Get genuinely good at AI — and the frontier beyond it
Free, plain-language lessons, beginner to expert. The flagship path makes you genuinely good at the AI you already use — with experiments you run in your own ChatGPT or Claude — plus a full library on quantum, crypto, finance, and the future of tech. Read here; master it (with quizzes and hands-on practice) in the app.
Building with AI
Design, build, evaluate, and ship a real AI application — reasoning from first principles about why each piece works and where it fails.
- What Is AI, Really?
- How LLMs Actually Work
- Choosing a Model
- Your First Real Prompt
- Context Is Everything
- Prompt Engineering Core
- Controlling the Output
- Debugging a Prompt
- Why Evaluation Is the Real Skill
- Build Your First Eval
- LLM as a Judge
- The Knowledge Problem
- Embeddings & Meaning
- Vector Databases (pgvector)
- Build a RAG Pipeline
- Making RAG Good
- Function Calling
- MCP: The Universal Plug
- Your First Agent
- When Agents Break
- Agent Frameworks
- A (Paper) Trading Agent
- Multi-Agent Workflows
- Guardrails & Safety
- The Builder's Stack
- Version Control with GitHub
- Frontend for AI Apps
- Backend & APIs
- Database with Supabase
- Deploy with Vercel
- Capstone: Ship a Real AI App
- Cost Optimization
- Observability & Monitoring
- Reliability at Scale
- Security Deep-Dive
- The Agent Loop, in Depth
- Goals & Planning
- How the Model Chooses a Tool
- Designing Tools an Agent Can Use
- Decomposition: Break the Task Down
- Chain-of-Thought & Tree-of-Thought
- Self-Consistency: Ask, Then Vote
- Prompt Anti-Patterns: How Prompts Go Wrong
- Chunking Strategies in Depth
- Embedding Quality: The Retrieval Bottleneck
- Query Rewriting & Expansion
- Multi-Hop Retrieval
- Context Windows: The Working-Memory Budget
- Short-Term vs Long-Term Memory
- Summarization & Compaction
- Memory Retrieval, Personalization & Privacy
- Testing & CI for AI
- Prompt & Version Management
- Safety & Red-Teaming
- Human-in-the-Loop & Shipping Responsibly
Quantum Computing
Explain superposition, entanglement, and what quantum computing does and does not speed up — and tell hype from reality.
- Bit vs. Qubit
- Superposition: A Real Blend, Not Ignorance
- Measurement & Collapse
- Why Qubits Scale (and the Catch)
- Entanglement
- Interference
- Quantum Gates
- What a Quantum Algorithm Even Is
- Grover's Search
- Shor's Factoring
- Quantum Simulation
- What Quantum Computers Are Actually Good At
- Physical Qubits
- Decoherence & Noise
- Quantum Error Correction
- What Today's Machines Actually Do
- Hype vs. Reality
- Post-Quantum Cryptography
- The Open Problems
- Quantum and the World
- How to Think About Quantum Computing
- The Quantum Fourier Transform
- Phase Estimation
- Amplitude Amplification
- Variational Algorithms (VQE & QAOA)
- The No-Cloning Theorem
- Quantum Teleportation
- Superdense Coding
- Bell Tests: Proving Entanglement Is Real
- Two Kinds of Quantum Error
- The Surface Code
- Logical vs Physical Qubits
- The Hardware Race: Four Ways to Build a Qubit
- Chemistry & Materials: The Flagship Application
- Optimization: The Honest Take
- Quantum Machine Learning: The Honest Take
- Quantum Sensing: Fragility as a Feature
- Quantum Advantage & Benchmarks
- Reading Roadmaps: The Milestones That Matter
- The Algorithm Gap
- When Will Quantum Matter?
Crypto & Tokenization
Derive why a blockchain works from first principles and tell a scam from a real use case — always with “here’s how to check it yourself.”
- What Is a Ledger?
