43. Startup Cities: A New Era of Governance with Patri Friedman
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Patri Friedman (00:00.502)
Our societies are a weird mix, right? The goal is like the best of the old and the best of the new. And in some cases, what we have is like the worst of the old and the worst of the new. If you look at representative democracy, which was created, you know, arguably in like 1783 in the U.S., it's very, very old fashioned. And then we have the worst of the new, like kids in middle school using social media and becoming depressed by it and, you know, TikTok stealing our attention. And that's not good.
And I think that if we can try more experiments, we have a better chance of picking the best of the old and the best of the new in a way that's better than we do today.
Mizter Rad (00:57.688)
Beautiful humans. Imagine if your phone never got updated. No new features, no fixes, just stuck in 2005 forever. That'd be crazy, right? Well, that's exactly what we do with government. We're using rules made before we had electricity to govern the world with AI. Today, we have Patry Friedman, a man who thinks we should be able to start new countries as easily as we start new companies.
Think about it, we're living in a world where anyone can start an app in their garage, but starting a new government system is still forbidden. As Patrick says, that doesn't make sense anymore. He's not just talking, he's building startup cities and parallel societies in different parts of the world. Some call him a radical, others a visionary. But here's the real question, what if he is right?
Patri, welcome to the Mizter Rad.
Yeah, thanks for having me. Great intro.
You know, Patry, I love what your name means, father, Patry, in Latin. And you have three children, of course, as far as I know, and you're a father in that way. But you also see yourself as fathering many new societies. And I think that's beautiful. Why don't you start by telling us more about that vision?
Patri Friedman (02:22.35)
The two main metaphors I use, one is to think of government as like each government is a business and to consider the global governance industry. What's beautiful about this is we can see the problems with the industry independent of any particular political view. The problem is it's really hard to switch providers. That is, it's difficult to move from one country to another.
you know, subset, a growing subset of no man's who do it, but it's very difficult for most people to move away from their job and their family. And the other problem is the barrier to entry. You know, as Mizter Rad said, you can just start an app, a tech company in your garage. There's no defined way to start a new country. And if we have an industry where there's a relatively small number of huge firms and it's really hard to switch between them and there's no startups,
we should expect that that industry is going to be terrible. Like it's not going to innovate. It's not going to add features. It's not going to serve customers well for these purely structural reasons. And so starting around 2001, I started thinking about this and how we can fix it. Like how can we enable the creation of startup societies? And there's been really like two main phases of this. The first was C-studding. When I started doing this work in the 2000s, countries were not willing to...
make any kinds of deals or pass legislation to allow self-governing communities. And so I looked to the ocean where Admiralty Law lets any ship register with any country and essentially franchise that country's sovereignty while they're 12 miles or more from land. And I did that for some years, got the word out to millions of people, hey, why can't we start new countries? But ultimately the ocean is a very difficult and expensive place. And starting in 2011 with Honduras,
following the ideas of Paul Romer's Charter Cities talk in 2009, countries started to be open to this, to passing national legislation. In Honduras' case, they changed their constitution in order to enable self-governing communities where the sovereign state, the host nation, chooses to delegate some of the right to create new regulations to a city. And so in kind of the second 10 years of my career, that's what I've been working on.
Mizter Rad (04:43.918)
That's great to hear. Actually, was a sea studying ambassador in Colombia back when I was living here in 2006, 2007, I got this business card. So you guys sent me back home. were blue, light blue or something, I remember.
I had a bunch, I used them for many years.
That was very nice, super interesting project. Is it still running or what's happening with C-Stating?
Yeah, the Institute is, it is still going. one of the focuses is a company called Ocean Builders in Panama, which is producing like sort of single family floating homes that, know, the trade off versus a sailboat is that they're worse at moving, but they're much more stable when they're in the waves. So you won't, you won't move around in moderate waves, but then it's worse at going from place to place. So I think it's a really interesting niche.
Is it Grant that is running it? Yeah. OK. I talked to Grant recently as well. We like to have him in the pot. Interesting project as well. But let's start by having you imagine your 2075. I want you to paint me a picture here of how you think humans are organizing themselves then. Do you think we still have these old school countries, or is it more like you're going to choose your government like you choose your apps today, for example?
