Speaker 1: Oh my god, Part two. Man, of all the parts
Speaker 1: that you can have, a second is easily the best.
Speaker 1: It's always the best, just too, that's the best jobs Aliens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Lost World story three. Yeah, the Lost World. All
Speaker 1: the best ones of the series, all the best ones
Speaker 1: of this Hall to be Oh my god, would stock Yeah,
Speaker 1: halloways the sequel is always the best. Super super is Dave.
Speaker 1: I'm Dave. Dave. Yeah, Hey, Hey, how are you doing.
Speaker 1: I'm good. I got lunchables. I got lunchables getting delivered.
Speaker 1: This is this is the country we live in, and
Speaker 1: I'm excited to eat those lunchables. Get some lunchables. That's
Speaker 1: that's the only person I know who eats lunchables. But
Speaker 1: well I never got him as a kid. So this
Speaker 1: is how I rebel skocking adorable. Yeah, um so uh yeah,
Speaker 1: obviously we we ended last episode talking about the freedom
Speaker 1: Ship UM, which was the mile long super boat that
Speaker 1: was going to everyone was going to live in total liberty,
Speaker 1: but also under Irish law with the FBI running everything. Right,
Speaker 1: So how did that work out? Well, they never built it. Um.
Speaker 1: Every three or four years from the mid nineties on,
Speaker 1: the freedom Ship would like creep back into the media
Speaker 1: when like some new backer, because like I think the people,
Speaker 1: the old people would just kind of hand it off
Speaker 1: to someone knew who would try to raise money off it. Again,
Speaker 1: like it was just this grift that wouldn't quite die
Speaker 1: just inheriting the grift. They're just kind of like passing
Speaker 1: it on, like do you want to build the freedom ship? Kid?
Speaker 1: By two thousand seven, the project was no closer to
Speaker 1: starting the construction, which should have concluded. In two thousand three.
Speaker 1: A writer for in These Times noted of is it
Speaker 1: to the news section of Freedomship dot Com reveals a
Speaker 1: more sluggish pace. The most recent message messages date from
Speaker 1: more than two years ago, for learnely explaining how scam
Speaker 1: operations are slowing things down, but that things are happening
Speaker 1: and they are moving fast. Meanwhile, the ship is not
Speaker 1: yet finished, indeed, it has not yet started. Despite this,
Speaker 1: Freedomship International Incorporated has been startlingly successful in raising publicity
Speaker 1: for this floating city, much credulous journalistic cooping over the
Speaker 1: biggest vessel in history with its hospitals, bunks, hospitals, banks,
Speaker 1: sports centers, parks, theaters, and nightclubs, not to mention its
Speaker 1: airport has ignored the vessel's stubborn non existence. That's very funny.
Speaker 1: And this, this Dave. The failure of the freedom boat
Speaker 1: brings me to the final but longest portion of our episode,
Speaker 1: which has to start with the c steading movement. Have
Speaker 1: you heard of c steading? C steading? Yeah? No, it
Speaker 1: doesn't sound good, but maybe I'm willing to be wrong.
Speaker 1: It's I think it's a cool idea. It's the idea that, like,
Speaker 1: people could take to the sea and like as the
Speaker 1: pioneers of old did, build their own homes in the
Speaker 1: middle of the wilderness and live off of them. But
Speaker 1: because it's the sea, you wouldn't be stealing anybody's ship. Um, Like,
Speaker 1: it's a neat idea. I would say the fictional analog
Speaker 1: that's closest to sea stetting is the incredible roy Shier
Speaker 1: vehicle se quest. Oh yeah, Royce Shier, just incredible. Um
Speaker 1: star of Jaws too exactly? Um well, I would say
Speaker 1: the star of Just two is alcohol. Yes, I mean,
Speaker 1: and the antagonist of like There's you know, you could
Speaker 1: argue that most of the reason that Jazz was that
Speaker 1: Shark was formidable is because they were just so drunk
Speaker 1: because everyone was hammered the entire time. Yeah, that's fair.
Speaker 1: So in SeaQuest, did you ever actually watch SeaQuest? I
Speaker 1: remember there was a guy with gills. Yeah, yeah, they
Speaker 1: shot it, I know briefly at Epcot Center did Yeah.
Speaker 1: I would say probably the high point of SeaQuest the
Speaker 1: series is the episode in which William Shatner plays Sloba
Speaker 1: Doon Melosovic. This party was born to play incredible move
Speaker 1: include an accent because it's yeah, he does an accent.
Speaker 1: Like the episode. It's an episode where like they have
Speaker 1: to there's this dictator who's like taken to the sea
Speaker 1: after getting like forced out having committed a genocide. And
Speaker 1: the episode was filmed during the Bosnian genocides. It's very
Speaker 1: clearly who who Shatner is supposed to be. This is perfect,
Speaker 1: it's incredible. So in SeaQuest, incredible show this this big
Speaker 1: ship travels around all these little like sea habitats people
Speaker 1: have built a right, like the ocean has just been colonized.
Speaker 1: There these little towns and villages and independent homesteads in
Speaker 1: the middle of the wild ocean. That's the idea the
Speaker 1: sea steads doing. They're doing a sea Quest, but without
Speaker 1: the giant boat, right, that's that's the people who wanted
Speaker 1: to do the freedom ship. They want to make the
Speaker 1: little bitty sea communities that eventually just I think necessitate
Speaker 1: the giant boat. They want floating homes just a little
Speaker 1: further out there, Just a little further out there. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sea steading got its official start in two thousand and
Speaker 1: eight when the Sea Steading Institute was founded in San
Speaker 1: Francisco by Patrie Friedman. Friedman and an archo capitalist and
Speaker 1: grandson of economist Milton Friedman, had been a Google engineer
Speaker 1: and was thus connected to Peter Teal. He convinced Teal
Speaker 1: to throw them some cash to found an institute. So
Speaker 1: Peter Teal throws a bunch of money into the Sea
Speaker 1: Steading Institute, and in their founding a statement, they promised
Speaker 1: to establish a permanent autonomous ocean community to enable experimentation
Speaker 1: and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems. The
Speaker 1: experimentation I love that idea because it's like, what experiment
Speaker 1: is best done on the ocean? Um only the illegal kind?
Speaker 1: Can we fuck the dolphins? Yeah, it's actually the worst
Speaker 1: place to do any other experiments. Like the movie Deep
Speaker 1: Blue Sea. They should have done that in a tank.
Speaker 1: Are you in the ocean? How did that help things? Yeah?
Speaker 1: In fact, it hurt things. Like all experiments don't get
Speaker 1: better if you're in the ocean. It just gets more complicated.
Speaker 1: As a general rule, very few things get better when
Speaker 1: you're in the ocean. Jurassic Park, the problem was there
Speaker 1: in an island like that was part of the problem. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: just don't do it. Stay on the ocean, Stay the
Speaker 1: funk out of the ocean. If I had, if I
Speaker 1: could have one message for my listeners, it's stay out
Speaker 1: of the ocean. You know, it's weird if I could
Speaker 1: have two messages. It's that. I think maybe dolphins could
Speaker 1: consent to sex with human beings. We don't know, I mean,
Speaker 1: like they understand the concept, right, Like, so I think
Speaker 1: who's to say, Yeah, I think the general rule for
Speaker 1: having sex with an animal, and you can all quote
Speaker 1: me on this and write it down, is uh, if
Speaker 1: the animal is doing the sex on you, like, that's consent, right,
Speaker 1: And it's that controversial now that I like that I
Speaker 1: don't agree with. If you heard of Mr Hands Dave,
Speaker 1: I have. But the horse was all right right, the
Speaker 1: horse was okay. I think there's some argument that it
Speaker 1: was psychologically hurt. Yeah, that it was traumatized a bit.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm not a horse psychologist. I think
Speaker 1: that's unethical, No, I I yeah, I think if a
Speaker 1: horse knew, Like I feel like a horse should be
Speaker 1: proud if they've killed somebody, because well, I was about
Speaker 1: to say so few of them do, but actually, now
Speaker 1: I think about it. The Yeah, so that's not special.
Speaker 1: There's nothing special, but Mr Hands, now that I think
Speaker 1: about it, no, no, no. But meanwhile, dolphins attempt to
Speaker 1: sexually assault people all the time, all the time. It
Speaker 1: happens constantly, and they do to other dolphins. So clearly,
Speaker 1: if you could communicate with a dolphin, I think it
Speaker 1: wouldn't necessarily be unethical as long as the dolphin gives consent.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying, Dave, we need an animal consent system. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: you're right. Yeah, I I think I just think dolphins
Speaker 1: it should be the same rules as people. Okay, that's
Speaker 1: that's that's that's that's my rant about dolphins. Sex. In
Speaker 1: the middle of this episode, we had to talk about
Speaker 1: sex with some kind of thing that you're not supposed
Speaker 1: to have sex within an episode about libertarian politics, it's inevitable.
Speaker 1: It's inevitable. Yes, that's we knew. We knew where all
Speaker 1: these roads were heading. Arguing about dolphins sex. If you're
Speaker 1: if you're building a society on the ocean, you're thinking
Speaker 1: about fucking dolphins, we know it. It's on the table.
Speaker 1: It's on the table, all right. I don't I don't
Speaker 1: want to fuck an animal. I would say they're the
Speaker 1: most fuckable animals. I think, yeah that I'm now I'm
Speaker 1: like racking my brain and I'm trying to think about it.
Speaker 1: You're thinking about the blowhole, aren't you. Of course. I
Speaker 1: love a very smooth so excited this week, so exciting.
Speaker 1: We're gonna get a lot of John c. Lily and
Speaker 1: hitting us up. So Peter Teal was really bullish about
Speaker 1: the future of c steading right, this this uh, this
Speaker 1: idea of like little independent autonomous ocean communities that you
Speaker 1: can experiment with different political ideas and innovative. He loves
Speaker 1: this um and he promised ominously in a press statement
Speaker 1: at the time that quote, the nature of government is
Speaker 1: about to change at a very fundamental level, which it was,
Speaker 1: and Peter Teal had a lot to do with it.
Speaker 1: But it was not through c steading. Not something I
Speaker 1: want to hear from Peter Teal. Yeah. I don't really
Speaker 1: want to hear much from Peter deal. No, although I
Speaker 1: do want to know what he's up to. Yeah what
Speaker 1: eyes on the man, But I don't want to hear
Speaker 1: from him. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It sounds like an amber
Speaker 1: alert with that. Yeah, Peters heels up to some ship.
Speaker 1: It's just always flashing in the background. Get up in
Speaker 1: the morning. God damn it, Peter Tal he's out. He's
Speaker 1: out there from Peter Teal. It's only quiet when he's asleep.
Speaker 1: Um So, Peter invests a bunch of startup cash to
Speaker 1: help make c stetting into like a name within kind
Speaker 1: of the libertarian community. But he doesn't put up a
Speaker 1: lot of cash, and by when The Guardian profiled the
Speaker 1: c stetting movement, his donations had dried up. By then,
Speaker 1: Freedman was billing c stetting. Freedman is the guy who
Speaker 1: founded and convinced Till to give him the money, was
Speaker 1: billing c stetting is the perfect solution to the problem
Speaker 1: of finding yourself trapped in a government that doesn't sell,
Speaker 1: that doesn't like have the same values that you have,
Speaker 1: which I agree, that's a problem. I think everyone listening
Speaker 1: to this right now knows what it's like to live
Speaker 1: under a government that does not, uh embrace your values.
Speaker 1: But um, yeah, I don't see. Well they think that
Speaker 1: c stetting is a perfect solution to that problem because
Speaker 1: you can move right, Like it's like what if, what if,
Speaker 1: you know, we wouldn't have a lot of the conflicts
Speaker 1: we have in society. There would be no need for
Speaker 1: protests to riots. If oh I'm not happy with what
Speaker 1: my government's doing, I'll just pick up and drive away.
Speaker 1: You know. It's modular, like I'll just move my house
Speaker 1: to another government. And it's the kind of thing. They're
Speaker 1: all engineers, libertarians and and the people are in these
Speaker 1: projects like both like libertarians and like the people who
Speaker 1: get most into c studding and similar sort of projects.
Speaker 1: They're all engineers, and it's a very engineer answer to
Speaker 1: the problem of like, oh, yeah, well, if you're not
Speaker 1: happy with your government, you just pick up and move,
Speaker 1: which is technically perfect and also completely insane when you're
Speaker 1: talking about people. It's nonsense, like it's always okay, so
Speaker 1: everyone's supposed to leave their family behind, Like what if
Speaker 1: they have debts somewhere. What if they have student loans
Speaker 1: um what about like health care situations? What if you
Speaker 1: know they have what what if it's not feasible for
Speaker 1: the vehicle that they are able to afford for them
Speaker 1: to actually get to another place. There's all these what
Speaker 1: if they don't want to leave, they want to do
Speaker 1: something else? Yeah, what if they want to change it
Speaker 1: because there's people they love there and because like they've
Speaker 1: put a lot of sweat equity in it and they
Speaker 1: just don't like what one faction of people are doing,
Speaker 1: Like it doesn't it's the tech bro problem where it's
Speaker 1: like figure out text. They're very good at what they don't.
Speaker 1: They didn't go to school for it. They didn't have
Speaker 1: an upbringing for understanding human beings. It's always the X
Speaker 1: factor that they leave out of their equation because they
Speaker 1: just don't consider it. And it's it seems to be
Speaker 1: everyone has, like dunning Krueger is a thing we all all,
Speaker 1: I certainly do talk sometimes on things that like we
Speaker 1: don't actually understand it's a human thing, Like nobody escapes this.
