The Joe Rogan Experience - #536 - Joe Quirk

Episode Date: August 18, 2014

Joe Quirk is a speaker, author, and director of communications at the Seasteading Institute.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! Hello everybody. For those of you who are not familiar with my guest, Joe Quirk is from the Seasteading Institute. And the Seasteading Institute, Seasteading is a very unique concept. And it's been going around over the last X amount of years online. There've been all these articles and videos where people have

talked about international waters going out and creating a city, a floating city, and trying to re-engineer society. This is, you know, all of the land on the earth has been sort of claimed and taken. You can't really start your own cult in the middle of nowhere without the government coming in and crashing your parade. But can you build a city and design a utopia based on the mistakes that we see in society today? Is that a fairly accurate way of describing seasteading? One of the misperceptions is that seasteading is not about creating one seastead. It's about- As close as you can get to this thing.

We always have them. Yeah. Just so you can move it around too. Okay, good. Sorry. We want to create as many seasteads as possible to provide people with the technology to found their own floating country. And the key idea is 193 national governments don't represent the range of ideas that 7 billion people have produced.

And we sort of have these government monopolies that control the decisions people make. And in order to have solutions for how to live together, we have to force them through these 193 government monopolies. And technology on every other front is moving forward. And the thing that's holding us back is that we're not innovating in the technology of governance. So the key idea is if we can create a Silicon Valley of the sea, if we can get thousands of Hong Kongs and Singapore's and Isles of Man's on the ocean

and allow innovators to go out there and form their own societies, we'll discover new ways of living together and we'll push forward evolution and governance. And what's to stop some fucking psycho like Jamie over here starting the Jamie country and just having like a one mile square thing that he's built some raft and it's, you know, some he's got some Mad Max style world. No, nothing, right? Yeah. Well, this is the key idea.

I mean, Jamie can go out there and declare himself tyrant of Jamie's stead. But the problem is he has to attract people to come to his seastead. And you just hit on the key idea that makes floating nations different from land-based nations. I mean, if you're some evil dude and you take control of a land-based nation, you got it. You got monopoly control over those people. Those people don't have any choice. That's the problem with modern governments. We can't choose among them like we can among other products that advance quickly.

If we're on the sea, you got to compete to attract immigrants. You got to compete to attract investment. You got to compete to attract people to give you money so that you can build a business in a way that they think is profitable. You got to attract different kinds of ideologues out there. It's going to start as a business. And if you think of countries as being founded by conquerors and future seasteads being founded by creators, what I like to call aquapreneurs,

that sets up a completely different dynamic. And if people can choose among seasteads, that will drive what we think will be a market of competing governments, competing to please people. And then this will unleash the innovation that's out there. For the past half century, people have come up with wonderful ideas for how we could live together. You can go online and look up all sorts of interesting rule sets. The problem is all ground is claimed and there's no place we can try this out. So the technology for permanent floating structures is coming. Half the earth's surface is unclaimed by existing governments. We have a new frontier and I think it's time we started

colonizing it and building floating cities. It's a very interesting concept, but I'm going to be honest, my own personal feeling about it, it's not my opinion of how it should go about, but my own feeling when I hear the idea of it. I go, yeah, that would be interesting, but man, it brings up all these other problems. Like some crazy fuckers are going to have their own weird countries floating out there. What kind of lawless lands are you going to create what kind of weirdness but when i think about when i analyze my own thoughts about it my own instinctive reaction to it like it's just that i know there's something wrong with the way

society is structured today but change brings a whole new set of problems and people are afraid of change yeah like in order to understand uh cing, you kind of have to go deep about where solutions come from. And so what's the right way to live together? The answer is we don't know. What's the right way to make this microphone? We don't know. These kind of magnificent solutions, they're not designed by some really smart person. They emerge from millions of people competing in a market to please us. And so we're on this exponential rocket in all areas except governance. And the problem is that governments are monopolies. And most of the problems we're afraid of exist among current monopolies of governance.

And the key idea is that on the water, a fluid environment is fundamentally different from a land-based environment. If you have a chunk of land, it's very easy for a conqueror to take it and declare monopoly control, and then the government doesn't advance. It has no incentive to advance. If you're on the water, and countries can only form if people choose to attach to each other, there is no land unless you attract people to come visit you.

If those people aren't happy with your seastead, they can detach and move somewhere else. We'll have a completely different situation where instead of citizens competing to survive their government's decisions, governments will be competing to survive citizens' decisions. So if you're a governor and you're competing to attract citizens and you go bankrupt and your seastead disappears as people detach and move fluidly somewhere else, it'll be much harder for it to kind of control consolidation. And then you're not even thinking about citizens,

you're thinking about customers looking for the kind of governance they want. And when you think about it, this is variation and selection. Variation by governments, selection by citizens. And I started as a science writer and a novelist. I wrote a lot about evolution. I thought about why is there progress in the world? Why aren't things just chaotic? How is our brain so sublime in biology that it can understand these symbols I'm sending to you?

Why is this coffee mug so available, so cheap, and so plentiful? It's because of variation in selection, decentralized variation in selection. And when I was exposed to Patry Friedman's ideas about evolution, like in the primal soup of the ocean, I realized he was right. On a fluid frontier where people can detach and move about and choose the societies they want, you would have variation and selection. We'd unleash the kind of progress we see in markets and technologies in governance. And we think of governance as a technology.

I think it's really interesting, this comparison that you made in a recent video that I watched about cell phones and the competition that drives cell phones to innovate and the reason why we have such amazing phones today, why we have all these apps, why we have all these incredible cameras, great battery life and it's because there's this incredible competition and multiple platforms all across the world. Everyone's trying to come up with the biggest, best thing every year. But in government, you have none of this. You don't have any competition. It's not a bunch of people competing to see whose ideas are the best. It's a very rigid, strict structure that's in

place. It's been in place for a long time it's archaic it's it's very very flawed the representative government that we have in this country today when you you look at the influence that they have the and you look at the influences on them as far as corporate interests special interest groups lobbyists it's all madness i mean no one in their right mind if you had a chance to re-engineer society no one would look at it and go perfect there's no reason to fuck with this this is this thing's great right you know it's a terrible terrible system and it's the only system we have and it is the system and if you try to change that system you're a traitor or psycho or whatever the fuck you are an anarchist you're a cult member or cult leader um this idea is that this same sort of competition that has led

everything to innovate to the incredible degree that it is at today whether it's computers whether it's cars all the things that we see and enjoy today in our society that that that are at this incredibly high level it's because of competition and that is the exact thing that is wrong with our government. This stagnation, this two-party system influenced by corporations that has the same mandate, the same ideas, the same tired rhetoric over and over and over again. And seasteading, you believe, offers a potential opportunity to break that mold. Yes, and it's about breaking the mold. And I think the future of humanity turns on the pivot of this problem because everything is advancing very quickly.

But governance is not, and because it is these monopolies, like you and I don't have to argue about which app we're going to have on our iPhone, and then we all vote on the app, and then we all get one app, and we have to agree on it, and then we have to wait four years to vote on the next app we're all going to get. No, apps proliferate, we all get to choose them, and this drives innovation in that field. And governments, you can imagine the government we're in right now, there's like 300 million people that have to fight with each other

over these small little changes. And then everyone ends up with a bitter compromise and nobody is happy. And I've been astonished at how people pushing forward this blue frontier have been independently attracted to the metaphor of apps. So there's this Dutch guy, Koon Ootheus. I'm pronouncing his name wrong. I don't know how to speak Dutch. But he runs Water Studio. And he has already created what he calls city apps. So he takes shipping containers and he converts them into schools. He converts them into water purification units. He converts them into hospitals. And he proposes he wants to float these things to crappy coastal governments and park them in the slums and provide schools and those kind of things for children. And the advantage these things have is that they're movable. Suppose the government says we don't want that.

Well, then you can move it somewhere else. It's much easier than having to build a school in those areas. And he calls this program City Apps. And I bet you he's going to be doing this in the next couple of years. How far out do you have to be from shore? Does it vary from country to country? It depends on what we're talking about. It varies slightly from country to country. In some cases, it's 12 miles. So for instance, some seasteaders are physicians and biotech entrepreneurs, and they're interested in innovating in the space of stem cells or in biotech and feel like the regulations written in 1970 are holding back innovations written in 2020. Another problem with monopolies, they can't update their rules. So we're just stuck with these old rules.

their rules. So we're just stuck with these old rules. Some of these guys just want to get a C-STED 12 miles offshore and start pushing forward stem cells and biotech, which is personalized medicine is the future of medicine. It can change everything. Other people want to get floating hospitals offshore, cheaper, better, faster care. Millions of people travel to India to get cheaper, better, faster care from American-trained physicians. Why take a plane all the way across the world when you can take a ferry just offshore? But to really be truly an independent country, you have to go about 200 miles offshore. 200 miles? Yeah. That's a really interesting point that you just brought up about medicine, about cheaper, easier, faster care or better care.

That's a very complex and tricky issue because a lot of people are worried about quacks. A lot of people are worried about people that are not following all the regulations that have been set by the American Medical Association and that you would attract bad people, bad ideas. And then, so thinking about the fluid frontier requires us to rethink these assumptions that we bring to this. So imagine- The fluid frontier. That's what you call in the ocean. Yeah, I got a million of these little phrases.

I like it. The blue frontier. So imagine I'm a quack, quirk the quack, and I go out there and I start offering some crazy procedure that causes cancer and kills people. Butt enhancement. Butt enhancement. Calking guns. Let's do it. If I start killing people, I'm in a market.

I don't have a monopoly. If I start killing people, I'm in a market. I don't have a monopoly. The first seastead that kills somebody or causes a disaster, that will be the end of that seastead. No one will move there. No one will go there. No one will invest in it. Just to take an example, one of the guys I'm going to feature in my seasteading book is Dr. Chris Centeno.

And he's innovated in the realm of stem cells. There's people that lost. I'll take an example, Jarvis Green. He's a two-time Super Bowl champ. He lost cartilage under his kneecap. Chris Centeno is one of the, he has like a thousand successful operations where he basically takes stem cells out of your hip, re-injects them into your joint. You grow a new cartilage like a baby.

Jarvis Green had been forced to retire. He took Centeno's treatments. He grew back his cartilage and he jumped out of bed and signed with the Houston Texans. He's had fabulous success with his procedure. After a thousand, more than a thousand successful procedures, the FDA knocked on his door and said, you can't offer this procedure. It's now illegal in the United States, this particular thing. So he was forced to license his procedure to the Cayman Islands, to a company called Stomatics. So now people are flying to the Cayman Islands to get this procedure done. So, you know, economists call this regulatory

capture. We have this instinct that if you just make a monopoly of regulators and put them in place, they'll protect us. But what ends up happening is the dominant industries within that area end up controlling the regulations or having undue influence in the regulations. Well, is there a process that this guy has to go through in order to clear this particular procedure that he hasn't done yet? Well, at first he thought that he did, and he thought that it was all legit. But the FDA is unclear about what its jurisdiction is. They came in and literally declared that your own stem cells, once taken from your body and processed, are now drugs. So they're like, okay, well, your stem cells are now drugs, so now we have jurisdiction.

We're telling you to stop. And, you know, that's absurd. I'm actually quoting from the letter they sent Centeno. That your stem cells are now drugs. Whoa. Well, there's this process that I've gone through called Regenikine. Are you aware of this? Have you heard of it?

I don't think so there's a doctor his name is Peter Weller from Germany he created this procedure where you take blood out of a person's body you spin it in a centrifuge and apply heat to it and in the the heated blood produces this incredibly potent anti-inflammatory agent and it's it's extracted from the blood. It's like a yellow serum and injected directly into areas of inflammation, joint swelling, things along those lines. Wow. This sounds very similar.

