1173: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian | How Wealth Hacks the World

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Today on the show, journalist Atusa Abrahamian.

She grew up in Switzerland, had a front-row seat to the international world of hidden art, money, and citizenship for sale.

She grew up hearing about Nazi gold and looted Jewish wealth, among other blemishes on Switzerland's otherwise shiny reputation.

On this episode, we'll discover how Switzerland, a landlocked country, somehow became one of the world's largest free ports, how billionaires, dictators, and others hide art, cars, wine, and even artifacts from prying eyes of government and even spouses, and how you too can buy a passport and become an international global citizen if, of course, you have enough cash to lubricate the system.

Here we go with Atusa Abrahamian.

I know you grew up in Switzerland, and it's kind of a fascinating place.

I'm sure you agree.

It's neutral, it's international.

There's all these different parts and people have different passports and different languages, but then it's got this dark underbelly that I kind of learned about recently.

You know, you grew up hearing about Nazi gold and looted Jewish wealth, which apparently they still have.

I think it's frozen, so they can't really do much about it.

Okay.

What does that mean?

How is it frozen?

I can't give you a specific example from the Nazi era, but more recently, people like Muamar Gaddafi, other dictators who have been deposed, had lots of money kicking around in Swiss banks.

And because these people are deemed objectionable, their accounts get frozen so that nobody can use the money, so that their heirs can't take the money.

But then it's unclear where it's going to go, right?

So it's kind of suspended in the vault, in the account, and nobody can spend it.

The bank must actually kind of dig that because now you've got 5 billion US dollars in a Gaddafi account.

And they're like, oh, all we can do is collect interest on this and invest it for the next 30 years.

Sorry.

Yeah, I guess they must count towards their various reserve requirements.

It's not a bad deal.

Yeah.

Geez, that's kind of shady.

I know that there was some kind of class action suit from a Jewish group that was like, we can prove that, I don't know, a thousand families stuff that was stolen was put into Switzerland by the Nazis, give it back.

And I think they settled for some.

billions of dollars.

Yeah, I mean, we're in an era now where Switzerland has acknowledged that the money is there, that harm was done, that Nazis are bad.

And so they have been paying out various lawsuits.

Is that enough to completely reform the Swiss banking sector?

It kind of depends who you ask.

We don't actually know still what's in there, but we're definitely not in the same place as we were in the 90s before all of these lawsuits were, you know, coming up.

I see.

How does that make you feel as somebody who's Swiss?

Like, it would make me feel a little bit like I'm a Native American and all my land was taken.

And I'm like, that's terrible.

Switzerland is a really nice place to to live.

A really nice place to grow up.

And you sort of take it for granted until you realize that a lot of that wealth is sort of off the backs of much less fortunate people.

And I think you can make the case that that is the case for all wealth.

You're always grewing somebody.

But in Switzerland, it's really like state policy.

It has been for a very long time.

And a lot of Swiss riches are somebody else's poverty.

Yeah.

Can you say more about that?

Yeah.

So Geneva, where I grew up, is a center for commodity exchanges.

Something like half the world's coffee and cocoa go through Geneva, not just to chocolate shops.

I'm talking about just trades, right?

And we know that these practices, these industries exploit developing countries and poor people.

And so it's not equitable.

And Switzerland is always taking a cut and really gets a huge advantage from being at the center of these commodity exchanges.

Another example is oil.

Tons of oil has been traded through Switzerland.

A little less now thanks to sanctions, but it's still, it's a big oil hub.

That doesn't mean that the barrels of oil are rolling into town, right?

It's numbers on a screen.

It's sort of projections into the future.

But oil's not great for the planet either.

And so, again, there's the sort of nice, clean face of Swiss prosperity.

And then there's the underside.

Where does it come from?

What is it doing?

It's fascinating how a country that is, I believe, landlocked has essentially is one of the most, the largest ports for commodities in the whole world.

Not just commodities, but also shipping.

It's a shipping center as well as a trading center.

It's pretty absurd.

It is absurd because it's like, oh, you want how many bro?

No, no, no, don't bring it here.

I don't want that in my house, but I want to trade it and make money off of it.

It's kind of like peak capitalism.

Like, how does this work again?

You see, I have a very large spreadsheet, and that's why I'm a billionaire, or that's why I have $100 million coming in.

