Patri Friedman

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Most of my life these days centers around my family (wife Shannon, son Tovar, daughter Iselle) and my role as the Executive Director 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". Please consider joining TSI and helping us increase competition in government.

My views on politics are somewhat odd: I am a libertarian who thinks most libertarians are totally wrong about how to increase freedom. I think the answer lies in public choice economics but that even public choice economists fail to apply it correctly. I think "direct" political activism (voting, political parties) has a chain of effect so indirect as to be useless, while the apparently indirect activism of building floating cities will directly and rapidly lead to greater innovation and diversity in governance. Here are some references if you'd like to learn more:

• My lead essay in the April 2009 issue of Cato Unbound: Beyond Folk Activism
• 18 minute talk on seasteading for social entrepreneurs at The Feast 2010.
• An hour-long talk on seasteading for libertarians at Mises Brazil.
• A longer and more detailed/messy compedium of my thoughts is on my politics page.
• some recommended references on competitive government, the school of thought I subscribe to & am helping create / coalesce / expand.

Some other useful and reasonably recent material:

• Tortuga - I helped found this Mountain View retrofit cohousing community. As of winter 2010, we have 14 adults and 2 kids. If you are interested in cohousing in Silicon valley, read about joining our community. Or join our Facebook Group for invites to our parties.
• My (non-mainstream) views on diet and exercise, including a talk on Intermittent Fasting I gave in October 2010.
• Picasa web albums for my pictures.
• Some of My prose writing.
• The ultimate in vanity: My wikipedia entry.
• I can be found in videos such as a 9-min documentary on Ephemerisle (a floating-festival I founded), or for something sillier, We Seasteaders wish ye a happy Talk Like A Pirate Day!
• Interested in trying out life coaching? My wife Shannon offers the first 3 sessions free!
• I sort of maintain the South Bay (SF Area) Acrobatics Classes/Jams Page.
• If you like Heroic Origin Stories, here is my Origin Story in Tropes.
• I sometimes record silly song parodies.

If you are looking for other worthy non-profits, check out The Singularity Institute if you're more into futurism, or my grandparent's foundation, The Friedman Foundation For Educational Choice if you're more into choice & freedom. If you're into neither, go to GiveWell to learn about the most effective ways to help the world.

If you need to correspond with me, I can be reached for personal things as patrissimo-at-gmail-dot-com and for work things as patri-at-seasteading-dot-org. Everything addressed to me gets at least a skim within a day or two, and I fully read most of it, but I unfortunately often don't have the time to respond to it quickly, at length, or sometimes at all. If you promise not to take it personally, I'll promise to use my time to do awesome things :). (Here's a good piece on the philosophy behind this.)