Description

My long term goal is to create a world where people can start countries. Like they start companies today.

In this conversation, we talk with Patri Friedman (@patrissimo), the founder of Pronomos Capital where they're supporting the development of charter cities and new forms of governance. In doing so, they're building the future of how new cities are created, how they're run, and how they innovate.

Key Ideas

• Law as Code, Cities as Product — Similar to code, law can operate as an open source library or database of the best laws that people around the world are continually contributing to and adapting. As a result, the cities and governments that are built off of these laws will be best positioned to serve their people.
• Everything as Insurance — In these charter cities, insurance would be used as a way to control who is allowed to visit the city. Everyone may buy liability insurance based on the risk they pose given their past history, psychological profile, and assets they own. Rather than being discriminatory, the efficiency of markets could make this a very accurate model reducing and providing compensation for any harm or damage that occurs.
• Markets Eating the World — By creating more markets, such as a market for governments, competition between different ways of doing things will arise which forces those who want to be at the forefront to optimize and improve their solutions.

Mentioned in this conversation

• Follow Patri on Twitter (@patrissimo)
• Pronomos VC
• Charter Cities Institute

Chapters

00:00 Welcome to Build The Future

03:01 Law as code and the city as a product

05:40 Testing laws and provisioning physical space

11:00 Voice, exit and governments that serve residents

13:38 Insurance and market incentives as policy tools

19:38 Charter city projects and host countries

24:05 The longer-term vision of a sovereign city-state

25:43 Citizenship, coalitions and geopolitics

30:05 Working with existing governments

34:23 Could charter cities emerge in the United States?

39:49 Software, cryptocurrency and new sources of capital

42:55 Finding a mission worth decades of work

48:53 Other opportunities in the physical world and markets

Links

• Pronomos Capital
• Patri Friedman — Pronomos biography

• @patrissimo
• Charter Cities Institute

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Build the Future Podcast. This is a project by World's Fair Co. You can learn more at worldsfair.org.