Speaker 1: There's probably like an expert on having sex with animals,
Speaker 1: who's who's like, no, they all wrong. Let me tell
Speaker 1: you about how dolphins. Fine, that's not the most fuckable animal?
Speaker 1: Are you kidding me? It's the giraffe. Just a man
Speaker 1: with a giraffe portrait in the background of his house
Speaker 1: screaming at us. Was through said, folks, I've thought about
Speaker 1: this for years. God damnit. Um. But for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: engineers are that I think the group of people most
Speaker 1: likely to be like And I think it's because what
Speaker 1: they do is so difficult and so in demand and
Speaker 1: so impressive. Like a good engineer is like a wizard,
Speaker 1: like some of the people like I've knew. I known
Speaker 1: a dude once we were camping with him and like
Speaker 1: he forgot to bring a headlamp, so he took apart.
Speaker 1: He turned the headlight of his car into a functional
Speaker 1: headlamp that lasted an entire weekend. It took him like
Speaker 1: thirty seconds. Um. Like, it's amazing when you can see
Speaker 1: people with that kind of like mechanical talent. The problem
Speaker 1: with that is that, like you said, they think that
Speaker 1: they understand everything that way and then everything works that way,
Speaker 1: and I think they don't. Yeah, I think it's the
Speaker 1: same with like doctors and stuff like that. Like you
Speaker 1: look at what's his name, Ben Carson. Yes, where it's
Speaker 1: like you can be really smart about one thing, and
Speaker 1: if that thing feels very important, you get a lot
Speaker 1: of people who are like, oh my god, thank you
Speaker 1: so much. You think, well, I must be smart about
Speaker 1: all the things. And that's when things get really wrong.
Speaker 1: I thinks get really wrong. Yeah, we're people like us.
Speaker 1: We're really good at things that don't matter. So like
Speaker 1: it's I guess again, you're right, we're probably over confident
Speaker 1: and talking. This is why podcasters keep giving people medical
Speaker 1: advice about what to do with accident. It's the Joe
Speaker 1: Rogan phenomenon. I'm very successful, So you're really good at
Speaker 1: talking into a microphone and wrestling. Um. That doesn't really
Speaker 1: have anything to do with medicine, but by god, you
Speaker 1: think it does. Um. And yeah, everybody does it to
Speaker 1: some extent. But for whatever reason, I don't know. This
Speaker 1: is a particularly white dude, especially white engineers who are
Speaker 1: fans of Peter Teal. Uh So yeah, this they cook
Speaker 1: up this idea, um, this very dumbmighty that also ignores
Speaker 1: like is every individual sea staid self sufficient in terms
Speaker 1: of food? Um? Which often they'll say that like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course they'll make their own food. You'll you'll be
Speaker 1: able to you know, hydroponically farm and you'll do this,
Speaker 1: and you'll do that, and it and again. It's it's
Speaker 1: always when you read them like explaining how you'll grow
Speaker 1: all of your food that you need to survive in
Speaker 1: your individual seapod um, it's like, okay, so you've never
Speaker 1: grown food, Like right, you've never ever grown anything because
Speaker 1: like I am not an expert farmer. I'm not an
Speaker 1: expert gardener, but I've spent a lot of my life
Speaker 1: on farm. It takes a lot of space in infrastructure.
Speaker 1: You hand keep like a family alive on a half
Speaker 1: acre if you're really good and really and that's a
Speaker 1: half acre of space that's fully utilized under like good conditions.
Speaker 1: You're talking about growing food in the ocean. Yeah, my
Speaker 1: migrant in this world would be I go to the
Speaker 1: whatever mainlands there, go to the supermarket, buy food, go
Speaker 1: out in the boat, and charge them triple for it
Speaker 1: because you make a killing doing that. Just think you
Speaker 1: want some real food. I got lunchables, all lunchables here.
Speaker 1: You go like that, still got plankton? Yeah, it's sick
Speaker 1: of eating of a bunch of fucking fish. Here, have
Speaker 1: some goddamn fruit and vegetables. Yeah, it's it's it's all
Speaker 1: just like never thought out beyond I'll finally be able
Speaker 1: to mine bitcoin and masturbate to illegal pornography. Um, like
Speaker 1: that's the that's the end of most of the people,
Speaker 1: most people, most not all people's thinking who get into this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it always it feels ultimately self serving, That's what it is.
Speaker 1: It's always just they want to do the things they
Speaker 1: want to do, and then they're like they get a
Speaker 1: big head about it, and they think, like, man, this
Speaker 1: is how people should live. And it's like and as
Speaker 1: critics at the time noted, like the worst case scenario
Speaker 1: for if this actually became a thing is a lot
Speaker 1: of people drown, right. The best case scenario is like
Speaker 1: aquatic apartheid where rich people build their like artificial islands
Speaker 1: to hide from poor people where they can't be beaten
Speaker 1: and murdered during riots over climate change and inequality like
Speaker 1: that that is the actual Like and also if we're
Speaker 1: talking about like a potentially realistic outcome of something like this, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've gotten better at like ships that can turn salt
Speaker 1: seawater into drinkable water, and can grow food if you
Speaker 1: have if you have Jeff Bezos's resources, He's building a
Speaker 1: very large boat right now. He could build a boat
Speaker 1: that could keep he and a number of other people
Speaker 1: alive with minimal supply for indefinitely. He has those resources,
Speaker 1: but he wants like a boat with like an arcade
Speaker 1: and stuff. Yeah, I mean he's building a very nice boat.
Speaker 1: He's building the boat all these people dream about having. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm sure it's going to be rad but also yeah,
Speaker 1: it's going to be a rich Man water fortress while
Speaker 1: he watches the world die. Um. Yeah, Freedman got as
Speaker 1: far and this is the only cool thing Freedman did.
Speaker 1: He started a Burning Man style nautical camping event called
Speaker 1: Femalile outside of a Sacramento I want to go. Um,
Speaker 1: it's not actually connected to Burning Man, but it's the
Speaker 1: same premise. And if you don't know Bernie Man, it's
Speaker 1: like there's nobody in charge. There's no like talent and guests.
Speaker 1: Everybody's a participant and participates in making the event together
Speaker 1: and handling things like safety and a Femalile is like
Speaker 1: all aquatic, so people build platforms and attach them together
Speaker 1: and like every platform is like a camp or a
Speaker 1: set of camps and stuff. So they have bars and
Speaker 1: restaurants and and different kinds of like art projects that
Speaker 1: are all connected to living spaces in this gigantic floating
Speaker 1: raft they make in the middle of a river together.
Speaker 1: Um and uh yeah, it actually sounds rad as hell. First, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they know what they're doing. We've on to community communities
Speaker 1: that separated themselves Jesus World, and what they tend to
Speaker 1: be is very serious about it and what Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they tend to and they tend to be like, look,
Speaker 1: someone has to do the the shitty stuff too, and
Speaker 1: we all take turns. And that's what it feels like
Speaker 1: these people are missing is the very serious like regard
Speaker 1: of how how to actually do this stuff and the
Speaker 1: fact that it comes down to like you're always going
Speaker 1: to have to work period. You're gonna have to work it.
Speaker 1: You're always going to be responsible to other people. Other
Speaker 1: people are going to limit your behavior because that's just
Speaker 1: life around people. It doesn't have to be like a
Speaker 1: police state. But like there will be times when you're like,
Speaker 1: well I would do this, but that will affect this
Speaker 1: other person in a negative way, and so I won't
Speaker 1: and it makes these guys really pissed that that would
Speaker 1: ever be the case. But normal people, especially normal people
Speaker 1: who do difficult things like build communities out of unhewn
Speaker 1: wilderness together, are like, well, yeah, we all give up
Speaker 1: a little bit of freedom in order to get to
Speaker 1: benefit from having the of their people around, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly if you live in alone in a cabin in
Speaker 1: the woods, like like your Tommy Lee Jones in the
Speaker 1: movie Wanted, That's right, No hunted everybody. I'm so sorry. Um,
Speaker 1: you have to like you have to get food, and
Speaker 1: you have to you have to do you have to
Speaker 1: earn that through work. It's just what kind of work
Speaker 1: do you want to do? Yeah, there's there's And I
Speaker 1: think actually the cool version of this you see in
Speaker 1: a femalile, which is um. I think it would be
Speaker 1: rad if like people were building autonomous communities in the
Speaker 1: sea that weren't just tax dodges. But we're like experiments
Speaker 1: to see if like, are there lower impact ways of
Speaker 1: keeping people alive? Is this perhaps the way we could
Speaker 1: do it that emits less or that that is is
Speaker 1: toxic that uses less land, Like is this an option
Speaker 1: for refugee communities for stateless people? Like there's another and
Speaker 1: and burners are kind of the perfect people to iterate that.
Speaker 1: It so like the guy, one of the people that
Speaker 1: comes into the very first effemal ile is this dude
Speaker 1: who helped who has been a long time person at
Speaker 1: the Big Burning Man, and he's like a ranger and
Speaker 1: his specialty was like safety. Um, and he he wasn't
Speaker 1: I don't think he was even particularly into C setting.
Speaker 1: He was just like, Oh, you guys are going to
Speaker 1: do an event on water where everyone's on water all
Speaker 1: the time. I don't want anyone to drown. I will
Speaker 1: help figure out how to make sure nobody drowns. And
Speaker 1: they've kept doing it. So the first year they do
Speaker 1: this event, the C Setting Institute like is the official host,
Speaker 1: and then after that their lawyers are like, hey, no
Speaker 1: organization can get insured to hold an event like this.
Speaker 1: It's way too dangerous. Um, you can never do this again.
Speaker 1: But it keeps happening because they just didn't need the
Speaker 1: C Setting Institute. Just a bunch of people show up
Speaker 1: every year and lash a bunch of elaborate rafts together
Speaker 1: and have kept doing it for like a decade now,
Speaker 1: and no one's ever died it's like the drinking age
Speaker 1: in Canada. Just be cool, Yeah, just be cool, take
Speaker 1: care of each other. Um they have I've googled this
Speaker 1: a little bit and like half of what they have
Speaker 1: written that's out on the internet. It's just like different
Speaker 1: guides to what to do with someone's drowning and how
Speaker 1: to avoid drowning. Like that's their number one rule is
Speaker 1: don't die again. It's it's that that's what bothers me.
Speaker 1: I guess about these libertarian see plans is that I
Speaker 1: understand the want to break free of the government. We
Speaker 1: all do. Uh you know. I grew up really into
Speaker 1: punk rock and an anarchy and all that crap, and
Speaker 1: so it's like the neat the the idea of making
Speaker 1: a commune or community and living away from the government
Speaker 1: is very appealing. And so say these people start from
Speaker 1: the top down. They're so bad at it. They're like
Speaker 1: casinos and malls, yeah this stuff. And it's like, no,
Speaker 1: just get plumbing right, yeah, right, a better way. Yeah
Speaker 1: there's And again it's this freedman like gives up on
Speaker 1: sea setting. He abandons the idea as soon as like
Speaker 1: the money starts to dry up. And um, I think
Speaker 1: the c setting in student. I don't know if they
Speaker 1: still have a presence at a Femaleile, but they don't
Speaker 1: host it anymore and it doesn't seem to be a
Speaker 1: big part of the project. And it's kind of like,
Speaker 1: if you were actually serious about it, all you would
Speaker 1: want to do is create more events like this so
Speaker 1: that people can in real time beta test different pieces
Speaker 1: of equipment and figure out the best way to build
Speaker 1: like durable, permanent Like that's really the ideal way to
Speaker 1: do this. It's not raise a bunch of money to
Speaker 1: like build your idea. It's spend ten years hosting events
Speaker 1: like this all over the world and have a couple
Speaker 1: of hundred thousand people experiment with shit. There's so much
Speaker 1: cool ship here. And if you're if you attend a
Speaker 1: female aile, like hit me up, it sounds rad I
Speaker 1: want to go um, But this it's just it. It
Speaker 1: shows you what a difference is between Like, if there
Speaker 1: ever is a colonization of the CE, it's gonna be
Speaker 1: like the people who do a Femaleile, it's gonna be
Speaker 1: like a bunch of people who already on their own
Speaker 1: are just making ship, living out in the sea for
Speaker 1: a couple of days or weeks at a time, figuring
Speaker 1: out better ways to do it, and just keep doing
Speaker 1: that more and more and more. It's going to be
Speaker 1: some VC firm, crowdfunds a c city, you know, because
Speaker 1: that's a dumb idea, or it's a government or some
Speaker 1: but yeah, the idea of a grassroots colonization, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that is what it would start with. And these the
Speaker 1: it's they're like expos, you know, like these little events
Speaker 1: where it's like we're just it's proof of concepts and
Speaker 1: it's very realistic and practical because like obviously, if someone
Speaker 1: can put it together for like a week long campout, um,
Speaker 1: then it's probably actually accessible. Yeah anyway, whatever, you know
Speaker 1: what else is accessible? David Um, I'm out of the
Speaker 1: virtues of capitalism which you can access by buying these
Speaker 1: products right now, don't think. Just get out your credit
Speaker 1: card and start paying. Ah we are back and way howdy,
Speaker 1: Dave Um. It has just been a fun time. So
Speaker 1: pat Patrie Friedman, who founds the c Stetting Institute, he
Speaker 1: bounces uh and he co founds a corporation called Future
Speaker 1: Cities Development, which ceased operating in two thousand and twelve
Speaker 1: without making any cities in two thousand nineteen, he started
Speaker 1: another Peter Teel backed project, a venture capital firm named
Speaker 1: prominos Um, whose mission was to make enough money to
Speaker 1: pay to build an experimental city somewhere, but on land,
Speaker 1: this time. A Wikipedia entry on this subject adds, hilariously,
Speaker 1: most of the cities will be aimed at foreign businesses
Speaker 1: seeking friendly at tax treatment. He's again this thing like
Speaker 1: we're talking a lot of ship on libertarians. I was
Speaker 1: a libertarian most of my life. I would still be
Speaker 1: one if I hadn't realized that a sizeable chunk of
Speaker 1: people who call themselves libertarians just want a corporation to
Speaker 1: be their boss instead of the gun. They just want
Speaker 1: to do a fraud. Uh Like in this I feel less.
