The billionaires' utopia blueprint

Starbase. Prospera. California Forever. Mars. From private cities to interstellar colonies, tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have backed experiments designed to operate beyond the borders — and laws — most of us live by. So we wondered: has this happened before? In this episode, we visit an Arctic archipelago, homesteads floating in the ocean, and a startup city in Honduras to explore where places built with the ultra-rich in mind leave all the rest of us. Guests: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of The Cosmopolites and The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World Wayne Gramlich, retired computer engineer Dan Girma, producer on NPR's Embedded podcast Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:28Speaker 01

  We did not ask if he had seen any monsters, for monsters have ceased to be news. There is never any shortage of horrible creatures who prey on human beings, snatch away their food, or devour whole populations. But examples of wise social planning are not so easy to find.

• 0:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's the year 1516, where inside the pages of a book called Utopia, breathing the fictional air of Antwerp, Belgium.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  The Utopians fail to understand why anyone should be so fascinated by the dull gleam of a tiny bit of stone, when he has all the stars in the sky to look at.

• 1:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  An old, sunburned, long-bearded traveler named Raphael Haithalade has just returned to Europe after spending five years on an island called Utopia. And he's seeing the world with new eyes, ranting to anyone who will listen.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men, procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the nation.

• 1:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  About corrupt leaders, absurd laws, and the enclosure system, in which so-called landlords fence off lands belonging to villagers, turning them into their personal fiefdoms, all for the sake of profit. What a contrast to the island of Utopia, he reminisces.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Where every man has a right to everything.

• 1:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  Gold is used for chamber pots. Private property isn't a thing. Everyone wears the exact same colorless clothes and works six-hour days.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Everyone has his eye upon you.

• 2:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  And all movement is perfectly regulated.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  If any man goes out of the city to which he belongs without leave, he is taken for a fugitive and severely punished. And if he does this often, he is condemned to slavery.

• 2:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  The author of this book, Thomas More, invented the word utopia. It's a Greek pun combining utopos, no place, and utopos, good place. It asks, in a tongue-in-cheek way, is a perfect society possible? Or is the fantasy just a mirror held up to reality? And a chance to change it?

• 2:47Speaker 03

  I mean, I hate to sound like utopic tech bro here, but if you'll excuse me for three seconds. You know, these are things that are going to save lives. We can make the world amazing. More profound than fire or electricity or anything that we have done in the past.

• 3:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  Over the last few decades, the tech sphere has thrived on the urge to optimize everything, including utopia. If we can just solve for X here and invent for Y there, we can build the perfect society. Perfect for who? That's a different story.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  You would prefer the human race to endure, right?

• 3:22Speaker 04

  You're hesitating. Yeah, well.

• 3:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  From private cities.

• 3:25Speaker 05

  California Forever is building the next great American city.

• 3:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  To interstellar colonies.

• 3:30Speaker 06

  You could absolutely colonize the whole galaxy.

• 3:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  Tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have backed experiments designed to operate beyond the borders and laws most of us live by.

• 3:43Speaker 07

  Starting new countries is actually possible, preferable and profitable.

• 3:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  So we were curious. Has anyone tried it? Has this fantasy of exit, of opting out of the rules and building a new world, been put to the test? I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. On this episode of Throughline from NPR, we'll take you from a forgotten Arctic archipelago. The only place in the world with open borders. To floating cities in the ocean.

• 4:09Speaker 08

  Out in the middle of nowhere, on your own.

• 4:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  To private startup nations that might be coming to some land near you.

• 4:17Speaker 09

  Is this going to be a little private fiefdom run by these venture capitalists? What do they really want?

• 4:27Speaker 10

  Hi, this is Emile Hartz from Denver, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high-fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake, ready-to-cook pizza, no antibiotics ever chicken wings, and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3 at Whole Foods Market.

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• 6:01Speaker 00

  Part one, A Weird World.

• 6:06Speaker 12

  We are told all the time that you have a certain number of countries in the world, that they all have borders surrounding them, and that's kind of the architecture of the world, of the political world and of the geographic world. But it turns out there's a lot more to it than that.

• 6:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Atousa Aroxia Abrahamian.

• 6:24Speaker 12

  I'm the author of two books, The Cosmopolites, which is about the global market for citizenship, and The Hidden Globe, How Wealth Hacks the World.

• 6:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  Atousa has spent the last couple of decades traveling and studying the world with a skeptical eye, observing its hidden architecture, which she describes as a jumble of weird jurisdictions.

• 6:47Speaker 12

  Lots of people will find themselves in... A weird jurisdiction at some point in their life. You might be at a border checkpoint. You might be working in a factory that's in a special economic zone. You might be on a ship that's flying a flag that you don't totally recognize.

• 7:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Or you might find yourself sailing by a small, very frozen archipelago called Svobard.

• 7:11Speaker 12

  Svobard is a northern territory of Norway in the Arctic Circle.

