 I think it's worth mentioning that there's like kind of two really different models of charter cities like one is kind of more what I worked on with seasteading, which is getting a bunch of like-minded people together where you are competing with San Francisco and New York and Singapore You're trying to get people from the developed world together and and for me I'm from the developed world and that's what I want I want to get together with my tribe and go start a self-governing city together But like Mark said it's that's like so so much harder and what I mainly focus my effort efforts on now with with pronomos are Projects like in Africa where there's tens of millions of people who are moving to cities You don't have to like compete with New York You just have to be slightly better than the other cities that are being built right and so just in terms like your marketing There's like you don't need marketing. You don't need to sell people like your customers are lining up and Your cities are for the locals and that it's just it's really really different and I think that the bread and butter is Cities for locals. That's someplace like Prospera. They're kind of doing a hybrid, right? So this is both for Hondurans and for people from the developed world coming and doing this biotech But you know, I think a lot of people have it in their mind with seasteading. There are no locals, right? So it's like, okay, a bunch of us are gonna get together and go make iron ran city or whatever But that's not what the bread and butter. That's not what most charter cities are today and what I think is easiest So this is kind of funny because usually I'm doing Pottery's line, but I'm gonna I guess take a slightly different tack I agree with pottery's point, but I've actually become a little bit more sympathetic to kind of competing with global talent Vitalik buterin organized us all who last year Which was a pop-up city in Montenegro and currently they have Natalia pop-up city at Prospera and this kind of made me realize that there is an existing digital nomad community that is kind of pretty Nomadic and open to looking for new places and new experiences I don't think you can populate a city with these people But you can use them to help seed a charter city in in Zanzibar for example What we're looking at is kind of competing with other East African countries to attract talent So I don't think we're gonna get Americans who are working in tech and SF to move there But if you're working in tech in Nairobi, or maybe you're working in tech in Johannesburg, right? We think we might be a competitive option for you And so thinking about like right how these dynamics what customer level you're focusing at I think is really critical as you think about how to develop a charter city totally agree on competing regionally Yeah, well, so if you're talking about this kind of market in governance where the mechanism for Consent in this scenario is that your it's voice and exits. You're exiting you're voting with your feet And that is how you are opting into the system, you know Patrick you mentioned the your your perception that democracy doesn't scale well What is the relationship between democracy and start-up cities? so we're talking about alternative governance and so I think part of what charter cities are is a way to open a space of Trying out new ways to govern people So I like in government to an industry and I would say that like constitutional representative democracy as pioneered by the United States 250 years ago, which people in Europe said was completely crazy that would never work is now the industry standard It's what a lot of countries do with what most successful countries do does not all but you know It was invented 250 years ago, and we have new technologies. We have new scientific understanding There's I think it's it would be absurd to think of that as kind of like the end of history that to me governance is a Technology it's much more like engineering than like Objectivism there's all kinds of different things you can do different arrangements. You have different tech You can create different types of institutions And so I think that it can it can it can keep evolving But we when you don't have a way to try out new systems to try out new institutions Then of course it's not going to move forward. So I see charter cities. I mean Today they're an alternative to democracy just because that's the dominant thing But in general what they are is a startup sector a way to try out alternatives to whatever the paradigm is today So that we can find new ways of governing that work better now that could be a tweak on democracy, right? You could do some kind of like Representative or liquid democracy where people voted like every day transfer their proxies try to make democracy work better It could be something totally undemocratic It could be anything else but the the idea at a meta level is let's try alternatives and look it Maybe that would be like Athens, right? There was a time and place. Well, the alternative that was tried was democracy, right? It's just when that was like a new thing. Let me can I broaden that for you mark because beyond democracy There's also just the idea of liberalism. That's what a lot of people here are interested in just you know individual freedoms Liberty That's what attracts a lot of libertarians to this project is the idea that this will result in jurisdictions that are more libertarian But what what do you view the relationship between liberalism broadly defined and charter cities? Yeah, this is a very big question To I guess kind of thinking about it I'm I think a bigger fan of democracy than patria is I think Democracy does scale to an extent right like Thomas Jefferson when he said right the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots He said like we need a new constitution every 20 years. I I think right Are there a lot of things that could be improved about American governance? Yes, of course Did it work better than I suspect a lot of the original people had anticipated? Probably also when I think about I guess where charter cities can play a role It's in this Kind of working with governments partnering with them improving capacity improving delivery of public goods Creating the opportunity for locals to get better jobs Perhaps this evolves into something more. Perhaps it doesn't I'm relatively agnostic on this I come from this from a little bit more of a Economic development angle. I think more broadly the question of kind of where does this fit in the liberal framework? There's been some talk about post liberalism, right? Are we in the end of a liberal era to me? That's I think kind of the wrong I guess question right a lot of people think about liberalism and they basically think about New Deal liberalism or great society liberalism but if you look at right liberalism has a Centuries old tradition in the Anglo world and part of Europe and also different traditions in other parts of the world But those are kind of the dominant in modern society and these idea of right individual rights of private property rights of Organizing government to meet the needs of the people I think are really embedded in liberalism and now it's become to mean like certain subsets of these things plus the welfare state Plus kind of government engagement, but those aren't necessarily tied to liberalism They're tied to one set like sub-sector of liberalism that has come out So I do believe kind of charter cities self-governing cities are in this broad tradition of liberalism Where society can choose how to organize themselves in a manner that they think best suits their needs And hopefully this kind of opens the door up to alternative forms of governance Right, maybe people like living in liberal democratic societies great Maybe they want slightly more competition in a charter city. That's a subset of that liberal democratic society I think we should be open to a large plurality of institutional arrangements and see which ones work. I Live in a surfer community in Queens in New York City And it's really fun because we have a bunch of surfers and people who are extreme adrenaline junkies And then we have a bunch of working-class normal Queens folks And then we have a bunch of people who live in public housing who you know frequently work at the airport nearby JFK The point being I don't exist in this community of other Intellectuals of other reason employees of other libertarians of other even like laptop class type workers. I Have a very You know unique and special community and I feel like I get a lot out of that exchange of perspectives What is this look like when we have you know many thousands or hundreds of thousands of charter cities But there's a little bit of self-sorting that happens And we end up with this homogeneity that ends up making it so that we never interact with people who think differently than we do Are you worried about this risk at all? Not really I mean Robin Hansen gave an interesting talk last night about the importance of having multiple different cultures something I'm quite sympathetic to I view the internet as a giant sorting mechanism and first it sorted subcultures online and those subcultures have began to instantiate in the real world and so right if you look at American history There used to be Democrats and Republicans both living in cities Sometimes cities would even elect Republican mayors right that like never happens anymore And so this sorting mechanism Exists it's going on if people choose to associate with people who share their beliefs who share their interests Sometimes it's gonna be ideological beliefs. Sometimes it's just gonna be lifestyle All right, I want to live in a healthy neighborhood, and I think if people sort along those lines like why not? I mean Look, there's just pros and cons right like if you sort with people like you in a certain way You get the advantage of being able to live together in that way and learn together and you get the disadvantage of being Exposed to less views so I really think it depends like we have to break it down into which specific attributes and like those Attributes that really only work if the whole community agrees I think we should be sorting into them a lot more because like the pros are worth the cons with attributes We're like you're not really gonna have the same laws, right? I mean, there's a lot of health things, you know banning microplastics or something that like you would really need a whole community to do And so let's sort that way and then but I think there is some risk that people will maybe like over sort We see that on the internet, but I just think that that's small compared to the gains. I I hear that I'm pretty sympathetic to that I also think that mark your point makes a lot of sense of like there's already been a little bit of over sorting in The sense that like I lived in homogeneous Brooklyn right before this and there was a certain Degree to which it felt like, you know, I'm entirely surrounded by essentially social justice oriented wokeness believing Bushwick and you know beds die hipsters and getting away from like there's already a High degree of homogeneity that exists in a lot of our cities right now And so it's like well, you know charter cities might be homogenous But would they necessarily be more homogenous than what we're already living in in a lot of cases? I mean mark your you live in DC, right? Like that's a I think it also relates to Kind of the previous discussion we were having about who the target customer is Right, I visited see that