How can you vote against a one-party state? It doesn't work. You can vote against Democrats as much as you can vote against communists. Elections are held, but the party always wins. So we have to begin by delegitimating that order because it isn't legitimate. It's not delivering results. That's why people are fleeing blue cities, fleeing blue states. And that's why they're voting with their feet for things like what Josh is building, things like Ridgerunner, startup societies around the world are restoring democracy by allowing people to exit the two-party system for the thousand-city system.
I'll begin by introducing everyone we have today on the New Founding Podcast. First, Balaji, former Chief Technology Officer at Coinbase, former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and founder of the Network School. We also have Josh Abatotoy, founder and CEO at Ridgerunner, and Nate Fischer, founder and CEO at New Founding. I actually want to start today with the Politico piece that came out over the weekend talking about the Ridgerunner project that Josh Abatotoy is leading in Tennessee. The subtitle was interesting: 'Inside the conservative plan to chart a new political future, one town at a time.' Reading through it, I think we all saw ways that this project relates or contrasts with ideas Balaji has been talking about—the Network State—and separately ideas Nate has been exploring through New Founding. In the Politico piece, Ridgerunner is described as 'placing a premium on developing communal spaces like schools, community centers, and churches where large families can gather to work, worship, or socialize.' So starting with Josh, Balaji's talked about successful communities having creeds. Do Ridgerunner neighborhoods have a creed, and if so, why?
I would say that yes, Ridgerunner neighborhoods do have creeds. I would speak of that as a way of life or a certain ethos, much lower resolution than journalists would often like to tell us that we have. Really the ethos of a Ridgerunner neighborhood is the American way of life, particularized a little bit to a particular region. Right now we're operating in the foothills of Appalachia, so we want to do a lot of stuff in the way of life that gets down to the level of neighborhood design that evokes the traditional way of life that people would have lived out here. I think often journalists, and there's a bit of a cottage industry now, they're trying to paint a picture of a very top-down ideological project. They want it to be at some level politically revolutionary or a conspiracy. Really what I often tell people is no, we're just hearkening to the way that neighborhoods have felt and looked in America for 200 years. We use a very simple tagline: faith, family, freedom. That's our creed. If you're a person who values more than just pure consumerism, if you care about your family and raising your kids in a healthy natural location, and if you value a sense of self-determination and permanency in your personal life and at a communal level, then a Ridgerunner neighborhood is very good for you. This is far less specific than what people will often talk about when they're talking about a creed, but that's our ethos.
I want to talk about how that relates to the Network State thesis, Balaji, and then also the Network School in particular. With the Network School, people are directly opting in from all around the globe. There's a Silicon Valley core to it. But how do you think about opt-in versus opt-out societies versus the sort of sticky, multigenerational, maybe less chosen types of societies that have characteristically defined America and the West?
