Joe Quirk: One Hundred Thousand Free Societies at Sea

Timothy Allen: Right, last one of the day. Cheers to you.

Joe Quirk: Cheers.

Timothy Allen: Sir, here is the story I was going to tell you.

Joe Quirk: Alrighty.

Timothy Allen: It is not a great story, but I laughed out loud. I interviewed Grant Romundt yesterday. Grant Romundt, for those listening, is this kind of James Bond-esque character who lives on a really retro, 1950s-looking floating house just off the coast of a tropical island. If you were creating a Bond villain, he might have a place like that. Or maybe even James Bond himself. It would either be the villain, or Bond would be hanging out there on a furry couch at the end of the film, bedding some babe after he has saved the world. Or it would be where we first learn about the baddie.

Anyway, Grant Romundt, who we will probably talk about because he is a seasteader, I asked him on the podcast yesterday, “How did you get going? How do you end up doing something like this?” Because I think it is quite crazy even to think that is a business model. I said to him, “You have got a lot of balls even coming up with that as an idea.”

Grant Romundt said, “Yes, it is funny. I thought I would never do another startup in my life.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

Grant Romundt said, “I thought I would never do another startup. I had done it. I had made a load of money from startups, so I thought I would never do it again.”

I said, “Why did you do it, then?”

He said, “I met this guy on a plane. I got on a plane and sat down next to a guy called Joe Quirk.”

Is that right? You met him on a plane?

Joe Quirk: That is right. I will never forget the moment.

Timothy Allen: When Grant Romundt said it to me, I thought, I can so imagine that you met this guy and then, a few years later, you have ploughed millions of dollars into floating cities. They are very beautiful-looking structures. It is not just some prototype. Sometimes you see a prototype of a seastead or something and they look like prototypes. This guy has jet-ski lifts, fitted kitchens, curved surfaces. It is incredible. It is incredible drone tech.

I said, “How do you get your food?”

Grant Romundt said, “We are organising this service where a drone delivers food from the mainland three times a day.”

I was like, dude, who thinks like that? Literally, who thinks like that?

Joe Quirk: James Bond thinks like that.

Timothy Allen: He does. And he is James Bond. There is a debonairness about him. My youngest son would dream up something like that. What I like about Grant Romundt is that he has actually built this thing. It is bordering on insanity, I think, to decide to do that.

To live in it is a big deal, because it is not for everyone. I was sceptical. I thought maybe Grant Romundt is not really living in it, but he is living in it.

Joe Quirk: He hates stepping on land.

Timothy Allen: He hates it.

Joe Quirk: He is James Bond. I write about Grant Romundt in my book. I am writing a book right now where Grant Romundt is featured as one of the heroes.

Timothy Allen: In real life, called Grant Romundt? Have you changed the name?

Joe Quirk: No, it is a true story. I call Grant Romundt the real most interesting man in the world. When I introduce Grant Romundt, I introduce it like the script to a commercial. Imagine there is the real most interesting man in the world, and you show him doing this when he is a child, doing this as an adult, doing this with different hairstyles all around the world, doing this entrepreneurship, being chased by mafia bosses. It is like, this is not a fake movie. This is the real life of Grant Romundt.

I was even thinking to myself, God, this guy is like James Bond. I do not know if you saw my talk.

Timothy Allen: I caught the second half, but yes.

Joe Quirk: Did you see Grant Romundt in the motorboat?

Timothy Allen: The drone stuff?

Joe Quirk: No, when Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl were on the run from the Thai Navy.

Timothy Allen: Oh, was that him? I did not cotton on to that. I saw Grant Romundt’s talk afterwards. I did not know who he was at that point. I just walked into the back of the room and you were speaking very animatedly, I have to say. You were really going for it.

Joe Quirk: About three months after I met Grant Romundt on that plane, Grant Romundt flew to Thailand. First I want to tell you the story. Grant Romundt rescued Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl, and they are alive because of him.

Grant Romundt and I met in Singapore. Grant Romundt rented a high-speed speedboat and raced out into international waters to illegally deliver them the entry paperwork so they could get into Singapore, one minute before the Singapore police surrounded them with gunboats while fighter jets flew overhead and a SWAT team with bulletproof vests boarded the Cervantes. Then they looked at the paperwork and realised Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl could get in for free, and Grant Romundt led them in.

Grant Romundt even said to me, “Man, when we were blasting out into international waters on that speedboat, it was kind of like James Bond.”

I was like, have you looked in the mirror?

Timothy Allen: He dresses in a very interesting way as well, does he not?

Joe Quirk: The real most interesting man in the world.

Timothy Allen: The real most interesting man in the world.

Joe Quirk: Meeting Grant Romundt on the plane was an experience I will never forget.

Timothy Allen: Can I just say something? You literally sat next to him on a plane?

Joe Quirk: We were changing planes on the way to a conference called Anarchapulco in Mexico, which is an anarchist thing.

Timothy Allen: Yes, Anarchapulco.

Joe Quirk: I was going to speak there, and I had put together this presentation to announce to the most radical anarchist audience that the first seastead had actually been built, and Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl were sleeping on it. It was probably just a few days before the Thai Navy declared a death threat.

I was high on life. On the way there I was wearing a T-shirt saying, “Stop arguing. Start seasteading.” I have said it so many times I lose the ability to say it. That is why I put it on a shirt.

Timothy Allen: And you have all this other stuff that you made up: aquapreneurs, coralcrete. It is hard to keep track of all these things you have made up. I was quoting all your words in Grant Romundt’s interview. I have committed them all to memory. I love new words, and I love that seasteading has a lot of new words. Coralcrete is my favourite.

Joe Quirk: They are all mine, because I am trying to pop you out of your land-based assumptions and get you thinking in a new way. I am giving you a new word to think with. When you have that new word, you do not forget what I am saying. I am trying to convince people of a completely new idea and shift the eight paradigms they have in their heads.

I have explained seasteading to thousands of people over the last twelve years. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they look at me like I am crazy and say, “Oh, that is interesting. Okay, I am going to walk over here now.” Some people get really mad because you might be free, and that makes a lot of people mad. Some people get converted or come around slowly.

Grant Romundt’s was the fastest conversion I have ever seen. Grant Romundt asked me a question, and I started answering it. He looked away and thought for a minute. He looked around, looked up in the air. You could watch the wheels turning in his head. Then he asked another question. I answered it, and he was looking around, thinking. It was like he was checking apps in his head. I could see the wheels turning within minutes of me talking about it.

At Anarchapulco, Grant Romundt would approach me every now and again and ask another question. I would answer him, he would nod and walk away, then come back and ask another question.

Then I gave my presentation, where I showed this rickety, crazy thing outside international waters in the Andaman Sea. When I was off the stage, Grant Romundt walked over to me and said, “I am in.”

I said, “What do you mean, in?”

Grant Romundt said, “With both feet. I will fly anywhere you need me to go.”

I said, “Well, you need to go to Thailand.”

Grant Romundt said, “All right. I will leave immediately. I will do anything you need to make this happen. I know a lot about new technology. I can put all the technologies together. I need to go out there and see this thing.”

So Grant Romundt literally flew to Thailand and went out on a motorboat. Grant Romundt was on the seastead probably less than a week before the Thai Navy would have attacked.

Then Grant Romundt went back to Canada. Later he went to Thailand and was doing a meditation retreat up in the mountains. The death threat came. Grant Romundt was one of the only people Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl could communicate with, because they had to trust what he was going to do.

Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl were rejected from Malaysia, so they had to do an absolutely impossible task: this insane race through five hundred miles, eight hundred kilometres, of piracy-infested waters, in a sailboat, through the most trafficked cargo shipping lane in the world, to make it all the way to freaking Singapore, because Singapore is the only reasonably free country in the area.

Every time they gave anyone information, people were on Facebook posting about it. So they had to decide to cut off the entire world. Grant Romundt, whom they had met three months before after meeting me, was one of the few people they trusted.

So Grant Romundt and I arranged to meet in Singapore, with me having no idea what the plan was. My job was to give a speech I was not supposed to give. I had to arrange for the organiser to cede half his time so I could give a fifteen-minute speech and create an excuse for why seasteaders were there.

So I was giving a speech knowing that there was some crazy rescue plan that made no sense to me, because Singapore was so far away from Thailand if you were going by sailboat. Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl did not have their exit stamps to get out of Malaysia. This is the climax of my book that I am giving away here.

While I was creating a diversion, Grant Romundt rented a high-speed speedboat, jumped in it, and raced out at full speed, not knowing he was in a race with at least three police boats with about six to eight armed policemen on each one. They were going out there to arrest Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl. Fighter jets took off from Singapore to go meet this “threat” to Thai sovereignty.

Grant Romundt got to them one minute before, handed over the entry paperwork, and he says, “I swear, it was within a minute.” These speedboats came right up to them with big guns pointed at Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl. Grant Romundt backed off as the guide boat. The authorities got on several times, got off the boat, put on bulletproof vests, raided it again, and Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl just kept saying hi and being friendly until the authorities figured out these people were not terrorists.

They looked at the paperwork, it passed muster, and they let Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl into Singapore. Thus they were saved by Grant Romundt, three months after Grant Romundt met them, because he wanted to make seasteading happen.

I can confirm that Grant Romundt had already made connections with the leading aquatech people in the world at the Singapore conference. All of Ocean Builders’ technology was open source, so Grant Romundt could have just used it. Grant Romundt could have moved on and done this without Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl. But he chose to risk his life.

Let me quote what Grant Romundt says in the book. Grant Romundt was flying into Singapore and had all these pictures of his time on the seastead. Grant Romundt literally said to me, “Well, I could be tortured to give up all this information if they catch me, so I deleted everything and put it on a heavily encrypted drive, and then I just went in.”

Without telling anyone, including me, what the hell he was doing, Grant Romundt completely risked his life to save them, while everyone else was throwing them under the bus or giving them away on social media because he wanted to seastead.

Then they all flew across the world and went to Panama. It just so happens I had been invited to Panama by our seasteading ambassador there. I met with the government, and with Grant Romundt we presented at the presidency and at the Panama Canal Authority. We made all these arrangements with the Panama government, and Panama is hosting a seastead factory there. They are all building there now, and Grant Romundt is chief executive of Ocean Builders.

This is the most insane résumé. What is the hardest job you ever got? Well, to get this job, I had to rescue these people in international waters from a Thai Navy that would torture me if it caught me, and I had to pay for the privilege. Grant Romundt had contacts in Panama and had Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl flown there. Grant Romundt had to pay for their luggage and plane tickets. Then Grant Romundt flew back to Thailand, went back to his meditation master, and within a couple of days of rescuing them was back on the top of a mountain training meditation with his meditation master.

Timothy Allen: Can you tell me a bit about Grant Romundt’s past? I did not drill him about it. He just said startups. I did not really go beyond that. I felt like I probably should have known, so I did not go there. What is Grant Romundt’s history?

Joe Quirk: As I portray it in “The Real Most Interesting Man in the World” in the book, where Grant Romundt swoops in all of a sudden to save them, Grant Romundt has had a long, interesting, unusual life.

At eleven, Grant Romundt was featured in Canada as the first paperless office. He was featured in newspapers as a young entrepreneur. As an eleven-year-old, he wrote some kind of code that won some sort of scientific award. I have already forgotten exactly what it was. Grant Romundt designed special haircutting scissors.

Timothy Allen: Really?

Joe Quirk: Grant Romundt ran a very popular hairdressing-salon TV show, where he served as host and sometimes as model. He got involved in various crypto things. Grant Romundt was a roommate of one of the co-founders of PayPal before PayPal was founded.

Timothy Allen: Ocean Builders did that Satoshi boat thing as well, did they not?

Joe Quirk: Yes. Ocean Builders bought an entire cruise ship. While everyone else was panicking during COVID-19, they bought a gigantic cruise ship, thinking they were going to say, “Hey, seasteaders, we have a cruise ship. We need to fill all the rooms.” That did not work out.

They literally bought the cruise ship, picked it up in Europe, sailed it around the Mediterranean with a full staff, sailed it across the Atlantic with a full staff, then brought it to the Caribbean. It was like a four-month vacation. Then they realised the plan was not going to work out. It cost something like fifty grand a month just for the thing to sit still in the water. They were about to go financially down the toilet, and they ended up selling it at a profit and pocketing seven million dollars. I guess I am not supposed to say that, but too late, I said it.

The media portrayed this as a failure. YouTube videos were made about what idiots they were. Okay, you sail around on a cruise ship by yourself, Caribbean, Atlantic, Mediterranean, for four months, and you end up making a couple of million dollars. That is called a success.

Timothy Allen: It did get absolutely smashed. There was obviously quite a lot of very sneery journalism talking about it. I could not find a positive, balanced version of the story. All I got was Guardian-style stuff.

Joe Quirk: They do not tell the truth. You might have heard me at the end of my talk calling out any journalists who were secretly in the audience, saying the reason they are lying and lying and lying about all the positive aspects of seasteading is because they are terrified we might set a better example than their shitty government that they worship.

Timothy Allen: I do not even think journalists think like that. I worked as a journalist for years, and I worked with journalists.

Joe Quirk: What is wrong with you people?