Patri Friedman (06:09.934)
I want to preface it by saying that kind of the big question mark over the next 50 years is about AI. And I worked on AI early in my career, but that's kind of, think, what the outcome is with AI is going to dominate the state of the world in 50 years. Could be very good, could be very bad. But focusing on my type of work, yeah, I think it's pretty inevitable. Like, it's just my other main metaphor is looking at
laws like software. a law is sort of a set of instructions and if-then statements, and it's an algorithm for people to follow. It actually is the same as computer code in a way, even though it's executed by attorneys and judges rather than computers. It's a set of instructions. And law is open source in the sense that almost all the laws in the world are published and freely available.
which means that anyone can refer to them and copy them and recombine them. For example, Honduras Prospera, which is the one operating Charter City, they've created their own thousands of pages of regulation by looking around the world at best practices and copying the best ones and making them fit together. And so I think it's inevitable that law, just because it's a true fact about reality, that law shares many of the same properties as code.
And so I think it's inevitable that we'll see open source databases of different legal modules that different jurisdictions are updating. And when you create a jurisdiction or you're looking to reform a jurisdiction, you will kind of look at the different things that are being done around the world and maybe copy them, maybe customize them a little bit, maybe combine them. So I think that's inevitable. I also think we'll see the unbundling of the nation state in the sense that right now,
When you pick a country, you get travel documents, a tax system, a healthcare system, an education system. There's all of these different things that are all bundled into one. And bundling is really bad for competition. Competition works much better when there's different providers competing to do each of those different things. That's how you get the power of innovation. My phone is made by Apple. My calendar and email is made by Google.
Patri Friedman (08:35.372)
You know, I use other apps from other providers and that's really what a wealth, how like a well functioning industry works. And so I think we'll see a lot more of that. Like the fact that our travel documents are issued by, you know, our country of citizenship kind of to me feels like, well, it made a lot of sense historically and it just makes, you know, less and less sense every decade. So I think you'll see private passport agencies that are like doing the background checks.
and then providing passports to people independent of what country they reside in, you'll see less and less kind of connection between your citizenship and where you live and what all your services are. You know, probably unbundling of like welfare and health care and all of these different things.
Interesting. Interesting. You talked about law sharing properties with code. You use an analogy of how law is open source the same way code should be, or in many ways is open source. But when you are testing apps, if your app crashes, me as a user, I just lose some photos and the developer can just quickly, you know, recode whatever crashed.
If a government crashes, people suffer. It's not that easy. How do you make that safe? Because I feel like that's an important thing to think about.
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, and one analogy here is to experiments, say, in medicine, where a drug that functions wrong or hasn't been sufficiently tested could hurt a lot of people. It happens occasionally. And the way we address this is with a series of tests. You know, first we tested in the test tube and then on smaller animals and then on larger animals and then on small numbers of people and larger numbers of people.
Patri Friedman (10:32.822)
And so we scale it up as it proves to be safe and effective. So this is what I say about communism, for example, which killed something like 50 to 100 million people in the 20th century. It's not that it was a bad experiment to try. I'm in favor of people trying experiments voluntarily. But it was an experiment that was tried on hundreds of millions of people at once without really being tested on a small scale. And we can see on a small scale that it
doesn't work very well. And so it's true that we want to be careful. And I think that a lot of the changes that happen will be very small and incremental. You know, once we've made there, there is a huge transition from our current like legacy States and regulations to a more 21st century system. and so those, those experiments need to be done on an opt in basis, right? We don't, you know, we, don't test new medicines.
We don't force it on people people learn about what the risks that are and and they volunteer so starting small testing with people who volunteer and opt-in and only scaling it up as it works and then you know moving to a world where like you know a new Linux distribution is is just a choice of a whole bunch of like Modules to incorporate and you can customize your Linux distro by being like I need to patch
this part of the code base. And I think once we've transitioned to a modern system, there'll be a lot more of those small patches a lot more often.
Yeah, that totally makes sense. And you mentioned before the example of Honduras, which opened up the space for experimenting with Prospera, which is this experiment that some people are running in which you were involved, I believe. And what happened there was interesting in many ways. then what also caught my attention is that one government came one day and said, OK, you go ahead. I give you a green light. And then the next day, next year, or
Mizter Rad (12:36.454)
of years later another government came, government from think she Omada Custer is her name, came and she said you you're you're you kind of do this here anymore or I'm gonna go against you. So how do you protect that those small-scale experiments against those kind of things?
