Best place to Move in 2024? - Joe Rogan & Peter Thiel

And there's no ideal place to live. Either it's not like California sucks, so there's a place that's got it totally dialed in with an enormous GDP and an enormous population. There's not like one big city that's really dialed in well. There are things that worked. So I looked at all the zero tax states in the US, and it's always... I think the way you ask the question gets at it, which is you don't live in a state, you live in a city. So if you're somewhat biased towards living in at least a moderately sized city, okay. I think there are four states where there are no cities: Alaska, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Hampshire. There's zero tax but no cities to speak of. Then you have Washington state with Seattle, where the weather is the worst in the country. Nevada with Las Vegas, which I'm not that big a fan of. That leaves three zero tax states: Texas, which I like as a state, but I'm not that big a fan of Austin, Dallas, or Houston. Houston is an oil town, good if you're in that business but otherwise not. Dallas has an inferiority complex to LA and New York, just not a healthy attitude. Austin is a government town, a college town, and a wannabe hipster San Francisco town. My books are three strikes and you're out. That leaves Nashville, Tennessee, and Miami, South Florida. Those would be two top choices. Miami's fun but I wouldn't want to live there. It's fun to visit, but it's a little too crazy, chaotic, cocaine-fueled, party-party-party. It's pretty segmented from the tourist strip. There's something paradoxical about a place that gets lots of tourists: some great things, but it creates a weird aesthetic because the day-to-day vibe is that you don't work and you're just having fun. That's probably a bit off. Nashville is its own real place. Nashville's great. Those are my top two; I could live in Nashville no problem. Since fifth grade onward, from '77, I lived in California. I'm a sucker for the weather. There's no place besides coastal California where you have really good weather year-round in the US. Maybe Hawaii is pretty good, but coastal California is tough to beat. Two hours from the mountains. It's mid August here in Austin; it's brutal. I think so. That was too hot for you? It was too hot for today's mild day? What is it out there, like 80? 85? 96? 96. I do so much sauna that I literally don't even notice it. I'm outside for hours every day shooting arrows and I don't even notice it. Well, I don't know if you're representative of the average Austinite. But I think you get accustomed to it. To me, it's so much better than too cold. You can die from the cold. You can die from the heat too, but probably won't if you have water. Cold's real. Cold places have five months of the year where your life's in danger. If you live in Wyoming and break down somewhere with no one on the road, you could die from exposure. That's real. There's a reason there's been net migration to the West and South. California can do wrong as long as the Earth doesn't move, no tsunamis. It's a perfect environment virtually year-round. Gets a little hot in the summer, but coastal not at all. An 80-degree day in Malibu is unusual. It's wonderful. Beautiful breeze off the ocean, sun's out, everybody's pretty. But confiscatory taxation is a package deal. It's a scam. They know you don't want to leave. I didn't want to leave California. It's fucking great. I appreciate you left. I always have the fantasy that if enough people like you leave, it'll put pressure on them, but it's never quite enough. It's too difficult for most people. It was very difficult for me, and I had a bunch of people working for me willing to pack up and leave, like young Jamie over there. But it was tricky. You're taking your whole business. My business is talking to people; that's part of it. My other business is standup comedy. So you left during COVID? I left at the very beginning, as soon as they started locking things down. I was like, 'Oh these fuckers will never let us back.' March, April, May... in May I started looking at houses. That's when I came to Austin first. I got a place in Miami in September 2020 and spent the last four winters there. So I'm always on the cusp of moving to Florida. Hard to get out of California. But it's gotten a lot harder relative to four years ago. My real estate purchases have generally not been great over the years. They've done okay but not the way I've made money otherwise, with one exception: Miami. Bought it in September 2020, and fast forward four years, it's up like 100%. Something like that. Paradoxically, that means it's gotten much harder to move there or Austin. If I relocated my office in LA, people who own houses... you have to buy a place in Florida that costs twice as much as four years ago, and interest rates have doubled. You could have locked in a 30-year mortgage at 3% in 2020; now it's maybe 6.5 or 7%. Prices doubled, mortgages doubled, so it costs four times as much to buy a house. There was a moment during COVID when people could move, but it's gotten dramatically harder.