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 175 of the Free Cities podcast.
Brought to you this week by our two wonderful Free Cities aligned sponsors.
That's right, our lead sponsor Veritas Villages are building off-grid freedom-oriented communities in Latin America.
Look out for their new 340-acre acquisition that just got the go-ahead in Costa Rica with nearly 400 residences planned.
Click on the link in the show notes to inquire about their other projects in Nicaragua and Panama.
And especially if you're a Bitcoiner, because you can buy your property in a Veritas Village with Bitcoin and you can spend Bitcoin at all communities.
And they will even help you to set up a mining rig in your self-sufficient home so you can mine Bitcoin as well.
www.veritasvillages.com forward slash free cities.
Also, our other sponsor, ArcPad. ArcPad are a seasteading company planning a second iteration of their groundbreaking reef resort in the Philippines.
This time, their project will be off the coast of Prospera in Honduras, one of the most important free cities projects in the world there.
You can purchase ownership in the Prospera Reef Resort either outright or via fractional shares from as little as 1%.
So anyone can get involved at this stage.
tinyurl.com forward slash ARC pad.
Also in the show notes.
If you want to start investing in a groundbreaking seasteading project, one of the first.
Right.
Today's guest.
Well, it's a gentleman by the name of Oswald Horowitz.
He's a filmmaker who stumbled into the world of seasteading and somehow ended up chasing one of the wildest frontier stories I think I've heard in a very long time.
Now, as with many crazy seasteading escapades, it starts with a Joe Quirk encounter.
Joe, you have a lot to answer for.
Oswald read Joe's book on seasteading and then took a trip to a floating festival in California
and after a few strange online connections he ended up trying to track down a mythical character
by the name of Samuel Landy, an Italian tech entrepreneur who was living at the time on a rusty
barge in international waters between Dubai and Iran. Samuel had a plan to bolt more barges
together and build a floating city state at sea now this isn't just a chat about the film
it's a conversation about the kind of people who actually push out to the edge and try and live
beyond the reach of the normal system is both fascinating and quite frankly insane at times
and when i say insane i mean both landy and oswald to be honest it's a story about risk
obsession, myth-making, sovereignty and what happens when a crazy idea stops being theoretical
and starts actually becoming real. Anyway, Oswald's new film is called The Legend of Landy.
It's still in production so you can't actually watch it yet but this long conversation will
hopefully give you a taste of what's to come. I think you're going to really like this.
now as i mentioned last week value for value people and comments and bitcoin donations this
week unfortunately you'll have to wait until next week i'm recording these two episodes in advance
because i'll be traveling to prospera later on this week and i will have zero opportunity to
record any intros in fact thinking about it as you listen to this i will already be in prospera
recording new episodes of this podcast talking of prosper don't forget the free cities conference
is looming closer and this year's event is a massive one for the first time ever we'll be
holding our annual conference inside a real functioning free city in previous years we've
gathered in europe mainly prague but also malheim in switzerland and monaco if you're an og you'll
remember them but this year prospera is ready to host us on the beautiful island of roatan in
honduras this event is quickly becoming our most anticipated conference yet and we're expecting
more international attention than ever before so what can you expect as an attendee well
everything that made our prague conferences so valuable presentations and updates of course
from more than a dozen of the world's leading free city projects and seasteading projects too
but what makes this event a first is that you won't just be hearing about free cities you'll
be experiencing one firsthand if you're short on time the core conference program in prospera runs
from september the 3rd to the 6th featuring keynote talks panel discussions project presentations
and plenty of opportunities for networking, which for me, that's one of the big things about these events.
The networking, the sitting around in the evenings, late night, dreaming up new projects.
That's what I love the most.
We'll also have our famous VIP dinner and auction with Mr. Mark Edge in charge there.
He's been on the podcast a number of times.
if you have a bit more time though i would strongly encourage you to arrive early and take part in our
optional activities on september the 1st and 2nd these include a site tour of prospera networking
events with local businesses snorkeling rowatan has some of the world's best coral reefs chocolate
tasting a visit to a visit to a wildlife park and beach volleyball plus much more we're also
offering a special day excursion to Ciudad Morazan, which is one of the other free city
projects in Honduras over on the mainland. These trips will take place on September the 2nd and
again on the 7th of September. So if you can extend your stay, you'll have the rare opportunity
to visit not just one free city, but two in a single trip. This really is an historic moment
for the movement. Not only are we hosting our conference inside a functioning free city for
the first time, but the political winds in Honduras have recently shifted way in the favour of free
cities with the election of a new president. So if you can make it, this is truly the year to not
miss the free cities conference. What are you going to pay for this, folks? You think it's
going to be really expensive don't you guess what tickets start at 239 dollars people what's not to
like about that get in quick though there will be limited availability of tickets compared to Prague
because the venue's slightly smaller and on April the 30th there'll be an increase in prices so
secure yours before then if you can and start planning your trip Ruatan is a wonderful island
but getting there from some countries can be a bit tricky and involves overnighting in America
if you're coming from Europe etc etc so this is the one to plan in advance get it all locked down
and then you can just look forward to it right time for the conversation and this week I suppose
why don't you just well grab your favorite rusty barge I know you've got a massive collection of
and drift out beyond the reach of the usual rules.
And whilst you do all that, well, you know what to do.
Sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Oswald Horowitz.
as i was saying to you earlier we've done a fair number of seasteading episodes
recently because um there's just a whole lot going on in the seasteading world
it it was it was kind of flat for a number of years it had a massive pump at the beginning when
everyone got into it and then it was almost like the reality hit well you know how do you do
seasteading it's a great idea I mean it's one of my favorite ideas in the whole of the free cities
ecosystem I won't explain why now but just listen to any of my episodes with Joe Quirk and you'll
realize why it's one of the fundamental ideas of self-sovereignty it has to be because you can move
basically at any moment but yeah it was flat for a while and then in the last couple of years
three of the major sea-stilling companies have come out with prototypes and suddenly I realize
it's going to happen it's all it's happening on a small scale now so individual things but my
absolute belief is now that it will be there'll be floating cities in possibly even in my lifetime
if I'm lucky enough and that's that's amazing and I love that fact so I think I tell you what a nice
place to start might be um how you end how you came across the world I mean were you already
into weird things prior to this or you know how do you how do you become someone who ends up making
a film about seasteading so yes I've always had a strange niche interest in various things and I'm
very into alternative forms of governance and the way in which the project started was I read Joe
Quirk's book Seasteading another person that another person's life that Joe Quirk has messed up
Very much so. Yes, he's almost killed me, actually. Literally. But yeah, so I read the
sea-standing book, and I became fascinated by the idea. And it says in the early chapters about
there's this floating festival called Ephemeris. And, you know, Ephemeris is in the Sacramento
Delta. And I thought, well, I was living in San Diego at the time, I should go. And of course,
I knew no one at Ephemer Isle and it was very difficult to get to Ephemer Isle because it's in
the floodplain in the delta and the nearest piece of land is a giant marijuana farm and so if you
set foot on there you might get shot so the thing is there's the nearest piece of land is like seven
kilometers away so with my friend I said all right let's get an inflatable boat off Amazon
so we got 120 dollar inflatable boats and we thought we'll just drive up there and see if we
can get there um so eventually yes i uh i met this guy called uh called brewster and he had this boat
called the electric avenue and uh yeah i spent the week at ephemeral and that was the thing that uh
started my interest off in in seasteading can you just i've never heard of ephemeral yeah does it
still happen now it still happens yes how have i how has joe never told me joe always just he knows
so much but there's loads of things he just doesn't bother telling me about that sounds amazing
like a seasteading festival like yes what happens at ephemeral for example so at ephemeral there is
it's not technically run by anyone not by the seasteading institute there's no organizers there's
no tickets the challenge is you have to get there so it's kind of a nice word play an ephemeral
island so for one week it uh all these people bring different floating structures attached
together and the original vision of ephemeral was that this thing would happen um once a year and
all different people would meet each other and eventually it could move out to the ocean
and become the first floating city or whatever.
That was the original idea behind it.
It's basically Burning Man on water, right?
That kind of thing.
Pretty much, yes.
And how far off the coast is it?
Or how far off the shore?
No, it's not off the coast.
It's in the Sacramento floodplain.
So the delta, there's lots of different river networks
and vast areas of water.
And it's in the delta.
It's not actually out at sea.
It's not fast moving water then, is it?
No, no, it's fairly, I mean, it's a river, you know,
so there's a very large river system.
So the water's moving fast, but it's not out at sea.
So it's quite a safe place.
And what's the craziest structures you see there?
Or is it mainly just people in boats?
Yeah, it's mainly people in boats.
They have, you know, those various catapults that will, you know, fling people across the water.
Just for the sake of it.
Yeah.
Because why not?
But it was, yeah, going to ephemera that I decided that I wanted to make a documentary about someone that was actually seasteading.
And by seasteading, I mean living in international waters.
because the point of seasteading is sovereignty.
It is to live outside the jurisdiction of any country.
And so I start searching around
and I find that there's basically no one
that's actually living in international waters.
So I do a lot of hunting around
and I joined this group chat called Atlas Island.
Mason.
Exactly, yes.
Mason's been on the show a couple of times.
Good guy.
He's just come out with an actual prototype for it.
Yeah, yeah, the Libra Arx.
Yes.
which is a phenomenal idea and it last i spoke to him actually it made me realize once again
seasteading is a reality because i've what i love about seasteading is that um it sounds like sounds
crazy but there are working examples of seasteading happening cruise ships is the most obvious great
example of free private floating cities but what what mason's making these movable they almost look
like movable barges, they exist all over the world in cities.
And you just don't give them a second look parked up.
I remember going to Amsterdam once and we got a boat somewhere
and on the way out of Amsterdam, all down the sides of the rivers
were large, square, floating houses, basically.
And I love that idea of seasteading, the sovereignty side of it being,
and say, well, you could go to Amsterdam, and then we could go to Prague, and then we
could go to Venice, and then we could go here.
And that's the self-sovereign life.
Anyway, I butted in there.
You better carry on.
Yes.
So Atlas Island.
Yes.
So I messaged this telegram group chat, and I said, I'm a filmmaker.
I want to make something about seasteading.
Has anyone got any projects out in international waters?
And there was one guy that reached out to me, a guy called Stefan.
Stefan.
yes don't know whether i've come across him tell me more so so stefan was in the process of
divorcing his wife selling all of his possessions and he wanted to liquidate everything and uh move
out to a boat and live out on international waters so for a while i was in you know chatting
with stefan for a few months and eventually he starts hearing about this man that is living on a
platform between Dubai and Iran in international waters. And Stefan had been trying to come up with
how it was that he could live out at the sea. And he thought, well, it's probably better to join
forces with someone else that's already out there. And so this guy was living on a deck barge, so
20 meters by 72 meters, so quite a sizable area. And this guy's plan was he wanted to connect
lots of these barges together to form a mini city state that could break away.
And so this is kind of one of the...
Sorry to put it in.
That's pretty much the Strait of Hormuz, isn't it?
That's kind of like that part of the world where all the shit's going down right now as we speak.
Exactly.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yes.
It seemed like at the time, I thought that's a very strange place to create some kind of new freedom project, you'd think, between those two countries.
Yeah.
I would agree with you there because, I mean, I don't know who owns that block.
you know how is how wide is it do you know because there's a limit to how much of it can be owned
possibly or not so i think the strait of humus that's quite thin that's maybe i think 26 or 30
miles um but off dubai it's probably more like maybe i'm not sure exactly maybe 150 200 miles
right on so that that means that that bit in the middle is stateless yes effectively well it's this
thing with international waters there's no actually clear definition of what is international waters
because 0 to 12 miles is in the territorial waters.
12 to 24 is your territorial waters
where you're able to police that zone.
But from 24 to 200, it's in the exclusive economic zone.
So even though that is international waters,
countries will still have rights to mine and fish there.
But 200 miles out is considered full international waters.
So there's various levels of international waters that you can be in.
Right, 200 miles is your safe bet.
I didn't know that.
I thought it was just the 20, I thought it was 21.
You say 24, right, 24 miles.
Yeah, 12 to 24 is known as the customs zone.
Even though 12 miles out is international waters,
you can get kicked out by the nation state there.
But 24 to 200 is, yeah.
Right.
Okay, so there's a dude living between Dubai and Iran.
Yes.
On a barge.
Exactly.
Tell me more.
So I thought, well, I want to go, this is my guy, it seems.
I've got to go and find him.
So Stefan has a meeting with the guy from the barge.
How do you have a meeting with a guy that lives out to sea?
You mean an online meeting?
Exactly, yes.
That's the cool thing is with Starlink being released,
all of a sudden now it is actually much more achievable
to do these seasteading free city projects in very remote places
because with Starlink you can be absolutely connected to the modern world.
So yes, Stefan had a Zoom meeting.
and uh you know i had given stephan lots of questions uh because i obviously you know
fascinated about what this guy was doing did he not want you to approach him directly is that
so at this point in time i thought it it this thing with filmmaking is a huge part of it at least what i do is figuring out how to get to people how to reach people That oftentimes the central problem
And you can imagine a guy that's living out in international waters between Dubai and Iran.
You know, who does that? Like, what is the reason someone would choose to do that?
Like, these types of people, as you all find out, are quite hard to reach.
So anyway, Stefan is in the meeting, and, you know, he's asking my questions.
And my last question to the man was, well, could I come on board and live with him?
And so the man, he's called Samuele Landi.
Samuele?
Samuele.
As in Samuel.
Samuel, but Italian.
Samuele.
Samuele Landi.
Sounds romantic.
Yes.
And when he asked if I could come on board, he was very against this idea.
and Stefan found this really strange
because he thought this guy's been very friendly
very open but as soon as there's any talk
of someone being there with the camera
all of a sudden his demeanour entirely changed
and there was actually a third person
in this meeting
who was a very important character in the film
I'm sure you know him
and he's a guy called Vit
oh yeah
we'll come to his involvement later
what was Vit doing there?
Jesus
okay vit vit everyone should know that but vit is the president of libel yes but at this point i had
no idea who it was it was just he was just a dude called vit but what but he was he happened to be
on the call he invited himself or you know i suppose he was friends with landy that's interesting
i mean it's a small world but um yes so anyway after this stefan he's got a paranoid guy he
starts to do research on landy and when you google samuel landy you see all these articles
where it's like fugitive, you know, wanted by Interpol,
massive bankruptcy fraud and all the rest of it.
And Stefan thinks, well, given that I've just liquidated all my possessions,
I don't want to invest them with what seems like a big financial criminal.
So Stefan wanted to go live there as well?
Was he just more next to him?
He wanted to get another barge and join it on to Landy's project.
Because there's this concept in seasteading of, you know, vote with your boat.
and in this barge model of seasteading if you don't like the society you're in you can just
break away so let's see yes so obviously after doing this research Stefan thought well I don't
want to have anything to do with this guy so he blocked Landy and I was like you know well you can
can you connect me with Landy and he said no and you know he didn't want to have anything to do
with these people he didn't want to put me in jeopardy or something by associating with these
sorts of people. So for a while I sort of forgot about the project and then I was in another
Telegraph group chat and I see this new member has joined called VIT. I thought, wow, what if
it's the same VIT? So yeah, I messaged VIT. I tell him about, you know, I've heard about this
platform out in international waters and, you know, I want to go and film this thing. And VIT
says to me, he says, sure, send me any of your previous work. And I suppose this is something
I've found a lot with making this film and in general in life, is that it's very important a lot
of the time to appear foolish rather than appear smart. If you appear smart, you can often put
yourself in jeopardy. So one great historical anecdote about this is that Stalin kills all of
inner circle. The one guy he doesn't kill is Khrushchev. And the question is, why didn't he
kill Khrushchev? And to me, the most convincing explanation as to why he didn't is that Khrushchev,
at Stalin's command, would start dancing funny jigs and doing like folk songs for Stalin. And
someone thought, I can't kill Khrushchev, this guy's funny. And Khrushchev, of course, ended up,
you know, ruling the Soviet Union after Stalin. And it's this thing of throughout history,
wise men they bring king's grief but the jester always always lighten their mood so you know i
was thinking about this and i was thinking well what can i send to this guy landy i already know
that he seems to be some kind of criminal he doesn't want anyone who's a filmmaker to come
on board so what have i what i sent him is of vital importance and i had the perfect video to
send you're talking about you didn't you didn't send this to vit you send this to this is through
I didn't have Landy's contact directly.
I was sort of communicating with him through VIT.
So I thought, well, what can I send?
