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 169 of the Free Cities podcast.
And this episode is lovingly brought to you by the wonderful Veritas Villages,
our lead sponsor. They're building off-grid freedom-oriented communities in Latin America.
And I think you knew that already. However, did you know about their newest land acquisition
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Lots going on with Veritas Villages and their communities should appeal to you if you're a
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produce www.veritasvillages.com forward slash free cities right today's show and it's another
seasteading show now my observation of seasteading is that there's a fair number of people in the
seasteading world who like to talk about the vision of seasteading however my guest today
Mitchell Suchner well he is most certainly focused on the economics of seasteading in this episode
we go deep into what it actually takes to make ocean communities viable not in theory but in
practice. With his project ArcPad, Mitchell is building a layered model for seasteading that
starts with real revenue from things like aquaculture, tourism and working infrastructure
that already exists in the water. And it's something you can see operating right now today
in his project off the coast of Sanal Island in the Philippines. We also talk about the seasteading
stack from things like stable offshore platforms and hurricane resilience to fish production,
his reef resort and the longer term potential of ocean-based industries like mineral extraction,
autonomous logistics and offshore data and technology operations. I think if seasteading
is going to scale it most certainly won't be driven by ideology alone. It will be driven by
exports cash flow and of course reasons for people to actually live and work at sea this
conversations about how that transition actually happens step by step from small practical projects
to the foundations of future ocean cities that was my ai that wrote that of course
but i was trying to make out that i said it
always experimenting with ai mate right shout outs this week
to all the ballers adding massively to the free cities podcast stack of bitcoin many thanks to
our top supporters you are in order matthias rose bids bullish mike nicholas and shadrach
many thanks they're the top five also thanks to chris your comment it was a strong arm emoji for
last week's episode with Vikram Bharati also Justin Bianchi he says loved this one also about
the same episode yeah I did too Justin some people you meet them you just click with them immediately
and by the way I've always wondered how you pronounce your surname I wonder if you could
clarify it somehow in a comment I did actually address chat gpt about this and it told me
that the way I've been saying it Bianchi is correct if you're an Italian but sometimes in
America they say Bianchi it didn't really clear it up for me so I'd love it if you just told me
how to say your name because you're often making comments right onwards and upwards time for the
show time in fact to pluck a fresh fish from the ocean slap it on the barbecue and grab a nice
quiet spot on your floating veranda as you, in time-honoured tradition, sit back, relax
and enjoy my conversation with Mitchell Suchner.
maybe since i've never met you before can we start with um can you give me a bit of a lowdown
on who you are and and what it is that you do i know what it is but i'd quite like to hear it from
you first. Sure. So my name is Mitchell Suchner. I am a seasteader, I guess, first and foremost.
I'm business partners with someone who's based out of Florida and we're together, we're running
ArcPad. And ArcPad is a general seasteading company. So we're developing seasteads themselves,
the floating structures where we're trying to, I guess I should say, manage and operate those
structures to turn a profit. That's why we built the Reef Resort. We're trying to build related
technology. We're trying to market the technology where anything, I guess, related to seasteading,
it's we have a project ongoing that is somehow a part of it. You know, the main things that I've
been talking about over the last few days has been the Reef Resort because it's a thing that's
on Airbnb and Travelocity and Booking.com. You can book it right now. You can go and stay there.
So it's a big public thing.
But we have a bunch of other projects under the hood that some people are not aware of.
Can I ask you how old you are?
You seem quite young to me.
29.
Oh, is that right?
That is very young in this.
How come you're so into seasteading then?
And especially the business side of it.
I know a lot of people who like the idea of seasteading.
But there's only really three main companies involved in actually building the structures.
And the actual community of Seasteaders is relatively small.
So have you got a background in, you know, like marine something?
I don't know.
Actually, my background was in just general computer science.
When I first graduated with a degree in computer science, I worked for a few banks.
I managed the database of a bank.
I managed the customer-facing website for another bank for a little while.
That was the main thing that I did.
But ideologically, I've always been inclined towards liberty and libertarian ideas.
And so really what happened, the big turning point for me was when we had the government lockdowns, the COVID lockdowns.
And I was kind of scrolling through YouTube videos and I found out about the Seastead that was built by Chad Elwartowski in Thailand.
And that kind of woke me up to the idea of Seastead.
That's one of the few times that seasteading kind of went viral, where a lot of people got hundreds of thousands.
The whole little series the Seasteading Institute did got like a million views or something along those lines.
So that kind of got a lot more eyeballs on them.
And so that's how I got into it.
And then once I found out, oh, seasteading is a libertarian thing.
Oh, this can bring you to international waters.
Oh, you can basically create a new country out of this.
I actually found seasteading before I found the Free Cities movement and the Network State movement For me seasteading was first but I still today think that seasteading has the capacity for more autonomy and easier negotiation
to obtain that autonomy compared to free cities and network states, because seasteading can take
you physically out of the existing countries. And that's something that the other projects
aren't doing. So as I see it, seasteading is like the layer zero, the physical infrastructure
that the layer one runs on top of.
So if the layer one is a network state,
the layer zero is the seastead
because you need the physical space to occupy.
So we can build the physical infrastructure
and then the free cities projects
and the network state projects
can come in and inhabit that infrastructure.
I'm with you on that.
It took me a few years to come to the same conclusion.
I'm slightly different.
I see the seasteading as,
I see, for example,
I see Prospera as a land-based seastead because seasteads are the most, if you're into private cities anyway, if you're into proper sovereign private cities, then the seastead is the best example because it's the most purest form.
I think other than possibly flying around in space or something on a Death Star or something like that.
And the last speech at the Mama Shelter Hotel, the last decentralized day thing, he was talking about space-steading.
And the whole time my father was with me and we were in the background watching this the whole time we're going, you know, I asked him his opinion. Do you think the space studying thing is a good idea? He said, I think it's a great idea, but it's a bit further off than seasteading. And that's true, but it is a great idea. I think space studying will be huge in a thousand years. There will probably be more people living in space than living on Earth, hopefully, you know, but that's a thousand years away.
Well, and as Joe Quirk would always say, it's too expensive to do it in space.
It's quite cheap to do it on the water.
And in fact, so many of the ways they train astronauts, they train space projects, they're all done underwater.
And if you think there's not enough space on the earth to do it, you're wrong because you're not including underwater as well.
And seasteading can be an underwater thing as well.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with it being an underwater thing.
when um i was looking at your cv in the on the um free cities website and it says that your your
your business is involved in ai ocean mining drones a load of other stuff not just i mean we'll come
to arc pads in a bit but that seemed interesting what what about what was ocean mining to begin
with what is that sure yeah so going back to it we're involved in a bunch of stuff because there's
a bunch of things that are related to seed studying and we're trying to develop all of these technologies
and make them accessible, profitable, and beneficial for future seasteads.
So going back to this ocean mining thing.
Ocean mining, there's an easy way to do it, which is tightly regulated,
and there's a more complicated way to do it,
which currently regulations don't exist for that more complicated way.
The simple way is seafloor mining.
With seafloor mining, there is, I don't know the exact number,
something like a trillion dollars in rare earths and valuable metals
and platinum and all kinds of things on the seafloor.
And there's these little, they're called polymetallic nodules.
And they have magnesium and all kinds of different metals
that are kind of lumped together into like a big metal ball
about the size of a golf ball or a softball on the seafloor.
And there's millions of these on the seafloor.
If you can just scoop them up and harvest them,
you've got a mine that's producing multiple different types of metals.
And you don't even really have an ore that you need to refine heavily.
You just get pure lumps of metal coming up off the seafloor.
It is a gold mine, potentially literally a gold mine, right?
Where is this?
There are multiple different zones.
I think one is called the, I'm going to botch the name here, the Clipperton zone or the Clarion-Clipperton zone.
That's one location where there's a big field of these polymetallic nodules for thousands of square miles.
Really?
Yes.
That's not very well known about, right?
I know about it.
A lot of people in the marine industry know about it, but it's illegal to harvest it right now.
You cannot legally, there is zero capacity to harvest this.
How far down is it?
Five or six kilometers.
Oh, Jesus.
Right.
Proper, you know.
So it's not even that it's legal.
It's probably very difficult as well.
It's difficult, but we have the ability.
If we wanted to, if the green light happened tomorrow, we could harvest these polymetallic nodules.