morta's on before coming to Prospera and they're targeting working-class Hondurans And most these working-class Hondurans are happy to have a home. That's safe. Their kids can play outside It's somewhat close to their job. They're not looking for right ideological friends They're looking for a good home and when you target people I think on the lower income end of the spectrum They're really looking to better their lives right kind of living with people who share ideological beliefs and culture is a luxury belief And so given that the potential market of low-income people who are rapidly urbanizing is probably two three orders of magnitude Larger than high-income people who might live in a charter city, right? Just functionally the the market is going to provide for those people and they're not going to sort ideologically They're going to sort based on like job location internal amenities etc. my my only concern with optimizing or prioritizing for the for economic growth and Kind of being agnostic about but let's first of all let's acknowledge like that There's serious problems in Honduras. This is just the ease of doing business Scale ranked, you know, 133 you can see all sorts of terrible rankings here starting a business 170 Dealing with construction permits huge problem 158 So, you know Economic growth the the theory the the libertarian theory put forth by Milton Friedman was that political free freedoms would follow economic freedoms but Then we look at the massive economic growth in a place like China We see like the the engine of growth that Shenzhen has been And it's not clear to me if That's exactly true that the political freedoms will necessarily follow and so Is that a risk if you're disentangling liberalism from The charter cities movement that we're just going to create a bunch of little tyrannical fiefdoms around the world I mean, I think that it turns out to Not be all the way true that political freedom leads to economic freedom What I would say instead is that political freedom seems to lead to moderate levels of economic freedom but also to high levels of welfare state and inefficiency and and Capture and all of this stuff and that places like Singapore and Dubai They have the highest levels of economic freedom You know Singapore is a one-party state and So I think that what we see is that you don't get the highest levels of economic freedom and economic growth from democracies It's like it's this safe path to do like pretty well, but not better than that but what about the inverse the political and freedoms and civil liberties following the economic growth because that that's the more concerning picture to me that You know China has experienced economic growth, but their people live behind the Great Firewall They don't have political speech. They're free speech. They're surveilled. I Don't know this does charter do charter cities solve what we're trying to make a world where more people can start more Jurisdictions and where there's more choice And I think if people get to shop for jurisdictions I mean I believe in markets and I believe in people being able to choose for themselves I think that they will get places that match them better than they do today with fewer options I mean people in China a lot of them can't easily leave there's a lot of places that won't take them in so more Jurisdictions more choice. It's gonna serve people better And if they turn out not to want something that we think they should want like maybe we should we think that they Shouldn't want to be surveilled, but they actually don't care You know again, that's it's their choice to decide where they want to live Yeah, I think to echo Patry's point right one of the best things you can do to help Chinese people today is to Kind of open up the doors for Chinese migrants and say hey look if you have some level of education Like come to this country and work And we won't let you near government or sensitive industries because maybe you're a spy But beyond that like please come and that would be one of the best things to do today to Help China. I think I mean another way to answer your question is like look it's possible to have multiple values Right like I like charter cities. I love charter cities. I'm dedicating my career to them However, like I also like forms of liberalism Some degree of like quote-unquote constitutional rights, right like civil liberties things like that I think those things are quite valuable. It's possible. There's a tension there And one way to that I am navigating the tension is for example many of the projects that we are working with are in Democratic countries. I think all of them might be And so it's possible kind of given that this movement is small to choose and focus to Work on these projects in places that have some degree of value alignment that have some degree of an understanding of right like even though Charter cities are gonna have their own incentive structure and eventually it becomes an industry and like that might take over But like the initial conditions matter a lot and the initial culture and the initial values matter a lot as kind of ideologies and industries evolve and I think Us the people in this room can play a role and hopefully setting that Foundational level that can hopefully guide this to not only want charter cities per se But also have some sense of charter cities that hopefully reflect the values that we have as well Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show just asking questions You can watch another clip here or the full episode here new episodes drop every week So subscribe to reason TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or To the just asking questions podcast on Apple Spotify or any other podcatcher. 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