TRASHFUTURE - Tropical Blockchain Night, Part 1 of 2 feat. Ian MacDougall

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

We bring on journalist Ian MacDougall to discuss the libertarian intentional-community of Prospera, a failing city-state in the Bay Islands of Honduras, where Thiel- and Andreessen-funded weirdos have tried to create a land where anyone can open a business with any law, from any jurisdiction, anywhere, adjudicated by some guys in Arizona. We’re not making this up. Read Ian’s article here! https://restofworld.org/2021/honduran-islanders-push-back-libertarian-startup/ Part 2 is already available on the Patreon! Get it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/71224587?pr=true If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-additional-show-tickets-396915263237 and Canberra: https://au.patronbase.com/_StreetTheatre/Productions/TFLP/Performances *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, Trash Future listeners. Please enjoy this part one of a two-part series on the topic of the Libertarian Blockchain Paradise Island of Prospera. Part two is already available on the Patreon. So if you want to hear the second part and find this topic interesting, there's a link in the show notes. It's available. Once again, thank you for being Trash Future listeners, and I hope you enjoy. Hello, everyone, and welcome to part one of a very special two-part episode of TF. It is me. This half is the free one. Yes, thank you. It's TF Investigates. We're all putting on big overcoats and fedoras, and we're all sort of like nosing around with big magnifying glasses. It's a BBC World Service theme song, but also like a beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, in the background.

I'm stroking my cat and saying, like, this is the last time, one last one. So there we go. Yeah, this is my one last one. Perfect. Well, yeah, it's not Hussein's one last one, unless he has something to tell us. It is TF. It's a two-parter. I've done the thing where I got obsessed with something and then made a two-part investigation out of it. So I did the only thing that it's reasonable to do when I do something like that. Use the escape valve for your special interest, which is what this podcast is. When you're at that point, like, you even got to make a two-part podcast series, or you sort of tell a girl randomly at a festival and then become a viral sensation. And what I have done is I have gotten Ian McDougal, a journalist, who has written on this particular subject to come on and hang out with us today. Ian, how's it going? It's good. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, so the subject today, this thing that has burrowed its way into my brain, is called Prospera. And it is, in short, the first, I think, libertarian intentional community of the, like, eco-modernism type that's adopted Bitcoin as a real currency to actually have people that live in it and some buildings. And it is completely fucking insane. Prospera sounds like the girl who bullied you at Cheltenham Ladies College. The guy which, yeah. And Ian, you've actually written on Prospera for the magazine Rest of World. How would you describe it to a new person? Sure, yeah. And when I was there, which is now, gosh, more than a year and a half ago, I guess, you know, it's really, it's on an island just north of the mainland Honduras called Roatan, which is famous for its scuba diving and it's a big tourist destination.

And it's like a little part of sort of in the middle of that island, this, I forget exactly how many acres. I think right now it's something like 60 acres of land. And all that was on it when I was there. And I think still, although they, I know they have new construction plans, was basically a sort of main, you know, kind of co-working space office building and then a few sort of housing units, these modular housing units. Would it be fair to describe it as a compound? Yeah, so it is in the sense that, yeah, they have an armed guard at the entrance. Incredible start, fantastic. Yeah, this is private security company called something like Bulldog International or something.

It's funny when we, the fixer I was with, and I went there with one of the founders, you know, the guard made the show, having him show him his ID and everything. He was there all the time. It seemed like a whole, you know, I'm not sure what they were trying to demonstrate exactly, but no one gets favorable treatment. Our libertarian community, we are checking IDs, unlike every other libertarian community in the world. It seems like it's the property rights thing. I could write to exclude people from here. We're checking ID, but only for ID. We're not looking at the age section. So it's this, it's this town that's sort of, it's this thing that's supposed to be a town. It has had these massive ambitions on the island, as you say, of Roatan. It actually calls itself a governance platform, and it has had, at this point, hundreds of millions of dollars invested into what is essentially a co-working space with some like small houses around it on 60 years.

In a really inconvenient location. It's one of the worlds most inconvenient locations. Just as a joke, we took hundreds of millions of dollars worth of money to put a wee work at the geographic North Pole. Yeah, it's almost as uncommutable for Central London as parts of South London. Yeah, it's technically in zone two. It's like a weird aberration. Well, I mean, technically, if I'm not mistaken, the Bay Islands were all part of what was British Honduras. So yeah, it technically is zone two. The nearest tube is tooting back, but it's a hell of a bust of the tube. So this oddly enough, Nate, what you said, that's actually a thing that they say is a big benefit to them for their like, because I've read all of their investor packs, right?

So they say, unlike the rest of Honduras, Roatan was British and therefore is safe and everyone speaks English. Oh, wow. Okay. I was wondering how long it would be until we got there. Yeah, right away. Yeah, I'm not going to do a potted history of that part of Central America, but I used to live in Honduras. And yeah, I mean, like, okay, Roatan, the Bay Islands are safer compared to like La Seva or Tegucigalfa or San Pedro Sula, which are incredibly dangerous cities. But like, yeah, it's tourist destination, but I think there's pretty common like what you're describing Ian of having armed guards. I haven't been to the Bay Islands, but I've been to similar areas and like everything that caters to foreign tourists has armed guards if I'm not mistaken. So in a way, yeah, go ahead, please.

You know, it is fairly, I don't know exactly what the crime reserve in them are much, much, much lower than on the mainland. Yeah, certainly then. But, you know, never it didn't feel unsafe in any way really. There were, you know, they did have sort of a lot of armed guards and stuff at various the sort of tourist hubs. I was staying kind of a bit out of the way. And then sort of like a they have these kind of like just like a hotel resort kind of thing, but it's just like cabins in the woods. It wasn't I don't think it's not too fancy, but they didn't have any kind of security there and didn't seem like they had a couple of dogs that hung around. But it did feel like a pretty safe place.

