The Joe Rogan Experience - August 18, 2014


Joe Rogan Experience #536 - Joe Quirk

Topics
Blue Apron Onnit supplements Seasteading governance concepts apps proliferate City Apps and Seasteads stem cell regulation controversy floating cities new countries innovate seasteads seastead nuclear threats seastead engineering challenges startup cities seasteading innovations medical innovations and regulation seasteading fuckery quantity of variables seasteading institute moral imperatives innovation and technological solutions fish farming and overfishing elephant poaching management ocean living and contemplation aquatic ape hypothesis aquatic ape theory Seasteading Institute
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Joe Quirk
Mentioned
Jamie Seastead Neil Sims Chris Centeno Seasteading Patrick Takahashi Benjamin Mazur Keith Weber Jarvis Green John Oliver Blue Apron Joe Quirk Tora Bora Moore Cara Santa Maria Ricardo Radulovich Lockheed Martin Stefan Molyneux Patrick Friedman Homo Aquaticus Wayfarer Studio and 25 more
Joe Rogan Experience #535 - Scroobius Pip Joe Rogan Experience #538 - Stefan Molyneux

Episode Stats


Length

2 hours and 16 minutes

Words per minute

169.51

Word count

23,147

Sentence count

1,978

Harmful content

Misogyny

22

sentences flagged

Toxicity

133

sentences flagged

Hate speech

30

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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?

