Shaun Newman Podcast - #1016 - Alex Voss

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Alex Voss is the CFO of Tipolis, a company focused on developing autonomous, privately governed new cities worldwide, often described as "governance as a service" inspired by concepts like free private cities. With a background in finance and investment banking, he transitioned into this role after engaging with libertarian ideas from works such as Titus Gebel's Free Private Cities. Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

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to follow Dad into the studio. Are you excited about spring coming? Yes. How was your hockey season? Good. And what has been your favorite part of the last couple of days? Have you done anything fun?

Yes. Come on, yes what? What did you do that was fun? I played goalie. In hockey? You played goalie in hockey? Well, I obviously missed that, folks. Did you stop the puck's?

She's nodding her head. Okay, there you go. Meal in studio with me today to introduce Monday's podcast. Let's get on to that tale of the tape. Today's guest is the CFO of Tipolis, a company focused on developing autonomous, privately governed cities worldwide. I'm talking about Alex Voss. So buckle up.

Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Alex Voss. Alex, thanks for hopping on. Thanks for having me, Sean. We, for the audience, we met in Panama City at Michael Thorpeps event. And I was listening to your presentation on autonomous cities and a whole bunch of other things. And I was like, that's an interesting thought.

Now, before we get to any of that, Alex, your first time on the show, I'm going to assume most people don't know who you are. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, absolutely. Names Alex Foss. My background is really finance and economics. I've been in that space now for 15, 20 years, largely in investment banking, a little bit in asset management. I don't know, six years ago, I was presented with an opportunity to join a startup in

the space that we'll talk about relatively soon here. It's a big ambitious project and I jumped at the opportunity and haven't looked back since. So my role within it is really on the finance, the economic side, but I'm also head of the business development. So quite a breadth, let's say, of skills and roles to play. You know, outside of that, I'm living in Ohio in the U.S. I was born in Ohio, lived in Chicago for, I don't know, 15 years. It's a nice enough place to be a young person, not particularly a great place to set down roots and raise a family. So I moved back home, and that's where I reside now, although I travel around quite extensively.

You know, when you first went into finance economics, that background, when did you start, when were your eyes open to something seems to be a little off here? Was it immediate or did it take some time? Immediate. I mean, my whole family works in the financial space. My parents, I don't know if they would identify necessarily as libertarians, but they're libertarians. You know, they'd snap their fingers and reduce the federal budget by 90%. That qualifies in my eyes. So, you know, I was sort of born this way.

I remember being asked early on by my mom, when you grow up, are you going to vote for the Republicans or the Democrats. And my answer was, well, whoever's better. So I was, I was never really, you know, part of one team or another and tried to always look at things for how they were. In terms of explicitly in the finance and economics space, I was very fortunate to go to University of Chicago, which is, I guess, to many, the foremost training ground for relatively free market economics. You know, it's the livelihood of Milton Friedman and some of these other famous names. That said, I went there and I had a basketball coach in high school that said, please do go there. That's going to be a great education, be a phenomenal experience for you, but make sure you're reading Austrian economics at the same time.

So you can really get the Chicago school is sort of known as the mathematical, quantitative version of economics, and the Austrian school is much more. logical and sort of derivative, you can, you start with basic axioms and you can sort of build out a worldview. Both schools are very, very free market, but very different methodologies. And so I had the entire time, you know, studying these two things, an extreme, let's say openness and understanding of how markets actually work and why exactly, you know, things like printing money inflation, regulation, these all create, they're actually superficial fixes to deeper problems in society. So I would say, frankly, I'm one of the lucky ones who's been more or less constantly exposed to this from the first I can remember. So just so I'm clear, a basketball