And it does it is most people I think it's actually easier to get around there in English than in Spanish weirdly. It's a very kind of peculiar place. I'm sure I'm wildly different and pretty pretty much every respect from the mainland is my sense. But so what we ask is what does Prospera say about itself? So this is from their website. They say we are enabling sustainable and profitable growth in partnership with local communities. Remember that in partnership with local communities for what comes next. They say Prospera partners with governments like Honduras to promote and operate economic development hubs which are called zones for economic development and employment or Zeds.

This is going to be big later. These hubs are integrated with local communities quote unquote unquote unquote and have semi autonomous governments and regulation guaranteed by the Constitution. You essentially have a sort of like reddit enclave and outside your town where you can drive in so you can get your ID checks and then you can walk amongst the redditors. The reddit enclave emits the white smoke and then you know that they've picked a new epic fake. No, it's a reddit conclave. Oh right. The reddit enclave is like the handsiatic league kind of thing where it's like subject to only its own laws. They say Prospera enables entrepreneurs to solve problems structurally and responsibly for the rest of the world because its governance institutions have been developed by and for local and global entrepreneurs and business people to institute key checks on governmental power.

The Prospera platform. The thing is this isn't that different from the way let's say relatively comparatively normal people talk about a special economic zone right. It's going to be this area where we can do entrepreneurship and have slightly less regulation and therefore be more efficient like people talked about Shenzhen that way at times. So what makes this worse because I know it's going to be something because it had to have been to make you like this about it. Oh boy, where to start. So like especially economic zones not good but it is a recognized kind of bad and this has to be like transformative kind of bad. So basically right here's how it works sort of in a nutshell as I understand it and I invite you to correct me if I'm wrong at any point. But the there is this zone right and it was created after a coup against the Manuel Zelaya in 2009 at which point this guy Pepe Lobo comes to power starts disappearing journalists outlawing the morning after pill appearing in the Panama Papers.

Just normal stuff. Before being praised by Barack Obama for bringing truth and reconciliation to Honduras after ousting who someone who I believe was not even really that far left. I sound familiar to like anywhere in the history of Central America. Everyone padded themselves on the back when Zelaya was removed because according to the Honduran Constitution which you obviously like is you know a plantation economy Constitution. He had violated the rules by trying to convene a constituent assembly to potentially consider rewriting it and everyone padded themselves in the back and like oh wow rule of law like order and democracy in Latin America. And then the Honduran military burst into the presidential palace and forced him at gunpoint onto a plane to Costa Rica and they were like oh whoops. Maybe we spoke too soon and that that the country went up in flames it was it was incredibly destabilized for a while. And then yeah Lobo took over and I don't.

I've lost touch with a lot of under and politics since then but that was the big thing about it was when we he leaks happened when all the cables got released like everyone knew that what had happened the coup was completely illegal. But yeah Washington was just sort of like all right play along. It's cool. Like we're we're like whatever you know like a little too much like Chavez even though it doesn't look like I'm at all so we're fine. And yeah Honduras. I'll stop now but basically like the problems Honduras was having with its internal stability and specifically with regards to drug trafficking got way way worse during that period of instability and they never really recovered. And now it's like yeah go ahead please. Well what's going to happen fortunately is that all that instability is going to be fixed by the implementation of what Pepe Lobo did more or less right away.

I think it's cool how both here and in Venezuela and in many other places in Central and South America you literally have the I can't be the only one who thinks that if the troops got together put a team together they could dominate the NFL but for drug trafficking. I can't be the only one who thinks the military this country couldn't like absolutely blow the cartels out of the water in terms of like drug trafficking efficiency. So before getting involved in all of that what happened was he came up where he basically like watched a Ted talk by Paul Romer and then get very gets very interested in this idea of charter cities tries to pass it with the Supreme Court that he inherited from Zalaya. They say no you can't just give away bits of the country because you think it would be good for the economy. I remember charter cities charter cities. The idea was Paul Romer he's like a Nobel Laureate in economics right and very smart about how the Nobel Prize in economics isn't real but it's not it's genuinely not it's it's passing itself off as a Nobel Prize anyway. Yeah so so his deal with with charter cities was what if we just did like the Shanghai Bund or what if we did any kind of other colonial enclave and we had a more developed country operator part of a less developed country in order to do entrepreneurship there. My understanding is it's essentially Paul Romer came up with the idea of what if instead of us making an excuse that imperialism is about the trains we actually tried to make it about the trains making him one of the world's biggest marks in idiots.

Yeah there's one time we'll do it for real. Yeah let's get back banned back together and make some trains. Now this is declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court to just give bits away at the country. So he does whatever any good you know Latin American right wing strong man does and replaces the Supreme Court with his friends who immediately say it's good. So Romer and a bunch of liberal worthies all get together in a transparency commission when they cook up the idea. After them some hither and dither. Romer and all the worthies resign when they find out that the right wing strong man sort of dictator of Honduras doesn't want to actually get Germany's like rail minister to come in and you know build a bunch of train tracks on the island of Roatan. That's a good reason for this it's because if you if you have if you want a model for like giving away parts of your country to outside investors for entrepreneurship that is sort of like time tested and proven in Latin America.

It's already there as you just do that business with corporations anyway. So instead of like a state instead of doing it with like I don't know some bunch of Christian Democrats from Baden-Württemberg or whatever you just get you know some company that like sells fruits or whatever. Yeah so basically and then so I'll turn back to Ian for this one right. A new oversight body called the committee for the adoption of best practices or camp is established. Now Ian can you tell me a little bit about what camp is. It's a committee. Sure. Yeah.