Timothy Allen: I was a nice journalist. But I was still ideologically captured, and I was incentivised to do certain things. Fortunately, I worked for The Independent. I do not know whether you know The Independent, but back then it was considered a really free-thinking kind of place. In the United Kingdom, we were anti-royalist, for example, which was unheard of. All the papers loved the royals.

Do you remember when Prince Charles married Camilla?

Joe Quirk: Yes.

Timothy Allen: Whenever there is a royal wedding, it is massive in the United Kingdom. I was the chief photographer at the paper at the time. The royal family wedding was in Windsor, just outside London, and there is a registry office in Windsor. Someone else was getting married there, just a random couple. It was not a big church. It was just the formal registry office.

The paper said, “Right, as a fuck-you to the royal family, go and cover that wedding.” You will never guess who it was. The guy getting married was a descendant of Thomas Crapper, the man associated with the flushing toilet, and his surname was even Crapper. So we ran a front page of their wedding and did not mention the royals at all. The headline was something like “Wedding in Windsor.”

That is the way the paper thought. We thought we were really something. But still, when I think about it, you are not incentivised necessarily to get a long, truthful solution. You are incentivised to make people read and to do something that gets readers. It is completely different to what we are doing now. One of our objectives is to bring out the truth, to find the truth. It is going to take a while, probably a couple of hours, to find the truth. You cannot do that in old media.

I do not think journalists are bad people. They are working to a certain remit, and you get wrapped up in it. I told this story to someone the other day. We had a Jewish editor for a couple of years, and because he was in the Jewish community he would often cover Jewish stories. I remember once they sent me down to a graveyard because it had been “decimated,” and this was a big story. I went down there and it was not decimated. It was just vandalised. It was teenagers scratching things on gravestones. I thought, I do not think this is what they think it is.

I took some photos and did not think anything of it. It still arrived on the front page. I was complicit in that, even though I do not feel like I am a bad person. You work there. You get sent on a job. You do the thing. The editor is doing it because he is part of a community, and they are worried about it for other reasons. It helps the cause, so they do it.

It is not bad in the sense that everyone is evil. There are a lot of bad people, but on the whole it is just people with incentives. Someone did an absolute hit piece on free cities recently, and I think it was horrendous. It was so badly researched and obviously full of lies. The most egregious thing is that whenever they go to Honduras, they check out Próspera and say, “Ah, neo-colonialist nonsense.” Then they go to Morazán and forget about that one, because Morazán does not fit the narrative at all. That is why you never hear about Morazán. You never hear about Morazán. Ciudad Morazán has sixty families living there, Hondurans working hard and living a good life. It is narratives, is it not? It is all narratives.

Joe Quirk: Yes. I have written a lot of fiction, and I have coached struggling authors to become award-winning authors. I say the same thing every time: every page has to have conflict. As soon as something good happens, people go and check Facebook. They put your book down unless every page has suspense, unless they are always worried about a conflict, always worried about what is going to happen next.

That is what people focus on. That is human nature. No conflict, no story. Stories are about conflict. So newspapers and media are about that. You have to make people mad. You have to make them afraid. You have to provoke all these primal emotions. There has to be a conflict. There has to be a villain. Villains animate people more than heroes. You can get people to read your story with the devil, even if there is no God in it. You always have to have a devil.

Timothy Allen: Do you think the hero is not as strong as the baddie? What did you call it?

Joe Quirk: The villain. Villains are usually one-dimensional characters. I think what provokes us to pay attention is somebody doing something bad, and then we can all point and yell and scream.

If I have an afternoon to go learn about seasteading and I am going to talk to this Joe Quirk guy, all the good things he is telling me are not a story. It is not a story until I can take something out of context that makes him seem like a jerk, or makes it seem like he is creating a tax haven, or whatever is going to provoke people to click. My goal is to get clicks. I am selling eyeballs to advertisers. In some cases, maybe I am trying to get subscriptions, but it is all a race to the bottom and there is no time to get to the truth.

I sympathise with that challenge. Look, I am trying to tell the truth about the Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl story, and it has taken me five years to get to the bottom of the truth. Luckily, I have trained myself as a novelist, so I understand that I want to get to the motivations. What was the motivation of the Thai Navy? What was the motivation of the journalists? What is going on? It is not enough just to do the chase. I have had to devote a ton of time to get to the bottom of the truth.

It is much easier to get in there, make Timothy Allen look bad, and sell a couple of clicks. My experience with journalists has been so poor. I cannot believe they put you on camera and then edit it to intentionally misrepresent what you are saying, with forethought. They sell their souls so cheaply. It is amazing to me, and it happens again and again.

Timothy Allen: That is rife. There are things I should say and things I should not. I worked in documentaries for a long time, very high-profile documentaries, and some of your favourite documentaries are literally a mishmash of cuts from different shoots over a period of three weeks, cut together to make it look like it all happened on the same day.

Recently, that has become something you have to talk about in the credits. I am talking about natural history programmes as well, where you are watching something and saying, “This is the most incredible story I have ever seen.” Yes, it took a year to shoot. That is why it did not happen in three days. Some of it was in a studio, some of it was green screen, and all this kind of stuff.

A lot of people have drifted into this way of making content. The worst of it now is YouTube, because there are no rules at all. There is no love lost if you completely fabricate something now. People are working for themselves. No one is accountable for anything unless they care about their reputation. That is much easier when you are an individual.

When you are working in a team, I have found myself in situations where I am like, okay, this is slightly unethical, but I am part of a team. If I kick up a stink here, it is much worse for me because there are five other people here who do not care, and I am going to be the dick. So what do I do? I try not to be part of it, but you are part of it. If you are on a crew in the middle of Mongolia shooting a documentary and the director is doing this, that, and the other, and you do not like it, what are you going to do? Walk away? They need you. You are the cameraman, or the sound guy.

It is systemic. I think it is changing. The gatekeepers are disappearing, and that was one way you could hide all this stuff. Information is free. The internet has freed information. It has been a radical revolution over the last twenty-five years. Individuals are now empowered to be in control of their own reputation, which I think is phenomenal. If you can be the boss of your own world, you should be. There is no question about it.

As soon as you are working under the umbrella of an institution, an organisation, or a company, you start turning a blind eye to some things. You have to. There is always something you do not quite agree with. That is one of the advantages of the twenty-first century: you can be a sole creator. You really can. It is marvellous, really.

Joe Quirk: The good thing is that if national public video made a thirty-second clip of our conversation, not only would it suck, it would misrepresent us. It would make us enemies, or it would take a couple of things out of context that make us more provocative. But that causes the audience to crave more depth, which is why the lamestream media has been shocked that everybody has switched over to podcasts like yours. We want to hear the two-hour conversation of two guys just talking, nobody editing it, real people talking. It is not fake.

Everybody is switching to that. I am so excited that decentralised media is allowing people to see how much the mainstream media lies about what politicians say and what chief executives say. I have known this since I published my first book. As soon as I was in the newspaper, they were wilfully misrepresenting me. It is unethical, and you do not have a platform to respond.

What people need to open their minds to is that the media does not just lie about famous people who have a platform to respond. They also misrepresent Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl, and little people, and The Seasteading Institute.

Yes, I have a platform where I can say whatever I want. I can put out my own podcast, make my own video, and ten thousand people listen to it. But then a million people read the article that lies about us, or half a million watch the YouTube video that lies about us.

Timothy Allen: Which million people? That is the important thing. I do not even care what mainstream or legacy media do anymore because I know who listens to them. They are too far gone, or they are not ready to hear this kind of stuff, and that is fine by me. I have absolutely made my peace with that.

Joe Quirk: I have to be okay with being misrepresented. I was on a walk with a gentleman a few hours ago who said, “Oh yes, I heard about this Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl thing. They parked their thing inside Thai territorial waters in a shipping lane.”

I was like, no, that is a lie. That is the problem. You are already famous in the popular imagination for things that are not true. The best way to laugh at mainstream media is to become the ongoing subject of it. Once it has happened a hundred times, you go through the stages of rage and grief, and eventually you get to the place where you are just laughing at what they say.

But most people are not there. They do not even realise they have beliefs based on what they have read in newspapers. They have ideas about what happens based on what they have read in the media. The media are not biased. They are not slanted. They lie. They lie to the public over and over. They lie for a living.

Timothy Allen: That is also a characteristic of people in general. It is not just the media that gives you presumptions you do not challenge. In the last two years doing this podcast, I have been on a phenomenal journey. Democracy was a big one for me. It was only four or five months ago that I realised, hold on a minute, this is not the pinnacle of governance.

I had to really think about that because democracy is one of those untouchable things you are not allowed to challenge. That was a big one for me. I am open-minded, and I had never, in fifty years of being alive, thought to check the alternatives. I just took it on board.

There are hundreds of those things. They are not just mainstream media. They are pervasive. They are just out there.

Joe Quirk: I hereby recommend Frank Karsten as a podcast guest. Frank Karsten wrote a very short pamphlet that is brilliant about why democracy is terrible. It answers every question with two-page answers. You cannot get through that book without realising, oh my God, why would anyone organise society this way? Frank Karsten is a friend, but I read his book before we became friends.

Timothy Allen: It really is all-pervasive. You can mobilise a nation by saying, “Protect our democracy.” Literally. That is how thick people are. In this day and age, there may be a situation where the democratic process works. I do not know. I do not care anymore. It is not my concern. I have realised there are some really interesting other ways to do it, and they work better anyway, even at small scale. I would rather do that.

Going back to being a journalist, when I was working for The Independent, I did think we were the good guys. We thought of the Daily Mail and people like that as the bad guys, because they really did lie. Their front pages were like, “Can we get away with this? Can we get away with saying this?” We never used to do that. We never used to think, I do not think, “Can we hurt these people?” It was different. We were reporting on what we thought were proper things, with a lot of social justice obviously.

But I came out the other side, and when I reflected on it recently, I thought, man, I was ideologically captured and I had no idea. I am almost certainly ideologically captured in some way now, but I am constantly on the lookout for those things. Back then, there were things you took for granted, and democracy is one of them. It is an all-pervasive thing you take for granted. Every day you hear about it on the news. “Thank God we live in a democracy.” “Look over there, they have not got democracy.” It is amazing. It is like hypnotism. We are propagandised in school to think this is the pinnacle of human achievement.

Joe Quirk: Was it Mark Twain who said, “If you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect”?

The good thing about democracy is that it opens you to the idea of seasteading. That is why we say things like, “What if you could vote with your house? What if you could move and take your property with you? If you want to choose your leaders, what if you could choose your own government? What if there were as many governments as you want, and you could move around and choose?”

I think in my book I refer to it as upgrading democracy from each individual voting on who rules us all to the ultimate minority, which is the individual being able to vote with their house and choose the government they want. Mobile city blocks, mobile communities moving around like cruise ships and choosing among a market of governance is the solution to the governance problem that is making the world psychotic, and always has made the world psychotic.

It encourages the part of human nature that wants to profit by serving others and discourages the part of human nature that is able to profit by exploiting others by getting power in the state.

Timothy Allen: It only works with a captive audience. That whole system only works with a captive audience. If you are the state, you have to keep people. You have to stop them leaving, basically.

Joe Quirk: Yes.

Timothy Allen: They do it softly with rules, regulations, exit taxes, and all this kind of stuff. If it gets bad, they put up a wall to stop you going. It is so insidious.

I do not know whether you were listening to the talks yesterday. Did you hear Neos’ talk?

Joe Quirk: My favourite.

Timothy Allen: I interviewed Neos on this podcast in Poland about a year and a half ago. I love that guy. He has such a way of making you enraged about the system. One of the things he said this time was perfect. He said, imagine being a creative person who has to run all their creations past someone else. If you are a painter, you paint a picture and then someone looks at it and says, “No, maybe not. You had better change that before you go out.”

Now imagine you are in one of the other creative industries: entrepreneurship. That is literally what entrepreneurs have to do. Every time they come up with an idea, they have to run it by a regulator, who is someone you do not like, do not respect, who adds no value themselves, and basically wants some money from you for the privilege.

Joe Quirk: And does not like you because you can do it.

Timothy Allen: Exactly. How horrendous is that? It is easy to say, “Taxation is theft,” or “Fuck the state,” but when you put it like that, it is enraging. In any other medium, you would have nothing to do with these people. You would say, “These are people I do not want to associate with.” But actually, they are the ones who basically rule your life, make it hard, and take money from you.

Every time you do something, every time you spend, every time you save, every time someone dies, every time you sell your house, the hand comes out: give me some.

Joe Quirk: With a gun in the other hand.

Timothy Allen: Exactly. I went through a big learning curve with money from learning about Bitcoin. It took me probably five or six years to realise money is a scam. Then it was another six years before I realised governance, the state, is a scam. It is unbelievable. What am I going to get next?

Joe Quirk: The next thing is seasteading. You have to get past the outrage. Yes, the money system is a giant anaemic drain on the potential of the distributed intelligence of humanity to solve all sorts of problems. If that system were not there, we would be on Mars by now, and we would have seasteads by now. It drains off all the creativity of people. It is just force.

But that has been true since the dawn of time. There has always been a situation where things are prospering and parasites go in to take advantage of it. Our very bodies are that. As a matter of fact, that is a good analogy. Most of the cells in our bodies are parasites, but we have evolved symbiotic relationships with them. Now they are kind of working for us.

