Free Cities Podcast

Bhutan’s Gelephu Mindfulness City just: - Raised 108 15m stupas in nine hours with 40,000 volunteers - Got a central bank that can hold Bitcoin - Made a British peer chief justice Britain can’t approve a bypass in nine years. Small, nimble countries with a shared culture win.

“You’re from Nagaland?” @vikbharati couldn’t believe I’d been there. I never had to look for a place to sleep. People would come up to me and say, “Come and stay at my house.” Full conversation 👇 fountain.fm/episode/XU4TuLuE…

A lot of anxious talk about stockpiling atm. In my opinion, it’s a short-term fix for a vague problem. Here’s the long-term strategy that worked for us: move out to the countryside and start a family. You start thinking like a prepper quite quickly. Fewer trips to the supermarket means more food in storage. Slowly but surely you acquire more tools and fix more things than you buy. Low time preference stops being an idea and becomes a habit. After a while it’s just a way of life. Being prepared is part of rural family culture.

One minute ahead of the gunboats. @joequirkexults tells me how @GrantRomundt raced out into international waters with the paperwork @E1war and Nadia needed to enter Singapore, just before gunboats surrounded them. A rescue story with a James Bond ending. Full conversation in episode 106 👇 fountain.fm/episode/i00eiN0M…

I tried to get @joequirkexults talking about something other than seasteading. We ended up arguing about AI. Floating homes, businesses that can leave, and whether a writer needs a human critic. Watch/listen👇 fountain.fm/episode/zuA6rA32…

Unfolding as predicted. Nothing to do with protecting children.

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“The salary is a bribe for you to not fulfil your dreams.” @polycarpweb5 on work, dependence and why sovereignty takes more than holding Bitcoin. Full conversation 👇 fountain.fm/episode/T0BpN1LJ…

Or just tax less and reduce the size of the government. それより、減税して政府の規模を縮小すればいい。

Pay your taxes. Then pay again to protect your shop. Paris police have advised shopkeepers to hire private security ahead of today’s protests. If basic protection costs extra, what exactly is the state’s side of the social contract?

“How long before the Navy shows up and shuts you down?” @YaronBrook’s objection to floating Free Cities: Bitcoin has no address to raid. A city does. We disagreed about how far governments would go. This is the difficult bit of seasteading.

“To edit who I am at the behest of the state? Then I’m already dead.” Discussing @LucyTCWife’s case, @garethicke answers a personal question: would he risk 13 months in prison rather than change who he is? Full episode 👇 fountain.fm/episode/9ZsXCoUk…

Look no further 👉 freecities.fm

After visiting the first Zuzalu, I was pretty sceptical about pop-ups. They’re starting to come of age now, though. Wide reach, real world results and proper business models. I’m bullish.

Bitcoiners called it again. A few months ago, Bitcoin was the canary in the coal mine. Over the summer, the Bitcoin ecosystem was hit first: the Coldcard firmware exploit, emergency patches at Core Lightning, and a flood of AI-generated bug reports. The base protocol held. The weaknesses were in the software built around it, and the response was a volunteer red team pointing AI at hundreds of Bitcoin repositories and fixing what it found in the open. This week the rest of the internet got its turn. PHP2Shell, a set of flaws that had sat in PHP for over a decade, was found with frontier AI models and patched on 21 October. PHP runs roughly three quarters of the web, and governments took their own sites offline while they scrambled to update. Bitcoin went first because it is the biggest open bug bounty in the world, and anything with money attached gets probed first. Banks, payment rails, hospitals and government databases are next, and most have relied for decades on obscurity and slow attackers. That cover is gone. It will probably be quite painful for a while. What survives will be simpler, tougher and more honest about its own weaknesses. Stress is how resilient systems get built.

Silicon Valley made the young founder an icon. Building a Free City might favour the person with grey hair. You have to convince a government to let you try. @patrissimo explains why experience counts when your startup is a city.