• 7:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Okay, let's be real. You probably won't find yourself there anytime soon. And honestly, I hadn't even heard of Svobard before talking to a Tusa. But you've likely heard of Svobard's neighbor, Greenland, which has been a hot topic lately. President Donald Trump reasserted in the new year that the United States wants Greenland.

• 7:35Speaker 08

  We are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.

• 7:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Like Greenland, Svobard is involved in the race for the Arctic. Being near the North Pole makes it an ideal place to track missiles flying across the planet and download data from satellites. New shipping routes are buried under the ice that climate change is rapidly melting. And buried in the ocean floor are a bunch of mineral resources. Copper, zinc, cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements, used in all kinds of technology. But there's also something that makes Svobard weird.

• 8:11Speaker 12

  Svobard is the only place in the world with open borders.

• 8:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  Open borders. Svobard is part of the Kingdom of Norway. But everyone from Indian climate scientists to Russian coal miners to Thai hikers are welcome. No visa required. Some might call that a fantasy, others a nightmare, but definitely weird. And the story of how Svobard ended up that way gives us a window into how the world of nations and passports, a world we take for granted as reality, came to be and what it means to exist outside it.

• 8:51Speaker 06

  About 9:30 a.m., land came in sight.

• 8:57Speaker 06

  Steep, rocky crags and peaks, covered or streaked with snow.

• 9:04Speaker 06

  It was a grandly desolate, sublime, weird landscape, utterly barren and unlike anything I had ever seen.

• 9:13Speaker 06

  The sun seemed to be boring holes through the clouds.

• 9:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1901, an American businessman named John Monroe Longyear stumbled across Svalbard while on a tourist cruise with his family. Longyear had built a huge timber and mining business in northern Michigan.

• 9:31Speaker 12

  This was a man who, legend has it, could smell coal. He went somewhere and he could just smell the coal, he knew where it was.

• 9:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  Call it a sniff sense. Sorry, I had to.

• 9:43Speaker 12

  I went to look at his archives in Marquette, Michigan, very far north, and I was immediately struck by how similarly Marquette in the winters smelled like Svalbard.

• 9:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  Quick context: Svalbard, being so cold and so far north, was uninhabited pretty much until the Europeans discovered it in the late 16th century. And by the time Longyear came along a few hundred years later, Svalbard still had no permanent population. It was terra nullius, a legal no man's land, a rare thing to find by this time because of industrialization and colonialism. People knew there was coal there, but previous efforts to get it had been abandoned. Longyear, though, was up for the challenge.

• 10:33Speaker 06

  The enterprise of developing a new and practically unknown coal field within 800 miles of the North Pole was an interesting and satisfactory experiment.

• 10:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  He sets up a settlement, names it Longyear City after himself, and starts the Arctic Coal Company.

• 10:52Speaker 12

  People said that he thought of himself as a polar emperor, which gives you a glimpse at his mindset and the kind of animating philosophy behind these things.

• 11:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  For a few years, he could live in this fantasy, slowly building a new little world on his terms.

• 11:07Speaker 12

  He's creating a company town. There's a shop, the laborers can only shop at the shop. They can only sleep at the dorms. Good luck, you know, finding another housing out there.

• 11:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  But it turns out, building a new society was hard.

• 11:22Speaker 06

  Many difficult and unusual problems.

• 11:27Speaker 12

  So there were two kinds of conflicts that took place. One was between the management and the workers. So John Munro Longyear and the local guys that he hired, they didn't like the food, he didn't like how lazy they were.

• 11:40Speaker 06

  Hundreds of laboring men, speaking a foreign language, and not always amenable to discipline.

• 11:45Speaker 12

  A classic tale.

• 11:47Speaker 06

  Strikes were instituted by disaffected socialistic leaders.

• 11:50Speaker 12

  And the other conflict was between him and other people like him, other people who were trying to start businesses and mine coal. And these were essentially disputes about property. Who owns what, who can go where, who planted the stake first? It got a little messy.

• 12:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Svalbard had no courts, no police, no property law.

• 12:12Speaker 12

  There was no authority to really rule on these things.

• 12:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  It seemed only a matter of time before some nation or empire would claim sovereignty over Svalbard and threaten his business. Longyear wanted to get ahead of that. So he reached out to his country of origin, the United States, and lobbied the government to get involved to protect his property rights in Svalbard.

• 12:36Speaker 12

  He did so under an older law called the U.S. Guano Act.

• 12:42Speaker 12

  That allowed the US to claim unoccupied islands in the Pacific that contained large amounts of guano, bird shit, bird droppings.

• 12:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  No joke, this is a real thing. This act from 1856 says that if an American citizen finds enough guano, bird poop, on an island not yet claimed by another country or empire, the US president could choose to use military force to claim sovereignty there. Why guano? Because it's a great fertilizer, necessary for maintaining food production at a time when synthetic fertilizers didn't yet exist. And it was also used to produce an ingredient for explosives. It was considered so valuable, it got the nickname "white gold." US citizens invoked the Guano Act to claim over 100 islands around the globe. And John Monroe Longyear tried his luck with it in Svalbard,

• 13:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  arguing that it should be expanded to include not just guano, but also coal and other minerals.

