Joe Quirk on Seasteading 3.0
2015-08-20 · Guest: Joe Quirk and Charlie Deist (Seasteading Institute) · 51:37
Seasteading and the Future of Autonomous Floating Cities
Bob Zadek welcomes Joe Quirk of the Seasteading Institute to discuss the future of floating cities and the “market of governance.” They explore how seasteading applies Silicon Valley innovation to the problem of stagnant nation-states, offering a vision of modular, mobile societies on the high seas.
Topics: Seasteading, Market of Governance, Innovation, Immigration, Libertarianism, Patri Friedman Speakers: Bob Zadek (Host), Joe Quirk (Guest)
The Frontier of Seasteading [00:01]
Bob Zadek: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show. Every Sunday at 9:00 a.m. We are the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. 72 hours of Libertarian Desert, but for The Bob Zadek Show. Happy to be here with you. We are the show of ideas, not attitude. Thanks so much for listening.
What a special show we have in store for you. In the studio with me, I have two—count ‘em, two—good friends and guests. The conversation will be among myself, my dear friend and producer, Charlie Deist, and Joe Quirk. Joe is a “seavangelist.” He’ll explain what a seavangelist is. Joe is an author of many best-selling books, including The Ultimate Rush—don’t we all want that?—It’s Not You, It’s Biology: The Science of Love, Sex, and Relationships, and Exult. Thank you, Charlie, and thank you, Joe, for being with us. We are going to be discussing seasteading, the next frontier. Joe, welcome to the show this morning.
Joe Quirk: Thanks for having me. Thanks for the introduction.
Bob Zadek: So, Joe, you are with seasteading and devote a lot of your time to the Seasteading Institute.
Joe Quirk: Yes, it’s the first real job I’ve ever had. And it’s because I got completely addicted to it. Once I—I started out as a writer, as you pointed out. I wrote a lot of books, I tell lots of stories, I find out interesting things that are going on, then I tell the story, and then I move on. The thing about seasteading was I felt like it solved a deep problem, which is that governments don’t innovate; they don’t evolve.
I feel like humanity is on a rocket ride powered by Moore’s Law, taking us into a fabulous future. I think all information technologies are converging, and there’s a very bright future ahead. And the greatest danger to that process, to me, is nation-states that are getting bigger and bigger, expanding more and more force over more and more people, and they’re not innovating. Governance is not getting better; in my opinion, it’s getting worse.
Bob Zadek: So, seasteading—what is the Seasteading Institute? What is the goal, the philosophy of seasteading? What is seasteading? Which—and to sort of give a spoiler of sorts—seasteading plays into both the oldest of human desires in a very modern way. So tell us about seasteading and what is the core human instinct that seasteading attempts to accommodate and expand?
Joe Quirk: One of the core human instincts is to move somewhere else and homestead. It’s been going on since the dawn of time. You don’t like where you are, you go some new place and you form your own community. Seasteading is homesteading the high seas. 45% of the Earth’s surface is unclaimed by any state. And because I’d been on a cruise ship and I had studied oil platforms, I realized the technology for living on the ocean was at hand and that we could colonize the seas.
And then I thought, “Well, that’s an interesting idea. I can see that humanity would go there; it’s completely realistic.” I was on a cruise ship where all the water was desalinated seawater. It’s like going camping and taking your mall with you. But why would anyone work for it? And when I met Patri Friedman at Burning Man, I went home and read his blog, and he kind of elucidated how a fluid frontier is fundamentally different.
What gives rise to monopolies on governance on land is that we’re all sort of captive citizens stuck to land. And if people could detach and move around—if you could, if you got unhappy with a particular society, break away and form your own fluidly—we’d have a market of governance. We’d have variation by government and selection by citizens. We’d unleash the forces of innovation and progress on the oceans. It’s like a Silicon Valley sensibility being brought to the problem of government.
A Market of Governance [05:15]
Bob Zadek: What’s so interesting is so much of what you said, Joe, is basically in the headlines today. What do we read about incessantly? Immigration policy. What is immigration? Immigration policy tries to deal with this determination that every human has to do the best for oneself and one’s family. And if you’re not happy where you are, you move. And immigration is merely the result of people moving to try to find a better life. So we struggle with immigration today in America as the recipient of people who are unhappy in other places.
