Welcome to the Free Cities podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 166 of the Free Cities podcast.
I'm going to get straight into it this week.
Now, you think you're pretty well-travelled, right?
You know, you're into plan Bs, nomadism, all the latest hot low-tax spots around the world.
Well, prepare to be humbled.
Today's guest is, well, certainly the most well-travelled person I've ever had on this pod.
maybe even one of the most well-travelled people in the world at the moment it's hard to know for
sure i suppose you could start with the fact that he's been to 326 of the 330 jurisdictions
slash territories which are categorized by the traveler century club list you might wonder why
has he not been to all 330 well three of them are inaccessible due to being military bases
that's midway and wake island and chagos british indian ocean territory in the diego garcia area
and the last one well it's tokelau and it's still got pandemic entry rules at the moment
anyway he's a real one he's got the instagram feed that most influencers can only dream of
and as he says in the interview actually he's not even promoting it it's just a private feed of his
travels anyway here's what the ai made of our conversation in this episode timothy allen speaks
with christoph hoyerman a perpetual traveler whose work sits at the intersection of global mobility
asset protection and quiet preparation for uncertainty. What begins with stories of
constant movement and remote places quickly turns into a deeper exploration of why some people choose
to anchor themselves to a single country, system or plan. Without turning it into a how-to guide,
the conversation moves through unclaimed territories, unusual experiments in sovereignty
and the lived reality behind concepts like exit optionality and plan b thinking
hoyman shares observations from years of travel and advising clients offering glimpses into how
families entrepreneurs and retirees are responding to tightening rules and rising friction worldwide
true the discussion also challenges common assumptions about digital nomads free cities
and what actually creates resilience, hinting at tensions between online freedom and physical
reality. Throughout, the focus stays practical and grounded. More about mindset and trade-offs
than hype. Well, that's good. Thank you, AI. Glad you appreciated it. Christoph is well-known
amongst digital nomads. His company, Statenlos, is very well-known and respected in the space.
This is, I suppose, a wide ranging conversation about mobility, risk and the future shape of freedom is one way I would describe it.
Talking of the future shape of freedom.
This episode is brought to you by Veritas Villages, our wonderful lead sponsor.
I'm trying to talk about them in different sections of the intro so you don't get bored.
But guess what? They're building off grid, freedom oriented communities in Latin America.
and these communities are perfect for you if you're a freedom lover looking to live amongst
like-minded individuals in places like Nicaragua, Panama and Costa Rica. They're also great if you're
a Bitcoiner. You can buy property with Bitcoin. You can spend BTC at the communities and they can
even help you mine Bitcoin with the excess energy that your home will inevitably produce. They're
already mining Bitcoin themselves and have been for a very long time. www.veritasvillages.com
forward slash free cities for more info. Please mention us. Use that link. Contact them. And maybe
2026 is the year you get a plan B in Central America or even as many have a plan A. Something
we talk about a lot in this conversation. Anyway, probably time to get onto the road less traveled.
a reminder before we go to please leave us a review on your podcasting app if you can remember
this week i would very much appreciate it particularly if you're using apple podcasts
my fountain.fm subs many thanks as always only one comment this week from you lot from origin drums
he's talking about the episode last week with rahim tagizad again i was actually going to write
to you to request a show with Rahim. And before I did there, it appeared in my feed. Many thanks,
great show and love the podcast. Yes, I enjoyed that episode as well. And as I replied to this
comment online, I'm going to tell you here, there's another episode with Rahim. That was number 39
from way back in the day and the first year of this podcast where we talk about Bitcoin citadels.
give that one a listen for an even more deeper dive into the concept also in this conversation
Christoph mentioned they have a Statenlos family retreat this year and when I looked into it turns
out he's doing that in conjunction with Rahim Takizadegan so very small world maybe look that
one up if you're a fan of both Christoph and Rahim oh and by the way an addendum the diving spot
that I can't recall in this conversation.
It's called Sipadan and it's in Sabah, Malaysia.
And by the looks of it, you need to go on a waiting list to dive there.
Anyway, right.
Time to get on as you dream of your second and third,
fourth, fifth, sixth passport, maybe.
You better just sit back, relax,
and enjoy my conversation with Christoph Heuermann.
you're you're you're a fascinating person put it that way i i don't think i understand really
who you are or what i understand i think i understand what you do obviously
let so let me tell you and then you can tell me where i'm wrong but you run a company that
basically deals with helping people emigrate, asset protection, citizenship, all this kind of stuff.
That's true, right? But also you live a very, looks like a pretty crazy life as a perpetual
traveler. Now I know some perpetual travelers and they tend to live in Georgia for six months and
then moved to I don't know you know Mexico but your Instagram feed is one of the most
ridiculous out there feeds I've ever seen it's like what influencers wish wish their feed looked
like so obviously that's intentional right but is is that are you doing that because you like it or
because it's a challenge to sort of go
to as many places as possible or to what the kind of inspiration behind that because you i mean like you an absolute instagram baller it it everywhere you go it very amazing like
the last one i was looking at and i've i've not seen half of this stuff i'm pretty well traveled
and they were like silver hotel pods like they look like spaceships where was that that was in
Saudi Arabia actually at the Red Sea, the Shibara Resort.
Right.
Amazing stay we had there two weeks ago, yeah.
So are you doing this because you want to know, you want to be able to, you want to experience
these things so that you can then sort of talk to people about them or are you just,
I want to go everywhere or do you actually just work from these places and...
Yeah, I mean, it's different.
Like, it's mostly personal curiosity that draws me to these places and it's not really
about being an influencer.
I'm an influencer in other things, but not on Instagram.
In the end, it's my private account.
I don't mind at all to earn money with my traveling.
I just put it there for the world to see
and for me to have good memories of the places I visited.
Is it private?
It's a personal account.
I have a business Instagram account as well, which is working well,
but this account you just mentioned is completely private.
Right, but it's not private.
It is public, of course.
People can see it.
It's just like my personal stuff where I put my personal memories, so to speak.
And if others like it, of course, it's great.
So why do you do that?
I mean, let me tell you, I traveled a lot, especially in the 90s and 2000s.
Mainly, it began as I was a backpacker, a kind of analog backpacker.
So I did that.
A lot of Southeast Asia, a lot.
But I did go to, I spent two, three, four years.
and then I had a career in photography and film and that kept me on the road for a lot of the time
but I got exhausted and there's no question about that you get this exhaustion
and but you don't seem to get that exhaustion how long you been doing it well I'm doing it now for
around 11 years I just stayed three weeks in Dubai because I promised it to my partner but
I got exhausted by staying too long in a place, I would say.
So I'm very happy now.
The next couple of weeks, I'm mostly one, two days in a place and move on.
So this is more my lifestyle.
I'm just used to it.
It's my routine.
And I can still have a successful business and many other projects.
Meanwhile, it just gives me power doing it.
Have you got a base anywhere?
We have a base in Dubai the last three years because my girlfriend has a nine-year-old son
and he goes to school there.