Timothy Allen: Who is “we” in that context? All animals? Do you mean our soul or what?

Joe Quirk: No. We have cells in our body that have our DNA, and we have more cells that are other creatures that live inside us. Over time, we have developed symbiotic relationships with them. I think of this as a relationship between seasteads and the state in the future.

If we have distributed networks of mobile governance providers, and customers moving around, attaching and detaching, you can think of that as like a primal soup. Hopefully, if we can scale them up quickly, as I plan to, very quickly, to one hundred thousand in a decade, they will win hearts and minds. They will be analogous to cruise ships. People are not hostile towards cruise ships, at least not to the extent that the state goes after them.

Cruise ships have a relationship with the parasitic state that is symbiotic. So does the Cayman Islands. The United States does not invade the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands has some sort of financial freedom. It is sort of rebellious against the United States, but it has a symbiotic relationship with the United States.

This even works off the coast of socialist Venezuela. Trinidad and Tobago is a very free-market place, maybe the most free-market islands in the Caribbean, although that is arguable. It is about six miles from the coast of Venezuela. Why does Venezuela not just invade it and take it? There is nothing to take except the freedom that allows people to prosper. It is not a resource-type place.

This is going on all over the world. Now imagine if you could float thousands of these things. You would very rapidly start developing all sorts of solutions we cannot imagine, all sorts of creativity we cannot imagine. These would be platforms for human acceleration that would not be controlled by the state.

There would be a natural evolutionary process, literally natural selection, going on: variation and selection among people choosing governance providers. You would set off evolution in governance itself if you could move your houses, city blocks, and cities around and choose what you want, the same way cruise ships do, and the same way all the wealthy people here do. Since they can move around, they are less taxed. This could easily be scaled up very rapidly.

Timothy Allen: The concern I have, though, is that there are not even that many land-based people looking for freedom in a sense, let alone people who might think, I mean, living on the sea is an acquired taste, is it not?

Joe Quirk: It sure is.

Timothy Allen: Do you ever wonder whether you might be screaming about seasteading and it is two hundred years in the future before it actually happens?

Joe Quirk: That is what I thought when I wrote the book. I thought maybe fifty years. Now I am thinking next year.

It is analogous to the American frontier. Virtually everyone in Europe said, “Why would you go to the North American colonies? There is nothing there. It is way more exciting and convenient to live here. I do not want to grow my own food.” But people who were fed up moved there. Then they established a monopoly and a gerontocracy, and then people said, “Who the hell wants to go out into Native American country and set up log cabins?” Virtually nobody, except for the Chad Elwartowskis and Nadia Summergirls of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It starts with the pioneers who are driven to do something new, the early adopters. They go out there and build their seastead or log cabin. They get attacked by the natives, as Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl were, and they have to run away. Then someone like Grant Romundt comes along and builds a more luxury seastead. Or someone on the North American frontier builds a farm with a fence around it. Then pretty soon they need to hire people. Pretty soon you need a hardware store. Pretty soon you need someone to babysit the kids while you milk the cows.

So it starts with those early adopters, the fanatics, the pioneers. If there is a Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl, then there is a Grant Romundt. If there is a Grant Romundt, then there is the next stage of people. The next customer is someone saying, “I do not know, it seems kind of cool, but I do not want to live there. Maybe I just want to try a short trip.” That is why the first business is probably going to be a SeaBnB, a name coined by Titus Gebel that we have all been repeating ever since. Go out there and stay for a day. Stay one night. Try the underwater room. See what you think. Take cellphone videos and post them on Instagram. I think you can win hearts and minds very quickly.

Timothy Allen: That is actually what happened to Grant Romundt, is it not? Grant Romundt rented a floating home somewhere in Canada, I think near Toronto. They had created these concrete floating homes for an exhibition. He saw them and went to live on one for a weekend as an Airbnb. Then he rented it for three and a half years. That is how Grant Romundt realised. I think he met you after that period of living on the thing, which is obviously what primed him for the concept.

Joe Quirk: There were only twenty-two floating homes in Canada on that side of Canada. The reason they were not allowed to build any more is because people were claiming, “These are not homes, so I do not have to pay property taxes.” The government said, “No thanks.”

But Grant Romundt designed his own interior, lived in it, meditated on the roof, and commuted by kayak through freezing Canadian waters. So yes, Grant Romundt was already in love with living on the ocean, very close to land, before he met me. Then once I described that half the Earth’s surface is unclaimed by any nation, and almost two-thirds of it are places where you can get a lot of freedom if you go more than twelve miles out, and that you can move these around, detach, and form bigger communities, Grant Romundt was getting all of that right out of the gate. No matter how deep I took it, Grant Romundt was getting it very fast.

People do not understand how pleasurable it is to live on the sea. People pay millions of dollars for oceanfront property. What would you pay for a 360-degree view? Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl used to watch the sunrise and the sunset on the same day when they were living on their tin can in the middle of the ocean.

Now go to the underwater room. You have a 360-degree aquarium view. You are in the aquarium, and the fish look at you. The coral reef is growing on your home. Are you still telling me this is roughing it? You know what is roughing it? Living on land, where there are mudslides, earthquakes, crime…

Timothy Allen: In the case of Grant Romundt’s seastead, I would probably like to live on it where it is at the moment, next to that little island. I would like beachfront property there. I am not sure I care about a 360-degree view. I get all the talking points, but I think it takes a specific kind of person. That is why I wonder whether people are ready en masse, or in large numbers, for those experiences.

If you told me you could create a floating island that felt a little bit like an island, I think that is something you could populate very quickly. But I think it takes a certain type of person to live the way Grant Romundt lives. He is a unique guy.

Joe Quirk: There are more out there. It takes a certain kind of person to get that big brick of a mobile phone that does not sound good and costs all that money. But somebody does it, and then they start driving down the price until we all have these tiny mobile phones with every kind of app on them we can imagine.

The jump between that giant brick of a mobile phone and the tiny mobile phones we have now, which can do everything we want, is a much bigger journey than the journey from the SeaPod to a floating island that looks like a resort where you do not get seasick. That is going to be a short thing to get to, because you can scale up to that very quickly, especially near the equator where waves are low.

I have no doubt that what Ocean Builders has achieved and what ArkPad has achieved is that they have provided the minimum viable product. ArkPad is selling its first ArkPads for 165K.

Timothy Allen: Not a year. To buy the whole thing.

Joe Quirk: Yes. ArkPad is competitive with oceanfront property.

Timothy Allen: Interestingly, I said to Grant Romundt, “What is the business model here?” His prototype cost him six million dollars. Do you remember The Six Million Dollar Man?

Joe Quirk: I sure do. I watched it every Sunday.

Timothy Allen: It was funny that it was six million. I said, “So are you going to start selling them to high-net-worth individuals, or people in Dubai who want to put one out in the backyard?” Grant Romundt said he was not going to until Ocean Builders could get the cost down to about 1.2 or 1.3 million dollars. That is still pretty expensive. It is a certain type of person who is going to buy that.

What do you imagine they come down to in the future? The thing about this kind of technology is that you can see it with boats. The price of boats has not come down that much. You still pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for a decent boat, do you not?

Joe Quirk: A sailboat?

Timothy Allen: Yes.

Joe Quirk: You can get one for much less than one hundred thousand dollars.

Timothy Allen: Can you?

Joe Quirk: Yes. You can get a cheap little sailboat worth less than your car. Then you can get fancier and fancier sailboats for bigger and bigger waves, all the way to yachts.

Timothy Allen: So you reckon there will be second-hand seasteads? Like “my first seastead” or something?

Joe Quirk: Yes. I am sure the first boats were expensive to make for lots of people. You can make any version of anything. Ocean Builders has the first product, and they are going to drive the price down to make it cheaper and cheaper.

There is only one sea pillar. I describe it as a sea pillar, a barrel that floats. But if you do four and put a platform on top of it, now you have a table floating, and now it is even more stable. Now you can sell it to a community of, say, one hundred people, or a business like a medical research business that wants to get twelve miles out and do less expensive medical research.

Timothy Allen: My other thought was that one of the biggest markets at the beginning for individual pods would be just offshore cities, because a lot of cities are built on nice little peninsulas or sheltered areas. That would make sense, as long as the bloody regulators do not come in and say, “You cannot put that there,” or “You cannot do this,” or “You cannot do that.”

As we saw the last time Canada had floating homes, they just stopped the idea. Almost certainly someone sitting in a government office, who does not add value and is nasty and not very nice, would just look at it and go, “Nope, we cannot leech off it.”

Joe Quirk: Which is why the next phase of seasteading is absolutely vital. They can do that out to twelve miles. At 12.1 miles, they cannot do that.

Timothy Allen: But why? They just change the rules.

Joe Quirk: They would have to do that by international treaty.

Timothy Allen: United Nations?

Joe Quirk: Yes. In order to stop the first seastead, they can go to the United Nations and petition to extend territorial waters, but that is going to take a while. It is always tyranny versus freedom, and you are always in a race. A country cannot unilaterally change the rules, unless maybe it is the United States. But why would the United States bother? It takes work, time, money, and effort.

Timothy Allen: How long do you think people will leave you alone out at sea in the coming one hundred years? Do you think they will ever start saying…

Joe Quirk: We have to follow the same trend as cruise ships. First, it is a bunch of rich people with butlers who take cruises. “The nerve of these people.” Then you start scaling these things up and making different versions. Next thing you know, my grandparents are on one and everybody loves them. You have Disney Cruises, and they win the hearts and minds of people. That is what you have to do. You have to scale it up.

All the digital technologies that worked in Silicon Valley worked by scaling faster than regulators could stop them. They already start getting customers and getting people excited. If you look at PayPal, that is what they did. Louisiana regulators, or whoever it was, swooped in and said, “We are redefining you as a bank. You have to do this and that.” PayPal said, “Well, one hundred thousand people in Louisiana are already using our service. Do you want us to shut down all those customers? How many votes is that?” Then the regulators changed their minds.

By the time regulators wake up and try to figure out what they can do about it, there are hundreds of thousands of people already using it. The United States could just change the rules for the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands has no standing army. There is nothing they can do. Tens of thousands of people live there. But people in the United States are already using Cayman Islands services. They do not want to shut that down, including powerful people in government.

That is how you do it. The arguments against seasteading at this point are arguments against attempts at freedom itself. People now object, “Well, the government could just come with a nuclear bomb and get you.” Absolutely. They can kill you anytime they want. But you have to move fast, and you have to do it.

I guess we are just not afraid because the Thai government tried to kill us. They did not try to kill me, though I might be listed on the death threat, but they tried to kill Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl. Look, Ocean Builders is building seasteads again in a different country. They switched to a different country. More gunboats could come. More countries could order. But I do not think they are going to bother, the same way they do not sink cruise ships, the same way they do not attack the Cayman Islands, and the same reason socialist Venezuela does not attack free-market Trinidad and Tobago.

Timothy Allen: I hope so. I am just thinking it through. I know seasteads and cruise ships are similar, but cruise ships are very mobile. That is a big factor when you think about it. It is one thing to have a cruise liner come through, dock, do business with you, buy things from you, and then sail away. It is another thing to have something out there on the horizon, sat there taking all your business, literally competing with you. Cruise ships are not competing with a resort when they dock, are they? They are adding to it.

I know you are going to say the seasteads are adding too, but really they are coming in to compete with the government.

Joe Quirk: Cruise ships do compete. If you are in a coastal hotel, have you ever been on a cruise ship?

Timothy Allen: I have not, no.

Joe Quirk: Everyone experiences this. I am in a coastal hotel. I am paying this much money. It is a crappy little hotel. I get out of the hotel, grab my bags, and board the cruise ship. I get in a room that is smaller, but cheaper per night than that crappy hotel. The food is better, there are ten thousand times more amenities, and I have my own personal butler. Why is this cheaper place to stay so much better than the crappy hotel I was just staying in?

Cruise ships are directly competing with hotels. Cruise ships are competing with old-age homes. People have figured out that putting grandma in an old folks’ home on land is much more expensive and she does not really get cared for. Put her on a cruise ship all year round and she gets taken care of. It is less expensive. It is still expensive, but people are doing it.

Timothy Allen: That is a great life hack. I have never thought of that before. You are right. How many staff are there per person on a cruise ship? It is something ridiculous.

Joe Quirk: It depends on the cruise ship. That is the other thing: the variety of things offered in the market of cruise ships. Look, we have a minimum viable product that is much cheaper. Imagine if you did not have to come into port. Imagine if you did not have to deal with land governments at all, which cruise ships do.

Timothy Allen: Why are cruise ships not looking down this route? Is it just because their business model works and they do not want to do it?

Joe Quirk: Cruise ships are the fastest-growing travel industry in the world. They are raking in cash like no other business you can think of. I think they are looking towards this. I was asked to speak on The World, which is a cruise ship that travels the world and people live on full-time, or at least some people live on it full-time. Some people have a condo they visit once in a while, or they are there six months out of the year, three months out of the year, eight months out of the year. They have all different sizes of things they offer.

They had me go on that thing and do three talks, each an hour long, on different subjects. I got to go on there and say, “You are the world’s first private city. You are it. You are what we are talking about. Imagine if you did not have to go to land at all. What if you could stay out here?”

