Today, Joe sits down with Ross, Christophe and Paul to explain how seasteading facilitates innovation and Blue Frontiers’ role in establishing such floating islands. Joe discusses the benefits of seasteading for coastal and island nations impacted by climate change and Buckminster Fuller’s concept of pollution as ‘resources we’re not using.’ They talk about what’s next for Blue Frontiers, including its upcoming token ICO and the SeaZones project.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Christophe Jospe: Hello, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Christophe Jospe, sitting here with my co-host Ross Kenyon and producer Paul. A really exciting episode that we have. Usually I introduce, but today we’re going to let Ross introduce the guest because he knows him personally. So Ross, why don’t you start us off here?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we’re here with Joe Quirk in Oakland. I’ve worked a little bit, consulting-wise, with Blue Frontiers, which is Joe’s company, and among his co-founders. And they do seasteading, which is this wacky idea of building floating platforms in the ocean that retain some degree of autonomy to determine their own rules, depending on where they are. Don’t want to put too many words in your mouth, though. I want you to evangelize a little bit. That’s your title, right?
Joe Quirk: Yes, I am a Seavangelist.
Ross Kenyon: Great, a hybrid portmanteau. Yeah, I was trying to figure it out — is it S-E-A or S-E-E?
Joe Quirk: Okay, so it’s a play on evangelist and sea. And it is in fact wacky. It’s very nearly as wacky as trying to change the world by clicking little levers in private booths for special politicians and hoping the world does what you want. If you want a preposterously utopian view of the world, it makes a lot more sense, and it’s much more realistic, to go build your own little miniature nation.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I wish it was a little bit easier to try that. When you described it — Dan Carlin has this way of approaching politics, it’s like the view from Mars, or if you’re explaining it, so I like to, to a Martian. Yeah, you’d be like, yeah, you’re just, you’re just pulling little levers, and then, like, people do things off of that, that you don’t really have any control of after that point. It’s like, this doesn’t sound always like the greatest of ways to do things, right?
Joe Quirk: And then the Martian would say, so I assume you call this planet Ocean. You say, no, no, we call it planet Earth. He’s like, well, more than two-thirds of it is planet Ocean. What are you doing with all that? It’s like, no, we just stay on land, and then we fight amongst each other about who gets to control everybody else through the political process.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I suppose that is one way of looking at it. So, Blue Frontiers — and you’ve also been involved in seasteading before Blue Frontiers was a thing. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about why you’re here and why you care about the things that you care about?
Joe Quirk: Well, I’m an author. I write. I tell stories, basically. That’s what I’ve been doing, and the main thing I do is listen in to really smart people and force them to explain it 20 times until a dumb person understands it. And then, once I can explain it, I can explain it like a guy in the bar. So I have written novels, I’ve written science books. I wrote a book about evolution called It’s Not You, It’s Biology: The Science of Love, Sex, and Relationships, which is basically, I take academic papers about evolutionary psychology, I put it in English, whereupon it becomes automatically funny, and then I make all the money off the scientists’ work.
Ross Kenyon: That’s kind of translation in a nutshell right there.
Joe Quirk: Yeah, they couldn’t say that without using obscure words that you don’t understand. So, but I came to understand the power of variation and selection. It’s the secret recipe that drives forward progress. So the microphones we’re using right now — many different forms have been proposed, and they survive by people selecting them, and whatever it is that’s selecting it ends up getting better and better just for them. So it works in life, it works in technology, it works in consumer goods, it works in language. It doesn’t really occur in governance itself, the most important service in the world.
And because, you know, if you want to vary and select among your governments, you need, as Patri Friedman points out, a revolution or a war or an economic collapse. And who has time for that? Let’s just stick with what we got. So I always thought that was sort of an intractable problem. And then I was on a cruise ship, and I noticed that the cruise ship was a floating city, and it was the highest standard of living I’d ever had. And it was cheaper than the coastal hotel I’d stayed in the night before I went on the cruise ship.
I also noticed a lot of the people working on the cruise ship were from the developing world, and they were living a much better life on the cruise ship than they would live elsewhere. And I couldn’t figure out, why is this city better? I didn’t really have an example, I didn’t really have an understanding, but I could see that it was somehow a floating city and it was flying the flag of like Panama or Liberia. So I said, well, this is interesting. In some way it’s like self-governing. Then about six weeks later I was at my tenth Burning Man, and anybody who goes to Burning Man ten times notices that rules evolve in ways that are not predictable given their initial parameters.
So I watched it develop over a decade, and you start to discover interesting things about the way people can live together that you wouldn’t have thought were possible. And invariably you start thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if we had more of these? Wouldn’t it be cool if we had hundreds all over the world, blank slates everywhere, where people could, from the bottom up, experiment with their own societies? People want to laugh at Burning Man, but you look at the challenges they face, especially environmental ones.
