Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Not-At-All-Sad History of Libertarian Sea Nations

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Robert is joined by David Bell to discuss the history of Libertarian Boat Cities.FOOTNOTES: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-billionaires-fantasia https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/24/seasteading-a-vanity-project-for-the-rich-or-the-future-of-humanity https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/may/06/duncancampbell https://www.wired.com/1997/10/a-boat-a-city-and-a-high-tech-waterworld/ https://inthesetimes.com/article/floating-utopias https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/prince-lazarus-rules-the-waves-1157051.html https://theweek.com/articles/482427/libertarian-island-billionaires-utopia https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-quest-for-a-floating-utopia/ https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voyage-satoshi-cryptocurrency-cruise-ship-seassteading https://www.seasteading.org/convert-cruise-ships-to-seasteads/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards. Are you sure you're Robert Evans? You didn't sound so sure. You know, Sophie, the nature of identity is so complicated. Who can say who anyone is? I'm Sophie Lichterman. Who is us? Who is us? Who is us?

Who is my new podcast? Who is us with Robert Evans? Presumably. And definitely Sophie Lichterman. Definitely. Definitely Sophie Lichterman. This is a show about bad people. It's called Behind the Bastards. And to talk about bad people with me is one of the better people I know, David Christopher Bell. Oh, jeez. Thanks. Full legal name. Yeah, just in case anybody's confused. Worked together for many a year. We lived together for a year. We did. Our cats were once friends. Our cats.

Allied together against another cat might be a better way of putting it. Yes, and me. Like whenever a cat sat, your cat would want to have nothing to do with me and loved my cat. And you know, honestly, that's fine. I'd rather it be that. Yeah. Cat lies. Cat lies. Dave, how do you feel about libertarians? Oh, no. People know that you don't tell the guests anything, right? The show would not work if we told the guests anything.

Yeah, guests come in cold intentionally. Sometimes they know the broad subject, but I don't even like that. That's not my preference. That bit is so good. It'll never get old. What do you think about in certain things here? Yeah, libertarians. My thoughts are like anything. The most vocal people representing it are incredibly irritating. Yes. But I suspect there's a lot of very good ones who keep to themselves. I was a libertarian for many years. I still think there's a lot of good stuff in some of the things libertarians say.

John Carpenter might be one, but he might not even know that. That makes sense for John Carpenter. Yeah. Today we are talking about the most vocal ones and specifically the most kind of unhinged vocal ones. Today, Dave, well, this week, really, I'm going to give you the long history of libertarians taking to the sea to try and establish floating nations. Oh, my God. Are we going to meet? I don't want to spoil. Are we going to be talking about Sea Land? Oh, you bet. A little bit. A little bit about Sea Land. Yeah. We're talking about the whole history of it because spoiler, every story ends the same way.

A bunch of people lose money and there's no libertarian floating nation. I feel like when step one is take to the sea, it does not end well, generally speaking. I mean, I've known sailors and know it doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, sorry. I have a blanket view of the ocean. I don't think it wants us in there. It doesn't want us in there. We don't belong there.

I mean, we'll talk about why people do this. And yes, for the folks who want to, there's always people who want to be like pedantic about like, I don't know if this one's really a bastard or like, we'll do like two episodes on like, we recently did two episodes on like, industrial level child molesters. And then we did an episode on a guy who was like an early fitness influencer and just like kind of shitty about eating disorders. And people are like, well, they're not really like, this doesn't really mean, yeah, they're not all going to be guys who raped 5000 kids. You know what kind of show that would be? A bad show. People would not want to listen every week. Yeah, absolutely. So we're going to talk about libertarians taking to the sea to build their own nations. And yeah, most of them are shitty people. So it's fine. They belong here. Okay.

Speaking of which, we're going to start by talking about Peter Thiel. So Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, Monarcho Libertarian quasi-fascist influencer on a grand cash scale. And you know, just man about town, Peter Thiel. He's running for president or he's running for senator under the name JD Vance. He is currently running for senator under the name JD Vance. Dark Money Kingpin. Peter Thiel has been on a couple of occasions, has shotgun money out towards bankrolling an exploratory round of seasteading experiments in libertarian utopian living. Seasteads in general, that refers to self-sustaining colonies of like floating homes basically. So sometimes it could be a boat, it could be like a little island of these weird little hexagonal like housing units that float.

There's a bunch of different designs around there. Everybody's kind of arguing about what the best version of this is. But a lot of libertarians think seasteading is the future and Peter Thiel has put a not, it's not significant to him, but significant amount of money to normal people into backing different seasteading projects. And the basic idea is that with a seastead you'll be in the ocean, so you won't have to abide by any nation's law. So all of these different ideas libertarians have about taxes and gun laws and age of consent laws. Mainly age of consent laws won't apply. You can really, I think there's an idea that if you get enough people out in the sea living the way we think people should live, everyone else will see that it works and then our ideas will take over.

There's a number of different ways that get sold to people. And yeah. It's water world rules. Yeah, it's water world rules. One sec, I have the wrong document open, I just realized. That's fine. You want me to just talk about water world for a little bit? Yeah, talk about water world for a second, Dave. I mean, I imagine it's water world rules down to like, yeah, Kevin Costner being like a shitty dude who like,

at one point I think he's gonna barter the woman and child that he's with. He sure does. That is a moment in that movie. Yeah, that movie's terrible. So you may have heard, Dave, that in September of this year the Guardian published an article about the doomed voyage of the Satoshi, which was a cruise ship, a bunch of libertarian crypto nerds had bought and tried to turn into a floating city. Did you catch this story? I vaguely caught it. I think that's one of those headlines that I was just like, not today. Yeah, not today.

I don't have time for this one. It's very funny. It's a pretty hilarious failure. We'll talk about it in detail later. But like when this, when it went viral that like libertarians were trying to like, create their own independent nation on a boat in the middle of the ocean, a bunch of people started bringing up Bioshock. Have you played Bioshock? Weirdly enough, I've played Bioshock Infinite. I do remember, I played a little of the first one and I do recall that he is making an ocean city in that. Yeah, it's a libertarian. I haven't played the game either, but I'm familiar as an internet person with the basics,

which is that it's like a libertarian underwater city that goes disastrously long and everybody murders each other, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's the basic idea. So I think most people are at least broadly aware of it. And yeah, it's funny that people would compare libertarians buying a boat, naming it after the founder of Bitcoin and then like trying to create a nation with it to Rapture. Because the reality of the situation is that like Rapture in Bioshock, which is that libertarian city, was itself like inspired by about like 60 years of libertarians trying to make cities and boats in various parts of the open ocean.

Right. Yeah. It's a satire. Like it was made as a satire. It was made as a satire, yeah. So you wouldn't want to like watch the satire and be like, hey, that's a good idea. I should model it after that. Yeah, it's missing the point.

Yeah, it's missing the point, but it's also funny to me that people are like, this is how ridiculous some of these people are that they like inadvertently did the thing that happened in this video game and was like clearly a bad idea. And the reality is that the video game was just kind of making fun of the fact that they keep trying to do this. This is like two of our lifetimes of a certain kind of libertarian trying to make a boat nation. And it never works, but it's always very funny. So the history of this, this longstanding drive, more than half a century old, to like create an habitat in the ocean that libertarians can try their ideas out in, that goes back to the golden age of science fiction, specifically, it goes back to a guy named Robert Heinlein.

