CG - The Exclave Experience: Relocating To 'Almost Canada'

I'm Chief profit and I did something a little bit crazy and I think that probably I shouldn't be the only person to do the same crazy things so that's what I'm going to share with everybody today uh why you should move to an exclave and we'll see if my clicker works does it work is it working Yes No Maybe clicker's not working oh well so uh this is the house that I used to live in and it's in a gritty industrial suburb of Seattle called Renton uh if you've flown on a Boeing 737 it was built in this town There's a big Boeing factory and the other thing that it's best known for is a very noisy chunk of

well-used 405 freeway called uh the Renton S curves which I lived just above and so in 2020 I was living in a thousand square feet of house uh working from home I had a view of the freeway all day and you know the house was built in 1943 it was never built very well because it was built for Boeing workers during the war and it was intended to be temporary housing and then it just kind of ended up being you know multi-generational home and the thing always needed work and it was drafty in the winter and I just wasn't really happy living there is especially in the middle of a pandemic because you know the walls kind of close

in on you when you're living in a pandemic right we all experience that so um one day I asked myself just what in the heck am I doing with my life and I work remote I can live anywhere that I want to in the U.S I could live in other countries even I could even live in really unusual or remote places and you know I kind of weighed moving some of the places that I'd always dreamed about because we always dream about maybe living in a tropical Paradise in Hawaii or something along those lines but that's not very practical for me my family lives in the Seattle area and I like to travel and I like the amenities

of a city honestly um so given all of that what should I do and what I ended up doing is remembering that this little corner that's circled in red exists it's in the Lower Mainland area which is the Greater Vancouver BC area but it hangs just underneath the Border when they drew the border the 49th parallel is is how it was demarcated between the United States and the British territories which are now known as Canada and this little five square mile chunk was left hanging down there and I went and started looking at real estate and honestly this place is one of the most unusual and beautiful places in the world the sunsets really do look like

this there's no filter on this at all I just took that on my cell phone and um you get to to experience that almost every day it's really clear because it's in a rain shadow highly unusual for the Pacific Northwest and if you work with me you you'll know this I literally joined my meetings from the beach because there's four wonderful Beach Parks so I can just basically walk from my house taking my meetings remotely and hang out on the beach while I do this I mean your company culture may vary you might not be allowed to work remotely or you know your co-workers might be jealous if you check in from the beach nobody Minds I get to

do that that's just kind of what I like to do Canada is literally across the street if you look at the picture on the left that's looking from the Canadian side into the United States oh my goodness now that better not be a Laphroaig 25 bottle with malort inside you guys really got me that [Music] not everything yeah I mean like I'll take a drink out of that but like yeah definitely like keep the bottle to yourselves this so besides Las Vegas for those of you who don't know this uh you can make as a speaker what they call an outrageous request and so I made an absolutely outrageous request for a bottle of Laphroaig 25. now that bottle

of Scotch if if there really is laphroyd 25 inside it is a 550 bottle of scotch and in no way did I expect b-sides to honor that you know it was just a completely flipping it was they said outrageous request it was outrageous so um and a bottle of this has just showed up and I insist like I do do you drink Scotch uh you must pour yourself some uh oh okay wonderful

okay oh oh oh wonderful okay very good cheers

oh my goodness this is so good uh you sure yeah oh wow that's uh that is that is a wonderful wonderful moment um I don't know if any of you drink Scotch but uh this is I mean this is kind of one of the Holy Grails cheers wow okay so this is something that I can't take to Canada because I'd have to pay Duty and we'll talk about that a little bit later in the presentation but uh Canada as I was saying is across the street now on the left that's looking from the Canadian side into Point Roberts uh there's just a white sign that says hey this is the us if you walk across here you might get in trouble uh

the other the middle picture is looking at the exact same spot from the U.S side and then all the way on the right Canada is literally across the street this is around 900 meters from my house uh the houses on the right side of the street are in Canada the road itself and the houses on the left side are in the United States and that's basically what the Border looks like so very different experience than the US's Southern border and they keep trying this and see if it does anything it it doesn't but the cheapest clicker on Amazon and sometimes it works uh so low housing costs I'm totally doxing myself here I've never given a talk with my real

