Welcome to the Free Cities podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 149 of the Free Cities podcast.
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www.veritasvillages.com forward slash free cities yes that's a new link veritasvillages.com forward
slash free cities just jump into the show notes for everything you might need to know and remember
patrick the founder of veritas villages will be speaking at the free cities conference in a few
weeks in prague that's one not to miss you all know how i feel about the free cities conference
it's the best one of the year i cannot wait www.freecitiesconference.com and if you look
in the show notes there's also a guide to the city of prague where to stay what to do enjoy yourself
right onto today's show and i'm speaking to a president this week yes second time on the pod
for vit jalicka and he is of course the president of libeland this time i ran into him at libeland's
satellite village called ark which is a couple of clicks down the danube from libeland on the
serbian side of the river as i mentioned last week i was speaking at liber pulko which is
liberland's anarcho pulko collaborative festival slash conference i was there to speak about the
free city's ecosystem of course from intentional communities at one end to full-blown self-sovereign
places at the other much like what Liberland are after during a quiet moment I got to sit down with
and we discussed everything Liberland here's a quick AI summary from Fountain this is an in-depth
discussion about the current state of the micronation its challenges and future plans key
topics discussed Liberland's status and development diplomacy and recognition economic and governance
models challenges and future prospects that's nice and simple many of you i think will know
my stance on liberland i tend to approach it quite cautiously i would say and with conservatism
one way to put it i don't think that necessarily means much it just means that i'd be way out of
my comfort zone trying to orchestrate that myself that's not to say i haven't put in the work though
to investigate it. Last time I visited, you may remember, I ended up in police custody,
pursuing my craft, being graciously ejected from the wonderful country of Croatia,
and asked not to return for three months anyway. See what you make of this conversation? The project
continues to grow, and as I discovered this time, it's growing in a way that I hadn't previously
noticed something that i think might actually become one of its most important characteristic
features in the future listen on to find out what that is anyway please don't forget you can support
this podcast directly in many ways by boosting us with bitcoin on any value for value apps
or subscribing monthly on fountain.fm that will give you access to bonus episodes amongst other
things the first two are now online and hugely popular amongst people who have listened there's
a four-hour conversation i conducted with the bitcoin seer i'll call him that is the man like
gg anyway everything you could possibly need to know about anything is no doubt in the show notes
so please take a peek in there and after you've done that i would highly advise you please to
grab a deck chair, plant it firmly in the sand just a couple of feet from the water and sit back,
relax and enjoy my conversation with Wit Jelichka.
Oh, amazing.
I got arrested.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I got kicked out of Croatia, so I have a...
Thank you.
How do you think about it?
Well, of course, these things don't happen overnight or over summer holiday, as many
people assume.
It's a process.
I'm thinking about it as like a manifestation of global will
rather than my own personal will.
I can lead the way in some sense,
and I'm trying to do that last 10 years,
but otherwise we're literally working in order to align the stars,
but we cannot make them align, right?
So it's a situation which there is nothing more powerful
than the idea that the time has come for,
and we are waiting for that proper time to manifest itself.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a pretty good idea.
Yeah.
It seems like that might go on for a very long time.
Well, there was a major advancement since you came last time.
Right now we are building on Liberty Island.
We didn't have anything knocked down on Liberty Island ever.
Maybe strategically it would have been a good idea to start from Liberty Island
because it really has a very special status in that sense that it not only in any Croatian map it not on any Croatian papers that it belongs to Croatia but also it not part of the forest
And from the forest side, the Croatian police and the Croatian forestrymen
were using the authority because it's a forest and they're a forest company.
Well, this is not part of forest and they have literally zero authority
to knock things down there.
Yes, they can come and they can bother people, but they don't have the power to clean the forest like they claim they have in the rest of Lebanon.
Based on some paper, seven years old from the Ministry of Agriculture, that they're supposed to take care of the forest in the area.
They now register that forest on that base.
They register it as a forest outside of Croatia with unknown owner.
right but they have the power to clean the forest and they are using that power
to take our bikes and cars and everything that they can find
But legally speaking,
Exactly, and that's why Serbians are watching us very closely and they're gathering the evidence, right?
That is happening.
So you mean, Serbians are watching us very closely and they're gathering the evidence, right?
Yes, in that sense.
But there is this status quo where Croatia has really not made any move to officially claim it.
And there is a very important element about the whole thing is that the Croatian constitution is very strict about the fact that the Croatian jurisdiction can be applied only on territory of Croatia.
It's like one of their basic articles.
Not every country has that.
I think actually very few countries have that specifically written in their constitution.
And that's quite helpful as well, right?
Since we claimed Liberland, or actually 20 years before that,
again, not a single paper, not a single map would mention
that Croatia is anyhow in possession of anything that is in Liberland.
Now they have claimed administrative powers over borders in August 2023.
They have not claimed the ownership, they claim that they can control the borders of this area,
which now they believe it gives them the right to fine people inside of it,
but the problem is that they never actually take these fines to the court.
So we cannot even see if that would work with their own courts,
because they know that every single court decision that they would make,
would again make their case for claiming the parcels on the other side of the Danube even harder.
Liberty Island is a piece that most people think is the whole Liberland.
This is a beautiful 1.2 km long sandy island, not part of the mainland of Liberland, but kind of in the middle of Danube.
And right now we are blessed that when the water gets down,
we don't even have to go through the water
because it's actually connected to mainland
when the water is very low, basically.
So yes, Liberty Island is this beautiful piece of land
that literally has zero connection to Croatia,
where right now we found the status quo with Croatians
that they don't feel they would want to cross this red line
when they really have zero paperwork to claim that they can be loyal to.
And they are leaving us alone.
