Burning Man is a giant, 80,000-person party in the desert, complete with a crazy amount of neon, bicycles, and narcotics. Grover Norquist is a powerful Republican, alternately famous or infamous for compelling GOP leaders to pledge never to increase spending, who attends Burning Man every year. He joins the podcast to talk about Burning Man, influential secret societies, his foray into standup comedy, and of course, taxes.

Original air date Sep 5th, 2019

Jonathan Hillis is the founder and caretaker of Cabin, a network of co-living spaces which link up and vet members in other communities via blockchain technology. His "neighborhood" of intentional living is in beautiful Texas Hill Country an hour outside of Austin, where he lives with friends in a hub-and-spoke model of private accommodation surrounding communal social spaces.

He's the former CTO of Coinbase, and you can see how his tech background influences his obsession with scalability (we talk about Metcalf's Law, and the optimum size of "one sauna teams") as well as the non-financial elements of blockchain to that end. It actually reminds me a bit of Neil Stephenson's Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities or "burbclaves" in Snow Crash.

Cabin strikes me as a kind of libertarian commune (though neither Hillis nor myself ever uses the term). It's big scattered geographic network of modular co-ops you can plug into and out of. Vetting community members is a big thing in communes, and Cabin relies on blockchain technology and somethin akin to personal Yelp reviews to allow people to skip up from Austin, TX to like-minded communities in Santa Fe or Portland, or wherever.

He joins to discuss his model, and what day-to-day life is like living in an intentional co-living community.

If you wanted to live with a bunch of buddies in a house, how would you do it? What are the mechanics of setting up, financing, and socially maintaining a commune? Samwise Rodriguez runs a commune—which combines their skills as a philanthropist, entrepreneur (and to some extent, as a polyamorist). This week we explore: how do you build your own commune?