In Brendan McCord's recent essay You Are Not a Function, he writes about the hollowed-out university that no longer prioritizes formation in young people. He cautions against blindly rejecting the institution without a worthy substitute, the kind of Bildung young generations so desperately need to avoid outsourcing their judgment and agency to LLMs. In my own pursuit to build cultural infrastructure with Flourish, I’ve been drawn to others doing the same. Zelda is one of them, a friend who is building a real, viable alternative that puts formation at the center.
Zelda Poem is the founder of Nautilus, a three-month residential program in San Francisco where young artists, scientists, and technologists live and work together, fully funded by patrons. She also works at 1517, the VC firm that backs dropouts and renegade students.
Zelda dropped out of high school in France at 15, and has spent the decade since building what she wished had existed.
In this conversation, we discuss:
[00:01:11] The school psyop, dropping out in France
[00:14:51] Nautilus and the case for “leisure fellowships”1
[00:26:11] Building bridges between artists and technologists
[00:35:58] Reviving the Medici patron model
[00:42:50] IRL is irreplaceable
[00:51:06] Education models we’re bullish on
[00:59:06] Why she stopped glorifying the grind
Leisure fellowship was coined by Pablo Antonio, who described it as finding competent socialites under 25 and giving them money to read, write, tinker, and meet people. Zelda's Nautilus is one of the few programs being built around this idea today.