Camp was I think supposed to be kind of like you know these these Zedes the the zones are like prosper as one of you know they were supposed to be kind of semi autonomous but camp was essentially the the connection to the government which I think was sort of in response to the initial invalidation of the Zedie law by the Supreme Court before it was you know the certain set of justices were removed and others were put in place. And so basically what they do is you know when a Zedie like Prospero wants to or what they're supposed to do wants to you know create a new regulation or law or something like that they have to get the approval of camp. So it's sort of you know government body. Although you know it was not exactly responsive to the people that that way is you know very much handpicked by by I guess I actually don't know if it was initially by Lobo and then whether his successor kept the same I can't remember exactly but but they were basically supposed to be the sort of entity that ensures that what these cities are doing isn't like totally illegal under Honduran constitutional law or isn't you know isn't a problem in some other way. I don't I don't think they've I think that you know for the people at Prospero told me that there was actually some genuine back and forth about some stuff but I you know I don't have a sense that they are a particularly hands on you know regulator. Sort of a ground rules thing you can't make the the mercenary island from Far Cry 3 real you can't try and like build you know experimental super weapons or whatever.

No bombing in the well well you would you would think that God's God's I hate when I this is the worst subject about which I've ever done this thing that I always do right jokingly refer to a terrible thing and you go forget that. So basically so we have this this thing established camp and then you know Romer says I can't believe you're giving it to a corporation I'm storming off essentially and then this the law then passes is then is then sort of upheld by the next president. Hernandez who's again campaigned heavily on the benefits of these days also is like directly implicated in drug trafficking and he's been indicted for it and he's been extradited to us. Exactly he is he's been a crime to hustle is it a crime to hustle and have a grind set and is it a crime I ask you to hustle large amounts of cocaine into the United States of America. Not if you're the CIA. That's true. And so what happened was on and then in 2017 this the first date Zayde which become prosper was authorized by by the camp. So then it was authorized in such a way as to be owned by this private company called Prosper Honduras Inc.

So you go from this thing that Paul Romer has this idea for a charter city where this is what he says about it. He says it's the essence of the idea is the notion of a startup city you have a chance to start a city a new. And I think what's unusual about a startup city is that you can propose something new without having to go through a long process of consultation and agreement among people who might be affected by a change. The startup city you can propose something entirely new and let people choose where they want to live under its rules. Yeah you can just build any mad thing with your investors money and then see if anyone wants to live there and if people don't like it they can just leave right. It's in that sense it's sort of like a variation on like Terra Nullius right. You can just do whatever you want not because there's no one there but because as informed consumers the people who are already in the place where you want to do the thing they can just move. Great thing about the charter cities is that there's a big door and if you don't like it.

That's right. And so if you don't if you don't like Prosper you can always move to another normal city like Neon for example. So it goes from this like Paul Romer idea to the ideas more aligned with German weirdo Titus Gebel. There's always a German guy I think every time we do one of these there's always a German guy somewhere. I love the low budget German remake of the HBO series Rome featuring Titus Gebel. So one of the chief architects of the Prosper legal system talked about how no really what this is all about is the private ownership of literally anything but also enough political power that and I'm quoting him here that we can reserve the right not to admit for example criminals communists or Islamists. Were there a lot of Islamists in Honduras? Maybe who can say you know sort of a sort of like you know prayer mats at the border kind of hysteria.

Absolutely. We were worried about that. That one crazy. Sicario three was going to happen to our beautiful island. So you might be wondering who sits on this on the committee for the adoption of best practices. I mean a bunch of guys with names. So they're they're appointed by the government Salvador Himmler again Milo. You're not far off.

Well they promised they would gain some German experts. I guess they weren't lying in the end. Experts in what time. Who's on the committee for the adoption of best practices who are just these like figurative arrest not real aristocrats they're figurative aristocrats because they just reapp they can just reappoint themselves and the list was only made public one time in a presentation towards the beginning of the Z. So again this is the pretend aristocracy of the camp. These people who are basically there to say adjudicate on any rules that the zone creates. Number one Archduchess Gabriella von Habsburg who's an abstract sculptor in the ambassador of Georgia to Germany and also a member of Liberty Road show. Number two Grover Norquist.

I mean I appreciate the fact that the Bay Islands will have a strong pro vapor influence. They do. I mean you know what we need to move on. It can't be an extractive economy. It can't be a tourist economy. It needs to be a vaping economy and who better to do that than Grover Norquist. Well Michael I am Ronald Reagan son Reagan. Great.

Dr. Barbara Colm the wife of Matthew Elliott from Vote Leave but one of the free market roadshow and taxpayer alliance people. Great. A post Soviet Georgian businessman who from 2004 to eight was the Minister of Coordination for Economic Reforms and declared that he was trying to sell everything in Georgia but its conscience and his goal he said was to close down his own ministry and demolish the state. Amazing. Morton Blackwell a special assistant to Ronald Reagan who was involved in the swift boating of John Kerry in 2004. Lars Sire Christensen the founder of Saxo Bank in a Danish tycoon Alejandro Shelfen. The Saxo Bank did. One of the world's leading commentators in the economic thought of Thomistic and late scholastic thinkers and a member of the advisory board of the social affairs unit in the UK and a member of the Montbelloran society.

