2025-02-02 23:17:34
The curriculum for Network School v2 revolves around the broad area of building startup societies. Sample topics covered include:
Early American history and the settling of the Wild West
The fall and rise of modern China, India, Russia, and Eastern Europe
The creation of modern Singapore and Dubai
Biographies of political figures from Deng Xiaoping to Robert Moses
The decline of Argentina and South Africa
The case-control studies of East/West Germany, North/South Korea, and Taiwan/PRC
Edge cases like San Marino, Northern Cyprus, Transnistria
The technology-fueled ascendance of El Salvador and Bhutan
National turnarounds like the Meiji Restoration and Boluan Fanzheng
The unification of France, Italy, Germany, India, America, and China
Ancient history from Gobekli Tepe to the collapse of Rome
The history of tech companies on the English and Chinese Internet
The general theme is building, collapse, and rebirth — but at the scale of cities and countries, not just companies. This is the next step for technology, because heads of network like Elon, Satya, and Zuck are now on par with heads of state like Trump, Modi, and Xi.
Here’s a draft reading list.
Macrohistory: Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
New Countries: Imagined Communities, Invisible Countries, The Origins of Political Order, How to Hide an Empire, The House of Government
Political Case Studies: A New Idea of India, China's Political Model, Seeing Like a State, Tomorrow the World, From Third World to First, When Money Dies, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
Regulation: Where is My Flying Car?, Three Felonies a Day, Reputation and Power, The Power Broker
Rebuilding: The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order
Self-Improvement: Atomic Habits, Tools For Titans, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Tech: Zero To One, Hard Thing about Hard Things, High Growth Handbook, AI Superpowers
Crypto: The Bitcoin Standard, Broken Money, The Sovereign Individual, The Truth Machine, Daemon
Startup Societies: Communistic Societies of the United States, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, The Network State
So, the general idea is to begin with macrohistorical context, zoom in to the details of how societies rise and fall, and then move to the specifics of how you’d (a) first build up yourself and then (b) build up your new society.
We’ll also have in-person and remote speakers of the quality we’ve had at the Network State Conference 2023 and 2024, and at Network School itself. Our past speakers include world-famous founders and investors like:
So: the topics, the reading, and the speakers give a common vocabulary for Network Schoolers on why we should build new societies and how others have done so in the past. With that foundation, we will add more content over time.
2025-02-02 23:16:43
The first Network School went amazingly well, as you can see from the video above! More than 4,000 applications came in from 80+ countries for 128 slots, showing global demand for our vision of a startup society. So after the quarter ended, we took a beat to scale up our capacity.
And now we’re back.
Network School v2 reopens on March 1, 2025 on an island near Singapore with double the capacity for a year-long term. Our goal is nothing less than bootstrapping a startup society capable of bootstrapping other startup societies.
That means we’re seeking frontiersmen. We’re seeking dark talent. We’re seeking people who want to create win-and-help-win societies, focused on both individual and collective self-improvement. We’re seeking remote workers, digital nomads, online creators, personal trainers, event planners, self-improvers and technologists of all stripes. And we’re specifically seeking those who want to help our nascent community learn technology, earn cryptocurrency, burn calories, and have fun.
You should come if you want to build up yourself while also building a cloud community, formed from scratch from the global Internet. If that sounds awesome to you, go apply at ns.com.
Then read more below.
We’re building the Network School in stages.
Startup society (v1). First, we ran an experimental Network School cohort for 128 people in Q4 2024. For most attendees, it was a smashing success, but we did learn some lessons that we’re addressing in our v2 curriculum.
Society-as-a-service (v2). Now, we’re beginning a year-long Network School for 256 members starting on March 1. The most important difference from v1 is that we now know we have enough demand to build a permanent cloud community. So our #1 criteria for admission is finding pioneers1 who want to build with us over the long run.
Society from scratch (v3). In parallel with running v2, we are building a permanent Network School campus nearby to house thousands of technologists from all around the world to learn technologies, burn calories, earn currencies, and have fun.
Scale the school (v4). As we build the permanent campus, we’re using prefab construction to create a portable template that we can open source and recreate anywhere in the world. Think of it like clone-stamping a Hilton or Starbucks, all around the world, except with the blueprints in the public domain.
So, by the end of stage 4, if all goes well, we’ll have a distributed network of Network School (NS) nodes around the world:
Start your own society (v5). But that’s not the final stage. Many Network Schoolers will attend with the intent of eventually starting their own societies, using the social, digital, and physical templates we develop at Network School. We intend to fund the best. And when those networks are overlaid on the same map, we’ll get a community of friendly startup societies that looks like this:
So, that’s how we’ll bootstrap a startup society that helps bootstrap other startup societies. Now let’s review Network School v1, and what we plan for v2 and v3.
More than a decade ago, I created a visualization of cloud formations, shown below. The lower right corner refers to the theoretical concept of a cloud community: a startup society, materialized from the cloud, without the baggage of the old world.
The idea was to build an Internet First community, which every member joins of their own free will. A city in the cloud, the 21st century version of the city on a hill.
The first Network School was an experiment towards making that vision a reality. I knew we could bring thousands together for the Network State Conferences in 2023 and 2024, but that was only one day. Could we bring together 100+ people for almost 100 days?
Answer: yes! We could, and we did.
As the video at the top of this post shows, we pulled together accommodation, gym, coworking, auditorium, cafe, laundry, wifi, office pods, and hangout spaces for a 128+ person community, along with spaces for self-organized events. Some of it we built, some of it we rented, and some of it we refurbished to create a whole that was greater than the sum of the parts. Our overall retention was very high, with the vast majority of members staying through their booked period.
What specifically went well in v1, and what could we improve? Well, we set out to make it easy to learn technology, burn calories, earn cryptocurrency, and have fun, while also building our cloud community. And the parts we really nailed were burning calories, having fun, and building community. Here’s a video with members working out together:
Given that Network Schoolers didn’t know each other before the cohort, and came in entirely through the Internet, I do think it’s awesome that we were able to build a cloud community and thereby establish the fundamental question we set out to test in v1. Here’s a little gif of everyone having fun, including the Christmas Party towards the end of the cohort:
That said, we didn’t get everything right in v1, and in v2 we want to improve the learning and earning experience. Basically, in v1 we’d set out to do daily tutorials and bounties. But we’d also set out to build a real community, with men and women from different stages of life, with different skills, and different time commitments. These two goals conflicted. If we made the tutorials/bounties too easy, then it turned off the hardcore engineers. Yet if we made them too hard, it turned off the casuals who just wanted to drop in and have fun.
