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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. So four whole months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh my God. Part 2, man. Of all the parts that you can have, a second is easily the best. It's always the best. Jaws two. That's the best jaws. Yeah. Aliens. Yeah. The lost world. Story 3. The lost world, yeah, all the best ones in the series. All the best ones of this Halloween 2. These are all the best ones. Yeah. Oh my God, Woodstock 1999. No, you know, yeah. Ohhh, wait. The sequels. Always the best. Super. Yeah. Super is Dave. I'm Dave. Dave? Yeah. Dave. Hey. Hey. How are you doing? I'm good. I got lunchables. I got Lunchables getting delivered because this is this is the country we live in. And I'm excited to eat those Lunchables. Gonna get some Lunchables. That's that's the only person I know who eats Lunchables. Dave. Well, I never got him as a kid. So this is how I rebel. Yeah. Looking adorable. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, obviously we, we we ended last episode talking about the freedom ship, which was the mile long super boat that was going, everyone was going to live in total liberty, but also under Irish law with the FBI running everything, right. So how did that work out? Is that a thing? Well, they never built it. Every three or four years from the mid 90s on the freedom ship would like creep back into the media when like some new backer. Because like, I think the people, the old people would just kind of hand it off to someone new who would try to raise money off it again. Like it was just this grift that wouldn't quite die. They're just inheriting the grift. Yeah, they're just kind of like passing it on. Like, do you wanna build the freedom ship, kid? By 2007, the project was no closer to starting the construction. It should have concluded in 2003, a writer for in these times noted. A visit to the news section of freedomship.com reveals a more sluggish pace. The most recent message messages date from more than two years ago, forlornly explaining how a scam operations are slowing things down, but that things are happening and they are moving fast. Meanwhile, the ship is not yet finished. Indeed, it has not yet started. Despite this, freedom Ship International Incorporated has been startlingly successful in raising publicity for this floating city. Much credulous journalistic cooing over the biggest vessel in history with its hospitals, bunks, the hospitals, banks, sports centers, parks, theaters and nightclubs, not to mention its airport, has ignored the vessel's stubborn nonexistence. It's very funny. Yeah, this is great. And this this. Dave, the failure of the freedom boat brings me to the final but longest portion of our episode, which has to start with the sea steading movement. Have you heard of sea steading? Sea steading? Yeah. No, I have not. It doesn't sound good, but maybe I'm willing to be wrong. I mean, it's a I think it's a cool idea. It's the idea that, like, people could take to the sea and, like, as The Pioneers of old did build their own homes. In the middle of the wilderness and and live off of them, but because it's the sea, you wouldn't be stealing anybody **** like it's a neat idea. I I would say the fictional analog that's closest to seasteading is the incredible Roy Schneider vehicle sequest. Oh yeah, Roy shider. Just incredible. Jaws two. Star of Jaws two. Exactly. Well, I would say the star of Jaws two is alcohol. Yes. I mean, and the antagonist of. Yeah. Like, there's, you know, you could argue that most of the reason that jazz was there, that shark was formidable is because they were just so drunk because everyone was hammered the entire time. Yeah, that's fair. So in Sequest, did you ever actually watch seaquest? I watched. I remember there was a guy with gills. There was. I remember that happened. They shot dolphin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They shot it, I know, briefly at Epcot Center at they sure did, yeah. I yeah, I would say probably the high point of sequest the series is the episode in which William Shatner plays Slobodan Milosevic. Oh, the party was born to play. Did you really incredible moves include an accent? Because it's. Yeah, he does an accent like the. It's an episode where, like, they have to. There's this dictator who's like taken to the sea after getting like forced out, having committed a genocide, and the episode was filmed. During the Bosnian genocide. So it's very clearly who who Shatner is supposed to be. Goodness, this is perfect. It's incredible. So in Sequest incredible show, this, this big ship travels around all these little, like sea habitats people have built around, like the oceans just been colonized. There's these little towns and villages and independent homesteads in the middle of the wild ocean. That's the idea. The Seasiders, they're doing a seaquest, they're doing a seaquest. But without the giant boat, right? That's that's the people who wanted to do the freedom ship. They want to make the little bitty. See, communities that eventually just think necessitate the giant boat. Yeah, they want floating homes just a little farther out there, just a little further out there. Yeah, seasteading got its official start in 2008 when the Seasteading Institute was founded in San Francisco by Patri Friedman. Friedman, an anarcho capitalist and grandson of economist Milton Friedman, had been a Google engineer and was thus connected to Peter Thiel. He'd convinced Teal to throw them some cash to found an institute. So Peter Thiel throws a bunch of money into the sea. Getting institute and in their founding a statement, they promise to establish a permanent autonomous ocean community to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political and legal systems. Experimentation. I love that idea because it's like what experiment is best done on the ocean. The illegal kind it can we **** the dolphins? Yeah. It's actually the worst place to do any other experiments, like the movie Deep Blue Sea. They should have done that in a tank. Like, why were you in the ocean? How did that help things? Yeah, in fact, it hurt things like all experiments don't get better if you're in the ocean. It just gets more complicated. Yeah, as a general rule, very few things get better when you're in the ocean. Right? Jurassic Park. The problem was there in an island like that was part of the problem, yeah. Yeah, just don't do it. Stay out of the ocean. Stay the **** out of the ocean. If I had, if I could have one message for my listeners, it's stay out of the ocean. You know what's weird? If I could have two messages, it's that I think maybe dolphins could consent to sex with human beings. We don't know. I mean, like, they understand the concept, right? Like, so who's to say, who's to say, yeah, I think the general rule for having sex with an animal, and you can all quote me on this and write it down, is if the animal is doing the sex on you. Like, that's consent, right? And is that controversial? No. Kids. Now that I that I don't agree with. If you heard of Mr Hand staff, I have. But the horse was alright, right? The horse was OK. I think there's some argument that it was psychologically hurt. Yeah, that it was traumatized a bit. I don't know. I'm not a horse psychologist. I think that's unethical. Yeah, I think if a horse knew, like, I feel like a horse should be proud if they've killed somebody. Because, well, I was about to say so. Few of them do. But actually, now I think about it, they, of course, they do kill a lot of people. Yeah. So that's not special. There's nothing special. But ** ***** now that I think about it. No, no, no. But meanwhile, Dolphins attempt to sexually assault people all the time. All the time. It happens constantly. And they do to other dolphins. So clearly, if you could communicate with a dolphin, I think it wouldn't necessarily be unethical as long as the dolphin gives consent. That's what I'm saying. Dave. Yeah. We need a animal consent system. Absolutely. You're right. Yeah. I I I think, I just think dolphins. It should be the same rules as people. OK, that that's that's that's that's my rant about dolphin sex. In the middle of this episode, we had to talk about sex with some kind of thing that you're not supposed to have sex with in an episode about libertarian politics. It's inevitable. It's inevitable, yes. That's we knew. We knew where all these roads were heading. Arguing about dolphin sex. If you're if you're building a society on the ocean, you're thinking about ******* dolphins. We know it. It's on the table. It's on the table. All right. I don't. I don't want to **** an animal. I would say they're the most ******** animals, I think. Yeah. I mean, now I'm, like, racking my brain and I'm trying to think about it. You're thinking about the blowhole, aren't you, Dave? Of course. I look very smooth and you know, so excited for your DM's this week. So exciting. We're gonna get a lot of johnsey Lily fans didn't mess up. So Peter Thiel was really bullish about the future of seasteading, right? This, this, this idea of, like little independent autonomous ocean communities that you can experiment with different political ideas and innovate. And he loves this. And he promised ominously in a press statement at the time that quote. The nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level, which it was. And Peter Thiel had a lot to do with it, but it was not through systematic, not something I want to hear from Peter Thiel, yeah, I don't really want to hear much from. Peter teal? No. Although I do wanna know what he's up to. Yeah, I wanna. I want eyes on the man, but I don't wanna hear from him. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We seemed like an Amber Alert with that. Yeah. Peter teals up to some ****. It's just always flashing in the background. Get up in the morning. *** **** it. Peter Thiel. He's out. He's out there. He's out from Peter Thiel. It's only quiet when he's asleep. So Peter invests a bunch of startup cash to help make seasteading into like a name within kind of the the libertarian community. But he doesn't put up a lot of cash, and by 2020, when the Guardian profiled the Seasteading movement, his donations had dried up. By then, Friedman was billing seasteading. Friedman is the guy who founded it and convinced him to give him the money. Was billing seasteading as the perfect solution to the problem of finding yourself trapped in a government that doesn't sell, that doesn't like have the same values that you have? Which I agree, that's a problem. I think everyone listening to this right now knows what it's like to live under a government that does not embrace your values. But Umm, yeah, I don't see. Well, they think that seasteading is a perfect solution to that problem because you can move, right? Like it's like, what if what if, you know, we wouldn't have a lot of the conflicts we have in society. There would be no need for protests or riots if, oh, I'm not happy with what my government's doing, I'll just pick up and drive away, you know? I'll just join. It's modular, like I'll just move. My house to another government, and it's the kind of thing they're all engineers, libertarians and and the people are in these projects like both like libertarians and like the people who get most into sea studying and and similar sort of projects. They're all engineers and it's a very engineer answer to the problem of like, Oh yeah, well, if you're not happy with your government, you just pick up and move, which is technically perfect and also completely insane. When you're talking about people, it's nonsense. Like it's always OK, so everyone supposed to leave their family behind? Like, what if they have debts? No matter what, if they have student loans, what about, like, healthcare situations? What if you know they have? What? What if it's not feasible for the vehicle that they are able to afford, for them to actually get to another place? There's all these. What if they don't want to leave? They want to do something else? What if they want to change it because there's people they love there and because, like, they've put a lot of sweat equity in it and they just don't like what one faction of people are doing? Like it doesn't. It's the tech pro problem where it's like figuring out tech stuff they're very good at. What they. They don't. They didn't go to school for it. They didn't have an upbringing for understanding human beings. It's always The X Factor that they leave out of their equation because they just don't consider it. And it's it seems to be