Patri Friedman joins us to discuss Seasteading. Listen to the archive.

Patri Friedman  is an activist and theorist of political economy, and former software engineer. He advocates rapid, incremental progress towards increasing human freedom by creating new countries that can experiment with alternative social structures. His preferred method is seasteading, to construct and inhabit floating communities on the open sea: "The point is not just to create one political system or type of system, but to make a turnkey product for creating new countries, so that lots of different groups will try lots of different things, and we can all learn from it." Friedman is also on the board of transhumanist organization Humanity+. 

The Seasteading Institute

Friedman is Executive Director of the Seasteading Institute, funded on April 15, 2008 with a half-million-dollar investment by PayPal inventor Peter Thiel.The Institute's mission is "to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems". This was initially a part-time project - one day a week while working as a Google engineer the rest of the time - but Friedman left Google on July 29 2008 to spend more time on seasteading. He and partner Wayne Gramlich hope to float the first prototype seastead in the San Francisco Bay within two years.

Patri is also the grandson of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and son of economist David D. Friedman.

Check out his page!