Speaker 1: I Robert Evans, this is Behind the Bastards. You sure
Speaker 1: you didn't sound so sure? You know, Sophie, the nature
Speaker 1: of identity is so complicated. Who can say who anyone is?
Speaker 1: Who is us? Who is us? This is my new
Speaker 1: podcast Who is Us? With Robert Evans, presumably and definitely
Speaker 1: Sophie Lictorman. Definitely, definitely, so, Sophie Lictorman. This is a
Speaker 1: show about bad people. It's called Behind the Bastards. Uh,
Speaker 1: And to talk about bad people with me is one
Speaker 1: of the better people I know. David Christopher Bell, jeez,
Speaker 1: thanks full legal name legal Dave. Yeah, just work together
Speaker 1: for many a year. We lived together for a year.
Speaker 1: We did Our cats were once as friends. M Ark
Speaker 1: allied together against another cat might be a better way
Speaker 1: of putting yes and me, Like whenever I cat said,
Speaker 1: your cat would have want to have nothing to do
Speaker 1: with me and loved my cat and you know, honestly
Speaker 1: that's fine. Yeah, I'd rather be that Yeah cat cat
Speaker 1: cat lies, Dave. How do you feel about libertarians? Oh? No,
Speaker 1: people know that you don't tell the guess anything, right.
Speaker 1: They that the show would not work if we told
Speaker 1: me coming sometimes they know the broad subject. But I
Speaker 1: don't even like that. That's not my preference. But that
Speaker 1: bit is so good it will never get old. What
Speaker 1: do you think about here, libertarians? My thoughts are, like anything,
Speaker 1: the most vocal people representing it are incredibly irritating. But
Speaker 1: I suspect there's a lot of very good ones who
Speaker 1: keep to themselves. I I I was a libertarian for
Speaker 1: many years. I still think there's a lot of good
Speaker 1: stuff in in some of the things libertarians say. I
Speaker 1: think John Carpenter might be one, but he might John Carpenter. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: today we are talking about the most vocal ones and
Speaker 1: and specifically the most kind of unhinged vocal ones. We
Speaker 1: are today, Dave, Well, this week, really I'm going to
Speaker 1: give you the long history of libertarians taking to the
Speaker 1: sea to try and establish floating nations. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: are we gonna beat? I don't want to spoil. Are
Speaker 1: we gonna be talking about Sealand? Oh you bet a
Speaker 1: little bit, a little bit about Seland yeah, we're we're
Speaker 1: talking about the whole history of it because spoiler, every
Speaker 1: story in's the same way, which is a bunch of
Speaker 1: people lose money and there's no libertarian floating nation. I
Speaker 1: feel like when step one is taken to the seat.
Speaker 1: It does not end well generally speaking. I mean I've
Speaker 1: known sailors and no it doesn't. Yeah, uh so sorry,
Speaker 1: I just I have a blanket view of the ocean.
Speaker 1: I don't think it wants us in there. It doesn't
Speaker 1: want to. We're not we don't belong there. And if
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, well, we'll talk about why people
Speaker 1: do this, and yes, for the folks who want to
Speaker 1: there's always people who want to be like pedantic about
Speaker 1: like I don't know if this one's really a bastard,
Speaker 1: or like we'll do like two episodes on like we
Speaker 1: recently did two episodes on like industrial level child molesters,
Speaker 1: and then we did an episode on a guy who
Speaker 1: was like an early fitness influencer and just like kind
Speaker 1: of shitty about eating disorders. And people are like, well,
Speaker 1: they're not really like this doesn't really mean. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: not all gonna be guys who raped five thousand kids.
Speaker 1: You know what kind of show. That would be a
Speaker 1: bad show. People would not want to listen every week.
Speaker 1: So absolutely we're going to talk about libertarians taking to
Speaker 1: the sea to build their own nations, and yeah, most
Speaker 1: of them are shitty people. So it's fine they belong here. Okay,
Speaker 1: speaking of which, we're gonna start by talking about Peter Teal.
Speaker 1: So Peter Teal, PayPal co founder, UM monarcho libertarian, uh
Speaker 1: quasi fascist influencer UM on a grand cash scale UM,
Speaker 1: and you know, just just man about town. Peter teele
Speaker 1: is bank. Yeah, he's running for president or he's running
Speaker 1: for senator under the name Jade Vance. I think he
Speaker 1: is currently running for senator under the name Jade Vans.
Speaker 1: Dark money kingpin. Peter teele Um has been on a
Speaker 1: couple of occasions has shotgun money out towards bankrolling and
Speaker 1: exploratory round of sea steating experiments UM. In libertarian utopian
Speaker 1: living c s sea steads in general, that refers to
Speaker 1: self sustaining colonies of like floating UM homes basically, So
Speaker 1: sometimes it could be about it could be like a
Speaker 1: little island of these weird little hexagonal like housing units
Speaker 1: that float. There's a bunch of different designs around there. UM.
Speaker 1: Everybody's kind of arguing about what the best version of
Speaker 1: this is. But a lot of libertarians think c stetting
Speaker 1: is the future. In eater, Teal has put and not
Speaker 1: it's not significant to him, but significant amount of money
Speaker 1: to normal people into backing different c stetting projects. And
Speaker 1: the basic idea, um is that with the c stead
Speaker 1: you'll be in the ocean, so you won't have to
Speaker 1: you won't have to um abide by any nations laws.
Speaker 1: So all of these different things ideas libertarians have about
Speaker 1: taxes and gun laws and age of consent laws, uh,
Speaker 1: mainly age of consent pass um won't won't apply. They can,
Speaker 1: you can, you can try to, you can. Really it
Speaker 1: could be. I think there's an idea that like, well,
Speaker 1: if you get enough people out in the sea living
Speaker 1: living the way we think people should live, everyone else
Speaker 1: will see that it works and then our ideas will
Speaker 1: take over. Right, There's a number of different ways that
Speaker 1: gets sold to people. And um, yeah, it's it's water
Speaker 1: World rules. Yeah, it's water World rules. Um one second,
Speaker 1: I have the wrong document open. I just realized that's fine.
Speaker 1: You want me to just talk about water World for
Speaker 1: a little bit. Yeah, talk about water World for a second, Dave.
Speaker 1: I mean I I imagine it's water World rules down
Speaker 1: to like, yeah, Kevin Costner being like a shitty dude
Speaker 1: who like, at one point I think he's going to
Speaker 1: barter the woman and child that he's with he share.
Speaker 1: Does that is a moment in that movie? Y? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that movie is terrible, So you may have heard Dave that.
Speaker 1: In September of this year, The Guardian published an article
Speaker 1: about the doomed voyage of the Satoshi, which was a
Speaker 1: cruise ship a bunch of libertarian crypto nerds had bought
Speaker 1: and tried to turn into a floating city. Did you
Speaker 1: catch this story? I vaguely caught it. I think that's
Speaker 1: one of those headlines that I was just like, not today, Yeah,
Speaker 1: time for this one. It's it's very funny, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a pretty hilarious failure. We'll talk about it in
Speaker 1: detail later. But like when this when it went viral
Speaker 1: that like libertarians were trying to like create their own
Speaker 1: independent nation on a boat in the middle of the ocean,
Speaker 1: a bunch of people started bringing up BioShock. If you
Speaker 1: played BioShock Weirdly enough, I've played BioShock Infinite, Okay, I do.
Speaker 1: I do remember I played all the first one, and
Speaker 1: I do recall that he is making an ocean city
Speaker 1: in that. Yeah, yeah, it's a libertarian I haven't played
Speaker 1: the game either, but I'm familiar as an Internet person
Speaker 1: with the basics, which is that it's like a libertarian
Speaker 1: underwater city that goes disastrously lying and everybody murders each other. Right, Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the basic idea. Um. So I think most people
Speaker 1: are at least broadly aware of it. Um. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's it's it's funny that people would compare
Speaker 1: libertarians buying a boat, calling naming it after the founder
Speaker 1: of bitcoin, and then like trying to create a nation
Speaker 1: with it, too rapture, because the reality of the situation
Speaker 1: is that like rapture in BioShock, which is that Libertarian
Speaker 1: City was itself like inspired by about like sixty years
Speaker 1: of libertarians trying to make cities and boats um in
Speaker 1: various parts of the open ocean. Like yeah, like it's
Speaker 1: not tire, Like it was made as a satire. It
Speaker 1: was made as a satire, so you you wouldn't want
Speaker 1: to like watch the satire and be like, hey, that's
Speaker 1: a good idea, I should model it after that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's missing the point. Yeah, it's missing the point.
Speaker 1: But it's also funny to me that people are like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is how ridiculous some of these people are that
Speaker 1: they like inadvertently did the thing that happened in this
Speaker 1: video game and was like clearly a bad idea. Um.
Speaker 1: And the reality is that the video game was just
Speaker 1: kind of making fun of the fact that they keep
Speaker 1: trying to do this. This is like this is this
Speaker 1: is like two of our lifetimes of a certain kind
Speaker 1: of libertarian trying to make a boat nation and it
Speaker 1: never works, um, but it's always very funny. So the
Speaker 1: history of this, this this this longstanding like drive more
Speaker 1: than half a century old to like create an habitat
Speaker 1: in the ocean that libertarians can try their ideas out
Speaker 1: in that goes back to the golden age of science fiction. Specifically,
Speaker 1: it goes back to a guy named Robert Heinlan Um.
Speaker 1: Heinlan most famously wrote Starship Troopers. Um. He's also one
Speaker 1: of the founding fathers of modern libertarian politics. He like
Speaker 1: helped create American style libertarianism. Um. He was a fascinating guy.
Speaker 1: He was kind of like Gene Roddenberry in that, like
Speaker 1: a number of his his science fiction books at the
Speaker 1: time were like ahead of the curve on things like
Speaker 1: racial justice and not in a way that is particularly
Speaker 1: impressive today. But he had like a habit of like
Speaker 1: he'd make his protagonists not white dudes, um, but not
Speaker 1: making a big deal. It was just like you know
Speaker 1: this this this guy's Hispanic and that's just the thing
Speaker 1: that's going on, which was not super common at the
Speaker 1: time for its time. There's also some racist hell stuff
Speaker 1: and some high loss but yeah, um, I'm I'm not trying.
