Paying attention to the failures and observations of others is a great way to learn from mistakes you didn’t make. One must consistently and objectively zoom out to look at the bigger picture to engineer situations with the best possible outcome.
This blog post is for aspiring passport bros who want a sober look at the reality of the lifestyle. The good, the bad, and the banshee.
Table of Contents
Pros and Cons of the Passport Bro Lifestyle
Well-defined perspectives are lacking, but there’s clickbait lifestyle design porn for miles.
TikTok passport bros can eat my ass. Anyone willing to put that app on their daily driver is an idiot.
The average passport bro blog will focus on the shiny things –-the novelty of normies, bread and circuses. Much content created by lads who just discovered the lifestyle and they’re still in their honeymoon period.
Before the pandemic, it was the same way with digital nomads. Guy discovers remote work, starts a blog, travels for 6 months, and considers himself a pioneer. Talks about internet outages like the Great Depression.
For many, the passport bro lifestyle is just an extended holiday on a fixed budget, most eventually return home and don’t suffer much –when the savings account is emptied they pack it in. And that’s cool if you land softly and you’re comfortable putting your chains back on.
But if you can make money online, you can wind up like your friendly neighborhood Hobo with a Laptop and travel forever. So far, it’s been a decade living across Canada, and a decade and change living abroad. The passport bro movement and digital nomad lifestyle are completely interchangeable.
It isn’t all upside, there are dark parts and pitfalls to avoid that you won’t learn about from the trust fund clout-chasers. You’re making incredible sacrifices and taking on a lot of risk to become a passport bro.
Reading my series on the passport bro movement is a great place to do your research:
- How to Become a Passport Bro
- Mistakes Every Passport Bro Should Avoid At All Costs
- The Pros and Cons of the Passport Bro Lifestyle (you are here)
And then of course, there’s guide after guide about making money online in the most creative ways:
Explore salaries for common online jobs, find an entry-level remote job, design and sell merch online with no inventory, learn about dropshipping, start a blog or your own online community site, and learn how to make money in an absolute emergency. And that’s only the beginning.
Soon, I’ll launch a co-ed online community where we can all meet. Get on the mailing list so you don’t miss first access, and drop me a voicemail if you have any questions.
I’ll cover the bright side first, but the real meat and potatoes lay in the cons.
Pros of This Lifestyle
1. Money Goes Further
Work online, earn US dollars, spend pesos. Depending on where you go, you could live on 1/3 the cost of living of your home country. Or even lower.
Rent a three bedroom house for $200 per month, buy a beer for a buck at a bar, live at a 5-star resort full-time for $600/month or less (negotiate a long-term deal and the price goes down dramatically), dazzle a fair lady for $20 on date night.
2. Food Quality is Usually Better
If you’re in a tropical climate, there’s plenty of cancer-fighting fresh exotic fruits to be juiced or blended, and street food ingredients were picked off the farm within days or hours of going down your gullet. Street food is rarely imported, that’s why it’s so cheap.
The food –holy shit, the food. If you can avoid canola oil and stick to raw awesome, you’re golden. It will change your mind, change your body odor, even. You’ll be a whole new human after a few years of eating right without processed foods (the rest of the planet seems to avoid them). They know how to do fruit and vegetables and make food great, it’s otherworldly.
Re-used seed oils are really your only real enemy when it comes to street food, so check the oil before you buy. Watch out for MSG, too –that shit is poison.
3. Like-Minded Male Friends
The male friends I made in the beginning of my journey will be friends until I die. It happens fast, it’s a tidal wave, and it’s more common than not. Which is nice, as most of your pals back home will dry up given enough time.
They’re usually from places you’re not, and after sharing a very unique lifestyle for awhile, you can swap war stories, income strategies, and keep each other motivated in work and at the gym.
Accountability was often the name of the game with my newfound friends. And they’re always ripe for the meeting everywhere you want to be.
My only caveat here is to avoid men who have no pre-existing male friends –who are you not to have any? Men usually smoke out the beta backbiters pretty quickly, and a dude without male friends is a red flag. The kind that slide into the DMs of your new girl, borrow money and never pay it back, or have questionable back stories. They often ride that philosophical wave, you know the type. Same shit goes for girls with no girl friends.