If you proposed to people, let’s have a temporary city of 60,000 people set itself up in the middle of a flat, featureless desert, bring in their own food, their own water, and their own porta-potties, and then they’re committed to leaving no trace — they all have to move out and take everything with them, such that, you know, people who come and scan the desert for the most part can’t tell the people were there. Is this even possible? I would say it’s not possible. But by developing techniques for this over time, they can solve amazing social and environmental problems.
So you start thinking, well, what if there were more experiments with bottom-up society formation in more places? I’m not the only person to think that way. And it’s like, well, just leave and start your own country. Or, there’s — you can’t do anything like that, right?
Right. You can’t leave and start your own country because all land is claimed by existing governments. It was at Burning Man where someone introduced me to Patri Friedman. Patri explained what seasteading was, and I didn’t understand. I thought he said seascaping, and my wife is an esthetician, so I thought this had something to do with escaping — Brazilians or something. And he described very briefly these floating cities in the ocean, and because I’d just been on a cruise ship, I said, yeah, technologically I think humanity could do that. Seems a little weird that someone would start a nonprofit to make this happen sooner than would otherwise occur.
And I walked away. And then after Burning Man I noticed that the seasteading logo was based on the Burning Man logo, and that really caught my eye. Why would proposed cities on the ocean be modeled after a temporary city in the desert? And I vaguely remembered the name, Patri Friedman or something, and I sort of Googled it, and I found his blog, and that’s when I had my conversion moment.
And so Patri elucidated that you could solve this problem of monopoly governments that don’t evolve, that aren’t subject to variation and selection, if you weren’t on land, but if you were on water — and the very ground beneath your feet could disassemble according to the choices of residents, and you can essentially vote with your house.
Ross Kenyon: Would it usually be modular, right?
Joe Quirk: You could. Fully modular.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you could disassociate, go somewhere else, you can join a new group, right?
Joe Quirk: Yeah. And as long as people could choose societies, you wouldn’t need a monopoly on governments. You would have variation by societies and selection by citizens, which to me, in principle, would unleash evolution in governance itself, the most important service that exists. All social problems flow downstream from governance. And I also understood that this is technologically feasible. I don’t understand the fundamentals of AI, I don’t understand the fundamentals of all sorts of technologies. I definitely understand cruise ships, platforms, governance, disassembling. I’m like, this needs to happen as soon as possible, because it could solve a very deep problem simply by setting better examples that show something to old governments. And we little appreciate how small, nimble governments set examples that end up changing the policies of old, big continental governments.
I can give you many examples of that. In fintech, I always look to Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, the Cayman Islands, Jersey, Guernsey — little tiny, tiny little islands and little political entities.
Ross Kenyon: Right, great examples.
Joe Quirk: Great examples. And even something like just simple things like Estonia experimenting with the flat tax. So Estonia was one of the countries that was suddenly independent after the USSR disassembled into small little states. So Estonia initiated this crazy idea called the flat tax, which was unthinkable. Everyone thought it was crazy. And then they immediately grew at more than twice the rate of other Eastern European countries and Western European countries, which were all growing at the time. This started a debate among other countries about the flat tax, and now something like 20% of countries have initiated a flat tax. Many American states have a flat tax. We would not have that innovation if this small little country hadn’t tried this. So the more countries you can proliferate, the more examples they can set, the more bigger nations change their policies.
So we’re talking about — this is sort of an abstraction, it’s sort of like at the root of society, how could you redo things and allow people to experiment with their own ideas? But once I talked the Seasteading Institute into letting me co-write the book with Patri, I kind of panicked, because I realized I can’t just make this about ideas. And it wasn’t until I went to the 2012 seasteading conference and met the people I would later call aquapreneurs, who are actually working on the solutions that Nori cares about, like, you know, seaweed that can absorb carbonic acid from the ocean, and you could have restorative foods and algae farms and fish farms.
And once you have actual innovators coming to seasteading with their solution, you realize this is a story about people and the solutions they can bring. It attracts people like you guys, and anybody with a new idea for how society can be done better, that needs a startup society, comes to the Seasteading Institute and is now getting involved with the startup company Blue Frontiers.
Christophe Jospe: So I want to interject here, Joe. This is actually — we never talked about how exactly we came up with Nori. We went through this whole brainstorming process, but reading your book and your sections on aquaculture and seaweed cultivation and its potential for not only just good business sense and feeding the world, but also decarbonizing the oceans, it made quite an impact on me. Would you guys agree with that? I think it was one of my primary inspirations for the name.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah. On top of that, it’s one of those very simple things that humans can do that allows something to proliferate rapidly, and, like you say, from the ground up, or in this case, from the sea up. So I read your book. I loved it. Already, we’ve all read it. Paul gave it to me. Paul actually gave it to me when he was off to Tahiti, to go on a trip that was organized by Blue Frontiers.