name in it uh and now you're looking at a picture on my house that's uh where I live on the left hand side it's literally a million dollars less than Canada than in Canada to buy a home on Point Roberts and this is why I was able to do it I mean Vancouver is one of the world's most expensive cities for housing I think that only Hong Kong is more expensive and I was able to get into a almost brand new 2017 boat uh four bedroom home that's 1900 square feet for uh 4.99 and at the rate that I financed at that translates to a housing payment of around 1900 a month which is less than a one bedroom apartment in San

Francisco so and actually less than a one bedroom apartment in many parts of Seattle so if you look at the right that's a scream cap from Zillow and it just shows the property evaluations the picture that I showed in the past in the last image where you saw Canada across the street from the US this is this is an aerial view of that and what you can see is that the numbers on the Canadian side are roughly a million dollars more for almost exactly the same house on one side of the Border versus the other so it really is kind of a total hack and most importantly Jimbo made in Bower meows are the first proofs of the

additional space so we were living on top of each other he's a very active two-year-old cat who loves to play and run around and now he has two floors to do it so uh when people say did you buy the house for your cat I'm like hmm I don't know for I guess for both of us I do spoil them way too much uh there's so you might wonder about taxes you know what's the tax situation if you're right next to Canada well the tax situation is exactly the same as if you're in Washington state because that's where you are so it's legally the United States anybody can move there if you have the right to live in the U.S uh with an

asterisk next to it and I'll get to that later um so there's no immigration formalities at all it's legally the United States so U.S taxes apply if you are working for a U.S company if you can work remotely the you know whatever tax rate you're paying you would pay in Washington state that's basically going to be what you will pay uh in Point Roberts there is no state income tax in Washington so that's pretty awesome Whatcom County has lower property taxes than Central Puget Sound so if you're used to if you're from the Seattle area or if you've been looking at the Seattle area as a potential place to move to if if you're in the Bay Area

or La kind of hoping to get away from the high tax high taxes in California but still be on the west coast you're going to be way lower in property taxes living a little bit farther north car Tabs are hundreds of dollars less expensive and you know honestly I feel like I'm getting away with something by living there just financially it works out so much better and Point Roberts itself is very stable and secure and so uh that is a bit of a concern who has concerns over the current state of stability of the United States right now anybody given what's been going on politically I mean you know some of us feel freely secure where

we are I'm I've been all over the world 76 countries and territories and counting all seven continents and I know where things end up when they continue on the trajectory they have and it turns into a lot of dysfunction you know stuff like the power not staying on and water not being drinkable and that kind of thing so um for me the fact that the power is provided by BC Hydro and marketed by Puget Sound Energy is a plus because I feel like the their ability to deliver reliable infrastructure over time is likely to be better the water comes from the city of Vancouver it's marketed by a local water district but it's good quality water and

it's run by the city of Vancouver where I expect that that Supply to continue and be reliable it's very very difficult for anybody with a criminal record to access point Roberts and so that's the thing to keep in mind is you know even if you've got a DUI that is something that is a really big problem to get through Canada so the other thing that I think is an upside or a downside depending on whether you like guns I personally don't I want nothing to do with them and I don't want to own any and I don't like being around them now we all have different opinions on guns but the discharge of a firearm is

illegal on Point Roberts there is no federal firearms dealer so there's no way to get you know any really high powered weapons over there and um you could really only bring them in on a boat but then you're not allowed to shoot them so it's it works out pretty well because the Canadians just don't want to have a whole lot of guns right next to their border uh so it and most people on Point Roberts just really don't want a lot of gun activity so effectively they're illegal unfortunately so is marijuana so even though it's legal on both sides of the Border in Washington state and in BC it's federally illegal in both countries to bring marijuana across a border so

