Samuel Delesque, founder of the Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal and co-creator of the governance tool Closer, describes with Pinchbeck how his project combines land stewardship with Web3 infrastructure. Delesque, formerly a software worker in New York, explains a three-layer structure in which a Portuguese operating company holding the land title, registered as a tourism project so it can interface with local government and apply for grants, is itself owned by a Swiss nonprofit called OASA that enforces regenerative constraints across its network. Residents buy or earn a token granting both access to live on the land and a vote on the project's direction. The project runs on Celo, chosen for sub-cent fees, its ambition to hold natural assets on its balance sheet, and its adoption in Africa. Delesque cites Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics as an influence on that ecosystem.
Guest: Samuel Delesque
In brief
- Delesque describes an ownership model in which the land effectively owns itself, held by an entity whose stated purpose is to regenerate and conserve it rather than by individual proprietors.
- Delesque argues that tokens can align incentives among stakeholders by tying residency rights and governance voice to either purchase or contributed work.
- Delesque contends that democratic institutions are unprepared for AGI and exponential technology, and that new coordination systems are needed at both local and global scale.
- Delesque says the Traditional Dream Factory model is designed as a replicable template that other land-based communities can adopt through the OASA network.
- Delesque explains that the Celo ecosystem drew on Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics in attempting to build a nature-backed economy, and that its uptake in Africa lets communities bypass conventional financial infrastructure.
- Closing on the political situation in the United States, both men describe an empire in visible collapse and frame local building as planting seeds for what emerges afterward.
Full text
Uh hey folks uh today I am here with Samuel Dlesque who is the founder of a innovative land-based community in Portugal uh called the traditional dream factory uh and uh I wanted to talk to Samuel because yeah it seems like they're doing a lot of innovative work particularly with blockchain and tokenization models and so on and I know that right now a lot of people are yeah thinking about um kind of the future of societ society, the future of communities and looking for kind of like innovative and plausible ways to uh to move forward and and kind of innovate socially and so on. So yeah, Samuel, can you tell us a little bit about your background and um yeah, just uh how you got to where you're at now? Yeah. Hey, and thank you so much for having me here. Um so yeah, my I've been basically based in Portugal the last four years.
Uh but before that, I've I've been working in tech. I was based in New York. Uh worked uh for different software startups and corporates. Um and yeah, I guess I've always been at the intersection of uh ecology, arts, uh and and technology. And through this latest uh experiment, basically we're trying to make some bridges and bring back local sovereignty to to land-based projects to be able to not only track and quantify impact on land in a way that's measurable and verifiable uh so that it can be transparent, but also creating new forms of governance systems that can empower local communities to um to govern in better ways.
uh and I think we are at this um precipice of uh AGI and exponential tech kind of taking over the world and all democratic systems are not ready for it and um the ways that we have been treating nature in general uh has been yeah to to the detriment of future generations and to the capacity of life to sustain itself on this planet. So, we're trying to build a new game, a new model to kind of realign all of these uh things together. And I think your idea is to build kind of a template that could be used by a lot of different communities. Isn't that kind of the idea? Exactly.
We we built a a platform uh that's leveraging web 3 infrastructure to be able to decentralize access and the governance rights to uh landbased projects. to to real estate. Um, and the way that it works is basically a bit similar to uh a cooperative uh but using digital technology. Um, and so in in our concept here in Portugal, the land owns itself. So the land goes into a nonprofit which has the purpose to regenerate and conserve the land. While the participants in the ecosystem uh who want to be able to live on these lands, they can purchase a token or they can earn the token for contributing work to the project.
Um and and then this token not only give you access to be able to live here, but it also gives you a voice in deciding how the future of the project evolves. Yeah, that sounds interesting. Uh so the land is more like a land trust or it's like not owned by anybody but you purchase the land and then you put it into like a trust or into a nonprofit structure. U and then is there also like a for-profit on top of that or um is everything held in this like nonprofit? So I mean there's different layers. Um the land title is actually uh being put into a a local entity in Portugal which is a company.
Um and now this company is basically what enables us to interface with local government um to like we are legally a tourism project and so uh having this entity enable us to apply for grants and doing all these kind of things but now this uh for-profit entity that's operating the project is actually owned by a nonprofit entity based in Switzerland. Um and this Swissbased entity uh is called OASA and OASA enforces regardive land structure principles on all of the lands that like uh falling under uh our network basically and each of these projects well TDF being the first one uh has its own token. Um so the token is really how we can create the sovereignty and align the incentives between different stakeholders in the game. Um and it has its own kind of governance infrastructure, its own set of members and the project has its full sovereignty in deciding how it evolves as long as it remains within the regative constraints of the project. Um cool.
