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12 episodes with charter cities
6 episodes with charter cities
2 episodes with charter cities
2 episodes with charter cities
2 episodes with charter cities
2 episodes with charter cities
3 episodes with charter cities
2 episodes with charter cities
3 episodes with charter cities
EPISODE #94: Welcome back to the pod! This week we have special guests Kelsey Piper & Patri Friedman joining Mike Solana to chat about our government's inability to build anything today, and the solutions that are being built. We discuss the history of seasteading, the evolution of charter cities, build vs. exit, the “Abundance” movement, Trump's 'Golden Age' and if we'll ever be able to fix the legislative branch.Featuring Mike Solana, Kelsey Piper & Patri FriedmanWe have partnered with AdQuick! They gave us a 'Moon Should Be A State' billboard in Times Square!https://www.adquick.com/Sign Up For The Pirate Wires Daily! 3 Takes Delivered To Your Inbox Every Morning:https://get.piratewires.com/pw/dailyPirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWiresMike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolanaTIMESTAMPS:0:00 - Welcome Kelsey Piper & Patri Friedman To The Pod2:00 - Charter Cities & Economic Freedom8:20 -The Origins and Evolution of Seasteading12:55 - Shenzen & Notable Seasteading Projects and Challenges21:15 - Charter Cities: Esmeralda, California Forever, Prospera in Honduras.28:50 - Ezra Klein & 'Abundance' Movement - Will It Work? 34:00 - Freedom Cities & The Trump 'Golden Age'42:00 - DOGE Failures47:45 - ADQUICK - Thanks For Sponsoring The Pod!48:48- Local Government and Political Reform50:36 - Meritocracy and Government Hiring52:28 - Democratic Values and Affirmative Action01:04:39- AI and the Future of Democracy01:05:42 - The Role of AI in Governance01:12:07 - Aesthetics in Urban Development01:21:42 - Exit or Build: The Future of America#podcast #technology #politics #culture
Are you interested charter cities? Summary of the article titled Building resilient cities: The role of charter cities in promoting resilient urban development from 2024, by Eva Klaus and the Charter Cities Institute, published on the Charter Cities Institute website.This is a great preparation to our next interview with Mark Lutter, the founder and executive director of Charter Cities Institute in episode 318 talking about charter cities and their role in urban futures. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how the charter cities concept can enhance urban resilience. This article introduces charter cities as new cities with new rules and the opportunities within climate adaptation and sustainable growth.Find the article through this link.Connecting episodes you might be interested in:No.074R - Resilient urban planning: major principles and criteriaNo.090 - Interview with Professor Matthew McCartney about the connection between economics and citiesYou can find the transcript through this link.What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Let me know on Twitter @WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the shownotes are also available.I hope this was an interesting episode for you and thanks for tuning in.Episode generated with Descript assistance (affiliate link).Music by Lesfm from Pixabay
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Mark Lutter. Lutter is an urban development expert known for his work on charter cities—new urban areas aimed at fostering economic growth and progress. He is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the Charter Cities Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to building the ecosystem for charter cities, as well as the CEO of Braavos Cities, a charter city development company. He holds a PhD in economics from George Mason University, and a BS in mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park. His interests span progress studies, governance, social dynamics and institution-building, with a belief that creating new cities can spark cultural and economic advancements similar to historical periods like the Renaissance or the Dutch Golden Age. He has been published or quoted in outlets like the Financial Times, The New Yorker, and The Chicago Tribune. Lutter and Razib discuss diverse topics, from the difficulties of the Prospera project in Honduras, to the possibility of developing San Francisco's Presidio into an Asian-style super-city. They explore the various pitfalls and possibilities faced when attempting to create new jurisdictions in developing nations in the Caribbean and Latin America, along with the major obstacles to urban innovation in the USA. Lutter outlines the economic case for charter cities, along with the normative values that undergird their creation as bastions of liberty and laboratories of cultural experimentation. Finally, they discuss the Trump administration's openness to the idea of the “Freedom City” in the Presidio, along with local opposition to the project.
In PX129 our guest is Jeffrey Mason of the Charter Cities Institute. Jeffrey joined CCI as a Researcher in 2019. His research interests include urban economics, structural transformation, special economic zones, and technology ecosystems. He has worked on policy advisory projects in Nigeria, Tanzania, Zambia, and Honduras, among other countries. Prior to joining the Charter Cities Institute, Jeffrey worked as an MA Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He holds a BA in economics from the University of Maryland and an MA in economics from George Mason University. His writing has been featured in publications including City Journal, Works in Progress, Investment Monitor, Quartz Africa, and The American Mind. The Charter Cities Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to creating the ecosystem for charter cities, founded on the idea that a fresh approach was necessary to tackle humanity's most pressing challenges, such as global poverty, climate change and rapid urbanisation. CCI believe charter cities—new cities granted a special jurisdiction to create a new governance system—are that solution. By improving governance through deep regulatory and administrative reforms, charter cities can help accelerate economic growth in developing countries and lift tens of millions of people out of poverty. Details at https://chartercitiesinstitute.org In podcast extra / culture corner, Jeff recommends the book ‘Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World' by Andrew Phillips and JC Sharman https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691203515/outsourcing-empire Jess recommends the TV series Ted Lasso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Lasso Pete recommends the book ‘The Diaries of Fred Williams 1963 - 1970' https://www.amazon.com.au/Diaries-Fred-Williams-1963-1970/dp/0522871208 Episode PX129 was released on 31 March 2025. PX is proud to be a member of the Urban Broadcast Collective.
In PX129 our guest is Jeffrey Mason of the Charter Cities Institute. Jeffrey joined CCI as a Researcher in 2019. His research interests include urban economics, structural transformation, special economic zones, and technology ecosystems. He has worked on policy advisory projects in Nigeria, Tanzania, Zambia, and Honduras, among other countries. Prior to joining the Charter Cities Institute, Jeffrey worked as an MA Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He holds a BA in economics from the University of Maryland and an MA in economics from George Mason University. His writing has been featured in publications including City Journal, Works in Progress, Investment Monitor, Quartz Africa, and The American Mind. The Charter Cities Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to creating the ecosystem for charter cities, founded on the idea that a fresh approach was necessary to tackle humanity's most pressing challenges, such as global poverty, climate change and rapid urbanisation. CCI believe charter cities—new cities granted a special jurisdiction to create a new governance system—are that solution. By improving governance through deep regulatory and administrative reforms, charter cities can help accelerate economic growth in developing countries and lift tens of millions of people out of poverty. Details at https://chartercitiesinstitute.org In podcast extra / culture corner, Jeff recommends the book ‘Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World' by Andrew Phillips and JC Sharman https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691203515/outsourcing-empire Jess recommends the TV series Ted Lasso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Lasso Pete recommends the book ‘The Diaries of Fred Williams 1963 - 1970' https://www.amazon.com.au/Diaries-Fred-Williams-1963-1970/dp/0522871208 Episode PX129 was released on 31 March 2025.
In PX129 our guest is Jeffrey Mason of the Charter Cities Institute. Jeffrey joined CCI as a Researcher in 2019. His research interests include urban economics, structural transformation, special economic zones, and technology ecosystems. He has worked on policy advisory projects in Nigeria, Tanzania, Zambia, and Honduras, among other countries. Prior to joining the Charter Cities Institute, Jeffrey worked as an MA Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He holds a BA in economics from the University of Maryland and an MA in economics from George Mason University. His writing has been featured in publications including City Journal, Works in Progress, Investment Monitor, Quartz Africa, and The American Mind. The Charter Cities Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to creating the ecosystem for charter cities, founded on the idea that a fresh approach was necessary to tackle humanity's most pressing challenges, such as global poverty, climate change and rapid urbanisation. CCI believe charter cities—new cities granted a special jurisdiction to create a new governance system—are that solution. By improving governance through deep regulatory and administrative reforms, charter cities can help accelerate economic growth in developing countries and lift tens of millions of people out of poverty. Details at https://chartercitiesinstitute.org In podcast extra / culture corner, Jeff recommends the book ‘Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World' by Andrew Phillips and JC Sharman https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691203515/outsourcing-empire Jess recommends the TV series Ted Lasso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Lasso Pete recommends the book ‘The Diaries of Fred Williams 1963 - 1970' https://www.amazon.com.au/Diaries-Fred-Williams-1963-1970/dp/0522871208 Episode PX129 was released on 31 March 2025.
How do we fight back against the broligarchs? Journalist Gil Durán, of the must-read newsletters Nerd Reich and FrameLab, shows the way, in this week's Gaslit Nation. Jean-Paul Sartre's famous line, “Hell is other people,” from his play No Exit, written in Nazi-occupied France, captured a grievance that mirrored the era's ideological clashes—fascism, communism, and isolationism, often overlapping and competing, fueling Stalin's genocides, the Holocaust, and World War II. The solution to sharing society with others, it seemed, was elimination: kill them. This is why democracies rely on tolerance—you don't have to like my existence, but you must let me exist in peace. Yet today's tech oligarchs, having amassed unimaginable wealth, would rather invest billions in creating tech colonies and new religions to justify mass murder, enslavement, and C.E.O. king fiefdoms than address world hunger, provide free education, and strengthen social safety nets. Their vision isn't coexistence—they're building an anti-empathy billionaire bunker cult. Gil Durán, a San Francisco journalist and former editorial page editor of The Sacramento Bee and The San Francisco Examiner, has a front-row view of the rise of the broligarchs, analyzing their fascist justifications for cruelty in his popular newsletter, Nerd Reich. Durán spent over a decade in California politics, serving as chief communications strategist for Governor Jerry Brown, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and Attorney General Kamala Harris. His work has appeared in The New Republic, Esquire, and PBS. He co-founded Framelab, a newsletter on politics, language, and the brain, with Dr. George Lakoff. Most importantly we discuss: how do we defeat the Nerd Reich and the Vichy Democrats? This week's bonus for our Patreon subscribers at the Truth-teller level and higher continues with Gil Durán of Nerd Reich, examining Democratic leaders as controlled opposition—public allies secretly serving the oligarchs. Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit! Show Notes: The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán https://www.thenerdreich.com/ FrameLab https://www.theframelab.org/ Trump on Charter Cities: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-a-new-quantum-leap-to-revolutionize-the-american-standard-of-living One of Peter Thiel's favorite book: The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780684810072 Find a Tesla Takedown Protest near you: https://www.teslatakedown.com/ Download/print fliers made by Rise and Resist: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NsdVaglj2-qbaUxPL-aXlPSSMbnjAPV-/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rCUHIzHfJunm2fnZzdm2sMUWlRYeUtGg/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MfkQlear-zAGgpkth6j_r85sSoXihilr/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fXKCdNCrkPOL8nYI8I9WU7-DGIAGHSXb/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/14oYKLO_vzVzEU1sxXSaH1kd_lZ1ylaOG/view?usp=sharing Clip: Elon Musk realizes he might lose his empire: https://bsky.app/profile/internetceleb.bsky.social/post/3lk2rd73f422n Robert Reich on Twitter: “When Trump was sworn in, Elon Musk's corporations were under more than 32 investigations conducted by at least 11 federal agencies. Most of the cases are now closed or likely to be closed soon, and the federal agencies are being defanged by DOGE. Funny how that works, huh?” https://x.com/RBReich/status/1898780869092884808 Andrea on Bluesky: “Start building a case for Trump and Musk to be arrested by the International Criminal Court” https://bsky.app/profile/andreachalupa.bsky.social/post/3lk47dkixgs2k EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION: March 17 4pm ET – Dr. Lisa Corrigan joins our Gaslit Nation Salon to discuss America's private prison crisis in an age of fascist scapegoating March 31 4pm ET – Gaslit Nation Book Club: From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, which informed revolts in Ukraine, the Arab Spring, Hong Kong, and beyond NEW! April 7 4pm ET – Security Committee Presents at the Gaslit Nation Salon. Don't miss it! Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join, available on Patreon. Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, available on Patreon. Have you taken Gaslit Nation's HyperNormalization Survey Yet? Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and the first ~40 minutes are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community
For the past three years, Isabelle Castro has reported extensively on fintech and crypto in Europe and the US, interviewing industry leaders to track the development of the financial system. At Digital Frontier, she is looking at the cutting edge of innovation, focused primarily on fintech and the web3 space but branching into topics like longevity and biotech, the future of cities and AGI.
Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute and Braavos Cities discusses focusing on tangible, actionable research to help make better decisions for developing charter cities. Lutter explains the significant challenges in city development, including the necessity of political buy-in and complex stakeholder coordination amidst increasing global uncertainty. He notes that younger, growing populations often drive city growth. Alongside Jarrad Hope, they explore topics such as urbanization patterns, financing mechanisms for low-income housing, and economic development strategies essential for successful charter city projects.JOIN THE COMMUNITYLogos TwitterLogos Discord TIMESTAMPS:00:00:31 Who Is Mark Lutter and What Led Him to Charter Cities?00:04:31 What Is the Connection Between Urbanization and Economic Growth?00:07:55 How Do Charter Cities Address Urban Migration?00:09:04 What Are the Key Elements for Effective Urban Governance?00:12:03 What Infrastructure and Governance Are Needed for New Cities?00:15:45 How Did Mark's Journey Lead to Founding the Charter Cities Institute?00:17:51 How Has Increasing Global Uncertainty Affected Charter Cities?00:18:27 What Are the Stages and Challenges of Starting a Charter City?00:21:21 Why Do Charter Cities Have a Controversial Reputation?00:22:31 How Do Charter Cities Compare to Special Economic Zones and Other Models?00:25:15 What Are the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurial Communities?00:27:53 How Can a Charter City Develop Its Economy Intentionally?00:31:04 What Lessons Can Be Learned from Real-World Charter City Projects?00:36:21 What Role Do Productivity and Markets Play in Poverty Alleviation?00:37:42 What Criteria Determine the Location of a Charter City?00:39:24 How Do CCI and Bravo Cities Differ in Their Approach?00:40:46 What Is Happening with Charter City Projects in Zanzibar?00:43:59 What Types of Research Facilitate the Development of Charter Cities?00:45:02 Why Is Regional Influence Increasingly Important for Charter Cities?00:45:29 How Can One Get Involved or Learn More About Charter Cities? Logos Press Engine includes Logos Podcast and Hashing It Out. Hashing it Out dives into the mechanisms and hardware of the technology that aid in making sovereign communities.
Art Finch is a South African-American Entrepreneur. Art has experience across South Asia and is interested in setting up Free Private Cities or Charter Cities. In this episode he shares his experiences in Bhutan and shares his theories on how Bitcoin and Free Private Cities can work together. Timestamps: (00:00) - Intro (01:28) - Art's background & his interest in building a Free Private City (FPC) (10:50) - The need for a Free Private City (13:11) - A look at Shenzhen as an SEZ (16:20) - Education in an FPC context (20:08) - Sponsors (22:22) - Education in an FPC context (contd.) (26:11) - Setting up an FPC in Bhutan (33:56) - Bhutan's leadership views on the FPC (41:41) - Sponsors (44:00) - Art's insights on Bhutan & Bitcoin mining (46:08) - Potential FPCs in the future X clips: 07:18 - biggest risk to FPC 08:47 - 10:01 - Bhutan FPC in a nutshell 10:57 - 12:40 - need for FPC 18:08 - 20:08 - learning/self education, role of schools, start with one node and grow from there - similar to bitcoin 44:08 - 45:59 - Bitcoin progress in Bhutan - mining ops, Links: Article mentioned: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2023/12/15/bhutan-futuristic-city-dragon-king/ Site: https://yungdrung.city/ Free Citadels profile: https://freecitadels.com/profile/art-finch/ Sponsors: Swan.com (code LIVERA) CoinKite.com (code LIVERA) Mempool.space Nomadcapitalist.com/apply Stephan Livera links: Follow me on X: @stephanlivera Subscribe to the podcast Subscribe to Substack
Politically Entertaining with Evolving Randomness (PEER) by EllusionEmpire
Send us a Text Message.Hyper-partisanship is tearing America apart, and we need bold solutions. In this episode of Politically High Tech, we welcome special guest Evan Jaqua, who presents his radical vision for an anti-political party movement. We push the boundaries of conventional political thought by discussing the addictiveness of political power and proposing revolutionary changes like one-term limits for politicians and the elimination of political party dominance. Jaqua passionately argues that our democracy is at risk when those in power prioritize their own interests over the principles they are supposed to uphold. Together, we dissect bipartisan strategies for resolving critical issues like immigration, criticizing both major parties for their self-serving agendas.Turning our attention to Central and South America, we expose the grave dangers posed by entrenched drug cartels and corrupt regimes. By drawing parallels to the fall of the Soviet Union, we highlight the transformative potential of creating economic disparities that can undermine tyranny. The conversation underscores the urgency of addressing root causes, such as political corruption, and advocates for term limits to ensure politicians serve their constituents. We propose comprehensive solutions to improve the quality of life and tackle the refugee crisis, underscoring the need for a holistic approach to combat lawlessness and corruption.Finally, we explore the economic and social benefits of encouraging immigration to revitalize struggling communities and industries. From affordable senior care to labor-intensive sectors like agriculture, an influx of immigrant labor could inject much-needed vitality into the American economy. We introduce innovative concepts like Charter Cities and self-sustaining manufacturing hubs in third-world countries as long-term solutions to global immigration challenges. As we critique the outsized influence of swing counties in presidential elections, we emphasize the importance of honest political discourse and the positive impact of travel on personal growth, setting the stage for future thought-provoking discussions.Follow Evan Jaqua at ...https://www.solutionsparty.org/If you want to be a guest on my podcast, please click at the link here.https://www.joinpodmatch.com/politically-high-techSupport the Show.Follow your host atYouTube and Rumble for video contenthttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUxk1oJBVw-IAZTqChH70aghttps://rumble.com/c/c-4236474Facebook to receive updateshttps://www.facebook.com/EliasEllusion/Twitter (yes, I refuse to call it X)https://x.com/politicallyht
Greetings Glocal Citizens! This week's conversation comes to you in two parts and is courtesy of a connection made by my guest from Episode 34, Stacey Enyame (https://glocalcitizens.fireside.fm/guests/stacey-enyame). Recognizing the intersection between tech and community/economic development and my background, Stacey suggested I join the Keta MakerSpace community on WhatsApp--a brainchild of #GlobalGhanaian, Paul Kwesi Damalie. We go into detail about the community and the vision for the platform and new city in the making in Part 2 of the conversation, both parts are not to be missed! Paul is founder of Damalie Innovation Holdings Group which invests in and builds companies in health tech, sports value chain, gaming and family entertainment, urban infrastructure & development and trade & embedded finance, climate resileince. Previously he was the co-founder of Inclusive Innovations Inc. which developed the Appruve API, product making it easy for financial services to verify individuals and businesses all over Africa. In 2023 Appruve was acquired by Smile ID. As a Fintech industry influencer, he is among Untapt's Top 23 fintech influencers to follow on X; he is a Chapter Lead of Next Money, the global thought leader community for stakeholders within the financial services and technology ecosystem. He organizes events (meetups & conferences) that create opportunities for stakeholders to discuss current trends, explore opportunities through networking and influence policy in the financial services ecosystem. He also has experience consulting for fintech startups and new market entrants into West Africa, working closely with fintech innovation programmes, accelerators and investors as well as financial inclusion research institutions. Where to find Paul? On LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauldamalie/) On X (https://twitter.com/PaulDamalie) On Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/imaginedbysenam/) On Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/paul.damalie/) What's Paul reading? The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (https://a.co/d/evhUwt1) by Ben Horowitz Every.to (https://every.to) What's Paul listening to? Funaná (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funan%C3%A1) Kizomba (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kizomba) Other topics of interest: Keta Coastal Analysis (https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/11/6/1144) Albert (https://booknook.store/product/albert-comfort-ocran-executive-collection-paperback/) and Comfort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_Ocran) Ocran DSF Lab (https://www.dfslab.net) Caribou Digital (https://www.cariboudigital.net) Afropolitan Network State (https://www.afropolitan.io) Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin talks Charter Cities (https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/podcast/charter-cities-podcast-international-hubs-and-the-future-of-living-with-vitalik-buterin/) an the Charter Cities Institute (https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/author/marklutter/) New City Concepts - Zuzalu (https://www.vitadao.com/event/zuzalu), Próspera (https://www.prospera.co), Fumba Town (https://fumba.town), Itana (https://www.itana.africa) On Digital Nomads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_nomad) Playground.ai (linkhttps://playground.ai) Google for Startups (https://startup.google.com) Y Combinator (https://www.ycombinator.com) Sand Hill Road (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Hill_Road) Tokeh Beach, Sierra Leone (https://tourismsierraleone.com/attractions/tokeh-beach/) Special Guest: Paul Damalie.
