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 168 of the Free Cities podcast.
Brought to you as always by the wonderful Veritas Villages, our lead sponsor.
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bit of news from them actually
They're currently out in El Salvador for the Plan B Forum Conference.
That's Alex Voss and Patrick Hibbert from Veritas Villages,
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Check it out, episode 156.
They'll give you the lowdown on what they've been up to
and what the plans are for other Veritas Villages, etc.
Some other news, Playa Pacifica, their Nicaragua beachfront village,
very popular one right now.
apparently buyers can tour move-in ready homes and homes near completion which makes this a very
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stay there you can go and rent them like airbnbs if you want as well but if you do rent it and then
buy it your whole holiday will be free anyway that's a lovely thought right today's show and
i would say that this was one of the most enjoyable conversations i've had recently
this was the first time that I'd met this week's guest but quickly discovered that we shared
something relatively unique at least in my experience and that is something that takes
up a good portion of the first part of the conversation the connection between us is a
northeast Indian state by the name of Nagaland now all will be revealed in the conversation but
FYI Nagaland is a remote tropical hilly area of the northeast frontier states of India and it was
somewhere that I spent a good six months as a photographer more than 20 years ago exploring
my guest today Vikram Bharati was actually born in Nagaland now that's quite amazing to meet
someone from that part of the world not many people travel there let alone someone who works
in the free cities ecosystem it's somewhere nagaland that is that i have a real fondness for
and somewhere that had a pivotal role in my life which i'll reveal in the conversation now vikram
currently living in singapore co-founded draper startup house and draper nation now draper nation
is in their own words quotes building the infrastructure of freedom creating high growth
companies and governance tools that shape the future of borderless citizenship digital sovereignty
and parallel societies that's their words in my words it is quite hard to decipher i'd say it was
part think tank part consultant part business development it's a lot of things what's important
is it's all relevant to the free cities ecosystem in fact vikram in this discussion positions himself
quite reasonably i would say at the overlap of free cities and network states in the venn diagram
of the industry in which we work by the way draper nation yeah that's tim draper the connection there
vikram will explain all in the conversation right what did the ai make of it a wide-ranging
conversation covers the host's one-man AI-assisted media workflow. Okay, not a hugely important part
of the conversation. Then pivots into deep reflections on Nagaland and northeast India,
touching on tribal governance, missionary history, matrilineal cultures, personal travel experiences,
and how those encounters shaped a lifelong scepticism of centralised systems.
The conversation then zooms out to free cities, SEZs, democracy versus sovereignty,
China's development model, Bitcoin versus crypto tokens,
and culminates in Draper Nation's experiments with digital governance
and cloud-based nations, arguing that small radical governance sandboxes,
physical and digital are the best path to future institutional innovation sounds quite wordy but i
suppose it's not too bad i'll co-sign that and get straight into the conversation before we go a quick
thank you to my subs on fountain or any value for value platform and especially our biggest supporters
this week thank you bullish mike nicholas podiensis ekrem philippe martino many thanks to
you all for the wonderful satoshis you have sent us i appreciate you all and if you're a subscriber
i will be putting up a new bonus episode soon i'm just trying to find the right one for you
anyway let's get into the show grab your backpack this week chuck it on the roof of that yellow
Tata Sumo over there and grab the front window passenger seat. If you've been to northeast India
you'll get that reference and then once you're in it just sit back relax and enjoy my conversation
with Vikram Bharati.
yeah well i'm impressed to see that you do everything here you're like a one-man show
i know i a bit of a bone of contention has to be said right i have a limited budget
but i'm a former and sometimes still filmmaker and director so i i would find it hard not
to do it quite well, at least on a budget.
Do you do the cameras?
I do everything.
I even use a clapperboard, mate.
Do you do the editing as well?
My beautiful AI agent does the editing now,
but hence the clapperboard.
Right.
Clapperboards.
We've always used clapperboards in...
Do you know what they're for?
Is it like the beginning, end of a clip?
It is, but it does do that.
It does tell you which scene you're looking at, but it also helps you sync everything up.
You create a very sharp noise.
Basically, this podcast setup is two cameras and two mics.
So when I make that crack twice, it gets recorded on all these devices.
And then when you import all this data into a bit of software for editing it, as long as you line up those cracking sounds, you're synced together.
um an ai is surprisingly bad at doing that i don't know why you know it should you should you can
normally automatically just say sync and but inevitably you still end up having to do it by
hand often but having a clapperboard makes that very very easy um but but yeah the actual editing
is done by an ai now so i feed it these two feeds so me and you and the two different um audio feeds
and I tell it which one's you.
So I say, when you're speaking, then the AI cuts to you.
Wow, that's amazing.
And then you watch the one with Patrick.
Did you watch it or did you listen to it?
I watched it on YouTube.
Right, okay.
That was all AI cutting.
Wow, that's, I would have never known.
Exactly, nor would I.
It's really good at cutting, actually.
And the reels that you do, the small, short reels.
They're all AI as well.
Wow.
But once again, they're AI, but they take a lot of human input.
But what the AI gives me basically, and this is kind of how a lot of people use AI anyway, is they, it gives you a starting point.
So I ingest, when I, what was that I heard?
Yeah, that's my, is that my phone?
Let me just put it on silent.
When I basically with the I ingest the so when the first day I is edited all this, then I ingest it into another AI which listens to it and pulls out what it thinks are important clips.
Then it creates I create a template for it and an AI template and it creates reels.
But they're often the production value is not high enough for me.
So then I go through them and I pick the ones that I think are relevant.
It'll give me 30 or 40 and I might pick 20 of them because a lot of the time they just get it wrong.
And then I correct the spelling mistakes because it puts titles on it.
I make the edits look nicer because it's really bad at editing.
It edits by the words.
But when you listen to it, there might be a bit of a word cut off or whatever.
and then we then that gets ingested into a bit of software which sends it out to social media
networks all at the same time timed so wow I know so basically wow that's so you are a one-man I'm
a one-man show at the moment but I don't want to be a one-man show I've been a filmmaker for years
and worked in large crews and they're too big for sure for now you know you can make a great film
which is two of you really, but really it's a function of how much income you're generating.
I mean, I generate income from this, which is profits, but it's not enough to pay someone else to edit.
So I do that as a labor of love and I don't really pay myself.
Really, you know, I kind of subsidize that side of it as well, which is actually changing.
I've brought on a sponsor recently and I'm now getting some new sponsors as well.
So the idea is to make it a fully functioning business.
I think you could.
I mean, when I was watching that one episode, what came to my head was you could really turn this into a media business with all kinds of stuff, not just a podcast, but a whole media franchise in that sense.
I intend to.
I'm not sure.
Well, look, I'm 54, right?
I don't want to run a company.
Okay.
How old are you?
I'm 45.
All right.
You look a lot younger than 45.
But you might have a bit more get up and go.
I wouldn't say I'm reaching.
Like I love doing this.
And I am obsessed with talking about all this stuff.
Free cities, privacy, cryptocurrency, whatever.
This is my life.
but the thought of running a business and having to deal with employees and stuff doesn't excite me
in the slightest or in fact I mean what I love about the way my life works at the moment is
when I get home in in a few days I can just take the rest of the week off if I want there's no
there's no the you know as long as I've I've made I've got on top of all the things I need to do
which I always do I always think it I've always lived a very very free life and even before I did
this when I was a filmmaker I probably worked probably I did about three months a year and the
rest of it was with my kids and and you know things ticking over but the actual nuts and bolts of work
was probably three months out of the year and that only changed because I gave up my whole life once
I got involved in this and it I mean I don't know this is I think your first foray into all this is
a little bit is it yeah i free cities i only heard about it recently when when peter reached out to
me and and it looked really awesome so so it's my first time coming in contact with this community
though i would say i've been involved in um i would say i don't know you can call this an industry
yes it is i think i think it's a new industry in fact i think this is probably one of the more
exciting industries that's sort of bubbling up yes 100 and it has different shapes and forms
around the world but i've been sort of building in the space for for a while for i would say for
the last eight years so yeah so well i was i i came in via the bitcoin route i was a bitcoiner
and that was what flipped my whole life upside down discovering bitcoin back in the day and then
realizing that that was more important than my former life.
And through Bitcoin, I met Peter.
Peter's a Bitcoiner.
And we know a guy called Safe Dino Moose, who's a very famous.
He wrote the best.
Oh, yeah.
You know Safe.
Yeah, yeah.
I've read all his books.
Okay, right.
Well, he put us together.
And then I was quite skeptical, I'll be honest,
of the Free Cities movement in the beginning,
mainly because I didn't really understand what it was.
and actually also thought it was quite boring compared to, you know,
like that side of it, cities and all this kind of stuff.
But what I've realized is because Bitcoin is now so ubiquitous,
it doesn't mean anything to necessarily be a Bitcoiner, if you see what I mean.
It's just like, it's like, are you a money person or are you a saver?
It's gone mainstream.
Exactly right.
And then I realized that actually governance and living together
is the next most important thing to sort of solve,
if you see what I mean.
And Bitcoin's definitely a part of it.
And so are lots of other things,
privacy and the tech stack and all this kind of stuff.
And then I was like, I can't make boring.
I can't make films anymore than the way I used to.
You know what I mean?
What's the point?
I used to make films all around the world,
like kind of, funnily enough,
here's something that you're going to be surprised at.
Because I caught the beginning of your talk.
I had to leave.
Oh, at the conference yesterday.
You're from Nagaland.
I am.
Dude, I've spent a long time in Nagaland.
No way.
Exactly.
That's not possible.
It is possible.
I went to Nagaland.
I was trying to think when it was.
I think it was about 20 years ago.
I traveled all around the frontier states.
Oh, I've been to all of them.
I basically went there originally because I'd heard about this story.
I was like a journalist and filmmaker.
and I'd heard about this story in Meghalaya,
which was that someone told me,
I was in Bhutan on a job and I met this guy.
This was before there was,
it was really before the internet, in fact,
that had really kicked off.
I said it was around 2000, early 2000, I think it was.
And I heard about this story in Meghalaya.
