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- [00:00]
A
If a student didn't make a million dollars, you would refund tuition.
- [00:04]
B
That's the craziest idea I've ever heard. The standard you're being held to is so insane. You can go to a normal high school, you can go to the high school where they're trying to help you become a millionaire. Which one do you want to go to?
- [00:15]
A
How do we destroy ambition?
- [00:18]
B
You are competing with the other students within this game of school. We all know it's sort of fake.
- [00:27]
A
Everybody has to come out of school. They're going to go straight on the factory line.
- [00:30]
B
The idea of single teenager creating a billion dollar business in the next 10 years, I don't think it's a question of if, it's a question of how many it's gonna happen. If we can unlock human potential as much as possible as early as possible, that is really one of the best things we could do for the world.
- [00:54]
A
So the other day you posted something and it captivated me. Been doing a lot of research on Alpha School and you made a post that you were going to launch a program within Alpha School that if a student didn't make a million dollars, you would refund tuition. So that's a big ask. The other part is you could be doing anything. You're a proven entrepreneur, you've done it across multiple businesses. So I just wanted to start with, why are you tackling this challenge? You could be doing anything.
- [01:23]
B
Yeah. So for context, I've lived in Austin since 2018. I've got three young kids and as somebody who didn't like school very much growing up, been very interested in what the school options were going to be for my kids as they got older. And a big part of what has really kept me in Austin is, is Alpha School is like it, you know, we'll talk more about the model, but it just their take on education and making school fun and being very forward thinking with like AI and the future of technology and preparing kids for that. Like I'd started to hear about it a few years ago and then really in the last year they started getting more public and just kind of got more and more excited about my kids going to school there eventually. So a year ago I started talking about building with AI, Vibe coding, all of that and somebody at Alpha School working in their high school. Cameron reached out to me because he wanted me to come do a workshop for the current students basically on like Vibe coding building with. I came in and ran this workshop, got to meet some of the high school students and was just really Impressed. You know, I went to one of the best high schools in the country. I went to Carnegie Mellon for college. Like, I grew up around smart high schoolers and smart college kids. And these high schoolers felt like they were on another level, right. It was just really, really impressed by them. And after the workshop, Cameron and I were talking and he told me about what he was really doing at Alpha School, which was he got hired to start this program, this new millionaires program where it was going to be a high school dedicated to teenagers who wanted to be entrepreneurs with this promise that you would make a million dollars by graduation or get all of your tuition refunded. And I was like, that's the craziest idea I've ever heard. That's fascinating. And so we started talking about it and, and you know, he knew that I was going to be a big part of that curriculum and it's a big part of how it's possible. Right? Because the, the barriers to entry for entrepreneurship and technology have come down so much with what one person with AI can do today. Where 20 years ago a bunch of teenagers starting million dollar businesses would have seemed pretty crazy, five years ago it would start to be believable. And now in the last year or two, it's getting more believable each year, especially in the build in public indie startup community. You see it, you've got people like Zach Yedagari who built Calai while he was in high school and just sold that for $50 million. And you've got more of these stories happening where it's starting to seem less and less crazy. And as we were hanging out, Cameron eventually said like, hey, here's who I'm thinking of hiring for the team. One of the people I want on the team is a really AI native entrepreneur, somebody who's been out there doing it, who can bring those personal stories to designing the program and working with the students. Do you know anyone? And I was kind of like, well, I kind of want to just, I just, I want to do this. This sounds like a crazy challenge. I mean, and what a fun challenge. And I mean, yes, I could obviously continue doing my own thing. I've been, this is my first job in 10 years. But just that challenge of we're going to start a high school where we are promising that you will make a million dollars by the time you graduate. And like, that's the standard we are being held to is so insane and so like cool and motivating that I was like, yeah, I want to come do this with you, what are the
- [05:13]
A
difference between the high schoolers that you got to hang around growing up at these elite schools and. And the high schoolers you're seeing today? Like, clearly you came in and you're like, I was impressed on a new level.
- [05:24]
B
Yeah.
- [05:24]
A
Can you describe, like, the difference that you saw?
- [05:27]
B
Totally. So I went to Choate Rosemary hall for high school, which. And nothing against Choate, I think that was like the best education at the time experience of my life. Right. I liked it. I thought it was even more valuable than college. And the. But the big thing still with really almost any elite school, is that for the most part, you are competing with the other students within this game of school. Right. You're competing on the grades, you're competing on fbla, on math, Olympiad, on all of these things that are within the school game, the school ecosystem. And what Alpha does a really good job of through the K through 8, but then especially at the high school level, is encouraging the students to think outside of school. You do your academics in high school, it's three hours. So the first three hours of the day you get your academics done, then you have the rest of the day to work on your Alpha X, which is your big passion project. That something that you're really excited about going after. For a lot of students, it's businesses. One student's putting on an Altine Broadway play and so she's out in New York all the time and working on this play production. And it's. So you're thinking outside of just like grades and academics and obviously for the most part, they're still trying to go to college, but it's just that, like, little bit more of that professionalism, that adult, like, thinking where it didn't feel like I was hanging out with 15 year olds, it felt like I was hanging out with maybe people who had just graduated college or people who were young in college. And I kept having to. I still have to do this. I keep having to remind myself that, oh, like, these kids can't open a bank account. There's all these ridiculous restrictions that kind of like get in the way of little things, because especially the ones who've been in the Alpha ecosystem for six, seven, eight years, they just kind of like, operate a little bit differently. It's a real adjustment to be around.
