In this episode of the podcast, I talk about the amazing invention that is Squarespace and how you can use it to make your website look like a professional website, and how it can make your life easier than ever before. I also talk about Blue Apron and how they make healthy, easy meals that are low in calories and low in fat. You can get 10% off your first purchase with code "JOE" when you enter the code word JOE when you sign up for a free trial at squarespace. And as always, thank you for tuning into HYPEBEAST Radio and Business of HYPE. Please don't forget to rate, comment, and subscribe to our other shows MIC/LINE, The Anthropology, The HYPE Report, and HYPETALKS. Please also hit me up at and tell me what you thought of this episode and what you think about it in the comments section below! Tweet me if you have any thoughts or suggestions on how to improve the audio experience on the next episode. or how to make it better! Timestamps: 0:00 - What's the new noise? 5:30 - How to make a website? 6:15 - What do you like about your website? 7:00- What are you looking for? 8:40 - How do you feel about it? 9:20 - What would you like to hear from someone else? 10:10 - What kind of food do you're cooking? 11:00 12: What s your favorite meal? 13:00 | What's your favorite thing? 14:00 -- What are your favorite dish? 15: What is your favorite food? 16:30 -- What's a healthy meal you're going to cook? 17:00 +16: What's something you're planning on making? 19:00 // 17:40 -- What s a good meal you re going to make for your next meal or something you would like to cook for dinner? 21:00-- What s the best thing you're most excited about? 22:00 & 17:20 -- What would someone else's favorite thing that you're making for you? 26:00 Is it better than that? 23:30-- What's going to be your biggest takeaway from this episode? 27:30 28:50 -- How do I feel about the food podcast?
00:00:08.000This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.
00:00:13.000Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that allows you to create your own professional-looking website.
00:00:19.000I say professional-looking because it's like a fake Rolex.
00:00:23.000But no, it'll be like a professional website.
00:00:25.000Squarespace is an amazing invention, and what they did is they figured out how to code a website that allows you to make your own websites in a very simple, easy drag-and-drop fashion.
00:00:34.000It is so intuitive, so easy to use, and it works on absolutely every platform, which is beautiful.
00:00:43.000It'll work on an Android phone, it'll work on a Windows computer, it'll work on a Mac.
00:00:48.000Very, very easy to use, and you can start your own website As simple as attaching pictures to an email or to a Microsoft Word document.
00:02:07.000I love the fact that a lot of my friends use it.
00:02:10.000Kara Santa Maria, who will be on soon, she used it to create her website and manage all her shit.
00:02:15.000It's just a really excellent way, and it's a sign of the new age of technology that we're in right now, that you can do this so much easier than it was just a few years ago.
00:02:26.000So squarespace.com forward slash, or enter in the code word Joe.
00:02:31.000Squarespace.com, enter in the code word Joe, and get 10% off your first purchase.
00:03:40.000It's like if you get a recipe book and you want to go out and buy all the stuff in it you got to look around and you got to like measure shit.
00:03:47.000Blue Apron takes care of all that stuff.
00:03:50.000And they work around your schedule and your dietary preferences.
00:05:09.000And last, but finally, not least, Onnit.
00:05:11.000O-N-N-I-T. We are a human optimization website, and we have a new product or a new version of our product, T +, which is a total strength plus performance thing.
00:05:25.000We just got a new clinical trial results, or we got new clinical trial results in on T +, on some tests.
00:05:33.000It's all available at Onnit.com, some tests that we did on weightlifters, a clinical trial for strength-based athletes.
00:05:41.000And all of the information on any of the supplements, any of the products that we sell at Onnit, we have a research page on every, if you go to each individual page for each individual ingredient has a research page.
00:05:54.000If you go to it, the research page will explain to you, like for instance, if you go to shroomtech.com, ShroomTech is a cordyceps mushroom supplement that's designed to increase endurance and oxygen utilization.
00:06:07.000And you're like, what the fuck is that about?
00:06:10.000Well, if you go to the ShroomTech page, you will see all of the research along with references that explains the mechanisms behind each individual ingredient, why it works, how they work synergistically, and what the studies have been done and what has been proven about these individual ingredients.
00:06:30.000What we're trying to do at Onnit is we live in a fantastic time and one of the beautiful things about this time is there's so much information out there and there are many many things that can benefit you physically many things that can benefit you mentally as far as your cognitive function you know and there's there's a lot of bullshit out there too it's hard to figure out what's the bullshit and and what's the real shit well at Onnit we have isolated what we find to be all the most beneficial supplements And we sell them to you.
00:07:00.000We sell them to you at a very reasonable rate with great ethics.
00:07:04.000If you buy any of the supplements at Onnit and you feel like, well, it's kind of bullshit.
00:08:12.000If you're thinking about starting any sort of an exercise program, look, if you're thinking about starting a health program, just get right on it, you know, as far as eating healthy and then mild exercise.
00:08:21.000But if you're thinking about doing anything as far as strenuous physical activity, please start off slowly.
00:09:46.000For those of you who are not familiar with my guest, Joe Quirk is from the Seasteading Institute.
00:09:53.000And the Seasteading Institute, Seasteading, is a very unique concept.
00:09:58.000And it's been going around over the last X amount of years online.
00:10:02.000There have been all these articles and videos where people have talked about International waters, going out and creating a city, a floating city, and trying to re-engineer society.
00:10:15.000This is, you know, all the land on the earth has been sort of claimed and taken.
00:10:18.000You can't really start your own cult in the middle of nowhere without the government coming in and crashing your parade.
00:10:24.000But can you build a city and design a utopia based on the mistakes that we see in society today?
00:10:32.000Is that a fairly accurate way of describing it?
00:10:45.000We want to create as many seasteads as possible to provide people with the technology to found their own floating country.
00:10:52.000And the key idea is 193 national governments don't represent the range of ideas that 7 billion people have produced.
00:11:00.000And we sort of have these government monopolies that control the decisions people make.
00:11:06.000And in order to have solutions for how to live together, we have to force them through these 193 government monopolies.
00:11:13.000And technology on every other front is moving forward.
00:11:15.000And the thing that's holding us back is that we're not innovating in the technology of governance.
00:11:21.000So the key idea is if we can create a Silicon Valley of the sea, if we can get, you know, thousands of Hong Kongs and Singapores and Isles of Man on the ocean and allow innovators to go out there and form their own societies, we'll discover new ways of living together and we'll push forward evolution and governance.
00:11:40.000And what's to stop some fucking psycho like Jamie over here starting the Jamie country and just having like a one mile square thing that he's built some raft and it's, you know, he's got some Mad Max style world.
00:12:40.000And if you think of countries as being founded by conquerors, And future Seasteads being founded by creators, what I like to call aquapreneurs, that sets up a completely different dynamic.
00:12:53.000And if people can choose among Seasteads, that will drive what we think will be a market of competing governments, competing to please people.
00:13:00.000And then this will unleash the innovation that's out there.
00:13:06.000For the past half century, people have come up with wonderful ideas for how we could live together.
00:13:11.000You can go online and look up all sorts of interesting rule sets.
00:13:15.000The problem is all ground is claimed and there's no place we can try this out.
00:13:19.000So the technology for permanent floating structures is coming.
00:13:23.000Half the Earth's surface is unclaimed by existing governments.
00:13:27.000We have a new frontier and I think it's time we started colonizing it and building floating cities.
00:13:34.000It's a very interesting concept, but I'm going to be honest, my own personal feeling about it, it's not my opinion of how it should go about, but my own feeling when I hear the idea that I go, yeah, that would be interesting, but man,
00:13:50.000it brings up all these other problems, like some crazy fuckers are going to have their own weird countries floating out there, and who's going to, what kind of lawless lands are you going to create, what kind of weirdness, but When I think about, when I analyze my own thoughts about it, my own instinctive reaction to it,
00:14:06.000like, it's just that I know there's something wrong with the way society is structured today, but change brings a whole new set of problems.