Speaker 1: So this is all Peter Teel money. Yeah, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: all the ones that Patrie is involved. I feel better
Speaker 1: about that because that's you're not scamming a bunch of people.
Speaker 1: You're scamming one person, and that person is Peter Teal
Speaker 1: And it's like, all right, that's fine. Like if it look,
Speaker 1: if you can scam a rich person out of a
Speaker 1: bunch of money, uh, you know, go for it. You know,
Speaker 1: you can write that down along with the animal fucking
Speaker 1: like it's it's yeah, it's uh, I get it, like
Speaker 1: it's it's better than uh scamming, like you know, the
Speaker 1: little person. Yeah, I mean I would agree with you
Speaker 1: if you're going to steal from someone. I think Peter
Speaker 1: Teal is an incredible person to steal from. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of teal from. Fine with you stealing from, but
Speaker 1: Peter Teal is like, I will, I will buy you
Speaker 1: a drink if you successfully steal from Peter Teal happily, happily,
Speaker 1: legally binding. So if you can, we make a T
Speaker 1: shirt that says, I will buy you a drink if
Speaker 1: you if you rob Peter Teal. We can't, but I
Speaker 1: love steal the Teal. There's a rhyme there. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's rather litigious, so this is legally a joke. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: so um. The C Steading Institute, though, did not go
Speaker 1: away when Patrie Friedman moved on to other grifts. It
Speaker 1: just picked up a new leader, the c evangelist. And
Speaker 1: that's a word that this guy created, Joe Quirk. No,
Speaker 1: I mean you don't trust see evangel evangelist quirk. No,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't trust any part of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I certainly don't trust the last name Quirk. Quirk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds kind of like Quirk from It does sound
Speaker 1: a little bit like from d S nine, but also
Speaker 1: his favorite Frangie. It also just sounds made up. It
Speaker 1: sounds like someone had to make up a name real quick. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they were like looking at like a cork in
Speaker 1: a bottle or something like, yeah, you know, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: of the Farrangie now, Dave. And just as quick aside,
Speaker 1: why do you think Star Trek didn't just like like
Speaker 1: they were supposed to be the new bad guys in
Speaker 1: in T and G and then everyone clearly real eased
Speaker 1: after the first episode. Oh my god, we made an
Speaker 1: anti semitic caricature race, right, we made space to choose?
Speaker 1: Why did why didn't they just stop? Like, why didn't
Speaker 1: they just give up like they Clint? They replaced them
Speaker 1: with the board. Why did we keep getting FRENGI what
Speaker 1: was the I can I have? I have an explanation?
Speaker 1: I mean not for the space choose part. That just
Speaker 1: seems like in all fantasy, when like j K Rally
Speaker 1: was like, what if there's a banker race and it
Speaker 1: was like that seems like a bad idea. J k
Speaker 1: Um no Star Trek. This is my problem with new
Speaker 1: Star Trek, and I'll only talk about this for maybe minutes.
Speaker 1: Tops uh No, they the whole thing was Star Trek
Speaker 1: is like the Klingons were the enemy in the original series,
Speaker 1: then they're working with them in Next Generation. So it
Speaker 1: does make sense for the Farrangi to then be allies.
Speaker 1: Like it's all about not defeating your enemies but joining them,
Speaker 1: and I think that's a very cool positive message in
Speaker 1: Star Trek. It's why I don't like Discovery, because they're
Speaker 1: back to the Klingon stuff, and I'm like, no, I
Speaker 1: like progress Progressive of nine. They had like good Borg
Speaker 1: people to agree with you about what's good about Star Trek.
Speaker 1: I just don't see why the people making Star Trek
Speaker 1: were like, well, we can't just pretend we never made
Speaker 1: an anti Semitism species and make another capitalist species that
Speaker 1: don't look like a Nazi cartoon. Yes, I mean early
Speaker 1: Star Trek. We were just talking about in this last
Speaker 1: episode where it's like progressive for the time you got
Speaker 1: us some season one Star Trek. There is a flat
Speaker 1: out very racist episode in the Next Generation. I think
Speaker 1: it's called Code of honor. Uh oh yeah, the planet
Speaker 1: where everybody's um. All of the people on the planet
Speaker 1: are black and it's very, very uncomfortable. Yes, yeah, they
Speaker 1: kidnapped Tosha Yard, like my goodness, Yeah we didn't look.
Speaker 1: They're all just white dude sci fi or they're trying
Speaker 1: to be progressive, but like they are being progressive, they're
Speaker 1: just not perfect there, you know, they're they're flawed human
Speaker 1: beings with bigotry that they didn't recognize was there, and
Speaker 1: they made something really cringe e. That happens, happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so uh, speaking of cringe e, let's keep talking about
Speaker 1: the c Stetting Institute. Joe Quirk, the c evangelist. Now,
Speaker 1: I haven't found a lot out about this guy's life
Speaker 1: before sea stetting. He must be he's got to be
Speaker 1: somewhere in his like mid to late forties, maybe early fifties.
Speaker 1: His first recorded accomplishment of any note is the publication
Speaker 1: of a novel called The Ultimate Rush. In The Ultimate
Speaker 1: Rush was about quote, a rollerblading messenger caught in an
Speaker 1: illegal insider trading ring. According to Wikipedia, that's not what
Speaker 1: I thought it was gonna be. The rollerblading messenger is
Speaker 1: named Chet Griffin and he quote spins his nights hacking
Speaker 1: for fun, so he's a he's a hacker roller skating messenger.
Speaker 1: I wonder how much of this was a rip off
Speaker 1: of snow Crash. I don't know this now that I
Speaker 1: read this sounds like it like this sounds like Gleaming
Speaker 1: the Cube. Did you ever see that movie where it's
Speaker 1: like you, it's a skateboarding Christian Slater movie and You're like, oh, cool,
Speaker 1: maybe it will be about like the big, the big
Speaker 1: skateboarding competitions. You say skateboarding Christian Slater movie, and I think,
Speaker 1: I why am I not watching this it right this second?
Speaker 1: The movie actually is like fucking Chinatown. Like it's like
Speaker 1: this weird noir where he's like doing terrorism against a
Speaker 1: corporation that killed his brother and it's like, come on, man,
Speaker 1: just skateboard to rock music, which also happens in the movie.
Speaker 1: But it's it's what That's what this sounds like. It
Speaker 1: is like it's too many hats on a hat is
Speaker 1: what I'm getting it here, Dave. I have a Christian
Speaker 1: Slater story to tell you, but remind me to save
Speaker 1: it for the end because I don't want to break
Speaker 1: up the flow too much here. Joe wrote this skateboarding hacker,
Speaker 1: Messenger insider trading book in nineteen and it made very
Speaker 1: little impact, although Joe claims two d and fifty thousand
Speaker 1: paperbacks were printed, which is key. That's a little thing
Speaker 1: you can tell about it. Aither printed? Huh? And where
Speaker 1: are they? Where they go? They perhaps in your attict
Speaker 1: right now. The most noteworthy thing about this book is
Speaker 1: that in two thousand eleven, Joe sued Sony Pictures for
Speaker 1: their upcoming feature film Premium Rush, alleging that it was
Speaker 1: based on his screenplay. A judge said, no, it was not. Um.
Speaker 1: He did not win this lawsuit just had the word
Speaker 1: rush in it. Yeah, similar than that, but okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In two thousand eight he wrote a book about love,
Speaker 1: sex and relationships, from which we get an author bio
Speaker 1: that tells us slightly more about him. And this this
Speaker 1: really gets a lot of this man's character. Joe Quirk
Speaker 1: comes across in this paragraph. Dave I studied literature and
Speaker 1: minored in development of Western civilization at Providence College, taught
Speaker 1: partially by Dominican priests who had no sense of humor.
Speaker 1: When it came to my biological observations about celibacy. I
Speaker 1: graduated at the top of the bottom, at the top
Speaker 1: of the bottom tenth of my class. I attended one
Speaker 1: year of law school, so only lost one third of
Speaker 1: my soul, which is just enough to function in American society.
Speaker 1: I invested the last seven in the years of my
Speaker 1: novel Royalties and reading evolutionary biology studies full time. Now
Speaker 1: I finally feel ready to ask a woman on a date.
Speaker 1: Oh no, that's hard bringing what a way to end that? Yeah, Joe, buddy,
Speaker 1: So that's the basics of joke quirk. You have a
Speaker 1: picture of him now in two Yeah, we've all met
Speaker 1: a joke quirk. In two thousand fourteen, he becomes the
Speaker 1: c evangelist for c Stetting, which I think is the head,
Speaker 1: but I'm not really certain and I don't care to
Speaker 1: find out. Um. The next year he founds an organization
Speaker 1: dedicated to building a floating city with unprecedented political autonomy
Speaker 1: and the waters of a host nation. The Guardian goes
Speaker 1: on to describe the start of Joe's contributions to the
Speaker 1: magical world of libertarian Bode cons quote. Nearly half of
Speaker 1: the world's surfaces unclaimed, says Quirk, who published a book
Speaker 1: on c stetting in two thousand seventeen with the ambitious
Speaker 1: subtitle how Floating Nations will restore the environment, enriched the poor,
Speaker 1: cure the sick, and liberate humanity from politicians. In an
Speaker 1: introductory video, he describes the planets oceans as a sort
Speaker 1: of research and development zone where we could discover better
Speaker 1: means of governance, and says that c steading could provide
Speaker 1: the technology for thousands of people to start their own
Speaker 1: nano nation on the high seas, giving people opportunities to
Speaker 1: to peacefully test new ideas about living together. The most
Speaker 1: successful c steads, he says, will become thriving new societies,
Speaker 1: inspiring change around the world. There's a lot in there
Speaker 1: that's very funny, Dave um. I. I like the fact
Speaker 1: that this is going to be a research and development zone, uh,
Speaker 1: but also a way for people to to live together,
Speaker 1: even though like the whole basis of it is, you
Speaker 1: can escape if you find yourself in a around people
Speaker 1: you don't like, um, which it actually seems like you're
Speaker 1: not learning to live together, you're just learning to like
Speaker 1: flee a series of communities as they collapse in interpersonal conflicts.
Speaker 1: Um it feels more Mad Max, where yeah, if everything
Speaker 1: falls apart, everybody scatters and they go do their other
Speaker 1: experimental communities. It's it's one of those like if you
Speaker 1: were utopian, and I am, you have to grapple with
Speaker 1: the fact that, like there's a lot of times people
Speaker 1: have tried to separate from society and make their own
Speaker 1: new society and it usually collapses and like and not
Speaker 1: for because the government cracks down, but because like if
Speaker 1: the wrong people fuck each other, like right, like the
Speaker 1: most utopian projects in the way most punk houses end, yes,
Speaker 1: where everybody hating each other. Yeah, yeah, and none of
Speaker 1: them dishes done and a lot of new std spread, right,
Speaker 1: someone gets their foot broken or something like that, and
Speaker 1: it's a whole thing. Yeah. Yeah, a good punk house
Speaker 1: only lass maybe a couple of years. Yeah, maybe that's
Speaker 1: the I mean, I guess I could, I could. I
Speaker 1: would say maybe some interesting ideas would come out of
Speaker 1: a bunch of like seaborn punk houses floating around and
Speaker 1: breaking apart and reforming. UM. I don't also maybe, but
Speaker 1: maybe not. Yeah, some other things could occur to UM,
Speaker 1: I'll admit to being intrigued by the idea somewhat, although
Speaker 1: I don't think their their pitch for how it would
Speaker 1: actually look is particularly interesting. So again I get it
Speaker 1: when they're like, look at that whole ocean that we got,
Speaker 1: and it's like, yeah, no, that's true. That's a whole
Speaker 1: lot of land, well not really land, but it's a
Speaker 1: whole lot of space that like, if someone figured out
Speaker 1: something to do with it, it's a good It's like,
Speaker 1: oh that's a that's cool. But then again it's like, again,
Speaker 1: the ocean doesn't want us there. Let's not sunk up
Speaker 1: another area. Although we are fucking up the ocean, let's
Speaker 1: not more. Yeah. Yeah, And that's one of the things
Speaker 1: about like we'll get on this, but like I don't.
Speaker 1: They always talk about how ecologically friendly it will be,
Speaker 1: but like they're also the people who think the the
Speaker 1: e p A is like the an illegal organization and
Speaker 1: we should like there should be no environmental rules about
Speaker 1: where you can and can't dump poison. It's the one yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the one case for like colonies on Mars. This
Speaker 1: is like yeah, go there, go yeah. I never get
Speaker 1: that mad about anything people say about colonizing Mars because
Speaker 1: it's like, well, the worst case scenario is you die
Speaker 1: and I don't know you, so it's fine. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: got hurt much, go fill it with your trash. I
Speaker 1: don't give a shit about Mars. Yeah, Mars is already dead.
Speaker 1: You're very welcome there. So yeah again, so far, this
Speaker 1: guy Joe Quirk's attempts UM to establish a floating utopia
Speaker 1: do not bode well for the future of utopian sea cities.
