1285: Passport Bros | Skeptical Sunday

1285: Passport Bros | Skeptical Sunday

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher Nick Pell. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the story of secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today on the show. If you've spent more than five minutes on TikTok, you've probably bumped into a certain genre of video. A young American guy holding up a passport like it's a Wonka golden ticket, bragging that he's leaving the west behind to find a wife who's traditional, who's feminine, and depending on how honest they're feeling, not like American women.

Welcome to the world of Passport Bros. A loosely organized but very loud movement of men convinced that crossing international borders is the secret to escaping modern dating, which they consider to be bad, and whatever else they think is ruining their love lives. According to them, romance abroad is simpler, where women are nicer, expectations are clearer, and everybody knows their role.

Allegedly Western women are so entitled, so unpleasant, and so irredeemably modern that the only hope for male happiness is a one-way ticket to Manila, Medellín, or Phuket. But are Passport Bros actually finding more fulfilling relationships or just different power dynamics? Is this about culture economics or just [00:02:00] unrealistic expectations from Passport Bros and the women who they're dating?

Do foreign women genuinely prefer these men, or are the incentives more transactional than advertised? To what degree is this predatory? And is it okay to travel the world in search of a submissive wife here today to help me navigate this turbulent airspace as writer and researcher, Nick Powell. Nick, you lived abroad and married a foreigner, but are not a Passport Bro.

So what's the difference here?

Nick Pell: I was married when I moved abroad. At least I was the second time I moved abroad. And one doesn't move to England or Ireland in search of supposedly submissive, docile, non-Western women. There are a lot of very stupid assumptions Passport Bros are operating on that we'll be getting into, but I am not now, nor have I ever been a Passport Bro.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So before we get any further into this, I want to be clear about what a passport bro is and what it's not. A Passport Bro is a guy who moves abroad, specifically looking for women because he accepts a certain frame [00:03:00] about the state of women in the Western world.

He's not a guy who moves abroad because of a job or to increase the standard of living, or even simply because he thinks he might have better luck with women in Korea than he does in Ohio.

Nick Pell: So it's a specific sort of toxicity, the belief that women in the West are bad for a variety of reasons, but hey, you know, you can still find pure women abroad.

I hope that my tone is communicating that. I do not agree with any of this. It's also distinct from sex tourism, though, to be clear, this is where the lines start getting blurry, but Passport Bros are not guys showing up in Bangkok to patronize the local ladies of the night. There are two overlapping preconceptions that fuel the passport bro phenomenon.

The first is that women in the West are all masculine and undateable.

Jordan Harbinger: Putting aside whether or not this is true, which it clearly is not, it's priced in that these things [00:04:00] are bad, and a lot of men would disagree that these were undesirable traits in a partner. It's kind of an extreme set of beliefs, right.

Nick Pell: Yes. I think that's fair to say. These guys do think they're bad qualities and people are allowed to want whatever they want in a partner. My wife is definitely not a feminist. I'm basically married to Cher from Clueless and she thought it was wonderful that I described her that way. Uhhuh to somebody else.

Yeah, whatever you want in your partner is fine. You're allowed to have preferences provided everyone's, you know, an adult and consenting, you know, the obvious asterisk that you would put on that. The issue is that Passport Bros want to paint all women in the West with this very broad brush. The west is a big place no matter how you define it with a lot of people, and they're obviously not all the same.

These bros also seem to be using extremes that they get from social [00:05:00] media as their go-to examples of what we're talking about and social media. Not the best representation of reality.

Jordan Harbinger: So that's a big fail right there. What is this sort of second overlapping myth?

Nick Pell: It's the opposite. Complimentary myth that women in other cultures are more docile, submissive, loyal, just ever so grateful to have a Western husband and they're just going to be easy Pickens for an Ohio six man to, uh, drop in and take home with him as his bride.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Which beyond being pretty gross, stereotyping is not true. I mean, it's funny you hear all these stories of guys who are like, yeah, I'm going to date abroad, and they come back. Just, it's hard. It's not as easy as people think.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I mean most of my experience in this regard is in England and like an American accent of any kind in England, just to them sounds like yee-haw howdy y'all.

So you just open your mouth and [00:06:00] they're just like, Ew Americans. That was my experience. But I also was married to an English woman who apparently didn't feel that way.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. She told you the truth.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So any super broad statement, there's something to this, which we'll get into the specifics of this later.

If you make a broad enough statement, there's likely going to be some truth to be unpacked from it and I, I try and be. Generous in my appraisals of people's ideas, even when they're phrased in idiotic ways. But the big problem is that it collapses multiple cultures, Russia and Thailand. What do those places have in common?

Not very much. And then it forgets about the differences within cultures. So a college educated upper middle class woman in Moscow is going to have very little in common with the average woman in Yakut, which is on the other end of the country of Russia. There's all kinds of class and [00:07:00] regional and educational divides within countries.

I want to be clear again that I think it's okay to want these qualities in a partner or any other quality you want. I'm not faulting them for having preferences. I am, however, mocking them for having preferences that bear no relationship. To reality in the same sort of way that they think that it does. A lot of this is ancient mythology of pre-internet sex tourism.

You could find forums and see guys talking about women abroad and it's not very accurate for reasons we're going to get into. I

Jordan Harbinger: think it seems predatory as well, though.

Nick Pell: I'm sure there are guys with predatory intentions who move abroad for romantic or sexual purposes. I don't think it's fair to say that's true of all of them.

If they are predatory, they are the dumbest predators on planet Earth because they're going to come up very quickly against the [00:08:00] disconnect between their stereotype of women abroad as easy pickings for the suave, sophisticated, relatively rich American, and the reality of the situation, which is very different.

But dating abroad does not make you predatory.

Jordan Harbinger: The issue is thinking you can use your relative affluence to have leverage over women abroad. And I think some of these guys, like maybe subconsciously slash secretly do think that

Nick Pell: maybe it's impossible to know what they're thinking unless they tell us.

And I agree that using, attempting to use financial leverage over women is predatory, but that happens in the United States. I also think that this is less likely to work than people think It's going to. Whoever may be out there thinking, I'm going to be a millionaire in Cambodia, and we're going to get into the reality of that.

But yes, if you are thinking when you move abroad is I'm going to be able to like financially coerce [00:09:00] women. First of all, that's. Not cool. And second of all, you are about to very rapidly learn that this is at best, far less true than you think it is.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Passport Bros also seem to think you can live like a king abroad.

Maybe that's true. I definitely agree. Going to Cambodia with your $35,000 a year job, which might put you in the middle of the road in the United States, would put you towards the top of the heap in the outskirts, that would be a pretty good lifestyle upgrade as far as going out to eat all the time and rent

Nick Pell: well.

of that because it's a lot less true than it used to be. So this is a really good time to start unpacking some of the financial myths about living abroad that fuel the Passport Pro phenomenon. First, there is the rise of a global middle class. You're going to be shocked these two countries aren't particularly relevant in terms of like Passport Bros are flocking here, but Albania and Mongolia are now upper [00:10:00] middle income economies according to the World Bank.

Jordan Harbinger: That is surprising. I've been to Albania, granted it was like 25 years ago, and one, it was the poorest country in Europe, and two, it really looked and felt like the poorest country in Europe at the time.

Nick Pell: Well, it still may be, but a lot has changed in the last 25 years. Specifically, the non-Western world just isn't as poor as it used to be.

So fewer people are going to be impressed by your $1,500 a month Airbnb. If you're hanging out at the hot night spots, boy, you might be hitting on the women whose parents own the building you live in. In major expat hubs like Medellin, Bangkok, Manila, the local upper middle class lives exactly like the American upper middle class.