00:14:31.000These kind of magnificent solutions, they're not designed by some really smart person.
00:14:36.000They emerge from millions of people competing in a market to please us.
00:14:40.000And so we're on this exponential rocket in all areas except governance.
00:14:47.000And the problem is that governments are monopolies.
00:14:50.000And most of the problems we're afraid of exist among current monopolies of governance.
00:14:57.000And the key idea is that on the water, a fluid environment is fundamentally different from a land-based environment.
00:15:04.000If you have a chunk of land, it's very easy for a conqueror to take it and declare monopoly control, and then the government doesn't advance.
00:15:13.000If you're on the water, and countries can only form if people choose to attach to each other, there is no land unless you attract people to come visit you.
00:15:22.000If those people aren't happy with your seastead, they can detach and move somewhere else.
00:15:27.000We'll have a completely different situation where instead of citizens competing to survive their government's decisions, governments will be competing to survive citizens' decisions.
00:15:37.000So if you're a governor and you're competing to attract citizens and you go bankrupt and you're...
00:15:44.000Seastead disappears as people detach and move fluidly somewhere else.
00:15:47.000It'll be much harder for it to kind of control consolidation.
00:15:51.000And then you're not even thinking about citizens.
00:15:53.000You're thinking about customers looking for the kind of governance they want.
00:15:57.000And when you think about it, this is variation and selection.
00:16:02.000Variation by governments, selection by citizens.
00:16:05.000And I started as a science writer and a novelist.
00:16:17.000How is our brain so sublime in biology that it can understand these symbols I'm sending to you?
00:16:23.000Why is this coffee mug so available, so cheap, and so plentiful?
00:16:27.000It's because of variation in selection, decentralized variation in selection.
00:16:32.000And when I was exposed to Patri Friedman's ideas about evolution, like in the primal soup of the ocean, I realized he was right.
00:16:42.000On a fluid frontier where people can detach and move about and choose the societies they want, you would have variation and selection.
00:16:50.000We'd unleash the kind of progress we see in markets and technologies in governance.
00:16:56.000And we think of governance as a technology.
00:16:58.000I think it's really interesting this comparison that you made in a recent video that I watched about cell phones and the competition that drives cell phones to innovate and the reason why we have such amazing phones today, why we have all these apps, why we have all these incredible cameras,
00:17:14.000great battery life, and it's because there's this incredible competition and multiple platforms all across the world.
00:17:21.000Everyone's trying to come up with the biggest best thing every year.
00:17:24.000But in government, you have none of this.
00:17:40.000The representative government that we have in this country today When you look at the influence that they have, and you look at the influences on them as far as corporate interests, special interest groups, lobbyists, it's all madness.
00:17:53.000I mean, no one in their right mind, if you had a chance to re-engineer society, no one would look at it and go, perfect.
00:18:26.000At today, whether it's computers, whether it's cars, all the things that we see and enjoy today in our society that are at this incredibly high level, it's because of competition.
00:18:36.000And that is the exact thing that is wrong with our government, this stagnation.
00:18:41.000This two-party system influenced by corporations that has the same mandate, the same ideas, the same tired rhetoric over and over and over again, and seasteading.
00:18:52.000You believe offers a potential opportunity to break that mold.
00:18:57.000Yes, and it's about breaking the mold.
00:18:59.000And I think the future of humanity turns on the pivot of this problem because everything is advancing very quickly.
00:19:06.000But governance is not, and it's because it is these monopolies like You and I don't have to argue about which app we're going to have on our iPhone, and then we all vote on the app, and then we all get one app and we have to agree on it, and then we have to wait four years to vote on the next app we're all going to get.
00:19:23.000No, apps proliferate, we all get to choose them, and this drives innovation in that field.
00:19:31.000And, you know, governments, you can imagine the government we're in right now, there's like 300 million people that have to fight with each other over these small little changes.
00:19:40.000And then everyone ends up with a bitter compromise and nobody is happy.
00:19:44.000And I've been astonished at how people pushing forward this blue frontier have been independently attracted to the metaphor of apps.
00:19:52.000So there's this Dutch guy, I'm pronouncing his name wrong.
00:20:18.000And he proposes he wants to float these things to crappy coastal governments and park them in the slums and provide schools and those kind of things for children.
00:20:27.000And the advantage these things have is that they're movable.
00:20:31.000Suppose the government says we don't want that.
00:20:33.000Well, then you can move it somewhere else.
00:20:36.000It's much easier than having to build a school in those areas.
00:20:39.000And he calls this program City Apps, and I bet you he's going to be doing this in the next couple of years.
00:20:43.000How far out do you have to be from shore?
00:20:57.000Some Seasteaders are physicians and biotech entrepreneurs, and they're interested in innovating in the space of stem cells or in biotech and feel like the regulations written in 1970 are holding back innovations written in 2020. Another problem with monopolies,
00:23:39.000Jarvis Green had been forced to retire.
00:23:41.000He took Centeno's treatments, he grew back his cartilage, and he jumped out of bed and signed with the Houston Texans.
00:23:48.000He's had fabulous success with his procedure.
00:23:51.000After a thousand, more than a thousand successful procedures, the FDA knocked on his door and said, you can't offer this procedure.
00:24:00.000It's now illegal in the United States, this particular thing.
00:24:03.000So he was forced to license his procedure to the Cayman Islands, to a company called Stematics.
00:24:12.000So now people are flying to the Cayman Islands to get this procedure done.
00:24:17.000So, you know, economists call this regulatory capture.
00:24:21.000We have this instinct that if you just make a monopoly of regulators and put them in place, they'll protect us.
00:24:26.000But what ends up happening is the dominant industries within that area end up controlling the regulations or having undue influence in the regulations.
00:24:34.000Well, is there a process that this guy has to go through in order to clear this particular procedure that he hasn't done yet?
00:24:41.000Well, at first he thought that he did, and he thought that it was all legit.
00:24:45.000But the FDA is unclear about what its jurisdiction is.
00:24:50.000They came in and literally declared that your own stem cells, once taken from your body and process, are now drugs.
00:24:57.000So they're like, okay, well, your stem cells are now drugs, so now we have jurisdiction.
00:25:19.000There's a doctor, I think his name is Peter Weller, from Germany.
00:25:24.000He created this procedure where you take blood out of a person's body, you spin it in a centrifuge and apply heat to it, and the heated blood produces this incredibly potent anti-inflammatory agent, and it's extracted from the blood,
00:25:40.000it's like a yellow serum, and injected directly into areas of inflammation, joint swelling, things along those lines.
00:26:02.000They had it in Germany, and like Kobe Bryant, a lot of these athletes were flying, a lot of UFC guys, flew to Germany to get this procedure done.
00:26:09.000But now it's available in several different places in America.
00:26:13.000I got mine done at this place called Lifespan Medicine in Santa Monica.
00:27:03.000And this stifles the innovation we need.
00:27:06.000So if you look at the psychodramas of our age, it's healthcare, it's banking, it's the public environment, it's education, it's war, it's all the things that governments micromanage.
00:27:19.000And so why aren't these things improving with all the other things we use that aren't micromanaged by government?
00:27:25.000It's because we don't have innovation because the government monopolies ultimately don't permit them.
00:27:30.000If you have a monopoly, you don't want people to compete with you.
00:27:34.000And we want to provide more market competition on the ocean in a place where you don't have to, you know, aggress against anyone on the ocean.
00:27:42.000Well, there's negatives against this micromanagement, but isn't there some benefits?
