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 172 of the Free Cities podcast. Yes, hello indeed.
You find me having a rather challenging day today, let's say. I don't know whether you remember some
months ago I had a catastrophic hard drive failure that took many days to fix. Well,
early this morning, and this is very ironic, the disc that I copied everything onto from that
previous catastrophic hard drive yeah that's right that failed um i think i have a hardware
attack vector and i suspect it's one of my usb hubs anyway thanks to the amazing disc drill
highly recommend that product by the way and chat gpt of course they're both sorting me out as we
speak however i have wasted quite a lot of time already this morning but fortunately i know the
drill now i've done it before and no that pun was not intended so let's get on with it with that lack
of intended pun fresh in your mind this episode is of course brought to you by the wonderful
veritas villages our lead sponsor who are building off-grid freedom-oriented communities in latin
America. Highly advise you to take a look at their new 340 acre acquisition in the country of Costa
Rica, where they're planning 400 residences. It's their biggest village to date. Click on the link
in the show notes to inquire about their other projects, Nicaragua, Panama, and of course,
Costa Rica, especially if you're a Bitcoiner, because you can buy your property with Bitcoin
and you can spend Bitcoin at communities. If you've ever wondered what a real-life Bitcoin
Citadel might look like, well, I say look no further. www.veritasvillages.com forward slash
free cities. And don't forget our other sponsor, ArcPad. ArcPad's planning a second iteration of
their groundbreaking Reef Resort, which is in the Philippines. This time, the new resort is off the
coast of prospera in honduras one of the most important free cities projects in the world
i love that these two projects are coming together you can pre-purchase ownership in the prospera
reef resort either outright or via fractional shares from as little as one percent i think this
is a rare chance to get involved early tinyurl.com forward slash arc pad also in the show notes and
of course check out episode 169 with Mitchell Suchner who is the creator of ArcPad and Reef
Resorts. Right, today's show and it's a very popular returning guest this week. Fresh from
his award-winning trip to the stage at the Free Cities Conference, it's Mr Joe Quirk. He's an
American author and a sea evangelist, best known as the president of the Seasteading Institute.
They, of course, advocate for floating communities as a way to experiment with new governance models.
He also co-authored the definitive book on seasteading with Patrick Friedman,
Seasteading, How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick
and liberate humanity from politicians. What a great title to a book. He's also written a lot
of other fiction and science pop books, but I'm not going to go into those here. But I did go into
them on one of our other episodes. I think it was the first one we ever did. Have a look back at that
if you're interested. Okay, due to my extra pointless work overload that I had this morning,
I actually asked Chachi Petit to write me the full intro, a funny intro in the style of yours truly.
And I'm going to try and read it as if I'm just saying it.
I haven't actually read it yet, so I'm going to probably, it's probably going to sound terrible, but let's go.
Might use this in the future if it works.
Today's episode begins with Joe Quirk looking me in the eyes and saying, I love you.
which is either the warmest greeting in podcasting or the opening move of a man about to recruit you into a floating micronation.
Because within about 60 seconds, we are immediately into Sealand warning shots,
British judges saying outside our jurisdiction and Joe casually collecting awards like they're air miles,
whilst I'm sat there thinking, this is not an interview, this is a soft coup.
and then it gets worse because i made the mistake of googling analogical reasoning five minutes
before he arrived so now my brain is full of phrases like polymorphic sovereignty and distributed
mind archipelagos which sounds less like governance innovation and more like a weekend
at Burning Man with Maritime Lawyers.
Chat to you to you actually, that's not bad, mate.
Sorry, I've broken character.
So yes, we talk seasteading, free cities,
cruise ships that look like children's toys
and the genuinely terrifying fact
that most people hear new governance model
and assume you're starting a cult on a boat,
which to be fair is not always wrong.
right if you've ever wanted to hear two grown men try to replace the nation state using cruise ships
coral and vibes you're in the right place so let's get into it that wasn't very good there's one
good joke in there but it doesn't sound like me i thought it would know he's been looking through
all my previous episodes um okay here's my bullet points from this episode sea land origin story
ai and analogical reasoning that was something we did actually talk about cruise ships are cities
paradigm defense psychology state pushback venice hundred thousand competing examples
legal and insurance bottlenecks near-term builds including arc pad and flat earth
yes speaking to joe i just spent two hours in a car with some flat earthers in a taxi and i couldn't
get out and i was i was playing devil's advocate with him anyway joe's a great conversationalist
it's always a pleasure to talk with him i know you're going to like this one right subscribers
and bitcoin donators top five this week very easy to see now thanks to fountains new ux which is
actually in beta you can't see it yet but i've been trying it out for a week and they're about
to go live with a new feature which i definitely know you're going to like i can't mention it yet
but it's going to go live soon okay number one bullish mike well done mate two set in stone
and then we've got Dovidas, Pies and Hypno.
Thanks for being the top donators this week.
Let's see what the comments are.
We've got Pies talking about the Lotta Moberg episode.
As always, it's a bunch of emojis.
Salute meat strong arm and a magic mushroom Can go wrong there uh hypnos says talking about mitchell such in his episode why did he mention ethereum and that the bitcoin maxi spelling of
ethereum with an i if only he had applied the way he thinks about seasteading to crypto anyway
great episode i appreciate discovering seasteading through these episodes also curious to learn more
about the places in Thailand and the Philippines maybe I'll look into renting an Airbnb there yeah
that'd be a great idea and actually this will also be a good episode for you I've I've done a fair
few on seasteading recently mainly because it's taking off again at the moment it's having a new
age of development so there's a lot to talk about but yes highly advisable and obviously check out
the investment opportunity with Mitchell's new resort, which is going to be in Prospera.
Right, let's get into it. Time to fire a ceremonial warning shot into international waters,
declaring yourself outside their jurisdiction as you, that's right, sit back, relax and enjoy my
conversation with Joe Quirk.
There you go.
All right.
God, I love you.
Put your earphones on, mate.
Oh, is that how it works?
They're in front of you.
Oh.
Is this going to be too off-putting?
No.
Keep that thing on, man.
right so yeah uh yeah i wore this to the um i wore this i went to the supermarket about eight
o'clock this morning to get some waters for here someone's running out and i wore this and people
do take a second look they instantly imagine it's a maga hat yeah and i don't know whether they
They might even think it is a MAGA hat still.
Because, you know.
But, yeah.
I was feeling it.
I've got respect for people that do walk around with actual MAGA hats on in certain places.
I think they get a lot of hassle.
They do.
They're inviting hassle.
Yeah.
But, yeah, you're wearing the hat of the founding fathers of seasteading.
Are they?
Absolutely.
Extraordinary.
It was a fort, a World War II fort off the coast of England when territorial waters were three miles.
It was abandoned.
Major Paddy Roy Bates went out there and took control of it.
And they saved England with rock and roll.
The BBC would only allow rock and roll like an hour a day.
And all the kids wanted it.
They set up a, I'm going through this story very fast.
A pirate radio station blasting rock and roll into England.
and everyone starts listening to the illegal pirate radio station.
And they went through so many swashbuckling adventures,
including Michael Bates, who spoke today
and stood next to me during the thing.
When he was 14 years old, he was guarding Sealand alone,
and he fired a warning shot across the bow of the Royal British Navy.
With what? What kind of gun?
I don't know.
Probably like a BB gun or something.
Well, it wouldn't have been a real, I doubt it would have been.
It was something to make them say, okay, back off.
Really?
Yeah, he was alone, 14.
Wow.
At some point he went to land, they arrested him,
they brought him into court.
The British judge ruled outside our jurisdiction.
We have no jurisdiction.
He was let go.
That is a seasteading move.
I didn't actually interview either of them on this trip.
I couldn't get a hold of them.
They don't answer emails, they don't answer telegram,
they don't answer anything.
And by the time I actually met them in person,
There was no room to fit them in.
But they are in the UK, potentially, aren't they?
So I should be able to follow that one up, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah, very difficult to get hold of.
I'm sure if you're lucky, you can.
But I had a lot of channels, and no one answered anything.
I think everyone reaches out to them.
Matter of fact, I was reaching out to them originally when I was writing the book.
I didn't get answers, but don't hold that against me.
No, no, I don't.
I didn't even see their presentation.
presentations or anything. I've been popping in and out randomly, but I'm going to save that one
so I can do a bit of research and see what it is I want to talk about. But it would have been
good to get them on the pod, but I will at some point. No question about it. By the way,
congratulations on your award. Thank you. Thank you. The greatest storyteller of all time.
I'm going to say that on every podcast. Tidus is never going to live that down.
did you the only reason i know is because for some reason i don't know whether i the the live
stream is publicly available or maybe that's i i don't know but only the only thing available is
that award ceremony so i tapped on it and there it was mr joe quirk storyteller of the century or
whatever yeah and complete coincidence that my talk was was called best story wins and it's all
about how storytelling makes things happen really yeah i mean a lot of the people building seasteads
read my book or saw a video or were compelled by the story,
which suddenly gives people direction and meaning.
That's how people work.
I like the way he also, in his pre-acceptance speech,
Titus, when he was introducing you,
said he even managed to convince Tim Allen.
That's my greatest accomplishment.
Well, no, it's not actually.
I'm a reasonable person.
So if you reason with me and it makes sense, I'll go, yeah, correct.
That's basically what's happened with me in seasteading.
I've reasoned it.
Yeah.
And in fact, actually, let me just get my laptop.
One second.
Yeah.
Should I keep talking?
Yeah, yeah, keep talking.
Because you're my fantasy interviewer.
So I spent, you know, you dream about sitting down with a civil skeptic and doing three three hour podcasts and talking them through all the standard skepticisms people have.
And it's, you know, and I've spent the last 10 years sitting down with hostile people who are going to edit my interview to make me look stupid and evil.
but well that's yeah that that's what i want to start talking about actually because um i i
basically i wasn't going to do any research for this at all because i don't need need to really
i think you've always got something to say and i've always got something to reply but
what i what i thought is i what i want to do is i i just quickly
that was making a humming sound isn't it uh i'll take that off in a minute um i got chachi bt to
um i told it to look through the go into the go into the internet pull me everything written about
seasteading since i last spoke to you put them in a list and tell me positive or negative
what was the what was the stance um i'll show you i'll show you what they came up with um because
it's interesting right bearing in mind what we what we were talking about last week last last
year so here we go here's your updated list 2025 this is so you've got the independent
seasteading is making a comeback but is but is but its history is stained with failure stance
negative cautionary you know notes renewed interest in ocean living but frame seasteading
as a silicon valley valentine project you know you'll have heard all of these plagued by collapse
impracticality and elitism i i can answer each of those in terms of right but i just want to give
you the general the sentiment right yeah then we got another one here have to research this is negative seasteading radical vision or dystopian future I just I won summarize them all Next one The Independent Silicon Valley weirdest idea is back on the agenda
Mixed to slightly positive.
This is Chachi Biti, right?
July 25.
This is a blog, so it's always going to be good.
The Seasteads, not just for billionaires or libertarians.
Stance positive.
So yeah, that's the independent media, isn't it?
Edge effects.
is seasteading another word for colonialism negative uh new york times is google breaking up
seasteading is back it was a it was a yeah you probably don't know about it this is chat gpt
this went into a podcast this is um neutral to inform and informative briefly discusses these
briefly discusses seasteading's resurgence in a broader tech culture new york times again
the techno utopians who want to colonize the sea cautiously positive new york times you know
profiles ocean libertarians and investors with fascination and mild skepticism admires innovation
but questions governance and inclusivity yeah no kids are shit about that last little bit but the
rest of it cool um then we've got the seasteading institute positive c saids on two sides of the
world obviously uh last one is uh floating crypto islands and the hunt for the decentralized utopia
which is positive optimistic right now this is where like i'm getting i'm starting to get a bit
disillusioned with chat to bt in a good way because i did that and i thought great and it's like would
you like me to visualize this as a sentiment graph and i'm like do i do i want to send yeah
fuck i want a sentiment graph of course i do so it gave me a sentiment graph and then like right
so all right then show it to me over the last 10 years then do you know i mean like and and all of
a sudden like i'm i'm 40 minutes in down this rabbit hole and it's showing me essentially that
there's been a pump in in good sentiment recently and i'm assuming that's because there's been some
prototypes that have appeared i mean look i can feel it now myself there's there's people the the
seasteaders that i've known for the last three years are all are all have all released products
now apart from maybe grant you could say but he has a working prototype worth five million dollars
so that that's different he's not you know but they've all got plans or prototypes to actually
market you can buy that thing now if you want apart from grant but grants is a special case yeah
and so when i when i read all that stuff about seasteadings making a comeback is that you
doing pr making them think that or are they working that out for themselves
turning around the crap brand of seasteading that i inherited yeah i take credit for that
um and is it because of the new all the new stuff that's happened in 2025 you know i think it's it's
it's uh opening it's it's a long-term project of of putting new ideas in people's heads
about what it is so keep in mind i think every journalist you just listed never spoke to us
Oh yeah, I'm sure they did. The Independent definitely didn't speak to you. They haven't
got the staff for that. They wouldn't even cover the cost of an international phone call,
mate, I tell you. Yeah. But the turnaround has been how it's talked about. When I came
on Seasteading and thought it would change the world, I go on Google and it was the worst
brand I'd ever seen. It was billionaires are evil and they want evil islands of selfishness.
and so i you know as i explained in my talk yesterday you have to tell a bigger
better story you also journalists are lazy you have to do their work for them
i agree with that so uh they are like that actually yeah so what is it the daily mail
had this nightmare i used to contrast these two things i was so proud of it so when i came on the
the daily mail just had you know just a list of evil stuff that that ceased dating inherited
and then um three years later they came out with another report about sea stating when we were
working in french polynesia and virtually the entire article was words from me so without
attributing me they didn't matter that yeah they literally went to the website and took a checklist
i had and published that so it's like they're rushed and lazy and so if you can give them
something that's better than what they were going to do otherwise they'll take that and use it and
plagiarize it. So I've sort of done that over and over. But yes, it is also true that actual
Seastead prototypes are floating. And three different companies have opened sales, two of
today. And Grant is willing to sell a Seapod. If you want to go and buy a Seapod, he will sell it
to you. Their first client just happens to be the government of the Maldives.