Speaker 1: In January of two thousand seventeen, after years of technical
Speaker 1: feasibility studies and political negotiations, the Sea Steading Institute signed
Speaker 1: a memorandum of Understanding with the Government of French Polynesia
Speaker 1: to build the first sea steads in its territorial waters.
Speaker 1: The designs were developed by Dutch architects named Blue twenty
Speaker 1: one UM, and it was kind of looked like a
Speaker 1: big resort UM. There was a bunch of villas and yeah,
Speaker 1: all sorts of like there's this idea there's gonna be
Speaker 1: big parks and ship like the other ones we're talking about. UM.
Speaker 1: And they planned to fund it through an initial coin offering,
Speaker 1: which is like a crowdfunding thing. UM. Like, we're we're
Speaker 1: going not a crowdfunding, it's it's UM. There they were
Speaker 1: planning to launch a new cryptocurrency and have the value
Speaker 1: of that cryptocurrency and like the money people put into
Speaker 1: it buying the initial coins fund the start of the
Speaker 1: of the island that they're going to build for the
Speaker 1: community they're going to build in French Polynesia. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Joe Quirk told reporters were going to draw a new
Speaker 1: map of the world with French Polynesia at the center
Speaker 1: of the aquatic age. So that's I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: step further than anyone else has really gotten. Yeah, cryptocurrency
Speaker 1: is a good way to get this crypto. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's and here's the thing that they didn't prove over
Speaker 1: the Republic of Minerva. They actually like a down with
Speaker 1: the government and we're like we want to do this,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, they've gotten farther than anybody else before,
Speaker 1: further than anybody else before them. Um. Now, I there's
Speaker 1: a lot of this that I find frustrating, um, including
Speaker 1: the fact that like I I find I'm particularly kind
Speaker 1: of like, as we just joked about it, but there's
Speaker 1: something really gross about quirks line that like, we're going
Speaker 1: to draw a new map of the world with with
Speaker 1: French Polynesia at the center in this community, we're building
Speaker 1: at the center of the aquatic age because the ocean.
Speaker 1: One of his the best things about the ocean is
Speaker 1: that there's like, there's not a bunch of countries in
Speaker 1: it murdering each other all the time and doing other
Speaker 1: horrible things. It's mostly just ocean um. And there's something
Speaker 1: disgusting about a person who would look at this, this
Speaker 1: like vast incomprehensible expanse of water with no no borders
Speaker 1: or walls around most of it and be like, well,
Speaker 1: what have we just made it more like the places
Speaker 1: where we're murdering each other exactly. It's just for the purpose. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like Jeff Bezos looking at space and being like,
Speaker 1: we should move industry here, And it's really really anyway,
Speaker 1: My dislike of Quirk is kind of furthered by the
Speaker 1: fact that he chose French Polynesia for the site of this,
Speaker 1: and he chose it because it's the world's largest exclusive
Speaker 1: economic zone now an exclusive economic zones basically it's a
Speaker 1: zone that can stretch, i think up to two miles
Speaker 1: from the coastline of a nation, where you have kind
Speaker 1: of a control of what like you can levy taxes
Speaker 1: and ship right like, it's it's your territory in terms
Speaker 1: of like what what ship passes through um and French
Speaker 1: Polynesia because it's this, it's there's like up shipload of
Speaker 1: islands in French Polynesia and it's spread over a wide
Speaker 1: geographic area. They have the largest exclusive economic zone in
Speaker 1: the world. So potentially you could monetize a lot of
Speaker 1: this more than it is currently being monetized. And that
Speaker 1: was kind of the goal these people had right um
Speaker 1: So Tom Bell, a professor of law in Orange County,
Speaker 1: drafted a contract for an agreement with the government of
Speaker 1: French Polynesia. He told reporters, we explained to the Polynesians
Speaker 1: how having a quasi autonomous area nearby was a good thing.
Speaker 1: Look at Monaco or Hong Kong or Singapore. Special jurisdictions
Speaker 1: create a lot of growth outside their borders, like Quirk.
Speaker 1: Bell also has a book about how people are going
Speaker 1: to start making their own sea cities for reasons besides
Speaker 1: tax haven. He theorizes that the first sea stead state
Speaker 1: will grow like a coral polyp and be so economically
Speaker 1: successful that it will enrich the whole area until it
Speaker 1: breaks free to live on the open ocean. So again
Speaker 1: he's saying that, like, we're gonna start this thing in
Speaker 1: French Polynesia. It's going to be a huge economic hit.
Speaker 1: It's gonna make a bunch of money and grow larger
Speaker 1: and larger, and eventually we'll just sail away from French
Speaker 1: Polynesia and abandon them because we'll be big enough that
Speaker 1: we won't have to have the protection of a state anymore,
Speaker 1: which is kind of shitty to French Polynesia because French
Speaker 1: Polynesia is one of the country's most threatened by climate change.
Speaker 1: Huge chunks of French Polynesia will cease to exist in
Speaker 1: the not distant future as a result of rising sea levels,
Speaker 1: and Quirk and Bell are basically saying, Hey, we want
Speaker 1: to come into your country, pollute the water, spew carbon
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere, speed up the rate at which your
Speaker 1: islands sink, and do that in order to power our
Speaker 1: bitcoin mining rigs. And then once we get rich and
Speaker 1: have a big island, we're gonna sail it away and
Speaker 1: you guys can deal with it. Right. It's like it's
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Yeah, It's like Tony Soprando giving someone alone,
Speaker 1: where it's like I'm gonna We're gonna take as much
Speaker 1: as we can from you, and then we're gonna toss
Speaker 1: you out. That's it. We we we got what we
Speaker 1: needed and now yeah, and now we're gonna bounce. And
Speaker 1: so it's like it's a short term solution for that
Speaker 1: country probably, or at least that's how they view it.
Speaker 1: And then it's they're just gonna get used up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really shitty. Again, it defeats the entire purpose because
Speaker 1: it's like, look, if you're gonna be shitty and use
Speaker 1: up resources and and and just ruin the world, just
Speaker 1: do that here in the US. Like what's the point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like you already have the ability to do most of
Speaker 1: these shitty You can funk over French Polynesia without traveling there.
Speaker 1: Every day Americans funk over French Polynesia. Likely you're you
Speaker 1: there's you have a variety of options for for harming
Speaker 1: the nation of French Polynesia without leaving your home. I
Speaker 1: hurt French Polynesia this morning when I opened a can
Speaker 1: of soda. Yeah, that's true. It was so easy. It's
Speaker 1: so incredibly easy to harm French Polynesia. And then you
Speaker 1: also got some soda out of it. And I got
Speaker 1: some soda out of it. Yeah. Um anyway, so uh
Speaker 1: as is probably obvious by the fact that it was
Speaker 1: obvious to us what a bad deal this was. It
Speaker 1: was obvious to French Polynesia. The government like agreed to
Speaker 1: sit down and talk to them a little bit. And
Speaker 1: the government agreed because the former Minister of Tourism for
Speaker 1: French Polynesia, Mark Collins co founded a company called Blue
Speaker 1: Frontiers with Joke wirk Um in order to like create
Speaker 1: the project. Um. So that's that's I think why there
Speaker 1: was some initial buy in that the government had, but
Speaker 1: that quickly ended. And I'm going to read from the
Speaker 1: Guardian here. The government was looking for something to address
Speaker 1: sea level rise in environment all degradation, whereas the c
Speaker 1: Setting Steading Institute was more about autonomy. Mark Collins says.
Speaker 1: He says that the prospect of a tax free enclave
Speaker 1: held little appeal for the locals, given that Polynesians don't
Speaker 1: pay income tax anyway. One Tahitian TV host compared the
Speaker 1: situation to the evil Galactic Empire in Star Wars, imposing
Speaker 1: on the innocent Ewoks while secretly building the Death Star.
Speaker 1: The libertarian position didn't help either, As Collins Chin put it,
Speaker 1: it's very difficult to ask for government support when your
Speaker 1: narrative is that you want to get rid of politicians.
Speaker 1: In retrospect, Bell agrees they already had a beautiful paradise
Speaker 1: in French Polynesia. The local community wasn't very enthused about
Speaker 1: the project, and I get it. They don't need strangers
Speaker 1: coming in and ruining their view, which you got that eventually, buddy. Um.
Speaker 1: It sounds like for the most part they weren't they
Speaker 1: weren't buying what they were selling. Well, we'll sit down
Speaker 1: with you. I think there may have been some money
Speaker 1: that changed hands, because there were people in the government
Speaker 1: who were initially kind of bullish on this, and then
Speaker 1: there were protests in the streets over it, like yeah,
Speaker 1: people being like what about our fishing areas, like what
Speaker 1: like this is such a bad like people like this
Speaker 1: is obviously a terrible idea, and the government quickly backed off.
Speaker 1: They were like, no, it's not it's and then they
Speaker 1: thought for a second, They're like, okay, never mind this time,
Speaker 1: everybody sorry. So with Blue Frontiers, the company that they
Speaker 1: were going to colonize the ocean around the French Polynesia
Speaker 1: with Um, when that fails, Colin's chin goes off to
Speaker 1: set start yet another C city project. Um and he
Speaker 1: claims to have given up and Collin again like the
Speaker 1: guy from the government who had been working with him. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: uh so Colin's chin starts another C city project. Um
Speaker 1: and he this one is a lot savvier, And I
Speaker 1: think he might actually succeed to an extent because he
Speaker 1: claims to have given up on the idea that libertarian
Speaker 1: tax dodge is a good basis for a civilization, and
Speaker 1: he instead founded an organization with the goal of making
Speaker 1: floating cities that are extensions of existing cities and thus
Speaker 1: pay taxes as normal. Basically like, hey, real estate is
Speaker 1: expensive in San Francisco. What if we build a floating
Speaker 1: city right right in the right outside of the Bay.
Speaker 1: What if we build a floating city on the side
Speaker 1: of New York And like that's that's the thing he's
Speaker 1: trying to sell, which is like, yeah, ship that might
Speaker 1: work someday, something like that might exist one of these
Speaker 1: days to deal with a variety of things. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: gonna say. It might have to exist, so it may
Speaker 1: be inevitable. Yeah. It's just very funny that this whole
Speaker 1: this it feels like one long negotiation this history that
Speaker 1: has reduced to like, okay, it's extension of city outside.
Speaker 1: Yeah what if what if it is the same laws
Speaker 1: as San Francisco, California, But we have waves. You know, Honestly,
Speaker 1: if they if they do it and then they're like
Speaker 1: we won, it's like good for you man, Yeah, good
Speaker 1: for you guys. Good work. Yeah. And yeah that that
Speaker 1: doesn't feel like a new type of government or something revolutionary.
Speaker 1: It just seems like a neat thing we could do
Speaker 1: the city. And also it's a it's a mix of
Speaker 1: neat thing we could do and thing we may have
Speaker 1: to do because of how badly we fucked up other things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what if more people are living in the ocean,
Speaker 1: maybe those are people who'd be like, hey, stop throwing
Speaker 1: stuff in here. Yeah. I just checked the ocean and
Speaker 1: it turns out it's not good here. Along with all
Speaker 1: the monsters that's filled with there's a lot of garbage.
Speaker 1: Like that's the thing is if if any of them
Speaker 1: came on it from sustainable living and cleaning up because
Speaker 1: we've were you know, there's all these prototypes and stuff
Speaker 1: of like ways to clean up the ocean and stuff.
Speaker 1: I feel like everybody would be like way more into this.
Speaker 1: If they're like, if we're gonna look out there, we're
Speaker 1: gonna do some online gambling, but also we're going to
Speaker 1: pick up all your trash and if and that's also
Speaker 1: a good way to make money or to be sustainable,
Speaker 1: where like the you can get help from other countries
Speaker 1: because they're like they're cleaning up our trash, we should
Speaker 1: support them. But again, it all starts from this very
Speaker 1: selfish place. Yeah, it's extremely selfish. Um, it's silly, and
Speaker 1: it's a bummer because again, as we keep coming back to,
Speaker 1: there's cool ideas. So Chin's idea for for these cities
Speaker 1: that are extensions of regular cities but in the waters
Speaker 1: to create a series of interlocking hexagonal islands which harvest
Speaker 1: power from waves in sunlight and regenerate marine life through
Speaker 1: an artificial reef system. And a lot of these different
Speaker 1: sea stetting plants today will say like and we'll grow
Speaker 1: back the reefs. It will provide a habitat for the animals.
Speaker 1: If they actually do it, that would be cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He calls his idea oceanic city. Um, and he claims
Speaker 1: that the hexagonal design allows for dragon drop city designing
Speaker 1: just like in sim city, so you can like flow
Speaker 1: to city, block it away and stick it in a
Speaker 1: new place, or just like drop a hospital or a university,
Speaker 1: you know, in the middle of a thing. Um And yeah,
Speaker 1: I I think aspects of this dream uh might be
Speaker 1: real listic. And I think in general, one of the
Speaker 1: things that's changed from now to the earlier days and
Speaker 1: like the seventies and then the nineties of this is
Speaker 1: that better technology stuff like three D printers means like
Speaker 1: you could do this, Like this isn't like the Mars colony,
Speaker 1: where we're like, well, Ellen, it may not actually be
Speaker 1: possible to do what you're talking about. At our current
Speaker 1: level of technology any in any reasonable capacity, we could
Speaker 1: absolutely build like semi autonomous sea habitats that people lived
Speaker 1: on and were modular, Like that's not physically impossible. Um.