• 13:43Speaker 12

  He had a lobbyist, he had a guy on K Street. He was even showing up to hotel lobbies to try to talk delegates into taking his side.

• 13:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  The US government ultimately decided not to intervene. And then, in 1914, reality came knocking.

• 14:10Speaker 12

  The war made it quite difficult to export coal.

• 14:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  When World War I broke out, his company Shipping and Trade ground to a halt.

• 14:20Speaker 12

  The clock was ticking, right?

• 14:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  And in 1916, Longyear sold his company's assets to a Norwegian coal mining company.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  In order to promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war, by the prescription of open, just, and honorable relations between nations, agree to this covenant of the League of Nations.

• 14:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  On June 28, 1919, in France's Hall of Mirrors, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, formally ending World War I. The treaty accelerated a shift that was already underway, moving the world from the Age of Empires to the Age of Nation-States. And it established the League of Nations, an international organization designed to maintain world peace through diplomacy.

• 15:17Speaker 12

  The powers were meeting to kind of divvy up what was left of the world.

• 15:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  This included convening a conference on, quote, "passport and customs formalities", to create a uniform 32-page booklet, a passport that would be required to travel across borders. There wasn't really a place for a place with no ruler. And so...

• 15:39Speaker 12

  Svadivard was formally bestowed upon Norway by the international community.

• 15:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  Why? Because Norway had been a good ally during the war, and it had the biggest presence on Svadivard, including a company that until a few years earlier had been owned by John Monroe Longyear. The treaty also carved out an exception for other corporate interests in Svadivard, keeping its borders open for business.

• 16:07Speaker 06

  It is a pleasure to know that Svadivard, though now under the flag of Norway, is forever dedicated to the arts of peace. It probably can never be drawn into international controversy.

• 16:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Svadivard wasn't a utopia. But over time, it did come to represent a place of global cooperation.

• 16:28Speaker 13

  75 boxes of seeds were carried down a red carpet today on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean, headed for cold storage, really cold storage.

• 16:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Since 2008, Svadivard has even housed a large post-apocalyptic seed vault, meant to safeguard the planet's food crops if the worst ever happens. Some call it a doomsday vault, others a Noah's Ark for global agriculture.

• 16:53Speaker 14

  This is the most valuable natural resource in the world. So in other words, as long as we intend to be on Earth ourselves, we're going to need this diversity.

• 17:04Speaker 15

  Tonight, we're heading north, way north, to the Arctic Circle, which is fast becoming one of the most contested regions in the world. And that means Beijing, Moscow, Washington, and the European continent are in a race for influence.

• 17:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Recently, with the race for the Arctic heating up, and as more countries, including the US, have challenged the sovereignty of nations around the world, Norway has begun pushing more firmly to assert its sovereignty over Svalbard and fend off foreign influence, cracking down on land sales to foreigners, stripping away foreigners' voting rights, limiting scientific research, and claiming hundreds of miles of Svalbard seas. Maybe they're seeing the writing on the wall, that the world order might be shifting again.

• 17:50Speaker 12

  The nation-state model, I think if we take a thousand-foot view from it, is both very new and very fragile, and might just be a blip.

• 18:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  The question is, if the rules are being rewritten, who gets to rewrite them?

• 18:06Speaker 12

  Svalbard is a story about, you know, sorry to say it, but men who want to start something new in a place that they consider almost a blank slate. I think there's a lot of parallels with somebody like Elon Musk, who wants to explore space. And this kind of awareness that none of the rules are all that fixed. If you just try hard enough, maybe the rules will bend to your own desires.

• 18:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up...

• 18:38Speaker 08

  It was like a message in a ball. You pop the cork in, you throw it out into the sea of the internet, and see what happens.

• 18:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  We take to the high seas.

• 18:55Speaker 16

  Hi, my name is Tim Berry. I'm calling from Charleston, South Carolina, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 19:04Speaker 11

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high-fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake, ready-to-cook pizza, no antibiotics ever chicken wings, and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 19:34Speaker 11

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• 20:23Speaker 00

  Part Two. Let a Thousand Nations Bloom.

• 20:27Speaker 17

  What makes a man to wander? What makes a man to roam? What makes a man leap bed and board? And turn his back on home?

• 20:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  These are the opening lines of the 1956 movie starring John Wayne called The Searchers.

• 21:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  The music feels almost wistful, reveling in the adventurous spirit that pushed so many to head out into the frontier. The movie follows Wayne's character, a Civil War vet who fought on the side of the Confederacy after he returns home to Texas. And like any good Western, there are long panoramic shots of the vast landscape, deep red sands and intense blue skies. The great unknown.

• 21:27Speaker 18

  This has come a long way before he died, Captain.