But it's also very clever of Switzerland to have come up with this business model.

And I talk about this in the book, but they came up with this very early on in the Middle Ages, where they realized the Cantons, it wasn't a nation state at that point, realized we don't have a ton going for us.

We're poor.

We're landlocked.

We don't have a ton of resources.

What we do have are young men who we can train to fight for our richer and more powerful neighbors.

And thus was born the mercenary trade.

This mercenary model of really creating wealth from whatever, whatever you can find has endured through the ages.

First starting with bodies, then going to gold, then going to more abstract commodities.

You know, Switzerland was trying to be a center for crypto for a while.

So they keep ahead of the game.

Tell me more about the mercenary trade, because I found this quite interesting.

I've heard of the Swiss Guard, but I thought that was just guys with the pants at the Vatican, but it was a thing for a while.

Yeah, the Swiss Guard are Swiss-trained soldiers who guard the Vatican, and they are just kind of standaround.

I don't think that they have particularly difficult jobs.

I'll rephrase, they're not at war.

The Swiss mercenary business began in the 1300s, and basically the Swiss men were trained into these regiments and they became very good at making these formations and attacking the enemy and really punching above their weight class.

They were just vicious, brutal soldiers.

The other nice thing about hiring a mercenary army is that you're not really dealing with your own people, with their sort of class politics, with their own kind of political allegiances.

They're hired guns.

And this is really useful if you just want to like get your enemy and not have to deal with the consequences or not have to then rehabilitate the soldiers, have them live in your country, you know, send them home.

They're just guns for hire.

And it's good for everybody.

It's good for Switzerland because they get rid of young men who might cause trouble at home.

It's good for the foreign country because they're hiring these guys who don't really have any particular allegiance.

And I guess on some level, it was okay for these men who didn't have much to do at home.

Maybe they wouldn't have had jobs.

I'm not condoning the mercenary trade, but you can see how the arrangement was seen as mutually beneficial.

So, guys out there, if you're unemployed, go join a random army and start attacking civilians for money.

That's what it sounds like.

The Swiss don't have mercenaries anymore, but they do have a very large standing army.

And in fact, military service is required there.

Yeah, I noticed that when I went there, you always see these mountain passes, and you'll just see guys like sitting on the edge of a tank or whatever, rolling up the hill, rolling down the hill, and wearing their uniforms.

And I was like, oh, Swiss army knives, right?

That's a thing, too.

Why does a neutral country need a military?

It's probably a dumb question, but I think a lot of people are probably wondering, especially if it's small, it's not like you can fight Germany.

Well, you could now, but to protect itself for all the usual reasons.

Like, most countries have a military.

You know, being neutral doesn't mean you're not going to get attacked.

Yeah.

But when they did, when they got threatened before, they just sort of said, fine.

Isn't that kind of how they ended up under the thumb of the Nazis?

They're very good at making arrangements.

Yeah.

So you grew up there.

Half the people you said weren't Swiss.

Yeah.

So I grew up in Geneva, and I was really in this international bubble.

My parents worked at the UN.

I went to international schools for the most part.

And in Geneva today, almost half the population was born somewhere else.

So it's just a really international group of people.

And then in the expat community, it's even more, obviously, because they're expats and they're coming, you know, coming for a few years.

Maybe they stay longer, but it feels transient.

It feels like people are always moving and it doesn't really feel so connected to the the rest of Switzerland.

I learned so much about Switzerland writing this book that I never learned in school.

We were studying World War II and like the Russian Revolution and all kinds of things, but not Swiss politics or history.

Did they leave that out on purpose?

Just think it wasn't part of the curriculum and they didn't really think it was as important.

Because remember, a lot of the assumptions of these schools is people are not going to stay in Switzerland.

And most people didn't stay in Switzerland.

I have friends in Singapore and Kenya and

Sweden.

So it's not a completely unreasonable assumption.

That said, if you're in a place, it's probably good to know a little bit about the place.

Yeah, you would think.

Although, I don't think as an American, I can shame another country's education system in a credible way necessarily.

Did you go to a school for diplomat kids or something like that?

Yeah, more or less.

It was an international school.

Yeah, that sounds really fun, actually.

I really liked it.

It was a great education.