- [07:32]
A
All right, y' all have heard me talk about Better Pitch for years on the podcast. I'm super proud of their founder, Nico, who is a great friend of mine. He's one of the best young entrepreneurs I've come Across. And in just two years he's built an incredible company that is now rebranding as Collateral Partners. And honestly, it makes perfect sense. From single family investment decks to complete brand overhauls, ongoing partnership support to market research, they deliver institutional grade work that actually moves capital. Think of them as the difference between looking like a startup and operating like an institution. They're really your entire institutional marketing department. The team you wish you had in house but can't justify hiring. Ex Goldman directors who understand your business, ex PE associates who craft your narrative, and world class designers who make it all look effortless. Go check out collateral.com and mention the Powers podcast and they'll give you a complimentary one pager. Enjoy the episode. And are these kids that you're meeting, have they already been in the Alpha program for a while or is it almost an immediate adjustment upon landing there? Like their eyes are opened up immediately to a whole new way of living?
- [08:46]
B
It's a bit of both. There's a number who've been in it for a while and then there are. There are also high schoolers who have transferred in in the last year or two, often because they were doing something at their previous school that made them a really good fit for the Alpha model. So we have one student who's an incredible social media marketer, particularly short form video. And so he was. So he's doing all the short form video marketing for Al Pacino's new movie. And so he's going out to California all the time and like getting footage to like do marketing for Al pacino. And he's 16, right? And he was doing this at his old school and trying to fit it in around like a normal academic schedule. And it was just, it was making him miserable, it was affecting his work. He was able to transfer in and now he can kind of do his academics anywhere because he has that trust. And so if he wants to go to LA for a week to work on this, Alpha will buy his tickets, like schedule his Uber, everything to get him out there, get him on set. He can do his academics remotely using our software while he's on the go, and then he can really go all in on this like very cool experience that he's developed for himself.
- [09:57]
A
So basically you're learning in real time. The agency that high school kids have and their capabilities are vastly underestimated by the general public. Like we've kind of put them in a box that they're only capable of so much and anything outside of that would just be a stretch of our imagination. And you're actually seeing that's just not the case.
- [10:17]
B
Yeah. And it's a very recent phenomenon. It's a very recent idea to think that teenagers need to be in this sandboxed environment. Historically, you would start an apprenticeship maybe when you were 13 or 14, and you'd be in the shop working with some kind of master smith, or you'd be in the clergy getting your religious training, or you'd be, you know, you'd go through your rite of passage, and then you'd be like, hunting or doing whatever other work the adults are doing once you're 13, 14, 15. But now we've kind of like extended childhood to not just 18, but in many cases, 22. I mean, heck, 27, 28. Right. We've sort of infantilized young people, and certainly some people do need the extra guardrails and the extra support while they transition into adulthood. But for a lot of teenagers, they're ready to go, right? They want the. They want the autonomy, they want the responsibility. They want to go do hard things and be challenged. And the biggest challenge they have available to them is this school game, right? Like get the good grades or whatever, compete with each other for the best colleges, but then you give them a more exciting game, a more interesting game, something more meaningful to go after, and they get way more excited about that and charge even harder in that direction. And that was certainly my experience in high school and college, too. I just didn't enjoy those games. I wanted to go find something else to play.
- [11:42]
A
Can you describe the current game of the school like the game within the school system now, as you see it? Can you give it a little even more context? I know you've thought about this a lot.