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to give you an idea of like
Speaker 1: why this guy is is stuck out to people. Um,
Speaker 1: he played around with a lot of libertarian ideas and
Speaker 1: a lot of really authoritarian ideas. He was a weird
Speaker 1: because like Starship Troopers is like a fascist book, Like
Speaker 1: it's it's extremely fascist if I recall, um, their hope
Speaker 1: and his interpretation is not what the book intended, and
Speaker 1: it's making fun of the book. It's a it's and
Speaker 1: now I know there's talk of making like another adaptation
Speaker 1: without that satire. Yeah, and it's like we're I think
Speaker 1: they're going the wrong way with that. Yeah, that definitely Yeah,
Speaker 1: because Verehoven like heard people describe Starship Troopers, which is
Speaker 1: the military runs the state, which exists entirely to like service,
Speaker 1: its ability to continue to do violence against these aliens that,
Speaker 1: as far as we know, had no role in provoking,
Speaker 1: like a fight with humanity. Um. And Heinlan or or
Speaker 1: Verehoven heard that it was just like, well, that sounds
Speaker 1: fascist as hell. I guess I'll just make a fascist movie, um, right,
Speaker 1: And no one knew I saw at the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I saw a screening of Starship Troopers where Verehoven did
Speaker 1: a Q and A afterwards, and he talked about his
Speaker 1: exasperation where he's like, I literally dressed them like Nazis. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like no one, no one realized it. Yeah. Uh, it's incredible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's some of what happens with Robert Heinland is
Speaker 1: also incredible. Um because so in addition to some fascist stuff,
Speaker 1: Heinland plays around with a lot of libertarian ideas, which
Speaker 1: is a big part of why he's remembered today. His book,
Speaker 1: in particular, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is like
Speaker 1: a lot of people would consider it a foundational text
Speaker 1: for like the American libertarian movement. It's a it's a
Speaker 1: very influential book. Um. And to kind of describe what
Speaker 1: happens in the book, I'm going to read a write
Speaker 1: up of it from The Baffler. Heinland's own apparent anti
Speaker 1: government ethos is channeled through the elderly Peruvian born Professor Proft.
Speaker 1: Bernardo de la Paz. Prof Is one of among hundreds
Speaker 1: of outcasts, outlaws and outsiders inhabiting underground colonies on the Moon,
Speaker 1: or as it's known in the late twenty one century. Luna.
Speaker 1: Proft's cheap comrades and arms are an Amazonian blonde rabble rouser,
Speaker 1: wyoming not and a one armed computer technician, the narrator
Speaker 1: Hero Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis, the Ragtag Trio spearheads of
Speaker 1: revolutionary movement to make this ramph Ecco outpost for the
Speaker 1: marginalized into a self governing nation free of the repressive
Speaker 1: rule of Earth. So there's like, you see why like
Speaker 1: this this is attractive to people, Right, there's this idea
Speaker 1: that there's a lot of like libertarian politics in it.
Speaker 1: There's also weird stuff like it's a mix of Congress
Speaker 1: is dumb and like governments can't get anything done, and
Speaker 1: also monarchy would be cool. Um, yeah, I get the
Speaker 1: like every year when I pay taxes, I become a
Speaker 1: libertarian for a second, Like, I get it. I understand
Speaker 1: the government's extremely frustrating and there's something very appealing about
Speaker 1: going off and starting your own thing. I absolutely get it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like in the d m V everybody is a
Speaker 1: libertarian or yeah exactly, like you're just ready to burn
Speaker 1: it all down. Um, but no, And what what's interesting
Speaker 1: there to me is kind of like with Starship Troopers,
Speaker 1: people take like a weirdly like the Minute of the
Speaker 1: Horse Mistress is about like people who are part of
Speaker 1: who are living in a colony that's being a by
Speaker 1: a government, rebelling in order to become independent. And see
Speaker 1: setting which is heavily influenced by this book is about
Speaker 1: sailing to the ocean to just hide from the government
Speaker 1: and and mind bitcoin. So I think there's a difference.
Speaker 1: I don't think. I don't think they're necessarily reading Heinlan right.
Speaker 1: That said, Robert Heinland probably would be into cease stutting.
Speaker 1: So perhaps I'm the one that's wrong here. Um. It
Speaker 1: also seems like never are a good policy to like
Speaker 1: start your belief structure from a fictional book, because it's
Speaker 1: it's not the writer isn't intending it to be something
Speaker 1: that you're you you take like an instruction manual, I assume.
Speaker 1: So it just seems like a recipe for disaster in general. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm sure like Heinlan was playing with ideas
Speaker 1: that were interesting to him and that some of which
Speaker 1: he thought should be instituted. Like that's pretty common and
Speaker 1: in fiction with a political edge, But I don't think
Speaker 1: I don't think he was seeing it as being as
Speaker 1: influential as it was in the way that it was.
Speaker 1: I think he'd be bummed that it's mostly been used
Speaker 1: for people to steal money from other people in order
Speaker 1: to not build boats. I think he would be unhappy
Speaker 1: with that. Fair um So, yeah, you can see the
Speaker 1: influence of the Moonsha Harsh Mistress and of Heinland in general,
Speaker 1: and like Elon Musk's plans to colonize Mars, the Crypto
Speaker 1: Orders making an an f T cartoon about apes flying
Speaker 1: to another planet to set up a colony. Like all
Speaker 1: of this, it's a common theme in in libertarian kind
Speaker 1: of angled fiction ever since. Um Now, The Moon Is
Speaker 1: a Harsh Mistress was published in nineteen sixty six, and
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one, a millionaire developer from Las Vegas,
Speaker 1: a guy named Michael Oliver attempted to create his own
Speaker 1: libertarian utopia. So, I don't know, we know Michael Oliver
Speaker 1: was definitely a Heinland fan. I don't know which which
Speaker 1: book in particular spurred him on, but I kind of
Speaker 1: think it's The Moon is the Harsh Mistress. Um. So
Speaker 1: five years after that gets published, this guy Michael all
Speaker 1: of her decides he's going to make his own independent
Speaker 1: libertarian state. And since there was no room on land,
Speaker 1: he decided to take to the sea. He established what
Speaker 1: he called the Republic of Minerva on a partially submerged
Speaker 1: reef near Tonga. Was called the Republic of Minerva because
Speaker 1: a boat called the Minerva had sunk there. Um, which
Speaker 1: could start, yeah, naming it after the last failure that
Speaker 1: happen around there. My goodness. Yeah, it is a little
Speaker 1: bit of a weird call. Um. So there's a little
Speaker 1: bit of land here. It's mostly just like barely reef
Speaker 1: that's barely above the water line and sometimes under it,
Speaker 1: like depending on kind of where the tide is. Um.
Speaker 1: It's only land in the technical sense of the word.
Speaker 1: But Oliver decides, like, I'm going to take this since
Speaker 1: it's in the it's in the it's up for grabs, right,
Speaker 1: anyone can own it if nobody owns it, right, no one.
Speaker 1: No one's gonna stop him there, And they're like, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: that is what he thinks. He gets together two other
Speaker 1: co founders who put in funding alongside him, um, and
Speaker 1: he announces through like magazines and stuff, that he's creating
Speaker 1: a republic. Uh. He said in these ads that he
Speaker 1: wanted to make quote and escape from high taxes, riots, drugs,
Speaker 1: and crime. Um. Which magazines like libertarian magazines. Yeah, we've
Speaker 1: got the name of one of them in here. Um.
Speaker 1: It is because this is right after like the Holy
Speaker 1: Week uprisings, after Martin Luther King's murder and all of
Speaker 1: the different kind of protests and riots in the wake
Speaker 1: of that. So there's there's kind of a little bit
Speaker 1: of a of a white supremacy angle here where it's
Speaker 1: like all the cities are so fucked up because of
Speaker 1: all the bad things we did to black people. Time
Speaker 1: to take to the ocean. Yeah, evergreen statement that there's
Speaker 1: always a little bit of white supremacy in these subsidies
Speaker 1: go in there too, Like okay, um, yeah, I want
Speaker 1: to quote from the website curbed here about Michael's plans.
Speaker 1: They intended to build a four acre artificial island over
Speaker 1: the reef and turn it into a resort that would
Speaker 1: sparkle like a jewel in the blue South Pacific. According
Speaker 1: to one of the Republic of the Nervous self published newspapers,
Speaker 1: they hope to attract tens of thousands of residents and
Speaker 1: base their governance structure on zero taxes, no welfare, no subsidies,
Speaker 1: and no economic intervention. A coin collector and a real
Speaker 1: estate investor, Oliver used much of his own wealth to
Speaker 1: establish the Republic of a Nerva. Soon after sending a
Speaker 1: declaration of independence, another founder, Morris Davis, built a tower
Speaker 1: of stones on the reef and planted a flag, a
Speaker 1: golden torch set against a blue background for the new
Speaker 1: country on it. So they got a flag. Now they
Speaker 1: got a little stone tower and a flag. That's step
Speaker 1: one gets step one flag there, and then you're good
Speaker 1: to go. I do just love that this guy, with
Speaker 1: his experience speculating in real estate and collecting coins, is like,
Speaker 1: I can make a country, right, I could be the
Speaker 1: founding father or something. I got some means founding fathers
Speaker 1: they weren't anything. I mean, yeah, I mean honestly, you
Speaker 1: look at like George Washington and it's like it is
Speaker 1: just kind of some jackaspion, Like, yeah, I think I
Speaker 1: can make his work. They're just bunch of dudes hung
Speaker 1: out like at a bar. Yeah, it is funny, but
Speaker 1: you are right. Every country was just founded by a
Speaker 1: bunch of dudes at a bar. Right, it's for me.
Speaker 1: It's with the libertarian stuff. It just always seems like
Speaker 1: they're gonna accidentally invent government every time. Right, you should
Speaker 1: say that, Dave, because that happens in every one of
Speaker 1: these stories. So because they're like, how do we pay
Speaker 1: for things? I don't know, maybe everybody gives a little
Speaker 1: bit of money, Like they start slowly stumbling on the
Speaker 1: same conclusion. It's the same thing that's happened with cryptocurrency,
Speaker 1: is like, because all these people get all of their
Speaker 1: money stolen constantly because there's no protections or safeguards, and
Speaker 1: then there's no recourse if all of your money gets stolen,
Speaker 1: and so people have like created things like coin base
Speaker 1: and crypto dot com that are places where you store
Speaker 1: your money and you have a guarantee to be protected.
