Citizen of the World

Introduction to Data

0:00You simply can't run a successful business without good data. Data is at the heart of every organization, but managing it can create friction, risk, and manual work. Everpeer transforms static data into a living system, making it intelligent, instantly accessible, secure, energy-efficient, and ready to perform in the AI era. Plus, Everpeer's evergreen subscription automatically delivers the latest innovations and security upgrades. Whether your data is in the cloud, on-prem, or at the edge, Everpeer makes data management so simple, it feels like second nature.

0:32Tame your data chaos with Everpeer. Visit everpuredata.com to learn more.

Business Connectivity

0:38So much activity is required to keep a business running smoothly behind the scenes, and connectivity is the key to it all. AT&T Business is built for exactly that, helping small businesses stay connected with reliability they can count on. For small business owners, connectivity is not just a convenience, it's essential. It keeps operations moving, teams aligned, and customers supported. It can be the difference between everything running seamlessly in the background or becoming the thing that brings work to a halt.

1:08AT&T Business Internet is designed to be a reliable provider, helping reduce friction and keep things running smoothly so businesses can stay focused on what matters most. Powered by AT&T Business. Built to work. Get AT&T Business at business.att.com.

99% Invisible Introduction

1:27This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

1:33Recently, I've had the great privilege of traveling abroad. I've been to Italy and Spain, Japan a couple of times, England, Scotland. So I've been pulling out my American passport a lot lately. And every time I present it to a customs official, I always get nervous. I honestly think it's meant to make you nervous. There is something inherently fraught and maybe even a little ugly about the ritual of presenting your passport. And that this little booklet you're carrying around with you, whether it says you're from the United States or Japan or Haiti, confers so much power.

2:07I can't stand the idea that your value as a person could be determined by the fact of where you were born. But the minute you're asked to show your passport, it's obvious that's how the world works. Especially when billions of people live in countries whose passports grant them little to no meaningful access to the rest of the world. While an estimated 850 million people do not even have the documents necessary to prove their nationality or legal existence.

Story from Far From Home

2:34Which is why we wanted to share this story from the podcast, Far From Home, by frequent 99PI contributor, Scott Gurian. A while back, Scott sat down with someone who deliberately surrendered his official nationality, including his passport, and began issuing what he believed was a better form of identification. We'll let Scott take it from here. Back in October of 2024, on the eve of the presidential election, Donald Trump held a giant political rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

3:07And one of the warm-up speakers was his soon-to-be political advisor, Stephen Miller. In a fiery speech, Miller expressed what would soon become the through line of the country's new anti-immigration policy. America is for Americans and Americans only. The rise of people like Stephen Miller shows that we're living in an era when nationhood and national identity seem to matter more than ever. But it's kind of strange, because at the same time that fascists in America and elsewhere are trying to get us all to think in terms of nations,

3:40we're dealing with all these global problems like pandemics, climate change, and AI. Meanwhile, technology in the 21st century often makes it easy to ignore things like nationality and national boundaries altogether. Therefore, I know this might sound sort of radical, but if it ever made any sense, the entire concept of the nation-state can sometimes seem kind of quaint and outdated for the modern world.

Gary Davis' Story

4:06This is the story of one man who reached all these conclusions himself more than 75 years ago, way ahead of his time. His name was Gary Davis, and I went to interview him back in 2009 when he was 88 years old. According to my directions, Gary's house was in South Burlington, Vermont, in the United States of America. But as soon as I pulled into his driveway, I noticed a sign next to his front door proclaiming it Sovereign World Territory. Hi, it's good to meet you. Sorry I'm running a few minutes behind here.

