Daniel Thompson | Free Cities Have a People Problem

Daniel Thompson: Yeah. The interviewer, the Channel 4 guy, is so dismissive of the internet in that David Bowie clip, it is almost hard to watch.

Timothy Allen: Well, that was quite a feat by David Bowie, I think, to understand that. Because I suppose we are on a similar cusp now with AI, right? People are making wild accusations, saying, “We’re all done in five years,” and other people are saying, “No, we’re not done in five years.”

But really, when you look at all the things that have come since, they are all a function of the internet. To actually understand that was extraordinary. I remember around that time David Bowie’s music completely changed. He started doing drum and bass, didn’t he?

Daniel Thompson: Yeah.

Timothy Allen: I didn’t like it, I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t think it worked. I think drum and bass works when it’s dirty and nasty, but when he did it he was kind of singing over the top of it and it didn’t quite work for me. But the point was, he was on it, wasn’t he?

Daniel Thompson: Yeah. You’ve got to take shots like that. If you look at his career, he was similar to Prince in that respect. Those artists are able to reinvent themselves. Madonna too. You’re not going to hit the bullseye every time, but the one that you do hit is worth all of the other ones where people go, “I’m not sure.” But you respect it.

Timothy Allen: I do wonder sometimes, and here’s my great segue, whether the Free Cities movement is not a moment like that. Inside the movement, it is very normal. I don’t think there is anything weird about this at all. We talk very easily and honestly about really weird concepts. But when you go outside the bubble, you realise people either think you’re a Nazi or a fascist or something weird.

Maybe it is the same thing. When you are in it, you just understand it and you expect it to happen. So you are not seeing the future in some visionary way. It is just very easy to see the future. Do you think the Free Cities movement is as big as something like the internet? It is a response, isn’t it, to the state of the world?

Daniel Thompson: The potential upside, if we deliver on what we want to deliver, has a real meaningful impact, like the internet did, for sure.

I am always fascinated with words. In that David Bowie video, in his head he is very clear. Now, because we have the realisation of his ideas, it is easy to quantify it. But for the reporter in that moment, he is just like, “I don’t get what you’re saying.” He does not understand the words in the way that David Bowie does.

I think that is the key. We were just having a founders panel before I came in here today, and one of the biggest topics in the space is: how do we connect with the general population on these ideas? Really, I think that is the next step to get to critical mass. How do we put it into words or concepts so it can be taken seriously, or even just reduced to a line?

When I talk about governance with my friends, they do not even really understand that this is something that can be discussed. It is just a hard line of how it is. Even the idea that taxes and visas, to an extent, will be commoditised, and that you will be able to go on as you do with your utility bill and pick the best one for you, does not compute with people.

I do not know why. I think, as you said, I have spent six years in this nomad space thinking about these things constantly. I did not get there overnight. So maybe this takes time.

Timothy Allen: The big red pill for me, and I think you were alluding to it earlier, was that there is an alternative to the state. The state is a more pervasive idea that lives in most people’s subconscious, I think. Even in mine, even though I know what’s up, I still find myself defending the state accidentally quite a lot.

The idea of any kind of private governance has got a long way to go. It has terrible PR. It comes from our socialist history, really. Making money, private anything, is considered bad, evil, nasty. Whereas the government is supposedly cool, looking out for you, your best thing, which is ridiculous if you think about it. It is not even based in fact half the time.

Daniel Thompson: I think in these chats, the far end of the spectrum is Sealand and Liberland. They are literally just saying, “Fuck you, I’m going to go and build my own thing.” I commend their dream there, but I look at it more around this symbiotic relationship. I really like the idea of special economic zones because of that.

There are plenty of beautiful places that need help, and that help can be given. The incentives can be put there, and there could be a really nice relationship. I do think Próspera, where we are today, got a tough start, but they paved the way.

I think there is now a lot more opportunity for really interesting symbiotic relationships with private, digital-first communities that band together. My hot take for the next five years is that a community like Noma Collective, which right now has 5,000 members who have come and travelled with us for at least a month, could be meaningful. If 2,000 of those people decided to move to a tax jurisdiction, suddenly that is a meaningful addition to any sort of deal you are doing with one of these developing nations.

I think it could be really powerful. Something that was previously reserved for religious sects, the super-rich or country-to-country relations is now a potential for the average person when they join these digital communities. That is only possible via the internet.

Timothy Allen: Exactly. Maybe we should talk about Noma Collective then. I went straight to the website and had a look. As a former analogue traveller in the 80s and 90s, I did a lot of backpacking. It is funny because, in later years, I also ran a production company that took expeditions to remote locations, and the website looked quite similar, funnily enough.

Daniel Thompson: Okay.

Timothy Allen: Except we were selling trips for eight people paying 20 grand or whatever. But it is like a cross between a travel agent and a network. I can see the attraction. I always thought nomads were pioneers, those people out there who might shy away from someone doing all the work for them. But obviously not, according to your business.

Daniel Thompson: Yeah, let’s unpack that.

Timothy Allen: Describe your company first.

Daniel Thompson: For sure. Noma Collective is a community of digital nomads, remote workers, or location-independent people, which might be a better broad term for it.

