1285: Passport Bros | Skeptical Sunday

25:27Of course you're rich. Everyone's rich. And it's like, no matter how he explains that just because he makes, let's say he makes 45 grand a year, everything is more expensive here. That's like completely lost on them somehow. They just don't care. They don't care to hear it because, but you make five times as much or eight times as much as us. You're rich. We can't wrap our mind around. So there's a situation where, sure, you might encounter some gold diggers because they assume you're rich by American standards, not Cambodian standards. But the whole, like, let them assume whatever they want can bite you in the ass when you get married.

25:58And the family's like, great, you need to build us a house now. It's like, whoa, that's not what I meant by rich. I meant go out to dinner four times a week, rich, not buy you a house that you construct to your dream home standards, rich. Global inflation is also a thing. These disparities just aren't what they used to be. How has the wealth gap between developed and emerging nations narrowed over recent years? Because when I did a lot of my traveling, like the late 90s, early aughts, the gap was pretty big in some places. And that's when it starts to close. From roughly 2000 until the COVID-19 pandemic, the between-country income gap narrowed significantly.

26:40The average income in developing nations grew nearly three times as fast as in advanced economies. So if you're thinking you're going to waltz into Brazil and be rich because you're a junior-level dev making$60 ,000 a year, you're first going to need to hop into your time machine back to 1995. five. Yeah. Do you have any specifics on how much the gap is narrowed? Yes. Between 1990 and 2019, the Global Genie Index, this is the measure of inequality among all individuals on Earth, that dropped significantly from 70 to 62 points. I don't know specifically what that means other than that it dropped a lot.

27:18So that means that the poor are less poor is the short version. Relative to other people. The drop was driven by emerging economies growing nearly three times faster than the West. And that's according to the Journal of European Economic Association. Emerging markets account for nearly two thirds of global GDP growth over the last 10 years. Yeah, it's also not the 80s in terms of access to education and information. People in Jakarta who live outside and ride a motorcycle for a living to deliver stuff have 5G phones and access to fintech and can read the New York Times or whatever if they wanted to.

27:56It's a totally different world, man. Yes. There's also the issue of a bunch of Westerners finding out about some big hotspot for cheap living. And voila, it's not cheap anymore because everybody moved there. I remember when the place was Prague. Yes. It was like, oh man, Prague's like beers 25 cents and I'm renting a mansion for 50 bucks a month. Prague is not like that. It has not been for like 20 years. It wasn't even what I went to Prague 20 years ago. It wasn't even like that. It's funny you should mention that. I went to Prague in the 90s and I went back in like 2020 or something like that.

28:29And I remember telling people in Prague, like, yeah, I came here last time and I stayed at a youth hostel and it was$4 a night. And they were like, yeah, I remember those days. is a guy I know was renting like a really sick apartment overlooking the whole city. And I was like, oh, how much is this? And he's like, oh, it's pretty expensive. And he told me it's a couple thousand dollars a month. And the owner said, yeah, I bought this place. And when I first got it, the rent was like$80 a month. And now it's like a place that he rents out for$600 a night or something because it's enormous and has like a badass roof deck overlooking Prague.

29:04The shift from like communism, nothing works. Where can we get some currency happened? And now it's nope, we're just on the market economy like everybody else. yeah and word travels fast about these places there's also an issue and i think this is present both with passport bros and their critics we've hinted at it but there's this idea that foreign women don't have agency they do and they're far more capable of deciding who they want to date and marry than you are from 10 000 miles away i think that there's this really gross assumption the caricature of Passport Bros anyway, and the critique of that caricature share, and that's the idea that these are women who are not capable of making decisions for themselves.

29:52Yeah, I can see how there might be a power disparity from one perspective. I mean, if you're making 10 times the annual wage in a country, yeah, you might have some leverage over other people, even women that you date, even that's a gross way to think about it. On the other hand, it's hard for me to see any scenario where that alone is going to be enough to get you this mythical unicorn trad wife or whatever that some of these guys are after. By the way, if you're unaware, a trad wife is short for traditional wife. That's a woman who adopts a lifestyle centered on traditional gender roles and domesticity, typically prioritizing homemaking, child rearing, and submission to her husband over a professional career.

30:29It's sort of like an internet meme-y kind of thing, like trad wiving. yeah i think it's a fair definition i do not have a trad wife by the way for anybody who may have misunderstood from my earlier comments i didn't take it that way and no you do not but no i definitely do not have a trad wife i do think a lot of guys not all but like i'll hashtag not all passport bros but like a lot of these guys do think they're going to kind of land a southeast asian slave wife or something and it's like huh hold the phone buddy that's gross and also not as likely to happen as you might think. Yeah, buy a lottery ticket because you probably got a better chance of winning that than you do of...