I'm being like stun locked here I'm just like absorbing a series of blows. Yeah I feel like a lot of these guys are sort of people who really wanted to be in the Epstein Black Book but didn't quite get there. So they sort of have the characters and they have the outlines but like they're missing something and perhaps this is like the alternative to like the Epstein Island. Imagine getting black bald from being a nonce. Let me ask you this question. Were these people just brought on because of the sort of like a you know I'll be the board member of whatever if you pay me enough money kind of thing or do you feel like there this was this ideological hodgepodge of people all really intensely agreed on this one idea and actually like cared a lot about it because like the idea of Grover Norquist in a Habsburg and some vote leave freaks from the UK like you feel as though that's a hell of a joke. They're like a paper that's like a paper board kind of thing.

That would be my best guess. Grover why do we need this 500 square foot vaping. And then Grover Norquist says to the horse. I'd like to know what Ian thinks of this as well but my sense is that everyone involved in this is ready to lose a lot of time and money. They just want to be right and they're really dedicated to the idea of trying to make a pretty stateless society. What do you think Ian? Yeah I think that's right. I mean I think a lot of the people who have been drawn to this both looking at the list for camp and I don't know how many of these people are still actively involved.

But looking at that initial list and then the kinds of people who are actually trying to you know build these ideas like the Prospero folks. I mean they're all people who I think wish it were you know 1980 and not sort of the end of that sort of neoliberal economic libertarian era. And I think they kind of see that that you know that moment is starting to fade or at least change into something else in Europe and the U.S. And so I think there's I mean there's always been this kind of look abroad in a sort of the neocolonial aspect of this. But I think there's now this sense that like you know if our project has a future it's perhaps on you know some you know foreign soil of some kind. The sea. I also think for a sea step. They're involved too.

Yep. But I also I also find it very I guess telling in a way that they found a client government but they also found a location where it like they wouldn't be doing this in like the Atlantic coast parts of Nicaragua. They wouldn't be doing this in like the Mosquito Coast. They wouldn't be doing this like in like Gracia Cedillo's. In Honduras for a variety of reasons but there is something to me where like when you mentioned that the reading your article that there was effectively a co-working space is sort of like the the metropole of this society. The thought crossed my mind like yeah but there are like ecotourist backpackers people like that who go to to Rotan and it feels like there's an element of. I don't know that it kind of makes sense why you have a government as unstable and corrupt as Honduras is but then you also have a place that's sort of got like a kind of tourist appeal to it that you can maybe get global people to go there. Whereas I can't imagine that like if you did this in Blue Fields Nicaragua that like people would just be you know just beating down the door to get a chance to go get out there.

I'm just imagining like you know a sort of intrepid explorer discovering the ruins of Prosper in like a thousand years. It's all like overgrown with vines and just going like we believe that this table was a focal point of their society. Here they played the now lost game which we believe was called Pong Ping. Yeah the loser of Pong Ping is like richly sacrificed. There are a few more fun members of the camp. One is a Peruvian economist and another Mont Pelerin Society member called Enrique Garcia who wrote a book called The Other Path the Economic Answer to Terrorism with Hanando De Soto. The incredible path. They're completely non shiny.

There is also it was led by a Honduran at the time named Mark Klugeman. Very very very Honduran surname right there. My grandfather came over from Switzerland. Richard Rahn who another member of the Mont Pelerin Society and also Peggy Noonan's ex-husband. And the Mont Pelerin Society in itself is already like a big club for nerds to jack each other off about markets. It still exists. I didn't realize that it was like still a thing. I think so.

I thought it was just like a moment in the early to mid 20th century. I mean look it's it's it's like the velvet underground. You know everyone. No one joined the Mont Pelerin Society but everyone who is in it founded an ill sort of ill fated intentional community. Then there's Mark Scousen who's I include only because he was inspired to get into right wing economics by his uncle prominent John Berger named Cleon Scousen. Just you just dug out all of the names in this story. I'm front loading the names. And the last one is Lauren A Smith who you may know as Nixon's defense attorney after Watergate.

Just a perfect a perfect cabal of weirdos. Yeah. Fantastic. And so basically right how it works in a nutshell is as we said there's this zone that's picked by the Honduran government that accompanies zone of alienation. You can hire a stalker to take you in there and pursuit of your own dreams. Well if your dreams are to open a Bitcoin education center then yes you can do that. And who's wouldn't be. Yeah.

So how it works in a nutshell as I understand it is that there's this area administered by the Honduran government as like sort of outside of Honduras and not a criminal sense but in like civil law sense. And a private company comes in and administers basically a set of contracts. You sign a contract to learn prosper that's sort of like an NAP. And then you can invest in the private company and then they have a tax that they pay to pay off their private investors. And so you if you want to be a resident of Prospera you have to pay two hundred and sixty dollars a year if you're Honduran or thirteen hundred dollars if you're not become a resident. And so all already you might say huh. And it's not in Roatan where the annual or the cost of monthly cost of living for a family of three. Everything is about eight hundred dollars.

That does seem like something of a substantial expense. Yeah. If like a significant amount of your money is like going on your citizenship fees for this libertarian community. And then and so that that's that's sort of the situation right. But then they've made thirty million of money funding in their first round from Prono most capital more on them later. And then they expect to make the rest of the thirty million when they inevitably make the land around Prospera to be incredibly valuable. And yes of course there was a land value tax because the specter of Georgism is never far away from a crazy idea for a new city. Although of course you know we should we should point out that like most libertarian projects you know the charges to live there sound expensive but they do operate a kids go free policy.

It's actually cheaper than it sounds. The thing is all of this land is like economically worthless being as it is merely beautiful island. You know what it needs instead is Bitcoin farms. Yeah. And so you know we could ask right like who who actually like lives there and how does it work. Right. As far as I can tell right and you know you've actually been there and so you sort of probably know a little bit better. But I've seen estimates that like about thirty Hondurans and then the Prospera employees themselves live there.