It started as a pop-up co-live in the middle of COVID. We reopened a big hotel in Belize, and we were like the only thing that Americans could go to. We were testing people in and out because of the rules. We created a bubble in a resort. We were bussing in entertainment, bringing in food and veg, and we set up a mini village on the beach.

When the regulations started to roll back, people were asking, “Where do we go next?” So it morphed. I never thought I would be here. This business was meant to be a pastime while we could not do music festivals.

For most of my twenties and part of my thirties, I did large-scale music festivals. My job was to get to a field with nothing in it and turn it into a music festival. So there was a lot of production and logistics.

When we saw that people really needed this, we thought we were solving infrastructure. Actually, what we were solving was loneliness. We decided to roll it out in more countries in this pop-up format.

I would have loved you to have seen the new website I am about to launch, because it shows more of the full ecosystem. The business started as a place for nomads, or remote workers more than nomads, to come together in physical space. Now I am transitioning it into an ecosystem.

I think the word digital nomad is a stage in a journey rather than the journey. That is my vision of it. You start location-dependent, like most people before the internet. Then you get the chance, in whatever way, shape or form, to make money on the internet. You call that being a remote worker, but basically it is being able to be location-independent.

Then there is this group of people, which is really our community, who I would call workationers or part-time nomads. They travel for under six months of the year. The distinction I make is the amount of time they are away. The problems they want solved are internet, experiences, loneliness, maybe eSIMs and insurance. They are not worrying about taxes or anything like that. They are still domiciled in their hometown or wherever they are.

Then you have digital nomadism, which I think is this maximum expansion moment. It is not forever, in my opinion. It is just what got cool and famous, and that is the word people grabbed onto. I think that is the moment where you are travelling full-time and seeing what you want to see in the world.

Then I think that is where the outward perception stops. People think, “Oh, I was a digital nomad in 2012, so I am still aimlessly travelling around the world,” or, “I have gone backwards to the old life.” I think that is incorrect.

I think there are several steps, and I think they end in this Free Cities, network society movement. How these two things converge is in a word that I have to give credit to Emi from Crecimiento, the Argentine network society. He came up with this word, multi-local, which I love. The definition of multi-local is feeling at home in more than two places.

The idea is that you slow down, you pick two or three places, and you rotate between those places. A bunch of people already do that. Maybe you do that. We are lacking the nomenclature to describe these things.

Then the next step I think about is family. That is where my infrastructure needs are right now. I have a three-year-old kid. How do I travel, do what I want to do, and live this life with a young life involved? That is a completely different set of infrastructure needs.

Then I think it all ends in a multi-generational network society. When you zoom out and look at it like that, there is an ecosystem that has three layers: governance, digital, and physical spaces. My long-term vision is to be able to offer, at each one of those steps, the necessary infrastructure for you to live your life. That is how I am thinking about it. The website does not show that at all, but it will in about a month and a half. I was able to do it all with AI, which is the craziest thing.

Timothy Allen: Funnily enough, the website kind of suits me now. I live in the UK and I have a family, but I have come to Próspera for a month to work. This is the first time I have done it, because I have not been away from my kids for that long. My oldest is 13 or 14. It is hard to go away.

But recently I just decided, “Come on, dude, you do not have to hang around at home all the time and work from home. Do this.” So I used this as a springboard to stay for the month.

In that sense, the current iteration of your business would be perfect. Everyone at home can go on the website and it has Belize for four weeks, Chile for two weeks, and within that it provides accommodation, yoga, high-speed internet, networking, working opportunities, whatever.

Daniel Thompson: Yeah. Fear drives a lot of decisions. When you are a trailblazer, you will just cut through the jungle with a machete and do it. It does not matter. But the majority of people are not going to do that. They want a template.

That was the thought process with the core product. It is a plug-and-play opportunity for you to travel the world and do it in a safe environment. An example is that we almost always do airport pickups, because nine times out of ten, where do you get scammed? You get scammed right outside the airport. It depends on the location. Singapore, maybe not so much. Argentina, for example, I cannot tell you how many times I have heard a story of someone adding a zero to the taxi payment and suddenly they are paying $300 for a $30 taxi.

The idea is that you do not have to be this crazy trailblazer and throw caution to the wind. Also, when you are dealing with your job, that can be even more scary. Not having a good internet connection is like missing the bus on the way to work. You cannot justify that. The core product is essentially a plug-and-play workation.

Timothy Allen: Airport pickups are the life hack, I will say. We used to run these expeditions, and I started doing one particular trip that got copied over and over because it was a really great trip. I offered certain things like airport pickups and free booze on the whole trip.

People would look at that and go, “My God, how do you know how much money you are going to spend?” It did not matter, because most people are normal. You might get people who drink a lot, but things like airport pickups, which cost maybe 30 or 40 bucks in most countries, or booze, which I know you are not going to do, were things people remembered far more than the cost of them.

I used to do all-inclusive and say, “Completely all-inclusive. Whatever you want to eat, whatever you want to drink, when we go to restaurants, you can do whatever you want.” Occasionally people took the piss, but it did not matter. Compared with our closest competitor, our trips were remembered as that. We were considered generous, even though, don’t tell them, I added some money on the price to cover it.