Speaker 1: It's like like, we're getting out of the bank system, right.
Speaker 1: It was like Lift was like, we're creating shuttles that
Speaker 1: go from point A to B and everybody pays a
Speaker 1: little bit. And it's like, do you mean a bus?
Speaker 1: Are you talking about a bus? Yeah, but more expensive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the the genius innovations of liberal It's very frustrating.
Speaker 1: I just once, I would like to see some Libertarians
Speaker 1: innovate in their community. But I don't know, filling in
Speaker 1: potholes um or altering the speed limits on on an
Speaker 1: interstate that has speed traps. Um, go go do something
Speaker 1: you don't. If they don't, don't just go don't. Don't
Speaker 1: try to make another boat city. It's not gonna work anyway. Whatever.
Speaker 1: So the founders of the Republic of Minerva, after they
Speaker 1: get their flag up at everything higher an Australian boat
Speaker 1: to fill the reef stuff with up with sand and
Speaker 1: their plan is just to dump sand on these shallow
Speaker 1: reefs until there's land. Right, that's the idea. That's how
Speaker 1: I'd do it. But yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. They
Speaker 1: wanted to get it to about eight feet above sea
Speaker 1: level um and they figured that if they could create
Speaker 1: fifteen acres of actual land that would be enough to
Speaker 1: convince investors that they were legitimate and thus get enough
Speaker 1: money to raise up to undred acres. So like, we're
Speaker 1: gonna make fifteen acres and we'll use that as a
Speaker 1: proof of concept. And then once people realize how much
Speaker 1: money is being made in having a barren island of
Speaker 1: free enterprise with no resources other than sand, um, they'll
Speaker 1: come crawl, they'll cut, the money will pour in. Absolutely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no taxes. Is there fresh water? Well? Know, can
Speaker 1: you can you grow food? Not really there? Shopping? No,
Speaker 1: but no telexes. Look at all this land we got.
Speaker 1: We can play like volleyball, and yeah it's tax free baby. Um.
Speaker 1: That said, like, there's ways it might have worked, especially
Speaker 1: if it actually had, if they'd got somehow gotten you
Speaker 1: in recognition, and rich people could just claim to live
Speaker 1: there and not pay taxes. Like I could see how
Speaker 1: this could be a money making scheme, And it might
Speaker 1: have been a money makes making scheme that worked if
Speaker 1: not for one thing, the existence of other countries. That
Speaker 1: was the one thing they didn't take into accounts. So
Speaker 1: damn other countries, These these these barren shoals that they're
Speaker 1: trying to pile sand onto are a little you know,
Speaker 1: I think just a couple of miles off the coast
Speaker 1: of Tonga, which is an island in the South Pacific,
Speaker 1: an island that has a government Dave and the military,
Speaker 1: and Tonga cease these foreigners creating what like it looks
Speaker 1: like they're trying to create a new country right outside
Speaker 1: of Tonga on land that on the land, like their
Speaker 1: naval vessels patrol and it's like, well, We're not really
Speaker 1: okay with this. It's like I'm imagining, like looking through binoculars, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I better call somebody forget to do them about this. Huh.
Speaker 1: If you don't, if you don't get libertarians, if you
Speaker 1: don't get rid of them quickly, you're just gonna have
Speaker 1: a nest of the bastards. Darn we got libertarians? Wait,
Speaker 1: social or free market? Now? Free market? God damn it
Speaker 1: gets spray libertarians? Are they at least mutualists? No? God him? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Um so the head of State of Tonga sent them
Speaker 1: a letter basically being like, We're not gonna let you
Speaker 1: set up an empire on our doorstep. That's that's not okay.
Speaker 1: So the first thing Tonga does is they start air
Speaker 1: dropping just random boxes of AIDS supplies onto the reef
Speaker 1: in order to establish ownership, right, like, if our government
Speaker 1: provides a service to this barren reef, then clearly it's
Speaker 1: part of our territory. That's also like a really good
Speaker 1: way to insult libertarians. I feel like it's like, here,
Speaker 1: have some help, and we don't want help. God damnit,
Speaker 1: none of them know. Nobody's there at the time. Maybe
Speaker 1: some crabs. Maybe some crabs got some free food out
Speaker 1: of this. Yeah, this is absurd on the side of
Speaker 1: Tonga too, because they're literally just being like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: let's drop random supplies on this island with a population
Speaker 1: of zero, then it's our suddenly. Like again, like cryptocurrency
Speaker 1: does kind of accurately get across to people like, yeah,
Speaker 1: money is nonsense, Like it's all, it's all, it's all
Speaker 1: a fucking con game. Yeah, so actual governments to be fair,
Speaker 1: like you see it in this where they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: they're saying that's there's what. We never cared about this
Speaker 1: piece of nothing before, but now let's drop some random
Speaker 1: crap on it, so it's ours. It's very funny. Um so, uh,
Speaker 1: this did not succeed in dissuading the Libertarians, they still
Speaker 1: continue to claim that they were a republic, and so
Speaker 1: in June of nineteen seventy one, the King of Tonga
Speaker 1: used his military to officially seize the land, which again
Speaker 1: had nobody on it. The dream of the Republic of
Speaker 1: Minerva died, but the grift did not die, because grifts
Speaker 1: are eternal. Michael Oliver started minting coins for his country
Speaker 1: after it was taken back by the Tongan government in
Speaker 1: order to raise funds too, I guess reconquer it. It
Speaker 1: was kind of unclear what the money was for. I
Speaker 1: was gonna say, yeah, yeah, what a step two here, buddy.
Speaker 1: You know what that feels like to me is that
Speaker 1: he had a really good idea for coins and then
Speaker 1: they threw this in front of him, and he wasn't
Speaker 1: going to change his plan. Yeah, he was gonna stop
Speaker 1: making coins. Yeah I had I have cool designs for coins.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do them no matter what he had. He
Speaker 1: had gold coins for seventy five dollars in silver coins
Speaker 1: for thirty five dollars um. And I should note now
Speaker 1: that these are Minerva dollars. Seventy five Minerva dollars um
Speaker 1: and thirty five Minerva dollars, So I don't know the
Speaker 1: actual value. I'm not certain of the exchange rate. This
Speaker 1: is like when Usher was Usher, who was handing out
Speaker 1: his own Usher bucks. Yes, sounds like these our Usher bucks.
Speaker 1: So he advertised these these Minerva dollars um as late
Speaker 1: as nineteen seventy five and austere publications like the Libertarian Review.
Speaker 1: So the Tongue and Government takes him out. In seventy
Speaker 1: one and seventy five, he's selling Minerva dollars into the
Speaker 1: tagline the World's most unusual new country inspiration for the
Speaker 1: most unique metal coin ever minted. M Yeah, it is
Speaker 1: on usual to have a country with no people that
Speaker 1: gets immediately conquered. That that is not common. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure house you'd sell it by being like this
Speaker 1: is fucking weird, right, you want a piece of this? Yeah?
Speaker 1: We made some calls, didn't we. Yeah. That said, if
Speaker 1: anyone can find any Republic of Minerva coinage, um, I
Speaker 1: would love that. Yeah. They come up online for sales sometimes,
Speaker 1: but I haven't found any recently. I feel like, ironically
Speaker 1: they're now worth a lot because it's probably like a problem,
Speaker 1: like how expensive they are you know. Oh yeah, they're
Speaker 1: probably just a collector's item. Yeah, um, collectors for fans
Speaker 1: of horribly failed grifts. Yeah. I'd be lying if I
Speaker 1: said I wouldn't get one just for fun, to have
Speaker 1: it like on on my shelf or something and have
Speaker 1: a little story there. I had a friend who got
Speaker 1: very excited to buy an in Ron mug. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just some of the somethings are exciting. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So moving on from there, Um, I I should make
Speaker 1: a note because we're starting with the Republic of Minerva,
Speaker 1: which I think is the first example of the thing
Speaker 1: we're talking about today, But there is one other thing
Speaker 1: that kind of happened around the same time that before
Speaker 1: you get to that. It is time. It's time for
Speaker 1: you know, are you interrupting me to make us go
Speaker 1: to add Sophie just for capitalism sake, just for capitalism
Speaker 1: sick and so that we can stay in our houses. Yes,
Speaker 1: I do love staying in my house, all right. Oh
Speaker 1: I do love a good house. Um, I love a
Speaker 1: bad house. Just a big fan of houses, house music,
Speaker 1: so good perfect house m D the TV show. Oh
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, great, great, great, great vehicle for um. Laurie
Speaker 1: that's his name. M you know there's an episode with
Speaker 1: Jeremy Renner in House. Oh no, I've forgotten, meanness. I
Speaker 1: remember this. It's all coming back to me. Yeah. God,
Speaker 1: what a tragedy. Um. So we're gonna talk now about
Speaker 1: the Republic of Seland, which is kind of it happened
Speaker 1: right around the same time as the Republic of Minerva. Um.
Speaker 1: I kind of think Republic of Minerva is more the
Speaker 1: Republic of Sealand isn't quite a libertarian thing. It's weird.
Speaker 1: Um alright, talk about it. Yeah, I've always wanted to
Speaker 1: go to Sealand. I actually a long time ago, I
Speaker 1: wrote a screenplay with Sealand in it, and I did
Speaker 1: a lot of research that I now completely forget. It's
Speaker 1: a principality. It's principality. The Principality of sea Land was
Speaker 1: established on an old Royal Navy platform that was built
Speaker 1: during World War Two to like protect shipping. So it's
Speaker 1: it's not not even shoals. It's just like this big
Speaker 1: metal looks a little bit like a tiny oil derrick
Speaker 1: kind of situation built in in the ocean in order
Speaker 1: to uh uh put guns on it to shoot things.
