2026-07-28 22:27:44

A writer named Stu Woo recently moved from San Francisco to Singapore.1 He got in touch to ask me why I’d also moved from San Francisco to Singapore, and why I’d decided to become a proud Singaporean. We talked about the reasons he and others had moved away from America — the old woman violently shoved out of a Muni bus, the gunshots and molotovs at tech CEO houses, and the simultaneous rise of Hasan Piker’s anti-capitalist far left alongside Nick Fuentes’ anti-immigrant far right. I also mentioned all the positive things that had pulled me towards Singapore, my many posts admiring the country, and my public announcement years ago that I’d moved to Asia.

I am now a citizen of Singapore, a country where my mother tongue of Tamil is an official language, where I can worship at a Hindu temple without insane people denouncing my religion, and where Indian-Singaporeans are full citizens rather than subject to endless racial obloquy. Fundamentally, I voted with my feet for Lee Kuan Yew’s vision of tolerant meritocracy, rather than Kodos or Kang.

As we spoke, Stu Woo volunteered that he personally had no imminent plans to return to America, and indeed might never return. He further acknowledged that millions of centrist Americans had made the same difficult decision to go into diaspora, just like countless liberal Russians, capitalist Chinese, and secular Iranians…because they loved their people, but not their governments.

But — and you might see where this is going — Stu Woo didn’t think it was relevant to include his own decision to go into diaspora, or that of millions of other Americans, in his upcoming Wall Street Journal hit piece on me. The thrust of his questioning, as you’ll see, was to make me look like an odd duck who’d done something weird…as opposed to an early adopter that Stu had literally followed to Singapore. I’ve redacted some of the personal info that Rupert Murdoch’s employees were planning to use in their corporate doxxing attempt, but see the red boxed outline below:

Yes, I actually do think it’s crucially important to elaborate on the fact that the America I loved has declined to the point that millions of Americans are forced to seek new countries, as reported at his own outlet...because it completely defeats their attempt to shame me for moving to another country, as Stu himself did!

So, let’s first go through some lesser-known context on why mass migration and its discontents is the story of our age. We’ll cover (a) the idea of moving faster and escaping things, (b) how the right to exit is the true right to vote, and why (c) every emigrant is seeking a new country. With that context, you’ll understand (d) my response to Stu Woo and the Wall Street Journal.

Move Faster, Escape Things

Millions of Americans have moved from blue states to red. Millions more are moving abroad to places ranging from Canada to El Salvador to Europe to Asia. Millionaires are being forced out of New York, while billionaires are being pushed out of California and Washington. We are talking about situations that have become so intolerable that some of the most capable people in the world — the founders of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Oracle, Citadel, and SpaceX — had to move from their long-established homes, on short notice, under political pressure. And now that the billionaires have been forced to choose between expropriation and emigration, the “mere” 50-millionaires are being targeted, and soon predictably onward down the income ladder.

The same phenomenon is visible globally, with Russians/Ukrainians/Arabs/Iranians fleeing war, Chinese youth leaving techno-communism, Indians seeking opportunity abroad, and Brits moving to Dubai. The list just goes on and on. Quantitatively, we’ve gone from ~10M migrants per year in 2000 to 35M+ per year by 2025. And due to digital nomadism and internet-accelerated mobility, this figure is only set to rise.

At the same time, a nationalist/socialist backlash against both those coming (the “invaders”) and those leaving (the “traitors”) is rising, both inside the West and abroad. Qualitatively, politicians are exploiting the Curley effect to pass taxes and laws that drive out enemy classes (particularly technologists) and enemy races (particularly immigrants). Within America, this is the common thread between Democrats and MAGA; both are doing their level best via tax policy and visa policy to establish politically homogenous states.

Democrats are de facto pursuing a one-party state (”democracy”, defined as rule by Democrats), while MAGA frames it in terms of a one-ethny state (”Real Americans”, as defined by Republicans). One can make a slightly more sympathetic case for MAGA, because they didn’t really start this, and because if Democrats take power they’ve promised to prosecute them...so perhaps MAGAs see no choice but to build one-party red states in Florida and Texas.

Regardless of the causes, though, both Democrats and Republicans are converging on the same political form as China: namely, a one-party state where elections may be held, but the party always wins. And where the only true vote is the vote with your feet.

The Right To Exit is the True Right to Vote

Just to recap: we’re at the outset of a time where nationalists and socialists will push both (a) forced expulsions and (b) exit bans of enemy classes and races, while internationalists and capitalists will seek both (c) jurisdictions where they’re welcome and (d) the right to exit jurisdictions where they feel unwelcome. The nationalists and socialists will debank, denaturalize, and demonize their perceived enemies; meanwhile, the internationalists and capitalists just need to move faster, to escape things.

Fortunately (and unfortunately), we’ve seen this movie before in the 20th century. And so we have some moral, historical, and economic arguments to bring to bear in favor of the right to exit.

Let’s start with the moral. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own.” This was so important they translated it into 80+ languages. Even made a cartoon. Why?

Because the worst regimes in history impeded the right to exit, including the Nazis, the Soviets, the East Germans, the Cubans, and the North Koreans. When those states weren’t murdering their citizens, they were essentially imprisoning them as slaves. Under Nazism, arbeit did not macht frei. And under Communism, with 100% taxation, you owned not even the teeth in your mouth, and were essentially a slave. So these regimes, the fascists and communists, did not want their slaves to escape:

Luckily, there was one country that stood against fascism and communism, for freedom, for the right to exit, for the right for each man and woman to vote with their feet. That country was the United States of America. A specific mechanism was the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which shamed and sanctioned the Soviet Union for impeding exit rights:

After all, the Soviet Union ostensibly granted everyone the right to “vote” in their faux constitution, but not the right to emigrate. That was the only way to truly vote against the communist regime.

And of course one can also make the economic case via Tiebout sorting that, in the long run, voluntary migration results in better states, because terrible states (like the USSR) lose their talent and capital to the point they eventually go bankrupt, while well-run states attract it.

Every Emigrant is Seeking a New Country

Now you have more context. In brief: 35M people per year now change their countries, including millions of Americans, and including Stu Woo and me. This number is accelerating. The right to do this, to change your citizenship, is a right that America supported with Jackson-Vanik, and that only communist and fascist states historically abrogated. Indeed, the abrogation of exit rights essentially makes you a slave.

That’s why I work on what I work on. I believe deeply in the equality of opportunity that immigration gives, the defense of liberty that emigration protects, and the practical democracy that exit rights represent.

Put another way: every emigrant is seeking a new country. Right now, there are 193 UN sovereign states to choose from, up from ~50 in 1950, an increase of roughly 2 per year:

Importantly, there were far more independent jurisdictions before 1950, which was the midpoint of the most centralizing century in history. Thus, I think it’s quite unlikely that this “8-bit world” that we’ve inherited from the 20th century, which still has less than 256 nation states, will continue indefinitely. Because just about everything else humans do has far more than 193 choices. Moreover, if we triple again, from 10M emigrants in 2000 to 35M in 2025 to 100M+ in a few years from now, it will put tremendous strain on the current system.

Among other things, America no longer wants to be the nation of emigrants. So we may need to find new countries that want to be nations of emigrants. This finally brings me to Network School, and Stu Woo.

How the Sausage is Made

Ok. Now you understand the context that Stu Woo didn’t feel relevant to include. In brief: he also moved from San Francisco to Singapore, he also agreed that San Francisco’s governance was in decline, he brought up the old ladies pushed out of Muni buses, he agreed that far left and far right were rising in America, he was also seeking a new country, he agreed that millions of Americans (and non-Americans!) are seeking new countries, and so on.

That’s important because it’s the problem statement. Whether you believe it’s feasible to start new countries or not, whether you think “193 countries ought to be enough for everyone”, step one is to agree on the problem. Without that, you might think what I’m doing is causeless and eccentric, rather than a new proposed solution to the same problem that Stu Woo and I both faced: namely, the political decline of the country we both came up in.

I should also note: Woo has been stalking me for some time, pinging contacts of mine and showing up uninvited at our premises. I only spoke to him because of a particularly egregious doxx he was going to attempt; he did back off from that, which was a little bit like a mugger “agreeing” to only rob rather than shoot someone.

Anyway, without further ado, here are Woo’s emails, with personal information stripped, and my responses inline:

Hi there,We hope you’re doing well! We enjoyed visiting the Network School on Monday – we managed to catch the passport check just before we left – and are close to finishing our story.

Note that Woo says he enjoyed Network School, as our members do! Please keep this in mind for what follows.

We know you haven’t commented to reporters, but we hope you will. This story is likely to be the definitive journalistic account of Balaji in traditional media. It will go through his life, his ambition to build his own country and the plans for the Network School.

