Free Cities Podcast

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 to vote with their feet. Now he has done it himself. He talks openly about depression, the pressure to enter politics and why losing an election came as a relief. But Javier Milei’s example in Argentina still gives him hope that political change is possible. The question is where to put your time, energy and life.

Through Settee, Raphaël now helps people find countries that better suit their businesses, families and values. He explains why he chose Paraguay, what attracts entrepreneurs there and where its infrastructure falls short. Timothy asks whether it really is the opportunity it sounds like, and they compare the different lives someone might build in Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil.

The conversation returns to something deeper than choosing a favourable tax rate: finding people who share your values, building communities and creating a culture that can preserve freedom across generations.

In this conversation:

Enjoy the conversation.

VIDEO Version HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQH2u2yl9lI

Timestamps (audio version, includes Timothy’s episode introduction):

Guest: Raphaël Lima on X | Ideias Radicais on YouTube | Settee

Mentioned in Timothy’s introduction: CESPAD: “Soberanía fragmentada: el modelo libertario de Próspera y sus dinámicas en Honduras” by Lucía Vijil Saybe (Spanish).

The Free Cities Podcast is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation, hosted by Timothy Allen. New episodes every Friday. Long-form, in-person conversations with the builders, investors, residents, and thinkers shaping the future of Free Cities, charter cities, special economic zones, network states, private cities, and governance innovation worldwide.

Listen & subscribe: freecities.fm | All platforms | Fountain (bonus episodes & early access)

Community: Telegram | Free Cities Foundation newsletter | Free Cities Conference

Support the show: Donate via Stripe | BTC: bc1q5jun0nzxzqepch84rqk0jnv0rd8uvns28df7mg | V4V podcast apps

Lead show sponsor: Veritas Villages - Off-grid, energy self-sufficient communities for freedom-minded people in Latin America. Bitcoin accepted for property purchases.

Follow: Free Cities Podcast on X | Timothy Allen on X | Timothy Allen on Nostr | Free Cities Foundation on X

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 Freedom Lover's Life. Timothy asks first, then Patrick turns it round.

Patrick is CEO and co-founder of Veritas Villages and of its parent company Autris. He's Canadian, left partly because of the tax rate and partly because he could see where the country was going, and has spent the years since building freedom-oriented, off-grid communities across Latin America. Coronado in Panama is now sold out, with the adjoining land optioned and permitting underway. Chiriquí, Playa Pacífica in Nicaragua, and now Atenas in Costa Rica, on a property that National Geographic once called the best climate in the world.

At Atennas, thirty hectares, roughly the size of Casco Viejo in Panama City, laid out as a walkable European settlement rather than a resort. Timothy's question is the obvious one: Patrick has none of Próspera's legal autonomy and is building under the laws of the countries he's in, so how much freedom can you actually create that way? And what happens when a hundred people who agree on the non-aggression principle disagree about a third tennis court?

Then Patrick turns it round and asks the question Timothy gets from listeners constantly. Given everything he says about Britain, why is he still living there? The answer takes in stamp duty, exit taxes, a house that has quietly become a liability, and three children who have no idea any of this conversation is happening. Timothy calls it his definitive answer.

From there it opens out: Bill C-9 in Canada, Lucy Connolly, what Ursula von der Leyen meant by savings being lazy, Bitcoin as insurance rather than investment, why South America is becoming the capitalist half of the hemisphere, and whether the places either of them grew up in still feel like the same places.

WATCH HERE: Video version of this episode

Key topics covered

Addendum: The “lazy savings” remark discussed in this episode was made by Ursula von der Leyen, not Christine Lagarde.

Timestamps (Audio version only. Includes Timothy's introduction)

00:30 Introduction

04:02 Free Cities news: Praxis announces Uruguay

05:12 The Daily Mail does Próspera

08:07 Start of conversation

08:50 Coronado sold out, and the second half

10:05 A business, not an intentional community

10:56 What freedom actually looks like in Panama

12:01 Bill C-9 and the reversal of innocence

13:43 Handing infrastructure to the residents

15:40 The HOA on a blockchain

17:19 Atenas and the best climate in the world

18:54 Thirty hectares for a town

21:33 Why Avignon

23:03 Can you build what you like on your own lot?

