going hell in a handbasket. And Mauritius actually was able to turn things around pretty quickly. And the way that they did that, and it's a long story involving a local shop owner and watch parts and pilots and smuggled watch parts. They managed to find a way to have goods made in Mauritius and then sent back abroad. When these goods were made in Mauritius, Mauritius was not taxing the companies that were making them. It wasn't taxing the imports and exports. They really just saw it as like a job creation program and a way to bring capital to their country.

25:51It worked out really well for Mauritius for some pretty contingent reasons. There was a big Chinese population, Chinese business people on Mauritius. And Mauritius was a way for those companies to get around import restrictions because there were restrictions for Chinese goods, but not Mauritian goods. And so by having the label sewn onto a shirt in Mauritius, you could get around that. Again, it was a little dodgy, but they were able to harness this sort of arbitraging and actually create a bunch of these special economic zones that were factories. And they eventually were like, OK, we're going to turn the whole island into a tax-free zone.

26:29And that was successful. I think across the board, no one's really taking fault with this model for them. There were issues about labor, about gender, about the way that people were treated. All right, folks, sell one of your antique Aston Martins and purchase one of the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.

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28:11And there's no shenanigans. I don't need your credit card number. It takes a few minutes a day. And many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again. It's all free. 6minutenetworking.com. All right. Now, back to Otusa Abrahamian. It seems kind of like sweatshoppy where they were like, hey, if you want really cheap stuff made. You can send it to here and it's a factory. And then when it goes out of the gate, it was never abroad. It was just in China the whole time or whatever. And they found these unique niches like exporting holes that were drilled in gemstones that then go on, I don't know, a Rolex or something.

28:49There's a little hole that goes on a little post. So it's not glued on. And that was a specialized skill. So they trained a bunch of what it sounds like women to do this. But then instead of being like, we're going to pay you a fair wage for this, we're like, this is going to be basically next to slave labor better than starving, and they start to export this. And even if local labor, let's say, gets expensive or more expensive, they just import labor from abroad, put them in this factory with dormitories. And it kind of seems like a race to the bottom. I can't imagine living in a place like that.

29:20So globally, these kinds of structures represent race to the bottom because factories just go in search of cheaper and cheaper labor and lower and lower taxes. But Mauritius, again, this is an anomaly, right? It worked out really well for them. They were kind of able to leverage that success and then go to the next level of being an offshore center and then became a sort of offshore business center and a tax haven. So they kind of leveled up. The same way that Switzerland went from mercenaries to warehouses to banking to crypto, there's kind of levels of this offshore-ness. And it's probably good for your country if you're able to go up.

29:55But what it means is that somebody else is going to replace you in the bottom. Yeah, that's a good point. I hate the justification, well, if we don't do it, someone else will, but that's kind of what's going on here in a way. Yeah, it sucks. And the reason that this happens is that we have such huge inequality in the world. There's this sort of fiction that all countries have sovereign equality, that all sovereigns are sort of unequal standing on the world stage. But that completely discounts power dynamics and military force and economics. And when there are much, much poorer, less powerful countries competing with the rich ones, it makes sense that this sort of thing happens.

30:28It does make sense. It's sort of like the only leverage you have if you don't have tons of natural resources, tons of space, tons of labor, tons of whatever technical expertise, your competitive advantage is, well, we're kind of willing to make things a little bit more lax. The incentives are there. And it's a mix of incentives and pressure from the private sector. And then also for a long time, the World Bank, the IMF, the development agencies were actually promoting free zones as a model for economic development. So that didn't help either. What about space? That seems like the next logical place to make loopholes for people to make a bunch of money.

31:03Yeah, I call space the ultimate offshore location. Yes, quite. The country that's really seized on space is a close cousin of Switzerland's Luxembourg. You ever been to Luxembourg? I haven't, no. Yeah, it's nice. It's kind of like Switzerland. So Luxembourg, again, like Switzerland, has been a tax shelter. It's been a place where corporations can register to get around rules. They've gotten into some trouble for this, but that's their vibe. In 2016, 2017, Luxembourg came up with a really novel idea, which was to recognize private property in outer space. Just quickly, like to own something, to have property, you need a law that recognizes it.

31:45Usually it's a country's law so that you can transact, you can sell it, you can buy it, you can kind of hold it. outer space is a little more difficult because there are space laws signed at the UN in the 60s that say that no country can have jurisdiction over outer space. They can't plant their flag and say it's their sovereign land. So China can't claim the moon. India can't claim an asteroid. Elon Musk can't claim Mars. But what's a little more ambiguous is whether the US can recognize private property on Mars, thereby allowing Elon Musk to essentially own it. There's some ambiguity in the space law, which Luxembourg fully exploited.

32:22They said, we're going to recognize this. We love property rights. We like to pass laws that rich people like. There were some consultants in the mix. There were some lobbyists from Silicon Valley. And so they came out with the Space Resources Act, which stipulates that anyone in the world who opens a company in Luxembourg can benefit from this recognition of space resources, of property rights in outer space. So it brought in a lot of asteroid miners and sort of sci-fi types. Yeah. A lot of these companies have gone under, actually, but the law remains. And so it's really going to actually outlive the first wave of space companies and probably benefit the future ones.

32:59So fancy countries like Luxembourg can essentially, I think the term you coined in the book, or I don't know if you coined this, but in the book, it's juridical entrepreneurship. Yeah. They're like, oh, OK, well, we're going to just make some laws and dot dot dot print money because we're the only ones who are offering this sort of property rights. There's other more kind of quirky entrepreneurship from countries that can't or don't make space laws. Tell me about this postage stamp. Yeah. Was it Chechnya? Chechnya, Togo. Every obscure little nation you can think of probably has issued a novelty postage stamp.