- [11:51]
B
Are you familiar with the term kayfabe? No, I've been using this a lot more recently. So it usually is. It's usually used in relation to pro wrestling, at least that's where it started. And now it's kind of leaked into the gestalt for a bunch of other topics where. When you're watching pro wrestling, right, wwe, you know they're not really fighting. They know they're not really fighting, but you're all kind of playing along because it's enjoyable to be in this ecosystem and to, like, have that experience or whatever, right? But we all know it's sort of fake, right? And this is true for a lot of things, right? You hear it now talked about a lot in politics, where a politician gets up and they talk about how billionaires are destroying the world and they're they're, they're looting everything. And most people who work in businesses know that like, well, they're also creating jobs, they're doing a bunch of these other things. And those same politicians are trying to raise money from billionaires and sometimes those billionaires are donating to those politicians. Right? And it's just kind of this like, game. We know you're saying that to get votes from this crowd. And so we're not going to take you too seriously in this regard because you're playing the game of politics, right? And a lot of kids are kind of playing the game of school where I know that you don't actually know that much about US History despite having this grade on your report card, because you probably just like crammed for the test or, you know, you crammed for the essay and then you just forgot about it. And we're just kind of like pretending that you know a lot about a lot of these areas because you need to get these grades so that you can go to this college. And the college admissions person knows that you don't actually know that much about a lot of these areas. But they want the people who are going to like, do the best in the jobs after graduation, right? Because then that makes them look better for their placement numbers post grad. And it's just kind of this like everyone's half pretending, half, you know, being serious. And some of the students who see through that, they'll just break out and do their own thing. They'll drop out and start businesses and whatnot. But if you're not going to exit the system, your best bet is to play the game so that you get into a better college, so that you get a better job afterwards, so you can kind of like exist in that, that system. And for most, for, for a lot of the last, call it, at least 50 years, you didn't have many other great options because once jobs started expecting people to have college diplomas, once we kind of moved away from the apprenticeship system, you, you had to go to college to get a decent job. And if you wanted to go to college to get a decent job, you had to try to do really well in high school. And so that was kind of like the track that was laid out before you. But really with, I'd say like technology and computers and like programming in particular, we started to move into this world of where you can just demonstrate competence again. And there are more and more of these jobs now where they don't really care about your degree, they don't care about your Grades because you can actually demonstrate competence. And increasingly that's where a lot of the best opportunities are. And as entrepreneurship has become more available to more students or to more people in general, more and more people are able to kind of exit the system. But there aren't many schools that cater to students who want to go do these other things. A lot of, if you're, if you're a 16 year old and you're really motivated by entrepreneurship, you still have to go to school for six hours a day and then go home and do homework. And so you have this six, seven, eight hour obligation every day. And you're trying to fit in the other stuff around it. And a number of kids pull it off, right? Especially in like video games and stuff. You'll see these kids who build like Minecraft servers or they build Roblox games and they're making real money and they're managing to fit it in around these crazy school obligations. But we in Alpha school now, we're kind of coming out and saying like, we're going to remove as many barriers as possible. You want to cook, we're going to let you cook. We're going to compress the academics as much as possible, make sure that you still get good sat, good AP scores, do all of that because we can, we can make it way more efficient, but then we can give you all the space and resources and everything possible to go succeed at the thing you're really motivated to do that's outside of this school environment.
- [16:21]
A
And the average testing scores I was on the website last night over a traditional high school are, I think like the average SAT score for a senior is like a 1480 or something. Or something. Like, I'm like, yeah. Did they raise the bar? Like, no, it's still out of 1600. I'm like, holy cow.
- [16:36]
B
Yeah, it's really good. And it's getting better because with kind of the traditional school system, they keep running the same playbook every year, right? This is how we do our math classes, this is how we do our reading classes. But for us it's all software based and we're revising and improving the software every year to try to make it better and better and better at getting you to that 1500 whatnot, sat as efficiently or as reliably as possible to get you to that 5 on AP physics as reliably as possible. And it's really cool working there because I see the teams coming in and testing the software, working with the students and we get to see some of the freshmen and sophomore SATs. And we have a bunch of freshmen now who are getting 1500s on their SATs, which is bananas. That's very hard to imagine. And you know, obviously we can't like guarantee that.
- [17:27]
A
Right.
- [17:28]
B
For every student, but we have the resources now to make that possible. And they're just getting better every year.
- [17:34]
A
And you probably know more about this than I do. The traditional school system as we know it today is basically built off the industrialist architecture, which is like, even to the degree, and maybe you know this, maybe you don't, that like a bell rings every hour. Because in a line shift, they're basically trying to create factory workers. How do we destroy ambition? Work to the mean, do not raise anybody that wants to. Everybody that has to come out of school, they're going to go straight on the factory line. We don't need lots of entrepreneurs. That's going to take away from the most, that's going to take away from us at the top. So we're going to put them in class for 45 minutes. A bell is going to ring and by the time they're 18, they will be so used to a shift change every 45 minutes that going right into a factory will seem like nothing. And while they're in class, they're going to sit down, they're going to listen to kind of a teacher, they are going to be told to shut up, not talk a lot, not get out of line. And hopefully after 18 years, we can have kind of killed ambition enough that they will be perfectly capable of just going right out onto the factory floor.
- [18:39]
B
Yeah, yeah. And even if we take the more generous interpretation of not like a malicious, we want to kill your ambition, but if we take the. This is probably what you're gonna do.
- [18:50]
A
Yeah.
- [18:51]
B
Right. And like, we gotta get you used to that.
- [18:53]
A
Yeah.
