10 Billion People Working to Improve Each Other's Lives

Racing Towards a Better Future, All Day, Every Day, Deepening Quality of Life for All

I believe political tribalism prevents us from achieving a better world for all. I want to create a world in which most people wake up every day and spend almost all their time improving the lives of other people. We are much closer to such a world than most people realize.

The best outcome of the current political situation would be that more people give up on the civil war that is government. Whatever happens over the next four years in the U.S., more than half of students in the US will have access to Educational Savings Accounts (ESAs), allowing millions of people to focus on improving the lives of children rather than forcing them through school.

How do we launch young people into meaningful lives?

Above all, they need to be confident and purpose driven, and they need to be embedded in healthy, caring, respectful, and meaningful relationships in order to provide a foundation for such confidence and purpose. They need to have significant autonomy so that they can find their way to their own purpose within their culture and community. And they need to develop the competence needed to achieve their goals, including respect, financial autonomy, and some contribution to something greater than their own needs.

School as it is currently structured rarely provides such a foundation for young people.

Yesterday I had a call with Ellis Spezia, who is a nineteen year old electric race car driver who is developing a STEM curriculum based on electric car racing with his mother, a Montessori educator. How cool would it be for kids to learn STEM while learning to design, build, program, and improve electric race cars? He currently has a Roblox game, The Renegade Ring Ellysium Nitrocross Experience as a way of enticing young people into the world of electic car racing. The whole idea is to transport kids from playing this on Roblox to building in the real world, while learning whatever system they are most interested in (no coercive curriculum!). I’m eager to co-develop and then pilot their curriculum at The Socratic Experience (TSE).

I also had a call with JJ Vollum, a former TSE student who is currently living in Prospera, where she is volunteering with a local Montessori school, developing her own after school program for a local Garifuna community, while leading Socratic discussions virtually with a Prenda school once a week. She is interested in working with me to develop a scalable software platform which combines the intellectually rich community we have at TSE along with the extraordinary range of cool learning materials on the internet to empower anyone to learn anything for free if they are motivated to do so. For a small cost, TSE could then help them get an accredited high school diploma, help with college admissions, or provide a pathway into the professional world.

One of the platforms I’m considering for doing this is Qbix.com, an open source community platform. Right now it is ugly and not at all inspiring. But one of the advantages of an open source platform is that we could escape Slack, Zoom, and all the other commercial software platforms we use while also empowering young people to create their own spin off communities and edtech software services on the platform, including AI edtech wrappers.

I also spoke with the founder of Heretic School, just such an AI wrapper built by Andrew Garber, a self-taught coder who also believes schooling is obsolete. He built a robot to serve food for his family’s restaurant during COVID when they could not hire employees—he was just thirteen. He is interested in building a platform for us rather than have us use Qbix.com. I need to get him a set of specs for the kind of community I’m envisioning.

Meanwhile, this morning I spoke with TSE senior Raheen Fatima, who is working with a partner in Pakistan (where she is based) on a web dev business while also developing a concept for a TSE-like school in Pakistan.

On Thursday I provided Socratic sessions for two siblings, in which the eight year old boy was able to estimate the size of a parachute needed to prevent an egg from breaking when dropped from a building. That led to considering “How do you estimate how many hairs on your head?” and “How many basketballs fit in a school bus?” He is good at math and good at building things, but he is not yet applying math in any engineering capacity. Now with the help of his father he will be.

His older sister, who is very bright but does not yet slow down to think, was able to shift from a childish version of an assignment on “How to create your ideal government” (in which she and her friend had listed “values” such as friendship, love, and respect) to considering questions such as: “Why doesn’t the military always take over the government?” “Why do we ever have anything other than might-makes-right?” “Why do governments sometimes collapse into horrible situations and why do they sometimes not?” For the first time, she was able to slow down and wonder about questions I had asked.

Earlier in the week I had been working with a six year old who is a voracious reader, including authors such as Roald Dahl, Astrik Lindgren, and J.K. Rowling. I asked her to what extent each of the worlds created by these authors was real vs. imaginary. And then asked her if the rules in each of the imaginary worlds were the same across each book: “What would it be like if Harry Potter rules were introduced into a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory world?” And of course this got us into the idea of world building, and she began to reflect on how authors create different worlds. Could she create her own imaginary world? What rules might it have?