33:32And it's just like a transparent way to make money off of stamp collectors who will pay a lot of money for a novelty Elvis Presley postage stamp. So let me get this straight. So Chechnya is just like, hey, we're going to break copyright law and print up a bunch of Elvis stamps and then sell them. And this is this is the big idea. I don't think it's a copyright thing. I think stamp collectors just want a lot of stamps for a lot of countries with cool stuff on them. Yeah. And they will pay the big bucks for something exclusive. and, you know, if it's from Chechnya, who cares? I see. This is the equivalent of Disney being like, hey, you can get a mug with Mickey Mouse on it on your way out of the park.

34:08Yeah, or like an NFT. Yeah, yes. This is a real-life NFT. It's called a picture, and it's printed on paper, and theoretically you can use it to mail something. There's only 12 of them. That's why it's so expensive. That's right. That's right. North Korea, they love stamps too. They have a gazillion – First of all, nobody mails anything in North Korea. You can mail things from North Korea. It takes forever, and you usually have to pay in U.S. currency or Chinese money, But they have so many stamps and some of them are like this big. They're like the size of my hand. Some of them are even larger than that.

34:38Then there's normal sized ones. And they have everything from rockets to missiles to satellites to gymnasts and athletes. And then they have, of course, like the different landmarks and things like that. And you can they're really it is cool, even from a guy who doesn't care about stamps like me. It's pretty neat. And it is, again, a blatant cash grab. It's like that propaganda posters. and then they love to try and sell these books that are all written by Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, but they're absolute nonsense and they're like law textbooks. Nobody wants them. They'll probably have AI write them next.

35:07Yeah. I mean, you might as well have ChatGPT tell you a bunch of nonsense that's in those books, but the stamps are cool. I found out about the stamp racket in this kind of interesting way. I read a paper by a professor at the University of Michigan that was all about countries that will do these kinds of novel sovereign entrepreneurship initiatives. So stamps, tax havens, like the whole array of things that only a country can do. And he found that a country that was a tax haven was more likely to sell these stamps, was more likely to do other types of things. And I ended up meeting this professor because I was at U of M for a year.

35:40And I said, Joel, how did you go down this road? It has nothing to do with your ever interest. And he said, oh, well, I like to collect stamps. Oh, there you go. It was sweet, yeah. I wanted to write something about stamps and teach a class. I mean, that's where I went to school, so that totally jibes. This is probably a little off topic, but where does Guantanamo Bay sit in this sort of structure? I know it's a military base, so it's not quite the same thing. The answer is it sits right in the middle of this whole structure because I like to think of offshore detention centers as a flip side of the tax haven.

36:10It's the same logic at work. If you can't pay zero tax in your country, find yourself a country that will let you. If you can't commit human rights abuses in your country, find yourself a territory that will let you do that, that will let you get around the rules. It's really the same kind of legal logic. And Gitmo, before it was a camp for detainees in the war on terror, it was actually a migrant detention camp. That's where they sent Haitian people who were fleeing Haiti in the 90s. Oh, I didn't know that. I thought this whole let's put migrants in Gitmo was new. No, no. There's a long history of that.

36:44And there were migrants sitting in Gitmo throughout the 90s. And it was, believe it or not, it was very controversial and everyone's somehow forgotten about it. I never knew, but I was younger. I guess that's my excuse. I was in high school. Yeah, I didn't really know the extent of it either until I was researching this. So that happened. Borontair sort of overshadowed that. And now we're talking about Gitmo again as a place where it's unclear if the U.S. can really do away with all due process and all sort of legal responsibilities. But there is certainly a perception and a desire to do that.

37:15And the way to do that is to move it offshore. So you also see this happening on a much more severe level with this El Salvador plan to send people to El Salvadorian prisons, sending people to Panama, and now apparently sending people to Libya. What? Oh, my God. Yeah, that was in the news yesterday. Not a great place to send people. No. They have open-air slave markets in Libya now. I've seen photos. Yeah, it's pretty scary stuff. And so we're sort of going back to this now. And I think it's important to think of it in this broader landscape of the offshore world and as just another example of it.

37:48Wow. What about you mentioned this? And I know that Patrick Friedman seasteading where he basically has a floating city idea. This seems like the primary way those could generate revenue. Yeah, you can build your house here, but also you can we have a bank. Like that's the first thing they're going to build besides the thing that floats is a bank, I would imagine. Yeah. So yeah, seasteading is this attempt to create new countries on floating platforms in international waters. The sticking point here is you need other countries to recognize you. So it might be kind of difficult to actually pull off.

38:18But as a thought experiment, I really love seasteading because we kind of are stuck in this paradigm that you can't have new countries, you can't try new things. And seasteading, for better or for worse, is trying to push that forward. So I appreciate the seasteaders for that reason. Yeah, if you create a hypothetical country on a floating platform in international waters, what are you going to do with it? You might just be a weirdo who lives on a boat. You might also use your status as a country to do sovereign entrepreneurship. Postage stamps, tax havens, banks, data centers. There's all kinds of things you can do if you are a country and all kinds of ways to make money if you're a country.

38:54So the possibilities are really anything you can do on land, you could theoretically do on one of these. There's already a floating nation, but I think it's kind of like not super real. What is it called? Sealand. That's what I thought. Yeah. Sealand. And it's like an old oil rig. Yeah, it's an old rig. You can purchase knighthood if you really are interested. They sell titles. I remember there was like a docu. I saw a clip or something on YouTube where this guy's like, yeah, my dad started it. There was a coup there where people tried to take it over and then they got their butts kicked and thrown in fake sort of makeshift, I should say, jails.

39:28and then they have passports and stamps and people live there, which sounds kind of horrible. The king and queen of Sealand. Yeah, they lived there for a time. They tried also to create a sort of a data haven there with some American guys. It didn't last so long. It seemed like a truly a miserable place to live. Yeah. Not fun. You're on the rusty oil rig in the middle of, where is it? I don't even know where it is. Off the coast of England. Yeah, so you have winter, but you're in the ocean. Wet. And it's wet. Wet. And salty. And also, I just feel like that's one of those places. How often do they inspect the integrity of this place where you're living?