To be clear: we did have guest lectures where members learned from world-class founders and investors like Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum), Bryan Johnson (Don’t Die), Ryan Petersen (Flexport), Olaf Carson-Wee (Polychain), Haseeb Qureshi (Dragonfly), Eli-Ben Sasson (Zcash/Starkware), Jesse Pollak (Coinbase Base), and Peak XV / Sequoia India (Shailesh Lakhani). And as expected, many members earned remotely, worked on their companies, or even built startups together.
But we encountered the Karpathy bimodality: either you’re learning just for fun by watching guest lectures, or you’re heads down with pen and paper studying a specific subject.2 So, we’re fixing this in the next version by staging our curriculum for different skill levels and focusing it on building a new society.
And that brings us to v2.
As mentioned, the second version of the Network School opens on March 1, 2025 with capacity for 256 members and a year-long duration. This group will be the seed for a permanent campus we’re building nearby, which will house 1024+ members.
So, you should apply if you want to bootstrap a startup society that itself bootstraps startup societies. And the next version of the Network School is more explicitly oriented around this goal of society building.
Because that’s actually how many great universities were first founded. For example, Harvard was started with just a single building and a single instructor, to train future leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.3 And the land grant colleges were built to teach frontiersmen how to run farms, dig mines, and erect buildings.4
Similarly, our v2 curriculum is oriented around the idea that the Network School is a mix of town and gown, both a startup society in its own right and a school that trains others to build startup societies. With that in mind, here’s what we’re planning for curriculum progression:
Lectures and reading. First, we’ll have guest lectures on startup societies with no prerequisites that the whole community can attend. These will be both in-person and remote speakers of the quality we’ve invited to Network State Conference 2023 and 2024. In addition, we’ll have a reading list and regular book club for discussion. You can see our draft curriculum here.
Workshops and hackathons. Next, we’ll organize workshops for two tracks of Network Schoolers: power users and programmers. Power users will learn how to use (and combine) the constantly shifting list of online tools, particularly in AI and crypto. And programmers will get hackathons on specific APIs and tools like Solana, Ollama, and Midjourney, with the goal of building something for their GitHub or Replit portfolios.
Courses and credentials. Over time, we’ll roll out AI-generated custom exams and cryptocredentials for particular courses that help build our society. The AI exams will come from turning public tech job postings into lists of skills and then exams, while the cryptocredentials will be NFT certificates awarded by proctors who conduct offline pencil-and-paper tests of these skills. But it’ll take us time to develop these.
Departments and placements. Eventually we want to organize STEM and humanities departments on an “Internet First” basis, with continuous education integrated with job placement. That means taking a software-centric approach to every discipline. For example, civil engineering would be centered around simulations, art would begin with AI generation and NFT monetization, and history would be combined with data science.
With all that said, I want to make four points that you should keep in mind before you apply.
First: Harvard wasn’t built in a day. Indeed, it was a single classroom entity at first with less than a dozen students! It took years of effort, many intermediate steps, and thousands of people to build it into a global university. Similarly, it will take time to go from guest lectures and reading lists to full-blown departments. So you should come only if you want to build the next Harvard, not simply attend it.
Second: the Network School itself is just a facilitator for bringing together great people. After all, you attend a conference for the talks, but mainly the community. You attend a college for the courses, but mainly the community. And similarly, you should come to the Network School for the content, but mainly the community, as you can see in this video:
Third: we want to pursue minimum necessary innovation in terms of new content creation, because there’s a tremendous amount of free online courseware that simply hasn’t been indexed and organized. A non-obvious point is that this rebundling5 of online courses is valuable in its own right, given the sea of information online. To navigate this ocean, we’ll focus on content that helps build startup societies. This criterion allows us to filter6 the vast Internet to determine what we want to teach and learn, and in what order.
Fourth: the Network School core team will organize as much as we can on a “centralized” basis, but the community will always be larger than the core team. So, you should come if you also want to teach and learn from other community members on a “decentralized” basis. These types of community-organized events were quite popular in v1.7
In short, you should apply to Network School v2 if you want to join a tech community. Think of it like moving to early Massachusetts with a bunch of positive-sum people while the construction of Harvard is in process.
Oh, one more thing about Network School v2. I’ve talked about the practical details of how we’re building the campus, and what to expect. But do we have something we want to prove in v2, like we did in v1?
Yes. At an individual level, v2 is similar to v1 in that it’s about allowing members to learn, burn, earn, and have fun. But at a collective level, if the purpose of v1 was to prove we could instantiate a cloud community, the focus of v2 is to build a paid waitlist that establishes the demand to build ever-more-ambitious cloud communities.
That requires a bit of explanation.
Remember how Elon memed the Model 3 into existence? He created a paid waitlist where 400k Tesla fans put up $1000 and waited literally years for the product. They did this because they wanted an electric car, because they believed in Elon, and because they knew how ridiculously hard it was to build something in the physical world. They took a calculated risk with Elon, and many of them also bought TSLA stock, and boy did he deliver for them.
That’s how we plan to build the Network School:
Elon’s waitlist established provable demand, and allowed him to negotiate with vendors to make the Model 3 a reality. Similarly, the Network School waitlist establishes provable demand that allows us8 to fund the land to make the Network School campus — and all future startup societies — a reality.
That brings us to our plans for Network School v3-v5. As noted above, we seek to build a campus from scratch (v3), open source the blueprints to scale it around the world (v4), and along the way encourage our attendees to start their own societies (v5).
Returning to that original visual, you can see how Network School v1-v5 form a progression, with gradually increasing scale and duration:
We’re already underway with the v3 campus, and we expect people who come to v2 to be ready to move there once residential units open up. Please note that this is a major construction project, and it may take a year or more to build v3, so like the patient Tesla waitlisters you should come with a flexible mindset.
One way to think about it: with normal real estate, you just rent an apartment and move in. But with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the pioneers built their cabins from scratch by chopping wood. The Network School is of course much closer to moving in than chopping wood, but there is some expectation that you help9 build the community — by holding events, recruiting new members, engaging existing members, and scouting future sites — while the physical campus is being built.