Yeah, it's a great question. mean, it was 10 years that the administration that came into power 2009, this program in 2011 until 2021. And you know, this was a great program, but that government, the president was, um, in bed with the darker traffickers and the U S by the end of his term, the U S was just waiting to arrest him whenever he lost an election and people got sick of him. And unfortunately, president Castor, who they voted in.
is a Marxist, not like a progressive, but she's trying to switch allegiance from the US to China. She restored relations with Venezuela. And one of her kind of campaign promises was to shut down this Zeta program, but she hasn't been able to do so in three years because, you know, they changed their constitution and passed national regulation and their constitution says that you can't just retroactively undo it.
And as a result, Prospero has been able to continue operating. And the main enforcement mechanism, very few people know about this, enforcing deals on sovereigns is actually critically important because if otherwise, no one would invest in other countries. Nobody would open factories and create jobs. Nobody would build infrastructure or resource extraction.
if the government could just come and take it. And so all cross-border investment is protected by a set of trade agreements, international treaties, and investor-state dispute resolution networks. And the way it works is to enforce things on a sovereign. You can never trust that sovereign to do any actions or make any decisions. And so if a country makes an agreement like this and then violates it,
Patri Friedman (14:52.77)
The way it works is that you sue them in international arbitration. And if you win, you take that arbitration award to any other country where that country has stuff and you can seize property, bank accounts, even accounts receivable. So if the losing country say is selling oil to another country, you can take the payment for the oil, like just like garnishing wages. The only things that.
that are not sizable to pay these awards are three things. Military, obviously you can't take like military assets, warships, cultural. So if they have, you know, the great paint painting from the country is on display in the Louvre. You can't seize that. And then the last category is diplomatic. You can't take embassies or embassy budget, but beyond that, everything is fair game. And so all of the other countries, you know,
the ones where countries have bank accounts, for example, they will enforce these agreements. And it's actually ubiquitous because it's so foundational. My favorite anecdote about this is that Honduras is cozying up to China and China, as they do with their soft influence projection, is
offered to start out with several hundred million dollars of loans or funding to build infrastructure in Honduras. And then Honduras withdrew from their investor state dispute resolution, like citing the fact that Prosper is suing them under this system as one of the reasons. Now withdrawing doesn't get you out of any past lawsuits, and Honduras is actually being sued by more companies than any country in the world.
this administration broke their agreements left and right. But now that they withdrawn, the Chinese said to Honduras, guys, they said, we can't give you this money unless you're in an investor state dispute resolution system. It doesn't have to be the main one that you withdrew from. You can join one of the smaller ones. But we were not going to give you this money if we don't have any recourse.
Patri Friedman (17:11.618)
You just take it in and don't pay back or seize the infrastructure. it's like even the new commie friends, like that's how foundational this system is to all global trade and investment is that even China was like, we have to have it.
Right, right, right. Yeah, it's like a guarantee in a way for new countries coming in as well.
It's almost as if all of the country's assets that are in other countries is a bond that's like hosted against them breaking their own agreements.
Right. That's really nice. I didn't know that. I didn't know that the system was so well structured in that sense.
Yeah, I they had to find a solution because otherwise, you know, we wouldn't be able to invest in developing countries and help them get richer, which is critical to the world.
Mizter Rad (18:04.878)
Right. That makes sense. That makes total sense. Whoever thought about that system, it's a genius. That must have been done a long time ago, I mean, this is not a new thing.
No, it's not new and these systems have evolved over time to meet this critical need.
Yeah, that's amazing. Tell me something. When, and I want to impact the sort of economics here. How do you make this experimental communities like, for example, the Honduras one or others that maybe you can tell me more about later financially sustainable? some people that are listening to this episode might be thinking, okay, yeah, you know, only tech millionaires paying premium citizenship fees can build new countries or
be in these new societies because, I don't know, maybe that's what goes through their head when they first hear you talking. Tell me more about the economics. How do you make money as a parallel society, as a new country, as a new city, as an experimental sort of region? And how do avoid
this becoming like a bubble for only people that have the resources to be there.
Patri Friedman (19:28.502)
Yeah. So, I mean, I do, I come from the Silicon Valley tech world, but what we're really finding is that it's actually quite hard to get people with resources to move to something new. there's this idea that, well, the people who can live anywhere will come live in our new community. But the thing is the people who can live anywhere can also live in Lisbon or Bali or San Francisco. And so it's actually very difficult to compete for those people.
on a car.
