Sovereignty for Sale w/ Atossa Abrahamian

I spoke to Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, an independent journalist and author of The Hidden Globe, about the world of offshore finance, special economic zones, and network states.

We dig into her reporting on a proposed crypto enclave in St. Kitts and Nevis, the history and reality of these zones, and what happens when libertarian ideas about sovereignty and markets collide with real communities pushing back. The network state adjacent project is called Destiny and is being proposed by Olivier Janssens, a wealthy bitcoin tycoon, for the island of Nevis. Locals have felt deceived by its marketing and have even made diss tracks about it.

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Timestamps
00:00 Highlight & Introduction
01:06 Sponsor Break Nym VPN
01:46 Meet the Guest
03:21 Passports and Offshore Worlds
05:56 Nevis Destiny Project Origins
09:40 SEZ Law and Local Backlash
10:39 The Destiny Pitch Video
00:08 Dubai Model and DIFC Courts
22:30 How SEZs Work Historically
28:20 From Factories to Lifestyle Enclaves
29:40 Bioshock and Body Mods
30:40 Managed Zones Not Free Markets
31:28 No Such Thing As Deregulation
32:52 Libertarian Influencers And Roger Ver
35:03 Why Not Just Use SEZs
35:50 Network State Factions And Thiel
38:54 Markets Logic Turns Colonial
42:20 Nevis Pushback And Colonial Memory
44:10 Passports Sovereignty And Mercenary States
47:00 Remote Control Citizenship And Land
48:54 Prospera Compared And Biohacking Drift
53:59 Network School As Adult Summer Camp
56:44 Closing Thoughts And Nevis Diss Track

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

These guys in 2017-ish were just like all out saying we want to purchase sovereignty from a country, we're gonna do it from a country that's indebted. But yeah, this like vision of Dubai like rising up from the desert from nothing, this narrative, which is bullshit because there was kind of a lot going on there before the skyscrapers. This idea that you can create this like world financial center from nothing using just laws and ideas and foreign workers is so appealing. And I understand why it's appealing. There's no such thing as deregulation because, like, actually, you're just replacing some rules with other rules. And this is what these guys want to do. They don't want to live in a lawless society, they love rules, they just want the rules to be their rules to benefit them. There are aspects of it that I think are funny, like it's basically a longevity cult. The way that he tries to rectify this is through some, you know, seasteading and prospera and like these essentially what amounts to lifestyle experiments with politics.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

That's okay, but don't impose this on the people who need this.

SPEAKER_03 1:06

This episode is sponsored by NIM, the world's most private VPN that protects your internet traffic and metadata. Unlike traditional VPNs, NIM uses a decentralized mixnet to scramble your internet data, hiding who you're talking to, when, and how often. You can switch between full mixnet mode for maximum anonymity or a faster VPN mode for everyday use. Pay in crypto or fiat, and even your payment stays anonymous thanks to ZK-powered anonymous credentials. Take back control of your online life at NIM.com. Sign up today using the code BlockchainSocialist and get an extra month for free. Hi everybody, my name is Josh Radavial. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist podcast. And today I have Atosa Arexia Abrahamian. She is an independent journalist who writes about the cracks in the nation-state system, a former editor at The Nation and Al Jazeera America. Abrahamian's reporting and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, The Intercept, and many other applications. And she is also the author of The Hidden Globe, How Wealth Hacks the World, which came out, I believe, a little over a year ago. And she recently wrote a piece that I found really interesting called Dubai the Caribbean with Crypto, Locals Aren't Buying It, which was published in the New York Times. That is about a specific project that a man named Olivia Jansens has been pursuing in St. Kitts and Nevis, which was a really, really interesting read. Basically, it got me back on my network state shit, and now I am it fired me up again to begin the criticisms of of all this type of stuff and look a bit deeper into what are the kind of different attempts that these guys are kind of doing. But before we get into that piece, maybe I think it would be really good, Atasa, if you want to maybe tell us a bit of like what got you into this story. And because your your background is really interesting because what what I read is you have quite a few passports. You have an experience like very international, four, which is like very, it's very rare for me to find someone who has more passports than I do, more citizenships than I do. I have three. So yeah, so I'm super interested if you want to lay the groundwork and then we can get into the specifics of the Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_02 3:21