Airport pickups were always one of those things. People complain about that stuff. What is it, £50 maximum on the price, for feeling like someone really cares about you and is looking after you?

Daniel Thompson: Yeah. I think one-stop-shop packages are what we are now accustomed to having across the board. We go to Netflix for all our media. Subscription models are giving us that a lot more these days.

In Próspera, we are going to roll out a family permanent hub, I guess we are calling it. I think families are super critical to any society getting to critical mass.

We have a trip happening this July where we are bringing about 20 families, maybe 50 people, to spend a month here. The package includes housing and schooling, with a presentation on the potential of taxes. The idea is that you can come and get a sense of what it would be like to live in a village with like-minded people.

I personally did all the calls with the families to vet them and understand them, because I am going to be here and this is my baby. Of all the products, this is the one I think is the most underserved in the current market and has the most potential growth.

That was shown by the fact that we had about 500 families apply. Time and time again they were saying, “I have been thinking about doing this on my own, and it just felt impossible. I could maybe get an Airbnb, but I do not know about the school.”

Then they see that someone has thought about this problem, and it becomes a soft landing. What I realised is that I need to roll out one-month, three-month, six-month and 12-month packages of schooling, housing and taxes. That is what we are going to do in 2027.

Timothy Allen: It is a brilliant idea, mate. Is no one doing that, as far as you know?

Daniel Thompson: There is one company, and they are doing really well. They are called Boundless Life. Shout out to them, because they really are the pioneers. They are a lot more on the education-tech piece, and they have housing partners.

Essentially, if you look at their website, it is very similar to Noma. It is like, here are eight or ten places. Some of theirs are pop-up cohorts, like summer cohorts, but they also have permanent hubs. There is one in Bali, one in Portugal. You can take your family and put your kids into school for three months, and then travel the world with these families around you.

The key is that the schooling is all connected, so you are not worrying about taking a kid in and out and then missing something or not being compliant. That is why we are doing summer camp at the start. Apart from the fact that we are relatively bootstrapped, setting up education is a big lift. But yeah, they are the only ones doing it, and I think it is a bit of a blind spot.

The narrative is that you do nomading for a bit, then you meet someone, then you go backwards. That really bothers me. This idea that we just have to go backwards.

It is what annoys me about return-to-office mandates. It is so binary. Surely there is a grey area. Surely there is a middle ground where a certain percentage of people and companies, in relevant areas, will be fine remote.

Yesterday we heard Sid speak. He gave the most amazing talk about fighting his cancer. GitLab is a super successful, fully remote company. There are examples of it working. It may be certain industries that lend themselves to it, but the idea that, “We tried it, it does not work, let’s all go back,” is crazy.

I think a lot of that, I am told, was driven by real estate developers.

Timothy Allen: People who are in real estate.

Daniel Thompson: There are two things. One is commercial leases and people holding heavy bags, really heavy bags. The other is that within the tech space, they found this loophole. By yo-yoing between return-to-office and remote mandates, they can do soft layoffs.

Someone moves, then a year later the company says, “We are pulling you back.” They are going to quit because they have their dog, their family and their life. It is nefarious, but I have heard that in the tech space specifically, it is a way to avoid paying layoff costs.

Timothy Allen: Are you using the Montessori school in Próspera?

Daniel Thompson: Yeah. It is Lucci’s first time in school, and they were super flexible. It was really cool.

I think we are at a crossroads with a lot of things with respect to AI, but the thing that is the most scary for me is education. My son is three and a half. If we assume that by 18, in 15 years from now, he is going to get a job, which I am not even sure is what is going to happen, how are we preparing him and all of the other kids for that?

The average school system is all around memorisation. You are never going to memorise better than an LLM. Fundamentally, I am concerned about that.

It is really cool to hear people in the talks thinking about this. Alpha School is getting a bit of notoriety. Acton Academy was one that Gabe from Próspera was telling me about. We need to focus much more on one thing: I need him to be able to make good decisions. If we can figure that out, then I think we are in a better place, because I do not know what decisions he is going to need to make.

Timothy Allen: Was it easy enough to approach the Montessori school and say, “Can we come for three months or two months and insert our kid?”

Daniel Thompson: Super flexible. They totally get it. With Lucci, my wife Evelyn was saying, “I do not know how he is going to react.” He has basically been with my wife and me for his whole life. We do not want to force him. There is no need to force him, in my opinion.

They said, “You can come, you can bring him in the morning, you can bring him in the afternoon. You pay the fee, but you can stay around if you want. You can go to the gym next door, and if he is not feeling good you can come and pick him up.”

That is really cool, in my opinion. We need more of that. What I have realised is that I want to be in places where I have more autonomy to affect and enact change. By no means are we done here in Próspera. There is a lot to do. But the opportunity to enact some sort of change is a lot higher here than in the UK with Ofsted. You are never going to get it.

I have friends who are great teachers trying to go through the process and get a school together, and it is just impossible. I think the way to do it is just not to tell anyone. Just hire a teacher and do not tell anyone.

Timothy Allen: How are you going to put 25 families up in Próspera?