Finally: I really like the facilities we’ve built, and use them quite a lot myself, but before you apply you should realize what we’re doing is frontier, not fancy. We are optimizing for editability, not luxury. So, while the Network School core team will attempt to handle as many issues as possible, you shouldn’t treat your stay as a luxury resort where the staff is at your beck and call, but as a startup society which we’re building together.
Another way of putting it: there are tech companies, tech currencies, and now tech communities. You know what an early stage startup looks like, and the milestones it hits before it becomes Google. You know what an early stage cryptocurrency looks like, and the milestones it hits before it becomes Bitcoin. Now we’re establishing what an early stage startup society looks like, and the milestones it hits before becoming something bigger.
Because the Internet now allows us to build societies from scratch, to go not just founder mode but founding father mode. And the closer you are to being a high-agency, low-maintenance technologist who just wants to work, work out, and build awesome things all day — while also hanging out with others with the same growth mindset — the more you’ll like founding Network School with us.
If that describes you, please do apply at ns.com.
We are particularly interested in tutors, recruiters, trainers, entertainers, coders, and builders.
You could actually make this more than a metaphor. Treat any aspect of starting a new society as an input to AI search, and then find courses online that relate to it. It could be at a high level (like the peopling of America) or at a low level (like the plumbing of a house).
Yes, Harvard was once a startup! It was opened in 1636 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony founded “New College” in Cambridge to train clergy. At first, there was just one building and a single instructor overseeing fewer than a dozen students. It was renamed “Harvard College” in 1639 after its first benefactor, John Harvard. The entire operation had very humble beginnings: just a handful of students, a very small faculty, and minimal facilities compared to the global university it would later become.
From Britannica: “The intent [of the land grant colleges] was clearly to meet a rapidly industrializing nation’s need for scientifically trained technicians and agriculturalists.“
As the saying goes, the only way to create value is bundling and unbundling. You unbundle CDs into mp3s, and rebundle into Spotify playlists. You unbundle newspapers into online articles, then rebundle into feeds. Similarly, we can unbundle traditional universities into online courses, and then rebundle them under individual tutors at the Network School, each focused on different aspects of building startup societies.
A curriculum focused on building new societies is simultaneously broad and specific, and also carries with it an implicit staging, because the knowledge that’s useful for a 100 person society is different from a 100,000 person society.
You can see a partial list of Network School community-organized events in this sheet.
Building real estate is like building automobiles, a capital-intensive and time-consuming endeavor. The paid waitlist model allows us to meme the Network School into reality, with concrete midpoints every step of the way.
We do want to figure out more “attachment points” over time where community members can help. At some point we’d like members to be able to contribute towards building the v3 campus, such that they aren’t simply electrical engineers but electricians, and not simply mechanical engineers but also carpenters. However, we need to figure out the logistics of that, because (a) construction is a specialized and regulated skill and (b) the NS core team can’t directly employ every (or even many) members of the community. What we can do in the meantime is give digital points of engagement: NS members can pitch in as tutors, recruiters, trainers, and entertainers, to help us learn, earn, burn, and have fun respectively.
2024-08-17 03:29:25
We got an island.
That’s right. Through the power of Bitcoin, we now have a beautiful island near Singapore where we’re building the Network School. We’re starting with a 90-day popup that runs from Sep 23 to Dec 23, right after the Network State Conference. Rent is only $1000/month with roommates or $2000/month solo. And we have plenty of day passes for visitors.
So, go apply online at ns.com! Then read more below.
As motivation, I’ve always wanted to expand equality of opportunity around the world. Because my father was born in a desperately poor country, but with the right opportunity he was able to make something of himself. Like dark matter, he was dark talent.1 And for more than a decadeI’ve been thinking about how to give others who are similarly situated the chance to make something of themselves.2 That is: I’ve been thinking about how to empower the dark talent of the world.
US universities used to fill this role, even imperfectly, and I loved Stanford when I taught there years ago.3 But the data shows they’ve declined in recent days. And they’re just not affordable or accessible to most of the world. So, it’s time for a new approach. And thanks to Saraswati and Satoshi, I have the resources to endow a new Internet-first institution: the Network School.4
The purpose of the Network School is to articulate a vision of peace, trade, internationalism, and technology…even as the rest of the world talks about war, trade war, nationalism, and statism. To revitalize democracy for the internet era, with digital polities and verifiable votes. To train the next generation to be not just leaders of companies, but inspirations for their communities. And to pursue truth, health, and wealth by leveling up our attendees personally, physically, and professionally.
Let me now describe in more detail how the Network School works, who it’s for, and how to apply.
The Network School is for people of all ages, not just the youth. And it’s meant to be lifelong rather than one-off, with both a structured and and an unstructured component. The structured part is about continuous daily self-improvement: learning skills, burning calories, and earning currency. Meanwhile, the unstructured part is about having fun and hanging out with people of similar values.
For short: learn, burn, earn, and fun.
The first part of the Network School is about learning technologies and humanities.
As motivation, the existing model of US undergraduate education is broken. You pay $100k+ for a four year degree, and then budget nothing for maintenance over the course of your life. It’s like paying $100k+ for a new car and budgeting nothing for maintenance.
By contrast, the Network School is about continuous education. It’s for remote workers, engineers, creators and digital nomads who want to integrate learning into their lives, rather than stopping everything to be a full-time student.
Here’s how that works. We set up mini-classrooms where you can drop in to see the problem of the day.5 You solve that problem and a proctor awards you a cryptocredential, a free non-transferable NFT sent to your crypto wallet that establishes “proof-of-learn.” Often your solution will involve putting code on GitHub/Replit (to show you understand a concept), or posting content to your social media profile (to show you understand a new AI tool). And over time, these cryptocredentials actually build up a cryptoresume proving what you know.
Our initial material focuses on founding tech communities, as distinct from tech companies. As such it touches on everything from crypto, AI, and social media to history, politics, and filmmaking. It should be useful even if you’re just growing a traditional company or building a following. Over time, of course, every branch of the sciences and humanities becomes relevant when building a community. So if this initial experiment works, we can expand branch-by-branch to build a new kind of university.