Where do people go on the web to check out all this stuff? Just they have that up front. Yeah, traditional dreamfactory. com. And we also have an AI assistant on there. So you can ask any questions and you'll be pretty good at summarizing our model or any findings from our white paper and so on. Mhm. And what about the Swiss company, the uh what's that one? OASA. OASA. Is is a website. And you you also find links to that from the traditional factory website. And um so you were explaining to me when we spoke that um yeah, I guess I want a little more detail. So you know uh is is this kind of using like Ethereum as as the sort of like token or the sort of backing token?
Yeah. So we uh we are using the Ethereum infrastructure and stack uh more specifically we're deployed on Seller which which is a layer 1 uh chain sitting on top of uh Ethereum and what that means is basically we have very cheap cheap transaction fees less than a cent and very uh rapid uh transactions as well. So you don't have to wait a long time and so on kind of avoiding some of the pitfalls of Ethereum and on top of that cell is basically a blockchain that aims to be uh not just carbon neutral but actually to invest in returned project. They have uh the the founders of the cellar ecosystem have looked at the Charles Eenstein sacred economics uh book at in how we can create economic systems that actually uh driving forward a naturebacked economy. So ultimately the goal of CEO is to not only hold natural assets on its balance sheet uh which means that it can actually claim to be carbon uh negative but also of course to optimize the technology to really have a very low kind of energetic um impact in terms of the energy consumption and in terms of the speed and so on.
One of the main reasons for that is that solo has a very big presence in Africa. So Africa can kind of leaprog forward and kind of skip a lot of the financial systems that we have in the west uh because it can go straight into blockchain technology. And you see that a lot in different villages around Africa where they have access to financial tools through the blockchain actually. Can you spell out the name of that blockchain? Cella. Cello. Cello. Okay, cool. Um and that's that's a protocol on top of the Ethereum system somehow. Exactly. It's uh basically the way that uh Ethereum has been structured in the last few years is to have Ethereum as like the kind of base settlement layer which kind of uh brings a level of a deeper layer of trust but because of the cost of uh submitting transaction on Ethereum which is often in multiple dollar range uh that means that you then have layer 2 networks which sit on top of it which kind of package um the transaction into batches making it much more fast andffic.
efficient uh and kind of avoiding some of the downfalls that you have from uh running applications directly on Ethereum. So I have to admit that you know where many years ago I was really excited about uh you know Ethereum and and blockchain then over time I became more and more like disenchanted because it just seemed it was more about like profit uh extraction and so on and kind of like a parasitic structure on top of the global economy. Um but uh when I spoke to you about this project uh there were some things about it where I was like oh that actually could work. That's interesting. And um you were saying that um so people I mean you're looking for people right now which you know we we can promote on this little chat to buy stakes or or come into the project in a way.
Uh why don't you um tell people about that um and how that works and what they get? Yes. So, I mean, we we're a bit different from the the typical crypto project in that uh we're backed by land, right? So, your token is backed by access rights to physical land and we're developing a thriving eco village in Portugal. So, we're building a co- livingiving space. We're expanding into a tiny house development soon. Uh we built already a lake and a biopool kind of all of this uh things happening on the ground kind of in parallel to to the technology. And the the key difference between crypto projects and and us is that uh we seek to put real value on chain.
So instead of just having all of these financialized kind of instruments and where you can kind of have all the leverage and all the different things that uh uh that crypto provides, uh we like our utility of the token is being able to have physical access to the land. And one token is one night spent at TDF per year forever. So it renews every year. If you buy 10 TDF tokens, you can come 10 nights this year and 10 night next year and so on and so on. Uh so it's a very simple and straightforward model. uh and the the crypto aspect kind of enable us to uh decentralize the the the access right to the space and we looked at more like um people spending time in the project as the kind of base unit of division for how do we divide the total cost of building such a space uh and also how do we divide the the governance right associated um with governing such a space.
