This week: Vitalia hosts "pop-up city"; Putin makes the wrong case on Ukraine

Vitalia hosts “pop-up city” in Roatán

Charter cities have the ultimate “cold start problem” — you can’t get people to move to your tropical greenfield until you get people to move there. So Vitalia is hosting a “pop-up city” in Roatán — encouraging radical longevity influencers and biotech entrepreneurs to visit for three months and try each other out. Buy your nootropic stack in crypto! Participate in unregulated gene therapy trials! Taste Bryan Johnson’s nutty pudding!

Friends report that it is cheap, beautiful, dense with smart/weird rich people — and allegedly ~30-40% female. They’ve got a Montessori school, fitness facilities, and co-working spaces.

The ideology doesn’t speak to me, but the basic quality-of-life arbitrage relative to any cost-comparable American city seems absurd.

US tech hubs are increasingly hellish places to live, but the lure of having all the big brains in one place is hard to beat. The first of these overseas zones to attract a critical mass of tech talent is going to be the real estate play of the century.

I’m going to book a trip out there soon, to answer the following questions:

• How real is the low cost of living out there? Presumably the organizers are eating some costs to prime the pump and get people out there. How much? What does it take to get things built over there? Can the island feed itself?

• How stable are relations with Honduras? What recourse do these guys have if Honduras decides to eat the golden goose? If Vitalia/Prospera are only viable as de facto American colonies, then putting down roots there is a bet on the long-term capacity and good-will of USG — which would defeat the purpose, at least for me.

• These guys are clearly very smart and very weird, but in what ratio? I respect the eccentric technology brother very much, but the long-term viability of a place like this for me, my family, and my friends depends on what percentage of these guys are talking to demons on research chemicals, mainlining their own aborted fetuses, entering into convoluted multiparty sexual arrangements On The Blockchain, etc.

Putin makes the wrong case on Ukraine

Maybe Putin wasn’t just filibustering in his interview with Tucker Carlson, but he was definitely filibustering. If he believes (as he constantly implies) that Americans are buffoonish illiterates, then he should make up his mind about whether it’s worth his time to persuade us, and either do it well or not.

Every time Tucker tried to bring him to his point, Putin essentially accused Tucker and his audience of being lightweights — but there was no tension between being intellectual and getting to his point, which was not as abstruse as he made it sound:

• Ukraine is kind of a fake country and a cutout for Western interests that has been persecuting ethnic Russians (this is identical to Hitler’s argument re: Czechoslovakia)

• Russia was willing to wink at Ukrainian assertions of sovereignty as long as they remained a Russian client, or at least “friendly”

• Maidan was an act of aggression against Russia, and a direct attack on ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, sponsored by the CIA

• NATO and USG are agreement-incapable and the Russians have no reason to believe they will ever stop pushing east, so Putin felt constrained to act before his country’s defenses were entirely overrun.

The part of his case that’s not complicated (“Ukraine is part of the Russian sphere of influence”) is the one he spent 45 minutes belaboring. In fact, if you want to make the case that the present conflict between Ukraine and Russia is a CIA confabulation, then starting the story 1,200 years ago is counterproductive.

The part of the case that is complicated (“Some countries are actually fake, and Russia has built their defense-in-depth with the cooperation of actually-fake client states, and screwing with that cooperation constitutes an existential threat, and NATO expansion is on autopilot and can’t be stopped without force”) got short shrift.

The most intelligent counter-arguments I have heard:

• Ukraine is real enough that people are willing to die in the hundreds of thousands over it. I don’t think you can fully explain that with naked coercion or psyops.

• Likewise, NATO expansion appears to have enthusiastic public support among former Soviet clients. It’s worth asking why that is the case.

Maybe American vassalage is just such an overpoweringly sweet deal that none of these regional actors has any meaningful agency, and are responding to a nonexistent threat — but I’d like to see him argue that case, rather than assume it.

Americans were probably not his intended audience in any case. Going on Tucker allows his own people to believe that America’s will to shovel money to Ukraine is cracking — and the snide Europoor ressentiment probably plays better there. Apparently they’re playing the video in Russian high schools.

Anyway, you’re not stupid if you found the lecture tedious and overbearing. Martyrmade did a much better job.

EXIT News:

• By popular demand this Thursday, February 15th we are launching a regular real estate development call. We’ll be working through a handful of early “intentional community”-style development projects, and doing Q&A on various real estate topics.

• Utah Valley hackathon has been pushed to Thursday, February 22.

• EXIT is now listed as a “digital society” on Balaji Srinivasan’s network state dashboard.

• I’ll be in Las Vegas this weekend doing a mastermind workshop with Tom Woods. Won’t have time for a full meetup, but I’ll post my whereabouts in the chat and we’ll get lunch or something.

• Get meetup invites for Salt Lake City (03/01), Seattle (03/29), and Austin (04/26) below the fold — or become a full member at exitgroup.us.