Gonçalo Hall | The Nomad Pioneer Betting on a Free City

Timothy Allen: We met, what was it, eight months ago? More or less?

Gonçalo Hall: May. Eleven months ago.

Timothy Allen: Nearly a year ago. Amazing. We met in Morocco, at a private, invite-only gathering of digital nomads. That was kind of my first proper foray into it, to be honest. I know those people, but I do not know them as well as you.

We met some really interesting people there, and we did a podcast because I thought you were one of the most interesting people there. I described you as a bit of a nomad influencer type, someone who had done a load of stuff that was really relevant to Free Cities.

Now, a year later, you are working on Roatán and we are in Próspera doing this interview. That is quite incredible. We spoke about Próspera when you were there. In fact, our interview caused a bit of a stink, I suppose, because you said, look, digital nomads do not know about Próspera, and they should. Your mission was to come over here and try to make that a reality, plus other things, and you have ended up basically working here. So give me the timeline, because I know roughly, but I do not know the ins and outs of it.

Gonçalo Hall: One year ago we spoke in Morocco. I was working with different governments. Rio de Janeiro was one of my clients, Nagasaki and others. I build communities for digital nomads. That is what I do for a living, working with governments and attracting foreign direct investment.

I was invited by Lonis Hamaili to come here for three months and do consulting on how to attract people here.

Timothy Allen: Lonis, that is?

Gonçalo Hall: Lonis is the VP of Growth at Próspera. I said yes. As we spoke about it, everyone was speaking about it. I was so interested in coming here to see what the reality was, because our conversation had been about my perception from the online conversation, the online media, et cetera.

I was right on most things, but I was still not aware of everything Roatán is. Nobody knows about Roatán. If I said nobody knows about Próspera, probably nobody knows, even in my community of world travellers, about Roatán up to today.

In August, I landed here for the first time. There was nobody here, because I think in August everybody leaves for some reason. I did my three months. I researched, I spoke with everyone in the different companies that are here, the hotel, the Duna Tower and everything in between. At the end of that, I was offered a position inside the ecosystem. One of the Próspera companies is called the Roatán Tourism Bureau, which basically has the goal of promoting Roatán to the world, because again nobody knows about this Caribbean paradise, which is very sad.

I said yes. Since then, I live here. I moved here with my family. I have a three-year-old, and we are all very happy here. There are still frustrations. We are still building. It is very early. But now I have a full picture because I have spoken with everyone in the ecosystem, I have spoken with the locals on Roatán, I have spoken with the government of Honduras for the last six months, and that gives me a really good feeling about where we are and what we need to build.

Timothy Allen: Excellent. Let us have a no-holds-barred conversation. Obviously there are probably some things you cannot say, but I am very interested to talk about what is working and what is not working, because I have very much got my opinions on what is not working. I do not mind voicing those opinions, because I know they are problems to get solved. I am not picking on the tiny little things. I am just looking at it thinking, here we are in a frontier territory, and currently my biggest observation is that it is a bit disparate. It is a bit cut off. All the elements of what Próspera will be are cut off.

But I do not mind, because I have spoken to everyone here and the vision of the future is basically the opposite of that. I know it is just a matter of time. Is that where you are at?

Gonçalo Hall: Yes, I would say so. I think what is missing right now… First, what has been built here is incredible. It is unique. There is nothing like this. People say, “What about these people who are trying to do something?” There is nothing even close to where we are right now.

I also think that in the last few years Próspera was fighting a different battle, and I have seen a complete change in the last two months since the elections, where we are and where we are going.

But definitely we have experience problems right now, because it is early. In terms of experience, right now it is not the best place in the world. If you come here right now, you do not automatically love it. You grow to love it if you are a builder. If you are just a person looking for a place to go for one or two months, I brought my people here last year and they did not like it.

The reason is that the experience is not seamless. We have not integrated all the single pieces. If you are in Duna Tower and you want to go to a different place in the ecosystem, it is still not fully integrated, which is something we would expect in a place like this. Most challenges today are experience-driven, I believe.

Now it is all about fixing the experience, and we have just hired the right person to do so, so that people like us not only come here to build but enjoy the journey of building. We are not there yet, but if you are a builder, this is a good place. If you want all the comforts that our community has in Bali, Lisbon and everything in between, we are not there yet. It is a good place to come and build a community.

Timothy Allen: One hundred percent. That has been my experience. I did kind of love it when I came, but then again I came for a very specific purpose. I have been here almost a month and I am leaving on Tuesday. My advice would be: if you are someone like me, you are going to love it here.

I would also say to those people, do not just come here for a few days. You can check it out if you want, but really you are missing a trick. You need to be the kind of person who can set aside a month and come and live here for a month and work from here. In my case, I got incredibly productive. I have done so much work here. It has been amazing.

But sometimes I got to the end of the day and thought, I would just love to pop down to the beach and have a swim. That does not quite happen here yet. You can go up to the pool. I live right next to the pool. But even that pool, I want to do some lengths, I want to go for a swim.

I said to people, if you are coming here looking for Tulum, it is not there. It will be at some point in the future. Something like that will happen here, but it will be one part of this. At the moment, it is for the frontiersmen and women.

Gonçalo Hall: Do you know the irony of everything you are saying? You are describing the traditional digital nomad when they go to a place very early. Go for a month. Do not be a tourist. Go for a month. That is what we do. The average stay of nomads is two months in every destination. In our community we always say, never go to a place for less than a month. So you just converted to digital nomad. Congratulations.

Timothy Allen: Well, thanks. I have literally been a digital nomad. I brought enough cables that, as soon as I got set up in my room, the TV on the wall was an extension of my laptop. I had screens everywhere and I started working straight away. I could see the sun setting outside my window.

Gonçalo Hall: Welcome to the community.

Timothy Allen: Interestingly, someone here, one of the very long-term residents, said I did it right. If you stay two or three months, you start hitting gripes. Then when you get to six months, you are on a roll again. I can see that.

I got into a groove. Saturday mornings I got picked up, taken to the supermarket, did all my shopping, put it in the fridge, and that was ready to go. There is not a huge amount of places to eat out, so I am not eating out a lot, but I do not care because I am here to work.

All these things are there for the taking. That is my takeaway. If you are someone who wants to do something, you need to get yourself here, because the opportunities are literally limitless. I spoke to Gabe the other day and he said, basically, if it is not against the law, you can do it. Do you want to build a little neighbourhood in the style that you like? Go and generate the money, get the backing, come and talk to us, and you can probably do it.

Gonçalo Hall: People are doing it. There is the Bitcoin project being set up by Tomek. There is Darien Village, with five towers being built as we speak. People are literally doing it.

Timothy Allen: The NOMAD Village as well, which for me… I do not like the name, but it is a nomad village.

Gonçalo Hall: That is the name of their company, yes. The government is NOMAD now. It is a little bit everywhere.

Timothy Allen: I went up there the other day to check it out. A bit of building has started, but not much. It is almost textbook. If you are a nomad and you ask, what do you want as a nomad? Cheap accommodation, a space where we can all hang out and interact, somewhere I can work quietly, access to a beach, access to the jungle. That is what they are going to build, I imagine. It is almost like a nomad playground.

