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.

This was a fun one. Enjoy!

-Solana

--
Mike Solana: We’re in this interesting moment of cross-political appetite for regions of the world, or countries specifically, free from onerous regulation. And [before we begin], I just want to see if we agree on the high-level problem here.

I think people have a sense we can no longer do anything inside the context of our current government. There’s a whole long list of things here. I think the most obvious is building new shit — building housing, especially, building infrastructure. The New York Times just published a piece on the Pacific Coast Highway. They reopened 11 miles near the Palisades, but something like 90-plus miles are still closed around Big Sur, and it’s been over two years. They’re blaming global warming. I don’t think it’s that.

It seems we have a broad inability to do stuff we used to be able to do, which to me is frightening, and one of the major themes of my work. So, first of all, do you think charter cities, special economic zones… freedom hubs?… are addressing this problem?

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, economic freedom seems like half the story here, and I do want to pitch political freedom as the other half. In particular, one of the big appeals of charter cities is if I wanted to host a conference there, I don’t have to worry about how many smart, capable people I know are able to get visas to attend that conference, or whether they can come for a week and work remotely. That is often illegal, and it shouldn’t be.

And if somebody’s coming to the US from another country, I think right now they unfortunately have to give some thought to what’s on their phone that might be searched at the border, and are there things they might want to say that they shouldn’t. So economic freedom is a big part of the story for me, and the other big part is political freedom, which also seems to be under threat right now.

Patri Friedman: The way I think of it is that governance is a technology, meaning many different parts of it can be improved differently. There’s not one pure theoretical answer. And we’ve had the opportunity to improve our governance technology in the past when the world was more violent, when it had more frontiers, when there were more revolutions. I’m not saying revolutions are a good thing, but they have a positive side effect of allowing experimentation with different social and legal forms. The American Revolution is a great example. It produced what is currently the industry-standard form of government: constitutional representative democracy.

We live in an age with far fewer revolutions, with fewer frontiers — a richer and more sedate age. And that’s great, but it’s lost us the ability to do the experiments we need to move things forward. And so I see the charter city concept as almost a side effect of peace, wealth, and stability.

The Origins and Evolution of Seasteading

Solana: I read about seasteading for the first time in a Peter Thiel piece “The Education of a Libertarian.” Importantly, and we’ll come back to this in the conversation, the concept is super rooted in anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism. I experienced all these ideas as right-of-center, not left-of-center, where maybe some of them are becoming popular now.

In the piece, Peter talked about a bunch of things, one of them was the frontier thing, Patri, that you mentioned. But he talked a lot about seasteading. That’s how I met you guys.

What were you thinking about when you launched the Seasteading Institute?

Friedman: Sure. Like most entrepreneurs, I was a frustrated consumer where the product that I wanted didn’t exist. And the product I wanted was a decently run libertarian country to live in. And that didn’t exist. So I got curious and tried to figure out why.

I came up with these ideas of looking at law like software, looking at governments like businesses. And I realized, well, the quality in this government industry — meaning how happy are citizens with their governments — is super low and super bad. But that’s actually not surprising because the firms in this industry are massive. And customers are super locked in. It’s hard to move. It’s expensive, [etc.].

And, you know, it’s not like an R&D lab. In the world of tech, people are always spinning off. They’re always exiting from current things to start startups to make new things. And we don’t have that for the government. And so I was like, well, what we need is some way to try out new legal and social and political systems on a small scale, on an opt-in basis.

And back then — I started exploring this stuff in the early 2000s — countries weren’t open to delegating regulatory authority in the way that charter cities work. So I looked at the ocean. People often think it’s like, “Well, it’s the ocean because on the high seas you can do anything.” That’s not true at all. The way international law on the ocean works is each ship needs to register with a country and fly its flag. And then the ship is a little bit like a floating embassy; they’re franchising that country’s sovereignty when they’re out past 12 nautical miles.

So it’s not that you can do anything. If you have a business in a country, you can’t easily just pick up and move, but the flag is like a virtual registration. And so all the countries in the world have the legal right to open these flagging registries and franchise their sovereignty. The only reason this exists is because the ocean is this fundamentally different physical environment where these ships as big as skyscrapers move around to different jurisdictions all the time. And so you can’t just use the old methods of fixed borders. But this legal difference is actually incredibly promising if you’re trying to do startup jurisdictions. Unfortunately, the economics of building on the ocean, which is very difficult and expensive, make it really hard.

