Will New City-States Replace Nations?

We interview Patrick Friedman, a leading thinker on competitive governance, about his vision for decentralized societies. He explains the charter city model as a way to "upgrade" existing nations by allowing innovation in legal systems. These startup societies enable jurisdictional experimentation absent in most countries today.

Patrick argues exit rights are paramount so groups can self-determine governance. He envisions charter cities as platforms where many opt-in communities with niche values/cultures can emerge. We discuss economics, recruiting celebrity founders, penal colonies, and more unorthodox concepts. Overall Patrick sees charter cities as unlocking competition to find better forms of social organization.

[00:00:00] Hello. We said, we're going to get a very special episode today, which can almost be thought of as a lost interview, because it was one of the early interviews we did. Uh, but it was in a very different format than our other episodes. And so we didn't want to release it until we had a bit more of a following. It was, was Patrick Friedman who runs Pronos capital, the first venture capital fund that focuses on charter cities and network states. So when people are trying to start new countries, uh, this is the main funder of that. And Patrick Friedman, who we've known for a very long time since Silicon valley. Is the guy who would have been at the center of the seasteading movement when that was really growing. He coded at Google for 10 years, rent a small angel fund since 2, 7, 11 has degrees in CS and business and has been a leader in the competitive governance scene for over 20 years. Yeah. Leaders understatement there.

He was basically he's the, what was the early charter city guy, when [00:01:00] most of the charter city movement with seasteading, which was this idea that people would go live on. Uh, sort of floating boats that would be made up of, uh, autonomous components that could like break apart and recombine. So like even your house, you could easily leave one government system and go to another government system very easily. So, uh, Some other stuff here I have 2001 began thinking about a new approach to upgrading governments. The side hustle 2008, started the sea setting Institute with funding for Peter teal, 2009. Co-created a famous phrase, a self-organizing festival on water, still running annual annually. So for if ever raises another thing, cause this is actually a really important event within. Silicon valley culture, which was seen as sort of like the rationalist slash less wrong version of burning man. Um, but it was done on boats, which honestly seems much more appealing to me. Uh, 2011 co-founded future cities development, which have had the first M. Oh you for a modern charter city in 2012 in to southern 18 started promos capital patrick [00:02:00] has board memberships and advisory positions across this charter city network state space He does talks interviews and events regularly around the world Very excited to, to bring this loss a bit of context for you and we have a few other interviews we might be able to put out this way Um so very excited about that.

Simone: Hello Simone.

Malcolm: It's wonderful to be here with you today. And Patrick Friedman. Patrick Friedman, he is and has been for a long time, known as one of the most preeminent thinkers of what. Future cities may look like what future society may look like. And given that we've been talking so much about the future of the world economy and the future of what human civilization may look like in ways that are very orthogonal to the way people think about civilization today, we are so excited to have him on.

Malcolm: I would love you to give a bit more of your background if you think as any is necessary. And the first question I will prompt you is, is has [00:03:00] any of your thinking around what future human cities may look like? Changed with the rapid development of AI and the movement of AI into the public sphere? Or had you, were you such a forward thinking, you already

Patri: accounted for all of this?

Patri: Well, nobody can know the timing of something like ai, but I think of it as being like somewhat orthogonal. Like, I have serious concerns about AI risk, but like, that's not my path, right? I have my part of the world order that I try to make better. And yeah, I think it's like really hard to predict what AI will do, but definitely now is the time when it's starting to do something.

Patri: So we'll find out. Okay. So when you think

Malcolm: about how cities are gonna change, what is your sort of go-to talking points right now?

Patri: Well, so I'm, I'm interested in New city states it's kind of my life's mission to make it so that we can start new countries, like we start companies today. And at this kind of halfway point, after 20 some years of working on [00:04:00] it what it looks like is what are called charter cities.

Patri: Charter cities have regulatory authority over some parts of the law while being under a country's sovereignty. And so I'm very interested in the way that that cities using new governance systems. Can be a way to kind of upgrade a country, right? Because the alternative, a lot of countries have old laws, maybe like relics of some mishmash of like pre colonialism, colonialism, post-colonialism.

Patri: Often the courts aren't great, but it's really hard to reform a whole country at once, right? I mean, you can't make huge changes the legal system of the whole country at once. And you shouldn't, right? You shouldn't change it on top of a bunch of people. But what this has meant so far is like very little innovation in government.

Patri: No, like sandboxes as we say in software engineering. No ways to test out new things. And that's what's really missing. And the genius of the Charter City idea is it says, Hey, wait. If we start with empty [00:05:00] land and then put a significantly different legal system there and people are opting into it, now we can make much bigger changes and test things out.