And indeed, on my show about a year ago, I had an author whose book was Why Money Walks. And he talked about how citizens of America would move from state to state with increasing velocity based upon tax climate, weather, freedom, perhaps the relationship with the police. So people are always looking to improve their life by movement. And seasteading simply recognizes that movement on land is, of course, possible, but there are political barriers. And seasteading says, “Let’s just remove the barriers and let’s have nations, albeit small nations, compete based upon political systems.” If we’re going to compete for breakfast cereal—pretty unimportant—why not compete, have competing political systems so people will have a choice? And so playing into choice is exactly what seasteading is all about.
Joe Quirk: Yeah, and we spoke before about supermarkets. You know, supermarkets allow a proliferation of choices. As many people as possible are providing services and products, and as many people as possible are choosing them, and that’s what drives the abundance that we have. And you can imagine if you granted me a monopoly over supermarkets, and I could just take captive control over a particular town, and the town could vote every four years on who’s going to run the supermarket, and whoever wins that gets to choose for four years the food that everyone gets and the amount they’re going to charge for it.
And then if you complain, I say, “Well, you get to choose every four years. You get to choose the head of the supermarket, and you can wait another four years and make another choice.” That just doesn’t drive improvement. That drives higher prices, it drives worse services and terrible products, and it doesn’t drive innovation. And if you can break up these monopolies—the most destructive monopolies we have in the world are nation-states, in my opinion.
And I think sea-states couldn’t even be properly characterized as states as long as they were disassemblable and modular. They’d be like cruise ships. I mean, I’ve been on cruise ships; I don’t argue about governance on a cruise ship. What drives the constant improvement in governance on a cruise ship is my right to jump ship and choose a better ship. Cruise ships are getting cheaper and cheaper; they’re getting more and more fabulous. One just came out with a 10-story water slide. I live near San Francisco, I’ve been on a cruise ship—cruise ships are more convenient and more enjoyable. And you can imagine these things ten times as big and groups of people getting together and saying, “Screw this, I’m going to go form my own little polity.” It’s not even a state anymore; it’s a market of governance emerging on the sea that people choose, and it would drive constant improvement.
Bob Zadek: And I found myself—of course, I live on a boat. I live on the Laissez Faire, as many of my listeners know. I live on a boat in the Bay Area, and so living on a boat is something I’m quite familiar with. And as I with great distress look at who is possibly going to be the next president, and what will our next government look like in 2016, for the first time, I start to check the seasteading blog and seasteading website. Because yes, we live in a democracy, and yes, we are given a choice, but what kind of choice is that when the alternatives all are pretty distressing? And I don’t like being told, “You have two choices, both of which are terrible.” And I like to know I have other options.
Now, living in a democracy and going through this empty ritual of voting is not a choice for me. It doesn’t do it because I don’t get to really have a meaningful choice. Now, in the Seasteading Institute—it was formed, I guess, in the early part of the 21st century. Now, how did it evolve? What was the first vision of seasteading and how has it evolved from its inception? And I should mention that Patri Friedman, whose name Joe mentioned—Patri, of course, is the grandson of Milton Friedman.
Joe Quirk: And son of David Friedman.
Bob Zadek: And son of David Friedman. And Peter Thiel also, the founder of PayPal, has been pretty active in the seasteading movement as well. And it’s gotten the attention of lots of folks in Silicon Valley.
Bob Zadek: What has been the evolution of the concept of seasteading and where—what is its present iteration?
Joe Quirk: So Milton Friedman advocated the freedom to choose. David Friedman—I should mention Milton Friedman wrote, was, participated in that great TV series on PBS available on YouTube called Free to Choose. It’s a must-watch for people. It’s wonderful public television, and also a book was written after the series on Free to Choose. And a must-read for your audience is The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, which many people read this book and he just sort of elucidates: what suppose governments were just outcompeted by free-market interactions? What would emerge? How would the incentives work out? In what way would you need a state? And he kind of walks you through how all this would work, and you realize, “My God, this would work if we could create this situation.”
Of course, primitive nation-states already claim all land. They emerge from previous centuries and from a primitive instinct, in my opinion. And so if you think that David Friedman wrote this book about The Machinery of Freedom, Milton Friedman elucidated famously the freedom to choose empowers everybody. And what was so remarkable about Patri is that he described a machinery of freedom to choose would emerge on the oceans.