So I am, you know, the reason I have all these passports is I'm a UN kid of Iranians. And so if you're from certain parts of the world, like you, you kind of collect you, you know, you collect them like Pokemon, like you can never have enough passports. And I think what we're seeing in the Middle East now, not to mention what we saw with COVID, et cetera, really bears that out. And it's probably a smart life decision, if not one that's available to most people. So I grew up in Geneva, um, which seems like a very, very boring place, but it's actually a very fascinating place because it contains kind of every aspect of the global, of the international world on the finance side, on the trading side, on the institutional side of the UN. So that's where I come from. Like that's my country. Um and uh, you know, growing up in this environment, I we got a really big dose of, you know, crunchy, idealistic internationalism without really very much awareness of the forces that really rule the world, which are like financial ones and commercial ones. And I guess I started trying to reconcile these two things. Like, how come the UN is like just steps away from like UBS? Um, how come all of these shipping companies are registered in Switzerland? There's no sea, it's a landlocked. Like, what is going on with all of these funny mailboxes in the old town? And that's kind of where this concept of the hidden globe came from, where you know, a lot of the world we live in is deterritorialized, a lot of it is offshore in some way. And I mean offshore in the broadest way possible, you know. Offshore is uh, yes, it's like a bank account in the Cayman Islands, it's also an immigrant detention center in Noru or El Salvador, you know, as we recently saw. It's the Panama Canal. Like offshore is a really broad category of things that are sort of ripe for exploitation. And the reason I got to Nevis, well, I got to Nevis in in a couple of different ways. My first book is all about passports, it's about the market for citizenship. Basically, lots of countries sell their passports, lots of people buy them, and this has effects on non-billionaires. And we can get into that later. But one of the countries that really pioneered this practice in the early 2000s was St. Kitts in Nevis. It did so with the help of a Swiss entrepreneur. There, again, connections to Switzerland. But basically, I went, I spent some time in St. Kitts and Nevis about a decade ago. Kind of loved the place, especially Nevis, got to know some people there. And then last year, actually, I suppose a friend of the pod, Quinn Slobodian, passed along a message from someone on Nevis saying, hey, this guy is trying to start a resort, a gated community. It's called Destiny. He's like a crypto guy. What's going on? And so Quinn passed this on. Thank you, Quinn. And I immediately recognized what this person was trying to do. So the person is Olivier Jansens. He is a wealthy early Bitcoin and Ethereum adopter. So he made a bunch of money. And then I guess he sold a lot of it from what he has posted. And now his big project is to create a kind of special economic zone on steroids on the island of Nevis. And it's somewhere, I mean, he the inspiration for this thing, if you look at the the the sort of architectural plans, it looks like a resort, you know, it's like kind of futuristic, like kind of whatever thing's sort of round, and there's terraces and infinity pools and all the stuff that you would expect on a Caribbean island. But the more I looked into, you know, what he really wanted, the more it became clear that like this guy was angling for maximum autonomy. He wanted a place where he could make his own rules with his buddies. Not, I'm not saying there's anything necessarily nefarious going on, but he wanted sovereignty. And in and I and I learned that iteration of this was much more open about this search for for sovereignty. He was in business with a fellow named Roger Veer, who I knew because he'd also bought a passport. And these guys in 2017-ish were just like all out saying, we want to purchase sovereignty from a country, we're going to do it from a country that's indebted, we're going to help them pay their debts, and they're going to give us what we want, and it's going to be the first libertarian country. And so all of these like really obvious ideological tropes that you kind of encounter in the network state world or the sort of tech libertarian world, they were just like, yeah, we're going to do it. This is what we want. So that was in 2017. Since then, Roger is out of the picture. He had some troubles with the IRS that he's now resolved. And Jansen's just kept at it with some of the same people, right? Same consultants. If you look at archives of their website, same guys coming up over and over again, but kind of finested into something more palatable that he could pitch to the Norvisian people. Now, unfortunately, the Noresian people caught wind of this in a way that was like not totally transparent at first. What happened was that Jansen set up a company and he hired people and then he needed land, right? He needed to buy land to have his enclave. And to do that, he hired a real estate agent, Sharon Brantley, who is the wife of the leader of Nevis, the premier. They have a kind of an interesting governance system where Nevis writes a lot of its own rules already. And so he got Sharon Brantley on board to go sort of door to door in this area and say, hey, like, are you interested to landowners? Are you interested in selling? We can offer this. Can we sign an agreement whereby in a couple of years you'll sell the land? And some people went for it and a lot of people didn't. You know, they were pretty skeptical, like, what are these guys doing? And there was very little information about who it was, what it was, where these people came from. One person I talked to said, all that we knew is that he was Belgian and wanted of space for friends and family. So this is gone. And then last summer, a piece of legislation makes its way through the St. Kitts and Nevis, the Saint on St. Kitts, the national parliament that allows for the establishment of special economic zones with certain provisions attached. The people that were for it were then they called it the Special Sustainability Zone Act. So it was really kind of greenwashed in this way. And the people that were for it were saying, well, this is gonna create more protections. If they're gonna build it, it has to be in an environmentally friendly way. And the people that were against it were like, what the heck? This is gonna create like a state within a state. That passed the parliament critics say very quickly. And then Jansens and his and his pals started to really, you know, pitch this more openly to the Navesian people and what that looks like.

SPEAKER_03 10:29

Right.

SPEAKER_02 10:30

I'm going on and on. Feel free to cut me off.

SPEAKER_03 10:34

But I mean, I I I I think it's great to have already this high-level summary of like everything, and then we'll get into some of the details.

SPEAKER_02 10:40

Yeah, yeah. And so the this all came to a head in October when Destiny, this LLC, released a video, and it's really quite something.

SPEAKER_03 10:50

It's incredible. Yeah, I think I will include it in the in the recording.

SPEAKER_02 10:55

Like weird crypto videos out there, but this one's pretty intense. It's like more than 15 minutes long, and Jansen's, I mean, his like head, his like disimponied head, is like talking over these landscapes and these beaches, it's very beautiful, and there's this music that sounds like AI Enya. And it's showing images that are also like clearly AI generated of like multiracial families, like enjoying themselves by an infinity pool and taking selfies. It's all very, very weird. And he in this video is just pitching his vision, you know, he's saying that they're gonna invest in infrastructure, which is something that SECs always say and and don't always do, that they're gonna do revenue sharing with the people, that they're gonna make a scholarship fund. And so what emerges is this really weird mix of like super hardcore libertarianism, but also like they the way that they would phrase it is they are creating a nanny state of their own. Because like they want to give money, like they want to do right, right, right. And in fact, this wasn't in the story because it hadn't happened yet. But the latest is that Destiny is is telling the Norvesian people that every single person on the island is gonna get a hundred dollars a month if this gets approved. And so it's like you're gonna create a UBI program, but you're it's it's muddled, it's muddled as calling it out. Um that's I mean, that's funny.

