Patrick Friedman is the founder of Pronomos Capital, a venture capital fund that focuses on charter cities and network states. He s been a leader in the charter city movement for over 20 years, and has been at the center of the seasteading movement when it was at its height in the late 90s and early 00s. In this episode, we talk to him about charter cities, AI, and what it means to be a charter city.
00:00:00.000Hello! So we're going to get a very special episode today, which can almost be thought of as a lost interview,
00:00:07.000because it was one of the early interviews we did, but it was in a very different format than our other episodes,
00:00:13.000and so we didn't want to release it until we had a bit more of a following.
00:00:17.000It was with Patrick Friedman who runs Pronos Capital, the first venture capital fund that focuses on charter cities and network states.
00:00:26.000So when people are trying to start new countries, this is the main funder of that.
00:00:31.000And Patrick Friedman, who we've known for a very long time since Silicon Valley,
00:00:36.000is the guy who would have been at the center of the seasteading movement when that was really growing.
00:00:43.000He coded at Google for 10 years, runs a small angel fund since 2011, has degrees in CS and business,
00:00:49.000and has been a leader in the competitive governance scene for over 20 years.
00:00:53.000Yeah, leader is understatement there. He was basically, he's the, was the early charter city guy when most of the charter city movement was seasteading,
00:01:02.000which was this idea that people would go live on sort of floating boats that would be made up of autonomous components
00:01:08.000that could like break apart and recombine.
00:01:10.000So like, even your house, you could easily leave one government system and go to another government system very easily.
00:02:38.000And given that we've been talking so much about the future of the world economy
00:02:42.000and the future of what human civilization may look like in ways that are very orthogonal
00:02:47.000to the way people think about civilization today, we are so excited to have him on.
00:02:52.000I would love you to give a bit more of your background if you think any is necessary.
00:02:55.000And the first question I will prompt you is, is, has any of your thinking around what future human cities may look like
00:03:04.000changed with the rapid development of AI and the movement of AI into the public sphere?
00:03:10.000Or had you, were you such a forward thinking you already accounted for all of this?
00:03:14.000Well, nobody can know the timing of something like AI, but I think of it as being like somewhat orthogonal.
00:03:22.000Like I have serious concerns about AI risk, but like, that's not my path, right?
00:03:27.000I have my part of the world order that I try to make better.
00:03:30.000And I think, 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.
00:03:41.000Okay. So when you think about how cities are going to change, what is your sort of go to talking points right now?
00:03:46.000Well, so I'm, I'm interested in new city states, kind of my life's mission to make it so that we can start new countries, like we start companies today.
00:03:55.000And at this kind of halfway point, after 20 some years of working on it, what it looks like is what are called charter cities.
00:04:03.000Charter cities have regulatory authority over some parts of the law while being under a country's sovereignty.
00:04:10.000And 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?
00:04:19.000Because the alternative, a lot of countries have old laws, maybe like relics of some mishmash of like pre-colonialism, colonialism, post-colonialism.
00:04:30.000Often the courts aren't great, but it's really hard to reform a whole country at once, right?
00:04:35.000I mean, you can't make huge changes, the legal system of whole country at once, and you shouldn't, right?
00:04:40.000You shouldn't change it on top of a bunch of people.
00:04:43.000But what this has meant so far is like very little innovation in government.
00:04:48.000No like sandboxes, as we say in software engineering, no ways to test out new things.
00:04:55.000And the genius of the charter city idea is it says, hey, wait, if we start with empty 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.
00:05:09.000And 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.
00:05:22.000I 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.
00:05:29.000It 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.
00:05:39.000As I like to say, one of my main generative metaphors is looking at governments like businesses and thinking about the governing industry.
00:05:47.000That's all the countries in the world.
00:05:49.000And citizens are 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.
00:06:00.000Yeah, 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, like there haven't been major innovations.
00:06:10.000And the last big one was when America was formed.
00:06:13.000And the reason you had that innovation is because right before that period, you basically had a flourishing of city states, which were the American colonies, combining European governments with Native American governments, which had evolved down completely different trajectories.
00:06:28.000And since then, we haven't had isolated scenarios where people could in lower risk environments experiment with totally new governance structures, which it sounds like is what you're trying to enable.
00:06:40.000As you enable that, what are some of the new governance ideas you find most interesting?
00:06:45.000Yeah, I definitely agree that the industry standard right now, the best practice is constitutional representative democracy.
