Ben, thank you for speaking at the Never State Conference.
Good to see you, biology. Ready to go.
Awesome. So, you know, Ben, you've been a mentor and I think I'd say a friend hopefully for many years now. And one thing is in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, you wrote about your time at Netscape, and Netscape in many ways was like the first internet company because it had downloads and so forth and it went viral and you guys went public and you had an acquisition, all the drama, right? And then we worked together on the rise of Bitcoin, which was the first internet currency, and obviously we've been very heavily involved in that with a16z crypto and everything and Coinbase and all that stuff, and now we're building internet communities. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as you know I think of them as the third kind of thing: societies, internet communities, network states. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you think they're the next big thing or could be?
Yeah. So I think they're very kind of parallel in the development. Before Netscape, which was the first thing that brought all of the internet pieces together, there were many pieces: FTP, TCP/IP, Gopher, this and that. But you needed something to unify all the technology. So it was a little deceptive in that a lot of people deep in the tech saw it as, well, what's new here? You're just putting an interface on it. And I think that what the network state is and network school is is very much like that. We have all the primitive building blocks of community: Discord, WhatsApp groups, Bitcoin, different currencies, stable coins, VR, but nobody's put the whole package together. That's really when it gets unleashed. In my experience, that's where you hit the knee of the curve, at the integration. It doesn't seem like a lot because all the pieces were already there, but the pieces as pieces just aren't the thing. It's not the product. The system integration has to happen after all the other pieces are mature because if any one piece is wiggly, the whole thing doesn't work. Only when all those pieces are mature can you snap them together.
Right. Exactly. And that's kind of the deceptive thing because until that point, people might have tried it and failed. Same with Bitcoin, right? It put together a lot of techniques: peer-to-peer, cryptography, etc., that had been around, but they weren't put together in a way where you could actually have money. Right, because ECDSA existed, hash functions existed, Hashcash existed. And in a sense, somebody remarked it was a clever integration of existing things. They didn't innovate on cryptography; they integrated the system.
Right. And it's funny you say that because I myself actually had not thought of that before in quite that way, as the analogy to the web browser. But once you do snap all these pieces together, that itself becomes a platform for other things.
Yes. Exactly. And then you had web apps and everything else. So what we're starting to see is these startup societies I call them, the parallel physical, each usually inspired by the parallel digital. For example, there's a startup society that is like Culdesac, which is based on all the micro-mobility stuff and wants to be a walkable community. And then there's Prospera, which is inspired by biotech innovations. And then there's another one booting up inspired by all the educational innovations.
Yeah. No, exactly. And I think that's going to multiply because one of the things, if you look at the primitive version, it's all kind of a community around an idea. But what about a community around the intersection of many ideas? For my own sake, it would be great if there was a tech hip-hop community. You could imagine many dimensions. If you think of every policy you might be interested in, if you took the intersection and found all the like-minded people in the world and put them in a community, that would be a very powerful thing.
Yes. And one thing is some of the other folks were having speak at the conference. For example, the CEO of AngelList read the Network State book and they've just opened this AngelList Founders Cafe in San Francisco, and he said he was kicking himself for not doing it three years ago. On the one hand, it seems an obvious thing, but it's also non-obvious because people drop in, they give customer feedback. So you can materialize the cloud into land. Many digital things that we think are purely digital have some physical manifestation that might actually be non-obvious.
Yeah, know that for sure. And when you add the physical, it does add a whole other dimension of possibility. For sure.
Yes, that's very interesting. So one way that we've started to establish a few templates in the space, for example the pop-up, which is somewhere in between a conference, which is a one-day thing, and what we're doing in Network School, which is a permanent setup.
Yeah, exactly. A pop-up like a one-month thing. It's longer than a conference because people have to bring a change of clothes, laundry. So do you have any kinds of things that you've been thinking about? You mentioned a tech hip-hop thing, and obviously we're used to thinking about solving this with a new tech company or a new currency. Have you thought about communities that you'd like to see?