The framing is wrong. It’s not “my ambition to build his own country”. My goal to create a process for starting new communities, cities, and countries which I published as The Network State. The book says on page one that it’s a toolbox, not a manifesto. And it’s inspired many other projects from Vitalik Buterin’s Zuzalu to Solana’s Forma to Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die Network State.

Moreover, the ideas behind startup societies existed before me. You can trace them back to Tiebout sorting, to Friedman’s work on seasteading, to the UN work on special economic zones, and to Romer’s work on charter cities. As Newton put it, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. The network state is essentially an open source project, which is meant to be decentralized and to minimize any dependence on anyone, most of all me. The only reason I did Network School is as a prototype of a startup society, to prove out the concept, and enable hundreds of other startup societies to follow that template.

Nothing is done till it’s done, and nothing is without hardship. But so far, it’s worked well enough that it’s grown to thousands of members, survived a nation state attack, and signed nation state partnerships. If we succeed, the path will be as tough as cryptocurrency was, but I do believe we are on that path.

We’ve heard Balaji repeatedly tout his book as a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and that he has won a Wall Street Journal innovation award, so we’d love to have his participation in this story as well.

I do say that, but that’s from the pre-2013 era when the Wall Street Journal was far more prestigious. It’s like mentioning Yahoo’s IPO, or something. (Which reminds me: we need to fund bestseller lists and awards that aren’t controlled by legacy media. Milner’s Breakthrough Prize is good.)

We may publish as soon as tomorrow. We’re sending you what we call a no-surprise email. It’s a detailed summary of the latest story draft, and it’s intended to give you a chance to correct, clarify, or comment on anything in it. Could you share any feedback by 2 p.m. Singapore time tomorrow? That’s 24 hours from now.

OK. My response below is a no-surprises response :)

Here’s what to expect:The draft is about 1,500 words, making it a longer story for us. It’s > likely to be prominently featured on WSJ.com and the print newspaper.The angle of the story is how Balaji’s vision to eventually start a new country through the Network School is running into the real-world realities of local governments and host nations, specifically Malaysia. The headline and dek will reflect this theme.

This framing is wrong because the entire concept of the network state, like cryptocurrency, was built from the beginning to be robust to the decisions of legacy states, while at the same time working with them pragmatically whenever possible. The fundamental idea is that if cryptocurrencies are decentralized currencies, then startup societies are decentralized communities. We abide by all local laws and then find the locales that want us there.

The story begins in Iskandar Puteri, Malaysia, describing Balaji’s belief that America is descending into anarchy and his ambition to start new countries/societies.

No, the story begins in America, where millions of Americans are now in diaspora and seeking new countries. Some have escaped the far right by going to Canada. Some have escaped the far left by going to El Salvador. Those with European ancestry have gone to Ireland. Others have “gone back where they came from”, and returned to China, Taiwan, India, or South Korea. Still others are digital nomads. And by the way, many people (from the liberals Barbara Walter and Stephen Marche, to the apolitical Dalio and Turchin) believe that America is descending into anarchy.

Point: this story is much bigger than me!

We detail how Balaji launched an entrepreneurial community in Forest City, Malaysia — a largely empty Chinese-built luxury development — setting up a campus with co-working spaces, a gym and a menu with meals designed by Bryan Johnson.

Yes, true.

We plan to quote Balaji from the recent Antler podcast stating: “Bryan Johnson wants to live forever. Sam Altman wants to build a machine of super intelligence. Elon wants to get to Mars… I just want to start a new country.”

This truncated quote removes the humor and context from what I said. Here’s the full quote in italics, which starts at 5:36:

My friend Bryan Johnson wants to live forever. Sam Altman wants to build a machine super intelligence. Elon wants to get to Mars. I just want to start a new country. That’s been done hundreds of times before in history! In many ways I’m like the boring enterprise SaaS of crazy tech things. The reason I say that is in a sense it’s much less radical than the other three. On the other hand, it’s often considered more radical than the other three. Often people are like, “Yeah, you might be able to live forever or get to Mars.” But the thing is those are purely technical things. This is technopolitical. So it actually involves…it’s not just hardware or software, but wetware. It’s the software in our heads, how we think about ourselves.

Note that I’m quite aware that it’s considered more radical to start a new country than to get to Mars, and the entire point of what I’m saying is that it should actually be considered less radical because it’s been done many times before. Morever, though it’s a longer discussion, most new countries have actually been started peacefully!

We discuss the Network School experience, noting that participants praised the convenience and camaraderie, but some complained about moldy rooms, quiet nightlife, and a lack of female participants.

This is a false, borderline libelous narrative from anonymous sources. Mildew is common across Southeast Asia, we fix such routine facilities issues as they arise, the explicit point of Network School is self-improvement rather than partying, and we had hundreds of women, families, and children at Network School. Seeing is believing, so here’s a video from a participant:

And here’s our page for families and children:

In short, we are absolutely not simply for the “tech bro”, but for the tech dad, tech mom, tech family, and tech children (as well as non-tech people, of course). Recall how Stu said that he enjoyed his trip to Network School? Well, so did literally thousands of others who took an international flight to attend, and thousands more locals.

We include a quote from a former participant comparing Balaji’s shifting vision to Willy Wonka, and a complaint that leadership didn’t actually talk about nation building very much.

Against Stu Woo’s anonymous quotes, in reality, any outside observer would note that my vision isn’t really shifting, given that I’ve been publicly working on the same thing since 2013.

Also, yes, of course, we didn’t talk about nation building very much! I’d already written about that in The Network State. The point of Network School v2 was simply practical community building, while respecting all local laws.

Others said they just enjoyed the convenient gym and food, hated the lack of nightlife, and didn’t think much about the Network State ideology.

Again: no one was coming to Network School for the “nightlife.” The entire thing is about self-improvement: learning technology, burning calories, and earning money with remote work jobs. Members do have fun on their own time, of course, but this is a community for producers rather than consumers. More like Stanford Engineering in the 2000s than Bali.

We detail the recent shutdown by Malaysian authorities following an investigation into whether residents held passports from Israel, a country Malaysia does not officially recognize. We note Balaji’s public response on social media likening the inspection to “swatting” and offering to reallocate capital to other countries. We report that local government authorities ordered the project to cease operations citing licensing irregularities, after which Balaji posted a video with Kazakhstan’s deputy prime minister announcing an > agreement to open a campus there.

This is a grievously incomplete summary of the facts.

First, as preface: I love Kazakhstan and am excited about what we’re doing next. I also still like Malaysia, and I want to be clear that every Malaysian we worked with in real life was great.

In brief, what happened is that an online hoax was posted on July 10 that accused us of harboring illegal aliens, specifically Israelis. But every passport was checked and no Israeli citizens were found. This hoax was indeed “swatting” because it was a provably false report that sent police to our house.

The Instagram hoax kicked off a separate investigation into a different part of the business, which seemed to be resolved when a minister tweeted that our “paperwork was in order”, a post which was then retweeted by the Prime Minister.

Ultimately, however, we were ordered to cease operations within 24 hours by a third investigation by the local government over a signage issue and an MBIP license on one subunit, after being told we had a remedial period. To be clear, we respect Malaysia’s sovereignty and are abiding by all Malaysian law. In the aftermath of this episode, we received offers from several governments to bring Network School to their country, and have signed our first MOU with the Republic of Kazakhstan.

The story contextualizes the Network School within a broader movement of tech leaders attempting to carve out network states and autonomous enclaves, mentioning figures like Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, and projects like Prospera in Honduras, East Solano Plan, and Praxis.

Oh, it contextualizes it? Does it mention the fact that CEOs are being shot in the back, having their stores set on fire, and getting their houses attacked with molotov cocktails, to the applause of millions? Does it mention the fact that the founders of Google, Facebook, Uber, Oracle, Amazon, and SpaceX were all forced to leave their home states?

I doubt it. Most likely, it presents what tech is doing as a causeless, idiosyncratic thing. Meanwhile, again, Stu Woo himself left his home for Singapore, for many of the same reasons tech guys left their homes, due to old women getting pushed off Muni buses! The difference is that some tech founders think they can not just move to places like Singapore, but build a startup Singapore. Maybe they’re wrong, but these are founders of fairly impressive things, and it’s worth a shot.

We explore Balaji’s background: growing up on Long Island as the son of Indian immigrant physicians, the bullying he faced in school as the lone brown kid and the unfair punishments for physically defending himself. We quote from the Anthology of Balaji saying that he learned early on that he had to stand up for himself, that the fix was in, and the state is against you. We also write about Balaji’s Stanford engineering degrees, co-founding a genetic screening startup and working at Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase.