it's until that stupidity ends no weed you can do CBD products and some of those are Delta IX and Edibles so if you enjoy the experience of cannabis there's ways to get get it legally but the uh dispensaries that you can go to in Washington there just aren't any on Point Roberts uh licensing is too complicated and expensive it's too small a population to make it economic and one thing with the security that I think is pretty awesome is it's so secure that it's rumored that the federal witness protection program shelters their most critical protectees in Point Roberts as well as you know some other locations around the country of course I don't have any direct knowledge of this uh

it's a it would be allegedly in a very well secured location but that gives you an idea of the level of security of this place right it's uh I think it's probably one of the most secure communities in the US and it's even YouTube famous there's if you search for Point Roberts on YouTube you'll find a couple of videos uh one says that we're going to be sold to Canada there's this uh Russian YouTuber who lives in Vancouver and and did uh semi-accurate uh video on on the place but uh it's you know it's starting to get some attention as well but what about the Border everybody asks about this because you know Crossing Borders

is stressful and what's it like to live in a place where if you want to go over the mainland of the US you're Crossing four borders uh that's real um and you know this place that's that's our entry point and I'm there a lot uh well we all cross the border a lot and the Border guards are people that we get to know they're all humans and they know us and so it's routine and it's usually fast once you for one know and follow the rules because if you're not following roles that's going to get you on the list of people that they look more closely at and that's not something you want so you do pay attention to the

rules present yourself as somebody who wants to follow them and intends to do so and you will generally have a very smooth experience both Canada and the US maintain border crossings at Point Roberts not all the exclaves do there's not a formal border crossing at the Northwest angle in Minnesota you have to call in by video in both directions and in Hyder Alaska which is one of the other us exclaves there's just no border checks at all going into the U.S there's there is a border check going from Beast back into BC from the Alaska side uh and that's good for us because it means that point Roberts is considered the United States so you can order any

of your online shopping and it's not subject to any sort of Canada Customs uh you know it gets kind of complicated and and also uh gas is sold at the same price as as it is in the U.S if we didn't have that border then probably the US and Canada would have to agree that point Roberts would be part of the Canadian custom Zone and so we'd be paying Canadian taxes for everything and that is kind of the deal that Hyder Alaska has but there's hardly anything in Hyder so it works for them uh if you're gonna go to the mainland us as I mentioned before you're Crossing into Canada driving across it and then

back into the U.S and so this means uh that there are some border formalities the app on the right hand side that there's a screenshot of is called arrivecan and the Canadian government requires you to fill fill out this uh app every time that you cross their border it was put in place for the pandemic hopefully it goes away at some point uh these these things though never go away really so it may just be a thing that we're going to have to fill out indefinitely so a couple of things with you know from private from a privacy perspective uh the Canadian government has refused to State whether or not they track you using this app so personally I

install it on a phone that I can either bring with me or not and fill it out that way I tend to bring the phone along when I want the Canadian government to know exactly where I was at all times and right now that's pretty much everywhere um that I am in Canada because it makes things a lot easier if they verify that what you told them that the border is true but that is you know obviously your call and it's a it's a privacy concern that some people would have uh so border authorities do put you in the system as a local and so if you're if you are what's considered a habitual resident of Point Roberts and the

Canadian government agrees that you are then they will put you in as a habitual resident and that means that you can use certain features of the arrivecan app that are not available to people that don't live on the point full time and Nexus is your friend so Nexus is a program that's jointly between the Canadian and the US government and you can sign up for this and what it does is it it enables you to use an expedited Border Crossing Lane in both the United States and Canada so it's kind of like Global Entry uh but if you have Global Entry you can only use that lane with the U.S side and you can go through that

lane in both the US and the Canadian side if you have Nexus so the thing with Nexus is it's pretty hard to get for one you have to be interviewed by both the US and Canadian governments and right now because of a dispute over whether or not U.S customs agents can carry guns inside of Canada only the U.S based Nexus enrollment centers are open because the U.S border guards can carry guns there the Canadians aren't going to let them carry guns inside of Canadian airports and so those all of those locations are indefinitely closed meaning that half the capacity to process interviews is effectively missing right now on top of that if you want Nexus you can only interview and