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:03.000 That's the new noise.
00:00:05.000 Hello, everybody.
00:00:08.000 This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.
00:00:13.000 Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that allows you to create your own professional-looking website.
00:00:19.000 I say professional-looking because it's like a fake Rolex.
00:00:23.000 But no, it'll be like a professional website.
00:00:25.000 Squarespace 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.
00:00:34.000 It is so intuitive, so easy to use, and it works on absolutely every platform, which is beautiful.
00:00:43.000 It'll work on an Android phone, it'll work on a Windows computer, it'll work on a Mac.
00:00:48.000 Very, 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.
00:00:57.000 It's really that easy.
00:00:58.000 They also have a beautiful logo creator.
00:01:01.000 You can create a clean and simple logo designed for yourself in minutes.
00:01:05.000 If you're thinking about starting up a business and you want a website to do it, Squarespace is your answer.
00:01:09.000 You're all in one platform.
00:01:11.000 You can start your own online business through Squarespace.
00:01:14.000 They have an online store you can set up so easy and quickly.
00:01:18.000 You can sell digital downloads.
00:01:20.000 If you are a musician or a comedian or you just want to see if people will pay to hear you talk, you never know. 1.00
00:01:27.000 Fuck it, man. 1.00
00:01:27.000 Just fucking Squarespace for everything. 1.00
00:01:30.000 Think about all the Kickstarters. 0.98
00:01:32.000 Some dude made a Kickstarter to make a potato salad.
00:01:34.000 They made like 50 grand.
00:01:36.000 If you want to sell yourself talking, I bet you could probably do it.
00:01:39.000 Every design automatically includes a unique mobile experience as well that matches the overall style of your website.
00:01:46.000 So your content will look great on every device.
00:01:50.000 For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase, go to squarespace.com and enter in the code word JOE. Squarespace.
00:01:57.000 A better web starts with your website.
00:02:00.000 That's what they make you say.
00:02:01.000 That's not my words. 0.96
00:02:02.000 My words are, Squarespace is fucking awesome. 0.95
00:02:04.000 It's really excellent. 0.95
00:02:06.000 I really, really enjoy it.
00:02:07.000 I love the fact that a lot of my friends use it. 0.90
00:02:10.000 Kara Santa Maria, who will be on soon, she used it to create her website and manage all her shit. 1.00
00:02:15.000 It'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.
00:02:26.000 So squarespace.com forward slash, or enter in the code word Joe.
00:02:31.000 Squarespace.com, enter in the code word Joe, and get 10% off your first purchase.
00:02:36.000 That's squarespace.com.
00:02:37.000 And the code word is Joe.
00:02:39.000 We're also brought to you by Blue Apron.
00:02:42.000 Blue Apron is a new podcast sponsor that I really enjoy and I've been using it lately.
00:02:47.000 What it is is they send you all the ingredients and detailed photographic instructions of how to cook them for healthy meals.
00:02:57.000 And I just made these peppers, these stuffed peppers the other day, like beef stuffed peppers.
00:03:02.000 It was really good.
00:03:05.000 It's really delicious stuff and it's super healthy.
00:03:07.000 500-700 calories per serving.
00:03:09.000 And you would really imagine that it would be more than that because it tastes really good.
00:03:13.000 It tastes like, hmm, this probably can't be good for you.
00:03:16.000 But they're designed by chefs and nutritionists and it's really, really yummy stuff.
00:03:22.000 $9.99 per meal.
00:03:24.000 They'll send you the ingredients in the exact right proportions.
00:03:27.000 With simple recipe instructions right to your door.
00:03:31.000 You know for a lot of folks ordering out is expensive and it can get pretty unhealthy.
00:03:35.000 Shipping and cooking can be tough or shopping rather.
00:03:39.000 Shopping and cooking. 0.99
00:03:40.000 It'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. 0.98
00:03:47.000 Blue Apron takes care of all that stuff. 1.00
00:03:50.000 And they work around your schedule and your dietary preferences.
00:03:53.000 Cooking takes about a half an hour.
00:03:55.000 Shipping is always free.
00:03:56.000 And they'll never send you the same meal twice.
00:03:59.000 Really yummy stuff.
00:04:01.000 I'll give you a list of some of the stuff that they have now.
00:04:06.000 Here's one of them.
00:04:08.000 Eggplants with chicken thighs, cod with parmesan-crusted squash, spice-rubbed pork medallions with peach salsa.
00:04:16.000 This is not like boring food.
00:04:17.000 It's really delicious.
00:04:18.000 Chicken breast gumbo with chicken sausage and okra, pan-seared scallops with sautéed sungolds.
00:04:25.000 Everything you get comes in one of those styrofoam containers.
00:04:28.000 It's packed with dry ice, so it stays cold for like two days.
00:04:32.000 Mexican-style turkey burger.
00:04:34.000 It's not like, they're not bland foods either.
00:04:36.000 They're really delicious.
00:04:38.000 And Blue Pit, like I said, Blue Apron ships for free to your door. 1.00
00:04:43.000 And if you want to try it out, see what's on the menu this week and get your first two meals for free.
00:04:48.000 Go to blueapron.com slash rogan.
00:04:50.000 That's the first two meals free just for going to blueapron.com slash rogan.
00:04:56.000 I recommend them.
00:04:57.000 I use them.
00:04:58.000 And like I said, I cooked just a few days ago.
00:05:00.000 I had this delicious stuffed peppers.
00:05:03.000 It was spicy, but not too spicy.
00:05:05.000 It was really good stuff.
00:05:07.000 Blueapron.com slash rogan.
00:05:09.000 And last, but finally, not least, Onnit.
00:05:11.000 O-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.
00:05:25.000 We just got a new clinical trial results, or we got new clinical trial results in on T +, on some tests.
00:05:33.000 It's all available at Onnit.com, some tests that we did on weightlifters, a clinical trial for strength-based athletes.
00:05:41.000 And 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.
00:05:54.000 If 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. 0.88
00:06:07.000 And you're like, what the fuck is that about?
00:06:10.000 Well, 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. 0.97
00:06:30.000 What 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.
00:07:00.000 We sell them to you at a very reasonable rate with great ethics. 0.99
00:07:04.000 If you buy any of the supplements at Onnit and you feel like, well, it's kind of bullshit. 0.91
00:07:08.000 I'm not really into this. 0.99
00:07:09.000 This is a waste of my money.
00:07:11.000 We have a 100% money back guarantee.
00:07:14.000 First 30 pills you order, you have 90 days.
00:07:16.000 You don't have to return the pills. 0.99
00:07:17.000 You just say this stuff sucks. 0.97
00:07:18.000 You get your money back. 0.95
00:07:19.000 All we're trying to do is make a good relationship with you. 0.99
00:07:22.000 We're trying to create a relationship where we sell you the best shit you could possibly get. 0.99
00:07:40.000 We sell strength and conditioning equipment. 0.99
00:07:43.000 Everything that you need for functional strength, meaning...
00:07:47.000 Strength that you can use in athletic endeavors like kettlebells, steel maces, battle ropes.
00:07:53.000 We sell medicine balls and ab wheels.
00:07:56.000 We also have workout DVDs like the excellent Keith Webber Extreme Kettlebell Cardio Series.
00:08:02.000 Keith Webber, who will be on the show in the next couple of months.
00:08:05.000 We're working out the details right now, but I'm a big fan of that guy.
00:08:08.000 His workouts are insane.
00:08:10.000 They're so fun to do.
00:08:12.000 If 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.
00:08:21.000 But if you're thinking about doing anything as far as strenuous physical activity, please start off slowly.
00:08:28.000 It's the most important thing. 0.99
00:08:29.000 The last thing you want to do is try to exercise and then get injured and be fucked for six months. 0.99
00:08:34.000 You don't want that to happen. 0.99
00:08:35.000 So start off slowly.
00:08:37.000 Pick a lightweight if you can afford it.
00:08:39.000 Hire a trainer to show you the basic movements in the correct form so that you're not injuring yourself and start off slow.
00:08:48.000 If you can't hire a trainer, there's plenty of DVDs, plenty of YouTube videos online.
00:08:54.000 You can go and just simple, basic exercises are broken down.
00:08:58.000 Do it slowly, please.
00:09:00.000 Take your time.
00:09:01.000 Build up.
00:09:01.000 Write down your results.
00:09:02.000 Write down your goals. 1.00
00:09:03.000 And get your shit together, son. 1.00
00:09:05.000 And gals. 1.00
00:09:05.000 Gals. 1.00
00:09:06.000 Daughter.
00:09:06.000 Son.
00:09:07.000 You can't call girls daughter.
00:09:08.000 Hey, daughter. 1.00
00:09:09.000 That's just fucking creepy. 0.99
00:09:10.000 Call a dude son. 0.99
00:09:11.000 It's okay.
00:09:12.000 Anyway, go to Onnit.
00:09:13.000 I've talked too much.
00:09:14.000 Onnit.com.
00:09:14.000 O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGEN. Save 10% off any and all supplements.
00:09:19.000 Relax, ladies and gentlemen.
00:09:20.000 Sit down.
00:09:21.000 Grab a cup of coffee.
00:09:22.000 We're going to discuss society. 0.99
00:09:24.000 We're going to figure out what the fuck makes this thing tick and is there a better way to go about it. 0.98
00:09:28.000 Joe Quirk is here from the Seasteading Institute. 0.99
00:09:31.000 Young Jamie, cue the music.
00:09:36.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.
00:09:44.000 Hello, everybody.
00:09:46.000 For those of you who are not familiar with my guest, Joe Quirk is from the Seasteading Institute.
00:09:53.000 And the Seasteading Institute, Seasteading, is a very unique concept.
00:09:58.000 And it's been going around over the last X amount of years online.
00:10:02.000 There 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.
00:10:15.000 This is, you know, all the land on the earth has been sort of claimed and taken.
00:10:18.000 You can't really start your own cult in the middle of nowhere without the government coming in and crashing your parade.
00:10:24.000 But can you build a city and design a utopia based on the mistakes that we see in society today?
00:10:32.000 Is that a fairly accurate way of describing it?
00:10:34.000 Seasteading?
00:10:35.000 One of the misperceptions is that seasteading is not about creating one seastead.
00:10:39.000 As close as you can get to this thing.
00:10:42.000 Just so you can move it around, too.
00:10:43.000 Okay, good.
00:10:44.000 Sorry.
00:10:45.000 We want to create as many seasteads as possible to provide people with the technology to found their own floating country.
00:10:52.000 And the key idea is 193 national governments don't represent the range of ideas that 7 billion people have produced.
00:11:00.000 And we sort of have these government monopolies that control the decisions people make.
00:11:06.000 And in order to have solutions for how to live together, we have to force them through these 193 government monopolies.
00:11:13.000 And technology on every other front is moving forward.
00:11:15.000 And the thing that's holding us back is that we're not innovating in the technology of governance.
00:11:21.000 So 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. 0.91
00:11:40.000 And what's to stop some fucking psycho like Jamie over here starting the Jamie country and just having like a one mile square thing that he's built some raft and it's, you know, he's got some Mad Max style world. 0.89
00:11:53.000 Nothing, right? 0.99
00:11:54.000 Yeah.
00:11:55.000 Well, this is the key idea.
00:11:56.000 I mean, Jamie can go out there and declare himself, you know, tyrant of Jamie's stead.
00:12:00.000 But the problem is he has to attract people to come to his seastead.
00:12:04.000 And you just hit on the key idea that makes floating nations different from land-based nations.
00:12:09.000 I mean, if you're some evil dude and you take control of a land-based nation, you got it.
00:12:14.000 You got monopoly control over those people.
00:12:16.000 Those people don't have any choice.
00:12:17.000 That's the problem with modern governments.
00:12:19.000 We can't choose among them like we can among other governments.
00:12:21.000 Products that advance quickly.
00:12:23.000 If you're on the sea, you got to compete to attract immigrants. 1.00
00:12:26.000 You got to compete to attract investment.
00:12:28.000 You got to compete to attract people to give you money so that you can build a business in a way that they think is profitable.
00:12:35.000 You got to attract different kinds of ideologues out there.
00:12:38.000 It's going to start as a business.
00:12:40.000 And if you think of countries as being founded by conquerors, And future Seasteads being founded by creators, what I like to call aquapreneurs, that sets up a completely different dynamic.
00:12:53.000 And if people can choose among Seasteads, that will drive what we think will be a market of competing governments, competing to please people. 0.90
00:13:00.000 And then this will unleash the innovation that's out there.
00:13:06.000 For the past half century, people have come up with wonderful ideas for how we could live together.
00:13:11.000 You can go online and look up all sorts of interesting rule sets.
00:13:15.000 The problem is all ground is claimed and there's no place we can try this out.
00:13:19.000 So the technology for permanent floating structures is coming.
00:13:23.000 Half the Earth's surface is unclaimed by existing governments.
00:13:27.000 We have a new frontier and I think it's time we started colonizing it and building floating cities.
00:13:34.000 It's a very interesting concept, but I'm going to be honest, my own personal feeling about it, it's not my opinion of how it should go about, but my own feeling when I hear the idea that I go, yeah, that would be interesting, but man,
00:13:50.000 it 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,
00:14:06.000 like, it's just that I know there's something wrong with the way society is structured today, but change brings a whole new set of problems. 0.97
00:14:15.000 And people are afraid of change.
00:14:18.000 Yeah, like in order to understand Seasteading, you kind of have to go deep about where solutions come from.
00:14:23.000 And so what's the right way to live together?
00:14:25.000 The answer is we don't know.
00:14:28.000 What's the right way to make this microphone?
00:14:29.000 We don't know.
00:14:31.000 These kind of magnificent solutions, they're not designed by some really smart person.
00:14:36.000 They emerge from millions of people competing in a market to please us.
00:14:40.000 And so we're on this exponential rocket in all areas except governance.
00:14:47.000 And the problem is that governments are monopolies.
00:14:50.000 And most of the problems we're afraid of exist among current monopolies of governance.
00:14:57.000 And the key idea is that on the water, a fluid environment is fundamentally different from a land-based environment.
00:15:04.000 If you have a chunk of land, it's very easy for a conqueror to take it and declare monopoly control, and then the government doesn't advance.
00:15:12.000 It has no incentive to advance.
00:15:13.000 If you're on the water, and countries can only form if people choose to attach to each other, there is no land unless you attract people to come visit you.
00:15:22.000 If those people aren't happy with your seastead, they can detach and move somewhere else.
00:15:27.000 We'll have a completely different situation where instead of citizens competing to survive their government's decisions, governments will be competing to survive citizens' decisions.
00:15:37.000 So if you're a governor and you're competing to attract citizens and you go bankrupt and you're...
00:15:44.000 Seastead disappears as people detach and move fluidly somewhere else.
00:15:47.000 It'll be much harder for it to kind of control consolidation.
00:15:51.000 And then you're not even thinking about citizens.
00:15:53.000 You're thinking about customers looking for the kind of governance they want.
00:15:57.000 And when you think about it, this is variation and selection.
00:16:02.000 Variation by governments, selection by citizens.
00:16:05.000 And I started as a science writer and a novelist.
00:16:09.000 I wrote a lot about evolution.
00:16:11.000 I thought about why is there progress in the world?
00:16:13.000 Why aren't things just chaotic?
00:16:17.000 How is our brain so sublime in biology that it can understand these symbols I'm sending to you?
00:16:23.000 Why is this coffee mug so available, so cheap, and so plentiful?
00:16:27.000 It's because of variation in selection, decentralized variation in selection.
00:16:32.000 And when I was exposed to Patri Friedman's ideas about evolution, like in the primal soup of the ocean, I realized he was right.
00:16:42.000 On a fluid frontier where people can detach and move about and choose the societies they want, you would have variation and selection.
00:16:50.000 We'd unleash the kind of progress we see in markets and technologies in governance.
00:16:56.000 And we think of governance as a technology.
00:16:58.000 I think it's really interesting this comparison that you made in a recent video that I watched about cell phones and the competition that drives cell phones to innovate and the reason why we have such amazing phones today, why we have all these apps, why we have all these incredible cameras,
00:17:14.000 great battery life, and it's because there's this incredible competition and multiple platforms all across the world.
00:17:21.000 Everyone's trying to come up with the biggest best thing every year.
00:17:24.000 But in government, you have none of this.
00:17:26.000 You don't have any competition.
00:17:28.000 It's not a bunch of people competing to see whose ideas are the best.
00:17:32.000 It's a very rigid, strict structure that's in place.
00:17:35.000 It's been in place for a long time.
00:17:36.000 It's archaic.
00:17:38.000 It's very, very flawed.
00:17:40.000 The 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.
00:17:53.000 I mean, no one in their right mind, if you had a chance to re-engineer society, no one would look at it and go, perfect. 0.99
00:17:59.000 There's no reason to fuck with this. 0.99
00:18:01.000 This thing's great. 1.00
00:18:03.000 It's a terrible, terrible system.
00:18:05.000 Right.
00:18:26.000 At 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.
00:18:36.000 And that is the exact thing that is wrong with our government, this stagnation.
00:18:41.000 This two-party system influenced by corporations that has the same mandate, the same ideas, the same tired rhetoric over and over and over again, and seasteading.
00:18:52.000 You believe offers a potential opportunity to break that mold.
00:18:57.000 Yes, and it's about breaking the mold.
00:18:59.000 And I think the future of humanity turns on the pivot of this problem because everything is advancing very quickly.
00:19:06.000 But 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.
00:19:23.000 No, apps proliferate, we all get to choose them, and this drives innovation in that field.
00:19:31.000 And, 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.
00:19:40.000 And then everyone ends up with a bitter compromise and nobody is happy.
00:19:44.000 And I've been astonished at how people pushing forward this blue frontier have been independently attracted to the metaphor of apps.
00:19:52.000 So there's this Dutch guy, I'm pronouncing his name wrong.
00:19:58.000 I don't know how to speak Dutch.
00:19:59.000 But he runs Water Studio.
00:20:02.000 And he has already created what he calls city apps.
00:20:07.000 So he takes shipping containers and he converts them into schools.
00:20:10.000 He converts them into water purification units.
00:20:14.000 He converts them into hospitals.
00:20:18.000 And he proposes he wants to float these things to crappy coastal governments and park them in the slums and provide schools and those kind of things for children.
00:20:27.000 And the advantage these things have is that they're movable.
00:20:31.000 Suppose the government says we don't want that.
00:20:33.000 Well, then you can move it somewhere else.
00:20:36.000 It's much easier than having to build a school in those areas.