Speaker 1: And after the war, the British take the guns away
Speaker 1: and it's just this platform. And you might think, well,
Speaker 1: didn't the British Navy own it? No, because they illegally
Speaker 1: built built it in in foreign foreign countries waters or
Speaker 1: an international water. Sorry, and you can't. You're not allowed
Speaker 1: to weaponize international waters. So the Royal Navy builds this
Speaker 1: this platform and they're like uh. And then the Warren's
Speaker 1: and the other countries are like, you know, it's an
Speaker 1: international crime for you to have that. And since you
Speaker 1: built it to fight Nazis, nobody's gonna say anything, but
Speaker 1: you should probably bounce. So the Royal Navy leaves this platform. Um.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen sixty five, UM, the UK has all
Speaker 1: these really harsh laws about what can be played on
Speaker 1: the radio and not so in the sixties and seventies
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of pirate radio stations that will like
Speaker 1: take to the sea and illegally broadcast music that can't
Speaker 1: be played normally in the UK. And one of these
Speaker 1: that that's fucking rat as. It's like pump up the
Speaker 1: vall the principality of ceiling. There's some ad ship here
Speaker 1: because it first gets inhabited when a pirate radio crew
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty five occupies the platform. UM, and it
Speaker 1: looks like a couple of them get in there. And
Speaker 1: in September of nineteen sixty seven, a British citizen and
Speaker 1: radio pirate named Roy Bates occupies it and while he's
Speaker 1: broadcasting illegal music from it, declares it an independent principality. Um.
Speaker 1: There's a whole fun story here. Mercenaries get involved. At
Speaker 1: one point, there's like a civil war and Sea Land
Speaker 1: basically and a government in exile. UM. A lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of wild ship happens in Sea Land. UM.
Speaker 1: It's not really a LIBERTATETD. It's not a super political
Speaker 1: thing like from what I recalled they do like online
Speaker 1: gambling now Like yeah, I I it's it's more of
Speaker 1: like it's more of what I can get behind, which
Speaker 1: is like, look at this thing that's just out there
Speaker 1: that no one owns. Yeah, let's brick up the place
Speaker 1: and like do stuff. There's not a pretension that they're
Speaker 1: like experimenting with a new frontier and civilization. They're like, Hey,
Speaker 1: if we take over this thing in the middle of
Speaker 1: the ocean that no one owns, we can broadcast songs
Speaker 1: without paying and gamble, which, right, I am entirely supportive of. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like if a bunch of libertarians showed up,
Speaker 1: they'd be like, no, we're full, Like, I don't think
Speaker 1: they want to build anything. We're not in this pret
Speaker 1: your revolution, buddy, Yeah, we got here before you too badly,
Speaker 1: you know. And Roy dies his I think his kids
Speaker 1: are now running everything. Like it's basically like a gimmick
Speaker 1: branding opportunity for the family. I'd call it. There's a
Speaker 1: roadside attraction vibe to it, even though obviously getting there
Speaker 1: is a nightmare. Um So, yeah, you've got Celand, you've
Speaker 1: got the Republic of Minerva. Late sixties, early seventies, but
Speaker 1: for obvious reasons, the libertarian dream of taking to the
Speaker 1: sea to avoid regulation it was clearly present that early,
Speaker 1: but it had to wait until the Internet age to
Speaker 1: really take off. You know, people try this back in
Speaker 1: the day, but it's just it's really hard to build
Speaker 1: a libertarian boat city without modern technological resources. I should say,
Speaker 1: it's hard to grift people into crowdfunding a libertarian boat
Speaker 1: city that never gets built. It's that idea that there's like, right,
Speaker 1: there's like there's probably like a couple of thousand people
Speaker 1: who will buy your grift. The problem is they're spread
Speaker 1: out throughout the world. There's not many in each town, right,
Speaker 1: And the Internet has made it, you know, instead of
Speaker 1: being the person going town to town selling tonics and whatnot,
Speaker 1: you can just like blast it out on Twitter and
Speaker 1: then they all come to you. Yeah. Otherwise you'd have
Speaker 1: to go person to person and ask like, hey, is
Speaker 1: anything bad if it happened to you, and then if
Speaker 1: they say no, say I got a deal for you. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1: You seem like a trusting little lamb. So in nineteen
Speaker 1: a guy named Howard Turney was he claims, and he's
Speaker 1: a liar, so can you take that with a bit?
Speaker 1: He says that for years before he'd had a dream
Speaker 1: of like following in the footsteps of the Republic of Minerva,
Speaker 1: but but getting it right and creating like an independent
Speaker 1: nation or an independent community in the ocean that could
Speaker 1: abide by libertarian principles. In n he's hanging out in
Speaker 1: Caribbean c and he finds a nice stretch of unusually
Speaker 1: shallow water that's in international waters, so it's underwater, but
Speaker 1: it's shallow, so with enough sand you could actually like
Speaker 1: build an island out there. It's kind of his idea. Um,
Speaker 1: So he says, he finds this in n and he
Speaker 1: decides to raise up new Land and establish a utopia.
Speaker 1: Now right around this same time, I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: the desire to fund the creation of a new island
Speaker 1: utopia came first or if this came first. But he
Speaker 1: changes his name to Lazarus Long. Oh my god, yeah
Speaker 1: that is that is a porn star name. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I was about saying he's not doing porn. Come on, no, no,
Speaker 1: he changes it to Lazarus Long because Lazarus Long, in
Speaker 1: addition to being obviously a porn name, is an homage
Speaker 1: to a Robert Heinland book. Um, and I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from an article Independent from in the Independent
Speaker 1: explaining Howard Attorney's thinking here he decided there were too
Speaker 1: many Howard turneys around and anyway, as he puts it,
Speaker 1: Prince Lazarus has a ring to it. He took his
Speaker 1: new name from a character and time Enough for Love,
Speaker 1: a novel by the American science fiction author author Robert Heinland.
Speaker 1: I admired his philosophy. It was so close to my
Speaker 1: own philosophy, as he says of his fictional antecedent, the
Speaker 1: Lazarus Long of Heinland's epic saga, is centuries old and
Speaker 1: lives in a world where aging is a thing of
Speaker 1: the past. His philosophy amounts to a series of pro
Speaker 1: individualistic slogans that can fairly easily easily be said to
Speaker 1: represent the thinking of the man who created them. Heinland
Speaker 1: coined the phrase there ain't no such thing as a
Speaker 1: free lunch, and among his other catchy aphorisms, are all
Speaker 1: men are created, unequal, taxes are not levied for the
Speaker 1: benefit of the text, and beware of altruism. It is
Speaker 1: based on self deception, the root of all evil. Huh yeah,
Speaker 1: So okay, So going back to so Lazarus Long you
Speaker 1: mentioned there about people like living forever, and like that's
Speaker 1: what that's what's going on, right, the Lazarus, like that
Speaker 1: was that's a reference to like Jesus resurrecting people for sure,
Speaker 1: And then long as in Long, yeah, just you know,
Speaker 1: like if he just wanted to make sure he had
Speaker 1: that double. In the golden age of science fiction, subtlety
Speaker 1: had not yet been invented. We hadn't we hadn't cracked
Speaker 1: the nut on being subtle. So yeah, every character. I mean,
Speaker 1: let's be fair, the founding the founding fiction piece for
Speaker 1: a cyberpunk. The most influential piece of science fiction in
Speaker 1: in decades was hero protagonist. Yeah. No, I mean two
Speaker 1: of the biggest sci fi things is Star Wars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and very little to the imagination and the one where
Speaker 1: they explore in space. Yeah, we're not good at that,
Speaker 1: but at the same time it sells. It works, so yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't need to be Look if the if the
Speaker 1: story is good, people will forgive a shitty title. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I haven't read this. Heindland book. Maybe
Speaker 1: it was good. So before his name change, Howard had
Speaker 1: been a small town kid from Bowie, Arizona, who had
Speaker 1: worked briefly as a cowboy before becoming an entrepreneur. He
Speaker 1: had definite narcissist vibes, telling an interviewer once, it took
Speaker 1: me a few years to realize that I had more
Speaker 1: intelligence than the average person and more imagination. This is
Speaker 1: funny because he speaks to all of the guys who
Speaker 1: try this, and literally all of their experiments in creating
Speaker 1: new nations are the same and all in the same way.
Speaker 1: So I love the fact that he's like, I'm more
Speaker 1: imaginative than the average person. I mean, it's one of
Speaker 1: the biggest Yeah. Like, if anybody's like I'm smarter and
Speaker 1: more imaginative than most people, I'm like, all right, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna walk the other way. We don't need to be
Speaker 1: having this conversation. Yeah. Yeah. So Howard was a successful businessman.
Speaker 1: He made money in the restaurant industry and then started
Speaker 1: marketing products for grocery stores. He farmed shrimp, he repaired
Speaker 1: and sold generators. He's just like makes a bunch of
Speaker 1: different businesses. And then in July of nineteen nine, when
Speaker 1: he's fifty nine, he reads a report in the New
Speaker 1: England Journal of Medicine about h g H, or human
Speaker 1: growth hormone UM, and the study show that world were
Speaker 1: two vets injected with h g H lost body fat
Speaker 1: and gained muscle mass. So Howard starts selling g h
Speaker 1: g H like he's he's like selling steroids. Basically, two people,
Speaker 1: this is the thing that like Joe Rogan takes um
Speaker 1: and uh. He sells it for like eighteen months before
Speaker 1: the pharmaceutical industry realizes there's profit to be made um
Speaker 1: and starts like selling them officially. Um. So Howard like
Speaker 1: gets build a clinic in Mexico. Um, in order to
Speaker 1: sell H g H to bodybuild the pharmaceutical company. Was like, wait,
Speaker 1: we can't do they make money off this ship? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Um yeah, So he gets rich selling h g H
Speaker 1: as one of the first people selling h H. Um.