So I went there and then I learned about, you know,
all the other states, Mizoram, Tripura, Manipur,
all these places.
and I was like fucking hell this place is amazing and it was off limits to foreigners that's right
right 20 years ago you couldn't really you could of course I guess as a journalist you probably no
no not as a journalist it's India right right you just meet well what I did was I spent six months
traveling around the front northeast frontier states and Nagaland was the most amazing because
it was the one that was that everyone said oh you can't go there and there's headhunters there
It's dangerous.
Yeah, it's dangerous.
And it kind of was dangerous, but I'd already been to some war zones as a journalist, right?
So I knew that actually in a place like that, you're safer than a local person, really, because you're nothing to do with what's going on.
So I snuck into a few, a few of the states.
And in other ones, I actually had, I managed to get a fake permit for Nagaland because it was all back in the day where you just stamp things.
Just a piece of paper.
Exactly.
Yeah.
But friends of mine who were coming in on in the back of trucks and stuff to go around.
But once you were in those places, they couldn't really catch up with you.
It was unless you hit a roadblock and Nagaland did have some roadblocks, but only when something happened.
Like, you know, like we were in where we were hanging.
I went all around where all the cognac people are because they were the most they were the famous headhunters.
That's right.
But there was still warring, basically, not with the Indian government, but between each other.
And, you know, like not that long ago before I was there, a head appeared on a stake, you know, in the middle of a village somewhere and all this kind of stuff.
And then the police would go in and shut it down.
And like, it's an amazing place.
I've still own quite a number of Naga shawls that I...
The red and blue ones.
Right.
Well, the ones that I really like, they're like Angami.
Do you know what tribe you are?
So I am Angami.
Oh, right.
So my mother is an Angami tribe.
Right.
Well, I've got an old Angami shawl that someone gave me.
Those are beautiful.
It is.
It's a black one.
That's right.
Right.
And it's a famous design.
I know that because it's popped up a few times in my life and I've still got it.
That's so mad that you're Angami.
It's really, really mad.
Have you spent any time there?
Not really.
I was born there.
So my mother is Angami, and my father is from Rajasthan.
So a completely different part of India.
And I was there until I was six or seven, until I left.
So I've been back there since.
In fact, I was there a few years ago.
And I do want to go back again.
But I didn't spend my adult life there.
But it is a very interesting place.
And it's unfortunate that it has a lot of potential.
Because it's unique, it's different, but it's also a very poor place.
And that makes it hard for the culture to really expand
and catch the imagination of sort of mainstream people.
Well, the thing about all of those states, just so people are listening here,
if you think of India as an inverted triangle,
on the northeast corner, including the Himalayas.
Like, is it Arunachal?
Arunachal?
Right.
That's the Chinese border.
Yes.
What's it called?
Arunachal Pradesh.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah.
And underneath it, there's Assam, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Tripura, Manipur, and Nagaland.
And these are, they're basically, you, as an ethnic group, you are basically Southeast Asian.
you're not of the indian continent but it became incorporated you're i mean burma is very similar
they're they're burmese so i would say the naga people of all the including all the tribes whether
it's um angami or cognac i would say they're more of the burmese stock but the north north of burma
and in fact if you go to you know you go to myanmar today and you go to the north it's all
it's all tribes in fact the naga tribes are in the north of burma yes and um that group are the
tribes that still there's still conflict in in myanmar internal conflict because the tribes
still see themselves as independent people yeah well and the same goes for the the nagas in india
who are separatists really because it shouldn't really be part of india you have you don't have
a huge amount in common culturally with with India as as as a whole I mean India is a vast
place anyway but um but but also there is warring amongst but on the whole I mean I I I would say
it was one of the pivotal moments in my life and it and it even physically it was but spiritually
I I loved hanging out there like I spent like one and a half months on a refugee camp in
Mizaram have you ever heard of the the brew tribe no they were displaced from Mizaram into sorry
into Tripura and there was like 20,000 or something of them living in this refugee camp which was
you can imagine a refugee camp there ended up just being a a city you know and it was all made with
bamboo and that it was a beautiful looking place actually it sounds terrible but it wasn't they
were just displaced and i i i just ended up living with one family and i just started living there
and just there were no foreigners anywhere even now i would say there's really no foreigners it's
become a little bit more integrated just because of technology everyone kind of knows what's
happening but i would say in terms of foreigners in nagaland there's probably still not i would say
there's probably a handful of foreigners who live there.
That's right.
But, and like I say, it actually did change my life because,
so back then I was a filmmaker and a photographer.
Then really I was a photographer only.
I hadn't started making films.
But, so I went to Megaliah and I made a photo story on this,
on these things called living bridges.
Do you know what they are?
Oh, that's right.
That's the trees sort of create the bridges, right?
Yes, right.
They're rubber trees that grow.
the the the khasi tribe they are the khasi up in the highlands of megaliah and for years they grow
them to get these trees together and they create their most incredible bridges and ladders and
stuff like 80 or 90 year old living bridges and no one heard about it there was no lonely planet
guide back then there was no nothing so i i and the internet was in its real fledged in days like
i had an i had a website in 1998 which i designed and built myself you can still see it on the
internet way back machine it's hilarious it's like little blocks of yeah and it was to showcase
my photography but it was it was terrible and what I was doing so when I was traveling whenever I
could get an internet connection which is hard around there but I could I think in in the majors
in Shillong there was an internet cafe that had like dial up on it or something and I was just
publishing my work to a web page just literally embedding it in a web page and then sending the
link to my my family back home so they could see what I've been up to you know because I was just
on this mad two-year I'm just going to photograph the world on my own sort of like trip I gave up a
job as a I worked at a newspaper in London and unbeknown to me I didn't think this thing through
as well but Google was indexing it and after about a year of me doing this I it was becoming
searchable and it never occurred to me back then that things like that would would transpire and
through that the BBC contacted me because they were making a documentary about tribal people
around the world and they said wow we saw these pictures of these bridges what the hell's going on
I got an email random email started a dialogue and ended up working on that film for almost
three years. It was a human planet it was called. It was like the eight part, eight episodes
about all the most crazy indigenous people living in extreme circumstances all around
the world And it was it completely changed my life It was it projected me to this completely different area of the media where I became a sort of person a media personality kind of thing And it was all because of this random guy I met in Bhutan who told me to go to Meghalaya and then I ended up going around spending six months in the Northeast Frontier State
Wow, that's wild. That's really, really wild.
But I couldn't believe it when you said that. You said, like, I'm from Nagel. I'm like, no. And to be an Angami, that's, that's amazing because.
Yeah, I think the Angami tribe, if I remember, is probably the largest tribe in terms of the numbers of people.
And probably the more influential tribe because people in power, I think, are from the Angami tribe.
But there's a lot of tribes.
Oh, yeah.
Chang, Ringma, Chakasang.
That's right.
Sangtam.
Yeah, Mao.
Tangkal, Mao.
Yeah.
There's a lot.
And I don't think the circumstances have changed that much since you were there in terms of internal conflicts between the tribes.
That still exists.
And I feel maybe that's maybe the main reason why it hasn't, you know, there's no cohesion between the tribes, which is unfortunate because the tribes came together.
thing is though they've tried that like i say i've covered a lot of indigenous people around
the world and um you can't unify tribes like papa in new guinea is another example of this
they've tried all kinds of things papa is a very extreme version of of the northeast states of
india because they're fully like warring with each other all the time and they so the local
government created a festival the hornbill festival which was tried to try and bring them
altogether which has really become a thing now yeah but that's a nightmare because you end up
everyone fighting at these things it's like put everyone all in one place and it's like the spears
come out and it's like oh god here we go again but i don't know i don't expect people to get on
i don't know why you would expect people to get on like just um i think the answer is probably
i mean funnily enough though when i look at the tribes of northeast india that you're very and you
have the same characteristics they're very chilled out actually maybe not the cognacs the cognacs were
pretty extreme right but most southeast agents have that calmness and super polite i mean i
traveled remember i've traveled six months right there was no tourist infrastructure at all and
so i and i never did i never one night spent a night looking for somewhere to stay never there
was always someone who came up to me in the street and said come and stay at my house you know it it
was that kind of a place and uh you know i that's why i ended up staying there for so long i was so
enamored by the extreme like um politeness and just niceness of people i couldn't believe
i don't think that's changed i don't think that's changed i think that's that that hospitality i
think is it's in it's in the culture what was your take on because i find it ironic that even though
people are you know very tribal in nature historically a lot of them are now baptists
yeah there's a reason for that because and here's some weird things about i've i found out a lot of
weird things about yeah especially megaliah where i went first like for example megaliah is the
rainiest place in the world did you know that i did not know that there's a place in in megaliah
which is near to Nagaland.
They're all part of the same sort of area,
which has something ridiculous like over two and a half metres of rain.
It's in the Guinness Book of Records.
It's the rainiest place.
It also has a matrilineal culture,
which means the women inherit all the surname, the second name, property,
all this kind of stuff, which is really weird.
So weird that I ended up making a BBC documentary
about the men's rights movement,
in Megaliah. There's actually a men's rights movement, which was campaigning for equal rights
with women. It's such a crazy place, right? So, you know, loads of weird and wonderful things like
that happen. Sorry, what did you ask me about? I was asking if, what was your thoughts on the fact
that they're all converted to Christianity? So, when I was spending time in Megaliah, I lived with
the Kassi tribe for like about a month and in this beautiful place called Mool-A-Long which is now an
Indian tourist destination strangely but it's where the living bridges are they were they were
the ones that made these bridges and they had a Baptist church there and it turns out that basically
Welsh missionaries went there like a hundred years prior as a lot of missionaries did in a lot of
places i think they saw tribal societies as an easy option because you're polite and you had a
you know you were easy to convince that uh this religion might be better than your indigenous
religion and you see it all around the world everywhere you go this was a very common thing
to do but it was just pure luck that the kind of the the the geography got divided up between right
So if the Baptists are going there, then whoever, they're not going there.
So we'll have this part of India.
You have that part.
Because they knew, the chassi knew more about Welsh history than I did.
And I was living in Wales.
Because this pastor who had set up the church in Molenong had been like, you know, telling them all about famous Welsh people from history and stuff like this.
But yeah, I don't know why everyone took it up.
I suppose people who have an indigenous religion probably saw Christianity as a new and interesting and innovative thing.
And especially because, like it, wrong or right, doesn't really matter.
People were enamored by outsiders coming in because they brought with them things that local people didn't have.