00:27:46.000Like, for instance, the government has been cracking down on Dr. Oz lately for all these bogus fat loss claims.
00:27:53.000Like, there's been all these different things that he shilled on his show that are miracles.
00:27:58.000Calls them, literally in his own words, miracle fat loss cures.
00:28:23.000You know, there might be some sort of a placebo effect that some people report, so you have some conflicting evidence.
00:28:28.000But isn't it important that there's some sort of a government regulatory or at least a board of physicians who are knowledgeable in whatever field that approve or disprove any sort of procedure?
00:28:41.000I think these kind of things are important, but it's even more important to hit restart once in a while.
00:28:47.000So if people want to stop what you're doing that you like about the reinjection of the blood, I've never heard of this, they can call forth a rule written in 1975. That the people that wrote those rules were not able to predict this innovation that happened in 2014 or whenever it happened.
00:29:06.000And the idea is, with new blue fluid rules on the ocean, we have to start again with a new regulatory structure.
00:29:13.000And this happens naturally when there's competition against monopolies.
00:29:18.000So, in a sense, you're trying to do what the Founding Fathers of the United States did.
00:29:22.000They tried to see what's going wrong in Europe and what they don't like about the system that they were controlled under.
00:29:31.000They leave, come to America, establish this new country, set forth these new rules and regulations, these new ideas, and then a couple hundred years later, they turn to dog shit.
00:29:59.000And I'm glad you're putting this in the perspective of the United States, because I think in the United States it was a giant life raft.
00:30:05.000Where, you know, tens of millions of people who were misfits in their home countries came here to try out their crazy ideas.
00:30:11.000And they discovered new ways of living together that ended up changing the whole world.
00:30:15.000And if there had never been this giant life raft where people could try something new, right now we'd be arguing, you know, which works better, communism or maranarchy?
00:30:23.000They'll be the only options that we have.
00:30:25.000The United States discovered new things that people just take for granted, like, you know, democracy and women's rights and things like this.
00:32:04.000And the company we're working with on our floating city project, Delta Sync, S-Y-N-C, speaks explicitly about the mobility of moving units forming floating cities and how this will create a kind of market of competitive governments that would be peaceful,
00:32:21.000that would empower citizens and disempower governments, so that governments are going to be constantly...
00:32:27.000Aquatic governments will be hustling to attract citizens rather than hustling to seize control of them.
00:32:34.000Because the ocean is such a fundamentally different medium in which human nature can compete.
00:33:11.000Seems like there would be more than that.
00:33:12.000Criss-crossing, and most of them are in docks, and they're dropping stuff off, and if it weren't for all this fluid commerce, the world economy would collapse.
00:33:21.000Wow, I thought it was way more than 100,000 boats on the whole planet.
00:34:49.000When new island nations provide huge economic value to the big nations, they do quite well.
00:34:56.000So the idea is that it'll be some sort of a benefit that the rest of the countries have by these competing governments.
00:35:04.000But don't you think that they would find that these competing governments put pressure on them to sort of innovate and that they would want to stifle that in some sort of a way?
00:35:12.000Well, we shall see because that's one of the key ideas.
00:35:32.000It was sort of an interesting hybrid called East Meets West, and it created, like, fabulous wealth in a very short period of time, embarrassing China into changing its policies.
00:35:44.000China has a lot of problems, but by opening its markets with, you know, Den Chaoping's open-door policy, it's caused at least a half billion Chinese to...
00:35:55.000To escape poverty because of the example set by Hong Kong.
00:36:00.000And there are examples like this over and over.
00:36:24.000When we look at the African island of Mauritius, when we look at Hong Kong, when we look at Singapore, when we look at the Isle of Man, all these places have innovated and affected and been used as examples of policies that have been instituted by larger nations.
00:36:41.000Now, when it comes to a practical application of this, How far away do you think we are from a legitimate Seastead nation?
00:36:50.000And it depends on how you define a Seastead.
00:36:52.000Right now, we're working on the Floating City project, which we're getting the Dutch company I mentioned before, Delta Sync, created a feasibility study.
00:37:01.000So we hope to have a small floating city with some level of independence in a host nation's territorial waters, hopefully by 2020, if all goes according to plan.
00:37:18.000Yeah, and this will be in the territorial shallow waters, right?
00:37:23.000Okay, so it'll be under the jurisdiction of that particular government?
00:37:25.000It'll be under the jurisdiction of that particular government, and we've got, you know, we're closing in on deals with those governments willing to offer us some level of independence to see what we can create.
00:37:40.000I mean, the special economic zone movement that's happening across developed nations is all based on this idea of we'll create one little space where, you know, people can experiment with new rules because even we politicians recognize that our government is screwed up.
00:37:55.000We'll see what kind of wealth can be created.
00:37:57.000I mean, Hong Kong started a movement that's happened all across the world, where now we're proposing, let us do a floating one.
00:38:06.000So we want to create a demonstration seastead that'll attract some attention and attract more brains to the problem, and then hopefully we'll be able to move further out And solve the remaining engineering challenges of floating breakwaters and large enough seasteads to remain stable on the high seas.
00:38:25.000And this is an engineering challenge that remains to be solved.
00:38:30.000But if you think about Shell's Prelude, it's larger than the Empire State Building.
00:39:25.000Because this isn't just like, hey man, let's move to Vancouver because the United States sucks.
00:39:31.000This is like, let's start our own thing and let's do it in this very radical way.
00:39:36.000What was it that made you want to invest so much of your time?
00:39:41.000Being part of Silicon Valley and seeing that so much innovation comes from people being able to freely compete and come up with new innovations, and all of a sudden I'm using instantaneous global telepathy, which we call Twitter.
00:39:56.000I never would have imagined such a thing could exist 20 years ago.
00:40:01.000And I think we radically underestimate the potential for innovation.
00:40:06.000And I'm very excited about the future of technology.
00:40:10.000And I'm in deep despair about the future of governance.
00:40:14.000And when I saw that mobile nations on the sea that can disassemble and be reassembled elsewhere, according to the decisions of the citizens, I realized, wow, this is a fundamentally different way in which human nature can compete that would be much less about conquering and killing and much more about creating value and attracting people to move there.
00:40:39.000We're living in a world where you and I are a member of the global 1%.
00:40:44.000The World Bank estimated that if you make US $34,000 a year, You're a part of the global 1%.
00:40:51.000Meanwhile, we have this bottom billion who work for less than $1.25 a day.
00:41:19.000So we are fabulously wealthy with our access to institutions.
00:41:23.000And there's another billion people, or 800 million depending on how you look at it, who don't have access to this.
00:41:29.000And a Gallup poll in 2009, there's 700 million people who told this poll, I want to leave my country forever, get the hell out of here and go somewhere else.
00:41:42.000And all the existing nations are acting as gated communities locking them out.
00:41:47.000This is not counting the people that say, oh, I want to go somewhere for a short period of time, make my money and come back.
00:41:53.000These are all the people like, tomorrow I will leave my home.
00:41:55.000So there's desperate people who want to go somewhere.
00:41:59.000I think seasteads won't be able to survive without immigration, without attracting immigrants.
00:42:06.000So a lot of seasteaders are interested in aquaculture, creating vast seaweed farms on the sea, vast algae farms to provide the world with food and fuel.
00:42:18.000The great thing about algae is that they grow their own biomass with carbon and nutrients, both of which are polluting the oceans.
00:42:26.000So you could in a sense feed and fuel the world with greenhouse gas if you could ramp up these ocean farms to the scale needed to feed people.
00:42:38.000You'd need to hire millions of people to have these farms.
00:42:42.000I don't think you and I are going to go work an algae farm.
