Two founders discuss AI. One's bought land in the Canadian woods with its own water and power. The other says this is the best time in history to build. 🧡

New episode is live for Fountain subscribers today. Everyone else, Friday morning UK time. Two founders, recorded back to back in Austin, who could not disagree more about what AI is going to do to us. Liam Martin has built a tool that makes a working digital twin of you out of your emails and calls. He thinks tens of millions of jobs could be gone inside a year, and has bought twenty acres in the Canadian woods with its own water and power. Nick Francis built one of the first fully remote company back in 2011, when people still made fun of him for it. He calls himself an incredible optimist, reckons more software engineers are being hired now than ever, and says the last ten per cent of any job, the craft, is the part AI will never touch. One of them is wrong. I still don't know which. https://fountain.fm/episode/obkVbUYCKw2MkAP887Uw

Does anyone know what method Satoshi used to generate random numbers?

Ever heard of Universe 25? Ethologist John Calhoun gave mice paradise. Unlimited food, water, nesting material, no predators, no disease. Nothing left to solve. They bred to 2,200, then unravelled. Pups abandoned. Males violent, others just grooming in corners all day. Births stopped completely. Day 1,588, the last mouse died. The pen still had room for a thousand more. Calhoun's read: scarcity never killed them. The absence of any role worth filling did. Now say it again with AI as the abundance. Code writes itself. Analysis, admin, design, decisions, all handled. The output keeps arriving whether or not you turn up. The question isn't whether we can build the utopia. It's whether we can build one that still needs us in it. Full episode👇

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

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

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

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

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

Fountain: Podcasts & Music

Free Cities Podcast • 146 - Efrat Fenigson: Stop Bitching, Start Solving • Watch on Fountain

Censorship, Community, Psilocybin Microdosing, Spirituality, Israel, Propaganda , Bitcoin, Privacy, Encryption, CBDCs, Shadow banning, Parallel Sys...

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

Fifty-one episodes about Bitcoin. That's one episode a week for almost a year, if you're feeling ambitious. Over three and a half years the Free Cities Podcast has been asking a different question: once you hold money the state can't debase, where do you actually live? What do you build? The archive now has its own page: On privacy: @Max on the praxeology of privacy, @JeffG on the architecture of freedom, @selfBankt on decentralised networks. On the state: @knutsvanholm on why democracy drifts toward totalitarianism, @Susie Violet Ward on digital authoritarianism, @Efrat Fenigson on CBDCs. On exit: @Daniel Prince on choosing a parallel life, @Nathan Day on overlanding and self-sovereign identity, @Tomek ⚡ K on the Bitcoin Free City he actually lives in. On the big picture: @allen the sovereign individual thesis, @npub13l3l...8xc2 on fiat as the biggest addiction of all, Polycarp Nakamoto on decentralised mesh networks. And on this protocol: @Ben Arc on Nostr and anarchy, @Nick Malster on liberating creators from the attention economy. Bitcoin fixes the money. These conversations are about what gets fixed next. All 51, one page: https://www.freecities.fm/search?topic=podbitcoin

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

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

New episode just dropped. Gonçalo Hall built the world's first nomad village in Madeira. Then he moved his family to a Free City. "You should build for nomads, but nomads should not be your end client." The nomad pioneer betting on a Free City, on the Bali playbook, the missing pieces, and why he isn't leaving. Video live on YT 👇

Tomorrow on the podcast: the nomad pioneer who chose a Free City. Gonçalo Hall built the world's first nomad village in Madeira and communities from Lisbon to Brazil. A year ago he told us nobody in the nomad world had heard of Próspera. Then he moved his family there. Fountain subscribers are already listening. Early access, one coffee a month 👇 https://fountain.fm/episode/dyxT1OIrg3aNthYWcAQE Everyone else: tomorrow.

Is it even possible to beat 'This Week in Bitcoin' to number one in the @Fountain charts?

Poly episode now up on YT:

"We've made our own golden calf, which is AI, and we're all worshipping this false god that knows all, sees all, and can tell us whatever we want. But the reality is, it's more like a dog that can talk." Polycarp Nakamoto episode live on @Fountain now: https://fountain.fm/episode/T0BpN1LJtOFYOpE9Lyxb

Got to sit down with Poly in Austin. In person, helmet on, as ever. You know the pitch: a second internet on Bitcoin nodes, mesh, Nostr relays, e-cash, the whole Web 5 stack, owned by nobody and impossible to switch off. We got into all of it. Bitcoin nodes in food trucks, shipping-container homes with a private AI inside, what actually happens when the internet goes down, and why he reckons the old one has five years left. The message, as ever: remove the centralisation from your own heart first, and have the self-sovereign stack in hand before you need it. One of my favourite conversations this year. Plan For Decentralisation. Early access for subs now. Everyone else, Friday. https://fountain.fm/episode/T0BpN1LJtOFYOpE9Lyxb

This stuff is absolutely amazing: