#124: Unschooling, Innovating Education, Intuitive Learning and Startup Cities with Zach Caceres
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Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to the Chewy Journal podcast. I'm your host, Camille Yang. My guest today is Zach Casseris. He is an experienced software engineer and focuses on modern web technologies. Zach is interested in education and startup cities and initiated a couple of cool projects in the relevant areas.

In today's episode, we talked about Zach's unschooling experience, innovating education, intuitive learning, and startup cities. I hope you enjoy it. I'd like to start with your background. Your website, I think, is the most interesting personal website I have ever seen.

It's very unique and special. Would you mind sharing your background to start? Sure. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate that. My website is an expression of the sort of interests of my life. The sort of tagline of the website is software and adventure, which is a personal mantra that I try to live by.

By trade and by day, I'm a software engineer, and that's how I make a living, and that's where I put a lot of my time and my focus. But I've always had an interest in understanding technology more broadly and understanding things that people may not conceive of as technological systems as technological systems. So this is everything from like

our shared interest in startup cities to different ways of conceiving of education and the role of technology in education. Really, this comes from my honestly sort of strange, circuitous way of arriving to my career.

I was originally unschooled from roughly age 13 up. Unschooling is essentially you just don't go to school and you just find your own way as a learner. And I did end up going to university. I did not study software engineering. I studied philosophy and economics. And then I ended up working at a series of mostly early stage startup projects in the

Various different spaces. I ended up transitioning to software later in my career because I wanted essentially to have that leverage to build things. I love the process of building. I loved like being in the halcyon early days where it's like there's a lot of ambiguity and you have to create order out of disorder or nothing, you know.

And yeah, and that's pretty much what I do today is I work with early-ish stage companies and build their tech and talk about the business and try to be practical about building things. Cool. So what made you quit school? What made you make that decision?

It was actually a really hard decision. I was very unhappy in school. There's overwhelming evidence that a huge number of people are extremely unhappy in school. Yeah, yeah. I was that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think in particular, in particular when I meet, you know, very dynamic people and I think highly creative people, you often hear that they were particularly miserable in school. And so I'm not surprised you had this experience, you know, given the projects that you're involved in and stuff.

I think there is a stigma associated with being unhappy in school, which is that you must have been, say, a bad student or not intellectual or something. But in my case, actually, I loved learning and I was a good student, but I was just miserable all the time. So I wanted something different.

That's what it boiled down to. Wow. So did you start your own learning program after you quit school? I originally, I started talking to my parents and trying to convince them to let me leave school. When I was in, I guess I was in about seventh grade and they just, they wouldn't buy it. It's a hard sell on, you know, on parents, right? I don't blame them, honestly, especially because at that time, you know, you're, you're

You're an immature adolescent, right? You're a 12-year-old boy. No one trusts a 12-year-old boy, you know? So eventually what we settled on, both my parents had to work. No one could teach me. And also my parents couldn't afford private schools. We actually toured private schools, but it was just like, it was out of reach. There was just no way to do that. So what we settled on was they were like, okay, we'll let you leave school, but you have to do two things.

The first is that you have to have a job or somehow be like engaged in the workforce. You can't just like hide in the basement and play video games or something. Right. And, and you have to show some evidence that you're learning. And what we ended up settling on was, Hey, read a lot of books,

take courses online and hold a job. And they were cool with that. And I'm truly grateful they were open-minded enough to consider that as like the pillars of an education. And so that's what we did was it was largely just like rolling my own experience that combined employment, employment reading, and then like following my interests by taking bespoke courses wherever I could find them. I think your story was featured in Barbara Oakley's book.

It was, yeah. So she has a chapter in a book called Mind Shift. And she has a chapter basically on people breaking rules. Honestly, I think my story was like sort of the...

the story of rebellion that you wanted to feature, you know, and I'm of course grateful, grateful to her for that. But I don't know, I guess I never viewed it as, as an act of rebellion. I was very rebellious when I was being forced every day into school. And for instance, I had, I was having a bad relationship with my parents during that time. And honestly, almost overnight,

when I left school and was able to focus more where I wanted to go, I became happier, more confident, and my relationship with my family got much better because it was less like, here are these people coercing me to do this thing I hate, and more like, here are people that I love and that are my partners in life and that are helping me realize myself. And that was an effect that I never would have predicted, but I'm grateful to, you know, to have had. Then later on, you...

back to university to do your degree? - Yeah, so I did end up going back to university. I also had a bit of a kind of a strange university experience. When I left school, school actually, despite the fact that for instance, you may pay taxes, if you leave school, you're forbidden from participating in anything that the school offers. You can't play in the band,

