 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris and I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Joe Quirk, president of the Seasteading Institute. He is the co-author along with Patrick Friedman of Seasteading, how floating nations will restore the environment, enrich the poor, cure the sick, and liberate humanity from politicians. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Joe. Thanks for inviting me, guys. It's great to be with you. Now, it may be obvious from the term, but what is Seasteading? Just to get off at the point one here. Seasteading is homesteading the high sea and the technology for building floating cities and floating communities on the ocean is at hand and Seasteaders want to make it happen sooner than otherwise because almost half the earth's surface is unclaimed by any existing nation state and Seasteaders want to empower people to have basically startup nano nations on the ocean. That seems like a pretty bold move that sounds pretty science fiction, which I'm sure as you say in the book consistently, the biggest question you usually get is, are you crazy? And so maybe that's the next question is like, are you crazy? Isn't the sea dangerous and volatile and barren? That'd be a good description of space and yet people are taking going to Mars very seriously. And the thing about living on the ocean is that science fiction is science fact. We already have oil rigs, which are on the high seas and very high waves for decades at a time. We have cruise ships that are essentially self governing floating cities. And Seasteading is a way of combining these two technologies for permanent living on the sea combining with the governance technology of cruise ship. Buckminster Fuller designed a floating city and unveiled it way back in 1968. It was featured in Lyndon Johnson's White House and people were taking very seriously the concept of floating cities. But the whole thing got derailed by the Cold War as people got distracted by the race to space to compete with the Russians. And guys like Elon Musk were young kids growing up reading science fiction about going to Mars and imagining that by the time they were grown up we're all going to go to Mars and then they grew up and realized it hadn't happened and they're mad and now they're trying to make it happen. But we're completely skipping the sea and I like to tell people that we live on planet ocean two-thirds of the earth's surfaces water. If you want to go deep down below the ocean you're basically that's like 98 percent of the living space. If you're interested in alien intelligence we have cephalopods like cuttlefish. They're highly alien intelligences. But most interesting to sea stedders is the chance to completely start over and to empower as many people as possible to start over. So we have 193 nation states governing 7.6 billion people. I live near Silicon Valley. Seasteading is sort of a Silicon Valley approach to the problem of governments sucking which is basically if you think that solutions come from startups and you think if you can create platforms whereby people can choose among different governance structures and you could actually create a peaceful market of governance at sea and people could choose among them you'd basically have a research and development department on the ocean for people to try different sort of governance ideas and as long as people can choose among them voluntarily we will unleash voluntary tiny societies on the ocean that can attach to each other get bigger break off from each other go elsewhere. We essentially have a variation by governments and selection by citizens which sea stedders believe will unleash evolution in governance itself and you can imagine libertarians are very attracted to this idea. So if the advantage of this though is that you can build these things outside of the territory of governments won't we just run into the same problem that Silicon Valley startups are starting to notice now with you know government calls for regulation of Facebook that it's one thing when you're small and no one's really you know you can you're just ignored by the governments but if seasteading actually became competitive or was done in substantial numbers wouldn't governments just decide maybe we do own those parts of the seas and not allow it? I think the greatest threat to seasteading is what you just described it's certainly not technological or business or anything like that and the great thing about old governments is that they're dinosaurs they move very slowly they're very dumb so Facebook can scale up and get a billion users before the government wakes up and starts getting upset that people like Facebook better than them and when people worry about you know governments worrying about seasteads and doing something about it I just cite historical precedents you know China doesn't invade Hong Kong because it's a blatant slap in the face of everything that communist China represented you know it's this little defenseless flea that created all these free markets and created so much prosperity it basically persuaded China to change its views the Cayman Islands off the coast of the US has no standing army takes a very spiteful stance with regard to welcoming medical mavericks and financial innovators and the US doesn't invade it they just sort of ignore it because it's it provides a surface so I always think of if nation states are like sharks you want to if you're a seastead you want to think like a cleaner fish you want to provide a service that the nation state appreciates I think it'll take so long before seasteads are actually some sort of threat to existing governments that seasteads have the power to scale up considerably there's a really great precedent to show how little governments care about you know new floating societies that are very rebellious so there was an abandoned seaford known as Fort Ruff's off the coast of England and it was outside the territorial jurisdiction of England at that time and there were