Listen:
Show Notes:
In this conversation, Atossa discusses her book ‘The Hidden Globe,’ which explores the complexities of special economic zones and the unconventional legal systems that exist outside traditional nation-states. She reflects on her upbringing in Geneva, Switzerland, and how it shaped her understanding of sovereignty and international law. The discussion delves into the evolution of citizenship by investment, the implications of offshoring asylum seekers, and the rise of a digital nomad class that challenges traditional notions of belonging and social contracts. In this conversation, Atossa and Mark delve into the complexities of immigration, the dynamics of migrant labor in Saudi Arabia, the challenges of governance in conflict zones, and the future of charter cities. They explore the motivations behind migration, the implications of statelessness, and the evolving nature of sovereignty in regions experiencing instability. The discussion also touches on the potential and pitfalls of charter cities as a solution to governance issues in developing countries.
Key Points From This Episode:
- The Hidden Globe reveals the complexities of offshore jurisdictions.
- Special economic zones are more common than traditional nation-states.
- Citizenship by investment is a growing industry with ethical implications.
- The conditions for asylum seekers in offshore centers are dire.
- Digital nomads are reshaping the concept of social contracts.
- Switzerland’s history illustrates the evolution of legal systems.
- Svalbard represents a unique case of non-discrimination in citizenship.
- Time zones can reflect political power dynamics.
- There’s a lot we don’t know about Saudi Arabia.
- It’s really hard to know what citizenship means.
- Sovereignty is really fraying upon multiple dimensions.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World
Charter Cities Institute on Facebook
Charter Cities Institute on Instagram
Transcript
[INTRO]
Atossa Araxia: The Hidden Globe is about the sort of greater offshore world. All of the places above and beneath and between nations. The goal of the book was to show that there is a lot more to the world than just the countries that we live in. There are many different systems of law. They don’t always correspond to land, really that the world is much weirder and more interesting than we think. As I started looking into different types of special zones, enclaves, I came to realize that they were maybe more the rule than the exception. There was more special economic zones than countries.
Mark Lutter: And so what got you interested in like poking on the boundaries of sovereignty, the weirdness of legal systems?
Atossa Araxia: I grew up in Geneva which seems like a pretty boring normal city, but then when you spend some time in it you realize that it’s full of holes, you know, you have all of the international organizations that have their own sets of rules, right. They’re sort of quasi extraterritorial. We have many free zones in the world. We have none that are just for people to enter and leave, as they will and Svalbard, which is an Arctic territory of Norway, is one of those.
Mark Lutter: If you look a lot of small lower income countries customs are where the governments get most of their tax revenue. You need a relatively sophisticated administrative apparatus to tax income. Trade is much easier to tax, you know, where it comes in through a port than income.
Atossa Araxia: I think there’s a lot that we take for granted about governance and the way that the world works. And I wanted to challenge that a little bit and I think that’s what’s interesting about what you guys are doing too.
[INTRO ENDS]
Mark Lutter: Hello and welcome to the Charter Cities podcast.
Atossa Araxia: Hi, Mark. Great to be here.
Mark Lutter: So you recently published your new book, The Hidden Globe, talking a lot about special economic zones and kind of weird jurisdictions. So tell me about it.
Atossa Araxia: The Hidden Globe is about the sort of greater offshore world. All of the places above and beneath and between nations. Many of them are special economic zones or modeled on special economic zones. We can talk about the many varieties of these in a little bit. And the goal of the book was to show that there is a lot more to the world than just the countries that we live in. There are many different systems of law. They don’t always correspond to land and really that the world is much weirder and more interesting than we think. That was really my main takeaway, having worked on it for five years.
Mark Lutter: And so what was the Genesis, what got you interested in like poking on the boundaries of sovereignty, kind of like the weirdness of legal systems?
Atossa Araxia: Yeah, a good question, it’s not the most obvious topic that you just, you know, stumble into. So I guess there are two answers, the sort of deep background is that I grew up in Geneva which seems like a pretty boring normal city, but then when you spend some time in it you realize that it’s full of holes, right? I call it Swiss cheese, which is kind of a cute way of talking about Geneva. So, you know, you have all of the international organizations that have their own sets of rules, right. They’re sort of quasi extraterritorial. The U.N. has its own postage system. Their employees are not subject to the same tax system as Swiss citizens. And they can even shop in this funny little store that is duty free. So every so it’s like the world is an airport when you’re in this status of work or at the U.N., which is interesting right because we think of U.N. as sort of a do gooder institution, but it’s actually outside of a lot of the world’s laws and boundaries as we experience them. Then, of course, there are the Swiss banks, which for a really long time were their own kind of black hole. The Swiss were very accommodating of foreign capital, didn’t really mind if it was coming from nice people or not nice people. And over the past 20 years, many of these accounts have been frozen, right, because of scandals. And, you know, it’s like not a good look to be holding on to billions of dollars from like Mobutu or some terrible, you know, person who’s abused human rights and whatnot. So there’s a lot of that in Switzerland. Switzerland’s been very instrumental in passing laws like regulatory standards and laws to attract industry, something that many countries do. This is not unusual, but to me, Switzerland was a pioneer in this because back in the day, like in the 1200s, its only significant export was mercenaries. So very sort of embryonic stage. Switzerland was wielding its capacity as a state, you know, as an entity that can make rules, wage war to train soldiers and send them abroad to fight for neighboring monarchs. This is good for many reasons. One is that it curried favor with these monarchs so that Switzerland, the cantons at the time it wasn’t the confederation wouldn’t just get invaded. This is always a risk when you’re a small country and you know at the heart of Europe.
The second reason is it brought money. And the third reason is it got rid of lots of young men who maybe would have been causing trouble at home. And we all know what that looks like. So it worked great for Switzerland. It really was able to use the little it had at this time. Make the most of what it had to create this thriving mercenary trade that went on, you know, into the 1600s. I don’t know if you, this is kind of a convergence of some weird sovereignties, but there were Swiss mercenaries fighting for the East Asia companies in Southeast Asia and around the world. So there are many layers and all of these concepts of like sovereignty and what the states do. We now have this pretty hidebound concept of it that like there’s one country and one people and one law and, you know, one system, but it’s always been fragmented and much weirder than we think. So that’s Switzerland I grew up in Geneva which is in Switzerland and this was all around me you know. On top of the U.N. and the banks, there was the Geneva Freeport, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later. I would see signs on the street for the Geneva Freeport, and I thought it was just like part of the airport or something. It was just it’s a known thing.