Swiss bits notwithstanding.

Yeah, sure.

Tell me about free ports.

These, we'll get to probably more of this later, but this just sounds like a lawless warehouse full of loot.

I'm going to correct you on the lawlessness later, but yes, it is a warehouse full of loot.

The Geneva Freeport is just a warehouse.

I like to say it's mini storage for billionaires.

Doesn't look like much from the outside.

There's a gate, there's some guards.

But inside, this warehouse benefits from various regulatory concessions that the warehouse next door doesn't have.

So it is considered outside of Swiss customs territory.

What that means is that for the purposes of most taxation, import taxes, tariffs, now we're talking about tariffs, and certain other types of taxes, it's not in Switzerland.

The Swiss are not going to impose that on you.

What that means is if you have a painting that you want to maybe sell to somebody else in the warehouse or hide from your spouse or just kind of stash away and keep quiet in case, you know, keep it for a rainy day, you can do that.

There's also a high level of secrecy.

Nobody knows what's in these warehouses.

No one even knows how much the loot is worth.

It's not just paintings.

There's gold, there's cars, there's wine.

Fun story.

I met a wine dealer in Laos once.

She told me that she worked for a vineyard and basically everything the vineyard produced went straight to a freeport.

A vineyard in Laos?

No, no, no.

It was in Europe.

I just got back from Laos.

And where would they pot, where can you grow on wine?

No, I met her in Laos, but she was Belgian and the vineyard was French.

In any case, there's tons of stuff in these warehouses.

They're hiding in plain sight.

It's not a secret that the Geneva Freeport exists.

In fact, if you walk around Geneva, you're going to see signs for the Jedot, which is that big fountain in the lake.

You're going to see signs for the UN, maybe a couple of museums, and the Freeport, Porfran.

There's signs on the highway for it.

So no one's pretending it's not there.

Interestingly enough, it was easier for me to go to Laos than it was to get into the Freeport.

I never got in.

They never let me in.

If you don't have a storage unit full of rare items, why would they let you in?

No, I'm too poor.

Also, you're a journalist and they probably are allergic to journalists.

Yeah, you know, some people have gone in and taken a peek, but it didn't work out for me.

Yeah, well, you're not going to get into somebody's storage unit regardless.

I suppose you'd have to find somebody who has one and is willing to take you there to, I don't know, help them move something or whatever.

That to me is crazy.

So it's like an administrative island.

Essentially, it is kind of like a little airport zone or a little free zone.

This is probably a silly question, but I'm going to ask anyway.

Why do these these exist at all?

Okay, so historically, the Geneva Freeport and other free ports served a really important purpose for world trade.

Much like today, colonial powers didn't like to trade with each other.

They had high tariffs.

They had various roles and restrictions around trading.

And freeports were areas where they could carve out space on, say, a Caribbean island.

and say, all right, well, you can't trade rum with the French, but you can do it here.

And so it was a place that allowed a little bit more freedom of commerce, a little bit more diversity.

People who maybe weren't allowed to live elsewhere in the country were allowed in the freeport, be it in Italy or Germany or a Caribbean island.

These had a very important function in trading.

The Geneva Freeport is located at a crossroads.

It's really at the heart of Europe.

And back in the day when actual commodities were going through Europe, not just numbers on a screen, merchants would pass through.

and they'd need to rest for a night or two.

Maybe they wanted to sell some things.

Maybe they wanted to, you know, network, Whatever it is merchants do.

And so they took advantage of the Geneva Freeport's enormous grain silos.

They stashed their grain there.

And administratively, this grain was not considered to have been imported into Geneva.

It was suspended.

It was in transit.

It had this liminal quality that meant that it wasn't going to be taxed.

You didn't have to fill out all the paperwork that you'd have to do.

And so it was really just a way of streamlining, again, trade and commerce.

You mentioned in the book nationalism and protectionism cost money.

What do you mean by that?

Just that it's a bureaucratic cost to what we're doing now, for example, in the United States?

Yeah, we're going to see prices go up.

At least that's what the economists project.

Look, if you put tariffs and customs fees on imports, the people buying them are going to end up paying more.

So it makes perfect sense in this capitalist framework to have places where these fees don't apply.

That's like the very basic explanation of the freeport logic.

So there's a carve-out.