Patri Friedman (19:58.606)
A lot of my focus these days, besides Prospera, is on building in Africa for Africans. And I think that's the primary market for these right now is people within the same country. There's another zone in Honduras called Ciudad Morizon, and they're focused on low income housing in kind of one of the most like dangerous industrial districts on the mainland. You know, they build houses for $12,000 and then rent them out for 100 bucks a month.
and provide security and just a little bit of private security is enough to make it a much safer community than the surrounding area. So that's a lot of the focus and beyond locals, I think the next group of people to appeal to is people in the region. For example, in the Gulf of Guinea where we're working, people in Nigeria, which is a huge country by population has a ton of talent. And the governance and the infrastructure are not functioning great.
And then after that, I think the next group is the diaspora. So in El Salvador, after Bukele cleaned up the crime, a number of people returned home who had moved to places like the US because they said, well, now that there's not murders all the time, I'd rather live in my homeland. The number one reason people move is economic opportunity, which again is a strike against nomads who already have that wherever they are. And the number two reason people move is family reunification.
And so bringing back the diaspora in a successful community is actually going downhill with family reunification. You know, these are like any city, you need a whole range of people. And I think that people kind of associate this with tech millionaires because that was my community in the Bay Area. And that was a lot of people who funded this, who find my work today, who are interested in this. But they're actually
not a very good market for building new communities in my opinion, at least not right now when these are small. Someday when we have communities with 100,000 plus people in it, then it makes a lot more sense. It's now a much more appealing size. Austin's only a million people and we have where I live right now and we have a lot of world-class people here. So I think that that just comes much, much later. You need your foundation first.
Mizter Rad (22:24.306)
But when you say that you work in the building, for example, in north of Africa, in Guinea,
West Africa, Gulf of Guinea area.
Okay, the Gulf of Guinea area, yeah.
The armpit. It's also how it's known. The armpit.
The armpit. OK. So when you're working in the armpit in Africa, how do you go about it? So who found the territory? Why there? What made sense? What made you go there and start? What did you start? Was the government open to the idea? How did it work? What's the status of the project right now?
Patri Friedman (23:09.492)
Africa is appealing for a number of reasons. I think it's kind of one of the places with the most headroom in terms of the potential versus kind of the current execution and level of infrastructure. I happen to have connections to a number of countries there that get us introductions to the heads of state with a lot of trust, with a warm referral.
know, the governments are interested in partnerships to help develop their country and provide better jobs for their people. And, you know, so we work with the government to create national legislation. We're working with about four countries right now and kind of bringing in more every month. And most of the land there is owned by the government. People lease it. And so there's kind of two major legal parts. One is the legislation that enables the zone.
and creating a partly self-governing jurisdiction. And the other part is the land grant, where the government puts in the land in return for a minority stake in the business. So they actually have equity in the community that we're creating. And then I should have mentioned last question, the financial model. You can think of these as being a combination of a real estate development and a government.
So a real estate developer makes money by taking empty land that's not worth very much and putting up buildings and infrastructure for people who want to live and work there. And they then make money from rents and from land appreciation because land is worth more, kind of the denser the population, the more stuff there is now. And then on the government side, these jurisdictions in many cases will collect taxes.
As a libertarian, I used be more skeptical on taxes, but now I look at it as an equity share of the economy. So if you're charging 10 % taxes, then if every million dollars of GDP that you create, you're getting a 10 % stake in that. It's like a profit share in the economy that you're creating. And so that provides incentives. I can spend less than $100,000 to...
Patri Friedman (25:27.278)
create some additional benefit or service or infrastructure that will bring in more than a million dollars more of GDP, then that's profitable for the city developer.
Yeah, especially if you also see results with the taxes you're paying. If you live in a place where you see the progress, infrastructure growing, good healthcare systems, if that is related somehow to the tax you're paying.
Yeah, definitely. mean, that's really important. There's, my grandfather had this great line about like, how good are people at spending money? It depends whether you're spending it on other people or yourself and whether you're spending your own money or other people's money. So the absolute worst is if you're spending other people's money on other people, that's what governments do. that's what happens. Yeah. Yeah. And so the thing is when there's a,
happening a lot in Europe right now.
Patri Friedman (26:21.902)
company that's running the jurisdiction, they're kind of spending their own money on other people in the sense that if the company goes into debt like most of our governments and spends too much money that doesn't create value, well then the employee stock and stock options and salaries are all at risk. The corporation needs to make good decisions that will grow the economy. And so it's actually incentive aligned like a private company.