00:42:45.000But I think people in Yemen or Somalia or Afghanistan would gladly take jobs there.
00:42:53.000I mean, migrant workers are fleeing their countries and trying to find better lives everywhere.
00:42:58.000And one of the reasons I'm interested in seasteading is I think we have the potential to uplift a significant proportion of the bottom billion.
00:43:07.000If you did develop this, how would you, or would you at all, control immigration to your Seastead?
00:43:14.000I mean, how do you weed out the undesirable, how do you keep people that are murderers and criminals from other countries that are fleeing jurisdictions of wherever they're from, they get in a boat and they show up at your Seastead and just fuck the whole thing up?
00:43:31.000Like, you can imagine you start a vast algae farm, you're going to be interested in being safe.
00:43:36.000And there's already numerous security industries working the oceans that provide security for all sorts of ocean-going vessels.
00:43:45.000So that industry already exists and it does a better job than land-based cops and militaries, actually.
00:43:52.000But if you offer better jobs, if you offer blue jobs to people...
00:43:58.000They'll take those jobs, especially when you consider that we're talking twice the population of the United States has announced that they're ready to go somewhere else.
00:44:11.000And, you know, I was talking to a woman from Senegal, Magat Wade, and she was telling me, you know, people from my country, they stow away on boats.
00:44:22.000And they, you know, they die, they drown.
00:46:03.000I think Estonia is incredibly exciting.
00:46:05.000And it's innovating in ways larger countries are not.
00:46:09.000You know, they've innovated in the realm of a flat tax, which was unthinkable.
00:46:13.000And I think I counted something like, since Estonia innovated in the area of the flat tax, they grew at like twice the rate of surrounding European nations, causing arguments among their politicians to instantiate a flat tax.
00:46:30.000I counted like 22 countries that have adopted Estonia's innovation.
00:46:39.000And the new startup countries set the examples that change things.
00:46:44.000So, why are we waiting for a historical accident?
00:46:46.000I'd like to create thousands of these.
00:46:49.000So, the place where you have to let go of the desire for control is to realize it's going to be up to the founders of these societies how they're going to provide security.
00:46:59.000It's going to be up to the founders who they're going to hire and what they're going to pay them.
00:47:05.000We're not controlling, we're empowering people to try things.
00:47:09.000And the reason I'm less afraid of aquatic nations than continental nations is because aquatic nations will have to attract people to live there.
00:47:17.000You're not going out and you're not conquering some place where people live and saying, I'll keep everyone safe.
00:47:23.000You're saying, I got to provide you an incentive to come live with me.
00:47:27.000And then there'll be other seasteads competing for the same workers, for the same innovators, for the same doctors and lawyers.
00:47:34.000If they provide better, cheaper services, then people will detach and move there.
00:47:37.000We're in a situation where there's nothing stopping the inexorable growth of governments because they are monopolies.
00:47:44.000And I think humanity has to innovate in this space.
00:47:48.000And it requires this deep mind flip to think about the difference between competing over land and competing over fluid, think of them as houseboats, on a liquid.
00:48:02.000It's much harder to seize monopoly control with your military over a bunch of boats on the ocean.
00:48:08.000I mean, it seems like they would just kind of surround you.
00:48:10.000Like if you try to do a Waco in the ocean, it seems like if you had like the Branch Davidian complex out there in the middle of the ocean, like I know Jamie's planning.
00:48:29.000The government would probably come in.
00:48:31.000I mean, if you say security, and I'm obviously playing devil's advocate here, but if you say everyone will be responsible for security in your she-stead, well, at what point does security become an army?
00:48:43.000Are you allowed to have nuclear weapons?
00:48:45.000Are you allowed to have, you know, if you innovate to the point where you're building some fucking Tesla weapons out in the middle of the ocean that can shoot down anything that comes anywhere near you, At what point is the government going to feel threatened by you and move in?
00:49:16.000Is it the islands of Barbados and Bora Bora that are just a few miles off the coast of Venezuela?
00:49:23.000Independent countries that are much wealthier and Venezuela doesn't...
00:49:29.000The Cayman Islands in many ways takes a spiteful stance towards the regulatory structure of the United States, welcomes lots of physician mavericks and financial mavericks to their shores.
00:49:41.000The United States doesn't attack the Cayman Islands.
00:49:44.000Right, but they're not 200 miles offshore with nuclear weapons.
00:49:48.000I'm sort of saying if you established a city that became a country that's floating offshore that's heavily armed.
00:50:11.000Like, for me to go attack someone and kill someone, there has to be a financial incentive for me that I feel like, or whatever incentive it is, incentive of power, that I feel like the cost of the invasion is going to pay back on some great thing I'm going to get, like the oil or any other natural resource that might be within that nation.
00:50:30.000Small island nations like Hong Kong, they don't have any natural resources, except a big port, and they're able to create all this wealth through trade and through policies.
00:50:40.000How does a seastead get enough money to build up a giant nuclear warhead or something and launch it from the seas?
00:50:49.000Well, couldn't Hong Kong sort of do that?
00:50:50.000With all the money that Hong Kong's generated, what if they started building an army?
00:50:53.000I think that would probably be a huge issue.
00:51:10.000So you have an amazing amount of capital, brain power, and money to build your nuclear weapons.
00:51:17.000And this is why these large governments, to me, are much more of a threat to the world than some floating island that has to not go bankrupt as it gets started.
00:51:31.000What is the major roadblock as far as...
00:51:35.000Technical capability of creating something along these lines.
00:51:40.000I mean, has the technology been invented in order to create a safe floating city, or is this completely theoretical?
00:51:49.000The key enabling technology at this point is how do you create something that can float on the high seas that is affordable by, say, you know, the average middle-class American.
00:52:02.000Am I right also in thinking that you don't have to worry about waves, as far as rogue waves or tidal waves, because those more affect land than they do the actual ocean itself?
00:52:15.000If you're floating, you would just kind of bob up and down a lot.
00:52:37.000You know, over the course of a day, your boat goes up about a meter and goes down a meter and you can easily not notice it.
00:52:44.000Tsunamis become deadly when they hit land and they start to roll and pitch and bury a city.
00:52:50.000There was a report that I really love where there's scuba divers off the coast of some Thailand area.
00:52:57.000They were underwater just swimming around having a vacation and they say, oh, there's a weird discoloration in the water and there's a little undulation happening.
00:55:28.000So, many of the Seastead designs you can see on our website are built in such a way that it looks like they're on pillars On like land and shallow water, but they're actually not.
00:55:43.000If you build your pillars deep enough and buoyant enough, you can set your seastead up, say, you know, 50 feet from the surface of the ocean, and the ocean waves are moving underneath the seastead, and it's remaining relatively stable.
00:55:59.000On these pillars that are just in water, and the pillars go down much further than you would normally think.
00:56:07.000It's kind of like building a foundation in a swamp.
00:56:11.000Yeah, I saw something where they figured out a way to make things so stable that you can play billiards on a boat.
00:56:21.000They figured out a way to stabilize like a pool table to the point where it reacts instantaneously to the movement of the ocean and the ship itself.
00:56:57.000Well, that's the precedent we use is to get people thinking about cruise ships.
00:57:01.000I mean, they're the size of skyscrapers.
00:57:02.000I mean, you can look at pictures on the internet and realize those tiny little ants are people.
00:57:06.000And everything people do in cities, they're already doing on cruise ships.
00:57:10.000You know, simulated skydiving, they have rock concerts on them.
00:57:13.000Yeah, here's this video of these guys playing pool on a cruise ship.
00:57:17.000And the boat is moving, but yet the balls are rolling perfectly because the ship, if you can see, the ship is moving, but the table stays completely level.
00:57:32.000So it adjusts with the movement of the ocean.