some pirate radio stations out there playing pirate radio that was basically not legal because the BBC only wanted to play rock and roll sometimes but this was fulfilling people's desire to play to play music all the time and this guy named Patty Roy Beatz basically sailed out there kicked off the rivals and declared himself a sovereign nation and when the Royal Navy ships sort of strayed into what they claimed is their territorial waters his son Michael basically fired a warning shot and it's like WTF what these guys are crazy and so what happens is did Britain try to invade did they swoop in and shoot these three crazy guys no they just sort of ignored it and and they kind of brought weapons charges against the Bates family and a British judge ruled that well they're outside the territorial waters of Britain so we don't have jurisdiction and it kept getting crazier another pirate radio rival tried to invade and take the the little 120 meter nation away from from from Bates and they like captured him and imprisoned him and then so a German diplomat like went and negotiated with Bates as if he was a sovereign country and then Bates seed this you know released the prisoner but then said aha you've negotiated with me that means you recognize me as an independent state so you couldn't get more provocative than these guys they've established a three generation dynasty on this silly little ugly sea fort the the territorial waters of England has since expanded to include sea land what's called the principality of sea land but they remain a self-declared micro nation Britain has not done anything about it they're just letting them do their crazy thing and and last I checked they were claiming 60 thousand six hundred thousand dollars US dollars GDP just just from selling like stamps and sponsoring a soccer team and and you know offering ducatums to people so you know I hope I'm involved with the first sea setting company now and we're not going to be as provocative as that we're not going to fire cannons at at Navy ships we're not going to capture people and imprison them but if if that crazy guy can establish his own little nation and governments basically don't care and he can actually make a profit that it's basically the ugliest smallest nation in the world I think that's a great precedent for what sea steds are capable of and a great example of how little the old big governments don't care because attacking a floating algae farm is basically going to be a PR nightmare now there are what 195 nations 3193 193 nations right now and they are competing with each other and it's you can you can move I mean some of them are more restrictive than others but you can move typically from one to another and yet none of them few if any of them are what libertarians would consider you know market utopias or the kind of place that were you know that we imagine these sea spads might be and so if it if among those nearly 200 nations we haven't seen any of them embrace these kind the kind of values that that we would like to see what makes us think that the sea steds would be any better well the stampede of people like us racing to sea sted to volunteer and get involved and make it happen so I think a really cool way to look at this is through the lens of special economic zones so we tend to think of nation states as being these great big things that control everybody inside them but they're disintegrating from the bottom up and so I mentioned Hong Kong earlier the first interesting little special economic zone that just a random experiment that happened accidentally through historical Caprice created so much wealth it ended up converting China into being a much more open market and a half billion people escaped extreme poverty that was such an interesting experiment that China allowed you know 14 more little special economic zones within its nation and those all created so much wealth right now probably more than half of all Chinese people have migrated to these special economic zones so in a sense people are already have already left the old poor communist rural China and moved to these much more prosperous free marketplaces this set of precedent where different countries around the world especially in the southern hemisphere started experimenting with little free ports little I think of them as legal islands allowing special exemptions from taxes and regulations to create prosperity and overall some special economic zones have failed some have succeeded some have been corrupted some have been spectacularly successful such as Shenzhen in China that basically more than 4,000 have proliferated across the world in the last 50 years it's completely peaceful it's a bottom up inside out revolution in governance as Tom W. Bell calls it who has been on he has been on free thoughts before yeah yeah he's the author of your next government question mark from nation states to stateless nations so it's already happening but these things are only so free so there's a there's this revolution and freedom to me this is the most momentous political revolution it's sweeping the world you mentioned 193 nation states well over 4,000 special economic zones have been completely outnumbered so the Tom W. Bell is the kind of the John Adams kind of the father of the C zone where he takes the best practices of all these special economic zones and he wants to instantiate them on the first floating legal structure which would be the C zone which we hope to establish in an island nation soon and continue this evolution of better freer governance that's interesting because your book is extremely optimistic and kind of surprising to the point that you feel like I felt like I was being pitched and I came to believe it more and more almost almost like I was being pitched time chairs in Mexico I can't miss real estate opportunity all the stuff but the really interesting thing about it was all these people not necessarily libertarians doing different technological things we're kind of converging on the same