u/timothyphoto

I interviewed Gonçalo Hall this week (Madeira Nomad Village, NomadX). He's now building in the extremely experimental Charter City of Prospera in Honduras.

His argument: if you build something good enough to attract a digital nomad, you've built something good enough for 90% of people, but the destinations that chase nomads as the end customer get it backwards. Canggu worked because nomads built for nomads, and everyone else followed.

I suppose what I'm asking is are digi nomads always paving the way for everyone else, or are there nomad hotspots that will always stay unique? Is it all just a process of developement? I'll be interviewing him again in a few months time and want to know how to develop the conversation further. Cheers.

Full conversation if anyone wants it: https://youtu.be/FbCybLt2AtE

New episode of the Free Cities Podcast (I'm the host). I went to Austin and got Poly across a table in person for a proper deep dive into the Web 5 / Lab 484 stuff.

The tech stuff:

• Hosting sites on your node and using the blockchain as a DNS replacement
• Running the whole thing on an Umbrel or Start9 box with a private self-hosted AI alongside it
• Off-grid spending with Fedimint and Cashu, and nodes relaying data for e-cash fees
• Mesh fallback over radio, Meshtastic and Ubiquiti when the ISPs are down

I love the idea (I can't think of a better alternative either) but i'm sceptical throughout the convo because I think it will be a Herculean task to get the public to use this. Am I too pessimistic?

Full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdKHpUS1cAs

We spend most of our time here on law, land, governance and funding. A guest on my podcast this week argued the binding constraint is far more boring: getting actual people to move in and stay, and that families are the key to critical mass, not lone founders and nomads.

Do you buy that people are the real bottleneck? And if so, why is almost nobody building specifically for families rather than solo operators?

You can listen to the full ep here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXHkRh3QSIo

I recently interviewed political scientist Eric Kaufmann about immigration, identity, Britishness, and the argument he makes in Whiteshift and Taboo.

Full disclosure: this is my own interview.

The bit I still grapple with is the discussion around “white culture”. Eric argues that demographic change, group attachment, and majority identity are real political forces and cannot simply be wished away. I’m still not convinced by the white culture framing. My instinct is still that Britishness should be about culture, not colour.

So my question for this sub is:

In modern Britain, is national identity mainly cultural and civic, or does ancestry still matter politically whether people admit it or not?

Episode link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClK0ZAZ_NjQ

I had a long conversation with Liam Bates of the Principality of Sealand, grandson of Paddy Roy Bates and one of the current custodians along with his brother James.

Here's what we got into that might be new even to people who know the lore well:

• His first-hand account of the 1978 coup: the German-led consortium luring his grandparents to Austria to "sign a deal," the helicopter assault on the platform, his father being held and starved, then the counter-assault, doors off the helicopter, flown in by a James Bond stunt pilot, to retake it.
• The aftermath most people don't know: they held one of the attackers (who held a Sealand passport) prisoner for treason for three months in the cell at the base of the North Tower, and Germany sent a diplomat directly to Sealand to negotiate his release.
• The earlier legal case after his father fired on a British naval vessel, and the judge finding the UK had no jurisdiction.
• The eCitizenship and DAO plans: ~1.5 million followers, e-citizens in 124 countries paying monthly, and where they want to take governance next.
• The genuinely ambitious bit: working with a Dutch marine engineer on new towers and reclaiming land to grow Sealand into a permanent physical island community, not just maintain the fort.

It's very much a primary source, his lived experience growing up going out there from age three or four, learning to fire a shotgun at five, the realities of the place rather than the myth.

What do people here think of the reclaim-land expansion plan? Genuinely ambitious or a step too far from what makes Sealand, Sealand?

You can see the full interview here: https://fountain.fm/episode/wx2mWplRLVACJdGBJGrE

I host a podcast on special jurisdictions and recently sat down with Niklas Anzinger, who runs Infinita VC and Infinita City in Próspera, the Honduran jurisdiction with regulatory autonomy. A lot of the conversation is governance, but the core of it is directly relevant to clinical translation and the regulatory bottleneck, so I thought it might interest people here.