31:06Anyway, I think your definition of trad wife is fair. I also think that the quest for the trad wife is ridiculous because it assumes that priorities don't exist on a spectrum. Like a woman is either pregnant with a baby on each hip and dressed like a Mennonite in a wheat field, or she's like this hyper-masculine man-hating career woman. These are not your two choices. But here's the punchline. There's a decent chance that the women in the host countries are going to be more educated than the passport pros. This was really surprising to me. World tertiary education of women has skyrocketed since 1970.

31:48That's another World Bank statistic. Female participation in the workforce has also increased dramatically. The chances that these women are looking for a provider is probably very low. We're also seeing a dramatic decrease in what can be called traditional values, according to the World Values Survey. By the way, you're also thousands of miles from home with little to no support network, and she's not. In a culture you may not understand completely, you may not speak the language. If you do, you don't speak it as well as she does. So when you really look into the data here passport bros in search of a trad wife are woefully misled and people angry about their search for a trad wife do seem to in my opinion be buying into this outdated and somewhat offensive in my opinion frame of what the developing world is like that has not had any resemblance to reality since the 70s.

32:53This is before I was alive. Right. We're talking about real people. So it's just not that simple, especially in tourist economies. We can safely assume a certain amount of savvy on the part of the women dating the passport bro. So if these are myths that miss the mark, what's the reality of the passport bro phenomenon, Nick? Well, if you're looking to drill down into hardcore data on this episode, you are going to be disappointed because there's a census of the passport bro we can fall back on. Oh, there's no, what is it called? Like a Pew study or whatever. What are those polls that they're always like?

33:25According to a Gallup, there's no Gallup polls. Yeah. Gallup polls and Pew studies. No, we don't have any of those. Are you a passport bro? Click here for$25 survey. We want to find out what kind of weird internet meme reality you think you're living in. What about just the number of Americans living abroad? Surely that's a number we can find. And then extrapolate wildly from there. Yeah. I mean, speculate wildly from there. Yeah. It's between 4.4 and 5.5 million, according to the Association of Americans Resident Overseas. Most of these are women. It's 52 percent. But that also only includes people working abroad.

34:01It wasn't clear to me if that included people employed by overseas companies or just living and working abroad. If you think flying 5000 miles turns your mediocre personality into a selling point, I got bad news. But first, sponsors. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by FitBod. Let me tell you why most workout plans fail. They are boring. They're generic. They expect you to remember what you did last time. That's why FitBod works so well, especially for New Year goals. You don't need motivation tricks or a new influencer routine. You need something that adapts as you go. I'll just open up FitBod before a workout, punch in how much time I got, what equipment's around at whatever hotel I'm in or whatever, and it instantly builds a workout that actually makes sense for me.

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36:13Kickstart your well-being journey with your first audiobook free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash JHS. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. I have to say I'm a little surprised that mostly women are living above. It's only by 52%. But still, like, I thought it would be 80 % dudes or 60 % dudes or 75%. I'm quite surprised at the balance, and I'm certainly surprised that it's more women. I don't know why. That just surprises me for some reason. Good for you, ladies. Get out there and travel. Guys, we all should be doing that. All right, so it doesn't tell us a whole heck of a lot about how many passport bros there are or who these people are or anything like that.

36:51There's 25.5 million videos on TikTok about passport bros, but those are both from bros and their critics. The subreddit, thepassportbros, has 99 ,000 weekly visitors and 2 ,500 weekly contributions. It's definitely a thing having a cultural moment, but beyond that, it's hard to parse out. What we do have, however, is a whole bunch of articles about Passport Bros and the phenomenon in general that give us varying degrees of insight into who they are. Travel Noir ran an article profiling Passport Bros that didn't give a ton in the way of additional insight, but one of the things noted in the article is that if you're an American and you move abroad, But depending on the country you move to, you've almost certainly moved up in height relative to everyone else in your new host country.

37:42Huh. Why is that important? Don't go to the Netherlands. I guess you'll be short unless you're really tall. Women expressing a preference for height is prevalent across nearly all cultures. And it's not just a stated preference. If you know the difference between stated and revealed preference, north of 90 % of all Western couples have a taller man with a shorter woman. If you want us to talk about, oh, that's not universal and different cultures. I think it was like the cook Island tribes are an exception and they were only 10 % of the women have a taller partner and they prefer men who are as tall as they are.

38:23So there's like nowhere in the world where women are like, oh man, this guy's six inches shorter than me. Dig it. yeah, throughout almost the entire Western and post-colonial world, women want a man who is at least taller than they are. So if you're 5 '5", and no shade, I'm not making fun of people who are a little bit shorter, by the way, I think the height standard sucks, really, but you can't argue with people's preference. But anyway, if you're 5 '5", and you move to Peru or something where the average height is lower than it is in the States, which I think it's like 5 '6", 7' here, whatever, something like that, you're going to instantly jump up on the scale, right?

