All right, great. Okay, so I'm going to talk to you guys about, you know, we've started new currencies. Can we start new countries and new communities, new cities? And why I think we can do that and why we think we're going to need to do that and perhaps how you can work with us on the startup society's network states movement. So starting new countries is possible but why now and what next? Let me start with that first part first. Why is starting new countries possible? So I wrote a book on this in 2022. It was pre-AI. Lots of things have changed but I think the core concept has held up and it's at networkstate.com. And in theory and practice, they are different. Let me describe the theory though first, right? Starting new countries, why do I think it's possible, preferable, and profitable? And the last part by the way, the reason I mentioned profitable, it's another way of saying possible because it has to be economically feasible. Let me start with the first part, possible. So are new countries even possible? So we have started new companies like Google out of a garage. We started new communities like Facebook out of a dorm room. New currencies like Bitcoin as you know arose from a white paper. So did Ethereum. Could we start new countries? Could we start network states or is just slinging around coins the end of the line? I love that as much as you do but like, you know, you can only trade tokens so many times before that becomes old, right? Can we start new countries? Can we start what I call network states? And I think we can. And just to be very concrete about what a network state is, this is a visual of a network state with 1,729,314 people. That's 729 plus pi for those who get that allusion. With 157 billion in annual income and a real estate footprint of 136 million square meters. And as you can see, a network state is basically a physical social network that owns territory around the world and that has a degree of diplomatic recognition, is recognized as a sovereign at least in part over some territory by one or more UN member states. And until such recognition arrives, it's not really a network state. And this is similar to how people would argue whether cryptocurrency was actually a currency or what have you. And you know, it's only got some of the attributes like medium of exchange and store of value and unit of account. And so there's a continuous thing where Bitcoin and Ethereum went from just a LARP that was on a single server to this global kind of cryptocurrency that's in use everywhere. Similarly, a network state, we'll have lots of intermediate stages where people argue about whether it's real or not. And eventually maybe it gets diplomatically recognized at least in part. Okay. And so when you think of it as a physical social network, it's got all these nodes. It's got like a million people, right? It's on par with a state in some sense. And how do we get to 1 million? Right? So there's actually a way to start from one person just like Satoshi in Japan in this example and he recruits 17 people around the world and then 172 and now a thousand. And once you start getting to even a few hundred people in one location, you can actually afford a fairly large building because if you have 254 people and they actually work together, they're not paying rent in a building. They can actually buy the building. And so this kind of whether you call it collective bargaining, I call it a network union. A union doesn't have to be set up in opposition within a company. It can be just a union of people that is working together to get things at bulk discounts and scale like Costco. And this is going to be important in this time of supply chain crisis where you can collectively bargain and bring down food costs and so on by bargaining with corporations. Basically bulk discounts. So in this case you get a bulk discount on real estate by buying an apartment complex together. Once you can coordinate, you can coordinate for the good of everybody in the community. That does by the way mean some degree of cooperation, some degree of, you know, maybe you don't get your number one choice, you get your second choice but everybody gets their second choice together and now you get equity in the building and that's actually pretty good, right? Okay. So this at 1,729 then at 17,000 you can actually start affording entire subdevelopments. You know a few thousand people online it's a small number like the number of views on a tweet, a few thousand is not that much but a few thousand people in person is a lot a lot a lot. So you can actually afford entire suburbs and you know large towers and stuff with even like 10,000 something people. 