Speaker 1: So it's exciting that like supplements have been with with
Speaker 1: us for a while in the libertarian space. So um
Speaker 1: he Prince Lazarus again, that's how he's known when the
Speaker 1: story starts, I know it's amazing. Pays four thousand dollars
Speaker 1: of his H g H money into the New Utopia Project,
Speaker 1: as he calls it, which is his planned to build
Speaker 1: an island in the shallow part of the Caribbean. He
Speaker 1: estimates the total project will cost two hundred and sixteen
Speaker 1: million dollars. So, like literally every other dude in our
Speaker 1: story and yeah, they're all dudes, he starts trying to
Speaker 1: raise money to fund this. Um. He raises it through
Speaker 1: what's called the New Utopia Development Trust, which he registered
Speaker 1: in Bailey's because they don't make you pay taxes. When
Speaker 1: journalists would question whether or not this was all just
Speaker 1: a grift. He would assure them that neither he nor
Speaker 1: his governors were members of the trust, which he said
Speaker 1: was independent and would only give a small percentage of
Speaker 1: construction costs to members of the government, which I'm sure
Speaker 1: it was completely true. It seems on the level, totally
Speaker 1: seems on the level. Nothing weird here. New Utopia gets
Speaker 1: off the ground right around the same time as another
Speaker 1: very dumb project called Oceania, which was another floating libertarian
Speaker 1: city that started raising money to build itself in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen nineties, right around the kind of the same
Speaker 1: time as New Utopia. I haven't found much about Oceania
Speaker 1: and never got off the ground. Is more than a website,
Speaker 1: so I'm not going to talk about it in detail
Speaker 1: other than to reference how the Prince you have to
Speaker 1: call him the Prince responded when a libertarian writer asked
Speaker 1: him why Oceania hadn't gone anywhere. So basically, these two
Speaker 1: start around the same time, one of them fails. A
Speaker 1: guy interviewing Prince Lazarus is like, hey, why do you
Speaker 1: think it failed? And Lazarus says the problem was that
Speaker 1: it was conceived by a bunch of radical militiamen. Everything
Speaker 1: was going to be legal. You could carry an anti
Speaker 1: tank gun down the street if you wanted, and they
Speaker 1: were going to have dueling made lawful. Now, who's going
Speaker 1: to invest their money in something like this where some
Speaker 1: drunk challenges you to a duel and kills you. There's
Speaker 1: not much incentive there. Mmmm feels like he's circling the point,
Speaker 1: Like it's that thing of like, yeah, we can't make
Speaker 1: it free for everybody all the time we have. There
Speaker 1: has to be like limits set. And then it's the
Speaker 1: question of well by who ye, And it's like, well,
Speaker 1: those people were clowns. I'm the I'm extremely intelligent and creative. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's I'm not. I'm not obviously coming from the
Speaker 1: perspective of that, like the only way to have a
Speaker 1: society is with like a top down government. But you, you,
Speaker 1: you do have to think about it more than like
Speaker 1: everyone can just do everything, and it's well, what do
Speaker 1: you do if someone starts killing people? You have to
Speaker 1: have an answer to that question. Like it says a
Speaker 1: lot that none of these none when these guys find
Speaker 1: themselves asked that question, none of them propose anything new.
Speaker 1: They just wind up recreating the government um as it exists.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, you don't actually have any ideas, you
Speaker 1: just don't want to be told what to do. But
Speaker 1: when you're angry at someone else, you just do government shit. Again.
Speaker 1: They want to be at the top. It reminds me
Speaker 1: a lot of when people are like back in the day,
Speaker 1: are like this forum is bullshit, I'm gonna create my
Speaker 1: own forum, and then they end up doing all the
Speaker 1: same stuff because it's just that they want to be
Speaker 1: in charge, and that's that's how you make four chance
Speaker 1: Like it's just it's it's it's just like you either
Speaker 1: if you do complete lawlessness, it's very hard to maintain
Speaker 1: that right. You have to like, you have to have
Speaker 1: an idea about what you want to replace the laws.
Speaker 1: And if your only idea is I don't think I
Speaker 1: should have to pay taxes and and should be able
Speaker 1: to sleep with twelve year olds, um, then your society
Speaker 1: is not going to have You're not going to have
Speaker 1: anything ready other than well, I guess I'll do what
Speaker 1: I just left when the problem happens. It's it's it
Speaker 1: feels the same as starting a cult, because well it is, yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's always like if I would be fine if
Speaker 1: someone was like, look, I just don't want to be bothered.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go into the woods and I'm going to
Speaker 1: live off the land or in this case, off the ocean,
Speaker 1: and I won't bother you and you don't bother me.
Speaker 1: The problem is that then it becomes this whole thing
Speaker 1: where they like want other people there and they think
Speaker 1: they think that they can make some sort of new
Speaker 1: government and it it it's like depressing to say it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all sort of we've we've thought it all up. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing if you if you're not coming
Speaker 1: to it with like here is if you're only saying
Speaker 1: I don't think these things should be present, but you're
Speaker 1: not saying I think we should do this instead, then
Speaker 1: you actually have an idea. You're just angry because things
Speaker 1: that exist are imperfect. Um. I think there's there's a
Speaker 1: if all if these guys are being like, hey, we're
Speaker 1: going to start a new society in the sea, and
Speaker 1: here's how we're going to deal with violence, and here's
Speaker 1: what how we're going to decide what's restricted, and here's
Speaker 1: going to be the community accountability. Okay, well maybe that
Speaker 1: will work you guys clearly have an idea other than
Speaker 1: I don't want to pay taxes or subsidies. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're creating some sort of yeah, communal system where
Speaker 1: everybody But yeah, this feels very have a plan right, Like,
Speaker 1: it feels very much the idea that their ideas stop
Speaker 1: short of I want to be in power. Like it's
Speaker 1: still it feels like a power grab. Yeah, I think it's. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The hope is I think, well, I think our most
Speaker 1: of them is just like trying to make money. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I think for a lot of people, it's the idea
Speaker 1: that like, well, I'm I got in too late to
Speaker 1: wind up ahead in where I came from. But if
Speaker 1: I create a new place out of the sea, then
Speaker 1: I can be the king there or literally the prince.
Speaker 1: And again I feel like we've all had that instead uh,
Speaker 1: to take to the sea article in the woods and
Speaker 1: be like, you know what, I'm gonna stop all of this.
Speaker 1: I'm just But then once you if you get into
Speaker 1: that scenario, then it's like, oh, no, how do I
Speaker 1: actually serve I mean, when I bought acres in Idaho
Speaker 1: and then cut off all of the power and internet
Speaker 1: access to that small town Um, I thought it was
Speaker 1: gonna be simple, but it turns out people need all
Speaker 1: sorts of things. You don't sounds simple, It does sound simple. Um,
Speaker 1: but my god, for one thing, Dave, I don't know
Speaker 1: if you know how expensive it is, but digging six
Speaker 1: foot holes the size of a human body real problem anyway.
Speaker 1: And if you get other people are real winers about
Speaker 1: that stuff. They hate digging corpse holes. Um, and they
Speaker 1: get pissed just because you blocked food from any what's
Speaker 1: It's a real problem. But the point is I thought
Speaker 1: about it more than these guys did, um, because I
Speaker 1: didn't have to already make land because there's lots of Idaho,
Speaker 1: right yeah, so and who gives a shit about that land?
Speaker 1: Let you go out there and just do whatever for
Speaker 1: a while and for a while, and then you know, okay,
Speaker 1: well yeah there there there are some laws. So yeah.
Speaker 1: But what we just talked about is like this thing
Speaker 1: you notice a bunch is that like they don't they
Speaker 1: always default to doing things the way they're done in
Speaker 1: the world. They left when a problem occurs and they
Speaker 1: don't have the only ideas, like political theory ideas that
Speaker 1: they seem to want to institute are like not paying
Speaker 1: taxes UM, and in fact, Prince Lazarus was one of
Speaker 1: the most blatant about this. He bragged that New Utopia
Speaker 1: would quote out Cayman the Caymans as a place to
Speaker 1: hide wealth, so he was very open about this is
Speaker 1: just for rich people as to use as a tax shelter. UM.
Speaker 1: Citizens of New Utopia would pay no taxes, just a
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred dollar five year bond that both buys you
Speaker 1: citizenship and promised to pay nine point five annual interest
Speaker 1: to the bearer. So you're an investor if you're a citizen. UM.
Speaker 1: So that's good. No way that could wind up with
Speaker 1: a situation that becomes slavery, like if people who come
Speaker 1: there and don't have the bonds have to pay in labor.
Speaker 1: I don't know a number of ways I could see
Speaker 1: that going UM and interviews the princes compared this positively
Speaker 1: to the fifty five thousand dollars a person had to
Speaker 1: pay in order to become a citizen of Belize for
Speaker 1: tax purposes, which is a thing you only know when
Speaker 1: you've become the citizen of another nation for tax purposes.
Speaker 1: Lazarus his goal was to get four thousand citizens to
Speaker 1: fund start up costs, and by the time The Independent
Speaker 1: interviewed him in nineteen seven, he had almost five hundred backers.
Speaker 1: So you know, that's half a million dollars. More than
Speaker 1: half a million dollars. Yeah, it's not six seven thousand,
Speaker 1: So he actually did invest four hundred thousand. He's got
Speaker 1: a good ready to return already. That was the year
Speaker 1: Prince Lazarus began agitating for UN membership for his country. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's giant. Um, I'm sorry, it's just have some land first,
Speaker 1: and like that is literally what the UN says. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the UN is like, we would consider your membership if
Speaker 1: there was land with people on it, which is our
Speaker 1: our requirement for a country. That's fair. I think that's
Speaker 1: more than fair from the U. N. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: because otherwise you're not gonna be able to get anything done.
Speaker 1: As the UN people are going to be trying to
Speaker 1: make everything into a country. Yeah. Yeah, oh yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: be doing it left and right. And I would say
Speaker 1: land with people on it is a pretty good line.
Speaker 1: If you're like minimum characteristics of a nation, land with
Speaker 1: people on it, we'll start. We'll start there and then
Speaker 1: we'll ask some more questions. Yeah, which I think there's
Speaker 1: more you could do. Is it your land by another government?
Speaker 1: Do the people know you're making them into a country. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're planning committing Yeah, right, the number of genocides you
Speaker 1: plan to commit next to and listen. If it's more
Speaker 1: than one, that's okay. A lot of countries have Most
Speaker 1: countries really are on the three to five point. There's
Speaker 1: that instinct to put a zero, but it's like, we're
Speaker 1: more concerned with you being honest at this. It's it's
Speaker 1: like if you put nothing on your customs declaration coming
Speaker 1: into the US, like you get away with a lot
Speaker 1: of ship if you're like, yeah, I bought some stuff.
Speaker 1: Like I came through customs once and he asked if
Speaker 1: I brought any illegal drugs and I answered with I
Speaker 1: don't remember, which is not the right answer, that turns out.