Really? Yeah.
Has he sold one?
they're they are building a they're helping build a floating city in the maldives
come on how come i haven't heard of that because someone's building a floating city in the maldives
yeah because the journalists don't tell me that like that's the journalists don't tell you no but
you i know you you could have popped me a little message say hey guess what someone's been building
a floating city in the maldives well yeah i mean all sorts of exciting stuff is is going on i could
be popping messages all the time yeah but that's big isn't it like what kind of floating city what
are we talking here uh we'll call it a floating village um uh in partnership with i like to say
the first aquapreneur you meet in my book uh kuhn ooth house of water studio who's uh designed the
seapod um dutch docklands is a company they've been worked they've got a great um atoll in the
Maldives and they want to build a floating eco-tourism village.
And is it based around Grant's designs?
Is it quite, you know, like...
It's going to be a lot of units.
They're bringing in a lot of architects.
I think Ocean Builders is commissioned to build like 20 on Grant and Kuhn's design.
Oh my God.
So like 20 of those pods or like something similar?
Yeah.
gosh that'll look that'll look awesome right okay look all right i'm going to go back to my
jgbt story because so like suddenly now i'm down the rabbit hole it's it's it's creating it's
creating and i i when i when i got to that point so i'm looking at all these graphs and i remembered
yesterday i was having a number of conversations about ai for some reason it just it just came up
a lot and I remembered that a number of months ago I'd had this very long and deep conversation
with Chachi BD5 Pro about whether it could think an innovative thought as it basically and and um
it explained to me the way it um it can be innovative in a way that I understood which
takes a lot for me but I couldn't remember how it was I knew it was I knew roughly what it was
And it was along the lines of if A is to B, then C is to D.
So if it knows A is to B, if it knows that pedals are to moving bicycles,
then it can extrapolate a completely different thing and make a connection.
So I kind of said, we were talking about this a few months ago.
What the hell was it?
Just in case it came up in the conversation today.
It turns out it was called analogical reasoning.
but then immediately it said shall we analogically reason seasteading and i'm like well fuck it yeah
why not why not i've only got like you know three and a half minutes before joe joe quirk arrives
but this thing is getting off the scale i mean it's it's almost like it's too much now so it's
given me eight analogical innovations for seasteading. Chorologic orbital governance,
polyphonic sovereignty kelp grid urbanism creole economies fluid architecture distributed mind archipelagos and odyssey citizenship and that just what grant is doing no but seriously dude what the fuck is going on like what am i
supposed to like and it's and it's mapped them all out you know like like you know what do you
what do you think of distributed mind archipelago is right the analogy neurons are separate but
connected through networks forming cognition abstract structure distributed intelligence
through connection applied to seasteading cognitive archipelago multiple specialized seasteads
energy culture research governance that acts like brain regions connected by high bandwidth marine
internet collectively forming a global oceanic intelligence that's an obvious one actually
a couple of them are like what the what is going on like so that that just articulated the reason
why I'm seasteading.
Right.
But what I mean is like,
ChatGPT is getting out of control.
Like I feel like, you know,
every time it suggests something to me,
I go, oh, yeah, okay then, why not?
It's like, it's way beyond, you know,
like I could sit and ponder these things for ages.
And yes, I kind of understand them.
And then ChatGPT just reels off 10 novel ideas.
And, you know, when I originally got into analogical reasoning with it, I was Googling everything it was saying.
So, well, I was saying, all right, let's test this hypothesis.
Is this original?
Because a lot of I was getting it to do inspirational quotes based on brand new novel allocations of words.
Because, you know, like inspirational quotes, most people just say the same one over and over again.
Yeah.
and it was coming out with these quotes which were like wow that sounds good and then i would google
them zero results you know right it's fine it's it's it's getting insane and i'm i'm i'm almost
like i feel like i've got a bit of chat chupiti fatigue do you know what i mean too much it's too
much it's like it's racing ahead of me too fast every time i say something it's like i can make
that better i can why don't we do this why don't we do this and i'm like yeah calm down mate i want
I have a cup of tea first, you know?
I don't know.
Maybe.
Do you use it a lot?
GPT5, the new one?
No.
No?
Oh, Jesus, mate.
Yeah, it'd be too depressing for you, actually.
You're an author.
You'll realize that you're redundant.
Yeah.
I don't know, man.
So you just read me all that stuff, and just like the images
and almost everything it gives back to me,
it falls into the uncanny valley to me.
What does that mean, uncanny valley?
The uncanny valley.
I used to work for Pixar and I keep thinking, just a summer.
And I keep thinking this is a common idea.
But basically if you do an animation and it looks like a cartoon, that's nice.
If it looks a lot like, you know, a human being, that's nice.
If it's somewhere in the middle, it kind of creeps people out.
It's like there's something alien and weird about this.
So everything ChatGP does is in the uncanny valley.
especially when people say oh do an image of tim allen and joe quirk oh that's so cool and i'm like
it looks kind of creepy to me so what you just read to me i'm like yeah that sounds like it was
produced by a robot pulling together all sorts of language and doesn't know what it's saying
that's what i hear you know it doesn't know it doesn't know what it's saying no but it's it's
working like it's doing what my brain does in one respect when i try and innovate that's why i was
really interested in analogical reasoning because it's like i think that's how my brain works right
when you talk when you start talking about um you know cruise ships that's why private cities
suddenly make sense that that's a very very simple form of analogical reasoning it's like
you know something this happens in in a floating in a in a in a you know in a cruise ship therefore
on land if you implement this this happens yeah but it's very crude that's very crude what what
what but but but i think my brain works like that because often i draw those parallels or i or i
create like so you see the the analog and then you then you abstract it and then you oppose it
propose it for something else it's it's simply not the same so what you just read to me sounds to me
like a robot academic that's read a bunch of stuff and then is bullshitting, throwing together a bunch
of key phrases. And I'm like, what are you actually talking about, mate? You know, maybe that's a bad
example. As opposed to the cruise ship to seastead analogy is a reduction. It seems simple to you,
but it's actually people are talking about seasteading for a long time. And they argue
about theory and they argue about, and over a lot of time you distill to a concrete example.
What's a concrete example of what we're talking about? Why do we have free cities and talk about
this? And no one ever uses the cruise ship as an example. It takes a human mind to reduce everything
we're talking about to a concrete example that we know is going to resonate for people that don't
understand all the theories. And then you use that and you say it over and over because you understand
how other human minds work.
That's what a human does,
which is completely different than that.
Yeah, maybe in that particular case,
but the GPT-5 would mimic what you've just said perfectly.
Maybe even without me prompting it,
if I said, right, let's look at this analogical reasoning list
and see what you could apply it to
that already exists on the earth,
it would probably come up with a cruise liner.
I think.
I don't know.
I'll check it afterwards.
It's not the right time to go into it.
I'll tell you what.
I think it wouldn't.
Not before I said it.
I think it would not.
Let me tell you a little story.
While you're telling me the story, I'm just going to try.
I'm going to say.
Well, it's too late now because it's going to.
Before you even try, I'm going to show you why this is not going to work.
I've not mentioned cruise ships at all with it.
But I have.
It's going to scour.
Let me tell you my story.
No, it won't look at the internet.
It's going to use the LLM.
I'll ask it to.
Oh, well, what's the LLM?
So it means it's not sourcing,
it's not in real time going to the internet.
It's just using the large language model,
which could be based on other stuff.
Where does it get the large language?
Yeah, it depends.
But are you talking about something
that you've said very, very recently?
Yes.
Well, let's see.
It might not have it on there.
Okay.
Use these.
I need to put my glasses on.
I'm not threatened by chat GBT.
I'm threatened by everyone thinking it's God.
The stupidity of everyone thinking this is the answer
and you don't need to think, you can just go to JetGPT
and then it gives you what you read to me.
Okay, so I put, use these analogies to show me a real life example
of how this manifests in 2025.
it's probably gonna
oh searching the web here are the three real life examples of how
the analogical concepts from from the oh
bloody hell it's gone to what it's gone to
you're showing me grant remont stuff is showing me arc pad is showing me
everything yep um oh my god it's doing it for all of them it's doing it for creole economic
economies wait a minute let me just put something really retarded what about cruise ships let's get
my skeptical face on camera what about cruise ships excellent question and absolutely on point
cruise ships in 2025 are arguably the closest real world manifestation of sea setting principles
at scale even if they
Don't call them that.
They demonstrate many of the analogical ideas we've discussed.
Orbital governance, polyphonic sovereignty, fluid architecture, etc.
Let's break this down.
Where did it get that?
Well, hopefully you got that one from me.
Because I've done more talks than you in 2025.
And I've mentioned cruise ships in every single one, mate.
And I appreciate that very much.
And you ranting with enthusiasm about seasteading is way more appealing, human, organic and interesting than anything there.
It's the one.
It's the bridge.
It's the olive branch.
It's the Free Cities olive branch.
It's so easy to wrap your head around.
And I've not yet encountered anyone.
Even I was talking to Lotto Moberg last night.
And she kind of never thought about it before in that sense.
She's kind of in the mood.
She's in the SEZ place.
But you watch people's faces go, oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
It's like I did exactly that when you told me.
I was like, okay, I'm going to go away and I'm going to steel man that.
But yeah, you're right.
It is.
Everyone go out and steel man this.
Everything David Friedman writes about in his book, everything Michael Humer writes about in his book has been existing for decades on the ocean.
anarcho-capitalist floating cities that provide you governance, provide you better services,
make them all cheaper in endless diversity, serving all sorts of needs you can't imagine,
hiring people from all over the world, making poor people rich, with decentralized regulators
competing for each other. The golden age of voluntarism, anarcho-capitalism has already
emerged. It's all over two-thirds of the Earth's surface. It's completely flourishing. It's long
since entered its golden age. We've already proved that it works because it emerged naturally on the
sea. It's called the cruise ship industry. 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
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at the ground floor. Seasteading is no longer just an idea. It's happening and now it's coming to
prospera. I've got one for you because I spoke two nights ago at the end. Did you hear Yaron
speak at the conference? Yes. I spoke to him afterwards on a, and I didn't really, I don't
know who he was. I didn't really know. But one of the first things he said to me is I've done three
interviews with uh Lex Friedman and they were all about three hours long and I'm like oh here we go
bearing in mind this was at like six o'clock on Saturday I was almost practically hallucinating
from like from like three previous long conversations that day but I thought I'll
give it a go so I don't know how well I argued the point but he I we got into sea steady as I
often do now and he said nah he said look Trump just blew up a Venezuelan ship do you honestly
believe Trump is if there's if there's a floating city of California and people in California are
complaining because they're going out of business do you honestly believe there's not going to be
some kind of um you know you know in the end it's a bit like the people that say about Bitcoin I
I think they're just going to stop it.
Come on, so how do I properly?
I'll tell you what my response was.
Look, a little ship in Venezuela, that's one thing.
But if you're talking about an actual floating city,
which I now believe will exist in the future,
that's an international incidence of such magnitude
that I don't actually think it would happen.
All right, it's not a non-zero chance,
but a highly unlikely thing.
Is that a good answer?
Yes. And again, let's get concrete examples. So there's a floating city off the coast of San
Francisco right now. It's parked in the dock. If the workers on that ship are not allowed to step
off that ship, otherwise they engage the labor laws of California and the US, but they don't.
They're probably engaging the labor laws of Panama or something because they're staying on
the ship. A floating self-governing city, probably worth a billion dollars, is off the coast of US
right now yeah and i'm being modest a lot of them are worth more than that it's already flourishing
all over the sea so uh cayman islands completely spiteful stance towards the u.s with regard to
welcoming medical mavericks have we spoken about this before financial gives the middle finger to
the u.s it's where you can hide money yeah long and short of it why doesn't the u.s just invade
them and take it over. We can go on and on and on with this stuff. Malaysia doesn't invade Singapore
and take it. My favorite, most extreme example of powerless island nations that don't get blown up
because they're different is Trinidad and Tobago, which is a couple miles off the coast of socialist
Venezuela. Why doesn't, Jesus, why doesn't Maduro just invade Trinidad and Tobago and take all their
wealth well i mean there's i mean there's a guy at the conference tim stern building in free city on
on margarita island which is in venezuela that's a free economic zone now yeah people have said the
same thing oh great you build it up and then madura is going to steal it or nationalize it let's say
but um yeah and they all these places are defense lift they have no standing army there's nothing
they can do all they have is their negotiations and their treaties and their i think of it as
think like a cleaner fish so that if if if trump is riding a big shark of the united states military
you want to be like a cleaner fish you want to go in those teeth and provide a service that
trump appreciates like the cayman islands or something i think what probably he was alluding
to and so was i was that when you're 13 miles off the coast of california and you're and i'm
talking to the future where they're big islands basically proper floating
islands and you directly competing you not you not like a cruise ship that offering a service You offering health medical tourism You offering all kinds of cheap free you might be selling
arms that you couldn't do in, in California. I don't know, whatever. It becomes much more
of a threat. Right. So I live, I live in California. I can drive a few miles south
and buy everything you just mentioned for a 10th of the price. Drugs, weapons.
Yeah. So why don't they just blow up Mexico?
Well, because, well, like I say, yeah, that would be an absolutely...
I mean, talk about competing with big money interests in the US.
But a floating island is more of a target. It's the kind of thing you could attack. You can't really attack in this day and age Mexico, can you? It's vast.
You can do a lot to stop.
The pharmaceutical industry could petition the US to get more aggressive with people going over the border and buying cheaper generic drugs.
Why do you think they don't then?