Greetings Glocal Citizens! This week's conversation comes to you in two parts and is courtesy of a connection made by my guest from Episode 34, Stacey Enyame (https://glocalcitizens.fireside.fm/guests/stacey-enyame). Recognizing the intersection between tech and community/economic development and my background, Stacey suggested I join the Keta MakerSpace community on WhatsApp--a brainchild of #GlobalGhanaian, Paul Kwesi Damalie. We go into detail about the community and the vision for the platform and new city in the making in Part 2 of the conversation, both parts are not to be missed! Paul is founder of Damalie Innovation Holdings Group which invests in and builds companies in health tech, sports value chain, gaming and family entertainment, urban infrastructure & development and trade & embedded finance, climate resileince. Previously he was the co-founder of Inclusive Innovations Inc. which developed the Appruve API, product making it easy for financial services to verify individuals and businesses all over Africa. In 2023 Appruve was acquired by Smile ID. As a Fintech industry influencer, he is among Untapt's Top 23 fintech influencers to follow on X; he is a Chapter Lead of Next Money, the global thought leader community for stakeholders within the financial services and technology ecosystem. He organizes events (meetups & conferences) that create opportunities for stakeholders to discuss current trends, explore opportunities through networking and influence policy in the financial services ecosystem. He also has experience consulting for fintech startups and new market entrants into West Africa, working closely with fintech innovation programmes, accelerators and investors as well as financial inclusion research institutions. Where to find Paul? On LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauldamalie/) On X (https://twitter.com/PaulDamalie) On Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/imaginedbysenam/) On Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/paul.damalie/) What's Paul reading? The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (https://a.co/d/evhUwt1) by Ben Horowitz Every.to (https://every.to) What's Paul listening to? Funaná (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funan%C3%A1) Kizomba (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kizomba) Other topics of interest: Keta Coastal Analysis (https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/11/6/1144) Albert (https://booknook.store/product/albert-comfort-ocran-executive-collection-paperback/) and Comfort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_Ocran) Ocran DSF Lab (https://www.dfslab.net) Caribou Digital (https://www.cariboudigital.net) Afropolitan Network State (https://www.afropolitan.io) Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin talks Charter Cities (https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/podcast/charter-cities-podcast-international-hubs-and-the-future-of-living-with-vitalik-buterin/) an the Charter Cities Institute (https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/author/marklutter/) New City Concepts - Zuzalu (https://www.vitadao.com/event/zuzalu), Próspera (https://www.prospera.co), Fumba Town (https://fumba.town), Itana (https://www.itana.africa) On Digital Nomads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_nomad) Playground.ai (linkhttps://playground.ai) Google for Startups (https://startup.google.com) Y Combinator (https://www.ycombinator.com) Sand Hill Road (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Hill_Road) Tokeh Beach, Sierra Leone (https://tourismsierraleone.com/attractions/tokeh-beach/) Special Guest: Paul Damalie.
The Catawba Economic Zone is the new best place to incorporate your LLC. In this episode we discuss how the Catawba Zone came to be, how it fits into the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) movement, and why it might be the best place to incorporate your business.
In this episode, we delve into the controversy surrounding the Prospera charter city in Honduras, which has embraced libertarian principles and adopted Bitcoin as legal tender and a unit of account. The city is currently embroiled in a legal battle with the Honduran government. Gene asks Jeffrey Mason, from Charter Cities Institute, what it all means for the future of charter cities. Jeffrey provides some good examples of how charter cities still have a lot of potential, and he talks about projects CCI is involved in in Africa, particularly in Zanzibar. Tune in to gain insights into the intersection of governance, economics, and innovation in the context of charter cities.Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored. About this episode's guest: Jeffrey Mason, Head of Research, Charter Cities Institute Jeffrey joined CCI as a Researcher in 2019. His research interests include urban economics, structural transformation, special economic zones, and technology ecosystems. He has worked on policy advisory projects in Nigeria, Tanzania, Zambia, and Honduras, among other countries. Prior to joining the Charter Cities Institute, Jeffrey worked as an MA Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He holds a BA in economics from the University of Maryland and an MA in economics from George Mason University. His writing has been featured in publications including City Journal, Works in Progress, Investment Monitor, Quartz Africa, and The American Mind.What's covered in EP234Introduction. (0:00)Honduran ZEDEs: zones for employment and economic development. (4:12)Honduran ZEDEs and impacts on local communities. (9:41)Investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms. (15:15)Charter cities and their potential to improve governance and economic growth. (20:37)Charter cities and urban development in Zanzibar. (26:15)Affordable housing development in Zanzibar, Tanzania. (30:56)Urban development and new city projects. (39:27)TakeawaysThe controversy surrounding Prospera in Honduras highlights the risks and uncertainties involved in charter city projects.The concept of charter cities is evolving, with a growing emphasis on affordability, local engagement, and sustainable development to ensure their long-term success.Legal and political stability, along with government partnerships, are crucial for the success of charter cities, as demonstrated by the contrasting experiences of Prospera and the Zanzibar project, Fumba Town, that Charter Cities Institute is involved in.Links relevant to the conversationJeffrey's bio: https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/people/jeffrey-mason/Ryan Grim's report at the Intercept “Honduras Ratchets Up Battle With Crypto-Libertarian Investors, Rejects World Bank Court”: https://theintercept.com/2024/03/19/honduras-crypto-investors-world-bank-prospera/Counter Points report “Honduras GOES TO WAR With Crypto Bros”, CCI's involvement with Fumba Town: https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/fumba-town/Fumba Town: https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/fumba-town/EP147 with Kurtis Lockhart on charter cities: https://economicsexplored.com/2022/07/11/charter-cities-a-public-private-partnership-ppp-model-w-kurtis-lockhart-ep147/Lumo Coffee promotionLumo Coffee Discount: Visit Lumo Coffee (lumocoffee.com) and use code EXPLORED20 for a 20% discount until April 30, 2024.Thanks to Obsidian Productions for mixing the episode and to the show's sponsor, Gene's consultancy business www.adepteconomics.com.au. Full transcripts are available a few days after the episode is first published at www.economicsexplored.com.
Can a city hold the key to unlocking economic prosperity on a grand scale? In this episode, we sit down with Brooke Bowman and Mark Lutter to discuss charter cities and their role in addressing economic development challenges. Mark is a visionary thinker invested in progress, governance, social dynamics, and the concept of new cities. He is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the Charter Cities Institute and CEO of Braavos Cities, a pioneering charter city development company. Brooke is the founder of Vibecamp, a community that aims to foster connections and personal growth. Join us as we delve into the intricacies of community-building, economic development, and cultural influence. We unpack the concept of charter cities as a way to address economic development challenges and the importance of facilitating genuine connections with people through city developments and fostering community and co-living without excessive overhead. Tuning in, you'll discover the value of creating spaces where like-minded individuals can gather and interact and how the intersection of co-creation and play drives culture and innovation. To learn how to unlock the potential of charter cities and create vibrant, sustainable communities with a focus on culture, innovation, and positive societal impact, don't miss this conversation!Key Points From This Episode:Introducing Mark, his background, and his interest in charter cities.The concept of Charter Cities and how they can alleviate poverty.Mark and Brooke's experience of a pop-up community experiment called Zuzalu.How community gatherings help drive innovation in a society.Explore creating a sustainable community with a vibrant culture.The Neighborhood project and how it helping to build communities.What role the internet plays in facilitating the formation of real-life communities.Details about the governance structure of the Próspera development.Incorporating families and children into Vibecamp communities.Insights into how long communities will take to grow to scale.Why mimicking successful models from history is essential.The important sense of community and shared values that festivals provide.Why there is a need for economic development alongside community building.An overview of the legal mechanisms to ensure long-term success.Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:Brooke BowmanBrooke Bowman on XMark LutterMark Lutter on XBraavos CitiesVibecampThe Network State ConferenceJason BennThe NeighborhoodCabin CityCharter Cities InstituteCharter Cities Institute on FacebookCharter Cities Institute on...
00:00 Introductions[1][2]02:40 Values in governance systems17:33 Seasteading[3]23:35 Zone for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDE)[4]27:55 Physical territory requirement 34:45 Open source law40:14 Charter Cities & Pronomos[5]54:31 Reading list[6]58:04 Criticism01:02:53 GoodbyePatri Friedman: https://twitter.com/patrissimo https://patrifriedman.com/Jarrad Hope: https://twitter.com/jarradhope_https://www.seasteading.org/https://www.lawg.org/the-zedes-law-in-honduras-sanctuary-for-exploitation-corruption-and-organized-crime/https://www.pronomos.vc/https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/reading/ Logos Press Engine includes Logos Podcast and Hashing It Out. Hashing it Out dives into the mechanisms and hardware of the technology that aid in making sovereign communities.
Today's episode is a throwback to when Erik interviewed Byrne Hobart for the first time on the Venture Stories by Village Global podcast. Byrne and Erik go deep on technological change, debate centralization versus decentralization, discuss mental models for financial bubbles, and examine human nature from the lens of different thinkers. The Riff is sponsored by Shopify: https://shopify.com/momentofzen for a $1/month trial period. --- The Riff is a part of the Turpentine podcast network. Learn more: https://turpentine.co --- We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com. --- Thanks to our sponsor: SHOPIFY Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries. From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/momentofzen --- LINKS: Byrne's writing: https://thediff.co --- X / TWITTER: @eriktorenberg (Erik) @byrnehobart (Byrne) @turpentinemedia (Turpentine) --- TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Intro (01:11) Byrne's Approach to Understanding (02:56) Productivity Growth (06:38) Debate on Globalization (16:30) Sponsor: Shopify (18:12) Understanding the Impact of Geography, Demographics, and Energy (27:25) State Capacity Libertarianism (33:21) Predicting the Future of US-China Relationship (34:37) Lessons from the East Asian Economic Miracles (35:42) The Role of Corruption in Economic Growth (36:32) Strategies for Subsidizing Exports (38:05) The Impact of Anti-Globalization Movements (38:30) The Trade Deficit Debate (46:21) Charter Cities (52:38) The Techlash (01:07:38) The Future of Wall Street and Its Impact on Society (01:17:53) The Power of the Dollar System (01:18:55) Understanding Negative Interest Rates (01:20:43) The Impact of Low Interest Rates on Infrastructure Development (01:25:05) The Impact of Demographics on Long Term Bonds (01:27:48) The Problem of Underfunded Pensions (01:28:52) Understanding Financial Bubbles (01:33:37) The Dynamics of Centralization and Decentralization (01:50:43) The Future of Silicon Valley and California (01:56:31) Disagreements with Notable Thinkers
In today's episode of Charter Cities, we're honored to welcome Lant Pritchett, a distinguished economist and a thought leader in development economics. Our deep-dive conversation will focus on the critical topic of growth diagnostics, exploring the complex challenges policymakers face in developing nations. Lant will illuminate the importance of identifying impactful actions for growth, emphasizing the need for rigorous debate and evidence-based decision-making. We'll also scrutinize the limitations of traditional development metrics like the "dollar a day" measure and consider alternative, more effective approaches. We'll also investigate innovative solutions like charter cities as a mechanism for fostering sustainable growth by addressing institutional challenges.Key Points From This Episode:Why overemphasis on low-bar goals lead to ineffective randomized control trials in developmentHow bright minds in development economics are missing the markPolicymakers in developing countries lack effective prioritization, not ideas, for fostering economic growthTony Blair's approach focuses on achievable priorities but could benefit from rigorous initial diagnostics for high-impact actionsDeveloping countries grow fast but collapse easily due to fragile "deals-based" governance, unlike OECD's robust rule-based systemsPrioritizing the prevention of growth decelerations; reforms can help but need better diagnosticsShifting focus from economic growth blamed on the end of the Cold War and structural adjustment failuresWeighing charter cities: positives include a focus on urbanization and productivity; challenges involve credibility and feasibility of implementing changeEmphasizing the need for experimentation and policy diversityHow migration from low to high TFP countries can yield 40x greater income gains than anti-poverty programsLabor mobility increasingly viable due to demographic shifts and political changeUrbanization requires new approaches to ensure inclusive, opportunity-driven growth in citiesLinks Mentioned in Today's Episode:RISEHarvard Kennedy SchoolCharter Cities InstituteCharter Cities Institute on FacebookCharter Cities Institute on Twitter
On today's Charter Cities episode, host Jeffrey Mason is joined by colleagues Heba Elhanafy and Matthew McCartney to unpack the New Africa's Bad Urban Laws project. This initiative dissects laws in African cities hindering growth and community well-being. Additionally, Jeffrey reminds listeners of the upcoming Africa's New City Summit in Kigali, Rwanda. The team dives deep, discussing the reasons for and effects of detrimental urban laws, using instances like Zambia's land ownership as an example. Tune in for an insightful discussion on urban policies in Africa.Key Points From This Episode:How urban laws negatively affect African urban environments across fiscal, administrative, and spatial planningThe project exposes bad urban laws and questions their persistent existence in African citiesBad urban laws persist due to misunderstandings, political interests, and distributional benefitsHow Zambia's outdated land ownership laws, rooted in colonial times, benefit a few and hinder economic developmentEgypt's attempt to modernize land laws led to unique urban challenges affecting millionsUrban physician reforms laws with expertise; urban politician navigates political realities for urban changesInteractive map showcases bad urban laws, allows user contributions for more awarenessCCI's research aims for awareness through interactive maps and practical urban reformLinks Mentioned in Today's Episode:Africas New Cities SummitCharter Cities InstituteCharter Cities Institute on FacebookCharter Cities Institute on Twitter
Coming up on today's episode of Charter Cities, we have a very special guest joining host Mark Lutter: Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum. In this episode, we delve into the fascinating world of community building and the importance of creating meaningful connections within cities and online communities. We explore the challenges and successes of building communities in different contexts, from crypto communities to health tribes. With insights from Vitalik's own experiences and observations, we discuss the value of diversity, the impact of infrastructure on small towns, and the need for community filters. Stay tuned for an enriching conversation on the power of communities in shaping our lives and the future of cities.Key Points From This Episode:Factors driving relocation due to cost of livingEmotional disconnect from home countriesGlobal impact of the crypto industryNavigating immigration complexitiesGrowing trend of purposeful location choices for hubsZuzalu community's remarkable success storySignificance of local insights in community buildingDiverse dynamics within health-focused communitiesCautions against hasty expansion and misuse of Zozalu's nameStructured growth imperative as project scalesRegional influencers and quest for secure refugesUrban and rural benefits of clusteringInfrastructure's role in enhancing small town appealSpecial network effects in close-knit communitiesDigital communities united by shared valuesSovereignty quest challenges and complexitiesCommunity's pivotal role in city developmentNavigating delegation challenges and preventing tyrannyLinks Mentioned in Today's Episode:ZuzaluVitalik on TwitterVitalik on MediumCharter Cities InstituteCharter Cities Institute on FacebookCharter Cities Institute on Twitter
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In this spiritual followup to our previous episode on Charter Cities, we get a glimpse at Galt's Gulch Chile. We investigate how a farming community built on Ayn Rand's principles fell into a freaky web of lawsuits, arrests, freaks, pencil mustaches, and a shooting at a Chilean protest by an American YouTube economist in a yellow vest.
To hear the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/TrueAnonPod --------- SBF's arrest, mixed with his brother's desire to buy an island in order to do unregulated medical experimentation, leads us towards the weird world of ultra-libertarian Charter Cities.