So I have the numbers in front of me here. It's 5.95 billion tons of manganese, 270 million tons of nickel, 230 million tons of copper. Copper is valuable. And 50 million tons of cobalt. And cobalt is one of those rare earths that's used in the production of batteries that Elon Musk sometimes talks about.
cobalt and lithium are both very important for batteries and cobalt a lot of it comes from africa
so it's kind of politically contentious um but yeah that's so the total commercial value this
is hundreds of billions of dollars not quite a trillion but as the value of these metals goes up
over time this one zone will probably end up being worth about a trillion dollars at some
point in the future and there are other zones like the clearing clipperton and did you say that the
reason that you can't go down there and mine it right now is because they don't really know what
the problems might be if you bring it up so it's a desert it's there's not a lot of life down there
there's some angler fish there's some you know probably there's some giant squids and things like
that as well and that that's certainly true um but i don't think those metal nodules aren't really
nutritious right there's certainly bacteria that grows on them but it's more being used for its
surface area. It's not producing energy. It's not providing nutrition. It's a thing that if you
removed it from the environment, it would probably be fine. I know there's a lot of environmentalists
that would say, well, we don't know, so you can't remove it. But it has enormous, even removing
5% of those polymetallic nodules would have a big impact on our ability to access things like
cobalt and copper, which is important to access. But they won't let you mine any of it. You can't
mine any of it. It's about four kilometers deep. But they will? Or what do you think? I mean,
is that is it something that you're planning on trying to extract at some point?
Not me? No, I think there are companies out there that are planning to extract this and are actively
lobbying. But again, you basically have to lobby the UN, which is a difficult thing to do. And so
seafloor mining is hard and not because it's logistically hard, the technology exists,
but it's hard in terms of regulations. What's not as difficult in terms of regulations right now is
what if you had a technology that instead of scraping these rare earth metals off the seafloor
and disrupting the environment, what if there were little tiny bits of it that were just floating
around in the ocean and you could create kind of a vacuum to just suck it up out of the water.
And so you suck up a bunch of water, the salt water goes in, it extracts the cobalt or the
lithium or whatever and it goes back out with everything included just not the cobalt or the
lithium but nothing else changes it doesn't affect the ph doesn't affect the salinity doesn't affect
the dissolved oxygen nothing there's zero environmental impact that's the technology
that we're developing and we have that technology working in the laboratory two different laboratories
we've had it working right now that's already a viable technology we're us and maybe a couple
of universities are the only ones that have this technology working right now and not only that
But once you have a technology that can extract minerals from the water column in the ocean, as opposed to the seafloor, lower regulation, but also the technology can spread to other dissolved minerals.
So we have it working for lithium.
Recently, very recently, we got a round in the laboratory working for rubidium.
Now, lithium is used to produce batteries.
Rubidium is used to produce lasers, night vision optics, things like that.
We're also working on cesium and we're working on other rare earths as well.
So these are things that we have functional right now.
Can you be sure that there's not an application of those metals in the water?
You know you said they inert or whatever but I mean I suppose there a possibility they part of the ecosystem is it I mean to some degree they definitely part of the ecosystem Even iron is a part of the
ecosystem. So there's a lot of dissolved iron in the ocean, right? And what they did in an experiment
with, I believe this is the Soviet Union decades ago, they took a bunch of like rust shavings,
and they dumped it in the Southern Ocean. And there was a huge algal bloom after that,
Because what they found was that iron was a thing that basically all phytoplankton needs to produce energy through photosynthesis.
And one of the main bottlenecks to the production of, you know, to algal blooms, to having more algae, is really just a lack of iron in the water.
It's one of the nutrients that is in low abundance, right?
But you look at something like lithium, for example.
Lithium is not used in as many biological processes as compared to like photosynthesis.
A single cell of algae needs to photosynthesize a lot.
It doesn't need a lot of lithium.
So even if you removed 90% or 95% of the lithium, and we know this because we can look in areas
where there are different concentrations of lithium and different, and lithium just doesn't
have a big impact on the environment.
So what I'm saying is it's a lot safer and arguably it's a lot more or I guess has less effect on the environment to pull an element out of the water column than it is to scoop it off the seafloor.
Another thing to consider is osmosis.
So if I have a patch of ocean where I magically remove all of the lithium in an instant, the rest of the ocean still is a bunch of lithium.
It's all going to flood back in there, not in the same concentration, but it kind of has a way of immediately renewing itself to some degree.
So again, the environmental impact, if you do it in one local area, is considerably decreased.
So I think that we can make a much better argument from a regulatory standpoint.
And again, one big difference is it's illegal to mine the seafloor right now.
There's no laws against taking minerals out of the water column.
But even when there are, it'll be an easier battle to say, I'm going to take lithium out of the water column.
I take it that when you mentioned this is all part of a sort of overarching strategy to work at sea.
things like ocean mining could be the sort of economic driver behind seasteads etc is that
is that kind of the idea absolutely i mean you know every town every city every country had to
start with by producing something there have been very few places that got their start
based off of being a service-based economy i guess you could say venice
um was probably historically it got started you know it really took off because of trade right but
most places initially gain a population because there's farming or there's mining. One of those
two things. So if you want to support a city, if you want to be able to grow a city, it has to have
something to export. It has to be able to produce something at a profit. So the ocean is great for
producing seafood and it can be also great for mining rare earths that ironically there's a lot
more rare earths in the water than there is on land. So how does that all mix with drone tech
and AI then? Well, it doesn't, I guess you could say it doesn't mix, right? The sea,
the ocean mining doesn't really mix with AI in a way that's direct. It mixes because they're both
related to seasteading. So the ocean mining is how can I, okay, the seasteads are how can I build a
floating city? The ocean mining is how can I give the floating city something to produce? The AI is,
or I should say the drones are how can I have better logistics or even defenses for a floating
city. And then the AI is how can I control those drones without a human operator to make them
cheaper? Or how can I maybe even do something like, you know, build an AI bot to trade crypto
or something like that, right? So we have an AI team right now. They have a few different projects
they're working on. I can't really go into detail on the AI because those projects are a bit more
private and not public facing. But, you know, certainly one of the things we want to do is
take the drones that we're developing and kind of automate those with AI. You can imagine that
having goods, you know, boated out to you, even if you're like 13 miles out, right, you need a boat
to come back and forth and dispose of your waste and to bring you food and to bring you fresh water
and things like that. So having a boat that doesn't need a driver is going to considerably
reduce your costs. Well, I spoke to Grant Ramon last year, he has all his deliveries come out on
drones, and he has food dropped off at his floating place. I think, yeah, obviously,
It's the future.
You can tell that.
But those are probably flying drones.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The ones that sit in the water can carry 10 times more weight and use less than half the amount of fuel or have much greater extended range.
Obviously, if you want to talk about logistics with drones, you want water-based drones.
You don't want flying drones, especially if we're carrying a lot of stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
I see what you mean.
So how does this all fit in then with ArcPad?
because those things you're talking about there,
they seem quite, actually, I suppose not.
But when you talk about it,
I'm thinking of giant floating cities.
But that's probably not true, is it?
I mean, you could have a mining rig, for example,
an ocean mining rig, which could be relatively small.
Size of a house, yeah.
And so when you extract sort of, you know,
these, when you extract things from the ocean,
where do they go?
Where do they sit?
And do you need a massive, I mean, are we talking on an industrial scale?
I mean, right now we're doing it lab scale.
So we're doing it in the laboratory.
What we're doing is we're actually taking big, you know, 10 gallon jugs of water from the ocean.
We bring it into a laboratory.
We test it.
Can we extract lithium?
Yes, we can.
Can we extract rubidium?
Yes, we can.
Can we extract cesium?
We're working on it, right?
And so we're doing it right now with pure salt water, which is a big thing because a lot of universities and scientific institutions, what they'll do when they're doing these experiments, they'll take distilled bottled water, they'll introduce a little bit of lithium or rubidium or something like that, and they'll say, okay, can I extract this from pure water? Yes, I can. My technology is a success.
They don't consider that there's all these other ions in a saltwater matrix that can all interfere with this chemical process.
And so your machine might work with distilled water, but it's not going to work with saltwater, which is very, very chemically complex.
And so our stuff actually works with saltwater.