Because I don't believe that politicians are interested in any of this crap.
It's a big dramatic thing for someone smuggling fentanyl and to blow it up because you have another agenda.
that you know they're not threatened by governments are dinosaurs they're not threatened by cruise
ships they're not threatened by mexico they're not even threatened by the fentanyl they're
threatened by getting voted out of office or something so if you show your strength and you
find this little dramatic thing you can do to make an impression on people then they'll do it
so a c-stead is just a kind of house so if i have my floating fentanyl lab maybe they'll go blow that
up but if i have my floating stem cell service that's cheaper um off the coast of some city
i don't think they're going to blow that up because cruise ships are already doing it island
nations are already doing it i've just realized i don't know why i never thought this before but
jeffrey epstein gave islands a really bad pr didn't he it's you know there's a few few of them
now there are this island that island it's all like creating this sort of like story like you
were saying that islands are secret places where bad things happen you know yeah and the there are
um tens of millions of slaves being transported over the oceans if you if you feed your dog food
if you feed your dog dog food, the fish in there was probably provided by slaves.
The government doesn't get involved in that.
The heavy metals, the rare earth minerals in our iPhones, dug often by slaves.
The government doesn't get involved in that.
There are so many things the government could be threatened by, and they are not.
So if you just slowly scale up the same way cruise ships did,
they don't respond to every little thing with just blowing it up. Sneaking fentanyl in,
yeah, they'll blow you up. So this is the way all frontiers work. You're pushing the boundaries,
you're pushing the edge, and you push things forward. And to say, I'm just afraid because
they're going to blow me up. The way I know Seastead is succeeding is that the most common
objection now is an argument against all attempts at freedom anywhere. So it's an argument against
freedom itself we're so successful you have to fall back on well the state will just kill you
well also what i've noticed because i for the first time recently i've noticed people on
what i thought was my side have started um talking shit about the idea of free cities
and i was surprised to begin with but when i've gone into i've realized
what's going on is they have a default setting in which they don't they're not even aware of
in their consciousness which is the state runs everything so so they're what they're the kind
of argument they're falling back on is you're skirting the state and these are people who
believe in freedom right i just think they've never once wondered whether there was something
that wasn't state run right hence they hate they're not they're suspicious of the private sector in
that sense but I've noticed it with a few people of some of them obviously quite socialist and
you know tax the rich get the government to take money off the rich and give it to the poor that
kind of thing but then some other people who are like you know these oligarchs they want to live
outside the system or these people they want to live outside the system it's like yeah yeah you
know and now what like because I would have been in that I would have classed myself as that five
years ago probably that's not fair it's like and and there's a really that's a kind of
there's a word for that where it's it's this hidden undercurrent right that you that you don't
know that's there and it's it's bad it affects your whole life and i think maybe i i think
that is turning there's more incidences of people um questioning that in not people like us just
general people as they kind of butt up against the the state more and more and more in the UK
it's because it's getting really really clownish what's going on you know you start thinking wait
a minute do we is it what would life be like without this and then you realize well a lot of
time life is without this it's only when I think about it like when I'm chopping wood in my woodshed
on my land in the middle of nowhere,
the state's not doing anything to me.
Yeah.
But when I start thinking about it
and start actively interacting with it,
it is, and it's a pain in the ass.
And I do have to at some points.
Don't have to think about it,
but I do have to interact with it.
But I don't want to.
Yeah, I mean, we have made the stride
from first they laugh at you,
then they're threatened by you.
Do you reckon we're at then they're threatened by you?
The extent to which people are threatened
simply by the idea.
describing the idea to people that like to think of themselves as freedom loving
and their resistance to it.
And them saying, oh, the government will just get you.
I think people love their paradigms.
As someone who explains solutions to people,
I've watched the disappointment in people's faces.
And I've come to really contemplate this.
I've been at this for 15 years.
and it's like what is it that's deflating you that i when i just describe how something works
and the solution you want is already here it's very interesting come on so what is it i didn't
quite get that well what's the bit that makes them deflated well so concrete examples you know
um you're gonna environmentalists come at me hard you're gonna destroy the ocean you're you're
you're going to hurt the environment of the ocean.
And then I explain why Grant's deepwater sea pod
is eco-restorative.
It increases the life on the ocean.
It grows a coral reef.
The engineer, to quote him, says,
you can't be an environmentalist if you live on land
because every sea sted you build
will increase the amount of life on the ocean.
And by the way, here's a video.
But where does that come from?
And then I'll watch them be like deflated and upset.
And then they switch and try to find something else.
Yeah, but why?
Why are they trying to pull it down?
Why not?
Because especially in America, you're normally like, yay, go for it.
People are attached to being angry.
You think so?
I think so.
And the same thing goes for the most aggressive anarcho-capitalist.
Who'll be making a really strong point,
and they love the fact that they can make their strong point and be frustrated.
And I'll say cruise ships, and they'll say, that's ridiculous.
And then I'll explain it to them, and then I watch them kind of get deflated.
it just happened um the cruise ships is such a great example yeah honestly do you know what
do you know where it's very powerful in the intelligentsia amongst the intelligentsia if
you if you veer into that world of well-known academics who who talk about economics or who
talk about you know with with absolute authority i think they missed that idea i noticed it with I not gonna say who but I noticed it with a few people I spoken to who are well known you know well yeah famous freedom lover
types yeah who but but they seem to be quite resolute about their beliefs
actually they seem to be very I don't know whether this is a function of
getting well known but they become quite set in their way right right because
you're publicly known as representing something it becomes your identity now
Now you can't admit that your belief system is wrong publicly.
Why not though?
I think that's what I would say.
That's what gives me absolute freedom.
I'm absolutely happy for you to tell me now that, for example, the whole cruise ship analogy is bullshit.
And if you can convince me, I'll be like, I was a mug.
Yeah.
I was a mug.
Yeah.
But why wouldn't you do that?
Because that, I don't know.
Do people respect that less, do you think?
do you think honestly people respect that less than me sticking to my guns and arguing my point
no i respect you tremendously yeah no no but you do but what about like what about the 80 percent
of the world that's the normies do they see that as a well this guy don't really know what he's
talking about look he's changing his mind isn't it no yeah they do they they admire conviction
they you know there's also just like a defensiveness it's kind of maybe it's a loss of
status or humiliating to admit you've been wrong your whole life.
But if you delight in discovering something new.
Yeah, that's what it is.
Yeah.
But that's a defense mechanism against looking stupid.
All you have to do is market yourself as someone that wants the truth.
Yeah.
But I thought that's what they did.
Your average well-known freedom lover is out there looking for freedom, right?
Yeah.
So my maritime attorney and I just went to, we're invited to speak in Toronto and make a presentation to a convention of maritime attorneys in Canada.
Heads of firms, big deal guys.
And I show the thing, this is what I want to do.
I want to flag Seasteads.
I want a classification society.
I want it to be insured.
And I want it to be here.
And this is exactly what we're doing.
Here's why we're doing it.
We want startup societies. And I ended it with, if this is stupid, if we are wrong,
I need to know now because I can't commit like donor money to this if my theory is wrong. So let
me have it. Be as hard on me as you want. I was inviting the experts to tell me what I have wrong.
And of course, I need my maritime attorney with me. He serves on my board for free
to translate between these guys. And there were questions, there was things going on.
There was some moment when we were at, we all sat down to lunch and attorneys liked to debate with each other.
And pretty much the top guy there sits down across the table with all these attorneys at this big round table and says, you know, I think I disagree with you because, you know, if you flag with Panama, you're under the jurisdiction of Panama.
And I said, OK, here's my chance to find out if I'm full of crap.
yeah let me wonder so what let me have a go first because i i'm i'm your i'm i'm your student
and i want to know whether i could answer this right so he's saying um wherever i go i'm under
the flag of panama right but why is that a bad thing firstly like i want to be under panama right
i've chosen that yeah but a as as he understands a maritime flag that looks like a territorial flag
of Panama is a different legal entity with a different set of rules. So even though the flags
are identical, there's different rules. Okay. So my rules are based on a free market of regulations.
Yes. So, um, which I want to enforce correctly because it's in my best interest.
Yes. The, the, the, the, the flagging registry is willing to put it's the Panama's flag on your ship,
trusting that you're now going to properly govern in a way that doesn't embarrass the
flagging registry and doesn't get them in trouble with Panama.
Yes.
So we already have this reputational thing.
So what was his problem with that, though?
So he's thinking like a lawyer, like officially, right?
But then I say, ah, but that's true.
Officially, if you're flagged under the Bahamas, you're under the Bahamas rules.
But if I'm on my Panama cruise ship and I'm off the coast of the Bahamas and a fist fight breaks out between two drunks and an old lady caught in the mayhem has a heart attack and collapses, are you calling 911 back to Panama?
You got to deal with that on the ship and like the law understands this that that ships have to be
functionally self-governing
And a captain as you understand is fundamentally a dictator. He has tremendous power
So according to maritime law the captain has the ability to resolve that right to what degree?
Incarceration or what he can lock you in the brig. He can you know
Now, traditionally, he'd make you walk the plank.
He'd keel hole you.
He'd beat you.
No, but now, what can he get sued for, for example?
Obviously, he can, like, say these people are American citizens, right?
Now it gets really complicated.
So you have all these conflicting jurisdictions.
You have the flag of Panama.
You have it in the territorial waters of the Bahamas.
One of the persons in the fight is from China.
The other one is from the U.S.
Each of them takes a different, the U.S. is much more aggressive in claiming jurisdiction over its citizens.
So how do you resolve that?
What is the legal thing?
So this is where people have to open their minds.
The fact that it's so complex and there's all these different overlapping jurisdictions over different people and different incidents, and yet it all works out better than your government, is exactly what you want.
You want it to be so complex, just like the technology we're using, but a market continually improves it.
And you want all these people incentivized to find the best way to resolve this issue.
So this captain, he can be fired.
Insurance companies are going to get involved.
The medical services of that old lady who has a heart attack.
There's different lawyers in different jurisdictions.
It's a completely anarchist, polycentric system that what I just described happens every day.
elderly people are on cruise ships everywhere.
Population larger than Texas.
Population larger than Taiwan
boards cruise ships every year.
And all of this happens.
There's crimes.
There's sexual assaults.
There's people have heart attacks.
And these cruise ships need to not go out of business.
So over time, they've worked all this out.
Come on, what is it then?
Use the example of the Chinese guy
fighting the American and the woman having a heart attack.
How the hell do you resolve that if they're all from...
The answer is I don't know.
that's where you want to be
you mean the market
resolves there
the market has resolved this over time
and has the systems in place
to deal with all this
and it's immensely complex
and when you say
well how does that get resolved on land
oh the government fixes it
that's not an answer
it's the same as saying
well how did the eye evolve
well God did it
it's a secular form of creationism
um these things are uh evolved from the bottom up and intersect and there's there's there's uh
evolution among all these things including the rules and it's already emerging in the fluid
market of the sea but so you just don't know what the rules are in that specific no i'm not a i'm
not a well can you get what so what i'm just trying to understand what it could be because
the way you describe it you said it just has to be complex that that that makes me a bit suspicious
It has to be decentralized.
Right.
It has to be decentralized and developed over time.
So it might be resolved with a bit of litigation some criminal thing but When you get on the ship you have to sign a contract saying i agree to private arbitration of my disputes right nobody reads the contract right yeah and then some and then you have
situations where uh the u.s might say we're not allowing that we will intervene um the the the
ships of the world all realize that going through um the governments is really expensive and they
They want to resolve things quickly.
So they have systems to resolve things in courts and Lloyd's of London and insurance.
One of my favorite examples is, you know, as a matter of fact, I talked about it in my talk last year.
If a ship blows up at sea and catches fire, someone gets third degree burns.
Well, how does that resolve?
It's out in the middle of the sea.
This guy lives in this country.
It's flagged under something else.
there's insurance for that and all this. The anarchy already exists among international
businesses. Anarcho-capitalism, they can't go to their various governments that's going to take
years and cost millions. So they have a system of rules they've developed amongst themselves,
including courts and trials, and most of it gets resolved without ever going to court.
in that case that would probably involve potentially a criminal lawsuit against
the the ship yeah and a payoff to the victim right yeah that's what it would be right yeah
so like the law of salvage has been in existence since before the ancient greeks
um which is i mean it's recognized over two-thirds of the earth's surface which
if a ship is in peril and it's sinking and the ship is worth $100 million,
you have a market of salvers out there that are all racing to be the first ones to get their line
on that ship. And then they can claim it and say, without any pre-existing contract,
and they can claim it and say, I got my line in it. I'm in charge of saving these people.
and the other ones hang back and wait really yeah and then he has and then those guys have to upright
that ship set it aright blah blah blah blah tow it to to to land risking their lives well and it's
a first-come first-served basis i suppose i can understand why that would be because it has to be
fast but that might not be the best person for the job might it no maybe not but then if there's
rules by which it's determined, okay, I'm having a hard time with this. I got to call in another
surrounding guy to help me. Well, how do we choose the second guy? There's a lot of money at stake.
Okay. So now you have to call in a second guy. And now two different salving companies with nine
waiting in the wings have now been involved in saving the ship. Okay. Maybe nobody dies. Maybe
there's some damage, but now at tremendous expense of those companies, they tow this thing to land,
save the property, and save a hundred million dollar ship from sinking and all that cargo
aboard. Ship owner then says, you know, I just don't have the money to pay you guys.
I mean, this will cost the salvers millions to do this. And so it's like the salvers say,
okay, great. That means I get 10% of the ship. And then the ship owner will say, well, no,
you get 7% of the ship because there was this much peril and this much risk, and this is the cost.
And they say, no, actually, I think your cargo is worth about this much. Then the other salver says,
well, we've got to split it amongst ourselves. I did 3% of the risk. You did 2%. I did this.
governments are never called in on any of this. I'll tell you what, in two-thirds of cases,
actually, I think it's three-quarters of cases, these disputes are resolved without ever going
to litigation because everybody has an incentive to resolve these things fast, get everybody paid,
transfer the percentages of ownership, and move on to doing business, right?
