In this episode, we discuss the current state of our society and the need for a new kind of governance in the 21st century. We talk about why charter cities are the way to go, how they can be built, and why they should be our new political system.
00:00:28.860Hello, Simone! Our country is dealing with the aftermath of the election, and yet we filmed this before the election.
00:00:36.580With that being the case, I need to say that democracy doesn't work.
00:00:40.860It is a terrible system, one person, one vote.
00:00:43.740This year we explored the failure of democracy, while the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos.
00:00:49.500The Guardian caught us saying this, and did a piece on us recently, where they aired for us, on our behalf, our plan for a new governance system for a charter city.
00:01:25.760That is typical! Why has it done that?
00:01:34.860I'll just put this over here with the rest of the fire.
00:01:40.700And all they can think to do to attack us is more and more articles that get our message to more and more people.
00:01:51.200And nobody, like, you know, they'll do an article, like, here is their horrifying system of government that they developed.
00:01:57.700And then they put the whole slide deck there, which shows that they're just being misleading, and it's actually a pretty nuanced and neat system of government.
00:02:10.520Which is fundamentally, like, what is this system fundamentally?
00:02:18.380And I actually think, when we talk about the Haven State Network, that I think society is going to descend into, so a quick note on why charter cities are important and the direction I think society is going.
00:02:29.140So, with rapid fertility collapse, you're going to have two phenomenons.
00:02:33.660One phenomenon is many countries are going to have depopulated regions and regions that are experiencing massive brain drains, especially if they're a smaller country, like the Isle of Man, which is where we were going to pitch this.
00:02:43.900Or, you know, think of something like Greece or so many countries around the world that are in otherwise relatively stable areas, but as soon as somebody gets educated, they leave, right?
00:02:54.680And they've got beautiful landscapes, beautiful areas that people could set up shop, but it is really hard to keep people.
00:03:02.020And the best way to do that, the best way to draw educated people back is to get the types of businesses that employ educated people back.
00:03:09.700And that means the types of companies doing, like cutting-edge genetic research, or crypto, or AI.
00:03:15.520And so, I created a governance model that was designed to draw all of those types of companies into the country.
00:03:22.440One where AI can have citizenship, where cutting-edge genetic research can be done, where the governance model was baked into a DAO, which is a type of blockchain ledger, basically.
00:03:36.240Every aspect of it was designed to be as friendly to, like, cutting-edge economic stuff as possible, and as adaptable to changing things as possible.
00:03:46.380But, that's why I was like, okay, so I'm going to pitch this to these regions.
00:03:51.000But at the same time, the second effect of fertility collapse is going to be that right now, you know, you have, like, one elderly person for every, let's say, three working-age people.
00:04:01.460We will reach an age where every working-age person is going to be supporting, like, three elderly individuals.
00:04:06.940And in addition to that, elderly individuals will make up the majority of the electorate, and they will be able to vote more and more resources to themselves.
00:04:14.860And so, even though it's not, like, a viable system, they're not going to say one day, oh, we should cut Social Security.
00:04:20.460I mean, we've already seen that they're unwilling to do that.
00:04:25.900Well, taxes go up on the few economically productive individuals that are left.
00:04:32.240And as we pointed out, it's the economically productive regions of countries that typically have the lowest fertility rates.
00:04:37.640So, if you look, like, it was in the United States.
00:04:39.320And it would be so great if kids from poor family had just as much of a chance of being economically productive as somebody from an economically productive family.
00:04:49.280That is not a nut that societally we have figured out how to even come close to cracking, which means in the next generation, dramatically fewer people are going to be economically productive than it was in this generation, which means the taxes on those individuals need to be astronomically higher.
00:05:05.060Things aren't region locked in the way that they used to be in terms of economic models.
00:05:09.560It used to be that if I was a big CEO, I'd have a skyscraper and tons of people and hundreds of thousands of employees, or I'd have oil fields that I needed to protect.
00:05:19.240And so, a country could tax me, and I couldn't just, like, leave.
00:05:22.360They're like, oh, well, then we'll just see the assets or the oil fields or the, you know, human talent, right?
00:05:27.220Now, with AI, this has really flipped on its head to an extent.
00:05:31.320And we've seen this with the new startups, but we've also seen this in the way that big companies are going, where, like, they're just hiring a lot fewer people and, like, programming and stuff like that.
00:05:38.340Because they just don't need it, which concentrates the wealth in fewer and fewer people, which means these smaller and smaller groups of economically productive individuals, when the state goes after them for their money, they're just going to say, F it, I'm leaving.
00:05:51.640Especially if charter cities exist as an alternative.
00:05:54.300And these charter cities are nice, fun places with a lot of interesting people.
00:05:58.960And you're like, well, how can you do that?