00:07:25.000Now it's the industry standard, but it's gotten it's gotten really out of date.
00:07:28.000And there's some people who just kind of assume that the status quo is the best that there is and only think about small changes.
00:07:34.000But like, come on, we've learned so much about science, about mechanism design.
00:07:38.000We 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.
00:07:46.000It'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 was values aligned and run well.
00:08:10.000And like and and and how can I fix it?
00:08:13.000Yeah. And so that kind of like sucked and I wanted to investigate it.
00:08:17.000But what I realized along the way is like, hey, what is the reason that there's not a country for any niche group is that we don't have ways to start new countries for smaller groups of people.
00:08:28.000And 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.
00:08:37.000And then I realized, like, wait a second, like that's going to let lots of other people with their own idea of a good civilization, try it.
00:08:44.000And 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.
00:08:53.000That'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 on a piece of paper like, yo, I want a car that goes zero to 60 in one point one seconds.
00:09:05.000It gets infinity miles to the gallon and nobody ever dies in a crash. Like a specification is not an engineering plan and the same way for government.
00:09:13.000And 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.
00:09:24.000And 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?
00:09:35.380I'm trying to create a startup sector, right, to unlock competition and innovation.
00:09:41.320And it's not it's not it's not on me to say what those systems are.
00:09:45.700I mean, I'd be interested in seeing some variant of the terribly named anarcho-capitalism, the system my dad was kind of a co-inventor of, try it out.
00:09:54.620But that's that's just sort of a personal thing.
00:09:58.080In general, the one thing, the one criteria that I that I care about for all of these is is exit.
00:10:05.060And the reason is that if you know that people can freely leave, then you kind of don't have to worry about anything else.
00:10:45.500Right. What matters is that people can choose it.
00:10:47.360So 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.
00:10:56.800That I would consider not OK and support intervention.
00:11:01.360And obviously, like there's corner cases. Right.
00:11:04.440Like you don't want to allow probably allow zero jail time. Right.
00:11:09.940Like I'm not saying anybody needs to be able to quit on a moment's notice, but I would want to keep things like that indentured servitude, like anything that prevents people leaving.
00:11:18.740If someone wants to indentured servitude for five years and they've like gotten to see what things are like, fine.
00:11:26.920Yeah. 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.
00:11:34.580We use today, which is typically a copy of the American model is that the American model isn't even really a working model.
00:11:40.680It's a model that collapsed into a stable state, but it's not working the way it was intended to work.
00:11:46.140Like early on, it was created to like prevent a party system and stuff like that.
00:11:49.820And 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.
00:11:59.120Another area that I wanted to, before we get into free moving stuff, because I really want to get into that.
00:12:04.580I think that's interesting, but just at the beginning of the pronatal stuff, we'll get more into it later.
00:12:09.500But I think a lot of people would hear what he's saying and they're like, why would a government cede control for one of these charter cities?
00:12:16.080And I want to get to your thoughts on this, but one thing that we've seen within our government work is a lot of governments, when they're talking about their rural areas.
00:12:23.920So 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.
00:12:32.860Because people, you have this massive urbanization.
00:12:35.780And so they are willing to try radical things to try to bring vitality back into some of their areas.
00:12:42.620I'm wondering what motivations you have seen.
00:12:45.700I'm kind of on the other side of that, in the sense that like, yay, urbanization.
00:12:50.760If people need to move anyway, if new cities need to be built anyway, then they can have regulatory autonomy.
00:12:56.720I think I would just worry like if there are strong, like, look, there are really strong economic forces pushing the world to urbanize.
00:13:05.580And I would just be really wary about trying to fight that kind of uphill battle.
00:13:10.400I mean, if there's innovative regulations that will help, sure.
00:13:14.240But like, I'm trying to fight the downhill battle of like, if you bring in the current best practices, then that is going to be a huge boost to the city, right?
00:13:24.040I 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.
00:13:35.220So this is a really interesting question then to me.
00:13:38.040How do you make that argument to an existing country?
00:13:40.560Because 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 centers, have looser regulations.
00:13:54.900Like maybe in the future, if there's a system that's really proven, that's gone for a while and a group of people has some really, they vote like 90% to adopt it, like, okay.
00:14:05.960But for now, no, it needs to be opt-in.
00:14:08.800So it's about creating land that new cities can be built on, sort of.