Solana: There is this history, obviously, before seasteading as well. I mean, you have Shenzhen, you have China doing a version of this apparently all over the country starting in 1980. That was not a part of the discourse at all.

What were you thinking about in terms of other things that had happened? Obviously Disney is our example in America where we’ve come closest to this. Was there anything else you were looking at, like, “Maybe something like that could work”?

Friedman: Yeah. I think now in the charter cities age, I’ve learned a lot more about special economic zones, about Shenzhen and Hong Kong, Dubai and their financial center are all relevant. But in the 2000s, I was more looking at micronations and I was kind of like, “Okay, these people are doing this as a LARP, as a game, but what if it was real?” And I looked at things like Sealand, Rose Island...

Solana: I’m a citizen of Sealand now. They gave it to me at Hereticon.

Friedman: Wonderful. Yes. I’m a Duke as well. They gave it to me. It’s fun. You know, they struggled for decades to find a profitable business model after the pirate radio era ended in the early seventies. They tried a bunch of things. They tried hosting extreme sports there. And nothing worked from the mid-seventies until like 10 years ago. But selling the noble titles and the fun citizenships is actually a successful business for them.

Solana: It’s wild. It reminds me of naming stars. It’s very related.

Friedman: Absolutely! It’s very similar — it’s like doubling down on the LARP of it. And this is the thing about seasteading versus charter cities: seasteading is way more fun and exciting, and there’s way more memes, but it’s just not as matched to the nature of the world as far as what’s possible now. And this is why I exclusively focus on charter cities.

Solana: Roko swears that material science has progressed in such a way as you could do it with ice, and affordably.

Friedman: It’s not that the physics doesn’t work for ice-steading. It does. But it’s just really hard to get people to move to a beautiful tropical island like Roatan, where Honduras Prospera is, with one of the best reefs in the world. That’s hard. And now you’re trying to get them to move onto an iceberg?

Notable Seasteading Projects and Challenges

Solana: What is the history of seasteading? What are the three or four projects that led us up to the current era, which you think are notable?

Friedman: There haven’t been a lot, because it’s really difficult. The two groups that are building stuff now are mainly ArcPad in Southeast Asia and Ocean Builders in Panama. Ocean Builders is building basically a spar: a narrow pillar with a platform and a home on top. And then there’s an underwater room and flotation [devices] down below that they’re manufacturing…

[In 2019,] Chad and Nadia of Ocean Builders were being hunted by the Thai government for treason, which is a capital crime, for building a seastead. For those who don’t know the story, Chad’s an American Bitcoin guy, Nadia is his Thai wife, and they decided to build in Thailand because Thailand had the manufacturing know-how and things were cheap there. And they were just testing this engineering design of the spar seastead, and Seasteading Institute had a documentary team out there.

They’d asked for permission from the Thai Maritime Authority, who said, “Sure, whatever, we don’t care, build the thing.” But then the Thai Navy found out, and they were pissed. It’s important to note that while this was on the opposite coast, one coast of Thailand is on the South China Sea, the most contested area of water in the world, where China pours concrete platforms on rocks to build them up and puts people there — islandness and habitability are criteria for claiming oil and gas resources. So Thailand is very, very touchy about this.

And so the Thai government charged Chad and Nadia with treason. They got wind of the charge, escaped, and went into hiding. They had to hide for weeks before they made a daring sailboat escape to Singapore. First they tried to go to Malaysia, and Malaysia was like, “We’re not taking you in, we won’t even let you resupply.” Eventually they escaped to Singapore, everybody lived, and they relocated to Panama, where they’re building platforms. But it’s like, I was making PowerPoint presentations and getting people excited about my ideas, and [at the same time it was] like, dude, when you’re messing with states, people can die.

From Seasteading to Charter Cities: Current Projects

Solana: It seems to me the entire conversation has evolved into charter cities of one kind or another. The most notable one would be Prospera in Honduras.

But there are also other really important attempts. California Forever — which has land, at least they bought it — it seems like they’re stalled out fighting a war with regulators. I was a fool who did not think that this was going to be an issue, but it’s like, you’re in California, and you bought a bunch of land to create a great city, a great place. And that’s not how they do things in California.