Host Jeffrey Mason welcomes esteemed guests Martin Rama and Yue Li to another enthralling episode of Charter Cities. Together, they embark on a deep exploration of the intriguing world of private cities, delving into their impact on urban agglomerations and the delicate interplay with local governments. Tune in today to hear their insights on the successes and challenges that private cities face, as well as the potentials that lie ahead. Through engaging discussions and vivid examples, our hosts and guests will illustrate the multifaceted landscape of private urban development. Martin and Yue share their perspectives on how private actors are reshaping urban environments and the intricate dynamics that govern these relationships. As our episode unfolds, the conversation navigates the complexities of urban development, revealing the key facts and insights surrounding this captivating subject. Thanks for listening!Key Points From This Episode:The significance of private cities as major urban agglomerations with political constituenciesThe push for a voice and a shift towards traditional cities as the population growsResistance against converting successful private cities into traditional onesStrategic underinvestment by private actors in services, relying on government provisionEvolution of institutions between private actors and local governmentsDesigning private cities to offer improved services and environmentsWillingness of residents and firms to pay a premium for landBenefits for developers or companies through increased land valueExploration of different private city models and demographic focusesA historical look at private cities and their reemergence in modern timesExamples of private cities in both advanced and developing countriesAn overview of private cities and their types in various countriesFocus on initial research in South Asia, including India and PakistanIndonesia's status as the country with the highest number of private citiesCategorization into company towns, strategic cities, and mixed citiesPrevalence of strategic cities in Indonesia, with some in IndiaAn analysis of economic activities and government support in private citiesVarious economic activities spearheaded by the private sectorEfforts to seek favorable treatment from the governmentThe role of special economic zones and infrastructure supportStrategies to attract specific industries and investorsThe urgent need for empirical research on economic dynamics and inequalityTentative conclusions and a call for further researchDefinitions and challenges associated with private citiesContradictions with typical city governance run by local governmentThe leading role played by private actors in planning, financing, and service operationChallenging but not new conventional notions of city governancePublic-private partnerships (PPPs) in private city governanceTopological studies, inventories, and governance evolution within private citiesVariations in roles and functions between the private sector and local governmentLand value capture and equity issues in private city developmentThe viability and underinvestment associated with value capture limitationsCreative equity solutions, such as preserving original residents or project sharesExploration of alternative value recovery and fairness mechanismsThe challenges faced by local governments in designing effective value capture strategiesLinks Mentioned in Today's Episode:The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
In der heutigen Episode freue ich mich Dr. Titus Gebel begrüßen zu dürfen. Wir sprechen über sein Konzept der »Freien Privatstädte«. Titus Gebel ist Unternehmer und promovierter Jurist. Er war Mitgründer der Deutsche Rohstoff Gruppe sowie des Startups Dual Fluid, deren CFO Björn Peters, in Episode 73 zu Gast war. Dr. Gebel spielt auch eine wesentliche Rolle in der Etablierung einer ambitionierten Sonderentwicklungszone mit dem Namen Prospera in Honduras und berät andere Sonderwirtschaftszonen weltweit. Aber das Thema des Gesprächs ist breiter: wir beginnen mit der Frage, was modernes Staatswesen ausmacht, was Freiheit bedeutet, was die Rolle von Bürger und Staat sind, wo die Ursprünge und philosophischen Ideen liegen und was bis zum heutigen Zeitpunkt in verschiedenen Nationen daraus geworden ist. Wir beginnen mit einem Blick in die Geschichte, was ist die Rolle des Staates nach Thomas Hobbes und John Stuart Mill? Was ist der Begriff der Freiheit? »Struggle between Liberty and Authority« »By liberty, was meant protection against the tyranny of the political rulers.«, John Stuart Mill Wie hat sich die Rolle des Staates verändert? »Der moderne Staat hat sich etabliert, um seinen Bürgern vor allem zwei Grundpfeiler des Lebens zu garantieren: Freiheit und Sicherheit.«, K. P. Liessmann Wie kommt es zu einem Mehr an Freiheit? Aus philosophischen Überlegungen und Ideen, oder aus pragmatischeren Aspekten? Führt der Weg von der göttlichen Bestimmung zur Freiheit? Wie wird der Wille des Volkes überhaupt bestimmt und was bedeutet dies für Minderheiten? Wir beide stimmen darin überein, dass wir eine beginnende, schwere Krise in den westlichen Demokratien, beziehungsweise Verwaltung erkennen. Die Frage ist: wie ist diese zu erklären und wie könnten Wege heraus aussehen? »Heute haben wir es mit einer Überdehnung des modernen Staates zu tun, und zwar sowohl wohlfahrtsstaatlich wie ökologisch. Mit dem Wohlfahrtsstaat, der eigentlich schon in der traditionellen Gemeinwohlformel angelegt ist, kehrt das summum bonum zurück: das größte Glück der größten Zahl; der gehobene Lebensstandard wird als politisches Recht definiert.«, Norbert Bolz Bismarck gilt als Erfinder des Sozialstaats, was war die damalige Motivation? Wie hat sich der Sozialstaat seit damals entwickelt? Führen falsche Anreizsysteme für Politiker in die Krise, denn Gratisleistungen des Staates erscheinen nur gratis, sind es aber natürlich nicht? »Es gibt in westlichen Demokratien keine klassisch liberalen Parteien mehr, das sind alles Umverteilungsparteien geworden« »Die Gruppe der Menschen, die tatsächlich produktiv und wertschöpfend tätig ist, wird immer kleiner.« Dazu passt auch der Gedanke des mittlerweile 93 jährigen Thomas Sowell: »You have people making [political] decisions, for which they pay no price when they are wrong. No matter how high a price other people pay.« Dr. Gebel hat ein Konzept entwickelt, das er Freie Privatstädte nennt und wir diskutieren über das Konzept, welche Rolle Verwaltung und Regierung einnehmen sollen, wie Anreizsysteme verbessert werden können und vergleichbare andere Ansätze, die in eine ähnliche Richtung gehen. Kann es so etwas wie Verwaltung als Dienstleistung geben? » Der Staat sollte aus meiner Sicht theoretisch kein Monopol auf das Staatsgebiet haben. In Liechtenstein haben wir das verwirklicht. So zwingt man den Staat, ein guter Dienstleister zu sein.«, Hans Adam II von Liechtenstein Wir sprechen dann über die zwiespältige Entwicklungen des 19. Jahrhundert, Engels und den Manchester-Kapitalismus. Welche Rolle spielt Solidarität, Menschwenwürde? Wer soll diese Gewährleisten, und in welcher Form? Welche Rolle spielt Selbstorganisation (bottom up) im Gegensatz zu staatlichen Top Down Mechanismen? Ab wann gleitet ein Sozialstaat in einen »Nanny-State« ab, ganz nach dem alten sozialistischen Motto »Von der Wiege bis zur Bahre« in der Hand des Staates? Gibt es in Deutschland nur mehr vier Grüne und eine rechte Partei, und sind letztlich alle auf dem Pfad des »Rent Seeking«? »Aus dem Recht der Bürger, nach ihrem Glück zu streben, wurde längst die Pflicht des Staates, für dieses Glück zu sorgen. Dass in einer Demokratie die Bürger diesen Staat ausmachen und deshalb solche Forderungen an sich selbst adressieren müssten, wird gerne vergessen«, Konrad Paul Liessmann Machen wir den Fehler einen vermeintlichen Idealzustand mit dem Ist-Zustand zu vergleichen? Warum gelingt es auch nicht mehr — nach Cicero — dass die Begabtesten in die Politik gehen, sondern wir heute eher eine negative Auslese erleben? »Wenn man merkt, dass man ein totes Pferd reitet, sollte man absteigen.« Titus Gebel erklärt dann sein Konzept der freien Privatstädte genauer, auch die Abgrenzungen zu Charter Cities und Sonderwirtschaftszonen im Allgemeinen. Warum sind seiner Ansicht nach die Anreizsysteme in diesen Konzepten besser? Welche Rolle spielt der Markt — als Entdeckungsverfahren — und wie können wir evolutionäre Prinzipien auch in Verwaltung und Staatswesen etablieren mit Mutation, Nachahmung, Reproduktion, beziehungsweise dem »Seed, Select, Amplify« (Meyer, Davis) Prinzip? Probieren und Scheitern sollte wieder möglich werden, sonst gibt es auch weiterhin keinen Fortschritt. »Es wäre besser, wir würden in einer Welt von 2.000 Liechtensteins leben, die alle ein veschiedenes System haben als in 200 Staaten.« Aber ist es realistisch, dass sich Koordination von viele kleine Einheiten global bei wesentlichen Fragen umsetzen lässt? Wie könnte ein solches System überhaupt umgesetzt werden, wo doch alle Landflächen von existierenden Nationen kontrolliert werden? Gibt es eine reale Chance der Umsetzung? Oder gibt es schon exisitierende Beispiele? Dr. Gebel spricht über Beispiele in China, dem Nahen Osten, Saudi Arabien und Südamerika? Sind diese Ansätze nicht nur Gated Communities für die Elite? Was macht ein Gemeinwesen? Ich fühle ja auch keine Gemeinschaft zu anderen Gästen in einem Hotel? »Es gibt zwei Arten von Menschen: die einen, die ihre Meinungen anderen aufzwingen wollen, und die anderen, die das nicht wollen und die sagen, Leben und Leben lassen. Die erste Gruppe strebt natürlich in die Politik.« Findet der wirkliche politische Konflikt heute nicht, wie so oft behauptet, zwischen links und rechts, sondern vielmehr zwischen autoritär und (klassisch) liberal statt? »Leben und Leben lassen in unterschiedlichsten Formen des Zusammenlebens.« Referenzen Andere Episoden Episode 73: Ökorealismus, ein Gespräch mit Björn Peters Episode 58: Verwaltung und staatliche Strukturen — ein Gespräch mit Veronika Lévesque Episode 57: Konservativ und Progressiv Episode 29: Fakten oder Geschichten? Wie gestalten wir die Zukunft? Episode 26: Was kann Politik (noch) leisten? Ein Gespräch mit Christoph Chorherr Episode 17: Kooperation Titus Gebel Webseite von Dr. Titus Gebel Deutsche Rohstoff AG Dual Fluid Titus Gebel, Freie Privatstädte: Mehr Wettbewerb im wichtigsten Markt der Welt (2023) Free Cities Foundation Liberty in Our Lifetime Konferenz 2023 Fachliche Referenzen Honduran ZEDEs: Their Past and Future Reason TV: A private libertarian city in Honduras (2023) Franz Oppenheimer, Der Staat (1907) Austrian Institute, „Der Staat soll nicht nur einer privilegierten Schicht dienen, sondern allen Menschen“ – Interview mit Fürst Hans-Adam II. von Liechtenstein (2017) John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859) Thomas Sowell im Gespräch mit Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge(7.9.2023) Konrad Paul Liessmann, Lauter Lügen, Paul Zsolnay Verlag (2023) Norbert Bolz, Keine Macht der Moral, Politik jenseits von Gut und Böse, Matthes & Seitz Berlin (2021) Christopher Meyer, Stan Davis, It's Alive, Texere Publishing (2004) Karl Popper, Die Offene Gesellschaft Karl Popper - Ein Gespräch (1974) Roger Scruton, How to be a Conservative, Bloomsbury Continuum (2014)
Malcolm Collins is a parent, polymath serial entrepreneur, education nerd, pronatalist and a 5x bestselling author, including the Pragmatists' Guide series.He has a podcast and YouTube channel called Based Camp.In this episode, we talk about a wide range of topics including:Demographic Collapse: At current fertility rates in developed countries, there will be 5 grandchildren per 100 people. This demographic trend is not economically sustainable and will lead to fundamental transformations of society.Pronatalism: Pronatalism is a movement that Malcolm and his wife Susan are well, known for as the founders of Pronatalists.org. The analogy is with climate change: it's not about freezing the planet, it's about countering an unsustainable trend - population decline - by having more children.Charter Cities: Malcolm views charter cities as key for the pronatalist movements as incubators for a different culture that is not influenced by "urban monoculture".Some of Malcolm's surprising theses are:The collapse is coming when markets price in lack of population growth and divest from assets that losing money to places that grow. These shifts in market sentiments typically happen gradually, and then suddenly.The winning cultures need more than high birth rates. The Amish people have high birth rates, but little clout. The winning cultures need to have high birth rates and be technophilic and be at the forefront of technologyThe key for charter cities or special jurisdictions to attract Malcolm are: a) a guaranteed right to use reproductive technologies, and b) a harsh environment, like a space colony, that nurture a culture of hard work to surviveThis is a kaleidoscopic episode with insights into the frontiers of humanity.
The traditional concept of sovereign states and physical borders has been stretched to its limits in the age of the internet and technological innovation. The slow pace of governmental bureaucracy and regulatory bottlenecks are hindering innovation and progress. Governments are struggling to understand and provide timely answers to global challenges. In this conversation with Niklas Anzinger, we explore how new cities and societies can be built in the age of the internet by introducing the concepts of Charter Cities and Network States.Niklas is the founder and GP of Infinita, the first Prospera-based VC fund. Niklas aims to end the Great Stagnation by supporting founders to overcome regulatory bottlenecks by utilizing startup cities, network states, and defi rails. Before Infinita, Niklas was an early-stage startup operator.00:00 Intro01:49 Definition of Network States and their properties12:05 Why the need to form new Nations16:57 The 3 types of emerging cities21:30 Niclas's story and how he got involved with Prospera31:31 What is Prospera and why it is unique35:57 Why you should consider Prospera44:49 How Niklas evaluates his startups investments
Hello everyone, and you are listening to Ideas Untrapped podcast. This episode is a continuation of my two-part conversation with Lant Pritchett. It concludes the discussion on education with the five things Lant would recommend to a policymaker on education policy, how to balance the globalized demand for good governance with the design of state functionalities within a localized context - along with RCTs in development and charter cities. I also got an exclusive one of his infamous ‘‘Lant Rants''. I hope you find this as enjoyable as I did - and once again, many thanks to Lant Pritchett.TranscriptTobi;Yeah, I mean, that's a fine distinction. I love that, because you completely preempted where I was really going with that. Now, on a lighter note, there's this trope when I was in high school, so I sort of want us to put both side by side and try to learn more about them. There's this trope when I was in high school amongst my mates, that examination is not a true test of knowledge. Although it didn't help the people who were saying it, because they usually don't test well, so it sort of sounded like a self serving argument. But examination now, or should I say the examination industry, clearly, I mean, if I want to take Nigeria as an example, is not working. But it seemed to be the gold standard, if I want to use that phrase. It's as bad as so many firms now set up graduate training programs. Even after people have completed tertiary education, they still have to train them for industry and even sometimes on basic things. So what are the shortcomings of examination, the way you have distinguished both? And then, how can a system that truly assesses learning be designed?Lant; Let me revert to an Indian discussion because I know more about India than Africa by far. There are prominent people, including the people around JPAL and Karthik Muralidharan, who say, look, India never really had an education system. It had a selection system. And the ethos was, look, we're just throwing kids into school with the hopes of identifying the few kids who were bright enough, capable enough, smart enough, however we say it, measured by their performance on this kind of high stakes examination who are going to then become the elite. So it was just a filter into the elite, and it really meant the whole system was never really in its heart of heart geared around a commitment to educating every kid. I've heard teachers literally say out loud when they give an exam and the kids don't master the material, they'll say, oh, those weren't the kind of kids who this material was meant for. And they leave them behind, right? There's a phrase “they teach to the front of the class.” You order the class by the kid's academic performance, and then the teachers are just teaching to the front of the class with the kind of like, nah, even by early grades. So the evils of the examination system are only if it's not combined with an education system. So essentially, an education system would be a system that was actually committed to expanding the learning and capabilities of all kids at all levels and getting everybody up to a threshold and then worried about the filter problem much later in the education process.So if they're part of an education system like they have been in East Asia, they're not terribly, terribly damaging. But if they're part of a selection system in which people perceive that the point is that there's only a tiny little fraction that are going to pass through these examinations anyway and what we're trying to do is maximize the pass rates of that, it distorts the whole system start to finish. My friend, Rukmini Banerjee, in India started this citizen based assessment where it was just a super simple assessment. You need assessment in order to have an effective education system, because without assessment, I don't know what you know or don't know, right? And if I don't know as a teacher or as a school what my kids actually know and don't know, how is anybody imagining that you're giving them an effective education? So I think the role of early assessment and the drive to integrate teaching with real time assessment, I think is hugely, hugely important. This is why I had the preemptive strike on the question of testing [which] is that I want radically more assessment earlier, integrated with teaching. And there are still some educationists that will push back against that. But if we put in a bundle, formative classroom assessment integrated with effective pedagogy and high-stakes examinations, then everybody's going to hate them both. So we have to really unbundle those two things.And the hallmark of an education system is that it really has targets that every kid can learn and believes every kid can learn, and builds a system around the premise and promise that every kid can learn. There's this example out there, Vietnam does it. And Vietnam did it and continues to do it at levels of income and social conditions that are very much like many African countries. So if I were a country, I'd kind of hate Vietnam as this goody goody, that, you know. You know how you always hated the kid in school who would really do well, and then the teacher would go, well, how come you're not like that kid? On education, Vietnam is that country. It's, like, out there producing OECD levels of learning with very little resources and starting at least in the 1980s, at very low levels of income. So they're proving that it's possible. They're the kid who, like, when everybody goes, oh, that exam was too hard, and like, Bob passed it, like, how hard can it be? Anyway? So I think radically different bases for assessment versus examinations. And to some extent, the only integrity that got preserved in the system wasn't the integrity of the classroom and teaching, it was the integrity of the examination as a filter.Tobi;I want to ask you a bit about the political economy of this a little bit. So if, say, you are talking to a policymaker who is actually serious about education, not in the superficial sense, but really about learning and says, okay, Lant, how do I go about this? How do I design an educational system that really does these things? I've written quite a number of reports here and there that rely so much on your accountability triangle. I would have sent you royalty checks, but it wasn't paid work. Sorry. So how exactly would you explain the political economy of designing a working educational system? I know people talk a lot about centralization versus decentralization, who gets empowered in that accountability triangle? Where should the levers to really push, where are they? So how exactly would you have that conversation?Lant; So let me start with the accountability triangle and design issues. I think people mistake what the accountability triangle and design issues are about in the following sense. If I'm going to design a toaster, and the toaster is going to turn my untoasted bread into toasted bread, and it's going to be an electric toaster, there are certain fundamental things that have to happen, right? I have to have a current. I need to get that current running through something that heats up. I need that heat to be applied to the bread. I need it to stop when I've applied enough heat. Now, those fundamental principles of toaster design can lead to thousands of different actual designs of toasters. So I want people to get out of the notion that there's a single best toaster and that the accountability triangle or any other mode of analysis is to give you the best toaster and then everybody copies the best toaster. The principles are, design your own damn toaster, right? Because there's a gazillion ways to toast bread. Now, [for] all of them to work, [they] have to be compatible with the fundamental principles of electricity and current flow. You know, so I'm trying to get to one size doesn't fit all, but any old size doesn't necessarily fit everything either.You raise the question of decentralization, right? The thing is, if you look across countries that have roughly similar learning outcomes from PISA and other assessments, they're radically different designs. France is an entirely centralized system. Germany is a completely federalized system. The US is almost completely localized system. The Low Countries, Netherlands and Belgium have money follows the student system into the private sector. They have the highest private sector enrollment of any country in the world because they allow different pillars of education between the secular, the Catholic and the Protestant to coexist. So then if you ask is decentralization the best way to design your education system? It's like, no, no, no, you're missing the point. The point is, if you choose a centralized system, there are principles in how you design the flows of accountability that are going to produce success and those that are going to produce failure. If you choose a decentralized system, there are systems of the alignment of accountability that are going to produce success and failure. So the analytical framework doesn't determine the grand design, it determines the mechanics of the design. And I just want to get that straight up front.Second, as a result of the eight year research project of RISE, we have a policy brochure that has, kind of, here are the five kind of principles and here's the 15 minutes if I have five minutes with a minister or leader of a country, here are the five things I want to tell. And the first of those things is, commit. A lot of times we want to skip the most fundamental stage. And what I mean by commit is you actually need to create a broad social and political consensus that you're really going to do this and that you're committed to it. This big research project, RISE, which is based out of Oxford and I've been head of for eight years, we included Vietnam as one of our focused countries because it was a success case. Hence, we wanted our research team to partly do research about Vietnam and issues that were relevant in Vietnam. But we really wanted to answer the question, how did Vietnam do this? Why did they succeed? Right? And five years into the research effort, I was with the Vietnamese team and they had produced a bunch of empirical research of the econometric type. Is Vietnam success associated with this or that measurable input? Nothing really explains Vietnam at the approximate determinant input level. And finally, one of the researchers said to me, Lant, we're trying to get around the fundamental fact that Vietnam succeeded because they wanted to. And on one level it's like, my first response was, I can't go back and tell the British taxpayers that they spend a million dollars for a research project on Vietnam, and the conclusion to why Vietnam succeeded was because they wanted to.