00:14:17.520That's what I'm asking where I'm having trouble.
00:14:19.180It's about building a new city on empty land 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.
00:14:35.160There are, sometimes countries 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.
00:14:50.600So this is where I want to prime you with our thoughts on this and hear what you, where you think things are going.
00:14:55.980So one of the things that we often focus on is in the developed world or most of the developed world and it, it's not, it's not just a developed world.
00:15:05.140And when I say most of the developing world, as of 2019, by the UN's own statistics, all of Central America, South America, and the Caribbean collectively fell below repopulation rate.
00:15:13.400And we live in an economy that requires constant, that was built on the assumption of constant growth.
00:15:20.600And there's a lot of stuff that we can get into in this, in other podcasts, like debt instruments that require constant growth or social security systems that require constant growth or marketplaces that require constant growth.
00:15:31.420But as the world begins to enter a state where, and we had an economy that grew on average over the past 300 years, because the number of workers was growing exponentially and the productivity per worker was growing linearly.
00:15:44.520If 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 invest will be the places with technophilic populations that have high fertility rates.
00:17:30.420And 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.
00:17:41.060First is evolution actually happens faster.
00:17:43.860Most people don't get this, but twice as many people means twice as many mutations, means double the chance of finding beneficial mutations.
00:17:50.440So, a larger population actually speeds up evolution, which is super interesting.
00:17:54.200It's one reason that we've adapted as much to agriculture as we have, even though we're not totally adapted.
00:18:17.420And then in terms of like meaning like more resources to throw at the huge problems like settling other planets so that we're like less vulnerable to a certain set of natural disasters also benefits as well.
00:18:46.400So, yeah, I really worry about this fertility stuff.
00:18:50.760Yeah, 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 with a ethnically and culturally diverse population, but with a population that has a strong sense of cultural identity.
00:19:09.000So, the most clear example here would be Israel, whereas the counter example would be countries with an ethnically and culturally homogenous population like Korea, which typically have the lowest fertility rates.
00:19:21.480So, 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?
00:19:35.160And how do you think about culture building as it relates to creating these new sorts of entities?
00:19:40.720I mean, it's been a while since I've looked into this, but it's my impression that, you know, that a huge amount of the fertility rate relates to education, length of education, women getting educated.
00:19:57.180And women as equal partners in society, which kind of sucks because what I want is a world where women have all of those things and we're making enough babies.
00:20:07.380And so, that makes the solution tough.
00:20:09.440And so, places like Africa and India are going to be like a massive percent of the world's population.
00:20:15.760But like, is that going to 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.
00:20:32.280In terms of like charter cities, I think that there's some countries that have tried pro natalist 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, or building communities differently, right?
00:20:56.140Like, I mean, come on, like the suburban America thing or the urban dangerous America thing, right?
00:21:02.220Like, the best way to run to like raise kids is for them to be able to like run around and play with other kids.
00:21:08.600And that makes it easier for the parents.
00:21:10.160Like, we're doing it all wrong as in like Brian Kaplan's book.
00:21:13.240But I think there's a lot of things that communities can experiment with.
00:21:16.140I mean, I'm moving to Austin imminently and I'm talking to various people who have communities where they live in proximity to decide where to live.
00:21:31.560So, I mean, I'll say I personally struggle with the idea 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.
00:21:45.440But then very few people are willing to move or they want to go to where everyone already is.
00:21:50.960And it's really hard to get that critical mass.
00:21:53.360And it's interesting you see cities like Austin start to form because that's where everyone already is.
00:21:58.760I don't know of any example where someone has seeded that.
00:22:01.540Like, Austin was already like the cool city of Texas.
00:22:04.780And 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 city, like from a sort of progressive standpoint in a tax-advantaged state.
00:22:19.920And so, I mean, I get that charter cities could possibly gain that formula and that other cities have done that as like tax havens internationally.
00:22:26.580But 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 one city where they go to.
00:22:38.080But 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.
00:22:51.500And 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 let's say with reprotech.
00:23:01.380We're talking about, well, it kind of sucks that you can't have like really high levels of education and female workforce participation.
00:23:08.720But if you had the uterine replicator.
00:23:12.920And if you had like a charter city that was like built around.
00:23:17.480Yeah, like genetically modify people to high heaven, like artificial wombs all the way, like zero ethics boards, like let her rip.