And so luckily, a few months before, I had made a short film,
which we call American Dreams.
And American Dreams utilizes the following ingredients.
So it utilizes a giant American flag.
It utilizes $150 worth of ketchup.
a very beautiful Mexican opera singer
and a single bottle of mustard
and the American National Anthem
It wasn't an ad, was it?
No, it was a...
Who did you make this film for?
For fun
Go on
So, essentially, I have a friend
that used to have a ketchup addiction
and this guy would consume bottles of ketchup
in a day
and it was quite disgusting
and it's a little bit of a crude joke
but we were trying to come up with a short film idea
to show him how disgusting his ketchup addiction was
so someone was joking
what if you were to make a sort of pornographic film
whereby the finale is ketchup
and it would be like this absurdist humour
and we thought well obviously we can't make a porno
but what if instead we just completely covered a girl in ketchup
and we shot it impeccably.
And it's this thing of if you have very high production value,
you can make a lot of strange things seem perfectly palatable.
Anyway, we shot this thing and there is this German word I really like,
which is Gesamtkunstwerk.
Gesamtkunstwerk, there's no direct translation,
but it means a total work of art.
It means an all-encompassing art form.
And that was how we felt about the catch-up video.
So anyway, when Witt asked me then, send me your previous work,
I figured, well, I should essentially send him this ketchup video
covered in ketchup.
And it was shot impeccably.
I want to make that clear.
This was not a low budget.
Well, it was a low budget, but it was a high production value.
Anyway, I sent that video to VIT.
And I click send, you know, and then a few minutes later,
I see VIT typing.
The typing goes away.
And then VIT just ignores me.
And I'm thinking, you know, I was so close.
I was almost going to get to Landy.
and all of a sudden I send this,
I suppose you could call it,
if you were being very crude,
you could call it a ketchup bukkake
if you were being very crude.
And I had sent this to the associate
of an international criminal or whatever.
Now these guys are ignoring me.
So for about a month,
again, I sort of forgot about the project.
And then after that,
Witt, he replies to me
and he says, nice.
He says, we're happy for sure to have you.
I was thinking, oh my God,
it seems to be on.
And then again, I say to Witt,
great, you know,
When are we going to go and visit Landy?
And then again, Vitt ignores me.
And, you know, like I call him, send me his messages, hear nothing from him.
And at this point, I had no idea who Vitt was.
So I thought, well, if he's not responding to my messages over the phone,
the only logical way to continue the project is to find him in person.
So I thought, well, how am I going to find him?
I thought, well, I'll go on the internet and just type in Vitt Libertarian.
and as probably all your listeners will know
Witt Libertarian will take you straight to the guy
so I thought okay
wow this is Witt, he's this president
of Liberland, this micronation
and I'm reading Witt's Wikipedia
and I see it's Witt's
birthday coming up, so I'm thinking
surely I'll find Witt at his
own birthday party at Liberland
so I thought well I'll go to Liberland and try and find him
they do, he does
celebrate it in, I think
I went last year, but
not in Liberland,
in Ark.
Exactly.
They have a festival
at the same time,
don't they?
They have the,
well,
Liber Polko.
Yeah,
I went last year.
So Witt's birthday,
if I remember correctly,
is September the 14th.
I think it's around that time.
I think Liber Polko
is maybe a little bit before.
But yes,
I got to Liberland.
I went to the Ark village
and no one was there
at first.
And then,
yes,
I went to Liberland
and
no one knew where Witt was.
And then I find out
that Witt's been banned
from Liberland
and
uh croatia really yeah yeah croatia i mean but libeland as well like in practice the police
don't let him set foot there so it's kind of this like strange legal anomaly where croatia
shouldn't technically be policing the region but they do anyway so there's plenty of episodes to
research that in this podcast we've talked about it in depth but i think people understand the
terra nullius it's called exactly areas of land which are unclaimed by anyone there's only a
couple who left in the world one in chad i think and the other one is in gorna sega it's called in
croatia yeah yeah yeah so there's also um beer toil in africa yeah that's the chad one and also
parts of antarctica are also unclaimed there was a slice of it i think it's called um
marie bird island i believe but it's it's on the mainland as well i assumed that
they just declared Antarctica sort of owned by everyone.
Countries have made claims, but not on all of it.
I'm not sure the historical reason why there was an era that's still unclaimed.
I doubt anyone's putting a flag there, are they?
Actually, Vitt tells me that he does have his flag on Antarctica.
And he also tells me he's soon going to have his flag on the moon.
Apparently so.
I think it's happening at the end of this year.
That's what I've been told.
Well, I can't...
It's not that I don't believe that.
I just don't believe Vitt believes people went to the moon.
You know, I'd have to ask him.
Go on.
Because Vitt recently had his prime minister go into space on this commercial space flight.
Yeah, it was the crypto guy.
What was his name?
Exactly.
It's the guy behind Tron.
Yeah.
What's his name?
Oh, God.
I can't remember.
Yeah.
So, all right.
So you're being ignored by VIT on email.
That's a common experience.
Don't worry.
It happens to everyone.
But I found out...
What you describe is absolutely correct, though.
You get responses about one month later,
as if you'd literally just pressed the button.
Yeah.
So VIT did...
Like, I was on Lieberland.
No one knew where VIT was.
It was this kind of great mystery.
And then it was his birthday coming up.
And then I find out he's been banned.
and anyway he then appears on this speedboat on his birthday um and so i i sort of get glimpses
of him in the distance i managed to kind of film him but i don't get close enough
to actually ask him about landy and so then vit leaves and um my seven days were up uh you know
for various reasons the croatian police uh gave me this this ban from croatian i had to leave
the same one exactly you got you got stopped on your way into libeland and they gave you they
basically kicked you out of Croatia but you have seven days yeah same thing happened to me I just
sit in the in the police station for like three hours and yeah yeah typed forms and stuff like
that they were sitting there going you know yeah yeah right oh it happened to someone else nice
yeah so then after I'm then uh ejected from Croatia I have this bike and I was with this
other guy that was um also being kicked out and at this point I had like kind of lost faith in the
project like I was kind of feeling like it was a very tricky to find Viet and again I wasn't quite
sure how to continue so anyway we're um we're biking back and beforehand i'd been in the arc
village but there was nobody there so i leave my bikes at the arc village and then as we're about
to get a bus back to apperton and go back to belgrade then suddenly um this guy who i'd met
on libeland a few days before says oh you know vit and the inner circle of libeland having this
dinner and then all of a sudden i'm boom i'm having dinner with vit in the arc village i'd
like to take a couple of minutes just to tell you about what I think is one of the most interesting
real world freedom projects that we've come across recently. If you've been listening to this podcast
for a while, you'll know that I'm always looking for things that actually exist, not the concepts,
not the renderings, but real projects where people are already building the future. And this brings me
to the Reef Resort, developed by the seasteading company ArcPad, founded of course by Mitchell
Suchner, who many of you will remember, was the winner of the Innovation Award at the 2025
Free Cities Conference. The Reef Resort, as far as we're aware, is the world's first operational
seasteading resort. It's located just off the coast of Samal Island in the Philippines, where
ArcPad currently operates. 14 floating units available through Airbnb and other platforms,
a project that has already hosted thousands of guests in both their accommodation and floating
restaurant now. Here's the development that will be especially interesting to listeners of this
podcast. ArcPad is planning a second reef resort, this time off the coast of Prospera in Honduras,
one of the most important Free Cities projects in the world, and construction is intended to align
with the 2026 Free Cities Conference. So this is where the opportunity comes for you. You can now
pre-purchase ownership in the Prospera Reef Resort. Ownership is available either outright
or through fractional shares, allowing you to purchase from as little as 1% up to full ownership.
Your ownership percentage determines your usage rights, your share of rental income from the
eco-resort operations and your voting power in property decisions. This also gives you the
opportunity, of course, to be part of a pioneering ocean-based development within the Free Cities
ecosystem. Full units at the Prospera site start from $95,000, but with fractional ownership
available you can participate at whatever level suits you if you'd like to explore this opportunity
i've included a link in the show notes where you can register your interest and access the pre-purchase
information if you're interested in free cities frontier living and the future of ocean-based
communities then this is a chance to get involved at the ground floor seasteading is no longer just
an idea. It's happening and
now it's coming to prospera.
And Vitt, you know, he's
apologized for not getting back to me so soon.
He said that his Telegram
inbox, he's got like thousands
and thousands of like scam messages
as Telegram does and he said he just
he was unable to reply to my messages.
So anyway, you know, fast forward a couple
of weeks, Vitt invites me out to Dubai
and we're getting ready to
go out to Landy's ocean hideout.
so uh you know viet hires this yacht and uh you know we're getting ready to go into international
waters i take it you brought your cameras with you at this point yeah yeah i was i was filming
everything along the way so you were filming looking for viet is this all part of the narrative
of the film or will it be yes this is the early part of the film which is how i actually found
landy and i suppose also my entry point into this world will also be how the audience experiences it
no I can tell by the way you're describing it
it's very narrative driven already
I was going to say you know
it should be in the film but obviously
but yeah great go on then
so let's see so yes
we're on this
we're on this yacht we're getting out into international
waters again I'm thinking great you know
I've almost made it
there was so many times prior to this where I thought I've made it
and then you know VIT stops responding to me
and anyway I thought I've made it now
you know I'm on this yacht with VIT
and Vip tells the captain the coordinates of Landy's platform.
And anyway, the captain didn't know about this until the day of.
And then the captain, there's this big argument.
He says, it's too far out in international waters.
Is this a UAE boat?
Yes.
So we all get ejected from the yacht and then Vip flies off.
And basically it's just me in Dubai.
And I'm messaging Landy and then Landy's speedboat had broken down.
Oh, so you are managing to speak with him now?
So finally, yes, in Dubai, we were sort of connected through this, and then I was messaging him.
And at this point, I was getting kind of paranoid.
It felt like some prank was being played against me, because I'm like, how can I not reach it?
Like, Landy's speedboat has broken down.
I ring up all these boating agencies.
All of them say it's too far, or it's going to cost insane amounts of money to go out there.
And it's like, there's just no way to get to Landy.
So again, it's the same principle.
If it's not working over the phone, you go in person.
so I went to uh walked along the Dubai marina and I spoke to everyone I saw with a boat
and uh anyway I sort of charmed these fishermen with my uh my limited Arabic knowledge and uh
convinced them to take me out really so that is the uh fishermen yeah yeah these uh you know they
take people wrecking uh in the gulf you know fishing over wrecks so they were accustomed to
going yeah I know that I you I remember the I don't know whether it's Dubai but when I used to
work in Sharjah a lot every week every year and we used to go down to the port there where they're
all they're very old looking ships and you know it's really beautiful ships compare when you
compare them to what Dubai looks like with super high tech so you get these massive live-in galleon
ships that look you know are you talking about those they're pretty slow and they no no I didn't
get taken on one of those ones it was more of a modern one uh but that would have been that would
been pretty cool uh well i imagine it would have taken a while though i couldn't imagine you could
convince any of those guys i mean they're no they're a lot of them are immigrant workers who
just go out to sea for like months at a time don't they go fishing and they just live on hammocks
basically i've photographed a lot of them over you know over the years um but um okay so you got
you got you found someone there was it expensive
i can't remember exactly i think it was maybe like 250 dollars oh which didn't seem didn't
seem excessive i thought good i thought given obviously it's but does he just drop you off
i mean how do you get back have you got his number or something yeah is there a phone signal
out there i suppose well there is starlink so you can't send messages right but yes they dropped me
off uh out there and um come on you can just go straight to they dropped me off what was the journey out there like how long is it 200 miles did you say No no no no no So 200 miles is in full international waters Oh right okay But he was about I think about maybe 40 miles out
Still, on a boat, that still takes quite a long time.
Yeah, yeah, it was a few hours. But it was, luckily, the waters were very calm. So we made it in quite, sort of quick time, but then actually it started to get sort of rougher.
And he knew you were coming.
He knew I was coming, yeah, yeah, yeah. He knew I was coming.
and uh jesus you must have been relatively nervous yeah i was all alone there was no one with me i
didn't have a sound guy nervous my because i'm because i've made a lot of films my nerves on
films is not what's going to happen to me it's am i gonna get the story that's the the bit i hate
about filmmaking is this constant fear of of realizing and when you start seeing opportunities
and you start thinking,
oh my God, I really need to film this
or I can't because it's the wrong moment
or it's going to cause a cultural problem.
It's just pure like pain, you know?
And I can't imagine going out to a place like this
and not knowing even if the guy's even going to be friendly to you.
I mean, he could have turned up
and he might have ignored you or something,
which would have been, I suppose,
can I ask you, this was something I thought of earlier.
In your film, are you doing any filming of yourself yourself
or is it more like of a higher production type of film than that?
I would say...
Like do you do pieces to camera on a phone and things like that
which you're inserting into the film?
There is a little bit of that but mostly not.
I would say that my voice is this presence throughout the film,
me asking people questions but I'm not really necessarily...
I think you would feel my presence throughout the film
but you don't physically see me.
Okay, right.
I suppose you know that at any moment in the film, it is me filming it.
So I am the eye.
Right.
So let's see.
So yes, it was very exciting, of course.
And of course, I was a little bit nervous.
But at the same time, it almost felt like there was no way not to do it.
Like to find out about such a thing and then to have this opportunity to go.
And then to not go because you're scared or something is kind of a denial of life itself.
Describe the scene when you arrive.
It's literally water and a barge.
There's nothing for 40 miles all the way around.
I mean, visually, nothing at all.
Nothing.
You're truly just in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah.
In the middle of nothing.
Yeah.
My God.
So, yeah, so we arrive and, you know, it's kind of the waters are getting a bit choppy
and it's kind of like tricky to actually sort of moor against it.
And especially the fishing boat was like very, they were kind of very apprehensive about dropping
me off because this thing visually appears very rusty and you imagine that there could be some
quite serious damage to their boat if they're going to go side by side and then he did have
this like little sailboat that was maybe 40 or 50 meters away on some rope and the fishermen were
like thinking about trying to drop me off in the sailboat and i would like pull myself up so i
didn't damage their boat but anyway luckily they they did end up some mooring side by side
and you know they land these of crew haul my stuff up and uh you know i was really apprehensive i
thought, well, who is this guy? I knew very little about him apart from that there are these articles
that say he was wanted by Interpol and all this sort of stuff. And it suddenly struck me when I
was actually there. Well, you know, I didn't know what was happening. Anyway, so he invites me on
board and he takes me into this shipping container. So essentially what it looks like is you have this
flat piece of concrete. It's kind of like Mad Max. There's things strewn everywhere. There's a
forklift truck. There's, you know, these workers doing a lot of welding and it's very basic. And
And there's people.
So it's not just him.
Not just him.
Yes, he had five workers.
Who?
Who are these?
Who are workers?
They are essentially migrant workers that work on ships.
Oh, cool.
So, yeah, they were from India, Philippines.
Jesus.
Yeah.
That, what a prospect.
What a story.
Now, forget what, I mean, it's a great story,
but I'm just thinking,
imagine you're an Indian guy who comes to the Middle East to work and you end up,
and you probably go home and think nothing of it.
It's just some job.
You don't realize that it's a very unusual thing that you're doing.
Well, as you'll find out later, I don't think they had that experience at all.
No?
They were very sure that what they had survived was something very, very intense.
Oh, right.
I think there's no way you could leave that.
And actually, some of them didn't leave it ever.
But anyway, we'll get to it later.
Jesus Christ.
So, yeah, so I arrive.
He takes me into this shipping container.
He's not really saying very much at this point.
Sorry, before you go on,
is there anywhere I can see a picture of what this looks like?
Oh, of course, I can show you a lot of...
But I mean, can I put it into the...
Because I've got no idea what I'm looking at here.
Are you describing it as a kind of like a concrete barge
with like a container on the top.
And, you know, I'd really like to be able to see it though.
Yeah, I can show you after the interview.
I've got lots of, maybe about 40 minutes of the film editing.
I just want a drone shot of what it looks like.
And I'll pop it into this so that people can see.
Great, yes.
So, yes, he invites me into this shipping container.
And at this point, like it suddenly hits me where I am.
I think like if anything goes wrong out here,
there's literally no way to get help.
No one really even knew I was particularly out here, apart from, I don't think I really told my parents, maybe something vague.
I was going to Dubai or something, but anyway, no one knew where I was.
Anyway, so he takes me into the shipping container, and he gets out a bottle of whiskey, and he pours me one shot of whiskey.