So this loophole.

exists so that the people seemingly kind of at the top who know how to use it or have access to can essentially out-compete people who have to pay those fees.

Pretty much.

And the other important thing to remember about the Freeport and the rules that were written hundreds of years ago is: okay, merchant brings his grain, stores it in the freeport, moves on a couple few days later.

He can't leave this grain there forever.

This grain is not going to accrue interest.

It's not going to get more valuable.

In fact, it's going to go bad if you leave it too long.

And so, this rule that considers it placeless, timeless, suspended makes sense for something perishable.

Now, it's a completely different ballgame if you're talking about a gold bar or a bottle of wine or a painting.

All of these things do gain value, right?

Sometimes depending on the markets, depending on the conditions the wine is stored in, but art definitely accrues value.

Gold has historically.

And if you're leaving it in the freeport, it's also not going to go bad, right?

You can just put gold there.

And as long as you're not doing something really stupid, it's going to still be gold.

But this rule that allows this indefinite suspension still applies.

And so that's why the suspension of time time as well as space allows people to use the loophole in much more nefarious ways than the grain merchant would have.

It seems like, let me come up with a hypothetical here.

If I sue someone for negligence where somebody gets hurt, they say they have no money.

I'm assuming that if I subpoena with the contents of their freeport storage unit, Switzerland tells me to go fly a kite.

Yeah, I don't think you can do that.

It depends on the jurisdiction.

And like the banking sector, Switzerland has been putting in place some reforms.

It's by no means the worst freeport out there.

In fact, there was a scuffle about antiquities in the freeport.

And you can't really store that, you know, very precious antiquities there anymore because Geneva is party to some UNESCO treaties.

But Singapore is not.

And so if you have these items and you want to put them somewhere safe and out of sight and out of mind, there are other places, other free ports that are going to accommodate you.

So if Geneva's not the sketchiest free port, what's the sketchiest freeport?

Oh, the absolute sketchiest one.

Oh, I think we have yet to see it.

There's free ports all around the world.

But, you know, Singapore is pretty lax about things like antiquities.

Places in the UAE and the Gulf are pretty lax about money laundering.

So for every kind of transgression, there's a place that's a little bit nicer to you about it.

Yeah, I've got a friend who does work in Dubai.

I have to be really careful not to even remotely identify anything about this.

But basically, I know that a lot of crypto bros went to Dubai.

And I was like, man, there's a lot of guys who made a lot of money in crypto.

And he works with some of these folks sometimes.

And he said, yeah, there's some guys who invested well and live in Dubai.

There's other guys who did a scam in crypto and live in Dubai.

And then the rest of them are pretending that they made money in crypto, but it's completely just money laundering from drug cartels in the Russian mafia.

And they are all in Dubai.

Yeah.

That squares with what people have told me, too.

It seems like there's a balance, right?

Because of course, there's places that are in sketchier countries, but then you run the risk of, I don't know, a military coup and then you can't get your stuff back.

Absolutely.

Which brings me to a really important point about all of these jurisdictions.

And that's going back to the lawlessness.

There's this perception that rich people want to break the law, that, you know, these free ports are places where you can just do whatever you want.

Actually, the laws are very clear what you can and can't do in the free port, and they protect the wealth.

And there's law to protect the wealth.

Property rights are sort of paramount among the clientele of these places.

And so there are laws.

They're just laws that work very well for

rich and like potentially sketchy people.

Yeah.

People who say, oh, they can break the law and get away with it.

They're missing the point.

They're writing the law.

Rich people love law.

And when the Panama papers came out a few years ago, or like 10 years ago at this point, the response from the industry, from the tax avoidance industry was, but it's legal.

And honestly, they were right most of the time.

There was some stuff that went on that wasn't legal.

But basically, these offshore trusts pitch clients by saying, well, this is legal here.

You can do it and you're not going to get sent to jail.

That's why they're so popular.

I didn't realize also that Switzerland, while starting out as a mercenary state that kind of sold its citizens, they also created life insurance.

This is such a random industry that how did this come up?

Yeah, it shows to their sort of powers of speculation.

So I'm going to try to recap this properly because it gets a little bit complicated.

So the Swiss were selling essentially bonds that pay out over time.

And they were selling this to investors.

