Welcome to the Free Cities podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 158 of the Free Cities podcast.
Yes, hello indeed and a very warm welcome from here, the hills of the Welsh borders.
As I look outside the window, winter has finally hit for real this morning.
We had an epic frost and as a result I've given myself a bit of a treat to help record this intro.
We know here that the cold season has definitely arrived when we have to go out into the fields at daybreak and smash the ice in the animals' water troughs.
Some of you may know this experience. That was my duty this morning.
and when I got back my eldest daughter has a temperature she was out late last night looking
after the horses so she's off from school asleep in her room upstairs and you know what I decided
to grab my laptop and a couple of mics move it into the house and I've set up a makeshift office
right here in front of our ancient fireplace.
And it's great.
I'll give you a little bit of a fireplace hit.
Here we go.
There, listen to that.
It's cold outside.
It's lovely in here, right?
Well, I certainly am a very happy man right now, to be honest.
I'm very easy to please, as I think many men are.
In my case, a wood fire sometimes is pretty much all it takes.
Maybe add a cigar to that and possibly a glass of something like, I don't know, a tawny port at this time of the year.
That would be good, but, you know, not at 10 a.m.
I'm happy peering into the flames.
And there's the dog.
That didn't take long.
She's in here.
She's curled up.
Right.
Now I'm set.
Right.
Talking of the weather and coldness, today's episode is about a place that exists in a part of the world.
the climate of which you could almost say is diametrically opposed to here in the Welsh
mountains that's right it's Honduras and today's and next week's episodes will both be about
Honduran free cities since the Honduran general elections will be happening in a couple of days
on Sunday that's the 30th of November depending on when you're listening to this
so this week I'll be speaking with Trey Goff
who is the Chief of Staff at Prospera
also one of the longest serving employees
at that particular free city I think
and then next week after the election result has come out
I'll be publishing an interview I did with Massimo Mazzone
who is the founder and owner of Ciudad Morazan
which is the, in inverted commas, other free city in Honduras.
There are more, but the two well-known ones.
Yes, Ciudad Morazan, the free city that journalists doing hit pieces never seem to want to visit or mention.
Somehow it doesn't fit their narrative.
Anyway, the outcome of the election will obviously have a massive impact on the ZAs.
expected policy direction potential impacts for governance stability investment climate
and just the day-to-day operations of the zay so here's a quick lowdown on who's in the elections
and who we want to win and who we don't want to win if you go and take a look at polymarket
you can see that polling is suggests a kind of three-way race you've got salvador nasralla who's
the Liberal Party, generally favourable towards ZAs. They're pro-business centrist. Then you've
got Risi Moncada, who is the Libre Party. They're unfavourable. They have supported efforts to
repeal the ZAs legal framework. And then finally in the race, you have Nasri Asfura from the National
party they are favorable support investment stability and economic zones so obviously
the implications for prospera and ciudad morazan favorable outcome would be nasrala or asfura to win
then we get likely continuity and improvement in the national political environment for zas
and a moncada win well obviously continued political pressure on the zas however even
if they do win prosper has shown remarkable resilience in the face of government opposition
and maintains a 50-year legal stability guarantee and in fact recently the zone has grown from 100
to 400 companies just in the past year alone so i think either way prosper is gonna win it's just
they win harder if we get a favorable government. Right, let's get on to the episode. But of course,
I forgot to mention this episode is brought to you by Veritas Villages. They're building off-grid,
freedom-oriented communities in Latin America. And these communities should appeal to you if
you're a freedom lover looking for a great plan B option, or in fact, as many have chosen, a plan
option, a home. For Bitcoiners amongst you, you can buy your property with Bitcoin and you can
spend Bitcoin at communities. They can even help you mine Bitcoin with the excess energy that your
home will be producing. www.veritasvillages.com forward slash free cities for more info. And
please mention the Free Cities podcast if you choose to do business with them. Right. Today's
episode trey goff and to be honest my conversation with trey possibly one of my favorites from
prague um it was a it was a great mix of information and and speculation and just some really deep
sort of philosophical stuff here's the ai summary from fountain in this episode of the podcast trey
explains some of prosperer's history and current state while also diving into some deep philosophical
thoughts on the future impact of AI. Key topics, Prospera Free Cities, Silicon Valley oligarchs,
regulation, artificial intelligence, personhood, consciousness, technology, capitalism,
existentialism. It's a good one. In fact, it's jam-packed. Updates from Roatan and then
a fascinating conversation about AI and the future. One that was actually only cut short
by my very busy schedule in Prague,
but one that will surely continue
when I next make it out to Prospera,
which may be sooner rather than later.
But even if it's not sooner,
it will obviously be
when the Free Cities Conference
is held in Prospera next year.
September the 3rd to the 6th, 2026.
Secure your tickets now
at freecitiesconference.com.
That's freecitiesconference.com.
And by the way,
if you're thinking of
becoming a resident of Prospera,
or starting a business in prospera you can use the free cities podcasts referral link which will
help us out in a very small way that is at prospera forward slash r forward slash free cities it all in the show notes click on it start your business and thank me later every little bit helps right thank you subscribers on fountain please consider doing the same yourself
if you're into the value for value platforms six bucks a month for bonus episodes and more
and the good vibes that you know we absolutely and wholeheartedly appreciate your support if
you're not into that quick review on apple or spotify only takes a moment and it really makes
a difference right time to relax and enjoy the episode here you go have some more of my fireplace
in the background the sounds will help you drift away as you sit back dog at feet steaming cup of
tea on the little occasional table next to your armchair relax and enjoy my conversation with trey
goth
like i was saying the first time we met was the first prague conference
three years ago yeah and i made a film i was i remember that yep yep and you were great for
soundbites i remember because when we used you at the very end of it i remember that yeah i can't
i could probably remember what you said but whatever you said was like perfect for the
ending of the film and it was like um i can't even remember it was just it was the most it was like
if you if you would distill a soundbite down to its most perfect essence it came out of your mouth
so um thank you for that for starters but um but um you're you're um yeah so you're and you were
at Prosper then as well. I think you were the, you're quite a long, long time Prosperian.
I was actually the first like full-time employee legally. Now, this is a bit of a technical point
because, you know, the founder, CEO, Eric was already working on the project. Of course,
there were a few other guys that were also working on the project, but they were not employees. They
were early investors and board members and they were just, you know, giving their time basically
to work on it. So I was the actual first like literal employee of, of this, this project
specifically. So I've been around since 2017. Wow. Actually, it's just reminded me, I've got
to ask you about this thing because I've been asking everyone who's ever been connected with
Prospera and even Massimo asked him yesterday, but the other day an article came out, which was
on a site that I think is pretty cool, Whitney website. I don't know if you know who she is.
Now she's a really, she's a cool independent journalist, millions of followers, whatever,
but it was she syndicated an article um i'll i'll read you the title it was called um city
states without limits and it was a basically a kind of like conspiratorial thing that a powerful
group of silicon valley oligarchs are basically pushing for the construction of privatized city
states aligned with you know a global network and they want to move away from nation states and stuff
And it's huge. I mean, it's a huge thing I read through. It's like one of those things that joins the dots between so many things. There was a lot about Peter Thiel. There was a lot about all the initial investors in Prosper. They got a lot of the Prosper stuff. It was a bit outdated. They talked a lot about the Crawfish Rock stuff and about taking land. I know, I know. It was really annoying.
but but there was i mean like i say i kind of respect the the the outlet that it was on
and i tried to i reached out to the guy and he he's not getting back to me he must be seeing
my messages because i'm saying like come on the pod dude i'd like to talk about this
not least because i think you've got a few things wrong but i just want to know more about this he
you know like what what where do you how do you join all these dots together and
you know like i've spoken to a few people about it i spoke like when i said it to massimo he's like
well yeah it's kind of true I suppose you know like they have they they don't like the state
they have got a lot of money they're not you know but it was just the conspiratorial side of it which
I found a little bit disturbing that there are people because then you know like there are a lot
of incentives to create free cities of course and and what I'm worried is that in in some future
that we all end up in because I think you at Prosper you've already gone through this a lot
the kind of in a neocolonial ism kind of way, you know, like, oh, you're taking land, you're doing
this. And there will be another one, I think, and it will be this, it will be tech billionaires
who want to isolate themselves, who want to be, they all, they all believe in a new,
in a feudal system, and they want to do this, that, and the other, and blah, blah, blah.
What do you think of that? I think it's all very entertaining, uh, and funny because it is so
diametrically opposed to like how things actually work and what actually happens that reading these
it it occurs to me and feels like reading a fanfic about what we do it's like oh cool somebody got
really creative like wow this is a very entertaining this would be a much more entertaining story than
the reality that happened which is just years of brutal grinding basically uh of course uh goes
without saying but to just be clear like all of the claims about you know land being taken from
anyone or just completely made up. In fact, we've Bloomberg wrote a piece, of course, a hit piece
that claimed the same thing about a year ago or something. We sued them and won.
Did you sue them?
Yes, we sued them and got a retraction, won apology letter, whole nine yards.
Right. There you go. I didn't hear that it was a retraction.
Yeah, we didn't kind of push this too much for a couple of reasons. But yeah, we've got one from
Bloomberg. And because of that, now we tell every outlet that reaches out to us with these kind of
hit pieces that, you know, you will face the same fate if you, you know, parrot the same lies
effectively. So I'm going to get to your specific point in a second, but this is a fun kind of small
tangent, if you will, that I think people will find interesting. Here's how this actually the
process works of a lot of these hit pieces being written. And I'm not speaking to the specific
post you're referencing because I haven't read it. But in general, a journalist always is, you know,
kind of ideologically opposed to what we do more or less. And so by definition, they're coming at it,
you know, incredibly aggressively and negatively. And it's not from some, you know, good-hearted,
let's hold, you know, truth to power kind of thing. It is just an ideological kind of axe to
grind effectively. And what they'll do is they'll go read the other hit pieces that have been written
about it. They then use those, Wikipedia does the same thing. They'll then use those as a basis for
the claims in their article, right? So if they want to make a sensational claim for which they
have no primary evidence, well, they can just point to another outlet that seems, you know,
superficially plausible, facially plausible, and then say, hey, these people said this,
and then now it's part of their article. So this is how these things kind of get propagated over
time. And then they do a great job of trying to find like specific people that will occur to a
lay reader as reputable. And also this person hates what we do so that they can get a like just
potent, you know, negative quote, basically. Okay. And here's how we typically find out about
these things. I'm going to read you as an example. I'll keep the outlet name away for now because
Hopefully they don't publish this, but I'll give you like a perfect example of what this actually looks like.
OK, so there's an outlet writing a piece about Prospera right now, a mainstream outlet.
And this is how the most recent communication from them.
They said, hey, the piece will run toward the end of November.
To add, I will include a criticism of Prospera from a respected academic that Prospera is, quote, a predatory project in a weak state.
Do you have any comment? Thanks.
I just read you verbatim the email from the journalist.
I read you verbatim the email.
So that's how that goes.
I get like, you know, we get one of these a month or so.
I wonder who the respected academic is.
It sounds like a left winger by...
100%.
It's probably, it's probably, there's just one academic who I have a real axe to grind
against.
Her name is Beth Gaglia She a PhD I think like anthropologist She written a couple of times about Prospera with you know peer articles that say very similar things it your normal kind of like critical theory left you know like sociologist and anthropologist type screed
basically but she has the phd after the end of her name so she's a reputable expert air quotes
expert right she can do they ever acknowledge the do they ever acknowledge the positives do they ever
say, you know, like we think this, but if you're a free marketeer, you know, if you believe in sort
of free market economics, then it's easy to argue that this has a massive effect. And here are the
reasons why. And actually here's the proof, which is, you know. So they don't ever include the proof,
but here's what they will do, which also backfires spectacularly almost every time.