Gonçalo Hall: Yeah, it is the Nomad Village in the end. I like the concept. I just do not like the name because I am very attached to my community.

Timothy Allen: You think no one should own that name?

Gonçalo Hall: I think nobody should own that name. I think it is very hard to have a company called NOMAD. I love the project. I just do not like the name.

Timothy Allen: Tough shit. That is life. You are only gutted because you did not get it yourself.

Gonçalo Hall: I think the point is, people are really building interesting things. Because I have been here for almost nine months now, I get to meet a lot of interesting people.

There are two kinds of people here. There are the dreamers who are not ready to build. They expect to be sponsored. They expect a little bit of socialism. We do not have that here. Then there are the ones who are ready to build. They understand the ecosystem, they come here, they try it out. That is the case of Ivan with Darien. He came here, he was doing his own thing, and then he thought, actually this is a good idea. Why do we not build a different kind of accommodation, build-to-rent? And he is building it: five towers.

If you are at this stage, ready to build, especially if you want to build something physical, right now we are an open canvas. We are ready to build. We are desperate to have more people build, to a certain point, and we will say yes to any quality project that comes in.

Timothy Allen: The more projects that come in, obviously the less disparate the whole place becomes. This is why I am saying manage people’s expectations. If they come to Próspera, they are going to say, everything is a bit disjointed, nothing is connected. Correct, we know that. Help. Do not complain about that. See it as an opportunity.

I do. I am racking my brains. I have never generated money, I have never got VC backing, I am a creative, I have never done any of that shit before, and even I am thinking maybe I could leverage my connections because there is so much opportunity here.

Gonçalo Hall: The opportunity is so big and so open right now that it is even hard to frame it. I think the biggest challenge people have when they come here is framing an opportunity and boxing it in a way that makes sense.

When I brought my community here, I brought ten people. They were saying, “There is no ice cream on the island. We should do ice cream.” Then they went to a different place: “There is nothing like this on the island.” Not just Próspera. Roatán is actually 20 years behind most of the Caribbean.

Yes, there is Próspera inside Roatán, but Roatán as an island is really behind the major trends. If you want to do a recovery centre with a good gym, there is no really good gym on the island. There are decent gyms, but there is nothing that would be acceptable in Bali, Costa Rica or even on the mainland. We are behind in so many things.

Hopefully Próspera becomes the hub that sparks the development of the rest of the island as we get more tourists, more people coming here, and hopefully more people hearing about Roatán. We will have three million people coming on cruise ships. I am not sure if that is good or bad; different discussion. But not just in Próspera, in the whole of Roatán, there are so many opportunities if you want to live here and build for the island as well.

Timothy Allen: Let us talk from the nomad perspective. Funnily enough, the latest episode we put out was Patrick Friedman saying, basically, do not build for nomads.

Gonçalo Hall: He is wrong.

Timothy Allen: He did not say it as black and white as that. His point was that only a fraction of nomads stay long-term. I know you might try to convince me otherwise, but he is not saying nomads are a bad idea. They have great function. I think his interpretation, and probably mine, is that what you are good at is advertising a place, especially in the beginning.

Gonçalo Hall: No. What you need to build is experience for nomads, because when you build for nomads, you build for everyone else. If you build something good enough to attract the digital nomad to whatever you are building, you are building something good enough for 90% of people.

If you have an international community good enough that digital nomads want to be part of it, every person who may be thinking about moving there will consider it more seriously, because there is a community of digital nomads there. That is why I say you should build for nomads, but nomads should not be your end client, which is slightly different.

Timothy Allen: That is a nice way of thinking about it. Talk about Bali in that sense. I went to Bali in the 80s. The only travellers there were backpackers. There might have been one big hotel in Kuta or somewhere like that. It was a backpacker place if you were a foreigner. If you were a local, it was just where you lived. It was beautiful.

Gonçalo Hall: It was surfers and backpackers.

Timothy Allen: Hardcore surfers and backpackers. But Bali now is nomad. It is your digital nomad hub of all hubs, is it not?

Gonçalo Hall: Yes, and there are reasons for that. The way it started was a crazy guy and a co-working space. He understood that nomads move between communities, not between places. Once he built one place to gather the community, what he called a co-working space, what we would now call a social club, everything began.

It was a co-working space where everybody met. It was super community focused. Events every day, a pool, all the Bali things. He was the first one. Because of that, Bali started to grow. More people attracted new businesses: one nice cafe, then gyms.

If you go today to Canggu, which in my opinion is the biggest digital nomad community in the world, the best cafes in the world are in Canggu. The best gyms in the world are not in the US or Europe. There is nothing comparable to what you can find in Canggu. The best co-working spaces are not in New York. The best co-working spaces, with pools, cold plunges, everything, are in Bali.

Canggu was built for digital nomads by digital nomads. The quality of the things we care about – the gym, co-working spaces, cafes, food, healthy food everywhere – is incredible. Right now there is a protein craze there. Everything is protein. Protein cafes, protein cakes. It happens because they really understand their end customer. This is not Bali itself understanding it. This is entrepreneurs building for entrepreneurs.

Timothy Allen: Overlay that model here. What do you end up with? In Bali, how many people have emigrated there?

Gonçalo Hall: So many. There is Green School, which is one of the best schools in the world, a nature school that is thriving since the nomad community moved in.

Timothy Allen: Are people getting Indonesian passports?

Gonçalo Hall: They can get residency, yes. Not a passport. A passport is a whole new thing, but it is not that hard to stay there. Most nomads, if they love it, start staying there. They start building property, getting property, buying property. You can buy for 30 years. People move there. If you go today to Canggu, there is an expat community and there is a nomad community.

Timothy Allen: What about the tech community? Here, quite a lot of the tech community have come in through the network state end and seen the opportunity, and Niklas has had a massive effect on bringing those people here. What are they like in Bali?

Gonçalo Hall: They are there. The entrepreneurial ones are there: builders, introverts, extroverts, they are all in Canggu. It hurts me because it is very far away and I do not really want to go there right now.

I went through this phase. I went to Bali in 2018, 2019. I loved it because it was the first place where I was surrounded by people like me. Everybody was building businesses. I thought, wow, this is it. I love this. And I am from Lisbon, which is known for this.

Then COVID happened, remote work exploded, everybody moved to Bali, and I did not like it anymore. Now the remote workers have started moving away. They had to go back to their countries for different reasons, and it is back to entrepreneurs again. So now it is exciting again for me. Meanwhile, one of the best infrastructures in the world was built.

There are problems, do not get me wrong. Bali is far from perfect. There is pollution. The beaches are not clean, et cetera. But in terms of concentration of entrepreneurial talent, from tech to AI, everyone is going to Bali. It is crazy.

Timothy Allen: What is the economic and regulatory situation there? Are they taxed much? One of Próspera’s huge advantages, if you are an entrepreneur, is that you can bring your business here, have a very acceptable tax rate and probably run your business in one of the best places in the world. You can pick that place and use those rules and regulations.

Gonçalo Hall: Bali is the opposite.

Timothy Allen: So if these guys are running their businesses in Bali, are they paying through the nose for it?

Gonçalo Hall: The ones building physical businesses are paying taxes there. The foreigners usually do not pay taxes there.

Timothy Allen: Because they are not there long enough?

Gonçalo Hall: Yes, or they have a residency scheme.