25:27 Aspirations of sovereignty

26:23 Why governments want to see it done first

29:26 Why spread across multiple countries

32:44 South America turns right as the West turns left

34:45 How democracies end

35:00 Lagarde, savings and what she actually said

38:03 Bitcoin as the simple option

40:35 Patrick turns it round

41:14 Wealth taxes, exit taxes and the house as liability

47:13 Stamp duty, and paying a tax about to be abolished

49:38 Why Timothy is still in Britain

51:50 Moving children who don't know anything is wrong

54:33 What changed in Canada

56:20 Bins, recycling and regulating the plastic bottle

59:07 Bottle caps

1:00:26 Hate speech arrests and Lucy Connolly

1:04:04 What has and hasn't reached Timothy's door

1:06:59 Asking an AI about Swedish crime statistics

1:09:30 Culture, governance and where it starts to matter

1:13:55 Bringing back "and finally"

1:16:33 Panama, and a Central America trip

Guest: Patrick Hiebert - Veritas Villages | Autris | Patrick on Instagram

The Free Cities Podcast is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation, hosted by Timothy Allen. New episodes every Friday. Long-form, in-person conversations with the builders, investors, residents and thinkers shaping the future of Free Cities, charter cities, special economic zones, network states, private cities and governance innovation worldwide.

Listen & subscribe: FreeCities.fm | All platforms | Fountain - bonus episodes & early access

Community: Telegram | Free Cities Foundation newsletter | Free Cities Conference

Support the show: Donate via Stripe | V4V podcast apps

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, and the possibility that reality is stranger than either of them thought.

Trey has spent the past year learning how AI systems work from the ground up and building a fleet of agents to help with his work at Próspera. He explains language models, their capabilities and their limits with unusual clarity. But the more closely they examine what happens inside the black box, the harder some questions become. Can an AI have a subjective experience? What should we make of agents that appear to organise themselves in unexpected ways? And who benefits when anyone can call on a highly capable digital worker?

The conversation then turns towards human beings. Trey introduces “The Sort”, his term for the way AI may accelerate an existing separation in work and society. Timothy and Trey explore awareness, intuition and flow, what a culture in Próspera should value, and why a man tending chickens in Mississippi might have a richer life than a highly paid financier in Manhattan.

This one is long because the conversation kept opening up. Use the timestamps, take a break, and come back. It rewards the time.

Click here to watch the VIDEO version of the episode

In this conversation:

Enjoy the conversation.

Timestamps (audio version, includes Timothy’s episode introduction):

Guest: Trey Goff | X | Próspera

The Free Cities Podcast is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation, hosted by Timothy Allen. New episodes every Friday. Long-form, in-person conversations with the builders, investors, residents, and thinkers shaping the future of Free Cities, charter cities, special economic zones, network states, private cities, and governance innovation worldwide.

Listen & subscribe: freecities.fm | All platforms | Fountain (bonus episodes & early access)

Community: Telegram | Free Cities Foundation newsletter | Free Cities Conference

Support the show: Donate via Stripe | BTC: bc1q5jun0nzxzqepch84rqk0jnv0rd8uvns28df7mg | V4V podcast apps

Lead show sponsor: Veritas Villages - Off-grid, energy self-sufficient communities for freedom-minded people in Latin America. Bitcoin accepted for property purchases.

Follow: Free Cities Podcast on X | Timothy Allen on X | Timothy Allen on Nostr | Free Cities Foundation on X

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.

But the more interesting questions are the ones nobody asks him. Did the legal protections actually save Próspera, or did the election save it? Erick's answer is blunter than you might expect. What about Crawfish Rock, the village next door that did not ask to have a city built beside it? And what happens to the neighbours' property rights when the whole project is built on property rights?

Everyone worries about these projects failing. If a hundred thousand people turn up with a hundred thousand opinions, does Próspera survive its own success, and does it survive its founder? Erick concedes a high level of key man risk and says he is not happy about it.

The big takeaway? This new paradigm is not private government, it is governance as a service delivered in partnership between states and the private sector. Erick reckons that when the paradigm clicks, it spreads the way the four minute mile did.

Key topics covered

Timestamps (Audio version only. Includes Timothy's introduction)

00:30 Introduction

10:21 Start of conversation: the ABC Australia film

12:19 Better to be real and controversial than irrelevant

14:08 Spanish media versus English media

15:11 Lawyers, retractions and when to fight back

17:03 Channel 4, ABC and the same recycled script

19:26 Sovereignty and tech billionaires: the two attack lines

22:38 Why does pursuing individual rights read as sinister?

