The billionaires' utopia blueprint

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The billionaires' utopia blueprint : Throughline
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
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The billionaires' utopia blueprint
April 23, 2026
3:05 AM ET
The billionaires' utopia blueprint
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Transcript
(SOUNDBITE OF HORSE NEIGHING)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Raphael Hythloday) 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF PAGE TURNING)
RUND ABDELFATAH, HOST:
It's the year 1516. We're inside the pages of a book called "Utopia," breathing the fictional air of Antwerp, Belgium.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Raphael Hythloday) 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.
ABDELFATAH: An old sunburned, long-bearded traveler named Raphael Hythloday 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.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Raphael Hythloday) I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a nation.
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.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Raphael Hythloday) Where every man has a right to everything.
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.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Raphael Hythloday) Everyone has his eye upon you.
ABDELFATAH: And all movement is perfectly regulated.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Raphael Hythloday) 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF HORSE NEIGHING)
ABDELFATAH: The author of this book, Thomas More, invented the word utopia. It's a Greek pun, combining outopos, no place, and eutopos, 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?
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
SAM ALTMAN: I mean, I hate to sound like utopic tech bro here, but if you'll excuse me for three seconds.
MARK ZUCKERBERG: You know, these are things that are going to save lives.
ALTMAN: We can make the world amazing.
SUNDAR PICHAI: More profound than fire or electricity or anything that we have done in the past.
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.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROSS DOUTHAT: You would prefer the human race to endure, right?
PETER THIEL: Uh...
DOUTHAT: You're hesitating.
THIEL: Yeah. Well...
ABDELFATAH: From private cities...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JAN SRAMEK: California Forever is building the next great American city.
ABDELFATAH: ...To interstellar colonies...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ELON MUSK: You could absolutely colonize the whole galaxy.
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.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BALAJI SRINIVASAN: Starting new countries is actually possible, preferable and profitable.
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 Rund Abdelfatah. On this episode of THROUGHLINE from NPR, we'll take you from a forgotten Arctic archipelago...
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN: The only place in the world with open borders.
ABDELFATAH: ...To floating cities in the ocean...
WAYNE GRAMLICH: Out in the middle of nowhere on your own.
ABDELFATAH: ...To private startup nations that might be coming to some land near you.
JACOB SILVERMAN: Is this going to be a little private fiefdom run by these venture capitalists? What do they really want?
EMIL HART: Hi, this is Emil Hart (ph) from Denver, and you're listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Part 1 - A Weird World.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ABRAHAMIAN: 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.
ABDELFATAH: This is Atossa Araxia Abrahamian.
ABRAHAMIAN: 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."
ABDELFATAH: Atossa 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.
ABRAHAMIAN: 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.
ABDELFATAH: Or you might find yourself sailing by a small, very frozen archipelago called Svalbard.
ABRAHAMIAN: Svalbard is a northern territory of Norway, in the Arctic Circle.
ABDELFATAH: OK, let's be real. You probably won't find yourself there anytime soon. And honestly, I hadn't even heard of Svalbard before talking to Atossa. But you've likely heard of Svalbard's neighbor, Greenland, which has been a hot topic lately.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: President Donald Trump reasserted in the new year that the United States wants Greenland.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not.
ABDELFATAH: Like Greenland, Svalbard 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 Svalbard weird.
ABRAHAMIAN: Svalbard is the only place in the world with open borders.
ABDELFATAH: Open borders. Svalbard 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 Svalbard 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As John Munro Longyear) About 9:30 a.m., land came in sight. Steep, rocky crags and peaks covered or streaked with snow. It was a grandly desolate, sublime, weird landscape, utterly barren and unlike anything I had ever seen. The sun seemed to be boring holes through the clouds.
ABDELFATAH: In 1901, an American businessman named John Munro Longyear stumbled across Svalbard while on a tourist cruise with his family. Longyear had built a huge timber and mining business in northern Michigan.