Speaker 1: And as a result, the kind of libertarian dreams of
Speaker 1: c stetting have gone from The first ones were all grifts, right,
Speaker 1: There were attempts to raise money in order to like
Speaker 1: get money, and nobody actually wanted to build anything. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: now that's kind of changed, and you're starting to get
Speaker 1: the first libertarian c setting advocates who believe in something
Speaker 1: and are actually willing to risk everything they have to
Speaker 1: try and set up a life at sea. That's fantastic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the grift that the thing that they were promising
Speaker 1: in the grift not a bad idea, but they were
Speaker 1: just doing a grift. So it does make sense for
Speaker 1: someone to come along and be like, but what if
Speaker 1: we actually did it? What if we tried? Yeah, these
Speaker 1: new things you're talking about, it's just so much more realistic.
Speaker 1: It reminds me of playing like Minecraft or Valheim or
Speaker 1: any survival game where it's like you build a base
Speaker 1: and then if you want to funk off and make
Speaker 1: a new base in the ocean, for example, you can't
Speaker 1: just like start again, you move your resources. Um, you
Speaker 1: you build it as part of it. And that's what
Speaker 1: they're getting at here, which is like they the first
Speaker 1: ideas was like clean break, we're doing our own thing,
Speaker 1: and it's like you kind of can't do that, like
Speaker 1: don't print your own money immediately, Like like this, the
Speaker 1: idea of building a city off of an existing city
Speaker 1: is a good compromise. If they actually do the things
Speaker 1: that they're saying they can do, it's it's realistic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's um, that's kind of why you're you've seen
Speaker 1: so far just one, well, no three now, But the
Speaker 1: first people who have actually done the opposite of a
Speaker 1: grift lost huge amounts of money trying to create societies
Speaker 1: at sea um. And the first of these guys, and
Speaker 1: the one who put the most skin in the game,
Speaker 1: is Chad l Wartowski. Chad is a lifelong libertarian. From
Speaker 1: the information available, at least, it seems like he got
Speaker 1: his start as a student at Michigan State University in ninet.
Speaker 1: His first election was Bill Clinton's re election, and Chad
Speaker 1: attended his speech by the president and found himself disturbed
Speaker 1: not by any of the sex crime stuff, but by
Speaker 1: Bill Clintons spending quote. He's talking about investing in this,
Speaker 1: investing in that, investing in that. I knew investing was
Speaker 1: code word for we're going to be spending money on this.
Speaker 1: Chad believed that the country needed to spend less and
Speaker 1: tax its people less. He spent time briefly agitating for
Speaker 1: the Free State Project and the Ron Paul campaign. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and two, after graduation, he got a job
Speaker 1: as a software engineer in Georgia. Chad made a stab
Speaker 1: at starting political life there, running for Congress once as
Speaker 1: a libertarian, but he couldn't get enough signatures to get
Speaker 1: on the ballot. During these years, most of Chad's political
Speaker 1: activism was complaining about the failure of libertarian politics to
Speaker 1: take off nationwide. He was just kind of like, why
Speaker 1: isn't this happened yet? Um. After years of this, he
Speaker 1: decided that fucket, he just go out and start his
Speaker 1: own settlement and live free. He spent years experimenting with
Speaker 1: different constructions methods. In his off time, he would work
Speaker 1: seventeen hour days as a software contractor and then like
Speaker 1: spend time trying to develop ways to build a sea
Speaker 1: habitat and whatnot. In his off time, UM, he did
Speaker 1: a lot of like government contracting. He was in Afghanistan
Speaker 1: for a while, like coding for the Department of Defense,
Speaker 1: and he made a shipload of money UM which he
Speaker 1: put into bitcoin. And in two thousand fifteen he got
Speaker 1: briefly involved with a couple of people uh in a
Speaker 1: project to sell c notes to try and raise fifteen
Speaker 1: million dollars to make a village at sea. Only five
Speaker 1: people invested, so the project was canceled and Chad was
Speaker 1: adamant to invest or to reporters that he refunded all
Speaker 1: of their money. Um, see notes sounds like a scam,
Speaker 1: but maybe it wasn't. Based on what comes next, I
Speaker 1: don't think it was. I think Chad's pretty earnest. My
Speaker 1: note to Chad. If Chad's listening is it sounds like
Speaker 1: he's he has some ideas. Uh, he's just not finding
Speaker 1: people who are interested. He is not popular, it's not
Speaker 1: getting enough signatures. That seems like the story of his
Speaker 1: life with this stuff so far. Yes, um, and that yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think that's that is about to change because
Speaker 1: in two thou sixteen, Chad retires and he's got a
Speaker 1: bunch of money, um, mostly in crypto, enough that he
Speaker 1: doesn't have to work anymore. So he's been some time
Speaker 1: bumming around trying to find other people who will try
Speaker 1: to start a society with him. Um. And he meets
Speaker 1: a tour guide when he's in Thailand and they fall
Speaker 1: in love and get married. Now, good for Chad. When
Speaker 1: you talk about a white rich guy who travels to
Speaker 1: Thailand and meets a tour guide and gets married, that
Speaker 1: is often a problematic story. Um, it's often horrible of
Speaker 1: the time. I don't think it is this time because
Speaker 1: number one, she's thirty three when they get married, so
Speaker 1: it's not nothing questionable about it. She's got like a
Speaker 1: thirteen year old kids. So like, I think he just
Speaker 1: actually found someone and they fell in love and it's fine. Um. So,
Speaker 1: Chad l Wartowski, you get the official behind the bastard
Speaker 1: seal of married a Thai woman while on vacation, but
Speaker 1: not like in a predatory way. Award nice, are you
Speaker 1: gonna mail that to him? Yeah? It's forty five pounds
Speaker 1: and made of solid bronze. Um. Yeah, as it should be.
Speaker 1: You know who also doesn't get married in a predatory way.
Speaker 1: But I said didn't. I said didn't If it's accidentally
Speaker 1: a Washington state Yeah, if it's the Washington State Patrol,
Speaker 1: they definitely at least of the time. Am I Right? Okay,
Speaker 1: here's the ads. We're back and we're talking about robbing
Speaker 1: insured banks and Peter teal Um. Yeah, the American dream,
Speaker 1: the American dream. Ah, I love America. So this lady
Speaker 1: Chad Jad marries a lady her name, she calls herself Nadia,
Speaker 1: a summer girl. Um, she picked a last name for
Speaker 1: herself when she left. She picked summer girl. Whatever. People
Speaker 1: make names. Yeah, no, it's it's fine. It's fine. They
Speaker 1: get married and they actually moved to French Polynesia briefly
Speaker 1: to help Blue Frontiers and their sea setting of it.
Speaker 1: So like when they're courting the government of French Polynesia,
Speaker 1: Chad hears about this and he just moves there right away.
Speaker 1: Like again, he's incredibly earnest. He's like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: this government's actually agreed, Like I'll just I'll be I
Speaker 1: need to move there so that when things start happening,
Speaker 1: I'm right in the middle of it. Um. Up until
Speaker 1: the end here, he's pretty endearing in some ways. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the whole thing falls apart, as we just discussed,
Speaker 1: and so l Wartowski flees back to Thailand with his
Speaker 1: new bride. Uh. Next he gets in contact with a
Speaker 1: German engineer and Aimed Rudiger Kulch like Chad, libertarian Like Chad,
Speaker 1: Rudiger is a libertarian. Um, and he's a libertarian who
Speaker 1: made all of his money in like the defense industry.
Speaker 1: He designed weapons systems before getting really into cryptocurrency and
Speaker 1: retiring to Thailand. Um. He had a dream, which he
Speaker 1: discussed in the c Setting Institute Forum of creating a
Speaker 1: launch loop, which is a huge sling shot that can
Speaker 1: throw things into space. And Rudiger Coke didn't like come
Speaker 1: up with the idea of a launch loop. People have
Speaker 1: talked for a while about like, well, you wouldn't actually
Speaker 1: need like all the fuel and stuff that you need
Speaker 1: if you could build a big enough slingshot type thing
Speaker 1: to just like launch stuff into the into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: And this is like just like throwing like cows, and like,
Speaker 1: I think spaceships mostly, Dave. I think they're really shooting
Speaker 1: for spaceships. I think that's a waste. What would you
Speaker 1: flick into space? It's just whatever I want space to have,
Speaker 1: you know, like confused some aliens and throwing he pop
Speaker 1: out there, give him to space. Start things off on
Speaker 1: a good footing with space. That way, when space is
Speaker 1: like should we kill this planet with the media, they'll
Speaker 1: be like, not the guys that gave us Iggy right.
Speaker 1: I want the first contact aliens have with our species
Speaker 1: to be their UFO slamming into Iggy Pop. Yeah. Like
Speaker 1: that's when I'm like, oh my god, we hit something
Speaker 1: pull over and then it's Iggy Pop yeah and Frozen yeah,
Speaker 1: and and a single copy of one of the Stooges
Speaker 1: albums that'll set things off right honestly, Yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: perfect idea, perfect idea. So Coke wants to build a
Speaker 1: launch loop, um, which a thing. I think it's a
Speaker 1: thing that could potentially work. Like, I think it's a
Speaker 1: thing where like astronautical engineers were like, well, yeah, tech,
Speaker 1: you could make something technically that would work this way
Speaker 1: and it might be a good idea, um, but no
Speaker 1: one had ever built it because it requires an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of space, so much that you could only really
Speaker 1: do it in the ocean. Um. Sorry, it's a catapult. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like it's like cotes, so just like fling shit
Speaker 1: into the stars. Incredible. Yeah, it's a cool idea. I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know how actually practical it is, but
Speaker 1: a bunch of people think it is. And yeah, honestly
Speaker 1: it's more sustainable right than you're doing now. If you
Speaker 1: could do it, it seems like it would be a
Speaker 1: good idea potentially. Um. Coke is like, well, we have
Speaker 1: to do it in the ocean, and so he makes
Speaker 1: a deal with Chad that they'll they'll pick a spot
Speaker 1: and they're gonna have to for this launch loop. Build
Speaker 1: a watch tower, right, so you can watch the launches.
Speaker 1: And so Coke is like, hey, you go and you
Speaker 1: help me fund this. You just live in the watch tower,
Speaker 1: you get your thing, you get to start c setting
Speaker 1: and I can use that as a base to make
Speaker 1: my my loop. Right. Um, So both men get get
Speaker 1: on board a project together and again most promising, they
Speaker 1: have a goal other than just like avoid taxes. And
Speaker 1: it's a little maybe outside of their means, but at
Speaker 1: least it's a goal. At least it's a dream beyond
Speaker 1: avoid taxes. Um. No, I just had a realization of
Speaker 1: all of this. All these guys because we've been talking
Speaker 1: about the idea of like they keep framing it as
Speaker 1: we should start a society, but ultimately it's just that
Speaker 1: they want to live a certain way. Yeah. Um, and
Speaker 1: that's part of the problem. I think it's an issue
Speaker 1: with libertarian in general, which is like you need to
Speaker 1: show how this would benefit people in general. Know what,
Speaker 1: it's just occurred to me. They all just want to
Speaker 1: be lighthouse keepers. That's it. That's the answer. Just be
Speaker 1: a lighthouse keeper and you're all set enough lighthouses, Dave,
Speaker 1: I know we need to bring back or lighthouses. Uh,
Speaker 1: and then we'll solve libertarians. That's that's Joe Biden's next
Speaker 1: big spending Billy trillion dollars for lighthouses. Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1: That's all we need. So Chad and Uh and Coke
Speaker 1: like decided to form a company in order to build
Speaker 1: this launch loop and a community around it. They name
Speaker 1: their company Ocean Builders, and their plan is to sell
Speaker 1: twenty or so pods at least and kind of build
Speaker 1: a community around this launch loop. And I think the
Speaker 1: idea is, like, Hey, if we actually build like a
Speaker 1: space launch facility, you're gonna want to live around that.
Speaker 1: There's going to be a bunch of money around that.
Speaker 1: There's a whole lot of businesses that like people could do.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's not the worst of the ideas
Speaker 1: people have had in this episode, it's the best. So
Speaker 1: they build a prototype and they tow it into international waters, unflagged,
Speaker 1: transmitting nothing off the coast of Thailand. Edwardtowski had eventually
Speaker 1: had initially tried to keep a low profile, and he
Speaker 1: wanted to He didn't want to make a big deal
Speaker 1: about it until things got established, but he also wanted
Speaker 1: to work with the c Steading Institute on the project,
Speaker 1: and once they heard a guy had actually made a
Speaker 1: c stead, like there's a dude living in the ocean
Speaker 1: off of a platform and international waters, they sent their
Speaker 1: president out to film a documentary about him. As The
Speaker 1: Guardian rites, it was not a stirring success, but also
Speaker 1: not a failure. More importantly, it was real, making chad
Speaker 1: Our first not a grifter of the episode. Due to
Speaker 1: a construction snaphoo, the pod listed ten degrees on stormy nights,
Speaker 1: Elwartowski in Summer Girl abandoned the tiny bedroom and slept
Speaker 1: in the kitchen as close as possible to the central
Speaker 1: spar A grocery run was a four day affair, and
Speaker 1: since there was nothing outside the c stead to park
Speaker 1: a boat, Coke had to pick them up. They sometimes
Speaker 1: stayed on shore instead, in an apartment in Fouquet that
Speaker 1: el Wartowski had rented for Summer Girls mother and fourteen
Speaker 1: year old son. So this is not easy. They're they're
Speaker 1: really committed to this, like you have to give it
Speaker 1: to him. These are believers. This is not a grift.