Yeah, probably. And imagine I can donate my blood to somebody else, but now I can't donate my own stem cells to myself. Well, what I'm confused is this procedure is legal in the United States. It's legal. It's called off- off label. It wasn't for a while. Um, they had it in Germany and like Kobe Bryant, a lot of these athletes were flying to a lot of UFC guys flew to Germany to get this procedure done. But now it's available in several different places in America. I got mine done at this place called lifespan medicine in Santa Monica. And, uh, it's incredible.

I mean, it has an amazing effect on knees, amazing effect. I've had it done on my neck, on my back. I mean, just any areas that were like problem areas, you can reduce inflammation in this incredible way. But it's essentially the same thing. It's taking your own blood out, making it, turning into the serum and then injecting it back into your body. What's different about what this guy's doing that it's illegal? Do you know? I don't know. I mean, think of it. What you're talking about is a new innovation.

People are coming up with new innovations and the climate among people innovating in healthcare and in, especially with stem cells and with biotech is one of fear. Like they don't know what the government is going to tell them to do because the rules are unclear. They're very complex and they keep changing the rules. And this stifles the innovation we need. So if you look at, you know, the psychodramas of our age, it's, you know, healthcare, it's banking, it's, you know, the public environment, it's education, it's war, it's all the things that governments micromanage. And so why aren't these things improving with all the other things we use that aren't micromanaged

by government? It's because we don't have innovation because the government monopolies ultimately don't permit them. If you have a monopoly, you don't want people to compete with you. And we want to provide more market competition on the ocean in a place where you don't have to, you know, aggress against anyone on the ocean. Well, there's negatives against this micromanagement, but isn't there some benefits? Like, for instance, the government has been cracking down on Dr. Oz lately for all these bogus fat loss claims.

Like, there's been all these different things that he's shilled on his show that are miracle, he calls them literally in his own words, miracle fat loss cures. Sure. And then it turns out they don't reduce fat at all. They literally do nothing. And then he's in trouble for that. That's important, right? I mean, isn't that what they're worried about with this stuff that someone can tell you,

hey, man, we're going to take some part of your hip out and we're going to fix your spina bifida. We're going to fix your scoliosis. We're going to fix whatever the hell you got. We're going to inject your scoliosis we're going to fix whatever the hell you got we're going to inject it into you it turns out it's not doing jack shit yeah you know there might be some sort of a placebo effect that some people report so you have some conflicting evidence but isn't it important that there's some sort of a government regulatory or at least a board of physicians who are knowledgeable in whatever field that approve or disprove any sort of procedure? Isn't that important? I think these kind of things are important, but it's even more important to hit restart once in a while.

So if people want to stop what you're doing that you like about the reinjection of the blood, I've never heard of this, they can call forth a rule, you know, written in 1975, that the people that wrote those rules were not able to predict this innovation that happened in 2014 or whenever it happened. And the idea is with new blue fluid rules on the ocean, we have to start again with a new regulatory structure. And this happens naturally when there's competition against monopolies. So in a sense, you're trying to do what the founding fathers of the United States did. They tried to see what's going wrong in Europe and what they don't like about the system that they were controlled under. They leave, come to America, establish this new country, set forth these new rules and regulations, these new ideas.

And then a couple hundred years later, they turn to dog shit. Yeah. Whenever it's a monopoly, it ends up turning into dog shit. How do you stop that from happening on Jamie Seastead? Because Jamie looks like a goddamn dictator to me. I think you get that guy out there on the sea. He's got his own little island. Next thing you know, he's banging all the women.

It's like Waco in the ocean. Yeah. And I'm glad you're putting this in banging all the women. It's like Waco in the ocean. Yeah. And I'm glad you're putting this in the perspective of the United States because I think in the United States it was a giant life raft where tens of millions of people who were misfits in their home countries came here to try out their crazy ideas. And they discovered new ways of living together that ended up changing the whole world. And if there had never been this giant life raft where people could try something new, right now we'd be arguing, you know, which works better, communism or monarchy? That'd be the only options that we have. The United States discovered new things that people just take for granted, like, you know, democracy and women's rights and things like this. It happened all over the world. Now, Jamie goes out on the ocean and starts his own seastead, he's not claiming some

giant bunch of land with a bunch of captive citizens that he can control. He has to convince people that his seastead can make a profit, that his seastead can provide blue jobs and attract people out there, that his seastead will survive competing with other seasteads. And imagine an environment where citizens at any time can detach from a seastead and float to a different seastead. But can they really? Because if you have a seastead, say if you – let's define a seastead because I'm thinking it's a floating city. If it's a floating city, floating cities have condos.

Condos you buy, you're stuck there, you You got a mortgage. You're not going anywhere. You're stuck in this floating city. Jamie goes crazy. He's doing meth now. God damn it. I got a goddamn condo on this meth heads seastead. I can't get off. I owe this money.

I'm upside down on my loan. What am I going to do? I have a family. My kids go to school in the seastead. Yeah. That's what happens in land-based governments. One way to think about this is the Dutch. Their country is sinking.

They're building floating homes. They built a floating pavilion. They're working on a floating park. Holland's sinking? Sure. They've been fighting against the water for a thousand years, building dams. You know, a little Dutch boy that plugged the dam with his finger. They're so accustomed to the water.

When you go there and suggest we need to build floating cities, they don't think it's crazy. And the company we're working with on our floating city project, Delta Sync, S-Y-N-C, speaks explicitly about the mobility of moving units forming floating cities and how this will create a kind of market of competitive governments that would be peaceful, that would empower citizens and disempower governments, so that governments are going to be constantly... Aquatic governments will be hustling to attract citizens rather than hustling to seize control of them. Because the ocean is such a fundamentally different medium in which human nature can compete. Now, have you ever, I'm sure you have, I shouldn't even ask it that way.

What about crime? Like, how are you going to protect citizens from invading seasteaders, from pirates? How are we not going to have, like, Waterworld? First of all, yeah. Yeah, we get this a lot and and and one way to think about it is that there's about a hundred thousand boats on the sea right now and civilization that's it yeah like at this moment riding around in the whole world i think so yeah seems like there'd be more than that crisscrossing and most of them are in docks and they're dropping stuff off and

you know if it weren't for all this fluid commerce that you know the world economy would collapse wow i thought it was way more than a hundred thousand boats on the whole planet three quarters water yeah it doesn't matter and uh if you think about it all those boats have to have some form of security and when you when you hear about violence you almost always hear about land-based governments involved in violence. You rarely hear about violence and crime on ships, though it occurs. So all civilization requires some kind of security. And all these boats have water propulsion.

They have sound propulsion. They have armed guards. I think at this point 75% of container ships have armed patrols on board. And I've ridden cruise ships. I've walked around American cities. Cruise ships are the size of skyscrapers, and they're a lot safer than some of the American cities I've been in. So security is really not a problem. If you're going to make a new floating nation, you should have some security. But if you think about Iceland, Malta, Bora Bora, Barbados, there's so many islands out there defenseless against the big nations. Cayman Islands is an example. They have no standing army. A lot of island nations have no standing army. They do business with the big nations. And the way I put it is,

if you're going to found your seastead, think like a cleaner fish in a world of sharks. You know, China is not invading Hong Kong. The United States is invading the Cayman Islands. Malaysia hasn't invaded Singapore. When new island nations provide huge economic value to the big nations, they do quite well. They do quite well. So the idea is that just it'll be some sort of a benefit that the rest of the countries have by these competing governments. But don't you think that they would find that these competing governments put pressure on them to sort of innovate and that they would want to stifle that in some sort of a way? Well, we shall see, because that's one of the key ideas. I mean, people little understand the power of small island nations to change the policies of great nations. And there are numerous examples of this. The most obvious one would be Hong Kong.

You know, Hong Kong gained some level of independence from China, was sort of an interesting hybrid called East meets West. And it created like fabulous wealth in a very short period of time, embarrassing China into changing its policies. China has a lot of problems, but by opening its markets with, you know, Deng Xiaoping's open door policy, it's caused at least a half billion

Chinese to escape poverty because of the example set by Hong Kong. And there are examples like this over and over. Portugal decriminalized drugs. Scientific American published the fabulous effects. And that's changing policies in the rest of the world. I can go on and on with this. Estonia with the flat tax. Little island nations innovate in ways that large continental nations imitate. And we want to create more of these. When we look at like the African island of Mauritius, when we look at Hong Kong, when we look at Singapore, when we look at the Isle of Man, all these places have innovated and affected and been used as examples of policies that have been instituted by larger nations. Now, when it comes to a practical application of this,

how far away do you think we are from a legitimate seastead nation? And it depends on how you define a seastead. Right now, we're working on the Floating City Project, which we're getting the Dutch company I mentioned before, DeltaSync, created a feasibility study. So we hope to have a small floating city with some level of independence in a host nation's territorial waters, hopefully by 2020, if all goes according to plan. Whoa, six years. Yeah. And this will be in the territorial shallow waters, right? Okay, so it'll be under the jurisdiction of that particular government?

It'll be under the jurisdiction of that particular government. And we've got, you know, we're closing in on deals with those governments willing to offer us some level of independence to see what we can create. And this is not a radical idea. I mean, the special economic zone movement that's happening across developed nations is all based on this idea of we'll create one little space where people can experiment with new rules because even we politicians recognize that our government is screwed up. We'll see what kind of wealth can be created. I mean, Hong Kong started a movement that's happened all across the world, where now we're proposing, let us do a floating one. We don't

need any of your land. Let's see what we can create. Maybe we can hire some local people. So we want to create a demonstration seastead that will attract some attention and attract more brains to the problem. And then hopefully we'll be able to move further out and solve the remaining engineering challenges of floating breakwaters and large enough seasteads to remain stable on the high seas. And this is an engineering challenge that remains to be solved, but if you think about Shell's prelude is larger than the Empire State Building. It's a floating oil and gas facility.

They've built the hull, and it should be on the water by 2017. It's going to be in international waters for 25 years. All the technologies are sort of closing in on solving the problem of creating a floating structure on the sea. And I think the more creative people we attract to this problem, I think the quicker we'll solve the problem and have a floating city. I think it'll happen in the next couple of decades. And it's easier to float than fly. We have space stations floating above us. We can certainly make sea stations. It's just that people have been more sold on

the idea of space. They haven't been sold on the idea of floating cities. This is a pretty radical proposition to invest a significant amount of your time in. Like what led you down this road? Because this is, I mean, this isn't just like, hey man, let's move to Vancouver because the United States sucks. This is like, let's start our own thing and let's do it in this very radical way. What was it that made you want to invest so much of your time? Being part of Silicon Valley and seeing that so much innovation comes

from people being able to freely compete and come up with new innovations, and all of a sudden I'm using instantaneous global telepathy, which we call Twitter. I never would have imagined such a thing could exist 20 years ago. And I think we radically underestimate the potential for innovation. And I'm very excited about the future of technology. And I'm in deep despair about the future of governance. And when I saw that mobile nations on the sea that can disassemble and be reassembled elsewhere

according to the you know decisions of the citizens I realized wow this is a fundamentally different way in which human nature can compete that would be much less about conquering and killing and much more about creating value and attracting people to move there. And, you know, we're living in a world where, you know, you and I are a member of the global 1%. You know, the World Bank estimated that if you make 34,000 US dollars a year, you're a part of the global 1%. Meanwhile, we have this bottom billion who work for less than $1.25 a day. $34,000 a year is a global 1%. Yes. Wow. That's what the World Bank estimated.

Another group estimated about 55. That's unbelievably shocking. 55K. Yeah. So it's like Americans have taken the upper part of the hockey stick and just chopped off the 1% of that and start complaining about that. Yeah, isn't that hilarious? Yeah.