Heinlein most famously wrote Starship Troopers. He's also one of the founding fathers of modern libertarian politics. He like helped create American style libertarianism. He was a fascinating guy. He was kind of like Gene Roddenberry in that like a number of his science fiction books at the time were like ahead of the curve on things like racial justice. And not in a way that is particularly impressive today, but he had like a habit of like he'd make his protagonists, not white dudes, but not make it a big deal. It was just like, you know, this guy's Hispanic and that's just the thing that's going on, which was not super common at the time.

It was impressive for its time. For its time. There's also some racist as hell stuff in some Heinlein books, but yeah, I'm not trying. I'm just trying to give you an idea of like why this guy is stuck out to people. He played around with a lot of libertarian ideas and a lot of really authoritarian ideas. He was a weird because like Starship Troopers is like a fascist book. Like it's extremely fascist. Right. If I recall Verhoeven, his interpretation is not what the book intended.

Not at all. It's making fun of the book. It's a it's and now I know there's talk of making like another adaptation without that satire. Yeah. And it's like we're I think they're going the wrong way with that. Yeah. Yeah. Cause Verhoeven like heard people describe Starship Troopers, which is the military runs the state which exists entirely to like service its ability to continue to do violence against these aliens. That as far as we know had no role in provoking like a fight with humanity. And Heinlein or Verhoeven heard that and was just like, well, that sounds fascist as hell.

I'll guess I'll just make a fascist movie. Right. And no one knew. I saw. I saw screening. Yeah, I saw a screening of Starship Troopers where Verhoeven did a Q&A afterwards and he talked about his exasperation where he's like, I literally dressed them like Nazis. Yeah. I know how I could have been clear. Yeah, like no one, no one realized it.

Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah. And it's some of what happens with Robert Heinlein is also incredible because so in addition to some fascist stuff, Heinlein plays around with a lot of libertarian ideas, which is a big part of why he's remembered today. His book in particular, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is like a lot of people would consider it a foundational text for like the American libertarian movement. It's a very influential book. And to kind of describe what happens in the book, I'm going to read a write up of it from The Baffler. Heinlein's own apparent anti-government ethos is channeled through the elderly Peruvian-born professor Prof Bernardo de La Paz. Prof is one of among hundreds of outcasts, outlaws and outsiders inhabiting underground colonies on the moon, or as it's known in the late 21st century, Luna.

Prof's cheap comrades-in-arms are an Amazonian blonde rabble rouser, Wyoming knot, and a one-armed computer technician, the narrator hero, Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis. The ragtag trio spearheads a revolutionary movement to make this ramshackle outpost for the marginalized into a self-governing nation free of the repressive rule of Earth. So there's like, you see why like this is attractive to people, right? There's this idea, there's a lot of like libertarian politics in it. There's also weird stuff, like it's a mix of Congress is dumb and like governments can't get anything done and also monarchy would be cool. Yeah, I mean, I get the like every year when I pay taxes, I become a libertarian for a second. Like I get it. I understand the government's extremely frustrating and there's something very appealing about going off and starting your own thing. I absolutely get it. Yeah, it's like in the DMV everybody is a libertarian. Yeah, exactly.

Like you just ready to burn it all down. Yeah. But no, and what's interesting there to me is kind of like with Starship Troopers, people take like a weirdly like them. The Moonage of the Hearse Mistress is about like people who are part of who are living in a colony that's being oppressed by a government rebelling in order to become independent. And Seasteading, which is heavily influenced by this book is about sailing to the ocean to just hide from the government and mine Bitcoin. So I think there's a difference. I don't think I don't think they're necessarily reading Heinlein right. That said, Robert Heinlein probably would be into Seasteading. So perhaps I'm the one that's wrong here. Sure.

It also seems like never a good policy to like start your belief structure from a fictional book or a work of fiction. Yeah. Because it's not, the writer isn't intending it to be something that you take like an instruction manual, I assume. So it just seems like a recipe for disaster in general. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure like Heinlein was playing with ideas that were interesting to him and that some of which he thought should be instituted. Like that's pretty common in fiction with a political edge. But I don't think he was seeing it as being as influential as it was in the way that it was. I think he'd be bummed that it's mostly been used for people to steal money from other people in order to not build boats.

I think he would be unhappy with that. Yeah, I think that's fair. So, yeah, you can see the influence of the Moon Isha Harsh Mistress and of Heinlein in general. And like Elon Musk's plans to colonize Mars, the crypto weirder is making an FT cartoon about apes flying to another planet to set up a colony like all of this. It's a common theme in libertarian kind of angled fiction ever since. Now, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was published in 1966 and in 1971, a millionaire developer from Las Vegas, a guy named Michael Oliver, attempted to create his own libertarian utopia. So I don't know. Michael Oliver was definitely a Heinlein fan. I don't know which book in particular spurred him on, but I kind of think it's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

So five years after that gets published, this guy, Michael Oliver, decides he's going to make his own independent libertarian state. And since there was no room on land, he decided to take to the sea. He established what he called the Republic of Minerva on a partially submerged reef near Tonga. It was called the Republic of Minerva because a boat called the Minerva had sunk there. That's not a good start. Yeah, naming it after the last failure that happened around there. My goodness. Yeah, it is a little bit of a weird call.

So there's a little bit of land here. It's mostly just like reef that's barely above the waterline and sometimes under it, like depending on kind of where the tide is. It's only land in the technical sense of the word. But Oliver decides like, I'm going to take this since it's up for grabs, right? Anyone can own it if nobody owns it. Right. No one's going to stop them there. They're like, yeah, sure, go ahead. That is what he thinks. He gets together two other co-founders who put in funding alongside him. And he announces through like magazines and stuff that he's creating a republic.

He said in these ads that he wanted to make quote, and escape from high taxes, riots, drugs and crime. Which magazines? Libertarian magazines. Yeah, we've got the name of one of them in here. It is fun because this is right after like the Holy Week uprisings after Martin Luther King's murder and all of the different kind of protests and riots in the wake of that. So there's kind of a little bit of a white supremacy angle here where it's like, all the cities are so fucked up because of all the bad things we did to black people.

Time to take to the ocean. Yeah. I gotta escape this. Evergreen statement that there's always a little bit of white supremacy in these things. Yeah, sub-cities go in there too. Like, okay. Yeah, I want to quote from the website Curbed here about Michael's plans. They intended to build a 400-acre artificial island over the reef and turned it into a resort that would sparkle like a jewel in the Blue South Pacific,

according to one of the Republic of Minerva's self-published newspapers. They hoped to attract tens of thousands of residents and base their governance structure on zero taxes, no welfare, no subsidies and no economic intervention. A coin collector and a real estate investor, Oliver used much of his own wealth to establish the Republic of Minerva. Soon after sending a Declaration of Independence, another founder, Morris Davis, built a tower of stones on the reef and planted a flag, a golden torch set against a blue background for the new country on it.

So, they got a flag now. They got a little stone tower and a flag. That's step one. You get your flag there and then you're good to go. I do just love that this guy, with his experience speculating in real estate and collecting coins, is like, I can make a country. Right. I could be the founding father or something. I got this. It seems easy enough. Those founding fathers, they weren't anything. I mean, honestly, you look at like George Washington and it's like, it is just kind of some jackass being like, yeah, I think I could make this work.

Yeah. They're just bunch of dudes who hung out like at a bar. Yeah. It is funny, but you are right. Every country was just founded by a bunch of dudes at a bar. Right. For me, it's with the libertarian stuff. It just always seems like they're going to accidentally invent government every time, right? Funny you should say that, Dave, because that happens in every one of these stories. Yeah, because they're like, how do we pay for things? I don't know. Maybe everybody gives a little bit of money.