Timothy Allen: What did they say to that? This is the bit where I get stuck with seasteads. I agree with your arguments and your talking points, but I am not sure about whether I would like to be at sea. I would like to be on land. That is why I have not taken a cruise ship before.

Lots of people do take cruise ships, but is it enough to kickstart a movement to get to the point where more land-loving people would entertain the idea of seasteads? I mean the far-distant future seastead projects, which are more like floating islands. There cannot be that many people on cruise ships. I imagine cruise ships have a lot of older folk travelling on them. Is it not the social aspect, the being looked after, that is an important aspect of the cruise ship? In a way, SeaPods are much more of a young person’s game.

I am thinking out loud here. I love the idea, and it has clicked for me for sure. I feel like one day it will be ubiquitous, like you say. I just do not know how quickly that is. You are very optimistic. I think it could be one hundred years. What you are saying is correct, but it could be one hundred years too early.

Joe Quirk: I thought so when I started to get into it. The more this all keeps coming together, I realise it is going to happen very quickly, and it needs to happen quickly if we are going to outrace the rise of the surveillance state.

I think your grandchildren are going to take a plane to a seastead, or a personal drone, and they are going to land on it and hang out with their friends. They will say, “Am I on a seastead or is this an island? I do not know the difference anymore.” They will just take it for granted, because by that time it will have scaled up into big things that have all kinds of stuff. You do not have to be a sailor.

Last year, a population equivalent to Taiwan boarded cruise ships. A population bigger than Texas, between twenty and twenty-five million people, boarded cruise ships every year to essentially vacation in private governance at sea. They do not understand why it is better, but it is better because it has private governance. That is why cruise ships can do so much and provide all kinds of crazy stuff.

Timothy Allen: That is the most compelling argument for seasteading, I think. When you say that, I am one hundred percent with you. They do not even realise they are living in a private-government system.

When I think about the timeline of events, correct me if I am wrong, you need the capital input of these individual seasteads initially in order to make your way to the big ones, right?

Joe Quirk: Yes. You need the minimum viable product that is realistically going to be bought. Next week, I am going to Saudi Arabia and maybe I will try to sell some SeaPods to sheikhs.

Timothy Allen: As soon as I was talking to Grant Romundt, I said, “Have you been to Dubai yet, mate?” I am almost certain they would buy a bunch of them at six million. They would not care. They would put them out there and they would be Airbnbs. One guy would buy one in the same way they buy cars. Once you can afford the biggest car in the world, it becomes about something else. Is it an A1 number plate or an A2 number plate? That is what costs the money, not the car. If you are the only one with a seastead, I am almost certain they will go for it.

Joe Quirk: It will start as a status symbol. Simultaneously, I will describe the future. In the next few years, there will be SeaPods and ArkPads floating. Some people are going to buy them as a status symbol, or because they think it is cool, or because they want to be alone. This will happen simultaneously on both sides of the Earth. Seasteads are already off and running faster than the state can control them.

Simultaneously, there are going to be SeaBnBs. Nadia Summergirl always wanted to run an underwater restaurant. There will be people just trying it out once in a while. There already are people staying on SeaPods, trying them out and making videos and posting them on Instagram. Pretty soon they are going to get even fancier and even bigger and go even farther out to sea. You will take a drone, sailboat, or helicopter out there and try it out. Eventually someone says, “I want to live on one of these.”

By 2035, we will have dozens of them in different parts of the world, maybe some in Saudi Arabia, maybe some in Panama, maybe some in the Philippines, running different kinds of businesses. You are diving and snorkelling around them. It is ecotourism. They naturally attract life. If one is out there for ten years, you will have a fabulous coral garden growing right outside your window. You can run a business from your seastead. Come on out. I will stay in the underwater room, you stay in the top room, and you can scuba dive around it.

There are decommissioned oil rigs that make money just letting people scuba dive around them, because anything you float on the sea automatically attracts sea life, and it is incredibly beautiful. Seasteads will have that very rapidly.

It will not take long before one of these Vitalia investors says, “That is where we need to go to run our life-extension medical research.” Right now people drive from the United States down to Mexico to get cheaper plastic surgery and cheaper knee operations. What if it was just off the coast of Los Angeles? People would take a ferry out there to get a knee operation at one-tenth the price.

Timothy Allen: This is the point where I think the state will start getting nasty. As soon as there is direct competition like that, the parasitic class will say, “We need to do something about this.” Whenever the state is challenged to be more competitive, its response is never to get better. It is always to regulate, stop it, or lay down the law.

That would be the point where someone who owns a plastic surgery business on Rodeo Drive is complaining in someone’s ear, saying, “What can we do about these annoying gits off the coast?”

Joe Quirk: Let us assume every worst-case scenario happens. Someone sets up a knee-operation thing off the coast of Los Angeles at one-tenth the price. The United States finds an excuse to shut it down. But there is another one in Brazil. There is another one off the coast of Monaco. Knock yourself out. Each of these states has to act individually, and it is hard to get the state to do what you want.

I think most of this will just be going on quietly. It is not like the medical industry near the Mexican border in San Diego is all angry that some of their patients are heading to Mexico to get the same medical services and the same drugs. Why is the pharmaceutical industry not doing something about that? There is all sorts of competition.

Timothy Allen: Is there anyone on a cruise ship doing medical tourism? Plastic-surgery-type stuff on boats?

Joe Quirk: There is. I should know this because my wife is basically in the industry.

Timothy Allen: Does it benefit from any kind of regulation specific to a boat?

Joe Quirk: Yes. They sell a whole service where you get to stay out there while you are recovering so no one sees you with bandages on your face. You are on a boatload of people with bandages on their faces, all slowly recovering and enjoying a vacation.

Timothy Allen: I love it. You can just imagine that scene: all these people walking around like zombies.

Joe Quirk: Weaker governments that cannot defend themselves already make most of their money competing with the big nation right next door that could stop them anytime, but does not. It is very hard to threaten a big government enough for it to actually care enough to do something about it.

There are so many examples. It will not be long before people are living out there. People who run seaweed farms have already reached out to us, not even knowing much about seasteading, saying, “I can imagine in five years I am going to need a dormitory of workers out there.” One of them is close to the Philippines, and I was saying that Mitchell Suchner with ArkPad could provide a dormitory for workers, probably pretty cheaply, to work your sea farm.

You and I are not going to take that job. Poor people in the Philippines will take that job, just like people from the developing world take jobs on cruise ships because it is better. It is better than being on land. People are already choosing the ocean because it is better, because they can get outside their corrupt governments.

Once you have a seaweed farm and workers working out there, you get people who want to homeschool, people who want to do any kind of business where they want to get outside the regulations of the existing state.

A guy who worked for the pharmaceutical industry reached out to me and spoke to me many times. I cannot name names or companies because he asked me not to. He said, “My company will spend a billion dollars to produce one damn drug, and it is basically the regulations that make it more expensive. If we could do this on a seastead just for a couple of months, just to narrow down the potentials of where these experiments are going with animal trials or human cells outside the jurisdiction, then we would know where we are going. Then we could come back to the United States and go through all the rules and the whole expensive process, but we would know where we were going because a lot of the errors had already been eliminated on the seastead. You could save my company one hundred million dollars.”

Timothy Allen: Here is another fly in the ointment. There will be things done twenty-one miles off the coast of California, say, that a lot of people do not agree with, and they will think those things should be stopped. You just mentioned animal trials. Animal trials are legal in pharmaceuticals. We all know that, but a lot of people hate it and think it is not fair.

That is emotive. I had this question written down. In Próspera, for example, they basically have regulatory capacity to make their own regulations, but everything else is about the Honduran government, criminal law and this kind of stuff. If you are twenty-one miles outside a country, what is that? Is it completely lawless?

Joe Quirk: No, it is not completely lawless. If you are twelve miles out, ninety-nine percent of laws do not apply, but a lot of criminal law applies. You cannot smuggle. You cannot drill the seabed. It is just very basic laws.

Timothy Allen: Is that based on the flag on your ship?

Joe Quirk: Yes, basically. Seasteads will initially have to have a flag. The thing you need to explain to land folk is that a maritime flag is a completely different kind of legal entity than a territorial flag, even though they look exactly alike.

I always talk about a cruise ship flagged in the Bahamas that leaves from Panama and goes on an Alaskan cruise, taking ten thousand people up there. While they are up in Alaska, an American gets drunk and gets into a fight with an employee from the Philippines. Somebody gets injured. There is a sexual assault. An old lady is so disturbed by this fight that she has a heart attack and drops dead.

The complexity of what is happening here: the United States takes a proprietary view of the American. The Filipino guy probably does not have the same kind of rights. The old lady has another situation. All these people have different insurance companies and are under different jurisdictions. How does that work?

It does work. This goes on every day on cruise ships. There are fights, deaths, murders, crimes. It all works out because it has evolved over time and scaled up and integrated all these different overlapping jurisdictions on one cruise ship. I will tell you what they cannot do: they cannot call 911 back to Panama and say, “Quick, cops, come rescue us.” They have to deal with it through the private security on the ship.

The captain is functionally a dictator. The captain absolutely can say, “Lock that guy in the brig. Do not let him out for the rest of the trip. Do not feed him any food.” The captain can do whatever he wants. As really happens, they will abandon you on an obscure island. The captain can say, “That was the second time you got drunk. You are off the ship. Figure out your own thing. Sue me in court.”

Timothy Allen: Are you saying that is literally entrenched in maritime law, or is it just the fact that you are on a private ship and it is tough shit because you signed a contract?

Joe Quirk: It is admiralty law. Whenever you say “literally,” it is always much more complicated than the simple way I am saying it. But yes, the captain functions with a tremendous amount of power.

You are British. A century ago, the captain could have had you flogged. Why do captains not flog workers now? Because now we have a market of customers. If you have me flogged or make me walk the plank, I can go write a negative Amazon review. Then my boss at the cruise line says, “What the hell is going on on our ship? You are supposed to keep our customers happy. Now they are going to switch to our competitor.” The captain says, “I really want to be a tyrant, though.” Well, I guess you have to be a good, wise leader, and you have to be so good at providing governance that nobody on the ship even talks about politics.

Timothy Allen: It has to be said, Joe Quirk, that the seasteading model, or the cruise-shipping model, is literally the best way to explain private governance to someone. There is no better way to show people that it can work. I am not even talking about land.

When you talk to people about private cities, a lot of people say, “That sounds horrendous. How do we know they are not going to kill and maim and be dictators?” But the cruise ship model is by far the best way to explain it.

Joe Quirk: Absolutely. It is very powerful that free private cities have flourished on the ocean, not on land.

Timothy Allen: I know. There are hundreds of them on the ocean right now.

Joe Quirk: Yes. People have their stereotypes about cruise ships, but the variety of what they provide is enormous. I have been on the giant Alaskan cruise ship that is as big as a city and better than any town I have ever been in, with more amenities than I can imagine. I have also been on the National Geographic tour for outdoorsmen, which is small. You have to get off the boat, go on big hikes, put on a wetsuit, and dive. It is for hardcore outdoorsmen.

In my talk today I showed cruise ships pulling out of port one after another, and I said each of those is a self-governing private city. Why are they not shooting at each other? They are leaving from Florida. Florida seized control of the free private city of Disney World. California controls Disneyland, not Disney Cruises. One Disney Cruise after another is leaving from Florida. They do not provoke the immune system of the state. Disneyland does. Disney World does. Disney Cruises does not.

Disney Cruises is safe. People trust their children with a dictator. They let their kids run around on this thing and say, “What if the kids get hurt?” They are not going to get hurt. “But there are no regulations.” I have a picture I show where the water slide that the kids take goes out over the sea and comes back in. It looks completely unsafe. What if that breaks? It is a see-through plastic thing to scare the kids. Why do parents not ask whose safety regulations these are? It is called market regulation. Disney Cruises is a self-governing thing that runs its own regulations. They do not want the kids to die. There is a market incentive for the kids not to die.

Timothy Allen: Is that true about regulations?

Joe Quirk: It is complicated. I would not be surprised if the ship is built in Singapore, say, and then you go to one of the certification societies that certify this thing as safe. I do not know Disney Cruises specifically, but I know ships choose which certification society certifies their ships as safe. So they are the regulators. There are something like fifty of them, and they are all competing.

I want their stamp on my ship saying it is safe, because that is good in the market. Each of those certifiers wants to provide good regulations so the ship lines keep choosing them to be the certifier. All they are selling is their reputation to guarantee safety. Everybody is willing to pay each other, everyone is competing to push prices down, and nobody gets on a cruise ship saying, “This thing is unsafe.”

My roads in the United States are not safe. Why do the regulators not protect me from that? My drugs in the United States are not safe. Why do the regulators not protect me from that? Buildings burn down with people partying inside in my city. Why did the fire regulators not protect us from that? Why does that not happen on cruise ships?

Because on land they have a monopoly over regulation, so there is no incentive to improve or make it cheap. On the ocean, there are competing regulators known as certification societies. There are competing cruise lines, dictatorships that compete with each other to serve customers. All these patriotic people step off their country and onto a free private floating city. They do not change their ideology, and it does not occur to them that they do not have to vote on this thing. They just have to choose, and it automatically improves.