Friedman: Yeah, I predicted this. When I think about the amount of goodwill it takes to get a country to pass national legislation to enable charter cities, it’s like, if you come in really warm with great introductions and a great value proposition for the country, you have a chance that maybe if you [make a bunch of attempts], one of them goes through.

And California Forever is like, “We’re just gonna keep it secret, not gonna enroll any local support.” It’s hard enough to build in California with support. I like to contrast their approach with our friend Devon Zuegel of Esmeralda, where she enrolled the local municipality and county from the very beginning of the project and included them in everything along the way.

Solana: Kelsey, what is the project you’re looking at and saying, “That’s the one I’m excited about”?

Piper: I have been watching Esmeralda very curiously, because it’s both in my area and because I think if Devon’s solution works, it is obviously way easier, and you now know it’s possible to find a local government you can work with (even if 99 percent of local governments aren’t possible to work with).

Solana: What is she trying to do exactly, for the audience who may not be familiar?

Piper: She’s been hosting a pop-up village called Esmeralda in Healdsburg, which is like two hours from the parts of the Bay Area where everything is outlandishly expensive. And she wants to build an actual city, a well-designed city, Esmeralda, on undeveloped land in that area with the cooperation of local authorities.

It would be under US jurisdiction. It wouldn’t do a lot of the innovative stuff that Patri is excited about, but there is still a lot you can do if you are planning a city from the start to be beautiful and engaging, a good place for people to live, and attract a great group of people to live there. Even if you can only do that, it would be amazing.

Solana: And so is that the one that’s your go-to of like — this is the way forward?

Piper: Well, it is certainly, if it can be done, and I think Devon is the person to do it. And if it can be done, I think it is a much more viable, immediate-term way forward, just because it doesn’t require solving any of these really hard problems.

I also watched Prospera pretty closely, and it’s gorgeous and I’m excited about it. But fundamentally, Prospera put in — and Patri can maybe speak more to this — a lot of work to ensure that future Honduras governments wouldn’t be able to just say, “Never mind, we’re out.” And future Honduras governments have still been continually threatening to say, “Never mind, we’re out.”

And so as much as they want to be not dependent on the goodwill or a willingness to adhere to the rule of law of future Honduras governments, I don’t think charter cities can fully escape that. And if you’re gonna be reliant on some government’s rule of law, America is better on that than a lot of places, for all its other downsides.

The American Context and the Frontier Spirit

Solana: A tough pill to swallow for a man who was once a young anarcho-capitalist who genuinely liked the idea of escaping the government. I think something I had to just accept was like, that’s probably not going to happen. So the question is like, what is the way? What is the model that could work? And like, which government is it? I’m wondering now about America. That’s where the flag is planted for me. How do we go about this? What do we even ask for?

Friedman: Yeah, how do you break a cartel? You work with the weaker members who aren’t making as much to disrupt the cartel. And governments, they’re like cartels. A small, mostly fixed number of giant firms who control everything — all land on earth and the rights over the ocean. But there are plenty who are willing to break the cartel if it brings their people benefits.

Solana: But all of these ideas are so American. [Which is why] it’s frustrating to be interested in [the charter cities concept]. The idea of a place that is freer, within a country where you can build what you want to build with your own property — it’s frustrating as an American to have that goal and feel like, “Man, there’s nowhere here I can do that.”

But then, I don’t know that I would have had that idea if I wasn’t an American.

Friedman: Yeah, more American than America is sometimes how I describe this movement. It’s true to the spirit of the revolution.

Piper: America was defined by having a frontier, right? There was a long time when the answer was “Go west, young man, we basically don’t have the rule of law there, build your own thing.” We still have this national ethos, and now the physical geography is just different.

Solana: Well, we found other places to put it, right? We put it on the internet. We put it in virtual reality. We put it in our fiction, Star Trek: The Next Generation, or Star Trek, period. We talk about the final frontier. We always dream of it.

Friedman: But we lost something... It’s great that a bunch of people worked on important things like new frontiers to advance humanity. But with the governance frontier becoming closed off, governance has become stagnant. That still matters.

