# Balaji Srinivasan, Network State Conference opening and closing remarks (Amsterdam, 30 October 2023)

- Speaker: Balaji Srinivasan
- Event: The Network State Conference, Amsterdam, opening remarks (with the closing remarks appended)
- Date: 30 October 2023
- Length: Opening 11 min 49 s (Balaji from 01:17); closing 7 min 14 s
- Video URL: Opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqIJI8fW4PI ; Closing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkLxN4xkoi8
- Slides: Yes. Dense slides: the network-state growth ladder, the 'parallel establishment' grid, the speaker schedule.
- Transcript source: Whisper (faster-whisper, model medium) on the archive.org mirrors of both videos. No published transcript found. Timestamps match the YouTube uploads.
- Format: `[mm:ss]` is the time the line starts in the source recording. Machine transcript: expect small word errors; quotes used in the analysis were checked against the published text where one exists.

---

[00:03] Good morning, everyone. My name is Noah Jessup, the founder of Proof Group. But before we dive
[00:36] in today, I want to feel some of the energy in this room. All right. So I'm going to
[00:44] say network, and you say network. Network. Network. Okay. Now, with that same energy,
[00:55] I want you to give a thunderous round of applause and a huge warm welcome to my
[00:59] my friend, the one and only, Bola G.
[01:17] All right, folks.
[01:19] So we've got a little QR code, which
[01:21] will be on screen in a second, for you to scan.
[01:26] And this is your proof of attendance, OK?
[01:30] If you want, you can take a photo of it
[01:32] and then scan it later if you want to do that
[01:34] or just scan it now.
[01:36] And I'm going to give some opening remarks.
[01:39] There's a saying, tell them what you're going to tell them,
[01:41] then tell them, then tell them what you told them, OK?
[01:43] So we've got a bunch of speakers today.
[01:46] We're going to go lickety-split through the whole thing.
[01:48] It's going to be almost like TikTok style, but in person,
[01:52] very fast, and hopefully really good.
[01:54] So that QR code is also there on the monitors
[01:58] if you missed it.
[01:59] So it's in the back in the white box if you need it.
[02:02] So today's conference, what's it about?
[02:06] So there's theory, there's practice,
[02:07] and then there's a conference itself.
[02:09] Let's talk theory.
[02:11] So in terms of theory, are new countries even possible?
[02:19] We started new companies like Google.
[02:20] We started new communities like Facebook.
[02:22] We started new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
[02:25] Can we start new countries?
[02:26] That's a concept of the network state.
[02:28] And I wrote a book on this idea.
[02:29] You guys might have heard of it.
[02:31] It's available for free at thenetworkstate.com.
[02:33] V1, I'm going to put out V2, the hardcover,
[02:36] make a movie, and so on.
[02:37] Maybe you guys will be in it.
[02:40] And so this is a pretty cool theory.
[02:43] And here's a visual of that theory.
[02:44] Here's a visual of the concept.
[02:45] If Bitcoin's a decentralized currency,
[02:48] the network state is a decentralized country,
[02:50] where it's got the population of a country,
[02:52] but it's all distributed around the world
[02:54] rather than concentrated in one place,
[02:56] just like the nodes of Bitcoin
[02:57] are all around the world rather than in one place.
[02:59] And how do you build something like this?
[03:01] Well, you can actually, there's
[03:02] a path to get to the cloud country,
[03:04] to go from not just zero to one, but one to 1 million.
[03:07] Here's an example, if there was a Satoshi in Japan,
[03:11] living in a building by themselves,
[03:13] if they can build a community of, let's say, 17 people
[03:17] and then 172, they start getting rooms together,
[03:21] start renting together.
[03:23] Eventually they have enough money
[03:24] to start crowdfunding buildings or floors.
[03:27] Eventually they have enough money in scale at 17,000
[03:30] to get maybe little cul-de-sacs or suburbs
[03:32] or what have you.
[03:33] And going up another order of magnitude,
[03:35] are actually at the scale of a very small UN listed country.
[03:38] And one more, at 1,729,314 people,
[03:42] it's a cloud country somewhere between Latvia and Bahrain,
[03:46] in terms of its size and scale in population and income
[03:49] and real estate footprint.
[03:50] So this is the concept.
[03:52] Nothing here violates any laws of physics.
[03:54] It's just using internet technologies we already
[03:56] have, like crowdfunding and social networking and VR
[04:00] and Zoom and all this type of stuff.
[04:02] But this is the theory, and that's cool.
[04:05] But how does it work in practice?
