Joyce Brand | Building Prosperity in the Danger Zone

Timothy Allen: So you have never done a podcast in person, Joyce. That is amazing.

Joyce Brand: Well, I enjoy podcasts a lot. It is standing on stage that terrifies me. I am afraid of forgetting what I wanted to say, and because I am afraid, I tense up, and that makes me forget exactly what I was going to say. So it is very difficult.

Timothy Allen: I have recounted this experience before, but I once got up on stage in front of around a thousand people, something like that, and I had a complete blank. I had come back from a long trip abroad and I had malaria. I had been in hospital on a drip, I was exhausted, overworked and overrun, and I was doing a speaking engagement. I walked onto the stage, looked out at the crowd, and I did not even know who I was, let alone what I was going to say. I do not know whether you feel this in that situation, but the fear starts rising in you, and you feel like if you let it, you are never going to remember who you are or what you are saying or what is going on. It could take over.

So I just made an excuse. I excused myself and said, look, I have just got to go and get a drink of water and I will be back literally in a minute. I walked off the stage, there were murmurs in the crowd, I went to the toilet, put water on my face and drank some water out of the tap. And when I came back, I was all right.

I have learned over the years to control that. Basically, as long as I get a good night’s sleep and I am relaxed and well prepared, I never have a problem. But under stress or sleep deprivation, even in these situations, occasionally I completely forget what I am saying. And I have been travelling for two days to get here, like you have as well. It is the kind of time it could happen.

But do you know what, I take these pills now. Neuro gum, they are called. I saw them on Joe Rogan’s podcast, I think. He said you should try these things when you get to the end of the day. I have had one today, because I have already done two interviews and the last one was a big one. You did a really long one earlier too, right?

Joyce Brand: Yeah, I did. It was more than two and a half hours.

Timothy Allen: So I took one about half an hour ago. So I am back, maybe. Right, Joyce. So you are a bit of an OG, aren’t you? Do you know what an OG is?

Joyce Brand: An OG? I really don’t.

Timothy Allen: Original gangster.

Joyce Brand: Original what?

Timothy Allen: Gangster.

Joyce Brand: Oh, I like that.

Timothy Allen: It does not mean that, though. It means that you have been doing something for a long time. You are an OG in the Free Cities world because you have been doing it for a long time, you are well known, you have written books about it, and you have lived in a Free City.

Joyce Brand: I have lived in a Free City, yes.

Timothy Allen: And chronicled it. Actually wrote about how it was to build it, what was happening every week. You were in Morazán. How long did you live there for?

Joyce Brand: About three years. The first time I went to Morazán was five years ago, when there was nothing there except for one warehouse and a dirt road. It was farmland in the most dangerous part of Honduras. When I went there, it was my first view of it, and there were cows running around all over. I was staying in an apartment in San Pedro Sula while waiting for them to build me a house. So I was there for several months before there was a house ready and I could move into Morazán.

Timothy Allen: It does beg the question, though, Joyce. Why were you there?

Joyce Brand: Oh, why was I there? Well, wow, that is a long story. It goes back quite a ways, because I have always been interested in ideas and freedom and individuality, and especially people having a choice. Voluntary interactions between people, rather than people forcing other people to do things or forcing their opinions on people.

It actually goes back to 1981, when I was selling office equipment in Portland, Oregon, and I had a government order for the first time. My job was to show businesses how they could increase their productivity, serve their customers better and make more profit, and that is what I loved doing. But one of the manufacturers of the electronic typewriters I was selling called me out of the blue and said they had got an order, because of their government contract, from an office in Portland for five high-end memory typewriters, and all I had to do for my commission was deliver the typewriters and train the secretaries.

So I took them out. The secretaries were excited to see them. But I found out, to my surprise, that all they did was type forms, all different. So they did not need a memory typewriter at all. And I was mystified about why they would spend all that money. How could you waste so much money when you are not increasing productivity? It made no sense. The office manager told me that the department head had to spend the equipment budget before the end of the year or lose it, and if he lost it, it would affect future years, and that would affect his status and his promotability.

So his incentives were the exact opposite of my regular private sector customers. And that is when it clicked for me that this was the way the system worked. It was totally logical, because the money was coming from taxpayers, not from voluntary buyers. Waste and fraud and abuse were baked into the system. Every decision maker at every level, every decision they made about spending taxpayer money, was perverse incentives. They had the incentive to waste it.

That opened my eyes to a truth about the way the system worked, and to the difference between coercion and consent, which had always interested me. They are total opposites, but they are also on a continuum. When it comes to governance, there is no pure coercive governance. Maybe North Korea, I don’t know. And there is no totally pure consent-based governance. Even the United States at the very beginning, when it was supposed to be based on the consent of the governed, there was already a lot of coercion involved.

That made me feel really frustrated, because there was nothing I could do about it. But what I did was start studying economics and political philosophy, while I was also doing a series of careers in the private sector. Sales, management, consulting, even a decade in Hollywood as a film editor.

Timothy Allen: Really? And I am not trying to be rude here, but were you using real film, as in cutting?

Joyce Brand: I got into it in my late 40s. Everybody told me it was going to take 15 years before I could edit my first film. I said, I think I will do it in three years. You cannot do studio films in three years, but three years to the day, I was editing my first film, which was a small independent film.

Timothy Allen: What was it shot on? What kind of format?