coach said, you should read this book while you're taking your studies because I think it's going to really give you some perspective. And as a young guy, you're like, you know what? I Thank you. I'm going to do that too. And off you went and you did that while at university? Absolutely. I mean, look, I am I am a libertarian and I like my freedom. But that said, I'm also like kind of conservative dispositional. And so I follow authority, you know, quite a bit. And so, you know, someone that I've had good teachers. I had great parents, all that sort of thing. So I wasn't a rebel that, you know, if you told me to do it, I was definitely not going to do it. I just did it. And I liked it. And it did change my life absolutely for the better. And I became just obsessed with this. stuff. So yeah, you can have a powerful impact on people as a coach or as a mentor or father or however it works out. So six years ago, you're sitting there and guys walk in, walk me through their pitch, or maybe not their pitch. Maybe Alex, just what stood out to you? You're like, this may, this could work. Yeah. Well, at the time, I was working in investment banking in Chicago. It is a relatively

relatively time intensive thing, but I would say it wasn't particularly fulfilling in my life. I was spending a lot of time doing a lot of work that I felt was not going to meaningfully change the world one way or another. And so I was reading quite a bit on the side as well. And I read an interesting book called Free Private Cities, Making Governments Compete for You. That's a book written by Titus Gebel, who is now my boss, but also, you know, friend and business partner in a wide range of things. And what Titus was trying to make the argument for was he's a self-made man. He was a lawyer by training, started a few companies, took one public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, retired to Monaco with his family. And because he's both German and a

lawyer, he couldn't sit back and do nothing. He couldn't play golf. It needs to be more intense than that. And so he figured, well, what can I do? And he, his experience led him in previous startups all across the world, from Australia to Canada, and everywhere in between. And his view was, well, governments everywhere, of course, some are worse and some are better, no problem, but they all suffer the same challenge. They do not have the incentive to solve any problems for you. Their incentive is to continue the problems further so that your bureaucracies can get bigger, grow a bigger budget, and they can then spend more resources and commandeer more resources to, quote unquote, solving the problem that they never do.

And so his idea was, well, how do we solve this? And so he wrote basically an instruction manual in this book that actually orientes the world towards having for-profit companies, buy land, develop it, try to make it both pleasant from a, you know, urban lifestyle perspective, but also from a legal and regulatory perspective. They would be the arbiters of what can happen within the city. And they're incentivized because they're for profit. They're incentivized. Not that they can be perfect, but rather that they at least have the incentive to regulate things appropriately. We don't want nuclear bombs built in a small city. I can understand that.

However, we don't want to arbitrarily stop people from building because the NIMBY's got together and they were able to vote to say no one can build another house within 100 meters of another one. These sorts of things, there are two ends of the spectrum and the only way that you can balance the right level of regulation and the right legal framework for society is to have someone who has actual. capital on the line, so being a for-profit business that will make or break its business, they have to be the ones that try to make this decision over time. And of course, if you do it in one place, you can do it in lots of different places, have lots of different companies competing on this sort of thing. And what happens when we have 15 different companies trying to do the same thing? They might do it slightly differently, but the ones that do it very well are going to

attract residents, they're going to make money and be successful. And then they're going to be copied by other people. The people who do it poorly are going to not attract residents. They're going to run out of money and go out of business. And it's not a problem for society. People just go to a different place to live. So that was his idea was you basically link the incentives to actually doing the right thing to the profitability of the company in the long term. So if I understood that correctly, a company walks in buys either a chunk of land or in theory, well, I guess you couldn't just walk in and buy a city, could you? It'd have to be, you buy a trunk of land, then on said trunk of land, you build something that people want to come be a part of.

Yep, that's right. I mean, if you buy an existing city where people already live, like to some degree, you could do this, but then you have all kinds of ethical questions that are very difficult about changing the legal regime that people live in without their consent, and it becomes very difficult. But if you simply buy an undeveloped land, you develop a city, and anyone who moves there signs an actual contract with the for-profit company and says, I would like to live there and I consent to following these rules, then you have no, at least in my view, ethical issues, you know, towards that end.

So typically it is, it's absolutely, you have to buy a green field chunk of land. And of course, you also need permission from the government typically to do this. So it's a challenging industry. All right. Why does the government have to sign off on this? If it's a private company and you're buying land, why does said country get to decide? On the one hand, you can do, you could do it the way you're describing. and not ask for the government permission.

