BULL MARKET UNIVERSITY

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In my to-read pile has been some stuff on Singularity University, the Ray Kurzweil/Peter Diamandis thing, Kurzweil being the guy who wants to live forever and Diamandis being the guy who wants to mine asteroids and become a trillionaire. It’s a school for billionaires and futurists and maybe writers like me. But I doubt it.

It’s not an accredited university, but people really want to go there, because they have the most famous thinkers in the world teaching stuff on neurology and artificial intelligence and stuff like that. Your main homework assignment is to come up with an idea that will help a billion people. That’s an easy one. Re-elect Narendra Modi.

But as you can see, that’s just the way I think, like, I think if I got accepted to Singularity University (which costs $25K for a couple of weeks) I would have a pretty different perspective. It’s funny, in my reading on SU, all I heard about was Moore’s Law this and Moore’s Law that, about how computing power will always grow at an exponential rate. Maybe not. This is an easy one. Has banking innovation grown at an exponential rate? No. Has utility innovation grown at an exponential rate? No. Computers have grown at an exponential rate because the government gnomes have left them alone. If you leave something alone, it will grow at an exponential rate.

Side note. In this fashion, maybe the genius of Obamacare is that it does leave room for innovation. A single- payer system would not.

And I’m sure for every heavy hitter that attends this thing there are complete jokers. Like, why do they invite Will.I.Am to Singularity? That guy is the cooler if I ever saw one. Look what he did to DDD.

Then, at the end of it, you get a 3D- printed class ring.

Something like this would be cool, and I’m sure would be worth the $25K. But this is bull market material, folks. Singularity University doesn’t exist in 2003. Or 2009. In fact, if there is a big VC wipeout (which is a matter of when, not if, something I’m sure the eggheads there would disagree with me on), Singularity goes out of business faster than Antioch, in Yellow Springs.

But who wants to be a party pooper.

I live in a bit of a finance bubble, and if I am being honest, I do not know a lot of Silicon Valley folks. Some. I am planning a trip to SF soon. There is a lot of silliness. And I think the press has a tendency to overstate how well people work together. Like, someone wrote a whole book about Pete Peterson and Lew Glucksman. Similar books could be written about Silicon Valley. But they’re not. Because we drool over these people.

I take this as a sign.

Would I love to be Google employee number 20 or something? Sure. Not really my skill set, though. I am a curmudgeon. The H.L. Mencken of finance. But I’m an optimist! Not only will I live to see cancer cured, I will see self-driving cars, hyperloops, asteroid mining, and if I am lucky, maybe even interstellar travel. I’m here to make sure people don’t screw up the financing, because they always do.