The billionaires' utopia blueprint
4/23/202649 min
Starbase. Prospera. California Forever. Mars. From private cities to interstellar colonies, tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have backed experiments designed to operate beyond the borders — and laws — most of us live by. So we wondered: has this happened before? In this episode, we visit an Arctic archipelago, homesteads floating in the ocean, and a startup city in Honduras to explore where places built with the ultra-rich in mind leave all the rest of us.
Guests:
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of The Cosmopolites and The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World
Wayne Gramlich, retired computer engineer
Dan Girma, producer on NPR's Embedded podcast
Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Speaker 10:30
[horse neighing] [page turning] 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 Abdelfatah· Host1:02
It's the year fifteen-sixteen. We're inside the pages of a book called Utopia, breathing the fictional air of Antwerp, Belgium.
Speaker 11:14
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 Abdelfatah· Host1:23
An old, sunburned, long-bearded traveler named Raphael Hythloday has just returned