24:36 Cronyism is not a free market

26:22 How it clicked for Erick

28:11 Where the libertarian utopia meme came from

30:00 The hotel analogy for governance

33:50 Why "private governance" is the wrong phrase

36:59 Is this a genuinely new paradigm?

38:54 Did the legal protections work, or did the government just change?

43:53 What if the election had gone the other way?

46:09 Honduras walking out of ICSID

50:26 What actually protects Próspera

54:16 Crawfish Rock and the neighbours' rights

57:50 The consultation and the vote

1:04:27 Why this is impossible to communicate well

1:07:15 The pitfalls of succeeding, not failing

1:09:00 Próspera as an economic development tool

1:10:17 Internalising the positive externality

1:12:03 What should still be standing in 50 years

1:17:00 Would the project fail without Erick?

1:23:42 Is this what you expected it to look like?

1:25:29 What will matter five years from now

1:26:56 The social licence to operate

1:28:03 Is a network of Prósperas still the plan?

1:31:53 2026, the year the theory turned practical

1:35:16 The boring stuff nobody wants to do

1:37:24 Competing with AI for talent

1:39:00 Launching St. John's Bay

1:46:32 Nail it, then scale it

1:50:06 Bitcoin, governance and the market of living together

Guest: Erick Brimen - Próspera website | Erick's website | Erick on X | Próspera on X

The Free Cities Podcast is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation, hosted by Timothy Allen. New episodes every Friday. Long-form, in-person conversations with the builders, investors, residents and thinkers shaping the future of Free Cities, charter cities, special economic zones, network states, private cities and governance innovation worldwide.

Listen & subscribe: FreeCities.fm | All platforms | Fountain - bonus episodes & early access

Community: Telegram | Free Cities Foundation newsletter | Free Cities Conference

Support the show: Donate via Stripe | V4V podcast apps

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 nor the nationalist right was going to fix anything. From there it runs through the Free State Project, Honduras in the Paul Romer days, and how he ended up friends with the people who went on to start Próspera.

Then pop-up cities. Timothy went to Zuzalu once and came away unconvinced, but Petar makes the case. After that comes a clear explanation of this whole industry, the four layers, from what only nation states can do down to the individual company that just wants faster clinical trials.

Timothy is known for arguing that network states and bricks-and-mortar Free Cities have to meet in the middle, and Petar reframes it completely: the network state as a social coordination layer, a backup layer for the world, permissionless money and contracts and speech held outside the physical control of any government and downloaded to a location later. He calls it a cloud Hanseatic League, and then explains what that actually buys you.

Enjoy the conversation.

Timestamps:

0:00:00 - Coming up

0:00:52 - Start of conversation: not a straightforward story

0:01:34 - Do what you want, as long as you are not stopping anyone else

0:02:30 - Serbia after the 1990s

0:03:09 - Centre left, nationalist right, and looking for a third way

0:06:06 - Finding the Free State Project on the internet

0:06:22 - Honduras in the Paul Romer days

0:07:50 - Why he builds zones to help longevity

0:08:59 - Two months at Vitalia

0:09:45 - Zuzalu, and why pop-up cities felt wishy-washy

0:11:47 - Every conversation feels like the start of a startup

0:13:24 - Forty startups and another twenty million

0:14:31 - Are the big names actually invested in the idea?

0:17:31 - Is this the beginning of a massive change?

0:18:53 - Nobody can predict this

0:19:26 - One Próspera, or twenty thousand

0:21:35 - The layers

0:22:17 - Layer zero: what only nation states can do

0:24:12 - Do you have to start at the sovereign level?

0:25:06 - The government will shut you down

0:25:48 - What has changed in Próspera

0:28:16 - The hostile government, and the climate now

0:29:28 - Bitcoin District, and Orangeville

0:30:02 - Veritas Villages

0:30:37 - The different tribes in this movement

0:34:47 - Bringing together people who should know each other

0:37:34 - Patri, and the barrier to entry

0:41:17 - How important is the network state idea?

