Zuzalu and d/acc

Transcript

All right, everybody's caffeinated. >> This is going to be high-tech. All right. >> Yay. High tech. >> All right. So, Ethereum, the Ethereum network states, Zuzloo, the sons and daughters of Zuzloo. You've been working on that for a few years now. Where where is the stat? There's zoo Georgia, Zoo Thailand, all these zoos. >> Yeah. So after the uh first one in Montenegro and then you know a smaller one in Istanbul uh we made this decision to decentralize it right so we'll say we basically said that you know there isn't going to be like one big Zuzalu meta or that tries to coordinate everything that happens and so everyone go do your own and uh we tried a couple of different mechanisms to like coordinate some

technology and coordinate some uh funding for them but otherwise just kind left them to go and pursue their own visions, right? And >> and so do they all use Zupass or is there like does a stack is like how does that work exactly? >> A lot of them do but not all. Um it's like I don't think there's like any single thing that they all agree on, right? It's much more of a constellation. Um and so you know we saw Edge City kind of go um in one direction and do its thing. Then you know we saw some of the newer ones this year. um you know Switzerland uh zooama you know zoo cash some uh interesting kind of adjacent you know like things I mean crescent in

Buenos Cyrus like um forces in Chiang Mai another one it's like a bunch of different projects that are going in a lot of different directions >> and there's some common themes so there's longevity and biotech >> that's a shared interest that we have >> and then I think another thing that popped out to me about uh what a lot of the Zuzlu projects work on is public goods of various kinds, >> various voting mechanisms, government mechanisms. Is that fair? Like passports, registries, that kind of stuff. >> Yeah. I mean, also you know what I what I've called the DAK philosophy, right?

So, >> right. So, explain that people don't. >> Yeah. So, it's well the the acronym stands for a lot of things but mainly defensive decentralized acceleration. Uh so accelerating technology that is uh open um open source uh that is uh decentralizing you know like both architecturally and uh designs to not concentrate power and uh like that at the same time is positive sum right and that is uh like actually trying to basically do defense rather than offense and you know keep everything cohesive.

Would you would you agree that let's say there's EA effective altruism effective accelerationism which started as a parody of EA but then became its own thing and which I'm sympathetic to then DAK is sort of somewhere in the middleish >> like a >> right I mean yeah I mean I would call it sort of the middle of a triangle but uh yeah >> middle of a triangle what's the other what's the other point? Yeah, actually the three that I often talk about is uh one is uh kind of you know European style del or degrowth. The other is uh like basically EAC and the third is what I call national security act. Uh so this is kind of safety oriented like centralized big government and like big corporate sort of stuff.

>> I I'd only quibble with one word there which is usually the safety argument is made because you know versus security argument. So national security will be the security argument and the EU types will be the safety argument. But it's like slightly I mean it's the same thing but it's just differently. >> Right. Right. Yeah. and and like to me the uh idea of DAX is basically technologies that do very well on things like safety and security where and I think there like Ethereum is a great example right because you know it is a blockchain that's uh keeping a half trillion dollar economy like safe and uh quite stable and uh increasingly not not even just the layer one increasingly the application layer right like the the

hacks in DeFi as a percentage of TVL have just been, you know, dropping like a rock over the last five years. Yeah, >> that's a good graph. I >> That graph exists. It's in my uh I think my second most recent post. Um you know, like I put the graph it like dropped from like 5% to like I think like 02% or something this year. >> Why Why do you think that is because smart contracts are becoming more audited and people have more experience with them >> basically? Yeah. Smart Yeah. more audits, more experience, uh better uh better understanding of best practices, more reuse of components. Um and uh I mean obviously there's still like there's always the frontier of people doing the crazy things but uh you know the the safe bubble like like keeps getting safer and it keeps growing.

