The billionaires' utopia blueprint

Summary

Throughline – “The Billionaires’ Utopia Blueprint”

Date: April 23, 2026
Hosts: Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei
Theme Overview:
This episode explores the persistent human urge to design and build utopias—from the philosophical ideal posed in Thomas More’s Utopia to the present-day attempts by tech billionaires to create new, privately controlled societies on earth and beyond. Through historical case studies and contemporary experiments such as seasteads and Prospera, the hosts dissect the motivations, successes, failures, and ethical questions behind “utopia blueprints” drawn (and funded) by the ultra-wealthy.

---

Main Themes and Episode Structure

• Historical roots of “utopia” (00:33–02:28)
• Svalbard: Open borders and the flaws of sovereignty (06:03–18:34)
• The libertarian dream of seasteading (20:12–35:11)
• Startup nations and Prospera in Honduras (36:29–49:53)
• Reflections: Who gets to design the rules? (49:10–50:29)

---

Detailed Breakdown & Key Insights

1. What is Utopia? (00:33–03:06)

• Historical Framing: Rund Abdelfatah introduces Utopia (1516) by Thomas More, questioning if a perfect society is possible or if the concept simply mirrors reality and offers a chance to change it.
• Quote: “We did not ask if he had seen any monsters, for monsters have ceased to be news…But examples of wise social planning are not so easy to find.” (00:33)
• Utopia is depicted as a society without private property, with open access to goods, regulated movement, and communal living—but with strict uniformity and harsh punishments.
• The ‘utopia’ concept is presented as both inspiration and warning—highlighting how dreams of perfection could slip into dystopia.

2. The Real-World Utopias: Svalbard (06:03–18:34)

Svalbard’s Unusual Status

• Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (journalist/author) describes the hidden complexities of global political architecture.

  “Svalbard is the only place in the world with open borders.” (08:08 – Abrahamian)

• History Recap: Svalbard, Arctic territory of Norway, an uninhabited “no man’s land” until mined for coal by John Munro Longyear, who saw himself as a “polar emperor.”

  “He could smell coal. He knew where it was.” (09:28 – Abrahamian)

Messy Experiments in Sovereignty

• Early 1900s: “Company town” with isolated laborers, conflicts over property, no government authority:

  “Svalbard had no courts, no police, no property law.” (12:06 – Host)

• Attempts by Longyear to get the US to claim Svalbard using the Guano Act failed.
• After WWI: The territory handed to Norway, but with a treaty keeping its borders open for business and research.
• “Svalbard wasn’t a utopia, but over time it did come to represent a place of global cooperation.” (16:18 – Host)

Modern Svalbard & Changing Borders

• Svalbard now houses the “Doomsday” Global Seed Vault—insurance for global agriculture.

  “This is the most valuable natural resource in the world.” (16:51 – Seasteading founder)

• As geopolitics shift, Norway is asserting greater sovereignty, restricting foreign influence, suggesting the current world order is fragile and subject to rewriting:

  “The nation state model...is both very new and very fragile and might just be a blip.” (17:48 – Abrahamian)

---

3. The Seasteading Experiment & the Tech Libertarian Vision (20:12–35:11)

The Dream

• Inspired by old “Wild West” myths, Wayne Gramlich, a retired engineer, dreams of new societies at sea:

  “Unlike the colonization of the west, where there were previous occupants, in the ocean, the only previous occupants are the fish.” (22:39 – Gramlich)

• He authors a technical manual for “Seasteading,” seeing ocean-based start-ups as the new frontiers.

The Reality

• Partnership with Patri Friedman (grandson of economist Milton Friedman):

  “It was a way to create more nation states in the world, to create competition and have better ideas.” (25:19 – Abrahamian, paraphrasing Friedman)

• Attracts interest and funding from Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and idol of the libertarian Silicon Valley ethos.

  “What if I give you half a million to promote the idea and push it forward?” (28:51 – Gramlich)

• The Seasteading Institute is founded, using language and imagery echoing Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

  "Let a thousand nations bloom." (29:05 – Host; Friedman catchphrase)

Where Did It Go?

• Engineering and marketing push but ultimate technical and political hurdles stall big projects.
• Early efforts (like “Burning Man on the Water”) fizzle; large-scale seasteads never realized.

  “I view large seasteading as a complete failure, but the small stuff is happening.” (34:40 – Gramlich)

• Christian critiques about escapism and feasibility:

  “If you're going to do this libertarian stuff, you might want to see if you can just find somebody who will loan you some dirt to do it on. It's probably going to be easier than building a seastead.” (35:00 – Gramlich)

---

4. Startup Nations: The Case of Prospera, Honduras (36:29–49:53)

Prospera as a Corporate Utopia

• Dan Gurma (NPR producer) visits the Prospera project, “an experiment in what the future of cities could look like if they were run by corporations.” (37:34 – Host)
• No oversight from Honduran authorities; businesses pick their regulations; crypto is preferred.
• Funded by tech heavyweights: Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Balaji Srinivasan.

