RamX          f (00:00)
Forest City, Malaysia, built on reclaimed land off the southern coast, near Singapore. Empty towers for years, a ghost development nobody could explain. Until 2024, when a residential compound opened inside it, called Network School. People moved in. They worked on companies together, studied technology together, lived by a shared philosophy about what a society could be if you just built it from scratch instead of inheriting one.

In July of this year, the Malaysian government revoked the operating license. One decision, one government, one signature. the experiment that was supposed to prove you didn't need permission from governments anymore needed permission from a government to exist at all. On august eighteenth, twenty twenty six, just a few days ago, it reopened in Astana, Kazakhstan. New visas, new cooperation, and talk of something much bigger than

A few hours away, a place called Burabay, where they're now discussing an entire city. We're going to spend tonight on what that actually is, who's funding it, and why the fastest

growing part of it right now runs through prayer as much as it runs through capital.

Bones (01:13)
Welcome back to Fortean Winds. I go by Bones, and with us as always is RamX

RamX          f (01:19)
Hey, hey, everybody.

Bones (01:20)
Hey Ram. Last time we mapped the wealth and the theology, the cadre and cathedral. tonight is part two, and it's the part where the theory stops being theory.

RamX          f (01:32)
Yeah, quick bridge for anyone catching us in the middle of this. We decided this was a big one and we're gonna make it our second episode in a three part series. this is our first three parter of season five, and last episode we talked about the fastest wealth consolidation in modern history, from traditional to digital sources. That was during COVID, and a stated intellectual program to replace the existing political elite.

And a sitting billionaire giving lectures about the Antichrist a few hundred yards away from the Vatican. Tonight we answer the research question that we began last time. What are they actually trying to build and where?

Bones (02:11)
Yeah, and the answer has address now, you know, as several addresses. Yeah.

RamX          f (02:15)
Well then let's go. I mean, not being invited never stopped us from showing

up before.

Bones (02:21)
Okay, start with the term itself because I think people hear network state and assume it's a metaphor, like a discord server with delusions of grandeur.

RamX          f (02:30)
Yeah, right. It's not a metaphor. Balaji Srinavasan, who we will henceforth refer to as just Balaji, is the former Coinbase CTO, and he wrote an actual book called The Network State. And his definition is precise enough that you could hand it to a lawyer. He lays out a development sequence. You start with what he calls a startup society, right? This is where these guys are coming from Silicon Valley. This is the world they know and this is how they think everything should work.

An online community organized around a shared idea. If it holds together, it becomes a network union. Economically coordinated, not just socially. If that scales, it becomes a network archipelago, like distributed pockets of physical property held by members, scattered across multiple countries, and if that archipelago gets large enough and cohesive enough, the end state is this network state that Balaji is.

envisioning a government in the full sense with territory and eventually diplomatic recognition from other governments.

Bones (03:39)
Yeah, that's strange. So diplomatic recognition like an embassy.

RamX          f (03:44)
Like an embassy. That's the stated endpoint. Not an exaggeration.

And the innovation that makes this different from every failed micronation attempt of the last century is the sequencing. Balaji's phrase for it is cloud first, land later. Old attempts at building a new country started with the land. You buy an island, you plant the flag, discover nobody recognizes you, and you have no economy. His model inverts that, right?

Build the ideology first, build the community, the shared identity, the economic network, entirely online, entirely before you own a single acre. Only once you have thousands of committed, wealthy, ideologically aligned people do you start acquiring territory. By then, you're not a guy with a flag, you're a functioning economy looking for a home.

Bones (04:36)
And and the founder is structured like what exactly?

RamX          f (04:40)
Like a startup CEO, and that's not my framing, it's his. He

Bones (04:44)
Right.

RamX          f (04:45)
argues explicitly that new political communities need a recognized founder with concentrated authority, the same way a company needs a CEO who can make a hard call without waiting for consensus. Citizens function more like early employees or users than voters, and the core move instead of trying to reform the government that you're unhappy with.

you you have to leave it. Exit over voice. If a jurisdiction's laws don't suit you, you don't organize a movement to change it, you just move.

Bones (05:18)
So we covered Yarvin last time as the intellectual seedbed for the anti democratic side of the all this. does Balaji just pick that up and run?

