Dear Sam

In your recent conversation with Tyler Cowen at the Progress Conference, you mentioned starting a Y Combinator-like thing might be your best shot at revitalizing St. Louis. You also discussed your hypothetical question for the Dalai Lama—what final prompt should one type for the ready-to-go superintelligence?

After thinking deeply about where humanity is headed, I wrote The Future of Loving Grace. This essay sounds like sci-fi, but I believe the underlying principles realistically tie together many of these seemingly disparate threads.

My view on systematically developing human potential (via capitalism) happens to be the same moral north star which you—along with Peter Thiel, Paul Graham, and Tyler—seem to have already grasped with much more clarity than others. I truly appreciate the significant efforts and resources dedicated towards Thiel Fellowship, YC, Emergent Ventures, etc.

But I don't view any of these programs as sufficient. Neither they nor more recent initiatives (Buildspace, The Residency, SPC, HF0, etc) have articulated the implicit underlying long-term endpoint. As a result, none are properly and directly aligned with their actual goal.

It looks like you've been thinking about parts of this concept since at least 2013, when you blogged "the most successful people create religions". Observing from a distance, I suspect you and Jony are now converging to see my predicted future more clearly than any other leaders in the field at present.

One day, I believe you will include some form of my proposed system as one of your "20 wildly different experiments" in education. These concepts exist outside of me, so I'm not exactly sure what my role should be. I just feel compelled to bring visibility to certain ideas which hopefully pull our best future forward.

It would be a pleasure to discuss things with you, to learn more about your perspectives, and to see how I might best be of service.