40:03I don't know that there's anyone there currently, but I could be wrong. I don't know. This whole thing kind of reminds me of these lawless zones in Cambodia and Laos where they have the scams in the call centers and they traffic people there. And it's basically a prison. I've covered this quite a bit. They're run by a lot of Chinese gangsters, essentially. The pig butchering? Yeah. Yeah. I've covered that quite a bit with the journalists who broke the story about, like, these places exist. And nobody cared. And people didn't even believe them until they started getting videos and photos and rescuing people who were there.

40:35And they were like, yeah, I came for a job. And I ended up in a call center where they tase you. Those are also mostly, I think, special economic zones, right, which allows the state to sort of deflect when they wouldn't otherwise maybe not be able to. Also, though, it's responsible for something like 50 percent of the GDP of Cambodia. So it's like they're not going to do anything about it. It's the biggest industry there. I'd love to talk about passports for sale. I've always wanted another passport because I love being able to travel through Europe and everything. And also, at first it was kind of a novelty thing.

41:04And now I'm kind of like, there is a world where this blue passport is not as valuable as it once was. I think we're already seeing that, but I think it could get a lot worse. Jordan, you're not alone. I have been writing about citizenship by investment as it's known, Passports for Sale, for almost a decade and a half. I wrote my first article about it in 2012. And it has changed. The landscape has changed dramatically. So selling passports used to be this kind of like back page of the economist next to the sex worker ads. Like it was dodgy. It was something it was like a James Bond villain thing.

41:37And in the early 2000s, a group of consultants turned that business around and made it really kind of clean and sanitized. And surprise, surprise, they came from Switzerland. So a group of guys essentially went door to door to different countries, knocking on the prime minister's door saying, hey, man, I've got a business idea for you. How would you like to make some money by selling your citizenship? And, you know, it sounds preposterous, but they really talked a bunch of countries into doing this. And into not doing this in the gray market, but actually establishing rules and regulations and kind of a process by which a foreign investor could buy real estate, donate money, any number of investment schemes, and in exchange receive citizenship from that country without necessarily living there.

42:21St. Kitts and Nevis, the Caribbean island, was a pioneer. Malta jumped on board. Antigua, Dominica, you name it. There's a bunch of countries now that do this. And over the past 10 years, this business has been growing. There are more and more agents and lawyers participating in it, and the clientele has grown. And to get back to your point, when I started writing about this, it was virtually unheard of for Americans to try to buy a second passport. The only Americans who were doing this were the ones who really wanted to just never hear about the IRS ever again. The only way you can do that is by getting another passport and renouncing your U.S.

42:57citizenship. And even then, it can take a while. Uncle Sam is pretty… They're going to say, hey, why did you do this? You make a bunch of money before you renounce your citizenship because you still got to pay taxes on that. Right. There's an exit tax. And actually, right now, there's a big case involving a man who is known as Bitcoin Jesus, Roger Ver, who got into some trouble for supposedly misreporting the amount of crypto he had on the day that he renounced his citizenship. Anyway, it's complicated and maybe not advisable, but people have done it and people continue to do it. The thing is, now, Americans are the number one clients of these citizenship brokers.

43:33They outnumber the other four, top four, by a lot. What are the other top four? I think it used to be Russia. It's a little trickier with sanctions. I think it was UK, China, Pakistan. That makes sense. You know, it changes. But like a lot of the time, it's either people with a lot of money or people with a really shitty passport. So now it's Americans. What does that mean? I have sort of two readings of this. The first is that COVID made Americans realize that the blue passport is not a sure thing. Other countries can close their borders to you at the drop of a pin. And you won't be able to go on vacation.

44:08You won't be able to visit Graham. You're not as free as you think. And so this attempt to buy a little more freedom, buy a sort of insurance policy makes a lot of sense in that context. The other thing that's happened, obviously, is the election of Donald Trump. Yeah. I think that Americans are starting to see their own country in a really different light from the way that they did 10 or 15 years ago and thinking, well, I don't know that this is a place for the future. So I'm going to make a plan B. Yeah, there's essentially you're buying citizenship. I know it's by investment, but I've got friends who are government adjacent in Malta and they were kind of like, hey, if you're interested in this, I can help you cut the line or whatever because it takes a while.

44:49And sometimes you have to live there and they're like, oh, you can use my address, whatever. What are your feelings on this, actually? Because you've done so much research on it. Surely you have thought about the ethical considerations and whether it's ethical at all. For sure. So it's not fair. I think it's crazy to say, oh, this is fair that rich people can buy passports while poor people have to sit in detention camps and get deported. And, you know, that sucks. I see. So the difference between me and somebody who's in a detention camp is I bought a passport from Malta so now I can live in a luxury apartment and they have to live in a refugee camp.

45:22Or, I mean, even look at what's happening here. Donald Trump was to sell gold cards for$5 million and deport, you know, everybody else. Like, it's not just Malta. It's happening in our backyards. Although the gold card is TBD. It's unclear how that's really going to work. Does it exist, actually? Is it real? It exists in Donald Trump's mind. It exists in the sort of public statements. But I don't know anyone who has applied for or even tried to apply for one. It's just talk for now. These things take time. you know, knowing them, they'll probably find a way to get it through. Yeah. So morally unfair, unjust, you name it.

45:57On the other hand, I'm sort of an immigration maximalist. I feel like if you want to move, you do what you need to do to get there. I'm not really here to judge. Of course, billionaires are going to do this with some sort of nefarious ideas in mind. But I don't think you can say, well, you can move and you can't move or you can get a second passport and you can't. So on that level, I kind of suspend judgment. I think it's also really interesting to think about what selling citizenship does to our idea of citizenship, period. What does it even mean if you can buy and sell it? Like maybe this isn't this emotionally loaded status that we've come to think of it as.

46:34You might not be able to afford a second passport, but using our deals and discounts, you can afford to support the sponsors that support this show. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support the sponsors who make this show possible. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, email me, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface codes for you.

47:02It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Atusa Abrahamian. countries like america you'd think we would be the kind of the first in line to sell citizenship because it doesn't really matter where you're from what color you are in many ways we aren't like well you're not american you don't look american that's not a thing people even say unless they're talking about whether you're wearing jeans or something right but japanese for example switzerland i know it's basically next to impossible to get citizenship in these places it's really really hard it takes a lot of time and sometimes it's not even i think in japan I think Japan is like impossible.