4. Women are Nicer to You
You never know what mixed bag of a response you’ll get for masculine chivalry by Western girls, they’re all at different stages of their programming. But a “thank you” is rarer than a single digit body count.
They’re made to feel fear, mockery, disdain, or derision of masculine men. Masculinity is cringe now. Eggshells for miles, and worse.
Passport bros are particularly triggering for this lot. Hell, even my digital nomad posts got me labelled a “colonizer” by more than a few —you know the type. On the other side of the spectrum, I got called a “race traitor” for having mixed race children. I can’t make this shit up.
Travel abroad and choose countries that align with who you are as a human –women will respect you and be outwardly polite in little moments you’re not used to.
Like not immediately getting up to leave when sitting beside them on the bus or a park bench, opening doors entering a building, letting them cut line at the grocery store when they have one item and you have a cart full. They won’t expect it, and they’ll be grateful for it.
They’ll even smile that authentic smile without a second shoe drop. That good feeling you share, reciprocally. Boy, it had been a long time for that shit before I GTFO.
I was born in ’81. Some readers may have never known a time when Western girls were as sweet.
5. You’re Exotic Now
Yeah, who knew. There’s chemistry in differences. Different culture, different upbringing, different accent, different physical features, different average penis size, “love language”, and what you both bring to the table. Some cultures respect traditional gender roles more than others.
And maybe you’ll find God. In some cases, allowing a woman to lead you to her faith becomes worth the entire clusterfuck of being a passport bro to begin with. It also makes it easier to ask her father for his permission to marry her, if that’s where it’s headed.
6. Brainwash Washes Out
When I look at any news from the West now, I see the blatant intent to radicalize. It’s been this way since before Nancy Grace and Bill O’Reilly.
I didn’t see that before I left. Western TV to me now is like watching ISIS recruitment tapes on YouTube circa 9/11. Your home country wants you sick and afraid. You see through all that when it comes at you in a language and culture you aren’t well versed in. You see the parallels, the mask slips.
Different countries have different propagandist slant, different nudge operations. When you switch over from one to another, the shift in messaging is noticeable. And once you notice it, you keep noticing it.
7. Traditional Gender Roles
Wherever you’re going, sweat and hard work is probably going to be a stronger currency in the dating marketplace than back home. And that paves the way for female respect of traditional masculinity.
The real men of the West –the ones with dirty jobs and hard labour, in the vein of Mike Rowe, are disrespected by women of the West generally speaking. No girl will tell her friends she wants the babies of a garbage man or plumber, if anything at all.
In the East, men who sweat are respected, fed, and lovingly looked after.
But that’s a sword that cuts both ways, gentlemen.
If you’re perceived as a rich fat ass, you will be found out and treated as such. Your resources will be extracted.
Most women still like muscles, no matter where in the world you go. They still care what their friends think –their friends who didn’t marry a foreigner. Their friends with local husbands who are garbage men and plumbers.
You still need to keep up with the local men. So keep fit, stay lean, and eat right. And fix shit around the house, don’t hire it out when you can avoid it.
Women around the world are still the same, there’s just more possibility they’re better outside the West.
8. Lower Body Counts
I know I got some ladies present hate-reading this post, I see you in my analytics –you’re more avid readers than the men I wrote this for.
Men have preferences that you ignore with a scorned subversive slant, for what? You’re lying to yourself if you think you get your cake. Higher body counts result in inflated heads, irritable tantrums, and zero resilience in relationships when the going gets tough.Â
A higher body count makes you ugly to most men, repulsive; but when you get rejected you blame the Chad doing the rejection –own your shit if you aren’t simple.
No, men who prefer a lower body count are not insecure. Loose women make bigger messes –an embarrassment to the social integrity of any male who isn’t a bottom-feeder or “feminist ally” who secretly wishes to get pegged.Â
Ignore general biological male preferences and FAFO, get ghosted hard by hard bodied men; you’ll learn one day, reality is a hell of a drug for cat ladies after the wall. Cry about it in the comments.
You can’t un-ring that bell. Hymen “virginity surgeries” and egg freezing are a sad cope.
You’re a punchline that women outside the West are laughing at right along with your passport bro ex partner.
– Source (be sure to name drop Hobo with a Laptop in her comments)
You’ll likely meet girls with a lower body count when you’re outside the United States, and you can usually suss that out in the first few dates.