Joyce Brand: They were still shooting on film at that time. This was in about 2001, when I edited my first film. They were shooting on real film and I was editing on an Avid. I did the editing digitally, but then I created a cut list, so I did not actually cut the film myself.

Timothy Allen: I imagined you with scissors.

Joyce Brand: And then they would telecine it. I did work as an assistant for a while where I was actually cleaning the film. They would send film from a film festival and it would come back and we would have to clean it with a cloth. That was fun. That was before I started editing, of course, in that three-year period. But I did about a dozen feature films in eight years. I loved it.

Timothy Allen: Anything I might know?

Joyce Brand: Not really, because they were all small independent films. But I did edit a few really good actors. Strangely enough, the best actor I ever edited was Eric Roberts, who is Julia Roberts’ brother. He is a really excellent actor. He kind of screwed up his career for a while, but he made a comeback and he has worked a lot since then.

Anyway, that is a little side track. But all those years I was having different careers, I was still really interested in studying economics and political philosophy. And it took 30 years of doing that before I finally found the solution to government incentives. Voluntary systems align incentives for human flourishing. And here it is, 45 years later, and I have finally seen that solution in practice in Morazán.

Timothy Allen: What I do not understand, though, Joyce, is how. It has taken me a while to get into governance. When Peter first told me about this world, I thought it sounded a bit boring. When I actually thought it through, and now I am in it, I find it all fascinating. But what you are saying is that you lived two simultaneous lives for a while. You were doing whatever and being whatever, whilst thinking about governance. That seems like a strange hobby.

Joyce Brand: I know, it does seem very strange. I guess you would call it my hobby, because it was my passion. And after 30 years, I finally found the solution in about 2010, when I met Spencer MacCallum. I co-founded a voluntarist convention, or festival, called Libertopia, and Spencer was one of our speakers.

Timothy Allen: Wait a minute, it rings a bell. I should know Spencer MacCallum. Who is he?

Joyce Brand: Spencer Heath was a really remarkable thinker of the early 20th century. He called himself a liberal, what we would now call a classical liberal. He was someone who had a lot of influence on other people, like, for instance, Murray Rothbard. But he did not have students himself, because he was an inventor and an engineer and he had a lot of other interests. But he was a philosopher, and he gave a lot of thought to things like governance.

His grandson, Spencer Heath MacCallum, named after him, felt that his life’s work was to promote the legacy of his grandfather and preserve the work his grandfather had done, all of those ideas that were actually very original. He was a social anthropologist, and he had written a book himself in 1970 called The Art of Community, built on his grandfather’s ideas. I think the most original and controversial was the idea that landowners were the natural people to provide governance services. That governance should be a service, and that career politicians were not the best people to be providing those services. The landowner has his interest aligned with his tenants, because his revenue grows as they prosper.

Timothy Allen: In its modern iteration, it is actually considered bad if you are in power as a politician and you own too much. People do not like that, do they? But you are saying it should be the opposite, really.

Joyce Brand: It is kind of the opposite. Politicians become enormously wealthy. They become millionaires on a $175,000-a-year salary, because they are in power, and people love power and are attracted to power. Landowners have to make their money by making their land more valuable. They are like any other entrepreneur, in the sense that they have to provide value in order to make all of that money that people envy them for. And people do not like to think, oh, this person made all this money because they provided all this value. They would rather think, this person must be a crook if he has all this money.

Timothy Allen: I guess maybe I feel that way a little bit about politicians.

Joyce Brand: That is the problem, and why it was such an original idea. But it had something to do with spirituality too. The person who serves most is the one who is promised to receive the most. The greatest among you is the one who serves the most. The way he integrated economics, political philosophy and spirituality was the thing that made him really unique. And Spencer MacCallum understood that from a very young age. When the rest of the family thought the ideas were kooky, my Spencer, Spencer MacCallum, understood them and valued them, and wanted to devote his life to preserving them.

So we became friends after 2010. I visited him and his wife in Mexico in the winter of 2011 and spent a few months with them, and that is when Spencer introduced me to his grandfather’s ideas. I was immediately struck by how much sense they made, because economically it is all about incentives, and you have to align the incentives. With politicians, it is public choice theory. Even though he is supposedly working for the good of the public, the politician has always got to make money to feed his family, and he has got to worry about his own career.

Timothy Allen: And the same thing, even more so, with bureaucrats.

Joyce Brand: The same with bureaucrats. They have to promote their careers, and that is why they make those bad decisions and waste all that money. So I understood that. And when I heard the idea of landowners having the right incentives to provide governance services, I started thinking about what governance services really are.

In the world we live in, especially in the US, the government does everything. Any kind of problem you have, the government is supposed to solve it. But when you really stop and think about what we need from governance, what we cannot provide for ourselves: number one, security. Protection of life, liberty and property. That is the ideal the United States was supposedly founded on. Second, we need some kind of legal system that is perceived as fair, so that people know that when they have disputes, and human beings always have disputes, it is part of human nature, those disputes will be handled fairly. Especially if you are having a dispute with the person providing governance, who has been given the authority to enforce the law and provide that security. And the third thing is infrastructure. Some kinds of infrastructure can be provided by private companies, but for things like roads and bridges and water treatment, big systems, it makes sense for governance to provide those as a service.

So a landowner builds those things on their land. They provide the security, they provide dispute resolution, they provide infrastructure. Those are the things we value and are willing to pay for. But what happens is that when people are granted a monopoly on the use of force in order to provide security, that monopoly gives them power, and human beings are attracted to power. So many people want to rule other people, run other people’s lives. They think, I know better than you, so I should tell you what to do. And that is something I have been against my whole life.