Now, you can either do that the right way or the not legal way, which I don't advise doing. You can do it the right way, which is you simply build whatever you like, but you have to follow sometimes like local zoning laws. You still have to fall under the regulations. So if you're building a startup and you do this on some land in Canada, still going to pay Canadian tax rates, potentially territorial tax rates. You're still going to have to follow the rules and regulations that the country of Canada puts forth, et cetera, et cetera. So that's,

you know, basically just large-scale real estate development. And I'm not against that. I think people can do that and they do it very well. That's fine. But what we're talking about is going further. It is effectively agreeing with the government. ahead of time. They will not intervene into this small section of their country. They will delegate authority for the operation, for the regulation, for the legal framework of the city to the private operator within agreed parameters. And at least in the way TIPOLUS looks at doing this, TIPLUS being my company, we are trying to go as far, as possible on the autonomy front.

The only aspects of autonomy that we don't want would be foreign policy, international relations, treaties, these sorts of interstate relationships we're not interested to have because we actually view them as a net cost. But what we do want is the ability to write the rules, regulations, laws, tax rates, or not tax rates within the city at our

own choosing. And so of course, if we're going to do that, we do need explicit permission from the government that we're working with. What countries have been like, this sounds like a good idea? Because I feel like when you say they will not intervene, you will not come into this place, you're not going to impose your, like, are there countries or like, oh yeah, this sounds like a good idea. Like I just full stop, I'm like as soon as you're talking, I go, Alex, I understand why Canada is not going, oh yeah, Please come here and do this. Yes.

Look, there are countries that are interested to do this. That said, even when they're interested to do it, it is still a tension. What I described as the sort of maximum model that is what TIPLUS wants. We do not always get exactly what we want. There is often case, in fact, I can't even think of an exception where there isn't some level of the host nation laws or rules. Typically, it's around ultimately retaining the court system and criminal law. Even if we have autonomous procedural aspects to the criminal law, we still retain

typically the criminal law of whichever host nation it is. There can also be other sort of nuances that the countries want to retain it. And we're open to that. And we understand that it's a negotiation. So, you know, from that perspective, you know, we don't always get everything we want. But are there countries that are open to giving quite a bit? There are. It's not typically the developed countries that are doing this.

I mean, this presents sort of the more business challenge aspect to what it means to work at TIPLUS. But the way we think about it is there's a sort of sliding scale of development. There's, you know, the United States, Canada, Western Europe. That's sort of one side. On the other side is like Central African Republic, Democratic Republic, Congo, you know, places like this. And then there's everywhere in between that's some, you know, some level of developed or not. In our experience, there's a fine middle ground that we want to find typically. The Western countries are simply not desperate enough. They don't have a reason to go for this. I mean, Canada as much as I think you guys are making many bad decisions and, you know, it saddens me to see. You're not feeling the pain nearly as much as other places are. You still have, you know, it's not the U.S. dollar, but the Canadian dollar still gives you quite some benefits. And you still have relatively high GDP per capita, all kinds of relatively good things still. Now, it's declining, but fine, you have it still.

On the other hand, we've gone to places like Central African Republic and they're like, you guys can have anything you want, but you got to defend it. And, you know, that's not particularly our business model either. And so we have to go somewhere in between, places that are hungry, interested for development, but development in a controlled way, which oftentimes our projects are. It's not just like, hey, let's unshackle everything and see what happens. it's like, let's create a little sandbox and see if some interesting things can happen in this sort of space. And so, yeah, we do find countries that are quite open to this.

They get a lot of foreign direct investment. They get some development. They get infrastructure. They get jobs creation. And what we really bring more than any other type of project is you get the type of investment, the type of nomad, the type of person that would not otherwise come to your company. country. You know, if you're if you're some South American country, you might get a neighbor that crosses the border because of, you know, some tax rate differential or something, but you're not going to get Silicon Valley, you know, billionaires that started, you know, whichever company. But if you