RamX          f (05:28)
Kind of, their framings are interrelated, but they're not quite identical, certainly aligned. And the more interesting lineage runs through someone we haven't discussed yet, Patri Friedman. He's the grandson of Milton Friedman, the famous economist. He founded something called the Seasteading Institute, which we've mentioned several times. This was back in the 2000s. the mission was as literal as it sounds. Build floating cities in international waters.

Outside any nation's jurisdiction where you could test different systems of government the way you'd test different product features. Teal put early money into it.

Bones (06:05)
Yeah, and it didn't work.

RamX          f (06:07)
It didn't work, and the reasons it didn't work are the whole lesson. The ocean is expensive, hostile, and legally uncertain in ways that made the economics never wash out. Pun intended. But but Freeman didn't abandon the goal. He changed the delivery mechanism. He founded Pronomus Capital, venture capital, but instead of funding apps, it funds alternative jurisdictions on actual land.

Negotiated with actual governments. The pivot from sea to land is the entire strategic evolution of this movement in one move. Balaji then takes that land-based model and adds the cloud-first sequencing on top of it. So the lineage is Friedman supplies the vehicle, Balaji supplies the go-to-market strategy.

Bones (06:54)
Yeah, and then venture capital for countries basically.

RamX          f (06:58)
That's the accurate one line description. That's not editorializing. That's functionally what pronomos is.

Bones (07:05)
So walk me through the map. Wh where does the money actually go?

RamX          f (07:10)
Pronomo's portfolio currently includes Prospera in Honduras, Itana in Nigeria, Praxis, and several other small projects. Prospera is the one to understand first, though, because it's the most mature. It operates inside a Honduran legal framework that allows semi autonomous economic zones. So they have their own regulations, its own dispute resolution. It's largely separate from the rest of Honduran law.

It's not a network state in the full sense Balagi describes, it doesn't have diplomatic recognition, but it's the clearest working example of a government voluntarily carving out sovereignty and then selling access to it just like they want.

Bones (07:50)
Yeah, I mean that's the part that really matters, you know. I I a government choosing to do this.

RamX          f (07:55)
That's the whole strategic realization. And we'll we'll come back to it.

And then there's Praxis, which describes itself outright as a digital nation, building membership and culture online with the explicit goal of eventually settling physical territory. And then there's network school, which is the most concrete social experiment of the bunch. Real people living together, testing what a founder led community actually feels like day to day. It's really happening. Built in Malaysia in twenty twenty four.

And it was shut down this July when Malaysian regulators pulled their license. Now it was reopened just a few days ago in Astana, Kazakhstan, with the Kazakh government cooperating on visas and preliminary discussions of something much larger. A full settlement called Network City.

And it's out in Burbay.

Bones (08:47)
That's a fast turnaround. I mean Malaysia to Kazakhstan in under a month.

RamX          f (08:51)
It tells you two things. One, they have the capital and the organizational speed to relocate an entire community almost immediately. Two, and this is the part we're sitting with, they needed a government's permission to do it. Twice,

Bones (09:05)
Yeah.

RamX          f (09:06)
right? Twice.

Bones (09:07)
This is the part of the research that stopped me because I expected the money and you know the tech utopianism, you know.

I didn't expect Belagi to be this explicit about faith,

RamX          f (09:17)
He is remarkably explicit, and I want to read the reasoning almost exactly as he gives it, because paraphrasing it undersells how deliberate this is. He argues that a startup society needs what he calls a moral innovation, something beyond financial incentive that gets people to actually commit. You have to commit morally, deep down in your soul. And

Bones (09:40)
Mm, do I.

RamX          f (09:41)
one of the examples he offers directly is traditional religion.

He cites Rob Dreyer's Benedict Option, which is the idea that serious Christians should intentionally build tight separated communities rather than keep losing ground inside a secularizing mainstream culture.

Bones (09:57)
Geez, and and his justification for that, you know, specifically works, I guess?

RamX          f (10:04)
Well that this is the line that does the most work in the entire research file.

Missionary societies outcompete mercenary ones.

Bones (10:13)
Missionary Society. Okay.

RamX          f (10:15)
What he means

is a community held together purely by money, by self interest, doesn't

Bones (10:20)
Mm.

RamX          f (10:20)
generate the loyalty needed to survive hardship. People

Bones (10:24)
Right.

RamX          f (10:24)
leave the moment a better offer shows up elsewhere. but a community organized around a moral mission, something people believe they're sacrificing for, retains people through difficulty in a way a paycheck never would. He's not saying this is a person describing his own faith.