That is the reason coercion grows. A government keeps finding other services to provide. There is no reason in the world for a government to be providing healthcare or education or charity or any of the thousands of services, quote unquote, that they now provide. But it is part of that will to power. Bureaucracies grow. It is a normal thing, a natural thing, but it is a thing that destroys civilisation. Because civilisation is individuals producing what they want to produce, what they are best at, what they are most passionate about, and then trading the results of their production with other people. That is the kind of civilisation I want, and I think most people want, so that we can all do the things we are best at, trade with each other, and live in peace. When you trade, you live in peace. You do not start a war against your major trading partner.

So all of those things came together in my mind. Why don’t we build jurisdictions run by entrepreneurs, landowners, rather than by politicians whose incentive is to get re-elected, and bureaucrats whose incentive is to build their careers? That is why I saw it as the solution. But I did not think there was anything I could do about it. I was already kind of an old woman at that point, and I thought, what can I do? So I just watched what was happening.

But in 2019, and I want to write a book called Life Begins at 70, because that is when my life began, in 2019 I was 70 years old, and I decided I had to make a change in my life. I wanted to do something with my life before it was over. I happened to go to an entrepreneurial workshop. I had always admired entrepreneurs and wanted to be one, and I had not had a really successful entrepreneurial journey. One of the exercises used Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One. The very first question, the first line in that book, is: what truth do you know that most people disagree with you about?

That sparked something in my mind. The truth that I know is that voluntary, decentralised governance is the way to solve the problems we have with all of the coercive political governments that exist now. And I decided I was going to devote the rest of my life to figuring out how to do that, what I could do to help, and how I could support the people doing it. I did not even know if there was anybody working on it. But because that idea came to me, that this is my purpose, I started looking for who was working on it. Is there anybody building cities anyplace? And I just started researching what was going on.

But it actually turned out to be sort of an accident that got me into the space. I was going to move to Colombia in 2020. I had my flight ticket. I was planning a trip in April.

Timothy Allen: Just a holiday type trip?

Joyce Brand: COVID came along. They cancelled my flight. I could not go to Colombia. So I was sitting in Vancouver, Washington at the time, and I started calling all my friends, everybody I knew. What is going on with COVID? Are you okay? The people you know, are they okay? I did not have a single friend who knew of anyone who had died of COVID. Everybody was fine, except their lives were totally upturned. Their businesses, their jobs. Everybody was suffering under the lockdowns.

But when I called Spencer, and I had not talked to Spencer for a couple of years, I called to see how he was doing. He was still living in Casas Grandes, Mexico, which is where I had visited him. He answered the phone and said, well, I am bedridden. I had an accident. I was run over by a car, and I cannot sit up now and do anything on the computer. And I talked to his wife, and she said they had a little house right next to theirs that they could rent to me.

I wanted to help him. I believed in the ideas and I wanted to help him, and I was planning on leaving the US anyway. Mexico was still open during COVID, so I was able to go and live in that little house right next door and see Spencer every day. And we started working together.

I should go back and explain. The main thing he was working on, that he wanted to finish, his life’s work, was a book called Economics and the Spiritual Life of Free Men. It was based on a series of talks his grandfather had given in 1961 that they wanted to turn into a book, but Spencer Heath passed away before they could do it. Spencer had been working on it for something like 60 years. He had transcripts of all the talks, plus the question and answer after each talk, and he edited it so that he added questions from the real people who were there, made-up questions for them to ask, and then answered those questions with material from the archive he had been building for 60 years of all his grandfather’s thoughts.

The project was nearly complete, but he had notes his grandfather had left, plus notes of his own, and he wanted someone to help him. He also wanted feedback from other people. So I would read him the suggested edits from his grandfather’s notes, his notes and my suggestions, and he would approve or disapprove. Even though he could not get out of bed, he was still sharp. He really understood exactly what I was saying. He approved most of the changes, some he did not, and he was able to explain why. And I found a few things in the archives that I thought helped make the point. So we worked on it together, and we finally finished the manuscript in October of 2020.

By that time, Spencer was starting to decline. There were several health issues aside from the accident, but mainly it was the accident. And I wrote to his friend and fan, Massimo Mazzone, and said Spencer was not expected to live past the end of the year, because that is what the doctor said. So in early November of 2020, Massimo travelled from Central America to Mexico, and he gave a dinner party for Spencer. The last one. It was a wonderful party. Spencer was so happy. It was the last time he was able to sit up and feed himself and drink wine and make a joke.

And after the dinner party, Massimo and I spent about four hours talking. He described his vision for Morazán. He wanted to create an entrecom, an entrepreneurial community, based on the ideas of Spencer Heath and Spencer MacCallum. He wanted to create a better quality of life for Honduran workers, and he had all of these ideas about how he could do it and how he thought it would work. He explained that they had a new law, and that law would give them protection so that they could really be free to make the kind of government services people wanted, and that it would be profitable. He had built a conglomerate in Central America, so he definitely knew what he was talking about. And I was so impressed. I thought, this is what I was dreaming of, a chance to do something with an actual Free City. This is the first entrecom in the world based on those ideas.

Timothy Allen: What is the connection between Massimo and Spencer, originally?

