New Cities, Network States and Technology

Transcript

so our our next speaker is Nicholas on singer uh he's going to be talking about new cities Network States and technology so give a huge round of applause for Nicholas everybody enjoy hi everyone great to be here can everyone hear me the back perfect cool yeah so has anyone heard of the network stage just the word the phrase hands up it's not that many everyone else hasn't heard about it right baji shasan right have you actually read the book or just listen to oh someone's read the book oh wow cool so an educated audience here so yeah I'm going to talk a bit about Network States new cities

right so one of my messages will be there's already new city developments that are kind of from the space and also how this can accelerate a new wave of technological progress why do I care about that um I have a VC fund I started it inspired by my experience being a resident in Prosper has anyone heard of prosp in this room yeah Charter City special economic zone on ratan beautiful Caribbean island that's part of the country of Honduras I'm a resident there I live there four to six months in a year and it inspired me to do this VC fund because what I'm going to talk about today is something great that's in the making that's

happening I'm a resident of zalu does anyone know about zalu vitalic popup City in Montenegro two months long Network State like experiment also super cool and I also organize a couple of events I'm going to do a a refi event on Zanzibar in Tanzania in two weeks so there's direct flights from Paris if you're going to ECC you can fly directly over there I also organized a conference new cities and network states which was the first of its kind and have a really Co cool podcast called The Strand the Technologies podcast so my first message is so many people who read BAGI spook they're like oh this is kind of confusing and sort of

very futuristic and way far into the future and my first message is it already exists right so and not that many people know about this this is already kind of a bigger thing or a bigger Trend right but there is real City developments right so Honduras is a Pioneer there are some places in Africa especially Nigeria and Zanzibar with two developments so there is a couple of developments happening with real physical space with real estate development also what I call Network States here is kind of a Community First approach to start new developments like that so afropolitan and practices especially have been innovating a lot there and also in the co-living S previous speaker mentioned uh cabin or

coh here these are also like tokenizing owning Landing in real estate together so to me they fall in the same Space cabin calls itself a network city right and there's a bunch of infrastructure around and a bunch of organization so I could give a much longer talk talking about all of those really fascinating stuff happening but I'm here mainly to talk about the thing that I love the most which is technology right so why do I care so much about these new developments because I think they can accelerate technology right so there's this quip by a notorious billionaire who said they promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters so I studied this for a

couple of years and I have a background in economics and I couldn't believe it at first but there's something to that right sort of in a slightly wonky depiction of it is this chart which talks about total Factor productivity it's basically the rate of productive economic growth right so we've been growing a lot until like the 70s and then we're we were kind kind of St stagnating or flatlining there's a website called WTF happened in 1971 which has hundreds of indicators showing that there's a worrisome Trend happening right and there's innovation in the world of bits that's great like we got software we got the personal computer we got web 3 and crypto but it's not happening in the world of atoms but in one example that makes this apparent to

me is cities right so San Francisco LA housing prices in many parts of the world like we heard from the speaker before for that's a common Trend and that's not good right also airports increasingly I've been a nomad for 3 years and I feel like airports are increasingly getting a worse product more expensive more taxes more bureaucracy going through so there's something happening and I spend tons of time on my podcasts just researching what's going on I have a background myself as an entrepreneur I talk to hundreds of entrepreneurs Regulators policymakers economists and I think there's a real problem in the way we do regulation right our regulatory Paradigm in healthcare and biotech there's

something called eo's law which is the reverse of Mo law right so if Mo law increased our computing power every two years or doubled computing power every two years Mor law does the opposite for new drug development literally the opposite happened in new drug development despite Mor law despite computational biology it costs now hundreds of millions and takes 10 to 15 years to bring new drugs to Market right it's been happening over decades if you're in crypto you know about the SEC you might have heard about Gary Gensler the Hoy test why are we talking about like laws from the 1930s that regulate a new technology why are we talking about like this orange tra that is supposed to regulate what we want to

