Today, I'm going to tell you why I will very likely never
return to the United States.
It was the country of my birth.
It was the country that I was last in.
In June of 2017, I spent a week and gave up
on the idea that I didn't want to go to the US
for as long as I was an American living overseas.
I didn't even want to fly through the US
and have to deal with the immigration and the TSA.
We'll talk about all that in a little bit.
But I finally said, you know what?
I had to go see a friend or two.
I got a couple of things I can do and I'll go and spend a week.
And little as I know, that would probably be the last week
I ever spent, the last time I ever breathed actual air
outside of a US airport because six months later
in mid-December of 2017, I flew from Cancun,
where I was hosting folks, laid over in JFK
and went onward to where I would renounce US citizenship.
And I'm going to tell you what exactly that means.
Remember I had a friend of mine.
I had a long layover at JFK.
We actually recorded some videos
that we've never ever shown before of my final moment
standing on US soil.
I remember walking out to the curb at JFK
and just, you know, breathing in not the freshest of air,
but breathing in at dusk on a New York day in December,
the final time that I would ever be there.
Certainly up until now and perhaps forever.
Now, I know there's going to be people who are saying,
well, if you left us and didn't fight
and you wouldn't stand with us, then good riddance.
You see a lot of good riddance
when people leave for whatever reason.
A lot of folks will leave in the UK and also the US
and other countries because of the high taxes.
These days, good riddance, they say,
until they realize they're losing money.
My departure wasn't really motivated by taxes
as much as we do help people move overseas
and reduce their taxes.
I felt like the country was irredeemably going
in the wrong direction.
It would work against people like me.
And I said, I don't want to be a part of that.
And so if people who perhaps fit into why the country
is in that position decide that I shouldn't come back
and we don't want you back, well, at 40 years of age,
I finally realized I don't get to control
what other people think and that doesn't mean
that I'm wrong or bad, but we'll talk about that.
One of the things that I was so impactful to me
and I didn't realize at the time,
right before I was born, my grandmother got remarried.
The nomad grandmas at work that we showed you her ancestry
that came many generations before her from Wales,
she remarried a gentleman who was born
in Burnow, Czechoslovakia and his family
and he were on the wrong side of the regime at that time.
He fought for his own country in the wrong side of the war,
eventually was granted passage to the US,
became a naturalized US citizen,
but was never able to go back because for as long
as the Iron Curtain was in place, he was on the naughty list.
He had been tried at Emsensia and my grandmother
told the story of how even when they would go
on a European river cruise, they said,
don't get off in your old country.
He regretted because he had lost his parents
that had both been sent to camps.
I believe he reunited at one point with his mother,
but he never got too good with his mother's grave.
And as I got older and as I created my identity
as someone who didn't want to live in the United States
and moved out and eventually said,
if I'm not gonna be here, why did I wanna be a citizen?
I identified more and more
and I understood more and more of that story.
You know, one of the things that I have tried
to practice in my life is not regretting
and I don't regret.
Even if I felt I regretted my decision,
I can't do anything to change it
because when you renounce your US citizenship,
people ask, well, you can just go and get it back
if you want.
No, it's permanent.
I can go and apply for some form of residence permits.
I can make an investment thing in an EB-5 green card.
I could perhaps go on an exceptional talent in 01.
I could perhaps, there's numerous ways you can get in.
I'm not sure if an 01 is immigrant or not.
I help people leave the US and go to it.
But I could find some way to get back in
if they would grant me that residence permit.
They might not and I could go through the same process
and anybody else who applies and lives there
and becomes a naturalized citizen.
I've kind of thought before,
I wonder if I became a naturalized citizen again.
Could I run for president as I am indeed
a natural born citizen?
Obviously, wouldn't win.
But it's not something that I regret.
And yet, as I think about my grandfather's story,
he obviously came to the US at a time
when going to the US was very much in vogue
and was a place you could go where you were treated best,
just as my, his wife, my grandmother's ancestors
had done a hundred or so years earlier.
And the simple thing is, why not go back to the US?
Well, for one reason,
I don't have any particular reason to go.
When I look at life,
I look at the story of my grandfather
and I look at it as having seasons.
He had a season living in Czechoslovakia
and you know what, his country turned against him.
And for me, looking at, you know,
some of the ways that the United States has changed,
have they turned against me personally?
No, but has the environment,
is it different than perhaps when I was born for sure?
And I think that seasons ought to change
when they're meant to change, seasons ought to change
when the circumstances change.
And so, you know, we had Tony Fernandez,
the CEO of AirAsia at Nomad Capitalist Live.
What I loved and what I found striking
about the speech he gave
and the talk that we had with our VAPs,
everything he talked about was so simple.
Why do you have more female pilots
along the other airlines?
We just did it.
