00 - Network State Conference 2023 - Opening Remarks by Balaji

Sa.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Noah Jessup, the founder of Proof Group. But before we dive in today, I want to feel some of the energy in this room.

All right?

So I'm gonna say network, and you say network. Network. Network. Okay, now, with that same energy, I want you to give a thunderous round of applause and a huge warm welcome to my friend, the one and only Paladin.

All right, folks, so we've got a little QR code which will be on screen in a second for you to scan, and this is your proof of attendance. Okay? If you want, you can take a photo of it and then scan it later if you want to do that, or just scan it now. And I'm going to give some opening remarks. You know, there's a saying. Tell them what you're going to tell them. Then tell them. Then tell them what you told them. Okay, so we've got a bunch of speakers today. We're going to go lickety split through the whole thing. It's going to be almost like TikTok style, but in person. Okay. Very fast and hopefully really good. So that, by the way, that QR code is also there on the monitors if you missed it. So it's in the back in the white box if you need it. Okay, so today's conference, what's it about? There's theory, there's practice, and then there's a conference itself. Let's talk theory. So in terms of theory, are new countries even possible? Right. We started new companies like Google. We started new communities like Facebook. We started new currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum. Could we start new countries? That's a concept of the network shape. And I wrote a book on this idea. You guys might have heard of it. It's available free@theneworkshade.com V1, going to put out V2, the hardcover, make a movie and so on. Maybe you guys will be in it. And so this is, you know, pretty cool theory. And here's a visual of that theory. Here's a visual of the concept. If you. Bitcoin's a decentralized currency. The network state is a decentralized country, right? Where it's got the population of a country, but it's all distributed around the world rather than concentrated in one place. Just like the nodes of Bitcoin are all around the world rather than in one place. And how do you build something like this? Well, you can actually. There's a path to get to the cloud country to go from, you know, not just 0 to 1, but 1 to 1 million. Here's an example. If there was a satoshi in Japan, okay, living in a building by themselves. If they can build a community of, let's say 17 people and then 172, they start getting rooms together, start renting together, eventually they have enough money to start crowdfunding buildings or floors. Eventually they have enough money and scale at 17,000 to get maybe little cul de sacs or suburbs or what have you. And going up another order of magnitude, they're actually at the scale of a very small UN listed country. And, and one more at 1,729,314 people. It's a cloud country somewhere between Latvia and Bahrain, okay, in terms of its size and scale in population and income and real estate footprint. Okay, so this is the concept. Nothing here violates any laws of physics. It's just using Internet technologies we already have like crowdfunding and social networking and you know, VR and zoom and all this type of stuff. But this is the theory, and that's cool. But how does it work in practice? Okay? And so that's what really today's conference is about. How do we turn that theory into practice? And if you talk about practice, I'm going to introduce a new concept today which is the parallel establishment. Okay? So imagine 1000 different startups, each of them replacing a different legacy institution. So for example, at the top there's San Francisco, and we're replacing San Francisco both with things outside it, like cul de sac in Arizona and Prospera in South America and Cabin, which is in Texas, but also around the world. And the neighborhood SF is actually fixing San Francisco. Firm within sf. Right. So you can have the Satoshi strategy of going outside or the Satya Nadella strategy of reforming within either Satoshi or Sathya is fine, as long as you're not Steve. Who says it ain't even broke? Steve Ballmer. Okay, so San Francisco, replace San Francisco with these startups, you know, societies. Then in the middle is Harvard, right? We take out Harvard and we have parallel education, that's repli. That synthesis, which is K through 12, but it's also AI tutoring, the Thiel Fellowship, Emergent Ventures. You're gonna hear from some of the founders of these today. And then the last row, there's another example, we replace media with parallel media. It's Twitter and X, it's substack. You're gonna hear from the author, the Great lady winx Day, and many other people doing parallel media. Okay? And so this concept of the parallel establishment. If you take up all of these new institutional replacements on the right hand side together, that's a parallel establishment. They exist alongside the legacy in parallel. They're gaining strength, they're pulling away users until they become the new thing. So this is how we turn that seemingly impossible thing of building a new country. Break into a bunch of individual startups and then aggregate them together. There's two parts of the parallel establishment. There's a parallel societies and these are the physical societies. These are the. The first part of today's conference is about these. To show that this is actually physical and real. Okay, you're going to see about a dozen of these physical startup societies. There's Cul de Sac in Arizona, there's Prospera as I mentioned in South America, there's Cabinet in Texas. But these are actually decentralized. They plan to do nodes elsewhere. That's just their first nodes. They're all kind of network cities or network societies that are setting up little nodes around the world. And so this is how we build Internet first physical infrastructure. We've got Internet first communities that have recruited from the Internet. These are the kinds of places. Cul de Sac, for example, is like a remote optimized