Based Camp - September 28, 2023Michael Gibson on The End of Academia and What's Next
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Summary
In this episode of Basecamp, we talk with Michael Gibson about his new book, Paper Belt on Fire, and why he thinks the media should have been more interested in Peter Thiel's venture fund, the Thiel Fellows program, and the Teal Fellowship.
Transcript
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of Basecamp, where today we have a very special guest and
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someone who's writing I really enjoy, but also whose work I probably enjoy even more,
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You probably, if you've heard of Michael, have heard of him because of his book, Paper
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However, he's in other circles, much more well known for being the co-founder of 1517,
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a very unique type of venture capital fund that doesn't just focus on sort of already
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proven older entrepreneurs, but rather really young people.
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We're going to talk about all these things, but in this conversation, we are really hoping
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to dive into his book, which I read as soon as an audio book was available, Paper Belt
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on Fire, which really aligns with a lot of the stuff that we're saying is much more eloquently
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It's sort of a mixture of philosophy, prognostication, but also like personal history and history of
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the 1517 fund, which is absolutely fascinating.
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So we're really excited to talk with you about it.
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And, you know, thanks for the kind words as well, both about, you know, whatever my
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writing style, but also about what we're doing.
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It's something like, because why would I have memoir in philosophy and then, you know, behind
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the scenes account of venture capital and backing young people?
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I think, I think it comes down to strange people do strange things.
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And when the times get tough, the weird GoPro, and I wanted to take people behind the scenes
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and add some color and story to, you know, some of these characters I've worked with over
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the years when the one thing, I guess, part of my bio, okay.
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Why tell this story is the, we have Danielle Strachman, my co-founder of 1517.
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We helped Peter Thiel start his fellowship program in 2010.
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And that was a program where a hundred thousand dollars was given to 20 individuals a year.
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The two conditions were one, you had to be 19 and under to apply.
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And two, you couldn't be enrolled in university.
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So you had to drop out or take time off, or maybe you never went.
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And across five years of co-running that program, we saw incredible things come out of it.
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We, you know, most notable examples are helping Vitalik Buterin launch Ethereum.
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Dylan Fields created a company called Figma that was acquired by Adobe for 20 billion last year.
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Austin Russell founded a company called Luminor Technologies.
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So the, the Teal fellowship had a lot of great successes and there's a independent,
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this guy is probably the best venture capital analyst in terms of being an outsider at CB Insights.
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And he put up a tweet, in fact, last week where he did a deep dive on the success of the Teal fellowship.
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And he, he posted the, the hit rate, like how many of these people, if there's 20 people in every class,
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you know, what's the rate at which people will create, you know, unicorn billion dollar businesses.
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And, and, you know, his conclusions were like, wow, this hit rate is something like 7%,
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which in the world of venture capital is, is quite astonishing.
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So, you know, there's this program out there that, that the world hasn't really heard about.
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Mainly because Peter Teal is, is persona non grata.
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And since I was there and part of it, I, I, that was a story I wanted to tell.
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So there's two things I wanted to, to discuss really quickly tied to what you just said.
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The second one we'll talk about next, which is, is how the media like tried to keep your book from being promoted.
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I think as much as it otherwise would have been given, you know, how big the things you guys are doing actually are.
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But the first thing I wanted to talk about, which is really interesting is within Silicon Valley.
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So sometimes some of our listeners, they say they watch us to sort of understand what I guess like elite society is thinking or whatever.
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With the fall of universities as good judges of people's competence, the highest status symbol a young person can achieve.
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And I'd say that this is pretty universally agreed upon among the VC sort of class in Silicon Valley is getting into the Peter Teal Fellowship.
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It is a much bigger deal than, you know, having a Harvard degree or something like that among the young.
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And it's interesting because we've seen this repeatedly in terms of like new status symbols among youth, where the highest form of status symbol comes from programs where somebody is giving the youth money.
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Like the new one is like the Atlas Fellowships, a pretty high status symbol, like after the Teal Fellowship, then it's probably the Atlas Fellowship.
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And it's because in a world where, and it's actually kind of crazy to think about it, that historically you would, we judge status on people would pay for that status.
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But now obviously status should be better judged on who's going to give you money.
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I wonder if you had any thoughts on the fall of the current academic system and whether or not you think it still has utility.
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I think hierarchies are best in a stable environment where they are hierarchies of competence.
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They have not degraded into corruption or incompetence.
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And let's say a hierarchy exists to solve a problem.
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If it is still solving that problem and you can judge people based on merit accurately, then it can be stable over time.
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And with that comes visibility, intelligibility, and the way people talk about their lives and careers.