10,000 by the way actually puts you at the scale of the smallest countries in the world like Palau and Nauru and so on. Then you get to 100,000 and now eventually you get to a million and now you're actually at the scale of a Latvia or Bahrain. You're a true, you know, state scale thing. So that's how this thing could emerge, right? And it's a gradual process just like Facebook started with one person in a dorm room and rose up. Bitcoin started with one person, Google started with two people in a garage. This is a mechanism for going from zero to one to 1 million. Okay? And that mechanism when you can see it, somebody will do it, right? Like that is to say it just, you know, when you see something like this, it's technologically feasible. Built on the stack that already exists, the internet stack of remote work and cryptocurrency and WhatsApp and telepresence and so on and so forth. It doesn't require something completely new like, you know, as much as I like seasteading or Mars that requires new technological breakthroughs. This doesn't. This is literally just coordinating people in ways we've already done. Okay. So why does 1 million put us within country range? Well actually most countries are small countries. The majority of UN members have less than 10 million citizens. And in fact, 38 have less than 1 million. The countries we think of as countries like China, Russia, America, India. There's very few countries that have more than 100 million people. Okay? Most have less than 10 million if you define a country as a UN member. Moreover, UN membership has actually grown over time, going from 50 to almost 200 UN member nations over the last 60, 70 years. And even though it's been flat since the end of the Cold War, you know, the number of currencies has recently exploded. So the number of countries likely will as well. So UN membership has grown over time and cryptocurrencies rank with fiat currencies. So cryptocurrencies are now at a scale that rank with fiat currencies. And at the time of the screenshot, Bitcoin was between the Turkish lira and the Chilean peso. And so if you put that all together, most countries are small countries, the number of countries has actually increased a lot. And that cloud or cryptocurrencies rank with fiat currencies. Could crypto countries rank with fiat countries? Okay, if the currencies can rank, could the countries rank? Could we have a cloud country that is on par with the countries we've inherited? Could we have a network state with 1,729,314 people ranking between Latvia and Bahrain? I think we could. And the main parameter is it's decentralized. Just like Bitcoin or Ethereum are decentralized currencies, a network state is a decentralized country. Okay. And the thing about this is that dashboard over here is actually, you know, the same thing that underpins this. Imagine 1,729,314 proof of humans 01s on chain that sum up to a network state census. That's actually a whole other talk that I gave but you know this is a dashboard just like CoinMarketCap but we call it let's say Network State Pop. If you're interested in working on this type of stuff by the way just apply to Network School and we're hiring folks and so on. Okay. So sufficient traction equals diplomatic recognition. Why do I say that? Why would that be the case? Well, if you look at, for example, Tuvalu, the country Tuvalu, they did a deal with GoDaddy for the .tv domain extension. Nevada did a deal with Tesla for the Gigafactory years ago. El Salvador obviously has adopted Bitcoin as its national currency. So that means the land is already negotiating with the cloud. We've already seen sovereigns ink deals with companies and cryptocurrencies in a sense whether inking a deal with a cryptocurrency or adopting it. So why could they not do that with the crypto community? I think they could. Okay. So sufficient traction, numerical traction will eventually equal societal recognition. It might be unpredictable because, you know, who would have figured in 2008, 2009 when Satoshi is launching Bitcoin that El Salvador would be the first to adopt it. Very unpredictable that Bhutan would mine Bitcoin. Who would know? One thing I think we can predict though is that small countries are going to be the biggest adopters of this kind of thing, of special economic zones and startup societies because they have, you know, the ability to set laws but they lack capital and they often want technology to come to their country. So there's a big win-win deal between large networks and small countries. Okay. So now why is it preferable? So why are new countries preferable? Because powerless people have an alternative in the form of new states to their failed states and ambitious people have an alternative in the form of frontier society. So at the top lots of countries around the world are basically melting down due to the supply chain crisis, inflationary crisis. At the bottom it shows that since the dawn of humanity, humans have wanted to push the limits, push the frontier, radiating out of Africa to the new world and eventually the moon. There's always been this kind of push for what's better. And this is actually the same U-shaped coalition as the crypto coalition itself. Why? Because it's the powerless and the power user. It's a powerless person trying to hang on to what a bank account even is and the power user who's pushing the limits of what a bank account is. Right? And so in the same way the powerless, their state is failing and the power user is reinventing the state, right? Same kind of coalition. And there's a certain kind of person who thinks oh the existing financial system, political system is working for them. Then this is not for them. They can safely ignore it. But those people on the edges, the U-shape, this is for them. Okay? Same as the crypto coalition. Now, why is it profitable? So, this is another way of saying feasible because if it wasn't profitable, you couldn't do it. But why are new countries profitable? This is a fun graph of nation states, social networks, and network states on the same graph. And on this axis is people, and