We often travel as a family.
often together with her only it's working very well um sometimes i'm traveling alone as well so
yeah very different lifestyles always yeah what is your travel setup as in do you travel with many
bags do you try are you one of those people that's an absolute zen master with packing and
you know i travel very light basically always only with hand luggage sometimes when i go to
Antarctica or other polar regions which happens quite often then I take a bigger bag with warm
clothes but generally even now in Prague only with hand luggage mostly without a suit now even
with a suit yeah I was gonna say you've got a suit but well you can't get that in hand luggage
you can put in hand luggage yeah well and then iron it when you when it comes out oh it's okay
you can do it if you know how to so the thing is I mean I have some other bases yeah I have
mobile bases I have a boat currently in Colombia I have some kind of expedition track I'm actually
visiting tomorrow in Spain.
Sorry, Simwa?
It's like an expedition truck, like you can say American Ram,
a pickup truck with a cabin on top, which is like a caravan.
So I'm using that a lot in Europe at the moment,
and I can also leave some stuff there.
Oh, right. Did you make that yourself?
Yes, it's completely tailor-made.
I let it build the last two years, and I just picked it up two months ago.
wow um i i've got a friend who who's got an overlander truck one of those ginormous ones
he did it himself as well he sold a company and he ended up with quite a bit of money
and he'd always wanted one i think it costed a quarter of a million to do it or something
but it's amazing and they really do use it but yours is more like a kind of it's a bit small
it's just 3.5 tons because in europe you're like limited to this for many things but it's still
amazing has a lot of power first trip i did in norway and denmark and it was a great fun like
one month ago it was where have you been in antarctica then that's interesting i've been to
six different places in antarctica this season i have three more cruises coming up so that's
generally my purpose not only in arctica but all the world i really want to see like the the layer
of the world i always say like the topography yeah so also see every region which is completely
different in Antarctica. So I've been to all the like six politically claimed areas of Antarctica,
like the British, Chilean, Norwegian, Argentinian territories, etc. Even at the South Pole,
that was a great journey three years ago. And there's still so many remote islands and places,
which is really nice for me to go to. What do you think about the current meme that there's
something weird going on in Antarctica in the places you're not allowed to go? If you've been
down there so many times do you know about that i mean like it's a antarctica is a place that
basically you can't go on the whole isn't it you can go you can go basically everywhere
can you it's a there's an arctic treaty and no one really has right over an arctic car you can
go everywhere if you have the funds to do that and there's many like multi-millionaires who go
there with private jets and with equipment and do their stuff what they want in an arctic drive
around and like special upgraded cars etc it's all possible but it will cost a lot of money
i thought that you couldn't fly across antarctica i thought that there was a
the treaty said it was off limits you can do that even some commercial flights do that rarely because
it's just too much of a detour fly over the south pole for example but you can do it i mean i flew
to the south pole and there's a couple of expeditions every year where you can go there as a
tourists there well there's a very big american base there directly at the south pole um but they
cannot prohibit you as a tourist from going there yeah really gosh that that's weird because they're
i don't know i i i haven't looked deeply into it but there's a lot of chatter on the internet about
antarctica being a place i know you can go to certain places but the the sort of central regions
Yeah, of course. I mean, it's very off limits for most people.
Like there's two, three operators who have camps in an Antarctic mainland.
Most people only visit on a cruise.
But there's people doing cross-country skiing to the South Pole,
hiking, climbing very big mountains over there.
But yes, it's a fascinating place.
What I really found weird all the time, they are perfectly pyramid-shaped mountains.
Completely natural.
So in my eyes, I think there were actually human-built pyramids back then.
Well, that's one of the theories, isn't it?
I've not, I don't actually, I don't think, I think that, I don't, probably don't think that's, the pictures that I've seen of them, I think, yeah, that's naturally occurring, you know, like, but it's, I'm very excited by the prospect that there is stuff there that, you know, is off limits.
So have you been everywhere on Antarctica?
Like all the places you can go where there are settlements?
Not yet, but this season I do another three cruises to regions I haven't been.
Then I've seen quite a lot.
And what are you looking for there?
Most people just gossip and say, oh, what's there?
It's only white, it's only ice, there's nothing.
But I mean, there's a lot of wildlife.
And you have great wildlife scenes.
Like once I encountered a couple of killer whales making waves to push the seals from the ice flows and then killing and eating them And of course it was a bit brutal but still an amazing memory
And you have so much other nature encounters there, like the sunsets are stunning.
The landscapes are very varied, it's not only white and ice, it's so much diversity.
For me I like the cold, I'm not feeling very well in warm weather.
I really like more the polar zones.
I did, in my former life as a filmmaker,
I worked on a big BBC project
where we made a film over four years.
It was called Human Planet.
I don't know whether you remember it.
It was one of their kind of blue chip films.
And I had to travel to all,
I had to travel to about 40 countries in that four years
and go to every different, like you were saying,
every different sort of ecosystem.
But we did the polar ones.
We did up in the north.
We went to like, you know, northern Canada.
We went to Greenland, you know.
And I get, whenever I'm up in those places,
I get a sense that you're not really supposed to be there.
It's so inhospitable to humans.
And our film was about indigenous people.
So we were making films about people who actually tended to live in these places.
But when you get up to those places, things become quite absurd.
And nothing, it doesn't seem like it's the kind of place that humans, you really should be living.
But they do, obviously.
And also the toughest, by far the toughest places like northern, not as high up, but northern Siberia.
they're some of the most
extreme people
I've ever met who live
I mean when you
it gets pretty, it's not too cold actually
when you travel through Antarctica in the summer
is it? Just maybe minus 10 degrees
we went to the South Pole, it was good
conditions, it was like minus 25
you have that in the Alps as well if you ski
yeah, but you've not travelled there
because it can get brutal right in Antarctica
obviously you don't go there in winter
you cannot even fly there, no one flies there
the people who are
living there all year they're completely stuck for like six months in yeah that also fascinates me
like living in one of those places yeah there's a big basis with a lot of amenities not only the
south pole i also visited a big american station mcmurdo in the rough sea and so like like a
village yeah like a free private city you can say and it's i mean that's interesting thing there is
basically no really um laws there it's full autonomous research stations yeah but they're
not private they're state-owned are they they're generally state-owned or state-affiliated yeah
and that do they buy do they have to put you up there or do you is it up to you to bring your own
accommodation or to no no they have all covered obviously they don't expect from you to go there
in a tent and get through you'll probably freeze after a night yeah wow that's amazing so come on
then what what else what are the weird weirder places you've been some somewhere i've probably
never heard of yeah i mean i like to visit very remote island territories um there's so much and
like the pacific and the atlantic which you just don't see on a normal world map and even if you
zoom in they're still too small that you see them and so i've been to a lot of those places
i also like to overland and like africa or russia to very remote places so um there's there's very
hard to choose one yeah yeah russia the same with me russia was kind of um somewhere i think i mean
yesterday in my talk i mentioned bierta wheel for example and there's other guys actually at
conference here was Bir Tawil.
How do you spell it?
B-I-R-T-A-W-I-L.
Bir Tawil is the only
remaining real terra nullius
in the world. Terra nullius means
it's completely unclaimed by other countries.
It's between Sudan and Egypt.
In Czech, that's right.
