New episode just dropped. Gonçalo Hall built the world's first nomad village in Madeira. Then he moved his family to a Free City.
"You should build for nomads, but nomads should not be your end client."
The nomad pioneer betting on a Free City, on the Bali playbook, the missing pieces, and why he isn't leaving.
Video live on YT 👇
Timothy Allen
timothy@nostr.com
npub1gcf9...qjg0
Chronicling the global movement to build freer societies.
Tomorrow on the podcast: the nomad pioneer who chose a Free City.
Gonçalo Hall built the world's first nomad village in Madeira and communities from Lisbon to Brazil. A year ago he told us nobody in the nomad world had heard of Próspera. Then he moved his family there.
Fountain subscribers are already listening. Early access, one coffee a month 👇
https://fountain.fm/episode/dyxT1OIrg3aNthYWcAQE
Everyone else: tomorrow.
Is it even possible to beat 'This Week in Bitcoin' to number one in the @Fountain charts?


Poly episode now up on YT:
"We've made our own golden calf, which is AI, and we're all worshipping this false god that knows all, sees all, and can tell us whatever we want. But the reality is, it's more like a dog that can talk."
Polycarp Nakamoto episode live on @Fountain now:
https://fountain.fm/episode/T0BpN1LJtOFYOpE9Lyxb
Got to sit down with Poly in Austin. In person, helmet on, as ever.
You know the pitch: a second internet on Bitcoin nodes, mesh, Nostr relays, e-cash, the whole Web 5 stack, owned by nobody and impossible to switch off. We got into all of it. Bitcoin nodes in food trucks, shipping-container homes with a private AI inside, what actually happens when the internet goes down, and why he reckons the old one has five years left.
The message, as ever: remove the centralisation from your own heart first, and have the self-sovereign stack in hand before you need it.
One of my favourite conversations this year.
Plan For Decentralisation. Early access for subs now. Everyone else, Friday.
https://fountain.fm/episode/T0BpN1LJtOFYOpE9Lyxb
This stuff is absolutely amazing:
"There is an alternative to the state."
New episode. Daniel Thompson has spent six years building communities outside the system, and his take is that the free cities movement's real bottleneck was never law or land. It's people. Getting them to actually show up, and to stay.
Digital nomadism as a stage, not the destination. Families as the key to critical mass. A broken property ladder swapped for something you genuinely own. And the case for buying a dying European village and rebuilding it with people who think like you.
Recorded in person in Próspera.
Stream it and boost on Fountain (V4V): https://fountain.fm/episode/Ozizg5VY0TnaYxMs04Lu
New episode out. I sat down with Prof. Eric Kaufmann to work out why the West feels like it's coming apart, and where it actually started.
His answer goes right back to the 1960s.
We got into immigration, identity, and the slow erosion of being able to say what you think.
Stream it on @Fountain -
https://fountain.fm/episode/FUw0E74ubpXGo4wBgyJ5
Reflections on my convo with @Tomek ⚡ K.
When asked about everything Próspera doesn't have yet, the missing coffee shop, the missing scooter rental, the missing late venue, the missing grocery store that solves the chicken-and-egg adoption problem, Tomek didn't treat any of it as a problem.
He treated it as the actual opportunity.
His view: a 200-person startup city isn't a finished product you move to. It's an open invitation. Every gap is a business someone hasn't started yet.
The legal and tax infrastructure is already in place. Próspera is the only jurisdiction on earth where you can denominate your books in Bitcoin, pay 1% corporate tax in sats, and sort residency in a few months. What's missing is the texture of normal life. That's where the next wave of builders comes in.
For anyone who has been waiting for a clean reason to start something in a charter city, this is the conversation to listen to.
https://fountain.fm/episode/uDCMkio9FJhVSCZxKKMv
Can anyone advise me?
Is a Mac Mini still a decent way to go for an AI set up at home? Looking to create a very specific AI system for podcast workflow. Won't use it for anything else. Cheers.
In case you missed it a few weeks back, this one is still worth your time, and arguably more relevant by the week.
I sat down with Lucy Connolly. A mother from Northampton who posted an angry, ugly message on X the night three children were murdered in Southport, deleted it within hours, was sentenced to 31 months, and served just over a year inside.
Where is the line between a statement that is vile and one that is criminal? When the state reaches for a prison cell over words, what does that signal, and to whom? Connolly is candid about what she wrote, what prison was actually like, and why she refuses to let the worst thing she ever posted define her.
And if you found this one interesting. This Friday I'll be dropping an interview with Canadian Prof Eric Kaufmann. Where Jordan Peterson brings the emotion, Kaufmann brings the evidence, circling the same cultural storm with survey data instead of sermons.