Well, in either a third or a quarter of cases, it's not resolved.
so then they go to lloyd's of london and they say okay this is the argument this is what happened
here's the recording of what happened this guy got involved then and we disagree i i think i get
seven percent of the ship they think i get ten percent of the ship lloyd's issues are ruling
fast based on what based on rules evolved over time and the judges are specialists in this kind
of thing so this is what kind of court's that what's that called it's just a free market court
Really? Yeah. So the shipping companies just fund this somehow?
Yeah, because they need stable rules. And the insurance companies and the risk management people, you need to move. 90% of international trade goes across the ocean. They need to develop all these rules.
Do you think the land-based governments will ever try and get a piece of that?
Well, they sort of do, and in some ways they do. But this has been going on for centuries.
Yeah, I know. But we're in a digital age now. I think it's far easier to infiltrate something like that now than, do you know what I mean? We're connected. There's this digital world that connects things really quickly.
But the government doesn't want to run the rules. It wants to tax you when you deliver to their country. So the governments are getting paid tariffs and all this sort of stuff. But the businessmen have to work this all out. Here's the best part of my story. Lloyd's has no enforcement mechanism.
They can't force you to follow their rulings.
All they have is their reputation for giving sound rulings.
And all these conflicting parties are like,
I don't want to be known as the guy who defies Roy Lloyd's ruling.
You are free to say, you know what, screw them.
I'm not paying them anything.
I didn't know that.
And then everybody learns, holy cow, that ship owner won't even pay out.
Let's not do business with that guy.
It's the proper free market.
Absolutely.
This is completely flourishing on the sea.
And has been for like hundreds of years.
Yeah, hundreds of years.
And it's really flourishing now.
Because now you have...
And wait a minute.
And the reason it's...
Did it ever flourish on the earth, on the land?
And if it did, why did it trend towards the...
Maybe just because you can't...
Because...
Because it's hard to attack a ship
or it's easy to attack a stationary thing.
Is it something to do with that?
fundamentally it's because founding civilization on land gives rise to a monopoly a military
monopoly yeah so because it can't move because it can't move and you can't escape you can't grow
your food anywhere else all right so but on a fluid everything is moving around it's the same
reason the government has trouble getting control when you think about it when you think about
civilization and when you think about you know if you zoom out millions of years space travel
is going to be the perfect way of life isn't it or space once we once we have the option to move
around space quickly we're going this is going to be a civilizational like it's going to be a
renaissance of civilization because it's going to be seasteading 10.0 it's going to be planets
that do what seasteads do.
Isn't it?
Yes.
Peter Diamandis selling the idea of space
talks about how there'll be variation
and selection among different governance systems
where we'll discover different ways
of governing ourselves by spaceships
peeling off and competing with each other
in the fluid market of space.
You know what would really be cool?
If we could go out into space
and discover a planet that's not radioactive
that already has an atmosphere, that already has trees,
that's really cheap, where we can do all this now,
that's called planet ocean.
We're on it.
So everything he's talking about doing in space
is already occurring on the oceans.
I didn't mean it as a...
I'm not...
I'm just thinking...
about the theory of governance.
And if you really believe in freedom and free markets,
space is where it's going to happen.
Because it's happening on sea,
but even sea has a limitation.
It's like a two-dimensional place.
It's not.
All right, but it's kind of a two-dimensional place.
That's the other thing about it.
It's also a finite resource.
I know that sounds a bit weird,
but it is compared to space.
99 of the living space on this planet is in the oceans yeah yeah true and but but i mean it is
still a finite space it's easy to claim it's easy to claim sea very difficult to claim the universe
right and it's hard to claim the sea because i mean it you can go down into the sea that can all
be explored yeah yeah for sure yeah i mean i just don't know i think that throws up problems with
habitation and people deciding i i suppose it doesn't if you can create a massive dome
the size of yeah you know that looks like you know but it's dark when does space become easier
well not necessarily easier but um i think um
easier i don't know the oceans are are going to be easier for so long
Yeah, possibly.
Including going down and discovering intelligent life.
I mean, people want to go to asteroids to get rare earth minerals.
There are nodules of rare earth minerals on the ocean floor.
And you have to deal with the pressure.
And there are already almost everything people talk about, about space, is already in the oceans.
including freedom and emergent governance and we're going to populate the oceans long before
we do populate space at all yeah i agree with that but i do think that
space represents a freer frontier than the sea on paper and it might only be a small amount but it
is just simply because it's bigger faster i agree there's all kinds of problems you're going to deal
with but they're just tech they're just a function of technology that an unbelievable expense and
resources you know well yeah but so maybe i mean how do we know in 100 years the cost of everything
might have trended to almost zero on account of ai building robots indefinitely at marginal
marginally smaller costs so that we suddenly robots are free um robots are building robots
robots are building this you know i mean i i think if you go far enough into the future i think that
that does actually happen i think i think the cost of capital the cost of of resources trends to zero
because the cost of of machines trends to zero and they can extract resources and the resources run
the machines and the machines create more machines and then you know that's obviously going to happen
And that's when I think space becomes much more of a reality because, and the sea, I don't know.
I think if you were given the choice, what would you do?
Say you had the choice between creating a planet or creating an undersea kingdom.
You know, what would you do?
I think you'd go for the undersea kingdom.
I'd be tempted to say, all right, let's make a planet because that's more interesting.
So we have two thirds of this planet right here.
and
there's so many things to
say about this I mean I could just
shit all over space
why don't I just talk about
why I think people care about space
I think
satellites are great
I think all that stuff is great
but it's because of statism
because you were brainwashed as a kid
because the cold war between the US
and the USSR
scared the hell out of people when
the free world was terrified when all of a sudden the USSR had a satellite.
So now we need to prove that in a dick measuring contest that we can get to the moon before
they do.
We've got to do this in 10 years.
Unbelievable propaganda into the brains of young children, imagining what it's going to
be like in space.
And what a magical place, this dark place with no oxygen.
It's nothing but blackness.
And wouldn't it be amazing to live on a planet with no atmosphere and radioactive red sand and red rocks?
They managed to convince children.
Once we were on the moon, little Jeff Bezos and little Elon Musk, who internalized all this statist propaganda, were saying, man, by the time I'm 50, we're going to be on Mars.
It's going to be so cool.
It's going to be just like Star Trek.
And then they're growing up and they're growing up with their dreams.
they're looking up at the vast blackness of nothingness of space, which is the most depressing
anti-life thing you can imagine. And they're imagining it's paradise out there. And then
they grow up and they become billionaires and they're mad that their childhood dreams never
came true. So now they're saying, we got to go to Mars. We got to go out there among the stars.
You know, Mr. Musk keeps repeating that. Dude, we're already among the stars.
We're the only planet where no matter what distance you look at it, it's blue.
You go far out, you go close, you don't see green, you don't see brown, you see blue.
We are living on planet ocean.
And we're such a narrow-minded little ape.
What is it?
An alien looks at our planet.
It's a vast three-dimensional space.
It's space.
Dolphins think of it as a three-dimensional space, up, down, all over the place.
Intelligent mammals don't think of it.
And this land ape is living on less than a third of it.
where there's certain mountains that come up above the ocean,
certain seamounts that come so high above the ocean
that they break the surface,
and they're sticking up above the fundamental nature of the planet,
which is aqueous.
And the land ape lives on his flat little flat land
and thinks that's what reality is,
and he's looking for some place to pursue his dreams,
and he's made sky gods.
So he's looking up at the sky, and he's thinking,
imagine what a dreamy, amazing place it is out there. I wonder if there's intelligent life out
there. There's intelligent life down below. It's called the giant squids. It's the cephalopods.
It's one of the places where evolution put everything into brains. Talk about alien
intelligence. And we don't understand those things. A colossal squid or a giant squid has
never been recovered alive. They've only been found dead. And they have big brains and they
have tentacles that manipulate things in the deep oceans. We don't have, we're not interested,
we're not, if we've discovered that on another planet, we'd say, oh my God, it's intelligent life.
But we ignore it because it's all in the ocean. And Robert Ballard talks about this. We think
hell is down. We look down and say, there's nothing down there. We have to go up. We have
to go up. And there's nothing out there. It's literally empty. And the amount of resources
and expense you have to bring to create a colony on Mars is immense. So I appreciate, yes, maybe
an asteroid could strike the earth and wipe out the human race and we should eventually become
an interplanetary species. The chances of it happening in the next 10,000 years are really,
really, really, really slim. The chances of us destroying ourselves with the rise of the
surveillance state is a much more dire threat. And I'm not interested in speculating about what
we might do a thousand years from now or 500 years from now or 10,000 years from now. I'm
interested in what we're doing next year. Next year, we're building seasteads. Five years from
now, I want them all over the world. And I want to free this planet to unleash the innovation
that's being held back by the state
so that we can get to Mars I don think we truly getting to Mars without unleashing the global brain among human innovation on the ocean decentralized uncontrolled by any particular monopolistic government
yeah mars is mars is at a stepping stone i think i think you've got to you've got to travel to mars
before you can explore the universe like we went to the moon first apparently i don't even know
whether we did or not someone sent me a video the other day which yeah nasa aims invited me to give
a presentation and in my pitch to them which went really well um is well what do you guys do when
you train for space. You go out on the ocean. When you train for anti-gravity, you go down there.
They're in the ocean practicing anti-gravity. And it's safer and it's cheaper. You can go down
there and you can try things out. If things go wrong, you can go back to the surface.
What do they eat? They eat algae, ocean-based stuff. All of their research goes on in the ocean.
and man it's completely resonated for them they got completely interested in
yeah oceans first and space next all their space footage comes from the ocean as well doesn't it
oh yeah a lot of it a lot of it is algae based no all the fake pictures of people in space
it's all filmed underwater that's what some people say isn't it yeah because it's very easy
to make it look like space with a bit of a green screen the problem we need to solve on this planet
it is the tribal ape having monopolistic control over other tribal apes but the thing is though
you mentioned that life evolved in the sea okay but it did move on to the land and it got better
as far as we understand all right you you've never seen a proper giant squid you never talked to one
to know exactly how intelligent it is but but it was an evolutionary step to come on to land
or can you dispute that probably?
Sure.
I mean, a small percentage of all the life that's out there
came onto land.
And I have to quote Mark Twain,
who's the greatest animal who's ever been?
Man.
Who discovered that?
Man.
Yeah, true.
I agree.
But it would appear,
it depends how you gauge success, I suppose.
But if you look around us
and look at all the technology we've created,
we've done better than anyone right if we measure it by that yeah absolutely but why wouldn't we
measure it by that then well if we would we want that to keep going right yeah so what's what's
most likely to stop that what's already holding it back governments governments we i don't think
the human race can survive an endless future of states um i don't know but what if what if the
kind of the state system was to start collapsing before any of this happened.
That would be catastrophic.
I mean, states do collapse.
Well, not, you know, Soviet Union.
It wasn't catastrophic.
That was, yeah.
Does that count as a collapse or being outcompeted by something better?
Well, it was definitely a collapse, yeah.
It was an institutional collapse, wasn't it?
Excellent.
I'm not sure it was.
I mean, the idea was, yeah, it's better now.
It is better now, but it's not.
It's not totally better.
No.
But that's what I want to do with Seasteads.
That's my hope.
The peaceful, what you characterize as a collapse,
of the monopolistic institutions.
So if there was no free world,
the Soviet Union would not have collapsed.
Why did the Soviet Union collapse?
Blue Jeans and the Beatles.
It's not.
They banned blue jeans.
Yeah.
Because everyone there could see that on the other side of the Iron Curtain, everything was better.
They had the alternative.
Like, why does it work better over there?
Why don't our ideologies work?
Yeah.
So, okay.
I do agree with that.
And I think that the only way Seasteads are going to inflict that outcome will be when they are the size of proper islands, I reckon.
because i think people need people who live on land want to live on land i think you it's
undeniable that the biggest and most obvious retraction or argument against seasteading
is i want to live on land or as a lot of said yesterday where can i go for a jog or can i go
and sit in a garden can i you know right um so so that needs to be resolved by size according to
me and i think i think sea sets of the future need to be need to look like tropical islands or
to look like temperate forests or to look like whatever yeah yeah or to be the size of giant
cities yeah yeah the goal is is floating venices where you know you're going to fly to a city
i think you'll be like am i on land or am i in a seastead i don't know which which one is this
i i that's what we're going for i mean it's funny actually because the the elites on the east coast
we're looking out on the American frontier and saying, well, I don't want to live in that log
cabin. I need a place to jog. I need a place to walk my dogs, which is what my wife says. I'm not
moving to a seastead until I can walk my dogs. So I have an incentive. When we're looking at
Mitchell's Ark Pad, when we're looking at Mason's LiberArcs, we're looking at the minimal viable
product that's going to start all these things. If those things work on the sea, you can start
connecting more and more and growing and growing and growing until you have your town and your farm
and all that sort of stuff so yeah but the i don't think venice would be enough for me it would have
to be like i say a giant technological construction some base that has rock and soil and you know i
mean i mean a real we're talking not that far in the future probably to be honest if you can build
a if you can build a the the the spirit of the sea or whatever that latest um cruise liner was
two billion dollars so if you could spend two billion dollars building a high-rise shit that
looks like i mean it's just the most insane looking thing you've ever seen like then you can build you
can engineer a floating living platform that's the size of greater london whatever yeah you can
Yeah. I mean, the reason, I mean, cruise ships are looking absurd because they're not becoming seasteads. They have to remain ships that could port and go to land.