And yeah, it kind of seemed like a customary thing to do, you know, with some pirate type out in international waters.
and I was waiting for him to pour a second shot.
And he doesn't pour a second shot,
so I thought it was a bit weird.
And then he motions for me to drink.
And he's not really saying anything the whole time.
And I was thinking, okay,
well, there's kind of two options.
Like, either it's poisoned or it's not.
And if it's poisoned and I refuse to drink it,
I'm basically already dead if it is poisoned.
Because even if I refuse to drink it,
there's many other ways he can kill me at sea.
but if I don't drink it
I'm thinking then
maybe he'll become
suspicious of me
so I'm thinking
in this moment in time
the only thing
really to do
is to just
take the shot
say cheers
and knock it back
and hope for the best
and it was totally fine
it was totally fine
I was not poisoned
and
he's not a drinker himself
he's just not a drinker himself
but maybe he was
a little awkward
and I didn't quite
articulate that
and anyway
I was expecting Landy
to be this
weird recluse
you know
he's wanted by the government
for some reason
but he was
the total opposite.
Like the perception of him online
and the perception of him
as he actually was
is entirely different.
He was like always
always cracking jokes.
Like he would call his family
about three times a day
every single day.
So he's really a family man
which seems like a strange thing.
You mean he's got a wife and children?
He's got a, yes.
He's got wives and
yeah, multiple children.
Yes.
What?
And he's,
he is,
he's Italian, right?
Is that Italian?
He is Italian, yes.
And his wife and children are Italian as well, aren't they?
Yes, yes.
So how does that work then?
Do they know, like why is he there?
Or is that something that will become apparent as the story goes on?
It will become apparent as the story continues.
But yeah, I suppose it's this thing of, as we'll find out later,
he's someone that's been a real adventurer throughout his life.
and for this he saw it as like one big adventure to kind of end his life with.
He was 58 and he said, you know, he told me in his interviews,
he said, I will die at sea for sure.
I'm not going back.
But what about his family though?
Did he not want to see them?
No, no, he did.
He also said, it's better to die in adventure than on a bed when you are very old.
And this is this current that has run all the way through his life.
And it seems like even if you are a father and you love your children very much,
it is also very sad for your children to think of their father as this great adventurer who has now
neutered himself because he had children you know he saw that in some sense his his fatherly duties
were not finished but all of his children were adults they were living their own lives and this
was his you know great adventure and if you think about it he probably had you know orders of
magnitude more communication with his children than most fathers would you know given that he
would call them literally three times a day so he was still very connected with his family
so I thought that was that was very different to how I imagined him well yeah I mean I am a dad
and I'm about to go away for six weeks and um it's a test it's literally a test you know partly
to see whether I can do it because I've never been away from my kids for more than
two two or three weeks and not much at all because I work a I work a lot in short bursts
and then I spend, you know, large, long periods of time at home.
But I can't imagine not, I can't imagine saying,
it's a bit like that film, wasn't it?
The weird one where the guy goes out into space
and he sees, you know, while he's away, he ages.
What's it called?
Oh, Interstellar.
Interstellar, yeah.
And that's the thing about Interstellar
that I always thought was a really, was bullshit.
It was him saying, I'm going to go and save the world,
but I'm never going to see you all again
because you'll all be dead by the time I come back.
And I thought, that's a bit unrealistic.
Why would you put that over and above your own family?
I don't know.
Maybe that's just me, but come on then.
So you're there.
You've got there, right.
I see.
So yeah, Lanny was very friendly.
He was very welcoming to me.
Do we know why then he didn't reach,
he didn't really want you there in the beginning?
Do we know what that was all about?
So this will come to a bit later.
So Landy had a lot of problem with journalists and especially with Seastick in general, I suppose, has this problem with with journalists.
Like it seems very strange, for example, like there was this recent New York Times article about ocean builders.
And they kind of frame this as this these weird, rich libertarians trying to like, I don't know, fuck the common people over and move out to sea after they've destroyed the land or something like that.
and it's like if you think about like what the ocean builders pods are these are these eco
restorative pods like whenever you build any kind of structure in the sea it fosters life
it can help rejuvenate the oceans and yet people that write these articles about it they don't
actually care about this at all i think i know i think i know why though i've thought about this a
lot i think every your majority of people on this planet without realizing it are what you would
called statists but it's it's an it's in their subconscious because whenever someone says to me
oh i'm just trying to live outside the system me i think cool your average person sees that as a
selfish move which is a bizarre concept really when you think about it because it's a liberating move
and and i think it it comes from this very deeply held belief that kind of the collective
the status collectivist idea is just very much pervasive it's been drummed into people a lot
that whenever they see anyone wanting to do something which for me seems so fair the fair
thing is like yeah you do what you want to do if you want to be a collectivist that's absolutely
fine um but and if you don't want to be a collectivist cool i'm really happy with that but
libertarians tend to think that's cool that's fine collectivists don't like you going outside
the collective and a lot of times you know you get the same the same thing happens when people
create a tax strategy that that saves them money or if you see now people talking about people that
moved to dubai to save tax they're slagging them off left you know have you noticed in the media
It's all these terrible people in Dubai because of what's happening in Dubai.
These now getting laughed at because they went out there to stop paying tax.
And me, I'm thinking, yeah, well, you know, to stop paying taxes is a good thing for you.
You get more money to basically invest in other things.
But your average taxpayer, it's like, there's a name for that.
There's a syndrome, isn't there?
where you're a taxpayer so if you see someone you know like doing something different you you have
to hate on them because you're the one you think oh that's not fair they're not paying tax but
yeah they made a move they thought it through and they moved to the other side of the world
to get a better life and you know but it's a very yeah it's a deeply the collectivist idea is
is all is very deep in a lot of people's subconsciouses and as a result anyone trying
to do anything on their own especially if it's as this as self-sovereign as this this is like
but seasteading is a very self-sovereign um movement because it's and it's also very difficult
to stop out of all the kind of sovereign identities that you could take on it's the most
i think personally the most pervasive and the best one and only probably will ever be topped
possibly by space travel in the end and you know when it happened when it comes and because there's
a sovereign presumably at least there's a sovereign space out there which is where you can really get
left alone it's not 200 miles off the coast it's like two million miles in the middle of nowhere
god knows you know but but no i agree the seasteading has there's a lot of misunderstandings
about what's going on with Seasteading.
But on the whole, I think it's people
who don't like the idea of someone being self-sovereign,
really, in a really deep sense.
Yeah, and I think with Landy,
I mean, part of the reason why he probably didn't want me on board
is even not trusting journalists,
is that he wanted to just do it.
He wanted to...
So he bought this second-hand barge,
which cost about 200,000 US dollars,
and he was spending a lot of his time repairing this thing.
And I mean, at least when people see footage of the barge, they'll think, is this guy an idiot?
You know, he's living on this incredibly rusty barge.
It looked like it's about to fall apart.
There was this Financial Times article where they described about Landy's project as something like a flotilla held together by giant rubber bands.
You know, it sounds like the ultimate fool's errand.
Like he seems like a complete idiot.
But I think what is very important to articulate for Landy is that he was buying a new barge that was twice as long and twice as wide.
And this was currently being manufactured.
So we thought, well, while I wait about a year for this thing to be made, I might as well get a secondhand barge and live out of the sea and test the difficulties.
So I actually know.
Do we ever, sorry, but do we know Landy's history?
I mean, having 200,000 pound to buy a barge is not something that everyone's got access to.
Yeah, yeah.
Especially while you're waiting for another barge to be built.
Yeah, yeah.
No, we can get to it.
I can give you a few breadcrumbs at the moment of Landy.
So, let's see.
Landy created one of the first VPNs on the internet called One Click VPN.
Oh, right.
So, he's got money.
He's got money.
He made a billion-dollar tech company in Italy, a telecoms company.
He brought high-speed internet to central Italy.
He was among the first people laying fiber-optic cables all across central Italy.
I think he had about 12,000 kilometers of fiber optic cables.
So he was an incredibly smart, competent guy.
And yes, as we'll find out a bit later, I mean, he was also among the first people that was selling encrypted mobile phones.
So this is in, you know, 2008, 2009.
Yes, he would sell these at this company called Cryptotel.
And they would sell their phones for a very small price, you know, $3,000 per phone.
but if you wanted to audit it
to know that the security claims were true
he would then sell you the source code
but that would cost a quarter of a million
or sorry three quarters of a million US dollars.
So you can imagine the kind of people
that are buying phones that effectively cost
three quarters of a million US dollars.
You can imagine he had a certain clientele.
Probably the CIA.
I did actually chat with him about this
and anyway I can't say.
I think you might get shot if you take too much.
But all the other things I'm telling you,
these are all, it's all known on the internet, you know.
People can research it if they're interested.
But it might, actually, before we go on,
how far through this film are you?
Like, as in, you know, when do you anticipate
people can be able to see this?
Because obviously you don't want to give away too much now
because you want to find a lot of this out in the film.
Yes.
So I would say that it will most likely be done
in spring of next year.
Right, okay.
That's what I anticipate.
And have you got much more filming to do?
There is one part of it
that is very, very difficult to film,
but it'll be the way the film ends,
but we'll discuss it later.
Okay.
But I would say that I've filmed most of it.
So after this, I spent a few weeks with Landy
and filming.
Living on the barge.
Because to me, it seemed like
what seems to hold back a lot of seasteading projects
is actually the individuals that have the willpower to actually go and live out in international
waters. And at least for Landy, he saw there's a lot of these sea-stating projects where people
are coming up with prototypes and designs, but there's very few people that are actually
physically building. And Landy thought, well, I don't want to invent anything new. Instead,
I want to rely on what already works, because these barges send goods all around the world.
So they're well-tested traversing the world's oceans. So he thought that this would be a good
place to start as you get these barges, you connect lots together.
Nothing new necessarily needs to be made.
And also even out at sea, it's incredibly difficult to make a living
through doing things at sea, you know, through like mining or fishing
or whatever it is, it's going to be insanely hard to actually have that
support you.
So he thought, I want to make things as simple as possible.
I going to continue working on my software projects out at sea and I can use Starlink and I can receive crypto and this can sustain me That was very 21st century isn it
So he thought, I really want to just make things as simple as possible.
So, yeah, I suppose lots more of the details about Landy
can be uncovered in the film, but essentially, yes,
then after this, I left the barge,
and at this point in time, I had filmed so many interviews
about everything Landy was doing,
But there was this big question that perhaps is a question on your mind, which is, well, who is Landy?
You know, why was he living out there?
Like, you know, what about these giant tech companies?
Like, how did he go from having a billion dollar company to living on this rusty barge in the middle of the ocean?
And I thought that, well, when I went there the first time, I was kind of a little bit afraid, of course, to ask him all these questions.
Because I thought, what if he thinks I'm trying to expose him or something?
And, you know, I became good friends with Landy.
and I thought that I will return
and on my second visit
I will ask him all these questions
about his past
so at this point in time
we're exchanging lots of messages
and he's telling me
you've got to go to Liberia
you've got to meet my friends
because Landy was
running the Liberian embassy
in Dubai
and he knew many Liberian presidents
and former presidents
and he was trying to connect me to uh to these people why for the film i think so
so the thing about landy is that a lot of people take this as being something very sketchy
but i think i feel like i understand why which is that he would associate himself
with like some of the strangest people uh in the earth like so for example he was
good friends with this guy called Charles Taylor.
So Charles Taylor is currently the only world leader in prison,
and he's actually in prison for crimes against humanity.
So a pretty, it's a strange person to know.
Anyway, Landy was trying to organize for me to go and be able to interview this guy in prison,
because he thought this would be another cool documentary idea for me.
No one has been able to interview Charles Taylor since he went to prison,
and Andy thought it'd be a fun adventure for me to...
Is he some African leader
who embezzled loads of money
and did loads of nasty things?
So, essentially, so Charles Taylor,
God, it's a whole other tangent,
the history of Liberia,
but essentially during the Liberian Civil War,
he was trying to overthrow the Liberian government.
And so he was trained by Gaddafi in Libya,
and then he and this guy called Prince Johnson,
who I met later in Liberia. They both went together to try and overthrow the Liberian
government. And anyway, he manages to overthrow the government. He wins the civil war. And
then he then holds an election. And this is his election slogan. And this is not a joke.
I'm being serious. People can check this up. His election slogan was, he killed my ma,
he killed my pa, but I will still vote for him. Vote Charles Taylor. That's his actual
election slogan it's not a joke he's taking um honesty to a whole new level yes and the very
surprising thing is you think well did this work and yes it worked very very well because not only
did he win but he won the highest share of the vote ever in liberian history and since then no
one has won a larger share of the vote than him so he is this very beloved uh liberian leader which
is very strange because the perception of him in the outside world is he's this genocidal maniac
or whatever but in Liberia he's really loved by the people and essentially so he won the Liberian
Civil War won the election and then there was this lady called Ellen Johnson and she basically funded
these rebels in Sierra Leone to then go and invade Liberia and Charles Taylor's like there are these
rebels trying to invade me I've got to well you know I've got to get them back and so he goes in
Sierra Leone takes all the diamond fields obviously African wars are very brutal um
brutal things and um so then after this then he is then tried in the Hague for crimes against
humanity and then when he is tried Ellen Johnson the lady that funded the rebels in Sierra Leone
then ends up ruling the country and a lot of people in Liberia basically think because Charles
Taylor was like very um strict with like western influence about them taking materials and resources
in Liberia. And essentially, there was so many people that did such horrific acts during the
Liberian Civil War, but only Charles Taylor was imprisoned, specifically because he was the
president. So not to say that he shouldn't be in prison, but the fact if he should be in prison,
many other people should be in prison as well. But it was only to take him out. So anyway, yes,
Andy wanted me to interview him. And I didn't have managed to interview him, but I have interviewed
his children. Because when Charles Taylor went to prison for crimes against humanity,
his children, one of them at least, lived with the Landy family in Dubai.
Wait a minute, but this is nothing to do with seasteading now.
Is it in the film, just as an interesting trip?
But what's it got to do with seasteading, or has it nothing?
No, no. So I would say the film is, it's called The Legend of Landy,
and it is of course about Landy's seasteading attempt.
But I would say that it is more broadly about freedom.
and because I think even with seasteading is that it's fine to come up with engineering designs but
you kind of have to have some kind of like spiritual drive to do something like to create
a new city or a new country usually these these founders will there'll be like these mythic founders
you know like Romulus founding Rome or whatever like every city has these these figures you know
you walk around London and you see um you know Trafalgar Square and any kind of movement needs
these kind of heroes so that's kind of how i hope that landy will be as uh as i'll explain now you
know i think you could call him the first martyr for seasteading so essentially yes we're i i leave
the barge we're exchanging all these messages he's telling about liberia he's telling about
these adventures i should have and i'm getting ready to go and uh join him um in january of 20
of 2023.
Second, so on the bar again.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
And so, sorry, sorry, I'm 2024.
And so, you know, I'm getting ready to return
and Landy stops replying to my messages.
I suppose it's been this common thread
of when someone stops responding to my messages,
well, I've just got to go and find them.
But this time was different because, yeah,
he doesn't reply to me for about a week
and, you know, it's kind of unlike him.
and then I get this call from his daughter
and she says there's been this giant storm
and his barge has been ripped apart
and his body has washed ashore in Dubai.
Really?
And it was found...
Would that happen?
Well, that's this question.
The body at least was found naked
with all of the skin removed.
The only bit remaining was the tip of his pinky.
And so they were able to identify him
through his pinky
and then they did a DNA test
to know if it was really him.
and the use of son's DNA and the body's DNA.
And then Landy's lawyer told me the results of this
would never have been made public.
So I was thinking, wow, I mean, what the hell has happened?
Good film about freedom.
The ultimate freedom is to fake your own death, isn't it?
Well, I don't think he faked his own death necessarily,
but lots of people did think this for a while.
But I suppose it's this thing of, in any kind of movement,
if you want to actually propel it to its greatest possible
potential and you have people actually pushing at the frontiers necessarily when you're on the
frontiers things go wrong you know things break like for example if you want to go to space there
have been many astronauts that have gone up in rockets and then they've exploded after launch
like necessarily if this is what is required for any new movement is people that are willing to
to push things uh forward so at this point in time i thought well you know i hope that what my film
was going to be at the beginning is i hope that i would go out to landy's um you know floating city
over many years and more people would come.
And I thought I would be like his PR man, you know,
like through my film, other people would join him,
more barges would come.
And after this, I thought, well, you know,
I've got to find out about Landy.