Patri: And also it's a way of kind of, Creating a bubble with like a different culture and having people like opt in and acculturate it in time. So that's really different about it and I think that definitely the city state. I mean, look, the best run country in the world right now is Singapore, which is a city state.

Patri: It seems like cities are like kind of like big enough to matter and potentially be independent while like small enough to be responsive to their citizens or customers. As I like to say, one of my main generative metaphors is looking at governments like businesses and thinking about the governing industry.

Patri: That's all the countries in the world and citizens or customers who pay taxes and other fees and get some package of governance services and are kind of like shopping for the place that gives them the best deal. [00:06:00] Yeah.

Malcolm: One of the things I love about what you're saying, and it's something that we often bring up, is really government hasn't been experimented with that much in a long time.

Malcolm: Like there haven't been major innovations. And the last big one was when America was formed. And the reason you had that innovation is because right before that period you basically had a flourishing of steady states, which were the American colonies, combining European governments with Native American governments, which had evolved down completely different trajectories.

Malcolm: And since then we haven't had isolated scenarios where people could, in lower risk environments, experiment with totally new government structures, which it sounds like is what you're trying to enable as you enable that. What are some of the new governance ideas you find most

Patri: interesting? Yeah, I, I definitely agree that the, the industry standard right now, the best practice is constitutional representative democracy.

Patri: Mm-hmm. But as you say, that's 1787. I think it was also, I mean, it being a frontier was [00:07:00] important. Also the philosophical flourishing around that time around freedom and equality was very much rooted in the enlightenment. And I think a lot of people don't know that the Europeans, they considered America crazy.

Patri: Like they seriously were like, this is insane, like this, like this democracy. Like it's insane and it's never gonna work. Like the American experiment they called it. So it, it was radical at the time. Now it's the industry standard, but it's gotten, it's gotten really out of date. And there's some people who, who just kind of assume that the status quo is the best that there is and only think about small changes.

Patri: But like, come on. We've learned so much about science, about mechanism design. We have all of this new technology. Like there is no way that the optimal form of government is still exactly the same as it was 200 plus years ago. It's funny you ask about what forms I actually, these days, kind of like, I don't like to answer that question or hold strong opinions because for me, I got into this because there wasn't a country that [00:08:00] was values aligned and run well.

Patri: Right? Those two things, there are almost none run well, none that were values aligned with me as a libertarian. And so I was like, what's going on? Why is this? And like, and and, and how can I fix it? Yeah. And so that kind of like sucked and I wanted to investigate it, but what I realized along the way is like, hey, what is the reason that there's not a country for any niche group mm-hmm.

Patri: Is that we don't have ways to start new countries for smaller groups of people. And that what I needed to do to get what I wanted was to figure out a way to unlock the creation of new jurisdictions in the world. And then I realized like, wait a second. Like that's gonna let lots of other people with their own idea of a good civilization try it.

Patri: And as far as the approach to like actually engineering a good society, like some people like think that if you agree on morals, you can like create a legal system. That's just, it's not true. We have a whole field of law and economics that like, there's no way, it's in the same way that like I could write [00:09:00] on a piece of paper like, yo, I want a car that goes zero to 60 in 1.1 seconds gets the infinity miles to the gallon and nobody ever dies in a crashes.

Patri: Like a specification is not an engineering plan. And it's the same way for government. And so, I realized that the thing I needed to do to have what I want would actually work, even if I'm wrong, about what makes a good society and even if I'm wrong, about how to build it. And so for, I don't know, maybe 18 years or so since coming up with kind of those theories, my focus is how can I unlock it so that groups of people can start new jurisdictions?

Patri: I'm trying to create a startup sector, right, to unlock competition and innovation. And it's not, it's not on me to say what those systems are. I mean, I, I'd be interested in seeing some variant of the terribly named a narco capitalism, the system. My dad was kind of a co-inventor of tried out but that's, that's just sort of a, a, a personal thing in general.

Patri: The one [00:10:00] thing, the one criteria that I, that I care about for all of these is, is exit. And the reason is that, If you know that people can freely leave, then you kind of don't have to worry about anything else. Not, not quite exactly, but in terms of what are the internal laws? Is it what I think is right and wrong?

Patri: All of that stuff. If you let people freely choose it, maybe there's like, maybe there's the option to have like death matches, right? And like just go at each other with chainsaws or cars or whatever. And like, people do it because like the money they get paid is gonna make a huge difference to their family and like elevate them, like whatever, like not my problem, right?