So we devised a few primitives that basically enable landbased project similar to ours to bring in these new tools, these technologies into the realm of smallcale physical communities uh which should solve some of the the downside of traditional eco villages. And so some of those are well first of all a lot of eco villages don't have a very clear ownership or governance structure. Um a lot of the communities that were set up in the 60s like kind of was back to the land movement uh they they had a lot of enthusiasm about ecological preservation and these sort of things but it was more about living in your own secluded bubble and disconnecting from the global system. I think what we're seeing now is like more of a transition into a more cosmolo view of the world where you have certain things that are better shared globally. The things that uh light for example like uh software and governance tools and uh you know kind of the whole means of production are shifting to to becoming more like this where you have uh access to technology which you can send via the internet to any remote community anywhere in the world uh mixed with more like on-site local action and production.
Um and so yeah so in a way basically when people buy the token it gives them an access right into this like physical space through this um governance mechanism and uh we can kind of get all the benefits from from the crypto side of things which is access to liquidity. People can buy the token, they can sell the token. So you don't have to be stuck with a physical space when you when you when you when you move there but you and also you can acrew value in that project right and that's the downside of traditional um eco villages is that um well because there was not like any clear like um equities that you could distribute to people all these kind of uh instruments that meant that a lot of people end up spending a lot of time and effort in building these spaces and after 30 years maybe they leave and they go somewhere else and they can't really take any of this value with them. So by creating a tokenized economies that actually represent the the most precious asset which is the access in terms of time in in the space um you can create a more equitable bonding mechanism for a community to be able to define what does value mean and how do we uh come in and come out. And so it enables it enables you as a customer to be able to show up to an eco village and to put in your energy and so on and to earn the token as a compensation knowing that if you leave someday you'll be able to have some values you can take with you.
Um yeah one one big kind of difference between our token and let's say traditional real estate or other ways you can organize these sort of things is that we are a stewardship token. Um so what we didn't want to to bring from the capitalistic world is this idea that simply by owning the token you can have the right to completely uh deplete the land extract from it and so on. We have to break that cycle of extraction that's been put in place over the last many centuries which has been causing depletion of resources globally and the tragedy of the commons. Um and it's how can we actually reverse that and how can we actually have local communities that are actually enhancing the local ecosystem so that leaving a positive trace on nature and so when you buy the token you are buying it with the uh condition that the land will be put into the commons the land will be regenerated we're going to be replenishing the commons and through the token you'll be getting access to that common um cool and um token I think you're telling me it's like a $100 euros or something per token right now around that. 242 currently.
242. Okay. Euros. Okay. So that gets you one night a year but for perpetuity in a way. Exactly. If you buy 10 tokens for 2,400, you have 10 nights in perpetuity. And um but then what about the people? How many people are living at the community right now? So we have about 15 people on the ground more or less per permanently right now. Um but I mean we can have between 10 to 80 people. So basically for events we'll have like up to 80 up to 100 people. Um and that happens pretty frequently when we have small festivals and so on. Um and then in our day-to-day life I mean you have different ways to to come and stay.
So I mean you can be part of the permanent team, you can be a permanent resident. So this like the whole tiny house neighborhood that we're building, this is getting into more of a co-ousing model. So having people who are here full-time, uh having families here, people who maybe run the businesses here, maybe people who are part of the the the team actually running the farm operations and so on. Um but then in parallel, you can also just come as a volunteer for a couple weeks or you can come as a builder resident or you can just come as a guest and just spend a few days. So the goal is to kind of have all the different levels of engagement so that we're not just stuck with one fixed community that kind of stagnates but to have a bit of both.
So where we get some people staying longer term, some people rotating and so on. Um cool. And then so people who live there permanently uh how does their share in the in the in the structure work? I mean do you said that they get rewarded over time for contributing? um should they mass tokens or something like that? Yeah. So basically the total number of tokens that we minted initially uh corresponds to the total number of accommodations that will be available in the project once the first milestone is completed. Uh so that's like 14 rooms of building and four studios and a house and and so on and so on.
And then we take that we multiply it by the number of days that they're available per year. So for example, for a private street, it's going to be two tokens per night times 365. And so that gives us a total uh initial supply of tokens. Um now we reserve 20% of the that supply for contributions. So if you're like working on the team or maybe you just come for months and you build a treehouse like we kind of define different projects that we want to get done and for those we assign token rewards. So if you're part of the team, you basically acrew a token and over time you basically have your um that representation uh which is like a fraction of the total access to this village which you can resell if you want to.
Um and then that get mixed with a couple of other tokens. So the proof presence and proof of proof of sweat which are just governance tokens representing other rights than just pure financial. So it's kind of this mix of uh governance through spending time here, doing work and also holding the actual asset and the access to the asset. So it sounds like in a way I guess it's not a project where anybody's going to get like super wealthy. It's more about uh creating a sustainable infrastructure. Well, I mean um we like our aim is not necessarily to remove the speculative aspects from from from real estate.