Joyce Brand: It was philosophical. Massimo had read Spencer’s work. I think he had read The Art of Community, and he knew about Spencer Heath. So they became friends. He even took Spencer to Honduras in about 2016, after the law had been passed, and he met the president accidentally.

Timothy Allen: Which one?

Joyce Brand: I think it was JOH at the time, Juan Orlando. It is a fun story. But Massimo was so cool.

Timothy Allen: He still is.

Joyce Brand: Oh, he is, of course. But he was so cool that night, because right then, after a few hours of talk, he invited me to move down to Honduras. He said he would give me a house and a salary if I would write the chronicle of the building of the city. And that was perfect. That was exactly what I wanted to do, to be a witness to everything that was happening. He said, write everything we do, the good and the bad, the things we do right, the mistakes we make, so that other people can use it as a blueprint to make other cities, because we want as many of these Free Cities as we can get.

His motive was mainly that he wanted to give back to Honduras, because he had become wealthy building this conglomerate in the country. He had married a Honduran woman, he had four Honduran children. So it was giving back, but it was also, I think, a legacy. And he made me this offer that so totally fit what I had decided to devote the rest of my life to.

Timothy Allen: But then again, Joyce, there was nothing there at that time, was there?

Joyce Brand: There was nothing there. At the time he made me that offer, they had just broken ground. It was bare ground.

Timothy Allen: So did you go down there and live off-site in the beginning?

Joyce Brand: Well, Massimo and I both promised Spencer that we would continue his legacy, that we would get the archive delivered to Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala, and that we would finish the book. I promised I would find a publisher, and I was able to find one in early December of 2020. By the time I was able to tell Spencer we had a publisher, he was already at the point where he could not speak. But I will never forget the look of joy on his face when I told him the American Institute for Economic Research was going to publish his book.

He passed away in the middle of December, and I gathered all the archives. In the middle of January, I took everything to Honduras. Massimo rented an apartment for me in San Pedro Sula, and there were people, the civil engineer, the construction manager, several people, who could take me out to Morazán to see it on a weekly basis. Every week I would go out and take pictures and talk to people and see what was going on in the building of the city. They also had weekly operational meetings, where they would talk about all the problems that came up and what they were doing about them, and I had access to all that information.

And I watched, I really watched the city being built. The first thing, they had to build a wall, because they needed a boundary. That was the territorial substrate of the city, the first thing. The wall went up, they started building the houses, they built the road, paved the road. It was exciting times.

Timothy Allen: So you documented it for how long, in the end?

Joyce Brand: I was documenting it like that until July of 2021, when we went to FreedomFest in the US to present the ideas and the project and what was going on. Massimo was not able to go, because COVID was still going and, because he was Italian, they would not let him into the US. He had been in Italy less than 14 days prior, or something stupid like that. So I went with Diego, who was the property manager at the time.

And I happened to have an accident on an escalator, where I thought I just had a bunch of bruises and cuts. But it turned out I had an internal injury I was not even aware of, and it became infected. I did not even know it. I kept saying, oh, it is going to get better, it is just a bruise. But it was a lot more. When we got ready to go back to Honduras, we had to get PCR tests, and you know how many false positives there are, especially if you have an infection in your body. So I was not able to fly. And that very day, I got so sick from the infection that I went to the emergency room, and they thought I was going to die. I got admitted to the hospital as a COVID patient. Fortunately, I was able to refuse the remdesivir and refuse the ventilator, and they gave me antibiotics.

So I recovered. I survived. I was in the hospital for about two weeks. But that experience weakened me a lot. It was a tough, tough experience. Even when I finally got back to Honduras, it took me a long time to recover, so I was not doing the chronicle in quite the detail I had been doing before. But I continued to live in Morazán. I had some health issues and did not get as much done on the chronicle as I hoped.

Timothy Allen: Your book, though, Pioneering Prosperity. Isn’t that about Morazán?

Joyce Brand: It is. Pioneering Prosperity: The Morazán Model for Free Cities. I was not chronicling in as much detail, but I wrote the book about the ideas and the experience. I told the stories in the book that I have just told you.

Timothy Allen: You can still buy the book, by the way. It will last longer than this podcast.

Joyce Brand: Yes. So the book took a lot of my time, but I was also observing Próspera. I did not live here in Próspera, where we are recording right now, but I knew what was going on, because there was a lot of friendship between the two cities and people visited back and forth. And in fact, I was in Próspera at an event when I had a health issue that was diagnosed as a rare autoimmune disorder. A few months later, after travelling to the US for a conference, I had a crisis that put me in hospital for almost two weeks. Plasma exchange, a big deal. My Honduran doctor said I should move back to the US for treatment, and that is what I did. I had to leave Morazán and go back to the US for treatment for this disorder.

But the amazing thing is, it was a kind of wake-up call that I had to do something about my health. If I wanted to live my purpose and do the things I had decided I wanted to do with my life, I had to take responsibility for my health and figure out a way to become healthy again, so that I would live long enough to at least contribute a little something to the movement.

Timothy Allen: I think you have done a lot to contribute, Joyce. What I was going to ask was, what lessons, if any, were learned from the process of creating and building Morazán?

Joyce Brand: There were a lot of small lessons. There were always problems. Suppliers did not come through. The normal problems you have with pretty much any startup business. People do not keep promises, people you hire do not do what they were supposed to.