Does that seem about right to you. So that sounds like that sounds right for sort of the number of people who seem to be kind of working there. But unless they and they may have built a lot more housing since I was there but there certainly wasn't enough housing at the time. Unless they converted part of that main building into you know apartments or something which I can't imagine is possible. I mean they had like four of these little modular houses which could you know plausibly I think you know house I guess four people or maybe a little bit more but not many when that and they may they may have built many more. I mean they're nice and they weren't bad but they're not very big. And so yeah I it's possible they built a lot more but it certainly when I was there there was not the you know just living space for them and people to live there to work there. Sure.

Sort of a handful of people. When this was when this was initially created Ian was this just like agricultural land or sort of like you know common common land that people lived on or was it like unoccupied and the people who wound up living there were drawn to it because of the job opportunities or things along those lines. Yes it was more there's the ladder really so they they bought the land from a family that I guess I think was from Roa Tampa most of them had moved to the U.S. At this point and they just had this you know that I think they had been sort of a fairly you know large landholder on the island and one of their like nephews or something works works with them now but yeah they sold they they sold this chunk of land to them and then there really wasn't anything there's you know kind of like a sort of leafy hillside heading down into the ocean but right next door to it essentially is there is a small sort of fishing village that isn't part of prosper but I'm sure we'll get to do later but but they they're not they're at least for what they've done so far they're not they're not lying or anything when they say they were just kind of on an unoccupied site there wasn't anyone looking there. Gotcha. Okay.

So I think we could so we sort of understand like the group of people who live in prosperous a small number of like Hondurans and they're like Americans who mostly work for prosper Honduras Inc. And then we could also ask right like okay well what kinds of like jobs are people actually doing there right so most of the people who work there work for a business called prosper employment solutions, which basically just acts as a kind of outsourcing provider for like educated quite ordinary remote jobs for American companies, but and they say they have about 1100 people registered to them, but if only 30 people live in Prospera, and anyone can work for this company. And really what that means is that a whole bunch of unless I get this wrong is that a whole bunch of Hondurans who live in Honduras are working for this company that's sort of not really in Honduras where you don't have a lot of rights as an employee in order to sell cheap, cheap overseas labor to American companies. So the roles that they have advertised are like a sales role the real estate company doing lease renewals, actuary work for insurance guy actually went on their job board and I picked some examples, actuary work for an insurance company that sells like car warranties, HR software company a remote personal assistant quite far away from what Prospera was really intended to be, which was this city without rules that was be the type that would I think in their words, revolutionized technology medicine and robotics, right. It's just quite ordinary.

So basically they were going to build neocolonial island Atlantis on the blockchain and instead they have a call center. That's what it would seem and what's very funny. Except without the call center part. You have the supervisory bit of the call center. It's a VPN node for the call center. The call center is in Tegucigalpha. That seems like more or less what it would be. So like, for example, one other thing I think is very funny.

You talk about the VPN node for the call center is that I have looked at brochure after brochure website after website. I've looked at so much prospering material and I've realized that they like they want to like take. There's so many pictures that they've taken of the one building from different angles to sort of lightly imply that there's more than one building, which is very amusing. This is this coworking space that mostly is worked in by people to work for Prospera, but there are a few companies got like six different sides. But there are a few companies that are sort of trying to set up there. And you cite this in the article, Ian, a gene therapy clinic called Mini Circle run by a man named Machiavelli Davis. I figured this out. I figured this out.

You know what this is? This is a hitman level. Like the armed guards, if they all have like the shared uniform, there's a bunch of like big sort of chests lying around. They're all on really fixed patrol routes. Yeah, no, this is what it is. 47. Your task is to eliminate the gene therapist. Machiavelli Davis. Come on.

And I'm surprised that he goes by Mac. Well, I sure hope I can trust my gene therapy doctor. Mac Davis. I really hope that isn't short for anything evil. Yeah, his hair was like covering part of his name tag on his lab coat. And you're just like, I wouldn't worry about that. And so like Mini Circle, what they do is they like, again, have like quite controversial gene therapies. They're like, look, the testing regimen in the US and the UK or whatever, it's too onerous.

They make you do too many trials. Some countries won't let you just inject billionaires with like child blood. And that's why you need a sort of a more entrepreneur friendly, regulatory environment. Here in Prospera, they're not even legally a child. There's a drone delivery company that again, like there's nothing to deliver or no one to deliver it to. There's a drone delivery company. Well, that's how drone delivery companies work best in my experience. Are you going to tell me it's like, yeah, the drone delivery company flies, you know, from Roatan to mainland Honduras.

Amazon, Amazon or sets deliveries is run by a guy named Klaus Witt Jones or something like that. There's a bank called Seshat Bank, which is annoyingly actually just trying to make a more effective bank. It seems I was, I was so excited to real business. Yeah, it's actually seems to be a real business. It's just very annoying. And then the most interesting run by Enron Bernie Mader, the most interesting one, which is called Pristine Bay Golf Club. And the owner, because what you can do with Prospera, right, is anyone who owns a business in Honduras can declare themselves to be part of Prospera. And so the owner joined his golf club to Prospera, which is nearby in a medieval sort of dynastic marriage.

He has saddled them with a golf course. Yeah, well, it's essentially, yeah, in a medieval sort of dynastic marriage. He has traded a golf course to a Habsburg for a permanent seat on the city council, which by the way, they are able to give him an exchange for his golf course joining the jurisdiction. Yeah, and I think it's like a hotel there too, right? It's like a little resort. I think it was like, yeah, when I was there, they hadn't bought it yet, but that place was struggling financially. So I know they were talking about that.