00:20:39.000 And he calls this program City Apps, and I bet you he's going to be doing this in the next couple of years.
00:20:43.000 How far out do you have to be from shore?
00:20:45.000 Does it vary from country to country?
00:20:47.000 It depends on what we're talking about.
00:20:49.000 It varies slightly from country to country.
00:20:51.000 In some cases, it's 12 miles.
00:20:54.000 So, for instance...
00:20:57.000 Some Seasteaders are physicians and biotech entrepreneurs, and they're interested in innovating in the space of stem cells or in biotech and feel like the regulations written in 1970 are holding back innovations written in 2020. Another problem with monopolies,
00:21:13.000 they can't update their rules.
00:21:14.000 So we're just stuck with these old rules.
00:21:16.000 Some of these guys just want to get a Seastead 12 miles offshore.
00:21:20.000 And start pushing forward stem cells and biotech, which is personalized medicine is the future of medicine.
00:21:26.000 It can change everything.
00:21:28.000 Other people want to get floating hospitals.
00:21:31.000 Offshore, cheaper, better, faster care.
00:21:34.000 Millions of people travel, you know, to India to get cheaper, better, faster care from, you know, American trained physicians.
00:21:43.000 Why take a plane all the way across the world when you can take a ferry just offshore?
00:21:47.000 But to really be truly an independent country, you have to go about 200 miles offshore.
00:21:53.000 200 miles?
00:21:55.000 Yeah.
00:21:56.000 That's a really interesting point that you just brought up about medicine.
00:22:00.000 About cheaper, easier, faster care.
00:22:04.000 Or better care.
00:22:05.000 That's a very complex and tricky issue.
00:22:09.000 Because a lot of people are worried about quacks.
00:22:11.000 A lot of people are worried about people that...
00:22:14.000 Are not following all the regulations that have been set by the American Medical Association and that you would attract Bad people.
00:22:24.000 Bad ideas.
00:22:26.000 So thinking about the fluid frontier requires us to rethink these assumptions that we bring to this.
00:22:32.000 The fluid frontier.
00:22:33.000 That's what you're calling the ocean seasteading?
00:22:35.000 Yeah, I got a million of these little phrases.
00:22:37.000 I like it.
00:22:38.000 The blue frontier.
00:22:39.000 So imagine I'm a quack.
00:22:40.000 Quirk the quack. 0.87
00:22:41.000 And I go out there and I start offering some crazy procedure that causes cancer and kills people. 0.74
00:22:46.000 Butt enhancement. 1.00
00:22:47.000 Butt enhancement. 1.00
00:22:49.000 Calking guns.
00:22:49.000 Let's do it.
00:22:53.000 If I start killing people, I'm in a market. 0.99
00:22:56.000 I don't have a monopoly. 0.96
00:22:58.000 The first Seastead that kills somebody or causes a disaster, that will be the end of that Seastead.
00:23:05.000 No one will move there, no one will go there, no one will invest in it.
00:23:08.000 Just to take an example, one of the guys I'm going to feature in my Seasteading book is Dr. Chris Centeno.
00:23:14.000 And he's innovated in the realm of stem cells.
00:23:17.000 There's people that lost...
00:23:19.000 I'll take an example.
00:23:20.000 Jarvis Green.
00:23:21.000 He's a two-time Super Bowl champ.
00:23:23.000 He lost cartilage under his kneecap.
00:23:26.000 Chris Centeno is one of the...
00:23:28.000 He has like a thousand successful operations where he basically takes stem cells out of your hip, re-injects them into your joint.
00:23:35.000 You grow a new cartilage like a baby.
00:23:39.000 Jarvis Green had been forced to retire.
00:23:41.000 He took Centeno's treatments, he grew back his cartilage, and he jumped out of bed and signed with the Houston Texans.
00:23:48.000 He's had fabulous success with his procedure.
00:23:51.000 After a thousand, more than a thousand successful procedures, the FDA knocked on his door and said, you can't offer this procedure.
00:24:00.000 It's now illegal in the United States, this particular thing.
00:24:03.000 So he was forced to license his procedure to the Cayman Islands, to a company called Stematics.
00:24:12.000 So now people are flying to the Cayman Islands to get this procedure done.
00:24:17.000 So, you know, economists call this regulatory capture.
00:24:21.000 We have this instinct that if you just make a monopoly of regulators and put them in place, they'll protect us.
00:24:26.000 But what ends up happening is the dominant industries within that area end up controlling the regulations or having undue influence in the regulations.
00:24:34.000 Well, is there a process that this guy has to go through in order to clear this particular procedure that he hasn't done yet?
00:24:41.000 Well, at first he thought that he did, and he thought that it was all legit.
00:24:45.000 But the FDA is unclear about what its jurisdiction is.
00:24:50.000 They came in and literally declared that your own stem cells, once taken from your body and process, are now drugs.
00:24:57.000 So they're like, okay, well, your stem cells are now drugs, so now we have jurisdiction.
00:25:01.000 We're telling you to stop.
00:25:03.000 And, you know, that's absurd.
00:25:05.000 I'm actually quoting from the letter they sent, Centeno.
00:25:09.000 That your stem cells are now drugs.
00:25:11.000 Whoa.
00:25:12.000 Well, there's this process that I've gone through called Regenikine.
00:25:15.000 Are you aware of this?
00:25:17.000 You've heard of it?
00:25:18.000 I don't think so.
00:25:19.000 There's a doctor, I think his name is Peter Weller, from Germany.
00:25:24.000 He created this procedure where you take blood out of a person's body, you spin it in a centrifuge and apply heat to it, and the heated blood produces this incredibly potent anti-inflammatory agent, and it's extracted from the blood,
00:25:40.000 it's like a yellow serum, and injected directly into areas of inflammation, joint swelling, things along those lines.
00:25:46.000 Wow, this sounds very similar.
00:25:47.000 Yeah, probably.
00:25:48.000 And imagine, I can donate my blood to somebody else, but now I can't donate my own stem cells to myself.
00:25:55.000 Well, what I'm confused is this procedure is legal in the United States.
00:25:58.000 It's legal, it's called off-label.
00:26:00.000 It wasn't for a while.
00:26:02.000 They 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.
00:26:09.000 But now it's available in several different places in America.
00:26:13.000 I got mine done at this place called Lifespan Medicine in Santa Monica.
00:26:17.000 And it's incredible.
00:26:18.000 I mean, it has an amazing effect on knees, amazing effect.
00:26:22.000 I've had it done on my neck, on my back.
00:26:24.000 I mean, just any areas that were like problem areas, you can reduce inflammation in this incredible way.
00:26:30.000 But it's essentially the same thing.
00:26:32.000 It's taking your own blood out, making it, turning it into the serum, and then injecting it back into your body.
00:26:37.000 What's different about what this guy's doing that it's illegal?
00:26:40.000 Do you know?
00:26:40.000 I don't know.
00:26:41.000 I mean, think of it.
00:26:42.000 What you're talking about is a new innovation.
00:26:45.000 People are coming up with new innovations.
00:26:47.000 And the climate among people innovating in healthcare, and especially with stem cells and with biotech, is one of fear.
00:26:55.000 Like, they don't know what the government is going to tell them to do because the rules are unclear.
00:27:00.000 They're very complex.
00:27:01.000 And they keep changing the rules.
00:27:03.000 And this stifles the innovation we need.
00:27:06.000 So 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.
00:27:19.000 And so why aren't these things improving with all the other things we use that aren't micromanaged by government?
00:27:25.000 It's because we don't have innovation because the government monopolies ultimately don't permit them.
00:27:30.000 If you have a monopoly, you don't want people to compete with you.
00:27:34.000 And we want to provide more market competition on the ocean in a place where you don't have to, you know, aggress against anyone on the ocean.
00:27:42.000 Well, there's negatives against this micromanagement, but isn't there some benefits?
00:27:46.000 Like, for instance, the government has been cracking down on Dr. Oz lately for all these bogus fat loss claims.
00:27:53.000 Like, there's been all these different things that he shilled on his show that are miracles.
00:27:58.000 Calls them, literally in his own words, miracle fat loss cures.
00:28:01.000 Sure.
00:28:02.000 And then it turns out they don't reduce fat at all.
00:28:04.000 They literally do nothing.
00:28:06.000 And then he's in trouble for that.
00:28:08.000 That's important, right?
00:28:09.000 I mean, isn't that what they're worried about with this stuff?
00:28:11.000 That someone can tell you, hey man, we're going to take some part of your hip out and we're going to fix your spina bifida.
00:28:17.000 We're going to fix your scoliosis.
00:28:18.000 We're going to fix whatever the hell you got. 0.99
00:28:20.000 We're going to inject it into you. 0.99
00:28:21.000 It turns out it's not doing jack shit. 0.99
00:28:22.000 Yeah. 0.74
00:28:23.000 You know, there might be some sort of a placebo effect that some people report, so you have some conflicting evidence.
00:28:28.000 But isn't it important that there's some sort of a government regulatory or at least a board of physicians who are knowledgeable in whatever field that approve or disprove any sort of procedure?
00:28:41.000 Isn't that important?
00:28:41.000 I think these kind of things are important, but it's even more important to hit restart once in a while.
00:28:47.000 So if people want to stop what you're doing that you like about the reinjection of the blood, I've never heard of this, they can call forth a rule 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.
00:29:06.000 And the idea is, with new blue fluid rules on the ocean, we have to start again with a new regulatory structure.
00:29:13.000 And this happens naturally when there's competition against monopolies.
00:29:18.000 So, in a sense, you're trying to do what the Founding Fathers of the United States did.
00:29:22.000 They tried to see what's going wrong in Europe and what they don't like about the system that they were controlled under. 0.99
00:29:31.000 They leave, come to America, establish this new country, set forth these new rules and regulations, these new ideas, and then a couple hundred years later, they turn to dog shit. 1.00
00:29:41.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:29:42.000 Whenever it's a monopoly, it ends up turning to dog shit. 0.99
00:29:45.000 How do you stop that from happening on Jamie Seastead? 1.00
00:29:48.000 Because Jamie looks like a goddamn dictator to me. 0.97
00:29:51.000 I think you get that guy out there on the sea. 1.00
00:29:53.000 He's got his own little island. 0.98
00:29:55.000 Next thing you know, he's banging all the women. 1.00
00:29:57.000 It's like Waco in the ocean. 0.88
00:29:59.000 Yeah.
00:29:59.000 And I'm glad you're putting this in the perspective of the United States, because I think in the United States it was a giant life raft.
00:30:05.000 Where, you know, tens of millions of people who were misfits in their home countries came here to try out their crazy ideas.
00:30:11.000 And they discovered new ways of living together that ended up changing the whole world.
00:30:15.000 And if there had never been this giant life raft where people could try something new, right now we'd be arguing, you know, which works better, communism or maranarchy?
00:30:23.000 They'll be the only options that we have.
00:30:25.000 The United States discovered new things that people just take for granted, like, you know, democracy and women's rights and things like this.
00:30:31.000 It...
00:30:32.000 It happened all over the world.
00:30:34.000 Now, Jamie goes out on the ocean and starts his own Seastead.
00:30:40.000 He's not claiming some giant bunch of land with a bunch of captive citizens that he can control.
00:30:45.000 He has to convince people that his Seastead can make a profit.
00:30:49.000 That his Seastead can provide blue drops and attract people out there.
00:30:53.000 That his Seastead will survive competing with other Seasteads. 0.97
00:30:57.000 And imagine an environment where citizens at any time can detach from a Seastead and float to a different Seastead.
00:31:05.000 But can they really?
00:31:06.000 Because if you have a Seastead, say if you...
00:31:09.000 Let's define a Seastead, because I'm thinking it's a floating city.
00:31:13.000 If it's a floating city, Floating cities have condos.
00:31:16.000 Condos you buy.
00:31:17.000 You're stuck there.
00:31:17.000 You got a mortgage.
00:31:18.000 You're not going anywhere.
00:31:19.000 You're stuck on this floating city.
00:31:21.000 Jamie goes crazy.
00:31:21.000 He's doing meth now.
00:31:23.000 God damn it. 1.00
00:31:23.000 I got a goddamn condo on this meth heads Seastead. 1.00
00:31:26.000 I can't get off. 1.00
00:31:27.000 I owe this money.
00:31:28.000 I'm upside down on my loan.
00:31:30.000 What am I going to do?
00:31:31.000 I have a family.
00:31:32.000 My kids go to school in the Seastead.
00:31:34.000 Yeah, that's what happens in land-based governments. 0.77
00:31:36.000 One way to think about this is the Dutch.
00:31:40.000 Their country is sinking.
00:31:42.000 They're building floating homes.
00:31:44.000 They built a floating pavilion.
00:31:45.000 They're working on a floating park.
00:31:46.000 Holland's sinking?
00:31:47.000 Sure.
00:31:49.000 They've been fighting against the water for a thousand years, building dams.
00:31:55.000 You know, the little Dutch boy that plugged the dam with his finger? 1.00
00:31:57.000 Right, right.
00:31:58.000 They're so accustomed to the water.
00:32:00.000 When you go there and suggest we need to build floating cities, they don't think it's crazy.
00:32:04.000 Hmm.
00:32:04.000 And the company we're working with on our floating city project, Delta Sync, S-Y-N-C, speaks explicitly about the mobility of moving units forming floating cities and how this will create a kind of market of competitive governments that would be peaceful,
00:32:21.000 that would empower citizens and disempower governments, so that governments are going to be constantly...
00:32:27.000 Aquatic governments will be hustling to attract citizens rather than hustling to seize control of them. 1.00
00:32:34.000 Because the ocean is such a fundamentally different medium in which human nature can compete.
00:32:41.000 Now, have you ever...
00:32:43.000 I'm sure you have.
00:32:44.000 I shouldn't even ask that way.
00:32:45.000 What about crime?
00:32:47.000 Like, how are you going to protect citizens from invading seasteaders, from pirates?
00:32:52.000 How are we not going to have, like, Waterworld?
00:32:55.000 First of all, yeah.
00:32:58.000 Yeah, we get this a lot.
00:33:00.000 And one way to think about it is that there's about 100,000 boats on the sea right now.
00:33:04.000 And civilization requires- That's it?
00:33:06.000 Yeah, like at this moment, riding around.
00:33:08.000 In the whole world?
00:33:09.000 I think so, yeah.
00:33:11.000 Seems like there would be more than that.
00:33:12.000 Criss-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.
00:33:21.000 Wow, I thought it was way more than 100,000 boats on the whole planet.
00:33:24.000 Three-quarters water.
00:33:26.000 Yeah.
00:33:27.000 It doesn't matter.
00:33:28.000 And if you think about it, all those boats have to have some form of security.
00:33:33.000 And when you hear about violence, you almost always hear about land-based governments involved in violence.
00:33:39.000 You rarely hear about, you know, violence and crime on ships, though it occurs.
00:33:43.000 So all civilization requires some kind of security.
00:33:46.000 And all these boats have water propulsion, they have sound propulsion, they have armed guards, I think at this point, 75% of...
00:33:57.000 Container ships have armed patrols on board, and I've ridden cruise ships.
00:34:03.000 I've walked around American cities.
00:34:05.000 Cruise ships are the size of skyscrapers, and they're a lot safer than some of the American cities I've been in.
00:34:10.000 So, security is really not a problem.
00:34:13.000 If you're gonna, you know, make a new floating nation, you should have some security.
00:34:17.000 But if you think about Iceland, Malta, Bora Bora, Barbados, there's so many islands out there defenseless against the big nations.
00:34:26.000 Cayman Islands is an example.
00:34:28.000 They have no standing army.
00:34:30.000 A lot of island nations have no standing army.
00:34:32.000 They do business with the big nations.
00:34:34.000 And the way I put it is, you know, if you're going to found your seastead, think like a cleaner fish in a world of sharks.
00:34:41.000 You know, China's not invading Hong Kong.
00:34:43.000 The United States is invading the Cayman Islands.
00:34:46.000 Malaysia hasn't invaded Singapore.
00:34:49.000 When new island nations provide huge economic value to the big nations, they do quite well.
00:34:56.000 So the idea is that it'll be some sort of a benefit that the rest of the countries have by these competing governments.
00:35:04.000 But don't you think that they would find that these competing governments put pressure on them to sort of innovate and that they would want to stifle that in some sort of a way?
00:35:12.000 Well, we shall see because that's one of the key ideas.
00:35:15.000 I mean, people little...
00:35:19.000 I think?
00:35:32.000 It 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.
00:35:44.000 China 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...
00:35:55.000 To escape poverty because of the example set by Hong Kong.
00:36:00.000 And there are examples like this over and over.
00:36:03.000 Portugal decriminalized drugs.
00:36:06.000 Scientific American published the fabulous effects.
00:36:10.000 And, you know, that's changing policies in the rest of the world.
00:36:13.000 I can go on and on with this.
00:36:14.000 Estonia with the flat tax.
00:36:16.000 Little island nations innovate in ways that large continental nations imitate.
00:36:22.000 And we want to create more of these.
00:36:24.000 When 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.
00:36:41.000 Now, when it comes to a practical application of this, How far away do you think we are from a legitimate Seastead nation?
00:36:50.000 And it depends on how you define a Seastead.
00:36:52.000 Right 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.
00:37:01.000 So we hope to have a small floating city with some level of independence in a host nation's territorial waters, hopefully by 2020, if all goes according to plan.
00:37:17.000 Whoa, six years.
00:37:18.000 Yeah, and this will be in the territorial shallow waters, right?
00:37:23.000 Okay, so it'll be under the jurisdiction of that particular government?
00:37:25.000 It'll be under the jurisdiction of that particular government, and we've got, you know, we're closing in on deals with those governments willing to offer us some level of independence to see what we can create.
00:37:38.000 And this is not a radical idea.
00:37:40.000 I mean, the special economic zone movement that's happening across developed nations is all based on this idea of we'll create one little space where, you know, people can experiment with new rules because even we politicians recognize that our government is screwed up.
00:37:55.000 We'll see what kind of wealth can be created.
00:37:57.000 I mean, Hong Kong started a movement that's happened all across the world, where now we're proposing, let us do a floating one.
00:38:02.000 We don't need any of your land.
00:38:03.000 Let's see what we can create.
00:38:05.000 Maybe we can hire some local people.
00:38:06.000 So 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.
00:38:25.000 And this is an engineering challenge that remains to be solved.
00:38:30.000 But if you think about Shell's Prelude, it's larger than the Empire State Building.
00:38:37.000 It's a floating oil and gas facility.
00:38:40.000 They've built the hull and it should be on the water by 2017. It's going to be in international waters for 25 years.
00:38:49.000 All the technologies are sort of closing in on solving the problem of creating a floating structure on the sea.
00:38:55.000 And I think the more creative people we attract to this problem, I think the quicker we'll solve the problem and have a floating city.
00:39:01.000 I think it'll happen in the next couple of decades.