apply at an enrollment center near the Canadian border so if you're going to do Global Entry you know just anytime you're coming back from an international trip at any U.S entry point you can do that interview and you cannot do that for Nexus like it has to be only in designated enrollment centers and the the appointments are backed up a year or so it's really a pain in the neck to get it but if you have it it really is your friend when you live on the point because it saves a ton of time if you leave a lot and I leave some I mean I come here but I spend most of my time on the point

uh people wonder about border restrictions I mean when you're Crossing you can get searched you know they can seize your stuff that there's like very expansive border search Authority that both countries have uh when you cross the border so what does that mean in Practical terms in day-to-day life well the borders are open 24 7. first of all so if you need to cross a border it's available and you can totally do that uh you need to have a clean criminal history no felonies as Canada defines them and that's why no DUIs because a DUI in the US isn't a felony but it is in Canada and Canada will not let you in if you've committed what they believe to

what they consider to be a felony in Canada so your criminal record just that it it's got to be pretty much completely clean or before you consider moving up there you should talk to the Canadian cbsa and make sure that they according to their understanding you're going to be cleared to go through Canada because otherwise it's going to be really bad for you um and yeah like once you live there don't get a DUI don't do bad stuff because if you do that's also going to make your life very complicated you've got to have the right to live in the United States to live in Point Roberts and so this is another thing that that you know people ask a lot well

if I live in Vancouver can I just buy a house in point Robertson commute and live there and you know do the same house hack that you did well no because if you are in if you're Canadian and you're in the United States for more than 183 days a year that's too many days and you get kicked out for six months so it's um not something unfortunately that's available unless you're a dual Citizen and you've got a US passport too and a lot of people on Point Roberts are dual citizens 75 percent of residents are have passports from both countries and so they can commute to jobs in Canada and live on Point Roberts and that's totally fine

uh but the same uh applies in Reverse so if you live on point if you want to live in Canada and you have only a U.S passport the Canadians aren't going to let you do that either they have the same 183 day restriction and this can complicate cross-border relationships so say that you fall in love with somebody who lives in a different country and most of the people in the Vancouver area are north of the Border they're not on Point Roberts well you're going to have to count your days of who's staying overnight at whose house and you're not going to easily be able to combine your home without paperwork so just keep that in mind

so more on Border searches and restrictions people just you know really are very focused on this area and I get it I mean it's it's kind of scary Crossing Borders most of us don't do it very often it's like certainly not twice a day like many Point Roberts residents do uh each Direction um and so what are the rules you can't have more than 800 pre-tax and goods that you're importing from Canada so if I go up to Canadian Tire and I buy for instance a uh you know like a steel pergola for the for my back patio which I did it's what they do is they take the price in Canadian dollars convert it to us

they subtract the tax convert that amount to US Dollars and it needs to be under 800 if it's over 800 that's actually fine you're allowed to bring stuff in from Canada it's no problem you just have to pay tax on that and the tax rate isn't very high so and they only charge it on the difference and usually they just don't want to do the paperwork so just declare everything when you bring it across if they say if they ask if you bought something in Canada just say what you did and usually they'll wave you through uh if it's only if you're buying really expensive stuff like a car or something like that in Canada that that you know customs and

paperwork gets involved uh it's relatively easy to transport things through Canada from the mainland so if you want to go over to the mainland and go to the Home Depot in Bellingham and bring stuff back through Canada now technically you're supposed to do paperwork and pay tax on it when you bring it into Canada and then clean the tax back at the other at the Boundary Bay Port of Entry and you know it's just and that's more paperwork and you basically did a lot of paperwork paid money and it was refunded and everyone wasted their time so in practice uh what the Border guards will ask is do you plan to stop in Canada or

are you driving straight through and if you um if you make an attestation that you're driving straight through then they'll let you do that usually with with you know things you pop for your house or whatever but and one question they'll ask a lot is do you have anything with you that you're planning to leave in Canada now if you do have things with you that you plan to leave in Canada if you've got gifts for example that you want to give to a friend that lives in Canada depending on what the value of that is there could be paperwork and Duty charge and the Canadian government is really sticklers about charging that Duty so