this axis is annual revenue per user. And you know over here for example there's Meta, WeChat, TikTok, LinkedIn, you know this is Snapchat, Weibo, this is Twitter back then and this is showing that their scale of these social networks is in the 100 million to billion person range but their monetization per person is in the tens of dollars per person per year. So like 30 bucks per person per year times three billion, $90 billion a year is a lot but it's relatively small scale per person. Then over here are like these small countries which have, you know, 1 to 10 million population and like 10,000 bucks, 20,000 bucks per person per year monetization. Then over here are the US and China which have large populations and annual incomes in tax revenue. And then finally over here would be startup societies, network states that might start digital and have an annual revenue in the order of hundreds of dollars per person per year. They become physical and now we actually got that and they start charging on the order of, you know, $10,000 per person per year for society as a service and eventually they start growing out and they start moving upward like this and getting to millions of people and this is the new SaaS, society as a service. And you kind of start on this axis of small but large monetization as opposed to, you know, high numbers of people and small monetization per person. You're basically providing way more value to people when you go up this axis. And I think that this is important because it means you can put capital behind it like, you know, Ethereum is, you know, in a sense it's a human rights movement to give rule of law around the world but by putting capital behind it that meant that you could have property rights plus human rights in the same package. This is what startup societies are. It's basically projecting crypto's values into the physical world. Okay. So starting new countries are possible but why now? Why now? Because history is running in reverse. So what do I mean by that? Well, basically many things that were happening in the past are happening today, but in the opposite order. So, for example, back then 1890, the western frontier closed. Today, 1991, the internet frontier reopened. Back then, there's the Spanish flu. It was heavily censored. Then, there was COVID-19, heavily covered. Back then, the captains of industry, the so-called robber barons. Today, the tech founders, right? Back then, the journalists beat the founders. Today, the founders are beating the journalists. Back then, the New York Times sided with Stalinist Russia versus Ukraine. Today, the New York Times reinvented itself as a champion of Ukraine versus Russia. Even though the New York Times, the reason Ukraine was occupied by Russia in the first place. Back then, this is a really important one. This showed that in the late 1890s, America was shipping goods to China. That's a person, a stereotypically portrayed Chinese person, and this says something like wanted, you know, 20,000, you know, railroads, engines, cars, rails. So, China is portrayed as the passive market and America is the manufacturing superpower that's exporting all these rails and goods and so on over the ocean via, you know, the Philippines and whatnot. And obviously today, that's completely in reverse. It's America that's a passive market and China that's exporting across the Pacific. Back then, Russia was a senior partner to China. Today, China's a senior partner to Russia. Back then, a British industry man ran India. Recently an Indian man ran Britain. Okay. So the reason I just point all this out is that those are qualitative examples but quantitatively what's actually happening, if there's only one graph that you keep in mind, this graph is perhaps the single most important graph in my view to understand the state and the future of the world history and the past of the world because it shows the trajectory of billions of people across a thousand years and trillions of dollars. Right? So billions of people and trillions of dollars across a thousand years. It shows over here that for, in the lower right corner for almost a thousand years the center of mass of the world economy, if you took Japan and China and India and the Middle East and Europe and approximated where their capitals were and you average their, you know, historical GDPs and there are guys who have done this kind of thing, most of the world economy was actually centered in Eurasia and that's why Marco Polo sought out China, why Columbus risked his life to get to India, why Persia was always a peer to Rome, why the Mongols and the Huns were able to invade, you know, from all the way from Asia into Europe. Why the Arabs were able to take Al-Andalus, there's rough military economic parity across the Eurasian supercontinent. Then with the advent of the industrial revolution, Europe basically rocketed to total dominance. The world economy rocketed over there. Then they all blew each other up with rockets and then by 1950 only the USA was not bombed or under communism or both. Right? Soviet Union, Japan, India was under socialism. Eastern Europe was blown to smithereens. Western Europe was largely blown up. Everything was blown up other than America. And so all of these postwar institutions were set up in the 40s and especially the late 50s, mid, early 50s, you know, mid, late 50s. And that was peak America