38:57You get an extra point if all of the women there are shorter than you, it's going to feel pretty good. Your dating pool opens up a little bit, whether it's fair or not. Man, I felt like a giant when I lived in Ireland. I'm 5 '9". Really? I'm not a big dude. And I was like, man, I feel like I'm two inches taller just living around people that are two inches shorter. So this article talked about the similar phenomenon of leveling up an income, which you may do, but it's how significant is it? By the way, the average height in Ireland is 5 '10". Oh, I call shenanigans on this data. There's no way.

39:29That's interesting. I mean, this is just what like Gemini has surfaced for me. That is so interesting. Come on, Wikipedia. I gave you$3. Five foot nine and a half average height for males, five foot nine and a half. I call shenanigans. That's interesting. I was taller than like every dude I met in Ireland. Either way, if everyone in your area was shorter than whatever, But yeah, for women, it's 5 '4". Wow. Damn. I'm not that tall. That's what I'm learning right now. I am taller than average, barely, like 5 '10". Anyway, move on. See, this is why the height thing, nobody wins. You got to go to North Korea where you're like, all right, fine.

40:08Now I feel tall, for God's sake. Dude, it's so weird. I used to date a girl who was like a couple inches taller than me in her bare feet who wore heels like every day of her life. and since this was before the internet decreed that this was the most important thing on planet Earth, I never thought about it. And then this happened and I'm like, man, I'm 5 '9". I'm a dwarf. I'm a mountain dwarf. I went to go live in Yugoslavia, which is, by the way, pro tip, don't go there if you want to feel tall because the average height, I think, is six feet. Go there if you don't want to get kidnapped by Serbian death squads.

40:44There's also that. Yeah, Montenegro, like you won't meet anybody who's not a giant. And Bosnia, same thing. Average is over six feet for men. So you're just like automatically. There's a place called the Denarik Alps. I was like, where's the tallest one? It's in southern and south central Europe. So it's like Balkan area. Over six feet is the average height for men. It's taller than Denmark, taller than Sweden, taller than, you know, Lithuania, Latvia. Those are tall countries. Like those are the average height of a man is taller than me. so it's taller than the Netherlands yeah anyway we're gonna have to do a whole skeptical Sunday on height because it actually is quite interesting apparently Tito was getting them babies their milk that's right yeah so the the article talked about the similar phenomenon of leveling up an income I think it's more like I made fifty thousand dollars back home and I make 62 grand comparatively in this country and it's like good for you but you can save more or something yeah yeah I'm not to sneeze at 12 grand, but anyway.

41:41Yeah, you're not going from taking the bus to having your own jet. You're going from taking the bus to having your own Vespa. Yes. So the other thing that was interesting in that article is the guys talked about how dating was easier, but they didn't really seem like they were looking for trad wives. In fact, they didn't necessarily seem like they were looking for wives at all. A lot of them just seemed to be young guys sowing their wild oats, as my father might say, while they save up money. Which is important because the stereotype is that they're moving to Bolivia to try and get a glorified mail order bride.

42:16Correct. And the Travel Noir article has a guy explicitly saying that he likes learning about new cultures and saving money. And that's why he does this. Dating, let alone finding a wife. He didn't mention it anyway. Who knows what lurks in his mind, but he didn't mention it. I think a common theme in what we're going to see is that passport bros in reality are much more complicated than the stereotype, which of course they are. There's another article in Le Mans that is very short and very unserious. It presents what is an obvious joke reel on TikTok about holding up your passport to attract women and treats that as if it were, oh, look what this guy's doing.

43:00He's making a stupid reel for TikTok. It speaks very authoritatively, this Le Mans article about these guys, and it doesn't interview any of them. It just seems like they're making it up. I will give it credit for mentioning in passing that women may be passport bros themselves. But, you know, Le Mans has a major paper in France, and it just published this smear piece without any backing, which is interesting to me, especially when this article is cited as an authoritative source other places. the New Zealand Herald did what more or less seems to be a write-around of the LeMond piece. What does that mean?

43:38What's a write-around? So a lot of online content today is just repurposed from other sources. You can tell one of these articles repurposed the other one because they say more or less the exact same thing and have the same sole source. A guy named Austin Abeyta. I have no idea who this guy is. He's the passport bro on social media. And we're going to talk about him a little bit more in depth later. But neither of these articles interviews him. They both just refer to TikTok articles he did as some kind of authoritative source on passport bros. Wow, two major world newspapers not even trying to interview somebody and just using social media posts as authoritative information about passport bros.