I think now it obviously doesn't make any difference.
they've got the internet now they can see just how screwed up the outside world is yeah i think
back in the day that there was much more of a rosy kind of sheen put on incomers i mean i had that
experience myself i was treated so well like i was i you know wherever i was a basically a sort of
20 something hippie i had dreadlocks long hair and if i walked into a village i'd be like straight
straight over to the guy in charge, sit down, you know, have a drink with them. And it's like,
you know, you don't, you, you get inserted into society at that level. I had no place.
I had no, no, no reason to be at that level.
I'm, I'm, I'm still, I still can't comprehend that, that you were there 20 years ago. It's,
it blows my mind. I've actually never met someone who, who's, you know.
Well, I've not met many people who've ever been there either, you know.
Well, you probably never met anyone who's from there that kind of lives, you know, my lifestyle.
Since Facebook, Facebook's big over there, right?
That's right.
Facebook's kind of like the internet.
It is the internet.
I still get messages from people.
Mr. Tim, we still remember you.
We still this, we still that.
Because like without realizing it, I had an effect on that place, especially Molinong.
And Molinong was the place in Megaliah where there was this one very famous bridge, which the BBC ended up making a film out of.
That was the rest of my story.
So the BBC contacted me and about the bridges and they ended up sending a massive film crew out there.
And then it put it on the map.
And what the only thing that happened that I was surprised about, because I went back about when I went back to do the story on the men's might, the men's rights movement.
Last time I was there, I was this sleepy little village, Molinong.
You know, it was amazing.
It was like an oasis.
And I went back and I imagined, yeah, there's going to be some tourism here now.
What I didn't realize was it was Indian tourism.
And I was expecting to see foreign tourists.
And then the penny dropped.
And I thought, oh, my God, wait a minute.
India's changing.
India.
And then you realize Indian, the middle class in India had risen in that short amount of time.
It was probably only about seven or eight years had exploded.
it you know well it's really exploded now because i was at the hornbill festival oh is it sorry
hornbill is that that's a nagaland one yes right wait a minute did i say that was in
did i just say that there was a hornbill festival in in um papua new guinea no no no no what was
that one called then uh you're talking about hornbill festival in in either magalaya or
there's one in nagaland no the one i was talking about in um oh in papua okay there's there is the
same thing there I think I got them mixed up anyway right right Hornbill you're right is a
coming together of the tribes in Manigaland it's become it's become so I was there a few years ago
and it was very interesting to see Indian tourists who would go for the festival but you know these
were not like Indian family tourists these were young adventurous bloggers you know young
adventurous backpacker types, all Indians, both men and women. In fact, you see a lot of
adventurous women travelers. And generally, these people are educated, you know, they probably
studied abroad. And they're very interested in the fact that in India, there is such a such a
culture. So I think it's a great thing. Just coming, you know, coming back to what you were saying
earlier in terms of the women having rights and women having a lot more control. That's really,
really fascinating. I'm glad you brought it up because I think this is still the case in
Nederland today. The women, you know, when I see my family structure, so it's like my aunts and
they run the families. Like my aunt or aunts, they run the household. They're the breadwinners.
And they're the ones calling the shots.
And the men are out just kind of like working in the fields.
Yeah, Megaliar, the youngest daughter, I think they call her the Kakuda or something.
She inherits everything.
And when you marry, you take on the woman's name.
It's fascinating.
It's absolutely fascinating.
There's only a few matri...
It's not matriarchal, it's matrilineal.
But I think there's almost no matriarchal, as in patriarchal, matriarchal societies in the world.
And there's only a few matrilineal ones.
I think there's some in South America up in the Andes or somewhere like that.
I mean, I guess some historians do say that for most of human history, it's been very much a matriarchal society.
You know, like mother goddess and animism.
the women were they they were in charge of their bodies for most of human history i think it's only
been a few thousand years that that's changed maybe that's why going back to what you said about
the of religion coming into the area because like i would say christian and religion is very much
patriarchal and like you say indigenous religion is often you could say matriarchal because it is
about the earth and it's about honoring the earth mind you saying that though you know i i dip my
toes into a few of the religions up there and there it's not as it it's very easy to go wow it
just must be amazing being at one with nature and it's not it's nothing like that so they want to
cut down a load of trees to build a garden they'll just do it and they'll burn it as well and you know
like it's it's not it's not as i think people idolize it things like that oh for sure and
Especially Nagaland, the last time I was there, I did notice that there's now a concerted effort to keep the environment intact.
So there's areas where you can't cut down trees.
But a lot of the nature has actually been destroyed.
And it's been destroyed just, you know, from economic reasons.
Timber, and you see even nature, like all the birds and animals have sort of disappeared
because there's no concerted effort to say,
hey, we're going to maintain the rainforest.
Because, you know, in that part of the world, there's rainforests.
Yeah, it's lovely.
And a lot of the rainforests are no more.
I trekked all over there.
Yeah, it's amazing.
After we finish speaking, I have got probably 20,000 photos from there.
I'd love to see them.
Quite a few of them are online.
And there is almost certainly pictures of Vangami people, I'm sure,
because I just went from place to place.
And in the end, it became, I got into the shawls.
If anyone doesn't know about the shawls.
The shawls are amazing.
They're all handmade.
Yes.
And so it became this thing.
And once I got into the shawls, I actually ended up just going to tribes to see their shawls.
Because they're just incredible.
And I still have a huge collection of them.
Like I say, I was given this one, this Angami one.
And it's what started it all off.
and um i get you know it's yeah it's um it's just weird to meet someone from there anyway
but so how did you get from nagaland to to to california then what was the is that because
i know actually i there are that kind of there are many more opportunities now aren't there for
around you know for youngsters from places like that to end up getting getting to america i've
I've run into like, I used to go to Mongolia quite a lot.
You see Mongolians from random places coming to university,
not from wealthy families necessarily or anything like that.
It's just the government do a scheme, get you here, do that.
How did you end up in California?
So my path was very different from, I would say,
the traditional path of someone born there would take.
So my path was different,
And though I think what I've noticed is that, yes, probably today, there's probably a community of Nagas in the U.S.
And predominantly, they probably have moved there through the church.
There's probably a few churches that, because, you know, it's a Christian Baptist religion.
So I think through the churches has probably been some migration.
And I'm on these emails.
I think I joined them a long time ago.
there's a Naga Foundation and I they do scholarships and stuff like that so so
probably through those channels though I think it's still very rare and so my
path was different because even though I was born in Nagaland my father was not
from Nagaland he's from he's from Rajasthan mainstream India and he worked
for the government he's a journalist no no he was a government official he
I thought he said mainstream media no no he was
Like mainstream India. Oh, okay, right like he was from the mainstream India and he was posted to Nagaland
He was posted he actually chose
to to go there because probably like you he was very adventurous, you know at 20
He became he converted to communism and he wanted to sort of he was one of those like very interesting characters and
and a free thinker wanted to do things by himself.
And so he chose to go to the most dangerous and new places in India.
And so he chose to go there.
Nobody wanted to go there.
Yeah.
I did, sorry to butt in,
I did hang out with a lot of the army out there as well.
Because once or twice there was nowhere to stay
because we were just going, you know, we were going off walking.
We walked into Burma.
we we were there's no there's no like line there's no like borders there and i think we were i've been
into myanmar a few times illegally i don't know whether i should say this but from that side from
the thai side you know like everything was negotiable back there i think it's still the case
now it's it's just it's such a vast piece of forest yes that it's very hard to sort of have
borders and do that. But yeah, so my father was, he was just a very interesting man,
and just very adventurous. So when he got there, he did realize that if he wanted to make any sort
of change, he would have to be accepted into the culture. Because, you know, when he moved there,
I mean, this is like probably in the 60s.
Wow.
So you can imagine, you know, the state of affairs there.
Yeah, I wouldn't have walked around the Cognac territory at that particular time.
I think at that time it was still very much very tribal.
Yeah.
But like very warring.
Yes.
Headhunting.
That's right.
Oh, my God.
I hate to say it, but that is what attracted me there.
Yeah.
I look at some photos of when my dad had moved there.
I mean, he was tribal office.
And so he very soon realized that he needed to get accepted into the culture.
And so he married the daughter of the chief.
And so then he became one of them through the marriage and got accepted into the tribe.
And so hence he was able to then affect change and build trust.
but he was not
he was a vegetarian
and as you know
bad idea
it's very difficult
they take meat eating to the next level
Rajasthan
but Rajasthanis aren't traditionally vegetarians
I think Rajasthanis are generally vegetarians
but he was a Hindu
didn't eat meat
and the culture that he got accepted into
heavy
he must have eaten meat though
Especially at their wedding.
Jesus.
Yeah, maybe.
There's no way he didn't eat a piece of meat at their wedding.
Yeah.
I mean, I can't imagine them having a vegetarian restaurant or something like that.
They probably do in Shillong now.
Because it's...
But anyway, yeah.
Come on, carry on.
I'm going to keep butting in.
Though, you know, the food is actually very interesting there.
When I was there last, I mean, the types of rice that grow there,
all the different black rice brown rice wild rice it just grows there it's it's fascinating and and
i think the quality of the produce is actually very high high quality of produce stuff that grows
there up in the altitude it kind of reminds me of a little bit of like peru um you know when you go
to the sacred valley and the corn that comes from there well the in yeah i mean the the british set
set up a lot of tea plantations around there as well,
like Shillong.
Very nice environment.
I mean, Shillong's, you know, like weather is just perfect.
You know, it's like a lot of like Darjeeling.
It's the same, same kind of, the same altitude.
Honestly, the North East Front Estates are so fascinating.
Geographically, everything.
Like the fact that Meghalaya is the rainiest place in the world.
