Stranded Technologies Podcast

Allison Duettmann is the iconic President of The Foresight Institute, the world's premier futurist think tank enabling science & entrepreneurship at the frontiers of technology.The conversation starts with Foresight's mission and strategy to avoid hype cycles - focusing on what's next, not current.The focus areas have particular learning and development trees:Intelligent Cooperation (Economics, Crypto, Incentive Design)Molecular Machines (Programmable Nanotechnology)Neurotechnology (incl. Brain Emulation)Longevity BiotechnologySpace ExplorationExistential HopeWe'll explore Foresight's history and Allison's own thinking, why she is hopeful towards the future, while closely monitoring risks.The Foresight Institute has been central to the themes of this podcast, with affiliated scholars such as Robin Hanson, J. Storrs Hall, Eli Dourado, featured.Thus, if you like this podcast you definitely need to get involved with the Foresight Institute. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.infinitacitytimes.com

This is the recording of a webinar about Ciudad Morazán, the charter city in Choloma, Honduras - not to be confused with Prospera, another Honduran charter city.Recorded on-site, this episode is a deep dive into one of the most interesting developments in city governance in modern history.Located in one of the most dangerous regions in the world when it comes to crime, Morazán provides a beacon of stability, safety, and affordable housing.It also runs its internal economy 100% on crypto, having developed its stablecoin (eLPS), based on the Honduran currency - the lempira.Founded by the Italian industrialist Massimo Mazzone, Ciudad Morazán is located in a Honduran ZEDE, a free zone with the highest degree of legal autonomy in the world.So Mazzone: "I want to show that liberty has the most impact on poor people."We couple this deep dive into Morazán with a background in free cities and the Honduran ZEDE legal system that allows this governance innovation.Chapters:00:04:46 - 00:11:14 Introduction to Bootstrap City by Alex Ugorji00:11:29 - 00:36:49 Economist Vera Kichanova about Free Private Cities Worldwide00:37:43 - 00:57:18 Prospera Major Jorge Colindres about Honduran ZEDEs01:02:13 - 01:46:59 Ciudad Morazan's Founder Massimo Mazzone Speaks01:46:59 - 02:03:10 Biographer Joyce Brand on Spencer Heath02:14:11 - 02:52:23 Alex Ugorji on Doing Business in MorazanTelegram Group for Bootstrap City - the initiative to promote awareness about Ciudad Morazán: https://t.me/bootstrapcity This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.infinitacitytimes.com

Trey Goff is coming back on to continue the previous discussion (Episode 9) about Balaji Srinivasan's book "The Network State" (TNS).This is the right time to dig deeper for two reasons: 1) TNS has increasingly become a meme in crypto and technology circles, 2) Balaji is commanding a lot of attention for #BitSignal, a bet on US dollar hyperinflation + Bitcoin rising to 1m.Trey & Niklas have become friends through Prospera, the modern charter city on Roatan, Honduras, and the zero-to-one "network state / not a network state."In addition, Trey has a new role as Co-Founder of Learn Arena, a competitive learning platform, and we'll discuss how Learn Arena will fix a frailing education system.Here is how the discussion unfolds:Trey iterates that the Prospera model follows many of the same schools of thought that Balaji Srinivasan follows in TNS, though with one critical difference: with Prospera, Trey has first-hand experienced the role of politics as a practical matter when it comes to becoming a territorial jurisdiction. Politics is hard but unavoidable.We update some of our learnings about regulations and what we can realistically achieve by upgrading governance, e.g. in the world of medical innovation and finance.Talking finance leads us to Balaji's Bet: we think Balaji is directionally correct in his analysis of a brittle US financial system, albeit we withhold judgment on whether or not the timeline will be correct - all of us have to assign our estimated probabilities.It is certainly the leading question of the time: we think a Bitcoin Standard world is more desirable, but there are better and worse ways to get there.For example, we are skeptical about achieving Bitcoinization by top-down decree like by President Nayib Bukele in the country of El Salvador.If one thing is certain, it's that the world has a lot of uncertainty. And navigating this uncertainty in finance will have massive implications for your personal wealth.There is no better way to navigate uncertainty than self-education.We discuss the US education system and its failings: Trey presciently identifies a core problem - school and education are both too easy and too hard.By introducing gaming and competition to set young people on alternative career tracks, Trey aims to revolutionize education with Learn Arena.Trey and Niklas have a lot to talk about - this won't be the last time!Join us for upcoming events: https://lu.ma/infinitaInfinita Website: https://infinitavc.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.infinitacitytimes.com