try our model, of course, I can't guarantee that to any one place we'll get, you know, Elon Musk or whatever, but you do open yourself up to having the possibility for much more drastic styles, let's say, of migration and investment and much more, you know, broad, uh, new industries that would not otherwise enter your country. So that's, I think, one of the big attractive selling points, you know, two countries to explore this. Okay. You got, you got Elon Musk or whatever billionaire sitting there. What is it about this? model that would be like, oh yeah, I want to go try this out. Like what is it about it? Because I'm like, I'm listening. I'm like, there's parts that I find interesting, parts that I find

just confusing. What is it that's so attractive about this model, Alex? Yeah. The, the thing that is the most attractive about this model is that we rat, A, it is that it's run by a for-profit a company who always has the incentive to try to find the right balance between innovation and regulation, that sort of thing. But the other thing is you actually sign a contract when you move your business or you as an individual move into one of these cities. You sign an actual real printed contract or these days doc you signed contract that lays out your rights and your obligations. it lays out our company rights and obligations as well. And this is incredibly important for a number of reasons.

One, it kind of gets rid of this whole mythical, like, you've signed a social contract, therefore you have to pay 57% taxes to fund transgender, whatever. Yeah, ridiculous. But here you actually do sign a real contract. And what this says is Sean Newman is going to move to this. city and he agrees. He has to follow the rules that we lay out, the basic rules we lay out, and he has to pay his resident fee each month or each year, whatever it is. Call it $5,000 per year. So relatively cheap. On the other hand, Tipalus or the city operator, whoever it actually is,

also signs that contract that says, we guarantee that you, if you pay your fee, we will guarantee you the rights to life, liberty, and property. If you get mugged in our city, we have not fulfilled our promise to maintain your safety. You can then sue us and not in our court. You can sue us in an international arbitration center that has not, it doesn't have our interest, it doesn't have your interests in mind. It simply has, you know, an attempt to get towards the truth of it. And so to me, that's one of the big the big benefits of this is our relationship is fully defined within this contract. There is no public forum. There is no voting. There is no, I feel like me and Sean got together and we think that our neighbor over here needs to pay more in taxes because he has a big truck and we want him to,

you know, pay for more road maintenance or whatever. There is none of that. You don't have a say over the city operator's relationship with anyone else. It's simply bilateral in every which direction. It's always bilateral. And I think that that's a huge benefit from the current model where we're all just bickering with each other because I think abortion's bad. You think abortion's good. You think we need to have trans rights activists everywhere. And I'm against it and all this sort of stuff. We just don't have to fight about it because everyone has their own relationship aligned bilaterally with the city operator. So if I go, okay, sign a contract, this is your end of the bargain and this is my end of the bargain,

which means the private company at any point can change the rules, or do you have a set group of rules that you walk in with every time? And I mean, if you start changing the rules and people just start leaving, it's not much of a business, is it? I mean, obviously you start losing money, hand over fist, you know, you know, the concepts of business, I mean, minus if you're getting subsidies from the government to help you, you know, like, forgive me. I think of the Postal Service in Canada, getting like billions upon billions upon billions of dollars to bail them out over and over and over again.

That isn't much of a business model. But in theory, if you're running a business and, you know, you're not making your residents happy and they all start leaving and selling and getting the heck out of Dodge, that's not much of a business model. So it's on the private company to ensure the rules are attracting people that want to come there and live there and all the things. But in theory, it's the private company then, or maybe not in theory, in practice. It's the private company that decides what all the rules are, correct? Yes, the private company decides that.

And I mean, your question about can we change the rules is a very good one. I mean, the answer to that is part of the beauty of the model is that we handcuff ourselves with the actual contract. of course, if you have a contract, I can't just change the contract unilaterally. Now, when the contract expires and we're talking about renewal, well, then we can, of course, renegotiate in good faith and try to figure out what the solution is. But I cannot change it unilaterally, nor can you. And that is really the beauty of it. Now, of course, we can talk about, you know, adjusting a contract on a go-forward basis.

So maybe we early residents have it in one way and we realize, oh, boy, we didn't cover, you know, this particular thing, we have to add it into all contracts moving forward. You know, this sort of thing will happen as with any other business. But, you know, the benefit is that it's not like, you know, a legislature in whichever Western country you want to talk about. I mean, the truth is that if Congress in the United States decides that I'm supposed to pay taxes 5% more than I am right now, they vote on it and then I pay 5% more. There is absolutely nothing that I can do about this.

