Ryan Salame

The Courses

Free courses on the systems that run the world: energy, money, technology, power, the body, and the map. Each one is a standalone PDF with data tables, worked examples, quizzes, and an answer key. Every entry lists the read time and the month it was last updated.

They were developed by Claude and edited by ChatGPT so I could study these subjects properly from the inside, and my notes from taking them go into the updates.

The internet is great for skimming. Prison is great for reading. These are built for reading: print one out or read it on a screen, in an afternoon or over a month. Either way, with these courses, you'll know more about these subjects than the majority of the people paid to talk about them.

Comments, thoughts, concerns? Email courses@ryansalame.com.

How the library is organized

Eleven collections, each with its own page. The first covers the map: the fourteen regions of the world and the countries in them. Eight each cover a system: how it works, who the players are, what the numbers say, and where it's heading. One covers companies, and the last covers mathematics, the tools underneath the rest. Every course stands alone, but they were written to reinforce each other.

Collection 1 — The World Regions

The map, region by region, with the countries that hold it.

All 2 courses →
  • The World Regions: Complete Series — A capstone and fourteen regional courses in one volume that profile every country, each region read through the question that defines it.
  • The Unknown Countries — Sixteen small states with outsized stories, from Guyana's oil boom to Liechtenstein's prince.
Where each part starts in the one-volume edition
  • The World (capstone)p. 1
  • The Mediterraneanp. 38
  • The Caspianp. 100
  • The Baltic & North Seap. 132
  • The Black Sea & Danubep. 174
  • The Arabian Peninsula, Red Sea & Gulfp. 214
  • Central Asiap. 256
  • South Asia & the Indian Ocean Rimp. 283
  • East Asia & the South China Seap. 322
  • Australia & the Pacific Islandsp. 373
  • West Africa & the Gulf of Guineap. 409
  • East Africa & the Indian Oceanp. 449
  • Central & Southern Africap. 486
  • North America & the Caribbeanp. 523
  • South Americap. 574

Collection 2 — The Physical Economy

The resources, infrastructure, and flows that everything else depends on.

All 6 courses →
  • Critical Minerals & Mining — Where copper, lithium, cobalt, and the rare earths come from, and why one country controls most of the processing.
  • Water — Groundwater, rivers, desalination, and the regions where the water crisis has arrived.
  • Food & Agriculture — The grains, the fertilizer, and the traders of a system that feeds eight billion people, and why it is fragile.
  • Shipping & Logistics — How containers, tankers, and chokepoints hold the world economy together, and what happens when a strait closes.
  • Construction & Infrastructure — How the world gets built, and why building got harder, from the quarries to the megaprojects.
  • The Automobile Industry: Makers, Money, and the Electric Turn — The world's car industry: makers, money, China's electric lead, tariffs, rules, and the buyer.

Collection 3 — Energy & Climate

How the world's energy is produced, delivered, and stored, and what it does to the climate.

All 5 courses →
  • Energy — Oil, gas, coal, nuclear, renewables, and the politics that connect them, through the 2026 Hormuz crisis.
  • Oil: The Barrel That Runs the World — Oil as a system: who pumps it, what a barrel costs, how the price is set, and the 2026 shock to the Strait of Hormuz.
  • Electricity & the Grid — The machine that must balance every second, in the year it met the largest demand increase in a generation.
  • Batteries — What happens inside a lithium-ion cell, why LFP chemistry won, and who makes the cells.
  • Climate & the Environment — The physics of a warming planet, the record and the models, and the solutions winning on cost.

Collection 4 — Money & Markets

How money is created, priced, borrowed, and stored.

All 8 courses →
  • Economics: How Economies Work — How markets set prices and where they fail, what moves a whole economy, and why economists disagree, worked on 2026's numbers.
  • Money, Markets & the Global Financial System — Central banks, the yield curve, the dollar, and thirteen crises from the Nixon shock to Hormuz.
  • The Stock Market — How shares are priced, the concentration inside the indices, and what a century of evidence says about investing.
  • The Bond Market — The largest market in the world, and the one that disciplines governments.
  • Foreign Exchange — The $9.6 trillion-a-day market, the dollar system, and whether the dollar's century is ending.
  • The Gold Market — Why a metal with no yield reached records in 2025–26.
  • Private Markets — Buyouts and private credit, the $16.7 trillion that trades nowhere, and the push to put it into retirement accounts.
  • The Owners: Who Holds the World's Capital — The $500 trillion ownership map, traced down to the households at the end of the chain.

Collection 5 — The Household & the State

What a household earns, owns, and insures, and what the state taxes, spends, and charges at the border.