Daniel Thompson: We have rented out the entirety of Las Verandas.

Timothy Allen: The whole lot?

Daniel Thompson: Yeah, all the ones that have kitchens.

Timothy Allen: I thought people were long-term in there as well.

Daniel Thompson: Not in Las Verandas. That is the hotel. You have the villas in Pristine Bay, which are all around the hills and the golf course, and there is much more long-term there. But Las Verandas is the hotel.

We have three five-bed villas, two four-bed villas, six or seven two-bed villas, and then a bunch of suites for a single parent and one child that have a mini kitchen. The key is that you need the kitchen.

This is an infrastructure problem. People say COVID fast-tracked remote work, but the infrastructure is not there yet. You have these rigid buckets. A resort is not sufficient for a month-long stay because it does not have kitchens, because they are trying to drive you through to the restaurants. Or you have an apartment building with no third spaces, which is not good for community either. Or you have a bunch of villas that are spread out.

When I was looking for places, it dawned on me that Las Verandas, or even the wider Pristine Bay area, is really unique. You have walkability within those villas. That is really awesome. You can have those serendipitous, natural moments. You can knock on doors. That is what people want. Then the school is a three-minute walk away, and you have all the amenities that a resort offers, but you have the kitchens.

Timothy Allen: It is a cracking idea. It would be like a family playground, basically. Like you say, old-school kids. You do not have to worry about what the kids are doing. You can let them roam around, knock on their neighbour’s door, go and see their mates. How long are you doing it for?

Daniel Thompson: It is a month long.

Timothy Allen: Brilliant.

Daniel Thompson: You said something just then. It is like going old school. Not backwards. It is looking back into the past and seeing what was done well. I think a lot of what I end up doing is just trying to recreate a village, really. A walkable community.

We kind of lost that. We know why we lost it. We had agriculture, then industrialisation, then cities. We created the internet and now we can redisperse. It is not reinventing the wheel. It is almost just going back and saying, “Wow, this is what we wanted.” Now it is possible while still having connectivity.

Timothy Allen: Also, in my anecdote, for the early years of my kids’ lives, we bought an RV and went on holiday in it every single time. What you discover is the same model. Caravans, RVs, tents, they all pitch up to a place. You open the door, the kids disappear, and you do not see them again until the evening, like when I was a kid.

The kind of people who do it are looking out for other parents and other kids. That is why we did it. Ironically, it used to be something people did because they could not afford to go on a normal holiday. By the last few times we did it, it was about the same price as going abroad, flying on a plane, taking the kids and having a villa.

We still go to one place down in Cornwall. It is an old-school campsite. We were there during COVID because we had an RV with a toilet, so we could drive it there. They had to shut the toilet blocks down and all that nonsense. We spent three months there one summer, right next to the beach.

We have friends from that place who have become our best friends. We met them because they were our neighbours. Then the same people always went back year after year. It is perfectly designed for families with children. It does not get any better than that, as long as the beach is close.

When I look at Las Verandas, it is banging. They have a safe beach, it feels like a village, albeit with little pathways between everything, and the school is there. It is a cracking location, mate. It is a really good idea.

Daniel Thompson: Thanks, man. I will let you know how it goes in July.

Timothy Allen: If you have got the clients, what can go wrong, other than people just do not like it?

Daniel Thompson: Then they are the wrong people if they do not like it. I say that in jest, but I am actually super confident it is going to go well.

As we progress through this movement in general, I think this might be the key to unlock critical mass. I really do. 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 in this movement is having families. If we can convince the wives and the kids to come, I think we get permanency much quicker.

Timothy Allen: The way I see it is not just that. It is a problem that needed solving. Whenever I spoke to people about nomading, travelling, all of that, there was always a point in the conversation where they said, “Yeah, but kids.” The best solution, if you still want to travel, would be something along these lines. An even better solution would be a network of places along these lines, where the same people go, so the kids see all their old friends.

Daniel Thompson: Nailed it. If you think about the description of a network state, that is basically it.

There are things you can do that people assume may be more difficult than they are. People always say kids need stability and routine, but that does not necessarily mean it needs to be in one place. You could do that by having the schools in that network laid out similarly. Even though it is a new school, they know where to hang their bag, for example. There are loads of ways, architecturally, that you could think about this in a really interesting way.

I just do not like it when people say, “No, you cannot do that.” That is actually what spurs me on. When people say that, I think, “Oh, I should probably try and do that.”

Timothy Allen: At Noma, do you own any real estate?

Daniel Thompson: Not yet, but that is kind of the next stage. We were having this conversation earlier about finance vehicles for these types of businesses.

When you look at hospitality, you have two buckets. You have tech or you have real estate. We are community, which traditionally does not have a finance vehicle. So it has taken people who are 100% ideologically aligned with us to say, “I believe in this and I want to see this in the world,” rather than, “I need this ROI on this investment.”

When you look at real estate, it is a logical next step. There is a lot of potential, but it is an asset-heavy business and can be difficult to run. There are a lot of reasons why you might do it in a different way.