And what’s weird about this legacy is Patri didn’t know Milton Friedman as Milton Friedman. He knew him as Grandpa. He wasn’t really raised by his dad. He kind of saw his dad during the summers and they shared a mutual interest in a kind of role-playing games. There’s some weird genetic thing there where they all are attracted to thinking about this problem, this perennial problem of monopoly governments and how they could be better.
Bob Zadek: I think it’s a weird genetic accident if you don’t think about that, but go ahead.
Joe Quirk: Well, yeah. All right, sorry. And so I was also thinking about this problem, and I thought this was a legitimately—and I thought it was insoluble, and I thought this was a legitimate solution. And I’ll tell you, I kind of went to the Seasteading Institute saying, “This should not be an obscure idea among people. This needs to be a mainstream idea. This is such an important thing to get started, that more—we need to attract as many brains as possible to think about solving this problem.”
So I started pitching, “I want to write a mainstream book about this.” And so that’s what I started doing with Patri. And so that book’s going to come out next year. But I started getting so addicted to talking about it and talking about it in the media and writing about it that it became that, you know, Randolph Hencken, the executive director, kind of asked me to come on and kind of be communications director, and that’s why I chose the name “Seavangelist.” So that’s the first real job I’ve ever had. I’ve always just been a writer.
Bob Zadek: Well, being a writer is a real job. You may not make tons of money, but it’s a job. I mean, you do get money and you get to buy food with it. Now, what is—right now, how do seasteaders see the actualization of this dream? What do they envision as being probable and likely and doable, and how will they fill this need people have just to be pioneers? Try something new, get it on the ground floor of a country, not of a startup techie, but of a country.
The Strategy: From Special Economic Zones to Floating Cities [15:30]
Joe Quirk: If you want a startup country, we’re on it. So the long-term dream is, you know, floating city-states on the ocean that are recognized by the UN. The immediate next baby step involves our Floating City Project. So we are reaching out to—people don’t know that there’s several nations all over the world that allow what I like to call legal islands on their land. It’s mostly in the subject—
Bob Zadek: The free city movement.
Joe Quirk: The free city movement, the special economic zone movement. They go by many names, and there’s probably about 3,000 of them across the world.
Bob Zadek: Wow.
Joe Quirk: Basically, in my opinion, inspired by Hong Kong. You know, Hong Kong was this little free-market experiment right next to this behemoth of communist China. It created so much wealth, it caused China to allow little special economic zones like Shenzhen and Macau, and these things proliferated across China. And we must remember that Hong Kong, which to most Americans is simply a place with low taxes and a great transportation system and some nice mountains and a harbor—but Hong Kong is a city-state with no natural resources. The only thing it has going to create wealth is freedom and smart people. That’s the only natural resource it has.
So if we wonder, “My goodness, how will we exist on some oil rig or cruise ship type place without water to pump out of a well and without magnesium to drill out of the ground and without acres of farmland?” Hong Kong does it quite well, thank you very much. So this concept is—do not think this is far-fetched because it’s happening. The only difference is Hong Kong happens to be on land.
Bob Zadek: That’s a distinction without a difference.
Joe Quirk: Yes. I mean, and you can imagine if Hong Kong could break away and float, if it could break up into little pieces. Now these kind of little special economic zones, free ports, are in countries all over the world. So if you’re a country that maybe isn’t performing that well, politicians in that country are more open to the idea, “Well, maybe the governance just isn’t working here. Maybe we should legislate a special zone where people can try a new experiment.” And these are succeeding in large part all over the world.
So we’re going to countries like that and saying, “We don’t need a special economic zone. We’ll build a floating one just offshore in your territorial waters.” The challenge with going to the high seas is that it’s expensive. It can be done. Oil platforms do it, oil rigs do it. But we want something that’s going to be affordable for regular people. If you go in the shallow waters, the technology for that already exists. The Dutch are already building floating structures. Singapore is already building floating structures. So the technology for floating small villages and city-states in shallow waters already exists.
The problem is nation-states claim the shallow waters. So if we go to these places and say, “Allow us political autonomy, we will build a floating island, we will bring in all our Silicon Valley-style innovation, we will bring wealth to your local folks”—a lot of nations are open to that and are in discussions with us about allowing this to happen. It’s win-win. We’ll bring you prosperity, you bring us freedom. We want to set an excellent first example of what a seastead could be that we think, I hope, will be better in every way, which will attract yet more brains to seasteading, so we can solve the deeper engineering challenge of having affordable cities on the high seas that would be more than 200 miles out and truly startups in governance.