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And I think college fit that for a long time, but people didn't notice that it became corrupted and that it wasn't solving the problem it used to solve.
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But nevertheless, like this lingering hierarchy that still has status and prestige is there.
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Whereas in a chaotic environment, which is the environment of innovation, dynamism, creativity, these hierarchies should come and go just based on who is solving that problem best over some period of time.
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But the thing, what I'll say is there's like a difference between excellence and greatness.
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Excellence is striving to attain high grades in an environment where there are assignments, essays, tests.
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These things are very legible, clear, and you can keep climbing up that hierarchy over the years.
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And maybe, you know, you become a Harvard grad, Rhodes Scholar.
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You're hired by the bureaucratic state, professional managerial class.
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But those types of people aren't the types of people who, you know, write the next great novel or invent, you know, necessarily invent the next, you know, big company or something like that.
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That creativity just comes from a different place.
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So, you know, that's an old distinction, if I think about it, that goes all the way back to the Iliad.
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This is the fundamental conflict in the epic poem because it starts off.
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It's the conflict is actually not the main conflict of the story is not between the Greeks and the Trojans.
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He's widely recognized as the swiftest, most lethal warrior.
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And yet he has to operate or work with legitimate, high status, prestige king who's also an idiot, Agamemnon.
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And the conflict of the book is Achilles basically, you know, shrugs like Atlas shrugs.
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And so I think maybe all societies have to find this balance between hierarchies of greatness and hierarchies of prestige where they're going to come into conflict or, you know, the old prestige ones need to fade away and be replaced by the next wave of the great.
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But over time, those newcomers become old timers and they become corrupt.
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So it's like we need a process that that knows how to sift these things out.
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Well, I mean, it's also really cool that I think that with the academic system falling, I think a lot of people can see that that's happening, but it's not as clear to many people what's going to replace it.
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And it is cool that I think that you played a part in founding this new system, which is already beginning to be replicated.
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And I think will replace the academic system by the time that our children are growing up as the primary status hierarchy for youth.
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Now, the second question, which I thought was really interesting, because, you know, when we were talking with you, how resistant the major publications were to cover your book or the major sort of, you know, given how impactful your work is.
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I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, a little bit about the suppression you have when you're in the Peter Thiel sort of.
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Well, we had the haters of the fellowship in 1517 now over a decade.
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So when the Teal fellowship was first announced in 2010, I think in the same week, we already had op-eds in Newsweek and other magazines denouncing the program as the white man's NBA, corrupting the youth, you know, getting them to focus on money and not, you know, the intangible rewards of reading great novels, something like that.
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Then we had Larry Summers, former treasury secretary, president of Harvard, come out and denounce the fellowship as the, this is a quote, he says, it's the most misdirected philanthropy of the decade.
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He had numerous bad articles written about us in just about every major publication.
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Scott Galloway, the bloviating commentator on tech, he dumped on us.
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So that, that just occurred throughout the decade.
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But over that time, we just had more and more success.
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And then when I, I had been writing some articles and this agent approached me about writing the book and I, I, I accepted and he was an Englishman.
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And I think he didn't really understand just how much the press and the media and let's say the cultural establishment from Hollywood to newspapers and so on, how much that had come to hate tech and in particular hate Peter Thiel.
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So Peter famously backed, you know, lawsuit against Gawker, Hulk Hogan versus Gawker.
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When that was revealed, media suddenly thought Peter, Peter was this evil billionaire, stifling free speech.
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And after both those things, yeah, I think that the intensity of the hatred just reached all new highs.
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So we, and we sent out the proposal for the book that was in 2021 and I was shocked.
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We sent it to 20 publishers, maybe six or seven wrote back.
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And here's another quote that is word for word.
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Someone wrote, Peter Thiel is evil and anyone who worked for him is, is evil.
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A bunch of people, yeah, they, they, they just did not like people.
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Peter, then another six or seven said, I, you know, someone was said, I went to Yale.
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And then, you know, six or seven just passed because they said it wasn't for them.
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I ended up getting picked up by a small independent publisher encounter and they put out mainly
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conservative libertarian-ish policy wonkish books.
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Tends to be very, you know, blend of academic think tank history sometimes, but this is the
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I certainly wanted to touch on policy issues like higher ed and what might be done.
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But, but I think it is the first book I've, I've seen them put out where it was like,
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okay, this is a story, a business story, but yeah, that was a struggle.
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And I think it, it represented that symbolic conflict.
