Free Cities Podcast

Can you build the community for a new city before the city itself exists? Timothy Allen sits down with Telamon Ardavanis of Edge City to explore what happens when people gather for a month to live, work and experiment together. What makes those gatherings valuable, who pays for them, and what remains after everyone goes home? Timothy hasn’t always been convinced by pop-up cities. His first experie...

What good is cheap electricity if you can’t rely on the people supplying it? Timothy Allen catches up with Dušan Matuška , co-founder of AmityAge , for a conversation recorded in Próspera about Bitcoin education, mining and the practical work of building greater independence. Dušan was one of the podcast’s earliest guests. Since that first conversation in San Salvador, he has taken his Bitcoin Edu...

When do you stop trying to change your country and start building a life somewhere else? Timothy Allen catches up with Raphaël Lima , the creator of Ideias Radicais and co-founder of Settee , during the Free Cities Conference in Próspera. Since their last conversation in Lisbon in 2023, Raphaël has run for office in Brazil, become a Christian and moved to Paraguay. For years, he encouraged people...

How much freedom can you actually build without legal autonomy, and what's the real price of staying put? Two men who've answered that question differently, swapping questions in Próspera. - A different format this week. Timothy and Patrick recorded during the Free Cities Conference in Próspera, and with neither of them having much time, they made it a collaboration with Patrick's own show, The Fr...

What happens when powerful AI tools can find weaknesses in software that humans have missed for years? And how much do we really understand about the systems finding them? Timothy Allen sits down with Trey Goff, Chief of Staff at Próspera, for a conversation that begins with a Bitcoin wallet exploit and ends nearly four hours later with consciousness, community, the nature of a meaningful life, an...

Everyone asks what happens if Próspera fails. Almost nobody asks what happens if it works. - Four long years of building a Free City while the government of the day tried to repeal the law underneath it. An arbitration claim large enough that Honduras walked out of ICSID. Two television crews in twelve months, Channel 4 and ABC Australia, both arriving with the same script and interviewing many of...

The four layers of building a new jurisdiction, and why the network state might be a backup layer for the world - Petar Čekerevac is a Senior Fellow at Atlas Network, working on their Project on Decentralizing Technologies. He was executive manager of Libertarian Club Libek in Belgrade, he helped set up the Serbian media outlet Talas, and he is an advisor to Bitcoin District in Próspera. The conve...

At 21 years old, Daniel Jackson is already president of a country. There is just one problem: he currently can't enter it. If you follow Free Cities, micronations or alternative governance online, there’s a good chance Verdis has suddenly appeared in your social media feed. Daniel says Verdis-related content has generated more than 200 million views over the past year, much of it following footage...

Gold, Bitcoin, and who gets the blame when the money fails. - Dominic Frisby has written about gold for MoneyWeek for the best part of twenty years. He co-wrote and narrated Four Horsemen, and wrote Life After the State, Bitcoin: The Future of Money? and Daylight Robbery. He writes the newsletter The Flying Frisby, performs stand-up, and has a satirical song you have probably heard without knowing...

Why are so many people suddenly questioning the official version of everything? - Gareth Icke grew up surrounded by some of the most controversial ideas in Britain. His father, David Icke, built an entire body of work around hidden networks of power, manipulation and control, and Timothy came across many of those books when he was younger. He found the way David connected institutions, incentives...

A first hand account from inside the worst four years. - Christian Betancourt is a Honduran lawyer, entrepreneur and one of Próspera's earliest residents. He was also one of the first people Timothy Allen ever interviewed for this podcast, back in episode three in 2022, when Próspera consisted of little more than the Beta building and the Honduran government had just begun its campaign against the...

One says relax. One bought a Bunker. Two founders on whether AI is coming for your job. - Liam Martin is the co-founder of Time Doctor and Running Remote, and the creator of Peppermint, an AI tool that builds a working digital twin of you out of your emails, messages and calls. Nick Francis spent more than fifteen years building and running Help Scout as a fully remote company. Both were recorded...

He knew the men who tried to start their own countries. He watched every one of them fail. - Mark Frazier has been in this movement longer than almost anyone alive. He put out libertarian magazines in high school, and by eighteen he had been made publisher of Reason, back when it ran out of a truck driver's apartment and had three hundred subscribers. That was 1970. Over the following half century...

