D/ACC The Swiss Way - Una Wang, Isla Munro-Hochmayr

Transcript

[Music] perfect hey everybody hi everyone and good afternoon how's the mood here it's been a long day um welcome and we will talk about Switzerland I know like it's probably a little bit hard to pronounce but uh we are a talu Swiss note so we're trying to establish talu community in Switzerland and who doesn't know like raise hands whoever here know what zalu is yes Masa yeah so good good amount of people but I give we I give a we give a short

um intro like what zalu is it's a network State experiment started by vitalic u in Montenegro first more than a year ago and it has evolving been involving over one and a half years into a pop-up City movement all over the uh all over the world actually actually um it went through a little decentralization uh period Well in the beginning was one event and now it's actually uh many hubs all over the world and because of that me and Isa picked up uh randomly and with a lot of passion that we want to build one in Switzerland because we loved it our experience and we loveed the community we think that it could provide even more fundamental change to the Swiss ecosystem so we're

very hyped about it and hope you also uh also typed after our presentation and uh basically that was the background why it's uh ready to launch nwork State experim because um nare State as you all know it's a kind of the hype movement in the last two years and there's a lot of things happening in for example prospera and a lot of different form of nare States has been happening and we actually think I personally think talu is and also Switzerland is standing in a very interesting spot in inside this whole network State experiment and uh we started off as like a long-term kind of uh residency and friends coming together

but there's kind of everyone felt that there's a magic sauce uh that no one want to leave and everyone wants it happen again and we also could could see a longer term impact that people brought back this passion back to where uh their country and also they are Tech developed and the community keep Building forward so we want to know that okay what is this m magic source of suu and how can we turn it into more of a movement and how this fit into a whole network State experiment and one thing that vitalic have said was that uh Switzerland is often considered to be the closest thing the real world has to uh classical liberal government's Utopia uh how many Swiss are

here so good I hope you are as bullish about Switzerland as us because we're are going to full bullish about Switzerland in the next two slides and hope you're on the right with us um so me and Isa we personally have been in Switzerland for eight years and um me personally my partner Swiss and um I really um love what I've seen in Switzerland it's actually the first European country experiment for me I was like in China and then I lived in us for five years and then Switzerland and we really figured that in Switzerland there's a lot of great things and it's a good place place to everyone says actually it's a hard place to leave it's a really hard place to leave um and we also wonder like what is really special

for Switzerland and when we want to build a special node in Switzerland we want to know that why is it different why people want to come to Switzerland compared to other places because globally there's a lot of different kind of U zuu node for example U mono for example there were Jia um QJ just mentioned like why we want to build one in Switzerland and we're building our is want to base on basically the culture of Switzerland and which um a top three is um Switzerland has the culture technology that basically we we call like Superior social technology the coordination the decentralized coordination that seems like has been worked and have Sovereign really sovereign state that coordinate really

well and have autonomy but at the same time on a federal level also um have um have like a per se like a greater coordination that move the country with a Swiss identity basically and it's democracy you know the um the seven seven seats and you know like no um per se the neutrality strategy and um like rotating of seven president and the president I think everyone knows that probably you've seen news that you can see the president on the street in a random event and take a photo with him and he doesn't seems like any president that come with red carpet and you know the whole shereé uh like any other country and also um we personally for

example have relationship with Swiss NEX I don't know if you know it post post as like a very lowkey um educational front but actually everywhere that the Swiss neck off next office all over the world is actually diplomacy um a Swiss Swiss territory so they're very I think Swiss is really good at um really tuned down their policy and having this front as a neutral place in the world so we do do think that there's a lot to learn like on this neutrality and a place for that Global dialogue and secondly um decentralization by by default like when me and Isa are all very deep in Dows and we did Dow Swiss together before and still in Dow Swiss um and we think like

okay like everyone when when talk about Dow after so many years of doing Dow now we're thinking like oh what is is Da really decentralized some Dows actually are not um and then what is and some people ask ask is Switzerland the first Dow in the world maybe um it's actually decentralized quite by default um though it didn't come with all the blockchain technology but it's the the governance how it organized is having decentralized in this spirit and also um we see a strong Dak alignment for Swiss culture um I hope you guys know what Dak is I feel like I throw a lot of words and um Dak is a defensive acceleration it's a way of tech optimis M proposed by