00:39:04.000 And it's easier to float than fly.
00:39:07.000 We have space stations floating above us.
00:39:10.000 We can certainly make sea stations.
00:39:11.000 It's just that people have been more sold on the idea of space.
00:39:15.000 They haven't been sold on the idea of floating cities.
00:39:18.000 This is a pretty radical proposition to invest a significant amount of your time in.
00:39:23.000 What led you down this road? 0.98
00:39:25.000 Because this isn't just like, hey man, let's move to Vancouver because the United States sucks.
00:39:31.000 This is like, let's start our own thing and let's do it in this very radical way.
00:39:36.000 What was it that made you want to invest so much of your time?
00:39:41.000 Being part of Silicon Valley and seeing that so much innovation comes from people being able to freely compete and come up with new innovations, and all of a sudden I'm using instantaneous global telepathy, which we call Twitter.
00:39:56.000 I never would have imagined such a thing could exist 20 years ago.
00:40:01.000 And I think we radically underestimate the potential for innovation.
00:40:06.000 And I'm very excited about the future of technology.
00:40:10.000 And I'm in deep despair about the future of governance.
00:40:14.000 And 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.
00:40:39.000 We're living in a world where you and I are a member of the global 1%.
00:40:44.000 The World Bank estimated that if you make US $34,000 a year, You're a part of the global 1%.
00:40:51.000 Meanwhile, we have this bottom billion who work for less than $1.25 a day.
00:40:56.000 $34,000 a year is a global 1%.
00:41:00.000 Yes.
00:41:02.000 Wow.
00:41:03.000 That's what the World Bank estimated.
00:41:04.000 Another group estimated about $55,000.
00:41:07.000 That's unbelievable.
00:41:08.000 $55,000.
00:41:09.000 Yeah.
00:41:10.000 So it's like Americans have taken the upper part of the hockey stick and just chopped off the 1% of that and start complaining about that.
00:41:17.000 Yeah, isn't that hilarious?
00:41:19.000 Yeah.
00:41:19.000 So we are fabulously wealthy with our access to institutions.
00:41:23.000 And there's another billion people, or 800 million depending on how you look at it, who don't have access to this.
00:41:29.000 And 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.
00:41:42.000 And all the existing nations are acting as gated communities locking them out.
00:41:47.000 This is not counting the people that say, oh, I want to go somewhere for a short period of time, make my money and come back.
00:41:53.000 These are all the people like, tomorrow I will leave my home.
00:41:55.000 So there's desperate people who want to go somewhere.
00:41:59.000 I think seasteads won't be able to survive without immigration, without attracting immigrants. 1.00
00:42:06.000 So a lot of seasteaders are interested in aquaculture, creating vast seaweed farms on the sea, vast algae farms to provide the world with food and fuel.
00:42:18.000 The great thing about algae is that they grow their own biomass with carbon and nutrients, both of which are polluting the oceans.
00:42:26.000 So you could in a sense feed and fuel the world with greenhouse gas if you could ramp up these ocean farms to the scale needed to feed people.
00:42:38.000 You'd need to hire millions of people to have these farms. 1.00
00:42:42.000 I don't think you and I are going to go work an algae farm.
00:42:45.000 But I think people in Yemen or Somalia or Afghanistan would gladly take jobs there. 1.00
00:42:53.000 I mean, migrant workers are fleeing their countries and trying to find better lives everywhere.
00:42:58.000 And 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.
00:43:07.000 If you did develop this, how would you, or would you at all, control immigration to your Seastead?
00:43:14.000 I mean, how do you weed out the undesirable, how do you keep people that are murderers and criminals from other countries that are fleeing jurisdictions of wherever they're from, they get in a boat and they show up at your Seastead and just fuck the whole thing up?
00:43:30.000 Security, hopefully.
00:43:31.000 Like, you can imagine you start a vast algae farm, you're going to be interested in being safe.
00:43:36.000 And there's already numerous security industries working the oceans that provide security for all sorts of ocean-going vessels.
00:43:45.000 So that industry already exists and it does a better job than land-based cops and militaries, actually.
00:43:52.000 But if you offer better jobs, if you offer blue jobs to people...
00:43:58.000 They'll take those jobs, especially when you consider that we're talking twice the population of the United States has announced that they're ready to go somewhere else.
00:44:08.000 There's not many places they can go.
00:44:11.000 And, you know, I was talking to a woman from Senegal, Magat Wade, and she was telling me, you know, people from my country, they stow away on boats.
00:44:22.000 And they, you know, they die, they drown.
00:44:25.000 She says they're fish food.
00:44:26.000 They're people so desperate to get out of their countries.
00:44:28.000 They're jumping on boats not knowing where they're going to go, saying, just get me anywhere, get me out of this hellhole.
00:44:33.000 And those people will take better opportunities.
00:44:38.000 Just like, you know, I'm Irish.
00:44:41.000 A hundred years ago, my ancestors were extremely poor.
00:44:45.000 They took better jobs in the United States, low-paying jobs, and now they're Their grandchildren are living lives of fabulous prosperity.
00:44:53.000 We need to keep this going.
00:44:54.000 We need more life rafts out there for the bottom billion. 1.00
00:44:57.000 So would you have any sort of a filtering system to keep people out?
00:45:00.000 Would you verify passports and do background checks on people before you allow them in?
00:45:05.000 I mean, what's the idea behind that?
00:45:06.000 Is it just going to be open and figure out how to do it along the way when things go bad?
00:45:12.000 I mean, what's the...
00:45:13.000 And one way to think about this is it's not about designing a society.
00:45:19.000 I have no ability to design the society.
00:45:21.000 I'm working to provide the technology so that other people can design their societies.
00:45:27.000 And new countries created in the past few decades Apply more modern rules to their founding and they do better jobs.
00:45:36.000 You know, there's been something like 29 new countries since like 1990. I hope I'm getting those numbers right.
00:45:42.000 Really?
00:45:43.000 Yeah.
00:45:43.000 There's been like...
00:45:45.000 Where are they?
00:45:46.000 They're like six since, you know, 2002. Really?
00:45:49.000 Yeah.
00:45:49.000 People don't realize new countries are created all the time.
00:45:52.000 And people don't say...
00:45:53.000 Where are they created?
00:45:53.000 I've never even heard of these before.
00:45:54.000 They're mostly countries breaking up into smaller pieces.
00:45:59.000 And...
00:45:59.000 Are any promising?
00:46:01.000 Oh, yeah.
00:46:02.000 Yeah?
00:46:02.000 Yeah.
00:46:03.000 I think Estonia is incredibly exciting.
00:46:05.000 And it's innovating in ways larger countries are not.
00:46:09.000 You know, they've innovated in the realm of a flat tax, which was unthinkable.
00:46:13.000 And I think I counted something like, since Estonia innovated in the area of the flat tax, they grew at like twice the rate of surrounding European nations, causing arguments among their politicians to instantiate a flat tax.
00:46:30.000 I counted like 22 countries that have adopted Estonia's innovation.
00:46:36.000 So, new countries innovate.
00:46:38.000 Old countries do not. 0.99
00:46:39.000 And the new startup countries set the examples that change things.
00:46:44.000 So, why are we waiting for a historical accident?
00:46:46.000 I'd like to create thousands of these.
00:46:49.000 So, the place where you have to let go of the desire for control is to realize it's going to be up to the founders of these societies how they're going to provide security.
00:46:59.000 It's going to be up to the founders who they're going to hire and what they're going to pay them.
00:47:05.000 We're not controlling, we're empowering people to try things.
00:47:09.000 And the reason I'm less afraid of aquatic nations than continental nations is because aquatic nations will have to attract people to live there.
00:47:17.000 You're not going out and you're not conquering some place where people live and saying, I'll keep everyone safe.
00:47:23.000 You're saying, I got to provide you an incentive to come live with me.
00:47:27.000 And then there'll be other seasteads competing for the same workers, for the same innovators, for the same doctors and lawyers.
00:47:34.000 If they provide better, cheaper services, then people will detach and move there.
00:47:37.000 We're in a situation where there's nothing stopping the inexorable growth of governments because they are monopolies.
00:47:44.000 And I think humanity has to innovate in this space.
00:47:48.000 And it requires this deep mind flip to think about the difference between competing over land and competing over fluid, think of them as houseboats, on a liquid.
00:48:02.000 It's much harder to seize monopoly control with your military over a bunch of boats on the ocean.
00:48:07.000 Is it though?
00:48:08.000 I mean, it seems like they would just kind of surround you.
00:48:10.000 Like if you try to do a Waco in the ocean, it seems like if you had like the Branch Davidian complex out there in the middle of the ocean, like I know Jamie's planning. 1.00
00:48:17.000 Look at that motherfucker. 1.00
00:48:18.000 Look at him over there. 1.00
00:48:19.000 He's planning it. 1.00
00:48:20.000 If you decided to do that and build some city and put up a giant barbed wire fence and have sex with everybody's wife and... 1.00
00:48:28.000 And store a lot of weapons. 0.98
00:48:29.000 The government would probably come in.
00:48:31.000 I mean, if you say security, and I'm obviously playing devil's advocate here, but if you say everyone will be responsible for security in your she-stead, well, at what point does security become an army? 0.94
00:48:41.000 Like, are you allowed to have a jet?
00:48:43.000 Are you allowed to have nuclear weapons?
00:48:45.000 Are 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?
00:48:57.000 How big can you get?
00:48:59.000 Does every seasteading nation have to be sort of either...
00:49:05.000 Like a satellite of a larger nation?
00:49:08.000 You know what I'm saying?
00:49:08.000 Well, conquerors have incentives.
00:49:11.000 And the way to think about how this works is to think about precedents that already exist.
00:49:15.000 So let's see.
00:49:16.000 Is it the islands of Barbados and Bora Bora that are just a few miles off the coast of Venezuela?
00:49:23.000 Independent countries that are much wealthier and Venezuela doesn't...
00:49:29.000 The 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.
00:49:41.000 The United States doesn't attack the Cayman Islands.
00:49:44.000 Right, but they're not 200 miles offshore with nuclear weapons.
00:49:48.000 I'm sort of saying if you established a city that became a country that's floating offshore that's heavily armed.
00:49:56.000 Right.
00:49:56.000 So you have to ask, how are continental nations in control of nuclear weapons?
00:50:03.000 Why aren't island nations in control?
00:50:05.000 Small island nations don't have nuclear weapons and most of them don't have standing armies.
00:50:09.000 You have to pay for that stuff.
00:50:11.000 Like, for me to go attack someone and kill someone, there has to be a financial incentive for me that I feel like, or whatever incentive it is, incentive of power, that I feel like the cost of the invasion is going to pay back on some great thing I'm going to get, like the oil or any other natural resource that might be within that nation.
00:50:30.000 Small island nations like Hong Kong, they don't have any natural resources, except a big port, and they're able to create all this wealth through trade and through policies.
00:50:40.000 How does a seastead get enough money to build up a giant nuclear warhead or something and launch it from the seas?
00:50:49.000 Well, couldn't Hong Kong sort of do that?
00:50:50.000 With all the money that Hong Kong's generated, what if they started building an army?
00:50:53.000 I think that would probably be a huge issue.
00:50:55.000 Don't you think?
00:50:56.000 And yet they don't.
00:50:57.000 Because if you own a continental nation, like, say, China, you have control over a captive population, you can fleece. 0.92
00:51:08.000 And pay for whatever you want.
00:51:10.000 So you have an amazing amount of capital, brain power, and money to build your nuclear weapons.
00:51:17.000 And 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.
00:51:31.000 What is the major roadblock as far as...
00:51:35.000 Technical capability of creating something along these lines.
00:51:40.000 I mean, has the technology been invented in order to create a safe floating city, or is this completely theoretical?
00:51:49.000 The key enabling technology at this point is how do you create something that can float on the high seas that is affordable by, say, you know, the average middle-class American.
00:52:02.000 Am I right also in thinking that you don't have to worry about waves, as far as rogue waves or tidal waves, because those more affect land than they do the actual ocean itself?
00:52:15.000 If you're floating, you would just kind of bob up and down a lot.
00:52:18.000 You wouldn't get swamped.
00:52:19.000 Yeah, I think you're talking about tsunamis.
00:52:21.000 Yeah, or rogue waves. 1.00
00:52:23.000 What was that stupid movie with Mark Mark? 1.00
00:52:25.000 Perfect Storm. 1.00
00:52:26.000 Perfect Storm, yeah.
00:52:28.000 Yeah, tsunamis are harmless on the deep sea.
00:52:31.000 People are shocked to hear that.
00:52:32.000 A tsunami wave can literally be thousands of miles long.
00:52:36.000 So if you're on a boat...
00:52:37.000 You know, over the course of a day, your boat goes up about a meter and goes down a meter and you can easily not notice it.
00:52:44.000 Tsunamis become deadly when they hit land and they start to roll and pitch and bury a city. 1.00
00:52:50.000 There was a report that I really love where there's scuba divers off the coast of some Thailand area.
00:52:57.000 They were underwater just swimming around having a vacation and they say, oh, there's a weird discoloration in the water and there's a little undulation happening.
00:53:05.000 Oh, well.
00:53:06.000 And they go back to scuba diving.
00:53:07.000 They come back to the surface and the hotel where they ate breakfast in is destroyed.
00:53:12.000 The city is destroyed.
00:53:13.000 They're swimming.
00:53:14.000 They swam through a tsunami and didn't notice it.
00:53:17.000 So coastal cities are sitting ducks for tsunamis.
00:53:21.000 If you're going to be subjected to a tsunami, you'd be safer on a seastead.
00:53:27.000 So those big crazy waves from a perfect storm, like if something comes like that?
00:53:32.000 So that is the fundamental engineering challenge.
00:53:34.000 Huge waves on the ocean.
00:53:36.000 So we have the technology to create a floating city in shallow territorial waters, and we're going to do that soon, hopefully.
00:53:43.000 The engineering challenge to be solved is how do you create permanent structures on the water that can stay out there?
00:53:52.000 You can create boats, but the problem is boats have to come to shore every decade or two decades to get cleaned.
00:53:58.000 You've got to have something permanent out there.
00:54:00.000 And there's numerous technologies.
00:54:03.000 One that's been in operation since 1962 is the flip ship.
00:54:10.000 It's basically shaped like a baseball bat.
00:54:12.000 You tow it out into the ocean and then you use ballast tanks so that it flips and then it stands upright.
00:54:19.000 So say like one-sixth of the ship of this big baseball bat is above the water and five-sixths below the water.
00:54:26.000 And it's described as being as stable as a fence post.
00:54:30.000 And these were on the water in 1962. They're still on the water.
00:54:34.000 So most of it is under the water.
00:54:36.000 Most of it is under the water.
00:54:36.000 So that would be essentially the anchor?
00:54:38.000 That would be the root?
00:54:39.000 That would be the root.
00:54:41.000 And so it can sit there among the waves, and you're on this thing.
00:54:45.000 Or underwater, you know, you can imagine looking out a window at a permanent aquarium.
00:54:49.000 Jamie's got a photo of it that he just pulled up here.
00:54:52.000 This is what it looks like?
00:54:52.000 Yeah, that's what the top part of it looks like.
00:54:54.000 Whoa.
00:54:57.000 So most of convincing people of the potential of Seastead involves telling them about what already exists.
00:55:03.000 I mean, that thing is older than I am.
00:55:05.000 It's been around.
00:55:07.000 Really?
00:55:07.000 Yeah.
00:55:08.000 So it's expensive.
00:55:10.000 It's too expensive for regular people to use.
00:55:12.000 It's used by the military.
00:55:13.000 It's used by scientists.
00:55:15.000 But you're seasick free on that thing.
00:55:17.000 Now imagine you make four of them or three of them.
00:55:21.000 You can build a platform on it.
00:55:23.000 You can build floors below the ocean.
00:55:26.000 You can build floors above the ocean.
00:55:28.000 So, many of the Seastead designs you can see on our website are built in such a way that it looks like they're on pillars On like land and shallow water, but they're actually not.
00:55:43.000 If 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.
00:55:59.000 On these pillars that are just in water, and the pillars go down much further than you would normally think.
00:56:07.000 It's kind of like building a foundation in a swamp.
00:56:11.000 Yeah, I saw something where they figured out a way to make things so stable that you can play billiards on a boat.
00:56:20.000 Yeah.
00:56:21.000 They figured out a way to stabilize like a pool table to the point where it reacts instantaneously to the movement of the ocean and the ship itself.
00:56:31.000 It stays constantly balanced.
00:56:34.000 Yeah, there's so much I can tell you about.
00:56:36.000 I mean, I rode on a cruise ship, an Alaskan cruise ship, and a month ago I was on a Galapagos cruise ship.
00:56:43.000 And you can have your martini glass, you pour the martini glass, you set it on the table, it's not rolling over.
00:56:50.000 It's like the larger you make your seastead, the more stable it is in the waves.
00:56:54.000 Those boats are kind of seasteads, right?
00:56:56.000 I mean, if you really think about it.
00:56:57.000 Well, that's the precedent we use is to get people thinking about cruise ships.
00:57:01.000 I mean, they're the size of skyscrapers.
00:57:02.000 I mean, you can look at pictures on the internet and realize those tiny little ants are people.
00:57:06.000 And everything people do in cities, they're already doing on cruise ships.
00:57:10.000 You know, simulated skydiving, they have rock concerts on them.
00:57:13.000 Yeah, here's this video of these guys playing pool on a cruise ship.
00:57:17.000 And 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.
00:57:32.000 So it adjusts with the movement of the ocean.
00:57:35.000 The table consistently, constantly adjusts so that the floor may be moving, but the balls are never rolling.
00:57:44.000 Isn't that incredible?
00:57:45.000 That is incredible.
00:57:45.000 And that would obviously be on like a smaller boat where it's not naturally stable anyway.
00:57:50.000 Because I've been on cruise ships where people are playing pool.
00:57:52.000 You know, you can't even tell you're on the water.
00:57:55.000 But if you think about the sinking of that Russian sub...
00:58:01.000 You know, they had to find a company to lift that thing off the bottom of the ocean without causing a disaster.
00:58:08.000 The Glomar situation.
00:58:11.000 This was a long time ago?
00:58:12.000 It was a few years ago.
00:58:13.000 I think it was called the Lursk, and the company is called Mamomet.
00:58:17.000 I don't know how to pronounce these things because they're in different languages.
00:58:19.000 But they had to lift this thing centimeter by centimeter, and they had to create a platform on the top of the water And create virtually perfect stability while they lifted this thing slowly off the bottom, you know, a nuclear sub off the bottom of the ocean in order to lift it up and it was a tremendous engineering feat.