But, you should probably read my post about Passport Bro Mistakes to be sure you’re not scraping the bottom of a heavily run barrel.
There’s no guarantees here, but chances are that the higher you go on the female totem pole, the lower the body count. Win/win.
In Asia, an education generally means endless hours studying because their family is counting on them, invested in them, and need them to succeed existentially.
In the West, an education generally means Frosh Week, thousand cock stares for miles, and a drinking + “pair bonding” problem.
9. Top Tier Women
The big cope among some Western women who are absolutely triggered by the passport bro movement is that their men are “leaving to find, and take advantage of, poor, unsuspecting, under-educated, lesser girls than themselves”. They view these girls abroad as concubines who don’t know better. Live in maids. Naive.
Reality? They’re dead wrong. And it’s kinda’ racist to assume anything of girls in countries one has never been to, period. The bigotry is thicc and telling.
But you love to see it in video, Western girls haven’t had to self-censor for decades. The self owns are prime, and the internet is forever.
In reality, highly educated women in the developing world are the norm in many places, and many are nurses, doctors, dentists, lawyers, professors, teachers, marketers, importers/exporters, federal employees, judges, real estate agents, entrepreneurs, museum curators, land owners, you name it.
You’re spoiled for choice and I can tell you from personal experience; I swam in the dating pool of the upper echelons of society in Thailand, and they are nobody’s fool. They got their shit together.
Social status still matters, but foreigners have a few passes local men don’t.
A higher income makes you look smart and reliable. Even if you’re a blogger like myself. Because I still make more than they do, I clean up good, I’m fit, I know my worth as much as I know my manners, and I have charisma. I can fit in.
Men are all over the board IQ wise, most are on the lower end of the spectrum. But women generally stick to the center of the bell curve, and there’s little difference in terms of intelligence anywhere you go in the world, when it comes to women.
10. Perception of Wealth
Yeah, another double-edged sword; the perception of wealth comes with anyone’s ability to live abroad “on holiday” as long as you are. You must be doing something right.
Women of all countries will often conflate riches with smarts or intelligence, and their hypergamy will flare up in your presence.
But a perception of wealth also makes you a mark. A resource to be extracted.
The perception of wealth has benefits, enjoy them. Punch above your weight. Legitimately finesse top-tier women, and only write metaphorical checks you can cash.
Fit men with money are dreamed about, fat men with money are prey –take that as you will.
Maintaining Frame
I’m about to share with you the cons vs the passport bro movement. But before I do, let’s talk frame.
Even choosing the right girl in the wrong country can break your frame and set you up for ruin. The darkest parts usually boil down to drinking, bad choices with women, and money.
Being aware of the mistakes passport bro movement enjoyers make in advance is a wise pursuit but it isn’t enough.
There’s a blueprint I recommend looking into.
“Frame” is an ephemeral term popularized by Rollo Tomassi from The Rational Male. At a high level, I’ve always viewed “frame” in simple terms; money, mentality, and fitness. Frame is the unspoken arbiter of reality and social proof solidifies it. Charisma ties it all together nicely, but not everyone has the latter.
Hierarchy naturally forms in every relationship, built upon an unspoken narrative. If you exude a narrative of success, you’re physically fit, and have the social proof to back it up –frame will be easier to maintain.
Don’t let people peek behind the curtain, and make things appear effortless on the surface. The social benefits to maintaining frame are limitless.
If you end up in a part of the world where you’re at a disadvantage or you choose a reckless woman, or maintain male relationships with reckless men, you could end up with expenses you weren’t ready for or a situation where you appear at a loss in one way or another –the narrative is shattered, and frame goes out the window.
At least, that’s how I view it.
I’ve seen more men get rolled by the lifestyle than succeeded as passport bros, long game. Search “foreigner suicide” on Thai news websites for a reality check before you book your flight, that shit is sobering. So much decapitation by balcony, the reasons why are usually written in between the lines and personal ruin is always the catalyst.
Maintaining frame is a matter of life and death in a zero sum game. The longer you’re on the road, the more important frame is.