everyone has like Dunning Kruger is the thing, we all all. I I certainly do talk sometimes on things that like, we don't actually understand. It's a human thing. Like nobody escapes this, right? There's probably like an expert on having sex with animals who's like, no, they got it all wrong. Let me tell you about how dolphins. Yeah, that's not the most ******** animal. Are you kidding me? It's the giraffe off. Just a man with a giraffe portrait in the background of his house, screaming at us. Was it through his headphones? I've thought about this for years. *** **** it. But for whatever reason, engineers are the, I think the group of people most likely to be like, I think it's because what they do is so difficult and so in demand and so impressive. Like, a good engineer is like a wizard. Like some of the people like I've known, I've known a dude once, we were camping with him and like, he forgot to bring a headlamp. So he took apart he he turned the headlight of his car into a functional headlamp that lasted an entire week and it took him like 30 seconds, right? Like it's amazing when you can see people with that kind of like mechanical talent. The problem with that is. That, like you said, they they think that they understand everything that way and that everything works that way. And I think it's they don't. Yeah. I think it's the same with, like, doctors and stuff like that. Like, you look at what's this name? Ben Carson, right? Yes. Where it's like, you can be really smart about one thing, and if that thing feels very important, you get a lot of people who are like, Oh my God, thank you so much. You think, well, I must be smart about all the things. And that's when things get really wrong. I think that's why we get really wrong. Yeah. With people like us, we're really good at things. That don't matter. So, like, it's. I guess, again, you're right, we're probably overconfident and talking. This is about a lot of things that This is why podcasters keep giving people medical advice about what to do with vaccinations. It's the Joe Rogan phenomenon. It's like Joe Rogan's, like, I'm very successful, Joe, you're really good at talking into a microphone and wrestling. Yeah, that doesn't really have anything to do with medicine, but by God, you think it does. And yeah, everybody does it to some extent, but for whatever reason, I don't know, this is a particularly white. Especially white engineers who are fans of Peter Thiel. So yeah, this they cook up this idea, this very dumb idea that also ignores like, is every individual seastead self-sufficient in terms of food, which often they'll say that like, well, yeah, of course they'll make their own food you you'll be able to, you know, hydroponically farm and you'll do this and you'll do that. And and again, it's it's always when you read them, like explaining how you'll grow all of your food that you need to survive. And your individual sea pod, it's like, OK, so you've never grown. Food, right. Like. Right. You've never ever grown anything because, like, I am not an expert farmer. I'm not an expert gardener, but I've spent a lot of my life on farm. It takes a lot of space and infrastructure. You can keep like a family alive on 1/2 acre if you're really good and really, and that's a half acre of space that's fully utilized under like, good conditions. You're talking about growing food in the ocean? Yeah. My, my grift in this world would be I'd go to the whatever mainlands there, go to the supermarket, buy food. Go out in the boat and charge them triple for it. Because you'd make a killing doing that. Just like you want some real food. I got Lunchables, all lunchables. Here you go. Yeah, like that. You still got plankton, no? Yeah. You sick of eating a bunch of ******* fish here? Have some *** **** fruit and vegetables? Yeah, it's it's it's all just, like, never thought out beyond. I'll finally be able to mine Bitcoin and masturbate to illegal *********** right? Like that's the that's the end of most of the people. Those people, most, not all peoples thinking who get into this, yeah, it always, it feels ultimately self-serving. That's what it is. It's always just they wanna do the things they wanna do and then they're like they get a big head about it and they think like man, this is how people should live and it's like and as critics at the time noted like the the worst case scenario for if this actually became a thing is a lot of people drown, right. The best case scenario is like aquatic apartheid where rich people build their like artificial islands to hide from poor people where they can't be. Beaten and murdered during riots over climate change and inequality like that. That is the actual like. And also, if we're talking about like, a potentially realistic outcome of something like this, yeah, we've gotten better at like ships that can turn salt sea water into drinkable water and can grow food if you have. If you have Jeff Bezos's resources, he's building a very large boat right now. He could build a boat that could keep he and a number of other people alive with minimal supply for indefinitely. He has those resources, right? But he wants. Like a boat with like an arcade and stuff. Yeah, I mean, he's building a very nice boat. Yeah, he's building the boat all these people dream about having, right? I'm sure it's gonna be rad. But also great escape pod for him. Yeah, it's going to be a rich man water fortress while he watches the world die. Yeah, yeah. Friedman got us far, and this is the only cool thing Friedman did. He started a Burning Man style nautical camping event called Femorale outside of a Sacramento. I want to go. It's not actually connected to Burning Man. It's the same premise, and if you don't know Bernie, man, it's like, there's nobody in charge. There's no, like talent and guests. Everybody's a participant and participates in making the event together and handling things like safety and a femorale is like all aquatic. So people build platforms and attach them together and like, every platform is like a camp or a set of camps and stuff. And so they have bars and restaurants and and different kinds of like art projects that are all connected to living spaces and this gigantic floating raft they make in the middle of a river. Together and yeah, it actually sounds rad as hell. The very first yeah, they know what they're doing. We've gone to communicate communities that separated themselves the world. Yeah. And what they tend to be is very serious about it. Yeah. And and and know what's yeah. Yeah, they tend to know. And they tend to be like, look, someone has to do the, the ****** stuff too. And we all take turns. And that's what it feels like these people are missing is the very serious, like, regard of how how to actually yeah. Do this stuff and the fact that it comes down to like. You're always going to have to work. Yeah. You might have to work it. You're always gonna be responsible to other people. Other people are going to limit your behavior because that's just life around people. It doesn't have to be like a police state, but like, there will be times when you're like, well, I would do this, but that will affect this other person in a negative way. And so I won't. And it makes these guys really ****** that that would ever be the case. But normal people, especially normal people who do difficult things like build communities out of unhewn wilderness. Together are like, well, yeah. We all give up a little bit of freedom in order to get to benefit from having other people around, right. Yeah, exactly. If you live in alone in a cabin in the woods, like like your. Yeah. Tommy Lee Jones in the movie wanted, that's that movie called Wait No, hunted. Sorry, everybody. I'm so sorry. You have to like, you have to get food and you have to, you have to do you have to earn that through work. It's just what kind of work do you want to do? Yeah, there's. There's and I think actually the cool version of this you see in a femorale, which is. I think it would be rad if, like, people were building autonomous communities in the sea that weren't just tax dodges, but were like experiments to see if, like, are there lower impact ways of keeping people alive? Is this perhaps the way we could do it, that emits less, or that that is is less toxic, that uses less land? Like, is this an option for refugee communities, for stateless people? Like, there's another and and burners are kind of the perfect people to iterate that ****. So like the the the guy, one of the people that comes into the very first of femorale is this dude. Helped, who has been a long time person at the big Burning Man and he's like a Ranger in his specialty was like safety and he he wasn't. I don't think he was even particularly into seasteading. He was just like, oh, you guys are going to do an event on water where everyone's on water all the time. I don't want anyone to drown. I will help figure out how to make sure nobody drowns. And they've kept doing it. So the first year they do this event the Seasteading Institute like is the official host and then after that their lawyers are like, hey, no organization can get insured. Hold an event like this. It's way too dangerous. Yeah, you can never do this again, but it keeps happening because they just didn't need the Seasteading Institute. Just a bunch of people show up every year and lash a bunch of elaborate rafts together and have kept doing it for like a decade now and no one's ever died. You can find cool. It's like the drinking age in Canada. Just be cool. Yeah, just be cool. Take care of each other. They have. I've googled this a little bit and like half of what they have written that's out on the Internet, it's just like different guides. What to do if someone's drowning and how to avoid drowning? Like that's their number one rule is don't die again. It's it's that. That's what bothers me, I guess, about these libertarian Sea plans is that I understand the want to break free of this government. We all do. You know, I grew up really into punk rock and and anarchy and all that crap. And so it's like the neat the the idea of making a commune or community and living away from the government is very appealing. Absolutely. These people start from the top down. They're so bad at it. They're like casinos and malls. Yeah, this stuff. And it's like, no, just get plumbing, right? Yeah, like just plumbing, right? Figure out a better way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's. And again, it's this. Freedman, like, gives up on seasteading. He abandons the idea as soon as, like, the money starts to dry up. And sure, I think the Seasteading Institute, I don't know if they still have a presence at a femorale, but they don't host it anymore. And it doesn't seem to be a big part of the. Project and it's kind of like if you were actually serious about it, all you would want to do is create more events like this so that people can, in real time beta, test different pieces of equipment and figure out the best way to build like durable, permanent. Like, that's really the ideal way to do this. It's not raise a bunch of money to, like, build your idea. It's been 10 years hosting events like this all over the world and have a couple 100,000 people experiment with ****. Like, there's so much cool **** here. And if you're, if you attend a femorale, like hit me up. It sounds rad. I want to go. Yeah, but this it it it's just it. It shows you what a difference is between, like, if there ever is a colonization of the sea, it's gonna be like the people who do a femorale. It's gonna be like a bunch of people who already on their own are just making **** living out in the sea for a couple of days or weeks at a time, figuring out better ways to do it and just keep doing that more and more and more. It's not going to be some VC firm, crowd funds, AC city, you know, because that's a dumb idea. It's a government or some or. It'll be a government. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. The idea of a grassroots colonization, like, yeah, that is what it would start with. And these the, it's they're like Expos, you know, like these little events where it's like we're just, it's proof of concepts and it's very realistic and practical because like obviously if someone can put it together for like a week long camp out, then it's probably actually accessible, right? Yeah. Anyway, whatever. You know what else is accessible? David? I'm getting the virtues of capitalism, which you can access by buying these products right now. 