So it was this point in time that I then go to Italy,
meet a lot of his friends.
I see.
So we're only halfway through the film really at this point
when he dies.
Okay, right.
So most of the film has happened since then.
And since then, of course, I mean,
there's a lot of people in the seasteading world
that all look up to Landy.
and things like Mitchell Suchner.
He was in contact with Landy a lot,
and they had plans to collaborate in the future.
Joe Quirk was messaging Landy for a long time.
He's someone that he knew all these people in the wider seasteading world.
So since then, I've been going to Ocean Builders,
spent a lot of time with Joe.
It's almost like through the other stories of seasteading,
we also find more about Landy's spirit
and the way in which this movement continues without him
and the fact that he had on people.
I'll be honest with you.
I mean, as someone who, you know,
I've dipped my toes into the sea-stealing world a few times.
First of all, I'd heard of him.
It was when, I think, I don't know why I got an email from you,
but I think it was about the film.
I think you were looking for probably investment or something.
And yeah, I'd never heard of him.
I'm surprised, like I say.
I speak to Joe quite a lot.
and he just forgets to tell me really important things like that, for example.
Like I've spoken to, I've had nine hours of conversations with him.
He's never mentioned Landy once.
He sounds like he's one of the central characters in the whole thing.
Maybe it's because he died.
Maybe he doesn't want to give a, you know,
tell the story of a seasteader who ends up basically dying
because, you know, that's not good PR at the beginning.
Well, I mean, you know, Joe has written about some lots on the seasteading,
his website.
I suppose maybe Joe is
what's the word
I'm not sure perhaps being chivalrous or something
perhaps he sees it as my story to tell
so he feels
but yeah I think that ultimately for any kind of movement
you need these kind of early heroic figures
these people that risk their lives
for something much greater
and Landy saw this as this
whole new opportunity for humanity
and he thought well instead of
waiting for the perfect time
I will try and do this thing
and he said that all the successive attempts
are likely to be far better than mine.
Like, all I want to do is just try.
You know, why not risk your life
for some bright future on the ocean?
So we're sure then that there was a big storm
and the boat sank
and is that pretty much true?
I know it's true.
All right.
So the reason why I can be very sure about this
is that, so obviously one would think
at this point in the story
that I would never return to the barge.
Obviously, it's been destroyed.
So there was a whole period where we're thinking,
well, we want to go back to the barge,
and we want to film the wreckage of it on the bottom of the ocean.
Oh, cool.
So for a long time...
So it's not too deep there, I suppose.
No, in the Gulf, it never gets very deep.
I think it's about 30 meters, or actually, it is exactly 30 meters,
where the wreckage, where we found it.
I think the deepest it gets to is...
Wow, you found the wreckage?
Yes, yeah.
Holy shit.
Yes, and filmed it impeccably, like it is.
I mean, this is pretty grim to ask, but did you see any bodies down there?
No.
Did UAE or Iran or anyone, did they send anyone out there to look for bodies?
Or is it because, I mean, in a way, it's an interesting test of the thesis of,
are they really in the middle of nowhere?
Like, did anyone show any interest in the fact that some people died there?
so the thing with the uae i suppose is they are
quite secretive about things you know it's not as if they have a totally open and free press maybe
it doesn't exist anywhere but anyway with the uae it definitely doesn't so there was there was
nothing really on in the news about this there was so there's um let's see uh yes so landy on
board and five people on board and these guys indian guys yes so landy's body was um they say
it was found there was another body one person is unaccounted for and there were two survivors
really yes jesus what did they do swim so i i managed well i i so i i had heard um
so yeah one of the one of the survivors um you know of course i became good friends with him
and um i had heard that there were two survivors but i wasn't quite sure who it was
but I knew their names
so I then just started searching the internet
if I could find any trace of them
and find their family members
so both of the survivors
I both found a lot of their family members online
and so I start sending messages to them
and I managed to get in contact with one of them
called Jeffrin
who is from Tamil Nadu
so
yeah
I suppose I felt like kind of a detective
or something at this point
it was kind of fun
it was almost like living out this sort of boyhood fantasy
and yeah so i found jeffrey and then i went to go and you know interview him and get his his
account of everything being destroyed so can you go into that and can you yeah well that's incredible
so how did they get back how did the two survivors get back to the shore for example
so the accident happened february the 2nd of 2024 and there was at this point in time in dubai
there was actually a lot of flooding going on it was kind of like storm season in this northern
part of the Indian Ocean. And so yeah, it was 5pm. And you know, it's stormy and they, you know,
Landy tells everyone to like tie everything down on board. And Jefferyn, he hears this huge crack
on the side of the barge. And he goes to investigate. And he tells Landy and this crack
is getting larger and larger and larger. And until the barge splits in two. So as an aside,
before I continue with the story is that people assume that if you build something larger on the
ocean it is necessarily more stable but that is actually very much not the case especially for
for large objects it's much better to go deeper I mean the way to see this is if you imagine like
there's you know a wave like this kind of shape if you have a barge on here and it's on the on
the crest of the wave there is a huge amount of force in the middle that can split the barge in
half where it'd be much better to have a barge that was half as long and it can actually slide
down the wave when things are too big there's actually a lot more forces that can destroy them
so in what you kind of want to take ocean builders approach of the way to get stability is not to
build um wide is to build deep first um so actually as also as kind of an interesting aside
is that this is the same way that whales sleep in the ocean it's much more stable and so there's
this thing called moment of inertia, where, you know, if you try and balance a pencil on your
finger, it's very difficult. If you try and balance a broomstick, it's very easy. And actually,
as things get larger, they get more stable. So for example, reusable rockets, the larger they get,
actually, the easier it is to land them, because they have a greater moment of inertia, it requires
more force to off-balance them. So it's kind of a nice observation about whales, and then seasteads,
and also reusable rockets. And then of course, there is this narrative of one of the most
important use cases for seasteading could be taking us into space because there is so much
regulation around launching rockets on the land that, you know, Elon Musk does now have a lot of
his launch sites on the ocean. So this perhaps could be the most important use case for seasteading
because the safest place to build seasteads is on the equator. And the equator is also the spot
which you need the smallest payload to get into orbit. So perhaps this could be in the future if,
governments get far more oppressive in their regulations towards space, like the oceans and
sea staying could be the way in which we get there. But anyway, back to the story. So the barge is
cracked in two. And so Landy is someone that he's always joking, you know, even in dire straits,
as it turned out, even in the face of death, his personality didn't really change. So Geoffrey said
that, you know, Landy was he told everyone to get life jackets on, get wetsuits on, and the barge
split into two and he said that Landy was joking about it's fine because beforehand they had one
barge and now they've got two barges you know we've increased our number of barges and Landy
was cracking jokes trying to get everyone to um you know remain calm and you know they're getting
Landy like can you call someone for help and and um yeah there was no mobile signal you know the
Starlink had been destroyed and after a while um when they were gathered on the back you know it's
starting to get dark you know the waves and the wind are increasing and and he said that the barge
flipped over.
So everyone is thrown into the water.
And, yeah, Jeffren, in his interviews, he says,
in that moment also, he was smiling.
You know, he said, Landy.
He was, or Landy.
So Landy was bleeding for his head, and he said,
ah, it's nothing, just a bit of blood.
And then Jeffren says, with the smile, just a bit of blood.
So anyway, Landy stayed near the barge,
and then Jeffren and the other survivor called J-Lord,
they hold on to Driftwood.
and they're sort of latched on like this
and they get blown towards Dubai,
sort of into the dark.
And actually, Jeffren couldn't actually swim,
but he was wearing a wetsuit and a life jacket
and they were just holding onto this driftwood.
And yeah, you imagine for 18 hours
being blown through the night.
Oh God, it's my worst nightmare, mate.
And they were saying that literally
that they couldn't swim
or like they couldn't even move.
You know, he said his muscles were like so tight,
just locked in like this.
And the only thing they would do is like move to one side to help keep it balanced.
And so anyway, they're getting blown through.
And then they see these ships off in the horizon the next day.
And they try and like wave to them or whatever.
But they're getting blown the other direction.
The ships don't see them.
They keep getting blown along.
And then just as I said, you know, they didn't swim.
Because if they lost any, if they started swimming, they'd lose energy.
And then, yeah, they see the ship that's like quite near to them.
And then J-Lord says to Geoffrey, you know, this is our last chance.
We've got to swim.
Is it? And at this point the sea died down a bit?
It's died down a bit, yes. I mean, it's still rough weather. And strangely enough, I actually
found a picture online of them being rescued. We managed to find the exact ship, because
the thing is that all ships on the ocean have these AIS tracking numbers. And we knew that
the rough coordinates of the barge.
And then we could see which boats were near Dubai at that time.
So we managed to pinpoint the exact boat
and also the exact time that Geoffrey said.
So that way we could also know the direction of the current,
which also then aided with our search plan for the barge
because we would know which way the currents were going at that point in time.
And then you found the crew and then you got their mobile phones
and you realised that this...
Yeah, so they were then, obviously all of their, you know, mobile phones and stuff, everything was totally destroyed.
No, but I mean to get a picture of them.
Oh, yes.
Where do you find the picture?
LinkedIn.
Yes.
Oh, my God.
Someone just said, oh, look, we found these crazy guys.
Yes.
So the captain of the boat, like there's this whole like photo shoot with the crew and they've all got these certificates.
And he's saying, you know, I'm so proud of my team.
Like they acted really decisively and rescued these two guys.
And yeah, he did this whole LinkedIn post for his company.
and then we found that
and then found them
when you see them
you know with their life jackets
kind of up above their heads
and they're sort of
just keeping up above the water
and they left the driftwood
and just started swimming.
So this guy had taken some shots
when they were being saved.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Brilliant.
So yes, have those two shots
and then a picture of the crew.
And so yeah
and then you know
Jefferyn went back to India
and obviously like I did
I think I did have his phone number
but obviously his phone
and SIM card is totally destroyed
so I managed to find his brothers
on instagram and reached out to them and then i you know flew out and and found out this aspect
of the story yes but the thing about it which i found quite i suppose endearing in a way is that
you know even in death like landy didn't change almost like that's how you can tell who someone
really is like when you're being tested in this way i suppose it's this kind of this
i don't know this sort of like spiritual aspect of like being a warrior is that in every moment
you're being tested you know are you a courageous individual are you a coward and like what do you
do when you're faced by you know your impending death are you a chicken are you are you afraid
or something but Landy was he was still the same you know keeping up morale and he did say in his
interviews he said I will die at sea for sure I'm not going back so for me that the film is that
it's not necessarily a sad story about someone dying it's about someone that had this this this
this dream that they believed in more than life itself quite literally he was quite happy to die
for this dream for what might have happened.
So, yeah, I suppose it's making...
So after you've shot all this,
the rest of the film is about us finding out who Landy is
and his life and what drove him, presumably.
Yes, that is one aspect of it.
So, yeah, and also we found the wreckage.
Yeah.
and
and what
dive down
it was too deep
to dive
no no no
30 metres
is fine
yeah I've been
to 40 metres
you're right
yeah I mean
divers can go down
to I don't know
they can go very deep
you know hundreds
of metres
with the right
equipment
so anyway
then we did this
kind of whole
search for the barge
and you know
we'd contact
all these
wreck hunters
and ask them
for strategies
and a friend of mine
that's helping me
out with a project
like we
like we both
studied sort of maths
and computer science
at university
so it was kind of fun
it was like
designing this whole search pattern and then getting people to go and search for it with sonar
and um it was also quite strange because we'd keep like i'm getting people to go and search for it and
then they would just stop replying to us so we had to keep finding new people to search it was
it's kind of strange anyway um so eventually we we found it and then we found a like people that
specialize in underwater cinematography to go and film it and again like we were trying to raise
money and we weren't raising enough money and all the rest of it and it meant that we didn't end up
actually filming the barge, the wreckage, until I think it was around maybe 18 months later perhaps.
And the thing was, is this was actually perfect. Because when we went down there, this thing had
became an oasis for life, covered in coral, and there was sea snakes and sharks. And this is one
of the arguments for seasteading that I hinted at earlier, is that whenever you build on land,
you destroy all the life that was there. But whenever you build on the ocean, it fosters life.
and Landy's Barge has become an oasis for life.
Like as soon as you go away from the barge,
it's just like sea and the sand and there's nothing at all.
But Landy's Barge has become this real oasis.
So there's some kind of poetic beauty in it.
And also one of these arguments for seasteading is that he may have died,
but all these animals have a new home.
Where did you find your divers then to dive to 30 means?
I've made a few films underwater.
Yeah, yeah.
I know there's a few guys around the world that do that kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I'll do a shout out for them.
They're called Scarlet View Media.
Oh, right.
And yeah, this sort of team of British divers.
And I suppose it's another one of those things.
You know, you just do some research on the internet.
You know, compile a list of maybe 20 people that seem,
or 20 companies that seem competent and then email them
and, you know, you find the best fit.
But you sound like you are very happy with what it looked like, you say.
Oh, yes.
No, really.
they did an incredible job, the divers.
And yeah, very just...
Did anyone find, I mean, did you find anything
unsettling down there or interesting or, you know?
Well, we found Landy's laptop.
We have his laptop.
That's kind of, have his laptop or have his mug.
What was actually very strange was,
you know, Landy would always be sitting in this swivel chair
doing his coding, whatever.
And, yeah, just seeing that, I mean, perhaps one of the last shots in the sequence, I imagine is, you know, you just, the camera's going above the sand and there's bare sand.
And then there's just this shot of his chair being covered in coral.
And then the sort of camera goes up and sort of up into the sky.
So very, just, yeah, it's so strange seeing this place where I'd walked around and now sunken and destroyed.
It was really something very strange.
no i yeah i love filming underwater i think it's i love being deep underwater as well it's just
so um nothing bothers you down there it's one of the best feelings in the world being down the only
trouble when you're filming is you i've i ran out of air once in in the philippines purely because i
was concentrating on what i was doing and got completely engrossed in it i was about 20 meters
down and i i realized fuck it's and i had to just shoot to the top i signaled we had some support
boats i signaled you know they gave me some air and i went straight back down again but
but um i do love being down there yeah we're making a film about um what was it called um
hooker pipe divers sorry second hooker pipe divers is that they're like uh fishermen who
basically use tubes that pump air down to them in the this was in the philippines oh wow it was
incredible it was called moroami it's a it's a fishing method where you get about 30 guys that
go down with with little pipes you know and just breathing through their mouth and they basically
all take a part of the net and then they just swim over the top of um coral reefs we were at
these are out to sea corals you get these little bit like what you're describing at about
40 meter depths you get these little islands of coral sometimes because all the coral inland has
been fished already and they just literally walk them across this thing and all the but all the
fish get trapped um but people yeah it was a it was a terribly dangerous method it's an illegal
fishing method but um we we got we stayed on one of those boats for like two weeks but yeah being
I don't know, I love the feeling of being underwater like that.
You don't dive yourself?
Very bit.
I don't have my, like, I do have my paddy qualification,
but I have not really a diver.
You didn't want to be there to direct it then?
Well, I suppose I was directing it from the boat.
So, I mean, we were filming it for 10 days in total.
So at the end of each day, we'd watch all the footage
and be chatting with the divers about what we wanted
and all the rest of it.
So I would like to go and dive at some point.
I think it would be this fun thing in the future,
you know to go down there um but yeah yeah so let's see what else um so we've okay now we're
looking into the landy backstory yeah so i suppose that the two major components is is the landy
backstory and also how the film will end are you allowed to i can tell you how the film will end
yes okay not gonna give too much away no no no no no uh i think it's it's the it's a similar thing
Well, I'll tell you.
Well, certainly you went to Liberia anyway,
because that was part of finding out why, you know, who he was and stuff.
So an interesting connection, at least with Liberia and seasteading,
is that, so I think the most common flag on the ocean is the Liberian flag.
So they have the biggest shipping registry,
because it's very easy to get a Liberian flag,
and they don't really police you anywhere around the world.
So Landy was flying the Liberian flag out in international waters,
and it is likely that if seasteads emerge,
the flag of Liberia would be a very good choice.
So there is this other connection with Liberia.
I've been there.
I've made some films.
In Liberia?
Yeah, yeah.
Really?
Years ago.
In what years?
God knows.
I'm going to guess 2010, maybe?
2010.
