Welcome to the Free Cities podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 164 of the Free Cities podcast,
brought to you as always by our wonderful sponsors Veritas Villages.
Veritas Villages are building off-grid freedom-oriented communities in Latin America
and these communities will no doubt appeal to you if, like me, you're a freedom lover
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They've got projects in Nicaragua, Panama and Costa Rica.
And if you're a Bitcoiner like me, well, you can buy your property in a Veritas village with Bitcoin and you can spend Bitcoin at all communities.
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Great for 2026, that one.
Veritasvillages.com forward slash free cities for more info.
that link is in the show notes of course and please mention us if you choose to do business
with them right today's show well it's a seasteading one we haven't had a seasteading show
for a while in fact it's the first seasteading show of three we have a trio of them coming up
over the next couple of months i'll also be speaking at a later date with joe quirk the
ever popular returning guest and recipient of our storytelling award at our Prague conference
last year I'll also be speaking with Mitchell Suchner he's the creator of Ark Pads who was also
at last year's conference he also created the first ever seasteading resort now he's also
creating a project in Prospera at the moment but I'm going to tell you more about that in the next
seasteading episode in February. I want to go much deeper into his new project because amongst
other things, he's actually offering pre-purchase ownership options on it. So look out for that in
February. That's a very exciting seasteading slash prosperer project going on there right back to the
show. Today's guest is Mason. He's a doctor and a seasteader, of course, and the builder of LiberArcs.
Liber Arks are his solar-powered floating catamaran-style homes designed for what I would
call very comfortable living on water. In this episode, we discuss Liber Arks' role in the wider
free cities and seasteading movement. We explore the practical challenges of living on water and
why seasteading may be the most realistic path yet towards individual sovereignty and mobile
self-directed lives. That's my take at least. It's become my take. Mason was one of the original
people that converted me to the ideas of seasteading. It was about two years ago, I think.
And as you know now, if you listen to this pod regularly, I'm a rather large advocate.
put fountains key topics in this episode seasteading and free cities liba arcs the design
and functionality the vision for atlas island that's another of mason's projects target market
and a marketing strategy for selling his product challenges and opportunities in the seasteading
movement and for this episode make sure you give the video version a look if you'd like to see
images of mason's libra arcs it really does help best way to do that would be to come and find us
on fountain that's fountain.fm fountain has both the video and the audio version if not you could
go to youtube where you'll find the video version of this episode or rumble if you're a bit more
subversive right talking of fountain shout out to all our value for value subscribers they're all
using fountain to donate monthly to the free cities podcast and many thanks for your continued
support and especially this week many thanks to og subscriber christopher albanese now just before
christmas christopher asked to make a well very generous one-off higher value donation to the
podcast for christmas and as a result i've now actually created a podcast donation page using
the podcast's stripe account so if you would like to donate fiat currency to the free cities podcast
you can use a credit card apple pay everything over on stripe details of that link are in the
show notes and many thanks again christopher for your very generous gift i hope i'm not embarrassing
you you didn't tell me not to mention it anyway another reminder to please review us on your
podcasting app just a one minute task that's my new year's resolution is to mention this to you
every week until it looks like we've got more subscribers on apple anyway don't forget january
is actually the most popular time of the year for people to book their summer holidays i know my
wife's currently just flicking through brochures continuously and whilst you're on the couch doing
that and browsing your tropical paradises remember the free cities conference is happening in a
tropical paradise this year that's right we're all heading off to prospera in september that's the
third until the sixth of september that's actually only about 230 days away so get planning people
spaces are more limited than prague and especially accommodation if you would like to stay inside
prospera itself right time for the convo grab a rum and coke or something similar and your favorite
deck chair i suppose it's time to for the second time in 2026 sit back relax and enjoy my conversation
with mason
right yeah we've come we've come on a bit come on a bit since the last time um
yeah you were on it wasn't video was it no it wasn't it was audio only which to be honest i
loved i loved audio only um but i understand that people want to see things and funnily enough in
in the grand scheme of things still most of our listeners are audio and on youtube we get you know
two or three hundred listens per episode it never seems to blow up but shorts which you know
like on tiktok i've had just about to hit half a million views on shorts this year
sorry in this last year yeah yeah um and you know what are and youtube shorts um
is also hundreds of thousands or something so that you can see the way people consume this stuff
is very different than I would have hoped.
Yeah, we started doing video and all of a sudden people are...
Sometimes I watch, you know, Joe Rogan for three hours.
I actually do sit there and watch it.
But people don't seem to...
They don't come...
Unless I'm being shadow banned on YouTube,
but I don't think I am.
I don't know.
I mean I listen to every single episode on my podcast app but I never go to YouTube to watch it So i don know do you listen to every single episode i do yeah do you yeah well here i like to ask your advice then
because sometimes i go off like i have to broaden the conversation a little bit yeah not least
because there's not really enough people just to talk about free cities we're on a episode 155 now
So there's not 155 people probably.
There probably are.
But so I obviously I branch out into freedom.
And my real sort of like passions when we branch out are often strange and weird things.
Like this actual episode that's coming out this week is with a guy called Joni Appleberg, who's a doctor.
He's a doctor.
But half the podcast probably we talk about psychedelics, which is not exactly a free cities concept.
but freedom is and so but yeah so what what's your opinion on on the kind of content and and
when it veers a little bit away from free cities does that bother you as a free cities listener
i don't think it bothers me i think it's less interesting to me than the more directly related
things but uh i mean you do a good job talking to people anyways so yeah well that we're about
to hit a very long and hard round of free cities because i'm i think i'm doing 20 interviews this
week so and they they will all be as you know we're at the free cities conference they'll they'll all
be the actual movers and the shakers of which you are one mason and um we've spoken once on this
podcast and i got the kind of the general i am mason um what you do and stuff and i'll be honest
with you i don't know a lot else since i mean i know that you've got that liberarchs have got a
new model and i think we were talking about that two years ago so that's obviously come to fruition
i haven't heard much more about atlas island so then don't take this wrong way i've deliberately
come in not knowing a huge amount yeah i hope that's okay so i'm just i'm basically just gonna
i basically want to know um and i don't know you probably noticed as well if you do actually
listen to every episode i've become a bit of a seasteader over the last couple years i've noticed
that yeah right and i mean i just just interviewed vera just now just before you and we ended up
talking about seasteading and i said to her and i'll repeat it now because i think it's true
is i think too many people um sit on the idea of seasteading and just think haha that's cute
without actually realizing i think it's one of the if not the most important idea in the whole
free cities ecosystem and the the main reason is because we have a working model in the general
consensus covering reality which is cruise ships which not only is very easy to explain all the
concepts of free cities especially free private cities um but also people can relate to it because
they can imagine themselves walking onto a ship right and when you say did you realize that's a
floating private city works the same way governance models the same flagging all this
kind of stuff yeah um so so even if we're not even talking about the actual nuts and bolts of the
items that you're building and the ocean builders and all that lot of building the actual concept
is super important and and will almost certainly be the thing which which for me it proves the model
I mean, obviously, you're a seasteader, so you no doubt agree, but pick apart my argument there.
No, I mean, I completely agree.
As you said, cruise ships are floating cities, right?
We don't call them that, primarily because they're short-term accommodations, but that's for the guests.
The people who live on them, live on them for six months at a time.
Their food is there, their house is there, their job is there, their boss is there, and everything's run according to the free private city model.
There's nothing related to national regulation for the most part in any of these projects.
And they're economically successful and they're winning.
They're proving that people choose free cities without even knowing the ideology behind it because it just works better.
Worth saying as well, super high standard of living.
I mean, obviously, it's not to everyone's taste, but I think possibly one of the highest standard of living possible for a normal person.
If you were a member of the aristocracy or a multi-billionaire, you could probably have that many people at your beck and call.
But yeah, not, you know, I don't know.
And the other important thing is it's not that it's a high standard living because we've taken a group of people and, you know,
pressed them into work or, you know, made them do something against their will by the government trying to force an industry.
These are people who voluntarily leave their homes and their families to go work on cruise
ships because they're treated better and they make more money than they would working where
they come from.
So all people involved are in a win-win situation.
It's completely voluntary.
I did a speech in Serbia last month and I did a, I wanted to, I wanted to, I was talking
to what you call normies about private cities and I've worked out through a, through a sort
of um just through talking to people the easiest way to describe them is using cruise ships right
not a lot of other people seem to do it but it's just so easy and so i did a bit of a dig in they've
just two new cruise ships come out and i've the name of it's forgotten it's something of the seas
icon of the seas two billion dollars yeah to build icon of the seas yeah that's enough to build a
city right yeah a floating city they did it is a floating city right but but i mean when when you
look at the other method and other models around i mean what are the main class of of sort of
seasteads these days floating cities you know i know nothing's been officially classified but as
someone who works and builds these kind of things what are the sort of major classifications according
to you that's uh i mean that's an interesting question uh i think obviously as we said cruise
ships are the best working example of a true floating city. You know, there are places where
there's already floating extensions of cities, you know, floating buildings and floating apartments,
things like that. Aside from that, the rest of it, when we're going at a smaller scale is still
just being launched now. So, so far we have the, the C pod from ocean builders, which is a spar
type home fairly unique and niche it's very interesting it's very beautiful I'm not confident
as to how well it will scale or you know become affordable price-wise just because of their
construction technique I'm hopeful but they've been working on it for quite some time and I think
they're still out of budget of the average family the one that I'm more excited about is the arc pad
from Mitchell Suchner in the Philippines.
