Episode Archive
"I realised I wasn't making a living, I was making an existence. I was existing, but I wasn't living. That's why I called my book 'Choose Life'. Because of the transformation that happened to us afterwards."
"We're not inventing anything here. These are all things that we walked around the world, here and there, and observed, and they are very doable, and they work in many places. We're just trying to reintroduce them in a packaged way to new places because that's very different from what the current norm is."
"No one person knows how to make a pencil. No one person has the resources to make a pencil. You need the chainsaws and the fuel and the mining for the metals to make the chainsaws. It turns out that to actually feed yourself, you don't need all those different people. All you need is a little bit of grass and a la...
"Most people didn't care, don't care, and will not care about freedom, and this is a fact. So, freedom-minded people were, are, and will always be a minority. And this is really important because when you realise this, you stop trying to change the global society by voting or by trying to make political changes, bec...
"Montelibero seems like a great, great place to be with great people to have around. And I think it's a combination of those two factors. First, you have your own place to come back to, and then you have people to spend time with, which is also very important while you travel. On the road, you meet lots of random pe...
"When you go to Madeira, things tend to happen to you. I've seen this happen. I've seen the light go on in people's eyes when they arrive. They're like, 'Yeah, I want to live here'. I've seen that many times. I haven't seen that anywhere else . "
"Showing the bottom up potential of Free Cities is tremendous. I think of the brilliant Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto who talks about dead capital and how there's knowledge distributed throughout the world. There are geniuses living in poor countries all over the world, but oftentimes they're not able to real...
"A dystopia always has a different side: a utopian one. The question is, is it possible to have a Bitcoin utopia while the world is dystopian? So that's a challenge to Bitcoiners. And I think it's a great challenge. It challenges you to think about what hyperbitcoinization may mean and what it looks like ."
"I'm not here to be a teacher. I'm not here to be the super technical PhD guy. I'm here to tell stories that people think 'That was fun to listen to. And by the way, I can remember that story and tell it to everyone again because it was a fun story.. and that has convinced me ."
"In Europe you have people who want to break up big companies because they're saying big is bad and that we need more competition and anti-trust enforcement is so important because we need competition. But then the same people say, when it comes to governments, big is great, no competition & global minimum tax. You...
"Historical examples are very important because if you come up with a new idea that has never been tried and tested in what I call the market of living together, then there's a high probability that it will not work otherwise it would have already existed in some form or another. "
"There are long-term debt cycles, which are 75 to 100 years. These are often correlated to the rise and fall of the global reserve currency a nd right now, it seems like we are at this turning point."
"It's inevitable that if you have a legislative body, then over time the number of laws will increase, the taxes will increase, indebtedness will increase and the number of people who are not productive will increase. That is in my view, absolutely inevitable. So you have to change the system... And I have made a p...
"Developing the technologies that would let people live in space habitats.. it's not trivial, but it's a whole lot easier than colonising a planet when you've got to get down and up. If we could get to the planet for free. I mean, if we had cheap transportation, if you had teleportation or something, then colonisin...
"I love starting from a positive approach and instead of asking myself 'How can I fight these governments?' as, unfortunately, many people still tend to do in the Free Cities space. The question I'm asking is 'How can those Free Cities actually contribute to the development of the host country.' "
"I wrote an article trying to apply John Locke's principles of property to something like Mars. His basic principle is that if you mix your labour with a natural resource then you own the result. It's the same moral principle that Ayn Rand identified that you have a right to the product of your productive effort. S...
"The fight for freedom is a constant struggle everywhere. In the long run, it's not as easy as just 'freedom-loving people will move to one jurisdiction and then that place will stay free forever'. That's not how it works."
"This is one of the things that we are proud of: We built a road under anarcho-capitalsm. Who's going to build the roads? We are going to build the roads! This is the living proof that the system works. We, libertarians, are responsible for our own land."
"I think that sometimes utopias are good. There were also socialist and communist utopias and I don't think that they were used for a good purpose. Actually, many people were killed because of these utopias, but I never heard about someone killed because of a libertarian utopia."
"There is something that you always have to keep in mind. If you bet on the end of the world, you can only be right once. Really... the odds are against you."
"I felt very hopeful for my region that we could get this off the ground, because the reality is that reforming these countries in Central America and other places is just so hard and the incentives are so misaligned, so completely misaligned. My perspective after trying to reform in country is that you have to find...