• 21:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's set just a few years after the 1862 Homestead Act passed, when anyone moving out West could claim land if they were willing to settle on and farm in.

• 21:40Speaker 08

  What was it like when people were colonizing the West, setting out on their own to build a ranch and stuff like that? And I realized that being out there was going to be a very lonely existence for quite a while.

• 21:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Wayne Gramlich. He's a retired computer engineer. And he remembers watching The Searchers back in the 1990s, a time when he was finding himself spending more and more hours on the newly minted World Wide Web, where he stumbled across a fascinating trend: stories of people who in the 60s and 70s attempted to build micro-nations at sea, all of which pretty much failed.

• 22:22Speaker 08

  Well, this is weird, but okay.

• 22:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  He found himself imagining what those attempts might have been like and considering how he would try to build a new nation in the middle of the sea.

• 22:33Speaker 08

  I was just sort of noodling around in the back of my brain.

• 22:37Speaker 18

  Another one, huh?

• 22:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Scenes from The Searchers flashed through his mind. He thought, maybe it would feel a lot like the Wild West, only wetter, with one big difference.

• 22:49Speaker 19

  I don't like it.

• 22:50Speaker 18

  What don't you like?

• 22:51Speaker 19

  Indians on the raid generally hide their dead.

• 22:54Speaker 08

  And if it don't care... I know I be political, but what we really treated, the Native Americans, really poorly. So I thought it was a positive endeavor, largely because unlike the colonization of the West, where there were previous occupants, in the ocean, the only previous occupants are the fish.

• 23:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  So on a whim, he sat down at his computer and started typing. The blank page, a kind of canvas to design a new world.

• 23:28Speaker 08

  How do you make the structures safer? Maybe recycle the 2-liter bottles.

• 23:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the paper, Wayne brainstormed all kinds of engineering hacks to different problems he foresaw coming up.

• 23:39Speaker 08

  It's probably a bad idea.

• 23:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hoping to avoid the pitfalls that had sunk those previous MicroNation attempts, like how to survive the elements.

• 23:48Speaker 08

  You can extract energy from waves.

• 23:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  Huge waves, relentless sun.

• 23:53Speaker 08

  Boost the difference in temperature of the surface water.

• 23:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  And what about food?

• 23:57Speaker 08

  You know, you can eat fish. It's out in the middle of the ocean, doesn't have a lot of fish.

• 24:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Wayne called the paper "Seastead-ing: Homesteading the High Seas."

• 24:07Speaker 08

  To capture some of the romance of, you know, manifest destiny.

• 24:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  It reads like an instruction manual, very much seen through an engineer's eye. He didn't talk much about the more dicey political stuff, like how you deal with pirates, or how you'd get the nation recognized by the UN. He figured it was just a thought experiment, so he didn't need to have everything figured out.

• 24:34Speaker 08

  Back then, I was just publishing everything I did on the internet. It's like, why not?

• 24:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1998, he uploads his paper to the web and...

• 24:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  For a while, nothing much happens.

• 24:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Three years later, in 2001.

• 24:53Speaker 11

  You've got mail.

• 24:55Speaker 08

  I got contacted by this guy named Patrice Friedman. That was the beginning of the next phase of the story.

• 25:05Speaker 12

  I remember he said that he should eventually just join the family business.

• 25:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  Journalist Atusa Araxia Abrahamian has interviewed Patri Friedman, the grandson of free-market pioneer Milton Friedman, a number of times over the last couple of decades. We reached out to him for an interview ourselves, but didn't hear back. Atusa says Patri came to seasteading from an economics angle.

• 25:30Speaker 12

  It was a way to create more nation-states in the world, to create competition and have better ideas and kind of evolve from our land-bound system of governance.

• 25:45Speaker 08

  We had a few back and forths. And then I think I asked him, like, "By the way, where are you?" Because you know, the fun thing about the internet is nobody knows where anybody is. He says, "Well, I currently live in Sunnyvale, California." So, "Well, guess what? So do I." "Okay, let's get together for lunch."

• 26:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  Can you take me to that first meeting? Because it's almost like an intellectual blind date, right?

• 26:10Speaker 08

  Oh, it absolutely isn't an intellectual blind date.

• 26:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  And they hit it off. Wayne learned that Patri had studied mathematics and computer science. And they were both excited about seasteading. They started meeting up periodically, revising that instruction manual Wayne had drafted, getting to know each other along the way.

• 26:31Speaker 08

  Occasionally, he would tell me stories of Grandma and Grandpa talking about economics. This is a family who's very much into the libertarian movement. And I'm not really into the libertarian movement.

• 26:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  The libertarian movement generally believes in individual liberty above all else, a competitive free market, and very little government interference in people's lives. And Patri saw something very libertarian in the seasteading idea.

• 27:01Speaker 12

  Experimentation was something that they talked about a lot.

• 27:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  And Patri really wanted to make that experiment a reality. From that first email, he'd said to Wayne...