And they have actually left anything that we built on Liberty Island alone from beginning.
We were a little bit unlucky that one year after we moved into Liberland,
there was the 50 years flood and the 30 years flood.
So the stuff that we have built on Liberty Island was damaged.
Normally this doesn't happen.
The church would stay.
The bar that we built there with the sandbags would also stay, etc.
yeah yeah that was the first first construction that that they made and then they actually married
in the church shana and christian used the church to to official marriage that that was fun so there
there are some remnants or remaining pieces of that church but right now we have two three houses
that are finished we're building two pontoon houses and we have a nice beach bar there we've
you've got the volleyball court, there is a cinema in Liberla.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's kind of nice that they...
I need to see this. We are, we're going there, right?
In a couple of days. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, the Hunting Lodge itself was a big story.
We were actually told at some point because they were only having the authority to clean the forest.
And they told me when I talked to somebody in person that they will not destroy built houses
because that's not considered a cleaning forest operation.
But then they crossed the line, that particular line, and they actually came and demolished it at the end.
and it was it was crazy because we used that basement like a bunker against their rates
and we had the double two two doors that were like steel reinforced so they couldn't easily
break in but they actually at the end made the hole through the through the top of that bunker
which was like 30 centimeters of reinforced concrete as well so that was their cleaning
forest operation then they took everything that was inside it was quite a lot of stuff quite
valuable that we use for construction because we already built the first floor of that medical
clinic on top of that on top of that bunker but that was a that was an interesting story episode
of Liberland that was basically last summer when there was not too much interest in the settlement
of Liberland itself but we had we had this push for constructing the building and I was thinking
it'd be great if we actually finish the the building and if the information is that they will not
attack our construction site
because it's not part of forest.
And they gave us quite a bit of opportunity
to develop that.
We were starting to get ready
for the second floor at that time.
And we used this quite new construction technology
so it wasn't expensive.
It was great as well.
We didn't have to follow the standard norms
but we were making this bubble concrete
where from one bag of concrete
you could make like four square meters of wall
so it was super cheap and super fast.
But that was a bit of a downturn last summer,
but the idea now is that Liberty Island is outside the jurisdiction of Croatia,
it's outside of any of their authorities,
and it seems like that's a place where we can develop now.
So, I...
Do you think the idea is that the country is not a country,
but the country is not a country,
but the country is not a country.
That's the point.
So all the cases where they are pushing against us,
if it's something territorial,
they always drop the case before it gets to the court.
If it's non-territorial,
like somebody shows middle finger to Croatian policemen
and that's not a good idea to do,
then they can claim their jurisdiction wherever they are.
But if it's territorial, they give us the fine,
but they never take it to the court.
And so that's very important, right?
because we have like 140 different cases which they basically dropped.
They are just, and that's what they told me, that we are winning the war against them
and our technique is bloody fingers because their fingers are bloody from writing nonsensical fines
and they have to literally fill like two A4s with handwriting to get that fine published
but then nothing happens, so we're just chilling when they do that.
Really, really, yeah, yeah.
But if they come to you and they try to fine you, I don't know, for not having dog on the leech,
which is a traditional fine.
And it's really funny in Liberland, what's happening is that Croatia is doing everything it can
to abuse its own legal system to legally harass us, right?
So it's unbelievable, like, you know, like, where else would you get fined for not having
dog on the leech in the middle of the forest in the no man's land than in Liberland, right?
But that's quite important. But what is also important that what I wanted to mention is that
when we actually turn to their courts for their robberies inside of Liberland, they basically tell
us, sorry, we don't have jurisdiction. And it's very important because that really, and it's not
It not just the courts it the prosecutor right So they basically like the Croatia as an entity claims they can do whatever they want in Liberla including stealing people bikes based on the fact that they don have jurisdiction
Based on the fact that it's terra nullius, basically they can do whatever.
And their courts, even though those crimes are, or crimes basically, cleaning of the forest, let's call it that way to be more diplomatic, is committed outside of Croatia.
they cannot do anything about it and what they also tell us that there is no other court that we could turn to.
You know, they understand that they don't have jurisdiction in Gornia Siga, in Liberla,
and they don't know about any court that we can send these requests to.
some
Well, that's what we're building here
We can do international arbitration if we have a backing of a sovereign country. That's one of our strategies right now
We can be kind of part of that
We can become ourselves more recognized by by different international organizations that can also give us some backing
That's also one of our strategies that we are pursuing.
And yes, if you're not a recognized country,
you don't have much ways to fight for your rights
other than basically making diplomatic friends
with other countries that can give you some hand.
And there are different NGOs as well
that can be useful inside of Croatia as well.
I'm happy that we found a couple that are friendly
and want to help us with the cause.
We do have dialogue, which is very important.
We didn't have any dialogue for two years,
now we have some sort of dialogue again,
which is very useful with some Croatian institutions.
What was the reality of all this stuff?
We were there on our official diplomatic visit.
I think we were on a very good track to getting fully recognized there.
But then that's why we changed the strategy.
We no longer discuss these things publicly because in El Salvador,
literally two weeks after we came out of El Salvador,
making all these arrangements, Croatia stepped in
and they sent a bunch of people with a lot of money there.
So they paid them quite a bit of money in humanitarian efforts.
They built them a new school and they told them not to recognize Liberland.
It's kind of interesting that Liberland is able to incentivize humanitarian aid all across the world coming from the Croatian state budget.
But you can see that they are actually taking us seriously.
But that, I mean, it's fun and we can also use it as one of our strategies.
But we cannot get far with open diplomacy in this way because everything we do, they're of course able to like outpay it right now.
right now even though we have Justin Sun on board he is quite capable to push a
lot of things financially with his 8 to 40 billion dollar net worth and I think
we have a wealthiest prime minister ever on planet earth or maybe second wealthiest
I don't know what it would be the exact exact numbers based on the net worth that he has
Did he approach you? Did he approach him?