And I know they're going to be launching sales of those very soon.
And he's actually looking to be building a floating house.
It looks just like a house.
It's on a flat platform.
You build a house on top of it.
And it will be cost competitive, actually cheaper than most real estate
in most parts of the developed world.
So that's very exciting to me.
And when he gets that launched and starts scaling up,
I think that's really where we can start to see things taking off and growing
because those are interlocking platforms that essentially fit the vision that Joe Quirk laid out of modular cities
with individual buildings that connect together and can be rearranged.
So that's exciting.
I think from my perspective, though, the other piece that I'm working on and will be launching actually on Friday
is the LibraArcs, which is taking it from the opposite direction.
Most of the things so far on the smaller scale have been stationary objects,
But what we're launching is a essentially a floating mobile home, a house yacht as we
could call it, that is designed for a family of between two to six people to live comfortably
on the ocean.
It if you imagine a waterfront apartment 110 square meters of interior space and another 40 or so square meters of balcony And now imagine that you can go anywhere in the world you want with this apartment And I think that adds to the dynamic because it one thing to have buildings that can be rearranged but it another thing to have the ability to move families around more easily
and both participate in sea staying as well as take advantage of the nomad lifestyle and
tour the world.
It's, in my perspective, it's the best of all worlds.
You get a home that's as comfortable as an apartment and as mobile as a boat or an RV.
So you really just bring your home wherever you want with you.
so that's those are the three projects i think right now that are uh closest to fruition right
i i'm with you there c pods that's grant grant's stuff i'd say they're high end i mean he i think
he told me that one cost him five million at the moment but yeah and he wants to get it down to
one million maybe but yeah and and you know the interesting thing about that they're you know
there are amazing engineers that are working on it um from my perspective what i would like to see
them do you know i mean i don't know the back side of their operations but they're taking on so many
things at once right they're not just trying to build a floating house they're trying to build
a floating futuristic house with uh an incinerating toilet and a ring that controls everything and a
helicopter landing on the roof and water recycling so i think that's why they're so expensive because
they're taking on so many challenges at once and you know it's fantastic that they're still going
and i hope that they will succeed but i think because they're taking on so much it's going to
take longer to you know to reach the mass market and also talking of arc pad as well the latest
arc pads that i saw were in the philippines were basically floating in a way tents so that's not
what you're describing no so arc pad i guess to clarify you know uh there are two things arc pad
the company which produces those floating tents he calls those the glamp houses that are part of
the reef resort and then the arc pad crd which is their um i guess you would call it their higher
end model but i would say a very reasonable model i i've told mitchell you know i don't know that
those tents are going to be something that will scale outside of lower income countries for lower
income countries where you have you know protected waters it's fantastic because it it addresses that
population but for a western audience i think the the model that will be most of interest to them is
is the arc pad d which i don't know if you've seen it on the website it's basically a 10 meter by 10
meter platform that floats a couple meters above the the waves and you can build a house one or two
stories right on top of that platform okay right because i'm speaking to him next week so i'll
hold off there i mean you've got your own project to talk about um but it's it's good to get a sense
i mean i'm just checking really that i know all the projects currently and that's that's what i
know so i'm glad to see that um like you say they're all small scale i think probably in the
back of everyone's minds is the multi-billion dollar cities. But according to you, at least,
do you think these are a stepping stone to get there? Or do you think this is a completely
different idea? Because it kind of serves the more nomadic side of things.
No, I think there's certainly a stepping stone to get there. The reason being is that as we started
this conversation, cruise ships are essentially a planned community where everything is owned by
one owner and rent it out to the individual, which can be interesting, but for, especially
for vacations, but most people don't want to live full-time in a community like that.
And you can see that because where people live on land is, is all cities that have grown
up organically block by block, building by building.
So I think this, this idea to build a, you know, a $2 billion boat that serves as a seastead
for people living aboard permanently, it could work, but it's, it's a bit of a, again, a
second problem because not only do you have to convince people to live on the water full-time,
but you also have to convince them that they're going to live in this planned community, which
they don't do on land. Whereas when you look at something like the Ark Pad or the Libra Arcs
or the Sea Pod, this is how cities build up on land. They start with a few individuals living in
their home and then more people come together. It becomes a village and then from there enough
people accumulate in one area and it becomes a town. You get a business district and it grows up
and grows up and grows up.
So if you, these three projects,
and there's a couple others in the works as well,
as a foundation stones for a larger city,
it will certainly take time.
But I think once you get enough people living in one place
that the demand for density is there,
then you'll start seeing engineers going
and developing larger structures
that are more equivalent to apartment buildings
or skyscrapers.
But you first, whenever you're building a city anywhere,
unless it's got a huge amount of government funding,
you start with low-rise development,
and that's where we're at right now with Seasteads.
so but as far as i know arc pad and c pod and we'll come to yours in a bit don't worry but um
i don't think they're modular are they well it depends on what you mean by modular well as in
they're designed as individual vessels at the moment and there's no way to park two next to
each other necessarily and link them up with the in a sense that you'll end up with something as
large enough to call a town or a city. So with the C-Pod, you're correct. They are not
directly linked together. They do have plans for platforms that connect them. But with the
Archipad, they actually are intended to be linked together. That's why they're all 10 by 10 meter
building blocks, because then you can link these together and create walkways between them. And you
can create blocks and blocks of housing that are walkable communities. I don't think you'll get to
the point where there's you know roads with cars or buses or anything like that but you could
definitely have people walking between the platforms or even biking between the platforms
and you could put tens or hundreds of these connected together and and build a small little
town or village okay right once again i'll leave that until i'm speaking to the guy that's actually
building these let's go on to your to your liberarchs as they're called with an x on the end
And I mean, I remember when we spoke last, a couple of years ago, they were catamaran-esque.
What's the, I mean, it would be really useful actually as well if you have a picture that I can lay onto the video as well.
Right, good.
I'll sort that out with you at a later date, but why don't you go ahead and describe exactly what it is?
Yeah, so I think the best way to describe it is that when most people build boats,
they build a boat around sails or motors for the purpose of moving. What we've done with the
Libra Arcs is we've designed an apartment, a single unit from an apartment building,
and put the things on top and below to make this into a floating and mobile house.
So technically speaking, you could classify it as a catamaran. It does have two halls underneath,
it's able to move at about five to eight knots. But from a practical perspective, what it is,
is it's a floating house that is able to move.
And it's really optimized around that.
Unlike other vessels that you can buy,
we designed everything around domestic appliances.
We don't want people, you know,
hassling with pump toilets like you have on boats.
We don't want them smelling the sewage.
We don't want to worry about low water pressure.
We don't want to have to go up and down narrow and tight stairs
or turn tight corners.
We don't want beds crammed in between two different things.
So what we did was we created this platform
where the living area is 9 meters wide by 12 meters long.
And that's a completely open space, free to be arranged however you want.
We've created a reference design, you know, that I think will suit most people well.
But all in all, what it is, is it is a floating house.
And it is designed to be mobile anywhere in the world that you want to go with it.
And engineering wise, does it have a pillar system like the C pods or whatever?
What keeps it afloat or upright?
Yeah, no.
So engineering wise, it is practically speaking a catamaran base with a house on top of it.
Um, so, you know, there's pros and cons to that.
Uh, certainly something like the arc pad is going to be more comfortable in a high wave
situation because you have the pillars.
There's no doubt about that.
The catamaran, you will feel the boat will move side to side with waves, not like a sailboat,
not like a monohull.
Um, but if you have two or three meter waves, you're going to feel it.
You're not going to, you're not going to think that nothing's happening on the flip side.
What it does allow you to do is it allows you to be mobile.
So while a stationary structure like a sea pod or an arc pad have to withstand four to five meter waves because
They are where they are and then they can't move when a storm comes with something like the Libra arcs
You can move and you can design it You can design your lifestyle around the weather conditions So before a large seasteading community develops I think you know the ideal situation would be for example spending your summers in the Mediterranean and spending your winters in the Caribbean always being in good
weather and sailing from port to port, maybe spending a couple of weeks or a couple of months
in each location. And, you know, you can homeschool your kids, you can work remotely and you can
tour the world and, you know, live life as a nomad without the inconvenience of living out of a
suitcase, the hassle of planes and the cost of hotel rooms.
So sailing across the Atlantic, not a problem?
Not a problem, no.
People do that in much smaller vessels all the time.
You're not going to go from England to Newfoundland.
You're going to go down through the Canaries and across in the tropical waters.
But if you pull up a map of pleasure craft routes, thousands and thousands of vessels
do this crossing every year.
Many of them are 30 to 40 feet long, much smaller, and monohulls rather than catamarans.
So it's certainly a very doable journey.
And anyone could accomplish it if they wish.
The other option is if you don't want to do that journey yourself, you can always hire someone to pilot your vessel.
So in the two times a year when you have to cross, it'd take a couple of weeks.
