Free Cities Podcast

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...

IQ, Institutions & Why Every Country Is Run Poorly - Crémieux is a pseudonymous statistician and writer with a large following on Substack and X. He likes to take widely cited studies, reopen the data, and argue the conclusions don't always hold up. His readers include Elon Musk and JD Vance, and his work circulates widely in tech and policy circles. Timothy Allen sits down with Crémieux in Hondur...

Sealand, Sovereignty & Building Freedom Without Permission - For nearly six decades, the Principality of Sealand has stood as one of the world’s most famous experiments in self-declared sovereignty: a former wartime sea fort occupied in 1967 by Paddy Roy Bates and still run by the Bates family today. What began as a pirate-radio outpost became a long-running test case in jurisdiction, legitimacy,...

Why Most Free City Projects Fail & What Actually Works - After more than two decades investing in charter cities, seasteading, and governance innovation, Patri Friedman has arrived at a blunt conclusion: most attempts to build new societies fail not because of bad ideas, but because of poor execution. Timothy Allen sits down with the founder of The Seasteading Institute and General Partner at Pron...

Inside Próspera's Survival, Legal Battle, and Vision for Governance as a Service - Próspera is the world's most closely watched startup city - a Free City project on the Honduran island of Roatán operating under the ZEDE framework with its own civil code, tax structure, and regulatory system. After surviving years of political hostility from the previous Honduran government, it now faces a pivotal...

“When Starmer came in in 2024, how many people across the entire British state changed jobs? Two hundred. One hundred ministers… and one hundred special advisors… And that’s it. And everybody else in that deep state stayed exactly the same.” - Timothy Allen sits down with James Price, former UK government adviser and political commentator, for a wide-ranging conversation on what it’s really like i...

“I will die at sea for sure. I’m not going back.” - Timothy Allen sits down with filmmaker Oswald Horowitz, the man behind the upcoming documentary The Legend of Landi, to trace the strange true story of Samuele Landi, an Italian tech entrepreneur who set out to live beyond the reach of the normal system on a rusty barge in international waters between Dubai and Iran. What begins as Oswald's quixo...

"Land use should not be prescribed by any planning regime. People come together into the city by seeking out very particular connections and a multitude of connections. And they have to find each other. There needs to be the degree of freedom to associate and self-organize what I call the co-location synergies." - Timothy Allen sits down with Patrik Schumacher, principal architect at Zaha Hadid Ar...

"You can vote your way into socialism, but you can only shoot your way out. They're never going to leave power." - Timothy Allen sits down with Mailyn Salabarria, a Cuban refugee and liberty advocate, to talk about what “voting with your feet” looks like when it is not a lifestyle choice but a survival move. Mailyn describes leaving Cuba with two suitcases and $200, then having to learn how freedo...

"The golden age of voluntarism, anarcho-capitalism has already emerged. It's all over two-thirds of the Earth's surface. It's completely flourishing. It's long since entered its golden age. We've already proved that it works because it emerged naturally on the sea. It's called the cruise ship industry." - Timothy Allen sits down with Joe Quirk, president of The Seasteading Institute, to make the s...

"There were probably a lot of brown envelopes on the table involved — they said, okay, have this zone then." - Timothy Allen speaks with economist Lotta Moberg. Lotta, author of the leading academic book on special economic zones, joins the podcast to challenge the conventional wisdom around why zones exist, whether they actually work, and what the popular narrative gets wrong. The conversation op...

"I want to be back in my tribe. I want to have strong people which I can rely on, which I can do business with, which I know, which have my back and I have theirs. That's exactly what I want to have. And if we are building this place right now, why would I fill it with people I don't know and I don't give a shit about?" - “The whole country is falling apart and nobody gives a shit about it.” - Tim...

"If I can sell someone something to buy, they might buy it. If you can sell someone something that they can live in, they're likely to buy it. If you can sell someone something that they can live in and also generates passive income for them, they're very likely to buy it." A real seasteading resort exists today. Here’s the business model behind it. - Timothy Allen speaks with Mitchell Suchner, fo...

“The free cities community seems very much more buttoned up and more pragmatic – real estate, free cities, development, SEZs. You need lawyers, you need bankers. And then the network state community, there’s a lot more dreamers, young dreamers who want to do pop-up cities. But there’s a convergence in between where you have a group of people who are a bit of both. And I think that middle group of...

“How do you get out of this? How do you separate yourself from your government today? How do you protect your wealth and your ability to provide for your family today?” - Timothy Allen speaks with Mikkel Thorup. Mikkel is a long-time expat, offshore consultant, and founder of Expat Money . He has spent over 25 years living outside his country of birth, traveled to more than 120 countries, and work...

“Why do you need Free Cities if you can live tax-free everywhere?” - Timothy Allen speaks with Christoph Heuermann. Christoph is a perpetual traveler whose company Staatenlos sits at the intersection of global mobility, asset protection, and quiet preparation for uncertainty. What begins with stories of constant movement and remote places quickly turns into a deeper exploration of why some people...