The purchasing power of the American dollar abroad generally applies to cheaper services. Rent. Maybe you can get a house cleaner to come by once a week. [00:11:00] This does not necessarily, and in fact, probably doesn't translate into economic or social leverage.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I remember when I lived in Panama, we had Embassy housing and we were young bachelors, so we were like, we're too lazy to clean.

We're too lazy to cook. And I remember one of the guys who was fluent in Spanish. He basically found somebody who would come over and go shopping in the morning and come over with like a bunch of seafood and cook like an amazing seafood dinner slash lunch for us or whatever for a few days, clean the whole house and leave, and she came by like three times a week for 30 bucks or something like that.

That was really like a great deal at the time and when we went out, we could buy like a bottle of alcohol at a club, which is something none of us would ever be able to afford in a million years in the United States. But you're right. Like once you started shopping for beachfront property or something like that, I mean, you still had to be rich by any measure.

You know? It was like once you get towards the sort of top higher echelons, like the pricing all bleeds together. There's a difference between being really poor at the bottom of the scale in Mexico [00:12:00] versus the United States. But to your point, there's not as much of a difference between being upper middle class in the United States versus being upper middle class in Mexico or Panama, for example.

Nick Pell: No, there's really not. And this is a thing Americans just have no idea of that. Like the urban upper middle class in Mali, which I'm mentioning because I knew a guy who was from an upper middle class urban family in Mali, and he was just like, white Americans think that I live in a better tent or something, and it's like I live in a penthouse.

The days of the $30 housekeeper in Panama are almost certainly gone. There is a definite disconnect between how cheap guys. Think things are going to be in their host country versus what they cost at home. Yeah, your rent, food, you cook at home. Notice every word there for food. You cook at home. Might be cheaper.

A lot of consumer goods are not.

Jordan Harbinger: Yep. [00:13:00] I also noticed that electronics and stuff like that, they're more, I was just in Patagonia and we did a helicopter thing to the top of a mountain 'cause hiking, it would've been impossible. And the guy, I was like, Hey man, you know, what's your name? Blah, blah, blah. He, oh, where are you from?

Like California. He's like, oh, I just got back from New York. I'm like, oh, for work? He's like, no. I went on vacation there. He was like, oh, why go to New York from Argentina? And he's like, it's cheaper. I'm like, wait, what? He's like, yeah, I like gadgets and it's actually cheaper for me to buy a camera and a PlayStation.

And an iPhone in New York. It's like cheaper for me to fly there and stay at a hotel and go on a vacation and buy a bunch of that stuff than it is for me to buy it here. Imported. And I'm like, oh yeah, that's right. We're all buying the same crap. And it's just way more expensive here. Yeah. So funny like that.

What is that called? E econ was a while ago. It's like the purchasing power parody, right? Or the, there's even an iPhone index, I think. Do you know about this?

Nick Pell: I know about the iPhone index. It's the relative cost of an iPhone.

Jordan Harbinger: So like in Brazil, the iPhone is 3,500 bucks or whatever it is, like the latest one.

And it's like, [00:14:00] all right, a flight to the United States is 900. Fly to New York. Buy an iPhone for yourself and your girlfriend or whoever you're paying for, and enjoy your time in New York City. You're not saving money by the time you go to New York, but you got a free ish vacation to New York, right?

Nick Pell: Yeah.

You got a trip to New York out of it. So yeah, I mean, where this comes into play is if you're playing the Rich American abroad and then your Panamanian girlfriend is like, Hey, will you buy me an iPhone? And you go, what? 3,500 bucks? Or you think on a smaller scale, if you think that a dinner out is too expensive, you are not going to look affluent, you are going to look cheap.

There's also a thing called the gringo tax

Jordan Harbinger: Sounds spicy.

Nick Pell: The rather crude term for the risk you take on when you decide you want to play Rich Westerner in a foreign land, these people are not stupid. They clock you right away and they start charging you more than they would a local. Because they think you [00:15:00] can afford it and you probably can.

Why not? In some cases, when you flaunt your relative wealth, you're going to be encountering women who are basically professional daters. They're not interested in long-term partnership. They're interested in a form of wealth extraction.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, so like you're filtering for gold diggers basically by acting like a baller, when you might not be,

Nick Pell: when you're not, and that's in the innocent cases, the women may be involved and often are part of a bigger criminal network.

In 2024 and 2025, the State Department issued a warning to tourists in Columbia about using dating apps related to a 200% increase in robberies. And a 29% increase in homicides. It's a little far afield, but there's a study about gay sex tourists in the Dominican Republic that unpacks the ins and outs of remittance payments and how the men [00:16:00] who think they're running the show often aren't.

There's an article on chain analysis, which is a on chain crypto analysis, uh, website, and they detail what they call the industrial scale of romance scams online. It's not just one crafty woman trying to take your money, it's a whole criminal enterprise. That article on, on chain analysis does not drill down specifically into what the growth and romance scams is compared to other types of scams, let alone one's targeting Passport Bros.

But it does say that the average transaction from social media scams has doubled. In the last 15 years, and the total take has increased by 238 times.

Jordan Harbinger: All right. If you're currently Googling best countries for submissive, trad wives, step away from the keyboard. We'll be right back after this. This episode is sponsored in part by The Perfect Jean.

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Jordan Harbinger: Don't [00:19:00] forget about our newsletter. Wee bit wiser. It is a short two minute read every Wednesday. It is very practical, something you can apply right out of the box.

It's usually a gem from the show or just from our lives. From us to you. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. It's a great companion to the show. We'd love to hear what you think. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday, the romance scam thing. That's a massive multi-billion dollar industry. I've covered this a little bit here on the show, but there's like those whole slave compounds and they caught that guy.

Then they extradited him to China from Cambodia, and the Department of Justice sees literally $15 billion in Bitcoin from this guy. Like it's actually wild. That's not gold diggers. That's like Chinese industrial scale organized crime.

Nick Pell: Yeah, the women are victims. They're not the perpetrators.

Jordan Harbinger: A lot of this depends on where you're willing to live.

Some cities overseas are more expensive than the ones we have here in the States. I think it probably goes without saying, and this is maybe a bad example, but if you live in Dayton, Ohio and you move to Shanghai, China, you are not [00:20:00] going to get a cheaper place to live in, hang out. You gotta go to like a tier three Chinese city where there's no gringos, basically other places.

Nick Pell: Moscow's super expensive.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right. I remember at one point Moscow was the most expensive real estate anywhere. I don't think that's true anymore. Before that, it was Tokyo, and then before that it was London. And now who knows, it might be Silicon Valley, lucky me, but other places you can live like a King Yakut, for example, if you're willing to live in the middle of nowhere, right?

If you want to live in Vladivostok, suburban, you know, whatever ring. You might do well, why you'd want to live there when your neighbors are going to be living in a gulag or whatever. Like that's on you. But I'm kidding.

Nick Pell: Yeah. I'm going to go be a millionaire in rural Azer bija because my dollar's going to go further there.

You know, like,

Jordan Harbinger: look, you move to Armenia and you stay outside of Yvan, you probably do pretty de look. I'm not trying to speak ill of other countries. I love going to those places. I think they're amazing. But

Nick Pell: I would love to live in Yon.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I'd spend time in any major city, anywhere. Pretty much anywhere.

Maybe barring Djibouti, but standards of Living are [00:21:00] very different abroad, even for people who have money.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And there's all kinds of cultural differences that you might think you're fine with, but you may not be once you get there. I hated living in Ireland, man. I mean, I liked the first six months, the honeymoon period, but after that I was just like, get me outta here.