You can't go in the library. You can't work in the shop. At least in Maryland, where I grew up, you're absolutely forbidden from any of these resources. So this was like, well, how do I-- I want to learn music. I want to do these things. So I ended up going to university early

because I was forbidden from participating in my age appropriate activities. So it's just like sort of how backwards all this stuff is, right? So I went to a local university in the town where I'm from, where I did some tutoring. And at that time, I was very interested in music. And I did some music tutoring and some other courses. And then I ended up transferring to New York University, where I then got more focused on

what became of my interest then, which was my interest in philosophy and economics. And the weird thing or like the, yeah, kind of the weird thing is, which is slightly embarrassing, but also kind of funny is that I, I,

graduated college before I graduated high school. When I got to my final year of college, the people said, hey, you know, you're going to be graduating soon, but we don't have any evidence that you have a high school diploma. And I was like, well, I don't have one. So I don't know. What do I do? And they had never dealt with that before. And so, yeah.

What I had to do, I actually had to take proctored tests for things that I had already studied in college, but at the high school level so that I could get retroactive high school credit and be considered a high school graduate and then I could graduate college. So all of these experiences inspired in me this idea that a lot of this stuff is just very arbitrary and very bureaucratic.

So that kind of motivates you to focus on the education. Yeah, it definitely made me kind of like, I don't know,

Let's say it pulled the blinders from my eyes in the sense that like a lot of this stuff, a lot of the way education is done, it's serving the needs of the bureaucracy or it's serving the needs of the employees of the education system. Or maybe it's serving the needs of like a particular set of administrators that have a particular ideology. You know, but it's not clear that there is a very strong, let's say, context.

and like entrepreneur relationship or customer and service provider relationship in the world of education. And the more, the older I got and the more that I look into it, including through the work of people like Barbara Oakley, who you mentioned earlier, the more that I started realizing, wow, the whole industry is really, in my opinion, like very backwards. And there's a lot of evidence that it's a deeply broken space, sadly. And if you think about what it is,

I mean, to me, it's just like this tragedy of epic proportions because education is the way through which people's idiosyncratic talents get to express themselves. And so you think of all these people that are trapped in systems optimized, say, for a, you know, systems optimized for the bureaucracy of the administration rather than optimized for the customer. And you think about how much innovation and

and art and just like happiness and just talent is just being squandered in it. It's really a sad thought. And that has maintained, like that sad thought has inspired me a lot to, you know, think and work in that space to some extent.

What other projects have you been doing focused on education? There's one main project in the education space that I worked on some years ago now. After I graduated university, I ended up working in Latin America for some years. And I worked for an entrepreneur that had a set of projects there. And I kind of moved between the projects and helped him get them off the ground and all that. And

one of those projects was a small experimental college. The college was part of a broader university, really a very good university in Latin America. And being a good university, they were like, hey, how can we incubate new ways of learning and new pedagogies without disrupting our whole model? So they made

what you could think of as like an education skunk works, like a place to try to try things that were very new. Like a venture. Exactly. And that was a project, it was called the MPC, which stood for the Michael Polanyi College. Michael Polanyi was a chemist turned philosopher. And one of his big ideas was this idea that

you know more than you can express and so when you are learning oftentimes learning by doing is a more effective way because you're you're internalizing things that you may not be able to talk about so that was the kind of vibe of the space so

So the MPC, I was not involved with it at first, but it ended up going through a difficult period, a period of like organizational and financial dysfunction. And the people that were backing it said like, hey, do you want to have a crack at trying to put this thing back on a stable foundation?

And I said, okay, went into it and had to do a pretty radical restructuring of things to make it both a functioning business, like to make the numbers add up and for it to work. But then also I ended up changing much about the process, the educational process and the pedagogy itself.

In particular, the challenges that we had were, one is we didn't have a huge budget, which meant we couldn't hire tons of like high profile professors in the program. The other is that, and in fact, in Latin America,

Guatemala is where this was in general. You just don't have access directly to the levels of human capital that you get. If you lived in like New York city or something, right. The other is that there was a really wide diversity of educational interests in the program. People had arrived to pursue idiosyncratic projects that they wanted to, they wanted to, for instance, like there was one guy that wanted to build a, uh,

a funeral insurance company, like this very specific niche. And he wanted to study all the things that were associated with that. You had people that wanted to do like event management or graphic design. It was like, how do we accommodate such a diversity of interests in a single place? What we ended up doing in the MPC was,

was converting the college into essentially like a market for education, what we would do is that at the start of every semester, we would

have all the students design what we call a learning contract. And the contract would specify all of the things, all of the goals that they had of things they were going to learn, processes and resources they were going to use, a form of deliverables and how they were going to be evaluated. And then what we did was we actually took their tuition money instead of us deciding who it was that was going to evaluate it. We gave them the money, the budget to administer to pay a private tutor

that would become the person who would evaluate and help them along in achieving those goals.