>> You know it's funny you might be able to derive some kind of aging function now that you've gotten we've got almost 10 years of smart contracts some sort of almost actuarial function >> which says what is that's an interesting machine learning problem. someone wants to do that, right? is like what is the risk of this contract based on its age >> you know and you know how many wreck news reports are there of you know it's like a like the biggest >> we've thought about this like I think Justin Drake had this idea that you could like I think he called it like the Lindy index and the index is the integral of uh logarithm of TVL uh over time >> and so basically yeah you know you

>> why why log TVL >> uh So obviously you know you accumulate lindiness over time you accumulate more lindiness uh the the bigger something is uh because uh if something's bigger then you know it has actual real opponents like it has to face real threats and I think like it has to be less than linear basically because like the number of new threats that you get going up from 1 million to 10 million like it's basic it's kind of similar to the number of new threats that you get going from like 1 billion to 10 billion right it's not like you know you get the same number from like 1 million to 10 as you do from like 1 billion to 1.09 and >> so meaning once it gets on people's radar they try start start trying to hack it and so the extra amount doesn't

matter that much. Is that why that that function >> right like basically yeah you know it's like every new order of magnitude I mean like it gives you a a fairly similar number of like new issues that you have to deal with. Yeah. I mean looking just like Ethereum's own history it feels pretty intuitive. >> Yeah. I mean one of the things that's very interesting about smart contracts is as you know like historically formal verification was always computationally infeasible and it was like you know breaking a breaking um what's it saying like a butterfly on a wheel >> and then suddenly with smart contracts the programs were small enough that it was feasible and they were value enough valuable enough that it was worth doing >> and so now you know you have certra and you have all these you know tools that try to do formal verification do you

feel that that has been working or I I mean that is that a contributing factor as well in your I think so. >> Yeah. So, okay. So, Ethereum network seeds. So, you've got the longevity parts, you've got the the the governance parts. So, coming back to that, what did what did you learn for the last twoish years of social experiments? So I think uh you know this whole uh network state movement and then you know the free cities movement and all these uh things that came before it uh they you know look started from a particular set of ideas and uh then you know when a set of ideas kind of collides with reality there's like the question of you know like what is the portion that

really sticks right and uh the thing that I've found is uh like it feels like there are individual zoo nodes that are turning into like persistent product market fit like I believe edge is already basically break even at least and uh you know to me some of the like frontier towers um like getting there already as I uh understand and like the others make sense from that perspective um but then uh like the questions that are always uh in the back of my mind right is like one is there's always been this longunning emphasis on getting some kind of government autonomy and a a lot of the time getting that like that product market fit like it at least in the short term you know it feels like uh

that's a thing that's hard to ask for and it has like a lower immediate value and so you know we're seeing people just not ask ask for it so far >> well I I so there is I think the the new salon economic zones and so on are like one step towards that because they've got like a deal with Kazoxan and whatnot so I think we're finally starting to see some you know and then obviously Prosper got the mini circle jurisdiction so I think I think there are some >> fruitful moves. There's Palao has the RNS.id which actually you've got I think right. Um so there's some fruitful moves towards getting jurisdictions to do novel things. Would you >> Yeah. I mean what what would you say out of all of those as like a type of uh juris like jurisdictional property

that's uh like both really meaningful and uh at the same time is uh like actually pragmatically valuable for people. Definitely mini circle the or rather the here's why the so the prosper story >> was they changed the law they got a biotech free zone >> they set up somebody set up mini circle various people invested >> then there was a treatment that uh Patrick Freriedman who you know spoke has used and he he really I'm only talking about their self-report right so Patri self-report was really good farm navy selfport was really good you know I I I'm not making any medical claims just saying that >> and then actually Bezos saw Farb Nevie's tweet and interacted with it and so on

because he is on the lookout for the things that money can't buy right >> and so this thing that radically so that's that's what I consider >> going all the way right from change the law start the company make the treatment give the treatment have it bubble up to the you know levels right like that is something I consider a success it's like a needle where it's only like N of one or end of two that's gone all the way through but it's a little clue as to what could happen if we could increase that that that's that's my I think best case study right now >> I mean I can actually give an answer from a totally different area uh immigration and visas okay >> uh so uh like you know there's a lot of this economic research that says that uh

like specifically immigration restriction is the uh like the one type of government regulation that like actually prevents the most uh economic activity and >> this is a Brian Kaplan style argument. >> Yeah, exactly. >> I I disagree with that but but I'll explain but go give >> and like the usual counter argument is basically like you know there's uh all of these people coming from all these places uh around the world and like we don't know who they are and we don't trust them, right? And uh the synthesis to me is basically that uh like the idea that governments could uh like regulate groups rather than individuals, right?