Living in England fun while it lasted, but I kissed the ground when I moved back. I was just so happy to be back. There are a lot of things about the United States that you just take for granted, and those are going to come into very sharp focus when you move overseas.

Jordan Harbinger: This sounds dumb as hell, and I'll just admit it right now, but me and Jen were like, we should move to Australia.

And then we talked to our friend who lived there and we were like, so y'all don't have like Australian Amazon Prime, right? And he's like, no. Oh God, we missed that from San Diego. And I was like, I'm out. We're like, I can't,

Nick Pell: there was no Amazon Prime in Ireland when I was there.

Jordan Harbinger: I can't. I'm like, I can't do, I'm so spoiled.

And it's funny 'cause it's like you can't live without American consumerism. You wanker. And the answer is, I guess not. No, that's

Nick Pell: correct. I [00:22:00] cannot, yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I mean there's probably more, but like. All the examples I'm coming up with, it's like, oh, I'm Amazon Prime. Ha. No, that's not set serious. But also no DoorDash and also this and that and the,

Nick Pell: yeah, dude, I lived off grid for five years.

I'm over it. I want to be able to have somebody deliver my Zyrtec to my door at 10 o'clock at night.

Jordan Harbinger: Now my places are like, let's go to China. Now you have Amazon Prime, except it's five minute delivery by drone probably. 'cause you know, regulations be damned. So if you want that, go to a place like China where you're living in the future.

But yeah, it's tough, man. Then you find out that, you know, there's other things that they don't have that you take for granted. Like, you know, freedom of speech.

Nick Pell: I mean, in Ireland they don't really have big boxes. So if you need diapers and iPhone cable and dog food. You might be making three trips to three different stores an hour apart.

The internet service is not reliable. Where I lived in Ireland, I lived in a fairly rural area, and so everything was still coming over. [00:23:00] Phone lines and the internet went out when it rained. Good thing it never rains in Ireland.

Jordan Harbinger: Starlink might solve that, but yeah, this was sort of before all that, eh,

Nick Pell: I don't know that it would with the cloud situation there, but sure.

Maybe beyond material stuff, there's all kinds of cultural morays that you don't even realize exist until you step outside of them.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. The other thing is if you move abroad and you posture as some kind of rich American people, might take you at your word, which is also, again, slightly predatory at best, and maybe by design.

Nick Pell: It might be. I think it's a matter of degree if you're just throwing money around and letting the locals assume whatever they assume. I don't think that's predatory. I think that's just spending money like a jackass. If you're like telling women that you own an oil field back home, yeah, that's gross.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And then you've got a phenomenon where they think you're [00:24:00] way richer than you are and expect maybe the kind of financial support that would go along with that. Or you just get your ass kidnapped and best case scenario, you've duped them into a relationship on false pre sentences. Worst case scenario, you get your ass kidnapped.

Not good.

Nick Pell: You don't necessarily have to be duping them. They can just assume you're wealthy because you have way more disposable income than they do. My ex-wife thought I was rich because I had my own apartment and drove a Chevy Cavalier.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay?

Nick Pell: People think what they think. There can absolutely be a disconnect and things getting lost in the translation.

I watched an episode of some reality show once, and this guy's Thai fiance was super pissed that he couldn't buy her a ton of gold for their wedding. I don't remember the specifics. He may have been misleading her about his wealth. I genuinely don't recall. I don't think he was though. I think he just have Boomer retirement money.

But anyway, for whatever reason, she thought he was a lot richer than he actually was, which you don't have [00:25:00] to actively mislead someone to have that happen.

Jordan Harbinger: No, actually, it's funny. I was talking to a friend of mine here recently and he said that his family in Thailand, they assume that he's rich, even though he's a dance instructor locally, and he's always complaining about being broke because he doesn't make a ton of money and he likes to live his life and travel.

But his family in Thailand, they are always asking him and his family for money because they're like, but you live in California. Of course you're rich. Everyone's rich. And it's like, no matter how he explains that, just 'cause he makes, let's say he makes 45 grand a year, everything is more expensive here.

That's like completely lost on them somehow. They just don't care. They don't care to hear it 'cause, but you make five times as much or eight times as much as us, you're rich. We can't wrap our mind around. So there's a situation where, sure, you might encounter some gold diggers because they assume you're rich by American standards, not Cambodian standards, but the whole like let them assume whatever they want can bite you in the ass when you get married and the family's like, great, you need to build us a [00:26:00] house now.

And it's like, whoa, that's not what I meant by Rich. I meant go out to dinner four times a week, rich, not buy you a house that you construct to, to your dream. Home standards rich,

Nick Pell: global inflation is also a thing. These disparities just aren't what they used to be.

Jordan Harbinger: How has the wealth gap between developed and emerging nations narrowed over recent years?

Because when I did a lot of my traveling, like in the late nineties early aughts, the gap was pretty big in some places,

Nick Pell: and that's when it starts to close from roughly 2000 until the COVID-19 pandemic. The between country income gap narrowed significantly. The average income in developing nations grew nearly three times as fast as in advanced economies.

So if you're thinking you're going to waltz into Brazil and be rich because you're a junior level dev making 60 grand a year. You're first going to need the hop into your time machine back to 1995.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Do you have any specifics on how much the gap [00:27:00] has narrowed?

Nick Pell: Yes. Between 1990 and 2019, the Global Genie Index, this is the measure of inequality among all individuals on Earth that drop significantly from 70 to 62 points.

I don't know specifically what that means other than that it dropped a lot, so that means that the poor or less poor is the short version

Jordan Harbinger: relative to other people.

Nick Pell: The drop was driven by emerging economies growing nearly three times faster than the West, and that's according to the Journal of European Economic Association.

Emerging markets account for nearly two thirds of global GDP growth over the last 10 years.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's also not the eighties in terms of access to education and information. You know, people in Jakarta who live outside and ride a motorcycle for a living to deliver stuff, have 5G phones and access to FinTech and can read the New York Times or whatever if they wanted to.

It's just a totally different world, man.

Nick Pell: Yes. There's also the issue of a [00:28:00] bunch of Westerners finding out about some big hotspot for cheap living and voila, it's not cheap anymore because everybody moved there. I remember when the place was Prague.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Nick Pell: It was like, oh man, Prague's like beer's 25 cents and I'm renting a minch and for 50 bucks a month.

Yeah. And Prague is not like that. It has not been for like 20 years. It wasn't even what I went to Prague 20 years ago. It wasn't even like that.

Jordan Harbinger: It's funny you should mention that. I went to Prague in the nineties and I went back in like 2020 or something like that. And I remember telling people in Prague like, yeah, I came here last time and I stayed at a youth hostel and it was $4 a night.

And they were like, yeah, I remember those days. A guy I know was renting like a really sick apartment overlooking the whole city. And I was like, oh, how much is this? And he is like, oh, it's pretty expensive. And he told me is a couple thousand dollars a month. And the owner said, yeah, I bought this place.

And when I first got it, the rent was like $80 a month. And now it's like a place that he rents out for [00:29:00] $600 a night or something. 'cause it's enormous and has like a badass roof deck overlooking Prague. The shift from like communism, nothing works. Where can we get some currency happened and now it's, nope, we're just on the market economy like everybody else.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And word travels fast about these places. There's also an issue, and I think this is present both with Passport Bros and their critics. We've hinted at it, but there's this idea that foreign women don't have agency. They do, and they're far more capable of deciding who they want to date and marry than you are from 10,000 miles away.