Timothy Allen: It is such a good example of all these theories. Why would you ever want to vote on the way your cruise ship is run? There is no democracy on a cruise ship. Is it a good product? Yes? Okay, I will use it. Is it a bad product? Yes? Right, I will go and use that one then. That is literally the model. The fact that people struggle with that idea on land is mind-boggling when you put it into those terms, especially when their parents already go on cruise ships.

Joe Quirk: Yes. A lot of people say those big crowded cruise ships with every amenity and endless troughs of free food are disgusting. I hated one like that. But I loved the National Geographic cruise. I loved the trip to Alaska, where I got to get off and see the bald eagles and row in a kayak up the Alaskan river. There are all these different opportunities, different models for different kinds of people who want different experiences.

You do not get seasick unless there is a big storm. Seasteads are better in that way, because if there is a storm and high waves on a cruise ship, you are going to get seasick and people will write bad reviews while barfing on your ship. But on a SeaPod with deep ballast in high waves, we expect those to be seasick-free, like oil rigs, which do not move around a lot even in very high winds and ginormous waves.

Timothy Allen: They build those for the North Sea, one of the worst seas in the world.

Joe Quirk: Yes, and we want to build ours for the best seas in the world for seasteading. Tell me your next objection, your next doubt.

Timothy Allen: My doubt is that we are not traditionally a world culture of seafaring people. It is a minority thing. I love the idea of seasteading because it explains the principles of what Titus Gebel is trying to do on land perfectly, except the downside to the land version is that you cannot leave when the state comes in and says, “No, we own this now.” Whereas on a floating city you can leave.

I think the floating city version of the seastead is probably the most perfect example of a private governance model you could have on Earth, unless we get anti-gravity technology and can take it into the sky.

Joe Quirk: We have anti-gravity technology. It is floating on the ocean.

Humans have been seagoing people since Homo erectus. Every grandparent in the United States, or in the Americas, North and South, came over on a boat. People have been getting on boats and going places. It has been a symbol of freedom since before we had writing. People have been moving and running away from monopoly governments on land since the dawn of time.

Human nature: we are a tribal species. I do not think it is interesting to ask whether we are evil or good. We are both. We are very complex. We are a family species. Family comes first. That is what human nature is. So if I can exploit you to serve my family, I am going to do it. If I have power in a state and can profit from taxing you or controlling you, I am going to do it, because it will make my family prosperous.

But if the only way I can prosper is to serve a stranger, then that is what I have to do. If you are stuck on land, land fundamentally and inevitably leads to a monopoly on governance. Once you have a monopoly, more and more people try to get into that government to make things happen for them and their families. That is human nature.

If I can prosper by serving you in a marketplace through voluntary interactions, then I am going to have to do that. But on the ocean, there is no way to get a monopoly on governance. You need static land that you can win a war over, then climb to the top of that bloody hierarchy and control people. That is what democracy is. It is farming people. Taxing people. It is a farm.

We think we are free, but half of our working time is going straight to the state. On the ocean, if people can move around, governance becomes a product. The only way I can prosper is by serving customers. This is how we get to a place where people do not even think about politics, do not even think about voting, and do not argue about it at all. They are just trying to prosper, serve, and enjoy creativity, as they already do on the ocean and on cruise ships.

Timothy Allen: It is absolutely true. You see a version of that in Dubai right now, in the United Arab Emirates. No one is voting there. It is ninety percent immigrants living there. Only ten percent of the people who live in the United Arab Emirates are Emiratis. In Dubai, no one is voting. People are just getting a great product, and they will keep staying there while the product is good.

You do not complain to Samsung that you want to vote on how Samsung makes phones. You just buy an Apple phone, or you buy a different brand.

Something I just thought of, because I have written down the word Elon here. Do you ever get the feeling that one day, if we are not alive, people will look back in the history books and see seasteading as a stepping stone to intergalactic living?

Joe Quirk: Absolutely. We are definitely going to the oceans before we go to Mars. Elon Musk is already a seasteader. He just does not know he is. Elon Musk, if you are listening to this podcast, and I assume you are, give me a call. I have been waiting.

Timothy Allen: If you had an hour sit-down with Elon Musk, what would you try and talk about?

Joe Quirk: I would say, “Why did you not build your companies in South Africa? You had to move to a country founded on the principle of fuck you.” That is what the United States is founded on: go fuck yourself. Elon Musk famously said that to the world.

Timothy Allen: That was amazing, was it not?

Joe Quirk: Yes. That is what Americans have been doing since the dawn of time. That is why we are armed. That is why we are the most libertarian country in the world, where very nearly one percent of us believe in freedom, which is a huge number of people.

Elon Musk moved from South Africa to the United States to escape government. Elon Musk moved his company from California to Texas to escape government. Elon Musk moved his launch site from Texas to Florida to escape politics. Elon Musk moved from Florida to the ocean to escape regulation. Elon Musk has built platforms on the sea. A lot of the incentive for that was to get outside jurisdictions. Elon Musk is not the only one. Other people launched from the sea decades ago in order to get outside state regulations.

That is not the only reason. You also want people to be safe. But it was crazy what Elon Musk was dealing with. People were saying, “The noise might hurt a whale if it happens to go by. You have to test on a sea lion and see if we deafen it on land while you strap it down to a board.” These are real stories they had to deal with.

Guys like Elon Musk are in a constant race. If Elon Musk could not switch among different governments, we would not have rockets going to Mars. We would not have these companies. Every government is trying to exploit what Elon Musk is creating, and Elon Musk just keeps moving. He has gone all the way to the sea, and he is landing in the sea.

Timothy Allen: I have got one for you: Tessa.

Joe Quirk: Tessa?

Timothy Allen: Tesla. Take it to Elon Musk. He has all these companies, has he not? The Boring Company, which I think is a phenomenal name for an interesting company.

Joe Quirk: Yes.

Timothy Allen: He has a lot on his plate, but it would be phenomenal if someone with that much capital took a liking to a notion like this. The elevator pitch is almost ready-made, is it not? It is the stepping stone. You can try out all the governance and all these things before you do it out there, because it is roughly the same, except it is a lot safer down on the sea.

Joe Quirk: And cheaper. NASA already trains astronauts under the water. You can simulate anti-gravity environments by going under the water. They already feed astronauts with algae stuff. I can go on and on. Everything people talk about getting in space is in the ocean.

They want to take rockets to asteroids to get rare earth minerals. There are rare earth nodules on the surface of the ocean floor, very deep, pure rare earth worth tons of money. You just have to deal with the pressure and get down there and do it. There are already companies trying to do it.

You dream about intelligent life out on Mars or in some distant quasar. There is intelligent life in the deep sea that we completely do not understand. Cephalopods, especially squid, cuttlefish, and octopuses, are a deeply alien intelligence. The bigger they get, the more intelligent they are. The biggest of all are the colossal squid and the giant squid, which are very, very deep. One has never been contacted alive. They are solving all kinds of complex problems down there with their appendages and doing all kinds of things. We have no interest in going deep intellectually and trying to understand this deeply alien intelligence that already exists on this freaking planet, which should be called Planet Ocean.

Ninety-nine percent of the living space on this planet is not on land. It is in the ocean.

Timothy Allen: Planet Ocean.

Joe Quirk: Correct. Absolutely. In the hundred years after seasteading, we may be living in the deep sea. If you are an alien intelligence that comes to Earth to study it, what you will see is a vast amount of life and a vast amount of three-dimensional living in the ocean. Some of the mountains, the seamounts, come up above the water, and that is less than a third of the planet. There is this very strange ape that lives on the very tippy top of all this living space and thinks everything that exists is on his little land that he is fighting over, while all the real life and interesting stuff is happening beneath him in this deep medium that he has not really entered or explored yet. Not truly.

Timothy Allen: Is it not true, though, that when you are talking about the sea, most of the life of the sea is on coral reefs? I have been diving in the South China Sea. There is nothing there. We made a film once about hookah-pipe divers who used to go down forty or fifty metres, and we had to jump into very blue water, look down, and you could see a long way. The South China Sea is really clear, and there is nothing there for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Nothing swimming around. Are you saying there is all this life?

Joe Quirk: Most of the surface ocean is a desert. There is no life at all because all the organic matter sinks below where sunlight can reach to induce photosynthesis. So when you watch a Sir David Attenborough thing about life under the sea, you think, “Oh my God, the ocean is so rich.” But yes, it is mostly coral reefs or places where upwellings happen.

All the rich nutrient wealth is below the surface of the ocean. The ocean moves and hits a seamount, and it pushes all this stuff up. In these tiny areas of the ocean, there are gardens of life and coral reefs.

In my book, a lot of the seasteaders I met made these arguments when I was meeting them twelve years ago. Seasteads will create more life on the ocean. Everything solid you float out there, and anything you suck up from the bottom, will naturally create life. All the spores floating around are starving for something to attach to. They cannot do it to boats. They do attach to boats, but boats keep scraping it off because it is bad for movement. If you are holding still, you can grow as much life as you want, and a lot of that life is edible.

If you go deep to the ocean floor, you will find life in a lot of places, and a lot of it is very mysterious.

Timothy Allen: I do not know. All the arguments are compelling, but I know it is not for me. You think that even if I were alive in fifty years’ time, it would be something I would just take for granted. It would be mainstream.

Joe Quirk: Floating cities will just appear. It is not like you are going to walk onto a platform and go, “Whoa, I am on a platform.” The first pioneers will be dealing with that. But once it is the size of this building, or the size of this city block, or the size of this city, eventually people are not even going to think about it. They are just going to another place. They are not going to think about whether it is floating and anchored to a seamount or not, because the problems will be solved.

Especially if you are close to the equator. I do not know if you saw my map in my talk. There are gigantic areas of the ocean, basically everything between Brazil and Africa, that have never had a hurricane, at least in recorded history. There is a seamount in international waters, about fifty metres below the ocean, that goes on for maybe fifty miles or something. A lot of people have independently said that is the ideal place to seastead. You can tether to these things and build cities.

Timothy Allen: Take that as an example. Say you create this absolutely massive private city, and it is moored or anchored somewhere like that. Almost certainly the United Nations, or one of these one-world institutions, is going to say, “We are going to impose some regulations on you.” They have already done it for space, even though no one has really been there. There are already agreements in place that you cannot own anything in space. In reality that will be difficult to police if you are Elon Musk and have beaten the government by fifty years. What are they going to do, say, “When you come back, you are in big trouble”?

But at sea, especially once you start feeling like a country or an entity, presumably they are going to start making rules and regulations. What is to stop the United Nations changing the rule about deeper water? They will say they are moving with the times, that these are new things. In the past we did not have to deal with this, now we do. Because we are in charge, we have to say that you need to pay us this or you cannot do that.

Joe Quirk: Always go back to the cruise-ship analogy. There are all these cruise ships, and there is a lot more than cruise ships on the sea. There are all sorts of vessels. In my talk, I showed a map. There are 180,000 on the ocean right now, all different kinds, small ones, big ones. Put them all together, they are all self-governing while they are on the sea. The United Nations does not go to the biggest cruise ship and say, “Now we have to impose some rules on you.”

We were in French Polynesia because a lot of these low-lying islands are afraid of going underwater and want to transition to being seasteads. But then they do not actually want to make it happen. They just want to be known for saying they want to make it happen. I think the one probably most in danger is Kiribati.

Say Kiribati transforms its little atolls and makes little seasteads next door, little floating platforms in shallow oceans. Meanwhile, the land kind of sinks beneath the ocean. Is the United Nations going to say, “Well, you do not get your exclusive economic zone anymore. You do not get your sovereign rights”? They will probably say, “No, we will recognise your floating platforms as nations, and you keep the same rules. You are still the sovereign nation of Kiribati.”

I think that could easily happen. Kiribati becomes a seastead nation. Now another maverick, say me, sets one up next door, outside Kiribati’s jurisdiction. Now we have a precedent. Seasteads are already recognised by the United Nations. Now there is a new one. It is sort of ignored, but babies are born there. The United Nations has an entire department dedicated to the statelessness of children. Can you make a petition to the United Nations? “Hey, we are beneficent. There are a hundred of us all over the world. There are a thousand of us. We want them recognised as sovereign entities. Look at all these children. Do you want them all to be stateless?”

Our maritime attorney, who has been volunteering at The Seasteading Institute since before I got involved and wrote the best first paper about how seasteads could work on the sea, has said to me that he would love to get on the floor of the United Nations to make precisely that argument.

These things will be slowly scaled up. Again, the cruise ship model: you win the hearts and minds of people. People choose it because they like it. Politicians’ nephews have been there, their daughters have been there, they themselves want to park some of their wealth there because it is a better choice than the Cayman Islands. You win people over, and people do not consider it that radical. It is just another choice.

Then babies are born out there. Pretty soon they are recognised as unique entities. Pretty soon they do not need a maritime flag. They get their own flag. Maybe they petition the United Nations for sovereignty, or maybe they do not want a flag at all. I think where we are one hundred years from now is that these things are not defined as states. They are new kinds of entities. They are not nations. They are not countries. They are sovereign governance providers. We just evolve towards that, and they will obviously be better than the shitty states because monopolies are always worse for the consumer.

