Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Not-At-All-Sad History of Libertarian Sea Nations

Dec. 2, 2021 - Behind the Bastards

01:50:02

Part Two: The Not-At-All-Sad History of Libertarian Sea Nations

# seasteading rudiger koch qanon bitcoin blue frontiers chad elwartowski climate change cryptocurrency french polynesia grant romant initial coin offering joe quirk libertarianism ms satoshi nadia summergirl pacific dawn patri friedman

Patri Friedman and Joe Quirk attempt to build libertarian sea nations, yet their seasteading ventures collapse under financial and practical realities. Despite raising $9.5 million for the MS Satoshi, Ocean Builders failed due to lack of maritime expertise, selling only seven cabins before scrapping the vessel. The episode critiques these "aquatic apartheid" projects as exploitative fantasies that ignore climate threats to nations like French Polynesia, concluding that wealthy libertarians cannot replicate historical pioneer survival without basic skills or respect for sovereignty. [Automatically generated summary]
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Recap Reality Shows 00:15:09
	Oh, my God.
	Part two.
	Man, of all the parts that you can have, a second is easily the best.
	It's always the best.
	Jaws 2, that's the best Jaws.
	Aliens.
	Yeah, The Lost World.
	Toy Story 3.
	Yeah.
	The Lost World.
	Yeah, all the best ones of the series.
	All the best ones of the series.
	Halloween 2.
	Halloween 2, The Facebook.
	These are all the best ones.
	Oh, my God.
	Woodstock 1999.
	Oh, yeah.
	The sequel's always the best.
	Super.
	Yeah, super is.
	Dave.
	I'm Dave.
	Dave.
	Yeah.
	Dave.
	Hey.
	Hey.
	How are you doing?
	I'm good.
	I got lunchables.
	I got lunchables getting delivered.
	Oh, thank you.
	This is the country we live in.
	And I'm excited to eat those lunchables.
	Gonna get some lunchables.
	Yes.
	You're the only person I know who eats lunchables, dude.
	Well, I never got them as a kid.
	So this is how I hear about.
	Yeah.
	Adorable.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah.
	Obviously, we ended last episode talking about the Freedom Ship, which was the mile-long superboat that was going, everyone was going to live in total liberty, but also under Irish law with the FBI running everything.
	Right.
	So how did that work out?
	Is that a thing?
	Well, they never built it.
	Oh, no.
	Every three or four years from the mid-90s on, the freedom ship would like creep back into the media when like some new backer because like I think the people, the old people, would just kind of hand it off to someone new who would try to raise money off it again.
	Like it was just this grift that wouldn't quite die.
	They're just inheriting the grift.
	Yeah, they're just kind of like passing it on like, do you want to build the freedom ship, kid?
	By 2007, the project was no closer to starting the construction, which should have concluded in 2003.
	A writer for In These Times noted, A visit to the news section of FreedomShip.com reveals a more sluggish pace.
	The most recent messages date from more than two years ago, forlornly explaining how scam operations are slowing things down, but that things are happening and they are moving fast.
	Meanwhile, the ship is not yet finished.
	Indeed, it has not yet started.
	Despite this, Freedom Ship International Incorporated has been startlingly successful in raising publicity for this floating city.
	Much credulous journalistic cooing over the biggest vessel in history with its hospitals, bunks, hospitals, banks, sports centers, parks, theaters, and nightclubs, not to mention its airport, has ignored the vessel's stubborn non-existence.
	It's very funny.
	That is great.
	And this, this, Dave, the failure of the freedom boat, brings me to the final but longest portion of our episode, which has to start with the seasteading movement.
	Have you heard of seasteading?
	Seasteading.
	Yeah.
	No, I have not.
	It doesn't sound good, but maybe I'm willing to be wrong.
	I mean, I think it's a cool idea.
	It's the idea that people could take to the sea and like, as the pioneers of old did, build their own homes in the middle of the wilderness and live off of them.
	But because it's the sea, you wouldn't be stealing anybody's shit.
	Like, it's a neat idea.
	I would say the fictional analog that's closest to seasteading is the incredible Roy Scheider vehicle SeQuest.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, Roy Scheider.
	Just incredible.
	Oh, yeah.
	Star of Jaws 2.
	Star of Jaws 2.
	Exactly.
	Well, I would say the Star of Jaws 2 is alcohol.
	Yes.
	I mean, and the antagonist of.
	Yeah.
	Like, there's, you know, you could argue that most of the reason that Jaws was, or that shark was formidable is because they were just so drunk.
	Because everyone was hammered the entire time.
	Yeah.
	That's fair.
	So in SeQuest, did you ever actually watch SeQuest?
	I watched it.
	I remember there was a guy with gills.
	There was.
	That was.
	They should.
	Shot the dolphin.
	Yeah.
	They shot it, I know, briefly, at Epcot Center.
	They sure did.
	Yeah.
	I would say probably the high point of SeQuest the series is the episode in which William Shatner plays Slobodan Milosevic.
	Oh!
	The part he was born to play.
	Do you know?
	Does it include an accent?
	Because it's, yeah, he does an accent.
	Like the episode, it's an episode where they have to, there's this dictator who's like taken to the sea after getting like forced out, having committed a genocide.
	And the episode was filmed during the Bosnian genocide.
	So it's very clearly who Shatner is supposed to be.
	Oh, goodness.
	This is perfect.
	It's incredible.
	So in SeQuest, incredible show, this big ship travels around all these little like sea habitats people have built around.
	Like the ocean's just been colonized.
	There's these little towns and villages and independent homesteads in the middle of the wild ocean.
	That's the idea the seasteadders have.
	Yeah, they're doing a sea quest.
	They're doing a sea quest, but without the giant boat, right?
	That's the people who wanted to do the freedom ship.
	They want to make the little bitty sea communities that eventually, I think, necessitate the giant boat.
	They want floating homes just a little farther out there.
	Just a little further out there.
	Yeah, Seasteading got its official start in 2008 when the Seasteading Institute was founded in San Francisco by Patri Friedman.
	Friedman, an anarcho-capitalist and grandson of economist Milton Friedman, had been a Google engineer and was thus connected to Peter Thiel.
	He convinced Teal to throw them some cash to found an institute.
	So Peter Thiel throws a bunch of money into the Seasteading Institute, and in their founding statement, they promise to establish a permanent, autonomous ocean community to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems.
	The experimentation, I love that idea because it's like what experiment is best done on the ocean?
	Only the illegal kind.
	Can we fuck the dolphins?
	Yeah, it's actually the worst place to do any other experiments.
	Like the movie Deep Blue Sea, they should have done that in a tank.
	Yeah.
	Why were you in the ocean?
	How did that help things?
	Yeah.
	In fact, it hurt things.
	Yeah.
	Like all experiments don't get better if you're in the ocean.
	It just gets more complicated.
	Yeah, as a general rule, very few things get better when you're in the ocean.
	Right.
	Jurassic Park.
	The problem was they were in an island.
	Like that was part of the problem.
	Yeah, just don't do it.
	Stay out of the ocean.
	Stay the fuck out of the ocean.
	If I could have one message for my listeners, it's stay out of the ocean.
	You know what's weird?
	If I could have two messages, it's that I think maybe dolphins could consent to sex with human beings.
	We don't know.
	I mean, like, they understand the concept, right?
	Like, so who's to say?
	Who's to say?
	Yeah, I think the general rule for having sex with an animal, and you can all quote me on this and write it down, is if the animal is doing the sex on you, like that's consent, right?
	And is that controversial?
	No, kids.
	Now, that I that I don't agree with.
	Have you heard of Mr. Hands, Dave?
	I have.
	But the horse was all right, right?
	The horse was okay.
	I think there's some argument that it was psychologically hurt.
	Yeah.
	That it was traumatized a bit.
	I don't know.
	I'm not a horse psychologist.
	I think that's unethical.
	No, I, yeah.
	I think if a horse knew, like, I feel like a horse should be proud if they've killed somebody.
	Because, well, I was about to say so few of them do, but actually, now that I think about it, they're probably a lot of people.
	Horses do kill a body cat.
	Yeah, so that's not special.
	There's nothing special about Mr. Hands now that I think about it.
	No, no, no.
	But meanwhile, dolphins attempt to sexually assault people all the time.
	All the time.
	It happens constantly, and they do to other dolphins.
	So clearly, if you could communicate with a dolphin, I think it wouldn't necessarily be unethical as long as the dolphin gives consent.
	That's what I'm saying, Dave.
	Yeah.
	We need an animal consent system.
	Absolutely.
	You're right.
	Yeah, I think, I just think dolphins, it should be the same rules as people, okay?
	That's my rant about dolphin sex in the middle of this episode.
	We had to talk about sex with some kind of thing that you're not supposed to have sex with in an episode about libertarian politics.
	It's inevitable.
	It's inevitable.
	Yes.
	We knew where all these roads were heading.
	Arguing about dolphin sex.
	If you're building a society on the ocean, you're thinking about fucking dolphins.
	We know it.
	It's on the table.
	It's on the table.
	All right.
	I don't want to fuck an animal.
	I would say they're the most fuckable animals, I think.
	Yeah, that.
	I mean, now I'm like racking my brain and I'm trying to think about it.
	You're thinking about the blowhole, aren't you, Dave?
	Of course.
	Well, they're very smooth.
	I'm so excited for your DMs this week.
	This is so exciting.
	We're going to get a lot of John C. Lily fans to hidden us up.
	So Peter Thiel was really bullish about the future of seasteading, right?
	This idea of like little independent autonomous ocean communities that you can experiment with different political ideas and innovate in.
	He loves this.
	And he promised ominously in a press statement at the time that, quote, the nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level.
	Which it was.
	And Peter Thiel had a lot to do with it, but it was not through seasteading.
	Not something I want to hear from Peter Thiel.
	Yeah.
	I don't really want to hear much from Peter Thiel.
	No.
	Although I do want to know what he's up to.
	Yeah, I want eyes on the man, but I don't want to hear from him.
	Yeah, exactly.
	We need like an amber alert with that.
	Yeah, Peter Thiel's up to some shit.
	It's just always flashing in the background.
	Get up in the morning.
	God damn it.
	Peter Thiel, he's out.
	He's out there.
	Everybody's looking out for Peter Thiel.
	It's only quiet when he's asleep.
	Yeah.
	So Peter invests a bunch of startup cash to help make seasteadding into like a name within kind of the libertarian community, but he doesn't put up a lot of cash.
	And by 2020, when The Guardian profiled the seasteadding movement, his donations had dried up.
	By then, Friedman was billing seasteading.
	Friedman is the guy who founded it and convinced Thiel to give him the money.
	Was billing sea steading as the perfect solution to the problem of finding yourself trapped in a government that doesn't sell, that doesn't like have the same values that you have, which I agree.
	That's a problem.
	I think everyone listening to this right now knows what it's like to live under a government that does not embrace your values.
	But yeah, I don't see, well, they think that seasteading is a perfect solution to that problem because you can move, right?
	Like it's like, what if, what if, you know, we wouldn't have a lot of the conflicts we have in society, there would be no need for protests or riots if, oh, I'm not happy with what my government's doing.
	I'll just pick up and drive away.
	You know, I'll just join.
	It's modular.
	Like, I'll just move my house to another government.