I think that there's this really gross assumption, the caricature of Passport Bros. Anyway, and the critique of that caricature share, and that's the idea that these are women who are not capable of making decisions for themselves.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I can see how there might be a power disparity from one perspective.

I mean, if you're making 10 times the annual wage in a country, yeah, you might have [00:30:00] some leverage over other people, even women that you date even. That's a gross way to think about it. And on the other hand, it's hard for me to see any scenario where that alone is going to be enough to get you this mythical unicorn, trad wife or whatever that some of these guys are after.

By the way, if you're unaware, a trad wife is short for traditional wife. That's a woman who adopts a lifestyle centered on traditional gender roles and domesticity, typically prioritizing homemaking child rearing and submission to her husband over a professional career. It's sort of like an internet Mimi kind of thing, like trad wifeing.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I think it's a fair definition. I do not have a trad wife, by the way, for anybody who may have misunderstood. From my earlier comments,

Jordan Harbinger: I didn't take it that way. And no you do not. But like

Nick Pell: no, I definitely do not have a TRA wife.

Jordan Harbinger: I do think a lot of guys, not all, but like I'll hashtag not all Passport Bros, but like a lot of these guys do think they're going to kinda land a Southeast Asian slave wife or something and it's like, huh, hold the phone buddy.

That's gross. And also not as [00:31:00] likely to happen as you might think.

Nick Pell: Yeah, buy a lottery ticket 'cause you probably got a better chance of winning that than you do of anyway. I think your definition of trad wife is fair. I also think that the quest for the trad wife is ridiculous because it assumes that priorities don't exist on a spectrum.

Like a woman is either pregnant with a baby on each hip and dressed like a Mennonite in a wheat field, or she's like this hyper-masculine man hating career woman. These are not your two choices, but here's the punchline. There's a decent chance that the women in the host countries are going to be more educated than the passport Pros.

This was really surprising to me. World tertiary education of women has skyrocketed since 1970. That's another World Bank statistic. Female participation in the workforce has also increased dramatically. The chances that these women are looking for a provider is probably [00:32:00] very low. We're also seeing a dramatic decrease in what can be called traditional values According to the World Value Survey, by the way, you're also thousands of miles from home with little to no support network.

And she's not in a culture you may not understand completely. You may not speak the language. If you do, you don't speak it as well as she does. So when you really look into the data here, Passport Bros. In search of a trad wife. Are woefully misled and people angry about their search for a trad wife do seem to, in my opinion, be buying into this outdated and somewhat offensive, in my opinion, frame of what the developing world is like.

That has not had any resemblance to reality since the seventies. This is before I was alive,

Jordan Harbinger: right? We're talking about real people. So it's just not that simple, especially in tourist economies, we can [00:33:00] safely assume a certain amount of savvy on the part of the women dating the Passport Bro. So if these are myths that miss the mark, what's the reality of the passport bro phenomenon, Nick?

Nick Pell: If you're looking to drill down into hardcore data on this episode, you are going to be disappointed because there's no census of the Passport Bro. We can fall back on.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, there's no, uh, what is it called? Like a pew study or whatever. Uh, what are those polls that they're always like according to a gallop, gall polls, pew

Nick Pell: studies?

No, we don't have any of those.

Jordan Harbinger: Are you a passport bro? Click here for $25 survey. We want to find out what kind of weird internet meme reality you think you're living in. What about just the number of Americans living abroad? Surely that's a number we can find and then extrapolate wildly from there.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I

Jordan Harbinger: mean, speculate wildly from there.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it's between 4.4 and 5.5 million according to the Association of Americans resident overseas. Most of these are women. It's 52%, but that also [00:34:00] only includes people working abroad. It wasn't clear to me if that included people employed by overseas companies or just living and working abroad.

Jordan Harbinger: If you think flying 5,000 miles turns your mediocre personality into a selling point, I got bad news.

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Jordan Harbinger: This episode is sponsored in part by Audible. I burn through at least two audio books a week, prepping for the show.

And let's be real. There is just no timeline where I'm sitting down and staring at a page. That's not how I learn at all. Audio is my mode. I'm listening on Audible while I'm getting my 10,000 steps in, sipping coffee on the couch, all while jotting notes down into my phone. Honestly, I wish I'd had Audible back in the day instead of zoning out to hours of mindless tv.

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Now back to skeptical Sunday. I have to say I'm a little surprised that mostly women are living above. It's only

Nick Pell: by 52%,

Jordan Harbinger: but still like I thought it would be 80% dudes or 60% dudes, or 75%. I'm quite surprised at the balance and I'm certainly surprised that it's more women. I don't know why that just surprises me for some reason.

Good for you ladies. Get out there and travel guys. We all should be doing that. Alright, so it doesn't tell us a whole heck of a lot about how many Passport Bros there are or who these people are or anything like that.

Nick Pell: There's 25.5 million videos on TikTok about Passport Bros. But those are both from bros and they're [00:37:00] critics.

The subreddit, the Passport Bros, has 99,000 weekly visitors and 2,500 weekly contributions. It's definitely a thing having a cultural moment, but beyond that, it's hard to parse out. What we do have, however, is a whole bunch of articles about Passport Bros and the phenomenon in general that. Give us varying degrees of insight into who they are.

Travel noir ran an article profiling Passport Bros. That didn't give a ton in the way of additional insight, but one of the things noted in the article is that if you're an American and you move abroad, depending on the country you move to, you've almost certainly moved up in height relative to everyone else in your new host country.

Jordan Harbinger: Huh? Why is that important? Don't go to the Netherlands, I guess you'll be short unless you're really tall.

Nick Pell: Women expressing a preference for height is prevalent across nearly all cultures, and it's not just a stated preference. If you know the difference between stated and revealed preference. North of [00:38:00] 90% of all Western couples have a taller man with a shorter woman.

If you want us talk about, oh, that's not universal in different cultures. I think it was like the Cook Island tribes are an exception and they were only 10% of the women have a taller partner and they prefer men who are as tall as they are. So there's like nowhere in the world where women are like, oh man, this guy's six inches shorter than me.

Dig it. Yeah. Throughout almost the entire Western and post-colonial world, women want a man who is at least taller than they are.

Jordan Harbinger: So if you're five, five and no shade, I'm not making fun of people who are a little bit shorter. By the way, I think the height standard sucks really, but you can't argue with people's preference.

But anyway, if you're five five and you move to Peru or something where the average height is lower than it is in the stage, which I think it's like 5, 6, 7 here, whatever, something like that, you're going to instantly jump up on the scale, right? You get an extra point. If all of the women there are shorter than you, [00:39:00] it's going to feel pretty good.

Dating pool opens up a little bit, whether it's fair or not.

Nick Pell: Man, I felt like a giant when I lived in Ireland. I'm five nine.

Jordan Harbinger: Really?

Nick Pell: I'm not a big dude. And I was like, man, I feel like I'm two inches taller. Just living around people that are two inches shorter. So this article talked about the similar phenomenon of leveling up an income, which you may do, but it's, how significant is it?

Jordan Harbinger: By the way? The average height in Ireland is five 10.

Nick Pell: Oh, I call shenanigans on this data. There's no way

Jordan Harbinger: that's interesting. I mean, this is just what, like Gemini has surfaced for me. That is so interesting.

Nick Pell: Come on Wikipedia. I gave you $3,

Jordan Harbinger: five foot, nine and a half average height in for males, average five foot nine and a half

Nick Pell: I call shenanigans.

Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting.

Nick Pell: I was taller than like every dude I met in Ireland.

Jordan Harbinger: Either way, if everyone in your area was shorter than whatever, but yeah, for women it's five four. Wow. Damn, I'm not that tall. That's what I'm learning right now. I am taller than [00:40:00] average, barely like five 10. Anyway, move on. See, this is why the height thing, nobody wins.