Everyone knows where it is and that it’s a thing. But it was totally unclear what it was, what its function was. And so I found out later that this too, was a warehouse out of space. It’s in Geneva for, you know, physical. I mean, it’s there. You can see it, you can touch it, you can smell it. But for the purposes of customs and taxation, it’s apart. And so this also serves a function right. So that’s Geneva, that’s like where I come from. I understand the logic of these things, I guess innately. But then when I started working as a journalist, I guess in the early 2010’s, I landed at Reuters and I was kind of bored covering the stock markets and doing the Daily news. And I happened upon an ad for a conference called the Global Citizenship and Residents Conference. And again, to me, this like U.N. kid from Geneva, I was like, that’s so nice. Like global citizenship. That’s me. And then I looked into it and it was actually a conference for the passport industry, which is sort of a nascent passport industry, which is literally the business of buying and selling citizenship from countries that allow it. This is legal. And that’s what really caught my interest, right? Because of course, like I always say, fraud is boring like fraud is boring. Illegal stuff is illegal.
Sometimes it’s you know, you have interesting characters, but like, there’s no question that an illegal passport is an illegal passport. And that’s not it’s not like sanctioned. But this was completely sanctioned. It was states, prime ministers going up on stage and saying, this is why you should become a St Kitts citizen. These are the advantages. This is how easy it is. You make this investment. You don’t even have to come to the country. You know, do your due diligence remotely and you can have this passport for life. You can give it to your children, you can give it to your spouse. And that seems like a really going back to this like idea of the nation and what it is and what a sovereignty represent. That seemed to say so much about the state of the world. That you could just sell the thing. I think there’s a pretty direct link between this practice of selling citizenship. Often small countries don’t have a whole ton going for them, trying to raise money and a country cordoning off a special economic zone with different rules, again, to attract foreigners, to attract foreign money in a way that could be considered compromising or a sort of a capitulation of sovereignty. And the really interesting part of that to me is that it isn’t it isn’t right on the one hand, yes, you’re selling off your passport, you’re cutting up your land and giving it away or, you know, but on the other hand, you’re doing it.
You’re the sovereign. You’re the state. You get to decide. And so it’s kind of a conundrum, right? Like, what is it? And I was really compelled by this question and this tension. So that’s the very long version of how this book came to be. As I started looking into different types of special zones, enclaves, exceptions, I came to realize that they were maybe more the rule than the exception.
There was more special economic zones than countries historically, there have always been more quirks and weird, you know, Suzerainty is and ______ like all kinds of different structures than there have been nation states. And it’s another misconception that the nation state is somehow this product of the peace of Westphalia. And if you look at the map, the map only really looked has only really looked the way it looks more or less, and it is always shifting since decolonization. So I think there’s a lot that we take for granted about governance and the way that the world works. And I wanted to challenge that a little bit and I think that’s what’s interesting about what you guys are doing too.
Mark Lutter: Well, yeah. I mean, I think I find, for example, the history of Switzerland fascinating. It’s kind of on some margin like the platonic ideal. Switzerland isn’t even really a nation state because nation state implies it’s a nation which has like some people with some shared culture. And like the Swiss have shared culture, but they’re also like relatively heterogeneous. Right they speak 4 different languages.
Atossa Araxia: I mean the shared culture. I was in Switzerland a couple of summers ago talking to a new friend who’s a journalist there, and he was like, what shared culture? We eat the same granola bars like that’s where it ends. We have very little like I’m from the French part. I don’t know anyone really from the German part. And this is notable because this is, I think, one of the ways Switzerland is able to maintain some semblance of unity. They have mandatory military service and they never go to war. So those two things seem key there.
Mark Lutter: Because if you look also for example you can contrast that with like the U.S. and France. Like the U.S. was basically a kind of people call it like revolution. And it wasn’t a revolution, right? It was a secessionist civil war. Right. Like the U.S. was part of the United Kingdom and seceded. But it was basically United Kingdom people that were on a “virgin land” namely, most of the Native Americans died because of smallpox. And the small populations that were left were enough to, like, force them off. But like the origin story, It has like nice parts of it. But there’s also like not nice parts of the origin story of the U.S. And it did come from this yet explicit like colonization attempt, if you look at France. Right. Paris conquered France.
Go back 150 years and you’ve got large parts of what is now France that did not speak French. Right. And so you had this and it’s much more recent in history than people realize. This is not like you go back to the French Revolution and large parts of what is modern day France like, yeah did not speak French that were not part of a kind of integrated tradition like Germany.
Like if you look at Germany’s history, like Prussia kind of created Germany. Most of Prussia is in what is today Poland like Prussia, what created Germany, kind of like no longer territorially exists as part of Germany. And yeah, as to your point, like one way to interpret it is the and World War Two. Like there was basically the most of the U.S. look at the USSR as well kind of decided, all right, we’re going to freeze all the borders. We’ve seen what happens when we allow countries to like, try to create new borders with military force. And the U.S. and the U.K. or the Soviet Union were the kind of global military superpowers. And they kept obviously fighting with each other but there was some consensus like, okay, allowing for countries to change borders via violence has the possibility to spiral into very, very bad violence and we don’t want that to happen. And now also we have nukes so we’re just going to freeze everything in place. And what’s partially interesting about the current era is we’re seeing these norms begin to substantially change. Right. During the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, he spoke about buying Greenland, which was like whacky crazy idea. But like now it feels like, look, is it going to happen? Probably not. Might it happen like, possible. You had over the last few days, Israel took some of Syrian land and their public statement was not we’re taking this land as a buffer zone. Their public statement was this land is now part of Israel now and forever. And this was unthinkable like ten, 20 years ago. And now it’s just like, okay, well, I guess it’s part of Israel. Who’s going to stop them?