That way, a person who wanted to learn about event management could literally just pay someone in the event management industry to meet and tutor them. Or the funeral insurance guy could pay someone in the insurance industry to evaluate their work. And it broadened the range of interests that we could accommodate. And that was like kind of the pattern at the center of the MPC that allowed us to create this diversity. Hmm.

So MPC's role is like a matchmaker. You find the tutor for them, then guide them through the learning journey. Yeah, so we played the role of matchmaker, which was helping them find the right person, obviously evaluating the quality of the contract. We had standards for that. And then also we were able, because of how we designed the contract,

we were able to plug that in to the legacy credit granting system of the university so that they could actually receive university credit for these like very

specific interests of their own and they could end up with like a proper degree. So we were kind of trying to hack the legacy system to accommodate what we felt like was a more modern way of learning. Do you think we can like scale up this model and apply it to other universities or what's the challenges you are facing? I think it would be really hard to scale. I would love to say yes because like I would love to just like

have that kind of thing scaled up. But I think it's something that is very hard to scale because every person really required a pretty individual touch. We knew most of the people, like let's say there's 50, 60 people that we're working with on a regular basis. You can know all of them and you kind of know how to guide them and help them. It could be bigger than it was at that time.

you know but i don't i can't imagine having you know 10 000 people operating this way

At least not at the same level of quality. So what else have you done in the education industry? I have a new project which will, well, we're still somewhat in the early days of it, but with Barbara Oakley, the educator that you mentioned earlier, she and I are collaborating on a project that right now it's tentatively called the intuitive programmer. That will probably change, but

That will become a MOOC from a prominent MOOC provider. I can't share more specifics than that yet, but it will become a MOOC and maybe also hopefully a book after that. We'll see. But Barbara Oakley is like one of the world. She's one of the world's leading experts on the science of learning. And she's best known for a MOOC called Learning How to Learn, which is a very rigorous scientific book.

approach to understanding how it is that the brain learns and what are the specific things you can do to learn better as a person. That's been an extraordinary success with millions of students. And it's just like beloved by almost everyone who takes it. What Barb and I want to do is to take many of the kind of neuroscientific insights that are from learning how to learn and similar work and take it and apply it

to the process of programming and software engineering. The reason that we want to do that

is because programming and software engineering, we feel like it's sort of like a world, very weird cognitive behaviors. It's very unnatural to sit in a chair all day and just like stare at abstract symbols and just be like, oh yeah, the semicolon was supposed to go there, but now it's here. And it's this weird thing for humans to be doing.

And there's been a huge amount of investment in the tools and languages and stuff that programmers use. But actually, there's really not been a lot of investment or work in the most important tool of all that sits at the center, which is your own brain as the programmer. And advances in neuroscience, of which Barb is the far greater expert than I, right? The advances in neuroscience that she has talked about absolutely have

very specific things to say for how to be an effective engineer in your day-to-day and also how to learn programming as you're skilling up. And so we're going to anchor a lot of the behaviors and habits and stuff of an effective software engineer in neuroscience and put that together in a way that is hopefully accessible and fun for people.

That's cool. Yeah, because I just watched the talk you did with Barbara on the intuitive programmer. Yeah, I was mind-blowing because as I mentioned, I'm not a coder, but I did the coding program with a free code camp before. I do think...

with her way of learning once you know you set up the like 25 minutes concentration time then you use the the focus man or diffuse diffuse the man what was the term of that yeah yeah focused and diffused mode yeah yeah so i find it's very interesting especially for the new newbie like me

Look, regardless of whether you're new or not, there's no escaping the power of the focused and diffuse mode. Barb also has some really interesting new material on the role of the basal ganglia in

essentially like what the, the neuroscientific basis of expertise and intuition and how that's trained in the mind. And anyway, I'm super excited about the topic. And I think there's going to be some really interesting, some really interesting points and framings on this stuff that as far as I know, has not ever

ever been done and it's just because of the crossover between a great expert like her into this new space you know I think she did a TED talk learn how to learn yeah I remember she did that put the link in the show notes yeah she's done some really interesting um

A variety of things. I definitely also recommend her book, Pathological Altruism. I imagine you probably have people interested in like affective altruism or other kinds of ideas in, you know, in your podcast, you know, listenership. And yeah.