they're going to make you pay and and do all the paperwork and so it's better if you're going to get a gift for somebody in Canada Amazon delivers to a locker like Amazon Canada has lockers and there is at the 7-Eleven just across the border there's an Amazon Locker so you can just order something from Amazon Canada pay the Canadian tax have it delivered to an Amazon Locker and then you've got your gift for your Canadian friend and you don't have to deal with any of that and of course it's only 15 minutes to the largest mall in British Columbia so you've got plenty of shopping in into Austin there's uh there's really no reason to you know to

buy stuff in the US and bring it to to Canadians so yes you can be searched anytime for any reason however keep in mind that the Border search authority of Customs and Border Protection in the United States is really expansive if you live within 100 miles of a border they can show up and search you anytime they want to so it's really no different at the border uh and that that Authority is rarely exercised at outside of a border crossing it's also relatively rarely exercised at a border crossing if you're somebody who's a routine border Crosser and they know what your travel patterns are and you've especially if you've been pre-cleared as a trusted traveler so you know in

practice you don't get searched much they totally can do it anytime they want to for any or no reason and you need to be prepared for that but also if you're if you don't have anything you're not supposed to have then there's not any problem they just wasted their time and yours and you just have to plan that into your day that anytime you cross the border it could be an extra hour while they decide to look through your stuff generally speaking it's really rare uh you know unless you really take off a Border guard or you happen to be be bringing something that's a flagged item that they have that they're required to dig deeper because of and you know

certain pesticides and those kinds of things can can cause a deeper search those are like agricultural items uh you know if you declare a prohibited agricultural item they're probably going to want to look at all your fruits and vegetables and meats just to make sure they're all there they're all okay but generally speaking you don't get searched a ton if you're not obviously up to anything shady and you're a regular border Crosser so some local amenities um most of the stuff most of my shopping is up in tawasan most of the stuff that I do is on the Canadian side but we do have some local amenities as well there's a full-service Supermarket uh we've got one grocery store it's around

the same size as a safe way or Kroger if you're from that part of the country there's a Bitcoin ATM which I think is kind of funny there's five gas stations too many Marts fuels sold in liters which is a little bit unusual uh costs are comparable at the gas stations to Seattle prices so you're going to pay around the same as you would in Seattle that's a little bit more than on the on the U.S mainland in Washington but it's also way easier to come into Point Roberts from the Vancouver area so we sell a lot of gas and it's a you know 50 cents a gallon maybe more than the Bellingham Costco there's a full service Marina with a

fuel truck and shadowy and that actually gets a ton of boater traffic because boaters who are heading to Canada for fishing usually will stop off and they'll fill their big boat tanks with much less expensive gasoline than in Canada there's a k-3 school and that's really fun uh there's so it's a one classroom school with one teacher and kindergartners for third graders go to school on the point after third grade they get bust over to Blaine which means that the kids are crossing four borders a day or they all have to have passports and it it's you know an extra hour of commute time it makes it a little hard on the kids because you know unless

their parents can go drive through four borders and pick them up they can't do any after school activities or anything and they also have to get up really early to be able to make it so if you're if you have school-aged kids or you're planning to have them do consider whether or not that's something you want to do many of the tech people who live on Point Roberts you know our salaries in the tech industry tend to be a little bit higher and so then then most of the locals there and so it could be affordable to send your kids to private school in tawasan it's you know way cheaper than international schools in most cases so

that can pencil out for a lot of people and then it's just 10 minutes away instead of you know that hour commute and after school activities become more practical uh there's one bank with an ATM that dispenses USD it's a it's a bank called Umpqua it's a local bank from Oregon uh and we're grateful to have it it's the only bank that's left Banner Bank closed and left uh if you if you fly your own plane or if you want to there's a grass airstrip it's legally in the United States there are no Customs clearing facilities at Point Roberts airport you have to clear Customs back into the U.S and Bellingham but if you want to fly