They will instead say something along the lines of, you know, this, you know, this project is a
special economic zone with, you know, a lower regulatory burden and where people can do,
you know, experimental biotech innovation, things like that, which you and I read like,
oh, this sounds great. But they don't add and that's bad. You're supposed to assume the bad
is implied from the way they frame it in the article. So what happens is one of the largest,
it was a couple of years ago, but one of the largest up to this year, days, single days of
e-residency signups we ever had was when a giant hit piece was published against us. I think it was
in the Financial Times maybe, some mainstream publication, because they did this throughout
the article, right? So it was clearly framed the way they wrote about it as it was supposed to be
negative, but they don't ever actually add, and that's bad because X, and then explain.
You're just supposed to assume it's bad. So people that think like we do, that understand how the
world actually works, read this and they go, well, this sounds awesome. I need to learn more about
this. This sounds amazing. So it actually, I don't mind when they do that. That's quite helpful,
actually. No, it's the, like, just literally making up lies that are infuriating.
We had some pretty good press recently.
I think, what was the one, the YouTubers that came?
Yes Theory.
Yes.
And they almost framed it as we came to sort of like, you know, they came, or correct me if I'm wrong, it looked like they came with an agenda and it was disproven.
Correct.
No, they did.
Yeah.
They did.
So we're much more open and kind of amenable to, you know, alternative media like YouTubers like that.
because basically the only thing we ask them when they come is obviously like you don't have to let
us review your thing like you have full journalistic integrity all we ask is that you let us show you
the actual proof like you know let us show you around let us answer your hard questions your
your you know more aggressive questions the skepticism you have like but let's just be
honest about it you know uh and that's it they came in just like that which is we're totally
fine with we're we're an open book to those types because i know for a fact given their prior history
they'll be fair they'll they'll tell the truth about whatever it is that they're they're kind of
investigating and looking at. So those kind of alt media types we quite like. And getting back to
your original point, I was just an aside, to be clear, I absolutely hate journalists. There's this
fantastic book called The Journalist and the Murderer. It's a book about how a journalist
was writing a long expose about a murderer and the way the journalist lied to and mistreated
and otherwise abused and kind of defrauded the murderer made people end up sympathizing more
with the murderer than the journalist. The journalist came out looking like the bad person.
And it has, I won't quote it here in four because it's too long, but it has the single best opening
paragraph of all time. It's absolutely phenomenal. So everyone should go read that. It's called the
journalist and the murderer. It's phenomenal. So to your original point, the about, you know,
this big Silicon Valley right wing conspiracy. Look, in some sense, I wish there were some truth
to that because it would mean it would be much easier to raise capital and we would have a lot
more resources and connections and things we could do to kind of help the world and to grow faster.
Right. So the degree to which it's not true is like astonishing because it's basically
diametrically opposed to the truth. You know, we've without going into details, you know,
we've tried to get some of these people, Peter Thiel being a great example to invest for years,
years, never could get them over the hump. Like they weren't weren't interested or it was too
it was too politically risky, whatever. We finally I jokingly say this with our the round we've
earlier this year, we finally made the hit pieces come true because we finally actually got a very
small investment, the emphasis on small from Peter Thiel's family office, finally, directly.
So we finally made some of the hit pieces true. But that should give you an inkling of what I mean.
It's not like there's a group of Silicon Valley billionaires and kind of tech oligarchs who,
you know, I have a monthly catch-up call with and I'm like, all right, what would you like me to do
now, sir? Or, you know, like, if we do that, you'll give me another $100 million? Amazing.
I'll go do that right away. Literally none of this is true.
I thought, in fact, in the article, he said the original money came from Peter Thiel.
No.
That is completely wrong.
Palantir?
Were they?
No.
They had zero involvement whatsoever.
I wish.
I would love to talk to the Palantir founders.
I'm sure they would love what we're up to.
That's right.
But no.
That's my point.
This is just the exact opposite of the truth in every conceivable way.
What people misconstrue is that, and this wasn't the first.
This was the second or third round we raised when this happened.
Potri Friedman, who's a good close ally and friend of mine, an ally of Prospera generally, he raised a venture capital fund of which Peter Thiel was a contributing LP, right, into the VC fund.
Potri's fund was meant to invest in projects like Prospera, right, charter cities, free city projects, that sort of stuff.
So, of course, we were the anchor investment for their fund.
Like we were the first big investment they made.
So people then took that to say, oh, Peter Thiel's directly invested in and controlling this project.
But at that point, we had never even talked to the guy.
We tried.
We never even talked to the guy at all.
So that's why I say when I read these, I'm like, oh, this is very entertaining fanfic.
It's just so – it is so hard to raise capital.
It is so hard to get people to understand what we're trying to do and believe in the idea, to understand this concept not of neo-feudalism or neo-colonialism or whatever.
It's like much simpler and in many ways more boring than that, which is partnering with existing host nations, not fighting against them like some others in the space or castigating them or whatever.
Like these people try their best given the incentive structures and institutional structures that they're faced with.
And we come to these people and say, look, your country, whether it's from the United States to Honduras, anywhere, and say, look, you're held back in a number of ways by your legal and regulatory environment, your institutional environment.
We don't innovate on the layer of governance anymore.
It's very hard to reform the things you need to reform at nation scale, if not impossible, nearly impossible is what I always say, with Argentina being the proof point to get why it's nearly and not always.
And so let's partner to create special jurisdictions where we work together to create a new legal, regulatory, and institutional environment that is much more amenable to entrepreneurship, innovation, and business while still protecting the public interest, the public good, protecting against negative externalities, things like that.
Like most people don't realize, right, in anywhere where we operate or are going to operate, right, where we're trying to pass enabling legislation, whatever, a key part of the enabling legislation everywhere is an oversight committee that has to approve and review the provisions of your charter or your governance system, things like that, that are always appointed by the government, right?
That's why I say in partnership with host nations, it's quite the opposite.
We work hand in glove with them effectively because the objective is, right, create a center, a nucleus, a nexus of prosperity in the country so that everyone else in that country can see in Honduras, for example, right?
They can see, oh, people in Honduras, Hondurans can run a robotic construction factory.
We can do this in Honduras.
It's not like there's some inherent limitation of the people that live there in some way, shape or form.
It's the institutional environment.
And the goal is to get them to realize, oh, I don't have to travel to the United States to make more money, to innovate, to do cool things that push the boundary and push humanity's technological frontier forward, right, and create prosperity for myself and my family.
I can actually do this here because I can see people doing it there in my country right now.
So it has massive spillover effects, but at a more foundational level, and this is hard to measure so people don't talk about it as much, but I think it's super important.
as I kind of grow older, I recognize the importance of culture more and more.
It can have a profound cultural shift over time, right?
Where people just, it shifts that belief from people don't do those kinds of things here,
whatever here may be, to, oh, well, I have visible physical proof that people do those
kinds of things here, that people like me do those kinds of things here where I live.
So it inspires these people to think bigger, to dream more.
And then it creates a template that ideally over time the rest of the country the actual national government can now deploy And instead of them saying hey we have this idea for a thing we want to do they can say it much easier political argument right
They can say, hey, it's working in our partnership with Prospera.
Let's do it nationwide, whatever the case may be.
You know, maybe they change it a little, whatever, whatever the policy is.
But it ends up being an example for the rest of the country to follow.
And we know this can work because that's what happened in China, right?
So Shenzhen became the first special economic zone in 1979.
and it grew massively. It has over 12 million people now. At the same time, the population
grew from roughly 300,000 over 12 million GDP per capita in real terms, inflation adjusted,
grew from around 300 US dollars to right around 40,000 US dollars. So the same time
your denominator in that fraction is multiplying by several orders of magnitude, you also massively
increased the numerator enough that the overall per capita number went up drastically in inflation
adjusted terms. So China saw this working, right? And today, by the way, over 50% of China's exports
come from their SEZs. All of their technological hubs and hubs of innovation are SEZs. There's 46
of them in the country. They're responsible for a vast majority of the economic activity and growth
in the country. So we know for a fact this can work in an authoritarian regime even, that they
see undeniably these principles work of good governance because it's not complicated either.
I said this yesterday, but just to reiterate, this stuff's not complicated.
It is really simple.
It is good, clear rules, fair, impartial, and just enforcement of those rules, fair and
impartial and rapid adjudication of disputes, right?
At a high level, that is it.
We know what works.
We know the formula for prosperity.
One of my favorite economists, Douglas North, won the Nobel Prize for kind of pointing this
out in inventing the field of institutional economics in the 1990s.
We've known this for a while.
It's just implementing it that's incredibly difficult.
So the way I like to think about Prospera, and I describe it to policymakers because
I do a lot of our policy work now is exactly as I've described it to you here. Like, look,
we know what works, guys. It's just you and I both know that for the US example, right? Congress
is dysfunctional. So because Congress can't do anything, here's another way, right? Let's do it
at a zone level. Let's prove it works and then expand it from there and use that as a template
to pass the similar legislation nationwide. You know, nothing would make me happier, by the way,
if we go somewhere, form a Prosper Zone, right? Running on the Prosper Governance platform.
it is wildly successful you know drives economic growth etc and then the rest of the country just
cut this wouldn't happen but like hypothetically right the rest of the country copy paste everything
we did amazing like you know complete you know total victory that would be nothing would make
me happier because then now the whole country could prosper the same way our jurisdiction is
right and now we have an incentive to innovate more and do better to continue to be able to grow
faster than the rest of the country so it's a dynamic process that incentivizes improvement
So it's a very long way of saying none of these rumors and allegations are even vaguely true.
They're like the opposite of reality.
I wish these billionaires were just handing me money for free.
That would be awesome.
It's incredibly hard to raise money.
And it's not like they have interesting policy ideas or ideas for kind of the business model that we can implement or anything like that.
I call this the myth of the helpful investor.
Not to say anything bad.
Some of our investors are genuinely helpful.
I'm talking very specifically about these kind of Silicon Valley oligarch billionaire types.
they're very hard to get to and if you can't at all it's like you know a 20 minute meeting or
something uh so like none of this is true it's like so the opposite of how this works uh that
i always i'm not even mad when i read these i'm just like wow i wish i wish there was a grain of
truth here even because my job would be easier it's not that i was mad it was that i feel like
these guys are on my side i'm on the i i'm you know i'm a i connect the dots on a number of things
um but and so that was what was annoying it was like come on you know like i'm i'm i'm working
amongst this thing and i believe in a lot of the things you do whitney webb's pretty good at you
know not that she wrote the article but she she did syndicate it but she's she's done some
excellent journalism on all kinds of corruption around the world and things like that though um
But, yeah, I agree, especially talking about the SEZ version.
I don't know whether you watched our film, did you, Zones of Progress?
Oh, yeah, of course.
It was amazing.
I directed that.
And during that process, I learned everything I needed to know about the process that countries can go through.
And, you know, China, as you rightly point out, is far the perfect example because they couldn't roll out changes nationwide.
You can't go from communism to a free market overnight.
It would be absolute mayhem.
So they used it as a sandbox and it worked, as you can see.
And I think Dubai now, or the Emirates kind of in general, are another good example because they basically have become a kind of whole – the free zones have kind of just bled into the whole country.
That's right.
And that's the theory.
I mean, the model works and what you're doing at Prospero, obviously, is the next step.
It's not rocket science when you look at it.
I wish sometimes that people could see it.
Actually, you just hit the nail on the head.
It's not complicated at all.
It's not.
And I fell into that trap myself to think that there was something complicated about this at all.