Have you wondered what Próspera is all about?Start with the founders. Gabriel Delgado Ayau is the co-founder and chief development officer (CDO) of the zero-to-one modern startup city in Honduras.This is an extensive episode where we talk about Gabriel's past in Guatemala as a serial entrepreneur that founded 17 startups, learning about the challenges for entrepreneurs in Central America, and how his grandfather's teachings showed him a better way - radically improving the institutions towards a free society.We talk about Próspera's founding history, the governance model of radical decentralization and regulatory flexibility combined with insurance risk assessment.First and foremost, Próspera's goal is to propel economic development for Honduras by providing better institutions to live, work and play.Consider this claim: if the bottom 75% of the world would implement the governance of the top 25%, the economic value created would be an additional $100 trillion (!).**In the episode, Gabriel mistakenly says $1tn, the true number is indeed $100tn.And this is not all. The famous blogger Scott Alexander once said:"To my biased eye, Próspera’s institutions aren’t just better than Honduran institutions. They might well be better than the institutions of America, Europe, and the rest of the developed world.Some of their ideas - 3D property rights, modular construction, common law regulatory options, medical reciprocity laws - are genuinely innovative, the first in the world.They’re things that intellectuals have been discussing for decades, and then suddenly some progressive-minded people get jurisdiction to try them out in and see if they work."This episode is an extended riff and deep-dive into this quote and should give any entrepreneur reason to be curious enough.It's almost hard to believe, which is why Gabriel and Niklas call on entrepreneurs to check it out for themselves, by joining the next couple of summits, taking place on the Caribbean paradise island of Roatan.Supercharging Health 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit, April 21-23 on Roatan: https://infinitavc.com/healthbio2023Decentralizing Finance 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit, May 5-7 on Roatan: https://infinitavc.com/defi2023Legal Engineering 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit, May 10-11 on Roatan: https://lu.ma/legalengineering2023 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.infinitacitytimes.com

Joey Krug is the co-CIO at Pantera Capital, the first U.S. institutional asset manager focused exclusively on blockchain technology, with 4.1bn assets under management.Joey is also the co-founder of the Forecast Foundation, contributing to the development of Augur (a decentralized oracle and prediction market protocol).Joey is a pioneer in the world of blockchain finance, and I want to take this opportunity to discuss two leading questions: how might the final takeover of defi (decentralized finance) over tradfi (traditional finance) look like?What are the barriers we need to overcome?As the co-CIO of the largest institutional crypto investor in the world and a private angel investor, few people have traversed the two worlds more than Joey.This gives Joey a unique set of sometimes surprising insights.For example, the liquidity of token investments is a double-edged sword. Token investments provide investors with more flexibility but investments with more extended holdup periods tend to perform better.Pantera's most successful investments were from their venture fund.The big win for defi would be to do away with the bloat of large banks: real estate footprint, manual transaction processing, and regulatory compliance.We discuss regulatory compliance extensively. The problem in tradfi is that legal norms evolve around the assumption of centralized entities developing regulations, but many of the necessary guardrails can instead be written in code.The problem with tradfi is not lack of financial products. Many traditional financial products, like mortgages or stock market exchanges, do make sense to Joey.What defi can instead do is participation in the system can be more global, more 24/7 (although that's not only an advantage), and more efficient.One of the key things to get right to make defi more available is to make it more user-friendly to the average consumer - a lot of work remains to be done.Infinita Website: https://infinitavc.com/Upcoming Conferences in Prospera: https://lu.ma/infinita This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.infinitacitytimes.com

Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University, and a research fellow with the Mercatus Center.Alex is one of the world’s best teachers of economics and reaching a large, worldwide audience as the cofounder of Marginal Revolution University and the popular Marginal Revolution blog together with Tyler Cowen.This episode is an intellectual journey that discovers insights that can be used by entrepreneurs and city developers.Alex has been teaching economics for decades, so we start the episodes with our favorite concepts.We talk about the Baumol effect that Alex uses to explain the now infamous price chart: why is it that some goods have become much cheaper (e.g. consumer electronics), while housing, education and healthcare have increased?This informs the thesis of the podcast, which assumes regulatory and political sclerosis are the key obstacles.The Baumol effect pushes back against this explanation.The Baumol effect instead offers a more long-run focused macroeconomic explanation: the success of technology adoption in some areas must necessarily correspond to relatively higher costs in other sectors.The discovery of this effect, however, could be a necessary, not a sufficient explanation. Niklas points at the non-linearity and the many examples of regulation being specific, non-macro factors with a large impact.Alex and Niklas end up agreeing that overregulation is a large part of the problem.We further talk about economic insights such as prediction markets or dominant assurance contracts that entrepreneurs can apply in practice.A problem in the governance of public goods and regulation, however, is that the laws of society are hundreds of years old, and little new innovation is taking place.However, private cities and special economic zones such as Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Dubai have shaken up the field in the second half of the 20th century. Alex talks especially about the lessons of Gurgaon, a private city in India.Gurgaon has been in many ways remarkably successful, but it also had experienced problems funding large public goods such as sewage and electricity.Alex’s recommendation to new city or governance startups like Prospera, Ciudad Morazan or the Catawba DEZ is to think of city development as a “dance between centralization and decentralization”.Towards the end, we take a deep dive into dominant assurance contracts as a mechanism for public goods funding - an idea we could use in city development, but also for venture capital and startup funding.You can help us apply these insights in practice, check out the upcoming builder-focused conferences in Prospera:Supercharging Health 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit, April 21-23 on Roatan: https://infinitavc.com/healthbio2023Decentralizing Finance 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit, May 5-7 on Roatan: https://infinitavc.com/defi2023 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.infinitacitytimes.com

Alicia Nahmad is a born entrepreneur, starting in the construction industry before doing her PhD. Now with The Circular Factory, she is translating advanced technology into real-world progress in the built environment.The Circular Factory is a kaleidoscopic and ambitious startup that aims to fix the construction industry through on-site construction mini-factories with software-driven robotic arms, 3D printing and sourcing local material and labor.Alicia talks to Niklas about how the construction industry has turned from a proud profession of highly skilled craftspeople into an old-fashioned industry that lost its reputation and missing on advances in the digital world.Construction has lots of problems, from a prevalent waterfall model of construction leading to cost overruns and time delays, lack of skilled talent, lengthy permitting, and regulations that make introducing technology harder.Alicia is set out to disrupt this industry with The Circular Factory. The first near-shoring mini-factory is based on the Caribbean island of Roatan, in the modern charter city of Prospera, where Niklas and Alicia will be neighbors.We talk about how having an audacious goal such as building a new city that creates shared prosperity can be a catalyst for change by invigorating an entrepreneurial spirit and community, as well attract a local labor pool for upskilling.The Circular Factory will open in mid-2023, and Infinita VC will soon announce a conference to invite builders, architects, and entrepreneurs to visit Prospera, celebrate the soft opening, and help us build a modern city.Follow Infinita VC to stay tuned: https://linktr.ee/infinitavcIf you are an entrepreneur and seek a community of techno-optimists, join us for upcoming conferences in Prospera, the startup city:Supercharging Health 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit, April 21-23 on Roatan.Decentralizing Finance 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit, May 5-7 on Roatan. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.infinitacitytimes.com

Does this sound straight out of a science-fiction novel? That's because it is.In "Termination Shock", Neil Stephenson described a near-future earth where climate change has significantly altered human society and follows the attempts of a businessman using solar geoengineering to cool the planet.Luke Iseman, a hardware entrepreneur and solarpunk, read the book and dug into Stephenson's research on solar geoengineering.To his amazement, he found that it was possible and nobody is trying it out!Luke founded make sunsets to experiment with balloons sending sulfur dioxide particles that reflect sunlight into the stratosphere, effectively replicating the process that volcanoes have done for millions of years to cool the planet.In this episode, we're joined by regulatory hacker Eli Dourado to better understand this powerful technology that could help humanity achieve climate mastery.Major innovations often start with hobbyists, tinkerers, and true believers, as Clayton Christenson's "The Innovator's Dilemma" found out. They are not taken seriously by the mainstream for a long time. While starting on a small scale, Luke's experiments have nevertheless engendered controversy in the scientific community.We talk about why science is disconnected from promoting real-world innovation by focusing too much on analysis instead of action and real-world experimentation.The episode is a fascinating journey that helps us better understand the challenges faced by entrepreneurs on the frontiers of science and technology.They are not hailed while they are doing the work, they instead face skepticism often from powerful groups - partly for good reasons as new technology never comes in a mature form, but also partly because incumbents fear for their status.As a result, we learn that entrepreneurs need to build a community of true believers around them on a mission against a hostile mainstream culture.If you are an entrepreneur and seek a community of techno-optimists, join us for upcoming conferences in Prospera, the startup city:Supercharging Health 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit, April 21-23 on Roatan.Decentralizing Finance 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit, May 5-7 on Roatan. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.infinitacitytimes.com

