Maybe 3 uh, 3 points, one a little bit on my personal uh, political evolution in thinking about these these questions. And then, um, I want to say some things on why I think seasteading is not just possible or desirable, but why it is actually necessary, both from a political and technological perspective. And I want to touch on that a little bit in my comments.

You know, I think my personal political evolution, in some ways, rather similar to Patrick's. I was, you know, when I was a teenager, when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, very much believed in the importance of the give and take of political debate, and thought that, you know, what you had to do was convince people of your ideas. And so, you know, it started a one of these independent student newspapers, and, you know, but most of it really was, it was, the metaphor I have was not like the pulling on a rope.

It was more like trench warfare in World War I on the Western Front, where you had incredible amounts of carnage, and everybody said, you know, we need to charge, and people, you know, need to ignore the machine guns, and work around the clock, licking envelopes, and ring doorbells, or whatever, like slightly more elevated versions of that are. And there was really no progress was ever made. And you had some sort of very marginal victories, but it just doesn't seem like it's worth the amount of effort that God expended.

And, you know, as I, um, and sort of in my 20s, when I was living in New York, you know, I sort of, you sort of start to understand why people get very pessimistic about stuff. And there's sort of a version of where I thought you could almost measure someone's IQ by their degree of pessimism. And so that, you know, the really optimistic people were generally not very bright.

And then, you know, people were a little bit smarter. They were, like, maybe secretly pessimistic, but they thought it was moral, that, you know, people should be exhorted to lick envelopes and ring doorbells.

And then, you know, there were, you know, really smart people who just got extremely pessimistic and thought that there's nothing an individual can really do in the face of the relentless indifference of the universe.

And so you basically, you know, if you're sort of, um, you know, and so it sort of often sort of manifests itself on the part of people who are more conservative and, you know, excessive amounts of alcohol consumption, and, of course, the people who are libertarian didn't necessarily limit themselves to alcohol. But in the event, sort of, I think my, my optimistic cut on this and sort of where I started to shift my views on this a little bit was that I started to think that, you know, maybe one didn't have to be so pessimistic if things were not limited to politics. And if there were things other than politics.

Maybe there were actually things one could do. And I think, you know, the venue that I think is an incredibly important venue for change is technology, because it is something that a small number of individuals or people can do. They can build companies, and those companies can change the world, in ways that can sometimes happen so quickly, or in such unexpected ways that the political system cannot fully grasp it.

And by the time the change has happened, Maybe there'll be some reaction, and maybe you'll get the aircraft carrier coming towards the sea stead, but if you have 10,000 different sea steads, you know, maybe it'll be too late. And I think that's, I think there is an element of technology where it is a way for people to unilaterally bring about change and make the world a better place. I think there was, you know, certainly a very big narrative of the internet of the late '90s and throughout this decade, where it has been about that.

You know, I think the jury on it is still out, you know, how big a deal it's going to be. Is it world transforming? Is it just this virtual reality that's too tangential?

I think it's definitely worth the effort. I think all these things are. But I think seasteading, in particular, is a very interesting version, because it's sort of at the point where it involves real live human beings.

It's unlike the internet. It's in a real place. And unlike outer space, um, I think it is much closer on the technology side, even though we can, you know, debate whether it's still utopian or not. This is, I think, a very important question for people to explore today. And so, this was sort of the basic frame that got me towards looking at technological solutions as a way to move the world in a direction that will make it more free.

Now, I want to just say, two sort of quick thoughts, and, you know, these will echo many of the ideas different people have, on why, I think, it is both politically and technologically necessary for us to be doing something like seasteading in on this planet, the next in the decades ahead. And the political one, which I think, you know, many people have folks, and I'll just say something very briefly on, it goes to the question of freedom and regulatory arbitrage, and the way I like to frame that particular question is the thought experiment. And the thought experiment is that in, you know, the year 1945, you had about 45 countries in the world.

Today, we have probably about 200 countries, maybe a little bit more, I think 192 in the United Nations, in practice, a little bit more than that. And the thought experiment question to ask is, fast forward to the year 2015. How many countries will exist in the world?

Is the number going to be greater than 200? Less than 200 or exactly 200? And the three answers to that question give you three different futures of the world, and we can sort of map out what they will be like.

