Talking poker, cities on the ocean, and anarcho capitalism with the founder of The Seasteading Institute.
Patri Friedman is a former Google engineer and founder of the Seasteading Institute, a small non-profit whose mission is "To establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems, which he created with help from Peter Thiel. He started Ephemerisle, the largest self-organizing festival on water. Patri is on the board of the Startup Societies Foundation, ran the angel fund Zarco Investment Group, and advises a variety of new governance projects.
Patri has a BS in Math from Harvey Mudd College, an MS in CS from Stanford University, and an MBA from Cardean University. He used to play poker competitively and wrote one of the first online poker bots.
He’s a self-described anarcho-capitalist, transhumanist and rationalist. He is also a prolific writer on philosophy, politics, and economics on Twitter and the blog Let A Thousand Nations Bloom. Patri comes from a line of great revolutionary thinkers, his grandfather Milton Friedman was the 1976 Nobel Laureate in economics, and his father David Friedman is a well-known political theorist and legal scholar. Today we talked about Poker, seasteading, and anarcho capitalism.
Alex: [00:00:00] Patri Friedman is a former Google engineer and founder of the seasteading Institute, a small nonprofit whose mission is to establish permanent autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse, social, political, and legal systems, which he created with help from Peter Thiel. He started Ephemerisle, the largest self-organizing festival on water and is on the board of the startup societies foundation.
Also ran the angel fund Zarco investment group, and advises a variety of new governance projects. Patri has a BS in math from Harvey Mudd college, an MS in CS from Stanford university and an MBA from Cardian university. He used to play poker competitively and wrote one of the first online poker bots.
He's a self-described anarcho-capitalist, transhumanist, and rationalist. He's also a prolific writer on philosophy, politics and economics on Twitter and the blog let a thousand nations bloom. Patri comes from a line of great revolutionary thinkers. His grandfather, Milton Friedman was the 1976 Nobel Laureate in economics and his father David Friedman is a well-known political theorist and legal scholar. Today. We talked about poker, seasteading, and Anarcho-capitalism -- hope you enjoy.
Cool. Shall we?
Patri: [00:01:20] Yeah.
Alex: [00:01:20] So before we get into seasteading, what got you into poker? You had a bit of a career in poker, right?
Patri: [00:01:26] Well, I don't know. I love playing games it's a game you can play for money. You know, I'm a math stats, probability guy. Yeah. I was always into board games and stuff. So. Yeah.
Alex: [00:01:39] Only reason I ask is I've had some of these conversations and I've talked to so many cool, really successful people.
And I feel like there's just this huge overlap with poker playing. Have you found that at all? Or am I just seeing things?
Patri: [00:01:53] There's definitely some, I mean, there's a lot of overlap. It's been like poker and finance, poker and investment, you know, it's a high pressure decision making environment. Yeah. I don't think it's an accident, plus it's fun.
I don't know. I mean, it's kind of the downside is that it's like a non-productive activity, you know, with, with occasional exceptions. Like if you're generating entertainment on televised poker and something that like, it felt like working, but really, really fun, but ultimately , I think it's a great think it's great entertainment, but it's ultimately like, It's not the same as working to build something that wouldn't exist without your work.
Like it's inherently zero sum, not necessarily zero sum in that, people may, people may enjoy playing and find it worthwhile, but they don't find it. Like they would have more fun if worst players were there, like, being a better player, you don't make their experience better.
Alex: [00:02:47] Right. That makes sense.
That makes sense. I maybe I'll look more into playing some poker that might do me well. Anyway, let's, let's talk about Seasteading. You're basically backing the construction of floating cities. Is that right? Like what's the basic elevator pitch that you give people?
Patri: [00:03:00] Yeah. I mean, all those, like I should say like, mostly like the last few years I've been working with countries to do experimental governments on land.
But yeah, I spent a lot of years, you know, the first 10 years or something working on Seasteading, cause back in the early two thousands, when I had the idea, I was like, well why, why is it no country I want to live in well it's because it's this really poorly structured industry where the firms are very large.
It's very expensive, to switch and you can't start a new one. It's like, there's no startups. Of course there is no innovation in shitty products. So to fix this, we need to start up countries. And at that time, countries on land were not willing to work with us. They weren't willing to do any kind of experimental governance.
And so I was like, well, we need to open a new frontier. Like, that's the way that we're going to get start up countries. And so we started looking into the, yeah, the engineering, the business and the legal aspects to build cities on the ocean.