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It was a, a, a symbolic example of this wider conflict between the, the old institutions
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and, and things that are popping up here and there that are, that are new and I guess
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And it's really humorous if you're actually in these spheres because they treat Peter
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Teal, like he's this big Machiavellian, like a spider web, a master guy who's controlling
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So much so that we've even been caught up in this.
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We got called up by a comedian who was pretending to be a reporter and they wanted to do a thing
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And we're like, yeah, we're actually like, after he's talking to you, you guys seem so
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I don't think he actually ran the comedy piece because he, he thought that we were so much
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And he's like, but you know, everyone's going to, they hate you because of those, those
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So, so our connection there is Simone used to be the managing director of dialogue, which
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was a secret society thing that was originally founded by Peter Teal.
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But anyway, so, so he was talking to the scene is because you have that, everyone is always
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like, how could you have possibly worked in any way tied to the sphere of this villain?
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And what's crazy is that if you're in these sort of circles, he actually just isn't that
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And he definitely is not as a web spider mastery sort of operator.
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So that, that was something I wanted to portray in the book was just, I had the fortune of working
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with Peter for directly for him for five years.
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He's an investor in 1517 and we are friendly and meet every so often.
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And, and the derangement syndrome around Peter and the media and the way they portrayed him,
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everything from, I mean, they, they make him seem like he's this rational Vulcan who has
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And then there is what you're pointing out is, is funny.
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They do always want to portray him as this, this mastermind chess master who, who sees six
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And one of the funnier moments I've had with Peter was, I said that to him, this was during
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the gawker, the time of when it was revealed, he, he backed that lawsuit and he asked me,
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he said, Oh, what do you think of the, the, the coverage?
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No one wants to debate you on the constitutional issues of privacy versus speech.
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Instead, they're just obsessed with portraying you as this chess master operating from the
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So actually this parallel that happened in my life was a different cultural group.
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So I was the director of strategy of the ventures, which was the most successful early stage venture
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And we were always getting into fights with the government to the extent that the fund
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was eventually shut down by, by government action over something that was later proven
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But anyway, a lot of people in the U S are like, why were you in this conflict with the
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And it was like, well, we came up with this really crazy investment strategy, which is we
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would invest in people who had dropped out of college or who didn't go to good colleges.
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And in Korea, these people are persona non grata, much more so than they are in the United
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And we were seen as sort of disrupting societal order in helping people that shouldn't get
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Because in Korea, the society is so much more hierarchical.
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You still have the child and the child, it's much more somebody getting a bunch of money out
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of nowhere, especially somebody who dropped out of college is genuinely seen as a social
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So what is interesting, and I think Peter Thiel, where he's actually been most successful
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is in identifying incompetent people who do not fit into the game of bowing to the systems
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So a lot of the time, these people would be filtered out.
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They'd be filtered out sometimes at elite institutions.
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They'd be filtered out of being allowed to write books or run funds, but he's able to look
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And because of that, he has access to a much wider and often a much more honest talent
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One of the cool interactions that I've had with my book being out in the world is I was
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doing a Zoom discussion with some people who had read it, and this happened off Twitter.
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And this young man who called in was actually a soldier in the Korean army, and he was calling
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from this base somewhere in Korea, and he wanted to let me know that he's having the
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best time reading out passages of my book to his bunk mates in the army, and they're laughing
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their asses off, and they couldn't believe that someone was saying what I was saying in
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the book or all the things we've touched on about, okay, maybe college isn't best for
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They are just manic for the university path in Korea.
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So the heresy is just even more hilarious to the few or shocking to others.
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What I found the parallel there is I think in the US, we can see how comical it is that,
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oh, yeah, if you see this talent pool that everyone else is ignoring, of course, you're
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It's the easiest arbitrage opportunity in the world.
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And then in the US, you're like, well, what if you invest in people who sometimes have
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But it's literally the position that we have lost venture capital funding for our school
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This is something that actually happens in the US.
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People are like, hey, we just can't be seen as identifying with conservatives.
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And also in the nonprofit space, this is something we consistently saw.
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We were working for a big nonprofit at one time, and I don't want to say which one this
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was, but they basically said when they found out that we had a conservative history, that
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we couldn't work for them anymore because it was too dangerous for their work to continue
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Because so many of the power structures in the nonprofit space within the US are just
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And as we point this out within nonprofit structures, when people go into nonprofits,
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Some of them are interested in making the world a better place.
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And some of them are interested in playing like status signal hierarchy, moving up within
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The people who are interested in making the world a better place, you know, they need
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to split their time within the nonprofit between social politics and actually trying to do
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Whereas the people who care only about personal status, they can spend their entire time on
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And so within these large bureaucracies, they always end up winning and controlling these
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organizations, which is, I think, how this group has gained so much power.