Basically that uh if you have a uh group and you know we could call it a network state, we could call it something else and then uh and then that group uh acquires a reputation for doing a good job of containing uh people who are highquality contributors, who are not likely to go commit crimes, who are not likely to go run off into the forest and so on. Then like from the perspective of a government's own interests, it's uh pragmatic for them to just uh let people from that group come because you know they're at the like if you already offer visa-free to like people from like some low income European country like realistically you're already at least as low risk as that, right? So I think uh especially in the age of I mean like

things like the whole like H1B situation like we need to figure out like you know new solutions to that kind of problem and I think like the something group level is like intuitively really feels right and >> yeah so so I think um let me give a quick argument against open borders and then >> tentively in for in the digital way. So the argument against is just you don't have open borders for your house, for your wallet, for anything that you really care about. You don't just allow anybody to come in there. So it's so you know if there's a bunch of people trampling through your living room, you say you know this and that extends your >> apartment and your and this that the out. And so that's the argument for controlling some degree of of in migration. With that said, in the

digital world, >> like Facebook, you know, Reddit or what have you, all these platforms, all the crypto platforms want everybody to become a user eventually, right? So, so the difference, why is there a difference? And I'd say in the digital realm, state capacity can scale >> almost independently of the number of people who are coming through, right? Um I mean yes there's blockchain scalability and so but it's not like the ability of Facebook to you know deal with malware spam scams people attacking each other that only very slowly scales with the with the population right >> so they can actually admit enormous millions billions of people and govern them >> with on the software side. The interesting question is how much that

scales and I think until that scales outside of software you couldn't do that in the physical world maybe one wouldn't want to. Yeah, and I think you know there has to be some kind of synthesis, right? And I think the whole point of this kind of online to offline thing that to me is at the core of this movement, right? Is that if uh like if your function is basically you know like you want to accept some number of people and you have some risk function then you like there are far better ways of making the decision of who than just basically discriminating based on which country someone comes from, right? Like that's Yeah. Like that's like a very low bandwidth signal, right? It's like during co they were trying to block borders in the US based on like Rhode Island versus New York or something like

that which is very very very poor as a signal. >> Yeah. And I think uh in general right like there's going to be a lot of these situations where like individuals wants to do various things companies wants to do various things and then uh governments they're like both interested but then uh you know they have their own risk calculation and uh if you have some kind of entity in the middle that's like basically able to acquire reputation for saying like these are people that we think are reasonably low risk right like it feels like something that's actually pragmat IC from both sides.

>> Yeah. So, so, so I do agree. It's funny because on the one hand, I'd say I think like what is is something humans have never done before whereas immigrations visas are something people have done. On the other hand, I think B might be a prerequisite for A because >> being able to set up an area where you can bring smart people from all over is becoming more and more and more valuable as a lot of places become more and more nationalist and and what have you, right? So, so I'd agree with you there. >> Uh, there are a bunch of countries doing digital nomad visas though. Mhm. >> And a lot of these small countries, have you observed this? You know, I was talking about this with a few other folks.

>> Small countries are more pro- crypto and more pro in general. Have you found that? >> I think so. >> Do you have a thesis? I mean, I have a thesis on why, but I'd love to hear if you have any thoughts. >> Yeah. I mean, I think if you're a large country, then you're big enough to where you think that you stand a chance of controlling the stack. If you're a small country, you don't. Right. And so, I think the uh the open stack is uh like that that is the alternative that makes sense for you. >> That's right. And that's why I think network states start can work with small states and actually strengthen them. You can bring talent you bring capital there. I mean >> then whenever you go like all the zoos >> probably bring quite a lot of investment money to their local thing or they they

could eventually over time at least DevCon Devcon did it not? Yeah. Yeah. So that shows like this cloud entities bring a lot of capital locally. So there's a positive sum trade to be had potentially. >> Exactly. Yeah. So one other thing that's like always interested me about the network state concept is uh it's not just about innovation in jurisdictional properties it's also about innovation in culture right and to me that's also at the core of the uh like I think the response to like are we just inventing co-working spaces and accelerators I >> I have I have a oneliner I have two oneliners on that okay that's not one ler it's a two liner but fine okay so first is hm why is why is like a sharp side never Why is it not just

co-working? Um because community is about connectivity. >> And the thing that differentiates a sharp society from a Starbucks is if you put on your augmented reality glasses, everybody in a sharp society would have edges between them because that's a community of friends >> and all the people at the Starbucks would uh be a community of strangers. It might be friendly, cordial strangers, but strangers nonetheless, right? So that I think is the difference. Community means connectivity and a lot of people use the word community to mean like oak benches and go ahead.