[04:07] And so that's what really today's conference is about,
[04:10] how do we turn that theory into practice?
[04:12] And if we talk about practice, I'm
[04:15] going to introduce a new concept today, which
[04:17] is the parallel establishment.
[04:20] So imagine 1,000 different startups, each of them
[04:23] replacing a different legacy institution.
[04:26] So for example, at the top, there's San Francisco.
[04:28] And we're replacing San Francisco
[04:30] both with things outside it,
[04:32] like cul-de-sac in Arizona and Prospera
[04:34] in South America, in Cabin, which is in Texas,
[04:36] but also around the world.
[04:38] And the neighborhood SF is actually fixing San Francisco
[04:40] from within SF, right?
[04:41] So you can have the Satoshi strategy of going outside,
[04:44] or the Satya Nadella strategy of reforming within.
[04:47] Either Satoshi or Satya is fine,
[04:49] so long as you're not Steve,
[04:50] who says it ain't even broke.
[04:51] Steve Bomber, okay.
[04:52] So San Francisco, replace San Francisco
[04:56] with these startup societies.
[04:57] Then the middle is Harvard, right?
[04:59] We take out Harvard, and we have parallel education.
[05:03] That's Repla, that's Synthesis, which is K through 12,
[05:05] but it's also AI tutoring.
[05:06] The Thiel Fellowship Emergent Ventures
[05:08] are gonna hear from some of the founders of these today.
[05:10] And then the last row there is another example.
[05:12] We replace media with parallel media.
[05:15] It's Twitter and X, it's Substack.
[05:17] You're gonna hear from the author,
[05:18] the great Lady Wing today
[05:18] and many other people doing parallel media, okay?
[05:21] And so this concept of the parallel establishment,
[05:23] if you take up all of these
[05:25] new institutional replacements on the right-hand side,
[05:28] together that's a parallel establishment.
[05:30] They exist alongside the legacy in parallel.
[05:32] They're gaining strength.
[05:33] They're pulling away users until they become the new thing.
[05:36] So this is how we turn that seemingly impossible thing
[05:39] of building a new country, break into a bunch
[05:41] of individual startups, and then aggregate them together.
[05:44] There's two parts of the parallel establishment.
[05:46] There's the parallel societies.
[05:48] And these are the physical societies.
[05:50] These are the first part of today's conference,
[05:53] is about these, to show that this is actually
[05:55] physical and real.
[05:56] You're going to see about a dozen of these physical
[05:59] startup societies.
[06:00] There's cul-de-sac in Arizona.
[06:02] There's Prospera, as I mentioned, in South America.
[06:04] There's Cabin in Texas.
[06:05] But these are actually decentralized.
[06:06] They plan to do nodes elsewhere.
[06:07] That's just their first nodes.
[06:09] They're all kind of network cities or network societies
[06:11] that are setting up little nodes around the world.
[06:15] And so this is how we build internet-first physical
[06:18] infrastructure.
[06:18] We've got internet-first communities
[06:20] that are recruited from the internet.
[06:21] These are the kinds of places.
[06:23] Cul-de-sac, for example, is like a remote optimized city.
[06:26] If you built a normal city with roads for the daily commute,
[06:29] What would a remote optimized city look like
[06:30] if it was built for remote workers?
[06:32] You totally rethink all the architecture.
[06:33] It's walkable, you don't have cars everywhere,
[06:35] the cars are on the outside, they're self-driving.
[06:37] It rethinks every piece of the infrastructure
[06:39] and these startup societies are doing things like that.
[06:43] So these are the parallel societies.
[06:45] And the other piece of the puzzle
[06:46] are the parallel institutions.
[06:47] So you can always think of it as a vertical strategy
[06:50] of building a new city in place
[06:52] and a horizontal strategy of replacing media
[06:55] and education and finance.
[06:57] And those two are complementary,
[06:59] the vertical and the horizontal.
[07:01] So the second part of today's conference
[07:04] is about the parallel institutions.
[07:06] These are the new New York Times's and Harvard's
[07:08] and new Supreme Court's and Wall Street's.
[07:10] It's internet first versions of medicine and law
[07:14] and media and education and finance
[07:16] and even science itself at DSI.
[07:17] This example on the right is for parallel education.
[07:22] So Replit has 20 million Replit developers
[07:25] is transforming computer science education worldwide.
[07:27] Synthesis, AI tutoring, so you'll be able to scale tutoring.
[07:31] And the Thiel Fellowship, you know,
[07:32] Thiel's unicorn success is awkward for colleges.
[07:35] We have the Thiel Fellowship, one of the co-founders
[07:37] right here is gonna talk to you later today.