Ideological Blueprint: Network States

• Srinivasan’s book How to Start a New Country advocates digital communities ("network states") that materialize physically.

  “Can we print out these online communities of gigantic scale into the physical world?” (38:52 – Tech supporter)

Controversies & Reality

• Prospera’s origins coincided with Honduran political crisis; legislation enabled autonomous “charter cities.”

• Critics highlight lack of consultation with locals, property disputes, worker protections, and fears about sovereignty and neo-colonialism.

• Paul Romer, the economist whose ideas inspired “charter cities,” distances himself as Prospera takes on a libertarian, corporate character.

  “The point of a place like Prospera is that there isn’t really a public to answer to.” (45:37 – Host)

• Recent legal battles: Honduran government repealed charter city law, declared Prospera illegal; Prospera sues for $10.7 billion (~25% of Honduras' GDP).

  “How is this not coercion when you have all of these levers at your disposal to achieve what you want to achieve?” (47:24 – Tech enthusiast/supporter)

• Other projects: Elon Musk’s Starbase (Texas), California Forever, Trump’s "Freedom Cities", all propose privately-controlled, regulation-free urban developments—many still virtual.

---

5. Reflections & Ethical Questions (49:10–50:29)

• The hosts return to the allegory of Utopia, noting that today's network-state experiments are less about perfect societies than efficient corporate domains.

  “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.” (49:53 – Host)

• Abrahamian’s critique:

  “I don't think that Elon Musk is saying we're going to create this...perfect society on the moon...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.” (49:53 – Abrahamian)

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Utopia’s True Purpose:
  “Is a perfect society possible? Or is the fantasy just a mirror held up to reality and a chance to change it?” (02:28 – Abdelfattah)

• On Libertarian Escapism:
  “Tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have backed experiments designed to operate beyond the borders and laws most of us live by.” (03:36 – Host)

• On Political Fragility:
  “The nation state model...is both very new and very fragile and might just be a blip.” (17:48 – Abrahamian)

• On the Limits of Exit:
  “It was never really my intent to get involved in the politics...sometimes you have to pick up a stone and just need to make move it a little further down the road and the next person picks it up and moves it a little further.” (33:23–33:44 – Gramlich)

• On Corporate Utopias:
  “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.” (49:53 – Abrahamian)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:33 – Opening reflections on Utopia (Thomas More)
• 06:03 – Svalbard: open borders, the origin story
• 14:48 – End of WWI, rise of nation-states, Svalbard’s treaty
• 20:12 – Introduction to seasteading, libertarian tech vision
• 29:05 – “Let a thousand nations bloom”; Peter Thiel funds Seasteading Institute
• 34:40 – Seasteading’s legacy: from big dreams to floating homes
• 36:29 – Prospera, Honduras: startup nations and charter cities
• 42:41 – Paul Romer and the charter city concept
• 45:37 – Criticisms and controversies at Prospera
• 49:10 – Closing: from utopian allegory to billionaire blueprints

---

Final Reflection

The drive to design utopias—whether by philosophers, colonists, or tech barons—remains deeply intertwined with questions of who gets to write the rules and for whom the “better world” is truly intended. The episode warns that contemporary billionaire-driven experiments look less like collective utopias and more like corporate, exclusive enclaves, with profound implications for democracy, sovereignty, and the future of social organization.

Transcript

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

This message comes from EasyCater, the workplace food platform. EZCATER helps organizations order food from favorite restaurants, meet dietary needs, and stay on budget with employee meal programs, flexible payment options, and 247 customer support all on one platform. Learn more at EasyCater.com.

[Narrator/Quote Reader]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Narrator/Quote Reader]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

An old sunburned, long bearded traveler named Raphael Haithalide 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.

[Narrator/Quote Reader]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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, where every man has

[Narrator/Quote Reader]

a right to everything.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Gold is used for chamber pots, private property isn't a thing. Everyone wears the exact same colorless clothes and works six hour days, everyone has his eye upon you, and all movement is perfectly regulated.

[Narrator/Quote Reader]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Commentator/Critic]

I mean, I hate to sound like

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

utopic tech bro here, but if you'll excuse me for three seconds. You know, these are things that are

[Narrator/Quote Reader]

going to save lives.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

We can make the world amazing, more

[Narrator/Quote Reader]

profound than fire or electricity or anything

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

that we have done in the past.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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 system society. Perfect for who? That's a different story.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

You would prefer the human race to endure, right?