Piper: Also, there’s something about touching grass being an important step in the loop by which we develop better governments. I feel like there’s a phenomenon where if you’re building something — crypto runs on the blockchain — even if you’re successfully not having to deal with US regulators (and in fact, you had to do a lot of dealing with US regulators, but even if we set that aside), because it’s all in the world of ideas, I feel like there’s something missing from the feedback loop, which is just not missing from the feedback loop if you’re trying to build a small town on the railroad. Just being routinely checked by real physical limitations weeds out the grifters really fast. You have to actually do stuff when you’re building in the real world.

The Abundance Movement and its Bipartisan Potential

Solana: I want to take it to something that you’ve talked about, Kelsey. The abundance stuff, the abundance Dems, the abundance Libs, the abundance movement, shall we say. [At first it was a little grating], this idea that people were discovering something very new [in this abundance framing]. This is stuff I’ve definitely talked about for a very long time.

Even the words: “Super abundance” and “post-scarcity” are things I encountered many, many years ago. They were also decidedly what I would call “weird right” ideas, the weird right wing, the sort of the freaky Burning Man right, the libertarian right, the Patri right, truly, is what we’re talking about here.

And so to watch center-leftists pick it up and be like, “Look at this cool thing that we invented”? One, frustrating, but two… kind of nice? Could there perhaps be bipartisan support for some of these ideas?

How would you characterize the center-left’s interest in these ideas right now? What are they excited about?

Piper: Yeah, so Ezra [Klein] and Derek [Thompson] are kind of coming from a classic big government lib [perspective]. Obviously, we would like to build high-speed rail and green energy and a bunch of stuff like that. When we try to do it, we spend astonishing sums of money and the thing doesn’t get built. This is incredibly embarrassing. The state of California is incredibly embarrassing. We need to figure out what went wrong, roll back a bunch of rules that aren’t serving their intended purpose.

Sort of starting from very lib premises, you’ve still got just a catastrophic failure to accomplish your goals. And maybe if we tried this other thing where we actually build stuff and prioritize governance and regulatory strategies that let us actually build stuff, then that would be way better.

This is, I think, only radical if you’re on the center-left. Because “the government regulations get in the way of building stuff” is not a new observation on the right at all. I think a lot of what Ezra and Derek are trying to do is say to a group of people who don’t care very much if the government stops private companies from building things, “Hey, the government actually does still impinge on all your priorities. So you actually do want to be on the team that fixes this, because it is standing between you and everything you care about.”

And that seems super valuable. You can quibble. I think we’re about to get into a lot of quibbles, but I’m excited about the general project of saying to people to my left, or to your left, certainly, “Hey, even the stuff you want is going to require us to learn how to build.”

Solana: Well, maybe one of the questions that I have here — it seems there is an interest in trying to work within the broader system. It’s like, what can we do at the state level, maybe in California? It’s less like, how do we escape it? It’s more like, how do we reform it?

Do you think the whole system can be reformed?

Piper: Yeah, so what is politically possible, within the Democratic Party or within the United States, is kind of the whole question, right? Can we build Esmeralda in California? Is a big rethinking of the Democratic Party possible, or is everybody who’s spending their effort there just wasting their time? I don’t know.

It does seem like we have under-tried the change the system approach. The Republican Party has changed extremely dramatically in the last 10 years. The Democratic Party also changed extremely dramatically, I think mostly in a bunch of bad directions, and then realized a bunch of those were bad, and is now adrift.

And it seems to me like that is a pretty good moment to try and say, “Okay, is there space in the system now for the stuff I care about? If people are like, “The center-left is going to try and carve this stuff out as a vision for the Democratic Party” — not the electoral pitch of the Democratic Party, but the thing that all the staffers are excited about and the enormous technocratic bureaucratic energy on the left, of which there is certainly a lot — if the thing it’s pointed at is the abundance stuff, that seems really good to me. I would be pretty happy.

So I’m less saying that’s definitely gonna happen. I’m more like, that is such a valuable bet if it pays off, and it doesn’t look impossible to me. I’m putting a lot of chips there right now.

Solana: Patri, your sense of whether there’s hope there?

Friedman: Before this administration, I never had hope that America would reverse its decline. I have some hope now, not a lot. I agree that getting some people pointed in a better direction is great. But I still think we need to be building new alternatives to these systems.

