The billionaires' utopia blueprint

8:31Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Svalbard is the only place in the world with open borders.

8:35Wayne Gramlich: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.

9:12Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:About 9.30 a.m., land came in sight. steep rocky crags and peaks covered and restrained with snow. It was a grandly desolate, sublime, weird landscape utterly barren and unlike anything I had ever seen. The sun seemed to be boring holes through the clouds.

9:38Wayne Gramlich:In 1901, an American businessman named John Monroe Longyear stumbled across Svalbard while on a tourist cruise with his family. Longyear had built a huge timber and mining business in northern Michigan.

9:52Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:This was a man who, legend has it, could smell coal. He went somewhere and he could just smell the coal. He knew where it was.

9:59Wayne Gramlich:Call it a sniff sense. Sorry, I had to.

10:03Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:I went to look at his archives in Marquette, Michigan, very far north, And I was immediately struck by how similarly Marquette in the winter smelled like Svalbard.

10:19Wayne Gramlich:Quick context. Svalbard, being so cold and so far north, was uninhabited pretty much until the Europeans discovered it in the late 16th century. And by the time Longyear came along a few hundred years later, Svalbard still had no permanent population. It was terra nullius, a legal no-man's land. A rare thing to find by this time because of industrialization and colonialism. People knew there was coal there, but previous efforts to get it had been abandoned. Longyear, though, was up for the challenge.

10:53Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:The enterprise of developing a new and practically unknown coal field within 800 miles of the North Pole was an interesting and satisfactory experiment.

11:05Wayne Gramlich:He sets up a settlement, names it Longyear City after himself, and starts the Arctic Coal Company.

11:12Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:People said that he thought of himself as a polar emperor, which gives you a glimpse at his mindset and the kind of animating philosophy behind these things.

11:21Wayne Gramlich:For a few years, he could live in this fantasy, slowly building a new little world on his terms.

11:28Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:He's creating a company town. There's a shop. The laborers can only shop at the shop. They can only sleep at the dorms. Good luck, you know, finding another housing out there.

11:38Wayne Gramlich:But it turns out building a new society was hard.

11:42Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Many difficult and unusual problems. So there were two kinds of conflicts that took place. One was between the management and the workers. So John Monroe Longyear and the local guys that he hired, they didn't like the food. He didn't like how lazy they were. Hundreds of laboring men speaking a foreign language and not always amenable to discipline. A classic tale. Strikes were instituted by disaffected socialistic leaders. 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.

12:23Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Who owns what? Who can go where? Who planted the stake first? It got a little messy.

12:28Wayne Gramlich:But Svalbard had no courts, no police, no property law.

12:33Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:There was no authority to really rule on these things.

12:37Wayne Gramlich:It seemed only a matter of time before some nation or empire would claim sovereignty over Svalbard and threaten his business. Longyear wanted to get ahead of that. So he reached out to his country of origin, the United States, and lobbied the government to get involved to protect his property rights in Svalbard.

12:56Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: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.

13:11Wayne Gramlich:No joke, this is a real thing. This act from 1856 says that if an American citizen finds enough guano, bird poop, on an island not yet claimed by another country or empire, the U.S. president could choose to use military force to claim sovereignty there. Why guano? Because it's a great fertilizer, necessary for maintaining food production at a time when synthetic fertilizers didn't yet exist. And it was also used to produce an ingredient for explosives. It was considered so valuable, it got the nickname White Gold. U.S. citizens invoked the Guano Act to claim over 100 islands around the globe.

13:52Wayne Gramlich:And John Monroe Longyear tried his luck with it in Svalbard, arguing that it should be expanded to include not just guano, but also coal and other minerals.

14:03Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:He had a lobbyist. He had a guy on K Street. He was even showing up to hotel lobbies to try to talk delegates into taking his side. The U.S.

14:14Wayne Gramlich:government ultimately decided not to intervene. And then, in 1914, reality came knocking.

14:30Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:The war made it quite difficult to export coal.

14:34Wayne Gramlich:When World War I broke out, his company's shipping and trade ground to a halt.

14:40Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:The clock was ticking, right?

14:42Wayne Gramlich:And in 1916, Longyear sold his company's assets to a Norwegian coal mining company.

14:51Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:In order to promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war, by the prescription of open, just and honorable relations between nations, agree to this covenant of the League of Nations.