Rollo Tomassi explains his views much better than I have and I highly recommend picking up a copy of any of his books, they read well as a series in the following order;
The Rational Male (2013)
The Rational Male: Preventative Medicine (2015)
The Rational Male: Positive Masculinity (2017)
The Rational Male: Religion (2021)
The Rational Male: Player’s Handbook (2022)
Invest in yourself, this is your call to action –I’m it. Rollo is the kind of guy you read, without joining his cult of personality; he’s kind of a boner in real life.
Women reading this post who actually care what men think and feel would be wise to read the books mentioned above.
Cons of This Lifestyle
1. Travel Will Become More Difficult
Now that our governments all learned that they can lock us down en masse, they’re eagerly working on a number of agendas that will make travel near-impossible for your average passport bro.
“15 minute cities”, ULEZ in the UK, carbon credits, government issued programmable money called CBDCs which can control how, where, when, and what it’s spent on like a social credit score, stakeholder capitalism, ESG scores, Agenda 2030, Green New Deal, Build Back Better, Lockstep, no injection no travel no exceptions, flight delays because a pilot is stroking out from their mandatory clot shot or worse –if you do not know about these things yet, you should start doing some critical research.
Simply put, there’s a digital prison being erected all around you, with very real consequences to your freedom in the very near future.
tl;dr you are the carbon they’re trying to reduce, but they’ll start by removing your freedom of movement. It happens slow, slow, slow, then fast. Here’s hoping that hard times make strong men.
2. Local Men Kind of Hate You, Sorta’
A handful of foreigners is no big deal, but a large population of ‘premium tourists’ consuming local resources while getting preferred treatment and dominating the dating pool tends to make the local men apprehensive. Add alcohol into the mix, and there’s friction. Too much friction, and someone is getting a machete to the chest.
Top it off with extreme economic disparity, mass unemployment, a series of crises one after another –and you’ve got yourself a pressure cooker. Traveling while black in a country like Italy as it suffers record numbers of illegal migrants could get one mistaken for being part of the reason for social upheaval.
At the very, very least, that cool friendly local dude you met last night before you randomly passed out likely drugged you to get you off the scene, and worse, maybe you woke up with less money in your wallet.
If you get drugged chances are it’s a friendly talkative dude doing it. Take that as you will. True story, bro.
3. Hard to Maintain Regimen
As a passport bro who’s lived abroad for over a decade, I understand the necessity of having a regimen and how hard it is to maintain one.
A repeatable daily schedule, quality sleep, lots of exercise, time to decompress with good company, and a healthy work/life balance matter more the older you get. Culture shock is a real thing, and it’s mentally taxing. What you do in your off time matters more.
Good luck learning to facilitate a proper regimen if you’re on the move all the fucking time.
If you’re going to be a digital nomad or passport bro; slow travel, spread it out, get a system for dealing with jet lag.
Try moving places seasonally, instead of weekly.
Align travel schedules with like-minded friends, and minimize costs so you can work less often.
Creating a profile on TrustedHousesitters is a big help with this, as you can enjoy someone else’s house rent-free for entire seasons at a time, and have the stability that comes with living in an established household. All you gotta’ do is walk a dog or feed a cat, at worst.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of having a warm body in their house to deter robbery, or water plants.
Holiday homes are usually all about their expensive location and comfort, they’re empty for entire seasons, and they need looking after. Search TrustedHousesitters’ database in prime locations and see what you come up with.
I’ve got a massive guide to getting chosen for the best house sitting opportunities, and you can sign up for TrustedHousesitters here –they’re the best website for this.
4. Utilities Suck
When you live abroad you’re going to be a victim of shit utility companies and the governors that are too incompetent to keep them in check.
If you work online you’re going to need redundancies to ensure you’ve always got a solid internet connection.
Starlink has travel-centric fee plans, you can move around with your dish, and it fits in a suitcase. A battery doesn’t hurt to keep it powered during blackouts. You may not be able to get a Tesla Powerwall, but you can get some real swell batteries by Ecoflow like I did.
Find a place you like, dig your heels in, invest in your situation –if it can go wrong it usually does at one time or another.
5. Travel Will Kick Your Ass
Never underestimate the convenience of slow travel. You’re not on holiday and you don’t need to cram as much as you can into your itinerary –you bought a one-way ticket somewhere and time spent outside your home country is an outcome calculated by a number of factors.
Getting awfully sick while abroad can potentially cut your journey short. Don’t push your body too hard, and be reasonable with alcohol.