arguably. And you can argue maybe 1991 was peak America after the end of the Cold War. But this period of 1950 to 1991 was in retrospect extremely unusual historically and the period of peak American dominance. After 1991, once, you know, India was no longer socialist and China was no longer communist and Russia was no longer communist, Eastern Europe was no longer communist. Now the world economy rocketed back out to Eurasia much faster than it had come. And this U-shaped curve is history running in reverse quantitatively. Among other things, it shows MAGA is infeasible because 1945 is not coming back. The entire postwar order is based on a state of the world with the US, UK, France, Russia and China being the winners of World War II where now the world economy is just totally totally different and those are not the, you know, the same kind of actors right? So now, you know, you have BRICS for example and things have moved out east. So this is maybe the most important graph in the world and it leads to many other graphs. It shows for example, you know, taxation went in reverse like this right? In the US it peaked in the mid-1900s and then it crashed afterwards because, you know, the Soviet Union had 100% marginal taxation but America had 90% marginal taxation back then. You see other things where like quote income inequality but basically wealth re-centralized. Individuals, the peak of the centralized state mid-century was really the peak of state power. You see history running reverse on steel where the US was 10x Chinese steel production. Now it's 10x in reverse the other way. You see it running in reverse on politics where, you know, the US was politically centralized in 1951 and basically it's broken apart by 2011. And you know basically that disintegration is also visible at the level of social networks. It's a totally different graph that shows individual Twitter users and blues and reds in 2017 were already basically separating out into two different clusters. By 2024, 2025 America's just ideologically disintegrated. History's run in reverse where it went from a centralized uni-party to now blues are on BlueSky and Mastodon and Threads and reds are on Truth Social and Gab and X. America's just broken into pieces. That means we're going to see new countries. And the reason is if you remember that graph I showed at the beginning with a number of UN member countries arising. That did not happen just by accident. And it happened because the British Empire fell and lots of new countries arose and the French Empire fell and lots of new countries arose and the Soviet Empire fell and a bunch of new countries arose. And when the American empire ends and it's ending now, you know, even if we might love Uncle Sam and I have a lot of affection for Uncle Sam, but I also recognize that it's ending. As that ends, you're going to see a huge surge up in new jurisdictions because there's going to be a lot of chaos around the world as they'll return to. And one way of thinking about this is actually you're returning to what the state of the world used to be, history running in reverse. Because if you go backward in time, go backward before this moment of, you know, only 50 sovereign entities. You actually get tons and tons of independent political units because here's what Germany used to look like before Bismarck. Here's what India used to look like. Okay? And you zoom in, it's fractal like this because people organize on the base of community, not geography. Maps are actually a very novel invention where a straight line on a map goes over mountain ranges and rivers and all this kind of stuff. You wouldn't actually draw a straight line on a map historically. So you go backwards in time, you have all these different jurisdictions. And so the thing is this is not how normally people think of things. It's surprising to them that there's so many more independent states as we go backwards in time, that 1950 was actually extremely unusual. It was peak centralization, peak westernization. So all the hearkening in America to that being the time that was the way things were and, you know, a high school grad could go and provide for a family and have a car and a house when he didn't have any education. That meant there's a guy in Poland or China or something like that who is in a gulag or starving because they're in this post-war crazy situation. That's not how the world was supposed to be. It's how Americans have told themselves the world is supposed to be. It's actually a very very unusual and aberrant time in world history. And so when you actually think about the world returning to what it used to be, it was a decentralized world. Then it radically centralized in the 20th century with the giga-states of, you know, communism and fascism and even democratic capitalism was very highly centralized. And now we're re-decentralizing. And that is both a technological phenomenon going from mass media and mass production to the smartphone, but it's also a political phenomenon going from the uni-party of 1950s America to the fragmented, you know, west, the decentralized west that we're seeing today. What I call American anarchy. That's why history is running in reverse. But we actually aren't done re-centralizing. As I said, when the American empire ends, and it's ending now for better or in many cases worse, right? I, you know, often when people say