47:37You can be like a third generation half Japanese person and they're like, well, sorry, your dad was from Germany, so you're still German. Yeah. And it's like, okay. I mean, it's really, really difficult to do that. I looked this up a while ago because I was like, oh, what second passports am I eligible for? And I thought I was Austrian growing up. And it turns out that my family just doesn't know what Austria-Hungary is. It's not Austria. That's too bad. I know. I was really bummed. Austria is a good one. I applied and the lawyer in Austria was like, so how do you know you're from Austria? And I was like, look, my great grandfather has this.

48:06And he's like, my man, this is an Austro-Hungarian document. Austria-Hungary was like just this mish of countries. You're not Austrian. So then I hired a genealogist to look at my family. And he's like, here's what you qualify for. Israel, because you're Jewish. Ukraine, not super recommended right now. Or you could probably get a Russian passport, but again, for various reasons. And I'm like, oh, cool. The only crappier passports that I don't qualify for, I think I qualified for Belarus. The only one that's worse that, of course, I don't qualify for would be something like North Korea, other than certain African countries.

48:41Yeah, Afghanistan. Yeah. But that's pretty bad. It was a pretty bad selection. Usually when you buy another passport, it's to get a better one, not a worse one. Right, not to get drafted into the Ukrainian army or thrown into prison. Or the Russian army. Or the Russian army, yes. And I was like, okay, Israel's my best bet. And they're like, well, also, I don't know if you read the news, but there's a war there too. I'm too old to be drafted into the IDF, for example. But also Israel, it's kind of like I'm going to get so many emails about this, but getting an Israeli passport now would be kind of like 1990.

49:10And you're like, you know, I should get my South African passport. What could go wrong? I mean, there's a world in which Israel gets sanctioned out into oblivion by a bunch of places and you can't travel there anymore. Yeah. It's not going to help you, Jordan. It's not going to help. The good news is if you have a couple hundred thousand dollars kicking around in a bank account, maybe in Switzerland, you have options. You can get visas. You can get citizenship in St. Kitts, Dominica, Caribbean zone, around quarter million dollars, maybe a little less. So do I have to give them that money or do I put the money in a bank and I can use it?

49:43You can't just put it in a bank and use it. You can buy a condo. There are things you can do that isn't just giving it to them. If you just give it to them, it's a little less. But yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. My friend Neil Strauss, who you might have heard of, he bought a condo in St. Kitts and Nevis and he has that passport now. And it's probably cool because it's a Schengen area European passport. even though it's an island in the Caribbean because of the way that those were formed. But I remember him going, yeah, that was not a good investment in terms of like the value of the real estate is garbage compared to the price you pay for the condo.

50:13Because it's basically you're buying the passport, but you get a condo with it. It's not a good property. It's really jacked up prices in this kind of bizarre way where the real value is the document. It's a piece of paper that you get with it. I didn't look into this, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that the people who build the condos that you can buy for that are related to the president of that country. I think some of them are actually foreign real estate companies, but you wouldn't be wrong to think that in general. It's just like who's going to support a 500 % markup on real estate and then throw in a passport?

50:43Yeah, yeah. Who is buying these things? Neil Strauss bought it because he's a weirdo like me, but who's really buying a passport? Who's investing? I think for Austria, it's like$2 million in invest. Who's doing this? Oligarchs? So, yes. So historically, or like historically, past 20 years, it's been Russians, Chinese people, Indians, Pakistanis, people from countries that don't let you transact as freely or travel as freely. There are really specific scenarios where like, if you're Chinese, and you want to put a company on a stock exchange in a certain place, you can't be Chinese. And so you have to get another one, like all of these really arcane scenarios.

51:21There were some Americans, right, for this kind of anti-tax reasons. And one of the big successes of the citizenship industry is that they turned having another passport into this like must have, you know, it's like an Amex, like the best Amex card. It's like a black card. It's almost a status thing, right? It might not even make sense for you if you're a French citizen to like go throw in another passport. But it really played on people's fears, on people's need for exclusivity, wanting more. And so in addition to being a pretty interesting business and geopolitics story, it's also like kind of a good advertising story.

51:57It is. Yeah, I should. What I should do is interview somebody who does this and be like, can you get an exchange for coming on this show? Can I get a passport that's, you know, a red one or a green one? We'll see. Are there any unusual reason? The whole thing is unusual. But are there any truly unusual reasons people do this? Like, yes, you don't want a Russian passport because it's bad. So you buy an Austrian one. Or yes, you want to float something on a stock exchange and you can't use your Chinese citizenship to do it. Is there anything where you're like, this is the weirdest one I've seen?

52:22The weirdest one I've seen isn't individuals going to buy one, but I'll tell you the story. So just as this passport market was becoming more established and kind of sanitized and clean and run by Swiss people, the United Arab Emirates decided that it was going to deal with the problem of statelessness. Bunch of people in the UAE, they say 10 ,000. I know for a fact it's more like 40 ,000 don't have any citizenship at all. They're stateless. How is that possible? So they entered the country decades ago, generations ago, and never got registered, never got citizenship. Entered from where? Yeah, neighboring countries.

52:57UAE is a relatively young country. The borders are pretty recent. So there was a lot going on. And look, there's also a huge amount of discrimination. You're from the wrong tribe. You're from the wrong place. We're just not going to give you citizenship. It's very expensive to give people UAE citizenship because it's like it's a full ride on life. Right. You don't have to pay for education and health care. It's a good deal. They don't want to give people Emirati citizenship, but they do want to give them something so that the U.N. gets off their case about all these stateless people. And what they do is that they strike a deal with a truly obscure country that I had not heard of until reporting on this, the Comoro Islands, former French colony, independence since the 60s, best known for having coup d 'etat often, very often.