In my daily Purpose class, we have been talking about ideal cities in our “What does the world need?” day of the week (Fridays). Sometimes it is useful to be provocative, so I first showed them the evidence that almost all violence is committed by young males, and then asked, “Given this evidence, is there any way we can reduce violence by focusing on young males?” In order to radically expand their range of thinking, I mentioned that there were feminists who had proposed eliminating all or most men as such a solution, or that Brigham Young had suggested that unmarried men were “a menace to society,” and thus perhaps the solution to single male violence is to get them married young. While the students found these proposed solutions provocative and entertaining, that led them to consider how to channel young male energy into healthy directions.

In the meantime, I’m working with my wife, Magatte Wade, on obtaining agreement with one or more African nations to host a Prospera special economic zone, including providing the legal autonomy to create a world class business environment. We are in serious discussions with key figures in several African nations and are planning several trips to meet in person (she goes about five times per year for such meetings, I accompany her once or twice per year).

She and I are supporting our team on the ground in Senegal to build the school there. It is Montessori for the young children, and TSE-like for the older ones. One Senegalese student, from a working class family, has learned enough English to join TSE and is also learning digital marketing skills. If we can get him to the point of earning $20 per month in digital marketing, he’ll be the richest kid in his town; at $100 per month he’ll be among the top earners in the small town he is in; at $1000 per month he’ll be one of the top earners his age in the nation.

He is being supported by Habib Fall, a self-taught Senegalese digital media expert who is working with Magatte on her social media. Habib is passionate about the Prospera Cities as well as innovative education in Africa and is totally inspired to build a “Bright Future for Africa.”

Braden Blacker, a TSE senior who will be making on the order of $200K as a talent manager for influencers and digital media marketers, is also working with TSE to develop a digital marketing program that we can also deploy in Africa. He and his dad, entrepreneur Andy Blacker, are building out a new digital media company at the intersection of media, gaming, influencers, and new forms of branding, advertising, and marketing. They are purpose driven and are building out a purpose-driven media ecosystem.

In the meantime, film maker Anat Zuria is discussing making a film with me on my Socratic dialogues with children (her children having attended one of my schools a decade ago). Meanwhile, I’m working with Ben Gabbai and Nicolas Forero to launch our second Socratic Parenting course.

Ultimately, the goal is to create a coherent ecosystem of new culture in which it is normal for everyone who is interested to contribute this way, so that children can engage in amazing, purpose driven learning while they and their parents enjoy spending time together. We quit forcing kids to do things they hate. Instead we inspire them to do things they love, which lead to productive, meaningful lives.

My wife and I, and I think most of the people in our ecosystem, “work” most of the time. But we love what we do and we do what we love. And we are helping to release billions of prisoners from dysfunctional governments in Africa while supporting a broader ecosystem of people working to release millions, then ultimately tens and hundreds of millions, of children from tedious, meaningless, coercive schooling.

She and I are by no means alone in this world. Everyone I know in the Prospera Cities/Startup Cities/Charter Cities world is inspired and excited about their work. Everyone I know working on high agency education models such as Montessori, Acton, Prenda, Alpha, Sora, Moonrise, Primer, and so forth are inspired by their work. Millions of parents are discovering the joys of homeschooling/unschooling and are breaking out of the painful process of forcing their kids into school and homework every day.

Thursday, I had lunch with Marilyn Rhames, an African-American post-doc at Baylor who has decided that launching her own school is more meaningful than going into academia or working in a conventional school. She wants to create a school that combines TSE’s focus on the classics with a forward-looking digital skills element (most of classical education is entirely backward looking).

Sci Fi writer William Gibson said, “The future is already here - it is just not very evenly distributed.” I mention a few of the things that I and others in my network are doing so that the notion that we can wake up every day to make each other’s lives better is a reality right now. I would say all of the service providers in our network enjoy working on meaningful projects. We employ graphic designers, operations managers, accountants, lawyers, software developers, administrative assistants, and a whole host of other individuals with various skill sets. Everyone is inspired to be working on projects that are tangibly improving the quality of life of other people.