And I realized it was an absence of bureaucracy
and red tape and BS that allowed him
to be the same kind of an entrepreneur that I am
and that maybe you are and take an airline
that he bought for 26 cents
and turn it into a big, big, big airline
that dominates in Asia.
And so, sometimes the simplest answer is the best.
Why do I want to go to a country that I had my season in?
Can't say it was the best season of my life.
Can't say that I particularly loved being there all the time
and forget that I thought, yeah, I'm paying too much in taxes,
just didn't feel like the place for me.
So why would I want to go back?
I think I flirted when I renounced with the idea of,
okay, well, it's no longer my country
so I can be more at peace with them
and okay, you know, they want to go bombing some country now.
I don't agree with that, but it's not in my name.
It's not my problem.
I'm going to be more accepting of that.
Hey, you do, you boo, and I'll be over here.
I've kind of eased up on that feeling
because I feel like, you know,
the US does stick its finger in so many places
and the whole you do, you boo thing
doesn't really exist for them.
They haven't really done anything to me
because I always played it straight.
But the simple reason why I don't want to go is, yeah, I,
the TSA in Malaysia is pretty darn pleasant
and it sets the tone for me in countries like that.
Why when you can have pleasant
would you go and have unpleasant?
You know, why when you go to countries
where I'm a citizen or even just a resident's permit holder
and they greet you with literally loving remarks,
would you want to go back to a place
where when I was a citizen, they would scream at you
and they would dump your bag out.
And who goes to Italy for 11 days by himself?
And I think honestly, I mean, I know people
that because they live in Asia,
get detained when they go back
under suspicion of being child pornographers,
which is pretty scary stuff that, you know,
you live in Asia and you live a normal life
and that's their impression of you, their citizen.
So there's that.
I just, I don't know what there is to do in the US.
And I think that people in the US have this idea
that there's, you know, there's nowhere else to go.
I mean, I can go to a baseball game
in a handful of other countries around the world
if I cared that much, but I don't care that much.
So I don't, I can go to Disneyland in Paris
or in Hong Kong and I'll have to go in the US.
I mean, what are the things that you can only do in the US?
I've seen the stuff I wanted to see.
I just, you know, you're never going to see everything.
I think people should realize
whatever they think only exists in their country
exists in a lot of countries.
I think that's what holds people back.
And that's one of the things
that I've tried to tell you over the years.
But I, you know, that same grandma,
she told me how her ancestors went to get on the ship
to move to the US back in, I was 1851.
And guess what?
It wasn't, oh my goodness,
you're going to the United States.
That's the best place to go.
It was, no, what are you going for?
How dare you?
Please stay back.
We want you so badly.
You can't do that.
You're making a mistake.
And they said, no, we're going.
And you realize that even when people were doing something
that we look back now on it and say,
oh, wow, that's pretty impactful.
Yeah, moving to the US, easy decision.
Wasn't so easy back then.
It's easy in hindsight.
And people tried to talk them out of it.
People tried to talk me out of renouncing.
People tried to say, you'll come back to the US eventually,
but I followed my own North Star.
Now, the other issue is I've chosen to be a citizen
of a handful of countries,
what I call T or B and T or C countries.
Seif Adidamus came to our event, Nomad Capitalist Live.
He talked about how he could have become Canadian
if he stayed and paid a bit more in taxes.
He chose to stay Jordanian.
I, pretty much all my passports
are better than a Jordanian passport.
He said, hey, I go and I get a visa, I'm fine.
Now the US has no problem with him.
And so he gets a US visa.
My passports, I've got visa free travel
to pretty much anywhere I wanna go in the world
except for the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand
and a handful of like African countries
that everyone needs a visa to go to
or Turkmenistan that everyone needs a visa for.
But the big ones are US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
pretty much every other country on Earth I can go to.
Now I can get a visa in New Zealand.
I think I applied once
and you have to send your passport off for three months.
I said, I have better things to do than that.
I've been to Australia, wasn't impressed.
Sorry, not for me.
We're all allowed to have different opinions, aren't we?
Been to Canada many times, okay, great.
Been there, done that, heading in the wrong direction.
And I spent, you know, a good chunk of my life
living in the US.
So I felt, hey, I don't really care
about going to these places.
I got offered a speaking gig in Canada.
I said, you know, I don't wanna bother, sorry.
And so if I won't go to be paid, you know,
tens of thousands of dollars,
why would I care to go for free?
So I have this collection of passports
and with that I would apply for a US visa.
I'm sure, I mean, there's people who have committed
crimes who are getting US visas.
But one thing is, it's pretty arbitrary.
One person said, a big part of getting a US visa is luck.
The US is infamous for having the most vague criteria
for granting a visa, unlike the UK and European countries
which have a much more objective set of criteria.
It's mostly tick the box for them.
But in the US, a lot of discretion is given to the interviewer
and you better hope that they are in a good mood.
