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"I believed in it very much, to the extent that I waged my own career and my own life by coming here. It had to resist. I used to joke that if it hadn't resisted I would have stopped practising law, stopped believing in it."
"I'm an entrepreneur. I love technology and innovation. I think the tools that are now available to us are beyond extraordinary… I think I'm an incredible optimist as it pertains to AI." "When you hear a lot of these AI evangelists talk publicly about AI, maybe there's a 10% chance that it could be dangerous or a 5...
"Many free zone initiatives have been pushing on a string. They've fallen in love with a particular location and then push, push, push to try to make it happen... So the big takeaway for me was that these efforts to set up free areas by funnelling money into a predestined spot were exactly the wrong way to start."
"We are building a social safety net that is global and ultimately our plan is to launch the first country on the internet, which will allow people to become member-based citizens and have that safety net follow them everywhere they go."
"It was London in the 1800s. It was Spain in the 1600s. It was Portugal in the 1500s. It was the Netherlands before that. And right now it's the Americas."
"If you have a bad owner, the people will leave. If he's not doing what he promised, if he's not keeping them happy, customers leave all the time. The worse he is, the sooner people will leave, he'll go bankrupt, and someone else will buy the property that can do a better job with it. That's the way business works."
"When you build for nomads you build for everyone else. If you build something good enough to attract a digital nomad to whatever you are building, you are building something good enough for 90% of the people... That's why I say you should build for nomads, but nomads should not be your end client."
"The real reason that I wear the mask is because it doesn't matter who I am. Anybody can be doing what we're doing thanks to Bitcoin and the Bitcoin node network. The message, the idea of free speech in a worldwide mesh network, does not depend upon any single person's identity. Everyone is building the mesh network."
"As we progress through this movement in general, I think this might be the key to unlock the critical mass. I really do think that. I think families are overlooked because the old family thought process, or the people who were families when we were younger, may not have been ready for this. But now everyone who's...
"It's good to have a norm against racism, but when you go to a taboo, that's a very black and white thing. There's no nuance, there's no grey zones, and all of a sudden this is a powerful piece of kryptonite that somebody can weaponise."
"Imagine we had the technology and we would say, oh, for a reason X, Y, Z, we don't allow people to use it. That would be like withholding life-saving medicine from someone, which is equivalent, ethically speaking, to killing someone."
"I'm going to say for full-time employees that spend over a billion on talent, I'm saying there's going to be 40% layoffs. And they might say only 10%, but in reality, they're recalibrating easily up to 40%."
"I came to visit, just to visit. On the second day, I bought a motorbike from Facebook Marketplace just to lock in. Okay, this might be my place."
"The minute you don't agree with something they do, they'll come for you too. Don't for one minute think that you're safe. So why are you supporting this? Because it could happen to any one of you."
"If you're ruthless about figuring it out, people will support you. And it's a matter of execution, right? So are we going to be the crazy or are we going to be the visionaries? It all comes down to executing and getting it done... and it being okay if it fails."
"Every country is run poorly, in my opinion. I don't think any country is run very well. Even Singapore is not run very well. They're too restrictive there."
"We've lived this life. My dad has. And my grandfather before him. We're sure of where we want to take it. It's not just dreams. It's grounded in reality. We've got a plan of how to get there. Now we just need to go and do it."
"There's so much LARPing... It's when you imitate the superficialities of something without actually doing it. The thing is that starting a new country is so fun and so romantic and so exciting and so unbelievably hard that even if you seriously try to do it, you're going to naturally find that it's so much easier t...
"The most important thing that can happen now with this new government for every other project out there.. is for Próspera to be successful. Because the more successful we are, the more people can point to us and say we're going to replicate that in our country."
“When Starmer came in in 2024, how many people across the entire British state changed jobs? Two hundred... One hundred ministers… and one hundred special advisors… And that’s it. And everybody else in that deep state stayed exactly the same.”
"The film is not necessarily a sad story about someone dying. It's about someone that had this dream that they believed in more than life itself, quite literally. He was quite happy to die for this dream, for what might have happened."