And both countries cannot claim it
because if they would claim it, they would
lose the claim on another territory
at the Red Sea, which has a lot of oil
and other interesting stuff,
while Bir Tawil has nothing.
So no one wants it.
And it's a place where many people go to, to declare their own state.
Actually, I went there in November 2019.
4th November 2019, I declared the free city of Bieterville.
And I put like a T-shirt of my company there with stones.
It's probably still laying there, demarcating the territory of my own country.
I did a talk a couple of months ago in Liberland.
and for the talk I did a bit of research and came across that place.
And there's a number of people that sort of take their own flags there and fly them.
So you don't think that Gornesiga, where Liberland is,
you don't think that's real terra nullis?
Liberland is not real terra nullis.
I mean, it's very hard for them to go there and set up camp there
because they immediately fought by the Croatians.
I mean, the Serbians tolerate them or even like them,
but the Croatians don't really accept their claim.
It's a nice thing to do, yeah.
But there's, like, those terra nullius,
there's a lot more other around the world.
So you think if you went to Bertobille,
how do you say it?
Bertobille?
Bertobille.
If you went to Bertobille
and started building something substantial,
because it's a bit like a Mars landscape there, isn't it?
It's very remote in the desert.
We had a tour from Khartoum in Sudan.
Well, now Sudan is in the middle of a bloody civil war, but back then it was relatively peaceful.
And it was, I think, a five-day trip to get there from the capital.
And the last three days, we were only in the desert.
We just set up camp on mattresses in the desert.
That was it.
And we were actually finding people there.
There were gold miners, like Arabic Battalion tribes with a lot of, I would say, slave labor from the black African countries.
And they were exploiting gold there.
and they thought we were Western prospectors trying to steal their gold.
So actually we were taken hostage there for three days.
And it was quite a tense situation.
They had a lot of fun playing around with their Karashnikovs.
And we had to wait for like the chief to come, but he had to come from very far.
So they took us there in their camp.
They treated us well.
They even slaughtered the goat for us.
But we couldn't leave and had to wait for like the chief.
And it was like very funny.
It was like an old man with like a two meter beard reaching to the ground and he negotiated with our Arab guide.
And in the end, they let us go.
But first, they really made these things you see before you beheaded.
They make a video of you and you have to say where you come from.
What's your name?
ETC.
So if you ever come back, then probably.
Really?
You like you're kneeling down.
They're standing behind you.
Not like that.
But that kind of thing.
Yeah, that kind of thing.
Shit.
So you thought, did you honestly, did you think?
I didn't think I was going to die, but it was a tense situation,
and we didn't really know what was coming towards us.
Bloody hell.
Did you have to pay some money to get out in the end?
We didn't pay any money to get out.
We even got a nice picture with Tim in the end.
I still have that picture.
It's a great memory.
I wasn't there alone.
I was there with a couple of other people who really liked those remote places
and went there to declare their own countries, more jokingly, of course.
But there are some people who have real intentions to settle this area,
But they will always clash with this gold miners and so on.
But what about if someone substantial with proper money decided, right?
I said I can't back, but only with Blackwater.
So if you have your private army, then you can probably colonize it.
Well, it's the kind of place where you could, it might, like I say, it looks a bit like the Mars landscape.
If you created domes and something like that.
But but honestly seriously speaking do you think?
apart from you know rogue bedouins who are with Kalashnikovs
Would any states have an issue with you really trying to do something Do you think the thing in the past was that the Egyptian border guards wouldn let you through to go there You could only go from Sudan Now from Sudan is very difficult because there a civil war there
And now I just bumped in this conference yesterday
into a guy who actually been there this year.
And he went from Egypt, which is generally much safer anyway.
And he has intentions now to settle it.
He has contacts to these Bedouin tribes.
And this is in good terms with them.
so maybe he's doing something i i find it very difficult i don't think it will work but
give it a try yeah in what sense does he want to settle it in in because it's not a very hospitable
place i mean you can't you have to take i mean it's still more hospital than antarctica for
example yeah rather a stone desert than an ice desert and i mean it's not too remote yeah i mean
it's maybe a day drive from like the nearest settlement in egypt um where you can fly to
but that's okay yeah and i mean uh people claimed everywhere on planet earth and probably will claim
some other planets soon as well and there the logistics are even more difficult yeah
you said you had a boat have you taken that to some pretty extreme places or are you a good sailor
yeah i got the boat during the pandemic times so we used it a lot to sail away from lockdowns
We did a transatlantic crossing.
We went from, in the end, from Croatia to Brazil, with like stops in Gibraltar, Canary
Islands, Cape Verde.
And that's a very nice island just in the middle of the Atlantic between Cape Verde and Brazil,
which is called the San Peter and Paul rocks.
Yeah, I think not many people have been there.
It's just like a couple of rocks in the middle of the ocean with a lighthouse on top of it.
one was in the lighthouse during COVID. Unfortunately, we couldn't land because it was quite rough waves.
But I flew my drone there. And there were like millions of birds and they were chasing my drone
in the end. So that was a fun experience. And what do you like when you drone a place? What do you do
with the footage? Do you use that for anything? Or is it just for personal fun? It's just for personal fun.
And I uploaded it on my personal Instagram. But I don't really do much with it. But I still have a lot
of footage. The big thing is I don't really like being recorded while I'm traveling. I'm not a
travel influencer. Many people are. I could probably be a quite influential travel influencer
if I would record everything. But I just like to make pictures for personal pleasure. And I'm
influencing in other areas like what you mentioned in the beginning of my business.
I know what you mean. As someone that traveled for work for a long time,
the when you have to get the camera out the time all the time it really gets on your
what's the word i can't without swearing it annoys you intensely in the end and you realize
it's literally a barrier between what you're experiencing and what you're doing and and then
my used to get my stomach used to turn i have to give it up in the end i did i i worked from 2000
to what for 20 years i was a journalist and a filmmaker and now i mean this i got into podcasting
because i just loved the fact i mean we're recording it now it's got video and stuff but
before video it was just voices and that was the most liberating thing i'd done in years i really
enjoyed it and ironically as well you could convey far more information in a conversation than you
could making a film anyway in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost so it made a lot
of sense but um but when i think about what you're doing i do think there are people who would say
wow you know that what a wasted opportunity i know you don't think of it like that and i know
you enjoy it and screw everyone else but you know i mean how many places have you been do you know
i mean there's a american travel club called tcc traveler century club and it divides the world
into 330 territories and i had to go to visit everyone i'm now at 326 so four are missing but
they're currently impossible they're all american military bases where you can't go really so you've
done it everywhere possible everywhere i mean there's a lot of other regions it's still the
world is still bigger still have a lot of destinations but like this list is about like
autonomous territories with their own laws and things like that and i've done everywhere there
And where are the American bases then?
Well, it's in the Pacific, like Midway, Wake Island,
very popular in the Second World War.
There is Chagos, British Indian Ocean territory,
which was quite in the media the last years
because they want to give it back to Mauritius,
which probably gives me an opportunity to visit it.
And there's one island which is not a military base.
They still have pandemic rules in place, so you cannot visit.
It's called Tokolau.
It's like an associated territory of New Zealand in the Pacific.