Timothy Allen: In that timeline, will that go hand in hand with the devolution of the state as well?

Joe Quirk: I think the devolution of the state is inevitable.

Timothy Allen: A lot of that depends on the currencies.

Joe Quirk: That is part of my motivation for this. We have to scale up as fast as the states are devolving. We have to evolve as fast as the states are devolving, and we have to quickly win people over so we do not provoke violence.

The good thing about democracies is that mostly a lot of people have to be mad about something. The president in the United States wanted to get involved in World War II, but he knew he could not until the people were motivated to get involved, and that did not happen until Pearl Harbor.

Do not provoke the immune system of the state. Be like the Cayman Islands, not Nicaragua.

Timothy Allen: I like that. Do not provoke the immune system of the state. That is a good rule in general, is it not?

Joe Quirk: Yes. I will give you another. You are from England. Right off your coast is Sealand. Why do they not just send ships out there to blow it up and kill those people?

Timothy Allen: Because it is not a threat. It is not worth the public relations nightmare.

Joe Quirk: Those guys are completely radical, and they have done crazy stuff. They have locked each other in prison.

Timothy Allen: Did the government not go out there once? Something happened, did it not?

Joe Quirk: I think it was the fourteen-year-old son of the founder who fired a warning shot across the bow of a Royal Navy ship. Guess what they did? They backed off.

Timothy Allen: Really?

Joe Quirk: Yes. Under some interpretations of international law, if you interpret Sealand as a vessel, which it is not, you can sort of do that as a warning. But do you really want to fire back at this kid? That guy is now third generation, a dynasty, with his kid running Sealand. They have made a living out there with their own micronation. It is not recognised by the world. But you can always say, what is to stop the state from going out there and killing you? Something like the Thai Navy does, but the British Navy does not.

There is a lot of ocean out there. There are a lot of countries to build seasteads off the coast of.

Timothy Allen: What is another example of something we take for granted now that started off under such radical circumstances?

Joe Quirk: Capitalism. Capitalism started with Venice. Venice is the first private city, or if you want to call it that, a swampstead.

Feudalism dominated Europe. How did the Renaissance start? How did all this free-market stuff start? What kicked all this off? There was so much war in Italy. Italy was sort of unique because it is on the other side of the Alps, so it is hard to get armies across. But there was tons of war in Italy. Refugees could not stand it anymore. They were just trying not to die, so they moved to a swamp.

Over time, it was like, “Well, we need a church. Let us build a church on stilts.” That was in about the 600s. They had a little church out there. They were living in little boats, skimming salt off the surface of the ocean at certain times of year to sell that salt to the world, because salt was such a precious commodity. This thing we use casually now, that costs nothing, people were willing to die along the Silk Road to get.

Venice found something it could trade and sell to the world so it could get stuff back. That answers another seasteading question: how are you going to make a living out there? How are you going to get food? How are you going to be independent? You rely on the resources of land. Yes, Venice relied on the resources of land. Venice had to find a unique service to trade for the resources of land. All islands everywhere prosper by trade with the rest of the world, just like cruise ships do.

So Venice slowly gets richer. More and more stilts are built. You have to watch videos on YouTube of how complicated, innovative, and clever it was that Venice built up this city on a swamp that was slowly sinking all the time. How do you get water? How do you defend yourself? How do you get food? How do you raise your children? How do you walk around? Who will build the roads? Well, they used the water as roads.

Eventually, Venice built up to this city-state that was independent of all the kings on land. It was not run by kings. It was run by merchants and bankers. All the innovations we take for granted in our free-market world started on the swampstead, whether it is double-entry bookkeeping, which keeps track of all these debits and credits happening all over the world. Do not tell a Venetian we are not a seagoing species, because Venetians were travelling all over the world and incorporating the best practices of different businesses.

Venice was a perfect hub. A lot of trade had to go through Venice. Venice built up banks. The foundational institutions of capitalism were started in Venice. Venice attracted the most creative people in the world. Is it not remarkable to think that Michelangelos, da Vincis, and Vivaldis always existed among us, but we just never discovered them? They never had a chance to flourish until they went to Venice and found rich people who wanted to show how much status they had. They were the sheikhs of their time, willing to pay artists to make beautiful things that made other city-states they were at war with want to compete with them.

Everyone starts competing for the creativity and innovation of the world. Before you know it, something is happening, some kind of flourishing of creativity that retrospectively is called the Renaissance and totally takes over Europe. The Dutch catch on. The Dutch went to the United States, founded Wall Street and New York, and created all these businesses that ended up being the real foundation of the United States, in my opinion.

It is the free-market, non-war-like, capitalist, voluntarist, decentralised networks of the world, founded near seas, among oceangoing societies, outside the jurisdictions of states, that kicked off the Renaissance. Without seasteading, we would not have the world we live in today, which is the standard for the whole world. China has imitated it. The whole world has imitated the innovations of Venice.

So there is a seastead for you. Should I go back further in time? In the talk I gave last year, I go through it very fast. Where did Western civilisation start? Did it start in ancient Greece? What was ancient Greece? It was hundreds of little islands, each self-governing, competing for the best and brightest, where people could leave anytime they wanted. They were at war, killing each other and doing all that stuff.

Where do you get ideas like democracy, theocracy, oligopoly, tyranny? All these words came from Aristotle, who was studying all these different islands and saying, “It is very interesting. All these things seem to go through different evolutions, and they all have different ways of governing themselves.” Aristotle invented the science of politics that we talk about now because everybody was on these islands competing with that same shitty human nature we have right now, but bringing out the best in human ingenuity because nobody could get control of everybody else.

All you need to do is decentralise governance, and you are going to kick off human creativity that has been held back since the dawn of time. I think we are on the verge of the next ocean Renaissance, and it is going to completely outdo Venice.

Timothy Allen: Do you think that devolution will happen on land, radically?

Joe Quirk: I do, because it is the same human nature on land. As long as I can go work for the government and then be guaranteed an income forever, as long as I do not take any risks, and I am always incentivised to prevent bad things from happening, and I do not get rewarded if something good happens, and I am always incentivised to say, “I need a bigger budget, so go confiscate more from the taxpayer,” humans are always going to be attracted to that. We want that kind of security.

You cannot get that started if people can just take their city block and move somewhere else and choose a different governance service provider. Governance is a service.

Timothy Allen: I kind of agree when you put it like that, though I still think the timeline is slower than you do. You are really bullish on the timeline. I want to know what happens on land in the meantime. Are states still getting bigger at this point?

Joe Quirk: Bigger is not the problem. It is a quest for absolute power over other people. That is what we all want. You want to prevent us from getting that.

Timothy Allen: Not you and me, but yes. I never understood why that is such a thing. It is very hard to imagine why you would want to completely tell someone else what to do. It does not seem to make human sense. You can kid yourself into thinking, “I need to tell that person what to do.” If someone is attacking you, you tell that person to stop and you use force. But other than that, the idea that people, when left to their own devices, will be as creative as they can be is obvious.

I do not understand how that is not a more pervasive argument for life in general. The free-market principle is obvious. There are so many examples of it. You know it with your kids. When you have children, if you keep saying, “You cannot do this, you cannot do that,” you get terrible kids. Everyone knows that. You give them a boundary and let them run within it. When they become sixteen or eighteen, that is it. They are free.

Joe Quirk: One in eight Asian men has the DNA of Genghis Khan.

Timothy Allen: Okay.

Joe Quirk: The evolution of the urge to control other people, take their stuff, and impregnate their daughters…

Timothy Allen: It came from one guy?

Joe Quirk: No, it goes all the way back. If you compare the Y chromosome, which we inherit from our fathers, with the mitochondrial DNA, which we get from our mothers, the Y chromosome has shockingly narrow genetic diversity compared to mitochondrial DNA.

What we can conclude from this is that during most of Homo sapiens evolution, and that is not even counting Homo erectus, roughly twice as many women got to be mothers as men got to be fathers. So you come into this world as a teenage boy with testosterone, not knowing that your instincts were selected for something. If you survive childhood and childbirth as a female, there is a pretty good chance, if you play your cards right, that you are going to get your genes into the next generation. I am going high to make the point, but say two-thirds of women get their genes into the next generation. Only one-third of males get their genes into the next generation.

So every boy comes into the world saying, “I have to beat out two-thirds of other men.” You are not in a world where you can trade inside your tribe. With your enemies, there are limited resources. You are competing over the same hunting grounds. Read Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization. There has been relentless culling of men. They kill each other and kill each other and kill each other. A small number of men spread their genes among many women, and a larger number of women survive childhood and childbirth, two very difficult things to survive, and pass their genes on.

It is not just men’s fault, because women find socially dominant men sexy. Men dressed in uniform, marching off to war to kill other men, can look like they can protect women. We are a tribal, warlike species who want to control each other.

I do not know why I got the genetic dice roll that is a minority, which apparently you got too: I just want to be left alone to do my own thing. I want power over myself. When I am chosen as a leader, I experience it as a tremendous responsibility. Most people seem to really get off on it.

Even among chimps, it is stressful to be the leader, but there is also an instinct to follow. People want leaders. People want to be told what to do. People want to follow directions, to be given a path, to feel secure.

Our instincts came from the Pleistocene savannah. Our instincts come from the tribe. All of that stuff is socialist. It is not until a phase change happened, where we had enough products that money and prices emerged, that there was a global intelligence happening. That is counterintuitive. We imagine God is showering us with wealth. The market is showering us with wealth.

Look at this microphone. Nobody knows how to make it, but it emerges from all this decentralised competition to serve each other. So we have these two instincts: to control strangers to get their stuff, and to trade with strangers to get their stuff. Which is the best strategy to allow my family and children to prosper?

If you are stuck on monopoly land, inevitably and no matter what, it evolves toward a monopoly of governance controlled by a military, which bureaucrats inherit, which people interested in power climb to the top of, and then they control other people. The world worships them as heroes, no matter how bad they are. This morning we were talking about a statue of Joseph Stalin, which was the biggest statue in the world not long ago. A few years ago, fifty-one percent of Russians said they had a positive view of Joseph Stalin. You still believe in democracy? Is Joseph Stalin evil? Outsiders think he is evil. A lot of people in Russia think Joseph Stalin was a great man. They want to follow a strong leader.

Seasteads are a technology to discourage that side of human nature, to make it harder to do, so that you are less like Joseph Stalin and more like a cruise ship captain, where you have to compete to serve strangers in order to make your family flourish because everyone can choose to go somewhere else. The ultimate decentralisation of power is to decentralise the very ground beneath our feet.

I think when we do that, our instinct to cooperate and our natural proclivity to unleash the global brain that is the marketplace will be unleashed from these shitty states. It will scale up so fast, with so much creativity, equivalent to the Renaissance, that it will outcompete the states and they will slowly go bankrupt as their children’s hearts and minds are won over by the seastead world. They will not even be called seasteads. They will just be called places to go.

Timothy Allen: It is an evolution. You steal stuff from other people, and then you trade with other people. The evolved version of stealing from people is trading with people, right?

Joe Quirk: Yes. Trade goes all the way back. Homo erectus traded. We have lots of evidence for that. When chimps meet another tribe, the males try to kill each other if they can outnumber each other. Humans have this interesting thing: they have opposable thumbs, and they make stuff. So you meet another tribe and you kind of want to fight with them, but they know how to make something good and you know how to make something different. Maybe you could trade. That slowly scaled up and emerged. In total contradiction to some of our instincts, our instinct to trade with strangers is really real.

But the manifestation of our instinct to war with each other ended up as nation states and smaller states inside them.

Timothy Allen: Do we ever let go of that side of it? I can see trade as a technological advancement as opposed to stealing. Do we ever leave stealing behind?

Joe Quirk: No.

Timothy Allen: Why not?

Joe Quirk: Because if you can get stuff more easily by stealing, most people choose to do it.

Timothy Allen: But can an evolutionary process make stealing too difficult?

Joe Quirk: An evolutionary market process can make stealing too difficult. That is why it is so peaceful in certain civilised places. Most people just do not steal because it is easier to cooperate, and then you have a culture of trust.

Timothy Allen: Abundance. In places of abundance, I suppose.

Joe Quirk: I am from Oakland, California. People take advantage of restaurants all the time. I am in Prague, and in every restaurant I have eaten in, they come over to charge you and ask what you have had so they know what to plug in and charge you. I think, what is to stop me from lying and saying I just had a glass of water? Well, there is enough cooperation going on that there is a culture of trust. You scratch my back and I scratch yours. We are part of the same city, so I consider you part of the same tribe.

Yes, I think you can create the conditions by which people prefer to be civil with each other and trust each other and be polite with each other. The best thing about human nature is that everywhere I have gone, if I am lost and ask for directions, and I am old enough to remember asking for directions, not once has someone said, “Begone, foreign dog. Get away from me, stranger.” No. People naturally make eye contact and want to help you out for no other incentive than to get the giver’s high and to pay things forward. We do have that in us.

But if I am having trouble paying for my kids’ education, and I can get a job where I am several steps removed from the people who are being exploited or taxed to pay for my job, I am going to do that. Just like when you worked for The Independent. Some of the things your bosses did were a little shady, but you were just the camera guy. It was not that bad. Over time it starts to nag at you, and then you say, “I just do not want to do this anymore,” because you are evolving and learning about free private cities. Then you are exposed to alternative media on X. Now you are seeing other ways media could work. You can see that you can have cooperative, honest media, and maybe you want to do that.

