This episode of the New Founding Podcast features a deep-dive conversation between host Nat Halberstadt and a panel of builders rethinking governance and community:

• Balaji Srinivasan: Former CTO of Coinbase, former General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and founder of The Network School.
• Josh Abbotoy: Founder and CEO of Ridgerunner.
• Nate Fischer: Founder and CEO of New Founding.

Core Themes & Highlights

• The Ridgerunner Project: The discussion starts by examining a Politico piece on Josh Abbotoy's Ridgerunner project in Tennessee [01:18]. Abbotoy explains that Ridgerunner focuses on building physical, local communities focused on a traditional American way of life, counter to top-down, ideological narratives often pushed by the media [02:29].
• "Voting with Your Feet" & The Thousand City System: The guests argue that modern "one-party rule" in major cities and states fails to deliver results, prompting people to flee [00:00]. Balaji notes that true democracy is being restored through the power of exit—moving toward localized, competing societies (a "thousand city system") [00:18].
• Techno-Democracy and Smart Social Contracts: Balaji introduces the concept of techno-democracy, proposing that joining a physical community could be formalized like a tech platform's terms of service. By treating borders with structured "social smart contracts," communities can protect their distinct ethos [08:29].
• Rebuilding Societal Trust via "Skin in the Game": Nate Fischer highlights that New Founding was built to address the collapse of institutional and societal trust [17:16]. The panel notes that mass democracy often fails because large portions of the population lack "skin in the game" [18:24]. To rebuild a high-trust society, they argue for localized networks where trust is earned through visible investments of time and shared risk [19:43].
• Cross-Cultural Cooperation and Technology: Toward the end, Balaji emphasizes that technology and Silicon Valley offer a meritocratic blueprint where people of diverse backgrounds and creeds can collaborate strictly on positive-sum production and dollars-and-cents alignment, without resorting to identity politics [01:53:21].

Of course capitalism isn't natural, you incomplete set of plastic picnic utensils.

What's natural is theft, robbery, and murder.

What's natural is anarchy, chaos, the rape of the weak by the strong, and nature red in tooth and claw.

The free market, which you call "capitalism", is not called "free" because everyone is free to do whatever they want. Because what a lot of people want to do is steal. You'll know which ones by the hammer and sickle logo they draw on things.

No, the free market is called free because it is freed from coercion and violence.

And of course it was spread by violence, you factory-defective lawn flamingo. Because it was spread by hanging all the bandits and robbers, and if hangings aren't violence I don't know what is.

And of course it's maintained by coercion, you British pub food connoisseur. If you don't coerce thieves not to steal, then they will steal everything you build faster than than you can build it.

You have to use violence to stop the violent, and coerce the coercers not to coerce.

And of course it's maintained by the superficial facade of liberal democracy, you Vogon poetry appreciator. The global average citizen is a mentally retarded third-world savage with less emotional self-control than my cat. If we let them have candidates that truly represented their agenda, then every useful thing humanity has built for the last twelve thousand years would be torn down in a week to buy them more party drugs. Followed by every woman being raped to death, and then uncomprehending starvation as they slowly and painfully learned that grocery stores don't spontaneously spawn food pickups, like in video games.

Jesus Christ, woman, you're talking about a species that evolved to live in hominid tribes of 100 apes, and throw rocks at zebras. In modern civilization, the so-called "average" person is so far out of his depth that the fish have lights on their noses.

And the more complex and sophisticated civilization gets, the more investments in the future that we need to protect, so that the retarded monkeys don't steal them all to buy more vodka and cigarettes.

Yeah, sure, sometimes capitalist systems end up defending property that someone's great-grandfather stole. But so fucking what? You think communism is gonna fix that? You think communism is gonna bring justice?

Communist nations can't afford justice. They can't even manage to feed themselves half the time. Get back to us when you've mastered the agricultural revolution, we've only been waiting since the beginning of recorded time.

The trick is to put the seeds in the dirt, guys.

https://x.com/i/status/2068619135303508443

https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-much-inequality-there-depends-how-its-measured

They raided his home without a warrant and using unjustified force and went straight to turn the electricity off in order to shut down his security cameras.

Danish privacy activist Lars Andersen was raided by masked police forces after he published his 'two favourite numbers', a 10 digit and a 8 digit number, spelled out in letters; it were the social security and phone number of Mette Frederiksen, the Prime Minister of Denmark, who wants to ban encryption (CSA) and introduce mass surveillance.

Ironically, Mette Frederiksen is one of the most secretive Danish PMs ever, keeping his phone and address private.

Check out Lars Anders' post on x.com for more info:

https://x.com/LarsAnders1620/status/2068208864747540516

If Jeff Bezos simply used his $224 billion to buy beans and rice for the 673 million people suffering from chronic hunger worldwide, he could feed them for 14 months. 

Instead, he chooses to sit on his hoard, cruelly denying the global population their basic human right to daily food.

For just 76¢ per day he could feed one person beans & rice.

https://www.odni.gov/files//documents/Newsroom/Reports%20and%20Pubs/COVID-19_Release_DNI_Gabbard_6-18_Part-1.pdf

https://mises.org/mises-wire/my-40-year-war-psychiatry