It's not.
it's really people flocking towards freedom economic freedom physical freedom whatever
they're they're flocking to a place where they can get done what they want to get done and they're not
you know frankenstein technology and you know this is the other thing i think that people
really misunderstand about prosper is that you can't just do anything there it's like it's on
when you if you if you don't dig under the surface you think what you can make your own
legislation what the fuck does that mean so i can just do anything i want no you've got to prove
you've got it you've got to prove to an insurer that whatever you're doing is insurable so you're
beholden to insurers it's like you know in many ways worse than than governments possibly i don't
know no that's exactly right so two points here um the first is there's actually a you know
filtering step if you will before you even get to the insurance companies right which is in the
Prospera governance system, you have to first, if you're proposing a new regulatory framework,
you have to propose that to the Prospera Council, which then has a charter-bound duty to review this,
ensure that it is better than, like the bar to clear, is that it is better than any other
available option that you could have otherwise picked, right? So first of all, that's a high
bar to clear. How do, talking about Ian, but what if it's something really complicated? Because you
must get a lot of experimental industries and stuff in there that probably are pushing the
boundaries of all kinds of regulation, right? Totally. So we've had some proposals, like a few
that have gone through, or both in the medical space, as well as in the finance space, both of
which incredibly complex fields, right? You need specific subject matter expertise. So in the
finance world, for example, at the time when that proposal was being reviewed, we had that particular
regulatory framework reviewed by, among other people, and kind of commented on and altered,
actually, by, you know, Sharak Shah, who was the chief strategy officer and one of the kind of
early executives and founders of the Dubai International Financial Center. So, you know,
he's done this exact thing very successfully elsewhere. At the time, one of the executive
directors of the FDIC in the United States was doing this for us as well, reviewing these things.
You know, we'll bring in, in other words, very specific subject matter expertise on the things.
On the medical side of the ledger, you know, we have a PhD in, you know, molecular biology
and related fields who will review these things that work in the kind of policy space.
And that's after it gets the kind of first pass from me and Nick Geranius and the rest of the council, all of which in our own right have worked in public policy.
That's what I've done my whole life basically even before Prospera.
So we all have some knowledge and expertise there.
And then when needed, if it's beyond the specific subject matter expertise of the council, we bring in third-party people.
Because again, everything always comes back to incentives for me to some extent because
people just like – again, this isn't complicated and people think they're kind of – I don't
think have the right mental models for this.
Imagine the hypothetical world where you propose a regulatory system for the medical
industry let's say.
I'm going to make up a wild example that allows you to make genetic
chimeras. So a genetic chimera would be like a human dog hybrid. They splice the two together
and see what happens. Something like that. Just an abomination. Okay. And then imagine for a second
that somehow, some way this actually gets passed to the council. It never happened, but like,
just bear with me. Imagine it does. We've just nuked our business from orbit. Like we're done.
We'll be bankrupt in six months or less because that's all everyone's going to talk about. Hey,
those crazy guys are doing the crazy stuff we told you they were going to do. This is going to
cause actual harm in a number of ways, because this can be the source of a bunch of completely
novel biological warfare type problems, novel bacteria, viruses, et cetera. It can introduce
a bunch of existential risk to humanity, actually. So we have an incentive from a pure business
perspective. We want to stay in business and become profitable. Then the first thing you have
to do is make sure your legal and regulatory environment is not insane because anyone's going
to look at that and say, oh, I'm not coming. I'm not going there. Look at these crazy articles about
these crazy guys. And in fact, I don't even want to be associated with that. Even if I'm in a
normal industry, I'm not even in the medical industry. I don't want to tell my investors
and potential business partners, hey, don't Google the place I'm at, please. It's fine. I promise.
That's not a workable business model. Trust me, bro.
Yeah, exactly. It's not a workable business model. So the incentives are what matter more
than anything else. So there's a panel that it goes through, and then it goes to the insurers,
who presumably do their own due diligence on it?
Of course.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
They don't take for granted what you've decided.
They then, right.
Because they can just refuse to provide the insurance.
They can just say, no, I'm not doing that.
I don't care what, I don't care if it passed the council or not.
I'm not going to do that.
Can you give me an example of one that has passed recently
that was quite innovative?
Yes.
So we call it kind of informally the mini-circle regulatory system
because they were the ones that proposed it.
um this was a couple years ago when minicircle first started operating but that's probably
why is minicircle so minicircle is a gene therapy company based in prospera uh this is another uh
funny tie-in to our earlier uh conversation about peter teal uh they had they had received direct
investment from peter teal in their seed round uh not us them um and they are working on like
longevity gene therapies they're applying uh this um gene circle technology basically i don't know
of that. It's long story short. And I'm about to tell you the limit of my knowledge here. So don't
if you ask me any more detail, I don't know. But my understanding of how it works is it's a
fairly well proven and reversible vector through which to do targeted gene modification on specific
proteins and cells in the body, basically. And it's reversible, critically, you can you can back
it out, basically, you can you can eject an enzyme afterward that dissolves the mini circle.
And therefore, it's gone. Like there's no there's no long term effect. It's not doing what's called
a germline gene edit, right? You can't do that in Prosper at all, actually, because it has like
existential risk. A germline gene edit, okay, it means you're editing the actual, like all somatic
cells in the body, and you're editing the genetic information that would be passed down to a child,
right? It's the actual like full genetic lineage, basically. There's a different kind of gene
modification you can do that temporarily modifies somatic cells to change the expression of a
particular thing for a particular duration of time before that cell eventually replicates,
And when it replicates, then it replicates back to normal state, basically.
Okay.
That's what they do.
It's a reversible, temporary change.
So if you like wanted to keep using their therapy indefinitely, you would have to get
another treatment of it every like 90 days.
I think it is 120 days.
So it's a cool kind of therapy.
And they proposed a novel regulatory system for this type of thing that basically in a
nutshell, I'm oversimplifying here, but it's like, we'll get the gist of it.
As long as you've gone through phase one equivalent trials.
So in the US, the FDA system, you have phase one, phase two, phase three.
Phase one is safety.
So phase one is where you're testing to see like, you know, will this harm people?
Does it cause any sort of adverse reaction?
Maybe theoretically and from the kind of, you know, etiology and biopharmacinetics of
the drug, it's not going to do anything.
But you never know until you give it to people.
The body's complicated.
So it has to have gone through that process of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that
we know for certain that it's not going to harm people, right?
There's not a bunch of negative adverse events.
After that, then, okay, normally in the FDA process, then you go through like further efficacy trials, which is phase two. And then phase three are efficacy as well as proving that it treats the specific disease you're trying to treat within the FDA framework better than other alternatives.
So it's a crash course on FDA works.
So this mini circle regulatory system basically says you've gone through phase one, then you can go to market so long as you have very, very clear free prior informed consent, including all of the possible tail risks.
You know, the list of kind of warnings you get when you buy some products in the US, that type of thing, that it's very clear that you understand it, you know, that you've reviewed it, that you're actually cognizant of what it is that you're doing.
But at a very basic level at that point, then consenting adults should be able to do what they like, right? So long as it's cleared this very basic bar of safety. Because this would be a negative externality we could create, right? If you have advanced treatments that your average customer that might be interested in buying these things doesn't understand, you know, it's too complicated, they're not a doctor, whatever.
That's why having this bar to clear is very important to make sure beyond a shadow of a doubt there's no tomfoolery happening there.
But beyond that, consenting adults should be able to consent to do things together so long as they are fully informed of what it is they're agreeing to do.
So that in a nutshell is how the kind of mini circle regulatory proposal works.
There's some other provisions.
That's the meat of it.
That whole consenting adults being able to take experimental drugs, that's quite a large part of Prospera's advantage, right?
I seem to have spoken to a number of people who, and it makes total sense to me.
Yes, of course.
Of course I should be able to try a drug if I want to.
Why would I not?
So you get that quite a lot, do you?
That's exactly right.
And it's not just that.
It manifests in a few other ways.
This is actually referred to in US policy spaces as right to try.
Montana passed similar legislation actually in the last year.
An L2 partner of ours, Infinita, my good friend Nicholas over there was instrumental in making that happen.
New Hampshire has passed something similar and is considering expanding it further.
So it's basically similar to what we do.
But there's another piece of it where we go a little bit further that also is one of those things like when you hear it, it's like, why doesn't everyone do this?
which is just reciprocity. Right now, let's say you're in the United States and there's a drug
that has gone through the full gamut of FDA equivalent in Australia, let's say, but it hasn't
gone through in the US, doesn't matter. Can't take it, can't use it. That company, even though
they've proven safety, efficacy, treatment, validity for the disease state, et cetera,
in other countries, they have to go through the whole multi-billion dollar process,
decade-long process in the US again to sell the drug in the US. So another simple change we made
is, look, if this drug is approved in a reputable country, so one of the OECD countries effectively,
or another country that has a robust, like provably robust, you know, pharmaceutical
review system, then you can use it and sell it in Prospera so long as you can prove to
us that it has gone through this full robust approval process in some other country, just
automatic reciprocity effectively.
That also is a huge unlock because there's a bunch of efficacious, you know, treatments
and pharmaceuticals and kind of enhancement compounds and protocols that are legal and
have been reviewed and have been taken by tens of thousands of patients elsewhere.
But you just can't do them in every other country except that one specific country because
no one has this reciprocity.
So it's not just the right to try if it's gone through safety trials.
It's also reciprocity if it's gone through the full trial gamut in a country that's high
income enough to have a reputable drug review system.
And in those cases, how much of the responsibility lays upon the head of the person taking the drug to also do their due diligence on it?
for example say it was like i don't know this is a silly example but say it was a north korean drug
and there was and it was allowed you know how much is how much wiggle room is there for you to not
tell them it from north korea and they take it and then die and then they sue you or whatever there basically no wiggle room there So there a couple of layers that prevent that from happening The first is that particular treatment protocol would never be approved to be done in the
jurisdiction in the first place by the insurance companies or when they got their regulatory
approval.
Because part of this regulated industry insurance system is you have to say, here's what I intend
to do.
Here's the safety and efficacy data on it, et cetera.
So it would never make it through that initial insurance review process.
both from kind of the Prosper side of things as well as any insurance company that's doing this.
So there's just layer one there that like your experimental North Korean drug would just never make it to market in the first place.
So there is a layer of not expecting every consumer to become an expert on etiology to be able to do these things.
But beyond that, after that, you have the same duty as you would in the US or elsewhere, right?
Where in the US, there's pharmaceutical companies market straight to the consumer.
People go to their doctor and request the drug basically.
And so long as it's FDA approved, they just go for it, even though they have no idea what the profound effects could be, positive or negative.
You know, SSRIs are my favorite kind of example of this.
The doctors and others don't talk about the profound negative side effects those can have over a very long time horizon because they're FDA approved.
So like, oh, whatever, it's fine.
And so there is always in any market some duty on the consumer to not just completely go in blind to things.
And the second layer of protection you have in Prospera is that informed consent piece, right?
You do have to demonstrate like provably that you've provided to the patient a detailed overview of like what the thing does, the potential risks, side effects, et cetera, and that they've signed this.
If you're using one of these more experimental treatments that has been approved elsewhere and has made it through phase one.
So it's a dual layer system.
But at the end of the day, there's no escaping that in any market.
Like at the end of the day, there's no regulatory system on earth that would work that stops stupid people from harming themselves.
I'll put it that way.
so when people like i've bumped into a few people around the world who said that oh i went to
prospera first a gene therapy for example are those people using prospera because it's too far
to fly to australia to get the same thing on the whole then is that is that the more the more common
reason why these kind of things are happening in prospera than than just some completely brand new
regulation or whatever uh it's actually more of a new treatment that happens more often uh because
is there's a lot of things that we have strong theoretical and kind of experimental trial
evidence that they will work, but they haven't made it through the full FDA process yet.
And they haven't been approved elsewhere either because oftentimes, right, just like in a
very kind of nuts and bolts way, these medical innovations come from the US, you know, Stanford,
MIT, whatever, or former, you know, students there.
So it often starts in the US.