And that's the reason why Bangladesh is always so flooded
because it all goes down yeah and the weather hits the himalayas up in the north can't get past
rains comes down megalaya into bangladesh you can understand so much about about um about just
everything by looking there i you know i went to river i there's a faint the biggest river island
in the world there as well in in assam along the big river that's right brahma is the brahmaputra
yeah and it goes which and you can follow that all the way up into the himalayas as well it's just
so diverse well it's becoming that region is becoming a lot more geopolitically strategic
in the sense that you know the one belt one road initiative plus india is trying to connect the
roads down to to thailand or down to you know to malaysia well also china claim aranachal predict
that's right that's a contagious and there's i went we would we the only place we never got to
where we tried to get up to the border there you know when you go straight to hit the chinese border
and the the army kept saying you can't come you can't come because there's proper skirmishes there
all the time yeah but there's a tribe that i really wanted to visit up there um that they do
oh that's it they they they put the things in their noses like it's insane they these big plates
well i can't remember what they're called i can't remember what they're called but but that was the
only place that i wanted to go that i couldn't get anyway i keep butting in sorry i love the place
you can you can tell okay I could talk about that area for so long so you you
got to oh yeah so my path my path was not the typical path because because of
my father's I guess networks and connections and and his his ability to
and his him being an outsider he sent us off he didn't want us to like me and my
siblings he didn't want us to grow up in in Nagaland because it was dangerous I
mean for him it was a very dangerous situation because he was one of the
first outsiders coming in and and essentially now dictating how things
should be done and the Indians weren't very well yeah so even though he was he
he was embraced by the culture and he married into the culture that was not
sufficient so so it was a very dangerous place for for the for the
children can I ask a quick question do you look any Indian I can't really make
it out you definitely look more Asian than Indian but did you according to your
friends back in Nagaland would they obviously recognize that you're not that
your dad was from register probably I mean I think they see me as mixed and so
if you look at my siblings my my two brothers and my sister are very much they look naga like if
they just look 100% naga me I look maybe a bit mixed because I actually have a beard which nagas
don't have facial hair that's right and so pretty bad beards it's true isn't it it's true remember
that so the facial hair is is is probably sets me a little bit but but I I think I would probably
be embraced as as a naga just because my mother is a gami and and the tribe is well known um but
yeah so so my dad sent us off to an international boarding school and didn't want us to be
raised in that environment so we we left very very early on wow and you said we'll get on to
some free cities to content in a minute but but so do so you reckon there's a naga community in
california is that right i think uh i don't think it's california i think it's somewhere in either
texas all right or uh and it's a church that'll be a church it's i think it's um some pastors i
think naga pastors sort of immigrated to the u.s and then sort of set up this this community you
asked me about my opinion on christianity what's yours what's yours i i it's probably similar to
yours i mean historically you look at around the world the tribes have always been very easy to
convert to to christianity whether it's in south america or or anywhere else in the world um and
and i think you're right i think they're a lot more accepting it's interesting though
because they, it does depend on the temperament of the tribe
and Asian tribes as in Southeast Asians are so soft and welcoming it too it too easy because a lot of tribes do do do reject you know like and I say the cognacs are a bit more like that
mind you the cognacs they're also religious as well because I went to church there you know like
when you go and live there you have to do all that stuff you have to go to church and stuff
but there are lots of cases around the world of of missionaries being told to f off basically but
It's just in Southeast Asia, you can just see why that doesn't happen.
Because you're such a welcoming group of people.
You're obviously going to welcome this thing in and then it's going to, you know, have its effect.
Well, there's probably much deeper reasons, which I honestly, I don't really know.
But I wonder why is it that there's got to be some other reasons.
And I think there might be simpler reasons such as maybe they do need a bit of structure.
You know, when you're very tribal and there's a lot of infighting, maybe coming under one umbrella creates a bit of structure, which maybe creates a bit of stability.
Maybe there's an element of that.
Maybe there's an element of a community cohesion that maybe the church brings that might be seen as a positive thing.
Maybe it could be the songs.
Maybe it could be, you know, it could be the singing.
And who knows?
There could be some very simpler elements.
Thing is, though, my impression of those missionaries 100 years ago,
they were very fire and brimstone, weren't they?
It wouldn't cut it now in a lot of places to go in there.
And, you know, like if you don't do what you'll go to hell and all this kind of stuff, you know.
But that was definitely the modus operandi in a lot of places.
You see in Africa as well that that whole kind of, you know, that you'll be damned if you don't do.
You know, that's true.
And I think that's probably what's happened in a lot of parts of the world through the Inquisitions and all of that.
But I think in Nagaland, I think it was probably the other way around.
I think the missionaries who went there were very loving and giving and caring.
and I think that's probably why they got accepted in,
because they were providing love.
I don't think it was coercion,
at least from what I've seen, at least in Nagaland.
South America, I think, probably a different story.
But I think in Nagaland, say 100 years ago, 150 years ago,
that's sort of when the missionaries started going there.
I think they brought a lot of love and care
and an outsider's perspective.
Imagine going in there 150 years ago.
Jesus.
I would have loved you.
Yeah, you would.
I would have been petrified.
I mean, I mean, it's, you know, like when I was there, you could get trucks around and you could move around.
But imagine walking everywhere.
And I mean, you've got to negotiate boundaries everywhere you go.
You can't just walk anywhere and go on to this place.
You know, there's good.
And where are you going to find your fixes?
where are you going to find the people to help you?
Because you can't take this guy into that place.
You've got to find someone he knows to then, you know,
and, you know, walking everywhere even.
I'm fascinated by places where you have to walk everywhere.
I love places without roads.
There's very few places like that now.
But 20 years ago, there were way more,
especially up in the Himalayas and around those places.
Bhutan, the same.
Sometimes in Bhutan, we walked 10 or 12 days to go to places, you know.
and yeah that is what used to drive me to all those places because as soon as a car as soon
as a road comes um everything changes very very quickly within two or three years structures change
and and that i'm not saying that's a bad thing at all i think it's not at all i think i had a very
privileged eye to be able to come you know come from my extreme luxurious life to then go and
sort of poke my my sort of nose into a different world but you know the roads that that's your i
think you're right it's the roads that's the first thing that comes in well maybe the first thing is
the television and then the roads but you know in nagaland the roads are still there's main roads
that sort of connect the highways but most of nagaland is still there's it's it's a walking
culture there's a lot of villages all around i would say most of nagaland probably doesn't have
highways and it's it's dirt roads or really bat-shaped roads well it's a it's a frontier
isn't it it's the edge of india and the only reason this this is my experience because i
traveled all around india for like a couple of years the only reason that they maintain roads
is for military reasons on the borders and that border the border with nagaland and myanmar i
mean it's the edge of Myanmar as well it's like it's kind of like the same in
Myanmar there's nothing there except forest on that edge and then on the
Nagaland edge there's nothing which is why you can walk to Myanmar very easily
then in fact a lot of the tribes live in both countries that's right yeah that's
right well I think the tribes like let's say the Angami tribes I think they were
really part of the Burmese diaspora or the Burmese geographical I guess
structure for for a very long time and they kind of were left to their own
devices for a very long time they were just it was such a remote part of the
world they were just sort of left to their own setup and it reminds me of you
know the tribal uh governance system it's actually very interesting because the tribes sort of manage
themselves and it's almost sort of like the greek systems back in the day where each sort of group
kind of manages themselves and um in a way it's still kind of like that and in a way it kind of
works yeah i mean i i think it actually does i i think i went to a lot of meetings and a lot of
circles of people discussing stuff and there's obviously a great importance put on resolving
issues you know it's the same you see the same thing in tribal societies all around the world
maintaining the tribe is really important and the smaller it is the more important it is to bring it
bring things out you know to have things out via normally an adjudicator and in tribal structure
it's often you know there's there's a there's a hierarchy of people that you can turn to to sort
of have your thing resolved and stuff but um i i agree i i agree you could look at it easily as a
decentralized system of governance right if you took the whole of that area and um people say yeah
but they're warring and and this and the other and it's like yeah but what's worse to like like
take the state of the world if you if the world devolved into lots of tiny city states and you
know there'd be a lot of fighting because there's more of them but i would say that's better than
russia and america fighting like if you you get small you get small conflicts but in in the
centralized version when you get two massive conflicts you get complete annihilation so
actually probably the decentralized one on paper at least is the better more preferable way of of
working. I don't know. It's a theory. Obviously, it fits in with the theory of like free cities and
city states and this kind of stuff as well. That's right. Yeah, it is. It is. I mean, it is a theory
and there's a lot of truth to it, though on the other side. And this is probably the story of
China, because China was this small kingdoms and what propelled China to become a modern,
wealthier nation was the fact that someone brutally was able to put it under
one centralized leadership. And without that, there's no way China would have risen,
at least from a modern perspective and an economic perspective. So I guess there's
truths to both. But what I see interesting with the free cities concept is,
maybe the direction is you centralize and become wealthy and then you decentralize.
I've just written that down. That came to me as you were speaking. It's a function of the
timeline you're on. That's right. I think you're right. Once your standard of living reaches a
certain point, decentralization makes more sense than, than, you know, like then trying it right
from the word go. Yeah. And you can see the contrast between, say, China and India. Because
in a way, India is still, in a way, a decentralized system, because they're a federalist system. And
so there's all these different states, and they have their own cabinets, and they have their own
governance, and, you know, all the states have to vote on stuff. So it is, in a way, similar to an
American system, a federalist system, which is a decentralized system, even though they're the
central authority and you know it's very hard to get stuff done in in in that sort of system
unless you pay unless you pay them enough right I mean that causes corruption though I mean things
are changing though China was able to propel because they were able to bring it under one
centralized system will that change down the road do they become more authoritarian or do then once
once they reach a certain economic level,
do they then decide to all sort of decentralize?
It's possible.
The other thing to obviously mention about China
is when China began the great change,
they used special economic zones to do that.
They couldn't roll out a free market version of capitalism
or sort of a more free market way of doing things.
They couldn't roll it out nationwide.
So they started for special economic zones, Shenzhen, Zhuhai.
I can't remember what they're all called.
And they are now some of the most powerful cities
where they got to try out the free market ideas
before they rolled them out into the rest of the country.
And that can't be underestimated
because that's the history of special economic zones.
It's one of the pivotal moments in the history of special economic zones,
which we're now at the iteration of sovereign special economic zones,
which are more like sovereign entities.
That's right.
Like countries.
And that's kind of where we're at now.
That's right.
And I think contrary to maybe mainstream view,
China is a very, very competitive place
in terms of the different cities competing with each other
for the next hub of electric vehicles or whatnot.
And if you're a mayor of a certain province,
I mean, the way you rise up the ranks
is to make sure your geography exceeds and flourishes.