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

You're hesitant. Well, from private cities, California Forever is

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

building the next great American city to interstellar colonies.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

Starting new countries is actually possible, preferable and profitable.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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 Abdelfattah. On this episode of Throughline from npr, we'll take you from a forgotten Arctic archipelago, the only place in the world with open borders, to floating cities in the ocean out in the middle of nowhere on your own, to private startup nations that might be coming to some land near you.

[Commentator/Critic]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

Hi, this is Emil Hart from Denver, and you're listening to Throughline from npr.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

This message comes from Synchrony bank who can help you get your do nothing savings off the couch and working hard. No more sleeping late and eating all the chips. Time to start earning your keep in a big way with their high yield savings account that has a great rate, easy access to your funds and no monthly fees or minimum balance requirements. Put your lazy savings to work. Go to synchrony.com NPR member FDIC. This message comes from Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try [e-mail], progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.

This Message comes from LinkedIn ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? For marketers, that's impressions. When ads don't create revenue, that's a tough conversation with the CFO. Instead, invest in results your CFO will love. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. So advertise on LinkedIn, spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Just go to LinkedIn.com NPRpod terms and conditions apply.

Part 1 A Weird World

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

This is Atusa Araxia Abrahamian.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Okay, 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 a Tosa. But you've likely heard of Svalbard's neighbor, Greenland, which has been a hot topic lately. President Donald Trump reasserted in the New Year that the United States wants Greenland.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[John Munro Longyear (Historical Figure, quoted)]

About 9:30am, 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.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

Upon

[John Munro Longyear (Historical Figure, quoted)]

the sun seemed to be boring holes through the clouds.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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 Longear 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.

[John Munro Longyear (Historical Figure, quoted)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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 finding another housing out there.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

But it turns out building a new society was hard.

[John Munro Longyear (Historical Figure, quoted)]

Many difficult and unusual problems.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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.

[John Munro Longyear (Historical Figure, quoted)]

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

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

A classic tale.

[John Munro Longyear (Historical Figure, quoted)]

Strikes were instituted by disaffected socialistic leaders.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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, but Svalbard

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

had no courts, no police, no property law.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

There was no authority to really rule on these things.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

It seemed only a matter of time before some nation or empire would claim sovereignty over Svalbard and threaten his business. Longear 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.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

He did so under an older law called the U.S. guano act that allowed the U.S. to claim unoccupied islands in the Pacific that contained large amounts of guano. Bird shit, bird droppings.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

No joke. This is a real thing. This act from 1856 says that if an American citizen finds enough guano bird poop on an island not yet claimed by another country or empire, the US President could choose to use military force to claim sovereignty there. Why guano? Because it's a great fertilizer necessary for maintaining food production at a time when synthetic fertilizers didn't yet exist. And it was also used to produce an ingredient for explosives. It was considered so valuable it got the nickname White Gold. US citizens invoke the Guano act to claim over 100 islands around the globe. And John Munro Longear tried his luck with it in Svalbard, arguing that it should be expanded to include not just guano, but also coal and other minerals.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

The war made it quite difficult to export coal.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

The clock was ticking right, and in

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Narrator/Quote Reader]

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 honourable relations between nations. Agree to this covenant of the League of Nations.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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 a League of nations, an international organization designed to maintain world peace. Peace through diplomacy.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

And so Svalbard was formally kind of bestowed upon Norway by the international community.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[John Munro Longyear (Historical Figure, quoted)]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Svalbard wasn't a utopia, but over time it did come to represent a place of global cooperation. 75 boxes of seeds were carried down a red carpet today on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean, headed for cold storage, really cold storage. 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. Some call it a doomsday vault, others a Noah's ark. For global agriculture, this is the most

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

valuable natural resource in the world.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

So in other words, as long as

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

we intend to be on Earth ourselves,

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

we're going to need this diversity.

[Narrator/Quote Reader]

Tonight we're heading north, way north to

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

the Arctic Circle, which is fast becoming

[Narrator/Quote Reader]

one of the most contested regions in the world. And that means Beijing, Moscow, Washington and

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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 them, the rules aren't all that fixed. If you just try hard enough, maybe the rules will bend to your own desires.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Coming up.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

We take to the high seas.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

This message comes from Prolon. Want to look and feel your best this spring? Prolon's Five Day Fasting Mimicking Diet is a clinically developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15% off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com NPR Support

for NPR and the following message come from Warby Parker, the One Stop Shop for all your vision needs. They offer expertly crafted prescription eyewear plus contacts, eye exams and more for everything you need to see. Visit your nearest Warby Parker store or head to warbyparker.com this message comes from NPR sponsor Carvana. Carvana believes selling your car should be refreshingly simple. Enter your license plate or vin, get a real offer down to the penny and schedule a pickup on your time. No surprises. Sell your car [e-mail] pick up. Fees may apply.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Part 2 Let a Thousand nations bloom

[Commentator/Critic]

what makes a man to wonder?