In a voluntaristic world, people will develop in different directions. Some of the people in my network are conservative Christians, others believing Muslims, others observant Jews, others are mainstream middle class secular Americans, and some are LGBTQ or polyamorous. In most cases I have no idea what the religious, political, or moral beliefs are of the people I’m working with (though we certainly have core principles to which we are committed). In the political world, these cultural universes engage in conflict. In a voluntary world, each creates their own community and does their best to raise children in a manner that is aligned with the beliefs of their culture and community.

Note that some of the revenue streams associated with the foregoing projects are from upper middle class parents paying TSE private school tuition. Some are from government ESAs paying private school tuition. Prospera is a real estate development which has raised about $150 million, has built a fourteen story building, and sold units to private owners. Prospera Africa will include real estate devoted to manufacturing, services (including finance, software and AI), education, and retail, along with residential and mixed use domains - “live, play, work.”

The foregoing includes Marilyn’s proposed project servicing low-income African American families in Waco, Texas, which will be financially viable once Texas passes ESAs. It includes a school serving working class families in Senegal, which Magatte and I subsidize - but as we get young people earning money through digital services we will have a financially self-sustaining model for the older children. It includes JJ providing volunteer after-school learning for local people in Honduras. It includes many people pursuing their dreams whether or not they have an immediate financial payoff. Some may go broke, others may become wealthy, some will experience both.

As we reduce the extent to which we are engaged in political conflict, and increase the extent to which we are engaging in voluntary, win-win transactions and communities, much of the misery and unhappiness of the world will fade away. The history of prosperity largely consists of the liberation of communities from more coercive forms of government, freeing up entrepreneurial initiative and independent thought to create better technologies and better ways of living.

Concretely, the global movement to create new jurisdictions is a path to providing billions of people with access to better lives. Within the U.S., ESAs are a path to liberating tens of millions of children from the damage of schooling.

As more people are liberated from pointless zero sum conflict, and are free to leave dysfunctional bureaucratic systems, a greater percentage of human energy and initiative will become devoted to joyful win-win projects. We are on our way to a world in which our children could enjoy spending almost all of their time making the world a better place for others through voluntary, entrepreneurial initiatives.

How do we launch young people into meaningful lives?

Above all, they need to be confident and purpose driven. They need to be embedded in healthy, caring, respectful, and meaningful relationships in order to provide a foundation for such confidence and purpose. They need to have significant autonomy so that they can find their way to their own purpose within their culture and community. And they need to develop the competence needed to achieve their goals, including respect, financial autonomy, and some contribution to something greater than their own needs.

School as it is currently structured rarely provides such a foundation for young people.

Yesterday I had a call with Ellis Spezia, who is a 19 year old electric racing driver who is developing a STEM curriculum based on electric car racing with his mother, a Montessori educator. How cool would it be for kids to learn STEM while learning to design, build, program, and improve elecric race cars? He currently has a Roblox game, The Renegade Ring Ellysium Nitrocross Experience. The whole idea is to transport kids from playing this on Roblox to building in the real world while learning whatever system they are most interested in (no coercive curriculum!). I’m eager to co-develop and then pilot their curriculum at The Socratic Experience (TSE).

I also had a call with JJ Vollum, a former TSE student who is currently living in Prospera, where she is volunteering with a local Montessori school there, developing her own after school for a local Garifuna community, while leading Socratic discussions virtually with a Prenda school once a week. She is interested in working with me to develop a scaleable software platform which combines the intellectually rich community we have at TSE along with the extraordinary range of cool learning materials on the internet to empower anyone to learn anything for free if they are motivated to do so. For a small cost, TSE could then help them get an accredited high school diploma, help with college admissions, or provide a pathway into the professional world.

One of the platforms I’m considering for doing this is Qbix.com, an open source community platform. Right now it is ugly and not at all inspiring. But one of the advantages of an open source platform is that we could escape Slack, Zoom, and all the other commercial software platforms we use while also empowering young people to create their own spin off communities and edtech software services on the platform, including AI edtech wrappers.