OK.

We quote Brian Armstrong from a podcast describing him as a “contrarian figure” and noting that colleagues previously found you challenging to work with.

Again, that’s not the full context of Brian’s quote. Here is the beginning and end:

“Balaji is a brilliant guy. He’s probably one of the top couple smartest people I’ve ever met in my life…He helped me become a better CEO and have a little more disagreeableness.”

In other words: I do not start conflict for the sake of it. It is true that I had to fire some people at Coinbase, but in general I am mostly good cop and a reluctant bad cop. For example: this journo, Stu Woo, is starting conflict, and I am responding, but that does not mean I am needlessly or typically disagreeable.

We discuss Balaji’s focus on pronatalism and boosting the birthrate, including his quote from a 2023 conference regarding the need for people in space exploration, because many people will die in space exploration and there are a lot of planets out there.

Completely distorted. The question is whether we need more births given that people contend the planet is “full.” The answer is that there’s a whole universe out there and we’ll need people to populate it. But that doesn’t mean you want some kind of human wave to populate space. You want autonomous drones to go first, derisk things, set up basecamps, and the like. Then send humans, but with maximum focus on life preservation. It is true that humans may die in space exploration, but that will happen with everything. No plane crashes, no planes; no train crashes, no trains.

We outline his core philosophy from your 2022 book, “The Network State,” and his blog post explaining the five-stage process from going from an online community to physical footprint and eventual diplomatic recognition.

It’s actually seven steps: https://thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state-in-one-thousand-words

We plan to say that playbook involves people with shared beliefs forming an online community, and then helping each other make money so they can pool funds, buy land and eventually seek recognition as a country

Yes, with the emphasis on community, not company per se. We don’t need to make money, just break even, such that our members have better lives.

We outline the setup of the Network School in Forest City starting in 2024 at $1,500 a month, noting growth in cohort sizes and initially screening applicants on views such as capitalism and pronatalism.

We did initially experiment with an ideological survey in order to cluster people on ideas and recommend friends. I wouldn’t call it “screening” though, because we took in people with many different interesting points of view, so long as they were generally good people.

We include perspectives from attendees, including a digital nomad who enjoys the gym facilities and a program manager from India who attended to jumpstart her career.

Given that (a) thousands of people took international flights to come to Network School, and (b) thousands of locals attended our free events and hackathons, and (c) that membership was steeply ramping up, I think it’s fair to say that most enjoyed it. But see their accounts for yourself.

We will note that before your standoff with Malaysian authorities, you did say that the Network School itself didn’t seek sovereignty and would abide by local laws

We have always abided by local laws, and I’ve said in multiple podcasts beforehand that we weren’t seeking sovereignty in Malaysia. Rough analogy: when Google was in its garage, it didn’t plan to put its future datacenters in its garage, but at some unspecified future location, to be contractually negotiated with the owner of that real estate.

Similarly: we only want to negotiate a special economic zone from a willing counterparty, which need not be the exact country we are in at any given moment. As a concrete example, Egypt leased Ras El-Hikma to the UAE for $35B, less than the $44B that Elon paid for Twitter. So it’s possible.

Finally, we cover your recent agreement with Kazakhstan, noting the country’s efforts to attract tech founders through tax incentives and special economic zones.

Kazakhstan is much more than incentives. It’s a beautiful, amazing country. Here’s a visual:

Fundamentally, Kazakhstan is just wildly underrated. Like Dubai or Singapore, Kazakhstan has competent government officials, talented citizens, diplomatic savvy, clean streets, great aesthetics, multicultural tolerance, capitalism, and techno-optimism. But it also has enormous swaths of low cost land, along with some of the lowest energy and building costs in Asia. This means it is the perfect place to build startup cities, because you can easily get a few hundred acres, along with the talent and capital to build in the physical world. Moreover, because it’s on the Silk Road trade route, it has a culture of positive-sum interactions with foreigners, so it has an enlightened visa policy. And it’s a high-tech country built by traditional nomads, so it culturally understands digital nomads. For all these reasons and more, Kazakhstan may be the perfect location to build digital nomad hubs and diasporic communities.

I should also note that we have committed to fully abiding by all Kazakhstan laws (as we always do) and respecting their territorial integrity (as we always have). We will help the country, build their economy, bring in techno-optimists from around the world, and scale here. At some point in the distant future, with sufficient capital, we may negotiate a 99-year lease with another willing country, just like Egypt’s lease of Ras al Hekmah to the UAE, to get our own special economic zone. Or we may build an artificial island from reclaimed land off the shore of a willing country, or we may even accompany Elon to Mars.

The specifics don’t matter at this point; again, it would be like Google picking out the location of its datacenters when it was still in the garage. A pro-crypto country understands this, because it understands Bitcoin. No one could have predicted in 2009 that El Salvador would be the first country to adopt Bitcoin; Satoshi just started it, the community scaled it, and eventually it achieved diplomatic recognition.

Finally, three questions. We plan to note that you…gave up U.S. citizenship in 2023, based on federal registry records, and that you held a Singaporean visa for tech entrepreneurs.

Note again that Stu Woo himself moved from San Francisco to Singapore! Am I digging through this Murdoch employee’s life for clicks, to make an issue out of a non-issue? Does anyone care what “Singaporean visa” this journo is on?

Note also how Woo frames my relocation to Singapore — which I made no secret of, publicly posting about it years ago — as “giving up US citizenship.” This is like saying that when I moved from New York to attend Stanford it was “giving up New York residency.”

To be clear: I’ve very publicly committed to Singapore. My sons will proudly serve in the Singaporean military, and I organize many free community events for Singaporean families. This is on top of investing millions into Singapore, backing Singaporean startups, bringing global tech figures to Singapore like Naval Ravikant, Bryan Johnson, and Pieter Levels, and hosting huge conferences in Singapore:

In short: I proudly voted for Lee Kuan Yew, rather than voting for Kodos or Kang. I voted with my feet, the only true vote, for the best country in the world. And I should note that many American Democrats share my view (as they’ve come to appreciate Singapore’s HDB flats and bans on racial/religious hatred), just as many Republicans post memes about how based Lee Kuan Yew is.

At the risk of being repetitive: again, as the Wall Street Journal itself has reported, millions of Americans, including Stu Woo, have moved abroad to seek a new life, as is their right as free people, due to the decline of America! Some have moved to Canada to escape the far right, or El Salvador to escape the far left. Some have “gone back where they came from”, by returning to China or India. Some are digital nomads. Some are white Americans who have exercised their right to birthright citizenship in European countries like Ireland, by getting second passports there. Some have moved to Dubai, and some, like me, have moved to Singapore.

To be clear: while I loved the America I grew up in, it just doesn’t exist anymore, due to the rise of the far left and far right. Perhaps we’ll start a new country some day, but right now, Singapore is the country on the planet that currently most reflects my values. Again, to put it plainly: I am a Tamil-speaking Hindu technocapitalist of Indian origin. Singapore honors Tamil as an official language, hosts Hindu temples where we can worship, has many people of Indian origin, and is a global base for technocapitalism. So the far right cannot attack me for my race here, nor can the far left attack me for my class.

Could you clarify the status of current residents in Forest City following the shutdown order, and whether transport or accommodations to Kazakhstan are being offered to existing participants?

We are taking care of everyone individually.

Later, Woo sent another email. I’m omitting the redundant parts, but here’s another question:

3) I understand your position that you think that what happened to the Network School in Malaysia was the result of an antisemitic hoax. However, you haven’t said it as such. We’re happy to say that you said on X that you belive the social-media accusation was false. Would you like to elaborate further to clarify what you believe happened?

OK. I did that above. But yes: an online hoax was posted on July 10 that accused us of harboring illegal aliens, specifically Israelis. But every passport was checked and no Israeli citizens were found. See my notes above for a more detailed response.

4) I understand your point that you’re doing what many Americans are doing: leaving America because of concerns over safety, the economy and other factors. But our average reader knows that. We’ve covered this in depth. I feel no need to elaborate on that point in our story. If you think this context is crucially important, do you want to give us a concise on-the-record explanation as to why?

I did that in this article :)

5) Is there anything else you would like to comment on, clarify or correct from the summary of the story I gave you? Again, our goal is to make sure that we fairly and accurately portray you.

Yes. Stu Woo, you should point out to the reader that you and millions more in the American diaspora like you, as well as millions of emigrants from around the world, are all seeking new countries. All we’re doing is trying to deliver on that demand in a new way.