4:40He came up to me, pointed out that I was standing on planet Earth, and asked me to present my World Citizen card. I didn't have one, so thankfully he decided to waive the requirement. Then he led me into his living room, where we'd sit for the next five hours, talking about a choice he made when he was 26 years old in 1948. It was a simple act that took just a minute to perform, but it would make the rest of his life really complicated. Over the next six decades, he'd be detained and imprisoned countless times,

5:11dragged off the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, and gained millions of followers. All while confronting bureaucrats who had absolutely no idea what to do with him. What set this chain of events into motion was Gary's decision to stand before a guy in a gray suit at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, put his hand on a Bible, and read a couple of lines off a sheet of paper. I hereby swear that I desire to make a formal renunciation of my American nationality, and pursuant thereto, hereby absolutely and entirely renounce my nationality in the United States,

5:47and all rights and privileges thereunto, and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to the United States of America. Gary's life journey that led him up to that point was pretty unexpected. You see, growing up in the 1930s and 40s, he had a lot going for him. He was born into privilege to a wealthy Philadelphia family whose car was a chauffeured Rolls-Royce. His father, Meyer Davis, was a famous bandleader at the time. This is his orchestra you're hearing right now.

6:20Family friends included Ethel Merman and Bob Hope. As a young man, Gary was a rising Broadway star who once performed as an understudy to the famous actor Danny Kaye. Then came World War II. Gary was drafted into the Army Air Corps and trained to pilot a B-17 bomber. The experience had a profound impact on him. That was a whole reassessment of my role in life. How dare they put me in this role? How humiliating to my soul, my moral character, my profession.

6:54Everything you learn in kindergarten is being thrust aside, and now you're a killer in the name of the nation. But you're not prepared for that. You're not prepared to even think about that. There's no education for that. At least there wasn't for me. Flying bombing raids over Brandenburg and losing his older brother Bud to a German torpedo caused him to re-evaluate not just his participation in the war, but his identity as an American citizen. I said there is something intrinsically wrong with society, and I'm not going to play this game anymore.

7:27So that started me in a whole wave of thinking about how not to play the game without going to a desert island, you know, and canceling out. He started reading about philosophy and history and studying the law. Eventually, he concluded that the only way to prevent future wars was for people to remove themselves from the system that creates the us-versus-them mentality.

Renouncing Nationality

7:50So, after a year of planning and strategizing, Gary decided to act. I walked into the U.S. Embassy on May 25th, 1948, and I asked to renounce my nationality. Well, everybody was appalled, of course. We're here to protect you. You know, I said, no, you can't protect me. You know, you didn't protect my brother, and you didn't protect anybody outside that I killed, and so forth. So, finally, I convinced him. The U.S. State Department says just a few thousand Americans a year give up their citizenship.

8:20So, Gary's action was kind of unusual to begin with. What made it even stranger was that he wasn't becoming a citizen of any other country. They said, okay, Mr. Davis, now you're a stateless person, and you have something that belongs to us. I said, what was that? The United States passport. Please give it to us. So, then the fun began.

8:46Gary left the embassy and went to the local office of the Associated Press to tell his story to the world. Then he went back to his hotel room to try to get some rest. But word had gotten out, so the phone began ringing constantly. First, it was United Press, then Reuters, then the International News Service, all asking him for interviews. As I sat in Gary's living room listening to his stories, I asked him to show me his scrapbook of press clippings from the days that followed. These are U.S. stories. Philadelphia News, May 27th, 1948.

9:19This went all over the press. What does this headline here say? A young citizen of nowhere must live there, too.

9:28See, the journalist had a lot of fun with me. I mean, here was a big story. It was unique. It was personal. It was political. It was active. The guy was on the line himself. It wasn't just a theory. Did people see it as a publicity stunt? The publicity stunt didn't come into play simply because of the renunciation. This guy's giving up United States citizenship. That's not a publicity stunt. It threw in a counter light the so-called theory that everybody wanted to be a United States citizen.

