While my career technically began in publishing in 2009, my journey through venture, and tech, and ultimately the kind of publishing I do today all began with Peter Thiel, who I first met that same year at a meet-up for a wild little organization called the Seasteading Institute. It happened like this: after reading an essay of Peter’s in which he described the organization, and its goal — to help facilitate the creation of hundreds or even thousands of new micro-nations in the ocean, free of terrestrial law — I reached out to the organization’s founder, Patri Friedman, and offered to write and work for TSI for free. He accepted, and here we are today. Fast forward 15 years, and Patri’s work has inspired an entire movement in everything from Charter Cities to the emerging discourse surrounding American special economic zones (SEZs).

Friday, I sat down with Patri and Kelsey Piper, a journalist with a lot of great insight into where the subject stands today, to revisit the Seasteading Project, and to discuss the movement I believe it spawned. How did what started as an essentially (and often explicitly) anarchist project evolve into fodder for the New York Times’ most cherished turbo libs, and what is the future of the movement now? We covered everything from the importance of our old frontier to the emergence of new “abundant” left, the fundamental brokenness of Congress, and the utility of democracy itself. Can it be saved?

Below, we’ve liberally edited and slimmed the transcript for clarity, and added subheadings for skimmability. But feel free to watch / listen to the whole conversation in its entirety here.