I know this is kind of, you know, I know this is boring for people to hear, but it's really exciting, interesting technology, actually,
because in 20 years, you know, who knows how much of the world's lithium could come from the ocean
because of what we're doing right now. Right now, there's a monopoly on lithium. There's a handful of
South American countries, Chile, Bolivia, I think Peru, they control a huge supply of the world's
lithium. And America basically doesn't produce anywhere near enough lithium to satisfy its own
needs so having the ability to produce lithium basically anywhere in the world or especially
near like hydrothermal vents you know which there's thousands of those that higher concentrations
of lithium there um yeah it's going to be a really big game changer hydrothermal vents are really deep
aren't they you find those around the marianas trench don't you i studied that a little bit at
university because there's actually life in hydrothermal vents oh yeah which is bizarre i i
studied zoology at university a very long time ago and hydrothermal vents were one of those
you'll never guess what but in this extremely acidic toxic uh quagmire in a hydrothermal vent
you get basically life and it's completely dark and the pressure is of some ridiculous you know
but um yeah working down there people get down that far do they go down to the marionas trench
in sort of like manned vehicles and stuff.
Is that possible?
They have.
There have been manned vehicles
that went into the Marianas Trench.
I can't remember the last time that it happened.
I know it's happened.
I know people have been down there.
It's total tangent.
What did you think about the guys
that went down to the Titanic?
I mean, in a way, they're kind of,
they're not too distant
from the kind of world you're in, experimental.
Are you talking about the...
The guys that went, you know.
What's the name of the company?
I can't remember.
Was it like blue Whatever Did you think it looked irresponsible The homemade submarine guys yes yeah I mean it we shouldn laugh mate they got completely compressed probably I should not laugh
at that I'm sorry now I got myself laughing I had a conversation with my parents after this happened
um you know because they were like oh wow this is kind of similar to what you're doing it should
be we should be concerned this is dangerous I told them you know no this is not what they did
is taking humans wildly out of their own natural environment, right? If you take humans to space
and something goes wrong with a spaceship, everybody dies because the environment is
dramatically different from the one that humans are acclimatized to. The surface of the ocean
is nowhere near as deep as the Mariana's Drench. Everybody can go on a boat. Everybody can go
cross the ocean on, on a, you know, even like a rubber dinghy and people do it all the time.
It's, it's not as, I'm not going to say sea staying is not complex, but it's not as complex
and it's not as dangerous as deep sea travel or, or space travel. So there's not as many things that
can go wrong. Fortunately, I know there are some people, um, Atlantis sea colony is one that comes
to mind where they want people to live on the bottom of the ocean. And that's awesome. But I
think that it's a little bit further away. I'd be willing to bet that it's closer than space
steading. I think there'll be underwater cities before there are space cities.
I think that goes without saying. I've got a feeling they'll even be testing them on purpose
under there, you know, because it's a good environment to test them. Something just occurred
to me when you think about the seasteading ecosystem, you're the only company that's
actually thinking about creating a way of monetizing your seastead at the same time,
other than, you know, obviously Airbnbs or, you know, is that right?
Is that a fair observation of what you're doing?
Is it that you're trying to give it a use, like a good economic use case,
almost before you've actually created the actual thing?
Yes, absolutely.
If, I mean, I view myself as a city founder more even than an entrepreneur.
If I'm going to build a city, I need to figure out what is it going to export?
What can it export? What can it produce? What can it build? Why would people choose to live here
rather than live where they came from? How can I attract immigrants? I already have the mindset
of a city founder. I already have the mindset of someone who basically is trying to advocate,
not even just for a technology, but for a country. You should come move to my country. I'm like an
immigrant spokesman. Because we need that. If we're going to build cities in the ocean, we need
to give a compelling argument to people. Why should you live in the ocean? And a big one's
economics. Can you have a good paying job out there? I had this when I was talking to Joe this
morning, I was giving my layman's viewpoint, which is I love the kind of what Grant's doing,
what I think these personal kind of places to live on the ocean, but they're an absolute niche
market as far as I'm concerned. I would not want to live there. What I want, I want to go straight
to the floating island and the more it looks like land the better the larger and the more it looks
like land the better however i'm aware that there's bound to be this interim period of something like
interlocking structures something something that looks quite you know clunky and probably a little
bit like an oil rig and and which isn't the kind of place i want to go and live any either however
If it's a business, it's different.
You know, I'd go and work on an oil rig, no problem.
I don't care there's no forest or woodland on an oil rig.
But if I was to move to a floating city, which the only way I would ever do that would be in the point where they are large islands that move around, which is coming.
I'm absolutely certain that that will exist.
It may not be in my lifetime.
I don't really know.
I think it'll be in your lifetime.
I think it will.
You really?
how old are you 54 it'll be in your life you had to think about that but all right describe those
islands then and you know before we get into your other stuff i mean because for me it's like
i want like you talk to any normie who's not into seasteading and it will be like can i go for a run
can i have a campfire around around in the woods can i walk my dog can i go for a jog you know
and for me I'm a wilderness fan so it would be great if I at least felt like there was this area
of of wilderness on these places and I so because really the the thought of living at sea is has
has no appeal to me at all but the sort of the thought of living on an island yeah you know
um I'd love to live on an island it doesn't really matter even how big it is if it has beaches around
the side and a couple of biomes, we were all good, you know? So that version of the Seastead,
you think that's coming in my lifetime? It depends. It depends on what do you mean by
wilderness? Um, you could build an oil rig really big. You could have an internal room inside that
oil rig. You could make it hot, humid, add some fog, add some mist, put some trees in there,
have a canopy, have like lush tropical, you could have like a self-contained box of jungle
floating in the middle of the ocean. We could do that today. That would be very expensive.
No, I don't mean that. Right. And do you know what I've just realized is you've got to, what,
what, what, um, what biome are you going to choose? Because if you, if you start out in
the tropics and end up somewhere a bit more temperate, all your plants might die.
Right. Well, that's kind of what I mean. You know, when you say what biomes are available,
I'm thinking, do you mean we're going to build the biome or do you mean we're going to move into the biome?
It's like saying what biome is available in Russia.
Tundra, that's what's available in Russia.
Yeah, but what I mean is I think for mass adoption of floating cities,
you've got to look to the land-based ones to get an idea of what people like.
And sure, slums exist, terrible cities exist, but no one wants to live on them.
and you're not and you're attracting people there and it's not just going to be about economics
probably it's going to be because it's an unusual thing it's going to be it's going to be about some
other things so so there's got to be green spaces me personally i'd like to feel like i'm on an
island i mean if you could make them as big as the isle of wight in the uk with fields and and
things like that even better you know and i'm sure that will actually come one day i think in the
beginning, like I say, the interim period, I'm not that interested in. But now you've just mentioned,
now I've just noticed what you're doing. And I'm thinking, yes, you're creating a business,
then you're applying it to seasteading. Yeah. If the price was right, I'd go and work on an oil rig,
or I would have done when I was younger, because the price normally is right. You get paid very
good wages to go and work on oil rigs. I'm sure a lithium mine would pay a lot of money.
Yeah. Especially a C, a lithium mine. Yeah, absolutely.
So, so to kind of get back to your question, you know, when are they going to look like islands? I don't want to disappoint you, but I don't know if they'll ever look like islands, at least the affordable ones, the ones for rich people. Yeah, absolutely. But the standard ones, what, here's what I imagine. There will be districts. You start with a single house, then you give it a lawn, right? So a green space. Then you add another house next door and another house next door and another house next door and a street connecting them all. And so it would probably end up looking more like suburbia.
There's going to be green space. There's probably going to be some trees scattered around because that's certainly affordable. But to say that I'm going to build a 10 square mile forest in the ocean or something like that, the amount of maintenance that you're talking about is realistically that's too much to handle.
That's why you can't build a forest in Russia.
You can't build a tundra in the desert.
I can't build snowy cliffs in Dubai, even though they'd really love to do that.
They do, though.
I'll take it back.
You can do it, but it's expensive.
It's really expensive.
It's purpose-built.