44:19This is such lazy non-journalism. Oh, it's going to get quite a bit stupider. the travel that's the name of a website apparently did an article that at least leads with the fact that people's dissatisfaction with dating is at all time highs okay that's a good start so where does it all fall apart the article uses as its main source a website called the official passport bros.com the page contains tons of ai images the page being the official passport bros.com It just looks like a lander designed to harvest clicks from people searching for passport bros and then sell them tchotchkes. It's not really clear to me how one would become the official website of passport bros.

45:06But the part of the page answering what is a passport bro could be a sort of unofficial manifesto of the movement, maybe. Okay. Because it reads like a caricature of what passport bros think. Like, feminism has ruined women, and marriage is this trap for men, and it doesn't read like something an actual person, let alone passport pro, would write. Even if this were some super toxic red pill guy, it doesn't pass the smell test. It's way too on the nose. For those unaware, red pill is a whole other rabbit hole, but briefly, it's a corner of online masculinity culture, where men believe they've woken up to supposedly harsh truths about women and dating and gender dynamics.

45:50It's less about self-improvement and more about adopting this cynical adversarial worldview that frames relationships as a zero-sum power struggle. It's kind of what people are talking about when they're talking about like toxic masculinity and dating. It's like this stuff. It begins with this and gets worse from there. Yeah, that's a fair encapsulation. But The Travels article is getting better a little. But once again, they don't interview these guys. I mean, if they're this omnipresent phenomenon on TikTok, you'd think you could get one of them to sit down with you for a cup of coffee or a Zoom call.

46:25But no, they just found some bizarre website posturing as the voice of passport bros everywhere and took that as their authority. Yeah, I mean, these guys are all over Reddit as well. I mean, you see them everywhere on social media. It's a whole thing. So how did you pick these sources? Because these are crappy. Yeah, they suck. So why'd I pick them? These are all the articles cited as sources by Wikipedia. And feel free, roll your eyes out of your head and go Wikipedia. But 99 % of people who want to know what a passport bro is are going to Google it, click the Wikipedia article, read that, and then call it a day.

46:59So I think it's significant to point out how poor the journalism is on these. Fox News at least went out and interviewed subject matter experts. But again, no Passport Bros were harmed in the making of this article. What is a subject matter expert on Passport Bros? Besides you now, what does subject matter experts have to say? How can you get credentials on something like this? A journalist can research it like we did. They didn't bother, clearly. We've got a dating expert, whatever that means. Yeah, as somebody who used to work in that industry, that doesn't mean anything. I could tell you that right now.

47:31They also spoke to an education expert and researcher analyzing conceptual foundations of biology, which again, meaning nothing. We've got Paula Pardell of Bloom Matchmaking. No one quoted in the article seems to be an expert in anything meaningful or relevant to the topic at hand. So this Fox News article, we've got a bunch of experts talking about passport bros as if they're experts, but they're just saying the same things that the unsourced articles do. And I know this trick very, very well. As a journalist, you're not allowed to make sweeping authoritative statements, but you can absolutely feed them to a subject matter expert as a question and get them to repeat back what you just said in different words.

48:20Right. And voila, now your article says what you plan for it to say all along. But somebody with credentials said it for you. That's funny. The Skeptical Sunday started out as a Skeptical Sunday on Passport Bros and has now evolved to do a Skeptical Sunday on crappy journalism. Here we are. Hey, man, neuro link it directly into my brain. But that's right. So the last articles I want to talk about, finally, at long last, they talk to a passport bro and ask him about the alleged movement. They finally get around to it. So here's the issue. This is one article we have about one guy. It's a journalist interviewing him and then rewriting it as a first person essay, which is kind of bizarre.

48:57But so she really is letting him have his say or it seems so from the outside. So who is this guy? Is this the well-known TikTok-y guy running things? This is Austin Abena. He's in his early 30s. He runs a big passport bro TikTok and Discord. If you're going to interview one single passport bro, he's the guy. So what does he have to say about his movement? Honestly, he comes across as totally reasonable. He didn't leave America so he could prowl the world looking for destitute footbound women who were desperate to be his live-in maid and sex slave. He mostly embraced the digital nomad life and then the passport bro thing, dating women from other cultures.

49:38That was a byproduct of a digital nomad lifestyle choice that he made. He comes across as intelligent, serious, and thoughtful. He talks about the seriousness of settling on a partner and how dating women from a number of different cultures makes it more likely that he will find someone who aligns with him, which is fair. In fact, he says most of the guys he talks to want to settle down, but they want to make sure it's with the right person. Does that sound familiar at all to you, Jordan? Yeah, that's funny. So what he's describing is what a lot of guys that I encountered when I ran the dating company had to say, right?

50:17My company wasn't really a place for guys who were like trying to pick up chicks all the time, get laid all the time, bro. It was more for guys who were mid-career, looking for something more, wanted a solid girlfriend or a wife, part of that something more. But they also didn't want to marry the first woman who looked at them like some grunt at a basic training. And that was very much my experience. I took Jordan's course because I worked for that company as well. And that was my experience with the guy that was in the course with me. You can say this is just one guy, which is obviously true.