00:23:26.660I do feel like some communities can build around that.
00:23:29.420But I've never heard charter cities discussed as like tech hubs or is like regulatory free for all zones in a like really groundbreaking way.
00:23:40.960Like maybe I'll be like, oh, yeah, well, like we'll be OK with crypto regulation.
00:23:44.080Are there any examples of charter cities or plans for charter cities that are like really like violently different or even like like Thunderdome?
00:23:52.780Like you were kind of describing like, yeah, we get a gladiatorial battles in a city.
00:24:32.000That's product market fit, not because there's not going to be experimentation, but because this stuff is brand new and we haven't kind of proven ourselves.
00:24:39.000And I think like crypto is the place where the governance innovation is really happening right now because it's so much easier in the cloud.
00:24:46.500And so I think that those tools and governance systems will be there to draw on when people want to want to create more radical things.
00:24:53.160In terms of what you said about the population, yeah, we call that the cold start problem.
00:24:57.760It's one of the top couple problems that any charter city startup faces.
00:25:10.160So like biology is network state concept, 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.
00:25:26.660Now, until one of these has happened, we won't really know, will those people move?
00:25:32.840But I think 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 who can work remotely or are in the same industry.
00:25:48.980I 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.
00:25:57.440And that may sound like a lot, but we're talking about kind of like 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 the social graph, like all move someplace.
00:26:13.380And look, we're not talking about like the middle of the ocean anymore, like Honduras Prospera is on Roatan, right, an island which has a bunch of tourist stuff and an airport.
00:26:23.660Praxis is looking at some countries around the Mediterranean that have like lots of stuff going on.
00:26:28.560So it's not just those thousand people.
00:26:30.740But, you know, I think that we have a shot.
00:26:32.240I mean, look at this Zuzulu thing that I just got back from a few weeks ago.
00:26:36.300This was this pop-up village in Montenegro where 200 people rented out a whole resort for two months.
00:26:43.580And then there was about 300 visitors that came through like me over the course of those two months.
00:26:48.820Vitalik Buterin was one of the kind of main forces behind it.
00:26:55.680Lots of people are like, how do I come next year?
00:26:57.840So this was like a group of people into longevity and crypto and network states, new cities who all got together.
00:27:04.600And 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.
00:27:15.360And there's no reason this couldn't work for all of them.
00:27:17.960So just any vertical, again, where there's a pretty compact, like highly connected social graph, 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.
00:27:32.700And then as there's that in-person bonding, I think it's natural to open permanent sites.
00:27:39.200Zuzulu is already thinking about this.
00:27:40.660We had a bunch of conversations about what kind of jurisdictions to look at because one of their criteria is, and this works for Montenegro, is being someplace where the government is open to talking about changing regulations.
00:27:52.540I mean, longevity regulations and the crypto regulations were presented to the head of state during Zuzulu, and they're looking at other countries like that for the future.
00:28:03.040So 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.
00:28:10.620And whether people float between them or stay in them, it's kind of up to the people.
00:28:17.780Just for your heads up, Simone, we were invited to Zuzulu, and with Praxis, the Collins Institute does have a contract with them to provide their education system.
00:28:28.200So we've been very involved with a lot of this stuff, 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.
00:28:35.340And 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?
00:28:44.900How do you build culture for new city-states to create a sense of identity?
00:28:50.880And what do good state holidays look like if you're creating them from scratch?
00:28:55.700And do you think that they're necessary?
00:28:58.280Yeah, I mean, I think, again, I'm very meta.
00:29:01.540I've worked to find what I think is the highest point of leverage.
00:29:05.320And so in terms of the design of a society for common culture and values, I don't get into the specifics of that.
00:29:13.560But what I will say is our greatest bottleneck is founders.
00:29:18.560I don't follow up on leads to countries anymore, because I have way more countries interested in talking than I have founders.
00:29:27.480And it's been like that for a couple of years.
00:29:45.260I think that that's something more of a commodity that can be hired.
00:29:48.660My, like, one specific or first specific thing now is community building experience.
00:29:54.700And then the last one is, like, connections with a given country or region or, like, really strong partnership building ability to create them.
00:30:03.940Because a charter city is, like, a partnership with a single, like, key stakeholder.
00:30:09.580But that community building side, like, that, that is a key skill that's needed.
00:30:13.880Because these things, whether it's an online community or the first in-person community, they are small communities.