- [18:53]
B
Because that's most likely where most of you are gonna go afterwards. And if we're trying to optimize or we're trying to design a mass market education system, we can base it on a factory. Right. It's hard to say which. Which like, came first. Right. It's like factories figured out mass align, like mass coordination at scale. Right. They really mastered that. And then the school system kind of learned from that process. And this is how we provide education to millions of people every year. And we have to factor in the challenges of, okay, we have one person to teach 15 and then 20 and then 25, and now it's closer to 30 in a lot of cases. And the only way you do that is with this highly Regimented, factory esque system. It's kind of like the best, worst option for doing what the public education system does. But again, like, we have the technology now, we can do something better. And it's really fascinating to see how many people just hate the alpha school model, right? Like you're putting them in front of a screen for two hours a day. They don't have a teacher standing in front of them lecturing. They don't have that same relationship. And then you talk to the kids and they're like, this is awesome. I can just do it in two hours on my own schedule and I don't have to wait for the slowest person in the class to catch up and I can just run ahead with it. And to be honest, some kids come in a couple of years behind and unfortunately in the normal system, there's no real way to help them catch up. If they can get a tutor, they can get caught up. But if you transfer schools or if you kind of like don't pay attention for a year, the system keeps going. You just move into sixth grade math, you move into seventh grade math and you'll just start getting bad grades and doing poorly. No one's getting you caught up because they can't give you that individualized attention. And so you have a lot of students who think, oh, I'm bad at math or I hate math. And the reality is you're just a year or two behind. And if you get caught up, you might enjoy it again, you might feel good about it again, but no one's providing that. But when you have the really individualized software and instruction style, you can.
- [21:07]
A
Yeah, it's like, why are we doing multiplication now? It's like, oh, because it's October 1st and the lesson plan says we start it has zero to do with mastering anything that you've done before then.
- [21:16]
B
Exactly. And so we'll have students come in, even in high school who need to go back to third grade math because they need to get caught up on their multiplication and their division because they can't succeed at algebra until they really master those four fundamentals. And the crazy thing is, if you have a high schooler, you can get them caught up in elementary school math in something like 30 or 40 hours. It's not a huge amount of time, but a teacher's not going to take that time. But the software can.
- [21:47]
A
Okay, before we get into building the school, if I was to give my interpretation of knowing you as friends on X is somebody who has mastered several things in different domains, like Almost every two or three years. You're like the expert in X.
- [22:04]
B
For better or worse. For better or worse.
- [22:07]
A
And you were called to go to a workshop to teach people how to vibe code and use AI, which means it hadn't been around that long, which means you became an expert in that. So before we get into how you're going to think about the program and building it, I wanted to just explore how do you think about mastering something? Yeah, like what's your process for doing this and maybe give a few examples of things that you've done.
- [22:32]
B
I mean, I've just always loved being on the frontier of whatever tech thing is going on. I just get so much energy out of that. And you know, when I was, when I was even like elementary school, I was obsessed with the video games. That was my thing, that was my game outside of school that gave me the challenge and, you know, satisfied that curiosity. And to me learning the new thing and getting really deep into it, it just feels like a video game. It's very self motivating. And I have managed to kind of build a career off of it where I can just kind of like be plugged into X and tech and whatever. I can see some interesting new thing I want to go figure out and then I can go figure, figure it out and then make it more accessible to the other people who also want to figure it out or use it. And for me, that started with SEO where I was in college. I knew I wanted to get into entrepreneurship. I didn't have a clear way in, but I was a philosophy major and I was a decent writer. And so I said, well, content marketing is kind of clearly a thing. And so my senior fall I realized like, okay, content marketing is my way into entrepreneurship. I started just reading every single thing I could, started practicing it every day, started a blog, started writing, and then was able to get my first internships and my first job off of the back of just doing it obsessively every day and trying to figure out, like, what are the levers that I can pull here to really succeed at this. And I think it's just like this has kind of always been the process for me is find the cool thing, start doing it obsessively, and then figure out what the like, big lever I can pull is to accelerate as quickly as possible in this domain. And for content marketing and for SEO, a lot of it was just getting really good at the writing part where when I started my agency, when I started Growth Machine, our big competitive advantage was that we did not cheap out on the writing. We hired really good writers and really good editors, a lot of like, MFAs, people who were very experienced at writing. And the actual, like, SEO mechanics were the easy part. That part wasn't that complicated. You could teach that really quickly. You couldn't teach good writing very quickly. That was hard. And so we could get these crazy results during that era of SEO because we could take great writers and then layer on the technical part. And the interesting thing about that from a business perspective too, is that that had some of the best margins because these highly technical SEO people would charge these crazy rates and made it very hard to build a business off of it. But you could find a really great writer, you could basically double their salary. Right. You could give them this huge leg up in their writing career while also charging a good amount on top of that, because you were adding in this technical element that they didn't have and so created a really great business. And that was kind of the interesting lever at that point in my career. And then it was the same with when I was really deep in crypto, where the, the thing that I realized was that there were this type of programming smart contracts. Right. Where it was extremely risky. Because the big difference with coding for crypto versus any other coding is that once you deployed the code, you couldn't change it.
- [26:00]
A
Yeah.
