#24 - Cory Levy Interviews Balaji

Balaji (0:00)

Cory, welcome to The Network State Podcast.

Cory Levy (0:01)

Thank you for having me. I don't really like being on podcasts, but here we are. And so I thought I'd maybe interview you. Go, go, go. Maybe it could be back and forth. Love it.

Balaji (0:09)

Let's go.

Cory Levy (0:09)

But maybe just to set the virtual stage, maybe you can just summarize in like two minutes what we just talked about on our tour. And then from there, I'll dive into some of the questions that I was thinking about in our walk.

Balaji (0:23)

Totally. Yeah. So briefly, as we know, it was easier to start Netflix and reform blockbusters, easier to start Bitcoin than reform the Fed. And I believe it's easier to start a new city than to reform San Francisco, and may even be easier to start new countries than to reform America. And at least with 99.99% of people working on the reform path, we should have some small fraction of people working on the path for building alternatives, which tech is good at, right? Peaceful reform by just building an alternative and then the customers of the old come to the new, the parallel institutions. And in a sense, what we've done here at Network School is just like you take a Google Doc and you print it out, or you take metaphorically an Amazon shopping cart, you print it out to your doorstep, right? Like it comes to your door, you take an Uber in the app and you print out an Uber to your door. In the same way, we're taking a cloud community and we're printing out in the physical world. And we're showing we can do that here at Network School. And if we prove that here, we can scale that out to other Network School nodes around the world. And eventually, we can do that where we have many students and many people come to Network School, start their own startup societies and pop-ups become the new startups.

That's it.

Cory Levy (1:35)

And so, how's it going?

Balaji (1:37)

I think it's going great. I don't know. Give me your impressions. You were here. I think it's pretty cool. Yeah.

Cory Levy (1:41)

Yeah. So I just got here less than an hour ago. And my Instagramverse reality is I thought it was going to be a little quiet. And not that many people, but in fact, when I arrived, it seemed to be like a bustling sort of place. And so, I was surprised in a very good way to see that. And so, I guess, how do you think about success in KPIs for this place? Remind me, how long has it been a place?

Balaji (2:09)

Just a year. Just a year or so. How long has it been? I think this has been a place for about a year. We opened Network School September 24th, 2024

So, it's just a little bit over a year, about a year and a month. And I think we have succeeded in bringing people from more than 100 countries here. And basically, I think it feels like SF, I think, like the good parts of SF. You know, like the tech, it's kind of like walking into a tech cafe.

Cory Levy (2:32)

Which surprisingly, they're limited in SF, where you can walk into a tech cafe past a certain hour.

Balaji (2:37)

Yes, that's right. So, we keep ours open late. And we are essentially something where there's a recognition that there's many cities around the world that have Unicor and so on now. Tech is decentralized out of SF. I'm sure you see that in your founders. The intranet is obviously outside of SF. Most billionaires are not American and so on, as we were just talking about. So, can we just print out the values of the good parts of SF in California and tech? Can we print them out somewhere else? And that's what we're doing here.

Cory Levy (3:06)

Understood. On our walk, you mentioned about some of our friends being in denial in the United States.

Balaji (3:13)

Yes.

Cory Levy (3:13)

Talk to me about that, and what else do you think people are in denial of?

Balaji (3:17)

Sure. So, the issue is basically that... Think about, for example, during the Biden administration. To many people, it was obvious that Biden was senile. Yet, he managed to make it through the 2020 election and four years of a presidency and even the Democrat primary, and then even six months of the general election period until at the very final moment, like three months before the election, it was finally marked to market and acknowledged, okay, yes, he was senile all along. And it was this thing where you can see on the polymarket like Biden's chance of being the nominee. And it just then collapsed like this. So, and polymarket was maybe the best tracker we have of objective sentiment because you weren't necessarily doing a real-time poll on that.