50:46But from everything that I could tell, Austin Abeyta is not a guy. He's the guy. He made the holding up the passport and a woman approaches you video I talked about earlier, it's so obviously a joke that journalists writing about him are just pretending to not understand. Or maybe they didn't get it. I don't know. Nah, these types of nonsense journalists are evil, not stupid. They're lying. They're not stupid. They get it. It's obvious. Go find the video. But Abeda comes across as serious, thoughtful, and frankly, quite mature for his age. Why? Other than looking for a partner, seriously, like that can't be the crux of the episode.

51:23no but let's talk about the passport video he holds a passport up a latina woman immediately approaches him it's a joke which we know because he talks about how it's this total american chauvinist attitude that every woman on earth is just like desperate to marry someone with an american passport i assure you there are millions and probably billions of women who have no desire to live in the United States. I would suggest that women who are - Some of those women already live in the United States and they don't want to live here. Yeah. Yeah, right? I think women willing to marry a man for a green card are just outliers in the extreme.

52:01Related to this, he talks about the idea that passport bros just can't handle American women. It's another American cultural chauvinist idea that American social mores and gender dynamics are superior to those in the rest of the world. American gender dynamics are just the gold standard and if you don't like it it's because you just can't handle it this is a ridiculous belief extremely chauvinistic culturally belief women in other parts of the world are different from American women in meaningful ways and it's totally fine for American men to prefer to date women from those cultures because of those differences.

52:44It does not make the women nor the men failed versions of Americans. It simply makes them different. I think that's a fair assessment, provided that what you like about other women from other cultures is not that they are easy to dominate financially and manipulate emotionally or something like that. That's the thing, though. I just haven't seen any evidence. I am not denying that this is a thing. Absolutely. There's a guy living in Thailand right now, just got off a plane. he thinks oh man like i just flash my cool 32 grand a year and i've got a domestic slave and it's like this guy's gross and he's an idiot but this doesn't seem to be a thing in the passport bro movement it more seems like they're an outgrowth of the digital nomad thing i think that the one article that we have where they let these guys speak he's very thoughtful and respectful he talks about his future wife staying at home and raising the kids if that's what she wants he talks about how he wants to give her that option but he doesn't say she has to do it he doesn't say it's a condition of marriage which by the way if that is a condition for of marriage for you there's people who do that and that's fine but it's not for him that's the thing he wants to offer his wife his future wife is you want to stay home and take care of the kids, I will be able to support us both.

54:05He's not demanding a silent baby factory. Based on how enterprising he seems to be, I don't see him being the type of guy who's going to be interested in a woman who has nothing going on in her life but doing his laundry. Before you go shopping for feminine energy like it's a duty-free fragrance at the airport, quick word from our sponsors. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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55:38So you think the aspect where the men are basically hunting other countries for glorified mail order brides, is that totally made up? I was not able to find any evidence for it, which does not mean that it's totally made up. It simply means that in my rather extensive research about this, none of these guys in the passport bro phenomenon check those boxes. When you talk about large groups of people, yeah, there's going to be bad actors. But I think you're going to learn very quickly that women in Poland and Peru and Cambodia aren't these ultra feminine automatons who are just waiting for a Western man to waltz up and deliver them from their Dickensian life of grinding misery.

56:17That is a very stupid stereotype of the women. And I think that it's as stupid as the stereotype of the men as predatory misogynist sex pests, because presumably if that was like the dominant attitude, I would have encountered it. there's this idea in the West in general, America in particular, that women in, say, the Philippines or Colombia, they're all just completely poor and they're completely ignorant and they're just easy pickings for these suave Americans who come in and financially dominate them. And it's an offensive and stupid stereotype when men think that it's an invitation to go date there.

56:56It's a stupid and offensive stereotype when Westerners see these women as agency-free victims to be protected. Even women in poorer countries have agency. Yeah, I've checked out TikTok digital bro mad, and I've looked at the subreddit many times before. A lot of these guys come across as wanting to ruffle feathers a little bit, and I can understand maybe why you like the guy you're talking about before, but... I do like feather rufflers, yes. For the record, he also talks about how women in America are raised to be more independent or maybe think poorly of men, which, again, is like a huge generalization.

57:27Is there evidence for that, though? Because I do hear that trope a lot from a lot of places. There is. no smoking gun evidence, but a Pew Research study in 2025 found that 25 % of respondents had negative views of masculine or manly men. So if you're a masculine or manly man, that's 25 % of the population who don't like you. The same poll shows respondents expressing critical attitudes towards traditionally masculine characteristics like confidence, risk aversion, and physical strength. So there's that. I've dealt with this before. I actually was negotiating with a company. They were thinking about bringing my show in.