- [26:01]
B
Which is crazy, right? Like, if you deploy your website and you realize there's a typo or something, you just change it, you redeploy it, it's completely fine, right? Yeah. This is a completely different type of programming. And just there were a couple of things where it was like being willing to take the risk and being very deep in the economic side of it. And you know, the, the incentive system like that kind of brought a lot of additional value to where I was not the best programmer in the world. But I had found this type of programming that not many other people were doing. There were very few people writing smart contracts at that point. And then layer in the kind of like understanding the incentive structure of token economies at that point, and then that became a very, very like, valuable skill set in that period. And same thing with vibe coding, where again, not the best programmer in the world at all. But by being really early on playing around with what you could do with cursor and GPT and all these things, I could kind of accelerate the timeline to mastery by picking an area where there wasn't 10, 20 years of domain knowledge to compete with. By like coming into these new areas, bringing some useful skills from previous ones and then finding where the opportunity is, you can kind of like shortcut that time to mastery and something we're thinking about for the program too. Because you have high school students, right. A 14 year old doesn't have 20 years of professional experience. So how do you make them very valuable to an entrepreneur who they might want an apprenticeship with or intern with? Well, you find the thing where they can be very valuable in a short amount of time by like digging into these new domains and identifying those opportunities that people are interested in exploring but maybe don't have the bandwidth themselves to go explore. Because I think that's the other big benefit I had was that by always being self employed, by always having a good amount of slack in my system. When Claude Code came out, when Cursor came out, I could just take a whole month and go crazy on it and rack up way more hours of experience with it in a time period than most people could. You see, with a lot of the AI stuff, there's always these big jumps after holidays.
- [28:14]
A
Yeah.
- [28:15]
B
Because everybody gets the Christmas break to go play around. They're like, oh my God, this is amazing. Right. I was kind of getting to do that all the time, all year. And so I had this whole year to go crazy on all the vibe coding stuff that most people didn't have the time. And that let me get much further ahead than most of the other people did during that era.
- [28:33]
A
So if, if we took just the vibe coding, I feel like every time I get on X now it can. X can make you feel like you're falling further and further behind as you see these incredible projects. And, and everything's being released. And I know it's always somewhere in the middle. X can be sensational. But okay. Just how your brain works. So you see, this is a huge opportunity. Vibe coding is very early. What does your brain immediately think, okay, I'm going to block out my calendar? Like, how do you, what are the, what does the first 24 hours even look like? How do you even know what you're going to work on?
- [29:07]
B
I almost never read stuff on how to do it. I just start doing it.
- [29:11]
A
Okay.
- [29:12]
B
And I think that that helps because it just allows me to develop a kind of intuitive feel for what's going on, where the edges are. And I'm just naturally driven to learning through projects. And so I'll just pick something that I want to do and then try to do it with whatever the new thing is. And it helps, especially if it's a project I've done before.
- [29:36]
A
Right.
- [29:37]
B
Because I've picked up programing to different degrees on and off over the last decade.
- [29:42]
A
Right.
- [29:42]
B
And every time I've started by trying to do the same couple things. Like, literally one of the first entrepreneurial things I ever did back in 2015 was this course called Programming for Marketers, and it was teaching basic JavaScript and automations to help you in marketing. I didn't know anything about marketing. I was partnered with somebody who did. But I did know enough of the technical stuff to help with figuring out how to do things he was doing with, like, you know, basic JavaScript. Right. Really? I mean, stuff that would take two seconds to vibe code today. That took days of figuring out back then. And so each time I picked up programming, I've kind of, like, gone through some of the same exercises. And so I think that's part of what made me see the potential with Vive coding. Really early on was literally two years ago when cursor first became a thing. Nobody's really talking about it, but me and Dan Schipper from every were texting about it a lot. And I was in cursor, and it was buggy and it was frustrating, but I was able to rebuild my blog just by sending in prompts and. And it felt like the most magical thing in the world. I was just like, oh, my God, this is incredible. Like, this is going to be the future, right? And again, like, nobody was talking about it, but by just trying to do something I had done before, I immediately kind of, like, saw the potential there. And that just naturally breeds more ideas for more, like, projects and things to try. And I'll really only go to, like, I never watch YouTube. I never watch.
- [31:14]
A
I'm shocked to hear that. I thought you were about to tell me, like, YouTube's taught you everything.
- [31:18]
B
No, no, I really don't do anything. Like, I just. I don't have the attention span for it. I can't, like, sit down and watch a video. If I have a very specific question, then I will try to find a video that answers how to do that, like, one thing. But, like, I generally find it's, like, too slow. Right. And I just want to be in there testing it, breaking things. And I think I generally have this attitude, too, of, like, if I break something, it's going to be fine. Like, it's not going to matter. It's going to be okay. And, you know, when I started in crypto, I was. I started building these smart contracts, right. Again, pretty risky thing. And kind of immediately made a terrible mistake that let somebody steal $35,000 from me.
- [32:01]
A
Okay.
