 This is my John Snow look by the way when my hair is just right Okay, we got a slide So at the dawn of the 21st century I was dissatisfied with my home country the US did not fit my values and the customer service was terrible Like I just wanted like a Boda phone kind of level and it wasn't even close So I thought maybe I'm in the wrong country. I looked around the world and really places weren't much better So it's like there's something really strange about this government industry that it's the largest sector in the global economy But the biggest company posts like staggering losses year after year and the worst companies Horror and so that was the puzzle in the early 2000s Most industries are constantly innovating and improving But most governments are barely innovating and they sometimes even go backwards So a lot of people look at government through the lens of Is it moral or does it represent me and I take a different view? I say drop that and just look at government as an industry So what do we see first the firms are massive and we know what that means for innovation and Second the barrier to entry. It's not just high. It's like undefined. You're like De-referencing a null pointer like there's not a process that's known And then the cost of switching providers like moving between countries is really high getting lower year after year But still really high and so from this angle This kind of cuts through all of these other views and just says we have an industry. That's a cartel of Huge companies that have local monopolies and high customer lock-in like of course this shitty service Of course, there's no innovation like the problem is not philosophical It's structural and this view also suggests an answer, right? We've got this legacy industry doing a crappy job. How do we fix it with? Startups with competition. So, you know now I'd reduce this problem of finding a home country for myself to something simple We just have to change the world so that people can create new jurisdictions They can create cities and countries like they start companies today simple, right? I mean not easy but simple So my first iteration was C setting the idea was that by building communities on the ocean We'd open a new frontier where we could create new societies new jurisdictions Then the barrier to entry might be as low as a cruise ship Not because the high seas are lawless. I'm so tired of that. That's not how it works It actually works in a really cool way where each ship registers with a country flies their flag And it's under their jurisdiction almost like a floating embassy. The country is Franchising their sovereignty to the vessel like which is amazing. It's very network-steady and because it's a virtual association In order to have some level of autonomy You just have to find one country anywhere in the world that's willing to create a custom flag for you They want to serve this new market So I wrote a book on C setting in 2004 With little with Pearl script so you could come on on every on every paragraph and then in 2007 Peter Teal funded me to start the first competitive governance non-profit the sea setting Institute And we reached millions of people with the idea of building new societies including some of your audience and speakers here today and We got the message out so well that we were even mark mocked by talk shows Which like now I wear is this total badge of honor Connected to land as libertarians are to reality And you know he wasn't all wrong After starting the Institute my partner and I running it knew that we needed more than a non-profit and some renderings We needed to build So we in 2011 we started working on a medical tourism cruise ship company, which we thought was promising But now let's go back meanwhile Dubai pioneered the modern zone in 2004 They wanted to create a financial center and they knew that their homegrown Sharia law was not a good supportive tech for that product Now laws people most people don't realize that law is open source Meaning it's published freely. It's available. It's copyable. So Dubai Forked London's code base. They copied it and modified it for their own uses Leaving it in English with the rest of their laws in Arabic And they even created their own courts and brought in UK judges who were experienced with this codes base But in 2009 a commas Paul Romer now know Ballori it brought his take on the idea and his analysis of why Expanding the traditional idea of zones to become charter cities Would be an incredible tool for development Many technical details to be worked out But those of us who are already starting to pursue these things can already tell that there's no roadblock There's no impediment other than a failure of imagination Like Dubai Romer's zones would set their own commercial law, but in his model Rather than being set up and run by the country as Dubai did it was set up and run by some guarantor nation that had good laws and high investor trust a Brilliant group in Honduras saw the potential of this idea and they they created the first real-world program Unlike Romer's concept these zones will be developed in a public-private Partnership with a company working with Honduras as the host country. I heard about this in 2011 was like holy crap Like wow like this this stuff is real We can like create a new jurisdiction on land where things are easier to build and so my co-founder and I Pivoted to charter cities After a year of work and the world's first MOU for a charter city with Honduras We realized in 2012 that we were just too early like Honduras had changed their constitution But they didn't have any budget yet like this was like a Google 20% project like kind of nights and weekends like side hustle And so, you know, it was not gonna happen soon We figured it would take years when they get this program and so, you know, we wound things up and did other things In the years after that starting in 2012 to 2017 Bitcoin started showering wealth on people who were highly highly value aligned And this has actually turned out to be critical in my fund the majority of investment dollars Comes from crypto so really important enabler Then in 2017 the Zeta program gave initial approval to Honduras Prospera, which you've seen and heard about here I'm like after 15 years a startup city was finally happening So I saw this as it's gotten real, you know, we're going from dreamers to doers. This is actually happening There's gonna be whole new industry around these ideas. So I started work on Pernoma's capital Which is the first charter city investment fund We closed in 2019 with some incredible backers including the visionary who brought all of us here together today And we fund companies that are actually building like I love that I finally get to show videos of like dirt Like real dirt like dirt is exciting dirt is not a rendering dirt is not an idea or a metaphor dirt is real And you've heard about Prospera and praxis. So I'll show you a few others When I close my eyes Sometimes I imagine a magical sunset Against the silhouette of greenhouse full of fresh fruits and the light cool breeze against a sparkling pond full of tilapia I imagine my son playing in green grass and my family sitting down to a healthy meal in the home I can call my own in the community. I helped to build So that's small farm cities which is turning empty land in Africa into profitable farming villages with microgrid infrastructure and affordable housing Now it Tana in Nigeria has been approved for the first digital free zone in Africa Maybe in the world. This is like a new type of special economic zone that adds incorporation banking and other features And they're building a district for builders where three thousand people will enjoy co-living co-working Restaurants and nature within the hundred and fifty square kilometer lecky free zone, which includes the largest refinery in Africa real dirt and In Palau our company metropolis just got the green light from the president Senate and Congress shout out to lane over there to create an offshore corporate registry where you can incorporate with the laws of Delaware or Singapore or Taiwan remember laws are open source There's nothing to stop a country from importing the laws and precedents of another country like a software library So you'll be able to incorporate offshore with standard documents or port an existing company to Palau like moving data centers keeping all of your documents and This is so real that this week. I am going to prosper to get my genes edited With a treatment only available there like that is real really really real So join us if you want to learn more you can find my podcasts and interviews Follow us on our socials portfolio socials and my DMs are open