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I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Ah, we are back and boy howdy Dave. It is just been a fun time. So Pat Patrick Friedman who founds the Seasteading Institute. He bounces and he Co founds a corporation called Future Cities Development which ceased operating in 2012 without making any cities. In 2019 he started another Peter Thiel backed Project, a venture capital firm named promos whose mission was to make enough money to pay to build an experimental. To be somewhere, but on land this time, a Wikipedia entry on this subject adds hilariously, most of the cities will be aimed at foreign businesses. Seeking friendlier tax treatment is again this thing like we're talking a lot of **** on libertarians. I was a libertarian most of my life. I would still be one if I hadn't realized that a sizable chunk of people who call themselves libertarians just want a corporation to be their boss instead of the government. They just want to do a fraud like in this, I feel less so. This is all Peter Thiel money. Yeah, yeah. That's all the ones that Patrick is involved. I I feel better about that because that's you're not scamming a bunch of people, you're scamming one person and that person is Peter Thiel and it's like, alright, that's fine. Like if it look, if you can scam a rich person out of a bunch of money, you know, go for it, you know, you can write that down along with the animal ******* like it's it's yeah, it's. I get it. Like it's it's better than scamming like you know the little person. Yeah. I mean, I would, I would agree. With you, if you're going to steal from someone, I think Peter Thiel is an incredible person to steal from. There's a lot of people I'm fine with you stealing from, but Peter Thiel is like, I will. I will buy you a a a drink if you successfully steal from Peter Thiel. Happily, happily, legally binding. Sophie, can we make a T-shirt that says I will buy you a drink if you if you rob Peter Thiel? We can't. But I love your enthusiasm. Steal the teal. There's a rhyme there. There's. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, he's he's rather litigious. So, yeah, this is legally a joke. Legally, no. Yeah. Ohh yeah, so the Seasteading Institute, though, did not go away when Patri Friedman moved on to other grifts. It just picked up a new leader, the C Evangelist. And that's a word that this guy created, Joe Quirk. Oh, I mean, you don't trust C avanc evangelist Joe Quirk? No, I don't. I don't trust any part of that. Yeah, I certainly don't trust the last name quirk. Quirk. Yeah, it sounds kind of like quark from. It does sound a little bit like, yeah, from DS9, but also just favorite frangi. It also just sounds made-up. It sounds like someone had to make up a name real quick. Yeah. And they were like looking at like a cork in a bottle or something like that. You know, I'm thinking of the farangi now, Dave. And just as a quick aside, why do you think Star Trek didn't just, like like, they were supposed to be the new bad guys in in TNG and then everyone clearly realized after the first episode, Oh my God, we made an anti-Semitic caricature race, right? We made space to use. Why? Why? Why didn't they just stop? Like, why didn't they just give up like they they replaced them with the Borg? Why did we keep getting Frankie? Like, what was that? I can, I have. I have an explanation. I mean, not for the space juice part that just seems like in all fantasy when like. JK Rowling was like, what if there's a banker race? And I was like, yeah, that seems like a bad idea. JK, No Star Trek. This is my problem with new Star Trek and I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll only talk about this for maybe 20-30 minutes, OK, sure, tops. No, they the the whole thing with Star Trek is like Klingons were the enemy in the original series. Then they're working with them and next generation. So it does make sense for the Ferengi to then be allies. Like it's all about not defeating your enemies. But joining them, and I think that's a very cool positive message in Star Trek. It's why I don't like discovery, because they're back to the Klingon stuff and I'm like, no, I like progress, progress. I have nine. They had like good Borg people too. 100% agree with you about what's good about Star Trek. I just don't see why the people making Star Trek were like, well, we can't just pretend we never made an anti-Semitism species and like make another capitalist species that don't look like a a Nazi cartoon. I mean early Star Trek we were just talking about in this last episode where it's like progressive for the time. Yeah, you go to some season one Star Trek, there is a flat out very racist episode in the next generation. I think it's called Code of Honor. Yeah, the planet where everybody's all of the people on the planet are black and, yes, very, very uncomfortable. Yes. Yeah, they kidnapped Tasha Yar. They should do just like, my goodness. Yeah, we didn't. They look, they're all just white, dude. Sci-fi. They're trying to be progressive, but, like, they are being progressive. They're just not perfect people. They're, you know, they're they're flawed human beings with bigotry that they didn't recognize was there and they made something really cringy. That happens. Yeah, that happens. Yeah. So Speaking of cringy, let's keep talking about the Seasteading Institute and Joe Quirk, the sea Vangelis. Now, I haven't found a lot out about this guy's life before seasteading. He must be he's got to be somewhere in his like mid to late 40s maybe early 50s. His first recorded accomplishment of any note is the publication of a novel called The Ultimate Rush in 1998. The ultimate rush was about quote, a rollerblading messenger caught in an illegal insider trading ring. According to Wikipedia, that's not what I thought it was gonna be. The rollerblading messenger is named Chet Griffin and he quote spins his Knights hacking for fun. So he's a he's a hacker roller skating messenger. I wonder how much of this was a rip off of snow crash. I don't know this. Now that I read this, sounds like it like this sounds like gleaming the cube. Did you ever see that movie where it's like you? It's a skateboarding Christian Slater movie and you're like, oh cool, maybe it'll be about like the big the big skateboarding competitions. Say, skateboarding Christian Slater movie, and I think I why am I not watching this right this second? The movie actually is like ******* Chinatown. Like it's like this weird noir where he's like doing terrorism against a corporation that killed his brother and it's like. Come on, man, just skateboard to rock music, which also happens in the movie, but it's it's what it that's what this sounds like is like it's too many hats on a hat is what I'm getting at here, Dave. I have a Christian Slater story to tell you, but remind me to save it for the end because I don't want to break up the flow too much here. Joe wrote this skateboarding hacker Messenger insider trading book in 1998 and it made very little impact, although Joe claims 250,000 paperbacks were printed, which is key. That's a little thing you can tell about an author printed, huh? Yeah. And where are they? Are they where they go? Are they perhaps in your attic right now? The most noteworthy thing about this book is that in 2011, Joe sued Sony Pictures for their upcoming feature film Premium Rush, alleging that it was based on his screenplay. A judge said no, it was not. He did not win this lawsuit, just had the word rush in it. Yeah, I'm guessing there's more similarities than that, but OK, yeah. In 2008, he wrote a book about love, sex, and relationships from which we get an author bio that tells us slightly more about him. And this this really gets a lot of this man's character Joe Quirk comes across in this paragraph. Dave I studied literature and minored in development of Western civilization at Providence College, taught partially by Dominican priests who had no sense of humor when it came to my biological observations about celibacy. I graduated at the top of the bottom of the top of the bottom 10th of my class. I attended one year of law school. They only lost 1/3 of my soul, which is just enough to function in American Society. I invested the last seven years of my novel royalties in reading evolutionary biology studies full time. Now I finally feel ready to ask a woman on a date. Oh no. That's so hard bringing. Ohh, what a way to end you that ohh yeah, Joe buddy. So that's the basics of Joe Quirk. You have a picture of him now? Yeah, in 2014. Yeah, we've all met. A joke. Quick. Yeah. In 2014 he becomes the C Evangelist for Sea Steading, which I think is the head, but I'm not really certain and I don't care to find out. The next year, he founds an organization dedicated to building a floating city with unprecedented political autonomy. And the waters of a host nation. The Guardian goes on to describe the start of Joe's contributions to the magical world of libertarian boat cons quote nearly half of the world surfaces unclaimed, says Quirk, who published a book on seasteading in 2017, with the ambitious subtitle how floating nations will restore the environment, enrich the poor, cure the sick, and liberate humanity from politicians. In an introductory video, he describes the planet's oceans as a sort of research and development zone where we could discover better means of governance. And says that seasteading could provide the technology for thousands of people to start their own nano nation on the high seas, giving people opportunities to to peacefully test new ideas about living together. The most successful seasteads, he says, will become thriving new societies, inspiring change around the world. Now there's a lot in there that's very funny, Dave. Yeah, I I like the fact that this is going to be a research and development zone, but also a way for people to to live together. Even though, like the whole basis of it is you, you can escape if you find yourself in a a around people you don't like, which it actually seems like. You're not learning to live together, you're just learning to like. Flee a series of communities as they collapse and interpersonal conflicts. Right. It feels more Mad Max. Where. Yeah. If everything falls apart, everybody scatters. Yeah. And they go do their other experimental communities. Yeah. It's it's one of those, like, if you were utopian and I am, you have to grapple with the fact that, like, there's a lot of times people have tried to separate from society and make their own new society, and it usually collapses. Yeah. And like, and not for because the government cracks down, but because like. The wrong people **** each other. Like, right, like the most utopian projects in in the way most punk houses end. Yes. With everybody hating each other. Yeah, yeah. And none of the dishes done and a lot of new STD spread, right? Someone gets their foot broken or something like that and it's a whole thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A good punk house only lasts maybe a couple years. Yeah, maybe. That's the. I mean, I guess I could. I could. I would say maybe. Some interesting ideas would come out of a bunch of like seaborne punk houses floating around and breaking apart and reforming. Also, maybe, yeah, but maybe not. Yeah, some other things could occur too. I'll admit to being intrigued by the idea somewhat, although I don't think their their pitch for how it would actually look is particularly interesting. So again, I get it when they're like, look at that whole ocean that we got and it's like, yeah, no that's true. That's a whole lot of land. Well, not really land, but it's a whole lot of space that like if someone figured out something to do with it, it's a good eye it like. Ohh, that's a that's cool. But then again, it's like, I again, the ocean doesn't want us there. Let's not **** ** another area, although we are ******* up the ocean. Let's not ******* murdering anymore. Yeah, yeah. And that's one of the things about, like, we'll get on this, but like, I don't they all, they always talk about how ecologically friendly it will be. But like, they're also the people who think the the EPA is like, the an illegal organization and we should like, there should be no environmental rules about where you can and can't dump poison. Right. It's it's the one case for. Yeah, it's the one case for like, colonies on Mars. This is like, yeah, go there. Go on. Yeah. I I thought it right up. I never get that mad about anything people say about colonizing Mars because it's like, well, the worst case scenario is you die and I don't know you. So he's fine. Yeah, that's gonna hurt much. Go fill it with your trash. I don't give