• 27:11Speaker 08

  "I would really like to build one of these things." I'm going like, "Well, that's a lot of work."

• 27:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  And it would require a lot of money, money they didn't have.

• 27:20Speaker 08

  We were always playing with the money problem.

• 27:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  Then the solution fell into their laps.

• 27:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was 2007. Patri was interviewing for jobs at different companies in Silicon Valley.

• 27:33Speaker 08

  He did apply for a job at Founders Fund, which is Peter Thiel's fund.

• 27:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Peter Thiel, the dawn of what's become known as the PayPal mafia.

• 27:46Speaker 20

  The companies that have defined our era all share one link. Their founders trace their origins back to PayPal.

• 27:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  Reporting about the PayPal mafia can sound like a who's who of every major tech company of the past 30 years.

• 27:59Speaker 21

  Peter Thiel started a hedge fund. They were like the earliest angel investor into Facebook, a gazillion dollars. Jeremy Stompelman, Russell Simmons, Yelp, Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn. Obviously, there's Elon, SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.

• 28:15Speaker 08

  YouTube.

• 28:15Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 28:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the 2000s, Thiel was pushing the idea that technology was an alternative to politics that could, quote, "unilaterally change the world." His biographer described him as, quote, "secretly the most important person in Silicon Valley," a place that some people consider to be...

• 28:34Speaker 08

  The crowning hero of the libertarian movement.

• 28:38Speaker 22

  Whether we're going to have a much better future or not, I think it gets driven by the rate of technological progress.

• 28:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  We reached out to Peter Thiel for this episode, but got no response.

• 28:51Speaker 08

  He aced the interview.

• 28:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Before he leaves, Patri casually brings up seasteading. And the idea eventually makes its way to Peter Thiel.

• 29:02Speaker 08

  That is just nirvana to the libertarian movement, a place where you can set up a libertarian society via seasteads. And so Peter said, "Well, what if I give you half a million to promote the idea and push it forward?"

• 29:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  So on April 15, 2008, they co-founded the Seasteading Institute with funding from Peter Thiel. Patri liked to say...

• 29:25Speaker 20

  "Let a thousand nations plume."

• 29:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  And their logos seem to reference the libertarian classic, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a man holding up the seastead above his head.

• 29:36Speaker 08

  It might have been inspired by that.

• 29:39Speaker 22

  The science fiction things are very interesting because so few people are doing them. There is something about that that's contrarian, fundamental. It's not being done enough of.

• 29:53Speaker 08

  So anyhow, money was allocated and then started doing stuff.

• 29:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  Peter Thiel gave them two marching orders. One,

• 30:02Speaker 08

  push the engineering forward.

• 30:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  And two,

• 30:04Speaker 08

  market it a little.

• 30:08Speaker 23

  So our love for the oceans has brought us together today to embark on a short journey into the unknown.

• 30:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  Patri took the lead, giving TED Talks, doing the press junket, spreading the gospel of sea steading.

• 30:20Speaker 23

  We've run out of frontier. All land is claimed and our revolutions have become increasingly superficial.

• 30:28Speaker 12

  I'm going to read you a quote from a story I did more than 10 years ago where Friedman said, what if Apple's genius designers build a city that's as fun to use as an iPad?

• 30:40Speaker 23

  Apple nation, the country that knows what you want even better than you do.

• 30:44Speaker 12

  And I think that really sums up both the moment and the sort of optimism around sea steading at the time.

• 30:49Speaker 23

  While saving humanity, we can also save the oceans.

• 30:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  The sea steading pitch was pointing out some real problems with existing governments. Things like corruption, increasing federal power, and slow-moving bureaucracy that were making it harder to respond to real social problems like rising healthcare costs and economic inequality. And a lot of people responded positively. It was time to give it a go.

• 31:17Speaker 08

  And then the question is whether or not we were going to do what we called the SFS, single-family sea stead, or a larger one.

• 31:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  They debated that question at the offices of one of Thiel's biggest companies, where they had a small space, a data analytics firm called Palantir.

• 31:36Speaker 08

  They didn't give us a room, they gave us a nook.

• 31:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  Palantir might sound familiar for two reasons. The company has recently attracted a lot of controversy for its close secretive work with government intelligence, defense, and immigration agencies. And it's the name of the seeing stones in Lord of the Rings.

• 31:54Speaker 22

  Originally created by the elves, it was meant to be used for good purposes. The power of Isengard is at your command, Sauron, Lord of the earth. It is potentially a very dangerous technology. It's very powerful.

• 32:09Speaker 17

  Orianna, build me a army worthy of the Lord.

• 32:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  Anyway, back in the mid 2000s, when Wayne was working on sea setting in a nook of their offices, Palantir wasn't on most people's radars yet. Wayne remembers one crucial meeting where he and Patri met with Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir and Peter Thiel's business partner, to decide how ambitious their first sea setting attempt should be.