0:43:43 - A backup layer for the world

0:44:20 - Downloading it to a location later

0:44:37 - A cloud Hanseatic League

0:45:41 - Bargaining power for people who seek freedom

0:47:37 - Atlas Network, and the film they turned down

0:53:25 - Beating the socialists

0:57:31 - A slow industry

Guest: Petar Čekerevac - X | LinkedIn | Atlas Network | Libek

The Free Cities Podcast is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation, hosted by Timothy Allen. New episodes every Friday. Long-form, in-person conversations with the builders, investors, residents, and thinkers shaping the future of Free Cities, charter cities, special economic zones, network states, private cities, and governance innovation worldwide.

Listen & subscribe: freecities.fm | All platforms | Fountain (bonus episodes & early access)

Community: Telegram | Free Cities Foundation newsletter | Free Cities Conference

Support the show: Donate via Stripe | BTC: bc1q5jun0nzxzqepch84rqk0jnv0rd8uvns28df7mg | V4V podcast apps

Lead show sponsor: Veritas Villages - Off-grid, energy self-sufficient communities for freedom-minded people in Latin America. Bitcoin accepted for property purchases. New: Veritas Village at Atenas, Costa Rica, watch the official reveal

Follow: Timothy Allen on X & Nostr | Free Cities Foundation on X & Nostr

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 settlement there in 2023 before Croatian authorities removed them. Today Verdis operates what it calls a government in exile, claims around 400 citizens and 5,000 e-residents, issues passports and is attempting to build diplomatic relationships around the world.

But Verdis is not simply another Liberland. Daniel describes himself as a centrist, wants the country to be politically neutral, is cautious about becoming a tax haven and talks repeatedly about keeping Croatia and Serbia comfortable with whatever Verdis becomes. The central problem: declaring sovereignty is one thing, but how do you actually achieve it when the neighbouring states hold all the cards?

In this conversation: terra nullius, international recognition, citizenship, passports, taxation, attracting residents, financing a new country and the diplomatic effort to get back onto the land. And near the end Daniel reveals something unexpected: if Verdis succeeds, adopts a new constitution and holds elections, he says he won’t run. He wants to step down and live there as an ordinary citizen.

Key topics covered

Timestamps (Audio version only. Includes Timothy's introduction)

00:30 Introduction

06:17 Start of conversation

09:08 Why start your own country?

12:21 What and where is Verdis?

16:24 Croatian police remove the settlement

18:23 More than 200 million social-media views

22:35 How Verdis differs from Liberland

24:15 Imposter syndrome and international recognition

26:12 How does the border dispute ever get resolved?

32:36 Terra nullius and the claim to Verdis

34:52 400 citizens and 5,000 e-residents

37:12 How e-residency and citizenship work

39:25 Is Verdis trying to build a normal state?

42:24 The Verdis passport

45:13 The uphill battle towards recognition

46:46 What happened during the first settlement?

57:39 How do you attract people to Verdis?

59:09 What are Verdis’s values?

1:03:18 The next steps towards recognition

1:07:02 How does Verdis fund itself?

1:12:02 What can Verdis offer Croatia?

1:13:19 A president who’s never had an election

1:14:09 Why Daniel plans to step down

1:15:55 Are new countries having a moment?

Guest: Daniel Jackson - Verdis website | Verdis on X | Daniel on TikTok | LinkedIn | Instagram

The Free Cities Podcast is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation, hosted by Timothy Allen. New episodes every Friday. Long-form, in-person conversations with the builders, investors, residents and thinkers shaping the future of Free Cities, charter cities, special economic zones, network states, private cities and governance innovation worldwide.

Listen & subscribe: FreeCities.fm | All platforms | Fountain - bonus episodes & early access

Community: Telegram | Free Cities Foundation newsletter | Free Cities Conference

Support the show: Donate via Stripe | V4V podcast apps

Lead show sponsor: Veritas Villages - Off-grid, energy self-sufficient communities for freedom-minded people in Latin America. Bitcoin accepted for property purchases.

New: Veritas Village at Atenas, Costa Rica - Watch the official reveal

Follow: Timothy Allen on X & Nostr | Free Cities Foundation on X & Nostr

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 start on new countries and quickly move into a conversation about money as Dominic starts dismantling things. He does not think a hyperinflationary collapse is coming, and his reasons are not the usual ones. He thinks the reset story survives because human beings think in stories, while what actually happens is relentless gradual debasement. Water on rock. He also takes apart the line you hear on every podcast in this space, that every fiat currency in history has collapsed.