a **** about Mars. Yeah, Mars is already dead. You're very welcome there. So yeah. Again, so far this guy Joe Quirks attempts to establish a floating utopia do not bode well for the future of utopian sea cities. In January of 2017, after years of technical feasibility studies and political negotiations, the Seasteading Institute signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of French Polynesia to build the first seasteads in its territorial waters. The designs were developed by Dutch architects named Blue 21, and it was kind of looked like a. A big resort. There was a bunch of villas and yeah all sorts of like, there's this idea, there's going to be big parks and **** like the other ones we're talking about and they plan to fund it through an initial coin offering, which is like a a crowdfunding thing. Like we're we're going not a crowdfunding, it's it's there. They were planning to launch a new crypto currency and have the value of that cryptocurrency and like the money people put into it, buying the initial coins fund the start of the of the island that they're going to build. The, the community they're going to build in French Polynesia, right? Yeah. Joe Quirk told reporters we're going to draw a new map of the world with French Polynesia at the center of the aquatic age. So that's, I mean, it's a step further than anyone else's really gotten. Yeah. Cryptocurrency is a good way to get this grift. Yeah. And it's and here's the thing that they they didn't prove over the The the Republic of Minerva, they actually, like, sat down with the government and we're like, we want to do this. Yeah. Which is, you know, they've gotten farther than anybody else before them. Than anybody else before them. Yeah, now I. There's a lot of this that I find frustrating, including the fact that, like I, I find I'm particularly kind of. Like, as we just joked about it, but there's something really gross about quirks lying that, like, we're going to draw a new map of the world with with French Polynesia at the center in this, like community we're building at the center of the aquatic age. Because the ocean, one of the best things about the ocean is that there's like, there's not a bunch of countries in it murdering each other all the time and doing other horrible things. It's mostly just ocean right. And there's something disgusting about a person who would look at this this like vast, incomprehensible expanse of water. With no, no borders or walls around. Most of it be like, well, what have we just made it more like the places where we're murdering each other? Exactly. It defeats the purpose. Yeah, it's like Jeff Bezos looking at space and being like, we should move industry here. And it's like, really? Really. Anyway, my dislike of quirk is kind of furthered by the fact that he chose French Polynesia for the site of this, and he chose it because it's the world's largest exclusive economic zone now an exclusive economic zone. It's basically it's a zone that can stretch, I think, up to like 200. Bells from the coastline of a nation where you have kind of control of what, like you can levy taxes and **** right? Like it's it's your territory in terms of like what? What **** passes through? And French Polynesia, because it's this, it's there's like a **** load of islands in French Polynesia and it's spread over a wide geographic area. They have the largest exclusive economic zone in the world. So potentially you could monetize a lot of this it more than it is currently being monetized. And that was kind of the goal these people had, right. So Tom Bell, a professor of law in Orange County drafted a contract for an agreement with the government of French Polynesia. He told reporters, we explained to the Polynesians how having a quasi autonomous. Area nearby was a good thing. Look at Monaco or Hong Kong or Singapore. Special jurisdictions create a lot of growth outside their borders, like Quirk. Bell also has a book about how people are going to start making their own sea cities for reasons besides tax haven. He theorizes that the first sea stead state will grow like a coral polyp and be so economically successful then it will enrich the whole area until it breaks free to live on the open ocean. So again, he's saying that like we're going to start this thing in French Polynesia. It's going to be a huge economic hit. It's gonna make a bunch of money and grow larger and larger, and eventually we'll just sail away from French Polynesia and abandon them because we'll be big enough that we won't have to have the protection of the state anymore, which is. Kind of ****** to French Polynesia because French Polynesia is one of the country's most threatened by climate change. Huge chunks of French Polynesia will cease to exist in the not distant future as a result of rising sea levels. And quirk and Bell are basically saying, hey, we want to come into your country, pollute the water, spew carbon into the atmosphere, speed up the rate at which your islands sink, and do that in order to power our Bitcoin mining rigs. And then once we get rich and have a Big Island, we're going to sail it away and you guys can *******. Go with it, right. It's like, it's pretty cool. Yeah. It's like Tony Soprano giving someone a loan where it's like, I'm gonna, we're gonna take as much as we can from you and then we're gonna toss you out. That's it. We we we got what we needed. And now yeah, and now we're going to bounce. And so it's like it's a short term solution for that country probably. Or at least that's how they view it. And then it's just going to get used up. Yeah, it's really ******. It again, it defeats the entire purpose because it's like, look, if you're going to be ******. And use up resources and and and just ruin the world. Just do that here in the US. Like, what's the point? Yeah, like you already have the ability to do most of these ******. You can **** over French Polynesia without travelling there. Everyday Americans **** over French Polynesia. Exactly. You. You're you. There's you have a variety of options for for harming the nation of French Polynesia without leaving your home. I heard French Polynesia this morning when I opened a can of soda. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it was. So easy. It's reasonably easy to harm French Polynesia and the. And you also got some soda out of it. Yeah. And I got some soda out of it. Yeah. Anyway, so as is probably obvious by the fact that it was obvious to us what a bad deal this was, it was obvious to French Polynesia. The government, like, agreed to sit down and and talk to them a little bit. And the government agreed because the former Minister of Tourism for French Polynesia, Mark Collins, co-founded a company called Blue Frontiers with Joe Quirk. In order to like create the project. So that's, that's I think why there was some initial buy in that the government had. But that quickly ended. And I'm going to read from the Guardian here. The government was looking for something to address sea level rise in environmental degradation, whereas the sea setting, setting Institute was more about autonomy, Mark Collins says. He says that the prospect of a tax free enclave held little appeal for the locals, given that Polynesians don't pay income tax anyway. One Tahitian TV host compared the situation to the evil Galactic. Empire and Star Wars. Imposing on the innocent Ewoks while secretly building the Death Star. The libertarian position didn't help either. As Collins Chen put it, it's very difficult to ask for government support when your narrative is that you want to get rid of politicians. In retrospect, Bell agrees. They already had a beautiful paradise in French Polynesia. The local community wasn't very enthused about the project, and I get it. They don't need strangers coming in and ruining their view. Which, yeah, did. You got that eventually, buddy. Yeah, it sounds like, for the most part, they weren't. They weren't buying what they were selling. No, they're alright. We'll sit. We'll sit down with you. I I think there may have been some money that changed hands because there were people in the government who were initially kind of bullish on this and then there were protests in the streets over it. Like, yeah, people being like, what about our fishing areas? Like, what about like, what? This is such a bad like, people like, this is obviously a terrible idea and the government quickly backed off. Yeah, there are like, no, it's not. It's. And then they thought for a second, they're like, OK, never mind. This was dumb. This was done. Everybody sorry. But with blue frontiers, the company that they were gonna colonize the ocean around the French Polynesia with. When that fails, Collins Chin goes off to set start yet another sea city project and he claims to have given up. And Colin Sheen again. Like the the the guy from the the government who had been working with him. Yeah. So Collins Chin starts another city project and he this one is a lot savvier and I think he might actually succeed. To an extent, because he claims to have given up on the idea that libertarian tax Dodge is a good basis for a civilization, and he instead founded an organization with the goal of making floating cities that are extensions of existing cities and thus pay taxes as normal. Basically like, hey, real estate's expensive in San Francisco, what if we build a floating city right, right in the right, outside the Bay? What if we build a floating city on the side in New York and like, that's that's the thing he's trying to sell, which like, yeah, **** that might work someday, like something like that might exist one of these days to deal with a variety of things. Yeah, I was gonna say it. It might have to exist it so it may be inevitable. Yeah. It's just very funny that this whole this it feels like 1 long negotiation this history that has reduced to like, OK, it's extension of city outside. Yeah. What if what if it is the same law as a San Francisco CA but we have waves. You know, honestly if they if they do it and then they're like we won, it's like good for you, man. Yeah. Yeah. Good for you guys. Good work. Yeah. And I yeah. That that doesn't feel like a. New type of government or something revolutionary. It just seems like a neat thing we could do outside of the city. And also, it's a it's a mix of neat thing we could do and think we may have to do because of how badly we ****** ** other things. Yeah, and you know what? If more people are living in the ocean? Maybe those are people who'd be like, hey, stop throwing stuff in here. It turns out we're doing bad **** to the ocean. Yeah, I just checked the ocean and it turns out it's not good here. Yeah, along with all the monsters it's filled with, there's a lot of garbage. Hmm. Like, that's The thing is if if any of them came on it from sustainable living and cleaning up. Because we've we're, you know, there's all these prototypes and stuff of, like, ways to clean up the ocean and stuff. I feel like everybody would be like way more into this. Yes. If they're like. If it was like, hey there, we're gonna do some online gambling, but also we're gonna pick up all your trash and if and and that's also a good way to make money or to to be sustainable where like the you could get help from other countries because they're like, they're cleaning up our trash. We should support them. But again it all starts from this very selfish place. It's extremely selfish. Yeah, it's really, it's silly and it's a bummer because again, as we keep coming back to there's. Little ideas, yeah. So China's idea for for these cities that are extensions of regular cities, but in the waters to create a series of interlocking hexagonal islands, which harvest power from waves and sunlight and regenerate marine life through an artificial reef system. And a lot of these different sea steading plans today will say, like, and we'll grow back the reefs. It'll provide a habitat for the animals if they actually do it. That would be cool. Yeah. He calls this idea oceanic city, and he claims that the the hexagonal design allows for dragon. Drop City designing, just like in SimCity, so you can like float a city, block it away and stick it in a new place or just like drop a hospital or a university, you know, in the middle of a thing, right? And yeah, I I think aspects of this dream might be realistic. And I think in general, one of the things that's changed from now to the earlier days and like the 70s and then the 90s of this, is that better technology, stuff like 3D printers means like, you could do this. Like, this isn't like the Mars colony. Where we're