But a number of the things you just said really resonate that I want to pick up on. One of them is, volunteers can do something quickly and don’t need to wait, and they can experiment, and when those experiments actually take a foothold, that can influence the rest of the world and actually create something that’s a better system for society. And I really feel like we live at this moment when all of these things are coming together. We have a population that is growing, and you have people who quite frankly don’t have a place to go. You have land which is being used up. You have governments which are oppressive or holding down on people. You have environmentalists who, for better or worse, want to innovate but don’t have the space to innovate or to try new ideas.
You have a number of health problems. You have all of these cures that, when you bring them together and under a large umbrella, which it seems like is the Seasteading Institute and the company that’s advancing this, Blue Frontiers, you could really drive some real change in what is maybe just a dream at Burning Man, starts to become a reality. Is that about right? Can we see that this isn’t just some crazy idea, but it’s actually taking foothold, and there’s actually a plan to start scaling these?
Joe Quirk: Yes, it’s a necessary idea. Humanity doesn’t realize it, but it’s pushing towards the oceans, and innovators are trying to get beyond existing jurisdictions the same way Europeans were coming to the New World to try something new, because the rules don’t adapt. And all these aquapreneurs I met at the seasteading houses, and others, you know, reaching out to the Seasteading Institute, that I feature in the book — all of them have these great ideas that they can’t push forward. You know, the seaweed farmer Ricardo Radulovich: the aquaculture regulations are written in a previous century and they’re not adaptable to the new technologies that are coming online. And I’ve talked to many seaweed farmers in California and Mexico, and all sorts of places, that are trying to get outside existing systems so they can do the new things. They need regulatory startups.
Fish farmers — it’s really tragic. You know, Neil Sims, who I also feature in the book, and there’s many more like him, who have scaled up these mobile, sustainable, Buckminster Fuller fish cages that swim with the schooling fish and completely defy all the problems with traditional fish farming, still have to cope with the laws and regulations written for those old fish farms in the 1980s. You know, people are dying for regulatory startups, where they can push forward new innovations. And everyone is trying to get out there, trying to get beyond these crusty old rules and start the new century, and a lot of them reach out to seasteading, and a lot of them are now volunteering at Blue Frontiers.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I guess maybe this would be a good point to explain: what is Blue Frontiers? And I also want to bring Paul into this and hear about his little jaunt over there.
Joe Quirk: So Blue Frontiers is the result of French Polynesia — the president of French Polynesia, in fact — writing a letter to the Seasteading Institute inviting us to come check out French Polynesia as a potential host site for the first seasteads. And it’s one thing to promote an idea through a nonprofit, but if you want to actually build seasteads, you’re going to need an actual startup company. And so Blue Frontiers is the startup company that is putting together all the experts under one umbrella, one company, and a large group of like 70 to 90 active volunteers at this point in various areas of expertise. And today is the day we launched Seacoin. You guys are here the day we launched it.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, it launched? I feel like we all missed this.
Joe Quirk: Yeah, I think it just happened today. I think I can say launch — or how about announce. I think the sale will be in May, but the public announcement and the thing on the website and the existence of Seacoin is now public as of today.
Ross Kenyon: Well, congratulations. [unclear]. We will continue to need your guidance. The regulations around launching new tokens is quite onerous and sometimes changing, and various agencies claim it and are duking it out amongst themselves to figure out who will have the privilege and authority of having the final say. So it has been an intellectually stimulating question, though at times quite frustrating. I’m sure you probably feel similarly.
Joe Quirk: Yes. But you can also imagine the situation that these various agencies are in. We’re, you know, they have protocols, they have setups, they have definitions of things, and now there’s a new innovation that doesn’t fit any of those rules. So they can’t even decide who’s in charge, what position we’re going to take on this, and they’re trying to figure it out. It’s much better if we could have rules emerge from the bottom up in that space rather than using old paradigms.
Ross Kenyon: So, as long as — people get pretty caught up in that precautionary principle way of thinking. [unclear] regulation where there have been explicit cases of fraud and scams that have happened in the cryptocurrency space, but those people have been prosecuted often, they’ve been subpoenaed when things have happened. But I don’t necessarily want to just apply the old rules or make rules up out of nowhere just based on ideas we’d have. I much prefer the regulatory sandbox approach that you’re describing. Let it mature a little bit. One of the great analogies I’ve heard for this is, imagine the internet starting and you had to come up with all the rules for the internet before it had even matured. Right? Would that have delayed — would it ever have become the thing that it is now, right?
Joe Quirk: What — I don’t even know. It’s probably terrible. Yeah, it would be terrible if they had tried to regulate it with rules from the 1950s. They wouldn’t be able to imagine what it’s going to be like. But, you know, no one wants to work in an industry with no rules. But if you establish the rules from the bottom up within the industries, among the experts actually involved, creating rules is also a discovery process. It’s not just the discovery of innovation, it’s discovery of the rules that go along with it.