15:11Wayne Gramlich:On June 28, 1919, in France's Hall of Mirrors, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, formally ending World War I. The treaty accelerated a shift that was already underway, moving the world from the age of empires to the age of nation-states. And it established the League of Nations, an international organization designed to maintain world peace through diplomacy.

15:37Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:The powers were meeting to kind of divvy up what was left of the world.

15:42Wayne Gramlich:This included convening a conference on, quote, passport and customs formalities to create a uniform 32-page booklet, a passport, that would be required to travel across borders. There wasn't really a place for a place with no ruler. And so…

16:00Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Svalbard was formally kind of bestowed upon Norway by the international community. Why?

16:06Wayne Gramlich: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 Monroe Longyear. The treaty also carved out an exception for other corporate interests in Svalbard, keeping its borders open for business.

16:27Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: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.

16:42Wayne Gramlich: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.

17:09Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Some call it a doomsday vault, others a Noah's Ark for global agriculture. This is the most valuable natural resource in the world. So in other words, as long as we intend to be on Earth ourselves, we're going to need this diversity. Tonight, we're heading north, way north to the Arctic Circle, which is fast becoming one of the most contested regions in the world. And that means Beijing, Moscow, Washington and the European continent are in a race for influence.

17:39Wayne Gramlich:Recently, with the race for the Arctic heating up and as more countries, including the U.S., have challenged the sovereignty of nations around the world, Norway has begun pushing more firmly to assert its sovereignty over Svalbard and fend off foreign influence, cracking down on land sales to foreigners, stripping away foreigners' voting rights, limiting scientific research, and claiming hundreds of miles of Svalbard seas. Maybe they're seeing the writing on the wall that the world order might be shifting again.

18:11Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:The nation-state model, I think if we take a thousand-foot view from it, is both very new and very fragile and might just be a blip.

18:21Wayne Gramlich:The question is, if the rules are being rewritten, who gets to rewrite them?

18:28Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Spellbart is a story about, you know, sorry to say it, but men who want to start something new in a place that they consider almost a blank slate. I think there's a lot of parallels with somebody like Elon Musk who wants to explore space. and this kind of awareness that none of the rules are all that fixed. If you just try hard enough, maybe the rules will bend to your own desires.

18:57Wayne Gramlich:Coming up...

18:58Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:It was like a message in a bottle. You pop the cork in and you throw it out into the sea of the internet and see what happens.

19:06Wayne Gramlich:We take to the high seas.

19:15Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Hi, my name is Tim Berry. I'm calling from Charleston, South Carolina, and you're listening to Brew Line from NPR.

19:43Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Or keep it easy with ready-to-heat quiche Lorraine, deviled eggs, and fresh-cut fruit. Celebrate mom with Whole Foods Market. This message comes from Babbel. Babbel's conversation-based language technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash NPR. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash NPR. Rules and restrictions may apply.

20:24Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:This message comes from the Arbor Day Foundation. For more than half a century, the Arbor Day Foundation and its global network of more than a million inspired individuals, businesses, and community leaders have united behind the power of trees to help solve some of the planet's most pressing problems. From Michigan to Madagascar, the Arbor Day Foundation is planting trees at the speed of a changing world in communities and forests across the globe. See how you can do your part at arborday.org slash NPR. Part two, let a thousand nations bloom. What makes a man to wander? What makes a man to roam?

21:14Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:What makes a man leave bed and board and turn his back on hold?

21:26Wayne Gramlich: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.

22:01Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:This has come a long way before he died, Captain.

22:04Wayne Gramlich: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.

22:15Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: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.

22:31Wayne Gramlich: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.

22:57Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Well, this is weird, but okay.

23:00Wayne Gramlich:He found himself imagining what those attempts might have been like and considering how he would try to build a new nation in the middle of the sea.

23:08Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:I was just sort of noodling around in the back of my brain.

23:14Wayne Gramlich: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.

23:24Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:I don't like it. What don't you like? Indians on the raid generally hide their dead. I don't want to be political, but we really treated the Native Americans really poorly. So I thought it was a positive endeavor, largely because, unlike the colonization of the West, where there were previous occupants. In the ocean, the only previous occupants are the fish.

23:53Wayne Gramlich: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.

24:03Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:How do you make the structures safer? Maybe we recycle the two-liter bottles.

24:08Wayne Gramlich:In the paper, Wayne brainstormed all kinds of engineering hacks to different problems he foresaw coming up.