2025-10-13 03:23:30

Network State Conference 2025 was a smash hit. Thousands of attendees, millions of followers, and billions of dollars heard about starting new societies from the Internet. We had the CEO of Binance and the CEO of Coinbase, the founder of Ethereum and the Solana Foundation, the government of Singapore and the government of the UAE, all talking about startup cities, tech hubs, and in-person communities.

Watch this to see the sheer size of the crowd:

All talks are now available for free here, and you’ll see a full recap at the bottom of this post. But before I cover what our speakers covered, I want to explain why we organized the Network State Conference in the first place…and why we think it’s so important to move from digital communities to physical societies.

From Digital to Physical

The old world is fading, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of popups.

Yes, that’s a joking paraphrase1 of Gramsci. Yet it’s also serious. Because the old postwar world is fading rapidly, as you can see from every headline on political chaos, military pullback, and monetary collapse. At the same time, the new world struggles to be born, because it’s not yet obvious what comes next.

One answer, half2 the answer at least, is that the successor to the rules-based order of America is the code-based order of the Internet. The rationale is that (a) the Internet is the only thing with global economic scale comparable to China and has also (b) given birth to an entirely new digital legal system that already de facto manages ~99% of global communications and transactions…yet is (c) still somehow largely invisible3 in the discourse despite its ubiquity.

That invisibility of the Internet is why so many struggle to see the code-based order as the successor to the rules-based order. The typical riposte is that the Internet just isn’t even a place4…so how could it possibly succeed the physical part of the old world?

The riposte to that riposte is to note that Christianity also isn’t a place, yet there are Christian5 places…because there are churches, cathedrals, and entire countries with the cross on the flag. Similarly, yes, the Internet itself is not a place, but there are Internet places…like startup offices, tech conferences, datacenters, and entire countries with Bitcoin as the national currency.

That means the cloud can take physical form. And that brings us to popups.

From Popup to Permanent

We define a popup as an internet community that temporarily meets up in the physical world, and terraforms it in some fashion while doing so. Concrete examples include:

• The Cursor Cafe

• The Claude Hat popup

• The AngelList Founders Cafe

• Coinbase’s Basecamp in Vermont

• Ethereum’s Zuzalu and its global spinoffs

• The Zcash Network State popup at Network School

• And the dozens of popups featured at the Network State Conferences

Here are some photos of popups. Starting from the top left and proceeding row-wise, that’s Cursor Cafe, Anthropic’s Claude Hat popup in NYC, AngelList’s Founders Cafe, Coinbase Basecamp, the ZCash Network School popup, and finally Ethereum’s Zuzalu:

Obviously, the term popup implies something evanescent. But if it’s successful, you can go from from a popup (which is a physical prototype) to a permanent (which is a production deployment). To make this concrete, below are photos of permanents, starting with the Tesla Diner, our own Network School, then SpaceX’s Starbase, and finally the new Solana Economic Zone in Kazakhstan.

Moving from popup to permanent may mean graduating from leasing real estate to buying it, much like starting on Heroku and eventually moving to your own datacenters. And it may even mean negotiating with governments for a measure of diplomatic recognition, as the Solana network state just did.

Seen in this light, a popup is similar to a startup, with a roadmap for starting up small but eventually scaling up big. It’s the third6 kind of thing: from internet company to internet currency to internet community. And it may also be the next big thing, at least according to no less than Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz.

And that leads us to the Network State Conference.

Network State Conference 2025

This year’s Network State Conference was huge, with thousands of in-person attendees and more than a million views online. Our primary goal was to demonstrate that it is now politically, financially, and technically feasible to materialize your internet community into a friendly in-person community.

And I think we succeeded in this aim! We put tiny communities on stage alongside Vitalik Buterin, Richard Teng, Ben Horowitz, Brian Armstrong, Amjad Masad, Ranveer Allahbadia, Nas Daily, Noah Smith, Arthur Hayes, Bryan Johnson, Andrew Huberman, and the governments of Singapore, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and El Salvador. In doing so, we established that there’s now an entire ecosystem now available to support you socially, politically, and financially as you turn your digital community into a physical society.

Of course, it’s rare to have so many prominent speakers at a single conference, or to see attendees glued to their chairs long into the evening. I think the reason is that Network State is not about selling a product. We are instead advocating an idea: the idea that a better world is possible, that you too can found or find your ideal community, and that we can take the once-functional parts of the 20th century rules-based order and rebuild them in a 21st century code-based order.

The Recap

All right. Now to the recap.

The core of each year’s Network State Conference are the talks by physical startup societies, both popups and permanents. We also feature governments, investors, coins, companies, services, writers, and creators with an interest in startup societies. Below we’ve organized speakers by category, with a link to their full talk on YouTube. We’ve also included a few relevant talks from previous years’ conferences (2023, 2024, 2025) and the Network State Podcast.

• Governments

  • 🇸🇬 Singapore (Jacqueline Poh): Jacqueline Poh runs JTC, which is Singapore’s $40B real estate arm. They’re recruiting global technologists to relocate both to Singapore and to the new Johor-Singapore special economic zone.

  • 🇦🇪 Abu Dhabi (Wai-Lum Kwok): Wai-Lum runs Abu Dhabi Global Markets (ADGM), the financial regulator that created pro-crypto rules early on. They now run regulatory sandboxes where global companies can work with Abu Dhabi prior to full regulatory approval.

  • 🇦🇪 Dubai (Rashid Mohammed, Expo City): Rashid is CTO of Expo City Dubai, an exhibition site that Dubai converted into a startup city. They’re building an open city OS for startups to test urban tech.

  • 🇸🇻 El Salvador (Stacy Herbert, Bitcoin Office): Stacy directs the National Bitcoin Office of El Salvador. The country now offers streamlined AI rules, 180-day tourist visas, and pro-business/tech regulations to bring in global founders.

  • 🇵🇼 Palau (Surangel Whipps Jr, President). The President of Palau spoke to Balaji about embracing crypto and implementing rns.id for a new kind of state-backed digital ID card, which has already been issued to figures like Tim Draper and Vitalik.

  • 🇲🇭 Marshall Islands DAO (Adam Miller). Adam Miller’s talk covers the new Marshall Islands DAO law, which is perhaps the best legal framework in the world for crypto-native entities, AI agents, and DAOs. More than 250+ of these entities have already been registered via midao.org.

• Investors

  • Naval Ravikant. Naval is one of the world’s most famous investors. In his fireside chat at Network State Conference 2024, Naval discusses the right to exit, the fractal frontier, and how technology enables people to opt into new forms of political and social organization.

  • Andreessen Horowitz (Ben Horowitz): Ben Horowitz is cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, the world’s largest venture capital firm with $46B under management. A16Z is now interested in funding internet communities as the third step after internet companies and internet currencies.

  • Polychain (Olaf Carlson-Wee): Olaf founded the first crypto hedge fund, now a multibillion dollar firm named Polychain. He sees network states speed-running the path from bare land to Dubai and Singapore, given the >100X increase in internet-native youth from 1995 to 2010.

  • AngelList (Avlok Kohli): Avlok is CEO of Angellist, a platform with $100B+ in assets. Influenced by Network State book, AngelList recently opened a Founders Cafe in San Francisco. He thinks of popups as the natural next step for tech.

  • Dragonfly (Haseeb Qureshi): Haseeb is cofounder of Dragonfly, a multibillion dollar crypto hedge fund. He views crypto as “laboratories of democracy” for ownership experiments, and spoke about the mechanics of token distribution from proof-of-work to points.

  • YCombinator (Garry Tan). Garry Tan is CEO of YCombinator, which has seeded companies with $600B+ in combined portfolio value. In this talk from Network State Conference 2023, Garry discusses SF’s many problems (drugs, cleanliness, education, crime) and noted that only some are due to elected officials. He recommends building parallel systems—particularly in media and academia—to replace the dysfunctional-and-unelected parts of the legacy system, thereby complementing voting by building as a civic duty.

  • Animoca (Yat Siu): Yat Siu’s Animoca manages 600+ portfolio companies with billions in assets. He views internet communities as more like peer-to-peer networks than traditional hub-and-spoke companies, and wants to build the (productive) GDP of network states as opposed to simply boosting their (financial) market cap.

  • Maelstrom (Arthur Hayes). Arthur Hayes is the self-made billionaire cofounder of BitMEX and Maelstrom, and a well-known writer. In this fireside, he discusses his new stem cell clinic, on the 80-year cycle forecasted in the Fourth Turning, and why he advises you to get your Bitcoin and get out.

  • 1517 Fund (Michael Gibson and Danielle Strachman). Michael and Danielle are cofounders of the Thiel Fellowship. They spoke about shorting the higher education bubble through VC, and returning $219M on just $18M invested.