There is no question that cultures of trust and good behaviour in civil society develop and evolve, but people fundamentally are self-serving, or I prefer to say family-serving.

Timothy Allen: Maybe, because of diversity of ability, there might always be people who find it hard to compete and therefore break the rules.

Joe Quirk: Or get resentful. “No matter what I try, nothing works. That guy is already rich. Maybe I can take a little something from him.” You have been to a government office recently. You do not find too many inspirational people there.

I have had experiences in the United States where I walk into the DMV and the person is hostile to me straight out of the gate. I am being completely polite, and they already hate me because they can tell I do not have a miserable job like they do.

Timothy Allen: I do not know. My next scepticism, and it is not my scepticism exactly, I just want to hash this out because I know this is a brilliant idea and model. It is so cool and brilliant. But I think I have a barrier to visualising it as a reality. It is too science fiction in a way.

You could show me a picture from an average sci-fi movie where you have these floating cities, and I am sure all that stuff will eventually exist. I do not know how, but I do not make the connection between that and SeaPods quickly. If I think about mobilising people, even in a decentralised way, the ground-up mobilisation of people, this is a huge undertaking because there is no infrastructure already in existence. It is all being built.

I would love to be a fly on the wall in a hundred years and look back at this conversation, because I am being such an obvious idiot. I know what I am saying. You could use the example of looking back a hundred years and imagine us discussing the telephone, and you saying, “No, seriously, we are going to be talking through the air to someone on the other side of the world on a little box,” and I am saying, “Yes, but how?” Someone has to explain it.

Joe Quirk: Infrastructure is for land, man. Grant Romundt’s deep-water SeaPod already does everything with solar. All the energy you need is done with solar. The toilet is an incinerator toilet that converts your waste into a couple of grams of ash. It recycles the same water over and over. Elon Musk has provided us with Starlink, so you can do internet from anywhere.

Try to think of something you do on land that you cannot do on the SeaPod that is floating right now, in pretty high waves, stably, with a helicopter that can land on it and a jet ski that can lift up into its side. You do not need infrastructure much.

Timothy Allen: I just thought what one of my barriers is. In the United Kingdom in the 1970s, there used to be a BBC programme called Tomorrow’s World, where they predicted the future. Most of the time they got it kind of wrong. When I look at a seastead, I feel like this is an incorrect prediction, even though it is a real thing sitting there in the sea. It feels like an idea that only a tiny number of people will click into initially.

Joe Quirk: One percent of one percent of one percent will be Grant Romundt’s customers. But all you need is one or two, or two or three, in different parts of the world, just modest little things as big as this building, more than twelve miles out to sea. Then people think it is cool.

It was probably hard to sell people on yachts. Yachts are much bigger, more complicated, require much more infrastructure, are way more expensive, with engines and inefficiency, and there are thousands of them all over the world. Suppose the yacht never had to come to shore and was one-tenth as expensive.

You just need to start selling a few. We have the minimum viable product. You can have different kinds. If we perfect the technology for staying out at sea, which we are basically there on, if the coralcrete works, if Mitchell Suchner’s material works, there are all sorts of things you can use that do not corrode in seawater. Most of it is expensive.

Timothy Allen: Grant Romundt said you run an electric current through it. I did not realise that was even possible. It stops rust.

Joe Quirk: Yes. A very small electric current running through the metal stops rust, and it attracts calcium carbonate from the ocean naturally. So you encase your seastead in a seashell. If molluscs find that protective, I think the seastead will be safe inside that. Fundamentally, it is just never going to corrode, except for the area at the interface between water and air. As that goes up and down, that part could rust, so it might have to be painted just like a ship. But yes, it is all natural. Then you have life growing on a coral garden.

Timothy Allen: Do you think a dozen individual seasteads could happen in different parts of the world?

Joe Quirk: Yes. More than a dozen. I am certain they will.

Timothy Allen: The tourist aspect makes total sense to me. I have been in the United Arab Emirates a lot. It is the kind of thing that happens there all the time. Drone taxis, this, that, and the other. I do not disbelieve any of this at all, Joe Quirk. I think it is definitely going to happen. I suppose I personally want it to get to the bit where we have floating cities quickly. The individual pod bit does not interest me.

Joe Quirk: The only thing I love more than seasteading is my wife. My wife says she is not moving to a seastead until she can walk our dogs. Ocean Builders is already planning floating wave breakers, and they have nice digital designs that include a permanent floating wave breaker where you can park your sailboat inside and move in, and it protects you from the waves. You can have grass on that. You can grow trees on that. You can walk around on that. It is like a little land park at sea. You can scale that up and make those bigger and bigger.

I knew guys who wanted to make wave breakers that capture wave energy. Their plan was that once the wave energy they capture can pay for the wave breaker itself, this can be scaled up to any level. It will pay for itself, and this will be the ultimate wave breaker for seasteads. I have not heard from those co-founders in a couple of years, so I assume they have not quite made it work. That is the way it works in seasteading. There are aquapreneurs working hard on something they love, telling me about it. I used to have them on the podcast, and then I stop hearing from them, so I assume it is not quite working out. But the fact that so many people get inspired to try stuff is pretty amazing.

Timothy Allen: What was the history of the seasteading movement, and have you noticed an ebb and flow of interest in it? With something this unbelievable, dramatic, radical, and new, often in the beginning everyone is super excited and then it dies off.

Even with Grant Romundt’s SeaPod, that is only recently launched. I did not see it, but I am almost certain that got a lot of press.

Joe Quirk: No, really. It did not get a lot of press. We are in a privileged position at the Free Cities conference.

Timothy Allen: The one Grant Romundt has moored off the coast?

Joe Quirk: There are three different kinds of SeaPods. There are two shallow-water ones close to land that got a lot of press. No one mentioned the word seasteading because seasteads are politically autonomous things that float at sea. Now Ocean Builders has the third version, which is farther out to sea, has an underwater room, and is working in waves, which means it could work more than twelve miles out. It is a potential seastead. Virtually nobody has seen that. Nobody has noticed it.

Before I ever got involved with seasteading, somebody founded The Seasteading Institute. It was Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman.

Timothy Allen: Peter Thiel was involved? I knew Patri Friedman was.

Joe Quirk: Immediately the press said, “Billionaire is trying to create tax havens for evil villains.” Then Joe Quirk swooped into the scene. The only way to defeat a bad narrative is to tell a better story, a story more compelling than their shitty story. So I started telling the positive story, which includes all these restorative effects that Ocean Builders has been emphasising, implementing, and proving work.

Ocean Builders got a lot of press for Eco SeaPods, but we want a seastead. We want startup governance, competitive governance on the blue frontier. This turns off ninety-nine percent of people, but it excites one percent of one percent of people, and they get involved.

We have had a lot of exciting things happen, including an agreement with French Polynesia to potentially build seasteads in its territorial waters, in its atolls, which serve as natural wave breakers. Exciting things happen, then you get kicked in the face, and most people go away. Then more exciting things happen and attract new people, and then you get kicked in the face. The kick in the face is always the government. Then more people drift away.

But I am not stopping. Grant Romundt is not stopping. Chad Elwartowski is not stopping. I do not know if you saw the end of my talk, where I showed the guys who died who were not stopping.

Timothy Allen: I did.

Joe Quirk: One guy vowed, “I am dying at sea. I am never going back to land again. I am going all the way.” He independently discovered that seamount or seaplane near the Seychelles islands in Africa. A lot of people discover that. I mentioned the one off the coast of Brazil. There is another one off the coast of Africa near the Seychelles. He discovered that, so he planned on getting bigger barges, towing them all the way there, anchoring on those things, and building a floating country. That is what he was going to do.

He did it in a completely unsafe way, so I refused to sanction what he was doing. But he did it nevertheless, and he got killed because he did not listen to me. This is the first time I am saying that publicly.

There are two things seasteading needs to do. We need to make this legal. We do that through a certification society, insurance, and flagging. We also need to protect seasteading from mavericks. We do that through a certification society, insurance, and flagging.

You have to go through The Seasteading Institute certification process, where we promise your seastead is safe and you can bring your kids to it. The age of cowboys has to be done. I want these to be the last three martyrs for seasteading. Chad Elwartowski, Nadia Summergirl, and Grant Romundt nearly got killed. Samuel and the others did get killed. Let us become adults and do this professionally because we are ready. They are making the safe versions, and we have to do this right, the same way boats and ships do. Get it certified and develop a new classification of vessel called a seastead.

Timothy Allen: We spoke about this last time, a year ago. Are you any closer to those classifications?

Joe Quirk: To do it, we need money.

Timothy Allen: What about someone like Grant Romundt? How much money are we talking?

Joe Quirk: A lot. I am probably going to need millions to bring this to fruition, and we are working on low six figures every year. I need to convince people that this is the way to make seasteads happen.

These aquapreneurs do not understand it because they have not got there yet. They do not understand there is a gigantic bureaucratic wall between them and 12.1 miles. If they want to be houseboats inside territorial borders, they can do that forever. If they want a seastead, they need to make these things certified, insured, and flagged. Then we will have tremendous freedom.

It is going to cost money. It is just not within the incentives of any particular seastead company to spend, I estimate, two million dollars, back of the napkin, to do this right. If one company spends two million to establish a certification process for seasteads, then all its competitors rush in, pay a couple thousand bucks, and get their flag. This has to be done by the nonprofit.

Virtually nobody on land understands this, because now we are talking about international law and real freedom. No matter how many times I explain it, land folk who believe in freedom come back and say, “Why do you not ask the Panama government?” No. Do not talk to the government. Talk to the flagging registry of Panama. The cruise ship that is free on the sea does not talk to the government. It talks to the flagging registry. Then it is a free private floating city.

Countries franchise out their sovereignty-granting privileges to private companies. The Bahamas government does not do it. The Liberian government, a former failed state, sure as hell does not do it. But they have incredibly successful flagging registries. When I talk to the Liberian government, I am talking to guys in New York City. They are running the flagging registry on behalf of the Liberian government. Liberia and the Bahamas are some of the highest-rated flags in the world.

You have to do it right. They do not want to flag anything that is not safe and insured. The Seasteading Institute understands this. Maybe I am the only one who understands this, but a lot of our volunteers who work in the ocean industry absolutely understand it, and they are all helping. We have naval architects, maritime lawyers, certification surveyors, people secretly inspired by seasteading who do not want their colleagues to know they are helping us. Maritime lawyers say, “Do not tell my colleagues I am working with you, but this is an amazing idea and it can actually happen.”

The only thing standing in the way is that the nonprofit does not have the budget to make it happen. I am tearing my hair out because flagging registries have spoken to us, and once they clue in that we do not have the budget yet, they walk away. But they want to make money flagging seasteads.

Timothy Allen: There lies the predicament.

Joe Quirk: Every libertarian donor listening to this podcast needs to stop funding people who are arguing with statists. Even if you convince all eight billion people that libertarian philosophy is correct, the state will not go away, because it is always better to exploit people through the state even if I understand what you are saying. Persuasion will never work. There is nobody to vote for who is going to bring you freedom. You have to create it on a new frontier, on a completely blank slate. We have to do it through the flagging registries.

We are this close. In the thirteen years I have been involved, seasteading has gone from an idea everybody hates, to governments making agreements with us and then screwing us over. We solved the price problem. We solved the weight problem. The engineering problem is solved. The business ideas are there. We have inspired companies to try to make it happen. The only thing standing in our way is our legal right to seastead, which we get through flagging registries. We need to close that deal.

There is no incentive for anybody to do it. It needs to be a service provided by the nonprofit to all seasteaders everywhere for all time. Once we do this, it is for all time.

Timothy Allen: What about someone like Peter Thiel? Does Peter Thiel still have any interest in seasteading?

Joe Quirk: I have never met the man. No seasteader I know has. Chad Elwartowski has never met the man. Nadia Summergirl has never met the man. Grant Romundt has never met the man. Peter Thiel, listen to this podcast and give me a call. Elon Musk too. Surely he has two million quid.

It gets weird in the press, and then your interests are elsewhere. If you are a brilliant person, your interests are all over the place. I do not know anything about Peter Thiel, but temperamentally Peter Thiel seems like a startup type of guy. Peter Thiel likes to get radical things started and then is not interested. Either make it happen or maybe it is not going to happen. Peter Thiel wants to empower people to make things happen. “I will give the college kid one hundred grand to try to make something happen.” That is a guy thinking on the cutting edge.

But it has to be people, or someone, or a number of people, who just believe in the idea, because there is no way of recouping that money unless you have a business interest that is a seastead or a seasteading company. All I can offer you is your name on the plaque at the base of the flagpole of the first legally flagged seastead, which will be as significant as the Statue of Liberty once all seas are freed everywhere. It will not be appreciated at the time, except by seasteaders, but in the future people will look back and realise, “Oh my God, those are the founders who signed the Declaration of Independence at the base of that first flag for international waters.”

Timothy Allen: Presumably the market will pay for it eventually. Take Grant Romundt. If Grant Romundt needed a flag to position his house off the coast of an island, he would do it, would he not?