58:11And after we hung up the call, my agent called and was like, okay, if that went really well, like the numbers are really good and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The manager loved you. And then a week later, he's like, they passed because it was one of those calls with like 50 people on Zoom that are all checking their email. And it was like somebody in the marketing department said too much mail energy. That was the critique. There was nothing more specific than that. It was just like one of those things. And she just said that she would never get over that and we need her on board. And so, yeah, we're going to pass her now.

58:41And my agent was like, okay, weird business decision. And the manager was like, between you and me, yeah, but we have this problem all the time. So I thought that was interesting. So I've run into like one of this 25 % of the population who was just like, I don't like this flannel shirt wearing guy who talks loud. That was enough. Yeah. Imagine being a tattooed bearded man who constantly sounds like he's yelling because he grew up in Rhode Island. America also scores high in terms of secular, rational, and self-expression views as opposed to more traditional views. Traditional values are also disappearing abroad.

59:16The Survey Center on American Life found that the majority of male respondents to a survey were interested in dating, but only a little over a third of the women were, and a plurality, 43 % of the women, were simply uninterested in dating at all. Huh. I don't think you need to think the women responding are right or wrong to see how that could be a bleak landscape for young men in the dating pool. But why do they think it's going to be better elsewhere? I think there's some, the grass is greener going on here, but we have some data to suggest that things are better abroad in terms of these metrics.

59:54The Ipsos Love Life Satisfaction Study for 2025 is super detailed and nuanced, but some key things to highlight are that America ranks relatively low in terms of satisfaction with your romantic partner. In fact, it ranks somewhere near the bottom, 49%. You compare that with Thailand or Colombia to passport bro hotspots and the satisfaction with your romantic partner, there's north of 80%. Presumably this is people from the same culture talking about their actual partners. Well, I agree, but it's potentially a perception is reality thing. It also might be that Americans are perpetually restless and dissatisfied, and that's reflected in the numbers.

1:00:34We also have the Gallup data on how respected women feel in society. less than half of American women feel respected in society, with 67 % of men thinking that women are respected in society. That is one of the bigger gaps in the world. And you don't have to agree with the men or the women to understand that disconnect is a potential point of friction. Where do women feel the most respected? I'm curious. I'll be shocked if it's Thailand or Colombia or something like that. Yeah, Colombia is actually near the bottom. I didn't see Thailand on there, but Colombia is right before Turkey. Northern Europe tops the list of countries where people, irrespective of gender, feel that women are respected.

1:01:21Baltic countries, Nordic countries, Benelux countries, places like that. It's possibly also worth noting women are more likely to feel that women are respected in society than men are in Saudi Arabia. So maybe a grain of salt on this study. But again, the important part of the study to me is the disconnect between how men view it and how women view it. And that, again, you do not have to say the men or the women are correct to just note that the disconnect could create some friction. So passport bros see this landscape. They have their own reaction to it. They're not telling American women to change.

1:01:59That's kind of the thing that's interesting to me about this. They're not going, oh, American women need to do this or Western women need to do that. They're just saying, all right, I'm out. I'm going to go look for partners somewhere else. I don't understand why there's some kind of vested interest in telling total strangers who they should want to date and why. Yeah, warm up those angry emails, folks. But I do see your point. Who cares if some guy goes abroad to date? I don't care. What I'm curious about is how is this different from mail order brides? I know you're not picking someone out on a website generally and then going to meet them and get married right away, but I don't know.

1:02:31Tell me the real difference here. Because you're moving to another culture, immersing yourself in it, dating women near you and yeah like there's no similarity there's no similarity at all i see so it's a fair response the women in a mail-order bride catalogs are like probably actually desperate possibly i mean if you're advertising on that that's a more clear indicator like i want to meet someone abroad and leave that's kind of the deal there i suppose it's a fair response i'm curious though how much of the passport bro thing is about having to avoid improving yourself so rather than looking within and upgrading yourself you go somewhere else where like you hope the standards are lower.

1:03:03I think this may be a kind of gross way to look at this. Like women in Thailand just have lower standards than American women. And I know that's not what you're saying, but like that's the thinking that's at work with that line of thinking. Isn't it fair to say passport bros actually think this though? Or I think some of them do. They're in for a very rude awakening. Women in Thailand and Columbia do not have lower standards for men. They're going to find that out at great personal expense and pain. It's just a gross attitude to have about people from other cultures that they just have lower standards.

1:03:40You know, and again, I'm not trying to say that you're saying that, but I do think that when people ask that question, that's baked into it. Women in Columbia have lower standards. Says who? I don't think they probably do. The Abeyta guy does address this in the Business Insider interview essay thing. He runs a Discord and yeah, presumably he's not going to throw his own guys under the bus but he does say a lot of these guys are into improving themselves adventures new experiences entrepreneurialism given that they're taking the drastic step of picking up their life and moving to a totally foreign culture i think that probably a lot of guys in his orbit are willing to both improve themselves and look for partners in other cultures do you not think there's any element of escapism involved here Oh, sure.