Yeah, yeah. Well, let me shift gears here for a second. And I want to know what you think about this. When people are living to 150, for example, and have brain computer interfaces and maybe they're in hands somewhere else in their bodies, how do we handle things like voting rights in your eyes, in your brain, in your mind? How do you how do you see that? Like imagine a, I don't know, 140 year old
person with enhanced intelligence, does she or he get the same vote as a 25 year old without augmentations? And then again, that brings up an even bigger question that is when AI becomes smarter than us, either standalone or within your brain as a brain chip or whatever, does it get voting rights as well?
And you can tell me, it depends on the society they decide for themselves, whatever. But I want to know your opinion. How do you see it? What would be your ideal, actually, startup city?
I'm actually a cyborg already. I have a chip implanted in my hand that I got in Prospera. You can tap it for my business card and it unlocks my Tesla. haven't done anything else with it. Every time I unlock my Tesla with my hand, I get a big kick out of it.
Mizter Rad (28:14.126)
Yeah, there's actually a guy I interviewed. He's working on a chip under the skin as well, where you can also put your credit card and so on and probably your Tesla key by now. But also, the chip actually measures your glucose level. It monitors it 24-7 real time, which is pretty cool as well. So that could also be implemented probably also for medical reasons.
Yeah, the payments thing is actually quite difficult and the reason is that Visa and MasterCard have a monopoly and every tap to pay, at least in the US, has to be specifically approved by them and they won't approve implants. Like technically, my chip could actually handle it. It's just there's this legal monopoly. yeah, I mean, think my answer to this is that
What I hold tightly is this idea of experimenting with a bunch of different societies and a bunch of different new ways of doing things. I think that's what's important. And I do have my own ideas about what types of societies are most likely to work, but I hold them much more loosely. That's falsifiable. You know, I want to enable people with visions to bring those visions to life. The model that I'm kind of working with mostly right now is a model where
There is not voting by the citizens. think one realization you can have when you think of government as a business is that there's a difference between being a customer and being a shareholder. So I'm a customer of Apple when I buy an iPhone, but I'm not a shareholder. So the customer is super, super important. That's who the business is serving. That's where all of their revenue comes from.
But I don't then go and vote for the board of directors of Apple unless I'm a shareholder, unless I have a financial interest on that side. And I think we've kind of mingled these in the way we think about government today in a way which is actually maybe somewhat unhealthy. You know, this idea that everybody who's using a service should get to decide, like make decisions about how that service works and who runs it. I think that's actually
Patri Friedman (30:35.768)
combining two things that are better to be separate. So in my vision, the citizens are critically important because those are your customers. And if they don't like your city and they leave, then you're losing your revenue base. But the actual decisions are being made by the shareholders of the company. So that's kind of the model that we're using today, though I'm very open to other ideas.
But hold on, in a country like that, your citizens are your customers, but who are your shareholders?
the investors and employees of the company that's operating the jurisdiction. Just like, you know, all of our big businesses today work this way.
Okay, I see what you mean.
Mizter Rad (31:18.432)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, so imagine we might have, I could imagine from what you're saying also, and from what I've been envisioning and thinking and learning from my past guests as well, you might have some societies run partly by AI and tech, and others completely, let's say, human controlled. How do you think competition plays out in that case?
My guess is that using AI will be such an advantage that even places that are ultimately human controlled will still consult with AI.
inevitable basically what you say
Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to differentiate between kind of like values and goals and like tools and implementation and strategies. Like I think it's best if the values and goals come from humans. And this is why, you you mentioned before there's the possibility of independent AI and AI augmentation of humans. And I'm a huge fan of AI augmentation of humans because then humans are getting this additional computational capability.
to make better decisions and process more data, well, it's still driven by human values and goals. I'm much more nervous about independent AI, which might have values and goals that are in conflict with humanity. It doesn't have to be that the AI wants to kill humans. It might just be that computers prefer, say, a different temperature on Earth or a different level of oxygen in the atmosphere. And any kind of preference like that
Patri Friedman (32:58.158)
you know, if the AIs come to be more powerful, would wipe us out as a byproduct. And so, you know, I think this applies both to individuals and to societies that, you know, I'd like to see the humans being the one who set the goals and have the values for the society, but then use AI as a tool to make that happen.