24:14Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:It's probably a bad idea.

24:16Wayne Gramlich:Hoping to avoid the pitfalls that had sunk those previous micronation attempts. Like how to survive the elements.

24:23Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:You can extract energy from waves.

24:25Wayne Gramlich:Huge waves, relentless sun.

24:28Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:It's the difference in temperature of the surface water.

24:30Wayne Gramlich:And what about food?

24:31Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:You can eat fish. It's out in the middle of the ocean. It doesn't have a lot of fish.

24:37Wayne Gramlich:Wayne called the paper Seasteading, Homesteading the High Seas.

24:42Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:To capture some of the romance of, you know, manifest destiny.

24:48Wayne Gramlich: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.

25:09Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Back then, I was just publishing everything I did on the internet. It's like, why not?

25:14Wayne Gramlich:In 1998, he uploads his paper to the web. And for a while, nothing much happens. Three years later, in 2001,

25:28Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:I got contacted by this guy named Patry Friedman. And that was the beginning of the next phase of the story. I remember he said that he should eventually just join the family business.

25:45Wayne Gramlich:Journalist Atusa Araxia Abrahamian has interviewed Patry Friedman, the grandson of free market pioneer Milton Friedman, a number of times over the last couple of decades. We reached out to him for an interview ourselves, but didn't hear back. Atusa says Patry came to seasteading from an economics angle.

26:04Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:It was a way to create more nation-states in the world, to create competition and have better ideas and kind of evolve from our land-bound system of governance. We had a few back and forth. And then I think I asked him, like, by the way, where are you? Because, you know, the fun thing about the Internet is nobody knows where anybody is. He says, well, I currently live in Sunnyvale, California. So, well, guess what? So do I. Let's get together for lunch.

26:39Wayne Gramlich:Can you take me to that first meeting? Because it's almost like an intellectual blind date, right?

26:45Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Oh, it absolutely is an intellectual blind date.

26:49Wayne Gramlich:And they hit it off. Wayne learned that Patry 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.

27:06Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: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.

27:20Wayne Gramlich: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 Patry saw something very libertarian in the seasteading idea.

27:36Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Experimentation was something that they talked about a lot.

27:39Wayne Gramlich:And Patry really wanted to make that experiment a reality. From that first email, he'd said to Wayne,

27:46Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:I would really like to build one of these things.

27:48Wayne Gramlich:I'm going like, well, that's a lot of work. And it would require a lot of money. Money they didn't have.

27:55Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:We were always playing with the money problem.

27:58Wayne Gramlich:Then the solution fell into their laps. It was 2007. Patry was interviewing for jobs at different companies in Silicon Valley.

28:08Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:He did apply for a job at Founders Fund, which is Peter Thiel's fund.

28:16Wayne Gramlich:Peter Thiel, the don of what's become known as the PayPal Mafia. The companies that have defined our era all share one link. 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.

28:34Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Peter Thiel started a hedge fund. They were like the earliest angel investor into Facebook. A gazillion dollars. Jeremy Stompleman. Russell Simmons. Yelp. Reid Hoffman. LinkedIn. Obviously, there's Elon, SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Kareem. YouTube. Yeah.

28:51Wayne Gramlich:In the 2000s, Thiel was pushing the idea that technology was an alternative to politics that could, quote, unilaterally change the world. His biographer described him as, quote, secretly the most important person in Silicon Valley, a place that some people consider to be.

29:09Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Crowns are all 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.

29:19Wayne Gramlich:We reached out to Peter Thiel for this episode, but got no response.

29:26Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:He aced the interview.

29:29Wayne Gramlich:Before he leaves, Padre casually brings up seasteading. And the idea eventually makes its way to Peter Thiel.

29:36Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:That is just nirvana to the libertarian movement, a place where you can set up a libertarian society via seasteads. And so Peter said, well, what if I give you half a million to promote the idea and push it forward?

29:51Wayne Gramlich:So on April 15th, 2008, they co-founded the Seasteading Institute with funding from Peter Thiel. Patry liked to say,

30:00Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Let a thousand nations bloom.

30:01Wayne Gramlich:And their logo seemed to reference the libertarian classic Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a man holding up the seastead above his head.

30:11Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:It might have been inspired by that. The science fiction things are very interesting because so few people are doing them. There is something about that that's contrarian, fundamental. It's not being done enough of.