ABRAHAMIAN: 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.
ABDELFATAH: Call it a sniff sense. Sorry, I had to.
ABRAHAMIAN: I went to look at his archives in Marquette, Michigan, very far north. And I was immediately struck by how similarly Marquette in the winter smelled like Svalbard.
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.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As John Munro Longyear) The enterprise of developing a new and practically unknown coal field within 800 miles of the North Pole was an interesting and satisfactory experiment.
ABDELFATAH: He sets up a settlement, names it Longyear City, after himself, and starts the Arctic Coal Company.
ABRAHAMIAN: 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.
ABDELFATAH: For a few years, he could live in this fantasy, slowly building a new little world on his terms.
ABRAHAMIAN: 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.
ABDELFATAH: But it turns out building a new society was hard.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As John Munro Longyear) Many difficult and unusual problems.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ABRAHAMIAN: 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.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As John Munro Longyear) Hundreds of laboring men speaking a foreign language and not always amenable to discipline.
ABRAHAMIAN: A classic tale.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As John Munro Longyear) Strikes were instituted by disaffected, socialistic leaders.
ABRAHAMIAN: 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.
ABDELFATAH: But Svalbard had no courts, no police, no property law.
ABRAHAMIAN: There was no authority to really rule on these things.
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.
ABRAHAMIAN: He did so under an older law called the U.S. Guano Act.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ABRAHAMIAN: That allowed the U.S. to claim unoccupied islands in the Pacific that contain large amounts of guano, bird s***, bird droppings.
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 U.S. 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. U.S. citizens invoke the Guano Act to claim over a hundred islands around the globe, and John Munro Longyear tried his luck with it in Svalbard, arguing that it should be expanded to include not just guano, but also coal and other minerals.
ABRAHAMIAN: 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.
ABDELFATAH: The U.S. government ultimately decided not to intervene. And then in 1914, reality came knocking.
(SOUNDBITE OF WHISTLE)
ABRAHAMIAN: The war made it quite difficult to export coal.
ABDELFATAH: When World War I broke out, his company's shipping and trade ground to a halt.
ABRAHAMIAN: The clock was ticking, right?
ABDELFATAH: And in 1916, Longyear sold his company's assets to a Norwegian coal mining company.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (Reading) 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.
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.
ABRAHAMIAN: The powers were meeting to kind of divvy up what was left of the world.
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...
ABRAHAMIAN: Svalbard was formerly bestowed upon Norway by the international community.
ABDELFATAH: Why? Because Norway had been a good ally during the war and it had the biggest presence on Svalbard, including a company that until a few years earlier had been owned by John Munro Longyear. The treaty also carved out an exception for other corporate interests in Svalbard, keeping its borders open for business.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As John Munro Longyear) It is a pleasure to know that Svalbard, though now under the flag of Norway, is forever dedicated to the arts of peace. It probably can never be drawn into international controversy.
ABDELFATAH: Svalbard wasn't a utopia, but over time, it did come to represent a place of global cooperation.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
MELISSA BLOCK: Seventy-five 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.
ABDELFATAH: Since 2008, Svalbard has even housed a large post-apocalyptic seed vault meant to safeguard the planet's food crops if the worst ever happens.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
MICHELE NORRIS: Some call it a Doomsday vault. Others, a Noah's ark for global agriculture.
CARY FOWLER: 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
AARON DAHMEN: 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.
ABDELFATAH: Recently, with the race for the Arctic heating up, and as more countries, including the U.S., 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.
ABRAHAMIAN: The nation-state model, I think, if we take a thousand-foot view of it, is both very new and very fragile and might just be a blip.
ABDELFATAH: The question is, if the rules are being rewritten, who gets to rewrite them?
ABRAHAMIAN: 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ABDELFATAH: Coming up...
GRAMLICH: It was like a message in a bottle. You pop the cork and you throw it out into the sea of the internet and see what happens.