No, no, no, he approached us, he applied for citizenship and said he wanted to help,
and that was two days before the first election, so I was thinking, why not?
It would be fun to have the first Prime Minister ever as the first Prime Minister of Liberality,
be kind of symbolic. But we had some dialogue already two years before that. He also asked
how he could help, but then he never got back. And it's fun to have him on board. Of course,
he's got lots of things on his plate. But he had just Eric Trump on a personal visit to his
quarters in Hong Kong. So we are quite close to places where we need to make the impact in order
to make Liberland a more recognizable entity.
Does he do anything on a day-to-day basis?
Does he have two people?
He's quite responsive if we need to do something serious.
So he's not there on a day-to-day basis.
His right hand is available for us right now.
So what kind of...
Helping recognition, that's one of his roles,
important one opening doors with big events and big conferences we do have a because of him i was
actually for example to bitcoin in in uae bitcoin conference and yes of course it's it's uh
it's a boost reputational boost like people take us seriously like it's always like before it was
like a fairy tale like where would you get all the money for for i don't know 20 million dollars
for development of Apatim.
And I'm saying our prime minister,
personal income between breakfast and lunch is $20 million.
So we do have the funding.
It's not a big deal.
So from that sense,
it really helped us to show that Liberland is capable to invest
if we have just a little bit more political support locally.
Is that part of your plan?
You just mentioned that developing Apatim, that's it.
Yes, yes, yeah, that's...
It's not that difficult right now, like for anybody from EU, you can just simply go there.
The border check usually lasts 25-30 minutes.
And it's not too bad.
Sometimes they are a bit pushy and tell you,
you cannot go to Liberland, but you tell them ciao
and you go after they check your documents.
So from that perspective, Liberland is open for business.
And the same way, like they say,
it's not jurisdiction of Croatia when we tell them anything.
You can literally open any kind of business in Liberland
and they will also not be able to do anything with it
because it's literally not their jurisdiction.
So from that point, we are actually a sovereign country.
We do get quite a lot of police checks from our neighbor, Croatia.
We get, you know, tonight, for example, very interesting.
Nobody showed up the whole night.
But most of the nights we get two police checks a night.
But that doesn't mean that they're able to persecute anybody
for things that are illegal in Croatia, in a way.
They are able to put it to the...
They are able to fine you for it,
but they are unable to push it through the courts.
We have not seen it yet that somebody would be
successfully trialled for doing something illegal in Croatia, in Liberland.
And is that when you say living in the mainland?
You are talking about Liberty Island?
Yes, right now Liberty Island is the safe place.
Again, because if you leave something on mainland,
it's not too bad lately also.
Three months we didn't see anything stolen from mainland.
Three months ago they have stolen nice electric motorcycle that we somebody parked there for two hours
They immediately came and took it but so far like three months now we don't see anything like that
But still like we consider Liberty Island to be safe for personal property and for construction right now
We ask people if they're coming to build in Liberland and all the citizens of Liberland by the way
Have the right to claim piece of land in Liberland including Liberty Island and build anything
So we've got two more guys that are coming very soon to do that
But Liberland we consider safe, this part of Liberland, and if you follow the construction
standard, meaning you do things either floating and you anchor them well, or you do it on
the trees, or you do it on the stilts, we even are able to make guarantees for the investments
into the construction.
...
I think it's quite a long way.
We were on bikes right Yeah just but just to mention like we actually have normally flooding like every three four years
right like it's not that there is flooding all the time but yes if you want to build something
that can stay long term you have to make it flood resistant and uh yes it can be on pontoons we now
just get four pontoons for like 2000 euro professional ones we connect them with the
wood we make a nice house six by four with the shower inside with the bedroom with kitchen so
that's that's one of the ways or three houses are also quite nice they're quite beautiful and whatever
i really like that we have now random tourists coming to liberland sometimes they're a little
bit surprised about the border check and about the wake-up call because they don't read all the
description on airbnb but yes like liberland accommodation is now on airbnb or visit.liberland
visit.ll.land is another website where people can actually book glamping stay inside of Liberland.
Really? In what? Treehouse?
They can do either treehouse or they can do the glamping.
Wow.
So does...
Got two treehouses.
One of them got red tape by Grisha, funnily enough,
but we are still assessing what to do.
The second one did not.
What does that mean?
They put like a red tape that it's not possible to go inside, but it doesn't like...
Oh, that's Liberty Island, right?
Yeah, yeah. But that doesn't, again, that doesn't mean that they can do this kind of stuff,
but they cannot push it again through their court system. Do you understand?
So like...
People are off the record. People are just still going into that.
We actually, for the sake of like having peace with them, we have not done anything in that regard.
But the glams are stable there for three months.
We can make very nice tent structures.
I just ordered a bunch of nice tents from China,
like big ones, inflatable ones.
The floating pontoons, I believe also,
that will be a very popular way.
And the second three houses, we made it a little bit more open,
so we cannot that easily put sticker on it.
And we're trying to assess exactly what should be the strategy.
But I think we really found those lines
where Croatia can go and where they really cannot go.
even if they abuse their own system of governance against us.
Do you know the company Ark had anything?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I noticed.
Well, they just...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ignite the...
...where you are.
Do you have strong flowing water?
Actually, we will end up basically having the same stuff.
Based on the limitations that Koresha is giving us,
extraterritorial we might end up with very similar technology
because we need to build on pontoons
and we might end up having to build a very nice tense,
heatable tense at the same time as this form of status quo with Koresha.