Freedom Cities and Regulatory Reform

Solana: Well, let’s talk about the Trump of it all. It is interesting to me how rarely people say something in politics to the extent of, “We are going to be the best we have ever been, better than ever, better than Abraham Lincoln.” Like on one hand, wow, that’s a really clownish thing to say, but on the other, wait a minute —

Friedman: Wouldn’t that be great?

Solana: Wouldn’t that be fucking awesome?

I think Trump is kind of weirdly open to almost anything. He just reads the culture and picks things up and drives forward. And what I would love to get on his radar is the concept of a regulatory-free zone. Special economic zones.

Let’s call it a Trump Zone. I’m happy to call it whatever he wants. Freedom Cities in California would be great. One specific thing I think we could get on his radar is something like rare earth metal processing and mining. I think we really need a place to do things like that.

Friedman: Yeah, part of the idea with Freedom Cities is to have different industry clusters for things that are strategic for the US, and rare earth metals is a great example. But I’ll just briefly describe what the program is.

Freedom Cities is something that Trump mentioned once pretty early in his campaign, and then again, late in his campaign. It’s the idea of building new cities on federal land. So there are a couple of different reasons for this. One, there’s lots of federal land, and it’s often, in the case where that land is near cities, not going to its highest-valued use. And so putting that land to work for America would be great.

And the other side of things is the regulatory difference. If you’re on federal land, you’re not under municipal, county zoning; you have your own policing. Think about how there are park rangers in national parks and not state police.

Solana: Yeah, the Presidio in San Francisco has a lot of weird rules because of this.

Friedman: Right, the Presidio and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco are great examples. The Alameda Naval Base, as well. You get a bunch of regulatory advantages in places that are too NIMBY, and where zoning is a problem, just by being on federal land without changing any laws.

Now, there’s a lot of work involved in this. Municipalities and counties and states do a bunch of useful things, besides slowing down innovation. And so the federal government would need to set up parallel institutions there.

Hesitations and Hopes for Political Change

Solana: So that sounds like — let’s call it the approach on the right. And then there is another approach, which is inspiring the Democratic Party of California to become an anti-regulatory party in a certain sense, to be suddenly excited about killing a lot of regulations. Kelsey, what do you see as the more likely path?

Piper: To be clear, if Freedom Cities happen, I would be excited about that. It is desperately needed. If the federal government has the will to try and get stuff done, I’m certainly not standing in the way of that.

My big hesitation comes from observing what happened with DOGE, which seemed to me like a great idea, the kind of thing that in principle could be massively excellent. The very short posting-to-policy pipeline was exciting to me. It was like, okay, we noticed stuff that can get acted on right away.

In fact, I think it has not only not done any of the things that I was hoping that it would do, it has also poisoned the well for a lot of those things, and it has also destroyed a lot of capacity to do those things that I was previously valuing and planning on. The US Digital Service, that was actually a really good department that was slowly — not fast enough, but — fixing a bunch of problems I had, and I wanted to build on it. And now there is less there to build on. You’re in a worse position than you started.

So if Freedom Cities happen, I’m certainly not going, “No, don’t do Freedom Cities.” But my baseline expectation about what will happen is that it would be a remarkably bad implementation that somewhat poisons the well and pisses everybody off unnecessarily.

To be clear, the main concern is just that if you want the longevity that investors need in order to invest, doing everything by executive order and then repealing it the next time the other party is in power is just stunningly irresponsible. We have to cut that out. We specifically have to cut that out if you care at all about business and manufacturing investment in America.

The Trump administration controls Congress, and you would think has a fair bit of sway with Congress given Trump’s power with the Republican Party, but they have been so disinterested in [legislation]... I hope I’m wrong. I hope it works. But I expect them to do too much through executive action and too much in a confrontational and destructive way. And I expect it not to work. I hope I’m wrong.

Solana: Every time there’s a [new executive order], I’m saying something along the lines of, “Why can’t we do this through our legislative branch?” And it’s because that branch is totally broken. And is that not actually the high-level problem facing our entire country? It just seems broken.