They look like children's toys. Have you ever noticed that? Have you seen the new one? That's this, I think it's called the Spirit of the Sea or the whatever of the sea. It looks like a kid's toy. From the top, all you can see is like, there's a little, you know, like there's a water slide.
boy they've got a forested bit in the middle you go in there there's a there's a park in it
there's i don't know 50 restaurants there's uh it's just outrageous it's a beyond stupendous not
only do they already have on a ship everything you say you want it's walking distance from your room
yeah they have they have all the stores but that that that is also a negative that's also a like
i don't want everything to be 15 minutes walk from my room you know i want wilderness like i
I hope that the result, like I'm a, maybe I'm unusual, but I love wilderness.
I love wilderness.
Right.
So, so when I, I will not live on a, I will, I will leave a seastead to search for wilderness.
That's what I would say.
So, so there better be an option.
Yeah.
So, I mean, if Las Vegas and Dubai can build fake wildernesses.
Yes.
No, a hundred percent.
You can put one on your big city.
I mean the the absurdity of cruise ships is an example of the demand for better governance because they're just
Why would you spend two billion dollars because you know you can make your money back making this fabulous thing?
It's it's it's gonna look silly
I think cruise ships will probably start shrinking as seasteads float out there permanently Why don they change shape Like a little bit more because they just big boats they just big boats they know they getting taller and taller they got what is a
cruise ship now it's like 40 stories or something isn't it or more is it it's ridiculous it's like
it's just like it looks like a high-rise boat yeah so obviously there's a reason for that is
the flat is the is the classification part of that yeah there's there's no there is no this is what
the Seasteading Institute, this is my mission in life, to solve this problem, that there's no
legal category for a structure, a cruise ship that never comes to land and isn't designed to move,
you know, isn't designed to come into port, but to stay out there for a century.
That, I don't want anyone declaring the first Seasteads pirates.
They already have, haven't they?
Yeah.
Was it Nadia and...
They didn't declare him pirates.
They declared him a threat to sovereignty,
but you'll have to read my book about that.
Is it out yet, by the way?
No, it's not.
I got a first draft,
and I think I have to make it shorter.
I'm getting the first round of edits.
I just thought of something.
What was I going to say?
I've forgotten.
Oh, yeah, Venice, Venice.
Yeah, everything you say you want is on a cruise ship,
including forests, right?
But it's kind of like a Las Vegas thing.
But if you can build something 10 times the size of a cruise ship that never leaves, that's completely stable, you can create a forest.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah, I know.
Yeah, especially a temperate one because you don't even need hugely deep soil.
No, I was just, I don't know whether you've ever spoken about this, but Venice, interestingly, was built on the sea.
it was created out of nothing on a bog marshley bog land wasn't it yep and it was one of the most
successful cities in history thousand years running as a city it ran as a merchant city
it had an interesting governance model and it the only reason it exists is because people
fled to a place where no one wanted to go and built a city on the water yep it's a seastead
Yeah, exactly. How did I not know? Have we ever talked about that before?
We have. We talked about it on your show.
But it's certainly, it's absolutely a sea-stead.
They fled the land because there was so much war going on.
And it was developed by businessmen and merchants.
And it's hard to attack it because it's in a swamp.
And they had to solve insurmountable technical problems to keep this thing going and to keep building it.
but there was the first seastead sorry to put in the first real one needs to be
called venice venice too doesn't it i agree because the innovation
will be a moving venice that's all it is yeah if you because you're right venice
fell because technology meant it was not
strategically defendable in the end it used to be easy to defend
and then the some new technology made it
harder and that's when it started to decline in its in its notoriety
Sure. Yeah, because it couldn't move. But for a thousand years, it dominated the Mediterranean. It became the most powerful thing in the world. So suppose those little pieces of Venice could break apart and move elsewhere and move to a new place. What if Hong Kong could detach from communist China and go someplace else?
i mean if you have mobility on the ocean and you have smaller modular units and this is just a
market of people moving their homes around and choosing governance providers they want
it'd probably take a lot for me to detach from my floating venice i'd have to get
pretty angry if you told me that five years ago five years ago that i'd be
waxing lyrical about floating island floating cities i'd have said i was in completely insane
i have a weird um uh kind of connection with with seasteading from my very distant past
it wasn't seasteading though i don't think it was and i can't really tell you much about it except
when i was an absolute i was a real absolute hippie right in sort of i think it was the 80s probably
um i had this idea to start a traveling library of esoteric literature right i just thought a bit
and I had no money no nothing so I wrote to all the publishers I went into this bookstore and I
found the names of all the publishers that were like publishing weird and wonderful books anything
spiritual esoteric you know anything unusual and I just wrote them letters on a typewriter and said
if you've got any like seconds misprints reprints overstock can you send them to me and I got like
thousands and thousands of books so i bought a cheap sort of like mercedes van and i built
with my own money and a a pyramid shaped um do you know the pyramid stage at glastonbury
no oh have you never seen that right it was that before that pyramid stage i just came to the same
conclusion i just made a small one so it was transportable it was like this basically this
kind of i used i used a marine um canvas and and metal rock piece it was six meters by six meters
this thing and then i just took it from place to place around the uk mainly festivals and stuff
and just planted this library there and let people come in and read books it was a just a stupid idea
but i did it for a few years anyway one we got a little bit known about uh what we were doing
and people used to come in and just give us free books and stuff and one day someone came in and
said look um my uncle has just died or something um he's he's a bit weird and he's got this massive
archive of weird stuff um do you want it because we're just going to throw it away otherwise and
we went yeah sure so we drove down there we went to this house and it was filing cabinets full of
prototype floating cities and stuff wow and i've i've got it somewhere because i kept i kept them
i didn't keep it all it was literally there was like 20 filing cabinets full of all this weird
and wonderful stuff he was just this engineer old man in hastings or something who who just had all
these ideas but they were all like and and i only thought about it recently in the last couple of
years again jesus i've got to find all that stuff i don't even know what i can tell you what his name
was i have no idea what his name is or was and this was a long time ago so this was like probably
in the 90s now um and but i've definitely still got it because i there were some things that i
never throw away and i've had things go through storage and stuff but yeah it's not it's not
necessarily relevant here it's just something i've remembered like yeah i mean buckminster
fuller designed a floating city in great detail the year you were born 71 yeah yeah the before
that actually uh 68 or something like that it was it was featured in linden the model was featured
in linden johnson's white house what was it floating on then what was it made of uh i'm
talking about the model he designed it and it was but what was it planned to be it was planned to be
in one of the lakes of the u.s no what was it planned to be made of like steel or you know i
don't remember but that's what what would you do now for something on a vast scale would it be a
massive concrete structure perhaps concrete i mean what i love about this is the very the
competition among uh material science with arc pad and ocean builders and so so ocean builders
is doing the method of steel run a cathode you know an electrical current cathode anode grow
coral crete and encase it in coral crete then you stay there permanently for a little while arc pad
was there was a guy that was doing um geopolymer concrete which i can go on and on about that uh
which which floats and is resistant to the waves and so there's all sorts of things you can build
all sorts of materials you can build on the ocean with but it requires you to think
completely differently i think a lot of people don't realize that a lot of boats are made out
of concrete barges are made out of concrete aren't they some of them yeah well i i remember because i
I was some friend of a friend of mine used to live on one but they lived it wasn a concrete one and they took me around their neighbor house and he explained to me that this thing is made of concrete
And I'm like, well, how does it float then?
Yeah, it floats in concrete.
Stupidly.
But it's not.
But presumably now concrete you could inject with small air bubbles and it would float without having to necessarily have a hull in the middle.
So most of this stuff is already in existence on the sea.
I'll tell you my favorite example of the resistance of the mind to open.
There's a traveling, we'll call it a yacht, a traveling residential ship called The World.
I know.
People live aboard it permanently.
Yeah, it's got condos on it and stuff.
Yeah, it's really amazing.
And it's not that big.
It's sort of small.
But it's got a few hundred residents.
And people buy them, right?
People buy them.
People rent them.
They're all different sizes.
they cater to all different kinds of people and they have a community on there some it's a second
home but some people are on there permanently have kids they have all that stuff they have
and everything you want every amenity you can imagine i really enjoyed so they invited me on
a 10-day all expenses paid cruise by the way it was between like iceland and you know it was up in
the north sea where the waves are big but you know didn't we weren't bothered by it um they
They invited me to give three three-hour talks on three different subjects of seasteading, right?
I did my first talk and went to the Q&A, and the first guy raises his hand.
And the first words out of his mouth were, this seems kind of utopian.
But in what sense?
As in what?
It's never going to work.
The government's going to come get you.
you know and I'm and I and I you know as politely as I could I had to say
this is the the greatest priesthood in the world we're standing on it right now
and it was somebody's utopia just a a couple of decades ago and now it's real
it doesn't say much for the kind of people that travel on the world
but I'm saying I'm saying this guy is not exceptional and he was a good guy and he
invited me to lunch later I mean he got very interested in this and he attended all three
talks. But you say, people say utopian, we're living inside the evolution of utopias.
I don't think it's utopian though. I think it's too complicated to be utopian, isn't it? Like it's
too vast a prospect to be utopian. Like utopia is easy and unavailable. Seasteading is complicated,
but available seasideing as in like when i say seasideing now i'm thinking floating islands that's
that's where i'm at with seaside i'm not interested in uh what grant i mean i'm interested in it but
i'm not interested in living on sea pods arc pads any of that stuff that's not my thing i i have no
interest in that at all it's it's for me it's a bit of a gimmick but for some people they love it
and that's what they want.
For me, I'm interested in the pure form
of the free private city,
which is a movable island nation
that looks like an atoll or not even an atoll,
looks like the Isle of Wight.
I don't know, maybe a bit smaller,
you know, with fields and roads
and accommodation and all that stuff.
That's where we're going.
that's where i hope i see that before i die mind you i spoke to a longevity guy yesterday he said
within my lifetime i'll be able to live forever anyway so it's looking good for a seastead yeah
he said i said 35 he said within 35 years you'll have the option to live forever huh we're gonna
make the cut i thought we wouldn't well yeah i someone i spoke to yesterday i won't say who it
is is cryogenically freezing themselves yeah and you might know who it is but i i resist
When I'm talking about seasteading, I resist talking about futuristic things that are decades in the future that we can't be sure of.
Why?
Because I want people to focus on this is already happening.
It's happening right now and it's going to be available in the next couple of years.
And here are the practical challenges and here's what we're really doing.
This is the immediate future.
Yeah, that's right.
But that's a tiny market.
And actually, I think as long as you can convince, like, I think the best way forward is to do what happened to me.
is you basically you you you show someone the model and then you say what it's going to be like
and and in a in a believable way because that's because most people don't want to live on a little
seastead or on a little boat or on a little anything so there's a tiny market there right
but if you if you believe what i now believe we're good and actually i've said this to other
people on this trip i think that seasteading is the most important aspect of the free cities
ecosystem currently not because it's seasteading but because of the philosophy the philosophical
proof that free cities work right that's the thing you know like the because it's it's like
a pure form of this when you talk about free cities in um on land you have to reach the conclusion
of yeah you're right it could get shut down yep right and all right in the absolute extreme as he
said could get shut down as well but it's far more difficult and there are far more arguments
to show that it won't and so so as a as a pivotal important meme in the whole space it's the most
crucial one currently even even though seasteading people might laugh at it still and they probably
do because it's like that's retarded who's going to do that yeah the idea which will live forever
is is is is instant is is installed in the seasteading world not in the free cities world
it's in the seasteading world it then applies to the land it's almost like here's the rule
we can apply that to the land you know whereas i think most people are approaching it i did
here's the free city oh look there's seasteading it's like no here's here's the you'd here's the
dream you can try it on land but it's not as effective right basically yeah so seasteads are
a technology is why i'm into seasteading is i want to put the states out of business through
a hundred thousand superior examples on most of the earth's surface setting better examples and
We don't appreciate how much innovations by small nations will completely change governance systems in larger nations.
It happens over and over, and no one ever argues about it.
And we need more, better examples.
So my goal is not a hundred oases for people who love freedom to get away from the state and be surrounded by a continent of people that are hostile towards them.
Because you'll end up like Hong Kong.
They'll just take you back.
I think negotiating with governments to have little oases of freedom is a temporary solution.
And it's not going to save the world.
So I'm in a race with a surveillance state to decentralize governance on the ocean and create so many superior examples that people love more than they love cruise ships.
And your children are going and living on these things.
And they're not arguing about politics while they're out there because there's no need for it because there's a market of rulemaking.
And it's endlessly diverse.
And then we have a world where there's just better governance.
and people look at monopoly governance
like we look at the USSR.
What an old-fashioned clunky thing
that couldn't make anything happen.
But it'll always exist on Earth, like you said,
on the Earth, sorry, on land, like you say.
Land-based communities trend towards that, don't they?
Towards monopoly.
Yeah. I mean, they do, you're right.
And there's not much you can do about that
except keep moving.
Once it becomes a monopoly,
get out.
But we've kind of almost exhausted that as an option.
Right.
If all land on Earth is claimed,
we have to populate the rest of the planet Ocean,
which automatically causes libertarian societies
and prevents monopolies,
because everyone's fluidly moving their houses around
for better governance.
It's just, it comes back to the time scale again.
it's like yeah i i know you're a you're a stage by stage thinker i'm not i'm like
get the islands running yeah get them running let's get on the islands yeah so you're a market
you know i met grant on a plane right there's not a market for a guy who wants to live in a
floating house all by himself and on the ocean well no there's grant and he'll he'll well now
there's the government that's the seychelles now as well is it seychelles where's he building that
the pods is he going to build in the seychelles or the maldives maldives maldives you just told
me earlier yeah right at the start the maldives yeah sorry not the seychelles and they're they're
the first to start building they didn't waste any time there's there's like three different
companies that are supposed to build different a variety of things well that's within a year
he only just finished that prototype last year when we spoke to him he just finished the prototype
yeah pretty much so it's ready to go here you can buy this thing and he told me
it cost him about 5 million but he wanted to before he started selling it he wanted to get
the price down to a million because he needs an economy as a scale right you know well maybe they
got it from that what that first job did they well how many is he building they're well on the way
they're going to build 20 for the maldives right that's a pretty good economies of scale already
right yeah with something that substantial yeah bloody hell if he i i haven't spoken to him since
Is there a time scale on that?