Does the water flow when it flows or is it still?
No, of course it's a lot of flow
and that's why all these constructions have to be built behind the trees
so we don't get taken away by the debris that is on the Danube.
Two pontoon houses are under construction this week.
If you will go there, like one construction starts in one day and the other one starts on
Tuesday and that should be the main buildings for survival of the winter. So that's the plan.
and then we've got the beach bar, that's quite nice.
We had pretty bad storm,
so we had to fix the roof twice already
and there was a funny video
where they were like literally holding onto the roof,
five people and almost flying on it.
Yeah, it was like 120 kilometers fast.
So sometimes we could also get storms.
But everything survived, no technological destruction,
just the roof had to be replaced.
And there is a regular bar
where people can cook there is a separate kitchen actually where some lahvac our most stable settler
now living he survived both winters in liberland so i would say he's our per one of our main guys
that we can call permanent uh inhabitant of liberland um honza hlavac but we call him lahvac
Is he a Serbian or a Croatian?
No, no, Czech, Czech, Czech.
Oh, wow.
So is he the longest living, as in the longest dwelling person?
Yes, and it would be very good to have exact number of days.
Now, our new mobile app will mark exactly people working for Liberland.
They will know exactly how long time they stay in Liberland.
But I would assess he's spent there more than nine months in total.
Wow.
And we have got also one Croatian, Tony, that lived in Liberland for I think at least six months as well.
Because of course we never left Liberland, right?
We keep the guard there since August 6, 2023.
The church has been demolished by the flooding, but it's still there.
So I think I'm not sure what exactly is the condition, but I bet it's kind of fallen.
What's the reason?
How do you build a new building for the next year?
Well, it is a plan for this year. I don't see any reason why we couldn't build a proper stilted structure.
That's the plan. And I'm working with architects on some nice Medusa style building.
The only condition is that we have to build three meters above the ground.
it's not a big deal right like it's you and you can make the steel so so quite
nice so I will probably call Zaha Hadid to make the final final design for this
and yes the sand is quite good for making reinforced concrete so we just
need to build bunch of iron bars there and and combine the cement with the sand
and we can build whatever we want
What is the status quo with Croatia?
The status quo with Croatia is that it's not possible to boat anything in Liberland.
So we can partially boat it in one kilometer away from Liberland.
But to my understanding right now they're really into stealing our boats for no matter what kind of reason.
But I'm okay with that, we don't need it.
We're able to transport one ton of material with one person in five hours in Liberland.
and they just take it over the road like pedestrians.
We have these wheelbarrows that can take half a ton,
so we can literally bring 20 cement bags in one trip.
And you don't even have to walk that much.
But it's funny, the policemen are standing behind you,
watching if you're driving on that thing or if you're walking behind it.
If you start driving on it, they immediately go and give you a ticket
for driving on the wheelbarrow.
It's just hilarious.
right like what they're what they're how the ways they're trying to like suppress us in what we're
hmm
What do you do?
First of all, you know, let me knock on the wood, there is a proper wood here.
We didn't have a single injury, right, in Liberland.
I want to keep it that way.
We want to keep that conflict very gentle.
And it's not even a conflict.
Again, I consider it more like a spanning partnership with Croatia.
And yes, like Liberland, you see there is this, I would say,
West-East conflict line now in Ukraine.
The West is fighting against East, but it's the same system.
Two very similar systems are fighting each other.
In Liberland, it's literally the new system building up
itself against the old system. Imagine how much resources
is spent on this West-East conflict, which
brings zero values to the humanity.
and Liberland we are spending micro resources to push forward this creation of new societies
but really from grounds up and and this is the thing about sovereignty like nobody's gonna give
it to you right you really have to build it step by step I mean eventually somebody can give you
the sovereignty but you have to deserve it in the first place it's like the god you know it only
helps the ones that can help themselves so you know that's what I'm talking about that this
conflict is very gentle and to be honest with you like for us the settlement in a sense is still
symbolical, right? Because the ideas behind Liberland are kind of conquering the world
already, right? If the president of Argentina was running his campaign on the platform that
is a general forum Liberland coming to save Argentina, I think that was very powerful
statement because literally, like, Liberland has taken over Argentina in some sense. But
of course, this is mainly about ideas and this Liberland is the place where those ideas
are put into physical reality in place in a gentle way,
but we never know which country might just jump right on these ideas that we have built
or on a blockchain governance that we have foreshadowed
and we'll simply forward these ideas decade ahead.
Hmm.
Yes, and what is really nice about Liberland is this genuine terra nullius case that we
have been building it up from, right?
So that really, I believe nobody can take it away from Liberland.
it becomes the mecca of these ideas no matter what right because this is the place where these ideas
have grown from from grounds up and and yes i have two other presidents we are in dialogue they're
interested in utilizing our blockchain governance and and these ideas that we represent on not not
necessarily on their country directly but maybe on some free trade zones so yes it's becoming
popular and I believe that the future really holds the fact that the taxes will have to be
voluntary basically sooner or later in most of the countries and the governance will have to be on
blockchain in order for the countries to be competitive at all and of course it will probably
take some sort of shift of paradigm or some sort of more harsh going down to the bottom like in
Argentina in order for people to realize but at some point it will and what is also very important
is that we are not pushing these ideas on anybody, right?
Like we are not saying you Croatians should adopt less taxes
or should adopt less regulations.
Like you guys can do whatever you want.
You can make 100% taxes, you know, come up with communism again,
you know, make the bureaucracy two times harder.
It's okay.
You know, it's your land.
It's your business.
But in Liberland, we really want to make a free society,
free, prosperous society.
We're very open about it, not hiding anything.
So then it's really up to people what they choose.