He's saying it as a builder identifying which retention mechanism performs best. Religion,

Bones (10:47)
Yeah.

RamX          f (10:48)
in his framework, is a technology.

Bones (10:51)
Mm, yeah. I mean it it goes back to Teal's promotion of cults.

RamX          f (10:58)
Exactly. And to be fair to him, at least Balaji's being honest about it rather than dressing it up, right? Praxis

Bones (11:03)
Yeah. Right.

RamX          f (11:06)
takes the same instinct and removes the analytical distance entirely. Their own materials talk about revitalizing what they call Western civilization. They frame the choice explicitly. Will the West sacrifice family, country, and God to pure materialism? They cite the Amish, the Mormons, and Israel by name.

as models of the kind of cohesion that they're after. Communities that hold together across generations because they share more than an economic arrangement.

Bones (11:36)
Right, so praxis isn't hiding it behind, you know, strategy language the way that Balaji does.

RamX          f (11:43)
Not even a little, and this connects to what we covered last episode without repeating it. Teal's lectures work at the level of eschatology, that's end times. Cosmic states. Who the Antichrist might be. What we're describing here is a different layer of the same structure. Not the theology of the founders, the theology is the actual glue holding the recruits together. Different mechanism, same architecture.

Bones (12:09)
Here's what we haven't explained yet, and it's the part that undercuts almost everything we just laid out. I mean, these projects are built explicitly to escape the reach of existing governments and you know government regulations and cannot actually function without existing governments. So we're going to spend the second half on that contradiction because it's not a footnote. It might be the whole story.

RamX          f (12:33)
Every one of these projects, no matter how far along, runs into the same wall. You need property law that a court somewhere will enforce. You need immigration status for the people you're recruiting. You need courts, security, infrastructure. and ultimately, if you want the diplomatic recognition, Balaji describes as the end goal, you need other sovereign governments willing to treat you as well.

Bones (12:58)
Yeah, Malaysia is the case study.

RamX          f (12:59)
In the cleanest possible form, network school could exist exactly as long as one government's licensing board allowed it. The moment that approval was withdrawn, the experiment didn't relocate gracefully, it evaporated, and it had to be rebuilt somewhere else from a standing start, at the mercy of a different government's willingness to say yes and play ball.

Bones (13:23)
Yeah, so that I mean the actual strategy isn't just escaping the state system.

RamX          f (13:27)
Right. This is

kind of funny. It's actually shopping inside of it. The

Bones (13:31)
Yeah.

RamX          f (13:31)
r the realistic version of this movement isn't sovereign communities floating free of government. It's finding governments, usually smaller, that are developing or looking for foreign investment and technological prestige. That they want you there because it makes them look bigger. That that's what

Bones (13:49)
Right.

RamX          f (13:50)
they're looking for, right? They're willing to sell, lease, or delegate pieces of their own sovereignty.

Honduras did it with Prospera. Kazakhstan appears to be doing it again right now with the network school and possibly with Burabay.

That's a fundamentally different and much more achievable political strategy than the exit the nation state branding suggests.

Bones (14:11)
So knowing all that, I mean is we have to ask, is this like one coordinated global project or is it you know something looser than that?

RamX          f (14:21)
So I think they're definitely interrelated, but we have to kind of hold four options on this at once, as always. So the honest answer is we don't have evidence that a single one of them is exclusively running this, right? And pretending otherwise would be exactly the kind of overreach we criticize.

First, there is a genuine belief, there is a real conviction that governments are failing, and this is happening across Western civilization. Like they are in it at a time where people have very little faith in government, and they believe that there's no viable alternative. And that alternative deserves to exist. We don't deny that. Their own writing supports this consistently. I don't think that's performance. Then there's the regulatory arbitrage.

Dressed in bigger language. for a lot of participants may simply be jurisdictions that are friendly to crypto, biotech, AI development, crime, all sorts of crime.

Bones (15:22)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

RamX          f (15:25)
You could just have that be legal in your district, right?

Bones (15:28)
Right.

RamX          f (15:28)
And none of that requires civilizational framing.

And then there's the fact that this is a form of billionaire neo feudalism, where founder control jurisdictions with concentrated authority start to look less like democracy with extra steps and more like a return to something considerably older, like actual feudalism.

Bones (15:48)
Right, right. So what's the fourth?