And there are a lot of details about them that are, you know, different. But I would say one variable that I think is incredibly important is if we have a future of the world in which there are, let's say, 1000 countries versus 200, which would be sort of a weirdly, because it was sort of be suggesting that nothing would change. I think the middle case is actually very unlikely, or if we go versus, and we have, let's say, 20 countries, or two countries, or one country.

What are some of the attributes of this? And one that I would submit, strikes me as very obvious, is that the marginal tax rates will vary quite a bit depending on the number of countries. And so if you looked at the world, the United States, 1950s, marginal tax rates were 91%.

And you know, if you didn't like that, you could move to the Soviet Union, you could move to various other places where the rates were even higher. And today, they have relentlessly come down. And I know that a lot of people are very worried about taxes going up imminently in the near future.

I actually am fairly optimistic about this. I think this is not going to happen, because there are too many countries. And I think we have a microcosm of this test going on in the state of California right now, where the government's run out of money, and the normal thing is to raise taxes, and you have all these people who are threatening to leave the state of California.

California. And so, so far, in spite of the worst financial crisis since the '30s, they have not been able to raise marginal tax rates in California. They're not able to do it in New York.

I predict they will not be able to do it in the United States as a whole. And so, you know, we're gonna be headed towards quite a systemic crisis, even though I think it's, in a way, a fairly, a fairly positive thing, because as long as globalization continues, and people connects it, and you have different countries, and the numbers going up, you will have this incredible pressure. And again, the different version of the thought experiment would be if the city of San Francisco were an independent country.

So it would be, well, it would be one of the most left wing socialist countries in the world. And I would predict the tax rates in San Francisco would be like Hong Kong. The marginal rate would be maybe 15%, 16%, if you could just move to Marin, or to South San Francisco.

It would be taxes way lower than the most the most right wing part of the United States, the most libertarian part of the United States, you would have super low taxes. And it has nothing to do with the ideology, the people, or anything like that. It is just the structure.

And I think the structure gets driven in large part by the technology. And this is why, I think, anything that can be done to create much larger numbers of countries will be very good. And so I will just leave it as this thought experiment for 2050 and what will be the number of countries in the world at that point.

And I think that if we want to increase freedom, we want to increase the number of countries. Now, the other third thread, I want to say just a few words about, is the sort of technological question. And I want to actually take a very different cut at this sort of a question, where normally the question about the feasibility goes to all these questions, is it possible?

Is it not possible? There's sort of questions about it's possible, but it's not desirable. Would anybody really want to live on a C stead or... framed the logical question more as a question of almost necessity of whether something like this is necessary.

And if you sort of think of a, you know, two by two standard matrix of whether it's, it's possible or desirable, you know, most of the people here are somewhere on the possible and desirable quadrant, you know, maybe with some reservations, but, you know, we obviously think it's at least somewhat possible, and that it would be somewhat desirable. You know, if we think about the people outside this room, There are probably quite a lot of people who think that it's not possible, but that's a good thing. And so it's sort of weird.

People shouldn't be living on oceans. And, um, and those are actually, um, Those are actually, we don't need to really worry about those people very much because since they don't think it's possible, they won't take us very seriously, and they will not actually try to stop us till it's too late. There's an even smaller number of people who think that it is, let's see, possible but not desirable.

So the people who think it's not possible and not desirable. So it's not possible. And it's good, sorry, I want to, let me print it this week.

Good and bad, possible, impossible. So people think that it is, um, we think that it's possible and good. The people who think that it is not possible and that that's a good thing, that it's not possible.

We don't need to worry about the people who think that it is possible, and would be bad. We do need to worry about, because they will try to actually stop us. But fortunately, that's an even smaller group than the second group.

The group that I think is actually really big. And that we never think about, is the group that basically thinks that C studding is not possible, and it doesn't, and it doesn't really matter one way or the other. And I want to sort of suggest that that's the group that's the most wrong, because if you sort of imagine a world where nothing is going to happen, And this is sort of what is what is considered good.