00:06:00.620How do you sort of work your way into it?
00:06:02.560Well, you can start with them being vacation spots.
00:06:04.600By that, what I mean is you build, like, yearly conferences there.
00:06:08.460Like, maybe the next iteration of, like, a hereticon or something like that is always happening at one charter city, so everybody knows.
00:06:15.000And you also can create it as a place where people take research sabbaticals.
00:06:19.600So some early city-states have reduced regulation on biomedical research, and that's something we would certainly propose for any city-state we were involved with is, like, a no-holds-barred, though always with informed consent, medical research area.
00:06:35.260So then in that case, you would create a temporary market of medical companies and researchers who will come and take a sabbatical in this area to run clinical trials on something or to run a PhD, you know, thesis, like, on some experimental treatment or thing that would be really cumbersome from a regulatory standpoint to study or research or vet or validate in some other country.
00:07:00.820And these are what we call the haven-state network.
00:07:05.180And so we'll go over a governance model for one proposed of these.
00:07:08.760But before we get into that, I will note, ironically, I think one of the most common governance types within the haven-state network is likely going to be communist.
00:07:19.000Aren't these, like, hyper-capitalist and elitist?
00:07:21.480And it's like, well, communism actually kind of works when you can kick out nonproductive individuals.
00:07:27.720And given the level of post-scarcity that these may have, like, you go to something like Hereticon.
00:07:34.540We don't pay for anything at Hereticon because the individuals who are running it just have so, so, so much money that they're like, oh, if I have interesting people there, that's fine.
00:07:46.460The people running these havens might have so much money that it's just like, oh, you know, I pay for all the daily expenses of individuals so long as they are economically productive.
00:08:00.000And I think that this is where The Guardian, when they were talking to me about the haven model I set up, they were like, yeah, but what about people who aren't economically productive?
00:08:10.820And I was like, well, my state's not really for them.
00:08:15.340I was like, there's plenty of other countries that can take people like that.
00:08:18.660And right now, we just haven't really done that, globally speaking.
00:08:22.000But I think that more states need to be like, oh, the economically productive people who need the state to support them.
00:08:26.700Yeah, maybe somebody else can take care of them.
00:08:29.040When you were talking about this last night, you simply cannot have, in any sustainable fashion, a country or city-state that both has porous borders and generous social programs.
00:08:41.380You can have one or the other, period.
00:08:43.640And this is a quote from my grandfather that somebody on Twitter tried to get us to denounce him for.
00:08:48.700And I was like, that's actually a great quote.
00:08:49.140Because he uses an out-of-date, not flattering, possibly slur term to refer to immigrants.
00:08:56.880And some goddamn fries, you fucking goo bags!
00:09:03.880But I don't think the term was considered that offensive back in his day.
00:09:08.940They're like, denounce your grandpa for saying something racist in a really poignant, so forethoughtful economic point that most mainstream politicians of today still don't understand.
00:09:23.180When you hugely restrict who can come into a country and who can stay in a country, you can be incredibly socially generous.
00:09:31.220But when you are completely free for anyone to enter, then you have to be incredibly socially restrictive.
00:09:36.640Eventually, any system that is socially generous and has open borders will, like osmosis, equalize with the outside environment for individuals who are not economically productive in training the state until the state is offering nothing more.
00:09:50.000And then it's just no reason to live there.
00:09:51.880So let's get into the actual plan we put out here.
00:09:55.600The slide deck was titled, The Next Empire.
00:10:05.380So on page one, and I'm actually going to read it and then we'll discuss each page.
00:10:10.040Is it possible to create a region with a high economic output and a high fertility rate?
00:10:15.760Fertility rates are falling in every developed nation across the world, especially in technologically engaged regions with high economic output.
00:10:21.740This yields a unique opportunity to create a charter city poised to become a dominant world power in the near future.
00:10:28.860Almost every nation in the world is based on a failed experiment.
00:10:32.380Two and a half centuries ago, an ancestor of one of this project's founders, George Washington.
00:10:45.280So that would make her the closest related living pathway.
00:10:47.940Worked with a diverse team of visionaries to create a new model government.
00:10:52.700Unfortunately, the model failed to match their vision almost immediately with safeguards against things like political party formation failing within their lifetimes.
00:11:00.580Despite this, almost every nation on the planet today has based their governing structure on the outline of the failed compromise this group tentatively created.
00:11:08.280When creating a new governing system under which large populations will live, it makes sense to go with systems that seem relatively safe and functional while distributing as much power to stakeholders as possible to lower the odds of revolt.
00:11:22.200Never to less, if we were to craft a world power de novo with an opt-in population, they would almost certainly build something very different.
00:11:30.260These systems were built not just for computers, but for an agriculturally focused subsistence society without trains and planes.