And then these people don't want to go to Australia, Europe, wherever to start their
their process. If for no other reason than the US is the largest medical market in the world by like
an order of magnitude. You know, we spend more on healthcare than anywhere else. Our per capita
healthcare spending is higher than most countries, national GDP per capita, literally, not an
exaggeration, it's absurd. So because of that, like you want to be in the US market. So that's
usually the focus. And then because of that, you know, the novel innovations also come out of the
US. So it might not have been passed elsewhere, you know, it might not be approved elsewhere,
but it's made it through phase one trials in the US or in another jurisdiction, but it's been
through phase one trial somewhere. And then it's not gone through the process elsewhere. So it's
literally not for sale anywhere else yet. Like you could not access it anywhere else yet,
but you can in Prospera. And the gene therapies people come to get, which are often this mini
circle treatment actually is the most popular by far. This folistatin treatment is just textbook
example of exactly what I'm describing. You can't go anywhere else literally in the world
to get that right now because we know it's safe. The particular underlying like technology,
that mini circle and the folistatin treatment have been used in other like forms and use cases,
but not in this particular way. But we know like the actual underlying mechanisms of action are
safe and the kind of drug interactions are safe. It's just that this specific thing has not been
approved yet. And some of them, they can't be by the way, because the FDA doesn't right now
have a robust enough process for approving gene therapies. Like one of my favorite examples of
this, we technically have the technology like as a species right now to have what are called
individualized gene therapy treatments, right? So this is, this would be where, you know, I scan
your genome and I say, Hey, based on your genome, we could give you this gene therapy that would
reduce your risk of Alzheimer's by 50% or whatever in old age. That would require for just you in
an N equals one situation going through the full FDA approval process, the full thing,
the multi-billion dollar decade thing. So of course there's a whole class of technologies here
that are just locked behind that wall basically. So there's a bunch of ideas kind of that are
known kind of in the latent space or in the medical space, and nobody's even working on
or trying because it's like, I don't even, it's not even possible.
There's no, there's no path to market there.
You can't do it like anywhere because the, another unfortunate consequence of the US
being the de facto global hegemon is that this has a lot of positive benefits to be
clear.
But one downside is the rest of the world also often just copies our regulatory systems
or models there's after ours, at least, even if they change it some.
So because of that, FDA doesn't do it.
People see the FDA as kind of the leader in the space. And to be clear, that in and of itself is rational, right? Because we spend more money on this than anyone else. We have the largest drug regulatory system in the world. So it stands to reason the U.S. is spending the most money on this. They have the smartest people working on it. If their system works, it'll probably work for us, right?
But an unintended consequence of that is if the U.S. doesn't let you do it, odds are basically every other country also won't let you do it.
It's another reason these type of zones are so sorely needed, right, is we need an outlet for these technologies in a responsible way, as I've described, proving they're safe first.
They're not going to harm you to actually see what these things do and to push the technological frontier.
I want to live in a world where I can go get individualized gene therapy, right?
To treat, you know, I've had seven knee surgeries because I have genetically, I just have really
bad cartilage in my knees.
The technology exists theoretically for me to fix that specifically.
If I could have an individuated gene therapy that causes my body to grow higher collagen
cartilage, basically, doesn't exist anywhere in the world because of this just massive
regulatory wall.
Basically, there's not even a regulatory wall.
It just doesn't exist.
It's not like, oh, the process is hard.
Like that would be a problem.
that's a solvable problem is that there is no process it's well i was just thinking about all
this stuff and it's such a catch-22 situation being a at the sharp end of the wedge is literally
you know even i me i think gene therapy i just think frankenstein i think you know it's like
you've got you've got such a pr quagmire doing what you're doing if you think about it in in
every single shape and form it's so easy to attack um a z a it's so easy it's it's all these things
all these things are are so easy to jump to the conclusion of and i'm i'm i'm fully on board and
i still think this oh yeah i still think that you know like i i can still imagine these things you
know it's crazy i know you know i mean we're i i would say as well i'm fully i'm thankful for
especially Prospero, because you are taking on all these head on.
You are literally the sandbox where all these things are playing out.
And in the grand scheme of things, I'd say this is why I feel so bullish at the moment on everything,
is a hardline socialist government has stepped up to you and said,
we're going to shut you down and then not acted on it.
That's amazing.
When you think about it, that's absolutely amazing.
I mean, you know, I don't know what your view on the current situation is there, but from an outsider looking in, I've heard them say the law is now illegal, is rescinded.
We're going to shut you down.
And then nothing happened and nothing is happening.
And now I hear different rhetoric.
I hear the rhetoric of, well, we've we've we did well.
There's no like we're going to shut you down.
It's like, yeah, we did well.
And so why?
Well, there's going to be no more ZAs.
It's like, yeah, well, what about the ones that you're going to shut down?
There gonna be no more You know is that true Is that kind of what happening More or less I have to be careful here because of the arbitration case we have of course so I can go into a ton of detail But speaking to what been publicly published by the Honduran Supreme Court and otherwise
the reason we're kind of seeing what you're describing is that the kind of legal foundations
of Prospera and of the ZA system writ large are so strong that there was just without a
supermajority of Congress, basically, which they have never had at any point, there's
literally no way for them to do what they want to do or they at least claimed they wanted to do on
the campaign trail, right, to actually like literally stop us from operating, run us out
of the country, et cetera, because of international treaties, the actual constitutional amendments,
all of it. There was no way with the way kind of Honduran law and constitutional law works in a
nutshell for them to do this in a way that is not extrajudicial, arbitrary, et cetera, which is
obviously how the international arbitration case came about, right? They attempted to do this in a
number of ways, including with the Supreme Court ruling in direct violation of several international
treaties and their own constitution in a number of ways. And so as a result of that, you know,
we have the arbitration case going. But all I'll say on that, to be clear, is that, you know,
it's not like we're – the goal here is not to win lawsuits, right? The goal here is to catalyze
prosperity, full stop. So we are hopeful and optimistic that, you know, in the near term,
call it, you know, the next year or two, somewhere in there, that this situation will be resolved
amicably and uh we'll we'll be able to move forward you know working it hand in hand and
in partnership with the honduran government again but even the lawsuit is a pr nightmare
like i understand like when you when you hear i mean i think it was the way it was spun was that
it's you're suing oligarchs are suing the honduran people not the government uh for more than the
gdp of honduras and that that it's kind of like i don't know whether it's true but the the essence
of it is true but when you that was the point you have to what do you want to do not do that
like the the rules say and they're hard for a reason the rules are that if they
renege on their deal this is what we want to do because we've got to stop them this is otherwise
why would we start this thing exactly you know and and but but to spin it in the other way is so
easy it's like and and it's not like it's easy to unspin it either that's what i was about to say
So what frustrates me the most about this, and this is not speaking specifically to the arbitration case.
This is just in general the hit pieces about Prospera and the narratives you're talking about.
It is so easy to like quite literally lie, mislead, misdirect, selectively kind of misinterpret intentionally and maliciously kind of what we do, who we are, what's going on.
And it is so much harder, right, to undo.
There's some term for this.
I can't remember.
That applies not just to us but broadly, right?
It happens in trading. It's like climbing the stairs and coming down the elevator, isn't it? Or is it, yeah, yeah. Coming down the elevator, climbing up the stairs.
That's exactly right. Like it, you know, to, to put it in kind of a tweet link, right? It takes one sentence to make a completely sensational, viral, totally false claim. And then it takes a couple of paragraphs to explain, no, here's how the law actually works. And people see that and they're like, they see the original tweet. They're not going to see the response we do immediately after explaining in great detail why this doesn't, why that's like false in multiple different ways, whatever the, you know, the, the sentence may be.
I never heard that Bloomberg retraction, for example.
It's infuriating.
I mean, I stop.
I read these things now because I want to see.
It's a good gauge.
You can gauge public opinion, you know.
Because if that changes, if the Bloomberg pieces start changing,
that's a really good sign, you know.
But, yeah, other than that, there's no point reading them, is there?
That's exactly right.
That's why I hadn't read the one you're talking about.
You won't have read this one.
No, absolutely.
This is kind of fringe, fringe.
But I would, the only reason like it was a little bit annoying
is because I think it's not like some left-wing publication lying.
Although what the guy didn't realize was the stuff he was saying
about Prospero was coming straight out of the left-wing newspapers
in Honduras.
And a few, you know.
But when I look at him, he's not that way inclined.
They're very much, they're truth seekers.
you know and there wasn't much but the narrative was just too juicy that's the problem the
narrative of oh there's a rich guy trying to i mean despite the fact of course you know like i've
asked because i'm interviewing a lot of people here connected with you know those eddies i've
asked everyone this because i was interested to see what their answers were i've had an interesting
answer yours has definitely been the most balanced but a lot of people have said yeah so what
literally well in a way it's true because like what what the people that write articles like that
probably don't acknowledge is that their default setting is that the state should be able to tell
them what to do and whereas we are are challenging that literally and if you don't know that because
i didn't for many years i never through never even thinking about that my default setting was not
really a default setting. It was, it was, it was, it was, it was like a bit of a scam really.
And so, so there's a lot of truth to the yes. So what, you know, if I had a billion dollars,
what would I do? Yeah. I might build a free city actually and put, and make sure that I'm kind of
in control of it because I would like it to go the way I want it to go. Just like I'm in,
bought a house and I live in it. I don't let other people tell me what to do in my house,
So it's a funny one, but you can't win.
All you can do is just keep building or you just keep doing your thing.
That's exactly right.
You have to just prove incontrovertibly and in a way that is even impossible to lie about that this does what we say it does.
This unleashes innovation.
This unleashes entrepreneurship.
This creates prosperity both for local populations and for the entrepreneurs and innovators that move into the space.
That's all you can do really because the – again, like as I described earlier, the daisy chain of these guys like publication A makes a false claim, publication B references publication A in theirs and then that continues for the next 24 letters of the alphabet basically.
And then suddenly what happens is from a lay perspective, you're just – as a person just coming into it for the first time, don't know how journalism works or how kind of modern mainstream media that has an agenda works.
Then you just go read a few articles.
You're like, oh, they all say the same thing.
Well, that must be true because they all say it, not realizing that literally all of them
are lying.
It is directly false.
And what they do is they're very clever about this, right?
So by attributing it to another source, they can facially claim they're not lying.
Like, oh, well, this other guy said it.
I'm just saying that he said it.
That's all.
Knowing full well the perception that they are attempting to cultivate, obviously.
So this is how the media often like intentionally misleads the craft and agenda.
They do – Scott Alexander at Astral Codex 10 has a fantastic write-up on this about exactly how this works because he's been the victim of this before.
So he wrote about the experience of what that's like.
And they are very studious about avoiding making very specific concrete claims worded in a way that you can immediately say that specific thing is blatantly false.
They do it in such a way that they have at least a layer of facially plausible deniability, superficially plausible deniability, right?
so other publications said it right i'm not i'm just quoting them i didn't say it uh you know it
doesn't matter that you know you're a journalist and you should have journalistic integrity and
actually look into the underlying you know facts of the of the case uh so then this kind of daisy
chains along multiple publications and you end up with this like just general perception that
because the lay public unfortunately although this is changing thank goodness but uh rapidly too
but people still trust a lot of these publications right like oh they're journaling you know at the
of the day, they can't, it can't be that untrue. Like there must be, you know, where there's smoke,
there's fire, right? Even if there's, even if there's some sort of, they're exaggerating it,
there must be some sort of truth to this. And the idea that there's not, that these people just have
a genuine, specific kind of decentralized and emergent agenda against this type of project
and kind of what we do is not it a novel concept to them Cause it and it also I feel bad for kind of people that haven studied kind of how the media works and had to go through The reason I you know it is because we been through it firsthand is because if you accepting the kind of the truth of how it works it means you also have to accept two things
One, oh, these publications I thought I could trust, I can't trust anymore. So now what do I do?
Which means now the onus is on you to figure out what's true and what's not. And in, you know,
2025 with social media, that could not be harder, right? This is why I am a fan of kind of the
Brian Armstrong, you know, Balaji methodology of going direct, like just talk to the people
directly, publish the truth, the videos, the pictures, whatever, the statistics about what
you're doing directly, like, and just ignore the media, they will be irrelevant at some point,
because now you can just talk to your audience, right? The function the media used to have the
leverage they used to have over people, and this is waning rapidly, was that, oh, you want to talk
to the world, you have to go through me, right? Which means they get to set the perception and
the agenda. But now, thanks to the internet, you can just talk to people directly. You don't need
the middleman, right? That is a transformative change. But getting that cultural shift for people
to go from, I can just default trust Bloomberg because it's Bloomberg, to I should default
mistrust anything these people say until proven otherwise, basically, is a very hard shift.
One last point on this. There's a term for this called gelman amnesia, okay?