idea in terms of how to get food how to get energy how to get different things from the ocean and how to build floating structures that can sustain it's it's not just libertarians it's coming from a bunch of different angles yeah it's interesting like it's it actually works best if you don't say the L word because that sets up people's you know psychological immune systems but as soon as you tell the world hey we're going to set up a platform you can completely start over with with a new governance system innovators come stampeding to you they don't need to self-identify as libertarian no more than a you know an American vacationer who steps on a cruise ship is changing ideologies because now they're getting free market health care and free market security on a self-governing ship with it with a dictator don't ask the captain you know they're not changing what their beliefs are but it's about the proliferation of choices and providing different places where people can experiment with different social structures and crucially people bring their own business ideas to see steady like crazy uh and environmentalists are interested in algae farms and seaweed cultivation and conservatives are interested in a new frontier uh people socialist want to create their own seastead everybody with a different idea who wants to prove their point to the world can get their own seastead build their own business model and then succeed or fail in the eyes of the public on their own terms that's the the great thing about seasteads is the uh the people who try them absorb the cost of failure and hopefully prosperity will be shared and the world can watch and see which systems work and we don't have to rely on politicians to impose systems from previous centuries from the top down on us so practically what does life on a seastead look like because i mean to to be perfectly honest like the the idea of living on an oil rig doesn't strike me as super appealing me neither and it always depends on whether we're talking about seasteading in 2025 or 2055 so i hope uh that the company that i helped co-found uh called blue frontiers will build the first very modest seastead uh in french polynesia which is right in the middle of the blue frontier which is the pacific ocean uh and if that works that'll be for around uh 300 people if people want to check it out go to blue-frontiers.com we have lots of visuals there we've already designed how it's going to look we've already got the engineers and it's basically going to look like a floating hobbiton uh basically green roofs it's going to look like any other island from a distance it's going to be inside a protected lagoon so there's no waves so we're going to be using existing technology it's basically uh this the same engineers who built the floating pavilion in roder dam are going to build something about seven and a half times as big which will be the first seastead if all goes according to plan with blue frontiers so but what about seasteading in 20 uh 55 uh hopefully by then you know oil rigs already are way too expensive only uh oil and gas exploration companies could afford them so if you think of seasteads as the intersection the confluence of material science of 3d printing of people i have colleagues working on geopolymer concrete and all this sort of stuff the way it would work is basically the way buckminster fuller uh designed it you know 50 years ago which is much of the seastead will be deep below the water the physical structure of the seastead where it'll have like tremendous ballast so if you put a lot of weight uh far down below the sea um you can create incredible stability and then have pilings which are basically pillars that go up high above the waves and then your city floats on top of it um so you have these very high waves your city well above it um and there's something called the flip ship if this seems like futuristic to you i'd encourage your listeners to look up the flip ship flip it's been in operation on the ocean since like 1962 and it's basically like a baseball bat thing think of it as a wine bottle that's much bigger where four-fifths of it is below the ocean basically uses ballast tanks to float in the oceans and it's described as being as stable as a fence post in 60-foot waves and that's just one little floating giant wine bottle you can think of it and robert ballard discoverer of the titanic and famous oceanographer he's a seasteading fan he's featured in the book and he wants to take flips put platforms on top of them high above the waves and create stable structures on the sea so in many ways large enough and deep enough structures on the ocean can be more stable and safe than coastal communities um safer in tsunamis which don't uh become destructive until they reach land tsunamis are harmless on the deep sea so it's it's basically the principle of of ballast below the oceans yeah when i when i read the part about the flip uh i immediately went to look it up as you and i do suggest listeners look it up it stands for floating floating instrument platform and there's a video on youtube of it of it turning it's it's like a big barge and then you fill it up and then it floats with part of it sticking out but four-fifths of it underwater it's it's pretty incredible um you get into in the book you also get into uh the well you seem to think the seasteading is almost imperative first of all rather than up whether it would be fun to do or good to do to get out of government but it would imperative in terms of food production and fuel production food in particular is pretty interesting what could how we could farm the sea yes in the book i feature uh rickardo radulovich who is one of many seaweed farmers who want to mass farm the oceans and the amazing thing about seaweed is that um um there are thousands of different species of algae that are edible uh it's more healthy than corn wheat or soy on which we base much of the food we eat now which is basically not healthy uh and the incredible thing about um