She has done really interesting research on the neuroscience of altruism and empathy and often and how often with good intentions, things can go extremely, extremely badly. And that, you know, in that to some extent.

human beings that will oftentimes excuse bad behavior when they're delivered through kind of altruistic presentations and through these motives. But she has some really cool research on that, which I recommend if anyone's interested in effective altruism. Oh, wow. That's very exciting. So apart from the education program, I know you have very focused on startup cities since 2011, right?

So you have been working on this way before biology made the start of sitting as a mainstream word. So can you please share some insights from your side?

Sure. Yeah, I should say that I'm extremely grateful to Bology for mainstreaming that concept. It's always been a dream of mine to see like the term startup cities in the context that we're talking about it, which is cities that are themselves startups, right? To see it in that context.

talked about by, uh, the mainstream of technology. I mean, that was honestly, that was like part of the mission that we were working on back in from, you know, 2011, 2012 up through 2016. Um,

when I shut down the Startup Cities Institute. My view on the space is that, yeah, there's so much history here. Like the space is very interesting because fundamentally it's about applying entrepreneurship onto a new industry that most people think is not an industry and that most people think that startups can't be it. And that industry is what I refer to as community technology. Community technology, you know, this

This is my best term for trying to capture the combination of systems that create an effective community. You can think of these systems as stretching from hard and physical things like, say, a sidewalk or like a light pole or a security camera or a street or like the kind of infrastructure of a city.

But stretching also all the way to more social things and abstract things like legal processes or rules about building or how easy it is to incorporate a business, right? Now, you know, I'm biased from the perspective of a technologist, right? But when I look at that, what I see is a tech stack, right?

In the jargon of startups, there's this idea of a tech stack. A tech stack is just a combination of complementary technologies that enable you to deliver a product. So if we think of community as a product, then there is a set of concrete technologies that form the stack behind it.

that enable that product to be delivered. Now, when I talk about community technology and like, this has very much been the framing that I've always been interested in, even back in the day, you know, like when I give talks in 2012 and stuff, I really believe that thinking about these things, these systems as technology is very important for our ability to conceive of how to innovate and improve these systems.

Right now, when most people think about infrastructure, you know, these systems, they think about them in terms of infrastructure and institutions and politics or governance or something. The

The problem with thinking about things that way is that one, they sound like someone else's problem because most entrepreneurs don't think I build infrastructure. I build institutions. It's just like not, it's not in the frame. Right. And the other is it's, it's, they become abstractions and the conversations become ridiculously abstract. So, you know, when you, when you, for instance, when I lived in, lived in Guatemala and,

And I've also done some traveling and some research in very difficult, very challenged communities, like what a lot of people would think of as slum communities around the world. When you go there and you talk to people, they don't talk to you about human rights. They don't talk to you about political will. They don't talk to you about transparency. They talk to you about very specific, concrete problems in technology. I don't have an electricity hookup.

There's gangs that patrol the streets. The police keep extorting me. I can't incorporate a business because it costs $1,000 and I live on $2 a day. It's like the thing that drives me crazy as an engineer is like when you hear these conversations and you hear how specific and concrete they are, that they're very particular problems in very particular pieces of the community tech stack.

But then you go to an event on, say, international development, and you basically just hear a bunch of consultants and politicians talking in abstractions about how we need to make a commitment to expanding access or these kind of big proclamations. Honestly, it just drives me... I appreciate that there are good intentions coming out of that space, but it drives me crazy because it is as though...

The conversation is as though no one has any idea how technology gets better, but it's not really that it's not like the forces that improve technology are a giant mystery. Like we know that technology improves through trial and error via startups, like not all startups succeed, but.

but startups take technologies and ideas about the market, bundle them together, put them on the market. They survive or they don't. And the ones that survive get to scale and deliver new innovations to the market. And the community technology stack as it is conceived of today and treated today is basically this weird walled off industry. That is the exclusive domain of NGOs, like international organizations, charities, government agencies. It's like,

where are the startups in this hugely valuable industry? That is the question that keeps me up at night. There is no reason that startups can't go and eat the community technology stack and provide these technologies and innovate them just as they have in tons of other industries before. When I say this to people, people will often retort to me and they'll say, well,

you know, Zach, it's not the same thing. Building a neighborhood, it's capital intensive. There's network effects. Like people will free ride on them, all these things. And it's like, you know, to me, it's like, look around you. Startups are building reusable rockets that are putting people, like normal people into orbit. Startups are like,

They're tearing apart like automation, manufacturing, shipping vehicles. It's all around us. What is it that makes us think that startups cannot build a street, you know, and houses that actually work for people? And if you consider that much of the dysfunction that you see when you live in, you know, developing world environments, you know,

When you see the concrete problems, a lot of it is that like there's distribution problems. In other words, community technologies are not able to reach where people are. There's cost problems, which is that like a good road or a good security guard is not affordable to the people that are there. It's like these are the bread and butter problems that startup like technologists and entrepreneurs solve every single day.

