Patri Friedman (born July 29, 1976) is an American libertarian activist and theorist of political economy.[1] He founded the nonprofit Seasteading Institute, which explores the creation of sovereign ocean colonies.[2][3][4]

Friedman grew up in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and is a graduate of Upper Merion Area High School, class of 1994, where he went by the name Patri Forwalter-Friedman. He was named after Patri J. Pugliese, a close friend of his parents.[5] He graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 1998, and went on to Stanford University to obtain his master's degree in computer science. He also holds an MBA from New York Institute of Technology Ellis College.[6] He worked as a software engineer at Google.[7][8] As a poker player, he cashed in the World Series of Poker four times.[9]

Friedman was executive director of the Seasteading Institute, founded on April 15, 2008, with a half-million-dollar donation by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[10] The Institute's mission is "to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems".[11][12] This was initially a part-time project one day a week while working as a Google engineer the rest of the time[7] but Friedman left Google on July 29, 2008 to spend more time on seasteading.[13] He and partner Wayne Gramlich hoped to float the first prototype seastead in the San Francisco Bay by 2010.[14][15] At the October 2010 Seasteading social, it was announced that current plans were to launch a seastead by 2014.[16]

Since attending the Burning Man festival in 2000, Friedman imagined creating a water festival called Ephemerisle as a Seasteading experiment and Temporary Autonomous Zone. Through the Seasteading Institute, Friedman was able to start the Ephemerisle festival in 2009, aided by TSI's James Hogan as event organizer and Chicken John Rinaldi as chief builder. The first Ephemerisle is chronicled in a documentary by Jason Sussberg.[17] Since 2010, the event has been annual and community-run.

On 31 July 2011, Friedman stepped down from the position as Executive Director of Seasteading Institute, but remained chairman of the board.[18] Later, he co-founded the Future Cities Development Corporation, a project to establish a self-governing charter city within the borders of Honduras.[19][20]

In 2012 it was announced the initiative would be halted due to the changing political climate of Honduras.[21]

During his poker career, Patri Freidman was predicted to become a world champion by Card Player Magazine.[22] He claims to have created AI bots for online poker.[23]

Patri is the grandson of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman[24] and economist Rose Friedman and son of economist and physicist David D. Friedman.[24][25] He has two children by his first wife. As of Feb 10 2018, he is married to Brit Benjamin.[26]

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Patri Friedman - Wikipedia