>> It's interesting you say that cuz that's like exactly a response I gave when uh someone asked me about the Estonia e- residency thing right because uh like I think the you know there are a lot of these beautiful kind of idealistic ideals there of like hey you know we are going to become a digital nation. I was yeah I was actually one of the first three Estonian residents along with >> it is yeah it's a cool thing and it's even a useful thing right there's a lot of like for example you know Chinese people for whom it's a an excellent way of getting you know like European ebanking right but then uh like to me ultimately a company is it's a hub and spoke thing it's a single entity with relationships to each person and a community is people who all do things for each other

>> issues too exactly that's right so so that's that's my that was my first and then on the Second one because you you said uh how do you know it's just not just co-working and and and so on. So like cultural innovation is there's usually somebody there's something you're doing where you're thinking it's good and the rest of the world thinks it's bad >> right and that so like I'm not saying to be controversial for the sake of it minimum necessary controversy but minimum necessary controversy if you need to do something good you know then so like a co-working space isn't quote controversial in that sense right so I think those would be the two answers connectivity and some small degree of controversy >> right yeah or sometimes you know like something where you think that It's good, but then like other people just kind of don't care or not interested,

right? It's >> a statement as a service. >> Exactly. I mean, even like I think like Brian Johnson is a good example of this, right? And like he has a lot of these like longevity ideas and like sometimes like you can't just go one step forward and uh you know like show like you can't just make every what you want happen through a single isolated product that makes sense in the context of everyone's pre-existing lifestyles. And like to his credit, you know, he has made versions of that and like his powders are good, right? But like sometimes like you also have to go deep, right? Yeah. And uh yeah and actually like I think this is also kind of my thinking in the context of like some of these zoo nodes. It's like something that a lot of them wants

to do as well, right? They wants to go deep on you know what I call Dak technologies which includes you know cryptography. It includes blockchain things. Um, it also includes a lot of health. Um, actually, so this thing I have over here, this is a a fun gadget. I'm actually a group that we give grants to out of Bali funds that it's a a clean air Tamagotchi. Uh, so it's uh basically a kind of Tamagotchi style game where uh but but it's attached to air quality monitors. And so here, you know, you have the CO2 meter, you have PM 2.5. And so this is basically you know a way of measuring like how how how good this room is in terms of you know like how

healthy the air is people not getting sick and so on. And so like effectively you know we're like actually bringing the uh the dream of you know the decentralized FDA thing. >> Exactly. I was going to get there. That's right. Like basically these sensors because ultimately regulation is information like let's say they're giving star ratings on um you know the quality of an actor and they're banning bad actors and if you had really great sensors that were impartial and that fed data and you had chain of custody and both the chain of custody and blockchain of custody sense and you could you know crypto cameras for example or or crypto sensors where they hash it as they're uploading it.

>> Yeah. Then you could come up with reports that were actually more trustworthy. Yeah. Right. Yeah. >> Yeah. Exactly. That's the plan. You know, basically hook up some sensors together with, you know, cryptography and No. >> And interesting, most of the time FDA might be too sensitive, but sometimes they're actually not enough. For example, like the uh the body scanners in the US airports like um TSA ran them through even though some people objected to FDA because there's a federal government agency who's able to ram them through. So sometimes you can audit them and actually find they're more risky than FDA would approve and you might not want that risk. Right.

>> Yeah. And like I think you know you can you can go around saying words about the clean air topic but then uh you can also just like go and create a demonstration and show people like look this is an entire community where everything is uh no >> and that's a great example of something for a community because there's so much economy of scale in having those things everywhere rather than I mean you can wear them around yourself but then you decentralize and you recentralize to have like some industrial strength thing and it's hooked to sensors and it tracks everything and so on and so forth. Right. Exactly.