You gotta go to North Korea where you're like, all right, fine. Now I feel tall for God's sake.

Nick Pell: Dude, it's so weird. I used to date a girl who was like a couple inches taller than me in her bare feet, who wore heels like every day of her life. And since this was before the internet decreed that this was the most important thing on planet Earth, I never thought about it.

And then this happened and I'm like, man, I'm five nine. I'm a dwarf. I'm a mountain dwarf.

Jordan Harbinger: I went to go live in Yugoslavia, which is by the way, pro tip. Don't go there if you want to feel tall, because the average height, I think is six feet.

Nick Pell: Go there if you don't want to get kidnapped by Serbian death squads.

Jordan Harbinger: There's also that. Yeah, Montenegro like you won't meet anybody who's not a giant and Bosnia, same thing. Average is over six feet for men. So you're just like, automatically. There's a place called the Denar Alps. I was like, where's the tallest one? It's in southern [00:41:00] and south Central Europe. So it's like Balkan area.

Over six feet is the average height for men. It's taller than Denmark, taller than Sweden, taller than, you know, Lithuania, Latvia. Those are tall countries. Like those are, the average height of the men is taller than me. So that's taller than the Netherlands. Yeah. Anyway, we're going to have to do a whole skeptical Sunday on height because it actually is quite interesting.

Nick Pell: Apparently Tito was getting them babies, their milk.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So the, the article talked about the similar phenomenon of leveling up in income. I think it's more like I made $50,000 back home and I made 62 grand comparatively in this country. And it's like, good for you, but

Jordan Harbinger: you can save more or something.

Yeah.

Nick Pell: Yeah. I'm not sneeze at 12 grand, but anyway.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You're not going from taking the bus to having your own jet. You are going from taking the bus to having your own Vespa.

Nick Pell: Yes. So the other thing that was interesting in that article is the guys talked about how dating was easier, but they didn't really seem like they were looking for trad wives.

In fact, they [00:42:00] didn't necessarily seem like they were looking for wives at all. A lot of them just seem to be young guys sewing their wild oats, as my father might say, while they save up money.

Jordan Harbinger: Which is important because the stereotype is that they're moving to Bolivia to try and get a glorified mail order bride.

Nick Pell: Correct. And the travel noir article has a guy explicitly saying that he likes learning about new cultures and saving money, and that's why he does this dating, let alone finding a wife. He didn't mention it anyway. Who knows what lurks in his mind, but he didn't mention it. I think a common theme in what we're going to see is that Passport Bros in reality are much more complicated than the stereotype, but of course they are.

There's another article in Lamont that is very short and very unserious. It presents what is an obvious joke reel on TikTok about holding up your passport to attract women and treats that as if it were, oh, look what this guy's doing. [00:43:00] He's making a stupid reel for TikTok. It speaks very authoritatively.

This Lamont article about these guys and it doesn't interview any of them. It just seems like they're making it up. I will give it credit for mentioning in passing that women may be Passport Bros themselves. But you know, Lamont as a major paper of France and it just published this smear piece without any backing, which is interesting to me, especially when this article is cited as an authoritative source.

Other places the New Zealand Herald did what more or less seems to be a write around of the Lamont piece.

Jordan Harbinger: What does that mean? What's a write around?

Nick Pell: So a lot of online content today is just repurposed from other sources. You can tell one of these articles repurposed the other one because they say more or less the exact same thing and have the same sole source.

A guy named Austin Abeta. I have no idea who this guy is. He's the passport bro on social media and we're going to talk about [00:44:00] him a little bit more in depth later. But neither of these articles interviews him. They both just refer to TikTok articles he did as some kind of authoritative source on Passport Bros.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Two major world newspapers. Not even trying to interview somebody and just using social media posts as authoritative information about passport brass. This is such lazy non journalism.

Nick Pell: Oh, it's going to get a quite a bit stupider. The travel, that's the name of a website, apparently did an article that at least leads with the fact that people's dissatisfaction with dating is at all time highs.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a good start. So where does it all fall apart?

Nick Pell: The article uses as its main source a website called the official Passport Bros.com. The page contains tons of AI images, the page being the official Passport Bros.com. It just looks like a lander designed to harvest clicks from people's searching for Passport Bros and then sell them [00:45:00] tchotchkes.

It's not really clear to me how one would become the official website of Passport Bros. But the part of the page answering what is a Passport Bro, could be a sort of unofficial manifesto of the movement maybe.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: Because it reads like a caricature of what Passport Bros think Feminism is ruined women and marriage is this trap for men and it doesn't read like something an actual past person, let alone passport bro would write even if this were some super toxic red pilled guy.

It doesn't pass the smell test. It's way too on the nose

Jordan Harbinger: for those unaware red pill is a whole other rabbit hole. But briefly, it's a corner of online masculinity culture where men believe they've woken up to supposedly harsh truths about women and dating and gender dynamics. It's less about self-improvement and more about adopting this cynical adversarial worldview that frames relationships as a zero [00:46:00] sum power struggle.

It's kind of what people are talking about when they're talking about like toxic masculinity and dating. It's like this stuff, it begins with this and gets worse from there.

Nick Pell: Yeah, that's a fair encapsulation. But the travels article. It's getting better a little. But once again, they don't interview these guys.

I mean, if they're this omnipresent phenomenon on TikTok, you'd think you could get one of them to sit down with you for a cup of coffee or a Zoom call. But no, they just found some bizarre website posturing as the voice of Passport Bros everywhere and took that as their authority.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I mean, these guys are all over Reddit as well.

I mean, you see them everywhere on social media. It's a whole thing. So how did you pick these sources? 'cause it's, these are crappy.

Nick Pell: Yeah, they suck. So why did I pick them? These are all the articles cited as sources by Wikipedia. And feel free, roll your eyes outta your head and go Wikipedia. But 99% of people who want to know what a passport bro is are going to Google it, click the Wikipedia article, read that, and then call it a day.

[00:47:00] So I think it's significant to point out how poor the journalism is on these. Fox News. At least went out and interviewed subject matter experts. But again. No Passport Bros. We're harmed in the making of this article.

Jordan Harbinger: What is a subject matter expert on Passport Bros. Besides you? Now, what does subject matter experts have to say?

How could you get credentials on something like this? A journalist can research it like we did. They didn't bother. Clearly.

Nick Pell: We've got a dating expert, whatever that means.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, as somebody who used to work in that industry, that doesn't mean anything. I could tell you that right now.

Nick Pell: They also spoke to an education expert and researcher analyzing conceptual foundations of biology, which again, meaning nothing.

We've got Paula Parell of Bloom matchmaking. No one quoted in the article seems to be an expert in anything meaningful or relevant to the topic at hand. So this Fox News article. We've got a bunch of experts talking about passport pros as if they're experts, but they're [00:48:00] just saying the same things that the Unsourced articles do, and I know this trick very, very well.

As a journalist, you are not allowed to make sweeping, authoritative statements, but you can absolutely feed them to a subject matter expert as a question and get them to repeat back what you just said in different words,

Jordan Harbinger: right? And voila. Now your article says what you plan for it to say all along, but somebody with credentials said it for you.

That's funny. This Skeptical Sunday started out as a skeptical Sunday on passport Rose, and has now evolved to do a skeptical Sunday on crappy journalism. Here we are.

Nick Pell: Hey man. Neuro link it directly into my brain, but that's right. So the last articles I want to talk about finally, at long last, they talked to a passport bro, and

Jordan Harbinger: yay,

Nick Pell: ask him about the alleged movement.