No, that makes sense. do you think that, so in my eyes, technology seems to always be winning over tradition because maybe it's just a more efficient way of living and running economies and so on. But if you look at indigenous communities, they've also survived for thousands of years. Do you think startup cities, let's call it startup cities or pilot societies can somehow bridge that gap between high tech innovation and time tested traditional human values?
because I think that you touched that a little bit in your previous answer, but yeah, how do you think that could this new cities bridge that gap?
Yeah, that's a great question. I'm definitely interested in combining the best of the old with the best of the new.
Yeah, because you were talking about one of the things you like about Austin is the psychedelic culture, for example, which I feel that is more on the traditional indigenous side of things.
Patri Friedman (34:18.67)
Yeah, I mean, think it is difficult to do that, but like most difficult things about designing a society, it's going to be much more tractable if we're out there running experiments and trying things. When you have a lot of people trying a lot of different visions, some of them work and some of them don't, and you learn. And I think that our societies are a weird mix, right? The goal is like the best of the old and the best of the new. And in some cases, what we have is like,
the worst of the old and the worst of the new. If you look at representative democracy, which was created arguably in 1783 in the US, the current model that's adopted in many places around the world is very, very old technology. Voting once every few years on a small number of candidates who represent geographic areas, that's very, very old fashioned. And then we have the worst of the new, like kids in middle school using social media and becoming depressed by it.
you know, TikTok stealing our attention and that's not good. And I think that if we can try more experiments, we have a better chance of picking the best of the old and the best of the new in a way that's better than we do today.
How did you actually get into this whole topic? I'm wondering and I'm very curious about it because from what I understand you went from coding at Google to building actual parallel societies. What clicked in your head to make this job?
Well, I it did take almost 20 years before Prosper opened in 2020. So for a long time, I was, I wrote a book about seasteading. I wrote a paper about this idea of competing and startup governments. This was both in the early 2000s. You know, I gave talk, I built up a community of people who were interested in these things. Eventually that led to me getting funding from Peter Thiel in 2007 to start the Seasteading Institute.
Patri Friedman (36:12.014)
I did that for some years, then I worked with Honduras. I left Google to start Seasetting Institute, and afterwards I spent a year working with Honduras, trying to start a city there in 2011, but it was too early. Even though they'd created the program, it took years, it took more than five years for it to actually get operating, and I actually went back to Google for a while. So it's been a long process of putting the ideas out there.
Really the biggest thing, I mean, I'm sure that I've had some impact, but the biggest reason why it's possible today is just the shift of the entire world towards the future. You know, I was part of a community of Peter Thiel funded nonprofits in the Bay Area and in the late 2000s that included funding for AI safety research, funding for anti-aging and trying to get us towards immortality.
and a bunch of other things that kind of all turned out to be huge and now have way more people and way more funding 15 years later. And I think the reason is just that we were all future focused, know, like your show. We were all kind of tapped into the way the winds of change were blowing. And in terms of my work, know, software is far more ubiquitous now. And so people see the parallels with law much better.
countries like small countries think of themselves as startups, they realize that yeah, there's advantages to being a large market, but there's also advantages to being a small country. can move quickly and innovate. There's just kind of, you know, we've had the success of special economic zones and especially Dubai's financial center, which is, was kind of like the closest thing to a charter city previously, that was operated by the country and not by a company. And so we...
the world has just really moved in a way where way more countries are open to this versus 20 years ago. And that's been the biggest factor in enabling it. I had to like wait for the world to catch up in a sense.
Mizter Rad (38:18.651)
That's interesting. mean, you've always been, I've always followed you since since I joined Seasteading back in 2000. I think it was 2000, must have been 2007 or 2008. When did you start with
that again? 2008 we opened it on.
2008 so then it must have been around. I know but you started before opening it officially. Did you start something before?
Yeah, from the early 2000s there was a community, know, we had like a website and web discussion forums and stuff. Okay well before that
I remember back then also watching videos from Jack Fresco, I think was his name. That was pretty inspiring as well. But talking about inspiration and working in the future, if you would talk to ambitious leaders or builders, entrepreneurs that are working on something today and they want it to be ready for the future that you envision, what kind of companies or projects would you start or would you recommend them or suggest them to start to be well positioned in, let's say,
Mizter Rad (39:19.224)
five decades from now or in the next decades to build something, to build the legacy, to have impact, to build something that lasts for generations. I know it's a hard question. I'm not pretending to have a perfect answer, but what would you think would make sense to build right now?