Um some people would put that as a critic towards us. Uh but what we are seeing is we want to funnel some of this uh funding that goes into real estate which is trillions of dollars. Um right it's the biggest asset class in the world and we want to take a fraction of that asset class and invest it into biodiversity, carbon capture and kind of ecosystem benefits. And so uh for us it wasn't the highest priority to not have any kind of return on it. And so if uh ultimately it's it's a market, right? So uh once all the tokens are issued and we we built and and so on, it's still going to be a marketplace and it's possible that token value will be going up by a lot because a lot of people want to come and spend time here.
Um so that is still a possibility. And so if that's the case, if the project is very popular, uh because we built a great facilities, because we have a great community on the ground and because we manage to spread the word about the project, well that mean that the token value increases. So uh because it does that basically what it does it it bonds the interest of the community, right? Because now everyone that participated in the project, they actually have an interest and a stake in the growth of this project in the future. Yeah. Um, and are you already working with other projects and issuing tokens um for other communities?
I know for instance a friend of mine has a community in Egypt and they were talking about working with you and so on. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so basically um TDF is a prototype that we see ourselves as like creating this new model for eco villages but just TDF is traditional dream factory for those who don't uh know your short hand. Yeah. Go ahead. Exactly. Yeah. So TDF is a this kind of blueprint and a prototype for creating uh technologydriven eco villages let's say. Um and this blueprint is now starting to be replicated in other places. Uh we basically package the software the technology into its own entity which is called closer and closer is supporting other spaces like TDF to uh set up their digital infrastructure.
So creating a landing page where you can uh issue access right to your visitors kind of as a replacement to Airbnb. So you're not on a brand extraction platform anymore but you can really have your own internal community. You can create a subscription model all these kind of things and layering on top the whole web three capabilities that we have. So enabling you to launch a token enabling you to then use this token for governance purposes and everything else that we're doing here. Um so currently we have I think six seven villages that are deployed on closer including uh Poset in Egypt that we're very excited to be launching very soon.
Uh we're also working on one right now called Earthbound in Sweden which is a 73 hectare uh property uh where they want to build this beautiful eco village uh that also has some um hospitality concept on it uh and which is also uh land conservation where they have all gross forest on it. Um, and yeah, I mean eventually we want to be able to create the tools for thousands of villages to be able to just run the same thing, launch a token, access to uh easier liquidity and have access to to financial capital, which is a main blocker to launching more eco villages around the world. Um, and yeah, coordination and capital is the two main things that cause projects to fail or to just not get started in the first place. And uh they say that nine out of 10 startups fail. I think in the world of uh eco villages, it's at least double as many that fail.
So 95%. And yeah, it is really of a hard journey because on top of having to build something from scratch together, you're living together, you have your relationships and your whole kind of ecosystem. And it's something that we kind of lost in our transition to living in cities to this individualistic type of living that we have today. And it's something that we have to relearn and we have to relearn to be part of nature and to live together in communities. So if there were people I mean you know I have an audience that goes all around the world but particularly in the US is probably what most people uh follow me who wanted to get in touch with you about about building one of these communities.
How would they do that? Uh they can simply find me on the on the website or uh reach out to me on Telegram or whatever. Um yeah, we're open to to talking with more communities. Um like I said, we've mainly been on boarding communities in Europe and like now starting in Egypt and potentially expanding out to to Africa later. Um nothing nothing in the US so far. Nothing in the US so far. The crypto regulations have been a bit uh difficult to to like stability in the US. um it shifted from being very aggressively anti-crypto to being now very aggressively pro- crypto. Uh so I think people are still kind of eyeing it and seeing what's going to happen long term.
Uh so we kind of chose Switzerland as our uh base for operations because they have uh some legal precedence in terms of recognizing Dows and tokens and so on. Um but I mean there's different projects working on similar kind of ideas in the US. But I think uh at this stage uh as far as I know, we're the only like token that you can literally just buy on the website and then use in perpetuity for for access rights. Um so yeah, I think there's a lot of projects popping up in Costa Rica and in other places and more and more people are looking for a different way of life. They're seeing that the the current ways that we're doing thing in society just does not work.