00:57:35.000The table consistently, constantly adjusts so that the floor may be moving, but the balls are never rolling.
00:58:13.000I think it was called the Lursk, and the company is called Mamomet.
00:58:17.000I don't know how to pronounce these things because they're in different languages.
00:58:19.000But they had to lift this thing centimeter by centimeter, and they had to create a platform on the top of the water And create virtually perfect stability while they lifted this thing slowly off the bottom, you know, a nuclear sub off the bottom of the ocean in order to lift it up and it was a tremendous engineering feat.
00:58:42.000We can go on and on like this, and we might bore your listeners, but there are multiple technologies that are all closing in on, hey, we can get something permanent on the sea.
00:58:51.000And it looks like Shell is going to build one soon.
00:58:56.000So the question is now, how do we make it cheaper?
00:59:00.000How do we attract more brains to this?
00:59:02.000How do we get a kind of XPRIZE? Attracting people to solve this engineering challenge.
00:59:08.000I think once we solve this challenge, seasteading will drive itself.
01:00:38.000But we could, if we had a great idea for a business that would work aboard a floating skyscraper, Like a gigantic hospital, a floating Cayman Islands.
01:00:50.000You know, one of my heroes who's building a health city in the Cayman Islands is named Devi Shetty.
01:00:59.000Yeah, he's an Indian guy and he did amazing stuff with, you know, he'll offer Americans heart surgery for one-tenth the price with the best doctors.
01:01:08.000That makes him enough money where he can offer medical insurance to rural Indians for 25 cents a month.
01:01:15.000So he plays this kind of jurisdictional arbitrage.
01:01:18.000So now he's moving to the Cayman Islands and building what are called health cities, ready to catch the rising wave of Americans who are going to be dissatisfied with their healthcare and want it faster, quicker, and cheaper, and will fly there.
01:01:34.000And I've been looking at him as a guy that seems like he understands what seasteading would be.
01:01:39.000He seems to understand the principles.
01:01:41.000And he's applying them by using real islands.
01:01:44.000And I've always fantasized if I could talk to him and get him to, like, invest in the Seastead.
01:01:49.000And, you know, I almost peed my pants a few months ago where he was in the news and he said, you know, the best place to have a floating hospital would be on a ship, you know, off the coast of a major American city.
01:02:01.000Given that we don't have that, I'm going to build one in the Cayman Islands.
01:02:23.000You want to innovate and compete with and embarrass governments the way, you know, Singapore and Hong Kong and the Isle of Man have done.
01:02:33.000Well on a small scale when you see the certain laws that are in place that are very restrictive and they don't make sense and then you see states that take chances like Colorado with their medical marijuana practices or rather legal marijuana where they're making untold amounts of money now I mean far past what they projected and now other countries are starting to look at the revenue that's being brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue And they're saying,
01:03:19.000Someone comes along and says, listen, the laws that are in place, they don't make any sense.
01:03:23.000The structure that's in place, it's antiquated, it's archaic, and it doesn't match up with what we know about medicine, what we know about physiology, what we know about life.
01:03:33.000So they're changing it, you're seeing the benefits, and now all these other states are now first switching to medical marijuana and projecting legalized marijuana all throughout the entire country.
01:03:44.000It's these archaic, very restrictive laws that don't make any sense, and there's no competition.
01:03:50.000Because of the monopoly of government, these laws are in place, and people say, well, you could vote them out.
01:03:54.000Do you know how much fucking money is spent keeping those laws in place?
01:03:59.000Do you know how many people lobby the prison guard unions, pharmaceutical companies, etc., etc., so many different companies lobby and spend millions of dollars of money to keep the laws in place?
01:04:10.000If you could have one state, just one state, you know, let's say South Dakota says, you know what, we're not so happy with the way things work.
01:04:18.000What we're going to do is we're going to open up South Dakota to a complete utopian society.
01:04:23.000We're going to just start from scratch.
01:04:25.000Instead of seasteading, why don't you come over to South Dakota and try rebuilding society over here.
01:04:31.000Would you be interested in something like that?
01:04:33.000Or do you think the only way to do this is to do it in the ocean?
01:04:37.000I ran my first podcast last week and I interviewed Zachary Caceres.
01:04:50.000He's a fascinating dude and he founded the Startup Cities Institute.
01:04:56.000Now, special economic zones, there's actually thousands of them all over the world.
01:04:59.000There's places like India, South America, China, are all like, yeah, it's embarrassing to be in a country that's not performing well.
01:05:06.000Let's create special little zones where we can start over with new rules.
01:05:10.000And there's, you know, they're called free cities, they're called free ports.
01:05:14.000Zach has been pushing in Guatemala the idea of the more free cities you can create, the more innovation you can create, the more wealth you can create for poor people if they choose to move there and take the jobs.
01:05:30.000And our whole discussion was, which is a bigger challenge?
01:05:34.000The engineering challenge of building something on the sea or the challenge of working at a deal with existing governments?
01:08:29.000So there's this guy, Patrick Takahashi, who's like a biochemical engineer from Hawaii, and numerous people like that are pushing forward this technology called OTEC, O-T-E-C. And it's basically ocean thermal energy conversion.
01:08:45.000And it basically takes advantage of the fact that the surface of a tropical ocean is very warm.
01:08:51.000And a thousand feet down, it's very cold.
01:08:54.000And you get like a huge temperature differential, which can drive a gigantic steam engine and basically use the ocean itself as a solar panel.
01:10:30.000It's funny, I was just at the equator when I went to the Galapagos Islands on my little trip, and I don't think there's an official width of the equator.
01:11:29.000It's one of those things I've been taught by the numerous aquapaneurs I've spoken to.
01:11:34.000The thing that makes seasteading that shows that it's a meta idea is all the diverse people that come to seasteading with their unique solution that no one who talked about seasteading has thought of.
01:11:46.000You know, on the website, we have this thing called the Eight Great Moral Imperatives of Seasteading.
01:11:50.000And each of them, it's a little video thing that I made to try to introduce people to the key ideas.
01:11:57.000And each of them features an aquapreneur that didn't even know about the other guys, but hears about seasteading and comes to us with, I have an idea for this seaweed farm, and this is how we could, you know, lower the carbon acidity of the ocean, and I could do this on a massive scale and blah,
01:12:58.000There's no environmental or negligible, unmeasurable environmental impact.
01:13:02.000The fish are on the deep sea living as if they're wild.
01:13:06.000These are crazy ideas, but they require being out in the place where there's no government jurisdiction for the most part.
01:13:15.000I mean, off the coast of Hawaiian Islands, there is some government jurisdiction.
01:13:18.000But we have, you know, 45% of the world's surface unclaimed by existing governments, where people are innovating in these unique ways to, like, feed the world with sustainable sashimi on the deep oceans.
01:13:31.000Is the idea of managing people just an archaic idea?
01:13:34.000And is what you're saying, what you're talking about when you're talking about micromanaging, the government trying to manage all these things and, in fact, fucking them up with too many regulations, is it impossible to really regulate human behavior at a certain point?
01:13:50.000Or to really regulate, especially when it comes to things like innovation, when it comes to...
01:14:01.000The creativity of 7 billion people is unpredictable, and there's always something new coming, especially as a seasteader where people come to me and tell me about things they could use seasteading for.
01:15:06.000I mean, how does anyone calculate these sort of regulations, especially an incredibly fluid and dynamic industry, like the technology industry, that most people, like, say if you're trying to regulate certain aspects of cell phone development,
01:15:23.000most people are just not qualified to understand them.
01:16:01.000And the humility we have to embrace is we don't know.
01:16:05.000We don't know how to regulate the future.