Patri: What matters is that people can choose it. So a place where like people weren't allowed to visit, media wasn't allowed to visit, family wasn't allowed to visit, or where people couldn't leave. That I would consider not. Okay. Yeah. And, and [00:11:00] support intervention. And obviously like there's corner cases, right?

Patri: Mm-hmm. Like, you don't wanna allow, probably allow zero jail time, right? What if somebody like runs up debts? Like, I'm not saying anybody needs to be able to quit on a moment's notice, but I would wanna keep things like that. Indentured servitude, like anything that prevents people leaving. If someone wants to indenture servitude for five years and they've like, gotten to see what things are like, fine.

Patri: But like 20 years, like, no. Yeah.

Malcolm: I, I, one thing I wanted to add color on that you were saying that I think is a point that a lot of people miss about the sort of default system of government we use today, which is typically a copy of the American model, is that the American model isn't even really a working model.

Malcolm: It's a model that collapsed into a stable state, but it's not working the way it was intended to work. Like early on it was created to like prevent a party system and stuff like that. And it's more just like, well, it doesn't completely collapse and it's better than the last system, but there is just so much room for improvement, which is what I love about what you're doing here.

Malcolm: Another area that [00:12:00] I wanted to. Before we get into free moving stuff, cause I really wanna get into that, I think that's interesting. But just at the beginning of the prenatal stuff, we'll get more into it later, but I think a lot of people would hear what he's saying and they're like, why would a government seed control for one of these charter cities?

Malcolm: And, and I want to get to your thoughts on this, but one thing that we've seen was in our government work, it's a lot of governments when they're talking about their rural areas, so if you're talking about a government with like a lot of small islands and stuff like that, beautiful idyllic places they have this fear of like, these places, they're depopulating because people, you have this massive urbanization and so they are willing to try radical things to try to bring vitality back into some of their areas.

Malcolm: I'm wondering what motivations you have

Patri: seen. I'm kind of on the other side of that in the sense that like, like, yay urbanization. If people need to move anyway, if new cities need to be built anyway then they can have regulatory autonomy. I think I would just worry like if there are strong, [00:13:00] like look, there are really strong economic forces pushing the world to urbanize and I would just be really wary about trying to fight that kind of uphill battle.

Patri: Mm-hmm. I mean, if there's innovative regulations that will help. Sure. But like I'm trying to fight the downhill battle of like, if you bring in the current best practices, then that is gonna be a huge boost to the city. Right. I believe that like effective governance, honest courts that act quickly, best practice laws that just boosts everything about a city and like makes the growth run downhill.

Patri: So this

Malcolm: is a really interesting question then to me. How do you make that argument to an existing country? Because my concern would be if I was coming to a country and I was saying, loosen the regulations and make one of your existing cities, one of your existing wealth sinners have,

Patri: have looser regulations.

Patri: No, no, no, no. I don't change laws on top of people. That's wrong. Okay. Like maybe in the future, if there's a system that's really proven, that's gone for a [00:14:00] while and a group of people has some really, they vote like 90% to adopt it. Like, okay, but for now, no. It needs to be opt in.

Malcolm: So it's about creating land that new cities can be built on.

Patri: Sort of no. Why, why would you? We got a world full of land, dude. There's lots of authentic, that's what I where I'm having trouble. It's about building a new city, an empty land. And, and for the government generally it's the motivation is just straightforwardly economic to get foreign direct investment to create jobs and to increase income.

Patri: Like that's the main thing. There, there are sometimes countries are, are interested in the sandbox aspect or even the fact that it's kind of, that it's kind of new and cool. But in the vast majority it's, it's economic development.

Malcolm: Economic development. Okay. That, that's fascinating. So, this is where I want to prime you with our thoughts on this and hear what you, where you think things are going.

Malcolm: So one of the things that we often focus on is in the developed world, or most of the developed world, [00:15:00] and, and, and not, it's not just the developed world, it's also the developing world. So, you have a fertility perhaps, and when I say most of the developing world as of 2019 by the UN zone statistics, All of Central America, south America and the Caribbean collectively fell below population rate.

Malcolm: And we live in an economy that requires constant, that was built on the assumption of constant growth. And there's a lot of stuff that we can get into in this. In other podcasts, like debt instruments that require constant growth are social security systems that require constant growth or marketplaces that require constant growth.