Speaker 1: You would not live that way for a grift. That's
Speaker 1: a that's a nightmare. That that sounds fucking miserable. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: I found an article on news BTC, which is a
Speaker 1: bitcoin in crypto news website, about Chad and Summer Girls
Speaker 1: establishment of the first actual libertarian c stead. It was
Speaker 1: published in the spring of two thousand nineteen, after the
Speaker 1: first episodes of the documentary about the effort came out.
Speaker 1: This article mostly celebrates that Chad used bitcoin profits to
Speaker 1: build his new home. It includes this line. El Wartowski
Speaker 1: states that the couple has made no effort to seek
Speaker 1: approval from the Thai government for their new home. He commented,
Speaker 1: We've just been keeping under the radar so far, but
Speaker 1: we follow all the laws of Thailand, so it's as
Speaker 1: if we're just living on a boat in the water.
Speaker 1: As far as they're concerned, all we expect from the
Speaker 1: Thai government is that they follow international law. We will
Speaker 1: be doing the same. But Nadia and I aren't doing
Speaker 1: anything we can't do on land. So you think that worked, Dave,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's again, it's just that they're they're just
Speaker 1: living in the ocean like it doesn't feel like they've
Speaker 1: built a libertarian society. Here's the thing, you know, who
Speaker 1: took this seriously is the Thai government. Um, so in
Speaker 1: Thailand you can go to prison for forever if you
Speaker 1: like make fun of the king. Um. Right, you can
Speaker 1: get executed for for smuggling drugs. It's not a chill government. Thailand.
Speaker 1: Government tightly wound is They're a little tightly wound, right.
Speaker 1: They don't like people just existing in their ocean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't like some guys starting his own nation off
Speaker 1: of their coast that they did not. They were not
Speaker 1: okay with this. I mean in fairness. Like if I
Speaker 1: had a yard and then someone was like, look, I'm
Speaker 1: just existing in your yard yard, I'd be like, maybe
Speaker 1: get off my yard. Yeah, Like, I'll talk to you,
Speaker 1: I'll see if you're cool, but maybe get off my y.
Speaker 1: They're like, it's cool. I'm a libertarian, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm calling the cops. But actually I'm not going
Speaker 1: to call the cops because that doesn't help. But yes,
Speaker 1: yeah I will. I will have a drone. Thank you.
Speaker 1: By the way, Sorry, quick aside. This is called ocean Builder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's all the name? Spend there was like ocean the
Speaker 1: utopianis Oceania. It just occurred to me. They all sound
Speaker 1: like sim builder games. They do all sound like video
Speaker 1: games that what's his name? The game made the sims, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they all sound like that, anything like that. So the
Speaker 1: Thai government finds out because he keeps doing press that
Speaker 1: he's living illegally, maybe off of the coast of their nation. Again,
Speaker 1: the legal situation here is kind of unclear, um, but
Speaker 1: the Thai government is not chill about it. And in
Speaker 1: April of two, nineteen summer, a girl gets a text
Speaker 1: from a friend back on the mainland that she and
Speaker 1: her new husband are on TV. The Thai Navy had
Speaker 1: judged their platform to be in a legal breakaway state
Speaker 1: and a threat to tie sovereignty and threatening Thaie sovereignty
Speaker 1: is a capital crime. They could both be given the
Speaker 1: death sentence for this. Oh my god. Also, there's never
Speaker 1: a good time to be surprised by the text you're
Speaker 1: on TV, Like I would never be like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: like you want to know if you're going to be
Speaker 1: on TV. You don't want to be shocked by that.
Speaker 1: And and here's the thing, Um, Chad is an an
Speaker 1: archo capitalist and when the when he gets reached out
Speaker 1: to by the media, like, hey, what do you think
Speaker 1: about the Thai government threatening to to like saying that
Speaker 1: you're a threat to their sovereignty. He like, he goes
Speaker 1: into an ideological explanation. He's like, well, I don't believe
Speaker 1: in nations or borders, so obviously I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: create a breakaway nation. Like that's just the Thai government
Speaker 1: does not by this, Like, you're not going to convince
Speaker 1: the Thaie government that that anarcho capitalism is the thing, Chad.
Speaker 1: They're just not going to listen. And they don't. I've
Speaker 1: never once been able to leave a store with a
Speaker 1: product and pay with I don't believe in money, Like
Speaker 1: that's never been a thing they'll accept many times. They
Speaker 1: not believed in a state, but Thailand does, and they
Speaker 1: have a military which they send after him. Um. He
Speaker 1: and Summer Girl barely managed to escape pursuit with their lives.
Speaker 1: It's a whole deal. Um yeah, like they and they
Speaker 1: are wanted in a bunch of the world. Now they
Speaker 1: had to travel places that didn't extradite to fucking Thailand.
Speaker 1: Um and it's it's it's actually kind of an interesting
Speaker 1: story you can find in that Guardian article. But to
Speaker 1: make a long story short, the place they land next
Speaker 1: is Panama. Now, over the course of late two thousand nineteen,
Speaker 1: after fleeing for their lives, Chad and Summer Girl had
Speaker 1: sat down with Coke via the Space Slingshot Guy in
Speaker 1: Panama and another guy, Grant romant Um. Now Grant is
Speaker 1: the former host of a TV show for hairstylists, UM
Speaker 1: who has made CEO. Once they meet Grant, this hair stylist,
Speaker 1: they make him CEO of Ocean Builders fairly shortly UM.
Speaker 1: And from what I can tell, he did have one
Speaker 1: real qualification, which is that in the nineties, before his
Speaker 1: hair stylist days, I guess he had worked on the
Speaker 1: freedom Ship project in Florida. UM, so he had he
Speaker 1: had that experience. He worked on a grift Um. The
Speaker 1: first two qualifications on his company bio where that he
Speaker 1: had he had quote one of the most advanced mobile
Speaker 1: paperless offices in Canada in nine and that he had
Speaker 1: also quote lived in a tech frat house in San
Speaker 1: Francisco with one of the six co founders of PayPal.
Speaker 1: So literally the top two lines and his resume are
Speaker 1: I I ran an office in Canada once and I
Speaker 1: used to live in a frat house. I lived with
Speaker 1: some people. Yeah, it's amazing. It's an incredible incredible plex
Speaker 1: all of these this it is a like a pattern, right,
Speaker 1: not just with this, but a lot of your episodes
Speaker 1: where if you look at their like employment history three,
Speaker 1: it's like it's like like managed to terry queen one
Speaker 1: year later, tried to start a government and like it's
Speaker 1: it's just again. I I sort of get it. Frustrated
Speaker 1: people are just like, you know what, I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: hit the reset button. But it never works. It never does.
Speaker 1: So he had had this guy Grant, who they pick
Speaker 1: as their CEOs. They all meet up in Panama and
Speaker 1: uh Coke introduces these two run now fleeing from the
Speaker 1: Thaie government to Grant, and they're like, well this guy
Speaker 1: should run our fucking business. Um Now, Grant was like,
Speaker 1: all of these people independently wealthy, right, That's the other thing.
Speaker 1: These are all like independently wealthy, rich people with nothing
Speaker 1: else to do. Um. And this is the first one
Speaker 1: I respect because at least Chad put some skin in
Speaker 1: the game. So together, independently wealthy, it often feels like
Speaker 1: it means they had wealthy they're from a wealthy family.
Speaker 1: I think it probably in a lot of cases. I
Speaker 1: don't know, I I don't know as much about all
Speaker 1: of their early lives, because there's not always a lot
Speaker 1: on these people. There's not like super detailed wikipedias and
Speaker 1: stuff disappear, and that you have what they say to
Speaker 1: journalists about their background. So we know that UM, l Wartowski,
Speaker 1: Grant and Coke put a bunch of money into setting
Speaker 1: up a land base in Panama where they were going
Speaker 1: to invest in technology. They'd figure out how to three
Speaker 1: D print the things they need and design submarine drones
Speaker 1: and the like. And UM, I do think they put
Speaker 1: a lot of money into this. Again, they're not grifters.
Speaker 1: I don't think they do actually believe, or at least
Speaker 1: some of them believe. L Wartowski certainly does. UM. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: what they believed in was not freedom so much as
Speaker 1: it was a specific freedom to take ownership of a
Speaker 1: thing not currently owned and exploited for profit. The Guardian
Speaker 1: makes it clear that their ideology, while less fraudulent than
Speaker 1: their predecessors, was still deeply problematic. Quote in the nineteen essay,
Speaker 1: Wayne Graham, Like a founder of the c Stetting Institute,
Speaker 1: noted that the Frontier was settled not by a few
Speaker 1: well financed parties, but by tens of thousands of smaller groups.
Speaker 1: These homesteaders were granted the legal right to a plot
Speaker 1: of land so long as they built a house and
Speaker 1: farmed for five years. As they converted the landscape, they
Speaker 1: laid the foundations for today's continent spanning United States. Grahamlick
Speaker 1: wanted to find technologies that would allow individuals to similarly
Speaker 1: colonize the sea. Quirk to discusses the U. S Frontier
Speaker 1: in his book c Stetting. It was a place, he notes,
Speaker 1: where leaders liberally doled out rights as they complete peded
Speaker 1: for new citizens. Western states did away with voting eligibility
Speaker 1: requirements based on landownership or tax payment, Quirk says, and
Speaker 1: Wyoming offered women the right to vote before anywhere else
Speaker 1: in the United States, in part because the territory needed
Speaker 1: women to marry its abundant bachelor's. When the topic comes
Speaker 1: up during my time in Panama, Coke claims that frontier
Speaker 1: initiatives helped make the nineteenth century probably the freest century
Speaker 1: we've ever had in human history. That's what I think about.
Speaker 1: The eighteen hundreds very free in the United States. A
Speaker 1: lot of free people walking around. Yeah, it's just like,
Speaker 1: look at all those free people there's that romanticizing the
Speaker 1: olden times, uh, where it's like, yeah, I mean, that's
Speaker 1: what we had to do. It's just not we don't
Speaker 1: do that now because we did it already, Like we
Speaker 1: can't we can't go out into the frontier and do that.
Speaker 1: It's just the world. The reason that could happen is
Speaker 1: because you couldn't get in a plane and like go somewhere.
Speaker 1: You'd have to be like, yeah, everybody go out into
Speaker 1: this area, start their own thing, and we'll catch up
Speaker 1: to you. Yeah. Well, you know, like that's just the
Speaker 1: only way to do that. And it's it's such a
Speaker 1: he's coming at it from such a myopic, like white
Speaker 1: dude focused view of of the way the history went,
Speaker 1: like even and even by that standard, for a huge
Speaker 1: chunk like the first third of the nineteenth century in
Speaker 1: the United States, white men didn't have the right to
Speaker 1: vote universally right, like there were property requirements for a
Speaker 1: lot of the country. I think was Andrew Jackson that
Speaker 1: ship changed under um and then for they're forgetting like
Speaker 1: you know, there were people already there a side that
Speaker 1: preceded it, and I guess you don't have that with
Speaker 1: the sea except for you do have cetaceans and like
Speaker 1: all other kinds of you still have, yeah, exploitation, have
Speaker 1: you have marine life? He's again, you learn a lot
Speaker 1: about this guy. He's calling the eighteen hundreds the freest
Speaker 1: century in human history. Women couldn't vote in the US
Speaker 1: for any of that time, and black people were slaves
Speaker 1: for almost It's only a thing a white guy can say.
Speaker 1: It's that again, that obsession, the idea of like, oh,
Speaker 1: what would the founding fathers think about X? Or why?
Speaker 1: And it's like, I don't give a ship what they
Speaker 1: have to think? Like they give what would Julius Caesar
Speaker 1: think about doing this? Like you know who gives a ship?
Speaker 1: He's dead? Yeah. Also, I don't give a ship with
Speaker 1: old people. Like the progress the whole ideas we're moving forward,
Speaker 1: and part of that is not giving a ship with
Speaker 1: the people before us thought and recognizing that they sucked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the lesson you should learn at age eighteen, but
Speaker 1: sometimes takes longer. So there was of course weird tax
Speaker 1: stuff wrapped up in in the plan these guys were
Speaker 1: cooking up. That's a factor in all of these Like
Speaker 1: they're still they still have their their pitches about how
Speaker 1: it's going to be a tax haven, UM, and that's
Speaker 1: why the group moved to Panama in the first place,
Speaker 1: right to avoid taxes. When Ocean Builders started advertising sea
Speaker 1: pods for sale, UM, they were I think serious. I
Speaker 1: don't think it's a grift. I think this is the
Speaker 1: first one that they really I don't think they'll ever
Speaker 1: build any but I think they mean to. So the
Speaker 1: sea pods that l Wartowski and the others are selling
Speaker 1: our luxury sea homes, UM I found them described in
Speaker 1: one article is looking like giant motorbike helmets on poles,
Speaker 1: which is not a bad way off. They look like
Speaker 1: the Jetsons house houses a little bit, but coming out
Speaker 1: of the ocean UM. They put a lot of money
Speaker 1: into designing their website, which has some lovely renders and
Speaker 1: succeeds in making these pods look like new tech industry releases.
Speaker 1: The Apple is heavily and influence here, like they're trying
Speaker 1: to make it look like that as opposed to like
Speaker 1: frontier ship like the future. That said, when you read
Speaker 1: through their marketing materials, there's actually some unintentionally horrifying things
Speaker 1: like this. The native pod software can be upgraded remotely
Speaker 1: and new sensors or automat and automations can be easily
Speaker 1: hot swapped. The pod will be like a mobile phone
Speaker 1: where you can install new home maps that are constantly
Speaker 1: being developed. So that sounds great, right, What if your
Speaker 1: home was in the middle of the ocean and also
Speaker 1: worked like your phone. Hey, you want to live in
Speaker 1: a tech nightmare suspended above the ocean. You know how
Speaker 1: your phone works perfectly all the time and you love it.