- Keys & Wallets: How You Own Crypto
- Tokens: What They Are and Aren’t
- Blocks & Hashes: Why You Can’t Quietly Rewrite History
- Reading the Chain Yourself
- Consensus: Agreeing Without a Referee
- Mining vs. Staking
- Smart Contracts: Code That Runs Itself
- Gas & Fees: Paying for Shared Computation
- Nodes: Who Keeps the Rules Honest
- Stablecoins: Holding a Peg
- Swapping Without a Middleman: AMMs
- Lending, Borrowing & Liquidations
- Tokenizing Real-World Assets
- The Oracle Problem
- Scaling & the Blockchain Trilemma
- Security in Practice: How Funds Actually Get Lost
- Custody: Who Holds the Keys
- The Regulation Reality
- Failure Modes: Where Crypto Actually Breaks
- Common Scams & How to Spot Them
- Where the Trust Actually Lives
- Evaluating a Project From First Principles
- The Honest Balance Sheet: What Crypto Is Really For
- Order Books vs AMMs
- Lending Mechanics in Depth
- Perpetuals: The Contract That Never Expires
- Where Yield Really Comes From
- MEV: The Value Hidden in Ordering
- Liquidations & Cascades
- Optimistic Rollups
- ZK Rollups
- Data Availability: The Hidden Pillar
- Bridges & Their Risks
- Modular vs Monolithic Chains
- The L2 Tradeoffs: What You Really Give Up
- Smart-Contract Vulnerabilities: Reentrancy
- Oracle Manipulation & Flash Loans
- What an Audit Does — and Doesn’t
- Key Management: Beyond a Single Key
- Formal Verification: Proving Code Correct
- Exploit Case Studies: The Recurring Patterns
- Tokenomics: Supply, Demand & Incentives
- DAOs & Governance: Voting With Tokens
- Emissions & Vesting: The Supply Schedule
- Treasuries & Mechanism Design
- Real-World Assets: The Last-Mile Problem
- Payments & Stable Systems: The Honest Scorecard
- Decentralized Identity
- NFTs & Digital Ownership
- The Adoption Scorecard: Promise vs Reality
- Does It Actually Need a Blockchain?
Finance, Trading & Markets
Reason about risk, value, and market mechanics from fundamentals — not tips. Empower, never give financial advice.
- What Is Money, Really?
- Price Is Not Value
- Risk vs. Reward
- What Is a Market?
- Opportunity Cost
- The Time Value of Money
- Compounding: Returns on Your Returns
- What Is a Stock?
- What Is a Bond?
- Diversification: The Only Free Lunch
- How Prices Actually Move
- What Is a Business Actually Worth?
- Why Beating the Market Is Hard
- Markets Move on Surprises, Not News
- Building a Portfolio
- Derivatives in Spirit: Insurance and Leverage
- Inflation & Interest Rates: The Big Levers
- The Business Cycle: Booms and Busts
- Bubbles & Crashes
- Behavioral Traps: How We Fool Ourselves
- Too Good to Be True: Spotting Scams
- Luck vs. Skill: The Survivors You See
- Thinking Clearly About Money
- Intrinsic Value & Discounted Cash Flow
- Valuation Multiples (P/E & Friends)
- Growth vs Value: Two Lenses
- Moats: Why Profits Survive
- Margin of Safety
- Quality at a Fair Price
- Why Diversification Works (the Math)
- Correlation: When Diversification Fails
- Position Sizing: How Much, Not Just What
- Drawdowns & Volatility
- Risk-Adjusted Return
- Rebalancing: Keeping the Plan
- Calls & Puts: The Anatomy of an Option
- Option Premiums: Intrinsic Value & Time Value
- Futures & Hedging: The Price of Certainty
- Leverage & Margin: The Amplifier
- Hedging Strategies: Putting the Pieces Together
- Structured Products & Their Dangers
- Interest Rates: The Price of Money
- Inflation: The Hidden Tax
- The Credit Cycle: Debt as the Amplifier
- Central Banks: Hands on the Dials
- Currencies & Exchange Rates
- How Macro Moves Asset Prices
- Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
- Expected Value: Weighing the Bet
- Process Over Outcome
- The Traps That Fool Even Pros
- Second-Order Thinking: “And Then What?”
- Your Money Philosophy
The Future of Technology
Reason about emerging technology and the future without hype or fear — the most explicitly optimistic-but-grounded track.
- Why the Future Feels Sudden
- Signal vs Noise
- Curves, Not Lines
- Too Soon, Then Too Late
- Forecast Like a Weather Report
- A Few Deep Forces
- Compute: The Cost of Thinking-by-Machine
- Energy: The Master Resource
- Biology Becomes Engineering
- AI: Cheap Intelligence
- Loops, Not Levers
- Why Making More Makes It Cheaper
- The Moving Bottleneck
- Old Parts, New Inventions
- And Then What?
- Tasks, Not Jobs
- Efficiency Can Backfire
- Who Gets It, and When
- Why Doom and Hype Both Sell
- Seeing Through Hype
- Taking Risk Seriously, Without Doom
- The Honest Optimist
- Base Rates: Start With the Odds
- Scenario Planning
- Calibration: Being Right About Being Unsure
- Prediction Markets & the Crowd
- The AI Frontier: Where It’s Actually Heading
- The Biotech Frontier: Biology Becomes Engineering
- The Energy Frontier: Toward Cheap Abundance
- The Robotics Frontier: AI Meets the Physical World
- The Space Frontier: The Cost of Getting There
- The Materials Frontier: The Hidden Foundation
- Networks & Network Effects
- Emergence: The Whole Is More Than the Parts
- Tipping Points
- Path Dependence: Why History Sticks
- Coordination Problems
- Resilience & Fragility
- The Transition Problem
- Institutions Under Pressure
- Technology & Power
- Who Gains, Who Loses
- Technology & Human Behavior
- Reasoning Past the First Effect
- The Mental Models for the Future
- Thinking Clearly Forward