So we are fabulously wealthy with our access to institutions. And there's another billion people, or 800 million depending on how you look at it, who don't have access to this. And a Gallup poll in 2009, there was 700 million people who told this poll, I want to leave my country forever, get the hell out of here and go somewhere else. And all the existing nations are acting as gated communities, locking them out. This is not counting the people that say, oh, I want to go somewhere for a short period of time, make my money and come back. These are all the people like tomorrow I will leave my home.

So there's desperate people who want to go somewhere. I think seasteads won't be able to survive without immigration, without attracting immigrants. So a lot of seasteaders are interested in aquaculture, creating vast seaweed farms on the sea, vast algae farms to provide the world with food and fuel. vast algae farms to provide the world with food and fuel. The great thing about algae is that they grow their own biomass with carbon and nutrients, both of which are polluting the oceans. So you could, in a sense, feed and fuel the world with greenhouse gas if you could ramp up these ocean farms to the scale needed to feed people. You'd need to hire millions of people to have these farms. I don't think you and I are going to go work an algae farm, but I think people in Yemen or Somalia or Afghanistan would gladly take jobs there.

I mean, there's migrant workers are fleeing their countries and trying to find better lives everywhere. And I'm one of the reasons I'm interested in seasteading is I think we have the potential to uplift a significant proportion of the bottom billion. If you did develop this, how would you, or would you at all, control immigration to your seastead? I mean, how do you weed out the undesirable? How do you keep people that are murderers and criminals from other countries that are fleeing jurisdictions of wherever they're from? They get in a boat and they show up at your seastead and just fuck the whole thing up. Security, hopefully.

Like, you can imagine you start a vast algae farm. You're going to be interested in being safe. And there's already numerous security industries working the oceans that provide security for all sorts of ocean-going vessels. So that industry already exists, and it does a better job than land-based cops and militaries, actually. But if you offer better jobs, if you offer blue jobs to people, they'll take those jobs, if you offer blue jobs to people, they'll take those jobs. Especially when you consider that we're talking twice the population of the United States has announced that they're ready to go somewhere else. There's not many places they can go. And, you know, I was talking to a woman from Senegal, Magat Wade, and she was telling me, you know, people from my country, they stow away on boats and they, you know, they die, they drown. She says they're fish food.

There are people so desperate to get out of their countries. They're jumping on boats, not knowing where they're going to go, saying, just get me anywhere. Get me out of this hellhole. And those people will take better opportunities. And those people will take better opportunities. Just like, you know, I'm Irish. A hundred years ago, my ancestors were extremely poor. They took better jobs in the United States, low-paying jobs.

And now their grandchildren are living lives of fabulous prosperity. We need to keep this going. We need more life rafts out there for the bottom billion. So would you have any sort of a filtering system to keep people out? Would you verify passports and do background checks on people before you allow them in? I mean, what's the idea behind that? It was just going to be open and figure out how to do it along the way when things go bad. I mean, what's the... And one way to think about this is it's not about designing a society. I have no ability to design the society. I'm working to provide the technology so that other people can design their societies.

And new countries created in the past few decades apply more modern rules to their founding, and they do better jobs. There's been something like 29 new countries since 1990. I hope I'm getting those numbers right. Really? Yeah. There's been like... Where are they? They're like six since, you know, 2002. Really? Yeah. People don't realize new countries are created all the time. And people don't say... Where are they created? I've never even heard of them before. They're mostly countries breaking up into smaller pieces. They're mostly countries breaking up into smaller pieces. Are any promising? Oh, yeah.

Yeah? Yeah. I think Estonia is incredibly exciting. And it's innovating in ways larger countries are not. You know, they've innovated in the realm of a flat tax, which was unthinkable. And I think I counted something like since Estonia innovated in the area of the flat tax, they grew at like twice the rate of surrounding European nations, causing arguments among their politicians to instantiate a flat tax. I counted like 22 countries that have adopted Estonia's innovation. So new countries innovate.

Old countries do not. And the new startup countries set the examples that change things. So why are we waiting for historical accident? I'd like to create thousands of these. So the place where you have to let go of the desire for control is to realize it's going to be up to the founders of these societies, how they're going to provide security. It's going to be up to the founders who they're going to hire and what they're going to pay them. We're not controlling, we're empowering people to try things. And the reason I'm less afraid of aquatic nations than continental nations is because aquatic nations will have to attract people to live there. You're not going out and you're not conquering some place where people live and saying, I'll keep everyone safe.

You're saying, I've got to provide you an incentive to come live with me. And then there'll be other seasteads competing for the same workers, for the same innovators, for the same doctors and lawyers. If they provide better, cheaper services, then people will detach and move there. We're in a situation where there's nothing stopping the inexorable growth of governments because they are monopolies. And I think humanity has to innovate in this space. And it requires this deep mind flip to think about the difference between competing over land and competing over fluid, think of them as houseboats, on a liquid. It's much harder to seize monopoly control with your military

over a bunch of boats on the ocean. Is it, though? I mean, it seems like they would just kind of surround you. Like, if you try to do a Waco in the ocean, it seems like if you had, like, the Branch Davidian complex out there in the middle of the ocean, like, I know Jamie's planning. Look at that motherfucker. Look at him over there.

He's planning it. If you decided to do that and build some city and put up a giant barbed wire fence and have sex with everybody's wife and store a lot of weapons, the government would probably come in. I mean, if you say security, and I'm obviously playing devil's advocate here, but if you say everyone will be responsible for security in your she-stead what point does security become an army like are you allowed to have a jet are you allowed to have nuclear weapons are you allowed to have you know if you innovate to the point where you're you're you're building some fucking tesla weapons out in the middle of the ocean that can

shoot down anything that comes anywhere near you at what point is the government going to feel threatened by you and move in? How big can you get? I mean, does every seasteading nation have to be sort of either like a satellite of a larger nation? You know what I'm saying? Well, conquerors have incentives. And the way to think about how this works is to think about precedents that already exist. So let's see. Is it the islands of Barbados and Bora Bora that are just a few

miles off the coast of Venezuela, independent countries that are much wealthier and Venezuela doesn't attack them. The Cayman Islands, you know, in many ways takes a spiteful stance towards the regulatory structure of the United States, welcomes lots of, you know, physician mavericks and financial mavericks to their shores. The United States doesn't attack the Cayman Islands. Right, but they're not 200 miles offshore with nuclear weapons. I'm just, I'm sort of saying, if you established a city that became a country that's floating offshore, that's heavily armed. Right. So you have to ask, how are continental nations in control of nuclear weapons? Why aren't island nations in control? Small island nations don't have nuclear

weapons, and most of them don't have standing armies. You have to pay for that stuff. Like, for me to go attack someone and kill someone, there has to be a financial incentive for me that I feel like, or whatever incentive it is, incentive of power, that I feel like the cost of the invasion is going to pay back in some great thing I'm going to get, like the oil or any other natural resource that might be within that nation. Small island nations like Hong Kong, they don't have any natural resources except a big port. And they're able to create all this wealth through trade and through policies.

except a big port and they're able to create all this wealth through trade and through policies so how does a seastead get enough money to get uh um to build up a a giant nuclear warhead or something and launch it from the seas well couldn't hong kong sort of do that with all the money that hong kong's generated what if they started building an army i think that would probably be a huge issue don't you think if and yet they don't. Because if you own a continental nation, like say China, you have control over a captive population, you can fleece and pay for whatever you want. So you have an amazing amount of capital, brainpower, and money to build your nuclear weapons.

And this is why these large, um, these large governments to me are much more of a threat to the world than some floating island that has to, you know, not go bankrupt as it gets started. What is the major roadblock as far as technical capability of creating something along these lines? I mean, has the technology been invented in order to create a safe floating city, or is this completely theoretical? The key enabling technology at this point is how do you create something that can float on the high seas that is affordable by, say, the average middle-class American.

Am I right also in thinking that you don't have to worry about waves, as far as rogue waves or tidal waves, because those more affect land than they do the actual ocean itself? If you're floating, you just kind of bob up and down a lot. You wouldn't get swamped. Yeah, I think you're talking about tsunamis yeah so rogue waves like you know

yeah what was that stupid movie with mark mark perfect perfect story yeah yeah yeah as tsunamis are harmless on the deep sea people are shocked to hear that soon like a tsunami wave can literally be thousands of miles long so if you're on a boat a boat, you know, over the course of a day, your boat goes up about a meter and goes down a meter and you can easily not notice it. Tsunamis become deadly when they hit land and they start to roll and pitch and bury a city. There was a report that I really love where there's scuba divers off the coast of some Thailand city. They were underwater just swimming around having a vacation. And they say, oh, there's a weird discoloration in the water. And there's a little undulation happening. Oh, well. And they go back to scuba diving. They come back to the surface.

And the hotel where they ate breakfast in is destroyed. The city is destroyed. They're swimming. They swam through a tsunami and didn't notice it. So coastal cities are sitting ducks for tsunamis. If you're going to be subjected to a tsunami, you'd be safer on a seastead. So those big crazy waves from a perfect storm, like if something comes like that? So that is the fundamental engineering challenge, huge waves on the ocean. So we have the technology to create a floating city in shallow territorial waters and we're going to do that soon hopefully uh the engineering challenge to be solved is how do you create permanent structures on the water um that that

are that can stay out there like you can create boats but the problem is boats have to come to shore every decade or two decades to get cleaned you got to have something permanent out there and there's numerous technologies like um one that's been in uh um commission been in operation since 1962 is the flip ship it's basically shaped like a baseball bat you tow it out into the ocean and then you use ballast tanks so that it flips and then it stands upright. So say like one-sixth of the ship of this big baseball bat is above the water, and five-sixths is below the water. And it's described as being as stable as a fence post.

And these were on the water in 1962. They're still on the water. So most of it is under the water. Most of it is under the water. So that would be essentially the anchor? That would be the the anchor that would be the root that would be the root and so it can sit there among the waves and you're on this thing or underwater you know you can imagine looking at a window at a permanent aquarium jamie's got a

photo of it that he just pulled up here this is what it looks like yeah that's what the top part of it looks like whoa uh so most of convincing people of the potential of Seastead involves telling them about what already exists. I mean, that thing is older than I am. It's been around. Really? Yeah. So it's expensive. It's too expensive for regular people to use. It's used by the military. It's used by scientists. But you're seasick free on that thing. Now imagine you make four of them or three of them. You can build a platform on it. You can build floors below the ocean. You can build floors above the ocean. So many of the seastead designs you can see on our website are built in such a way that it looks like they're on pillars on land in shallow water, but they're

actually not. If you build your pillars deep enough and buoyant enough, you can set your seastead up, say, 50 feet from the surface of the ocean, and the ocean waves are moving underneath the seastead, and it remaining relatively stable uh on these pillars that are just uh in water and the pillars go down much further than you you know would normally think it's kind of like building a a foundation in a swamp yeah i saw something where they made it so they they figured out a way to make things so stable that you can play billiards on a boat. They figured out a way to stabilize like a pool table to the point where it reacts instantaneously to the movement of the ocean and the ship itself. It stays constantly balanced.

Yeah, there's so much I can tell you about. I mean, I rode on a cruise ship, an Alaskan cruise ship. And a month ago, I was on a Galapagos cruise ship. And you can have your martini glass, you pour the martini glass, you set it on the table, it's not, you know, it's not rolling over. It's like, the larger you make your seastead, the more stable it is in the waves. Those boats are kind of seasteads, right? I mean, if you really think about it. Well, that's the precedent we use is to get people thinking about cruise ships. I mean, they're the size of skyscrapers. I mean, you can look at pictures on the Internet and realize those tiny little ants are people.