A Country on the Internet, a Passport by 2050, and the Death of the CV - Joey Flores is Head of Marketing at SafetyWing, the Y Combinator-backed company building a global social safety net for remote workers. A two-time startup founder whose YC-funded music startup was acquired, he dropped out of high school at sixteen and now lives in Oaxaca, Mexico. Timothy Allen sits down with Joey at the Runni...

Second Passports, Plan B Residencies, and the Americas Super Cycle - Vance is the founder of My Latin Life, an immigration agency covering residency visas across Latin America. A Canadian-American software developer, he began travelling after reading Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek and arriving in Playa del Carmen in 2018. Timothy Allen sits down with Vance in Próspera for a practical guide to i...

Spencer Heath, the Entrecom Model, and the City With One Owner – Joyce Brand is a proper OG of the Free Cities world: author of 'Pioneering Prosperity: The Morazán Model for Free Cities', co-author of Spencer Heath's posthumous Economics and the Spiritual Life of Free Men, and one of the very few people in this movement who has actually lived in a Free City. She spent three years as an early resid...

Nomad Villages, the Bali Playbook, and Building a Caribbean Frontier – Gonçalo Hall is a pioneer of the digital nomad movement, the builder behind the world's first Nomad Village in Madeira and the founder of NomadX, who now runs the Roatán Tourism Bureau, a Próspera company whose job is to put a little-known Caribbean island on the map. A year ago, in episode 130, he told Timothy that almost nobo...

Community, Mesh Networks, and the Plan to Build a Parallel Society on Bitcoin – Polycarp Nakamoto is the masked, anonymous figure at the centre of Lab 484, a research laboratory and cluster of startups based in Austin, Texas, building for Web 5: a second internet that runs peer-to-peer on Bitcoin nodes rather than the centralised choke points of the web we use today. Through Lab 484 and its flagsh...

Building New Cities Starts With People: Digital Nomads, Families, and the Minimum Viable Society – Daniel Thompson is the co-founder and CEO of Noma Collective, a global community of remote workers, location-independent professionals and, increasingly, families, who travel and live together in different parts of the world a month at a time. Born and raised in the UK to a family of musicians, he sp...

Woke's 1960s Origins, the Race Taboo, and the End of the Progressive Era – Eric Kaufmann is a Canadian professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, where he directs the Centre for Heterodox Social Science. One of the most prominent academic voices on nationalism, national identity, and political demography, he is the author of Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Maj...

Self-Sovereign Medicine: Biotech, Right to Try, and the Cracks in the FDA's Monopoly – Niklas Anzinger is a German entrepreneur who has probably done more than any single person to put Próspera on the longevity biotech map. He is the founder and General Partner of Infinita VC, the first VC fund based in Próspera, Honduras, and the founder and CEO of Infinita City, formerly known as Vitalia, a netw...

He Swapped His Production Team For Claude – Matthew Mottola is an American who fell in love with freelancing in his twenties and then spent the next decade trying to drag the rest of corporate America with him. He was early at Gigster, built the Microsoft 365 Freelance Toolkit, co-authored The Human Cloud with Matthew Coatney (HarperCollins), and now runs Human Cloud as an aggregator of flexible-t...

He Quit Poland for the Best Job in Bitcoin - Tomek Kołodziejczuk is a Polish bitcoiner from Warsaw, where he founded the Bitcoin Film Festival, now four years old and the first of its kind in the world. A year ago he flew to Roatán to visit Próspera, the Honduran free economic zone he'd been hearing about for years. On his second day he bought a motorbike from Facebook Marketplace to lock the deci...

12 Months in Peterborough Prison for One Deleted Post - Lucy Connolly is a mother and childminder from Northampton. On the evening of the Southport murders in July 2024, she fired off an angry tweet, regretted it within hours, and deleted it. A week later, two police officers knocked on her door. Twelve and a half months later, she finally walked out of HMP Peterborough. Timothy Allen sits down wi...

The Free City That's Been 45 Years in the Making - Paloma Lecheta is a Brazilian entrepreneur and co-founder of Founder Haus, a hub for what she calls healthy entrepreneurship in Jurerê Internacional, a private neighbourhood on the island of Florianópolis. After accelerating around 1,800 startups across Brazil, she is now part of a small group of founders trying to do for Brazil what Próspera is d...