I also spoke with the founder of Heretic School, just such an AI wrapper built by Andrew Garber, a self-taught coder who also believes schooling is obsolete. He built a robot to serve food for his family’s restaurant during COVID when they could not hire employees and he was about 13. He is interested in building a platform for us rather than have us use Qbix.com. I need to get him a set of specs for the kind of community I’m envisioning.

Meanwhile, this morning I spoke with TSE senior Raheen Fatima, who is working with a partner in Pakistan (where she is based) on a webdev business while also developing a concept for a TSE-like school in Pakistan.

On Thursday I provided Socratic sessions for two siblings, where with the 8 year old boy I got him focused on figuring out how to estimate the size of a parachute needed to prevent an egg from breaking when dropped from a building. That led to the estimation problems of “How do you estimate how many hairs on your head?” and “How many basketballs fit in a school bus?” He is good at math and good at building things, but he is not yet applying math in any engineering capacity at all yet. Now with the help of his father he will be. With his older sister, who is very bright but does not yet slow down to think, I got her to shift from a childish version of an assignment on “How to create your ideal government” in which she and her friend had listed “values” such as friendship, love, and respect to get her to consider why doesn’t the military always take over the government? Why do we ever have anything other than might makes right? Why do governments sometimes collapse into horrible situations and why do they sometimes not? For the first time, I got her to slow down and wonder about questions I had asked.

Earlier in the week I had been working with a six year old who is a voracious reader, including Roald Dahl, Astrik Lindgren, and J.K. Rowling. I asked her to what extent each of the worlds created by these authors was real vs. imaginary. And then asked her if the rules in each of the imaginary worlds were the same across each book - what would it be like if Harry Potter rules were introduced into a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory world? And of course this got us into the idea of world building, and she began to reflect on how authors create different worlds. Could she create her own imaginary world? What rules might it have?

In my daily Purpose class, we have been talking about ideal cities in our “What does the world need?” day of the week (Fridays). Because sometimes it is useful to be provocative, I first showed them the evidence that almost all violence is committed by young males, and then asked, “Given this evidence, is there any way we can reduce violance by focusing on young males?” In order to radically expand their range of possibility, I mentioned that there were feminists who had proposed eliminating all or most men as such a solution, or that Brigham Young had suggested that unmarried men were “a menace to society” and thus perhaps the solution to single male violence is to get them married young. While the students found these proposed solutions provocative and entertaining, that led them to consider how to channel young male energy into healthy directions.

In the meantime, I’m working with my wife, Magatte Wade, on obtaining agreement with one or more African nations to host a Prospera special economic zone there, including providing the legal autonomy to provide a world class business environment. We are in serious discussions with key figures in several African nations and are planning several trips to meet in person (she goes about five times per year for such meetings, I accompany her once or twice per year).

In the meantime she and I are supporting our team on the ground in Senegal in building the school there. It is Montessori for the young children, and TSE-like for the older ones. One Senegalese student, from a working class family, has learned enough English to join TSE and is also learning digital marketing skills. If we can get him to the point at which he will earn $20 per month in digital marketing he’ll be the richest kid in his town, at $100 per month he’ll be among the top earners in the small town he is in, at $1000 per month he’ll be one of the top earners his age in the nation.

He is being supported by Habib Fall, a self-taught Senegalese digital media expert who is working with Magatte on her social media. Habib is passionate about both the Prospera Cities as well as innovative education in Africa and is totally inspired to build a “Bright Future for Africa.”

Braden Blacker, a TSE senior who will be making on the order of $200K as a talent manager for influencers and digital media marketer is also working with TSE to develop a digital marketing program that we we can also deploy in Africa. He and his dad, entrepreneur Andy Blacker, are building out a new digital media company at the intersection of media, gaming, influencers, and new forms of branding, advertsing, and marketing. They are purpose driven and are aligned with building out a purpose-driven media ecosystem.