And everything people do in cities, they're already doing on cruise ships. You know, simulated skydiving, they have rock concerts on them. Here's this video of these guys playing pool on a cruise ship. this video of these guys playing pool on a cruise ship and the the boat is moving but yet the balls are rolling perfectly because the the ship if you can see the ship is moving but the table stays completely level so it adjusts with the the movement of the ocean, the table consistently, constantly adjusts so that the floor may be moving, but the balls are never rolling. Isn't that incredible? That is incredible.

And that would obviously be on like a smaller boat where it's not naturally stable anyway. Because I've been on cruise ships where people are playing pool. You know, you can't even tell you're on the water. But if you think about the sinking of that Russian sub, you know, they had to find a company to lift that thing off the water without causing, off the bottom of the ocean without causing a disaster. The Glomar situation. This was a long time ago? It was a few years ago. I think

it was called the Lursk and the company is called Mamomet. I don't know how to pronounce these things because they're in different languages. But they had to lift this thing centimeter by centimeter, and they had to create a platform on the top of the water and create virtually perfect stability while they lifted this thing slowly off the bottom, a nuclear sub off the bottom of the ocean in order to lift it up. And it was a tremendous engineering feat. We can go on and on like this, and we might bore your listeners, but there are multiple technologies that are all closing in on, hey, we can get something permanent on the sea. And it

looks like Shell is going to build one soon. So the question is now how do we make it cheaper? How do we attract more brains to this? How do we get a kind of X prize attracting people to solve this engineering challenge? I think once we solve this challenge, seasteading will drive itself. Shell is going to build one. And they're building an oil refinery that floats? Is that what the idea is? Yeah. And it's not, they're not calling it a seastead, but it will be, you know, 200 miles off the coast of Australia. It's built in like South Korea. And it's bigger than the

Empire State Building. You can fit several, you know, football fields on it. And it's going to be in international waters for up to 25 years. So are they treating it like a city? Think of it as like a giant skyscraper on the water. Will it be reasonably self-sustaining, or is it going to rely on constant visits by freighter ships? Like all ships and islands everywhere, it requires constant visits by freighter ships. Like all ships and islands everywhere, it requires on constant visits and trade. But this is like,

they don't think of it as an independent country. They think of it as a... Shell Prelude Fling Facility. Wow, look at the size of that thing. It's gigantic. Bigger than the Empire State Building. Yeah, more massive. And see if I can remember how many football fields on it.

You could play, I think it's five football games in a row. Wow. So it's doable. It's just still too expensive. Shell can afford that, and they can pay it back. Well, so are skyscrapers, right? I mean, you and I can't go out and build a skyscraper. It's too expensive.

But we could if we had a great idea for a can't go out and build a skyscraper right expensive but we could if we had a great idea for a business that would work aboard a floating skyscraper like a like a gigantic hospital um a floating cayman islands you know one of my heroes uh who's building a health city uh in the cayman islands is named uh devi sh He did create a name. Yeah, he's a he's an Indian guy. And he did amazing stuff with, you know, he'll offer Americans heart surgery for one 10th the price with the best doctors. And that makes him enough money where he can offer medical insurance to rural Indians for 25 cents a month. So he plays this kind of jurisdictional arbitrage. So now he's moving

to the Cayman Islands and building what are called health cities, ready to catch the rising wave of Americans who are going to be dissatisfied with their health care and want it faster, quicker, and cheaper, and will fly there. And I've been looking at him as a guy that seems like he understands what seasteading would be. He seems to understand the principles, and he's applying them by using real islands. And I've always fantasized if I could talk to him and get him to, like, invest in a seastead. And, you know, I almost peed my pants a few months ago where he was in the news, and he said, you know, the best place to have a floating hospital would be on a ship, you know,

off the coast of a major American city. Given that we don't have that, I'm going to build one in the Cayman Islands. And I'm like, oh, my God, like there's so many people thinking along these lines. Like if we could just, we have innovations and technologies moving forward, and we have regulatory structures and governments holding it back. And the world can't be held back. The world has to move forward. You don't want to overthrow governments. That's violent. You want to innovate and compete with and embarrass governments the way Singapore and Hong Kong and the Isle of Man have done. Well, on a small scale, when you see the certain laws that are in place that are very restrictive and they don't make sense. And then you see states that take chances like Colorado with their medical marijuana practices or rather legal marijuana, where they're making untold amounts of money now,

I mean, far past what they projected. And now other countries are starting to look at the revenue that's being brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue. And they're saying, you know what? Why would we avoid this? This is crazy. What are we seeing as far as violence? Well, we're seeing a drop in violent crime. What are we seeing as far as drunk driving and driving accidents?

We're seeing record lows, record lows as far as traffic fatalities and drunk driving. That's exactly what happens. Someone comes along and says, listen, the laws that are in place, they don't make any sense. The structure that's in place, it's antiquated, it's archaic, and it doesn't match up with what we know about medicine, what we know about physiology, what we know about life. Let's change it. So they're changing it. You're seeing the benefits.

And now all these other states are now first switching to medical marijuana and projecting legalized marijuana all throughout the entire country. It's the same sort of a situation. It's these archaic, very restrictive laws that don't make any sense, and there's no competition. Because of the monopoly of government, these laws are in place, and people say, well, you could vote them out. Do you know how much fucking money is spent keeping those laws in place? Do you know how many people lobby the prison guard unions, pharmaceutical companies, et cetera, et cetera, so many different companies lobby and spend millions of dollars of money to keep the laws in place. If you could have one state, just one state, you know, let's say South

Dakota says, you know what, we're not so happy with the way things work. What we're going to do is we're going to open up South Dakota to a complete utopian society. We're going to just start from scratch. Instead of seasteading, why don't you come over to South Dakota and try rebuilding society over here? Would you be interested in something like that? Or do you think the only way to do this is to do it in the ocean? I ran my first podcast last week, and I interviewed Zachary Caceres. Welcome to the club. You interviewed him?

No. Welcome to the podcast club. Yeah. Your first one. It was your first one. He got in there. And it was a marvelous interview. He's a fascinating dude, and he founded the Startup Cities Institute.

Now, the special economic zones, there's actually thousands of them all over the world as places like India, South America, China, are all like, yeah, it's embarrassing to be in a country that's not performing well. Let's create special little zones where we can start over with new rules. And there's, you know, they're called free cities, they're called free ports. So, you know, Zach has been pushing, pushing the in in Guatemala the idea of the more free cities you can create, the more innovation you can create, the more wealth you can a deal with existing governments and asking them for a piece of their land. Right. And some of these places have been very successful. You know, Shenzhen across the bay from Hong Kong.

Given the example that Hong Kong set, you know, China agreed to create a little special economic zone called Shenzhen and, you know, created once again, spectacular wealth. So now they've allowed more of these experiments. So the way you know an industry isn't working is if you have to argue about it. You know, when our arguments don't matter, our experiments matter. And the reason we have to argue about politics is because it's not innovating and everyone is frustrated. And the reason we have to argue about politics is because it's not innovating and everyone is frustrated. And the more startup societies we can create, the more we'll empower innovators to come up with ideas we haven't thought of. The best solutions always come from outside our heads. So I'm a big supporter of startup cities.

Startup cities, people are a big supporter of seasteading. And, you know, may the best societies win. Hmm. But your idea is primarily to build it in the ocean. And if you do build it in the ocean, what are the potential natural disaster worries you have to worry about? If you don't have to worry about waves, you do have to worry about things like hurricanes and things like that, right? Would you have to engineer the buildings very specifically to deal with tropical storms and things along those lines?

Seasteads are mobile. The people that are sitting ducks in the face of a hurricane is anyone that's nailed to a coastal nation. All the megacities in the world are springing up along the coast, and many of them are susceptible to hurricanes. If you're a seastead, you know, I grew up in the East Coast. I was subjected to a few hurricanes. You know about them a few days before they come.

And then it's batten down the hatches, get in the basement, you know, whatever you have to do. If you're a seastead, you could potentially just move out of the way, as boats do. So you would just, I mean, there's some of them that are just massive though. I mean, there's, there's like Katrina. I mean, how many States was Katrina?

How many States wide was Katrina before it hit? It was enormous, right? It was enormous. And I'm curious to know, um, how much, how much lead time do people have in the warning of that?

Um, you're leading me to talk about, you know, I have to get bigger and bigger with, seasteading's a big subject. And the thing I want to tell you about now is, we'll start with the fact that hurricanes don't cross the equator.

A lot of people don't know that. There's never been evidence of a hurricane crossing the equator. You mean south to north? Across the line. Either way. You mean like go along the vertical axis of the equator or go above it? Go above the equator or go below the equator.

Really? Yeah. Why is that? I don't know. The Coley-Rollis Forks, I have no idea. But so there's this guy, Patrick Takahashi, who's like a biochemical engineer from Hawaii, and numerous people like that are pushing forward this technology called OTEC, O-T-E-C. And it's basically ocean thermal energy conversion. And it basically takes advantage of

the fact that the surface of a tropical ocean is very warm and a thousand feet down, it's very cold and you get like a huge temperature differential, which can drive a gigantic steam engine and basically use the ocean itself as a solar panel to, you know, power an ocean city or an ocean plant ship, as he calls it, and also power the land-based nations of the world. We can completely replace fossil fuels with a clean, green, renewable energy of OTEC. fossil fuels with a clean, green, renewable energy of OTEC. Does it sound futuristic? They built a working one in 1979 during the Carter administration as it was part of the oil crisis. And then soon after that, when oil places fell, OTEC was abandoned. No more OTEC plants were built. Now there's whole companies involved with building OTEC. They're going to build one off the coast of China. Numerous island nations have commissioned OTEC plants to be built off their coasts. The Bahamas is going to build two. So why did I go to this? We're talking about hurricanes. build these uh gigantic otech plants is on the equator because that's where the surface water

is warmest and as an added benefit you're safe from hurricanes for the most part so the equator itself how wide is the equator like what's considered the equator i mean it's not a line right yeah it's it's uh it's it's where the you know the earth spins on its Yeah, it's where the Earth spins on its axis, and it's where it's basically the Earth that spends the most time closest to the sun. There must be a height though, right? Yeah, that's a good question. It's funny, I was just at the equator when I went to the Galapagos Islands on my little trip, and I don't think there's an official width of the equator. You know, I have no idea. Or height.

It seems like there should be. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's just the line where the Earth spends the most time closest to the sun. Everywhere else we have seasons because the Earth is on a wobble. The Internet says it has length, no width or depth. That makes sense. It's a line. It's just a very fine line with no height at all.

It's an abstraction. How strange. So you'd have to be on that line. But if you went up too high, what if the northern tip of your city gets fucked by a hurricane? I mean, that could happen because a lot of hurricanes are caused by very warm water. But it seems so bizarre that it would not cross. Yeah, it starts sort of near the equator, and then it moves either north or south. Wow, that's so weird.

Yeah, and I don't understand why. It's one of those things I've been taught by the numerous aquapreneurs I've spoken to. The thing that makes seasteading that shows that it's a meta idea is all the diverse people that come to seasteading that shows that it's a meta idea is all the diverse people that come to seasteading with their unique solution that no one who talked about seasteading has thought of. You know, on the website, we have this thing called the eight great moral imperatives of seasteading. And each of them, it's a little video thing that I made to try to introduce people to the key ideas. Each video is like five minutes long. And each of them features an aquapreneur

that didn't even know about the other guys, but hears about seasteading and comes to us with, I have an idea for the seaweed farm, and this is how we could lower the carbon acidity of the ocean, and I could do this on a massive scale, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we have another guy, one of my favorites is Neil Sims, who runs the Valella Research Project. He has fish cages that school with the moving fish. So he literally, see if I can describe this to you. Think of the Hawaiian islands as rocks in a stream.