	And it's the kind of thing they're all engineers, libertarians, and the people in these projects, like both like libertarians and like the people who get most into seasteading and similar sort of projects.
	They're all engineers.
	And it's a very engineer answer to the problem of like, oh, yeah.
	Well, if you're not happy with your government, you can just pick up and move, which is technically perfect and also completely insane when you're talking about people.
	It's nonsense.
	Like it's always.
	Okay, so everyone's supposed to leave their family behind?
	Like what if they have debts somewhere?
	What if they have student loans?
	What about like healthcare situations?
	What if, you know, they have, what if it's not feasible for the vehicle that they are able to afford for them to actually get to another place?
	There's all these.
	What if they don't want to leave?
	They want to do something else.
	Yeah.
	What if they want to change it because there's people they love there and because like they've put a lot of sweat equity in it and they just don't like what one faction of people are doing.
	Like it doesn't.
	It's the tech bro problem where it's like figuring out tech stuff they're very good at.
	What they they don't they didn't go to school for it.
	They didn't have an upbringing for understanding human beings.
	It's always the X factor that they leave out of their equation because they just don't consider it.
	And it seems to be everyone has like Dunning Kruger is a thing.
	We all, I certainly do, talk sometimes on things that like we don't actually understand.
	It's a human thing.
	Like nobody escapes this.
	Right.
	There's probably like an expert on having sex with animals who's like, no, they got it all wrong.
	Let me tell you about how dolphins fuck.
	Yeah.
	That's not the most fuckable animal.
	Are you kidding me?
	It's the giraffe.
	Just a man with a giraffe portrait in the background of his house screaming at us through his headphones.
	I've thought about this for years.
	God damn it.
	But for whatever reason, engineers are the, I think, the group of people most likely to be like, and I think it's because what they do is so difficult and so in demand and so impressive.
	Like a good engineer is like a wizard, like some of the people.
	Like I've known a dude once we were camping with him and like he forgot to bring a headlamp.
	So he took apart, he turned the headlight of his car into a functional headlamp that lasted an entire week and it took him like 30 seconds.
	Like it's amazing when you can see people with that kind of like mechanical talent.
	The problem with that is that, like you said, they think that they understand everything that way and that everything works that way.
	And they don't.
	Yeah, I think it's the same with like doctors and stuff like that.
	Like you look at, what's his name, Ben Carson?
	Right.
	Yes.
	Where it's like you can be really smart about one thing.
	And if that thing feels very important, you get a lot of people who are like, oh my God, thank you so much.
	You think, well, I must be smart about all the things.
	And that's when things get really wrong.
	That's when things get really wrong.
	Yeah.
	With people like us, we're really good at things that don't matter.
	So like it's, I guess, again, you're right.
	We're probably overconfident and talking about a lot of things.
	This is why podcasters keep giving people medical advice about what to do with vaccination.
	It's the Joe Rogan phenomenon.
	Joe Rogan's like a very successful at William Road.
	Joe, you're really good at talking into a microphone and wrestling.
	Yeah.
	That doesn't really have anything to do with medicine, but by God, you think it does.
	And yeah, everybody does it to some extent.
	But for whatever reason, I don't know.
	This is a particularly.
	Especially white dudes.
	Especially white engineers who are fans of Peter Thiel.
	So yeah, they cook up this idea, this very dumb idea, that also ignores like, is every individual seastead self-sufficient in terms of food?
	Which often they'll say that like, well, yeah, of course they'll make their own food.
	You'll be able to, you know, hydroponically farm and you'll do this and you'll do that.
	And again, it's always when you read them like explaining how you'll grow all of your food that you need to survive in your individual sea pod.
	It's like, okay, so you've never grown food.
	Right.
	Like, right?
	You've never ever grown anything.
	Like, I am not an expert farmer.
	I am not an expert gardener, but I've spent a lot of my life on farm.
	It takes a lot of space and infrastructure.
	You can keep like a family alive on a half acre if you're really good.
	Yeah.
	Really, and that's a half acre of space that's fully utilized under like good conditions.
	You're talking about growing food in the ocean.
Seasteading Infrastructure 00:08:41
	Yeah.
	My grant in this world would be I'd go to the whatever mainland's there, go to the supermarket, buy food, go out in the boat and charge them triple for it.
	Because you'd make a killing doing that.
	Just like, hey, you want some real food?
	I got lunchables, all lunchables.
	Here you go.
	Yeah.
	You still got plankton?
	Nah.
	Yeah.
	You sick of eating a bunch of fucking fish?
	Here, have some goddamn fruit and vegetables.
	Yeah.
	It's all just like never thought out beyond I'll finally be able to mine Bitcoin and masturbate to illegal pornography.
	Right.
	Like that's the, that's the end of most of the people, most people, most, not all people's thinking who get into this.
	Yeah, it always, it feels ultimately self-serving.
	That's what it is.
	It's always just they want to do the things they want to do.
	And then they're like, they get a big head about it and they think like, man, this is how people should live.
	And it's like.
	And as critics at the time noted, like the worst case scenario for if this actually became a thing is a lot of people drown, right?
	The best case scenario is like aquatic apartheid, where rich people build their like artificial islands to hide from poor people where they can't be beaten and murdered during riots over climate change and inequality.
	Like that is the actual like, and also if we're talking about like a potentially realistic outcome of something like this, yeah, we've gotten better at like ships that can turn salt seawater into drinkable water and can grow food.
	If you have Jeff Bezos' resources, he's building a very large boat right now.
	He could build a boat that could keep he and a number of other people alive with minimal supply for indefinitely.
	He has those resources.
	Right.
	But he wants like a boat with like an arcade and stuff.
	Yeah, I mean, he's building a very nice boat.
	Yeah.
	He's building the boat all these people dream about having.
	Right.
	I'm sure it's going to be rad, but also.
	It'll be a great escape pod for him.
	Yeah, it's going to be a rich man water fortress while he watches the world die.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Friedman got as far.
	And this is the only cool thing Friedman did.
	He started a Burning Man style nautical camping event called a Femur Isle outside of Sacramento.
	I want to go.
	It's not actually connected to Burning Man, but it's the same premise.
	And if you don't know Burning Man, it's like there's nobody in charge.
	There's no like talent and guests.
	Everybody's a participant and participates in making the event together and handling things like safety.
	And ephemeral is like all aquatic.
	So people build platforms and attach them together.
	And like every platform is like a camp or a set of camps and stuff.
	And so they have bars and restaurants and different kinds of like art projects that are all connected to living spaces in this gigantic floating raft they make in the middle of a river together.
	And yeah, it actually sounds rad as hell.
	The very first thing they know what they're doing.
	We've gone to community communities that separated themselves from this world.
	Yeah.
	And what they tend to be is very serious about it.
	Yeah.
	And know what's yeah.
	Yeah.
	They tend to know and they tend to be like, look, someone has to do the shitty stuff too.
	And we all take turns.
	And that's what it feels like these people are missing is the very serious regard of how to actually do this stuff.
	And the fact that it comes down to like you're always going to have to work.
	Yeah.
	Period.
	You're going to have to work.
	You're always going to be responsible to other people.
	Other people are going to limit your behavior because that's just life around people.
	It doesn't have to be like a police state, but like there will be times when you're like, well, I would do this, but that will affect this other person in a negative way.
	And so I won't.
	And it makes these guys really pissed that that would ever be the case.
	But normal people, especially normal people who do difficult things like build communities out of unhewn wilderness together, are like, well, yeah, we all give up a little bit of freedom in order to get to benefit from having other people around.
	Right.
	Yeah, exactly.
	If you live alone in a cabin in the woods, like your Tommy Lee Jones in the movie Wanted, that's the movie called.
	Wait, no, Hunted.
	Sorry, everybody.
	I'm so sorry.
	You have to like, you have to get food and you have to, you have to do, you have to earn that through work.
	It's just what kind of work do you want to do?
	Yeah.
	There's, there's, and I think actually the cool version of this you see in ephemerisle, which is, um, I think it would be rad if like people were building autonomous communities in the sea that weren't just tax dodges, but were like experiments to see if like, are there lower impact ways of keeping people alive?
	Is this perhaps a way we could do it that emits less or that that is less toxic, that uses less land?
	Like, is this an option for refugee communities, for stateless people?
	Like, there's another, and, and burners are kind of the perfect people to iterate that shit.
	So, like, the guy, one of the people that comes into the very first ephemeral is this dude who helped, who has been a longtime person at the Big Burning Man, and he's like a ranger, and his specialty was like safety.
	Um, and he, he wasn't, I don't think he was even particularly into seasteading.
	He was just like, oh, you guys are going to do an event on water where everyone's on water all the time.
	I don't want anyone to drown.
	I will help figure out how to make sure nobody drowns.
	And they've kept doing it.
	So the first year they do this event, the Seasteading Institute is the official host.
	And then after that, their lawyers are like, hey, no organization can get insured to hold an event like this.
	It's way too dangerous.
	You can never do this again.
	But it keeps happening because they just didn't need the Seasteading Institute.
	Just a bunch of people show up every year and lash a bunch of elaborate rafts together and have kept doing it for like a decade now and no one's ever died.
	Yeah, you can't be cool.
	It's like the drinking age in Canada.
	Just be cool.
	Yeah, just be cool.
	Take care of each other.
	They have, I've Googled this a little bit and like half of what they have written that's out on the internet is just like different guides to what to do if someone's drowning and how to avoid drowning.
	Like that's their number one rule is don't die.
	Again, that's what bothers me, I guess, about these libertarian-sea plans is that I understand the want to break free of this government.
	We all do.
	You know, I grew up really into punk rock and anarchy and all that crap.
	And so it's like the need, the idea of making a commune or a community and living away from the government is very appealing.
	And so is they.
	These people start from the top down.
	They're so bad at it.
	They're like casinos and malls and this stuff.
	And it's like, no, just get plumbing right.
	Yeah.
	Like just plumbing right.
	Figure out a better way.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	There's.
	And again, it's this Friedman like gives up on seasteading.
	He abandons the idea as soon as like the money starts to dry up.
	And I think the Seasteading Institute, I don't know if they still have a presence at a femorale, but they don't host it anymore.
	And it doesn't seem to be a big part of the project.
	And it's kind of like if you were actually serious about it, all you would want to do is create more events like this so that people can, in real time, beta test different pieces of equipment and figure out the best way to build like durable, permanent.
	Like that's really the ideal way to do this.
	It's not raise a bunch of money to like build your idea.
	It's spend 10 years hosting events like this all over the world and have a couple hundred thousand people experiment with shit.
	Right.
	It's like a bunch of people.
	There's so much cool shit here.
	And if you're, if you attend a femurle, like hit me up.
	It sounds rad.
	I want to go.
	But this, it just, it shows you what a difference is between like, if there ever is a colonization of the sea, it's going to be like the people who do a femoral.
	It's going to be like a bunch of people who already on their own are just making shit, living out in the sea for a couple of days or weeks at a time, figuring out better ways to do it and just keep doing that more and more and more.
	It's not going to be some VC firm crowdfunds a sea city, you know, because that's a dumb idea.
	Yeah.
	Or it's a government or some or it'll be a government.
	Yes, absolutely.
	But yeah, the idea of a grassroots colonization, like, yeah, that is what it would start with.
	They're like expos, you know, like these little events where it's like, we're just, it's proof of concepts.
	Yeah.