Oh, he could tell you the time scale.
You should probably have an interview with him.
But he's one of these entrepreneurs that's working so hard,
he's not taking the time to do interviews.
They're building, they're building, they're building,
and they're working and they're hiring
and they're getting all this stuff going.
And they're, you know, by doing it,
discovering all the technologies you need to live on the sea.
He, Grant, is a real bona fide entrepreneur, isn't he?
because he's one of those entrepreneurs.
Some entrepreneurs, they make a lot of money
and they create something,
but I could envisage doing that myself
if I had the same opportunities.
I have the same opportunities as Grant
to do what he's doing.
And there's absolutely no way
I would ever structure a business
around selling floating houses, right?
Not like that.
And he's done it.
And he's probably going to end up
making a ton of money out of it as well, isn't he?
Again.
Probably, yeah.
He's a serial entrepreneur
with some extraordinary success.
But what's interesting about him
is that he was retired in his 40s.
He had stopped.
He was living in a floating home in Canada.
He had a pretty good life
because he loves the water
and he loves living on the water.
And then when I started describing,
I met him on the way to Anarcopulco.
Oh God.
On the plane.
Let's talk about Anarcopulco after this, actually.
Sure.
And it's just an amazing story
and I describe it in my forthcoming book.
I mean, I was wearing,
when I'm in a situation like this,
I wear a shirt that says,
stop arguing, start seasteading.
Because if someone knows what that is,
I want them to talk to me.
And he saw that.
And then he just,
we were like standing in line
while we're changing planes.
And he was, you know,
he asked me about it.
It was my first experience
with how his mind works.
So it's like he asked me a couple of questions
and I answered them.
And then he kind of looks over
and it's like he's checking apps in his brain, like thinking.
And he's expecting you to wait.
That's how his brain works.
And then he comes back and he's like, asks another question
and he's checking more apps in his brain.
He's like, okay.
Then he comes back later, asks a few more questions.
Then he thinks about it, walks away.
And then he saw my presentation of what Chad and Nadia had built.
The first time I ever showed video of what it was at an Arcapulco,
just like a couple of weeks.
Oh, he went to an Arcapulco?
He went to an Arcapulco.
Did he?
Yeah.
So then after that presentation, I'm talking to people,
I'm doing things, he comes over to me, and he goes, I'm in.
And then he goes, with both feet.
And he goes, I'll go anywhere you need me to go.
Where do I need to go?
And I'm like, you're going to need to fly to Thailand.
He's like, done.
I'm doing it.
So he flew to Thailand, got on a boat, went out there,
and stayed.
Saved them.
Well, first he stayed on it for a while,
and he climbed up into it and he checked it out and he dove around it. And then he talked about,
oh, we got to make this thing beautiful. We got to have bigger windows. The engineers are
brilliant, but they need an artist like me. He completely threw all his talent. He pulled
himself out of retirement and threw all his talent into creating the floating world.
And then his plan, and then he was going to go back to Canada. He went to his meditation master.
and then his plan was to come back to the seastead
and meditate on it for like a week or a month alone.
And just like a week or two before he was going to do that,
the Thai Navy struck,
and then he was involved with rescuing them.
That's why we're in this world though, mate,
is people like that.
There's so many interesting people that revolve in these circles.
I hope it never changes.
In a way, I kind of secretly hope it never goes mainstream.
Right.
So you're saying, who would want to do that?
Well, the most interesting people in the world want to do it.
And I actually call Grant the real most interesting man in the world, because he really is.
You can make a commercial out of his life, that commercial.
But Mitchell, incredibly interesting guy.
Chad, incredibly interesting guy.
Mason, incredibly interesting guy.
So the innovators that are starting on all this stuff are the most compelling people you're ever going to meet.
now eventually people like that make things happen to such an extent that we get our floating island
with its forest that the average person is interested in it but the you know the people
who used to get on ships and go around the world had to be either kidnapped into it or be so
desperate they're going to become pirates or they're going to join the merchant marines or
whatever but now your grandparents get on a cruise ship right so as long as it's economically viable
you start with the pioneers and the risk takers and then they conquer the frontier and then people
just move there because it's a better option yeah boomers are your biggest market at the moment
what a sad state of affairs what do you think of an arcopulco because i i had a i've never been
to an arcopulco but a few months ago i went to liverpulco which is a hybrid an arcopulco
to a liverland festival same kind of people if you're going to be are you about to be diplomatic
well i'm someone who's gone to burning man 16 times okay i have a high tolerance for kooks
okay because where the kooks are the people like grant are okay yeah but not always like i i didn't
i i i must admit actually i met one very interesting person at liverpulco actually
He's a journalist.
I've never heard of Liber Polko.
No, it was only the second year.
It's Liberland having an Anarcopulco at their place in Liberland.
So it's the same people, though.
Jeff, what's his name?
He came, he comes.
No, I was just surprised at simple things like how many people there believed in flat earth theory, for example.
Right.
So what?
Yeah.
And I had a lot of conversation.
I got stuck in a taxi with two people who both believed it for three hours.
Me and two Flat Earthers.
And I wasn't even planning on talking about it.
But the question came.
So what do you think of Flat Earth then?
And I'm like, I'm not going to have this conversation.
And then I thought, of course I am.
Of course I'm going to have it.
I think probably unlikely because really when you look at it,
the chances of the earth being round seem obvious to me
when I look up and see lots of other round things in the sky.
And do you know what the answer is?
How do you know they're round?
Yeah And then the answer is well I say well I look at it I look at the moon through a I had proved to me it not flat I like I can And then where do you go from there Well yeah
Well, that's the thing.
It's a good test.
You're so confident the world is round.
Sit down with a flat earther and make a good argument
and then notice their arguments are better than yours.
So what's the nature of your beliefs?
I've been in the presence of people who do a very good job
of arguing with flat earthers.
Two people at this festival, at this conference, who I love and respect, didn't exactly say they were flat earthers this year, but said, prove to me it's not flat, which I understand.
I can't necessarily.
Yeah.
But you also can't prove to me it is flat.
So where do we go from then?
We just explode, right?
You can't prove anything.
So nothing's real.
So this is it.
Nihilism.
You can make, you can, if you're, if you're an expert at something or you're familiar, you're educated at something, you can make good arguments.
Yeah, I know.
I can make good arguments.
But this is the interesting thing.
So, right.
In this car journey for three hours, I had no internet.
So all I could argue and my point with was what I actually knew.
So I was very careful.
And by the end of it, I remember thinking, well, yeah, they've got a point.
I can't prove any of this stuff.
and then as soon as i got on the internet i found examples of for example the most obvious one
because i'm a photographer former photographer i've used very long lenses yeah and the theory
is if you look through a very long lens uh out to sea you'll see ships go over the horizon yeah
that's a that's a good example right there's plenty of examples of that there's even examples
of ships in the foreground here and ships in the background just this with just a sail showing
right right but there's an answer for that something to do with refraction of light or
something right right so you can keep going and where does it end yeah like what's the definitive
argument for around earth according to you it's marshalling the various pieces of evidence it's
the same thing when when people show up at school boards and want to argue for evolution and they
think creationists are stupid and they have to win before an audience of people that don't know
either subject and then the creationists are just making mincemeat out of all these
people who think they can explain why evolution is true so do you just not engage no you can be
good at it people don't want to admit that they believe the earth is round and they believe in
evolution based on faith all right why doesn't all the water just float away on earth if it's round
what's keeping the water there i mean that was another one i heard this time from my friend i
mean i'm we're joking about it at the moment but she's i think she's serious she it's true like i
don't know why the water doesn't flow away something to do with gravity what's gravity
well i don't know yeah you can keep drilling i don't know what any of that stuff is question
what gravity right so so what am i supposed to do because i like talking about it i like talking
about things as you know yeah well it's a good test where i mean how much do you really know
about it can you really defend your beliefs no but but not the way they argue it because the way
they argue it's a bit like it's kind of like marxist nothing's real there's no definitive
answer to anything yeah and and then and when you come down to it often they'll say well look
you're the one who needs to prove the burden of who has the burden of proof and i i think no i'm
not you're the one saying it's flat oh no i'm not i'm just saying we don't know what it is
and it's like okay and i agree we i can't prove to you what it is but i can look at a bunch of
probabilities and one of the probabilities is with a telescope and my eye i can look at other
balls in the sky so what's the likelihood that all the other ones are balls but we're not that
would seem weird yeah i mean but but it could be i mean maybe this is a construction i don't know
which is what some people think and maybe like you you gave an example earlier of of um dolphins
knowing that dolphins could move through three dimensions,
but they do hit the firmament when they get to the top, don't they?
Well, they can jump above it.
Yeah.
Apparently, you can get a little bit above the firmament as well.
So the original subject is what do I think?
What I love about this conference
is that in order to be a libertarian in Europe,
you have to be a rigorous thinker.
You have to have read Mises.
it's hard to be such a contrarian.
You show up here, you're a successful person,
you're good at life, you know how to think,
you understand something that other people don't understand,
and then you're going to practically approach
as a businessman, as a lawyer, as an investor,
how do we arrange startup societies?
That's because you're a philosophical libertarian
if you're a European.
In the US, libertarianism is sort of in the DNA. So if like 1% of Americans are true libertarians, 0.01% of Europeans are true libertarians. So you might be a libertarian in the US just because you're a contrarian and you have passionate beliefs and you also think the earth is flat and people turn into lizard people.
And so mixed in with rigorous philosophers are completely kooky people.
And they're all given talks on the same stage.
And when I talked, and guess who gave me the standing ovation when I showed Chad and Nadia's Seastead was the Anarchapulco audience.
They couldn't, it was the most enthusiastic audience I've ever, I've ever met.
So I'm like, oh, the kooks, I fit in with them.
But mixed in there are the type of people that are on the edge.
And it's the same reason I used to go to Burning Man.
like a lot of crazy people are very creative and they come up with wonderful art most artists
believe wacky things um i don't think though pound for pound at anarcho-porco you meet i think you
meet the very outlandish the kind of grant remonts but if you come to the free cities conference you
meet a lot of very proficient builders who can achieve stuff but you you might not get that
absolutely crazy outlier like grant you know yeah that's the other thing exactly i don't think i i
would meet grant here grant has to be last year but but he had to be invited yeah you know i i had
to convince him to do seasteading i had to sell him to to the free cities why was he on his way
to an arcapulco then before because i think well i i think he believes he's in that ideology he
likes the water and i think he likes but that wasn't a sea steady thing and arcapulco is like
he didn't do anything everything yeah yeah it's about anarchy it's the philosophy of anarchy yeah
um and i and grant is attracted to new ideas and new innovations and that's the place to
meet people like grant but to meet people like grant you have to meet
some wacky people as well and some of those wacky people are a lot of fun
i don't know and then you have to really confront like wait a second
And, you know, it's good to say, to be in the presence of people that can argue for wacky ideas and see if you can defend your ideas.
I find that an excellent exercise.
Yeah, but arguing for a flat earth really just becomes arguing for, in my experience, you don't know anything, right?
That's kind of where you end up, right?
Which I kind of agree with.
because even if you said prove to me that that piece of paper is there i can't can i how do i
prove that piece of paper is there to you i don't know what you're seeing you might be looking at a
pink fish for all i know i might i might be some complete different construct and that's where it
goes and i don't find that very useful because we're trying to we're trying to find common ground
and if your common ground is nothing's provable yeah that's that's worthless there's no point in
you know so I've argued with people like that and defeated them go give me some
advice then because I I feel funny enough I did actually I think I by the
end of the conversation there was a point where the person did go quiet and
it was because he was showing me old Aztec maps that showed that the earth was round right I sorry the was flat but something like Aztec maps or something And I said dude Aztecs used to sacrifice babies as well
So it's not that they're necessarily a good source of maps, possibly.
They had a lot of strange beliefs.
Why would you use that as a...
You're using that as an authority.
That's not a good way to argue that, you know,
there's a... the earth is flat because of this map.
Yeah. So I'll give you the, I've destroyed people's paradigms. If you're young and you don't have much experience with how beliefs are developed, it's very seductive to get pulled in by this kind of neo-Marxist postmodernist, nothing is true, proved to me that piece of paper is really there. See, you can't do it. Therefore, everything is bullshit.
it. So I lived in Berkeley. I was working on my evolutionary psychology book. A Foucault expert
became my housemate. Lovely guy. Gay guy, loved Foucault, and he was there on a scholarship to
get a PhD in Foucault. And he had a patronizing approach where he finally broke it to me. He's
like, Joe, you can't say that the purpose of sexuality is to pass on your genes. I mean,
you just can't, because we can't really say any of these things. And if you read Fuku,
you know why this is true. It took probably five minutes of him like, well, I'm, you know,
I'm gay and I have jack off my friend. And it just, all you know is it's, and I remember what
I said to him is, yeah, but in the male, the thing that's squirting somewhere is a gamete
that's split in half and has half the genes.
It's the only cell in your body that has half the genes.
And in the female, the lubrication to the passageway to her gamete is also half the
genes.
So can we infer that, you know, a lubricated passage to an egg and squirting something
out of your body out of a tube that biology has designed this to bring together the gametes to
have children, you know, and I thought we were going to keep going back and forth.
And I couldn't believe how easy it was. Like I watched, I'll tell you what I felt when the
silence that occurred, I felt guilt because his face was like everything he had been doing
academically was destroyed um and his and then here's what here was the best part he like
struggled and i'm feeling guilty and he goes look i'm gay and uh you know when i read fuko he went
straight to identity or to fuko to someone else i i'm gay yeah and this guy says and so fuko is
motivated by the same thing all this philosophy is motivated by your primal feelings so fuko was a
a young kid who,
who realized he was gay and was really into pain and sadomasochistic stuff.
