Have you ever wondered what would happen if a group of the world’s richest tech billionaires decided to build their own private city with their own private laws, tricked an ancestral village out of their land to do it, and then sued the entire nation of Honduras for two-thirds of its national budget when things went south? Well, buckle up. Because this week, Jaron and Tim went deep on Prospera — a real place, on a real island, backed by real names you’ve definitely heard before. And spoiler alert: it’s about as encouraging as it sounds.
It Started With a 16-Year-Old and a Sci-Fi Novel
Every wild story has an origin, and this one is genuinely bonkers. Back in the ’70s or ’80s, a Honduran teenager named Octavio Sanchez wrote a political sci-fi book. The premise? He was supposedly receiving government bulletins from the year 2050 painting a picture of a future Honduras. His big thesis: Honduras wasn’t poor because its people lacked ambition — it was poor because of a broken government. His solution was, to put it bluntly, a libertarian fever dream. Rip out the regulations. Delete the red tape. Let business just… business.
That novel became a cult favorite in libertarian circles for decades. And then, in 2009, an economist named Paul Romer gave a TED talk that gave the whole idea a name and, eventually, a Nobel Prize.
Charter Cities: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Romer’s big idea was “charter cities.” The pitch is simple: our legal system is too clogged with rules for businesses to really thrive, and lobbying to change it is a fool’s errand. So instead, start with a clean slate. Carve out private land inside a friendly municipality, and build your own dream city — your own police, your own schools, your own infrastructure, and most importantly, your own laws.
If that sounds familiar, it should. As Jaron pointed out, it’s basically Walt Disney’s original vision for Epcot. It’s a place where one very rich person gets to make every single decision. And as the guys asked, only slightly sarcastically: why not let a billionaire decide everything about your walled-off little society? He’s rich, so he must be smart, right?
Crawfish Rock Never Stood a Chance
Here’s where the story turns from “quirky economic theory” to genuinely dark. After Honduras eventually passed a constitutional amendment creating ZEDEs (zones of economic development), a Venezuelan wealth fund manager named Erik Brimen — who, per the guys, looks like what happens when you ask an AI to generate “evil business guy” — set his sights on Roatán, a gorgeous island near the world-famous Great Blue Hole.
There was just one catch: a village called Crawfish Rock, home to Black Caribbean families who’d lived there for five-plus generations. According to a Guardian article, the developers rolled in posturing like a charity — promising infrastructure, aid, and help for everyone. They handed out contracts. Locals signed. And what they were really signing were land agreements. In their own words, they’d been “heavily deceived.” They didn’t realize they were signing away their community. Colonialism with better branding.
Welcome to Prospera (Bitcoin Only, Please)
So what did the billionaires build? A business paradise. Roughly 200 full-time residents, over 500 companies, Bitcoin as legal tender, and a menu of 31 nations whose regulations you can choose to live under — or write your own. There’s even an “E-class citizen” tier so you can run a Prospera-based company from your couch in Glendale.
And the stuff happening inside? Wild. Taser-knife fights. Experimental biohacking. Non-FDA-approved gene therapies. Longevity guru Brian Johnson (aka “the wet gecko”) reportedly got a treatment done there because it was the only place it was legal. The one bright spot Tim spotted in a photo? A fire extinguisher on the wall — a tiny reminder that the boring safety regulations we take for granted are literally the difference between a building standing and a building collapsing in an earthquake.
Money Wins (Unfortunately)
In 2021, leftist candidate Xiomara Castro won the presidency in a landslide on an anti-Prospera platform. Congress unanimously repealed the ZEDE laws. The Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. Victory, right? Nope. Prospera had loaded its contracts with landmines: a 10-year sunset clause, 50-year investment treaties with Kuwait and the United States, and a case filed with a World Bank court that let them sue for potential future profits. The total ask? $10.7 billion — two-thirds of Honduras’s entire annual budget. By the end of 2024, Honduras caved.
Between the taser knives, the Roger Stone cameos, and an investor list that reads like a supervillain reunion (Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Tim Draper, and friends), this episode left Jaron and Tim genuinely rattled — especially when they landed on the truly chilling part: there’s now a growing movement to build these same private cities on U.S. National Parkland. Between the “alpha handshake” debate, the manosphere podcast bit, and a shared existential dread about being ruled by literal Batman villains, this is one of those TILLN deep-dives that’s equal parts hilarious and “wait, this is real?”
Things I Learned Last Night is an educational comedy podcast where best friends Jaron Myers and Tim Stone talk about random topics and have fun all along the way. If you like learning and laughing a lot while you do, you’ll love TILLN. Watch or listen to this episode right now!
Sources
- Próspera (Wikipedia)
- Building the world’s first private libertarian city (Reason)
- Rifleman’s Creed (Wikipedia)
- Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System (Wikipedia)