The Elysian Dispatch

“Canada should join the EU.” That was the suggestion made by former German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel when Donald Trump took office in 2025. A poll later found nearly 60% of Canadians open to it. The idea has been floated enough that it’s worth considering whether federal layers like the EU should be open beyond geographic bounds. Or as I prefer: whether countries should be able to join part...

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...

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 s...

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?” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers...

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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.elysian.press/subscribe

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 corporation...

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...

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 inc...

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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discu...

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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discu...

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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.elysian.press/subscribe

I’ve been struggling to follow the news in any way that is productive. It’s too zoomed in on the most dramatic things happening today, without any context of the wider picture and what the trends are actually saying about our countries and the world. So I decided to zoom out and make a report card for the whole world. Something that is a snapshot of how every country is doing in terms of governanc...

KKR is either a villain or a hero, depending on who you ask. The private equity firm started buying up companies, giving employees equity in them, then selling them at a profit with windfall results for employees and KKR. Some employee-ownership advocates see the company as an unlikely savior, offering workers stake in billion-dollar businesses. Others see it as an apex predator of late capitalism...

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s four-story art installation shrinks humans to the size of ants and invites us to participate in the natural world as insects do. She wants humans to feel empathy for the natural world—for the insects and animals who live in the ecologies we destroy for our own wellbeing. Maybe we need to. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or g...

Katie Boland, co-founder of the Delta Fund , recently wrote an article arguing that KKR isn’t providing employee-ownership, but is “equity washing." A baseline employee ownership deal (known as an ESOP) would be much better, she says. I think it’s a mistake to compare a private equity company like KKR to traditional employee-owned companies—we should compare them to other private equity companies....

In Becky Chambers’ beautiful novel and masterpiece, A Psalm for the Wild Built , Sibling Dex is afraid to walk off the path because of the harm they might cause the grass and the creatures that live in it. But they come into contact with a robot who finds this strange. “Every living thing causes damage to others, Sibling Dex. You’d all starve otherwise. Have you ever watched a bull elk mow its way...

New York City’s mayoral primary has served as a kind of theater for what the future of the Democratic Party should look like in the United States. The story is told through three characters: The Trad Democrat, played by Andrew Cuomo, The Social Democrat, played by Zohran Mamdani , and The Abundance Democrat, played by Zellnor Myrie, Brad Lander, Whitney Tilson, and Adrienne Adams. What kind of Dem...

Employee equity programs created a new entrepreneurial class and fostered a generation of employee-owned companies. They also led to rampant inequality. Without Silicon Valley cutting employees in on the deal, all of our economic value could have funneled to the top instead of just nearly all of it. Our task now is to drastically expand what Silicon Valley started: To increase the share of compani...

If 120 million workers became owners in the companies they work for, the impact on wealth ownership would be seismic. Here's how it could work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.elysian.press/subscribe

Companies are wealthier than nation-states. They don't have borders. They pioneered workers’ rights before governments mandated them, and are often more inclusive than nations. Companies are smaller and more nimble than nation-states. They are more efficient and less polarized than countries. Company campuses are already a lot like city-states. A Google employee is better cared for than a United S...

Mondragon is the largest group of worker cooperatives in the world. With 92 cooperatives in the industrial, financial, retail, and educational sectors, the group earned €11 billion in revenue last year with more than 70,500 workers. Each of those cooperatives are owned and democratically run by their workers, who vote their leadership into office and share in the profits when their cooperatives do...

Plato, Thomas More, and Aldous Huxley all place utopia on an island—a small city-state that self-governed. For a long time, the city-state was our best and only form of government. But eventually, they went wrong where the state in Plato’s Republic did: they grew, consuming more land and more people and requiring an even bigger body of government to manage them all. Eventually, they were no longer...