Like they start slowly stumbling on the same conclusions. It's the same thing that's happened with cryptocurrency is like, because all these people get all of their money stolen constantly because there's no protections or safeguards and then there's no recourse if all of your money gets stolen. And so people have created things like Coinbase and crypto.com that are places where you store your money and you have a guarantee you'll be protected.

It's like when Lyft was like, we're getting out of the bank system. Right. It was like Lyft was like, we're creating shuttles that go from point A to B and everybody pays a little bit and it's like, do you mean a bus? Are you talking about a bus? Yeah, but more expensive. That's the genius innovations of... It's very frustrating. Just once, I would like to see some libertarians innovate in their community, but I don't know,

filling in potholes or altering the speed limits on an interstate that has speed traps. Go do something. You don't have to... Don't try to make another boat city. It's not going to work anyway, whatever. So the founders of the Republic of Minerva, after they get their flag up and everything, hire an Australian boat to fill the reefs up with sand.

And their plan is just to dump sand on these shallow reefs until there's land. Right? That's the idea. Right. That's certainly how I do it. Yeah, that makes sense. They wanted to get it to about eight feet above sea level and they figured that if they could create 15 acres of actual land, that would be enough to convince investors that they were legitimate and thus get enough money to raise up to 2,500 acres.

So we're going to make 15 acres and we'll use that as our proof of concept. And then once people realize how much money is being made and having a barren island of free enterprise with no resources other than sand, they'll cut the money we'll pour in. Absolutely, yeah. There's no taxes. Is there fresh water? We'll know. Can you grow food? Not really. Is there shopping? No.

But no taxes. Look at all this land we got. You can play like volleyball and stuff. It's cool. Tax-free, baby. That said, there's ways it might have worked, especially if it actually had, if they'd somehow gotten you in recognition and rich people could just claim to live there and not pay taxes. I could see how this could be a money-making scheme

and it might have been a money-making scheme that worked, if not for one thing, the existence of other countries. That was the one thing they didn't take into account. Damn other countries. These barren shoals that they're trying to pile sand onto are a little, you know, just a couple of miles off the coast of Tonga, which is an island in the South Pacific,

an island that has a government, Dave, and a military. Right. And Tonga ceased these foreigners creating what, like, looks like they're trying to create a new country right outside of Tonga on land like their naval vessels patrol and is like, well, we're not really okay with this. It's like, I'm imagining, like, looking through binoculars, like, I better call somebody about this.

You got to do something about this. If you don't get libertarians, if you don't get rid of them quickly, you're just going to have a nest of the bastards. Oh, darn, we got libertarians. Wait, social or free market? No, free market. God damn it. Get the brooms out. Get the spray.

Libertarian spray. Are they at least mutualists? No. God damn it. Yeah. So the head of state of Tonga sent them a letter basically being like, we're not going to let you set up an empire on our doorstep. That's not okay. So the first thing Tonga does is they start air dropping

just random boxes of aid supplies onto the reef in order to establish ownership, right? Like, if our government provides a service to this barren reef, then clearly it's part of our territory. That's also like a really good way to insult libertarians. I feel like it's like here, have some help. And they're like, we don't want help. God damn it. Also none of them were there.

Oh, okay. Nobody's there at the time. Maybe some crabs. Maybe some crabs got some free food out of this. Yeah. This is absurd on the side of Tonga too, because they're literally just being like, well, okay, let's drop random supplies on this island

with a population of zero. Then it's ours suddenly. Like, again, like cryptocurrency does kind of accurately get across to people like, yeah, money is nonsense. Like it's all a fucking God game. We're all larping. Yeah. So are actual governments to be fair.

Like you see it in this where they're like, oh, they're saying that's theirs. Well, we never cared about this piece of nothing before, but now let's drop some random crap on it so it's ours. It's very funny. So this did not succeed in dissuading the libertarians. They still continue to claim that they were a republic. And so in June of 1971,

the king of Tonga used his military to officially seize the land, which again had nobody on it. The dream of the Republic of Minerva died. But the grift did not die because grifts are eternal. Michael Oliver started minting coins for his country after it was taken back by the Tongan government in order to raise funds to, I guess, reconquer it. It was kind of unclear what the money was for.

I was going to say. So are you going to invade Tonga? Retaliation, yeah. Yeah, what is step two here, buddy? You know what that feels like to me is that he had a really good idea for coins. And then they threw this in front of him and he wasn't going to change his plan.

Yeah, he wasn't going to stop making coins. Yeah, I have cool designs for coins. I'm going to do them no matter what. He had gold coins for $75 and silver coins for $35. And I should note now that these are Minerva dollars, 75 Minerva dollars and 35 Minerva dollars. So I don't know the actual value.

I'm not certain of the exchange rate. Right. This is like when Usher, was it Usher who was handing out his own Usher bucks? Yes. That sounds like Usher. These are Usher bucks. So he advertised these Minerva dollars

as late as 1975 in austere publications like the Libertarian Review. So the Tongan government takes them out in 71 and 75 he's selling Minerva dollars into the tagline, the world's most unusual new country, inspiration for the most unique metal coin ever minted. Mmm. Yeah.

It is unusual to have a country with no people that gets immediately conquered. That is not common. Yeah. I'm not sure how else you'd sell it by being like, this is fucking weird, right? Yeah. You want a piece of this?

Yeah. We made some calls, didn't we? Yeah. That said, if anyone can find any Republic of Minerva coinage, I would love that. Yeah. They come up online for sale sometimes,

but I haven't found any recently. I feel like ironically they're now worth a lot because it's probably like a problem like how expensive they are. They're probably just a collector's item. Yeah. Collector's for fans of horribly failed grifts. Yeah.

I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't get one just for fun to have it like on my shelf or something and have a little story there. I get it. Yeah. I have a friend who got very excited to buy an in-ron mug. You know? Yeah.

It's just some of the, some things are exciting. Yeah. Yeah. So moving on from there, I should make a note because we're starting with the Republic of Minerva, which I think is the first example of the thing we're talking about today, but there is one other thing that kind of happened

around the same time that might count. And before you get to that, it is time, it's time for, you know. Are you interrupting me to make us go to add Sophie? Just for capitalism's sake? Just for capitalism's sake and so that we can stay in our houses. Yes.

I do love staying in my house. All right. For most experts, we're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing.

And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev,

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first

birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, I do love a good house. I love a bad house, just a big fan of houses. House music. Oh, so good. Oh, perfect. House MD, the TV show.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, great, great, great vehicle for... Hugh Laurie. Hugh Laurie, that's his name. Yeah, what happened to him? You know, there's an episode with Jeremy Renner in house. Oh, no, I've forgotten.

Goodness, I remember this. It's all coming back to me. Yeah. What a tragedy. So we're going to talk now about the Republic of Sea Land, which is kind of... It happened right around the same time as the Republic of Minerva.

I kind of think Republic of Minerva is more... The Republic of Sea Land isn't quite a libertarian thing, it's weird. All right, we'll just talk about it. Sea Land? Yeah. I've always wanted to go to Sea Land. I actually, a long time ago, I wrote a screenplay

with Sea Land in it, and I did a lot of research that I now completely forget. It's a principality. Isn't it a principality? It is a principality. The principality of Sea Land was established on an old Royal Navy platform that was built during World War II to protect shipping.