And so what happened, right? The other thing, this raises one of the core questions of like why, how this whole thing works, right? Because presumably a bunch of people work at that hotel. Are they all of a sudden going to pay like their $260 to be residents of Prospera? But they're working for a company. Of course not. They're going to be migrant laborers, but in a country that like just started existing like down the road from them. And that their boss just elected to be part of, which you can do.

You could do that in mainland Honduras. You don't need to be in Roatan if you want. You can be anywhere. And they have in fact, in Lesiba, there's a big chunk of land that they incorporated into like Prospera hub, the city or whatever they call it. They want to be Hong Kong and they want Lesiba to be Shenzhen as far as they understand. Yeah, yep. And so they, the idea right though is that this hotel is now able to choose its own tax jurisdiction after a few years and also is politically involved in the running of Prospera. I actually went into the filings and this is one of the points on the bill of sale, which is the promoter and organizer, which is Prospera Honduras Inc. warrants to the owner of the hotel that it will exercise all its powers and prerogatives under the Prospera Charter to have one of the seats in the Prospera Council of Trustees

filled by a representative of the owner of the hotel. It's literally in the law. It's a little fiefdom, you know? It's like a sort of like a bishopric in the Holy Roman Empire, you know? You have a seat on the council like by right. Absolutely. I'm going to buy a petrol station on the A12 and designate it the Romford Autonomous Zone and join it to Prospera. And we say also like earlier, right?

You know, other projects going on include, I don't know if this is started. Well, you were there Ian, the Duna Tower, which is a 13-story mixed-use commercial tower in the Rotan jungle, where studio apartments start at $400, which again, average living cost on the island for a family of three is $800. Is that to buy or rent? That's like, no, like to rent. That's what would be very libertarian of them to sell something to you when they could rent it to you. Yes, of course. Yes, you get a studio apartment for $400 a month or half the cost of living for a family of three. And all you have to do is live in the jungle in a sort of libertarian tower block.

Yeah, well, that is like the shortage of Honduras. So, you know, you've got to pay the premium for it. They're opening a filial of a bally ball or something like that. I mean, yeah, well, one thing also about that, you know, about the approach to the places you have to drive. So it's like, there's a turnoff from like the main road that runs along the island right next to this big shopping center, like the mega plex or something like that. And then it's just like this dirt road that goes up and down these hills. And it's the most rutted road I've ever driven on. I've lived in some pretty rural places and like when it rains, it's just undriveable.

It's just completely like destroys the road. They keep, you know, the government keeps talking about paving it, but it hasn't happened after 10 years of promises. So it's not exactly an easy place to get to. It's the other thing. It's a it's like sort of borderline inaccessible certain times of year. So what we're saying is it's like a we work that again, you as I said earlier, you really can't get to it's like a yeah, it's a we really commit to getting into work. And I have actually the master plan of prosper in front of me like any good libertarian community. It has it's the only building that really exists up at the top. It has then some high quality residences up at the top.

A bunch of mysterious, a mysterious little sort of blue and white temple for some reason. Not sure what that's about. Well, it has the Bayabu residences by Zaha Hadid, who's basically and again you cite this. I mean, she's involved in every like her aesthetic has become the intentional libertarian community aesthetic. But again, Ian, in your article, you talk about like how it is a kind of like SimCity almost where you can like pay $5,000 to reserve your dream home in the North Coast to relative design by Zaha Hadid. Yeah. I mean, it's like modular. You can go in there and in theory, it's like kind of like, you know, a tinker with sort of what the interior of your apartment or house would look like and sort of mix and match.

And I think the big driver there was after Zaha Hadid herself died is what's the name? Shoemaker Patrick Shoemaker, the German. Yeah, it's big libertarian guys and he's been very heavily, heavily involved. But yeah, I mean, it's I don't think any of that stuff is anywhere near as I understand it being being built. Oh, I have the dates when the Bayabu hotel modular residences are supposed to be like open for business. They're supposed to be constructed from January and then open in next March. This has not happened. This has not come close to happening.

I do find it very funny that they decided they're going to build libertarian bossing say from avatar, but they forgot to build a road. And so it's just like, damn it. Libertarian's the greatest nemesis. Once again, roads that at the bottom of this like long skinny city that goes along the coast and then sequestered across a river is low cost homes. Are the low cost homes beautiful Zaha Hadid style dwellings? In a word, well, I mean, the thing is they're exactly the same and as much as as many of them exist as one another. But no, they're supposed to be less nice. So otherwise, how do you work?

What do they look like? Are we talking like a lesser Zaha Hadid? Do you just get like a bit of sort of like angular concrete or what are we talking about? It seems like a square building. I've actually seen a picture of a couple that have been built and it's just like a square building with a small window and a door. It's it's not much, but it's like made of wood. It's not a shipping container. No, yeah, I was I was in a couple.

I think it's like the similar those that was like labeled the beta resins or because these. Yeah, these sort of modular. Bates of residence. I would hate to be forced to live in the beta residence. Right. Well, I guess I think they just call it that because it was like there, you know, beta testing of it or something like that. But but you know, yeah, I mean, they were nice enough. But yeah, they're not big, but they're sort of meant to be modular.

We could modify them. And I mean, it's not like a not a crazy idea, but it's not. Yeah, it's not exactly luxury living. So we can also ask, right? We sort of have an idea, I think of the physicality in the economy of this place, right? It's supposed to be this, you know, place where the future will be invented. And like so many of those places, it's sort of a call center with some buildings that you can't really get to. But sort of enormously flashy investor presentations that people keep dumping money.

