We don't need no education We don't need no thought control No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teacher, leave them kids alone

In 1665, Cambridge University closed b/c of the plague. Issac Newton quarantined himself at his childhood home. It was the most productive time of his life. He discovered the calculus & laws of motion. Stuck a bodkin in his eye to study optics. How will you spend the next year?

Not many know he was an applicant to the Thiel Fellowship way back in 2013 or 14. We passed on him because we didn't think a media company had the scalability of tech startup. Our mistake! But Charlie kept coming to our events for a long time.

Courage is in shorter supply than genius

I was always puzzled as to why there wasn't an in-depth book on the origins of PayPal. Jimmy Soni's new book, The Founders delivers. Superbly written. And truly extensively researched - interviews w/ all the main players (@elonmusk @peterthiel @mlevchin @DavidSacks @reidhoffman)

Thiel 2009

How’s this for a sense of destiny — when he was 16 years old in 1890, Churchill wrote this to a friend:

Great piece by @dodgeblake

Startup idea: bathroom club. This startup owns and maintains nice bathrooms in cities across America. Only members who pay membership dues are allowed to use the facilities. Starbucks/Equinox but actually for bathrooms. There has been a tragedy of the commons w/ respect to public toilets and even semi-private bathrooms like those at Starbucks.

WTF Happened In 1971? Very much understudied era in history. The fork in the road, when stagnation began to spread. wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Gates paid way more than Elon's offer to divorce his wife. Bezos paid about the same. Some billionaires want mistresses. Others want free speech.

We need national rent-seeking control

About the same time Larry Summers said the Thiel Fellowship was “the most misdirected philanthropy of the decade.”

Harvard grads Thiel Fellows

This is John Galt speaking…

This whole LK99 episode could be a decisive turn in the De Sci movement. Replication moving faster than the Ivory Tower and academic journal gatekeeping power cluster. Founders of tech companies getting PR boosts for replicating lab work

One day I walked into the office and Peter Thiel was in a conference room with 7 scholars. I asked his assistant what they were doing. She said “Reading chapter 7 of The City and Man by Leo Strauss.” They were in that room 9-5 that day. One chapter.

On July 21, 1969, The New York Times published the reactions of intellectuals and artists to the Moon landing. Can't help but laugh... Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose--Hatred of progress, adventure, & achievement. Same dung thrown at @elonmusk every launch. Pablo Picasso: "It means nothing to me." Charles Evers, Mayor of Fayette, Mississippi: "America needs to look at the Earth, not at space. Before one more dollar is spent on outer space, we must make sure that not one child here on Earth goes to the dinner table with no food on it." Saul Alinsky: "I wish to Christ they'd take the South Vietnamese Government and stick them in the capsule. Send them to the moon one way. That's the only way to get rid of them since they won't take dough and go to Switzerland. We'll have to fight a war of independence to free ourselves from the Vietnamese." Louis Mumford: "A symbolic act of war!...It is no accident that the climactic moon landing coincides with cutbacks in education, the bankruptcy in hospital services, the closing of libraries and museums, and the mounting defilement of the urban and natural environment, to say nothing of many other evidences of gross social failure and human deterioration." Reinhold Niebuhr: "The chief reason for assessing the significance of the moon landing negatively, even while the paeons of triumph are sung, is that this tremendous technological achievement represents a defective sense of human values, and of a sense of priorities of our technical culture. The same technology that gave us this triumph has created many of our problems." David Riesman: "The possibility of nuclear destruction has made a greater difference in my life than space exploration is likely to make." Jesse Jackson: "How can this nation swell and stagger with technological pride when it has a spiritual will so crippled, when it is so weak, so wicked, so blinded and misdirected in its priorities?" Robert Jay Lifton: "The moon landing epitomizes the more general awe and helplessness we feel before our own tools and techniques." More here: timesmachine.nytimes.com/tim…

Fuck you money may be the last hope for free speech.