It's simply, you know, all this whole fake like you can vote your way. and resolve it. Like, I'm one person. My vote means nothing towards this. Congress is going to do whatever they're going to do. I have no protection from that. But in actual contract, you can say, look, I have a contract right here. It says 5,000. I'm not paying you 6,000. I don't care if you're losing money. Go, go raise investment and try to fix it on a go forward basis. That's your problem, not mine. How many, well, I got lots of questions here. Let's see. How many of these are actually being built? Like, do you have one operational or is it like 50 operational?

Yeah, it's very, very new industry. There are, I would call it two operational at the moment, both in Honduras, because the limiting factor is you need the legislation in place from the host nation first, potentially sometimes even need a constitutional amendment. That's happened in Honduras. So TIPOLUS in an earlier form was part of the first project in Honduras called Honduras Prospera Inc. That is a very, very, you know, none of the, we all live in the real world, so there's no like perfect model, let's say, but that's the closest thing you could imagine to it. There's one more in Honduras called Ciad Moresan.

That is not something TIPOLUS is a part of, although the founder of that is a good friend of ours and a big supporter of Tipolis. he's just a very wealthy person that's been able to do it on his own. So those are the two live ones. I would think relevant to the space, there is one been announced in Nevis. So if St. Kitts in Nevis, it is not yet live. They're still in the final phases of negotiations with their host nation. And then my company, Tipolis, is in deep negotiations with Brunei, which is a small country relatively close to Singapore to do a similar sort of project. It's not live yet. We are hoping

in the relatively near future it becomes live, but we still need final sign off. And then we can start developing it and running it. How big of a place are you talking? And like how many, like, give me a picture here. Is this like 100 people? Is this 1,000 people? Is this 50,000 people? Yeah. Obviously, each project is somewhat different, like a Nevis project. The island of Nevis has like 10,000 people on it. So you're not going to probably build a city of 50,000 at least anytime soon. So, you know, there has to be some level of cultural and and demographical background to it. But in principle, we're talking about relatively large scale projects. So think 50,000 people probably as of first order. of magnitude is probably right for the general project, potentially up to millions. But I mean, I think if you got to 50,000, that would be quite the first win for the industry. The reason for this is that the business model of this, we think the problem is, you know, there are two aspects to the economics of this.

One is governance, governance as a service. And then the other is the real estate development side. Those are the two main factors that go into this. But the problem with the world right now is that government eats up at 40% of global GDP. That's not a good thing. I mean, of course, if I went into government and I could get 40% of the GDP of a place, I could make a lot of money from it. But that's exactly what's hamstringing society from advancing.

We need small, efficient government to streamline everything. So we think actually in the long run, the sort of disruptive factor for governance is that we're just going to charge a small fee. Call it $5,000 per person per year. We think we can make a couple thousand dollars of profit per person. So say it costs $3,000 per person. We charge $5,000, make $2,000. There's profit to be made in that. Absolutely.

However, that's not enough to really make a multi-billion dollar business, especially when you're talking about developing the infrastructure and the real estate for a city the size of 50,000 people. That has to come in the form of real estate. And the benefit that we have in terms of real estate is that it's real estate on the biggest amount of steroids you can possibly imagine in terms of the upside. So if you think about typical real estate, what you're doing is you're buying land that is undeveloped and developing it and then seeing an appreciation from that. Call it three to five times upside, something like that.