I actually want to show you something in terms of opt-in and opt-out, and also rebut the journalist critique of the things Josh is doing. Democrats and communists have both built one-party states. If you look at California, it is not really a democracy. Elections are held, but the party always wins, and that's been true for 15 years. In fact, the end of democracy in California led to the hundred-billion-dollar California train and the homeless industrial complex, the end of effective Republican opposition to keep the Democrats honest. Often on the right they'll say we need less democracy. In a sense, this is where you needed more democracy because one-party rule led to out-of-control spending. China's also turned full communist, and Democrats and communists are not averse to working together. They have done so historically. Carney is doing this with communists in Canada. The crucial point is that Democrats, unless they actually say Carney is wrong for meeting with Xi, and Newsom is wrong for meeting with Xi, and Manchin and Walz and everybody else who's praised China—unless a journalist or Democrat says that was wrong and they're against one-party rule in California and they're going to push for multi-party elections, they simply cannot say they're against one-party rule. Their fundamental belief is in one-party control. Everything they've done is to turn the state into their startup so they can get control and award themselves the money, and do that in all these other blue cities. So we have to begin by delegitimating that order because it isn't legitimate. It's not delivering results. That's why people are fleeing blue cities, fleeing blue states. And that's why they're voting with their feet for things like what Josh is building, things like Ridgerunner, startup societies around the world that are restoring democracy by allowing people to exit the two-party system for the thousand-city system. We are restoring democracy by having people have the consent of the governed. The core thing of democracy, if you strip away all the superstructure and mechanisms, is: did you as an individual consent to this government? Is this some oppressive totalitarian thing you don't consent to, or did you freely consent? The consent of the governed is good because even people on the capitalist right can understand that, because consent and contract are very similar. If you have cooperation and consent and contract, you don't have coercion. Rediscovering why consent to the government is so important means what Elon did with Starbase, where he's got a city in Texas and 98% of people there have actually voted for it to be incorporated. They've all consented to his government. That is the meta-moral framework. How can you vote against a one-party state? It doesn't work. You can vote against Democrats as much as you can vote against communists. Elections are held but the party always wins. So the way you vote against them is with your feet and with your wallet, by voting for someone like Josh. The crucial thing is technocramacy. We can formalize that. When somebody enters a society like Ridgerunner, they sign something like terms of service. Imagine you've got something like that at the border—99% of security is border security. They sign a social smart contract saying they abide by the core team of Ridgerunner's terms of service. That is a manifest public vote. It is a declaration. It is consent. So it's got the left libertarian concept of consent and the right libertarian concept of contract, and you can even put that on chain—a provable signature. In this fashion, we've rebuilt democracy literally one person at a time, where one and ten and a hundred and a thousand people migrate to a place like Ridgerunner, and every single person has voted to be there. They've made that vote manifest in public so all the other people can see they voted to be there. They've actively consented. If they withdraw it, they can just leave and go to another society. That is actually how we restore democracy. We constantly bring up the fact that we're opting out of non-consensual, hierarchical, authoritarian communist Democrat—but I repeat myself—government, into startup societies, voluntarily and freely chosen, like free men and free women are able to do.
I've got to jump in and comment there. Balaji, when I'm not doing real estate, I'm a lawyer and into Republican theory. What you're describing—we have a deep tradition of what we can call an analog version of that in America. That is our settlement pattern. That's the frontier community. One of the crucial things that happens in these frontier communities or opt-in communities is people take a great degree of ownership over their own political future, not just individually but also at a communal level. It's the perfect training ground to actually instill Republican virtue. If you really do believe that people can be capable of governing themselves, this is the kind of thing that is a training ground for that. One of the corollaries to what's going on in California and other places with one-party governance is there's been a collapse of self-governance. People are not valuing the deliberative process and the republican reciprocality that the American right tends to value, which is why we're more tolerant of having multiple parties. In a state like California, people are less capable of self-governance. I think they're happy to cede more control to a state that's going to be a scientific administrator of society and help move society along to egalitarian ends.
I want to show you something because there's this really great video. In 1630, the history of America is often talked about on both left and right. The left talks about revolution and revolutions for equality, and the right talks about war: Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War, Cold War—America's born fighting. But that's actually not what it was. It was actually peacefully building. North America is one of the least war-torn major regions of the world over the last few hundred years. What happened was people could exit and peacefully build. These societies were a few hundred people in 1630. Massachusetts Bay Colony was 1620, Virginia was 1607. They were small, and over time they grew. You get more startup societies, and then you have a leaderboard like CoinMarketCap except it's startup societies and their populations. Eventually these individual startup societies, which were very different at the beginning—the Puritans and the Virginians were there to get away from each other since they were fighting in the English Civil War—they became eventually the United States of America. It was 170 years, roughly 1607 to 1776, of peaceful building and peaceful competition between states. People would migrate back and forth. At various times in American history, you see Ohio and Illinois high up in the rankings, attracting a lot of population and smart people. Later you see California becoming really big, and now Florida and Texas, Florida especially rising up the rankings. These states become more salient as they attract people and economic growth. It's peaceful competition between states. Interestingly, this is actually how China works nowadays. After Deng Xiaoping, they set it up as centralized hierarchical competition. All the states compete to attract talent and money from the central government and each other. It's almost government as venture capitalists. That is a model that works. The critical words being peaceful and competition. One of my biggest points of disagreement is the increasing emphasis on war and militarism on the right. The male desire to protect got distorted into the military-industrial complex and all these insane wars in the Middle East. Very similarly, the woke desire to care got turned into the homeless industrial complex in San Francisco. Instead, we can do the city industrial complex—building these communities, towns, cities, building alternatives to the big cities. Peaceful competition between states is actually good. War is bad.