Alex: [00:03:49] It sounds like that's changed since then, though. Right? Like, obviously I want to get into talking about building on water, but it sounds like you guys have had some sort of compliance on land.
Patri: [00:03:58] Yeah. So what happened was I started. So the Seasteading Institute is like 2007, 2008 although I started like writing a seasteading book and giving talks in like the early two thousands before I got funding. And then in 2010 the country of Honduras changed their constitution and created this first program in the world for making the.
Kind of semi-autonomous zones called Zetas. And so, you know, I've been thinking about leaving the Seasteading Institute to do a startup like maybe we were looking into like medical tourism, cruise ship as a venture. But then we decided to yeah, to go work in Honduras, we got the first MOU with them, but then we, we were, we found out that they didn't actually have any staff or budget.
And you know, I'd assume that change to the constitution and political will be the hard part. But it was clear. It was gonna take a long time and their Supreme court struck down the initial version of the program. And so we quit and gave back the money to investors. And, you know, that was in 2012 and they didn't approve the first zone until like a couple of years ago.
And it launched last year. So, you know, it was going to be awhile.
Alex: [00:05:08] Got it. So if we're talking about building on water, which it sounds like is what a lot of this started around, surely there's there's practical barriers, right. To building on the ocean. I'm sure we're talking about just so people are aware building close to the shore.
Maybe since weather probably poses an issue.
Patri: [00:05:24] Yeah, there's huge practical problems. Like on land, you know, you have this solid foundation and on the ocean, you gotta float, you gotta build a lot of nothing, and you're on a surface, that's moving up and down like crazy. You know, you can't anchor unless it's shallow.
So it's very challenging and expensive, but you know, you can see from like the cruise ship industry that you can deal with the ocean at a profit people can live there for like, Got like reasonable daily rates, like it's doable with expertise and economies of scale, but yeah, it's, it's very difficult and I think you basically need shallow water.
What's tricky is that if there's any land, like. Suppose you have like a seam out and underwater mountain. If it goes above the surface of the water, then it's claimed by some country. So you need to find places where it's like shallow enough, you know, I don't know, 50 to 150 feet that you can like anchor or put in wave breaks, or maybe there's a reef that itself serves as a wave break.
But yet not have anything that's above water. And there are some such places in the world. That's what you need.
Alex: [00:06:32] Have those engineering challenges and obviously some price barriers you've been working on, in and around this space for a while. Have those improved as time has gone on?
Patri: [00:06:41] Well, there are the sea pods.
So we have these people who. Starting a couple of years ago, they started building actually, it was like my original design pretty close to it. What's called, uh, a spar platform where you have a single narrow pillar that gives you low cross-sectional area of the waves and then a platform on top.
And they built one off Thailand. And I don't know, he probably, he probably followed the news and saw what would happen. He got accused of a capital crime and hunted by the government and the seaside was seized and destroyed. And they had hit out and made a daring escape I boat, and got out. And now they're in Panama, but now they're manufacturing sea pods.
So you can actually go buy one. Now also since 2008 the ship market has kind of crashed because, you know, ships were like overbuilt and there was a global recession. And so you've been able to get ships, had scrapped prices for the last 13 years. So a few people like the ocean builders guys tried getting one, but they couldn't get it insured.
Brock Pierce is getting some shifts now there's like few people working on it. So I think that's like a viable approach because like you get the entire like form of a ship and like construction costs and everything for free. You're basically just like paying for the steel.
Alex: [00:07:54] Right. You know, I talked to mark lutter about charter cities not too long ago, and there seemed to be.
Yeah, quite a few similarities. Oh, cool. I mean, aside from the obvious fact that you're building on water, they seem pretty similar. What's the big advantage there for building on water.
Patri: [00:08:11] Well, the big, the big advantage was the legal environment in the sense that the way Admiralty law works is that if you're a moving object and you're on some kind of trip that goes to multiple countries, or you're just out there past 12 nautical miles, basically.
Your, you are regulated by your flagging state, which is a virtual association via ship registry. And there's the sense in which it is truly competitive governance. It's almost like it's like, I guess it's not quite like an Ark of capitalism, but like it's like having franchise sovereignty where you like every country in the world is competing to like, be the one to delegate sovereignty to you.
