Background
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.
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 graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 1998, and worked as a software engineer at Google.
He founded the nonprofit Seasteading Institute, which explores the creation of sovereign ocean colonies. As a poker player, he cashed in the World Series of Poker four times. 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 left Google on July 29, 2008 to spend more time on seasteading.
At the October 2010 Seasteading social, it was announced that current plans were to launch a seastead by 2014. Since attending the Burning Manitoba festival in 2000, imagined creating a water festival called Ephemerisle as a Seasteading experiment and Temporary Autonomous Zone.
Through the Seasteading Institute, 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.
Since 2010, the event has been annual and community-run.
On 31 July 2011, stepped down from the position as Executive Director of Seasteading Institute, but remained chairman of the board. Later, he co-founded the Corporation, a project to establish a self-governing charter city within the borders of Honduras. In 2012 it was announced the initiative would be halted due to the changing political climate of Honduras.
He claims to have created Artificial Intelligence bots for online poker.
Patri is the grandson of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton and economist Rose and son of economist and physicist David Doctorate. As of December 2015, he is engaged.