You can hire someone to bring your vessel for you and you can take a two-week vacation and go wherever else you want anywhere else in the world.
gosh i i'm i don't know enough about sailing but the thought of going across the atlantic in
a large catamaran with all my possessions in it and you know an apartment does seem a tad scary
it's obviously not what about you know like i've i've sailed i have a i think we spoke about this
last time i have a bad history of sailing i've i've sailed i hate sailing basically end up
you know and i one thing i know is one of the things that happens all the time is everything
falls off the shelves and the tabletops and all this kind of stuff so the thought of and but i'm
someone who who's owned an rv and a caravan before so i love the idea um but i also know that you have
to pack things away very well so you know a couple years ago i think i helped convert you to seasteading
let me convert you to the libra arcs now okay first of all it's not a sailboat i you know i've
learn to sail. I appreciate sailing, but I don't like sailing, right? I like living on the water.
And that's what this has been designed around. There is no sail on the boat. The roof is covered
with about 27 and a half kilowatts of solar panels. And the boat is moved by two electric motors.
So going at a reasonable speed, you can cruise indefinitely on electric power from the sun.
No need for any diesel, no need for any gas. If you want to go faster, if you want to go when the
clouds are out, there are, there is a diesel generator that will let you go across the ocean
with diesel power alone, but there is none of the hassle, none of the inconvenience of sailing.
And because our electric motors, there's basically no maintenance. So you can think of it like an
electric RV. You push the throttle forward, the engine spool up and you, you steer the boat and
it goes where you want to go. You don't need to worry about trimming the sails or any of those
other skills that do take a long time to develop. It's very easy to pilot. Secondly, because there's
no sail and because it's a catamaran, it doesn't, it doesn't, you know, go side to side like a normal
sailboat does. The catamaran, by nature of having two hulls, it will always stay parallel to the
water surface. So as long as you're going somewhere where the waves are relatively reasonable, which
you can certainly plot out based on modern weather forecasts, catamarans are not like sailboats.
If you watch a video of a catamaran on YouTube, first of all, the stove is not gimballed because
everything's flat. Second of all, you'll see people crossing the ocean and they have wine
glasses on their table and they're eating normal food and normal drinks on a table and everything's
flat and everything's smooth you'll feel a little bit of rocking but similar to an rv going down the
highway it's not like a boat going crashing across big waves going back and forth as a sail goes left
and right so yeah it i completely understand and this is actually part of the reason why we designed
the libra arcs because there's very few vessels of this size that are comfortable that are not
designed around a sail and i think the big sail on top is a major barrier to entry for many people
who want to enjoy the lifestyle on water so what we've done is we've created essentially a large rv
i mean it makes rvs look small because most rvs are what eight feet wide or something like that by
40 feet long i think our vessel is uh our vessel is 64 feet long and 30 feet wide so it's you know
probably five or six times the size of an rv it's quite impressive it's big and it's just as
comfortable as an RV. And on top of that, you can go anywhere there's water. So you can go to
islands, you can go to coastlines. So it's all the benefits of the RV, but with more space,
more comfort, energy independence, because you're not going fast. So solar power works,
you don't need to fill up your diesel tank constantly. And then also country independence,
you're not landlocked to one location, you can basically go anywhere in the world you want to go.
Because when you look at the map of civilization, most civilization is based around waterways and
water access for historic reasons. Even Prague, which is, you know, in Central Europe, we've done
the, we've looked at the charts and the LiberX, based on the size that we built it, can actually
sail into downtown Prague. So, you know, maybe in a couple of years, you'll see someone sailing to
the Free Cities Conference on their LiberX. They'll park on the river and they'll walk to
the conference and they'll go back home to their apartment. Where can you moor down here though?
I mean, like presumably you need to, you can't just leave it in the middle of the river. Well,
Well, not in the middle of the river, but usually along the river, there are places to moor up boats.
So anywhere along the river, you can moor up any boat.
You can just moor it up and you have your solar power.
You have everything with you.
I seem to remember when we spoke before, and this is something that Joe Quirk is always going on about,
is in order to get your vessels inshored, et cetera, they need to be classified.
I'm pretty sure we spoke about it before.
We did, yes.
Is a Liberax classified?
Um, it's not yet because we haven't built the first one, but it is designed according
to standard catamaran rules and it is designed.
And as soon as we build the first one, it will be classified according to a catamaran
rules.
So as far as insurance is concerned, this is the same as any other boat.
That's one advantage of using the catamaran hull.
Unlike the, uh, the sea pod or the archetype pad, we're not looking to create a new category
of thing.
Uh, yes, it's more comfortable.
Yes.
It feels like a home on the inside, but the regulators look at it and say, Oh, this is
a catamaran.
We know exactly what to do with this.
And as long as you check these boxes, which we have, as soon as you get it built, we'll
give you a stamp and you'll get your insurance.
So there are already catamarans that are nine meters by 12 meters.
Absolutely.
Yes.
And what are they?
Just massive shit.
That's a big, isn't it?
Well, it's-
Nine meters by, yeah.
I mean, I built an annex of my house, which is six meters by six meters.
And that was pretty big.
Yeah.
So nine meters by 12 meters.
Nine meters by 19 and a half meters.
Oh.
12 meters is the interior space.
The overall length is 19 and a half meters.
Nine by 19.
So that's, yeah, that's big.
Yeah, it's a standard class.
If you look up different catamarans, the big companies, Lagoon, Leopard, Fountain Pajot,
they all have boats in this size range.
They usually call them the 60 or the 65.
Ours is the 64.
It's a standard size boat.
It is, you know, on the higher end of recreational, but nothing absurd.
Like these are things that you would see quite commonly in most anchorages.
It's just most of them are built around a big 80-foot mast on top of it with sails and designed for sailing around and cruising.
I was going to say, why hasn't this not been done before?
I mean, when you look at – I'm a keen observer of RV technology, mainly on YouTube these days because I no longer own one.
But these days, you know, especially in the States, you can buy things which are just out of this world.
They're like, you know, the sides come out like this.
So RV technology is just like going on in leaps and bounds.
So what is it about boat technology, which means people are keeping boats as boats, if you see what I mean, and not designing them around apartments, say?
I think, isn't that a fair way to describe the angle you're coming from?
Is it from a habitation first and then, you know, sailing second?
Because it's not actually sailing, but, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
I think, you know, there's a couple answers to this.
One, there is a product that is somewhat similar to what we're doing called the silent yacht
and they do sell them.
But the difference is that for the most part,
boatbuilders have not really focused on mass manufacturing vessels of this size. They've
really made them kind of bespoke one-off things that are run in small production series, which
by extension means that, you know, they're not attainable for the average person. And also,
it becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If someone knows that this boat is
going to cost at least 2 million euro or $2 million, then they're going to want to make it
look fancy and they'll add you know some extra curves and things that make it harder to manufacture
because what's an extra 500 000 when you're already paying two million but we've taken the
opposite approach that we've designed from the ground up a boat that is designed for
manufacturability and scale so i think to circle back to your question um i think right now there
are boats that you can live on they're very comfortable they're just not affordable for
the average person um and what we're looking to do at librax is we're not really inventing a new
category, what we're looking to do is go from the bespoke automobile to the Model T. We want to make
something that's mass producible, that's attainable from the masses, and that can be affordable for an
average middle-class family. And that's what we're aiming to price this boat at. We've actually just
gotten a quote back from one potential producer, and they told us that they should be able to
produce this vessel for about $750,000 US, which sounds like a high number, but when you think
about it, that you have a 110 square meter apartment that has constant waterfront views,
no utility bills and mobility to go around the world that's actually quite comparable and cheaper
than waterfront apartments in many major cities in the western hemisphere presumably as well a
catamaran of that size is quite expensive anyway is it oh yeah no i mean if you wanted to just get
a standard catamaran you're talking probably uh two million oh right okay so yeah so we've made
it cheaper than the average catamaran something i've just thought about is you probably are gonna
to be up against, like your buyer, for example, you've got, it's an interesting little niche
that you're going to try and sell to because your average boat person probably going to
look down their nose at something that doesn't sail, right?
It doesn't sail and it doesn't look like a boat, right?
It looks more like an RV.
It's a big box on top of the water rather than having sleek curves and lines.
So yeah, it's a very different market.
and and that's you know we're leaning into that and we're embracing it we're not trying to be a
boat we're trying to be a house and again going back to your previous point we're when you're
selling a two million dollar boat you need to not only find someone who has two million dollars you
need to find someone who has two million dollars probably in cash because it's hard to mortgage a
boat that's used for recreation on top of the ability to pay for the principal residence we're
targeting the 750 000 price point as someone who uses as their primary accommodation so anyone
who's been able to buy and pay off water for an apartment can sell that apartment buy one of these
and live on it full time so it's a completely different market and seasteaders will certainly
be part of it but we've also done a lot of thinking about this that to scale this up we need to go
beyond seasteaders at least initially and still seasteading catches on and really it's ideal for
a family who wants to live a nomad lifestyle and enjoy the outdoor world and explore and and have
freedom but what about you know not having sea legs which your average you know like who is your
who is your buyer i said that's an interesting question really because like i say why why would
suddenly why would someone who's not a fae with the sea suddenly decide you know what i'm going
to live on the sea which is i understand ideologically is a phenomenal idea but um i
I wouldn't necessarily think that most people would think that's an easy transition to make, going from land to sea.
