Eric Czuleger: What's a Country?

??? Jesse sits down with Eric Czuleger to talk about countries that don't exist, the future of the nation state, and more.

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signal in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

Episode 5: Eric Czuleger

This episode originally debuted on April 18, 2024. Want to see episodes right when they drop? Subscribe to youtube.com/@UrgentFutures . As an added bonus, that simple click helps the channel tremendously!

Eric Czuleger's fascination with travel, history, and politics began as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Albania. After service, he completed his first circle of the globe. Returning to the U.S. he worked as a barista, yoga instructor, intelligence analyst, journalist, and tech storyteller. Eric spent his year of statelessness while completing his MSt in creative writing at Oxford University. He's lived, worked, and traveled through 47 countries and climbed two of the seven summits. Czuleger is the author of Eternal L.A., and Immortal L.A. He is also the writer and reader of the Howl Podcast, which is strange short fiction for a strange short existence.

I met Eric during the “tech storyteller” phase of his career during the NFT boom. Amid what felt like an endless stream of tech-hype, Eric struck me as somebody who had thought deeply about what decentralization and tokenization might enable at a systems level, such as new forms of governance like liquid democracy. Like me, he approached the subject with a mixture of cautious optimism and skepticism of the hype.

As it happens, Eric was actually interviewing me for a documentary at the time, but our conversation stayed with me. He’d briefly mentioned some of his other lives, including that he was a writer, which we bonded over. Fast forward a few years and he releases You Are Not Here, one of the more idiosyncratic travelogues you’re liable to read. I was excited about his varied backstory and convergent expertise, so I invited him onto Urgent Futures to get into the question that animated his book: what’s a country?

Grab your copy of the book here .

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures . Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz , Asad J. Malik , Lia Halloran & Kip Thorne , Cherie Hu , Eric Czuleger , Idris Brewster , Dennis Yi Tenen , Lisa Messeri , & more.