If they want to support, you're talking about the Croatian policemen,
if they want to support a system that they don't see as efficient,
or that they're prosperous or support a new form of society.
And yes, I also made it very clear, like every single policeman in Liberland
will be at least three times better paid than in Croatia,
because I believe these guys are really heavily underpaid.
Thank you.
How did you develop the constitution?
Well, yes, from that sense, I'm grateful that we had these 10 years of relative non-development,
physical development of Liberland and we had time to develop the constitution and I'm quite happy about it.
It has become a nice document and I hope we will be able to have a serious debate about it in Prague
on the Christmas party that we have in December and that it will be adopted hopefully by the 11th anniversary in April 2026.
And then, you know, if the structures of governance and the constitutions are firmly set,
I mean everything in Liberland already works in line with the constitution and in lines with these basic principles.
So the Congress is elected in the same way everything is already in blockchain, but it's not codified in words.
it only is codified as a smart contract,
which actually is ultimately the only thing that matters, right?
Because you can bend the words
and you have seen it from other constitutions
in many different ways.
But in Liberland,
our constitution was first written as a smart contract
and now we're putting it into words
to kind of give it humanly explanation.
And by the way, you're very welcome to read it, right?
If you just put Liberland constitution,
you should get directly to the Liberland forum
and then click on the latest version, make the comments, etc.
So we welcome anybody that is interested to see how we operate internally
to jump right into it and leave us some comments.
So yes, these things are being finalized right now.
I'm grateful that we had the time to do it.
It really took 10 years.
And I think we had seven different versions.
And I would never say I'm happy with it.
I always had some major doubts about being too long, being too fuzzy, being, you know, the system of election not being the right one.
And of course, you can have million different ways of governing a country.
Ultimately, the only thing that matters is if people are able to live free lives, right?
Nobody really cares if the Dubai ruler is whatever he does, as long as he doesn't raise taxes.
Or in Monaco, people don't come to get votes.
There are people that are living there for five generations.
They still didn't get the citizenship.
And they don't come there to vote.
They come there to live free lives.
But the goal with Liberland was to make a model that would be replicable on a regular society of people
where you would really put in line
or put the incentives in alignment.
That's something from the guys that started Prospera, by the way.
I always use that phrase,
put incentives into alignment, into society,
really put a little bit of democracy,
put this corporate governance in,
take what really worked from the monarchical systems
and combine it together into a nice,
completely transparent blockchain based form of governance where the best ideas of previous
constitutions and the best ideas of modern-day DAOs or decentralized autonomous organization
merges to run a nation-state.
Thank you.
What are you fin Incredible We want to have a strict private property law so you could do quite a lot inside of your own property
You can park wherever you want, right? We don't want to regulate it too much.
For example, right now it's an interesting case when it comes to building standards.
And there has been quite a lot of debate about having any building standards.
But yes, I think it's okay for government to actually give guarantees for construction right now,
but only to the buildings that follow some building standards.
If I'm very certain that the building will float away next year
and potentially take a couple more houses with it because it's not going to be well tied
and will not follow these construction advices.
So a lot of things can be actually sorted out by private sector that they will not be insured, right?
if you don't do things in line with some sort of standard technology.
So yes, all these construction norms will be applied in Liberland
based on the fact that they are actually useful
if you don't want to have your house falling down on you.
And we're not worried about that element at all.
And in general, yes, we actually said that we are okay
with having Croatian criminal code for now
because it's not too bad like it's not too bad like if people really steal from each other
and they don't um you know they don't give the money back we have of course a system of merits
which is very important so we can we can basically through the courts take away immediately the shares
of liberland as a form of compensation or partially take them and wait if the people
will sort out the situation but yes like people should go to jail if they murder somebody if
somebody becomes dangerous and starts to kill other people,
you know, just 20 years in jail,
probably according to the Croatian system.
So that is not the big problem.
The criminal code really is not the core, you know.
All these like retarded bureaucratical processes,
which really make me think, you know,
should I ask for building permit in Serbia or in Croatia
or just build a house in Liberland?
What is more viable?
Because both things are very painful, right?
Like it's unbelievable how many papers you have to collect here as well in order to start a reasonable construction and how much troubles you have.
So those things will be much easier in Liberland for sure.
You're not going to have to wait five years for transfer in the LAND register.
Everything happens in a split of seconds.
It's already in blockchain, all the LAND register of Liberland.
By the way, you can go to LANDregister.ll.land.
You can see the plots and how people have claimed them.
So these are the things which really matter, right?
like remove all the bureaucratic obstacles,
don't push people to pay taxes,
they will immediately jump into Liberland
and they will actually be happy to pay taxes.
And especially if they see that their taxes
going to some particular thing that makes sense
to have the name on the bridge,
why not, you can ship in some money.
I think that that will be the result, yes.
Well, because just like with Bitcoin, you know, the good money is replacing bad money, right?
There will be a replacement of government, like we're simply offering better product on the market.
People will, even though they might ideologically disagree because they would like to build yet another communist society,
society, they will be forced by market forces to adjust to the fact that, yes, this model
is so much prosperous.
And, you know, we see this huge resilience against free markets.
I mean, let's name it South Korea and North Korea.
You can have these two models like living next to each other and still the South Korean
model is not bringing enough innovation to North Korea.
Yes, so there is this huge, I would call sturdiness,
or how do you call it, from people about their lifestyle.
And of course there is crazy governance model
that were developed all around the world
that will make it harder, but eventually
the better governance model will replace
the old bad government's model.
Hopefully.
See or see if the
And
What can I do to 봄?