Yeah.
So, again, like our Atlas Islander, our plan, I don't think that the first people buying the Libra Arc will anchor it in the middle of the ocean and just live there.
I think the vast majority of people who buy the first dozens or hundreds of these vessels will be people who want to live on it and live a coastal life.
So they'll probably, you know, they could take it, like I said, to Prague for a month, spend a month here and then say, well, you know, now I want to go to Paris.
I'm going to bring it to Paris.
I'll spend five days, I'll sail to Paris, and I'll spend another month living in Paris.
So it's someone who wants to enjoy the lifestyle available in all these cities and move around as a nomad,
but have the convenience of having their entire house and all their possessions with them,
not having to live out of a suitcase and not constantly relocating.
You know, certainly if you want to be a hardcore sailor and go out and, you know, race,
you're going to, you know, encounter adverse conditions.
But if you're a digital nomad or, you know, a retiree who has enough money that you're not in a rush,
you don't need to go anywhere quickly you can wait a few days for the weather to pass and wait
for a good sailing opportunity then you'll make your one or two or five day journey to your next
destination and then you'll spend most of your time at anchor but what about you know like do
are you gonna you're presumably you're gonna need to understand sailing a little bit i appreciate
that it's going to be nice and simple but you know um cruising into a port or a dock or whatever
You know, you can't just, you know, parking your boat is not going to be as easy as parking your car, is it?
No, but because it's a catamaran, because it has electric motors and it doesn't have a sail, it actually becomes much easier.
You're not going to take someone who's never sailed a boat and just say, here are the keys go.
But what you can do is give them five or seven days of training.
And I can tell you personally, I was not a sailor growing up.
But after five days on a catamaran, you get the hang of it.
It works just like any other skid steer vehicle.
You have great control over it.
A catamaran, because it has two motors, one in each hull, can actually spin itself in a circle on a dime and rotate anywhere you want it to go.
And because they're electric motors and you don't have a sail, it's very easy to control.
So, yeah, it does take some getting used to.
But anyone who can drive a vehicle with a few days of training can drive a catamaran.
When you look at all the projects, like the three you've mentioned so far, I think it's obvious that the first iterations of all these things are kind of recreational type applications, possibly tourism.
You know, these seem to be, which is interestingly what I've also thought would be the first applications of floating cities as well.
the same kind of stuff tourism a bit of an interesting oh let's go and stay on the floating
city or let's go and stay um and uh i mean part of the fact is of that is probably that the price
starts high and comes down i assume you're anticipating the price to come down somewhat
as you start producing that's the hope i mean to be honest we've done a lot um to get the price
down we were here again two years ago talking about the concept um and looking at external
pictures, you won't notice too many differences, but we've gone through probably 10 iterations
of refining and manufacturability of this vessel. And that $750,000 price point, I think is
very competitive. What I can tell you is it certainly will not go up in terms of inflation.
And if we can scale up, then my hope is that we can continue to drop that price over time,
at least adjusted for inflation, in terms of gold ounces, for example, maybe not in terms of
Fed bills that are going to constantly decrease in value. But...
Point, you have to add that to everything you say.
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, three years ago when I first thought of this, so the target price was
$500,000. And you say, okay, well, now it's $750,000. But $750,000 buys less now than $500,000 did back then.
I've got a feeling when we first spoke, when I spoke with you two years ago, we spoke about Bitcoin, didn't we?
We did a little bit. Yeah.
I think I told you it was a great time to buy.
Yeah, I think, yeah, you did.
And you know what, I'm a gold guy.
And luckily I got into gold because gold did just as well.
I'm not sure.
Actually, I'm going to have to call you on that.
I don't think it did as well.
If you look at the charts, it's done.
In two years?
I don't know the exact timeframe,
but on average over the last three to four years,
gold has performed or outperformed Bitcoin.
I'm going to have to look into that.
I can't believe that's true.
Four years ago, gold was around 2,100 Canadian an ounce.
And it's now about 6,000 Canadian.
It's like tripled in the last four.
It's tripled. And two years ago, Bitcoin was maybe 30.
Yeah.
So it's more than tripled.
Well, it's about the same. It depends on where exactly you start and end, but yeah.
Okay Well then let go back eight years then Anyway But so yeah so where are you at then with actually selling them
Have you got a brochure?
Can someone look through and go, yes, I'd like this, this?
A lot of people pick RVs from a brochure, don't they?
And they kind of custom make them sometimes.
Yeah, so we just finished the design for the first model.
obviously there is the option to customize but we've come up with a layout that is
i think pretty applicable to most of our buyers so our plan is what on friday i'm in two days from
now i'm going to be presenting at this conference and i'm going to be showing the picture showing
the renderings and asking for people to take orders and once we get our first three to five
orders we'll start our first batch production of the of the librax wow so yeah you can be you can
say anything here this won't be going out before friday or before your your your talk so that's
your announcement is it yeah wow so and can i i'll be able to use pick those pictures in the video
version of this i hope yeah absolutely and okay so what do you what do you expect like are you on
actively because i know you've got you've got another life you've got a whole nother life
haven't you you've got and i know that because i think sometimes people like let's say they have
trouble consolidating the two. You're a doctor, right? Yes. And then you're a Seasteader. Yeah.
So how does that work then when you start selling Seasteads? Are you looking to get out of the
doctoring game or whatever, or is that something you can run alongside? I mean, I can run them
alongside, to be honest. My private life is what's allowed me to fund this. I've put a lot of money
into developing this product and haven't asked anyone for a dime. I've paid everything out of
my own pocket and I intend to continue doing so because this is a passion of mine. I would like
eventually to start making a profit on these. The first batch is going to be sold basically at cost
because, you know, there's always bugs you need to work out on the first batch. But then my hope is
to eventually start making a profit and first and foremost reinvest that into further iterations and
improvements in our product. Hopefully again, reducing that production cost, scaling up.
uh but you know in the long term if i can sell enough of these that it becomes a viable income
for myself um and i can devote myself to this which is my passion then i think you'll see the
other parts of my life scaling back in relation to it and this could become more of a full-time
endeavor interesting grant grant remont who who who created the um c pod lives on his yes
so he built it for himself first you know you haven't done that now why is that well i mean
the honest answer is because i'm still young right i mean i i've been fortunate and i have a
relatively good income but i haven't had the decades to build up the savings necessary to
live off of my savings as of yet right i mean i still need to pay my bills i need to pay for my
phone and uh like i said i haven't raised any money from anyone else i don't intend to i want
to keep control of this project because i i don't want anyone else dictating how it goes i believe in
and I want to shape it and, you know, see it impact the future.
For me, you know, LibreRx is, like I said, if I can make money, fantastic.
But it's, for me, more than anything, a legacy project.
I want to see this change the world.
And I don't want to have to be beholden to someone who's put in a couple hundred thousand dollars
so that I can make it come to fruition a little bit quicker,
but then want to make a quick buck and, you know, ruin the vision.
So it's a project of passion and I'm committed to making it succeed.
so it means that I've gone a little slower it means I'm doing other things and it also means
that for now I don't have the I don't want to risk having to stop doing what I'm doing
because I could you know sell everything and go all in but then if I run out of runway to get this
thing to market you become between a rock and hard place where it's going a little more
conservatively and you know having an income on the side that you can support I'm not worried
about the break-even point and I won't be forced to compromise my values
or the mission of the product in order to make it succeed.
Will you, though?
Yes.
Will you live on one?
Yes.
You will?
Absolutely.
So describe your ideal life on a Liberax then.
So, you know, there's the idealistic mason who believes that Atlas Island will succeed.
And realistically, I don't know the timeframe.
Sorry, better stop you there.
Just give a quick overview of what Atlas Island is,
because we haven't actually established that.
So we talked about it last time, but I'll refresh here.
So Atlas Island is my other project that I started before the Libra Arcs.
It's a seasteading project.
As you may or may not be aware, seasteading is generally considered a broader term.
It's not dedicated to private cities.
Seasteading can be for any number of ideological reasons.
Atlas Island is, if you take seasteading and you take free cities and they had a baby, that will be Atlas Island.
And it's an anarcho-capitalist libertarian seasteading movement designed around private governance and individual sovereignty.
We've created a plan as to how we want to achieve that.
Briefly, it's a five-step plan because, as we talked about earlier, you can't just pick up 100,000 people and drop them in the middle of the ocean and say, city, go.
You need to build things up step by step as cities on land have always done over time.
So the first step is an online community, which we're developing right now.
The second step after that is getting people actually moving on to floating vessels in marinas nearby. And that's where the Libra arc comes in, because there's not many vessels that people want to move on and the ones that they do are too expensive. So the idea with the Libra arcs was to create a platform that can be mass produced and they can get people in our community actually moving on to a floating structure, floating vessel that's mobile, but also that is comfortable, attainable from a financial perspective, and also approachable from a skills perspective for the average person.
So once we get enough people living on these catamarans in marinas all around the world, the idea then is to build a floating marina of some kind, probably using a structure similar to the archipad, actually.
So you can imagine a bunch of archipads put together into a floating platform.