I mean, it was a pretty harsh place.
completely corrupt that was my experience we because i was i was working on behalf of a
um an ngo i was making a film for an ngo and everyone we met was it was it was it was a really
dastardly scenario there was is it monrovia there's a capital right in monrovia
is completely squalid mostly except for the five-star hotel where all the NGO people stay
and you and the UN headquarters there where everyone's driving these brand new things and
we and and one of our contacts they said oh you must come and meet the mayor you know of Monrovia
and I'm and and she showed us around this lavish you know like she wanted to show us this new room
she'd built a tv room with like walnut walls and all this kind of stuff and it was just like
this is all so wrong this is this is everything that's wrong about NGOs is they're funneling all
this money into this place and and I came away that was one of the last jobs I did for an NGO
actually I came away with a really bad taste in my mouth because even the projects they were
pushing were were really not um not something I that it was beyond what I thought NGOs should be
they were they were policy projects let's you know get them to grow these strains of rice or
let's build these things and you know i i preferred your films actually uh what were you what stories
were you covering in um i covered the first one was about um was about create it was such it just
was so stupid i hope they're not listening but um there was this project this ngo funding project
you know monrovia had no sewage uh system at all i don't it probably still doesn't now
like basically people were shitting everywhere like everywhere you went there were these kind
of places where people went to the toilet and it was disgusting obviously but it was just the way
things were because there was no way to to take this stuff away there was just no system for it
the beaches as well were just terrible yeah right everything and some bright spark in an NGO in the
UK that I won't mention had just come up with this great idea to do these composting toilets
with live worms living in them.
And this, you know, and it was just like,
oh, you know, you get out there
and you realize they built five or six of these things.
No one used them.
And the whole, all the money got funneled
into something else.
And people pocketed the money and blah, blah, blah.
And it was just one of those scammy NGO things
that most people don't realize a lot of the time.
This is what happens in these kind of organizations.
And it's not that these are nasty people.
These are well-meaning people in the UK
coming up with ideas i did another one once in um pakistan where they they had the refugee camps
they had this problem with people going out to the outside the uh the edges of the camp to go to the
toilet so they said right cool we're going to create all these like toilets so that they can
you know and we dig and they spent all this money building these things and obviously within a few
days they were rancid and no one cleaned them and and nothing happened so everyone was using
which wasn't a bad necessarily a bad idea because it was just what you did and early in the morning
you walk out to the edge of the desert out there you do your thing and you come back as soon as
they put it all in one place this idea was right this is going to be great because then we can have
a proper in you know there was no thought that maybe if no one no one wanted to clean them
because they were disgusting and within a few weeks they were completely use useless think you
no load of money pumped into that but yeah the liberia one was that was the compounding toilets
and then i did one the last one i did which just i realized this is wrong they were trying to get
inland farmers to change the kind of rice they used to this gm rice because it gave four crops
a year instead of two or something and i'm really suspect of things like that because i think like
just leave them alone i mean in in land it was actually it was actually a really lovely country
the roads obviously were unbelievable like they were all dirt roads and in the rainy season which
second time around we were there in the rainy season you can imagine i've got the the best
footage of trucks trying to get across these horrendous you know it's just one of those
countries that unfortunately you find just not working corrupt um no infrastructure just you know
i and i don't really know how you short of starting from scratch anyway this is a bit of a side
how did you find liberia did you like liberia i i love my time in liberia i don't think i would
recommend as a tourist destination no i do not mean either well i don't know i haven't been there
for a while but depends on what you're like i mean i i let's see i suppose to your point about the
composting toilets i found this quite amusing which is i stayed like pretty much next to the
president's house and uh on one of the walls next to his house like on the outside of his compound
there's this graffiti you see all over monrovia i saw it's probably 50 plus times it says
only dog allowed to pee pee here by the president's house um yeah liberia is interesting as well
because it has exactly the same constitution as the United States,
almost exactly the same.
And it's one of the longest independent African nations,
I believe the second after Ethiopia,
and it has a huge amount of natural resources.
So it's strange the way that it is.
Yeah, because almost the whole population lives in poverty, I would say.
Is that fair to say?
I mean, I can't...
Yeah.
It is one of the poorest nations in the world.
Yes.
but yeah let's see so in Liberia yes I met a lot of Landy's friends a lot of people in the
government that knew him of course what's the initial connection between Landy and Liberia
so even to go back a step so um we'll go into depth about Landy's past but it's of a sort of
broad overview is that you know he's born in the middle of Italy and as a young child he does a lot
of these motorcycle races all across Africa does the Paris de Car he's always had this early
adventurous spirit. And just like he kind of likes the frontiers of being out in Africa and
being in these dangerous places, he's also into the frontier of cyberspace, you know, creating
a VPN technology, like he would make these, when you probably remember them, you know, like payphone
cards or whatever, he was like among the first people making these in Italy. And then he makes
this telecoms company called Utilia, which lays all these fiber optic cables all across central
Italy. And in the space of, you know, about five years from basically nothing, it becomes the fourth
the largest telecoms company in Italy. And at least this is Landy's side of the story. I mean,
is that he said that he was his company was entering into a deal with Berlusconi,
where there'd be some kind of merger because, you know, Berlusconi, the president of this company
media set, and he's kind of this media mogul. And anyway, Samuele said that at the last minute,
Berlusconi pulled out of this deal, and then started accusing Samuele of like,
massive fines from the government.
And these fines are worth hundreds of millions of euros.
And so basically, from Samuele's perspective,
he feels like, you know, I create this big company.
I try to enter into a deal with the president.
Obviously, he's the president,
so he can basically get the courts to do whatever he likes.
He pulls out of the deal, accuses me of all these fines.
My company eventually goes bankrupt.
And then all of Samuele's fiber optic cables
are then acquired by a shell company owned by Berlusconi.
That's Samuele's side of the story.
I mean, I'm not going to delve into the details too much in the film, because also it's a very long legal case that lasted many years, and lawyers devoted all their energies to this, so it's not for me to say whether Landy is innocent or not, but at least what Landy was then accused of, of fraudulent bankruptcy.
And you can imagine, perhaps from the more libertarian perspective, you create this giant company, the government tries to fuck you, they accuse you of all these fines, and then you think, well, if they're going to take all my assets, I might as well try and save some of them.
So he leaves the country, and maybe he does fraudulent bankruptcy, maybe he doesn't, I'm not sure. But after this, he then has to flee Italy.
and so even before this Landy would spend a lot of time in Liberia he did have a portion of Utilia
that was doing a lot of infrastructure in Liberia you know so they would build hospitals out there
and they would do the whole telecoms network in Liberia and of course if you want to do business
in African countries you have to know the people that are running things it's impossible you know
to do large-scale projects without that so yeah that was sort of Landy's involvement in Liberia
And so the thing is, yeah, Landy set up the Liberian embassy in Dubai.
And there is this kind of I suppose you would call it like a meme perhaps amongst commodity traders of being a Liberian diplomat Because in the 90s it used to be that you can pay to get a Liberian diplomatic passport
And as a diplomat, you are able to, you know, you have diplomatic immunity, so able to take
like a briefcase or whatever, of diamonds or whatever, you know, across borders and
things like that.
And anyone that's a Liberian diplomat is considered insanely sketchy.
But I would consider Landy probably the only legitimate white Liberian diplomat that has ever existed.
I'll tell you why.
So after Landy, or even before this.
So one thing that's very endearing to me about Landy is that he was never trying to show off.
He was never trying to do good PR for himself.
He really just wanted to pursue his projects essentially in peace.
It was really only because I was so persistent in trying to reach him that a filmmaker even came on board and filmed what he was trying to do.
He was never chasing publicity at all. And of course, there's all this negative press about him.
And so anyway, after Landy died, I get in contact with someone from the Liberian embassy in Dubai.
And he tells me how Landy coordinated the rescue of hundreds of Liberian girls that had been sold into slavery in Oman.
And so essentially what had happened is, you know, these girls would be promised that they would be up to study, go to school, you know, get jobs in Oman.
They would be sent to Oman.
When they would arrive, they would all have their passports taken away from them.
If they protested against this, they would be beaten.
And a lot of them essentially were working as slaves, you know, for little to no pay.
And, you know, of course, some of them, you know, the more attractive ones would have a certain fate.
And also Liberia has no diplomatic ties with Oman.
So there's no Liberian embassy with which these girls can get any help.
And some of them would escape, you know, try and leave through the airport.
But they're unable to escape because they have no passports.
and oftentimes when they went to the airport they would be beaten and taken back to their slave
masters. So anyway some of these girls then think well how can we escape from here? There's no
Liberian embassy in Oman. Where is the nearest Liberian embassy? It was actually technically
floating in international waters between Dubai and Iran. And so what Landy would do is when he
found out about this he figured well I've got to try and get as many of these girls out of Oman as
possible. And the Liberian government wasn't particularly helping with this issue. So Landy
personally used his own money, he would pay for safe drivers, or for getaway drivers to go in the
night. These girls would then have to escape from the houses, there'd be a driver that would pick
them up. And as I said, they couldn't just go to the airport and leave because they didn't have
papers. So they would then all stay in a safe house that was paid for and organized by Landy
in Muscat, the capital. And then Landy would then start the basic negotiations with the government
and the slave masters to allow these girls to leave,
to be able to get their papers and all the rest of it.
Are there land borders they could have gone out on?
Well, I think they just basically didn't have any documents
with which to leave.
And you imagine, let's say you have no money at all.
You've essentially been a slave.
You go to the border.
I mean, what do you do next?
Then you're just in some other strange place.
I don't know, sneak over.
I was just thinking about,
I don't, I've never traveled across any borders there.
Actually, no, I've been from like the UAE
to um somewhere else i can't remember you know but and there's no border really you know you just
you know so the point is you know what do you do then you know then you're not some other strange
land well but you you said that he set up uh the our liberian embassy in dubai yeah yeah yeah yeah
so then so with these girls they were all in this um safe house in muscat and then he would then get
all of their papers and he would you know pay for their plane tickets to get back to a liberian you
hundreds of these girls were basically rescued by him.
And this is another thing with the media,
how they oftentimes don't care about the truth whatsoever.
So for example, there was this Financial Times article about Landy.
And everyone that reads about Landy on the internet,
they consider him this terrible guy for some reason.
But what crimes did he actually do?
The only thing you can say that he might have done is fraudulent bankruptcy.
That's the only real thing.
But he seems like this terrible criminal or whatever
from the way the media portrays him.
But when you say fraudulent bankruptcy as well,
Yeah.
I look at that and think, I thought when you were saying it, I thought what you said.
Yeah.
I thought here's a pretty, you know, authoritarian government trying to steal all my possessions.
I'm going to try and hide some.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think that's a very normal thing to do.
Exactly.
And you can also see this is perhaps one of the reasons why Landy was even drawn to seastiding in the first place.
Is he thinks that, well, I'm clearly a highly competent individual.
I have a lot to give to my nation.
I brought high speed internet to it.
And if my nation isn't treating me right, well, why don't I try and create a state in which I will be valued, in which I can recreate a state with the right ideals?
So you can see maybe that was why he was drawn to sea setting.
Was that an expressed, you know, was he trying to create a state or was that just, you know, did he ever say that out loud?
Well, I suppose he's someone where he doesn't like to make grandiose claims.
you know he's you know he considered himself as living out in the frontier he wanted to encourage
other people to join i think definitely that was his ultimate ambition but he perhaps wouldn't have
stated it in such you know grandiose terms he was just i'm sorry let me grab some water oh yeah
back in a moment can you can you go of course yes i'll speak while you're gone so that i don't have
to cut this um yeah what was i going to say um i don't know actually
yeah i i i thought as much that we should probably bring a bottle of water out here
i figured this might become a long conversation thank you very much indeed thanks um
so he's not he's yeah go on let's see where were we so yes in terms of his did he express
that he was actually thinking of creating a new country
necessarily?
Or was he just playing with diplomacy?
Because that seems quite fun.
Was he actually a Liberian diplomat himself?
Yeah, I mean, he had a Liberian diplomatic passport.
So he's obviously someone, like in our world,
you know, passports and voting with your feet
and all this kind of stuff.
And how to skirt the system is always talked about.
That seems like just another version of that to me.
just at a higher level you know yeah it seems like you know landy really almost embodies the
kind of archetype of a person that is actually able to create some kind of new society or some
kind of new state because ultimately you do need to be incredibly competent to i mean i mean even
for example it's probably much easier to create a billion dollar company far easier than it is to
create a state yeah and ultimately people that are going to build micro nations have to be people
that are supremely competent in what they want to do and also even in trying to create a new state
like I actually don't think that you know seasteaders will say oh there's no more land left
or whatever so we have to do it out in the ocean but I think ultimately if you're good at diplomacy
there is like vast areas of the world that are totally uninhabited like for example Kazakhstan
there's so much area there if you're a very skilled diplomat you can negotiate you know
especially economic zones and all the rest of it so I really don't think that the bottleneck
in creating new states is land I think it is almost entirely very competent individuals that
are actually able to you know make these things happen i think in the case and what you're saying
though i agree same with large swathes of most of russia is is like there's forests that go on for
hours and hours and hours and hours you know there's not a shortage of land the the problem
with the land-based version of seasteading which is what you're describing is you cannot move and
this is why i love seasteading so much because as a sovereign entity you're the alt you have the
ultimate ability to to change neighbors and and which you can't do on land once you commit to the
land to your to your physical space you are at the whim of your host nation no matter who they are
and there's nothing wrong with that as a strategy and ironically and and this was something i didn't
mention earlier but i think one of the best strategies with sovereign sovereignty is not to
be known about and i was wondering whether that was part of the reason he didn't want to speak to
you in the first place as well because it's one thing living in between iran and and dubai it's
another thing when everyone knows about it because as soon as people know about it as soon as you
become a person of interest that's when people start showing up exactly and and the wrong people
start getting but if no one knows you're there and i i i think as a strategy i almost think if
you really want to sort of sovereign life you're probably just better off sometimes just building
a little community in the middle of nowhere where no one really wants to go and just keep it under
the radar because because it's very easy to do that as soon as you like you say as soon as you
start negotiating with governments it's like suddenly things get very complicated governments
are some of the least efficient organizations in the world literally they have a terrible incentive
model compared to the private sector you know and as a result dealing with them you know because
they all have all the guns as well which doesn't help by law they have all the guns so you can't
even sort of like stand up to them from that sense i mean you can but you do you would do so at your
peril i think i mean some people have um you have to use legality on the whole legal sort of like
you know systems and diplomacy and communities you know if you've got a big enough community
that you can affect opinion of governments and stuff but but um yeah yeah the sort of different
strategies like you know you don't necessarily need to get any weapons at all like for example
one thing that could be a future liberal and strategy is obviously croatia is giving them
lot of grief so one thing you can get is get a larger nation to look out for you so for example
malay has said on video you know when he says when you ask malay like what country is he from
he doesn't say argentina he says i'm from libeland and if for example argentina decided that they
already wanted libeland to exist they could put you know a huge amount of international pressure
on croatia so one way the diplomatic way is to get larger nations to support you for whatever reason
maybe it could be for research into i don't know certain medical practices or whatever it is that's
It's not possible in other states, but it's that way.
Or, of course, there's also, you know, you've got to develop, you know, advanced weaponry.
Like you could think, for example, North Korea has, no one's trying to invade North Korea because they have nukes.
And you imagine if technology gets much more advanced in the future, you could have smaller nation states that,
or smaller startup societies that would have nukes and just say, guys, you know, we're sovereign.
Don't mess with us. And probably nobody would.
So obviously it's not a thing that you necessarily want to do is to start developing nuclear weapons.
but it is a way actually, it's one very clear way to guarantee your sovereignty
because you say you guys won't mess with us because we're able to defend ourselves.
So do you really want to be at the whim of the changing opinions of different governments
or especially with drone technology, perhaps like small nation states
can become incredibly powerful in and without themselves
and defend themselves with the technology?
Yeah, it's a tricky one.
It's a very tricky one because I think my hope is that we enter this new age
where institutions because institutions are crumbling according to me the world over and
that a lot of that is a function of the internet yeah I don't know you've noticed this but in my
lifetime I come from the pure analog world when I was younger to this world and information is now
so free and easy to obtain it's caused so much turmoil on the planet you can see it I mean even
simple things like the Epstein files, you know.
I wonder how many people are now wondering new thoughts
about the people that govern them
that would never have known about that kind of stuff.
Oh, hello.
Oh, that's yours.
It's up on there.
Sounds like Skype.
No.
Skype, I didn't know Skype was still working.
You know, like, and yes.
the age we live in is the age of chaos
because now you and me have access
to this very high level of information
that would have been gatekept from us before
and it allows us to form new opinions
and stuff like that.