But we’re intentionally starting with something simple. Our learning is about continuous education, about solving the problem-of-the-day.
The second part of the Network School is about burning calories.
Longevity is important, but 20th century communities just aren’t physically set up to maximize physical fitness. Quite the contrary: the default mode of Western society is sedentary and sugary. Those who want to escape this need to roll their own nutrition and workout program, which takes time, money, and energy.
We’re changing that. I’ve teamed up with my friend Bryan Johnson to set up Blueprint-inspired food and fitness for the entire Network School community. Bryan will be on campus to set up the program, and then his designates will maintain it on a daily basis. Like many of you, I’ve been both fit and fat at various times, so this is a product I want to use myself.
Every member of the Network School gets a daily workout slot with a semi-personal trainer, much like a group fitness class. You run and lift in the morning at your chosen time, getting a proof-of-workout from your trainer. Your group holds you accountable for showing up. Then you get a box with your Blueprint-optimized healthy meals and head to work. The whole point is to provide willpower-as-a-service, where the community6 provides the discipline.
We’re starting with the basics of running, lifting, eating, and sleeping properly. The initial goal is to hit the limits of your genetics. But if all goes well, the biotech founders that come to the Network School will eventually help us all surpass our genetic limits, to live much longer than we otherwise would.
But again, we’re starting small! And so the “burning calories” part is about lifelong health and the workout-of-the-day.
The third part of the Network School is about earning currency.
We’ll have crypto prizes of the day for open source projects, AI content creation, and microtasks. There will be $1000 bounties every day for the duration of the program, similar to the various prizes I’ve posted on Twitter and Farcaster. And community members will post their own prizes.
Next, in keeping with the overall theme of self-improvement, we’ll have office hours to help with your job, your career, your visa status, and your funding. We’re much more invested in you than a typical college career center because our interests are aligned: the more you earn, and the stronger you are financially, the more you’ll eventually have to reinvest in the community.
Finally, we’ll have visitor hours with famous visiting technologists. As my friend Sriram noticed, when investors come through Singapore I typically do a podcast with them. Many will also visit the Network School to meet attendees, invest in them, or hire them. Others will give remote talks. And you can see the quality of visitors from the speakers in our conference and podcast.
So, earning is about constant career development and the prize-of-the-day.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, of course. So the fourth part of the Network School is about fun.
This is the unstructured component. It’s most of what you’re here for. It’s just about assembling great people in one place: positive-sum people who believe in technological progress, internationalism, and capitalism. It’s your internet friends, coming from URL to IRL. Stanford introduced the concept of residential education, but this takes it to the next level.
In fact, our initial location is very similar to Stanford. It’s beautiful and sunny, and less than an hour from a major city (Singapore) with an international airport (Changi). That means you can be heads down during the week, head into the city on the weekends for fun, and get to just about anywhere in Asia within the same day. This is convenient for the >50% of the world that lives within the Valeriepieris circle.
We’ll do some group outings too, but most of the fun will be up to you.
Who is the Network School for? There are four lenses on this: demographical, ideological, professional, and personal.
As mentioned, our focus is the dark talent. The more respect you have for legacy institutions, and the more respect they have for you, the less suitable you’ll be as an applicant.
So: the Network School is for Indian engineers and African founders, for makers from the Midwest and the Middle East, for Chinese liberals and Latin American libertarians, for Southeast Asia’s rising technologists and Europe’s remaining capitalists.
It’s for everyone who doesn’t feel part of the establishment. But it’s definitely not only for tech, because a community does not run on tech alone.
Ideologically, the Network School is for people who admire Western values, but who also recognize that Asia is in ascendance, and that the next world order is more properly centered around the Internet — around neutral code — than around either declining Western institutions or a rising Chinese state.
For example, the Network School is for those who understand that Bitcoin succeeds the Federal Reserve, that encryption is the only true protection against unreasonable search and seizure, that AI can deliver better opinions than any Delaware magistrate, and that democracy can be rejuvenated with cryptography. It is for those who believe in technology, harmony, internationalism, and capitalism. It’s for those who want Silicon Valley without San Francisco. And for those who want to found, fund, and find not just new companies and currencies — but new cities and new communities.
Our ideal applicant is capable of remote work, or has enough savings to support themselves while at the Network School. For our initial cohort, we’re seeking three major groups of people in particular:
Writers, artists, influencers, and filmmakers
Trainers, athletes, coaches, and clinicians
Founders, engineers, designers, and investors
These are, roughly, the demographics focused on learning, burning, and earning respectively. Of course, if you fall outside those categories but still think you have something to contribute, you should still apply to the Network School.
I should mention that the Network School is a “product” that I built for the young version of myself — the aspiring young engineer. This is the community I want to live in: a technocapitalist college town, a Stanford 2.0 that’s globally affordable and genuinely meritocratic.
So, I’ll be on campus full time. Bryan Johnson and I are supervising the setup of everything from bench press to French press. And we’ll eventually be recruiting faculty in the form of content creators, fitness influencers, and angel investors for the learn, burn, and earn portions of our program respectively. But all that in due time.
Ok, so how do you apply to the Network School?
Just register at ns.com/apply, where we’ve set up a simple Luma page. That initial application takes a few minutes. Then, if you pass review, we’ll send a second application where you pay rent. As mentioned, our monthly rent is $1000 (with roommates) and $2000 (solo). We also have daily and weekly rates too, but short-term visitors still need to apply.
The rent gets you an air-conditioned room on a beautiful island, with internet, gym, and access to all courses and community services. You’ll still need to handle your flights and pay for your food, but we think the overall package is extremely affordable. And so the Network School could be an amazing option for individuals or small teams looking to save money, get fit, and level up while living in paradise.
I’m looking forward to seeing you there! Just fill out the application at ns.com/apply.
Join the discussion on your forum of choice:
We’ll answer questions and update the FAQ.
Dark matter is the undiscovered matter that tools like the Hubble Telescope let us see. By analogy, dark talent is the undiscovered talent that we need the “mobile telescope” to let us see. That “mobile telescope” is all the new mobile phones around the world, newly connecting people to the global internet and making talent visible.
See this 2014 interview where my collaborator Vijay Pande mentions our work on the dark talent. I’d been thinking about this since our online course with 250k students. It proved to us just how much untapped talent was out there.