Speaker 1: But I was just being honest because I hadn't slept
Speaker 1: in a very long time because of the illegal drugs
Speaker 1: you took out with you. That's correct, speaking of illegal drugs.
Speaker 1: You know what you know well sells illegal drugs, Dave,
Speaker 1: Oh No, all sorts of people, I imagine, namely the
Speaker 1: products and services that support this podcast delicious well here's
Speaker 1: hardcore drug use. M hm uh, we're back and we
Speaker 1: are we we just smuggled some ship into the country,
Speaker 1: then some ship out of the country. Then we kind
Speaker 1: of we kind of square danced with the country a
Speaker 1: little bit. Uh, it's been it's been good, good times.
Speaker 1: So Prince Lazarus decides Tonga sent their military and to
Speaker 1: take the last libertarian island nation that we tried to establish.
Speaker 1: I don't want that to happen to me, So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get you in membership. Then I can't be invaded.
Speaker 1: Um famously a thing that happens when you're in the U.
Speaker 1: N you don't. You don't get invade, did um. But
Speaker 1: that's what he decides to do, and he starts trying
Speaker 1: to raise money from libertarians, saying I need a hundred
Speaker 1: million dollars before the UN will accept me as a country.
Speaker 1: That is not how it works. Yeah, I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: do they take bribes, which, just like anybody with a
Speaker 1: hundred million bucks, you get to be fucking every millionaire
Speaker 1: would have a country if that was the way it worked,
Speaker 1: like it would be nothing to them. Elon Musk would
Speaker 1: have like thirty each based off of meme coins he
Speaker 1: would be issuing passports. Yeah, oh yeah. I love the
Speaker 1: idea that the u N takes pride. It's just like
Speaker 1: und million bucks, not even like if if it's just
Speaker 1: the right clerk, you slip him a hundred dollars. He's like, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: you guys are in the country. I'm just imagining a
Speaker 1: shady u Win guy and a fucking uh trench coat
Speaker 1: and the alleys of New York. Hey, you want to
Speaker 1: start a country, could be get really easy for you.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's a good gript. Yeah so yeah. So
Speaker 1: he announces this, he starts raising money, and the UN
Speaker 1: sends a response being like, will consider your membership when
Speaker 1: there's evidence that there's literally anything there. Um. This pisses
Speaker 1: off Prince Lazarus and he lashes out, telling a reporter
Speaker 1: that he didn't want to be in the UN anyway. Quote,
Speaker 1: they're trying to implement worldwide banking rules and regulations that
Speaker 1: are not in keeping with the philosophy of New Utopia.
Speaker 1: Plus they have a refugee policy for all their members.
Speaker 1: As a new little country, I cannot afford boatloads of
Speaker 1: people from Central America or Cuba or Haiti coming to
Speaker 1: my shores. Because I have no welfare system and I
Speaker 1: have no plans to have a welfare system. You also
Speaker 1: don't have shores. Yeah, you don't have a lot of things, abuney,
Speaker 1: there's there's there's actually nothing that you have. It really
Speaker 1: seems like you're just a guy. It's calling himself a
Speaker 1: country and running around and just like absolutely not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna put up my CREDNZA. Yeah, it kind of
Speaker 1: seems like we need to call like your family and
Speaker 1: see if they could come get you. It would be
Speaker 1: funny if the if the U N had accepted him
Speaker 1: but then just started sending refugees to his house. Look, man,
Speaker 1: until you get ashore, you gotta put these people somewhere.
Speaker 1: He's just kind of boxes of currency and refugees. Lazarus
Speaker 1: had another plan to make his city profitable, unrestricted medical
Speaker 1: testing on humans. H H business had gotten eaten away,
Speaker 1: been big Farma hopped on the h g H train,
Speaker 1: and so Lazarus next got interested in anti aging medication.
Speaker 1: When he was interviewed in he told the reporter that
Speaker 1: he had secret knowledge of upcoming anti aging developments. Quote,
Speaker 1: there are things on the horizon that people today can
Speaker 1: only dream about. We are not that far from being
Speaker 1: able to live multiples of what we look at now
Speaker 1: is the human lifespan. His name is Lazarus. His name
Speaker 1: is Lazarus, and it's the saint. Peter til is also
Speaker 1: really into immortality. It's a bunch of like, rich white
Speaker 1: dudes who are scared of death and even more scared
Speaker 1: that someone at any point might tell them what to do,
Speaker 1: or just that they might not be able to act
Speaker 1: with complete impunity and never consider other people or society
Speaker 1: like that's the thing that's most offensive to them. I
Speaker 1: think part of the money diseases that, like, for example,
Speaker 1: if you were to say, hey, what if I sold
Speaker 1: books online and you happen to be the first person
Speaker 1: to do that, you think that every idea you have
Speaker 1: from then on is amazing, when the reality is just
Speaker 1: that you did a thing first and it was easy
Speaker 1: for you because you were in the right place for it,
Speaker 1: and ideas and like expansion seems easy in their minds,
Speaker 1: and so it feels like it's a lot of people
Speaker 1: who want to cut corners. Uh, who got successful once
Speaker 1: and assume it's always going to be like that. Yep, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure the cave person who invented fire for the
Speaker 1: first time, Like I got a lot of clout for
Speaker 1: a little while, and then tried some other experiment that
Speaker 1: ended with them like catching their dick on fire and dying. Also,
Speaker 1: I'm guessing people at the time, we're like, you didn't
Speaker 1: invent fire, Like lightning hit that tree over there and
Speaker 1: you grabbed the fire, like you you know, you just
Speaker 1: were the first. You're the damn first. Yeah, it would
Speaker 1: be funny the side of a caveman with like a
Speaker 1: burning branch with a wild fire in the background, being like, look,
Speaker 1: if you guys, if you guys all invest I can
Speaker 1: make this like this. There's no into how big this
Speaker 1: thing could get. Oh yeah, this fire could really spread.
Speaker 1: This fire could really spread all the kids uncontrolled wildfire.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, they kind of do. They kind of do so.
Speaker 1: Um yeah he uh he claimed that basically. So the
Speaker 1: claim he starts making is that there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: miracle anti aging drugs that are totally ready for people
Speaker 1: to take and can cure death, but the damn f
Speaker 1: d A won't let him get approved. Um right, And
Speaker 1: so New Utopia. What will make it profitable is once
Speaker 1: they get this island built, you can sell these unapproved
Speaker 1: drugs to anybody. Um, and that'll that'll. So he's like,
Speaker 1: that's why I think rich people will invest because they
Speaker 1: want my anti aging drugs. It just keeps getting better
Speaker 1: and better. Yeah, it's it's very funny. Um. Next from
Speaker 1: the Independent quote. Later this year, if everything goes to plan,
Speaker 1: a construction company will begin pouring piles at thirty foot
Speaker 1: intervals into these virgin reefs. Then precast concrete platforms will
Speaker 1: be placed on top of them, and on top of
Speaker 1: these a city will be erected. Plans for the initial
Speaker 1: stage of development include apartments, are three d fifty thousand
Speaker 1: square foot shopping mall, five hotels, a bank, a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand square foot medical center, a casino, a
Speaker 1: convention center, and a university offering scholarships to students from
Speaker 1: every country in the world. There will be no taxes
Speaker 1: in New Utopia, with the single exception of an import
Speaker 1: duty tax on consumable goods, nor will there be any
Speaker 1: kind of welfare system. A constitutional sovereignty. The Tree will
Speaker 1: be run by a board of governors appointed by the
Speaker 1: Prince himself. Currently, these governors are scattered all over the
Speaker 1: world awaiting the time when they can formally take up
Speaker 1: their posts. All of them, the Prince told me, are
Speaker 1: experts in their chosen fields. Really wish we knew who
Speaker 1: those guys were. Oh god, yeah. Imagine going out into
Speaker 1: the world with a degree from New Utopia Community College
Speaker 1: and being like, no, it's a real thing, trust me,
Speaker 1: my guests, and I would I would wager to bet
Speaker 1: that of the governors who are experts in their field
Speaker 1: he hired to run his his country, not one of
Speaker 1: them knew how to do things with sewage. Absolutely, I'm
Speaker 1: just certain there was no one. There were no thoughts
Speaker 1: going to like what about all the poop? Yes, I
Speaker 1: I really get into like that that vibe that they
Speaker 1: would build the city and then they'd be like, wait,
Speaker 1: what do we put under this? Like they would not
Speaker 1: have started there. And my guess is that they would
Speaker 1: have just shat straight into the ocean and like killed
Speaker 1: all of the sea around it and formed like this
Speaker 1: disease is filled poop bog thearians. Yeah, I think that
Speaker 1: it's right there. I get just walk into the ocean,
Speaker 1: do your business and walk out that it would be
Speaker 1: the benefit of living at sea self cleaning. Yep. So
Speaker 1: the first phase of construction is was scheduled to be
Speaker 1: completed by the start of September UM and UH of September.
Speaker 1: On December, the country's first birthday celebrations were going to
Speaker 1: be held. UM would start with the class the crowning
Speaker 1: of Prince Lazarus. Then he would bestow titles on those
Speaker 1: who had helped to create the new nation. UH. There
Speaker 1: would be celebrity guests and an inaugural speedboat Grand Prix. UM.
Speaker 1: So they had a lot of they had a lot
Speaker 1: of ambitions. UM. Oh my goodness, did Yeah, they really did. Um.
Speaker 1: But of course New Utopia never got off the ground.