This tells you that there are some very weird things off with the technological sort of vision of the future. And basically, uh, I think one of the, taking sort of a step back from steestetting, one of the critical questions we have to ask is whether we're in this sort of exponentially growing technological civilization, or whether we're in a place where there's stasis and nothing is happening, just to sort of go to Patrick's Point, not so much on the political social level, but the technological level. And if you have an exponentially accelerating civilization, you expect there to be sort of a lot of, you know, major breakthroughs.

And it's sort of like, you know, I think this is sort of like the image of science fiction books from the 1950s and 1960s. We'd have colonies on the moon, you'd have robots, you'd have flying cars, you'd have cities in the ocean, under the ocean. You'd have eco farming.

You'd turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the '50s and '60s, and that would sort of transform the world. And, you know, if we're honest, some of these things have happened, and some have not, and there are, I think, some legitimate concerns about whether technology has progressed quite as quickly as we would have liked.

There's a book that was written in 1968 by a left of center French writer, which we can perhaps dismiss too easily, Zerbon Schreiber, the American Challenge, described with an exponentially accelerating civilization the United States would look like, and it basically said that if you had exponentially accelerating technology, by the year 2000, the U.S. would be so far ahead of the rest of the world, people would no longer need to compete with anybody else. And so the average person would in the US, in the year 2000, would work seven hours a day, four days a week, have 13 weeks a year of paid vacation, because the technology would move so quickly, you would no longer need to compete. Now this, you know, has not entirely happened.

And I think we need to ask, you know, very hard questions why the future has not arrived as quickly as people hoped it was going to arrive in the late 1960s. You know, the future history of Star Trek, 1967, you'd have lunar bases by 1980, man missions to Mars by 1990, it would go from there to the stars. And I think, now, and I think most people are actually extremely complacent about this set of questions.

As I said, they don't worry about it. They don't think it matters. But the problem is, they have all these other things that they're doing that are implicitly dependent on accelerating technology.

And I'll give you just one sort of financial example of this, which is that basically, if we were to go outside this hotel and take a survey of people, and they'd say, you know, 90% of them, I would guess, even though I'm not taking the service, I'm just making these numbers up, would say, yeah, seasteading's crazy, it's not going to happen, it doesn't matter. It's probably a good thing, it's not gonna happen. So they're sort of in this very big quadrant.

But they also think that their house prices are gonna go up 8 to 10% a year. If they put money into the stock market, going to grow 8 to 10% a year. They believe that they have money in pension funds that's automatically going to grow.

And you have to sort of ask, how is all of this actually possible when they're envisioning no technological progress whatsoever? I was speaking at a, I was speaking at a university, trustees group, in North Carolina, they invested in my venture fund about a week ago, and, you know, they had about 5% of their money was allocated to venture capital, the other 95% of other stuff. Mr. Capital piece hasn't been really working for the last 10 years, and so they're wondering where they should dial back that 5%.

And I was explaining to them, well, you know, if that 5% doesn't work, If technology is not going to actually make any progress, you know, you're not going to make any money on the other 95%. So, you know, if you want sort of a Paschal's wager type argument, you can say that you might as well put all your money into venture capital, because if that doesn't work, you know, everything else is going to be worthless anyway. And this was just a shocking. thing to them because they didn't think these two things are connected at all.

And they don't think that exponential, technological progress is somehow secretly embedded in all the financial models. And if you ask, you know, why do people think the stock market goes up 10% a year? Well, it's because it's done that for the last 100 years on average.

And why has it done it for the last 100 years? It's because we've had extraordinary technological progress for the last 100 years. If you were in a completely static world, let's say you were living in the late declining stage of the Roman Empire from 400 AD to 500 AD, I suspect that if you had invested in the equivalent of the stock market, you would not have gotten 10% of your returns.

You probably would have been done extraordinarily well to sort of get something like zero. And so, there are these, and it seems to me that one of the sort of challenges we have is that, on the one hand, this sort of stuff is perceived as incredibly strange and incredibly weird, and yet, it is implicitly assumed by everybody who bought a large house in Las Vegas, everybody who's putting money into an equity index fund, and one of our challenges, try to sort of connect the dots, and make it clear to people, that these things are, very, very deeply, very deeply linked together. Now, I think, I think that there is sort of a, I think one of the challenges that we have in terms of, to the extent we are talking to people outside this group, and not just acting unilaterally, I think one of the things that needs to be very much retold is the narrative of what happened in 2008, and the sort of economic crash that took place.