30:27Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:So, anyhow, money was allocated and then started doing stuff.

30:33Wayne Gramlich:Peter Thiel gave them two marching orders. One, pushed the engineering forward. And two, marketed a little.

30:43Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:So our love for the oceans has brought us together today to embark on a short journey into the unknown.

30:49Wayne Gramlich:Patry took the lead, giving TED Talks, doing the press junket, spreading the gospel of seasteading.

30:55Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:We've run out of frontier. All land 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? Apple Nation, the country that knows what you want even better than you do. And I think that really sums up both the moment and the sort of optimism around seasteading at the time. While saving humanity, we can also save the oceans.

31:29Wayne Gramlich: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.

31:52Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:And then the question is whether or not we were going to do what we call the SFS, single-family Seastead, or a larger one.

32:01Wayne Gramlich: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.

32:10Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:They didn't give us a room. They gave us a nook.

32:13Wayne Gramlich: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.

32:29Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Originally created by the elves, it was meant to be used for good purposes. The power of Isengard is at your command. So young, lord of the earth. It is potentially a very dangerous technology. It's very powerful. Or young, build me an army worthy of more.

32:50Wayne Gramlich: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 Patry met with Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir and Peter Thiel's business partner, to decide how ambitious their first sea-setting attempt should be.

33:12Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:And I voted small and Joe and Patry voted large and that's the way we went.

33:18Wayne Gramlich:But just as they started to put the wheels in motion to actually try to build something.

33:23Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:You know, life intervened.

33:26Wayne Gramlich:Let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate. The stock market is now down 21 percent.

33:33Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:43 percent. Everything and more has been completely wiped out.

33:37Wayne Gramlich:Wayne had been living off of some internet stocks that were doing great up until the 2008 recession hit.

33:43Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:I had to go find another job.

33:45Wayne Gramlich:Which meant less time for seasteading.

33:47Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:So I was still on the board, but I said I can't spend nearly as much time on it.

33:52Wayne Gramlich:I asked him if the co-opting of seasteading by libertarians played any role in his decision to step away.

33:59Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:You're pulling me into the politics.

34:02Wayne Gramlich:Which he told me he wanted to avoid discussing. He said he'd always been most interested in the engineering.

34:08Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:It was never really my intent to get involved in the politics. And so, sorry, you're just not going to find a very political answer out of me. My general view is, you know, sometimes you're walking along the road and you have to pick up a stone and you just need to move it a little further down the road. And the next person picks it up and moves it a little further.

34:30Wayne Gramlich:Patry Friedman continued full force with seasteading for a few more years after Wayne left. The closest he got to building a seastead was Ephemer Isle, also known as Burning Man on the Water. It's billed as a floating celebration of community learning art and seasteading. In 2011, Patry stepped down from the Seasteading Institute, as did Peter Thiel. Since then, there have been attempts to build a seastead island. One project involved an agreement with French Polynesia, but public concern over, quote, tech colonialism led the local government to cut ties with the institute. These days, most projects are focused on building single-unit, self-sufficient, eco-friendly floating homes.

35:16Wayne Gramlich:Seastead projects are underway worldwide, including in Panama, South Korea, and even right here in the U.S., in Florida and Mississippi. 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 bring a fringe libertarian dream of exit more into the mainstream. Though Wayne says,

35:45Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: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.

35:57Wayne Gramlich:Coming up.

35:58Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:You don't need to start a seastead. You can have America.

36:16Wayne Gramlich:Hi, this is Sibona Ambuero from Even Prairie, Minnesota. I love your show. You're listening to Throughline.

36:26Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Make Mother's Day special with brunch or dinner from Whole Foods Market. Start with quality cheese and charcuterie with no synthetic nitrates. Then choose sustainable, wild-caught, or responsibly farmed seafood on sale. Finish with seasonal bakery treats like strawberry pretzel cream pie. Or keep it easy with ready-to-heat quiche Lorraine, deviled eggs, and fresh-cut fruit. Celebrate mom with Whole Foods Market. This message comes from Babbel. Babbel's conversation-based language technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world.

37:04Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash NPR. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash NPR. Rules and restrictions may apply.

37:27Wayne Gramlich:Part 3. The Cities of Tomorrow.

37:32Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you to Honduras. Local time is 10.43 p.m.