I thought the example of the Mass Bay Colony is interesting. It's founded by Puritans. It was a true exit, escaping religious persecution in England. The purpose was quite positive. Puritan John Winthrop coined the famous 'city on a hill' objective for the project. It's important also to note that the Mass Bay Colony, at least initially in its conception, had a unifying religious element, and then there was a cultural and ethnic element as well, given they came from the same place. Maybe I'll direct this toward Nate, thinking more today: how do you create trust or coherence in modern iterations of these sorts of projects?
I think there's a few factors, and trust and what it takes to build high-trust communities has been a central theme of New Founding since I started it. I started in response to some major disruptive trends, one being the decline in societal trust and institutional trust. We're a venture firm looking to solve problems, build successful businesses, and make money. If you see societal trust declining—one of the major trends of our era—you recognize that trust has a lot of value. If you do have trust, it probably has growing market value. Where trust exists, it may find new uses where previously something was done via a centralized institution that failed. I think it's very hard to build trust. To maintain trust, skin in the game is one of the critical functions. That's why mass democracy fails: many people don't have any meaningful skin in the game. They're voting for something that is pure handouts. It was recognized by the founders, going back to the Greeks. If there's no skin in the game, if your society is run by people just trying to take from other people, you're inevitably going to destroy the trust that exists in society. Taleb does a very good job talking about this concept of skin in the game and how baked in it is to almost every aspect of any stable institution. The question is where does that exist and where can you build that? It's interesting to see crypto attempts to build that. The internet is losing. It was in some sense a higher trust environment when it was dominated by cultural norms that allowed a free internet to exist. In a world of bots and a global internet, there's no default of trust because there's no skin in the game. It costs nothing to send an email, so you get unlimited spam. We're going to have to see a world reorganized around networks that actually have some degree of trust. It's interesting to build new ones and also to look at communities and institutions that still maintain trust. I look at churches: if everyone goes to church every week, there's a level of proximity, physical time together, skin in the game that maintains something often lacking in other parts of society. One of the classic forms of skin in the game is time together. There's a line about England in the 1800s: 'There may be no great virtue in a man in the city of London going to the same club at the same time every Thursday for 20 years, but it makes him a more reliable credit risk.' There may not be great virtue, but there's skin in the game. He's invested his time. If he does something that hurts his reputation, he's surrendered the reputation earned over a lot of time in that club. You look at physical startup societies: when you move there, when you buy property there, you're putting skin in the game in a way that is costly if you go against the norms of that community. Online communities face the problem that there's often very little meaningful skin in the game. They were too easily opted in and out of. If it's too easy to opt in and out, there's not going to be a lot of trust. Whereas if people are putting something significant in, they've built up a reservoir of trust that means the community can actually behave in high-trust ways. A lot of what I think about is identifying existing pockets of trust and how we build on those, building more trust-dependent actions in society around those, in a world where the institutions that provided those functions are losing their credibility.