Atossa Araxia: Right, I would add just to the narrative of the borders closing, I think it’s also it was also very useful for business, for capitalists to keep people in place. Right. Because you have a workforce that isn’t as mobile. I am approaching all of this from a pretty anti nationalist or critical of nationalism point of view, but the whole concept that the territories and the cultures, they didn’t go together necessarily for a long time. Like I don’t think that’s a controversial thing. I think that’s just history. It’s just how things shook out, whether you like it or not. And so we have all been a little bit brainwashed into complacency, into thinking that the system we have now is what it is. And yeah, I think it’s changing. I think maybe you and I we’re the two least surprised people when Trump said he wanted to buy Greenland. And now, you know, the incoming administration is trying to make some deals with neighboring countries to take asylum seekers. Right. Which is I think it was Bahamas, Panama, a handful of Caribbean states and Bahamas said no, But who knows? I mean, are we going to see this international system for resettling refugees get turned into something a little more transactional based on bilateral treaties and exchange of money? Like that’s also really interesting. That has been happening for a while. Australia is an example I get into in my book where they were sending Ping Nauru and Papua New Guinea to take asylum seekers. But again, this is something that should have been taking place on their territory. It was technically their responsibility under international law, but they found a way around it right in this like interesting territorial hack. And we are absolutely entering an era where we’re going to see more and more of this sort of thing.
Mark Lutter: And I think like part of the interesting point is I’m perhaps slightly more sympathetic to nationalism than you are. if you look at the 19th century people tend to associate that often like with liberalism, but like what liberalism is, it was very heavily associated with nationalism at the time. Right. Like 19th century, like liberalism. Kind of what happened was the emergence of the nation state tended to like create internal free trade zones with free trade being good. And part of that was crushing kind of local principalities and municipalities. So like 200 years ago, if you want to trade down the Rhine, you would have to stop every five miles and pay another prince another tax. Right. And that makes trade very difficult because you just have this like really bifurcated internal taxation system. And by being able to kind of centralize political control to some degree, you can make a more coherent kind of national tax system.
You can allow for much easier internal movement of goods, internal movement of people. And so like movement of goods and movement of people, I think is generally good in the vast majority of circumstances. The question is like, given political constraints, at what level is the optimal set of kind of movement? Because some levels of movement are just unsustainable given kind of political realities.
Atossa AraxiaYeah, I think that’s totally right politically. I mean, we can’t even get a handful of people from Mexico into this country at this point. So there’s no denying that.
Mark Lutter: So I guess to return a little bit more to kind of your book. So what was the kind of favorite special economic zone or weird jurisdiction you studied and what was the one that kind of horrified you the most?
Atossa Araxia: My favorite that’s an interesting question. So there are two, there’s a sort of good favorite and the bad favorite and like the good favorite, I guess the sort of squishy happy favorite was Svalbard in the Arctic.
We have many we have many free zones in the world. We have we have none that are just for people to enter and leave, as they will and Svalbard, which is an Arctic territory of Norway, is one of those. And what I thought was really cool about Svalbard once I got into the research a little bit. So I assume the reason Svalbard is a free zone is because after World War One, until World War One, Svalbard was terra nullius. It was a no man’s land. There were people there coal mining mainly, fur trappers, you know, the sort of arctic stuff that you would expect. But there was no central government. It was kind of a free for all. And when Norway gained ownership of the archipelago in the Treaty of Versailles, the powers stipulated that Norway could have it, but they had to have this policy of nondiscrimination.
So if you’re in Svalbard, you can’t be discriminated against for not being Norwegian, which is a huge deal because like nationality is not under the American Civil rights Act. Like nor in any country, it’s pretty fair game to deny people a job if they don’t have a work permit. And like this is just we’ve accepted this, not so in Svalbard. And that’s really cool, I think. Where I was wrong initially is that I had assumed, as many have assumed, that this freedom, this openness was like this lovely postwar internationalist concession, but it was actually the products of intense lobbying from an American coal miner and his lawyer on K Street, who before the hand off to Norway, were so terrified of their coal mines and their property rights being taken away that they were just agitating and trying to make sure that this wouldn’t happen to them. And out of that, this was not the only factor, but out of this very intense lobbying and record keeping and they just had like reams of documents showing this. We put a stick here and we built a hut there and we have a mine here. And this is the output. There are like intense documentation. We’re able to get this into the treaty. So it did not end up benefiting them. They pulled out and, you know, moved on with their lives. But I did think that that was an interesting twist that maybe some of these, you know, utopian places can come out of something really quite commercial or mercenary or, you know, a self-interest. That kind of blew my mind. My least,
well, then I have another favorite. I think Luxembourg is just such a clever jurisdiction. They are on top of everything. They are way ahead of the curve like they, like Switzerland, were able to accommodate foreign capital in creative ways when their colonies, when their steel industry shut down, but their incursions into outer space, they’ve passed a space law that recognizes property rights. Really gone all out has been both incredibly interesting to watch and I think quite successful. They’ve built a space industry in Luxembourg, so hats off to them, even though some of their activities are pretty nefarious and they’re very, very they have been very involved in helping companies dodge tax.
Mark Lutter: Cool, and I guess what’s the least favorite or kind of the most horrifying special economic zone or weird legal hack that you came across
Atossa Araxia:So the most horrifying one is this offshoring of asylum seekers, because the conditions they were held under are just awful. And I think being offshore, this sort of evasion of responsibility on the part of the state that’s funding it and running these detention centers, it just it created a situation where no one was responsible, there was no accountability. It was horrible for the people there like absolutely horrible. I never went to any of these places. I, for various reasons, could not go.
I did go to a really strange place called Bhutan, which is on the border of Laos and China. And I wouldn’t say it was like a horrifying or like there was nothing like morally offensive about it to me, but it was the place had such bad vibes. So it’s in Laos. It’s in Laos, but everything in it is Chinese. The license plates on the cars, the restaurants, language. You can’t even buy a beer with Lao currency and everything’s on WeChat now or like Alipay and WeChat now. But anyway, I didn’t have those apps, I had Lao money. I was like, Can I just please buy a beer, please? And it was bizarre because it was this half built city.
It was sort of ghostly. The weather was strange. Everything about it was really unsettling, it kind of felt like you were in a sci fi movie, like almost Blade Runner ask, but in the Jungle and this is a place that again, it’s in Laos on Lao territory. But the Chinese have so dominated the economy there by building up the real estate. It’s a Chinese company building it that you really don’t quite know where you are. And the reason I went to Bhutan was I like going to weird places but I have a specific one for this. Bhutan had decided some years ago when the Chinese started investing in it to change their time zone to match the Chinese time zone, which is enormous. It goes from one edge of town of China to the other, and I found that quite radical because it is really political. Time is very political, right. It is a kind of a capitulation to Beijing, but also it was kind of funny because this place, the biggest selling point of Bhutan, is that it’s a hub on this big railway line that China, the China Lao Railway that’s going to be extended even more. And like the one thing you need when you are catching a train is to know what time it’s coming. And in this place, you go to the city, you go to the hotel desk. There’s one time at the reception, which is the Chinese time. But then if you ask anyone what time it is, they’ll give you the laos time because the cell phones have the lao network and nobody knows what time it is so you always have to specify loud time or Chinese time. And like this was a real issue when I was planning on getting the train back. And I’m like, okay, we need to know which time, which time? So that was strange and I had not anticipated it to mess with my head to that degree.