And then at that platform, on top of the platform, you can have a business district with shops and commercial places, restaurants, perhaps some rental apartments for people who can't afford their own vessel.
and on the outside of that you can have a whole bunch of docking space for people who have their
their catamarans whether it's a libra arcs or any other vessel that they have and that becomes a
floating proto-seastead in a sheltered area once that develops large enough and it becomes
you know to some degree self-sufficient economically it has a little bit of a circular
economy going on the idea would then be to move that whole floating platform further away from
shore still close enough to shore that you can get there but it then lets you develop that economic
self-sufficiency even further, test your designs out in more adverse conditions. And eventually,
once you've established probably a community of at least a couple thousand people with,
you know, like I said, hundreds of archipads and a bunch of other vessels,
and you've proven that it works and that, you know, for the most part, you're conducting all
of your business and your daily interactions with other people on this platform, you can then move
that whole community out into international waters. So that's the five stage plan for achieving true
seasteading, which is international waters, flags of convenience, multiple platforms. And, you know,
from getting from where we are stage one to stage five could very well take multiple decades,
depending on how things progress. Ultimately, that is my goal to, you know, live on a Libra
arcs and associate with a community of other like-minded individuals in a true seastead in
international waters. But I'm also a very practical person. So in the short term, you know, once I
start selling enough of these and I want to make this my full-time job and passion. My plan would
be to move on to one, continue selling them, promoting the movement. And in the interim,
I would probably spend my time, as I mentioned earlier, cruising around different places in the
world, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, Indo-Pacific, and just exploring the world,
working remotely, selling these products and enjoying life.
it does sound very nice and something that i know a couple of people that do which is relatively
similar but much more localized is living on barges a lot of people travel around the uk
living on barges you can sail barges across to other to um you know like the netherlands and places like that if the sea is good And I can definitely see the attraction there I often I had a very good friend of mine actually
who during the pandemic, you know, was thinking about decamping to a barge.
You're talking a narrow boat, right?
Yeah, we call them barges, but yeah.
Because they're not as big as what you're describing,
because they have to go down canals.
But they are very long and people live on them.
Lots of people in the UK live on them permanently.
Absolutely.
And, you know, you can sail them into Camden Lock in London,
more right in the middle of North London,
and pop out to the shops and stuff,
whereas you could never afford a one-bedroom apartment.
And barges are quite cheap.
You just have the upkeep and the mooring fees occasionally.
This is essentially that concept,
but expanded to something a little more comfortable
and a little more seaworthy,
because those barges really shouldn't leave the canals of the UK.
I wouldn't feel comfortable taking one of those barges across the Atlantic, right?
That's not a vessel designed for it.
I don't think you can.
You can definitely take them across to other parts of Europe, though.
When you have the right weather window, yeah.
But actually, the UK is a little bit of an outlier in this.
The rest of Europe has an inland waterway system designed around fixed sizes,
and that was one of the design parameters.
That's why we chose 9 meters wide and less than 20 meters long,
because that means that this vessel can get into almost every major European city.
So what people do in the UK with narrowboats, you could do this in Europe
or along the Great Loop in America with the Libra Arcs.
So it is designed that if you want to live that lifestyle
and just sail around inland waters in Europe and North America,
you're absolutely able to do that with this boat.
There's going to be a bit of cultural friction there, isn't there,
between the people that live on narrowboats when they start seeing it.
I can imagine the horror that they would see these,
in the sense that I think a lot of people would class,
some people that live in RVs would say it's a bit crass.
You know, like I bet you that you get a similar cultural divide on the sea.
You could, but also there's probably not going to be much overlap.
Like these boats are not going to fit into the canals in the UK.
They're too wide for that.
But I mean in France.
In France, though.
The canals aren't that big in France.
Oh, they're not ginormous.
They're not ginormous, but most,
So the canals that are the inland waterways that this is designed for are also used for industrial purposes.
So it's not like it's just a recreational canal.
These are things that are taking, you know, multi 100 foot long barges with containers and bulk cargo.
So these would actually be some of the smaller vessels relative to what else is traveling on these waterways already.
Yeah, Europe is very much pivoting towards trying to move traffic onto the waterways, which is why there's an active effort to expand these waterways, really for freight purposes.
But it also means that it works out perfectly with our time.
Why is there a movement to move back onto the water then?
That seems, I mean, it would be back, wouldn't it?
Because there was a time when almost everything was moved by water.
I mean, I'm not an expert in European politics, but I think their perspective is that it's more energy efficient to move things by water than by rail or road.
So their idea is to, you know, first of all, decongest the rails and the roads, but also to be more potentially environmentally friendly, I guess.
Is it though?
I mean.
Yeah.
I mean, actually shipping by water is one of the most energy efficient ways to ship things.
Is that right?
Yeah.
That's why you see the container ships.
They don't bring a container ship to the nearest land possible.
they bring a container ship as far inland as they'll be able to get it because it's actually
much cheaper to just leave things on the ship and go as close as possible i mean that's why you have
the suez canal and the panama canal right you could have said let's unload the ship here and
put it on rail and bring it to china by rail uh or you know across uh across north america by rail
but it's easier and more efficient to keep it going by water water is a fantastic method to
move bulk cargo and anything. So describe your perfect sort of like yearly kind of,
say you're living on a Liberax. Is it a Liberax 64, did you call it? Yeah. Is that the model,
64? Yeah, the 64 because it's 64 feet long. That's generally how boats are modeled.
Okay. Describe your perfect year. I want people to start imagining this, you know,
what it could be because i know that there are currently uh amongst the super wealthy who have
large yachts there's a route that they tend to travel around the world and a lot of it's to do
with um events that they go to in different countries but but what would the what would
the liberax kind of buyer be potentially doing i know you've mentioned a few sort of european
cities and stuff? Yeah, I think it really depends on what your goals are. I think for me, I generally
like spending a week or two in each place. So in the summer, I would sail along the coast of the
Mediterranean for the most part. You can start in Spain and continue along to France and Italy,
go along the coast, get to Greece, sail around the Greek islands. And basically what I would do is
each year I would look for what's an interesting city or a port that I want to stop at. And you can
stop at each of those ports for a week or two weeks. Obviously during the day you can still do
your work. You're going to have satellite internet on the vessel so you have your office on board.
But then you can take your family and a couple nights a week or every night depending on how
you want to live you go into the city, you walk around, you see the sights, maybe do something
touristy, have a nice meal and on the weekends you can do a little road trip. You can leave the
vessel parked and rent a car and drive a little bit further inland and really just explore all
the different parts of europe in say somewhere like the med mediterranean i i is it necessary to
to come into a port or come into a or are you talking about just offshoring yeah yeah so there's
multiple options depending on how much money you want to spend and you know what you value um the
the cheapest thing is as long as you find areas that you're allowed to anchor you can just drop
your anchor because you have solar power on the roof you have no need to plug into anything ample
power not only to power your vessel but also for all your domestic needs you could run you know
your tv your air conditioning day and night all day every day and not worry about running out of
electricity we also have dual water generator water makers on board so no need to fill up on
water we have wastewater processing so no need to empty your tanks either so you can absolutely live
at anchor permanently full-time and moving from anchorage to anchorage and then when you want to
go inshore you can drop the the dinghy which is a small little boat off the back and sail in and
and just more up that dinghy going, you know, now in terms of stepping up in terms of cost,
but also potentially more convenience, you can, instead of dropping anchor, you can use a mooring
field, which is where they have permanent mooring balls that you can pick up. It's a little bit more
stable, a little bit less hassle. And then the most expensive, but also most convenient is you
can go into a port either every day or on certain days when you want and, and rent a slip and more
up into the slip and then you have access to shore power you have access to all the shore facilities
and you can literally just walk off your boat onto the dock and and go into town and once again my my
when i think about these things i'm always thinking about bad weather and what that would mean
and would it become a nightmare and etc tell me something for example the mediterranean
do you get bad seas in the mediterranean you absolutely can but usually it's quite seasonal
it's you know more so in the winter that you get the bad weather and also again as we as i mentioned
there are weather forecasts so if you see that there's bad weather coming that may be the day
that you decide okay well there's a really bad storm coming i don't want to be an anchorage here
even though i'm safe it might not be the most comfortable thing to be swinging back and forth
on your anchor so if you see that there's a bad storm coming you you can either go into a protected
harbor um you know where there's a small little opening that prevents the weather from getting in
there or you could even go into a port or a marina and then rent a slip and then you're fully
you know, tied up to the slip and nice and secure and have the ability to get on and off
without worrying about the seas.
So it's really just a question of what you're comfortable with, planning around the weather
and deciding how much you want to avoid it versus riding it out.
The thing that most people don understand about boats is when we design boats we have things we design for One of them is called stability and there a Naval architect on YouTube He made a kind of a little funny video He said that stability is not what people think of when they buy a boat
When people buy a boat, they think of something called seakeeping,
which is how comfortable the boat is in the conditions.
And given that it's a, you know, 64 foot long catamaran,
this boat will be among the most comfortable of any that you can own
on a personal level in conditions, just because it's large and wide.
And it's, you know, the bigger the boat and the wider it is, the better it handles waves because it averages things out and it keeps them calm.
But that being said, when we talk about stability, catamarans are exceptionally stable vessels.
In fact, the only reason catamarans ever run into trouble for the most part is because they have too much sail up and the wind pushes the boat over.