And so the competition, in a way,
it is in a way sort of decentralized in that sense
because all the different mayors
have to then compete with each other
to make the provinces much more,
better than the guy next to them.
It's true.
I mean, I don't know enough about China.
Last time I went to China was a long time ago,
even around that same time I was in Nagaland.
Actually, maybe a bit later than that.
But you do hear a lot of negative stuff about China,
and rightly so in a way, because it's very centralized.
And I think they are basically,
what they're trialing in the form of governance there this sort of social credit systems and all
this kind of stuff is super dystopian for for the western eye but yet we see it happening here as
well i don't really know but you know i i that i i agree with you shouldn't it's not all bad
but i really don't know what the solution is because i don't believe at all in the social
credit system i think that is dystopian but i don't know how you stop it happening because it's
a function of technology and it makes total sense if i was running a country it makes total sense
yeah you know well i i think i don't think anyone really knows how it's going to play out because
it's never been done in history to in that size and that big scope of 1.5 billion people it's never
it's never been done so i don't think anyone really knows because there's no precedence
and that size but you know what's what's interesting um uh what you were saying that
the rise of China in a way was propelled because they set up a few special economic zones and they
were like the test beds which sort of created the know-how to sort of expand that across the country.
Another, this is, I think I recently was listening to one, a German economist who lived in Japan
and had written a book that was a bestseller in Japan. I forget the name, but he was saying the
other reason China really sort of took off during that time was because Mao,
oh no, Deng Xiaoping had gone to Japan and he had asked them, what's your secret to like
all of the stuff? And I think in Japan there is the truth and then there's the truth. And in public
you speak the truth, but behind closed doors you speak the real truth. And behind closed doors,
they basically said it's the banks because they asked him how many banks do you have and he said
we have one bank and the japanese were like how are you going to get credit to to all of these
people through one bank and in japan at the time they had all these banks to distribute credit to
you know to to uh all the businesses and that's when he went back and he set up
hundreds and hundreds of cooperative banks and that really unleashed the credit system
and and that was probably at least you know according to this theory it was probably one of
the more important factors um of of sort of the rise of china which i think is fascinating well
Well, I mean, imagine the undertaking of going from a communist system to a free market system.
They don't have, they don't even have ownership.
That's right.
There's no market.
There's no market for ownership, property, anything.
You can't roll that out.
You can't just collapse a country of that many people and say, right, suddenly you can now, you know, you can now buy houses, you know, buy bits of land and stuff.
Who knows?
You know, you have, I think the, the SEZs were, you know, like, I mean, Shenzhen is, is a power, a global powerhouse.
Hong Kong, you know, is, is, it has, it had to happen that way.
And I, because, and what's so great about that is you can see the same thing now happening with people.
So it's like, you can't roll out.
I mean, Dubai might be a good example, though, because Dubai started its zones a while ago.
And now when you go to Dubai, you feel like the whole place is just embodying these ideas.
And Dubai will probably, I don't know whether, I mean, that's debatable whether they will actually innovate further in the zone.
But certainly you can try out new governance systems now.
It's not so much the economics side.
It's more like, well, why don't we govern in a bit more of a freer way and see if that works?
And then that bleeds out into the world.
I mean, that's the theory that we were all behind, you know.
And I think it's a good theory, though.
I would say being in the conference last few days, one thing I did notice is I think a lot of the free cities movements and people experimenting, a lot of it is being done in the West.
and the conversation is being,
the conversation is really coming from a sort of Western perspective.
Though I think a lot of this stuff is also happening in Asia.
And if you look at the special economic zones
that are popping up in Asia, it's incredible.
So one of the reasons why I moved to Singapore and live there now
is I wanted to see what's happening in Asia by living there
and not from the Wall Street Journal in California.
And now that I live in Singapore and I see it from that perspective,
there's like across the bridge in Malaysia,
there's a lot of very interesting special economic zones that are popping up.
And in Malaysia, for instance,
the political system is that there is a central government,
but there's also kings.
You know, there's a sultans sort of all over Malaysia.
So Malacca sort of has its own sovereignty.
Johor has its own sovereignty.
Penang, which is sort of more Chinese leadership, has its own sovereignty.
And I suppose there are in a way states, but there's rulers.
There's a sultan.
and that system is I think very interesting for the free city sort of concept to to look at because
they're in a way doing it and they don't call it that but I think it is it is and so that's just
Malaysia but then Indonesia there there's some very interesting stuff happening Indonesia
Vietnam is trying a lot of special economic zones in fact one of my favorite cities in Vietnam is
Da Nang. And Da Nang is a newer city that's very modern, and it's a planned city. So if you go to
Hanoi or you go to Saigon, it's crazy, right? Because the infrastructure is, they're building
on top of each other. But in Da Nang, it was an empty place, and then they planned the city.
So the roads are great, the sidewalks are amazing. And that city is flourishing,
because it's a sort of a new city.
And so I think Vietnam is trying a lot of these things.
And those places do make a lot of difference
because they change the needle.
They move the needle from a macro perspective.
I think you're absolutely right.
And I would say that the reason that it's skewed towards the Western eye
is because the movement in its current form has come out of Europe.
Right.
But 100%, you know, like hotspots of the world, you know, Central America is definitely a hotspot.
But also Asia, Southeast Asia, you know, there's a big project going through a feasibility study in Brunei at the moment, which is exactly what you're talking about.
Sultan wanting to do something, you know, sovereigns get to think much longer term than your average democratic system.
And I mean, one of the conclusions that Free Cities people come to in the end is how do you work with the host government and which the longer term the government can think, the better.
Now, the democratic governments, often you run into super problems immediately and Prosper is experiencing that now.
One government loves the SEZs, gives them the go ahead.
The next one comes in, it's far left socialist and they're like, stop stealing our land.
and then close it down.
Right.
But the reason Dubai is so successful.
It's sovereigns saying, right, here's a hundred year plan for this place.
And there's no voting people in and out.
And as long as you've got a good king,
obviously the downside is if you get a bad king or a bad queen,
they can screw a whole country up.
But on the whole, you know, a lot of people don't like the sovereign model.
But if you just look at it on paper,
has massive benefits to creating great countries.
I mean, we're all here trying to work out
what the best version is.
What's that libertarian book?
I think it's called The End of Democracy
or The Death of Democracy.
Not Hopper.
I think it's Hopper.
Democracy, the...
The God that died.
Yeah, the God that failed.
Right.
I mean, I think the central premise of that book
is that sure that sovereigns uh are a better way of managing than democracies um because they could
think much much um it's it's a fascinating book dude if you go into that and i if you go into that
whole it's the ultimate um red pill is is is democracy doesn't work because at the moment
the democratic system is just untouchable.
I mean, you've got nations fighting for democracy.
Let's bring democracy to Iraq.
Let's bring, you know, and it's like,
but there is a growing interest in the notion
that this is a terrible system
because it forces short-term thinking
and it incentivizes politicians to think in the wrong way
because it's like a job
and you're looking four years ahead.
And when you leave these days, and I mean, when you take democracy to extremes and places like you look at places like Mexico, where when when there's a regime change in Mexico, people are getting killed.
The old people, the people who are leaving are just slaughtered sometimes, you know, like in the new lot, just change all the rules.
And Honduras, the same thing happened.
It went from right to left.
And during the right regime, they changed the constitution to allow for ZAs.
This was voted on.
ZAs are the free zones in Honduras.
The other side got in and said no and changed it back unconstitutionally.
So now nothing means anything.
So what happens now?
Then that was the democratic system again.
There was nothing to keep it in check.
And whatever you plan can be overturned in four years if things don't go well.
And I don't know.
Me personally, I don't really know what the answer is.
I love the private city model because I think that has the best incentive model.
That's like you run a small city as a business and you have a contract.
So if I'm the city provider, I have a contract with you.
This is what, these are my responsibilities.
These are your responsibilities.
And then we stick to it.
And we have an outside arbitration outside of that.
That seems fair, good, and, you know, nothing's perfect.
But at least we've got a contract.
And people will say, yeah, but contracts get broken.
It's like, well, the Honduras are doing pretty well with their contract at the moment.
They had a contract.
They had an international agreement.
They had an agreement with the government not to shut them down.
And then they're suing the government and the government are backing down now.
So that's kind of working.
So in Honduras, is the ZAs, is that incorporated into the constitution?
Yeah, that's how they got the permission to do it.
The vote was to change the constitution to allow these places because they were prior to that, they were kind of unconstitutional because they have a degree of regulatory sovereignty.
They don have legal sovereignty on you know like murder you know this kind of they have they have regulatory autonomy But that a big deal That is a big deal Yeah That is a big deal So do SEZs often That the thing The difference with Prospera is you can live there and you can get all the benefits
It's normally just businesses, you know.
Yeah, but I do agree about the private cities.
Ironically, I think yesterday there was a lady that did a presentation and she was mentioning Irvine.
Irvine California is the largest private city in the world and uh the most successful private city
in the world because it's the size I used to live in Irvine I had no idea really and I lived there
for two years and Irvine was well it's it's not a place for me because it's very suburban you know
big roads fences and uh and big homes so it wasn't it wasn't a place that that I particularly liked
because I was young.
But I think it is the safest city in America
and privately built by the Irvine family.
And a huge success, huge success.
And I think more of those will definitely pop up.
Are you familiar with the work that John McKinney is doing?