Mark Lutter: Yeah, that that would be pretty unsettling. So you spoke a little bit about kind of the I guess, buying and selling of passports, which was your previous book that was published about a decade ago. And I remember during kind of previous conversations we had; we spoke a little bit about this. And one of the kind of points that you made that stood out was seeing how the kind of buying and selling of passports went from this like weird French thing to now being like a sub what professional industry, like a relatively professional industry.
Still a bit weird. Like it’s not like the mainstream thing, but like it’s become a little bit more professionalized and we had this conversation a while ago so correct me if I’m mischaracterizing your statement. Talk a little bit about like you went to this conference global citizens, you saw this happening. Great, let’s get to that story a little bit more.
Atossa Araxia: Yeah, so before I appeared on the scene, there have been various countries selling their citizenship for like limited time or kind of gray zone. You know, they’d advertised in the back pages of the business press and cater to populations that were feeling unstable. Right. So Hong Kong during the handover, Lebanese people all the time. There was a market and it was like you had to know a guy kind of but you could get you could get a passport. It would be more or less sanctioned. You could use it. But what started to change in the sort of early to mid 2000s is that a company called Henley and Partners, this consulting firm based in Switzerland, but they’re really global now, got a contract from the nation of St Kitts and Nevis to essentially revamp their citizenship by investment program. Since St Kitts had become independent in 1984 from Britain, it had this little stipulation in its nationality code. And the Swiss company saw this said this is a huge business opportunity the company and its founder its main man, Christian Kaylin, had been working on tax issues in Switzerland helping wealthy foreigners negotiate a flat tax. So they kind of had a lay of the land. They knew the clientele, they knew what rich people wanted, and they saw that this was something that they could market, you know, around the world. This was also a time I mean, this started right before the financial crisis but like, I don’t know if you remember like 2006, 2007 things felt off. Like it felt like something big was going to happen. And, you know, the next ten years were pretty crazy. Like there was a financial crisis, there was the Arab Spring. A lot of things happened. And so this combination of geopolitical events, financial crash and this availability, this new availability of a passport gave birth to an industry that is keeps growing. St Kitts started to have enormous success. Its neighbors in Dominica and Grenada started to get involved and opened their own programs. Malta followed suit. Cyprus had some version of this before, but this became this kind of like a go to way for small states to pad their budgets. And obviously the passport trade attracts a certain type of person, right? There are plenty of law abiding people who are, for one reason or another, wants a second passport. And I understand them. I have 4 like if I only had one knowing what it’s like to have four, I wouldn’t feel so good about just having one. You know, I get it. I’m not a billionaire, I’m minor. I got mine organically, but I guess where was I going with this? There is a lot of demand People were buying, more countries were selling. And it became pretty controversial, especially in Europe because when you sell so it’s a country’s rights to do whatever it wants with its naturalization laws that is like one of the core tenets of sovereignty, national sovereignty, you can’t really mess with that. You can’t tell a country who belongs and who doesn’t except in this very marginal case of Svalbard in Norway and the European Union got very upset at Malta because they were saying, well, you shouldn’t be able to put a price tag on citizenship. And you shouldn’t be able to do this because then you give people access to the whole EU.
And we didn’t agree to this. So like why should you grant them access to all of our countries? And they dragged Malta to court, to the European Court of Justice, and the result is TBD. But it looks like it looks like the Europeans will have to drop the suit because their advocate they’re the sort of ombudsman in the court that gives opinions that people typically listen to. In short of a final judgment, told the Europeans, you don’t really have a case here because it’s up to Malta to decide who to let in and who not to let in. So these things have become legitimized both from the legal side and also from the industry side, which went from being this pretty fly by night, you know, sketchy kind of milieu to like dominated by like multinationals and Swiss consultants and due diligence firms and like, you know, big companies, big law firms. So it’s not as shocking as it used to be. I think this concept of a golden passport or a golden visa, it just ends up being categorized in the same in just like rich people things and all, not James Bond villain things, but just like rich people things. And that’s where we are now.
Mark Lutter: Yeah, it seems like especially, for example, if you’re Chinese, lots of Chinese people are moving money abroad and given the kind of somewhat arbitrary repression of the Chinese government as well as they’re kind of slow moving property bubble. If I was Chinese for example, I will very much want another passport. And you’re also just looking at now with right. You’ve had what some people have, for example characterized as like pogroms in Amsterdam after an Israeli professional soccer team played another soccer team. Right. Like and so you do see kind of these challenges with order that are going to cause some minority populations to want. And I’ve got several African friends who spend a lot of time in the Caribbean because the U.S. immigration system is not particularly open.
Dubai has been restricting kind of migration from some African countries, and for them, most African passports are very bad in terms of like access to other countries. And so for them, having the option to has kind of a good passport that allows them to travel the world much more, much more freely, is a huge benefit and me being an American, I don’t feel a particularly strong desire to have another passport, but I can understand why other people would find that kind of something quite important to have.
Atossa Araxia: Yeah, yeah. And it can come from a lot of different viewpoints. It can like, it can just be like paranoia, it can be discrimination. It can be, you know, just wanting to live in another place and not being able to. It really runs the gamut.
Mark Lutter: Yeah, one of the more interesting I guess that’s what it seems I’ve been exposed to about 18 months ago I attended to Zanzalu which you might have heard of. It was this like pop up that Vitalik Buterin kind of helped organize in Montenegro. And it was the idea being like, okay, can we get like a few hundred people together for two months? And like, what are the social dynamics of that? And like, the short version is it like works people had fun. They were like interesting conversations but exposed me to a lot more of these, I guess like digital nomad types than previously, where like I’ve always lived in the U.S. and though I travel a lot like this kind of opened like here’s this new class of people. These aren’t like the rich people in their fifties who want a second passport. These are like the smart young people, some from countries with good passports, but many of them from countries with bad passports that like don’t have a specific like tied to a specific place. Even had conversations with some of them recently, some kind of who are Canadian by nationality. And they’re still paying Canadian taxes, but they’re wondering like, look, why am I paying Canadian taxes? I’m only in Canada three months out of the year. Like I travel a lot, why would I not like domicile in Dubai or somewhere else that has a much more favorable tax regime? Where they are starting to feel a little bit like a sucker. Right. Okay. Why am I paying 30% of my income like I like Canada, there’s some degree of pride, but like the social contract feels like it’s breaking down on some margin in a way that this I don’t know maybe you experience this earlier than me just given your kind of background living in Switzerland. But like I write about this stuff, at least more recently I’ve got this like much more granular appreciation for how it’s being perceived by people making decisions who are like in the same general socioeconomic bracket as myself. So it’s not like some far off super rich person.