So it's not even shoals. It's just like this big metal, looks a little bit like a tiny oil derrick kind of situation built in the ocean in order to put guns on it to shoot things. And after the war, the British take the guns away and it's just this platform. And you might think, well, didn't the British Navy own it?

No, because they illegally built it in foreign countries' waters or in international waters. Sorry. And you're not allowed to weaponize international waters. So the Royal Navy builds this platform. And they're like, and then the Warrens and the other countries are like, you know, it's an

international crime for you to have that. And since you built it to fight Nazis, nobody's going to say anything, but you should probably bounce. So the Royal Navy leaves this platform. And in 1965, the UK has all these really harsh laws about what can be played on the radio and not.

So in the 60s and 70s, there's a bunch of pirate radio stations that will like take to the sea and illegally broadcast music that can't be played normally in the UK. And that's cool. That's fucking rad as hell. It's just like pump up the volume, man. This story, the Principality of Zealand, there's

some rad shit here because it first gets inhabited when a pirate radio crew in 1965 occupies the platform. And it looks like a couple of them get in there. And in September of 1967, a British citizen and radio pirate named Roy Bates occupies it. And while he's broadcasting illegal music from it, declares it an independent principality.

There's a whole fun story here. Mercenaries get involved at one point. There's like a civil war in Zealand basically and a government in exile. A lot of a lot of wild shit happens in Zealand. It's not really a libertarian. It's not a super political thing.

From what I recall, they do like online gambling now. Yeah. It's more of like, it's more of what I can get behind, which is like, look at this thing that's just out there that no one owns. Let's break up the place and do stuff. There's not a pretension that they're

experimenting with a new frontier in civilization. They're like, hey, if we take over this thing in the middle of the ocean that no one owns, we can broadcast songs without paying and gamble. Which I am entirely supportive of. Yeah, I feel like if a bunch of libertarians

showed up, they'd be like, no, we're full. I don't think they want to build anything. We're not in this for your revolution, buddy. Yeah, we got here before you too bad. Lee, you know? Yeah. And Roy dies. I think his kids are now running everything.

It's basically like a gimmick branding opportunity for the family. There's a roadside attraction vibe to it, even though obviously getting there is a nightmare. So, yeah, you've got Zealand, you've got the Republic of Minerva late 60s, early 70s. But for obvious reasons, the libertarian dream

of taking to the sea to avoid regulation, it was clearly present that early. But it had to wait until the internet age to really take off. You know, people try this back in the day, but it just, it's really hard to build a libertarian boat city without modern technological resources.

I should say it's hard to grift people into crowdfunding a libertarian boat city that never gets built. Yeah. It's that idea that there's like, right, there's like, there's probably like a couple thousand people who will buy your grift. The problem is they're spread out throughout

the world. Not many in each town. Right. And the internet has made it, you know, instead of being the person going town to town selling tonics and what not, you can just like blast it out on Twitter and then they all come to you.

Yeah, otherwise you'd have to go person to person and ask like, hey, is anything bad if it happened to you? And then if they say no, say, I got a deal for you. Yeah, exactly. You seem like a trusting little lamb. So in 1995, a guy named Howard Turney

was he claims and he's a liar. So he take that with a bit. He says that for years before 95, he'd had a dream of like following in the footsteps of the Republic of Minerva but getting it right and creating like an independent nation or an independent community in the ocean that could

abide by libertarian principles. And in 1995, he's hanging out in the Caribbean Sea and he finds in a nice stretch of unusually shallow water that's in international waters. So it's underwater, but it's shallow. So with enough sand, you could actually like build an island out there.

It's kind of his idea. So he says he finds this in 1997 and he decides to raise up new land and establish a utopia. Now, right around this same time, I'm not sure if the desire to fund the creation of a new island utopia came first or if this came first,

but he changes his name to Lazarus Long. Oh my God. Yeah, that is a porn star name. And yeah, I was about to say and he's not a porn. Come on. No, no. He changes it to Lazarus Long because

Lazarus Long, in addition to being obviously a porn name, is an homage to a Robert Heinlein book. And I'm going to quote from an article in the Independent explaining Howard Turnies thinking here. He decided there were too many Howard Turnies around.

And anyway, as he puts it, Prince Lazarus has a ring to it. He took his new name from a character in Time Enough for Love, a novel by science fiction author, Robert Heinlein. I admired his philosophy. It was so close to my own philosophy, as he says of his fictional antecedent.

The Lazarus Long of Heinlein's epic saga is centuries old and lives in a world where aging is a thing of the past. His philosophy amounts to a series of pro-individualistic slogans that can fairly easily be said to represent the thinking of the man who created them. Heinlein coined the phrase,

there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. And among his other catchy aphorisms are, equal, taxes are not levied for the benefit of the text and beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil. Huh. Yeah. Okay, so going back to, so Lazarus

Long. Long. You mentioned there about people like living forever and like that's what that's what's going on, right? The Lazarus, like that was a reference to like Jesus resurrecting people. Yeah, for sure. And then Long as in Long.

Yeah, he was, look. Just a long, you know, like long life. He just wanted to make sure he had that double like. In the golden age of science fiction, subtlety had not yet been invented. We hadn't cracked the nut on being subtle. So,

every character, I mean, let's be fair. We're never subtle. The founding fiction piece for a cyberpunk, the most influential piece of science fiction in decades was hero protagonist. Yeah. No, I mean, two of the biggest sci-fi things is

Star Wars and Star Trek. Yeah, and both of which lead very little to the imagination. Yeah, and the one where they explore in space. Yeah. We're not good at that, but like at the same time it sells it works, so. Yeah, you don't need to be. Look, if the story's good, people will

forgive a shitty title. Yeah. I don't know. I haven't read this Heinlein book. Maybe it was good. So, before his name change, Howard had been a small kid from Bowie, Arizona, who'd worked briefly as a cowboy before becoming an entrepreneur. He had definite narcissist vibes. Telling an interviewer once,

it took me a few years to realize that I had more intelligence than the average person and more imagination. This is funny because he speaks to all of the guys who try this and literally all of their experiments in creating new nations are the same and all in the same way. So, I love the fact

that he's like, I'm more imaginative than the average person. I mean, it's one of the biggest red flags. Yeah. Like, if anybody's like, I'm smarter and more imaginative than most people, I'm like, all right, I'm gonna walk the other way now. We don't need to be having this conversation. Yeah.

Yeah. So, Howard was a successful businessman. He made money in the restaurant industry and then started marketing products for grocery stores. He farmed shrimp. He repaired and sold generators. He's just like, makes a bunch of different businesses. And then in July of 1990, when he's 59, he reads a

report in the New England Journal of Medicine about HGH or Human Growth Hormone. And the study showed that World War II vets injected with HGH lost body fat and gained muscle mass. So, Howard starts selling HGH. He's like selling steroids

basically to people. This is the thing that Joe Rogan takes. And he sells it for like 18 months before the pharmaceutical industry realizes there's profit to be made and starts like selling them officially. So, Howard like builds a clinic in Mexico

in order to sell HGH to bodybuilders. Excellent. So, the pharmaceutical company was like, wait, hold on there. You can't do that. You can make money off this? Where can it do that? People will buy this shit? Yeah. Yeah. So, he gets rich selling HGH

as one of the first people selling HGH. So, it's exciting that like supplements have been with us for a while in the libertarian space. So, Prince Lazarus again, that's how he's known when the story starts. Oh, my God.

