The secret techbro city of the future
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What ambitious project are tech billionaires proposing?
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This podcast was produced on the lands of the Awabakal and Gadigal people. G'day. Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening. If there's one thing the mega-rich love, it's their big, expensive vanity projects. Clive Palmer and his Titanic replica. Donald Trump and his White House ballroom. But for some billionaires, that's not enough. They don't want to build just one thing. They want to build a whole town in their image. Earlier this year we did an episode on the deposition of Les Wexner, the billionaire who seems to be the main source of Jeffrey Epstein's wealth. We learned that he essentially built his own town from the ground up, New Albany in Ohio. The thing is, he's not alone. A guy from the Czech Republic is so obsessed with California that he's tried for over a decade to build a new city just outside San Francisco.
Pat Sunderland has been looking at this and is quite taken with the drama surrounding the town they want to call California Forever. G'day, Pat. Hello, Matt. How are you? I watched the full five-hour deposition of Les Wexner, and honestly, he really just wanted to talk about his town. He wasn't... I don't blame him. I mean, he didn't really want to talk about Jeff Epstein. He didn't want to talk about all these things. He was like, can we talk about more about, like, my little town? I think, why do we only have depositions about things that are massive criminal networks, you know? Why don't we have depositions into hobbies?
What?
That's true. Yeah, drag a guy in, make him talk about his little dude project, you know. What have you got going on in your shed, man? Senator, is it true that you play the orcs in Warhammer? You know, it's just something that, a little bit of variety. Okay, so this tangent involves a Czech national and his interest in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yes, so I want to take you back very specifically to the 1939 World's Fair in San Francisco. Because this was a watershed moment for the city. This was the exhibition that was partially dedicated to celebrate the two major bridges that had been completed in the city just a couple years earlier.
How did the history of San Francisco influence modern developments?
So one of them was the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and the other was, of course, the Golden Gate Bridge, one of the, if not the most famous bridge in the world when you take away the Sydney Bias.
Okay.
Now, of course, the Sydney Howard Bridge was opened very similar time. It was a fantastic time for bridge builders. It was a bunker time. It was an incredibly good time for bridges and for iconic bridges. And yeah, no, it's good stuff. So they had a lot to celebrate, but they didn't know exactly where they should hold the festivities. Yeah. They came up with a very elegant. Alcatraz.
Yeah, why not?
The party's so good you'll never leave. Yeah, yeah. They came up with quite an elegant solution, which was if we're celebrating these two big bridges, let's build a man-made island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. So this is a place. Why would you do that? There's Alcatraz. Albatross Island is in the middle of San Francisco Bay. I just said Albatross. I know, I know. But, you know, if you haven't seen The Rock, it's very hard to escape. Yeah, yeah. So they instead build what is now known as Treasure Island, great name, and they build a whole artificial island that's still in full use today. There's about 3,000 people living on this island. And so this few years, this period where they built not only two of the biggest bridges in, you know, America...
and an entire Madman Island became this core inspiration for this Czech guy called Jan Šramík.
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