RamX          f (15:50)
The fourth is that this is a coordinated, deliberately anti democratic political project, with Thiel, Balaji, Friedman, and the rest operating as one directed effort.

so whether they all meet in a back room at Teal's next dialogue secret society event, or whether they don't meet at all. They are all singing the same tune at the same time.

Bones (16:14)
Yeah, I mean they want you to feel like it's there's a deeper meaning behind it all, but you know, you look at it, it's like libertarianism just gone mad, where they've just

RamX          f (16:24)
Yeah, they keep invoking libertarianism in this as a way to try to get cyberpunks on their side. But you know,

Bones (16:31)
Mm, yeah.

RamX          f (16:32)
we're we're old school cyberpunks and you're not gonna fool us, man. Like

Bones (16:34)
Yeah.

RamX          f (16:37)
you're exactly what we fight.

Bones (16:39)
Yeah.

RamX          f (16:40)
They're brushing up on the ideas of like Al-Qaeda or any other interconnected cell network, right? That's trying to

Bones (16:47)
Yeah.

RamX          f (16:48)
overthrow from the shadows.

Bones (16:50)
Right.

RamX          f (16:51)
And they don't have a single command structure that we can see. So you can't identify the one leader, expose the one memo or break the chain in one way. You know, you've got Bellagia

Bones (17:03)
Right.

RamX          f (17:03)
over here, you got Musk over here, you got Teal over here. And sometimes their ideas are the same, sometimes they're not.

And they don't have to agree. They can all be pushing towards this network state idea and have completely different political ideas. Because a networked coordination doesn't need anyone in charge. Participants don't have to agree on everything. TEL doesn't need to agree with Praxis' civilizational rhetoric. Balaji doesn't need to share TIL's eschatology or religion at all. They just need incentives that point in compatible directions.

And then the system self-organizes around them without a single point of failure. That's not a smaller threat than a conspiracy. In some ways, it's a more durable and realistic.

Bones (17:48)
Yeah, right. So I mean where does where does it go now?

RamX          f (17:52)
Burbay is the one to watch first. Whether that Kazakh government partnership turns into an actual settlement or fizzles the way Seasteading did,

Watch whether other governments, smaller states looking for foreign capital and tech sector prestige start following Kazakhstan's example. And there's

Bones (18:09)
Right.

RamX          f (18:09)
a there's a research direction, the notes for this episode flag that we haven't gone into yet deliberately, because it's a full episode of its own. The money. Who the actual limited partners in Pronomas are, where Praxis' financing rounds trace back to, whether the same capital sources keep showing up behind the odd ideology.

The influencers, the political donations, and the physical city projects are all happening at once. We need to follow the money.

Bones (18:39)
Yeah, I mean that that sounds like episode three.

RamX          f (18:42)
That's right, baby. That's episode three. If the same

names keep appearing across all those categories, we're not looking at a loose intellectual tendency anymore. We're looking at an actual financial network. And at that point, the word coordination starts to mean something very specific.

Bones (18:59)
Yeah, th episode three could be a good one.

RamX          f (19:01)
I think it will be, and here's where I want to leave it today. They described this as an exit from the state. What we actually found is a shopping trip. Malaysia said no. Kazakhstan said yes. For now, on its own terms, recoverable the same way Malaysia was. They're not building outside the system of nations. They're finding out which nations are for sale in pieces, and how much of themselves those nations are willing to part with.

Bones (19:28)
Yeah, I mean they're they're riding a fine line because they're looking you know, in a developed nation like the US probably has just too many guardrails to move on it. But then they wanna go to these other nations that might not have as many guardrails and it's a slippery could be a slippery slope. So I hope that's why Teal moved to South America because he'd had no hope in doing it in the US, you know.

RamX          f (19:52)
Right.

But they're always here because there's money here, there's network here, there's infrastructure, right? So,

Bones (19:55)
Yeah, that's true. His business is here. Yeah.

RamX          f (19:59)
you know, we're getting pulled into it and there's no way that these little network states aren't going to have an impact on the United States of America, right? I mean, they're

Bones (20:09)
Yeah, true.

RamX          f (20:10)
aiming towards us.

Bones (20:12)
Well I think that should wrap up the episode. that's fourteen wins. sources on are on the site. Balaji's own book is one of them, and the academic literature on the network state movement.

The Reuters reporting also. And if you're new to this thread, start with Cadran Cathedral, then come back here. Thanks for listening, everyone.

RamX          f (20:33)
Yeah, we'll see you for part three, everyone. Thanks for listening. Take care.