[Laughs]Tobi; That's kind of on the nose, right? Lant; Yeah. On another level, it's a deep and ignored truth. The policymakers ignore it, the donors ignore it. Everybody wants to ignore it. Everybody wants to assume it's a technocratic issue, it's a design issue. I think the fundamental problem of these failing and dysfunctional education systems, it's a purpose problem. The purpose of education isn't clear, understood, widely accepted among all of the people from top to bottom responsible for achieving results. And once that leads to what I call norm erosion. Within the teachers, there's this norm erosion of what does it really mean to be a teacher? So again, the first and maybe only thing I would say if I had five minutes with a leader is, how are you going to produce a broad social, political and organizational commitment that you are really going to achieve specific, agreed-upon learning results? The technical design issues have to flow from that commitment rather than vice versa. And you could copy France's system, you could copy the Vietnamese system. I think you've heard the term from me and others, isomorphic mimicry. You can copy other people's systems and not have the same effect if it isn't driven by per purpose. Like, if you don't have the fundamental commitment and you don't have the fundamental agreed-upon purpose, the rest of the technical design is irrelevant.Tobi;It sort of leads me to my next theme. And that is the capability question in development.Lant; Yeah.Tobi; First of all, I also want to make a quick distinction, because lately, well, when I say lately that's a little vague. State capacity is all the rage now in development.Lant; Really? Is that true?Tobi; Yeah,Lant; I'm so happy to hear that. 3s I'm glad that you think so. And I hope that that's true, because it wasn't. It really wasn't on the agenda in a serious way. So, anyway …Tobi; But I also think there's also a bit of misunderstanding still, and usually, again, maybe I'm just moving with the wrong crowd. Who knows? People focus a lot more on the coercive instruments of the state and how much of it can be wielded to achieve certain programmatic results for state capacity. Revenue to GDP in Nigeria is low, how can the states collect more taxes? How much can the state squeeze out of people's bank accounts, out of companies, or the reverse. That, the reason why the state collects very little taxes is because state capacity is low. But, I mean, nobody really unpacks what they mean by that. They just rely on these measures like X to GDP ratio.Another recent example was, I think it was in 2020, when the pandemic sort of blew over and China built a hospital with 10,000 bed capacity in, I don't know, I forgot, maybe 20 days or…Lant; Yeah. It was amazing.Tobi; A lot of people were like, oh, yeah, that's an example of state capacity. It's very much the same people now [who] are turning around and seeing China as an example of failure on how to respond to a pandemic. So I guess what I would ask you is, when you talk about the capability of the state, what exactly do we mean?Lant; In the work that were done and the book that we wrote, we adopt a very specific definition of capability, which is an organizational measure. Because there are all these aggregate country level measures and we use them in the book. But in the end, I think it's easier to define capability at the organizational level. And at the organizational level, I define [that] the capability of an organization is the ability to consistently induce its agents to take the policy actions in response to circumstances that advance the normative objective of the organization. And that's a long, complicated definition, but it basically means can the organization, from the frontline worker to the top of the organization, can it get people to do what they need to do to accomplish the purpose?And that's what I mean by the capability of an organization. And fortunately, unfortunately, like, militaries, I think, make for a good example. It's amazing that highfunctioning militaries have soldiers who will sacrifice their lives and die if needs be, to advance the purpose of the organization. Whereas you can have a million man army that's a paper tiger. No one is actually willing to do what it takes to carry out the purpose that the organization has been put to of fighting a particular conflict. And I think starting from that level makes it clear that, A, this is about purpose, B, it's about inducing the agents to take the actions that will lead to outcomes. And the reason why I'm super happy to hear that capability is being talked about is (you're doing a very good job as an interviewer drawing out connection between these various topics) the design of the curriculum is almost completely irrelevant to what's happening in schools. And so there's been way too much focus in my mind in development discourse on technocratic design and way too little on what's actually going to happen in practice. And so my definition of capability is, you measure an organization's capability of what actually happens in practice, what are the teachers actually going to do day to day? Right? And having been in development a long time, I often sit in these rooms where people are just, you know, I go out to the field and teachers aren't there at the school. Teachers are sitting in the office drinking their tea while the kids are running around on the playground, even during scheduled instructional time. And then I go back and hear discussions in the capital about higher order 21st century skills. You know, I wrote this article about India called Is India a Flailing State?Tobi;Yeah.Lant;And what I meant by flailing is there was no connection between what was happening in the cerebrum and what was being designed at the center. And what was actually happening when the actual fingers were touching the material and the nerves and sinews and muscles that connected the design to the practice were completely deteriorated. And therefore, capability was the issue, not design. So that's what I mean by capability. I mean, you use the example of tax. I think it's a great example. It's like, can you design a tax authority that actually collects taxes? And it's a hard, difficult question. And I think by starting from capability, I was really struck by your description of capability being linked to the coercive power of the state because that's exactly not how I would start it. I would start it with what are the key purposes for which the state is being deployed and for which one can really generate a sufficient integrated consensus that we need capability for this purpose.Tobi; Now, one of my favourite blogs of yours was how you described… I think it was how the US escaped the tyranny of experts, something like that. So I want to talk about that a bit versus what I'll call the cult of best practice…Lant; Hmm.Tobi; Like, these institutions that are usually transplanted all over the world and things like independent central bank and this and that. And you described how a lot of decentralized institutions that exists in the United States, they were keenly contested, you know… Lant Yes.Tobi; Before the consensus sort of formed. So I'm sort of wondering, developing countries, how are they going about this wrong vis a vis the technical advice they are getting from development agencies? And the issue with that, if I would say, is, we now live in a world where the demand for good governance is globalized. Millions of Nigerians live on the internet every day and they see how life is in the industrial rich world and they want the same things. They want the same rights. They want governments that treat them the same way. Someone like me would even argue for an independent central bank because we've also experienced what life is otherwise.Lant; Right. Tobi; So how exactly to navigate this difficult terrain because the other way isn't also working. Because you can't say you have an independent central bank on paper that is not really independent and it's not working.Lant; Your questions are such a brilliant articulation of the challenges that are being faced and the complex world we live in because we live now in an integrated world where people can see what's happening in other places. And that integrated world creates in and of itself positive pressures for performance, but also creates a lot of pressures for isomorphism, for deflecting the actual realities and what it will take to fix and make improvements with deflective copies of stuff that has no organic roots. I've written lots of things and even though you love all of your children, you might have favorites. One of my favorite blogs is a blog I wrote that is, I think, the most under cited blog of mine relative to what I think of it, which is about the M16 versus the AK-47.Tobi;Oh, yeah, I read that.Lant;It's an awkward analogy because no one wants to talk about guns.Tobi;Hmm.Lant;But I think it's a really great analogy because the M16 in terms of its proving ground performance is an unambiguously superior, more accurate rifle. The developing world adopts the AK-47. And that's because the Russian approach to weapon design was - design the weapon to the soldier. And the American approach is - train the soldier to the weapon. And what happens again and again across all kinds of phenomena in development is the people who are coming as part of the donour and development community to give advice to the world, all want them to adopt the M16 because it's the best gun, and they don't have the soldiers that can maintain the M16. And the M 16 has gotten better, but when it was first introduced, it was a notoriously unreliable weapon. And the one thing as a soldier, you don't want to happen is as you pull the trigger and the bullet doesn't come out at the end. That's what happens when you don't maintain an M16. So I think this isomorphism pressure confuses what best practice is with assuming there's this global best practice that can be adopted independently of the underlying capacity of the individuals and capabilities of the organizations. So I think huge problem.Second, I think there is a super important element of the history that the modes of doing things that now exist in the Western world and which we think of as being “modern,” I'm using scare quotes which doesn't help in a podcast, but we think of as being modern and best practice had to struggle their way into existence without the benefit of isomorphism. In the sense that when the United States in the early 20th century underwent a huge and quite conflicted and contested process of the consolidation of one room, kind of, locally operated schools into more professionalized school systems, that was politically contested and socially contested. And the only way the newer schools could justify themselves was by actually being better. There was no, oh, but this is how it has to be done, because this is how it has been done in these other places, and they have succeeded. And so there was no recourse to isomorphism, right. So in some sense, I think the world would be a radically better place for doing development if we just stopped allowing best practice to have any traction at all. If Nigerians just said, Screw it, we don't want to hear about it. Like, we want to do in Nigeria, what's going to work better in Nigeria? And telling me what Norway does and does not do, just no. Just no, we don't want to hear about it. Like, that doesn't help because it creates this vector of pressures that really deteriorate the necessary local contestation. My colleague Michael Wilcock, who is a sociologist, has characterized the development process as a series of good struggles. And in our work on state capability, we say you can't juggle without the struggle. Like, you can't transplant the ability to juggle. I can give you juggling lessons, I can show you juggling videos. But if you don't pick up the balls and do it and if you don't pick up the balls and do it with the understanding that unless you juggle, you haven't juggled, you can never learn to juggle. So I think if development were radically more about enabling goods, local struggles in which new policies, procedures, practices had to struggle their way into existence, justifying themselves on performance against purpose, we would be light years ahead of where we are. And that's what the debate about capability has to be.And I think to the extent the capability discourse gets deflected into another set of standards and more isomorphism, just this time about capability, I think we're going to lose something. Whereas if we start the state capability from discussion of what is it that we really want and need our government to get better at doing in terms of solving concrete, locally dominated problems, and then how are we going to come about creating the capability to do that in the Nigerian context, (I'm just using Nigeria, I could use Nepal, I could use any other country). That's the discussion that needs to happen. And the more the, kind of, global discourse and the global blessed practice gets frozen out completely, the sooner that happens, the better off we'll be.Tobi; So I guess where I was going with that is…Lant; 78:25Yeah.Tobi; One of those also fantastic descriptions you guys used in the book is” crawling the design space” on capability. So now for me, as a Nigerian, I might say I do not necessarily want Nigeria to look like the United States. Because, It wouldn't work anyways. But at the same time, you don't want to experiment and end up like Venezuela or Zimbabwe. It may not work to design your central bank like the US Federal Reserve, but at the same time, you don't want 80% inflation like Turkey. So we're ate the midway, so to speak?Lant; I get this pushback when I rail on best practice. I often get the push back, well, why would we reinvent the wheel? And I've developed a PowerPoint slide that responds to that by showing the tiniest little gear that goes into a Swiss watch and a huge 20 foot large tire that goes on a piece of construction machinery. And then say they're both wheels. Nobody's talking about reinventing the wheel. There are fundamental principles of electricity that a toaster design has to be compatible with. So, again, there is a trade off. There are fundamental principles, but there's a gazillion instantiations of those principles. We don't want to start assuming that there's a single wheel, right? When people say, don't reinvent the wheel, it's like, nobody's reinventing the idea of a wheel. But every wheel that works is an adaptation of the idea of a wheel to the instantiation and purpose for which is being put. And if you said to me, oh, because we're not going to reinvent the wheel, we're going to take this tiny gear from a Swiss watch and put it on a construction machine and expect it to roll, it's like, no, that's just goofy, right? And what I've really tried to do in the course of my career is equip people with tools to think through their own circumstances.Tobi;Hmm.Lant;Coming back, the accountability triangle or the crawling the design space. What I'm not trying to do is tell somebody, here is what you should do in your circumstance, because my experience is what's actually doable and is going to lead to long-run progress is an unbelievably complicated and granular thing that involves the realities of the context. But what I do want to do is help people understand there are certain common principles here and some things are going to lead to, like, Venezuela like circumstances, and we've seen it happen again and again, but there are a variety of pathways that don't lead to that. And you need to choose a pathway that works for you. And the PDAA isn't a set of recommendations, it's a set of tools to help people think through their own circumstances, their own organization, their own nominated problems and make progress on them. The accountability triangle isn't a recommendation for the design of your system. It's a set of tools that equip people to have conversations about their own system. And I have to say, at one time was in some place in Indonesia and it was a discussion of PDAA being mediated by some organization that had adopted it and was teaching people how to do it in Indonesia. And I had the wonderful experience of having this Indonesian woman who was a district official working on health, describe in some detail how they were using PDAA to address the problem of maternal mortality with no idea who I was. And I was like, oh, just for me to hear her say, here is how I use the tool to address a problem I've never thought about in a context, in an organization I've never worked with. So I think equipping people with tools to enable them in their own local struggles is my real objective rather than the imagination that I somehow can come up with recommendations that are going to work in a specific context.So the don't reinvent the wheel is just complete total nonsense. It's like every wheel is adapted to its purpose and we're just giving you tools to adapt the idea of the wheel to your purpose. Adapting a square to the purpose just isn't going to work. So I agree. We want to start from the idea of things that work. And there are principles of wheel design that you can't violate. You can't come in and say, I have a participatory design of a water system that depends on water running uphill. No. Water runs downhill. That's a fundamental principle of water. But I think the principles are much broader and the potentiality for locally designed and organic, organically produced instantiations of common principles are much broader than the current discourse gives the possibility for.Tobi; 83:47 I can't let you go without getting your thoughts on just a few more questions. So indulge me. I've stayed largely away from RCTs because there's a bunch of podcasts where your thoughts can be fairly assessed on that issue, but it's not going away. Right? So for me, there's the ethical question, there's the methodological question, and there's the sort of philosophical question to it. I'm not qualified to have the methodological question, not at all. Maybe on the ethics, well, there's a lot of also biases that get, so I'm not going to go there. For me, when I think about RCTs, and I'm fairly close here in Nigeria with the effective altruism community, my wife is very active, and I have this debate with them a lot. Surprisingly, a lot of them are also debating Lant Pritchett, which is which is good, right now. The way I see it is. The whole thing seems too easy in the sense that, no disrespect to anybody working in this space at all… in the sense that it seems optimizing for what can be measured versus what works.So for me, the way I look at it is, it's very difficult to know the welfare effects for maybe a cohort of households. If you put a power station in my community, which has not had power for a while. So, but it's pretty easy if you have a fund and you distribute cash to households and you sort of divide them into a control group, and you know… which then makes it totally strange if you conclude from that that that is the best way to sort of intervene in the welfare and the well being of even that community or a people generally. I mean, where am I going wrong? How am I not getting it? Lant; No, the people listening to the podcast can't see me on the camera trying to reach out and give you a big hug. I think you have it exactly right. I think we should go back and rerecord this podcast where I ask you questions and your questions are the answer. So I think you've got the answer exactly right. So first of all, by the way, the original rhetoric and practice of RCTs is going away, and roughly has gone away. Because the original rhetoric was Independent Impact Evaluation. All of the rhetoric out of JPAL and IPA and the other practitioners is now partnerships, which is not independent, but essentially everybody's adopted the Crawl the Design Space use of evidence for feedback loops in making organizations better. So they've all created their own words for it because they don't want to admit that they're just, again, borrowing other ideas. So to a large extent the whole community is moving in a very positive direction towards integrating, seeking out relevant evidence for partner organizations in how can they Crawl the Design Space and be effective. And they're just not admitting it because it's embarrassing how wrong they were first, but they've come to the right space. So I want to give them credit.When I gave a presentation at NYU called The Debate About RCTs Is Over And I won. It's not a very helpful approach, it's true, but it's not