To answer your previous question, how could this overlay? The one thing Bali did was build for experience. Everything in Bali is built for an incredible experience. Anything we build here needs to be thought about as attracting people. Once you come here, you need to feel you want to stay here forever.

There are two layers. There is the physical layer. Do we have the right gyms? Do we have the cold plunges? Whatever people are into today. The second layer is the community. Bali today, after many years, nails both. If we build the physical part of it, I have no worries that we will attract and maintain the right people. We are not there yet. We need to build it. But it is not that hard. In my head, we are 150 or 200k from success.

Timothy Allen: Sorry, I left my phone on. That noise means my daughter is going to start sending me messages. Wait a second.

When I went up the hill yesterday and looked around some of the building plots, when you get up there and look back down across the island, you realise the potential is here for it to be an incredible place.

Bali has been built now. When I went in the 80s, we were staying in people’s houses in Ubud. Now Ubud has spas and all this kind of stuff. But back then it was blatantly obvious. You woke up, albeit on the floor of someone’s house, looked out across the rice paddies and thought, this is amazing. We did not even take photos. There was no Instagram. In the guidebook you saw the rice terraces; now the guidebook is real life. People have built their houses among that, or they are down on the beach overlooking the views.

When you look here, it has all the same stuff. All the same opportunities. There are beaches all the way around the island, a reef all the way around the island, jungle all the way back. If you want to create a little hideaway in the jungle overlooking the sea, easy peasy.

Gonçalo Hall: It is insane. And we have the second-largest coral reef in the world. I only truly appreciated Roatán once I got on a boat and went diving. That was the first time I thought, ah, okay, Caribbean. I see the difference. I have been all around the world and I have never seen such a high-quality diving experience as here: the coral reef, the fish, the starfish, the sharks. You can see it all.

I have never lived in a place like this. I live in a private villa overlooking the coral reef and I do not spend that much money. It is not a cheap place, but compared with other Caribbean destinations it is really, really cheap. This place is beautiful. That is why I am still here.

I see the same potential you are seeing. I like faster timelines, so sometimes I feel anxious because I want to build fast. I want the experience to be on par with places I have built before, so I can bring more people in. I struggle with the two timelines: are we building or are we bringing people? For me, without the experience, it is very hard to bring the kind of people I need to bring.

But maybe we can design an experience for early adopters, as you were saying, where we can have an incredible experience for people who come here to build, come here for the community. We can do this almost like pop-up events for one month, where people come here to build their company or build their network.

Timothy Allen: Funnily enough, we were talking about this off camera. That has been my realisation. I have not consciously sat down and thought, what is a good way forward for Próspera? I have just ended up doing something that worked really well, which was to come here for a month. I was not trying to look around the island, see all the sights or go diving. I just came here to work. As a result, it has been the most enjoyable period of work I have had in years.

You mentioned the pop-up city thing. I have always thought they are not very good. I went to Zuzalu and thought, this is pure LARPing. The meetings happening there might have been good for them, but it was not my thing. The reason, I think, is that in the previous iteration of pop-up cities, you pick a place, everyone goes, then everyone leaves.

This is why Próspera is different. You come here and it is a long-term project. It has already been here for years and it will be here for many more years. For me, I have said to everyone that every year I am coming here for a month. No question about it, unless something changes. I may as well come here for that month, because we have that opportunity as entrepreneurs and people.

I have a family. I cannot just do Bali for 12 months and here for 12 months, but I can do one month, and it is not bad. It is actually cheaper than living at home for me personally.

Gonçalo Hall: I think the next level for this idea is something I will personally do in October because of a new project. I am the CEO of the Roatán Tourism Bureau, and I have a new project connected with longevity, which of course is connected with Infinita, with GARM Clinic, with the fact that we can have gene therapy here, which is unique, and everything else.

My strategy for the island is that one of the areas I want to go into is longevity. Therefore I am having a pop-up month kind of situation where we are doing a lot of longevity stuff: bringing speakers, building a community here, building for this space, AI hackathon, whatever happens in that month.

I was thinking maybe this is the model. Maybe we need to create experiences. You are a very specific type of person, but most people really miss the community side of things. If people do what you did, but are surrounded by a community and people like them, they can exchange ideas, geek out about building a new website, a new project, a new podcast, while they are on the rooftop sauna before going to the pool. That is where the magic happens.

It is not so hard. At the end of the day, it is organisation and marketing. I am not sure if it is at the Próspera level, but I think that is one of the directions we will try to push. I am sure Lonis is already doing it in one way or another, but I see these pop-up months or thematic months as very interesting for the next one or two years, to bring more people, exchange ideas and keep rotating people for one or two months.

Timothy Allen: I do think it is at the Próspera level. Bitchill is basically a similar thing: Bitcoiners come here for a month and hang out. When I first heard about Bitchill, I thought, that is great, but who is going to do that? And then I have done it. I have just ended up doing it.

Because Bitchill has just started, a load of Bitcoiners are here, so I am hanging out with them and doing what they are doing. Now I get it. Actually, that is a real business model.

You said I maybe do not care about the community as much. My version of that is different. I do not necessarily need to sit and eat with a group of people every night. But my sense of community here was that every time I got in the lift and someone else got in, 50% of the time it was someone I had never met before, and they were interesting. I would say, “What are you doing here?” A couple of days later you bump into them somewhere, and before you know it, even if you are like me and you do not go straight in and introduce yourself, it unfolds. You start to know everyone. A month is how long it takes me.

Gonçalo Hall: But if we structure it in a better way, we can accelerate that curve. You do it in the first week. It is almost like speed dating. We do events around it. Imagine we do an event around podcasting and you are a speaker. Thirty people attend and then 30 people know you.

Part of this is getting to know who is in the building and building events around them for the rest of the community, which is something that is not yet happening. If we have the structure of pop-up months, this can happen much more easily. We know Tim does podcasting and knows a lot about network states, so there is definitely a talk there. Then he knows John, and John loves AI and thinks about it 24/7. Let us do a workshop with them.

Now 30 people know John. This is a way to accelerate the process you went through, giving it just a little bit more structure. I think it is a business model. I do not think Próspera will follow this business model, but I think whoever is listening to this podcast and wants to come here for a month – that is what Próspera is looking for.

Timothy Allen: Talking about that month, what is missing from this part of Próspera and the other side, because it is a little bit too formulaic, is a place to hang out.

Gonçalo Hall: A third place.

Timothy Allen: A cheap place to hang out. The whole of backpacker culture was based around beach huts, basically. There was always one big hut where everyone ate. That turned into digital nomad culture, I think. You need that space where every night I can go down, sit on my own if I want, play chess with some rando, meet people, or be at an event. That is what Próspera does not necessarily have yet. It might not be their vision, actually.

If you think about it from the biotech side, a biotech month is a brilliant idea. It is the perfect application of what is already here. But what third space would you need for a biotech month, for example?

Gonçalo Hall: I will always need two spaces. I need a co-working space, which currently is managed by Infinita. And I need a meeting space, which we have at P1. It changed a lot. It was from Infinita and now it is kind of a meeting space. It is called a makerspace. You can do 3D things and it also has table tennis and a kitchen, so people do events there.

Timothy Allen: That is all in the Duna Tower?