And I want like the, I will die a happy man if the only thing I can accomplish in my life is to convince more founders to go into this industry of community technology and aggressively pursue the same kinds of like vertical integration.

cost-saving innovation, like business model refinement, the kinds of concrete things that are really going to make this stuff accessible and possible to people. So that's my mini TED Talk rant here, Camelia. I'm sorry, but I'm very passionate about this subject. And I can't share too many details right now, but I am looking forward to being more actively involved in this space here in the near future.

I care about it very much and I want to be involved. Yeah, love your passion here. It reminds me about Chinese government because they have the central method to...

built the village from scratch. I would say all the poor, you know, the poverty rate in China, I don't know the specific number, but people living in rural China area, they do feel the significant improvement of their life. If we can gather enough

people and resources, we can definitely achieve the startup city goals. I don't know what's the gatekeepers here. Why not many startups, founders, they want to go into this area? Yeah. I mean, there are definitely real serious opportunities

obstacles to doing it, right? I mean, it's expensive to build infrastructure and systems like that. And then depending on, again, if we go back to the idea of a stack of technologies underpinning community, some of those technologies are cheaper and more tractable and easier to provide than others. If we go towards the more, say,

legal side of things, there's obviously huge barriers, which is that you have to somehow negotiate with a government to open up some sphere of autonomy for you to go and innovate in that dimension. There is precedent for those. And there are a lot of people in this space,

I'm very focused on that particular dimension, what we might think of as the legal or governance innovation dimension. I'm cool with that and there's a lot of great work there, but in my opinion, there's a lot that's one part of the stack. And even saying...

hey, we improved the governance for someone in some far-flung community somewhere, that still doesn't solve the very concrete, like I don't have electricity, my street is not safe, these kind of problems. So I'm also very interested in innovations in this more like meat space concrete stuff. One project that they're not really doing, I should say a good example of a project

that is not innovating on, let's say, the governance dimension, but to my mind is like a very cool and innovative new startup city project is Cul-de-sac outside Tempe, Arizona. Cul-de-sac is a startup that was backed by Y Combinator, and they're building a car-free neighborhood. So if you think about what

you know, some of the innovations here, it's like the architecture itself reflects a fundamentally different value proposition about the community. It's like, hey,

people want to live in an environment where there are fewer cars and it's nicer, more pleasant to walk around. And maybe there's more green space and parking is not like this constant headache, all of this stuff. So cul-de-sac is really innovating on how that value proposition is delivered. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a cool article where

cul-de-sac is partnering with um i think it was lyft and some other transit providers to give every person in the neighborhood it's like three thousand dollars worth of transit credits for scooters and and ride sharing and stuff so again like this is that's real innovation on the value proposition of community and that is not uh something that required

some kind of partnership with government or something like that. But it's still real innovation and it's cool. What do you think the cryptocurrency and currently DAO play in the startup city? Because I see people start to fund raising to build a city door or some project like that. What's your thought? Yeah, it's interesting. You know,

I have a very, I have a pretty like neutral perspective in the sense that I'm not like super excited, but I'm also not pessimistic. I guess just because it feels so early that it's, you know, and I'm not an expert, you know, in blockchain technology. So I, you know, I learn about these things as I go along, right? Certainly, I think the cryptocurrency space is

merely by virtue of how much wealth it has created and the kind of people that it has created wealth for will be very important to the future of startup cities. Because I think it's quite likely that funding and interest and early adopters and stuff will come out of the cryptocurrency space. There's, you know, people talk about currency innovation as well. Like, could you actually have a currency that is

unique to a startup city in this. I don't see why not. I'm not sure that I have not encountered a very compelling particular case for why you would want that rather than just live somewhere and then use Bitcoin or something that's already established.

But that's innovation. Back in 2013, I did a small project called MuniBit, which was focused on trying to apply blockchain technology to municipal finance. The idea being is that you would have a ledger that would transparently show how every dollar in a municipality was shared.

So I think there's adjacent innovations, maybe like that, or things like land titling being on the blockchain as a less corruptible form of that. That's also interesting. I guess for me, I don't see any of these things as absolutely necessary to pursue innovations in startup cities, but I do view them as a...

let's say as a, as sort of a fellow traveler innovation or as an adjacent innovation to what's going to go on there. And I wish people who are doing things like trying to like, you know, cabin Dow city Dow, these kinds of projects, I wish them the absolute best. Like I hope that they're right and they succeed because it would be awesome. Yeah. So,

So you mentioned you had some interesting life experience in Guatemala or Ghana, like slams. Would you mind sharing some stories? Yeah, sure. I guess my interest first, my interest in...