It's not just something the middle class can have.
middle class is going to have, what the average person is going to have is a suburb here, a suburb
there, another suburb over there, floating suburbia everywhere. And you walk out, you go to the bus
stop, the boat stop, you get in a boat and it takes you over to your friend's neighborhood
district or it takes you to the business district or it takes you to the mining district. And all
these districts are floating maybe a couple miles away from each other. So you have this open blue
space in between every district and you don't have to get on a bus boat to go from one district to
another and ride with other people, you can take your boat. Or if you want to take your own private
boat, not to a district, but just to the open ocean, there's the wilderness. There's the great
expanse. You can go out into the middle of the ocean and you can go see whales and you can go
see orcas and you can go see dolphins and you can go scuba diving. You can even go scuba diving under
the cities that, you know, even some of them, depending on what type of seastead you're talking
about, maybe it's five feet deep, maybe it's 50 feet deep, but you can go way down and see all of
these you know huge fish there's really huge fish out in the middle of the ocean there's ore fish
there's hopefully you don't see a giant squid that'd be that'd be dangerous but sometimes they
come up to the surface at night or near to the surface there would be nature dangerous are giant
squids dangerous they can be dangerous a humble squid is dangerous a humble squid will attack
people what do they do how do they attack you they have these long tentacles and they reach out
and they grab you and then i guess they rip you apart really i mean no one's ever been attacked
by a giant squid and and live to tell the tale so i just assume they ripped you apart
i'm joking no but seriously how do they do they constrict you or something no so what squid usually
do is they have like a bunch of short tentacles and they have two long tentacles and when they
get nearby to something they shoot out the long tentacles like a like an arrow and it grabs the
thing and then it pulls them in and then they have a beak like a parrot's beak inside of all the short
tentacles. The short tentacles pull back, the parrot's beak comes out and it just bites the
thing that it just grabbed. Really? Yeah. Didn't know that. What have they got? Any teeth-like
structures in there? It's a beak. It's like a parrot's beak. Really? A squid has a beak? Yes.
Jesus. Looks just like a parrot's beak. Right. You learn a new thing every day. That's a complete,
and I did a degree in zoology as well. I should probably know that.
Now, when you describe the floating neighborhoods and stuff, this is what instantly comes to mind.
You know, a little bit of choppy water.
And now everyone's house is doing that and the roads doing that.
And the bits, you know, obviously I'm wrong because you wouldn't do that.
Why am I thinking that?
What's the reality going to be?
The reality is, so if you look at the ArcPad, we have two different designs on our website you can see right now.
One is the Hexa Farm.
And we're working on improving the design.
Right now it's meant for just coastal waters.
I'd love to have like a more deep water version of the hexa farm. The other one is the arc pad.
The arc pad is on spars. So if you look at these big columns that go down to the water,
if you look at an oil rig, it's built the same way. Big columns going into the water. You look
at the sea pad with Grant, it's a big column going into the water. And the arc pad has nine
of these big columns. And what spars do is it's kind of complicated. So I'll simplify it down.
Basically, when a wave hits the side of your seastead, it will roll under the seastead without causing it to wildly tilt back and forth.
And the reason for that is because these spars minimize the contact area with the surface of the water.
So instead of all the buoyancy being at like one inch depth, most of the buoyancy, it goes down deeper, right?
So basically, the way the calculation works is the more buoyancy you have below where the wave can hit, the less impact the wave has.
So instead of a wave hitting you when you turn to the side, the wave can hit you and just go under and you don't even notice it.
So spars, depending on how big your spars are, how many spars you have, you can ride out a storm and not even really know you're going through a storm.
But again, that comes down to personal preference.
What kind of seastead do you want?
And what about movement, you know, on the point of the compass?
Do they stay in one place quite well?
Because they're not touching anything, right?
I mean, they're not they're not they're not piled down into the ground.
They literally, yeah. So what would stop things crashing into each other?
So again, this depends on, are you talking about coastal or are you talking about like the floating cities in the ocean?
Floating cities, I think so, yeah.
What I think would happen, what I anticipate happening is either A, they're going to be anchored to a seamount,
which is a shallow area in the middle of the ocean. It's like the top of an underwater mountain. That's a seamount.
You can run a line down there and anchor it.
And if you anchor one here and one a mile away at the other side of the mountain, they're not going to hit each other because there's a rope connecting them to the top of this underwater mountain.
So they're not going to bump into each other.
If they're free floating, which usually means they're following some kind of an ocean current or something along those lines.
Maybe it's like a circular current.
That's called a gyre.
So they just go in circles all day long.
And that way they'll stay in the same place, which you want for a city.
If that's the case, you're going to have a single boat on standby,
or you're going to have some kind of like an underwater electric propulsion system
that just turns on in emergencies.
And if I see that my neighborhood and your neighborhood are getting too close,
and they're about to bump into each other,
I'm going to turn on that propulsion system,
and they're going to move away from each other, and everything's fine.
But if the propulsion system fails, and they end up colliding,
they're going to collide at like half a mile an hour, and nothing's going to happen.
Oh, right.
The Hexa Farm, I think I've seen that.
Is that the one that's in existence off the coast of the Philippines?
They're both in existence off the coast of the Philippines.
What, the ArcPad as well?
Yes.
Is it?
The ArcPad C, the version C.
The final version is the version D.
So we actually put the C in the water last September.
Since we put it in the water, it has ridden out two hurricanes and sustained no damages.
Did you by any chance have cameras running and things like that to see what was happening?
Was someone on it?
No one was on it.
We did have cameras running.
And I think we put out a video last year.
I don't have any recording of the recent hurricane.
Actually, okay, there's another hurricane that's about to hit in just a couple of days.
There's a guy that lives on an island nearby.
And just before I came in and saw you today, I messaged my employee who knows the guy.
I was like, hey, if it's safe, can you go out on your your balcony and just go up to your window when the hurricane hits?
And can you get some video for me so I can put that on social media?
And so I don't know if I'm going to get any new video or not.
But I know we had some some pictures and video from last year.
And that's anchored, right?
That's anchored.
That's anchored in place.
So I don't know what they I don't know what the arc pad looks like.
I know what the hexa farm is.
Is that the one that's an Airbnb now as well?
Because I saw some Filipino influence.
Hi, welcome to my holiday.
I'm kind of living on the sea.
That's the hexaform.
Right.
Describe it.
So it has two pieces.
One is the farm, the hexaform itself.
It's a big hexagonally shaped fish cage.
And it's actually kind of like a tiered fish cage where there's a cage and then another cage encompassing the smaller cage.
It's like a nested cage system.
and one of the reasons we did this is because the central cage is for high stocking density of fish
typically milk fish you feed them they're like 30 fish per cubic meter very very densely stocked
and then you get tons and tons and tons of them i think last time we did a harvest of a single cage
we got about 11 metric tons in less than six months so you can produce way more food than you
need to feed the amount of people on the resort which is why if this were in the middle of the
ocean today, this would already be a net food exporter. We'd already be exporting seafood as of
today, which is great. But then the outer cage is for the loose packing density. We pack them like
four or five or six fish per cubic meter. And we typically use rabbit fish for this because
the waste product of the milk fish will allow algae and sea sponges to grow in the cage of the
rabbit fish. The rabbit fish will eat the sea sponges and eat the algae and the things that
grow on the cage, and then they feed themselves.
So you feed the milk fish,
and the rabbit fish get fed for free which they not directly eating the waste part like they not poop They they they clean fish you know but it it like a two for one special And most fish farms don do that to the degree that we do So ours is actually a bit more efficient in that
sense. So once again, you've designed this with a way to generate income as well. Yes.
What about the tourism side of it? Is that, that part of it? Or are these designed to sort of be
floating fish farms essentially? Right. So the step one is the floating fish farm.
The step two is, okay, so we have a hexagon in the water.
You can imagine a hexagon, right?
You got the small hexagon, you got the big hexagon.
Now draw a line from the corner of each hexagon.
This will be hard for people that are listening to the audio.
Draw a line, and what you'll end up with is six cells,
like little rectangular pieces that kind of go around in a big circle, right?
So you have six of these cells.
In every cell, we take another floating platform,
which we just call it a reef platform because it's the reef resort, right?
but it's basically like this fiberglass and stainless steel, like, you know, purpose built
platform. And you put that in the water and then you put housing on top of it. And the housing can
be anything. We're using like glamping tents right now, but we're going to upgrade to fiberglass
houses, especially when we, when we do an expansion. And so that housing is where people
can actually live. So you got the high density farm in the center, then you got the houses on
the side and then below the houses, you got the low density farm. So if you put a glass bottom
floor in your room. These are mostly studio units because it's a resort. It's like a hotel, right?
So there's studio units right now. You put a glass bottom. You can actually look down and you can see
there's still like thousands of fish below you while you're sleeping at night. I've thought of,
we'll put like a little light in the water. So at night, all the rabbit fish, they tend to kind of
crowd around lights. So you can imagine when you're going to sleep, we don't have the glass
bottoms yet, but we will soon. When you're going to sleep, you'll look down, you'll see all the
rabbit fish swarming around and just kind of, you know, swing around in circles and it's in this
light underwater. It's going to look really cool. How and how's business at this place? I mean,
you're renting them out, you're farming the fish. In fact, I've got a feeling there's a restaurant
there as well, isn't there? So are you cooking the fish in the restaurant? Yes, we are. Yes.