So it's this like incredible competitive system and because ships are mobile, like you can like. Change it, you could like be registered and be regulated by The Bahamas this year and be regulated by Panama next year. So this really amazing legal environment, like a lot of people. They're by my work. And they think that I'm saying like the high seas are free for all.
You can like, just go there and be free. It's like an urban legend that's out there. You'll see, like on the Simpsons or something, just like, oh, we're in the high season. No one can touch us. And that's not true at all. But what is true is that like the actual legal environment is one that's like incredibly competitive and really like suited to this.
You know this world that we want to see. But it's much more difficult and expensive there aren't people living there. So like, people are gonna have to move out to the middle of nowhere if they want to do it. And it's just a lot harder. And now that, you know, countries are willing to do governance experiments on land.
That's my focus, but you know, so excited about the ocean builders, sea pods, and the Cecil thing too, is like talking to a number of countries about doing like a custom ceased dead flag. Or did they specifically say here's what's ours and here's, what's yours. Here's what you'd have to make laws for.
Like here's the interface. I think that'd be pretty awesome.
Alex: [00:10:02] Really cool. One thing I wanted to ask is Seasteading mentions rising sea levels as one, among many reasons for studying VAP and right. Are we assuming climate change and significant sea level rises? You're reversible here.
Patri: [00:10:16] I mean, I don't think Seasteading depends on it at all.
I mean, obviously the more of the world that's like water the better for seasteading and you know, it's potentially a tool for populations that are going to be displaced. Like maybe you can use sea steads or build platforms on a drowning island or something and elevate the population of web waves.
But it's really, it's, it's not particularly dependent on it.
Alex: [00:10:37] The other thing is just sort of the modularity that you get with seasteading and even a lot of the stuff that you might be doing now on land. One thing that's really intriguing is this sort of increased autonomy that you get, or even an ability to like secede from a centralized government.
How does that really play in?
Patri: [00:10:52] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm very excited about that, but I'm not sure. You know, it's not clear to me that it's worth like the costs.
Alex: [00:11:01] Sure.
Patri: [00:11:01] I think, you know, I'd say my current kind of prediction is like at, will be really powerful, the ability to vote with your house. But I think that we're probably more likely to see that in space colonies, like not, you know, not like Mars, but like like free floating ones, asteroid belt.
Places like that, that will actually get this kind of modularity. Cause it's even easier to unhook and move things in space. So if we're able to go there and make it economically feasible, I think you'll get that. What I call dynamic geography.
Alex: [00:11:30] So I mean, as far as laws go, how does all of this change?
It seems like you've got sort of two things you're playing with right now. One is correct me if I'm wrong here, like sidestepping reform in some way, by doing Seasteading or cooperating with centralized government by doing a lot of this stuff on land cause I mean, at the end of the day, like you said, pretty much all land is claimed by some sort of central government. What's the play on either of those?
Patri: [00:11:53] I mean, I wouldn't say there were, there were sidestepping. It's kind of like a common belief, but like the way Admiralty law works is you have to register with some country. You plug into international law through them. You're franchising, their sovereignty.
What's different about it is that any, you know, any ship can be with any country. And then they can like change that registration annually. So it's this competitive market, whereas on land, if you pick like one, one specific place where you're building, like you're making a deal with one government and like, yeah.
Maybe you can get governments competing with each other at the beginning, but then like wants you to pull your capital. You had your community, it's like stuck in one place. So, you know, that's a disadvantage, but it's made up for it by that much lower capital costs.
Alex: [00:12:33] Got it. So talk a little bit about ephemerisle.
Are you guys still doing that? I mean the San Francisco Chronicle area, it's hilarious. It's the San Francisco Chronicle calls it burning man on boats, but I'm sure there's a lot more behind how all this happens.
Patri: [00:12:48] Yeah, I actually, I had the idea for a ephemerisle first, like when I first started getting into seasteading, I was like, well, if we're going to try to get people to like live free on the ocean, like, it'll be a lot easier to get people to go there for a week.
And they got them to like move there. So what if we started out with some kind of like, like raft up where like for a week, every year people went and actually like, Like had different laws, right. And had different laws on different islands and tested out like new legal systems for a week. But you know, doing that kind of thing off shore very difficult, but the same reason seasteading is difficult.
So we decided to start out in the Sacramento, Delta, which is this kind of, you know, boating recreation region near the bay area. And the first year it was run by a seasoning a student in 2009. But like, we weren't able to get insurance. And we started in 2010 trying to get insurance really early maritime insurance is very difficult because there's like odds and make liability on caps.