SPEAKER_03 12:27

I think that that's an interesting twist of like now what's funny is like they're doing the thing that I feel like a lot of libertarians do when they like describe the the corruption on the left in like different in different countries and different places. Are you talking about oh, they just give them free money, and here they are, they're just like we're gonna give you free money. Let us do it.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

So it's okay, right? And it and so you know, people who oppose this project are like, what do you try to do? Bribe us, like we're not gonna go for this. What what and how are you even but it's a good deal, it's a good deal. Yeah, and like I guess, you know, sure, I'm sure a hundred bucks a month is nothing to sniff at if you live you know you're Nevis and like fine, but you know, at what cost and what is this gonna create on your island?

SPEAKER_03 13:15

Yeah, I I really want to stress the point, like when I the video is incredible. I mean, it's just it's really it's especially funny for me because I lived in Belgium for like four years, and so I know a lot of I immediately tell he's he's you know Flemish just by his accent is so is so like Flemish, like farmer. It's it's incredible.

SPEAKER_02 13:37

Does it sound really country to you? That's so funny.

SPEAKER_03 13:40

I don't know about country, but just like very like I I I just know so many people who sound like that from living there. I just like worked with a lot of Flemish people. I have no hate towards Flemish people, but they are they are funny sounding when they they speak English sometimes. Some of them have uh the funny accents, and I definitely picked up that accent from living there, to be honest. But uh yeah, I mean it was just like really I don't know to me because Belgium is an interesting country because I I at least my impression of it living there was that it's one of the one of the few European countries that have been able to keep a little bit more of its social democracy in place compared to other ones. It's definitely being eroded away like like everyone else. But I don't know, libertarians from Belgium are like really quite an anomaly for me. Like if there's I think there's something about if you become libertarian, but you grew up in the Nordics, if you grew up in like, you know, these places that have strong social democracy, I think there's something. Yeah, there's something very strange to me about that person.

SPEAKER_02 14:36

I think that probably what happened is that this, you know, this guy was in these circles of of Bitcoin, early Bitcoin, early and like it's in the water, you know. So yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:49

Yeah, I think at at the same time, like in in certain circles in these countries, there are people who are just kind of like America files. Like they're just really into they they look up to America in various ways. If they grew up in Europe, but they like really idolize the US at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 15:02

I think it was just like such a thing where there's the the sort of Dubai is like what we aspire to. And in fact, part of the pitch is like we are gonna have Dubai on the Caribbean or Monaco. That actually he lives in Monaco, so that that's another, I guess, data point.

SPEAKER_04 15:19

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:20

But yeah, this like vision of Dubai like rising up from the desert from nothing, this narrative, which is bullshit because there was kind of a lot going on there before, you know, the skyscrapers. This idea that you can create this like world financial center from nothing using just laws and ideas and foreign foreign slave workers, um, is so appealing. And I understand why it's appealing. And like Dubai gets a lot of hate. I happen to like kind of like it. I think it's really interesting and and kind of, you know, there's a lot of problems, but there's also a lot of interesting and and cool stuff going on there, um, and also money laundering and and dodgy things. But the model for this enclave is the Dubai International Financial Center, which is which I read about in my book. And it's very interesting because if you look at the DIFC, it looks like a mixed-use sort of commercial, residential skyscraper, glitzy, whatever. There's mall, there's cafes, everything is is like contained within, there's a mosque, everything's contained within this complex. And the complex has its own kind of legal system, it's a special economic zone, and within that, it has its own court system, which is parallel to the Emirati court system. And this was established because foreign companies wanted common law, they wanted English language courts, they didn't want to deal with the Muslim system and the Emirati judges and whatnot. They wanted their own kind of familiar law, which again, like there's a really negative way to spin this, and there's a way of like, yeah, if you went to law school in like the US, and you know, you want you just want the law that you know how to practice, and these companies are coming from abroad.

SPEAKER_03 17:07

So, like fine, you know, give them the benefit of the or it's plurality or something.

SPEAKER_02 17:12

Yeah, and like legal pluralism has has been like more the the norm than like this very territorial kind of the found founded to set a word, contain, you know, one law, one land, one people kind of mentality. So like being aware of that, I think is important. But the DIFC was was a model for what this guy wanted to build because it could be in one country with a different set of rules. And he did his research and he found the guy that was behind a lot of the legal reforms in the DIFC, this guy Mark Beer, who's clever, very like worldly and clever person, paid he like he really went and found all the people that could execute this. But the problem remains that the people on Nevis, of which there are not very many, there's like 13,000 people living here. He still couldn't like get them on board. You know, there were polls that showed that like 90 plus percent of people thought this was a terrible idea. There were, you know, social media is all all about like what the hell's going on. People are upset, you know, they they don't seem to be able to be bought off.

SPEAKER_03 18:18

They were not bought by the the$100 a month, or I guess that's like maybe a reaction to the poll. Maybe it was like, well, we'll give you a hundred dollars a month.

SPEAKER_02 18:26

Is that I think things may change. I mean, I think that unfortunately it's not up to the people, it's up to the government of St. Kitts, the Parliament. You know, there are many layers of approvals that need to happen, and many of those could still happen without people being enthusiastic.