very helpful because I have to let them do what they're now doing, which is exactly what I said they should have been doing, and they are now doing. So, to some extent, asking people to say, yeah, we changed what we're doing is a big ask. And I'd rather they actually change what they're doing then they admit they did that. So to some extent it is going away. I think it's going away as it was originally designed, as this independent white coat guys, descend on some people and force them to carry out an impact evaluation to justify their existence. They're much more integrated, let's Crawl the Design Space in partnership with organizations, let's use randomization and more AB testing ways. And so I feel it's moving in a very positive direction with this weird rhetoric on top of it.Second, I think you're exactly right and I think it's slightly worse than you said. Because it's not just about what can be measured, but it's about attributability. It's not just what can be measured, but what can be attributed directly, causally to individual actions. And my big debate with the Effective Altruism community is I'm hugely, you know, big, big, big wins from the Effective Altruism movement attacking kind of virtue signaling, useless kind of philanthropic endeavors. I think every person should be happy for them. But if I were African, I would be sick of this philanthropic b******t that you guys are going to come and give us a cow or Bill Gates talking about…Tobi;Or chickens.Lant;Chickens. My wife doesn't do development at all. She's a music teacher. But when she heard Bill Gates talking about chickens, she think, does Bill Gates think chickens haven't been in Africa for hundreds of years? Like, what does he think he knows about chickens that Africans don't know about chickens? That's just such chicken s**t, right? But again, I'll promote a blog. I have a blog called let's All Play for Team Development. And I think what you're raising in your thing is that it's not just what we can measure, it's what we can measure and attribute to the actions of a specific actor. Because, you know, your example of not having power in a village, that we can measure. But all of the system things that we've talked about so far - migration, education, state capability - these aren't going to be solved by individualized interventions. They're going to be solved by systemic things. And with my team on education, we've had this big research project on education standards but I keep telling my team, look, if you're not part of a wave, you're a drop in the ocean. The only way for your efforts to not be a drop in the ocean is for you to be part of a wave [of] other people around you working on the same issue, pushing in the same direction, to build that. And that kind of thing gets undermined by attributability. So with my RISE project, I sometimes tell my funders, you can have success or you can have attributability, but you can't have both, right? Because if we're going to be successful at changing the global discourse in education, we're not going to do it by ourselves. We're going to be part of a team and a network. So, anyways…By the way, like early, early, early in the Effective Altruism movement, I had an interview with Cari Tuna and I think Holden Karnofsky, when they were thinking about what to do, and I made exactly this point. It's like, look, being effective at the individualized interventions that are happening is one thing, but don't ignore these huge systemic issues because you can't measure the direct causal effect between the philanthropic donation and the outcome. And that's your point, I think, which is, Nigeria is not going to get fixed by cash transfers.Tobi;No way.Lant; I mean, for heaven's sakes if Nigeria had the cash to transfer to everybody and fix it, well, then the national development struggle wouldn't be what it is. It's a systemic struggle across a number of fronts.Tobi;Why not just get Bill Gates to donate the money.Lant; But again, even Bill Gates, his fortune relative to the…you know, impact you could have through these programs, relative to what happens with national development, is just night and day. So to the extent that the adoption of a specific methodology precludes serious, evidence-based, hard struggle work on the big systemic issues, it's a net negative.Tobi;Again, to use your term, “kinky ideas in development.” Lant; Yeah.Tobi;I was reading a profile in the FT, a couple of days ago, all about charter cities, right?Lant; About what?Tobi; Charter cities. It was an idea I was kind of into for a while, I mean, from Paul Roma's original presentation at TED. But you strongly argued against it at your CATO debate. So what is wrong with that idea? Because there are advocates, there are investors, who think charter cities are this new thing that is going to provide the space for the kind of organizational and policy experimentation. And China's SEZs are usually the go to examples, Shenzhen particularly. So, what do you have to say about that?Lant;I like discussing charter cities.Tobi;Okay.Lant;And the reason I like discussing charter cities is because they're not kinky. Right. My complaint about Kinky is that you've drawn this line in human welfare and you act as if development is only getting people over these very low-bar thresholds. So conditional cash transfers are an example of Kinky, and conditional cash transfers are just stupid, right? Charter cities are wrong.I mean, conditional cash transfers are just stupid in a trivial way.Charter cities are wrong in a very deep and sophisticated way. So I love talking about charter cities. The reason I love talking about charter cities is A, they have have the fundamental problem posed, right? The fundamental problem is countries and systems are trapped in a low level equilibrium and that low level equilibrium is actually a stable equilibrium and so you need to shock your way out of it. And the contest between me and Charter cities is I think there's good struggle paths out of low level equilibrium. So I'm a strategic incrementalist. I want to have a strategic vision, but I want incremental action. So I'm against the kinky, which is often incremental incremental, it doesn't really add up to a development agenda. So I like, yes, we need to have a way out of this low level equilibrium and state capability in the way education systems work, in the way economic policies keep countries from achieving high productivity, et cetera. But I'm a good struggle guy. And charter cities want Magic Bullet. Right.Now, the rationale for Magic Bullet is that good struggle is hard and hasn't necessarily proved successful. And these institutional features that lead to these low level traps just are resistant to good struggle methods out. And I think that's a really important debate to be having. But I think the right way to interpret China's experience and Yuen Yeun Ang's book on how China did it is, I think, a good illustration of this is China was Good Struggle. Using regional variations as a way of enabling good struggles. It's instructive that difficulty with Charter Cities always goes back. You keep going deeper and deeper of who's going to enforce this, who's going to enforce this, who's going to enforce this, you know. They're caught in their own catch 22 in my mind. So the first proposed, what appeared to be feasible Charter City in Honduras eventually got undermined by governance issues in which the major investor didn't want to actually be subject to rules based decision making. So, I love talking about charter cities. I think they're on the right set of issues of how do we get to the institutional conditions that can create a positive environment for high productivity firms and engagement and improved governance. And they have a coherent argument, which is good, that, it's a low level trap and there's no path out of the low level trap and so we need big shock to get out of it.But I don't think they're ultimately correct about the way in which you can establish the fundamentals. You can't just big jump your way to having reliable enforcement mechanisms and until you get to reliable enforcement mechanisms, the whole Charter City idea is still kind of up in the air. The next podcast I have scheduled to do is with the Charter Cities podcast, so that hopefully…Tobi;Oh. Interesting. Last question. We sort of have a tradition on the show where I ask the guest to discuss one new idea they would like to see spread everywhere. But I think more in line with your own brand, like you said earlier, I think I would like to ask for our own exclusive, Ideas Untrapped Exclusive Lant Rant, something you haven't talked about before or rarely. So you can go on for however long you wish. And that's the last question.Lant; I think if I had to pick something that if we could just get rid of it, it would be this fantasy that technology is going to solve problems. My basic point I make again and again and again is Moore's Law, which is the doubling of computer capacity every two years, has been chugging along, and it might have slowed down, but has been chugging along since 1965. So computing power has improved by a factor of ten to the 11th. And just as an illustration of just how big ten to the 11th is, the speed you drive on a freeway of 60 miles an hour is only ten to the 7th smaller than the speed of light. So ten to the 11th is an astronomically huge number in the sense that only astronomers have any use for numbers as big as ten to the 11th. Okay. My claim is anything that hasn't been fixed by a ten to the 11th change in computing power isn't going to get fixed by computing power. And I ask people sometimes in audiences, okay, particularly with older people, you look a little young for this question, but I ask them, okay, you older people that have been married for a long time, computing power has gone up ten to the 11th over the course of your marriage, has it made your marriage any better. And they're like, well, a little bit, sometimes when we're abroad, we can communicate over Skype easier, but on the other hand, it's made it worse because there's more distractions and more temptations to not pay attention to your spouse.So on net, ten to the 11th of computing power hasn't improved average marriage quality. And then I ask them, has it improved your access to pornography? And it's like, of course, night and day, like, more instantaneous access to pornography. And my concluding thing is a huge amount of what is being promoted in the name of tech is the pornography of X rather than the real deal. So people promoting tech in education are promoting the pornography of education rather than real education. People that are promoting tech in government are promoting the pornography of governance rather than true governance. And it's just like, no, these are deeper human issues, and there's all kinds of human issues that they're fundamentally technologically resilient. And expecting technology to solve human problems is just a myth. It enables salespeople to pound down people's doors, to sell government officials some new software that's going to do this or that. But without the purpose, without the commitment, without the fundamental human norms of behaviour, technology isn't going to solve anything and the pretence that it is is distracting a lot of people from getting to the serious work. So if we could just replace the technology of X with the pornography of X, I think we'd be better off in discussions of what its real potentialities are. How's that for [an] original?Tobi;Yeah, yeah.Lant;You asked for it.Tobi; Yeah, that's a lot to think about, yeah. Thank you so much for doing this.Lant; Thanks for a great interview, Tobi. That was super fun. We could go back and record this with my asking questions and your questions being the answers. Because you're really sophisticated on all these issues. You're in exactly the right space.Tobi;Thank you very much.Lant;Great. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe
Episode 222 (2 May 2013): In this chat from the archives, Michael and I discuss real teaching and the problems with institutional reform when the "powers that be" don't want to let go. Michael also appeared in Episode 94 (Sep 2020) of Jive Talking https://soundcloud.com/jivetalking/94-michael-strong-is-radically-improving-education
I'm with Patri Friedman who is a General Partner @ Pronomos Capital, the world's first charter city VC fund. Before this, he founded The Seasteading Institute, a non-profit that explores the creation of sovereign ocean colonies. What is a charter city? What does a sovereign ocean colony mean? We will explore all these ideas in detail with Patri pretty soon. For now, you should know that Patri is a champion for innovation in governance. Our economy thrives because there's continuous innovation happening when new products and services are brought in the market. That innovation is mostly driven by startup companies who challenge the status quo of established companies. But this dynamic doesn't exist in governance – we're stuck with the legal systems and constitutions we're born into. What if we could kick-start a new city with an entirely fresh take on society? That's the topic of today's discussion. == What we talk about == 00:00 - Introduction to the podcast 01:13 - What led Patri to start the Seasteading Institute (a non-profit that explores the creation of sovereign ocean colonies) 05:44 - The current status of the project 07:29 - What is the legal status of putting a house, in the middle of nowhere? 16:30 - Definition of a Charter City 19:13 - What type of governments would allow Charter Cities? 21:30 - Are some governments fearful of giving up control? 24:50 - Have you made any investments in Charter Cities? What are the exciting things that are happening in this space? 29:20 - How do you motivate these incredibly smart, talented, and motivated people to move to a new city? 32:45 - What does a seed investment/early stage investment mean for a charter city or a community? 35:30 - Are there any focus areas or geographical regions you're interested in that entrepreneurs can reach out to you with their pitches? 39:30 - How did your father David D. Friedman's and grandfather Milton Friedman's thinking shape your thinking? 45:10 - What is the basic principle of Anarcho-capitalism? 51:20 - Are ideas like DAO in crypto inspired by Anarcho-capitalism? 52:44 - Have you thought about what governance systems will make sense when we become interplanetary species? 55:45 - Any laws on who claims a part of Moon or Mars? 56:20 - What is Jhana Meditation, and how does it differ from other styles of meditation? 1:04:00 - Is there anything else that you want to add, that you wanted me to ask, but I didn't ask? 1:05:12 - Concluding Thoughts
Sam and Emma host Raymond Craib, Professor of History of Cornell University, to discuss his recent book Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age. First, Sam and Emma dive into updates on early voting and the GOP's abandonment of New Hampshire, before diving into Biden finally centering GOP cuts to Social Security and Medicare in his talking points. Professor Raymond Craib then joins as he jumps right into his “big tent” definition of libertarianism, ranging from the neoliberal politics of Hayek and Friedman to Murray Rothbard's complete reliance on private contracts in his theory, with the Ayn Rands and Ludwig von Miseses falling somewhere in between. After walking through the distinct roles the state can play along this spectrum – particularly in protecting individuals from direct violence and in their private property rights – Sam, Emma, and Professor Craib tackle the disregard for the inherent violence and expropriation of primitive accumulation that sets the stage for the rights libertarians supposedly respect. This brings Professor Craib to the progression of attempts at libertarian Utopia and the constant need for colonial measures of expropriation to begin these attempts, first taking on Michael Oliver's experiments attempting to lay claim to foreign lands for his new utopia via domestic law and insurrectionist attempts at secession, before diving into the more contemporary version of this libertarian colonial utopia, Sam, Emma, and Raymond parse through Paul Romer's “Charter Cities,” and how he essentially created a system of finance-backed feudalism that inevitably created an incredibly precarious system. They wrap up the interview by assessing the future of these mass-scale speculative real estate grifts, and what role the Big Tech monopolists will play when these grifts are right in their wheelhouse. And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma dive into Bob Woodward's continuing leaks from the Trump years, as Trump claims to be the only one to look into Kim Jong un's eyes and truly understand him, and Nicholas from Silicon Valley explores the disappointing conclusion to the January 6th hearings. Olivia from Las Vegas discusses the recent bout of mail-in-ballot-related crime in the city, and launches a greater conversation on voter intimidation, Kowalski celebrates MR as the Holidays approach, and Dr. Oz continues to dig his own grave. Dylan from New Mexico talks about Santa Fe's housing crisis, and Tucker Carlson cackles as Kari Lake #owns a CNN reporter, plus, your calls and IMs! Check out Raymond's book here: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1242 Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: http://majority.fm/app Check out today's sponsors: ZipRecruiter: Some things in life we like to pick out for ourselves - so we know we've got the one that's best for us - like cuts of steak or mattresses. What if you could do the same for hiring - choose your ideal candidate before they even apply? That's where ZipRecruiter's ‘Invite to Apply' comes in - it gives YOU, as the hiring manager, the power to pick your favorites from top candidates. According to ZipRecruiter Internal Data, jobs where employers use ZipRecruiter's ‘Invite to Apply' get on average two and a half times more candidates — which helps make for a faster hiring process. See for yourself! Just go to this exclusive web address, https://www.ziprecruiter.com/majority to try ZipRecruiter for free! Cozy Earth: One out of three Americans report being sleep deprived, and their sheets could be the problem. Luckily Cozy Earth provides the SOFTEST, MOST LUXURIOUS and BEST-TEMPERATURE REGULATING sheets. Cozy Earth has been featured on Oprah's Most Favorite Things List Four Years in a Row! Made from super soft viscose from bamboo, Cozy Earth Sheets breathe so you sleep at the perfect temperature all year round. And for a limited time, SAVE 35% on Cozy Earth Bedding. Go to https://cozyearth.com/and enter my special promo code MAJORITY at checkout to SAVE 35% now. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/
The idea of leaving society to start up a new one isn't exactly new... history is full of people leaving to go start new countries. But the idea became especially fashionable in 20th century America and was jump-started as a reaction to the counterculture in the 1960's, and given new life by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in the 2000's. Dave talks with Raymond Craib, professor of history at Cornell University, about his new book "Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age" which covers the upsurge in these ideas in the 60's to today, and their connection to everything from Brexit to Seasteading. Learn more about Ray Craib's work on Twitter (@raycraib) and at his Cornell faculty page: https://history.cornell.edu/raymond-b-craib Adventure Capitalism (Book): https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57700808 Keywords: Libertarian exit, libertarianism, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Michael Oliver, Werner Stiefel, New Atlantis, Tonga, Minerva Reefs, Abaco, Bahamas, Mitchell WerBell, Andrew St. George, Phoenix Foundation, Azores, New Hebrides, Vanuatu, Stefan Mandel, Mondragon, David Duke, Bayou of Pigs, Peter Thiel, Seasteading, Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman, Balaji Srinivasan, Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, Mencius Moldbug, Urbit, Hans-Herman Hoppe, James Dale Davidson, William Rees Mogg, Jacob Rees Mogg, Brexit, Sovereign Individual, Longtermism, Effective Altruism, Honduras, ZEDEs, Charter Cities, Liz Truss, Shankar Singham, Barbara Kolm, Mises Institute.
Peter Young is the managing director of the Free Cities Foundation. In this interview, we discuss the development of autonomous administrative areas around the world called ‘free cities', where new types of governance can be offered to citizens outside the control of existing states. - - - - Paul Romer, former chief economist at the World Bank and a Nobel prize winner, proposed in 2009 the concept of Charter Cities. Romer was trying to tackle the problem of stagnant investment in the Global South arising from bad governance. The solution was to evolve the idea behind special economic zones and create autonomous city-states within existing countries. The autonomy would extend to alternate legal and political systems from the host nation, and to the provision of services by private organisations. An advanced guarantor country would protect the legal rights of residents. The idea was that such cities would become trusted centres predicated on good rules, attracting investment, firms and people, the benefits of which then filter beyond the cities' boundaries into the host country. The Free City Foundation have taken Romer's idea and sought to implement it in different parts of the world. The aim is to provide citizens with alternatives to the status quo: establishing new legal, financial and municipal relationships with residents. The ideology is to reduce the size of the modern state, which is considered to act in its own self-interest at the expense of society. There are a number of different scales of initiatives for the Free City Foundation: from intentional communities to prosperity zones, all the way to Free Private Cities. Prospera in Honduras is a working example of a Free City: a new settlement on the island of Roatán is being developed within its own civil law, regulatory agencies and taxation; although it must still adhere to the Honduran constitution, international treaties and criminal law. But this is only the start: many more examples are being developed across the world. Perhaps the most innovative idea is Seasteading, where independent communities are developed in international waters, outside of the jurisdiction of existing governments. Are these initiatives viable and preferable alternatives to the nation-state? That may be too early to tell, but there is a growing number of investors who think they are the future of civilisation.