00:58:42.000 We can go on and on like this, and we might bore your listeners, but there are multiple technologies that are all closing in on, hey, we can get something permanent on the sea.
00:58:51.000 And it looks like Shell is going to build one soon.
00:58:56.000 So the question is now, how do we make it cheaper?
00:59:00.000 How do we attract more brains to this?
00:59:02.000 How do we get a kind of XPRIZE? Attracting people to solve this engineering challenge.
00:59:08.000 I think once we solve this challenge, seasteading will drive itself.
00:59:14.000 Shell is going to build one.
00:59:16.000 And they're building an oil refinery that floats?
00:59:19.000 Is that what the idea is?
00:59:19.000 Yeah.
00:59:21.000 They're not calling it a seastead, but it will be 200 miles off the coast of Australia.
00:59:27.000 It's built in South Korea.
00:59:31.000 And it's bigger than the Empire State Building.
00:59:34.000 You can fit several football fields on it.
00:59:37.000 And it's going to be in international waters for up to 25 years.
00:59:41.000 So are they treating it like a city?
00:59:44.000 Think of it as like a giant skyscraper on the water.
00:59:49.000 Will it be reasonably self-sustaining?
00:59:51.000 Or is it going to rely on constant visits by freighter ships?
00:59:57.000 Like all ships and islands everywhere, it requires on constant visits and trade.
01:00:01.000 But this is like, they don't think of it as an independent country.
01:00:05.000 They think of it as a shell prelude fling facility.
01:00:10.000 Wow.
01:00:10.000 Look at the size of that thing.
01:00:12.000 It's gigantic.
01:00:14.000 Bigger than the Empire State Building.
01:00:16.000 Yeah, more massive.
01:00:17.000 And see if I can remember how many football fields on it.
01:00:20.000 You could play, I think it's five football games in a row.
01:00:23.000 Whoa.
01:00:24.000 So, it's doable.
01:00:27.000 It's just still too expensive.
01:00:30.000 Shell can afford that, and they can pay it back.
01:00:32.000 Well, so are skyscrapers, right?
01:00:34.000 I mean, you and I can't go out and build a skyscraper.
01:00:37.000 It's too expensive.
01:00:38.000 But 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.
01:00:50.000 You know, one of my heroes who's building a health city in the Cayman Islands is named Devi Shetty.
01:00:58.000 Weird name.
01:00:59.000 Yeah, 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.
01:01:08.000 That makes him enough money where he can offer medical insurance to rural Indians for 25 cents a month.
01:01:15.000 So he plays this kind of jurisdictional arbitrage.
01:01:18.000 So now he's moving to the Cayman Islands and building what are called health cities, ready to catch the rising wave of Americans who are going to be dissatisfied with their healthcare and want it faster, quicker, and cheaper, and will fly there.
01:01:34.000 And I've been looking at him as a guy that seems like he understands what seasteading would be.
01:01:39.000 He seems to understand the principles.
01:01:41.000 And he's applying them by using real islands.
01:01:44.000 And I've always fantasized if I could talk to him and get him to, like, invest in the Seastead.
01:01:49.000 And, you know, I almost peed my pants a few months ago where he was in the news and he said, you know, the best place to have a floating hospital would be on a ship, you know, off the coast of a major American city.
01:02:01.000 Given that we don't have that, I'm going to build one in the Cayman Islands.
01:02:04.000 And I'm like, oh my god.
01:02:05.000 Like, there's so many people thinking along these lines.
01:02:09.000 Like, if we could just...
01:02:10.000 We have innovations and technologies moving forward, and we have regulatory structures and governments holding it back.
01:02:17.000 And the world can't be held back.
01:02:19.000 The world has to move forward.
01:02:20.000 You don't want to overthrow governments.
01:02:22.000 That's violent.
01:02:23.000 You want to innovate and compete with and embarrass governments the way, you know, Singapore and Hong Kong and the Isle of Man have done.
01:02:33.000 Well on a small scale when you see the certain laws that are in place that are very restrictive and they don't make sense and then you see states that take chances like Colorado with their medical marijuana practices or rather legal marijuana where they're making untold amounts of money now I mean far past what they projected and now other countries are starting to look at the revenue that's being brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue And they're saying,
01:03:00.000 you know what?
01:03:01.000 Why would we avoid this?
01:03:02.000 This is crazy.
01:03:03.000 What are we seeing as far as violence?
01:03:05.000 We're seeing a drop in violent crime.
01:03:06.000 What are we seeing as far as drunk driving and driving accidents?
01:03:09.000 We're seeing record lows.
01:03:12.000 Record lows as far as traffic fatalities and drunk driving.
01:03:18.000 That's exactly what happens.
01:03:19.000 Someone comes along and says, listen, the laws that are in place, they don't make any sense.
01:03:23.000 The structure that's in place, it's antiquated, it's archaic, and it doesn't match up with what we know about medicine, what we know about physiology, what we know about life.
01:03:32.000 Let's change it.
01:03:33.000 So they're changing it, you're seeing the benefits, and now all these other states are now first switching to medical marijuana and projecting legalized marijuana all throughout the entire country.
01:03:42.000 It's the same sort of a situation.
01:03:44.000 It's these archaic, very restrictive laws that don't make any sense, and there's no competition.
01:03:50.000 Because of the monopoly of government, these laws are in place, and people say, well, you could vote them out. 0.96
01:03:54.000 Do you know how much fucking money is spent keeping those laws in place? 0.85
01:03:59.000 Do 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? 0.98
01:04:10.000 If you could have one state, just one state, you know, let's say South Dakota says, you know what, we're not so happy with the way things work.
01:04:18.000 What we're going to do is we're going to open up South Dakota to a complete utopian society.
01:04:23.000 We're going to just start from scratch.
01:04:25.000 Instead of seasteading, why don't you come over to South Dakota and try rebuilding society over here.
01:04:31.000 Would you be interested in something like that?
01:04:33.000 Or do you think the only way to do this is to do it in the ocean?
01:04:37.000 I ran my first podcast last week and I interviewed Zachary Caceres.
01:04:42.000 Welcome to the club.
01:04:43.000 You've interviewed him?
01:04:44.000 No.
01:04:44.000 Welcome to the podcast club.
01:04:45.000 Yeah.
01:04:46.000 Your first one.
01:04:47.000 Your first one.
01:04:48.000 You got in there.
01:04:49.000 And it was a marvelous interview.
01:04:50.000 He's a fascinating dude and he founded the Startup Cities Institute.
01:04:56.000 Now, special economic zones, there's actually thousands of them all over the world.
01:04:59.000 There's places like India, South America, China, are all like, yeah, it's embarrassing to be in a country that's not performing well.
01:05:06.000 Let's create special little zones where we can start over with new rules.
01:05:10.000 And there's, you know, they're called free cities, they're called free ports.
01:05:14.000 Zach 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.
01:05:30.000 And our whole discussion was, which is a bigger challenge?
01:05:34.000 The engineering challenge of building something on the sea or the challenge of working at a deal with existing governments?
01:05:44.000 Right.
01:05:54.000 I think we're good to go.
01:06:13.000 And the reason we have to argue about politics is because it's not innovating and everyone is frustrated.
01:06:19.000 And the more startup societies we can create, the more we'll empower innovators to come up with ideas we haven't thought of.
01:06:28.000 The best solutions always come from outside our heads.
01:06:32.000 So I'm a big supporter of startup cities.
01:06:35.000 Startup cities, people are a big supporter of seasteading.
01:06:39.000 And, you know, may the best societies win.
01:06:42.000 But your idea is primarily to build it in the ocean.
01:06:46.000 And if you do build in the ocean, what are the potential natural disaster worries you have to worry about?
01:06:52.000 If you don't have to worry about waves, you do have to worry about things like hurricanes and things like that, right?
01:06:57.000 Would you have to engineer the buildings very specifically to deal with tropical storms and things along those lines?
01:07:04.000 Seasteads are mobile.
01:07:06.000 The people that are sitting ducks in the face of a hurricane is anyone that's like nailed to a coastal nation. 0.93
01:07:14.000 All the megacities in the world are springing up along the coast, and many of them are susceptible to hurricanes.
01:07:20.000 If you're a seastead, you know, I grew up in the East Coast.
01:07:23.000 I was subjected to a few hurricanes.
01:07:25.000 You know about them a few days before they come.
01:07:27.000 And then it's batten down the hatches, get in the basement, you know, whatever you have to do.
01:07:31.000 If you're a seastead, you could potentially just move out of the way, as boats do.
01:07:35.000 So you would just...
01:07:37.000 I mean, there's some of them that are just massive, though.
01:07:40.000 I mean, there's like Katrina.
01:07:42.000 I mean, how many states was Katrina?
01:07:44.000 How many states wide was Katrina before it hit?
01:07:46.000 It was enormous, right?
01:07:47.000 It was enormous.
01:07:48.000 And I'm curious to know...
01:07:52.000 How much lead time do people have in the warning of that?
01:07:57.000 You're leading me to talk about, you know, I have to get bigger and bigger.
01:08:00.000 Seasteading is a big subject.
01:08:02.000 And the thing I want to tell you about now is, we'll start with the fact that hurricanes don't cross the equator.
01:08:08.000 A lot of people don't know that.
01:08:11.000 There's never been evidence of a hurricane crossing the equator.
01:08:14.000 You mean south to north?
01:08:15.000 Either way.
01:08:16.000 You mean like go along the vertical axis of the equator or go above it?
01:08:20.000 Go above the equator or go below the equator.
01:08:22.000 Really?
01:08:23.000 Yeah.
01:08:23.000 Why is that?
01:08:24.000 I don't know.
01:08:25.000 The Cholirolis forks?
01:08:26.000 I have no idea.
01:08:28.000 Huh.
01:08:29.000 So there's this guy, Patrick Takahashi, who's like a biochemical engineer from Hawaii, and numerous people like that are pushing forward this technology called OTEC, O-T-E-C. And it's basically ocean thermal energy conversion.
01:08:45.000 And it basically takes advantage of the fact that the surface of a tropical ocean is very warm.
01:08:51.000 And a thousand feet down, it's very cold.
01:08:54.000 And you get like a huge temperature differential, which can drive a gigantic steam engine and basically use the ocean itself as a solar panel.
01:09:13.000 I think?
01:09:26.000 It was part of the oil crisis.
01:09:28.000 And then soon after that, when oil places fell, OTEC was abandoned.
01:09:32.000 No more OTEC plants were built.
01:09:34.000 Now, there's whole companies involved with building OTEC. They're going to build one off the coast of China.
01:09:40.000 Numerous island nations have commissioned OTEC. O-Tech plants to be built off their coasts.
01:09:46.000 The Bahamas is going to build two.
01:09:48.000 So why did I go to this?
01:09:50.000 We're talking about hurricanes.
01:09:51.000 Across the equator.
01:09:52.000 Yeah, so the best place to build these gigantic O-Tech plants is on the equator.
01:10:00.000 Because that's where the surface water is warmest.
01:10:03.000 And as an added benefit, you're safe from hurricanes for the most part.
01:10:07.000 So the equator itself, how wide is the equator?
01:10:11.000 Like, what's considered the equator?
01:10:13.000 I mean, it's not a line, right?
01:10:15.000 Yeah, it's where, you know, the Earth spins on its axis.
01:10:20.000 And it's where it's basically the Earth that spends the most time closest to the Sun.
01:10:26.000 There must be a height, though, right?
01:10:29.000 Yeah, that's a good question.
01:10:30.000 It's funny, I was just at the equator when I went to the Galapagos Islands on my little trip, and I don't think there's an official width of the equator.
01:10:40.000 I have no idea.
01:10:41.000 Or height.
01:10:42.000 It seems like there should be.
01:10:43.000 Yeah, I don't know.
01:10:44.000 I think it's just the line where the Earth spends the most time closest to the sun.
01:10:49.000 You know, everywhere else we have seasons because the Earth is on a wobble.
01:10:52.000 The internet says it has length, no width or depth.
01:10:56.000 That makes sense.
01:10:57.000 So it's a line.
01:10:57.000 It's just a very fine line with no height at all.
01:11:00.000 It's an abstraction.
01:11:02.000 How strange.
01:11:03.000 So you'd have to, like, be on that line. 0.98
01:11:06.000 But if you went up too high, what if, like, the northern tip of your city gets fucked by a hurricane? 0.89
01:11:11.000 I mean, that could happen because a lot of, you know, a lot of hurricanes are caused by, you know, very warm water. 0.88
01:11:17.000 But it seems so bizarre that it would not cross.
01:11:19.000 Yeah, it, like, starts, you know, sort of near the equator and then it moves either north or south.
01:11:24.000 Wow.
01:11:24.000 That's so weird.
01:11:26.000 Yeah, and I don't understand why.
01:11:29.000 It's one of those things I've been taught by the numerous aquapaneurs I've spoken to.
01:11:34.000 The 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.
01:11:46.000 You know, on the website, we have this thing called the Eight Great Moral Imperatives of Seasteading.
01:11:50.000 And each of them, it's a little video thing that I made to try to introduce people to the key ideas.
01:11:55.000 Each video is like five minutes long.
01:11:57.000 And each of them features an aquapreneur that didn't even know about the other guys, but hears about seasteading and comes to us with, I have an idea for 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,
01:12:13.000 blah, blah, blah.
01:12:13.000 And then we have another guy, you know, one of my favorites is Neil Sims, who runs the Valilla Research Project.
01:12:22.000 He has fish cages that school with the moving fish.
01:12:28.000 So he literally...
01:12:30.000 Let's see if I can describe this to you.
01:12:32.000 Think of the Hawaiian Islands as rocks in a stream.
01:12:36.000 And as the ocean comes by the islands, it creates little eddies behind these islands, like a little leaf floating around.
01:12:43.000 So he's got these circular fish cages where he keeps the fish inside them.
01:12:47.000 So the fish just kind of school in a circle, and the cages move with the schooling fish around in a circle, and he has a GPS on the cage.
01:12:56.000 So the fish are out there.
01:12:58.000 There's no environmental or negligible, unmeasurable environmental impact.
01:13:02.000 The fish are on the deep sea living as if they're wild.
01:13:06.000 These are crazy ideas, but they require being out in the place where there's no government jurisdiction for the most part.
01:13:15.000 I mean, off the coast of Hawaiian Islands, there is some government jurisdiction.
01:13:18.000 But 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.
01:13:31.000 Is the idea of managing people just an archaic idea?
01:13:34.000 And 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?
01:13:50.000 Or to really regulate, especially when it comes to things like innovation, when it comes to...
01:13:55.000 I mean, are regulations, in fact...
01:14:01.000 The creativity of 7 billion people is unpredictable, and there's always something new coming, especially as a seasteader where people come to me and tell me about things they could use seasteading for.
01:14:10.000 I'm like, I had no idea.
01:14:11.000 I can't believe you're telling me this.
01:14:13.000 This is very exciting.
01:14:13.000 So I've had to embrace my humility that I don't understand what's coming.
01:14:18.000 So people are afraid.
01:14:19.000 People want regulations.
01:14:39.000 And, you know, those Moore laws don't keep pace with Moore's Law, to make a pun.
01:14:44.000 I mean, we have thousands, tens of thousands of regulations written in the 70s that are still constraining innovation.
01:14:52.000 And those people were not capable of predicting innovations that were going to come in the 21st century.
01:14:58.000 So if you want regulations, you need them as organic and dynamic as the industries they regulate.
01:15:04.000 Right, but how does that work?
01:15:06.000 I 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,
01:15:23.000 most people are just not qualified to understand them.
01:15:26.000 They just don't know Right. 0.99
01:15:44.000 I mean, holy shit, you're dealing with a completely different animal. 1.00
01:15:46.000 One of them is essentially a computer that could run your whole life and check your heart rate and do all kinds of nutty shit. 1.00
01:15:53.000 Locate, you know, it's got a GPS on it and can tell you where to go, can navigate you.
01:15:58.000 And the other one was just simply a way to call people.
01:16:01.000 Right.
01:16:01.000 And the humility we have to embrace is we don't know.
01:16:05.000 We don't know how to regulate the future.
01:16:08.000 And so if you confront the fact there is no human being that can pre-regulate the innovations that are happening in a decade, you realize that the way to solve these problems is not to simply create a permanent monopoly that writes way more laws than it allows to go away.
01:16:27.000 You need to break up those monopolies. 0.74
01:16:30.000 You need competing jurisdictions I think of it as fluidly overlapping a market of developing regulations on the ocean.
01:16:46.000 Initiated by the industries, and we see this in lots of other industries where regulations develop over time from within.
01:16:54.000 A lot of people don't know that a lot of the things we take for granted, aspirin, knee operations, lots of heart surgeries, they just came from the ground, from doctors experimenting.
01:17:06.000 So every country goes through this cycle.
01:17:09.000 It's such a constant cycle that it's actually called, what is it called?
01:17:14.000 Cardwell's Law?
01:17:14.000 There's like an official name for it.
01:17:16.000 That you start out with these blossoming industries, I think?
01:17:39.000 The regulations just accumulate and accumulate and none of them ever go away.
01:17:43.000 So 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.
01:17:55.000 And you end up killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
01:17:57.000 But essentially, the balancing act is between safety and innovation, right?
01:18:02.000 That's the balancing act, especially when you talk about things like thalidomide.
01:18:06.000 How do you sort of manage that?
01:18:10.000 How do you manage the balancing act of safety?
01:18:13.000 And innovation.
01:18:14.000 Because in terms of especially some untested medical procedure, like I have a friend who got a stroke from Vioxx, some arthritis medication.
01:18:26.000 And he was a young guy, got a stroke.
01:18:29.000 Wow.
01:18:30.000 It's pretty crazy.
01:18:31.000 And they pulled it off the market, and now it's illegal, and all those lawsuits and all this jazz.
01:18:35.000 But...
01:18:36.000 What do you do to ensure that one of those things, the most beneficial, whether it's like the most beneficial innovative technology arises, or do you err on the side of caution at all costs and make sure that no one becomes a victim of some emerging idea that hasn't been vetted out yet?
01:18:57.000 Because we have a monopoly, they err strongly on the side of the precautionary principle.
01:19:02.000 So the regulators are in an impossible position.
01:19:06.000 They have no way of evaluating all the new stuff that comes online.
01:19:10.000 They just don't have the resources.
01:19:12.000 So they have to do it in consultation with the dominant industries, who invariably lean them towards, you know, don't allow this innovation through.
01:19:21.000 What if a disaster happens?
01:19:22.000 And regulators are blamed for disasters, and they don't get credit for all the innovations that come through.