Friedman: This is the original thing. If you look at governance as a technology — as a computer scientist, I’m used to looking at scaling properties for algorithms. And I think that democracy, its scaling ability is limited. In a huge democracy with 100 million-plus people, the lawmakers are so far away from the people. And it’s not a philosophical concern. I just think if you look at its performance by scale, it has a lot of weaknesses at the high end. We are a large democracy, and large democracies don’t work very well. So let’s find some new tech.

Piper: I don’t know if I’m quite that pessimistic, but Congress is catastrophically broken and it’s doing enormous damage to the country. I think that is totally uncontroversial. And the only reason I’m less pessimistic is because we have tried nothing to fix this…

How hard have we tried to fix Congress? How hard have we tried? Do we have 10 people thinking full-time about rules changes they can demand that would make Congress not be so dysfunctional? Do we have one person thinking full-time about that?

Maybe Patri’s right here. I’m certainly not confident he’s wrong, but I’m kind of like, how much have we even tried to fix this? And a big part of my agenda right now is if Congress is broken, what if we try just throwing a lot at the wall in terms of fixing Congress? And then maybe that would have a lot of good downstream effects.

The Future of Democracy and Governance Technology

Solana: Patri, I want to “make space” for the question of whether or not democracy is doomed. It’s something I worry about myself.

Friedman: If you think that democracy is the be-all end-all, the savior, and the One True System, then I think the reality is very depressing. Again, to me, democracy is a technology. It’s a technology that’s really good. There’s a reason it’s taken the world by storm in the last few hundred years. It doesn’t work everywhere for everyone, but it’s the best we have…

[But] if you just forget everything you think about it, and just say, “Given the technological changes that have happened in the last 250 years, what are the chances the political system that was pioneered in 1787 is still the best one today?” It’s zero, just from a pure, simple, outside view perspective. So much has changed. We have all these new technologies for getting information about people’s preferences, for organizing ourselves. And surely the optimal form of government is gonna be one that leverages those. And so, of course, democracy is doomed, just like every technology is doomed to eventually be replaced by something better.

Solana: It reminds me of the stories you can tell are sort of shaped — let’s just rip off McLuhan right now — by the mediums that exist at any given time. The printing press kind of gave way to our current form of government. Today, the printing press is dated technology. It was dated years ago. And now we’re entering the world of AI.

What does AI mean for representative democracy? It seems like [AI will make] everything very, very different. And that certainly includes democracy.

Kelsey, do you agree that it seems hard for the government not to fundamentally change if the technology has changed or progressed so immensely?

Piper: AI in particular feels to me a little bit separate from everything else. If AI weren’t happening, I think I would say, “I think we can get another 100 golden years out of the fundamentals of the American system with a series of technocratic fixes.” I think you can get quite far with that. And I think democracy is not just the system, it is also the system for changing the system.

AI changes that picture. AI is really fast. Policymakers have a terrible time making decisions about it because the timescales they operate on are just not the timescales AI operates on. It is the first massive technological and social change that is basically being incubated entirely in private industry, and not even with all that much government money or involvement of any kind.

The implications are pretty staggering. The timescales are pretty staggering. And I think having voting rights over what happens in the United States becomes less relevant if by far the most important thing is what is happening inside one of a handful of private companies.

[For example], a scenario where OpenAI successfully automates almost all knowledge work. Then, that is a pretty bad situation for almost all knowledge workers to be in.

And I’m not sure — maybe Patri disagrees with me here — it solves anything if they have total freedom to live and work under any regulatory structure they like, if the fundamental situation is one where we just overnight automated almost all knowledge work.

Friedman: Yeah, but that’s not really in the scope for charter cities, right? Charter cities are a way of experimenting. If you want to figure out how to incorporate AI into governance, charter cities are a great tool to do a bunch of experiments with that.

Solana: If everybody’s out of work and furious and they don’t have enough money, well, the government’s going to change. We’ll no longer be a democracy. It’s like, we’re going straight to communism, I think. Or I guess whatever things become when communism is tried, and that’s pretty ugly.

Maybe it seems super intellectual or too intellectual, nerdy, boring, beside the point. But I actually think the question of what our government is going to be — it’s a good time to ask that question.

