TRANSCRIPT: The Liberland Show 58 — Jonathan McCormick (Founder of Mount Crypto)

Overview:

In this episode our guest, Jonathan McCormick, Founder of Mount Crypto, discusses:

1) An Ocean Builders home concept (ocean.builders/landpod)

2) The power of entrepreneurship when government takes a step back

3) The Liberland Constitution

Contact Jonathan: mccormick9@protonmail.com

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Transcription:

This transcription is an experiment with providing Liberland Show content in a format that is accessible to people who either have a hearing disability or who simply prefer reading over listening. If you appreciate this written format, please let Jonathan McCormick know at mccormick9@protonmail.com.

Adam Carswell (AC): Hello and welcome to episode 58 of the Liberland Show. I’m your host, Adam J. Carswell. Today we are joined by Jonathan McCormick, the founder of Mount Crypto. Jonathan, thank you for coming on the show, and before we get into the fun and excitement, and what the heck Mount Crypto is—well actually no, I guess that’s what we’re gonna do right here. Tell us a little bit about…your story, your background and we’ll go from there.

Jonathan McCormick (JM): All right, well, first of all, Adam, thanks for having me on the show. It’s a great honor and Mount Crypto is a platform that I am working on making which will be able to automatically trade cryptocurrencies and other types of currency for profit on each trade reliably so that there’s maximum returns with minimal chance for loss of principal. The inspiration for that idea came to me actually as I was in the shower thinking about it. It’s really funny because what originally got me started on that was being targeted by a scammer. And I think being targeted by that scammer may end up being one of the best things that’s happened to me. It’s one of the greatest blessings in disguise because it got me thinking about how to make the too-good-to-be-true returns that they were talking about—how to make that a reality using the coding skills that I’ve been gaining over the course of the past few months. And so, I’m really excited about it. It’s still a long way out from getting that minimum viable product out, but that’s something that I am definitely working on.

AC: Yeah, wow, cool! I love the background on the story. I’m a huge believer in storytelling and honestly, at the end of the day—product or service, whatever it is—what sells is the story behind it. And it’s good to know that, not only—again—that you have a cool, inspirational story on how it came to be but…I’m sure—just based on our interactions that we’ve had so far—it’s coming from a good place. You’re someone who adds value to an environment that you enter into almost instantaneously. Guys, I know that because we have our weekly international calls for Liberland, and Jonathan is a new face that’s been popping-up recently. Happy to have him there also, kinda as like some fellow American blood. You know, the past few meetings he has not been afraid to unmute his microphone, and he shared some really cool things—one I want to get into today. You know what? Let’s just get into this one here, Jonathan. There’s like this cool, pod, like home/future—it looks like a futuristic home but I guess they’re actually being built somewhere in the world, and I guess if you could just describe what I’m talking about, cause, you know, like, I can’t put the words to it.

“The government gets in the way so much of the time and stifles a lot of the innovation that would otherwise potentially solve a lot of the problems that the government is attempting to solve.”

JM: Sure, Adam. So, what I was mentioning during the calls that one day was this special type of housing. It’s made by this company in Panama called “Ocean Builders” and they’re these sort of egg-shaped pods with windows and everything, and it’s on this stem-like thing. Okay, so, imagine, like, a flower bud that’s relatively large, on a stem; and then the stem digs into the ground. So, because of that—because of the elevated portion that’s significantly above the ground—that makes it essentially floodproof. And these pods are capable of being installed in the open ocean, which I think is really, really awesome. They’re designed to be as self-sufficient as possible, which takes away a lot of the excuses a lot of people make for having the government intervene with stuff like utilities, with wastewater treatment—that kind of stuff. And, so, I think that they’re really cool. They sell for—last I checked—somewhere around two hundred thousand dollars-ish. Yeah, I think they’re…really futuristic, high-tech, and I think they would be really cool to maybe someday have in Liberland. Of course…each person will be able to do as they see fit (in accordance to the laws, assuming everything works out). One thing that I think this brings out is it’s just another example of how people are able to find solutions to problems if they’re able to, if nobody stands in the way—like the government. The government gets in the way so much of the time and stifles a lot of the innovation that would otherwise potentially solve a lot of the problems that the government is attempting to solve.

AC: Yeah, yeah. And…what was the name of the pod—or is there a website that we can reference just to go—I think getting a visual of what you’re talking about makes it, you know, that much more cool.