37:40Wayne Gramlich:In June 2025, Dan Gurma, a producer on NPR's Embedded podcast, took a trip to the Honduran island of Roatan.

37:50Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Mangrove trees line tons of the coastline. You have pretty beaches on either side.

37:56Wayne Gramlich: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.

38:06Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:You kind of dive into this very densely forested hillscape. There is a big sign, a big Prospera sign. Once you get to that part, it kind of just cascades right into the sea.

38:27Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Prospera is kind of an experiment.

38:32Wayne Gramlich:An experiment in what the future of cities could look like if they were run by corporations. Almost everything in Prospera happens without any oversight from the Honduran government. It offers companies operating there a menu of laws and regulations. There's no FDA, no HHS, taxes are low, and crypto is a preferred currency.

38:54Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:They have a startup venture capitalist vibe.

38:59Wayne Gramlich:Over$150 million have been invested in Prospera by venture funds affiliated with tech titans like Palantir's Peter Thiel, venture capitalist Mark Andreessen, OpenAI Sam Altman, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.

39:17Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Google was started within a garage within our lifetime. Facebook was started from a dorm room within our lifetime. Bitcoin was started from a white paper within our lifetime. So new companies, communities, currencies have all been started in this way. Could we start new countries?

39:30Wayne Gramlich:Prospera is a real-world case study for a growing movement to create so-called startup nations. The Spiritual Guide of this Business Movement is a book by Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of Peter Thiel and fellow libertarian. It's called The Network State, How to Start a New Country.

39:50Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Can we print out these online communities of gigantic scale into the physical world?

39:56Wayne Gramlich:It outlines a vision of digitally connected, exclusive communities that design so-called states online first, and then map them onto land.

40:06Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:The idea is somehow they'll find land, push out the people that they don't want, who they call the blues, and keep the people that they do, who he calls the grays, than lobby existing governments for sovereignty.

40:22Wayne Gramlich:Srinivasan calls this approach

40:24Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Tech Zionism.

40:27Wayne Gramlich:Tech Zionism, a reference to the movement that led to the creation of the State of Israel.

40:33Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:To me, Tech Zionism only really says one thing, which is that we only want to live with other Tech Zionists and we want to choose our neighbors. Well, who are the Tech Palestinians in this situation? I don't think that that's in the book. I think for a long time, tech considered itself sort of searching for new frontiers. And in recent years, they're starting to look for literal frontiers.

40:55Wayne Gramlich:By the way, this is journalist Jacob Silverman. He writes a lot about the tech industry, focusing on the intersection of tech and politics.

41:04Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: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.

41:11Wayne Gramlich:There are all kinds of network state-type projects being imagined right now, abroad and within our own borders. Exiting the system is no longer a fringe or weird idea. Starbase, Elon Musk's city in Texas, was created to build a path to Mars. The billionaire-backed California Forever project is planning a new city on 50 ,000 acres of farmland on the edge of Silicon Valley. And President Trump has proposed building so-called freedom cities.

41:43Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:We should hold a contest to charter up to 10 new cities.

41:48Wayne Gramlich:Built on federal land, but privately funded and free from traditional regulations, environmental laws, and labor unions. These projects are expensive, backed by billionaire tech investors, and most are still in the digital design phase, i.e. they don't yet exist in reality.

42:11Wayne Gramlich:Which brings us back to Prospera, a place that does exist.

42:17Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:There was a very long back and forth with the Prospera people about coming in as a journalist.

42:23Wayne Gramlich:It took Dan Gurma almost a year to get permission to visit Prospera from its management team.

42:28Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Their version of a government is like a board of directors.

42:32Wayne Gramlich:And in the meantime, he was digging into how this place ended up in Honduras.

42:37Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:What I ended up finding out over time was that Prospera was born under circumstances where Honduras was under a lot of geopolitical turmoil. The coup has left Honduras deeply polarized. This is around 2008, 2009. Honduras had just undergone a coup. It's an example for all the other countries. Don't let yourself be overrun by tyrants. 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. Are there some rules we can develop for changing rules? While that's happening, there's this idea of... Something called a charter city. Charter cities developing totally separate.

43:31Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:You start from uninhabited territory, people can come live under the new charter, but no one is forced to live under it.

43:39Wayne Gramlich: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.

44:00Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:The Honduran government learned about this man and his ideas, and they got interested in what he was proposing.