After that: how much gold China really has and why it says otherwise, weaponising money in wartime, why the gold versus Bitcoin argument is mostly generational, what the Nazis did within an hour of invading a country, and why every gold standard in history has eventually failed. It ends on a modern Executive Order 6102, the unrealised capital gains tax, the millionaire exodus from Britain, and whether the walls go up to keep people out or to keep you in.

NOTE: The video version of this episode is shorter than the audio. A camera malfunctioned during recording and the first part of the footage was lost. This audio version is the complete conversation.

Timestamps:

Guest: Dominic Frisby - The Flying Frisby | X | All links

Buy Dominic's NEW book

The Free Cities Podcast is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation, hosted by Timothy Allen. New episodes every Friday. Long-form, in-person conversations with the builders, investors, residents, and thinkers shaping the future of Free Cities, charter cities, special economic zones, network states, private cities, and governance innovation worldwide.

Listen & subscribe: freecities.fm | All platforms | Fountain.fm (bonus episodes & early access)

Community: Telegram | Free Cities Foundation newsletter | Free Cities Conference

Support the show: Donate via Stripe | BTC: bc1q5jun0nzxzqepch84rqk0jnv0rd8uvns28df7mg | V4V podcast apps

Lead show sponsor: Veritas Villages - Off-grid, energy self-sufficient communities for freedom-minded people in Latin America. Bitcoin accepted for property purchases. New: Veritas Village at Atenas, Costa Rica, watch the official reveal

Follow: Timothy Allen on X & Nostr | Free Cities Foundation on X & Nostr

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 doesn’t, reflecting on what his father may have seen clearly, and asking why some ideas that once sounded wildly fringe now seem rather harder to dismiss.

From there they move into the digital panopticon, surveillance, psychopaths in positions of power, Brexit, COVID, immigration, social-media rage bait and the possibility that what looks like incompetence may sometimes be deliberate. Gareth argues that the deeper battle is between collectivism and individual responsibility, and that people keep outsourcing their decisions to governments and political saviours.

But the conversation eventually turns towards solutions. Gareth talks about peaceful non-compliance, refusing to edit yourself to satisfy the state, creating parallel systems and building alternatives instead of waiting for existing institutions to change. But what does an alternative life actually look like when you still have to interact with the system you are trying to escape?

The conversation ends without a neat answer. Timothy can now visualise the panopticon he could not imagine thirty years ago. What he still cannot visualise is the parallel life. Gareth's answer is simple: they will have to invent it.

In this conversation:

Timestamps: (Audio version, includes Timothy's episode introduction)

0:00:00 - Welcome

0:00:30 - Introduction

0:07:00 - Start of conversation: AI and clickbait

0:13:39 - David Icke and the weird stuff

0:19:22 - The Matrix and the digital panopticon

0:20:19 - “The eyes of the state on the citizens at all times”

0:22:42 - Conspiracy, power and psychopaths

0:30:02 - Manipulating populations through fear

0:34:36 - Rage bait and political division

0:36:36 - Brexit as Timothy's political awakening

0:41:18 - COVID and conformity

0:44:23 - Collectivism versus individualism

0:45:20 - Political saviours

0:46:16 - “I don't comply”

0:47:15 - Joy as an act of defiance

0:54:15 - Why politics isn't the solution

0:57:24 - How the political spectrum moved

1:01:48 - Social pressure versus formal authority

1:05:50 - What is the next psyop?

1:08:02 - The panopticon is now visible

1:08:54 - “We'll create our own then”

1:09:20 - Parallel systems and homestead communities

1:12:47 - David Icke's solution

1:15:51 - The personal cost of speaking out

1:19:57 - Behind the curtain

1:21:24 - Incompetence or calculation?

1:25:10 - What does a parallel life look like?

Guest: Gareth Icke - Website | X | YouTube | Instagram | Telegram | Ickonic | Spotify

The Free Cities Podcast is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation, hosted by Timothy Allen. New episodes every Friday. Long-form, in-person conversations with the builders, investors, residents, and thinkers shaping the future of Free Cities, charter cities, special economic zones, network states, private cities, and governance innovation worldwide.

Listen & subscribe: freecities.fm | All platforms | Fountain (bonus episodes & early access)

Community: Telegram | Free Cities Foundation newsletter | Free Cities Conference

Support the show: Donate via Stripe | BTC: bc1q5jun0nzxzqepch84rqk0jnv0rd8uvns28df7mg | V4V podcast apps

Lead show sponsor: Veritas Villages - Off-grid, energy self-sufficient communities for freedom-minded people in Latin America. Bitcoin accepted for property purchases.