They finally get around to it. So here's the issue. This is one article we have about one guy. It's a journalist interviewing him and then rewriting it as a first person essay, which is kind of bizarre, but so she really is letting him have [00:49:00] his say or it seems so from the outside.

Jordan Harbinger: So who is this guy? Is this the well-known TikTok guy running things?

Nick Pell: This is Austin Abeta. He's in his early thirties. He runs a big Passport Bro, TikTok and Discord. If you're going to interview one single Passport Bro, he's the guy.

Jordan Harbinger: So what does he have to say about his movement?

Nick Pell: Honestly, he comes across as totally reasonable. He didn't leave America so he could powl the world looking for destitute foot bound women who were desperate to be his live-in made and sex slave.

He. Mostly embrace the digital nomad life, and then the passport bro thing, dating women from other cultures. That was a byproduct of a digital nomad lifestyle choice that he made. He comes across as intelligent, serious, and thoughtful. He talks about the seriousness of settling on a partner and how dating women from a number of different cultures makes it more likely that he will find someone who aligns with him, [00:50:00] which is fair.

In fact, he says most of the guys he talks to want to settle down, but they want to make sure it's with the right person. Does that sound familiar at all to you, Jordan?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's funny. So what he's describing is a what A lot of guys that I encountered when I ran the dating company had to say, right. My company wasn't really a place for guys who were like trying to pick up shits all the time, get laid all the time, bro.

It was more for guys who were mid-career looking for something more, wanted a solid girlfriend or a wife. Part of that, something more. But they also didn't want to marry the first woman who looked at them like some grunt outta basic training.

Nick Pell: And that was very much my experience. I took Jordan's course 'cause I worked for that company as well, and that was my experience with the guy that was in the course with me.

You can say this is just one guy, which is obviously true. But from everything that I could tell Austin Abeta is not a guy. He's the guy. He made the holding up the passport. And a woman approaches you. Video I talked about earlier. It's so obviously a [00:51:00] joke that journalists writing about him or just pretending to not understand,

Jordan Harbinger: or maybe they didn't get it, I don't know.

Nick Pell: Nah. These types of nonsense journalists are evil, not stupid. They're lying. They're not stupid. They get it, it's obvious. Go find the video. But a beta comes across as serious, thoughtful, and frankly quite mature for his age.

Jordan Harbinger: Why? Other than looking for a partner seriously, like that can't be the crux of the episode.

Nick Pell: No, but let's talk about the passport video. He holds a passport up. A Latina woman immediately approaches him. It's a joke, which we know because he talks about how it's this total American chauvinist attitude. That every woman on Earth is just like desperate to marry someone with an American passport. I assure you there are millions and probably billions of women who have no desire to live in the United States.

I would suggest that women who are, some of

Jordan Harbinger: those women already live in the United States and they don't want to live here. Yeah,

Nick Pell: yeah, right. I think women willing to marry a man for a green card are just [00:52:00] outliers In the extreme related to this, he talks about the idea that Passport Bros just can't handle American women.

It's another American cultural chauvinist idea that American social mores and gender dynamics are superior to those in the rest of the world. American gender dynamics are just the gold standard, and if you don't like it. It's 'cause you just can't handle it. This is a ridiculous belief. Extremely chauvinistic, culturally belief.

Women in other parts of the world are different from American women in meaningful ways and it's totally fine for American men to prefer to date women from those cultures because of those differences. It does not make the women nor the men failed versions of Americans. It simply makes them different.

Jordan Harbinger: I think that's a fair assessment provided that what you like about other women from other cultures is not that they are easy to dominate financially and manipulate [00:53:00] emotionally or something like that.

Nick Pell: That's the thing though, I just haven't seen any evidence. I am not denying that this is a thing. Absolutely. There's a guy living in Thailand right now, just got off a plane. He thinks, oh man, like I just flashed my cool 32 grand a year and I've got a domestic slave. And it's like, this guy's gross and he's an idiot, but.

This doesn't seem to be a thing in the passport bro movement. It more seems like they're an outgrowth of the digital nomad thing. I think that the one article that we have where they let these guys speak, he's very thoughtful and respectful. He talks about his future wife staying at home and raising the kids if that's what she wants.

He talks about how he wants to give her that option. He doesn't say she has to do it. He doesn't say it's a condition of marriage, which by the way, if that is a condition for of marriage for you. There's people who do that and that's fine, but it's not for him. That's a thing he wants to offer his [00:54:00] wife, his future wife, is you want to stay home and take care of the kids.

I will be able to support us both. He's not demanding a silent baby factory based on how enterprising he seems to be. I don't see him being the type of guy who's going to be interested in a woman who has nothing going on in her life, but doing his laundry

Jordan Harbinger: before you go shopping for feminine energy, like it's a duty free fragrance at the airport.

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Thank you for listening to and supporting the show. Your support of our sponsors keeps the lights on around here. All of the deals, discount codes of ways to support the show are searchable and clickable on the website at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Now for the rest of skeptical Sunday. So you think the aspect where the men are basically hunting other countries for glorified mail order brides is that totally made up.

Nick Pell: I was not able to find any evidence for it, which does not mean that it's totally made up. It simply means that in my rather extensive research about this. None of these guys in the passport bro phenomenon. Check those boxes. When you talk about large groups of [00:56:00] people, yeah, there's going to be bad actors, but I think you're going to learn very quickly that women in Poland and Peru and Cambodia aren't these ultra feminine automatons who are just waiting for a Western man to waltz up and deliver them from their Dickensian life of grinding misery.

That is a very stupid stereotype of the women, and I think that it's as stupid as the stereotype of the men as predatory, misogynist sex PEs because. Presumably if that was like the dominant attitude, I would've encountered it. There's this idea in the West, in general America in particular, that women in, say the Philippines or Columbia, they're all just completely poor and they're completely ignorant and they're just easy pickings for these sua Americans who come in and financially dominate them.

And it's an offensive and stupid stereotype when men think that it's an invitation to go date there. It's a stupid and offensive stereotype when westerners [00:57:00] see these women as agency free victims to be protected. Even women in poor countries have agency.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I've checked out TikTok digital bro Mad, and I've looked at the subreddit many times before.

A lot of these guys come across as wanting to ruffle feathers a little bit. And I can understand maybe why you like the guy you're talking about before, but

Nick Pell: I, I do like Feather ruffler. Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: For the record, he also talks about how women in America are raised to be more independent or maybe think poorly of men, which again, is like a huge generalization.

Is there evidence for that though? 'cause I do hear that trope a lot from a lot of places.

Nick Pell: There is no smoking gun evidence, but a Pew research study in 2025 found that 25% of respondents had negative views of masculine or manly men. So if you're a masculine or manly man, that's 25% of the population who don't like you.

The same poll shows respondents expressing critical attitudes towards traditionally masculine characteristics [00:58:00] like confidence, risk aversion, and physical strength. So there's that.

Jordan Harbinger: I've dealt with this before. I actually was negotiating with a company. They were thinking about bringing my show in and after we hung up the call, my agent called and was like, okay, if that went really well, like the numbers are really good and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

The manager loved you. And then a week later he's like, they passed because it was one of those calls with like 50 people on Zoom that are all checking their email. And it was like somebody in the marketing department said too much Mail energy. That was the critique. There was nothing more specific than that.

It was just like one of those things. And she just said that she would never get over that and we need her to onboard and so yeah, we're going to pass her now. And my agent was like, okay. Weird business decision. And the manager was like, between you and me. Yeah, but we have this problem all the time. So I thought that was interesting.