	And it's very realistic and practical.
	Cause like, obviously, if someone can put it together for like a week-long camp out, then it's probably actually accessible.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, whatever.
	You know what else is accessible, David?
	The virtues of capitalism, which you can access by buying these products right now.
	Don't think.
	Just get out your credit card and start paying.
Smarter Investing Tips 00:04:48
	On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajinista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
	What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
	We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
	Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
	That's great.
	It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
	If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
	Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iTeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
	I'm Ana Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
	Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.
	I'm talking to people like Julie K. Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
	These victims have been let down time and time again for decades and decades and decades by local law enforcement, by federal law enforcement, by administration after administration.
	The Justice Department, through, I think we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
	Listen to Bleep with Ada Navarro as part of the Michael Tura Podcast Network.
	Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
	So I'm Leanne.
	This is my best friend Janet.
	Hey.
	And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
	Absolutely.
	Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip.
	Just a little bit bigger hips, wider.
	This is a podcast.
	We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
	Sidebar, why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
	Oh, they had a BOGO.
	Well, then you got it.
	You want to white clothes up here?
	Just hit.
	What are y'all doing?
	Microphones?
	Are you making a rap album?
	I will.
	How could you move?
	I would buy it.
	Cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake.
	That sounds delicious.
	Oh, you're lucky.
	I'm not a drug addict.
	You're lucky.
	I'm not an alcoholic.
	You're lucky.
	I'm not a killer.
	I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.
	Oh.
	Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	Hey, Ernst, what's up?
	Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
	On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
	From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
	Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
	But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
	That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
	If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
	Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
	Ah, we are back.
	And boy, howdy, Dave.
	It has just been a fun time.
	So, Petri Friedman, who founds the Seas Studying Institute, he bounces.
	And he co-founds a corporation called Future Cities Development, which ceased operating in 2012 without making any cities.
	In 2019, he started another Peter Thiel-backed project, a venture capital firm named Prominos, whose mission was to make enough money to pay to build an experimental city somewhere, but on land this time.
	A Wikipedia entry on this subject adds hilariously, most of the cities will be aimed at foreign businesses seeking friendlier tax treatment.
	Because again, this thing, like, we're talking a lot of shit on libertarians.
	I was a libertarian most of my life.
	I would still be one if I hadn't realized that a sizable chunk of people who call themselves libertarians just want a corporation to be their boss instead of the government.
	Right.
Star Trek Ferengi Allies 00:04:24
	They just want to do a fraud.
	Like, in this, I feel less.
	So this is all Peter Thiel money?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	All the ones that Petrie is involved in.
	I feel better about that because that's, you're not scamming a bunch of people.
	You're scamming one person and that person is Peter Thiel.
	And it's like, all right, that's fine.
	Like, if, look, if you can scam a rich person out of a bunch of money, you know, go for it.
	You know, you can write that down along with the animal fucking.
	Like, it's, it's, yeah, it's, uh, I get it.
	Like, it's, it's better than scamming, like, you know, the little person.
	Yeah, I mean, I would say that.
	I would agree with you.
	If you're going to steal from someone, I think Peter Thiel is an incredible person to steal from.
	There's a lot of people I'm fine with you stealing from, but Peter Thial is like, I will buy you a drink if you successfully steal from Peter Thiel.
	Happily, happily.
	Legally binding.
	Sophie, can we make a t-shirt that says, I will buy you a drink if you rob Peter Thial?
	We can't, but I love your enthusiasm.
	Steal the teal.
	There's a rhyme there.
	There's Dexter.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Unfortunately, he's rather litigious.
	So this is legally a joke.
	Legally a joke.
	Oh, yeah.
	So the Seasteading Institute, though, did not go away when Petrie Friedman moved on to other grifts.
	It just picked up a new leader, the C Vangelist.
	And that's a word that this guy created.
	Joe Quirk.
	No.
	I don't like that.
	You don't trust C Vangelist.
	Joe Quirk.
	No, I don't.
	I don't trust any part of that.
	Yeah, I certainly don't trust the last name Quirk.
	Quirk.
	Yeah, it sounds kind of like Quark from DS9.
	It does sound a little bit like from DS9.
	That's his favorite.
	Ferengi.
	It also just sounds made up.
	It sounds like someone had to make up a name real quick.
	Yeah.
	And they were like looking at like a quirk in a bottle or something like that.
	You know, I'm thinking of the Ferengi now, Dave.
	And just as a quick aside, why do you think Star Trek didn't just like like they were supposed to be the new bad guys in TNG?
	And then everyone clearly realized after the first episode, oh my God, we made an anti-Semitic caricature race.
	Right.
	We made Space Jews.
	Why didn't they just stop?
	Like why didn't they just give up?
	Like they replaced them with the Borg.
	Why did we keep getting Ferengi?
	What was the...
	I can, I have, I have an explanation.
	I mean, not for the Space Chews part.
	That just seems like an all-fantasy when like J.K. Rowling was like, what if there's a banker race?
	And it was like, ah, that seems like a bad idea, JK.
	No, Star Trek, this is my problem with new Star Trek.
	And I'll only talk about this for maybe 20, 30 minutes.
	Okay, sure.
	No, the whole thing with Star Trek is like the Klingons were the enemy in the original series.
	Then they're working with them in next generation.
	So it does make sense for the Ferengi to then be allies.
	Like it's all about not defeating your enemies, but joining them.
	And I think that's a very cool, positive message in Star Trek.
	It's why I don't like Discovery because they're back to the Klingon stuff.
	And I'm like, no, I like progress, progress.
	Seven of nine, they had like good Borg people too.
	100% agree with you about what's good about Star Trek.
	I just don't see why the people making Star Trek were like, well, we can't just pretend we never made an anti-Semitism species and like make another capitalist species that don't look like a Nazi cartoon.
	Yes.
	I mean, early Star Trek.
	We were just talking about in this last episode where it's like progressive for the time.
	If you go to some season one Star Trek, there is a flat out very racist episode in the next generation.
	I think it's called Code of Honor.
	Oh, yeah, the planet where everybody's, all of the people on the planet are black and very, very uncomfortable.
	Yes.
	They kidnapped Tasha Yarr.
	They should.
	She's just like, my goodness.
	Yeah, we didn't.
	Look, they're all just white dude sci-fi.
	They're trying to be progressive, but like being progressive.
	They're just not perfect people.
	They're 90s.
	They're flawed human beings with bigotry that they didn't recognize was there.
	And they made something really cringy.
	That happens.
	Yeah, that happens.
	Yeah.
	So, speaking of cringy, let's keep talking about the Seasteading Institute, Joe Quirk, the Sea Vangelist.
Flawed Sci-Fi Authors 00:02:52
	Now, I haven't found a lot out about this guy's life before Seasteading.
	He's got to be somewhere in his mid to late 40s, maybe early 50s.
	His first recorded accomplishment of any note is the publication of a novel called The Ultimate Rush in 1998.
	The ultimate rush was about, quote, a rollerblading messenger caught in an illegal insider trading ring, according to Wikipedia.
	That's not what I thought it was going to be.
	The rollerblading messenger is named Chet Griffin, and he, quote, spends his nights hacking for fun.
	So, he's a hacker roller skating messenger.
	I wonder how much of this was a ripoff of Snow Crash.
	I don't know now that I read this.
	Sounds like it, like, this sounds like Gleaming the Cube.
	Did you ever see that movie where it's like a skateboarding Christian Slater movie, and you're like, oh, cool, maybe it'll be about like the big skateboarding competition.
	Because you say skateboarding Christian Slater movie, and I think, I, why am I not watching this right this second?
	The movie actually is like fucking Chinatown.
	Like, it's like this weird noir where he's like doing terrorism against a corporation that killed his brother.
	And it's like, come on, man, just skateboard to rock music, which also happens in the movie.
	But that's what this sounds like.
	It's like, it's too many hats on a hat, is what I'm getting at here.
	Dave, I have a Christian Slater story to tell you, but remind me to save it for the end because I don't want to break up the flow too much here.
	Sure.
	Joe wrote this skateboarding hacker messenger insider trading book in 1998, and it made very little impact.
	Although Joe claims 250,000 paperbacks were printed, which is key.
	That's a little thing you can tell about an author.
	Printed, huh?
	Yeah.
	And where are they?
	Where'd they go?
	Are they perhaps in your attic right now?
	The most noteworthy thing about this book is that in 2011, Joe sued Sony Pictures for their upcoming feature film Premium Rush, alleging that it was based on his screenplay.
	A judge said, no, it was not.
	He did not win this lawsuit.
	Just had the word rush in it.
	Yeah.
	I'm guessing that's the same thing.
	Yeah, there's more similarities than that, but okay.
	Yeah.
	In 2008, he wrote a book about love, sex, and relationships, from which we get an author bio that tells us slightly more about him.
	And this really gets a lot of this man's character, Joe Quirk, comes across in this paragraph, Dave.
	I studied literature and minored in development of Western civilization at Providence College, taught partially by Dominican priests who had no sense of humor when it came to my biological observations about celibacy.
	I graduated at the top of the bottom, at the top of the bottom tenth of my class.
	I attended one year of law school, so I only lost one-third of my soul, which is just enough to function in American society.
	I invested the last seven years of my novel royalties in reading evolutionary biology studies full-time.
	Now I finally feel ready to ask a woman on a date.
Oceanic City Vision 00:15:38
	Oh, no.
	That's so heartbreaking.
	What a way to end that.
	Oh, no.
	Yeah, Joe, buddy.
	So that's the basics of Joe Quirk.
	You have a picture of him now.
	In 2014.
	Yeah, we've all met a Joe Quirk.
	In 2014, he becomes the sea vangelist for seasteading, which I think is the head, but I'm not really certain, and I don't care to find out.
	The next year, he founds an organization dedicated to building a floating city with unprecedented political autonomy in the waters of a host nation.
	The Guardian goes on to describe the start of Joe's contributions to the magical world of libertarian boat cons.
	Quote: Nearly half of the world's surface is unclaimed, says Quirk, who published a book on seasteading in 2017 with the ambitious subtitle, How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity from Politicians.
	In an introductory video, he describes the planet's oceans as a sort of research and development zone where we could discover better means of governance and says that seasteading could provide the technology for thousands of people to start their own nano-nation on the high seas, giving people opportunities to peacefully test new ideas about living together.
	The most successful seasteads, he says, will become thriving new societies, inspiring change around the world.
	Now, there's a lot in there that's very funny, Dave.
	Yeah.
	I like the fact that this is going to be a research and development zone, but also a way for people to live together, even though the whole basis of it is you can escape if you find yourself around people you don't like, which it actually seems like you're not learning to live together.
	You're just learning to like flee a series of communities as they collapse in interpersonal conflicts.
	Right.
	It feels more Mad Max, where if everything falls apart, everybody scatters.
	Yeah.
	And they go do their other experimental communities.
	Yeah, it's one of those, like, if you were utopian, and I am, you have to grapple with the fact that, like, there's a lot of times people have tried to separate from society and make their own new society, and it usually collapses.
	Yeah.
	And, like, and not for because the government cracks down, but because like the wrong people fuck each other.
	Like, right.
	Like, most utopian projects in the way most punk houses end.
	Yes, with everybody hating each other.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And none of the dishes done, and a lot of new STDs spread.
	Right.