And it is typically described as a credit crisis. And what credit is involves claims on the future. And it's so like, Patrick, I'm going to lend him some money, he's going to pay me back more in the future because I assume there's going to be all this progress and growth, and that's why he will be able to pay me more.

And in some sense, I can think, you know, people focus on it being too much regulation, too little regulation, people are stupid or greedy. All these sort of psychological explanations, I think what the way you need to think of this entire economic crisis is a technological crisis, where people basically assumed there was going to be very rapid progress, and it didn't quite happen, and that's why all the money they owed, which implicitly assumed this exponential progress, all of a sudden, couldn't get paid off, and you have a crisis. And it's very important for us to diagnose the crisis correctly, if we're going to solve it.

If we misdiagnosis, we will never solve it. And so, one of the things I think we need to sort of try to do is somehow go back to the future, back to the way people thought the future was going to progress in the 1950s, 1960s, a world of runaway exponential progress. And that is sort of the way we need to get out of it.

And so, the question of whether sea steading is desirable or possible, in my mind, is not even relevant. It is absolutely necessary. And so, I let other people figure out how to do it.

But from my point of view, it is simply unnecessary that it be done. And I think that, you know, the alternative is for all of us to sort of gently go into that good night, which I refuse to do. Thank you very much.

All right. Yes, go ahead. So, why do you think we haven't made the kind of progress in the physical sciences, I guess, technological advances where people were imagining in the '50s and '60s?

But we have the rapid advances in the information. Now, I remember it was struck me in the movie 2001, you know, all the all the spacecraft and stuff wasn't there when 2001 arrived, but all the technology was not only there, but more advanced than what was in the movie. And I, you know, one thing you can say is the government was responsible for the space program and the private sector is responsible for the information, but is there something else?

Is it just harder to do this, build spacecraft? You know, I don't have, I have all sorts of speculative theories on the why question. I think, I would say on the what question, you know, and I don't think there has been progress in the last 40 years, obviously, there's been tremendous progress in the information revolution, the internet, some progress in biotechnology, I think, a little bit less there than I would have liked.

There's been, but other areas, there's been, there has been, there has been somewhat less. And I think there are sort of many different sort of why type explanations I can give. The cultural one I sort of bias towards is that there's a degree to which people don't think this stuff matters, and that they don't study it, they don't devote their lives to it, they don't focus on it.

They think that it's a problem that other people will solve. And that basically, we can just buy, figure out the way to get the house in Vegas, and that's what we should specialize in, and other people will figure out a way to have this runaway exponential progress. And, you know, this sort of a free rider approach generally works, but it doesn't work when, you know, everybody believes it.

And I think something like that has happened. I think there obviously are all sorts of crazy government incentives, you know, one of, I think there's, you know, there's an argument that every, uh, this is slightly polemical, but there's an argument that every ailment and disease in the United States is the fault of the government, and that basically, um, you know, it's, that's why we have people who are fat. that's why we have people, you know, who have all sorts of health issues of one sort or another. And so, yeah, I think there's probably a very big, you know, very big governmental part of this.

I would say, though, the setting aside the why question, and even setting aside the what question, from today going forward, we have to make progress on these sorts of things. So we can debate whether there was a lot of progress in the last 40 years or not. We can debate, whether, you know, why there may have been slower progress, what I'm interested in is just getting it restarted today, and because I think the place where the really big gains will be made in the next 20 years, are in some of these sort of more foundational material signs, some of these hard technologies that need to get built out, and to really generate the kinds of things where you can have an economy that's massively growing. relatively unregulated, comparatively unregulated.

And that's been a reason why. Yes. Well, it happened very quickly.

And so people were not able to get on top of regulating it. So I think that was, that may be a why component. Certainly, you know, my experience at PayPal, where we, you know, created this new financial service, which attracted a great deal of regulatory scrutiny, it happened so quickly that the regulators were too slow to respond.

So, you know, we went public in February 2002, there were some people in the state of Louisiana who wanted to shut us down because maybe we're doing illegal banking. You called up the bank regulators in Louisiana and said, you know, there are 100,000 people with PayPal accounts in the state of Louisiana, 3,000 small businesses. Does Louisiana really want to get a reputation as a state that's technologically backwards and hostile to progress?