But because our boat doesn't have a sail on top of it, you don't have that concern.
so there is no reason that the libra arc should ever become unsafe it should always be stable it
may not be comfortable if you have 20 meter waves you're going to have the boat go up and down over
those waves and you'll have some angling and you're going side to side the boat will always
be safe to live on it's just a question of what you're comfortable with so um yeah to circle back
to that and that question it really is just a question of your comfort level and some people
may have better sea legs and they may say oh you know three meter waves i'm rocking back and forth
a little bit. Maybe I can't leave glasses on the table all night long because they'll slide back
and forth, but I'm okay with that. Other people may not tolerate that and they may say, well,
you know what, I'll spend the 50 or a hundred dollars. I'm going to bring it into a marina
for these few nights because I don't want to be uncomfortable like that. So it really depends on
on what you do, what you tolerate. I think though, the best thing is to plan your general travels
around the weather patterns because the big storms are generally fairly predictable and you can work
work to avoid them. I certainly wouldn't want to be in the Caribbean, for example, during hurricane
season, right? That's just not a good plan. Again, the boat would probably survive it if it didn't
get washed on the shore, but why do that, right? I mean, you have the ability to move unlike the
other seasteading projects, so you might as well plan your life around being where the weather is
good at all times. Amazing. And like you say, insurance-wise, it's simple. Insurers understand.
Do you think you could get a mortgage for one of these?
I think you could.
It's not as easy as a house.
You're going to need a bigger down payment,
but you can get mortgages on boats.
I know that some of the other companies
have been looking at other options
for mortgaging things or fractional ownership.
It's certainly a possibility.
And if you have insurance, it becomes a lot more viable.
And like I said,
I'm talking to you about seasteading right now.
I suspect that 80 to 90% of our sales will not be to seasteaders, right? It'll be to just
retirees, digital nomads who want to live a life on the water and potentially don't even have any
political ideology, but just value the lifestyle. And for them and for the insurance companies,
we won't mention anything about seasteading. This is just simply a comfortable catamaran that is
affordable and comfortable to live on, which makes it super simple from a flagging and an
insurance perspective. And just like any other boat, you can mortgage it the same way.
So you think your major buyer is going to be a digital nomad or just...
Or a retiree, yeah.
So where do you find these people?
How do you reach those kind of people?
That's a great question.
That's something that we're working through right now.
My plan, my goal is, like I said, we're launching this boat for sale in the next couple of days.
And my hope would be that the first three to five people who buy the first batch of boats,
number one are super passionate about it but number two represent a somewhat diverse spectrum
of individuals i've already talked to a few individuals who may be interested and the idea
is it will like i said to some degree be a beta test working out the kinks which is why we're not
going to take any profit we're going to release the first few models at cost to those individuals
but also with the caveat that we want those individuals to be almost brand ambassadors
ideally they can have you know a youtube channel or a podcast and they can document their adventures
if you look at youtube there's that you know there's there's countless channels of people
sailing right so if i can get three to five people who document their life on librax not only does
it reach the sailing community but then by youtube's algorithms reach out to people who are
interested in that but maybe not comfortable with the sailing part of it with the you know living in
cramped quarters and that's how we're going to do it by having brand ambassadors and probably a
referral or affiliate program where they can take a cut of the commission of sales that they make to
their followers it's definitely something i've noticed has taken off recently probably in the
last two or three years probably a pandemic thing again is channels of normally pretty good looking
husband and wife maybe a dog because they never seem to have actual kids yeah yeah living and
our journey around the world or here we are coming into this island or that and like we'll get the
sailing people we'll also get the rv people we'll get the digital nomad people so we need we're
targeting to have you know someone who whose lifestyle represents each of these people right
obviously there will be the hardcore seasteader libertarian but there will just be that you know
like you said young uh good-looking couple who wants to travel the world and doesn't want the
hassle of pulling up and down sails and wants the convenience of being able to run their
conditioning 24 7 and not worry about it because on most sailboats you do think about management of
power you think of management of water so it's someone who doesn't want to make compromises
and is maybe not so much in it for the sport as the lifestyle but you're not going to make a
prototype an unsolved prototype you're only going to start production when it's yeah each unit will
be built to order um like i said we have a standard floor plan we have a standard layout we've got all
the specs done uh so if someone came and said you know here's 750 000 i'm ready for you to start
building it we could start laying uh aluminum in the next couple months and have it done probably
within one year so uh yeah it will be initially um built to order because again i'm self-funding i
don't want to spend seven million dollars to build 10 units and then try to sell them afterwards
but eventually once we've got the production line up and running and we've done our first
couple dozen then we will probably have a small inventory of ones available for sale that are
pre-built it's very exciting really i mean joe joe's joe quirk's been getting quite excited about
everything recently he's saying he thinks that seasteading has reached a new paradigm absolutely
You think so as well?
Yeah.
I'm very passionate about our project, but I'm also very excited about Mitchell's project with the ArkPad, right?
I think our project is a proto-SeaStead and will work well in SeaSteads.
But I think when you combine LibraArcs with the ArkPad, you now have a platform for large floating businesses and you have a platform for families to live on vessels that can then go and patronize those businesses.
Do you know what?
I mean, I'm trying to think of all the things that you should, that would be good for you to do, because I'm a critic in my mind.
Every time you say something, I'm thinking, yeah, but what about this?
But what about this?
That's the big battle I think you have, is convincing people that living on water is not scary, it's not bad, it's not weird.
It's not. And also, it's convincing the people who sail boats that living in something that looks more like a house is a good idea as well.
So it's...
I mean, I'm going to be honest. I'm not targeting that market, right?
If someone wants to sail and they love pulling up and down their canvas and they like the wind tipping them left, you know, important starboard, they're not my target market, right?
They're going to buy their catamarans with a sail on top. Fantastic. Good for them.
but that is such a small portion of the population we're targeting the population who wants mobility
who maybe likes the idea of an rv but wants more space and more flexibility to go more places
so that's really our market right there so would you target actual rv people would you go to
rv conventions for example do you think do you think there's any crossover there
i mean because like i'm saying a lot of our fees are turning into mobile houses they're insane
some of them.
You know, I literally, it's a little personal passion
of mine is just watching YouTube videos
and people showing you around their ridiculous RV
that's just off the, you know.
I think that's the answer there, right?
I mean, I'm one person.
I have some people working for me,
but there's so many RV shows
and boat shows around the world.
For now, we just don't have the scale for that.
Maybe 10 years down the line
when we have a bunch of these available,
we can bring them to these shows.
But I think for now, the thing is YouTube
and other online platforms
is gonna be our means to get the message out
and having, like I said, three to five people
who are documenting their life,
showing, hey, you know, there's a storm,
but I'm still eating my meal.
I still have my glasses on the table.
Everything's good.
I'm comfortable.
I wasn't a sailor a year ago
and now I'm living this life and I love it.
I think that's going to be the biggest sales pitch for us.
You're absolutely right there.
That would be something that, you know,
I've talked about this for three years
and I still wonder about those things.
And I've seen all the evidence to the contrary
and I still wonder.
And I think partly it's because like, you know,
I live in a very old solid house
and when there's a massive storm outside,
I still worry about what am I going to have to fix
in the morning?
You know, what's going to blow off the roof?
what's going to you know let alone if i was on the water and i wasn't an experienced sailor or
whatever you know yeah but on the other hand um you know i have a background in engineering as well
and what i would say is that houses seem solid because they have bricks on the outside and maybe
in europe they're a little bit more solid but most houses in north america are just pieces of stick
yes put up vertically with a small flat piece of wood between them that's very thin right and then
you have some insulation and maybe you put some siding or some brick on the outside and they're
you know they're all built in a haphazard manner on site there's nothing that's standardized
if you've ever seen a house construct you see oh well this is crooked okay well we'll just shave
that down a bit slap some mud or tape on here you know add a little plaster there you know shimmy it
all okay it looks good enough now right but these boats are precision engineered they're going to
be designed and they're going to be built in a factory cut with cnc machines and the entire
structure is out of aluminum so you have a precision piece of aluminum that is you know
completely enclosing everything welded together solid you know i think that this is going to be
stronger and more sturdy than any standard house that you'll have built yeah that that that wooden
house thing is an american thing i was just thinking in my own house our walls are almost
a meter thick stone yeah not solid stone there's a hole at the gap in the middle but but i still
worry about the tiles flying off the roof in a in a storm or something yeah and again that's again
the way houses are built right this thing the entire outside is a solid piece of aluminum
i mean you have six millimeters of aluminum uh or whatever a quarter inch aluminum not much is
going to happen to that i mean maybe if you have a hurry you know a tornado and a and a piece of a
metal rod goes and you know hits the side but for the most part what's going to happen to a solid
box of aluminum not much yeah quite amazing really i mean can i the final couple of questions i've
got um you're quite ideologically driven as well aren't you really you know as most people are in
this kind of world but um but where does that fit in when you start marketing these things is that
an important aspect of it or no no i mean for me i know in all honesty you know i have my ideological
beliefs um but i think this is also something that differentiates atlas island um from a couple
other projects, right? We're not trying to claim that we're going to have a government and we're
going to have, you know, elections, we're going to be this libertarian paradise. What we're trying
to do is look at, practically speaking, how does the world work and identify how do we achieve the
best lifestyle and the best freedom using that existing framework. I don't think I'm going to
convince people to change their political views. I'm not going to convince, you know, America to
elect an anarcho-capitalist or libertarian, right? It's not going to happen, much less so in Canada
or Europe, right? This is just not going to happen. So the question is, people who value freedom and
value that, do you want to spend your life fighting a political process? We're almost certainly going
to lose because the vast majority of people want to be told to how to live their life? Or do you
want to create a system where you can opt out and vote with your vote and just choose to live your
life as you desire? So yes, the reason why this came into existence was my belief in freedom and
liberty. But from a practical sense, I don't care what people who buy it profess on a political or
ideological sense. What I care about is that in a practical sense, they're looking for freedom
and a good quality of life and the autonomy to do what they want and go where they want and be
where they want and not be bothered by other people. And whether they say they're libertarian
and anarcho-capitalist or whether they say that they're liberals or apolitical, it doesn't matter
to me, right? I'm not going to be saying this is a libertarian vote. I'm saying this is a vote for
people who value freedom and independence and having a good life and being able to be sovereign
over your own life and live how you choose to live where you choose to live.