ocean-based crops is that they can be environmentally restorative so this is way beyond sustainable and this is you can think of this as the libertarian answer to environmentalist critiques which is that there's a type of seaweed called macro-synthesis i think it's called it's been called the um the redwood of the ocean and in order to build its biomass these different kinds of seaweed need to draw tremendous nutrients and carbonic acid from the oceans basically and our posts are just polluted with dead zones which are caused by agriculture and all the agricultural runoff that runs into the oceans and dumps all this nutrient wealth that can be used by seaweed farms which would basically restore those areas i'm very uh intimately aware of this i wrote a whole book before i discovered seasteading about the problems of agricultural runoff and its effect on coastal oceans and its effect on marine mammals it's it's really brutal you can imagine these dead zones as they're called restore to their pristine conditions by eating imagine if you had a company called restorative foods i was trying to found a company like that with a friend of a libertarian friend of mine in big agriculture to try to make this go and we spoke to maybe a half dozen seaweed farmers in california none of whom have a particular ideology but all find the regulations in california and in the u.s so onerous they can't scale up their vision and they want to get outside uh the existing jurisdictions and scale up their seaweed farms and neil sims who i also features in the book he's a fish farmer he says uh you know first come the farms and then come the cities you got to establish the business model out there it's just like the western frontier and that sea stands can be thought of as the covered wagons you get out there you get your seaweed farm you get some workers on there you start hiring people then the towns will come on their own what's the economy of these things look like like i guess i'll start with just how much would it cost to live on one of these early or in development sea steds so the first sea sted in the early 2020s that will be established by blue frontiers will have to be competitive with beachfront property so if you take uh it's going to be about 7500 square meters if you divide that up among 300 people it comes out to about 200 000 per person which is steep but some of the islands are designed for small apartments and things like that so it has to be the only way the close to shore sea steds will compete economically is that they have to offer something that's less expensive than the land that's right on the shore especially the beachfront property and the great thing about sea steds is that even though it may be more expensive to build a floating neighborhood than a neighborhood on land the land is more expensive than the water the sea sted doesn't have to pay for the land so if you establish a sea zone in a lagoon off the coast of some beautiful bungalows in tahiti we could conceivably make the sea steds cheaper than what people are already paying for with bungalows and hotels and apartments on the beaches of tahiti so do you expect people like in the first wave to be telecommuters from silicon valley kind of people because it doesn't there's no jobs there i mean you don't have someone at least going to work at mcdonald's able to go live on a seastead not only because they can't afford it but there's no mcdonald's there or other services so as initially is it do you expect kind of people who are telecommuting to live there the first one is going to feature various businesses it's very important to me that the first sea steds set a stellar example so we plan to have scientific researchers in the blue economy wave energy generation technologies on there we plan to have homes for students to come and learn i want it to be beautiful and to integrate economic classes some of it will be villas for you know families others will be small apartments and all those people will require services and so we hired an economic modeling firm known as mc which gave a third party estimate that by the time the we're going to do these sea steds in three phases the first one succeeds we're it's going to triple in size over about 10 years and they made a an independent assessment of the economic activity that will be created by this when you consider ecotourism and potential underwater apartments where you can see through the aquarium walls at how floating sea steds can be environmentally restorative and the commuting back and forth it'll be a short ferry ride from from shore so people will probably work there and go back and forth mc estimated that by the end of phase three when there'll probably be less than a thousand people on there the the sea stead will produce it you know at least 760 direct jobs and a lot more indirect jobs when you consider entrepreneurship on shore to service the various people that will be coming out to visit this amazing floating island that looks like a real island and that's not blue frontiers estimates that's a that's a third an independent third party so once you're on the water there's all sorts of things you can do better like solar for instance floating solar is about 20 percent more efficient than solar on land because you use the water to cool the solar panels and the the first sea stead the engineers who work with us plan to use that warmed water to for the showers for the dishwasher for all that sort of stuff so even just the sheer incubation hub and the center for excellence that will be concentrated on the sea set alone i think will give work to all sorts of network effects so that as people expand anyone that wants a new jurisdiction where they could do something interesting they will come to you and probably the industry most beating on our doors is medical research and healthcare professionals who want to get outside existing systems and start regulatory startups what does the governance system look like like do the people who live there have an