Free Cities Podcast
by Timothy Allen
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, Polycentric Governance, Geopolitics, Seasteading, Homesteading, Freesteading, Digital Nomadism, Flag Theory, Freedom, Liberty & Bitcoin. We are the official podcast of the <a href="http://f
Episodes
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205 - Why Are People Moving to Pop-Up Villages? | Telamon Ardavanis
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...
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204 - Bitcoin, Energy and the Reality of Building a Free City | Dušan Matuška
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...
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203 - Should You Fix Your Country or Leave It? | Raphaël Lima
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...
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202 - The Cost of Staying Put | Patrick Hiebert
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,...
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201 - Nobody Understands What's Inside the Black Box | Trey Goff
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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180 - Why Bad Ideas Persist | Crémieux
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...
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179 - My Family Owns a Country | Liam Bates
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...
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178 - 8 Hard Truths from 25 Years of Investing in Free Cities | Patri Friedman
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...
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177 - The Próspera Master Plan | Gabriel Delgado
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.…
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176 - Why Everything Feels Broken | James Price
“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...
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175 - The Last Free Place | Oswald Horowitz
“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…
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174 - The Architecture of Spontaneous Order | Patrik Schumacher
"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...
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173 - The Hidden Path to Tyranny | Mailyn Salabarria
"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...
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172 - The Ultimate Exit Strategy | Joe Quirk
"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...
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171 - The Truth About Special Economic Zones | Lotta Moberg
Special Economic Zones, Public Choice, and the Truth Behind China's Miracle Lotta Moberg is an economist and author of The Political Economy of Special Economic Zones, widely regarded as the leading academic book on the subject. After a PhD at George Mason University she spent a decade in macro...
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170 - Leaving Europe Is The Rational Choice | Tim Stern
"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...
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169 - The First Operational Seasteading Resort: Reef Resort | Mitchell Suchner
"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...
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168 - Vikram Bharati | At the Intersection of Free Cities & Network States
“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…
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167 - Mikkel Thorup | The Global Freedom Map Is Changing
“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...
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166 - Christoph Heuermann | You Can Live Tax Free Almost Anywhere
“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...
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NEWS 002 - Venezuela After the Capture of Maduro
In this NEWS episode of the Free Cities Podcast, Timothy Allen summarizes a recent Free Cities Foundation Ambassador call focused on the reported capture of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and the rapid signals of reopening that followed. - Drawing on firsthand accounts from Tim Stern…
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165 - Rahim Taghizadegan | Exit Is More Powerful Than Voice
Bitcoin, Citadel Theory, Geoarbitrage, Capital Mobility, Privacy, Austrian Economics, citadel.garden, Family, Plan B, Private Communities, Optionality, Sovereignty, Free Cities - Timothy Allen speaks with Rahim Taghizadegan. Rahim is an Austrian economist and philosopher, founder of the…
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164 - Mason | The Last Piece in the Puzzle for the Sovereign Individual
Seasteading, Floating Cities, Ocean Living, Private Governance, Catamaran Design, Flag Theory, Libertarian Communities, Sovereign Living, LiberArx, Atlas Island, Ocean Builders, Free Cities. - Timothy Allen speaks with Mason. Mason situates seasteading within the Free Cities movement, contrasting...
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163 - Yaron Brook | Why Atlas Shrugged Keeps Happening
Collectivism, Individualism, Objectivism, Statism, Freedom, Ayn Rand, Free Speech, Entrepreneurship, Reason, Transhumanism, Free Cities, Self-Interest, Liberty, Technology, Philosophy - Timothy Allen speaks with Yaron Brook. Yaron is an Israeli American author and commentator best known as the...
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162 - Vladimir Leshko: You Will Live Forever If You Choose To
Longevity, Gene Therapy, Unlimited Bio, Próspera, Regulation, AI, Biohacking, Philosophy, Morality, Spirituality. - Timothy Allen speaks with biomedical engineer Vladimir Leshko about gene therapy, longevity, and why Próspera’s regulatory environment makes human trials possible that are…
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161 - Swen Lorenz: Demography is Destiny
Sark, Free Cities, Flag Theory, Capital Flight, Geo Arbitrage, Investment, Independence, Relocation, Political Risk, Wealth Mobility, Government Failure. - Timothy Allen speaks with Swen Lorenz. Swen is a Sark resident who was at the centre of the recent bid to rejuvenate the island by buying up...
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NEWS 001 - Updates on the Honduran General Election & ZEDEs
This NEWS episode of the Free Cities Podcast reviews Honduras’s unresolved presidential election, with Nasri Tito Asfura (National Party) seen as the likely winner over Salvador Nasralla (Liberal Party), and the socialist Libre party effectively sidelined. Jorge Colindres and Alex Ugorji agreed...
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160 - Mark Edge: The Freedom to Leave
Free State Project, Libertarianism, Seasteading, City-States, Proprietarianism, Democracy, Privatized Governance, Immigration, Sovereignty, Liberty Movement, Economic Freedom, Silicon Valley Oligarchs. - Timothy Allen speaks with Mark Edge. Mark is an award-winning radio show host, most famously,...
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BONUS 005 - Timothy Allen: Finding Freedom in an Unfree World
Welcome to this BONUS episode of the Free Cities Podcast. These episodes are exclusively available to our subscribers on Fountain.fm, and I will be releasing them periodically throughout the year. - If you're not on Fountain, you can access the episode here:...
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159 - Massimo Mazzone: Liberty Without Libertarians
Free Cities, Ciudad Morazán, Libertarianism, Autonomy, Decentralization, ZEDEs, Honduras Politics, Próspera, Oligarch Conspiracy, Entrecomms, Entrepreneurial Communities, Freedom, Network States. - Timothy Allen speaks with Massimo Mazzone Massimo Mazzone is the founder of Ciudad Morazán. We talk...
About this show
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, Polycentric Governance, Geopolitics, Seasteading, Homesteading, Freesteading, Digital Nomadism, Flag Theory, Freedom, Liberty & Bitcoin.
We are the official podcast of the <a href="http://f
Hosted by
Timothy Allen