10:03Everybody was trying to get into the United States after the war. Here's a guy who gives up his United States citizenship. What is he? Is he a crackpot? Is he a clown? What's his motivation, in other words? We want to find out more of who he is and what his real reasons are. Gary attempted to answer some of these questions by releasing a statement explaining his action. In the absence of an international government, our world politically is now a naked anarchy. Two global wars have shown that as long as two or more powerful sovereign nation states regard their own national laws supreme and sufficient to handle affairs between nations,

10:46there can be no order on a planetary level. This international anarchy is moving swiftly toward a final war. I no longer find it compatible with my inner convictions to contribute to this anarchy and thus be a party to the inevitable annihilation of our civilization by remaining solely loyal to one of these sovereign nation states. I should like to consider myself a citizen of the world.

11:16To be clear, this wasn't an entirely new or original concept. Many notable individuals throughout history, including Socrates, Charlie Chaplin, and more recently, Barack Obama, have called themselves world citizens. But Gary took this idea to another level. For the rest of his life, he'd be a free agent operating by his own set of rules and without any sort of roadmap or instruction manual. Being neutral, my position was outside the framework of the laws of the nations.

11:49It was very exciting. You know, wondering what's going to happen now. What's the French government going to say? The answer came quickly. Given that he was now undocumented, French officials gave him a deadline to get out. But without a passport, where could he go? Traveling anywhere was sure to be difficult. But just as Gary was considering his options, he had a stroke of luck. The day that I was supposed to be out of France was September 11th, 1948. That was the day that the General Assembly of the United Nations took over a little part of Paris at the Trocadero, and it was declared international territory.

12:31It was the only place I could go, actually, without going to jail or without going to another nation and facing the same problem that I faced in France. So I went to the United Nations. I made a press statement saying, I'm your first citizen. You know, I have to live here. Gary and some friends camped out on the front steps, calling for world citizenship as a path to lasting peace, something the UN's predecessor, the League of Nations, had failed to uphold. Officials didn't know quite what to do with them.

13:03Then, that November, Gary managed to gain access to one of the General Assembly's meetings, and he used the opportunity to draw attention to his cause. An incident that reflects the mood of an impatient world interrupts proceedings at the United Nations Assembly. All the press was there, and we had huge lights, and we had the balcony box wired up so that it could take our speech. All the delegates were on the floor.

13:35Eleanor Roosevelt, you know, with their headphones, they were wondering where this voice is coming from. I said, I interrupted the name of the people not represented here. The nations you represent divide us, separate us, and lead us to the abyss of World War III. What we need is one government for one world, and if you don't do it, step aside. We're going to do it ourselves. We had screaming headlines the next day.

14:06Those headlines were seen by people around the world. Authors and intellectuals like Richard Wright, Albert Camus, and even Albert Einstein spoke out on Davis's behalf, and he began receiving letters from supporters near and far. Remember, the war had just recently ended, and memories of the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust were still fresh in people's minds, especially there in Europe, so folks were eager to hear what Gary had to say. Less than two weeks after his storming of the UN, he gave a speech in a Paris auditorium, and 20,000 people showed up.

14:40Many of them expressed interest in his movement, so he got to work creating something they could actually join. We set up a registry of world citizens. We hired a hall, and we started issuing a world citizen card. And that was the first thing. We were IDing a whole new constituency, a world constituency. It was a new language. Though Gary Davis no longer had a nationality, he still considered New York his home.

15:14So he returned to the U.S. Embassy and managed to convince authorities to let him migrate back to his native land. After arriving, he got married, had a kid, went back to acting, and tried returning to his pre-war life. But his heart just wasn't into it. I was making good money in show business, and I had so many offers, and I gave it all up. I left the top show in Broadway after three days of rehearsal. And I told the producer, I'm sorry, Harris, I can't be in this show because I got to work for world peace.