input into the the laws and regulations on the sea stead are there taxes or fees does this does it look like you know being on a cruise ship like that that you know dictatorship that you mentioned earlier does it look more like a democratic nation state well if it's when it starts very small it'll be uh under the jurisdiction of french to palanese which will also be under the jurisdiction of france but we will negotiate considerable regulatory and administrative autonomy through the sea zone and if french palanese assigns into law our sea zone it'll basically be no personal tax no corporate tax it'll be largely uh self-regulating and uh we're committed to the decentralization of governance the currency we're committed the the token of exchange we're committed to using is called varion var y o n which is uh sort of like a cryptocurrency um that people are buying already they're in we're in presale now to raise money for the sea stead so it'll be radically uh decentralized and people who own varion will have a say in some governance decisions so the whole philosophy of seasteading and our approach to uh currency is the decentralization of power so we want to take uh special economic zones to the next step in evolution which is governance will be developed from the bottom up i can get into more details on that but the the basic idea is that as long as people can create different societies voluntarily go bankrupt if they don't work and then other people can choose them voluntarily and the crucial mechanism is that people can leave voluntarily you could detach your miniature island float away and go somewhere else so if you can decentralize the very ground beneath your feet we'll develop uh governance from the bottom up uh so the best way of governing ourselves no one knows how to do it but we uh it waits to be discovered on the oceans in my opinion now you guys have lots of intelligent listeners so i'm sure they want the actual uh details if i was in the mainstream i wouldn't get into this but so what you know what are the first floating islands by blue frontiers how are they going to be governed um they're going to be maximally inclined towards uh economic and personal freedom and so basically in with french polynesia if they pass the season blue frontiers in french polynesia will choose a peer group of countries among the most peaceful and prosperous and well-run countries on earth and then those countries will choose the regulations in the season and the way it works is if all those say there's a dozen you know of the best countries if all of those have a law or a rule they can all agree that that law rule should be on the sea zone if a single country dissents say uh switzerland says our country runs just fine without that rule even though the other 11 countries say they require it then that rule of regulation won't be instantiated on the sea zone so it's uh when i first joined the sea stating institute i learned the term uh strategic incrementalism so it's going to be the next step it's going to be the most socially free and the most economically free but because it's not yet on the high seas it won't be completely free you know criminal law france will be in charge of that and so it'll sort of be like uh taking slow engineering steps uh out onto the high seas while also taking steady legal steps uh towards steadily towards complete freedom on the high seas which is the ultimate goal of sea stating well and as you say in the book many times that and i've said in different contexts too is that one of the goals of freedom is you don't exactly know what it looks like because freedom is a discovery process and so at this stage in sea stating i think the analogy you use is is asking whoever created the transistor what uh the computer look what kind of things people will do on the computer in the future whereas the architecture is the transistor but who knows you know the app store and what apps are going to be created that's all unpredictable in its own way yeah apps i i love the analogy of apps because you know people say well what what kind of government are you going to create joke work on your seastead and you know not to compare myself to steve jobs but i'll do it anyway it's like steve jobs wasn't creating an iphone so he can have an iphone with one app on it he's trying to create the platforms where other people can bring their apps in my case governance apps and as long as people can choose among them uh the best apps will emerge and the crappy ones will go away and then we'll have this huge proliferation of things we couldn't imagine serving us in the area of governance that certainly we couldn't imagine before we had the platform and i always use the analogy of of ben franklin the difference between you know centralized control of innovation monopolies and decentralized experimentation so ben franklin genius uh innovated in the control of electricity and innovated in governance one of the most advanced guys of his day so his uh experimentations with and control of electricity led to inventions that he couldn't possibly have imagined that have permeated every area of our life it's the only reason we're able to talk about it ben franklin wouldn't even recognize a light bulb you know from the from the franklin stove to this iphone i'm talking you on no one could have come to him and said well what good will this electricity do how will how will people be lit in the future he couldn't have really answered but he also helped write the rules the parameters for the united states government with a quill pen when information traveled at the speed of a horse and we haven't had any updates since then we've added more rules we we have the same methods by which we choose our rulers uh it's it's changed over time but there haven't been startups there haven't been revolutionary uh new ideas that the ben franklin's of today can try out and you know the north america at that time was basically a giant sea stand with the smartest people in the world went and tried