I love this. I've got a bunch of things I've been collecting while you've been talking. I want to show a few quick visuals that might help think about this quantitatively and help with this broader project. The first is a visual I made: cloud formation seeking physical shape. This is people: 2, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 people meeting for a day, a month, a year, 10 years. You can multiply this across to get a concept of man-months in one location. Two people for one day is coffee with a LinkedIn contact. Two people for one month is a remote engineer onsite. Ten people for a day is a hackathon. As you process this table, you see people meeting up in person for longer periods at larger scale. The guy in your example, Nate, where he goes to the same club for 20 years, is like one or two people for 20 years. A way of quantifying this is the number of man-months spent in that community: the number of people times the amount of time they're spending in a society. It's like the number of coins times the price per coin is CoinMarketCap. This is the number of people times the time spent. What we're trying to do with Network School and any startup society: we started with a pop-up, 100 people for a month. Then V2 was 100 people for a year—we completed that. We're about to complete V3, about 1,000 people for a year. We're closing in on 500 man-years of network. We've had thousands of people come and if you multiply by the duration they've stayed, we have almost 500 man-years, which is a lot for something that started 18 months ago. As you said, Nate, in-person meeting is necessary to build trust—not sufficient, but necessary. Trust is like a credit score: do I trust you to not default? Do I trust you to not defect? Do I trust you to cooperate even when it might be in somebody's short-term interest to defect? That's not something that can easily be spent down. It takes a long time to build up and often can't be rebuilt with the same person. Another related thing is we need to build that on the internet. There's this concept from the late '90s called web of trust. It says: I've got a friend, here's a stranger, here's another stranger, but my friend's friend trusts them, therefore I can give some reduced level of trust in them. There's a lot of math you can do on large networks. For example, person A, your friend, has a commercial relationship with person B that you can see some of on-chain for months or years. Therefore you have some reason—not 100% trust but not 0%—and if person A vouches for person B, you might say I'll let them into our community on a trial basis. Because it's crypto, it's unfalsifiable on the internet. AI can solve partial differential equations but not cryptographic equations. You can have people bring their trust. Crypto is certainly not the only way, but it's one of the best from a scalable, internet-first perspective. You rebuild trust by lots of micro interactions. A hangs out with B and they're cool. A hangs with B and C. Then maybe person D takes in 10 bucks from 20 people and organizes a pizza party and pulls it off. That's what a mayor used to be: the guy you trusted to crowdfund things. He wasn't taking a slice off the top. He was the fraternity president. You had a settlement of a hundred, a thousand people, and it wasn't some prestigious role—it was actually a pain in the butt. You just passed a hat, and this was the person you could trust to deliver public goods. Nate or Josh, you're in that role respectively in your communities. You're implicitly the people that others trust. To manage your community, you need to nail the numbers, the dollars and cents, have good aesthetics, and have a moral purpose articulated in words. Just to recap: A, man-months is how much time and scale is being spent at the community. We can literally start ranking startup societies by man-months in a census. B, web of trust: you can now rebuild it with web 3 of trust using crypto concepts and the hundreds of millions of people in crypto. And one more visual referencing the Puritans. This is a really important map, much more important than 1776. This is 1607, 1620, and 1720, during and leading up to the English Civil War. The English Civil War killed a larger percentage of the English than World War I. It was the same Western left and right fighting. Some of them, the more pragmatic ones, said I don't want to fight. When phrased as religious liberty, yes, but really they wanted to build their own community under their own governance. The Puritans and Pilgrims went to New England. The right of England, the Virginians and Cavaliers, went to Virginia. The Scots-Irish went to Appalachia, and the Quakers went to Pennsylvania. That's a simplification, but I look at this as comparable to the crypto tribes today—Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana—exiting to the cloud with their own currencies and networks, and then crowdfunding territory on the land somewhere else, because we've had half of it but not the other half, and the star society piece is the other piece.
One thing I think is interesting is Nate mentioned a signal of skin in the game is time spent consistently. You showed that graph with the x and y axes, the number of hours being one of the axes. Will wrote this piece a couple months back where he emphasized another dimension: how much people value something, or to what extent they're opting in. The piece was called 'Nobody Walks to Canva,' or something close. The distance somebody is willing to travel to go to something is actually a really interesting indicator today. You're based out in Singapore with the Network School. I'm curious, across the time and distance dimensions, can you say a little more on what you think is drawing people to the Network School? How is it organized? Even for people less familiar in our audience, maybe just take a minute to define what you're doing with the Network School.