Geopolitics and the Race Against China [22:15]
Bob Zadek: What’s interesting is, what is the relationship between what China is doing—building so-called man-made islands in the South China Sea, which has caused great distress to the American—to the U.S. Department of Defense because of defensive reasons—what is the relationship between what China is doing building these so-called man-made islands, which are getting a lot of world attention, and seasteading?
Joe Quirk: China’s move represents the expansion, an aggressive expansion of the power of its particular nation-state over more jurisdictions. Seasteading represents the empowerment of people that don’t have a nation-state to start as many startup societies as they like. So we want to increase the number of polities in the world to attract people.
So when I’ve been following what China’s been doing, I feel like this is a race between something that’s very bad and something that’s very hopeful. And I was sort of in an email chain with some of my seasteading supporters—matter of fact, the people who want to be on our Floating City Project—saying, “This is terrible. China’s going to seasteading before we are. We got to move.” And somebody wrote back to me saying, “Actually, this could be a good thing for seasteading because the bad guys are innovating in the technology, which we can then use in the very near future.”
So they’re developing the technology. So, you know, one of the scariest nation-states in the world is moving into floating structures. Freedom lovers, we better get on it and beat them to it and get out there and create as many free societies as possible.
Bob Zadek: And it should be mentioned, we are not describing a life of ice—I’m not describing a life of isolation. It’s not like there you are, like Napoleon on Elba, and you’re stuck. Um, this is simply where you will work, where you will live—perhaps all the time, perhaps most of the time, perhaps some of the time—but so long as you are there and working, you are living in a political environment of your choosing, one where you have basically gotten to by choice select exactly the political climate you want.
Now, that is a level of freedom that Americans haven’t realized for hundreds of years. We go through the ritual of choice by voting, but the choice is between such similar alternatives that it’s not really a choice at all. So for the first time—not quite for the first time, but the seasteading movement is offering profound political choice, one that anybody who’s listening to this show has never experienced in their lifetime, unless you live perhaps in a gated community somewhere and you get to vote on the color of your neighbor’s house.
Joe Quirk: And in that case, that’s local governance that people usually feel better about. If I can vote locally within a community I choose, there’s usually more agreement about the type of community we want. The gigantic nation-state, there’s no agreement at all. And I feel like if the states could break up—I mean, the secession movements in the United States are crazy. They go on in Hawaii, they go on among Native Americans, Texas and California can’t get along. There’s all sorts of groups that want to break up—Six States movements. It goes on and on and on. Imagine if they could break up into pieces and move around.
Bob Zadek: And Joe, you hit the nail on the head because we talked about—you said mega-nation-states, giant nation-states, and then you talked about local control. This is all about having control over your political life. And you cannot have control if your political life is governed by a huge political body. If it’s governed by a town council, if it’s governed by a very local community, you have great control. And that’s what seasteading is offering.
The Next Frontier for Freedom [24:15]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’m having a wonderful hour talking with Joe Quirk. Joe is a sea evangelist. He is active in the Seasteading Institute. Joe will direct you to passport control so you can get a passport to the next seasteading village, which we are building. Questions are always invited.
Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show. We’re the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend—the show of ideas, not attitude. Join my conversation this morning with Joe Quirk and with my producer and dear friend Charlie Deist. Charlie has been active as well in the seasteading movement. We are talking about seasteading: the next frontier for freedom.
Before I get back to my guests, Joe and my friend and producer Charlie, I would like to give you a nautical heads-up, if I may. There is a wonderful video series being produced called Life on the Sea, Life on the Water. Life on the Water describes various local characters in the San Francisco Bay Area who have spent their entire life on the water. They are a special breed. Their lives are fascinating. They are independent thinkers, independent livers. And the series is called Life on the Water. I invite you to—if you’re in the Bay Area, it’ll be shown. There’ll be a showing at the Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley on September 3rd and September 10th at 7:00 p.m. Contact the Throckmorton Theater for tickets, or look for the series Life on the Water. You can get the videos online. These are interesting characters. I happen to know them myself living in the Bay Area. And what better series to mention on my show as we talk about life on the water writ large, aka the Seasteading Institute.