back and forth between Mainland Washington and Point Roberts you can do that and that gets interesting right because it's not that far to Seattle so you actually could commute by a plane down there if you had to you know work at Microsoft or something like that uh and uh hardware store is called Nielsen's and they offer a full line uh plus they have U-Haul rentals keep monkey into this thing wish my clicker worked hey it works okay laptop figured out how to make my clicker work great uh so there's even more local Services we've got three restaurants and a food truck uh Mexican food coming soon Antonio Sula one of the locals was making Mexican food at the

deli of the marketplace but he's decided to Branch out on his own and and do a food truck and his food is awesome it's all completely legit uh their potty wagon comes and does portable toilets and they pump your septic and that's good because every home has septic so you should get to know them uh if you need your roof cleaned your windows washed any of that kind of thing there's a Bellingham company that'll come over and provide services on the point there is one local guy but he's battling some health problems right now so for now the Bellingham company is is the one that can come and do it there's a mechanic in a detail shop uh

and so anything you need done with your car you can get done on the point which is great or they can at least patch it up enough that you can get up to Canadian Tire which is 15 minutes away and that's a full service shop that can do anything uh and then there's a newspaper even which is kind of wild but it's a monthly it's like actually printed on dead trees it's called the Allpoint bulletin and it's online as well so feel free to take a look at it uh pack grub is uh the editor and writes most of the stories and honestly it's it's like pretty well done they cover issues that that are

relevant to our area it's it's like true local journalism and you just don't see that very much anymore uh so the phone and Internet situation when people you know talk to me they say there's got to be a catch like what's the deal here well the deal is like if you look at Power 10 power 10 megabits that's that's uh my internet's like I've got the next tier app it's 15 megabits down and two up and that's all I can get uh so you have to get creative you have to think like a hacker if you want to have faster internet um so would be telephone is pretty bad uh at least in terms of the service that

they're offering that's not just me saying that the Washington State Department of Commerce ran a study of communities across the state of Washington and Point Roberts rated the slowest so would be telephone is providing as ranked by the Washington State uh Department of Commerce the slowest internet service in the state thank you would be telephone so some people use starlink with varying results it does drop out a bit and we've got tall trees everywhere and so that makes it pretty tough also we're pretty far north right on the 49th parallel which means a lot of atmosphere to punch through uh makes it kind of tough for Zoom calls but when it works it does work really well and as fast according

to the people that have it uh there's gonna be fiber to the home allegedly from would be telephones starting in 2025 they got very large grants from uh the USDA of all things millions of dollars of money uh Federal money so far they've uh dug some trenches and they've got some spools of fiber around there's nothing really going on right now because uh they have some issue getting their Upstream connectivity from Bell Canada turned on uh or so they claim um and Verizon has a tower with LTE on it and that can go up to 20 30 megabits sometimes you can you can get a solid 15 at any given point so maybe you do some

Verizon and you mix it up with the DSL or maybe you go for starlink and and that works for you it just really depends what you're doing I spend a lot of time on zoom and so I need something that's pretty reliable the good news with zoom is it's just really good at dealing with terrible connectivity that's just one of the things that that they do a great job at and so for me um and the stuff and the kind of work that I do which is mostly working in Google apps and and having Zoom calls uh it works pretty well um for for ADSL it just gets really annoying if you want to run more than

one device or uh if you're you know trying to stream 4K or something like that uh Logistics so people ask like what are the logistics how do you even get stuff there it's you know that's got to be really hard clearing two borders um yeah so in order to get anything large onto the point you either need to bring it yourself and you can totally do that or you can hire Point Robert's auto Freight uh to bring it in their bonded carrier and so what's a bonded carrier it means that they seal up the truck at the Canadian border and the Canadian government agrees that whatever's in there it's basically in the U.S and and

it never entered Canada and then it gets unsealed when the truck arrives in Point Roberts and that is basically how stuff gets in so things that would be prohibited agricultural items can come in that way things that are uh you know that are that would be charge tax in Canada can come in that way the service isn't cheap it is available and you know it's just part of the cost of of uh doing business when you live on the point uh anything that you can order from UPS and FedEx will show up just like if you were anywhere else in the United States and USPS as well so and all of those are bonded carriers too

