A German business magazine recently ran a piece on a libertarian emigration ranking and, in passing, used one of my ventures as its illustration of advisors who, in the magazine’s word, “stoke” fear among the wealthy. The evidence offered was a short list of phrases from our own materials: economic decline, a demographic time bomb, the rising danger of war, and the build-out of a surveillance and control state.
I read it. I wasn’t offended. If anything, I was grateful. When a mainstream outlet decides your message is loud enough to be worth needling, it has just told your audience that the message is landing. So let me say plainly what the article implied and what I am happy to own.
We are loud, and that is on purpose
We make videos. We make them for a medium that rewards a sharp hook and punishes a mumble. That is not a flaw in what we do. It is the job. We are not a newspaper, we have never claimed to be journalists, and we are not bound by the house style of a magazine. We make our own rules, and they work for the people we serve: self made men and women who built something real, who tend to distrust the corporate consensus, and who are not waiting for permission to think for themselves. They like the volume. So do I. I am not going to apologise for the register, and I am not going to change it.
And most of what we make is good news
Loud is not the same as negative, either, and this is where the framing is most misleading. Take our work as a whole and it is overwhelmingly positive. Most of our videos are not warnings at all. They are about the upside of leaving: the country that finally fits you, the business that breathes once it is free of a hostile tax regime, the perfectly legal structures that let you keep more of what you earn, and the plain energy of people who stopped waiting and built a life on their own terms. Emigration, in our telling, is not flight. It is opportunity, more freedom, often more money, and very often more happiness.
That same spirit runs through everything around the videos. Our events are not doom seminars. They are rooms full of capable, optimistic people comparing notes on how to build something better. Our New Horizons Club is named for precisely what it is about. The clue is in the name.
So to reduce all of that to four ominous phrases is not analysis. It is selection. Pick the darkest four lines from any serious body of work and you can cast anyone as a prophet of doom. The honest picture is the reverse: we talk about risk because risk is real, but we spend far more of our time on possibility, because possibility is the whole point.
But here is my line, and it is a bright one
I have never trafficked in conspiracy theories. Not anti-vax. Not “deep state.” Not the secret-cabal rubbish that floods this corner of the internet. I never have, and I never will.
This matters more than the volume, because loud is not the same as unhinged. The serious people I advise are doing diligence with real money on the table. The moment an advisor sounds like a crank, those people walk, and they are right to. The line I draw is precisely what makes the rest of what I say worth hearing. Loud and sane. That is the whole proposition, and the distance between me and the genuine fringe is not a matter of tone. It is a matter of whether the claim survives a fact-check.
So let me do something the article did not. Let me show the receipts.
The fears Capital quoted are documented, not invented
Take the “surveillance and control state.” I am not describing a hidden plot. I am describing legislation, much of it justified in its own text:
- The automatic exchange of financial information. The Common Reporting Standard now loops in more than a hundred jurisdictions reporting account data across borders. DAC6 forces disclosure of cross-border arrangements. DAC8 extends the same logic to crypto. Each was sold as anti-evasion. Each also means more of an ordinary person’s financial life is reported by default.
- The proposals stacking on top. EU-level studies of an asset and wealth register. Recurring trial balloons for a wealth tax or a one-off wealth levy. A digital euro whose programmability and offline limits are openly debated. The “chat control” client-side-scanning fight that returns no matter how often it is voted down. Cash caps. Beneficial-ownership registers.
You do not need a theory to be concerned about any of this. You need the Official Journal of the European Union. The disagreement between me and my critics is not about the facts. It is about the framing. They call it fairness and security. I call it the scaffolding of a control state. Both of us are reading the same statutes.
Exhibit A: when the state reached for standing wealth
Here is the example I keep coming back to, because the record is clean.
In the spring of 2020, as the pandemic hit, the chair of the SPD floated a Vermögensabgabe, a levy on large fortunes, to finance the fallout. Senior figures from the Greens and the Left backed it within days. By the following year, a one-off levy was reportedly being weighed inside the Federal Finance Ministry itself, until the ministry’s own academic advisory council warned, in an unpublished opinion, that such a levy would shake the confidence of savers and investors and damage Germany’s hard-earned reputation as a safe place to invest.
Notice the word that kept surfacing in that debate: Lastenausgleich. That is not neutral fiscal vocabulary. It is the name of the 1952 law under which the post-war state assessed a levy of up to half of standing assets, payable over decades, to redistribute wealth after the war. When politicians reach for that word rather than a duller one, a German wealth-holder hears exactly what is being invoked: a precedent in which the state took up to fifty percent of what people owned, by decree.
To be precise, because precision is the point: this levy was proposed and seriously examined. It was never enacted. I will not say it happened, because it did not. But it was pushed by people at the top of governing parties and it reached the finance ministry’s desk. That is not fearmongering. That is the minutes.
Exhibit B: the war on the doorstep
I have written more than once that I regard Putin as a gangster and a criminal. I will say it again here so there is no confusion. But my opinion of the man is irrelevant to the strategic question, and the strategic question is this: forcing a nuclear power into a corner is not an intelligent strategy. Reasonable people disagree about Ukraine, and I respect that this is contested ground. What is not in dispute is the trajectory of the risk. The Munich Security Index now places fears of NATO escalation and of a nuclear strike at their highest levels in years. That is the establishment’s own instrument telling you the danger is real and rising.
And the deeper point, the one that should focus any German mind, is historical. Over the last five centuries, German soil has been roughly an order of magnitude deadlier than American or British soil when you measure the per-capita risk of dying in armed conflict on the territory itself. Run the numbers honestly, with the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic campaigns and the two World Wars on one side, and the American Civil War and the Blitz on the other, and you land somewhere around twenty times. Not a feeling. Arithmetic. Central Europe is, statistically, the most fought-over ground in the civilised world, and it is naive to assume that five hundred years of pattern simply switched off in our lifetimes.
Why this is personal
My great-grandfather, Nikolaus Ehlen, was imprisoned by the Nazi regime and handed a Redeverbot, a formal ban on speaking, for the crime of saying what he thought. My family knows, in its own bones, what it costs when a state decides which fears a citizen is permitted to name out loud. So when I am told that pointing at published law and published history amounts to “stoking” fear, I hear an old and unwelcome melody. The lesson of that heritage is not to lower your voice. It is to make sure that when you raise it, you are right.
The deal I offer
So here is the bargain, stated openly. On the surface, yes, we are loud, because that is how you reach anyone at all in 2026. But beyond the noise there is a great deal of substance, and it is the part that actually matters. Scratch the surface and you will find a source under every claim: a directive, a ministry opinion, a security index, a casualty figure. Scratch a little deeper and you find twenty-five years of actually doing this. Living across Switzerland, the UK, the United States, Malta, Ireland and Scotland. Building real, lawful structures for real people. Learning, the hard way, where the theory meets the tax office, the bank and the border.
The hook is loud because it has to be. What sits underneath it is quiet, technical and earned. The hook earns your attention. The substance earns your trust. Anyone genuinely interested finds that depth within a click or two, and that is by design.
Capital is welcome to find the volume distasteful. I would only ask that they check the claims before they reach for the word “stoked,” because every one of them holds. Loud, yes. Wrong, no.
Life is short and fleeting. One shot. Make it count.
Carpe Diem, Sebastian