So this is probably also going to open up in the next couple of years,
and I will still visit it.
What about that place?
I think it's an Indian territory.
Is it the Andaman Islands?
Where is that?
Andaman, yeah.
Andaman is great.
I've been there this year for over a week.
I did a lot of diving there.
But which is the place that has a tribe living on it?
Yeah, it's in the Andaman Islands.
It's North Sentinel Island.
North Sentinel Island.
It's around 20 kilometers.
I haven't been there, but I've seen the island.
You can see it from the mainland, from the main island.
Obviously, it's dangerous to go there, and it's prohibited,
and you will probably face a couple of years in an Indian prison
if you try to go there.
Really?
So I didn't, but it's a fascinating island, definitely.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, didn't a guy lose his life there recently?
Yes, no, not recently.
That was a couple of years ago,
but recently a guy went there in a little inflatable boat,
But before he could land, he was detained by the Indian Marine and faces prison time.
When we were making that film, I was telling you about one of the episodes we did on the jungle.
We got permission to fly over uncontacted tribes in Brazil.
And unfortunately for me, I was scheduled to be on the flight.
And then right at the last minute, they insisted on sending their own photographer who worked for the, I forget the name of the organization.
But that footage is the most incredible footage I've ever watched in my life of people, basically, as they were flying around.
And the whole thing, when you think about it, I mean, it's probably completely unethical as well.
They weren't close.
They were flying around.
And we had the Cineflex camera, which back in those days was so that you could shoot long distance.
And they came out completely covered in red, firing bows and arrows at the plane and stuff.
And I watched it over and over again.
And it's just such a bizarre and crazy thing to think about.
And there's quite a number.
I mean, these guys, forget the name of the organization now.
It was something like the National Organization of Protected Peoples or whatever.
their idea was look if we let the bbc fly over here and shoot this we only have to do this once
and then everyone the footage is free everyone can use it and it was i mean people still use
that footage to this day but just the i'm fascinated by the thought of people living in
that isolated a lot there's so many nice tribes all around the world some more civilized some
others not and i've been to places in like papua new guinea or in the jungle in africa
where they really live like they did 10 000 of years ago like the pygmy tribes in africa
hunting with like little tubes for the monkeys and have very fascinating tattoos and things like that
so it's very interesting how how men choose to divert live lifestyles in the last couple of
thousand years well it's i i think is what the most fascinating thing is realizing that there's
not much difference between you and them it's just a cultural thing and a few
like technological advances. We lived with the Bayaka people do you know them?
They're in the Congo and we what's that Central African Republic we had to fly a private
plane in because you couldn't go in and we made a film about them climbing the trees to collect
honey you know like from bees oh my god it was the most insane thing there were these 40 meter trees
and they just lash a kind of um bit of liana around the tree and then round their back and
then just go up this tree with with like they used to set fire to um leaves as well to create smoke
so they kind of just climb these trees with burning leaves and then when they get there
The bees attack them.
It's just like people's risk tolerance in places like that is completely different to us.
We have no concept.
I've found that a lot of places.
I used to travel to Mongolia a lot every year.
It's the same there.
If you said to a Mongolian, can we get up that mountain?
They just say, yeah, let's go for it.
Whereas if you said it to one of us or a climber, they would be like, well, let's think about this.
We're going to need this, this, this.
But we have this complete risk and that way of analyzing risk, which is different to your average form of a human who, I don't know.
I think we just, I think we live too comfortable a lives.
I think that's probably where it comes.
I mean, you, like when I look at your Instagram, you do seem to travel very comfortably.
But also you do do the kind of like hardcore stuff as well.
Yeah, I mean, I just mentioned it yesterday in a chat about travel.
Some people choose to like hitchhike their way through Africa.
It's a nice travel experience.
But I mean, I'm not only a traveler.
I have this successful business with many employees.
I'm a shareholder of over 50 companies worldwide.
We have a lot of things to do every day.
And I can't just do that with limited internet, 12 hours a day in a bus.
It's not working.
In the other way, I earn enough money to get my private drivers, my private guides driving
me around and actually telling me the history and many other stuff which I wouldn't get
if I was just sitting in a bus.
You might get, of course, nicer experiences with locals.
For me, it's not that important.
I'm more like an introvert guy.
I don't need to speak every day with thousands of people.
I'm rather interested in the history, the culture,
and the nature and so on of countries.
When you travel in the truck, do you live in the truck?
I live in the truck, yeah.
It has a very nice cabin in there, quite a lot of amenities.
So I built it just for the purpose.
to now like this year i have like 120 flights um so from next year on i would like to reduce it to
maybe half or one third and travel more overland with that truck or more overseas with my boat
what's your internet set up in the truck then is it starlink it has starlink yeah but i mean in
europe i went to norway for my virgin voyage i didn't use starlink because there's like 5g mobile
everywhere. Starlink must be a game changer for you. It was for me mainly for Antarctica yeah
because before I have an online business I can take luckily I can take like one or two weeks off
but it will still damage my business quite a lot but with Starlink now and start basically on every
cruise ship going down there I don't have an issue anymore and I do a lot of those cruises which are
often quite long and actually Antarctica the last couple of years was the like region I spend most
days in every year because each cruise takes two three four weeks and it's great for working for me
yeah you have a great experience with the nature but you have a lot of downtime as well and for me
it's a very like peaceful area to get some work done yeah what do you actually have to do on a
day-to-day basis then for say start and loss is do you are you a hands-on like you said you've
invested in 50 businesses that obviously means you can't spend a huge amount of time i mean
Can you explain what Statenlos is first?
Yeah, I mean, Statenlos is a consulting agency where people become more free and wealthy
by applying international strategies to their life,
like shifting their residency, citizenship, companies, bank accounts, insurances,
and many other things.
So basically everything which can be done in another country in a better way,
we can help with.
And what do you do at Statenlos on a day-to-day basis?
So currently I have like around seven full-time employees, a couple of freelancers which do
most of the work I don't want to do.
I still do quite a lot of sales and consulting, but I do it in a very efficient way over the
years.
I found just efficient way of doing things when probably working around three, four hours
a day.
And that's enough to like help a lot of clients.
I mostly do consultings, some calls, mostly voice messages to help people with their problems.
And then coordinate my employees.
A lot of podcasts like this almost every day.
I mean, I'm mostly focused on the German market.
I mostly have Germans with Austrian clients, but we have international presence as well.
We do everything in English and Spanish and Portuguese and other languages as well.
And we do it everywhere in the world.
Yeah, so most like tax lawyers for example, they are in Cyprus in Dubai in Hong Kong and they just sell you this solution
Because they don't have any idea of the world and we do all the world every attractive country
We provide solutions for our clients
So when you say you personally do consulting do you mean one-on-one or do you consult for you know?
It's online it's online consulting. Yeah, but it's for individuals, right? It's for individuals sometimes companies as well
It's very heterogeneous.
It's a very nice thing.
I have everything from like little families who are just employed and want to get out of the system up to multimillionaires with a huge business conglomerate.
From like 14 year olds who want to start the business but can't because they're not 18 yet.
Up to last month, I had a 90 year old grandma who wanted to emigrate to Costa Rica.