Some of the things I think are really interesting are around collective ownership. Initially, I was playing around with the community fractionally owning through traditional models, like an LLC or something like that. But what I am now thinking might be more interesting or more novel is this ability to use critical mass and economies of scale.

Rural land, I think, is undervalued. We all have this idea of wanting to live in a village in Italy and remodel a house, but it is a really big undertaking on your own. What I am seeing within ecovillages, farm-to-table movements and some other movements is the ability to say, “No, let’s do it together.”

Instead of it being me on my own, let’s go with me and 500 other families to this piece of land. If you could convince 500 people to go to a piece of land and overlay subscription economics onto that, you could say, “You do not need to pay a big lump sum up front. You can pay $500 a month and that is your vesting, or after vesting, your HOA.”

That is how I am looking at it now. I want to use my learnings from music festivals to get a lot of people in one place. You are going to need a land partner who would be like a patron of sorts. But then you could lower the barrier to entry to get onto the property ladder and roll out a basic subscription.

The other key part is contribution. When you look at the Homestead Act, which was used to get people to move from the east to the west of America, it was: go to the land, till the land, use the land, make something from the land, and then we will give it to you, basically.

I do not think we can give land away, but we could definitely say, “If you till the land, for lack of a better word, and you pay a subscription…” Rural land is cheap. This is the oldest game in real estate. Buy a big piece of land, lot it out and sell it. I am just saying that instead of needing a 50 grand deposit, with economies of scale, getting to 2,000, 4,000 or 5,000 people, it really starts to make sense. That is my big next piece.

Timothy Allen: I have written a few things down there. First, do you know Rahim Taghizadegan?

Daniel Thompson: No.

Timothy Allen: He is doing a version of that already. Rahim is a Bitcoiner. I forget which episode it is, probably about 12 or 13 episodes ago. He is basically building a network of small villages for families around the world. It is shared ownership, but it is quite private. You can approach him and try to get involved, but it is slightly more closed.

When you mentioned that, two things came to mind. One is him, and the other is abandoned villages. I made a film about abandoned villages in Bulgaria about 10 years ago. We went to all these places where you could buy a house for two grand. A couple of them were incredible little places that you could probably buy up for £250,000 back then. I do not know whether it is still the same.

I know a lot of Bulgarians were earning money in the EU, travelling back, buying these little pockets, getting Starlink, and turning remote mountain villages into places.

Then the other thing is whether it is necessarily a good idea to invest in real estate.

Daniel Thompson: I think you need to do OpCo/PropCo models when looking at investment. Real estate investors are very different to VC, and that is something you need to manage. The jurisdiction is a big player too. I would not want to own land in Bali, for example, but maybe in Belize I would, because of the laws around that.

Ownership is not the necessary end goal. The end goal is autonomy, to be able to deliver what I want to deliver. Nine times out of ten, ownership is the answer to that problem. But finding an ideal real estate partner would be even better. If they are out there, please come. I think I have the people to fill it.

Real estate developers tend to be from another generation. They have mostly invested in very different models. Even if you have two spreadsheets, one showing high ADRs with relatively low occupancies, squeezing high seasons and low seasons because everyone used to only travel for two weeks, versus a new world where you have lower ADRs and higher occupancies, it does not enter. It is like the David Bowie conversation. The words I am saying do not make sense to those people.

Having said all of that, I am seeing family offices and real estate developers where the next generation is taking over the business. They have lived the problems we are solving. Like anything, it is time. Real estate is a slow beast.

Timothy Allen: You should definitely speak to Patrick from Veritas Villages.

Daniel Thompson: I just did a panel with him, and we were like, “We need to speak.” We had a coffee this morning. His story of selling 80 houses right off the bat on his first thing is everyone’s dream, if you think about it.

Villages, yes, 100%. I came at it from a different angle. There are municipalities that, on a base level, are doing this, but they are doing it in a B2C format. They are saying, “One family, come and live here and buy this house for a year.” I am saying, “Why do we not do that with 500 families and get them aligned around this idea of a minimum viable society?”

I launched it about three weeks ago. Right now, I am really thinking about the contributors who will create those domains. The first one I am proud of is healthcare, because I think healthcare is a big piece.

SafetyWing is a nomad insurance agency, but they also have the Plumia arm of their business, which is this global passport idea. Sondre, the CEO, has been wanting to buy a chateau for years. We met when I spoke at his summit, or his embassy, in San Francisco. He said, “Dude, if you get this together, I will come and be an anchor tenant. I will set up a physical clinic so there is a doctor there and an actual clinic, and I will insure everyone in the society.”

So then it is like, okay, health insurance and doctors are covered. If we have a flat-pack temporary housing partner, because for critical mass we need to be able to move quickly and get everyone into a place, then modular infrastructure becomes important. It is like music festivals: you have the ability to get everyone in a place and deliver the infrastructure.

I am about to close an education partner. Then I start to go, “Okay, if I have an education partner, a flat-pack housing partner, a health partner, and a local agriculture partner, then I can bring all those communities together.” I have a couple of Burning Man camps, a UK music festival that is interested, a bunch of artists who will come, some documenters.

If you get them all to go at the same time, and not just drip-feed in, I think what you will have is the vibe of a pop-up, but with the ability to extend past that month and iterate into the permanent.