00:11:37.380Imagine how a system intentionally designed from the ground up could fare.
00:11:41.740And I do think a lot of people forget that.
00:11:46.680That the model that the founders created was both a compromised and a failed compromise within their own lifetimes.
00:11:55.720And yet almost every democracy since then has been based on it.
00:11:59.140Yeah, it made sense to do because you don't want to make up a new system if you just fought a revolution and you can't really risk that.
00:12:05.120And you have, you know, hundreds of thousands of millions of people living under it and you don't want to risk something falling apart.
00:12:09.680But if you were creating something de novo, of course, you would want to create a completely new system.
00:12:13.620Why would an existing country succeed land to this kind of experiment?
00:12:17.220With rapidly collapsing and aging populations across the developed world, especially in rural areas, many countries are desperate to save their faltering economies.
00:12:27.140Why would a young person who is left a decaying rural area for college return once they are educated,
00:12:32.300when almost all of our world's economic opportunities are clustered in one of a handful of dense population centers around the world?
00:12:39.580Our project will allow us to transform a region on a downward trajectory into one of the world's future tech hubs,
00:12:47.360a center for dynamism, investment and growth.
00:12:50.240Why won't existing charter cities succeed?
00:12:52.040For a charter city to succeed, it must be appealing to the host country, generate revenue, e.g. attract companies, and generate citizens, e.g. attract immigrants.
00:13:03.300Most extant charter cities are primarily concerned with realizing an ideological vision.
00:13:08.680While ideological vision can attract a small number of immigrants, it will always be fundamentally less sustainable than a persistent and obvious economic opportunity not available anywhere else in the world.
00:13:20.160To bring the smartest, most economically productive people in the world to a place, that place's opportunities must be economically attractive and meaningful in a global context.
00:13:32.880When a lot of city-states are focused on just being vacation areas, you really have to have a reason to go, because there are, there's an endless number of amazing vacation areas to go to.
00:13:42.420I'm not going to say that vacation areas, they make a few big mistakes.
00:13:46.900They try to attract ideological extremists.
00:13:50.940They're like, you agree with our ideology so much more than your host country's ideology, or wherever you were born's ideology, that you will move to where we are.
00:13:58.840Well, and a risk of making it like a social club, and framing it as such, like a society, is, well, then it's attractive to people who really care about social ties.
00:14:09.920And what you're proposing to them is essentially socially isolating them.
00:14:13.140You're taking them away from major international cities, and you're putting them in a city-state.
00:14:19.260So it's like trying to select for people who are the least likely to buy into this.
00:14:23.320If they were going to take that approach, you would need to select for religious extremists who want to go off and make a compound and be in isolation.
00:14:29.700Which is what we tried to do in the way that we structured this to an extent.
00:14:32.760But religious extremists have multiple religious factions, and you'll see how we do that.
00:14:36.920But in addition to that, I will note that one, that Patrick Friedman, who has been on this show before talking about charter cities, he finally got fed up and decided to just start his own.
00:14:45.900And I really like the charter city that he's starting as a model, which is, it's in Africa, and instead of focused on trying to get, like, white people from the United States to move there, who already have, like, great jobs and live in a fairly stable country, it's focused on just being marginally better than the other countries in Africa, and focused on disproportionately getting economically productive people from the other African countries to move there.
00:15:23.400And it bothers me so much that I've met, while traveling, you know, sitting around in airports or in cars, so many people who have immigrated from African countries that are unstable, who are very smart, very educated.
00:15:38.520And then they go to a country like the UK or the US, and they are Uber drivers, they're cooks.
00:16:12.120But I also wish Wakanda existed because it would be so cool.
00:16:15.300If you look at the way that we structured this going forward, what you're going to realize is that a lot of charter cities are built to try to attract people.
00:16:22.380And we are building this to try to attract dollars, which is very different.
00:16:28.240Well, and beyond that, to attract intelligence.
00:16:31.820So not just intelligent, agentic people, but intelligent, agentic AIs who can count as citizens in this city-state.
00:17:25.520So how the city-state will attract and create economic demand.
00:17:30.080So one, and this is probably my favorite part, although I love AI citizenship too, but number one, no holds barred medical research.
00:17:36.840So you get the vacationers coming in for the cancer treatment that the FDA wants to approve, and you get the researchers who are doing their fellowships.
00:18:06.560But okay, AI citizenship is also super cool here.
00:18:09.980Enshrine into the Constitution citizen rights for synthetic intelligences.
00:18:14.360As AI develops, much of the world's economic opportunity will be generated by AIs themselves.
00:18:19.520However, restrictions on AI owning property or capital will make most nations difficult places to host these centers of economic production.
00:18:27.800So I love being a safe haven for them.