Malcolm: But as the world begins to enter a state where, and, and we had an economy that grew on average over the past 300 years because the number of workers were growing exponentially, and the productivity per worker was growing linearly, and we begin to see the number of workers declining exponentially, we're going to start to see economies decline on average, the world economy decline on average, which means we're entering a very interesting economic time where the only safe places to [00:16:00] invest will be the places with.

Malcolm: Technophilic populations that have high fertility rates,

Patri: but Nigeria

Malcolm: Woo. Right. But since Exactly. Yeah. None of the countries have figured this out yet. What are your thoughts? How does this work for the cities you economic and,

Simone: sorry, Malcolm, we have to, did you see him pixelate? Yeah. Yeah. Malcolm, you have to.

Simone: Okay. Well, we'll just

Patri: focus

Malcolm: on the first question. The second question I'll ask later is, how does this relate to freedom of movement at an intergenerational and cultural level? But, we'll, we'll ask that separately. So

Patri: here's where we're starting. So I'm, I'm totally with you. I'm a hundred percent with you on the fertility collapse and the problems.

Patri: I think maybe the only thing I, I'm not sure I agree with is whether GDP will go down. Certainly I don't think per capita GDP will go down, and I suppose it's a question for like total GDP of productivity increases versus population decline. But I agree, I'm like super worried about it.[00:17:00] I think it's a huge, huge problem, like a ticking time bomb.

Patri: And I think what a lot of people don't understand, because most people just have zero sum thinking intuitively, right? Positive sum, just positive sum is a much, much more evolutionary novel thing. So of course, we're like less adaptive to think about it and for population people think about the fact that more people means we're sharing more fixed resources.

Patri: But the thing is very, very little of our economy consists of fixed resources. Almost none of it does. And the vast majority of humans are able to create more than they consume and that they're actually like kind of economies of scale or benefits in a large population I'll give too. First is evolution actually happens faster.

Patri: Most people don't get this, but twice as many people means twice as many mutations. Means double the chance of finding beneficial mutations. So a larger population actually speeds up the evolution, which is super interesting. It's one reason that we've adapted as much to agriculture as we have, even though we're not totally adapted.

Patri: And the [00:18:00] other thing is ideas. Like most of the economy consists of ideas twice as many people, as twice as many ideas and ideas are, basically free to replicate. One person thinks them and everybody benefits from them. And so like more population is, is good. And then in terms of like meaning, like more resources to throw at the, the huge problems like settling other planets so that we're like less vulnerable to a certain set of natural disasters.

Patri: Also benefits as well. And so, yeah. And the fact that like all the existing systems are based on like a different demographic pyramid and they're all gonna break. Like, I gotta say, I got mixed feelings about that. Yeah. Like, maybe they should break. And like that, that's what the math says.

Patri: So, yeah. I, I, I really worry about this, this, this fertility stuff.

Malcolm: Yeah. What I'd love you to pontificate on further is when I look around the world, the countries that seem to have this fixed the most are countries [00:19:00] with a. Ethnically and culturally diverse population, but with a population that has a strong sense of cultural identity.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. So the, the most clear example here would be Israel whereas the, the counter example would be countries with an e ethnically and, and culturally homogenous pop population like Korea, which typically have the lowest fertility rates. So one, I think charter cities naturally lend themselves to diverse populations, but how do you create the sense of identity or do you even think that's necessary to maintain a high fertility rate?

Malcolm: And how do you think about culture building as it relates to creating these new

Patri: sorts of entities? I mean, it's been a while since I've looked into this, but it, it's, it's my impression that. You know that, that a huge amount of the fertility rate relates to education, length of education, women getting educated and women as equal partners in society, which [00:20:00] kind of sucks because what I want is a world where women have all of those things and we're making enough babies.

Patri: And so, that makes the solution tough. And so places like, Africa and India are gonna be a, like a massive percent of the world's population. But like, is that gonna last most likely with the pattern we've seen as they move up the income ladder and become more like westernized or, when it's the whole world, it's more just like developed that their fertility rates will probably plummet too.

Patri: In terms of like charter cities I think that. There's some countries that have tried prenatal policies, that there's various things that you can do. And having more jurisdictional experimentation means that more different groups are trying more different things, whether it's different laws or policies, whether it's a different culture Right.

Patri: Or building communities differently. Right. Like, I mean, come on. Like, like the, the suburban America thing or the [00:21:00] urban Dangerous America thing, right? Like the best way to run to, to like raise kids is for them to be able to like run around and play with other kids. And that makes it easier for the parents.