I know, it's amazing. Pays $400,000 of his HGH money into the new Utopia project as he calls it, which is his plan to build an island in the shallow part of the Caribbean. He estimates the total project will cost $216 million.

So, like literally every other dude in our story, and yeah, they're all dudes, he starts trying to raise money to fund this. He raises it through what's called the New Utopia Development Trust, which he registered in Belize because they don't make you pay taxes. Sure. When journalists would question whether or not

this was all just a grift, he would assure them that neither he nor his governors were members of the trust, which he said was independent and would only give a small percentage of construction costs to members of the government, which I'm sure was completely true. As they say, seems on the level, totally. Seems on the level. Nothing weird here.

New Utopia gets off the ground right around the same time as another very dumb project called Oceania, which was another floating libertarian city that started raising money to build itself in the early 1990s, right around the same time as New Utopia. I haven't found much about Oceania

and never got off the ground as more than a website, so I'm not going to talk about it in detail, other than to reference how the Prince you have to call him the Prince, responded when a libertarian writer asked him why Oceania hadn't gone anywhere. So basically, these two started around the same time, one of them fails.

A guy interviewing Prince Lazarus is like, hey, why do you think it failed? And Lazarus says, the problem was that it was conceived by a bunch of radical militiamen. Everything was going to be legal. You could carry an anti-tank gun down the street if you wanted. And they were going to have dueling made lawful. Now, who's going to invest their money in something

like this, where some drunk challenges you to a duel and kills you? There's not much incentive there. Feels like he's circling the point. Like, it's that thing of like, yeah, we can't make it free for everybody all the time. There has to be like limits set. And then it's the question of,

well, by who? And it's like, well, those people were clowns. I'm extremely intelligent and creative. Yeah. And I'm not obviously coming from the perspective of that, the only way to have a society is with

a top-down government. You do have to think about it more than like, everyone can just do everything. And it's, well, what do you do if someone starts killing people? You have to have an answer to that question. It says a lot that none of these, when these guys find themselves asked

that question, none of them propose anything new. They just wind up recreating the government as it exists. It's like, well, you don't actually have any ideas. You just don't want to be told what to do. But when you're angry at someone else, you just do government shit again. They want to be at the top. It reminds me a lot of when people are

like, back in the day are like, this forum is bullshit. I'm going to create my own forum. And then they end up doing all the same stuff. Yeah. Because it's just that they want to be in charge. And that's, that's how you make 4chan. Like, it's just,

it's, it's, it's just like you either, if you do complete lawlessness, it's very hard to maintain that, right? You have to like, you have to have an idea about what you want to replace the laws. And if your only idea is, I don't think I should have to pay

taxes and, and should be able to sleep with 12 year olds. Then your society is not going to have, you're not going to have anything ready other than, well, I guess I'll do what I just left when the problem happens. It's, it feels the same as starting a cult. Because, well, it kind of is.

It is. Yeah. Because it's always like, if I would be fine, if someone was like, look, I just don't want to be bothered. I'm going to go into the woods and I'm going to live off the land, or in this case, off the ocean. And I won't bother you and you don't bother me. The problem is that then it becomes

this whole thing where they like want other people there. And they think, they think that they can make some sort of new government. And it, it it's like depressing to say it's like, yeah, it's all sort of, we've we've thought it all up.

Yeah. That's the thing. If you, if you're not coming to it with like, here is, if you're only saying, I don't think these things should be present, but you're not saying, I think we should do this instead, then you don't actually have an idea. You're just angry because things that exist are imperfect.

I think there's, there's if all, if these guys are being like, hey, we're going to start a new society in the sea. And here's how we're going to deal with violence. And here's what, how we're going to decide what's restricted. And here's going to be the community accountability. Okay, well, maybe that'll work. You guys clearly have an idea other

than I don't want to pay taxes or have subsidies. Yeah. If you're creating some sort of, yeah, communal system where everybody, but yeah, this feels very much have a plan, right? Right. It feels very much the idea that

they, their ideas stop short of I want to be in power. Like it's still, it feels like a power grab. Yeah. I think it's, yeah, the hope is, I think, well, I think for most of them, it's just like trying to make money. But yeah, I think for a lot of people, it's the idea that

like, well, I got in too late to wind up ahead in where I came from. But if I create a new place out of the sea, then I can be the king there or literally the prince. And again, I feel like we've all had that instinct to take to the sea or to go

in the woods and be like, you know what, I'm going to stop all of this. I'm just, but then once you, if you get into that scenario, then it's like, oh no. How do I actually survive doing this? Yeah. I mean, when I bought 1300 acres in Idaho and then cut off all of the power and internet

access to that small town, I thought it was going to be simple. Right. But it turns out people need all sorts of things, you know. It sounds simple. Yeah. It does sound simple. But my God, for one thing, Dave, I don't know if you know

how expensive it is, but digging six foot holes the size of a human body, real problem. Anyway. And if you get other people, people are real winers about that stuff. They hate digging corpse holes. Yeah. And they get pissed just because you blocked food from any.

It's a real problem. But the point is I thought about it more than these guys did because I didn't have to already make land because there's lots of Idaho. Right. Yeah. And who gives a shit about that land? Yeah. You can go out there and just do whatever for a while and then

for a while and then, you know, the authorities get involved. Okay. Good. Well, yeah, there are some laws knocking on the door. So, yeah, but what we just talked about is like this thing you notice a bunch is that like, they don't they always default to doing things

the way they're done in the world. They left when a problem occurs and they don't have the only ideas like political theory ideas that they seem to want to institute are like not paying taxes. And in fact, Prince Lazarus was one of the most blatant about this. He bragged that New Utopia would quote

out came in the Caimans as a place to hide wealth. So he was very open about this is just for rich people as to use as a tax shelter. Citizens of New Utopia would pay no taxes, just a $1,500 five-year bond that both buys you citizenship and promise to pay 9.5%

annual interest to the bearer. So you're an investor if you're a citizen. So that's good. No way that could wind up with a situation that becomes slavery like if people who come there and don't have the bonds have to pay in labor. I don't know. A number of ways

I could see that going. In interviews, the Prince compared this positively to the $55,000 a person had to pay in order to become a citizen of Belize for tax purposes which is a thing you only know when you become the citizen of another nation for tax purposes. Lazarus's goal

was to get 4,000 citizens to fund startup costs. And by the time the Independent interviewed him in 1997, he had almost 500 backers. So, you know that's half a million dollars, more than half a million dollars. Yeah, it's not bad.

6,700,000. So if he actually did invest 400,000, he's got a good ready return already. That was the year Prince Lazarus began agitating for UN membership for his country. Oh, too far, man. Yeah, he's trying. Oh, my goodness.

He claimed? I'm sorry, it's just have some land first and like build some buildings. That is literally what the UN says. Yeah. The UN is like we would consider your membership if there was land with people on it.

Which is our requirement for a country. That's fair. I think that's more than fair from the UN. Yeah, I think so, because otherwise you're not going to be able to get anything done as the UN. People are going to be trying to make everything into a country. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I'd be doing it left and right.

And I would say land with people on it is a pretty good line if you're like minimum characteristics of a nation land with people on it. We'll start there and then we'll ask some more questions. Yeah, I think there's more you can do. Is it your land? Is it owned by another government?

Do the people know you're making them into a country? Yeah. Any atrocities you're planning on committing? Yeah. Write the number of genocides you plan to commit next to it. And listen, if it's more than one,

that's okay. A lot of countries have done genocides. A lot of most countries really are on the 3 to 5 point. There's that instinct to put a zero. But it's like we're more concerned with you being honest at this point. Yeah, it's like if you put nothing on your customs declaration coming into the US.