Without her, she said brainwash family.
And she actually did it, yeah.
What's the biggest trend you can see at the moment then?
The most obvious trend amongst people, you know, in your business?
Yeah, I mean, global mobility really increases, yeah.
Especially I saw it after the pandemic, but even before.
In the beginning, when I started my business 10 years ago, it was like the typical people,
like digital entrepreneurs, digital freelancers coming to me.
Now it's everyone.
It's a lot of pensioners.
It's a lot of families with kids.
also for the purpose for example in many european countries you have very like strict laws on
homeschooling and those parents don't want to send their kids to school anymore because you're
completely brainwashed there and you have a lot of security risks nowadays so they just want to
homeschool them it's prohibited so they come to me for solutions how to live a free life as a family
internationally what do you think about something we talk about quite a lot on this podcast is
then the reality of free cities in the future may not really be that much to do with
mobile westerners if you know what i mean and more to do with like local people moving to
free cities for a better standard of living what's your opinion on that i think i've gone
through a couple of iterations of ideas about this about how important mobile westerners are really
yeah it's actually interesting i think you didn't hear my talk yesterday at the conference i exactly
took this topic there like the title of my talk was why do you need free cities if you can live
tax-free everywhere because us as mobile westerners if you know how to do it we can live in every
country of the world completely tax-free with a lot of other advantages and we don't really need
free cities because it's just more attractive somewhere else because free cities in the beginning
especially don't have the infrastructure,
which is attractive for us.
So I made the point yesterday in my presentation
that free cities should draw more physical workers,
physical businesses.
And by doing that, of course,
they make it more attractive for digital nomads as well.
So digital nomads can come, can invest,
can have maybe certain advantages as well but in the end I think the focus should be on the people and there a lot of people who want to emigrate but they don have a digital business They don want one
They have other skills and there's basically no alternatives.
Yeah.
Um, there's lots of tech sevens over 50 tech sevens in the world where you can live tech
three digitally, but there's basically no tech seven where you can live tech three physically.
And I think free cities can really like serve the gap for those people by having low, not necessarily zero, but low taxes and especially a very good regulatory environment.
And that's also interesting for me.
Yeah, I have a lot of digital business, but I'm invested a lot in analog projects as well.
Like I have a lot of agricultural projects, for example, a walnut plantation in Georgia, a winery in Argentina.
I'm a lot invested into mining and so on.
And this is all an analogous project.
And I'm also really willing in the future to have my own restaurant, my own hotel and things like that.
But I don't obviously want to do it in Europe with very high regulation and taxes.
But I could really imagine doing that in a free city if there's nice conditions.
Do you think the digital nomads are a powerful group then or not, really?
They are quite a big group nowadays.
but honestly you have to say many digital nomads are really low earning freelancers.
There's a couple of digital entrepreneurs making quite a lot of money but I would say 90% of digital nomads
have less than $3,000, $2,000 a month. So they get by, they have the lifestyle they wish to
but they don't really have the power to change much. They're just struggling and getting by more or less.
When I've had a couple of conversations with nomad influencers recently who've said that they're like for not first movers, but they're early movers to a place that can actually put a place on a map.
I think some examples, someone, one of them said that they thought that Lisbon really was, you know, the nomad influence on Lisbon had made it much more.
Do you think there's any truth in that?
Yes, that's true. I mean, there's a lot of nomad bubbles, I tend to call them, places like Bali or Cape Town or Lisbon, for example.
And many people just go to these places, they stay there a couple of miles and then they go somewhere else.
For me, that's not even nomadism. I always have problems with the term digital nomad, because most of these people are not really nomads in my eyes.
I'm more of a nomad but anyway
I generally tend to avoid
these places yeah I go to many
places in the world for a long
time I haven't been to Bali
I still haven't been to many popular nomad places
because for me it's just not interesting
but what I mean is do you think
there's truth in the fact that
nomads can elevate a place
and then
not just for themselves but for
and then everyone goes there
they gentrify places
because if a lot of nomads come
there will be nice restaurants and bars and so on popping up but there will also be a lot of
problems like you have in lisbon with very high rentals now lots of airbnbs instead of long-term
flats and that of course um makes trouble with the local population and uh yeah political
intervention to solve that yeah did you did i hear you right you said just earlier that you could
live tax-free in any country if you know how to do it and if you have the right citizenship and
residence is possible how do i live tax-free in the uk then that seems incredible but obviously
not all of the year yeah that's always the thing um you basically have to leave your home country
at least parts of the year in the uk depends uk has a bit more complicated rules if you're a
british citizen you're often limited to just be there like 90 days a year or even less but as a
German without any further ties to UK like a property there or business there I can easily
visit the UK also half a year every year and live there right I see and then there's like special
programs I mean that it's a big point at the moment yeah there's this or there was the so
called non-domiciled system in the UK where you could live basically tax-free in the UK for 17
years and a lot of billionaires made use of that but it was cancelled last year and now a lot of
wealth exited the UK to other places. And I think the tax didn't went up, it fell down like
a lot of percentages. Because of course, the richer you are, the more flexible you are,
and those people just leave to better jurisdictions. I think it's true as well. I own a property in the
UK. That's a bad thing for tax, isn't it? That gives you a further tie and reduces the amount
of days you can stay there so often brits can only visit like 30 to 60 days in their home country
and then they need like two other places to live around the world but it can still be fine for many
people what do you think would be one of the better strategies for a family then like because
i think the problem like when i was young and single and free i could it was amazing but with
a family it's very and i mean the kind of things like you know you don't really want to be moving
your kids out of a school and they make a bunch of friends i think things like that can really
undermine your children's yeah definitely i mean we have the same my partner is a nine-year son
that's why we're based in dubai the last three years so he can go to school there have his friends
but we will uh next year when he finishes primary school we will try homeschooling for a year
but we actively have the opportunities to give them friends there as well.
For example, in 10 days in Portugal, we make a big conference
with a lot of homeschooling families from our community
and we have like 100 kids there with their parents
one week in the Algarve coast
and they just connect each other, find other children to play with
and meet them up everywhere in the world.
Is that the Statenlos Conference?
It's like the Statenlos Family Conference.
Just intended for families who are interested in international lifestyle.
And I mean the concepts are very diverse.
There's a couple of families who are quite nomads.
They move every one to two months.
Most people have like their base, like two bases.
And it's possible you can have a house in many countries without triggering any taxation.
Especially in the Mediterranean, like in Spain, in Italy, in Greece and so on.