Um and yeah we are a lot of people have uh are witnessing a lot of the biodiversity collapse and climate change and everything else that's happening around the world and looking for solutions and I believe that these type of technologydriven eco villages is both a a local solution you are optimizing for your own uh resources having your own water your own uh food production your own housing your own energy and so on and so on Um but it's also a solution to the global problem and this is exactly what we need to be doing everywhere like the monocropping fields is what's causing water to be eroding and it's what's causing loss of biodiversity and so on and so on. Um and I think by having this kind of technologydriven approach uh we can actually solve it at scale and we can actually coordinate on a global level to build new fabric for society which can be uh which is which isn't going back to the dark ages and abandoning technology but it's rather about leaning into it. Um, Vitilik Brin, the founder of Ethereum, wrote this article about a year ago about uh, decentralized acceleration and we're in this age of AI like starting to pick up pace and um, AI starting to take a bigger and bigger role in terms of our institutions. I mean, right now you have a a president who is like actively working towards an AGI and we don't know when this kind of intelligent explosion is going to happen. Uh and but what we know is that what really matters is giving agency back to humans.
And so um decentralized protocols and and I think in general the Ethereum community has been very good at kind of looking for what does it actually mean to lean into technology to have more optimistic futures and how can we give agency back to people? How can we make it so that um through having traceable data streams you can actually have influence on more global uh issues? Uh what was the name of the paper you said? So was that by Vitalik or by somebody else you said? Yeah, by Vitalik called DACC. Okay. Oh yeah, I think I have heard about that. Yeah. Uh okay. So um how are you dealing with I know that a lot of communities that try to start in Portugal struggle with how difficult it is to build anything there.
like I'm I'm friends with the people at Tamara and they've been unable to build kind of like substantive structures for like decades. Uh have you found a way around that or is that why you're doing the tiny house things? It's a way to sort of circumvent. Well, I mean we we've been very aware I mean I think a lot of people tend to move to Portugal with the assumption that it's very easy and you can just do whatever you want. Um, the truth is a lot of people have been doing that and they kind of end up in a gray zone where they have unlicensed buildings and these kind of things and it might work for for you as a family, but then eventually if you want to resell the house or or anything like that, it doesn't hold any value and maybe the municipality will actually ask you to tear it down eventually.
Um, and so what we did was well, um, we we looked for assets that were undervalued and that could, uh, that could get licensing. So, uh, we looked for industrial properties. Well, it wasn't our first uh kind of approach, but eventually we ended up looking for industrial properties around Atlantasia region because we liked a place with a lot of sun, access to the beach. Uh, and so we found this abandoned chicken farm. So we had 1,500 square meters of existing building. So we're not building anything new right now. It's like a bunch of uh existing real estate which is completely undervalued and that we're transforming from an abandoned building into a thriving regenerative neighborhood.
And so that was like the first step in kind of enabling us to have like a full licensing pass for for the for the building. And then we're adding a tiny house neighborhood. Um yeah, that is one of the things. Um, but I mean the tiny houses have really like a very small footprint in the overall project. And we also have over 4,000 square meters of urbanizable land that's part of the village that we're next to and we call that better. And so we basically picked a spot where we have plenty of growth opportunities so we can build more houses in the future to uh to bring more residents.
And eventually the goal is to have about 100 people being able to live on site full-time alongside with having other businesses like a restaurant, a mushroom farm, a commercial orchard and uh all kind of different business activities uh that are working together with nature and showing that we can create a regenerative economy from this local scale. Very cool. And I think you're going to give me some type of link if people want to is that it by tokens or something where like um I I would I guess receive some, you know, benefit of some of some small amount or something like that. Um yeah, exactly. Like we we're rolling out a couple of features uh this month.
Affiliate kind of a thing. Exactly. We're rolling out an affiliate uh program to enable uh people that uh we want to spread the message about TDF to be able to do that and to align the intent in incentives so that anyone who uh we think is a good fit and who can share it with their audiences can also uh benefit from uh selling well from us growing basically through having uh token sales and subscriptions and those different things. Uh people can also just subscribe on our website u for 10 bucks per months which is more for like get getting access to our educational material. So we also recording a lot of video content about how we're doing all of these things and this is like a a small easy way that you can be part of it.
Um and about the token sales, we're also releasing a new feature now this month uh which is enabling bank transfers um to be able to well to accept bank transfers for uh for token sales which uh should unlock a lot of people to be able to come into the system because what we noticed so far has been like rather they have to go through aum wallet or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Uh cool. Um, so and um kind of what have you been um focusing on in your like f how how frequently because I know I was in Portugal and I just missed your festival unfortunately, but how frequently are you doing these these are I guess in a way part of your tourism initiative, but um kind of like what are what are you focusing on?