  • Pronomos (Patri Friedman). Patri created the seasteading movement and is now focused on new cities. Through his Thiel-backed fund Pronomos, he’s an early investor in Prospera and Alpha City.

• Startup Societies (Popups and Permanents)

  • Infinita (Niklas Anzinger). Infinita is a longevity network state, an L2 built on top of Próspera’s L1. It has Minicircle gene therapy, and it’s hosting the new Rejuvenation Olympics.

  • Prospera (Erick Brimen, Lonis Hamaili). In talks from 2024-2025, Erick and Lonis present Prospera’s physical plant and its governance-as-a-service model, now with 300+ companies and 2000+ paying Prosperians.

  • Culdesac (Ryan Johnson). Ryan is the cofounder of Culdesac Tempe, a car-free, mixed-use community in Arizona. The city offers residents a variety of mobility options like light rail, ride sharing, electric bikes, and autonomous vehicles, with integrated retail and residential spaces to promote walkability.

  • Edge City (Janine Leger, Timour Kosters). In talks from 2024-2025, Janine and Timour describe the origins of Edge City and how it’s now held seven pop-ups across four continents, with 10k+ attendees and $1M+ in grants, and multiple permanent sites on the way.

  • Esmeralda (Devon Zuegel). Devon spoke about Edge Esmeralda, a pop-up city inspired by the Chautauqua movement.

  • Crecimiento (Juan Benet). Juan Benet’s talk outlines his work on Crecimiento, and how Argentina might become a global crypto leader by fostering hundreds of tech startups.

  • Zu Georgia (Veronica Schrenk). Veronica’s talk covers how Zuzalu evolved from a single gathering into a decentralized movement, with spin-off experiments like ZuVillage Georgia pushing forward new ideas.

  • Zu Thailand (Nicole Sun). Nicole helped organize Zuzalu and then built ZuThailand, a pop-up city experiment inspired by the first Zuzalu event.

  • Oz City (Olly Kovalieva). Olly created Oz City, a popup for AI and web3 builders, with seventy founders building together in Argentina before Devconnect.

  • Nuanu (Sergey Solonin). Sergey built Nuanu, a creative community in Bali focused on art, entrepreneurship, and co-living.

  • Threefold (Florian Fournier). Florian presented Threefold as a foundation for building sovereign digital communities.

  • Arc City (James of Arc). James is building Arc, the first L2 at Network School. The aim is to gather a group to eventually build their own charter city.

  • Forma (Farhaj Mayan). Farhaj created Solana Economic Zones in Kazakhstan and Georgia. Kazakhstan in particular has now launched a national crypto reserve and announced a crypto city.

  • Zuitzerland (Isla Munro-Hochmayr). Isla founded Zuitzerland, an Ethereum-centric popup focused on d/acc. Their token economy is based on Switzerland’s 700-year governance history.

  • Liberland (Vít Jedlička). Vít is a Czech-born politician and the president of Liberland. He shares his experience of trying to build a country in unclaimed land between Serbia and Croatia.

  • Ipe City (Jean Hansen). Jean Hansen is the founder of Ipé City, a popup city for techno-optimists in Brazil. He discusses their recent agreement to build a special economic zone in Florianopolis.

  • Alpha City (Bradford Cross). Bradford is CEO of AlphaCity and managing partner at Pronomos. He gives an overview of the startup cities they’re architecting in Africa.

  • Bitcoin Sranam (Maya Parbhoe). Maya Parbhoe of Suriname talks about why it’s smart to work with small countries, and how she’s been working to make Bitcoin the national currency of Suriname.

  • Fractal NYC (Alexander Grintsvayg). Grin is the founder of Fractal Boston, which began in NYC. It’s a community of friends living/working together, with 1000+ in NYC, and now expanding to Vancouver, Porto, and Geneva.

  • Wagon Box (Paul McNiel). Paul McNiel is the founder of the Wagon Box, a 20 acre property in the Wyoming mountains, that hosts events and retreats with a Christian/classical culture focus.

  • NOMAD (Zach Milburn). Zach has built NOMAD, a worldwide network of villages for remote workers. He’s also architected a unique modular unit at nomad.homes that can be built and shipped anywhere.

  • Vibecamp (Brooke Bowman). Brooke organizes VibeCamp, a volunteer-driven event that transforms online connections into co-created in-person communities.

  • Charter Cities (Mark Lutter). Mark explains the idea of charter cities, highlighting their role in economic development, historical examples, and the ongoing efforts of the Charter Cities Institute to foster new city projects worldwide.

  • Plumia (Sondre Rasch). Sondre’s Plumia is an aspiring internet nation with a social safety net and a digital passport.

  • Aaron Renn (Christian Network States). Aaron Renn, founder of American Reformer, speaks about how Christians can build startup societies and network states to congregate with others that share their values.

  • Cover (Alexis Rivas). Alexis Rivas of Cover talks about hyperdeflating the cost of homes via rapid modular construction.

• Coins

  • Ethereum (Vitalik Buterin, Founder). In this fireside, Vitalik discusses the progress of Zuzalu, a family of Ethereum-aligned popup cities, the idea of d/acc, and the contrast between geographically central startup societies (“embassies”) vs geographically remote cities (“monasteries”).

  • Solana (Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, Cofounders). Anatoly explains how Solana is building a parallel, decentralized financial system that outperforms traditional finance in efficiency, cost, and composability. Raj highlights how the Solana stack empowers the creation of network states by enabling communities to build and govern themselves.

  • Solana Foundation (Akshay BD, CMO). Akshay explains how he scaled Solana globally in the physical world, drawing on his experience at Uber.

  • Base (Xen Baynham-Herd). Xen Baynham-Herd, lead of Base Global Growth, describes Coinbase’s progress towards a Base Network State.

  • Telegram TON (Veronika Kapustina, CEO TON Strategy). Veronika Kapustina, CEO of the new Telegram TON Strategy Co, outlines TON’s plans for a global superapp that can create physical communities and fund space travel.

  • Zcash (Zooko Wilcox, Founder and Josh Swihart, Electric Coin Company). Zooko is the cofounder of Zcash, and explains what principles allowed Zcash to last for a decade. Josh Swihart is the CEO of Electric Coin Company, which helps develop Zcash. He discusses Zcash’s huge week prior to the conference, with ZEC hitting a “god candle”, with enormous energy finally flowing into unstoppable private money.

  • Eigenlayer (Sreeram Kannan, Founder). Sreeram Kannan, cofounder of EigenCloud, spoke about how verifiable AI enables smart governance.

• Companies

  • Binance (Richard Teng, CEO). Richard Teng is the CEO of Binance. In this fireside chat with Balaji, he discusses why the Internet becomes the world’s largest capital market and why small countries love cryptocurrency.

  • Coinbase (Brian Armstrong, CEO). Brian Armstrong, CEO and cofounder of Coinbase, talks to Balaji about their joint history of success, and tells the audience that anyone working on real cryptocommunities and network states should build them on Base and reach out to Coinbase Ventures.

  • Replit (Amjad Masad, CEO). Amjad Masad is cofounder and CEO of Replit. In this fireside, Amjad and Balaji talk about their shared interest in educating the developers of the developing world, the history and future of Replit, and how the physical world is becoming more programmable.

  • Gemini (Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, Founders). In this talk from 2023, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss discuss the failures of the SEC, and the successes of red states and foreign states on crypto regulations.

  • Kraken (Jesse Powell, Founder). Jesse Powell is cofounder and chairman of Kraken, a multibillion-dollar crypto exchange. He discusses parallels between the rise of early crypto and the rise of network states with Balaji.

  • Farcaster (Dan Romero, Founder). Dan gives an overview of Farcaster’s decentralized media platform, and offers thoughts on how network states can be built on Farcaster’s open protocol.

  • Catena (Sean Neville, Founder of Catena and Circle). Sean is cofounder of Circle and Catena. In this chat, Sean and Balaji discuss how they worked together to launch USDC, the second largest stablecoin in the world, and now fully legally recognized by major governments.

  • Synthesis (Chrisman Frank). Chrisman Frank speaks about building a parallel educational system with AI tutoring.

  • Research Hub (Patrick Joyce). Patrick Joyce of Research Hub talks about decentralizing science and creating incentives for distributed replication.

  • Henley Global (Dominic Volek). Henley Global shares how to build a portfolio of global citizenships, and how migration trends highlight second citizenships as essential tools for mobility and security.

• Writers

  • Noah Smith (Noahpinion). Noah Smith is the founder of the popular Noahpinion newsletter, with 400k+ subscribers. In this talk, he describes his idea for building a New Hanseatic League, a network of states. See also his recent Substack post on the topic.