The Seasteading Institute was founded in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area in the early part of the 21st century. It is a nonprofit which seeks to expand political frontiers and to give citizens of the world a political alternative living on the water, whether the water is a mega-ship or an oil-rig-type platform, or perhaps even a man-made island—who knows where this will go. And that is less important than the important principle that each of these small city-state nations—whatever they will be, it’s a new formation—they will be formed under the principle of freedom, so that you will have local control over your life, and there will be dozens, perhaps hundreds, of small nation-states.
And just like you decide in what housing development to live and what city to live and what state to live and what country to live, now citizens of the world will be given a choice. If you want to live in a commune-type environment, there will no doubt be one. If you want to live in a free-market, personal-freedom environment, there will be just the perfect platform, boat, or floating island for you. That is the concept of seasteading. It satisfies the most basic of human needs: the need to improve your life for yourself and your family, and to have once again control over your political life. Because much as we like to think that we live in a democracy—which of course we do theoretically—as you can tell from the current political climate, we don’t really have much by way of choice. The alternatives don’t make everybody very happy these days. So seasteading satisfies that void. Joe, is that a fair description of seasteading?
The Anachronism of Conquest [30:40]
Joe Quirk: I think that it is. And someone out there is objecting right now, saying, “Well, what if these things prosper and make lots of money? Then the big nation-states will just come in and conquer you.” And I cite as to consider what’s already out there. The cruise ship industry: the average cruise ship is already a libertarian skyscraper. It docks in one nation, it flies the flag of another nation, it incorporates in another nation, it hires from anywhere, and no one argues about the rules on cruise ships; they just choose among them, and that’s why they get more and more fabulous.
I also cite, say, the Cayman Islands. No standing army, offers no tax, takes a spiteful stance towards the U.S. in many ways, welcoming financial and healthcare mavericks. And the United States doesn’t conquer it, and it prospers spectacularly. We spoke about Hong Kong before. You know, Hong Kong’s been around for half a century, prospering and embarrassing China. China’s changed its policies as the result of Hong Kong and has not attacked it despite bullying it. And this goes on and on. People little appreciate the power of small, new political experiments to change the policies of old nations.
Bob Zadek: Also, you know, you talk about the danger—though it’s not much of a danger—of quote, “conquest.” Well, that whole concept seems strangely anachronistic. I mean, conquest historically existed because one nation or group wanted land, natural resources—something that the victim, the target, had that the aggressor wanted.
Joe Quirk: Yes.
Bob Zadek: Floating islands, city-states—they only have the intellect and the souls of the people who live there. It’s like conquering steam.
Joe Quirk: Yes.
Bob Zadek: There’s nothing to conquer. You want the island? Have it. We’ll just go to another island or another city-state. So while on the one hand, you can say, “Well, who’s going to build the submarines to protect us?” there’s nothing to protect against. Nobody will care—that is, no other nation will care—that there is this floating Hong Kong-type organization out there somewhere where people are absurdly happy, content, and peaceful.
Joe Quirk: About 19 countries don’t even have armies or militaries. Most of them are island nations. They’re defenseless. Conquerors have incentives. If you’re sitting on a big pile of oil, I might want to conquer you. If you’re simply a floating Hong Kong creating wealth through trade, there’s not much to conquer. The greatest resource is human work, human productivity. People have to live somewhere. If you can claim control over that group of people, and you get a line around your border that ends up where your army stopped killing the other army, and now you get to claim that thing—that’s a primitive thing from previous centuries that just doesn’t apply to how the modern world works. I don’t think we need these things anymore. I think on the water, they won’t be properly characterized as nation-states. I think they’ll be more like communities.
Bob Zadek: Experiments.
Joe Quirk: Thank you, Charlie.
Seasteading as a Dynamic Experiment [31:59]
Joe Quirk: Yeah, when you mentioned that word, it really got my ears buzzing because I think that was what differentiated seasteading in my mind: the word “experiment”—meaning that you can actually—it’s not a utopia or some envisioned end ideal. It’s a dynamic process that’s constantly unfolding through the dynamics of competition and choice.