01:16:08.000And so if you confront the fact there is no human being that can pre-regulate the innovations that are happening in a decade, you realize that the way to solve these problems is not to simply create a permanent monopoly that writes way more laws than it allows to go away.
01:16:27.000You need to break up those monopolies.
01:16:30.000You need competing jurisdictions I think of it as fluidly overlapping a market of developing regulations on the ocean.
01:16:46.000Initiated by the industries, and we see this in lots of other industries where regulations develop over time from within.
01:16:54.000A lot of people don't know that a lot of the things we take for granted, aspirin, knee operations, lots of heart surgeries, they just came from the ground, from doctors experimenting.
01:17:06.000So every country goes through this cycle.
01:17:09.000It's such a constant cycle that it's actually called, what is it called?
01:17:16.000That you start out with these blossoming industries, I think?
01:17:39.000The regulations just accumulate and accumulate and none of them ever go away.
01:17:43.000So the bureaucracy rides on this wave of innovation and then it starts dragging it down because there's just no incentive for the regulators to cut back on their regulations.
01:17:55.000And you end up killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
01:17:57.000But essentially, the balancing act is between safety and innovation, right?
01:18:02.000That's the balancing act, especially when you talk about things like thalidomide.
01:18:14.000Because in terms of especially some untested medical procedure, like I have a friend who got a stroke from Vioxx, some arthritis medication.
01:18:36.000What do you do to ensure that one of those things, the most beneficial, whether it's like the most beneficial innovative technology arises, or do you err on the side of caution at all costs and make sure that no one becomes a victim of some emerging idea that hasn't been vetted out yet?
01:18:57.000Because we have a monopoly, they err strongly on the side of the precautionary principle.
01:19:02.000So the regulators are in an impossible position.
01:19:06.000They have no way of evaluating all the new stuff that comes online.
01:19:12.000So they have to do it in consultation with the dominant industries, who invariably lean them towards, you know, don't allow this innovation through.
01:19:22.000And regulators are blamed for disasters, and they don't get credit for all the innovations that come through.
01:19:27.000But on the flip side, aren't the people that are coming up with these innovations, wouldn't they try to influence them to any regulatory body to let them slide through because these would be extremely profitable?
01:19:39.000And wouldn't they say, hey, you know, this is all safe when maybe in fact it hasn't?
01:19:43.000And how have there been a bunch of different medications that have been released onto the market that turned out, like, I remember Fen-Fen, remember that?
01:19:53.000Where people, I remember this girl, she was about, she was a pretty girl, but she was about 30 pounds plus overweight, and then one time I saw her, and it wasn't that long, it was, you know, a few months later, and all of a sudden she's a skinny little bombshell.
01:20:20.000But we should confront the fact, like, our minds always go to this bad story.
01:20:25.000And so we see the thalidomide baby from the 60s.
01:20:29.000But we don't see the tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, and some estimate even more than that, that have died as the result of medical innovations that are available Often in other countries and are already approved that are not approved, say, in the United States.
01:20:45.000So we don't need to, you and I are not going to agree on a balancing act and impose it on the world, but we should recognize that there's a cycle, that it starts out being protective and then it becomes overprotective and then it prevents and quashes innovation.
01:21:00.000And when it's a monopoly, it never innovates, it never stops writing new rules.
01:21:06.000And once it's controlled by dominant interests, New people that don't have a billion dollars or ten years to wait to get their drugs through the process.
01:21:15.000And that is the conservative estimate.
01:21:44.000I mean, the more time goes by, the more I'm impressed with the power of the market to regulate itself.
01:21:50.000But in terms of medical things, I mean, people will become victims.
01:21:54.000I mean, the market will regulate itself, but are you comfortable making that distinction?
01:22:01.000I think right now we're victims of being denied the innovations that are available that are held up, or preventing innovators from discovering new things.
01:22:16.000The same reason you put out a product that isn't poison and you put effort into your podcast at the beginning to assure people, I want to build a relationship with you and if you don't like it, I'm going to give you your money back.
01:24:45.000John Oliver did a whole piece on Dr. Oz and Dr. Oz being brought in front of Congress and Dr. Oz saying one thing on his television show and then saying completely contradictory.
01:24:57.000Dr. Oz grilled in Congress amidst weight loss products he touts don't pass scientific muster.
01:25:04.000So we're looking at examples of market regulation.
01:25:10.000I'm not even going to take a hard stance that we don't need any regulations by a central authority.
01:25:18.000I'm not even going to take a hard stance on that.
01:25:19.000I'm asking people to look at the power of these kind of things to regulate itself and the problem with Just accumulating thousands and thousands of rules that prevent anyone from trying something new.
01:25:34.000Yeah, I mean, I'm not a big government guy.
01:25:37.000I'm not a big fan of government, but it's just the devil's advocate position, I think, has to be sort of addressed in these sort of scenarios because I think there is the potential for fuckery.
01:25:49.000And it's like, how do you protect citizens from things that they're not entirely educated in?
01:25:54.000What laws do you establish that protect people from someone victimizing someone with some sort of an unproven product like bad butt job medicine that leaves people crippled?
01:26:51.000And the way to solve that problem is not to just take some of those shitty people and give them absolute power over everybody else.
01:26:57.000And then they promise to make everyone behave better.
01:27:00.000I think governments will evolve and innovations will occur if there's decentralized power among multiple people who can only profit and be selfish by finding ways to serve and please each other.
01:27:13.000And that includes producing regulations by which we behave.
01:27:32.000New structure for government, new structure for finances.
01:27:37.000What you're doing is you're sort of opening up the door and allowing a wide variety of people to come through and allow the best ideas to float to the top.
01:27:50.000Seasteading is not about seizing power from your political opponents.
01:27:53.000It's about ceding power to your political opponents to try their ideas elsewhere, to see if they can create something that will surprise you.
01:28:01.000And you can laugh at the fiascos if you want.
01:28:04.000But the more experiments, the more likely we are to discover solutions.
01:28:18.000But I think I can design society through my political opinions.
01:28:22.000And the only tool I have to do that is force.
01:28:24.000So that forces me to fight over who's going to control the government to force other people who disagree with me to do what I want.
01:28:31.000I don't think anyone knows how to run society.
01:28:34.000I think the solutions to humanity's deepest challenges are discovered.
01:28:40.000And they're discovered by lots of people trying lots of crazy ideas.
01:28:43.000Well, I think one of the big issues in society is what I call the quantity of variables, is that when you have a very small group of people, the variables are not that large, and you can handle 20 people.
01:28:56.000If we had a relationship with 19 other folks and we were all living together on a large patch of land that had a good amount of natural resources where no one had to worry about starving and death, why someone else lived high on the hog, if everyone was even with the distribution of natural resources,
01:29:17.000The real conflict comes when you have a quantity of variables, when you have 350 million people, and then you have things like immigration, you have things like the stock market, you have things like...
01:29:32.000Weird things that go down in terms of loans, in terms of credit cards.
01:30:20.000And I appreciate how the solutions emerge.
01:30:25.000They're not, you know, imposed by somebody.
01:30:27.000They emerge from the kind of global ecology of voluntary transactions that produces solutions.
01:30:34.000And the more people you have trying different things, the more peacefully they can compete in the market, the more likely these solutions are to emerge.
01:30:42.000And we need to update the governance, the technology of governance, just like other technologies.
01:30:48.000And we can't do that through monopolies.
01:30:50.000Is this something that you do full-time?
01:31:05.000Once I was captivated by the seasteading story, once I met the people I call aquapreneurs with all their ideas, I realized this is the most important story I could possibly tell.
01:32:37.000Yeah, you should serve on our board or something.
01:32:42.000So imagine a regular middle-class person who donates money to the Seasteading Institute.
01:32:49.000I mean, people get infected with this idea.