There’s different viruses and illnesses around the globe that vary enough to slip past your immune system because your body has no prior exposure. The West is generally a sterile environment, for the most part.
Food, water, air, and touching surfaces are all attack vectors –but too much hand sanitizer is no good for your health, either. Hand sanitizer is just an antibiotic for your skin, your body absorbs it, there is fallout from using it too often. Plus it’s usually full of male hormone disruptors –maybe that’s why beta men slather it on so much.
Prioritize sleep and quality foods. Consider getting a water bottle with a charcoal filter in it, and maybe a light pen to fend off water-borne parasites and bacteria. Drinking water in developing countries can sometimes take some getting used to. Avoid tap water, especially in places like Bali –explore the term “Bali belly” to find out why I singled out Indonesia.
Carrying around pharmaceuticals will require a prescription with your name on it, but natural health supplements can be purposefully added to your eating schedule with no trouble at the border.
Goldenseal is a great natural antibiotic and anti-fungal that doesn’t nuke your microbiome like pharmaceuticals do (it can even cure some STIs in the right doses). I always pop two if I am eating food I consider somewhat questionable for whatever reason.
Ivermectin is a little harder to get these days because of the political situation around COVID –Joe Rogan brought it the fore and was ridiculed for “taking horse paste” but this drug works wonders on parasites, inflammation, and inhibiting virus replication. It’s a must-have for any passport bro, read up on it. It’s one of those drugs that have very low toxicity, and new off-label uses are discovered on a regular basis. I take it the day before long distance flights to reduce my chances of getting sick.
Probiotics and living foods are an absolute must to keep your guts in working order. Live foods like saurkraut, kimchi, pickles, kombucha, and kefir. I can ferment most of this stuff at home, but not so much if I am always on the move.
Long trips can mean a lot of sitting, and deep vein thrombosis (DVT, blog clots) due to inactivity. Instead of taking Aspirin, I prefer Nattokinase or Bromelain (but never take them together). They thin your blood and actually dissolve clots –a bonus if you got fucked up from the clot shot.
If I didn’t have a home base in the Philippines, I’d have to carry a suitcase of just health supplements, whey protein, and the like.
Travel slow or seasonally and you can easily acquire hard to find health supplements, and build a proper health kit. You can also more easily source quality meat and vegetables at a lower cost.
6. Unreliable Birth Control
I cannot recommend packing 3+ doses of Plan B “morning after pill” enough, fellow passport bro. The main ingredient is Levonorgestrel, and the single pill 1.5mg dose is available under the brand name Victoria where I’m at (it could be called something else where you are).
Condoms in Asia are brutal; even reliable brands you recognize from back home are different. The sizing is off, maybe they’re made locally and break easily. Maybe they’re fake.
Having the morning after pill is a smart thing to pack and I believe it’s over the counter in much of the world. But it could also be unbearably hard to get when the clock is ticking on a broken condom with a dirty un-marriageable girl.
In Asia, you can find it on Shopee or Lazada –their version of Amazon. But that takes weeks to arrive. Getting it in the pharmacy means a doctor’s appointment and running around town because pharmacies run out of things all the time.
Total fucking nightmare. Bring your own.
Girls in countries that love and value having kids and starting families are less likely to take birth control as religiously as in the West.
As a result, you are more likely to knock someone up. And you could also be set up, or held accountable for another mans seed.
7. You May Wind Up Supporting Her Family, Too
Some cultures put a dowry on their daughter’s head if you want to marry (rural areas in Northern Thailand, for example), other girls go fishing for foreigners to support their family whether actively on their own volition or because they succumb to familial pressures.
Some will even spring a fee on you after you bed them and won’t leave until they’re paid whatever they can get –banshees.
Don’t fall asleep with hard cash laying around your room, if you do you’re just showing off and may be sized up as stupid. If your safe isn’t bolted down, keep cash under your mattress on the side you sleep on, or a plant pot, if in your room at all. I avoid using a safe, regardless –every hotel safe and gun safe has default secondary PIN codes and word gets around.
“One Night in Bangkok” comes to mind. And that’s why it’s important to focus on day game; the caliber of woman you find relies on the clockwork and location.