• 32:37Speaker 08

  And I voted small and Joe and Patri voted large, and that's the way we went.

• 32:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  But just as they started to put the wheels in motion to actually try to build something.

• 32:48Speaker 08

  You know, life intervened.

• 32:52Speaker 24

  Let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate. The stock market is now down 21%.

• 32:58Speaker 25

  43%. Everything and more has been completely wiped out.

• 33:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Wayne had been living off of some internet stocks that were doing great, up until the 2008 recession hit.

• 33:08Speaker 08

  I had to go find another job.

• 33:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  Which meant less time for sea setting.

• 33:12Speaker 08

  So I was still on the board, but I said, I can't spend nearly as much time on it.

• 33:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  I asked him if the co-opting of sea setting by libertarians played any role in his decision to step away.

• 33:24Speaker 08

  You're pulling me into the politics.

• 33:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  Which he told me he wanted to avoid discussing. He said he'd always been most interested in the engineering.

• 33:34Speaker 08

  It was never really my intent to get involved in the politics. And so, sorry, you're just not going to find a very political answer out of me.

• 33:44Speaker 08

  My general view is, you know, sometimes you're walking along the road and you have to pick up a stone and you just need to move it a little further down the road. And the next person picks it up and moves it a little further.

• 33:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  Patri Friedman continued full force with sea setting for a few more years after Wayne left. The closest he got to building a sea stead was Ephemeral Isle, also known as Burning Man on the Water. It's billed as a floating celebration of community learning art and sea steading. In 2011, Patri stepped down from the Sea Setting Institute, as did Peter Thiel. Since then, there have been attempts to build a seastead island. One project involved an agreement with French Polynesia, but public concern over, quote, "tech colonialism" led the local government to cut ties with the institute. These days, most projects are focused on building

• 34:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  single-unit, self-sufficient, eco-friendly floating homes. Seastead projects are underway worldwide, including in Panama, South Korea, and even right here in the US, in Florida and Mississippi.

• 34:51Speaker 08

  I view large seastead-ing as a complete failure, but the small stuff is happening, and everybody calls them seasteads, so the name stuck.

• 35:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  And it helped bring a fringe libertarian dream of exit more into the mainstream, though Wayne says...

• 35:10Speaker 08

  If you're going to do this libertarian stuff, you might want to see if you can just find somebody who will loan you some dirt to do it on. It's probably going to be easier than building a seastead.

• 35:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up...

• 35:23Speaker 12

  You don't need to start a seastead, you can have America.

• 35:42Speaker 26

  Hi, this is Sibon Ampuero from Eden Prairie, Minnesota. I love your show. You're listening to Throughline.

• 35:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high-fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake, ready-to-cook pizza, no-way-antibiotics-ever chicken wings, and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 36:21Speaker 11

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• 37:06Speaker 11

  Boyd in Florida.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Part three, the cities of tomorrow.

• 37:14Speaker 27

  Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to welcome me to Honduras. Local time is 10:43 PM.

• 37:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  In June 2025, Dan Germa, a producer on NPR's Embedded podcast, took a trip to the Honduran island of Roatan.

• 37:32Speaker 28

  Mangrove trees line tons of the coastline. You have pretty beaches on either sides.

• 37:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Dan wasn't there for that. He drove to the northern side of the hills to a place isolated from the rest of the island, a place called Prospera.

• 37:48Speaker 28

  You kind of dive into this very densely forested hillscape. There is a big sign, a big Prospera sign. Once you get to that part, it kind of just cascades right into the sea.

• 38:09Speaker 28

  Prospera is kind of...

• 38:13Speaker 28

  An experiment.

• 38:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  An experiment in what the future of cities could look like if they were run by corporations. Almost everything in Prospera happens without any oversight from the Honduran government. It offers companies operating there a menu of laws and regulations. There's no FDA, no HHS, taxes are low, and crypto is a preferred currency.

• 38:36Speaker 28

  They have a startup, venture capitalist vibe.

• 38:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Over $150 million have been invested in Prospera by venture funds affiliated with tech titans like Palantir's Peter Thiel, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.

• 38:59Speaker 07

  Google was started within a garage within our lifetime. Facebook was started from a dorm room within our lifetime. Bitcoin was started from a white paper within our lifetime. So new companies, communities, currencies have all been started in this way. Could we start new countries?

• 39:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  Prospera is a real world case study for a growing movement to create so-called startup nations. The spiritual guide of this business movement is a book by Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of Peter Thiel and fellow libertarian. It's called The Network State: How to Start a New Country.

• 39:32Speaker 07

  Can we print out these online communities of gigantic scale into the physical world?

• 39:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  It outlines a vision of digitally connected, exclusive communities that design so-called states online first and then map them onto land.

• 39:48Speaker 09

  The idea is somehow they'll find land, push out the people that they don't want, who they call the blues, and keep the people that they do, who he calls the grays.

• 39:57Speaker 12

  Then lobby existing governments for sovereignty.