do in this space right I think we'd be already much much further especially when it comes to like tokenization of realwood assets if it wasn't for these bottlenecks right who updates them so the idea is like it always is in technology or in much of progress of human history where are the Frontiers right so it used to be the American West for example or we looking for new Industries like crypto technologies that are born free software they were unencumbered by by anything so where is that where can we go right so the network state is that idea that's out there basically to encapsulate the uh intent to exit and exit is not full exit right so you can

also do a digital exit you just want a place where you have permissionless right and we have a place right now we have a 0o to one where that permissionless extends into the real world I'm a very proud resident of that space and again it catalyzed my bigger Vision that now there's something we can do about all these things right so and many of the other projects they're also pushing the boundaries in other areas prosperous is really the most advanced one of its kind so this why I'm very bullish on it and spend most of my time there and prospera has I think the winning idea to solve the regulatory problem and the idea is called polycentric common law there's a

fantastic pcast episode with Tom W Bell who literally developed an open-source legal code right so he collected the best legal practices from hundreds of years and put them in a file literally on GitHub right so if you have a new new network state project if you want to build kind of a new Society you can use that legal code and Fork it and adapt it to your local needs to your local culture and everything like that which I think is an absolutely brilliant idea and the core idea to it that is flexibility right so you're not forced by your regulator or your government you have to you know you're under jurisdiction you have this but instead you have flexibility that's something I could talk about for hours but the idea

is and what's great about it is is it's flexible for business right so as a business you're not under this one FDA instead you can choose what regulations you're under there's a great company called minicircle that is doing clinical trials in Prosper right and they're not doing anything much different they're they still doing safety trials they just can cut tons of bureaucracy by just saying oh we need to we don't need all this documentation beforehand that's redundant right or area Loop a drone Logistics company did you know that zipline the biggest drone company in the world I think valued at several billion they didn't start commercial flights in the United States they started them in Rwanda which is kind of crazy right

because the aviation regulations in the United States treat drones like Airlines which is insane for a small startup you just can't do that and fulfill all these requirements so now with Prosper every Loop has has a base to do what zipline has done in Rwanda similar cases C Factory super fast building permits to build like really funky futuristic housing like this in the background or sashad bank right so this the financial system is getting more centralized because of Regulation right it's not it's not preventing it it's centralizing it even more right so after the financial crisis the approval for new bank Charter in decreased by 98% which means there's fewer big Banks

which is part of what BAGI calls the Fiat crisis right now so in in Prosper we have a new bank charted just like that so why do I care about this so what's the ultimate goal of it I think with these places with Prosper with network states with new cities we're experimenting in finding a better economic model right so a model that can give us 5% productive economic growth instead of two right so two is what we got in the best years probably not right now but we got it in the best years that's what got us to where we are now if we get back to 2% we would 7.5x Humanity in 100 years which is great but I don't think it's enough to solve like

extreme poverty and allow us to build like um you know an extraplanetary a multiplanetary species if we can get that to 5% we're g 130x Humanity that would allow us to solve extreme poverty that would allow us to solve housing that would make us a multiplanetary species that would be a new civilizational super abundance right so just looking at time because I can get very excited about these things oh I'm actually quite have a lot of time so there's a couple of levers where I think that we can test in these new developments and cities to reach this 5% and they're actually not that funky right they're actually very common sensical we just need to do what

we already know works so we know in crypto we can build a new Financial system right I mean many of us are probably already building these tools right right the problem really just is that the the banks are fighting back right and they don't want that right because they see they see they think they're threatened Tokyo has deregulated housing in the early 2000s it has since not increased in rent and in land prices it's like one of the only or major city in the world right where everybody everywhere else that increase Tokyo is just building right it's just much easier to build new housing education also very big topic right so I think we're doing a lot wrong