[07:40] So that's the theory and practice
[07:41] and they come together in this conference.
[07:42] And I'm just gonna briefly say, you know,
[07:45] who the speakers are and then you're gonna hear
[07:48] from the speakers themselves.
[07:50] So we're gonna begin with five
[07:52] physical parallel societies, okay?
[07:55] Cabin the neighborhood SF nomad praxis and cul-de-sac in many ways there are different ways of materializing cloud communities
[08:01] Onto the land okay and again some of them are outside of SF some of the neighborhood SF is within SF
[08:07] And you know their complementary strategies then we'll hear for four more physical societies from Prospera from fractal from
[08:15] vibe camp and from spectra and
[08:18] These are by you know founders have already built cities who have already had large exits very very credible people
[08:24] who have either built or are in the process of building.
[08:27] We're also gonna hear from three builders of houses,
[08:31] towns, and cities.
[08:31] So, Bill Cover is building like houses.
[08:34] Shervin Pishvar, first investor in Uber,
[08:36] has built a town.
[08:38] And then, Stefan Zingerle of Casa Roscombe
[08:41] has actually built entire cities in Africa
[08:43] and he's gonna show you those, okay?
[08:45] So, and the reason those are complimentary
[08:48] is just like in computer science,
[08:50] you might have innovation at the level of the database
[08:53] but then a higher level at the innovation of the web server.
[08:55] Innovation at the level of the house
[08:56] is complementary to innovation at the level of the town.
[08:58] Then you can build new kinds of towns in your houses.
[09:01] After that, the third part of part one,
[09:04] more parallel societies.
[09:05] These are different.
[09:06] These are more digital and emerging.
[09:08] They're more like DAOs and crypto stuff.
[09:11] And you start to see how this space is converging.
[09:14] So that's MetaCartel, Coordinape, Plumia, Yayim,
[09:17] and the Pronomos Fund by Patrick Friedman
[09:19] that invests in these new societies.
[09:21] We'll also hear from Vitalik on Zazalu,
[09:24] his pop-up, not Network State, but what we're thinking of as a network school, maybe a competitor
[09:28] to Harvard and Stanford and what have you, because it's actually already got a strong
[09:31] research vibe.
[09:33] Then we're going to go to lunch, and after we come back from lunch, you're going to
[09:38] hear from Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer winner, you know, when that was worth something maybe,
[09:42] and then also from Ashley Rinsburg and Alon Newhouse on how the media, the establishment
[09:49] are basically broken and how they're broken in great detail.
[09:52] And you kind of need that, because that's the criticism part of constructive criticism.
[09:55] And then the second half is the constructive part, where you're actually building something,
[09:58] right?
[09:59] So you need both.
[10:00] Criticism, why is it broken?
[10:01] Constructive, how do we fix it?
[10:02] So Nas of Nas Daily, Nuseri Seen, and Dan Romero will talk about building new
[10:08] media and new social media and to replace the old.
[10:14] Next we have parallel education.
[10:16] So we have, as I mentioned, Synthesis and Michael Gibson, a Teal Fellowship founder.
[10:20] Tyler Cohn will talk to you about emergent ventures,
[10:22] Amjad will talk to you about Replet,
[10:24] and you'll see how education is being transformed.
[10:27] And then we're gonna talk about parallel laws, okay?
[10:31] So essentially, what would a better system of laws look like?
[10:34] The laws are broken in San Francisco.
[10:35] They're broken for AI.
[10:37] They're broken for physical security
[10:38] and for second citizenship.
[10:40] And we need to fix them for building entirely new cities.
[10:43] We're gonna talk about new legal systems
[10:45] and how we get there.
[10:47] Penultimately, we're gonna talk about
[10:49] parallel biomedicine, which is a subset
[10:50] of both parallel regulation, parallel science,
[10:53] and parallel medicine.
[10:54] You're gonna hear about a new biotech-free zone,
[10:57] a longevity community, and research hub,
[11:00] funded by my friend Brian Armstrong
[11:02] on how they're doing decentralized science
[11:03] and trying to change the incentives for science.
[11:06] Last, you're gonna hear about parallel finance.
[11:08] That's another way of thinking about crypto.
[11:09] That's why crypto people are interested in this,
[11:11] because parallel finance is a crucial subset,
[11:13] but it's a subset of the entire parallel establishment.
[11:16] Anatoly will talk about how Solana
[11:17] has essentially built a parallel banking system,
[11:20] And Solana Breakpoint, by the way,
[11:21] is tomorrow and the day after and so on in this exact venue.