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Yeah, it does become a system of control and exclusion.
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And I think the derangement of our institutions into the woke madness, left-wing, knee-jerk
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For the wise investor, it may create an opportunity.
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But it is sad to me that this has become a way to exclude.
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I think, I mean, I'm not going to cry too much over my book, but it is interesting to
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I couldn't get anyone from normal publications to review the book.
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I think it's because of this affiliation with Peter Thiel, these ideas, maybe the conservative
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It's pretty clear now that conservatives were being shadow banned and pushed out.
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One concept that I really liked from the book, I mean, it's in the title, is this concept
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And now so much is being run by the paper belt, which is essentially the media, knowledge
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workers, clustered around the East Coast, right?
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And the book is a lot about subverting this, right?
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Just where, you know, after sort of like publishing your book and being attacked by the paper belt
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or resisted by it, I mean, part of me is, yeah, the paper belt is 100% on fire.
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And also, yeah, my mom pointed out to me, she's like, wait, your book is called Paper
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Belt on Fire and you're upset that no one on the paper belt likes the book?
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But I think the lingering status and prestige of these institutions is strong and they're
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I think they're still doing important things like governing the country or providing some,
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I think there is a sense in which, yeah, people ask me, like, why didn't you just self-publish?
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I think, yeah, I'm not quite sure these old institutions are completely dead and I need
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to or wanted to operate within them in order to get the word out.
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But I get it if they if they don't want my message coursing through their veins.
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The yeah, I the paper belt is this configuration of power on the East Coast from Washington, D.C.
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Other people have called it the Acela Corridor, I-95.
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You know, there are other names for these things.
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But the thing that stood out to me was that they are indeed paper based, everything from
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the U.S. dollar to a diploma at Harvard or MIT.
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And what when I learned more about just, you know, I was deep into cypherpunk, you know,
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And I certainly retain a lot of that that rebellious vibe from from the cypherpunk era.
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But I also just learning a lot about, you know, why was Bitcoin created?
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And and I I came to see that it is very much against these paper based trust institutions,
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because if you if you are relying on paper, whether it's a diploma or a dollar, there is
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an institution that has to be trusted to verify that that piece of paper has value, that it signals
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something that it's meant to signal, that it hasn't been corrupted or watered down.
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And so that was interesting to me that the paper is tied to the performance of the of
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these institutions, you know, because we have to, you know, we have to trust them.
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And it seems to be the case that diplomas don't signal what, you know, these schools claim
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they do and that the U.S. dollar doesn't signal what the government necessarily wants it
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So that that that stood out to me and I wanted to run with it, that I think we do have a
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Our our attempt in the book is with the book that I wanted to depict is, OK, what is it?
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OK, here's the analysis, the critique of the decline.
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But what can we do outside of it that that's creative and inspiring?
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And I think stories are the best way to inspire people.
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I'm curious also how far away you think we are from the next thing, whatever it is exactly
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after the paper belt, like the network state or this more decentralized world, because it's
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We're like, whoa, this could happen really fast.
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You know, we read like Zyhan's The End of the World is just the beginning.
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And we're like, holy shit, like everything's going to change.
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And then, you know, things kind of stay the same.
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You know, it's been like zero times since the pandemic actually hit.
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What do you think the future like tipping points are going to be?
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Maybe let's just focus on the institution of school and education.
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I think all what you just said is true in that category.
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The pandemic came and parents came to see that they couldn't trust the bureaucrats or the
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teachers when it came to, you know, providing an education to their children or just, you
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know, being nice people or even being open, right?
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There were some unions that extended the, you know, closure of the schools and so on.
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So a lot of anger and frustration among parents started to pick up.
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And then we saw greater movement into either school choice at the state level can, you know,
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just cut checks to people to send their kids somewhere else, but also homeschooling.
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I haven't seen the numbers, but it just seems to me that, you know, more and more people
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are doing these things and politicians are running on that issue.
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But like you said, the legacy institutions are still strong.
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And every parent I talk to who isn't, you know, normie parents, like their dream is still,
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you know, just they judge themselves on how good of a parent they are by, you know, how
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their children make their way through, you know, K through 12 into, into universities.
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So given that that is still so mainstream and just the main path, I think there's a long
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We've seen how the institution is failing, but people are still buying into it.
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I think we just need more and more success stories.
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Just have to keep building on, you know, the stories about people who are outside of it.
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I love what you all are doing in terms of, you know, you're another new entry into the field.
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Can we help younger people earlier and doing different things?