"Land use should not be prescribed by any planning regime. People come together into a city by seeking out very particular connections. And they have to find each other. There needs to be the degree of freedom to associate and self-organize what I call the co-location synergies."
"You can vote your way into socialism, but you can only shoot your way out. They're never going to leave power."
"The golden age of voluntarism, anarcho-capitalism has already emerged. It's all over two-thirds of the Earth's surface. It's completely flourishing. It's long since entered its golden age. We've already proved that it works because it emerged naturally on the sea. It's called the cruise ship industry."
"There were probably a lot of brown envelopes on the table involved - they said, okay, have this zone then."
"I want to be back in my tribe. I want to have strong people which I can rely on, which I can do business with, which I know, which have my back and I have theirs.. And if we are building this place right now, why would I fill it with people I don't know and I don't give a shit about?"
"If I can sell someone something to buy, they might buy it. If you can sell someone something that they can live in, they're likely to buy it. If you can sell someone something that they can live in and also generates passive income for them, they're very likely to buy it."
"The free cities community seems very much more buttoned up and more pragmatic - real estate, free cities, development, SEZs. You need lawyers, you need bankers. And then the network state community, there's a lot more dreamers, young dreamers who want to do pop-up cities. But there's a convergence in betwee...
"How do you get out of this? How do you separate yourself from your government today? How do you protect your wealth and your ability to provide for your family today?"
“Why do you need Free Cities if you can live tax-free everywhere?”
“Politics is overrated, generally.”
“We didn’t design a boat. We designed an apartment and made it float.”
“The struggle ultimately is not political. The struggle ultimately is philosophical.”
“If you are alive in the next 40 or 50 years, you will be able to decide how long you live.”
“This year Sark has definitely gone downhill, possibly edged towards, call it crisis.”
“There is only one freedom. The freedom to leave.”
" I really don't care which one of the various ways of reaching liberty is going to happen. I just want at least one to work . "
"We know the formula for prosperity. "
"It’s not about the way you make decisions, it’s about consent. "
"These are the pillars of our thought... and there's going to be no wavering from that. "
"We are starting to see symptoms of civilisational decline. "
"Shall we lock everyone down and then cripple supply chains, then pump as much money into the system as we can possibly get away with? "
"It's part physical land, it's part network state, its part branding.. ."
"We're going down the wrong path ."
"The hardest pill to swallow is that democracy is socialsim ."
"Just like with Bitcoin, good money is replacing bad money. There will be a replacement of government. We're simply offering a better product on the market."
"We're in a 'shock and awe' situation in history, and a lot of people just do not know how to react to it. So what do they do? They just stay despondent and silent."
"Where we've got to with the internet over the last 25 years is terrifying."
"Do you want to bitch about it? Do you want to take a black pill? or do you want to find some solutions?"
"We now have half a million civil servants in the United Kingdom. We used to run the entire empire on forty thousand. "
"Bitcoin was built for chaos. Real estate was not."
"You don't need to be ashamed for living and acting freely. This is just how it's supposed to be. "
"Competition works. So why doesn't competition apply to government? "
"Inflation is the greatest, unfair, immoral tax that exists on the planet. "
"It can sound very deep and philosophical at first — this idea that if you find value in something, you can send some value back. But it really comes down to the creator: How much do you want that freedom?"
"We're trying something here, and we're going about it in a very responsible way and according to the ideas that we think work. And if they don't work, then—well—we'll learn from that, and you can try your version of this."
"This is the hill that I'm happily going to die on, because I didn't start my life with two suitcases and two hundred dollars in my pocket for my American-born children to end up living in the same disaster that I had to run away from."
"You can only be as free as you are authentic to yourself ."
"Most people we've met and had any level of conversation with — they're all libertarian, except they just don't know the term, and so they don't know the philosophy either. But they do know that they want the government out of their pockets and out of their bedrooms."
"I'm for all the liberties. If you're only for one liberty... If you're only involved in one thing and you have one passion then maybe find a different place . But if you're for all of it. If you want to live and let live, then this is your spot."