53:40I thought you were going to say scuba diving. They wish. It's beautiful. I went there and it was spectacular. But yeah, they have been unable for various reasons to really develop their tourism sector. And when the UAE... Who's will do that? Military takeovers tend to do that. When the UAE approached them via this intermediary, this guy Bashar Kiyuan, to propose this business deal, they were like, sure. And so on paper, the deal was they're going to document 5 ,000 stateless families in exchange for 200 million bucks, I think dollars or euros. This was 10 or 15 years ago. And so the deal went through and ended up being more than that much money and more than that many passports.

54:19Someone actually leaked me the list of every passport printed. And it was like 40 ,000 people, babies, grandmas, you know, they really did it. Like they documented most, I think, most of their stateless population. Those people still live in the UAE. They're just foreign residents. Overnight, they just become citizens of a country they maybe have never heard of. It's pretty weird. Wow. Oh, and I'm going to guess that passport is genuinely terrible if they're giving it away and buying it in Groupon style. It's the junk bond of passports. However, what I later learned from some people who'd received the passport and then were unable to get it renewed is that a passport is better than no passport.

54:57And so they got these passports. Then there were some problems getting them renewed. The deal was off and then it was back on again. A lot of internal politics. And people realized, OK, actually, I came to depend on this to get my driver's license to send my kids to school. And so it ended up being useful. I'm not saying this is good. This is not the way to solve statelessness, but it did have a use. I was really concerned that this would lead to mass deportations because when you're a foreign citizen, you can be deported very easily, especially in an authoritarian place like UAE. That happened to one dude who was an activist and he was sent around the world in this sort of really crazy series of events.

55:37He was detained, told he had to leave, given the choice between going to like Yemen or Thailand, like a bunch of places and Thailand. Oh, God, I hope he picked Thailand. And he picked Thailand. He was like, sure, I'll go to Bangkok. Yemen is not, yeah. Maybe Yemen wasn't on that list, but it was a bunch of places that were quite unstable slash at war and Thailand. So these are the places you can go without a visa or without too many procedural things. So he went to Thailand. Then he met with some UN people and got resettled ultimately in Canada. And it worked out. But you could see this happening at scale, right?

56:11Just mass deportations with no accountability. That hasn't happened yet. I don't know that it's going to happen. I don't want to say it's a happy ending, but it's sort of they've reached stasis here. But it shows that these passport sales, we think it's just about the ultra rich, but they have knock-on effects all around the world to all kinds of different people. What's the benefit for countries that sell passports? Is it just, all right, we got a bunch of money from the UAE or Malta's like, we'll give you a passport, but it's going to be$750 ,000. And they're like, eh, that's kind of worth it.

56:40We could use the cash. Is it really just that? Yeah. In theory, you know, you have people coming over. Maybe they're starting companies. Maybe they're bringing their lawyers and housekeepers. And Israel is kind of like that, right? They're like, we need more people, Jews, to live here because we're small. We're constantly under threat. And if you want to come here from New York, like, OK, spend six months a year here and spend a bunch of money, bring their wife and kids. It's still expensive to do that. But it's probably better than growing up in Belarus or Ukraine, if you're Jewish, especially.

57:11Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that has Israel has this added level of like, we need to replace people that were killed during World War Two. Like there's a whole other I don't think Malta is like we need to replace the last Maltese. No, unlikely. And they're very Catholic. I think they probably have more kids than most European countries. Anyway. Yeah, it's all about the money in some form or another, whether it's direct or whether it's via starting a company or parking your yacht and hiring a sea captain like it's money. What are the main risks people should think about if they're thinking, oh, I'm going to buy a passport.

57:42I've got 200 grand kicking around. I'm going to get a Caribbean passport. What's the big deal? Find out what your responsibilities are as a citizen. Yeah. You mentioned the draft. I don't think that a Caribbean nation is necessarily going to go to war, but read the fine print. I can see a situation where I'm like, oh, that would be cool. And I grab that passport. And then your kid grows up and they're like, hey, we have mandatory civil service for two years. You got to work in a hospital. And it's like, oh, we're never going to go back there. Oh, actually, we have this agreement with the whole European Schengen area that you can't do that until you have this stamp in your passport.

58:12So I'm like, hey, Jaden, I got bad news for you. This is my son. He's five. You got to go work in a hospital in Dominica for two years instead of going to college because otherwise you can never go to Europe or the Caribbean ever again. And there's going to be a warrant out for your arrest. Yeah. You know, something like that. I've never heard of someone getting drafted after buying a passport. But I do know of people who don't naturalize in countries they're eligible for because they don't want to get drafted or because it's too dicey. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that's a theoretical possibility.

58:39The other thing is if you're buying a passport, you can't count on your visa free access to, say, Schengen area sticking around forever because these agreements are functions of diplomacy and geopolitics and things that happen in the world. And like, who knows? So there are no guarantees in life. And buying a passport is maybe a hedge, but it's not a guarantee. Yeah. I wonder how common is it for people who buy citizenship? What's the likelihood they're doing it for illegal or sketchy purposes? Oh, I couldn't say. One man's sketchy is another man's legal. Well, that's the idea behind buying it.

59:13I'm thinking of UAE. I mentioned this earlier in the show. There's a lot of crypto bros there. And my friend, I was like, yeah, that must be interesting. Those people are so technically inclined. And he's like, a lot of them are just laundering money for drug cartels. They have no idea how to transfer Bitcoin. There have been some very high profile, certifiably shady people who've bought passports. Joe Lowe, the 1MDB mastermind. Yes, we covered him on the show. Yeah, he bought a Cyprus passport. I mean, these things come out, right? So there are many. You can Google them. And they, I think, have found ways both through the legal process and around it.

59:51And so, listen, I say that these are official programs. That isn't to say that if you don't know a guy, you can't go around it. Like, maybe you know a guy in Malta. Like, this happens with some frequency. Yeah, I do know a guy in Malta. The thing is, that happens in all business. This is not unique to the passport trade. This is just business. It's just usually when you know a guy and you're like, yeah, I'll get a discount on this particular motorcycle because he works at the dealership. That's different. Like my dad can get a discount on a Ford because he worked at Ford. You get a little pin code and the dealer puts it in and suddenly you're paying$1 ,000 less for the car.