JM: Yeah, absolutely. So right now I’m looking at their website. It’s ocean.builders/landpod. …

AC: There you go guys. See, Jonny’s, he’s on top of it. I ask him for the website and…you got it like right there, right on the spot. Thank you, Jonathan. Okay, so, let’s learn a little bit more about who you are, where you came from, and then, if you could tie that into how you also discovered Liberland.

JM: All right, Adam. So, I grew up in a family with quite a lot of siblings, actually. I’m the firstborn and right now I’m the oldest of seven kids…

AC: There you go.

JM: …to the same parents, thankfully. There’s never a dull moment at my house! I’ll put it that way, yeah.

…

AC: You guys are in Oklahoma?

JM: Yes, that’s right, in Oklahoma. And, yeah, I grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist Christian home and during the time when I was in elementary school, I was a pretty good kid during the first grade year, but then after that I started to catch an attitude and wanted to become the class clown. And most of the time it was not appreciated by either my teachers, nor my classmates. …I was being a rebel, in a bad sort of way. For example, when we had this “stone soup” event, where each of us was assigned an ingredient for the big pot that each of us was going to contribute to. I was assigned something that I thought was extraordinarily boring, and that ingredient was cauliflower. I thought that was the most boring thing that they could have assigned to me. And so, when we went to the store to buy the ingredients to recreate this fairy tale story, I decided that I was going to be in civil disobedience to that, and that I was going to buy jalapeno peppers, because jalapeno peppers seemed far more exciting to me. And, needless to say, that situation did not turn out very well. But yeah, that’s the kind of kid I was. I was a bit of a jerk.

“I decided that I was going to be in civil disobedience…”

AC: Yeah, hey, well, I mean, the good thing that I see in there is that you do have a little bit of rebellion built within you. Not to say that rebellion itself is…all good, but it’s an important piece of thinking outside the box, and at the end of the day becoming a trendsetter and creating new ways of thinking and that sounds like that is the part of maybe your childhood that you’ve taken and applied to what you’re working on now. And maybe it had also brought you to Liberland.

JM: Yes, I would say that my tendency toward rebellion, independent thinking has definitely helped me to fall in love with the spirit of Liberland, with the principles that are in the [Liberland] Constitution draft and those types of stuff. But yeah, to tie the loose ends from that quick snippet of my life story is that my dad eventually assigned me to read the book of Proverbs over and over. And there is a ton of important lessons there and at this point in my life, I would say that I do have a lot of skeptical tendencies of…letting the evidence lead for things. …for my life in particular, I think that had it not been for that, I wouldn’t have advanced to the point where I am now because I would have had no aspirations for it. As I kept learning to do more and more things, I started realizing more and more how I potentially could contribute to changing the future and, while I think that the Liberty Movement in general and Liberland have a lot of challenges that they’re facing, I also think that all those challenges can be overcome—and we must overcome—through proper means, of course.

AC: Yeah.

JM: A lot of people think that stuff like violence should be not quite a last resort, a resort that comes before the real last resort. …But violence and suppression and censorship—all those things—not only do they negatively impact the people that it’s targeted against, but as the case in the news lately, I remember Twitter and Facebook and some other platforms (that they claim to be). Some platforms on social media were trying to censor a certain news article from a news outlet called the New York Post (I believe?) and when they were trying to censor it, their censorship ended up making the story go more viral than it otherwise would have, because people were calling them out on the censorship and saying that censorship is wrong. And that fueled the fire of the opposition. So yeah, that’s just one illustration of how censorship and violence and stuff can really activate the people on the opposite side in a way that they would not otherwise be fired-up in. And yeah, who can blame them? I mean, who wants to live in a world where whoever just-so-happens to be the biggest and strongest gets to have their way regardless of anybody else’s rights? I mean, that’s not a world that I would want to live in.

AC: Yeah, yeah. Wow. I mean, you make—you actually do make—a strong point there that I’ve never looked at it this way. And I think we actually are starting to see it with a lot of the censorship that’s been going on. I would just say the virus for an example. There’s a lot—probably more now than ever—people questioning the truth, and I think you and I coming from the same background, we love truth-seekers; we love people…who are gonna be like, ‘Hold on, wait a second. …what is the government doing? What is the NSA doing? …What’s Twitter censoring?’ I think now more than ever, people are starting to actually—as we would say—wake up. And it’s a perfect opportunity for a podcast like this to land on the ears of someone who wants to know more and I just would highly encourage whoever’s listening now to stay plugged into the Liberland Show. So you follow-up with Jonathan after this call if you wanna kinda get an idea for where he’s getting his information cause I have to say, he’s talking about some things that I would definitely consider worth looking-into. We don’t have time to go down that rabbit-hole right now necessarily, but [one thing we’d like to get to with] Jonathan is the constitution and [not just any constitution, but] the Constitution of Liberland. And I know that this is also something that you’ve taken strong interest in. …we’ve…still got a little bit of time here before we’ve got to end it, so let’s kinda dive into your thoughts on the Liberland Constitution and what gets you so excited about it.

