"The golden age of voluntarism, anarcho-capitalism has already emerged. It's all over two-thirds of the Earth's surface. It's completely flourishing. It's long since entered its golden age. We've already proved that it works because it emerged naturally on the sea.
It's called the cruise ship industry."
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Timothy Allen sits down with Joe Quirk, president of The Seasteading Institute, to make the strongest practical case for “exit” as a governance strategy, starting with Sealand and pirate-radio absurdity and ending with a serious blueprint for floating communities that can iterate on rules the way markets iterate on products.
They use cruise ships as the key intuition pump: millions of people already live for weeks at sea under private rule-sets with security, dispute resolution, labor hierarchies, and tight logistics, which makes seasteading less sci-fi and more a question of engineering, law, and finance.
From there, the conversation digs into what actually blocks seasteads from becoming mainstream: legal classification (not quite a ship, not quite a building), insurance, standards, and the need for designs that feel like livable cities rather than tiny pods for hobbyists. Joe argues seasteads are a “technology” for creating 100,000 competing governance experiments across most of the planet, while Timothy keeps pressing on the realism: what would make this legible, scalable, and resilient against political pushback.
Enjoy the conversation.
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New ArkPad Seasteading Resort in Próspera: https://tinyurl.com/ArkPad
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LEAD SPONSOR: Veritas Villages: https://www.veritasvillages.com/freecities
Veritas Villages are building off-grid, energy self-sufficient communities for freedom lovers in Latin America. Bitcoin is accepted at all villages, including for the purchase of property.
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Previous interviews with Patrick Hiebert, Founder of Veritas Villages:
EP 156: https://fountain.fm/episode/66NqAclTBh7FByIX7lCq
EP 107: https://fountain.fm/episode/Fh6uGwZvVtPsYsR53pTI
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TIMESTAMPS (Audio Version Only)
0:00:30 – Episode introduction
0:09:46 – Start of Conversation
0:11:00 – Sealand origin story, warning shot, “outside our jurisdiction”
0:16:00 – Media narrative shift: “seasteading comeback” and brand rehab
0:23:24 – AI analogical reasoning and “ChatGPT fatigue”
0:34:31 – Cruise ships as anarcho-capitalist governance at scale
0:38:16 – “Will the state just crush it?” and how exit survives
0:43:44 – Islands, vice, and why governments ignore bigger abuses
0:48:06 – Paradigm defense: why people resist solutions they can’t unsee
0:54:49 – The captain as dictator, overlapping jurisdictions, polycentric order
0:59:48 – Salvage law and Lloyd’s as a working market court
1:12:16 – Planet Ocean: why space is propaganda and the ocean is the real frontier
1:47:37 – Flat earth as a stress test for epistemology and belief
2:18:18 – The bottleneck: certification, insurance, flags, and making seasteads family-safe
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NOSTR:
- Timothy Allen: npub1gcf9ltaeu42f4tr20z3avkas04dezlx3jaudqsuu87gvmh686xasrvqjg0
- Free Cities Foundation: npub1lsj8pmgedqqamt89c27tzjjnlf0wn7q7udjm7j2cl9xxz97eacns2mwpee
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LEGACY SOCIAL MEDIA:
- Joe Quirk: https://x.com/joequirkexults
- Seasteading Institute: https://x.com/Seasteading
- Timothy Allen: https://twitter.com/MrTimothyAllen
- Free Cities Foundation: https://twitter.com/freecitiesfound
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OTHER LINKS:
- Seasteading Institute: https://www.seasteading.org/
- Joe's Bibliography: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B000AQ5392
- Veritas Villages: https://www.veritasvillages.com/freecities
- Invest in ArkPad's Próspera Resort: http://tinyurl.com/ArkPad
- Free Cities Foundation: https://free-cities.org/
- Become a resident or business owner in Próspera: https://prospera.co/r/freecities