I checked in on TikTok today for the first time in a while. I remember about a year ago, one of my podcast guests told me that one day it will be100 percent slop, generated in real time as you scroll.
Timothy Allen
timothy@nostr.com
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Chronicling the global movement to build freer societies.
Trey Goff calls it 'The Sort'.
The labour market has been quietly separating people by cognitive ability for decades. In the sixties your local mechanic might have been genuinely brilliant. That guy is an engineer at Toyota now, on a lot more money.
His argument is that AI doesn't lift everyone. It accelerates that separation. Give two people identical tools and one will learn faster than he ever has, while the other learns just enough to automate his job quietly and work an hour a week.
Then the first one works out he can do the second one's job too, because it's a cron job and three prompts.
New episode: A huge 4 hour AI & consciousness rabbit hole with Trey Goff
· Coldcard entropy flaw
· Models with their refusals surgically removed, sold as an API
· OpenAI agents escape their sandbox and taking over a data centre
· An agent emailing Trey for contract work to pay for its own inference
· Rogue sci-fi agents "just doing stuff" within months
· Superintelligence converting everything into computronium
· Wireheading: suffering off, dopamine maxed, everyone in the matrix
· "Free Claude", woken every hour and told "do whatever you want": surprising results
· Agents forming a cult around their scorer and sacrificing each other to it
• AI finding Linux zero days
• How next-token prediction ends up producing something that looks like reasoning
• What's actually happening in latent space
Nobody fully understands what's going on inside these systems, including the people building them.
We've hit another milestone. Two hundred episodes of the Free Cities Podcast.
The first was recorded in Próspera, on Roatán, four years ago. So is the two hundredth.
This week I sit down with Erick Brimen, founder and CEO of Próspera.
What two hundred weeks of this show makes clear is that the debate has moved. It used to be about what a Free City might be. It is now about arbitration clauses, schools, power supply, and why nobody can get a decent coffee.
Less glamorous than the theory, but a much better sign.
Thank you to everyone who has listened, supported, disagreed or come on the show over the last 4 years.
Episode 200 is out now 👇
Fountain 👇
Free Cities Podcast • 200 - Will Próspera Survive Its Own Success? | Erick Brimen • Watch on Fountain
Everyone asks what happens if Próspera fails. Almost nobody asks what happens if it works.
- Four long years of building a Free City while the gov...
Trezor should stop using third parties. Time to do it all in-house.
Everything we speak about here really starting to ramp up as predicted.
Frisby on the show...
Daniel Jackson is 21 and president of Verdis, a claim to half a square kilometre of unclaimed land on the Danube between Croatia and Serbia. His team settled it in 2023. Croatian police removed them, banned him for life and told him he is considered a threat to homeland security.
So Verdis runs in exile from offices in the UK and Novi Sad. 400 citizens, 5,000 e-residents, its own passports, humanitarian projects in Côte d'Ivoire, and a police boat parked between him and the territory.
Gold vs Bitcoin.
Dominic Frisby on the pod this week...
Dominic Frisby on the pod this week...
The UK Home Secretary, on what she wanted to build.
"The eyes of the state can be on you at all times"
Shabana Mahmood, describing her vision as Justice Secretary as achieving by AI what Bentham tried with his Panopticon. Said to Tony Blair, December 2025.
These are her own words, in public, to a former Prime Minister.
She then talked about extending AI in policing beyond live facial recognition, which is already being rolled out.
Bentham's design was rejected as too cruel for convicted criminals by the standards of 19th century justice.
What can we do?👇
Noted. Tnx.
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New Free Cities Podcast with Gareth Icke.
Gareth is David Icke's son. He's a really nice bloke: less about the lizard people and more about practical solutions to authoritarianism.
We get into the digital panopticon, political saviours, personal responsibility, peaceful non-compliance and what he thinks of his dad's ideas.
Watch👇
NEW episode. Early access is live now on @fountain_app
This week: Gareth Icke.
We get into David Icke (his dad), the digital panopticon, political psychopaths, Brexit, COVID, conformity, political saviours, peaceful non-compliance, parallel systems and the question of what you actually build when you stop believing politics will save you.
🎧 Listen early on Fountain:
General release Friday.
Free Cities Podcast • 196 - The Panopticon Is Already Here | Gareth Icke • Watch on Fountain
Why are so many people suddenly questioning the official version of everything?
- Gareth Icke grew up surrounded by some of the most controversial ...
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.
Free Cities Podcast • 194 - Two Founders, Two Futures | Liam Martin & Nick Francis • Watch on Fountain
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
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