“A world where there's a plethora of different kinds of society where people consent to the rules, and people have the ability to choose what kind of system they live under, is a better society for everyone.”— Peter YoungPeter Young is the managing director of the Free Cities Foundation. In this interview, we discuss the development of autonomous administrative areas around the world called ‘free cities', where new types of governance can be offered to citizens outside the control of existing states.- - - - Paul Romer, former chief economist at the World Bank and a Nobel prize winner, proposed in 2009 the concept of Charter Cities. Romer was trying to tackle the problem of stagnant investment in the Global South arising from bad governance. The solution was to evolve the idea behind special economic zones and create autonomous city-states within existing countries.The autonomy would extend to alternate legal and political systems from the host nation, and to the provision of services by private organisations. An advanced guarantor country would protect the legal rights of residents. The idea was that such cities would become trusted centres predicated on good rules, attracting investment, firms and people, the benefits of which then filter beyond the cities' boundaries into the host country. The Free City Foundation have taken Romer's idea and sought to implement it in different parts of the world. The aim is to provide citizens with alternatives to the status quo: establishing new legal, financial and municipal relationships with residents. The ideology is to reduce the size of the modern state, which is considered to act in its own self-interest at the expense of society. There are a number of different scales of initiatives for the Free City Foundation: from intentional communities to prosperity zones, all the way to Free Private Cities. Prospera in Honduras is a working example of a Free City: a new settlement on the island of Roatán is being developed within its own civil law, regulatory agencies and taxation; although it must still adhere to the Honduran constitution, international treaties and criminal law.But this is only the start: many more examples are being developed across the world. Perhaps the most innovative idea is Seasteading, where independent communities are developed in international waters, outside of the jurisdiction of existing governments. Are these initiatives viable and preferable alternatives to the nation-state? That may be too early to tell, but there is a growing number of investors who think they are the future of civilisation.- - - - This episode's sponsors:Gemini - Buy Bitcoin instantlyLedn - Financial services for Bitcoin hodlersBitcasino - The Future of Gaming is herePacific Bitcoin - Bitcoin‑only event, Nov 10 & 11, 2022Ledger - State of the art Bitcoin hardware walletWasabi Wallet - Privacy by defaultTexas Blockchain Summit - Nov 17-18, 2022 | Austin, TexasBCB Group - Global digital financial Services-----WBD553 - Show Notes-----If you enjoy The What Bitcoin Did Podcast you can help support the show by doing the following:Become a Patron and get access to shows early or help contributeMake a tip:Bitcoin: 3FiC6w7eb3dkcaNHMAnj39ANTAkv8Ufi2SQR Codes: BitcoinIf you do send a tip then please email me so that I can say thank youSubscribe on iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | Deezer | TuneIn | RSS FeedLeave a review on iTunesShare the show and episodes with your friends and familySubscribe to the newsletter on my websiteFollow me on Twitter Personal | Twitter Podcast | Instagram | Medium | YouTubeIf you are interested in sponsoring the show, you can read more about that here or please feel free to drop me an email to discuss options.
Today's guest on the Expat Money Show is Francisco Litvay, Co-founder of Settee, an internationalization company. At age 17, he moved from Brazil and, at 21, became a digital nomad, having been in more than 20 countries on 4 continents since then. He specializes in Special Economic Zones and Charter Cities and is an ambassador for the Free Private Cities Foundation and Head of Internationalization at the Adrianople Group, a business intelligence firm focused on special jurisdictions. TODAY'S CONVERSATION WITH FRANCISCO Today I chat with Francisco Litvay about the power of free cities and private cities and how they just work better. If you're new to this idea, listen to the entire podcast, there's so much we unpack. We discuss the possibility of creating a voluntary system of government and how that can help your business, how you can pay less taxes, and how free zones can help you move to different countries. And if you've ever wondered how each of my podcast episodes is connected, week after week, I'll let you in on the secret during this show. A fascinating conversation on the practicality of libertarianism, what are the big projects in this space really have legs, things that are up and coming and what Francisco is working on right now. Francisco and I talk about ZEDEs, the concept, and the value they bring to the world. We talk a lot about Honduras and what it will mean to the country, but there are many around the world. We delve into other jurisdictions like Uruguay and the UAE, how their governments have handled special economic zones, and what the incentives are for businesses set up in these zones. You've decided that you love the idea of a free zone, and you want to participate; Francisco discusses the company formation side, the banking side, the living side, and anything you can actually do to increase your own freedom using this vehicle and this varies from country to country, so listen carefully. Special Economic Zones in Africa? Countries like São Tomé and Príncipe or Nigeria. Maybe these are great alternative countries and islands that we should look at? If you want to see where all of the special economic zones are across the world, basically every zone on earth, go to Open Zone Map. If it's a charter city, a free zone, a free port, private or public, or if you really want to learn about zones and see where there are opportunities close to you, check out the open zone map; I'll give you the link below. HOW TO REACH FRANCISCO LITVAY Adrianople Group - https://www.adrianoplegroup.com/ (https://www.adrianoplegroup.com) Open Zone Map - https://www.openzonemap.com/ (https://www.openzonemap.com) Internationalization website (for Portuguese Speakers): https://settee.io/ (https://settee.io) Francisco's contact: @franlitvay on every social media RELATED EPISODES https://expatmoneyshow.com/episodes/kolja-spori (196: How To Make Friends With Warlords And Other Dangerous Individuals – Kolja Spori) https://expatmoneyshow.com/episodes/peter-young (192: Building Free Private Cities Around The World – Peter Young ) CONCLUSION This is such a super exciting topic for my clients and for me. I love learning about ZEDEs and free private cities, and special economic zones around the world. I'm also grateful to be connected with people that really understand what's going on in the world today. Don't miss this episode!
Can we do cities better? Researcher Heba Elhanafy, and the American headquartered think tank the Charter Cities Institute, think so. Heba joined Jason and the Smarter Cities Podcast from her office in Zambia, where she is working with African governments on creating new and better cities that work for people as well as deliver economic development. Learn more about Heba and the Charter Cities Institute at: https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/ Smarter Cities Podcast: Listen and subscribe at Spotify here: https://lnkd.in/fJq96sk Listen and subscribe at Apple Podcasts here: https://lnkd.in/fRBYnZf You Tube: https://lnkd.in/g8rFxGf E-mail us at smartercitiespod@gmail.com This episode is presented with thanks to Podium, the end-to-end digital platform that provides the property and construction industry with insights and clarity never experienced before. Find out more at: https://lnkd.in/dFwaDufp
CityDAO Podcast | A Community-Governed Crypto City of the Future
Here with us today on our CityDAO Podcast is Carl Youngblood, who is currently spending his vacation in Madrid, Spain. Carl is a Software Engineer for over twenty years, specializing in highly scalable web services and applications. He is especially interested in blockchain technology and smart contracts. For today's episode, we will have a more in-depth discussion about Charter Cities, Carl's transition to the blockchain space, his work in AWS (Amazon Web Services), proof-of-work versus proof-of-stake, designing the city of the future, and so much more. Carl used to be a part of the Amazon Web Services as a Senior Solutions Architect and Blockchain specialist. He is also the Co-Founder of Blockscale LLC, which provides highly-available, reliable, and scalable blockchain services for crypto projects. Blockscale has led the deployment of the Tezos Foundation's baker infrastructure during their mainnet launch, and continues to maintain it today. They have also released open-source projects and tools for Ethereum and Tezos. Blockscale was recently acquired by Coinbase. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/city-dao-podcast/message
Kurtis Lockhart, Executive Director of the Charter Cities Institute, tells us about the benefits of charter cities - cities with their own rules or charter, independent of national or subnational governments. Kurtis argues the best way to implement charter cities is via public-private partnerships (PPPs). Learn about the fascinating work the Charter Cities Institute is involved in around the world with a view to stimulating economic development and lifting millions out of poverty. About this episode's guest - Kurtis LockhartKurtis Lockhart is Executive Director & Head of Research at the Charter Cities Institute. Kurtis is also a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Oxford. His research examines the effect of institutional reforms on public goods provision with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. At Oxford he has taught both quantitative methods and African politics. In the field, Kurtis has previously worked as a Research Manager for the International Growth Centre (IGC), for Warc Africa (both in Sierra Leone), and for the ELIMU Impact Evaluation Center in Kenya where he managed the implementation of several randomized control trials across many different sectors (health insurance, rural electrification, tax administration, and legal aid). Kurtis has also completed consulting projects with both Oxford Development Consultancy and with Warc Africa. He holds an MSc in Development Management from the London School of Economics where he graduated top of his class, as well as a BA in Economics and Development Studies (First Class Honors) from McGill University. Find him on Twitter @kurtislockhart.Links relevant to the conversationThe Charter Cities InstitutePodcast Archives - The Future of Development (Charter Cities Institute podcast)Paul Romer: Why the world needs charter citiesThe Charter Cities Institute on Twitter: @CCIdotCityCreditsThanks to the show's audio engineer Josh Crotts for his assistance in producing the episode and to the show's sponsor, Gene's consultancy business www.adepteconomics.com.au. Please consider signing up to receive our email updates and to access our e-book Top Ten Insights from Economics at www.economicsexplored.com. Also, please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored. Economics Explored is available via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, and other podcasting platforms.
I flew to the Bahamas to interview Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX! He talks about FTX’s plan to infiltrate traditional finance, giving $100m this year to AI + pandemic risk, scaling slowly + hiring A-players, and much more.Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Timestamps(00:18) - How inefficient is the world?(01:11) - Choosing a career(04:15) - The difficulty of being a founder(06:21) - Is effective altruism too narrowminded?(09:57) - Political giving(12:55) - FTX Future Fund(16:41) - Adverse selection in philanthropy(18:06) - Correlation between different causes(22:15) - Great founders do difficult things(25:51) - Pitcher fatigue and the importance of focus(28:30) - How SBF identifies talent(31:09) - Why scaling too fast kills companies(33:51) - The future of crypto(35:46) - Risk, efficiency, and human discretion in derivatives(41:00) - Jane Street vs FTX(41:56) - Conflict of interest between broker and exchange(42:59) - Bahamas and Charter Cities(43:47) - SBF’s RAM-skewed mindUnfortunately, audio quality abruptly drops from 17:50-19:15TranscriptDwarkesh Patel 0:09Today on The Lunar Science Society Podcast, I have the pleasure of interviewing Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX. Thanks for coming on The Lunar Society.Sam Bankman-Fried 0:17Thanks for having me.How inefficient is the world?Dwarkesh Patel 0:18Alright, first question. Does the consecutive success of FTX and Alameda suggest to you that the world has all kinds of low-hanging opportunities? Or was that a property of the inefficiencies of crypto markets at one particular point in history?Sam Bankman-Fried 0:31I think it's more of the former, there are just a lot of inefficiencies.Dwarkesh Patel 0:35So then another part of the question is: if you had to restart earning to give again, what are the odds you become a billionaire, but you can't do it in crypto?Sam Bankman-Fried 0:42I think they're pretty decent. A lot of it depends on what I ended up choosing and how aggressive I end up deciding to be. There were a lot of safe and secure career paths before me that definitely would not have ended there. But if I dedicated myself to starting up some businesses, there would have been a pretty decent chance of it.Choosing a careerDwarkesh Patel 1:11So that leads to the next question—which is that you've cited Will MacAskill's lunch with you while you were at MIT as being very important in deciding your career. He suggested you earn-to-give by going to a quant firm like Jane Street. In retrospect, given the success you've had as a founder, was that maybe bad advice? And maybe you should’ve been advised to start a startup or nonprofit?Sam Bankman-Fried 1:31I don't think it was literally the best possible advice because this was in 2012. Starting a crypto exchange then would have been…. I think it was definitely helpful advice. Relative to not having gotten advice at all, I think it helps quite a bit.Dwarkesh Patel 1:50Right. But then there's a broader question: are people like you who could become founders advised to take lower variance, lower risk careers that in, expected value, are less valuable?Sam Bankman-Fried 2:02Yeah, I think that's probably true. I think people are advised too strongly to go down safe career paths. But I think it's worth noting that there's a big difference between what makes sense altruistically and personally for this. To the extent you're just thinking of personal criteria, that's going to argue heavily in favor of a safer career path because you have much more quickly declining marginal utility of money than the world does. So, this kind of path is specifically for altruistically-minded people.The other thing is that when you think about advising people, I think people will often try and reference career advice that others got. “What were some of these outward-facing factors of success that you can see?” But often the answer has something to do with them and their family, friends, or something much more personal. When we talk with people about their careers, personal considerations and the advice of people close to them weigh very heavily on the decisions they end up making.Dwarkesh Patel 3:17I didn't realize that the personal considerations were as important in your case as the advice you got.Sam Bankman-Fried 3:24Oh, I don’t think in my case. But, it is true with many people that I talked to.Dwarkesh Patel 3:29Speaking of declining marginal consumption, I'm wondering if you think the implication of this is that over the long term, all the richest people in the world will be utilitarian philanthropists because they don't have diminishing returns of consumption. They’re risk-neutral.Sam Bankman-Fried 3:40I wouldn't say all will, but I think there probably is something in that direction. People who are looking at how they can help the world are going to end up being disproportionately represented amongst the most and maybe least successful.The difficulty of being a founderDwarkesh Patel 3:54Alright, let’s talk about Effective Altruism. So in your interview with Tyler Cowen, you were asked, “What constrains the number of altruistically minded projects?” And you answered, “Probably someone who can start something.”Now, is this a property of the world in general? Or is this a property of EAs? And if it's about EAs, then is there something about the movement that drives away people who took could take leadership roles?Sam Bankman-Fried 4:15Oh, I think it's just the world in general. Even if you ignore altruistic projects and just look at profit-minded ones, we have lots of ideas for businesses that we think would probably do well, if they were run well, that we'd be excited to fund. And the missing ingredient quite frequently for them is the right person or team to take the lead on it. In general, starting something is brutal. It's brutal being a founder, and it requires a somewhat specific but extensive list of skills. Those things end up making it high in demand.Dwarkesh Patel 4:56What would it take to get more of those kinds of people to go into EA?Sam Bankman-Fried 4:59Part of it is probably just talking with them about, “Have you thought about what you can do for the world? Have you thought about how you can have an impact on the world? Have you thought about how you can maximize your impact on the world?” Many people would be excited about thinking critically and ambitiously about how they can help the world. So I think honestly, just engagement is one piece of this. And then even within people who are altruistically minded and thinking about what it would take for them to be founders, there are still things that you can do.Some of this is about empowering people and some of this is about normalizing the fact that when you start something, it might fail—and that's okay. Most startups and especially very early-stage startups should not be trying to maximize the chances of having at least a little bit of success. But that means you have to be okay with the personal fallout of failing and that we have to build a community that is okay with that. I don't think we have that right now, I think very few communities do.Is effective altruism too narrowminded?Dwarkesh Patel 6:21Now, there are many good objections to utilitarianism, as you know. You said yourself that we don't have a good account of infinite ethics—should we attribute substantial weight to the probability that utilitarianism is wrong? And how do you hedge for this moral uncertainty in your giving?Sam Bankman-Fried 6:35So I don't think it has a super large impact on my giving. Partially, because you'd need to have a concrete proposal for what else you would do that would be different actions-wise—and I don't know that that I've been compelled by many of those. I do think that there are a lot of things we don't understand right now. And one thing that you pointed to is infinite ethics. Another thing is that (I'm not sure this is moral uncertainty, this might be physical uncertainty) there are a lot of sort of chains of reasoning people will go down that are somewhat contingent on our current understanding of the universe—which might not be right. And if you look at expected-value outcomes, might not be right.Say what you will about the size of the universe and what that implies, but some of the same people make arguments based on how big the universe is and also think the simulation hypothesis has decent probability. Very few people chain through, “What would that imply?” I don't think it's clear what any of this implies. If I had to say, “How have these considerations changed my thoughts on what to do?”The honest answer is that they have changed it a little bit. And the direction that they pointed me in is things with moderately more robust impact. And what I mean by that is, I'm sure one way that you can calculate the expected value of an action is, “Here's what's going to happen. Here are the two outcomes, and here are the probabilities of them.” Another thing you can do is say - it's a little bit more hand-wavy - but, “How much better is this going to make the world? How much does it matter if the world is better in generic diffuse ways?” Typically, EA has been pretty skeptical of that second line of reasoning—and I think correctly. When you see that deployed, it's nonsense. Usually, when people are pretty hard to nail down on the specific reasoning of why they think that something might be good, it’s because they haven't thought that hard about it or don't want to think that hard about it. The much better analyzed and vetted pathways are the ones we should be paying attention to.That being said, I do think that sometimes EA gets too narrow-minded and specific about plotting out courses of impact. And this is one of the reasons why that people end up fixating on one particular understanding of the universe, of ethics, of how things are going to progress. But, all of these things have some amount of uncertainty in them. And when you jostle them, some theories of impact behave somewhat robustly and some of them completely fall apart. I’ve become a bit more sympathetic to ones that are a little robust under thoughts about what the world ends up looking like.Political givingDwarkesh Patel 9:57In the May 2022 Oregon Congressional Election, you gave 12 million dollars to Carrick Flynn, whose campaign was ultimately unsuccessful. How have you updated your beliefs about the efficacy of political giving in the aftermath?Sam Bankman-Fried 10:12It was the first time that I gave on that scale in a race. And I did it because he was, of all the candidates in the cycle, the most outspoken on the need for more pandemic preparedness and prevention. He lost—such is life. In the end, there are some updates on the efficacy of various things. But, I never thought that the odds were extremely high that he was going to win. It was always going to be an uncertain close race. There's a limit to how much you can update from a one-time occurrence. If you thought the odds were 50-50, and it turns out to be close in one direction or another, there's a maximum of a factor-of-two update that you have on that. There were a bunch of sort of micro-updates on specific factors of the race, but on a high level, it didn’t change my perspective on policy that much.Dwarkesh Patel 11:23But does it make you think there are diminishing or possibly negative marginal returns from one donor giving to a candidate? Because of the negative PR?Sam Bankman-Fried 11:30At some point, I think that's probably true.Dwarkesh Patel 11:33Continuing on the theme of politics, when is it more effective to give the marginal million dollars to a political campaign or institution to make some change at the government level (like putting in early detection)? Or when is it more effective to fund it yourself?Sam Bankman-Fried 11:47It's a good question. It's not necessarily mutually exclusive. One thing worth looking at is the scale of the things that need to happen. How much are things like international cooperation important for it? When you look at pandemic prevention, we're talking tens of billions of dollars of scale necessary to start putting this infrastructure in place. So it's a pretty big scale thing—which is hard to fund to that level individually. It’s also something where we’re going to need to have cooperation between different countries on, for example, what their surveillance for new pathogens looks like. And vaccine distribution If some countries have a great distribution of vaccines and others don't, that's not good. It's both not fair and not equitable for the countries that get hit hardest. But also, in a global pandemic, it's going to spread. You need global coverage. That's another reason that government has to be involved, at least to some extent, in the efforts.FTX Future FundDwarkesh Patel 12:55Let's talk about Future Fund. As you know, there are already many existing Effective Altruist organizations that do donations. What is the reason you thought there was more value in creating a new one? What's your edge?Sam Bankman-Fried 13:06 There's value in having multiple organizations. Every organization has its blind spots, and you can help cover those up if you have a few. If OpenPhil didn't exist, maybe we would have created an organization that looks more like OpenPhil. They are covering a lot of what we’re looking at—we're looking at overlapping, but not identical things. I think having that diversity can be valuable, but pointing to the ways in which we intentionally designed to be a little bit different from existing donors:One thing that I've been really happy about is the re-granting program. We have a number of people who are experts in various areas to who we've basically donated pots that they can re-grant. What are the reasons that we think this is valuable? One thing is giving more stakeholders a chance to voice their opinions because we can't possibly be listening to everyone in the world directly and integrating all those opinions to come up with a perfect set of answers. Distributing it and letting them act semi-autonomously can help with that. The other thing is that it helps with a large number of smaller grants. When you think about what an organization giving away $100 million in a year is thinking about, “if we divided that up into $25,000 grants, how many grants would that mean?” 4,000 grants to analyze, right? If we want to give real thought to each one of those, we can't do that.But on the flip side, sometimes the smaller grants are the most impactful per dollar and there are a lot of cases where someone really impressive has an exciting idea for a new foundation or a new organization that could do a lot of good for the world and needs $25,000 to get started. To rent out a small office, to be able to cover salaries for two employees for the first six months. Those are the kind of cases where a pretty small grant can make a huge change in the development of what might ultimately become a really impactful organization. But they're the kind of things that are really hard for our team to evaluate all of, just given the number of them—but the re-grantor program gives us a way to do that. Instead, we have 10, 50, or 100 re-grantors, who are going out and finding a lot of those opportunities close to them, they can then identify those and direct those grants—and it gives us a much wider reach. It also biases it less towards people who we happen to know, which is good.We don't want to just like overfund everyone we know and underfund everyone that we don’t. That's one initiative that I've been pretty excited about that we're going to keep doing. Another thing we've really tried to have a lot of emphasis on making the (application) process smooth and clean. There are pros and cons to this. But it drops the activation energy necessary for someone to decide to apply for a grant and fill out all of the forms. We’ve really tried to bring more people into the fold.Adverse selection in philanthropyDwarkesh Patel 16:41If you make it easy for people to fill out your application and generally fund things that other organizations wouldn't, how do you deal with the possibility of adverse selection in your philanthropic deal flow?Sam Bankman-Fried 16:52It's a really good question. It’s a worry that Bob down the street might see a great book case study that he wants and wonder if he can get funding for this bookcase as it’s going to house a lot of knowledge. Knowledge is good, right? Obviously, we would detect that pretty quickly. The basic answer is that we still vet all of these. We do have oversight of them. But, we also do a deep dive into both all of the large ones, but also into samplings of all the small ones. We do deep dives into randomly sampled subsets of them—which allows us to get a good statistical sense of whether we are facing significant adverse selection in them. So far, we haven't seen obvious signs of it, but we're going to keep doing these analyses and see if anything worrying comes out of those. But that's a way to be able to have more trusted analyses for more scaled-up numbers of grants.Correlation between different causesDwarkesh Patel 18:06A long time ago, you wrote a blog post about how EA causes are multiplicative, instead of additive. Do you still find that's the case with most of the causes you care about? Or are there cases where some of the causes you care about are negatively multiplicative? An example might be economic growth and the speed at which AI takes off.Sam Bankman-Fried 18:24Yeah, I think it’s getting more complicated. Specifically around AI, you have a lot of really complex factors that can point in the same direction or in opposite directions. Especially if what you think matters is something like the relative progress of AI safety research versus AI capabilities research, a lot of things are going to have the same impact on both of those, and thus confusing impact on safety as a whole.I do think it's more complicated now. It's not cleanly things just multiplying with each other. There are lots of cases where you see multiplicative behavior, but there are cases where you don't have that. The conclusion of this is: if you have multiplicative cases, you want to be funding each piece of it. But if you don't, then you want to be trained to identify the most impactful pieces and move those along. Our behavior should be different in those two scenarios.Dwarkesh Patel 19:23If you think of your philanthropy from a portfolio perspective, is correlation good or bad?Sam Bankman-Fried 19:29Expected value is expected value, right? Let's pretend that there is one person in Bangladesh and another one in Mexico. We have two interventions, both 50-50 on saving each of their lives. Suppose there’s some new drug that we could release to combat a neglected disease. This question is asking, “are they correlated?” “Are these two drugs correlated in their efficacy?” And my basic argument is, “it doesn't matter, right?” If you think about it from each of their perspectives, the person in Mexico isn't saying, “I only want to be saved in the cases where the person in Bangladesh is or isn't saved.” That’s not relevant. They want to live.The person in Bangladesh similarly wishes to live. You want to help both of them as much as you can. It's not super relevant whether there’s alignment or anti-alignment between the cases where you get lucky and the ones where you don't.Dwarkesh Patel 20:46What’s the most likely reason that Future Fund fails to live up to your expectations?Sam Bankman-Fried 20:51We get a little lame. We give to a lot of decent things. But all the cooler or more innovative things that we do, don't seem to work very well. We end up giving the same that everyone else is giving. We don’t turn out to be effective at starting new things, we don't turn out to be effective at thinking of new causes or executing them. Hopefully, we'll avoid that. But, it's always a risk.Dwarkesh Patel 21:21Should I think of your charitable giving, as a yearly contribution of a billion dollars? Or should I think of it as a $30 billion hedge against the possibility that there's going to be some existential risk that requires a large pool of liquid wealth?Sam Bankman-Fried 21:36It's a really good question, I'm not sure. We've given away about 100 million so far this year. We're going to start doing that because we think there are really important things to fund and to start scaling up those systems. We notice opportunities as they come and we have systems ready in place to give to them. But it's something we're really actively discussing internally—how concentrated versus diffuse we want that giving to be, and storing up for one very large opportunity versus a mixture of many.Great founders do difficult thingsDwarkesh Patel 22:15When you look at a proposal and think this project could be promising, but this is not the right person to lead it, what is the trait that's most often missing?Sam Bankman-Fried 22:22Super interesting. I am going to ignore the obvious answer which is that the guy is not very good and look at cases where it's someone pretty impressive, but not the right fit for this. There are a few things. One of them is how much are they going to want to deal with really messy s**t. This is a huge thing! When I was working at Jane Street, I had a great time there. One thing I didn’t realize was valuable until I saw the alternative—if I decided that is a good trade to buy one share of Apple stock on NASDAQ, there's a button to do that.If you as a random citizen want to buy one share of Apple stock directly on an exchange, it'll cost you tens of millions of dollars a year to get set up. You have to get a physical colo(cation) in Secaucus, New Jersey, have market data agreements with these companies, think about the sip and about the NBBO and whether you’re even allowed to list on NASDAQ, and then build the technological infrastructure to do it. But all of that comes after you get a bank account.Getting a bank account that's going to work in finance is really hard. I spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours of my life, trying to open bank accounts. One of the things at early Alameda that was really crucial to our ability to make money was having someone very senior spend hours per day in a physical bank branch, manually instructing wire transfers. If we didn't do that, we wouldn't have been able to do the trade.When you start a company, there are enormous amounts of s**t that looks like that. Things that are dumb or annoying or broken or unfair, or not how the world should work. But that’s how the world does work. The only way to be successful is to fight through that. If you're going to be like, “I'm the CEO, I don't do that stuff,” then no one's going to do that at your company. It's not going to get done. You won't have a bank account and you won't be able to operate. One of the biggest traits that are incredibly important for a founder and for an early team at a company (but not important for everything in life) is willing to do a ton of grunt work if it’s important for the company right then.Viewing it not as “low prestige” or “too easy” for you, but as, “This is the important thing. This is a valuable thing to do. So it's what I'm going to do.” That's one of the core traits. The other thing is asking if they’re excited about this idea? Will they actually put their heart and soul into it? Or are they going to be not really into it and half-ass? Those are two things that I really look for.Pitcher fatigue and the importance of focusDwarkesh Patel 25:51How have you used your insights about pitcher fatigue to allocate talent in your companies?Sam Bankman-Fried 25:58Haha. When it comes to pitchers, in baseball, there's a lot of evidence that they get worse over the course of the game. Partially, because it's hard on the arm. But, it's worth noting that the evidence seems to support the claim that it depends on the pitchers. But in general, you're better off breaking up your outings. It's not just a function of how many innings they pitch that season, but also extremely recently. If you could choose between someone throwing six innings every six days, or throwing three innings every three days, you should use the latter. That's going to get the better pitching on average, and just as many innings out of them—and baseball has since then moved very far in that direction. The average number of pitches thrown by starting pitchers has gone down a lot over the last 5-10 years.How do I use that in my company? There’s a metaphor here except this is with computer work instead of physical arm work. You don't have the same effect where your arm is getting sore, your muscles snap, and you need surgery if you pitch too hard for too long. That doesn't directly translate—but there's an equivalent of this with people getting tired and exhausted. But on the other hand, context is a huge, huge piece of being effective. Having all the context in your mind of what's going on, what you're working on, and what the company is doing makes it easier to operate effectively. For instance, if you could have either two half-time employees or one full-time employee, you're way better off with one full-time employee because they're going to have more context than either of the part-time employees would have—thus be able to work way more efficiently.In general, concentrated work is pretty valuable. If you keep breaking up your work, you're never going to do as great of work as if you truly dove into something.How SBF identifies talentDwarkesh Patel 28:30You've talked about how you weigh experience relatively little when you're deciding who to hire. But in a recent Twitter thread, you mentioned that being able to provide mentorship to all the people who you hire is one of the bottlenecks to you being able to scale. Is there a trade-off here where if you don't hire people for experience, you have to give them more mentorship and thus can't scale as fast?Sam Bankman-Fried 28:51It's a good question. To a surprising extent, we found that the experience of the people that we hire has not had much correlation with how much mentorship they need. Much more important is how they think, how good they are at understanding new and different situations, and how hard they try to integrate into their understanding of coding how FTX works. We actually have by and large found that other things are much better predictors of how much oversight and mentorship they’re going to need then.Dwarkesh Patel 29:35How do you assess that short of hiring them for a month and then seeing how they did?Sam Bankman-Fried 29:39It's tough, I don't think we're perfect at it. But things that we look at are, “Do they understand quickly what the goal of a product is? How does that inform how they build it?” When you're looking at developers, I think we want people who can understand what FTX is, how it works, and thus what the right way to architect things would be for that rather than treating it as an abstract engineering problem divorced from the ultimate product.You can ask people like, “Hey, here's a high-level customer experience or customer goal. How would you architect a system to create that?” That’s one thing that we look for. An eagerness to learn and adapt. It's not trivial to ask for that. But you can do some amount of that by giving people novel scenarios and seeing how much they break versus how much they bend. That can be super valuable. Specifically searching for developers who are willing to deal with messy scenarios rather than wanting a pristine world to work in. Our company is customer-facing and has to face some third-party tooling. All those things mean that we have to interface with things that are messy and the way the world is.Why scaling too fast kills companiesDwarkesh Patel 31:09Before you launched FTX, you gave detailed instructions to the existing exchanges about how to improve their system, how to remove clawbacks, and so on. Looking back, they left billions of dollars of value on the table. Why didn't they just fix what you told them to fix?Sam Bankman-Fried 31:22My sense is that it’s part of a larger phenomenon. One piece of this is that they didn't have a lot of market structure experts. They did not have the talent in-house to think really deeply about risk engines. Also, there are cultural barriers between myself and some of them, which meant that they were less inclined than they otherwise would have been to take it very seriously. Ignoring those factors, there's something much bigger at play there. Many of these exchanges had hired a lot of people and they got in very large. You might think they were more capable of doing things with more horsepower. But in practice, most of the time that we see a company grow really fast, really quickly, and get really big in terms of people, it becomes an absolute mess.Internally, there's huge diffusion of responsibility issues. No one's really taking charge. You can't figure out who's supposed to do what. In the end, nothing gets done. You actually start hitting the negative marginal utility of employees pretty quickly. The more people you have, the less total you get done. That happened to a number of them to the point where I sent them these proposals. Where did they go internally? Who knows. The Vice President of Exchange Risk Operations (but not the real one—the fake one operating under some department with an unclear goal and mission) had no idea what to do with it. Eventually, she passes it off to a random friend of hers that was the developer for the mobile app and was like, “You're a computer person, is this right?” They likely said, “I don’t know, I'm not a risk person,” and that's how it died. I’m not saying that’s literally what happened but sounds kinda like that’s probably happened. It's not like they had people who took responsibility and thought, “Wow, this is scary. I should make sure that the best person in the company gets this,” and pass it to the person who thinks about their risk modeling. I don't think that's what happened.The future of cryptoDwarkesh Patel 33:51There're two ways of thinking about the impact of crypto on financial innovation. One is the crypto maximalist view that crypto subsumes tradfi. The other is that you're basically stress-testing some ideas in a volatile, fairly unregulated market that you're actually going to bring to tradfi, but this is not going to lead to some sort of decentralized utopia. Which of these models is more correct? Or is there a third model that you think is the correct one?Sam Bankman-Fried 34:18Who knows exactly what's going to happen? It's going to be path-dependent. If I had to guess I would say that a lot of properties of what is happening crypto today will make their way into Trad Fi to some extent. I think blockchain settlement has a lot of value and can clean up a lot of areas of traditional market structure. Composable applications are super valuable and are going to get more important over time. In some areas of this, it's not clear what's going to happen. When you think about how decentralized ecosystems and regulation intersect, it's a little TBD exactly where that ends up.I don't want to state with extreme confidence exactly what will or won't happen. Stablecoins becoming an important settlement mechanism is pretty likely. Blockchains in general becoming a settlement mechanism, collateral clearing mechanism, and more assets getting tokenized seem likely. There being programs written on blockchains that people can add to that can compose with each other seems pretty likely to me. A lot of other areas of it could go either way.Risk, efficiency, and human discretion in derivativesDwarkesh Patel 35:46Let's talk about your proposal to the CFTC to replace Futures Commission Merchants with algorithmic real-time risk management. There's a worry that without human discretion, you have algorithms that will cause liquidation cascades when they were not necessary. Is there some role for human discretion in these kinds of situations?Sam Bankman-Fried 36:06There is! The way that traditional future market structure works is you have a clearinghouse with a decent amount of manual discretion in it connected to FCMs. Some of which use human discretion, and some of which use automated risk management algorithms with their clients. The smaller the client, the more automated it is. We are inverting that where at the center, you have an automated clearing house. Then, you connect it to FCM, which could use discretionary systems when managing their clients.The key difference here is that one way or another, the initial margin has to end up at the clearinghouse. A programmatic amount of it and the clearinghouse acts in a clear way. The goal of this is to prevent contagion between different intermediaries. Whatever credit decisions one intermediary makes, with respect to their customers, doesn't pose risk to other intermediaries. This is because someone has to post the collateral to the clearinghouse in the end—whether it's the FCM, their customer, or someone else. It gives clear rules of the road and lack of systemic risk spreading throughout the system and contains risk to the parties that choose to take that risk on - to the FCMs that choose to make credit decisions there.There is a potential role for manual judgment. Manual judgment can be valuable and add a lot of economic value. But it can also be very risky when done poorly. In the current system, each FCM is exposed to all of the manual bespoke decisions that each other FCM is making. That's a really scary place to be in, we've seen it blow up. We saw it blow up with LME nickel contracts and with a few very large traders who had positions at a number of different banks that ended up blowing out. So, this provides a level of clarity, oversight, and transparency to this system, so people know what risk they are, or are not taking on.Dwarkesh Patel 38:29Are you replacing that risk with another risk? If there's one exchange that has the most liquidity om futures and there’s one exchange where you're posting all your collateral (across all your positions), then the risk is that that single algorithm the exchange is using will determine when and if liquidation cascades happen?Sam Bankman-Fried 38:47It’s already the case that if you put all of your collateral with a prime broker, whatever that prime broker decides (whether it's an algorithm or a human or something in between) is what happens with all of your collateral. If you're not comfortable with that, you could choose to spread it out between different venues. You could choose to use one venue for some products and another venue for other products. If you don't want to cross-collateralized cross-margin your positions, you get