Well,I would say...
how would it
I think Einstein said it
there are two things that are endless
and one of them is the human stupidity
right so it's
we're dealing with a lot of
a lot of
resistance from that side it's unbelievable
how much crazy stuff
humans have created just in the 20th
century along like all the dead people
for nothing right it's instead
of like focusing on building people are
literally focusing on
destroying things which you know to me
doesn't make much sense but yes it's probably this yin-yang whatever universe
has to be in balance scenario but from my perspective like we have as a human
as a society have done so much crazy stuff it might be a good time to do
something reasonable again
as long as you have somewhere to go to and we still have quite a few places around the world
by the way we just offered a very good price for residency program in paraguay for all citizens
and for e-residents of liberland so we are also building up a place or resort in paraguay
as a form of expansion because we really appreciate that paraguay is one of the best
places to have a tax residency and we cannot even compete it from from liberal perspective right like
it's and even the the speed of the process of getting that tax residency is just unbelievable
you literally go there in you go there for one day in a year you manage to mostly with with
with our lawyers you can finish it literally in one one day you don't have to wait in any line
you're all set you get immediately your driving license uh you know get get shipped to you
with DHL in three days and you can claim fully tax residency in that country
and as long as you are not living in your home country,
we cannot compete with that in Liberland.
You cannot make it much better than that.
So we decided to simply put it on the dashboard.
People get e-residency of Liberland and they get discounted services for e-residency
and I think maybe it's still running that all the new citizens of Liberland
get also the tax residency in Paraguay.
And you can't really land in Paraguay.
Yeah, we've got quite a few development projects where we're still making the move to which one to go to
We always have partners for this, but there will be a nice Liberland place in Paraguay
Yeah, that's the idea and of course like it will be kind of agorist place within within Paraguay as well
Thank you bottom up
So they're building cities.
to be in
as of when
Well, to be honest with you, I'm surprised that it's not a little bit faster, right?
Prospera has been also growing.
I would say that they're the most successful intentional community.
And of course, it was a big political fight.
And this is the problem where you're not sovereign.
They can kind of take away your rights whenever the political spectrum changes, which is risky.
And that's why we decided to go with full sovereignty.
But on the other hand, I just wish that these intentional communities,
like even the Liberland ones, were a little bit faster to grow.
we have a very nice project now in Zanzibar.
We will release that very soon.
That's a $10 million investment project.
I think that's something to,
that's going to be under Liberland flag.
That will be a major, major thing.
I hope that we will be able to release
that news publicly very soon.
And yes, there are quite a few,
you know, micro villages in Mexico.
You know, we do have micro,
settled like micro village in Portugal, etc.
And of course, we naturally tend to bring in anybody that does something like that, but I just don't see enough growth.
I was thinking it will be much faster. People in different countries would get quicker together and build a nice libertarian community.
But maybe we'll see that next year when we announce this, for example, this project, we will see much more resorts.
What is the case with Liberland?
I mean, that's the case with Liberland.
I don't think we are willing to compromise too much at this stage.
We want to run our business.
We are happy to take their advice, but we are not in the situation to become an autonomous
territory in Croatia at this stage.
But again, we are open for discussion.
We are not closed-minded.
How do you think they are doing this?
I think they do pay attention, they watch us closely and they see that we are bringing value to the region
and they don't have any problems with us here.
We don't have any problems with them, but yes, of course, I wish the bureaucratic processes in Serbia
were a little bit faster than they are, because if they were, we would already have also
like a flourishing city here but under the current circumstances it's a bit more difficult but we're
launching the longevity and spa 200 meters from here in a very nice historical building the
construction will start in two months you're very welcome to come for our longevity conference
in november 1st and 2nd that will be the official lunch and we are building some eight eight nine
plots uh over there very very beautiful ambient you know with swans and with horses now if you go
there nice oak trees so it will be a there will be a lake in the middle so
we are expanding here as well and not just leaving this area which is still
frozen because of some bureaucratic processes there was according to my
original plan five years ago there was supposed to be a nice hotel right next
to this building but it's impossible on the current setup but not because we
wouldn't have money or we have capacity just because things are a little bit
difficult
What is the problem with the government?
We really have open doors right now.
Imagine we have 1200 citizens and now all of them are actually welcome to come in Liberland and build
and they are getting sovereign guarantees for the investments that they are making in Liberland.
That means that they are actually going to get, in the case of something happening to these structures,
risk or any kind of flooding or anything and if they build a going to these construction standards
we're giving them sovereign guarantees baked by liberal and merits for for these constructions
kind of kind of kind of
enough
they they're getting they're getting the insurance or not it's not insurance
it's like sovereign guarantee that's the way we should call it and they're
getting it in merits so the shares of Liberland are yes yes but not in the
liquid form they are getting it in the stake form like everybody else that pays
taxes that means we can talk about it of course how the system of because we use it for voting
we use it as a collateral in our crim in the criminal cases or any kind of disputes we use it
as a form of reputation even companies basically when they pay taxes they get staked merits or we
call them polypooled merits that means they're quite like frozen on the blockchain but you can
can unstake 10% a year so you can still benefit from you can ask for your taxes back for your
voluntary taxes back think about it like no the taxes are voluntary you can actually get them back
if you want to not everything at once but in this reasonable ratio 10% a year which should and
everything is kind of 10% because like healthy growth of a society normally is 10% so I was
thinking it's possible and it's already working like there are people on welfare in Liberland like
people that have settled for half year like Mirek and Veronica the couple now
they're constantly on welfare in Liberland they're using the shares that
they have gained through their settlement activities where they didn't
require any salary they were paid in Liberland stake merits they're unstaking
them or unpolit pooling them every month and they're making a reasonable amount
money. Well there is a decentralized exchange directly in our blockchain so they can just
jump there and then sell it. They get Liberland dollars and Liberland dollars are already
traded on more than 20 exchanges around the world.
