Text: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DO0FQdsnsSLtAwSa29g4FdnNT0VVfDQF/view?usp=sharing ..read more

A short piece I wrote about the material culture of post-Eastern Bloc, pre-EU Romania that I grew up in. Photo credit: evz.ro, Bianca Zaharescu - It's Bucharest in 1996, I was there too. The text and some pictures: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rmy_kTZDiThV0G6msDEufoyX_-05M65tJVM_fCsG2TY/edit?usp=sharing ..read more

One year and one month ago I’ve set out to become a full-time entrepreneur. I have not succeeded. Can you learn from my mistakes? This is the final episode of Valiant Growth, season 1.Photo credit: daivinandleah via Flickr ..read more

I've been thinking about talking more about my story with breaking contact with everyone I knew three years ago and completely resetting my life while coming to England. I especially wanted to talk about the painful mistakes I have made in talking to my family and friends following my understanding of the Freedomain Radio relationship strategy. I just couldn't figure out the personal development garb to dress those in to make them fit into the Valiant Growth format. They might make it into an episode eventually, but until then, my friend Nick Hazelton solved that problem for me with ..read more

I’ve been an ultra-sedentary person for most of my life and had zero interest in anything to do with physical health. But I am doing more now than I did before. And my friend Chris Stefanick can claim some credit for that. He showed me a vision of health that’s focused on living a better and longer life, having more fun, having fewer limitations, of joy in movement and nutrition and self-care not because the end result impresses someone but because it’s a path of self-mastery, of learning something new for its own sake. This is a talk with Chris. My aim is to nurture your intrinsic motivation ..read more

It’s amazing to live in an age where all knowledge is at our fingerprints! You don’t have to transcribe ancient texts at candlelight in a monastery or do questionable menial tasks for a guru anymore to gain access to some knowledge. I had a two-hour round trip commute to the university - I quit midway when I figured out I could learn more than what a whole day in higher education had to offer by simply reading a business book in the same time. That said though, self-study has its fair share of challenges. Some of the reasons we’re not all already Internet-fed renaissance man geniuses ..read more

How do you stay frugal when friends want to go out? And can you actually find better groups and collectives instead of building independence? I answer these two questions in this extra show. 1: "What do you do when someone suggest for instance grabbing a lunch when you have no desire to spend even on drinks but find it hard to say "well, I do not wanna spend money on food or drinks"?" 2: "I find myself really valuing from the attention paid to underlying needs in this discussion. It makes me wonder: How much libertarianism develops as a result of experiencing authority figures / collectives th ..read more

In 1974, a man disappeared somewhere in the Siskiyou Mountains, never to be heard of again. He wasn’t a tourist lost in the forests - he’s been living in the region for years. He wasn’t a rookie camper overwhelmed by wilderness - he had written several articles on camping and survivalism, based on his own experience of practising these skills. So what happened to Tom Marshall? Letting Go Isn't Free A basic and well-known tenet of stoicism is to stop trying to act on (and worrying about) things that aren't really in your control, or that can't at least be significantly influenced by you. Some o ..read more

It was a little past midnight on Wednesday and I was sitting in the bathtub. It was the 9th of November, and I was feeling terrible. I had no idea who the Prime Minister of Romania, the country where I grew up, was. I had no idea which party was in power in the UK, where I had been living for the past year and a half. But I had just spent 12 months following the ups and downs of of the 2016 US elections, a country that I couldn’t vote in, had no real way of living in in the short and medium-term, and hadn’t even visited. A 5 point swing in the betting odds (on average more ..read more

I've become quite fed up with a show notes that had very little value to the listener. So I've decided to turn them into full-blown, stand-alone blog posts! Hence, until this experiment lasts, I am now running a blogcast instead of just a podcast. Are you as excited about this as I am ..read more