As background, I once taught bioinformatics and statistics at Stanford, as well as an online MOOC in 2013 with 250k students. Before getting into startups, I thought I’d be a professor. I still admire what Stanford once was, but it’s in decline just like other US institutions. I do feel fortunate that I didn’t waste my life in academia like some of my peers. But I also want to build an Internet-first version.
Saraswati is the Hindu goddess of knowledge and Satoshi is of course the founder of Bitcoin. This is just meant to be fun, don’t read too much into it.
We recognize that you might need to focus on your remote work job for a few days in a row, so you can also catch up by doing several problems at a time.
In general, you shouldn’t need extraordinary willpower and discipline to be fit. But you currently do because (a) corporations have optimized the placement of hyper-palatable foods in every checkout line, grocery store, and strip mall and (b) modern dwellings aren’t built around the premise that everyone will be exercising every day. There’s more reasons too, but suffice to say that a subscription residential community with fitness as part of its premise should enable a different outcome.
2024-07-26 03:19:09
We're headed for something far worse than 2008.
As Elon, Dalio, and Jamie Dimon all recognize, the Western world is headed for a sovereign debt crisis. Just like the establishment was hiding the president’s senility, they’re also hiding the true state of the economy. But let’s calibrate with the ten charts below, and then you can judge for yourself.
Note: this post and the followups got 4M+ collective views on X.
See here for the discussion: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
First, did you know the Fed made more emergency loans in 2023 than during the financial crisis of 2008? The banking system is on life support thanks to the US government first selling billions in bonds to financial institutions and then devaluing them with surprise rate hikes.
Just look at this graph from the Fed. The blue bump below on the left is the lending from the global financial crisis of 2008 — you know, that little old thing! The purple bump is COVID. And the giant orange/aquamarine monster on the right is the 2023 banking crisis. See how much higher it is than even 2008?!?
Second, did you know the US is borrowing more under the "Biden boom" than it did during COVID? Set aside whether a coronavirus should have been treated as a financial crisis. At least the COVID borrowing was at ~0% rates. But today the US government is borrowing historical sums of money in peacetime…and at 5% rates! This is the act of a desperate man maxing out his credit cards to pay his bills.
Third, did you know that all this borrowing has made interest payments on the national debt the second largest government expense? More than defense, or Medicare, or anything else other than Social Security. Billions of tax dollars (and printed dollars) now go towards payments to bondholders. And even still, anyone who bought US Treasuries (or other bonds) got annihilated over the past few years. For all the warfare and all the welfare, it was buy now pay later.
And as you can see from the graph, the time to pay has come:
Fourth, did you know that the dollar has lost at least 25% of its value in just four years? This one you probably knew from just your lived experience of inflation. But Larry Summers estimates that purchasing power has been eroded even more radically than this, with annual numbers hitting 18% if you include the enormous spike in loan payments due to rate hikes. Compounded over four years, that’d be easily more than 25% of the dollar's value.
Yet even 25% in four years is quite a lot:
Next, did you know that China (the single largest foreign buyer of US Treasuries) has been dumping US paper at an accelerating clip? This is a bit technical, but China is an “outside investor” in the US kind of like a new venture capitalist investing in your tech company is an outside investor. Even by buying just 5% of your equity (or in this case, debt), they set the price for everyone else. And show that there’s robust outside demand, by people who don't have to buy.
But now that outside demand is crashing:
But isn’t the dollar a store of value? What are other countries saving in if not US Treasuries? Well, China is a bellwether for much of the non-US world. And those countries have begun stacking historical quantities of gold, even as Western countries have been selling gold.
Take a look:
Ok, what about the dollar as medium of exchange? Well, China — which is the #1 trade partner of most countries in the world now — has just flipped to majority CNY for cross-border foreign exchange deals:
Ok, but can’t the dollar still be used as a sanctions weapon? Don’t countries need access to the US financial system? Actually, no. All the sanctions on Russia actually ended up hurting Europe more than Russia. Europe needed Russia’s oil and gas, but Russia had other customers.
So according to the World Bank (not a Russian source!), Russia just flipped Japan to become the fourth largest global economy in GDP-by-PPP:
All right, but what about the US military? Can’t it ultimately go to war to protect the dollar? Well, that’s a much longer conversation, but see the graph below. Today the US is ostensibly in “peacetime."
And yet it has comparable debt to WW2:
This means the US has neither the money nor the manufacturing base for a sustained military campaign against a peer rival like China. You can’t fight your factory — especially when you’re out of money.
Finally, maybe the single most important number is the $175.3T figure. That’s actually the true debt of the USA, when you take all the entitlements into account, like Social Security and Medicare. And that number is itself rapidly increasing. Don’t take it from me, take it from the Feb 2024 Financial Report of the United States Government.
That $175.3T lines up with the ~$200T number that Druckenmiller has been using for the all-in liabilities of the US government when you take everything into account. And of course, at this point we are in monopoly money territory, because:
The entire fedguv only collected ~$2T last year
That number is itself juiced by deficit spending
The dollar is down ~25% in real terms since 2020
And the "177T" in asset value plummets if liquidated
...or if there is a financial crisis, or both
So, that 175T debt is unpayable. And the US government doesn't have nearly enough to pay for what it owes. It's made promises to everyone, from allies to retirees, that it simply can't keep. To hang on to power amidst that web of broken obligations, it is going to get nasty on a level beyond which most can really comprehend.
See this post for more:
I really haven’t even gotten started. There are many more graphs I could show, many more videos from investors around the world from bonds to real estate who seeing what's happening. But: if you’re intellectually honest, you realize that the dollar’s position is rapidly eroding. It simply isn’t the indispensable asset it was. To summarize:
China doesn’t need the dollar to trade because they are using CNY instead of USD.
BRICS doesn’t need the dollar to save because they are buying gold instead of US bonds.
Russia doesn’t need the dollar to live because they are the fourth largest economy after being shut out of the US economy.
Yet the US needs as much of the world as possible to accept the dollar, as it’s borrowing at levels beyond COVID, beyond WW2, beyond any empire in history.
So, what comes next? I have some ideas, and you have some ideas. But first we need to align on what’s happening.
A popular line of thinking is that the economic gains from AI is gonna solve this problem. How do you respond to that?