JM: All right, well, there are lots of things in the Liberland Constitution—which is a draft for now, but hopefully it’ll end up being put into law after the provisional government ends up being phased-out, just due to practicality for now—lots of things to love about the Liberland Constitution. It does inherit a lot of stuff from the United States Constitution, a lot of the spirit of the American Revolution, as our president of Liberland said with having the founding of Liberland on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. That was really cool. And it has lots of the principles [of] an individual having certain rights which the government has no business taking away. And it has many things that go beyond what the United States Constitution has which I really, really love. Among them are things like the deficit solution. With the U.S. Government, there’s—every single year now—a deficit, a huge deficit and there will be these debt ceilings that Congress sets, but, if it busts that budget, no big deal; they just raise the ceiling and then the taxpayers pay it (either through taxes themselves or through inflation with printing a bunch of extra money to cover the cost. But still, the taxpayers end up paying it. But with the Liberland Constitution, on the other hand, the solution that it has for deficits is that if there is a deficit, then those legislators who voted in favor of that budget end up having to split the difference out of their own pockets. And wow, if there were something like that here in the United States that was actually not able to be nullified with some quick thing from Congress, if Congress actually was held accountable to that standard, there would be some major changes to how spending is done here in the United States.

AC: Absolutely, I mean, it reminds me of the concept of extreme ownership and…taking responsibility…for what you best see fit. Instead of using someone else’s energy to get the job done…you’re using your own and I think for society to be successful and flourish, it’s almost like, ‘How is that not being put into practice?’ Yeah, thank you for shedding light on that.

JM: No problem, Adam. And yeah, the Liberland Constitution also has wonderful stuff like term limits, and it also has a ban against ex post facto law. Even though it doesn’t use the term ‘ex post facto law,’ it still has the core principles in there of the government not being able to prosecute you for doing something that, at the time you did it, was perfectly legal, because if you were to not have that protection, then the government could essentially just prosecute anyone for literally anything that they’ve ever done in their lives.

AC: Right, yeah. That’s a good point. Well, I love it. As far as…your involvement with Liberland right now at this moment, Joey Langenbrunner connected us. He said, ‘Hey, bring on Jonathan. He’d be a great fit for the Show,’ and, you know, we love Joey here. I joked with him on our last international call. I’m like, ‘Joey, you can’t come back on the Show until you introduce me to at least ten more guys,’ cause we’ve had him on here like six times already…but yeah, I’m sure…you have a relationship with Joey and some of the other guys. …What have you been actively working on in the Liberland community?

“Are you gonna establish the Liberland Mars office?”

JM: Well, most of what I’ve been working on directly has been with Liberland Press. I’m a senior international correspondent for the Liberland Press. I’ve written about three articles so far. And yeah, there are a lot of interesting things going on with the global community of Liberlandians. And I’m so happy that we live in the age that we live in now, where we have technology to be able to communicate with people from literally anywhere on the globe and—hopefully soon—anywhere between Earth and Mars as well. #OccupyMars!

…

AC: Are you gonna establish the Liberland Mars office?

JM: Well, that’s a long way out; but hey, who’s to say that I can’t do that at some point in time?

…

AC: One thing that I love about Liberland is, to make an impact here in this country, really all you gotta do is…just start doing it. And if you’re doing something that we think is not right, then someone will put you in check. So I feel like you could probably just…go and take a stab at Liberland Mars right now…and see what happens.

JM: Well, it’s an intriguing idea. I’ll want to write that down to look into a little more later. Yeah, I’m definitely very excited about the advances in space exploration. Yeah, I think there’s some great work being done.

AC: Love it.

JM: And this time around, it’s not the government that’s leading the charge, and I think that’s also really cool.

AC: Yeah, more power to the people. Well, all right, Jonathan. Thank you so much for investing your time here with our Liberlandian listeners today.

…

UPDATE: Since this interview, Jonathan McCormick launched an unofficial “Liberland-Mars Virtual Representative Office” at https://liberland-mars.space/