Those first six months, when I was chronicling it so carefully, were before the election. It was actually in April of 2021 that we started hearing words that there might be problems from the government. Up until that point, the government had been cooperative in following the law, although there were some bureaucrats who were reluctant to give up their power. They did not make things easy. One of the big problems was getting cooperation from the customs division, because there were bureaucrats who did not want the zone to have that much customs authority.

Timothy Allen: It is worth mentioning, is this correct, that the government you are talking about was the opposition to the government that created the law?

Joyce Brand: I am sorry, I was not clear about that. This was before the election. This was the government that was supportive, that had actually passed the law. But a government is not just one person. It is all of these different people with their own personal incentives. And bureaucrats are building their careers. There are power issues. Even though the official government line was, this is the law and this is what you have to do, they were slow, or non-cooperative, or created other problems of one kind or another. At that time, the only problems were bureaucratic. Red tape that was supposed to be cut and did not get cut.

But we started hearing about one of the candidates for president in the upcoming election at the end of 2021, a socialist woman who was married to the former president who had been deposed in a coup after attempting to stay in power past his term. Nobody thought she had much chance at that point. But politics being politics, things changed, and we started hearing more propaganda against the ZEDEs. Which made sense, because they had to have something to say: we are going to be better than the present government. So they were accusing the present government of all kinds of corruption and crimes, and they used the ZEDEs. They said, since they passed this law, the ZEDEs must be crooked or corrupt somehow. None of it was true, but it made a good narrative for the opposition. And things happened politically. One of the other candidates threw his support behind that party, and in the election in 2021 the socialist party won. One of their campaign promises had been to destroy the ZEDEs.

Timothy Allen: Can I ask you a question about that, from someone who was living through it all when it happened? I get the sense, especially when I am talking to people in the Free Cities movement, that it was quite an important campaign element. Is that true or not?

Joyce Brand: The strange thing is, they made it important. The Honduran people knew nothing about the ZEDEs. Nobody knew about them, nobody cared about them. But it made a good campaign story. It made a good narrative for them. So they tried to make it part of their platform. And there were enough people in positions of power who either bought into it or decided it would help them too. There were elements that were threatened. The most powerful businesses in Honduras could feel threatened by new investment coming into the country that would compete with them, that would have the ability to make the kinds of rules that would attract investment they could not attract with their business models. And academia was very leftist, so they were doing whatever they could to support the candidacy of the new socialist party. It was not that the Honduran people cared. It was politically beneficial for a lot of different people.

Timothy Allen: But is it true that during that election cycle most people in Honduras knew what they were and thought they were bad, or not? Because they were using them as a punching bag, weren’t they? Did it mean that people heard about them?

Joyce Brand: You know, I thought it would, because it was on TV, they were advertising, and it seemed like they were doing everything to make it a big deal. But when I talked to actual Honduran people, I always asked them: do you know about the ZEDEs? And everybody I talked to who was not political, the lady at the beauty salon, a taxi driver, normal people, had never heard of them. Unless you were politically involved and following politics, and most Hondurans do not really follow politics, because they do not trust any of the politicians. They are far less trusting of government than Americans are.

Timothy Allen: We should probably, before we go any further, explain the entrecom model, since that is the model behind Morazán, and it is different to what is going on here in Próspera. Can you sum it up? What exactly is it?

Joyce Brand: As I mentioned, it is Spencer Heath’s idea that the landowner should provide the governance services. The one thing that is really different about entrecoms, from Próspera or any other kind of voluntary governance, is that title to the land is held by one entity. And that entity then has the flexibility to respond to its market. Every jurisdiction, depending on where it is located physically in the world, has a different market to serve. You cannot just make a city and drop it down in any particular place. You have to build a city that responds to all the conditions in the local area.

So an entrecom gives more flexibility to offer its customers different kinds of services. One example Massimo uses a lot: if you find you have a lot of customers who want an office building in a certain place, and there are residences there, if the land is owned by the residents, there is nothing you can do. But if the land is rented, you can make the residents an offer and say, I will give you a better house in another location if you move out of this one. That flexibility is one of the benefits, but there is a lot more, just by having control in one entity rather than a political system where you are arguing about what is going to happen.

Timothy Allen: So the difference between Próspera and Morazán: here you can invest in property, and in fact Próspera is looking for people to create services and that kind of stuff. In Massimo’s model, Massimo owns the land, comes up with the plan, builds the buildings and rents them out. And people can choose to do it or not.

Joyce Brand: Próspera, of course, is voluntary as well. But I think of it as the myth of home ownership. That it is the best investment. A lot of times it has been, historically. But it ties you to a certain piece of land, and especially these days, with mobility, if you want to move for a job, there are not the advantages there used to be. And the crazy thing about home ownership, especially in the States, is that you have to pay a pretty hefty tax every year on your home. So you do not really own it.

Timothy Allen: No, of course you don’t. Because if you paid that tax indefinitely and the price of your house stayed the same, in the end you have lost your house. You have paid the price of your house.

Joyce Brand: It is actually worse than that, because the government has all of this ability to tell you what you can and cannot do on your own property. The property you think you own, but you cannot build an extra bedroom without getting some kind of zoning approval. It is different levels of government, but home ownership is not what it used to be, or what people think of it as being. If you rent, there is certainly the possibility of long-term leases, and of building a home that you want. You can own the home, you just do not own the land under it. That is much more beneficial for the community as a whole, and it gives a unified vision for the community that is responsive to the market, rather than being up for a democratic vote where your neighbours can raise the taxes on you or make changes.