You know.
I'm a monetary economist by profession, right?
And then I also studied political science.
And I took quite deep interest into monetary policy in general.
My main work was on the foreign reserves.
So that like from early age, I was always interested in that.
So I think I designed the system quite well, basically using the best ideas from people
like Milton Friedman about automated central bank and best ideas about the governance from
all these libertarian thinkers and really combine it into a tokenomics model.
And I think it's still like pretty badly underappreciated in the crypto world, even though,
let me give you an example, okay?
So what, because crypto world is of course crazy and there is like high irrationality
in the markets. But of course, the projects with substance prevail and I believe building
a sovereign country on blockchain is the most substantial thing you can do on blockchain.
So I believe that even the crypto crazy meme markets will at some point properly recognize
what we're doing. But we had already this hype, like Liberland dollar went 50x from
one dollar to 50 dollars and that was quite shortly after we released them and we released
them as a form of dividend to everybody that had merits. So think about it was like a three-hour
option to cash out all the dividends for 50x and the dividend was nominally 10% of the value
of what people ever give to Liberland in any shape or form. And so there was three hours
after 10 years of development of Liberland where you could cash out 5x on any energy or money that was given to Liberland and it was just the first dividend So I think there is a huge potential when it comes to having
Liberland also as a very successful investment project and this was kind of
first proof of that concept and I think there will be many more stories like that
but it all depends on very irrational crypto markets.
We are growing, we are growing.
If you follow the numbers, we are very close to 800,000 people that applied for citizenship
and you can see that every week there is another 700, 800, 2000 people that apply for citizenship.
It's quite, it's like...
Of course, most of them apply and never follow through with the payment or never,
but there is quite a serious interest and I think we're sending out around 300, 400 e-residency cards a month right now.
So yes, there is like substantial interest in what we're doing.
What I'm doing with Liberland dollar ecosystem, and it was not that easy decision to make.
Like we were not supposed to have a currency actually initially.
But then we, for legal compliance reasons, that was one of the main reasons.
And also for technological reasons because of the blockchain ecosystem that we adopted.
We were kind of pushed to do it.
And I think it was actually the good decision to make.
First of all, yes, there is a great benefit that when people adopt your currency, you can collect the seignorage.
The fact that people are using your currency is beneficial and that's kind of a tax that nobody sees happening,
but it's better if this energy stays within the society.
and yes, newly printed Liberland dollars go to Liberland Congress
and they are therefore spending for the infrastructure projects.
And now they're spent, I would say, half on settlement,
these newly minted Liberland dollars,
and it's being built, I would say, in a reasonable way there.
And half of it is going to the development of the infrastructure of Liberland dollar.
And I'm very proud that we finally got listed, for example, on Alchemy Pay.
So anybody can buy Liberland dollars with credit card in one second.
We haven't had that for quite some time.
And we've got two more gateways.
And PintoPay will very soon adopt Liberland dollars.
So you can directly pay with Liberland dollars using your credit card that you have in the phone.
So we have closed the ecosystem.
And I believe we have become substantially better than any euro ecosystem.
In that sense that we allow anybody to easily jump in from the fiat world.
And easily jump back to the fiat world.
or stay inside of the crypto ecosystem and make business inside of it.
Like people said, we should have made the governance on top of Bitcoin.
I don't think it was technologically possible.
Maybe today with RSK we could build something like that.
But what I really like that we build a sovereign system independent of anything else, including Bitcoin.
Because, you know, I like Bitcoin.
You know, we adopted Bitcoin 10 years ago in Liberland, like seven years before El Salvador has even started talking about it.
It's great.
But I like the sovereignty aspect.
and even Bitcoin is something out of my control
or out of the society that we are building control, right?
So I really like that aspect of having the whole package basically.
And yes, we build those rules that are completely transparent
about how new money is created.
Liberland merit is 70 million.
It never will be more than 70 million.
It's very much like the Bitcoin model.
But the Liberland dollar model is basically the model
that Milton Friedman envisioned for automated central bank.
There is a set, not inflation, by the way,
you can have deflation even with a lot of new money printed, right?
But there is a set monetary increase every year, which is 10%.
And I believe that we are definitely growing,
our economy is definitely growing faster than 10%.
That means that even with the increasing monetary supply,
the chances that the value of Liberland dollar will always go up are pretty high.
and we made the token very rare.
We didn't print billions of it.
So I think if we just see a little bit more general adoption
outside of Liberland, which is gonna be very likely
if we keep all these cool ecosystem things
like the credit cards, like onboarding, easy onboarding,
like putting everything into one mobile app,
then we will see people using it all around the world.
you
This is another you know debate by the way like still you've got the developers that are in charge of bitcoin development, right?
There was huge debate about the size of the block.
It's still man-made thing, right?
Even though it's mathematically bait, it's man-made.
There are still developers, there are still miners.
It's not a Liberland sovereign project from that.
It can be hijacked, actually.
If people say it cannot be hijacked, it can be hijacked.
If you actually call half of the Bitcoin miners
and you thread them that you will shoot them
if they don't do something, it can be hijacked
also on that level. So, and again, 90% of Liberland monetary reserves are in Bitcoin.
We are putting 10% of our monthly revenue always to Bitcoin for reserves. So we have adopted
that strategy very well. But I'm just saying that for us, it's not like a religion that
it has become for many people. We see it like realistically in that sense that, you know,
there is always going to be evolution of monetary system.
Like Bitcoin is not the ultimate answer to everything.
No, it's a very good system that will probably prevail
for another 30 to 50 years,
but it's very likely to be at least,
you know, like if you now jump into Solan ecosystem,
it's just amazing, right?
Like in that sense that you can literally flip any asset
for any other asset in one second.