That's, isn't that libertarian?
Well, we call that libertarian. So, okay.
I know what you mean though. I'm being facetious.
I'll tell you, I'll tell you, yeah, no, but I'll tell you an analogy here that's, you know,
that's very applicable. So, you know, in Honduras, they have a couple of these special zones,
right? Prospera has obviously marketed itself as the libertarian zone, right? Morazon is the
blue collar worker zone. And one of the people who helps to run Morazon, I was talking to them,
I said, what's, you know, your biggest challenge with Morazon? And they said, my biggest challenge
is convincing these blue collar Hondurans to pay their 5% tax or whatever it is in the zone.
I said, what do you mean? Like outside the zone, they have to pay 30 or 40% tax. He says, yeah,
but they don't. So, you know, these people who may have elected a socialist government
And in practical sense, they just don't pay their taxes, right?
I think there's a lot of people who ideologically don't identify it.
But when it comes down to it, if people have the choice and they can choose to keep money
for themselves, they can choose to be free, even if they claim that they're, even if people
claim that they're, you know, communist or socialist, most people will make the choice
that benefits them in the end of the day.
And that's what we're banking on.
Not the political belief, but based on people looking out for their own interests and doing
what's best for them and their family.
Well, that's the other thing about Morazon that Mark Edge sort of made me realize is
it's a libertarian paradise with no libertarians in it. Apart from possibly Joyce and Alex.
Yeah And this brings us back to cruise ships right This is how we started our conversation Cruise ships are a libertarian paradise but people don go to cruise ships because they believe in libertarianism They go because it offers a better service
and a better quality of life at a lower price.
And at the end of the day,
I don't care what we say, I care what we do.
And if we tell everyone that we're not political at all
and we don't mention anything about politics,
but we create a system where everyone opts out
and everyone chooses to live by private government
and everyone's quality of life improves because of that,
then I think we've won.
Amen to that. Yeah. And nicely brought round four circle as well. You're a pro. Thank you for that. Yeah, great. Thanks for coming in. That's super exciting. I think I really do. I think I've told you this off camera. I feel like not only seasteading, but I think the whole movement is cranking up a notch at the moment.
there's a lot of new projects coming online there's a lot of people announcing new projects
even at this conference and there's a lot that we can't announce that seem to be happening and
they're all as i was mentioning this morning in another interview they're all on a spectrum
of freedom i think you're you're right on the kind of almost self-sovereign end absolutely
really at the at the far yes self-sovereign end yeah and and like i said i mean we're not like i
will market it that way here. But for the average person, I just market it as freedom and independence
to live your life as you choose, right? The right to choose how you want to live your life.
And you'll see in my presentation at this conference, actually, that that is one of my
slides, I think is titled Your Sovereign Home. That's how we're, you know, we're selling this.
It's for the sovereign individual who wants to be truly independent. You know, you've cut ties
with the banks, you've cut ties with big tech, you've cut ties with your government. Now you can
cut ties with, you know, the land-based society and have the ability to be truly independent.
And this is the last piece in the puzzle for the sovereign individual, right?
You can have your cryptocurrency or your gold.
You can have all your digital nomadism.
But until now, people have needed to interact with the state by renting or buying a place to live.
Because as much as you say you're a digital nomad, you still live in the physical world.
This allows you to cut that final tie, untether yourself from society and be truly self-sovereign and a sovereign individual, sovereign family.
I can see a really great, this is my marketing head just clicked into games.
when you you just all the way you're describing it you've obviously thought this through well
cutting ties with you know you know there were a lot of a lot of really good memes there and
you're right you know i think and this is something i've really come to understand over
the last few years is seasteading is the next important thing that has to happen in the world
of the sovereign individual it has to happen and also when it happens it will be the precursor to
space travel and exactly the same it will be where all the lessons are learned for space travel
yeah and we've designed the libra arcs around that right i mean i kind of talked about it briefly
but there is a lot of engineering that's gone behind it that doesn't show up in the marketing
right and and when you think about it going one by one right you're location independent you can
move anywhere in the world you're energy independent you have solar generation you never need to buy
power from anyone ever again either for movement or for your daily life uh you have satellite
internet, you never need to, you know, connect to a landline anymore. You have water generation,
you have wastewater management. The only thing that you're not truly independent of on a Libra
is potentially food. But on the other hand, if you put a scuba compressor on there, you get some
spear fish, you know, some spear guns and a couple of fishing rods, you could potentially be food
independent as well. But taking that last one back, you could easily store one, two year supply
of food on this boat for your entire family. And for a year or two, you could just go anywhere you
want to any deserted island and be completely independent while still connected by the internet
but fully sovereign fully independent not relying on anyone else whatsoever
wow so that's that's the dream we're selling right it is but it's not a dream really when
you think about it is it is actually a reality providing i can't wait to see the first one
mason i really can't i can't wait to to see it because i you know i i like i say you know i'm
I'm a massive fan of the whole idea from an ideological basis.
Like you've just laid out.
If you really believe in the,
in the,
the ideas of self sovereignty,
this is it.
This is how you get it.
And it's not actually possible on land.
No.
The only way you get self sovereignty on land is when people don't know you're there.
Yeah.
Which is a good strategy,
but,
but really,
you know,
and that's the other thing too,
you know,
I had mentioned these,
you know,
these different ambassadors.
I think the one that I hadn't mentioned that we need to do as well is before all of this,
I was a bit of a prepper.
I liked the idea of, you know, you build your, your, your house off grid and you have all
of this, but at the end of the day, you can have the best possible off grid house.
But if things go wrong and you're trying to protect yourself and your family, you can't
move.
So if society collapses and someone finds where you live, you're kind of stuck.
What's a better prepper situation than being on a boat with everything you need and able
to move and just say, well, things are going bad. I guess I'm going 20 miles offshore and
riding things out. So I think that's another, you know, marketing angle. And I think that will be
when we've truly succeeded is when we've got the digital nomads, when we've got the lifestyle
people, we've got the seaside people, and we've also got all the off-grid prepper people who
previously wanted a big property in the country, but now realize maybe it's better to be on the
water. That's amazing. Well, it's come at the perfect time. I mean, the free, what I call the
three cities ecosystem is broad and you know it's all degrees of freedom that's what it is
i just love the fact that you're right up you're right at the extreme end and because without
people at that end you know like in a way it's the end that markets the whole movement in a way
because um a lot of people find it hard to wrap their head around a place that's giving a bit more
freedom. And they're like, yeah, well, that's not really, but it is.
And then when you, when you, when you spend time in this world, you realize
that as long as there's a little, as long as there's more freedom than before,
you doing the right thing You know there no such thing as suddenly creating the perfect freedom except funnily enough at sea or space where you really can you know but then the other thing too is it
yes it's maximal freedom but it's also no compromises because not only can you be off
grid and you completely separate from society but at the same time if things are going well
like i said you can also pull this up into prague into paris to london to any of the major cities
and say, things are going well.
I want to anchor here
and I want to spend a month living my life
in the middle of the city, Singapore,
Dubai, Monaco, anywhere you want to go,
you can take full advantage of society,
be fully integrated,
but then still have that ability to break off
and be fully independent at any time that you choose.
That's what got us into RVing.
Me and my wife and my kids,
we used to have a six birth RV,
a Heimer it was,
do you know the German brand?
I don't know.
I know the American brands a little bit.
Right.
Yeah.
And one of the best things about that was, because initially you think, right, we're just going to be going and visiting all these lovely remote places.
But then you realize, especially, for example, in France, you can park in the middle of a city at a special place.
You don't even have to park it on the side of the road.
They're called air de service.
And they have a hookup there and they have this and that.
And you literally, as long as you've got a toilet and a shower on you, you can walk out in the middle of a city, go to a restaurant and come home.
And that was a real eye-opener.
That's what convinced us.
And the reason why the Lieber-X is better than an RV is because, number one, more cities are accessible by water than by land.
Because you know you're not limited to one specific continent or one region.