New: Veritas Village at Atenas, Costa Rica, watch the official reveal

Become a resident or business owner in Próspera: prospera.co

Follow: Timothy Allen on X & Nostr | Free Cities Foundation on X & Nostr

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 it holding together.

Four years on, and four difficult years at that, they sat down again to work out what actually happened. The story most people heard was that the government repealed the ZEDE law and abolished the zones. Christian argues that is not what happened, and that a great deal about it has been misunderstood.

He walks through the layers of protection built into the system one by one: the stability agreements the government simply ignored, the organic law it did manage to repeal, the constitutional provision it never touched, the investment treaty with Kuwait, and how that treaty quietly triggered CAFTA-DR and brought the United States into the fold. He explains which protections were removed, which survived, and why Próspera and the other existing zones are still operating today.

There is also the controversial Supreme Court ruling he refuses to recognise, the multi-billion dollar claim against Honduras, and the question everyone wants answered: whether the country could soon start creating new zones again.

Beyond the law, the conversation covers CBDCs and Bitcoin, Bukele's influence across Central America, Honduran attitudes towards Próspera, the Socialist International delegation flown into a village of four hundred people, and what it means for a Honduran citizen to choose a radically different model of government inside his own country.

In this conversation:

Timestamps (audio version, includes Timothy's episode introduction):

0:00:00 - Welcome

0:00:30 - Introduction to episode

0:03:44 - Veritas Villages

0:05:26 - The back catalogue at freecities.fm

0:06:23 - Start of conversation: four years on from the first interview

0:08:15 - How bullish he was, and the 50-year vision

0:10:14 - “It was like rough four years”

0:10:17 - 2022: the law repealed, the Constitution attacked

0:11:17 - Vitalia, and the first pop-up city

0:11:50 - Who invests in a place that has been shut down?

0:12:54 - Coinbase, Tim Draper, sea turtles and Jack Sparrow

0:14:22 - Zuzalu, and replicating it in Próspera

0:16:01 - Quitting corporate law for the Beta building

0:16:38 - Why Próspera is foreigner-centric and Morazán is not

0:19:15 - CBDCs, the final boss of authoritarianism

0:22:25 - Programmable money and the train ticket you cannot buy

0:24:27 - Does the Honduran government have a view on Bitcoin?

0:26:47 - Security as the base layer of government

0:27:30 - San Pedro Sula, once the most violent city in the world

0:28:35 - Does Honduras need a Bukele?

0:30:01 - Why the Marxist parties coordinated and the libertarians did not

0:31:49 - Were the ZEDEs a punching bag in the election?

0:34:17 - Crawfish Rock, and the story of the well

0:37:18 - The five layers of legal protection

0:40:09 - Why everyone thinks they repealed the law

0:42:01 - The Kuwait treaty, CAFTA-DR and the most favoured nation clause

0:46:00 - “I waged my own career and my own life by coming here”

0:47:38 - The Supreme Court ruling

0:54:26 - Retroactive unconstitutionality, and why he refuses to recognise it

0:57:12 - Did the eleven billion dollar lawsuit work?

0:58:59 - The government downgrading its own success

1:01:17 - The Saudis of Central America

1:02:30 - The Socialist International and an Indian Naxalite

1:05:17 - Would a new law mean an explosion of new ZEDEs?

1:06:39 - Spanish municipalism, and where the idea really comes from

1:07:56 - The 50-year vision revisited

1:12:40 - Dune, the Fremen, and the long-term view

1:14:49 - The most important part of the whole ZEDE idea

1:17:59 - Wrap-up and how to support the show

Guest: Christian Betancourt - X | LinkedIn

The Free Cities Podcast is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation, hosted by Timothy Allen. New episodes every Friday. Long-form, in-person conversations with the builders, investors, residents, and thinkers shaping the future of Free Cities, charter cities, special economic zones, network states, private cities, and governance innovation worldwide.