Yeah, I think so.
he's in this conference and and um he's working with a tribal oh yeah yeah yeah i i caught a bit
a bit of that sorry yeah he had indigenous people in the states that's right the the native the native
indian tribes have you know sovereignty of their own land and and i think every state has you know
some differences but he's trying to do sezs with them and i think that's that that's a very
interesting idea well basically when you're if you if you adhere to these kind of ideas that
we're talking about you have to look for opportunities and opportunities arise where
there are already semi-sovereign places who want to improve themselves it and also it it that there
almost certainly needs to be an obvious improvement like it's very difficult to sell this idea to like
the italian government for example it's like why why would we but if you go to honduras
and you say to the government look you know this place which is the most dangerous part of honduras
cheloma one of the most which is near where morazan is which is that one of the free cities
out there yeah we can build this thing if you let us run it the way we want to run it
in a bit more of a free market so we don't have so many regulations we can build what we want
we can probably change things around and lo and behold bang it works people want to live there
you know inside the free city there's literally no crime outside the the mafia run run the place
and and that's good for a country not necessarily if you're a socialist government unfortunately
because that forces them that's a forcing function on them to be a better government
which they they don't really want to the the more centrist and right-leaning governments tend to
appreciate that a bit more because they also see money coming in investment coming in and they take
a cut of the taxes because you can you know you can choose your own tax rate and stuff but yeah i
would say in the same as you said earlier in the same sense that china used secs as sandboxes for
economic um evolution i think free cities are sandboxes for governance evolution and because
you get to try anything and if you if you trade if you follow that out into the far future hopefully
you would have this myriad of experiments happening and the and the good ones will win and the bad
ones will fail and then we'll kind of know what the best governance model is that's right that
that's the idea that's the idea and i think it's very exciting and and i think there needs to be a
lot more experimentation done in small and small sandboxes and it's great to see that people are
you know doing this and and that's that's essentially what you know what i've been doing
i haven't asked you have i yeah draper nation i don't even know what draper nation is you better
give me the 101 quickly i i deliberately didn't look it up because i wanted to ask you you but
tell me about draper nation yeah so essentially draper nation is a venture lab and it's probably
the world's first governance venture lab.
And the idea is to just do a lot of experiments in governments,
in different forms of governance, whether it's digital, physical,
and just try them.
Try them, do experiments, and it's a laboratory of experiments.
How does that work, though?
First of all, why Draper?
What does that mean, Draper Nation?
So are you familiar with a guy named Tim Draper?
Yes.
Okay.
So I've been working with Tim for the last six years.
Okay.
Actually, just say who Tim Draper is for people listening.
Yeah.
So Tim Draper is an iconic Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
his family it's it's a three four generation business and I would say some attribute the
venture capital business to his grandfather sort of starting the business through setting up the
GPLP structure and and bringing money from New York to the orange orchards of California you know
in the 50s or 60s and setting up this new asset class or this new investment class called the
venture capital business because prior to that capital was done through credit
or through your commercial investment banking formats and the idea of professionalizing
the money of friends, family, and fools, professionalizing that as an asset class was a new thing.
So the Draper family is attributed to sort of starting that business.
So Tim Draper is a third-generation venture capitalist, invested in a lot of well-known,
successful companies that are very much oriented towards freedom and making the world a lot
more free.
So for instance...
I didn't know that.
I know Tim Draper is a sort of figure, is a well-known sort of industrial, well-known venture capitalist.
Well, he's a wild guy.
If you look into him, he's a very, very wild person in a positive sense, very, very passionate.
And he thinks outside the box and he invests in things that are very unreasonable today.
and so for instance you know his i think his first fame to success uh was investing in hotmail
which uh you know if you remember free email at the time was just it was just an insane concept
my wife's email address is still hotmail honestly i think a lot of people are like that
you run into some hotmails here and there you you it ages them for sure you know yeah
It was the first email account I ever got.
Yeah, it was the first.
Well, I think AOL was my first.
But I had a Hotmail one too.
But, you know, Hotmail changed the world in the sense it allowed anyone to communicate.
So that was, I think, his first sort of like big success.
And then after that, Skype, which was video conferencing.
Which has just been disbanded.
We've disbanded with Microsoft.
I should make a correction on that.
because the other day, I think it was two episodes ago,
we talked about this, and I said,
how could they go out of business?
But actually, they were consumed by Microsoft in a way.
It became Teams.
Right.
So they didn't really go out of business
in the sense that they were a terrible business.
They more got consumed by a bigger entity.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I think it was a positive thing.
Microsoft took the IP,
and now a lot more people use Teams because of the size.
and and uh sort of like to your persuasion uh tim is probably most well known for being one of the
earlier investors in bitcoin and he did an auction he bought one of the marshall auctions and and
bought a lot of bitcoins and this is very early on i think in 2011 or 2012 beautiful move and he's
been he's been a proponent of bitcoin from you know the early days so i think that's in a way
one of his you know he's known he's very well known for that and uh so i've been you know i i i
admire him a lot um even though he's a very eccentric wild person i think you need more
eccentric wild people what do you mean even i like eccentric well that's right yeah you strike
me as someone who would as well he's a fascinating guy and and i have a lot of respect and trust um
and so i you know i've been working with him for the last six years and doing all kinds of
different experiments and um so draper nation is is is a company you know named i guess with his
his last name uh but yeah it's a company that i have built uh with him but so explain to me how
you um how you experiment with governance like in a company yeah without actually building a city
and then governing it or something.
So where my interest is in exploring
is not governance models on land,
not governance models on sea,
but I'm just very curious to see
if we can build interesting models in cyberspace.
And so that's been my sort of interest that I'm exploring.
And it's a very difficult proposition
but I feel that's sort of like my calling.
And so the experiments that I would like to do and am doing
is very much in cyberspace.
And just to give you some sort of baseline examples,
one of the earlier, I think, innovators in digital governance
was the country of Estonia.
And Estonia launched this e-residency program,
which I'm a big proponent of
and have been involved with them for a very long time.
And e-residency essentially was,
okay, we have this physical territory called Estonia.
Everything's digital.
How about we open up this infrastructure
to people who are not from Estonia?
So anybody from around the world
could become an e-resident of Estonia,
have access to government administrative services,
like setting up companies, paying taxes.
and it opened up the possibility that you could do a lot of these things digitally.
So that's sort of like one example of where I think there could be a lot of innovation.
And just to sort of give you some basic data points,
like 80% of government services can be done digitally,
whether it's your pensions, your health care.
80% can be distributed digitally.
And so that's a big deal.
And so then that opens up a country to then provide those services
to people who are not from that geography.
So that's sort of like the framework where we're pursuing.
Did Tim Draper ask you to do this, or did you just say,
look I'm going to do this and they sort of yeah so prior so prior to Draper Nation I started a
company and Tim invested and it folded into his ecosystem called the Draper Startup Houses and
this is where I was building physical free cities around the world at one point we were in 30
countries where we would go into very adventurous countries and put up buildings and these buildings
would become small private micro nations and mostly entrepreneurial people startups would come live
work in these buildings and it was a complete entrepreneurial ecosystem so there would be
education programs there'd be hackathons that i ran a venture fund we would invest in these companies
and they would live and work in these buildings and so no degree of sovereignty or anything like
that no there was it was essentially just a startup house if there was no you
know it's just place people to live and work together but but in essence in a
way it was sort of like a college dorm but for startups and so I I did that for
a very long time and we put up these buildings around the world and so that
was my first are they still operating there yeah yeah so we went at some point
We went a bit crazy and put up 30 of these.
Then we consolidated.
Did you go to Nagaland?
No, no.
But though, you know what?
Interestingly, that thought has crossed my mind.
Dude, come on.
You've got to.
Like, why wouldn't you?
Like, why wouldn't you do it in your homeland?
This kind of thing.
You know, like.
I actually, you know what?
It's a very interesting thought because one of the, I think, one of the strengths that Nagaland has,
which is completely under
capitalized on
is the fact that
everyone speaks really good English
yeah you're right
the young people they all
speak amazing English
and I think that's
what a great
skill set that is
and so you know India
India forayed into
commerce through call
centers right in the 2000s
and everyone would make fun of Indian call centers just because the language
and the accent but Nagas actually don't have an Indian accent they they you know
so they speak very well and they communicate really well I think that's
that's a skill set that I feel like could be used to build stuff but yeah
that the thought has crossed my mind talking of digital governance models
the the most fun and interesting one i've heard of recently which is a guy a guy called ian
underwood i met in new hampshire a few months ago obviously and interviewed him and he he proposed
a system and i i'm going to really explain it badly but he was saying like if you look at america
and you see Democrats voting and, you know, the two sides voting, basically,
and one of them is always disenfranchised.
So why don't you create an online system where you can register yourself
and vote for what you want so that everyone gets what they want?
So you basically, if you believe in this XYZ, then you incorporate that into your sort of like your kind of online status.
So you can live amongst each other without disenfranchising each other, if you see what I mean.
And I've explained it really badly here, but.
It's interesting.
I think you may be, are you speaking of like this, I think there's a term for it called liquid democracy.
That's slightly different.
No, this is his own little idea.
Oh, I see.
But I mean, the point is he was saying, you know, if you look at the voting block of, say, Democrats in America, it's the size of some countries, you know.
Sure.
Right.
So why not treat it as a country?
So why not say, right, as a Democrat, right, for example, so take two different people.
One person believes in Social Security.
So one person believes in, you know, we should give money to pay for people who are less fortunate.
And the other person's like, no, I'm more of a free market person.
I think, you know, people should, that shouldn't happen.
So why shouldn't those two people both get what they want?
Why should we force, if the Democrats get in,
why should we force Social Security on the Republicans if they don't believe in it?
So you could just all live amongst each other.
And if you're a Democrat, you kind of, you're in the Democrat pool online.
online so you do pay it but you can't take out if you're if you're then uh if you're on the other
side and you're not paying you can't take it out if you see what i mean he's trying to solve the
problem of democracy which basically means that if you lose like you can be disenfranchised as
49.9 oh no no sorry that's wrong you can be disenfranchised like in the uk at our last election
I think the government won on 20% of the vote, 20% of the kind of people that live in the country.
That's a terrible system.
Well, a representative democracy, which is sort of the democracy that we have in the West.
I mean, I would say there's certainly question marks whether a representative democracy is the right way to govern.
because you're essentially now electing a group of people to make all the decisions for you.
And maybe when you were a small, when you were a small country, maybe that made a lot of sense.
But now if you have a country of three, four hundred million people and four people now make every single decision for you,
maybe it's time to change that.
I mean, I think a lot of people have written about this and this is an interesting topic.
But I do think that because now we have the ability, because we have technology, everyone has a phone,
things like voting on individual matters, individual things, it's just a lot easier.
And so why not have people vote on specific issues that are probably more meaningful for them?
I guess the UK tried it, I think with Brexit.
I mean, Brexit was an individual referendum, right?
It was a one policy referendum.
Yeah, and I think the pushback on that would be mostly it's none of most people's business.
Well, like, you know, like, what do you know about?
What do I know about, like, whether we should leave the EU or not?
Yeah, I've got a personal opinion on it, but I don't run a country.
I've got absolutely no idea.