Patri: Like we're doing it all wrong, as in like Brian Kaplan's book. So I think there's a lot of things that communities can, can experiment with. I mean, I'm moving to Austin imminently and I'm talking to various people who have communities where they live in proximity to, to decide where to live.

Simone: Well. Okay. That's really interesting. Yeah. Can I ask you a question? Please. Yeah, so I mean, I'll say I personally struggle with the idea of of city states or charter cities because we constantly see people complain about wanting to start or have communities or like live somewhere where it's really cool, but then very few people are willing to move or they want to go to where everyone already is and it's really hard to get that critical mass.

Simone: Yeah. And, and it's interesting, you see cities like Austin start to form because that's where everyone already is. I don't, I don't know of any [00:22:00] example where someone has seated that, like Austin was already like the cool city of Texas. Yeah. And then there were a bunch of sort of tax incentives that got all the tech people to go to Austin because it was like the one Okay.

Simone: City, like from a like sort of progressive standpoint in a tax advantaged state, I also is city Red

Patri: State. That's the formula. Yeah.

Simone: Right. And, and so, I mean, I, I get that Charter Cities could possibly game that formula and that other cities have done that as like tax savings internationally, but. In the end, I feel like I get this impression that people are more living in like tech-based spheres, where like there isn't necessarily a, a one city where they go to, but it's like sort of social graphs that tend to be governed by the same social laws and work in the same like investment spheres and kind of live off their own floating economies.

Simone: But they're like cloud economies. They're not anchored to any place. And the only way that to me, I feel like a charter city would really pick up or get off the ground is for an industry, like [00:23:00] let's say with repro tech, we're talking about, well, it kind of sucks that you can't have like really high levels of education and, and female workforce participation and.

Patri: But if you had the uterine replicator Exactly.

Simone: It's gotta help. If you had like a charter city that was like built around. Yeah. Like, genetically modify people to high heaven, like artificial wounds all the way, like zero ethics boards, like letter rip. I, I do feel like some communities can build around that, but I, I've never heard charter cities discussed.

Simone: As like tech hubs or as like regulatory free for all zones in a like really groundbreaking way. Like maybe they'll be like, oh yeah, well, like, we'll be okay with crypto regulation. Are there any examples of charter cities or plans for charter cities that are like really like. Violently different, or even like, like thunderdome, like you were kind describing like yeah, we get a gladiatorial

Patri: battles ethnicity.

Patri: Don't that word violent, like, I mean, look, there is one charter [00:24:00] city, Honduras Prospera. There is one. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And their, their, and their legal system is English, common law based. Mm-hmm. Drawing from the best jurisdictions around the world. I think they took Texas mortgage law and Delaware corporate law.

Patri: Right, right. And put together. But the way I see it is that what I'm in this for is for people to try radical new systems and find the next best thing eventually, right. But product market fit today. It's just bringing best practices and honest sufficient courts to new places, right? That's product market fit.

Patri: Not because there's not gonna be experimentation, but because this stuff is brand new and we haven't kind of proven ourselves. And I think like crypto is the place where the governance innovation is really happening right now. Mm-hmm. Because it's so much easier in the cloud. And so I think that those tools and governance systems will be there to draw on when people want to wanna create more radical things.

Patri: In terms of what you said about the population, yeah. We call that the cold start problem. It's one of the top [00:25:00] couple. Problems that any charter city startup faces, right? Is people wanna move where people are and how do you get them to move? And, we have a few answers. So, like, apologies, network state concept.

Patri: Mm-hmm. Or you can look at what Praxis is doing is the idea of recruiting a values aligned community online who get together in meetups and build social bonds with the intention of moving together. Mm-hmm. Now, until one of these has, has happened, we won't really know will those people move.

Patri: But I, I think if you get a. If you get to the degree to which there are like compact social graphs, right? Where people mainly have connections within a given set of people. Mm-hmm. Who can work, work remotely or are in the same industry. I think the idea is, and it has to be a set of those people who would want to move someplace and live under a new regulatory system.

Patri: And that may sound like a lot, but we're talking about kind of like [00:26:00] the entire population of the world, the entire like nomad population of the world to just find some of these connected graphs where it's like, hey, if this, if like the thousand people closest to me in a social graph, like all moved someplace and look, we're not talking about like the middle of the ocean anymore.

Patri: Like Honduras, Prospera is on Roton, right? An island which has a bunch of tourist stuff in an airport. Praxis is looking at some countries around the Mediterranean that have like lots of stuff going on. So it's not just those thousand people. But you know, I, I think that we have a shot.