And the bonds were based on life expectancy.

But there was this little kind of glitch, I guess, in the policy that paid out the same whether you were six years old or 65 years old.

The bonds would pay out equally for people of all ages, but there was this little kind of glitch, I guess, in the policy that paid out the same whether you were six years old or 65 years old.

And of course, it makes more sense to buy the policy.

It costs the same, right, for a little girl than as it did for an old man.

And so these bankers were like, wait, we're just going to buy a whole bunch of life insurance policies from these little girls that they found, very well-to-do little girls who'd just been vaccinated against some diseases.

So their life expectancy just jumped overnight.

Again, this was a version of selling bodies of young men to fight abroad.

Here, they were insuring the bodies of little girls to speculate and then make a lot of money.

Oh, I see.

So they're like, they'll probably live for a while.

They're vaccinated.

They're women.

They're wealthy.

Totally.

They're going to live twice as long as some dude who is outside all day.

Exactly.

And they paid the girls too.

I mean, the girls got something out of it.

But again, it's ingenious.

It's very clever.

Yeah.

It's funny because they're commoditizing the rice and the grain, but they're also like, how do we commoditize our people?

Well, we sell our men to fight in foreign wars.

No, not that.

That's so last year.

What can we do now?

Oh, we can make life insurance.

It's really like, I'm sensing a trend in Switzerland.

There's a level of abstraction that the Swiss have been able to deal with that is quite forward-thinking in that sense.

The free ports, they remind me of Indiana Jones and the the Lost Ark.

Isn't that the last scene where they're shoving a box with the ark into a row of other boxes to be forgotten forever?

That's kind of what I imagine.

Yeah, I don't, I'm sure that others have had that thought too.

Does this facilitate money laundering at all?

Because you can hide something that's worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in a storage unit and no one's going to say it's there.

Yeah, it can.

It can.

It's definitely one of the spots that money launderers can turn to.

Again, it depends on the freeport.

Just to give credit where it's due, I think the Geneva Freeport has gotten quite strict about this sort of thing, mainly because they had so much bad press, right?

It's like, it sounds sketchier than it is, but the others could be a little bit more relaxed.

Sure.

Yeah.

Singapore picked up where they left off from the look of it.

Does the United States have anything like this?

So the United States has something analogous that's very interesting in light of where we are today with the tariffs.

So after the Great Depression, there were a bunch of tariff laws passed called the Smoot-Holly tariffs.

Now, Trump's tariffs are, I think, even higher than those, but that was just like a big slap in the face for world trade.

And suddenly things were much more expensive to import.

In an effort to keep the imports coming, at least a little bit, to maybe stop the bleeding a little bit, members of Congress passed a law allowing for the foreign trade zones to be established.

FTZs are all around us now.

There's a couple hundred in the States.

And they're like the freeport in the sense that they are cordoned off space where different customs rules apply.

They are used for warehousing.

They're also used for manufacturing.

And they're a way to sort of import goods and hold them there and then either re-export them without paying the tariff or you import them sometimes at a different tariff rate.

I see.

They're not a silver bullet for the tariffs at all, but historically, they have kind of flourished in times of protectionism.

What about Russia?

Surely they have something like this.

Russia was going to turn the whole city of Ladivostok into a free port.

And yeah, and when you asked, what are the sketchy ones?

people were like, oof, what's going to happen there?

You know, it's pretty near North Korea.

It's near China.

You know, heavens 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 to carve out in Vladivostok.

We're just going to say that you can not pay tariffs tariffs on anything unless we decide we want to make you do it.

Yeah.

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 have 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 sanctioned.

So they really don't even need to worry about this.

He 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.

This 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.

So 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.

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.

Economists 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.

It 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, this sort of arbitraging, and actually create a bunch of these special economic zones that were factories.

And they eventually were like, okay, we're going to turn the whole island into a tax-free zone.

So, and 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.

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All right.

Now back to Atusa 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.

There's a little hole that goes on a little post, so it's not glued on, right?

It's, and that was a specialized skill.

So they trained a bunch of what it sounds like women to do this.

But then they were 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.

So globally, these kinds of structures represent a 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 offshoreness.

And it's probably good for your country if you're able to go up.

But 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 on equal 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.

It 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.

Yeah, 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.