What we're doing is taking a much larger area. It's typically a rural area because of just the size of the plot that we have to get. It's typically in the jurisdiction of a government that's not particularly conducive to business. Historically, there's a reason that the land is very cheap. It's not developed. It has no infrastructure on it. And it potentially is also shackling people from developing on it because of whichever land use restrictions that people have. And what we're doing is buying this land, unshackling it from all these restrictions.

developing a piece of it, including the infrastructure, and making it an attractive place for people to live. And on top of all of that, implementing a world-class legal system. So call it like a Singapore legal system or a Hong Kong legal system or even a United States legal system, taking the best from all of these. And the upsides you get from that, it's really hard to know because we haven't really seen this yet. But an approximation might be the case of call it like Singapore land prices versus, you know, pick your rural land prices in Latin America or Africa or Southeast Asia. And the upside, if you look at the difference in the price per square meter or whatever unit

you want to look at, is about 500,000 times. So we're talking about the upside being absolutely astronomical. If you can truly create a world-class environment that people want to live in, that they demand that real estate, you can make tons of money from creating the next Singapore, the next Dubai, the next Monaco, the next Hong Kong, you know, pick your case study. And so for us, that's really the business model. And that means because you don't build a city overnight, it's a 20, 30-year project minimum, that you have to pick a very large plot of land, call it five. thousand hectares is a sort of first approximation because you have to sell early land, you know, to finance the development, but ultimately the upside is in 30 years. If this truly is the next Monaco, then I want to sell land later on at its appreciated value. And that's how I make

my return in this business model. So we're talking about super large scale, super long term, highly risky projects, absolutely, but the upside is absolutely fantastical, even without any form of debt. This feels like maybe a poor comparison, but would Vegas be like an idea? You go off into the desert, you're like, I'm going to do all this cool stuff. And in like 25, 50 years, there's going to be so many people come here, we're going to make just money hand over fist. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm, I mean, it's a similar idea. Would that be fair? Yes, it is. Absolutely. I mean, Vegas started a little bit more in the Wild West sort of de facto autonomy rather than like written down legislative. You know, there's more cowboys and saying, don't, you know, we're going to do what we want. But yes, absolutely, that's the case. I mean, you have the benefit of legalized gambling. And that is why, of course, Vegas, that was that was the regulatory arbitrage that they were able to unlock. People invested lots of money. It became. became very attractive. People move there. People set up business there. And over time, it becomes this massive, ridiculous city in the desert. And this is, this is exactly what we have. I mean,

of course, different industries and not all that sort of thing. But in principle, Vegas is a very good first approximation. So now, if I take, you know, like obviously this isn't going in Vegas and it's going to have way different intentions than Vegas, I believe, I think is what I'm getting. Like, what you're trying to attract is people that believe in, you know, I'm spacing on the word, Alex, but I'm like, I don't know, like, I'm signing a contract. You're going to stay out of my way. You're not going to overcharge me for 1,800 things. You're not going to overtax me. The rule of law is going to be implemented. And that is a very small, not small portion of the population, but at the same time, you're looking for certain individuals that find and hold that at a high

value to go into something like this, to build something like this, so where in 20 years it becomes a destination of choice. I mean, it's got to become a destination of choice before that. But you think in 20 years, it's like, oh, do you want to go take a look at whatever the city's called, sorry, Las Vegas. And all of a sudden it becomes that hub of people wanting to be there. That's what you're talking about building out long term. Absolutely. That's what we're talking about. And think about, So you're very perceptive to point out a certain type of person is interested in this sort of thing. We're trying to attract a certain type of person. But think about the incentives for all of this.

This is why I think we can provide governance as a service for a few thousand dollars per year. Because the people who are going to be looking to live in a place like this, who are they? It's the people like Sean Newman. It's the people that work hard that want to start their business. both mostly want to be left alone to raise their family. They're willing to pay a little something for the community goods, but they don't want to be taxed arbitrarily. They are self-motivated, self-starters. They're the people that actually want to be reliant on themselves, not on daddy government to make them safe, to protect them, to give them handouts and welfare and all this

sort of stuff. We're not attracting that type of person because we have nothing to give them. So where are they going to stay? They're going to stay in their country. They're going to do all of it. So how do you, okay, so you got this city. I'm really, like, I can kind of see it, but then I think I keep reminding myself, I'm thinking of Vegas in the desert. So I'm like, this is kind of different. But regardless, at the start, like rule of law. Like I think of like, what do you have in a city?