Many people were denied simply because the embassy officer
didn't like the face of the person
and you can't do anything about it.
There is no appeal.
In some jurisdictions, they have a pre-determined
secret percentage of denials
like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria,
and actually it's more countries than that.
So in these jurisdictions,
you have your application already stamped and denied
without even hearing your case, even to millionaires.
Now, do I think most millionaires can get a visa?
Sure.
This is not to say that if you renounce
here US citizenship, you won't be allowed back in.
I think having a TRA passport would be a better thing to do
if you want to be in that camp.
You know what also be good is probably not having a business
that tells people what I, I mean, it's the truth
and I believe it, but coming out here and talking
about how the US is heading in the wrong direction
as a sort of cottage industry probably doesn't help.
Why? Because they do have discretion.
I think in most countries that I would go to,
you know, I've gotten numerous residence permits,
citizenship's around the world.
I've sometimes asked, hey, you know,
here's what I do for work and they're like,
what, why would that matter?
Do you break any laws?
No, I have a clean criminal record.
Okay, so what's the problem?
Well, maybe subjectively they don't like it.
And nobody cares here.
Do you meet the criteria?
Are you a good person, dah, dah, dah, dah.
I've said there are judgmental countries
and not judgmental countries.
I think most countries are not judgmental.
Do you, do you tick the box?
Do you, you know, do you have the amount of money
needed to invest to get the residence permit?
You know, do you have the clean criminal record?
And I tick those boxes, but I'm not convinced
and I don't want to waste the time
to keep going down to the US Embassy
and begging head in hand, please give me a visa.
I think it's $190 every time you go.
Why would I bother to do that?
Well, I don't really want to go.
And even the fact that even some people
with TRA passports, this is pretty rare.
When I talked to some of,
there's a story from a Hungarian.
He was in Canada, tried to cross the land border.
He's got a remote job.
Guy at the US border doesn't know what a remote job is,
sends him back.
Why do I want to be associated with a place
where that's the criteria
when almost no other country in Earth has that criteria?
There's no such thing as what you could just visit,
can't you?
Either you touch US soil or you don't.
There's no, I mean, you can't even fly through.
If I want to fly from Dublin to Bogota, Colombia,
I can't take the flight through Newark
because there is no sterile transit in the US.
You have to enter the country.
You have to have a visa just to fly through.
So when we fly people all around the world from our company,
we generally avoid flying them through the US.
If nothing else, it's just a time suck.
And so you might think,
oh, wow, look at what this guy's done to himself.
He's cut off his opportunities.
It was never something I wanted in the first place.
And so I think that what sometimes people think is,
once they've burned the bridge, as it were,
by the way, I didn't burn a bridge.
I share my honest opinions.
I'd be able to follow all the US laws if they live there.
If they don't like that I have an opinion,
kind of flies in the face of what the US was all about
if they want to hold that against me.
I thought it was all about, we're individualists
and we have free speech
and we get to speak out against the government.
I guess that's kind of less of a thing these days.
But I think people tend to regret stuff
or they think they'll regret stuff
once they've cut off an option.
And I just don't think it's a healthy thing to do.
Again, I left for a whole lot of personal reasons.
I could have stayed at expat
and continued paying practically no tax
and kept the citizenship.
Now, I would have had a few more restrictions
on how I use that money,
but even if that were a major criteria, which it wasn't,
that's not that I'm leaving for the tax.
I think my last couple of years I paid zero
when I did it legally.
And so the idea of, oh, well,
if you leave for tax reasons, didn't,
then you shouldn't be allowed to come in,
kind of flies in the face of the fact that
if I overstayed a visa, which is supposedly the reason
that one would not be granted a visa,
I would become a tax resident
because US B-1, B-2 visas are generally good for six months.
And if you spend six months in the US,
you can be sucked into the tax debt
and why would you give up citizenship in a country
to have all the negatives
without the citizenship in the passport?
So it doesn't make sense,
but that's why there's a handful of countries
like the US which are judgmental.
And I just look at everything like a relationship.
I don't give extra points to people in my family.
If people in my family do stuff that's wrong,
they don't get extra points towards being wrong
because we share blood.
And in the same way,
I don't think your country should get extra points
because you subscribe to something called patriotism.
If your country does something wrong to you,
if your country is judgmental,
if your country makes the wrong call,
then you ought to extract yourself from that relationship.
I did it in the most complete of ways.
And what you realize when you extract yourself
from bad relationships
is usually the other person doesn't change.
And I think that for me,
my feeling when finally being out was okay,
I'm not part of this,
I'm gonna feel better about whatever they do.
And I still to some extent feel that way,
but they haven't changed.
They're still going to judge me based on,
hey, we think you don't like paying tax
or we don't like that you say bad stuff about us.
And we've had, we had some twerp from one of the embassies
or used to work at one of the embassies
commenting under his own name saying,
oh, I hope you suffer.