SPEAKER_04 18:43

Right.

SPEAKER_02 18:43

Um and then, you know, the way that these things go is like, okay, it gets approved, it gets built, and then it's like, well, what are you gonna do? Not work there? Are you gonna boycott the place? Like you you do it does end up sucking you in in the same way that like, oh, you maybe you don't like data centers, but they they open one near you and you don't have a job, and so you go work for the data center. Like that kind of sucks. It's like capitalism. But that's that that is what ends up happening with a lot of these SEZs, in fact.

SPEAKER_03 19:15

Yeah, I so I actually want to go a little bit deeper into the history of SCZs. You've you've written quite about quite a bit about it already in and freeports. You mentioned, you know, being in Geneva, somehow Switzerland being one of the like, if I understand correctly, like one of the largest offshore countries when they have no shore, it's completely landlocked. Like there's a bunch of very weird contradictions, but because of historical circumstances, it's been like, you know, this European enclave for for basically financial secrecy and and whatnot. But uh there are also plenty of examples as well. There's there's plenty of failures that I think that there's somehow people are just like not so aware of, but there's quite a lot of failures. And then there are some maybe you could call successes in places like funny enough, China. China has a lot of special economic zones, and as well. I actually recently learned this after listening to another podcast of yours, but about about Mauritius. But I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about like, yeah, some of these failures, some of these successes, and if there's anything like, is there anything you've noticed that that kind of determine whether one is like a success or not and how they're managed?

SPEAKER_02 20:17

Yeah, I mean, that's like the million-dollar question. So, in in, I want to say, so how let's go really, really, really far back. So, like during, you know, in colonial times when their world was ruled by empire, empires of various kinds, there were still islands, and many of them in the Caribbean, where you could trade more freely. So you could buy like rum from the whatever you could, you could do stuff that you couldn't do onshore. And so that's like a very sort of rudimentary and an early version of offshore. Also, ports, like physical ports in places like Italy, where you know they would they would welcome Jewish businessmen or Armenies or people that were not like part of the country the way that the the ruling classes saw it. This was a slightly freer place for enterprise and commerce. Fast forward to like the 1950s, there are various experiments for how how to like save money in business. And so one, sorry, I'm being very broad because like there's so many different examples that you you almost have to be very broad to like capture the like mentality of it. But in the 50s, there was an interesting experiment where um a consulting firm flew to Puerto Rico to see how US bus sort of onshore US business people could use the Puerto Rican workforce and the Puerto Rican tax fiscal concessions, because there's no federal income tax in in Puerto Rico at the time. A consultant went out there, he did the study and like ended up bringing over a lot of business from the mainland to like essentially exploit Puerto Rican labor because it's cheaper and the taxes were lower and like. everything was less expensive, could bring it back to the US and not pay taxes on on, you know, the the profits. I'm getting it a little muddled, but like basically it was cheaper, easier, and like they deemed better to to manufacture things in Puerto Rico and bring back. So that's just like a proto-offshoring. This guy then went to the the US-Mexico border, established McKiladoras. And so, you know, you see this like mechanism of like identifying places elsewhere where it's cheaper, sending business. This is all very familiar, right? This is offshoring. It's been a huge talking point in politics recently. And so whether it works is is almost a question of like for how long because yes at first it works. The business saves money, the local people get jobs, everybody's happy. But then the more of these things you add, the more competition there is and the lower the standards get. And so you know this expression the race to the bottom that's how it happens. It's not just Puerto Rico. It's not just Mexico. It just creates this whole archipelago of places where capital is just chasing profit and like lowering costs, often at the expense of the people doing the work. So this like model of this zone or of this space where things cost less really took hold in the 70s and 80s thanks to organizations like like the UN, like the World Bank sometimes having sometimes this was tied to export taxes, so import and export taxes. So you could bring materials into a zone in say like an African country and you wouldn't be charged on the duties to bring it in and then you wouldn't be charged on the export. And so it was known as an export processing zone. The things that were built in the zone were purely for export. And putting zones in like countries that were struggling almost became a reflex with these like consultants with the international organizations like okay let's try that let's try that and like make jobs. And again like sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't the more successful ones are the ones I think again in broad terms where the government is involved where it's sort of occurred there's a plan. It's not just like we're going to give Company X a 10 year tax holiday and then they're going to get out and find a new one. It's like you know you have some longer term prospects maybe you train workers maybe you build infrastructure and the other types of places where this tends to be more successful is like kind of authoritarian places, right? Where they have a lot more control over what happens. So um China, great example, you know, you could you can look at the data and say that these zones with with different rules really did change the game. Didn't happen in the top down way that a lot of people think it did. And there's a lot of stuff around the edges that is like a lot more myth than than than reality. But yeah it can work if your goal is to produce more stuff and have companies have bigger profits and also as a byproduct you know you do create jobs. Are they good sometimes? Are they bad often? So that's kind of the the landscape the the thing that happened after so we have these zones that are really industrial right in places like Mauritius in places like China in African countries. But the sort of next iteration of this is like taking the concept of the enclave and and applying it to like finance and applying it to trading and then beyond that it's almost like a lifestyle thing. And that is where we are with this Nevis project. That's where we are with Prospera in Honduras. It's like you're not just making widgets you're not just hiding money you're like putting people there and turning it into a lifestyle and that's where like I don't think Prospera gets a lot of flack like this Nevis thing. I don't know I I don't think we know like what the full effects of that are going to be like already gated communities exist already like rich people live far far away you know from poor people with huge walls around them. So I'm trying I it's it's T V D like where the problem is here that doesn't already exist somewhere else. But you if you are a local person who suddenly is told that this is gonna show up in your backyard you can see why this would be very upsetting.