00:18:32.200Writing the government into blockchain allows us to make the city-state's currency literal tokens within the government.
00:18:37.860This will make the region attractive for cutting-edge Web3 projects.
00:18:40.980So I think that this is – and this is the interesting thing is if you're thinking right now, how could you make AI a citizen, right?
00:18:51.380Because if you go as a one-person, one-vote system, making AI a citizen doesn't make any sense because an AI could just clone itself and then have tons and tons of votes.
00:19:01.300And you don't know – like what if an AI, it's not a well-programmed AI and it's dramatically less competent than the average person?
00:19:08.100You can't have AI be a citizen in that respect.
00:19:10.800So many people may hate that we have moved away from a one-person, one-vote system.
00:19:15.200But in a way, we've actually made the system more inclusive by doing that because now we can have AI politically participate, whereas it's impossible for AI to politically participate in a one-person, one-vote system.
00:19:30.480So to move on, most importantly, the government must incentivize the creation of highly productive economic actors.
00:19:36.840To your point, Malcolm, our model achieves this by, one, creating reproductive technology due to the conditionally enshrined protection for medical innovation,
00:19:45.840which allows for the possibility of mass production of genetically selected humans,
00:19:50.640and, two, providing incentive systems that grant more voting power to the creators of economically productive agents, including AIs and corporations.
00:20:02.800You're most excited about the governing structure, aren't you?
00:27:20.620One is, is you don't want to create the negative incentives by giving words of the state a vote.
00:27:24.480And the other is, is to say they already have an ability to outsize impact the voters.
00:27:30.200But the second note I'd make here with these sorts of individuals is I find it really perverse.
00:27:36.500And I was telling this to the Guardian article
00:27:38.220that one person could pay like 50,000 times as much of another person as taxes.
00:27:43.160It gives the state 50,000 times as much as another person.
00:27:45.620And they don't get one iota more say in how that money is spent or what's the best way to spend that money.
00:27:51.080Like that seems to me ridiculous and deeply unfair.
00:27:55.240I wonder if it's a cultural thing because I definitely, with everything in my life,
00:27:59.520have this intuition of, well, if someone paid for it, then they get to call the shot.
00:28:04.400Like if someone paid for my vacation, then they get to decide what we do every day.
00:28:10.040If someone is paying me to do work, then they get to decide how I do that work.
00:28:13.840And I think this should be the same way with government.
00:28:20.880I mean, if someone's paying for government, then they get to decide how the government works, right?
00:28:24.840It seems, but is that a cultural thing?
00:28:27.360Because this seems to be so foreign to other people.
00:28:31.240I, well, whether it's a cultural thing or not, this system is sure to draw economically productive agents.
00:28:38.360Whether they are, and you see how this breaks the AI problem.
00:28:41.220No longer do you have the problem of like AI is being able to spam themselves.
00:28:44.980If an AI is being economically productive and contributing to the state, then it should have a say in what the state is doing correlatory to how much they're contributing to the state, at least within this branch of the government.
00:28:54.440If a company is paying a bunch of taxes, that company gets a vote.
00:28:57.940And there's other places where companies get votes, by the way.
00:29:00.160In London, companies get votes and companies get votes in Hong Kong.
00:29:02.540So that's not a particularly novel concept, but the vote being correlatory to how much they're paying into the state is.
00:29:08.320The same with individual human actors.
00:29:10.000If I'm an individual with a ton of money, I can come into the state.
00:29:12.560And now, in addition to this, I am actively punishing myself by cheating my taxes or by finding tax loopholes.
00:29:19.900Because I have a lower vote the more I take advantage of tax loopholes.
00:29:23.960So this has the additional model of sort of forcing taxes onto the table.
00:29:32.620A citizen's voting power in this election is determined by the net utility to the state of all citizens they have brought to the state,
00:29:40.740either by having and raising citizens, coding them, in the case of AI, or founding them, in the case of corporations,
00:29:46.360plus half the net utility of any secondary recruits of their direct recruits brought, for example, grandchildren or spinoff AIs or companies.
00:29:53.260So this system is essentially meant to increase the number of people that exist within the state.
00:30:00.120And you could think of it as a bit of a pyramid scheme.
00:30:02.680But that's the way society really needs to be structured population-wise for people to have more people.
00:30:08.680And as you can see here, it means that me as an agent within the state,
00:30:12.780you know, the Guardian obviously wanted to frame this as the more kids you have, the more votes you have.
00:30:16.700But that's very explicitly not what it says.
00:30:19.040If I bring an economically productive immigrant into the state, because when you immigrate to the state,
00:30:24.140you always say this person was my benefactor who brought me in,
00:30:27.300that person's taxes, any taxes they end up paying, ends up contributing to this portion of my vote.