01:19:27.000 But on the flip side, aren't the people that are coming up with these innovations, wouldn't they try to influence them to any regulatory body to let them slide through because these would be extremely profitable?
01:19:39.000 And wouldn't they say, hey, you know, this is all safe when maybe in fact it hasn't?
01:19:43.000 And 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?
01:19:53.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:19:53.000 Where 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.
01:20:06.000 Yeah. 0.98
01:20:06.000 I was like, what the fuck is going on? 0.98
01:20:08.000 Like, what'd you do? 0.99
01:20:08.000 Oh, I'm on Fen-Fen. 0.99
01:20:11.000 Six months later, heart problems, all these health issues.
01:20:15.000 Right.
01:20:15.000 She balloons up again.
01:20:16.000 I know someone on FinFin, too.
01:20:18.000 It was crazy.
01:20:19.000 Yeah.
01:20:20.000 But we should confront the fact, like, our minds always go to this bad story.
01:20:25.000 And so we see the thalidomide baby from the 60s.
01:20:29.000 But we don't see the tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, and some estimate even more than that, that have died as the result of medical innovations that are available Often in other countries and are already approved that are not approved, say, in the United States.
01:20:44.000 Right.
01:20:45.000 So we don't need to, you and I are not going to agree on a balancing act and impose it on the world, but we should recognize that there's a cycle, that it starts out being protective and then it becomes overprotective and then it prevents and quashes innovation.
01:21:00.000 And when it's a monopoly, it never innovates, it never stops writing new rules.
01:21:06.000 And 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.
01:21:15.000 And that is the conservative estimate.
01:21:17.000 Ten years?
01:21:18.000 Yeah, ten years.
01:21:20.000 So all sorts of new players innovating in interesting spaces, like for instance in stem cells, are not able to compete.
01:21:29.000 So we don't get the innovations that they have.
01:21:32.000 So there should be some regulation.
01:21:34.000 There should be something.
01:21:35.000 It shouldn't just be the market decides.
01:21:37.000 It shouldn't just be, you know, when people start dying, then people stop using it, and now we know.
01:21:43.000 It can't be that, right?
01:21:44.000 I mean, the more time goes by, the more I'm impressed with the power of the market to regulate itself.
01:21:50.000 But in terms of medical things, I mean, people will become victims.
01:21:54.000 I mean, the market will regulate itself, but are you comfortable making that distinction?
01:22:01.000 I think right now we're victims of being denied the innovations that are available that are held up, or preventing innovators from discovering new things.
01:22:16.000 The same reason you put out a product that isn't poison and you put effort into your podcast at the beginning to assure people, I want to build a relationship with you and if you don't like it, I'm going to give you your money back.
01:22:27.000 That's a kind of regulation.
01:22:29.000 You're incentivized to provide a good service.
01:22:32.000 If you put something out to kill somebody, you're in a lot of trouble.
01:22:36.000 And I think people underestimate the power of that kind of market force to incentivize people to not poison their patients.
01:22:44.000 I agree with you, but then even with all the regulation in place, you still have this Dr. Oz type situation.
01:22:50.000 You still have someone who's profiting off of something that doesn't do jack shit and is on television calling it a miracle. 0.81
01:22:57.000 Yeah. 0.50
01:22:58.000 I've been waiting for Dr. Oz to go down, and I'd be curious which came first.
01:23:04.000 Was a journalist exposing him, and then governments came in and slapped him down?
01:23:13.000 I don't know what happened.
01:23:14.000 I mean, our idea is always that...
01:23:15.000 It's doctors.
01:23:16.000 It was actually a medical student that chased it down.
01:23:20.000 There was a whole article about it that was on...
01:23:23.000 Here, I'll pull it up.
01:23:24.000 Medical student...
01:23:26.000 So that, if that's true, that's an example of a market regulation that occurred.
01:23:31.000 Right, but how many people got fleeced before that happened?
01:23:33.000 Meet the medical student who wants to bring down Dr. Oz.
01:23:36.000 This is the guy who, his name is Benjamin Mazur. 0.98
01:23:42.000 And Benjamin Mazur is the student that saw, I guess, he was watching all these different claims and he's like, this is all horseshit. 0.91
01:23:50.000 So he chased it down.
01:23:53.000 Yeah.
01:23:54.000 And Dr. Oz, I mean, he's a good example of the point I'm trying to make.
01:23:58.000 I mean, he's in a regulatory structure.
01:23:59.000 He's completely ensconced.
01:24:01.000 And what he was doing wasn't stopped.
01:24:03.000 It took someone, you know, coming from the ground up and analyzing it himself, probably a competitor, and exposing him as a fraud.
01:24:13.000 I don't know if it's hurt his career, but I'm sure people are reacting against him.
01:24:18.000 This is a good thing.
01:24:19.000 So we're describing the essence of a market regulation right here.
01:24:25.000 Has anyone from the government come in and fined Dr. Oz?
01:24:28.000 Has he been imprisoned?
01:24:29.000 Well, I know he was brought in front of Congress.
01:24:31.000 Aha! 0.94
01:24:32.000 Yeah, it was a big story.
01:24:35.000 It was all over the news.
01:24:36.000 But he was on that...
01:24:39.000 What's that show?
01:24:40.000 The new HBO show?
01:24:41.000 The Gentleman with the Glasses?
01:24:43.000 John Oliver.
01:24:44.000 Yeah.
01:24:45.000 John Oliver did a whole piece on Dr. Oz and Dr. Oz being brought in front of Congress and Dr. Oz saying one thing on his television show and then saying completely contradictory.
01:24:57.000 Dr. Oz grilled in Congress amidst weight loss products he touts don't pass scientific muster.
01:25:04.000 So we're looking at examples of market regulation.
01:25:09.000 Mm-hmm.
01:25:10.000 I'm not even going to take a hard stance that we don't need any regulations by a central authority.
01:25:18.000 I'm not even going to take a hard stance on that.
01:25:19.000 I'm asking people to look at the power of these kind of things to regulate itself and the problem with Just accumulating thousands and thousands of rules that prevent anyone from trying something new.
01:25:32.000 And that's the situation we're in.
01:25:34.000 Yeah, I mean, I'm not a big government guy. 0.69
01:25:37.000 I'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.
01:25:49.000 And it's like, how do you protect citizens from things that they're not entirely educated in?
01:25:54.000 What 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?
01:26:07.000 There's that out there.
01:26:08.000 How do you deal with that in this seasteading world?
01:26:12.000 And how do you keep order?
01:26:15.000 Well, it's the same reason I don't put out a book with no words in it, and you don't put out a podcast with just a bunch of farts.
01:26:23.000 Do you see what I'm saying?
01:26:27.000 Yeah, I mean, we don't have monopoly control over what we do.
01:26:31.000 There's other authors competing to get you to read their books.
01:26:34.000 There's other podcasters competing to get me to listen to them, and I listen to you instead.
01:26:41.000 Seasteading is not about, here's the list of rules we're going to impose on the ocean.
01:26:46.000 It's confronting human nature. 0.96
01:26:48.000 And there's always potential for fuckery. 1.00
01:26:50.000 People do shitty things. 0.98
01:26:51.000 And the way to solve that problem is not to just take some of those shitty people and give them absolute power over everybody else. 0.83
01:26:57.000 And then they promise to make everyone behave better.
01:27:00.000 I think governments will evolve and innovations will occur if there's decentralized power among multiple people who can only profit and be selfish by finding ways to serve and please each other.
01:27:13.000 And that includes producing regulations by which we behave.
01:27:17.000 That's fascinating.
01:27:18.000 So what you're essentially doing is you're providing a method for new civilizations to innovate.
01:27:27.000 You're not proposing any sort of guidelines.
01:27:29.000 You're not proposing any sort of...
01:27:32.000 New structure for government, new structure for finances.
01:27:37.000 What you're doing is you're sort of opening up the door and allowing a wide variety of people to come through and allow the best ideas to float to the top.
01:27:49.000 Yeah.
01:27:50.000 Seasteading is not about seizing power from your political opponents.
01:27:53.000 It's about ceding power to your political opponents to try their ideas elsewhere, to see if they can create something that will surprise you.
01:28:01.000 And you can laugh at the fiascos if you want. 1.00
01:28:04.000 But the more experiments, the more likely we are to discover solutions.
01:28:08.000 And that's the truth of politics.
01:28:12.000 You know, society is more complex than this microphone.
01:28:15.000 I can't design this microphone.
01:28:18.000 But I think I can design society through my political opinions.
01:28:22.000 And the only tool I have to do that is force.
01:28:24.000 So that forces me to fight over who's going to control the government to force other people who disagree with me to do what I want.
01:28:31.000 I don't think anyone knows how to run society.
01:28:34.000 I think the solutions to humanity's deepest challenges are discovered.
01:28:40.000 And they're discovered by lots of people trying lots of crazy ideas.
01:28:43.000 Well, I think one of the big issues in society is what I call the quantity of variables, is that when you have a very small group of people, the variables are not that large, and you can handle 20 people.
01:28:56.000 If we had a relationship with 19 other folks and we were all living together on a large patch of land that had a good amount of natural resources where no one had to worry about starving and death, why someone else lived high on the hog, if everyone was even with the distribution of natural resources,
01:29:14.000 Wouldn't be that hard.
01:29:15.000 There wouldn't be a lot of conflict.
01:29:17.000 The real conflict comes when you have a quantity of variables, when you have 350 million people, and then you have things like immigration, you have things like the stock market, you have things like...
01:29:32.000 Weird things that go down in terms of loans, in terms of credit cards.
01:29:39.000 There's so many variables.
01:29:41.000 That's when it becomes incredibly difficult to manage a society, when no one person can be aware of all the variables.
01:29:49.000 The quantity of variables gets outside of the realm of comprehension.
01:29:52.000 Yes.
01:29:53.000 And everything that works out well for us is outside the realm of comprehension.
01:29:57.000 I could not possibly make this table or that water bottle or that computer.
01:30:01.000 You could make this table.
01:30:02.000 I know the dude who made it.
01:30:03.000 It's not that hard.
01:30:04.000 Okay.
01:30:04.000 Well, I wouldn't know where to get the wood.
01:30:06.000 I wouldn't know how to make the varnish.
01:30:08.000 There's no varnish.
01:30:09.000 This is raw.
01:30:09.000 That's why it's got coffee stains.
01:30:11.000 Yeah, you could figure this out.
01:30:13.000 But I know what you're saying.
01:30:14.000 You wouldn't be able to make the microphone.
01:30:16.000 Yes.
01:30:16.000 Table.
01:30:17.000 I think you could make the table.
01:30:18.000 I couldn't make the microphone.
01:30:19.000 You're a smart dude.
01:30:20.000 And I appreciate how the solutions emerge.
01:30:25.000 They're not, you know, imposed by somebody.
01:30:27.000 They emerge from the kind of global ecology of voluntary transactions that produces solutions.
01:30:34.000 And the more people you have trying different things, the more peacefully they can compete in the market, the more likely these solutions are to emerge.
01:30:42.000 And we need to update the governance, the technology of governance, just like other technologies.
01:30:48.000 And we can't do that through monopolies.
01:30:50.000 Is this something that you do full-time?
01:30:53.000 I do it full-time.
01:30:54.000 You're involved in seasteading full-time?
01:30:56.000 Yes, and it's the first real job I've ever had.
01:30:59.000 So I've always been a writer.
01:31:01.000 I tell stories.
01:31:02.000 I started out as a novelist.
01:31:03.000 I eventually became a science writer.
01:31:05.000 Once I was captivated by the seasteading story, once I met the people I call aquapreneurs with all their ideas, I realized this is the most important story I could possibly tell.
01:31:17.000 So I've written the book.
01:31:19.000 It's going to come out next year about seasteading.
01:31:22.000 But I became such a sea-vangelist.
01:31:25.000 I talked about it so much.
01:31:26.000 You have so many of those.
01:31:28.000 Blue jobs, sea-vangelist, aquapreneurs. 0.99
01:31:33.000 Yeah, I'm a professional bullshit artist. 1.00
01:31:35.000 The nerds in Silicon Valley need me to sell their shit to real people. 1.00
01:31:41.000 So they kind of brought me on to the Seasteading Institute to talk about seasteading. 0.99
01:31:46.000 They were smart enough to see that I'm driven by it and I'm passionate about it.
01:31:52.000 And where does your money come from, if you don't mind me asking?
01:31:54.000 Well, now I'm working for a non-profit.
01:31:57.000 And I'm a paid speaker.
01:32:00.000 The non-profit is Seasteading?
01:32:02.000 The Seasteading Institute, which was founded by Peter Thiel and Patry Friedman.
01:32:05.000 So you get paid to evangelize seasteading, essentially?
01:32:09.000 I get paid to do lots of things with regard to the non-profit.
01:32:15.000 And the money comes from donations?
01:32:17.000 The money comes from donations.
01:32:18.000 So we have over a thousand donors or a thousand people who have donated.
01:32:24.000 And we have hundreds of volunteers that have gotten involved.
01:32:28.000 And we have probably 85 ambassadors.
01:32:32.000 I'm getting so many ambassador applications right now, I can't keep up with them.
01:32:36.000 I want to be an ambassador.
01:32:37.000 Yeah, you should serve on our board or something.
01:32:42.000 So imagine a regular middle-class person who donates money to the Seasteading Institute.
01:32:49.000 I mean, people get infected with this idea.
01:32:52.000 They 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.
01:33:02.000 We just don't have numerous people experimenting with new ideas.
01:33:08.000 We 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.
01:33:24.000 So, explain to me how this works.
01:33:26.000 Like, someone says, I think Seasteading is a good idea.
01:33:30.000 Is there a Kickstarter page?
01:33:32.000 Do you have a PayPal link?
01:33:35.000 I mean, how does someone donate to this where it winds up being your income?
01:33:40.000 We have a donation page on the website.
01:33:43.000 Every time we send out our newsletter to our fans, we put a little donation link there.
01:33:47.000 We accept Bitcoin.
01:33:49.000 It's pretty easy to donate to the Seasteading Institute if that's what you want to do.
01:33:53.000 If you go to the website and are inspired by it.
01:33:56.000 And what is the website?
01:33:57.000 Seasteading.org.
01:33:59.000 And, you know, I strongly recommend checking out the Eight Great Moral Imperatives, which is one of the problems the Seasteading Institute has had is that it's been very technical and it's talking to, you know, aquatic engineers and there's legal scholars talking about stuff.
01:34:13.000 And people go and they're kind of overwhelmed by the information.
01:34:16.000 And they don't know where to start.
01:34:18.000 So I've tried to popularize the idea and create, you know, eight little videos explaining just the basic angles from which people are approaching seasteading to solve global challenges that people care about.
01:34:31.000 So the eight great moral imperatives you have as a video on seasteading.
01:34:36.000 And what is, it's only a minute, right?
01:34:38.000 Each one is probably about five minutes on average.
01:34:41.000 The introduction is a minute.
01:34:43.000 The introduction is a minute.
01:34:44.000 And then you can click on any of the eight.
01:34:46.000 And it's a list of things.
01:34:48.000 If you name me something you care about, I can tell you about an aquapreneur that's trying to solve that problem.
01:34:54.000 Well, let's click on the link, Jamie.
01:34:56.000 Go to the eight great moral imperatives, and let's just play the introduction.
01:35:00.000 If you just Google the eight great moral imperatives, it'll show up.
01:35:04.000 It's the first link, but it's on seasteading.org, and there is a 53-second video.
01:35:10.000 That will sort of introduce this idea.
01:35:15.000 Got it?
01:35:17.000 Yes.
01:35:19.000 That is the issue, right?
01:35:20.000 Moral imperatives.
01:35:21.000 That is the issue.
01:35:23.000 We'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.
01:35:34.000 Let's hear this.
01:35:35.000 When we listen to the sea, we know what our moral imperatives are.
01:35:42.000 Feed the hungry.
01:35:43.000 Enrich the poor.
01:35:45.000 Cure the sick.
01:35:47.000 Clean the atmosphere.
01:35:49.000 Restore the oceans.
01:35:51.000 Live in balance with nature.
01:35:54.000 Power civilization sustainably.
01:35:57.000 Stop fighting.
01:35:58.000 I want to tell you about eight aquapreneurs who plan to fulfill these moral imperatives by building floating cities on the sea.
01:36:08.000 Click on the issue you care about below, and maybe we can convince you to join our growing seasteading community.
01:36:18.000 What is the timeline on implementing this sort of a thing?
01:36:23.000 Like, if you had to be realistic and you had to make an estimate as to how long between now and when there really is a floating civilization.
01:36:35.000 I've enjoyed...
01:36:36.000 Well, one way you can think about it is...
01:36:40.000 When do we have to get one of these things going?
01:36:42.000 And I was very impressed that the aquapreneurs I interviewed, like six of them independently cited 2050. As a time where this is when we're going to run out of fresh water.
01:36:54.000 This is when we're going to run out of phosphate.
01:36:56.000 This is when we're going to reach peak oil.
01:36:58.000 You know, whatever people say.
01:36:59.000 And, you know, I'm not qualified to judge whether 2050 really is a deadline for humanity, like a pinch point in several key commodities humanity needs to survive.
01:37:10.000 So say we have no choice but to find solutions to global problems by 2050. And say I'm saying we can solve these problems by engaging the power of the sea.
01:37:20.000 So that's the timeline.
01:37:22.000 So I think, I hope by 2020, we'll have a demonstration, Seastead, within the territorial waters of a host nation.
01:37:31.000 And if we can hire some local people, create some blue jobs, absorb coastal runoff, and turn that into algae, That'll attract more ideas.
01:37:43.000 I'm hoping maybe, you know, you can imagine 2035, you have something on the deeper ocean, people come up with a breakwater.
01:37:51.000 We have people contacting us right now about you can create a solid ice breakwater to protect a city.
01:37:57.000 Solid ice?
01:37:58.000 Yeah.
01:37:59.000 It would have to be in an incredibly cold environment, no?
01:38:01.000 Apparently not.
01:38:02.000 Apparently you can get one in the tropical oceans.
01:38:03.000 I'm not even going to go into detail on this.
01:38:05.000 I'm using this as an example of Of qualified engineers that are coming to us with ideas for how to do this on the ocean.
01:38:12.000 So you would use solar power to power some sort of a freezing element?
01:38:18.000 No, apparently, I'll have to point you to his proposal.
01:38:23.000 I mean, apparently ice can sit for a very long time if it's solid enough, even in tropical waters.
01:38:29.000 But whatever.
01:38:30.000 That's just one idea.
01:38:31.000 I like the OTEC idea, using the ocean as a solar panel to replace fossil fuels.
01:38:37.000 A key idea to think about ocean crops So something to think about.
01:38:43.000 70% of the world's fresh water is used for agriculture.
01:38:47.000 Between like a quarter and a half of all land is used for agriculture.
01:38:51.000 We've depleted the topsoil.
01:38:53.000 We're using up the fresh water.
01:38:54.000 Populations are going up.
01:38:56.000 We're facing a water crisis by 2050. Then you think about the fact that algae crops, sea farms require no fresh water whatsoever.