David A. Johnston is the Chief Strategy Officer at DLTx, the first public tech company run by decentralists who believe the future will be built on open public blockchains, owned and operated by their users.David is a major crypto OG, he was the chairman of the board of Mastercoin and facilitated the world’s first ICO (initial coin offering), he was one of the first people to analyze the Ethereum white paper.This episode is to understand the thinking that leads David to his current beliefs, to give us a better sense of how we can build a more decentralized financial system, a more decentralized “web3” or decentralized everything for that matter.David explains the "tokenization of everything" logic, and how it comes from his insights into economics and libertarian philosophy.One of his core insights in 2013 was that the network effects of technology companies are specialized. Arguing against others who believed Bitcoin would become the be-all-end-all, David foresaw and shaped the emergence of decentralized applications (dApps), before Ethereum even launched.The train of decentralization is now in motion and unstoppable. It will eventually lead to all assets having an on-chain record of transactions and ownership.This new decentralized finance system is orders of magnitude cheaper, faster, and more efficient than the traditional system that requires lawyers and intermediaries.Governments and legislators, consequently, fight against this new system that is threatening to upend their privileges. The United States has become a hostile environment for crypto, which is why David moved to Puerto Rico 3 years ago.Special jurisdictions have been forward-thinking, like Estonia, Switzerland, Portugal or Singapore, and especially Puerto Rico, in attracting the crypto community.Adoption of cryptocurrencies is highest in Nigeria, Vietnam or Argentina.David is quite open that the blockchain movement is on a collision course with nation states, and he would like to see a separation of nation and state.The future might be network nations that are globally distributed, but share an identity, a membership or residency, or a common culture.That is the ultimate end of the decentralization of everything.Join us on May 5-7 the Caribbean island of Roatan for a summit in Prospera and help us build exactly that decentralized future: https://infinitafund.com/defi2023For more information about Infinita, check this Linktree: https://linktr.ee/infinitavc This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.infinitacitytimes.com

Bret is an entrepreneur on a big mission as the CEO of Last Energy, a vertically integrated nuclear-powered electricity provider.Bret aims to create energy superabundance, fix climate change and elevate human potential to unimaginable heights and sees nuclear as the solution.Few if any people in the world have talked to more experts. Bret hosts the "Titans of Nuclear" Podcast, which has a whopping 380 episodes!Bret and Niklas talk about why nuclear has become such a stagnant industry.The history of the industry is, surprisingly, not one mainly driven by fear or public perception. Bret uncovered that the problems of the industry started before Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island were catalyzing fear.Instead, it was utility regulation in the US that incentivized the industry to build bigger and bigger nuclear power plants.The industry itself was selling the argument that nuclear power is dangerous and needs massive amounts of safety, and regulation needs to ensure that.The process known as "regulatory capture" is responsible for nuclear stagnation.Bret systematically debunks misconceptions about nuclear: meltdowns and nuclear radiation are not dangerous at all. Uranium is not a scarce resource - in fact it could power the planet for up to a billion years.However, nuclear energy does have a cost problem. The cost problem is the result of industry stagnation and overregulation, and it needs to be solved.With Last Energy, Bret is super-modularising and vertically integrating the value-creation process. It's not a technical innovation, but a business model innovation: Last energy takes responsibility for all aspects of project development, from conceptual design through operation and maintenance, selling electricity directly to customers through power purchase agreements.Bret expects the first nuclear power plant in 2025 in either the UK, Poland or Romania - European countries with high energy costs or dependence on Russia.If we can solve the energy problem, we can supercharge human progress.Infinita Linktree: https://linktr.ee/infinitavc This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.infinitacitytimes.com