Which means they're less likely to be jaded, have up-front fees, verbose contracts and installation payments. As is obvious, in this case, when he talks about having 6 months of unpaid work.
1. Keep money in the local economy. 2. Build a local network. 3. Have face to face meetings to get your ideas across more quickly - whiteboarding, seeing facial reactions to comps, hands-on testing, etc.
I've done remote work, and I've done work with clients in my local area. There's reasons for both, but most clients I work with want local, or at least want the ability to meet face to face on occasion. The few that didn't want to (or even declined attempts to meet f2f) either skipped out on their bill, or were wanting extremely commodity services (install wordpress on my server, fix this javascript error, etc).
Sue in California? How much is THAT going to cost someone based in Europe?
And really, what recourse does Fitness SF have either? If they sue him, maybe they win. Maybe that makes it hard for him to come to the USA. Is that a problem for him? Can they legitimately go after him vs his company (and vice versa). It's a no-win situation all around.
I'd say that the big lesson to be learned from this is that international customers pay up-front and with a deposit if you're going to allow things that increase the price (e.g. rush changes). For most things there's not usually a good reason to add the expense and complication of 12-hour time differences and international borders unless you're planning up front to make legal recourse difficult.