And as the ocean comes by the islands, it creates little eddies behind these islands, like little leaf floating around. So he's got these circular fish cages where he keeps the fish inside them. So the fish just kind of school in a circle and the cages move with the schooling fish around in a circle and he has a GPS on the cage. So the fish are out there. There's no environmental or negligible, unmeasurable environmental impact. The fish are on the deep sea living as if they're wild. These are crazy ideas, but they require being out in the place where there's no government jurisdiction for the most part.

I mean, off the coast of Hawaiian Islands, there is some government jurisdiction. But we have 45% of the world's surface unclaimed by existing Governments where people are innovating in these unique ways to like feed the world with sustainable sashimi on the deep oceans Is the idea of managing people just an archaic idea and it is what what you're saying what you're talking about when you're talking about? micromanaging the government trying to manage all these things and in fact fucking them up with too many regulations, is it impossible to really regulate human behavior at a certain point or to really regulate, especially when it comes to things like innovation, when it comes to, I mean, are regulations, in fact, roadblocks to innovation? The creativity of 7 billion people is unpredictable. And there's always something new coming, especially as a seasteader, where people come to me and tell me about things they could use seasteading for.

I'm like, I had no idea. I can't believe you're telling me this. This is very exciting. So I've had to embrace my humility that I don't understand what's coming. So people are afraid. People want regulations. And rather than take a position on whether we need regulations or not, we should all agree that the way to create sound regulations

is not to simply create a monopoly that has permanent control over any particular industry and writes a bunch of rules, passes a bunch of laws, accumulating thousands and thousands of more laws. And those more laws don't keep pace with Moore's law, to make a pun. I mean, we have thousands, tens of thousands of regulations written in the 70s that are still constraining innovation. And those people were not capable of predicting innovations that were going to come in the 21st century. capable of predicting innovations that were going to come in the 21st century. So if you want regulations, you need them as organic and dynamic as the industries they regulate.

Right. But how does that work? I mean, how does anyone calculate these sort of regulations to especially an incredibly fluid and dynamic industry like the technology industry that most people like say if you're trying to regulate you know certain aspects of cell phone development most people just are just not qualified to understand them they just don't know what they're talking about right you're talking about something that's changing year to year if you if you uh made regulations and as far as the development of cell phones back when the motorola starAC was state-of-the-art,

and you try to apply those same innovations today with the Samsung Galaxy S5, I mean, holy shit, you're dealing with a completely different animal. One of them is essentially a computer that could run your whole life and check your heart rate and do all kinds of nutty shit, locate, you know, it's got a GPS on it and can tell you where to go, can navigate you. And the other one was just simply a way to call people. Right. And the humility we have to embrace is we don't know. Right. We don't know how to regulate the future. And so if you confront the fact there is no human

being that can pre-regulate the innovations that are happening in a decade, you realize that the way to solve these problems is not to simply create a permanent monopoly that, you know, writes way more laws than it allows to go away. You need to break up those monopolies. You need competing jurisdictions, sort of like, I think of it as fluidly overlapping. sort of like, I think of it as fluidly overlapping, a market of developing regulations on the ocean initiated by the industries. And we see this in lots of other industries where regulations develop over time from within. A lot of people don't know that a lot of the things we take for granted, aspirin, knee operations, lots of heart surgeries, they just came from the ground, from doctors experimenting.

So every country goes through this cycle. It's such a constant cycle that it's actually called, what is it called, Cardwell's Law. There's like an official name for it, that you start out with these blossoming industries. There's some disaster that happens that causes regulation. In the case of medicine, it was the thalidomide scandal that happened decades ago. So then these regulations come in place to protect people from disasters. But by creating a monopoly of regulation production, the regulations just accumulate and accumulate, and none of them ever go away so you the the uh the bureaucracy rides on this wave of innovation and then it starts dragging it down because there's just no incentive for the regulators to cut back on their regulations and you end up killing the goose that lays the golden egg but

essentially the the balancing act is between safety and innovation, right? That's the balancing act, especially when you talk about things like thalidomide. How do you sort of manage that? How do you manage the balancing act of safety and innovation? Because in terms of especially some untested medical procedure like i have a friend who um got a stroke from vioxx it was some some uh arthritis medication and he you know was a young guy got a stroke you know it's pretty crazy yeah and they pulled it off the market and now it's legal and all those lawsuits and all this jazz but what what do you do to ensure that one of those things,

the most beneficial, whether it's like the most beneficial innovative technology arises, or do you err on the side of caution at all costs and make sure that no one becomes a victim of some emerging idea that hasn't been vetted out yet. Because we have a monopoly, they err strongly in the side of the precautionary principle. So the regulators are in an impossible position. They have no way of evaluating all the new stuff that comes online. They just don't have the resources. So they have to do it in consultation with the dominant industries

who invariably lean them towards, don't allow this innovation through. What if a disaster happens? consultation with the dominant industries, who invariably lean them towards, you know, don't allow this innovation through. What if a disaster happens? And regulators are blamed for disasters, and they don't get credit for all the innovations that come through. But on the flip side, aren't the people that are coming up with these innovations, wouldn't they try to influence them to any regulatory body to let them slide through because these be extremely profitable and wouldn't they say hey you know this is all safe when maybe in fact it hasn't and haven't there been a bunch of different um medications that have been released onto the market that turned out like

i remember um fen fen you remember that yeah where people uh i remember this girl she was about she was a pretty girl but she she was 30 pounds plus overweight. And then one time I saw her, and it wasn't that long. It was a few months later, and all of a sudden she's this skinny little bombshell. I was like, what the fuck is going on? What did you do? Oh, I'm on FinFin. Six months later, heart problems, all these health issues.

She bloons up again. I know someone on FinFin too. It was crazy. Right. She balloons up again. But I know someone on FinFin too. Yes. It was crazy. Yeah. But you, we should confront the fact like our minds always go to this bad story. And so we see the thalidomide baby. Right.

From the sixties. But we don't see the tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, and some estimate even more than that, that have died as the result of medical innovations that are available, often in other countries and are already approved, that are not approved, say, in the United States. Right. So we don't need to, you and I are not going to agree on a balancing act and impose it

on the world. But we should recognize that there's a cycle, that it starts out being protective, and then it becomes overprotective, and then it prevents and quashes innovation. And when it's a monopoly, it never innovates. It never stops writing new rules. And once it's controlled by dominant interests, new people that don't have a billion dollars or 10 years to wait to get their drugs through the process. And that is the conservative estimate. Ten years.

Yeah, ten years. So all sorts of new players innovating in interesting spaces, like, for instance, in stem cells, are not able to compete. So we don't get the innovations that they have. So there should be some regulation. There should be something. It shouldn't just be the market decides. It shouldn't just be, you know, when people start dying, then people stop using it, and then, you know, now we know.

It can't be that, right? I mean, the more time goes by, the more I'm impressed with the power of the market to regulate itself. But in terms of medical things, I mean, people will become victims. I mean, the market will regulate itself, but is, are you, are you comfortable making that, that distinction? I think right now we're victims of being denied the innovations that are available that are held up or preventing innovators from discovering new things. And, you know, if you, you know, the same reason you put out a product that isn't poison and you put effort into your podcast at the beginning to assure people, I want to build a relationship with you, and if you don't like it, I'm going to give you your money back. That's a kind of regulation.

Like, you're incentivized to provide a good service. If you put something out to kill somebody, you're in a lot of trouble. And I think people underestimate the power of that kind of market force to incentivize people to not poison their patients. I agree with you. But then even with all the regulation in place, you still have this Dr. Oz type situation. You still have someone who's profiting off of something that doesn't do jack shit and is on television calling it a miracle yeah you know so i've been waiting for dr oz to go down and i'd be i'd be curious which came first was it was uh a journalist uh exposing him and then uh governments came in and slapped him down i don't know what happened i mean our idea is always that it's doctors it's a. It was actually a medical student that chased it down. There was a whole article about it that was on here. I'll pull it up. Medical student. So that that if that's true, that's an example of a market regulation that occurred. Right. But how many people got fleeced before that happened? Meet the medical student who wants to bring down Dr. Oz. This is the guy who his name is Benjamin Mazur. And Benjamin Mazur is the student that saw, I guess he was watching all these different claims and he's like, this is all horseshit. So he chased it down.

Yeah. And Dr. Oz, I mean, he's a good example of the point I'm trying to make. I mean, he's in a regulatory structure. He's completely ensconced. And what he people are reacting against him. This is a good thing. So we're describing the essence of a market regulation right here. Has anyone from the government come in and find Dr. Oz? Has he been imprisoned? Well, I know he was brought in front of Congress. It was a big story. It was all over the news. But he was on that, what's that show? The new HBO show, The Gentleman with the Glasses. John Oliver. Yeah. Yeah.

John Oliver did a whole piece on Dr. Oz and Dr. Oz being brought in front of Congress. And Dr. Oz saying one thing on his television show and then saying completely contradictory. Dr. Oz grilled in Congress admits weight loss products he touts don't pass scientific muster. So we're looking at, I mean, we're looking at examples of market regulation. I'm not even going to take a hard stance that we don't need any regulations by, you know, a central authority. I'm not even going to take a hard stance on that. I'm asking people to look at the power of these kind of things to regulate itself and the problem with just accumulating thousands and thousands of rules that prevent anyone from trying something

new. And that's the situation we're in. Yeah. I mean, I'm not a big government guy. I'm not a big fan of government but it's just the the devil's advocate position i think has to be sort of addressed in these sort of scenarios because i think there is the potential for fuckery and it's like how do you protect citizens from things that they're not entirely educated in what laws do you establish that protect people from someone victimizing someone with some sort of an unproven product like you know bad butt job medicine that you know leaves people crippled there's there's that out there yeah how do you deal with that in this seasteading world and how do you keep you know how do you keep order well it's the same way it's the same reason i don't

put out a book with you know no words in it and I don't put out a book with, you know, no words in it. And you don't put out a podcast with just a bunch of farts. Do you see what I'm saying? Right. Yeah. I mean, we don't have monopoly control over what we do. There's other authors competing to get you to read their books. There's other podcasters competing to get me to listen to them.

And I listen to you instead. It's not about, seasteading is not about, here's the list of rules we're going to impose on the ocean. It's confronting human nature. And there's always potential for fuckery. People do shitty things. And the way to solve that problem is not to just take some of those shitty people and give them absolute power over everybody else. And then they promise to make everyone behave better. I think governments will evolve and innovations will occur if there's decentralized power among multiple people who can only profit and be selfish by finding ways to serve and please each other. And that includes producing regulations by which we behave. That's fascinating. So what you're essentially doing is you're providing a method for new civilizations to innovate. You're not proposing any sort of guidelines.

You're not proposing any sort of new structure for government, new structure for finances, what you're doing is you're sort of opening up the door and allowing a wide variety of people to come through and allow the best ideas to float to the top. Yeah, seasteading is not about seizing power from your political opponents. It's about ceding power to your political opponents to try their ideas elsewhere, to see if they can create something that will surprise you. And you can laugh at the fiascos if you want. But the more experiments, the more likely we are to discover solutions. And that's the truth of politics. You know, society is more complex than this microphone.

I can't design this microphone, but I think I can design society through my political opinions. And the only tool I have to do that is force. So that forces me to fight over who's going to control the government, to force other people who disagree with me to do what I want. I don't think anyone knows how to run society. I think the solutions to humanity's deepest challenges are discovered. And they're discovered by lots of people trying lots of crazy ideas. Well, I think one of the big issues in society is what I call the quantity of variables, is that when you have a very small group of people, the variables are not that large,

and you can handle 20 people. If we had a relationship with 19 other folks and we were all living together on a large patch of land that had a good amount of natural resources where no one had to worry about starving to death, why someone else lived high on the hog, if everyone was even with the distribution of natural resources, it wouldn't be that hard. There wouldn't be a lot of conflict. The real conflict comes when you have a quantity of variables, when you have 350 million people, and then you have things like immigration. You have things like the stock market.