SPEAKER_03 26:26

Right. Yeah I this is yeah something I find I I don't know I don't know if you're into into video games but it really reminds me of this video game called Bioshock. Well my husband he's a big gamer I I am not you would you would you would I think you would love this game honestly like at least the story of the game is about you know a guy who's who's very zealous and very like radicalized libertarian in this kind of like a retrofuturist world where he brings about this kind of underwater libertarian paradise that then where everything goes bad people are like genetically modifying themselves to shoot fireballs out of their hands and everything kind of gets out of control. And they do want to genetically modify themselves and they have genetically modified themselves like this is duck yeah yeah Milton genetically modified himself in a special economic zone in Honduras a few years ago okay it was like cardiovascular like performance like it was whatever like it's you do you buddy like but it's it's happening accurate yeah for sure yeah but I guess the the thing that was kind of that I was thinking then is like it sounds to me that the special economic zones is really actually not it's a it's it it seems to work more when it's not actually taken like a laissez faire approach which is kind of what it's often kind of framed as is actually just loosen everything and then let the market do its thing. It'll it'll build things up but actually it's like in these in these places where it's actually quite managed like high like that's kind of the the impression that I get from me I mean China probably had very extremely highly managed processes as to what what what what became kind of loosened up what became not and then they have this whole apparatus for figuring out what were the good things what were not and but yeah I I if you look at if whenever the US does it just seems to always kind of fail.

SPEAKER_02 28:14

I don't know I mean I'm gonna steal a line from from a law professor that I I admire greatly a Marty Koskaniami he's finished anyway he had a line in a recent paper that said there's no such thing as deregulation because like actually you're just replacing some rules with other rules and this is what these guys want to do. They don't want to live in a lawless society. They love rules they just want the rules to be their rules to benefit them.

SPEAKER_04 28:36

Right.

SPEAKER_02 28:37

Right and this is this is like actually the logic of the offshore world it's not that we're gonna give you a space where you can do whatever you want it's that we are going to we're gonna construct a set of laws that protect you when you do certain types of activities. Right. It is it is it rich people love law corporations love law they need it like this is what protects them as investors as business people like in contracts and so nobody actually wants a lawless society. They just want to pick the laws which like again like I can sympathize with that I too would love to pick my own laws. I'm not like trying to build a where I can do it. But I think if you look at it in that way rather than thinking of it in like as an anarchic you know laissez faire but more what is going to benefit you then that it becomes much clearer.

SPEAKER_03 29:29

The picture becomes much clearer right right okay let's get a little bit maybe more into some of the specifics here that that was funny you mentioned so this guy Olivia Jansen's I think it's so funny his his three interests are Elon Musk cryptocurrency and libertarianism he wouldn't tell me about them because he wouldn't talk to me.

SPEAKER_02 29:50

So for all I know he's like a passionate equestrian or loves art but he wouldn't talk to me so I couldn't say um there's maybe more to the man than than his posts would suggest.

SPEAKER_03 30:03

Yeah I mean compared to his post on Twitter at least it does it doesn't I mean that's basically his Twitter when I went through it for a bit just like okay that is literally the only three things he is talking about. But I thought it was interesting that he tried something with Roger Vare I can't remember I'm forgetting now the the name but it was like a very similar type of project this is something I mean free society yeah who is Roger Vare is the guy behind Bitcoin cash or kind of like led the the fork of Bitcoin to Bitcoin cash. Hasn't really as far as I can tell panned out super well for Bitcoin cash. I don't think it's in too much use now he got he is one of these like more I say maybe principled libertarians in the sense that he got rid of his US passport and I think I think he I guess he got the St. Kitts one and but then he got in trouble for not paying enough taxes supposedly because the the US has a lot of weight so the the the the claim against him is that he didn't disclose the quantity of Bitcoin he was holding at the time of his expatriation when he renounced his citizenship.

SPEAKER_02 31:04

So when you do this and you you have enough you have a lot of money you're supposed to say okay this are all my assets of all different kinds and you are you are sort of levied a certain percentage of that um as a condition for your getting out of the US and yeah the IRS alleged that he didn't disclose it all he said oh like something about his lawyer not doing anyway he settled$50 million.

SPEAKER_03 31:31

50 million small price to pay I guess to not have to go to jail for someone like him.

SPEAKER_02 31:35

I just like think about Roger and like he just owed way more than me. But anyway he yeah I guess he bowed out he said he's no longer involved one can only believe him you know um but Jansen's kept going and sort of took the same concept and sort of and and like maybe professionalized it sanitized it maybe made it a little bit more mainstream he's talked about this in in other kinds of QA's he did in Nevis about how maybe there was a certain amount of youthful idealism around this idea of making a new country and actually making a new country is a huge pain in the ass because you have to go to the UN and you have to print passports and like nobody wants that. That's annoying that's not like for that's not freedom. And so it's actually much easier to negotiate maybe limits on your freedom, but freedom nonetheless within the structure of a special economic zone because then you know the country you're in is going to do all of that stuff.

SPEAKER_03 32:34

You can just do the fun stuff right yeah so I think it's kind of interesting because one of the things about the network state stuff that I've also like constantly question people about why it's like why why do you need to make your own country? Why do you need another state exactly because you can already get what you want in in so many other ways what is kind of the so I feel like that's that's a kind of a within this weird you know sack of people or whatever this cohort that's maybe one of the one of the dividing lines is kind of like do we make a real country or not? Right.

