#13 - Jason Calacanis

Jason Calacanis (0:00)

Hey, everybody, welcome back to the show. I am super excited because friend of the pod who, gosh, I don't know when the last time we did a pod was, a couple of years ago.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:08)

A couple of years ago, yeah.

Jason Calacanis (0:09)

Balaji Srinivasan is here in Singapore, and I'm in Singapore. I'm a little bit jet-lagged, but you're a great podcast guest because you got a lot of ideas. And so I got to go visit you in Malaysia, just north of Singapore, about 45 minutes.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:31)

Just slightly west, slightly west of Singapore.

Jason Calacanis (0:32)

Slightly west of Singapore. And you have started The Network School, The Network State. All the stuff you've been talking about for years, there's now a there there. Six months ago, you found a place where there are apartment buildings and space that is, I guess, relatively cheap and available, and you've got your fan base of tech bros from around the world and ladies joining you to build what? What is the vision here for people who've heard of Network State, Network School and this sort of project you're working on, which seems to be your life's work, what exactly are you building?

Balaji Srinivasan (1:15)

So Network School is the first node of a network society where it serves several purposes. But, you know, the United States was started actually, not just with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but with Harvard. It was like literally a single room schoolhouse when it started, right? And the Midwest, the land-grant colleges, like, you know, Texas A&M was like agricultural and mechanical. And so that was meant to build up the Midwest, like, so you had a college and a town kind of, you know, side by side, you train the engineers and the humanists to help build the society. And of course, the Bay Area, Stanford and Berkeley helped build Silicon Valley, right? So there's three examples in the American context where a university and a town and a society kind of all went together, right? And so that's what we're doing. We are building a society ourselves. We're building a startup society that's also a template for other startup societies. And the way I think about it is this is the third type of thing, intranet company, intranet currency, and now intranet community. If you go to ns.com, you can see what we're doing.

Jason Calacanis (2:19)

Pretty good domain name, ns.com, Network State.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:23)

Right, so it's Network School, but it also stands, of course, for Network State and Network States, plural, and that's important. So we have, if you go to ns.com dashboard, front-slash-dashboard, you'll see more than a hundred startup societies around the world. And the reason for this is we have these online communities. People since, if you're watching this, you're spending a lot of time online. Right, by definition. By definition, that's right. And so all our transactions are online, all our communications are online, but many of our friends are online, and we don't see them in person, but we'd like to do that. So bringing those online communities together in person actually has a physical network effect. I mean, duh, but also not duh. So we've unbundled the world onto the internet, and everybody's alone at home. Now we re-bundled the world into the physical world. And when you do this, suddenly you actually solve a lot of problems. You actually reinvigorate democracy because when people vote with their feet and move to a location, now, look at, for example, Starbase, right? Starbase, Texas, which just incorporated Elon's new thing, right?

Jason Calacanis (3:19)

Yeah, where Starbase is located decided to take that town and rename it Starbase, and the people who are engineers at SpaceX voted, as well as some of the locals, to create a new city or town.

Balaji Srinivasan (3:33)

New city or town, and they won 97% of the vote, right? 97.7%, okay? And it was like 212 to 6 or something like that, right? And the thing about this is that is actually reinvigorating democracy. It's intranet democracy because you're voting with your feet to move to Starbase, you're voting with your wallet to help build up this community, and then you're voting with your ballot to ratify what you just did. You're combining all three. You have skin in the game because you actually move physically, you're physically there, you're putting capital in, and then as a consequence that you're also voting to build something. And so it's something where you have a lot of alignment in the community, right?

And that aspect of the frontier and the physical world, obviously that built America, right? A big part of what built America is you had all these people from the old world who came out. And actually, there's, you know, in the mid 1800s, people would just, if they didn't like it on the East Coast, they would go further in and they just build their own society, right? And even the earliest Americans, those were, you know, the European colonists and they set up the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Virginia Colony. The whole point was that you had a new jurisdiction to do things. Now, of course, people say, Oh, the Native Americans were there. That's true. But in many ways, they were warlike. And so these new tribes came in. So you had N Native American tribes. Now you have N plus one, N plus two, N plus three. They all slugged it out. And actually, the Native Americans were like brave warriors that lost battles. But, you know, for example, in Mongolia, they make statues to Genghis Khan. And so they should make statues to Sitting Bull and all of these kinds of warriors. But leaving that aside, that's actually like a war that was lost, a war that was won. That just happens all around the world. Nobody has control of any territory forever. And so ideally, though, you want to be able to do that today without any wars, without any conflict, right? How do you do without any conflict? Because everybody thinks all the land is taken, but it's actually not.