Timothy Allen: Have you got a particular chateau in mind?

Daniel Thompson: We almost closed on a chateau right below Montpellier, but it did not happen. Bureaucracy is obviously a factor when you are looking at Europe, as we all know, which is why there are no zones there.

Timothy Allen: Especially chateaus. They often belong to multiple people, don’t they?

Daniel Thompson: Also, this was an issue of zoning. I feel that if a pop-up happens, a percentage of those people will want to stay longer, because the feeling when you are in those pop-ups is magical, but then it evaporates because it is not permanent.

My thought is that you have this old building that is almost like your central base, and you can get maybe 500 people on the land for that first pop-up. Then you can see who wants to be permanent.

You are not going for autonomy as well, because it is Europe. They are not going to give you autonomy. I never thought that. There are so many people doing that who still need to figure out the critical mass piece. I was thinking about it from that perspective.

Again, I am not dogmatic. If someone came to me and said, “There is this island in the Caribbean, I want to do it there,” and all the right pieces were there, even if it did not have the old building, I think I would still do it. I am just thinking from the perspective of what is the easiest sell, what is going to go most viral, what will make this a success in terms of proving that you can get 1,000 people in one year to move somewhere.

Timothy Allen: Does that throw up a load of problems with zoning? A thousand people hanging out around a chateau for months on end is probably a difficult ask from a local council, right?

Daniel Thompson: It depends on how desperate they are. It depends on what kind of depopulation problems they are having. It depends on how well you integrate into the local community and how you present it. There are a lot of factors.

The thing we were looking at with France was that there is an old tradition of the grape-picking season, where a lot of people would go to a place for an extended period of time to help with those processes. There are definitely ways.

Ultimately, each place will have its own things you have to contend with. But I would be less concerned by asking forgiveness for some temporary infrastructure than I would be about more serious infractions. That is not that bad, you know what I mean?

Timothy Allen: That is your history doing music festivals, probably.

Daniel Thompson: Yeah. Also, specifically in France, from the due diligence I did, if you are doing it for under a certain period of months in the year and you are not breaking foundations, it is a lighter licence that you need to get.

If you are able to prove it out, I have case studies from Belize where we know how much money we have injected just by bringing people. It would probably be about 1,000 people now over the four years, but even bringing 500 people who are not families and are not just coming for a holiday, you can see the local impact.

So it is about how desperate the situation is in that place. At some point, it becomes relevant.

Timothy Allen: I have a friend in the south of Spain whose family, I think back in the 1930s or 40s, were offered a sweet deal to come and own a farm in the south of Spain, which they still own now. It is thousands of acres.

The actual farm itself is beautiful. It is based around a central square, and it is basically like a small village. It has a chapel, accommodation for all the workers, stabling.

Daniel Thompson: Do they want to do a society?

Timothy Allen: No, probably not. She has inherited it and turned it into a lot of Airbnbs. They have put a proper pool in. They have horse riding there and lots of stabling. That is a massive part of their business model. They have a farm of about 3,000 acres, with houses on the side.

The only reason I am saying it is because those properties do exist.

Daniel Thompson: They do exist, and more than ever they are really struggling. The families or groups that once wanted those things went generation to generation, but often the younger kids moved to the city. They are not interested, and there is a level of upkeep.

One of the things we were looking at is that wherever we go, we will need full-time handymen, plumbers, electricians. You will need people who are ideologically aligned and have a specific skill set, and you are essentially giving them a free space.

This is the only way festivals have ever worked. You have a bunch of people doing specific jobs for a free ticket because they love what is happening. That is a really interesting, successful model. We have not quite figured it out yet for this piece, but for something like that, yes.

No wonder people steer you away from buying an old building if it is just you and your family, because all the bills become yours. You are not a plumber, so you are not going to have a full-time plumber there. Whereas if you are doing a more ideological movement, I am sure you could convince someone who is sick of plumbing in London to come and live for a year in the south of France.

Timothy Allen: When I was younger, I worked festivals myself, on the build-up and the takedown. The build-up especially was always the most fun. Three weeks before the festival, you go there and just hang out. You all eat together.

What festivals did you do back in the day?

Daniel Thompson: I worked at Secret Garden Party. I worked at Glastonbury. I was much more heavily involved in festivals in Croatia. My business partner and long-term friend Jack Robinson set up Outlook and Dimensions in Croatia, in a place called Pula.

Timothy Allen: Was that the one on the island?

Daniel Thompson: No, it was in a fort, an old abandoned fort. I think they and Sónar were the first ones. At one point, they were responsible for a considerable amount of the tourism going to Croatia. Now it is common. There are a million festivals. In fact, there is oversaturation, and it has got to the point where quite a few have closed down because it was too much.

I worked those for quite a few years, and also one in Iceland called Secret Solstice. Those are the main ones I worked on.

Timothy Allen: You should get out to the Rhodope Mountains, mate, and look at the deserted villages up there. They are incredible. They are on their own, so they have got a road going up to them and they sit in a little valley on a river. All the houses are already built. They are old houses in Bulgaria.