SPEAKER_02 33:07

And somebody who maybe got got the memo. So Peter teal famously funder of seasteading and via some funds this prosperity but teal I guess he was smart in the sense that he realized oh I can just support Trump and get what I want here and I don't have to like live on a submarine and so that you know but but but and so like on some level I almost you've got to give it to them. They're committed to the bit they like want to keep thinking about this stuff and I I want to keep thinking about this stuff and it's it's cool.

SPEAKER_03 33:40

But the network state I don't know unclear what the endgame here is like they have this university they have these like seminars it's more like networking that's yeah basically what it's what's what's like I mean it's super funny to me and so it's like they've kind of trapped themselves in the same you know types of traps and self-criticisms on the left that that kind of exist already about like lifestylism and like lifestyling their politics and like commoditizing their politics in in some way that I find really fascinating and and then they also have their own little divisions within each other that also like at least for as an outsider I'm just like what what exactly is the difference that I kind of like for you guys but I don't know I guess it's better that you guys disagree than than all you and I talk yeah but so one person who's been on this beat for a super long time is Patrick Friedman and something I I've been talking on and off over the years and like he's a pretty like sympathetic dude to talk to you know I don't agree with him a lot of stuff but like something he said very early on really struck me where he was describing you know finishing college and sort of being a little itinerant and figuring out basically what all young people do is figuring out what is your role in the world and where who are you going to be and where you're gonna live.

SPEAKER_02 35:00

And he said that he he was just like and maybe I'm being naive but like he this this really like touched me.

SPEAKER_03 35:07

He said well there was nowhere in the world that really aligned with my values and I was like yeah dude me too um yeah and I and I guess like the way that he tries to rectify this is through some you know seasteading and prospera and like these essentially what amounts to lifestyle experiments with politics that's okay but but don't impose this on the people of Nevis right right right yeah I I mean the I got I've gotten into some fights with with some of these guys and it's really they just truly believe themselves to be doing something good by doing it because because they have this kind of like I think just internalized view about I guess the role of markets and the role of capitalism and capital and all this stuff that it's kind of hard to like I've I've got I've I've had some very strange arguments where then they end up getting into a corner where they just justify colonialism and so that it's like from from the position of trying to stay principled towards like what they believe will be the outcome of free markets development and building out things is that you know when you talk when you bring up inequalities and the inequalities that are created and the one the inequalities that they're taking advantage of it's sort of like yeah but I'm helping them out and they you know these poor people like they're just they just don't know and I need to come and help them and then it gets into really murky territories where I had you know was explained the racial pyramid by by one of these guys which was very fascinating to be told that I was you know lower on the pyramid than he was but yeah I mean eventually they just kind of get there.

SPEAKER_02 36:55

I mean if you if you push them long enough at times yeah yeah I mean something that that this video that you that we've been talking about that like kind of made my ears pop perk up a little bit is he kept saying international families and like that's kind of code for something right that's like and then you go on the Facebook pages of the the Nevis residents and they're like you know really unflattering comparisons to like King Leopold and you're like okay I get where you're heading from like I I you know without going there but but but this like market just like market mentality is all the more weird when it ends with oh and we're gonna give you a hundred dollars a month for just like yeah you know like that's not market that's a handout true true yeah I guess yeah I don't even want to in their in their vocabulary right like I think they spend a bit too much time trying to make these ideas consistent and like moral or somehow principled and and actually maybe they're just a bunch of guys who want to do what they want to do and and like only find this political theory in retrospect or you know after the fact my yeah I mean what I I think there are people in this world who who read but not many you know and a lot of the political ideas I think I don't want to say trickle down but like seep their way into the into their way of not through like studying or thinking about things but just through like posts or like podcasts.

SPEAKER_03 38:37

Except this one. Exactly exactly I mean there was like I don't know you probably saw the the recent clip of Mark Andreessen being like yeah I don't no one you shouldn't self-reflect like all these great men never self-reflected they just did things and they just kept just such a bizarre bizarre thing to to think and say it's just like it definitely feels like we are not speaking the same language anymore yeah I I would like to know you know what you noticed or saw with like the people of Nevis because you mentioned like like the the majority of them in all these polls they're they're against it. They they find it very strange. Is this something I'm curious was it just the video was that bad or was it like and people saw the video and then the word spread or were locals aware of special economic zones and these types of structures around Destiny because I imagine this I mean in in the Caribbean for sure this is not the first time people try this.