• 40:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  Srinivasan calls this approach

• 40:06Speaker 09

  tech Zionism.

• 40:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Tech Zionism, a reference to the movement that led to the creation of the State of Israel.

• 40:15Speaker 12

  To me, tech Zionism only really says one thing, which is that we only want to live with other tech Zionists. And we want to choose our neighbors, well, who are the tech Palestinians in this situation. I don't think that that's in the book.

• 40:29Speaker 09

  I think for a long time, tech considers itself sort of searching for new frontiers. And in recent years, they're starting to look for literal frontiers.

• 40:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  By the way, this is journalist Jacob Silverman. He writes a lot about the tech industry, focusing on the intersection of tech and politics.

• 40:46Speaker 09

  Rather than kind of reform or change existing institutions, a lot of tech elites want to either replace them entirely or create their own alternatives.

• 40:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  There are all kinds of network state-type projects being imagined right now, abroad and within our own borders. Exiting the system is no longer a fringe or weird idea. Starbase, Elon Musk's city in Texas, was created to build a path to Mars. The billionaire-backed California Forever Project is planning a new city on 50,000 acres of farmland on the edge of Silicon Valley. And President Trump has proposed building so-called Freedom Cities.

• 41:25Speaker 08

  We should hold a contest to charter up to 10 new cities.

• 41:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  Built on federal land, but privately funded and free from traditional regulations, environmental laws, and labor unions. These projects are expensive, backed by billionaire tech investors, and most are still in the digital design phase, i.e., they don't yet exist in reality.

• 41:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Which brings us back to Prospera, a place that does exist.

• 41:58Speaker 28

  There was a very long back and forth with the Prospera people about coming in as a journalist.

• 42:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  It took Dan Girma almost a year to get permission to visit Prospera from its management team.

• 42:10Speaker 28

  Their version of a government is like a board of directors.

• 42:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  And in the meantime, he was digging into how this place ended up in Honduras.

• 42:20Speaker 28

  What he ended up finding out over time was that...

• 42:25Speaker 28

  Prospera was born under circumstances where Honduras was under a lot of geopolitical turmoil.

• 42:34Speaker 29

  The coup has left Honduras deeply polarized.

• 42:39Speaker 28

  This is around 2008, 2009. Honduras had just undergone a coup.

• 42:45Speaker 06

  It's an example for all the other countries. Don't let yourself be overrun by pirates.

• 42:50Speaker 28

  And it was trying to find a way to be let back into the global community, trying to find new ways to develop its economy.

• 43:00Speaker 07

  Are there some rules we can develop for changing rules?

• 43:04Speaker 28

  While that's happening, there's this idea of-

• 43:08Speaker 07

  Something called a charter city.

• 43:11Speaker 28

  Charter cities developing totally separate.

• 43:14Speaker 07

  You start from uninhabited territory. People can come, live under the new charter, but no one is forced to live under it.

• 43:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  A Nobel Prize winning American economist named Paul Romer came up with the idea of charter cities. The idea was to have a more successful country lease an empty tract of land from a host country, set its own rules, operate as an autonomous city, and court foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation.

• 43:42Speaker 28

  The Honduran government learned about this man and his ideas, and they got interested in what he was proposing.

• 43:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  Romer was eventually sidelined, and Honduran lawmakers opted for a slightly different proposal. Instead of another country administering the land, a private corporation would. It was an attractive idea for Honduras, which had long been open to private investment.

• 44:06Speaker 28

  This goes back all the way to, you know, right after First World War, when the idea of banana republics were starting to pop up in the region. Honduras is the first nation to be labeled one of those. And it's always been very capitalism minded, free, private enterprise minded country ever since then.

• 44:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  But plenty of people objected. Would it basically act as a state within their state? Would this threaten Honduran sovereignty?

• 44:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Still, in 2013, under a cloud of controversy, a law greenlighting charter cities was passed.

• 44:43Speaker 28

  The Supreme Court of Honduras deemed it unconstitutional.

• 44:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  But afterwards, the Honduran Congress, led by members of the president's party, ousted four members of the Honduran Supreme Court.

• 44:55Speaker 28

  It was part of a couple of things causing a constitutional crisis in Honduras.

• 44:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  On top of this, there was a lack of transparency, which didn't sit well with Paul Romer, that economist whose ideas had kickstarted all of this. The tech billionaire backers funding Prospera and the constitutional crisis were pushing the project in a direction he wasn't comfortable with, becoming what he called "a libertarian fantasy", early signs of the network state movement.

• 45:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  But the project continued without him. In 2017, Honduras Prospera Inc. purchased its first plot of land, 58 acres that bordered a small local fishing village whose residents say they were not properly consulted. Over the years, Prospera has come to own more than 1,000 acres. Some local landowners protested. Not all residents have formal property titles and they fear their land claims are being undermined. Amid that, construction got underway on new housing and research facilities, employing some locals. Prospera has its own labor systems, which aren't clearly spelled out. When one worker died in an accident on the job,

• 46:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Prospera's management said the family was compensated, quote, "appropriately", but details were not made public. And that's by design. The point of a place like Prospera is that there isn't really a public to answer to.