[11:24] So if you want to stay in Amstam,
[11:25] you can come to Breakpoint.
[11:27] And so the solution is a parallel banking system.
[11:30] Then you're going to hear about the problem, which
[11:32] the Winklevosses will talk about how the current system
[11:35] has failed on regulation.
[11:37] Cody Sanchez will talk about how it's failed on Wall
[11:38] Street.
[11:39] And you'll also hear about how it's
[11:40] failing on currency and basically everything else.
[11:43] So when it's the beginning, let's get started.
[11:45] So.

---

## Closing remarks (separate video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkLxN4xkoi8; timestamps restart at 00:00)

[00:02] All right.
[00:04] So we are now at the closing remarks.
[00:10] We just got through 40 speakers.
[00:13] And so we have more than 1,000 people here, actually,
[00:25] as you probably learned at registration.
[00:27] Actually, we have more than 1,200 people.
[00:29] And there were so many more who wanted to come.
[00:31] So whatever we do next, we'll be in a bigger venue
[00:35] and whatnot, which is great.
[00:36] So the movement is absolutely growing.
[00:39] And so what I want to do, just, you've had tons of lectures
[00:43] and content and so on and so forth.
[00:46] I wanted to give a few very quick slides
[00:47] and let's get to hanging out and connecting with people
[00:50] for the next couple of hours.
[00:51] And then lots of folks are gonna be around in Amsterdam
[00:54] for the evening and for the next few days.
[00:56] So lots of network state connections, okay.
[00:58] So just some closing remarks.
[01:00] So basically, you know, two things I have for you, okay.
[01:05] an exit poll and a parting gift, okay?
[01:09] So the exit poll is very simple.
[01:13] Just scan that QR code or go to
[01:15] thenetworkstate.com front slash poll, okay?
[01:19] You might also take a photo of it and then, you know,
[01:23] like QR code scan it later in the event that
[01:26] WiFi is flaky or cell reception is flaky
[01:29] or something like that, okay?
[01:31] This will take you about maybe 10 minutes to do.
[01:35] but it's actually essential for turning
[01:38] what we're doing here further.
[01:40] I mean, we've already started turning it
[01:41] from theory into practice.
[01:42] You've seen a lot of literal concrete getting poured
[01:45] in some of the talks here, right?
[01:47] And a lot of thinking on how do we make this work
[01:50] for security, and how do we make it work for mainstream,
[01:52] how do we make it work given the political environment
[01:54] and so on and so forth.
[01:56] But this exit poll actually helps in a different way,
[01:58] which is it helps us understand
[02:00] where the community is at, okay?
[02:02] So we ask some basic questions like
[02:04] just your contact info, like your ETH name or your Solana name.
[02:10] We ask what country or what city you're in,
[02:12] so we can pick the next venue.
[02:15] We ask for feedback on the conference itself.
[02:18] And if you've got a great tweet on the conference,
[02:20] or you should tweet it on the conference.
[02:22] If you haven't tweeted on the conference,
[02:23] go and tweet on the conference.
[02:25] And then paste in the link to the tweet.
[02:26] So I'm going to create a page of all the tweets.
[02:28] So then that'll be like a kind of a nice souvenir,
[02:31] like a record of what everybody thought at this moment,
[02:34] like putting your John Hancock on the Declaration
[02:36] of Independence kind of thing, you know?
[02:39] And, but the fourth thing that's on there
[02:41] is actually a list of sort of polarizing questions.
[02:45] And the reason I'm asking a bunch
[02:46] of these polarizing questions,
[02:47] you can of course answer N.A. to them.
[02:50] But the reason is, as I mentioned in the poll,
[02:52] there's something that Scott Alexander
[02:53] calls a scissor statement, right?
[02:55] And a scissor statement is something which
[02:57] one side thinks is obviously true
[03:00] and the other side thinks is obviously false.
[03:02] like, you know, is Thor a god or not?
[03:05] That's a non-controversial one from the olden days, okay?
[03:09] And people probably came to blows over that.
[03:11] So the reason that we've asked a bunch of
[03:15] these sort of political questions in there
[03:17] is that what we're doing is inherently political.
[03:19] And I want to figure out
[03:22] how to avoid unnecessary scissor statements,
[03:24] figure out where the center of mass of the community is,
[03:27] what things do we have consensus on,
[03:29] and what things do we somewhat disagree on,
[03:31] and then try and figure out, okay, how do we optimize
[03:35] for that center of mass?