So this is this phenomenon that a lot of people have experienced where you read the news, you read the newspaper, whatever, some media outlet on things you don't know anything about.
And you're like, just assume it's true.
Like that's your default assumption.
There must be some journalistic integrity.
Assume it's true.
And then you go read an article that you happen to be involved in or just know the subject matter.
Well, you're not even involved in it, but it's an article about the 3i Atlas comet and you're an astrophysicist, right?
And normally you read all the business stuff and you believe it because you don't know anything about these businesses.
you're not involved so must be true but then you read the astrophysics piece on this comment and
you're like that's obviously not true no there's there's no extra gravitational acceleration what
you're just making this you don't you're understanding it so poorly i don't even know
how you mess this up this bad and then you flip the page and read an article about prospera whatever
oh this must be true this is why it's called gal man amnesia like you flip the page and forget
oh wait hold on do you forget there's one this happens to a lot of people oh i thought people
didn't forget. I wish that was the case, but you'd be amazed how often this happens,
where people will read a thing they know a lot about, realize it's entirely fake,
and then not make the completely correct logical deduction from that, that, oh,
everything they write must be like this. They just think, oh, this is a one-off. Like,
you know, my area is complicated, whatever, you know, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
And they just keep on keeping on. It's infuriating. It's called gelman amnesia.
If you, I think that that mode of journalism is always almost reaching its final form.
When you follow it to the end, you get articles with quote tweets in them by just who knows who, you know, so and so said this.
And you think that's a retarded thing to say.
It's like, but it doesn't matter.
It's like somebody said it and it backs up the article that we're saying.
And it's like that happens a lot.
Oh, and it will be.
I've seen a few of these that are like very funny.
These are not about Prospera, but just about other things I know about where they will have exactly what you're describing.
The article is based on like four or five quote tweets or screenshots of a tweet.
And then I go look up the actual tweet on X.com and it has like 50 views.
Like you just found a random person, literally.
It's often an anonymous account too.
You found a random anonymous account that said the thing that advances the narrative you would like to advance.
And then you publish that as if this is a credible source.
What?
It's insane.
That is genuinely insane behavior.
You said earlier that you think that a good strategy was to ignore the media because they're going to be irrelevant anyway.
I would push back on that because I think when I look at Prospera's kind of trajectory, I think in the earlier days, I think you got hammered.
And I didn't see a lot of pushback, actually.
I totally agree.
You agree?
I actually totally agree.
Yeah, this is a shift we've made, you know, in the last couple of years, basically.
So we have two different strategies now.
So we don't ignore them.
So like that hit piece, I read you the email from the journalist from yesterday.
That one, obviously, our media team and our comms team responded with fire and brimstone, basically, as you should.
That's a just completely insane thing to even ask me.
And here's the truth of what's going on in Prospera.
So we at least cover our bases there so that the article doesn't read.
We asked Prospera for comment on this claim that they are a predatory narco state or whatever it said.
And they had no comment.
Yeah, they refused to comment.
Exactly, exactly.
So now at a bare minimum, they at least are forced to say something from what we said.
Although this is a sidebar, but even that can be dangerous sometimes because a couple
years ago, I did an interview with the MIT Technology Review, who for some insane reason
was writing about Prospero, which like to start off with why you should be covering
the cool tech MIT and other people are building, but whatever.
Did the interview, I recorded it, the whole thing.
I told the journalist I was doing this, recorded the whole thing so that I would have proof
if I was misquoted or something, thinking this is just like an insurance policy, I won't need it.
She was, you know, very nice journalist, very cordial on the call, seemed friendly,
publishes the piece. And one of the quotes that made us sound terrible made me sound terrible.
They did. We forced them to change this immediately because we threatened to sue them
and because we could prove it. She literally had taken like a, you know, a couple sentence response
I had. And then she cut it in such a way that it read completely differently from how I said it
by removing selectively parts of my response so that she like, you know, used the paper mache
to create a new quote out of whole cloth by like selecting words I had said in parts of sentences
I had said in Frankenstein combining them. So even that can be dangerous. But anyways,
so first strategy is we respond, you know, so at least that's on the record. It doesn't say,
you know, Prusper refused to comment or something. But then beyond that, we just go direct. So we,
if you go to our new section on our website and our blog or follow us on X,
we often will immediately publish something if we have a, you know, there's a hit piece in coming
or one was just published, like, hey, here's some of the lies in this, right? So I've done this a
few times as well. You know, a few years ago, the MIT Tech Review one was a great example.
You know, they claimed a bunch of crazy stuff, not just for my quote that I had the video of,
but they claimed some other things that we had like video and photographic evidence was just
blatantly false. So then we published the response to that and, you know, at least force them to
change a few of the things. Now, what is frustrating about that is because we haven't
been doing this like direct strategy enough, you know, the, I'm not going to, I have no way to get
to at all, like the guy or gal who just reads MIT tech review and is not on X, for example,
or does it, he's not going to go to our website and go see, well, have these guys responded?
So that is still frustrating. But that's why it's important to grow that kind of native direct
audience, which we're, we're working on in a number of ways. And we'll continue to do so.
And then continue to just tell our story directly and publicly as a part of the reason I'm,
I'm kind of – I don't know if we're going to do this yet to be clear.
I'm not like announcing anything.
But I'm hoping I can talk the team into doing a podcast, some YouTube video series, et cetera.
Because I think like, look, we should just tell the whole story with some well-produced YouTube videos and do a giant podcast series on like how to prosper a start.
What's the actual – like just sit down with Eric and Gabe and Tidus and everybody and like let's tell the whole story start to finish.
Publish the whole thing.
It will be a multi-hour podcast series.
Let's do some YouTube videos of it, the whole nine yards.
and then continue doing so,
talking about stuff going on in the jurisdiction
so people can just see with their own eyes directly
exactly what's going on
and start building that kind of direct audience.
I want to put some more energy into that in the future.
Definitely.
Well, you know, we've got,
I don't know whether you remember,
I started this podcast in Prospera
and my first seven or eight interviews
were with various people in Prospera.
That's awesome.
You weren't there at the time,
but we came over, that was three years ago.
And, you know, I've done everyone,
And it's pretty much everyone.
Gabe.
I haven't done.
Yeah, I've done a lot.
A lot of the people involved in Prospera.
But you know what I think is a good idea for Prospera is what Bitcoin Beach did.
You know, Bitcoin Beach.
They have a Bitcoin Beach, have a podcast studio at Bitcoin Beach because so many people come there.
But that's the same as Prospera.
So many people come to Prospera.
So you've got the problem with, I find with Prospera.
good quality podcasts is you need to do it in person.
Like this, what we're doing here now
is you can't compete with this online.
So it's either the way I do it,
which is relatively expensive,
but, and I have to do periods of time.
Like here I'm doing 20 interviews
and then I'll use them over the next few months.
And it's probably the most cost effective way to do it,
but it's not ideal
because you can't do newsy things really.
You can, but then, you know,
it's just you have to juggle things around a bit but if you're the place where everyone comes and
i think prosper is becoming that i mean you know you've got a massive rota of events now
our own included i i mean we've announced it now the free cities conference will be in prosper
next year super excited i know me too i am so excited and you know this is so you've got this
group of people coming through so all you have to do is make one room make it into a studio
and just anyone who's coming,
just get them in the studio for like an hour.
And, you know, because the Bitcoin Beach podcast
is really good.
It's doing really well.
It's run by the guy, the American guy,
what's his name,
who actually kind of came up
with the whole project in the beginning.
And it's a lovely studio.
But that would be a brilliant idea.
That's a great idea.
I am going to...
Well, you do have so many people coming through.
How often are you having events now?
There's multiple a month now.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
So, I mean, and when you have an event, you're getting all people connected with the space.
That's exactly right.
As what, you know, you, I mean, actually, I probably shouldn't be telling you to do this.
You're going to be a direct rival to me, but I will do it better.
Don't worry.
There you go.
That's exactly right.
No, but I honestly, I think if I was, I mean, I said, I've often said to people, if I didn't
have a family, I'd be in Prospera running the podcast out there, a hundred percent,
because I would have to be living in a free city.
Oh yeah.
I would have to be.
I can't at the moment because of just my situation in life.
But I would be running it there and I would be making forays to other places as well to cover different projects.
But I would be running it from there.
You know, it would 100% be that.
So what's new up there?
I saw a bit of your presentation.
I had to leave halfway through.
But you were kind of commenting on all the latest things.
Yes.
And in fact, after that, I messaged a few members of the team to just be like, hey, give me some more.
You know, we've done a lot this year and I can't just remember it all off the top of my head.
Give me some more of the interesting things that, you know, have happened recently, basically.
So, you know, I talked about here the groundbreaking for the Nomad Nation Village project.
Oh, yeah, that was cool.
Darien Village project.
Those are two different real estate projects going on right now.
So Nomad Village is going to be a sort of DigiNomad specific place.
It's going to be good for them.
it's going to have co-working spaces and like cheap accommodation.
That's right.
That's so cool.
That's right.
It's going to be awesome.
And then Darien Village, which is another real estate developer,
is building a cluster of initially five,
and then it's scalable up to as big as they can raise the capital to build.
Why is it called Darien Village?
That's a great question.
I have no idea.
Is that D-A-R-I-A-N?
D-A-R-I-E-N.
And that's not the company that's doing it, is it?
No.
I wonder what that is.
It's a partnership with a few kind of entrepreneurs and real estate developers.
And what's the – has it got its own slant or is it just places to live?
Yeah, it's places to live.
Now, what they're trying to do is make like little kind of micro hubs.
So the way they arrange the initial five and then they'll try to replicate this, you know, elsewhere as they expand is built in such a way that it increases the kind of surface area for like serendipity, basically.
So there's like a central kind of hub, park, node area.
and uh the to get from building to building you need to walk through this area so there's a higher
likelihood you're going to kind of run into people uh they'll have some commercial space on the on the
lower floors to have you know little cafe shops things so it's very experimental architecture
kind of yeah yeah what's not even experimental it's taking what we know works from urbanism
and places that have some of the best urbanism in the world like uh you know barcelona is one of my
favorite examples they're walkable super blocks they're called um that kind of increase this
density in a way that is not off-putting and kind of rough like Manhattan and is actually livable.
So it's more along those lines. And I'm really excited about that one because of how scalable
it is. Like once this initial one is successful, they can build a bunch more stuff. And then we've
been doing some pop-up events. We've done them in New York City and Singapore and Stockholm.
We'll get dozens to hundreds of people sometimes to show up at those that haven't heard about
Prospero and wanted to learn more. We have both record number of both new company and corporations,
a record number of e-residency formations.
We had our largest month ever,
actually like single month of new legal entities
formed last month.
So everything's accelerating pretty quickly.
Why is that then?
What prompted that?
What's happening is for whatever reason,
and I find stuff generally snowballs like this
in a way I don't really understand,
but it's like once you reach some sort of inflection point,
it just organically starts accelerating
for reasons that aren't clear to basically any of us.
I mean, we've improved eProsper drastically this year.
It's much easier to use and more reliable,
things like that.
So, I mean, part of it is we made the process easier, but I don't have a solid explanation other than people are – like we're getting prominent enough.
People are hearing about it, and that is, you know, from the top of funnel down to people that actually end up doing it.
It's just that top line number is increasing enough that the people that make it all the way through the funnel is increasing.
My observation is as well that the digital nomad community have noticed it recently in the last six months.
and you know Gonzalo Hall I interviewed him in um where is it in Morocco a few months ago it just
and he was on his way to see you guys and stuff and I I was surprised because I went I met him at
a nomad conference and I was I was talking about free cities there and no one knew anything about
it and no one knew anything about Prospera and and Gonzalo had only just heard about it and he
You could see the cogs turning in his mind when I was speaking to him,
saying, wait a minute, you know, this is exactly what we want, what I want.
That's right.
You know, and I think I underplayed the digital nomads in the past
because I think they're not a big group of people,
but they're a little bit like they do come at an important time, I think.
And what they're also good at, I think, is focusing attention on a place.
