Somewhere / Anywhere

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Send us Fan Mail Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 3 of 8 Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 2 of 8 The second half of our PP story opens on the worst morning in modern Spanish history. On 11 March 2004, three days before a general election the Popular Party expected to win comfortably, an Al-Qaeda cell detonated bombs on Madrid's commuter rail. Roughly 200 people died; it remains the deadliest terrorist attack the European Unio...

Send us Fan Mail There is a tidy story we tell ourselves about who pays their debts. Rogue regimes and resource-rich autocracies default; mature European democracies, embedded in the rule of law and dependent on the confidence of the markets, do not. This episode is about what happens when that story breaks — when Spain, facing a wave of international arbitration awards arising from the retroactiv...

Send us Fan Mail Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 1 of 8 Why does Spain's Partido Popular speak so many different political dialects at once — Madrid's free-market libertarianism, Galicia's institutional conservatism, the Christian democracy of its old guard — and yet remain the largest political party in Europe? In this opening installment of a new series on Spanish democracy...

Send us Fan Mail Percival Manglano is one of the most underrated operators in modern Spanish politics. As Minister of Economy and Finance for the Community of Madrid, he passed three budgets in a single year, cut spending into the teeth of the worst recession since the Civil War, and shepherded the libertad de horarios law - that ended state control over shop opening hours in Madrid and which no o...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Somewhere, Anywhere , we step outside the studio and into the home of one of Europe’s most important classical liberal thinkers: Pedro Schwartz . What follows is less an interview than a conversation across generations about freedom, institutions, and the intellectual life of modern Spain. Schwartz’s life traces the arc of European liberalism in the twentieth ce...

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Send us Fan Mail Madrid didn’t become “Madrid” by accident. The late nights, the density, the sense that the city is competing for talent rather than managing decline. In this episode, Diego and I sit down with Esperanza Aguirre, former President of the Community of Madrid, and treat her not as a personality but as a case study: what happens when a politician is a serious defender of classical lib...

Send us Fan Mail In this wide-ranging conversation, Tyler Cowen joins Rasheed and Diego to examine Latin America's structural challenges, cultural strengths, and economic future. Why do some countries remain trapped in political psychodrama while others quietly stabilize? Can El Salvador become a long-term success story? Why does Argentina produce both world-class literature and chronic fisca...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Somewhere/Anywhere , Rasheed and Diego engage in a wide-ranging debate on the political economy of Europe, the structure of the European Union, and the persistent confusion about where authority, responsibility, and failure truly lie. The conversation opens by distinguishing Europe as a historical and cultural space from the European Union as a legal-institution...

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Send us Fan Mail Why has Bullfighting survived the modernization of Madrid? It is usually encountered at a distance through stereotypes, political arguments, or half-remembered images. In this episode, Rasheed and Diego talk through the experience at ground level, using Rasheed’s first visit to a bullfight in Madrid as a way to slow the subject down and look at it carefully, step by step. The conv...

Send us Fan Mail When Mario Vargas Llosa died in Lima on 13 April 2025, the Hispanic world lost its most articulate apostle of classical liberalism. This episode dissects not the novels — brilliant though they are — but the ideas that powered them. We trace his migration from early Fidelista enthusiasm to a creed rooted in Popperian fallibilism, Hayekian humility and Tocquevillian suspicion of cen...

Send us Fan Mail  Ecuador is one of the rare Latin-American economies that has zero price-tag chaos — and that’s thanks to its quarter-century embrace of the U.S. dollar. In 1999 the sucre collapsed, inflation hit 37 percent a year and banks went belly-up; twelve months later dollarization tamed prices and — even today — remains supported by roughly eight in ten Ecuadorians. But political calm nev...

Send us Fan Mail 🚨 This podcast episode is a celebration of Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism: a real-world demonstration that open markets and open minds can deliver prosperity.  🔑 In 1990 less than 1% of the Spanish population were foreign residents. The foreign-born population was even smaller, with immigrants accounting for about 0.5% of residents  As of January 1, 2025: 14% of residents in Spa...

Send us Fan Mail Bolivia was once celebrated as South America's economic success story—rich in natural gas, flush with exports, and rapidly reducing poverty. Today, it's spiraling into crisis: crippling fuel shortages, disappearing reserves, soaring debt, and political chaos threaten total collapse.  In this no-holds-barred breakdown, we expose: The Gas Boom Turned Bust : How did Bolivia...

Send us Fan Mail 🚨 The Economic Boom Propaganda has to END 🚨   Ever heard about the "economic rocket" the Spanish government is bragging about? It is a hoax. Instead of soaring upward, Spain is spiraling into debt, joblessness, and misery— faster than ever!  Meanwhile, Prime Minister Sánchez keeps tightening his grip, silencing judges and the press. Did you realize Spain now leads Euro...

Send us Fan Mail 🔴 Is Javier Milei a genuine libertarian, or is he drifting dangerously close to populist conservatism? In this episode, we dive deep into the ideology of Argentina's self-identified anarcho-capitalist President, Javier Milei, unpacking the critical differences between true modern liberalism (for our European audience) and authentic libertarianism (for those tuning in from th...

Send us Fan Mail What's really happening in Argentina under President Javier Milei? In this episode, we take a deep dive into the controversial "Chainsaw Reforms" introduced by President Milei, a radical set of policies aimed at drastically reshaping Argentina’s economy; under an anarcho-capitalist framework. We will defend - in great detail - the view  that these measures are the r...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the inaugural episode of The Capitalismo Podcast, a new series dedicated to exploring the political economy of the Hispanic world entirely in English. In this first episode, co-hosts Diego Sánchez de la Cruz and Rasheed Griffith examine Spain’s landmark transition from the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) to a modern constitutional democracy.  Referred to as La Transició...