And for me as a young sort of acolyte of Milton Friedman, hearing about Patri Friedman’s bold vision for a thousand experiments on the high seas—forget hundreds or dozens—I think what humanity really needs at this point, given the diversity of the planet and the number of different challenges which will require different kinds of thinking for the solutions, we really need to start thinking about how we can tailor our experiments, our environments, to better fit our—whether it’s our cognitive profile or our personality type. Personally, I hope that I live on a seastead with a bunch of people who do not match my personality type, and that the experiment will be amplified by, you know, many, many different subtypes within it. But getting beyond the idea of a libertarian paradise into the realm of entirely new possibilities, unimagined possibilities through experimentation.
Bob Zadek: Yeah. And you know, Charlie, when I hear you speak, and Joe, what I—now my mind is off and it’s spinning as it often does. And what I imagine is at very least, at very least, most Americans, probably most people on the planet, have never really experienced true political freedom. There is this ritual of voting, this ritual of going to the polls and of watching mud wrestling, aka debates. But the choices are within such a narrow range that it’s not really a choice.
And when citizens of seasteading organizations, seasteading political bodies, when they experience—at very least, they will go back to where they came from, if it’s only a visit, enlightened. “This is what freedom feels like.” None of us, while we are given freedom to select our breakfast cereal, there’s a lot of freedom we’ve long since lost. And the history, of course, is freedom, as Madison observed: the natural cause of freedom is for it to erode, not to expand. So every generation in America is experiencing less and less freedom, so it’s being taught out of us. And to go back to a platform and to teach it back into people so that when they go home, they go home enlightened—if that’s all that it accomplishes, that’s profound.
Joe Quirk: I think the wonderful thing about freedom is I think we could just—when it works, we take it for granted. And I think the wonderful thing about seasteading is we don’t need to argue or teach people anymore. You demonstrate that something works better. People move there because the job is better, because they like things better there. People are completely statist on cruise ships and don’t even recognize what they’re experiencing.
And Charlie and I used to work together at the Seasteading Institute. And what I loved about it is that when I would go there and work with these marvelous seasteaders, straight through the national election, we never even mentioned it. And I was in a room—we have a sign-up that says, “Stop arguing, start seasteading.” Thank you. And you had that phrase, “Let freedom float,” you know. And we had people in the room that came from the left, that came from the right, that were anarcho-capitalists, and we even had, like, a radical scholarly feminist lawyer. These are the type of people that would argue with each other. We did not argue. We sat in that room and we worked on seasteading, and here’s the election coming again, and we’re not discussing it. But because we’re working on something that’s going to matter.
And you know, I was raised Catholic. I would go into the confessional booth, I’d light the votive candle, and the priest would make everything okay. And now I can go in a little voting booth and click and vote, and then the politicians will make everything okay. It’s a con. I recognize this. But if we can go out and create startup societies, and once we realize the technology is at hand—and we’ve already attracted legal scholars, legal volunteers, aquatic engineers, maritime attorneys, people interested in medical research at sea, people interested in floating healthcare—the caliber of people that are coming to us saying, “Build me a seastead, I’m ready,” it fills you with this sense, this mission that you’ve got to get this out there. There’s too many people who want this.
And I don’t think it’s a threat to anything we care about. It’s just providing more choices for more people to choose them. And if you like your government, you can keep your government, and you can sit back and watch these things proliferate on the water. You can laugh at the fiascos if you like. And if we create a floating Hong Kong or a floating Cayman Islands, maybe we’ll be humbled by something new. And what I love about freedom in markets is that I didn’t imagine Facebook. I didn’t imagine texting; I didn’t imagine email. Things I didn’t imagine were offered to me, and I got to choose them. And I’m imagining the kind of society I would want to live in. I have no idea what I’m talking about. It doesn’t come from our plans and our dreams. It comes from allowing lots of people to experiment, lots of people to choose, and the solutions emerge. So I want to see things emerge, little societies emerge on the ocean that completely humble me as to my own beliefs and get me to switch there and move there.
Bob Zadek: I’m a lender, and I’m sitting here fantasizing about being the chairman of the board of Aqua Bank. I’ve already designed the name, and I’m gonna be building some non-FDIC regulated bank called Aquabank. And that’s my—for the first seasteading platform I can get, I’m gonna be the local friendly banker, chairman of Aquabank.
Joe Quirk: Excuse me, do you have callers?
Bob Zadek: We have callers already.
Joe Quirk: Watch out for competition, Bob.
Bob Zadek: Uh oh. Competition. I love competition. Rick from San Carlos. Welcome to the show this morning. How are you?