You have a hospital in case emergencies happen. There's going to be emergencies happen here. Are you going to have people, I don't know, drunk and disorderly or whatever that comes? probably. And so do you have a hospital? I assume yes. Do you have a police force? I assume yes. Do you have courts to settle disputes? I assume yes. Yeah, three good points there. So courts is a very, very difficult question because many nation states feel that that is a part of their sovereignty to hold the sort of at least the Supreme Court level, you know, the sort of the court of appeals type. I understand that. So at a minimum,

what we'll have in every case is arbitration and mediation as the forms of first level of dispute resolution in any case. What we have looked at in many places is a form of a dedicated court branch, a court of a first instance court and then a court of appeals branch, a dedicated one from the host nation, that we actually help finance, that we have some level of say into the initial proposal for judges, even if we don't, we get to nominate, even if not appoint judges. And the reason for this is because we are talking, our legal system is typically a slightly modified version of UK common law. I mean, yes, the whole project sounds a little bit crazy and aspirational. And, you know, there's some level of fairness to that, that criticism,

sure. But we're not talking about like Alex's law. You know, I'm not writing the legal system. We're talking about importing things from places where it's tried and true as best as we as humans have ever come up with. And so that's oftentimes different from whatever a host nation's legal system is. And so we want to make sure that there's judges that truly understand the legal framework of our jurisdiction. And so that's why we try to set up these. It's still a court of the host country, which retains their sovereignty. They still have appointment rights, but we get nominating rights to try to help guide this towards the more, you know, business focus and sort of Western focus, I would say, to some degree within the city. So that's a tricky one. The hospital is a little bit

easier to explain. I would think for all of these types of questions, we as the city operator have to do whatever it takes to make this attractive for people to move there in the first place. If there's a nearby hospital that's very close and easily accessible and not exorbitantly expensive, then maybe we don't need one right away. If we're off in the middle of, you know, the desert or the jungle or whatever and we're nowhere close, yeah, we do need one because who's going to come there without some basic level of care? Absolutely. And then on the security front, that's the last one. That's again a little bit tricky because policing powers is often something that

host nations view as part of their sovereign ability. We, in many cases, we do have policing powers. In many cases, we have more of security power, you know, security personnel rather than just, rather than full on, you know, policing power with the right to detain. and that sort of thing. That's a tricky balance, but yes, there is absolutely security for public order, safety and security. I mean, we have to do this as the operator of the city because if you're mugged,

you can point to your contract and say, you promised me, you know, that I would have security. And I didn't. I got robbed. My house was broken into or I was beaten outside of the bar last night and my wallet taken. We can't have that because then you can sue us. And so we have to, you know, we of course have to actually provide that service. This is a wild idea. Like, I think of all the ideas that have come on this show, this is a wild idea, Alex.

Why not? I'm just thinking aloud, and I'm sure that in all your conversations, you've explored these ideas. What stops a group of people from, I don't know what to call it. Is it an autonomous state or an international state maybe? I don't know what the word I'm looking for. But I think of places like, I don't know, the Vatican or, I don't know, city of London or, you know, you take it and you go, so how come they do what they're doing? And when you're walking through everything that you're doing, and like, holy moly, right?

Like this is a giant undertaking. And that would be a giant undertaking as well. Just that if all of a sudden you pencil out, like, listen, we're, we're now an international zone or whatever they call it. We're going to do what we're going to do in here. And you have no say we can implement all of our laws and et cetera, et cetera. Why not go down that path? Or there's no money there? Um, you could, you, there are groups that are going down that path.

my view of it would be that there's actual actually being a sovereign comes with a heck of a lot of responsibility that I don't actually want. I think it's very costly. I mean, like I think about it. This is obviously a sort of taking it to its logical conclusion type of situation. But like United States is in some ways the only sovereign country in the world because ultimately it, gets to dictate what everyone else does. I as an American taxpayer, I don't love this.

I mean, even whatever your opinion on any of the foreign interventions there are, it is costing us a ton of money. We have subsidized world trade. We have subsidized tons of NATO, all kinds of stuff for decades and decades and decades. And, you know, a lot of people say it's in America's interest. Fine, I can understand that to some degree. But as a for-profit, and I won't even weigh in to all, you know, People can think whatever they want about it.