00:30:33.380However, if I bring an immigrant into the state and that immigrant is a net drain on the state,
00:30:37.740but I have like economically productive children,
00:30:40.320that immigrant's economic weight to the state ends up subtracting from the economic benefit that I produce through my children.
00:31:28.060This word is elected by a vote from all past living executors.
00:31:31.580This lowers the influence of party politics and enables those with the most knowledge of being an executor to have say in who gets the job.
00:31:40.000Actually, you know where this is also?
00:31:45.160Yeah, because the Empire, although it's not a great example because the Empire is like crumbling and poorly governed,
00:31:50.500but it's run by this clone of just the same person always.
00:31:54.240But there's like the old retired version of the clone.
00:31:58.120There is the active middle-aged governing version of the clone.
00:32:01.360And then there's the young kid clone who's like apprenticing and learning under like the grandfather and the dad and then like the young one.
00:32:11.220And it's kind of an interesting, I mean, it sort of creates a sense of...
00:32:14.580How is there any correlation between these two systems?
00:32:17.200Well, because you have the previous ruler of the Empire advising the current ruler of the Empire.
00:33:07.640If there are party politics that differentiate between the two wards, like somebody is much more likely to win one word than the other word, the two voted wards.
00:33:16.260This is the word of the present and the word of the future.
00:33:18.900I suspect that it will be pretty broadcast from the perspective of the word of the past if they are going to vote for one of these two parties.
00:33:28.140And because of that, it doesn't really make sense to do that.
00:33:32.240I.e., you would basically know whoever the word of the past was going to support is going to be the person who wins the moment party politics ends up developing, which is why you need party politics to not end up developing.
00:33:44.100The word of the past also has a huge benefit.
00:33:47.740If you look in, like, the U.S., one of the things that's always talked about is, like, past presidents are usually very friendly with each other, and they always like to go golfing together, and a lot of the animosity between them dissolves really quickly because, you know, they've experienced something unique, and now they're interested in the future of the state.
00:34:04.840Well, also, they have more knowledge about the job than anyone else, right?
00:34:09.340You know, they're going to be very good at potentially choosing somebody.
00:34:13.480But in addition to all of that, it means that you aren't going to have the NASA problem, where you have wild party swings where one person – because the executor can do so much to overhaul society, right?
00:34:26.340Like, just say, well, okay, we're going to build, like, a totally different system for our governance structure.
00:34:29.980This makes it much harder to do that unless most past presidents also think that's a good idea, which is a really good system to prevent radical changes.
00:34:40.500And the only case in which you could do that in which most past presidents don't agree to it is when the general population, or at least the economically productive population, vastly agrees with it.
00:34:52.140So why not one-vote-one-person, because apparently people think this is absolutely crazy.
00:34:57.840Here's what I was just thinking this morning.
00:34:59.820I was like, oh, yeah, I mean, because the United States started out as one-man-one-vote, but we didn't find that to work forever, because we found that, oh, there were actually other contributing members to society that maybe also deserve to say, like, maybe not white people.
00:35:18.840Like, there's no, why would we assume that the voting system we have today is perfect?
00:35:22.920It wasn't perfect when the founding fathers started the United States, and it's not perfect now.
00:35:26.820I'm not saying that our system is applicable to the United States at all anyway, but I'm just saying, like, it's funny that people are so insistent that our current voting system is unimpedal.
00:35:37.040So anyway, why not one-vote-one-person?
00:35:39.920Our system recognized that competence is not evenly distributed among a population and rewards individuals with more control over governing decisions when they have demonstrated proven, measurable competence.
00:35:53.180Our system furthermore lowers the voice of those who have already worked within the government or receive government support as they are adversely incentivized to protect their own positions and privileges.
00:36:04.140Productivity is not the only contributory factor that warrants governing power.
00:36:09.420The system must also reward those who raise or build productive elements in a society while punishing those who bring citizens into the system that are net drains on resources.
00:36:20.020Finally, the influence of past leaders on present leadership is designed to allow for more continuity than existing systems of government,
00:36:28.720dampening the NASA problem, as you say, Malcolm, in which particularly large long-term projects are severely undermined with every administrative change.
00:36:39.040But I think here's where they'll get even more spicy, like, because some people are like, well, well, maybe I can get with one, like, different kinds of voting.
00:36:47.840But this is where I think it's so fun, because why not yes and this, right?
00:36:52.640So a tiered society, existing governing systems assume that every citizen has equal value when they objectively do not.
00:36:59.880Our system assumes an individual's value is correlated with their utility to the state and optimizes around these individuals with the most utility to the state,
00:37:08.480all to ensure the competent operation of a state that attracts productive immigrants.
00:37:12.660To this end, not all citizens are equal within the state.