Timothy Allen: Like some homeowners associations. I have heard horror stories of people taking over politically. I think Morazán is very lucky as well, in the sense that Massimo owns it. Massimo is not just a normal, well, whatever he is, billionaire, millionaire, I do not know, he has got a lot of money. He is very hands-on. He does town hall events, is it every couple of months?

Joyce Brand: He attends every weekly meeting.

Timothy Allen: So in a sense, people could look at the entrecom model and say, well, what if you get a bad owner? It is the same with the example you gave, about wanting to offer a service in a particular area where there are people living. In the entrecom model, presumably, a bad owner could just kick people out against their will. Is that true or not?

Joyce Brand: Well, you cannot kick them out against their will, because it is contractual. There are really two advantages. Because it is contractual, they can be kicked out if they are bad for the community, which is a good thing.

Timothy Allen: Which is also contractual. If you do not renew a lease, that is kicking them out, in a way. And I think there were a couple of cases where someone stole something and they were kicked out in the end.

Joyce Brand: If you break the contract, if you do not agree to be a good neighbour, if you do something that creates problems for your neighbours, yes, you can have your lease not renewed. Or if you do not pay your rent. But on the other hand, the positive of it is that because you have a contract, if the provider does not provide the services they promised, as in your example of a bad entrecom owner, they can be taken to third-party arbitration for damages. You cannot do that with any government that has a monopoly on force. Or if you try, you are going to lose.

Timothy Allen: So in that sense, Próspera and Morazán are the same. Arbitration occurs with a third party.

Joyce Brand: The thing about Morazán and Próspera is that they look so different. The rental versus owning model looks so different, and people think of them as being so different. But the fact is, they are very, very similar. They are both built on the same structure of statutory autonomy, international treaty protection, and legal insulation against arbitrary reversal. They both depend on providing value to their residents for their growth. They both have contractual governance, an agreement of coexistence. Próspera can also kick people out if they do not live up to their agreement of coexistence. They both have dispute resolution services that are fair because they are third party, with no bias in favour of the owner. And they both have optional monetary systems. Monetary optionality means you can use whatever currency you want, whether it is Bitcoin or stablecoins or any currency people choose. And that is the thing: they choose voluntarily.

Timothy Allen: But you mean amongst each other? Because you cannot pay your rent in Bitcoin in Morazán, can you?

Joyce Brand: Well, if somebody wanted to pay their rent in Bitcoin, it could probably be arranged. But actually, some people did want to pay their rent in stable corn.

Timothy Allen: Stablecoins.

Joyce Brand: Stable corn.

Timothy Allen: Sounds nice.

Joyce Brand: Stablecoin. What is the correct…?

Timothy Allen: No, stable corn is a crop. Stablecoin.

Joyce Brand: But yes, that is part of the freedom, the voluntary aspect, the consent-based aspect, and they share all of those.

Timothy Allen: So any currency could be used, but you have to negotiate the use of it.

Joyce Brand: It is always any currency between willing buyer and seller. So you would have to convince the owner of the entrecom to accept a payment that you chose. And nobody has asked to pay their rent with Bitcoin. They have asked to pay their rent with stablecoin. And of course, the most important thing that Próspera and Morazán have in common is the opt-in and opt-out. It is as easy to opt out as to opt in, so you are subscribing rather than submitting to governance. And it is easier to opt out if you do not own the land that you live on. So in that instance, the entrecom has an advantage over the develop-and-sell model, what they call the subdivision model.

Timothy Allen: They are both relevant, and they are available for different people. You could argue that here in Próspera you probably get more innovative things happening, because there are more people, a more decentralised bunch of ideas coming in and doing stuff. But that is not better or worse. That is just different.

Joyce Brand: Exactly. And that is the beauty of the Free Cities concept. An entrepreneur can create a Free City that has the rules that people choose, and people are all different, they have different preferences. One person would choose one rule set and another would choose another, but they can still trade with each other between cities. They can still form alliances. Each person is choosing to live under a rule set with, theoretically anyway, like-minded people who chose the same rule set.

And my vision is to have a world full of Free Cities that are networked in alliances to protect each other, but that trade because they have the voluntary aspect in common, that can make treaties between each other and create this network, so that every human being on the planet can eventually choose the governance they want to live under, choose the provider they want for those services. And there might be one city that provides all kinds of welfare services, and people who want that, but they are going to have to pay a lot more for it. That is the thing. When you have to pay for it, your real preferences come into action. Right now we are paying for things that we think are immoral. No matter where you are, no matter what your preferences, there is bound to be something you are paying for that you think is immoral.

Timothy Allen: The other thing, of course, which people probably do not like to admit, is that if you have a bunch of competing Free Cities and one of them has a large welfare state, the natural cycle of that place will be that people go there searching for the welfare. The welfare needs to be provided by the residents, and if you model that out, the cost goes up, and the chances are those places always lose their most productive people.

Joyce Brand: Exactly. Which is what we see happening in the world today on a country basis.

Timothy Allen: I would love to see that play out. About six months ago, I got ChatGPT to model it. I said, look, here we have got about 20 competing Free Cities, and I want about 25% of them to be socialist. Now tell me what happens over the next 50 years or something. I think it ended up still having a couple of socialist Free Cities, God knows why. But like you say, when people actually have to put their money there. I have often thought, even in a country, welfare should be voluntary. If you are the kind of person who believes in welfare, then you should pay it, and you can still live alongside people who do not pay. It is just that the only people who can claim welfare should be the people who paid in. I think that is a really fair system. Because then you really know who believes in welfare.