>> Sensors. Yeah. >> Cool. Um, okay. So, you've seen you you got Zuzulu going. Uh, switching gears for a second. What other kinds of communities would you like to see or or are you just happy to sit back and watch the Zuzulus or are there things that whole startup societies you'd like to see? >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think um out of the different Zuz Zuzul, you know, like the like I think um there's two categories that uh at least of these like very small scale nodes that I think are interesting. They're sort of what I would call embassies and monasteries, right? And uh embassies are basically, you know, >> that's a good term. I immediately get it. It's like are you receiving lots of people versus your cloistered

>> exactly like frontier towers, you know, like one in SF and uh like I would call it an embassy, right? They like the were pretty smart. You know, they bought up this uh apartment building that's like actually in the area that's, you know, historically known as being the crime den. And then they bought it up like basically just before it started getting cleaned up. And so it's actually a very timing. >> Yeah. A very good deal. But you know they it's like a they have 16 floors and then there's you know a floor for Ethereum, there's a floor for biotech and a floor for AI and they're just creating this uh environment that just really makes all of these technologies uh available at a high density and like you I think you could you know go even

further in terms of like focusing on specific philosophies like I would say yeah you know there should be one of these that's like purely open source um and And uh you know for for monasteries like uh you know basically a monastery is just something that's like further away and uh it's more about this kind of holistic lifestyle but then like historically speaking you know like actual monasteries like the weren't just like monk um monks kind of praying and doing things right they did things. The tricky part about a monastery is it's hard to imagine I mean almost by definition that growing >> right >> because since it's closer from the world it's not recruiting it's not scaling advertising and so the embassies would

seem to grow much more than the monasteries unless there's something I mean and that would just have a natural selective >> you know it's interesting because I would actually categorize network school as being more like a monastery >> monastery interesting I think there's aspects of both >> because Stanford has aspects of both >> rightm Mhm. >> So the thing is you we do receive lots of people >> but by having it somewhat airgapped then it's its own community whereas if it's right in the middle of the city then it doesn't have its own community. So I think there's there's some combination but a pure monastery wouldn't work at least.

>> Yeah. I mean that that sounds right. I think uh yeah I mean what I have in mind by the word is definitely something that's like like at least reachable for people. Actually though, you're right though. There's a trade-off of two terms, which is accessibility goes up as you're closer to the city center, >> but community goes up as you're further from the city center or connectivity very roughly, right? >> Yeah. And it's all about the graph structure, right? You know, community as people could do things for each other and then uh if that community is like right beside a much bigger thing like you know, the graph is just going to naturally look like that, right? And you know, >> yeah. So I maybe the ideal would be it was very accessible but it was a road that nobody ever wanted to travel down.

>> Yeah. >> Then it's got the combination of high accessibility and that's interesting. I could think about measuring that. >> Um okay. So anything you know else on your mind I think you want audience to know I should I should know. I mean I think uh I mean the other thing I uh would uh want to see is like experimentation more on the culture side right and I mean like I think culture is something that's uh really important right and uh >> the one commandment Sapphire was writing about like the keto kosher and stuff like that offline in particular >> exactly yeah know the whole like thing that you guys are doing in terms of like having explicitly offline spaces like I think that's great right I think uh you know there's a valuable role that

culture plays is in uh just uh like creating and like creating local consensus and like standardizing answers on you know just big important questions of how to live life and I think that needs to be like really yeah updated for the 21st century >> I I think so in particular on yeah >> so so on the offline thing so this is something you and I have talked about maybe maybe worth right so with cars >> we are advancing cars still with self-driving cars electric cars even flying cars. We can also subtract cars and build totally walkable spaces, right?

>> And so we can advance tech with AI and crypto and all this stuff. We can also subtract tech and this is what we're doing at network school as we were talking about where totally offline offices, pencil and paper, install phone lockers in like half the building so that you have to lock your phone when you walk into the building and you're just present and you're offline and so on and so forth. and just start to have offline spaces as walkable spaces where it's like almost like not getting hit by a car as you're walking along. You don't get hit by a push notification in an offline space, you know?

>> Yeah. I mean, knock off who has uh like who almost feels PTSD from uh like just peacefully living uh my life and then randomly having minute long clips of me doing things pop up on like Yes. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing is it's funny. I realized that some people don't turn on do not disturb all the time on their computer. >> Yeah. >> And I'm like, "Oh my god, they must get get barrageed with notifications all I can't I couldn't imagine even thinking like that, right?" >> Yeah. >> Um and so the way the things are set up by the defaults, we have to change the defaults on this stuff and make it more friendly.

>> Yeah. No, I mean it's uh I mean I'm just excited to see like where this movement goes and just like the first like 10 of these things turn into something that I Yeah. that I would feel really excited not just to visit but to live in. >> Awesome. Great. Thank you very much for talking. >> Thank you too. Thanks.