01:32:52.000They realize, rather than arguing about my particular political problem, I go deeper and realize it's the structure itself, that we just don't have the innovations.
01:33:02.000We just don't have numerous people experimenting with new ideas.
01:33:08.000We got to go deeper and hit restart on multiple small governments, micro-countries on the sea, and we'll discover solutions we're not imagining now, just like the United States discovered solutions that were not in the imaginations of monarchists in previous centuries.
01:33:59.000And, you know, I strongly recommend checking out the Eight Great Moral Imperatives, which is one of the problems the Seasteading Institute has had is that it's been very technical and it's talking to, you know, aquatic engineers and there's legal scholars talking about stuff.
01:34:13.000And people go and they're kind of overwhelmed by the information.
01:34:18.000So I've tried to popularize the idea and create, you know, eight little videos explaining just the basic angles from which people are approaching seasteading to solve global challenges that people care about.
01:34:31.000So the eight great moral imperatives you have as a video on seasteading.
01:34:36.000And what is, it's only a minute, right?
01:34:38.000Each one is probably about five minutes on average.
01:35:23.000We've got to get down past the divisive political language and just talk about human values that conservatives, liberals, libertarians, and anarchists and everyone else shares for the most part.
01:35:58.000I want to tell you about eight aquapreneurs who plan to fulfill these moral imperatives by building floating cities on the sea.
01:36:08.000Click on the issue you care about below, and maybe we can convince you to join our growing seasteading community.
01:36:18.000What is the timeline on implementing this sort of a thing?
01:36:23.000Like, if you had to be realistic and you had to make an estimate as to how long between now and when there really is a floating civilization.
01:36:36.000Well, one way you can think about it is...
01:36:40.000When do we have to get one of these things going?
01:36:42.000And I was very impressed that the aquapreneurs I interviewed, like six of them independently cited 2050. As a time where this is when we're going to run out of fresh water.
01:36:54.000This is when we're going to run out of phosphate.
01:36:56.000This is when we're going to reach peak oil.
01:36:59.000And, you know, I'm not qualified to judge whether 2050 really is a deadline for humanity, like a pinch point in several key commodities humanity needs to survive.
01:37:10.000So say we have no choice but to find solutions to global problems by 2050. And say I'm saying we can solve these problems by engaging the power of the sea.
01:39:24.000A lot of people are proposing that we park algae farms around the dead zones off the coasts of various cities in the world, absorb all that nutrient and carbon pollution, turn it into food and fuel over the long haul.
01:39:37.000Wouldn't the problem be heavy metals, though?
01:42:25.000It's a fascinating idea, the idea of seasteading, and it's also fascinating to try to reverse the process that we've already begun.
01:42:35.000As far as destroying the oceans, as far as the amount of pollution that we're leaking into the oceans, if that could actually benefit some life forms in some sort of a way, and then we could sort of turn that back around and get something out of it in that way.
01:42:48.000Yeah, I mean, algae's been the keystone of the global carbon cycle, you know, for three and a half billion years.
01:42:53.000You know, it knows what it's doing, and we've been working against the carbon cycle and just like screwing up the whole planet.
01:43:00.000We can turn that wheel back around if we base our food on the ocean.
01:43:04.000I read something about dumping scrap iron into the ocean to re-oxygenate the ocean because dumping scrap iron into the ocean, it would serve as a base for algae to start growing on.
01:44:32.000No, it's mostly ocean crops that keep the world in balance.
01:44:37.000And the more you forest the oceans with, say, seaweed crops, the more carbon, to build their biomass, they have to pull this carbon and nutrient out of the water, which lowers the acidity of the ocean,
01:45:14.000But the fact is, if we start ramping this up, We could, you know, soy, corn, wheat, it's not as healthy as seaweed bread.
01:45:25.000Isn't it amazing when you see issues that pop up, technological issues, whether it's, you know, pollution or what have you, and then these innovations come along to try to deal with these solutions or to try to create a solution for these issues.
01:45:43.000And it seems like that's one of the things that people do.
01:45:47.000It seems that people need to be in the face of some sort of a problem to solve in order to truly innovate.
01:45:53.000And when you think of this O-Tech thing, and this O-Tech thing happened during the Carter administration when the gas problems were at the peak for that time, changed the motor industry.
01:46:04.000The automotive industry was forced to make much more fuel-efficient cars, compact cars, all came out of that.
01:46:10.000You know, before the American cars, these big V10 pigs.
01:46:14.000And then all of a sudden, we had an issue.
01:46:17.000And then innovation springs from that issue.
01:46:20.000And you look at all the things that's going on today, like there's a young man who invented some sort of, at least a theoretical design, to clean up the plastic patch in the middle of the Pacific garbage patch.
01:46:35.000I don't know his name, but an amazing idea that in a short amount of time would be able to filter out all that plastic, and then perhaps that plastic could be reused.
01:46:46.000So the Seasteading Institute gets proposals about how to clean up the Great Garbage Patch, right?
01:46:51.000And as a generalist who tries to put this all together, someone described an expert as someone who can describe to you in great detail why something can't be done.
01:47:01.000So I get humbled often by experts that describe, well, that's never going to work.
01:47:06.000It's too hard to build a permanent structure on the high seas, and here's all the reasons why.
01:47:10.000Look at all this esoteric language I use that intimidates you into thinking I'm right.
01:47:14.000And then a year and a half later, I find out Shell Prelude is building the fucking thing on the ocean.
01:48:18.000The backlash people were shown to be demonstrated with an experiment on the water that they were mistaken.
01:48:24.000So he went out and did a small scale of this, and he was able to clean up some stuff.
01:48:29.000So, if we scale this up, will it work?
01:48:32.000Will it cause another problem that won't work?
01:48:34.000It could even be a terrible idea, but by galvanizing and being a lightning rod for this problem, it attracts new innovative minds to update his solution and find the real solution.
01:50:56.000You know, hunter-gatherers, homo sapiens left Africa and just exterminated all the megafauna on every continent.
01:51:02.000You know, hunting fish is not the way to go.
01:51:04.000We proved that with bisons, mastodons, even ducks.
01:51:07.000The way to increase the biomass of the oceans is the way we've increased the biomass of the land, which is to farm animals.
01:51:15.000And Neil Sims is trying to do this in a humane way.
01:51:18.000Well, what was done with bisons is lack of regulation.
01:51:21.000What's been done with other animals, game animals in this country, has left more deer in this country right now than were there when Columbus landed.
01:51:55.000And the problem, I think, at least as it's been understood or as it's been explained to me, is that with fish, you're dealing with international waters.
01:52:06.000You're dealing with a bunch of different nations.
01:52:08.000I mean, they have an issue with the Japanese crews that won't stop whaling.
01:52:13.000They whale under the false pretense of doing research, scientific research, and then sell the whale carcasses.
01:52:19.000I mean, there's these boats that the sea shepherds have attacked and have shown time and time again, like, these guys are fucking whaling.
01:53:01.000I mean, Lockheed Martin is actually funding Neil Simms' experiments, as is like the copper industry, and all these different players are coming in because they see the future of food is in aquaculture.
01:53:16.000I mean, a lot of this is we have no choice.
01:53:18.000It's like we, you know, over the last, what, 50 years or a century, have exterminated like 90% of the fish in the oceans.
01:54:37.000And Neil Sims refers to himself as a passionate environmentalist.
01:54:42.000And he went back and read about fish populations in the world.
01:54:46.000He's a great fish connoisseur and fish lover.
01:54:48.000And when he talks about fish, he salivates.
01:54:50.000He's so excited about how they behave and what they do.
01:54:53.000And yeah, you can hear the pain in his voice when he talks about what the fish populations were like in 1920. Yeah, that's not that long ago.