Piper: I think it’s a good time to be thinking about it. And I don’t know for sure what’s going to happen or when it’s going to happen, but since 2019, the folks at OpenAI have been saying, “Yeah, we are going to automate all knowledge work.” And since then, they’ve been making pretty steady progress on the amount of knowledge work they automate. And so far, yeah, it’s a productivity multiplier, as you would expect from the basic economics and stuff like that.

I can pretty easily see a world where that stops being true, where the Future Perfect newsletter it writes is just better than the Future Perfect newsletter that it writes with my assistance. There are some smart people that I can’t actually be helpful to.

I do think that if we’re not thinking ahead about the plan, then yes, the default is massive social unrest, various redistribution efforts, which are some combination of appeasement and threat and reaction, none of which is a good outcome for anybody, or at least is very far short of the best possible outcomes for everybody.

Solana: I guess we have a comp though. We have a comp in the oil countries, Qatar and shit, where they pay all their citizens. And it seems weirdly dystopian because they sort of import a slave class as well. But separate from that, the actual Qataris, it seems like they’re living kind of what tech people talk about on UBI.

Piper: I’m somewhat skeptical [about what] most people will do if you’re just like, “Well, we automated your job, but here’s a big paycheck.” If they spend that doing stuff that’s meaningful to them, cool, awesome. But I kind of worry that a lot of people will do a lot of drugs and not much else.

Do we have a massive crypto sports betting explosion and hyper-interesting algorithms that play you the absolute most compelling TikToks 24/7, and you just do a lot of drugs? Like, this could happen consensually, this could happen in a democratic framework. It would still feel to me like a fundamentally tragic outcome for the human race.

Solana: We did see some of that during COVID.

Friedman: The cyberpunk future.

Piper: The Wall-E future feels kind of disturbingly plausible at this point.

Aesthetics and the Abundance Movement

Solana: I want to get to my last one, which is sort of a petty point. I want to kind of pick on abundance. I’m seeing a movement rise up, and it’s a combination of several things. Let’s call them the YIMBY center-left because the socialist-left in San Francisco is very opposed to it. So let’s say the YIMBY center-left, the abundance libs, the “we just discovered that Joe Biden was senile for four years” libs — under the banner of Alex Thompson’s new book. Maybe, to a certain extent, the EA people. And the Nate Silvers of the world — they’re all in this group.

Piper: You’re definitely pointing at a very real group on the center-left.

Solana: And so for me, so for that group of people, which I see as the emerging — hopefully that becomes the Democratic Party rather than the Hassan Piker, Luigi Mangione left, which is kind of what I suspect is going to happen, sadly.

But if it’s you guys, I don’t know what you want to call yourselves, but why the fuck are the buildings so ugly? Why are the buildings so ugly in San Francisco?...

I go to Paris and I look around and I think, this is the most beautiful city in the world. It’s totally centrally planned. The buildings in America that we’re building right now are so ugly. And I think the YIMBY people should care more about it, because if you want to convince people that what you’re doing is important, beauty is the path to do that. Why are they so disinterested? I mean, does it bother you? Do you think this is valid? What is going on with the ugly buildings?

Matt, pull up a picture of one of the ugly buildings so we know what we’re talking about here.

Friedman: I relay this point about how distant people are from their customers or users. There was a great study that went around on Twitter recently where the more years somebody has studied architecture, the more their tastes diverge from that of a regular person. And so we’re educating people away from what people actually like.

Piper: I do think a lot of people have become very hardcore “all that matters is housing” because housing matters a lot and because any other criteria you admit onto the table become excuses to delay. So there was a lot of just, “I will bite any bullet you throw at me.” You’re like, “It will shadow my vegetable garden.” “Great, I love shadowing your vegetable garden.” “It’s hideous.” “Great, I love how hideous it is.”

Which is not healthy. You generally don’t want to have an adversarial attitude about trade-offs. You want to have a, “Yep, trade-off acknowledged. We’re doing it anyway” attitude. But you log into Oakland City Council meetings to discuss whether something can be built, and there are so many objections that I think there is an attitude of, “Yep, yep, we want to build anyway, we want to build anyway, we want to build anyway, we want to build anyway.”

And it takes unusual virtue and carefulness to go, “Of all those objections, which one is shared by the largest percentage of people? And is there a good way to accommodate it at a tolerable cost?”