San Francisco is past its prime: it has combined the expensive and the bland and the appalling into a new form of decadence. Expect fewer new companies to start there. No music. No art. nationalreview.com/2019/04/s…

Ayn Rand’s villains keep stepping forward with greater frequency and higher intensity

Why is housing so expensive? Because the government constrains supply. Simple as that. Top 3 policy issue in the U.S. has a straightforward libertarian solution.

Thiel Fellow donates $1 billion

Aging is a disease. Maybe life extension is debatable. I don't think so, but let's concede it to the Malthusians. Even so, negligible senescence--ageless aging--should not be. This Seychelles tortoise is 189 years-old. He was alive when Charles Darwin arrived on the Galapagos

Is this from a deep-tech startup or a minimum-security prison? Great teams are hardcore. Pre-seed startups live or die by timeline and runway. The best companies execute at an unthinkable rate. Ivy Leaguers who choose McKinsey or Goldman will never know the joy and the ecstasy of pushing past the limits of what they thought was possible.

June 20, 2016 — 1517 agrees to be the first money in to Loom over Chipotle burritos. Today Loom acquired by Atlassian for $975m Congrats guys. Best carne asada I’ve ever had! 🥳🌯🌯

The Straussian Conclave

"Thiel fellows have achieved shocking success, enough to merit a reconsideration of our current approach to college." bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

“SF proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. Its opening was recently delayed to 2021, yielding a project duration of around 7,300 days. The project will cost $100,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.”

After 10 years, I left SF for LA in January. There are somewhere north of 137 blog posts and stories that have been written about "Why I Left SF" in the last few years. Here is mine: city-journal.org/thousands-l…

Prediction: Dylan Field will be CEO of adobe in 5 years

Dude, you’re so wrong. There is going to be a bank run. Will you step down from your candidacy if you are wrong?

PayPal's current market cap of $123 billion is worth more than the combined value of all of the PayPal Mafia's creations. That includes LinkedIn, SpaceX and so on. But I think we'd all agree it is better that they moved on.

There is an old Russian saying: You have weaned yourself from all desires, and have renounced the world, but to what effect? You are weak and grey and the beauty of the world has grown repulsive to you.

What if the biggest constraint to progress really is a question of psychology, not economics?

It is not so much an overproduction of elites that is dangerous. No, it’s an overproduction of critics. 10,000 critics for every 1 creator. Universities wanted students to appreciate greatness, but instead they only taught doubt, destruction, & grievance

Thiel + Girard = explanation of cultural stagnation (1) college is only path to success so anyone and everyone compete to go (2) the more you compete, the less differentiated you become (3) the more alike we are, the fewer unique ideas and creations we will see. Now we can see what success within the establishment truly is: to become a master at a form of imitation. Not differentiation, but imitation. And an imitation cloaked in the language of uniqueness. Read any pile of college admissions essays and weep at the sea of sameness before you.

There is one awesome response from Eugene Ionesco, a Romanian playwright best known for his play about rhinoceroses taking over a town.

These are the people in control of what should be the greatest city of the 21st Century, a new Athens, a new Florence...never before have creative power and political power diverged so clownishly, so sadly.

Techxodus: “Our concentration in San Francisco is not serving us any longer, and we will strive to be a far more distributed workforce,” Dorsey said on Twitter’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday cnbc.com/2020/02/08/twitter-…

Harvard grad 1517 founder w/ 3 years at McKinsey. No college Applying for vp role. IPO

Calling Ayn Rand, your villains are loose

It's out! Some write manifestos. Others tell stories. I do both. Want to know what it's like to work for Peter Thiel? Want to know how we ran the Thiel Fellowship & 1517? Why are network states and charter cities necessary for progress? It's all here: amazon.com/gp/product/164177…

Close quarters w/ indoor HVAC is looking more and more problematic. Office of the future:

There is a saying in Switzerland -- the Swiss do not have an army. They are an army.

Sometimes people ask what it’s like to work for Peter Thiel. It’s not that he connects the dots faster than us. Its that he sees dots no one else sees and connects them in surprising and novel configurations.