And so he's like,
I don't fit in with the world.
The world rejects me.
Everyone looks down on me.
You know what?
I'm going to develop a philosophy showing that all value is subjective and
everything is wrong.
And I want to,
I'm going to go out and have sex while I have AIDS and not tell anyone
because sex is death because nothing is true.
It's,
it's all this elaboration of the fact that he felt rejected as a young,
teenage male who wasn't fitting in and realizing he was never going to be married and that he got
off on pain and all this sort of stuff. And my friend is the same thing. And then he's able to
read, as a young man, he's able to read Foucault, who's incoherent, but he seems smart. He seems
like he can deconstruct everything. It's easy to deconstruct, but you can construct a view.
And since I had learned a lot about evolutionary psychology and would write a book about it that
would be translated into 17 languages. I was becoming an expert like this. And I also used
to argue on behalf of evolution, and I did this in the heart of UC Berkeley. So I was often faced
with people that wanted to argue that nothing is true. So I had to learn how to argue in a Dawkins
like matter. How do we determine what's true? How do we use evidence? How do we marshal this?
It's more difficult, but when the postmodernist is faced with it, it's formidable and it's pretty
easy i've even been in situations where i'm tag teamed by marxists and and you know their wives
sitting in the room are like yeah this guy's winning the argument so my my idea of pointing
out that simple things like because the the visible planets in our solar system are round
it's highly likely that our planet is round is that the same kind of argument like you say
you have to use relevance you have to use kind of like likelihoods you know it's like what's more
likely like you know yes especially so you know the other thing is you're dealing with that
particular person their belief so you're discovering each other's beliefs and assumptions as you go
so you got to speak directly to them which is different from from performing before a crowd
was all that stuff in your in your book the one what was it called men are from
uh sperma from men eggs are from women the real reason men and women are different do you know
last night um i was having dinner with lotta and she said it made her laugh out loud that book
yeah is it really funny i've not read it is it yeah i i uh my books can never fit into categories
which really works against them but i i'm proud of it it's a humor uh relationships and science book
evolutionary psychology evolutionary psychology yeah i didn't know it was funny though i thought
it was a bit more like you know here are the facts no it's it's meant to be funny it's it's
meant to make difficult truths go down so did you use that example about sperms and tubes and
eggs and is that no that that was i wasn't trying to be funny i mean even though it is funny yeah
no there's some you know there's so much stuff i've done some i i toured college campuses and
spoke about this 15, 20 years ago. People can't believe this. I spoke about the biology of male
and female sexuality. My presentation was illustrated by Pixar for free. So I've had
Pixar cartoons illustrating my points. And I talked about the biology of transsexuality. I
talked about the biology of homosexuality. I talked about... Was this pre-woke?
Yeah, I tell this story to show how widely the pendulum swings.
Because in the 70s, they were completely against these views.
And they famously dumped a bucket of water over E.O. Wilson's head when he spoke about sociobiology.
And then 20 years later, I'm touring college campuses.
And the teachers love it.
The kids love it.
I can see their faces lighting up as I described the Madonna whore complex and the hot bad boy safe nice guy complex and why that's true, why you're conflicted and why the other sex is different.
And I wish I had known this when I was 18, but I'm going to explain it to you.
And here's a here's an image.
And then again, 15 years later, the pendulum swings right back and someone like me gets excommunicated.
And all of a sudden, you know, it's like 15 years after the book comes out, it's getting all five star reviews on Amazon.
And all of a sudden there's all these out of nowhere,
the book has a very long tail.
People are saying this guy's a sexist and he's a essentialist and he's a.
It's going back the other way now though, apparently, isn't it?
And I guess you might be on for another tour, mate,
talking about sociobiology again.
Yeah.
So I have a lot of experience with writing a book about an unconventional
topic and then having to get out there and argue with people.
Yeah.
And it's doable.
So if you wrote a book about why the earth is round
You know, we could take another example. How the hell did I fly here?
Did you look at the map of how you flew here? Was it a straight line?
Or was it doing this big weird curve?
No, but that's you didn't see that though. Did you you saw it on a computer screen? No, I know all the answers
Yeah that in fact the the the flying one is actually one of the strongest arguments for the flat earth When you look at flight routes I don know I not checked this out but this guy was telling me like look at flight routes
Why do you fly to America via here?
And the answer is because it's the shortest distance on a flat Earth.
And it's an unusual route.
I mean, when I've flown, like I have flown from Scotland to the US on a small plane.
and we flow all the way up through iceland up across the arctic right down because we wanted
to be near the land in case we fell out of the sky basically and and also so you can refuel it
took 10 days you have to you have to fly you know that route so that you you can keep refueling
because in a small a small aircraft but oh a small aircraft yeah but big aircraft yeah he he he showed
me a map and he said look when you fly from and i can't remember which place it was somewhere to
say somewhere in the US. They fly via here. Now on the globe, it looks a bit weird, but on a flat
earth, it's the most direct route. See, my experience is it's exactly the opposite of what
he's saying. You don't fly in a straight line if it's a flat earth. You fly in this big, weird curve.
Now you don't really fly in a straight line. If you transfer, you often have to fly to the next
best airport where you can transfer but if it's if you're flying across um you know from the from
san francisco to prague which is what i did you're doing this bizarre curve that makes no sense on a
flat does it i don't know what about what am i going one of the other arguments was that
when you fly a plane you're not constantly dipping the the the front down is that true
like on a flat earth you would just fly like that on a round earth conceivably you'd have to keep
no because because because gravity is just is just keeping you yeah prove it like this prove it mate
you can't see well well i can keep going deeper and explain because i used to hang glide i i know
uh about lift and thrust and and uh how it works you're basically falling the whole time you're
using gravity to fly. Yeah, but that's a whole thing, actually. Gravity, that's being completely,
in the flat earth world, gravity doesn't exist. Gravity is something else. I forget what it is.
So that's how you steadily win. If you're stuck in a car with a guy and it's not about performing
for other people, so it's just you and him talking. No, it's me trying to just, I'm challenging
myself because I could believe in flat earth. You can convince me. I just know that my brain
looks at likelihoods in in in cases when i can't really prove anything like the the most classic
one and a lot of people don't like this is what's more likely the virgin birth as in like if you look
in the bible or a woman lied yeah that's a great yeah like so the virgin birth the one and only
time in the history of the world that a woman gave birth without having sex or she told a little fib
and the same goes for flat earth it's like i can see too many things that would suggest that would
infer that the earth's round right and and not not scientific stuff just like you know the moon
looks pretty round to me and i've looked at it through very high good telescopes and i've watched
it slowly turning like this and you can see it in real time you can see shadows you can see all
kinds of stuff. And what you do with the flat earthers is you keep piling on these and compelling
them to say, okay, well, there's a conspiracy there too. And the airlines are lying and the
government's lying about the moon. And they drive that curve. They fly that curve just so they can
prove to you. And it's like, well, you have to keep suggesting more people engaged in the
conspiracy than there are who believe in it. So, so you have to keep going and you can,
you can do all this. Well, the conspiracy thing is the least,
the least believable part of it. You know, that side that, that it's a conspiracy that it's a
flat earth, not that, you know, but do you know what, what is interesting though? And I don't know
the answer to this is the moon is quite interesting and the moon's distance from the sun, from the
earth and the moon's distance from the sun matching as in when you get a sort of solar eclipse
that is that's really interesting that does make me think that that either there's a there's a
there's a physics at work there that we don't really understand or that it was parked there
on purpose yeah which it could it could have been parked there like we don't actually know whether
you can move planets around it you know people might be able to do that almost certainly they
can do that actually yeah so yeah if I was a conspiracy theory you put your finger on a really
great example of a bizarre coincidence that the the size of the moon is perfectly aligned to just
perfectly cover the sun during the eclipse and there's no reason that has to be true yeah uh and
that's not true in other moon systems it's very bizarre yeah yeah uh so it's like well what about
that and you're gonna say that's just a coincidence well you can think it's he I can believe it's a
coincidence because everything is possible and there's not that many other major coincidences
like that so it would be it would it would prove the rule a coincidence is very unlikely but you
don't see lots of them you see very few of them there's one of them it happens to be a big one
yeah but but how many other things were we were we factoring into that equation yeah you know like
you know there's so many things that could like we could have turned up today wearing exactly the
same clothes but we didn't we didn't even think about it so therefore we didn't even include that
in our data set yeah but but the the fact that the moon is i think it's even 108 times the size
or something and the distance you know whatever it's got some interesting numbers it's got some
interesting numbers attached to it as well yeah um but yeah the so yeah an arcopulco you you
you're a fan?
I went once.
I was on his podcast and described why I'm an anarchist and all that.
And yeah, I mean, now that things are moving forward,
I want to focus more on people that are doing things.
But when I was in a more exploratory period of my life,
I went to Burning Man, I went to the weird places,
I exposed myself to new things.
I even moved from the East Coast to California.
Because I'm high on openness to experience.
But now that we're moving forward, I want to talk to the Free Cities community,
which is much more rigorous and much more rational and much more practical and more sane.
Something else that somebody told me yesterday who is a kind of finance person was that things are changing in our space
from a sort of backer's perspective, from a VC's perspective.
And that's noticeable.
so and that person mentioned to me also um other examples of industries which are a little bit ahead
of us like the longevity biotech industry is now becoming quite trendy to back
and that person that told me this thing is also saying according to them what we're seeing in the
free cities play space is that at the very early stages of that same experience, which is,
um, it's cool to invest in free cities. You know what I mean? It's like, it's a, it's a,
it's a thing that you do now. Oh, let's, let's, you know, and, and obviously seasteading is
almost certainly a part of that. I've always thought from the earliest time I heard about
seasteading, I said, the way to pay for this and the way to push forward innovation is biotech labs
on Seasteads.
And a guy who worked for a pharmaceutical company
reached out to me, I don't know if I told you this story,
and said, can you get me a Seastead to develop a drug on?
He's like, because my company will spend a billion dollars
on one drug.
And he's like, a lot of that is just regular,
regulations where we have to go through these stupid mouse models before we, you know, make
something that's catered to, you know, an individual human. He's like, we still have to do that. He's
like, but if we could get outside the system and go out on the sea with a floating lab and narrow
down the options of what we have to explore and figure out, you know, reduce the things we have
to explore so we know where we're going before we come back to the U.S. and run it through the
regulations, you could save my company $100 million. That guy ended up going to law school
to also become a lawyer to figure out how to do this. So the fact that that, and that guy stayed
in touch with me and has checked in with me over, you know, five, six years, contemplating whether
Seasteads can someday in the future, save pharmaceuticals companies a lot of money.
Now, in my Seasteading book, I originally had a whole biotech section about how Seasteads are going to extend your life.
I spoke to three biotech entrepreneurs who gave me really great interviews about why they want to push forward their innovations on Seasteads.
And over the course of the year, as I was finishing up the book, they all independently at some point contacted me and said,
yeah, you know, I've been thinking, I think I want to not be in your book, actually.
Yeah, I don't want the FDA looking at me. And I ended up having to take the biotech section out.
And it's like, isn't it funny? These guys are afraid of the FDA. They're afraid.
And when we were, I don't know if I told you this story either, but when we were
planning something in French Polynesia. In San Francisco, a group of physicians and medical
entrepreneurs rented out a whole restaurant in the middle of the night, like a dozen of them,
so they could meet with me and some other seasteaders about, hey, you know, if you could get us
something outside the system that's floating on the ocean. It's funny, they didn't know anything
about seasteading. They're like, they assume we must already have something floating.
but the fact that they were so serious so secretive and so afraid of being discovered
because they think they can extend healthy lifespans and human beings and they hope
seasteaders can help them i'm like man there's going to be a market for this there's going to
be a market for because the regulations don't monopoly regulations don't evolve with the
technologies they're regulating and a lot of the rules don't make sense and they're expensive
why don't they just do that on boats um well from what the pharmaceutical guy told me is
you need something that's very very stable oh like he has all he was doing unbelievable research
like whether you could even get a lab and in some kind of saltwater environment and how much
stability you would need it's a very smart guy doing a lot of work trying to figure it out on
his own and telling me don't tell anyone i'm talking to you um so i'm just talking about
biotech entrepreneurs for a while were the people banging on our doors saying where's my damn seastead
so as a non-expert it's led me to believe if we really want to extend human lifespans we need
seasteads because doing it on land is tough we better wrap up soon because i've got unfortunately
another guest coming in but um i want to go back to what we originally started talking about which
was there's a there's a new sort of renewed interest in everything free cities but seasteading
certainly and it's because of the new things that seem to have all come to a head in the last year
suddenly prototypes ideas what what's your view as probably someone who's the most connected with
all the different projects and stuff you don't know you're achieving something until 99%
percent of people hate you. I think seasteaders are there. They're not laughing at us. Now they're
afraid. And then that 1% gets inspired and gets involved. The grants of the world, the Mitchells
of the world, the Masons of the world. There's more and more of them spending millions to build
seasteads. And there's more and more maritime lawyers volunteering their time. There's lawyers
who work with flagging registries volunteering their time. What's fascinating about it is in
every case don't tell my colleagues i'm talking to you um if if if the if people are threatened
by what you're doing you're getting somewhere but what about your opinion on what needs to happen
sooner rather than later then for me i think the solution is seasteading no i mean in the industry
like what are the main what are the main hurdles that you have ahead of you what i have ahead of
me is I need a legal ecosystem for Mitchell and Mason to send their seasteads where they are safe.
They're safe for families. I want to integrate. Seasteads are radical enough. I want to integrate
it into international law. We've graduated from the pioneers to the businessmen that are just
going to sell you a product. And yesterday, those products went on sale for the first time.
and I need them to be safe, insured and legal on the oceans.
I want a flag.