ABDELFATAH: ...We take to the high seas.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
TIM BARRY: Hi, my name is Tim Barry (ph). I'm calling from Charleston, South Carolina, and you're listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Part 2 - Let A Thousand Nations Bloom.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SEARCHERS")
TEX RITTER: (Singing) What makes a man who wanders? What makes a man to roam? What makes a man leave bed and board and turn his back on home?
ABDELFATAH: These are the opening lines of the 1956 movie starring John Wayne called "The Searchers." 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE SEARCHERS")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) This one's come a long way before he died, Captain.
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 it.
GRAMLICH: 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.
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 micronations at sea, all of which pretty much failed.
GRAMLICH: Well, this is weird. But OK.
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.
GRAMLICH: It was just sort of noodling around in the back of my brain.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE SEARCHERS")
WARD BOND: (As Captain Clayton) Another one, huh?
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.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE SEARCHERS")
WILLIAM STEELE: (As Nesby) I don't like it.
BOND: (As Captain Clayton) What don't you like?
STEELE: (As Nesby) Indians on a raid generally hide their dead. And if they don't care...
GRAMLICH: I don't like to be political, but, well, 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF COMPUTER BOOTING UP)
ABDELFATAH: So on a whim, he sat down at his computer and started typing, a blank page, a kind of canvas to design a new world.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GRAMLICH: How do you make the structures safer? Maybe we recycle these two-liter bottles.
ABDELFATAH: In the paper, Wayne brainstormed all kinds of engineering hacks to different problems he foresaw coming up...
GRAMLICH: It's probably a bad idea.
ABDELFATAH: ...Hoping to avoid the pitfalls that had sunk those previous micronation attempts, like how to survive the elements.
GRAMLICH: You can extract energy from waves.
ABDELFATAH: Huge waves, relentless sun.
GRAMLICH: Increase the difference in temperature of the surface water.
ABDELFATAH: And what about food?
GRAMLICH: You know, you can eat fish. It's out in the middle of the ocean. Doesn't have a lot of fish.
ABDELFATAH: Wayne called the paper "Seasteading: Homesteading The High Seas."
GRAMLICH: To capture some of the romance of, you know, manifest destiny.
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 U.N. He figured it was just a thought experiment, so he didn't need to have everything figured out.
(SOUNDBITE OF DIAL UP SOUNDS)
GRAMLICH: Back then, I was just publishing everything I did on the internet. It's, like, why not?
ABDELFATAH: In 1998, he uploads his paper to the web, and...
(SOUNDBITE OF DIAL UP SOUNDS)
ABDELFATAH: ...For a while, nothing much happens.
(SOUNDBITE OF DING)
ABDELFATAH: Three years later, in 2001....
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ELWOOD EDWARDS: You've got mail.
GRAMLICH: I got contacted by this guy named Patri Friedman. That was the beginning of the next phase of the story.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ABRAHAMIAN: I remember he said he should eventually just join the family business.
ABDELFATAH: Journalist Atossa 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. Atossa says Patri came to seasteading from an economics angle.
ABRAHAMIAN: 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.
GRAMLICH: 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. OK, let's get together for lunch.
ABDELFATAH: Can you take me to that first meeting? 'Cause it's almost like an intellectual blind date, right?
GRAMLICH: Oh, it absolutely is an intellectual blind date.
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.
GRAMLICH: 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.
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.
ABRAHAMIAN: Experimentation was something that they talked about a lot.
ABDELFATAH: And Patri really wanted to make that experiment a reality. From that first email, he'd said to Wayne...
GRAMLICH: I would I can build one of these things. I'm going like, well, it's a lot of work.
ABDELFATAH: And it would require a lot of money, money they didn't have.
GRAMLICH: We were always playing with the money problem.
ABDELFATAH: Then the solution fell into their laps. It was 2007. Patri was interviewing for jobs at different companies in Silicon Valley.