"I think we are at a point in human history where we are at a huge crossroads. We could go down the dystopian route where everyone's just being fed AI information and no one has a true connection with other human beings. Or we could double down on humanity and really interact with the human condition."
"Trump gave a speech saying that he's ending Elizabeth Warren & Biden's 'War on Crypto'. We're trying to say to him, 'Then release the prisoners of war if you ended the war on crypto'."
"How do we communicate that getting the government involved, paying for everything, or having a system in which the government's going to be giving you everything is not necessarily the right answer. "
"What they're building, without knowing it is the nomad dream.. Nobody knows about it."
"In some countries, we get our power from god. I'm some countries, we have a king who got his power from god. In some countries, it's just whoever is the baddest dude. Those are all answers, but the American answer, as I think of it, is: government operates from consent."
"The entire world wants the same thing. We all want freedom. We all want personal responsibility & individual liberty. "
"Whether you are Conservative or Democrat or voting for either, you're basically fighting in a territory of which version of Statism should prevail. "
"I don't believe that taxation is theft, and the reason I don't is because if you can go to Próspera and opt into their fee scheme, then you are no longer tax cattle."
"There is no true free market value to anything in the US healthcare system. "
"The sweet spot is when the short term and the long term are aligned... ...For most libertarian Americans, their life in New Hampshire will be better than wherever they are. So it works for them in the short term, and you've got that aspirational, transcendent thing in the distance that you're still chasing after...
"It was more of a requirement to be self-reliant. You just had to, or else you didn't make it. And so that self-reliance and independence—and that 'I'm going to take care of myself and I don't need you' attitude—is, I think, in our DNA. That was part of what motivated the founders to say: We can take care of ourse...
"In my experience, I do think that governments find it more difficult to argue with ten thousand human faces than they do to argue with 'people with money trying to do stuff."
"Society is primarily authoritarian and t hey train us in authoritarianism from an early age and they reward authoritariansim and all the stories are authoritarian. So, to actually have that amount of programming, for normal people it's so hard to break out."
"The desire for conformity & order is stronger in most people than the desire for freedom. But what you can do in an open society is teach people that freedom, although it may not come naturally to most people, produces better outcomes: It makes people richer, it makes people happier and constraining your natural t...
" You can say 'there is something in my past... and that is why I am like this', which abdicates your responsibility for right now and gives it to some past event. Trauma is real. But if you focus on it too much it can also mean giving up your power. "
"Our city only consists of entrepreneurs who are from a certain type of mankind. You're not exactly going to be seven times boostered and jabbed if you are in this community. You won't exactly like the German government and what they do and what they stand for. We're not talking about ultra right activists, we're...
"When everybody is talking about Free Cities, for me this is very interesting because if there is a model that has proven to be sustainable here on earth, there's little reason why those same fundamental frameworks couldn't be just adapted to people who want to do long term space missions or live in outer space . "
" They say Germans are romantics in the sense that they follow an ideal to the bitter end, maybe to their own detriment. But who knows? M aybe if they figure out that the ideal is freedom, then they will follow that to the bitter en...
"That's the biggest catch-22 of Free Cities. You're creating a refuge from the rules of a government, but ultimately, you're at the whim of the same government that has made the situation so bad in the first place."
"F rankly, if you don't stand your ground, you will always be fleeing. You will never have anything. Próspera got a commitment from the government of Honduras to have this arrangement for the next 45 years. At this point, the government i...
"There are 110,000 people dying every day from aging: forty million per year. Alzheimer's , diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and so on are each bigger issues than COVID. Why are we not, as a society saying let's remove red tape and do this faster? And I understand that society is not going to do that, but how abou...
" In Europe, twenty years ago there wasn't really a Pan-European identity. Today there is which is in part a legacy of the European Union. I think similarly, with digital nomads you're seeing what might be described as a decreased loyalty to their home country and an increased willingness to just say: 'OK, I'm goi...