vitalic a while ago um very encourage everyone to check out the article it's a great right um and basically it's a it's it's it's a thinking a great thinking and theory about how to we a salary Tech but at the same time um keep a defensive ground as for in this world now you know in the midst of a lot of changing orders in the world how do we keep a defensive ground while progressing and we think Switzerland also did a really good job drop in the past years and remain neutrality a lot of um governmental strategy has been pushing progress but at the same time could be defends itself quite well throughout world war one for War II for

example and then uh beyond that more on the tech and innovator side we do think like Switzerland attracts like Global Innovations um some things like people don't think more think about oh San Francisco has and like but actually we we do have crypto Valley and um also Switzerland is the world number one Innovation per capita so there's a really great output as for Innovation and um patents and technology and also buil to last everyone know the Swiss quality right whenever it's stamped it probably 30% more price charged as for the As for the marketing but I do think from I had an architecture background so for me it's very astonishing like how

the building here really long lasting and the quality and attention to detail so if you look around I think um Switzerland have really have the mentality to build to last and it has 700 years history of decentralization which is the longest in the world and also it's a talent magnet I don't need to say too much about that um I think even in the AI front now a lot of new AI open a just open an office right anic as well yeah anthropic uh Google was here apple is here so it's really a talent magnet one thing that we do want to make a difference uh in Switzerland is that we want to see how to make Switzerland basically the barrier a bit lower for talents because one thing we do see also in web 3 Community is that a lot of

talents are coming from everywhere and Switzerland is expensive so one thing we do want to tackle like if you brainstorm with us like how do we remain a talent magnet but at the same time lower the barrier and lower the cost for talent to come to Switzerland and I think here is a good segue IA will talk more about the philosophy that we developed and how do we want to achieve basically what we imagined Switzerland and our state experiments in Switzerland yeah thank you yeah I I think una touched on a really important point which is that in dowas I feel like we had the digital technology the tech technology um but maybe we were missing a little bit the social technology layer

uh to some degree and we've started learning but we're still from my perspective not even close to being there and what our thinking is and what we suspect is that there's a lot to be learned from Switzerland in terms of bringing this social technology layer um that over 700 years of doing decentralization and living as a decent scale Society in the real world in the real world decentralization that there's a lot to be learned and hopefully uh transferred from that learning to Dows and to decentralize organizations and the kinds of things that we in web 3 want to build more of um so that's hopefully one of the key things that we will be able to learn from and bring to web 3 and I'm sure that web 3 also has a

lot that it could be doing more to bring real world impact to Switzerland um Beyond meme coins um and so we started looking more into Swiss culture what is it exactly about Swiss culture and the technology that they've built as a as a psyche and mindset that is actually different and when we dug into it we realized that it's actually somewhat similar to diak um as una said it's kind of vitalic wrote all of this about defensive acceleration and in it he talked a bit about Switzerland but we didn't go too deep into the detail of the culture he talked more about the mountains as a

defensive side of Switzerland and how that's helped it develop um our realization was that what diag is to some degree is about in defending the individual rights um things like privacy um defending things that matter to keep you safe um and accelerating the things that we all want more of uh as a collective um and we started thinking about Cypher Punk or lunar Punk and solar Punk and how actually Cipher Punk and lunar punk are exactly that they're about the more about the individual more about the private sphere more about um what you need to protect as an individual and the you want to have for yourself and lunar

Punk is much more sorry solar Punk is much more about the collective about what we're achieving together like the optimistic vision and at the same time we were looking at definitions of the state and what does actually mean to be a network State what are we actually innovating on here and at its core the state is the interface between the individual and society and building an efficient interface for uh us to do things together and coordinate together and little little while after we kind of came up with this falic actually also wrote another essay on uh I think on pluralism was the essay and he brought up a very similar framework around the yin and the Yang and that you need to Pro protect the individual rights like the individual

right to protest if you have that um you can protest and you can actually coordinate to protect the autonomy um it's the same time yeah you need the collective rights to protect the individual rights so there's an interesting interplay between between those things and that is kind of where we see the secret source of Switzerland is that they've done particularly well at balancing or integrating the individual and the collective um keeping the rights and the freedoms of the individual while also building something that's really powerful and meaningful and where Society is thriving and Innovation is great and uh income and wealth is doing well and the currency is stable and so diving into that there's a lot to be learned as a culture um