You can buy or rent a house, live there half a year.
half a year then you move to another mediterranean location live there another six months of course
some parents or some kids want to go to school then you maybe have a fixed base and but in a
nice country like panama or dubai and you still travel a lot but the kids can go to school there
yeah so there's a lot of opportunities we yeah we traveled with our family for a year during the
pandemic and one of the first things we did whenever we arrived at a place was find the
local homeschooling telegram groups and it was very easy to meet people uh you know that whole
network of homeschoolers now it really increases yeah i mean when i started out 10 years ago
especially like in german there was basically nothing now there's like 50 competing german
speaking online schools and then on a very scale you have even more options so and it's really also
a change in mentality yeah also the pandemic helped a lot because a lot of parents had to
homeschool their kids or didn't want to send them to school anymore couldn't send them to school
and i think generally families get much more mobile nowadays much more flexible
and like those thoughts people generally have grew up with you need a home you need to live
there all the time you need to pay your taxes they are getting shattered more and more i think
it's a good development do you think states around especially europe and england
UK these kind of do you think they gonna they catching up with all this stuff or do you think they gonna Because like normally Things like this would make a state compel it to be more competitive to try and attract you right but what we we actually see the opposite of that now in the
uk for example we see them blocking you from leaving instead of like trying to attract you
they're saying right now there's an exit tax or there's a wealth tax or something
where do you think this is all going because like more and more people are almost certainly
going to start thinking like this?
Well, you see both developments.
Some countries, of course, try to increase their exit barriers.
They introduce exit taxes or other laws, like France, for example,
at the moment has the idea to introduce citizenship-based taxation,
like in the US, and other Western European nations may follow.
And then you may be even forced to give up your citizenship,
get another one.
Some people are pondering that option.
On the other hand, you see a lot of countries nowadays
providing these options, making it much easier to emigrate with certain conditions,
not illegal migration to Germany. Germany has not a single legal investor
migration program, but if you come there for a way of passport, you're warmly
welcomed and on social security, which is multiple of what you would earn with 60
days work in your home country. But a lot of southern European nations
have recognized that like Greece or Italy, Spain, Portugal. They put on investor programs to get
like a visa for real estate investment and things like that. And they have a lot of tax breaks as
well. So as a foreigner, you can live completely tax free for a long time in Spain, in Portugal, in
Cyprus, Malta, many other places. So do you think it's a constant, like, swinging pendulum
geopolitically yes of course it's always changing every week there is a country like getting worse
but every day there's also every week there's a country getting better yeah and there's so many
different countries like i said i've been to 326 of this autonomous territories and there's a trend
of rather having new countries a lot of like regions who use also the like new social media
trends to mobilize their people and try to succeed and things like that.
So I think we are rather and I find that a good development to a world with more states
and not like a single centralized super state like the EU or even the UN.
So that would be a very bad dystopian totalitarian development.
I always say I want the world of thousands of Liechtensteins, Andorras, Monaco and so on.
That would make the people living there much more free.
You do see though, like in Europe, you do see large places conspiring, for example, on a tax rate.
What is it? What's the minimum tax rate they're trying to get?
Well, it's basically gone now.
They tried to do this 15%, but only for like very big companies, over 750 million revenue.
And now some countries backed out, even Germany backed out of that agreement.
So it's basically that.
I mean that's a nice thing for us even in the European Union to do anything in terms of taxes
every member state has to agree if there's only one member state we're doing it it doesn't happen
and there's so many tax havens like Malta Cyprus Island Luxembourg and so on that will never come
through and that's a nice development as well can you what do you think are the most attractive
places then like just surface level people that haven't even really thought any of this through
currently what are the i know i'm probably i'm sure you're going to say something like dubai but
is that is that is that one of the most attractive places at the moment i mean dubai is very attractive
not really because of the taxes we are not based in dubai because of the taxes here we are based
there mainly because it's convenient you can travel everywhere in the world very comfortably
very quickly you have a great education system great health system you can basically order
anything at home. Generally when I come to Dubai there's a nurse waiting for me
making a checkup, there's a tailor getting me new clothes, there is everything
coming to your doorstep without even leaving and then the heat that you
especially have in summer is beautiful as well and there's so many friends of
me living there so it's always nice to visit. But of course the desert lifestyle
is not for anyone and people choose to go to other places like popular places
This can be in Latin America, like Costa Rica or Panama.
A lot of people went to Mexico because they had much less restrictions during the pandemic, for example.
Or Asia is very popular, places like Bali and Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines.
There are so many options.
There are still, like I said, 50 options where you can live tax-free as a digital worker.
And that makes it pretty convenient, yeah.
What about Southern Europe?
the uncomfortable, the inconvenient truth for a lot of people is they want to live in a Southern
European environment. It's, you know, like, I guarantee you anyone in Dubai, if you said,
if there was a Dubai in Southern Europe, would you move? And be like, yes.
I mean, most Dubains doing that, right? Most Dubains won't, also those who can afford it,
they don't stay in Dubai during the summer. Every year between like June and October,
those people leave Dubai for like three, four, five months and they are in southern Europe.
But they don't trigger any taxation there. You can have a holiday home, you can stay up to six
months without any issues. And I always say that to my clients as well. You don't need to do the
travel lifestyle I do. I know very, very little people who are in that same passion. You can just
like leave Germany to Mallorca that's like the favorite holiday island in Spain
live there six months, de-register from Germany, still stay in Germany six months
and you're completely out of the system as well. Yeah, by just like flying for
like one and a half hours once a year and back. Yeah, so there's and these options
exist basically for every citizen of the world. Only Americans have a problem
because they're taxed by citizenship but there's also ways to get out of this.
I see now your strategy, your main strategy makes a lot of sense.
I've always thought my mindset is, can I move somewhere and pay hardly any tax?
But your mindset is you can live there.
You just can't spend all year there.
So you have to create a lifestyle for yourself where you work.
You kind of live between the cracks in the system.
I mean, for me, it's not even imaginable to spend more than a couple of weeks or months in a single place.
For most of the world, it's different, I know.
They can't really imagine staying less than half a year in any place.
But still, that's changing.
And those people who are willing to change that have a lot of advantages.
What is it about, why don't you want to stay in a place for a long time then?
I don't really find it beneficial for myself.
I still have this curiosity to explore the world, so many places.
I mean they don't get less
that's the thing
the last couple of years
I had my list to complete
I had these 326 territories
I wanted to visit
and now that's gone
and now the world gets even bigger
and there's so many other new places
there's new hobbies
like I started diving two years ago
and now I want to visit
all those great scuba diving places
very remote islands
where you can only go on a dive level board
so there's
it's never stopping
if you want getting addicted
Have you dived in the Galapagos Islands?
I have a trip coming up next year.
I'll tell you another place I dived, which was phenomenal,
which is hard to get to.
We were making a film about sea gypsies in…
Indonesia, Malaysia.
No, it wasn't.
No, no, no.
It was not Brunei.
Oh, Jesus, my memory.
One of the…
You know Kalimantan.
One of the places…
Yeah, that's Malaysia, Indonesia.
I've been there, actually.
I've been diving there.
It may have been Malaysia, but what's another country around there that isn't Malaysia,
that's part of…
No, Borneo is Indonesia and Malaysia.
Yeah yeah Kalimantan is anyway there an island a very small island there with a massive drop I mean it unbelievable And there is so much life around there but they don let We got permission to film there just randomly
No, no, I met the sea gypsies.
It was very nice.
We actually snorkeled with whale sharks there together with the sea gypsies.
And it's amazing.
They can free breath for 20 minutes or so underwater.
Yeah, yeah, that was part of our film.
We filmed...
I can still remember his name.