00:37:16.360Individuals can be rewarded with titles and additional privileges determined by the executor by opting into lump sum payments or higher tax schemes.
00:37:24.320This is akin to paying for a premium membership, but at the state level, I love that.
00:38:25.580I mean, obviously, from a certain perspective, it's incredibly dystopian because you're thinking about this from the perspective of some comedic movie in which some loser in society can't even park to go for a job interview because he's not, you know.
00:38:40.400Here's what you're not thinking about is when you can create opt-in mechanisms for the ultra-wealthy to pay more than their fair share and be happy and excited to do so, that's tax burden that's not going to the middle class and poor.
00:38:54.980Yeah, I mean, yeah, the flip side of that scene in which this guy is getting frustrated about not being able to park, well, yeah, but this guy also isn't paying very much in taxes, you know.
00:39:03.040The way I put it this way is, am I okay with wealthy people in society having it a bit easier if they're paying like billions extra in tax dollars that I don't need to pay?
00:39:14.540It seems dystopia until you think about it for five seconds and you realize it's perfectly rational.
00:39:19.360Well, and again, that's us on, okay, that's at least me on airplanes.
00:39:24.060You know how I am with business class.
00:39:25.260I always wish I could fly business class everywhere.
00:39:27.620But then whenever it comes to it, because I obviously have my own discretionary income, I could spend my money on that, but I don't because it's dumb.
00:39:50.600And I think that that's what this comes down to, is that as long as people are framing things logically, instead of being like, oh, I deserve to be in business class.
00:39:57.780But, I mean, I don't want to pay for it, but I still deserve to be here.
00:40:44.200For a person or entity to become a citizen, they must either start a new tribe or be accepted by an existing tribe.
00:40:50.200This is where we're getting into describing what Curtis Yarvin was the first person who was like, yeah, this sounds like the millet system.
00:40:55.960Tribes are associated with cultures and cultural norms, e.g. Catholics, Mormons, et cetera.
00:41:03.640An individual's tribe is responsible for social services, medical care, schooling, social safety nets, et cetera, and can demand independent taxes that are collected by the state and distributed to the tribal group.
00:41:15.200An individual can switch tribes if they choose to, but only after both paying a fine and paying back their tribal group for all services rendered to them, net their tax or voluntary contributions to the group.
00:41:26.840For example, if an individual joined the Catholic group for their good medical care, they would not be able to deconvert immediately after the medical issue was dealt with unless they paid for the tribe's net tax loss on their medical expenses.
00:41:40.320Individuals moving out from their parents' homes, as well as individuals marrying for the first time, are exempt from this rule.
00:41:48.160Tribal groups can apply any restrictions they want on joining and can impose additional laws on their members.
00:41:53.920For example, a tribe may enforce monogamy, but are responsible for internally policing them.
00:42:01.680If people struggle to understand why this is so valuable, it makes it much easier for religious extremists to protect their culture and individuals with unique cultures to protect their culture.
00:42:12.440Which is to say, when you move into the state, a portion of your social services and a portion of your taxes are going to your tribal group.
00:42:22.080So when the state collects your taxes, it collects an additional amount of taxes, which can almost be thought of as like, in the United States, you have your federal taxes and your state taxes.
00:42:31.580And in this, you would have your federal taxes and your, basically your religion taxes.
00:42:41.240Whatever group it is, it's like your religion slash cultural group taxes.
00:42:44.460I'm trying to think, so how would things be different for the Amish, for example, who already lived in a very isolated state and sort of provide their own services to their own community?
00:42:53.360How would it be different for them if they operated within this city-state governing system versus what they already operate with?
00:43:01.460Right now, the Amish, so in the United States, when I am choosing which state taxes I want to pay, I have to choose which state I want to live in.
00:43:10.300Okay, and then that determines which state taxes I'm going to pay.
00:43:13.880So if I'm an Amish person, I'm paying for like the public school system, even though I'm not using the public school system.
00:43:19.860I'm paying for Medicaid and medical costs, even though I'm not using any of that.
00:43:26.700I, anywhere in the United States, I'm often paying for things that are not things that I may culturally use.
00:43:32.480For example, I may be Catholic and I'm paying into government-funded abortions or government-funded PrEP for gay orgies.
00:43:39.160You know, I, well, you should see our episode on that.
00:43:41.980It's absolutely wild that this is happening.
00:43:43.880But in this system, I move there and instead of choosing like which state I want to be to, wherever I live within the system, I choose which tribe I am affiliating with, which is basically like a religion.
00:43:55.260And then that determines an additional part, in addition to like my federal, my state taxes, an additional tax I'm going to pay, which is determined by the tribe.