um oh okay um one thing that as we looked into this I mentioned it earlier this morning as well there's this painting does anyone know the gotad post painting yeah okay a couple of people um so the godhead post painting is one of the most famous paintings in Switzerland I didn't know about it before but when I started talking about this a friend a co-founder actually sent me this painting he said the reason this painting is famous is because it's about um it's supposed to be about or the belief is that it's about um balance the Swiss magic source and the Swiss culture of needing to balance caution and progress and figuring out how to do that as a kind of a conservative agrarian society but also moving into the

industrialization and progress and Technology um and it was interesting that this is such a defining painting for Switzerland and such a key thing and that's exactly what we're talking about with the ex so we think there really is a strong correlation here um so why a permanent sandbox for Switzerland with Switzerland um we started looking as we were kind of like why should we be building what is what is actually needed in terms of change why should we be building anything Zulu in Switzerland and what can we really change and una touched on it a bit with like yeah Switzerland's amazing and many people should probably be building here but it's also like a lot of teams only come here when they've already raised 10 million and they can afford our crazy

prices so what could we be doing more to bring teams here early um and if we want to learn from Switzerland we're probably not going to like accelerate Switzerland too much so the biggest impact we can potentially have is doing more of Switzerland and helping other people adapt and integrate Swiss culture and the cultural technology into other projects so we have to get them here we have to build things with them um and we have to do radical Innovation um and when we looked into social theory and the theory of change there's really amazing paper on free social spaces so free social spaces you could think of as uh churches in the south of of America

before the Civil Rights Movement became this space where people could coordinate and talk about something that was a radical change from wider society and they were in this free social space protected from the Norms of society and were able to bring more radical ideas those ideas could be social ideas they could also be techn ology ideas um and another example is say the French French cafes or the vienes salons um that accelerated certain thought or social movements um and so these free social spaces don't actually have to be physical spaces but they often are um and what we realize is that having a permanent zuu node in

switzland allows us to build on the cultural technology learn from the cultural technology um Implement things and experiment uh learn from what's already working learn to coordinate better um experiment with ethereum aligned Tech experiment with privacy Tech in a small protected environment and then scale it up once we are in that kind of Niche protected environment have built something that's working and successful and where people are willing to try it and and use it and then scale that to the real world into a wider group of people um so that's kind of what we're talking about when we say free social

spaces is develop these radical ideas internally um free of the politics and The Wider norms and then hopefully create radical social and Tech Innovation as an output um yeah we think that zerland as a movement um has all of the ingredients to actually create this change uh so on the one hand people so we have an amazing community in Zulu and The Wider social technology that's being built there we also have an awesome team and community that we built in our event in September and have been co-designing this with we have amazing cultural technology in Switzerland and the philosophy that we can learn from there and the part we're working on but are

confident we will have soon is the space and infrastructure to actually build this together in a permanent way and actually have that Innovation as an ongoing process so the way we envision this over the next sort of five to 10 years is starting this year uh with uh the first major popup Village or city um that's happening in May we'll have 150 to 200 Pioneer residents um hopefully 500 or so visitors um and we'll use that to think really first principles about what would the ideal space look like what should ownership look like in that how do we want to build this and why do we want to build it the the way we want to build it

um once we have the permanent space in place once we've thought about things in depth we want to start scaling into a more per into this more permanent Hub uh work with partner institutions and with pyer residents and start scaling that Community have say 10 tech labs working on things like AI privacy ZK biotech longevity and really start scaling these ideas in Switzerland and then the long-term V Vision to really have a permanent Village of people living and working together you know ideally having kids and letting them go to kindergarten together um and yeah having this real hub for Tech and innovation in Switzerland done uh with a DC mindset um and kind of touching on this whole thing

of Silicon Valley it's like Silicon Valley is move fast and break things and I think our idea would be move fast and break less things so yeah uh we would love to have some of you there uh May 1 to 26 um we can't disclose the location for security reasons but we would really love to have you apply uh we're on zen. CH you can apply there uh it's going to be awesome people if you're interested in working with us and building something along these lines and we're excited to have you and yeah you can ping either of us on Telegram and we'll love to talk so thank you [Applause] [Music]