His name was Sulbin.
this guy's little wooden glasses little wooden things and he we filmed him in real time diving
down breath diving walking along the bottom of the sea because he he's quite a he was a really
small guy and as soon as he got down below he just stopped he sunk so he he had a spear gun and he
was just walking along the bottom and then he spear gunned this thing at a fish and brought it
up and the whole thing lasted about three or four minutes and he was absolutely fine when he got up
He could have gone on for longer.
It's really incredible.
It's interesting, though, the sea gypsies, because they, you know, I mean, obviously there's a connection with seasteading.
It's a proof of concept in many ways.
And what's interesting about the Bajau that we were with is they didn't have a citizenship.
They actually didn't have a citizenship.
They were living between the Philippines and northern Indonesia around Sulawesi and places like that.
I don't know what.
I mean, this was a while ago.
this was like 10, 15 years ago,
but I think they still don't really have citizenship.
They don't have a passport.
They just kind of like move around, you know.
Yeah, in like certain areas, that's fine.
But generally in the world, of course,
if you don't have a passport,
then you're without much rights.
And that's the idea of Statenlos,
which translates to stateless, yes.
It's not to have no passport at all.
It's rather to have multiple passports
in order to be more flexible.
if one country turns totalitarian.
For example, I have a German passport,
and with what I'm doing,
that's not exactly the interest of the German government,
and they might sanction me by removing my German passport,
and then I'm without travel mobility anymore
and have to go back to Germany, pay taxes, and so on and so on.
So that's the main reason why I got another passport.
I bought the passport of Vanuatu, a little Pacific nation,
in order to be more flexible and free.
the thing about second passports is and correct me if i'm wrong but it seems like it's something
that you need a relatively substantial amount of money to do i mean at least a quarter of a million
dollars or something is that is that true that's changing so like when what was for me it was like
120k so less now there's even programs out there where you can get the passport for like 60k
so there's lots lots more options coming up i mean it's not the best passport but they serve
their purpose of course there's other ways to get a passport just marry the right person
even just like if you want kids go to the right country and have your kids there we have a lot
of clients actually doing that a lot of young families who like go to places like brazil
argentina chile which have very good passports and which gives your child citizenship at birth
directly it's the same in the us and canada and you as a parent get basically directly the right
to stay and after a short time one two years also citizenship so there's other ways if you don't
have money and want a good second citizenship of course you can also live in the country
for long enough and many latin america countries just live there two three years and you also get
a relatively good passport yeah i interviewed fran last year he told me about brazils you can do that
You can have a child in Brazil, can't you?
Yes, you can have a child in Brazil, and then you'll get Brazilian.
And it's a nice passport to have, I think, yeah.
I like Brazil a lot.
It's one of my favorite countries.
What is the best passport currently?
I think in the recent ranking, it was Singapore.
But there's not much difference.
Like, there's like one, two, three more countries you can visit with that passport compared to other ones.
Like, most European ones, like German and UK, are pretty strong still.
But, I mean, that can change over time, yeah.
But generally you see in the world it's getting more free.
It's not getting more restricted.
More and more countries are opening up their borders
because they see they can attract digital nomads,
they can attract investors,
and that's generally a good thing for the country.
Really?
You think the trajectory is positive?
I don't know.
I hear a lot, certainly I see a lot around Europe.
I think of the opposite.
Maybe it's just because I live in the UK
and it appears like they're shutting down the...
They're literally...
They obviously want to punish the Brits
who wanted to exit the European Union,
but generally it's getting easier to travel,
even with a bad passport, yeah.
So even Europe, you think Europe's as a place...
A lot of people are really down on Europe.
It's going in the wrong direction.
Are you more of a positive?
I mean, there's, for example, not citizenships,
but golden visas still in Europe, for example.
in latvia you have to invest like 50 000 in the local company and that gives you unrestricted
mobility in the european union again yeah so there's a lot of like little hacks you can do
which are not that expensive which like restore your mobility yeah
yeah i i wish i could think more about things like that because i have a i probably quite a common
have a scenario that's quite common which is i have a house that i own in a country in europe
well in you know i'm in the i'm in the uk and my family is well embedded in the lifestyle we live
and it's very difficult to change that until the children are a bit older i don't really know how
to do that but i i mean we did it would it would take a very substantial event in the uk
for us to sit down at the kitchen table and go right we got to get out of here
Yeah, I mean, it's always what you want in your life.
And sometimes the social circles are stronger and better.
And you say, oh, it's okay to pay taxes to have this lifestyle.
But it's not okay.
But those things might change, yeah.
And you really have to make up your mind with your family about that.
And a lot of people, a growing amount of families are saying it's not okay.
And we'd rather leave.
But I mean, leaving is not always the only option.
We have a lot of people who want to stay in their home countries as well.
so of course I'm more popular for this like topic of perpetual traveling but we do a lot of tax
optimization for people as well who stay in their home country and there's options yeah
especially you should prevent yourself from certain scenarios yeah like a world war with
Russia for example or things like that by just getting a second bank account outside your home
country getting a residency without living there but just like as a plan b for example
every day we have germans flying to paraguay and getting a residency there because it's so easy
and then they come back to germany live in germany but they have a residency where they
can go to escape to when things turn wrong yeah and then they have like the guarantee that they
can travel to this country and get in and live a peaceful life yeah i've heard that one is you can
you can do it within a day is that right in paraguay probably a couple of days within a week
is fine and you basically don't need any requirements just a couple of documents
translated and epistyled and fly there pay a couple of thousand to a local lawyer and then
you get your residency which is converted to a permanent one after two years and your
hope would be true for your whole family as well yes you can take your wife your kids and so on
and there's a couple of other places in the world so well so when say say something in that scenario
if you get a residency in Paraguay
and then something
happens in your home country, all that means
is that you could go to Paraguay
and stay there indefinitely
it doesn't mean you get any passport
options or anything like that. Not directly
but generally if you live long enough in a country
you have the passport option
so in Paraguay after 3 years of permanent residency
you can get citizenship as well
How many
passports have you got or is that a secret?
No at the moment I have 2 of the
I mentioned German and one or two, but I'm actively on the way to get a couple of more passports.
Are you striking me as the kind of person that would have about 10?
You haven't. How come? I would have thought you...
The main issue is because it was illegal in Germany until very recently to have multiple passports.
So some countries with strict nationality cannot have only the nationality of the country you're born to.
And some countries are more flexible.
And Germany had a single citizenship until last year, 2024, July.
so it's only around like 15 months it's legal to have multiple citizenships so directly after
i was getting to the vanuatu thing and i'm currently working on my third passport
all right we'll wrap up soon but according to you then based on what you know and what you
are generally seeing can you make a kind of loose prediction of what's what's what's going to
transpire over the next sort of 25 years according to the geopolitical stuff do you think you know
are there are there places on the rise places on the decline you know just the general culture of
being able to move around i mean my because you see my one of my thoughts is that we're on a
trajectory and this is technological trajectory as well which is going to make it very easy to
limit people's travel quite quite easily with with algorithms and with social credit scores
Yeah, you have this development of like a digital ID now coming up in Germany and most of the Western world and that can turn very dystopian.
But if you have the right strategies for yourself, it's not that big issue.
For example, that's why I also put this citizenship of Vanuatu because it's a very remote country without much infrastructure.