And I’d cite as an example the rules that operate on the ocean. And I’d kind of like to write a book about this that I’d kind of like to call The Stateless Half of the Earth. There’s regulatory bodies, there’s food safety bodies, there’s all sorts of decentralized — there’s safety enforcers, there’s like 50 ship classification societies in the world that all compete to be the one to regulate the rating of ships. And it’s not state-controlled at all, it’s completely free market. And there’s all sorts of complex rules that have developed on the ocean in a sort of decentralized way, which is what we’d like to unleash on seasteads.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Whenever I think of maritime law — I’m sure, Paul, you’re the same too — I immediately think of Michael Bluth and Arrested Development. Yeah, they can’t prosecute you for treason out there.
Joe Quirk: That’s right.
Ross Kenyon: Well, when you talk about maritime law emerging, I know a decent amount about it, not too much, but I know the Hanseatic League in the Baltic was quite big — you know, the German trading cities there. But this whole corpus of law just emerged through people having judges make decisions and using those as precedents, and it just sort of had a tendency to work, rather than legislators sitting around in the building and trying to figure out the best way to do that and being lobbied. And so you had judges being like, no, this is the way that it works, and it’s best if we do it this way. Is that broadly how it works?
Joe Quirk: Yes, it was created by judges over time, and also even with the Hanseatic League, that’s certainly true. But also created among merchants, where we need some means of getting along with, as an accepted set of rules that we can all agree on so we can all do business together. And when the people making the rules are incentivized to have the disputes be resolved as quickly as possible, you often end up with, like, this term, the fluidity of rulemaking, and rapid evolution where bad rules go away, but rules that people like tend to stay. And there’s a whole complex way of describing that. You know, once you kind of grok seasteading, Blue Frontiers’ idea, you can kind of drill down into all the ways this is really great.
Ross Kenyon: You know, then it becomes, well, why should French Polynesia or other island nations be interested in this at all, Joe?
Joe Quirk: Well, so the problem of the lack of innovation in governance is a deep problem in the world, but the other big problem in the world is sea level change threatening coastal nations, and especially island nations around the world. French Polynesia is worried they’re going to lose a third of their islands by the end of this century. At the least, have their water table severely threatened. So if you can go to coastal and island nations and propose a way that they can organically adapt to sea level rise affordably, in exchange for baby-step experiments with seasteads, where each step the risk of failure is absorbed by the people building the seastead, not the country itself, and each success, the prosperity is shared locally, then you can start this scaling up of platforms that allow people to adjust to sea level change, that experiment with new ways of governing ourselves. And we kind of step by step affordably solve two of the biggest problems in the world, which is the change in sea level, and the need for startup innovation in society.
Ross Kenyon: We always love every startup that combines two fields that are already complicated and misunderstood. We do climate change plus blockchain. You’re like, uh — and yours is pretty much the same, but you can add AI and machine learning and everything else too. You know, oftentimes you’ll see like three or four appendages onto startups like that, and it’s scary. Like, there’s no way you’re good at probably even one of these. Maybe, maybe two.
Joe Quirk: Yes. [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: But yeah, why don’t you tell the listeners about your trip out to French Polynesia and what you’re up to at Blue Frontiers?
Paul Gambill: Yeah. So last year Ross came to me — Ross had been working with Blue Frontiers — and he told me about this week that Blue Frontiers is hosting where they were inviting people out to come see Tahiti and French Polynesia and learn more about the project and share ideas and kind of generally try to contribute to the growth of seasteading. And I was super fascinated. I first came across seasteading in, I want to say, 2010 or 2011 or so.
Ross Kenyon: That event at ASU that Patri [unclear]?
Paul Gambill: No, no. I think somebody at ASU might have told me about that, and that’s how I heard about it. So I was interested in it from the governance perspective. So as someone who sees the same sort of issues with slow movement and policy change, and ill adaptations to the modern world, the idea of having sovereign floating cities that can experiment with different ways of governing people is really appealing to me. But then it wasn’t until Ross told me about this, so I got your book, Joe, and I read it, and everything clicked into place for me.
Because what I really liked about your book was the way that you focused on all of these people who were trying to make innovations in the way of doing things that would support seasteading, that are trying to solve environmental problems. And so it wasn’t presented as like, this is a crazy utopian fantasy of libertarians who just want to secede from their big centralized countries. It’s about, this is technology that can help solve major ills. We can clean up the oceans, we can clean up the earth while providing all these other benefits, everything that you’ve been talking about so far.
So that was really appealing to me, and I applied for the week. I got in later that day. I got on the phone with Randy Hencken and we talked about it for a little bit. He was like, all right — I told him about what we were doing with Nori. He said, okay, this is great, you should come. So in October last year I went out with, I think there were seven, eight or nine people, it changed throughout the week. There were about eight to ten of us participating in this. And the Blue Frontiers team took us on tours around Tahiti. We did several different cultural explorations with locals, learning a lot about Polynesian culture, which was super fascinating. And we went to Moorea and to an atoll, Tetiaroa, and I got to see different areas. We didn’t go too much further away just because the French Polynesian islands are like so, so spread apart.
