At 21 years old, Daniel Jackson is already president of a country. There is just one problem: he currently can't enter it.
If you follow Free Cities, micronations or alternative governance online, there’s a good chance Verdis has suddenly appeared in your social media feed. Daniel says Verdis-related content has generated more than 200 million views over the past year, much of it following footage of him being chased by Croatian police boats.
Verdis claims a tiny piece of land on the Danube between Croatia and Serbia, close to Liberland. Daniel and his team established a settlement there in 2023 before Croatian authorities removed them. Today Verdis operates what it calls a government in exile, claims around 400 citizens and 5,000 e-residents, issues passports and is attempting to build diplomatic relationships around the world.
But Verdis is not simply another Liberland. Daniel describes himself as a centrist, wants the country to be politically neutral, is cautious about becoming a tax haven and talks repeatedly about keeping Croatia and Serbia comfortable with whatever Verdis becomes. The central problem: declaring sovereignty is one thing, but how do you actually achieve it when the neighbouring states hold all the cards?
In this conversation: terra nullius, international recognition, citizenship, passports, taxation, attracting residents, financing a new country and the diplomatic effort to get back onto the land. And near ...
"A very realistic possibility is that you see governments get themselves into increasing amounts of problems. Governments go bankrupt. Their currencies do collapse. And they then blame the Bitcoiners and the gold bugs."
“You know, to just say no. It’s the most important word in the English language.”
"I believed in it very much, to the extent that I waged my own career and my own life by coming here. It had to resist. I used to joke that if it hadn't resisted I would have stopped practising law, stopped believing in it."
"I'm an entrepreneur. I love technology and innovation. I think the tools that are now available to us are beyond extraordinary… I think I'm an incredible optimist as it pertains to AI." "When you hear a lot of these AI evangelists talk publicly about AI, maybe there's a 10% chance that it could be dangerous or a 5...
"Many free zone initiatives have been pushing on a string. They've fallen in love with a particular location and then push, push, push to try to make it happen... So the big takeaway for me was that these efforts to set up free areas by funnelling money into a predestined spot were exactly the wrong way to start."
"We are building a social safety net that is global and ultimately our plan is to launch the first country on the internet, which will allow people to become member-based citizens and have that safety net follow them everywhere they go."
"It was London in the 1800s. It was Spain in the 1600s. It was Portugal in the 1500s. It was the Netherlands before that. And right now it's the Americas."
"If you have a bad owner, the people will leave. If he's not doing what he promised, if he's not keeping them happy, customers leave all the time. The worse he is, the sooner people will leave, he'll go bankrupt, and someone else will buy the property that can do a better job with it. That's the way business works."
"When you build for nomads you build for everyone else. If you build something good enough to attract a digital nomad to whatever you are building, you are building something good enough for 90% of the people... That's why I say you should build for nomads, but nomads should not be your end client."
"The real reason that I wear the mask is because it doesn't matter who I am. Anybody can be doing what we're doing thanks to Bitcoin and the Bitcoin node network. The message, the idea of free speech in a worldwide mesh network, does not depend upon any single person's identity. Everyone is building the mesh network."
"As we progress through this movement in general, I think this might be the key to unlock the critical mass. I really do think that. I think families are overlooked because the old family thought process, or the people who were families when we were younger, may not have been ready for this. But now everyone who's...
"It's good to have a norm against racism, but when you go to a taboo, that's a very black and white thing. There's no nuance, there's no grey zones, and all of a sudden this is a powerful piece of kryptonite that somebody can weaponise."
"Imagine we had the technology and we would say, oh, for a reason X, Y, Z, we don't allow people to use it. That would be like withholding life-saving medicine from someone, which is equivalent, ethically speaking, to killing someone."
"I'm going to say for full-time employees that spend over a billion on talent, I'm saying there's going to be 40% layoffs. And they might say only 10%, but in reality, they're recalibrating easily up to 40%."
"I came to visit, just to visit. On the second day, I bought a motorbike from Facebook Marketplace just to lock in. Okay, this might be my place."
"The minute you don't agree with something they do, they'll come for you too. Don't for one minute think that you're safe. So why are you supporting this? Because it could happen to any one of you."
"If you're ruthless about figuring it out, people will support you. And it's a matter of execution, right? So are we going to be the crazy or are we going to be the visionaries? It all comes down to executing and getting it done... and it being okay if it fails."
"Every country is run poorly, in my opinion. I don't think any country is run very well. Even Singapore is not run very well. They're too restrictive there."
"We've lived this life. My dad has. And my grandfather before him. We're sure of where we want to take it. It's not just dreams. It's grounded in reality. We've got a plan of how to get there. Now we just need to go and do it."
"There's so much LARPing... It's when you imitate the superficialities of something without actually doing it. The thing is that starting a new country is so fun and so romantic and so exciting and so unbelievably hard that even if you seriously try to do it, you're going to naturally find that it's so much easier t...
"The most important thing that can happen now with this new government for every other project out there.. is for Próspera to be successful. Because the more successful we are, the more people can point to us and say we're going to replicate that in our country."