something new and it worked so much better it ended up converting the whole world and uh you know i think of another story i like to tell is um steve wasniak i think a steve wasniak is a moderate from ben franklin he uh he worked at hewlett packard hewlett packard was a big monstrous company uh steve wasniak was loyal to hewlett packard he loved working at hewlett packard and he designed the personal computer and he pitched it to his superiors at hewlett packard uh five separate times they said no five separate times and with great reluctance he quit um and he went off and founded a company with steve jobs that steve jobs named apple and that design became the initial design for the personal computer so if steve wasniak couldn't leave and try something else outside at his own risk we wouldn't have had apple it wouldn't have happened so to me sea stating is a platform for the wasniaks of governance the the internet and books are full of people with all sorts of ideas for how governance could work better and there's no place where they can be tried out you know my co-author on this book is patry freedman he's the grandson of milton freedman he's the son of david freedman i'm very persuaded by their ideas i would like to have a place where those ideas can be tried and to see what emerges unpredictably it'll certainly be better than whatever i can imagine and whatever emerges among floating societies in 2035 will not resemble the idea ideologies we have now they'll completely defy our limited little minds because we'll engage the global brain on behalf of innovating in governance the same way the global brain is innovated on behalf of technologies based on electricity now if i've learned anything from you know movies like the perfect storm or the crab fishing show deadliest catch that the sea is pretty dangerous and it has some pretty bad storms that come up and you mentioned tsunamis and but even in this place in tahiti if it is modular to the point that you can actually detach one of them if a typhoon comes won't that almost just destroy the entire thing the oceans are very dangerous uh just as tornadoes on land are dangerous and we should keep in mind that you know planes still fly and boats still sail the seas so you want to start your seastead not in highway of conditions preferably close to the equator where waters are warm and very low the french polynesia especially the areas around where we're going to start seasteading if if uh french polynesia approves are some of the water warmest and lowest calmest waters on the ocean and we'll start inside a protected lagoon which is sort of a protected atoll actually which is like a natural wave breaker it's like as the volcano knows slowly sink before below the oceans over millions of years they form these nice little rings uh we're inside it's like turquoise and lovely and calm and you can put your seastead right inside one of those and french polynesias has many many many atolls stretching over an area the size of western europe which is what uh french polynesia controls but it's still a hurricane would would disrupt that atoll to some extent wouldn't it sure but they don't get cyclones of that magnitude we have to account our our engineers are dutch and they build things to account for the the one in a 10 000 year storm they're very proud of that um so uh the big hurricanes that you see in other parts of the ocean don't really occur in this area they do get the occasional cyclone um but the people who live on those islands and the boats that are there and the cruise ships that sail there all weather those things and our first seastead will too uh and it's about being sort of tethered to the ocean inside an atoll tethered to the seafloor inside an atoll creating a kind of stability realistically how big can this get so seasteading as a whole like will it will it always remain small nations that you know a handful of people live on or will could we see significant numbers of people eventually living on the open ocean I think we could get a floating Hong Kong because as these different little things compete um some of them will work very well and then there'll be a runaway process where the economy will start to grow so fast that others will come there's also an incentive to provide superior governance because the bigger your seastead the more stable it is in waves and the longer it can stay out there and I can imagine a floating venice with little moats for roads where people can move their seastead in and out but the more of these things you can lock up the the the higher you know the the more dangerous conditions you can remain in you know imagine uh you know uh oil platforms where there's a hundred or a thousand of them all locked up together and to get an idea of how fast a prospering economy can grow I I always uh point to Shenzhen which is a fishing village that was right across the street from Hong Kong and was the first uh imitation of Hong Kong that China allowed and you know at one point there was just a little fishing village they didn't even have a street light and they just had tremendous growth tremendous um property values ascending by you know 18 000 percent over a couple of decades and now they make 90 percent of our computer keyboards uh that was just a little bit of freedom a little bit new economy and people raced there and created something new so once you have a society that works I think it will start out distributed I think you will have lots of small little seasteads living in the doldrums near the equator but the ones that succeed I think will attract more and more people um so I I actually do think we could conceivably have cities with floating airports on the ocean and our children will be flying to floating islands the same way they fly to the Cayman Islands and not think it's weird you uh you point out in the book that a lot of it is about business it's not it's not as much about governance and stuff the latter part is but about all these businesses that can be put onto the