Second Passports, Plan B Residencies, and the Americas Super Cycle
- Vance is the founder of My Latin Life, an immigration agency covering residency visas across Latin America. A Canadian-American software developer, he began travelling after reading Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek and arriving in Playa del Carmen in 2018.
Timothy Allen sits down with Vance in Próspera for a practical guide to internationalising your life. They discuss the five routes to a second passport, why ancestry should usually be investigated first, why Mexico often suits Americans while Paraguay appeals to Europeans, and how some Latin American residencies can be maintained with very little time on the ground.
The conversation then turns to the larger shift Vance sees taking place across the world: declining confidence in Europe, growing optimism in Latin America, El Salvador's transformation, Dubai's sudden vulnerability, and his belief that the present economic super cycle belongs to the Americas.
In this conversation:
"If you have a bad owner, the people will leave. If he's not doing what he promised, if he's not keeping them happy, customers leave all the time. The worse he is, the sooner people will leave, he'll go bankrupt, and someone else will buy the property that can do a better job with it. That's the way business works."
"When you build for nomads you build for everyone else. If you build something good enough to attract a digital nomad to whatever you are building, you are building something good enough for 90% of the people... That's why I say you should build for nomads, but nomads should not be your end client."
"The real reason that I wear the mask is because it doesn't matter who I am. Anybody can be doing what we're doing thanks to Bitcoin and the Bitcoin node network. The message, the idea of free speech in a worldwide mesh network, does not depend upon any single person's identity. Everyone is building the mesh network."
"As we progress through this movement in general, I think this might be the key to unlock the critical mass. I really do think that. I think families are overlooked because the old family thought process, or the people who were families when we were younger, may not have been ready for this. But now everyone who's...
"It's good to have a norm against racism, but when you go to a taboo, that's a very black and white thing. There's no nuance, there's no grey zones, and all of a sudden this is a powerful piece of kryptonite that somebody can weaponise."
"Imagine we had the technology and we would say, oh, for a reason X, Y, Z, we don't allow people to use it. That would be like withholding life-saving medicine from someone, which is equivalent, ethically speaking, to killing someone."
"I'm going to say for full-time employees that spend over a billion on talent, I'm saying there's going to be 40% layoffs. And they might say only 10%, but in reality, they're recalibrating easily up to 40%."
"I came to visit, just to visit. On the second day, I bought a motorbike from Facebook Marketplace just to lock in. Okay, this might be my place."
"The minute you don't agree with something they do, they'll come for you too. Don't for one minute think that you're safe. So why are you supporting this? Because it could happen to any one of you."
"If you're ruthless about figuring it out, people will support you. And it's a matter of execution, right? So are we going to be the crazy or are we going to be the visionaries? It all comes down to executing and getting it done... and it being okay if it fails."
"Every country is run poorly, in my opinion. I don't think any country is run very well. Even Singapore is not run very well. They're too restrictive there."
"We've lived this life. My dad has. And my grandfather before him. We're sure of where we want to take it. It's not just dreams. It's grounded in reality. We've got a plan of how to get there. Now we just need to go and do it."
"There's so much LARPing... It's when you imitate the superficialities of something without actually doing it. The thing is that starting a new country is so fun and so romantic and so exciting and so unbelievably hard that even if you seriously try to do it, you're going to naturally find that it's so much easier t...
"The most important thing that can happen now with this new government for every other project out there.. is for Próspera to be successful. Because the more successful we are, the more people can point to us and say we're going to replicate that in our country."
“When Starmer came in in 2024, how many people across the entire British state changed jobs? Two hundred... One hundred ministers… and one hundred special advisors… And that’s it. And everybody else in that deep state stayed exactly the same.”
"The film is not necessarily a sad story about someone dying. It's about someone that had this dream that they believed in more than life itself, quite literally. He was quite happy to die for this dream, for what might have happened."
"Land use should not be prescribed by any planning regime. People come together into a city by seeking out very particular connections. And they have to find each other. There needs to be the degree of freedom to associate and self-organize what I call the co-location synergies."
"You can vote your way into socialism, but you can only shoot your way out. They're never going to leave power."
"The golden age of voluntarism, anarcho-capitalism has already emerged. It's all over two-thirds of the Earth's surface. It's completely flourishing. It's long since entered its golden age. We've already proved that it works because it emerged naturally on the sea. It's called the cruise ship industry."
"There were probably a lot of brown envelopes on the table involved - they said, okay, have this zone then."
"I want to be back in my tribe. I want to have strong people which I can rely on, which I can do business with, which I know, which have my back and I have theirs.. And if we are building this place right now, why would I fill it with people I don't know and I don't give a shit about?"