So I find referendums a little bit stupid.
it you know like i one of the guys i spoke to uh last on this podcast just yesterday they it's um
patrick hibbert who's making veritas villages they have a they have a system which is like a
dow but they have waited they have waited voting so you get so within their community it's not quite
been implemented yet they're just making it now because they wanted to shift put it onto the
Bitcoin network. But you say you get 100 votes a year, and you can choose where you put those votes.
So throughout the year, the kind of homeowners will vote on things like, do we want to build this?
Are we going to allow chickens? Or roosters? Are we going to? And you can choose how much you vote.
So you could vote. If you don't care much, you could not even vote. If you care a bit, you could
vote one of your votes. If it's an issue for you that really matters, you could put 60 votes in,
you know and that way but then you'd have less votes to vote on other things so you have to
think about this because at the end of the year you get you reset back to another 100 votes or
whatever it is you know and i like a system like that a little bit more because the one vote per
person thing is a i mean i don't i don't even vote i don't think my vote does anything i i'm not
i'm not under any illusions that me voting matters i think when i when i've ever voted in the past
it was either cope or just me wanting to make myself feel better right fuck you yeah like you
know which i did in the referendum right i wanted i i wanted to decentralize everything so i voted
against you know the eu but what what did you do nothing it's just like i just felt better the next
day when i saw them squirming in their seats going oh shit we lost you know um but but yeah
So how do you test them out then?
Like what's the methodology for testing out something like that?
Yeah, so our methodology is I kind of see ourselves as an action-oriented think tank in that sense.
I don't like the word think tank, but we take action.
So we build things, we put them out in the world, and then we see how it performs, and that's how we learn.
And so the last experiment we did was we built a digital country.
And we put it out in the world.
We did some media campaigns.
And 100,000 people wanted to be part of this virtual nation.
No location?
No location.
Completely virtual.
Okay.
So the idea was, can you build a country with everything in it except the land?
and so that was the experiment.
And you got 100,000 sign-ups?
Yeah, and we issued 50,000 passports.
People came from every country of the world.
There were Palestinians in there, there were Israelis in there,
there were people from every country of the world,
and we ended up having 2,000 ambassadors
that set up their own embassies around the world,
and we did this in a span of six months.
Did you take it to anywhere?
Because that's a tour de force.
It's a tour de force.
I mean, you know, like digital nomads dream of this.
Because if they get enough people, they can go to governments and say,
look, I could potentially bring 5,000 people into your country.
Give us a good deal.
That's right.
And especially the baseline first principles is
if 80% of government services can be done virtually,
maybe maybe an entity that's a virtual entity can provide the services so that was the experiment
and it was a very very interesting experiment 50 000 citizens and um so that draper nation that
was draper nation okay we called it draper nation but you know we want to do a lot of these experiments
so there were some some very key takeaways that i had from that experiment the main takeaway
way for me was, wow, it is actually possible. People are interested in becoming part of these
types of experiments. And so then hence, I was thinking about, okay, if we were to redo this
again, how would we do it? And it occurred to me that maybe there are nations that exist today that
don't have their own land. So for instance, Tibet is a very interesting example, right? Tibet,
they have history, a language, they used to have land, but they will never have land ever again,
it's just not possible, but they have a culture. They have a religion, culture, diaspora,
they have an economy. What if you were to take Tibet and put it on the cloud,
create a country called Tibet, but there's no land,
but it's Tibetans, and you have government services
that you provide to citizens of this e-Tibet.
And then this-
Wait a minute, like what?
Okay, so imagine you go to eattibet.com.
Yeah.
And there is healthcare, there's insurance, there's pension,
there's a central bank that you pay into that pays you.
There is a voting system, there is licenses,
home ownership licenses, driving licenses.
This is similar to what I was talking about, actually.
So, for example, sorry to butt in, say it was Tibet,
which is a really good example because Tibetans live all over the place in
China but also in northern India and stuff so you could vote on something
like we're all gonna do this and it would span borders that's right and but
they would all act as a as a whole in a sense that's right so the voting is one
piece an important piece but I think the more important piece for me is you could
create an economy for Tibetans that is cross-border you could have digital
services is my mind is just really because I'm thinking you basically can redefine borders at
will that's right right so with Draper Nation the people who came in were very like startup people
because that's the business that we had built before but I feel people like a diaspora like
the Tibetans would be a very interesting good use case or let's say let's take the Kurds you know
there's Kurds everywhere they don't have their own land but there's millions of them and so if you
had a Kurdistan on the cloud, you could potentially build an economy for them. So this is, and the
other thought that I had was, there are digital nations today, we just don't call them that. So
for instance, Google could be a country, right? They have employees, they have special perks and
services that provide to their citizens or their employees. They have embassies around the world.
They have trade agreements. We just don't call them trade agreements. They have all the components
of a country, but it's a corporate entity. So a multinational corporation, in a way, is a nation.
It's probably more powerful as well.
In some cases, Apple is probably more powerful than most countries in the world,
in that sense. So I think the idea of a digital country, a digital nation,
sounds far-fetched, but I have an itch to kind of explore that.
Is that, I mean, I haven't dived deep into Balaji's stuff, but is that essentially a network
state or is that different in some way? Is the network state just the kind of community side of
it? Yeah, so I think there's some parallels, and there's some components of it. Though I think
Balaji's, by the way, I love what he's doing. And recently, I hosted the whole network state crew
in our office in Singapore. And I love what they're doing. And but I think Balaji's concept
is essentially, that it's going to be groups of people who just network together. But I think the
idea of a digital nations, it takes it to the next level, which where you're saying you can actually
create a nation that is sits on the cloud but it provides all the basic services that a government
would do i mean for instance you know that tim tim draper usually says this and i'm still trying
to understand it but he he says that a government is essentially a form of insurance in some
capacity it's a form of insurance so as as a british citizen if you're something happens to
somewhere you can kind of count on your government to well I don't count on my
government anymore but I know what you're saying right it's a form of
insurance so one of the experiments that I would like to do and we're sort of
researching this is you know can we build some sort of an insurance product
let's call it a universal earned income some sort of insurance product that that
can be sold and can be bought by by citizens so these are all the
experiments that we try to do hmm I don't know you probably don't know about
this but it's an interesting experiment you know what liberal and is yeah yeah
vit vit oh you met vit right here's my interesting take on the evolution of
liberal and because liberal and started with the idea of a physical piece of
of land. Gornushiga it's called. It's that little, you don't need to know why, but it's a bit of
unclaimed land. And whenever they go to that bit of unclaimed land, they always have hassle
because it's, it's contentious. So the next thing they did was they bought a bit of land
in Serbia, which is nearby, which isn't contentious. It's just like buying a property.
and they used it as a base to be, you know,
where they could base themselves
because basing themselves in what they call Liberland
is just too much hassle
because the police come on and kick them off
and all this kind of stuff.
And then slowly but surely,
the bit of land that they chose in Serbia,
this is kind of like lots of Liberlanders are living there.
You know, like, wait a minute.
So, and then you get Liberland.
Liberland is also an online community.
That's right.
And you get Liberlanders grouping together in other countries.
And suddenly you start realising, well, hold a minute.
The place we have the most hassle is that bit of land that we're trying to sort of like terraform.
Everywhere else people get left alone, but we're still Liberland.
We're still Liberlanders, you know.
And I find that really interesting because, you know, there's some truth in it.
Sure, they want sovereignty, which is the hardest ask in this business that we're in.
The hardest ask is complete sovereignty.
But they've got quite a lot as well.
And I think I have only just noticed it.
I've only just started realizing it.
I think they probably realized it a bit a while ago.
But I've only just pieced it all together because I went there recently and I was sat in Serbia, surrounded by Liberland, was in this lovely place.
And I was thinking, this is Liberland.
Right Right So it very interesting And I not I mean I don know whether you kind of worked out the free cities ecosystem but the network state people aren very well represented here We not really a network state type of thing we more like a kind of bricks and mortar you know governance
type of we're not we're not massively into the online bit yeah so yesterday i had this reflection
that because the network state community you know i'm close to them and i live in singapore which is
the network schools across the street.
And I recently housed that community in our office.
And the reflection I had was,
so the free cities community seems very much more buttoned up
and more pragmatic, right?
It's like real estate, free cities, development, SEZs, right?
Very, you need lawyers, you need bankers,
like you need some proper buttoned up like endeavors, right?
Yes.
That seems like free cities.
And then network state or network state community, there's a lot more dreamers, you know, young dreamers who want to do pop-up cities and they love the idea of buildings, decentralized nodes and all of that.
But they're usually a lot more younger, a lot more tech-oriented, software-oriented, and a lot more idealistic.
But there's a convergence in between where you have a group of people who are a bit of both.
And I think I fall into that category.
I would say that as well, yeah.
And there were some people that I met who were at the Network State Conference, and they were here.
So I think that middle conversions is actually a very interesting group of people because you have to be a dreamer and do unreasonable things, but you also need to be pragmatic.
And so I think that that middle group of people are people that I think are going to do some very interesting things.
Yeah, I think I'd agree with you there.
I think I've come from the Free Cities end of the pie chart for sure.
I came in that way.
Because there's a lot of things that delineate those two groups.
Even like Bitcoiners are almost exclusively on the FreeCity side.
And on the other side, you get blockchainers.
Yeah.
And they don't mix very well.
In all honesty, we don't mix very well.
In fact, I was telling Vit, and he was kind of taken aback.
One of the learnings I had from launching this digital country was you actually don't want to use the blockchain.
Great, mate.
I'm going to clip that.
Well, because we use the blockchain.
Which blockchain?
So we built our passport system.
We built it on base, on top of base, which is an EVM compatible chain.
And we use fire blocks for our infrastructure and so we outsource the safety and security to fire blocks
Which is a great company and we launched this past passport system. It's a nightmare
So you saying that just a database just use a normal database kind of thing. Yeah, well, I say use Bitcoin for money
so that is a blockchain but just use Bitcoin for money and for
transactions like databases for this just use dude
the Bitcoiners are going to love you.
We've been saying that for years.
Yeah, just use Bitcoin.
You don't need a blockchain for any of this.
You don't need your own token.
And I know Vit is launching his own,
he has his own token, et cetera.
And I get the desire to do it.
