Balaji Srinivasan outlines the Network State idea: decentralized communities that grow from online to real-world jurisdictions. He sketches examples like Prospera and Vitalia, describes a growth path from individuals to 1.7 million people, and announces a Network State school that received thousands of applications and will accept 150 students.
Questions this video answers
Noah Jessup — Chief Investment Officer of Proof Group.
Thousands of applications from more than 100 countries.
150 people.
Approximately 1.729 million people.
Welcome to the Network State Conference Singapore. Let's make some noise. Alright, to get started here. I'm going to say network and you say network. Can we give even more? Let's try again. How? Have a little copy c and then we'll do it again. Network. Fantastic. My name is Noah Jessup. I'm going to be your co host today, making things run smooth. I'm the chief investment officer of a fund called Proof Group. And today it's such an inspiring city and place to be talking about the Network State. And so my ask for you today is just make one friend here who you can help in whatever they're building and dreaming. And today I'd like to welcome a man who needs no introduction, my friend Balaji. Okay folks, you know, a few years ago networks taped again. It's just a book and we have a conference and now this one is to exercise and make sure we're going to do it on the ilms. It'll be even bigger. And of course you're all invited. So I'm just going to give some brief opening remarks and then describe what we're going to see today. We're going to talk about the parallel societies, digital societies popping up all over the world, the parallel institutions which are the and also the global context as to why this is all important. And then finally I'll wrap it up with a closing address. You're also going to hear today from the founder of Ethereum, the founder of Coinbase, the founder of Solana, the founder of Angellist, Brian Johnson of Don't Die and many, many other luminaries, including some special guests that are really famous in various places. So opening marks theory, practice. I'll be brief. Theory. So some of you have seen this slide before, but I'll reiterate it for those who have never heard of the concept are new country is even possible. We know that we can found new companies, Google out of a garage and new communities. The 3 billion person community. Does Facebook start out normal? We know we can start new currencies like Bitcoin from a white paper. But can we start new countries and growth? That's the next step. That's what taking the Internet seriously means. I wrote a book on this video, you might have heard of it. It's free online@goodmercy.com working on v2 hardcover and all this stuff. Here's a visual concept. So if Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, the Network State is a decentralized country. It is something where the people have their hearts in one place but they're spread out all over the world. Here's how we get there from 1 to 1 million. How one of you could found a network state. You start as for example an engineer in Tokyo. You recruit people online, you start gathering territory. People are just larping at this point in their rooms and eventually you start to have a larger community of maybe there of 100 something people. Maybe it's a large discord group or something like that. Now you've got about a thousand people and actually a thousand people doing something in the physical world is a lot bigger than you think. This is about 2,000 people. It's actually a pretty big number. So once you're at this level you actually probably got escape velocity. You actually got a value proposal coming back to your community. And crucially there's nodes all around the world. They don't have to be in one place. This is what allows you to use the Internet to scale. You're in one place online and the same WhatsApp group, the same Discord. Then you get 17,000, 172,000 and eventually 1.729 million people. That's actually on par with nation states. That would make you somewhere between Bahrain and Latvia, one of the UN listed countries. Crucially you don't just have a population income like tech companies do. You also have a real estate footprint, approvable real estate footprint using all the Oracle and other technologies, deep in technology that we've built in crypto. It's very cool to have this network in practice. So that's the end goal. What are the steps? So we have a book, we have a school you can all apply@ns.com apply and we've got our first few days thousands of applications from more than 100 countries around the world. We accept 150 people over scaling school. So even if you put in like a $10 thing in the paid wait list that actually is like Elon's Model 3. It shows the demand for me to spend the capital to build out the real estate to scale the school for all of you. So you can go to ms.comapply and check that out in many ways. You can. Today's conference is an annual event organized by students and faculty at the government school. And our counters in three parts mentioned parallel societies, parallel institutions in the global context. Really about building up the parallel establishment with you being some of the earliest members of that. What exactly is the parallel establishment? I'll give you one figure and then I'll leave it to the speakers. What is a parallel establishment. So we have these physical parallel societies that are popping up around the world like Prospera and Vitalia, and Honduras, like the Suzu, which is in several places, but it's in Montenegro, there's something in Singapore, there's something in Turkey, there's Cul de Sac, which is in Arizona. And there's Etchy's World, where you're going to hear from soon, which is in Northern California. And each of these have taken like an aspect of technology that's purely digital before and sort of manifested in the physical world. You take this digital concept, AI, and you manifest in the form of drones, humanoids and self driving cars. You we take this digital concept of crypto innovation or digital innovation, we manifested into the physical world. And so for example, Vitalia and Prospero took all this theory about advanced biomedicine and actually found a jurisdiction, built a jurisdiction where you could actually do human self improvement. You'll hear from one of the first human self engineered people in the world who became really jacked as a consequence of that. Then investors started following him because the next level you can be on Professors Suse Lou is parallel finance based on Ethereum. Cul de Sac is parallel transportation because it builds walkable community. And EdgexMerelda is rethinking what a community and culture even is. And the cool thing is that once one of these innovations works, your first product, your first moral innovation works well, then it can be adopted. If the innovations work, they get ported over. I guess this is the one table to keep in mind. We can have these small physical communities, they can take some pieces on the world. There's a critique in the world and you actually have a constructive. You actually build things and you prove that people want that better local community, they want that biotech innovation zone. And once you prove in this example that they want parallel finance, they want Ethereum, then that can spread out to other communities. And of course the toolkit works. Yes, people are sharing ideas. That's the purpose of this conference. You're going to hear from all the pioneers and all the parallel societies around the world of what they're doing and why they're doing it. Everybody can learn from each other and grow stronger because we're a positive set of people. And so without further ado, let's hear from the parallel society, starting with Jean Ledger of Edge City.