You can get away with a lot of shit if you're like, I came through customs once and he asked if I brought any illegal drugs and I answered with, I don't remember. Which is not the right answer. Oh, Dave. But I was just being honest.

Because I hadn't slept in a very long time. Because of the illegal drugs you took out with you. That's correct. And speaking of illegal drugs, you know what, Tom? Who else sells illegal drugs, Dave? Oh, no.

All sorts of people, I imagine. Namely, the products and services that support this podcast. Mmm. Delicious. Well, here's hardcore drug use. Mmm. What would you do if a secret cabal

of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic

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About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union

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We're back and we are. We just smuggled some shit into the country then some shit out of the country then we kind of square danced with the country a little bit. It's been good time.

Prince Lazarus decides to send their military to take the last Libertarian island nation that we tried to establish. I don't want that to happen to me. I'm going to get UN membership then I can't be invaded. Famously a thing that happens when you're in the UN.

You don't get invaded. But that's what he decides to do and he starts trying to raise money from Libertarian saying I need $100 million before the UN will accept me as a country. That is not how it works. Yeah, I was going to say, do they take bribes? Is that the idea?

It's just like anybody with 100 million bucks you get to be fucking every billionaire would have a country if that was the way it worked. Like it would be nothing to them. Elon Musk would have like 30 each based off of meme coins. He would be issuing passports. Yeah. Oh yeah.

I love the idea that the UN takes bribes. It's just like 100 million bucks. Not even like if it's just the right clerk you slip them $100. Yeah, sure. Yeah, you guys are a country. I'm just imagining a shady

UN guy in a fucking trench coat in the alleys of New York. Hey, you want to start a country? It could be really easy for you. Well, yeah. It's a good grift. Yeah. So, yeah.

He announces this. He starts raising money and the UN sends a response being like we'll consider your membership when there's evidence that there's literally anything there. This pisses off Prince Lazarus and he lashes out telling a reporter that he didn't want to be in the UN anyway.

Quote, they're trying to implement worldwide banking rules and regulations that are not in keeping with the philosophy of New Utopia. Plus they have a refugee policy for all their members. As a new little country, I cannot afford boatloads of people from Central America or Cuba or Haiti coming to my shores

because I have no welfare system and I have no plans to have a welfare system. You also don't have shores. Yeah. You don't have a lot of things, buddy. There's actually nothing that you have. It really seems like you're just a guy

who's calling himself a country and running around and just sort of ranting on people. Refugees, absolutely not. Yeah. We're going to put up my credenza. Yeah, it kind of seems like we need to call the police and see if they could come get you.

Yeah. It would be funny if the UN had accepted him but then just started sending refugees to his house. Look, man, until you get a shore, you got to put these people somewhere. He's just got a box of currency and refugees.

Amazing. Lazarus had another plan to make his city profitable. Unrestricted medical testing on humans. Sure. Lazarus had gotten eaten away when big pharma hopped on the HGH train. And so Lazarus next got interested

in anti-aging medication. When he was interviewed in 1997, he told the reporter that he had secret knowledge of upcoming anti-aging developments. Quote, There are things on the horizon that people today can only dream about. We are not that far from being able to live multiples

of what we look at now as the human lifespan. His name is Lazarus. His name is Lazarus. He's a human and immortality. It's a bunch of rich, white dudes who are scared of death and even more scared that someone at any point might tell them what to do

or just that they might not be able to act with complete impunity and never consider other people or society. That's the thing that's most offensive to them. I think part of the money disease is that, for example, if you were to say, hey, what if I sold books online

and you happen to be the first person to do that, You think that every idea you have from then on is amazing when the reality is just that you did a thing first and it was easy for you because you were in the right place for it and ideas and like Expansion seems easy in their minds. And so it feels like it's a lot of people who want to cut corners who got successful once and assume it's always going to be like that. Yep. Yeah, I'm sure the cave person who invented fire for the first time like got a lot of clout for a little while and then tried some other experiment that ended with them like catching their dick on fire and dying. Also, I'm guessing people at the time were like, you didn't invent fire. Like the lightning hit that tree over there and you grabbed the fire. Like, you know, you just were the first. You're the damn first. Yeah. It would be funny. The sight of a caveman with like a burning branch with a wildfire in the background being like, look, if you guys, if you guys all invest, I can make this like this. There's no end to how big this thing could get. Oh yeah, this fire could really spread. This fire could really spread. All the kids love uncontrolled wildfire. Yeah, yeah, they kind of do. They kind of do.

So yeah, he claimed that basically, so the claim he starts making is that there's a bunch of miracle anti-aging drugs that are totally ready for people to take and can cure death, but the damn FDA won't let him get approved. Right. And so new utopia, what'll make it profitable is once they get this island built, you can sell these unapproved drugs to anybody. And he's like, that's why I think rich people will invest because they want my anti-aging drugs. Right. God, it just keeps getting better and better. Yeah, it's very funny. Next, from the Independent, quote, Later this year, if everything goes to plan, a construction company will begin pouring piles at 30 foot intervals into these virgin reefs. Then precast concrete platforms will be placed on top of them. And on top of these, a city will be erected. Plans for the initial stage of development include 1200 apartments, or 350,000 square foot shopping mall, five hotels, a bank, 150,000 square foot medical center, a casino, a convention center, and a university offering scholarships to students from every country in the world. There will be no taxes in new utopia, with the single exception of an import duty tax on consumable goods, nor will there be any kind of welfare system. A constitutional sovereignty, the country will be run by a board of governors appointed by the prince himself. Currently, these governors are scattered all over the world, awaiting the time when they can formally take up their posts. All of them, the prince told me, are experts in their chosen fields.

Really wish we knew who those guys were. Oh, God, yeah. Imagine going out into the world with a degree from new utopia community college. And being like, no, it's a real thing. Trust me. My guess, and I would wager to bet that of the governors who are experts in their field, he hired to run his country. Not one of them knew how to do things with sewage. Absolutely. I'm just certain there was no one, there were no thoughts given like, well, what about all the poop? Yes, I really get like that vibe that they would build the city and then they'd be like, wait, what do we put under this? Like they would not have started there at all.

My guess is that they would have just shat straight into the ocean and like killed all of the sea around it and formed like this disease filled poop bog that the libertarians, yeah, I think that's my guess. Well, that's like the ocean, it's right there, I get it. I just walk into the ocean, do your business and walk out. That it would be the benefit of living at sea. It's self-cleaning. So the first phase of construction was scheduled to be completed by the start of September and of September 1999. And on December, the country's first birthday celebrations were going to be held. It would start with the crowning of Prince Lazarus, then he would bestow titles on those who had helped create the new nation.

There would be celebrity guests and an inaugural speedboat Grand Prix. So they had a lot of ambitions. Oh my goodness, they sure did. Yeah, they really did. But of course, New Utopia never got off the ground. The Securities and Exchange Commission eventually declared it a fraudulent nationwide internet scheme. And this is like 97, so this is a really groundbreaking fraudulent on internet scheme. Like not a lot of precursors at that point, really.