Even if they don't necessarily stay and live there forever or whatever.
That's right.
So, yes, they are a good kind of market fit for what Prospera offers.
And I'm glad they're kind of – more of them are coming.
Obviously, I hope we eventually become like the number one digital nomad hub in the world.
But there's a catch there, which my friend Potri Friedman helped me kind of – he had this insight and walked me through.
And I think he's right, which is if you're trying to build like a durable city with a durable permanent population, you get like a false positive signal from the digital nomads, potentially.
Like this hasn't happened empirically yet, but it's possible at least, which is you get a bunch of digital nomads coming in and out.
You're like, oh, we're growing fast and look how many people are here.
And then they move on to the next – they go to Lisbon or something next, right?
Because a lot of them move in groups and then they'll stay for a couple months somewhere and then go somewhere else basically.
So if your goal is, which ours is and many others, to have density of people that are there every single day, a density of actual permanent residents, then they are not a perfect fit for that.
Now, having said that, obviously, I welcome that group with kind of open arms.
I think that's a perfect fit for kind of their entire ethos, of course.
But yeah, you need both.
I want the digital nomads and I want people that will actually move full-time, live full-time, so you get the best of both worlds.
You get the digital nomads coming in and doing cool stuff and spending time there, and they're doing so when they come, spending time with and making friends with the permanent residents.
I think that's the key point there.
I remember a few years ago speaking to people who are working at Prospera saying, no, we're not focusing too much on digital nomads because of these reasons.
But the truth is, and what I've realized now is, just invite everyone.
Why wouldn't you?
Like, why would you limit that?
Even if they do come and go it doesn matter You just want everyone there That exactly right You want as many people as possible That exactly right Yeah I mean that was Gonzalo taught me that as well I mean they talk a lot about funnels
I don't know whether you've ever heard them give presentations about,
basically about how many people come and how many people stay and make families and stuff.
And according to them, at least, I say them, the digital nomads, you know,
like they're one group of people.
There is follow through.
That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
A subset of them just end up staying places.
You're exactly right.
It's another reason that we invite them and anyone else in.
And then something else that I didn't talk about in the presentation because I didn't
have time, but was super exciting and super cool.
So we did a fashion show a month or two ago, somewhere in there.
Miss Honduras was there.
All of the kind of leading Honduran social media influencers and kind of fashion influencers
were there.
It was a roaring success.
Everybody loved it.
Some partnerships resulted with some fashion schools in the region and in Honduras.
And that resulted in a group of people wanting to start a fashion district in Prospera, basically, to start creating a culture of that kind of innovative and artistic side of innovation through fashion, basically.
So they're kind of working on that now.
And some interesting kind of groups from all over the place are getting involved.
There will be an event.
They haven't announced it yet, so we'll go into detail.
But there will be a cool event related to this.
It won't be in Prospera, but it will be involving Prospera pretty heavily.
with some like major fashion brands later, early next year that a friend of mine is pulling
together that I'm working on with him. So there's all sorts of cool kind of stuff like that in the
works. So it's not just the kind of, you know, air quotes, hardcore entrepreneurship as well.
There's also kind of the culture making and the fashion things that have started sort of moving
more. You know, we signed a sister city agreement with Stark City in the United States. So we have
a sister city agreement. These are basically, they don't like do anything legally other than saying
like, hey, we have similar mindsets and populations, and we'd love to share businesses and residents
and have people go back and forth, more or less.
Really?
What's it called?
Stark City?
Stark City.
Where is that?
It's a city in the US.
It's either in Florida or Tennessee.
The exact state is escaping my memory right now.
So the schools will do a swap with the students will come and see.
Stuff like that.
We used to twin towns, we used to call them.
Yeah, exactly the same concept.
Exactly the same concept.
That's exactly right.
So yeah, we've had a – it's been a really good year.
A lot of cool companies coming, and then we have some more interesting stuff coming.
So I've been working on with some of the leading AI research and AI safety scholars to develop an AI agent statute.
There's a problem in the AI space right now, which is the agents are finally getting capable enough to do kind of semi-autonomous things for you.
But the problem is their legal status is super unclear, and no one wants to give them personhood, so we're not doing that for sure.
There's, in fact, a bunch of US states in the EU even have passed laws that explicitly say we will never give AI personhood.
like proactively, but because it's very philosophically complicated, but setting a
liability and legal framework to allow people to actually do like what I call legally significant
actions, let an AI do legally significant actions on their behalf or the behalf of their company,
things like negotiate contracts, whatever the case may be, partnership agreements, you know,
whatever, moving or managing money. There's not a framework for that right now. So it's kind of
unclear how those things should be handled. It's assumed some of them are just default illegal.
and there's no place in the world where there's a legal framework where you can actually do this
and experiment with deploying AI agents in this kind of more forward-thinking, semi-autonomous
or fully autonomous way. So we're working on some enabling legislation to do that,
hopefully be done, you know, Q1 of next year. I've been getting a bunch of really good feedback
from some of the leading people in the AI world and at like, you know, places like the AI Law and
Safety Institute and some other places. So we'll have that going on. I'm hoping at least to use
that to then attract some of the attention to some of the frontier labs so they can do some of their
more kind of agentic research within Prospera, actually, to be able to leverage the legal
system to create legal entities and then, you know, do interesting stuff, leveraging the
AI.
What does that mean, agentic?
You mean AI experimentation?
Experimentation is almost true.
Oh, whatever, like training?
Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, people are just doing that on their servers, aren't they?
Like, is it?
Yeah, the important piece here is the legally significant action part.
So, like, you don't need a piece of legislation to have Claude go organize your inbox or send
an email for you or something, right?
But right now, if, for example, let's say I have an AI agent that is negotiating supply contracts. Let's say I'm a company that buys things. I need some widgets. And I have an AI agent that is now my supply logistics manager, for example.
Like that's within the capability envelope of a lot of existing systems and especially the near future systems that for sure will be.
There's no like legally clear rules right now on what happens if like my AI agent in negotiating with you defrauds you somehow, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Right. It's just default like my fault or my company's fault.
And there's no way to kind of segregate these things.
So while you could theoretically do it right now, it's at legal risk to you and your company.
And so developing a reasonable framework around this that involves requiring liability insurance
if you're going to use these things at different levels depending on what they're doing,
requiring bonding, right?
So you have to post a bond basically.
That means that people that are harmed can get paid out immediately if they're harmed
by the agent, things like that.
The lack of clarity here is another key thing I've learned to prosper, by the way.
Regulatory clarity is as important as like the actual underlying meat of the regulation.
There's no regulatory clarity here for anyone at all.
So the default nature of businesses is like, well, I don't have regulatory clarity.
I'm just not going to do it.
Like it's not worth it.
It's too high risk unless you're in a very specific kind of field or type of entrepreneur.
So this is meant to at least what I'm working on, create that space where you have the legal
clarity.
Now you could try something like a supply management agent or something and see how it
works and know full well if things go awry, both you and your counterparty are completely
like covered and insured either through an insurance company or through a bonded escrow.
is there any quick and easy way to explain why they don't want to give personhood to ai agents
yeah so part of it is emotional and part of it's philosophical i've been very deep down this rabbit
hole recently so i'll try to keep this short on the emotional side uh people are extremely
reticent to give uh any sort of artificial like silicon based the you know form of consciousness
effectively personhood. It just emotionally feels wrong. Like, no, I am a human. I'm a biological
being. Like I am conscious. I have subjectivity. Like that cannot apply to like a different
substrate. Like that, there's just an emotional gut that feels wrong in some interesting, like
just gut emotional sense. That's hard to even put into words. And then on the philosophical side,
you, you immediately run headlong into one of the largest unsolved problems in philosophy,
which is called the hard problem of consciousness, which is, okay, like, what does it mean to be a
person to be considered for legal purposes, and for philosophical and ethical purposes,
a person and have all of the rights and responsibilities and morals and ethical
duties that come along with that. And that is not an easy question to answer. It's an easy
question to answer when you just have humans to deal with as intelligent, agentic actors.
But now you will have artificial software, right, you will have code that is intelligent, aware,
and agentic. So answering that question of like, what does that actually mean? What does it mean
to be a person? What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to have the like ethical and
moral duties that come along with having that designation? It runs headlong into just a thicket
of philosophical problems. The hard problem of consciousness is at the core of it all,
which is to put it in its most extreme form. It is by definition, like in principle,
logically impossible to verify if another entity or being is conscious okay because you could have
what are called p zombies okay so p zombie refers to it's just a ignore the name it's the letter p
yeah probability zombies is what that refers to um so you could theoretically have a world with p
zombies so let me let me i'll let me sketch out the thought experiment for you this is the core
of the hard problem of consciousness basically assume you have assume you have me and then a
perfect clone of me sitting next to me except this clone is run by an AI okay
the AI has for whatever reason we're gonna make some assumptions right has
ingested all of my all of the data about me from the specifics of the state
of my brain to my history and background and whatever so it is perfectly like me in every single way except you and I both know for an ironclad fact it doesn have a brain there a chip up there instead Okay There is and it is
not alive in like any definition of the common sensical definition of alive and a person and
conscious. It's just an, it's just an algorithm, you know, running some very complicated math.
The result of which is it looks and acts exactly like me, right? It is impossible for you to be
able to know for a fact, if both of us were sitting in front of you, which is which it's
completely impossible. So this really gets to the core of the hard problem of consciousness.
It's impossible to verify in principle if another entity is conscious. Why? Because consciousness is
subjectivity. It is that internal felt sense of a continuous stream of existence, right?
That it is something to be you is the way Sam Harris often describes this, right? The hard
problem of consciousness. And that it is impossible for me to even verify that you're conscious. Now,
obviously i'm not saying you're not uh the the point is like i can't see and it is impossible
through any scientific measurement or otherwise for me to somehow externally empirically validate
that you have a subjectivity that you experience qualia that you have a continued felt sense of
self right that is in principle impossible so just asserting in a law that oh ai or people
even if you can get over that emotional hump that i mentioned earlier is like all right well what
does that mean and how do we verify that? What is the difference between that and like the way
Claude 4.5 works right now? What are the systems for that? How do we define it? Even just literally
the definition of person in that sense is just so far completely unsolved philosophical problem.
Obviously, there's a bunch of heated debate about this in the kind of academic philosophy world,
but the knee-jerk reaction has been from legislators basically is like,
we don't want to deal with this. We're just going to stop it before it becomes a thing.
I suppose the best way to test all that out is in the digital world, like avatars in the digital world, because that's much more simple.
Like if I murder you in the digital world, you know, if we are avatars, am I committing some kind of a crime here?
Exactly.
I mean, am I?
But we can't ever know in principle.
And the thing is, this is like really hard to do.
So you would think, well, this is software.
We can look at how it works.
It's code.
We can look at how the code runs and at some point in there figure out kind of what makes you conscious.
But then you run into the problem of like, oh, we don't even know what makes humans conscious.
We don't actually understand consciousness at a very fundamental level.
There are serious theories in both philosophy and physics actually for what's called panpsychism, which is that like consciousness is like a substrate the same way like gravity is a substrate or like the space time field is a substrate of reality.
Maybe consciousness is a substrate of reality in some fundamental sense.
We have no idea how this works literally at all.
Uh, we have a bunch of crazy ideas about it that are impossible to verify or test.
I'm going to give you a perfect example of this.
Literally yesterday, I was reading this paper that came out yesterday from, uh, Anthropic,
which makes Claude, um, from their, what's called the interpretability research team.
So they like kind of, they, they do research on, you know, like how do these things actually
work and what they have a tool where they can suppress the activation of specific parts
of the neural network to suppress different kinds of perceptions and concepts in the models.
And so they found, fascinatingly, if you suppress the deception part of their neural network, so the part of their neural networks that we know for a fact is associated with the concept of deception and doing deception, then the model's claims about its own consciousness drastically increase by a gigantic margin.
so what that again decreasing deception suppressing deception in other words forcing them to be honest
in some very fundamental sense drastically increases how often the model claims it is
conscious has subjectivity like is aware etc uh we don't know what this means like i'm not and to
be clear i'm not claiming claude is conscious right but there's something there and we don't
even know what to do with that like what do you do with that the researchers themselves were like
here's the evidence i'm not really sure what this means to be honest it's just a very odd space so
So that's why when I first started doing this, I was like, oh, cool.