You have things like weird things that go down in terms of loans and in terms of credit cards. There's so many variables. That's when it becomes incredibly difficult to manage a society when no one person can be aware of all the variables. The quantity of variables gets outside of the realm of comprehension. Yes, and everything that works out well for us is outside the realm of comprehension.

I could not possibly make this table or that water bottle or that computer you can make this table i know the dude made it it's not that hard okay well i wouldn't know where to get the wood i wouldn't know how to make it so there's no varnish this is raw that's why it's got coffee stains yeah you could uh you could figure this out but i know what you're saying i wouldn't be able to make you wouldn't be able to make the microphone yes table so i think you make the table i couldn to make the microphone. Yes. Table. I think you can make the table. I couldn't make the microphone. You're smart, dude. And I appreciate how the solutions, they're not imposed by somebody.

They emerge from the kind of global ecology of voluntary transactions that produces solutions. And the more people you have trying different things, the more peacefully they can compete in the market, the more likely these solutions are to emerge. And we need to update the governance, the technology of governance, just like other technologies. And we can't do that through monopolies. Is this something that you do full time? I do it full time. You're involved in seasteading full time? time. You're involved in seasteading full time. Yes. And it's the first real job I've ever had. So I've always been a writer. I tell stories. I started out as a novelist. I eventually became a science writer. Once I was captivated by the seasteading story, once I met the people I call aquapreneurs with all their ideas, I realized this is the most important story I could possibly tell.

So I've written the book. It's going to come out next year about seasteading. But I got, I became such a sea evangelist. I talked about it so much. You have so many of those. Blue jobs, sea evangelist. Yeah. Aquapreneurs.

Yeah. I'm a professional bullshit artist. The nerds in Silicon Valley need me to sell their shit to the, to the, to real people. So they kind of brought me on to the seasteading Institute to talk about seasteading. You know,

they were smart enough to see that I'm driven by it and I'm passionate about it. So, you know, and where does your money come from? If you don't mind me asking, well, now I'm working for a nonprofit and I,

I, I'm a paid speaker. The nonprofit is Seasteading? The Seasteading Institute, which was founded by Peter Thiel and Patry Friedman. So you get paid to evangelize Seasteading, essentially. I get paid to do lots of things with regard to the nonprofit. And the money comes from donations? The money comes from donations.

to the nonprofit. And the money comes from donations? The money comes from donations. So we have over 1,000 donors or 1,000 people who have donated. And we have hundreds of volunteers that have gotten involved. And we have probably 85 ambassadors. I'm getting so many ambassador applications right now,

I can't keep up with them. I want to be an ambassador. Yeah, you. You should be. You should serve on our board or something. So imagine that kind of time. Imagine a regular middle-class person who donates money to the Seasteading Institute. Yeah. I mean, people get infected with this idea. They realize rather than arguing about my political, my particular political problem, I go deeper and realize it's the structure itself, that we just don't have the innovations.

We just don't have numerous people experimenting with new ideas. We've got to go deeper and hit restart on multiple small governments, micro countries on the sea. And we'll discover solutions we're not imagining now, just like the United States discovered solutions that were not in the imaginations of monarchists in previous centuries. So explain to me how this works. Like someone says, I think seasteading is a good idea. Is there a Kickstarter page? Do you have a PayPal link? I mean, how does someone donate to this where it winds up being your income?

We have a donation page on the website. Every time we send out our newsletter to our fans, we put a little donation link there. We accept Bitcoin. It's pretty easy to donate to the Seasteading Institute if that's what you want to do. If you go to the website and are inspired by it. And what is the website? Seasteading.org. go to the website and are inspired by it.

And what is the website? Seasteading.org. And, you know, I strongly recommend checking out the eight great moral imperatives, which is one of the problems the Seasteading Institute has had is that it's been very technical and it's talking to, you know, aquatic engineers and there's legal scholars talking about stuff. And people go and they're kind of overwhelmed by the information and they don't know where to start. So I've tried to popularize the idea and create, you know, eight little videos explaining just the basic angles from which people are approaching seasteading to solve global challenges that people care about. So the eight great moral imperatives you have as a video on seasteading

and what is, it's only a minute, right? Each one is probably about five minutes on average. The introduction is a minute. The introduction is a minute. And then you can click on any of the eight. And it's a list of things like, if you name me something you care about, I can tell you about an aquapreneur that's trying to solve that problem.

Well, let's click on the link, Jamie. Go to the eight great moral imperatives and let's just play the introduction. If Jamie go to the eight great moral imperatives and let's just play the introduction if you just google the eight great moral imperatives it'll show up it's the first the first link but it's on seasteading.org and there is a 53 second video that will sort of introduce this idea yeah that is the issue right moral imperatives yeah it's more we got to get down past the divisive political language and just talk about human values that you know conservatives liberals libertarians and anarchists and everyone else shares for the most

part let's hear this when we listen to sea, we know what our moral imperatives are. Feed the hungry, enrich the poor, cure the sick, clean the atmosphere, restore the oceans, live in balance with nature, power civilization sustainably. Stop fighting. I want to tell you about eight aquapreneurs who plan to fulfill these moral imperatives by building floating cities on the sea. Click on the issue you care about below, and maybe we can convince you to join our growing seasteading community.

What is the timeline on implementing this sort of a thing? Like if you had to be realistic and you had to make an estimate as to how long between now and when there really is a floating civilization. I've enjoyed, well, one way we can think about it is when do we have to get one of these things going? And I was very impressed that the aquapreneurs I interviewed, like six of them independently cited 2050 as a time where this is when we're going to run out of fresh water.

This is when we're going to run out of phosphate. This is when we're going to reach peak oil. You know, whatever people say, and you know, I'm not qualified to judge whether 2050 really is a deadline for humanity, like a pinch point in several key commodities humanity needs to survive. So say we have no choice but to find solutions to global problems by 2050. And say I'm saying we can solve these problems by engaging the power of the sea. So that's the timeline. So I think, I hope by 2020, we'll have a demonstration seastead within the territorial waters of a host nation. And if we can hire some local people, create some blue jobs, absorb a coastal runoff, and turn that into algae.

That'll attract more ideas. I'm hoping maybe, you know, you can imagine 2035, you have something on the deeper ocean, people come up with a breakwater. We have people contacting us right now about you can create a solid ice breakwater to protect a city. Solid ice? Yeah. It would have to be in an incredibly cold environment apparently not apparently you can get one in the tropical oceans i'm not even going to go into detail on this i'm using this as an example of like

qualified engineers that are coming to us with ideas for how to how to do this on the ocean so you would use solar power to power some sort of a freezing element that... No, apparently... I'll have to point you to his proposal. I mean, apparently ice can sit for a very long time if it's solid enough, even in tropical waters. But whatever. It's just one idea. I like the OTEC idea,

using the ocean as a solar panel to replace fossil fuels. A key idea to think about ocean crops. So something to think about, 70% of the world's fresh water is used for agriculture. Between like a quarter and a half of all land is used for agriculture. We've depleted the topsoil. We're using up the fresh water.

Populations are going up. We're facing a water crisis by 2050. Then you think about the fact that algae crops, Freshwater populations are going up. We're facing a water crisis by 2050. Then you think about the fact that algae crops, sea farms require no freshwater whatsoever. They require no soil whatsoever. And we haven't actually reached peak phosphate. We've just taken it out of the soil and dumped it into the oceans. Well, what absorbs all these nutrients out of the oceans? Well, algae farms.

So we can park, a lot of people are proposing that we park algae farms around the dead zones off the coasts of various cities in the world, absorb all that nutrient and carbon pollution, turn it into food and fuel over the long haul. That's just one. Wouldn't the problem be heavy metals, though? I mean, when you do arsenic and things along those lines, like, you would be feeding that to people. You can't extract that. Well, you can extract it. Apparently, there's people trying things with muscles

and various natural organisms that remove these things from, you know, it's weird how many, like, bacteria and small little creatures process this stuff. Right. And people are talking about, we need to farm on that level. We need to farm on these tiny little levels. So you would get some sort of organisms that take out the heavy metals, and then the other organisms would eat the carbon. Right.

And turn that into fuel. Well, people are trying to create these, you know, cyclical little systems. They're already doing it on a small scale, you know, involving mussels that, you know, filter feeders with this kind of fish, with this kind of algae. Algae haven't undergone all the artificial selection that makes wheat, corn, and soy so productive. And yet algae is a lot healthier. And a lot of people react and they say, ugh, algae, I don't want to eat that. But most people don't know that algae is already in most of the foods we eat. It's a fertilizer that nourishes the land crops we use.

It's in toothpaste. It's in beer. It's in ice cream. Carrageenan and agar. I don't even know how to pronounce all these aspects. And then seaweed as well. Seaweed is huge. And it's very healthy. you know carrageenan and agar and i don't even know how to pronounce all these aspects and then seaweed as well the seaweed is is huge um and it's very healthy and it's very healthy it has uh it's probably the healthiest plant in the world it has all the amino acids um depending on the

species has a lot of fiber you know fish don't synthesize their own omega-3s. They get it by eating algae. And when you consider that, you know, corn was this tiny little ugly thing that no one wanted to eat. Wheat is this, if you showed someone a wheat stalk, they'd say, I don't want to eat that. But you just, a few generations of artificial selection, you can create all this marvelous stuff we eat. We can do the same thing with algae that we're already using in our foods. And, you know, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation helped Ricardo Radulovic, the founder of the Sea Gardens Project. He's big on creating, he wants to create seaweed farms on the sea. He mixed seaweed flour with wheat flour, sending it to the developing world. It does a lot for malnutrition among those people.

There's so many ways you can use the healthier plants of the sea to feed people. And you don't need to use fresh water. So a lot of people say agriculture needs to become aquaculture and we can give Kansas back to the songbirds. That's funny. It's a fascinating idea, the idea of seasteading. And it's also fascinating to try to reverse the process that we've already begun as far as destroying the oceans, as far as the amount of pollution that we're leaking into the oceans, if that could actually benefit some life forms in some sort of a way, and then we could sort of turn that back around and get something out of it in that way. Yeah. I mean, algae has been the keystone of the global carbon cycle, you know,

for three and a half billion years, you know, it knows what it's doing and we've been working against the carbon cycle and just like screwing up the whole planet. We can turn that wheel back around if we base our food on the ocean. I read something about dumping scrap iron into the ocean to reoxygenate the ocean because dumping scrap iron into the ocean, it would serve as a base for algae to start growing on. Yes. for algae to start growing on. Yes. So Patrick Takahashi and others proposed that for the OTEC-supported plant ships

that you might have to seed some iron. I mean, there's ways this has to be tweaked. And when we get to this level of detail, I just refer you to the experts who are talking about it. And we never know what's going to work. All these people are thinking about these ideas, experimenting with them on a small scale.