All of that really started when I did this kind of like journalistic excursion in 2011 with the Kenya National Alliance of Street Vendors and Informal Traders. KINOSNIT is the acronym. And they still exist. They're a big organization.

umbrella organization, kind of like a union for the people who are what in the jargon is called informal entrepreneurs. It's like some guy who's selling you bananas, like at a, at a traffic stop in the middle of Kenya, or someone who has a, a clothing stand on the side of the street or something like that. Yeah.

I got really interested in this because I met this gentleman named Robert Newworth, who has a wonderful book called Stealth of Nations, which is a play on the term, the wealth of nations, right, by Adam Smith, where he really made a compelling argument that all around the world, the informal economy where these people like the members of Knesset live,

They control an absolutely enormous portion of global GDP and of the employed population. If I remember the numbers correctly, 60% of the world's employed population works essentially outside the formal legal system of any country in the informal economy.

And if we took all the people who work in the informal economy and we summed up all of their businesses and the wealth that they create, it would actually be the third largest economy on earth. It would only be behind the United States and China. So it's like...

Sometimes when I talk about, oh yeah, I went and hung out with these street traders in Kenya, it sounds like some weird thing on the fringes, but by the numbers, it's actually very central to the world economy and the economic future of the human race. So anyway...

I spent time with these street traders and traveled all around Kenya with them. And I tried to understand their supply chains and like how their business model worked and like what were the problems that they were encountering. And this was really kind of the first set of, this was the first experience where I had where I started thinking about like,

what are the specific problems, right? Like not abstract things like these people need more human rights. I'm certainly not opposed to that. But again, when you talk to the traders, they talk about like very concrete things, right? So that was my first exposure to that.

I spent time, for instance, with informal security guards. And I interviewed the owner of a security company, which was very strange to see how policing services are either replaced or augmented by these essentially entrepreneurial offerings, which was like this whole world that I didn't know existed. There are...

if you go to wholesale markets, oftentimes people are doing business with like no contracts whatsoever. So they will be...

they will be on the phone with someone in China that says, hey, ship me this tarp of clothes. And they have no agreement whatsoever. And they send them money through some digital payment system. And then they hope the thing shows up. And sometimes it does. And sometimes it doesn't. Because it's hard to trust over such a complex transaction with no contract, right? There's these rich networks of mutual aid societies where people are providing insurance.

There are courts that are basically held in like vegetable stalls or on garbage mounds where traders are basically fighting it out like they would in a business court in, you know, in Delaware or something. But it's like some dusty vegetable stall where a respected member of their industry is arbitrating that dispute or they'll hire them.

they'll hire law students from like a local university or something like that. So the point is that there really is this amazing rich network of underground entrepreneurship that provides this whole range of what I refer to as community technologies early in our conversation, dispute resolution and infrastructure and all that kind of stuff. So when I got to Guatemala, I had, and Latin America in general,

I had some experiences that are somewhat darker in the sense that

you know, I was once extorted by the police. You know, the police had machine guns and I was like driving late at night. And, you know, it was very scary. You know, they make you get out of your car and they line you up against, you know, they line me up against a wall. And at that time I spoke very little Spanish. And so it was hard for me even to understand like what was going on. And I

I thought they were going to shoot me. And then they planted drugs in our car and claimed that we were drug traffickers and demanded that, said, oh, but you can get off if only you make a donation to such and such a cause, right? And that's what we did. I'm not proud about it, but we felt...

what choice do you have? You're in a dark alleyway with guys with guns. They're demanding money. I gave them the money, you know? I was also robbed by a youth gang, which was also very scary, which was, I was coming home

and was at a stoplight. And I was behind, the lanes were blocked by two cars in front of me. It was a two lane road. So I couldn't drive anywhere. And there was a kid, basically a child, like a 15 year old came up and started with a handgun and tried to smash the driver's side window with the handgun and demanded that we roll down the window, which we did. And then put

put the gun to our heads and demanded our cell phones, which we gave to him. And then he left. And look, I should say that like these experiences, like, you know, they're obviously like tragic and traumatic experiences. But for me, what they did was they drove home how high the stakes are for improving this stack of technologies, community technology, of which security is a cornerstone.

And it made me grateful also for, you know, I'm an American, which is, it's a privilege to live in the United States where like I can walk around my home city of Denver and like no one's going to pull out a gun and rob me like that. And the police aren't going to extort me, you know, and that's a privilege that hopefully can be extended to a wider variety of people over time. Yeah, your experience reminds me about the movie called City of God. Yeah.