• 46:27Speaker 28

  It creates a particularly core irony when we think about Prospera as a libertarian hope, being able to be created because of this strong man approach.

• 46:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  In other words, it's not pure exit in the classic libertarian mold. It's using the system's power to exit while shaping the system for others.

• 46:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Critics of Prospera say it echoes colonial dynamics familiar to Roatan.

• 46:56Speaker 28

  For years, the island of Roatan was actually kind of a disputed territory between colonial powers, including the Spanish and the British.

• 47:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  In April 2022, after a new leftist government took power in Honduras, the charter city law was repealed.

• 47:13Speaker 28

  And then the Honduran government goes a step further and declares through the Supreme Court that the previous law is null and void.

• 47:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  Nullifying a guarantee made to Prospera that they would have 50 years to operate even if the law was repealed.

• 47:31Speaker 28

  And so now, as far as the Honduran government was concerned, Prospera was an illegal settlement.

• 47:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  Prospera then sued the Honduran government in an international tribunal, seeking a massive amount of money.

• 47:44Speaker 28

  $10.7 billion.

• 47:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  $10.7 billion. For context, that's about a quarter of Honduras's annual GDP. The tech investors backing Prospera are collectively worth much more than that. And they have the backing of the country with the most powerful military on earth.

• 48:04Speaker 28

  How is this not coercion when you have all of these levers at your disposal to achieve what you want to achieve?

• 48:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  The case is still ongoing, the future of Prospera hanging in the balance. Based on what Dan saw when he finally got to visit Prospera last year, development seems to have slowed down.

• 48:26Speaker 28

  We didn't see that many kind of like actual companies like working. A lot of it is virtual.

• 48:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  There were some residential buildings, a Montessori school, a few research facilities working on out of the box medical experiments, like gene therapy meant to cure aging, but not many people.

• 48:45Speaker 28

  I've spoken to some people who are working more on charter cities outside of Honduras. And when I speak to them about Prospera, they tend to describe it as a learning experience for this movement, not so much the model that they want to replicate. I think Prospera probably best reflects some naked truths about the power that the developed world has right now and the tools at its disposal to to maintain its power.

• 49:21Speaker 09

  Is kind of the ideological groundwork for a lot of these efforts to make new cities or communities or kind of self-run polities.

• 49:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  There are other charter cities planned in more than 20 countries, especially in Asia and Africa.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  The utopians fail to understand why anyone should be so fascinated by the dull gleam of a tiny bit of stone that has all the stars in the sky to look at.

• 49:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  When Thomas More wrote Utopia over 500 years ago, designing a perfect society was an allegory. Today, technology is making attempts to reshape reality and create versions of so-called network states more possible than ever. The impact of this kind of thinking can be seen all around us, on an island in Honduras, on farmland near San Francisco, amid the rubble of Gaza, or before long, maybe a crater on the moon. The people designing these cities might not care if their choices lead to utopia or dystopia for the rest of us because the cities aren't necessarily for us.

• 50:34Speaker 12

  I don't think that Elon Musk is saying we're going to create this like perfect society on the moon. I don't even think that there's much of a desire to create a society. The focus really is on how can we make business work better? How can we cut through red tape? That's not utopian unless you live in a society of corporations.

• 51:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Rande Abdelfatah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR. Next week on the show, how reality became something you could edit and sell.

• 51:22Speaker 12

  The idea is that we're going to record people being people and placing them in very sort of strange, bizarre situations. And that's going to teach us something about what makes people tick.

• 51:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Adebroui. This episode was produced by me and Julie Kane. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Devin Kadyama.

• 51:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Irene Noguchi. Kiana Mulholland.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Thomas Coltrane.

• 51:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sarah Wyman. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Special thanks to Holly Baxter, senior staff writer at The Independent, and Rachel Corbett. Thanks also to Tom Nicholson, Yohanna Sturgie, Dylan Kurtz, Rebecca Farrar, Leana Simstrom, Julia Redpath, Beth Donovan, Yolanda Sangueni, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keely. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes

• 52:17Speaker 30

  Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.

• 52:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected]. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number, too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.

• 52:47Speaker 11

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 52:51Speaker 00

  This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Fall tastes better with better ingredients from Whole Foods Market. No added growth hormones or antibiotics in their meat department means slow-braised short ribs are even more satisfying. All seafood is wild-caught, like their vibrant sockeye salmon, or verified responsibly farmed. And all sweets, including fall-themed cookies, are made without high-fructose corn syrup. Spice up fall at Whole Foods Market. This message comes from HomeServe. Got a burst pipe, HVAC outage, or electrical issue? HomeServe has your back. Go to homeserve.com/audio for 50% less your first year. Savings compared to renewal price, Fort Worth, Florida.