Gonçalo Hall: It is all in Duna Tower, yes.

Timothy Allen: But do you think for something like that you need a beach bar or a beach restaurant?

Gonçalo Hall: That would be great, yes. The issue here is that there is land in between Pristine Bay, which is currently managed and owned by us, and Duna Tower, where we are today. That land in between is a 15-minute walk.

Timothy Allen: Through the forest. It is beautiful, though.

Gonçalo Hall: During the day it is beautiful and in 15 minutes you are on the other side. But if you go by car, it is 20 minutes all around, up and down the mountain on an average road. If we connect both spaces, then you have a beach club to do that.

I am just starting to plan this longevity month, and I plan to have sponsored villas in the hotel. The hotel is on the Pristine Bay side. I will have one company sponsor a villa, doing their own events and building community there. Another company sponsors another villa. The entrepreneurs or early startups will probably stay at Duna because it is much cheaper than the hotel. Then we have the villas in Pristine Bay.

I can create this city kind of feeling, even though we have land in between, by separating things and spreading them across the properties. It is not easy to do with everything we create here, but if you think as an ecosystem – and I am lucky because I am an insider, I work here, I know everyone in the ecosystem – it is easy for me to integrate the aspects, even golf and everything in between.

Is there a third space today that can act as a beach bar? Not really. I think we will eventually make the makerspace a third space for fun. That is already happening with table tennis. I also think the cafe we have at Duna should be a meeting place. Make it $3 or $4 coffee and turn it into a meeting space. If you hang out outside, you have shade, a nice breeze because it is elevated, and everything. It just misses the right execution.

Timothy Allen: I said this on a podcast the other day. A little bird told me the cafe is moving out because they have bought a big property. If you are someone who just wants to run a great coffee shop, come and do it here. There is a space waiting to go. Get a good machine so you can knock out quick coffees, a bit of food if you want, and you will get guaranteed business.

At the moment it is an artisan coffee shop. It is a bit clunky. During the event there were huge queues and everyone was getting pissed off. It is not necessarily right yet. It is there for the taking in Duna Tower. It would be an opportunity for someone, because they would create that space, it would get good, and by living and working there they would hear about the next place and do it again.

Gonçalo Hall: If you make it a community-centric place, you are thinking only about coffee, but there is no reason why it cannot be open until 9 p.m. and have a bar.

Timothy Allen: Also, there is that massive space outside that is literally not being used, watching the ocean. You can put a cover over it. It has a sunset view. It is so underused.

Gonçalo Hall: Maybe we are a little bit too early in so many ways. Yes, we need more entrepreneurs. That is it. We need more people to come here, understand this is a place to build, and move here like I did.

To do that, we need to improve the experience because entrepreneurs are looking for a certain level of experience. We do have some really good things. My kid loves Pristine Academy. There is a school here, Montessori-based. She loves it. One of the reasons we decided to stay was actually the school. She is three years old and there are about 18 kids in her class. As a family, because we are very nomadic, that helps, but it was one of the reasons we decided to stay. We do not plan to go anywhere else in the foreseeable future. It is actually the school.

Timothy Allen: You know Daniel from Noma Collective?

Gonçalo Hall: Of course.

Timothy Allen: I spoke to him a few weeks ago. He came through Próspera, and his idea, which is killer, is to do month-long retreats for families. Here is where Próspera is brilliant. He said, what do families want? They want certain things, one of them being education for their kids. So they went to the Montessori school and said, can our kids join for a month? And they went, sure. All of a sudden he thought, great, I can do business here.

The family month retreat is a bloody brilliant idea. I know all the problems with having families. If you said to me you can bring your family here, insert yourself into island life, the mum and dad can work, the kids can go to school during the day – not just any school, a cracking school – and it is all taken care of, all you do is turn up. Come on.

Gonçalo Hall: And the school is at the beach club. You can literally go from the school and in ten seconds you are swimming at this beautiful huge beach club with a pool, service and incredible food by an Argentinian chef we just hired from the best hotel on the island. No joke.

Again, going back to experience, I work here but I go back and forth. My girl still asks me, “When are we going to Brazil?” Do you know why? Very simple, cheap thing: there is no playground. My girl wants a playground. She says, “Papa, when are we going back to Brazil?” Because in Rio, where I was working with the city, there was a playground.

Timothy Allen: What does that entail? Sand on the floor and stuff to climb on? A slide?

Gonçalo Hall: Slide and stuff. It is an experience problem. We will do it in the next month, so maybe by the time some people listen to this, it is already here. I have been pushing for it for six months. It will happen. But it is the little things and the little things add up.

Imagine you are a husband and wife with one kid and you are making the decision: do I move there or not? Your kid saying they want to go back to Brazil is not a good thing. Sometimes, if you go deep, it is something very simple like a slide and a swing.

Timothy Allen: I know that one. When we travelled for a year around Central America with my kids, my eldest was about eight or nine. There are things you definitely need. Number one is access to a pool, because when you are mum and dad and the kids are getting angsty in a hot place, number one is pool. Number two is beach. Number three is a place they get used to going to, like a playground. It is good for the parents as well because you connect with other parents.

You could be in the most five-star hotel of all five-star hotels, and if your kids are having a terrible time, you are having a terrible time.

Gonçalo Hall: In a way, Pristine Bay is a little bit like that, because it is a resort and still feels like a resort. It is incredible. I was swimming before coming here with my kid in my pool, in my villa in Pristine Bay. Sometimes I want to leave the house and go to the hotel pool in Pristine Bay. Sometimes I want to eat a great Argentinian barbecue while I swim, and I go to the beach club in Pristine Bay. All this is part of Próspera.

My kid is super happy here. She is learning three languages. We are Portuguese, so she speaks Portuguese. She is learning Spanish, so she does not say amarelo or yellow; she says amarillo. She is learning English at the same time. She says “don’t push.” Everything is mixed because she is three years old. As a father, it is magical. I do not want to leave this place. I want her to grow up surrounded by an international community, but in a beautiful place like this.

A playground is a $3,000 problem. It is easy to fix. But the fact that we did not have anyone thinking about those little experience things in the past is one of the reasons why, in my opinion, we are not at 10,000 people right now.

Timothy Allen: At Pristine Academy, how many kids are there and what kind of families are they?

Gonçalo Hall: They started with 36, if I am correct. Right now they have 57. They almost doubled this year. They have done incredible work improving everything. The school leader is also giving swimming lessons at the beach club, so we have a very good school leader who thinks about the whole experience of the kids. They went on a field trip to the airport.

In my daughter’s class, which is the children’s room, there are 18 and at least eight different nationalities: Israel, Spain, Italy, Americans. There are fewer Americans than I expected here. It is somehow very European, even though we are in the Caribbean.

There is a whole world in her class. She speaks with different people and learns different words and cultures. It is so interesting. I love it.

Timothy Allen: And the mums and dads, why are they here?

Gonçalo Hall: Different reasons. One Israeli family works with the cruise ships. They learned about Próspera, opened a company, but they work with the cruise ship companies. Other kids are from here. Right now, in my opinion, we have the best private school on the island, so some people simply come to Pristine Academy as a normal school. Others are around Próspera. I would say the main people are from the island or moved to the island for business or lifestyle reasons.