They cannot have the system in place.
They live like a subsistence lifestyle.
They have their fields, have their fruits, have their pork and their fish, and that will
continue into a long time.
So you have these traditional cultures where you are better off and with the passport of
this country you still have some mobility without the disadvantages you have with digital
ID systems.
So in my eyes we are getting into a much more multipolar world, which is generally a good
thing because there's always a parallel system or different competing parallel systems.
Not all good, but you still have some options.
And in my eyes, I wouldn't recommend to live in most of Asia and Europe and Africa in the
next couple of decades.
I think the safer places to live in the southern hemisphere, especially southern America, also
the Pacific region, I think they will be rather fine without big wars or violence and other
troubles because they're mostly self-sufficient as well.
So generally and that my purpose as well going to those countries My favorite countries are places like Argentina New Zealand and of course Antarctica yeah you can live in Antarctica so so like going back
to the digital ID thing do you say say the digital ID thing becomes as dystopian as people say it
could would you still integrate with that but you would move in and out I think you don't have a
option to not integrate to that because I mean in the in the beginning it would just be an option
but at some point you're completely like out of social life and business life if you don't have it
so you have to like play the game but you should always have like a parallel system in place
where you can opt out of it if you want to or need to yeah just before we go what do you think of
destiny have you have you you know the place in St. Kitts have you have you looked into it do you
know about this not much but we do a lot of business we send kids we do a lot of
foundations and trust there because it's the best use dictionary world for asset
protection it's basically impossible to like sue you there get your money from
there so I think destiny I think this is new new special zone there right yes
we made made holidays and nevis also kids one year ago when it's a nice place
in the Caribbean much better than many of the other island stays there I was
just wondering if you had any connection to the project itself and because it's quite well it's a
it's a huge there's a lot of capital behind it and stuff and you know like you say it's as a place
nevis and it's an interesting place to do it probably one of the better places to do it in
fact yeah definitely okay anyway well look thanks christoph um enlightening i wish i could i wish i
could live i i think actually i probably if i commit the idea to thought i think slowly over
the next few years it will transpire but it's such a slow process it's always a seed i mean most
people don't know at all about this world they don't have the perspective at all and then they
find me online or wherever and they think, oh, yeah, I will never do that.
But then over time, the seed is planted and it's growing.
And then there are some events taking place, like the tax authorities coming,
wanting additional 20, 30 K tax from you.
And that really says, no, that's enough.
And now I'm doing it.
And then they need to convince their wife, their kids, but often they're doing it.
And when they're then out, then I often see like a kind of healing process.
Yeah.
And after a year, they also feel completely free.
They often come back to me and say, oh, now I have this and this business idea.
I could never do it back then, but now I can do it.
Now I have the time and the money to do it.
And it's generally great to hear that from those people.
Yeah.
Which never really looked like they would ever go out of their like traditional lifestyle I think you absolutely right And I think a lot of people stop themselves doing it But you need to make a move to realize
that you were either right or wrong anyway.
But most people stop at debating doing it.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of fear.
There's so many TV shows in Germany,
but also I think internationally as well,
where they show like failing immigrants.
It's funny to watch, but of course,
it instills fear in a lot of people that they will fail.
And there's a lot of immigrants failing and coming back.
But generally, it's people who often fail or would fail in their home countries as well.
Talking of TV shows before we go, Jan, you know Jan Bertram from our organization, he told me something.
He mentioned it on a call the other day.
He says, when you speak to Christoph, ask him about this.
And I committed a few things to memory.
And then I, but it was just a few words.
And thank, that GPT is amazing.
I typed in your name, Coca-Cola, T-shirt, German documentary.
And it searched through all the German results and came up.
Is this true that back in the day before your company was well known,
you were on a TV show and got incredibly slated by the show
because you basically showed everyone that you could live a tax-free life.
And it went viral. Is this right?
Yeah, it's a German show called Galileo.
That's right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it was like eight years ago.
It was my second year as a perpetual traveler.
I had like a vacation with a couple of clients in Panama.
And the film team came there.
And I mean, I really, even from like my university times,
I know bad press is good press for you.
Even if they make everything very bad,
I still probably have more advantages than not.
And in the end, I think they had like 30 hours of video material
over a couple of days in Panama.
and they really got like the 10 worst minutes out of it.
For example, yeah, they put me in a pool for like three hours.
I had to stay in that pool and they waited because the pool was cold
until I started to tremble.
And those couple of seconds I tremble, they put into the documentation.
Or another example, they really wanted to like illustrate me
like as a homeless person who cannot afford clothes and so on.
So they just said to me, you have to wear always the same.
yeah also when we were filming different countries in different places you have always to wear the
same and then they like made it look like it i couldn't afford any clothes or under other than
that i have yeah so i learned a lot about like media and propaganda at this thing but in the end
it doesn't didn't damage me it gave me a great boost of visibility yeah so yeah i mean and most
people are not dumb they will see what's really going on all press is good press really so you
would you would you would advocate for that?
Yeah, I'm quite using it a lot.
For example this year I went to the famous crypto dinner of Donald Trump in DC And I was one of the only ones giving interviews and i had interviews from like australia and and a lot of big stuff bbc cnn and so on and um yeah um for me that was
also great visibility boost yeah because i'm just standing there i'm saying yeah um it's nice to to
see donald trump live he's a charismatic person and um for me it's not a bad thing to do like that
Well, funnily enough as well, talking of that, before this interview, I was thinking, right, let's, let's, I typed your name into Google and put it onto news, just to see what's happened recently. And it was all stuff from that Donald Trump thing.
which is interesting.
I didn't expect that at all.
I just went there with two friends,
just a nice time together,
see him live,
make some connections to other people
which are mostly from the crypto world.
I didn't even consider
that there was so much media interest.
I had like a big German newspaper
coming to me making photo shootings.
I had a German state television
making a documentary about me based on that.
So obviously it has a Donald Trump focus
but it also makes people aware of what I'm doing.
And also a number of these organizations,
they're so lazy, aren't they?
Modern news organizations.
You put a picture of the menu of the dinner on Instagram
and they just will use it as the main picture.
Yeah, they're all using my material.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I used to work in that world.
I don't necessarily have much respect for him now.
But anyway, Christoph, thanks very much for coming in.
And yeah, thanks for enlightening me again.
And actually, I really do think, like I was saying, the seed has definitely been planted now.
I think I was missing something, actually.
I was missing that I could still live a similar life in the UK to what I'm living now without getting clobbered for so much tax.
I've missed that one.
I mean, in many cases, even your wife's children can stay in the UK.
and if you do it right, you can be out parts of the time
because you're doing anyway for work, for example,
and then have some advantages.
And I mean, that's the nice thing,
maybe last word about my work.
It's so diverse.
I've consulted over 5,000 people now personally
and no case is like the other.
It's all very different because we don't sell a product.
We see all the world and we see the client
with his individual preferences, dreams, goals,
and then try to find the best solution.
And that's a very rewarding work.
I'm sure it is. Well, good luck for the future. And you've had an effect on me anyway, which is great.
But thanks for coming in. It's a pleasure talking to you.
Thank you.