the thing is that ups only deals with stuff up to 70 pounds so if you want to order something bigger it's going to end up delivered through Point Roberts Auto Freight usually and then uh one thing that I think is kind of funny is because you can order anything online and have it delivered to Point Roberts and it's being delivered to the US but it's right next to Canada a lot of Canadians do their online shopping on U.S sites where Goods can be cheaper or there's a wide variety wider variety of stuff or things are available often in the US before they're available in Canada and so there's this cottage industry of uh places where you can just

have your package sent in Point Roberts and for two or three dollars they'll receive it for you and and you can come down and get it from Canada so that's that's kind of cool but there's challenges the Border does create a real barrier and a psychological barrier there's you know you need bonded carriers for large items uh online shopping has a more limited selection if you go to Amazon and you punch in a rural zip code anywhere in in the rural us uh I looked at you know in the outskirts of Olympia before and and it was the same kind of thing right you don't get that like Amazon Prime now stuff uh stuff that can be delivered

today uh or by Amazon Trucks Only that's not going to be available so if anything that Amazon can send you via UPS or FedEx or Walmart or any of your online retailers that's the stuff that you're going to have this election to do so if and this could this gets to be a really big problem with Walmart because they default to using doordash to send you stuff like out of the grocery section and then you get all the way to the end and you find out you can't do it so you'll get used to this once you you know and knowing what kind of items you can can get or not cannabis is effectively illegal as I brought up and

availability of services can be a challenge right it's a really small community with 850 people who live there year round and that means that if there's an electrician who prefers large jobs uh so your your small electrical jobs are going to be on a waiting list and they could be a while before they get done there's one guy that does roofs and his son and it's and you know they're really good but they have a really long waiting list because they roof every house on the point there's two landscaping companies and they're just not taking new clients and there's one plumber who's semi-retired and lives in Canada he's a dual citizen so what's the opportunity it's

unincorporated Whatcom County what does that mean uh and you you know that you know me you know there's going to be something conspiratorial here right so unincorporated Whatcom County means that there's very few regulations if you live in in an unincorporated part of a county there's no City police there's no city regulations there's just none of that so the things that you can you may want to do on your land that are crazy ideas anywhere else you can totally do on Point Roberts possibly only around 850 people live there year round most are retired two-thirds three quarters depending how you count are dual citizens they don't like change but they know that a reboot is needed for

the community to survive so many people left uh during the 15 months that the Border was closed uh that you know there's just something different than what they've done before is going to be needed and the place literally exists because of a border hack their whole history has been Geographic Arbitrage so if there's anywhere in the in the world that's hacker friendly this place is and so what's my pitch if we want to turn a place into I'm wearing a tour camp shirt and Point Roberts is around 25 miles or 20 miles Northwest of tour camp and so if you've been to tour Camp you know that when hackers gather and are and get the opportunity to be

creative together in one place a lot of magic happens because when you have enough of a concentration of hackers the amount of creativity and awesomeness that happens is really very difficult to match anywhere else in the world and we do the same thing at hacker summer camp every year in Las Vegas right when all of us come together and make a lot of really cool stuff happen and so I was thinking why can't it be tour Camp every day why can't it be uh Defcon and b-sides all the time and one way that could happen is if you have a place that's safe it's geographically re distributed there's the ability it's geographically restricted it's close to

the the amenities of a major city so you can get to an airport in 25 minutes you have access to all of the stuff of a world-class City like Vancouver can offer but you get to live around a whole bunch of really smart creative awesome hackers and so uh somebody had to be first so I moved but I don't need to be the only hacker who lives there and I'd like to invite all of the people who are watching this on the stream or here in the room if you want to check the place out I've got a pretty big house I didn't mean to buy something that big there's just not a lot for sale there plenty of

extra room hit me up uh happy to uh invite you to check it out and kick the tires and uh with that um there's my contact information uh tprofit tprofit.org or you can hit me on Twitter at tprofit and uh by the way like Shameless plug if you want to work from the beach with me my employer is hiring senior security Architects and Engineers for full remit roles so feel free to hit me up with any questions about those two they are not a b side sponsor so it's just a Shameless plug and with that I'll open up for questions if anybody has any