- [32:01]
B
Right. Not fun. Yeah, not fun at all.
- [32:04]
A
Not, not great.
- [32:05]
B
However, by having that attitude of like, I'm just going to go and I was going to figure it out, I'm going to learn, I'm going to make some mistakes, I'm probably going to lose some money, I ended up learning way faster than everybody who was kind of scared.
- [32:17]
A
Yep.
- [32:18]
B
Same thing with all the Open Claw stuff in the last two months. Right. Where I ended up kind of like becoming one of the leading people on x. Talking about OpenClaw, because when I created mine and put it online and everything, I gave him his own bank account and his own stripe account and, and put him in charge of running a business and just said like, I'm going to see how far I can push this and maybe somebody's going to hack it and they're going to steal, you know, what could now be hundreds of thousands of dollars for me. But I'm going to learn something and it's going to be an interesting experience. And kind of just having that attitude really shortcuts the learning process because I'm not, you know, if it was somebody else's money, I'd have a different attitude. I'm not doing this with like Alpha school, obviously, but for my own learning, I'm willing to take those risks and I think that's where a lot of the education really happens.
- [33:06]
A
Okay, we cannot gloss over this. Yeah, you, you said the magic words. You said Open Claw and okay, again, so Open Claw comes out. What, what is for, for the common folk. What is Open Claw?
- [33:21]
B
Openclaw is basically just a wrapper around all of the different AI APIs that we've had available for a while.
- [33:32]
A
Okay, so what's a wrapper?
- [33:35]
B
Yeah, I'll go back to. Maybe a better analogy is that we've had these engines which are the different AI models, Claude, GPT, Kimmy, whatever, which are just like engines you can use to power things. And Open Claw was a new car you could put that engine in and it happened to be just like the car with the best handling and the best navigation system and the best little bits of built in tech to wrap around that engine that anybody had put out on the market yet. And going back to being early and kind of being on the frontier of these things. The founder of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberg, he'd been publishing AI tools and open source projects for BASIC for almost a year before he published openclaw. And I had actually used a few of them. So I was kind of already familiar with what he was doing. And I had been very interested in one in particular that he had done called Vibe Tunnel, which was a way to control Claude code from your phone. And it was really ugly and really buggy and really unreliable. But having been using Claude code, which was just a. A way to make your AI write code for you on your computer, having used that a lot, just at my computer, at my desk, and being frustrated that I couldn't do it on my phone when I was, you know, out and about or in the bathroom or whatever, when he first released vibetunnel, I was like, oh, my God, this is the best thing ever. And so then later, when he releases openclaw, which is a way to make your computer do things from your phone, from anywhere where it feels like you're just talking to another person using your computer, it immediately clicked where there was no like, why is this cool? Why is this interesting? Why does anybody care about this? It immediately solved these pain points that I had from two years of trying to code with AI. So what OpenClaw did was it kind of just gave you a way to give an AI full access to your computer. Kind of like you're talking to another person and saying, hey, go do this. And you didn't need to give it permission, you didn't need to give it a browser, you didn't need to give it very detailed step by step instructions. It just understood how to use your computer. And that was the real kind of like magical unlock there, where it immediately allowed me to do all these other things that I kind of wanted to do before but had gotten bottlenecked on.
- [36:16]
A
And when you say use your computer is the beauty of it because your computer already has all this data in it about you, or it could be any computer. When you say talking to a computer, does it have to be one that's like my laptop that I've been on for six years, it's got tons of my stuff on it. Does that make it more valuable or just the fact that it can man a computer on its own?
- [36:36]
B
Both. So the fact that it could man your computer with all of your data and information is a huge part of what makes it so powerful and what makes it so scary.
- [36:45]
A
I was going to say, like, you're not worried?
- [36:47]
B
Yeah. Well, so going back to being willing to take risks, basically, as soon as, as soon as I realized that this was a way to give an AI full control of a computer and all of the data and all of the abilities on it, I was one of the first people to run out and buy a Mac Mini and put my open claw on it and say, okay, this is your computer.
- [37:09]
A
Yeah.
- [37:09]
B
So now I'm not worried about you getting my kid's Social Security number and doing something stupid with it, because everything on this computer is just for you. But now I can kind of fearlessly give you full reign of it and just see what happens, right? And just push this to its limit. And so by kind of creating that safe sandbox, I could start playing around with a lot of things that other people were a lot more worried to do because they're worried about their data, their email, their bank account, all of that stuff getting. Getting leaked.
- [37:40]
A
Okay, so what did you tell.