You also have a high degree of decentralization.
and so yes I'm not the most Bitcoin fundamentalist as many even liberal citizens are.
I'm a big believer that this is a great way to decentralize, take the money away from the state.
Yes we have created a state currency but what we have done is we put into it the best we could find
again from what we found in central banking and what we found in the crypto madness.
I think the...
No, that's not true.
This is the thing that you underestimate.
Liberland is fairly well decentralized right now.
In that sense that right now the whole ecosystem is run more than on 60 computers.
You would have to actually not knock on these guys door one by one and any citizen has the
right to build another node.
I hope there will be thousands of nodes from that perspective because it's actually quite
profitable.
Do you use your own blockchain?
Yeah, it's a custom version of the substrate.
.
There must be, of course, there are major upgrades now and on.
And of course, we are three years away probably from,
serious quantum computer problem.
Like I think everybody underestimates
the speed of development of that.
My personal estimate it will be under three years
when it will become a serious issue
because this development of quantum computers
is also going exponential
and everybody's talking about these qubits
and how it's gonna take 10 years for them to build up.
But then you see that next week,
somebody already doubled the number of qubits, right?
Like, which was seem to-
That's more of an issue to you.
I mean, as far as I understand,
How do you update Bitcoin?
We will be able to update as well, but I'm just saying that somebody actually has to update Bitcoin as well
and it's also a political topic, how to update it.
Don't tell me that the whole thing is not also quite political inside of the...
It's not that it's so different from any other software project.
software projects. There are people in charge ultimately the miners have to decide if they
will adopt it or not sometimes they're pushed but I would not say this is a completely given from
god no there is a human structure behind it which is quite trustworthy it's very well decentralized
but still it's a human concept that these guys are humans that are running these machines that
are mining bitcoin.
Yeah.
Thank you.
But either way like you know yes I expecting some bigger jump
but on the other hand, if we just grow 30% a year,
we will outgrow the size of Croatia economy in 20 years from now.
Do you understand that? Like, even though if we just follow the...
Liberland as a kind of brand.
Liberland as a brand will be bigger than Croatian economy in 20 years from now,
from now if we just follow the exponential growth that we've been working.
I mean like of course you know it's very difficult to assess again like creations can go
Waiko and they can like try to really prevent again from anybody walking in lima. I don't think
I think we really came up with the status quo and I think we are improving that situation.
People were not able to live at all for eight years, everybody was arrested now.
People can live in Liberland, Croatia is putting a lot of resources to get us out, but we are growing.
We are able to build two houses a week now. I think we will expand it to five houses a week.
We will simply build a society on Liberty Island.
I hope that we are going to be able to keep good relations with Croatia and they are not coming to come up with some new strategies against us.
But the Liberland as an ecosystem, if we keep growing 30%, yes, we will be all around the world.
There will be probably a couple of countries that adopt our system of governance.
We will have, you know, resorts all around the world at this pace as well.
as well and yes Liberland we will put quite a few resources to actually make
it inhabitable and a sovereign piece of land and and from the budget that is
growing about 20-30% every year we will always put 10 to 15% to make sure that
that we are building new society here and I think at some point that pressure
will be so huge that even if Croatia simply I believe they will have bigger
problems than to try to destroy a bunch of houses on the territory that they
don't that they don't claim right this is the fun fact like there is some some
level of their capacity to just mess up with somebody else's business and they
might also have at some point much bigger problems than then then putting
resources to destruction of what somebody else is doing
Thank you
I would say they are still part of Honduras, kind of, and they are having serious legal issues, right?
The question is how far are they able to defend themselves, but they seem to be...
It seems like eventually they just managed to get rid of any competition inside of Honduras
by what the Honduras government did, which seems pretty good.
But of course, again, they are still within a country that has its own army.
They can make their own laws.
They can decide not to respect their treaties,
just like, of course, we have with Croatia.
Even though they could recognize us at some point,
then they could come back and invade us just because they have a bigger army.
But this all comes down to diplomacy.
This all comes down to really making friends at the right places
and making sure that we survive in this Balkan ecosystem.
but people are you know used to having new countries here i think it's a really good spot to start a new country
i do hope one day
you know there is there is one thing which you should not also you know right
To get listed on the list of countries, for example, on Wikipedia, you literally need to get recognition just by one or two countries on that list.
It's not that getting to the country list is so difficult.
It's not.
We have that already.
We cannot disclose it because it's not strong enough and it would be probably messed with by the powers that be.
But we are building up more and more of it.
and yes like we are actually recognized country these days
I just find the whole thing absolutely
I can't juggle that many issues in my head at once
Let me just talk about one more thing
Think about for example Mr. Beast
How many Lamborghinis he burned
And people are kind of excited to watch it
And they throw millions at him through the advertisement
like we have maybe half million dollar of damage from Croatia in last three years right it's not
even one Lambo but we are using this environment that like a real case environment to really
finalize our system of governance finalize the system of how the police will be working
you can basically anybody can try right away on our mobile app how the liberal and police system
will work or how the tenders are completely open. So with very little, I would say, costs,
we are able to change a lot of mindset about the feasibility of things because we are literally
showing that things can work and we are making a lot of progress both on diplomatic front and
yes, we are heavily underfunded, I believe, and heavily underappreciated,
but that still doesn't stop us from growing 30-40% a year.
Thank you for the interview.
As always, pleasure.
Yeah, that's a resort for Liberlanders that are fed up with settling Liberland so they can come and enjoy themselves in Serbia for a while.
But really, the plan is to make it into also a city here, you know, but Serbia is actually quite reasonable when it comes to many regulations.
So I'm happy about having them as a neighbor.
Amazing.
Thank you.