While you were talking about Liberland there
and you can be as diplomatic as you want,
what do you think about Liberland?
You've been there, you know VIT,
you know what's going on.
What's your one-on-one on the situation
and what you think about it and what you think might happen?
Well, I would say to start with, of course, I hope that Liberland is a great success.
I think ultimately you could think of the startup city-state projects, maybe.
Of course, it's got lots of different citizens.
They do have some kind of government structure.
Actually, funny enough, Landy was one of the main contributors to a lot of their software.
This is how Landy and Vic got connected, is that a Liberland...
So essentially, I mean, the idea perhaps of Liberland, or the core idea, at least according to it, is that you have voluntary taxation.
So citizens don't have to pay taxes, but if they do pay taxes, you have a greater share of the vote, which kind of makes sense.
I mean, imagine you have 10 friends, you're deciding where you want to go on holiday.
Some guy says, you know, don't worry, guys, I'll pay like 90% of the holiday.
Obviously, he kind of gets to decide what happens with the money.
Like this is a very intuitive way that all of us will naturally organize ourselves in smaller scales.
So this is his idea for governance, which also means that, you know, the Lieberland governance star necessarily means that they will be less involved with the running of the actual country.
But, you know, Landy did actually, he fixed a lot of bugs in their code.
And that was how he got connected with VIT is all of a sudden this, you know, great programmer comes along and just like rewrites your whole code base.
And for VIT, that was very exciting.
So I do think that idea ultimately is very important about this whole like, you know, voluntary taxation.
and I think like for me whether Liberland fails or not I like the spirit of trying to create
something new and I think even if you think some people might be skeptical and think that what
Liberland doing is a bunch of nonsense you imagine a thousand Liberlands all with different styles
of governance some of them are going to really thrive so if for me I like the spirit of Liberland
whether they're going about it the right way who's to say but I like that spirit of of exploration
and actually trying something.
And it is one of the few places on earth,
at least where it is unclaimed by any government.
Or even, I mean, just, it's not necessarily unclaimed,
but it's like Serbia says that it belongs to Croatia
and Croatia says it belongs to Serbia.
So maybe Croatia might say is that,
actually, this isn't unclaimed land.
It is just a land that is on the negotiating table
that hasn't yet been decided.
Yeah, but they police it.
They do police it.
And in the courts, that basically alludes to the fact
that they think they own it,
even though they don't want to admit it out loud.
Yes, but even Croatia would claim
that they're just managing the area,
they don't actually own it.
But I suppose the problem,
the challenge maybe for Liberland
is since this piece of land
is on the negotiating table,
are they able to develop enough
such that if it is finally decided
that it belongs to Croatia or Serbia,
can they develop enough
that there could be international pressure
that could stop it,
maybe from Argentina
or through other nation states?
It's kind of one of the challenges.
Can they do it?
My opinion, looking at the game theory of Liberland, is that Croatia and Serbia will never decide on a result.
Because they don't want to lose out.
Which is great news for Liberland.
However, Croatia is never going to want to give them sovereignty.
Because then they lose either way.
Like, Croatia loses if they give it away.
and Croatia loses if they claim it, if you see what I mean.
Because if they claim it, they lose land on the other side.
And if they give it away, they've kind of lost whatever remaining land they have.
The way that they can win is by it being beneficial that it's Liberland.
Yeah.
And that is a very long-term strategy as far as I'm concerned.
And, you know, arguably, VIT could bring in huge investment to there.
The question is, do they want that?
you know you know your average you know kind of free market economist would say yeah great
you know there'll be jobs there'll be this there'll be that but who knows whether you know
a country wants another country suddenly popping up next to them that has all kinds of connotations
i did ask him once i think he i said would you ever can would you ever make it a free zone within
uh croatia like an economic zone and i'm pretty sure he said he'd entertain the idea so
maybe that's a way forward i don't know but having spoke to it a lot and studied it myself
and been there a few times and thought about it i see it goes nowhere until some high level
political agreement gets made you know there's no point in trying to keep building stuff there
as far as I can tell, you know,
that the incentive model won't favor that for you.
The incentive model is you need a very,
like you need Croatia to suddenly get a Millet style president randomly
who quite likes the idea or something like some bit of fortuitous luck like
that.
I don't see the constant trying and trying and trying is actually working.
I don't know.
I'd be, I'm exactly like you.
I'm happy it exists because it's great.
but having been there it's really chaotic and and and i can't imagine
people i can't imagine croatia if i was in the croatian government i wouldn't be taking it
seriously put it that way yeah if you see what i mean you know i suppose at least what vit would
say is it may be chaotic but i mean part of that chaos arises because whenever they do do
construction they know build tree houses and all the rest of it uh the croatian police comes in and
destroys it i mean one thing that is cool about libeland is that it actually i think would be
very easy from an infrastructure perspective to develop it very quickly because the Danube there
is very wide and you have huge barges that could carry like an insane amount of building materials
that they go all the way up to Hungary through the Danube and you could actually develop quite quickly because it so easy to ship materials there so it does have the potential have you have you seen Zaha Hadid plans that they created you
know like Patrick Schumacher I interviewed him yesterday you should have a look at this crazy
stuff they came up with I mean yeah it's a it's a I think they'd have to drop a lot of earth there
because it basically floods most of the time yeah I suppose it could be like you know Venice or
something some of the most beautiful cities have been built on water and on swamps basically you
know libeland is effectively a swamp venice is the one of the best uh well it's the one i think
one of the most successful cities of all time there's a thousand years worth of great governance
you know that that really worked and it was built on water i mean it's the ultimate seasteading
like advert you know um yeah i agree i agree it could be a great uh you know libeland could be
great i just i think what i want to know is like when if i could go back in history and be there
when people were deciding to found venice say i just want to know what what kind of people were
they because what you notice in in the free city space is you see a lot of especially actually in
the seasteading space even more so there are some very serious people or in the but there are a lot
of fringy people like Liberland's a good example if you go to visit Liberlanders I'm still on some
of their telegram groups I'm you know I've been to the I went to Liverpool last year you see a lot
of craziness there as well a lot of very fringe ideas yeah yeah very fringe not not necessarily
you know flat earth fringe and and and I and I love all that stuff yeah yeah me too but it doesn't
necessarily work well in you know in the diplomatic arena you know you you there's a way to there's a
way to um you know i i think i don't know i i'm i think that it needs a lot of that i think i think
you need you need serious people and i know if it's serious he's a serious guy but but when you
go when you see what surrounds the liberland and what the community is like it's quite it's very
Celtic but maybe that's how that they're the frontier people maybe that's how it starts maybe
if we could go back in time to the to people deciding to live off the coast where Venice is
now they were the same people they were a little bit crazy a little bit woo way you know because
you need those people you know but I like the idea of someone like Landy because not only is he a
frontiersman in the extreme he also is very intelligent and he's built billion dollar
companies and he's you know this is the kind of person i mean i mean i mean an interesting side
about landy is i've done a lot of research into his family history and so first of all um the
landy tribe specifically called the landy tribe have been in existence for at least 2300 years
they were first mentioned by the ancient greek geographer strabo so they were this germanic tribe
that lived in northwestern Germany.
And so the Landi tribe was part of this thing called The Thing.
And The Thing was this collective of Germanic tribes
that then sacked Rome and destroyed Rome.
So after the Landi tribe then sacked Rome,
they then moved to northern Italy
and they established a city-state called L'ostato Landi,
the Landi state.
And the Landi state is the longest-lived Italian city-state
run by a single family.
so Landy and also the only um the description of the Landy tribe in uh in uh you know um 2300
years ago in 300 BC is that they were described as a Germanic tribe living near the ocean that was
where they felt this affinity towards so and then of course his family having this city-state and
then it's kind of interesting you think these I suppose you could call it maybe blood memories
that Landy has so you know these because I don't think all of his family that I've spoken to they
don't even know about Los Stato Landi. It's actually kind of incredible that, you know,
only in three or four hundred years, you know, the memory of this fades. But, you know, Landi,
in his blood, like his exact lineage, they were creating city-states.
But you say, so Los Stato Landi now is no longer a registered city-state?
No, it was a city-state during the Renaissance. So it was, you know, when Italy was many different
city-states. They have a huge amount of castles. I have been to a number of the Los Stato Landi
castles and they're kind of an established family in um i don't have a book actually it's behind you
there uh you can see the the noble house of the landy it's the their entire family history in the
landy family they were you know did a lot of innovations in like banking and finance during
the renaissance and i suppose landy is you imagine uh that you know if the people that created the
statue land if they were alive today how would they act well maybe just like landy and somehow
Now Landy's not conscious of his past,
but this is what his people do.
So at least all of his children that I've spoken to
have no idea about this.
I don't know if, of course I didn't have a speak to him about this.
So you found all this out since you've been making
the rest of the film after he died.
Yeah, yeah.
Gosh, that's, it was a real tragedy that he died
when you think about it.
Imagine if, maybe he had drawn the dots, who knows?
but that might have that might have been a really interesting resurgence of understanding
you know because imagine that if you realize okay i used you know because in a way a lot of what
people talk about in the free cities world is people they we love a lot of people love the city
state model it's a good model maybe a little bit tweaked and a little bit changed you know
but to think that your ancestors were you know created their own and now you're alive and you're
creating another one you know yeah well I think to me it's this important reason to have an
appreciation of your history and like where you came from and what your ancestors did and not to
say that oh my ancestors were great therefore I'm great it's more that you know look at what my
ancestors achieved, that can inspire me in the future. And if there is no future to it,
there's no point in doing it. So I think we've got to think that throughout the history of
Western civilization, when have we seen the most flourishing? In places like Renaissance Italy,
in places like when you had thousands of little city-states in modern-day Germany,
or during ancient Greece. The times we've seen the most development, and the times that stick
in the memories of Europeans is ancient Greece, is Renaissance Italy. And if that led to the
greatest flowering of culture, it can happen again, of course. And, you know, all these
little city-states merge into much larger states, but then collapse out. So I think
if we just look at our history, we think, well, you know, this can happen again. And,
you know, perhaps it's vital to, because sometimes larger nation-states, they don't need to
flourishing of culture, particularly.
I think it's vital because what you're describing is competition. It's a free
market like if you if if if you have a hundred greek islands and they all have different governance
models and it's easy to get between one and the other you get to see the in the free market which
ones do well this is the market showing us what governance model works best yeah the problem we
have currently is we have these behemothic states which command you know vast areas and don't allow
that yeah and we're so we're arguably we are at the we are at an inflection point where we get
to see that crumble again into smaller smaller decentralized governance models which would be
i mean that's obviously the dream who knows maybe in 500 years there might be 30 000 yeah i mean i
don't know i mean it could even be soon like for example you think of no one could have predicted
the ussr collapsing and like one uh i mean one of my favorite countries is turkmenistan um you know
the USSR collapses, Turkmenistan was part of the USSR. And then there is just this like random
dentist. And he thinks to himself, this whole region is mine. It's not only is it mine,
I am the king. I'm like the god of this place. Like he builds this golden statue of himself
made out of gold and puts it on this marble column. And it rotates around such that it always
faces the sun. So in Turkmenistan, there was this holy book that he wrote, where he's the prophet.
and the book is talking about him all the time.
And like, for me, what actually creates cities and culture
is usually like a couple of individuals imposing their tastes on a place.
So with this guy in Turkmenistan,
he declared that the whole city had to be made of white marble.
Every car that was not white was outlawed.
Or an example that's maybe closer to us is that, you know,
Paris was basically a giant slum for most of its existence.
And then Napoleon III comes along.
he decides to just knock down all of the slums and then build Paris as we know it today,
which is why when you walk around Paris, it is, you know, very uniform in the way that all the buildings appear.
So oftentimes it is, even if you might think a city is, you know,
millions of people potentially contributing towards its development,
it's usually just like the aesthetic tastes of a couple of individuals that really propel it forwards.
But what about the ideological places?
Do you think that, you know, like, because taste wise, I think, yes, a lot of people are drawn to a place because it looks nice.
But I think in this age, and I think one of the driving forces really that we see in movement is apart from economic freedom is physical freedom.
like you know we we know that from 2020 onwards lots more people started thinking about physical
freedom and about political freedom because we were all told to stay in our homes and a lot of
people went no why and then when they tried to get out they realized it caused them a lot of problems
and then a kind of a map of the world appears quite quickly and you can see which places are
more welcoming to you as a free free spirited person which which aren't and that's what i see
most people grappling with now it's like we're seeing many we're seeing the veil being pulled
back in in many senses um and as a result many institutions are basically stumbling many things
are stumbling because the veil is being pulled back you know from most things because of the
internet and because of the free free use of free use of information but then as it as it
people deal with that in many ways some people stick their heads further in the sand but a lot
of people are going okay right i presume i presume you've read the sovereign individual the book
no oh right okay the sovereign individual thesis which is a book written in the 90s which is
basically predicted the the world we see now which is the empowerment of the sovereign it's called
the sovereign individual in many ways now we we're living that you know you as a sovereign
individual could probably move anywhere in the world and make a living and live a good life and
you're very mobile with your capital now because you could as long as you you understand how
cryptocurrency works you can just leave with your whole net worth even in your head you don't even
need it on a on a hard drive or whatever um so so this is playing out now this this thesis and
There's two sides, obviously.
The sovereign individual is here and the state is here
and they're arch enemies.
And this is the kind of ebb and flow of culture,
of freedom, of control, you know, and it's been,
it never resolves.
It just continues ad infinitum.
But we do seem to be, because of technology now,
we do seem to be on a threshold where there are two paths ahead.
and I don't know how it plays out.
I know how I want it to play out for myself
and my family and friends.
And I hope that probably
there'll be parallel worlds that exist.
I think it's very hard to know
because we see technologies offering
the authoritarian state
a massive opportunity right now,
especially artificial intelligence.
Combine that with centralized power
And you can monitor almost every aspect of a person's life, pretty much, unless you're living on a barge in the middle between, you know, like Dubai and Iran.
And even then, probably, you can probably still get monitored there in the next 30 or 40 years, you know.
so so there need to be places where ideologically people understand no we don't actually want
this kind of of method of living and i'm pretty sure in the beginning they'll be at the fringes
they have to be yeah because the fringes are ungovernable and and you can't you can't conquer
the fringes either really because they're a waste of it's a waste of resources you know
authoritarians want to conquer the main bulk of everything it's like if you live in a city
you're you're easy to control if you live out in the middle of the countryside down the end of a
track you're much less cost effective to try and control you and i think you know a barge in the
middle of the straits of homos or wherever it was is is is a very hard who's going to spend money
trying to to stop that when it gets big enough maybe yeah you know it becomes a thing of interest
at that point but but um i don't know where how we got into this but yeah i mean one thing to follow
on from this is i think that like from a strategy perspective for new nation states i think or new
micronations or whatever i think it's very important not to be too ideological like you can
have your the ideology but i think it's important for it to be kind of implicit if you're if you're
very certain about all these sorts of things and you declare that to the world it's very easy for
people to attack your project like i think it could be better even for example for a seastead
instead of saying it's going to be this libertarian paradise where we can do all drugs and experiment
on people and do all these crazy things outside of control of the law you know maybe it's better
to say that okay we're making this seastead out in you know international waters and it's going to be
a you know i don't know a biodiversity research center you know we're going to experiment with
corals and breeding them and things like that and that being like the clear reason that you give to
the outside world because that's harder to attack i think that a lot of people that set up um like
micronations for ideological reasons are basically if they do that it's basically going to fail
straight away because you know large states are so powerful that if they see this they're just
going to crush you because even in international waters you're not outside control of the law
a navy can just send a destroyer and and you know destroy your project so i really don't think
ideology is the way to make it happen i think it's like legitimate businesses maybe yeah or
have you know a like like the business is the state or something and they have specific aims
that are palatable to people,
like, I don't know, rejuvenating this area of forest
and we're going to integrate this forest
with our, I don't know,
eco-restorative homes or whatever.
But I think that is a much better path forwards.
Like you say, doing it kind of underneath the radar,
but it's still being a public thing
where people can find out about it.
Mitchell Suchner would very much co-sign
what you've just said.
That's his theory.
And I understand it as well.
And I think it's true
because when you look at the,
when you look at, you know,
like if you go look at the origins of cities,
there's always a reason why a city is placed where it is.
And it's normally by a river
because you can bring goods.
It becomes like a merchant place.
Venice is a good example of that,
you know, run by merchants.