there is a hand raised uh blue shirt

yeah sure so the question was for for people in the Stream um hey there's this small matter of the fact that your border was closed for 15 months so nobody could leave like during the pandemic uh would you care to address that yes um so what happened is the Canadian government and the US government agreed to mutually shut the border which is the first time in history that's happened and it was closed for 15 months and there was no exception for uh initially for Border communities and Border dependent communities on both sides of the Border that created a lot of problems and obviously the gears of government turned slowly in both Washington DC and Ottawa

especially during a pandemic when nobody knows how to coordinate anything and they're all trying to figure out how to work remotely after a couple of months the Canadian government ended up coming out with an exception for essential services so what they would do is they'd let you through to the mainland of Washington if you didn't stop in Canada at all for anything that they deemed essential the problem was that you know if your horse has an eye infection and as Lucy and I as happened to one person's horse or my neighbor's cat had a kidney problem and couldn't pee for two days and like was in excruciating pain and nearly died it was up to the Border

guard that you got and whether or not they considered that to be essential or not and some border guards had a more generous interpretation of that than others so uh you know the horse lost its eye um I understand my neighbor threatened to abandon the cat at the Border in Canada at which point then it would be an animal welfare issue that they'd have to deal with and that was the way that uh that she was able to take it to the vet but um anyhow that's it it was really rough for a while and then the Canadian government gradually loosened restrictions and look I get it you know they they had a really big problem early

with with uh Americans claiming they were going to Alaska and then going and taking vacations in Alberta and you know in some cases people brought coveted with them and they'd had it really well under control so I get what they're I get why they were so conservative also Canada has socialized health care so they're thinking from our perspective of what do they need to do to to maintain the public health and not have to spend crazy amounts of money I mean they can't just dump the problem on their population they have to deal with it so their government was way more conservative than ours whether or not that was the right decision um you know that's for history to decide

it was pretty rough for a while these days you have to fill out a Rifkin that's at the the borders open Canada is open for business we're welcome again um you know Canadian people are not mad at us like there's no vandalism of course that was going on earlier because uh you know the Canadian public was just outraged when people were using the the Alaska border hack when people were saying that they were going to Alaska and really they went on vacation in Canada that was just like completely outrageous uh to to the Canadian public and so there was some public anger and outrage that resulted from that but things have blown over these days Canadians are pretty

good natured overall so um it's water under the bridge at this point and uh you know we're pretty close to back to business as usual as much as we can be in a pandemic any other yeah

so the question is you live in the Pacific Northwest also known as the Pacific Northwest where it's famous for being cloudy all the time and if I have seasonal affective disorder am I gonna get that if I move to your rainy corner of the world where it's very gloomy and rainy all the time and the good news is uh probably not on point Robert specifically because it's in a rain shadow Point Roberts and and tawasan just happen to be in a spot where the clouds are mostly blocked by a mountain on Vancouver Island across the water which is uh maybe 30 miles away and so it is we get more Sun than anywhere else in the Lower Mainland uh

it does rainstall uh just like it can pretty much anywhere outside of the Southwest but uh it's not nearly as bad as you would think uh the thing that you do need to keep in mind is if you need to get sunlight our days are really short in the winter so it can be you know sometimes seven or eight hours of daylight maybe so the thing is if you work remote and you can walk to the beach and take your meetings there it's not all that cold it does not get super cold in the Pacific Northwest because we're our climate is moderated by the water and so I take a walk every day even in the winter its node once

um over the winter but that's pretty rare any other questions this Laphroaig 25 is phenomenal by the way I've never had it so um I hope I don't have a new habit of a 550 a bottle of Scotch thank you b-sides for this anything else Yes No Maybe all right so I don't see any other questions from the audience but again like I'm totally serious I think that it is time to build a hacker City if at some point Roberts it should be somewhere but why not Point Roberts foreign