Timothy Allen: Earlier on, you mentioned the bit of land between here and Pristine Bay. I never got to the bottom of it. I spoke to Gabe and he said someone owns it and Próspera does not necessarily want to buy it because they want to put the money elsewhere at the moment. But obviously it needs to be incorporated into Próspera somehow. What do you know about it that you can say?

Gonçalo Hall: The short-term solution that would fix everything is asking permission from the owners to build a road, even if it is just for golf carts or electric bikes. That is the obvious solution. They do not necessarily want to sell and we do not necessarily want to buy. We just want to connect both properties.

Timothy Allen: Why do they not want to sell?

Gonçalo Hall: They think it is going to be worth more in the future.

Timothy Allen: They are probably right.

Gonçalo Hall: Yes.

Timothy Allen: But I was told they probably would not want a road because they thought it might undermine the need to buy it. I think the opposite. If you connect that, you are basically giving prime real estate a way through and access.

Gonçalo Hall: Going back to Bali, in Bali there is this road called the shortcut, which is legendary. It was a tiny road, only one car could fit, and sometimes people fell into the rice field because it was so tight. Honestly, that is what we need. We need a shortcut. It does not need to be bigger. It does not need to be for a car. Walking is 15 or 20 minutes. If we have a shortcut with a decent pathway, with an electric bike or a golf cart, it would work. It is really close and it is beautiful. Imagine a bike ride through the forest looking at the ocean. It just needs a bike path and a couple of electric bikes.

Timothy Allen: But as far as you know, the family who owns it are going to sit tight for a while.

Gonçalo Hall: I do not know. I am not involved in any negotiation. But I know that right now we are not trying to buy it. The discussions I know are: please allow us to pass by.

Timothy Allen: The road already goes through there, doesn’t it?

Gonçalo Hall: The path. We walk through it. It is not official, but we literally walk through it every day. Many people who work on the Pristine Bay side go back and forth by walking. It is a 15-minute walk. It is just not properly marked or illuminated, so at night it is trickier. Even Patrick Friedman was having an event here one day and said, “I am already at Pristine.” He had just walked through the woods because he knew the path.

Timothy Allen: Do you know much about the little beachfront land between here and Pristine Bay? I think I saw it on a map. A funny little bit that sticks out where they want to build a venue or something.

Gonçalo Hall: Is it in front of where we are?

Timothy Allen: Along the beach between here and Pristine Bay. I think I saw it on a map.

Gonçalo Hall: I do not know much about that.

Timothy Allen: I was trying to find a map online the other night to insert into a video and I could not really find the right one. Over on the Pristine side there are 350 acres. It is massive. The golf club, in a way, probably will not survive long-term.

Gonçalo Hall: Depends how long-term we are looking. If we are looking 50 years, you are probably right, not just for building but for water reasons. Building a golf club in the Caribbean, where water can become scarce, may not be a good idea as population develops. But meanwhile, there is so much land to build before that. We are not scarce of land. We need more people to come and build their ideas, anything from another tower to a smart village or smart apartments. Right now we are open for people who dream, who want a good place to build and attract more people.

Timothy Allen: You said you are the CEO of what, Roatán Tourism Bureau? Juxtapose that against Próspera tourism.

Gonçalo Hall: It is a Próspera company. The difference is that Próspera understands we need to promote the island because nobody knows where Próspera is, and even fewer people know where Roatán is. The idea is to promote the island with a strategy.

In the case of Honduras, tourism is not their forte right now, or maybe never was. Even though it is a beautiful country, they never really invested in tourism like Costa Rica and other countries in the region. Guatemala is investing millions. Nobody has really planned how to develop the tourism of the island, develop a brand and develop a sense that this island has a place on the map and people should come here.

Próspera understands this, so it sponsors the Roatán Tourism Bureau to attract people, promote Roatán, go to conferences, make the messaging around it – like a public tourism bureau, but private, Próspera-style.

Timothy Allen: What is the current situation? Who comes here and why?

Gonçalo Hall: We have 2.1 million cruise ship passengers coming by. They come, stay for six hours and leave. They leave, on average, $60 a day, which is not ideal.

Timothy Allen: That is the ultimate digital nomad model. They come and they do not stay.

Gonçalo Hall: Do not compare those people. It was great because nobody was coming to Roatán before, so this was a zero-to-one situation. The challenge is that they may reach three million this year, and Roatán has, if we are very optimistic, 100,000 people. That is not good environmentally, and it is not good in terms of the money they leave.

One tourist who comes for a week of scuba diving usually spends around $2,200 with much less ecological impact. Right now, most of our airline tourism is from the United States. We have five direct flights to the US. Air Canada has just announced two flights for the next season, from December I think. We also have various flights from Canada already. Most of the people coming here are Americans. We have some from Guatemala and Central America, and some from the mainland, mostly for Semana Santa and other holidays.

This is an incredible destination. Somebody told me this is like Hawaii for Americans, and for Central Americans it is an incredible destination. People speak Spanish and really want to come here. It is not that hard.

Personally, I want to attract more diversity and quality. Longevity is one of my biggest bets here right now because of everything we have inside Próspera. I also think there is a real future space for digital nomads. I was going to launch a programme, but we had an accident: the co-working space in West End burned down. So the idea was to launch two nomad villages, one in Próspera and one outside Próspera, because that would make more sense.

West End would be more party and social. Próspera would be for builders and entrepreneurs. If I only built one and everybody came here, the people looking for party would definitely be in the wrong place. We need both experiences in Roatán, like I did in Madeira, Brazil, et cetera.

Timothy Allen: Are you saying they might try to limit the number of people coming on cruise ships?

Gonçalo Hall: No, because it is Honduras. It is easy money. Cruise ships are easy money. It is like a drug. People come here, they pay first, they have whatever experience, and they go. So people never focus on giving a good experience. That is the problem.

If someone focuses on the cruise ships while giving a good experience, cruise ships can become the top of the funnel to attract people to come back and dive, stay longer and spend more money. Most of the people coming are Americans and they have money. They just come in this environment and do what people do in the same environment. Maybe they fall in love with the place if you give them a good experience and they want to come back, just like digital nomads.

My future strategy for cruise ships is to work with local operators to design the experience better and educate them into giving a better experience, so we can eventually convert passengers into people who come back and add value to the island.

Timothy Allen: The longevity medicine model is crazy good. You cannot look at the situation here and not realise that one of the biggest selling points is that this is one of the few places in the world where certain things can happen. If I was to bet on something, it would be that.

You have a tropical island. You have the kind of things people like to do when they want to feel healthy. You have longevity medicine. Mix that together, give them a good service, and why wouldn’t you? Then you get your month-long stays, because longevity medicine is a long-term proposition. It is not something you do for a week.

Gonçalo Hall: Our prediction is an average stay of two weeks. We are working with GARM Clinic, which, besides gene therapy, has five XPRIZE-winning therapies from Peter Diamandis. It is not just gene therapy anymore. They have a whole set of therapies that you cannot do anywhere else in the world, or almost anywhere else in the world.

We have Las Verandas, which is a beautiful hotel. So the whole ecosystem is ready for something, yet that something was never developed because there was nobody in charge of building something for tourism. That is my first big bet right now. It should be launching mid-May or mid-June, and we should receive the big batch of people. We are doing a whole conference, a whole month in October, right after the Free Cities Conference.