00:30:19.420And so people who are good at that, what is the experience designed for a country?
00:30:24.060Like, and who think about things like songs and holidays and things like that, I think is a really important part of this.
00:30:31.840So Simone, what were you going to ask?
00:30:34.300As a solution to the cold start problem, what are your thoughts on, like, Company Town 2.0?
00:30:40.320Where a company like Google or Amazon or anyone with sufficient funds, who's also bringing in a lot of talent and possibly tax revenue,
00:30:49.020don't approach as a nation or even a state in the United States and says, hey, allow us to create a city,
00:30:56.020allow us to create our own laws or have these sorts of allowances and bring in people and own their housing and own their restaurants and everything.
00:31:04.540A 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.
00:31:11.240Do you feel like there are serious problems with it?
00:31:13.280Well, I mean, first of all, it's good because it's more cyberpunk and the cyberpunk future is part of what I'm here for.
00:31:26.180I think it's a great solution to the cold start problem.
00:31:28.600Again, like people need to be able to exit.
00:31:30.640Like, I don't worry about a Company Town so much.
00:31:32.700If it's Google engineers, right, like they're not going to, they're not going to like be in a situation where like they're getting charged more than they're getting paid in salary or any of that, like terrible crap that happened in Company Towns.
00:31:56.260So WeWork at one point decided to try to create like a, their own building complex, right?
00:32:02.500But it was like WeWork branded like live and work, right?
00:32:05.820And they initially had planned to make it like a Company Town.
00:32:08.500Like 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.
00:32:18.100So they ended up having to desperately find other people to fill it.
00:32:21.920And 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.
00:32:30.780You're building it for your employee's salary.
00:32:34.840I mean, I think that effective organizations are just going to solve that automatically.
00:32:39.240Like you only need like one competent project manager to make sure that doesn't happen.
00:32:44.560But yeah, I mean, one way of generalizing, because I'm sorry, I'm relentlessly meta.
00:32:50.820Actually, I'm not sorry that I'm relentlessly meta.
00:32:52.340The Company Town idea is saying that like if you can get like a set of 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.
00:33:09.780Like this is what's what's different and like one it's like not happening yet.
00:33:15.060Because these ideas are so new, but 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.
00:33:28.800So, for example, I worked a little bit on a concept to make an e-sports city, right?
00:33:34.740Like for gamers where it's like you have like a huge e-sports stadium where you might see your favorite streamer having coffee or a restaurant where people would move to.
00:33:44.980From my investment perspective, I was mainly stuck on I just didn't see any like regulatory things.
00:33:50.900I was like, well, maybe legalization of betting on them or something, but there's not really regulations needed.
00:33:56.060But, you know, even though governance change is my focus, like the broader state 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.
00:34:10.300So 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 want to rewrite.
00:34:24.620And so I think that drawing from big existing communities like e-sports or like Oprah, like I think celebrities, like Oprah City, Tony Robbins.
00:34:52.960I think, yeah, I think those will be like, we have to prove the concept, we weirdos.
00:34:58.160But then I think it's going to be stuff like that.
00:35:00.040Yeah. So I know here to 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 preacher who often had interesting ideas.
00:35:25.800When I'm talking about a celebrity Protestant preachers who would have been seen as just another person within their faction, but that had interesting ideas about things like diet and stuff like that, very similar to your modern celebrity.
00:35:38.940Did Kellogg create something like a – no, he just got a lot of retreat.
00:35:41.760Kellogg was not early in America. That was about 100 years, I think.
00:35:44.020Yeah, that was – yeah, really that year.
00:35:48.820Yeah, that's awesome. I didn't know about 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.
00:35:59.340Yeah, I mean, it wasn't – what is Confucius if he is not a lifestyle brand? What is Jesus if not a lifestyle brand?
00:36:05.480I've actually been – by the way, I've been getting into the Jesus lifestyle brand lately.
00:36:10.300Yes! Well, I mean, you got the long hair going, you know.
00:36:12.660Yeah, I've been – there's this Christian preacher I really like, John Mark Comer.
00:36:20.080I got into him because he has videos on the Sabbath, so bringing Shabbat to Christians, because it's one of the Ten Commandments that was kept.
00:36:27.900Like, 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 minimalism, and the Sabbath is one of his practices.
00:36:39.180But he has a recent book called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, because hurry is a profound enemy to spiritual life.