1:04:28I'm sure that's one ingredient in the soup. What really matters is what you do once you get there. And remember what I said about Ireland. I love the first six months. There's always a nice rosy glow to, you know, a new environment. But what matters is what you do when it wears off. What about the monetary aspect of the passport bro phenomenon in dating abroad? Because I feel like there has to be this whole cottage industry erected around helping these guys move, helping them fit in once they get there, helping them meet women of the type they're looking for. That's got to be a niche. the marriage tourism industry is pretty orthogonal to passport bros as far as i could tell and seems to be aimed at older audiences these are very structured experiences much more like taking a cruise passport bros are like they're gonna read about a place on wiki travel and then go there with clothes on their back and a laptop start meeting women the passport bros on reddit that's where you can see more of them talking for themselves i obviously didn't reference any of that It's directly here because it's Reddit.

1:05:26But if you want to go there, it's there. Typically though, I will say about the subreddit, it's not like pickup artist stuff. Meeting a girl is just one piece of the puzzle for them. There's definitely advice about dating in various cultures, but a good chunk of that is about staying safe and not getting scammed or robbed. And a lot of content is just, oh man, I was in Columbia. It was great. I had a great time. Or what's Vietnam? Or how do I get started with this? people are going to be shocked at what percentage of the content is actually about meeting girls. And by the way, they ban people from the subreddit for misogyny and sex tourism content.

1:06:02That's kind of a relief. My image of this whole movement was like a bunch of sort of red pill misogynist sex pests, like you said, but it's wildly different than I expected. I think a lot of people who had never heard of Passport Bros probably would have made that assumption readily. What type of content do they have about women on there? I'm curious because you mentioned And some of it is about dating, but it's not pickup artist stuff. So I'm genuinely curious. One guy was asking if women in Kenya are less inhibited than European women. He's going to be very disappointed if that's what he expects, I think.

1:06:32Yeah, it wasn't even clear what he meant by that. I think that there is a lot anyway. And the comments are just like, watch out for scams and things like I was in Kenya and it was like this. And then you see comments that are like, well, you know, there's good and bad women everywhere. which is yeah like a generally true thing right as is true it sort of runs counter to the stereotype that these guys are saying hey all western women are bad i'm moving to columbia where the women are pristine and preserved from these corrosive modern feminist values it seems more nuanced and balanced and it just seems like a bunch of young dudes traveling with the idea that maybe they'll meet a girl which is pretty normal and does not even need to have its own name or movement maybe Well, I think that there's a certain subset of a person who's just angry at the idea that guys would try and pick up girls.

1:07:22But whatever. If you came here for outrage porn, I'm sorry to disappoint. Some people are just going to be upset about this and they're allowed to be upset about it. People are allowed to have their dating preferences. And people are allowed to have opinions about those preferences as well, I suppose. Oh, absolutely. But at the end of the day, the only opinions that matter are the men and the women involved in the relationship. and depending on the culture, maybe the woman's family. I think a lot of guys who get into international travel expecting easy pickings are going to be super shocked at how savvy women abroad are.

1:07:54And they're also probably going to be very shocked at how involved women's families are in their romantic lives, even early on. Or even if it's just her evaluating you through her parents' eyes. Yeah, that's right. America is kind of an outlier towards individualism on the whole individualism versus community spectrum. The more traditional society you're going to, the more likely it is that parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, grandparents, and so on are going to get involved early on. Again, she's at the very least probably going to be vetting you through the eyes of her family.

1:08:30You mentioned scams being a frequent topic on the subreddit. What are some of the things that people have to deal with when their quest for love abroad goes wrong? Oh, guys get drugged and like taken for everything they have. Yeah, that's insane. Not surprising at all. I think I've seen this on Dateline or something similar. The rule of law is not super strong in a lot of these places, so it can definitely be dangerous. We mentioned the Columbia State Department warning, tons of kidnappings, tons of crime in general in Columbia. Other scams to stop far short of anything quite that extreme, but they can leave you broke.

1:09:04one is intense romantic communications over weeks or even months and then all of a sudden there's a big crisis and I need a pile of money and give it to me in crypto or asking them to pay for travel to your country. That's a thing. I've told this story on the show before but I was coming home from Ukraine. This is like 20 plus years ago and I saw my friend at the airport and she had a sign that was like welcome to America and I thought originally that it was my buddy and his wife like pranking me. Hey, why did you guys come here? And they're like, Jordan? I'm like, yeah, I'm coming back from ukraine like so we were chatting and they were like how many more people you think are on the plane i'm like i think i was one of the last ones because my bags were so late and they're like we're looking for this girl did you see her and i was like no and her uncle had met some girl online from ukraine and then he had paid her air quote yes girl yeah some dude who pretended to be her and this is years ago right this is like before you could just do a video call with somebody really easily or anything like that so yeah he'd sent her money to travel from kiev or moscow whatever.