So I've run into like one of this 25% of the population who was just like, I don't like this flannel shirt wearing guy who talks loud. That was enough.

Nick Pell: Yeah. [00:59:00] Imagine being a tattooed, bearded man who constantly sounds like he's yelling because he grew up in Rhode Island. Uh, America also scores high in terms of secular, rational and self-expression views as opposed to more traditional views.

Traditional values are also disappearing abroad. The Survey Center on American Life found that the majority of male respondents to a survey were interested in dating, but only a little over a third of the women were, and a plurality. 43% of the women were simply uninterested in dating at all.

Jordan Harbinger: Huh? I don't think you need to think the women responding are right or wrong to see how that could be a bleak landscape for young men in the dating pool.

But why do they think it's going to be better elsewhere?

Nick Pell: I think there's some, the grass is greener going on here, but we have some data to suggest that things are better abroad. In terms of these metrics, the IPS OS Love life satisfaction study for 2025 is super detailed and [01:00:00] nuanced, but some key things to highlight are that America ranks relatively low in terms of satisfaction with your romantic partner.

In fact, it ranks somewhere near the bottom 49%. You compare that with Thailand or Columbia to passport bro hotspots and the satisfaction with your romantic partner there is north of 80%.

Jordan Harbinger: Presumably this is people from the same culture talking about their actual partners.

Nick Pell: Well, I agree, but it's potentially a perception is reality thing.

It also might be that Americans are perpetually restless and dissatisfied, and that's reflected in the numbers. We also have the Gallup data on how respected women feel in society. Less than half of American women feel respected in society with 67% of men thinking that women are respected in society.

That is one of the bigger gaps in the world, and you don't have to agree with the men or the women to understand that disconnect is a [01:01:00] potential point of friction.

Jordan Harbinger: Where do women feel the most respected? I'm curious. I'll be shocked if it's Thailand or Columbia or something like that.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Columbia is actually near the bottom.

I didn't see Thailand on there, but Columbia's right before Turkey, Northern Europe tops the list of countries where people, irrespective of gender, feel that women are respected. Baltic countries, Nordic countries, Benelux countries, places like that. It's possibly also worth noting women are more likely to feel that women are respected in society than men are in Saudi Arabia.

So maybe a grain of salt on this study. But again, the important part of the study to me is the disconnect. Between how men view it and how women view it, and that again, you do not have to say the men or the women are correct to just note that the disconnect could create some friction. So Passport Bros see this landscape.

They have their own reaction to it. They're not telling American women to change. [01:02:00] That's kind of the thing that's interesting to me about this. They're not going, oh, American women need to do this, or Western women need to do that. They're just saying, all right, I'm out. I'm going to go look for partners somewhere else.

I don't understand. Why there's some kind of vested interest in telling total strangers who they should want to date and why.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Warm up those angry emails folks. But I do see your point. Who cares if some guy goes abroad to date? I don't care. What I'm curious about is how is this different from mail order brides?

I know you're not picking someone out on a website generally and then going to meet them and get married right away, but I don't know. Tell me the real difference here.

Nick Pell: Because you're moving to another culture, immersing yourself in it, dating women near you and Yeah, like there's no similarity. There's no similarity at all.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So it's a fair response.

Nick Pell: The women in a male or bride catalogs are like probably actually desperate.

Jordan Harbinger: Possibly. I mean, if you're advertising on that, that's a more clear indicator. Like, I want to meet someone abroad and leave. That's kind of the deal there. I suppose. It's a fair response. I'm curious though, how much of the passport bro thing is about having to avoid improving yourself.

So rather than looking within and [01:03:00] upgrading yourself, you go somewhere else where like you hope the standards are lower.

Nick Pell: I think this may be a kind of gross way to look at this like. Women in Thailand just have lower standards than American women. And I know that's not what you're saying, but like that's the thinking that's at work with that line of thinking,

Jordan Harbinger: isn't it fair to say Passport Bros actually think this though, or

Nick Pell: I think some of them do.

They're in for a very rude awakening. Women in Thailand and Columbia do not have lower standards for men. They're going to find that out at great personal expense and pain. It's just a gross attitude to have about people from other cultures that they just have lower standards. You know, and again, I'm not trying to say that you are saying that, but I do think that when people ask that question, that's baked into it.

Women in Columbia have lower standards, says who? I don't think they probably do. The Abeta guy does address this in the Business Insider interview essay thing. He [01:04:00] runs a Discord and yeah, presumably he's not going to throw his own guys under the bus, but he does say a lot of these guys are into improving themselves, adventures, new experiences, entrepreneurialism, given that they're taking the drastic step of picking up their life and moving to a totally foreign culture, I think that probably a lot of guys in his orbit are willing to both improve themselves and look for partners in other cultures.

Jordan Harbinger: Do you not think there's any element of escapism involved here?

Nick Pell: Oh, sure. I'm sure that's one ingredient in the soup. What really matters is what you do once you get there. And remember what I said about Ireland. I love the first six months. There's always a nice rosy glow to, you know, a new environment, but.

What matters is what you do when it wears off.

Jordan Harbinger: What about the monetary aspect of the passport bro phenomenon and dating abroad? Because I feel like there has to be this whole cottage industry erected around helping these guys move, helping 'em fit in once they get there, helping 'em meet women of the type they're looking for.

That's gotta be a niche.

Nick Pell: The marriage tourism industry is pretty orthogonal to Passport Bros, as far as I could [01:05:00] tell, and seems to be aimed at older audiences. These are very structured experiences, much more like taking a cruise. Passport Bros are like, they're going to read about a place on Wiki travel and then go there with clothes on their back and a laptop start being women.

The Passport Bros on Reddit, that's where you can see more of them talking for. Themselves. I obviously didn't reference any of that directly here because it's Reddit, but if you want to go there, it's there. Typically though, I will say about the subreddit, it's not like pickup artist stuff. Meeting a girl is just one piece of the puzzle for them.

There's definitely advice about dating in various cultures, but a good chunk of that. Is about staying safe and not getting scammed or robbed. And a lot of content is just, oh man, I was in Columbia, it was great. I had a great time. Or What's Vietnam? Or how do I get started with this? People are going to be shocked at what percentage of the content is actually about meeting girls.

And by the way, they ban people from the [01:06:00] subreddit, from misogyny and sexism called that.

Jordan Harbinger: That's kind of a relief. My image of this whole movement was like a bunch of sort of red pill, misogynist sex pess, like you said. But it's wildly different than I expected. And I think a lot of people who had never heard of Passport Pros probably would've made that assumption readily.

What type of content do they have about women on there? I'm curious. 'cause you mentioned some of it is about dating, but it's not pickup artist stuff, so I'm genuinely curious.

Nick Pell: One guy was asking if women in Kenya are less inhibited than European women,

Jordan Harbinger: he's going to be very disappointed if that's what he expects.

I think.

Nick Pell: Yeah. It wasn't even clear what he meant by that. I think that there is a lot anyway, and the comments are just. Watch out for scams and things like I was in Kenya and it was like this, and then you see comments that are like, well, you know, there's good and bad women everywhere. Which is

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, like a generally true thing,

Nick Pell: right?

This is true.

Jordan Harbinger: It sort of runs counter to the stereotype that these guys are saying, Hey, all Western women are bad. I'm moving to Columbia where the women are pristine and preserved from these [01:07:00] corrosive, modern feminist values. It seems more nuanced and balanced, and it just seems like a bunch of young dudes traveling with the idea that maybe they'll meet a girl, which is pretty normal and does not even need to have its own name or movement maybe.