What are you highlighting? What's what's the fun you want people to have? Yeah, I mean so this year is um like our build year. So, we've been like very focused on uh developing out a lot of the infrastructure. We finally received like the full construction permits and everything. You were talking earlier about the the permitting kind of thing and yeah, it it it was also just a very long process and even though we've been on it like since the first day, it just took a long time to get everything approved. So, now we have everything approved and we're actually like building out all the different spaces.
We just built an event space. uh we turned a whole one of the big warehouses like over 400 square meters where we put chestnut flooring and everything. So now we have like a big beautiful event space and we putting the co-working space in there and so on. Um and yeah and so for this year we we we put a big u request out for builders. So, we had a lot of resident builders come and we had like carpenters and um gardeners and so on show up and really help us build all the different projects along the way. So, right now it's a bit of a a build party and I'm a burner and I love going to Burning Man and a lot of the people who also show up at this community, this is like one of the anchors.
Um, and I think one of the key things about Burning Man, it's a it's a duoy principle and everyone is encouraged to take part and to co-create. And I think that's the beauty of it right now is you have like 10 15 people on the ground and everyone is deeply passionate about either it's carpentry or land or whatever. Uh, so there's plenty of opportunities to kind of be part of that. And then throughout the year we're hosting like a few bigger events uh like small festivals with like 80 to 100 people. And so the first one was Harmonia which was kind of the the spring equinox.
And then we're going to have another one uh well in in May there's East Lisbon happening. So the crypto scene is coming to Lisbon. We're going to be hosting an event there. And then we're going to host a decompression here at TDF uh with the regenerative side of the crypto people. Um and then we're also going to be hosting an event in June called Aguasera which is um a wellness related um event. uh also bringing together uh female climate leaders uh to bring the the female voices out about the the regeneration. Uh so yeah, we kind of host like regular events and yeah and then over the next 12 to 16 months the goal is to wrap up a lot of the construction for the co-l livingiving side of things where we are now.
Uh and then we're going to be going into the development of the tiny houses next year. Um and yeah and then I guess it will be um the the intention after that is uh we're looking for 300 people who want to be the citizen of TDF who owns uh 30 plus tokens who really participate in the governance and who make the decisions together who spend at least part of the each of each each of those 300 people owns 30 plus tokens. Yeah that the goal you see so that's that's like a $200,000 or $200,000 euro investment from each person in a way. Uh, no, it's about€ 10,000 a bit less than €10,000 to become a citizen. I see.
Okay, got it. Yeah. With 30 tokens at 242. Um, and basically those citizen are people that um like let's say more digital nomad, entrepreneurs and so on that want to be part of the project that come for part of the year um and you know who are just engaged in the in the governance processes and so on. Um and then well the next tier is obviously like if you want to be here full-time and then there's like a higher token um requirement to be able to live full-time in a tiny house for example. Um so yeah and then basically the goal will be to from next year on when we start to be more focused on operation it's going to be to be mix both like the uh agricultural outputs like uh we have a big food forest on the ground.
We're going to be producing food from uh from forest, running a mushroom farm, having a restaurant, these different things. And the goal is to have about 3 months out of the year where it's more uh public oriented with like public events and little festivals and all of that and nine months out of the year where it's more geared towards the internal community of members, which is still pretty large. But um yeah, sounds cool. uh question for you around like um yeah I guess I've heard some kind of criticisms around kind of like the kind of digital nomad migration to Portugal uh being kind of difficult for the locals and you know I guess it's you know I know it's EU is one block but you know people could say it's a little bit of a form of colonization in a way because like it was a more backwards sort of cheaper country where people like you know earn less a little bit and so on. How are you feeling about that?
Is that something that you're like addressing in your in your, you know, sort of um architecture in any way? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think Portugal kind of had this like uh multiple factors that kind of brought a lot of people like 1 million people immigrated to Portugal over the last uh few years. Um I mean what's what's the total population? It's like 10 million or something. 10 million. Yeah. So it's like 10% of the country that just immigrated here. Uh but I mean to be honest, they had some very bad policies. things like the golden visa for example, you invested half a million, you would get your citizenship and so that attracted a lot of almost like bad money like you had people just like buying up the real estate causing a massive uh real estate bubble.