All this hopeful stuff is going on, like what you just described. And the idea is we need to open up this frontier for people to experiment on. We need to allow the ocean to let civilization, we need to base civilization on the ocean. Because of the fact that so much of it is such a resource the ocean uh you know most of the oxygen comes from the ocean uh life comes from

the ocean most of the oxygen comes from the ocean as far as like like you mean like algae and sea seaweed and yeah things along that yeah i mean seaweed forests make the world's rainforest look like potted plants that's what i always say when you consider like the amount of carbon they store the amount of uh you know oxygen they produce yeah wow i know i had no idea i always assumed it was just forests no it's mostly uh ocean crops that uh keep the world in balance. And the more you forest the oceans with, say, seaweed crops, the more carbon to build their biomass, they have to pull this carbon and nutrient out of the water, which lowers the acidity of the ocean, which is exactly what

we need to do. The more carbon you pull out of the ocean, the more carbon the oceans pulls out of the air. So you could reverse the whole carbon problem by just creating massive seaweed farms on the ocean. And people have calculated about how much you would need, and it'd be the size of this state or the size of this country. And nobody really knows. But the fact is if we start ramping this up, we could – soy, corn, wheat, it's not as healthy as like seaweed bread. Isn't it amazing when you see issues that pop up, technological issues, whether it's pollution or what have you, and then these innovations come along to try to deal with these solutions or to try to create a solution for these issues. And it seems like that's one of the things that people do. It seems that people need to be in the face of some sort of a problem to solve

in order to truly innovate. And when you think of this OTEC thing, and this OTEC thing happened during the Carter administration when the gas problems were at the peak for that time, changed the motor industry. The automotive industry was forced to make much more fuel-efficient cars, compact cars, all came out of that. Before the American cars, these big V10 pigs. And then all of a sudden, we had an issue. And then innovation springs from that issue.

And you look at all the things that's going on today. Like there's a young man who invented some sort of, uh, at least a theoretical design to clean up the plastic patch in the middle of the Pacific garbage patch. Boyan Slat, I think is his name. I don't know his name, but, uh, amazing idea that in a short amount of time would be able to filter out all that plastic and then perhaps that plastic could be reused. Perfect, perfect idea. So the Seasteading Institute gets proposals about how to clean up the great garbage patch, right? And as a generalist who tries to put this all together, someone described an expert as someone who can describe to you in great detail why

something can't be done. So I get humbled often by experts that describe, well, that's never going to work. It's too hard to build a permanent structure on the high seas. And here's all the reasons why. Look at all this esoteric language I use that intimidates you into thinking I'm right. And then a year and a half later, I find out Shell Prelude is building the fucking thing on the ocean. So it turns out it can work. So Boyan Slat is an example of this. So he designed this system to basically clean up the garbage patch, the great garbage patch. Yeah, there it is.

This is his system. And he had a huge TED Talk that went viral and went all over the world. And what's so remarkable about him is that he's only 19 years old. After a few months, huge backlash. People who knew better started criticizing him and saying he doesn't know what he's talking about. And people fall for these stupid ideas. And I'm like, well, that's kind of embarrassing. I'm glad I didn't like feature him too much. I guess he is just a kid who doesn't know what he's talking about. So he rose to the challenge. He got some funding. He's out there on the water experimenting. And now the backlash has backlash. Now people are saying, oh, it is going to work.

We could ramp this up and clean the great garbage patch. And guess what? Nobody knows. We don't know. All we know is he's proposed this thing. It's attracting a lot of brains to the problem. People are inspired to get it done. There's a backlash. The backlash people were shown to be demonstrated with an experiment on the water that they were mistaken. So he went out and did a small scale of this and he was able to clean up some stuff. So if we scale this up, will it work? Will it cause another problem that won't work? It could even be a terrible idea, but by galvanizing and being a lightning rod for this problem, it attracts new innovative minds to update his solution and find the real solution. This is how the XPRIZE works. One of the biggest issues with human civilization in regards to the ocean is overfishing.

It's a huge, huge issue. is overfishing. It's a huge, huge issue. What ideas have been proposed that make sense that you're aware of that deal with that? Well, I spoke about Neil Sims and the Vilela Research Project a moment ago, and I'm not doing justice to what he's doing. So mobile fish cages. And it blurs the line between fish farming and wild fish. So fish farming gets a bad rap because, you know, fish farms, they're bolted to the coasts. The fish swim in their own poop. They can't go anywhere. They're not living normal lives.

Then you have to have, you know, biofoulants and all this stuff. So he's just required us to completely rethink what fish farming is, and he takes it out in the deep ocean where it's below the water you can't even see it the the cages float around in eddies behind giant islands the fish float around in there um and there's the fish is healthy it has no mercury it's higher omega-3 content than the wild version of that fish it's a totally new kind of fish kona kampachi why is it higher in omega-3 than the wild form of the fish because apparently the fish live better uh on the deep sea when they're like uh fed uh by humans periodically like the wild the wild i have no idea what are they feeding them they're feeding them a mix of fish meal and soy and then finishing it off with fish meal at the end.

And sashimi guys, a guy named Wong in Hawaii, are declaring it a great sashimi. They've had taste tests with his fish where the experts can't tell the difference between farm fish and wild fish. Experts can't tell the difference between farm fish and wild fish. So if this becomes profitable, you're talking about creating huge numbers of fish on the oceans. And the problem is that we treat the oceans like a giant commons and we're like hunter-gatherers out there exterminating them. We're not farming fish. You know, hunter-gatherers, Homo sapiens left Africa and just exterminated all the megafauna on every continent. You know, hunting fish is not the way to go.

We proved that with bisons, mastodons, even ducks. The way to increase the biomass of the oceans is the way we've increased the biomass of the land, which is to farm animals. And Neil Sims is trying to do this in a humane way. Well, what was done with bisons is lack of regulation what's been done with other animals game animals in this country has left more deer in this country right now than were there when columbus landed there's there's a way to manage wildlife there's a way to manage certain amount of animals the problem is if everyone was hunting there would be no more wild animals the reality of wild animals is there's not enough wild animals in relationship to the amount of people that are here there's 350 million americans they would require a lot

of wild animals if that's all we ate there's a way though to regulate and what the problem i think is at least as it's been understood or as it's been explained to me is that with fish you're dealing with international waters you're dealing with a bunch of different nations i mean they have an issue with the japanese crews that won't stop whaling yeah they whale under the false pretense of doing research scientific research and then sell the whale carcasses i mean these there's these boats that the um the sea shepherds have attacked and have shown like time and time again like these guys are fucking wailing they're not doing any experiments they're not doing scientific research but that's the loophole the loophole is that these japanese boats can still kill whales as long as it's for quote-unquote scientific research so they're just killing whales right you know so the the oceans

should not be a wild west it should be civilization it should be a part of civilization right but if there's seven billion people that want fish we have no choice but to farm fish right it's like more than a billion people get their main sustenance from fish and that is going to go up i mean uh lockheed martin is actually um funding um neil sims's uh experiments uh as is like the copper industry and all these different players are coming in because they see the future of food is in aquaculture i mean a lot of this is we have no choice it's like we you know over the last what 50 years or century of exterminated like 90 of the fish in the oceans it's like we either we turn that around or we're gonna have hunger is there a way that they can

somehow another repopulate the wild populations of these fish like tuna drastically reduced did you see jiro dreams of sushi no documentary fascinating documentary um one of the sad aspects of it is he talked about what it used to be like it's it's about a guy who's been doing sushi forever and it's all about his obsession with creating the perfect dishes and really interesting oh maybe i did see that is is it said in um it's just about this one sushi chef i did I watched that with my wife. We were mesmerized. Yeah.

Fascinating, right? Yeah. The old man in Tokyo in the subway station. It's a very small place. I thought it was so, my wife wanted me to watch it. I'm like, I'm not watching a fucking guy make sushi. Who gives a shit? Yeah.

And then more and more people told me it's not about that. You got to see it. You got to check it out. And then I watched it. more and more people told me it's not about that you got to see it you got to check it out and i watched it uh but the saddest thing was like showing photos of the fish markets from the 1950s and 60s and there was just fish everywhere and he was just talking about the wide variety and the large numbers enormous tuna were everywhere it was just insane and now it's one-tenth of that yeah and and and uh neil Neil Sims refers to himself as a passionate

environmentalist. And he went back and read about fish populations in the world. And, you know, he's a great fish connoisseur and fish lover. And when he talks about fish, he salivates. He's so excited about how they behave and what they do. And yeah, like you can hear the pain in his voice when he talks about what the fish populations were like in 1920. Yeah, that's not that long ago. Yeah. And we can't keep treating the oceans like a toilet and like a thing where we can just hunt as much fish as we want. The fisheries have to be managed.

Fish farms can help with that. And we have to repopulate the oceans with fish. Yeah, not just farm fish, but wild fish. the oceans with fish. Yeah. Not just farm fish, but wild fish. Like that was what the question was,

was do you know of any methods that are being contemplated for repopulation, repopulating the wild fish? The only way it would work is if it's profitable to have lots of wild fish. So true. And then you would also have to stop certain people from different nations. You'd have to have some sort of an agreement with, uh, fishermen everywhere. legal frameworks that already operate on the ocean and allow people to interact with each other. And there's, you know, overlap in the jurisdictions and it mostly gets worked out. And the oceans is, you know, sort of civilized and it's ready for the next layer of legal evolution, which I think is stewards of the ocean. I think we're ready for a kind of new evolution and market-based evolution on the water,

a market-based regulation on the water and sovereign nations. Market-based, but the problem is that's how people feed their families, make their profit, run their business. They run their business by pulling fish out of the water. You would have to tell them you're going to make less money. You're going to pull in less fish.

That's hard to do. Yes, ands tells a story about trying to work with you know poor fishermen in the cook islands and how there's just an incentive for everyone to just take as much fish as they can out of the commons um and and so it's like if i don't grab the fish the other the guys i'm competing with will grab the fish and you can say yes but we'll need more fish for next year if you kill them all now we won't have any fish next season you know so we have to have rules but then the complex reasons why people behave you know follow the rules and why they don't and the problem with it just being a commons where everyone's competing to get fish out. Everyone has an incentive to cheat. So what is the means by which you get people to cooperate to preserve the fish long term? Resources have to

be managed or they go away. The present way we're dealing with the oceans is obviously not working. Right. And we would have to make some sort of an agreement worldwide. And that seems to me to be one of the most difficult aspects of trying to fix the whole whole problem i think so i but it's it's got to be worked out otherwise we'll run out of fish yeah and i hope they don't run out of fish first and then say what do we do you know how do we fix this? Right. I mean, even in areas where they have brought back certain animals to the animals that were on the verge of extinction, you still have to worry about poaching. It's still an issue all throughout Africa with a lot of endangered species. Obviously, we know about this with the rhino that even to this day, even all the knowledge that everyone knows that rhinos are dying off they're still poaching yeah and i was reading a recent explanation lately about elephants

in africa and they were contrasting kenya with a nation that's next to it and i forget what it is and you know in in one country the uh populations of elephants went up and in another country the population of elephants went down. And it was kind of counterintuitive. And, you know, the place where the population of elephants went down was where there was just like a government monopoly controlling, which was easily corrupted. The place where the populations went up when it was sort of pseudo public, but also privately owned. So they'd sell a certain amount of poaching where it becomes somebody's cash cow to have elephants there. Because you can't just protect elephants and allow the populations to grow as much as you want.

So, I mean, we can drill down and discuss how regulations can evolve to increase populations of wild animals in a manageable way. But you and I don't need to settle it now. The fact is we need more solutions. Well, Africa is a very interesting analogy. It's very interesting to compare what they've done with wild animals in Africa to what needs to be done in the ocean because there were many animals in Africa that were on the verge of extinction

and now are quite common. But they're quite common in these high fence operations where they hunt them. Right. It's really weird. Like the populations have boomed on a lot of animals that were almost in danger just a few decades ago. And now there's many of them, like the highest numbers they've ever recorded in Africa and some of these species. But they're in these high fence operations. And that's a weird sort of a contradictory situation when they've become manageable, profitable.

They've become a resource. Yeah. They've become a resource that you can manage. And once that happens, that's when their populations go up. But then everyone's like, but no, they're hunting them. Yes, but there's more of them, but they're killing them. Yes, but there's more of them to kill. Okay. It's a weird line there. And again, it's this superstition that I as a seasteader, I'm always trying to get around. The way you solve a problem is to create a monopoly of nice people who will make everyone else be good.