Ross Kenyon: Is it something like Polynesia occupies the same area that the landmass of Europe does? It’s enormous.
Joe Quirk: About the same size as Western Europe.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, it’s huge. So we only went to the local islands. Something that you pointed out to me, Joe, when we were there, that had not occurred to me before, was that Polynesians were always explorers, and Tahiti was really like the center of their exploration, how they moved around to the different islands of Polynesia. The last island group, that last archipelago that they got to, was the islands of Hawaii. And the idea of exploring and going, not knowing what they’re going to find, and going out there and looking for some new land where there is some opportunity for them — seasteading makes perfect sense. It just extends, this is just like the next phase of exploration in trying to find the new opportunity. And so now we’re making new islands, and that really stuck with me.
And I found it super interesting on a more personal, like, selfish level, and how Nori can benefit from this: the idea of harvesting kelp and growing kelp and then just basically dumping it over the side of the ocean, letting that sink to the bottom as a carbon sink. That would sort of collectively fall under the name of blue carbon. There’s a lot of research being done into this, and we could see that as a methodology that we would support to do, and that could be a beneficial thing for inhabitants of seasteads to do that. Like, we could provide this sort of financial mechanism for them to grow kelp, you know, take some of it for food and nutrition and take some of it and just throw it over the side of the island and let it sink, and you’re doing multiple things at once. That was kind of the start of the trip and how interesting it was.
Joe Quirk: So this is like a dream come true for me, because, you know, when I was discovering this, you’re putting it in the book with a sense of, why don’t people know about this? I have to write about this so the actual entrepreneurs can go out there and do it. But yes, that vision of how aquaculture, whether it’s seaweed or it’s fish, that you could actually, you know, chop it up and drop it to the ocean floor if you’re looking to remove carbon from the ocean and the atmosphere. You can get carbon credits for this or whatever, but it would essentially be out of the biosphere for a hundred million years. I mean, it would drop down below where photosynthesis can reach, and this would be a way of, you know, restorative fuel, restorative eating, a whole environmentally restorative industry.
Ross Kenyon: My other favorite thing about growing kelp is that if you do it in coastal areas where large amounts of agriculture have taken place, growing the kelp can help clean up the excess phosphorus and nitrogen runoff that’s come into these coastal areas, that’s choking the life out of the coasts. You’ve got fertilizer built into the water for free to grow this kelp, and it’s cleaning up this thing, these chemicals that are sort of toxic.
Joe Quirk: Yes. And this is the actual vision of our actual engineers who will be building the floating islands in French Polynesia, and or in countries around the world, which is to absorb the nutrient runoff that, you know, comes off of agriculture, and absorbing it with seaweed and different kinds of algae, and seaweed that would take out the heavy metals. And there’s a whole discovery process around that, and you could actually restore coastal environments. And this really resonates for me. I wrote a whole book designed for adults and children about the Marine Mammal Center here in California. It’s called Call to the Rescue. And it’s all about how marine mammals are affected negatively by nutrient pollution and how that gives rise to mass die-offs and the negative environmental effects.
And so we always think like, oh, we have to prevent people from doing this, we have to stop fertilizer from running into the seas. I don’t know how we’re going to do that. But if you think of all that nutrient, what’s called nutrient pollution, as a resource — you know, Buckminster Fuller said that pollution is simply resources we’re not using — you can completely restore all those coastal environments by absorbing all that nutrient runoff and carbonic acid and turning it back into food and fuel, if Blue21 has their vision fulfilled.
Ross Kenyon: We were actually at the Buckminster Fuller Institute yesterday and did a podcast over there.
Joe Quirk: Well, were you with Amanda?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Joe Quirk: Wow.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you know her?
Joe Quirk: I’m a fan.
Ross Kenyon: You’re a fan?
Joe Quirk: Yeah, I met her once or twice.
Ross Kenyon: You tech burners involved in environmental pursuits — I feel like it probably isn’t the biggest community. Or maybe it is.
Joe Quirk: Maybe it is. Is that all? 60,000, there’s a lot.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s a sizeable community. Yeah, well, very nice. There’s a lot to be excited about there from multiple angles too, and any time you can take a waste product and turn it into an economic input... I’ve never heard that Buckminster Fuller quote, but I love it, because it’s one of the themes that I come back to constantly here: you can take that problem, and then all of a sudden it becomes a solution, and it’s economically viable. There’s no reason for anyone to fight over it. It’s not like you need to no longer pollute or no longer fertilize your crop. So you can still do that. We just found a way where we can make it all work together.