"When I start with a client, I ask them what they want. And usually, the typical way of answering this question is to first think about what is possible and then choose from that. Then I say 'What would you want if anything was possible?'."
"I am very excited about El Salvador. I think they are doing great things there. I think they're going to grow a lot and there's a lot of potential. That said. My experience so far is that it's a bit similar to what's happened with the Honduran ZEDEs: That a lot of people are cheering on the sidelines, wishing the...
"A pet peeve of mine is the idea that Free Cities are going to full of Westerners... I think Most Free Cities that are successful will be local based like Morazan . Morazan can grow a lot faster than Próspera because it's target market is the people of Honduras."
"We're still at the very early stages. This is a new frontier . This is unlike anything we've ever done before on the planet. This is a whole new way of living that's just starting, it's at the very early stages and we're trying to figure out the right mix to make it work. It's kind of like designing Disneyland for...
"When the crap hits the fan in the world, people need places to go and we can't create them fast enough, we can't create them big enough. If ten percent of the world's population says 'I want to go there' we're never going to be big enough to handle that, b ut the people who are making that choice now to have that...
"On the ocean there is no way to get a monopoly on governance . You need static land on which you can win a war and climb to the top of that bloody heirarchy and control other people. On the ocean, if people can move around then governance becomes a product and the only way you can prosper is by serving customers."
"Achieve gender equality, ensure the rule of law, promote justice, and promote non-discrimination. These are the fancy words that they're using, but in reality, the deeper you go into this agenda, the more you realise that there's a plan here that aspires to absolute control over humanity."
"I think that what is significant with the pandemic is not that there was a virus, but how they used people to enforce their ideas against other people. And that is pretty scary because we like to think that we are much more modern today than, say 1930s Germany. But it was pretty obvious I think that during the pan...
"War is the health of the state . I don't think that many people really understand that. That's where the money is made: War, death, destruction. They love it. It gives them an excuse to run the money printer."
"War is the health of the state . I don't think that many people really understand that. That's where the money is made: War, death, destruction. They love it. It gives them an excuse to run the money printer."
"Freedom of speech requires a free space."
"It's so much easier to tear down and criticize than it is to actually come up with an idea for changing something and making something better — and the inspiring thing about the free city projects is that although it's still on a modest scale, there's clear evidence."
"The things I think we're worst at is how we choose leaders, and then how we delegate power, and how a leader passes on power — these are probably the three biggest fuckups that we do as human beings."
"I could see that if someone didn't get this to stop then it would just keep going — as far down as for children. And I just knew deep down 100% that that was wrong and that would cause harm, and I just couldn't let that happen."
"You don't need motivation — you need to have a very clear understanding about your identity and only take on work that that identity is loyal to. Because the days up here, there's no motivation in the world that gets you up here on a bad day."
"I want a world where people come into power, go to the room with the money, open the door — and the room is empty."
"If there was one thing I wanted to change in this world, it would have nothing to do with governments, laws, or taxes — it would simply be the way we relate to our children."
"One day we will generate more revenue from the digital realm than from the physical world."
"We asked ourselves: if we were terminally ill and had two years to live, what would we do? The answer was go and travel the world in a truck. So we built one."
"Not everyone has a sense of self-control. That's why it's easier to live according to rules someone else already set. It takes the burden of responsibility away."
"I describe myself as made in Hong Kong. I lived there for 61 years. And now I want to bring Asia to the UK's door."
"I would like to see the world as a supermarket. You go around and pick what suits you best. Governments should be competing for you as a customer, not holding you as a hostage."
"Think about how depressing it would be to know everything we know about Fiat and not have Bitcoin. There are people who went through that. Bitcoin is the life raft they never had."
"It's all theoretical until it happens. And now we're literally handing over keys to people who own property in a free private city in Honduras."
"You've got to understand. These people really do see most of us as useless eaters."
"12 hours before everything collapsed I was in a club celebrating with friends, beautiful girls, good times. If you had told me the banks would be closed and the peso worthless by morning, I would have bet everything against it. And then it happened."