city. Like if you built a normal city with roads for the daily commute. What would a remote optimized city look like if it was built for remote workers? You totally rethink all the architecture. It's walkable. You don't have cars everywhere. The cars are on the outside. They're self driving. It rethinks every piece of the infrastructure. And these startup societies are doing things like that. Okay, so these are the parallel societies and the other piece of the puzzle are the parallel institutions. Okay, so you, you can almost think of it as like a vertical strategy of building a new city in place and a horizontal strategy of replacing media and education and finance. Okay. And those two are complementary, the vertical and the horizontal. So the second part of today's conference is about the parallel institutions. These are the new New York Times and Harvard's, the new Supreme Courts and Wall Streets. It's Internet first versions of medicine and law and media and education and finance and even science itself. The desai, this example on the right is for parallel education. So Replit has 20 million Replit developers, is transforming computer science education worldwide. Synthesis, AI tutoring. So you build scale tutoring. And the Thiel Fellowship, you know, Thiel's unicorn success is awkward for colleges. We have the Thiel Fellowship. One of the co founders right here is Going to talk to you later today. So that's the theory and practice and they come together in this conference. And I'm just going to briefly say, you know who the speakers are, and then you're going to hear from the speakers themselves. So we're going to begin with five physical parallel societies, okay? Cabin, the neighborhood sf, nomad, Praxis and cul de sac. In many ways, there are different ways of materializing cloud communities onto the land. Okay. And again, some of them are outside of sf, some of the, you know, neighborhood SF is within SF and, you know, they're complementary strategies. Then we'll hear from four more physical societies, from Prospera, from Fractal, from vibecamp and from Spectra. And these are by founders who've already built cities, who've already had large exits, very credible people who have either built or are in the process of building. We're also going to hear from three builders of houses, towns and cities. So Bill Cover is building like houses. Shervin Pishvar, first investor in Uber, has built a town. And then Stefan Zengerle of Casa Roscomm has actually built entire cities in Africa. And he's going to show you those. Okay? So, and those, the reason is. The reason those complementary, those are complementary is like, just like in computer science, you might have innovation at the level of the database, but then at a higher level, at the innovation of the web server. Innovation at the level of the house is complementary to innovation at the level of the town. Then you can build new kinds of towns in your houses. Okay? After that, the third part of part one, more parallel societies. These are different, these are more digital and emerging. They're more like daos, you know, and crypto stuff. And you start to see how this space is converging. So that's Metacartel Coordinate, Plumia Yayam and the Pronomos Fund by Patrick Friedman that invests in these new societies. We'll also hear from Vitalik on Zuzalu, his pop up, not network State, but what we're thinking of as a network school, maybe a competitor to Harvard and Stanford and what have you, because it's actually already got a strong research vibe. Then we're going to go to lunch and after we come back from lunch, you're going to hear from Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer winner, you know, when that was worth something, maybe. And then also from Ashley Rinsberg and Alon Newhouse on how the media, the establishment are basically broken and how they're broken in great detail. And you kind of need that because that's the criticism part of constructive criticism. And then the second half is the constructive part where you're actually building something. Right? So you need both criticism. Why is it broken? Constructive. How do we fix it? So Nas Daily Nasseri, Sean and Dan Romero will talk about building new media and new social media and to replace the old. Next we have parallel education. So we have, as I mentioned, synthesis. And Michael Gibson, a Thiel Fellowship founder, Taller Cohen will talk to you about emergent ventures. Amjad will talk to you about Replit, and you'll see how education is being transformed. And then we're going to talk about parallel laws. Okay, so essentially what would a better system of laws look like? The laws are broken in San Francisco, they're broken for AI, they're broken for physical security and for second citizenship. And we need to fix them for building entirely new cities. We're going to talk about new legal systems and how we get there. Penultimately, we're going to talk about parallel biomedicine, which is a subset of both parallel regulation, parallel science and parallel medicine. You're going to hear about a new biotech free zone, a longevity community and research hub funded by my friend Brian Armstrong, and how they're doing decentralized science and trying to change the incentives for science. Last, you're going to hear about parallel finance. That's another way of thinking about crypto. That's why crypto people are interested in this, because parallel finance is a crucial subset of, but it's a subset of the entire parallel establishment. Anatoly will talk about how Solana has essentially built a parallel banking system. And Solana Breakpoint, by the way, is tomorrow and the day after and so on in this exact venue. So you can, if you want to stay in Amsterdam, you can come to Breakpoint. And so that's the solution is a parallel banking system. And you're going to hear about the problem which, you know, the Winklevoss's will talk about how the current system's failed on regulation. Cody Sanchez we'll talk about it's failed on Wall street and you'll also hear about how it's feeling on currency and basically everything else. So in the beginning, let's get started.