In 2025, I purchased 25 shares in a Banksy painting that the art investment platform Masterworks purchased for $8.7 million. Very few could afford the full sticker price, but by opening ownership of the painting to hundreds of investors rather than just one, Masterworks makes it accessible to everyone.

Platforms like these allow anyone to fractionally own assets that go up in value. Why shouldn’t cities be owned the same way? By the people and businesses who live and work there? That’s a hypothesis I initially pursued while writing Let Cities Build Utopia. But while fractional investment works great as an investment in assets or businesses, I don’t think it works great for cities for one reason: Fractional investment is uneven ownership. Those with more equity benefit more than those with less equity. Does that really make sense for a city where everyone lives together?

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Have you ever tried to get a dinner reservation on a Friday night, go skiing on a Saturday, book a campground on a weekend, or get a flight on a holiday weekend? Or even go to the gym or grocery store after work?

If you have, you might be inclined to think that your city is too congested—there are just too many people!—but really, the problem is that we’re all working and recreating at the exact same time.

Dinner reservations are usually freely available on a Tuesday, the ski slopes are empty on a Thursday, campgrounds and national parks have open availability mid-week, and the streets are clear in the middle of the day. The gym and grocery stores are usually empty mid-day.

If even a quarter of the white-collar world adopted an asynchronous schedule, we could benefit local businesses, traffic congestion, even air quality.

The question isn’t whether we will do it or even when—it’s which companies are going to be the first?

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David Le was bored at his job, so he got a new one—and never quit the old one.

It was just that he was super efficient—he got more done in a 20 hour work week than his coworkers did with 40. “If I can do your job twice as fast,” he thought, “why can’t I do two 20-hour-a-week jobs rather than pretend to work 40 at one?”

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If you’ve joined the Elysian Collective in the last two years, you might not know that I’ve modeled our organization after old social clubs. Specifically, one founded by William Morris in 1890 London.

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I spoke with Glen Weyl, founder of RadicalXChange, author of Plurality and Radical Markets, and the lead of Microsoft’s Special Projects division where he founded the Plural Technology Collaboratory.

Weyl talks a lot about how we can innovate democracy, not just throw it all out in favor of autocracy. In this Guest Lecture, we talk about his recent debate with Curtis Yarvin, whether corporations are autocracies or democracies, whether countries like Singapore are more or less democratic than the US, and how we can use technological advancements and borrow from models around the world to create something much better than representative democracy.

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Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland Oregon are all taxing companies that pay executives excessively.

Seattle was the most recent one to do it, taxing companies 5% on everything they pay executives over $1 million, and using the estimated $30 to $80 million in annual revenue to fund social housing.

In this guest lecture, Tiffani McCoy shares how they did it. As the co-executive director of House Our Neighbors, she shares how they got the signatures and passed the ballot measure this year—all while Amazon and Microsoft aggressively fought it.

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Mark Cuban thinks we should end exorbitant pay for executives.

“I would create tax incentives for companies that rewarded all of their employees with a pari passu-type ratio of stock rewards to income,” he said on a recent podcast. “If the CEO gets $100,000 worth of stock and makes $1 million, that’s 10%. The person working the front desk who makes $40,000 gets 10%. I think that’s the path to income equality.

“You have to increase people’s asset base in order for them to have assets that appreciate and keep up. Because if you don’t have assets that appreciate, you can’t ever keep up.”

If all employees earned the same percentage of stock relative to their salary, wage inequality would be eradicated.

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America’s billionaires will call anything “socialism”—so long as it keeps them from paying taxes.

They parrot the idea that we need billionaires, because it’s the promise of million-dollar payouts that incentivizes them to build the internet, autonomous vehicles, and rockets.

Both are untrue, as evidenced by our very own country and our own history.

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We can’t deny that technology has pushed the human body far beyond what Greece’s ancient athletes could have achieved. Every person on a podium today got there, not just because they are athletically superior, but because they have been scientifically and technologically optimized to be superior.

This, we should recognize, is a new form of progress.

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The allure of the "strongman" is back, and the ideal of a "benevolent dictator" haunts our imagination of the future. But the solution is not to abolish democracy, it’s to innovate it.

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