So much money has been dumped into this thing by people who want to make a point. So we can ask, like, who's actually behind all of this? The big guy, and we're going to come back to him quite a bit, is a man named Eric Breiman, who was born in Venezuela before then going to Babson College, working at Brown Brothers Harriman, and then eventually starting a social impact investing fund called New Way Capital to quote, unquote, promote growth in Latin America, to which I can say a lot of alumni of Brown Brothers Harriman have done a lot of different things to quote, unquote, promote growth in Latin America. That's true. Yes. So he's going to drop something on us like Manuel Noriega is an alumnus or something like that.

So he's also joined by Gabriel Delgado, a tech guy from Guatemala, whose parents started their own university with a giant mural dedicated to Ayn Rand on it. The president of Prospera, Prospera Honduras International, Joel Baumgar, who is an extremely conservative Mississippi state legislator. So they've just, like, scoured two continents for the worst freaks and dipshits they could find. And then they've gone all in on building a little island. Again, building a co-working space on a little island, mostly. Building a little co-working space and possibly some, like, small but maybe quite nice houses. Is Suicide Squad for building a shite co-working space now? Also involved was a guy and who comes up in your article quite a bit who I want to get too soon.

Tristan Montoroso, who is an evangelical priest from Roatan and a friend of Bremen's from military school, who was like the main driver who would to encourage him to invest, and was also the ambassador essentially to the nearby town of Crawfish Rock. And then finally, the investors have included Pronomos Capital, which is a joint venture between Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, and then Milton Friedman's grandson, Patrick. What is with all of the fail-sons in this? We've got Reagan's kid, we've got Milton Friedman's kid, we've got, like, a sort of late-stage Habsburg. I don't understand it. Stage 5 Habsburg. I'm sorry, madam, we can't save you.

So it's a welfare policy for those guys' kids. Yeah, absolutely. It feels that way. I mean, this feels to me like if you are so flooded with Coke money, K-O-C-H. Well, not both. It's a double entendre. It's not legally actionable. I mean, the origin story does definitely sound like something that you would come up with after a big night doing a lot of Coke.

Like, what if we created, like, an island where everyone worked at Salesforce and lived in, like, WayCube of course? Yeah, see, I was going to say that this sounds like a William Falkner novel written by Wes Anderson, but like, malevolent. Like, really, really malevolent. What is this kind of libertarian city but a small-plates country? I have a theory about what exactly this is. Once Riley gets to the way this is governed internally. And then Pronomos' website just quickly said it wants to see, quote, crowd choice and governance provision with new start-up societies and completely new developments in unclaimed areas such as the high seas or the celestial bodies. We've got to find a front here and we're going to find one somewhere.

These prosperous ladies got celestial bodies. We're going to establish a Bitcoin education center on the surface of the sun. Let's do it. Why not? And just before I carry on, I want to remember one other business, which is that there was this, like, Czech libertarian who was super into the idea of being a brewer. And there's a, oddly, there's like a long history of Czechs living on Roatan. And so a Czech brewery right beside Prospera went up for sale. So he was going to buy it and join it to Prospera.

But then Joel Baumgart convinced him to not do a brewery but instead make it a Bitcoin education center. Oh, my God. Just in case they were up to do a real thing. This is too tangible. This is too tangible. You have to do some nonsense instead. Just being like, this is what a Bitcoin is. This speaks to his, like, power of charisma, though, because you do have to work quite hard to get a check under any circumstances to not brew beer.

They love doing it. Yeah, they often do it without even noticing. You just have to point it out to them. It's like a tick. It's like, why are you sort of, like, perched on top of this big keg? And you're just like, what? You know what you're talking about. And then I also have this.

I want to sort of move into a little bit about the relationship between Bremen, Prospera, and Crawfish Rock. And I want to start by doing a little table setting. This is a quote I captured from Bremen on a podcast talking about why Honduras. He says, I think in the case of Honduras, it's been a combination of enlightenment by a handful of reformers that really and passionately want the best for their country, such as that in Habsburg, with dire conditions and a very high degree of need for something different to emerge. The local population recognizes that it's not conducive to good economic activity if they are protesting on the grounds or disrupting the general sense of security. There's a self-correcting nature to how the local population thinks about how to deal with things that, hey, it's not perfect here, but they know they're shooting themselves in the foot if they seek to solve problems through large-scale political unrest.

Oh, that's grim. That's really grim. That makes me want them to solve problems through large-scale political unrest. And this is something I kind of noticed, and so I turned to Ian here as well, right? There's something I kind of noticed about Bremen, which is that he really does seem to like to say something with a sort of smile that does sound threatening when you just read it out. Yeah. I mean, he's an interesting and complicated figure, but he and Delgado are given sort of like, you know, I kind of see, I can see from their sort of upbrings how they came to find this idea appealing, and then obviously also sort of the ideological stuff from their background. But yeah, Delgado is much more the charmer, like Bremen's the business, the sort of strictly business kind of guy. I mean, it's very nice. He's not like a, you know, sort of mean guy or anything, but at least it wasn't in my experience. But yeah, I have seen videos of him talking to locals where, yeah, it's kind of like, you know, he gets a lot more…

Nice village you've got here. Yeah. It'd be a shame if anything happened to kind of them. Yeah, not all of them made it into the piece, but yeah, there were some videos with like his, we'll get to this stuff later, but I guess it's the local council in that village, Crawfish Rock, where he's, you know, yeah, it is kind of like the, you know, smile on the face sort of being quite, you know, sort of literally, you know, nice village you've got here. It'd be a shame if anything happened. The local residents don't want to shoot themselves in the foot, and I certainly wouldn't want to have to shoot any of them in any part of their body.