I mean, I have a very subjective answer and that's build charter cities and eventually be building sovereign city states. It's actually our biggest bottleneck in the movement right now. For a long time, the bottleneck was that countries weren't open to these experiments. You know, it was funding and now the biggest bottleneck is experienced entrepreneurs. Starting a new society is really hard. Like any startup is difficult and this is even harder. And as a result,
We see that our most successful companies are led by people with the most experience. know, having a couple decades of experience working with governments and regulators in a startup context is massively helpful. And I think a lot of people don't realize that you can go and start a charter city today. You know, can reach out to me, happy to have a conversation. I can fill you in on the...
You know, what are the milestones and kind of how does the whole process work? And, you know, starting a city is potentially a much, much longer period of time investment than a company. might start a company and 10 or 15 years later, sell it or step down. And well, you could potentially do that with a city. That city, if it's successful, is going to be around for 50, 100,000 years.
And so it's actually an incredibly ambitious thing that you can take on to make the world better and create a legacy is creating a new society.
Mizter Rad (41:11.896)
But when we talk about the specifics of, because starting a city sounds like there's a lot of stuff to take care of. when you think about that, if you would have to break it down, are we talking about, for example, focusing on creating a framework for, let's say, on a society level, A-B testing kind of thing, or maybe a legal framework for brain computer interface that is unique in the world so that you can
from there kind of build a society around dad, you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, that's closer. I would say, you know, that actually, even though I got into this wanting people to try like really brand new legal and political systems, I think product market fit today is just bringing best practices of streamlined, efficient regulations and competent regulators in courts to all the places that don't have that. And so you actually don't need to innovate very much on the legal side.
But what you got at with your question is, how does your different legal environment bring in different industries and how do you build around that? And that's one of the key parts of the problem. So you need to be talking to governments and partnering with them to find your host country. But a key part of it is what is going to be the economic engine of the city? Like, what are people going to move there in order to do that they wouldn't be able to do elsewhere? And you know, that
involves specifics about the country and region you're in, about what skills and resources are available, you know, and it's kind of like the entrepreneur's task of figuring out like what product can I create that people want and they don't have yet. The city is the product. So what industry verticals can I target and maybe build an industry cluster that will provide jobs to the locals, that will bring in investment, that will get people moving there. That's at the center of it.
Mizter Rad (43:16.568)
So it would make sense to think about it in the following sense. Find a place, a city, location that is well suited for your sort of target group. just to give you an example, create a new education system for elderly people. Because we believe that we will live longer anyway. So if you create a system somewhere,
an education system for people living longer than 80 or for people older than 60 and you focus on then you become the person or the place for those people to come there. That already is a good step. Would you say it's something like that?
Yeah, yeah, then that's great idea. So it's like if you're age, you know, 60 plus, you're probably retiring. People sometimes retire to the developing world. And you say, and if you're one of those people who is a lifetime learner who wants your brain to be stimulated, wouldn't it be great to live in a community where costs are lower because you're in a you're in the developing world and you're in a community with people that that
think like you and there's all kinds of interesting things to do, learning and talks and things to light up your mind. But that makes sense, a lot of sense to me. It's a great idea. And I usually don't say that to be honest. I'm very frank about when I think people's ideas wouldn't work.
Okay, that makes sense.
Mizter Rad (44:53.614)
I'm glad I got your idea. again, I've been looking into this topic for a while and I really appreciate people working into this stuff because I feel that it's big problem in our society. We're kind of stuck there. anyway, Pate, it's been an honor having you on the Mizter Rad Show. We are on a mission, as I told you before, my team and I are on a mission to understand how the world will look like in 50 years or in the next five decades.
trying to help future builders and entrepreneurs kind of navigate what's coming. And I think your insights into what we might look as a reinvented society itself are super valuable for anyone wondering where to focus their energy and their talents. And for that, I really want to thank you.
You're welcome. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Well, beautiful humans, listening to patri reminds me of something profound. We built the pyramids, we sent humans to the moon and we created AI, and yet we're stuck with ancient ways of running our societies. Maybe it's time to be as bold with our social system as we are with our technology. Until next time, stay curious, question everything, and remember, in 2075, your grandkids might not ask you, where are you from, but...
What kind of society did you join? Thank you so much. Hasta la vista.