Kind of a sick kind of place to go to.
You know, I live in a lot of countries.
I have homes, I talk to people.
And nobody's ever said they hope I suffer.
That kind of tells you something about the country.
And so as the U.S. becomes more and more,
well, quite simply more and more poor,
I think that people like me fit in even less and less.
Here's a comment from someone who doesn't like
something I said.
How many people are sitting around drinking their coffee
this beautiful morning having the cash
to run it and buy a place in Vanuatu?
Not the majority by any means.
And how many Americans want to run like scared chickens
while nemesis like Russia or China nuke our country?
By the way, I don't know about you.
If someone's gonna nuke your country
and you have the chance to run,
I don't know, I would get out.
I would escape the blast radius.
But I also know, yeah,
the majority of people don't have the chance.
I think he's talking about,
we talked about Vanuatu citizenship.
You buy stuff there and get citizenship.
I can afford to do that.
What the reality is for everybody else,
I mean, we should always be aware
of everyone else around us.
But for me, yeah, I can afford to do that.
So what?
I should be taken as a joke.
You know, again, it was just at nomad capitalist live
out that long ago,
talking to speakers from all around the world,
very high level people.
And when you talk to them about this stuff,
they're like, yeah, of course that makes perfect sense.
It's not like, oh, well,
who do you think you are to do that?
And you just realize this is a country of butthurt people.
You know, in Ireland, people leave Ireland,
nobody ever calls them a traitor.
There's a history of immigration as part of it.
You know, people leave, I've been all over Eastern Europe,
people leave and they go and they get a passport,
they come back, people don't call them a traitor.
There's something about the US that it's like,
if you didn't do exactly what I think you should do,
then you're a bad person.
No fighting back, he says.
I suspect these cowards who plan to run from the fight,
which isn't really what I did.
I think it was more about looking at opportunities
somewhere else, wanting a sense of adventure.
Sure, if I can keep more of my own money,
that's nice, probably about the girls over there are nicer.
But you know, to Americans, I've always run,
why go back and hang out with those people?
I hang out with Americans who have liked mine with me,
people who are like our clients, but most are not.
Why go back to an entire country, these people,
who think that I'm a coward and who assumes
I must have voted for Biden, wasn't a citizen to vote?
So be gone with you.
I'm staying and defending my country
to whatever I can, whereas I've chosen to have a good life
and have my values and have the biggest impact
by not being suffocated by that system.
So why go back and remind myself?
Maybe the US is a lot less individualistic
than it wants to think when you're supposed to agree
with what this person says is the majority.
This to me is the face of what a lot of Americans think.
They don't know what the policies they create do.
They don't understand that people need a tourist visa
to come to the country.
Remember some folks asked a friend of mine from Egypt,
why haven't you been to the US?
These are people who voted to keep everyone
from the S-hole countries out.
That's what they supported.
And then they're like,
why doesn't a single woman from Egypt
who's like statistically the biggest visa overstay risk,
why wouldn't she be allowed to come to the country?
People make these policies, they support these things.
They don't even know what it's about.
At least in some other countries,
people have some idea what their politicians are doing.
But what I also find interesting is,
people say, oh, you abandoned the country.
How many people move from Wisconsin to Florida
to save a few points on taxes or for better weather?
They abandoned their people,
but it's okay because they just went to Florida
and not Uruguay.
So bottom line is there's just not enough in the US
for me to want to go back.
And that's not me saying I hate the country.
It's not me saying I wish anyone ill.
It's me saying and answering the question,
why don't you go back?
People ask me all the time,
how often did you go back?
I don't.
What?
Because they have great beaches.
We have the Nomad Beach Index.
Lots of great beaches all around the world.
People on Instagram post about,
oh, thank goodness I'm back from Europe.
We have air conditioning again.
Yeah, I've got air conditioning.
I'm good in Malaysia, it's cold.
It's cold air conditioning.
And I have all the things that I want somewhere else.
And I think that it's hard for me to make a choice.
I live in places all around the world.
I have never found the one place
that I want to stay and live the rest of my life.
Not because I'm running away,
yes strategically having levers is a good thing.
But I find too many places interesting
and yet the US is not one of them.
Having acceptance to me is important.
And I think just saying, you know what?
At some point it's good just to close something off.
Don't stay in touch with the X
and the relationship,
enter the best time as possible.
If they want to think you're a bad person,
let them go off and do what they're gonna do,
what you do, what you're gonna do.
I don't regret.
And I think sometimes moving forward's the best thing.
Cutting off an option as much as I like collecting options.
If you have the chance to cut one off,
I think it's a good thing.
And it is for that reason that I don't go back
and don't expect to go back.
Could I always change my mind?
Of course I could, that's the benefit of.
Being human and adapting and evolving.
But there's your answer.