So I think it's good that we all do things to prevent that from happening. It's cool that a guy who like, does maybe having an intentional community somewhere like this just make you act more like a bond villain? Or is it just people who already act like bond villains who seek out these intentional communities? I mean, someone like some free punch after the talk is… I mean, I think he and Delgado really believe this stuff. I mean, that's, you know, they believe that, you know, the rational actor theory describes the way the world works, and if they just sort of create the right incentives for property reciprocity. I mean, they really, I mean, I didn't see any sort of sign that they were kind of like, you know, in the way they say the coax or something,

or kind of like, yeah, we love libertarianism as long as it, you know, means the government does stuff to help only us. It was, they seem like true believers in it, but, you know, it's… Seems way worse. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it's almost more likely to cause mischief in some ways. I also feel like there's just something to be said for that quote that you brought up Riley about, you know, that they want to find a way to discourage locals from political disruption, you know, using that euphemism. Because, like, political disruption is not exactly an easy thing to do in a society like Honduras, specifically in Honduras, where, I mean, I think one of the things we've talked about,

Bericoceros on this show before, but, like, there's a famous story in the last… It was in 2016 of an Indigenous activist, like an environmental activist in Honduras being murdered. Seems like the state was involved or at least aware of the plan to do it. You know, you don't… It's just a country where there aren't really labor protections, where they're, you know, where the average working person's lot is basically to work for so little that, like, they don't really have any hope of owning much more than, you know, a phone charger for a $20 phone. Like, it's a really, really grim situation.

And so, like, I just… There's something in that cavalierness about saying, hey, I, you know, we basically want to let people know that, like, life can never get better unless we dictate exactly how it's going to work. It's a self-correcting problem. It just really, yeah, it really… That creeps me out a lot. And maybe it's just because of the fact, like, having seen what conditions are like for everybody, people in that country on the mainland. And I don't know, Ian, if you have any thoughts on that, but just, like,

I think the contrast being so stark between that kind of, like, callousness versus, like, what the circumstances are like for people, for working people in Honduras, that really creeps me out. Yeah, I think there's… I mean, that's one of the sort of big, I mean, setting aside the sort of morality and everything of it all, you know, just, like, practically speaking, they have a very… What strikes me is a very sort of distorted view of what the situation is for ordinary people in Honduras. And I mean, it makes sense when they go there, they stay in these, you know, they were staying in, like, one of the sort of, like, all-inclusive kind of resorts, you know, populated by Americans.

Right, so they're not… And also, Roatan is a much, much economically better office, I understand it, than the mainland, so it's a bit different. And then they have ambitions to spread to the mainland, so they'd have to contend with that eventually. But yeah, I think it's very much the sort of classic, like, you know, like, rich guy misunderstanding of, like, what ordinary people's lives are like. I mean, and in fact, that quote is a good example. People protest there all the time. They're very politically engaged. Absolutely.

Including on the island, I mean, Honduras generally as well. But like, it's not like a… It's not a place where people are afraid to speak their minds. So speaking… Like, sort of coming into sort of what you were talking about specifically about the relationship between Prospera and Crawfish Rock, on Prospera, there is a sign that says, Prospera, providing running… Providing you running water since 2019. Can you explain this vaguely threatening sign? Yeah, yeah. So it's basically the situation. It's a little bit like complicated, so I'll try to keep it simple.

But they had a sort of water source in this fishing village next door, Crawfish Rock. And somehow there was some issue with the… I can't remember exactly the electricity bill or some… Somehow it sort of stopped working. And part of this sort of, you know… And I think, you know, at the start, it seemed as far as I could tell, somewhat genuine, at least. You know, sort of the idea of like, oh, you know, we have this water source on our Prospera Zade next door. We will, you know, provide you water. They were a little surprised in the village when they got a bill, a monthly bill for it.

Libertarian. Yeah, right, exactly. Well, yeah, I mean, they're quite explicit about… I think there's one of the interviews with the local media. Bremen was said something along these lines of like, you know, we don't believe in a dependence mentality or this or classic sort of libertarian point of view. Yeah, no free lunch. Very close, literally, to do not become addicted to water. Well, you actually have a man in electricity and you'll electrify for a day, but teach a man to electricity.

I have the quote here. It's that Bremen explain that Prospera generally doesn't believe in charity as a primary source of support because it creates dependencies. So instead of creating a dependency on you, what we're going to do is we're going to bill you for the water, which by the way, we control all of. Make you dependent on us, right? Yeah. Yeah, so they, and to be fair, when the pandemic started, they did stop. They stopped billing them for that time period. Pretty British almost.

But I guess eventually what happened was there was a sort of clash between some of the folks that were aligned with Prospera in Crawfish Rock and the people who were kind of opposed to it and ultimately, you know, it's a little unclear. The Prospera people say that the sort of local leaders asked them to stop providing water because they were going to get it fixed through sort of working with local politicians. The people who the Prospera folks say said that have a very different account of it, which is that they said, yeah, we're going to get around water source, but they didn't say turn off our water in 30 days, which ultimately did happen.

And then I think about a month later, they got the government kind of got water moving in some fashion. Again, either got there, the village system working. I can't remember the exact details, but yeah, it was the kind of thing that, you know, predictable, I guess, in hindsight or should have been predictable. But I think if you believe some of the stuff that these guys believe, you sort of think people will behave differently and thank you for, you know, for giving them the privilege of paying you for water. Thank you for making me not dependent on a handout.

Well, I am sort of yet sitting below Immortan Joe's big citadel. I think that the relationship we always enjoy on this podcast is we find that you can fit all the things we talk about onto a kind of like a four corner matrix, whether two axes are evil and stupid. And I feel as though this is kind of sitting in the evil and stupid quadrant. Thank you.