Well, there's so many. I'm part of many primitive communities in the form of WhatsApp groups and so forth, and it would be really nice to see those be much more highly dimensional, maybe have a physical incarnation. It's everything from the LLM community to various different kinds of things, but they're all so primitive because there's no money in them. There's no crypto in these communities, no physical dimension, no virtual reality dimension. All you can really do is chat, which is one of the things you'll do in a community, but there are many more ideas you could have.
Yeah. It's funny you say that because the WhatsApp and Signal groups, what I like about them is you have a lot of busy CEOs and investors, and we can remain in lightweight contact with a lot of people. And then you have the physical, like maybe there's a coffee and you put in an invite there, a Luma invite, and 20 or 10 of the people from the group show up, and you can just pick up right where you left off with this long-running group chat conversation. There's definitely this amazing thing there.
Yeah. But what's interesting is when you say what you just said, you kind of want to be able to hold a meetup within the chat, hit a button and create a meetup, or hold a meetup and do maybe a quick VR talk. I don't know. Maybe the chat interfaces will get there, or maybe we'll need something completely new.
Yeah. Because right now, you can do that, but it's a bit of a heavy cognitive and social lift. It's a little more risky to say, 'Hey, let's all get together.' You don't want people to go, 'Nah.'
Yeah. Well, one thing that's interesting about that is with WhatsApp, a very modern question is 'Where are you?' Because probably if you analyze text in the 1800s, it's very rare for someone to ask where are you, because there aren't that many times you wouldn't know the other person's physical location.
Yeah, you would certainly know where they are if you're sending a postal message.
Yes, that's right. So one of the things that's interesting is WhatsApp itself is location-aware, but an interesting thing that happens is people cycle around the globe and they're in the Spain airport or they're here, just sending messages. We take for granted the level of mobility there. Even though they're in one place in the chat world, they're moving around the physical world. So maybe there's something that would suggest, to reduce the social overhead as you mentioned, that these three people are nearby, you guys should meet up, but you need to allow location tracking. That's one concept, for example.
Yeah, that would be super convenient because then you'd also not have to worry, 'Oh, hey, let's meet up. Oh, I'm in France.' That's going to be hard.
Okay. Well, that was a waste of a message for me.
Yes. The thing is that people would have to also want to be location tracked. It has to be done in exactly the right way that they feel good about it.
So, okay, internet communities. There's another angle on this, which is things like self-driving, many of the biotech things that we're interested in. We can potentially have those within special economic zones. Did you see my post from a few months ago on the Special Elon Zone?
Oh, I didn't see that. I got to look at that. That sounds like a good post.
Just all Elon's tech gets to work for free without restriction.
Exactly. That's right. So my thought was, what is the sort of westernized version of the Asian special economic zone? The Special Elon Zone, or more generally the Special Founder Zone, would be to find some swath of territory. Maybe it's in the US. Maybe it's El Salvador. So Elon gets, because Tesla is a global business, some country or state carves out a piece of territory and says, 'Okay, Elon, you can move at the speed of physics rather than permits. You can crank out all the humanoids you want. You can mine stuff out of the ground.' And what they would do is import existing regulations on graffiti and stuff. You don't have to rewrite every single law. You just allow quick changes to existing laws. The crucial thing being that it's essentially an uninhabited territory, as close to Burning Man as possible. What are your thoughts on something like that?
Yeah. No, I think it's very doable. There are so many states in the US that would want to do that. I know Nevada would want to do that. They have Burning Man. They would certainly rather have something that was productive. So I think that's super viable. There are certain states of course you could never do it, but for sure, and I think it could not only be really productive but it would also create a very special community of both like-minded people and people who knew how to build things.
That's right. And actually, the thing about this is if it worked for Elon, then it could work for Palmer Luckey to have the drone zone, and you could have different kinds of things, like a more mundane thing, manufacturing.