1:00:23That's different than being like, I know a guy. Now I don't have to leave Europe because my friend is letting me use his mailing address and saying that I rent a room from him. So now I'm Maltese. Yeah. And also I cut a check for$500 ,000 or whatever it is. So interesting on that point, Malta has recently gotten into some trouble because when it started selling passports, the European Union hated it. They were pissed. And they were trying to stop them and it didn't work. And they essentially dragged them to court at the European Court of Justice. And the judgment came out a couple of weeks ago and the judge said, Malta, like, you can't do this.

1:00:57Your people, your Maltese investor citizens have to have a more genuine link to Malta. You can't just have your friends address. You can't just join a golf club. You can't just have a gym membership and say you live here. You have to really live here. He did warn me about this. He was like, now's the time because this is about a year ago. So now's the time, man, because I know they're having some trouble with this. He's like, if you want it, I'll get to the forms. So they're cracking down on that. I think there will still be ways for people to acquire it. You just have to actually move there for some time.

1:01:25Yeah, he said, like, worst case scenario, you have to live here. But there's ways around that, too, because, of course, when you're in the Schengen area, they say, oh, yeah, you're supposed to stay in Malta. Well, who's checking me when I leave? Oh, well, they might see that you flew out of Germany. Well, not if I charter a jet. Well, that's too expensive. Not really, because I don't have to fly to the United States. I just have to fly outside of the Schengen area, book a flight from that country and go. Yeah. I mean, it is interesting in the sense that European rules are undermining European rules, right?

1:01:51Like it's hard to hold these things accountable when you have free movement, which is good. I think free movement is a wonderful thing. So we'll see how that transpires. I think that there are some legal minds skeeving behind the scenes trying to find solutions. You must have multiple passports, I assume. I have four. I have Swiss because I live there forever. Canadian because I was born there. Iranian because my parents were born there and it's actually really hard to get rid of. Wait, okay, we'll talk about that. And American. American, okay. Became American two years ago. Why is an Iranian citizenship hard to get rid of?

1:02:24I assume that's your least useful passport. I think it would be useful if I traveled to the Middle East more, but I don't and I don't speak Farsi. So to get rid of it, you have to go in person, fill out forms. I don't know the language. Would not recommend. Also, I don't have particularly strong feelings about my Iranian citizenship and so I might as well keep it, right? Sure, yeah. There's a whole subreddit for this. It's called Passport Porn. Where people, have you seen this? Yeah. It's like, here's mine. And it's like, whoa, how come you have Armenian and Iranian? Okay, I understand that. But then Belgian and Australia.

1:02:53And then people tell their story of like how they grew up here and then here. And their parents are diplomats from here. I love that. Or you'll see somebody who has like North Korea and South Korea. And you're like, okay, this is a defector. But then they have a Canadian one. And you're like, oh, okay, where do you live now? Toronto. It's really interesting because the people's stories are told in passports. And it's just like a photo of them sitting on the table. Yeah. And yeah, I do love it as well. And it makes me feel very, what's the word? Is it provincial where I'm like, I just have this American one.

1:03:21It's a good one, but like, I don't have the rainbow passport going. You got to work on your stack. I got to work. Yeah, I got to work on my stack. And again, the only ones I qualify for are ones that will get you killed in 2025. I guess if I wanted to drop serious bank, I could become Austrian. I have to invest. I think it is$2 million. You have to invest and you also have to convince them that you're special. So I don't know. Maybe Austrian is podcasters. And this podcast won't do it? Yeah, come on. I'll get one of those super talent. I can't name a single Austrian podcast. I'm sure they exist.

1:03:53Yeah, you're right. That actually is my best bet. Here it's called like a special talent visa. And it's like, oh, I'm a really good Olympic gymnast. Okay, fine. You can settle here. A piano player. This is kind of how it works. You know, I was on one of those extraordinary alien visas. Yeah, really? Yeah. For being a journalist, essentially? For being a writer, yeah, yeah. You have to send them like a phone book full of your achievements and recommendation letters. It's pretty involved, but yeah. Yeah, I prefer the cut a check method, but then those passports are not as widely accepted. If you were going to advise somebody who's considering buying a second passport, hypothetically, what would you say are the top factors they should consider before making the leap?

1:04:32Asking for a friend, of course, a friend who doesn't exist. Okay, things you should consider when buying a second passport. Make sure you have a really trustworthy agent or lawyer. There's a lot of people working in this business now. Some of them are shady. Some of them are super legit. So make sure it's someone you trust, someone who has reviews and who has not knowingly or unknowingly done business with a type like Joe Lowe. So that's ethical, right? But is there a legal reason for that? Because can you get your, if I go through that agent, maybe I get revoked in five years because they're like, eh, we went through this guy.

1:05:02I think the risk is that if you're using an agent who gets things done fast because he knows a guy, like, you don't know if that guy is going to end up working on your case and if that's going to end up coming back to you. I see. Right. So just do it by the book and find someone who who's pretty conservative in that sense. That's a lot of money. Yeah. The second thing to keep in mind is pick your country wisely. Make sure you're not going to get drafted. if you are worried about things like expropriations or a house being seized or, you know, coups. Like, look into that. Make sure it's a stable jurisdiction.

1:05:35Jordan, you could probably buy a Camaro Island passport. I could. I don't know that that's something that you want to do. No. Or that it would help you. It depends on the cost. I would get it for the stack, but if it's just, like, affordable. But, yeah, for travel purposes, it's unlikely I would use something like that. Yeah, and find out what this passport will get you. If it's, like, marginally better than what you can have now, you can just get visas. It's not so hard to get a visa if you have a U.S. passport. And then make sure that getting another passport isn't going to jeopardize the one you already have.