"Who cares what's real?" Could very well be the intellectual poison of our time. Teenagers tell Keanu nowadays they don't understand why Neo wants to know what's real in the Matrix. I've also heard that more & more people say they would choose to enter Nozick's experience machine. Question the nature of your reality. Sometimes this is called science. Sometimes philosophy. Acceptance means you're either complacent or a dupe.

The actually existing education system is so awful, it's mind-boggling that it has any defenders

Boo! Just drop out.

I hope he shuts down 30 Under 30

Could be named The Powder Room

When making this comparison people forget to mention the constraints we were operating under. You had to be 19 and under when you applied and you had to drop out. YC can take anybody.

Balaji kicking of Network State Conference — how do we build parallel institutions to the establishment? @balajis #networkstateconference

San Francisco in 2030 will be like Detroit in 2010, except with Benioff ruling downtown instead of Dan Gilbert.

I chatted with some conservative Harvard students this week. Me: Are there any Marxist organizations on campus? Student: Yeah. The faculty.

Balaji at FDA Thiel at CIA Andreessen at EPA Satoshi at the Fed

Sound barrier Human powered Flight

A lot has been written about the Gundo. No one has addressed the countercultural vibe shift and the why of it. I take a crack at it for City Journal city-journal.org/article/the…

Got some flak for “flexing” the Thiel Fellowship, but here is an even harder flex: When Dylan Field, Vitalik Buterin, Austin Russell et al were recruited, we had ridiculous constraints: (1) candidates had to be 19 & under when they applied (2) batch was limited to 20 people

Empire Yoda: "Try not. Do or do not. There is no try." Last Jedi Yoda: "The greatest teacher, failure is." The Force went from definite optimism to the A/B testing & the Lean Startup. The great stagnation is everywhere.

How do we make things and what are the main ways we can improve our way of making them? At the appointed time, at the expected quality, at the right place for the lowest cost? New Stripe Press book, The Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter is both a history of and an X-ray into the production process. Solid entry in the Silicon Valley canon, especially important for hardware startup founders to read. A side note: this book should replace all copies of Howard Zinn in American schools. It delivers a sense of awe for how anything is made at all and a sense of gratitude for the untold millions of tinkerers who have improved the way things are made.

Woke: let the people of Hong Kong move to the US. Bespoke: let the people of Hong Kong bring their rules with them and establish New Hong Kong on the coast of California.

Imagine we are all unjustly in a prison. And we can pool our resources to grant to one or two of us who can escape. Who would we collectively free? We would free the team that once outside, built the tools to free us all. This is the Rawlsian case for technology & science.

This view is why 1517 prints money. The paper belt doesn’t trust extraordinary young talent to do great work.

San Francisco's budget nearly doubled from 2010 to 2020 -- $6.4 billion to now $12 billion, thanks in large part to the tax revenue from tech companies and their employees. Where did this money go?! What happens when it dries up now that everyone is fleeing? I shudder to think...

Santa is the patron saint of anarchism. 1/ He lives as a sovereign individual on a seastead in international waters. 2/ He disregards all laws of intellectual property to create an abundance of goods that he then distributes according to a little understood moral code.

envy, what a fantastic emotion to put on display.

Techno-optimist Golden Rule: Do for the future what you wish the past had done for you.

I see one pile of money that could be used to pay off college debt

Many people have recommended this podcast to me knowing it would piss me off. No doubt Ramtin is a hustler and brilliant, and has made exceptional returns but make no mistake: he is the knight of credentialism and a the worshipper of gatekeepers and status dynamics. Notice how in art or even in venture he has no judgment for himself as to what is great work, but only for which other high status people want something. He is a dark girardian.

Welcome to the Roaring 2020s

Homicides are still increasing — it’s only the percent of the rate of change that is decreasing. Let’s say you have 100 murders in year 1. In year 2, you have 200 murders. And in year 3 you have 250 murders. It would be silly to say that homocides are going down. The rate at which it increased went down, but there are still more. The Times is suggesting that homicides are decreasing when it’s just the rate of change as measured by comparing it to the gains of the previous year.