GRAMLICH: He did apply for a job at Founders Fund, which is Peter Thiel's fund.
ABDELFATAH: Peter Thiel, the don of what's become known as the PayPal Mafia.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CINDY POM: The companies that have defined our era all share one link - their founders trace their origins back to PayPal.
ABDELFATAH: Reporting about the PayPal Mafia can sound like a who's who of every major tech company of the past 30 years.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Peter Thiel started a hedge fund. They were, like, the earliest angel investor into Facebook. Made a gazillion dollars. Jeremy Stoppelman, Russell Simmons, Yelp. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn. Obviously, there's Elon, SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: YouTube?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah.
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...
GRAMLICH: Ground zero of the libertarian movement.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
THIEL: Whether we're going to have a much better future or not, I think it gets driven by the rate of technological progress.
ABDELFATAH: We reached out to Peter Thiel for this episode, but got no response.
GRAMLICH: He aced the interview.
ABDELFATAH: Before he leaves, Patri casually brings up seasteading, and the idea eventually makes its way to Peter Thiel.
GRAMLICH: 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?
ABDELFATAH: So on April 15, 2008, they co-founded The Seasteading Institute with funding from Peter Thiel. Patri liked to say...
ABRAHAMIAN: Let a thousand nations bloom.
ABDELFATAH: And their logo seemed to reference the libertarian classic, Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" - a man holding up the seastead above his head.
GRAMLICH: It might have been inspired by that.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
THIEL: 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.
GRAMLICH: So, anyhow, money was allocated and then started doing stuff.
ABDELFATAH: Peter Thiel gave them two marching orders. One...
GRAMLICH: Push the engineering forward.
ABDELFATAH: And two...
GRAMLICH: Market it a little.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PATRI FRIEDMAN: So our love for the oceans has brought us together today to embark on a short journey into the unknown.
ABDELFATAH: Patri took the lead, giving TED Talks, doing the press junket, spreading the gospel of seasteading.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FRIEDMAN: We've run out of frontier. All land is claimed, and our revolutions have become increasingly superficial.
ABRAHAMIAN: 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?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FRIEDMAN: Apple Nation, the country that knows what you want, even better than you do.
ABRAHAMIAN: And I think that really sums up both the moment and the sort of optimism around seasteading at the time.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FRIEDMAN: While saving humanity, we can also save the oceans.
ABDELFATAH: The seasteading 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 health care costs and economic inequality. And a lot of people responded positively. It was time to give it a go.
GRAMLICH: Then the question is whether or not we were going to do what we call the SFS, single-family seastead, or a larger one.
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.
GRAMLICH: They didn't give us a room. They gave us a nook.
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."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
THIEL: Originally created by the elves. It was meant to be used for good purposes.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE LORD OF THE RINGS: FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING")
CHRISTOPHER LEE: (As Saruman the White) The power of Isengard is at your command, Sauron, lord of the earth.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
THIEL: It is potentially very dangerous technology. It's very powerful.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE LORD OF THE RINGS: FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING")
ALAN HOWARD: (As Sauron) Build me an army worthy of Mordor.
ABDELFATAH: Anyway, back in the mid-2000s, when Wayne was working on seasteading 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 seasteading attempt should be.
GRAMLICH: And I voted small and Joe and Patri voted large. And that's the way we went.
ABDELFATAH: But just as they started to put the wheels in motion to actually try to build something...
GRAMLICH: You know, life intervened.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: The stock market is now down 21%.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: Forty-three percent.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #5: Everything and more has been completely wiped out.
ABDELFATAH: Wayne had been living off of some internet stocks that were doing great up until the 2008 recession hit.
GRAMLICH: I had to go find another job.
ABDELFATAH: Which meant less time for seasteading.
GRAMLICH: So I was still on the board, but I said I can't spend nearly as much time on it.
ABDELFATAH: I asked him if the co-opting of seasteading by libertarians played any role in his decision to step away.