15:47Unsure of what to do next, he struggled with how to navigate life as a stateless individual. So I went to the top civil rights lawyer in New York. I told him, I said, I'm not a citizen here. I'm not an immigree. I'm not a visitor. What is my status? And they had a full staff meeting on that. And they said, you're not really here. Legally, you're not here. Physically, you're here. And the government has recognized you physically. Therefore, not being within the framework of the United States law,

16:19you have been recognized by the United States government as a sovereign, like the Iroquois Indians. So you've got nationhood within you. You call yourself a world citizen, and you have all these people out there as world citizens. How can you be a citizen without a government? They said, you've got to declare your government. Once you declare the world government, then you can do a lot of things. First of all, you can issue your own documents, your own money. You can declare war on the United States, and then the United States will beat you,

16:50and then it has to take care of you for the rest of your life. They had a field day. You know, these were lawyers kind of having fun. This was a new problem, which they never had.

17:02Gary gave this some thought and decided to follow their advice.

Founding the World Government

17:06On September 4th, 1953, he formalized that registry of supporters he had created while he was in Paris and founded the World Government of World Citizens. He opened an office in New York and hired some staff and interns to carry out the day-to-day running of the government via a nonprofit organization called the World Service Authority. And they started issuing documents, including birth and marriage certificates, international residence permits, and political asylum cards for people who contacted them requesting help.

17:37So, at this point, I had to ask Gary the question that's probably on your mind right now, which is some variation of, can they do that? I mean, here you have this guy who decided he wants to form a new government that anyone can join, and he's printing official-looking credentials for people to present to border guards and bureaucrats. Were these documents actually legitimate? Well, is the United States legitimate? Is war legitimate? You know, turn it around. I question it around. Who is to say what is legitimate? Is not my claiming to be who I am legitimate?

18:09If you're on a desert island alone, are you legitimate? You're the government. You're the citizenry. You're alone. Do whatever you want. But you see me coming along in a raft, and you say, well, we're together now. We form a community. Then we legitimize the community. How do governments start in the first place? They don't start with governors. Governments started by people deciding to have a government, to legitimize themselves within a community. But enough with the philosophizing.

18:40From a legal perspective, Gary told me that yes. He said the work of his new world government was entirely legitimate, because it was based on the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a U.N. document describing the rights and freedoms of all people. Now, the first article that we've taken is the Article 13, Section 2, which is an article on freedom of travel, which says everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. But what is a country? Tom Paine said, my country is the world.

19:11And when you think that you can get around the world in two days today, you can say, well, really, the world is a country at this point. So we need a document based upon freedom of travel. Hence the creation of the World Passport, printed in seven languages, including the made-up universal language of Esperanto. So it's made to look like any other passport typically issued by a nation-state that someone would have. Yeah, yeah. It's a document which they can look at, and it IDs you completely. But it's just not a national passport.

19:43This is all important for the guy on the frontier, because this is the way they operate. You see, it's for him. It's not for us. We don't believe in passports. We think they're stupid. In fact, many times I say, look, our passport is a joke. It's a joke on them. Whereas your passport, your national passport, is a joke on you. Gary said he thinks the whole process of making someone get a stamp and a little book in order to cross an imaginary border is really dumb. But by creating his own passport,

20:13he was basically thumbing his nose at the establishment and saying, see, I could play this game too. Now, in case you're thinking that Gary just started the world government as a form of political feeder, I should explain that he saw his organization as serving a real need. You see, many of the letters he and his colleagues received, especially in those early days, came from refugees who were stateless themselves. But unlike Gary, they didn't choose to end up that way. They needed a document to say who they were.

20:44They couldn't get it from the nation. There are huge refugee camps outside of Djibouti or in the Sudan and so forth. And the people or families living under tents in the heat. Now, the United Nations is not issuing them documents, but the World Service Authority is. And believe it or not, these passports and other documents that Gary and his team of ragtag visionaries created actually worked some of the time. Gary told me the story, for example, about the time members of the Ogoni tribe

21:15from southern Nigeria reached out asking for help. After protesting the Shell Oil Company's environmental destruction of their land, they had to flee across the border to a refugee camp in the neighboring country of Benin. They didn't have any identity documents, though, so the world government made passports for close to 2,000 of them, which they were then able to use to obtain visas to get out. There was also the young conscientious objector who successfully avoided registering for the draft through some clever letter writing