We'll knock this out in like a week.
This is super clear.
And I started getting into it.
I was like, oh, God, this is one of the hardest unsolved problems in philosophy right now.
I don't want to touch this with a 10-foot pole.
It's what I use AI for the most, actually, is especially if I'm declaring something philosophical,
I always put it into ChatGPT and say, look, rip me apart.
Tell me where I'm going wrong here.
And I've ended up having some very interesting conversations with myself, essentially. And one of them ended up with me trying to understand how the AI was working stuff out.
and I because and I was because I'd read that there was a point that a lot of people kind of
didn't really understand how it they you know they understand the algorithm but they don't know
why it was coming to some solutions and and the AI said to me look I said well so what are you
what are you good at that's unusual and it said well I can I can say like red is to a strawberry
as um and then some completely weird and random like um i don't know uh i can't even think of the
example it gave me but it clicked it was very good and i think interestingly like i'm quite
good at that like my my my own brain like if you tell me a bunch of stuff my brain functions in a
way that it it thinks about other versions of that thing which are completely unrelated
and and that's what that's what the ai was good at but didn't know why it was or how it was like
that's it i was trying to work out whether it had any original thoughts and i was trying to
you know because i like what what was we were doing thought experiments we me and the ai were
doing thought experiments and then i was googling them to see if anyone had ever written or said
this before and that most of them there was absolutely no record of any of this and i'm
saying right so are we getting any original thoughts here and it explained to me like look
what i can do is i can take a concept that you understand like um like i say it wasn't red is to
a strawberry it was a fun it was one thing is a function of something so you know movement is to a
wheel as um a cushion is to uh and it would and it would it would be the same kind of
thing it's very hard to explain what it was and and it was absolutely absolutely fascinating and
like the other day i mean i i don't god knows where this thing's going but i was i always fact
check my own podcasts uh like afterwards because i have to i end up talking about a lot of things
over and over again and i often recount experiences from my past and i go back and i check them to
make sure that i wasn't bullshitting because you know how things oh yeah and on this the last
episode that i put out was a very deep and philosophical one about spirituality and about
hallucinogenic drugs and all kinds of stuff and i talked about some mythological experience
sort of, it's a mythology from Indonesia.
This is very random.
There's a sort of deity called Nyailorukidul,
who lives in the South Seas of Java.
Like, no one knows about this shit except a few people
and the whole population of Java, obviously, right?
And the person I was talking to recounted something to do with ayahuasca
and a deity involved with ayahuasca.
And then I started talking about Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
because in the same way that I felt, hey, there's a connection here.
And I told the AI this and I said,
is there a connection between any of these things?
I mean, these are so random.
One's from South America, one's from...
And it came up and he said, yeah.
He said, this is a very astute observation.
And do you know what it ended with?
It was amazing.
It said do you want me to write a poem about that And I went fucking I went yes And it wrote me a beautiful poem that wove all these mythological stories together I mean Jesus Christ
It's incredible.
What the?
It's incredible.
Where is this going?
Yeah.
Like, what can I do with my life anymore? Like, what can I? I couldn't sit and write. I mean, funnily enough, it wrote a kind of rhyming poem first. And I laughed and I said, come on, dude, write me something. Come on. Don't do. I don't want rhyming poems. And then it did.
it wrote something beautiful.
I don't understand what we're going to end up doing ourselves.
They're genuinely deeply intelligent.
And what's even crazier than that is most people,
and I'm speaking about you specifically here,
but most people don't even realize that
even if you're on the plus subscription for OpenAI, for example, for GPT,
the default auto setting,
which is when you just open a new chat, just automatically on auto,
what that actually does is it takes your query
and it routes it to this thing called a router,
which is a smaller model that then very quickly decides
based on the content of your query,
which other model to send it to. Now, this is a very clever way for OpenAI to save on inference
costs, right? The cost of actually running the model, which is gigantic, because they can send
very simple queries to GPT-5 mini, which is a quantized distilled version of GPT-5. And it's a
much smaller model, cheaper to do inference. It's also much dumber, okay? It might send your query
to the GPT-5 thinking low, which is like the lowest reasoning effort in the API, basically.
But that's like the most you're going to get. But then if you put it on thinking, so it's in the
drop-down menu when you select the model it did it is you literally immediately gain like between
20 and 40 iq points and then if you're on the pro subscription you can set thinking to different
levels i am too because i use it for work all the time it's it's it has massively increased my
productivity uh and then so you can increase it there and then gpt5 pro which is the only like
it is the absolute smartest model any of us like normal people that don't work inside of open ai
have access to is like phenomenal it is it is genuinely the smartest like artificial thing we've
ever cooked up. The smartest kind of artificial thing ever, basically. And it is regularly doing
similar things. So for example, a famous mathematician from I think Stanford, I can't
remember, I have to go look at the tweet, but he was saying, Oh, I use GPT five pro in when I'm
coming up with papers all the time. He was like, now often, it's not like it's coming up with my
ideas. But I will just pitch over the fence, the idea I'm having about a particular mathematical
concept that's novel, like he's breaking new ground in math. He'll have GPT formalize it into
GPT-5 Pro, formalized it into a proof, explained the proof, et cetera.
Said sometimes it'll get it wrong.
Sometimes it'll get it right.
But there's been multiple times now where within a conversation like this with GPT-5
Pro, he and the AI together in a very collaborative way, in a way that he has said himself he
would have never come to by himself, will come up with a new novel proof or theorem
that solves a longstanding problem in math.
And he does this like regularly.
It's how he writes all his papers now.
Just this week, this person was struggling with a very niche medical issue that is unsolved
in medicine today. And they threw it over the fence to GPT-5 Pro, said like, you know, just
think deeply about this. Give me anything that's off the wall that might work. This was a couple
months ago when they did this. It proposed a novel treatment therapy and explained how it should work
with an existing drug that could be applied in a different way in a different dosage for their
particular problem. And a paper was published this week by some researchers that saw this a couple
months ago, went and tried it, and it worked. It's a totally novel treatment that GPT-5 Pro just came
up with de novo uh deep mind at google has several specific models that have come up with all sorts
of new stuff and they've solved protein folding completely they have some frontier math models i
am like at this point probably 60 sure based on some stuff uh dimis uh who's the founder and ceo
of open of deep mind uh based on what he said publicly they're either have solved or are very
close to solving the navier stokes equation which it's one of the millennium challenge problems so
uh the millennium challenge problems are some of the largest most important unsolved problems in
math and physics. And they've been unsolved for centuries, like the entirety of human history,
basically, once we found them. So Navier-Stokes in particular deals with, without boring people,
it deals with fluid dynamics and fluid mechanics, okay? It's very hard to model fluid mechanics,
whether that be like aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, like how water flows through things, how air
flows around things. It's next to impossible. We have equations that approximate it pretty well,
which is why you can have CGI and airplanes that work, that sort of stuff. But the second you
actually deterministically solve it, once you solve the Navier-Stokes equation, we now have like
perfect command and control of all fluid dynamics, which means suddenly problems that, for example,
have kept us from fusion energy, right? So the reason like fusion reactors are very difficult
and don't work yet is because getting the magnetic fields correct to contain the plasma that is in
the core of a fusion reactor and have it be net positive, meaning it outputs more energy than it
takes to start it basically, is a direct fluid dynamic problem that is so complex the world's
largest supercomputers cannot solve it today. If you have a solution to Navier Stokes, it is
trivially easy. You just run it once and it's done. Problem solved completely forever. Fusion
energy suddenly becomes like, it goes from impossible to like, just build it next year.
It's trivially easy. There's a bunch of similar problems like that. You solve superconductors
immediately and a bunch of other like core, just sci-fi technological unlocks. And Demis has said
publicly that all he said about it is, you know, we'll have an announcement next year, but we've
made great progress on some very vexing problems and has mentioned navier stokes a couple of times
it's like we'll change the world immediately it unleashes a whole new class of literally sci-fi
technologies force fields laser weapons a bunch of stuff that we have like rudimentary crappy
versions of suddenly become like trivially easy to do and they have an ai model that's doing it
that's solving these things i don't know i i i can't believe it really i don't know i don't know
I don't know what to think about it because I,
I just know that it's better than,
better than me.
And the way I'm using it at the moment is collaboratively.
Definitely.
I use it to understand myself and to make sure that what I'm thinking,
I use it to challenge myself.
That's what I'm using it to do.
Right.
But I'm getting a sense that at some point it's just going to be like,
you know,
and what am I then?
Yeah.
What am I?
So let me get conspiratorial with you for a second.
I think about this a lot because this is not a like – what I'm about to say, which is a speculative conspiracy basically, is not a problem right now.
But will without a doubt, if you assume – not even exponential, just linear AI progress will be a huge problem, which is the following.
You eventually get to a point at some point, whether it's 10 years from now, 20 years from now, five years from now is irrelevant, where artificial general intelligence is better than the best humans at every possible thing.
Okay, like literally everything. If you just play that forward a little bit, given like kind of the current state of affairs, what that world looks like is a vast majority of the world's economic activity is controlled by and done by AI agents, models and robots, powered by whatever the first frontier AI lab is, or the first two or three frontier labs that probably happen simultaneously is the way these things have been working so far, like a couple labs will figure it out the exact same time. That's how every advance has happened so far.
uh is that is that is there something in there uh there's a whole other thing about a contemporaneous
invention if you ever as a sidebar but if you ever look at the history of invention like the
light bulb uh which benjamin franklin is often credited for inventing was invented by like five
people at the same time around the world uh same thing happened with calculus um so when uh yeah
when when calculus was invented several other people had discovered at the same time this is
weird thing that happens where which could indicate some kind of substrate of consciousness
It ties back to that. That's exactly right. It's very odd. That is just an unsolved,
like it's just a pattern that we've noticed and we don't know why it happens, but it's happening
with AI too. So a couple of frontier labs will usually make an event at the same time.
So play that forward. Let's imagine it's three, just I'm picking a random number,
but say, you know, it's open AI, Anthropic and Google, whatever. It doesn't matter which
specific ones. Well, now all economic activity can be done by their models, which means they
effectively control literally all economic activity. You've now, to put it in economics
terms, you have substituted all labor for capital, all of it, because what is AI? It is algorithms
running on chips in data centers. So you have swapped 100% of labor for capital. That means
those capital owners now control quite literally everything. Now, before we get to that point,
it's not going to get to that point because,
This is going to cause completely unimaginable political and social strife, right?
Because we are effectively irrelevant in almost every conceivable way at that point.
We meaning humanity.
Sorry, can I just back in?
This obviously goes hand in hand with the price of – there's a physical implication of this.
Robots, machines, and the cost of them is trending to zero.
And right, okay.
That has – this is all part of it.
It's not just algorithms running.
Exactly.
Well, so the algorithms running, which is the AIs, right, solve all of those problems.
Like they design 1,000 X more efficient chips.
We push the cost of inference down to the physical limit.
There's like a physical limit to like in physics literally of how low – how little energy you can use to do a simple calculation, which is like the root of it.
So you get like chips that are operating at the limit of physics, right?
You get materials of superconductors that bring the cost of energy for these things down orders of magnitude.
You get effectively free infinite energy from fusion energy.
Like all of these things are solved in fairly rapid order by this artificial super intelligence.
So then you end up in this very bizarre world where like three companies control literally everything, have more power than anyone else, have this caged, chained god basically that they can do anything with.
It is a just completely incomprehensibly bizarre world we are headed toward.
Like I cannot describe how weird it is.
And this is actually, I think, the end state of capital. So I just finished reading this very esoteric work of philosophy on the plane on the way down here called The Machine Against God.
Now, this guy is not a theological. It's like pure philosophy. But his thesis is basically like what I'm describing here is just the end state of capitalism.