Joyce Brand: When you are looking at your neighbour who is not paying it.

Timothy Allen: Right. You will really have to call their bluff then, and say, well, okay, are you paying their welfare or not?

Joyce Brand: That is kind of like, if people had the choice to contribute to social security, how many people would actually do it?

Timothy Allen: Exactly.

Joyce Brand: It is ridiculous when you think that people are mandated to pay their money, supposedly for a scheme that is actually just a Ponzi scheme.

Timothy Allen: Well, it is part of the political scheme as well. It is horrible, actually. It is so insipid, because the democratic system has now become: we need to get into power, and we can offer free money to people who will then vote for us. And it is this horrendous cycle going round and round. I am seeing it in my own country. I saw a stat the other day that in the UK, the amount being paid out in welfare was almost the same as tax receipts. It was unbelievable. When you looked at the amount the government was deriving from tax, either all of it or a little bit more than all of it was going straight out in welfare.

Joyce Brand: And what kind of a system is that? It is so wrong in so many ways. And there is a whole other aspect to it that people do not think about. Everybody says, oh, we need a social net so that people are not starving on the street, we have got to take care of each other. It sounds really good. But when you actually look at it, what are you doing? You are trapping people in dependence.

With real charity, charity is voluntary. That is the definition of real charity. And when it is voluntary, the person giving the money is doing it because they want to help someone, or a class of people. They are doing it because they believe in it. It is valuable to them, and they receive something emotional for the money they are spending on charity. On the other side, the people who receive the charity know that somebody cared enough to give them a helping hand, and therefore they are motivated. Human nature has both great good and great evil, and the good part is that most people have this feeling that if someone chose to help them personally, they have an obligation to pay it back, or pay it forward. They do not feel entitled to it. They know it was given voluntarily, to help them out.

The exact opposite happens with welfare. People become entitled. I am alive, therefore my fellow citizens should pay for everything for me. And if I do not have enough money to buy the latest iPhone, then somebody is not doing their thing. They should be paying for it, even though I am not working. That just grows and grows, and it destroys the character of the people receiving the money. And it destroys the character of the people giving it, when they are forced to give it, because they do not get any of the joy of helping someone. They know they have to help that person whether they want to or not.

Timothy Allen: I think also that that system does not work as a function of the size of the state. Any local community that is still in some shape or form local, no one would go without there, on the whole.

Joyce Brand: That is the thing. People are generous. And the greater the prosperity of the population, the more generous they can be. Even with all of the government welfare and all of the big charities, people still contribute to local charities. They help their neighbours without having to be forced. And just think, if they were not being forced, how much more would they help their neighbours? That would make so much better a society, of people serving each other, helping each other.

And I have seen it in Morazán, even. There was a man, an Uber driver, who had a car accident, and he was injured so badly that he needed an operation on his leg. And people in the community, and these are poor people, they make what, $600 a month or something, pitched in to help him, to give him the money so he could have the surgery. And that, I think, would happen anywhere you have a high-trust community where everybody is there voluntarily. It is not an ideological thing. Nobody has to be shamed into it. We do want to help each other. We are social animals, and we do want to live together in peace.

Timothy Allen: We do want to live together in smaller communities as well, I think. One of the functions of large states is that you do not know the people in your community, and you certainly do not know the leaders in your community, which is one of the other reasons why politics fails so badly. If you are a local leader and someone can come up to you in the pub, or on the street, and call your bluff on something, or ask you something to your face, things get sorted out. Things get done. You are living in a realm where you have to answer to actual people. And unfortunately, the world we live in at the moment is the opposite of that.

Joyce Brand: Yes. And it has got so bad, in fact, that, I mean, I do not know what it is like in the States, but in England now you expect political figures to lie. It is part of the way politics is done.

Timothy Allen: And there is no shame in it at all. You do have it bad, though. Trump really lies a lot now. He was talking about Iran the other day, saying we have had talks with Iran, and they have got 48 hours to do what they say. And then apparently Iran went straight out, the Iranian government, and said, we did not speak to Trump. And sure enough, two days later, what he said, he did. But the point is, it has got to a point now where it is almost like comedy. You expect a politician to lie, and it is normal, and people accept it.

Joyce Brand: And this is the kind of stuff they told us would happen in 1984. That you would just accept things as normal that should be very abnormal. In fact, it was not that long ago, in my lifetime, that lying was considered extremely bad. If a politician was caught in a lie, say, 50 years ago, their career would be over. One lie could destroy their career. And now it is totally different.

So yes, I absolutely agree with that. And I think Free Cities are the solution. And a big part of Free Cities is that they are decentralised. I do not know how big an entrecom could scale, because it has not been tried.

Timothy Allen: Well, you will discover. The market will show you.

Joyce Brand: The market will show you. Exactly. We can find out. But even if individual Free Cities do not scale that big, if you have so many Free Cities, it does not matter. And, oh, your question about a bad owner of an entrecom. It is really simple. If you have a bad owner, the people will leave. If the owner is not doing what he promised, if he is not keeping them happy, if he is not keeping them satisfied, customers leave all the time. And that is where the opt-in, opt-out takes care of those problems. No matter how bad the owner, the worse he is, the sooner people will leave, he will go bankrupt, and someone else will buy the property that can do a better job with it. That is the way business works. Businesses go out of business all the time when they fail to serve their customers well.