like, well, Elon, it may not actually be possible to do what you're talking about at our current level of technology any in any reasonable capacity. We could absolutely build like semi autonomous sea habitats that people lived on and were modular. Like, that's not physically impossible. And as a result, the kind of libertarian dreams of seasteading have gone from the first ones were all grifts, right? There were attempts to raise money in order to like, get money, and nobody actually wanted to build anything. Well, now that's kind of changed, and you're starting to get the first libertarian seasteading advocates who believe in something and are actually willing to risk everything they have to try and set up a life at sea. That's fantastic. Yeah, because the grift that they the thing that they were promising in the grift, not a bad idea, but they were just doing a grift. So it does make sense for someone to come along and be like, but what if we actually did it? Yeah, what if we just did it? Yeah, these new things you're talking about. It's just so much more realistic. It reminds me of playing like Minecraft or Valheim or any survival game where it's like you build a base and then if you wanna **** *** and make a new base in the ocean, for example, you can't just like start again. You move your resources, you you build it as part of it. And that's what they're getting at here, which is like they the first ideas was like clean break. We're doing our own thing and it's like, you kind of can't do that, like don't print your own money immediately, like. Like this, the idea of building a city off of an existing city is a good compromise if they actually do the things that they're saying they can do. Yeah, it's it's realistic. Yeah. And it's that's kind of why you you've seen so far just one well, no three now. But the first people who have actually done the opposite of a grift lost huge amounts of money trying to create societies at sea. And the first of these guys, and the one who put the most skin in the game is Chad Elwer towski. Chad is a lifelong libertarian. From the information available, at least, it seems like he got his start as a student at Michigan State University in 1996. His first election was Bill Clinton's reelection, and Chad attended a speech by the president and found himself disturbed not by any of the sex crime stuff, but by Bill Clinton's spending quote. He's talking about investing in this, investing in that, investing in that. I knew investing was code word for we're going to be spending money on this. Chad believed that the country needed to spend less and tax its people less. He spent time briefly agitating for the Free State project and the Ron Paul campaign in 2002. After graduation, he got a job as a software engineer. Georgia Chad made a stab at starting a political life there, running for Congress once as a libertarian, but he couldn't get enough signatures to get on the ballot during these years. Most of Chad's political activism was complaining about the failure of libertarian politics to take off nationwide. He was just kind of like, why isn't this happened yet? After years of this, he decided that, **** it, he'd just go out and start his own settlement and live free. He spent years experimenting with different constructions methods. In his off time. He would work 17 hour days as a software contractor and then. Like spend time trying to develop ways to build a sea habitat and whatnot. In his off time he did a lot of like government contracting. He was in Afghanistan for a while, like coding for the Department of Defense, and he made a **** load of money which he put into Bitcoin. And in 2015 he got briefly involved with a couple of people in a project to sell C notes to try and raise $15 million to make a village at sea. Only five people invested, so the project was cancelled and Chad was adamant to invest or to a reporters. That he refunded all of their money. See, now it sounds like a scam, but maybe it wasn't. Based on what comes next. I don't think it was. I think Chad's pretty earnest. My note to Chad, if Chad's listening is it sounds like he's. He has some ideas. He's just not finding people who are interested. He is not popular. It's not getting enough signatures. That seems like the story of his life with this stuff so far. Yes. And that. Yeah. And I think that's that is about to change because in 2016 Chad retires and he's got a bunch of money, mostly in crypto enough that he doesn't have to work anymore. So he spent some time bumming around, trying to find other people who will try to start AC society with him. And he meets a tour guide when he's in Thailand and they fall in love and get married now. Good for Chad. When you talk about a white rich guy who travels to Thailand and meets a tour guide and gets married, that is often a problematic story. It's it's often horrible 100% of the time. I don't think it is this time because #1, she's 33 when they get married, so it's not nothing questionable about it. She's got like a 13 year old kid, so like I think he just actually found someone and they fell in love. It's fine. So, Chad El Wartofsky, you get the official behind the ******* seal of married a Thai woman while on vacation, but not like, in a predatory way. Award. Nice. Are you going to mail that to him? Yeah, it's £45.00 and made of solid bronze. Sure. Yeah, as it should be. You know who also doesn't get married in a predatory way? Oh, God. But what I said didn't. I said didn't. What if it's accidentally at Washington State Patrol? Yeah, if it's the. Washington State Patrol they definitely at least 40% of the time, am I right? OK, here's the ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one meant mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family and at Mint. Family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. 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Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. We're back, and we're talking about robbing insured banks and Peter Thiel. Hmm. Yeah. The American dream. The American dream. Ah, I love America. So this lady, Chad Chad marries a lady, her name. She calls herself Nadia summer girl. She picked a last name for herself when she when she. I think when she left. She was an English summer girl. She picked summer girl. Whatever. People make names. Yeah. No, it's it's fine. It's fine. They get married and they actually move to French Polynesia briefly to help blue frontiers and their sea steading event. So, like, when they're courting the government of French Polynesia, Chad hears about this and he just moves there right away, like, again, he's incredibly earnest. He's like, Oh my God, this government's actually agreed. Like, I'll just, I'll be I I need to move there so that when things start happening, I'm right in the middle of it. Up until the end here, he's pretty endearing in some ways. But yeah, the whole thing falls apart is we just discussed. And so El Wartofsky flees back to Thailand with his new bride. Next, he gets in contact with a German engineer named Rudiger Koch. Like Chad libertarian. Like Chad, Rudiger is a libertarian and he he's a libertarian who made all of his money. And like the defense industry, he designed weapons systems before getting really into cryptocurrency and retiring to Thailand. He had a dream, which he discussed in the Seasteading Institute Forum of creating a launch. Loop, which is a huge slingshot that can throw things into space and Rudiger Coke didn't like come up with the idea of a launch loop people had talked for a while about like, well you wouldn't actually need like all the fuel and stuff that you need if you could build a big enough slingshot type thing to just like launch stuff into the into the atmosphere. And this is like just like throwing like cows and like cars. I think spaceships mostly, Dave. I think they're really shooting for spaceships. I think that's a waste you'd rather what would you fling into space. It's whatever I want space to have, you know? Like, confuse some aliens and, yeah, throw Iggy Pop out there, give him the space. Start things off on a good footing with space. Oh yeah. That way when space is, like, should we kill this planet with a meteor? They'd be, like, not the guys that gave us Iggy. Right. I want the first contact aliens have with our species to be their UFO slamming into Iggy Pop. Yeah, like, that's what I like. Oh my God. We hit something, pull over, and then it's Iggy Pop. Yeah, Iggy Pop. Frozen corn pop. Yeah, and and a single copy of one of the. Youjizz albums, yeah, that'll set things off, right? Honestly, yeah, yeah, that's a perfect idea. Perfect idea. So Coke wants to build a a launch loop, which I think. I think it's a thing that could potentially work. Like, I think it's a thing where, like, astronautical engineers were like, well, yeah, tech. You could make something technically that would work this way, and it might be a good idea, but no one had ever built it because it requires an enormous amount of space, so much that you could only really do it in the ocean. Sorry. It's a catapult. Yeah. It's like, it's like a wild coyotes. Yeah. So they just, like, fling **** into the stars. Incredible. Yeah. It's a cool idea. I don't, I don't know how actually practical it is, but a bunch of people think it is. And yeah, honestly, it's more sustainable, right, than what we're doing now. If you could do it, it seems like it would be a good idea potentially. Coke is like, well, we have to do it in the ocean. And so he he makes a deal with Chad that they'll they'll pick a spot and they're going to have to for this launch. To build a watchtower, right, so you can watch the launches. And so coke is like, hey, you go in, you help me fund this. You just live in the watchtower. You get your thing, you get to start seasteading, and I can use that as a base to make my my loop, right? So both men get get on board a project together. And again, most promising, they have a goal other than just like avoid taxes. And it's a little maybe outside of their means, but at least it's a goal. At least it's a dream beyond avoid taxes. No, I just had a realization. With all of this, all of these guys, because we've been talking about the idea of, like, they keep framing it as we should start a society, but ultimately, it's just that they want to live a certain way. Yeah, and that's part of the problem. I think it's an issue with libertarian in general, which is like, you need to show how this would benefit people in general. No, what? It just occurred to me they all just want to be lighthouse keepers. Like, that's it. That's the answer. Just be a lighthouse keeper and you're all set. Not enough lighthouses, Dave. I know. We need to bring back our lighthouses. Yeah. And then we'll solve libertarians. That's that's Joe Biden's next big spending bill. Yeah. A trillion dollars for lighthouses. Yeah, that's it. That's all we need. So Chad and and coke like, decide to form a company in order to to build this launch loop and a community around it. They named their company Ocean Builders. And their plan is to sell 20 or so pods at least, and kind of build a community around this launch loop. And I think the idea is like, hey. We actually build like a a space launch facility. You're gonna wanna live around that. There's gonna be a bunch of money around that. There's a whole lot of businesses that like people could do. And you know, it's not the worst of the ideas people have had in this episode. It's the best. So they build a prototype and they tow it into international waters, unflagged, transmitting nothing off the coast of Thailand. Edward Towski had eventually had initially tried to keep a low profile, and he wanted to. He didn't want to like, make a big deal about it until things got established. But he also wanted to work with the Seasteading. Institute on the project. And once they heard a guy had actually made a seastead like there's a dude living in the ocean off of a platform in international waters, they sent their president out to film a documentary about him. As the Guardian writes, it was not a stirring success, but also not a failure. More importantly, it was real, making Chad our first not a grifter of the episode quote due to a construction snafu, the pod listed 10 degrees on stormy nights. Elwer, Towski, and Summer Girl abandoned the tiny bedroom and slept in the kitchen. As close as possible to the central spar. A grocery run was a four day affair and since there was nothing outside the Seastead to park a boat, coke had to pick them up. They sometimes stayed on shore instead in an apartment in