I love that it's like we have downgraded your New Utopia to internet scheme. Yeah, too fraudulent internet scheme. The stark difference between what he's selling and what it actually is is pretty amazing. It's extremely funny. Yeah, the SEC ruled that there was like no evidence he'd even tried to figure out how to construct the project. Like I don't even think Lazarus Long ever wanted to make this, he just wanted to get a bunch of money. Get a bunch of money. Now, the fact that the SEC, like if he was real, the fact that the SEC had declared it a fraud,

should not have stopped him if he was really motivated to make this thing. And in fact, he had told a reporter in 1997 that there is nothing, no law that can stop me. If for some reason it slowed down or postponed, I'll still make it happen. It's something that needs to happen. Lazarus Long died in 2012 at age 88, unable to obtain the immortality drugs he desperately needed because he'd never gotten this country built, Dave. That's a shame, man. It's a real tragedy.

Imagine the frustration. Yeah, I've only got that country going. Yeah, that's probably his last thought. Yeah, if only I'd gotten New Utopia started. Maybe that's what was going through his daughter, Elizabeth Henderson's head, when in 2017 she announced that she was restarting New Utopia. And that the project would have a completed floating city by 2021. That's heartbreaking.

Now, Dave, as we record this, we've still got about six, seven weeks left in 2021, so she could pull it out. She could pull this out. Honestly, I have more sympathy for her. And, you know, if I can help in any way, I can. Yeah, I'll help with this floating city. It's fine. She probably had a lot to deal with, I'm guessing. Yeah, I'm just thinking like you're raising the environment and then you probably love your father and you want to honor them.

And it's like, I'm getting into the family business. Or it's, I'm getting into the family business of committing fraud. Stealing money from libertarians. Which is probably what it actually is. But I like, I like to hope she's a troublemaker and is like, I'm going to make this floating city. God damn it. Yeah. So, yeah, 1997 is when the New Utopia project like both started and blew up.

It was also the year that the first boat-borne libertarian sea nation concept really got started. So you had these guys trying to make platforms and islands and stuff in the middle of the ocean. Now we're going to have some libertarians. They're like, what if a boat was a country? They're just like, guys, we've had boats this whole time. Why don't we just do that? Boats already exist. Let's make what a country.

The freedom ship was the dream of an engineer named Norman Nixon. In the early 1990s, right around the same time as Lazarus found his shoals. Norman had the brilliant and totally original idea to create a planned community on an island outside of the US. Unfortunately, wars kept breaking out around the islands that he wanted to choose, so he was unable to pick any of them. Norman decided then to build his own dam island. He brought on specialists to help him sell this idea, including a marketing director who asked him, if we're going to build an island and we're going to put some houses on it, then why not make it move? Oh my goodness.

You're talking about reinventing the government, just like working back from island to boat. Yeah, I also love, okay, I got to create a government. I need a marketing director. Top of the list, top of the list. And yeah, this is just cruise ships, which are, which are terrible. Terrible places for horrible people. Yeah. And it's like, just go on a cruise, just, just, just become like a waiter on a cruise.

And you'll be fine. Yeah, as this will end, I think the visions a lot of these people put forward of life in their sea utopias. I would prefer to be a waiter on a cruise ship, knowing full well that's about the worst job on planet Earth. Oh yeah. So Norman decided his new, his new nation would live aboard a ship, but not just any ship. He announced through the same kind of libertarian magazines and online spaces as the other people did, he announced that he was going to build the largest boat in human history. It was going to be 4,300 feet long and 25 stories high, six times larger than any ship ever built.

Norman put the price tag for this project at a lean $6 billion, which feels like a bargain. Yeah, I guess if he got it, if he got that $6 billion. Yeah, why not? So the idea was brilliantly unhinged. Norman said the ship would never dock. It would never get close to the, it would never get closer than 12 miles away from the shore. So it would always be within international waters, never crossing inside the legal boundaries of any nation. People would only be able to reach it by boat shuttles or airplanes.

It was going to have an airport on it also. Yeah. Yeah, just the biggest, a mile long boat. I mean, how else is he going to escape with all that money when it all goes crashing down? You're going to have the biggest boat ever. Yeah. Condos aboard would start at $425,000 with a $1,000 monthly maintenance fee because in this libertarian utopia, you're not allowed to fix your own home. Norman estimated 24,000 units would be on the ship and he was sure that once he'd sold that many, he'd have enough cash to actually build it.

And by the way, again, it's worth noting, he's not just talking about building a boat, he's talking about like the most significant construction project in human history. Like an order of magnitude more complicated than the tallest building ever made. Right, he's talking about the most amazing thing in engineering and ship that can grow its own food. Yeah, all he needs is the money first. Yeah, it's just a money problem. Good deal, good deal. So, Wired actually interviewed Norman over this and best of all, they brought in experts to analyze how realistic his claims were. Quote, I don't imagine that people would buy this and would live on this thing for the rest of their lives.

They would see it as a sort of vacation home. I could see a lot of criminals buying condos, said Gene Feldman, an oceanographer with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Based on his own experiences living on ships and small islands, Feldman said, it's very different living in an environment where you have very definite boundaries. You can see the extent of your world and that does something to your brain after a while. You lose your sense of time and space. Oh, no. He's just like, I don't think they're thinking about what it would be like to live forever on a boat that never gets closer than 12 miles to shore. They're creating their own prison.

Yeah, you're making a floating prison for everybody. Going back to Waterworld, that's not a cheery look at the future. Like us all living in the ocean would be exhausting. Yeah, there's a lot that you have to, people aren't supposed to be in the ocean as you so astutely noted, Dave, so you have to adapt a lot to it. Yeah, it literally pushes us out of it every time we try to go in. It doesn't want us, we can't drink it, it's filled with monsters, leave it alone. Just leave it alone. Leave it alone, toss some car batteries into it and get on with your day.

Give it a car battery or two. For the eels. Yeah, exactly, or the dolphins, whatever they want to do with it. It's their car battery now. Once it hits the ocean, they own it. Which if we actually made that law, they might have enough nukes to stop us from destroying their environment. They just need thumbs, that's the one thing they need. I think they could figure it out, they're smart.

In media sort of like blasts and whatnot, Norman and his agents bragged that their floating island would be a huge tourist draw with more than 10,000 hotel rooms available. Casinos, printing companies, furniture outlets, department stores, all tax-free. They were particularly bullish about the promise of taking an American-style mall around the world so foreigners could shop just like us, but on a boat. This is the selling point. Did you say printing companies? Yeah. Where it's like there's casinos and restaurants, also you can make copies and stuff. And it is a good ghost?

Yeah, like no government interference with you. You can print anything you want. Yeah, print in your zines. Even tasteful nudes of, well, then we get into the age of consent stuff again. So as it happens, the Liberty Ship organizers plan to just go ahead and use US dollars as their currency. This was justified because it was easier. Like everybody values dollars, we'll just use those. I get it.

Like money, money, do that later. Yeah, I don't want to live under the tyranny of a nation, but like, I mean, you know, dollars. Yeah. It's hard to, again, inventing your own money. Yeah, it's a whole thing. If you're convinced that people need money, you might as well just use money that already exists. Although now we have crypto, which we'll talk about in a little bit. So even though the ship planned to stay in international waters, the Liberty was going to fly the flag of a nation.

This is a requirement for international maritime law. Norman claimed that Ireland had agreed to let them register there and that the ship was going to fly an Irish flag, which would mean that the people on board the Liberty would be bound by Irish law, which did not, at that point, I think allow abortion, among other things. Oh man. Also, you said claimed that Ireland allowed. Yeah, he said that they'd worked out a deal, you know. I feel like I know where that's going.