Timothy Allen: Will people be able to do therapies during that month as well?

Gonçalo Hall: Yes, that is the idea. We are first bringing speakers, sponsors and companies here as well, but the whole concept is based around GARM Clinic and a couple of others.

Timothy Allen: What is it called?

Gonçalo Hall: GARM Clinic. G-A-R-M.

Timothy Allen: What is that?

Gonçalo Hall: GARM Clinic is the clinic that implements all these therapies, including gene therapy. A company can develop something, but usually they are not the ones implementing it in the health system. GARM Clinic is literally the one giving you the shots with the gene therapy.

Timothy Allen: Are they incorporated in Próspera as well?

Gonçalo Hall: Yes.

Timothy Allen: I suppose they would have to be, or they could not do it. This month has been such an eye-opener for me. I really understand what is going on here now. Before coming, I knew about the opportunities here, but they did not seem real like they do now.

People fly to Turkey to get their hair transplanted because it is an amazing service, it is top quality and it is cheaper than doing it in their own country. Why would they not come here? This is similar, and perhaps better, because it is for things you cannot get anywhere else.

Gonçalo Hall: My theory here is that right now in the US, and in Europe though it is quieter, there is a huge peptide craze. Everybody is injecting peptides for literally everything. I did not know. I only learned this two weeks ago.

I visited GARM Clinic. I am now on peptides as well.

Timothy Allen: Are you?

Gonçalo Hall: I have to test. How can I sell them if I am not testing them?

I was in the restaurant at Las Verandas and there was a couple looking around, trying to open the door. I went to speak with them. They were from San Francisco, staying at Kimpton, and they had heard about this Próspera thing. They were looking around to see if they should move here. I told them, yes, it is cool. They said, “There is such a craze in the US. Everyone is doing wellness. You need a good gym and spa here.” I said, “Yes, true, but we also have GARM Clinic. This is the only place in the world where you can get gene therapy.” They said, “Oh wow.” Then I mentioned peptides and they said, “Actually we can also do peptides?” And I thought, oh my God, I need to move here.

I lived in real life what certain people in the US are looking for and what they will be looking for outside the US. Here we have the Caribbean, the beauty and already the peptides and everything else that is next level above the peptides.

Timothy Allen: What are peptides then? Should I be taking them?

Gonçalo Hall: That is a great question. We should ask Niklas that. As far as I understand it, some are not approved drugs yet. For example, one of the peptides I will be taking first is retatrutide. I took a GLP-1, Mounjaro, basically to lose weight.

In my brain, I have ADHD, so I have this scarcity with food. If I see a big plate, I have to eat everything. Once I took it, I only ate the good things. My brain stopped saying, “Whoa, I need food.” Now I eat what is good for me. Even sugar tastes bad after you stop. That was the first one I took, Mounjaro. I lost 10 kilos, which was great.

When I started studying peptides, because they were in my environment, I kept seeing people talk about them. I am taking retatrutide because it is even better than Mounjaro. It is currently in phase-three FDA trials. This should be a talk with Niklas, but I will try my best. It means it is not approved yet, but it is available for non-human consumption. In the US, you can buy it as non-medication, and everybody is buying it.

There are peptides for everything. This one is more for weight loss and liver fat. There are peptides to improve injuries. I have tendonitis in my shoulder from 22 years of volleyball. That is the second peptide I will implement, because with a couple of injections you can improve and get much better, especially for tendons and muscle recovery.

It is a whole new world for me. I am not promoting it yet. But as someone who wants to take care of my health, I am almost 39 and the pain starts to become real. I was a volleyball athlete, I do sport every day, I play padel here, and now I have more pain than I used to have. If I live here and I am promoting longevity, I had better live it. I think it is self-proof. I need to do it. I am very excited.

Timothy Allen: You have not started yet?

Gonçalo Hall: I will start next week. I was still on a GLP-1, and I will start next week.

Timothy Allen: What is the one you are taking for your shoulder?

Gonçalo Hall: Retatrutide first, for losing more weight and improving a lot of markers.

Timothy Allen: Losing weight? You do not need to lose too much weight. What does it do? Stop you feeling hungry?

Gonçalo Hall: The way I felt was that it stopped the urge to eat everything. My brain operates in a way where I want to eat everything, and once I took it, I started making proper choices.

Timothy Allen: So it affects your brain?

Gonçalo Hall: For me, 100%. I do not know the theory behind it, but for me it was huge.

Timothy Allen: I am seeing Niklas in Austin in a few days, actually, so maybe I should ask him about those. There are all kinds of things I probably need.

Before you came here, you were somewhere with someone. Are we allowed to talk about that? It was the reason we did not do the interview earlier.

Gonçalo Hall: Yes. I was on the mainland. We went to a farm or ranch – Rancho Sofía, I think – in the middle of a tourism region full of ranches, about an hour from Tegucigalpa.

We flew there with the team. It was incredible because what they did as a private company is they had this ranch, and it became a place for entrepreneurs to go and build their businesses. We met all these people building businesses inside the ranch. This is on the Honduran mainland.

The person showing us around knew everyone’s story. He would say, “Josefa was lost, she was in the West, she came back, now she is head of maintenance, she built her own company and serves the hotel and the businesses here.” Or, “Joana was somewhere, she was lost, we brought her here, she opened her own crepe shop and now she sells.” They do events for 1,000 people. It became a huge thing all over Honduras.

It is basically rural tourism. Instead of them building everything, they bring entrepreneurs. They support them with free rent. They take a percentage of the business to start, and once they grow, they basically just pay rent like normal businesses.

Everything they built was around experience. People come here, they see this and feel that. They built something for kids because if your kids are happy, you are happy. They built a cookie workshop where children design cookies so parents can be happy with their kids and have an experience without phones. You can wash the horses because that gives you an experience with animals that people have lost. Someone built a restaurant because the food is this and that. They supported all the businesses.

I was thinking, wow, there is a huge parallel with Próspera. This is literally what we want here.

Timothy Allen: Is the lesson for Próspera to be very welcoming to entrepreneurs?

Gonçalo Hall: I think we are. I think we just need to be more proactive dealing with entrepreneurs. Yes, we are one of the best places to build a business. But can we give them the hand and guide them as well? Can we be almost like an incubator, where you come here and do not just open your business but we help you along the way?

This is not just the jurisdiction. There is a learning curve if you open a physical business here. It is a very special place. Can we be more proactive in helping people build their business while giving incredible experiences to our people?

The cafe you mentioned: instead of just renting the space, can we help a local entrepreneur from Roatán build their cafe here? Go with them, advise them, maybe tell them to sell avocado toast because all the nomads are coming next month and they love avocado toast with eggs. Maybe open tonight, do a community quiz night. Can we guide them to success to the point that a person with no money starts something and in one or two years is paying rent because they are so successful? I think that is a great model.

Timothy Allen: When you say ranch, are we talking thousands of acres?

Gonçalo Hall: I think it is not that big, but they have space.

Timothy Allen: And the entrepreneurs were Hondurans or outsiders?

Gonçalo Hall: All Hondurans, mostly from the village. Incredible story.