🎧 Listen or watch the full conversation with Lucy Connolly:
▶️ YouTube:
🎙️ Fountain: https://fountain.fm/episode/ER6rtwYRUDZmSIgWVZ5r
🟢 Spotify:
🍎 Apple Podcasts: 
Spotify
182 - Jailed for a Tweet | Lucy Connolly
Free Cities Podcast · Episode
Apple Podcasts
182 - Jailed for a Tweet | Lucy Connolly
Podcast Episode · Free Cities Podcast · May 15 · 1h 14m
@Efrat Fenigson has been on the show 3 times.
Catch up with her episodes in the new archive:
https://www.freecities.fm/search?q=Efrat+Fenigson
An Australian man cured his dog's cancer for $3,000. No pharma company. No FDA. Just a genome sequence, AlphaFold, and a homemade vaccine.
That story is a small window into a much bigger shift, and it's the subject of our new Free Cities Podcast episode with Niklas Anzinger, Founder & CEO of Infinita City and a General Partner at Infinita VC.
Niklas has probably done more than anyone to put Próspera on the longevity biotech map. We sat down in Austin to talk about why the way medicine gets made is starting to come apart, and what replaces it.
A few of the threads we pull on:
- Why aging isn't officially a disease, and why that quietly holds back one of the best-funded industries in the world.
- How China went from near zero to 30% of global pharma licensing deals in a single decade, and what that should tell the United States.
- Why Right to Try laws in Montana and New Hampshire might matter more than any federal reform.
- Robin Hanson's idea that your doctor and your life insurer should be the same company, so that someone finally has an incentive to keep you alive.
- And the question underneath all of it: why do you need permission to try to save your own life?
Apparently, a lot of this stuff is going to happen in my lifetime.
And I'm quite old. Fingers crossed.
Watch the episode 👇
New episode is up, but only for subs rn.
Niklas Anzinger has spent the last few years building a biotech hub inside Próspera. In this conversation he makes the case that the FDA's monopoly on who gets to try what medicine is costing lives, and that the cracks are finally appearing.
Dog cancer vaccines built at home for $3,000 with AlphaFold.
Sid Sijbrandij going founder mode on his own bone cancer.
China eating 30% of global pharma licensing deals in a decade.
Montana and New Hampshire quietly cracking open the Right to Try framework.
And why Próspera's insurance-based regulatory model might be the most important governance innovation nobody's talking about.
Early access on @Fountain now. General release Friday at 6.15am GMT.
https://fountain.fm/episode/d0sQp6idoayM1GrrVXHx
Most people think geopolitics is complicated.
It isn't.
It's the same playbook. For 300 years. Maritime dominance. Broken countries. Managed migration. Dollar zones. The same families. The same institutions.
Patrick Henningsen has spent decades reporting from war zones, reading the classified think tank papers, watching the narratives get manufactured in real time.
This conversation goes deep.
Ukraine. Israel. Migration. NATO. The Anglo-American Empire. The petrodollar. Why Russia didn't fold. Why Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv. Who actually benefits.
Not a conspiracy theory. A coherent picture most people have never been shown.
🇧🇷 A Brazilian banker bought raw land in 1980 and built a private city: water, sewage, security, urban planning, all within Brazilian law. No special legal status. Just contracts and stubbornness.
He died last year at 83. His name was Péricles de Freitas Druck. Most of the Free Cities world has never heard of him.
Now a small group of founders wants to take what he built and add the one thing it's missing: formal regulatory autonomy. A Próspera-style Digital Economic Zone on the island of Florianópolis, built on a 45-year foundation that's already profitable, already governed, already real.
Brazil loses 1,200 millionaires a year. Many of them are founders. Most of them don't want to leave.
This is the story of a Free City hiding in plain sight, and the people racing to formalise it before the rest of the world notices.
The Bitcoin economy that's quietly forming on a Honduran island:
Episode 184. Recorded at the world's biggest remote work conference in Austin.
AI is replacing jobs faster than anyone wants to admit. The companies say10%. My guest, who sees the inquiry data before the layoffs hit the news, says 40%.
His final question ties it all back to where we live: who do you sue when the AI is wrong? In Free Cities, you actually have an answer.
Free Cities Podcast • 184 - What AI Can't Replace | Matthew Mottola • Watch on Fountain
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 n...
New ep with Matthew Mottola, CEO of Human Cloud. Early access for @Fountain subs now.
He told me:
- 40% layoffs are coming at large companies
- He's automated 98% of his company's podcast workflow with Claude
- Most agencies are quietly run by freelancers
- Google runs on 60% contractors and doesn't advertise it
- Universities are mostly a waste unless it's Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford or Harvard
We disagreed on plenty. Especially the AI bit.
Free Cities Podcast • 184 - What AI Can't Replace | Matthew Mottola • Watch on Fountain
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 n...