Nick Pell: Well, I, I, I think that there's a like certain subset of of person who's just angry at the idea that guys would. Try and pick up girls, but whatever. If you came here for outrage porn, and I'm sorry to disappoint, some people are just going to be upset about this and they're allowed to be upset about it, people are allowed to have their dating preferences

Jordan Harbinger: and people are allowed to have opinions about those preferences as well, I suppose.

Nick Pell: Oh, absolutely. But at the end of the day, the only opinions that matter are the men and the women involved in the relationship, and depending on the culture, maybe the woman's family. I think a lot of guys who get into international travel expecting easy pickings are going to be super shocked at how savvy women abroad are.

And they're also probably going to be very shocked at how involved women's families are [01:08:00] in their romantic lives, even early on. Or even if it's just her evaluating you through her parents' eyes.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm yeah, that's right. America is kind of an outlier towards individualism on the whole individualism versus community spectrum.

Nick Pell: The more traditional society you're going to, the more likely it is that parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, grandparents and so on are going to get involved early on. Again, she's at the very least probably going to be vetting you through the eyes of her family.

Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned scams being a frequent topic on the subreddit.

What are some of the things that people have to deal with when their quest for love abroad goes wrong?

Nick Pell: Oh, guys get drugged and like taken for everything they have.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's insane. Not surprising at all. I think I've seen this on Dateline or something similar.

Nick Pell: The rule of law is not super strong in a lot of these places, so it can definitely be dangerous.

We mentioned the Columbia State Department warning, tons of kidnappings, tons of crime in general in Columbia. Other [01:09:00] scams to stop far short of anything quite that extreme, but they can leave you broke. One is in intense romantic communications over weeks or even months. All of a sudden there's a big crisis and I need a pile of money and give it to me.

In crypto, we're asking them to pay for travel to your country.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a thing. I've told this story on the show before, but I was coming home from Ukraine, this is like 20 plus years ago, and I saw my friend at the airport and she's had a sign that was like, welcome to America. And I, I thought originally that it was my buddy and his wife like pranking me, Hey, why did you guys come in?

They're like, Jordan. I'm like, yeah, I'm coming back from Ukraine. And they're like, so we were chatting and then they were like, how many more people you think are on the plane? I'm like, I think I was one of the last ones. 'cause my bags were so late and they're like. We're looking for this girl, did you see her?

And I was like, no. And her uncle had met some girl in online from Ukraine and then he had paid her. And Yes girl. Yeah, some dude who pretended to be a girl. And this is years ago, right? This is like before you could just do a video call with somebody really easily or anything like that. So [01:10:00] yeah, he had sent her money to travel from Kia or Moscow, whatever, and then she just didn't show up.

And I was like, I've seen these people scamming at cyber cafes, make sure it's real. And he's like, it's definitely real. She's definitely real. Blah, blah, blah. Sure enough, two weeks later I followed up with her and I was like, so whatever happened with that? She's like, sure enough. She called like that day or that night, whatever, and was like, I got robbed and they stole the money for the plane ticket.

Can you send more and I'll fly in next week. And he was like, oh. So that combined with me being like, I've seen them sending the emails from the internet cafe. This is maybe a scam. That combined with the ridiculous story that didn't add up. He was like, yeah, this is fake. If that happens, that probably happens less now.

'cause there's probably way more better slash easier scams, romance scams. Let's

Nick Pell: get on Zoom.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And then it's like, oops. Now what they do, a guy who knows English really well will manage all the email communication. They'll know everything about the story. So he'll tell them, I'm telling him you took a beach vacation and you came back and your grandma was sick, and then you had to take her to the [01:11:00] hospital and we're going to ask him for money for this.

And she's like, okay. And she's sitting there like smoking a cigarette in the cyber cafe and he's like, all right, and you want to visit his country, but the UK seems like far away and it's a dream and you'd love to come visit him. And she's like, all right, whatever. So it's a whole thing. And then if the guy's like, I want to do a video chat, he's like, all right, you gotta do a video call with this guy.

And she's, oh, my English is crap. And I remember he was like, don't worry about it, just like smile and nod. He knows you don't speak English that well. And if you ask why you can type, you just tell him what I told you. You use a translator and you type slowly, it's all orchestrated. So of course you're going to see this girl on video and she's going to be like, I want see you in in Los Angeles, and you're going to be like, oh, she's so hot, bro.

Let me wire her $600. It's not that hard to scam somebody who wants to believe what you're telling them.

Nick Pell: Yes, absolutely.

Jordan Harbinger: What other scams are out there?

Nick Pell: You might find yourself the victim of sextortion. They get you naked on camera, blackmail you to not release the pictures, catfishing making fake profiles.

Sure. That's a big [01:12:00] component of a lot of these fake profiles where, uh, someone's falsely claiming to be a relative who's translating. Stuff like that.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Basically, anytime someone wants you to send them crypto for anything, you're being scammed

Nick Pell: unless you're buying steroids

Jordan Harbinger: right from a storage unit off the side of the highway.

Nick Pell: Yes. Just be on the lookout for inconsistent stories, AI generated images. But that's just good advice for using the internet in general.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think one more scam I want to talk about is the scam of the algorithm. You know, remember the internet is constantly feeding you things curated to get you to watch.

So if you are tunneling into a black hole of misery about how awful women are in the west and how you're going to be treated like a God, if you just find the right third world developing country, the internet is going to show you more content that confirms that preference. But influencer driven fantasies are not real.

They're not real folks. You might mesh better with people from other cultures sherp, but it helps to know what that culture is actually going to be like. Not just stereotypes and cliches, but a deeper knowledge of cultural values [01:13:00] and how they play out in your soon to be new home or with your soon to be family in-laws, et cetera.

Cross-cultural relationships can work. I'm in one, but that's provided you have realistic expectations, not fantasies based on red pill, blogs and influencers. And thanks again to Nick Pell for helping us bring this whole thing through customs. Thanks everyone for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me: jordan@jordanharbinger.com.

Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show. All at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and this show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Tadas Sidlauskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Our advice and opinions are our own. And yeah. I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, of course, we try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel, even if it is fact-check. So consult a professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and wellbeing.

And remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you [01:14:00] love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.

What if the real gender gap no one's talking about is the one where men are falling way behind? I sit down with Richard Reeves to unpack why guys are struggling.

JHS Trailer: What's happening with our guys now? So many of our young men where they're just not feeling that same level of motivation and aspiration as young women, right?

We don't want to go back to World War women. Were discouraged from doing it, of course not. But we should worry when we see gender gaps like that two to one, we should at least be asking the question like, why is that happening? Is that good? But the trouble is back to where we started. Like so many people just don't even want to confront the fact that this could be an area where we should be more worried about men than women.

They just can't do that because they think politically that's not acceptable and that's just get us into a horrible position. Too many people even now struggle to admit that men are having problems 'cause they think men are the [01:15:00] problem. And until we get past that, we're just going to keep losing these men.

There's an old traditional saying, which is women need to hear. That they're loved and men need to hear that they're respected. I'm going to say there's a grain of truth. I do not want to stereotype. I do not want to say it's true of everybody. And as a society, that's how we have to think about this. It's and not all.

And right now too much of our politics, especially around gender, is being framed as all pick a side, pink or blue, insane. And it's got us to a very difficult place in our culture. And so we've just all gotta give ourselves permission to care about boys and men without living in fear of the fact that in doing that, we've somehow gone over to the dark side and become a misogynist.

That is not true. And it's more of us that say that the less true it'll become

Jordan Harbinger: for more on what it really takes to help men thrive without setting women back. Check out episode 1126 of The Jordan Harbinger [01:16:00] Show.