All 6 courses →
  • The Consumer — The household as an economic unit: its income, spending, saving, and debt.
  • Real Estate & Housing — The world's largest asset class, from the American home near its record price to China's collapse.
  • Insurance & Risk — The industry that prices risk for everyone else, through the climate repricing and the Hormuz year.
  • Public Finance: Taxes, Budgets & Debt — How the American government raises $5.4 trillion, spends $7.4 trillion, and owes $40 trillion.
  • Trade & Tariffs — How trade works, who wins from it, and who paid for the tariffs of 2025–26.
  • Work & Labor: Jobs, Pay, and Power — How work is counted, what it pays, and who holds the power in the slow-hiring market of 2026.

Collection 6 — Technology

The industries at the frontier and the chains beneath them.

All 7 courses →
  • Semiconductors & Chip Production — How a chip is made, why the leading edge sits with one company, and how the chip war has been fought.
  • Artificial Intelligence — What a large language model does, how it is trained, and what the industry looks like in October 2026.
  • Robotics — Robots in factories, warehouses, and streets, the bet on humanoids, and the cheap drone's remaking of war.
  • Quantum — The ways to build a qubit, error correction, the threat to encryption, and the companies.
  • Internet & Telecommunications: How the World Connects — How data crosses the world, who owns the cables, towers, satellites, and clouds, and who governs and cuts them.
  • CPUs & GPUs: The Processors Behind Computing and AI — How processors work, why the GPU won the first round of AI, and who makes the chips in phones, PCs, and data centers.
  • Cybersecurity: Risk, Defense & Recovery — How attacks happen, what they cost, and how households and organizations prevent, detect, and recover from them.

Collection 7 — Power & Government

How states are run, who holds the power, and how it is checked.

All 7 courses →
  • Government Systems — Every kind of regime, and how each one works and ends.
  • The U.S. Government — The whole federal machine as it stands in 2026, department by department.
  • Defense & Modern War — How wars are fought and paid for in the 2020s, from the drone age to the nuclear order.
  • Armies for Hire: Mercenaries, Contractors, and Wagner — Who hires soldiers and who bears the cost, from Renaissance Italy to Wagner and Africa Corps.
  • The Chinese State — How the People's Republic is actually run, from the Party's pyramid to a county's budget.
  • Israel — A country of 10 million at the end of a three-year war on four fronts.
  • Elections & Representation — How votes become power in the United States, and what other democracies do instead.

Collection 8 — Society

The people themselves: their numbers and migrations, the news they make and consume, the faiths they follow, and the questions of truth, justice, and how to live.

All 5 courses →
  • Demographics & Migration — A species at or near the point where it no longer replaces itself, older than ever, and crossing borders less freely than a few years ago.
  • The Media — Who owns the news, who pays for it, and whether the press is dying or transforming.
  • Journalism — How the news is made and defended, at the level of a first-year college course.
  • Religion: Who Believes, Who Leads, and Who Pays — How many people follow each faith, who governs the great religions, and where their money comes from and goes.
  • Philosophy: What We Can Know, What We Owe, and How to Live — The oldest open questions, from the mind and free will to God, justice, and death, with each answer's best case and what it costs.

Collection 9 — Health & Medicine

The body, and the science and systems of keeping it working.

All 4 courses →
  • The Human Body & Human Health — How the body works and fails, with every lifestyle claim graded by the strength of its evidence.
  • Exercise Optimized: Training for a Long, Healthy Life — How much training is enough, how to build a balanced routine, and what the evidence says about everything sold to speed it up.
  • Biotech & Pharma — How a drug is discovered, tested, approved, priced, and copied, and the industry that makes it.
  • Healthcare Systems: Care, Cost, and Access — How health care is paid for, delivered, and rationed, in America and around the world, and why America pays the most.

Collection 10 — Companies

One enterprise at a time: the businesses, the numbers, the people, and the risks.

All 3 courses →
  • The Musk Companies — Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, X, Neuralink, and the Boring Company, read as one enterprise.
  • Berkshire Hathaway — The company Warren Buffett built over sixty years, in its first year under Greg Abel.
  • JPMorgan Chase: Inside the World's Most Valuable Bank — The largest American bank: how it earns, what it risks, and who will succeed Jamie Dimon.

Collection 11 — Mathematics

The mathematics behind the library's subjects, taught through them.

All 2 courses →
  • Real World Math — Calculus, linear algebra, and probability and statistics, taught through finance, energy, and AI, with practice problems solved in full.
  • Thinking Straight: Fallacies, Biases, and the Numbers That Fool Us — The errors behind bad decisions, each taught through a case where it cost someone something.

A note on the figures

Every course carries the line Figures current as of a month and year on its cover, the same month its entry here gives as last updated. Numbers were checked against primary sources at that date. Courses are updated as the world changes, and each update moves the date on the cover and in this catalog.** **