Speaker 1: What if your house was like that, and also if
Speaker 1: anything went wrong, you drowned. Right, It's the thing that
Speaker 1: we we said in one of these episodes, which is
Speaker 1: like the ultimate goal. It's successful, it's still something I'm
Speaker 1: not interested in. It's it's like it's the same with Mars,
Speaker 1: where it's like, hey, you want to live on this
Speaker 1: dead planet or you can't go outside, and it's like
Speaker 1: not really, I might live on the sea and the
Speaker 1: right circumstance, but it's not a bunch of sterile techie
Speaker 1: looking pots. It would literally, yeah, on a sea. Like
Speaker 1: the like said before, the worst case scenario is a
Speaker 1: bunch of drownings. But honestly, that is the best version
Speaker 1: of dying in the ocean. Yes, Like, like that is
Speaker 1: the that is baseline. That is like, if you're drowning,
Speaker 1: you're like, oh good, I'm glad I'm drowning and not
Speaker 1: getting eaten by a monster, because that is also on
Speaker 1: the table. There are literal monsters in there, fucking monsters
Speaker 1: like love Craft I and looking demons that will that
Speaker 1: will eat you or or try to have sex with
Speaker 1: you if they're a dolphin. It's just the the end
Speaker 1: goal is not appealing to me. Yeah, I mean it's not.
Speaker 1: I don't know, uh that that that's that's I guess
Speaker 1: a taste thing. You know, different people appeal for different things,
Speaker 1: but the way in which they're specifically trying to sell
Speaker 1: this is just horrifying to me. Like the fact that
Speaker 1: it will work like your phone, well, that's not very attractive.
Speaker 1: My phone is a piece of shit. No one wants
Speaker 1: to live in a smart home yet until we actually
Speaker 1: figure out a way for that to work, especially not
Speaker 1: one on the sea. It's the same with Tesla, where
Speaker 1: they're like, have instead of all these dials and stuff,
Speaker 1: have a screen, And I'm like, I don't feel good
Speaker 1: about that. Even if it works, I'm not Maybe the
Speaker 1: kids under me will be okay with that. I'm still
Speaker 1: I'm too old to be okay with that. I'm certainly
Speaker 1: not okay with that. And also in the damn ocean,
Speaker 1: and it's like, yeah, I'm not an expert on building
Speaker 1: things in the ocean, but all of their renders are
Speaker 1: like these smooth, white, curved products that look like again
Speaker 1: like apple gadgets, and all of the permanent sea structures
Speaker 1: I've ever seen, like like oil rigs, like look huge
Speaker 1: and rough and blocky and like they might need to
Speaker 1: maybe they need to look that way to like survive
Speaker 1: in the ocean. I don't know, I'm not an expert,
Speaker 1: but no, like when you were talking about those modular things,
Speaker 1: you think of this futuristic idea of like whoop whoop,
Speaker 1: they just it's like, no, they probably have to like
Speaker 1: toe it. It probably takes like like weeks to move
Speaker 1: and it's probably like really rough season, really inconvenient. Uh yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's the same with this. It's like salt water
Speaker 1: and air and it's just gonna rust and look gross.
Speaker 1: Like you don't want it to be like white because
Speaker 1: that will just become gross, right, Like it will get
Speaker 1: really weird and stained. Yeah, but it just seems like
Speaker 1: a nightmare. Here's what they write about. Um, this is
Speaker 1: maybe the most unintentionally horrifying thing they've written about these
Speaker 1: houses they're trying to sell. We think the home of
Speaker 1: the future will be elegant, simple and clean. To achieve this,
Speaker 1: we decided to hide the lightbulbs lights, which is in
Speaker 1: power outlets, by building them into the design of the
Speaker 1: house that they are invisible yet always right where you
Speaker 1: need them. Oh boy, yeah, that seems like a good idea,
Speaker 1: that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's everything hard to adjust
Speaker 1: and change on the fly, which again I think bow
Speaker 1: you need to be able to like repair them and
Speaker 1: ship in media rez otherwise you might die. I don't know,
Speaker 1: not about expert here. Just tell them what other people
Speaker 1: have told me. The house is like you you need
Speaker 1: to if you need to do the rewire stuff. It
Speaker 1: shouldn't be tough. It shouldn't be built in Yeah, it shouldn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the hubrist of the design, which is like speak to.
Speaker 1: One of the features they advertise for the seapod is
Speaker 1: a lightning prevention system. Um. Yeah, in that in that
Speaker 1: exciting didn't even think about lightning, And now that now
Speaker 1: that's all I can think about. Yeah, they talk about
Speaker 1: lightning rods because like those just direct lightnings flow. What
Speaker 1: if you could just stop lightning? And I don't entirely
Speaker 1: know their plans there, but do they not explain it?
Speaker 1: Because I think there's a bunch of different reading you
Speaker 1: could do. But it all comes back to like my question,
Speaker 1: which is, well, if you're doing something to the environment
Speaker 1: around you that makes it unable for lightning to form
Speaker 1: in a time when it's trying to form lightning, what
Speaker 1: else does that affect. It's like cloud seating where it's
Speaker 1: like okay, but you know that'll that'll do other stuff too, right,
Speaker 1: like like if you if you start making it rain
Speaker 1: places it's not supposed to rain, like other stuff will
Speaker 1: happen right now exactly, it's okay, you want to live
Speaker 1: near this volcano, don't worry. We figured out a way
Speaker 1: to make it not erupt. And it's like I don't
Speaker 1: believe you. I'm gonna need to have a lot of
Speaker 1: information before, like the garantt we guaranteed to stop lightning.
Speaker 1: It's like m M, I just will need more information. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would need a couple of different things, I think. So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you've been following along so far, this doesn't seem
Speaker 1: dissimilar to a number of grifft saciety projects we covered earlier.
Speaker 1: The seapods could easily be yet another attempt to get
Speaker 1: rich in pre orders or whatever and then run away.
Speaker 1: But as it turns out, the Ocean Builders team we're
Speaker 1: willing to put yet more skin in the game. COVID
Speaker 1: hit and it absolutely pants the entire cruise ship industry.
Speaker 1: And suddenly there was a way cheaper way to like
Speaker 1: build a ce platform than they're making seapods. You could
Speaker 1: just buy a cruise ship, a brock Bottom price cruise ship,
Speaker 1: Dave um. So the three pulled their money and put
Speaker 1: together nine and a half million dollars, which they definitely
Speaker 1: should never have had in the first place. So this
Speaker 1: is fundamentally a happy story. They really shouldn't have any money.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, they're about to buy a cruise ship.
Speaker 1: They shared you buy a cruise ship day. They're just
Speaker 1: gonna sail that around and then they're gonna like, well,
Speaker 1: they had realize fuel is expensive. We're going to Oh,
Speaker 1: this is a full story. You don't have to wonder
Speaker 1: how it'll end. Sorry, I'm just imagining like someone waking
Speaker 1: up and going outside and just seeing a cruise ship
Speaker 1: just like beached near their house, three dead Libertarians on
Speaker 1: the beach in front of it. Exactly. Oh God. So
Speaker 1: they buy a cruise ship, the Pacific Dawn, forty five
Speaker 1: meters long, which is just four thousand meters short of
Speaker 1: the Freedomship. So they're on their way. At least it's real.
Speaker 1: So they they pivot in their dreams of c setting. Um,
Speaker 1: they commissioned plans for a new ce city, and the
Speaker 1: Dawn is going to be, in their minds, the centerpiece
Speaker 1: of a network of sea pods. So they'll park the
Speaker 1: Dawn somewhere and then start selling sea pods which will
Speaker 1: like form out around it, you know. Um, and they'll
Speaker 1: build a little sea town that way. Um. They also
Speaker 1: decide that like, well, we need a lot more startup capital,
Speaker 1: although I don't know that they did, because ten million
Speaker 1: dollars seems like you could build some sea pods with it.
Speaker 1: I'm sure the guys who go to that, like burn
Speaker 1: on the Water managed to build things like that for
Speaker 1: less than ten million dollars. But instead of using it
Speaker 1: for R and D, they buy this boat and the
Speaker 1: plan is to sell the cabins on it for dollars
Speaker 1: a piece and use that money to fund the development
Speaker 1: and sale of sea pods, which will gradually turn into
Speaker 1: a society. I imagine the response with people saying no,
Speaker 1: saying I can just take a cruise like a cruise,
Speaker 1: but you're on the cruise ship and it never moved.
Speaker 1: And bitcoins, that's the other thing, Like there's no like
Speaker 1: they're not doing like a little Broadway shows or like
Speaker 1: you know, no fancy dinners. It's just and we'll talk
Speaker 1: about that in a second. So their plan is that
Speaker 1: like gradually, over time they'll be able to fund the
Speaker 1: creation in the sale of more sea pods, which will
Speaker 1: like surround the Pacific dawn, and there will be platforms
Speaker 1: for growing food and manufacturing things and providing park land. Um,
Speaker 1: although I guess you would have to pay for the
Speaker 1: park land because there's no government that's paying for things.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's never explained. They name their
Speaker 1: cruise ship the Satoshi because the guy, the anonymous founder
Speaker 1: of Bitcoin's pseudonym was Satoshi. Um. And yeah, the plan
Speaker 1: for the c city is for it to look from
Speaker 1: the air like the B and Bitcoin. Oh so gross. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, and it's also like, well, okay, if you
Speaker 1: don't have if you're a libertarian society who's making everybody
Speaker 1: form the shape of a bitcoin logos, whose whose job
Speaker 1: is that, how do you tell that behavior? How do
Speaker 1: you make that? Yeah? So I don't know. Maybe they
Speaker 1: had a plan on October. Oh you're not into the
Speaker 1: big bitcoin c city based around a cruise ship that
Speaker 1: you live in forever. No, man, it's such an incredible
Speaker 1: down grade. Like again, all these stories are like these
Speaker 1: negotiations where they're like I want to start my own country,
Speaker 1: and then it ends with like okay, but I get
Speaker 1: to keep the truck. It's and then they get like
Speaker 1: a truck and that's it. So on October, Chad el
Speaker 1: Wartowski announced to read It that the fondest dreams of
Speaker 1: generations of libertarians were about to be real. List they
Speaker 1: were going to build finally a sea born libertarian nation.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from a Guardian summary of the
Speaker 1: discussion that followed, quote, So I am buying a cruise
Speaker 1: ship and naming it M. S. Satoshi. A m A
Speaker 1: asked me anything. The responses were quick, need an apprentice
Speaker 1: aviation mechanic. I know how to use a yo yo
Speaker 1: any room for me, and included the inevitable skeptics, anyone
Speaker 1: remember the good old days of the fire festival. But
Speaker 1: Plenty took the proposition seriously and wanted to go over
Speaker 1: the small print. Where is the power coming from? Gas? Internet, food, water, toiletries?
Speaker 1: What taxes will she be subject to? L Wartowski answered
Speaker 1: every question with grave attention to detail. There would be
Speaker 1: generators at first, followed quickly by solar power. This would
Speaker 1: be an eco friendly crypto ship. High speed wireless internet
Speaker 1: would come from land. Utilities would be included in the
Speaker 1: fees at first, but would be meted out when the
Speaker 1: cabins were upgraded. You don't want to have to pay
Speaker 1: for someone else's mining rig in their cabin, he wrote,
Speaker 1: referring to the resource intensive computational process that introduced his
Speaker 1: new crypto coins into the system. But as the Reddit
Speaker 1: q and A continued, l Wertowski's meticulous responses revealed some
Speaker 1: of the more naughty practicalities of life on board. It
Speaker 1: turned out that the only cooking facilities would be in
Speaker 1: the restaurant. For safety reasons, no one was allowed to
Speaker 1: have a microwave in their rooms, though some cabins had
Speaker 1: many fridges, noted al Wartowski, determinatively sidestepping the point. He
Speaker 1: offered residents discount at the restaurant and mentioned that some
Speaker 1: interested cruisers had already talked about renting part of the
Speaker 1: restaurant kitchen so they could make their own food. Would
Speaker 1: entrepreneurs to come up with solutions and try them out,
Speaker 1: he wrote, in a valiant attempt to convert a fairly
Speaker 1: fundamental stumbling block into wild startup energy. This is your
Speaker 1: place to try new things right there. He You have
Speaker 1: to pay for the food at the restaurant. Yes, is
Speaker 1: the only kitchen. That is the only kitchen that libertarian
Speaker 1: mecca that has a cafeteria. This will be the freest
Speaker 1: ace on earth. But no microwaves. Ye, no microwaves. And
Speaker 1: you can't make your own food in anyway? Well, no,
Speaker 1: you could pay to use the communal to use the kitchen.
Speaker 1: Someone entrepreneurs could figure out how to lease it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's very funny. We haven't. I feel like I
Speaker 1: should have threw out this been talking or speculating about
Speaker 1: the amount of cocaine is involved in this entire It's
Speaker 1: not none, David's not not none or at least it's
Speaker 1: a real three in the morning. I'm starting a business energy,
Speaker 1: you know, like it's it's it's that. It's probably cocaine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's painful. What else hurt us again? Tell us more bad?