Speaker 1: The Securities and Exchange Commission eventually declared it a fraudulent
Speaker 1: nationwide Internet scheme. And this is like nineties seven, so
Speaker 1: this is a really groundbreaking fraudulent on internet skim, like
Speaker 1: not a lot of precursors at that point. Really, I
Speaker 1: love that it's like, we have downgraded your New Utopia
Speaker 1: to Internet scheme to fraudulent internet scheme. The stark difference
Speaker 1: between what he's selling and what it actually is, it's
Speaker 1: pretty amazing. It's extremely funny. Um. Yeah. The sec ruled
Speaker 1: that there was like no evidence he'd even tried to
Speaker 1: figure out how to construct the project. Like, I don't
Speaker 1: even think Lazarus Long ever wanted to make this. He
Speaker 1: just wanted to get a bunch of money. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: the fact that the SEC, like, if he was real,
Speaker 1: the fact that the SEC had declared it a fraud,
Speaker 1: should not have stopped him. If he was really motivated
Speaker 1: to make this thing. And in fact, he had told
Speaker 1: a reporter in n that there is nothing, no law
Speaker 1: that can stop me. If for some reason it's slowed
Speaker 1: down or postponed, I'll still make it happen. It's something
Speaker 1: that needs to happen. Lazarus Long died in two thousand
Speaker 1: twelve at age eighty eight, unable to obtain the immortality
Speaker 1: drugs he desperately needed because he'd never gotten this country built. Dave,
Speaker 1: that's a shame, man, It's a real tragedy. Imagine definitely
Speaker 1: that country going. Yeah, that's probably his last thought. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if only I got Mike Utopia started. Maybe that's what
Speaker 1: was going through his daughter, Elizabeth Henderson's head went In
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen, she announced that she was restarting New
Speaker 1: Utopia and that the project would have a completed floating
Speaker 1: city that's heartbreaking. As we record this, we've still got
Speaker 1: about six seven weeks left, so she could pull it out.
Speaker 1: She could could. Honestly, I have more sympathy for her.
Speaker 1: Uh and you know, if I can help in any way,
Speaker 1: can Yeah, I'll help with this floating city. It's fine.
Speaker 1: She probably had a lot to deal with. I'm guessing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm just thinking, like, you're raising the environment, and then
Speaker 1: you probably love your your father and you want to
Speaker 1: honor them. And it's like I'm getting into the family business,
Speaker 1: or it's I'm getting into the family business of committing
Speaker 1: from libertarians. It's just probably what it actually is. But
Speaker 1: I like, I like to hope she's a true believer,
Speaker 1: and it's like, I'm gonna make this voting city, got damnit? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Um so yeah is when the New Utopia project like
Speaker 1: both started and blew up. Um. It was also the
Speaker 1: year that the first boat born libertarian ce nation concept
Speaker 1: really got started. So you had these guys trying to
Speaker 1: make platforms and islands and stuff in the middle of
Speaker 1: the ocean. Now we're gonna have some libertarians. They're like,
Speaker 1: what if a boat was a country? But it's just like, guys,
Speaker 1: we've had boats this whole time. Boat already exist. Let's
Speaker 1: make what a country. The freedom Ship was the dream
Speaker 1: of an engineer named Norman Nixon in the early nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: right around the same time as Lazarus found his shoals
Speaker 1: Norman had. Norman had the brilliant and totally original idea
Speaker 1: to create a planned community on an island outside of
Speaker 1: the US. Unfortunately, wars kept breaking out around the islands
Speaker 1: that he wanted to choose, so he was unable to
Speaker 1: pick any of them. Norman decided then to build his
Speaker 1: own damn island. He brought on specialists to help him
Speaker 1: sell this idea, including a marketing director who asked him,
Speaker 1: if we're going to build an island and we're going
Speaker 1: to put some houses on it, then why not make
Speaker 1: it move? Oh my goodness, I just you know, you're
Speaker 1: talking about reinventing the government, just like working back from
Speaker 1: island to boat. Yeah. I also love Okay, I got
Speaker 1: to create a government. I need a marketing director. Top
Speaker 1: of the list, top of the list. Yeah. And yeah,
Speaker 1: this is just cruise ships, which are which are terrible
Speaker 1: places for horrible people. Yeah. Yeah, and it's like just
Speaker 1: go on a cruise just just just become like a
Speaker 1: waiter on a cruiseal and fine as this will end.
Speaker 1: I think the visions a lot of these people put
Speaker 1: forward of life in their cee utopias. I would prefer
Speaker 1: to be a waiter run a cruise ship, knowing full
Speaker 1: well that's about the worst job on planet Earth. So
Speaker 1: Norman decided his new his new nation would live aboard
Speaker 1: a ship. Um, but not just any ship. He announced
Speaker 1: through the same kind of libertarian magazines and online spaces
Speaker 1: as as the other people did. He announced that he
Speaker 1: was going to build the largest boat in human history.
Speaker 1: It was going to be forty feet long and twenty
Speaker 1: five stories high, six times larger than any ship ever built.
Speaker 1: Norman put the price tag for this project at a
Speaker 1: lean six billion dollars, which feels like a bargain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess if he got it. If he got that
Speaker 1: six billion, Uh yeah, why not? So the idea was
Speaker 1: brilliantly unhinged. Norman said the ship would never dock, it
Speaker 1: would never get close to the It would never get
Speaker 1: closer than twelve miles away from the shore, so it
Speaker 1: would always be within international waters, never crossing inside the
Speaker 1: legal boundaries of any nation. People would only be able
Speaker 1: to reach it by boat shuttles or airplanes. It was
Speaker 1: going to have an airport on it. Also, Yeah, just
Speaker 1: the biggest a mile long boat. Is he going to
Speaker 1: escape with all that money when it all crashed? The
Speaker 1: biggest boat ever. Um condos Aboard would start at four
Speaker 1: and twenty five thousand dollars with a one thousand dollar
Speaker 1: monthly maintenance its fee, because in this libertarian utopia, you're
Speaker 1: not allowed to fix your own home. Norman estimated twenty
Speaker 1: four thousand units would be on the ship, and he
Speaker 1: was sure that once he'd sold that many, he'd have
Speaker 1: enough cash to actually build it. And and by the way,
Speaker 1: again it's worth noting he's not just talking about building
Speaker 1: a boat. He's talking about like the most significant construction
Speaker 1: project in human history, like an order of magnitude more
Speaker 1: complicated than the tallest building ever made. He's talking about
Speaker 1: the most amazing thing. Yeah, that can grow its own food,
Speaker 1: and all it needs is the money first. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just a money problem. Good deal, good deal. So Wired
Speaker 1: actually interviewed Norman over this, and best of all, they
Speaker 1: brought an experts to analyze how realistic his claims were.
Speaker 1: Quote I don't imagine that people would buy this and
Speaker 1: would live on this thing for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 1: They would see it as a sort of vacation home.
Speaker 1: I could see a lot of criminals buying condos, said
Speaker 1: Gene Feldman and ocean an oceanographer with the NASA Goddard
Speaker 1: Space Flight Center. Based on his own experiences living on
Speaker 1: ships and small islands, Feldman said, it's very different living
Speaker 1: in an environment where you have very definite boundaries. You
Speaker 1: can see the extent of your world, and that does
Speaker 1: something to your brain. After a while, you lose your
Speaker 1: sense of time and space. He's just like, I don't
Speaker 1: think they're thinking about what it would be like to
Speaker 1: live forever on a boat that never gets closer than
Speaker 1: twelve miles to shore. They're creating their own prison like that.
Speaker 1: You're making a floating prison for everybody going back to
Speaker 1: water world. That's not a cheery look at the future.
Speaker 1: Like us all living in the ocean would be exhausting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot that you have to People aren't supposed
Speaker 1: to be in the ocean. As you so astutely noted,
Speaker 1: Dave's it literally adapt a lot to it. It literally
Speaker 1: pushes us out of it. Every time we try to
Speaker 1: go in. It doesn't want us. We can't drink it.
Speaker 1: It's filled with monsters. Leave it alone. Just leave it alone,
Speaker 1: Leave it alone. Toss some car batteries into it and
Speaker 1: get on with your day. Give it a car battery
Speaker 1: or two. Yeah, for the heels, Yeah, exactly, or the dolphins,
Speaker 1: whatever they want to do with it. It's their card battery. Now,
Speaker 1: you know, once it hits the ocean, they own it.
Speaker 1: Which if that, if we actually made that law, they
Speaker 1: might have enough nukes to stop us from destroying their environment. Um,
Speaker 1: so they just need thumbs. That's the one thing they need.
Speaker 1: I think they could figure it out. They're smart um
Speaker 1: in media, sort of like blasts and whatnot. Norman and
Speaker 1: his agents bragged that they're floating island would be a
Speaker 1: huge tourist draw, with more than ten thousand hotel rooms available, casinos,
Speaker 1: printing companies, furniture outlets, department stores, all tax free. They
Speaker 1: were particularly bullish about the promise of taking an American
Speaker 1: style mall around the world so foreigners could shop just
Speaker 1: like us, but on a boat. Did he see selling point?
Speaker 1: Did he? Did you say? Printing companies? Yeah? Where it's
Speaker 1: like there's casinos and restaurants. Also, you can make copies
Speaker 1: of the yeah yeah, like no government interviews with you.
Speaker 1: You can print anything you want, printing your zines, even
Speaker 1: tasteful nudes of wealth. And then we get into the
Speaker 1: age of consent stuff again. Um, So as it happens,
Speaker 1: the Liberty ship organizers plan to go just go ahead
Speaker 1: and use U S. Dollars as their currency. Um. This
Speaker 1: was justified because it was easier. Thank everybody values dollars.
Speaker 1: We'll just use th I get it, like money, money,
Speaker 1: do that later, do that. I've already lived under the
Speaker 1: tyranny of a nation. But like I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: dollars sort of again, inventing your own money. It's just yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it is. It's a whole thing. If you're convinced
Speaker 1: that people need money, you might as well just use
Speaker 1: money that already exists. Um. Although now we have crypto,
Speaker 1: which we'll talk about it a little bit. Even though
Speaker 1: the ship planned to stay in international waters, the Liberty
Speaker 1: was going to fly the flag of a nation. This
Speaker 1: is a requirement for international maritime law. Uh Norman. Norman
Speaker 1: claimed that Ireland had agreed to let them register there
Speaker 1: and that the ship was going to fly in Irish flag,
Speaker 1: which would mean that the people on board the Liberty
Speaker 1: would be bound by Irish law, which did not at
Speaker 1: that point I think, allow abortion, among other things. Oh Man,
Speaker 1: also you said claimed that, Yeah, he said that they
Speaker 1: had worked out a deal. You know, I feel like
Speaker 1: I know where that's going. Yeah, so he's saying we're
Speaker 1: gonna fly under an Irish flag and everyone will be
Speaker 1: accountable to Irish law. But then there's all sorts of
Speaker 1: principle libertarian jargon and the promo materials like quote, there
Speaker 1: will be no intrusion into or involvement with personal business
Speaker 1: finances or commercial transactions, which I don't know Ireland might
Speaker 1: have something to say about Ireland's like, yeah, there will be.