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

What makes a man to roam? What makes a manly bed and boy and turn? 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.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

This has come a long way before he died, Cap'.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

N. 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.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

Well, this is weird, but okay.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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 city.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Another one, huh? 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.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

I don't like it.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

What don't you like? Indians on the raid generally hide their debt, and if they don't care. I don't want 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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

It's probably a bad idea.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Hoping to avoid the pitfalls that had sunk those previous micronation attempts, like how to survive the elements you can extract energy from waves, huge waves, relentless sun,

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

difference in temperature of the surface water.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

And what about food?

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

You can eat fish. It's out the midd. The ocean doesn't have a lot of fish.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Wayne called the paper Seasteading, homesteading, the

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

high seas to capture some of the romance of, you know, manifest destiny.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

In 1998, he uploads his paper to the web. And for a while, nothing much happens. Three years later, in 2001, you've got mail.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

I remember he said that he eventually just joined the family business.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Journalist Atusa Araksiah 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. Atousa says Patri came to seasteading from an economics angle.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

We had a few back and forth and then I think I asked him like, by the way, where are you? Because you know, that's 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. Let's get together for lunch.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

Oh, it absolutely is an intellectual blind date.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

And they hit it off. Wayne learned that Potry 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.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

Experimentation was something that they talked about

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

Wayne, I would really like to build one of these things. I'm going like, well, that's a lot

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

We were always playing with the money problem.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Then the solution fell into their laps. It was 2007. Patri was interviewing for jobs at different companies in Silicon Valley.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Peter Thiel, the don of what's become known as the PayPal mafia. The companies that have defined our era

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

all share one link.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Their founders trace their origins back to PayPal. Reporting about the PayPal mafia can sound like a who's who of every major tech company of the past 30 years.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

Peter Thiel started a hedge fund. They were like the earliest angel investor into face made a gazillion dollars.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Jeremy Stompelman, Russell Simmons, Yelp, Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn.

[Commentator/Critic]

Obviously there's Elon, SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, Chad

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.

[Narrator/Quote Reader]

YouTube.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

Yeah.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

He aced the interview.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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?

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

So on April 15, 2008, they co founded the Seasteading Institute with funding from Peter Thiel. Patry liked to say, let a thousand nations bloom. And their logo seemed to reference the libertarian classic, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. A man holding up the seastead above his head.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

It might have been inspired by that. The science fiction things are very interesting

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

because so few people are doing them. There is something about that that's contrarian, fundamental.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

It's not being done enough of. So anyhow, money was allocated and then started doing stuff.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Peter Thiel gave them two marching orders. One, push the engineering forward and two,

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

market it a little.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

So our love for the oceans has brought us together today to embark on a short journey into the unknown. Patri took the lead, giving TED talks, doing the press junket, spreading the gospel of seasteading. We've run out of frontier, all land

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

is claimed, and our revolutions have become increasingly superficial. 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?

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

While saving humanity, we can also save the oceans. 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.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

And then the question is whether or not we were going to do what we call the sfs single family Cstead or a larger one.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

Originally created by the elves, it was meant to be used for good purposes. The power of Isengard is at your command, Sauron, Lord of the Earth. It is potentially a very dangerous technology. It's very powerful warrior. Build me an army worthy of Mordor.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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 Potry 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.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

But just as they started to put the wheels in motion to actually try to build something, you know, life intervened. Let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate. The stock market is now down 21%, 43%, 3%.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

Everything and more has been completely wiped out.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

I had to go find another job,

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

which meant less time for seasteading.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

You're pulling me into the politics, which

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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, you're walking along the road and you have to pick up a stone and just need to make move it a little further down the road and the next person picks it up and moves it a little further.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Padre Friedman continued full force with sea setting for a few more years after Wayne left. The closest he got to building a seastead was ephemeral. Also known as Burning man on the Water. It's billed as a floating celebration of community learning, art and seasteading. 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 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 US In Florida and Mississippi.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

I view large seasteading as a complete failure, but the small stuff is happening and everybody calls them seasteads. So the name stuck and it helped

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

bring a fringe libertarian dream of exit more into the mainstream. Though Wayne says if you're going to