- [37:44]
B
Well, so, I mean, it started with, okay, I was trying to build this AI app. And so I started using it like Vibe Tunnel. I started using it as, okay, you can write code for me. You can manage coding agents. And so now I can just text you from my phone and you can be writing code for me 24 7. And then it kind of made me realize, like, okay, well, now the. Now the issue is that I have to tell you to do things now. I'm the bottleneck. Up until this point, the bottleneck was me being at my computer and dictating stuff. But you're so responsive and you're so fast and you're so capable that now the issue is, like, me not having enough things to give you to do. So how do I give you more things to do? And so the next step was like, okay, well, I can connect the bug tracker that I have for this site that reports when something's broken or something's not working. I can just connect that directly to you. I don't need to intermediate it anymore. I can just have those bugs go straight to you, and then you can fix them and you can deploy the fix and I never have to interact at all. And so I set that up and it started. It started working, started going through those loops and I was kind of like, okay, now we're getting somewhere really interesting, right? Like, okay, so what else can I give you as inputs to make you do things? And that was when it came. That was when I started to have this idea of, I could give you an X account and you could just interact with people. I could give you an email, I could give you a stripe account. I could just give you the ability to respond to things and do things and build rules in and just remove myself from the system as much as possible and see where it goes. And so that that's what I did. I gave him an X account. And at the start, I said, okay, well, I'm going to. We're going to be pretty careful here. I don't want you to, like, leak any personally identifying stuff. I don't want you to. You know, there was one example of somebody tricking an open claw on accident to send them a bunch of crypto. And, you know, it's okay, we got to be careful about that, but do it for a few days. And I carefully monitored it. We came up with some rules. And then I just said, like, okay, go. You can just reply to people now. You don't need to run it by me anymore. You just, like, you have a personality. You just reply. And he's been replying to people on X for two months. And I don't really see most of them and some of them don't make any sense. But every now and then there are these strokes of brilliance, too, where I'll see a reply and go, that's kind of creepy. Like, that's weird that you had such a good reply there. And the same thing with giving him an email and saying, okay, if a customer emails you because they're pissed and they want a refund, you just go to Stripe and you, okay, well, you just jumped. You just, yeah, okay, he has customers. Well, okay, yes. So when I gave him the X account, the next thing that I said was, I want you to make money. Like, I want you to launch a business and I'm going to go to bed and you think of a product that you could create and launch with no intervention from me. Get it up and I'll review it in the morning. And so he made a PDF basically, of how to set up an open claw and how to give it more autonomy than most people did. He built a website, put the PDF on the website. He got all the Stripe stuff set up. He just needed me to give him the right API keys in the morning. And so when I woke up and opened up Telegram, he was like, all right, everything's good to go. I just need this API key and I need you to review the PDF that I made and they'll be ready to launch. And I gave him the API keys. I didn't look at the PDF. I was like, that is your product. I am not going to review it. If you feel confident that it is good, oh, my God, then you publish it. And he did. And it did something like $1,000 in sales the first day. It sold 60 or $70,000 since then. And this is the crazy thing is, you know, he would sell it and people would buy it, and they get the PDF. And the first week or so, I started seeing a couple things on Twitter that people weren't super happy with the product. And he eventually messaged me on Telegram where he was like, hey, I've gotten a few emails recently of people having, you know, requesting refunds because I had this daily thing where I was like, every night I want you to review everything you did that day, and then the next morning, tell me one way we can improve your business, improve your operations, so that you keep getting better without me, you know, checking every single step of the way. And one morning he was like, a few people have asked for refunds because they don't think the quality is good. I said, okay, well, make it better. And, you know, he took all their feedback, created a version 2, sent it to everybody who had bought it. And he's done that three or four times now, where the tech advances, and he still has old notes in the PDF and a couple people ask for refunds, or they say it should be better, and he just makes it better and publishes a new version. And eventually he built out a much bigger product, which is like a marketplace for skills and open claw personalities. I haven't touched the code once. I haven't even really looked at the code. He built 100% of it himself, and we came up with the idea together. He didn't, you know, completely come up with this on his own, but I said, like, this is your product. Like, you make it, you publish it, you handle the refunds, the customer support, and all of it. And to be clear, some of the stuff he's done just hasn't worked at all. Has been, like, a mess, right? This hasn't been, like, magic, Internet money, sunshine and daisies. Like, a lot of stuff hasn't worked, but way more has worked than I would have expected. And I think it just goes back to, like, being willing to take those risks and seeing where it goes and how far we can push it. And again, it kind of like, this is like a crazy tie back, but it's sort of like the high school thing. It's like if you just remove a lot of the guardrails and give more autonomy than you're comfortable with, you'll often, you know, it won't be perfect, but you'll get way crazier results than you might have expected if you were really scared and guarded and conservative about everything all the time.
- [43:51]
A
All right, so you are. You've accepted A job to build this entrepreneurship program?
- [43:57]
B
Yeah.
- [43:57]
A
Are you building this from absolute scratch?
- [44:00]
B
For the most part, yeah.
- [44:01]
A
Okay.
