Free Cities Podcast
byTimothy Allen
BusinessEntrepreneurshipNewsPoliticsSocietyCulture
The Free Cities Podcast is the leading podcast covering alternative governance, new jurisdictions, and the global movement to build freer societies. Hosted by Timothy Allen, the show features long-form, in-person conversations with the people building autonomous jurisdictions and real-world pathways to more freedom. We focus on what actually works, the legal structures, incentives, economics, and business models that turn freedom from an idea into a way of life. Builders and sceptics welcome. Free Cities, Charter Cities, Special Economic Zones (SEZs), Network States, Startup Societies, Pioneer Communities, Intentional Communities, Popup Cities, Governance Innovation, Competitive Governance, Governance as a Service, Regulatory Innovation...
Episodes(40 episodes)
200 - Will Próspera Survive Its Own Success? | Erick Brimen
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 same people. Erick has now decided that the answer to defamation is lawyers, and says outlets including the New York Times and Bloomberg have had to retract.</p...
Published: Sep 18, 2026Duration: 1h 54m 10s
199 - The Hanseatic League in the Cloud | Petar Čekerevac
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 conversation starts in Serbia in the 1990s, with three wars and a dictatorship just behind it, and a teenager working out that neither the centre left no...
Published: Sep 11, 2026Duration: 1h 3m 45s
198 - We’re Building a New Country in Europe | Daniel Jackson
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 of him being chased by Croatian police boats.
Verdis claims a tiny piece of land on the Danube between Croatia and Serbia, close to Liberland. Daniel and his team established a se...
Published: Sep 4, 2026Duration: 1h 19m 20s
197 - They'll Blame You When It Fails | Dominic Frisby
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 it was his. His new book is The Secret History of Gold, published by Penguin.
Timothy caught him at Liberpulco, at the Liberland Ark Village in Apatin. They...
Published: Aug 28, 2026Duration: 1h 14m 55s
196 - The Panopticon Is Already Here | Gareth Icke
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 and influence into a much larger picture genuinely compelling, even if the shape-shifting reptiles were a bridge too far. This conversation begins there: with Gareth separating what he believes from what he...
Published: Aug 21, 2026Duration: 1h 27m 57s
195 - How to Survive a Hostile Government | Christian Betancourt
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 ZEDE framework. Nobody knew whether the project would survive. Christian was so confident in the legal architecture that he left his corporate law career and moved there, betting his future on...
Published: Aug 14, 2026Duration: 1h 19m 30s
194 - Two Founders, Two Futures | Liam Martin & Nick Francis
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 at Running Remote in Austin.
When Timothy Allen first sat down with Liam Martin a year ago in Morocco, he was the one...
Published: Aug 7, 2026Duration: 1h 5m 12s
193 - Fifty Years of Watching It Go Wrong | Mark Frazier
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 he worked on free zones in more than fifty countries, advised the Reagan administration on enterprise zones, consulted for the World Bank and USAID, and wrote...
Published: Jul 31, 2026Duration: 2h 18m 0s
192 - The First Country on the Internet | Joey Flores
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 Running Remote conference in Austin, Texas, for a conversation about building for the 21st century nomadic life. SafetyWing's pitch is simple and audacious: your healthcare, income protection...
Published: Jul 24, 2026Duration: 1h 4m 32s
191 - Everyone Needs a Plan B | Vance
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 internationalising your life. They discuss the five routes to a second passport, why ancestry should usually be investigated first, why Mexico often suits Americans while Paraguay appeals to Europeans, and how some L...
Published: Jul 17, 2026Duration: 1h 39m 29s
190 - Building Prosperity in the Danger Zone | Joyce Brand
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 resident and chronicler of Ciudad Morazán, the "blue-collar" Honduran ZEDE built not for tech founders and digital nomads but for ordinary Honduran workers, in what was...
Published: Jul 9, 2026Duration: 1h 33m 3s
189 - The Nomad Pioneer Betting on a Free City | Gonçalo Hall
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 nobody in the digital nomad world had heard of Próspera, and that its real problem was community and public relations. Twelve months later he has moved to Roa...
Published: Jul 3, 2026Duration: 1h 34m 44s
188 - Plan For Decentralisation | Polycarp Nakamoto
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 flagship Archipelago operating system, the community is assembling the hardware and software for a censorship-resistant mesh network, owned by nobody and run by everybody, that they believe will be needed when the internet as...
Published: Jun 26, 2026Duration: 2h 23m 53s
187 - Free Cities Have a People Problem | Daniel Thompson
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 spent his early twenties in music marketing and PR and ran one of the biggest weekly nights in the dubstep scene before leaving to travel. After two years on the road he settled in Bu...
Published: Jun 19, 2026Duration: 1h 13m 2s
186 - You're Not Allowed to Say This | Eric Kaufmann
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 Majorities (Penguin, 2018) and Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution (2024, published in the United States as The Third Awokening). After two decades at Birkbeck, University of London, he left in 2023 for Buckingham, Britain's se...
Published: Jun 12, 2026Duration: 1h 48m 53s
185 - Medicine Without Permission | Niklas Anzinger
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 network of hubs for longevity biotech acceleration. He also hosts the Stranded Technologies podcast, which has featured guests including Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan. Niklas is a returning gues...
Published: Jun 5, 2026Duration: 1h 46m 27s
184 - What AI Can't Replace | Matthew Mottola
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-talent platforms, the layer between Fiverr at the bottom end and Deloitte at the top, where you go for projects in the $500K to $5 million range that need real specialists, not resumes from a...
Published: May 29, 2026Duration: 1h 23m 17s
183 - The Bitcoin Free City | Tomek Kołodziejczuk
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 decision in. He hasn't been back.
Timothy Allen sits down with Tomek for a wide-ranging conversation that goes from the...
Published: May 22, 2026Duration: 1h 52m 38s
182 - Jailed for a Tweet | Lucy Connolly
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 with Lucy for a conversation about what happens when an ordinary mother becomes a national headline, the deleted tweet, the dawn raid, the magistrate's court video link, the...
Published: May 15, 2026Duration: 1h 14m 3s
181 - Brazil's First Free City | Paloma Lecheta
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 doing for Honduras, turn a quietly functioning private development into a formally recognised Free City.
Timothy Allen sits down with Paloma in Honduras for a conversation about the 45-year-old Bra...
Published: May 8, 2026Duration: 1h 57m 26s