So how is how is business going? Is it all up and ready and rentable and all this kind of stuff? I
know i saw influences there yep um as of september 1 we opened for overnight stays
so in september and october we've been fully booked every weekend for the last two months
and just this past weekend two days ago um only saturday was fully booked not sunday but on
saturday we were fully booked and there was a an additional boat of tourists that showed up
and wanted to do like a walk-in.
So we could only accommodate them for a day two
or they couldn't stay overnight
because the rooms were booked.
But we were basically like double capacity.
And that was fine because again,
we build these floating platforms too.
Some people would be worried,
oh, you're over capacity.
Is it going to sink?
No, it's not going to sink.
And what happens in a storm?
In a storm.
Have you had a storm?
We've had several storms.
We haven't had a hurricane.
The glamp houses, the hexa farms.
So the glamp houses are the housing.
The hexa farm is like the farm thingy
that the housing sits inside of, right?
So just clear there.
It's been through several storms.
It's been through tropical storms.
It has not been through a hurricane
because it's south of the hurricane belt.
So once you get close enough to the equator,
there's no longer any hurricanes.
And that's important because
if you want to build a floating city,
a true seastead,
you really do want to build it
at or near the equator
or in an area that does not get hurricanes.
Yeah, you just definitely want to do that
because even if you build something
to survive a hurricane,
no one will be comfortable in a hurricane so in the storms that you've had i presumably you just
have to shut it down and say we're closed for a couple of days well for the tropical storms no uh
there was one time where there was an earthquake and there was a threat of a tsunami
this is a great lead up this is a great marketing pitch for our resort
there was an earthquake and the coast guard contacted us and said,
you need to bring your guests back to land because we're worried about a tsunami.
Now, the funny thing is if you're deep enough in the ocean and a tsunami hits,
it's no problem.
Right. The wave doesn't break. It just rolls under you. So you don't even notice anything.
So actually, if you're too near to the shore, the bigger danger is being too close to land.
Now, no tsunami hit. And even if a tsunami had hit, because of where we are, the bathymetry,
that the layout of the seafloor probably would have been like one foot tall.
So it probably wasn't a big danger anyways,
but the Coast Guard still want us to evacuate.
During the tropical storms, we don't really evacuate.
Is it windy in those storms?
Yeah, it's very windy.
It's very windy and there are somewhat significant waves,
but not so much that it makes it uncomfortable
and certainly not enough to put people in danger.
Really?
Yeah, you can easily build a safe system.
The Hexer Farm has pillars or not?
No, no.
But it doesn't kind of go all over when the waves come.
No, it doesn't.
Part of the reason is because, so the pillars are for rolling over huge waves.
If you just have smaller, medium-sized waves, all that you really need is to kind of be built like a barge.
And a barge is just like a big rectangle sitting in the water.
And really, if you go wide enough with something, if you make it very, very wide,
then any wave that is less than the length of that rectangle in the water there's more math
that goes into it than this but any wave that hits it that's not sufficiently large isn't going to be
able to tilt it instead is just going to hit the platform apply stress to the hull and as long as
the stress isn't enough to break the hull nothing happens it just stays level so as long as they're
built strong enough they'll just go through small and medium-sized waves and they won't move around
unlike a boat, which a boat is built for speed. So it's supposed to go fast with the water. So you
have a specific shape to go fast and a specific shape to not rock around a bunch. And obviously,
the hexaform doesn't move. So it's built to basically just always be stable. So the only
waves that could rocket around are tropical storm waves, which it does rock during tropical storms,
and of course, hurricanes. But with the arc pad, it wouldn't even rock during tropical storms,
it would take a hurricane to really make it shake around.
It's hard to comprehend that.
I think, unless you probably look at an oil rig in a storm.
Yeah.
Because they, yeah, because they withstand,
like they put those in the North Sea,
they put those in terrible places, don't they?
Yes.
And those rarely sink.
Like, you know, when an oil rig sinks,
it's much more likely to be due to human error than a storm.
Right. So Hexafarm, ArcPad, ocean mining, drones, and AI.
That's the stack.
That's the kind of seasteading stack, isn't it?
Oh, and tourism, of course.
Tourism.
Tourism is another one of these prongs, isn't it?
Well, I guess the stack, the income stack is aquaculture.
That's the production of fish and seaweed.
Tourism, because aquaculture, you can start making money right away.
tourism you need a marketing presence and then you get to start making money and then ocean mining
is probably next where you don't need any marketing presence but it takes longer to get the technology
working and get the regulations in your favor but they kind of scale in that order right like you'll
make some money from aquaculture you can make more money from tourism then you can make the most money
from the the sea mining and then once you have a floating city established and it has those three
income streams then the gates open to lots of income because then you can do the special economic
zone stuff, right? Now you can say, I'm going to attract medical entrepreneurs. I'm going to attract
IT entrepreneurs, tech guys. I'm going to bring in crypto. I'm going to bring in this and that
and the other thing. And actually, a lot of people don't know this. There's another technology that
we're not developing. Microsoft is developing this. And this is a very good technology. It's
an underwater data center So right now people are looking into developing more data centers because AI is booming and so AI needs these data centers Microsoft has you might need to look this up for me but I don remember the name but it like a big underwater capsule that
filled with nitrogen gas, no oxygen. That's important. I'll come back to that later.
It hangs below a floating structure, some kind of pontoon that holds it just below the surface.
And the temperature of the ocean makes sure that it always stays at a consistent temperature. So
you're not paying for air conditioning. So that slashes your energy bill by like 60%.
And then because the nitrogen is inside the container, that actually means that it's a
less corrosive environment than normal air. And so you have servers break down less frequently.
So as long as you have someone up top, potentially on a floating platform like a Seastead,
who has wires running down, and he can manage the software side of running a data center,
you can basically have a floating data center in the ocean that is cheaper to build cheaper to
operate cheaper to build faster to deploy and breaks down less often and so that could be a
very good thing for seasteads once they get to scale um what what level of design and build a
build are they at is that like on just on paper at the moment i think they've built six of them
already really yeah and deployed them yeah they're deployed they're functional right now where
Yeah. Like, I mean, why aren't they? Did they contact you or do they just invent their own little platform and put them underneath?
They're just using pontoons. They're just using like little aluminum pontoons that float to the surface. They're not using Seasteads.
They're doing this not because Microsoft wants to push forward the Seasteading movement, but just because they realized that this is a fundamentally good business model.
Yeah. I mean, it doesn't matter whether they want to push forward the movement. It's whether or not you embrace it, because that's another way to monetize the movement.
I mean, the movement needs an economic incentive model.
It does.
Unless Elon Musk wakes up tomorrow and goes,
do you know what?
I'm a seasteader.
I'm not a spacesteader.
I mean, if he did.
I'd support it.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it would be a better thing, in fact.
Yes.
He would actually probably,
you would see more results quicker as well, I think.
Which would be more exciting in a way
because it's, I don't know.
I think sometimes it's a bit of a misnomer to say we're going to Mars because he might be saying that in 50 years time.
He might still be saying we're going to Mars.
And by that point, it would have lost a bit of its kind of sheen, if you know what I mean.
Yeah. And let's say he puts someone on Mars next year.
Let's say 2026, first man on Mars.
He doesn't just visit. He's going to stay there.
What next?
What is he exporting?
What is he growing?
What is he producing?
How does he build a factory?
How does he raise his kids there?
How do you establish a city on Mars?
Even if you've got one guy, what is the economic model?
I mean, what are you mining on Mars that you can afford to ship back to Earth
and have it still retain its value?
Have they even talked about that?
I don't know.
Because, yeah, like you say, it's one thing to mine something there.
It's another thing to wait 26 months or whatever.
How long does it take to get to Mars?
I can't even remember.
is quite, it's longer than 26 months.
But it's one of those, you know, I don't know.
There's probably something on there.
I mean, I would imagine if 20 years ago,
you didn't realize you could take metal out of the ocean, right?
Right.
So who knows what's on the surface of Mars?
There's probably some good stuff there.
I would argue it's probably a better idea
to establish an asteroid colony than a Mars city.
But that's even further away.
Is it?
In terms of distance, not necessarily in terms of time.
Like I said, I think an asteroid is an easier thing to establish a colony in than to do it on the surface of Mars because it's low gravity.
So to ship it, you know, firstly, there's a lot more exposed platinum, gold, palladium, stuff like that.
Better things in the asteroid belt, they're easier to access and easier to ship back to Earth.
So in that sense, just go for the asteroid colony.
I love the fact people sit around talking about things like this.
