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@alphaxbarry
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“Either Caesar, or nothing”. Founder @templecities
Joined March 2016
As an “industry”, charter cities are where AI was in the 2010s: anti-memetic, fringe, with lots of experimental energy and still intellectually potent. Yet despite the current Charter City Winter, the most important company of the century will be a charter city company.
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Something admirable about young Thiel’s naked greed
whenever you feel like you're taking too much risk recall that as PayPal was running out of cash 33-year-old Peter Thiel tried to transfer what remained to his LARP hedge fund so he could go long Treasuries
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Ahem
You don’t need VC or PE to reindustrialize. Neither are fit for purpose. You need a State Bank—run by private sector domain experts—with unlimited fiscal authority, independent of congress or the Fed, built on MMT principles (crucial). Watch this: say USG creates a new American
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You don’t reindustrialize by giving financial capital an even longer leash. You reindustrialize by subordinating the interests of financial capital to those of sovereign production capital.
America has the world's best financial markets, and this can be rapidly converted into industrial capacity if the will exists. JPMorganChase's announcement today is a great signal of that will materializing.
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From “super intelligence isn’t enough” by Fukuyama. True enough. The bottleneck to deploying AI into the world over the next decades is governance. Need to fast track permitting / regulation to scale compute and power? Governance. Unions blocking automation of industries?
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This is the billionaire’s dilemma. You could either hoard your stash like Smaug at Erebor, and live in fear of cops coming for your shit, or you could just YOLO that shit and buy yourself a crown.
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This is arguably the only thing SBF was right about. MF was spending capital he didn’t even have on a quest to take over the world. Sure FTX collapsed, but which living billionaire would have the balls to cut Anthropic a $500M check in 2021?
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Thiel is easily the only thinking billionaire in Silicon Valley—yet even he dare not kill the miser within him. His conclusion here isn’t wrong, just weak. The contrarian solution to resolve this would be to engage in the most aggressive program of philanthropy (not altruism)
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It’s a tough realization but the best way to ensure you can work on big, interesting things as a founder is to get rich first. Unless you have rich friends/fam, you’re better off getting a few $M’s under your belt first to work on big shit
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YC is an anti signal. The best founders I know have either been rejected by YC or simply do not even consider it
I’ve been rejected by YC 7 times. In that time: - i built and sold a startup - i built a following of over 400k devs - i learned what i enjoy doing and what i don’t - i’ve learned more about building, business, and marketing than any job or school could have ever taught me -
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Promising. Given US’ actual capabilities, Pax Americana should be much smaller than the globe but much larger than the nation. Containing China militarily is a fool’s errand. The real competition should be technological and economic.
NEW: The new National Defense Strategy has been delivered to SecDef Hegseth for review, and places homeland security over deterring China has the Pentagon’s primary mission. Not everyone in the Pentagon thinks that’s a good idea.
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Energy I’m on for the rest of the decade. The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.
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Some (speculative) predictions: 1. Charter cities will have their Chat GPT moment within a decade. 2. Space exploration and industrialization will be primarily funded and organized by the world’s leading charter city companies, not states (exception: China). 3. Most nation
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The sci fi show Alien:Earth depicts a future where the world is divided and run by 5 companies who, according to the show lore, solved all the world’s problems as nation states failed. Hollywood can only conceive of sci fi in dystopian terms, but there is no reason to assume
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And just as the East India Companies emerged at the frontiers of their respective metropoles, the most powerful charter city companies will spring up in the periphery of the American World Empire. None of this is good or bad. It just is. It’s already baked in.
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The East India Companies point to the future ahead. Both the Dutch and British EICs essentially invented modern capitalism. Similarly, the most successful charter city companies this century will define what’s next after the post-war socio-economic consensus collapses.
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Everything from geopolitics, AI / labor displacement debates, energy, high tech races, immigration, political economy, (re)industrialization, the future of money, demographics—all of the most powerful trends of the century converge in the charter city.
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