The main argument he makes:

• Próspera's realistic niche is phase 1 trials, healthy-volunteer studies that cost $5-10M in the US but can reportedly be run for a few hundred thousand there, with a relatively low infrastructure build-out. The pitch is not doing exotic science, but compressing the cost and timeline of getting already-de-risked candidates into first-in-human data.
• He's spending most of his time now in Montana and New Hampshire, where new Right to Try laws create a pathway for patients to access treatments that have cleared phase 1. The model uses state-authorised private certifiers (closer to the Dubai accreditation model than a full regulatory monopoly), sitting under the state Department of Health.
• The underlying regulatory mechanism is an insurance-based model (he credits Robin Hanson): rather than one central approver, a statutory requirement for liability insurance, with private regulators competing on the quality of their review.
• He also discusses China going from roughly 0% to 30% of global pharma licensing deals in a decade, largely by streamlining the bureaucratic (not the safety) side, and the US looking at Australia-style reform in response.

He's fairly candid that this is about commercialization and access speed, not novel science, and that the credibility of the review process is the thing that has to hold up when an adverse event eventually happens.

Curious what people here think of the private-certifier approach specifically. Does a competitive market of state-authorised reviewers plus mandatory liability insurance actually produce rigorous review, or does it risk a race to the bottom compared to a single federal gatekeeper?

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkfN8o-GN7c

Long story short, I was a young photographer, travelled the northeast frontier states for six months with no tourist infrastructure and no real plan. Nagaland was the one everyone said don't go, "it's dangerous". Obviously that made me want to go more.

I ended up living with families, trekking through Konyak territory, collecting Angami shawls, and just falling completely in love with the place. I've barely met anyone who's even heard of it since.

Fast forward to last year. I'm interviewing a guy at the Free Cities Conference in Prague and he mentions he's from Nagaland. His mother is Angami. I nearly fell off my chair.

We ended up spending about 40 minutes just going back and forth, the tribes, the missionaries, the matrilineal culture over in Meghalaya, walking into Myanmar, the hornbill festival, why the place never quite gets the attention it deserves.

It's episode 168 of my podcast, the Free Cities Podcast. The rest of the conversation is about governance and technology which is our normal territory, but if you're from Nagaland or have any connection to the northeast states I think you'll enjoy the first half especially.

Happy to answer any questions about my time there, it was one of the most formative experiences of my life.

VIDEO starts at Nagaland discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzfUUAQiil8&t=565s

Disclosure: I work on the Free Cities Podcast and we just put this out. Posting because there's actual substance on the next phase here — not just a retread of the 60 Minutes documentary. Some of what Liam goes into:

Physical plans

- Two new towers, designed by **Koen Olthuis at Waterstudio.NL** (Dutch firm, the floating-architecture people). Piled into the sandbank, with the old structure preserved inside the new build.

- Land reclamation to follow: sheet-pile a perimeter, backfill, expand into a proper island. Initial population target ~50 on the towers, then "sky's the limit."

- Funder outreach is now active — they're talking to people for the next phase.

Community / governance

- Sealand DAO in development, with e-citizens getting voting rights. They're studying the weighted-voting model Veritas Villages is building on Bitcoin to avoid voter fatigue.

- ~1.5M followers across social, thousands of paying e-citizens in 124 countries.

- Liam's read on most network-state projects: they only solve half the puzzle (sovereign claim *or* physical place). Sealand has both.

Operations today

- Two paid staff onboard at all times, one of them an old pirate-radio veteran from the family's earliest era.

- Starlink, wind, solar. Liam says he can spend 3 weeks at a stretch without cabin fever.

History retold in detail

- The 1978 German coup attempt: the consortium luring Roy and Joan to Austria, the helicopter raid, Michael being held in the room, the James Bond stunt pilot flying the retake, the captured Sealand passport-holder tried for treason and held in the North Tower jail for three months, and the German diplomat sent to Sealand to negotiate his release — which Liam frames as de facto diplomatic recognition.

- Legal status: when the UK extended territorial waters to 12nm, Sealand's prior claim was grandfathered in. Median line drawn between overlapping claims under international maritime norms.

- Declassified UK papers show a deliberate "wait for it to disappear" policy.

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh34hbK7Y1k

Happy to answer questions if anyone has them.