  • Tomas Pueyo (Uncharted Territories). Tomas Pueyo runs a popular newsletter called Uncharted Territories with 100k+ subscribers. Here, he speaks about the pending end of the Western nation state.

  • Glenn Greenwald. Famous independent writer Glenn Greenwald speaks on digital privacy, internet censorship, and the decentralized technology that could deliver us a free and open internet.

  • Niall Ferguson. Bestselling author and historian Niall Ferguson reflects on the changing world order in the internet age, debating the question of whether states that have waged wars against gold and oil can effectively wage war against Bitcoin.

  • Ayaan Hirsi-Ali. Author Ayaan Hirsi-Ali shares her journey leaving Somalia to seek asylum in the Netherlands, and talks about why building new communities outside traditional systems is essential for freedom.

  • Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution). Tyler talks about Emergent Ventures, Marginal Revolution University, and radically slashing the overhead associated with academic grants.

  • Alana Newhouse (Tablet Mag). In this 2023 talk, Alana introduces the idea of brokenism as the true American political axis. Her idea is that the real debate isn’t between the left and right, but between those still invested in Western institutions, and those who think they’re broken and want to build anew.

  • Ashley Rindsberg (Gray Lady Winked). Ashley Rindsberg’s book details how the New York Times Company has faked the news for more than a century, from Stalin’s USSR through Castro’s Cuba all the way to the present day.

  • Bruno Macaes (World Builders). Bruno Macaes is former Minister of European Affairs for Portugal and a bestselling author. In this talk, he notes that geopolitical power is “God Mode” in the video game sense, the ability to change game variables. He defines a superpower as one that can run such a video game, and relates this idea to the concept of a network state.

  • Kathleen Tyson (Multicurrency Mercantilism). Kathleen says the alternative to the dollar actually already exists: it’s the dollar and all other currencies. She presents a series of graphs that show the multi-currency world is already here, with the dollar down ~50% vs gold.

  • Avik Roy (FREEOPP). Avik Roy, founder of FREOPP, examines how repeated expert failures have shaped public policy and explains how network states can harness these lessons to create more resilient societies.

  • Parag Khanna (AlphaGeo). Parag Khanna speaks about the age of global mobility and digital nomadism.

  • Murtaza Hussain (Drop Site). Murtaza Hussein is a writer who covers surveillance, privacy, Bitcoin, and decentralized media. He sees network states as inevitable, given that nation states are now lumbering like empires before them, and given that networks in particular can guarantee inalienable rights.

  • Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (Catholic Network State). Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, founder of PolicySphere, spoke about the Catholic Church as the original network state.

  • Rajeev Mantri (A New Idea of India). In this 2024 talk, the author of A New Idea of India assesses India’s rapid upward trajectory with technologies like UPI, and previews the next 25 years.

  • Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation). Michel Bauwens is the founder of the P2P Foundation. He speaks about how web3 can be used to regenerate local communities and strengthen the digital commons.

  • Hive Mind (Garrett Jones). Garrett Jones, economist and author of Hive Mind, explains why a nation’s collective intelligence drives long-run prosperity more than individual intelligence.

• Creators

  • Bryan Johnson (Blueprint) (2024 fireside, 2024 talk, 2025 talk). Bryan Johnson, founder of Blueprint, is an anti-aging and longevity pioneer. Balaji sits down with Bryan in 2024 to compare how their two distinct paths somehow led them both to have a very similar conclusions. Later, in 2025, they flesh out a proposal for a longevity-focused network state.

  • Pieter Levels (NomadList). Levels is a self-taught dev who has built and launched 40+ startups, including highly successful projects like Nomad List. In this fireside, Pieter explains how he runs multiple companies as a solo founder, why finding your tribe matters, and what the future holds for digital nomads.

  • Andrew Huberman (Huberman Lab). Huberman discusses what the ideal Huberman community materialized into the physical world might look like, and why that’s better than just building a device.

  • Nuseir Yassin (Nas Daily). The founder of Nas Daily has 10M+ followers worldwide, and joined Balaji at the 2025 Network State Conference to discuss content creation and community building in today’s social media environment.

  • Ranveer Allahbadia (The Ranveer Show). Ranveer is the founder of India’s largest podcast, with 10M+ followers worldwide. He joined Balaji at the 2025 Network State Conference to discuss how he built a global media following from nothing, survived being cancelled, and is refocusing on community.

  • Rudyard Lynch (WhatIfAltHist). Rudyard (aka Whatifalthist) has 730k+ followers on YouTube. In this 2024 chat with Balaji, he discusses the sheer scale of the internet, notes that it’s as significant as any shift in human history, and talk about why that’s likely to rework the state.

  • Beff Jezos (e/acc). In this 2023 talk, the cofounder of the now-successful effective acceleration (e/acc) movement outlines the alliance between AI acceleration and crypto decentralization.

  • Punk6529 (NFT Network States). Punk6529, a well-known NFT investor with 400k+ followers, drops virtually by to give three quick ideas on network states.

  • Molson Hart (Can we Build Hardware if China Wins?). In this 2024 talk, Molson of Viahart asks the hard questions about how to build hardware in the world where China wins.

  • Farb Nivi (Minicircle). Farb Nivi explores his personal health journey, his successful experiment with Minicircle, and why radical longevity research could reshape the future of health.

  • Codie Sanchez (Blue Collar Network States). In this 2023 talk, Codie Sanchez talks about making the network state accessible to everyday people and blue collar workers in particular, to build the largest possible political coalition.

Wow! OK, that’s sovereign governments, billion dollar funds, billion dollar coins, billion dollar companies, creators with millions of followers, famous public intellectuals, and dozens of startup societies…all of whom are now interested in the broad idea of bringing online communities into the physical world.

Of course, our short recap of each talk doesn’t fully convey the energy of the event. So if you want to see the full videos, go look at the Network State Conference playlists for 2025, 2024, and 2023.

From URL to IRL

Now let’s recap the recap.

Clearly, quite a lot of successful people now have an interest in startup societies. But one thing I want to stress is that anyone can now start a startup society, with minimal resources, including you. The point of having all these prominent folks at the conference is just to establish that there is now social, political, and financial support for you to materialize your ideal community7 in the physical world.

And there’s also now a process: begin with a popup, and get your online friends in the same place at the same time for an extended duration. If that goes well, the next step is to crowdfund a permanent startup community. And from there, the sky’s the limit, because you’re bootstrapping from the cloud.

Ultimately, the goal of the network state movement is to help create 1000+ friendly internet communities around the world that anyone can choose from, from vegan villages to Catholic cities to biotech boroughs. To allow you to find or found your ideal society in the physical world. We think of this as the third kind of thing: after internet companies and internet currencies, we finally have internet communities.

The next startup is a popup.

Subscribe now

2025-09-28 17:17:40

Network State Conference 2025 will be in Singapore on October 3. We already have 3000+ registrations, but by the time you read this there may still be a few spots left. You can attend in person for $99 or watch remotely by signing up here.

This year’s speakers include Vitalik Buterin, Bryan Johnson, Ben Horowitz, Brian Armstrong, Amjad Masad, Ranveer Allahbadia, Arthur Hayes, Nas Daily, Noah Smith, Andrew Huberman, and the governments of Singapore, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and El Salvador.

Our event is right after Token2049 and Solana APEX, where I’ll also be making guest appearances. So, if you’re in Singapore for this week’s cryptocurrency gatherings you should certainly come to the Network State Conference.1

Because the next step after cryptocurrencies is cryptocommunities.

From Cryptocurrencies to Cryptocommunities

Network states are becoming real.

We wrote our book in 2022, held our first conference in 2023, and opened our school in 2024. Now, we have a movement. From tiny startups to global organizations, many different actors are now opening up physical popups, starting startup societies, materializing internet communities, and negotiating special economic zones.

This year’s conference documents that movement. We have Vitalik Buterin on Ethereum network-state inspired popups like Zuzalu and Etherlaken. We have Brian Armstrong and Xen Baynham-Herd of Coinbase on Basecamp and the Base Network State. We have Akshay BD and Farhaj Mahan from Solana on Forma and the new Solana Economic Zones. We have Veronika Kapustina, CEO of Telegram’s new TON Strategy Co, on the path to the Telegram Network State. And we have Bryan Johnson speaking about longevity and the Don’t Die Network State.

So: Ethereum, Coinbase, Solana, Telegram, and Don’t Die — all important online movements with billions of dollars and millions of followers — are materializing their cloud communities into the physical world. And they’ll be speaking about it at the Network State Conference.