Joe Quirk: Yeah, that’s the best kind of solution, isn’t it? Yeah, I mean, Fuller literally said pollution is resources we’re letting go unused because we’re ignorant of their value. And, you know, Blue21, working through Blue Frontiers, has this concept of cyclical metabolism, that we could create these societies in harmony with how nature itself works, and it’s just like an extension of nature itself, which is what it should be.
Ross Kenyon: Are they the ones growing the fish and then using the oil from the fish to convert that into fuels, or is that a different group?
Joe Quirk: So, in the book, they were called DeltaSync. The first aquapreneurs you meet are Karina Czapiewska and Rutger de Graaf, who are the co-founders of DeltaSync. Their first language is Dutch, and I think after a while they realized that having sink in the name for your floating city — it’s supposed to be S-Y-N-C. So they changed themselves to Blue21. It’s sort of like a different entity, and those very people featured in the book are now the people that are going to be building the first floating islands, almost definitely.
Ross Kenyon: Well, we’re throwing out Buckminster Fuller quotes. I have this sticker that Amanda gave us yesterday. I’d just like to say it again: you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. And I think that really resonates not only for what Nori is doing, but for what Blue Frontiers is trying to do, because there’s an entirely new model that we can build here.
Christophe Jospe: And I just want to take this back a little bit to the theme of this podcast, which is the Reversing Climate Change podcast. And I know we’re also the floating architecture, engineering and design series of the Blue Frontiers podcast. And those things together — okay, we can definitely play a role in reversing climate change. And on the one hand, you’re helping islands that are most affected by sea level rise adapt, but you’re also enabling that adaptation to be regenerative to the health of the planet. And so when we think about climate change being a function of too much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and excess in the ocean, where now oceans are acidifying and coral reefs are dying and all sorts of fish populations are just having weird trends that we never saw before because of how the planet is out of kilter...
We now can see a movement that doesn’t just say, okay, we’re going to go live and kind of save ourselves by floating at sea, but let’s float at sea, let’s live in a way that restores the health of this planet, and let’s play a role in innovating to get that health of the planet there more quickly, in a way that makes the systems of today kind of obsolete.
Paul Gambill: Right. So yeah, because it’s not just that these floating islands are being built to serve the needs of people in places that are going to be impacted by sea level rise. Like, the technologies that are developed as part of this are going to be beneficial to all of humanity, and it’s just a matter of figuring out the business model that can enable the growth of this. There has to be some sort of value created for some people willing to pay for that value. But the technologies and things we learn from that, that can be applied in so many more ways.
Joe Quirk: Yes. And seasteading is not an escape, it’s a solution to the problems that land people care about, and that’s why most people are pursuing it.
Ross Kenyon: Land people, landlubbers.
Joe Quirk: We prefer terrans. Yes, land folk. But yes, that quote, Buckminster Fuller, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete — that’s one of the first things Rutger de Graaf said to me, co-founder of DeltaSync and Blue21, when I first met him, to talk to him. I mean, it’s like they were independently conceiving of seasteading over there in the Netherlands without calling it that, in every dimension. And they actually built a floating pavilion in Rotterdam, and it’s like, oh my God, they’re like really getting started. So we partnered with them, to take the next step.
Ross Kenyon: And what’s next? What’s coming for Blue Frontiers?
Joe Quirk: What’s coming for Blue Frontiers is, hopefully we’ll get lots of attention for the Seacoin. Hopefully we’ve fulfilled all our obligations to French Polynesia, and we hope that they approve of our legislation for the SeaZone, which takes the best practices of the 4,000 special economic zones around the world and instantiates them in one.
Ross Kenyon: Can you explain — what is a special economic zone?
Joe Quirk: A special economic zone I think of as legal islands created within countries with special exemptions from certain regulations and certain taxes in order to create prosperity. I think of the first one as being Hong Kong, the next one as being Shenzhen. And, you know, over the last 50 or 60 years, these have been so successful. Little miniature, modest governance startups with some different rules and some exemptions created within countries have been so successful that more than 4,000 have proliferated across the world, in like 70% of the world’s countries at this point. This is the most momentous political revolution in the world, and nobody knows about it because it’s completely peaceful and it’s from the inside out.
And Tom W. Bell writes about it in depth in his book Your Next Government? From the Nation State to Stateless Nations. And he is one of the key legal advisers at Blue Frontiers, and he sort of designed the SeaZone, which is the next step beyond the special economic zone. So it’s kind of like taking the best, the greatest hits of regulations and rules from various countries and applying them on the SeaZone, and basically it’s strongly inclined towards personal and business freedom. We’re going to choose a peer group of countries among the most peaceful and prosperous countries on earth. They’re going to decide which rules and regulations are going to be on the SeaZone. If they all agree that rule is necessary, then that will be on the SeaZone. If even one of those countries prospers without that rule, then you can veto that rule.