Timothy Allen: Is Próspera going to do business with them or is it just a learning experience?

Gonçalo Hall: I think we are learning from people who do it well, which for me is the right signal. For me, as someone who came from the outside and kind of works for Próspera but does not, it shows me two things.

For the last four years Próspera was trying to survive. How can you build an experience and invest in experience if you do not know whether you will last one more year? It is hard. Right now I see a huge shift. We are focusing on attracting people, experience, marketing, who we are, our messaging. For me as an outsider-insider, it is very clear that now is the time to build the experience, now is the time to go all in on attracting entrepreneurs. I think this trip was part of that transition.

Timothy Allen: Does that include incentives, not tax breaks but things like the ranch offering free rent?

Gonçalo Hall: I think we are already doing it. Some people are trying to build something from zero and instead of charging for the land, Próspera is becoming a partner, for example. I do not think it is something they will do across the board, but for the right people, especially locals who want to build their business inside Próspera right now, yes. I see it as likely, as we are actively seeking to integrate more than ever with the local and national communities.

Timothy Allen: It does seem very easy. I wonder whether the only reason it looks so easy is because I am in this world of Free Cities. Within this world, an opportunity like this is relatively rare. But in the world of developing nice seaside places or beach places, there are probably a lot of opportunities. Do you think we are a bit slanted in one direction?

I know the regulatory environment here is a crazy opportunity that most people probably do not get. Like your peptide couple: they come here but do not realise that side of it. That is obviously the biggest selling point. It has all the factors you want for a lovely beach resort, jungle, and so on, but what makes it different from another tropical island is the regulation.

Gonçalo Hall: Hopefully that, and in my vision community is going to be the key. Why here and not the Bahamas? Because we can have longevity therapies here and the people you want to hang out with will be here. Why here and not Lisbon? Because it is a tropical paradise two hours from Miami, two and a half hours from Austin, and you will see people here building like you.

If you are an entrepreneur, my vision – and this is mine, not Próspera’s – is that this becomes the place people like us come to build. If you want to build something and be surrounded by people like you, this should be where you go, because it is the same time zone, it is two hours from the US, it is very easy to go back if something goes wrong, and you will be surrounded by incredible people building incredible things.

Yes, the regulation is incredible. If you are doing something wild, that matters. Most people are not building gene therapies. Most people want to build a business. Yet we can be an incredible place to live because it is beautiful, there is a great school, and we can be the place people looking for a company for three, four, five, six years or forever can come to be in a resort, surrounded by other entrepreneurs. There are no other places like that. We just need to finish the last part of the building – by building, I mean the community, the entrepreneurs, the experiences. If we become the place where entrepreneurs come, if you are in the US, it is a no-brainer.

Timothy Allen: Also, I hate to say it, but Próspera has a massive head start on everyone else.

Gonçalo Hall: One hundred percent.

Timothy Allen: It is an amazing opportunity now. The fact that we probably have four to eight years of good times politically ahead means it is the biggest opportunity on planet Earth, I think, if you are of this mindset. I am not saying everyone is. We are a weird bunch of people, but we are spread out all over the world.

If you are thinking about doing something in Bali, you are going there for a specific reason. When you break down all those reasons, they can all exist here and you have regulatory autonomy.

Gonçalo Hall: If we keep attracting people like the people who developed the gene therapy and GARM Clinic, you will have access to a lot of incredible new things you can only access here. I do not think we even know what can be built in this regulatory system.

What can you do with AI if you do not have the regulations you have in Europe? What can you do with crypto if you can have regulations that are 100% pro-crypto? What can you do with real estate, which is also highly regulated? Can you build something incredible?

This can be a canvas for people who are early in any of these spaces and are being held back by regulations. Top of mind right now is AI. Building anything in AI in Europe is a nightmare. Why do you not move here and build from here? It is a laptop.

Timothy Allen: The funny thing is, I can even do my job from here. It is crazy. It is the first time in my life. The whole point of my job is travelling around the world interviewing people. But here, people come here. I got more than 20 interviews done since I have been here, and all I did was walk between Duna Tower and the Beta Building. It is insane. I really wish I was at a different stage in my life.

Gonçalo Hall: Living here is exactly that experience. You say interviews, but I get access to incredible conferences almost every month. I met the 13-time Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion. He did a retreat here because Infinita brought him. I ended up hanging out with him. We went to play Topgolf together, went on a boat together. I was just hanging out with a 13-time world champion of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

I have uncountable stories of incredible people who pass by. Tim Urban is a genius. I was reading his stuff before I knew he was a human, and now I got to meet him. Not in a weird way. I got to meet Tim Urban, and I did not move. He just came to me. This keeps happening.

Timothy Allen: Unfortunately for everyone listening, I did not get an interview with Tim Urban. I contacted him before we came and said, can you spare an hour? He said, I am only on the island for a day. I think if I had pushed it on the day I might have got it, but I did not want to. I had so many interviews anyway.

There were so many great people at that conference. Talking of conferences, the Free Cities Conference is coming here, which is another thing we spoke about a year ago. It will, I am told, be the biggest ever conference in Próspera, probably the biggest gathering of people.

Gonçalo Hall: We are training. We just did a TEDx. I was co-organiser of TEDxRoatán, the first ever, so we are practising for you guys. I think it is going to be incredible. As you said, it will be the first time it is actually organised in a Free City.

Timothy Allen: I know. We are getting quite big as well. I have taken a lot of intel home with me about what I think might go wrong. We have run our conference in Prague in military style before. The last three or four years, we have done it in the same place. When you repeat, you get good at it. Here, I can already see what the problems are going to be, so I think we are going to manage people’s expectations.

That is my lesson from being here. I have met people who come here and say, “It is not what I expected.” That is not because the place is wrong; it is because they expected the wrong thing. I know what it is now and what it is not, and my mission is to make sure people understand that.

If you undersell somewhere, people are happy. If you oversell it, they are not. I could easily oversell Próspera because, if you live in this ecosystem, it is the cutting-edge place where everything is happening. But it is also very early-stage. It attracts people used to travel. When they need a new towel for their room, they press a button and a towel appears. That does not necessarily happen here.

The same goes for community. I can see it will happen. But at the moment, sometimes I finish work and think, I would quite like to do something, and then realise there is not much I can do without getting in a car and driving down there. I do not actually want to do that. I want to put my flip-flops on, walk down to the beach and have a beer overlooking the sea. You cannot quite do that on this side.

Gonçalo Hall: We can build it. I think we will build it before September.

Timothy Allen: I have already said that what there is not here at the moment, or not a good enough version, is a little cafe. When you wake up at seven in the morning, I am making coffee in my apartment. But if there was a cracking coffee shop where it was three bucks for a coffee, not six dollars for an artisan one…

Gonçalo Hall: I will interrupt you. I think in September, when the Free Cities Conference happens, we will not have one but two cafes.

Timothy Allen: Good. The cafe in here is lovely. The cafe inside the Beta Building is great, but they open at 10 or 11. During a conference, open at seven. People have got off flights, they are sleeping funny hours, they wake up and want to do something.

The only real shame with this side of Próspera is that the beach experience is not there. There is a beach down there and it is lovely, but it is not really a beach experience.