1:10:04And then she just didn't show up. And I was like, I've seen these people scamming at cyber cafes, make sure it's real. And he's like, it's definitely real. She's definitely real, blah, blah, blah. Sure enough, two weeks later, I followed up with her and I was like, so whatever happened with that? She's like, sure enough. She called like that day or that night, whatever. And was like, I got robbed and they stole the money for the plane ticket. Can you send more and I'll fly in next week? And he was like, oh, so that combined with me being like, I've seen them sending the emails from the internet cafe this is maybe a scam that combined with the ridiculous story that didn't add up he was like yeah this is fake that happens that probably happens less now because there's probably way more better slash easier scams romance scams let's get on zoom yeah and then it's like oops now what they do a guy who knows english really well will manage all the email communication they'll know everything about the story so he'll tell them i'm telling him you took a beach vacation and you came back and your grandma was sick and then you had to take her to the hospital and we're going to ask him for money for this.

1:11:02And she's like, okay. And she's sitting there like smoking a cigarette in the cyber cafe. And he's like, all right. And you want to visit his country, but the UK seems like far away and it's a dream and you'd love to come visit him. And she was like, all right, whatever. So it's a whole thing. And then if the guy's like, I want to do a video chat, he's like, all right, you got to do a video call with this guy. And she's out, my English is crap. And I remember he was like, don't worry about it. Just like smile and nod. He knows you don't speak English that well. And if he asks why you can type.

1:11:27You just tell them what I told you. You use a translator and you type slowly. It's all orchestrated. So of course, you're going to see this girl on video and she's going to be like, I want to see you in Los Angeles. And you're going to be like, oh, she's so hot, bro. Let me wire her$600. It's not that hard to scam somebody who wants to believe what you're telling them. Yes, absolutely. What other scams are out there? You might find yourself the victim of sextortion. They get you naked on camera, blackmail you to not release the pictures. Catfishing, making fake profiles. Sure, that's a big component of a lot of these.

1:12:01Fake profiles where someone's falsely claiming to be a relative who's translating, stuff like that. Yeah, basically anytime someone wants you to send them crypto for anything, you're being scammed. Unless you're buying steroids. Right, from a storage unit off the side of the highway. Yes, just be on the lookout for inconsistent stories, AI-generated images, but that's just good advice for using the internet in general. Yeah, I think one more scam I want to talk about is the scam of the algorithm. You know, remember, the internet is constantly feeding you things curated to get you to watch. So if you're tunneling into a black hole of misery about how awful women are in the West and how you're going to be treated like a god if you just find the right third world developing country, the internet is going to show you more content that confirms that preference.

1:12:45But influencer-driven fantasies are not real. They're not real, folks. You might mesh better with people from other cultures, sure, but it helps to know what that culture is actually going to be like, not just stereotypes and cliches, but a deeper knowledge of cultural values and how they play out in your soon-to-be new home or with your soon-to-be family, in-laws, et cetera. Cross-cultural relationships can work. I'm in one. But that's provided you have realistic expectations, not fantasies based on red pill blogs and influencers. And thanks again to Nick Pell for helping us bring this whole thing through customs.

1:13:17Thanks, everyone, for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger dot com. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show all at Jordan Harbinger dot com slash deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tata Sadlowskis, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own. And yeah, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, of course, we try to get these as right as we can.

1:13:49Not everything is gospel, even if it is fact-checked. So consult a professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well-being. And remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today. 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. What if the real gender gap no one's talking about is the one where men are falling way behind?

1:14:17I sit down with Richard Reeves to unpack why guys are struggling.

1:14:47they think politically that's not acceptable and that's just got us into a horrible position. Too many people, even now, struggle to admit that men are having problems because they think men are the problem. And until we get past that, we're just going to keep losing these men. There's an old traditional saying, which is women need to hear that they're loved and men need to hear that they're respected. I'm going to say there's a grain of truth to it. I do not want to stereotype. I do not want to say it's true of everybody. And as a society, that's how we have to think about this. It's and, not all.

1:15:25And right now, too much of our politics, especially around gender, is being framed as all. Pick a side. Pink or blue. Insane. And it's got us to a very difficult place in our culture. And so we've just all got to give ourselves permission to care about boys and men without living in fear of the fact that in doing that, we've somehow gone over to the dark side and become a misogynist. That is not true. And it's more of us that say that, the less true it will become. For more on what it really takes to help men thrive without setting women back, check out episode 1126 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.