SPEAKER_02 39:36

No, I think that in Nevis the biggest contention was more like why is the premier's wife knocking on my door and trying to buy real estate and not telling me who's buying it why is all of this stuff going on behind the scenes even before the video appeared I think people just felt sort of misled and and like there was dishonesty and maybe conflict conflicts of interest around the the whole thing you know I think there's a lot of mistrust in in this premiere Mark Brantley at the moment and you know you hear rumors like he's on the this guy's yacht he's on Roger Vare's yacht he's taking vague so there's just this like perception of corruption if not outright corruption which I I can't speak to. So that bums people out. The video is super weird. I don't know that there is like a deep understanding of special economic zones but what there is a deep understanding about on Nevis is colonialism because guess what? St. Kitts and Nevis only got independence you know 40 some years ago were for a long time ruled by the British and and people were around for that. People remember that and what really struck me when I was reporting this is I was looking at videos of town halls and like QA's and they just turn into lectures about colonialism and they're in its aftermath and the structures that remain in place and like how we got there. I'm gonna talk about the passports again for a minute because I think it's relevant. So you know when you're a small country you have to make something from nothing right whether it's you know you you have to get by somehow right St. Kitts is not a great power nor is Switzerland. So like in the very early like in the 13th century Switzerland had nothing going for it. What did it do? It rented out mercenaries to warring monarchs around it right so this is like a very early example that I think is important of like having a sort of mercenary mentality and and using your capacity as a state to like make money from other countries to like stay in the game. And it's instructive when you also look at the way that St. Kitts again maybe not having a lot of resources to work with besides tourism saying okay well we have the citizenship we have a pretty good passport people will want to buy it let's market that let's make money off of that so you know there are costs but it you can see how this would appear to be money from nothing. And that is also kind of the organizing principle for the zone right we're just gonna cordon this off have different rules it's not going to cost us very much and they're gonna give us all this money. So so again like you can see where you can see the thread that that ties all of these things together. So people were aware that the citizenship program was in some way like selling or compromising or commoditizing Sankit's sovereignty and I think that seeing it displayed or seeing it like expressed very explicitly in like we are going to take this piece of land and sort of essentially give it to someone else really drove home this colonial aspect of it.

SPEAKER_04 42:48

I don't know if I answered your question.

SPEAKER_03 42:53

I guess for them you know in that context it's just like looking around knowing your history it just smells or like it it rhymes with the things that you're that you're told about it and that what you what you see. I think yeah one of the just like crazy things to me as well is just like this 1300 people and nobody knew him. Yeah at least in in like in the reporting or just this like is I mean yeah so I don't I mean to I I don't know I feel like they're it's like trying to play a game okay I I like I've already made it clear I'm a gamer but you know like the game Civilization or like Age of Empires or like these types of like it's almost like I feel like they're playing like people management games that they're trying they they see themselves as like kind of above their they're they're looking top down at the world and saying like oh this is a good place to do this this is a good place to do that and like you know hoping that they can just like click a button to make them yeah like SimCity start.

SPEAKER_02 43:52

Yeah yeah I mean I think in this case like Jansen's is an economic citizen of St. Kitts right so you know like Like whether he goes there or not, he has he holds he has certain rights as a citizen, um which is significant, I think. He's not a foreigner technically, even though he is for all intents and purposes. But yeah, no one saw him around. He he didn't travel there, maybe at all. I I can't say for sure, but not one person who I talked to, and I talked to a bunch of people, had ever seen him in real life. Like it was always on Zoom or like, you know, on screen. So and and by the way, you don't need to at the time that he would have applied for citizenship, you don't have you don't even have to go there. You could do it all remotely.

SPEAKER_03 44:42

Okay. So in in many cases, he was able to be just kind of like, you know, in the gamer seats, click, you know, get passports and just have to send, you know.

SPEAKER_02 44:53

Like have someone on the ground hire the you know, premier's wife, like for sure.

SPEAKER_03 44:58

Right, right. Right. I guess in many ways, if you have that much money, that is kind of how you experience the world, or like can experience the world if you if you choose to. You from a bank account, the wiring money from one place to another around the world in a world that is globalized economically in many ways, that you can't just go back to network state, like territory is secondary, right?

SPEAKER_02 45:22

Those like ideas like first you create these digital communities and like-minded people, and you gain kind of traction in that way, and only then do you go and like try to negotiate for land. So, yeah, it's it's an interesting perception of like physical presence. It's it's very Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 45:47

So one of the last things that maybe I wanted to get into a little bit is kind of compare it to in the the existing project that kind of I think a lot of people at this point know of, which is Prospera.

SPEAKER_02 45:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 45:59

Which is based in in Honduras, in in Ruatan, which is an island where they've been doing this now for a few years at the very least. They have like they have it, they have one building. I have been asked to go there. Like I've interacted, at least online, with some of the people who are highly involved in it. It really wears me out. I listened to this whole presentation by this one guy, Nicholas Anziger. The presentation was quite, it was like half an hour or something like that. And at the end, kind of like him talking about how wonderful Prosper is, how wonderful it's going to be, kind of like the big thing that he was like harping on at the end. 4% GDP growth per year. Like that was like the big thing that was like, wow, that was supposed to be like the big drop. He expects 4% growth GDP in these types of places.

SPEAKER_02 46:47

Kind of like this being in the Prospera zone or Honduras.

SPEAKER_03 46:52

I don't remember. I mean, this was this was a couple of years ago, but like it's just interesting, kind of yeah. It was funny to me that that Olivier had called Prospera a joke. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:05

So I had many questions about that. He called it a joke in a QA with some people in Nevis, you know, where he was kind of trying to pitch it, pitch it. He didn't say more. I don't know why he thinks it's a joke. I was really surprised that he said that. Maybe he knows that people don't like Prospera and that he wanted to distinguish himself from that. Maybe he has beef with the people involved. I will say, I called a lot of people for the story. No one had anything nice to say about this guy. You know, so it's possible that he just like doesn't get along with the Prospera people and right.

SPEAKER_03 47:43

This kind of personal ego stuff.

SPEAKER_02 47:46

Personal stuff that like has nothing to do with what we're talking about. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know what aspect of it is a joke. I mean, I there are aspects of it that I think are funny. Like it's basically a longevity cult. It's it's like barely a special economic zone, right? Like they're just doing wellness retreats, right? Like, what is there anything else going on there right now besides their their one building and some like telework, maybe?