"We have one unique selling point that no one else can offer. We offer freedom. And that alone will outlast any temporary conflict we have with Croatia."
"I define addiction as any behavior that helps you avoid feeling your feelings. By that definition, most of us are addicts. And Fiat money is one of the biggest drugs of all."
"They fired everyone overnight... made their entire operation dormant, closed all the hotels - it was kind of like a power move, a bit vindictive."
"Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else." (quoting Hans-Hermann Hoppe)
"When inflation was 13%, how many people got a 13% pay rise? Hardly anyone. Right? So we all got poorer. Right? So wouldn't it be great to have something in your life that's counteracting that effect? "
"It is sometimes hard to have a whole country reinvent itself. This process is too slow and too cumbersome with too much friction and no vested interest. We need more special economic zones and I think they play an enormous role in the whole progress of world civilization... exploring ways of doing business and way...
"DMCC has been named global free zone of the year for 10 years now... it's a mixed use zone. It doesn't switch the lights off at 5 pm a nd everybody goes home. It's got the capability to drive revenue and to drive activities 24/7. I think that's a really important part of understanding the evolution of very success...
"The only country that takes you for granted & will try to force you to stay is your home country. Everyone else is fighting to attract you."
"This is how memes are born. You cannot predict them, you cannot control them and you cannot regulate them. They have to come from your heart."
"In 2019, if you had asked me 'Will things change?', I might have thought that certain things would change but there is an Overton window of what's possible. Post 2020, so much has changed and I think the Overton window has just been blown wide open. Now is the time to be talking about these big ideas because now w...
"I think they view Dubai like a project. It's very much like a project where you're quite literally building from the ground up and you are learning from history, you're learning from the existing world, you're learning from other nations, other cities. You're seeing the things that they do well, the things they don...
"Autonomy is a tool to achieve something. We should never speak of autonomy just for autonomy's sake. The objective is always to create an environment that attracts businesses, that attracts investment and that attracts people. That is what we're talking about . "
"Autonomous cities will develop naturally if they're given the legal framework to do so. At the moment, most special economic zones have policies that apply to businesses and they're targeted at creating space that is focused on a particular sector. I think if you allow that to be extended to residential components...
"I'm still a fan of certain rules and regulations, but they should allow enough space for businesses to innovate and consumers to choose, and they should also not prescribe what solution will be good for consumers. Regulators should not pick the winners and losers. Consumers should do that, because that's what cons...
"Last year our largest growth was in the Middle East. Our business has grown three times in the Middle East. And it's not just us. All the big architecture firms are now working a lot here. Because as I said, it's easier to build a city here than one small building somewhere in the European Union. "
"Honestly, I'm actually not a big fan of traveling, which seems crazy when I have the lifestyle that I do. I just really hate taxes. I hate bureaucracy. I want to own my own destiny. That's why I live the way I do. "
"People are exiting society to build their own bubbles where they grow their own food, are self-sufficient, and have also learned how to consciously design human relationships. Many of the most successful of these projects refer to themselves as 'research centers for peace' because they're exploring alternative gov...
"When I went to El Salvador, I went to try and find the catch. What's really happening there? What is this Bukele dictator actually doing there? I went in there to to ask tough questions about Bukele. It took me about a week to change my mind, to realise that's not really the story. That people love him. They hone...
"Freedom is not going to come for free. You can't ask anyone. You can't go and ask a police officer to give you more freedom because he's going to follow the law. That's his job. "
"Overall, political risk, be it national, local, or geopolitical international risk, has been on the rise over the last 15 years. It has become critical and the time is ripe to consider it in detail and to consider your options. "
"This is the project of my life. I want to live and I want to die in that place, in a free place because as libertarians, we need a physical place to live. I mean, things like Network States are fine, but in the end we are people living in a three dimensional world. We need to have our feet on some soil and I want...
"As far as the Cypherpunks go, I wanted the viewers to really understand WHY there is Bitcoin out there. You know, why? Why Bitcoin? And so it was really important for me to explain that a bunch of people were afraid that freedom could be jeopardised and so they built things.. and Bitcoin became the tool to fight f...