Speaker 1: So uh yeah, And it is funny. You can you
Speaker 1: can't have microwaves in your room, but you can't have
Speaker 1: a bitcoin mining rig. It's it's perfect, It's perfect. It's
Speaker 1: just fucking perfect. Um. It is very funny that both
Speaker 1: the Liberty Ship and the Setosis founders admitted upfront, Oh, yes,
Speaker 1: we will have to radically curb your freedoms in order
Speaker 1: to make a life on a boat together possible. Um.
Speaker 1: Whatever criticisms you have of them, though, they hired a
Speaker 1: captain and a skeleton crew for the ship, and some
Speaker 1: of them sailed their asses to Panama with it. This
Speaker 1: is again, more than any of their predecessors except the
Speaker 1: Sea Land Guy ever managed. They started auctioning the seven
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy seven open cabins off in late November.
Speaker 1: They held a number of informational calls for potential customers
Speaker 1: where they talked about ship like their COVID safety policies
Speaker 1: on board, and their plans to accept a bunch of
Speaker 1: stupid crypto coins with names like Eureka coin and doge coin.
Speaker 1: They also informed people that pets larger than a small
Speaker 1: dog or pets that barked, would not be allowed on board. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's so it's crawling with cats, thousands of that's what
Speaker 1: That's what it would be, is give it cats eating
Speaker 1: the corpses of libertarians who died when their mining rig
Speaker 1: overheated them as they stroked out of the island in Japan.
Speaker 1: It will be like this boat perpetually sailing the ocean.
Speaker 1: Just covered it, and we'd just say that dogs would
Speaker 1: not want to attend that event. Yeah, thank you. Cats
Speaker 1: would love it. So, how many rooms do you think sold, Dave,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess it's like when he's like trying to
Speaker 1: get those signatures and all that. I'm guessing, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say seven rooms. Wait, that's how many sold. No,
Speaker 1: that's how many are were available into I'm guessing three seven,
Speaker 1: So twice as good as you thought, more than twice
Speaker 1: as good as you thought. Dave really underestimated them. Um,
Speaker 1: So the fact that only seven rooms sold was a problem.
Speaker 1: Another problem was that none of the men who had
Speaker 1: thrown down near ten million dollars for this boat and
Speaker 1: decided to make life on the sea their chief goal.
Speaker 1: Actually knew about living on a boat or say, like
Speaker 1: a boat, why would you need to know that, Dave,
Speaker 1: You're trying to figure out a whole new way of life.
Speaker 1: You don't have to know how to work a sale
Speaker 1: or maintain an engine. Likely this this remind this is
Speaker 1: like this is like a slow down g T a
Speaker 1: rampage where you're just like jumping from one thing to
Speaker 1: another desperately trying to hijack stuff. Like it feels like
Speaker 1: the boat has been hijacked in slow motion by someone
Speaker 1: who doesn't know how to use a boat. And now
Speaker 1: they're just sailing off and they're wondering what the hell
Speaker 1: all the buttons do and they're not sure what they're
Speaker 1: gonna do. They do they do have to hire an
Speaker 1: actual professional captain to say that's the good news. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine being that captain's he's giving some quotes and
Speaker 1: it sounded like a nightmare, but in your tongue. The
Speaker 1: whole way of this was very adamant about like they
Speaker 1: did not know what they were doing. Where they're like,
Speaker 1: we can pay you, and I'd be like cash, I
Speaker 1: don't want I don't want to goddamn like pictures of
Speaker 1: dogs on coins. You give me cash, fucking cash money baby.
Speaker 1: Um So, there's a lot of talk this whole episode
Speaker 1: about like international waters, the freedom of international waters. Here's
Speaker 1: the thing, International law heavily regulates a lot of the ocean.
Speaker 1: Um sailing requires certain certificates, like you have to have
Speaker 1: a bunch of things that prove your boat is safe.
Speaker 1: And the guys didn't realize they needed to have that.
Speaker 1: Um so they had to like put it in drydock
Speaker 1: and pay a bunch more money and set the project back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just google it, you just they could have googled it.
Speaker 1: They could have googled that. It also turns out that
Speaker 1: you have to have insurance for boats that are going
Speaker 1: to sail into and exist within another nation, and insurance
Speaker 1: companies were like, well, we're not going to ensure a
Speaker 1: boat run by three guys who don't know anything about
Speaker 1: boats and want to park it off the coast of
Speaker 1: Panama and turn it into a floating bitcoin city. Like
Speaker 1: we don't, we don't. We're like, we're not even going
Speaker 1: to quote you a premium on that that's just not
Speaker 1: a business we want to be. I never thought i'd say,
Speaker 1: comrade insurance guy. Yeah, well, I mean it's just it's
Speaker 1: pretty basic. So the whole venture fell apart, and the
Speaker 1: ship was eventually sold for scrap at a loss of
Speaker 1: a lot of money. The Guardian chronicles the very funny
Speaker 1: reactions these guys had when they realized they'd never bothered
Speaker 1: to learn ship about what life on the ocean might entail. Quote.
Speaker 1: After trying multiple insurers and brokers, Romance began to realize
Speaker 1: that the cruise ship industry was, as he put it,
Speaker 1: plagued by over regulation, along with airlines and nuclear power.
Speaker 1: According to Harris, it's in the top three. The ocean
Speaker 1: builder's great freedom's project, whose intrinsic purpose was to offer
Speaker 1: an escape from oppressive rules and bureaucracy, was being hobbled
Speaker 1: by oppressive rules and bureaucracy. As l Wartowski would reflect
Speaker 1: a few months later on Reddit, a cruise ship is
Speaker 1: not very good for people who want to be free.
Speaker 1: So perfect punchline to all this to be like this
Speaker 1: whole time, they're like, we're taking to the sea where
Speaker 1: there's no laws, not bothering to google or check to
Speaker 1: see if that's true. Are their laws in the sea.
Speaker 1: That's basically what this all is. As they've and fantasizing
Speaker 1: about going to this place that was magical in their
Speaker 1: mind and now they're learning, like finally what the place
Speaker 1: actually is. Yeah, like that's what it seems like. It's
Speaker 1: like it's like it's like wanting to go to Mars
Speaker 1: for all the fresh air in trees, you know, like
Speaker 1: they never bothered to check incredible. It's it's it's very funny.
Speaker 1: And of course they have to sell the cruise ship
Speaker 1: for scrap metal. They it's it's just a giant disaster.
Speaker 1: It's all, none of it, none of it works out. Um.
Speaker 1: And as time has gone on since the dream Dying,
Speaker 1: Chad l Wartowski has gone on to post more concerning things. Uh.
Speaker 1: The post he made when they had to sell the
Speaker 1: boat was quote, we have lost this round the new
Speaker 1: normal great reset gains another victim, which is like Q
Speaker 1: and on anti vac ship. So I am worried about Chad. Um.
Speaker 1: I like you. I like you, buddy, I you got potential. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's in terms of like I understand your disclaimer where
Speaker 1: you're like, these aren't bastards the bastard is like huberous
Speaker 1: and maybe our education system. Yeah, like the bastard is more.
Speaker 1: This is more people victims of their own yes, of themselves,
Speaker 1: and like the grifters early on, Yeah they were bastards,
Speaker 1: but it it is like I feel bad for them,
Speaker 1: and honestly, I kind of want them to have a win, uh,
Speaker 1: provided that they are good people, like you said with
Speaker 1: the vaccine stuff and getting a little shaky. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: they could be terrible people otherwise. But it's like, oh man,
Speaker 1: oh buddy, Yeah, and it wants I want I want
Speaker 1: to do something for you. Yeah, I I want to.
Speaker 1: I want something. I want there to be I want
Speaker 1: I I think this idea is cool. Like I think
Speaker 1: that I might go to that event in fucking Sacramento. Um,
Speaker 1: that sounds rad as hell. I love the idea of
Speaker 1: like people walking away from I mean speaking of of
Speaker 1: of the term walk away. Read Cory Doctors wonderful sci
Speaker 1: fi book walk Away. But I love the idea of
Speaker 1: people like, let's let's abandon these horrible governments and figure
Speaker 1: out over time how to like live in the sea.
Speaker 1: There's a cool idea there, as long as you're not
Speaker 1: poisoning the ocean or or whatever, like I don't I'm
Speaker 1: not laughing at the idea of wanting to live in
Speaker 1: like a designed community and the ocean of like hard
Speaker 1: scrabble frontiers people. That's pretty rad, but that's not These
Speaker 1: are not hard scrabble frontier people except for maybe Chad. Yes,
Speaker 1: their heart is in the right place or when they're
Speaker 1: not grifting, their heart is in the right place. And
Speaker 1: that's the thing is like you could point that lens
Speaker 1: at me and be like, look at you, you fucking coward.
Speaker 1: You're not trying anything. These people are at least trying.
Speaker 1: They but they're trying to actually accomplice this thing instead
Speaker 1: of just bitching about the government, like it's like you
Speaker 1: got to give them something that it's just you gotta
Speaker 1: again going back to that, yeah, going back to the
Speaker 1: core idea of libertarianism where it's like I've never seen
Speaker 1: someone's explain how it would help society. It always feels
Speaker 1: like it's just I I I I want this freedom,
Speaker 1: I don't want to pay taxes, and it's it's the
Speaker 1: idea of how to build an actual practical society. I've
Speaker 1: just maybe I'm ignorant, maybe that's been explained, but I've
Speaker 1: just never seen it. Well. Part of it is, you know, Dave,
Speaker 1: And this is the thing where because Chad's not really
Speaker 1: a pioneer, the original like pioneers for all of the
Speaker 1: genocide and stuff, we're like number one people who could fail.
Speaker 1: Like it was life or death for a lot of them,
Speaker 1: like we are either going to make life out here
Speaker 1: farming or like we will starve to death. Like that
Speaker 1: was for some of them a very real thing. We
Speaker 1: only hear of the successes. Yeah, the rest are like
Speaker 1: just skeletons. And they they were also all people who
Speaker 1: like knew how to do ship Like you watch the
Speaker 1: fucking the Avich, you know that that's a good example
Speaker 1: of like showing how many different skills a person would
Speaker 1: have had to have to like make a life even
Speaker 1: vaguely feasible in those kind of conditions. So, like the constant,
Speaker 1: the costs are high, and it was people who were like,
Speaker 1: we're already very self reliant. These people number one, they're
Speaker 1: all millionaires. No, I don't think any of them are
Speaker 1: gambling more than they can afford to lose, So like
Speaker 1: they're they don't they can easily go do something else,
Speaker 1: this is not the stakes are not actually that high
Speaker 1: for them. And number two, they don't have much in
Speaker 1: the way of skills. It doesn't seem like like they
Speaker 1: don't know how to do any of the things. It
Speaker 1: would be like somebody setting out to start a farm
Speaker 1: in an undiscovered to them continent and like having never
Speaker 1: touched dirt or built a house and just being like,
Speaker 1: we'll I'll pay people along the way to do that part. Right,
Speaker 1: it's the top down thinking. It's the fact that they
Speaker 1: live in this society that they live in where they're
Speaker 1: afforded a lot of privilege or comfort, and they say, oh,
Speaker 1: I want to make it like a city in the
Speaker 1: in the sea. Uh, And they don't think about where
Speaker 1: do you start because they just that's not how they
Speaker 1: are thinking about it. It's it's absolutely top down thinking.
Speaker 1: And it's like very cringe to listen to. And I
Speaker 1: still feel bad because they are their own worst enemies
Speaker 1: with this stuff. Again, their heart seems to be in
Speaker 1: the right place. If if it's the non grifters, it's
Speaker 1: just their methods. The swings they take are so silly
Speaker 1: and like again the ideas there there are these ideas
Speaker 1: that are like Oh, that's a neat thing. But they're not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're trying to start with those ideas and not grow
Speaker 1: to them. Yep. I think that's as good an epitaph
Speaker 1: for this as possible. You got any You got any
Speaker 1: plug doubles? Yeah, Dave plug your plugibles. Fuck it at
Speaker 1: Movie Hooligan on the Twitter. I have a podcast network
Speaker 1: with Tom Ryman that's called game Fully Unemployed. Uh. We
Speaker 1: we do a lot of podcasts about movies, mainly movie
Speaker 1: reviews and so on and so forth. We have some
Speaker 1: podcasts under our Patreon that's patreon dot com slash Gamefully Unemployed,
Speaker 1: one called Fox Molders, a Maniac one called Tom and
Speaker 1: Jeff Watch Batman. They they they are exactly what they
Speaker 1: sound like. Check all that out if you want to,
Speaker 1: you know, if you don't, you don't have to. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you know that. And there's also the
Speaker 1: new podcast Tom and Jeff Watch Bateman, which is just
Speaker 1: a chronicle of the fact that Tom and Jeff have
Speaker 1: been stalking Jason Bateman for years. Yeah. Yeah, but we're collecting.
Speaker 1: We're we're waiting for that saga to end before we
Speaker 1: do the podcast. You know, we want to see that
Speaker 1: how that will turn out fire? But yeah, you should
Speaker 1: do uh just doing sequests, just the show where you
Speaker 1: just explain episodes of sequence. Yeah, let me tell you
Speaker 1: know this episode of sequest. Yeah, that's it. That's the
Speaker 1: title of the podcast. It's fine, Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1: It'll just be me talking about how much I appreciate
Speaker 1: Roy Scheider. Nobody else, it's nobody up, just me. Well, um, look,
Speaker 1: take a hundred dollars and throw it into the air
Speaker 1: somewhere in the outdoors. If you want me to make
Speaker 1: that podcast, and if enough of you do it, I'll
Speaker 1: release it. That's how money works. That is how money works.
Speaker 1: Dave Well, that's going to do it for all of
Speaker 1: us here at behind the Bastards Until next time.