So you only have, you know, the rules that are demonstrated to work and be necessary in the most prosperous nations on earth. So again, we’re also on a legal frontier, so it’s not a willy-nilly, we’re going out there and just starting all over. We’re taking best practices that already exist, strongly inclined towards freedom. We’re only going to use the ones that have been demonstrated to work, and we’re going to throw out the ones that aren’t. And we’re going to let these societies emerge from the bottom up, developing their own rules. We’re going to have something called the SeaZone Authority that administrates these rules. It’s going to be under the protection of one of the most peaceful and prosperous, although one of the most peaceful countries on earth, which is French Polynesia, which in turn will be a part of France.
So there’s going to be these little concentric circles going down to the SeaZone. So it’s all very just a perfect little minimum viable product for the seastead that will be able to scale up and become the seasteads on the high seas in the future.
Ross Kenyon: Now, when is that? When can you relocate, 2021?
Joe Quirk: I expect you guys on the [unclear] seastead. Well, at least come visit, because we need to. I really like [unclear], I start drooling if I hear it. Who knows? I mean, I think this could scale up if we have the first few examples that people can point at and look at, and it’s beautiful and they gasp, but it’s made of something that’s different, and its international unity. And it’s an incubation hub showing all these blue technologies, wave technologies, and people get a view of what the future of sustainable floating societies is like. I think that will have such an effect that other countries worried about sea level rise will reach out to us. And I think getting these first few examples is really important, and then we can scale up really fast and proliferate thousands of them all over the world in the decades ahead.
Ross Kenyon: I hope. It’s pretty exciting, and we’ll keep watching this too, see what happens. There’s a lot of moving parts to it too. Working on the team, there’s people that are working on the food systems, people who are working on the architecture — clearly you can’t have something that would not be seaworthy — and then also there’s a huge legal component to it too, and then there’s a blockchain component to it. It seems like you’re innovating, or trying to, in multiple areas, and keeping things real lively.
Joe Quirk: Yeah, it turns out that founding a totally new civilization from the ground up, or the water up, is even more complicated than it sounds. Yes. But fortunately, you could have said the same thing about, you know, my iPhone. Like, the people creating the iPhone, for instance, couldn’t imagine the apps that were going to be on it, and which ones would go out of business, which ones would work. I don’t know, I’m just providing the platform, and then all the innovators can rush in and compete to serve people the best. And that’s how I end up with all these marvelous little apps, and I hope in the future there will be governance apps. And I think the innovations are in principle undetectable that will emerge from floating societies.
Ross Kenyon: I think we share that in common with you. We see ourselves the same way, that we build this platform where people can pay for carbon removal, and all sorts of different methodologies people can show up with and test out and try to prove that these are valid and are removing carbon dioxide, and other people will be willing to pay for them. And who knows what are the different ways that people could do that but they aren’t doing it right now?
Joe Quirk: Yeah. Joe McKinney, one of the co-founders of the Startup Societies Foundation, he convinced me live on his podcast to refer to myself as, as he refers to himself, an exitarian. So if you have to choose an ideology, like, it sounds like someone who only eats eggs. All right, we need to rethink that name. But the principle of exit, that’s the fundamental mechanism that works: that if people don’t like something, they can leave, and so the people providing the service have to please them. And so as long as you can choose voluntarily among all these different services, then the best options emerge, because the innovators will have to compete with you. And we just don’t have that with our societies. Now I can’t just quit the United States and leave. It’s not that easy. Now you have to pay them a ton of money to do so, and they keep raising the exit tax. If people want to renounce their citizenship, it gets more and more expensive and more onerous.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. There’s a very good book that I read, it’s very short. You’ve probably read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, right?
Joe Quirk: No, all my friends have read it and they’ve all argued about it with me so much, I feel like I don’t need to read it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah. It’s a pretty quick read, but you probably just know these ideas anyways. The general point of it is that there’s two main ways to change a system. You can either have voice, in which case you get to vote or complain to the manager at a restaurant. The alternative is exit, in which case you never go to the restaurant again, or you just leave the country and you emigrate somewhere. And there are trade-offs to both of these approaches, but seasteading in general seems like a very strong exit potential, which in turn might actually encourage voice. If they know that you can really leave very easily, wouldn’t they be more likely to resort to voice rather than exit?
Joe Quirk: Yes. I mean, my wife is exercising her voice at the IRS right now and not getting much of a response. I have registered complaints at the post office, and so I have a voice at the post office. It somehow just doesn’t work, because I can’t just take my business and go somewhere else, and the people providing the service don’t care. But at other services I use, if I express a complaint to just about anybody at Starbucks or something, they’re so worried about a Yelp review. My voice has power only because I hold in my hand the threat of switching to Peet’s. That’s all it takes.