	Someone gets their foot broken or something like that, and it's a whole thing.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	A good punk house only lasts maybe a couple years.
	Yeah.
	Maybe.
	That's the, I mean, I guess I could.
	I could, I would say maybe some interesting ideas would come out of a bunch of like seaborne punk houses floating around and breaking apart and reforming.
	I don't know.
	But also, maybe not.
	But maybe not.
	Yeah.
	Some other things could occur too.
	I'll admit to being intrigued by the idea somewhat, although I don't think their pitch for how it would actually look is particularly interesting.
	So again, I get it when they're like, look at that whole ocean that we got.
	And it's like, yeah, no, that's true.
	That's a whole lot of land.
	Well, not really land, but it's a whole lot of space that, like, if someone figured out something to do with it, it's a good idea.
	Like, oh, that's a, that's cool.
	But then again, it's like, again, the ocean doesn't want us there.
	Let's not fuck up another area.
	Although we are fucking up the ocean.
	Let's not get murdering it.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And that's one of the things about like, we'll get on this, but like, I don't, they all, they always talk about how ecologically friendly it will be.
	But like, they're also the people who think the EPA is like an illegal organization and we should like, there should be no environmental rules about where you can and can't dump poison.
	Right.
	It's the one case for like colonies on Mars.
	It's just like, yeah, go there.
	Go on.
	Yeah.
	I fuck it right up.
	I never get that mad about anything people say about colonizing Mars because it's like, well, the worst case scenario is you die and I don't know you.
	Exactly.
	So it's fine.
	Yeah.
	You're not going to hurt much.
	Go fill it with your trash.
	I don't give a shit about Mars.
	Yeah, Mars is already dead.
	You're very welcome there.
	So yeah, again, so far, this guy, Joe Quirk's attempts to establish a floating utopia do not bode well for the future of utopian sea cities.
	In January of 2017, after years of technical feasibility studies and political negotiations, the Seasteading Institute signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of French Polynesia to build the first seasteads in its territorial waters.
	The designs were developed by Dutch architects named Blue21, and it was kind of looked like a big resort.
	There was a bunch of villas and yeah, all sorts of like, there's this idea there's going to be big parks and shit like the other ones we're talking about.
	And they planned to fund it through an initial coin offering, which is like a crowdfunding thing.
	Like we're going, not a crowdfunding.
	They were planning to launch a new cryptocurrency and have the value of that cryptocurrency and like the money people put into it buying the initial coins fund the start of the of the island that they're going to build or the community they're going to build in French Polynesia.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Joe Quirk told reporters, we're going to draw a new map of the world with French Polynesia at the center of the aquatic age.
	So that's, I mean, it's a step further than anyone else has really gotten.
	Yeah, cryptocurrency is a good way to get this grift on.
	Yeah.
	And here's the thing that they didn't prove over the Republic of Minerva.
	They actually like sat down with the government and were like, we want to do this.
	Yeah.
	Which is, you know.
	They've gotten farther than anybody else before them.
	Farther than anybody else before them.
	Yeah.
	Now, there's a lot of this that I find frustrating, including the fact that like I find, I'm particularly kind of like, as we just joked about it, but there's something really gross about Quirk's line that like we're going to draw a new map of the world with French Polynesia at the center in this like community we're building at the center of the aquatic age because the ocean, one of the best things about the ocean is that there's like,
	there's not a bunch of countries in it murdering each other all the time and doing other horrible things.
	It's mostly just ocean.
	Right.
	And there's something disgusting about a person who would look at this like vast, incomprehensible expanse of water with no borders or walls around most of it and be like, well, what if we just made it more like the places where we're murdering each other?
	Exactly.
	It defeats the purpose.
	Yeah.
	It's like Jeff Bezos looking at space and being like, we should move industry here.
	And it's like, really?
	Really?
	Anyway, my dislike of Quirk is kind of furthered by the fact that he chose French Polynesia for the site of this.
	And he chose it because it's the world's largest exclusive economic zone.
	Now, an exclusive economic zone is basically it's a zone that can stretch, I think, up to like 200 miles from the coastline of a nation where you have kind of control of what, like you can levy taxes and shit, right?
	Like it's it's your territory in terms of like what shit passes through.
	And French Polynesia, because it's this, it's, there's like a shitload of islands in French Polynesia and it's spread over a wide geographic area, they have the largest exclusive economic zone in the world.
	So potentially you could monetize a lot of this more than it is currently being monetized.
	And that was kind of the goal these people had, right?
	So Tom Bell, a professor of law in Orange County, drafted a contract for an agreement with the government of French Polynesia.
	He told reporters, we explained to the Polynesians how having a quasi-autonomous area nearby was a good thing.
	Look at Monaco or Hong Kong or Singapore.
	Special jurisdictions create a lot of growth outside their borders.
	Like Quirk, Bell also has a book about how people are going to start making their own sea cities for reasons besides tax haven.
	He theorizes that the first seastead state will grow like a coral polyp and be so economically successful that it will enrich the whole area until it breaks free to live on the open ocean.
	So again, he's saying that like we're going to start this thing in French Polynesia.
	It's going to be a huge economic hit.
	It's going to make a bunch of money and grow larger and larger.
	And eventually we'll just sail away from French Polynesia and abandon them because we'll be big enough that we won't have to have the protection of a state anymore.
	Right.
	Which is kind of shitty to French Polynesia because French Polynesia is one of the countries most threatened by climate change.
	Huge chunks of French Polynesia will cease to exist in the not distant future as a result of rising sea levels.
	And Quirk and Bell are basically saying, hey, we want to come into your country, pollute the water, spew carbon into the atmosphere, speed up the rate at which your islands sink, and do that in order to power our Bitcoin mining rigs.
	And then once we get rich and have a big island, we're going to sail it away and you guys can fucking deal with it.
	Right.
	It's like, it's pretty cool.
	Yeah.
	It's like Tony Soprando giving someone a loan where it's like, we're going to take as much as we can from you and then we're going to toss you out.
	That's it.
	We got what we needed.
	And now, yeah, and now we're going to bounce.
	And so it's like, it's a short-term solution for that country, probably, or at least that's how they view it.
	And then they're just going to get used up.
	Yeah.
	It's really shitty.
	Again, it defeats the entire purpose because it's like, look, if you're going to be shitty and use up resources and just ruin the world, just do that here in the U.S. Like, what's the point?
	Yeah, like you already have the ability to do most of these shitty.
	You can fuck over French Polynesia without traveling there.
	Every day, Americans fuck over French Polynesia.
	Exactly.
	You have a variety of options for harming the nation of French Polynesia without leaving your home.
	I hurt French Polynesia this morning when I opened a can of soda.
	Yeah, that's true.
	Yeah, it was so easy.
	It's incredibly easy to harm French Polynesia.
	And you also got some soda out of it.
	Yeah.
	And I got some soda out of it.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, so as is probably obvious by the fact that it was obvious to us what a bad deal this was, it was obvious to French Polynesia.
	The government agreed to sit down and talk to them a little bit.
	And the government agreed because the former minister of tourism for French Polynesia, Mark Collins, co-founded a company called Blue Frontiers with Joe Quirk in order to create the project.
	So that's, I think, why there was some initial buy-in that the government had, but that quickly ended.
	And I'm going to read from The Guardian here.
	The government was looking for something to address sea level rise and environmental degradation, whereas the Sea Steading Institute was more about autonomy, Mark Collins says.
	He says that the prospect of a tax-free enclave held little appeal for the locals, given that Polynesians don't pay income tax anyway.
	One Tahitian TV host compared the situation to the evil Galactic Empire in Star Wars, imposing on the innocent Ewoks while secretly building the Death Star.
	The libertarian position didn't help either.
	As Collins Chin put it, it's very difficult to ask for government support when your narrative is that you want to get rid of politicians.
	In retrospect, Bell agrees.
	They already had a beautiful paradise in French Polynesia.
	The local community wasn't very enthused about the project, and I get it.
	They don't need strangers coming in and ruining their view, which I'm glad you got that eventually, buddy.
	It sounds like for the most part, they weren't buying what they were selling.
	No, they're all like, all right, we'll sit.
	We'll sit down with you.
	I think there may have been some money that changed hands because there were people in the government who were initially kind of bullish on this.
	And then there were protests in the streets over it.
	Yeah.
	People being like, what about our fishing areas?
	Like, what about like, this is such a bad idea.
	Like, people were like, this is obviously a terrible idea.
	And the government quickly backed off.
	Yeah, they were like, no, it's not.
	And then they thought for a second, they're like, okay, never mind.
	This was dumb.
	This was dumb, everybody.
	Sorry.
	So when Blue Frontiers, the company that they were going to colonize the ocean around French Polynesia with, when that fails, Collins Chin goes off to start yet another Sea City project.
	And he claims to have given up.
	And Colin's Chin, again, like the guy from the government who had been working with him.
	Yeah.
	So Collins Chin starts another Sea City project.
	And this one is a lot savvier.
	And I think he might actually succeed to an extent because he claims to have given up on the idea that libertarian tax dodge is a good basis for a civilization.
	And he instead founded an organization with a goal of making floating cities that are extensions of existing cities and thus pay taxes as normal.
	Basically, like, hey, real estate's expensive in San Francisco.
	What if we build a floating city right outside the bay?
	What if we build a floating city on the side of New York?
	And like, that's that's the thing he's trying to sell, which, like, yeah, shit, that might work someday.
	Like, something like that might exist one of these days to deal with a variety of things.
	Yeah, I was going to say, it might have to exist at some point.
	Yeah, it may be inevitable.
	Yeah.
	It's just very funny that this whole this it feels like one long negotiation, this history that has reduced to like, okay, it's uh extension of city outside.
	Yeah, what if what if it is the same laws as San Francisco, California, but with no waves?
	You know, honestly, if they if they do it and then they're like, we won, it's like, good for you, man.
	Yeah, good for you guys.
	Good work.
	Yeah, and I, yeah, that that doesn't feel like a new type of government or something revolutionary.
	It just seems like a neat thing we could do outside of the city.
	It also, it's a mix of neat thing we could do and thing we may have to do because of how badly we fucked up other things.
	Yeah.
	And you know what?
	If more people are living in the ocean, maybe those are people who'd be like, hey, stop throwing stuff in here.
	Hey, why is this shit to the ocean?
	Yeah.
	I just checked the ocean and it turns out it's not good here.
	Yeah.
	Along with all the monsters it's filled with, there's a lot of garbage.
	Like, that's the thing is, if, if any of them came on it from sustainable living and cleaning up, because we've, we're, you know, there's all these prototypes and stuff of like ways to clean up the ocean and stuff.
	I feel like everybody would be like way more into this.
	Yes.
	If they're like, if we're going to like, hey, we're going to do some online gambling, but also we're going to pick up all your trash.
	And if, and that's also a good way to make money or to be sustainable where like the, you could get help from other countries because they're like, they're cleaning up our trash.
	We should support them.
	But again, it all starts from this very selfish place.
	Yeah, it's extremely selfish.
	Yeah.
	It's silly.
	It's silly and it's a bummer because again, as we keep coming back to, there's cool ideas.
	Yeah.
	So Chin's idea for these cities that are extensions of regular cities, but in the water, is to create a series of interlocking hexagonal islands, which harvest power from waves and sunlight and regenerate marine life through an artificial reef system.
	And a lot of these different seasteading plans today will say like, and we'll grow back the reefs.