Nation States + Network States

But wait, there’s more. Because the concept of the network state is also about win/win cooperation between nation states and digital networks. After all, many countries (particularly small states, and those from the ascending world) want global technologists to bring capital, talent, and economic development to their jurisdictions.

Towards that end, we have talks by representatives of the governments of El Salvador, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore. Stacy Herbert will speak about El Salvador’s Bitcoin office, its AI law, and its digital nomad programs. Rashid Mohammed will talk about Expo City, a startup city built in Dubai, while Wai-Lum Kwok will discuss Abu Dhabi Global Markets (ADGM)’s pro-crypto regulation. And Jacqueline Poh, chief of Singapore’s $40B JTC development arm, will speak about building the physical infrastructure and innovation parks that enable Singapore’s rapid economic growth.

The Network State Ecosystem

And there’s still more.

• Billion dollar funds. We have heads of billion dollar funds, including Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, Olaf Carlson-Wee of Polychain, Avlok Kohli of AngelList, and Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly.

• Billion dollar companies. We have fireside chats with founders of multi-billion dollar companies, including Amjad Masad of Replit, Arthur Hayes of Bitmex, and Yat Siu of Animoca.

• Billion dollar coins. We have major crypto projects like Dan Romero of Farcaster, Sreeram Kannan of Eigenlayer, Circle cofounder Sean Neville, and Zcash cofounder Zooko Wilcox.

• Million follower creators. We have creators with millions of followers, including Ranveer Allahbadia of Beer Biceps, Nuseir Yasin of Nas Daily, and Andrew Huberman.

• Public intellectuals. We have talks from Noah Smith of Noahpinion, Thiel Fellowship and 1517 Fund cofounders Michael Gibson and Danielle Strachman, seasteading inventor and Pronomos founder Patri Friedman, Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry of PolicySphere, Murtaza Hussein of Drop Site, Parag Khanna of AlphaGeo, Avik Roy of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, and Kathleen Tyson of Multicurrency Mercantilism.

• And startup societies. And, of course, we have founders of startup societies2 like Farhaj Mayan of Forma, Niklas Anzinger of Infinita, Timour Kosters of Edge City, Aaron Renn of American Reformer, Alexander Grinspan of Fractal Boston, Maya Parbhoe of Bitcoin Sranan, Paul McNiel of Wagon Box, Adam Miller of MIDAO, Bradford Cross of Alpha City, Olly Kovalieva of Oz City, Vit Jedlicka of Liberland, Lonis Hamaili of Prospera, Jean Hansen of Ipe City, and James of Arc’s ârc.com.

I could say more…but need I say more?3

The point is that many of the most successful founders, creators, and investors in the world are now interested in the idea of bringing online communities into the physical world. Moreover, writers, policymakers, and intellectuals from around the world (and across the ideological spectrum!) are aligning around the concept of fusing networks with states, with ideas ranging from pro-tech regulations to special innovation zones. And all this capital and talent going towards the area means that you too4 can join a startup society that suits you — or found one yourself.

Because that’s the next step. We’ve started internet companies, we’ve started internet currencies, and now we’re starting internet communities.5 Come to the Network State Conference to be there at the start.

2025-08-03 16:38:31

Here are ten thoughts on AI that I personally find economically useful. Let’s go.

1. First: there is no AGI, there are many AGIs. That is: we empirically observe polytheistic AI (many strong models) rather than monotheistic AI (a single all-powerful model). We have many models from many factions that have all converged on similar capabilities, rather than a huge lead between the best model and the rest. So we should expect a balance of power between various human/AI fusions rather than a single dominant AGI that will turn us all into paperclips/pillars of salt.

2. Next, AI moves all costs to prompting and verifying. Basically, today’s AI only does tasks middle-to-middle, not end-to-end. So all the business expenditure migrates towards the edges of prompting and verifying, even as AI speeds up the middle.

3. AI is amplified intelligence, not artificial intelligence. Today’s AI is not truly agentic because it’s not truly independent of you. The current crop of agents can’t set complex goals, or properly verify outputs. You have to spend a lot of effort on prompting, verifying, and system integrating. That just means the smarter you are, the smarter the AI is. It’s really amplified intelligence, more than agentic intelligence.

4. AI doesn’t take your job, it lets you do any job. Because it allows you to be a passable UX designer, a decent SFX animator, and so on. But it doesn’t necessarily mean you can do that job well, as a specialist is often needed for polish.

5. AI doesn’t take your job, it takes the job of the previous AI. For example: Midjourney took Stable Diffusion’s job, and GPT-4 took GPT-3’s job. Once you have a slot in your workflow for AI image generation, AI code generation, or the like, you just allocate that spend to the latest model. Hence, AI takes the job of the previous AI.

6. AI is better for visuals than verbals. That is, AI is better for the frontend than the backend, and better for images/video than for text. The reason is that user interfaces and images can easily be verified by human eye, whereas huge walls of AI-generated text or code are expensive for humans to verify. See discussion with Andrej Karpathy here and here.

   

7. Killer AI is already here, and it’s called drones. And every country is pursuing it. So it’s not the image generators and chatbots one needs to worry about.

8. AI is probabilistic while crypto is deterministic. So crypto can constrain AI. For example, AI can break captchas, but it can’t fake onchain balances. And it can solve some equations, but not cryptographic equations. Thus, crypto is roughly what AI can’t do. See also these talks (1, 2) on how AI makes everything fake, but crypto makes it real again.

   

9. AI is empirically decentralizing rather than centralizing. Right now, AI is arguably having a decentralizing effect, because there are (a) so many AI companies and (b) there is so much more a small team can do with the right tooling, and (c) because so many high quality open source models are coming.

10. The optimal amount of AI is not 100%. After all: 0% AI is slow, but 100% AI is slop. So the optimal amount of AI is actually between 0-100%. Yes, the exact figure varies by situation, but just the idea that 0% and 100% are both suboptimal is useful. It's the Laffer Curve, but for AI:

    

Finally, here’s an a16z podcast with Martin Casado and Erik Torenberg where we go through all these ideas in depth!

Today’s AI is Constrained AI

Putting it all together, fundamentally, this is a model of constrained AI rather than omnipotent AI.

• AI is economically constrained, because every API call is expensive and because there are so many competing models.

• AI is mathematically constrained, because it (provably) can’t solve chaotic, turbulent, or cryptographic equations.

• AI is practically constrained, because it has to be prompted and verified, and because it does things middle-to-middle rather than end-to-end.

• AI is physically constrained, because it currently requires humans to sense context and type that in via prompts, rather than gathering all that for itself.

To be clear, it’s possible that these limitations are overcome in the future. It’s possible someone could unify the probabilistic System 1 thinking of AIs with the deterministic/logical System 2 thinking that computers have historically been very good at. But that’s an open research problem.

Some of these ideas previously appeared on X and YouTube. See comments here, here, and here. And the talks here, here, and here.

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2025-07-28 09:24:26

All property becomes cryptography.

Let me explain why.

1. First, right now, trillions of dollars worth of digital gold is secured onchain. Bitcoin is now valued everywhere there is an internet connection. And no matter what political faction you're in, everyone agrees on the raw fact of who owns what amount of BTC.

2. Next, right now, the full legalization of stablecoins means that every other asset goes onchain. Because if there is a legal status for onchain currency, of course there's a legal path for onchain stocks, onchain bonds, and every other type of financial asset.

3. So, that's a lot right there. But there's actually a next step. As you can see from the video below, this door can also be secured with an onchain smart lock. That means the door to your house can be secured by crypto. So can the door to your car.

   From Hideyoshi Moriya: My home also can be unlocked with Ethereum, by verifying a NFT (ENS) ownership. In this example, the system verifies if I have an ownership of piyo.eth @ensdomains.
   

4. Indeed, any door can be secured in this way. The door to a plane, to a train, to a boat, to a building. Any door can be secured onchain.

5. But this is really more than the keys to your car door. It's really the keys to your car itself. The digital signature starts the engine. And that means any piece of capital equipment, from cranes to drones can be similarly secured.

6. That includes the humanoid robots, the sidewalk robots, the self-driving cars, and just about anything that's controlled electronically. Which is almost everything.

7. There are exceptions. The food on your plate, the shirt on your back, those can't and won't be secured onchain. But that's actually a negligible fraction of value in the world.

8. For everything else, for 99%+ of what's valuable, for every financial asset and every capital asset, we will secure it onchain.

9. And the reason we'll have to do that is that the blockchain is the only truly secure backend. The Pentagon gets repeatedly hacked, as do many web2 services, but scaled public blockchains do not.

10. So: even the control plane for the drones goes onchain. The blockchain is the basis by which we can build a code-based order on the Internet, a new kind of global economic union that allows anyone with an internet connection to access world-class monetary policy and contractual equality.