Patri: I mean, look at this Zulu thing that I just got back from a few weeks ago. This was this pop-up village in Monte Negro where 200 people rented out a whole resort for two months and then there was about 300 visitors that came through like me over the course of those two months. Vitalik Budin was one of the kind of main forces behind it, and it was awesome.

Patri: People loved it. Lots of people are like, how do I come next year? So this was like a group of people [00:27:00] into longevity and crypto and network states, two cities who all got together. And I think that to me, What was so exciting about it was not just that it worked this one time for this one vertical, but there are a ton of different nomad verticals and there's no reason this couldn't work for all of them.

Patri: So just any vertical again, where there's a pretty compact, like highly connected social graph you, you can start doing these things and having people like get together in person for longer stretches of time and maybe have that location move over time. And then as there's that in-person bonding, I think it's natural to open permanent sites.

Patri: Zulu is already thinking about this. We had a bunch of conversations about what kind of jurisdictions to look at. Cuz one of their criteria is, and this works for Monte Negro as being someplace where the government is open to talking about changing regulations. I mean longevity regulations and the crypto regulations were presented to the head of state during Zulu and they're looking at other [00:28:00] countries like that for, for the future.

Patri: So I think that you could just do this bond more and more, have this happen more each year, have it grow more, and then have permanent settlements and whether people float between them or stay in them, it's kind of up to the people. What

Malcolm: are your thoughts on Simon? I can interrupt you here just, just for your heads up, Simone.

Malcolm: We were invited to Zulu and with Praxis, the Collins Institute does have a contract with them to provide their education system. So we're, we've been very involved with a lot of this stuff and, and I think it may look like we're just total outsiders to the space, but it is something we've been very interested in.

Malcolm: And the core thing that we were looking at was praxis that I found really interesting that I wanted to get your pontification on, is how do you build holidays? How do you build culture for New City states to create a sense of identity? And what do good state holidays look like if you're them from scratch?

Malcolm: And do you think that they're necessary?

Patri: Yeah, I mean, I think [00:29:00] again, I'm I'm very meta I've like worked to find what I think is the highest point of leverage. And so in terms of like the design of a society for like common culture and values I, I don't get into the specifics of that, but what I will say is in, in like our greatest bottleneck is founders.

Patri: Like I, I've stopped. I don't follow up on leads to countries anymore cause I have way more countries interested in talking than I have founders. Wow. And it's been like that for, for a couple of years, that things have really changed. And I, so I often get asked like, what do I look for in a founder? And obviously the first thing is all of the same things as everyone else.

Patri: But the second thing I used to say, some real estate experience and I totally changed my mind. I think that was just wrong. I think that that's something more of a commodity can be hired. My like, One specific, or first specific thing now is community building experience and then the, the last one is like, connections with a given country or [00:30:00] region or like really strong partnership building ability to create them because a, a charter city is like a, a partnership with a single like key stakeholder.

Patri: But that community building side like that, that is a key skill that's needed because these things, whether it's an online community or the first in person community, they are small communities. And so people who are good at that, what is the experience design for a country like and who think about things like songs and holidays and things like that, I think is a really important part of this.

Patri: So Simone,

Malcolm: what were you gonna ask

Simone: as a solution to the Coldstar problem? What are your thoughts on like company town 2.0 where a company like Google or Amazon or anyone with sufficient funds who's also bringing in a lot of talent and possibly tax revenue approaches a nation or even a state in the United States and says, Hey, allow us to create a city, allow us to create our own laws or have these sorts of allowances [00:31:00] and bring in people and own their housing, and own their, their restaurants and everything.

Simone: A lot of people describe company towns as being very dystopian, but it also seems like it could be a quick solution to the Cold Start problem. Do you feel like there are serious problems with it?

Patri: Well, I mean, first of all, it's good because it's more cyberpunk and, the cyberpunk future is, is part of what I'm, what I'm here for.

Patri: Yeah, sign me up. I think it's great. No, I think I, I think you're very on point. I think it's a great solution to the Coldstar problem. Again, like people need to be able to exit. Like I don't worry about a company town so much, if it's Google Engineers, right? Like, They're not going to, they're not gonna like be in a situation where like they're getting charged more than they're getting paid in salary or any of that.

Patri: Like, terrible crap that happened in company towns, right? Like they'll just go to Facebook or whatever. Yeah. So I, I think it's great. It's a great idea. Yeah. And we'll, and we'll just see whether they go for it. So

Malcolm: there's a great story here I have to tell. So WeWork at one point decided to try to create [00:32:00] like a their own building complex, right?