Well, it is pretty crazy, isn't it? It is pretty crazy. So yeah, that's, that's good. I'm glad I'm, I'm glad I'm speaking to you because I, I, you've just filled in one of the gaps in my seasteading repertoire, which is why would people go to the interim places between personal seasteads and proper cities?
I've not I'm not an advocate really for the idea that people are going to park all their boats close to each other out at sea.
I don't think so. I don't know what you think about that.
Because they do it in ports, but it's a different thing at sea unless you build some ginormous concrete floating harbor type thing.
You know, I think I don't know if I was to say I've done I've sailed.
I've everyone knows this. I don't really enjoy it. Okay. You know, but, but the good, but staying
on a boat is one thing. Staying on a boat in a port where you can pop out to a restaurant and then
come back and then go to bed. That suits me. But actually doing that at sea wouldn't. All right.
I'm not a seafarer. So, so maybe I've got, you know, a bias, but what do you think? Like,
is that going to happen? I think that, um, you've already interviewed Mason LaShina. Yes.
Yeah, and so his idea, he talked about this with the Libra Orcs, didn't he?
Yes.
Right.
So his idea is, and I think it's a very feasible idea, actually.
There's a few reasons you might want to have a yacht flotilla, and those are sometimes called flotillas.
So you might want to have a flotilla for collective defense from pirates, and it does work.
If you have like 10 yachts together in one location, you're not going to be attacked by pirates at that point.
There's too many of you.
You might want to do it in case one of the yachts breaks down to share fuel, to share resources,
or if you had 100 yachts together or 1,000 yachts together, it's very feasible that one guy could
take his yacht and say, mine is now a restaurant, mine is now a grocery store, and you just board
another yacht and you go on board and you buy your groceries and you have dinner. And so it could act
kind of functionally like a port. Like you say, it'd be a little bit more shaky, there'd be some
more waving around, but I think there'd be enough places to go that you wouldn't really feel
restricted. So I think that it's very feasible. One downside is if it costs a million dollars to
buy a yacht, it's going to cost a million dollars a year in maintenance to keep it operational
because yachts are really expensive. And the point of Seasteads, proper Seasteads, is that they should
be a much, much more cheap and lower maintenance, way lower maintenance. You know, just the upfront
cost is not even the most important. The maintenance is the most important.
But the Lieberarchs, Mason's Lieberarchs, they are low maintenance, aren't they?
They are low maintenance.
It's a good design.
It's probably, in terms of a yacht, I'd say it's the best design out there, especially for seasteading.
Pound for pound or dollar for dollar, I'd say the Lieberarchs is the best yacht that you could buy.
And it's to the point where, I think it is a seastead.
It really is a proper seastead because it has a few things that are really important.
One, it's fully solar powered, which means that you don't even need gas.
You don't need fuel to get where you're going.
you're not going to run a run a fuel anytime soon to its um i i think that's the biggest thing and
two is that it is lower maintenance i could go into because we're involved in helping mason with
the design of the libra arcs and you know there's without going to a lot of detail there's less
things that can break down well what i liked about the libra the libra arcs is once again
it's it has a land-based counterpart that is a massive market which is basically like the rv market
right RVs on land are huge business people love them they're a part of culture that people live
in them they do you know and that was a new one for me hearing him say look you know you want to
go live in in Paris for a bit then you're going to pop over to there and then you're going to go
down this the Danube and you're going to stay there and then you might pop over to the Seychelles
or you know and that makes once again you know seasteading for me is all about making it
make sense because because whilst I want floating islands that just most people when you say things like that go don be stupid don be ridiculous Even though I know I pretty sure I say I bet on the fact that it going to happen
It's much easier, you know, cruise ships the same.
I can explain a cruise ship to someone and then say, but what's the difference between a cruise ship and a floating island?
Apart from it, it'll look a bit different.
It won't look like a toy with all these little slides and swings and all this kind of stuff on it.
it just might look different. And the same goes for Mason's Liberax. I think it's great because
all of a sudden I understand it. I'm like, okay, it's a floating RV basically, you know, and I've,
I've had, I'm an RV owner, so I understand the freedom you get from it. And the only thing I
would think with a Liberax is, well, am I going to be able to sail that thing? And according to
mason anyway it's going to be something that's a lot easier to sail than your average yacht or
ship or something yes definitely it requires less maintenance it requires much less fuel i mean
another thing with with yachts is the fuel cost is enormous so the libra arcs basically solves
that so if you're looking for again the best bang for your buck the libra arcs is the best
yacht in the market hands down um going back to what you said about about cruise ships i would
argue something that cruise ships already are seasteads can i talk about flagging for a second
Sure. Yeah. Okay. So why is Prospera a fundamentally good place to do business?
It's because you can, and I guess I don't, you know, to verify that what I'm saying is accurate,
they have the ability to, someone can say, this is the regulation I want to abide by. They can say
in this country, they have this type of regulation. I propose that I should follow this regulation,
So that's sometimes called jurisdictional arbitrage. You're taking different jurisdictions. You're saying, I want to follow this law. I want to do it in this way. So with a cruise ship, they can actually practice jurisdictional arbitrage for the, you know, one ship flies one flag.
You can fly the flag of the Bahamas, the flag of Panama, the flag of Mongolia, but that's not a flag that's taken seriously.
If you fly the Mongolian flag, you have the benefit of no one will ever try to enforce laws on your seastead because Mongolia doesn't care about boats.
You can fly their flag and they just won't, you know.
They've got no coastline.
They've got a bit of Lake Baikal.
Yeah.
That's kind of.
Right.
But also, if you try to go into port with a cruise ship that's flagged under Mongolia, they won't even let you in the port.
Really, won't they?
No, they won't. They don't take you seriously. So maybe some crazy guy out there wants to fly the flag of Mongolia on a seastead, but I guess I have to disavow that for now. But anyways, you can do jurisdictional arbitrage in the ocean. The system already exists through flagging registries.
So the idea here, and this again goes back to why I say a seasteading city would be composed of multiple districts.
Because if you have 10 districts to your city, they can be under 10 different laws.
Imagine that one is the business district and it's under, you know, it flies like if Prospera had a flag, it could fly the flag of Prospera.
It's basically Prospera 2.0 and you can do business as if you're in Prospera.
Then you have one that flies the flag of Panama and one that flies the flag of the United States.
and nobody's going to, you know, pirates aren't going to attack the United States because that
would call in the United States Navy. So now you've got this massive military defense district
that no one's going to attack it. So you can use that as a safe haven. Every flag can bring a
different benefit to a floating city. So you can basically take the type of jurisdictional
arbitrage that cruise ships can already do. And the fact they can do it is why I'd consider them
seasteads to some degree. But you can basically crank that up to an 11 and say, I want to have
all of these different laws apply. I want to go to this restaurant in Panama and I want to go back
to my house in America and then I want to go to the shopping mall in Singapore. And they're all
within like, you know, walking distance of each other. It's a very interesting idea.
I'll need to sit on that one for a few days to work out what the implications of that would be,
because the difference with a cruise ship is you don't have different countries bumping up against
each other like that unless of course you're entering the heart the port of a foreign country
but that's slightly different that that's kind of understandable and also whilst on paper that makes
total sense and it's like it's like a work a great workaround right things like that always make
you know people you know the wrong kind of people interested in what you're doing because you're you
look at that and you go oh hold on a minute hold on a minute you're just scamming the system here
now like i know that cruise shipping is kind of scamming the system a bit it's it's using maritime
law to basically create private floating cities and cruise wherever you want without getting
attacked by anyone you know but that's a good thing yeah exactly that is a good thing but this
what you've just described whilst it's true and and could work on paper it might be a bridge too
far. It might be a little bit too far, you know. Describe what you think would go wrong.
Well, firstly, the say you said if you had an American district, you could have the U.S.
Navy come and help you or somebody. As long as the president is like, yeah, I feel.
Exactly. So you need the backing, first of all. And they'll say, well, hold on a minute.
you're right next to
Panama and Panama
we don't trust Panama
Maduro or not
Venezuela
can you have the flag of Venezuela?
no they wouldn't be on there
stick to Panama
but I suppose you would have to think
geopolitically as well when you
created these things but
I don't know I just think
you know what it's like
when you draw attention
to something and then people get interested in it and then they go, hold a minute, we're
going to stop that now.
I think a lot of what goes on with cruise ships is not acknowledged by a lot of people
because it's really none of their business in a way.
And it goes, it's been going like that for a long time.
It's over the horizon.
It's out of sight, out of mind.