Gonçalo Hall: We cannot promise you that one yet. Inside Pristine Bay we do have it, actually two: one at the hotel and one at the beach club. Here we cannot promise that yet.

Timothy Allen: What is the situation down there? You can go onto that beach and swim, but it is kind of cordoned off from Próspera.

Gonçalo Hall: That one down here is not ours. It is from Crawfish Rock, the village. Technically, you cannot privatise beaches.

Timothy Allen: But the beach does not belong to anyone, right?

Gonçalo Hall: Yes, but it is not a real beach.

Timothy Allen: Well, it is sand and water.

Gonçalo Hall: It is like the village playground. You go down there and kids are playing football. You can walk forever and the water is still on your knees. You can jump from the pier, and it is beautiful. Pristine has more things.

Part of the experience over the next one or two years is definitely: how can we have an incredible ocean experience straight from Duna? You get a sunset there. Crawfish Rock is beautiful. We are working more and more with them. It is untouched. Tourists do not really go there. It is just locals and beautiful Caribbean architecture. As things get calmer here, we will enjoy more of the village.

Timothy Allen: What is the relationship with Crawfish Rock? You always hear about it. I heard some funny stories about what was going on there and what the former government was doing, bringing Marxists in to give talks in Crawfish Rock and all kinds of weird stuff. What is the current situation according to you?

Gonçalo Hall: I think we still have the same two ladies who appear in all the interviews. It is always the same two. The rest of the people I have met are very pro-Próspera. Not everyone, but things are calming down. There was a lot of this war: pro and against. With the current government, there is no team, no discussion. It is just normal. Próspera is there, we are not against it.

As there is nobody sponsoring the hate against the ZEDEs, things are calming down. I would think that even the previous party that was in power will eventually become less against economic development. I can see a world where, even if politics changes in the future, once this becomes normalised again – maybe it takes a year – the hate speech across the island slowly comes down.

Crawfish Rock is still very close. I believe in one year we will be working closely with them for their development. Someone told me that at least 30 or 40% of people from Crawfish Rock work here now.

Timothy Allen: Is that right?

Gonçalo Hall: For sure. We need talent. The hotel, Pristine Bay, all our businesses need talent, and they are here.

Timothy Allen: They have an opportunity to offer all kinds of things: restaurants, cafes, the beach cafe you were talking about.

Gonçalo Hall: They should be the ones building it, not necessarily us. Walking down there takes five or ten minutes. Imagine that, like the ranch, we empower them to build their businesses because we have the clients. We empower their entrepreneurs to start building the cafe, the restaurant, whatever it is. There are almost zero businesses there. There is nothing, just incredible people.

As someone trying to bring prosperity to the island and our neighbours, we should be the ones empowering them to start their businesses, especially cafes and restaurants, because the sunset there is beautiful and the people are incredible. It is island life. Everything is good and easy.

Timothy Allen: I am getting too excited and too bullish on it. I am gutted in a way. I wish I was here building. I know I have a role in all this and my role is important, but I really do wish I was building. I just do not know what. I do not come from that world.

Gonçalo Hall: I think one of our next cohorts is going to be for people looking to build something. There is a solution. It is not Próspera itself, but I think people will start building cohorts, like the Network School, like pop-up co-livings, for people who want to build, especially right now with the eyes on this place. It is pre-idea. Just come here if you are looking to build something. Even if you have a job, come here, and surrounded by the right people you will end up building something. That will happen. I think it is a matter of months.

Timothy Allen: Right. I think we should knock it on the head. Gonçalo, it is great to see you here. I am really happy everything has worked out nicely. Those little meetings and little connections are important, aren’t they? The butterfly effect is real.

Gonçalo Hall: We have to thank Lauren Razavi from Plumia. Without Lauren, I would probably not be here today. The only interactions I had before with Free Cities were always through Lauren. She was pushing me to meet this world and go to the conference.

Timothy Allen: That is how I met her. I interviewed her because she was on the speaker list at our conference a few years ago. There is obviously a connection there, probably Peter, I do not know. She is the one who invited me to that event. That is the connection.

Gonçalo Hall: She is a visionary. Plumia was on its way to become the first internet country. I am not sure where they are right now, and it is part of SafetyWing, so they were very integrated with the nomad space. That is how I got to meet her. I was involved with them from the beginning, being a nomad ambassador, nomad influencer as you call me. She is incredible. She is the reason I am here today, ironically, and probably the reason we are speaking again, because we met in Morocco.

Timothy Allen: Does she ever focus on this side of this stuff?

Gonçalo Hall: I am working to bring her here. She needs to come here. She is the reason I am here, so we will bring her here. I do not know when, because she has a full agenda and she is building crazy things as always. But we need to bring Lauren here for sure.

There are other people building so many things around the world, from entrepreneurs to connectors, who need to come here but never had the last spark. They know they need to come here but were never really pushed to come here and be here for a month. We need to be very intentional with these people because they will be our 1,000 true fans, and they will be the ones promoting us more than anyone else.

Timothy Allen: Right. You are the guy to make it happen anyway. Nice to see you again. I will see you in about six months for our conference. Everything is good and I am so happy everything is happening here. It is so exciting to be here. Thanks for coming. Thanks for speaking.

Gonçalo Hall: Thank you so much. I think in six months it will be better. In one year this is going to be an incredible place to win.

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Notes

This transcript was reconstructed from the raw timestamped episode text. The podcast introduction, sponsor read, value-for-value section, conference promo and end-of-episode outro were removed. The transcript above starts at the beginning of the conversation, around 0:09:58 in the audio transcript, and ends before the outro begins.

Speaker names were added and formatted in bold. The source transcript did not include reliable speaker diarisation, so speaker turns were inferred from the flow of the conversation, context, interruptions and repeated references. Short interjections and overlapping speech were lightly consolidated where doing so improved readability.

Timestamps, filler words, repeated false starts and obvious transcription artefacts were removed. The conversational tone, meaning, jokes, scepticism and main order of the exchange were preserved.

Proper nouns and likely ASR errors were corrected where possible. The main corrections/normalisations include: Gonçalo Hall; Roatán; Próspera; Lonis Hamaili; Roatán Tourism Bureau; NomadX; Rio de Janeiro; Nagasaki; Duna Tower; Beta Building; Pristine Bay; Pristine Academy; Las Verandas; Noma Collective; Daniel Thompson; Canggu; Ubud; Kuta; Green School; Niklas Anzinger; Infinita; GARM Clinic; Bitchill; Darien Village; NOMAD Village; Zuzalu; West End; Semana Santa; Air Canada; GARM Clinic; GLP-1; Mounjaro; retatrutide; XPRIZE; Peter Diamandis; Rancho Sofía; Tegucigalpa; TEDxRoatán; Crawfish Rock; ZEDE; Lauren Razavi; Plumia; SafetyWing; and Network School.

A few names/phrases remain context-dependent and should be checked against the audio or internal Próspera notes before publication: Tomek, Ivan, the exact branding of NOMAD/NOMAD Village, the exact name of the cafe operator in Duna Tower, the exact spelling of Rancho Sofía’s entrepreneur names, and any specific claims around medical therapies or regulatory status.

No independent fact-check has been applied to claims made by either speaker beyond checking spellings and likely identities of proper nouns. Medical claims in particular should be treated as speaker claims, not editorial assertions.