I do not know what it is like now. This was 10 years ago, but it must still be the same problem. I have heard the same story in Portugal and Spain. The only trouble with the Bulgarian ones is that you run the risk of getting cold in the winter. Can people handle that? I do not know.

Daniel Thompson: That is one of the reasons why I was picking the south of southern Europe. You kind of want it to be temperate all year round.

Portugal, Spain, Italy and France are the four that have been shining out to me. I am spending the second half of May and the first half of June looking at properties, existing ecovillages that maybe have extra land, that maybe are not quite at the scale we want but would like to be involved.

We have another project that is friends of ours called… Jesus, what is it called? They bought a lot of land, hectares of land. Anyone you think I should go and see, let me know. I think they are in Portugal, if not Spain. The way it works on a lot of these things is you buy 50 hectares of land, and you get the properties on the land, but they are spread out. They are already there. They did not get a huge number of properties because the land was important to them.

I am annoyed, because I want to give them a plug now but I cannot remember. I will put it in the show notes.

Timothy Allen: It will come to you halfway through.

Daniel Thompson: It will. There was one someone told me about that I am going to see called Traditional Dream Factory, which is in Portugal.

Timothy Allen: I do not know it. Like you say, it is a good idea. But I would differ with you in that I think the building is more important than the land. You were saying get land and develop it, but I know from experience, albeit anecdotal, that developing land is very difficult.

What is easy is when you have already got a bunch of buildings. You do not have to worry about permissions in the same way. Developing land is always a ballache.

Daniel Thompson: I agree. If there was a village that could house 1,000 people and did not need to be built, I would go for that. I am not against it. I just think there are not many of those.

Timothy Allen: There is a website called villagesforsale.com, isn’t there? Have you been on it?

Daniel Thompson: Yeah. They normally do not hit that size. They are usually 40 houses or something like that.

Timothy Allen: Really? That is not enough?

Daniel Thompson: I think it is enough to get to critical mass. I do not think it is enough for the subscription economics to make sense.

I think you are really looking at the edge of what Patrick says a charter city should be, between 8,000 and 10,000 people. That is where the subscription economics start to make sense. Then you have not only a profitable business model, but also money to be used for the commons and things like that.

Timothy Allen: How do you find a site that has the potential to house 10,000 people? Even if you get a village that is already quite big, that is a lot of extra building on the edges of it. That is difficult in communities.

Daniel Thompson: Difficult in the sense of the build, or the planning and permission?

Timothy Allen: Yes. All of it.

Daniel Thompson: It is going to be difficult, 100%. Part of me thinks that the place I should do it is just Próspera, because I would not have to worry about the permissions. They would be fully supportive. We would be able to fast-track everything. But I think it is a harder sell to get people to come and live here.

This is not going to happen overnight. The timeline we are trying to bring forward is a 20-year timeline. The developments I know that are successful, like ecovillages, are on crazy long timelines.

When I explain the network society movement to people, I often say it is like the butting heads of two very distinct worlds. You have the “move fast and break things” world of tech, and the slow behemoth of real estate. What we are trying to find is a mezzanine of those two things. If I can shorten 20 years to five, that is a big win. I want to show critical mass at one year, so I am thinking one year to 1,000 people, then three to five years to hit 8,000 to 10,000.

One of the things that has come up in conversations with one or two municipalities is that if the land is already zoneable, you are looking at maybe one-year timelines. You would want to front-load the zoning, so everything is zoned as multi-use or two or three distinct uses. Then, in theory, the whole land would be pre-zoned or front-loaded, and people could choose specific already-approved designs afterwards. You could have three types of pools, three types of houses.

I am making it very simple, but that is the thought process. Is there a possibility, as with off-plan real estate development, to say, “These are the five housing options, it is already lotted out, you buy one of the lots”? There is an evolution of that thought process when working with a municipality and showing, with data, how much money is going to flood into that economy. It needs the right set of circumstances.

Timothy Allen: I have remembered another project. It was a village called Panadexo. I interviewed him about two years ago. Spain, I think. He bought a whole village, but he is selling options on the houses, or selling the houses.

God, I wish I could remember the other one. Pavla’s sister. I am having an absolute memory block. Anyway, if it were me, I would do the village thing, because it is there.

I am thinking ahead about PR and promoting something. A chateau is lovely, but a village is where you actually get to live with neighbours. Especially if you are focusing on families, which I think is brilliant. You want to create that village. Living in a chateau is great, but I think it is more like a shared house.

Daniel Thompson: This chateau had a bunch of different houses that were more like farmhouses, so it was a little bit more like that. But yes, the ideal scenario would be an existing village that has fallen into depopulation, ideally with some residents still there who are excited about this. Then you could really galvanise with the old community.

That is really important. I do not want to create an enclave that closes out the locals. That is where you get the kickback more than ever. When I was looking at things like agriculture, it takes about a year to grow anything. You do not want the idea to be, “I am going to have my house and my garden.” Someone could have their own personal garden, but when you are talking about feeding 1,000 people, you will 100% fail if you do not use the local community around you.

If you are in agricultural areas, it is probably a bunch of people who have been doing it for hundreds of years. You would want them involved.