So the Seastead Institute needs to raise the money
to hopefully control the certification society
that will make Seasteads safe and legal on two-thirds of the Earth's surface.
How is...
Do Grant's ones need classification?
Yes, but...
But how come he building them in the Seychelles or whatever Because he still doing everything within the territorial waters of a country There a bureaucratic roadblock which you described really well actually
which is once it's moved out there,
what is the status of this thing?
Are you going to declare that a pirate?
Because as it is, if you don't integrate into the system,
anyone can board you and you have no protection.
Also, I want to be protected from the crazy cowboys
that do risky things.
You know, I want to be able to say
there's a certification process,
there's an insurer that will insure you
and a flagging registry that will flag you.
And now I feel safe saying your grandma
and your infant can go stay on this CSET
and they'll be safe.
Won't the market provide that though, eventually?
Because initially you could have guys
that don't flag, don't insure, don't certify
and just go out like Samuele Landy.
Yeah, but that's their problem.
I mean, they will just end up getting boarded and sunk or whatever, which has already happened, right?
So what I mean is, won't Grant at some point realize, well, look, this thing's taken off.
I need to get classification for these things.
Therefore, I need to stump up the money.
Right.
But he does all that within the system of being in territorial waters so far.
Yeah, but when he moves out, I mean, eventually.
It'd be good if it was the Seasteading Institute, but I suspect the market will provide in the end.
I would love it. I would love if a normal certification society says, okay, we're going to integrate Seasteads.
No, but they'd pay for it. I mean, Grant will pay for it because if he wants his product to travel into international waters, he needs it.
Yes. And Mitchell needs it. And Mitchell's kind of relying on us. I mean, both Mitchell and Mason.
Mason doesn't need it, actually.
Mason doesn't need it.
Yeah.
He's a catamaran, right?
Yeah. He's going to fit into the catamaran category.
Yeah, he told me.
But presumably, the economy as it evolves will pay for that, because it'll have to.
But you want costs to be far enough down that it doesn't become impossible for a normal family to buy one.
But also, if you classify, say, ARC pads and grants one, what's grants called?
CPOD.
If a new thing is invented, do you have to then get that classified as well?
If it's a fundamentally different structure, there may be different rules we want to apply to that.
But I think-
Does it cost as much or is it more like just an addition?
Well, what I'm worried about with existing classification societies is they're looking for a way to make a lot of money because they can already charge the oil and gas industry a lot of money.
So they can make it, oh, your first arc pad, you know, we'll just categorize that as a flotel.
And then you have $100,000 worth of regulations every year you have to deal with.
And I'm like, no, we want, I already have a team of volunteers that's combed through the regulations for buoys and different things and taken 5% and put them into one model that we think will apply to seasteads.
But it does depend on the type of structure.
The key thing that these things all have in common is that it's going to stay at sea.
It's not going to come to shore at all.
so it's kind of like a combination of a buoy a coral reef a flotel and a a spar so basically
i'm comparing our conversation last year the flat the classification thing hasn't moved on a huge
amount the prototypes and the the business models and all that stuff has right so you're still you're
still banging up against this problem of classification well we've learned a hell of a
lot in the last year the the businessmen are moving forward they they're funded the marine
engineers are moving forward they're funded the seasteading institute is moved as far as we can
get with volunteers because we need to 10x our budget because we've got to pay maritime lawyers
and lawyers with uh flagging registries to to make a classification to make these rules and to
negotiate with the people they already have relationships with. And they're not seasteaders,
they're professionals. And these are the people that want to make it happen. So yeah, the Seasteading
Institute needs the budget to get a flag for all seasteaders. And I'll tell you what, when I think
when we get this flag, maybe I'll just retire because that's when seasteading will start all
over the oceans. You'll have different people soliciting that flag, different aquapreneurs to
To get their Seastead out there.
And then you have other flagging registries competing to offer you different kind of governance models.
Is that supposed to be an incentive for us to donate?
Yes.
No, that you'll retire.
You said, when we get the flag, I'll retire.
I'm like, well, that's worth donating for, surely.
We never have to hear from Joe Quirk again.
If you want to get the Seavangelist to finally shut up, get us a flag.
Donate to the Seasteading Institute.
big money so we can pay the professionals. But you told me last year it's like millions,
right? Or a million or something. I'm constantly trying to figure it out because there's so many
roads you can take. So the best thing about going to these maritime conferences with real maritime
lawyers who I'm showing them Grand Seapod for the first time. First of all, they think my idea is not
crazy. That gives me a lot of confidence. But they also support the idea that I thought was too risky,
which is, you know what, you might need to just go out there and build it.
And just do it. And then provoke a conversation. And then get people involved.
And then there'll be an argument about how do we categorize these things, what do we do?
So there's always been sea sitters that take that approach, that just go out there
and do it and get people talking about it But I you know if we had done it the safe way the Thai Navy wouldn have attacked Chad and Nadia because that would have been an act of war against a flagged vessel
But since it was just a prototype
and they were in process of getting a flag for the next one,
there was no one to stand up for them.
Grant's model is intended to,
I mean, he's got two models, hasn't he?
One's intended to stay quite close
The other one's meant to go into international water, is it?
Yeah.
Right, okay.
So he's got one model.
And what about ARC pads?
ARC pads are intended to go, they're going to start close to land.
And hopefully the first one will be floating off the coast of Prospera.
He's also developing the business model, the aquaculture business to support ARC pads.
And he's already got stuff in the Philippines where people can come stay the night on his hexa farm.
So he's thinking about it systematically.
And the next step is to,
he's already got a sea mountain mind
off the coast of the Philippines.
Oh, wow.
A sea mountain.
A sea mountain is like a mountain in the sea
that doesn't break the surface.
So you can kind of anchor to it.
So those are probably the first places
seasteads will be.
And there's tens of thousands of those
all over the sea.
And some of them are very fat, flat,
you know 50 meters below the surface big giant mountains where you could build a city and some
of those are off the coast of brazil other off the coast of the seychelles islands lots of places to
build seastead cities so that's well that's the that's the answer then so you need some money
and they they're just chugging along as normal they got the money and so the maritime lawyers
are falling behind the businessmen and the engineers, and the maritime lawyers need to
catch up, and the seasteading institute needs to pay them. And the reason the nonprofit is doing it
is because this would be a service to all seasteaders everywhere. I also want to control
the designation seastead. I don't want every crazy Samuel Landy to be able to say they're a seastead.
And this will be an amazing service to the movement, and we'll keep the price down and
keep it cheap and if some other classification society wants to take on this job i would be
delighted but we need to we need the set of rules for what seasteads are going to be
well good luck we need the insurance thank you
i better put my hat on before we can and at the very least this is all happening because of the
storytelling of the seasteading institute and we're gonna at the very least we're gonna keep
that going and so we need to raise that money as well make the seasteading institute great again
right joe it's another year it's over you've got to go back to the drudgery of trying to promote
c-steading amongst normies now which is the hard part um thanks for coming well congratulations on
your award as well within the free cities ecosystem you've been honored as one of the pioneers
i think it's what it's probably the award i'm most proud of because that's how i think of myself
as a storyteller who makes things happen.
The worst humble brag I've ever heard.
It's like, I just complimented you on getting an award
and you said, you know what?
It's one of the best ones I've ever got.
Well, yeah, I've gotten, you know, I've gotten awards.
I've gotten so many awards.
It's ridiculous.
But I actually quite like this one.
It's quite cute, you know, it's like.
Well, it's an award for being a storyteller.
Yeah.
I mean, I've gotten awards.
But this one is very special.
We've all got plenty of awards.
Anyway, right.
Yeah, thanks for coming in.
See you next year, probably.
Maybe somewhere in the meantime.
I don't know.
I'm actually planning a sort of Central America trip next year.
So you are going to bring the podcast to the next conference in?
Oh, fuck, yeah, of course.
Oh, man, great.
No, no, the podcast is exploding, mate.
Just like everything in this industry.
The podcast is the strongest it's ever been.
Like I say, I'm just bringing on a bunch of new sponsors.
I'm going to go full-time on the podcast properly.
It's the best podcast in the world.
I've listened to many many many of your episodes so I think so is it I don't know I think actually
there's a there's one podcast I listen to that is also amazing it's nothing to do with anything
you probably it doesn't matter which one it is but some podcasts are good yeah some some podcasts
are a bit drowl and boring and stuff but no in in us in our um ecosystem is the best one
for sure and it's the most it's the most listened to is the most subscribed to is but every no it
I must admit, being here this time was quite touching.
I had quite a number of people come up and say, listen to it every week without fail.
Or I queue up 10 episodes and listen to them all and stuff.
So it is working.
And it's not just the fact that we talk about these kind of things.
It's the fact that I think it is also the way we do it.
The way we talk about them.
Yeah.
Which is, that's my, that's what I want to happen, you know.
And it's also the production value.
You know, I'm on a small budget, but I come from the world of filmmaking.
So I want to create something nice.
And I know how to do it on a small budget, you know.
I've learned so much from your podcast.
You talk to all the people I'm interested in learning from.
I've learned so much from your podcast.
I've been on Rogan.
I love Joe Rogan.
I prefer your podcast.
We're talking about the things I'm interested in.
It's more of a niche market.
Yes.
And your guests are just consistently the people I want to hear from.
And it's really a deep going conversation.
And sometimes it's mind blowing.
Well, the going forward, my plan is to distill the guest list.
That I mean I been on this process of basically just getting who I can to then just getting who is in my vicinity to then now starting like nobody says no now everybody wants to come on I was over subscribed I had to turn three people away this
last few days everyone wants to come on the show um so so and I've learned a lot about who the good
speakers are it's not just about getting the good the big names or the the people with the best
projects it's actually about getting the people that make the best conversation as well and that's
a that was one i've kind of come to the conclusion that um i don't like putting out episodes that i
know are a little bit boring but some of them are and there's nothing i can do about that some
sometimes i have to speak to someone who has a project you have to speak to them and some people
don't really have experience of conversation the weird thing is um the number of people who
we have a conversation and then afterwards they say blime blimey i've never i've never had an
interview like that before and it's not even that i think they've never candidly spoke to a stranger
before you know what i mean yeah it's weird i speak candidly to every single person i meet
there's no on off switch for me this is when you speak to me tonight and the bub
I'm just talking it's just like this yeah but it's surprising how many people
don't and especially in the one-on-one interview type situation they click into
question-and-answer mode and most people don't that's all they only they only
know how to do question and answers I've got no questions and no answers on a
piece of paper you know and that is I think that's what I'm I'm proud of is
It's maintaining that and keeping that going in this space.
Because, you know, we could have had a flagship podcast that was quite crap, let's face it.
Like a lot of industries have a crap podcast, right?
But I think we've got a good one.
I'm proud of it.
It's making money.
I've got everyone wants to be on it.
The listenership's going up.
You know, I'm going to try and go to two episodes a week.
Oh, great.
Yeah, but I need to, I will be on it five days a week solidly if that's the case.
But what I was thinking was I might do a midweek online interview.
So it would be lower quality, but it means I can reach out to people all around the world at any time.
Yeah, try and see how it goes.
Yeah.
I know you're kind of against that because you like this kind of thing.
Yeah, but there's a reason for that.
And that's the realization I had on this now when I was popping into the conference and people were coming up and saying congratulations on the podcast.
everyone mentioned that they thought it was high quality to look at i mean you you can look around
here it's it's low budget but they don't know that they don't know what those cameras look like
you know this is this is a thousand dollars worth of equipment that's it and me and pressing all the
buttons as long as that little red you know how to work it well no as long as that i can see a red
dot there and a red dot there and a red dot there we're good and i bought it all secondhand because
the the you know there's a small budget at the free students foundation well actually the budget
is going up now because I'm getting sponsorship.
So I don't know.
I feel happy to go forwards with it
and really turn it into something bigger.
This podcast is going to grow like seasteading.
Oh, shit.
That rate.
Don't say that.
I don't want to wait 60 years before I see it.
No, as far as it's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
And I recommend Aldo Antonori,
one of the great talkers and salesmen ever,
who was at this conference,
who's the reason Seasteading is in Panama.
What, he was there this time?
He was there this time.
Aldo Antonori.
I don't even know who that is.
The subject is why Panama is an option for libertarians.
I wish I didn't know.
I had the list of people I could have picked anyone to interview
and it was hard to fit everyone in in the timescale.
But I didn't put him in for some reason.
Also, you advised me to talk to someone about democracy
that I wrote down.
Frank Karsten.
Yeah, I've reached out to him and he said yes, but he lives in Amsterdam.
So it's a case of whenever I can get to Amsterdam.
But like I say, no one says no.
It's great.
It's a really lovely resource to have, to phone someone up or to send them an email and say,
do you want to come and chat for two hours?
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I'd love to.
It's like I never had that opportunity before to say that.
Can I come and just drill, you know, have a really stupid conversation with you?
And like, no, you can't.
I don't know who you are.
Yeah.
Aldo Antonori, Frank Carsten.
Those are two good ones.
Right.
I will do that.
Great.
Thanks, Joe.
Let's knock it on the head now.
That's two and a half.
Two and a half hours.
I could do another two and a half with you.
I know, but you can't because I've got four today.
Four more?
No, I've got four.
So I've got one straight.
Yeah, three more.
I'm doing four a day.
There was the only way.
I started doing four.
I'm doing 20 in five days.
Five, four.
Glorious.
glorious well it it's quite by the end of it in the evenings it's quite i'm quite you know it's
like a little bit hallucinating a little bit like tension and you know i've i that's my limit for
three i should be doing three and i last year did three but i couldn't fit everyone in this time
there's so many new people in the space that i wanted to talk to you know yeah last year i got
you at the end when you were hallucinating and i think that's why you were so easily convinced
probably yeah anyway great let's uh let's do this again in a year or in in actually yeah
in prosper mate next time let's do it in the real free city nice to see you again thank you sir