I love the optimism. But let's do the math. As of late July 2024, here are the market caps of the top tech stocks:
AAPL: 3.4T
MSFT: 3.3T
NVDA: 3T
GOOG: 2.25T
AMZN: 1.67T
META: 1.25T
TSLA: 0.78T
So, the combined market cap of the Magnificent is "only" $15.65T. That's less than 10% of the $175.3T owed by DC! So, even if AI produces another Magnificent 7, there's no way to grow out of this. And by the way, it takes years to grow a trillion dollar company, years during which the US will just accumulate more debt at an accelerating clip. Everyone isn’t going to get what they’re owed.
A debt crisis is coming.
2024-06-10 15:39:35
California is not a democracy. It’s a one-party state.
Because California Democrats do not hold competitive multiparty elections. No matter how the people vote, a Democrat always wins. The real election is thus actually a selection, where candidates are chosen1 before the primary in a smoke-filled room by the Party. And around the time one-party control was consolidated in the early 2010s, governance started to dramatically worsen, and California's growth rate suddenly leveled off:
Now more than one million citizens have fled2 the once-Golden state for other locales, voting with their feet because they’ve been stripped of the ability to substantively vote with their ballot.
California illustrates the gap between deed and word. Consider that Democrats managed to (a) build a one-party state that (b) a million people fled while (c) holding faux “elections” that a Party member always won whilst also (d) endlessly proclaiming their regime democratic!
This unmistakably resembles China. They've also (a) built a one-party state which (b) millions of people fled that (c) holds faux “elections" where a Communist Party member always wins while (d) endlessly proclaiming their regime democratic.34
There are other similarities, too.
Democrats5 ruthlessly censor internet speech, just like Communists.6 Democrats7 use the state as a battering ram against tech companies, just like Communists.8 Democrats9 tax citizens and hand the resulting funds to Party affiliates, just like10 Communists. Democrats11 encourage loyalists to move to contested territories to strengthen political control, just like12 Communists. Democrats13 funded gain-of function research, just like Communists. And most ominously, Democrats14 are now persecuting their political opponents15 on trumped up charges — just like16 Communists.
This is no small thing. When Communists talk about "communism", what they mean is rule by the Communist Party. And when Democrats talk about “democracy”, what they mean is rule by the Democrat Party. California is their desired end state — where blues never lose.
Now, let’s handle the objections.
The first objection is that Republicans do it too. Look at all the red trifectas, as per this quoted tweet!17 But this argument fails on three counts.
First, when Republicans overturned Roe, Democrats affirmed reproductive choice at the state level.18 They didn’t just copy Republicans — they did something different. So if Democrats actually believed in democratic choice, they would affirm competitive multiparty elections in their states even if Republicans pursued the opposite policy. They aren’t doing that. Which means Democrats genuinely believe in reproductive choice, but not democratic choice.
Second, Democrat control of blue states is much stronger than Republican control of red states. For example, even within a “Republican stronghold” like Texas, Austin is a deep blue city. There is no equivalent of red cities within blue states.19 This alone means blues have significant political power within red territory, but not vice versa.
Third, Democrat control of national institutions — both elected and unelected — is overwhelming. As the graphs show, Democrats control academia20, media21, US government agencies22, and even 70%+ of GDP23. In the language of diversity, Republicans are vastly underrepresented. They’re not even close to 50/50.
So: Democrats have more control at the national level, more control within red states, and total control within their own blue states — yet have not used that control to restore democratic choice.
Actions speak louder than words.
The second objection is that no really — Republicans do it too! They have one-party states, so Democrats are justified in having the same thing. You can’t expect Democrats to enable other parties to not just run, but win. That’s not in their political interest. And it’ll weaken the Democrat Party!
And now we get to the nub of the issue. Communists also have one-party states. Does it then follow that Democrats should have them too?
Because the whole theory of why democracy is supposed to be superior to communism is that it provides real alternatives, real feedback. Just like capitalism provides choice in the market, democracy provides choice in the electorate.24 So if you actually believed in democracy, you’d believe alternation of power strengthens society in a way one-party control never would. And you’d hold competitive multiparty elections even if the other guy didn’t, because it makes your society stronger.
This gives the game away. We know Democrats do not believe in democracy, because they’ve ended competitive multiparty elections in the states they control. Unless other parties are routinely taking political power, it is not a democracy.
The last objection is around motive: ok, but why would Democrats destroy democracy?
It’s simple: once blues gain total control, they begin funneling tax dollars to Democrat affiliates. This is how you get a $100B train in California where no train is built but Democrat unions get paid25. And this is how the homeless industrial complex makes money26, by getting people addicted to drugs and then getting paid by the size of the problem:
This is also how BLM burned down black businesses while lining blue pockets27, and why student loan relief goes to Democrat voters28, and in general why so much public money produces so little today in the way of public goods29.
This, in short, is the blue business model. The purpose of the blue political machine is to fleece Americans while enriching Democrat loyalists.
However, they can only pull off this scam with total one-party control. Outside eyes would stop the gravy train. And that's how you get “vote blue, no matter who.”30
"Vote blue no matter who" came out of the mouths of Democratic presidential candidates31. It's a straightforward rejection of democracy as ideology in favor of Democrat tribalism. All that matters is that blue tribe gains power, so blues can get paid.
Of course, not all blues get paid! Only the connected ones do, political consultants and union bosses and key interest groups and the like. Many blues pull the lever without getting the cheddar. They fall for the marketing.
After all, remember how much blue people pretended to care about black people in 2020, and how little they spoke about them afterwards? “Democracy” serves a similar role for the Party in 2024. It's just a marketing slogan, and can be discarded like BLM once it’s no longer useful.
Look how they pumped and dumped Ibram Kendi32. After the election, the Party can easily flip from declaiming for democracy to decrying populism, as it has before.
In short, if Democrats actually believed in competitive multiparty elections, they'd pursue them regardless of what others did. All their rhetoric revolves around democracy as stated principle, but in blue states where they have total power they've ended it in practice. The obvious reason for this is graft and tribalism: vote blue, no matter who.
It is only a matter of time before Democrats scale what they've done in blue cities and states to the federal level. That's certainly the goal. And it returns us to the original question.
