BONUS 003 - Jake Hamilton: Mind, Machines and Meaning

Welcome to this bonus episode of the Free Cities Podcast. These episodes are exclusively available to our subscribers on Fountain.fm, and I will be releasing them periodically throughout the year, especially during weeks when our regular episodes are ones subscribers have already had early access to.

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If you're not on Fountain, you can access the episode here: https://fountain.fm/episode/727p2ykSx85aTmeNbC8N

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Where should I begin with this one? It is a very long episode—over three and a half hours in total—but as always, there is a reason for that.

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A bit of background: in November 2022, I was in San Salvador speaking at Adopting BTC, a Bitcoin conference in El Salvador. At the opening party, I met a gentleman by the name of Jake Hamilton and we had a very interesting late conversation over dinner that struck a chord within me.

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Later during the trip, I had a day off and reached out to him to ask if he would sit down and and have a conversation with me. Nothing was off the table; the plan was simply to start talking and see where it went. That is exactly what we did.

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We began by discussing Urbit, a decentralized operating system that Jake is a developer for. That was my original reason for wanting to speak with him. However, the conversation quickly branched off into a huge range of topics.

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When I edit these podcasts, I usually keep a running list of subjects we cover. By the end, it helps me get a clear picture of what we talked about and makes writing an episode description much easier. For this conversation, that list grew to more than sixty topics. To give you a sense of what you’re in for, we started with Urbit and moved on to digital nomadism, ethics, complex systems, artificial intelligence, the Akashic records, Bitcoin and time, Planck seconds, non-computational quantum physics, metaphysics, the origins of humans, the digital realm, religion, Christianity, simulation theory, the end of humanity, DMT, psychedelics and near-death experiences, fasting, spirituality, ketamine, spirit animals, sugar, proof of work, existential traps, narcissism, StarkNet, the Bitcoin circular economy, Bitcoin maximalism, the philosophy of Bitcoin, Bitcoin as monetary critique, digital aliens, the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, Neuralink, conflict, and cultural patrimony. And that is only part of the list.

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I even asked an AI to summarize it, and it came back with: “Urbit, Bitcoin, digital nomadism, effective altruism, and various aspects of technology, consciousness, and the future of humanity.” I prefer my own list.

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This is exactly the kind of podcast I love to make, and I am very grateful to Jake for agreeing to do it. After all, he was just someone I met at a party. We had never met before, and I have not met him since. Yet he was incredibly generous with his time, sitting down with me for three and a half hours at their Urbit developer house in San Salvador.

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I think this episode is a perfect bonus because it is quite technical and especially relevant to the Nostr community, the value-for-value community, and of course, Bitcoiners. It has essentially never been heard. I originally recorded it for a podcast I had just started at the time, but that project went nowhere because I launched this show a few weeks later. So this recording has been sitting untouched for a couple of years, just like the other episodes I will be releasing here.

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If you want to follow Jake and hear more of his unique perspectives, you can find him on Twitter at his intriguing handle 36_72541890. He once explained the meaning of that number to me, but I have completely forgotten it, and even ChatGPT cannot figure it out.

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Settle in for this one. You may really want to sit back and relax. I hope you enjoy it. I certainly did, and conversations like this are one of the reasons I get up in the morning.

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Enjoy.