"If you have an idea, bring it up. Let's put it on the table. Let's discuss it. And yeah, we can potentially make it happen. Maybe it works because we are still a relatively small community. Probably as we grow, it's going to change a little bit. But for now, it works quite well. Everybody's quite welcoming to diff...
"I remain disappointed, flummoxed, angry and aggravated that free market libertarianism has not made more headway because it seems to me to provide many, if not most of the answers to the barriers to human flourishing and removal of human suffering. "
"Previously, whenever people gathered with friends for dinner or lunch, the first question that would usually come up was 'Will you leave Hong Kong?'. In the last two or three years, that question has changed to 'When are you going to leave Hong Kong? "'.
"It's beneficial if you can speak to leaders and politicians around the world and educate them about Bitcoin. Not about them essentially adopting it, but to let them know that there's a bottom-up movement happening all around the world and that really, they can't do anything to stop it. So they might as well embrace...
"There is this famous quote that you can never change things by fighting the existing reality and that you have to start something new. I think that's pretty much valid. It might be much easier to start a new country than it is to fix an existing one. "
"People are completely persuaded by monopoly governance. They're brainwashed with it. It's coming for us. It's coming for free people. It's coming fast, it's coming hard and it's not hiding its agenda. So this is where I want to argue with all my colleagues. We don't want one Próspera here. We don't want a dozen Pr...
"If you have these ecologies of freedom, you can make amazing cities and that is one of the best things you can do. I think you'll be hard pressed to do it somewhere else these days. Even existing, amazing cities are being ruined by bad policy and not being allowed to mature or being allowed to mature enough.. There...
"W e have to go back to doing more with neighbours, with family with friends. That's one way of replacing big government. Yes, you can replace it with a Free Private City and a service model, but you can also replace it with actual communities, and the actual community is, I think more attainable. Particularly for l...
"If you speak to urban planners, they will tell you that to have a viable, sustainable community, you need 1100 to 1300 households. That's a rule of thumb in that industry. A household in the UK is 2.4 people, so you can come to a figure. Very importantly, we are not saying that we actually know what the figures sho...
"The playbook today on a Fiat standard is to figure out a way to lie, cheat, get into central banking, get into politics and if you can't get into central banking or politics, get into big business and get as close as you can to the monetary spigot. So all of the incentives align you in such a way that you're basica...
" I think that what we're going through is pretty new. For most of human history, there has always been a frontier. So there was always a space where new people could push into and there's certainly some sort of ideological conformity among the kinds of people who are interested in that. They are different in some w...
"I think that's a perennial question for a lot of people who want to influence the world around them. Are you going to go into academia and change the world through ideas? Are you going to go into politics and change the world through actions? Or are you going to do both and work for a think tank? "
" We are talking about forming new societies. I mean, it's a big topic, but I think the main things have been covered now. I think I can say that because it took me 30 years to get the knowledge to write the book and I have discussed this topic intensely with all kinds of people all over the world. I can say that we...
"We need to be creating free societies across the world. What was it that Hans-Hermann Hoppe said? We need thousands of Liechtensteins'". We do need more of this across the world. You want to be able to run into your president at the local grocery store. That's my opinion on it. We need more smaller communities tha...
"There are a lot of countries and cities that are worried about the sea level rise and are investing a lot of money into research and development for floating extensions of their cities. The Netherlands already does this. The technology to build floating cities is being developed regardless of Seasteading. I'm just...
"Right now we've been living in a society of debt on debt on debt on debt. This is something that cannot be sustained. The current financial system as it is currently constructed, cannot survive in the long term on this type of methodology. So there needs to be a shift and a move to a new type of system for any type...
"I realised I wasn't making a living, I was making an existence. I was existing, but I wasn't living. That's why I called my book 'Choose Life'. Because of the transformation that happened to us afterwards."
"We're not inventing anything here. These are all things that we walked around the world, here and there, and observed, and they are very doable, and they work in many places. We're just trying to reintroduce them in a packaged way to new places because that's very different from what the current norm is."