Well, don't know if it's a bubble, but it's definitely been massively inflated over the last several years. Uh but that's particularly for places like Lisbon and Porto. Uh if you look at Portugal as a whole, you have the whole inland which is like really depopulated and you you have a lot of these type of villages where you actually have a loss of population and so they actually need young people to to come back and to reinhabit uh rural places. Uh a lot of the young Portuguese people, they haven't really been seeing a future in Portugal. I think maybe it's getting a bit less true now, but over the last 30 years after the end of the dictatorship and so on, a lot of people just left.
So you have a lot of young Portuguese people that live in all of the other kind of western countries. Um, and that kind of leaves a bit of a of a gap where in a lot of these villages you have like the very elderly and maybe sometimes some young kids, but you don't really have everything in between. Um, so actually I think it's it's not so much about uh having too many young people arriving in Portugal. It's more about how like what do we do with that energy? Like first of all there's all this capital. We're just just inflating real estate bubbles in Lisbon and Porto.
Uh if instead of that it would be going to regenerative projects like TDF. I think it would be quite the opposite uh from a problem would be actually a solution uh while also bringing young people, bringing culture, bringing education, opportunities, bring new ways to to see the world. Um, and I think Portugal uh has been pretty lucky in a way because it has like this um it was a bit backward and I guess because of the dictatorship you know um the culture has just been uh yeah it hasn't really eroded in the same way as other western countries has and there's still a lot of solid solidarity amongst people and a lot of openness to to change and to welcoming people. So actually arriving here in Abella always felt super welcome. The people have always been like very um yeah very pleased to welcome us and to see us take over this abandoned building and to actually turn it into something useful.
And I think there's a bit less of this stigma of foreigners coming and uh taking away opportunities and I think we're starting to see it more and more like in places like Lisbon. But I think in the countryside there's still tons of opportunities for people to come back and to maybe propose a different model of just gentrifying buying apps of real estate and um and where it becomes a story of collaboration and not a story of competition. Cool. Uh yeah, I love it. I mean, thanks uh Sam. I appreciate you for giving me a uh more positive uh idea around where crypto could, you know, is going and could and could go.
Uh I mean I guess I've had a lot of um you know in in America right now um yeah we're seeing the sort of rise of this you know Trump fascism and also we're seeing the sort of tech elite who kind of lined up behind Trump and um I guess a lot of them support this ideology of like Balagi Stravanosan the network state or the patchwork state from Curtis Yarvin or the sovereign individual book which teal and Andre site as one of their main influences where they talk about a future of commercialized sovereignty. Uh so kind of like kind of feels like the destruction of uh the US um economic and political and social infrastructure is kind of a setup to um introduce kind of like uh you know Trump calls them like freedom cities or network states or so be sort of like you know instead of people getting you know government services they'll have to pay kind of like for protection to like private contractors but that would also be kind of like um a blockchain based thing. So, yeah, I was made to have a very negative feeling about, you know, the future of of all this stuff. Um, I don't know what your your thinking about that is, but I appreciate that you're trying to do it in this other way that's maybe not so destructive. Yeah, I mean, I think you're completely right, and I think a lot of this like uh techno extremist that we're seeing rise um I mean, it it's become just like extremely apparent in in the US right now, like over the last 6 months.
It's like all of a sudden we have like completely exposed like how that kind of techno utopian has kind of collapsed into a complete dystopian kind of scenario. Um like I was saying earlier I think it's it's it's not so much about technology versus not technology because this is not going to get us anywhere. Like once technology is here it's here to stay unfortunately like there's no going back. So, you know, I think it's a lot of in in some way you have a lot of the same pattern that has been playing out throughout history of the the the the proletar against the the elites and so on and so on kind of the same kind of patterns repeating and I think you're seeing the same kind of patterns repeating embedded in those now technologydriven systems. So you're seeing a lot of the kind of uh ideas propagating from like farright ideas that are being used and things like network state concept that are used by libertarians to justify certain things.
But then you also had a lot of backlash against it. So after Balaji wrote this book and so on, a lot of people have been kind of agreeing with some of the base concepts but then taking it to completely different uh realms like we we all agree is that yes technology would play a big role in coordinating humanity in the future but what we're actually used to choose as the values that that we're underpinning all of that with are very different and so you have projects like Rei which is calling itself a regenerative network society um which is taking that ideas of decentralized network of nodes globally and bringing that forward to maybe gaining some kind of diplomatic recognitions although it's very different kind of phrasing and so on but the goal of refi is to regenerate the planet so if we can shift a little bit the values and the things that underpin uh what we want to bring forward in this kind of network situation and you can also look at o as a network state right we we are an ecological ical network set if you want to because we are a network of nodes. Each node has its own land, its own governance structure um and kind of yeah brings together people around coordinating u to optimize for more ecological benefits to be created. So I think you can use technology for good and for bad and there's no there's no going back. We're not going to uh regress.