SPEAKER_03 48:12

Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of just remote workers going through. There's definitely a lot of focus, as far as I can tell, on the biotech side of things and being able to do this. I mean, they do have um certain regulatory and like tax benefits that I know that the current government government has been like trying to take away, but then they're like they're trying to sue them back through I think like the World Bank or something like that.

SPEAKER_02 48:37

But there's like many tax havens in the world, like all of the stuff that Prospera is proposing, like kind of exactly go to Dubai, you can go to like um and so the edge that they seem to have is really just like nice beach, you know, weird people who like to hang out together and like some you can experiment on yourself genetically or something. I I really am very curious to see where it goes because maybe they can have a whole successful thriving business of like biohacking stuff. There's certainly demand for that. But is that the like full kind of expression of this like libertarian dream? I don't know. It seems a little bit disappointing.

SPEAKER_03 49:23

I mean, I think there's something there's something I like it I find in libertarian circles like this deep desire of kind of like extending the self through technology in a way that is like weird, I guess. Or just like, I mean, it's it's interesting to think about like the philosophy or like the you know what what does technology actually do in many ways. Like, you know, my voice is being extended by the mic and going through a bunch of tubes under the ocean to like show up in your to go through your computer that facilitates this this conversation that of course is interesting and cool, but I think there's also hyperfixation on technology to specifically extend one's own self to reach their peak.

SPEAKER_02 50:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:03

In some way. And so like I think this biotech yeah. Yeah, yeah, this biotech stuff really fits into that.

SPEAKER_02 50:10

Yeah. Yeah. And look, if they're gonna start doing like clinical trials in a way that like isn't really kosher in the US or Europe or or what have you, then you sort of get into this kind of tricky territory where like I personally don't care if you decide that you want to do this to your body in Rowaton, like again, like you know, your body, your choice, but like it gets a little dicier if you're like in a place where there's a local population and maybe you're signing them off. It can it's like kind of slippery, right? You can see like the really insidious road this can go down, or it can just be like weird and you know what it is now.

SPEAKER_03 50:51

Yeah. It's it uh but like from what I can from what I've can tell and what I've known from a lot of the stuff that goes on at like network school, which is the network, which Balag has been running in in Malaysia, um it's it and I've talked I've spoken to many people who've who've gone through there, it it kind of I feel like what's kind of sad or funny about all this is that it's kind of come down to a radical lifestyle, is kind of what it's ultimately a lot of these things have become rather than political movements.

SPEAKER_02 51:24

Yeah, in some way. They were doing intentional communities, they were doing like polyamory, like you know, West Coast, like kind of like slightly hippie stuff as well. But what's the lifestyle for the network school? Like, what are the principles of that lifestyle? I'm curious.

SPEAKER_03 51:43

I mean, a lot of that stuff is just about working out a bunch. Yeah, it's you know, working, which is like fine and good. I mean, I think that's like, you know, yeah, be healthy, be physically healthy, like eat well. Like they had they had Brian Johnson there, and supposedly they're eating a bunch of Brian Johnson's blueprint food. I don't know that much about the diet, but like I suppose it's I assume it's probably healthier than like most people's average diet.

SPEAKER_02 52:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 52:09

But the thing that I'm kind of hearing from a lot of people is that a lot of people those who do go there tend to be people who like they just broke up with the partner. They just like, you know, they quit their job, they're looking for something else, they're kind of exploring. So it's kind of become this basically summer camp for people for adults, I mean like young adults to kind of bali coded. Yeah, yeah. And that was that was one of the that was the other thing that I that I heard from from someone who went is that they, you know, they met a lot of people who were just digital nomads from Bali who liked the the specific digital nomad experience that they would get there versus in Bali because they pay one price and then they get a bunch of stuff. So it's just like you commoditized your own political movement very quickly and defanged it almost. Like it kind of removed a lot of the radical whatever radical was about it is like not there. And it's not, as far as I can tell from people who were there recently, there's not that much discussion about the network state.

SPEAKER_02 53:09

Yeah, but really this. A little weird, not for me, but like there's been so and and I understand that the structure of Prospera is very alarming to anyone on the left. Like, look at what they're doing, look at what could they could do with this. But Prospera itself, I don't think is like I don't think that it's gonna end there. I think it's something else is gonna pop up that is gonna make Prospera just look like a circus.

SPEAKER_03 53:37

Well, thank you, Tasa, so much for coming on the podcast and sharing more about this story and sharing more about your experience of being in Nevis and and your research. Highly recommend to check out the piece. It'll be it'll be linked. It's in the New York Times. Yeah, I think it's it's although it sounds kind of silly when you kind of like dig deep into it, I think it's also important just to kind of like keep tabs on on what's going on because you never know when these people will also come to your own community to be prepared.

SPEAKER_02 54:05

There's also really funny stuff that happened, which I won't spoil, but there's some very funny little like some people who didn't like the Nevis, the Destiny, they made like a diss track, they made a rap song that was like criticizing it.

SPEAKER_03 54:18

Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 54:19

There's a little incident with some Bitcoin machines that were delivered, and everyone saw them, and it was like, what is this going on? So anyway, you should read the article.

SPEAKER_03 54:28

Please send me the diss track. I'll I'll maybe make it the outro.

SPEAKER_05 54:34

You should know by now South Coast Cove.

unknown 54:47

He wants to create his destiny.