capital efficiency for cross-margining them—for putting them in the same place. But, the downside of that is the risk of one can affect the other. There's a balance there, and I don't think it's a binary thing.Dwarkesh Patel 39:28Given the benefits of cross-margining and the fact that less capital has to be locked up as collateral, is the long-run equilibrium that the single exchange will win? And if that's the case, then, in the long run, there won't be that much competition in derivatives?Sam Bankman-Fried 39:40I don't think we're going to have a single exchange winning. Among other things, there are going to be different decisions made by different exchanges—which will be better or worse for particular situations. One thing that people have brought up is, “How about physical commodities?” Like corn or soy? What would our risk model say about that? It's not super helpful for those commodities right now because it doesn't know how to understand a warehouse. So, you might want to use a different exchange, which had a more bespoke risk model that tried to understand how the human would understand what physical positions someone had on. That would totally make sense. That can cause a split between different exchanges.In addition, we've been talking about the clearing house here, but many exchanges can connect to the same clearinghouse. We're already, as a clearing house, connected to a number of different DCMs and excited for that to grow. In general, there are going to be a lot of people who have different preferences over different details of the system and choose different products based on that. That's how it should work. People should be allowed to choose the option that makes the most sense for them.Jane Street vs FTXDwarkesh Patel 41:00What are the biggest differences in culture between Jane Street and FTX?Sam Bankman-Fried 41:05FTX has much more of a culture of like morphing and taking out a lot of random new s**t. I don’t want to say Jane Street is an ossified place or anything, it’s somewhat nimble. But it is more of a culture of, “We're going to be very good at this particular thing on a timescale of a decade.” There are some cases where that's true of FTX because some things are clearly part of our core business for a decade. But there are other things that we knew nothing about a year ago, and now have to get good at. There's been more adaptation and it's also a much more public-facing and customer-facing business than Jane Street is—which means that there are lots of things like PR that are much more central to what we're doing.Conflict of interest between broker and exchangeDwarkesh Patel 41:56Now in crypto, you're combining the exchange and the broker—they seem to have different incentives. The exchange wants to increase volume, and the broker wants to better manage risk, maybe with less leverage. Do you feel that in the long run, these two can stay in the same entity given the potential conflict of interest?Sam Bankman-Fried 42:13I think so. There's some extent to which they differ, but more that they actually want the same thing—and harmonizing them can be really valuable. One is to provide a great customer experience. When you have two different entities with two completely different businesses but have to go from one to the other, you're going to end up getting the least common denominator of the two as a customer. Everything is going to be supported as poorly as whichever of the two entities support what you're doing most poorly - and that makes it harder. Whereas synchronizing them gives us more ability to provide a great experience.Bahamas and Charter CitiesDwarkesh Patel 42:59How has living in the Bahamas impacted your opinion about the possibility of successful charter cities?Sam Bankman-Fried 43:06It's a good question. It's the first time and it’s updated positively. We've built out a lot of things here that have been impactful. It's made me feel like it is more doable than I previously would have thought. But it's a lot of work. It's a large-scale project if you want to build out a full city—and we haven’t built out a full city yet. We built out some specific pieces of infrastructure that we needed and we've gotten a ton of support from the country. They've been very welcoming, and there are a lot of great things here. This is way less of a project than taking a giant, empty plot of land, and creating a city in it. That's way harder.SBF’s RAM-skewed mindDwarkesh Patel 43:47How has having a RAM-skewed mind influence the culture of FTX and its growth?Sam Bankman-Fried 43:52On the upside, we've been pretty good at adapting and understanding what the important things are at any time. Training ourselves quickly to be good at those even if it looks very different than what we were doing. That's allowed us to focus a lot on the product, regulation, licensing, customer experience, branding, and a bunch of other things. Hopefully, it means that we're able to take whatever situations come up and provide reasonable feedback about them and reasonable thoughts on what to do rather than thinking more rigidly in terms of how previous situations were. On the flip side, I need to have a lot of people around me who will try and remember long-term important things that might get lost day-to-day. As we focus on things that pop up, it's important for me to take time periodically to step back and clear my mind and remember the big picture. What are the most important things for us to be focusing on? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com
In this conversation, host Tamara Winter and Juan Du ,Dean of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, discuss Du's book, The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City—and the many myths that surround the city's origin and development.For a transcript of this episode, visit press.stripe.com/juan-du-transcriptFor more on Beneath the Surface, visit press.stripe.com/beneath-the-surfaceFollow Stripe Press on Twitter @stripepress
Each year, tens of millions of people migrate from rural areas to cities—mostly in emerging economies, where populations are growing faster than governments can create basic infrastructure. To address the challenges of urbanization without industrialization, development experts, economists, and policymakers have proposed solutions spanning from increased immigration to better family planning.In this episode, we ask: could charter cities—a model inspired by the successes of places like Singapore and Shenzhen—be a path to accelerating growth in emerging economies?Special thanks to Patri Friedman, Mark Lutter, Mwiya Musokotwane, Isabelle Simpson, and Juan Du.For a transcript of this episode, visit press.stripe.com/charter-cities-transcriptFor more on Beneath the Surface, visit press.stripe.com/beneath-the-surfaceFollow Stripe Press on Twitter @stripepress
Today's episode is a bonus episode, where we take a deep dive into the Italian Renaissance (with a focus on Venice) with world-renowned expert, Professor Corey Tazzara. From the fall of the Roman Empire to the formation of independent city-states, to the financial and political ramifications of the crusades, to the rise and fall of Venice as an economic powerhouse, this conversation has it all! We start at the beginning, with a comment on the role of the Middle Ages in the formation of society as it is today, and how the literature of the times contributed to the maintenance of the Roman Empire as a power. Despite this, there was decentralization across Europe in the 800s, and independent city-states arose. Rome regained its power from tourism and through regaining the seat of the papacy, while Florence formed the birthplace of the Renaissance through its art, culture, and adoption of investment banking. Milan became an authoritarian state, and we hear how the condottieri contributed to this. Unexpectedly, Genoa gained wealth in the loss of the War of Chioggia, while Venice was created from the marshes by refugees. The focus of the conversation shifts to the role of Venice in the Renaissance, and how it influenced society as we see it today. We learn how venture capital was created to profit from the Crusades, and how links to other cultures and societies benefitted the trade between Venice and the rest of Europe and the Middle East. Tune in to find out how the Venice of today differs from the Renaissance era Venice, and so much more, in this incredible discussion! Key Points From This Episode: • Welcome to Corey Tazzara, professor of history at Scripps College and the world's leading expert on medieval and early modern freeports. • Background into the decentralization of the Roman Empire, and why we owe today's society to the Middle Ages. • How the literature of the Middle ages maintains the Roman Empire's power. • The formation of independent city-states across Europe, and how they worked. • The role of the papacy in reviving Roman law. • What the 12th Century Renaissance is, and how it impacted the European economy. • How the crusades altered the trade done at the port city-states: sea vs land travel. • Why the Fourth Crusade was the first example of venture capital. • The radical democracies that started in the Byzantine era across Italy. • A quick tour of the major houses at play across the city-states in the 1300s. • The revival of Rome: from the center of an empire to a tourism hotspot. • How Florence became a republic, and why Corey feels it is the birthplace of the Renaissance. • Why the adoption of investment banking fueled Florence's prosperity and the rise of the Medici family. • Turning to Genoa: how the loss of the War of Chioggia lead to the gain of Western wealth in the centuries to come. • The role of the condottieri in Milan's authoritarian government and war-based economy. • Who Francesco Sforza was, and how he served as an example of the dangers of the condottieri to political powers. • A few honorable mentions of other city-states that had tumultuous histories throughout the Renaissance. • The formation of Venice: how it was formed, and why its history is so different from other city-states. • The story of St. Mark's remains, why Mussolini hated the church of San Marco, and what these anecdotes say about Venice. • Why Venice is the birthplace of investment banking and its role in the Fourth Crusade. • How making Venice the gateway to the Levant drove up profit and Venetians who changed the world....
The Ukraine-Russia conflict has dominated headlines over the past few months, with countless theories and hypotheses being touted to explain Russia's aggression. Join us as we talk to one of the world's leading experts on violence and politics, Professor Chris Blattman. We start the episode with an explanation of why Chris chose to write his latest book Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace, and how he can apply the logic within to explain Putin's motivations and behavior. We learn why peace is a better driver for innovation and competition than war, and what Chris feels about the controversial observations made by John Mearsheimer about the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Tune in to learn what the George Washington example is, and the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in the rising levels of violence within the USA. We next move on to the role of CBT in reducing violence across the globe, with some insightful examples of Mr. Rogers-like personas across Africa who Chris has worked with. This episode is jam-packed with tons of fascinating insights into current affairs, how to best tackle poverty, theoretical debate and so much more. Join us today as we talk to a true role model and thought leader on another episode of the Charter Cities podcast. Key Points From This Episode: • An introduction to Chris Blattman, author, economist, political scientist, expert on violence, and seasoned peacebuilder. • The inspiration behind why Chris wrote Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. • Chris's response to John Mearsheimer's observations on the Ukraine-Russia conflict. • Why Chris is content that his book was published before Russia invaded Ukraine. • The five logics of war applied to the Ukraine-Russia conflict: unchecked interests, intangible incentives, uncertainty, commitment problems, and misperceptions. • Why Chris feels that peace drives competition and innovation better than war. • The George Washington example: what it means and how it can be applied to other situations. • Why Chris is interested in applying Machiavellian logic to his research and blogging. • How the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted levels of violence within the USA, and why. • Why the Mr. Rogers principle is so effective, and examples Chris has come across in other countries. • CBT and how it can be applied to reduce poverty. • The monetary values associated with CBT across different cultures. • Why oversimplifying complex problems is bad for the solution, and why including locals in the solution is key to success. • An example of one of Chris' RCTs that failed! • Why Chris feels that he might have had a larger impact on society if he had moved into consulting in Africa. • The factors that helped to make the Harris School the success it is today. • Why Chris thinks giving cash is more effective at reducing poverty than other interventions. • How decentralizing power will be the ultimate solution to poverty. • Chris's thoughts on the Charter Cities Institute and goals. • Where Chris is now, and the issues he will be researching in the next five years. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisblattman/ (Chris Blattman on LinkedIn) https://chrisblattman.com/ (Chris Blattman) https://chrisblattman.com/why-we-fight/ (Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace) https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010 (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined) https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-tilley-obe-a242501b8/?originalSubdomain=uk (Charles Tilley on LinkedIn)...
Honduras ZEDEs are a radical attempt at creating private cities to alleviate poverty and stimulate the economy. The program has been met with significant controversy. Prominent Honduran ZEDE lawyer Jorge Colindres discusses the most common anti-ZEDE arguments with Thibault Serlet. Join us on November 4-5 at TransLogistica in Warsaw, Poland:https://translogistica.pl/en/Jorge's Twitter:https://twitter.com/georgecolindres?lang=enSPI Inertia:https://spi-inertia.com/ZEDE Prospera:https://prospera.hn/ZEDE Morazan:https://www.morazan.city/ZEDE Orquidea:https://zedeorquidea.com/ This podcast was produced by the Adrianople Group. The Adrianople Group is a business intelligence firm that focuses on special economic zones, venture capital, private equity, and geoeconomics. For more information, please visit:https://www.adrianoplegroup.com/https://twitter.com/geoeconomicspod #HondurasZEDE #ZoneforEmploymentandEconomicDevelopment #CharterCities #CharterCity #ZEDE #Honduras #Prospera #Morazan #Orquidea #Jorge #Colindres #JorgeColindres #Thibault #Serlet #ThibautSERLET #Inertia #SPIInertia #NewayCapital #ErickBrimen #HondurasElection2021 #Geopolitics #Internationalrelations #Podcast #Adrianople #AdrianopleGroup #Geoeconomics #Economics #Infrastructure #Interview #Expert #Trade #Zone #Economy #Markets #Development #Regulations #Law #Legal #Governance
Mark Lutter is the Founder and Executive Director of the Charter Cities Institute. CCI's aim is to build an ecosystem for charter cities We talk about - The basic concepts of charter cities - What is the biggest misconception about charter cities? - What personality type does it take to run a non profit? --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/pradyumna-sp/message
In this Geoeconomics Podcast episode, Aleksa Burmazovic talks with Tom W. Bell, lecturer at the Chapman University Fowler School of Law, founder of Archimediate LLC, and leading legal thinker and scholar of the SEZ space. Tom W. Bell: http://www.tomwbell.com/ "Your Next Government?" Audiobook:https://www.audible.com/pd/Your-Next-Government-Audiobook/B08J28YHSL Prospera:https://prospera.hn/ Ulex and the Institute for Competitive Governance:https://instituteforcompgov.org/ulex Free Society Project:https://www.freesociety.com/ Dubai International Financial Center:https://www.difc.ae/ Balaji Srinivasan's 1729:https://1729.com/ Scott Alexander's Piece on ZEDEs:https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera Tom's Paper on Common Law Zones:http://ojs.instituteforcompgov.org/index.php/jsj/article/view/30/12 CERN:https://home.cern/ This podcast was produced by the Adrianople Group. The Adrianople Group is a business intelligence firm that focuses on special economic zones, venture capital, private equity, and geoeconomics. For more information, please visit: https://www.adrianoplegroup.com/ https://twitter.com/geoeconomicspod This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons with Attribution #Podcast #Adrianople #AdrianopleGroup #Geoeconomics #Economics #Infrastructure #Geopolitcs #Interview #Expert #Trade #Zone #Economy #Markets #FreeTradeZone #FreeTrade #Business #Development #Sustainable #Regulations #Law #Legal #Governance #SEZ #Future #Cities #CharterCity #CharterCities #NewCity #SmartCity #SmartCities #Government #2030 #Market #Institute #Study #SpecialJurisdiction #TomWBell #Prospera #Honduras #ChapmanUniversity #ArchimediateLLC #Legalthinker #Code #Bitcoin #CommonLaw
In this Geoeconomics Podcast episode, Aleksa Burmazovic talks with Kurtis Lockhart from the Charter Cities Institute about how cities work, what governance must do to adapt, and how the next 15 years will look like in the governance and human cohabitation spaces. Don't miss the Charter Cities Handbook:https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/ Charter Cities Institute Twitter:@CCIdotCity Kurtis' Website:https://kurtislockhart.com/contact/ This podcast was produced by the Adrianople Group. The Adrianople Group is a business intelligence firm that focuses on special economic zones, venture capital, private equity, and geoeconomics. For more information, please visit: https://www.adrianoplegroup.com/ https://twitter.com/geoeconomicspod?l... This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons with Attribution #Podcast #Adrianople #AdrianopleGroup #Geoeconomics #Economics #Infrastructure #Geopolitcs #Interview #Expert #Trade #Zone #Economy #Markets #Industrial #FreeTradeZone #FreeTrade #Business #Development #Sustainable #Knowledge #Money #Regulations #Law #Legal #Governance #SEZ #Investment #Routes #China #CharterCitiesInstitute #Future #Cities #City #CitiesofTomorrow #Book #Books #CharterCity #CharterCities #NewCity #SmartCity #SmartCities #Government #2030 #Market #Institute #Study #MarkLutter
Hello there and welcome to the Fifth Comedy episode of Doc Strange and the Dude, "The Strange Mole Show" - Text, Text, Nudge Nudge - The Strange Mole Show Episode 5 - 26th April 2021 What a couple of weeks we have had since Episode 4 Snidey Cuts and Bruises Boris Johnson 'said he'd rather see bodies pile high in thousands' than do 3rd lockdown! Ironically, that thanks to him, extra thousands of deaths AND a third lockdown because he didn't listen to the science, again. Anti Mask, Covid Denying, Thick as Mince, Tory Voting, Brexit Loving Flag Shaggers have been out in force. Beating up the Police! Boris Johnson Texts from James Dyson asking for Tax breaks for Ventilators, which were never made or supplied. Boris Johnson claims he paid for the hidious make over at number 10 and not from donations. Coming from the man who said he didn't get paid enough to live on. Wasted £2.1m on breifing room that now won't be used and built by Russia. Cummings is ratting out Boris Johnson because the powers that be want Gove to be PM. Which will lead to Freeports becoming Charter Cities and your rights will mean diddly squat. Basically, it's all about Johnson, the Liar, the Fraud, The Adulterer, Tax Avoider, Murderer and floppy headed, squinty eyed Devil that he is. There's Nothing Funny about any of it, but we've tried, Enjoy the show! www.StrangeMole.co.uk @StrangeMoleShow Written by Holy Mole, Performed by Holy Mole, Chris Doc Strange and Chrissie Grech Please Share if You Enjoy our idea of a Satirical Comedy Sketch Show. Thanks for listening. WARNING: The Police are "Just Following Orders" from Priti Patel (Histroy will remember that name. Not in a good way.) Listen to the Podcast and give us your feedback. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * I have #3Point5Percent Vinyl stickers available. Free & Fast, Signed for UK Post - 14 Day No Quibble Returns. LOVE THEM or Return Them. No Questions Asked. https://ko-fi.com/s/243b81c2b5 #ThreePointFivePercent #Resist #Revolt #Remove #ToriesOut #ToryLiars #Brexit * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Writers and Performers VERY Welcome, Please Get in touch. There's No money in it, for any of us (yet), but it's cathartic and who knows what will happen. ---------------- We would Love even more listeners, please share and help out. We do this for the love of it. There's no Ads and it's free to listen, so why not? Have a listen and enjoy. We welcome feedback and if you want to take part in the show, get in touch below. Fancy supporting us and our quest for fun? Please Become a Supporter and Sponsor us, we have no way to make a living right now. This podcast is made with love but we need to eat, any donation is very welcome. Thank you xx Please Buy us a Coffee or Two if you've enjoyed the show, thank you (Yes, I'm Begging) Buy Chris Doc Strange a Coffee or a Signed Copy of my Book "The Honest Hypnotists Guide" Visit Doc Strange the Comedy Stage Hypnotist Bloke in a White Coat Buy The Dude a Coffee and checkout his extra special mashups, heck, he can even make one just for you. Find us on On Twitter @ChrisDocStrange and the Dude @HolyMole Oh and if you would like an online knees up and laugh with friends around the World, then you can hire Chris P Tee Magician as your Magical Zoom Party Host, the Party at Yours, Wherever that may be. Any Age, Anywhere in the World. Upto 100 Screens, Any Language (I can mime) Also Available in Person for Covid Safe Entertainment throught the UK from May 17th, Book Now. (Vaccinated & Enhanced DBS)
We interview Kurtis Lockhart, Head of Research at the Charter Cities Institute and PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Oxford. We discuss Charter Cities in Zambia and Nigeria, International Relations, Geopolitics, China and Hong Kong, UBI, Infrastructure, Migration, Human Rights, Intra-African Trade, Education, Urbanisation, Free Trade, Regional Integration, and Culture. You can find us @secretbunkerpod on IG and Twitter, The Secret Bunker Podcast on Youtube, Reddit, and all podcast hosts. Reach out to us at any of these and thesecretbunkerpodcast@gmail.com as well as leaving audio messages on secretbunkerpodcast.com, which will be live answered on a future episode! Music: Reach The Top by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/secretbunker/message
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