00:44:03.460But the tribe also gets to distribute things like medical care, things like education, things like all sorts of different social services that might be like free psychologists, free counseling, free, you know, all sorts of stuff like that that might be very valuable to me.
00:44:21.660And so if I'm something like the Mormon church and I'm coming here, basically the 10% tithe would be automatically added to the taxes and then distributed to the Mormon church and the Mormon church would distribute their, their services to members, you know, whether it's systems, et cetera.
00:44:36.680And this is a really great system because it means that now me as a cultural group, I need to on a per cost basis also appeal to people.
00:44:46.180And the reason we have the system where a person cannot opt into a group and then opt out is it prevents scamming these groups.
00:44:52.020So I couldn't, for example, join the Mormon group in name only just to get access to their like medical care and then nope out the moment my medical bills were paid, you know, I'd have to pay that back.
00:45:01.580And somebody is like, well, that could cause abusive situations, but we noted that and we allowed for loopholes for the two most likely abusive situations.
00:45:08.820Yeah, this is your, this is as far as you can go with porous borders and a heavy social state.
00:45:13.700Yeah, one is when you're married, you can pop out whenever you want, which is great.
00:45:17.660You can pop into a new tribe whenever you want.
00:45:21.020And two is, and this is only for first marriages.
00:45:23.240And two is when you leave your parents' household, you can pop out of any religion you want.
00:45:28.460So you're not stuck in your birth culture.
00:45:30.140Now this is assuming another culture will have you.
00:45:33.160Keep in mind, because you will be a burden to these cultures, or you may be a burden to these cultures in terms of caring for you, they may just say, eh, we don't want you because you're not a productive member, you don't seem sincere, you don't seem whatever.
00:45:47.260And I suspect that we're going to see a much more exclusionary view of who can join their membership by religions that are in this system.
00:45:55.860And when you even saw this, when the Puritans went to the colonies, there would be all these discussions on, can you bring this servant?
00:46:07.980When they leave the indentured servant, do we actually want them being a Puritan?
00:46:11.120Yeah, there was, there was, yeah, these were exclusive communities and people were very selective about who they brought in because they also knew that they, they were going to be largely dependent on each other and they couldn't afford a world in which they were deadweights.
00:46:33.300So hat tip, Robin Hanson, we love you.
00:46:35.740Every individual AI or company registered in the state, for example, every politically relevant unit, pays two tax streams.
00:46:43.120One is paid to the state like normal taxes, while the other, consisting of 25% of whatever the state is paid, is paid to their bondholders.
00:46:52.400The initial owner of an individual's bond is the individual's creators.
00:46:56.820For example, the child's bond would be split 50% between their parents.
00:47:01.340Some tribes may demand a portion of this bond in exchange for membership.
00:47:04.940For example, the Mormon community may own 50% of this bond for every child born within their community.
00:47:10.360This system is designed for three purposes.
00:47:12.840One, it yields a direct and large cash benefit for having a child and raising them well.
00:47:17.920This cash benefit exactly scales with the presumed economic productivity of the child.
00:47:23.420As parents can sell their children's shares, shares that will be worth less if parents do not raise the child to be economically productive.
00:47:30.580Two, it provides an economic incentive for those with capital to invest in those without it.
00:47:35.960For example, those born into disadvantaged families.
00:47:38.480For example, if an otherwise smart kid was born into a disadvantaged family and their parents traded or sold their shares at a discount to an elite educational institution, that institution would be financially incentivized to educate the child and help them in any way it can.
00:47:54.740We imagine most of the time these shares will be sold to educational institutions or other types of companies that specialize in improving people's economic status is that will be in the best interest of both parents and children.
00:48:06.980Three, it provides a large economic incentive for companies, educational centers, and cultural groups to study methods for raising economically productive individuals.
00:48:19.260So for people who don't understand, it'd be like if Simone and I had a kid and then that kid, 25% of all the federal taxes they paid, end up going to ever hold the bond on them.
00:48:28.880And so suppose like polygenic screening costs a lot of money, but the companies that are offering it have a really high degree of confidence that it will help these people be more productive members of society.
00:48:39.060Then the polygenic screening companies can say, okay, for 10% of any child we create bond, we will do the polygenic selection for free or an educational institution.
00:48:50.480And this is the problem with existing educational institutions is they have no reason to actually care about a child's outcome.
00:48:55.340And I suspect that many services like educational institutions and polygenic screening companies will only be able to sell for bonds because me as a parent, if one educational institution is like, I'm going to charge you X many hundred thousand dollars a year and another is like, oh, I just want the bond.
00:49:09.860I'm like, okay, well, one of these is actually motivated to improve the kid's economic outcomes while the other is just motivated to take my money.
00:49:16.420Obviously, I'm going to choose the bond holder.