And it's, so I was surprised to learn
because I thought, okay, we need our own token.
We need to have blockchain to power
like all the transactions.
but the learnings was very clear you actually don't want to do it and so i was telling i was
trying to tell that hey like this was my experience you shouldn't use the block you know don't do on
token just just use a database and use bitcoin for payments but i think he's gone down that road
i grilled him on it the other day again i always do whenever anyone uses a blockchain i will always
fight the Bitcoin a corner, which is blockchains are for money.
You know, that's the use case.
That's right.
Don't, because anything else that you do doesn't make sense
because it exists in the digital world.
Like if you're using NFTs for your land, it's just an NFT.
There's no proof that that's connected with the land.
Those things kind of don't work.
And also, you know, every blockchain except Bitcoin is attackable quite easily.
So you're not even getting a kind of foolproof, decentralized way of doing stuff.
Well, all the tokens, they're sitting on AWS.
Yes.
That just is a reality.
They're sitting in a centralized server, all of them.
And so it's, you know, after 17 years, I think it's become clear that there's a clear winner
off the blockchain and there's no second winner it's there's one winner and everything else is
like so much behind then why not just use that as the money and then the rest is just community
building i mean that's essentially it you're bringing people together and hopefully you all
do great fun things together and and have some sort of a some sort of a identity that you can
all rally towards but essentially that's really it in terms of nation building um so that anyways
i was trying to explain that to him but well vit vit basically came up with the like he's a he's a
bitcoin or two i mean they've got a massive bitcoin treasury and they they have every time
they generate money they put it into the treasury some of it as a bitcoin as well but he he kind of
had this economic idea to do it this way he you know i mean what what what gives those blockchains
a bad idea a bad impression is when people just raise using them and and then just sell back into
the market and they go to zero and that happens thousands and thousands of times it's a game and
and by the way through our fund we've invested in a lot of you know these projects and and
Tim Draper has invested in a lot of these projects as well even though Bitcoin is our core principle In the venture business you want to experiment you want to try all the stuff So we have invested
in all kinds of tokens and all of that. And I think it's fun to sort of see where it goes,
like give it a chance, like try it out. But I think it's a game. And the game is,
there's, there's some currents in the world, there's some energies in the world that's pursuing
tokens and and tokens are a trillion dollar market um outside of bitcoin right so the whole
token market is 3.5 trillion dollars and a trillion of that is token so there's a lot of money in in
and so and the game is you put something out people invest in it you sell it back so it's a
game and i think it's a fun game i actually think it's it's entertainment it's just it's all it is
entertainment. I don't, I agree with you, but I would say you're quite rare in thinking it's a
game. I think a lot of people think they're buying. I mean, I remember, you know, the big
burst of new tokens in 2017, wasn't it? I remember believing a lot of that stuff and thinking,
you know, yeah, this is, you know, and wanting to know what was new and what was out there.
But when you watch them all trend to zero in Bitcoin terms after that, and you realize that this is an IPO, this is an IPO process.
This is how you generate money to start a business.
So as long as you can convince people the business idea is good, they will buy your token.
And then you already hold half the supply.
So then you start selling it back to the market.
But meanwhile, the whole thing's trending to zero.
And I think the extreme is meme coins.
It's like, can I get in and can I get out?
Right, yeah, maybe.
But if you're a meme coin trader, you're degenerate, basically, aren't you?
You're just into gambling and having fun and stuff.
But the whole way that tokens were marketed was definitely not that.
It was definitely these things are changing the world.
Blockchains are going to change the world.
And a blockchain is changing the world.
It's the money blockchain.
It's the Bitcoin blockchain.
That's right.
But all the other blockchains are more efficient as just a normal database.
You don't really need to do it on a blockchain.
I think maybe in some cases, like a lot of the communities that I visited
have implemented blockchain voting, for example,
because you can kind of design it quite easily.
And it does give you the option to sort of like use a blockchain.
But you can design the same system.
No, the voting on the blockchain.
so we built a system
that people can vote on the blockchain
it's just not necessary
in fact it incurs more complexity
more costs
and you don't
it's just not necessary
it gets in the way of what you're really trying to do
and you know
I think the aha moment for me
was because I launched
NFTs, we launched tokens
we've done all of that
and because we've done it
we realized that it is
it's it's if you look at it as an entertainment value right how is it any more different than
someone watching netflix or you know binge watching a tv show that they love it's just
it's entertainment and i i think the newer generation people in this you know who are 17
16 18 i think they kind of see it as a game and as entertainment and and so the from a perspective
of entertainment it's kind of it can be fun for the older generation it's not amused yeah what's
disappointing though is that if you look at the like like take the example of you know meme coins
yes i see a lot of youngsters like trying their luck on the meme coins but i think that's sad
because they're being compelled to do that because of the way we live at these days and the systems
we live under because they could be long-term thinking they could be putting that money into
bitcoin for the long term and in 20 years they'll they will have achieved something whereas when
they're meme coining it's like one percent of them that end up up but it's the mindset and the
mindset is i'm fucked i'm 18 years old i'm fucked i'm gonna try and win a hundred grand on a meme
coin rather than being able to think long term and going do you know what i'm just gonna bit by
bit save for the future in a bit of Bitcoin on the side and that's that's a great strategy you know
well I that that time in history has sailed and you know I always tell my wife and I look at her
parents and they're the perfect example of what used to work and what doesn't work today with
what you're saying. So my my wife's parents are Dutch boomers. They had very they worked themselves,
but nothing fancy they had they owned a campsite in Frigeland and they had their own B&B and very
basic jobs they did their entire lives. But they were able to buy a house, two houses, they're able
to save money they're able to sell send their three kids to great universities and they lived
amazing middle class beautiful lives that is no more and the reality is in today's system
and it's in china it's in the us it's in europe if you're 18 19 20 coming out of university
that aspiration is not a reality and that's just the that's just the facts and so when i look at
the world and i look at the history of the world i don't really see the world as cyclical
and i don't really see the world as a as a as a linear progression it's ocean currents right
currents come together they become a tsunami they become a hurricane and there's not much you can do
when certain currents come together So I think we live in this turbulent currents where the middle class post War Two system is just no more and you can go back So there this is why I think to your point entertainment value of meme coining is it just it a reality of life And it very unfortunate But this is this is a new world I suppose
yeah I do agree with you Vikram look I'm loving this conversation I could go on for a lot longer
but as you know I'm on a real tight schedule here we're at one hour 52 minutes and I've got
eight minutes till the next guy comes in um and I'm sure there's tons of stuff we haven't spoken
about already because we only just touched on actually what you do after the big Nagaland rant
but I did enjoy that by the way that's really I've never spoken to anyone about Nagaland I don't
I think, except in lectures and in presentations and stuff.
So it's really nice to chat.
But let's finish on that.
That was a slightly negative tone.
I'd like to end on something positive.
So maybe bring your most positive take to the table.
And this is why I love what I do,
because I think we can make a big change in the way the system works.
And I think the way it's going to, where the needle is going to move is not in trying conventional things.
I think you're going to have to do experiments that are just far out.
It's just unreasonable.
It's the only way to try to build a system where people can have more opportunities.
And this is why I think the idea of a digital parallel nationhood just creates so much more opportunities for people all around the world
who can tap into this economy that happens virtually.
That idea for me is if it works,
and there's a lot of ifs, it probably won't work.
But if it does work, it will change the way we organize people in the world.
I think we change the way economies are built.
And I think it will change the way people in the future will have opportunities.
communities so that that's that's why I do you know what I'm doing I mean I would say it already
has worked I wouldn't say if it works I think online communities are the proof that it works
every single person I work with currently I met at a in a digital community and sometimes we come
together sometimes we don't but we're we're we're for all intents and purposes we have a very small
micronation of people i think that might even be the one of the best applications of the internet
is connecting people it might be i mean it's worked it's worked on so many levels already even
dating apps is there you know so many of these applications are about putting human beings
together that's right um i know we sometimes veer in too much into the digital side but i would say
that the product's been proven.
It's happened.
And I love the idea of,
I think Tibet's a great idea.
I don't know how you could ever get everyone
in Tibet on board with that.
Well, so we did a hackathon in Bangalore.
And I wanted to do it in India
because Dhammashala is in India.
And you, you know, I put it online to say,
hey, we're doing a hackathon to build a digital Tibet.
The amount of engineers that came for the hackathon
from all over India.
They just showed up.
And we did a full weekend hackathon,
and it's all publicly accessible on GitHub.
All the code is open source.
And we have 12 projects.
And people built.
People built a central bank.
People built a jobs portal.
People built a voting system.
And it's all there on GitHub.
So the tools have already been built.
It's just a matter of not convincing
some Tibetan authority to say,
hey let's let's give it your blessing why do you have to why why do you need someone's blessing
really think about it especially if it's young tibetans i mean there's no there's no there's no
reason it'd be great to be to get a blessing but in in many ways i feel like the current power
structures don't understand this stuff what might be better is to present to them 50 000 young
tibetans already in a network and say hey look what we've done because that's basically how
how you do things these days and you don't ask people to build products and stuff you know
but i i don't know i don't know i think it's always good to everything we do is in is in
corroboration with with with governments but there's nothing wrong but a lot of what we do
isn't in a way if i'm planning something out i'm not asking i'm not looking for validation before
I've created the product, you know.
I mean, I know we have to end here,
but the next experiment I want to do
is I want to build a parallel America on the cloud.
And I'm calling it e-America.
And I want to build a United States that's on the cloud
and anyone can join as long as you agree to the constitution.
And it'll have all the services.
It'll have registry of company, pay your taxes,
all the government stuff it will be there everything except land and will it have the
actual constitution on there you mean it's just going to mimic the whole it'll be a parallel
united states wow that's that's the next experiment that i want to do wow welcome that's it's great
good luck with that that that's something i would not be able to wrap my head around that's the
silicon valley side of you coming out i don't think big like that i think much smaller i think
in small steps i could never imagine right i'm going to just create america on the cloud you know
that wouldn't work for me but it obviously works for you so good luck mate and it's been great
talking to you yeah i'd love to do this again i think i think i feel like there's a lot of places
we didn't go and and it's just pure time constraints yeah um thanks for having me
yeah many many many thanks for coming and good luck with absolutely everything
Thank you.