Out of sight, out of mind.
But when you actually look at it, it's incredible.
from a governance perspective what cruise ships are doing is mind-blowing and if people in power
knew they'd be like oh wait a minute you know we're missing a trick here these guys can pretty
much you know they can choose this and they can do that and you know in the same sense that if
you're a cruise liner and you said right i am just gonna do um cheap medical treatments on my
cruise ship and I'm going to park it right in the middle of some port in a foreign country.
Well, you can't do it in port.
Right.
You can't do it in territorial waters. You have to be at least 12 nautical miles minimum distance
from any land.
But on a cruise ship, is that still true?
That's still true on a cruise ship.
Oh, right. So you can do medical tourism on a cruise ship now, as long as you're 12 miles out.
Theoretically, I don't know of any cruise ships that are doing this at the moment.
probably because of what you're saying.
They don't want to attract attention to themselves.
Yes, but that's what I mean.
But they could not do it if they were in port, to be clear.
They could not do it if they were a mile outside of port.
They would need to be at least 12 miles outside port.
But that's what I mean.
So drawing attention to yourself then brings in the wrong eyes
who look at the whole thing and go,
wow, we really need to control this a bit more
because these guys are, you know, they're in charge of themselves.
They're just, there's a free market out there.
Even the regulations are like self-enforcing.
It's great.
I mean, it's what we want.
But when you see what we want on land, they don't like it.
Right.
So why would they like it out at sea, if you see what I mean?
I don't think that.
Who is they?
They are.
They is bureaucrats.
In the case of Prospera, they is the Honduran government.
Well, it's not the Honduran government.
It's the, what is it, the Libre Party.
All right, the left-wing government.
the left wing governments.
So let's say that, you know,
So let's take two hypothetical examples. One is I have a seastead. It's off the coast of Venezuela. The Venezuelan government sees the seastead. They see all the freedom. They see all the stuff that we have. What are they going to do? Are they going to attack the district that flies the American flag that legally under international law would be the same as attacking an American vessel? I don't think so.
I thought of something. What's the incentive for America to allow the Seastead to flag under their jurisdiction?
Okay, so what is the incentive to allow it to is that the rules are already in place that if you pay the fee, you can flag with the American flag.
As long as you meet the qualifications, you're allowed to.
What is the reason that they would actually militarily defend a Seastead? Pride. The reason would be pride.
Okay. I think probably because it's a bit left field, the whole idea of floating islands and seasteads is so left field. I think that would be a tall order. It's one thing to protect a US citizen on their ship. It's another thing. I don't know. Obviously, at some point in the future, absolutely, that could easily happen.
But thinking about it in the first instance, it's so like crazy, isn't it?
Not to me, but I've been doing this for a while.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, not to me either.
I'm thinking I'm trying to be a normie here and go, what the hell are those guys doing out there?
They've created an island made up of all these different countries and they've used each they've used the different countries to sort of like protect the thing.
I mean, it's a it's a bold sort of five day five D chess move, chess move, isn't it?
Because arguably you could do just one big Prospera.
So you fly Prospera's flag once they've got a flag, say, and then you just choose OACD regulations from around the world anyway, because they can do that in Prospera.
I like the idea, though, because then you can leverage the best parts of the countries that you're involved in.
But then something that Joe always says to me is if you flag under so-and-so, like say you're flagged under Panama, but you're in the Seychelles or you're in Tonga Islands or something and something goes wrong.
The Panamanian, is that what you say?
Panamanian?
Panamanian.
Yeah, the Panamanian Navy aren't going to come out and save you, are they?
No.
It's too far away.
so there is that aspect that means that it could be a bit of a farce as well well so part of it is
about legitimacy part of it is about saying you know a leftist government saying these people are
pirates we need to militarily attack them and the seasteaders being able to see no look we have a
legitimate flag here's our permit here's our flag we're under panama so you can't attack us right
part of it is like here's my excuse here's my permit i get to show you my permit that says i'm
allowed to do this. That's one part. Another part is, so let's go back to Tonga. If Tonga
militarily attacks a vessel, which is flagged under Panama, that's punishable under international
law. The Panamanian Navy will not step in. Once again, there's a chance that the American Navy
could. There's no guarantee because America's allies with Panama. So Panama could call America,
hey, our vessel's been attacked, and America could step in. Another thing is,
So, feasibly, you could probably just sue Tonga in an international court and have their foreign assets seized and say, you guys violently attacked a registered vessel.
You can't do that.
And you confiscate, you know, $500 million in their assets overseas.
Yeah, I have to say, Mitchell, it's a good idea.
Obviously, you think about this stuff all the time.
So, things like this are floating around in your brain.
Yes.
I'm not trying to crash.
No, I didn't mean it. But they are. And there's probably a thousand more as well. But because it's a novel idea to me, I've got to think about it because I'm thinking about whenever you put lots of different countries together. Mind you, that's not true. Antarctica. Antarctica has shared places, doesn't it? And they, as far as I know, they don't have a huge amount of conflict.
No, it's out of sight. It's out of mind, right? Where does conflict come from? It comes from
politicians causing conflict. It comes from government saying, I'm going to fight you for
your resources. There's no resources that are easily accessible in Antarctica right now. So
there's no need for any conflict. If you can put your seastead not 13 miles out, but 130 miles out,
which is what I would advocate for or 230 miles out then ideally it wouldn be a politically contentious thing to exist because it just too hard to physically get there It too much trouble to invade so they won bother invading At the end of the day your best defense is not the flag that you fly but how far away can you get from Venezuela
How far away can I be from Beijing?
A big factor here is also distance.
The ocean is so vast.
The distances are so vast.
what is the reason that China has effectively taken over Hong Kong and now they want to take
over Taiwan, but it would be so much easier to take over Tonga. It's basically defenseless.
Tonga is really far away. Distance is a great defense.
So do you think one day, I'm going to keep pushing you because I want this. No, but do you think one
day 260 miles off the coast of somewhere i will see in the distance something that looks exactly
like an island exactly like an island so so so think about it what the qualities of an island
that you like a beach beaches something in the middle trees something taller in the middle
you know like or or sort of yeah trees around you know is that do you think that will be a reality
Or do you think by their nature, seasteads will have, will have to evolve as a, as a kind of distinct organism kind of thing, you know, like a distinct organism.
As in, are we going to mimic, cause like, are we going to mimic, um, what we already know and love?
No, no, no.
About islands.
I mean, so, so, you know, like I'm, I'm, I'm being a normie again and the normie side of me doesn't want to go and live on an oil rig for fun.
Right.
I want to go and live on a tropical beach for fun.
So is it going to look like a tropical island or is it going to look like an oil rig?
I don't, again, I don't want to disappoint you, but do you want me to give the real answer?
Yeah, of course I do.
Okay.
So the real answer is this.
Technology generally evolves in whatever way is most efficient.
That, usually that doesn't mean whatever is the prettiest, right?
The most productive factory is not the most beautiful factory.
But that being said, again, you have to realize there can be residential districts, commercial districts, and industrial districts.
Will there be a residential district that looks like a floating island with tropical beaches and houses kind of going up towards this big hill in the center?
Absolutely.
When we have enough seasteads, people will make a district that looks just like that.
But it's not the most cost-effective way to build a seastead.
that it's not the most stable way to build for storms. It's not the most, you know, it would be
something for the middle class. It wouldn't be, it wouldn't be like the industrial, the basic,
you know, bare bones model. The bare bones model is going to look however, whatever the most
efficient hull design provides for. So it will look, I would say, effectively distinct. There
will probably be a seastead aesthetic. You'll probably look over and say, that looks like a
tropical island and it has its own aesthetic. That looks like a cruise ship and a cruise ship has
its own aesthetic. That looks like an oil rig and that has a very industrial aesthetic and that
looks like a seastead. And future seasteads will not look like oil rigs, but they will not look
like cruise ships and they will not look like islands. They will look like something completely
distinct. Even the ginormous ones? Even the ginormous ones will probably not look like oil
rigs because an oil rig was designed to be an oil rig. It will have a fundamentally unique
characteristic. And I think that's a good thing that seasteads will look fundamentally different.
And there will be different types of seasteads that fulfill different purposes, and they will
all look fundamentally distinct. Again, the residential ones and the commercial ones and
industrial ones will all look fundamentally distinct. And especially the residential ones,
I expect they're going to look really pretty. And some of them will look like tropical islands,
but I think most of them will have a different aesthetic.
The good thing, Mitchell, is that you're young enough to probably see this thing through to
quite an advanced stage.