And number two, no matter how great you design an RV, just based on the speeds, the engineering behind it, and the size, you're not going to be energy self-sufficient.
you're always going to need to buy diesel but with this you don't need that right you can truly be
independent from movement and you can sail continuously at five knots with no need for
any external power input i forgot to ask actually how long how long do these things last how long
does a as an aluminium whole vessel last uh i mean if it's well maintained essentially indefinitely
i mean at least 50 to 100 years if it's well maintained you're replacing the anodes um yeah
they they shouldn't corrode as long as you take care of them so there's a bit of i mean what does
that involve like taking it into a port every so often and having the barnacles yeah i mean that's
that's more an efficiency thing from a from a durability perspective um so the one risk of
aluminum is that in seawater with stray electrical currents it can slowly wear down the aluminum
so what you do is every couple years you you put a chunk of um of another metal like zinc for
example on the boat you connect it up and over the next couple years that zinc will wear down
and while it's wearing down it protects the aluminum so when it's worn down you need to
replace that every couple of years but it's very minimal maintenance actually is that an expensive
process no no no i think a couple hundred dollars if that oh right not coating it no no it's it's
literally it's a couple blocks of zinc you know a couple of a couple pounds of zinc and you just
put them in strategic places and then it uh by by electricity it protects it it's not physically
protecting it. The aluminum is strong itself. It's just electrical currents can sometimes damage it.
So you direct the electrical currents where you want them to go rather than through places you
don't want them to go. Is there any, is there good camaraderie between you and everyone else
in this space making stuff? Yeah. I mean, myself and Mitchell work very closely together. Grant,
I've spoken to a few times. I haven't worked as closely with him, but I think seasteading and the
free cities movement is it's truly it's early and it's exciting and there's so much growth
potential that anyone who truly believes in the vision is not going to be um nastily competitive
like we're friendly competitive we're trying to build a better product but we also want to help
each other because if more people buy libra arcs there's gonna be a bigger market for archipad and
if archipad is developed and you know has floating business districts then there's gonna be a bigger
market for our product right so i think um in a sense we're all we're all um collaboratively
developing different aspects of the ecosystem. And what I've said before, and I'll say it again,
this is a passion project for me, right? I think that the LibraRx is the best option for people
who want to be sovereign individuals and have that lifestyle. And I think we've done a fantastic job
at it. If tomorrow or on Saturday at the conference, someone shows me and says, ha,
I did a better job than you. I've designed a better boat that does more than yours can and
is half the price. I'll say, fantastic. How can I help you build it? Because I want the movement
to succeed right i'm i'm funding the project because i believe in the movement it's not a
money-making scheme for me it's a it's a way to move the movement forward and i think a lot of us
are like that obviously everyone has to pay their bills but i think everyone is committed to doing
what it takes to move the movement forward rather than advancing their own self-interest
hallelujah yes excellent oh i'm excited again about seasteading yeah i think i think i think
And I, yeah, I, I almost, look, the day I live at sea, you know, you've won.
I was about to say that.
When you sell your house in Wales and you buy a Libra X, we've won.
Well, no, I mean, it's not, it's not that I would have any problem selling my land-based
house actually.
Yeah.
I've been on a funny journey with that recently.
I've always owned my home.
I've started to see it as a bit of a liability.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Because of a number of things, but even just capital gains and like, you know, what did
you call it?
Wells taxes and stuff like that.
Yep.
I do actually realize that I used to think property was one of those things that was quite safe, but actually it could turn into a bit of a ball and chain.
And it also means that you can't respond to your government very well.
No, exactly. It's a political liability.
And also, I think property is also a surface area like a maintenance liability, right?
Because unless you actually own just an apartment,
you have a lot of maintenance to do on your property
for not to fall into disrepair
and then be taxed or fined
because you haven't maintained your property, right?
You can't just leave your house for three weeks
or three months and let everything become overgrown.
You'll probably come back to a big fine
and a complaint from all your neighbors
that you haven't maintained it.
But a boat is much easier.
There is maintenance,
but compared to owning a full property,
especially an off-grid type property,
there's a lot less maintenance on that boat.
Is there the kind of maintenance you get on boats
where you have to wash the deck down
and you have to do this
you know, saltwater corrosion and all this kind of stuff.
So yeah again the corrosion we talk about the anode that you know that slow maintenance The deck you can wash as often as you want We going to use an artificial material called S that is very resistant to corrosion
The outside is very simple, easy to clean, durable.
The inside, also, unlike, I guess this is another thing I hadn't mentioned before,
but most boats are kind of designed as boats first and foremost,
and they add some other stuff in to make it livable.
Ours is designed as a fully insulated and conditioned space.
So the entire interior space will always be air conditioned, heated, dehumidified and maintained at an appropriate temperature.
So it should really slow the degradation of all the internal materials.
It also means that we can use standard household furnishes, which are cheaper and operate better than most marine furniture.
And then in terms of the general maintenance on the vessel, a lot of the maintenance comes from either the sails or the rigging in a sailing vessel or the big diesel engine or the gas engine in a power vessel.
but ours is two electric motors a battery bank plus or minus a small generator so the actual
maintenance on it is is very low it's similar to an electric car right i mean an electric car
probably has even more maintenance because going down the highway at 120 kilometers an hour this is
moving slowly at five to ten kilometers an hour so the maintenance on an electric boat is is minimal
if any i mean it's you you clean the floors you wash the walls and that's about it it would be the
supreme irony if i ended up living on a boat but i i you know like i say ideologically it makes
the most sense out of everything the question is is how much of a sovereign individual do i want to
be that's that's it really when it comes down to it isn't it yep you i think the your only
your only chance on land to be a sovereign individual is is being somewhere that no one
really knows you're there and what kind of quality of life do you have well that's the problem yeah
you can't interact with the world unfortunately you it's a choice you have to make and it's
something i think about so much at the moment because those are the thoughts that relatively
normal people are starting to have oh wait a minute is is my standard is is the way i'm living
in accordance with what i believe and if it's not okay well how do i do that um i think my big
the big barrier to me ever being a seasteader in reality would be the fact that i feel like
there's a kind of there's a there's a seafaring culture that i'm not a part of and i've dipped my
toes i have to say and it wasn't it wasn't really my thing but i'm also not a part of that culture
right i didn't grow up sailing i'm not interested in boats for the sake of boats i'm interested in
from the ideological perspective and that is like i said also one of the things that differentiates
it is not designed as a boat for boaters it is designed as a floating mobile house for people
who want to be mobile but don't want to have to spend years learning how to to trim a sail or
uh you know uh maintain a diesel engine or uh wax a decks right it is designed as a floating house
first and foremost i've got it i just realized remembered something in in amsterdam there's
quite a few floating houses aren't there all all around i remember on quite large river fronts
at the side, we were going in a boat somewhere
and I was looking at them.
Yep.
Very much like square boxes.
Yep.
So you could just pull up to one of those more there
for however much they charge.
I don't know.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, no, that's the thing, right?
If you don't want to move,
if you say, I like Amsterdam
or I like Monaco if you have the money,
you could take one of these,
you could put it in a mooring slip
or find a seawall and just lash up to it
and live there as long as you want
until you decide that the time it comes to leave.
You could spend the same,
you could spend two years in the same location
from a sea spitting perspective that,
you know, that has implications for taxes
that you're now probably technically living in that area.
But-
Are you though?
Like, is anyone, that's a good question.
Most countries have some kind of rule
that if you leave a boat in the country
for a certain period of time,
I think it's usually six months,
then you've considered to have imported it
and you're now residing in that country,
which is not a problem, right?
I mean, the point you made is very valid
that a lot of people live on floating houses already.
So even if you're not ready to see stead,
even if you say, look, I need to be in Amsterdam,
but I want to have an option.
You could buy one of these,
moor it up and live there for three or five years.
And then if things change,
instead of having to sell,
you can just say, yeah,
it's time for me to leave and I'm going to leave.
It'd be hard for them to tax you as you left anyway.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Without putting too fine a point on it,
you'd be waving out of the back window.
Exactly, exactly.
you haven't paid your exit tax yeah sorry i can't hear you too far away yeah yeah wow yeah okay right
we better knock it on the head i've we've got some we've got a team building thing to go to
tonight but anyway look thanks for um thanks for coming in it's it's great to hear the story after
two years that is actually literally about to launch that's phenomenal and i wish you all the
greatest of luck i think um like i say i i live vicariously through seasteaders i you've you've
converted me and i've got a very critical mind about it mainly because i don't want to just
think oh yeah i i really want to be critical because it's such a far out idea well i mean i
don't expect you to be in the first batch but you know maybe batch three or four we'll see uh the uh
the free cities podcast uh move to a video format with you and your family living on a libre arcs
Well, yeah. I mean, we started this podcast in Prospera, so it would be the natural progression.
Yep.
Run it. Have you seen that film, The Boat That Rocks?
I haven't seen that one.
It was about radio. I think it was about Radio Caroline.
Oh, OK.
It's a great film, actually. Honestly, a really great, not just because of the story, but it's a great film.
It'd be one of those. We run the podcast off a moving seastead.
That would be the ultimate, I suppose. Talk about living the dream.
Anyway, thanks, Mason.
And good luck with your talk and good luck with everything, man.
I really mean that.
Thank you very much.
It was nice chatting with you again.