Phuket that El Martowski had rented for summer girl's mother and 14 year old son. So this is not easy. They're they're really committed to this. Like, you have to give it to him. These are believers. This is not a grift. You would not live that way for a grift. That's a that's a nightmare. That sounds ******* miserable. Yeah. I found an article on news BTC, which is a Bitcoin and crypto news website about Chad and Summer Girls establishment of the first actual libertarian seastead. It was published in the spring of 2019 after the first episodes of the documentary about the effort came out. This article mostly celebrates that Chad used Bitcoin profits to build his new home. It includes this line elwer towski states that the couple has made no effort to seek approval from the Thai government for their new home. He commented. We've just been keeping under the radar so far, but. Follow all the laws of Thailand. So it's as if we're just living on a boat in the water. As far as they're concerned, all we expect from the Thai Government is that they follow international law. We will be doing the same. But Nadia and I aren't doing anything we can't do on land. So you think that work, Dave? I mean it. It's again, it's just that they're they're just living in the ocean, like it doesn't feel like they've built a libertarian society. So let's just say here's the thing, you know who took this seriously is the Thai government. Win Thailand. You can go to prison for forever if you like, make fun of the king, right? You can get executed for for smuggling drugs. It's not a chill government. Tyler's government tightly wound. Is there a little tightly wound. They don't like people just existing in their ocean. Yeah. They don't like some guy starting his own nation off of their coast that they they did not. They were not OK with this. I mean, in fairness, like if I had a yard and then someone was like, look. I'm just existing in your yard. I'd be like, maybe get off my yard. Yeah, yeah. Like, I I'll, I'll talk to you. I'll see if you're cool, but maybe get off my yard and they're like, it's cool. I'm a libertarian and I'm like, I'm, I'm calling the cops. But actually, I'm not gonna call the cops because that doesn't help. But yes. Yeah, I will. I will have a drone dispatch you, by the way, sorry. Quick aside, this is called Ocean Builder. Yeah. What is all the names, Ben? That was like ocean. God. There's like. Utopian project. Yeah. Nicks, Oceania. It just occurred to me they're they all sound like SIM builder games. They do all sound like video games. That what's his name? The guy who made The Sims. Yeah, they all sound like that. Any sound like that? So the Thai Government finds out because he keeps doing press that he's living illegally, maybe off of the coast of their nation. Again, the legal situation here is kind of unclear, but the Thai government is not chill about it. And in April of 2019. Summer girl gets a text from a friend back on the mainland that she and her new husband are on TV. The Thai Navy had judged their platform to be an illegal breakaway state and a threat to tie sovereignty. And threatening tie sovereignty is a capital crime. They could both be given the death sentence for this. Oh my God. Also, there's never a good time to be surprised by the text. You're on TV. Yeah. Like, I would never be like, whoo. Yeah. Like, you wanna know if you're gonna be on TV? You don't wanna be shocked by that. And and here's the thing. Chad is an anarcho capitalist. And when the, when he gets reached out to by the media like, hey, what do you think about the Thai government threatening to to like saying that you're a threat to their sovereignty, he, like, he goes into an ideological explanation. He's like, well, I don't believe in nations or borders. So obviously I'm not trying to create a breakaway nation. Like, that's just absurd. The Thai Government does not buy this. Yeah, like, like you're not going to convince the Thai Government that that anarcho capitalism is the thing. Chad, they're just not going to listen, and indeed they don't. Yeah, I have never once been able to leave a store with a product and pay with. I don't believe in money. Like that's never been a thing. They'll accept this many times. May not have believed in a state, but Thailand does, and they have a military, which they send after him. He and summer Girl barely managed to escape pursuit with their lives. It's a whole deal. Yeah, like they and they, they are wanted in a bunch of the world now. They had to travel places that didn't extradite to ******* Thailand. And it's it's it's actually kind of an interesting story you can find in that Guardian article. But to make a Long story short, the place they land next is Panama. Now, over the course of late 2019, after fleeing for their lives, Chad and Summer girl had sat down with coke via the space slingshot guy in Panama and another guy, Grant Romant. Now Grant is the former host of a TV show for hair stylists. He was made CEO. Once they meet Grant, this hairstylist, they make him CEO of Ocean builders fairly shortly. And from what I can tell he did have one real qualification, which is that in the 90s before his hair stylist days, I guess he had worked on the Freedom Ship Project in Florida. So he had he had that experience, he worked on a grift. The first two qualifications on his company bio were that he had, he had quote one of the most advanced mobile paperless offices in Canada. In 1995 and that he had also quote lived in a tech frat house in San Francisco with one of the six cofounders of PayPal. So literally the the the top 2 lines on his resume are I I ran an office in Canada once and I I used to live in a frat house. I lived with some people yeah it's amazing. It's an incredible incredible Plex all of these this it is a like a pattern right? Not just with this but a lot of your episodes where if you look at their like. Employment history. It's like, it's like like managed to Dairy Queen one year later, tried to start a government and like, it's it's just I again. I I sort of get it. Frustrated people are just like, you know what? I'm just going to hit the reset button. But it never works. It never does. So he had had this guy Grant, who they pick as their CEO. They all meet up in Panama and Coke introduces these. To run now, fleeing from the Thai government to to grant and they're like, well, this guy should run our ******* business. Now, Grant was like all of these people independently wealthy, right? That's the other these are all like independently wealthy, rich people with nothing else to do. And this is the first one I respect because at least Chad put some skin in the game. So together, independently wealthy, it often feels like it means they had wealthy. They're from a wealthy family. I think probably in a lot of cases. I don't know, I I don't know as much about all of their early lives because there's not always a lot on these people. There's not like super detailed Wikipedias and stuff. They just appear. And that you have what they say to journalists about their background. So we know that Elwar, towski, grant and Coke put a bunch of money into setting up a land base in Panama where they were going to invest in technology. They'd figure out how to 3D print the things they need and design submarine drones and the like. And I do think they put a lot of money into this. Again, they're not grifters. I don't think they do actually believe, or at least some of them believe. Martowski certainly does. And unfortunately, what they believed in was not freedom. As much as it was a specific freedom to take ownership of a thing not currently owned and exploited for profit, the Guardian makes it clear that their ideology, while less fraudulent than their predecessors, was still deeply problematic. Quote in the 1998 essay, Wayne Gramlich, a founder of The Seasteading Institute, noted that the frontier was settled not by a few well financed parties, but by 10s of thousands of smaller groups. These homesteaders were granted the legal right to a plot of land so long as they built a house and farmed for five years as they converted the landscape. Who laid the foundations for today's continent spanning United States? Gramlich wanted to find technologies that would allow individuals to similarly colonize the sea. Quirk 2 discusses the US frontier in his book C studying. It was a place, he notes, where leaders liberally doled out rights as they complete peated for new citizens. Western states did away with voting eligibility requirements based on land ownership or tax payment, quirk says, and Wyoming offered women the right to vote before anywhere else in the United States, in part because the territory needed women to marry its abundant bachelors. When the topic comes up during my time in Panama, Coke claims that frontier initiatives helped make the 19th century probably the freest century we've ever had in human history. Hmm. That's what I think about the 1800s. Yeah, very free in the United States. A lot of free people walking around. Yeah. It's just like, look at all those free people. There's that. Romanticizing the olden times where it's like, yeah, I mean, that's what we had to do. It's just not. We don't. Do that now because we did it already. Like we can't. We can't go out into the frontier and do that. It's just. The world. The reason that could happen is because you couldn't get in a plane and like, go somewhere you'd have to be like, yeah, everybody go out into this area, start their own thing, and we'll catch up to you. Yeah. You know, like, that's just the only way to do that. And it's it's such a he's coming at it from such a myopic, like, white dude focused view of, of the way the history went, like even and even by that standard for a huge chunk, like the first third of the 19th century in the United States. White men didn't have the right to vote universally, right. Like, there were property requirements for a lot of the country, I think, was Andrew Jackson. That **** changed under. And then they're forgetting, like, you know, there were people already there, you know, genocide that preceded it. And I guess you don't have that with the C except for you do have cetaceans and like all other kind of. You still have, yeah, exploitation you have. You have marine life. He's calling again. You learn a lot about this guy. He's calling the 1800s, the freest century. Human history. Women couldn't vote in the US for any of that time. No. And black people were slaves for almost 70% of it. Yeah. Yeah. Only a thing a white guy can say. Yeah, it it's that again, that obsession, the idea of like, ohh, what would the founding fathers think about X or Y? It's like, I don't give a **** what they have to think. Yeah, like they suck. What would Julius Caesar think about me doing this? Like, no. Who gives a ****? He's dead. Yeah. Also, I don't give a **** what old people like. The. With progress, the whole idea is we're moving forward, and part of that is not giving a **** what the people before us thought and recognizing that they sucked. Yeah, that's the lesson you should learn at age 18, but sometimes takes longer. Yeah. So there was, of course, weird tax stuff wrapped up in in the plan these guys were cooking up. That's a factor in all of these. Like, they're still, they still have their their pitches about how it's going to be a tax haven, and that's why the group moved to Panama in the 1st place, right, to avoid taxes. Yeah, an ocean builders started advertising sea pods for sale. They were I think serious. I I don't think it's a grift. I think this is the first one that they really, I don't think they'll ever build any, but I think they mean to. So the sea pods that L wartofsky and the others are selling are luxury sea homes. I found them described in one article is looking like giant motorbike helmets on Poles, which is not a bad way if they look like the Jetsons house houses a little bit, but coming out of the ocean. They put a lot of money into designing their website, which has some lovely renders and succeeds in making these pods look like new tech industry releases. The apple is heavily in influence here, like they're trying to make it look like that, as opposed to like frontier **** like the future. Like the future. That said, when you read through their marketing materials, there's actually some unintentionally horrifying things like this. The native pod software can be upgraded remotely and new sensors are automated and automations can be easily hot swapped. The pod will be like a mobile phone where you can install new home apps that are constantly being developed. So