21:45claiming that his citizenship in the world government forbade him from joining the American military. And the woman in Uganda caught in a bind when her country's dictator decided to expel her and other members of the country's Indian minority. We received a urgent telegram saying that one of the mothers, the Indian mothers, had given birth at Uganda airport. So what the baby needed was an immediate birth certificate because they were going to be picked up the next day

22:17by a British plane. And I got on the typewriter, wrote out the first world birth certificate and went to a stationery store and put a seal on it and so forth. And I got it in the mail at 5 o'clock and got down to that airport the next day. And the plane came in. The captain of the plane said, where's the baby's documents? We can't take anybody without documents. And the mother handed him the document that I had just typed out on my typewriter.

22:49Well, the baby was in the mother's arms, of course. So the captain accepted that. He had to accept that. And the plane flew to Heathrow. And that was the document upon which that baby got into UK with the mother. In the decades that followed, the world government has continued its work, issuing more than 5 million legal documents, including nearly 1 million passports.

23:19They say that Ecuador and five African countries have offered official recognition at one point or another. And according to copies of passport stamps and visas people have sent them, nearly every other country in the world has also accepted these passports for travel. On at least a few occasions. While some of these might be instances where the border guards simply weren't paying close attention to the pieces of paper in front of them, the world government contends that the fact that their passports have been honored thousands of times over the years

23:49is proof that these can't just all be mistakes. But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that for every instance where people have had success using these documents, there are many other times when they haven't worked as intended. Some critics have charged over the years that the world government is in the business of selling false hope to undocumented individuals, given that the legal recognition and acceptance of world passports and ID cards is unpredictable and by no means guaranteed. An organization spokesman said, however,

24:21that simply providing people with papers gives them some degree of human dignity. Gary, for his part, had little sympathy for anyone who said his documents like the world passport were a little more than novelty items. Does it work? You know, I have to say to you, no, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. I work. I'm the citizen. The documents do nothing. It's a tool. A hammer does nothing

24:52unless you pick it up and know how to use it. My consciousness works and I'm conscious of who I am. That's the only thing that works. We say that to everybody who calls us. We're not doing anything, really, except giving testament to who you are. In other words, he said people can't simply present a world passport at a national border and expect to breeze through immigration the way they might with a national passport. They need to stand up for their rights and know the right things to say

25:23to convince the border guard to let them through. Did you claim to be a world citizen? Do you know anything about the Declaration of Human Rights? Have you read any of my books? You know, you're on that front line. You're the guy who gets out there and talks to these idiot officials. If you ever learn how to talk back to them, then they're going to put you down. They're going to humiliate you every time. Then you're going to write to me or call me and say, I paid for that passport and it doesn't work. When people say your passport doesn't work,

25:54you say, well, I went to India with the first passport, number 00001, and I left India three months later with 17 visas on my first passport. Don't tell me that passport doesn't work. But even Gary, who was well-versed in international law and had all the best legal arguments at his disposal, had mixed success. Over the years, by his own account, he was imprisoned 34 times in nine different countries for trying to exercise

26:25what he saw as his right to freedom of travel as a world citizen. Sometimes, it was because his passport was outright rejected. Other times, he was initially allowed to enter a country but then later arrested. Since he disagreed with the concept of nation states, there were also instances where he crossed the border by riding a bicycle on a path through the woods instead of going through an official crossing. So he'd get in trouble for that. When I first learned about Gary Davis a number of years ago, I was intrigued. So I actually sent away

26:57for one of his world passports. But it's been sitting in a drawer ever since and I've never tried using it myself. Because I'll be honest, while I really appreciate the concept of a world without borders, I'm not an activist for the cause. I mean, it's not something that I feel so strongly about that I'd be willing to risk being detained for hours or even days in some foreign country's airport and missing my flight. When I'm traveling, I usually just want to get to my final destination without engaging in political and philosophical arguments

27:28with border guards along the way. I mentioned to Gary that I had one of his passports but never used it and he called me a coward. I understand why he sees it that way because for him, this was a cause worth devoting his life to. I've taken my case up to the Supreme Court. They didn't hear the case but when the Supreme Court denies your writ, that means the lower court decisions prevail. But all the lower court decisions were that I was an excludable alien but they couldn't exclude me.