	It'll provide a habitat for the animals.
	If they actually do it, that would be cool.
	Yeah.
	He calls his idea Oceanic City.
	And he claims that the hexagonal design allows for drag and drop city designing, just like in SimCity.
Libertarian Grift Exposed 00:05:40
	So you can like float a city block away and stick it in a new place or just like drop a hospital or a university, you know, in the middle of a thing.
	Right.
	And yeah, I think aspects of this dream might be realistic.
	And I think in general, one of the things that's changed from now to the earlier days and like the 70s and then the 90s of this is that better technology, stuff like 3D printers means like you could do this.
	Like this isn't like the Mars colony where we're like, well, Elon, it may not actually be possible to do what you're talking about at our current level of technology in any reasonable capacity.
	We could absolutely build like semi-autonomous sea habitats that people lived on and were modular.
	Like that's not physically impossible.
	Right.
	And as a result, the kind of libertarian dreams of seasteading have gone from the first ones were all grifts, right?
	There were attempts to raise money in order to like get money and nobody actually wanted to build anything.
	Well, now that's kind of changed, and you're starting to get the first libertarian seasteading advocates who believe in something and are actually willing to risk everything they have to try and set up a life at sea.
	That's fantastic.
	Yeah, because the grift that they, the thing that they were promising in the grift, not a bad idea, but they were just doing a grift.
	So it does make sense for someone to come along and be like, but what if we actually did it?
	Yeah, what if we trifled?
	I just did it.
	Yeah.
	These new things you're talking about, it's just so much more realistic.
	It reminds me of playing like Minecraft or Valheim or any survival game where it's like you build a base and then if you want to fuck off and make a new base in the ocean, for example, you can't just like start again.
	You move your resources.
	You build it as part of it.
	And that's what they're getting at here, which is like the first ideas was like clean break.
	We're doing our own thing.
	And it's like, you kind of can't do that.
	Like, don't print your own money immediately.
	Like, like this, the idea of building a city off of an existing city is a good compromise if they actually do the things that they're saying they can do.
	It's realistic.
	Yeah.
	And that's kind of why you've seen so far just one, well, no, three now, but the first people who have actually done the opposite of a grift lost huge amounts of money trying to create societies at sea.
	And the first of these guys, and the one who put the most skin in the game, is Chad Elwartowski.
	Chad is a lifelong libertarian, from the information available, at least.
	It seems like he got his start as a student at Michigan State University in 1996.
	His first election was Bill Clinton's re-election, and Chad attended a speech by the president and found himself disturbed, not by any of the sex crime stuff, but by Bill Clinton's spending.
	Quote, he's talking about investing in this, investing in that, investing in that.
	I knew investing was code word for we're going to be spending money on this.
	Chad believed that the country needed to spend less and tax its people less.
	He spent time briefly agitating for the Free State Project and the Ron Paul campaign.
	In 2002, after graduation, he got a job as a software engineer in Georgia.
	Chad made a stab at starting a political life there, running for Congress once as a libertarian, but he couldn't get enough signatures to get on the ballot.
	During these years, most of Chad's political activism was complaining about the failure of libertarian politics to take off nationwide.
	He was just kind of like, why isn't this happened yet?
	After years of this, he decided that, fuck it, he'd just go out and start his own settlement and live free.
	He spent years experimenting with different constructions methods in his off time.
	He would work 17-hour days as a software contractor and then like spend time trying to develop ways to build a sea habitat and whatnot in his off time.
	He did a lot of like government contracting.
	He was in Afghanistan for a while, like coding for the Department of Defense.
	And he made a shitload of money, which he put into Bitcoin.
	And in 2015, he got briefly involved with a couple of people in a project to sell C notes to try and raise $15 million to make a village at sea.
	Only five people invested, so the project was canceled.
	And Chad was adamant to invest or to reporters that he refunded all of their money.
	C notes sounds like a scam, but maybe it wasn't.
	Based on what comes next, I don't think it was.
	I think Chad's pretty earnest.
	My note to Chad, if Chad's listening, is it sounds like he has some ideas?
	He's just not finding people who are interested.
	He is not popular.
	It's not getting enough signatures.
	That seems like the story of his life with this stuff so far.
	Yes.
	And yeah, and I think that is about to change because in 2016, Chad retires and he's got a bunch of money, mostly in crypto, enough that he doesn't have to work anymore.
	So he spends some time bumming around trying to find other people who will try to start a sea siety with him.
	And he meets a tour guide when he's in Thailand and they fall in love and get married.
	Now, when you talk about a white rich guy who travels to Thailand and meets a tour guide and gets married, that is often a problematic story.
	It's often horrible 100% of the time.
	I don't think it is this time.
	Because number one, she's 33 when they get married.
	So it's not.
	Nothing questionable about it.
	She's got like a 13-year-old kid.
	So like, I think he just actually found someone and they fell in love and it's fine.
	So Chad L. Wartowski, you get the official behind the bastard seal of married a Thai woman while on vacation, but not like in a predatory way award.
Problematic Love Stories 00:04:31
	Nice.
	Are you going to mail that to him?
	Yeah.
	It's 45 pounds and made of solid bronze.
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	As it should be.
	You know who also doesn't get married in a predatory way?
	Oh, God.
	But what if I said didn't?
	I said didn't.
	Yeah, but what if it's accidentally at Washington State Patrol?
	Yeah, if it's the Washington State Patrol, they definitely at least 40% of the time.
	Am I right?
	Okay.
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Unclear Legal Situations 00:14:54
	Yeah.
	The American Dream.
	The American Dream.
	Ah, I love America.
	So this lady, Chad, Jad marries a lady.
	Her name, she calls herself Nadia Summergirl.
	She picked a last name for herself when she left her.
	She picked Summer Girl.
	She picked Summer Girl, whatever.
	People make names.
	Yeah, no, it's fine.
	It's fine.
	They get married and they actually move to French Polynesia briefly to help Blue Frontiers and their seasteading of it.
	So like when they're courting the government of French Polynesia, Chad hears about this and he just moves there right away.
	Like again, he's incredibly earnest.
	He's like, oh my God, this government's actually agreed.
	Like I'll just, I'll be, I need to move there so that when things start happening, I'm right in the middle of it.
	Up until the end here, he's pretty endearing in some ways.
	But yeah, the whole thing falls apart as we just discussed.
	And so El Wartowski flees back to Thailand with his new bride.
	Next, he gets in contact with a German engineer named Rudiger Koch.
	Like Chad, libertarian, like Chad, Rudiger is a libertarian.
	And he's a libertarian who made all of his money in like the defense industry.
	He designed weapons systems before getting really into cryptocurrency and retiring to Thailand.
	He had a dream, which he discussed in the Seasteading Institute forum, of creating a launch loop, which is a huge slingshot that can throw things into space.
	And Rudiger Koch didn't like come up with the idea of a launch loop.
	People had talked for a while about like, well, you wouldn't actually need like all the fuel and stuff that you need if you could build a big enough slingshot type thing to just like launch stuff into the atmosphere.
	And is this like just like throwing like cows and like cars in the space?
	I think spaceships mostly, Dave.
	I think they're really shooting for spaceships.
	I think that's a waste.
	You'd rather what would you fling into space?
	Just whatever I want space to have, you know?
	Like confuse some aliens.
	Yeah, throw Iggy Pop out there, get him to space, start things off on a good footing with space.
	Oh, yeah.
	That way when space is like, should we kill this planet with a meteor?
	They'll be like, not the guys that gave us Iggy.
	Right.
	I want the first contact aliens have with our species to be their UFO slamming into Iggy Pop.
	Yeah.
	Like that's what I like.
	Oh my God, we hit something.
	Pull over.
	And then it's Iggy Pop.
	Yeah.
	And it's Iggy Pop.
	Frozen Corn.
	Iggy Pop.
	Yeah.
	And a single copy of one of the Stooges albums.
	Yeah.
	That'll set things off right.
	Honestly.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's a perfect idea.
	Perfect idea.
	So Koch wants to build a launch loop, which a thing, I think it's a thing that could potentially work.
	Like, I think it's a thing where, like, astronautical engineers were like, well, yeah, tech, you could make something technically that would work this way, and it might be a good idea, but no one had ever built it because it requires an enormous amount of space, so much that you could only really do it in the ocean.
	Sorry, it's a catapult?
	Yeah, it's like a wily coyote?
	Yeah, so just like fling shit into the stars.
	Incredible.
	Yeah, it's a cool idea.
	I don't know how actually practical it is, but a bunch of people think it is.
	Yeah, honestly, it's more sustainable, right?
	Than what we're doing now.
	If you could do it, it seems like it would be a good idea potentially.
	Coke is like, well, we have to do it in the ocean.
	And so he makes a deal with Chad that they'll pick a spot and they're going to have to, for this launch loop, build a watchtower, right?
	So you can watch the launches.
	And so Coke is like, hey, you go in, you help me fund this.
	You just live in the watchtower.
	You get your thing.
	You get to start seasteading.
	And I can use that as a base to make my loop, right?
	So both men get on board a project together.
	And again, most promising.
	They have a goal other than just like avoid taxes.
	And it's a little maybe outside of their means, but at least it's a goal.
	At least it's a dream beyond avoid taxes.
	No, I just had a realization of all of this.
	All these guys, because we've been talking about the idea of like, they keep framing it as we should start a society, but ultimately it's just that they want to live a certain way.
	Yeah.
	And that's part of the problem.
	I think it's an issue with libertarian in general, which is like you need to show how this would benefit people in general.
	No, it just occurred to me.
	They all just want to be lighthouse keepers.
	Like, that's it.
	That's the answer.
	Just be a lighthouse keeper and you're all set.
	Not enough lighthouses, Dave.
	I know.
	We need to bring back lighthouses and then we'll solve libertarians.
	That's Joe Biden's next big spending bill.
	A trillion dollars for lighthouses.
	Yeah, that's it.
	That's all we need.
	So Chad and Coke decide to form a company in order to build this launch loop and a community around it.
	They name their company Ocean Builders, and their plan is to sell 20 or so pods at least and kind of build a community around this launch loop.
	And I think the idea is like, hey, if we actually build like a space launch facility, you're going to want to live around that.
	There's going to be a bunch of money around that.
	There's a whole lot of businesses that people could do.
	And, you know, it's not the worst.
	Of the ideas people have had in this episode, it's the best.
	So they build a prototype and they tow it into international waters, unflagged, transmitting nothing off the coast of Thailand.
	Edward Towski had eventually had initially tried to keep a low profile.
	He didn't want to make a big deal about it until things got established.
	But he also wanted to work with the Seasteading Institute on the project.
	And once they heard a guy had actually made a seastead, like there's a dude living in the ocean off of a platform in international waters, they sent their president out to film a documentary about him.
	As The Guardian writes, it was not a stirring success, but also not a failure.
	More importantly, it was real, making Chad our first not a grifter of the episode.
	Wow.
	Due to a construction snafu, the pod listed 10 degrees.
	On stormy nights, Elwartowski and Summergirl abandoned the tiny bedroom and slept in the kitchen, as close as possible to the central spa.
	A grocery run was a four-day affair.
	And since there was nothing outside the seastead to park a boat, Coke had to pick them up.
	They sometimes stayed on shore instead in an apartment in Phuket that Elwartowski had rented for Summergirl's mother and 14-year-old son.
