The Voluntary Life

Part 1 of an interview with entrepreneur Judd Weiss , talking about business relationships. In this episode Judd shares his thoughts and experiences about how to approach working relationships in general and the question of going into business with others. Should friends go into business together? What makes a good business partnership? Why do so many business partnerships go so badly wrong? Find...

Part 2 in the short series of podcasts about  The Voluntary Life. This episode is all about the podcast itself. The podcast comes out once per week and is a mix of solo-casts and interviews. Some topics are covered in more detail as a series, like the entrepreneurship series. The aim of the podcast is personal freedom empowerment: providing ideas for finding the maximum freedom in your own life, w...

The first in a series of podcasts introducing The Voluntary Life , both as a concept and as a podcast. This episode explains the concept of living a 'voluntary life', which is a life lived according to the principle of free choice. The extent to which we have the freedom to make our own choices about our lives (and to respect the free choices of others) is the extent to which we are leading the vo...

A podcast about how to overcome indecision, paralysis and procrastination about entrepreneurship and JFDI (Just F-ing Do It). There are some objective hinderances to creating and running a business, especially if you have other major commitments in your life that you need to focus on first. However, often the battle is really an internal psychological one. How do you get into the mindset of being...

A message of optimism. Happy New Year! Show Notes: The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves  by Matt Ridley Article on the recent massive decline in poverty

Some thoughts on what it is that frightens people about the free market, based on my own experience. The fear of the market is often expressed in very abstract arguments about whether free markets would really work (if we had them) and what their relationship is to poverty etc. However,  at an individual level, I believe people fear markets because of how vulnerable you can feel when taking part i...

This episode is an interview with Edwin, an expat entrepreneur in Chile. Edwin talks about his experience on an entrepreneurship visa in Chile and shares his thoughts about the pros and cons of Chile as a place to live and to create a startup in. He discusses other things to consider regarding coming to Chile as an entrepreneur, including his views on the Start-up Chile grant, some comparisons of...

An interview with Eduardo Marty, who founded  Junior Achievement in Argentina and in many other Latin American countries. Junior Achievement is a charity that teaches entrepreneurship to children and young adults. Eduardo has also held academic posts as professor at the University Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala, and the University of Buenos Aires. He is one of the few academics who is truly passio...

This episode is about gaining freedom from intellectual heroes. I share some thoughts about how to extract the best ideas from thinkers that you admire, without relying on someone else to think for you. I talk about some ways I have found for gaining intellectual independence, including: Taking apart the "package deal" of a set of new ideas to use the ones that work and discard the ones that don't...

This episode is an interview with Joel Bowman, the managing editor of The Daily Reckoning e-newsletter email and former managing editor of the Rude Awakening. After completing his degree in media communications and journalism in his home country of Australia, Joel moved to Baltimore to join the Agora Financial team. His keen interest in travel and macroeconomics first took him to New York where he...

This episode covers a lot of questions I faced getting started in investing as a private investor and my own experience in tackling these questions: Why invest (i.e. why not just leave your money in a bank)? Who is going to manage your investments, an external manager or yourself? Are you going to be an active investor (e.g. analysing individual securities for value and trading more often) or a pa...

This episode is about saving money and it's relationship with freedom. Many people are trapped in a "wage slavery" lifestyle, living from month to month. Although their income rises during their career, their expenses scale correspondingly (or even lead ahead, creating debt). There are two approaches to developing the savings that allow get you out of this trap: One route is to increase earnings w...

This episode is about the freedom that comes from getting out of debt. We live in a time when being in debt is the norm in our society. The basis of the debt culture lies in government policies (such as inflating the money supply and artificially lowering interest rates) that actively incentivise individuals to get into debt. These government policies filter through into opportunities for debt eve...

This episode is a about the significant milestones along the way towards achieving financial freedom. In my opinion, reaching each of these milestones brings you closer to being financially free and it is useful to take a step back and consider what the steps along the way of your journey will be. Some milestones to consider are suggested: Financial independence or "paying your own way", whereby y...

This episode is about the entrepreneurial mindset. What kind of thinking do you need to be an entrepreneur? More importantly, how will doing entrepreneurship change the way that you think? Jake talks about some key aspects of the entrepreneurial mentality including: cultivating optimism and perseverance using the trial and error method acceptance of failure and the possibility of failure a deep ro...

This episode is about the issue of shared ownership in business. It covers key questions that anyone considering going into business with others will face, including: Should you go into business with others or be a sole owner-entrepreneur? If you do go into business with others, how will you split ownership? How will you ensure that the owners are all incentivised to add value to the business? In...

This episode is an interview with Craig Rowland, who is the co-author of a new book called The Permanent Portfolio: Harry Browne's Long-Term Investment Strategy . In the episode we discuss the Permanent Portfolio strategy and many of the insights from Craig's new book. We talk about the way in which the Permanent Portfolio approach differs from other investment strategies including: The choice of...

This episode discusses ways in which you can overcome the limitations of the country in which you happen to have been born and, as much as possible, live with the whole of planet earth as your homeland. The topics covered include: Travelling and seeing the world, to help you make conscious choices about where you want to spend your life Taking the opportunity to live abroad for extended periods of...

This episode is about the most advanced democracy on earth. It is about the most effective system we have for letting everyone have their say, working together to change society in a non-violent way.... Oh and it's probably not what you think. Show Notes: Ludwig Von Mises' "The Anti-capitalistic Mentality " Churchill's  quote on democracy Karl Popper 's views on democracy can be found in The Open...

This episode is about where you choose to live and the impact that this choice can have on your level of freedom. Many people who have written about personal and political liberty have suggested a link between where you choose to live and how free you are. In the podcast we explore 3 different ideas about this choice: The ideas in " Walden " by Henry David Thoreau: finding freedom by living self-s...

This episode is a review of the book " The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich " by Tim Ferriss. It is a skype conversation with a group of friends. The ideas that we discuss include: taking mini-retirements and getting out of a one-track career mentality extended travelling testing new entrepreneurial ideas with sales pages on the web before starting outsourcing task...

This episode is about how you as an individual can help alleviate poverty in a non-political, principled way. It's an economic view of how you can reduce poverty through economic development and the wealth that it generates. Jake presents ideas of the economist Ludwig Von Mises about how you can create economic progress and development, focussing on three key activities: creating technical innovat...

This episode is an interview with Kristov, an application security specialist, about what kind of measures individuals can take to ensure a level of security and privacy for their computers and their online life. In the interview, we cover security and privacy for a range of topics including: email use web browsing malware and viruses password managers data storage  use of torrents VOIP and chat a...

The second part of the interview from the B ecoming Who You Are Podcast . We talk about a whole range of topics including: The fear of criticism that can come up when putting creative work out there The challenges of being yourself at work The future of The Voluntary Life podcast The difference between abstract business planning and being conscious of what's really happening in your business now T...

This episode is an interview with Marc de Mesel , who was previously on the show talking about investing in Europe . Marc runs a blog on investing in Europe in dutch and also an investing blog in english . In this episode, Marc talks about the hidden tax that is inflation. We discuss the difference between official inflation figures and the real loss of purchasing power that ordinary people experi...