Usually 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 U.S.

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.

They 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.

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 so fancy countries like luxembourg can essentially i think the term you coin in the book or i don't know if you coined this but in the book it's juridical entrepreneurship yeah you're like oh okay 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 thing in Chechnya.

Was it Chechnya?

Chechnya, Togo, every obscure little nation you can think of probably has issued a novelty postage stamp.

And 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 the big idea?

I don't think it's a copyright thing.

I think that stamp collectors just want a lot of stamps from 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 here.

Yeah, 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 stamps.

It's like 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, than 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 to.

I don't know if AI write them next.

Yeah.

I mean, you might as well have ChatGPT tell you a bunch of nonsense.

That's what'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 a U of M for a year.

And 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.

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.

It'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.

And 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 about it.

I was younger.

I guess that's my excuse.

I I was in high school.

Yeah, I didn't really know the extent of it either until I was researching this.

So that happened.

War on terror 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.

And 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 Salvador in prisons, sending people to Panama, and now apparently sending people to Libya.

So

yeah, that was in the news yesterday.

Not a great place to send people.

No, they have slave open-air slave markets in Libya now.

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.

Wow.

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.

Like, 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.

Yeah.

The sticking point here is you need other countries to recognize you.

So it might be kind of difficult to actually pull off.

But as a thought experiment, I really love seasteading because we kind of are stuck in this paradigm that you can't 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 seasteadders 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.

So 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?

Sea land.

That's what I thought.

Yeah, sea land.

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's like a document.

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.

And 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.

In the in near off the coast of England.

Yeah.

So you have winter, but you're in the ocean.

Wet.

Yeah.

And it's wet.

It's 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

I 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 and 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.

Yeah,

the pig butchering.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've covered that quite a bit with the journalists who broke the story, but like, hey, these places exist.

Yeah.

And it was, nobody cared.

And people didn't even believe them until they started getting videos and photos and rescuing people who were there.

And 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% 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 loved being able to travel through Europe and everything.

And also, at first, it was kind of a novelty thing.

And 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.

And 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 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.

St.

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.

Right, right.

The only way you can do that is by getting another passport and renouncing your U.S.

citizenship.

And even then, it can take a while.

You know, Uncle Sam is pretty.

They're going to say, hey, why did you do this?

You bake 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 Veer, 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.

They 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.

You won't be able to like visit Graham.

Like 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.

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 with a 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 and 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.

It's a good thing.

I see.

So the difference between me and somebody who's in a detention camp is I bought a passport from Alta, so now I can live in a luxury apartment and they have to live in a yeah, or I mean, even, I mean, look at what's happening here.

donald trump was to sell gold cards for five million dollars and deport you know everybody everybody else like it's not just malta it's happening in our backyards uh although the gold card is it's 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 there's just 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.

On 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.

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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,

you 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.

This 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.

And 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 up 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.

Oh, 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.

Yeah, Afghanistan.

Yeah, but that's pretty bad.

It was a pretty bad selection.

Usually when you buy another passport, it's to like get a better one, not a worse one.

Right.

Not to get drafted into the Ukrainian army or thrown into

the Russian army.

Yes.

So, and now, and I was like, oh, 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.

And 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 you have if you have a couple hundred thousand dollars uh kicking around in a bank account maybe in switzerland you can uh there you have options you can get visas you can get citizenship in st.

Kitts uh Dominica you know 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?

You can't just put it in a bank and use it.

You can buy a condo.

Like 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 because it's basically you're buying the passport, but you get a condo with it.

It's not a good thing.

It's really jacked up prices in this kind of bizarre way where the real value is the document.

It's the 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% 500% markup on real estate and then throw in a passport?

Yeah.

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 and invest.

Who's doing this?

Oligarchs?

So, yeah.

So historically, or 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 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.

There 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.

It is, yeah.

What I should do is interview somebody who does this and be like, can you

get it in exchange for coming on this show?

Can I get a passport that's a red one or a green one?

We'll see.

Are there any unusual reasons?

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?

The 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.

A 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.

UAE 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 in life.

Right.

You don't have to pay for education and healthcare.

Yeah.

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 UN 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, independent since the 60s, best known for having coup d'état often, very often.

I 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...

Cools will do that.

Military takeovers tend to do that.