	So this is not easy.
	They're really committed to this.
	Like you have to give it to him.
	These are believers.
	This is not a grift.
	You would not live that way for a grift.
	That's a nightmare.
	No, they're not.
	That sounds fucking miserable.
	Yeah.
	I found an article on NewsBTC, which is a Bitcoin and crypto news website, about Chad and Summergirl's establishment of the first actual libertarian seastead.
	It was published in the spring of 2019 after the first episodes of the documentary about the effort came out.
	This article mostly celebrates that Chad used Bitcoin profits to build his new home.
	It includes this line.
	Elwer Towski states that the couple has made no effort to seek approval from the Thai government for their new home.
	He commented, We've just been keeping under the radar so far, but we follow all the laws of Thailand, so it's as if we're just living on a boat in the water as far as they're concerned.
	All we expect from the Thai government is that they follow international law.
	We will be doing the same.
	But Nadia and I aren't doing anything we can't do on land.
	So you think that worked, Dave?
	I mean, it's again, it's just that they're just living in the ocean.
	Like, it doesn't feel like they've built a libertarian society so much as they're in the ocean.
	You know who took this seriously?
	It's the Thai government.
	So in Thailand, you can go to prison for forever if you like make fun of the king.
	You can get executed for smuggling drugs.
	It's not a chill government, Thailand government.
	It's a little tightly wound, isn't it?
	They're a little tightly wound, right?
	They don't like people just existing in their ocean.
	Yeah, they don't like some guy starting his own nation off of their coast.
	They were not okay with this.
	I mean, in fairness, like if I had a yard and then someone was like, look, I'm just existing in your yard, I'd be like, maybe get off my yard.
	Yeah.
	Like, I'll talk to you.
	I'll see if you're cool, but maybe get off my yard.
	And they're like, it's cool.
	I'm a libertarian.
	And I'm like, I'm calling the cops.
	But actually, I'm not going to call the cops because that doesn't help.
	But yes.
	Yeah, I will have a drone to speak to.
	By the way, sorry, quick aside.
	This is called Ocean Builder.
	Yeah.
	What has all the names been?
	There was like Oceania.
	There's like New York Oceanics, Oceania.
	It just occurred to me.
	They all sound like Sim Builder games.
	They do all sound like video games that, what's his name?
	The guy who made The Sims.
	Yeah, they all sound like that.
	They all sound like that.
	So the Thai government finds out because he keeps doing press that he's living illegally, maybe off of the coast of their nation.
	Again, the legal situation here is kind of unclear.
	But the Thai government is not chill about it.
	And in April of 2019, Summergirl gets a text from a friend back on the mainland that she and her new husband are on TV.
	The Thai Navy had judged their platform to be an illegal breakaway state and a threat to Thai sovereignty.
	And threatening Thai sovereignty is a capital crime.
	They could both be given the death sentence for this.
	Oh, my God.
	Also, there's never a good time to be surprised by the text you're on TV.
	Yeah.
	Like I would never be like, woo, yeah.
	Like, you want to know if you're going to be on TV.
	You don't want to be shocked by that.
	And here's the thing.
	Chad is an anarcho-capitalist.
	And when he gets reached out to by the media, like, hey, what do you think about the Thai government threatening to, like, saying that you're a threat to their sovereignty?
	He, like, he goes into an ideological explanation.
	He's like, well, I don't believe in nations or borders.
	So obviously I'm not trying to create a breakaway nation.
	Like, that's just absurd.
	The Thai government does not buy this.
	Yeah.
	Like, you're not going to convince the Thai government that anarcho-capitalism is the thing, Chad.
	They're just not going to listen.
	And indeed, they don't.
	I have never once been able to leave a store with a product and pay with, I don't believe in money.
	Like, that's never been a thing they'll accept.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Chad may not have believed in a state, but Thailand does, and they have a military, which they send after him.
	He and Summergirl barely managed to escape pursuit with their lives.
	It's a whole deal.
	Yeah, like they, and they are wanted in a bunch of the world now.
	They had to travel places that didn't extradite to fucking Thailand.
	And it's actually kind of an interesting story you can find in that Guardian article.
	But to make a long story short, the place they land next is Panama.
	Now, over the course of late 2019, after fleeing for their lives, Chad and Summergirl had sat down with Koch, the space slingshot guy in Panama, and another guy, Grant Romant.
	Now, Grant is the former host of a TV show for hairstylists.
	He was made CEO.
	Once they meet Grant, this hairstylist, they make him CEO of Ocean Builders fairly shortly.
	And from what I can tell, he did have one real qualification, which is that in the 90s, before his hairstylist days, I guess, he had worked on the Freedom Ship Project in Florida.
	So he had that experience.
	He worked on a grift.
	The first two qualifications on his company bio were that he had, quote, one of the most advanced mobile paperless offices in Canada in 1995, and that he had also, quote, lived in a tech frat house in San Francisco with one of the six co-founders of PayPal.
	So literally, the top two lines on his resume are: I ran an office in Canada once, and I used to live in a frat house.
	I lived with some people.
	Yeah, it's amazing.
	It's an incredible, incredible plex.
	All of these, it is like a pattern, right?
	Not just with this, but a lot of your episodes, where if you look at their like employment history, it's like it's like managed a dairy queen one year later, tried to start a government.
	And like, it's, it's just, I again, I get, I sort of get it.
	Uh, frustrated people are just like, you know what?
	I'm just going to hit the reset button.
	But it never works.
	It never does.
	So he had had this guy Grant, who they pick as their CEO.
	So they all meet up in Panama and Coke introduces these two now fleeing from the Thai government to Grant.
	And they're like, well, this guy should run our fucking business.
	Now, Grant was, like all of these people, independently wealthy, right?
	That's the other thing.
	These are all like independently wealthy, rich people with nothing else to do.
	And this is the first one I respect because at least Chad put some skin in the game.
	Right.
	So together.
	If they were independently wealthy, it often feels like it means they had wealthy, they're from a wealthy family.
	I think probably in a lot of cases.
	I don't know.
	I don't know as much about all of their early lives because there's not always a lot on these people.
	There's not like super detailed Wikipedias and stuff.
	They just appear.
	And you have what they say to journalists about their background.
	So we know that Elwartowski, Grant, and Koch put a bunch of money into setting up a land base in Panama where they were going to invest in technology.
	They'd figure out how to 3D print the things they need and design submarine drones and the like.
	And I do think they put a lot of money into this.
	Again, they're not grifters, I don't think.
	They do actually believe, or at least some of them believe.
	El Wartowski certainly does.
	Unfortunately, what they believed in was not freedom so much as it was a specific freedom to take ownership of a thing not currently owned and exploit it for profit.
	The Guardian makes it clear that their ideology, while less fraudulent than their predecessors, was still deeply problematic.
	Quote, in a 1998 essay, Wayne Gramlich, a founder of the Seasteading Institute, noted that the frontier was settled not by a few well-financed parties, but by tens of thousands of smaller groups.
	These homesteaders were granted the legal right to a plot of land so long as they built a house and farmed for five years.
	As they converted the landscape, they laid the foundations for today's continent-spanning United States.
	Gramlich wanted to find technologies that would allow individuals to similarly colonize the sea.
	Quirk, too, discusses the U.S. frontier in his book, Seasteading.
	It was a place, he notes, where leaders liberally doled out rights as they competed for new citizens.
	Western states did away with voting eligibility requirements based on land ownership or tax payment, Quirk says.
	And Wyoming offered women the right to vote before anywhere else in the United States, in part because the territory needed women to marry its abundant bachelors.
	When the topic comes up during my time in Panama, Koch claims that frontier initiatives helped make the 19th century probably the freest century we've ever had in human history.
	That's what I think about the 1800s.
	Very free in the United States.
	A lot of free people walking around.
	Yeah.
Horrifying Crypto Ships 00:17:17
	It's just like, look at all those free people.
	There's that romanticizing the olden times where it's like, yeah, I mean, that's what we had to do.
	It's just not.
	We don't do that now because we did it already.
	Like, we can't go out into the frontier and do that.
	It's just the world, the reason that could happen is because you couldn't get in a plane and like go somewhere.
	You'd have to be like, yeah, everybody go out into this area, start their own thing, and we'll catch up to you.
	Yeah.
	You know, like, that's just the only way to do that.
	And it's, it's such a, he's coming at it from such a myopic, like, white dude-focused view of the way the history went.
	Like, even, and even by that standard, for a huge chunk, like the first third of the 19th century in the United States, white men didn't have the right to vote universally, right?
	Like, there were property requirements for a lot of the country.
	I think it was Andrew Jackson that shit changed under.
	And they're forgetting, like, you know, there were people already there.
	Yeah.
	You know, like, genocide that preceded it.
	And I guess you don't have that with the sea, except for you do have cetaceans and like also other kinds of stuff.
	So you still have, yeah, exploitation.
	You have marine life.
	He's called, again, you learn a lot about this guy.
	He's calling the 1800s the freest century in human history.
	Women couldn't vote in the U.S. for any of that time.
	No, it's not.
	And black people were slaves for almost 70% of it.
	Yeah, it's only a thing a white guy can say.
	Again, that obsession, the idea of like, oh, what would the founding fathers think about X or Y?
	And it's like, I don't give a shit what they have to think.
	Yeah.
	Like they give the fuck.
	What would Julius Caesar think about me doing this?
	Like, no, who gives a shit?
	He's dead.
	Yeah.
	Also, I don't give a shit what old people, like, the progress.
	The whole idea is we're moving forward.
	And part of that is not giving a shit what the people before us thought and recognizing that they sucked.
	Yeah.
	That's the lesson you should learn at age 18, but sometimes takes longer.
	Yeah.
	So there was, of course, weird tax stuff wrapped up in the plan these guys were cooking up.
	That's a factor in all of these.
	Like they still have their pitches about how it's going to be a tax haven.
	And that's why the group moved to Panama in the first place, right?
	To avoid taxes.
	But when Ocean Builders started advertising sea pods for sale, they were, I think, serious.
	I don't think it's a grift.
	I think this is the first one that they really, I don't think they'll ever build any, but I think they mean to.
	So the sea pods that Elwartowski and the others are selling are luxury sea homes.
	I found them described in one article as looking like giant motorbike helmets on poles, which is not a bad way of, they look like the Jetsons houses a little bit, but coming out of the ocean.
	They put a lot of money into designing their website, which has some lovely renders and succeeds in making these pods look like new tech industry releases.
	The Apple is heavily an influence here.
	Like they're trying to make it look like that as opposed to like frontier shit.
	Like the future.
	Like the future.
	That said, when you read through their marketing materials, there's actually some unintentionally horrifying things like this.
	The native pod software can be upgraded remotely and new sensors and automations can be easily hot swapped.
	The pod will be like a mobile phone where you can install new home apps that are constantly being developed.
	So that sounds great, right?
	What if your home was in the middle of the ocean and also worked like your phone?
	Hey, hey, you want to live in a tech nightmare suspended above the ocean?
	You know how your phone works perfectly all the time and you love it?
	What if your house was like that?
	And also, if anything went wrong, you drowned.
	Right.
	It's the thing that we said in one of these episodes, which is like the ultimate goal, if successful, is still something I'm not interested in.
	It's like, it's the same with Mars, where it's like, hey, you want to live on this dead planet where you can't go outside?