All property becomes cryptography.

This post originally appeared on X. See comments here.

2025-04-19 00:35:39

Global meritocracy is finally here.

We’re launching a new fellowship for founders and creators, open to anyone from any country. You can apply online in ten minutes. If accepted, you will receive $100k in funding for a new or existing venture. Our main requirement is that you relocate to the Network School campus near Singapore with other fellows for one year to lock in.

If that already sounds amazing, go to ns.com/fellowship/apply. Then read on for details on who should (and should not!) apply, what the process is like, and why we’re launching this.

(1) Who should apply

You should apply if you’re a global tech founder, AI-first creator, or community builder.

Our ideal founder recognizes that the Internet is rising, that Asia is rising, and that technology has now fully decentralized1 out of Silicon Valley. We welcome applicants from any country, so long as you have English language fluency. As for the specific area2, what you’re working on matters less than how intensely you’re working on it. Some of our founders will be early in their careers (like recent high school grads or newly minted PhDs), while others will have more experience (like open source developers, research scientists, early stage startup alumni, or engineering professors). But we’re flexible, so long as you’re technical.

Our AI-first creator category is newer and deserves a bit more explanation. In short, we believe 20th century media is over. And we think every niche filled by the formerly mainstream media — Hollywood, newspapers, magazines, broadcast television, and the like — is up for grabs as never before, with production shifting from traditional venues to the global Internet. So, we’re looking for filmmakers, artists, and storytellers who want to make tasteful3 use of AI to hyperdeflate production costs and write new stories for the 21st century. We’re open to “traditional” creators too4, but we think the economic leverage from AI will be substantial5, so we want creators who think about AI as an integral part6 of their workflow.

Our community builder category is likewise new and also merits explanation. Briefly, we think the third kind of “thing” after tech companies and cryptocurrencies will be startup societies. That means intentional communities, pop-up cities, and network states, where digital tribes assemble offline in person. I’ve written about this at length in The Network State, but see this video and dashboard to see why we we think startup societies will be a megatrend.

About you

OK, so that’s the type of person we’re looking for professionally — a founder or creator. But what are you like personally?

• You’re Internet First, in that you broadly believe in the open web, decentralization, cryptocurrency, and encryption.

• You’re classically liberal, centrist, or otherwise politically pragmatic7 — rather than ultranationalist or socialist.

• You’d be in tech even if markets crashed for a decade, so long as you had time to study, learn, and explore.

• You’re excited to relocate to our solarpunk campus near Singapore for a year to level up among others of like mind.

• And you’re likely what we call dark talent — undiscovered greatness from the middle of nowhere8, whether that’s India or Indiana, Eastern Europe or the Middle East — who just needs a shot to prove yourself. And this is your shot.

So: you should apply9 for the Network School Fellowship if you’re looking for a sunny, green, and calm environment to build your dream amidst a community of builders. We’ve created a peaceful place with minimal distraction where funding, coffee, food, gym, office space, laundry, cleaning, and all the rest is provided so you can focus on work.

Now, let’s focus on the application.

(2) How to apply

Because we’re open to the whole world, we expect many to apply. So, we have a simple multi-stage process for obtaining a Network School Fellowship.

• Form. First, fill out the form at ns.com/fellowship/apply. We’ll review to see if you have either potential (as demonstrated by test scores and academic accomplishment) or results (as demonstrated by tech portfolio or startup traction). We’ll also administer a short screening test and ask for references.

• Zoom. For those we deem competitive in the first round, we’ll do a structured video interview where we get to know you and ask a number of interactive questions. We seek people with high integrity and high agency, a combination that’s hard to assess through forms alone.

• Room. Finally, we ask candidates who make it to the third round to fly out10 to our Network School campus near Singapore11 for an in-person, proctored, pencil and paper objective examination similar to the IIT JEE, the GaoKao, or the SAT. This offline component allows us to AI-proof the online talent search, thereby confirming your skills. During your trip you’ll also meet other Network Schoolers, see the facilities, and determine if you’re ready to build.

• Boom. Then, if you’re accepted, you’ll relocate to Network School for one year to build. We’ll either fund12 your existing company or set up a new one. Existing companies will be backed in their current jurisdictions, while new companies will be incorporated by default in Singapore.13

So that’s the idea: a global startup draft, like the NBA draft, where we source talent from around the world and colocate it in person. We’re starting with 100 global founders in our first batch, and plan to scale up over time if things go well.

But why are we doing this?

(3) Why we’re doing this

We believe the old path for finding global tech talent — which went through Stanford14, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, California, and ultimately America — is ending. So we’re going to need a new path, based on pure global meritocracy. And we think the Network School Fellowship could be a starting point for this new path.

To motivate this, let’s talk about (a) what the path for tech talent used to look like, (b) why it’s now broken, and (c) how we plan to replace it.

The old path for tech talent

Let’s break this up into the American and global paths.

The American path once started with a smart young kid in the middle of (say) Indiana like Scott McNealy. He’d take the SAT, get a great score, attend a top engineering school at a reasonable price, come to Stanford for his graduate degree, found a Silicon Valley tech company, scale it up, and eventually go public.

The global path once started with a smart young kid in the middle of (say) India like Vinod Khosla. He’d take the IIT-JEE, get a great score, attend a top engineering school at a reasonable price, come to Stanford for his graduate degree, found a Silicon Valley tech company, scale it up, go public, and eventually become a US citizen.15

Now, if you know anything about those two men, you’d know that they cofounded a little multibillion dollar company called Sun Microsystems. That is: they came from very different places, but thanks to the magic of global meritocracy, thanks to international capitalism, they could build something great together that pushed tech forward and benefited the world.

The old path for tech talent is broken

Yet their story is much less possible in today’s US. I won’t rehash every headline, but today’s Scott McNealy might well be blocked from matriculating by DEI, and today’s Vinod Khosla might well be blocked from immigrating on an H-1B. And that’s really just the start of it. Every single piece of the old path for tech talent is now either fully broken or under assault. To review:

• Stanford. With anti-merit admissions, unaffordable tuition, student visa denials, grade inflation, ideological zealotry, AI fakery, lack of reproducibility, and budget cuts, US academia (including Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, etc) is in steep decline.

• Silicon Valley. Still great people here, but the proverbial garage startup may need $250k just for compliance. High cost, high regulation, and high ideological conformity now means fewer crazy ideas — and much more consensus (and hence fundable, but perhaps not exceptional) work.

• San Francisco. Even more extraordinary cost, rampant crime, out-of-control filth, anti-tech laws, and ideological anti-tech sentiment that’s escalated all the way to ritual destruction of self-driving cars and violent attacks on founders.16

• California. A bankrupt state that can’t control fires, stop theft, or build public infrastructure — but that will still raise taxes and impose anti-tech regulations.17

• America. Now institutionally hostile to skilled immigration, foreign investors, student visas, exports, imports, free trade, and foreigners in general, with unpredictable corporate law.

In short: the combination of surging anti-capitalism and anti-internationalism means it’s going to be much harder for global tech talent to come to Silicon Valley to build international tech companies. That path is now closing.

Fortunately, we still have the Internet.

The new path for tech talent

Remember, there’s no silicon being mined out of the hills of Silicon Valley. There’s no natural resource keeping tech there. So in theory, given that you just need a laptop to build things on the Internet, we should be able to materialize the global tech community anywhere. But in practice, someone needs to actually do that.

And constructive proofs are always more satisfying than existence proofs. So, rather than simply assert that a better path exists, we must build it. And from a practical standpoint, we must also recognize that we can’t replace the old path for global tech talent in one fell swoop. After all, literally millions traveled that path, and will continue to do so for some time, even if it’s breaking. So we’ll have to start small, with perhaps just one hundred builders, to prove a new path for tech talent.

And thus the Network School Fellowship.

In a sense, our fellowship just does the “obvious” thing. It starts with the observation that tech has already decentralized out of Silicon Valley, and it gives a new coordinating point for global tech talent to assemble.

We put the first node of the Network School in the new Singapore-Johor Special Economic Zone because (a) thousands of millionaires have moved to Singapore, (b) >50% of the Earth’s population is within a short plane flight, (c) ~50% of GDP is now within Asia, (d) crypto has already decentralized to Asia, (e) AI is in the middle of similarly decentralizing, and (f) the zone has plenty of visas for global talent and a stated goal of recruiting 20,000 skilled workers.

In other words: we have capital here to fund tech companies, visas for tech talent, and the will to build. And with that will, we’ve already built our initial facilities and seeded the community. Which means we have everything set up for you.

And all we need is you. So, apply for the Network School Fellowship at ns.com.