When the UAE approached them via this intermediary, this guy Bashar Kiwan, 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.

It ended up being more than that much money and more than that many passports.

Someone 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.

And I'm going to to guess that passport is genuinely terrible if they're giving it away and buying it in

coupon style.

That'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.

And so they got these passports.

Then there was some problems getting them renewed.

The deal was off and then it was back on again.

A lot of internal politics.

And people realized, okay, actually, I came to depend on this to get my driver's license to send my kids to school.

And so 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.

He was detained, told he had to leave, given the choice between going to like Yemen or Thailand, like a bunch of places and Thailand.

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 the 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?

Just 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.

We 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.

Israel's 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, okay, 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.

Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, that has, Israel has this added level of like, we need to replace people that were killed during World War II.

Like, there's a whole other, I don't think Malta is like, we need to replace the lost 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.

I'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 like 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 and your passport.

So I'm like, hey, Jayden, 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.

The 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.

I really,

one man's sketchy is another man's legal.

Well, that's the idea behind buying it, right?

I'm thinking of UAE, right?

I mentioned this earlier in the show.

There's a lot of crypto bros there.

And my friend was, 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 one MDV

mastermind.

He's on the show.

Yeah, he bought a Cypress 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.

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.

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, 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 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.

That'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.

Your people, your Maltese investor citizens, have to have a more genuine link to Malta.

You can't just have your friend's 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.

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 you 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.

Yeah, 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?

Like 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 skewing 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 i wait okay we'll talk about that what's the and american american i became american two years ago why is an iranian citizenship hard to get rid of i 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 uh to get rid of it you have to show 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 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 Iran?

Okay, I understand that, but then Belgian and Australia.

And then people tell their story of like their, how they grew up here and then here, and then 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.

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.

It's a good one, but like, huh.

Yeah.

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 Sirius Bank, I could become Austrian.

I have to invest.

I think it is $2 million.

You you have to invest, and you also have to convince them that you're special.

So, I don't know, maybe.

And this podcast won't do it.

Yeah, come on.

I'll get one of those.

I can't name a single Austrian podcast.

I'm sure they exist.

Yeah, 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 or piano player.

This is kind of.

You know, I was on one of those extraordinary alien visas.

Yeah, 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?

Asking 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, uh,

I 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'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 your house being seized or, you know, coups, like look into that.

Make sure it's a stable jurisdiction.

Jordan, you could probably buy a Comoro 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.

Some countries don't allow dual citizenship.

Hungary is talking about ending it at this point.

These things evolve.

Citizenship laws evolve.

So make sure 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.

And 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.

I 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, okay.

Come here and do some other stuff, maybe learn some Portuguese, but your passport is being processed.

It's going to take, you know, three years or however long because they've got a stack 10 miles high.

Yeah.

But he can basically become a Portuguese citizen.

Yeah, 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.

I 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'll 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.

I think it says a lot about 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.

And 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.

And 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, and 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.

And 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.

I mean, residence, like actually proving residence 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.

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 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.

And 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.

We're at 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?

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.

I 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 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.

Some 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 at 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, yeah, my great-grandmother came from Sicily.

I think now they were like, all right, it's enough.

We got half of New Jersey.

What's going on?

Yeah.

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.

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, et cetera.

But 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

it.

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.

They don't go to Paris.

And if they wanted to go, now they just can't, or they have to apply for a visa.

And 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 do any or explore anything like this.

So it's going to create this sort of divide, this tier of society that didn't exist before.

Yeah, 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, ill-gotten podcast gains and escape U.S.

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.

Dropping the arrogance.

You don't have to say that.

There might be a little bit 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.

And 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 the Trumpy candidates.

So 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.

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I was terrified.

I was like, had my last rights read to me.

Fortunately, 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 CBS.

And so my mission then became, could I figure out what the hell is 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 CBS, 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.

80% 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?

All things a Tuzab or Hamin 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 the the show.

It does make a big difference.

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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, We BitWiser, 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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We don't write a whole bunch of stuff.

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We're busy too.

A two-minute read.

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It's a great companion to the show.

JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.

Don't forget about six minute networking as well, as previously mentioned over at sixminutenetworking.com.

I'm at JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

This show is created in association with Podcast One.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jay Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sedlaskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember, 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.

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