	And it's like, not really.
	I might live on the sea in the right circumstance, but it's not a bunch of like sterile, techie-looking pots.
	Literally, yeah.
	On a sea, like the like we said before, the worst case scenario is a bunch of drownings.
	But honestly, that is the best version of dying in the ocean.
	Yes.
	Like, like that is the, that is baseline.
	That is like, if you're drowning, you're like, oh, good.
	I'm glad I'm drowning and not getting eaten by a monster because that is also on the table.
	There are literal monsters in there.
	Fucking monsters.
	Like Lovecraftian looking demons that will, that will eat you or try to have sex with you if they're a dolphin.
	It's just the end goal is not appealing to me.
	Yeah.
	I mean, it's not, I don't know.
	That's, I guess, a taste thing.
	You know, different people appeal for different things, but the way in which they're specifically trying to sell this is just horrifying to me.
	Like the fact that it'll work like your phone.
	Well, that's not very attractive.
	My phone is a piece of shit.
	No one wants to live in a smart home yet until we actually figure out a way for that to work.
	Especially not one on the sea.
	Yeah.
	It's the same with Tesla where they're like, instead of all these dials and stuff, have a screen.
	And I'm like, I don't feel good about that.
	Even if it works, I'm not.
	Maybe the kids under me will be okay with that.
	I'm still, I'm too old to be okay with that.
	I'm certainly not okay with that and also in the damn ocean.
	And it's like, yeah.
	I'm not an expert on building things in the ocean, but all of their renders are like these smooth, white, curved products that look like, again, like Apple gadgets.
	And all of the permanent sea structures I've ever seen, like oil rigs, like look huge and rough and blocky and like tough.
	They're covered in both of them.
	They might need to.
	Maybe they need to look that way to like survive in the ocean.
	I don't know.
	I'm not an expert, but.
	No, like when you were talking about those modular things, you think of this futuristic idea of like, boop, whoop.
	It's like, no, they probably have to like tow it.
	It probably takes like weeks to move.
	And it's probably like really rough seas and really inconvenient.
	Yeah.
	And it's the same with this.
	It's like salt water and air and it's just going to rust and look gross.
	Like you don't want it to be like white because that'll just become gross, right?
	Yeah, it will get really weird and stained.
	Yeah.
	But it just seems like a nightmare.
	Here's what they write about this is maybe the most unintentionally horrifying thing they've written about these houses they're trying to sell.
	We think the home of the future will be elegant, simple and clean.
	To achieve this, we decided to hide the light bulbs, light switches, and power outlets by building them into the design of the house that they are invisible, yet always right where you need them.
	Oh boy.
	Yeah, that seems like a good idea on a naval vessel.
	Yeah.
	It's going to have everything hard to adjust and change on the fly.
	Which, again, I think boats, you need to be able to like repair them and shit in media res, otherwise you might die.
	I don't know.
	Not a boat expert here.
	Just telling what other people have told me.
	Just a house is like, you need to, if you need to do the rewiring stuff, it shouldn't be tough.
	It shouldn't be built in.
	Yeah, it shouldn't be.
	Yeah.
	It's the hubris of the design, which is like one of the features they advertise for the CPOD is a lightning prevention system.
	Yeah, isn't that exciting?
	Didn't even think about lightning, and now that I'm now that's all I can think about.
	Yeah, they talk shit about lightning rods because they're like, those just direct lightnings flow.
	What if you could just stop lightning?
	And I don't entirely know their plans there, but I do they not explain it?
	Because there's a bunch of different reading you could do, but it all comes back to like my question, which is, well, if you're doing something to the environment around you that makes it unable for lightning to form in a time when it's trying to form lightning, what else does that affect?
	It's like cloud seeding, where it's like, okay, but you know, that'll do other stuff too, right?
	Like, if you start making it rain places, it's not supposed to rain, like other stuff will happen, right?
	No, exactly.
	It's like, hey, you want to live near this volcano?
	Don't worry.
	We figured out a way to make it not erupt.
	And it's like, I don't believe you.
	I'm going to need to have a lot of information before, like we guarantee to stop lightning.
	It's like, I just will need more information.
	100%.
	Yeah, I would need a couple of different things, I think.
	So, yeah, if you've been following along so far, this doesn't seem dissimilar to a number of Grift Sea Sciety projects we covered earlier.
	The sea pods could easily be yet another attempt to get rich in pre-orders or whatever and then run away.
	But as it turns out, the ocean builders team were willing to put yet more skin in the game.
	COVID hit, and it absolutely pants the entire cruise ship industry.
	And suddenly, there was a way cheaper way to build a sea platform than making sea pods.
	You could just buy a cruise ship, a Brock bottom-price cruise ship, Dave.
	So the three pooled their money and put together $9.5 million, which they definitely should never have had in the first place.
	So this is fundamentally a happy story.
	They really shouldn't have any money.
	Oh, my goodness.
	They're about to buy a cruise ship.
	They sure do buy a cruise ship, Dave.
	They're just going to sail that around and then they're going to like, well, they're going to realize fuel is expensive.
	So we're going to.
	Oh, this is a full story.
	You don't have to wonder how it'll end.
	Sorry, I'm just imagining like someone waking up and going outside and just seeing a cruise ship just like beached near their house.
	That's three.
	Three dead libertarians on the beach in front of it.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Oh, God.
	So they buy a cruise ship, the Pacific Dawn, 245 meters long, which is just 4,000 meters short of the Freedom Ship.
	So they're on their way.
	At least it's real.
	So they pivot in their dreams of seasteading.
	They commission plans for a new sea city, and the dawn is going to be, in their minds, the centerpiece of a network of sea pods.
	So they'll park the dawn somewhere and then start selling sea pods, which will like form out around it, you know?
	And they'll build a little sea town that way.
	They also decide that, like, well, we need a lot more startup capital.
	Although I don't know that they did because $10 million seems like you could build some sea pods with it.
	I'm sure the guys who go to that like burn on the water manage to build things like that for less than $10 million.
	But instead of using it for RD, they buy this boat and the plan is to sell the cabins on it for $25,000 a piece and use that money to fund the development and sale of sea pods, which will gradually turn into a society.
	I imagine the response was people saying, no, thanks.
	I can just take a cruise.
	Like a cruise.
	But what's what you're lived on the cruise ship and it never moved.
	And it didn't have all the cruise ass.
	Like, that's the other thing.
	Like, there's no, like, they're not doing like little Broadway shows or like, you know, no fancy dinners.
	It's just an empty cruise ship.
	We'll talk about that in a second.
	So their plan is that like gradually over time, they'll be able to fund the creation and the sale of more sea pods, which will like surround the Pacific Dawn, and there will be platforms for growing food and manufacturing things and providing parkland.
	Although I guess you'd have to pay for the parkland because there's no government that's paying for things.
	I don't know.
	That's never explained.
	They named their cruise ship the Satoshi because the guy, the anonymous founder of Bitcoin's pseudonym was Satoshi.
	And yeah, the plan for the C-City is for it to look from the air like the B and Bitcoin.
	Oh, okay.
	This got so gross.
	Yeah.
	I know.
	And it's also like, well, okay, if you don't have, if you're a libertarian society, who's making everybody form the shape of a Bitcoin logo?
	Whose job is that?
	How do you compel that behavior?
	How do you make that?
	Yeah.
	It's so maybe they had a plan.
	Only so it's just so cringe.
	Oh, you're not into the big Bitcoin C-City?
	No, I'm not into that.
	Based around a cruise ship that you live in forever?
	No big B for me, man.
	It's such an incredible downgrade.
	Like, again, all these stories are like these negotiations where they're like, I want to start my own country.
	And then it ends with like, okay, but I get to keep the truck.
	Like, deal.
	And then they get like a truck, and that's it.
	So on October 20th, 2020, Chad Elwartowski announced to Reddit that the fondest dreams of generations of libertarians were about to be realized.
	They were going to build, finally, a seaborne libertarian nation.
	And I'm going to quote from a Guardian summary of the discussion that followed.
	Quote, So I am buying a cruise ship and naming it MS Satoshi.
	AMA, ask me anything.
	The responses were quick.
	Need an apprentice aviation mechanic?
	I know how to use a yo-yo.
	Any room for me?
	And included the inevitable skeptics.
	Anyone remember the good old days of the fire festival?
	But Plenty took the proposition seriously and wanted to go over the small print.
	Where is the power coming from?
	Gas, internet, food, water, toiletries.
	What taxes will she be subject to?
	Elwartowski answered every question with grave attention to detail.
	There would be generators at first, followed quickly by solar power.
	This would be an eco-friendly crypto ship.
	High-speed wireless internet would come from land.
	Utilities would be included in the fees at first, but would be metered out when the cabins were upgraded.
	You don't want to have to pay for someone else's mining rig in their cabin, he wrote, referring to the resource-intensive computational process that introduces new crypto coins into the system.
	But as the Reddit QA continued, Elwartowski's meticulous responses revealed some of the more knotty practicalities of life on board.
	It turned out that the only cooking facilities would be in the restaurant.
	For safety reasons, no one was allowed to have a microwave in their rooms, though some cabins had many fridges, noted Elwartowski, determinatively sidestepping the point.
	He offered residents a 20% discount at the restaurant and mentioned that some interested cruisers had already talked about renting part of the restaurant kitchen so they could make their own food.
	We want entrepreneurs to come up with solutions and try them out, he wrote, in a valiant attempt to convert a fairly fundamental stumbling block into wild startup energy.
	This is your place to try new things.
	You have to pay for the food at the restaurant?
	Yes.
	That is the only kitchen?
	That is the only kitchen.
	That is dope.
	What a great libertarian mecca that has a cafeteria.
	This will be the freest place on earth, but no microwaves.
	Yep.
	No microwaves.
	And you can't make your own food in any way.
	Well, no, you could pay to use the communal, to use the kitchen.
	Someone could lease it.
	Entrepreneurs could figure out how to lease it.
	They're still paying.
	Yeah, it's very funny.
	Oh my fucking God.
	We haven't.
	I feel like I should have throughout this been talking or speculating about the amount of cocaine is involved in this entire It's not none, Dave.
	It's not none.
	It's not none or at least some sort of amphetamine.
	It's a solid point.
	Might be ketamine.
	It might be ketamine.
	It's a real three in the morning.
	I'm starting a business energy.
	You know, like it's, it's, it's that.
	It's probably cocaine.
	Yeah.
	Oh, it's painful.
	Robert.
	Wow.
	What else?
	Hurt us again.
	Tell us more, bad.
	So, uh, yeah, and it is funny.
	You can, you can't have microwaves in your room, but you can have a Bitcoin mining rig.
	It's perfect.
	It's perfect.
	It's just fucking perfect.
	You're right.
	It is very funny that both the Liberty ship and the Satoshi's founders admitted up front, oh, yes, we will have to radically curb your freedoms in order to make a life on a boat together possible.
	Whatever criticisms you have of them, though, they hired a captain and a skeleton crew for the ship, and some of them sailed their asses to Panama with it.
	This is, again, more than any of their predecessors, except the sea land guy, ever managed.
	They started auctioning the 777 open cabins off in late November of 2020.
	They held a number of informational calls for potential customers where they talked about shit like their COVID safety policies on board and their plans to accept a bunch of stupid crypto coins with names like Eureka Coin and Dogecoin.