"No one person knows how to make a pencil. No one person has the resources to make a pencil. You need the chainsaws and the fuel and the mining for the metals to make the chainsaws. It turns out that to actually feed yourself, you don't need all those different people. All you need is a little bit of grass and a la...
"Most people didn't care, don't care, and will not care about freedom, and this is a fact. So, freedom-minded people were, are, and will always be a minority. And this is really important because when you realise this, you stop trying to change the global society by voting or by trying to make political changes, bec...
"Montelibero seems like a great, great place to be with great people to have around. And I think it's a combination of those two factors. First, you have your own place to come back to, and then you have people to spend time with, which is also very important while you travel. On the road, you meet lots of random pe...
"When you go to Madeira, things tend to happen to you. I've seen this happen. I've seen the light go on in people's eyes when they arrive. They're like, 'Yeah, I want to live here'. I've seen that many times. I haven't seen that anywhere else . "
"Showing the bottom up potential of Free Cities is tremendous. I think of the brilliant Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto who talks about dead capital and how there's knowledge distributed throughout the world. There are geniuses living in poor countries all over the world, but oftentimes they're not able to real...
"A dystopia always has a different side: a utopian one. The question is, is it possible to have a Bitcoin utopia while the world is dystopian? So that's a challenge to Bitcoiners. And I think it's a great challenge. It challenges you to think about what hyperbitcoinization may mean and what it looks like ."
"I'm not here to be a teacher. I'm not here to be the super technical PhD guy. I'm here to tell stories that people think 'That was fun to listen to. And by the way, I can remember that story and tell it to everyone again because it was a fun story.. and that has convinced me ."
"In Europe you have people who want to break up big companies because they're saying big is bad and that we need more competition and anti-trust enforcement is so important because we need competition. But then the same people say, when it comes to governments, big is great, no competition & global minimum tax. You...
"Historical examples are very important because if you come up with a new idea that has never been tried and tested in what I call the market of living together, then there's a high probability that it will not work otherwise it would have already existed in some form or another. "
"There are long-term debt cycles, which are 75 to 100 years. These are often correlated to the rise and fall of the global reserve currency a nd right now, it seems like we are at this turning point."
"It's inevitable that if you have a legislative body, then over time the number of laws will increase, the taxes will increase, indebtedness will increase and the number of people who are not productive will increase. That is in my view, absolutely inevitable. So you have to change the system... And I have made a p...
"Developing the technologies that would let people live in space habitats.. it's not trivial, but it's a whole lot easier than colonising a planet when you've got to get down and up. If we could get to the planet for free. I mean, if we had cheap transportation, if you had teleportation or something, then colonisin...
"I love starting from a positive approach and instead of asking myself 'How can I fight these governments?' as, unfortunately, many people still tend to do in the Free Cities space. The question I'm asking is 'How can those Free Cities actually contribute to the development of the host country.' "
"I wrote an article trying to apply John Locke's principles of property to something like Mars. His basic principle is that if you mix your labour with a natural resource then you own the result. It's the same moral principle that Ayn Rand identified that you have a right to the product of your productive effort. S...
"The fight for freedom is a constant struggle everywhere. In the long run, it's not as easy as just 'freedom-loving people will move to one jurisdiction and then that place will stay free forever'. That's not how it works."
"This is one of the things that we are proud of: We built a road under anarcho-capitalsm. Who's going to build the roads? We are going to build the roads! This is the living proof that the system works. We, libertarians, are responsible for our own land."
"I think that sometimes utopias are good. There were also socialist and communist utopias and I don't think that they were used for a good purpose. Actually, many people were killed because of these utopias, but I never heard about someone killed because of a libertarian utopia."
"There is something that you always have to keep in mind. If you bet on the end of the world, you can only be right once. Really... the odds are against you."
"I felt very hopeful for my region that we could get this off the ground, because the reality is that reforming these countries in Central America and other places is just so hard and the incentives are so misaligned, so completely misaligned. My perspective after trying to reform in country is that you have to find...