01:39:06.000 They require no soil whatsoever.
01:39:08.000 And we haven't actually reached peak phosphate.
01:39:11.000 We've just taken it out of the soil and dumped it into the oceans.
01:39:15.000 Well, what absorbs all these nutrients out of the oceans?
01:39:19.000 Well, algae farms.
01:39:22.000 So we can park...
01:39:24.000 A lot of people are proposing that we park algae farms around the dead zones off the coasts of various cities in the world, absorb all that nutrient and carbon pollution, turn it into food and fuel over the long haul.
01:39:37.000 Wouldn't the problem be heavy metals, though?
01:39:40.000 Heavy metals is a problem.
01:39:42.000 You would be feeding that to people.
01:39:45.000 You can't extract that.
01:39:46.000 Well, you can extract it.
01:39:47.000 Apparently, there's people trying things with muscles and various natural organisms that remove these things from...
01:39:56.000 You know, it's weird how many, like, bacteria and small little creatures process this stuff.
01:40:01.000 Right.
01:40:02.000 And people are talking about, we need to farm on that level.
01:40:04.000 We need to farm on these tiny little levels. 0.92
01:40:05.000 So you would get some sort of organisms that take out the heavy metals, and then the other organisms would eat the carbon.
01:40:12.000 Right.
01:40:13.000 And turn that into fuel. 0.96
01:40:14.000 Well, people are trying to create these cyclical little systems.
01:40:19.000 They're already doing it on a small scale, involving mussels that filter feeders with this kind of fish, with this kind of algae.
01:40:30.000 Algae haven't undergone all the artificial selection that makes wheat, corn, and soy so productive, and yet algae is a lot healthier.
01:40:38.000 And a lot of people react and they say, ugh, algae, I don't want to eat that.
01:40:41.000 But most people don't know that algae is already in most of the foods we eat.
01:40:46.000 It's a fertilizer that nourishes the land crops we use.
01:40:50.000 It's in toothpaste.
01:40:51.000 It's in beer.
01:40:53.000 It's in ice cream.
01:40:54.000 You know, carrageenan and agar.
01:40:57.000 I don't even know how to pronounce all these aspects.
01:40:58.000 And then seaweed as well.
01:41:00.000 Seaweed is huge.
01:41:02.000 And it's very healthy.
01:41:04.000 And it's very healthy.
01:41:05.000 It's probably the healthiest plant in the world.
01:41:08.000 It has all the amino acids, depending on the species.
01:41:12.000 It has a lot of fiber.
01:41:14.000 You know, fish don't synthesize their own omega-3s.
01:41:17.000 They get it by eating algae.
01:41:19.000 And when you consider that, you know, corn was this tiny little ugly thing that no one wanted to eat.
01:41:25.000 Wheat is this, if you showed someone a wheat stalk, they'd say, I don't want to eat that.
01:41:29.000 But just a few generations of artificial selection, you can create all this marvelous stuff we eat.
01:41:36.000 We can do the same thing with algae that we're already using in our foods.
01:41:41.000 And the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation...
01:41:45.000 Helped Ricardo Radulovich, the founder of the Sea Gardens Project.
01:41:49.000 He's big on creating.
01:41:51.000 He wants to create seaweed farms on the sea.
01:41:53.000 He mixed seaweed flour with wheat flour, sending it to the developing world.
01:42:01.000 It does a lot for malnutrition among those people.
01:42:04.000 There's so many ways you can use the healthier plants of the sea to feed people.
01:42:11.000 And you don't need to use fresh water.
01:42:14.000 So a lot of people say agriculture needs to become aquaculture, and we can give Kansas back to the songbirds.
01:42:23.000 That's funny.
01:42:25.000 It's a fascinating idea, the idea of seasteading, and it's also fascinating to try to reverse the process that we've already begun.
01:42:35.000 As far as destroying the oceans, as far as the amount of pollution that we're leaking into the oceans, if that could actually benefit some life forms in some sort of a way, and then we could sort of turn that back around and get something out of it in that way.
01:42:48.000 Yeah, I mean, algae's been the keystone of the global carbon cycle, you know, for three and a half billion years.
01:42:53.000 You know, it knows what it's doing, and we've been working against the carbon cycle and just like screwing up the whole planet.
01:43:00.000 We can turn that wheel back around if we base our food on the ocean.
01:43:04.000 I 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.
01:43:16.000 Yes.
01:43:16.000 So Patrick Takahashi and others proposed that for the OTEC-supported plant ships, that you might have to seed some iron.
01:43:24.000 I mean, there's ways this have to be tweaked.
01:43:29.000 Yeah.
01:43:44.000 And the idea is we need to open up this frontier for people to experiment on.
01:43:48.000 We need to allow the ocean to let civilization – we need to base civilization on the ocean.
01:43:57.000 Because of the fact that so much of it is such a resource?
01:44:00.000 The ocean, you know, most of the oxygen comes from the ocean.
01:44:05.000 Life comes from the ocean.
01:44:06.000 Most of the oxygen comes from the ocean as far as like, you mean like algae and seaweed and things like that?
01:44:14.000 Yeah, I mean, seaweed forests make the world's rainforest look like potted plants, is what I always say.
01:44:19.000 When you consider like the amount of carbon they store, the amount of, you know, oxygen they produce.
01:44:27.000 Yeah.
01:44:28.000 Wow.
01:44:29.000 I had no idea.
01:44:30.000 I always assumed it was just forests.
01:44:32.000 No, it's mostly ocean crops that keep the world in balance.
01:44:37.000 And the more you forest the oceans with, say, seaweed crops, the more carbon, to build their biomass, they have to pull this carbon and nutrient out of the water, which lowers the acidity of the ocean,
01:44:52.000 which is exactly what we need to do.
01:44:55.000 The more carbon you pull out of the ocean, the more carbon the oceans pulls out of the air.
01:45:02.000 So you could reverse the whole carbon problem by just creating massive seaweed farms on the ocean.
01:45:08.000 And people have calculated about how much you would need and it'd be the size of this state or the size of this country.
01:45:13.000 And nobody really knows.
01:45:14.000 But the fact is, if we start ramping this up, We could, you know, soy, corn, wheat, it's not as healthy as seaweed bread.
01:45:25.000 Isn'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.
01:45:43.000 And it seems like that's one of the things that people do.
01:45:47.000 It seems that people need to be in the face of some sort of a problem to solve in order to truly innovate.
01:45:53.000 And 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.
01:46:04.000 The automotive industry was forced to make much more fuel-efficient cars, compact cars, all came out of that.
01:46:10.000 You know, before the American cars, these big V10 pigs.
01:46:14.000 And then all of a sudden, we had an issue.
01:46:17.000 And then innovation springs from that issue.
01:46:20.000 And 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. 0.94
01:46:33.000 Boyan Slat, I think is his name?
01:46:35.000 I 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.
01:46:44.000 Perfect, perfect idea.
01:46:46.000 So the Seasteading Institute gets proposals about how to clean up the Great Garbage Patch, right?
01:46:51.000 And as a generalist who tries to put this all together, someone described an expert as someone who can describe to you in great detail why something can't be done.
01:47:01.000 So I get humbled often by experts that describe, well, that's never going to work.
01:47:06.000 It's too hard to build a permanent structure on the high seas, and here's all the reasons why.
01:47:10.000 Look at all this esoteric language I use that intimidates you into thinking I'm right. 0.91
01:47:14.000 And then a year and a half later, I find out Shell Prelude is building the fucking thing on the ocean. 0.83
01:47:19.000 So it turns out it can work. 0.97
01:47:22.000 So Boyan's slat is an example of this.
01:47:24.000 So he designed this system to basically clean up the garbage patch, the great garbage patch.
01:47:30.000 Yeah, there it is.
01:47:31.000 This is his system.
01:47:32.000 And he had a huge TED talk that, you know, went viral and went all over the world.
01:47:36.000 And what's so remarkable about him is he's only 19 years old.
01:47:39.000 After a few months, huge backlash. 1.00
01:47:42.000 People who knew better started criticizing him and saying he doesn't know what he's talking about, and people fall for these stupid ideas. 1.00
01:47:48.000 And I'm like, well, that's kind of embarrassing. 0.99
01:47:50.000 I'm glad I didn't, like, feature him too much.
01:47:52.000 I guess he is just a kid who doesn't know what he's talking about.
01:47:54.000 So he rose to the challenge.
01:47:56.000 He got some funding.
01:47:57.000 He's out there on the water experimenting.
01:48:00.000 And now the backlash has backlash.
01:48:02.000 Now people are saying, oh, it is going to work.
01:48:04.000 We could ramp this up and clean the Great Garbage Patch.
01:48:07.000 And guess what?
01:48:08.000 Nobody knows.
01:48:09.000 We don't know.
01:48:11.000 All we know is he's proposed this thing.
01:48:13.000 It's attracting a lot of brains to the problem. 0.73
01:48:15.000 People are inspired to get it done.
01:48:17.000 There's a backlash.
01:48:18.000 The backlash people were shown to be demonstrated with an experiment on the water that they were mistaken.
01:48:24.000 So he went out and did a small scale of this, and he was able to clean up some stuff.
01:48:29.000 So, if we scale this up, will it work?
01:48:32.000 Will it cause another problem that won't work?
01:48:34.000 It could even be a terrible idea, but by galvanizing and being a lightning rod for this problem, it attracts new innovative minds to update his solution and find the real solution.
01:48:47.000 This is how the XPRIZE works.
01:48:49.000 One of the biggest issues with human civilization in regards to the ocean is overfishing.
01:48:54.000 It's a huge, huge issue.
01:48:56.000 What ideas have been proposed that make sense, that you're aware of, that deal with that?
01:49:04.000 Well, I spoke about Neil Sims in the Valella Research Project a moment ago, and I'm not doing justice to what he's doing.
01:49:12.000 So mobile fish cages.
01:49:14.000 And it blurs the line between fish farming and wild fish.
01:49:20.000 Fish farming gets a bad rap because fish farms, they're bolted to the coasts.
01:49:25.000 The fish swim in their own poop.
01:49:27.000 They can't go anywhere.
01:49:28.000 They're not living normal lives.
01:49:30.000 Then you have to have biofoulance and all this stuff.
01:49:33.000 He's just required us to completely rethink what fish farming is.
01:49:37.000 He takes it out in the deep ocean where it's below the water.
01:49:41.000 You can't even see it.
01:49:43.000 The cages float around in eddies behind giant islands.
01:49:46.000 The fish float around in there.
01:49:49.000 And the fish is healthy.
01:49:51.000 It has no mercury.
01:49:53.000 It's higher omega-3 content than the wild version of that fish.
01:49:57.000 It's a totally new kind of fish, Kona kompachi.
01:50:00.000 Why is it higher in omega-3 than the wild form of the fish?
01:50:03.000 Because apparently the fish live better on the deep sea when they're fed fish.
01:50:08.000 By humans periodically.
01:50:10.000 Like, the wild...
01:50:12.000 I have no idea.
01:50:12.000 What are they feeding them?
01:50:13.000 They're feeding them a mix of fish meal and soy.
01:50:18.000 And then finishing it off with fish meal at the end.
01:50:22.000 And sashimi guys, a guy named Wong in Hawaii, are declaring it, you know, a great sashimi.
01:50:31.000 They've had taste tests with his fish where the experts can't tell the difference between farm fish and wild fish.
01:50:38.000 So if this becomes profitable, you're talking about creating huge numbers of fish on the oceans.
01:50:45.000 And the problem is that we treat the oceans like a giant commons and we're like hunter-gatherers out there exterminating them.
01:50:53.000 We're not farming fish.
01:50:56.000 You know, hunter-gatherers, homo sapiens left Africa and just exterminated all the megafauna on every continent.
01:51:02.000 You know, hunting fish is not the way to go.
01:51:04.000 We proved that with bisons, mastodons, even ducks.
01:51:07.000 The way to increase the biomass of the oceans is the way we've increased the biomass of the land, which is to farm animals.
01:51:15.000 And Neil Sims is trying to do this in a humane way.
01:51:18.000 Well, what was done with bisons is lack of regulation. 1.00
01:51:21.000 What's been done with other animals, game animals in this country, has left more deer in this country right now than were there when Columbus landed.
01:51:30.000 There's a way to manage wildlife.
01:51:32.000 There's a way to manage a certain amount of animals.
01:51:35.000 The problem is, if everyone was hunting, there would be no more wild animals.
01:51:41.000 The reality of wild animals is there's not enough wild animals in relationship to the amount of people that are here.
01:51:47.000 There's 350 million Americans.
01:51:49.000 They would require a lot of wild animals if that's all we ate.
01:51:53.000 There's a way, though, to regulate.
01:51:55.000 And 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.
01:52:06.000 You're dealing with a bunch of different nations.
01:52:08.000 I mean, they have an issue with the Japanese crews that won't stop whaling. 0.99
01:52:13.000 They whale under the false pretense of doing research, scientific research, and then sell the whale carcasses. 0.98
01:52:19.000 I mean, there's these boats that the sea shepherds have attacked and have shown time and time again, like, these guys are fucking whaling. 0.96
01:52:29.000 They're not doing any experiments. 0.96
01:52:32.000 They're not doing scientific research, but that's the loophole.
01:52:34.000 The loophole is that these Japanese boats can still kill whales as long as it's for quote-unquote scientific research. 0.96
01:52:41.000 So they're just killing whales.
01:52:42.000 Right.
01:52:43.000 So the oceans should not be a Wild West.
01:52:46.000 It should be civilization.
01:52:47.000 It should be a part of civilization.
01:52:49.000 Right, but if there's 7 billion people that want fish...
01:52:52.000 We have no choice but to farm fish.
01:52:55.000 Right.
01:52:55.000 It's like more than a billion people get their main sustenance from fish.
01:52:59.000 And that is going to go up.
01:53:01.000 I 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.
01:53:16.000 I mean, a lot of this is we have no choice.
01:53:18.000 It's like we, you know, over the last, what, 50 years or a century, have exterminated like 90% of the fish in the oceans.
01:53:24.000 Yeah, it's the same.
01:53:25.000 It's like either we turn that around or we're going to have hunger.
01:53:28.000 Is there a way that they can somehow or another repopulate the wild populations of these fish?
01:53:34.000 Like tuna have drastically reduced...
01:53:36.000 Did you see Jiro Dreams of Sushi?
01:53:38.000 No.
01:53:39.000 The documentary?
01:53:39.000 Fascinating documentary.
01:53:41.000 One of the sad aspects of it is he talked about what it used to be like.
01:53:45.000 It's about a guy who's been doing sushi forever and it's all about his obsession with creating the perfect dishes and Really interesting.
01:53:53.000 Oh, maybe I did see that.
01:53:56.000 It's just about this one sushi chef.
01:53:58.000 I watched that with my wife.
01:53:59.000 We were mesmerized.
01:54:00.000 Yeah, fascinating, right?
01:54:01.000 The old man in Tokyo, in the subway station.
01:54:05.000 He's a very small place.
01:54:07.000 I thought it was so...
01:54:08.000 My wife wanted me to watch it. 1.00
01:54:10.000 I'm like, I'm not watching a fucking guy make sushi. 1.00
01:54:12.000 Who gives a shit? 1.00
01:54:13.000 And then more and more people told me, it's not about that. 0.99
01:54:16.000 You gotta see it.
01:54:17.000 You gotta check it out.
01:54:17.000 And then I watched it.
01:54:19.000 But the saddest thing was like showing photos of the fish markets from the 1950s and 60s.
01:54:25.000 And there was just fish everywhere.
01:54:27.000 And he was just talking about the wide variety and the large numbers.
01:54:31.000 Enormous tuna were everywhere.
01:54:33.000 It was just insane.
01:54:34.000 And now it's one tenth of that.
01:54:36.000 Yeah.
01:54:37.000 And Neil Sims refers to himself as a passionate environmentalist.
01:54:42.000 And he went back and read about fish populations in the world.
01:54:46.000 He's a great fish connoisseur and fish lover.
01:54:48.000 And when he talks about fish, he salivates.
01:54:50.000 He's so excited about how they behave and what they do.
01:54:53.000 And 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.
01:55:01.000 And we can't keep treating the oceans like a toilet and like a thing where we can just hunt as much fish as we want.
01:55:07.000 The fisheries have to be managed.
01:55:10.000 Fish farms can help with that.
01:55:11.000 And we have to repopulate the oceans with fish.
01:55:15.000 Yeah, not just farm fish, but wild fish.
01:55:18.000 That was what the question was.
01:55:20.000 Do you know of any methods that are being contemplated for repopulating the wild fish?
01:55:27.000 The only way it would work is if it's profitable to have lots of wild fish.
01:55:34.000 So true.
01:55:35.000 And then you would also have to stop certain people from different nations.
01:55:39.000 You'd have to have some sort of an agreement with fishermen everywhere.
01:55:43.000 Yes.
01:55:44.000 And people don't realize the oceans already, you know...
01:55:50.000 It's like the United Nations Law of the Seas.
01:55:52.000 There's all these legal frameworks that already operate on the ocean and allow people to interact with each other.
01:55:58.000 And there's, you know, overlap in the jurisdictions and it mostly gets worked out.
01:56:03.000 And the oceans is, you know, sort of civilized and it's ready for the next layer of legal evolution, which I think is stewards of the ocean.
01:56:16.000 I think we're ready for a kind of new evolution and market-based evolution on the water.
01:56:22.000 A market-based regulation on the water and sovereign nations.
01:56:26.000 Market-based, but the problem is that's how people feed their families, make their profit, run their business.
01:56:32.000 They run their business by pulling fish out of the water.
01:56:34.000 You would have to tell them you're going to make less money.
01:56:36.000 You're going to pull in less fish.
01:56:38.000 That's hard to do.
01:56:40.000 Yes, and Sims tells a story about trying to work with poor fishermen in the Cook Islands.
01:56:46.000 And how there's just an incentive for everyone to just take as much fish as they can out of the commons.
01:56:52.000 And so it's like, if I don't grab the fish, the guys I'm competing with will grab the fish.
01:56:57.000 And you can say, yes, but we'll need more fish for next year.
01:57:01.000 If you kill them all now, we won't have any fish next season.
01:57:04.000 So we have to have rules. 0.96
01:57:06.000 But then the complex reasons why people follow the rules and why they don't.
01:57:12.000 And the problem with it just being a commons, where everyone's competing to get fish out, everyone has an incentive to cheat.
01:57:19.000 So what is the means by which you get people to cooperate to preserve the fish long term?
01:57:26.000 Resources have to be managed or they go away.
01:57:29.000 The present way we're dealing with the oceans is obviously not working.
01:57:34.000 Right, and we would have to make some sort of an agreement worldwide, and that seems to me to be one of the most difficult aspects of trying to fix the whole problem.
01:57:44.000 I think so.
01:57:45.000 But it's got to be worked out, otherwise we'll run out of fish.
01:57:48.000 Yeah, and I hope they don't run out of fish first and then say, what do we do?
01:57:54.000 You know, how do we fix this?
01:57:55.000 Right.
01:57:56.000 I 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.
01:58:08.000 Right.
01:58:08.000 It's still an issue all throughout Africa with a lot of endangered species.
01:58:12.000 Obviously, we know about this with the rhino, that even to this day, even all the knowledge that everyone knows that rhinos are dying off, they're still poaching.