ocean getting energy from the ocean and things like that and that seems to be a really important component that you know you could say hey do you want to live out on the ocean and maybe some people you'll find at a libertarian party convention will say yes but but the question of whether or not a business would go out there and build the kind of infrastructure and make money out of the ocean in order to build more and more and scale the problem up uh what kind of businesses are interested in this now and and do you have you seen a growth in the amount of businesses that are looking at the sea for various whether it's energy or getting out of the regulatory environment and stuff like that yes I mean as you very smartly point out you see stating it's not an ideology it's a technology that requires a business model to pay for people to build it and float out there and actually move out there so the people most interested in us and yes there is a constant acceleration of people coming to us with their ideas about the type of business they'd like to float the type of technology they could develop so to to run through them quickly it's certainly algae farmers and seaweed farmers it's absolutely medical researchers um including mainstream ones who are like even if I could get out even if I can move our experiments out onto a seastead for six months and then bring them back and go through the whole regulatory process of the FDA that could save a Maybridge or pharmaceutical company you know 100 million dollars uh people in the industry have actually told me this um so you know we'll build the sea you know we build factories worth a billion dollars just to produce one drug we'll pay for a seastead too um and certainly people working in material science um I one of the biggest business models is simply ecotourism and people wanting to um be in an incubation hub where other people are working to be pioneers there's people with uh that want to sell flagging rights I mean if you just think about you know if you had a cruise ship that never docked and floated out there permanently and it could be its own nation um there's there's all sorts of ways to rethink how your business would work in a different sort of regulatory environment and one of the big ones is definitely floating hospitals uh Debbie Shetty who I feature in the book who's Mother Teresa's former heart surgeon he's been called the Henry Ford of heart surgery uh offers you know just a huge humanitarian has just saved many many lives with his low-cost heart surgery in India uh he actually said in the economic times um that the best place to have a hospital is floating offshore an existing American city and and given that he doesn't have that he's he's already built a health city in the Cayman Islands so businesses are already flying their employees down there to get their knee transplant while on vacation in the Cayman Islands because it's cheaper to do it that way with a butler and a concierge surface than it is to have them get their knee replacement surgery uh in the US so there's there's innovators trying to get out the side the old regulatory structures in pretty much every business and industry you can name that you would need to build society from the ground up uh and we can even do it from the water up so uh you name it somebody in that industry is reaching out to us and they tend to be the most uh innovative and entrepreneurial supports as I mentioned you you are very optimistic throughout the whole book and we often ask our guests uh if they're optimistic as we have guests who have you know apocalyptic predictions about various things and but but you seem optimistic so uh is that accurate do you you think that you would you be surprised if by 2050 there wasn't some substantial c-studying presence in the world well I like to think that I'm not an optimist I like to think that I look at the evidence and do my best to determine what's most likely and I'm very influenced by Matt Ridley who wrote The Rational Optimist uh incidentally he blurbed the c-studying book I'm very proud of that and uh you know his book is very much about like just look at the evidence uh does it say that the apocalypse is coming or does it say that things are trucking along okay or does the evidence suggest that things are spectacularly getting better uh in pretty much every measure of well-being we can measure globally and surprise surprise it defies human intuitions everything is getting much much better in most areas I'm interested in c-studying in the startups governance startup societies movement because I think governance is the most important service and it's the thing that's getting worse and worse and I don't think humanity can survive unless we solve that problem but I'm also influenced by Nassim Taleb which is you can look at all the trends and say it's all getting spectacularly better but the thing that will could set us back is a black swan it's something you and I are not going to talk about just like the solutions are beyond our imaginings the thing that could completely screw us up is something we're not talking about you know who knows some cloud of methane gas below the earth's crush there could be an earthquake and it could be released and we'd all be you know wiped out and none of us were worried about it so all the trends suggest that we have a lot to be positive about the trends in governance and fiat currencies I think are very negative but I think blockchain tech and c-studying and startup societies could be solving that problem I think it's looking up I think our children and grandchildren will be much wealthier than the wealthiest people today but there could be some black swan that comes out of nowhere and screws up everything so I hope I'm an optimist because the evidence suggests I should be an optimist thanks for listening free thoughts is produced by test terrible if you enjoy free thoughts please rate and review us on iTunes to learn more visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org