Yeah, so he's saying we're going to fly under an Irish flag and everyone will be accountable to Irish law. But then there's all sorts of principled libertarian jargon and the promo materials. Like, quote, there will be no intrusion into or involvement with personal business, finances, or commercial transactions, which I don't know, Ireland might have something to say about. You say Ireland's like, yeah, there will be. Yeah, there will be. Norman bragged that only food sanitation would be regulated, which beyond making him FDA-cooked is still at odds with Irish law and with libertarian practice too.

Why just food sanitation? Can people not take care of that themselves, Norman? Right. This feels like if I set up like a cardboard stand outside that sold crystal meth and called it Starbucks, you know, and it's just like, this is another Starbucks, folks. Starbucks approved. Here's your crystal meth. Like, that's what they're creating here.

Yeah, and he's trying to get people to believe it like, well, we'll fly under an Irish flag, but whatever crimes you want to do when you're living here, they're not going to have any problem with. You can run your cocaine empire from our floating boat and you're good to go. It's a real like, don't worry, my roommate's totally cool moment. Yeah, that is what they're doing. So, Wired did their due diligence and they reached out to experts in boat stuff to put some of the claims by the Liberty people to the test, and here's one example. David Hall of the Center for Marine Conservation said,

dealing with massive amounts of solid wastes generated on board is just one of many concerns. There are all sorts of questions that they'll have to deal with, such as what hazard, if any, would it pose to marine animals? Whales are hit by ships all the time, he said. It sounds as if a whale collided with this thing, I don't think it would have much of a chance. Still, the plan and the fundraising went on. In 2000, after three years of feverish propagandizing, the freedom ship had evolved beyond just a project of Norman Nixon, and now it accumulated a sports team's worth of managers and investors speaking for it. Here's how they sold it in an article three years later.

The freedom ship's creators say the vessel, whose construction is due to start in Honduras this summer, will be one of the wonders of the world. The company behind the scheme said reservations for the 20,000 homes on board have begun to accelerate, and there were already plans for two other floating cities. Freedom ship will be nearly a mile long, 725 feet wide and 340 feet tall, and will have room for 40,000 people, including a staff of 10,000. There will be a school in a university on board, not to mention a landing strip, a hospital, a shopping mall, a casino, and 200 acres of open space. Roger Gooch, the ship's marketing vice president, claims to have 15% of the units reserved. Later in that article, which opens with the author noting that creators say the ship will be a new wonder of the world,

construction was claimed to be starting in 60 to 90 days. By this point, tourism is no longer the draw, they're not claiming people are going to show up here. Gooch claims that the boat company, the people making this, are just a giant landlord, and that's all they want to do is provide entrepreneurs with spaces to do their businesses. But they also want to set up a university where it's bragged. They want to set up a university for the kids there to go to, but also so that drug companies can do unregulated tests on people. Sure. And they love this casino thing.

They really want casinos. And I get it because it's basically, they're just trying to create a town, but then just like a shady town. That's it. It's a town to do shady stuff. Yeah, it's just a town for just crimes in one school. Yeah. Where they'll shoot you up with unregulated drugs. Right. Like if it weren't for the shady stuff, just create a town. Yeah.

You know, like that's it. That's all you're making. You can do that anywhere. Yeah. Well, not anywhere, but yeah, it's purely, I think that's why it's always sketchy, right? Because it always comes down to, we want to do really shady stuff, and we're going to make it seem like we're just, you know, we're fucking off into the ocean. We're doing our own little utopia where you can do anything. Like that's always like the underlining part. Yeah.

Yeah. So here's the thing, Dave. You know libertarians, right? Like personally? I mean, how do you think as a general rule, how do you think libertarians feel about the FBI? Oh, God, I'm sure they like, I'm sure they really respect them. You know, they understand, you know, it's a job, you know, you got to do what you got to do. And they're very respectful to them if they like talk to them or any authority.

Dave, it's funny because you're doing this because normally when libertarians and the FBI intersect, it's a gunfight. Right. This it's very funny because they hire an FBI agent to keep track of law and order on their floating ship. Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah, so they're just doing. They're just doing in America, but with like you can, you can sell drugs, I guess. Right.

They're just doing the pirate bay. Like that's the whole thing is it's just. No, the pirate bay would have been way cooler, Dave. Oh, absolutely. It's just, but all these things are, it's just like, hey, get in on this before we're shut down, you know, like that's it. And if they were honest, I don't know if I'd respect them more because, you know, some of the things they want to do is horrifying. Yeah, but like if it was like, look, we just want to go gamble on stuff and like do a bunch of drugs. So we're creating this quote unquote country.

And we don't really believe in anything, but. I might be a citizen if it was. Exactly. If that was what's going on. Look, we're just being Vegas in the ocean. Yeah. And we're, you know, you can't kill people there. You can't do like you can't do a lot of fucked up stuff.

We just want a little more freedom. You want to be able to be like, like do a little do some stuff that's crimes elsewhere, but we don't want to people to be murdering each other. This is not an ideological thing. We just think it would be neat if we could sell crack cocaine and operate a casino. I would be like, great. Exactly. But I will go to your casino and smoke crack. If it's like, look, if someone murders someone, that's not cool.

But if you, yeah, if you like do a bunch of PCP and fall into our engine. I mean, that's that it is what it is. Like that's what you're here to do. And it's, it's frustrating to me like these guys, that's kind of how they want to, like they set, they talk a good game about like Liberty, like no intrusions on personal liberties, all that stuff. And then they hire like, so in this article from like three years later, Mr. Gooch tells the interviewer that they've hired a former FBI man to head a 2000 person security force with state of the art defensive weapons. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And different, he talks about how like, oh, every deck and floor will have their own elected representatives, but also the captain's word will be finer, final.

So it's like, so you want to have an ocean dictatorship run by the FBI with guns and no one else gets guns and you're calling yourself a libertarian. Right. They're like, look, every deck has its own like representative and then there's like a president of the boat. Yeah. Like you're just, it's just doing government. It's always just doing government. And we have an unaccountable armed wing of the state that can do violence to you with no recourse. And yeah, it's, it's, see, we're freedom.

We've developed freedom. This all reminds me a little bit. This is weird of Disney World because Disney World is like when it was established, they did a lot of stuff with Florida where they were like, look, just stay out of here. We'll have our own EMTs and stuff and like fire. Like that's essentially what they're trying to do, but like Florida obviously still or Disney still exists in the country. But it feels very much like, like Walt Disney's dream of Epcot and stuff where he was like, I want this to be its own nation. But, you know, Disney has rights. So I guess what I'm saying is have some fucking rights on your country.

And I think it'll work out. Like if they have like a, like a log flume, I'd be like, this is great. It's great. Good for them. But instead they just want to, yeah, I don't know what they want. I guess they just want to do a bunch of illegal shit. Yep. Yeah. And, and. Which is fine too, I guess, I don't have their own FBI to have their own FBI.

Yeah, it's cool. You know what else is cool, Dave? Oh no. Your plugables. My plugables? Your plugables are cool. Are we done? Is the episode over?

Yeah, this part one is over. Okay, okay. Hey, listen. Hey, hi. I'm on Twitter at Movie Hooligan. I run a podcast network with Tom Reiman called Gamefully Unemployed. You can find that wherever you find podcasts. We do stuff about movies and such.

We have a Patreon, patreon.com, slash Gamefully Unemployed. There's a bunch of exclusive podcasts on that. I'm also a head writer for some more news. So check that out as well. That's all my stuff. Well, I'm no one and you can find me nowhere. Goodbye forever. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.