that sounds great, right? What if your home was in the middle of the ocean and also worked like your phone? Hey hey, you want to live in a tech nightmare suspended above the ocean? You know how your phone works perfectly all the time and you love it? What if your house was like that? And also, if anything went wrong, you drowned, right? It's the thing that we we said in one of these episodes, which is like the ultimate goal, if successful, is still something I'm not interested in. It's it's like it's the same with Mars where it's like, hey, you wanna live on this dead planet where you can't go outside and it's like, not really. I might live on the sea in the right circumstance, but it's not a bunch of like sterile, techie looking pots. It would literally, yeah. On a sea like the like we said before, the worst case scenario is a bunch of drownings. But honestly. That is the best version of dying in the ocean. Yes, like, like that is the that is baseline. That is like if you're drowning, you're like, oh good, I'm glad I'm drowning and not getting eaten by a monster because that is also on the table. There are literal monsters in there. ******* monsters, like Lovecraftian looking demons that will that will eat you or or try to have sex with you. If they're a dolphin. It's just the the end goal is not appealing. For me, yeah. I mean, it's not, I don't know that, that that's that's, I guess, a taste thing. You know, different people appeal for different things, but the way in which they're specifically trying to sell this is just horrifying to me. Like the fact that it will work like your phone, well, that's not very attractive. My phone is a ***** ** ****. No one wants to live in a smart home yet until we actually figure out a way for that to work, especially not one on the sea. Yeah, it's the same with Tesla, where they're like, have instead of all these dials and stuff. The screen. And I'm like, I don't feel good about that. Even if it works, I'm not. Maybe the kids under me will be OK with that. I'm still, I'm too old to be OK with that. I'm. I'm certainly not OK with that. And also in the damn ocean. And it's like, I yeah, I'm not an expert on building things in the ocean, but all of their renders are like these smooth, white, curved products that look like, again, like Apple gadgets and all of the permanent sea structures I've ever seen, like, like oil rigs. Like, look huge and rough and blocky and like, right, tough. They're covered in. They might need to. Maybe they need to look that way to, like, survive in the ocean. I don't know. I'm not an expert, but no, like when you were talking about those modular things, you think of this futuristic idea of like, BOOP, boop, they just it's like, no, they probably have to, like, tow. It probably takes, like, like weeks to move, and it's probably like, really rough seas and really inconvenient. Yeah. And it's the same with this. It's like saltwater. Air and it's just gonna rust and look gross. Like, you don't want it to be like white because that'll just become gross, right? Like it will get really weird and stained. Yeah, but it just seems like a nightmare. Here's what they write about. This is maybe the most unintentionally horrifying thing they've written about these houses they're trying to sell. We think the home of the future will be elegant, simple and clean. To achieve this, we decided to hide the light bulbs, light switches, and power outlets by building them into the design of the house. That they are invisible, yet always right where you need them. Oh boy. Yeah, that seems like a good idea. On the on the naval vessel. Yeah, yeah. It's it's gonna you're gonna have everything hard to adjust and change on the fly. Which again, I think boats. You need to be able to like, repair them and **** in media res. Otherwise you might die. I don't know. Not a boat expert here. Just tell them what other people have told me. The house is like, you need to if you need to do the rewiring. Yes. Stuff. It shouldn't be tough. It shouldn't be built in. Yeah, it shouldn't. Yeah. It's the hubris of the design, which is like Speaking of humans to do anything else. One of the features they advertise for the Cpod is a lightning prevention system. Umm yeah, and that isn't that exciting. Didn't even think about lightning. And now that I'm now, that's all I can think about. Yeah, they they talk **** about lightning rods cause like those just direct Lightnings flow. What if you could just stop lightning? And I don't entirely know their plans there, but I do. They not explain it because I think there's a bunch of different reading you could do, but it all comes back to like my question, which is well if you're doing something. To the environment around you that makes it unable for lightning to form in a time when it's trying to form lightning. What else does that affect? It's like cloud seeding, where it's like, OK, but you know that'll that'll do other stuff too, right? Like, right, like if you if you start making it rain places it's not supposed to rain. Like other stuff will happen right now. Exactly. It's OK. You want to live near this volcano? Don't worry. We figured out a way to make it not erupt, and it's like, I don't believe you. I'm going to need to have a lot of information. Before like the the Gary we guaranteed to stop lightning, it's like Umm, I just will need more information. Hmm 100% yeah, I would need a a couple of different things I think. So yeah, if you've been following along so far, this doesn't seem dissimilar to a number of grift sea ciety projects we covered earlier. The seed pods could easily be yet another attempt to get rich in pre-orders or whatever and then run away. But as it turns out the Ocean Builders team were willing to put yet. Or skin in the game COVID hit and it absolutely pantsed the entire cruise ship industry and suddenly there was a way cheaper way to like build a AC platform then making sea pods. You could just buy a cruise ship, a Brock bottom price cruise ship Dave. So the three pooled their money and put together nine and a half, $1,000,000 which they definitely should never have had in the 1st place. So this is fundamentally a happy story. They really shouldn't have any money. Oh my goodness. They're about to buy US cruise ship. They sure do buy a cruise ship day. What are they gonna do? They're just gonna sail that around and then they're gonna like, well, they gonna realize fuel is expensive. And then 20. This is a full story. You don't have to wonder how it'll end. Sorry, I'm just imagining, like someone waking up and going outside and just seeing a cruise ship just, like beached near their house. Three dead libertarians on the beach in front of it? Yeah, exactly. Ohh God. So they buy a cruise ship, the Pacific Dawn, 245 meters long, which is just 4000 meters short of the freedom ship. So they're on their way. At least it's real. So they they they pivot in their dreams of seasteading. They Commission plans for a new sea city, and the dawn is going to be, in their minds, the centerpiece of a network of sea pods. So they'll park the dawn somewhere and then start selling sea pods, which will like form out around it, you know, and they'll build a little sea town that way. They also decide that like, well, we need a lot more startup capital, although I don't know that they did, because $10 million seems like you could build some sea pods with it. I'm sure the guys who go to that, like burn on the water, manage to build things like that for less than $10 million. But instead of using it for R&D, they buy this boat and the plan is to sell the cabins on it for $25,000. Piece and use that money to fund the development and sale of sea pods, which will gradually turn into a society. I imagine the response was people saying, no thanks, I can just take a cruise, like a cruise. But what if you lived on the cruise ship and it never moved and and could use Bitcoin cruise like, that's the other thing. Like there. There's no, like, they're not doing like little Broadway shows. They're like, you know, no fancy dinners. It's just. An empty cruise, we'll we'll talk about that in a second. So their plan is that like gradually over time, they'll be able to fund the creation and the sale of more sea pods, which will like surround the the Pacific Dawn. And there will be platforms for growing food and manufacturing things and providing Parkland. Although I guess you'd have to pay for the Parkland because there's no government that's paying for things. I don't know, that's never explained. They named their cruise ship the Satoshi, because the guy the anonymous. Founder of bitcoins. Pseudonym was satoshi. And yeah, the the plan for the sea city is for it to look from the air like the bee and Bitcoin ohk. OK. This contract. So gross. Yeah, I know. And it it's also like, well, OK, if you don't have, if you're a libertarian society who's making everybody form the shape of a Bitcoin logo, it's whose job is that? How do you compel that behavior? Yeah. How do you make that? Yeah. It's so, I don't know, maybe they had a plan on October 20th. It's just so cringe. Oh, you're not into the big Bitcoin Sea City based around a cruise ship that you live in forever? No big B for me, man, it's such an incredible downgrade. Like, again, all these stories are like these negotiations where they're like, I wanna start my own country and then it ends with like, OK, but I get to keep the truck. It's like deal and then they get like a trek and that's it. So on October 20th, 2020, Chad Elwer Towski announced to Reddit that the fondest dreams of generations of libertarians were about to be realized. They were going to build finally a seaborne libertarian nation. And I'm going to quote from a guardian summary of the discussion that followed quote so I am buying a cruise ship and naming it Ms Satoshi AMA. Ask me anything. The responses were quick. Need an apprentice aviation mechanic? I know how to use a yo-yo any room for me and included the inevitable skeptics. Anyone remember the good old days of the fire festival? But plenty took the proposition seriously and wanted to go over the small print. Where is the power coming from? Gas? Internet? Food, water, toiletries? What taxes will she be subject to? El Martowski answered every question with grave attention to detail. There would be generators at first followed quickly by solar power. This would be an eco friendly crypto ship. High speed wireless Internet would come from land. Utilities would be included in the fees at first, but would be metered out when the cabins were upgraded. You don't want to have to pay for someone else's mining rig in their cabin, he wrote, referring to the resource intensive computational process that introduces new crypto coins into the system. But as the Reddit Q&A continued, Elward Towski's meticulous responses revealed some of the more naughty practicalities of life on board. It turned out that the only cooking facilities would be in the restaurant. For safety reasons, no one was allowed to have a microwave in their rooms, though some cabins had many fridges. Total wartofsky determinately sidestepping the point. He offered residents a 20% discount at the restaurant, and mentioned that some interested cruisers had already talked about renting part of the restaurant kitchen so they could make their own food. We would entrepreneurs to come up with solutions and try them out, he wrote, in a valiant attempt to convert a fairly fundamental stumbling block into wild startup energy. This is your place to try new things right there. You have to pay for the food at the restaurant. Yes, that is the only kitchen. That is the only kitchen that is dope. What a great libertarian Mecca that has a cafeteria. This will be the freest place on Earth. But no microwaves. Yep, no microwaves. And you can't make your own food in any way. Well, no. You could pay to use the communal to use the kitchen. Someone could lease it. Entrepreneurs could figure out how to lease it. Paying? Yeah, it's it's very funny. ******* God, we haven't. I feel like I should have throughout this been talking or speculating about the amount of cocaine is involved in this entire. It's not none, Dave. It's not, not none. Or at least some sort of amphetamine solid point. My might be ketamine, might be ketamine. It's a real three in the morning. I'm starting a business. Energy, you know, like it's it's it's that it's probably cocaine. Yeah. Both painful, Robert. Wow. What else hurt us again? Tell us more bad. So yeah, and it is funny. You could. You can't have microwaves in your room, but you can't have a Bitcoin mining