The Ocean Dividend and Galt’s Gulch [39:15]
Nick: Oh, hi. This is—hello, sir. How are you, Mr. Zadek?
Bob Zadek: Fine. Call me Bob.
Nick: I’m sorry, sir. Just a little pathological response from many years serving the country, but this has been a fascinating journey, I might add. My name is Nick. I apologize, I may have mumbled a bit. But this is fascinating. It resonates with me specifically to the village that exists in the valley that Ayn Rand described in Atlas Shrugged: Galt’s Gulch. People are sick of it. I completely agree.
What is to—is it—why do you go to the ocean? Because of the laws that would allow the development of a society such as you describe, you know, what’s to stop it from happening in, I don’t know, in St. Charles, Missouri? That’s the first question. And then is there any worry about—if it’s true that a society like this could be built to develop, would it attract all the people that actually accomplish things in a society? What would happen to the rest of society? I’m curious in the impact.
Charlie Deist: Hey, Nick. This is Charlie here. I can speak to the first question a little bit because it’s something that I thought a lot about at my time working as research and communications coordinator alongside Joe for a little while. And ultimately, I think the reason for going to the ocean is twofold. There is the political freedom in the fact that this unclaimed land presents opportunities to settle new jurisdictions, whereas all existing land is claimed, except for we know Liberland and a few other small exceptions from previous shows.
But the reason we talk sometimes about the ocean having a tax associated with it—and when the taxes on land rise above the tax that comes in the form of a harsh environment, potentially a more isolated environment if you don’t have the right transportation solutions—seasteading is about reducing the ocean tax. But there’s also something that you could look at as an ocean dividend. And we have this vast frontier that’s untapped. It’s the largest solar collector in the world. The opportunities for restoring fisheries with the right practices, for generating the new kinds of fuels to power civilization—the only place on earth where there’s the resources with this magnitude, renewable resources that can power us into the 21st century, that’s going to be the ocean.
And food in particular. We’re looking at billions of people now in the third world with increasing demand for protein, high-quality protein, and that can’t come from land anymore. We’re kind of starting to reach the limits.
Joe Quirk: So that’s a little bit of a libertarian ecological perspective that goes hand in hand with the business perspective, which is we need industries to build out, and seasteading provides both the reason for building out those industries, and the industries provide the financial sustainability for the effort.
Bob Zadek: The second question you asked, I think, was about people leaving—what’s going to happen to what’s left behind when all the producers have left, the sort of Galt’s Gulch 2.0?
The Competition of Governance [41:25]
Joe Quirk: Sure, and I’ll hand that one over to Joe. In my opinion, humanity strides forward on the power of startups and experiments, as Charlie said. And the United States was, in my opinion, a giant life raft where people got to start over, and it attracted a lot of the best people from Europe and other places, and it continues to attract people. And we invented new ways of living together that completely changed the world. Europe didn’t lose all its best people. It’s hard to attract everyone away to your proliferation of Galt’s Gulches. And seasteaders would like to continue this on the blue frontier. And whenever you create freedom, people stampede there.
We talked about Hong Kong. Hong Kong set such a good example. Right across the bay from Hong Kong, China created Shenzhen, which is a little town that had more political freedom, had more economic freedom—not perfect, but it had a lot of it. And in a very short period of time, 10 million very poor people went there, and now the microphone I’m speaking into is probably made by one of them. The mouse I’m using—probably 90 percent of mice are made in Shenzhen.
Bob Zadek: And also I would add to that, Rick, if that seems scary to you, look at what happens even in the United States. We have, at least in theory, 50 separate state governments, all of whom are competing for citizens. And you have read about, Rick, I’m sure, how many producers have left California to go to Texas, perhaps to Utah, to other states where they find more freedom and lower taxation. You have migration within the states all the time. And what happens is the states that are net losers, they are forced against their will to change, so that the whole is much greater than the individual states, because everybody gets better. That is simply federalism on the world stage instead of within one country. So Rick, I think what happens is—one more comment. Of course, Rick. Sure. To your point.