27:58There's nowhere they could send you to. There's nowhere they could send me. So Gary was basically in a stalemate with the U.S. government living out his life in his humble home there in South Burlington, Vermont, despite existing in a sort of legal limbo. One journalist went to the immigration department and she asked what is Gary Davis' status? And his answer was Gary Davis is a legal fiction.

28:22That means I don't exist. If that's not proof of the power of an individual that according to the United States, according to all the nation states, you claim to be a world citizen, you become a legal fiction that they can't deal with you. But you're still existent. In addition to issuing passports, birth certificates and ID cards, Gary's world government has created a legal department to provide support for document holders whose paperwork is denied. They've established a sovereign order of world guards that anyone can join.

28:52And they've even printed their own stamps and world money. This is our world treasury here. He pulled out a box. As a world citizen, I decided that we need a new currency. The currency is called the Mondo, M-O-N-D-O. And this money is based upon energy. Where is the greatest source of energy? It's the sun, obviously. Buckminster Fuller says there's more energy poured on the earth by the sun in five minutes than humanity uses all year.

29:23These are kilowatt dollars. This is a peace currency. You can't fight wars with it. So look at the immediate trust that it'll have. I get a lot of letters for people to donate money. I always put this money in and I explain it with a sheet. This is world money. You want a donation from a world citizen? This is what you're going to get.

29:45Now, I haven't gone into the markets and started using it at this point, but that'll come.

29:52Gary passed away in 2013 at the age of 91 and he was active until the end. Shortly before his death, he mailed a world government passport to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange when he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and also to fugitive national security contractor Edward Snowden who's been living in Russia since his U.S. passport had been revoked.

30:18Gary Davis' view of political boundaries was not that they shouldn't exist, but rather that they don't exist. He said they're a legal fiction we've all come to believe in and by placing himself outside the realm of the nation-state, he'd thereby rendered them obsolete. For Gary, the idea of world government was not some far-out utopian vision, but rather an idea rooted in pragmatism. He said we're all world citizens, but it's up to each of us whether

30:49we want to recognize that fact. When I first met Gary at his home there in Vermont, he told me about a recent trip he had taken to visit his kids who lived in Montreal. Coming back, he arrived at the U.S. border, as usual, with only his world government passport. At first, immigration refused to let him pass. It was the same bureaucratic showdown he'd faced many times over the years. Gary told them that their borders

31:19were ridiculous. He said that the sun shined the same on both sides of their imaginary line and that he was just going from one part of the world to another. Eventually, they relented. Get out of here, they said. Go home.

Update on the World Citizen Government

31:41When we come back, I talk with Scott about the work of Gary's world government today. Stay tuned.

31:50You simply can't run a successful business without good data. Data is at the heart of every organization, but managing it can create friction, risk, and manual work. Everpeer transforms static data into a living system, making it intelligent, instantly accessible, ennodd, secure, energy efficient, and ready to perform in the AI era. Plus, Everpeer's evergreen subscription automatically delivers the latest innovations and security upgrades. Whether your data is in the cloud, on-prem, or at the

32:21edge, Everpeer makes data management so simple, it feels like second nature. Tame your data chaos with Everpeer. Visit everpuredata.com to learn more. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great like impressions, but then they don't see revenue. LinkedIn has a word for that. Bull spend. Instead, you can get the highest ROAS of major ad networks with LinkedIn ads. Cut the bull spend.

32:51Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Go to linkedin.com slash invisible. Terms apply.