Speaker 1: Norman bragged that only food sanitation would be regulated, which,
Speaker 1: beyond making him f D a cukeed is still at
Speaker 1: odds with Irish law and with libertarian practice. Why just
Speaker 1: why just food sanitation? Can people not take care of
Speaker 1: that themselves? Norman R This This feels like if I
Speaker 1: set up like a cardboard stand outside that sold crystal
Speaker 1: meth and called it Starbucks, you know, and it's just
Speaker 1: like this is another Starbucks, folks, Starbucks approved, here's your
Speaker 1: crystal meth, like, that's that's what they're creating here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's he's trying to get it people to believe
Speaker 1: that like, well, well, flat flight or in Irish flag flag.
Speaker 1: But whatever crimes you want to do when you're living here,
Speaker 1: they're not gonna have any problem with. You can run
Speaker 1: your cocaine empire from our floating boat and you're good
Speaker 1: to go. It's a real like, don't worry my roommates,
Speaker 1: totally cool. That is what they're doing. So Wired did
Speaker 1: their due diligence and they reached out to experts in
Speaker 1: boat stuff to put some of the claims by the
Speaker 1: liberty people to the test. And here's one example. David
Speaker 1: Hall at the Center for Marine Conservation said, dealing with
Speaker 1: massive amounts of solid wastes generated on board, it's just
Speaker 1: one of many concerns. There are all sorts of questions
Speaker 1: that they'll have to deal with, such as what hazard,
Speaker 1: if any, would it post marine animals? Whales are hit
Speaker 1: by ships all the time. He said, it sounds as
Speaker 1: if a collided with this thing, I don't think it
Speaker 1: would have much of a chance. Still, the plan and
Speaker 1: The fundraising went on in two thousand. After three years
Speaker 1: of feverish propagandizing, the freedom Ship had evolved beyond just
Speaker 1: a project of Norman Nixon, and now it accumulated a
Speaker 1: sports team's worth of managers and investors speaking for it.
Speaker 1: Here's how they sold it. In an article three years later,
Speaker 1: the freedom Ship's creators say the vessel, whose construction is
Speaker 1: due to start in Honduras this summer, will be one
Speaker 1: of the wonders of the world. The company behind the
Speaker 1: scheme said reservations for the twenty thousand homes on board
Speaker 1: have begun to accelerate, and there were already plans for
Speaker 1: two other floating cities. Freedomship will be nearly a mile long,
Speaker 1: seven ft wide and three ft tall, and will have
Speaker 1: room for forty thousand people, including a staff of ten thousand.
Speaker 1: There will be a school in a university on board,
Speaker 1: not to mention, a landing strip, a hospital, a shopping mall,
Speaker 1: a casino, and two hundred acres of open space. Roger Gooch,
Speaker 1: the ship's marketing vice president, claims fiftcent of the units reserved.
Speaker 1: Later in the article, which opens with the author noting
Speaker 1: that creators say the ship will be a new wonder
Speaker 1: of the world. Construction was claimed to be starting in
Speaker 1: sixty to ninety days. Um so yeah, by this point,
Speaker 1: tourism is no longer the draw. They're not claiming people
Speaker 1: are gonna like show up here. Gooch claims that the
Speaker 1: boat company, the people making this are just a giant
Speaker 1: landlord and that's all they want to do is provide
Speaker 1: entrepreneurs with spaces to do their businesses. But they also
Speaker 1: want to set up a university. Um where it's bragged
Speaker 1: like they want to set up a university for the
Speaker 1: kids there to go to, but also so that drug
Speaker 1: companies can do unregulated tests on people. Sure they and
Speaker 1: they love this casino thing. They really want casinos, and
Speaker 1: I get it because it's basically they want to they're
Speaker 1: just trying to create a town. But then just like
Speaker 1: a shady town. That's it. It's a town, a town
Speaker 1: for just crimes in one school, yeah, where they want
Speaker 1: to shoot you up with unregulated drugs, right, like if
Speaker 1: it weren't for the shady stuff, just create a town. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, like that's it, that's all you're making. You
Speaker 1: can do that anywhere, uh well not anywhere, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's purely I think that's why it's always sketchy, right,
Speaker 1: because it always comes down to we want to do
Speaker 1: really shady stuff, and we're gonna make it seem like
Speaker 1: we're just you know, we're sucking off into the ocean.
Speaker 1: We're doing our own little utopia where you can do anything.
Speaker 1: Like that's always like the underlining part. Yeah. So here's
Speaker 1: the thing, David. You you know libertarians right, like personally,
Speaker 1: I mean, how do you think as a general rule,
Speaker 1: how do you think libertarians feel about the FBI? Oh god,
Speaker 1: I'm sure they like, I'm sure they really respect them.
Speaker 1: Uh well, you know they understand, you know, it's a job.
Speaker 1: You know, you you gotta do what you gotta do,
Speaker 1: and they're very respectful to them if they like talk
Speaker 1: to them, well any authority. David. It's funny because you're
Speaker 1: you're you're going, you're doing this because normally when libertarians
Speaker 1: and the FBI intersect, it's a gunfight. Um right, This
Speaker 1: it's very funny because they hire an FBI agent to
Speaker 1: to keep track of law and order on their floating ship.
Speaker 1: Oh wow wow. Yeah, so they're just doing doing in America,
Speaker 1: but with like you can you can sell drugs. I
Speaker 1: guess right, they're just doing the Pirate Bay, Like that's
Speaker 1: the whole thing is. It's just know, the Pirate Bay
Speaker 1: would have been way cooler, Dave, Oh, absolutely, it's just
Speaker 1: but all these things are it's just like, hey, get
Speaker 1: in on this before we're shut down, you know, like
Speaker 1: that's it. And if they were honest, I don't know
Speaker 1: if I'd respect them more because you know, some of
Speaker 1: the things they want to do is horrifying. But like
Speaker 1: if it was like, look, we just want to go
Speaker 1: gamble on stuff and like do a bunch of drugs.
Speaker 1: So we're creating this quote unquote country. Uh, and we
Speaker 1: don't really believe in anything. But I might be a
Speaker 1: citizen if it was exactly if that was that what's
Speaker 1: going on. But now these are like, look, we're just
Speaker 1: being Vegas in the ocean, uh, and we're you know,
Speaker 1: you can't kill people there, you can't do like, you
Speaker 1: can't do a lot of funked up stuff. We just
Speaker 1: want a little more freedom, just a little able to
Speaker 1: be like like do a little do some stuff that's
Speaker 1: crimes elsewhere, but we don't want to people to be
Speaker 1: murdering each other. This is not an ideological thing. We
Speaker 1: just think it would be neat if we could sell
Speaker 1: crack cocaine and operate a casino, I would be like great, exactly,
Speaker 1: But it's like we'll go to your casino and smoke crack.
Speaker 1: If it's like, look, if someone murders someone, that's not cool.
Speaker 1: But if you yeah, if you like do a bunch
Speaker 1: of PCP and fall into our engine, I mean that's that.
Speaker 1: It is what it is, like, it's what you're here
Speaker 1: to do, and and it's it's frustrating to me. Like
Speaker 1: these guys, that's kind of how they want to, Like
Speaker 1: they say, they talk a good game about like liberty,
Speaker 1: like no intrusions on personal liberties, all that stuff, and
Speaker 1: then they hire like so in this article from like
Speaker 1: three years later, Mr Gooch tells the interviewer that they
Speaker 1: hired a former FBI man to head a two thousand
Speaker 1: person security force with state of the art defensive weapons. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: and different. He talks about how like, oh, different, every
Speaker 1: deck and Flora will have their own elected representatives, but
Speaker 1: also the captain's word will be final final. So it's like,
Speaker 1: so you want to have an ocean dictatorship run by
Speaker 1: the FBI with guns and no one else gets guns,
Speaker 1: and you're calling yourself a libertarian right there, Like look,
Speaker 1: every deck has its own like representative, and then there's
Speaker 1: like a president of the vote, like just it's just
Speaker 1: doing government. It's always just doing Yeah, and we'll have
Speaker 1: an unaccountable armed wing of the state that can do
Speaker 1: violence to you with no recourse and yeah, it's it's see,
Speaker 1: we're freedom freedom. This all reminds me a little bit.
Speaker 1: This is weird of Disney World, because Disney World is
Speaker 1: like when it was established, they did a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff with Florida where they're like, look, just stay out
Speaker 1: of here, We'll have our own E. M T s
Speaker 1: and stuff like fire like that's essentially what they're trying
Speaker 1: to do. But like Florida obviously still or Disney still
Speaker 1: exists in the country, but it feels very much like
Speaker 1: like well Disney's dream of Epcot and stuff where he
Speaker 1: was like, I want this to be its own nation. Uh,
Speaker 1: but you know, Disney has rights. So I guess what
Speaker 1: I'm saying is have some fucking rights on your country,
Speaker 1: and I think it'll work out. Like if they have
Speaker 1: a like a like a log Flume, I'd be like
Speaker 1: this is great, that's great, good for them. But instead
Speaker 1: they just want to Yeah. I don't know what they want.
Speaker 1: I guess they just want to, uh do a bunch
Speaker 1: of illegal ship yep. Yeah, and and which is fine too.
Speaker 1: I guess I don't have their own FBI. To have
Speaker 1: their own FBI. Yeah, it's cool. You know what else
Speaker 1: is cool? Dave? Oh no, your my plugables? Is the
Speaker 1: episode over? Yeah? This part one is over? Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: hey listen, Hey hi. Um, I'm on Twitter at movie Hooligan. Um.
Speaker 1: I run a podcast network with Tom Ryman, uh called
Speaker 1: game Fully Unemployed. You can find that wherever you find podcasts.
Speaker 1: We have we we we we do stuff about movies
Speaker 1: and such. Uh. We have a Patreon Patreon dot com
Speaker 1: slash game fully Unemployed. Uh, there's a bunch of exclusive
Speaker 1: podcasts on that. I'm also I'm a head writer for
Speaker 1: some more news. Check that out as well. That's all
Speaker 1: my stuff. Well, um, I'm no one and you can
Speaker 1: find me nowhere. Good Bye forever.