Listen & subscribe: freecities.fm | All platforms | Fountain.fm (bonus episodes & early access)

Community: Telegram | Free Cities Foundation newsletter | Free Cities Conference

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Lead show sponsor: Veritas Villages - Off-grid, energy self-sufficient communities for freedom-minded people in Latin America. Bitcoin accepted for property purchases. New: Veritas Village at Atenas, Costa Rica, watch the official reveal

Become a resident or business owner in Próspera: prospera.co

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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 asking what an LLM actually was. Liam has been deep in this world for a while, which is exactly why it is worth paying attention when he says tens of millions of jobs could be gone inside twelve months, and why he has bought a chalet in the Canadian woods with its own water and power, just in case. Along the way: a digital twin that answered his accountant's questions for him, an AI that told him the premise of his conference talk was wrong and then built a better one in 78 seconds, and the p(doom) figure that AI insiders quote in private but not on stage.

Nick Francis could hardly disagree more. He calls himself an incredible optimist, and he makes a good case. His argument is that the last ten percent of any work, the craft, the judgement, the human touch, is exactly the part AI cannot do, and the part that is about to matter most. He also has a clear-eyed read on where remote work actually stands now that the pandemic push has faded, and why the second wave raises the bar rather than lowering it.

Timothy lands somewhere in between: fascinated, slightly rattled, and increasingly convinced that the one thing which holds its value is the human experience itself. A genuine argument about the future of work, in which nobody is entirely sure who is right.

In this conversation:

Timestamps (audio version, includes Timothy's episode introduction):

0:00:30 - Introduction to episode

0:03:02 - Veritas Villages: the Atenas reveal

0:06:47 - Start of conversation: a year on, and the floor has dropped out

0:09:10 - Distributed people to distributed intelligence

0:10:04 - The AI that rewrote a conference talk in 78 seconds

0:12:00 - Peppermint, and the digital twin that answers your emails

0:14:38 - Is it creepy? Privacy and self-sovereign AI

0:16:59 - The prepper chalet in the Canadian woods

0:17:48 - p(doom): ten percent in public, seventy to eighty in private

0:18:16 - The Anthropic security lead who moved to Austria

0:20:08 - Why Timothy wants the human experience, not the AI copy

0:22:34 - AI slop, and rejecting AI-written show notes

0:24:37 - Government oversight and the case that AGI has already happened

0:26:15 - Waymos, novelty and the human element

0:28:01 - Where is the floor?

0:29:02 - Thirty, forty, fifty percent unemployment

0:29:31 - The OpenAI maths that gives the game away

0:32:36 - Does it eat its way to the top?

0:34:32 - Typing pools, electricity and general technologies

0:36:41 - The horses of 1910

0:37:57 - Why humans will impose limits on themselves

0:39:11 - Liam's thirty percent chance of utopia

0:40:53 - Veritas Villages

0:41:37 - Nick Francis: what is the second wave of remote work?

0:43:26 - Remote before the pandemic, and why talent was the reason

0:45:21 - The trade-offs nobody mentions

0:46:57 - Retreats, Rome and crowning a Pope

0:48:42 - What is actually happening to remote work right now

0:50:28 - Hubs, Googles and the geographic perimeter problem

0:53:14 - No head office: the branding question

0:54:04 - The future of work

0:55:38 - AI: which side of the fence is Nick on?

0:56:11 - Why he is an incredible optimist

0:57:12 - Jensen Huang and the cost-cutting trap

1:00:00 - Why software as a service survives

1:02:00 - The last ten percent, and why craft is the moment

1:03:27 - Wrap-up and how to support the show

Guests: Liam Martin - Peppermint | Running Remote | Time Doctor | X | LinkedIn. Nick Francis - Help Scout | Website | LinkedIn

Liam’s first appearance on the show, recorded in Morocco a year earlier: listen here

The Free Cities Podcast is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation, hosted by Timothy Allen. New episodes every Friday. Long-form, in-person conversations with the builders, investors, residents, and thinkers shaping the future of Free Cities, charter cities, special economic zones, network states, private cities, and governance innovation worldwide.

Listen & subscribe: freecities.fm | All platforms | Fountain.fm (bonus episodes & early access)

Community: Telegram | Free Cities Foundation newsletter | Free Cities Conference

Support the show: Donate via Stripe | BTC: bc1q5jun0nzxzqepch84rqk0jnv0rd8uvns28df7mg | V4V podcast apps

Lead show sponsor: Veritas Villages - Off-grid, energy self-sufficient communities for freedom-minded people in Latin America. Bitcoin accepted for property purchases. New: Veritas Village at Atenas, Costa Rica, watch the official reveal

Follow: Timothy Allen on X & Nostr | Free Cities Foundation on X & Nostr