And so like, there were like fewer insurers kept dropping out. Eventually was like only Lloyd's of London. And like, it was like a hundred dollars, a person, a thousand dollars a person like, you know, for a week event. We were just like, this is just like cost-prohibitive. So we like canceled the event and kind of conveniently immediately after we posted the cancellation, some friends of ours posted that they were going to have the same event in the same place.
Cause without any Seasteading Institute sponsorship. So it was completely community driven and it's been community driven since.
Alex: [00:14:24] That's awesome. So I want to get back to just sort of the fundamental, like beliefs here when it comes to regulation. I mean, this sounds a lot of what you're talking about. Sounds like what mark was talking about when I spoke with him about charter cities, but I mean, do you basically think governance is too deeply entrenched to make any meaningful headway?
Is it better to just wipe the slate clean and start from scratch? Or is there another way around it?
Patri: [00:14:49] Well, I mean, it depends on the country, you know, the smaller the country, the easier it is to rewrite things. And you know, but like as a software engineer, like you can only get so far by like patching code, like to get real progress every now and then you need to like, use the latest technologies and do a clean rewrite with everything that you've learned.
Like IatGoogle, we would rewrite stuff every. I don't know, three to five years I hear at Facebook, they would like rewrite things like every 18 months. Like, so that's just like a whole different world of, you know, innovation. And so, yeah, I think that like, when you have a huge system that like a law are running and depend on for basic things like property rights and physical safety and things like that, people are correctly very nervous about messing with it.
And governments and politicians tend to be very, very conservative. They don't want to like adopt crazy new laws and they probably shouldn't for everyone, but like, we need that, that test bed, like that lab where we are rewriting things and then trying them on a small group of volunteers. And then if they work, scaling them up, you know, to a region that works, maybe scaling it up to a bigger region so that we also get.
Innovation. And you know, like I got lots of friends that try to get laws passed and stuff, and you know, on the margin, you can have some impact that way. But I think that, yeah, in most cases, we're at the point where we could really use some rewrites.
Alex: [00:16:13] So coming at this from a different angle, we have Pronomos which is your venture fund, right? How did that come about? Is it just sort of to back a lot of these ideas that seasteading was putting forward?
Patri: [00:16:24] Yeah. Yeah. So Pronomos is specifically backing charter cities, real estate developments that come with deep regulatory reforms. And yeah, just. A combination of the number of investors and founders, you know, kind of my ideas were out there.
I only had people had people in who were like in high school when I was doing seasteading stuff. And now we're running like billion dollar companies and they're like, Hey man, when can I get my like startup country? And so like the idea of that just compounded to gotten to a much bigger group of people.
Crypto gave a lot of wealth to people who think in terms of private, decentralized alternatives to the state. And then states were really changing, especially small states where Estonia is he governance you know, or, or Taiwan small countries are realizing like, Hey, we actually there's. They're they're large diseconomies of scale and government and, you know, being small and responsive to our citizens, like enables us to innovate and get advantages for our country and countries with just much more open to this kind of thing.
I think. The success of SEZs in China or the Dubai international financial center. There were just a whole bunch of factors that made countries kind of more receptive. And so it was clear that, you know, what had worked on in Honduras in 2011, 2012 could now actually kind of be done and probably be done in like multiple places by multiple companies.
And so I thought it would kind of be the most fun, the most useful to work across all the companies. Rather than trying to do one myself. And so I served kind of as a bridge between investors and Silicon valley and the world of charter studies.
Alex: [00:18:03] You know, I think it's, it's probably fair to say you're doing some pretty cool stuff when grandson of Milton Friedman isn't even like the first 10 things people think about when it comes to you. That said it seems like some of those, like libertarian. Yeah. Right.
Patri: [00:18:16] I have to work on something big enough that that will be true. And I'm just lucky I found something that I liked and that I got traction on because I feel like I could very easily just like. Tried to do big, big, crazy things that didn't work again and again, but I got lucky. I found something that works.
Alex: [00:18:33] Do you think those like libertarian ideals were passed on at all? Was that something you sort of grew up around?
Patri: [00:18:39] Yeah, definitely. And I, I mean, I think some of it honestly, I think some of it was like genetics. So like I grew up with my mom. I spent summers with my dad, but like, I would just find myself like, Just like are doing for libertarian positions with my classmates. Didn't even like, even before I'd ever even heard of the libertarian party, I just like pretty straight libertarian moral intuitions about what's right and wrong.