In either case, they’ll try more often than not, sooner or later. It will usually be for a surgery, or some massive problem wrapped up in urgency –the reasons are telling in their own way. A father in need of a kidney operation is likely a man of vice, a superfluous reason demonstrates just how much of a paycheck they see you as. For my mother in-law, it was a wall around a secondary property the middle class family owned (and no, I didn’t).
And it isn’t all banshees.
Some passport bros will grill me for saying this, but it’s not always a sucker or simp that pays; her desire for you may be legitimate but her family is truly in a pinch.
The better the lay and sweeter the woman, the more difficult it is to judge. There is no sweeping answer, no general rule. If you’re a man of means and she’s a prize, it is what it is. How soon they ask, how they ask, and what they say it’s for are all deciding factors.
If it’s a large sum, get a receipt or a contract with conditions you set. Nothing is free, and that includes your generosity.
8. Where There Are No Advantages
Sure, there’s advantages to being a foreigner with a thick wallet, sharp wit, and hard body. But after a few years you begin to notice the complete absence of advantage in key areas of your life –moments where the rubber meets the road.
You’re ‘the other’. Always will be. That’s the line you walk.
For all your game, charisma, money, and smarts –there will be situations where you’ll be given an involuntary haircut.
If you get in a fight with a local, right or wrong, you are wrong.
If you get into a car accident, right or wrong, you are wrong.
If your girlfriend falsely accuses you of physical abuse –you get it.
There is no longer any ‘home team advantage’, you forfeited that when you expatriated. Nobody is coming to save you, bystanders will be more interested in live-streaming your misfortune than help you resolve it. Fuck, be wary of white knights –what’s that going to cost you?
If you think America is racist, wait until you’re in a life altering pinch outside of it. Only fragile men think America is r-r-r-r-rrrracist (and maybe beta boys should sit this one out).
Any police man you meet along the lines of a deportable or criminal offence will probably be sizing you up from the moment they meet you (see con number 2).
Keep your wits about you and pay your way out if you can at the onset of a problem, once you reach a cell it’s on paper and you’re going through a very slow and likely corrupted legal system.
And do not run out of money.
9. Two-Tier Pricing
There’s a price for you and there’s a price for the locals. You’ll rarely get a discount over a local, if ever.
I noticed this most prominently in Thailand, where the love/hate relationship with foreigners is palpable.
Tourist attractions, historical landmarks, accommodations, and even the occasional fruit stand on the side of the road on a bus route will have a sign in the local language with local pricing and a sign in English with a higher price, often double what the locals pay.
The money you pay is still probably cheaper than what it would be in your home country, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
10. Missing Out
Miss a few birthdays, weddings, maybe even a half dozen funerals (totalllly not COVID vaccine related, I’m sure) and your friends and family will begin to drop off.
My sister perpetuated the lie that I hate everyone and that’s why I left, and getting anyone on a regular video call schedule after all that was like herding cats. Fuck you, Jen.
Face it; you’re either there, or you’re here. You can only choose one.
It’s a slow death, and you don’t know yet how people will receive it back home with you being gone for years at a time.
This just might be the con vs the passport bro lifestyle that stings the utmost.
Alright. Let’s Wrap This Up, I’m Done
I mentioned some posts I wrote in a series, you should keep reading:
How to Become a Passport Bro
Mistakes Every Passport Bro Should Avoid At All Costs
The Pros and Cons of the Passport Bro Lifestyle (you are here)
How to Become a Digital Nomad
I also mentioned Rollo Tomassi, a man I would recommend my sons read one day as his perspective is timeless:
The Rational Male (2013)
The Rational Male: Preventative Medicine (2015)
The Rational Male: Positive Masculinity (2017)
The Rational Male: Religion (2021)
The Rational Male: Player’s Handbook (2022)
Download Digital Nomad Escape Plan
Digital nomadism is rad. I wrote the book on it and you should check that out.
Buy me a coffee if you liked this post.
Share this article with friends. I know you won’t share it on your main profile, but slide this post into the DMs of your friends. I’d really appreciate it, I’m in a tough racket these days; if I get ghosted, it isn’t women –it’s fucking Google.
Help me to keep fighting the good fight, share this article.
Big love from Palawan, gents. Google image search that shit.Â
And send me a voicemail if you wanna’ say hello or tell me I don’t suck.