Great. I actually have a single video that I just want to show you. [Video: What happens when you invite 300 founders, trainers, and creators to a man-made island near Singapore. For the last 12 months, builders from over 100 countries lived together at the Network School. We learned new skills, burned calories, and earned money by starting companies and working remote jobs. The idea is simple: take the best parts of a college campus—the friendships, the infectious energy, being surrounded by people who push you—remove the quarter-million-dollar price tag, build new futures or fix what's broken, and design a daily rhythm for ambitious people who are actually building. For $1,500 a month, we get an ocean-view room, a 24/7 fitness gym with classes, meditation spaces, and access to tons of workshops and classes. But here's what most people miss: this isn't just a cool place to live. The long-term vision is to build a startup society where kind people who think can work together to achieve their goals and improve themselves. Instead of arguing about politics online, we lock in during the day, discuss big ideas over dinner, and collaborate in real life to make your dreams a reality. A year ago, nobody knew this thing existed. Now there are thousands of people applying. And to be honest, we're just getting started.] That's a quick summary. We have people from 100 countries. It's basically Silicon Valley outside Silicon Valley, or Stanford outside Stanford. It's a competitor to SF. Nothing wrong with YC—YC is an incubator. This is a competitor to SF rather than YC, or at least at first a competitor to a slice of Silicon Valley. You have to start small. Rather than taking on the full panoply of things, we just made it really easy to co-live and co-work. That's what we're doing: practice over theory. I think of it as cross-country skis. For many years I worked on theory. I built crypto and put out The Network State book as theory. Then as soon as I put it out, you immediately want to edit it but you can't because it's finalized. You realize all the things you messed up. I wanted to write a V2 but I stopped myself because people will say great, you have two books and now startup societies, you loser. So instead we actually went and built something. The reason we built Network School is to show that it was possible. That's why Elon did SpaceX. He didn't want the headache of running a giant aerospace company. He just wanted to show NASA it was possible. I wanted to show it was possible and build a template others can copy. This will sound corny but it's actually really true: I don't need more capital, I don't need more anything in life. What I want is peace. I want peace between people. Some of my Bitcoin maximalist friends, I have to explain: it doesn't matter how much money you have. If you're in the middle of the Syrian civil war, what do you want to do? You want to buy a ticket out of there. Money assumes there's somebody who will accept money. If things are shooting and exploding, you can't trivially turn money into what you want. Peace is understanding between people. We're spending down societal trust so fast—it took years, decades to build up. People don't understand that there will be shooting and fires. Money is not useful when someone is shooting at you. What you actually want is peace and understanding. So we do this Network School with people from all these different countries. We showed that you can do internationalism and capitalism even when everything is trending towards nationalism and socialism. Then those people go back and start a startup society in Japan, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, or the US. It's almost like a grassroots United Nations, but it's United Networks, where startup society founders from around the world come to hang out. They're not just founders—they're cool people. Some are startup society citizens. They're bilingual: they speak both cloud and land, the universal language of technocratic capitalism, but they also understand the Texas twang or Peruvian culture. That's what the current generation of elites lost. The whole point was: you're an elite, you can speak multiple languages, but you're also supposed to take care of your people—those who are somewhat like you. You have a responsibility to both. They just became a pure globalist Davos class, divorced from the people underneath, because it's more fun to hang out with elites. I define my people on the basis of class: the mathematician, the technologist, the engineer from anywhere in the world. That's millions of people—tech people. You guys will have a different kind of creed. That's what we're trying to do with Network School. It's meant to be an open-source project that others can copy. We're going to open-source the template. One of the things I was happy about the other day: someone said 'I hate Balaji but I'm doing a network state.' I'm like, yes, that's great. All I care about is peace and happiness. If they say f-you Balaji and take 50% or even 30% of the playbook, amazing. It's like a book where people find 30% valuable—amazing. That's all I care about. Open-source project.