Atossa Araxia: Totally and yeah, I’m kind of having a hard time wrapping my head around like how permanent this digital nomad class is going to be because like I’m a little older than you, I have two kids, and now I’m like, I could never. They’re in school like it’s not just not possible. You can’t bounce around as much when you’re you have adult responsibilities.
I think what you’re getting at is like the social contract isn’t so much breaking down, but it’s it looks different. Like, I think that all of the people that you’re talking to understand the importance of a social contract, but it might not be the one that you’re born with, right? We might be heading into a time when this is something that you have a little bit more autonomy over. And that would be a good thing, right? Because if it allows you to build a more meaningful social contract with other people in a place that makes more sense for you, like I’m all for it. The danger is if you really just don’t have any ties anywhere and I guess, like, what do you expect to get in return? We’re humans, like we’re social creatures. We need institutions and governments at some point in our lives and I think I’m all for people traveling and living where they want. But like, it’s important not to lose sight of that just on a social level. So I don’t know what’s going to happen with these digital nomads. They’re also different. I spend a lot of time thinking about expats and expat culture because kind of grew up in one and they seem different from the traditional expats because they’re not going like under the sort of umbrella of an institution like the U.N. or a state Department or a Procter and Gamble. They’re free agents. They have a different way of being in the world. I would love an anthropologist to look at that and tell me what’s going on.
Mark Lutter: I can introduce you to one if you want. Unofficial anthropologist but he’s followed a lot of the pop ups and taking notes on the people who attend, why they attend, done interviews etc.
Atossa Araxia: Please, I would love that
Mark Lutter: Yeah, remind me after the call, I’m happy to introduce you. Yeah. I mean, I think there is like one, on some margin dystopian future is like the Emirates and they were successful to the extent they have built something right people move there voluntarily to improve their lives.
Even the people on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum from India, Pakistan. These people are stupid. They know the risk. They’re still choosing to move there because they can make a lot more money than they can in their host countries. Yeah, but you still have this like just very bifurcated kind of segregated class, like society where if you’re in the kind of upper income consultant spectrum, you’ll only interact with the lower income people. Like when they drive you somewhere, when you order food or check into a hotel, there is no like meaningful social safety net. It’s kind of very different from the western, liberal, democratic kind of states that we’ve built over the last almost century kind of in the post-World War Two era. The interesting intellectual trends that have kind of has happened over the last few years is the kind of right it’s called the Middle East migration model has become a lot more legitimized and like mainstream commentary
Atossa Araxia: The kafala system you mean.
Mark Lutter: I don’t know that term.
Atossa Araxia: The sort of sponsorship based migration.
Mark Lutter: Yeah, also the idea of just like you can migrate and you’re on a work visa and there’s no expected path to citizenship or residency and very strict enforcement if you overstay your visa.
Atossa Araxia: Totally, Yeah
Mark Lutter: It starts to creep a little bit in the mainstream dialog at least in the U.S., in the kind of channels I’m following is look right like this is better on some margin for me from a humanitarian perspective. It increases labor market, increases the job market. But it is like this change in the nature of society in terms of how you define somebody as a member of the society, which gives me like a little bit of unease.
Atossa Araxia: It’s uncomfortable. It’s really uncomfortable and you’re absolutely right that this is kind of creeping in and I think it’s for mostly because it feels kind of hopeless to reform anything in the U.S. It’s just been stuck like immigration is so frustrating and no one can seem to figure out how to fix it. But even so, the person that came to mind when you mentioned this creeping into U.S. dialog is an economist named Branko Milanovic, who’s like pretty much a lefty, you know, I agree with him on most things. Maybe you guys don’t but he wrote an article and it’s part of a book, too. It was in 2017 or something and the gist of it was, you know, if we want to fix migration in a way that is palatable, if we want to have more migration in a way that is palatable to countries more prone to restrictionism, why don’t we do that? Why don’t you allow them to come to a country, let’s say the U.S., but have made no promises about future citizenship or social welfare or anything like that. And at the time I like definitely clutched my pearls and I was like, But Franco, it’s so undemocratic. And like, I actually wrote about this at the time, but it does seem like that is the way things are moving, for better or for worse. On the one hand, giving people opportunities to move if that’s what they want to do is good, is an unmitigated good, in my opinion. I guess I’m sort of an immigration maximalist in the sense that like however you get there, why you get there It doesn’t matter if that’s what you want to do but on the other hand, it’s a pretty dismal future to think that you’re going to a new place and you’re setting up a life and you don’t really have any prospects of being there permanently or like or having a good life.
So it’s tough. It’s tough. I think it is such a case by case thing, because if you’re coming from a place where you make slightly less money but you have, you know, citizenship and rights and stuff and you want to make a little more money, like maybe the balance doesn’t maybe this makes sense. But then if you’re coming from somewhere where you’re physically unsafe, maybe it becomes more appealing.
Mark Lutter: You know, it’s hard to make decisions like that for people. One of the kinds of classic examples I sometimes bring up is Saudi Arabia I think has the third or fourth largest number of migrants in the world. The U.S. is one then like Germany, Russia, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia might be like over Russia, but all of the Saudi migrants are from India. India is democratic. You can vote, it’s liberal on like some margins obviously there’s still like great repression of women. Lots of bad things happening. That’s like a for its income level, a pretty well functioning kind of like liberal Democratic state. And you have people like choosing to move to Saudi Arabia, which is like even before the recent reforms.
Atossa Araxia: Not democratic at all
Mark Lutter: Yeah, not democratic. Like now women are like at least somewhat like free but before the reforms, just like repressive on every margin, like if your kind of employer decides they want to take action against you, there’s basically zero recourse you have and yet still these people, this isn’t a hundred years ago. These people are in WhatsApp groups. They are talking to their friends back home. Like when you made the decision to go, you have a reasonably informed risk profile of that. And like you still have huge numbers of people like willing to do so. And I think on some margin you just have to respect the rights of those people making those decisions.