What was interesting about the place in the south of Montpellier is that it was a wine region that was good, but not quite like the other wine regions. It was not quite as well known, so they struggled with tourism. They were actively having problems with fewer people and less money coming through the area.

Again, I think the perfect place will arise. If there is an area that has way more houses and already has this existing old town, I agree with you 100%. That is ideal. Then, as more and more people become interested, you can build the newer town around it.

Timothy Allen: Is that project called Noma as well?

Daniel Thompson: No, it is called Minimum Viable Society. It is minimumviablesociety.com.

Noma has a funnel with the pop-ups. We are opening these permanent hubs. I am thinking about how people want to commune together and live. MVS is almost like the answer for the permanent hubs of Noma.

When I was doing my early reach-outs about buying fractional real estate together, I realised there is a massive problem with property prices. People cannot afford this. There are people who make good money and are still just breaking even.

If you say to someone, “Come and buy property together, but you need 100 grand,” it drops the number of people interested. Whereas if you say, “Can you pay $500 to $1,000 a month plus your rent, to vest into ownership?” I think that is way more appealing to the younger population, because it may be the only option to get on the property ladder right now for the average person. That is a real problem we are struggling with.

Timothy Allen: Great. Beautiful project, mate. I like it. It is intuitive. It makes sense.

From my perspective, because I have a family now and I did travel a lot, it is the problem that needs solving. During the pandemic I travelled with my family. We did Mexico, Spain, El Salvador, stuff like that. We used the homeschooling network to meet people. All the Telegram groups were homeschooling Telegram groups, and they were good. But people were still saying, “We are all going to such-and-such in the south of Spain now,” and then you still had to find your little property.

If you had a person in charge of getting people into your place, and it was just one thing, one person you phone up, rather than having to go to real estate agents and realtors and find out who is renting what, it would be amazing.

Daniel Thompson: One-stop shops, man. I think that is how you get more people in, 100%.

Timothy Allen: There is a lesson there in your current business model too. It is a one-stop-shop thing, isn’t it?

Daniel Thompson: I was so surprised when 500 families applied for this trip. The ratio of rooms to applications was way more than any other trip I have ever done, by about 10 times. It shows a need for it. There are a lot of families with young kids living this lifestyle, or adjacent to it, watching and wanting a way to start.

Timothy Allen: I was going to say I always end on a positive note, but that is a positive note. Thanks for coming in. Great project. Good luck, because it is a need. It is a hole in the market. As I think it through now, it is a massive problem that needs solving.

Daniel Thompson: I think so. I feel like we are on the cusp of getting to critical mass and having some of these projects be successful. We are all realising that families are part of that. But over and above that, there is just this desire to go to a place with people who are living this lifestyle. When there are enough people at the top of the funnel, the businesses will be created.

Timothy Allen: Great. Good luck. I am sure I will see you around.

If you want to get involved, look in the show notes. All the details will be down there if you want to get involved in any of the stuff Dan is doing with Noma Collective.

Thanks for coming in.

Daniel Thompson: Pleasure, mate. Thanks so much.

Timothy Allen: Thank you.

Notes:

This transcript was reconstructed from the episode’s raw machine timestamps. Speaker labels, timestamps, repeated fillers, obvious false starts and ASR line breaks were removed or tidied for readability. The meaning, voice, swearing and main order of the conversation were preserved.

The raw transcript supplied here begins at 0:13:26, with the David Bowie / internet exchange, and appears to exclude the earlier cold open, sponsor read and solo introduction. The conversation as transcribed begins at that point and ends at Timothy’s sign-off.

Proper nouns were checked where possible. The following ASR errors or likely errors were corrected: “prints” to Prince; “gnome collective” to Noma Collective; “Prospero” to Próspera; “SeaLand” to Sealand; “LiraLand” to Liberland; “Cresimiento” to Crecimiento; “e-sims” to eSIMs; “Boundless life” to Boundless Life; “GitLab” retained as GitLab; “Sid” is rendered as Sid Sijbrandij; “Alpha schools” to Alpha School; “Acton academy” to Acton Academy; “Ofsted” retained as Ofsted; “Las Verandas” and “Pristine Bay” corrected as place names; “Rahim Tagizadeh” to Rahim Taghizadegan; “Safety Wing” to SafetyWing; “Plumier / Plumia arm” to Plumia; “Sondra” to Sondre; “Montpelier” to Montpellier; “Secret Garden” to Secret Garden Party; “Sonar” to Sónar; “Rodopi mountains” to Rhodope Mountains; “Panadejo / Panadexo” to Panadexo; and “Dream Factory” to Traditional Dream Factory.

The following names are phonetically transcribed from the raw audio/transcript and should be checked against the audio before publication: Lucci, Evelyn, Gabe and Pavla. I have not independently verified Daniel’s family names.

The “Channel 4 guy” in the David Bowie internet clip has been left generic because neither speaker clearly names him in the provided transcript.

The “families applied” figure has been rendered as “about 500 families” because that is how it appears in the raw transcript. No independent verification has been applied to that claim.

No external fact-checking has been applied to factual claims made by either speaker beyond checking spellings and likely identities of proper nouns.