And the answer was, No, we don't, and so we'll let it keep going. And so I think the fact that you have, you know, that you have, like, a large, I think there is, so I think there is a velocity of it that is actually fairly, fairly critical. And so, uh, you know, I think, you know, I don't know when we start, uh, building sea steads on masse, but it probably would be helpful if once we started building them.

We started building like, you know, 100s a year. Yeah. Uh, let's see.

Yes, go ahead.ologicalitiives do you see right now Well, I think I think the ones that I'm most excited about are all, you know, we have a venture capital fund. I basically try to redirect all of it towards, you know, science fiction type investing. So it's basically space, robots, AI, you know, the next wave biotech.

We're going to try to find a seasteading related venture if we can figure out the right way to do it. So that's one of the things, you know, we try to incubate a for profit company to do something on a C studding context. But I think as an investor, I like those areas the best, because they seem to be so extraordinarily out of fashion among everybody else.

So, if, if, you know, even if we just find one C studying company and one robotics company, they'll do very well because nobody else is investing the stuff. Yes. I don't, um, you know, I think it's, don't have a strong, don't have a strong view on nanotech.

It is, you know, a lot of these technologies have happened slower than people were predicting, if you sort of think of Drexler's engines of creation, book, which I think was written in 1986 or something like that. You know, it certainly has taken a bit longer. I would, you know, I'd sort of focus on the science fiction technologies of the '50s and '60s at this point.

So space, robots, some of the biotech stuff, some of the AI type stuff. And so, you know, but nanotech may, it may be there or may not be. Don't have a strong view on it.

Yes. on TV up here, but down in Southern California, the state of that last dream, uh, the TV out there with Lugar County, too, uh, to the better, lower taxes. The question really is if you envision these coming being created by the break of a current countries in. So you have a methodism in my work other than, you know, the revolution, where the United States might grow up in the other countries.

Well, I think one of the, one of the sort of very difficult problems for the United States, as a country, is, um, is that, uh, we have this, um, we have this very troubled history where you had, um, the attempt to break it up in the 1860s, was motivated by something that was objectively pretty evil, namely slavery. And so, because of that, whenever people talk about secession of states and a breakup of the United States into various pieces. You automatically end up sounding like you're racist and have something, and you want to do something really, really crazy.

And so I think there is sort of a weird part of the U.S. history that makes it unusually difficult to break the U.S. into different components. Now, that being said, I do think, objectively, the U.S. should be many different countries. And you could say the only thing that sort of currently makes the U.S. a single big country is sort of the global military might that it is able to project.

And basically, and if you didn't think that was an important value. We should just have all these countries be different, because people's values in Texas are radically different from San Francisco, and it seems very bad to have just one group trying to sort of domineer the other and sort of alternate at various points. And so, rationally, it should be many different countries.

Very hard to do, given the cultural history of this country. Yeah, go ahead. Um, I will not be able to attend your untalk because I, unfortunately, have, like, a crazy schedule that gets scheduled by people, and I sort of have not been able to assert enough control over my life in general.

And I have a, I do not discount my life sufficiently six months into the future, and I'm willing to commit to things like speaking at this event and things, things of that sort. And so, unfortunately, will not be able to do it. However, I think the biotech areas that I think are the most promising are the intersection of biotech with various other technologies.

And I think we may be close to a point where it is possible for people to start biotech companies who do not have PhDs or MBAs. And so the basic criterion that we have for investing in biotech is companies in which the people do not have PhDs or MBAs, because they all have screwed up massively. For 30 years, they run an industry where people have on the whole returned no money to investors.

And it's been marginal academic projects, and then typically they're dressed up by NBA people who are salesy and markety and substance free. And in sort of a bad way. And, um, and so, uh, we, um, I think, I think there is, at this point, enough information out there that people can learn on the internet, that you can have, you can have people start, uh, start very successful companies, um, who don't necessarily have all the right credentials.

And that's what I think is very hopeful. So I think there's sort of, at our LP meeting on my venture fund, in a month, we're going to have like a discussion on sort of what we're describing as garage biotech, and how people can actually start biotech companies out of a garage at this point. And that's sort of the direction, I think, is worth looking into