And we're talking about the same thing. So some of the elephant populations that are controlled by, say, a government monopoly and nothing else, those populations keep going down because there's no one really incentivized to protect against poaching. And if you work for that monopoly,

you essentially have ownership over this. So there's all sorts of reasons to take payoffs and bribes. There's also a problem where the elephants interact with people, and elephants are dangerous, and elephants knock down trees. You know, elephants will attack people. And then in these other places in Africa where I guess you describe them as high fence operations, you make it so that a stable elephant population is profitable to the people who live there. Right. So they say, all right, we'll have like 5%. We'll let people poach for a high number.

Well, they're not poaching. It's actually legal. Legal hunting. I shouldn't say poaching. They pay like $50,000 and they go kill an elephant. It's kind of fucking crazy. Yeah. and they go kill an elephant.

It's kind of fucking crazy. Yeah. But then the people in charge of that are like, okay, now, I mean, there's either elephants are hunted or elephants become overpopulated. Yeah. So there has to be a way that these populations are managed.

It's not just a simple manner of illegalizing all the killing of elephants. And this is the hard thing for people to get their minds around. The hard thing for people to get their minds around who love animals. Yes. If you really truly want these animals to have large populations, you have to manage those populations. And that's not something that anybody wants to hear.

Yeah. And I love animals. And my wife is an animal fanatic. And if we care about animals continuing to exist, we have to confront the fact that you don't just protect them and allow their populations to exponentially grow until they starve or come in contact with villages and kill people. Well, that's a problem that we have in California with this, this, the government has outlawed in California, killing of a lot of predators that are in large populations now, like most particularly mountain lions. There's a large population of mountain lions in California now, and subsequently the deer population has dwindled. They've dropped substantially.

And there's a place that I go to called Tohon Ranch. On one waterhole, they have a trail camera that's photographed 16 different mountain lions i mean that's fucking crazy that's 16 different animals that are killing something virtually every day so every day 16 different i mean killing machines mountain lion is a machine i mean they kill pigs deer elk whatever they can get a hold of and they're just decimating the deer population decimating you know any any game animal they can get a hold of and it's illegal to hunt them and it's not regulated it's not it's not being managed it's not being managed correctly and one of the reason is because public opinion public opinion based on ignorance they think oh these asshole hunters want to kill

mountain lions well no but you have to manage the populations of all of these animals. If we're going to be stewards of the land, they all need to be kept in check and they all need to be monitored. And it's not being done with these specific predators just because of what I believe is an ignorant public opinion. And I agree with you. And what people are working so hard to do with elephants and mountain lions needs to be done with fish on a massive scale. A massive scale. Yeah. Bringing it back to what I care about. Yeah. It should be a huge part of what the government, you know, like it should be a huge part of what we plan for. And as far as like

looking towards the future, I mean, look at what percentage of our diet is based on seafood. It's got to be enormous. It's a huge percentage. And we don't even realize that when we eat some broccoli or we eat a cow, that many of the crops that the cow ate or that came from the broccoli came from algae fertilizers. Fuel, feed, and food are very largely supported by ocean crops. Do you live by the ocean? Yes, I do. Are you an ocean freak? You're like one of those dudes out there.

I'm an ocean freak, yes. Was this a part of your life always, or is this something that sort of developed? I love the outdoors. I was an Eagle Scout. i love forests as well i do love being on the ocean i think i'd like to live on the ocean i think the first you know if we get a good seastead going i'd consider living there um but you give up having a backyard sure ocean i was just on a boat um for you know 10 days or something a few weeks ago in the Galapagos Islands.

And man, sitting on a boat and looking out at the sea, you want to talk about contemplation, relaxation, you know, some nice breathing. It doesn't take any discipline. It just happens. You know, the human mind, I feel like, is meant to stare at fire and water and sky. And mountains. And mountains. It gets you in a good place yeah isn't it strange it's like these it's essentially artwork that's designed by the universe you know the thing that people love about artwork is you get to look at something like that boot that boot over there you look at it and go wow that's amazing that's really cool like somebody built that and that's

so cool to look at somebody made that well what a mountain is is essentially the most incredible artwork ever, but it's completely natural. It's there all the time, and no one can own it. You can move around it, look at it from different angles, but it's essentially just like artwork. It gives you the same feeling that you get when you look at a beautiful painting, but magnified tenfold, a thousandfold. I think so.

I mean, we were staying in a place in colorado my wife and i and i i spent hours uh staring at a big mountain like it was a tv so that's deep in me it was just i i couldn't believe the comfort i got from sitting on the porch and just looking at this magnificent thing in colorado yeah um so i don't know that's just a primal thing and i think the oceans man it affected me every time i'm on the water and i'm just looking at the sky looking at the water i feel like wow i'm turning into a better person just by sitting here yeah i have a friend who has a beach house and uh we sometimes go to hang out at their place and uh when we uh when we go there it's just amazing how everything just sort of

you sit there like looking at the water splashing up against the rocks and everybody's just chilled out it's almost like it has some sort of a tranquilizing effect on on everyone around it i mean beach communities are notoriously relaxed when was the last time you were in a really hectic beach community yeah they essentially don't exist and and you know there's always island paradises with like people tell you it's just super mellow people yeah hawaii i mean hawaii look there's a lot of fights in hawaii you know but you're also dealing with polynesian people some of the greatest warriors throughout civilization yeah you know that so gangster that they got on these little fucking canoes and travel thousands of miles across the ocean yeah i mean they're just very aggressive people yeah but still pretty cool and pretty chilled out for the most part yeah i'm

thinking about like little islands like the seychelles islands and you know the people that live there i've never been to these places but i'm told by people who go there that it's just like everyone is chill and calm and it might be because they're just looking at water all the time yeah and looking at the vastness of the ocean which sort of falls in the face of any ideas that you have any delusions of grandeur any you know when you start looking at your life what's important what i need to do i need to get this done and this deal needs to be made and then you look out the ocean like actually in the greater spectrum you know if you look at it in perspective like come on it's you're just a little blip a little tiny little thing out there just maybe just enjoy a little bit more yeah we

we we evolved from uh the ocean and we have to complete the cycle and get back to uh get back to the ocean and become uh homo aquaticus or something homo is that another one you're gonna coin another i just coined that just now. Have you ever read the theory about the aquatic ape? Yes, I wrote a chapter about it in a book, The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. What do you think about that? Explain it to people who don't know what it means. Well, it's this uncanny fact that human beings,

what makes us different from other large apes and other primates is that we share all these qualities with marine mammals that only occur among marine mammals. And it includes subcutaneous fat. You know, a chimp stores all his fat between his organs. We have it just beneath our skin, just like a manatee or something. We have voluntary breath control. We can jump in the water and swim around. We have a diving reflex, which otters have. If you dive, it automatically shuts off your nose and all this sort of stuff.

Chimp falls in the water, drowns in mere minutes. We're comfortable in water. We're hairless. Most mammals that are hairless are aquatic mammals. And you start listing, the more you list all these qualities, people are like, oh my God, we went through a stage where we were like aquatic apes. That's what made humans different. And it's one of the, I think the aquatic ape hypothesis is an excellent example of the difference between a hypothesis and a theory. Because what it has going for it is tremendous explanatory power.

We don't have hard evidence like a webbed hominid foot. By the way, 7%, I think, of human beings are born with webbed toes. That's one of the things people don't know. What? Yeah. 7%? Yeah. See if that's still true.

It was true when I wrote my book. Whoa. Look it up. Wow. So when I was researching this, you know, whatever, six or eight years ago, yeah, that was true. And I cited the reference. Webbed toes. So then you think about, all right, you take an orangutan baby, throw it into the water.

It drowns very fast. You take a human baby, throw it into the water. it's it drowns very fast you take a human baby you throw it into the water it knows how to hold its breath it waits till it comes to the surface and then it naturally floats and kicks its feet so there's all this weird like where did we get all these qualities it's actually one in 2 000 to 2 500 live. Well, that's close enough. Yeah. Well, yeah. It's pretty small.

One in 2,000, one in seven. Or seven percent. What are you, a stickler for? Yeah, I'm a stickler for facts. I'm crazy. But it still is interesting that it, I mean, even that, one in 2000 it's fairly common i wonder if it's one in 2000 that's more like a weird anomaly anomaly if it's something that's way more common like one percent that could be something you know atavistic like the appendix something right right right right what are the other um things about the aquatic ape theory that are compelling uh some i should be oh even

large brains um the mammals with the largest brains are mostly in relation to the rest of their body are mostly aquatic animals apparently dolphins whales yeah orcas also that we're um we're evolved to you know process and use you use fish fats really efficiently and really, really well. Like why is that true? All I know is the aquatic ape proponents keep lining up all these things. And in some cases, the only animals that have these things in common are aquatic mammals and humans. are aquatic mammals and humans. And it has to do with,

the main ones are like hairlessness and subcutaneous fat. What are the arguments against this? The arguments against it are, we have not found a single fossil that would support this hypothesis. So that's why it remains officially a hypothesis, not an actual theory. Fossils are really hard, though. That's the difference between, you know, one of the things about fossils is that something has to happen in order to create a fossil. For the most part,

most people that die, your body's going to be absorbed by the animals, the biology, by bacteria, by rodents, scavengers, there'll be nothing left. It has to, something has to happen. You have to be trapped in a mudslide, volcano, whatever it is that covers you with something that preserves you. Yeah. I think the chapter, Aqua Ape, that I wrote for that book is available online and people can go check it out. I think I'm going to have to – now I've got to research this 7% thing. Am I going to have to update that? Yeah, you're going to have to update that.

Oh, man. It is a fascinating thing, though, the idea that the reason why people are so different and why we, like if you take a baby and throw a baby in the water, they immediately know to hold their breath. It's instinctive. It is weird. I'm like, why do we have all these weird qualities? Yeah.

And then also the fat thing, that if you take a chimp, like little baby chimps are hard, hard these weird qualities? Yeah. And then also the fat thing. That if you take a chimp, like little baby chimps are hard, hard little muscle things. Baby babies are just floaty little suckers. They're floaty. Yeah. They're built with all this fat. And then if an orangutan gets really fat, you don't go up and squeeze fat on the outside of its body. We store all this fat outside our organs,

beneath our skin, this sort of subcutaneous they call it. And that's a quality of aquatic mammals. It is weird that we have all these qualities, but there's no there's just no hard evidence is the thing. So it's... And this massive attraction to the ocean. I mean, you don't see a bunch of baboons

sitting out there staring at the ocean. Yeah. And all communities are founded next to oceans. We love the water. Yeah, it's fascinating stuff. The aquatic ape theory. Look into it, folks. It's very interesting.

Listen, man, this is a great podcast. I really enjoy this very much. Wow. It's a fascinating subject. I think there's massive potential for all this. And I think that it's really cool that you are investing so much time and so much energy into promoting these ideas. And I hope anybody listening to this explores further. Go to seasteading.org and check out the website and see what they have to offer.

And Seasteading, is it just Seasteading on Twitter? What is the Twitter handle? I think it's the Seasteading Institute. Yes, that is it. Seasteading Institute on Twitter. Thanks, man. I had a great time. It was a lot of fun.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Is there anything else you want to direct people to or tell people about? Go to the Seasteading Institute. Check out our floating city survey. Let us know what you'd like to see on a floating city. We have a donation page there. Read up on stuff. We are working on the floating city project, and we'd like you to check it out and see if you think it's realistic and if you'd like to move there.

Glorious. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it, man. It's a lot of fun. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it, man. It's a lot of fun. Okay. We were brought to you this week by Squarespace. Thank you to our sponsors. Go to squarespace.com, use the code word Joe,

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Use the code word ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements. Lots more podcasts coming this week. Rich Voss is here on Wednesday. Stefan Molyneux will be here on Thursday. Lots more stuff. Thanks, everybody. Take care. Big kiss.

Mwah. Tchau, tchau.