But as a business person, this is not the business that I want to be in. The business I want to be in is effectively real estate where we can promise you to provide basic guarantees to your life, liberty, and property. Otherwise, you're on your own. You build businesses and make it a very attractive, interesting place for people to live. And we all make money over time providing sort of basic governance as a service. I don't want to get into the bigger picture, first of all. And I would say the second thing of all is it's a much more difficult conversation with host nations. We at TIPOLUS are, we really do view it as a collaboration with a host nation.

We don't want to take over your powers. We don't want to make you sub-sovereign. You can continue to, in fact, use your sovereignty to create the zone that we would like to operate. We're not trying to compete with you. We're not trying to dethrone you. We don't want to be competitive. We simply want to help you by creating a place where you can attract more qualified migration and make the world a better place that way.

There's no reason to fight over it, I would say. I guess one other thought here. We just went through COVID. Don't know where you stand on that. I have my thoughts. Regardless. I do too. You have your zone.

You're within a zone. Okay? Or you're within a country. Is the theory then, if they have a, a pandemic like thing, a war, a debt crisis, etc., something that is worldly. It's coming in. And we got to shut everything down. Well, we live through that. Or war comes. And they go, you got to support in the war effort. I don't know. Is there the legal framework of like, listen, we're this private entity. We don't do those things. Is that even possible?

Yes, to a large degree, not to a perfect degree. There's no perfect solutions in the world of meat space. So I can't give you an absolutely perfect answer on absolutely everything. But in theory, this is a key benefit to what we do. Now, oftentimes when we're setting up one of these projects, we have to explicitly accept that we adhere to the international treaties, the constitution of whichever host nation, and the international treaties that they've already signed on to. So if it's the World Health Organization or whatever else, we can't always get out of

everything. What we can do is say we're not interested to be part of on a go forward basis, more international treaties on, say, like global tax harmonization or, you know, these sorts of things. So one of the best things we can do is basically, I can't solve all problems that have ever been created, but I can on a go forward basis make it very difficult to force the residents of my city to be under the thumb of this sort of thing. The other thing I can say about like a COVID situation, I think a COVID type situation, there's a argument that there was a force majeure, at least to some degree, where the private operator would probably have had the ability to require call it face masks for a period of time.

However, like we said earlier, you as the resident can sue us in a different court outside of any of these jurisdictions. And we actually have to prove then that we thought it was necessary. And as we all know from the COVID thing, it was very, very clear by about May of 2020. that it was very difficult to justify these sorts of things and they were mostly tyrannical. I mean, I would have gone with even earlier, but I'm trying to present a relatively like balanced case. To prove in court.

Yes. And I think by early summer of 2020, it was imminently clear that this was not justified, particularly in cases where people are outside in the sunlight, away from people, you know, swimming on the beach or, you know, whatever.

you know, this sort of thing. I can't say that I could have completely gotten rid of all of it, absolutely, but I can say that it again has to be tied to reality more than, you know, Canada just going nuts like California did in other places and say, you're going to mask up for five years because I like when you're masked up. I mean, that's not going to happen. If people are interested in this, where would you direct them to? Yeah.

I would say a couple places. You can follow me on Twitter at Alex D. Voss. You can go to TIPOLUS website. That's T-I-P-O-L-I-S.com. That is the for-profit company actually doing this. There's not a ton of marketing materials, but that is the real-world action. And the last place I can send you is the Free Cities Foundation.

It's a United States Foundation that is broadly promoting this sort of concept, all of the different projects that I've talked about today as well as a few others. You can find information more. Just Google Free Cities Foundation. You'll see it's the first one that comes up. Alex, appreciate you hopping on and talk to me a little bit and asking, answering all or trying your very best to get to the, because I'm like, in theory, you know, there's a lot of things that can go on until it's in practice and you actually get to mess with these things. but I appreciate you hopping on and doing this today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Sean. Great to meet you.