Charter Cities Podcast

Today we sit with Sebastian Mallaby, a successful author and esteemed Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council of Foreign Relations. He has also been a contributing columnist for The Washington Post and previously served on the editorial board. To open the show, we put Sebastian’s career into a nutshell before asking him to expand on his background...

Creating and enforcing a watertight contract between two global parties is a challenging task. For starters, the world is rapidly evolving, and as a result, many contracts are in dispute. Though not unheard of, contract disputes are becoming commonplace and there is an increasing need to evolve systems. Today we talk with Mark Beer, a world-renowned buyer and once Chief Executive of the Dubai International Financial Centre’s Dispute Resolution Authority...

Cities may have seemed more fragile during the global COVID-19 lockdowns but, as Greg Woolf’s impressive studies of early urbanism show, cities have been re-invented many times. In today’s episode, listeners hear from Greg, who is an historian and archaeologist, specializing in the late Iron Age and the Roman Empire. Greg is currently the Director of the Institute of Classical Studies and a Professor of Classics at the University of London...

There is a growing body of empirical evidence that points toward the important, long-term effects that historic events can have on economic development, and today’s guest, Dr. Nathan Nunn, is major player in this area of research. Dr...

Today’s guest is Mark Koyama, Economic Historian at George Mason University. Mark recently co-authored Persecution & Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom with Noel Johnson, and in this episode, we talk to Mark about some of its big themes – state capacity, religious toleration, and political competition. We begin by hearing Mark’s ideas about a key argument in his book, the connection between religious freedom and the development of liberal societies...

Digital technology has evolved to the point that by hitting keys and tapping mice buttons, you can literally build a city in the cloud. This viral idea was started by angel investor Balaji Srinivasan, who believes in creating cities with crowd-funded territories and governed by smart contracts. In our conversation with Balaji, we touch on many intricate topics that link to two concepts — using tech to design ideal cities and how innovation is driven by exit strategies...

What is progress, has it slowed down, and what can we do about it? Joining us today to talk about the emerging field of progress studies and how it might help us dig into questions like these, is Jason Crawford, author of the blog, Roots Of Progress. Jason opens by providing us with a definition of progress and why the active study of it might help us rekindle it in our world. We talk about how progress has increasingly dwindled next...

The Charter Cities Institute has seen rapid growth in recent months, having gone from three employees in February to ten as of this week, so we decided to do something a little different on today’s show. Kurtis Lockhart, Head of Research at the CCI sits down with Founder, Mark Lutter, to provide a high-level overview of the concept of charter cities, why their time has come, how the CCI fits into it all, and what the future holds...

Today we welcome Erick Brimen, the CEO of Próspera, which is arguably the world's first charter city, off the coast of Honduras on an island called Roatán. Erick is on the podcast to unpack the exciting news about Próspera, the philosophy behind its founding, and the vision for its short-term and long-term future...

Tocqueville said, “We need to work at making democracy work.” That is the springboard from which this episode begins. Kurtis Lockhart fills in for Mark Lutter as today’s host, and our guest is Professor Nic Cheeseman. Nic is a political scientist at the University of Birmingham, and was formerly the head of the African Studies Center at Oxford University...