	They also informed people that pets larger than a small dog or pets that barked would not be allowed on board.
	Oh, so it's crawling with cats.
	Thousands of casks of cats and fairies.
	That's what it would be.
	Cats eating the corpses of libertarians who died when their mining rig overheated them and they stroked out of their boots.
	Can I just say that island in Japan, it'll be like this boat perpetually sailing the ocean, just covered in the corner.
	Can we just say that dogs would not want to attend that event?
	Yeah.
Top-Down Thinking 00:10:34
	No, thank you.
	Cats would love it.
	So how many rooms do you think sold, Dave?
	I'm going to guess it's like when he like trying to get those signatures and all that.
	I'm guessing, all right.
	I'm going to say 777 rooms.
	Wait, that's how many sold?
	No, that's how many were available in total.
	Right.
	I'm guessing three.
	Close.
	Seven.
	Yeah.
	So twice as good as you thought, more than twice as good as you thought, Dave.
	You really underestimated them.
	So the fact that only seven rooms sold was a problem.
	Another problem was that none of the men who'd thrown down near $10 million for this boat and decided to make life on the sea their chief goal actually knew about living on a boat or sailing a boat.
	Why would you need to know that, Dave?
	You're trying to figure out a whole new way of life.
	You don't have to know how to work a sail or maintain an engine like a cup.
	This is like a slowed down GTA rampage where you're just like jumping from one thing to another, desperately trying to hijack stuff.
	Like it feels like the boat has been hijacked in slow motion by someone who doesn't know how to use a boat.
	And now they're just sailing off and they're wondering what the hell all the buttons do and they're not sure what they're going to do.
	They do have to hire an actual professional captain to sail.
	That's the good news.
	Can you imagine being that captain?
	He's given some quotes and it sounded like a nightmare.
	Yeah, biting your tongue the whole way of these things.
	He was very adamant about like they did not know what they were doing.
	Where they're like, we can pay you and I'd be like, cash right now.
	I don't want no fucking I don't want no goddamn like pictures of dogs on coins.
	You give me cash.
	Fucking cash money, baby.
	Yeah.
	So there's a lot of talk, this whole episode about like international waters, the freedom of international waters.
	Here's the thing.
	International law heavily regulates a lot of the ocean.
	Sailing requires certain certificates.
	Like you have to have a bunch of things that prove your boat is safe.
	And the guys didn't realize they needed to have that.
	So they had to put it in dry dock and pay a bunch more money and set the project back.
	Just Google it.
	They could have Googled it.
	They could have Googled that.
	It also turns out that you have to have insurance for boats that are going to sail into and exist within another nation.
	I don't have that either.
	And insurance companies were like, well, we're not going to insure a boat run by three guys who don't know anything about boats and want to park it off the coast of Panama and turn it into a floating Bitcoin city.
	Like, we don't, we don't, like, we're not even going to quote you a premium on that.
	That's just not a business we want to be.
	I never thought I'd say comrade insurance guy.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, it's just, it's pretty basic.
	So the whole venture fell apart, and the ship was eventually sold for scrap at a loss of a lot of money.
	The Guardian chronicles the very funny reactions these guys had when they realized they'd never bothered to learn shit about what life on the ocean might entail.
	Quote, after trying multiple insurers and brokers, Romant began to realize that the cruise ship industry was, as he put it, plagued by over-regulation.
	Along with airlines and nuclear power, according to Harris, it's in the top three.
	The Ocean Builders Great Freedoms Project, whose intrinsic purpose was to offer an escape from oppressive rules and bureaucracy, was being hobbled by oppressive rules and bureaucracy.
	As Elwartowski would reflect a few months later on Reddit, a cruise ship is not very good for people who want to be free.
	What a perfect punchline to all this to be like, this whole time they're like, we're taking to the sea when there's no laws, not bothering to Google or check to see if that's true.
	Are there laws in the sea?
	Yeah, that's basically what this all is, is they've been fantasizing about going to this place that was magical in their mind.
	And now they're learning finally what the place actually is.
	Yeah.
	Like that's what it seems like.
	It's like wanting to go to Mars for all the fresh air and trees.
	You know, like they never bothered to check.
	Incredible.
	It's very funny.
	And of course, they have to sell the cruise ship for scrap metal.
	It's just a giant disaster.
	It's all none of it.
	None of it works out.
	And as time has gone on since the dream dying, Chad Elwartowski has gone on to post more concerning things.
	The post he made when they had to sell the boat was, quote, we have lost this round.
	The new normal great reset gains another victim, which is like QAnon, anti-vax shit.
	So I am worried about Chad.
	I liked you.
	I was liking you, Buzz, buddy.
	You got potential.
	You got the chutzpah.
	Yeah, it's in terms of like, I understand your disclaimer where you're like, these aren't bastards.
	Yeah.
	The bastard is like hubris and maybe our education system.
	Yeah, like the bastard is more, this is more people victims of their own.
	Yes.
	Of themselves.
	And like the grifters early on, yeah, they were bastards.
	But it is like, I feel bad for them.
	And honestly, I kind of want them to have a win, provided that they are good people.
	Like you said, with the vaccine stuff and it's getting a little shaky.
	You know, they could be terrible people otherwise, but it's like, oh, man.
	Oh, buddy.
	Yeah.
	And it's.
	I want to do something for you.
	Yeah.
	I want something.
	I want there to be.
	I think this idea is cool.
	Like, I think that I might go to that event in fucking Sacramento.
	That sounds rad as hell.
	I love the idea of like people walking away from, I mean, speaking of the term walk away, read Corey Doctorow's wonderful sci-fi book, Walkaway.
	But I love the idea of people like, let's abandon these horrible governments and figure out over time how to like live in the sea.
	There's a cool idea there as long as you're not poisoning the ocean or whatever.
	Like, I don't, I'm not laughing at the idea of wanting to live in like a designed community in the ocean of like hard scrabble frontiers people.
	That's pretty rad.
	But that's not, these are not hard scrabble frontier people, except for maybe Chad.
	Yes.
	Their heart is in the right place, or when they're not grifting, their heart is in the right place.
	And that's the thing is, like, you could.
	point that lens at me and be like, look at you, you fucking coward.
	You're not trying anything.
	These people are at least trying.
	But they're trying to actually accomplish this thing instead of just bitching about the government.
	Like, it's like, you got to give them something for that.
	It's just going to that.
	Yeah, going back to the core idea of libertarianism where it's like, I've never seen someone explain how it would help society.
	It always feels like it's just I, I, I.
	I want this freedom.
	I don't want to pay taxes.
	And it's, it's the idea of how to build an actual practical society.
	I've just, maybe I'm ignorant.
	Maybe that's been explained, but I've just never seen it.
	Well, part of it is, you know, Dave, and this is the thing where, because Chad's not really a pioneer.
	The original like pioneers for all of the genocide and stuff were like, number one, people who could fail.
	Like, it was life or death for a lot of them.
	Like, we are either going to make a life out here farming or like we will starve to death.
	Like, that was for some of them a very real thing.
	Yeah.
	And we only hear of the successes.
	Yeah.
	The rest are like just skeletons in the woods.
	They were also all people who like knew how to do shit.
	Like you watch the fucking, the Vivich, you know, that's a good example of like showing how many different skills a person would have had to have to like make a life even vaguely feasible in those kind of conditions.
	So like the concept, the costs are high and it was people who were like, were already very self-reliant.
	These people, number one, they're all millionaires.
	I don't think any of them are gambling more than they can afford to lose.
	So like they can easily go do something else.
	This is not, the stakes are not actually that high for them.
	And number two, they don't have much in the way of skills.
	It doesn't seem like.
	They don't know how to do any of the things.
	It would be like somebody setting out to start a farm in an undiscovered, to them, continent and like having never touched dirt or built a house and just being like, well, I'll pay people along the way to do that part.
	Right.
	It's the top-down thinking.
	It's the fact that they live in this society that they live in where they're afforded a lot of privilege or comfort and they say, ooh, I want to make a city in the sea.
	And they don't think about where do you start because they just, that's not how they are thinking about it.
	It's absolutely top-down thinking.
	And it's like very cringe to listen to.
	And I still feel bad because they are their own worst enemies with this stuff.
	Again, their heart seems to be in the right place if it's the non-grifters.
	It's just their methods, the swings they take are so silly.
	And like, again, the ideas there, there are these ideas that are like, oh, that's a neat thing.
	But they're not.
	Yeah.
	They're trying to start with those ideas and not grow to them.
	100%.
	Yep.
	And I think that's as good an epitaph for this as possible.
	You got any, you got any pluggables?
	Yeah, Dave.
	Plug your pluggables.
	Fuck it.
	At Movie Hooligan on the Twitter.
	I have a podcast network with Tom Ryman that's called Gamefully Unemployed.
	We do a lot of podcasts about movies mainly, movie reviews, and so on and so forth.
	We have some podcasts under our Patreon.
	That's patreon.com slash gamefully unemployed.
	One called Fox Mulder is a Maniac.
	One called Tom and Jeff Watch Batman.
	They're exactly what they sound like.
	Check all that out if you want to.
	You know, if you don't, you don't have to.
	I don't know if you know that.
	Yep.
	And there's also the new podcast, Tom and Jeff Watch Bateman, which is just a chronicle of the fact that Tom and Jeff have been stalking Jason Bateman for years.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	But we're collecting, we're waiting for that saga to end before we do the podcast.
	You know, we want to see how that'll turn out.
	You should do gunfire.
	But yeah.
	You should do just doing sequests.
	Just the show where you just explain episodes of sequest.
	Yeah.
	Let me tell you about this episode of Sequest.
	Yeah.
	That's it.
Sequest Podcast Recap 00:02:57
	That's the title of the podcast.
	It's fine.
	Yeah, I think so.
	It'll just be me talking about how much I appreciate Roy Scheider.
	Nobody else.
	It's nobody else.
	It's just you.
	Yep.
	Just me.
	Well, look, take $100 and throw it into the air somewhere in the outdoors if you want me to make that podcast.
	And if enough of you do it, I'll release it.
	That's how money works.
	That is how money works, Dave.
	Well, that's going to do it for all of us here at Behind the Bastards.
	Until next time.
	On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Pole Show are geniuses.
	We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
	Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
	Yes.
	Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
	I actually, I thought it was.
	I got that wrong.
	But hey, no one's perfect.
	We're pretty close, though.
	Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
	This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
	There's an economic component to communities thriving.
	If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
	Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
	If you're watching the latest season of the Real House Wise of Atlanta, you already know that's a lot to break down.
	Marcia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
	They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
	Pinky has financial issues.
	On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real House Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the tea everybody's talking about.
	To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
	On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
	What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
	We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
	If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
	Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
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	Guaranteed human.

Chapters

00:00:00 Financial Literacy Month
00:02:30 Recap Reality Shows
00:17:39 Seasteading Infrastructure
00:26:21 Smarter Investing Tips
00:31:10 Star Trek Ferengi Allies
00:35:35 Flawed Sci-Fi Authors
00:38:27 Oceanic City Vision
00:54:06 Libertarian Grift Exposed
00:59:46 Problematic Love Stories
01:04:17 Unclear Legal Situations
01:19:11 Horrifying Crypto Ships
01:36:29 Top-Down Thinking
01:47:04 Sequest Podcast Recap