Second Thiel fellow this month to take a company public with more than a $2 billion valuation forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin…

“The Thiel Fellowship is the most misdirected philanthropy of the decade” Former Harvard President Larry Summers. Meanwhile... techcrunch.com/2019/07/19/in…

San Francisco, city of the future, will have planned power outages this summer — PG&E’s “Public Safety Shutoff”—when dry fields & high winds threaten fires. So technologically advanced is this city, we will sit in darkness & food will rot because we don’t know how to transmit ⚡️

Skip the PhD and reach out to 1517 for the money you need to run some experiments

I’ve seen teams of 3 students on no sleep over 36 hours at Hack the North build better scheduling and signup platforms

Burbclaves coming. If you want a history of the future, get your copy of Snow Crash now

Today at 1517 we’re launching The Invisible College. $50k to pull an Isaac Newton. Work away from college this Fall and discovery something new. Don’t die of boredom drooling in front of Zoom. And don’t put a bodkin in your eye! 1517fund.com/post/invisible-…

Whatever it takes, we’re gonna make this happen.

The greenest, cleanest New Deal would involve massive infrastructure build in nuclear energy. Even 2nd gen nuclear reactors are cleaner and safer than coal and gas. Not one death in all US reactor history, including nuclear submarines.

That Thiel Fellowship program never helped to make anything great.

“A people ought to fight as much to keep their traditions/laws as to defend the city’s walls.” —Heraclitus

The American Dream shouldn’t be about wealth, or accomplishment, or even owning a home in a super-zip. The American Dream ought to be about American Virtue. But sadly the American Aristotle didn’t get tenure and instead is writing code for stat arb at Ren Tech.

Sadly becoming more probable with each passing day....

Perhaps the most underrated invention of all time is the corporation. Purposeful coordination to mutual benefit on a scale and across so many sectors that it boggles the mind.

Lol my book has far more controversial ideas in it than this

Nullius in verba--"take nobody's word for it"--has been the motto of the Royal Society since its founding in 1660.

Sounds like any university today: "In heated moments Soviet philosophers would argue whether cutting-edge scientific theories—relativity or quantum mechanics in physics, say, or resonance theory in chemistry—were compatible with the tenets of Lenin or Friedrich Engels."

Diligence — VC speak for calling their friends and other VCs and asking them what they think about a company

Creative clusters are rare--Athens 5th century, Paris 1920s, Silicon Valley 1950-2017, etc. They emerge and are not made. Technocratic efforts to seed them invariably fail. But some hallmarks of healthy creative clusters are: - an increasing pool of successful innovators over time - adventurous angels, investors, & patrons - excited customers, fans, & audiences - relatively cheap housing - relatively cheap office space - third places where new ideas are debated: cafes, bars, parties, salons, lecture series, restaurants - a friendly political environment - a thoughtful media, publications - a pantheon of heroes, iconoclasts, & villains - sophisticated writing to explore theory, vision, history - lore and know-how accumulated from past greats who laid the foundations of the art - big seasonal industry events and celebrations - fellowships and grants - easy access on-ramps to a career in the game for newcomers - boundary figures from other disciplines who mix it up with the core - the overall feeling that this is the center of the universe for anyone in the game

“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre education system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts.” — Frank Zappa

The future is not being built in Europe

My fav pic this week of the brothers Missor carrying their statue around San Francisco this week

Good metaphor for American 18-year-olds who think they need a college degree to learn and start a fulfilling career

“this is the first year of the 21st century” — Peter Thiel forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman…

Deregulating housing would: -make us richer -increase fertility -increase employment for working class males -lower inequality -reduce carbon emissions -reduce homelessness -fight crime

There have been various explanations for the Great Stagnation and the difficulty of making progress: (1) all the low hanging fruit have been picked (2) lack of will power, funding, and regulatory drag The first is looking weaker. While the second is becoming more apparent:

Welcome to San Francisco: it costs as much as Switzerland but looks like Venezuela

Would anyone be interested in reading (rereading?) Dostoevsky’s Demons & Notes from Underground with me? I don’t want a book club, but I am imagining a Zoom meet up followed by group email threads on various topics related to the books.