Rick: So it doesn’t scare me. I’m just trying to ask it from the other side, kind of a thought language term. But I’m a biologist. I believe in the application of integration of recombinant technologies for a number of issues. It will address the percentage that have happened. You can apply it to the other thing. What’s interesting is that none of you appear to be scared or put off by the use of technology to make things better. Why is there such—specifically Europe? Europe’s a disaster. They do not use any type of technology. They’ll use it for medicine, if it’s a biologic, but not the food. It’s almost driving third-world countries to just continue to live in despair. There are a number of genetically modified organisms sitting in patent shelves protected by radical activists who just, for whatever reason, do not want to adapt or evolve. And then I’m going to hang up and just listen to your comments off that. Thanks a lot.
Innovation, GMOs, and the Precautionary Principle [46:10]
Bob Zadek: Thank you very much for your thoughtful comments, Rick. We appreciate your being a listener. Now, of course, Rick was discussing issues like GMOs—how the Europeans are fanatical in their opposition to GMOs, which we’ve had on the planet for thousands of years. It’s simply sensible growing and altering of crops to make them healthier and more disease-resistant. So there is a great body of population that has been taught to be frightened of technology. They’re just adverse to it. Not having lived in Europe, I can’t speak to how it happened or look under their sort of psychological resistance, and they will simply be left behind. And the hope is that they observe an alternative way to look at the world and they learn from it. That’s the hope.
Joe Quirk: And the way to win these sort of arguments is not to argue; it is to demonstrate something.
Bob Zadek: That’s a great point.
Joe Quirk: And that’s what seasteading is all about. So in my dream, I’d like to see a seastead on the ocean. Matter of fact, I’m working on a company—the early parts of a company—that we would call Blue-Green Foods that would involve seaweed, environmentally restorative food, and genetically modified seaweeds and algae in general. It’s much more healthy than corn, wheat, or soy. It’s not only environmentally sustainable; it’s environmentally restorative. It can make the coast better. And the number of innovators that are working in every industry, including food, including everything that this gentleman referred to, that are coming to seasteading, trying to find a way that they can push innovation forward. And the problem with governments is once you create this monopoly of force, the dominant industries work as hard as they can to control that monopoly of force, and then they stop new innovations from coming, which is why we end up with the cluster-f of governments.
Bob Zadek: Let Joe speak.
Joe Quirk: I also see an argument for people who are not necessarily on board with the GMOs but still might have an interest in seasteading. You could propose the thought experiment this way: Let’s say you and a group of people believe in the precautionary principle—this idea that until we have solid proof positive that GMOs are safe, our default assumption should be that they’re not safe. And that is not an entirely unrespectable position. There are people like Nassim Taleb who hold this view, and those people could go off and set up their own community on a seastead, and the ocean functions as their quarantine, in a way, from the rest of the world. And we’ll see over time what happens to the non-GMO seastead. Are the people living longer? Are they thriving? Do they, you know, start to have some radiant glow if they eat non-GMO foods and are 100 percent pure? And we could literally just have Petri dishes—or “potty dishes,” as I called them before—where we observe the long-run effects.
The Humility of Seasteading [51:30]
Bob Zadek: As we were running out of time—we have about two minutes to go—this whole concept of seasteading and of having individuals get to choose their form of government is born out of modesty and humility. What’s absent is the concept that anyone on the planet has all of the answers. And the collective wisdom is much smarter than the wisdom of a few wise men, whether they’re in Washington or Brussels or Paris or London.
Joe Quirk: Or a radio studio in San Francisco.
Bob Zadek: Or a radio studio in San Francisco. So seasteading recognizes that humility and that modesty and says no one is that smart. So we will work together, figure it out, and not impose a system of government upon you. It basically is living in an environment free of coercion. And that is the secret. Now, Joe, we have a minute and a half left. How do people connect up with seasteading? How do they learn more about it? And how do they follow your writing?
Joe Quirk: Seasteading.org is our website, and there you can check out our Floating City Project, which we hope to initiate soon. We have designs—architects have designed some seasteads based on our feasibility project written by Dutch engineers. Check out our “Eight Great Moral Imperatives,” which is a video series showing all the things featuring different sorts of aquapreneurs that want to do fabulous things on seasteads that might surprise you. And if you’re interested in living on a seastead, go to our survey and fill it out and let us know what you want to see on a seastead, and we’ll do our best to provide it for you.
Bob Zadek: You better increase survey capability after the 2016 election. You’re going to get a lot of hits. Thank you so much to Joe for joining me for the hour, and for my dear friend and producer, Charlie Deist as well. I’ll be back next Sunday. Have a nice Sunday, everybody.