So again I think uh referring to some of the ideas that Vitilik put in in his DACC it's like we want to build technologies that actually give more sovereignty more autonomy more freedom to people uh and that is also conserving the biological structure of the planet so that future generations can have a chance to enjoy it. Um and yeah, I think like books like Ministry of the Future make a very good case for why we should start to uh yeah to just put the rights of future generations um maybe in in our kind of governance systems and so on. And I think ultimately it's also about indigenous culture starting to break through in those technological systems and a lot of the kind of westerndriven colonization mindset that has been driving the expansion of markets or expansion of privatized properties all around the world and kind of we now privatize entire planet and there's not really other places to grow and because we're kind of with in this like finite uh amount of space and finite kind of resource scope that mean that now well we have to change it and so we're changing it from inside and I think we're going to see some of these indigenous wisdom starting to break through in our technology systems in our coordination systems as well as you're going to have maybe more extreme ideas and you know maybe a repeat of what we had last century uh with like eugenics or or whatever like it's almost a little bit some of the same kind of ideas um but yeah I think it's uh there's just going to be the same kind of battle happening and we need to lean into technology to make the the vision that we want to see of the world come forward. Um and yeah, in my in my eyes like the ecological battle is like by far the most urgent one because we we know that we're not going to survive another century if we just continue down the path that we're on currently. And I think like we're going to see the end of kind of this expansion of the western ideas of the markets of the technologies and all of that very soon.
At at the same time, we're having AGI and uh super intelligence that are happening and we want to be able to lean into those factors as well so that we're not just going to be stuck stuck in the matrix forever, but we can actually provide an alter alternative path where humans have more agency and more sovereignty in how they live their lives. Well, I got to admit that I really appreciate what the way you're thinking and I think it's a very uh those are very great points. Um, uh, yeah, I mean like, uh, apparently this weekend, according to Bill Mc Kibben, who's one of our leading ecologists, uh, Trump is going to try to remove, uh, kind of, uh, tax status from environmental nonprofits. So, they're making this like massive attack against, you know, the universities, the climate movement, uh, the legal profession, the media. Uh, it's pretty insane what's happening here and how fast it's happening.
Uh it's very scary to see the US just kind of collapse like this. Um uh but um you know what were we going to say? You had a yeah I mean I think the ecological attacks have been a bit less present in the media and than some of other things and I think that's also completely part of the agenda. I mean uh what is it called? The gulf of mass destruction. Um, but I mean I think it was a few weeks ago Trump ordered the like the the login companies to get access to all of the primary forest and so on. And yeah, I mean I think the US I mean well I used to live there.
I feel like right now I I really don't have a desire to be living there. Um, I think I mean the US is just taking it to the extreme and I guess we're going to see firsthand what like a completely collapsing empire kind of looks like. Uh, and I mean I think we just need to plant some seeds so that after the fire something emerged from the ashes. Um, yeah. But yeah, it is it is very sad to see and and I don't really know what we can do about it except uh just focusing on I think I think you're correct. It feels like a fire that now is like um just fl you know burning out of control and like the right-wing media and the sort of Christian fanatics and the tech unfortunately the tech people went in this direction you know and then you have to think about you know why that happened kind of like historically or financially like what were the incentives for them because these guys were mostly like um you know supporting like you know progressive progressive politics a decade ago.
Uh but we don't have to solve that for today. Uh you're welcome to say something if you want. I saw I saw you opening your mouth, but I was I was going to sort of wind us up to a conclusion here. Yeah. No, I mean I think uh I think all we all we can do from from our kind of perspective is do the right thing locally and try to build new coordination systems that are actually more scalable, more uh more focused on solving the the biodiversity crisis and all the other crisis that are on us and yeah working on something that works for the local scale and for the global scale and for the rest I think we're going to sit with a bowl popcorn and watch what's gonna happen in the next season of humanity.
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you very much, Samuel. I love the project. Uh we'll promote it. I I'll put a link in the uh in in the description. Uh you give me that affiliate link or whatever if you have it and yeah, we'll go from there. Perfect. Thank you so much. Nice chat. Ciao. Bye. Ciao.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.