44:07Wayne Gramlich:Romer was eventually sidelined, and Honduran lawmakers opted for a slightly different proposal. Instead of another country administering the land, a private corporation would. It was an attractive idea for Honduras, which had long been open to private investment.

44:24Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: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, private enterprise-minded country ever since then.

44:44Wayne Gramlich:But plenty of people objected. Would it basically act as a state within their state? Would this threaten Honduran sovereignty? Still, in 2013, under a cloud of controversy, a law greenlighting charter cities was passed. The Supreme Court of Honduras deemed it unconstitutional. But afterwards, the Honduran Congress, led by members of the president's party, ousted four members of the Honduran Supreme Court.

45:13Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:It was part of a couple of things causing a constitutional crisis in Honduras.

45:17Wayne Gramlich:On top of this, there was a lack of transparency, which didn't sit well with Paul Romer, that economist whose ideas had kick-started all of this. The tech billionaire backers funding Prospera and the constitutional crisis were pushing the project in a direction he wasn't comfortable with, becoming what he called a libertarian fantasy, early signs of the network state movement.

45:44Wayne Gramlich: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.

46:37Wayne Gramlich:And that's by design. The point of a place like Prospera is that there isn't really a public to answer to.

46:44Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: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.

46:57Wayne Gramlich: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.

47:14Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:For years, the island of Roatan was actually kind of a disputed territory between colonial powers, including the Spanish and the British.

47:23Wayne Gramlich:In April 2022, after a new leftist government took power in Honduras, the charter city law was repealed.

47:31Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:And then the Honduran government goes a step further and declares through the Supreme Court that the previous law is null and void.

47:43Wayne Gramlich:Nullifying a guarantee made to Prospera that they would have 50 years to operate even if the law was repealed.

47:50Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:And so now, as far as the Honduran government was concerned, Prospera was an illegal settlement.

47:56Wayne Gramlich:Prospera then sued the Honduran government in an international tribunal, seeking a massive amount of money.

48:02Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:$10.7 billion.

48:04Wayne Gramlich:$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.

48:21Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:How is this not coercion when you have all of these levers at your disposal to achieve what you want to achieve?

48:32Wayne Gramlich:The case is still ongoing. The future of Prospera hanging in the balance. Based on what Dan saw when he finally got to visit Prospera last year, development seems to have slowed down.

48:44Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:We didn't see that many kind of like actual companies like working. A lot of it is virtual.

48:51Wayne Gramlich: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.

49:03Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: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. It's kind of the ideological groundwork for a lot of these efforts to make new cities or communities or kind of self-run polities.

49:48Wayne Gramlich:There are other charter cities planned in more than 20 countries, especially in Asia and Africa.

49:58Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:The utopians fail to understand why anyone should be so fascinated by the dull gleam of a tiny bit of stone. He has all the stars in the sky to look at.

50:09Wayne Gramlich:When Thomas More wrote Utopia over 500 years ago, designing a perfect society was an allegory. Today, technology is making attempts to reshape reality and create versions of so-called network states more possible than ever. The impact of this kind of thinking can be seen all around us, on an island in Honduras, on farmland near San Francisco, amid the rubble of Gaza, or before long, maybe a crater on the moon. The people designing these cities might not care if their choices lead to utopia or dystopia for the rest of us because the cities aren't necessarily for us.

50:52Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:I don't think that Elon Musk is saying we're going to create this like perfect society on the moon. I don't even think that there's much of a desire to create a society. The focus really is on how can we make business work better? How can we cut through red tape? That's not utopian unless you live in a society of corporations.

51:27Wayne Gramlich:That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah, and you've been listening to ThruLine 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. ThruLine was created by me and Ramtin Adabloui. This episode was produced by me and... Julie Kane. Casey Miner. Christina Kim.

52:00Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Devin Kadiyama.

52:01Wayne Gramlich:Irene Noguchi. Kiana Moketem.

52:04Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Thomas Coltrane.

52:05Wayne Gramlich:Sarah Wyman. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Special thanks to Holly Baxter, senior staff writer at The Independent, and Rachel Corbett. Thanks also to Tom Nicholson, Johannes Dergi, Dylan Kurtz, Rebecca Farrar, Liana Simstrom, Julia Redpath, Beth Donovan, Yolanda Sanguini, 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

52:35Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara,

52:38Wayne Gramlich:Anya Mizani, And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.

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