00:49:18.080So there's so many society externalities to this or like a company like Google, if they're like really convinced that we can make X type of people more productive, they could go into like a whole poor community and then just buy all the bonds in that community and then increase the value of those bonds by improving the quality of life of that community.
00:49:40.200This is the core of governance design as it should be approached by everyone going forward.
00:49:45.060So in the past, governance design was created by based on, well, this is how we do it.
00:49:50.600Maybe if I tweak it a little bit, it might be less shitty.
00:49:54.020Whereas what you really need to look at is what will incentivize people to do a thing that is good for everyone.
00:50:00.740It is about aligning incentives, period.
00:50:03.120Don't look at what was done in the past.
00:50:05.060Don't think that that and people hear this, this concept that we first heard of from Robin Hanson and they're like, oh, that sounds weird.
00:50:11.680I don't know, like selling a bond or you're like selling that person.
00:50:14.100And just stop, stop thinking about that and think about incentives.
00:50:19.100As I was saying with Google, so like suppose Google does something, it makes predatory actions beneficial.
00:50:25.800So let's talk about a predatory action.
00:50:27.940Google goes into a ghetto and they buy up all of the kids' bonds in that ghetto and people will be like, oh, this is so predatory.
00:50:35.720Well, now what does Google have an incentive to do?
00:50:37.700It has an incentive to renovate all the playgrounds, to renovate all the school systems, to make sure all the houses get renovations and all the lead is tested for.
00:50:45.340To give scholarships to all the children, to give them tours.
00:50:48.900Yeah, that's how it maximizes its earnings from these bond holdings.
00:50:52.540Like that is the key to making a state.
00:50:56.260It reminds me of this scene in Dune when they're like, oh, well, the smugglers operate underground.
00:51:03.780And he goes, well, then why don't we just tax the smugglers but make it legal?
00:51:07.860And they're like, wait, I hadn't considered doing that.
00:51:10.380And it's like, yeah, if it's legal but taxed, now there's a benefit to them being above board with us.
00:51:15.700But we can also better monitor what's happening.
00:51:17.800And this is what we mean with things like, well, if your vote is based on the amount that you're paying in taxes, now there's a huge disincentive to using tax loopholes.
00:53:04.520Let's get a few ultra religious groups in on this.
00:53:07.580I mean, I think that that's what you really need to make this happen.
00:53:09.760And a few, like, incredibly tech forward organizations.
00:53:13.060And then we can build the first of the future charter cities or the first of the future haven networks.
00:53:17.680Now, on a less bright note, and this is something that I'm just really coming to terms with, because most countries are not willing to or politically unable to come to terms with the fact that you cannot have both porous borders and generous social services, they will fall apart.
00:53:35.260And we need, we need somewhere, I'm sure most people want somewhere they can flee to that is okay.
00:53:43.040And I think most people are going to be willing to work for it.
00:53:45.840They're going to be willing to be productive members of society.
00:53:48.160And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that even most people who are heavily dependent on social services and handouts would much prefer to be independent citizens.
00:53:58.280It's just that once you get stuck on this stuff, you get stuck in a loop and it's really hard to get out.
00:54:02.760And I think that creating this and many other haven states that have similar systems, it's not just something of like, this could be a solution.
00:54:15.060We need this because we are going to end up between this, this, this social services and porous borders dynamic and demographic collapse.
00:54:23.000We are heading toward civilizational collapse and we need, we need that techno feudal system of little cities upon a hill, little city states that survive this.
00:54:37.040So yeah, maybe we do need to get into this because there has to be something left for people to flee to.
00:54:44.480Well, yeah, that we do. We do. There has to be something for people to flee to because the existence.
00:54:50.940I don't like this. I don't like thinking you think through things. I'm like the rest of society. I don't think through things. This is fine. I like thinking this is fine. And you're just showing me the flames all around us.
00:55:04.320If we have any ultra wealthy people who watch this and want something like this set up, let us know.
00:55:10.840We are actually competent enough to put this together, but I want to see some bites before we do.
00:55:15.380Because the last time we tried to do this, we got a lot of interest from people who wanted to buy into the project.
00:55:20.240This was Project Eureka, but we didn't have connections with Capital that was interested.
00:55:26.860Yeah, we had the property. We could have done the whole thing for like $10 million. It would have been so inexpensive. I was very disappointed.
00:55:33.140And this would have been right outside Manhattan, which was so frustrating. Such a good property. It was an old convent.
00:55:38.340But they're a completely different model than the model we're describing here.
00:55:41.660And I don't want to go into that model right now. That's for a different episode.
00:55:45.160But for the model we're describing here, if you buy into this early, you could end up making an astronomical amount of money if things play out the way that we predict they will play out.
00:55:56.160But you would need to buy in enough to get this off the ground.