01:58:21.000 Yeah, and I was reading a recent explanation lately about elephants in Africa, and they were contrasting Kenya with a nation that's next to it, and I forget what it is.
01:58:31.000 And, 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.
01:58:42.000 And, you know, the place where the population of elephants went down was where there was just like a government monopoly controlling which was easily corrupted.
01:58:49.000 The place where the populations went up when it was sort of pseudo-public but also privately owned so they'd sell a certain amount of poaching where it becomes somebody's cash cow to have elephants there.
01:59:03.000 Because you can't just protect elephants and allow the populations to grow as much as you want.
01:59:08.000 We can drill down and discuss how regulations can evolve to increase populations of wild animals in a manageable way.
01:59:18.000 But you and I don't need to settle it now.
01:59:20.000 The fact is we need more solutions.
01:59:23.000 Well, Africa is a very interesting analogy.
01:59:26.000 It's very interesting to compare what they've done with wild animals in Africa to what needs to be done in the ocean.
01:59:33.000 Because there were many animals in Africa that were on the verge of extinction and now are quite common.
01:59:39.000 But they're quite common in these high-fence operations where they hunt them.
01:59:44.000 It's really weird.
01:59:46.000 The populations have boomed on a lot of animals that were almost in danger just a few decades ago, and now there's many of them, the highest numbers they've ever recorded in Africa on some of these species.
01:59:58.000 But they're in these high-fence operations, and that's a weird sort of a contradictory situation.
02:00:03.000 When they've become manageable, profitable, they've become a resource.
02:00:10.000 Yeah.
02:00:10.000 They've become a resource that you can manage.
02:00:12.000 And once that happens, that's when their populations go up.
02:00:17.000 But then everyone's like, but no, they're hunting them.
02:00:20.000 Yes, but there's more of them. 0.95
02:00:21.000 But they're killing them. 1.00
02:00:23.000 Yes, but there's more of them to kill. 1.00
02:00:25.000 Okay. 1.00
02:00:26.000 It's a weird line there.
02:00:29.000 And again, it's this superstition that I, as a seasteader, am always trying to get around.
02:00:32.000 The way you solve a problem is to create...
02:00:35.000 A monopoly of nice people who will make everyone else be good.
02:00:40.000 And we're talking about the same thing.
02:00:42.000 So some of the elephant populations that are controlled by, say, a government monopoly and nothing else, those populations keep going down because there's no one really incentivized to protect against poaching.
02:00:53.000 And if you work for that monopoly, you essentially have ownership over this.
02:00:58.000 So there's all sorts of reasons to take payoffs and bribes.
02:01:01.000 There's also a problem where the elephants...
02:01:04.000 Interact with people and elephants are dangerous and elephants knock down trees.
02:01:09.000 You know, elephants will attack people.
02:01:12.000 And then in these other places in Africa where I guess you describe them as high fence operations, you make it so that a stable elephant population is profitable to the people who live there. 0.97
02:01:23.000 So they say, all right, we'll have like 5%.
02:01:25.000 We'll let people poach for a high number. 0.53
02:01:28.000 Well, they're not poaching.
02:01:29.000 It's actually legal.
02:01:30.000 Legal hunting.
02:01:31.000 I shouldn't say poaching.
02:01:32.000 They pay like $50,000 and they go kill an elephant. 0.99
02:01:35.000 It's kind of fucking crazy. 0.99
02:01:36.000 Yeah. 0.97
02:01:37.000 But then the people in charge of that are like, okay, now, I mean, there's either elephants are hunted or elephants become overpopulated.
02:01:46.000 Yeah.
02:01:46.000 Yeah.
02:01:47.000 So there has to be a way that these populations are managed.
02:01:51.000 It's not just a simple manner of illegalizing all the killing of elephants.
02:01:55.000 And this is the hard thing for people to get their minds around.
02:01:57.000 The hard thing for people to get their minds around who love animals.
02:02:00.000 Yes.
02:02:00.000 If you really truly want these animals to have large populations, you have to manage those populations.
02:02:07.000 And that's not something that anybody wants to hear.
02:02:09.000 Yeah, and I love animals.
02:02:10.000 And my wife is an animal fanatic. 1.00
02:02:12.000 And if we care about animals continuing to exist, we have to confront the fact that you don't just protect them and allow their populations to exponentially grow until they starve or come in contact with villages and kill people.
02:02:27.000 Well, that's a problem that we have in California with this.
02:02:31.000 The government has outlawed in California killing of a lot of predators that are in large populations now, like most particularly mountain lions.
02:02:41.000 There's a large population of mountain lions in California now.
02:02:44.000 And subsequently, the deer population has dwindled.
02:02:47.000 They've dropped substantially.
02:02:49.000 And there's a place that I go to called Tohon Ranch.
02:02:52.000 On one waterhole, they have a trail camera that's photographed 16 different mountain lions. 0.99
02:02:57.000 I mean, that's fucking crazy. 0.98
02:03:00.000 That's 16 different animals that are killing something virtually every day. 1.00
02:03:04.000 Wow.
02:03:18.000 Decimating, you know, any game animal they can get a hold of.
02:03:22.000 And it's illegal to hunt them.
02:03:24.000 And it's not regulated.
02:03:25.000 It's not being managed.
02:03:27.000 It's not being managed correctly.
02:03:29.000 And one of the reasons is because public opinion. 1.00
02:03:31.000 Public opinion, based on ignorance, they think, oh, these asshole hunters want to kill mountain lions. 1.00
02:03:37.000 Well... 1.00
02:03:37.000 No, but you have to manage the populations of all of these animals. 1.00
02:03:42.000 If we're going to be stewards of the land, they all need to be kept in check, and they all need to be monitored, and it's not being done with these specific predators just because of what I believe is an ignorant public opinion.
02:03:55.000 And I agree with you.
02:03:57.000 And what people are working so hard to do with elephants and mountain lions needs to be done with fish on a massive scale.
02:04:03.000 A massive scale.
02:04:04.000 Yeah, bringing it back to what I care about.
02:04:05.000 Yeah, it should be a huge part of what the government...
02:04:08.000 It should be a huge part of what we plan for as far as looking towards the future.
02:04:14.000 I mean, look at what percentage of our diet is based on seafood.
02:04:18.000 It's got to be enormous.
02:04:19.000 It's a huge percentage.
02:04:20.000 And we don't even realize that when we eat some broccoli or we eat a cow...
02:04:25.000 That many of the crops that the cow ate or that came from the broccoli came from algae fertilizers.
02:04:33.000 You know, fuel, feed, and food are very largely supported by ocean crops.
02:04:42.000 Do you live by the ocean?
02:04:44.000 Yes, I do.
02:04:45.000 Are you an ocean freak?
02:04:46.000 You're like one of those dudes out there.
02:04:48.000 I'm an ocean freak, yes.
02:04:50.000 Was this a part of your life always, or is this something that sort of developed?
02:04:56.000 I love the outdoors.
02:04:58.000 I was an Eagle Scout.
02:05:01.000 I love forests as well.
02:05:02.000 I do love being on the ocean.
02:05:04.000 I think I'd like to live on the ocean.
02:05:05.000 I think the first, you know, if we get a good seastead going, I'd consider living there.
02:05:11.000 You'd give up having a backyard in the ocean?
02:05:13.000 Sure.
02:05:14.000 I was just on a boat for, you know, 10 days or something a few weeks ago in the Galapagos Islands.
02:05:21.000 And, man, sitting on a boat and looking out at the sea, you want to talk about contemplation, relaxation.
02:05:27.000 You know, some nice breathing.
02:05:28.000 It doesn't take any discipline.
02:05:29.000 It just happens.
02:05:30.000 You know, the human mind, I feel like, is meant to stare at fire and water and sky.
02:05:36.000 And mountains.
02:05:37.000 And mountains.
02:05:37.000 It gets you in a good place.
02:05:39.000 Yeah, isn't it strange?
02:05:40.000 It's like these...
02:05:41.000 It's essentially artwork that's designed by the universe.
02:05:45.000 You know, the thing that people love about artwork is you get to look at something like that boot over there.
02:05:50.000 You look at it and go, wow, that's amazing.
02:05:52.000 That's really cool.
02:05:53.000 Somebody built that, and that's so cool to look at.
02:05:56.000 Somebody made that.
02:05:56.000 Well, what a mountain is is essentially the most incredible artwork ever, but it's completely natural.
02:06:02.000 It's there all the time, and no one can own it.
02:06:05.000 You can move around it, look at it from different angles, but it's essentially just like artwork.
02:06:09.000 It gives you the same feeling that you get when you look at a beautiful painting, but magnified a tenfold, a thousandfold.
02:06:15.000 I think so.
02:06:16.000 I 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.
02:06:25.000 It was just, I couldn't believe the comfort I got from sitting on the porch and just looking at this magnificent thing in Colorado.
02:06:32.000 So, I don't know, that's just a primal thing, and I think the oceans, man, it affected me.
02:06:37.000 Every time I'm on the water and I'm just looking at the sky, looking at the water, I feel like, wow, I'm turning into a better person just by sitting here.
02:06:44.000 Yeah, I have a friend who has a beach house, and we sometimes go to hang out at their place.
02:06:48.000 And when we go there, it's just amazing how everything just sort of...
02:06:53.000 You sit there, like, looking at the water, splashing up against the rocks, and everybody's just chilled out.
02:07:00.000 It's almost like it has some sort of a tranquilizing effect on everyone around it.
02:07:05.000 I mean, beach communities are notoriously relaxed.
02:07:08.000 Yeah.
02:07:09.000 When was the last time you were in a really hectic beach community?
02:07:12.000 Yeah.
02:07:13.000 They essentially don't exist.
02:07:14.000 And, you know, there's all these island paradises with, like, people tell you it's just super mellow people.
02:07:19.000 Mm-hmm.
02:07:19.000 Yeah.
02:07:20.000 Hawaii.
02:07:21.000 I mean, Hawaii...
02:07:22.000 Look, there's a lot of fights in Hawaii, you know, but you're also dealing with Polynesian people, some of the greatest warriors throughout civilization.
02:07:31.000 Yeah. 0.98
02:07:31.000 You know, so gangster that they got on these little fucking canoes and traveled thousands of miles across the ocean. 0.98
02:07:37.000 Yeah. 0.99
02:07:37.000 I mean, they're just very... 0.99
02:07:39.000 Aggressive people.
02:07:40.000 But still, pretty cool and pretty chilled out for the most part.
02:07:44.000 Yeah, I'm thinking about little islands like the Seychelles Islands.
02:07:47.000 The people that live there, I've never been to these places, but I'm told by people who go there that it's just like everyone is chill and calm.
02:07:54.000 And it might be because they're just looking at water all the time.
02:07:57.000 Yeah, and looking at the vastness of the ocean, which sort of falls in the face of any ideas that you have, any delusions of grandeur, any, you know, when you start looking at your life, what's important, what I need to do, I need to get this done, and this deal needs to be made, and then you look at the ocean,
02:08:12.000 like, 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.
02:08:24.000 Yeah, we evolved from the ocean and we have to complete the cycle and get back to the ocean and become Homo Aquaticus or something.
02:08:35.000 Homo, is that another one you're going to coin? 0.88
02:08:36.000 I just coined that just now.
02:08:40.000 Have you ever read the theory about the aquatic ape?
02:08:44.000 Yes, I wrote a chapter about it in a book, the aquatic ape hypothesis.
02:08:48.000 What do you think about that?
02:08:49.000 Explain it to people who don't know what it means.
02:08:51.000 Well, it's this uncanny fact that human beings, what makes us different from other large apes and other primates, is that we share all these qualities with marine mammals.
02:09:03.000 That only occur among marine mammals, and it includes subcutaneous fat.
02:09:08.000 You know, a chimp stores all his fat between his organs. 1.00
02:09:10.000 We have it just beneath our skin, just like a manatee or something.
02:09:13.000 We have voluntary breath control.
02:09:15.000 We can jump in the water and swim around.
02:09:18.000 We have a diving reflex, which otters have.
02:09:21.000 You know, if you dive, it automatically shuts off your nose and all this sort of stuff.
02:09:24.000 Chimp falls in the water, drowns in mere minutes, you know.
02:09:29.000 We're comfortable in water.
02:09:30.000 We're hairless.
02:09:33.000 Most mammals that are hairless are aquatic mammals.
02:09:39.000 The more you list all these qualities, people are like, oh my god, we went through a stage where we were like aquatic apes.
02:09:47.000 That's what made humans different.
02:09:50.000 I think the aquatic ape hypothesis is an excellent example of the difference between a hypothesis and a theory.
02:09:57.000 Because what it has going for it is tremendous explanatory power.
02:10:01.000 We don't have hard evidence like a webbed hominid foot.
02:10:06.000 By the way, 7%, I think, of human beings are born with webbed toes.
02:10:11.000 That's one of the things people don't know.
02:10:13.000 What?
02:10:13.000 Yeah.
02:10:15.000 7%?
02:10:15.000 Yeah.
02:10:16.000 See if that's still true.
02:10:17.000 It was true when I wrote my book.
02:10:18.000 Look it up.
02:10:21.000 Wow.
02:10:21.000 So when I was researching this, you know, whatever, six or eight years ago, yeah, that was true.
02:10:26.000 And I cited the reference.
02:10:28.000 Okay.
02:10:29.000 Webbed toes.
02:10:30.000 So then you think about, all right, you take a orangutan baby, throw it into the water. 1.00
02:10:36.000 It drowns very fast.
02:10:38.000 You take a human baby, throw it into the water. 0.99
02:10:40.000 It knows how to hold its breath.
02:10:42.000 It waits till it comes to the surface, and then it naturally floats and kicks its feet.
02:10:46.000 So there's all this weird, like, where did we get all these qualities?
02:10:51.000 It's actually one in 2,000 to 2,500 live births.
02:10:56.000 Well, that's close enough.
02:11:00.000 Yeah, well, yeah.
02:11:03.000 It's pretty small.
02:11:06.000 1 in 2000, 1 in 7, or 7%.
02:11:09.000 What are you, a stickler for...
02:11:12.000 Yeah, I'm a stickler for facts. 0.98
02:11:13.000 I'm crazy.
02:11:14.000 But it still is, it's interesting that it, I mean, even that, 1 in 2000, it's fairly common.
02:11:20.000 I wonder.
02:11:21.000 If it's 1 in 2000, that's more like a weird anomaly.
02:11:24.000 If it's something that's way more common, like 1%, that could be something, you know, atavistic, like the appendix, something left over.
02:11:31.000 Right, right, right, right.
02:11:33.000 What are the other things about the aquatic ape theory that are compelling?
02:11:40.000 Oh, even large brains.
02:11:44.000 Mammals with the largest brains, in relation to the rest of their body, are mostly aquatic animals, apparently.
02:11:51.000 Dolphins, whales, orcas.
02:11:54.000 Also, we're evolved to process and use fish fats really efficiently and really well.
02:12:03.000 Why is that true?
02:12:05.000 All I know is the aquatic ape proponents keep lining up all these things. 0.90
02:12:09.000 In some cases, the only animals that have these things in common are aquatic mammals and humans.
02:12:18.000 The main ones are like hairlessness and subcutaneous fat.
02:12:25.000 What are the arguments against this?
02:12:28.000 The arguments against it are, we have not found a single fossil that would support this hypothesis.
02:12:34.000 So that's why it remains officially a hypothesis, not an actual theory.
02:12:38.000 Fossils are really hard, though.
02:12:40.000 That's the difference between, you know, one of the things about fossils is that something has to happen in order to create a fossil.
02:12:46.000 For the most part, most people that die, your body's going to be absorbed by the animals, the biology.
02:12:51.000 By bacteria, by rodents, scavengers.
02:12:55.000 There'll be nothing left.
02:12:57.000 Something has to happen.
02:12:58.000 You have to be trapped in a mudslide, volcano, whatever it is that covers you with something that preserves you.
02:13:04.000 Yeah.
02:13:05.000 I think the chapter, Aqua Ape, that I wrote for that book is available online and people can go check it out.
02:13:12.000 Now I've got to research this 7% thing.
02:13:16.000 Am I going to have to update that?
02:13:17.000 Yeah, you're going to have to update that.
02:13:18.000 Oh, man.
02:13:20.000 It is a fascinating thing, though, the idea that the reason why people are so different and why we, like, if you take a baby and throw a baby in the water, they immediately know to hold their breath.
02:13:31.000 It's instinctive.
02:13:33.000 It is weird.
02:13:34.000 Like, why do we have all these weird qualities?
02:13:36.000 Yeah, and then also the fat thing, that if you take a chimp, like little baby chimps are hard, hard little muscle things. 0.98
02:13:44.000 Baby babies are just floaty little suckers.
02:13:46.000 They're floaty. 0.97
02:13:47.000 Yeah, they're built with all this fat.
02:13:49.000 And then, you know, if an orangutan gets really fat, you don't go up and squeeze...
02:13:54.000 Fat on the outside of its body.
02:13:56.000 You know, we store all this fat outside our organs, you know, beneath our skin, this sort of subcutaneous, they call it.
02:14:05.000 And that's a quality of aquatic mammals.
02:14:07.000 It is weird that we have all these qualities, but there's just no hard evidence is the thing.
02:14:12.000 So it's...
02:14:13.000 And this massive attraction to the ocean.
02:14:16.000 I mean, you don't see a bunch of baboons sitting out there staring at the ocean. 1.00
02:14:20.000 Yeah.
02:14:21.000 And all communities are founded next to oceans.
02:14:26.000 We love the water.
02:14:29.000 Yeah, it's fascinating stuff.
02:14:30.000 The aquatic ape theory.
02:14:31.000 Look into it, folks.
02:14:32.000 It's very interesting.
02:14:33.000 Listen, man, this is a great podcast.
02:14:34.000 I really enjoy this very much.
02:14:36.000 It's a fascinating subject.
02:14:38.000 I think there's massive potential for all this, and I think that it's really cool that you are investing so much time and so much energy into promoting these ideas.
02:14:50.000 I hope anybody listening to this explores further.
02:14:54.000 Go to Seasteading.org and check out the website and see what they have to offer.
02:15:01.000 Is it just Seasteading on Twitter?
02:15:04.000 What is the Twitter handle?
02:15:05.000 I think it's the Seasteading Institute.
02:15:08.000 Yes, that is at the Seasteading Institute on Twitter.
02:15:11.000 Thanks, man.
02:15:12.000 I had a great time.
02:15:13.000 It was a lot of fun.
02:15:13.000 Yeah, I appreciate it.
02:15:15.000 Is there anything else you want to direct people to or tell people about?
02:15:19.000 Go to the Seasteading Institute.
02:15:21.000 Check out our floating city survey.
02:15:25.000 Let us know what you'd like to see on a floating city.
02:15:28.000 We have a donation page there.
02:15:29.000 Read up on stuff.
02:15:30.000 We are working on the floating city project, and we'd like you to check it out and see if you think it's realistic and if you'd like to move there.
02:15:36.000 Glorious.
02:15:37.000 Thank you, sir.
02:15:38.000 Appreciate it, man.
02:15:39.000 It's a lot of fun.
02:15:39.000 Okay, we were brought to you this week by Squarespace.
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02:15:54.000 Blue Apron, an excellent way to get meals delivered to your house that you can cook easily with detailed instructions. 0.80
02:16:03.000 Go to BlueApron.com forward slash Rogan and get two free meals just for going to BlueApron.com forward slash Rogan.
02:16:13.000 I use them.
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02:16:24.000 Lots more podcasts coming this week.
02:16:26.000 Rich Voss is here on Wednesday.
02:16:28.000 Stefan Molyneux will be here on Thursday.
02:16:30.000 Lots more stuff.
02:16:31.000 Thanks everybody.
02:16:32.000 Take care.
02:16:33.000 Big kiss.