Given that blues now unapologetically reject competitive multiparty elections at the state level in favor of faux contests that their Party always wins...given that they've created electorally unaccountable governments that steal billions from their citizens...given that California and China have both built one-party states...what might the future of blue governance look like?
It sure ain't multiparty democracy.
What it looks like is an exercise for the reader.
Many Democrats believe that if their company is all white, they’re doing something wrong. But if their state is all blue, they’re doing something right. Even though the far left is also far white.33
Specifically, partisan blues are not working to address the erosion of democratic norms and checks-and-balances within Democrat-controlled states. They are unbothered about total one-party control in states they control, and certainly aren’t looking to see how gerrymandering, redistricting, and the like are stifling democratic voice.
Yet if they were looking…here are a few specific examples of how California Democrats changed the laws to keep themselves in power.
Redistricting: The California Citizens Redistricting Commission creates boundaries that favor Democrats. ProPublica actually called out the extent of their partisan redistricting.
Cracking and packing. Relatedly, here’s how gerrymandering works in practice in California. As CalMatters notes, “packing is concentrating blocs of voters to limit their power to as few districts as possible” and “cracking is spreading like-minded voters among several districts so that their influence is diluted.”
Migrants. This is a huge topic with much denial, but in 2013 Pew found that “among Latino immigrants who are not U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents (and therefore likely unauthorized immigrants), some 31% identify as Democrats and just 4% as Republicans.” So, California Democrats encouraged illegal migration with various programs for the “undocumented” as they have a +27 point advantage among this group. Some of those programs include AB60, Medi-Cal, and CalEITC:
These examples can be multiplied. Laws were changed to benefit Democrats. And taxpayer funds were appropriated from Americans to give to Democrat affiliates. The obvious point is to get money and win votes for Democrats. It’s the blue business model, the blue political machine.
In other words: one-party Democrat rule in California did not happen by accident. The Party acquired control, and used its political capital to gain more power and lock out the competition. Its actions reveal that the Party does not care about competitive multiparty elections — namely democracy. It cares about remaining in power.
For example, the Los Angeles DCP endorsement is a candidate interview prior to the primary. In a one-party Democrat state, this endorsement carries significant weight.
California's growth trajectory dramatically slows from 2013 projections. And from 2021: "In the last decade, 1.3 million more people left California than came in from other states. And, it’s accelerating. Half a million people have left for other states in the last two years alone."
Surprisingly, China actually holds elections. Yes, the Party always wins.
Remember, they call themselves the "People's Republic" of China. Two out of the three characters in PRC are devoted to extolling how democratic they are.
Here's the Atlantic saying "In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong."
Here's NYT saying "Free Speech is killing us". I don't think I really need a citation on China's internet censorship, but you can look up the Great Firewall.
Here's one of many articles on the Democrat anti-tech turn.
Here's the Communist techlash, best illustrated with the regime's attacks on Jack Ma.
Here's an excellent piece on how elected Democrats send taxpayer money to their nonprofit affiliates. Here's another from Pirate Wires on the same topic.
Do we need a piece on Communist graft in the PRC? Xi announced a crackdown on corruption (“Tigers and Flies”) that likely also ensnared many of his political enemies.
The Emerging Democrat Majority is the Judis/Texeira playbook for how Democrats could rely on immigration to flip states blue.
Communists use similar tactics: "Over the decades, Beijing has...attempted to transfer large number of Han Chinese people into Tibet".
On gain-of-function research, news keeps breaking on this topic, but suffice to say that science funding is largely run by Democrats and the Wuhan lab was certainly run by Communists.
Are Democrats persecuting their political opponents? Even NYMag admits they are.
There's now a long list of Republicans being prosecuted. One interpretation is that they actually committed a crime. Another interpretation is that they committed the crime of being Republican.
Do Communists persecute their political opponents? Well, you wouldn't want to be Bo Xilai or Hu Jintao.
Nothing against Mr Bump. But his tweet implies that Republican trifectas (where Republicans control governor/house/senate at state level) are justification for why Democrats should enjoy decades of one party control in blue states.
However, if you listed Republican states where reproductive choice had been abrogated, that wouldn't justify symmetrical Democrat abrogation of reproductive choice.
By analogy, given that Democrats campaign on democracy, and claim to believe in it as a core principle that differentiates them from Republicans, you'd expect them to pursue a different policy. But they aren't.
Many blue states passed laws affirming reproductive choice after Roe was overturned.
Bryan Caplan discussed the dearth of red cities in blue states here. And you can see the list of party affiliations of city mayors here. You can calculate the stats, but in general, there are many more blue cities in red states than vice versa.
70%+ of GDP is blue too.
The relationship between capitalism and democracy as economic choice + political choice is a common topic. I should find the canonical scholarly citation, but here's a recent article.
California HSR is $100B. As of mid-2022, it hadn't laid a single mile of track. But it achieved the desired effect of paying off Democrat-affiliated unions. As the LA Times wrote:
"Unions are the powerhouse behind California’s troubled bullet train...organized labor supports the massive $100-billion project and wants lawmakers, rail board directors and other state officials to stick with it."
Here's the source of that graph showing homeless budget up and to the right alongside the homeless population. See also Pirate Wires and American Affairs on the nonprofit industrial complex.
BLM burned down black businesses, while the BLM foundation bought $6M mansions with donated funds.
Because student loan forgiveness disproportionately benefits Democrat voters, Republicans have called it a political bribe.
Again, that American Affairs is quite good as a tour d'horizon of where the public money goes. The short answer is that a lot goes to nonprofits, which produce nonresults.
Here's Edsall in NYT acknowledging that "vote blue no matter who" is a popular slogan and strategy, even as he questions its longevity.
Here's Kendi getting dumped in 2024, now that he's not useful to the Party. As much as I disagree with him ideologically, on some level I feel bad for Kendi. He was just used and abused by the Party.
As Jonathan Haidt showed years ago, the farthest left groups within the US (“Progressive Activists”) are significantly whiter than the population at large.
2024-05-01 11:37:48
Gil Duran’s fake quote was just hit with a community note. Here’s the link to 3:19:51 of the original video, so you can see for yourself.1
Sure, the lie got around the world — but the truth now gets its boots on. Because everyone who liked, replied, or reposted his tweet just got a notification informing them of the actual context.