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And, and maybe they don't go to college or maybe they do, but they have a greater focus
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I think that, that if we build on this, then, okay, I don't know.
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I can't put a time range on it, but maybe 10, 20 years, we'll start to see a substantial
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I think that's, if we like make good alternative systems.
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I think something you're missing is if you look at young people today, like if you look
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Like people had already begun to separate out of the system to the extent where, when I look
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at the people now who have achieved like disproportionate wealth in our society or disproportionate
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positions of power, many of them were in these, you know, 1000 people, 2000 people chat rooms
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in like the early rationalist, let's go back when I was in Silicon Valley, you know, 20
00:26:37.040
If I look today, a lot of people can look and they can be like your channel, are these
00:26:41.380
communities you're swimming in are like really small communities.
00:26:44.340
That doesn't mean that they aren't disproportionately bringing in some of the smartest people.
00:26:50.100
Like when we're in Silicon Valley and I look at things like the Atlas fellowship and it
00:26:53.100
was really shocking to us because we had a number of people go through our school and every
00:26:56.580
single one of them also then went to the Atlas fellowship completely independently of us.
00:27:00.840
And what that showed me is that we are, when we're out there sourcing being like, I want
00:27:07.760
the smartest kids in the U S and we have two people who are doing this sourcing.
00:27:11.720
They keep finding the same kids and all of these kids kind of know each other already.
00:27:16.080
So I do think we live in a world where the smartest people with ambition and with individual
00:27:23.020
agency are actually already beginning to coalesce outside of the old power system.
00:27:31.660
That's the first big step, whatever comes next.
00:27:36.800
And actually I said COVID is one of these catalysts for, for pushing people out of schools, but
00:27:42.860
we haven't even touched on the woke madness and the ideological indoctrination where I think
00:27:49.780
quite moderate parents don't even want to have to deal with this stuff now.
00:27:52.960
And, and, and maybe that'll accelerate as well.
00:27:56.980
Well, another thing that I've seen, which does suggest to me, maybe things are moving
00:28:00.720
fairly fast is many very high achieving college age people.
00:28:06.200
We know now have enrolled in prestigious universities when they get in, because they feel like that
00:28:13.760
And it probably still will, but they're also completely phoning it in.
00:28:22.560
So once that generation starts raising their own kids, are they, are they going to pay for
00:28:30.360
We can't, but one of our, our close friends recently got into Harvard for graduate school.
00:28:38.140
And I go, look, you just get the slip of paper.
00:28:44.620
And there's an old joke that it's easier to, what is it?
00:28:49.120
It's harder to get into Harvard than to fail out of it.
00:28:53.760
Well, I, I, I came close with my Stanford MBA a few times, not failing out, but I guess
00:29:02.760
I think, well, one other issue is, I think is just how bad schools are.
00:29:08.220
And so it's tough for people to really judge the quality of things when, when it's not
00:29:14.360
clear what difference it makes, but it could be the case and that maybe methods of instruction
00:29:20.500
and methods of building curiosity improve so much that the people who are outside the
00:29:27.320
system are just so clearly far ahead along these dimensions that other people in the
00:29:34.020
I mean, I think like people obviously switch from Uber to Lyft because it was just so wonderful
00:29:42.460
Such a big improvement on the old medallion system, paper-based system that, that they,
00:29:48.260
But now, you know, education is so expensive and then it's not even clear how much of a
00:29:53.940
You know, people just want their kids to be with other kids who are pro-social and pro-learning.
00:29:57.640
But, you know, when it comes to methods of instruction, no one's really good at judging
00:30:03.400
But what if you did send your child to a school and they learned calculus in three months instead
00:30:08.680
I think, you know, people, if they saw that, they'd say, well, all right, I want to send
00:30:16.320
When it's fine, I guarantee you, I just wish we could develop it a little faster.
00:30:20.800
Anyway, I have had so much fun talking with you in this, in this work.
00:30:30.720
I would also direct people to things that you're running.
00:30:32.740
You know, if you know a really young, smart person who is working on big ideas, stuff like
00:30:37.560
the 1517 Fund are actually, or the Deal Fellowship are where it is for the next generation.
00:30:44.560
And for our young viewers who are just like, yeah, but I can't, what do you mean you can't?
00:30:49.240
Like being a genius in a meaningful context is about having individual agency and being
00:30:54.860
able to go out there, search for opportunities and execute on the opportunities you're searching
00:31:07.500
We have a submission form on our website that we answer.
00:31:11.080
And you don't even have to be starting a company.
00:31:12.720
We just want to meet people who are attracted to, you know, this vibe and this world and these