"I believe that the ability to vote with your feet is true democracy. When you can relocate easily and decide what system, what jurisdiction works for you best."
"You are no longer dependent on elites to tell you what you're allowed to think and we should always be optimistic about that. I think, in a lot of ways, the insane censorship and this whole apparatus that's designed to keep us from speaking our minds is a reaction to the fact that we're winning the conversation jus...
" When I'm asked what will be happening with the Free Cities concept in the future, I would say that the most important thing is that the internet is shaping and changing the various known feelings such as belonging, such as origin, such as who I am, what am I for?... for most youngsters around the world... and over...
"This is one thing that the state is very successful at. It has managed to make people feel good about their own complacency. "
"We can succeed in this world. This is not a vale of tears. Life is not suffering, as Jordan Peterson would put it. We can succeed and our happiness is possible. And not only is it possible, it's good... that your life is your highest value, your own life."
"I think that the best can be the enemy of the good & the better , and sometimes we should be careful about saying that we have this vision of this fabulous idea, and overlook opportunities for incremental improvements to what exists now."
"We consider art a way of thinking, like a communication protocol. So when you want to talk about change of mindset. When you want to open minds, which is necessary if you want to spread freedom, art is one of the great tools. We've proved that."
"That's the ideal. That's what I think would work best... if you could only vote with your feet instead of voting in a political democratic system."
"These are the Cypherpunk ideals... to use modern day technologies to define and establish the property rights of individuals in cyberspace. And to make sure that theft and surveillance are not possible anymore."
"I think that the main trait of unschooled kids is that they ask questions and they want to find out more, whereas in school they are told what to do. It's a totally different way of growing up."
"If you go to court today, it's usually a battle with one winner and one loser... But I would like to explain to people that that's not always necessary and that there are situations where you can both be better off."
"Every good story is ultimately libertarian in nature."
"One thing you are in control of is your attitude and your mind. You can always find a little bit of freedom there. That's really where liberty starts and ends."
"I am very well aware that the state isn't going anywhere in our lifetimes. It will be a gradual process where it will become more and more irrelevant. This is how I would like things to evolve".
"Do you have a Plan B? Do you have a separate form of money? Can you move?... Are you building networks of security & trust?"
" For us the ultimate mission is to empower individuals. Bitcoin and Bitcoin education is a tool to make that happen... But the end goal is to create individuals that have self-sovereignty, that have personal responsibility and that have agency in their own lives "
"I am a firm believer that Próspera will change Honduras. Honestly, we have suffered so much. So many governments have hurt us. I think that Próspera is the solution."
"What I want is experimentation. I don't think that anyone has discovered some kind of optimal method of governing a specific area. I don't think anyone has found that yet. So what I want is... 'Let a thousand flowers bloom'..."
"More and more people are interested and I think that COVID accelerated this and made people think about: 'OK, should I live where I live right now?... Or do I want to live in this place with this governance model?'"
"It's good freedom, for sovereignty, for democracy to not have all the power concentrated in the national government. [...] There's an understanding of sovereignty that's really the core in this whole issue. I think sovereignty resides in the people and I think it should be very well distributed through various inst...
"I realized they would rather let us be homeless and begging on the street than not do what we are told. And to me that was so wrong and so evil that I was like, if they can do that, they wouldn't have any issues taking our kids away if they decided we were unfit to parent them based on whatever they decided."
"2020 was that year when basicly I was doing my research and thinking, OK, I need my escape plan. I need a way to get out of here."
"You make it a community issue, and you assign the responsibility to a particular entity. You don't just leave it in the hands of the central government. You leave it in the hands of a local organization that everybody knows each other, so if you're not doing things right, you're going to be ashamed."
"So my revenue is dependent on your success and your success depends on my regulation. So I want to make sure that I have the best regulation and the best regulatory environment possible for your business to be successful."
"We think that for historical reasons the world has converged on a small number of governance models and we think the world would be better if people could choose the kind of governance model they live under and not be limited by the range of choices that are available today."