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Coming up, you don't need to start a seastead.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

You can have America.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

Foreign.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Hi, this is Yvonne Ampuero from Even Prairie, Minnesota.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

I love your show.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

You're listening to Throughline.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

This message comes from Prolon. Want to look and feel your best this spring? Prolon's five Day Fasting Mimicking Diet is a clinically developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15% off, plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com NPR this message comes from Warby Parker. Prescription eyewear that's expertly crafted and unexpectedly affordable. Glasses designed in house from premium material starting at just $95, including prescription lenses. Stop by a Warby Parker store near you.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Part 3 the cities of Tomorrow

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff we'd like to welcome you to Honduras. Local time is 10:43pm Please remain seated.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

They have the startup venture capitalist vibe.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

Google was started within a garage within our lifetime. Facebook was started from a dorm room within our lifetime. Bitcoin was started from a white paper within our lifetime.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

So new companies, communities, currencies have all

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

been started in this way. Could we start new countries?

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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 how to Start a New Country.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Commentator/Critic]

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

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

he calls the grays, then lobby existing governments for sovereignty.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

Srinivasan calls this approach Tech Zionism. Tech Zionism a reference to the movement that led to the creation of the State of Israel.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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.

[Commentator/Critic]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Commentator/Critic]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

We should hold a contest to charter up to 10 new cities built on

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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. That is they don't yet exist in reality. Which brings us back to Prospera, a place that does not exist.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

What I ended up finding out over time was, was that Prospera was born under circumstances where Honduras was under a lot of geopolitical turmoil.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

The coup has left Honduras deeply polarized.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

It's an example for all the other countries.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

Don't let yourself be overrun. My parents.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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.

[Wayne Gramlich / Patri Friedman (Seasteading Founders)]

Are there some rules we can develop

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

for changing rules while that's happening? There's this idea of something called a charter city. Charter cities developing, totally separate. You start from uninhabited territory, people can come live under the new charter, but no one is forced to live under it.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

But plenty of people objected. Would it basically act as a state within their state? Would this threaten Honduran's sovereignty? Still, in 2013, under a cloud of controversy, a law greenlighting charter cities was passed.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

The Supreme Court of Honduras deemed it unconstitutional.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

On top of this, there was a lack of transparency, which didn't sit well with Paul Romer, that economist whose ideas had kickstarted all of this. The tech billionaire backers funding Prospera and the constitutional crisis were pushing the project in a direction he wasn't comfortable with becoming what he called a libertarian fantasy. Early signs of the network state movement. But the project continued without him. In 2017, Honduras Prospera Inc. Purchased its first plot of land, 58 acres that bordered a small local fishing village whose residents say they were not properly consulted. Over the years, Prospera has come to own more than 1,000 acres. Some local landowners protested. Not all residents have formal property titles and they fear their land claims are being undermined. Amid that, construction got underway on new housing and research facilities employing some locals. Prospera has its own labor systems, which aren't clearly spelled out. When one worker died in an accident on the job, 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.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

and void, nullifying a guarantee made to Prospera that they would have 50 years to operate even if the law was repealed.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

$10.7 billion.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

$10.7 billion. 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.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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.

[Tech Enthusiast/Supporter]

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 is kind of the

[Commentator/Critic]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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

[Narrator/Quote Reader]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

When Thomas Moore 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.

[Atusa Araxia Abrahamian (Journalist/Author)]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah (Host)]

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. The idea is that we're going to record people being people and placing them in very sort of strange, bizarre situations, and that's going to teach us something about what makes people tick. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Adaplooi. This episode was produced by me and Julie Kane, Casey Miner, Christina Kim, Devin Kadayama, Irene Noguchi, Kiana Mokatemi, Thomas Coltrane, Sarah Wyman. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel. Special thanks to Holly Baxter, senior staff writer at the Independent, and Rachel Corbett. Thanks also to Tom Nicholson, Johannes Durgi, Dylan Kurtz, Rebecca Farrar, Liana Simstrom, Julia Redpath, Beth Donovan, Yolanda Sangweni and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keighley. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write [e-mail] 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.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

This message comes from Mittie Health introducing Agewell Longevity Care, designed by Women for Women. Whether you're looking to prevent future health issues or just feel more like yourself, learn [e-mail] that's joinmidi.com this message comes

from Capital One with the Venture X card, earn unlimited double miles, a $300 annual capital one travel credit, and access to airport lounges. Capital One what's in your wallet? Terms apply [e-mail] this message comes from

Pod Save the World if it's hard to make sense of modern global conflicts, Pod Save the World breaks down the week's most impactful foreign policy news with digestible expert analysis. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.