And Mitchell's idea,
he has a sort of a way in to seasteading,
which is you need a business first.
In his case, he's experimenting with tourism,
fish farms you know he's talking about mining eventually but i think that comes later but i
think you're right i think if you if you have a if you have a financially viable project before you
know it you you'll have a a community and a thriving community because the reason why people
are there is to make money and i think you know i mean dubai is arguably that dubai is a merchant
city you know and people don't go there to do politics nobody go moves to dubai to be political
at all because there is no real politics for you as an outsider you go there to be a merchant
to do business and to follow the rules that that seem to work and and if you're unhappy
with the way you're governed you get to leave i mean this is the really the whole thesis of this
you know and so yeah i think i think maybe you're right i think if you declare like vit has you know
if you declare okay we're going to start a micronation suddenly you're a person of interest
and your project is a project of interest because you're basically a direct threat if you're a
business you're actually someone who is not a threat necessarily you're actually someone who
might who might offer something in return but um but yeah what about landy though what was
what was he he wasn't well he was ideological wasn't he was a kind of leave me alone
don't tread on me kind of guy right i think landy he is someone that throughout his life
he wants to be on the frontiers like he i think he's like the kind of archetype of a person
that likes being in an environment where other people simply can't live you know he thinks like
being out on the scene obviously well he did of course die out there but as as you know the
frontiers are inherently dangerous but i think the kind of people that create new cities or you
you're asking earlier about you know what kind of a person creates venice i don't know about in the
specific case of venice but i could say in the case of the united states all of the founding fathers
were considered terrorists you know if the british caught them uh we would have hung them and you
know considered it a good job and it's like i interviewed joe for my film and he says um something
like the first pioneers who go to the frontiers
have always been outlaws who say what does he say He says fuck you to society fuck you fuck your laws I creating my own state or something like that But the point is you know new nation states don want to see other states popping up
They would rather absorb them into their territory.
And the people that want to create new states
are always going to have a strong incentive to do so,
like with Landy.
Even though it isn't actually a very important point to add,
which is that a lot of people think that
because Landy was some fugitive or something,
that he moved out to the ocean to be free from the law.
That's not the case at all.
He was living in Dubai.
He could have had a very nice, comfortable life in Dubai
for the rest of his days.
But instead he thought, you know, I want one last great adventure.
Like, wait, do I want to just, you know,
he's had this interview with him where he's saying,
you know, he's saying,
what is the most important thing you can have in your life?
The option to do what you like.
You know, anything.
Does he want to just spend his days having brunch in Dubai
or whatever, or does he want to go out to the ocean and try and create something new?
So I think that ultimately the people that create new societies, they are pretty much
always considered outlaws at the beginning.
But once they win and they establish a state, then they're these great founders of a new
nation.
And then the kind of the more normal people come and develop the vision.
But I think to even try and create a new state, you have to have a very strong incentive to
do so.
So I think really Landy is the archetype of the person that does want to create, you
you know, a new state.
And also with Landy,
I think the thing that's very admirable about him
is that this like drive for freedom
is ever present throughout his life.
Like there is one person I interviewed in Italy
who says, you know, he says in Italian,
but it translates to, he was a pirate,
but a white pirate who searches for liberty
for himself and for the others.
And it's like the story of,
that I was telling you earlier
about these girls that were enslaved in Oman.
For Landy, for him to find out about these people
that are living in such a fundamentally unfree way,
like it makes them like uncomfortable.
Like how can he find out about this
and not do everything that he can to help these girls escape?
And he told no one about this.
And oh yeah, I was talking about,
there was this journalist, I wouldn't mention her name,
but she was with me in Liberia and I introduced her
and she interviewed about 20 of these girls
that Landy had helped rescue.
And of course they were saying about the way
in which Landy coordinated everything.
And then she writes this article in the Financial Times
and she's talking about Landy being a Liberian diplomat
and then she says this story about how
there was two Liberian guys in the UAE
and they were getting deported back to Liberia
and Landy was like too chicken to go to the police station
to help them out.
And it's like, I was there when you interviewed
literally 20, not just one or two, 20 girls
and you didn't even mention it.
And it's almost like you realize that so many journalists,
even if she didn't make any factual errors
or lies in the article that she wrote,
you can make lies by omission and like people like landy there's almost like an incentive from you
know the powers that be whatever to portray him as this like raving idiot or this guy that's just
out for himself after me that's what's or or is it that the a lot of journalists can't get behind
somebody journalism in in in its modern incarnation is about slagging people off it's not about
showing why people are good i mean you look at politics is the same you never hear the other
side of the aisle in a debate go do you know what that's a pretty good idea i'm not gonna just
counteract counter you on this i'm actually gonna say yeah fair enough that's a good policy or
whatever you know it's it's always about bringing people down and the press i used to work in
fleet street you know and i was in london yesterday and i just it gives me the shivers
now being in a place like London I just think of it as you know just or anyone working in the
mainstream media now like if I accidentally turn on the tv somewhere and I'm in a hotel room and
the news comes on and you look at it and you go because I live in the what you would call the
alternative media like same as you it's just like a horrible that side of the aisle where they're
where they're reporting in a mainstream way is so wrong and driven by,
like you say, there's not necessarily a search for the truth.
There's a search for maintaining a narrative.
Like why wouldn't you want to tell the story?
Like if Landy, like you've managed to,
or it sounds like you're going to tell a very interesting story about the guy.
but in you know the financial times especially the story has to be this is a bad person doing
a bad thing like when do you ever hear i mean i don't read the financial times but i'm going to
guess they don't often glorify people unless it's milk this is keens or someone like that i don't
know no you know like it's not part of the journalistic you know modus operandi anymore
to sort of say, to be positive about things.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
Because there is a positive side to almost everything.
Even like, for example, with Landy,
I was saying earlier about,
in the very opening scene of the film,
and Google Samuel E. Landy's name,
researching who he is,
and it says, you know,
Interpol have arrested Samuel E. Landy in Abu Dhabi.
There's that news article.
And the news article is entirely fake.
Like, for example, Landy was not arrested
by Interpol in Abu Dhabi,
clearly, because he was still a free man.
And yet, you know, Rai, the biggest,
kind of like, you know, the equivalent of the BBC in Italy, published this article such that everyone
that ever looks up Landy immediately associates with him with Interpol. But you realize that was
like totally not true whatsoever. And just by publishing that article, people's perceptions
of him are entirely changed. And so that's kind of what I hope through this film is to actually,
you know, tell the real story of Landy from the people that knew him and to have him as this
archetype of someone that, you know, was trying to create these new, these new states, you know,
out at sea or you know and be this inspiration without you know overselling him yes you know him
you've known him briefly you've had a lot of contact with him was he a decent guy is he a
nice guy is he or do you think there's there's there's a dark side to him or this like what why
did the financial times paint him as a as a as a yeah so i can tell you very specifically why the
financial times paint him as a bad guy which is that so whilst landy was out at sea there was all
these journalists that would start running these articles like why is an international fugitive
the main advisor to the world's largest carbon credit fund and you think what so landy worked
for this company called blue carbon and blue carbon is owned by the royal family in the uae
and they they sell carbon credits and i suppose at least publicly it just says that you landy
helped give this company um you know it support and anyway so this journalist um she's a climate
change reporter and she obviously wants to make you know carbon credits look as silly as possible
so she has you know landy is helping out this company in some way and she makes she wants to
make carbon credits look very foolish and wants to make landy look like a fool i mean even just
on the topic of carbon credits um i'll say where they're bad good but i think ultimately the the
idea of them is is a positive one which you think there are these nations that are forested they
are, you know, very, very poor, that keeping the forests to them, just letting them be is there's
no economic incentive to do so whatsoever. So the idea with a carbon credit is you say, well, this,
this is, you know, the lungs of the world, in some sense, this helps clean the world's air.
And we are going to create this, this, you know, this token or this asset, that means that we value
the economic benefit that carbon credits give. Obviously, the way that it's executed, maybe
scammy, maybe not, whatever. But in principle, the idea is a good one. I suppose at least what
Landy thought is that this seems quite intuitive. We create this thing that means that Forrest can
still stay up. So that was at least why the Financial Times don't like Landy. And for me,
it's like I just respect the energy with which he lives his life. It's this energy of always
be willing to start over again, you know, instead of when the Italian government tries to lock you
in prison you think no you know i'm going to escape i'm going to move to dubai i'm going to
set up a new tech company in dubai this one crypt hotel i talked about earlier making cryptid mobile
phones you know i get bored of that you know i'm friends with all of these people in africa and
why not move out to the sea to me that's like it's a very romantic way it's a very like energetic way
in which to live your life like he's someone where like just i think the thing that guides him really
is adventure and um i mean even from my my my own uh you know with this film there's something like
very romantic about you know uh meeting a guy like prince johnson like he was this um you know
liberian warlord or whatever and for me it's like it's fun it's like being in a place where other
people are afraid to go you know and these like strange characters that you meet and in faraway
lands like it's kind of this this adventurous spirit is ultimately what creates you know what
for example creates the british empire and spreads technology around the world whatever you think
about it ultimately you know the industrial revolution starts in england and it spreads
around the world in a major part because of the british empire whether you agree with it or not
this is the thing that spreads civilization for civilization to spread you know it has to expand
for me landy he's always he's always he's an adventurer and uh you know it's hard not to admire
someone like that yeah you what you've just said well almost certainly pissed lots of
people off in certain political ways i i i don't agree or disagree with it same with carbon credits
i i think i could probably argue carbon credits from both sides one that it's terrible and one
that it's okay i just see who's involved with carbon credits and think yeah dodgy af you know
but i i don't i don't really know i i don't even there's too many things to care about in the world
these days, isn't there?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, you can't address all of them.
We've been going a very long time,
but I think I might start sort of wrapping it up slowly.
I have a good way to wrap things up,
but go ahead with your questions.
Well, I was going to say,
you were going to mention how the film was going to end.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
So maybe, was that what you were thinking as well?
It was, it was indeed.
Okay, yeah, let's go there then.
Well, let's take like a 10 second break.
I'll grab some water.
Oh, okay, yeah.
And then we'll jump into,
would you like more water as well?
yes thanks of course i'm i'm gonna have to try and keep speaking again because i'm sick of
having to um edit things like this this is going to be a very free-flowing uh
unedited at all um episode thank you very much indeed right okay
we should have bought
we should have just bought a jug in here
yeah that would have been a smart move
so
so I'll tell a story first
it's totally disconnected
it will seem disconnected but it's actually entirely
related which is that
so
in Germany in 1248
there was this archbishop
That sounds, there's like something that, what's his name, the Russian, what's his name?
Jesus, my mind.
Who runs Russia?
Putin?
Putin.
Yeah.
That's a Putin move.
He did a whole interview with Tucker Carlson.
Did you hear that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he did that.
Go on.
Start it again.
Sorry.
So in 1248, there was this German archbishop called Archbishop, I think it was like Conrad von Hofstaten or something like that.
Sure.
And this archbishop, he wanted to create the largest cathedral in Europe.
So he got these architects and they drew the designs for the cathedral.
It was going to be this giant twin-inspired church.
he found the best location for it and he laid the cornerstone of the church and anyway he ran out of
funds this project was forgotten then 600 years later in the 1800s there are these monks that
were going through these archives and they found the designs for the cathedral and they then you
know found the proposed spot they found the cornerstone and then they used the cornerstone
and they built then the largest twin-spired cathedral in Europe.
And it is, I think, yes, the Cologne Cathedral.
I believe it's actually the most visited landmark in Germany in the present day.
So, I mean, bear that in mind then with how it relates to the end of the film.
Okay.
So, when I was in Liberia, you know, investigating Landy's life and finding all that about him,
I, oh, there's actually another thing that I have to say before this.
So Landy's plan was that he wanted to move his floating platform
from between Dubai and Iran,
from there to this place in the Indian Ocean called the Sayadamala.
I don't know if you've heard about it,
but it's something that Joe often talks about, Mitchell talks about.
Is it an area where the seas, it's like an underground sea mountain or something?
Exactly. It's like a sea mount off the coast of Madagascar.
Underwater.
Underwater, exactly, yes.
And so it's very shallow. It's near the equator.
and you know when it's very shallow it means it's easy to build structures there so even if there's
giant storms you know you can have these sort of um sort of metal things coming out of the sea or
whatever anyway that was where landy wants to go to and a lot of seasteaders consider this the best
place so whilst i was in liberia i started having these dreams and in the dream i was flying above
the Sayadamala. And beneath the waves, I saw this giant colossus head of Landi. It was about three
meters, and it was bronze. And in the dream, there are these piratical band of men that come out,
and they're searching for the head. And in the dream, when they find it, they raise the head up
from the depths, and they make a full colossus, the Colossus of Landi. And around the Colossus of
Shulandi, a city-state develops out in the Sayada Mala. And I had this dream multiple times, and I'm
someone that has very intense, vivid dreams. And whenever you have a dream a second time, you
instantly clock, well, I've already had this dream. So I had this recurring dream, and I was thinking
about it a lot, and I thought, you know, what if this dream is not just a nighttime vision, but what
if this is a vision of the future? What if this is a way, or what if this is going to be the way in
which a city develops on the Saadamala. So I thought, well, if this is to happen, how could
it be? It is, of course, a possibility. You can imagine that, you know, they could actually make
a colossus of Landy there, and they could build a city around him. And a lot of great cities from
antiquity, you know, the colossus of Rhodes or any city, you need to have these monuments that
everyone can identify with. You know, Landy is this great pioneer that he died trying to create
a city-state here, but maybe we continue his legacy. Just as there was Wolf Hilberts that
wanted to make a floating city in the Sayadamala, Wolf Hilberts died, the idea passes to Joe,
the idea passes to Landy. This idea of a city-state in the Sayadamala has passed from person to person
to person, and I hope that it will continue on. So I thought about this, and I thought, well,
if this was to be real, how could it be real? And I realized that what is my role then in the dream?
what I have to do. So I realized, well, it's quite obvious what my role is. My role is,
is I have to make a three meter bronze colossus head of Landy. And so it is, at first,
you know, I tried to get, it's very difficult to fundraise for such a thing. And I got these
French sculptors to make a prototype version of it, which is 40 centimeters high in bronze.
And these people are called Atelier Mazur, and they are currently trying to build like a giant statue of Prometheus in the United States.
And they want it to be larger than the Statue of Liberty.
So when I walked into their workshops in Paris, I saw this, you know, giant head that was, you know, much, much taller than the height of this room.
And I thought, well, these are the guys to make it.
So anyway, I...
Out of bronze as well?
Out of bronze, yes.
It's going to be heavy.
About two to three tons.
so they you know they made the prototype version 40 centimeters in bronze and um anyway they were
charging a massive amount of money to make a three meter version they were charging like 200,000
US dollars I tried a lot you know I tried I tried my best to raise that money but it wasn't possible
so anyway um uh so I figured well I've got this bronze prototype you know I don't have 200,000
dollars I mean how can I proceed so anyway I got the head uh 3D scanned and I figured well like
around the world, like who are the best people at making colossal structures?
The number one people are undoubtedly the North Koreans.
They make a lot of colossuses all around the world, in Africa.
They've done projects in Poland, in Germany.
Maybe I can't get the North Koreans to build this for me.
But the second best place is in Thailand,
because they build giant bronze Buddhas all the time.
So I got the small model of Landy that Atelier Mazur made.
It's been very accurately 3D scanned, sent to this foundry in Thailand.
And they have already built the three meter wax model.
And they are soon going to be cast it in, I think, around April the 1st is the current roadmap.
And I would like to say that this bronze head is going to be larger than any bronze head that was created in antiquity of a real person.
So in terms of the history of the European peoples, the largest colossus head ever made of any real person is Lenin.
so far the second largest colossus head made of any european person is samuel elandi the third
largest is constantine the great who was the uh the roman emperor that had the largest bronze head
made so anyway the construction is underway um i can show you already um what has been done now
i've done a lot of filming what are you going to do with it then well think it no well in the dream
The dream is that in the Sayadamala, there are these men, or maybe women too, that go out to the Sayadamala and find this head of Landi.
So, well, I have to take it to the Sayadamala.
And the way the film will end is that you will have this shot of this three-meter bronze head being lowered into the seas in the Sayadamala and laid to rest there.
And the hope is that when people see this, this is such a powerful image
Like imagine seeing this three meter bronze head, it's hard to get such a thing out of your mind.
And my hope is that one of the viewers may see this and they may think,
what if it is me? You know, what if I will raise this bronze head up from the depths?
