Conversations with Jeremy Kauffman, Joe Quirk and Rahim Taghizadegan examine how institutions shape human behaviour, and how people can build alternatives. Political philosophy meets the practical questions of ownership, consent and the freedom to leave.
"People simply don't believe that it's actually happening. That is the first challenge, that it's real and that it's actually happening. And it's better to be real and controversial than to not exist and be irrelevant."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
“Politics is overrated, generally.”
" 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. "
"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 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."
"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...
"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."
" 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...
"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."
"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...
"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 . "