1:06:03Some countries don't allow dual citizenship. Hungary is talking about ending it at this point. These things evolve. Citizenship laws evolve. So make sure you're not accidentally screwing yourself by getting another passport. The idea is to improve your life and freedom, not to decrease it. And if you don't do your research, it can backfire. Why do countries not allow dual citizenship? Oh, nationalism. Yeah. That was the other thing, right? In Ukraine, not only would I have the Ukrainian passport, they require you to renounce your U.S. passport. And that just seems like a really bad deal in 2025.

1:06:34I know Jewish people have more options for this. My producer, Gabriel, he's moving to Portugal. And part of the reason is because his family was there in like, I don't know, 1405 or whatever, probably a little later. But then they left due to the Spanish Inquisition and went to Mexico and then the United States. So he basically just sent in a metric ton of forms and they're like, oh, OK, come here and do some other stuff. Maybe learn some Portuguese. But your passport is being processed. It's going to take three years or however long because they've got to stack 10 miles high. Yeah. But he can basically become a Portuguese citizen.

1:07:08Yeah. My friend did that. Portugal has been doing this. Austria. Tens of thousands of American Jews have become Austrian. I tried that. Spain was doing this to some degree. And then there's grandparents, right? You may have Greek grandparents, Italian grandparents, Spanish grandparents. Like there are almost forensic citizenship investigators that will track down your relatives, get the birth certificates from the municipality, get the signatures. There's a whole industry around this. So you might not even have to drop, you know, 200K. You might just need to hire someone in this Italian village to get the documents you need.

1:07:40I have a guy that does that for people who are interested. He mostly specializes in Jews, but he'll do it for anybody. And it's most of his work, I think, is for second passport citizenship. It's like, oh, you need to prove you're Jewish? And your relatives came from Belarus and all the records were basically destroyed. Now I've got a guy who will go to the graveyard, find your ancestors, take photos of that, dig up copies that were then exported to Germany by the Nazis, grab those copies. Like it's pretty involved. I mean, it's incredible. This is the moment we're living through where everything feels so uncertain that people are scrambling for second passports.

1:08:10I think it says a lot about what we're all collectively experiencing today. The agency that offered me the Israeli thing two years ago or so, they were like, hey, this is a relatively fast process. It's a little expensive, but we handle everything for you. We'll even drive you around. We cover accommodation, blah, blah, blah. I talked to the guy a few months ago because he started listening to the show. And then he's like, hey, if you're still interested, it's going to take like two or three years because we had, I think he said something like 30 ,000 new applicants come in. For Israel. For Israel.

1:08:41And that shows you how bad the situation is, right? So for Israel, mostly from Russia and Ukraine, because things are so bad in Russia and Ukraine that they'll go to a literal another area where there's a war going on because it's still better than getting drafted or ending up in a drone situation. Well, and the Israelis aren't outgunned. Right. Quite the contrary. Right, right. So it's quite interesting that this is how it's cruising. And they're constantly tightening the screws on the requirements. Before it was like, you're Jewish. Okay, fine. You stay here sometimes. You have a mailbox. Now it's like, no, you have to live here.

1:09:14And then it's like, well, if you're really wealthy, you don't have to live here. You just need an address and someone has to get your mail and someone has to file forms. You need a phone number, but you don't have to live here, live here. And then they tighten it a little more and a little more and a little more. But as long as you're willing to pay a few thousand extra dollars a year, that requirement maybe doesn't apply to you. And if you can fly there a few times for some meetings, okay, that's good enough to prove that you live here. It's like a cat and mouse a little bit with these. Yeah.

1:09:39I mean, residents, like actually proving residents is going to be the next big thing. I talked to an attorney in Portugal separately for this passport thing for the show. And he said, yeah, there's a residence requirement now. This is if you're not a Jewish descendant of Portugal. This is just like me as a Californian wanting to go there. They hate Californians now because we've driven the real estate market sky high. guy he said actually yes there's a residence requirement but the way they prove that is they send you mail you have to have a phone number you have to get bills paid and he goes so what you do is you buy a property or rent one then you rent it as an airbnb and he's like i happen to know people who manage those and then you leave by train and the government just goes ah he lives at this place meanwhile this lawyer agency guy is renting it out as an airbnb to tourists having it sort of pay for itself a little bit.

1:10:30And then after two or three or five or however many years, you just suddenly have lived there long enough to get a passport. Yeah. So it's, again, just like cat and mouse, like there's a requirement, but then a lawyer, an agent, somebody else is willing to do something right on the line slash over the line for you for the right price. Yep. And you're good to go. Yeah. But you're right. It does say something about the uncertainty globally that this has now become a thousand percent more popular in the last whatever five years. Yeah. And I can certify that. Like I've watched this go from zero to 60.

1:10:59We're like 55 right now. What do you think the next move is with this? Do you think more countries will start to sell passports like the United States? Or do you think that countries will go, you know what, this is starting to become an immigration issue. Maybe we turn it down or just jack up the cost. I mean, these are immigrants that countries aren't really going to turn their noses up at, right? They're like rich white people who like have remote jobs and like money. It's going to be a different political problem from large numbers of people coming from North Africa or the Middle East for like essentially racial reasons.

1:11:33I think what's going to happen, and this is my speculation, I think they're going to tighten the screws some. It's going to look a little more strict. There's going to be a ways around that. But I do think it's going to be more important to actually move, which is actually fine because it seems like now people do want that. I think a lot of us can use a few years abroad, expand our horizons in any case. Yeah, definitely. A thought I had is that all of this talk of globalization ending and nationalism coming back is actually pushing people away to take more advantage of globalization. Some people.

1:12:04Some people, yeah. Well, it's almost going to be like a different tier, right? There's going to be people who go, yeah, when this whole nationalism thing hit, I decided to get my Irish passport by descendants or what do you call it? Heritage. Heritage, yeah. And then my head of sales over a podcast one, she's getting her Irish passport because basically you just have to say your great grandparent has it. Now suddenly you've got a great passport because Ireland's pretty solid. Italy, I think, just closed the doors on this a couple months ago where they were like getting all these people who are, my great grandmother came from Sicily.