when it comes to education in ways that are that I could talk for hours about what I mentioned in medical right so um there's different degrees of freedom how we could sort of um how we could improve and I'm happy to talk about all of them but some are very common sensical also I think nuclear energy would be a clean source of energy or of power that would allow us to well improve the climate right and to also develop um all sorts of other industrial technology we can need for example to desalinate water so we can have like clean water much more accessible all over the world right also I think labor Mobility is one of the biggest problems in the world right so I think it's the biggest Injustice in the world that's

going on today or the biggest driver of inequality is the passport you're born with right so it explains by far the most and it's a major Injustice and my hope is that in this space we can create a more open world where it's easier if you're born in a country where there's not much opportunity to go somewhere else where you can upgrade and upskill your life where there's also some really cool and funky stuff that I don't know yet if it can work but my friend in longevity biotech tell me we could live hundreds of years awesome let's try it right now in the dfda we're doing it way too slow or nano technology right so we can have like these miniature nanoscale robots that could engineer the material

world synthetic biology probably as well coupled with AI we could literally have robots built bu housing right so energy 2 Che to meter and just a much more open world you know my one of my favorite economists Brian Kaplan estimated if we had open borders we would double world GDP right so something specific to this conference that I wanted to mention because I would otherwise probably asked the question what opportunities are there for crypto for web 3 just to list a couple where these new devel Vel Ms can help us accelerate right so one is easy sound money right so you know once you have your money in in crypto you governments can't abuse it to fight Wars

and they can't take it away from your or sees it you know unless that's under explicit small smart contracts that you agreed with before same for wealth protection right so you know you're going to have a real social contract and you know you can sue that government or whatever whatever and you know this obeys the rules of the smart social contract right public goods funding right so I think a lot of the barriers for example for crowd funding um you know accredited investor rules in the United States not sure in Europe you're that familiar with it but it makes a lot of public goods funding harder right it makes it harder for people who are not very wealthy to participate in like communal efforts to to do public goods also property rights in 3D are pretty

cool so you can tokenize the air right and have a market for like drones right so where can they fly where can they not fly or for viewpoints right so you want to get together as a community and sort of protect this airspace and its views same for like nature protection right that's the place this is exactly where we can tokenize sort of access to to to to land you can have an auditable public treasury doesn't yet exist to my knowledge but it would be great I made an X when it already exists right I can point examples I didn't make an X when it when it doesn't exist yet uh at zalu we experimented with zero knowledge technology for identity verification also super cool what if in

the future you know your passports could be created through you know zero knowledge technology which is much more you know privacy insuring and then you know lastly this hyper liquidity hyper tokenization of everything like the bottleneck right now is simply registers right land Registries for for property and securities laws around that and what you can trade and what you can't trade so so yeah this is just a summary of this is just the beginning or the surface of why I'm really excited about this space and it's really nessing right the first conference in that space the new cities and network States conference was just like two months ago in zalu right and it's inspired by this space

right by you know ethereum is in a way a uh a network State and zalu is kind of italic first experiment to well let's see what happens if we get together in the real world and do things so that's super super encouraging and I think a real inflection point so I think for any Builder there is ample opportunity to join and see which projects excite you you know they have all have different focuses right some are more libertarian some are more Progressive more fun funding public goods so I want this space to have loads of different flavors and we try out loads of different things and how we can improve governance right so um here you can find me connect with me something that I didn't include here I'm doing a

little meet up on Saturday um one of the co-founders of prospera is actually here so on Saturday he can talk we can talk more things Prosper which is really really exciting it's something again could talk about for hours so go on that thing and then click on events and then I think it's the first event on Saturday hope to see you there I think we still have three minutes for questions thank you yeah I was just going to say like um yeah my question is that as as bureaucratic as regulation may be sometimes and ineffective it's also there to protect against existential risk externalities exploitation and by