So. Yeah, definitely. You know, and also the like political philosophy and economic thinking is a big part of it too.
Alex: [00:19:09] How would you sum up your politics? I, I, you know, in doing the research beforehand, you're sort of described as an anarcho capitalist and to be honest, I think anytime anarcho is put before something, it can like be a little spooky for people, but firstly, would you agree with that?
And secondly, how would you sum up the views? Because you, you sort of differ from in ways, from what people might call a run of the mill libertarian.
Patri: [00:19:32] Yes. I have my own political philosophy and essentially a differentiates between like what I, as a customer want. I think like standing libertarians, they say we're talking about right and wrong and the country has to implement what's right.
And enforce the laws that are. That are fair, et cetera. And me, I just say lots of people have different ideas about what rights are and how to balance them without it's. It's very like, you can't just take a set of rights and like enshrine that into law. So, you know, my dad studies the economic analysis of law and we have like pretty clear mathematical it's sort of an overdetermined, like.
You know, because there's there's detection costs and punishment costs and court getting wrong. And sometimes we'll like, we, we haven't, we don't know how to create institutions that create a certain set of rights of output. It's kind of like if you said like, Hey, I want to, I want a battery powered car that like, you know, can charge up in five minutes on like the sunlight and go like super fast and go super long.
And it's like, Like, you can say those words, but they do not constitute like any kind of blueprint and what you're describing may not even be possible. So, you know, that's, I kind of think about it as like, we have our preferences as customers rather than, as like right and wrong and like turning a desired type of society into laws and institutions that create that is extremely hard.
And so. You know, I want to live in the libertarian country because that's my personal consumer preferences, but I don't consider it some kind of moral center. And I'm fine with lots of other people having lots of other kinds of society if they want to live in. I just want to see a world where people can start more types of test out laws and institutions.
Didn't practice like view governance is much more of an engineering problem than a philosophy problem. You know, it's about tinkering with institutions and building cultures and create a system where you get kind of. Innovation and progress. Cause you're doing this experimentation you know, technology and then, you know, maybe that system will produce, you know, a society that does much better on like what I think the outputs ought to be.
And that would be great. Maybe it produces a totally different society. It's compelling to me. What matters is that you're producing a bunch of societies, optimizing them through competition.
Alex: [00:21:47] You're also a self-described rationalist and transhumanist. So to close this out, I thought it'd be fun to talk about those.
I actually have one of these chats planned with a guy named Zoltan is fun in a while. He was very much involved in the transhumanism thing. So what's the draw for you there? What does that look like?
Patri: [00:22:05] Sure. I mean, you know, rationalism, uh, it's, it's just the idea of trying to like, actually understand the world around you, of being humble about how many cognitive biases we have and how kind of a natural it is for you to think clearly.
And, you know, just caring about really understanding the world and your own cognitive biases and trying to get things right. Transhumanism. I think I find the idea of like self modification to be incredibly empowering. I think that, you know, Upgrading ourselves with technology is, is not very easy.
But unlike something like LASIK or even getting a tattoo, just like being at like, I don't know, I think video games or something like being able to upgrade yourself, like make yourself better, make yourself stronger. It's like, it's incredible. And we don't have very many ways to do it very well. So it's not like, I think that, you know, everybody should be out there.
Getting tons of modifications. Cause we really have very few the general idea that like we should be using technology to make ourselves, you know, faster, stronger, happier, et cetera. Like not just accepting the way that nature bred us. I think it's incredible.
Alex: [00:23:15] That's awesome. Man, time just flew and you've been getting a workout the whole time.
What are you on? Like a, like a treadmill or something?
Patri: [00:23:23] Elliptical, yeah.
Alex: [00:23:24] There you go.
Patri: [00:23:25] I had shoulder surgery like, uh, a few weeks ago and I spent a lot of time in bed and, you know, I just got like so weak to where, like, you know, even just like walking around or like carrying a bag or something it's hard.
So this week I'm really trying to, you know, get some exercise in every day. So I can like, you know, be a person who can like run, carry things and stuff like I used to.
Alex: [00:23:51] Well, thank you, man. It was a pleasure talking. I appreciate the time really.
Patri: [00:23:55] Awesome. Yeah, this was fun. All right, have a good one.
Alex: [00:23:59] Hey, you too. Bye!
Patri: [00:24:02] Bye!