At the frontier of governance
Long-form conversations from inside the global movement to build freer societies.
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.
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Episodes · 202 conversations
"If there's one thing I've learned over the last couple of years that has made my life magnificently better, it's that reality is not what it seems like in any meaningful sense. And there's so much more out there."
"People simply don't believe that it's actually happening. That is the first challenge, that it's real and that it's actually happening. And it's better to be real and controversial than to not exist and be irrelevant."
"We have to be humble about the vision in that sense, and then very bold in our attempts to achieve these underlying goals."
"It definitely feels like an uphill battle all the time. But I think anything's possible."
"A very realistic possibility is that you see governments get themselves into increasing amounts of problems. Governments go bankrupt. Their currencies do collapse. And they then blame the Bitcoiners and the gold bugs."
“You know, to just say no. It’s the most important word in the English language.”
"I believed in it very much, to the extent that I waged my own career and my own life by coming here. It had to resist. I used to joke that if it hadn't resisted I would have stopped practising law, stopped believing in it."
"I'm an entrepreneur. I love technology and innovation. I think the tools that are now available to us are beyond extraordinary… I think I'm an incredible optimist as it pertains to AI." "When you hear a lot of these AI evangelists talk publicly about AI, maybe there's a 10% chance that it could be dangerous or a 5...
"Many free zone initiatives have been pushing on a string. They've fallen in love with a particular location and then push, push, push to try to make it happen... So the big takeaway for me was that these efforts to set up free areas by funnelling money into a predestined spot were exactly the wrong way to start."
"We are building a social safety net that is global and ultimately our plan is to launch the first country on the internet, which will allow people to become member-based citizens and have that safety net follow them everywhere they go."
"It was London in the 1800s. It was Spain in the 1600s. It was Portugal in the 1500s. It was the Netherlands before that. And right now it's the Americas."
"If you have a bad owner, the people will leave. If he's not doing what he promised, if he's not keeping them happy, customers leave all the time. The worse he is, the sooner people will leave, he'll go bankrupt, and someone else will buy the property that can do a better job with it. That's the way business works."
"When you build for nomads you build for everyone else. If you build something good enough to attract a digital nomad to whatever you are building, you are building something good enough for 90% of the people... That's why I say you should build for nomads, but nomads should not be your end client."
"The real reason that I wear the mask is because it doesn't matter who I am. Anybody can be doing what we're doing thanks to Bitcoin and the Bitcoin node network. The message, the idea of free speech in a worldwide mesh network, does not depend upon any single person's identity. Everyone is building the mesh network."
"As we progress through this movement in general, I think this might be the key to unlock the critical mass. I really do think that. I think families are overlooked because the old family thought process, or the people who were families when we were younger, may not have been ready for this. But now everyone who's...
"It's good to have a norm against racism, but when you go to a taboo, that's a very black and white thing. There's no nuance, there's no grey zones, and all of a sudden this is a powerful piece of kryptonite that somebody can weaponise."
"Imagine we had the technology and we would say, oh, for a reason X, Y, Z, we don't allow people to use it. That would be like withholding life-saving medicine from someone, which is equivalent, ethically speaking, to killing someone."
"I'm going to say for full-time employees that spend over a billion on talent, I'm saying there's going to be 40% layoffs. And they might say only 10%, but in reality, they're recalibrating easily up to 40%."
"I came to visit, just to visit. On the second day, I bought a motorbike from Facebook Marketplace just to lock in. Okay, this might be my place."
"The minute you don't agree with something they do, they'll come for you too. Don't for one minute think that you're safe. So why are you supporting this? Because it could happen to any one of you."
"If you're ruthless about figuring it out, people will support you. And it's a matter of execution, right? So are we going to be the crazy or are we going to be the visionaries? It all comes down to executing and getting it done... and it being okay if it fails."
