Ep. 110: Tomas Pueyo & Trey Goff On The Next Silicon Valley Might Be A New Country

**Niklas Anzinger** (0:01)
Welcome to the Stranded Technologies Podcast, where we explore how to accelerate the future. Imagine a world of abundance, longer lives, clean energy, transparent markets, robots and AI doing the toiling labor. Why don't we have those things yet? Join us as we explore the biggest problem that holds back Frontier Tech, overregulation. Now we have real solutions, startup cities, network stays and on-chains finance. Please find ways to support us in the show notes. Now enjoy this episode.
All right. Today is March 28th in 2026, and we have two guests today. This is going to be a special episode. We have Tomas Pueyo here, the author of Uncharted Territories, and we have Trey Goff here, the Chief of Staff and Head of Public Policy of Prospera. This is the third episode with Trey actually. So there is a tradition we've established of Trey, Nik, Riff and Ramble.
And this time we're doing it actually being interviewed by Tomas, who is very curious about hearing about the long-term strategy of Prospera and Infinita. So with that, I'll give the mic and the moderation to you.

**Tomas Pueyo** (1:09)
Thank you, Nik. And yes, I'm super excited about this because I think you know this, most people don't know this, that there's not enough jurisdictions in the world. We're not testing enough the rules of the game. They have been fixed for many decades because there's no more countries. There's no more jurisdictions. There's no more cities, really. And so what you guys are doing is not just yet one more settlement or just a community. It is a way to change the rules of the game on how we create wealth and happiness. So that's how I think about it. And you guys, I think, are special because you were among the first and you are among the biggest. And so all of these things are super exciting. So I wanted to spend some time with you to understand deeply how things started here and then where you think it can go and the nitty-gritty of the challenges that you have and how you're hoping to grow. Does it make sense?
Perfect.
I'd love to start. And I think the history is interesting, but we can write about this. I can write about this a bit more. So I'm interested in the history on how the SEC started in Honduras and whatnot, and then Prospera specifically at a high level to start with.

**Trey Goff** (2:32)
Yeah, absolutely. So I can tell the story up to when Niklas came.
So I'll start from kind of first principles, like why are we doing this? Why did we end up doing this in the first place? And it's a pretty straightforward story, which is trying to pull the biggest leaver we can to increase and maximize the prosperity of the highest number of people in the world effectively. So if you take a huge step back and think like what are...

**Tomas Pueyo** (2:55)
Very ambitious.

**Trey Goff** (2:56)
Exactly. So at the concept level, right? What are the biggest leavers you can pull to do so? There's this great field of economics called institutional economics that looks at exactly this, right? What makes at an institutional nation-state scale, some places prosperous and others not.
And Douglas North, one of my favorite economists, he won the Nobel Prize back in the 1990s and invented this field by basically pointing out that, hey, the governance institutions as well as the cultural institutions, but primarily governance, which what I mean by institutions here, because it sounds like a technical term.

**Tomas Pueyo** (3:23)
The rules of the game.

**Trey Goff** (3:23)
The rules of the game. It's exactly right. The water in which we all swim that we kind of take for granted. That is the key ingredient. If you're looking for one, obviously prosperity is like causal, but if you're looking for the biggest causal factor, that's it. The quality of and structure of your governance institutions primarily.
As you mentioned previously, the governance institutions of the world have been quite static for a long time. I mean, you could trace this back if you want to trace it back to as far as possible to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1492, that created the modern system of nation states, right?
Since then, we've effectively been operating more or less in this nation state kind of institutional structure, right? And it has created modernity. I'm not at all saying specifically that this is a bad thing or anything like that. The point is just there's no innovation happening at that layer. So if you're trying to find the biggest lever to pull, the thing to innovate on to improve the actual human flourishing of the largest number of people, what would be improving governance institutions? So you have a couple of ways you can do that, right? You can first do the traditional method, which is like, hey, I'm going to go become a politician, get elected somewhere. Go lobby a government to have a public policy change or whatever. But unfortunately, because these institutions haven't changed in so long, and kind of just the state of the world as it exists, that unless you have billions of dollars, and even then, it's very hard, and unless you have billions of dollars, it's nigh impossible to do so, at least for places that matter, that are like large, like the United States, or even for smaller places where you can have the largest marginal effect.