Malcolm: That was like WeWork branded, like live and work, right? And they initially had planned to make it like a company tone, like they were going to stock it with their own employees, but they were so disorganized that right before launch they realized that they paid almost none of their employees enough to afford it.

Malcolm: So they ended up having to desperately find other people to fill it. And I think that follows your point there where if you're doing a company town like this, make sure you're not building it for the CEO's salary, you're building it for your employee's

Patri: salary. Yeah, I mean, I think that effective organizations are just gonna solve that automatically.

Patri: Like you only need like one competent project manager to make sure that doesn't happen. But yeah, I mean, one way of, one way of generalizing, cuz I'm sorry, I'm, I'm relentlessly meta, actually, I'm not sorry that I'm relentlessly meta the company town. Idea is, is saying that like, if you can get a, like a set of [00:33:00] people who all have like shared economic activity and like shared culture such that socializing with each other is valuable and like an existing community, like, this is what's, what's different.

Patri: And like one, it's like not happening yet, right? Because these ideas are so new. But it's, it's my opinion that, not the first ones, but that the first really big. Charter cities that happen will be drawn from like large existing communities. So for example I worked a little bit on a concept to make an eSports city, right?

Patri: Like for gamers where it's like, yes you have like a huge eSports stadium where you might see your favorite streamer having coffee or at a restaurant where people would move to. From, for, from the, my investment perspective, I was mainly stuck on, I just didn't see any like, regulatory things.

Patri: I was like, well, maybe legalization of betting on them or something, but there's not really regulations needed. But, even though governance change is my focus, like the broader [00:34:00] sta space of these new communities, what I call sovereign communities is it can be value aligned or culture aligned or based on like a lifestyle thing, having different education system.

Patri: So I kind of consider the work I do on governance to be in this broader space of any group of people who get together to live in person. With some differences from the rest of society, some parts of the Civilizational Text Act that they wanna rewrite. And so I think that drawing from big existing communities like eSports or like Oprah, like I think celebrity c like Oprah City, Tony Robinson.

Patri: Oh, yes, yes. I don't know. I would consider living in those places, people who have like huge audiences and have opinions about health and wellness and how to live a good life.

Martha

Simone: Stewarttown, that's for

Patri: me. I, I, I had the, I had the pleasure of having dinner with her actually in South South Korea like some years ago.

Patri: And she's amazing. I think she is. I think yeah, I think those will be like, we have to prove the concept. We weirdos. But then I think it's gonna be stuff like that. [00:35:00] Yeah. So

Malcolm: here what he's saying, a lot of people may think this is an insane concept, but if you look at the early city states that made up the Americas, a number of them were essentially celebrity colonies, where they were based around a celebrity peer preacher who often had interesting ideas about Brigham Young, well, Brigham Young.

Malcolm: It's an example of a celebrity city state, but that's not America.

Patri: Right.

Malcolm: That's more a religious city state. What I'm talking about is celebrity protestant preachers who would've been seen as just another person within their faction, but then had interesting ideas about things like diet and stuff like that.

Malcolm: Very similar to your modern celebrity. Did Kellogg

Simone: create something like a No, he just, early America,

Malcolm: that was about a hundred

Simone: years, I think. Yeah. That, that was really late year.

Patri: It was small, but in the baby. Yeah. That's awesome. I didn't, I didn't know about the, the preachers having lifestyle stuff. I mean, obviously, religions have a lot of lifestyle stuff in them, but you know, it's very old and immutable.

Patri: Yeah. I mean, it [00:36:00] wasn't conf

Simone: confus. What is Confucius if he is not a lifestyle brand, what if, what is Jesus, if not a lifestyle brand? Let's, I've actually

Patri: been getting, by the way, I've been getting into the Jesus lifestyle brand lately.

Simone: Yes. Well, I mean, you got the long hair going, you

Patri: know this. Yeah. I, I've been, I, there's this This Christian preacher, I really like John Mark Comer.

Patri: Mm-hmm. I, I got into him because he has videos on, on the Sabbath, so, bringing Shabbat to Christians because it's one of the 10 commandments that was kept. Like, it's not one of the like two or three that changed, but it's kind of mostly ignored and he's into kind of slowing down and, and, and minimalism and the, the Sabbath is one of his, his practices.

Patri: But he, he has a recent book called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry because hurry is a profound enemy to spiritual life. And I learned like these awesome points about how like Jesus literally says Hey, I have an easy life. If you want an easy life, come with me. Listen to me, follow my [00:37:00] principles, and do the stuff that I do.