Joe Quirk: He would, yes. But he would need to understand the process, and I would be willing to help with what little we have been able to discover.

Timothy Allen: That is why I am thinking these ideas are ahead of their time. Grant Romundt is not ahead of his time in a way. You can rent that as an Airbnb for a thousand dollars if you want. It is real. It is a real marketable good.

The actual seastead is still in the idea stage, is it not? The realistic seastead at 12.5 miles out is a very small market. Much smaller than Grant Romundt’s market. It leads to a million other things in the future, but the barrier to entry is very high. There are hardly any people who currently want to live there, and they need a flag in order to do it, which costs two million quid to get assessed.

Joe Quirk: I should point out that when Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl built that little tin can on the sea, I forget how many people, maybe fifty or one hundred, reached out after I made my little documentary about it on YouTube and said, “Yes, I want to buy one.” They were prepared to go live in a community out there with Chad Elwartowski and Nadia Summergirl. During the manhunt, that number tripled. The manhunt only attracted more people going to Ocean Builders saying, “I want to buy one if you guys survive.” So that happened. There was already a market.

Timothy Allen: I was just mentioning that Grant Romundt’s market is conceivable to me. I could sell one of Grant Romundt’s pods. If you said, “Go and sell that,” I reckon I could sell it.

Joe Quirk: Really? Can you help us?

Timothy Allen: I will give it a go if you want. In the Middle East, there are people right now who would look at that and go, “Brilliant.” In the same vein, there are people out there who want to build a tower two metres taller than their neighbour’s tower, simply because at that level of wealth there are very few ways to delineate yourself from the other billionaire over there.

The first ever floating houses are good. Grant Romundt’s creation is a five-star experience from what I saw in the video, and it was not a render, it was the actual one he is living in. That is important for people in the United Arab Emirates. You cannot sell them a crappy seastead. You have to sell them the Rolls-Royce of seasteads, and Grant Romundt has built the Rolls-Royce.

Joe Quirk: Grant Romundt has, yes. But we have a division of labour here. Grant Romundt is the technology guy. He had enough background knowledge that he realised right away something I thought was impossible, which is that every single one of these things can be put on a floating home. He can make his futuristic smart house and it will work. I thought, I would like to see that. Holy shit, Grant Romundt has done it.

That is the exciting part. We have the technologist and entrepreneur who put all this together, brought the price down, and is selling it at reasonable costs, in my opinion. But what we understand at The Seasteading Institute is the boring part, which is the legal ecosystem on the seas. That requires a lot of explaining. We have done a lot of research on it.

I saw this coming years ago. Now the actual marine engineers and aquapreneurs are way ahead in the race. They are building the technology to make it happen. But we have to deal with the fact that if they just go out on the high seas and station these things unflagged, first of all, you have not guaranteed to me that it is safe. I want that through a certification society and an insurer. I want to see it insured by a marine insurer. We might not be able to get that because it is such a novel technology. We might not be able to get insured. But if it is not flagged, you could be treated as a pirate. If it is flagged, you are within the network of international law, and you are completely legit. Everyone else has to recognise you, even if you are flagged by Palau, which I think could be a great option.

Timothy Allen: Good luck is all I can say to that. Luck favours the bold. I have a lot of respect for your passion, Joe Quirk, and for your grit to keep going. I know in this business, and I am talking about the free cities ecosystem in general here, and I imagine it is the same in all frontier businesses, you get knocked back. You get this, then knocked back. You are always just about to do something, and things are moving.

This time last year, I was looking at prototypes that looked a little bit like tin cans. This year, I looked at a space-age pod straight out of the future.

Joe Quirk: That is how I opened my talk. Two years ago, I was showing you this digital image of the Jetsons at sea. Now here is the real Jetsons at sea, for sale and floating. Extrapolate another two years. Extrapolate another two years. How much progress are we making? How many more of these things can we make? How much fancier can we make it? How much bigger can we make it? We are full on moving very fast.

Timothy Allen: Something I have noticed is that most of the market-driven innovation is happening close to shore, is it not? That is what I mean about your flagging. I think the flagging is super important, and it is almost a catch-22 situation. But the market is not really deeper at sea yet.

Joe Quirk: The steps have been taken. There are two pretty close to shore, and then the third is about a mile and a half out. I have a really impressive video where you come over the mountains of Panama, and you keep going and see this little white thing on the horizon. You wonder, “Is that going to be a seastead?” You get closer and closer and then swoop in on this thing, and you think, my God, this is really far out. Those waves are really strong, and it is completely stable. If you are a seasteader and you see that, you think, that will work twelve miles out in waves like that. It is already pretty far out.

Timothy Allen: It is not that far. Who wants to live there? I can understand living just off the coast of a beautiful tropical island like Grant Romundt does. Grant Romundt can get on a jet ski and be on the beach in five minutes. He can see the beach from his front room. But I do not click with what starts people living in these little things right out there. You are a lot more isolated. Twelve miles out is what, a half-hour ferry ride?

Joe Quirk: That is shorter than my commute from Silicon Valley to San Francisco.

Timothy Allen: Is the reason to live there just because you are outside the jurisdiction?

Joe Quirk: I think that is the business reason to live out there. There is also the adventure, and it is beautiful. Ocean Builders already has social media influencers who come stay on the SeaPods frequently and love taking videos of themselves.

Timothy Allen: Which one? The one farther out?

Joe Quirk: No, not that one. That one is not open to the public yet. They are trying to beat the world record for being underwater. That one is going to be 120 days. I bet at the end of 120 days, when they announce they have the world record, the world will start paying attention to that thing. I bet people will then do the SeaBnB on that thing.

Timothy Allen: Grant Romundt told me his business partner will probably come up to the top to celebrate 120 days, but Grant Romundt reckons the business partner will go back down there. He said he likes it down there. Who are these people?

Joe Quirk: That is the way pioneers are.

Timothy Allen: The Great Plains of America, I can get. A six-metre-diameter room with a bike to pedal on, a couple of sofas, and a computer is pretty hardcore. That is like prison, is it not?

Joe Quirk: Are you sure? If you are looking out the window and seeing the ocean in every direction?

Timothy Allen: Yes, I am sure. If you have ever been on a boat for a long time, you know the insanity of looking at the same thing constantly.

Joe Quirk: You do not think looking out aquarium windows in every direction will keep you engaged?

Timothy Allen: You can get bored of everything, mate. There are people who sit in their basements looking at computer screens all day. Those places may be suitable for those people. I am not that guy. Put me on the Great Plains of America with arrows flying over my head. That I would enjoy. That is a real adventure for me.

Joe Quirk: Now you are the one who is weird, finally in this podcast.

Timothy Allen: I have always pushed frontiers. I have been a traveller my whole life. I have always gone to the furthest, most remote location I can go. I know it is not the same as being an adventurer two hundred years ago, but I do a version of it and I appreciate that. But I am a wide-open-spaces kind of person.

Joe Quirk: There are people who live on boats. There are families who homeschool their kids on catamarans. There are people who never leave their sailboat. There are ocean-going people who, if I try to talk about seasteading, say, “There are already people doing this.” I say, no, I mean staying out there permanently. A lot of people are already doing stuff like this, flying under the radar.

Timothy Allen: I agree with that. But I love the idea of the freedom you would feel, and for me that time will be when there is a floating island that is much bigger. I need to step over the earlier stage. I do not want a wired phone, I want my mobile phone. I want to go straight to the mobile phone.

Joe Quirk: Just like everybody else.

Timothy Allen: Not necessarily. Most people.

Joe Quirk: I do not think it is very long before there is something out at sea the size of this city block, with grass and trees on it.

Timothy Allen: You reckon? How long? A decade? Two decades?

Joe Quirk: A decade. Ten years. It depends if someone wants to form some sort of business out there.

Timothy Allen: That is important. Who is that person who wants to form a business out there? They need the two million to get the flag. They need all this stuff.

Joe Quirk: They do not need it. I want the nonprofit to have the two million to get the flag.

Timothy Allen: I know, but if the nonprofit does not get it, the market will provide it in the end and someone will incorporate it into their business model, right?

Joe Quirk: That would be great. Take that off my hands, businessman. I would love that.

Timothy Allen: It is quite a bit of expenditure before you have done any of the technological stuff.

Joe Quirk: Imagine this thing is floating out there and you can scuba dive all you want. Maybe nobody lives out there. Maybe it is just a business running a scuba-diving thing that is better than the decommissioned oil rigs people are already scuba diving at, many of which are very far from land. Maybe the person running that business wants to stay there and not have to go back to land every time.

Soon enough that could scale up. Then you want a store, and other things, and a cafeteria. The oil industry already has floatels that house five hundred workers for weeks at a time.

Timothy Allen: What do they do about flags?

Joe Quirk: Those are flagged as oil rigs, and they have dense regulations. They have gone through that process already. The process I want to go through again has scaled up.

It all scales up. At one point people found this black stuff in the ground and realised they could burn it for fuel. Then they realised there was some underneath the ocean, five hundred feet out to sea. How the hell are you going to drill through the ocean and go down to the ocean floor to get it? Plus, it is five hundred miles from shore. Who is going to pay for that? How are you going to get the guys out there?

Eventually there is an incentive for someone to do exploratory drilling and find that stuff. They use all that up. How do you get to the point where you are going three hundred miles out and down a mile until you hit the ground?

Timothy Allen: But that is the thing. Everyone uses oil.

Joe Quirk: They did not use oil. They used kerosene lamps, which killed whales for the oil. The world had to shift to using oil by people drilling for it. They started out drilling on land, then started using up that stuff, then realised the real stuff was out at sea. There had to be market demand, and they slowly scaled it up. It is unimaginable what they are doing now.

Timothy Allen: What do you think the market demand for floating cities will be in the end?

Joe Quirk: There are so many networks of markets. Pharmaceutical research. Vitalia, if you are listening, you need your business not in Honduras but on a seastead. If you really want to scale up life-extension technologies rapidly, if you want to use human cells instead of animal trials, if you eventually want humans to go out there and research with full consent and try therapies that are not allowed now, you are going to need to do that on a seastead. Investors who are serious can pay for it. The faster we have seasteads, the longer you are going to live.

Timothy Allen: Imagine the public relations of that. How are they going to report on that? Frankenstein Island. It is terrible, mate. How do you compete with the misinformation that will arise out of that?

Joe Quirk: Here comes the floating Frankenstein Island. Let them write it, because they already are. This has been happening since before I got involved. “Floating tax havens for Dr Evil” is the narrative. Keep it. It is not productive, and then 99.9 percent of people are enraged and hate me and everything I represent, and a tenth of a percent are inspired and get involved and say, “Actually, I am a naval architect, and I am secretly an anarcho-capitalist. I cannot tell anyone, but I will meet with you once a week and advise you. Tell Peter Thiel I will help for free.” Then I always have to break the news that Peter Thiel is not helping us.

Frankenstein Island, write whatever you want. I have my alternative media. I can be on your podcast and tell the truth to people willing to listen for five hours.

Timothy Allen: But when you get terrible PR, people whisper in the ears of states, do they not? States are always going to be the biggest enemy. I am not trying to…

Joe Quirk: It is better to be criticised now than to face reality later. What would be the worst-case scenario? The worst-case scenario I could possibly imagine is what actually happened. We built this little seastead. We put a loving couple on it. We made a little YouTube video. They were immediately threatened with the death penalty. All the media in the whole world ganged up to lie about them. There was a giant manhunt. They got away. Nadia Summergirl had to say goodbye to everything she had ever known, fly to the other side of the world, and start seasteading again.

That is the market. Those people are the real heroes who will be worshipped throughout history in the future. I am just not afraid, because it has all happened. They lie about me right now. They lie about me nonstop. People meet me and say, “Is there not some shit that wants to create tax havens for the rich?” I always say, “Yes, that is actually me. I was that guy you saw on TV that you hate.”

I am already famous for being a selfish rich white male who just wants to create tax havens for the rich. They will absolutely write that this is about Frankenstein Monster Island. Bring it on. There is nothing they can do that they have not already done. They tried to kill us. People have been killed. People have died, and all the lies have already been told.

Timothy Allen: I would say, no, they have not. Lies are infinite.

Joe Quirk: Lies are infinite, but I have a seastead floating.

Timothy Allen: Okay. I think we have to wrap it up. I do not know how long we have been riffing.

Joe Quirk: All right. To all your rich people listening: The Seasteading Institute needs your support. We need to ten-times our budget, or we are just going to build floating eco-islands in territorial waters. Contact The Seasteading Institute. Ask whatever questions you want, and I will explain why this is the path forward for freedom.

Stop negotiating with governments. Get off the land, because it cannot happen there, not in a lasting way. Let us make one hundred thousand free societies under sea.

Timothy Allen: Okay, Joe Quirk. You will. I will visit. I will see you there.

Thanks for chatting. Another great conversation. I always appreciate your oratory skills, and I love how dedicated you are to this thing, because I think most people would not have taken as many knockbacks as you have. Well done for that, and thank you for coming on and sharing your wisdom again.

Joe Quirk: Thank you for the gift of your attention and for not editing this to make me look bad.

Timothy Allen: I will need to. Do not worry.