Timothy Allen: It is funny, isn’t it? I think the idea that governance could be a business is really going to have its time over the next 50 to 100 years, because it is so easy to understand and to explain. It is amazing that it has just never really caught on.

Joyce Brand: I think there is an explanation for it. Partly, there has been so much propaganda about corporations. The big tech companies, big pharma, big food, all of these big corporations that do so much evil, that hurt people so much, that create so much suffering. And people say, oh, that is capitalism. Those corporations are capitalism. Capitalism has failed, it is horrible. And what they do not realise, and this is the thing that I think explains why people do not understand the concept of Free Cities, is that these corporations exist totally because of the government monopoly on force. Anybody in a business could be attracted to power, and the bigger the business, the more money they have to buy the politicians, to pay the lobbyists who go in and get all of these favours from the government. All of these evil corporations, if you trace it back, are getting some kind of favours from government. They would not be able to do the harm they are doing if they were not getting favours from government.

Just take Pfizer. We have got COVID as an example. People put up with the most incredibly horrible, tyrannical orders and mandates, and meanwhile Pfizer was making billions, because people were being forced to take their vaccines, and they had no liability. That lack of liability would not be possible in a free market. It would not be possible if you did not have a government that could pass laws saying this company is not liable for the harm it causes. But that is the world we live in, and it is not capitalism, and it is not free markets. And because of that, people do not understand when you tell them: no, real businesses have to please their customers. They cannot harm their customers.

Timothy Allen: It is also true, I have noticed, in some countries that have had periods of socialism in recent history, that anything doing well, anything garnering profit, is often seen as corrupt, because for many, many years that was the only way you could get profitable: by being in cahoots with the government in some shape or form. Portugal is a really good example of this. People would not think of Portugal as a socialist country now, but I know a lot of Portuguese people who say, if your business starts doing well in Portugal, people get really suspicious of you. And that needs to really get flushed out of a culture.

Joyce Brand: And they do not understand that the reason they are corrupt is that they have been corrupted by the government. If you grant that kind of power to a government, the government is going to use it, and people are going to be attracted to it and take advantage of it. It is a fact of human nature. It is that evil side of human nature. The good side is the people who are honest enough to start a business of their own, a small business, and build it by providing services. And that is the true free market, and free enterprise, and capitalism.

Timothy Allen: I think that is quite a nice place to end. That was quite a nice positive note to end on. It is getting quite late, Joyce.

Joyce Brand: Oh, is it?

Timothy Allen: There is a party going on outside that door as well. I do not know if you can hear it.

Joyce Brand: I have heard it. I do not know how much the microphones are picking up.

Timothy Allen: Oh, do not worry about that. I have got an AI that will be able to sort that out. I do not worry about things like that. What time is it? It is quarter to eight. We have been talking, one hour 22 minutes now.

Joyce Brand: Oh, wow. It does not seem like it. It seems like it has gone really fast.

Timothy Allen: It has gone fast, Joyce. Right, well, anyway, thanks for that, and good luck with everything. And you are going back to Morazán in a couple of days, aren’t you?

Joyce Brand: Just to visit. Sunday, I am going to Morazán.

Timothy Allen: I am hoping to get over there this trip, because I have never been. While I am in Próspera for the next month, I am hoping to make a quick trip over there. It depends. If not, at the end of the year when we have our conference. Are you coming to the conference, by the way?

Joyce Brand: Oh, yes. Definitely. And I am probably speaking in a breakout room or something.

Timothy Allen: Anyway, it is nice seeing you, and I am looking forward to the next few days here as well. Thanks for coming in.

---

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 0:09:04 in the audio transcript, and ends at the close of the conversation, 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, including the stable corn exchange.

Proper nouns and likely ASR errors were corrected where possible. The main corrections/normalisations include: Joyce Brand; Ciudad Morazán (rendered variously as “Morazon”, “Morizan”, “Marzan” and “Morison” in the source); Massimo Mazzone (source “Mazzoni”); entrecom (source “intercom”); Spencer Heath; Spencer Heath MacCallum (source “McCallum”); The Art of Community; Economics and the Spiritual Life of Free Men; the American Institute for Economic Research; Pioneering Prosperity: The Morazán Model for Free Cities; Libertopia; Universidad Francisco Marroquín; Casas Grandes; San Pedro Sula; Vancouver, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Próspera; ZEDE and ZEDEs (source “ZAs”, “Zeddy”, “Zettis”, “Zedays”); Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH); FreedomFest; Avid; Eric Roberts; Julia Roberts; Murray Rothbard; Peter Thiel; Zero to One; remdesivir; stablecoin; Neuro Gum; Joe Rogan; ChatGPT; and Pfizer.

A few names/phrases remain context-dependent and should be checked against the audio before publication: “Peter” (who first introduced Timothy to this world); “Diego” (Morazán’s property manager at the time of FreedomFest); the identity of the interviewer in Joyce’s earlier session that day, whose name has been withheld pending verification; the entrepreneurial workshop Joyce attended in 2019; and the publisher name as spoken, which has been normalised to the American Institute for Economic Research.

No independent fact-check has been applied to claims made by either speaker beyond checking spellings and likely identities of proper nouns. Medical claims (including accounts of treatments refused) and political characterisations (including the account of the 2021 Honduran election and the deposed former president) should be treated as speaker claims, not editorial assertions.