This is shaping up to be another Shattered Glass-scale disaster for The New Republic, at a time when they can least afford it.
The New Republic editor is @mtomasky, their CEO is @MichaelCaruso, and their editor-in-chief who lost the $34M is Win McCormack (whose public email for contact is [email protected]). Maybe you can ask them why they've decided to let Gil Duran endanger their entire publication? Libel is not a profit-maximizing activity.
The original piece is below.
Years ago, the New Republic published a series of false stories that were so egregiously fake that a movie was made about it called Shattered Glass.
Now it’s happening again.
A “journalist” named Gil Duran just committed a act of ethics cleansing. He posted a fake quote, monetized the traffic, and then stealth edited (v1, v2, v3) his lies days later without running any correction — hoping you wouldn’t see the change!
This is so egregiously unethical that even people who dislike me saw immediately that it was literally libelous:
Fortunately, we have Twitter. Gil Duran faked around — but you found out. So read this piece, then fact check his fake quote with a Community Note.
Here’s what happened.
A Democrat operative named Gil Duran — who was apparently fired from the San Francisco Examiner after making up stories in similar fashion about Michelle Tandler — recently posted a fake headline complete with a fake disclosure, and then consciously hid the replies that pointed out his lies. His libel got many views on Twitter and spread to Hacker News, Reddit, and Threads. Then the New Republic stealth edited the fake quote in his article…multiple times (v1, v2, v3)…after they’d monetized the traffic…without publishing a retraction!
A genuinely insane series of events. Let’s take it in turn, starting with the fake quote.
In the fake quote, Duran claimed I’d called for “ethnic cleansing”. But as you can see at 3:19:51, I actually said that largely Asian technologists — like myself! — are being ethnically cleansed out of San Francisco by a Democrat establishment that has legalized crime, including brutal attacks on Asians. To address this, I called for Democrats to be pushed out of power in the city via non-violent political warfare.
Now, you may not agree with my point of view. You may think random murders of immigrant engineers like Hanako Abe by Democrat-released criminals are just part of living in a big city. But you have to admit the New Republic completely inverted the meaning of what I said. In fact, Duran’s lie was so egregious that even people like Glen Weyl who strenuously disagree with me noted the libelous misrepresentation warranted an immediate correction!
After this, the New Republic knew they were dead to rights. So first they stealth edited the headline. Then, later, they stealth edited the body copy. Here’s the v1, v2, and v3. Obviously, the multiple stealth edits betray mens rea — guilty conscience.
They knew they’d faked around and been found out.
But the fakery actually goes deeper than that.
As mentioned, the author of the article is a guy named Gil Duran. Duran spends his time fruitlessly attacking just about anyone in tech who’s critical of California Democrats, from Elon Musk to Garry Tan. And in his disclosures under these articles, he says only that he’s a “journalist”:
But in reality, Duran is a lifelong Democrat operative! He’s been paid by just about every major California Democrat —including Kamala Harris, Jerry Brown, Tom Steyer, Dianne Feinstein, and Antonio Villaraigosa — to help them gain and maintain power. He’s thus one of the people most responsible for the descent of California into feces, needles, and bankruptcy. That’s why he endlessly attacks anyone who criticizes California Democrats. And — very consequentially — in those New Republic articles he conspicuously omits any disclosure that he’s ever been paid by California Democrats.
He does brag about it when he’s soliciting consulting money, though:
I mean, to understand what’s going on visually, Gil Duran was once paid by just about every California Democrat, and now spends his time attacking just about every California Technologist:
That’s three indisputable propositions:
Gil Duran received past payments from California Democrats
Gil Duran attacks current critics of far left California Democrats
And Gil Duran didn’t disclose those past payments in his recent attacks
The question then arises: is Gil Duran currently being paid by California Democrats to astroturf attacks on their critics? Did one of his patrons like Tom Steyer get tired of these tech guys speaking up — and order a hit? Someone should find out.
Regardless: Duran is a Democrat when he wants to collect consulting fees and a “journalist” when he wants to lie to the public.
After Duran posted his fake quote, several people pointed out he was making it up. He hid all these replies, because he knew he was lying. All he cared about was maximizing the traffic! See for yourself:
Then, a few days later, after The New Republic realized they might have a libel suit on their hands, they stealth edited (v1, v2, v3) the headline and then the article.
But hiding the replies fits Duran’s MO. He’s all about faking the discourse in the name of “framing” the discourse. He even admits to it on his blog: to not reply to critics, to block rather than engage. He calls Elon a Nazi, he calls Substack Nazi, and he attacks everyone in tech from Michelle Tandler to California Forever.
Why? Because he wants California Democrat Forever. He wants a one-party state in the name of democracy. His entire life’s work is about ending democracy in the Golden State, in the actual sense of competitive multiparty elections, as you can see here:
Duran even admits this too! He proudly writes about turning San Francisco into a one-party state where "no Republican has been elected in decades.” Whatever this is, it ain’t democracy:
And that’s where the rubber hits the road.
Democrats like Duran hate democracy. They’re about as “democratic” as the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. They built a one-party state by driving Republicans out of California and into a permanent minority through a conscious multi-decade strategy. They gained total political power only to bankrupt the Golden State, steal millions for toilets and billions for trains, and literally cover its beautiful cities in feces and trash.
Their only possible remaining competition within California comes from tech. And that is why they hate us.
Just to recap, here’s the level of fakery we’re dealing with:
The New Republic has faked stories before
Duran also faked a story before on Michelle Tandler
Duran was apparently terminated from the SF Examiner for that fake
Duran faked his disclosures, hiding his highly relevant past payments from California Democrats in articles that attack critics of those self-same California Democrats
Duran faked the quote on ethnic cleansing
Duran even hid the replies pointing out he’d faked the quote!
Then, days later, the New Republic stealth edited the article multiple times (v1, v2, v3) without publishing a correction.
I mean, come on.
This is the pathetic state of California Democrats, journalists, and legacy media. They’ll make things up to cling to power. This is why tech must check their power. Fortunately, with social media we can rebut their lies. So if you want to help, add a Community Note to Gil Duran’s libelous post. Point out how the New Republic silently changed (v1, v2, v3) their false headline without running a correction.
They faked around.
Make them find out.
