CreatorClub

.@naval on Tech Education: “Technology is a form of leverage—and it's the ultimate form of leverage. If I'm a programmer, what people don't realize is that I have a million robots working for me. If I come up with an idea, I code that idea up, and now a million robots carry that idea. They're just sitting in a data center—for heat, efficiency, and space reasons—loaned to me by Amazon through AWS, who takes a small cut. That leverage means that if I decide on the right thing to do versus the wrong thing to do, I can make $100 million—or zero. It's a very wide swing. Someone who isn't leveraged through technology doesn't have that force multiplier. Someone working in a traditional industry doesn't have that same advantage. When we talk about the distribution of capital, we're used to thinking of money as the main source of capital. Before that, the main source of capital was people. How many people are working for you? That's why older generations tend to be impressed by how many employees you have. People who are a little more savvy ask how much money you're managing or how much revenue you're doing. But the correct question is: How many robots are working for you? How many programmers are working for you? How many machines are working for you? Because those are the ultimate force multipliers. So I believe the way forward is through technology education. Where technology education falls down is that it's really popular to preach education for kids. Everybody wants to educate kids—because kids can't talk back. They have no choice. Go to school. Sit down. Shut up. Learn. But what about adults? We have this myth that adults can't be educated. That adults either self-educate or they can't be educated at all. We believe that if you're 45 years old and you lose your job because your factory shuts down, you're done. Your only options are: Society has to bail you out because you're destitute. Or we artificially preserve your job through tariffs, trade barriers, or tax breaks—even though the world no longer needs that job. Instead, I think we need a culture of adult education. Imagine a model where every four years it was socially acceptable—and financially supported—for you to go back to school for a year. You'd say: "This is my school year." Maybe this year you're going to learn electronics. You spend a year learning electronics. You could be 54 years old and learning electronics. That should be a normal part of society. We need continuous education built into society because the leverage you're craving is actually permissionless. It's available to everybody. But it's knowledge-based. The gate isn't a banker sitting on a pile of money. The gate is knowledge. It's building of that knowledge. And the sharing of that knowledge.”