GRAMLICH: You're pulling me into the politics.
ABDELFATAH: Which he told me he wanted to avoid discussing. He said he'd always been most interested in the engineering.
GRAMLICH: 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. 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 a little further.
ABDELFATAH: Patri Friedman continued full force with seasteading for a few more years after Wayne left. The closest he got to building a seastead was Ephemerisle, also known as Burning Man on the Water.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
VIRGINIA PRESCOTT: It's billed as a floating celebration of community, learning, art and seasteading.
ABDELFATAH: In 2011, Patri stepped down from The Seasteading 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 single-unit, self-sufficient, eco-friendly floating homes. Seastead projects are underway worldwide, including in Panama, South Korea and even right here in the U.S., in Florida and Mississippi.
GRAMLICH: I view large seasteading as a complete failure, but the small stuff is happening, and everybody calls them seasteads, so the name stuck.
ABDELFATAH: And it helped bring a fringe libertarian dream of exit more into the mainstream. Though Wayne says...
GRAMLICH: 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ABDELFATAH: Coming up...
ABRAHAMIAN: You don't need to start a seastead. You can have America.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIOBHAN ANFUERO: Hi. This is Siobhan Anfuero (ph) from Eden Prairie, Minnesota. I love your show. You're listening to THROUGHLINE.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Part 3 - The Cities of Tomorrow.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PILOT: Ladies and gentlemen, JetBlue Airways would like to welcome you to Honduras. Local time is 10:43 p.m. Please remain seated.
ABDELFATAH: In June 2025, Dan Girma, a producer on NPR's Embedded podcast, took a trip to the Honduran island of Roatan.
DAN GIRMA, BYLINE: Mangrove trees line tons of the coastline, and you have pretty beaches on either side.
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.
GIRMA: 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, and it kind of just cascades right into the sea. Prospera is kind of an experiment.
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.
GIRMA: They have the startup venture capitalist vibe.
ABDELFATAH: Over a hundred fifty million dollars 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SRINIVASAN: Google was started within a garage within our lifetime. Facebook 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?
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."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SRINIVASAN: Can we print out these online communities of gigantic scale into the physical world?
ABDELFATAH: It outlines a vision of digitally connected exclusive communities that design so-called states online first, and then map them onto land.
SILVERMAN: 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.
ABRAHAMIAN: Then lobby existing governments for sovereignty.
ABDELFATAH: Srinivasan calls this approach...
SILVERMAN: Tech Zionism.
ABDELFATAH: Tech Zionism, a reference to the movement that led to the creation of the state of Israel.
ABRAHAMIAN: 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.
SILVERMAN: I think for a long time, tech considered itself sort of searching for new frontiers. And in recent years, they're starting to look for literal frontiers.
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.
SILVERMAN: 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.
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 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: We should hold a contest to charter up to 10 new cities.
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.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ABDELFATAH: Which brings us back to Prospera, a place that does exist.
GIRMA: There was a very long back and forth with the Prospera people about coming in as a journalist.
ABDELFATAH: It took Dan Girma almost a year to get permission to visit Prospera from its management team.
GIRMA: Their version of a government is, like, a board of directors.
ABDELFATAH: And in the meantime, he was digging into how this place ended up in Honduras.
GIRMA: What I ended up finding out over time was that Prospera was born under circumstances where Honduras was under a lot of geopolitical turmoil.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER #1: (Non-English language spoken).
MONICA VILLAMIZAR: The coup has left Honduras deeply polarized.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER #2: (Non-English language spoken).
GIRMA: This is around 2008, 2009. Honduras had just undergone a coup.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER #3: It's an example for all the other countries - don't let yourselves be overrun by tyrants.
GIRMA: 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PAUL ROMER: Are there some rules we can develop for changing rules?
GIRMA: While that's happening, there's this idea of...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROMER: Something called a charter city.