that they're often saying it in a gleeful way or they're denying that it was an empire in the first place but the American Empire was in many ways the greatest empire in world history and it's very, we're all going to feel it when it ends but it's ending now and it's pulling back militarily. It's causing all these crazy wars. It's pulling back, you know, deglobalization is underway. Lots of things are happening where America is declining and or retreating from the world and walling itself off in the process. And as such lots of its security guarantees are collapsing. A lot of the order, the post-war order gets replaced with the post-American disorder. And so you're going to see re-decentralization similar to the end of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Empire. And when people say the world is multipolar, is increasing multipolarity dragging the world into chaos? Maybe yes. And the thing about this is there's a guy who's the president of Kazakhstan and he said if the right of nations to self-determination was realized in reality on the entire globe, over 600 states would emerge on Earth instead of 193. Of course, that would be chaos. And so he actually lived through that. He lived through the fall of the Soviet Union. He understands what that is. And you know, he's probably right. Except here's the thing. If we see it coming, maybe we can forge order out of chaos, right? Maybe we can understand that it's not simply about restoring the rules-based order on chain. That's part of it. But projecting that order into the physical world so we can have opt-in peaceful communities where people can find some shelter, some oasis amidst this and we can have a seed of, you know, essentially rebirth of civilization. So what next? You know, I wrote this book The Network State. I've been holding conferences. We're going to have our fifth conference this year October 9th in Singapore. I'm going to announce it soon and we opened something which I call Network School. This is the first day of Network School. And Network School is a startup society that bootstraps other startup societies. This is the first day of Network School. That's me and my friend Brian Johnson there. We basically, there's this essentially empty island that was built off the coast of Malaysia and right next door to Singapore. And it's as close to seasteading as you'll get and actually that's where I'm, you know, coming in from right now. That's where Veronica is as well. And the Network School is making societies real and thereby bootstrapping more startup societies. And so, you know, the goal is we start with 128, 256, 1024 then eventually we open up Network School nodes around the world and we also have projects like Zuzalu and Don't Die that are friends and, you know, Zuzalu whether you call it the Ethereum network state, it's network state inspired and it's an Ethereum project. Brian Johnson wants to do the Don't Die network state. We want to see a thousand different startup societies around the world, some are vegan, some are carnivore. This is basically how we restore democracy to the world. Why? Because California is becoming a one-party state due to gerrymandering. Elections are held, but the party always wins. The same party always wins. Texas and Florida in response are becoming one-party states. And of course, China is a one-party state. So, Democrat states, Republican states, and the Chinese state are all becoming one-party states or have become one-party states. So, the only way to kind of protect and preserve democracy is going to be between states rather than within them. So to give people a choice over what their government is, we want to have a hundred, a thousand startup societies and you apply to the best country you can get into at age 18 just like you apply to the best college you can get into. And in fact those are actually very similar just like, you know, many millions of, you know, immigrants would apply to the college at age 21 that they could get into like get their masters in electrical engineering at Stanford with an F1 student visa. Then they get an H-1B to a company and then they get their green card or permanent residency. They get their entrance to a country, college, company are actually one full stack integrated thing that many people have actually traveled as a path over the last several decades. We can make that a full stack thing where actually make it something where at age 18 you apply to the best country you can get into. And you should come and visit Network School. There's a lot of things I can say about it. You can save money, cut burn to 18,000 per person per year. We have just 1,500 a month if you're with a roommate for everything, room, board, etc. Raise money, co-locate your remote company, or just build a startup society. So, it's a very practical thing that's meant to turn this very abstract theory into practice of just having a peaceful internationalist community. Neither MAGA nor woke, basically centrist, you know, center left, center right, centrist, democratic capitalists welcome and Ethereum people welcome, Bitcoin people welcome. We tamp all crypto tribalism down and we have people of all, you know, countries. Because we have more than 100 countries at Network School and so that's where you should come and visit, check it out and we're at ns.com. All right, with that let me stop and I will take questions.