What I love about this is that if you’re trying to change the world in the marketplace, the market of providing a service compels bad people to behave well. And if you’re trying to change the world through politics, the political process compels good people to become more corrupt in order to succeed. And, you know, a great example of this was, in between writing the seasteading book proposal for publishers and waiting for it to sell at a publisher, I took a job at a lamp store where the boss was one of the most bitter, meanest guys I’ve ever met. Just very, really bitter, mean man. You really had problems. But when he was in the presence of his customers, he was so serviceable and so knowledgeable and so helpful, and always customers just thought he was the greatest guy. But then to everyone else he was just such a mean guy. But because it was in his interest to be a good guy in order to sell his products, he was compelled to become a better person, because all his customers had the power of exit. They can go to the other lamp store.
Christophe Jospe: Do you want to say your line, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: No, no, I love that. Not at all, I want to do it. I always, I always say it, I just got baited into doing it. When you can appeal to people’s selfish desires and the system turns that into pro-social ends, that’s like the ultimate outcome of policy. So you have this guy who doesn’t really care about these people, but he’s getting paid to, so he’s going to behave himself.
Joe Quirk: Yes, we’re all better off as a result, and if we didn’t have that, he’d probably just be a cranky old guy, get off my lawn.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yelling at the mailman.
Joe Quirk: Yeah, that’s who he was, actually. He was the mailman. Yeah, it was really, yeah. I mean, if we can agree that human nature exists, you don’t even need to say whether we’re selfish or not selfish. We can just say that I care about myself and my family and my friends more than I care about my allies, and then I care about my allies more than I care about my general tribe, and then I care about my tribe more than I care about strangers. So if you give me power, I’m always going to choose my family and friends and the people who got me in this position over strangers, because that’s just my priority. That’s the way we’re built. So what compels people to devote themselves to serving strangers? It’s when that’s their only power. If I can pursue my self-interest through providing things for them...
Ross Kenyon: This is the classic idea I associate with Hayek, but it’s been all over the place: that there’s a micro order, that’s the family and your friends, you don’t need market economics working in there. We can treat each other well just by being altruistic. But when it comes to the extended order, you can’t really hold people accountable through social norms with people you only see once, like a tourist coming to your shop. You have to use the discipline of the market, of profit and loss, of someone actually paying you for a service. That’s just one of the better ways to organize a giant mass society.
Joe Quirk: Yes, and governance itself should be like this. A politician shouldn’t just be afraid that I might vote for the only other option. The politician should be afraid that I’m just going to take my taxes and go to another place, or choose another form of governance. And, you know, credit cards are a form of governance and they hustle to please me, and we can go on and on with this.
Ross Kenyon: I wish California was better at this. But the big states like California and New York especially, they treat demand for living there as inelastic, that doesn’t really change. Granted, people are leaving California for places like Texas that have a booming economy and lower taxes, but I don’t feel like they respond very well to attracting people. It’s like, everything’s expensive here, there’s high taxes, and it isn’t that well governed. We have the fifth biggest economy in the world, we have Hollywood and Silicon Valley, yet half the time the books aren’t balanced at all, and it seems like we fight over everything. It’s kind of a kooky place to live. But they treat you sort of like, you want to be here, you want the beach, right? All right, too bad. That’s what you’ve got to deal with.
Joe Quirk: So if I have a monopoly over this section of one of the largest economies in the world, I can just grow and provide more services and tax people worse and worse. But notice how people are starting to leave California. It used to be the place where people go, and now it’s a place where people are leaving, largely because it’s poorly governed. And we already have town-steading and city-steading. People can switch among towns and cities, and the more choice you have, the better service gets.
Ross Kenyon: This is great. I think we should probably end it, but I could see why your podcast with Blue Frontiers went for two and a half hours, because I think that we could probably do the same. Just, yes, riffing, rapping, hanging out.
Joe Quirk: Adequately Seavangelized, though?
Ross Kenyon: I got the full, you know, wololo, wololo from Age of Empires, when you would convert enemy units with a priest. They just go, wololo. Well, I got Seavangelized.
Joe Quirk: Yes. Well, I only Seavangelized you guys, that was just an appetizer. I think my conversation with the Seavangelist Nathalie Mezza-Garcia, I think we went for seven hours. I sat down, and then, so she just took the first two and a half hours and made that a podcast. But we thought about, you could make a whole audiobook out of that. Yeah, we’re interested in the same things, so we just kept going deeper and deeper, do all this stuff. And, you know, it’s just all sorts of interesting ideas about spontaneous order and systems developing from parts that don’t communicate with each other, and so on. It’s really interesting.
Yeah, there are certain people where I find out what they’re interested in, and then I say they should be seasteaders, and then they become seasteaders. One of them was Nathalie. Another one was Tom Bell. You can just tell by how they talk about things that they’ll be interested in seasteading.
Ross Kenyon: So yeah. Well, thanks for being here, Joe. Thanks for having us in your home.
Joe Quirk: Yes. Thanks for being here in my home.
Ross Kenyon: How long can we stay?
Joe Quirk: Depends on what you say about my home, live on the air.
Ross Kenyon: It’s beautiful.
Joe Quirk: Okay, you can stay.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks, Joe.
