The frontier is in the ruins (Network School)

The sun is coming up on the 13th floor of the Marina Hotel in Malaysia’s Forest City.

The city is a sprawling $100 billion Chinese development on an artificial island off the coast of Singapore. Originally intended to house a million residents in a Green City of the Future, only 1% of the units are occupied, many of them by maintenance staff. It is essentially a ghost town.

The hotel serves as dormitory for the first class of Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School, which will be the nucleus of his new city.

He told us the accommodations would be “frontier, not fancy”, and it’s an apt metaphor. The new frontier is not a greenfield development: it’s in renovating and reoccupying the ruins of the old world.

It’s fun to drink bottled water in a half-powered-up luxury high rise surrounded by the overgrown towers of an empty city. Sleek, futuristic Bay Area cultural artifacts inhabiting rough, disused architecture makes it feel a bit like a Fallout game.

The school, five minutes from the hotel, is currently a basic co-working space — the draw will be the people and projects. The curriculum is broken up into three categories: “learn”, “burn” and “earn”.

“Learn” will involve a curriculum split between technology and humanities, with credentials bestowed as NFTs — “proof of learn”.

I don’t know how much of this content I’ll catch (I’m only here for a week), but it looks like a mix of expert instructors popping in, and self-organized instruction from the other students on crypto, AI, business management, content creation, etc.

“Burn” is the school’s fitness regime. Just finished my first MANDATORY Bryan Johnson workout, after my MANDATORY Bryan Johnson breakfast.

Bryan and Balaji have talked about “willpower as a service” — basically surrounding people with limited optionality and peer pressure to make good decisions.

When you’re on an island with nothing to eat but broccoli and lentils and nutty pudding, you figure out a way to eat it.

(They have some steak and chicken options too, so I guess it’s “Blueprint Lite”.)

The group workouts include an NFT streak system, with both a leaderboard and a loser-board to encourage people to show up for their workout.

These are very high-openness, friendly people — it will be interesting to see how hard-edged they are willing to get about these things, how much they are willing to insist.

“Earn” describes a system of crypto bounties for solving various problems — open source software development, content creation, and various “microtasks”.

In his opening address, Balaji said, “the San Francisco garage startup is dead, because a garage in San Francisco costs $3,000 a month” — but his goal at Network School is to create conditions for young tech founder types to pay their own way while they build their own projects.

I don’t know if the school will be directly accessible to people like us with families, but I wish I could have found something like this when I was 21.

Other than physically getting to Singapore, the tuition and lodging is very accessible. Adjusted for inflation, the fees are comparable to what I spent to attend BYU in 2009.

This Friday, the Malaysian government announced a 0% tax rate for family offices (private wealth management firms for ultra-high-net-worth families) in Forest City — setting the stage for a Special Economic Zone.

If the school can generate some early wins and present itself as a curator of those tax-advantaged investments, then (the plan is) billions of dollars flow into the city, transforming it into an antipodal tech hub to rival San Francisco.

It’s a 30-minute drive to Singapore (or, eventually, a 15-minute ferry) — so there’s already an immense pool of investors who wouldn’t have to travel far.

Right now, the island’s construction (mostly high-rise two-bedroom apartments) and far-flung location makes it a better fit for Western digital nomads and regional expats. There are 3 and 4-bedroom “villas” for sale, but these were behind a security gate and we couldn’t get a look at them.

I’m interested in it as a place to invest, but we don’t know yet what kind of investments are possible under Malaysian law.

Geopolitically, if you were betting on the draw-down of America’s empire, it seems unlikely that Singapore (which is 75% Han, and stands astride the most important naval choke point on the planet) would retain its status as a serene and independent capitalist entrepot.

On the other hand, the opportunity in Forest City exists partly because the Chinese economy is wildly overbuilt in real estate, and the CCP has made it difficult for Chinese nationals to invest overseas. Just as the US is militarily overextended, China is economically overextended, and their demographic situation is terminal.

So maybe there’s a version of the world in which the collective exhaustion of both regional hegemons, and the diminishing returns to military scale afforded by crypto and drone technology, give places like Singapore some breathing room.

EXIT News

• Tonight’s weekly group call will be a discussion of The Network School.

• Next Tuesday we’ll hear from Alex Petkas from the Cost of Glory on classical education, and the classical approach to human cultivation.

• DC Meetup is Saturday, 10/12. Member invites for the full meetup will go out today via email. Cocktail hour invite below the paywall for subscribers.

• Just before the DC meetup we’ll be at Passage Press’s Noticing event on Thursday 10/10. EXIT guys get half off admission, inquire within.

• On Sunday, 10/13 I’ll be at Network Society Camp here in Austin. Let me know if you’re coming.

• Four-month business incubator starts in October.

  • Develop an idea into a business model and investor pitch

  • $500 buy-in, but you get $450 back as you show up and hit your commits.

  • Remainder goes to a prize for the winner

  • Members can check #BizIncubator in the chat for more details

• Cocktail hour invites for Washington, DC (10/11), San Francisco (11/8), and Dallas (12/6) meetups available below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you.