Fifty years ago, men were raising flags on seamounts in the Pacific and declaring their own countries. Mark Frazier knew them. He was a reporter on the ground when one of those breakaway nations collapsed. He has spent the half century since working on free zones in more than fifty countries, and he has watched almost every way these things can fail. The lesson he drew is the opposite of what most people in this space believe. You don't build a free place by pushing it on a government. You make it a prize that governments compete to win. He once had twelve countries bidding to host a single project. His take: The answer to capture and control is not to seize power but to make it pointless. In a world of real abundance, there is no scarcity left to fight over. I sat down with him for two hours. It is, as far as we can tell, the only long conversation with him that exists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boqCcAAHGLY #Nostr #FreeCities #Sovereignty #Bitcoin

Interested in the nomadic life? Here are 23 conversations to inspire your next move... https://www.freecities.fm/search?topic=podnomads

Joey Flores dropped out of school at 16. His CEO found out by accident, because nobody had ever read his CV. He now runs marketing at a company doing tens of millions. His point: the CV is dying. Applicant-tracking software filtered him out for years for having no degree, screened out before a human saw his name. So he stopped applying and started building things people could see. Now he hires the same way, the person who shipped something beats the person with the tidy résumé every time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr8YsUSiXYQ

The first country on the internet. Not a network state that amasses people online and hopes to manifest something physical later. An actual membership passport, a social safety net that follows you across borders instead of dying at them, mapped out to 2050. New epsiode with Joey Flores 👇 https://fountain.fm/episode/50oqpay64qsLYVIfatPT

The UK House of Lords just voted for a measure that would put age checks on VPNs. It will probably die in the Commons. But the fact that they voted for it at all is the tell. When I last sat down with , she called this. Her point: privacy tools only protect you when everyone uses them. The moment only the privacy-conscious reach for a VPN, you stop being hidden and start being flagged. You become the one person in the room with the curtains drawn. The state doesn't need to read what you're doing. It just needs to see that you're the type who hides. And the deeper point: privacy itself is being further reframed as suspicious. "What do you have to hide" becomes the whole argument. You forget why there's a door on the bathroom. You forget why you write in a private journal. Her answer: The ID checks are here. Now what? Encryption is how you put the doors and curtains back in a digital world. Bitcoin is how you keep the ability to transact when permission becomes the default. Full convo👇 https://fountain.fm/episode/vH5TROQYv6U5zGpX5jqL

"Being a tourist in a country is better than being a resident of a country." Episode 165 of the Free Cities Podcast is Rahim Taghizadegan, Austrian School economist, on why exit is more powerful than voice. > Why the Bitcoin citadel meme started as an insult and became a plan. > Why your house might be a liability wearing an asset costume. > Why intentional communities fail and contractual ones don't. > Introduction to citadel.garden, his network of quiet, family-oriented refuges: 25 houses per location, held through a Swiss structure backed by Bitcoin, deliberately not advertised. Insurance, not utopia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soAsJKORVEU

Fifty-one episodes about Bitcoin. That's one episode a week for almost a year, if you're feeling ambitious. Over three and a half years the Free Cities Podcast has been asking a different question: once you hold money the state can't debase, where do you actually live? What do you build? The archive now has its own page: On privacy: on the praxeology of privacy, on the architecture of freedom, @selfBankt on decentralised networks. On the state: on why democracy drifts toward totalitarianism, on digital authoritarianism, on CBDCs. On exit: on choosing a parallel life, on overlanding and self-sovereign identity, on the Bitcoin Free City he actually lives in. On the big picture: the sovereign individual thesis, on fiat as the biggest addiction of all, Polycarp Nakamoto on decentralised mesh networks. And on this protocol: on Nostr and anarchy, on liberating creators from the attention economy. Bitcoin fixes the money. These conversations are about what gets fixed next. All 51, one page: https://www.freecities.fm/search?topic=podbitcoin

Everyone needs a Plan B. New ep just dropped for subs. Everyone else, Friday. https://fountain.fm/episode/ODAgF0oMqNvApzRdOm7Q

At 70, Joyce Brand decided to do something with her life before it was over. At 71 she moved to farmland in the most dangerous part of Honduras to chronicle a Free City being built from nothing. That city is Ciudad Morazán: one owner, no politicians, rent instead of taxes, near-zero crime in a region famous for the opposite. New episode of the Free Cities Podcast, recorded in person in Próspera. Zap it, boost it, or just listen: https://fountain.fm/episode/TGKQl8lS1Ga2WqmoLDos