4.4 • 921 Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2025
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
It’s clear states, borders, and countries constantly evolve. But how do countries form? And what does it take to start a new one?
In this episode, Michael interviews Erick Brimen, founder of Prospera, a project dedicated to creating Special Economic Zones that foster economic growth through free-market governance.
Brimen shares insights into the challenges of governance in developing nations, lessons learned from Venezuela’s economic collapse (despite the country having the world’s largest oil reserves), and successful governance models in places like Dubai (a small desert fishing and pearl diving village until the early 1970s) and Hong Kong (under British rule until 1997).
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0:00.0 | You're listening to the Michael Shermer show. |
0:15.5 | Hey everybody, it's Michael Shermer. |
0:17.3 | It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer show. |
0:19.2 | Have I got a winner for you today? |
0:21.0 | This is a subject I've long been interested in. As you know, I've written a bit about what we might do when we set up a colony on Mars. |
0:29.9 | What will must do for his political system or economic system or taxes or roads? Conflict resolution. How are we going to do all that on Mars? Well, |
0:38.7 | there have been many experiments here on Earth. And my guest today is somebody who's trying to |
0:42.8 | start his own, well, I don't know if I'd say a country, but some kind of a plan community. |
0:48.4 | These are called a Z-E-E-E-Z-E-E-Zone for employment and economic development. He's doing this in Honduras. |
0:55.8 | Eric, nice to see you. |
0:56.6 | Thanks for coming on. |
0:57.8 | Thanks for having me on, Michael. |
1:00.2 | Yeah. |
1:01.0 | Yeah, so when your publicist or whoever that was that contacted me, I reached out, I thought, |
1:06.5 | man, this is somebody I've been, I would love to talk to because, as I mentioned at the start here, |
1:11.7 | you know, how do you set up a new country or zone of living and doing business and surviving? |
1:18.2 | I have no idea other than kind of the egghead political theory books that I've read, but I've |
1:25.2 | never actually met anybody to try to do something like this. |
1:27.7 | So give us a little bit of background. Where are you from? Where'd you go to school? How'd you get |
1:31.8 | into all the different things I just introduced you as? Sure. I was born and raised in Venezuela, |
1:38.4 | in South America, the country that by any measure should be one of the wealthiest countries in the |
1:43.8 | world, but unfortunately, it's one of the poorest. |
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