privatizing ownership to billionaires of like exponential Technologies do you not see that as like quite dangerous and like potential to actually accelerate risks and the climate crisis and uh icial intelligence risk uh bio kind of engineering all this kind of stuff seems quite scary to me to me the exact opposite is scary right so when you look at any material existing existential risk like bioweapons like nuclear power like weapons of mass destruction like gas everything everything has one thing in common they've been used for military purposes by governments right so do we want to give governments the power to regulate these Technologies instead of you know being them having them open source right where where you can

actually build checks and balances right it's not few centralized actors that have access to dangerous technology or the power instead you know we can build open source security protocols against these things I think that would be a much more safer World why would it be open source if it's VC owned if it's yeah if it if it's VC and private owned it's not necessarily open source you could just be replicating the same extractive models but worse that's the risk right well I would say open source is good right the more better yeah but there's no guarantee that it's open source right no I mean does not guarantee but you know we've seen in software and we've seen in crypto and web 3 you know the first thing that builders in that space gravitate towards is making lots of things available open source and it did so without regulations

to tell them to do so right now look look what's happened to crypto now for what what are the reasons um yeah appreciate the talk love the network State energy I'm curious about this lens around GDP growth going to 5% if this happens in an extractive economy we lose access to clean air our top soil biodiversity and clean water at an increased rate where the science already shows we're going to hit tens of millions of deaths per summer per year by 2035 so what are we looking at if we keep you know increasing the rate of extraction in this current economic system if we don't solve the underlying

problem of how we treat the planet yeah again I think the almost the entire opposite is true right so it's because of like governments that outre things like nuclear power very cheap and clean energy that we are much less close to combating climate change than we are I think is also due to one of the biggest source of emissions in the world is fossil fuel subsidies by governments mainly coming from Egypt from Indonesia from um from China from India these are one of the biggest sources and you know I think we we can do much better again if the market is much more liquid and if especially if it's growing because what is we've also seen is as populations get more wealthy we care more about the

environment we have more resources to protect the environment and we have more people that can um labor on protecting the environment got time for one more question or yeah it time is up but then we have time for one more question or oh um I'm confused oh these are all questions I think we should prioritize people in the room though right oh these are people in the room okay cool which ones do I do how do we heck do we need 5% growth is it sustainable um why don't we just reduce

waste again I think these are things aren't mutually exclusive right I mean we can have a longer debate about that but you know wealthier societies are also more protective of the environment and have cleaner air yeah no it isn't yeah I mean we won't solve that entire debate

but I'm happy to stay around much longer to debate that I like these debates so I think we should have this debates um how to get to zalu I don't know about the next zalu all right but I think it's going to happen sometime this year or early next year um why should we give more power to VCS when their entire model is completely [Music] authoritarian yeah I mean as opposed to what right I mean I'm trying to I think when I compare it in Honduras for example I'm going to make the first ever VC investment in a startup the uh the comparison is very predatory financing options it's people like giving them

like very little money for getting very high ownership shares it's like very big Banks trying to grab away ownership from Founders right and it's very very predatory so when you compare it to that I think VC can do a lot good in the world right is it the be all and all no happy to take criticisms can you describe in detail how life is in zalu or prospera what kind of population is there yeah that's a great question so very different so Prosper is very it's very local driven right so 60 70% of people in Prosper are Honduran right so about half of those are local Islanders it's an English speaking island right and there there as service workers as Cooks as teachers

some of them are setting up their own schools and doing their own businesses which is really cool the other of is educated Hondurans from the mainland right so they go to prosper instead of the United States and search for opportunity because it offers comparable High wages and opportunity and the other third is People Like Us in this room or like me right so Internationals I bologi calls them crypto internationalists I kind of like that word I like Frontier Technologies and I want to see where you know cool stuff is being built or done um um and in zalu is pretty much only the last one right so zalu uh wasn't very local montenegrin but um has been developing relations with the Montan government so zalu is very much crypto

internationalists like people here in this room yeah sorry qu time is over but I hope to see you on Saturday or after this [Applause] talk