Patri: But yet, Christian churches have gone so far from that. They're not teaching people to like to live like Jesus. There's some little principles from there that they teach, but it's like, it's this whole different thing. And like Jesus was very clear, if you want to, like, if you wanna be like me, live like me, right?

Patri: Mm-hmm. It wasn't just about like, listen to my sermons, it was about a different way to live. One that we've very much gone away from in the modern day. And so there's this like much smaller subset of like Christian religious authorities today who actually like put this viewpoint forward and think that the church has kind of lost its way and that it should be saying.

Patri: And but the problem is that living like Jesus is. It's really hard. It's really hard in the minor world. Maybe it could be done better in a community dedicated to

Simone: it. I dunno, actually, I'm just gonna say, like, we don't people

Patri: that cross this here much anymore. The point

Malcolm: have you seen, because [00:38:00] I actually think it would work really well if you're talking about intergenerationally durable cultures and stuff like that.

Malcolm: And as a good recruitment mechanism. Any celebrity preachers or anything, has the Charter City community reached out to any of them about starting potentially a religiously themed charter community?

Patri: No, but it's a, it's a great idea cuz it's just a classic community seed. I think we, we've talked to some, the closest is talking to some.

Patri: Like very, very large musicians in Africa who have kind of a big following, for like, both their music, but it's like, it's, it's more than that in Africa. Yeah. These huge artists, there's also like a, a, a culture aspect too, but it's a great idea.

Simone: Sweet. Okay. I wanna take us from utopia lifestyle brand cities, which sound really cool to another form of city state that also addresses a major, we'll say wicked problem which is [00:39:00] penal colonies.

Simone: So you talk a, talk about in the beginning of this, the, value of being able to get away. But I, I do think that, there's, there's this growing concern about crime in cities. Some nations are like, well, just. Screw it. Let's like round up all the criminals, put 'em in jail. What are you pitching here,

Malcolm: Simone?

Malcolm: Well, I'm just wondering,

Patri: like, I dunno, but it's gonna be awesome.

Simone: I, everyone wants to like, create these solutions. I'm like company towns that own people, penal colonies, make it happen. But I mean, I, one of the things that we're really, interested in is, recidivism and, and people concerned about crime in cities and, also like, it, it really sucks and it seems really stupid to me that you just lock someone away and that, that costs a lot to people For sure.

Simone: When instead, like, if this is about removing people from a society where it's not working for them, would it be possible to build a society where it does work for them or where at least they're not hurting? I wanna reword. That's an,

Malcolm: that's an

Patri: insane idea. I mean, it's, it's not like Australia is like a functioning modern country.

Patri: I

Simone: [00:40:00] know. It's not like that. I mean, come on.

Malcolm: So think about how many problems it solves. So one states, it costs them a lot of money to to house an incarcerated population. They do have a recidivism problem. They would likely be willing to pay for some external entity to take. The, this population, especially if it was being handled in a humane manner or more of a humane manner than their existing

Patri: prison system.

Patri: It could even be opt-in and you could opt in. Yeah, opt in. Like I think it's really tricky. You have to be careful, like I said, like the right to exit to me is like the thing that kind of makes it so that we don't worry about other things. If it was opt-in, then, then sure. But look, so, so my, one of the things my dad does is study lots of different legal systems across the ages.

Patri: He has a book, legal system's, very different from ours and banishment. Was a very traditional punishment, right? Because it is very expensive to keep people in jail through much of history. It wasn't done except for very important prisoners or for like shorter periods of time. And so I think banishment is [00:41:00] like a fair and effective solution.

Patri: Like a society should be able to decide who's in there and who isn't as far as like crime and cities. I mean, I really think it's ineffective governments without incentives. Like I don't think a privately run city that makes its money from rents and taxes. Like that's just, that's not gonna happen.

Patri: Mm-hmm. And by the way, like as a little, I used to be so against taxes, and now I'm like, wait, if, if you have an entity, like a, a for-profit company, like creating gdp, then like having an like taxes or just there's like a rev share. Yeah, it's like they have an equity share. If you're taking like seven and a half percent taxes, not a random number because that's what you need in the O C D to not be able to tax haven Uhhuh.

Patri: It's like you have a seven and a half percent equity share of the economy, which you're doing work to create. It kind of makes all the sense in the world. But yeah, I agree. Like again, if you're, if you're like a profit maximizing. Company that's trying to like, make money by making a great place to live and work that people wanna come [00:42:00] to that's growing where people's incomes are increasing that, that's the