In the meantime, film maker Anat Zuria is discussing making a film with me on my Socratic dialogues with children (her children attending one of my schools a decade ago). Meanwhile, I’m working with Ben Gabbai and Nicolas Forero to launch our second Socratic Parenting course.

Ultimately the goal is to create a coherent ecosystem of new culture in which it will become normal for everyone who is interested to do all of this, so that children have amazing, purpose driven learning while parents enjoy spending time with their children. We quit forcing kids to do things that they hate. Instead we inspire them to do things that they love and that lead to productive, meaningful lives.

My wife and I, and I think most of the people in our ecosystem, “work” most of the time. But we love what we do and we do what we love. And we are helping to release billions of prisoners from dysfunctional governments in Africa while supporting a broader ecosystem of people working to release millions, then ultimately tens and hundreds of millions, of children from tedious, meaningless, coercive schooling.

She and I are by no means alone in this world. Everyone I know in the Prospera Cities/Startup Cities/Charter Cities world is inspired and excited about their work. Everyone I know working on high agency education models such as Montessori, Acton, Prenda, Alpha, Sora, Moonrise, Primer, and so forth are inspired by their work. Millions of parents are discovering the joys of homeschooling/unschooling and are breaking out of the painful process of forcing their kids into school and homework every day.

Thursday I had lunch with Marilyn Rhames, an African-American post-doc at Baylor who has decided that launching a her own school is more meaningful than going into academia or working in a conventional school. She is very interesed in creating a school that combines TSE’s focus on the classics with a forward-looking digital skills element (most of classical education is entirely backward looking).

Sci Fi writer William Gibson said, ““The future is already here - it is just not very evenly distributed.” I mention a few of the things that I and others in my network are doing so that the notion that we can wake up all day, every day, to make each other’s lives better is a reality right now. I would say all of the service providers in our network enjoying working on meaningful projects. We employ graphic designers, operations managers, accountants, lawyers, software developers, adminstrative assistants, and a whole host of other individuals with various skill sets. Everyone is inspired to be working on projects that are working in a tangible way to improve the quality of life of other people.

In a voluntaristic world, different people will go in different directions. Some of the people in my network are conservative Christians, others believing Muslims, others observant Jews, others are LGBTQ, others polyamorists, yet others are mainstream middle class secular Americans. In most cases I have no idea what the religious, political, or moral beliefs are of the people I’m working with. In the political world, these cultural universes engage in conflict. In a voluntary world, each creates their own community and does their best to raise children in a manner that is aligned with the beliefs of their culture and community.

Note that some of the revenue streams associated with the foregoing projects are from upper middle class parents paying TSE private school tuition. Some are from government ESAs paying private school tuition. Prospera is a real estate development which has raised about $150 million and has built a 14 story building and sold units to private owners. Prospera Africa will include real estate devoted to manufacturing, services (including finance, software and AI, education, and retail, along with residential and mixed use domains - “live, play, work.” The foregoing includes Marilyn’s proposed project servicing low-income African American families in Waco, which will be financially viable once Texas passes ESAs. It includes the school serving working class families in Senegal, which Magatte and I subsidize - but as we get young people earning money through digital services we will have a financially self-sustaining model for the older children. It includes JJ providing volunteer after school learning for local people in Honduras. It includes many people pursuing their dreams whether or not they have an immediate financial payoff. Some may go broke, others may become wealthy, some will experience both.

As we reduce the extent to which we are engaged in political conflict, and increase the extent to which we are engaging in voluntary, win-win transactions and communities, much of the misery and unhappiness of the world will fade away. The history of prosperity largely consists of the liberation of communities from more coercive forms of government in the past, freeing up entrepreneurial initiative and indepedent thought to do create better technologies and better ways of living.

Concretely, the global movement to create new jurisdictions is a path to providing billions of people with access to better lives. Within the U.S., ESAs are a path to liberating tens of millions of children from the damage of schooling.

As more people are liberated from pointless zero some conflict, and are free to leave dysfunctional bureaucratic systems, a greater percentage of human energy and initiative will become devoted to joyful win-win projects. We are on our way to a world in which our children may spend almost all of their time making the world a better place for others through voluntary, entrepreneurial initiatives.