And maybe, like I said with the story of Archbishop von Konrad Hofstetten, whatever he's called,
maybe this head lies there for a few hundred years, maybe it's forgotten.
But given that the Saadamala is maybe the best place to build a floating city around the world,
that even if it's entirely forgotten,
in the future, if people are going to build a floating city,
it is likely they will choose the Sayadamala.
And if they do choose the Sayadamala,
it's likely that they would do a lot of research about the place.
Maybe they might find out about the Legend of Landy,
and they might find out about it,
and think, well, isn't there this bronze head
we should go and raise up from the depths?
Or maybe they won't.
Maybe they'll go out to the Sayadamala,
and they'll do these sonar scans,
and figure out how they should construct this city,
and then they'll find, wait a minute,
that's a giant hunk of bronze, you know,
on a sonar that thing is going to be very uh very easy to detect so the hope is that perhaps this is
this will happen that's like the idea is is that ideas live independently of humans someone can
write an idea in a book and that person dies 600 years later the idea is picked up so this is how
i want landy to be remembered and ultimately if landy is a is maybe landy is a fool and uh his
life will sink into obscurity. That's not for me to decide. That is for future humans to decide.
But maybe they may think the opposite. Maybe they'll think this idea of creating a floating
city is a good one. They'll go to the Sayadamala. They will raise him up from the depths and he
will then be remembered as this great pioneer. It's not for me to decide, but I want to lay the
seed. I want to lay the keystone of the city in the Sayadamala. I want to place the first piece
and maybe others will continue.
I mean, it depends how deep,
how spiritual you want to get about it
because you could argue that you're anchoring the idea
in a different dimension as well.
Who knows what goes on?
I mean, I'm open to understanding things
in a completely different way,
but I probably believe that the intention behind that
would be so big that there would be some kind of you know how would you describe it some kind of
energetic version that was all also there how deep is it by the way at the side of mala like
are you talking like 20 meters so the side of mala varies greatly in depth of course i will
not say exactly where the side of mala is a fairly large area of course i will not say exactly where
it is i don't want anyone to go and you know steal it or something but anyone do you think people
would i don't think so i think the value of the bronze is actually you probably you'd pay a lot
in fuel to actually get out there i think it wouldn't really make economic sense to try and
salvage it and melt it down but it's only for the committed you know i'm not so how deep would you
oh yeah so depth wise yes um so the side of marla varies greatly i think the shallowest part of it
is i think the shallowest part that i've seen on on charts is eight meters eight some of it though
is more like 30. Some of it is hundreds of meters. It varies a great amount because you have these
kind of seamounts, you know, where it rises up. Maybe I'd put it on one of the shallowest parts,
but also the deeper it goes, the greater the longevity of it because there's less oxygen
in deeper waters. And there's also protective measures that we can take. Like there have been
bronze statues that have been found over 2000 years later in the ocean that have been in great
condition so maybe the maybe landy will just live on in bronze you know for thousands of years i do
know the feeling when you're making a documentary of not knowing how to end it i've never gone down
that route though that's very funny that's very interesting like because there isn't an obvious
end and i don't know maybe there wasn't an obvious end but now now you know i can imagine
um the final shot when you're sort of swimming away from the bronze and it just disappears into
the sea and you know underwater that is yeah you know something along those lines or something
wow so yeah i mean have you told does joe know about this i take it yeah yeah yeah very much so
what does his family think about the fact that their dad's gonna be they have a massive head
under the sea do they think you're a little bit yeah i mean also he when did he die i mean it must
February the 2nd, 2024.
So it's even, probably they're still grieving and stuff.
Yes.
But ultimately, you know, Landy is someone who has been much maligned by the media.
He has received very little good publicity in his life.
And he was just basically living his life outside of that.
And my film, I hope, will tell, like, the true energetic story of his life.
And, like, for me, it's not even just about him, his life specifically.
it's about the energy with which he lived his own life
and the intensity with which he lived it
and maybe people will see this film
maybe it's not seasteading
but it might inspire them in some other direction
so for me it is this great
yes, way of energy of ending the film
I mean, you've been shooting for a long time
haven't you?
it's a pretty long
yes, it's been going on well
the film I suppose started
probably in October of 2023
which is when I first met Landy
so yeah it's been going on for
what two years and a bit
and have you sold it?
no no no I also have pretty much almost entirely retained control of like I own pretty much everything Some of my friends have invested a little bit of money into it but it just like me and my friends
And where do you imagine?
I mean, I'm just thinking, is it a Netflix documentary or is it, do you want to go turn it into bits?
Well.
Can you do anything bigger than that these days?
Like where, how do you, what's the biggest a documentary can be these days?
I don't know.
I mean, I think it's a documentary where it's something quite, it's fresh.
It's not something that you would see, you know, you couldn't see, oh, I've seen that already.
There's a million films like that one.
I don't know.
I don't know how to live.
Yeah, but you have to make money as well.
Of course, of course.
I mean, at least the strategy at the moment is reaching out to lots of different distributors,
sending them cuts of the film, seeing who is interested.
I mean at least the advice that I've been given
is that you don't want to
sell it to a distributor before it's done
because often times they will then
want a lot of creative control and ultimately
then you're kind of beholden to them
and their vision so
currently I'm reaching out to lots of different distributors
and when the film is finished then
shop around and see which one
will you know which one's most into it
The dream of course and I don't know whether
this is still the dream because I don't know how
I don't
don't dip my toes into that world anymore but what would be to finish it get it in some festivals and
get it liked in a well-known festival and then sell it i mean yeah that's the goal but is that
still what people do i mean like i just you know like i was a couple of days ago i was listening
to the radio in the car and they said oh who's presenting at the oscars this year and i was
thinking oh my god do people still do that do people still go to the oscars just be like and
i know that's me that's me dropping out of society in a way and mixing with you know other you know
other sections of society but i find all that stuff really kind of old school now you know
and and dying and and old-fashioned and you know i don't know i mean you can easily see something
like this as a netflix doc but do you want it to be just another one when you click docs on the
netflix and like oh there's this one and this one and this because there's some great documentaries
on there yeah yeah there really are but but i find the world of filmmaking that i come from from a long
time ago there was far more i don't know i i felt it was more inspirational than we find now that
there is so much stuff there are people putting out documentaries on youtube that are pretty good
and fun and low budget but but really intrigue intriguing you know i don't know where i'd position
myself anymore that's where it got out i think yeah i don't like that world you know i suppose
for me like the let's say the film's a total flop no one watches it whatever um like i would consider
that a great success like the places that i've been and the people that i've met and for me the
reason to make the film is because it's very enjoyable making it of course if it's also i
hope of course it's a success because you know there's lots of other films i want to make after
this one and the better this one is like the easier the next ones will be but it's a bit like
with Joe's book, for example. You know, I read Joe's book, and then this whole thing happened
in my life. You know, Rudy, the main engineer behind Ocean Builders, at least Joe told me that
Rudy says that, you know, he read Joe's book, you know, twice straight away. He keeps a physical
copy and a copy on his phone at all times. And the idea is with Joe, he writes this book, and then
a couple of people take action. And then that then actually moves forward the frontier in some way.
And I hope the same thing with this film. Like, it's this energetic thing where a couple of people
might see it and then actually maybe lift the bronze head up from the depths and make a floating
city or maybe do something else but for me it's like i'm not not sure what to uh sort of coin this
maybe it's maybe this is how you describe it i i'm trying to think of a good name for it but maybe
it's like uh the uh the aristocratic principle of content creation which is basically that you make
a film not for everyone you only make it for a couple of people even like a couple of individuals
but in order to reach those individuals
it has to be very good
and a lot of people have to see it
so it's this thing
if it wants to be very entertaining
in and of its own right
but really you make it just for a couple of people
like really Joe in some sense
wrote that book for Rudy
like Joe in his interviews
he said you know
when I wrote this book
I dreamed that a marine engineer
would come along
and make all my dreams come true
and he says something like
God and his infinite sense of humour
gave me Rudiger Cock
and in some sense
you know Joe
the book was very popular
lots of people read it
great reviews and all the rest of it but the reason to write it was that Rudy made Ocean Builders
that was really the reason it doesn't really matter if a million people read your book
because ultimately oh they read a good book they move on to something else but if like if your
writings or the things that you create actually inspire a city state like perhaps that could
happen with this podcast maybe that is like that to me would be the ultimate goal if I was running
this podcast at least of like what it could turn into it's it's entertainment but it also means
something wider than itself. It has this ability to actually affect the course of civilization in
some way. Like for example, you know, with ocean builders, they're hoping to help with oxygon,
which is this floating city in Saudi Arabia, where they're building this industrial city where like
half of it is on land, and half of it is in the ocean. And ocean builders are hoping that, you
know, they might be able to help out with the construction of this. And you think of, well,
Joe's book then could have led and or helped developed oxygon in Saudi Arabia, and who knows
what that will go on to do.
So it this idea of ideas living independent of us and we are just vessels to help propagate them And someone like joe has ultimately spread these ideas to people that have the energy to actually you know develop them so
no i i would agree with that actually i it's nicely articulated i've never thought of it
necessarily like that but i'd i've i mean the in the the reason to even talking about this podcast
the reason to do this was never to make a lot of money i don't think i've ever been driven by money
I've been driven by a couple of things.
One is that the enjoyment of the process, like you said,
and the other is that I know something that I think is beneficial
and I want other people to know about it.
And that drives, that's a very strong driving force.
But it's true that there is obviously an unfortunate tension
between that idea and making a living though, which is annoying.
And I know Joe has it, obviously, because Joe would love a million dollars to get the sort of like, to be able to ensure seasteads, you know, what's the called, not the flagging system.
He wants to create a flagging registry.
No, he wants to create a registry.
Yeah, yeah, basically.
And that's going to cost a lot of money.
But you're right.
Maybe someone listens to this and goes, you know, it's a very, it's a funny thing because it's a very small world, the world of seasteading.
cesteading and and the government the world of living together the world of people experimenting
with governance as well is a very small world i know that now because i i've i've realized what
it is i came into this world from a very specific place which was you know free private cities
really titus gables ideas about you know that was what and i and having been here for a few years
now i realized that the fun thing to think about is governance which it just seems like such an
unsexy idea when you're when you you know when you don't know anything about it but when you
start thinking about it humans amassing together and living together is really fascinating and how
to do it well is something that most people just don't think about and especially people you know
in the West in general, they just think, okay, we've got a system and it works and this is how we do.
And often, many times they're living quiet desperation in their life, living in it and not realizing that they could possibly even think of an alternative.
You know, so yeah, I'm with you on that one.
And I think I might commit that one to my lexicon and to my memory.
That, yeah, yeah, maybe the whole point of a 10-year period of your life
was just to trigger one or two people.
Of course, even one person, that's actually much more than you can expect in some sense.
If someone actually acts on it, then it's totally worth it.
Yeah, I think you're right.
But yeah, I feel like really governance is perhaps the most important thing of all
because it is how humans interface with each other.
And you think of like throughout human history,
or even right now,
so many people are like so like badly placed.
Like they haven't met the right people.
They weren't able to do like,
like unlock their potential.
And cities can at their peak,
totally unlock what humanity is capable of.
There is a big part of genius is,
you know, interacting with so many different people
and this like mixing of ideas
and like in the Renaissance,
or even like, for example,
I think in Athens,
the largest population that Athens ever got
I think was 400,000 people
and you think of like the output of 400,000 people
has been such that like we continue to study
all their philosophers to this day
like you don't actually need a great amount of people
but with the right people and like interacting in the right way
it can inspire humanity for millennia to come
so really creating that is perhaps the most important thing
Yeah, Joe's a big advocate of that
Joe really does believe that by creating free places on the frontier, that's what you're doing.
You're bringing human potential together because by its nature, seekers of the frontier are out there people on the whole.
And when you put them all together, it's quite chaotic, but you basically unlock more potential than you could ever do.
I feel like the internet did that as well.
I really do feel like the internet has kickstarted that.
I mean, almost everyone I know now and who I interact with,
I met through the internet, you know.
And, you know, it's very much part of the idea structure
of, you know, future places.
And it is, you know, using networks to bring people together.
I think, you know, we have, in our world,
we have two very much two sides that one who's very network focused and one who's very sort of
physical world focused and i i think where we sit and where most people should start moving towards
is that place in the middle because i think they're really both part of it you know they
really are but we do need the physical places and who knows yeah i mean i i think i would say
almost certainly there will be a floating city inside Amala at some point in
history because of what we know and because of the fact that meme exists and
that floating cities will exist therefore eventually they'll look for a
frontier like side of Mala why don they so so I would say you know whether or not people will use your head as a dive site or whether they raise it up who knows
It doesn't matter, really.
It's not for us to decide ultimately.
Yeah, yeah.
But like you say, for all you know,
you'll be creating such a strong,
it'd be like a ceremony
with deep kind of spiritual connotations
that you'll never know about,
that there'll be ripples
that sort of like flow through reality
that, you know,
might have an effect that you can't see.
Who knows?
But yeah, great story, mate.
Great story.
Yeah, it says in the Bhagavad Gita,
you're entitled to your actions,
never to its fruits.
All you can do is act.
Yes.
Yeah, so,
but how you get from that
to let's stick a massive,
let's stick a massive iron
a bronze head in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
I don't know.
That's the seasteading world, mate.
That is the seasteading world.
It's full of crazy people on the edges.
Anyway, look, it's great to meet you.
Thanks for inviting me down here.
It's a great story.
It's now, yeah, I can't believe Joe's never mentioned.
He probably has mentioned his, you know, Landy to me before.
I just probably didn't commit it to memory.
but um also what's exciting about landy is that you know of course there are these big publications
that have sort of start to be interested in his story but he's still basically unknown even in the
seasteading city-states micronations world he's basically unknown but i hope that soon it's like
a there's this uh philosopher really like called uh thomas carlisle he says uh if a man was great
while living he becomes 10 times greater when dead right so i hope that's what that's what i
you seek to do with Landy.
Okay.
Is there a time scale
on when people
might be able to see the film?
Well, I mean, there is.
I do have a website,
thelegendoflandy.com
and people can see
some segments
from the film on there.
Yeah, if anyone wants
to invest in the film
or be a part of it
and help move it forwards,
you know, that's...
Are you...
I mean, have you got
enough money to finish it
or do you need
more rounds of, you know...
Well, I think that
it seems like with the film,
obviously there's always more money that you want to raise and you never quite get the amount
that you want but so far I've always been able to get enough to keep moving and it seems like really
and especially with the head for example you tell this to people and their eyes glaze over and they
think this guy's an idiot but I'm like and now I have it you know I have well I have the prototype
I have the real thing they're going to be casting it in a couple of weeks and people will realize
all of a sudden this guy's actually serious like this is not a joke this is actually it is happening
right so so all right legends of landy.com that's the place to go oswald thanks thanks a lot um i'm
gonna fuck yeah i follow with a great interest now and um i like i say i i'm a massive seasteading
convert this is just another arrow in the quiver of or uh you know of of the stories around it and
i think joe would as joe would say himself it's like the narratives the stories in ste ste ste
seasteading are some of the most important parts of it because they are what inspire people on the
frontier they've got very little concrete not literally but they've got very little
concrete evidence to say you know this is what we want seasteading to be because it's a very
crazy thought i know you know cruise ships are a really good way to explain it but i think what
me personally what i imagine are lit are floating cities and and they don't look like cruise ships
they they they might model their governance on a cruise ship but they're they're a lot they're
very different to that they're very futuristic incredible amazing places um and and they will
exist 100 i and i think you'll probably be part of that story hopefully so thanks thanks for having
me and yeah let's let's maybe years time or certainly when the film comes out let's let's
do another one absolutely i look forward to it all right you made it to the end of the show so
i'm just going to go ahead and assume that you got some value out of this episode if you want
to help the show please follow or subscribe right now it takes only two seconds and it massively
helps the show. If you want more, well, you can get bonus episodes and early access to all episodes
on fountain.fm by subscribing for the measly price of just, well, one venti frappuccino in
Starbucks for a whole month. That's right, six bucks. Or you can just support the mission by
streaming sats on any of the value for value platforms like Fountain or use the Bitcoin
and fiat donation links in the show notes. We run this show on a tight budget, as I'm sure you're
aware. So any additions to that or to the strategic Bitcoin reserve will be greatly appreciated.
And one more thing. If you know someone who'd love this episode, share it directly with them.
That personal share beats every algorithm in the book. All the links, the community and the
newsletter are in the show notes. See you next week.
Thank you.