00:36:48.160And I learned, like, these awesome points about how, like, Jesus literally says, hey, I have an easy life.
00:36:55.800If you want an easy life, come with me, listen to me, follow my principles, and do the stuff that I do.
00:37:01.760But yet, Christian churches have gone so far from that.
00:37:05.240They're not teaching people to, like, to live like Jesus.
00:37:07.660There are some little principles from there that they teach, but it's, like, it's this whole different thing.
00:37:15.020If you want to, like, if you want to be like me, live like me, right?
00:37:20.080It wasn't just about, like, listen to my sermons.
00:37:22.120It was about a different way to live, one that we've very much gone away from in the modern day.
00:37:26.600And 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.
00:37:41.780And but the problem is that living like Jesus is, it's really hard.
00:37:54.140Like, we don't nail people to cross it so much anymore.
00:37:58.660Have you seen, because I actually think it would work really well if you're talking about intergenerationally durable cultures and stuff like that and of the 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?
00:38:16.900No, but it's a great idea because it's just a classic community seed.
00:38:20.820I think we've talked to some, the closest is talking to some, like, very, very large musicians in Africa who have kind of a big following for, like, both their music.
00:38:35.380But it's, like, it's more than that in Africa, these huge artists.
00:38:39.300There's also, like, a culture aspect, too.
00:38:45.260I want to 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 penal colonies.
00:39:00.760So you talk about, in the beginning of this, the value of being able to get away, but I do think that there's this growing concern about crime in cities.
00:39:10.220Some nations are like, well, just screw it.
00:39:12.560Let's, like, round up all the criminals, put them in jail.
00:39:17.180I don't know, but it's going to be awesome.
00:39:20.100Everyone wants to, like, create these solutions.
00:39:21.800I'm like, company towns that own people, penal colonies, make it happen.
00:39:25.940But, I mean, one of the things I'm really interested in is recidivism and people concerned about crime in cities.
00:39:32.540And also, like, it really sucks and it seems really stupid to me that you just lock someone away and that that costs a lot to people.
00:39:40.020When 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 other people?
00:40:11.780They would likely be willing to pay for some external entity to take this population, especially if it was being handled in a humane manner or more of a humane manner than their existing prison system.
00:40:36.820But look, so one of the things my dad does is study lots of different legal systems throughout the ages.
00:40:42.240He has a book, Legal Systems Very Different From Ours.
00:40:44.840And banishment was a very traditional punishment, right?
00:40:48.860Because it is very expensive to keep people in jail through much of history.
00:40:52.620It wasn't done except for very important prisoners or for, like, shorter periods of time.
00:40:57.040And so I think banishment is, like, a fair and effective solution.
00:41:01.680Like, a society should be able to decide who's in there and who isn't.
00:41:05.040As far as, like, crime in cities, I mean, I really think it's ineffective governments without incentives.
00:41:09.720Like, I don't think a privately run city that makes its money from rents and taxes, like, that's just, that's not going to happen.
00:41:17.340And by the way, like, as a lawyer, I used to be so against taxes.
00:41:21.080And now I'm like, wait, if you have an entity, like, a for-profit company, like, creating GDP, then, like, having an, like, taxes are just, it's like a rev share.
00:41:49.760Like, again, 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 want to come to that's growing, where people's incomes are increasing, like, that's the incentive.
00:42:03.780Then something expensive like incarceration, like, it just, it's just very unlikely to be the best solution, right?
00:42:20.040Maybe if you don't want to vanish, people can kind of be in the society for a period of time in, like, a certain, like, limited area where there's more security and protections from them leaving, but they can actually, like, work, right?
00:42:34.420Like, stay economically productive enough to pay for the housing.
00:42:37.160There's an old Heinlein story, which is, like, a, like, utopia, whole utopia society, and there's this one place where, like, they send the people who break the rules.
00:42:57.960Well, I think because we have way too many laws.
00:42:59.500I mean, there's just a lot of reasons.
00:43:01.060Yeah, and so if there were, like, an opt-in option for, like, all right, you know what?
00:43:05.340Like, if you want a road warrior society where you're just going to be super violent, or if you just want, like, drug society where, like, whatever goes, like, it's all for you.
00:43:13.200Like, if people could opt into that, you might actually get really interesting innovation.
00:43:17.360You might actually get people for whom mainstream society or whatever society they would be jailed in doesn't work.