1:12:31I think now they were like, all right, it's enough. We got half of New Jersey. What's going on here? Yeah. What's up with Edison, New Jersey, just moving over to this place? And I think they got sick of that and they decided to tighten up the requirements a lot. All the people who applied, I think, before April are good to go, but everybody else is just kind of SOL at this point. Yeah. Austria, the Germans are always kind of tight on this kind of stuff. So they really want to make sure that you are pushed out because of the Nazis or that your grandparents lived there or even you have spent time there, speak German, etc.

1:13:00But yeah, I think it's quite interesting. This sort of crust of people who are moneyed, international, don't want to be locked into a place for different reasons. They'll become more international. But I think, man, the people I grew up with in Michigan, they're not doing this anytime soon. They are going to have their blue passport. And if it means you can only go to Florida because you can't go to Mexico or Canada in 10 years or Europe, that's not. You're going to be stuck. But it's not really going to affect their day-to-day life. This isn't something that bothers them. They go to Fort Lauderdale on vacation.

1:13:30They don't go to Paris. And if they wanted to go, now they can't or they have to apply for a visa. It takes a year to get it. So it's fascinating to me and a little alarming because it does seem like, look, I fall on the right side of the line, I think, here, fortunately. But only because I got really lucky. I started a podcast 18 years ago, and now it's lucrative. If I had worked in the same industry as my parents, my mom was a public school teacher, my dad was an auto worker, I would have zero options to explore anything like this. So it's going to create this sort of divide, this tier of society that didn't exist before.

1:14:03Yeah, we have so much inequality, and there's only going to be more of it. I think that's clear. Leave us with some good news. Some good news. anything. I mean, right now I feel much better to launder my ill-equipped or ill-gotten podcast gains and escape US government jurisdiction. So I appreciate that. But leave us on something a little more positive. I guess, okay, positive maybe for everyone but Americans. But I think that Americans are finally, some Americans, the ones we've been talking about, are finally maybe dropping a bit of arrogance about how they see themselves, about how their country behaves and realizing that they're not immune.

1:14:38Dropping the argument. You don't have Twitter. I think there might be a little bit more humility among Americans, especially Americans who go abroad. I think that we're going to start seeing that. And where will this moment lead us? Who knows? But hopefully somewhere better. You got to keep some hope. Yes, that's true. You know, I wasn't going to continue after that, but I feel compelled to. I used to say things like, I'm trying to think of a good example, but it would be something to do with immigration, for example, or the way, let's say, like China treats people or surveils people every five to 10 years or so i lose a little slice of the pie of my ability to do that right it was like before 2001 or patriot act stuff i could say this surveillance is absolutely ridiculous we don't do this look at how you live compared to how we and now i'm like oh patriot act 9 11 stuff nsa edward snowden disclosures yikes okay i don't really have a leg to stand on there and then it was like look we accept immigrants we incorporate them into society and look at the way this country treats immigrants and doesn't incorporate them into society and they're second class citizens.

1:15:40And now I'm like, oh, we're deporting people with no due process to a prison complex in El Salvador that doesn't let people outside and puts them together like cattle. Maybe I'll shut my pie hole on this one, too. When governments do something really egregious, it can go in one of two ways. It can normalize the really egregious behavior or it can make the world realize how egregious it is. And I think we're on that side now. I mean, the world is appalled at these deportations. The world is in Canada and Australia, they voted for really ailing middle-of-the-road liberal parties because they didn't want to go down this road with a Trumpy candidate.

1:16:12So maybe that's also something to be a little optimistic about. Yeah, especially if you can afford to move to Canada with your Iranian passport. Atusa, thank you very much. My pleasure, Jordan. Thanks for having me. Imagine facing a rare, incurable disease and finding out that AI could repurpose an FDA-approved drug as a potential cure. That's the breakthrough achieved by Dr. David Fagenbaum and the mission of his company. I'll never forget the doctor walks in the room and says, David, your liver, your kidneys, your bone marrow, your heart, and your lungs are all shutting down. That's it. Like, we've tried everything.

1:16:48There's nothing more that we can do. I was terrified. I was like, had my last rites read to me, of course, you know, no one thought that it was even possible that I could survive. You're dying from this horrible disease. Chemotherapy just gave you a little bit of a window, but it's probably going to come back. So, you know, what's your game plan to prevent this thing from killing you? Well, the only way to get back is to use the tools that you have within reach. I'm like, shit, I've got this horrible disease. And the only way that like, I might be able to save myself is if I can find a drug that's already at the CVS.

1:17:17And so my mission then became, could I figure out what the hell's going wrong in my immune system? So then maybe I could find a drug that already exists that could treat it. I'm not supposed to be here. Like, my drug wasn't made for me. It saved my life. It was always there. I am completely on fire about this idea that there are drugs at your nearby CVS, your nearby Walgreens, that could help more diseases and more people, but the incentives aren't aligned for us to do that. So we created Every Cure a couple years ago because we believe that every drug should be utilized for every disease it possibly can, regardless of whether it's profitable or not.

1:17:5580 % of our drugs that can help people today and tomorrow, no one's doing any research whatsoever to figure out more uses for them. Tune into episode 1005 of the Jordan Harbinger Show to explore how existing medications are bringing new hope to those confronting elusive illnesses. Man, I don't know. What passport should I buy? Send your suggestions to Jordan at jordanharbinger.com. I actually might get a Taiwanese one. I'm going through the process right now. and then I guess when China takes over and makes everybody a citizen of China I'll be a Chinese guy? I don't know. Is that how that works?

1:18:29All things that do Zab or Amin will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com Advertisers, deals, discount codes and ways to support the show all over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals Please consider supporting those who support this show. It does make a big difference. Our advertisers love it. They circle back with me and then they buy again and then I can afford to read books and talk to smart people and keep making this stuff. Also our newsletter are a wee bit wiser. It's very specific and practical. It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions and your psychology and your relationships.

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1:19:29Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who is interested in, I don't know, maybe they're on the market for hiding their stolen art or a passport that gets them out of their restrictive regime, definitely share this episode with them or anybody who's interested in geopolitics. oligarchs aside in the meantime i hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time