01:55:01.000And we can't keep treating the oceans like a toilet and like a thing where we can just hunt as much fish as we want.
01:55:44.000And people don't realize the oceans already, you know...
01:55:50.000It's like the United Nations Law of the Seas.
01:55:52.000There's all these legal frameworks that already operate on the ocean and allow people to interact with each other.
01:55:58.000And there's, you know, overlap in the jurisdictions and it mostly gets worked out.
01:56:03.000And the oceans is, you know, sort of civilized and it's ready for the next layer of legal evolution, which I think is stewards of the ocean.
01:56:16.000I think we're ready for a kind of new evolution and market-based evolution on the water.
01:56:22.000A market-based regulation on the water and sovereign nations.
01:56:26.000Market-based, but the problem is that's how people feed their families, make their profit, run their business.
01:56:32.000They run their business by pulling fish out of the water.
01:56:34.000You would have to tell them you're going to make less money.
01:57:06.000But then the complex reasons why people follow the rules and why they don't.
01:57:12.000And the problem with it just being a commons, where everyone's competing to get fish out, everyone has an incentive to cheat.
01:57:19.000So what is the means by which you get people to cooperate to preserve the fish long term?
01:57:26.000Resources have to be managed or they go away.
01:57:29.000The present way we're dealing with the oceans is obviously not working.
01:57:34.000Right, and we would have to make some sort of an agreement worldwide, and that seems to me to be one of the most difficult aspects of trying to fix the whole problem.
01:57:56.000I mean, even in areas where they have brought back certain animals, animals that were on the verge of extinction, you still have to worry about poaching.
01:58:08.000It's still an issue all throughout Africa with a lot of endangered species.
01:58:12.000Obviously, we know about this with the rhino, that even to this day, even all the knowledge that everyone knows that rhinos are dying off, they're still poaching.
01:58:21.000Yeah, and I was reading a recent explanation lately about elephants in Africa, and they were contrasting Kenya with a nation that's next to it, and I forget what it is.
01:58:31.000And, you know, in one country, the populations of elephants went up, and in another country, the population of elephants went down, and it was kind of counterintuitive.
01:58:42.000And, you know, the place where the population of elephants went down was where there was just like a government monopoly controlling which was easily corrupted.
01:58:49.000The place where the populations went up when it was sort of pseudo-public but also privately owned so they'd sell a certain amount of poaching where it becomes somebody's cash cow to have elephants there.
01:59:03.000Because you can't just protect elephants and allow the populations to grow as much as you want.
01:59:08.000We can drill down and discuss how regulations can evolve to increase populations of wild animals in a manageable way.
01:59:18.000But you and I don't need to settle it now.
01:59:46.000The populations have boomed on a lot of animals that were almost in danger just a few decades ago, and now there's many of them, the highest numbers they've ever recorded in Africa on some of these species.
01:59:58.000But they're in these high-fence operations, and that's a weird sort of a contradictory situation.
02:00:03.000When they've become manageable, profitable, they've become a resource.
02:00:29.000And again, it's this superstition that I, as a seasteader, am always trying to get around.
02:00:32.000The way you solve a problem is to create...
02:00:35.000A monopoly of nice people who will make everyone else be good.
02:00:40.000And we're talking about the same thing.
02:00:42.000So some of the elephant populations that are controlled by, say, a government monopoly and nothing else, those populations keep going down because there's no one really incentivized to protect against poaching.
02:00:53.000And if you work for that monopoly, you essentially have ownership over this.
02:00:58.000So there's all sorts of reasons to take payoffs and bribes.
02:01:01.000There's also a problem where the elephants...
02:01:04.000Interact with people and elephants are dangerous and elephants knock down trees.
02:01:09.000You know, elephants will attack people.
02:01:12.000And then in these other places in Africa where I guess you describe them as high fence operations, you make it so that a stable elephant population is profitable to the people who live there.
02:01:23.000So they say, all right, we'll have like 5%.
02:01:25.000We'll let people poach for a high number.
02:02:12.000And if we care about animals continuing to exist, we have to confront the fact that you don't just protect them and allow their populations to exponentially grow until they starve or come in contact with villages and kill people.
02:02:27.000Well, that's a problem that we have in California with this.
02:02:31.000The government has outlawed in California killing of a lot of predators that are in large populations now, like most particularly mountain lions.
02:02:41.000There's a large population of mountain lions in California now.
02:02:44.000And subsequently, the deer population has dwindled.
02:03:37.000No, but you have to manage the populations of all of these animals.
02:03:42.000If we're going to be stewards of the land, they all need to be kept in check, and they all need to be monitored, and it's not being done with these specific predators just because of what I believe is an ignorant public opinion.
02:06:16.000I mean, I... We were staying in a place in Colorado, my wife and I, and I spent hours staring at a big mountain like it was a TV. So that's deep in me.
02:06:25.000It was just, I couldn't believe the comfort I got from sitting on the porch and just looking at this magnificent thing in Colorado.
02:06:32.000So, I don't know, that's just a primal thing, and I think the oceans, man, it affected me.
02:06:37.000Every time I'm on the water and I'm just looking at the sky, looking at the water, I feel like, wow, I'm turning into a better person just by sitting here.
02:06:44.000Yeah, I have a friend who has a beach house, and we sometimes go to hang out at their place.
02:06:48.000And when we go there, it's just amazing how everything just sort of...
02:06:53.000You sit there, like, looking at the water, splashing up against the rocks, and everybody's just chilled out.
02:07:00.000It's almost like it has some sort of a tranquilizing effect on everyone around it.
02:07:05.000I mean, beach communities are notoriously relaxed.
02:07:22.000Look, there's a lot of fights in Hawaii, you know, but you're also dealing with Polynesian people, some of the greatest warriors throughout civilization.
02:07:40.000But still, pretty cool and pretty chilled out for the most part.
02:07:44.000Yeah, I'm thinking about little islands like the Seychelles Islands.
02:07:47.000The people that live there, I've never been to these places, but I'm told by people who go there that it's just like everyone is chill and calm.
02:07:54.000And it might be because they're just looking at water all the time.
02:07:57.000Yeah, and looking at the vastness of the ocean, which sort of falls in the face of any ideas that you have, any delusions of grandeur, any, you know, when you start looking at your life, what's important, what I need to do, I need to get this done, and this deal needs to be made, and then you look at the ocean,
02:08:12.000like, actually, in the greater spectrum, you know, if you look at it in perspective, like, come on, you're just a little blip, a little tiny little thing out there, just maybe just enjoy a little bit more.
02:08:24.000Yeah, we evolved from the ocean and we have to complete the cycle and get back to the ocean and become Homo Aquaticus or something.
02:08:35.000Homo, is that another one you're going to coin?
02:08:49.000Explain it to people who don't know what it means.
02:08:51.000Well, it's this uncanny fact that human beings, what makes us different from other large apes and other primates, is that we share all these qualities with marine mammals.
02:09:03.000That only occur among marine mammals, and it includes subcutaneous fat.
02:09:08.000You know, a chimp stores all his fat between his organs.
02:09:10.000We have it just beneath our skin, just like a manatee or something.
02:13:20.000It is a fascinating thing, though, the idea that the reason why people are so different and why we, like, if you take a baby and throw a baby in the water, they immediately know to hold their breath.
02:14:38.000I think there's massive potential for all this, and I think that it's really cool that you are investing so much time and so much energy into promoting these ideas.
02:14:50.000I hope anybody listening to this explores further.
02:14:54.000Go to Seasteading.org and check out the website and see what they have to offer.
02:15:30.000We are working on the floating city project, and we'd like you to check it out and see if you think it's realistic and if you'd like to move there.