rig. That's perfect. It's perfect. It's just ******* perfect. You're right, it is very funny that both the Liberty ship and the Satoshis founders admitted up front. Ohh yes, we will have to radically Curb Your freedoms in order to make a life on a boat together. Possible. Whatever criticisms you have of them though, they hired a captain and a skeleton crew for the ship, and some of them sailed their assets to Panama with it. This is again, more than any of their predecessors except the sea land guy ever managed. They started auctioning the 777 open cabins off. In late November of 2020, they held a number of informational calls for potential customers where they talked about **** like their COVID safety policies on board and their plans to accept a bunch of stupid crypto coins with names like Eureka Coin and Doge Coin. They also informed people that pets larger than a small dog or pets that barked would not be allowed on board. Oh, it's so it's crawling with cats. Just what I'm thousands of cats, cats and ferrets. That's what. That's what it would be, is give it to eating the corpses of libertarians. Died when their mining rig overheated them and they stroked out in their room. And I just say island in Japan. It'll be like this boat perpetually sailing the ocean just covered. And we just say that dogs would not want to attend that event. Yeah. No, thank you. Cats would love it. So how many rooms do you think, soul Dave? I'm gonna guess. It's like when he like trying to get those signatures and all that. I'm guessing. All right. I'm going to say 777 rooms. Wait, that's how many sold? No, that's how many are we were available in tonight? I'm guessing three close. Seven. Yeah. So twice as good as you thought. More than twice as good as you thought, Dave, you really underestimated them. Yeah, so the fact that only 7 rooms sold was a problem. Another problem was that none of the men who'd thrown down near $10 million for this boat and decided to make life on the sea their chief goal actually knew about living on a boat or sailing a boat. Why would you need to know that, Dave? You're trying to figure out a whole new way of life. You don't have to know how to work a sale or maintain an engine. Like, I can't really. This, this this is like, this is like a slowdown GTA rampage where you're just like jumping from one thing to another, desperately trying to hijack stuff. Like it feels like the boat has been hijacked in slow motion by someone who doesn't know how to use a boat, and now they're just sailing off and they're wondering what the hell all the buttons do, and they're not sure what they're going to do. They do. They do have to hire an actual professional captain to say that's the good news. Can you imagine being that captain? It's he's given some quotes and it sounded like a nightmare. Yeah, but and your tongue the whole way of he was very adamant about like they did not know what they were doing where they're like, we can pay you and I'd be like cash right now. I don't want *******. I don't want no *** **** like pictures of dogs on coins. You give me cash, you *******. Cash money, baby. Yeah. So there's a lot of talk this whole episode about, like, international waters, the freedom of international waters. Here's the thing. International law heavily regulates a lot of the ocean. Sailing requires certain certificates. Like you have to have a bunch of things that prove your boat is safe, and the guys didn't realize they needed to have that, so they had to, like, put it in dry dock and pay a bunch more money and set the project back. Yeah, just Google it. You could just, they could have googled it. They could have Googled that. It also turns out that you have to have insurance for boats that are going to sail into an exist within another nation's borders. And insurance companies were like, well, we're not going to insure a boat run by three guys who don't know anything about boats and want to park it off the coast of Panama and turn it into a floating Bitcoin city. Like, we don't, we don't like, we're not even going to quote you a premium on that. That's just not a business we want to be. I never thought I'd say comrade insurance guy. Yeah, well, I mean, it's just, it's pretty basic. So the whole venture fell apart, and the ship was eventually sold for scrap at a loss of a lot of money. The Guardian chronicles the very funny reactions these guys had when they realized they'd never bothered to learn **** about what life on the ocean might entail. Quote after trying multiple insurers and brokers, romance began to realize that the cruise ship industry was, as he put it, plagued by over regulation along with airlines and nuclear power. According to Harris, it's in the top three the ocean builders Great Freedoms Project, whose intrinsic purpose. Just to offer an escape from oppressive rules and bureaucracy was being hobbled by oppressive rules and bureaucracy. As El Wartofsky would reflect a few months later on Reddit, a cruise ship is not very good for people who want to be free. So perfect punchline to all this to be like this whole time, they're like, we're taking to the sea where there's no laws, not bothering to Google or check to see if that's true. Are there laws in the sea? Yeah, that's basically what this all is, is they've been fantasizing about going to this place that was magical in their mind. And now they're learning like, finally what the place actually is. Yeah, like, that's what it seems like. It's like a. It's like. It's like wanting to go to Mars for all the fresh air and trees, you know, like they never bothered to check. Incredible. It's it's it's very funny. And of course they have to sell the cruise ship for scrap metal. They it's it's just a giant disaster. It's all. None of it. None of it works out. And as time has gone on since the dream, dying Chad Arlo Wartofsky has gone on to post more concerning things, the post he made when they had to sell the boat. This quote we have lost this round. The new normal great reset gains another victim. Which is like Q Anon anti vac. ****. So yeah, I am worried about Chad. I like you. I was liking you, Buzz buddy. I you got potential. You got the huzzah? Yeah, it's in terms of like, I understand your disclaimer where you're like, these aren't ********. The ******* is like hubris and maybe our education system. You know, like the the the ******* is more. This is more people. Victims of their own. Yes, I think of themselves and like the the grifters early on, yeah, they were ******** but it it is like I feel bad for them and honestly, I kind of want them to have a win, provided that they are good people, like you said, with the vaccine stuff and it's getting a little shaky. Umm. You know, they could be terrible people otherwise, but it's like, ohh man, ohh buddy, yeah. I want, I want. I want to do something for you. Yeah, I I I want to. I want something I want there to be. I want I I think this idea is cool. Like, I think that I might go to that event and ******* Sacramento. That sounds rad as hell. I love the idea of, like, people walking away from. I mean, Speaking of of of the term walk away, Reed. Cory Doctorow was wonderful sci-fi book Walk Away. But I love the idea of people like, let's let's abandon these horrible governments and figure out over time. That'll, like, live in the sea. There's a cool idea there, as long as you're not poisoning the ocean or right or or whatever. Like, I I don't, I I'm not laughing at the idea of wanting to live in, like, a designed community and the ocean of, like, hard Scrabble frontiers people. That's pretty rad. But that's not these are not hardscrabble frontier people except for maybe Chad. Yes, their heart is in the right place. Or when they're not grifting, their heart is in the right place. And that's The thing is, like, you could point that lens at me and be like, look at you, you ******* coward. You're not trying anything. These people are at least trying they but they're trying to actually accomplish this thing instead of just ******** about the government. Like, it's like you got to give them something for that. It's just that you got again, going back to that. Yeah, going back to the core idea of libertarianism where it's like, I've never seen someone explain how it would help society. It always feels like it's just I I. Why I want this freedom. I don't wanna pay taxes. And it's it's the idea of how to build an actual, practical society. I've just. Maybe I'm ignorant. Maybe that's been explained, but I've just never seen it. Well, part of it is, you know, Dave, and this is the thing. Where? Because Chad's not really a pioneer. The original, like pioneers for all of the genocide and stuff. We're like #1 people who could fail, like it was life or death for a lot of them. Like we are either going to make a life out here farming, or like we will. Starved to death. Like that was for some of them a very real thing. Yeah, we only hear of the successes, yeah. The rest are like just skeletons in the woods. They were also all people who, like, knew how to do ****. Like, you watched the ******* the pavich, you know that? That's a good example of, like, showing how many different skills a person would have had to have to, like, make a life even vaguely feasible and those kind of conditions. So, like, the constant, the costs are high. And it was people who were like, we're already very self-reliant. These people #1, they're all millionaires. I'm I don't think any of them are gambling more than they can afford to lose. So like they're they don't they can easily go do something else. This is not the stakes are not actually that high for them and #2 they don't have much in the way of skills. It doesn't seem like they don't know how to do any of the things. It would be like somebody setting out to start a farm in an undiscovered to them continent and like having never touched dirt or built a house and just being like, we'll all pay people along the way to do that part right. It's the top down thinking. It's the fact that they live in this society that they live in where they're afforded a lot of privilege or comfort and they say, ooh, I wanna make it like a city in the in the sea and they don't think about where do you start because they just that's not how they are thinking about it. It's it's absolutely top down thinking and it's like very cringe to listen to and I I still feel bad because they are their own worst enemies with this stuff. Again, their heart seems to be in the right place. If if it's the non grifters, it's just their methods, the swings they take. Yeah. Are so silly. Yeah. And like again, the ideas there, there are these ideas that are like, oh, that's a neat thing, but they're not. Yeah, yeah, they're trying to start with those ideas and not grow to them 100%. Yep. And I think that's as good an epitaph for this as possible. You got any, you got any plug cables? Yeah, Dave, plug your plug cables. **** it. Movie hooligan on the Twitter I have a podcast network with Tom Ryman that's called game fully unemployed. We we do a lot of podcasts about movies, mainly movie reviews and so on and so forth. We have some podcasts under our Patreon that's patreon.com/gainfully unemployed. One called Fox Mulder is a Maniac 1 called Tom and Jeff watch Batman. They they they're exactly what they sound like. Check all that out if you want to, you know? If you don't, you don't have to. I don't know if you know that. Yep. And there's also the new podcast Tom and Jeff watch Bateman, which is just a chronicle of the fact that Tom and Jeff have been stalking Jason Bateman for years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But we're collecting. We're we're waiting for that saga to end before we do the podcast. You know, we want to see that. That'll turn out almost done fire. But, yeah, you should do just doing a sequest just the show where you just explain episodes of sequence. Let me tell you about this episode of Seaquest. Yeah, that's it. That's the title of the podcast. It's fine. Yeah, I think so. It'll just be me talking about how much I appreciate Roy Schneider. Hmm. Nobody else. It's nobody else. Yep, just me. Well, look, take $100 and throw it into the air somewhere in the outdoors if you want me to make that podcast. And if enough of you do it, I'll release it. That's how money works. That is how money works, Dave. Well, that's going to do it for all of us here at behind the ********. Until next time. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's SPREAK. Theyare.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Survive on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.