They filmed in Brazil. In Brazil, right? Yeah. You can see those little kids, they need to make a living and they do all those dangerous things and ethnic things, but they don't have a choice. But I do think technology will help them. Like what's happening in Nigeria, you can see they use technology to build wealth. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I do feel optimistic about that.

Even in China, I see the street vendors, they use WeChat payment with facial recognition.

Every time I go back to China, I go mind blown. Just see the technology change the people's life. Absolutely. Very, yeah. It reminds me about your Twitter cover photo. Where did you get that one? Yes. So, yeah, my Twitter cover photo, at least right now, is an image from

Broad Group, which is a Chinese construction company. And it says, build everlasting civilization. And when I saw that that was their company slogan, I just thought, God, this is such an epic company slogan. And I'll be honest with you, Camelia, one thing that I despair of a little bit in the

A lot of companies, and I would say in particular, unfortunately, tech companies, there's a certain degree of cynicism and negativity about technology and building. And I think that if I went into a lot of companies where I've worked or the average startup, and I was like, build everlasting civilization, I think most people would look at me like I'm a weirdo and I'm overly optimistic and sort of a bit ridiculous, right? It just seems...

There's this kind of cultural vibe that sort of only silly and childish people that aren't sophisticated enough to recognize how broken everything is are optimistic and like really enthusiastic about the future. And I hate that about modern American culture. Like I want that to change. And I try to live my life and like speak in a way that is like contrary to that because I want that meme to reverse itself.

So anyway, build everlasting civilization, I thought it was an epic company slogan, but in particular, I was interested in it because Broad Group arguably is accomplishing their mission because they are the pioneers of a modular form of construction that...

massively lowers the cost and speeds up the time it takes to build buildings. So they built a, I think it was a 10-story building in, I think it was 28 hours at quite low cost. And again, if you're interested in startup cities and the kinds of themes that you and I have been discussing, this is a perfect example of the kind of significant innovation that attacked

a piece of the community technology stack, right? If it doesn't take 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build a bunch of houses or a neighborhood, right? That makes it relatively more accessible to people

create experiments in community to build a minimum viable community where you're prototyping the project and also to hopefully reach the lower end of the market where people need things like, you know, the housing and infrastructure that could be enabled by broad groups innovation. So yeah, I'm a,

I'm a fan of the company. Oh, I see. Yeah, because this slogan is super common in Chinese companies. A lot of them use kind of a similar concept. Yeah, sometimes you feel like, wow, you are so utopian. But they do kind of show people the vision they are going towards too. Yeah. And look, I'm not big for...

you know, big on utopian visions or anything like that. Like, you know, I'm a, you know, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a builder person. All I do every single day is just see everything is broken all the time. You know, like that, that's my whole world of engineering. Right. So I'm not like sold on utopian visions, but like,

speaking in a way that communicates like the future can be better. I think that is just like, to me, it's like a healthy psychology as far as I'm concerned. It's not, it's not believing that everything is going to be perfect. It's that the, the future can be marginally better or less imperfect than it is today. You know, that's good saying. Yeah. Yeah.

And one last thing I want to talk about is Benjamin Boom's two sigma problems. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I encountered that link, but I have no idea what is that. Would you mind explain about this one? Sure.

So Benjamin Bloom was like an education theoretician and I think a psychologist by training, as I recall. He did some experiments in the 1980s that showed that through individual tutoring and a pedagogy called mastery learning. And mastery learning is basically like you don't advance to the next thing until you've done really well on the first thing. It's like very kind of common sense.

Through individual tutoring and mastery learning, he could achieve a two standard deviation improvement over the control group. So that's where the two sigma comes from, the two standard deviation improvement. So that meant, as I recall, it was like the...

the average member of the experimental group performed better than 98% of the control group, which is essentially like, especially in something like education. You may know this already, but education is a field that has suffered very badly through something that in recent years has been called the replication crisis, which is that a lot of research can't be replicated and lots of stuff just turns out it's just like nonsense everywhere. And yeah,

There's been follow-up studies to Bloom's 2-sigma study, and they have showed lesser but still significant improvements. And where it's been tried, it seems like there's some signal truth here. Ironically, when you hear of Bloom's 2-sigma finding, it's always framed as Bloom's 2-sigma problem.

And the reason it's framed as a problem is because Bloom decided at the conclusion of his research, well, we found this like amazing, potentially amazing educational innovation and way of teaching, but no society can scale the idea of tutoring everyone through mastery learning. So what are we going to do? We can't really do anything about this. Like it's a problem, right? Yeah.