Atossa Araxia: Yeah, I think there’s also a lot we don’t know about Saudi because there’s also no free press and there’s, you know, it’s really hard to know. I mean, there is a headline a few months ago that like 30,000 people disappeared in Neom in this new project, like, just disappeared. I don’t know what the sourcing is. I don’t, like, have access to what they had. But like, that’s a lot of people. I haven’t seen follow up, I don’t know if you know anything more about this, but I was like, what? Like that’s crazy.
Mark Lutter: Yeah, my initial reaction to that was just like those numbers are so large as to be unbelievable. Somebody did a brief just like analysis where it was like, look, if you compare because you’ve got other megaprojects in the Middle East, right, you can compare it to the Burj Khalifa, where you will have like not 100% accurate, but like somewhat accurate statistics of number of workers and deaths. And so to end up with like the 30,000 disappear you’re like the number of workers has to be so large as to be like these people will be visible from satellites or something that like, yeah.
Atossa Araxia: I mean that whole project is just to me really murky, and I have struggled to get a good handle on it. I think that’s by design. Do you think that they’re going to pull it off? Do you think that we are going to have the lion or Neom or whatever it’s called now.
Mark Lutter: No, I mean my interpretation, I did some consulting work on it a year and a half ago and I mean it was fine. They flew me to a panel, flew me to Venice and sat me on a panel with that _____ So like, happy to do that. And my advice was you should try to think a little bit more about like, who are the people are going to live there, why are they going to come, right? What industries are going to locate there? And then about nine months later, they decided to dramatically scale back their plan. So clearly, they read my essay and were like Marks, right. We’re going to listen to him. I’m pretty sure that did not happen.
Atossa Araxia: Probably they just ran out of money
Mark Lutter: Yeah, that was it. My interpretation is just that MBS wants legacy projects and he has very little idea of the actual mechanics involved with cities. So their plans were, for example, to get like 2 million residents in seven years. Shenzhen took about 14 years to get 2 million residents in Shenzhen. They were starting from a population of about 100,000 various fishing villages right next to Hong Kong. Shenzhen is probably the most successful urbanization in human history. And if that took 14 years to get to 2 million, the possibility that Saudi Arabia gets to 2 million in seven years is just like completely unrealistic.
Atossa Araxia: Right, unless they’re trying to move all the Gazans there overnight and like maybe half of Lebanon. I’m saying, there are ways to do it, but they’re not good ones.
Mark Lutter: Yeah, the other kind of example is in Saint Petersburg, I think when they were building it like they literally conscripted every stonemason in all of Russia
Atossa Araxia: And like beyond they like imported people too, didn’t they? Yeah.
Mark Lutter: And so you can do like completely bonkers state led projects. But like, given that, like my understanding is like it’s barely functional, Jeddah is fairly functional, like the Saudi government is still, even though it’s very centralized, it’s still like somewhat like responsive to Saudi citizen concerns. Like NBS, I think has made a lot of enemies in his tenure. And so he can’t do things entirely unilaterally because there is a risk of kind of a coup or something similar. And yeah, so my interpretation is legacy projects did not have people or was unwilling to listen to people talking about how it could realistically be implemented. And so tried to do something very unrealistic until they ran out of money and had to scale it down. And my guess is we’ll build a small portion of it. Have 50,000 people living there declared a success and then just move on because like the actual build out of it is just like does not make sense.
Atossa Araxia: I think they’ll end up using it for like junkets and resort stuff and, you know, business travel and whatnot. So anyway, we’ll see.
Mark Lutter: So one of the other kind interesting examples from your first book was Comoros. I might be mispronouncing because I only read it in your book but kind of a small island country off Africa that was one of the first kind of getting involved in selling passports, but not selling passports to rich people, kind of a much more a much different market.
Atossa Araxia: Yeah. I really wanted to show the two ends of the market and what happens when you start selling citizenship. And on the high end, we’re familiar. You know, Peter Thiel has a New Zealand passport and a bunker like whatever that’s known. And on the other end so coming back to the UAE or the Gulf, I guess because they have this problem around the Gulf. There are a lot of stateless people in this region and it’s for a bunch of different reasons. But some of them are migrant workers who just kind of stayed and didn’t register. Some of them are families who’ve been there forever but just for whatever reason weren’t able to register when the polls when the sort of rolls of citizens opened and they had to register themselves. Some are discriminated against anyway. Long story short, the UAE at the time had, they claimed 10,000 _____ stateless people, it was actually closer to 40 or 50. I found out through leaked documents later, but they had this plan not to give them citizenship of UAE which would have been expensive and politically, you know, fraught, not that they can really vote and instead buy citizenship from another country. This was brokered by a middleman who himself was very clever, you know, citizen of the world. He was Syrian and French and lived in Kuwait and very enterprising man. But they brokered this deal in exchange for on paper, $200 million of paper, a lot more. The Comoro Islands would document the stateless people in UAE. And the way that it works is that they opened an embassy or a sort of a consulate or a building. I’m not really sure what the legal status of the structure was, but there was a building where people would go, the stateless people would go register, fingerprints, photograph, etc. and then, you know, a little while later would receive passports from this country that they had sometimes never heard of. None of them had been there. And the weird thing about this passport is it didn’t really give them the right to go and live there. It was really just an ID document. So, again, if we’re talking about the devaluation of citizenship or the re-imagining of it, like what does citizenship mean if you can have it and it confers, you know, status to you, but you can’t use it in the country that you’re supposed to be part, super bizarre.
This whole thing unraveled for various reasons, political mainly. The opposition party didn’t like it, they went after the president at the time. He wound up in jail. You know, politics, right. And what surprised me in the follow up to the story and I was getting more and more data about it and I actually was sent the whole Excel document of every single person that had become a Comorian citizen and UAE babies and elderly people.
What surprised me the most is that a few years after the book and a couple of articles came out, I started hearing from some of the people who’d gotten the passports and were now faced with the fact that the passports would no longer be valid because the Comoros didn’t want to do it anymore. And they were saying, well, this was weird, was not our first choice, but we had it and it was useful because we could get a license plate for our cars and we could like go to the dentist or like whatever. Boring life admin that you can’t do without a citizenship document.