[03:36] And I have a mental model of where I think all of you guys
[03:39] are in terms of being, well, I don't want to prejudge it,
[03:41] okay, so the exit poll for a reason, all right?
[03:45] So please do this, it'll help us a lot.
[03:47] And as an added sweetener, okay, I'll actually,
[03:51] I'll give you the parting gift even before
[03:52] you complete the exit poll, but are you gonna raise,
[03:54] can you guys raise your hands and say you're gonna
[03:56] complete the exit poll?
[03:56] Please raise your hands.
[03:58] Okay, thank you very much.
[03:59] Okay, so please do complete this.
[04:01] Here's your parting gift, okay?
[04:03] So it's the networkstate.com front page poll.
[04:05] Here's your parting gift.
[04:06] So he did this completely of his own accord.
[04:09] I did not ask him to do it.
[04:10] Eric did the Navalman Act that sold a million copies.
[04:14] And so he of his own accord did the anthology of biology.
[04:17] And he's such a great guy.
[04:18] And I was thinking, you know,
[04:20] all the journos who hate tech,
[04:22] all the guys who are haters,
[04:23] I have to spend some cycles on them.
[04:25] Why not spend time on a guy
[04:26] who's actually like a great guy?
[04:29] And so Eric wrote this book, which is actually,
[04:33] it's really as much Eric as it is me
[04:34] because it's kind of a compilation of
[04:38] like tens of thousands of snippets
[04:40] from tweets and podcasts and so on
[04:41] that he found interesting.
[04:42] And it's always interesting to see
[04:43] what others find interesting.
[04:46] So that QR code, if you scan that,
[04:47] you get the first chapter.
[04:48] It's online, anthology of ology.
[04:51] It's also got the illustrations by Jack Butcher,
[04:53] who many of you guys know from crypto.
[04:54] He's an amazing artist.
[04:56] And I think it's actually an amazing piece of work.
[04:59] And this is like a prequel for maybe the Network State
[05:02] hardcover or what we might do there,
[05:03] and a lot of other things coming there.
[05:06] That's a parting gift.
[05:07] So you guys all got the screenshot of that?
[05:08] Yep, good.
[05:09] Take a photo of it if you haven't, all right.
[05:13] And that's a wrap, but one last thing,
[05:17] which is we are actually making the Network State movie.
[05:21] If you guys wanna be in the movie,
[05:23] I'd like to take a group selfie of you.
[05:26] So if our camera guys, all right,
[05:28] there are camera guys coming.
[05:30] Great.
[05:30] So we're just going to do a few.
[05:32] Like first, I'll kind of stand like this.
[05:34] You guys can say something.
[05:35] Maybe, I don't know, say Network State.
[05:37] I know we said that a few times,
[05:39] but it's good for the one more
[05:40] cut for the official movie.
[05:42] And then we can come in and get a group selfie
[05:44] if you guys want to do that.
[05:45] So let me do that.
[05:47] Yeah.
[05:48] Yeah, we'll just do a group tip.
[05:50] We're doing this all together.
[05:52] All right.
[05:53] And then don't fall off the stage, that's the key thing.
[05:56] That's right.
[05:57] Come on in, come on in.
[05:58] How should I, should I just stand like this?
[06:00] Can you angle it properly?
[06:01] Okay, great.
[06:04] If I sit, if I sit, I don't know if it,
[06:06] I don't know if it's camera angle.
[06:07] Okay, okay, great, great.
[06:09] Okay, great.
[06:11] Yes, of course, I'm gonna do, oh, mosh.
[06:14] I know it's not that kind of audience,
[06:15] no, no, crowd surf, okay, great.
[06:19] All right, we got it?
[06:21] This is like the ultimate,
[06:22] like you guys know the AI thing,
[06:24] which is like the Norse Vikings in the boat,
[06:28] you know, right?
[06:29] You know, or like ancient Egyptians, right?
[06:31] So this is the future, are we good?
[06:33] We also have to thank the streamers.
[06:35] Oh yeah, what, the streamers?
[06:36] All the people watching in, tuning in.
[06:38] Oh yes, of course.
[06:39] Streamers, QT this, QT this if you want.
[06:43] Okay, this is great.
[06:44] All right guys, so I think we got the content?
[06:46] Oh, okay, all right, one more?
[06:48] All right, okay.
[06:49] Oh my God, everybody wants to take a selfie now.
[06:50] Okay, so, should I turn around?
[06:53] Okay, great.
[06:54] All right, one, two, three, Network State.
[06:56] Can we get one more?
[06:57] All right, ready?
[06:58] Okay.
[06:59] One, two, three, Network State!