I've, I've kind of like mind blown that that's the conclusion because it's just like, wait, we maybe discovered this amazing thing. Like, why is this not a solution that we're trying to figure out how to make real, you know? So, um, anyway, the conclusion here is that, um, blooms to Sigma finding, uh,

has been applied to great effect in particular niches. For example, Salman Khan, the great innovator behind Khan Academy, uses mastery learning. And arguably, Khan is himself a sort of scaled individual tutor for millions of students.

And it's also been applied by founder Luis Van On in Duolingo, the language learning application. And again, Duolingo uses this kind of mastery learning approach where you're only advancing. And again, it's not quite the same as SalmonCon, but there is this, as Khan Academy, but there is this aspect of almost like I'm having individual tutoring in the application. These are, you know,

They're imperfect, even though they're brilliant apps and they've had a wonderful effect and I love them. But the thing that interests me is like, hey, is there a way to scale Bloom's Two Sigma finding to like primary education?

because if there's a way to do it, that's obviously a huge deal. If we could just take the whole distribution of, of outcomes for people and shift them over in the huge way that blooms to Sigma suggests, right. That would be a game changing, you know, world changing innovation. I don't have the answer to that question. The, the the,

My own interest in that for now is someday when I have children, I intend to just apply tutoring and mastery learning for their education. My view is that I can solve that problem. That's within my sphere of control. And I hope to continue to learn about that and see what other innovation is there. Many software entrepreneurs are interested in Bloom's two sigma problem because they view software as a way to possibly scale it.

But so far, based on my understanding, that has not panned out. Like there seems like maybe there's a kind of human aspect or something that doesn't, that just like doesn't work. It's maybe similar to the challenge of scaling the MPC that I mentioned earlier, that like there is this element where a human has to be in the loop and that will always be kind of expensive or, you know, hard.

to manage. So I don't have the solution, but I do think Bloom's two Sigma finding is a very interesting and more entrepreneurs should check it out. Yeah, it reminds me about Elon Musk children. I think they were in some, this kind of school, but I can't remember what, what is, I'll find the link.

Yes, it's Ad Astra, I believe is the name of it. Yeah, I think that's the one. As I recall, I think they're opening up Ad Astra and trying to replicate it and scale it out. But look, I would argue that Blooms to Sigma, there's another dimension here, which is that

elites have used tutoring forever as a way of securing the education of their children. The stereotype of the Victorian gentleman in England was like, I hire my mistress of the house or the tutor to educate my children. In medieval times, you go back to ancient Greece, it was like Alexander the Great being tutored by Aristotle. This legacy of tutoring

It tracks elite education throughout history, and it even continues today because the urban elites and people that can afford private schools and all these things also heavily invest in tutoring for their kids. And then the kids do better on the SAT, and they go to better schools, all that kind of stuff.

goes. So I'm very interested in what the real costs, and I've done some modeling for this, because I want to do this for my own, you know, future family, is modeling the costs of

What is the real cost of having a tutor and where are the levers where you can reduce cost or share cost or, you know, focus, focus tutoring in such a way that it becomes attainable to someone who is say more middle-class or isn't like a super elite, right? That would be the first step to making a Bloom's two Sigma finding a practical kind of

you know, about a product and approach that's, that not just super elites can, can access. I see. Great. One last question. What gets you most excited about the future? Oh man, I don't know. It's honestly, it's, it's a long list. I'm very bullish on the future.

I'm a believer in what economic historian Deidre McCloskey calls the great fact. And the great fact is that sometime in the late 18th, early 19th century, like human wealth and knowledge and innovation just started taking off in this sort of insane combinatorial explosion of wealth and possibility. I mean,

We're the inheritors of that. And I feel so grateful to be born in the modern era where everything about this experience that you and I are having right now is enabled by that legacy of innovation. And so I am so excited to see all the ways in which innovation will expand into areas where we did not believe that

that things could be massively more innovative. So some of these are things like say education or startup cities, like, like we've already talked about, but probably there's all kinds of amazing stuff hiding in plain sight for, for, for medicine, for, you know, things like mental health. Like there's, there's all this research on the role of psychedelics, perhaps like being able to

treat PTSD and depression and all these things that people I think or cancer you know people have talked about the mRNA vaccines possibly having some effect on cancer I'm not an expert I'm not going to innovate in those spaces but I am a

I'm amazingly excited to see how the web of innovation will percolate out into all of these spaces and like to see what 2050 is going to be like. I don't believe it's going to be the terrible dystopia that so many people think. I think it's going to be amazing. And I'm like, I'm grateful to be living in this time of amazing, you know, knowledge explosion and opportunity that technology and entrepreneurship has created.

That's great. Thank you so much for your time. I know it's been a couple of months since we made this happen, but totally worth it. Yeah, very nice to talk to you. Thank you so much, Camille. I really appreciate you having me.