Exactly. So on that point, if you know about how Deng Xiaoping reformed China, when he took over the country was all brainwashed, total communist, and he couldn't reform it all at once. So he just set up a few special economic zones, especially Shenzhen near Hong Kong. He didn't allow everybody in. There was a membership process or an admissions process where only the most capitalist-sympathetic people were allowed in, and they weren't going to make trouble. And of course, that became this gigantic Chinese city. This way they could gradually reform communism rather than try to change the whole country at once. They could experiment with new laws. So for manufacturing, all of the OSHA, EPA type stuff, you could suspend that in this one zone, and everybody who came in signed a new social smart contract that would basically say, 'I'm coming into this totally desolate piece of territory because of the new rules.'
Yeah. No, I think that would be a great idea. It would be amazing for the US if we could do it here.
Yes. So here, not there where you are.
Well, we could do it in Singapore too.
Yes. So I want to, of course, it'd be amazing if we do it in the US. And in a sense, if you can do it in the rest of the world, then that gives you a template to bring into the US potentially. So we can pursue parallel paths potentially.
So on that topic, relatedly, there are a bunch of countries that are pursuing interesting kinds of pro-tech legislation, like digital nomad laws, crypto laws, DAO laws. I'd love to know your thoughts on the progressive, for example in Wyoming they did the first DAO law, Tennessee followed up with a DAO law. I'd love to know your thoughts on the jurisdictions, politicians, etc., that are pursuing the most technologically progressive interactions with not just tech companies, but tech currencies, protocols, startup communities. You must have some thoughts on this.
Yeah. So in the US, it does tend to be the red states or the purple states at least. So Wyoming, Nevada, Florida, Texas to some degree, a lot of the southern states are very open to manufacturing and these kinds of things. Around the world, it's been interesting. Worldcoin, I think their most active country per capita is Argentina. Half the citizens of Buenos Aires are active users on Worldcoin. They also made a lot of progress surprisingly with Malaysia, which is pretty good. Of course, in the UAE, Dubai has been very aggressive. So I think countries are now seeing tech policy as a way to really compete, but it tends to be countries that want to grow, as opposed to what's going on in Europe or some other places, or in California even, where they are like, 'We're rich enough, now we need to divide up the pie and protect our children.'
That's right. They're unfortunately taking prosperity for granted.
Yeah. You mentioned this thing about places that want to grow. One of the things I've been most pleasantly surprised by over the last 5 years or so is small states putting themselves on the map, like El Salvador, but also small cities like Palau, Marshall Islands. They've taken very pro-crypto approaches. My general pattern on this is that there are 190 to 193 UN members, and it's a little bit like a reverse merger or digital asset treasury company. You've got a listed company with a symbol, and you've got a coin that wants to be listed, and there's a deal they can do to list the coin. This guy has a symbol and a sense of political legitimacy but not capital, and this guy has capital but not legitimacy, and then they merge together. That can now be done at the level of the state, whether a sovereign state or a US state.
Yeah. That is a very smart move, I think, by those states. It's really interesting that you can differentiate just by thinking about how to grow and how to maintain prosperity. There are whole societies that have given up on that idea. Mark and I just had dinner with one of the potential candidates for Prime Minister of the UK, and she was going through, 'What's your differentiation?' She's like, 'Growth. We can grow the economy.' And I was like, 'Wow, that's a very interesting differentiator.' It's interesting also because historically people have said natural resources are the differentiator, but I actually think it is human resources, or capital, basically.
Right, letting the human resources do their thing.
Yes. And we should come up with a term for that. But I'd like to at some point organize a conference of small countries and pro-growth jurisdictions. That's one side of a two-sided market, and we have all the tech founders and venture capitalists as the other side, and put them together. The Network State Conference is like the V1 of that, and we've got a bunch of folks here who are doing that.
Yeah. No, for sure. I think that goes together. People who want the network state in their territory are probably the exact countries that are interested in pushing forward into the future.
Yeah, because we can bring talent and capital there, just like crypto, just like tech itself. So now, what has surprised you about the last 5, 10, 15 years in terms of tech and policy? Or does nothing surprise you? Or maybe there are so many things. But what have you found to be interesting or something that we should look at, pursue, pay attention to?