GIRMA: ...Charter cities developing totally separate.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROMER: You start from uninhabited territory. People can come live under the new charter, but no one is forced to live under it.
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.
GIRMA: The Honduran government learned about this man and his ideas, and they got interested in what he was proposing.
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.
GIRMA: This goes back all the way to, you know, right after the 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, private enterprise-minded country ever since then.
ABDELFATAH: But plenty of people objected. Would it basically act as a state within their state? Would this threaten Honduras sovereignty? Still, in 2013, under a cloud of controversy, a law green-lighting charter cities was passed.
GIRMA: The Supreme Court of Honduras deemed it unconstitutional.
ABDELFATAH: But afterwards, the Honduran Congress, led by members of the president's Party, ousted four members of the Honduran Supreme Court.
GIRMA: It was part of a couple of things causing a constitutional crisis in Honduras.
ABDELFATAH: On top of this, there was a lack of transparency, which didn't sit well with Paul Romer, that economist whose ideas had kick-started 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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 a thousand 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, 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.
GIRMA: It creates a particularly core irony when we think about Prospera as a libertarian hope, being able to be created because of this strongman approach.
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. Critics of Prospera say it echoes colonial dynamics familiar to Roatan.
GIRMA: For years, the island of Roatan was actually kind of a disputed territory between colonial powers, including the Spanish and the British.
ABDELFATAH: In April 2022, after a new leftist government took power in Honduras, the charter city law was repealed.
GIRMA: And then the Honduran government goes a step further and declares through the Supreme Court that the previous law is null and void.
ABDELFATAH: Nullifying a guarantee made to Prospera that they would have 50 years to operate, even if the law was repealed.
GIRMA: And so now, as far as the Honduran government was concerned, Prospera was an illegal settlement.
ABDELFATAH: Prospera then sued the Honduran government in an international tribunal, seeking a massive amount of money.
GIRMA: Ten point seven billion dollars.
ABDELFATAH: Ten point seven billion dollars. For context, that's about a quarter of Honduras' 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.
GIRMA: How is this not coercion when you have all of these levers at your disposal to achieve what you want to achieve?
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.
GIRMA: We didn't see that many kind of, like, actual companies, like, working. A lot of it is virtual.
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.
GIRMA: 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 maintain its power.
SILVERMAN: It is kind of the ideological groundwork for a lot of these efforts to make new cities or communities or kind of self-run polities.
ABDELFATAH: There are other charter cities planned in more than 20 countries, especially in Asia and Africa.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Raphael Hythloday) 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.
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.
ABRAHAMIAN: 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ABDELFATAH: That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah, and you've been listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR. Next week on the show - how reality became something you could edit and sell.
GATES: The idea is that you're going to record people being people and putting them in very sort of strange, bizarre situations, and that's going to teach us something about what makes people tick.
ABDELFATAH: Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me and...
JULIE CAINE, BYLINE: Julie Caine.
CASEY MINER, BYLINE: Casey Miner.
CHRISTINA KIM, BYLINE: Christina Kim.
DEVIN KATAYAMA, BYLINE: Devin Katayama.
IRENE NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Irene Noguchi.
KYANA MOGHADAM, BYLINE: Kyana Moghadam.
THOMAS COLTRAIN, BYLINE: Thomas Coltrain.
SARAH WYMAN, BYLINE: Sarah Wyman.
ABDELFATAH: Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Volkl. Special Thanks to Holly Baxter, senior staff writer at the Independent and Rachel Corbett. Thanks also to Tom Nicholson, Johannes Doerge, Dylan Kurtz, Rebecca Ferrer, Liana Simstrom, Julia Redpath, Beth Donovan, Yolanda Sangweni and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keeley. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...
NAVID MARVI, BYLINE: Navid Marvi.
SHO FUJIWARA, BYLINE: Sho Fujiwara.
ANYA MIZANI, BYLINE: Anya Mizani.
ABDELFATAH: And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline@npr.org. 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.
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