I think there is often a good way to do beauty at a tolerable cost. And when there isn’t, it is often a thing where we could use technology to close the gap. I’m very excited about the people who are trying to automate stone carving so that we can have cool stone carving at low prices everywhere.

A pet thing of mine — anybody of your listeners who knows botany is gonna tell me this is impossible because I don’t actually know anything about botany — but big old-growth oak trees and redwood trees make everything beautiful. The problem is they take hundreds of years to build. Do they have to take hundreds of years to build? Can we have really fast-growing trees?

Solana: Yes. I talked to a guy, Gabriel Licina, for a podcast I did. It was one of the seasons of Anatomy of Next when I was still doing the podcast back at Founders Fund. And he was doing what he called aggressive afforestation. He was genetically modifying flora to take over cities. He’s a biohacker. And this was part of it, to just get things to grow faster. Maybe it’s possible.

But I agree. I see these pictures of Mexico City and people say, “This is the most beautiful city in the world.” And I think, “There are just plants in this picture. That’s what you’re actually talking about.”

Piper: Yeah, people love trees. If you compare identical, boring subdivisions and one of them has old-growth trees that are almost making an arch over the road and one of them doesn’t, the trees, they lift the human heart.

The other thing is insurance companies despise the trees because they will fall on your roof. When our insurance inspector last came by, he was like, “Honestly, 90 percent of my job these days is telling people to stop having trees that are going to cause their insurance company to have to make expensive roof repairs.”

And this feels like some kind of market failure, right? If everybody values your old-growth tree, but your insurance company that has to pay for your roof repairs is like, “I’m losing money on your old-growth tree, please stop having it.” I think beauty matters. I think reasonably often the right place in our trade-off navigation would be making places more beautiful. And even when we can’t afford to, okay, let’s figure out how to afford to.

Solana: Last thought, given the entire conversation we just had: exit or build? Exit America or build in America? Is there a path to save America? Is there not? I think I know where you’re going to come at this, but Kelsey, I’m starting with you. Exit versus build.

Piper: I want to build. I think that we’re in a weird realignment. There’s a lot of leverage to having a case for what America ought to look like, and a lot is rapidly changing about what the government thinks of itself as doing and can do. There is a point where I’d be like, “Now I’m out,” but it’s pretty far away. I feel like I’ve got to give this a try first. And I think it can work. I think things that people thought were impossible actually happen all the time.

Friedman: I have strong opinions on this. I would say for me, it’s not exit versus build. It’s exit and build. And I think I kind of disagree with the framing of “exit.”

Look at something like the Traitorous Eight leaving Shockley and starting Fairchild Semiconductor, which led to our entire electronics industry. They exited, right? But they exited in order to build something and then bring it back to the market better.

The Shenzhen-Hong Kong example is incredible. Millions of Chinese people exited China to go to a place where they could actually produce value, that had better laws, better regulations. And then, for Hong Kong, when Deng Xiaoping started to liberalize China, a lot of this business expertise flowed back and was able to uplift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. More people were uplifted out of poverty than has ever happened in the history of the world by the combination of Deng’s interest in reform and Hong Kong to draw models and experience from.

And so I think that when you exit a giant institution to build something that is meant to make a better product, there’s a sense in which you’re not exiting; you’re exiting the institution. You’re not exiting the economy. Your goal is to make something even better for those who are using the current system. And the same way with charter cities, it’s not like running away. It’s like, “Hey, I want to clear space to reimagine this.”

[To be clear,] it’s not retiring into the jungle with low cost of living. It’s more like, “Let’s go build something better and then come back and out-compete them.” You’re not trying to leave. You’re not trying to take your abilities out of the domain of the human race. You’re just taking them out of an institution that’s not working very well.

Solana: Are you doing that in America? Are you doing that physically in America?

Friedman: To some degree you can do it in America using cyberspace and incorporating in other places. But your ability to do so is limited. And I think one of the most important problems to solve is upgrading the operating system running on every piece of land managing every city and county. And that’s what I’m about.

And I think you upgrade that operating system by having a blank canvas and taking the space to design something new. Maybe the first thing you do doesn’t work. Maybe the fifth thing you do doesn’t work. But look at how much benefit has come to the world from the American constitution. America showed that, “Hey, this different way, with free speech and free religion — it actually works better.”