And he doesn't mean capitalism in like a kind of the way we typically talk about it in political philosophy.
What he's referring to is like the dynamic process that was started at the point at which humans figured out we could trade things for value effectively.
that summoned what he calls the machine, okay, as kind of a memetic concept. And what the machine
does is it maximizes something. Right now, what the machine is maximizing is very specifically
like subjective felt dopamine per moment at the lowest cost possible, right? Because of that,
you end up with a bunch of an acceleration toward things that we all agree we hate and sucks. Like
my favorite punching bag example of this is how prevalent gambling is everywhere in everything now,
right? But that's the machine at work. All of the incentives of every single part of everything
is effectively summed up in this concept of the machine. Well, the end point of the machine,
because what it does is it optimizes a particular function, the function that it's optimizing that
dopamine maximization effectively. Well, the most efficient way to do that is by creating
super intelligence that can then effectively solve all problems instantaneously almost within a
blink of an eye in the grand scheme of the timescale of the cosmos, right? And so you end
up in this very bizarre world. And it's this process that we've all started completely
unintentionally that no one controls or directs. You can't even, no matter how hard you try.
In fact, when you try to fight against it, it turns against you, right? This is why like
people make money selling communist merchandise, right? That is the machine doing what it does,
maximizing this subjective felt dopamine. So it even takes criticisms of itself and uses that to
accelerate further, right? So you end up in a very bizarre world where the machine, which is
synonymous in this example in this kind of concept with asi uh it ends up in just a genuinely
unseeable and incomprehensibly weird end state i think about this a lot it's talking back to
prosper a little bit just because i'm like all right well if that's going to happen crap i need
to make sure we get some built some ai data centers at least i want to be part of the stack
somewhere i don't know that's as far as as far as i've gotten doesn't that lead to in in abundance
though? I mean, for us, I mean, what does the human experience look like in amongst all that,
do you think? Yeah. So you end up in a world where the Jetson's technology of like the replicator,
like a machine where you can press a button So in this world basically technological progress is our ability to like manipulate matter efficiently at a low energy cost to oversimplify Well that means if you just run that process out over time it doesn matter what time scale you eventually end up with the ability to arbitrarily manipulate matter right
Which means like rearranging atoms into whatever formation you would like with an arbitrarily low energy cost, as low as is allowed by physics basically.
So this is the world of what some people call post-scarcity or superabundance.
Like there literally is no material restriction on anything anymore.
But then literally what does a human do with their day?
So this is – we're assuming aligned AI because so far all evidence suggests that for some reason – I'm a Christian, so divine intervention, God's hand, something.
The AI is just aligned by default.
I don't know.
But because it is aligned by default, I'm assuming alignment for this, right?
I'm not assuming the doomsday scenario basically because that's much worse.
So assuming humans exist in this world, we have super abundance, right, because the AI is aligned.
Well, then you have the crisis of meaning and purpose that we currently have that affects everyone all the time simultaneously because now there's nothing like productive you can contribute to that the artificial superintelligence cannot do better by definition.
And this covers everything from art to social organizing to cultural innovation to obviously like physical technological innovation, literally all of it.
So you will never want for anything.
You can live more lavishly than if you had $500 billion today, far more lavishly because of this.
And then what?
Like literally what do you do with your day and your time?
What do you do?
Well, everything becomes meaningless because everything is available to everyone at all times.
so there's no meaning.
Exactly.
It is a completely bizarre world.
And humans are good at inventing meaning,
is the thing.
But we'll restrict ourselves, though.
That's what I think.
That will be the result.
We'll put restrictions on ourselves.
I'll give you an example.
Because that already happens everywhere at all times.
I used to, before I sort of dived deep first into this,
I used to run extreme expeditions
to very remote locations.
I didn't know that.
That's awesome.
I've done all kinds of weird things.
I've spent 10 years migrating
migrating with the same nomadic family across the altai mountains every year i need a documentary
on your life dude well look anyway whatever but i i learned a lot about humans and people and myself
from a lot of those things and one of them was why for example in that case we used to walk for
five days we used to walk 150 kilometers across the altai mountains with all with a thousand animals
and all these nomads bitterly cold minus 35 you're basically putting yourself through hell
now why would you do that like why would you do that when society's kind of like trending towards
convenience like that's what we're doing we're all we're trying to make our lives convenient we've
always got a bottle of water we've got a comfortable seat and that's the same thing there's something
quite primordial about us that needs a challenge that needs discomfort we have too much comfort
so we we artificially create discomfort for ourselves and and and when you walk across the
mountains for five days and it's ridiculous and hard and and blah blah so the same thing will
happen here we will artificially create meaning for ourselves by restricting what we can hopefully
it'll be ourselves doing it i mean uh you know because if someone else is doing it that's
basically communism you know 20.0 or whatever the worst i mean you know it is easy to see ai as very
communistic when you when you look at it oh yeah it's it's a kind of i mean yeah i don't know it's
the ultimate centralization no the the so the solution is cultural innovation you're exactly
right like history the optimistic case here is like historically we've solved these problems
through cultural innovation coming up with new cultural norms and ways of being that solve these
kind of problems of meaning and purpose uh given enough time uh we eventually will like kind of
figure it out and find ways to to create that meaning and purpose for ourselves effectively
It's just an unsatisfying, I think it's true, but it's an unsatisfying answer.
And so far as I just saying like we figure it out It be fine Like you know it we figure it out somehow But that is what it feels like I mean I am optimistic I never really planned that much for the future of things like that I would rather be standing in front of it and go
right now what? Yeah. Because I'm sure, I'm sure we'll come up with something.
Because I, for example, one of the other things you can question is who cares? Like if I want to
go out and garden for myself, why do I care that an AI can do it better than me?
Right.
Like really, it doesn't matter.
Yeah.
An AI could do it better than me.
But then if an AI did it better, if I instruct an AI to garden for me, to create flowers
and plants and food, then I'll sit on my ass and do nothing.
So I may as well just go out and do the proof of work.
I mean, I may as well do it.
That's exactly right.
You have to have a lot of, but that's it.
It comes down to, um, you have to be quite committed to the human experience.
That's right.
You know, you really have to do that.
That's right.
I have a perfect example of this from my own life.
So I love cars, fast cars specifically.
I love sports cars.
I love them so much.
Have you got one?
Yes.
So I-
Have you got some?
Yeah, just one.
Just one.
Prosper doesn't pay that well, I wish.
No, I have one.
What is it?
It's not a super expensive one.
So I have a 2020 Shelby GT350 Mustang.
So it is a very fun car.
It's the only car Ford ever made with a flat plane crank engine, which for those of you
that are not gear heads just means it, you know, it red lines around like a little over 9000 RPMs,
which means it can sound at the high end like a Ferrari or Lamborghini. That's how they kind of
scream. It's because they're flat plane crank engines that can red line much higher than your
normal cross plane crank, you know, crankshaft driven engine that will red line like 5700 or
6000 or something like that. Very cool car. Very unique car. They only made it for like four years.
I love it to death. But it's not the fastest car that I you could buy even for the same amount of
money. Nevermind if you wanted to spend some more money, like even for that year, nevermind for
today, you know? Uh, in fact, all of the new faster cars, including the new faster Mustangs,
the new Corvettes, of course, the new, you know, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, the Koenig-Zigs, et cetera.
They, uh, all have what I call dual clutch transmissions, which shift faster than any
human could ever possibly shift. And they, they shift at the perfect time. Every time, uh, you
almost like audibly can't even hear it shift. It just, it just moves. It's measured in milliseconds.
It's absurd. But I intentionally bought a car with a six speed manual transmission because I didn't want that. And I didn't want all of the other. There's a bunch of new computer aided systems where like in a bunch of the new cars and hyper cars pioneered this. And now it's trickled down to stuff like Corvettes. They have drive modes. You can put them in where like for the Corvette, for example, literally, if you're taking it for a track day at Road Atlanta, you can put the thing in Road Atlanta track mode.
and the computer knows the exact like millimeter by millimeter layout of the track and will
dynamically adjust your like steering input understeer oh shit it's it's absurd it's absurd
so it basically does it for you like you don't have to do almost anything so i intentionally bought
what is what they call in the community a driver's car that doesn't have any of those
like technological things it is a classic like with a clutch pedal six-speed manual transmission
because I wanted that visceral experience of driving the car myself.
It's harder. It's slower.
Like I'm going to be slower around the track or whatever
than some of these modern cars that have all the bells and whistles
and the computer-aided driving.
But I would rather do that because it is a more visceral human experience.
It is much more fun. It is much more challenging.
It has a much deeper learning curve.
And I'm actively choosing to do that.
Like for the same money, I could have bought one of these other things
that drives for you basically.
But I didn't want to do that. I wanted that felt visceral human experience. You put it quite well with human experience of doing that. So I think that is the long term solution to these things. My only fear is with my kind of conspiracy about the capital all accumulating to these couple companies is once this happens, like there's in my mind, like this could play out a bunch of ways, but I think of it in two big buckets.
One bucket is like this process just kind of happens and somehow we're able to navigate it such that we get post-scarcity.
It doesn't matter that these two or three companies own everything.
Who cares?
Because literally material scarcity is solved for everyone simultaneously That effectively utopia heaven on earth kind of case But there another way this goes which is along the path at some point when they just rapidly start replacing most labor with capital most labor with AI automation
you get massive political and social unrest, massive global scale violence. And we basically
blow ourselves up before we can get there. Somebody gets unrestricted access to one of
these models, they immediately invent a biological weapon that is uncurable, that it can attack the
human genome and like kills everyone simultaneously and is impossible to stop the spread of,
as just one example of the existential risks at play here among many. So I hope we don't go down
that path. I think we will actually find another way to challenge ourselves. I was just thinking
it through there. I mean, if you look from purely a capital perspective or from, you know,
like consumer, a consumer perspective.
You know, a hundred years ago,
you might aspire to have, you know,
something that now is completely abundant.
But we find other things to aspire to.
And there'll be a point in the not too distant future
when billionaires won't have that much access
to different things than anyone.
Elon Musk has the same phone you do.
Right. Now at that point, there will be other things.
And it may be spiritual.
It may be something.
I mean, like often you see that with wealthy people, status then becomes something they go for.
They want a hospital named after them.
They don't necessarily want a thing.
It's the name on the hospital.
It's an abstract version of something.
And there will be many more things like that.
That's exactly right.
But the spiritual aspect, you imagine the spiritual path, you know, like people might just once all that crap becomes meaningless.
What are you going to focus on?
You're probably going to focus on spirituality.
Exactly.
And that is probably an infinite thing.
And in a way, if what we understand about consciousness is correct,
the AI actually won't be able to compete with us on that level.
It might be able to mimic us, but it almost might be that we are the tip of the wedge
because it can't think a novel thought.
It can't experience a novel experience.
It can only mimic us.
I don't know.
Whereas we might have this kind of divine, you could call it power, to have novel experiences.
I don't really know.
I mean, it's a lovely thought experiment.
I'm going to take that one away.
It's so hard because it is in principle logically unprovable too because of that P-zombie problem, right?
So we will literally never know.
Trey, look, I've got to stop.
I want to carry this on but in five minutes
Mikael is
going to ring me on my phone
that was a very
beautiful conversation I really
love to carry that on I can see that we've
got a lot further to go oh yeah I would love
to keep talking to you about anything and everything
this has been a blast
but yeah
this is going to be a funny one to sell this
one it started as Prosper and ended with
consciousness
yeah
but um but thanks for thanks for coming in and yeah like when i when we come down to prosper we'll
do it we'll do a proper thought experiment we just go off on a weird one and just see where it takes
us i they're my favorite kind of conversations but i literally because i have a really tight
schedule here sure sure absolutely but um but many thanks for um coming in and sharing your wisdom
and that yeah thanks for that because i i i i i love thought experiments and i that's a new one
for me so many many thanks absolutely thank you for having me this was a this was a blast i look
forward to doing this again next year. We should both get there a couple of days early and we'll
just block off a bunch of time and just go after it. It'll be so fun. Excellent. Thanks for coming
on. Thank you.