One says relax. One bought a Bunker. Two founders on whether AI is coming for your job.

- Liam Martin is the co-founder of Time Doctor and Running Remote, and the creator of Peppermint, an AI tool that builds a working digital twin of you out of your emails, messages and calls. Nick Francis spent more than fifteen years building and running Help Scout as a fully remote company. Both were recorded at Running Remote in Austin.

When Timothy Allen first sat down with Liam Martin a year ago in Morocco, he was the one asking what an LLM actually was. Liam has been deep in this world for a while, which is exactly why it is worth paying attention when he says tens of millions of jobs could be gone inside twelve months, and why he has bought a chalet in the Canadian woods with its own water and power, just in case. Along the way: a digital twin that answered his accountant's questions for him, an AI that told him the premise of his conference talk was wrong and then built a better one in 78 seconds, and the p(doom) figure that AI insiders quote in private but not on stage.

Nick Francis could hardly disagree more. He calls himself an incredible optimist, and he makes a good case. His argument is that the last ten percent of any work, the craft, the judgement, the human touch, is exactly the part AI cannot do, and the part that is about to matter most. He also has a clear-eyed read on where remote work actually stands now that the pandemic push has faded, and why the second wave raises the bar rather than lowering it.

Timothy lands somewhere in between: fascinated, slightly rattled, and increasingly convinced that the one thing which holds its value is the human experience itself. A genuine argument about the future of work, in which nobody is entirely sure who is right.

In this conversation:

• A year on, and the floor has dropped out
• Vibe coding a website, and a WordPress plugin built in seconds
• Distributed people to distributed intelligence
• The AI that rewrote a conference talk in 78 seconds
• Peppermint, and the digital twin that answers your emails
• Is it creepy? Privacy, PII layers and self-sovereign AI
• The prepper chalet in the Canadian woods
• p(doom): ten percent in public, seventy to eighty in private
• The Anthropic security lead who moved to Austria to write poetry
• Why Timothy wants the human experience, not the AI copy
• AI slop on Instagram and TikTok, and rejecting AI-written show notes
• Government oversight, and the case that AGI has already happened
• Thirty, forty, fifty percent unemployment inside a year
• The OpenAI valuation maths that gives the game away
• Waymo at seven dollars a ride
• Typing pools, electricity, and what a general technology does
• The horses of 1910
• Why humans will choose to impose limits on themselves
• Liam's thirty percent chance of utopia
• Nick Francis and the second wave of remote work
• Remote before the pandemic, and why talent was always the reason
• The trade-offs nobody mentions
• Retreats, Rome and crowning a Pope
• What is actually happening to remote work right now
• Hubs, Googles and the geographic perimeter problem
• The future of work
• Why Nick is an incredible optimist
• Jensen Huang and the cost-cutting trap
• Why software as a service survives
• The last ten percent, and why craft is the moment

Timestamps (audio version, includes Timothy's episode introduction):

0:00:30 - Introduction to episode

0:03:02 - Veritas Villages: the Atenas reveal

0:06:47 - Start of conversation: a year on, and the floor has dropped out

0:09:10 - Distributed people to distributed intelligence

0:10:04 - The AI that rewrote a conference talk in 78 seconds

0:12:00 - Peppermint, and the digital twin that answers your emails

0:14:38 - Is it creepy? Privacy and self-sovereign AI

0:16:59 - The prepper chalet in the Canadian woods

0:17:48 - p(doom): ten percent in public, seventy to eighty in private

0:18:16 - The Anthropic security lead who moved to Austria

0:20:08 - Why Timothy wants the human experience, not the AI copy

0:22:34 - AI slop, and rejecting AI-written show notes

0:24:37 - Government oversight and the case that AGI has already happened

0:26:15 - Waymos, novelty and the human element

0:28:01 - Where is the floor?

0:29:02 - Thirty, forty, fifty percent unemployment

0:29:31 - The OpenAI maths that gives the game away

0:32:36 - Does it eat its way to the top?

0:34:32 - Typing pools, electricity and general technologies

0:36:41 - The horses of 1910

0:37:57 - Why humans will impose limits on themselves

0:39:11 - Liam's thirty percent chance of utopia

0:40:53 - Veritas Villages

0:41:37 - Nick Francis: what is the second wave of remote work?

0:43:26 - Remote before the pandemic, and why talent was the reason

0:45:21 - The trade-offs nobody mentions

0:46:57 - Retreats, Rome and crowning a Pope

0:48:42 - What is actually happening to remote work right now

0:50:28 - Hubs, Googles and the geographic perimeter problem

0:53:14 - No head office: the branding question

0:54:04 - The future of work

0:55:38 - AI: which side of the fence is Nick on?

0:56:11 - Why he is an incredible optimist

0:57:12 - Jensen Huang and the cost-cutting trap

1:00:00 - Why software as a service survives

1:02:00 - The last ten percent, and why craft is the moment

1:03:27 - Wrap-up and how to support the show

Guests: Liam Martin - Peppermint | Running Remote | Time Doctor | X | LinkedIn. Nick Francis - Help Scout | Website | LinkedIn

Liam’s first appearance on the show, recorded in Morocco a year earlier: listen here

The Free Cities Podcast is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation, hosted by Timothy Allen. New episodes every Friday. Long-form, in-person conversations with the builders, investors, residents, and thinkers shaping the future of Free Cities, charter cities, special economic zones, network states, private cities, and governance innovation worldwide.

Listen & subscribe: freecities.fm | All platforms | Fountain.fm (bonus episodes & early access)

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Lead show sponsor: Veritas Villages - Off-grid, energy self-sufficient communities for freedom-minded people in Latin America. Bitcoin accepted for property purchases. New: Veritas Village at Atenas, Costa Rica, watch the official reveal

Follow: Timothy Allen on X & Nostr | Free Cities Foundation on X & Nostr