And now these things weren’t valid anymore and they were even more screwed. So it really made me think twice. I mean, it’s dark, but it really made me think twice about, I don’t know, like it’s not good. it doesn’t seem right to just give someone a random citizenship that they didn’t ask for. But on the other hand, the only thing worse than that is then taking it away.
Mark Lutter: Just to I guess, slightly change focus. One of the more kinds of, interesting thing questions on the borders of sovereignty that’s recently popped up is the Syrian war where HTS which I guess it was formerly like some al Qaeda offshoot now controls the majority of Syrian territory except the guy running it seems to be like somewhat cosmopolitan.
And they’ve announced that they want like free markets that’s state controlled. The area that was under their control over the last decade did more economic activity as measured by light right satellite light increased which is greater economic activity, while Syria under the Assad regime had the amount of decrease. And then two, there’s this other question of right, you’ve got the Kurds control a lot in the northwest. I don’t think that the coast where kind of Alawite majority has been conquered, maybe has in the last few days. But like Syria hasn’t really been a coherent country for at least the last decade. And given the current kind of coalition that controls Syria, it feels unlikely that it’s going to be a coherent country in the future. And you also see this in Nigeria, for example, the government doesn’t control parts of like northeastern Nigeria outside of cities. And so, I mean, I don’t know, your thesis is much more on like zones so I don’t know to what extent do you think about the kind of these other adjacent things, but like it feels like this tradition of sovereignty is sort of fraying upon multiple dimensions.
Atossa Araxia: Yeah, I think if you look outside the U.S. and Canada and like, I guess the Western Hemisphere, this has been going on for a while, like Somalia comes to mind, you know, they have all of these devolved arrangements and factions running different parts of the country. All the ports in that area are heavily controlled by different interests, sometimes different corporations.
So, you know, again, it’s not new, but I think in this case, we’re going to be seeing it play out day by day. What I thought was so interesting about the reporting from Syria, and I don’t have any particular knowledge. I was just listening to NPR. Is that one of the first reports from the ground that they did was from a customs depot on the border with Lebanon. And like that really tells you what are the sort of primary things of rebuilding a state. Well, trade, customs, like all of this boring stuff that like people don’t really like to talk about because it kind of sucks. But like, that’s where the reporter went, that’s where the action was happening. And like, that’s really important too.
Mark: Yeah, if you look at a lot of likes, I mean Syria is not small but like small lower income countries Yeah, customs are where the governments get most of their tax revenue. You need a relatively sophisticated administrative apparatus to tax income.
Atossa Araxia: well, soon we will have this in the U.S too If the tariff.
Mark Lutter: Yeah, but that’s the reason why the US had tariffs in the 19th century is because like tariff, like trade is much easier to tax. Like, you know, where it comes in through a port you say pay X dollars than income and so this was also a New York Times article. This was maybe a decade ago or so that reported on municipal services in ISIS controlled regions compared to like Iraq controlled regions and like the ISIS controlled regions, provided much better municipal service in terms of like much more reliable. They could pick up the trash, they would repair the roads, which is you also see this kind of with the Taliban today is the Taliban appear to be governing more effectively than the previous government, at least on some margins. Obviously, lots of bad stuff but like just in terms of like not having to bribe everyone to get a permit in terms of actually controlling having a monopoly of violence, you are seeing these kind insurgent governments being able to do that much more effectively, which kind of questions the western notion a little bit or at least Western supported governments in these parts of the world.
Atossa Araxia:Well there’s something to be said for smaller units of governance on the like day to day level. I think a lot of things are better at scale but then things like knowing what residents need in terms of trash pickup is like, I don’t know, in Brooklyn it’s block by block every block has like weird stuff around the trash and the rats and so. I don’t think there’s a blanket and this is very unsatisfying answer, but there’s no one way to do things which I suppose the Taliban are learning.
Mark Lutter: And then maybe, I guess to conclude just a few questions, you have a chapter in the book on Charter Cities kind of focusing a little bit on Paul Romer on Prospera. So if you want to kind of chat about that.
Atossa Araxia: Yeah, I had a really hard time writing about Prospera because it’s such a quick moving story and you know, when you write a book you hope that it’s relevant in a few years at the very least, and with their entanglements with Icsid and all these outside groups now getting involved, it’s just really hard to keep track of what was going on. So I didn’t feel I could write a definitive chapter on Prospera. We don’t know how the story ends. There is a New York Times article about it and the magazine that was, you know, exhaustive, had all the notes. I know some people had issues with it. I have been reading about it too much so it wasn’t for me.
I was like, I know all this stuff already, I don’t need to read this again. But it did a good job of like explaining the stakes. But Prospera, correct me if I’m wrong, but like when it started, people were really people on the left and progressives and liberals were very concerned that this would become a sort of a dystopian corporate dictatorship. And like if you look at what’s and I’m not saying that’s impossible because theoretically, like, yes, that’s set up in a way that could create this kind of scenario. But day to day it’s like it’s a beach resort with like hackathons and wellness and like, I don’t know it sounds like L.A. to me like from my impression of L.A., it’s just like, yeah, this is like a, you know, a bunch of, like, whatever. It’s not as insidious and scary as it could have become and this isn’t to say that the people involved aren’t ideological and like, I don’t agree with them, but I don’t know. It’s hard to know what’s going to happen. What do you think is going to happen? Do you think they’ll be shut down?
Mark Lutter: Yeah, I mean the most recent thing, KPMG, I assume Prospera paid them, but KPMG issued a statement basically saying that the Supreme Court ruling. So I guess for context, right, I think _________. But for us, like Honduras passed basically Charter Cities legislation in 2013 to enable the creation of multiple charter cities. Prospera launched publicly, I think in 2000 and then about I think it was three years ago, maybe two years ago there was an election and the left wing government won. The left wing government had one of their campaign platforms to shut down Prospera and the other ZEDES, the other charter cities and they’ve been going back and forth. The most recent update is the Supreme Court ruled that the legislation that enabled Prospera was unconstitutional. Prospera is fighting that. There was a kind of a statement document from KPMG that says that the Supreme Court ruling is illegitimate. And so I think Prospera is just deciding if they’re going to ignore the Supreme Court ruling. Now with Trump’s election. They’ve been making a PR and lobbying push and kind of engage several congressmen. Rubio is going to run state. He will probably be confirmed and he doesn’t like communist left wing governments. So it’s quite possible he decides to make an example out of Honduras. So I think they’ve got a decent chance of making it through. It’s hard to know. I think like, look, even if they do survive the next year, a new government gets elected, right?
Atossa Araxia: They’re not going to have long term legal stability, it’s just not going to happen in Honduras for them. And so and that’s the major obstacle.
Mark Lutter: The thing is to do any like large capital intensive project, you need access to foreign investment and international capital flows. And to do that, you need to have like some degree of friendly relations with the host country. And even if Honduras escapes this government, it’s unlikely the next government reverses a Supreme Court ruling. And even if they do right, I’m an investor, I’m gonna look okay you just have like four years of a giant shit show. Do I want to embark on a 10 year 20 year project given like Honduras kind of swings wildly from left to right.
Atossa Araxia: yeah, I agree with that and I think that that speaks to sort of the central problem of charter cities is that like no country that needs one would be a good place for one. It doesn’t actually solve the fundamental problem, which is that there are jurisdictions where it is hard to do business because they are dysfunctional and unreliable, sort of unstable.
Mark Lutter: I will respond to that because I have a response. There’s no silver bullet but before talking about that, just to briefly mention, I don’t know if you mentioned in your book, but the other kind of Charter city project in Honduras is Ciudad Morazán and I visited there and that one was kind of quite nice. In some ways I found it a bit warmer than Prospera because Prospera is like a very nice beach resort, but you don’t really interact with the locals unless they’re like serving you food or something. something, right?
And Morazán, they had a kind of a big warehouse that they were using until the new government came into power, but they also have when I was there it was 60 units, I think they might have built another 40 units or something. Basically working class housing. And so you had a lot of working class Hondurans living there, some work in call centers.
They had appointed mayor when I was there, a kind of single mother working in a call center. Her mom, for example, was very anti ZEDE and so she would kind of joke when she would see her mom like, hey, I live in one of these. Like, what’s the problem? And so you saw this like kind of fun local dynamics where some of the people didn’t even realize they lived in a ZEDE.
Atossa Araxia: It’s like a village, right? it’s like a town, a little town. Yeah. Look, I was going to say they maybe they need better PR, but like, probably better to stay under the radar because the more that you talk about these things, the more controversial they become.
Mark Lutter: And there was the value proposition just because Honduras is a very violent place was like, you can live here, your kids can play outside, you don’t need to worry about security.
Atossa Araxia: But that’s just a gated community, right? What’s the difference really?
Mark Lutter: A gated community for low income residents, which is I think an innovation because in Honduras, if you’re high income, you have that. If you’re low income, you don’t and living in a violent place is not great. And so I think that is an important innovation and then more design had the potential to scale create a lot of jobs as well if they had a favorable legal environment. But with a kind of antagonistic government a lot of the investment was pulled back.
Atossa Araxia: Yeah. I mean, it does seem maybe a little bit shortsighted to put the, you know, libertarian ideologues in the same bucket as this project. I don’t know if there’s a way around it because it’s the same law that allows for both to exist.
Mark Lutter: Yeah, Morazán is also led by a libertarian ideologue
Atossa Araxia: Right, but less loud about it.
Mark Lutter: He is just a very kind of brutal, like brutally effective businessman. And to me that’s yeah, like if we analogize the charter city space to the kind of passport space, right. We’re still probably in the vaguely 2014 era, maybe a little bit earlier in terms of kind of it’s not attracting like the super serious talent, it’s not attracting the super serious capital, still a little bit fringe. It’s getting better but like we haven’t quite had that one win yet that legitimizing thing that can say, okay, look, we can do this, we can put on suits, we can like play the game, we can do this because this is a good business opportunity rather than because we’re ideologically committed to a certain outcome. And I think once you have one of those, you need the ideologues because nobody else is kind of dumb enough to bend their heads against the wall for a decade.
Atossa Araxia: To be clear, I agree that this is going to happen, right? I write in the book I think this is what’s going to happen. My personal take is like I think that progressives and left lefties should get involved with this because like, you can do things with this too.
But it is going to happen, I think you’re right too situated in the sort of like St Kitts early St Kitts era of passport sales and like at some point they’ll be in Malta and at some point, they’ll be on international court and who knows what they’re going to say about it. But like I do think you’re on this trajectory, it’s just really, it’s sturdy and there’s a lot going on in the world. So, you know, you win some, you lose some.
Mark Lutter: Yeah. And I think to your point about I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of like the tension of charter cities is that you only want to build them in places that need them, but the places that need them need them for a reason, which tends to be like lack of rule of law, governance instability I do think Honduras is particularly hard. Latin America, the left wing parties tend to be like literal communists, and the right wing parties tend to be like, I don’t know, proto fascist. And in, for example, the Caribbean, you tend to have like populist and populist. In Africa, the governments tend to have some degree of right tribal affiliation. So you still have these political elements, but they tend not to be like Latin America probably has like the hardest left right swing in terms of election politics out of any region in the world.
And then two, I think also some of the lessons from Honduras is look, you need to build up local engagement a little bit earlier. You should have locals investing, you should figure out how to do job centers. Right? Resorts are nice, but resorts don’t tend to be super heavy job centers. You should figure out how to and maybe this is impossible given the politics, but how to build ties with both parties
Atossa Araxia: I think that in Dubai, the DIFC, the International Financial Center, was put there to serve international business. So it made sense to import people and structures and things that they were comfortable with. If the goal in Honduras is to serve local people, you can’t expect them to be thrilled about imported Arizona judges skyping in for lawsuits in Prospera like it just doesn’t really match the scene. So yeah.
Mark Lutter: You have to fit the context to the project or the project to the context. I started the Charter Cities Institute seven years ago and it’s definitely been a lot slower than I would have hoped. In the last six months we’ve had a lot more green shoots so I’m fairly optimistic and just I guess to shout out for those listening also an invitation for you. We’re having our New City Summit in Nairobi, June 12th and 13th. We’d love to have you attend, speak, moderate a panel if you’re listening. Also, please come. Yeah, thanks for thanks for coming on the podcast.
Atossa Araxia: my pleasure, always nice to chat Mark, Take care.
Mark Lutter: All right.
[OUTRO]
Mark Lutter: Thanks for listening to the Charter City podcast. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. You can follow us on your favorite podcasting platform or subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you enjoyed this conversation, we’d appreciate you sharing it on social media. Thanks for listening and we hope to see you again.