33:02If you're trying to be more intentional about what you wear day-to-day, Quintz can help with that. They've got pieces that feel easy, comfortable, and still put together. The fabrics feel elevated and the fits are clean. Think 100% European linen shorts and shirts from $34. Lightweight, breathable, and comfortable. Everything is priced 50% to 80% less than what you'd find at similar brands. Quintz works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman, so you're getting premium materials without

33:32the markup. So speaking of being intentional about what you wear, I often wear a t-shirt when I'm at home working, but then I have to go on a Zoom and interview someone that I respect and admire, and so I have a Quintz zip-up cashmere sweater on my chair at all times so I can put that thing on, zip it up, and look good when I talk to these people. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to quintz.com slash invisible for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada too.

34:02That's quince.com slash invisible for free shipping and 365-day returns. quintz.com slash Lysol is known for proven disinfection and today it also delivers a clean that smells great including a lavender scent. Lysol disinfecting wipes, all-purpose cleaner spray, and power toilet bowl cleaner clean and kill 99.9% of viruses and bacteria. The all-purpose cleaner can be used on hard, non-porous surfaces in the kitchen and bathroom.

34:34Disinfecting wipes help clean everyday surfaces like remotes, tablets, and smartphones. And the power toilet bowl cleaner disinfects both the toilet brush and and bowl for two-in-one disinfection. Don't just clean, Lysol clean.

34:50So I'm back with Scott Gurian who originally produced that story for his podcast Far From Home. Scott, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for having me, Roman. So this is all from an interview that you did with Gary nearly 20 years ago. So I wanted to get a bit of an update from you. You mentioned that the organization that Gary founded, it's still around. What is their mission today? How has it changed since Gary's death? So I actually spoke to David Gallup, who's the president and

35:20general counsel of what they're now calling the world's citizen government. And he says the organization has kind of broadened their focus a little bit since Gary's death. When he was around, they were just kind of very insular and Gary, in retrospect, was really opinionated. He could be difficult to work with at times. He just wouldn't have patience for people who didn't exactly agree with his vision of how the world should work. So, yeah, I think in some senses,

35:51Gary's death kind of freed up the organization to kind of pursue things a little bit differently. Nowadays, they're working with other organizations more. In specific terms, some of the things that the world citizen government is focusing on nowadays, they're working on advocating for the creation of a world court of human rights, and they're also trying to expand the movement to a younger audience. They're creating these world citizen clubs at a bunch of high schools and college campuses all over the place. Nice. Are they still

36:22making world government passports? Oh, yes, definitely. Yeah, they've now issued about a million of them, as well as a number of other identity documents. So there is still a demand and they're still fulfilling that need. And do they work? I mean, do they work without the power of Gary behind them? Yeah, that's an interesting question. And I touched on this a little in my piece. So the world citizen government says that 189 countries have recognized the passport on a case-by-case basis.

36:53And they say there's a small number which at one point or another have given de facto recognition. They've sent letters saying that we officially recognize this, though, in many of those cases it's been years ago and it's unclear whether they still do. The world government says the only way that they have of knowing for sure, like, if their passports are working, is when users of the passports send them back stamps. Well, they send photos. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. It really does work, believe it or not. I know it's hard to believe, but no, people send back stamps and they say they've collected thousands of

37:23these over the years of border guards, like, issued, you know, passport stamps as well as, like, work permits and visas, you know, in the world government passport. So these documents are honored in many cases. Like, they told me this one case of this businessman who had been traveling all over Latin America with his world passport, he sent it into the world citizen government because he was so successful using it that he had run out of space. He needed more pages. Like, they were just really impressed. That's amazing. So who are the people who are applying for world government

37:54passports today? Is it all people like you that are just like, oh, this would be a fun thing to have, or people who really need some kind of documentation? From what I hear, it's a mix. As always, there are just people who are uncomfortable with the current system who want a second form of ID, like people from certain nationalities who might face hostility in certain parts of the world because of where they're from, or people serving in some kind of role like working with an NGO, international aid workers where their primary identity

38:24is helping people around the world, not to their individual nation-state,