I hope so.
No, I mean, it's true.
I mean, I'm, you know, I'm just thinking,
it's, I don't know,
it seems to me it's quite an unusual business
for someone quite young to get into
because it's very weird and innovative
and you've, you know, you've got to,
you've got to really know that you want it.
I mean, you really,
that's why I really like Grant.
Grant's got an insane mind.
Grant actually thinks that it's a good idea to create space age looking pods that you live in on the ocean.
And so he built one. That's insane. And now he's sold some to whatever.
Is it the Seychelles or someone? Maldives.
Maldives. Yeah. I mean, now it's a business.
Who sits down and goes, I know I'm going to make this thing for five million dollars.
And it going to he probably end up making a ton of money as well that a proper entrepreneur a proper entrepreneur I think you a proper entrepreneur because this is crazy thoughts you know floating cities
But it all makes sense to me on a small scale.
But also the hardest thing I should imagine is you have to do it in stages.
You can't go from nought to floating city.
Yes.
And if you want a floating city, you're going to have to sit tight on your hands for a very long time, messing around with little things and fish farms and then building up to this.
And then right now, let's include this.
And then, you know, and that's a long term vision, mate.
I've got a lot of respect for that.
Thank you.
Rome wasn't built in a day.
Venice wasn't built in a day.
And no seasteading city will be built in a day.
Yeah.
And Venice was one of the most successful cities of all time.
I'm always saying this. It was built on the sea. There was nothing there. It was a marsh bog, marshland sea, wasn't it?
Yeah, absolutely. It was, I mean, I think, I think some of the land, some of the land they initially built on, it was above water at low tide and then fully submerged to high tide. And they chose to live there.
But I mean, it's the perfect model for seasteading because they did it to get away from everything, didn't they?
And it made it, one of the reasons it lasted for so long as a hub was because it was hard to attack because of where it was.
I mean, which is exactly what seasteads are as well.
That's what I'm saying.
They had like a mile of water to defend themselves in the medieval era.
Now, if you had 130 miles of water, 230 miles, I think that's still a very decent defense, even in the modern era.
Do you think that the powers that be, I don't know who that is, but just let's call them the powers that be, are going to pay a lot of interest in Seasteads when they start getting that big?
Is it going to be something that bothers them?
Or is it going to be like you say, well, it's nothing to do with us because it's not in our jurisdiction?
I think that I want to be careful what I say here.
Can I speculate?
Of course you can.
Yeah, of course.
Okay.
Just say you're speculating.
I would speculate that Paris is going to be hostile.
I don't think that the governments that tend to rise to power in France is going to be amenable to seasteads.
Why France in particular?
Well, so a while back, I was talking to someone at the conference a couple of days ago.
and the whatever i don't know what the name of like the french version like mi6 or masada or
some kind of like french intelligence agency they wrote um and she said she's gonna send me
the copy of this it's in french so i have to translate it but she's telling me they wrote a
paper or a book decades ago on all of the things in the future that could go wrong and could bring
about human calamity or the end of civilization and one of the things that the french intelligence
agency wrote about
as one of the biggest dangers
for the modern world
was seasteading.
No.
They said.
When was this?
I don't remember
if it was the 80s
or the 90s or when.
Again, I...
Was it a thing then?
When was seasteading
first uttered the word?
Roughly the...
I think really the idea
has been around
since the 60s to the 70s.
Oh, has it?
I didn't know it went back.
Yes.
It went back to Rose Island
was in Italy.
That's right.
That was a floating structure.
There was a thing called
the Republic of Minerva
between Tonga and Australia, about halfway between.
So that was another seasteading project.
They actually dredged up an island, but it was a similar concept.
So I think that what happened is the French intelligence groups looked at this
and they said, wow, that's bad.
Freedom? That's bad. Can't have that.
And so they wrote about how this could,
basically they said something along the lines of like,
if you had terrorists or like violent rebels or something,
they were on a seastead,
it would be diplomatically really difficult to attack them.
They would be physically really far away.
They could be mobile, which means building a trap or a wall around them politically is really difficult.
You can't get neighboring countries to agree to attack a city if that city can just pick new neighbors.
So even in multiple levels, the diplomatic ability to attack a seastead is really difficult.
And this was something that worried the French intelligence agency.
Can't recall their name.
And so they wrote about this as being a really big threat.
And if a government says that what I'm doing is a really big threat, that's a massive compliment to me.
Yeah.
So, but that does imply that they will.
Do you think they'll get...
I hope not soon.
Well, no.
I would like for the French government to try and attack and delegitimize seasteading when there's already a population of 2 million in the ocean.
That's what I hope for.
Because if they try to nip it in the bud too early, then on the one hand, they'll probably be successful.
On the other hand they look overzealous and hyper You know imagine if the French intelligence agency started like assassinating seasteaders and then word got out on that That would get tens of millions of people
all over the world highly sympathetic to and highly interested in seasteading. So obviously
governments in the modern age, they don't tend to overreact in violent manners because it's bad PR
and PR is a really big deal. But if they wait too long, then they can't stop it anymore. So that's
what I would hope. Well, I've seen
that play out a number
of times and I think you've got
you'll be fine.
I mean, it's happened in a number of things
that are unusual. Bitcoin's a
great example. It's been known
about since the beginning by the powers that
be. But it was
so weird and wonderful and
unlikely to succeed.
That they didn't shoot anybody over it. Yeah, and by the time
they got their shit together
and they haven't even really got their shit together yet now
either. And it's too late anyway.
Yeah, they're so slow moving.
They couldn't catch Bitcoin.
They couldn't catch Ethereum.
Ethereum is also already established.
They can't stop that.
Governments are too slow moving,
and the free market just keeps getting faster and faster and faster
as technology evolves.
And I really believe that seasteading technology will move so fast.
You don't think of the maritime industry as being fast moving.
It's notoriously slow moving.
But I think that seasteading technology can move so fast
that 50 years from now, governments will turn their head and they'll say,
why is there 5 million people over there in the middle of the ocean?
Yeah.
And it's too late.
I think you're right.
I think that it will happen.
It will.
It'll be, they'll suddenly realize.
Yeah.
No, that's, it's good to hear anyway.
And like I say, I'm glad I spoke to you because I've spoken to all the other seasteaders on the whole.
I haven't spoken to the Sealand lot, actually.
this is kind of like the original project really isn't it yeah you should talk to them because
their story is a bit different they didn't fly under the radar at all they yeah yeah they actually
got into several guns out they got guns and they fired the guns yeah multiple times i tried very
hard to get them here but they're very hard to get a hold of they never answered their emails or
anything but i will don't worry them on whatsapp yeah yeah yeah and signal and i'm sorry telegram
and everything. No, it's fine. It's, it doesn't matter. I had, I've got ample of what I need,
but they will be on my radar to come on the show because like I say, I've spoken to everyone else.
And what I like about what you're doing is you're attacking the whole thing in a holistic way,
as in, um, how am I going to let's, you know, let's monetize this thing first. And I know you
could argue that everyone else is monetizing it, but they're monetizing it by, buy my thing.
Yes.
You're monetizing it by, come on, work on my thing, or my thing generates money.
If I can sell a thing, if you can sell someone something to buy, they might buy it. If you can
sell someone something that they can live in, they're likely to buy it. If you can sell someone
something that they can live in and also generates passive income for them they're very likely to buy
it yeah that's great i think we should leave it there that's a nice positive end to to it's a
it's actually mitchell the end of my time here in prague as well it's been have you enjoyed the uh
the free cities uh conference i always enjoy the free cities conference i enjoyed the conference
and i enjoyed this uh this recording as well it was amazing you're absolutely right i i i got to
see a few few talks even this year but it is tell me whether you think that something's different
this year that there's a we we something about the movement has has kind of got over a little hump
and there's something new happening is that is that just me no i i think so i think there's
i don't know if i'd say it's gotten over a hump i'd say that i see a a pattern leading up to
exponential expansion. I see more people, more interest, more money, more than what we had last
year. And what I also see is more seasteaders showing up to this conference as well, and more
people talking about seasteading. And I think that's a really good thing because, you know,
the two groups that need to get a lot of traction right now are seasteaders and network states and
have those two things come together. And then boom, you've really got something that is going
be a very advanced technology cumulatively. Thank you, Mitchell. Lovely to speak to you.
Thanks for coming in. Thanks for coming in so late as well. It's getting dark. You're the last.
And good luck with everything. Genuinely good luck. And I'll be following closely from now on.
So thanks. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you, Jim.
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