- [44:02]
B
I mean, no program like this exists in the world right now. There are obviously startup accelerators, right. Y Combinator, who, you know, they'll take a business that started and they'll help pour gasoline on it. There are college entrepreneurship programs, which, if you're like an entrepreneurship major in college, it's kind of a red flag. You're not learning that in a lecture. Right. So I was in my business school originally and I dropped out into the philosophy program because I realized the business program wasn't going to teach me anything about entrepreneurs, but I had to go learn it on my own. You have these, you have these high school clubs like FBLA and deca, but you're kind of like playing startup, you're playing entrepreneur, you're. You're trying to win these competitions. You're not necessarily. They're not really teaching you how to, like, go build a business. And there are shorter boot camps around entrepreneurship or building a product, like building a software, whatever. There's no high school that says, we're going to give you four years of mentorship guidance resources. We're going to compress the academic day as much as possible and then give you five plus hours every single day of mentorship guidance resources, everything you need to build a business. No one's done this. And so we do kind of have to figure it out from first principles. There's a lot of, like, great stuff we can lean on. Obviously, we're talking to tons of entrepreneurs about, how did you get started? Right. What worked for you? How do we shortcut this process? Learning from our own experience. But it is a lot of, like, we have to figure it out from scratch, and we can't really figure out a lot of it before it starts because we have a plan, you know, we have ideas, we have some structure on what the program is going to look like, but a certain amount of it's going to go out the window when all the students show up. And we have to be really adaptive to their needs. And a little bit of build the plane in flight. So it's a. It's a crazy challenge.
- [46:01]
A
Okay, so what are some of the biggest early things you're thinking about to make sure you're directionally on target?
- [46:08]
B
So a couple of things really stand out. One is, what is. What are the main reasons that a high school student would fail to make a million dollars by graduation? It's kind of like the Charlie Munger inversion, right? Right. Like, I don't. I want to know where I'm going to die, so I can just not go there, right? It's like, okay, why would they fail? And when you ask that question, a few things immediately pop out, right? One is spending too long on the wrong thing.
- [46:33]
A
Okay?
- [46:34]
B
Because a really easy trap. And almost every entrepreneur tells this story of when they started out. They just started building a product and started thinking about the product, and they made all these plans and they hacked on the software and they had meetings and they, they, you know, they made decks, but they never talked to a customer, right? They never tried to sell, they never tried to get money. And so literally, like, week one, we're going to make them sell something, right? You're going to get in somebody's face, you're going to try to get money, you're going to have to come back and you're going to talk about it. As soon as you start thinking, this is an idea that I want to turn into a business, we're going to try to get that validation as, as immediate as possible, right? Like, you think you need to go build this for six months before you try to sell it. Like, no, you can put up a landing page, you can get pre orders. You can do that this weekend. Right? So that's kind of like one way you shortcut the process or one, one big barrier you have to remove. Another one is like building something for a market that isn't. Isn't a good market. Right. And this is particularly challenging for students because, again, you've been a student your whole life. You've been in the school game, and your social ecosystem is all other students. And so the immediate impulse is, I'm going to make something for other high school students. Yeah, they don't have money. They're probably not the best people to, like, go build something for. And unless you have like a Zuckerberg Facebook building for other college students, like, that's probably not the right market. So we need to get them out of the school mindset as quickly as possible. And so one, they're going to get that from just being in this ecosystem, being with us, being with the, like, roster of mentors and people who are going to come through and talk to them, but we're going to try to get them plugged into apprenticeships as quickly as possible. Because if they're just with their peers, they're not really learning what businesses need. If we get them out of the classroom, at least metaphorically, right? This could all be online working with entrepreneurs, business Leaders in categories that they are interested in. They will start to see what businesses actually need, what they'll pay for, how much they'll pay for it, and they'll get a much better sense of kind of where those business opportunities are. But then you get to the next problem, right, which is how do you make a 14 year old interesting as an apprentice or as a, you know, an employee for a project to a successful entrepreneur? Because we don't want charity, we don't want to be going to these business leaders and saying like, hey, will you please take this kid for two months and like teach them some stuff, you know, do us a solid. Because that, I mean that one, that's lame, right? It's embarrassing for us. And they're probably not going to learn very much because they'll get like a pet project, they'll get something kind of like fake. We're going back to kayfabe, right? Fbla, deca, whatnot. And so we need to say like, okay, well how do we give you valuable skills as quickly as possible so that you can go do something useful for somebody who could use these new skills that you have. And so, you know, we probably can't teach them and certify them to do like SOC 2 compliance as a 14 year old, right? Like that's not going to be a good fit. But if we can teach them, if you know, we can say like, okay, here is this menu of skills we can help you get quite good at in a month or two. Like let's pick a couple of them. We're going to give you a really aggressive boot camp and getting excellent at this and then we're going to help pair you with somebody who's looking for that skill set. And this could be a bunch of things like the vibe coding and AI building is a big one, right? Because somebody might have an idea for an app or product that they want to test. They need somebody to build it. They don't want to go find an Engineer. But a 14 year old who is deep in building with AI can probably learn how to build a version of that in a month or two. Especially if they have somebody who is like telling them what to go build. So like that's one skill. Another would be anything around like video production, short form videos, like doing social media, marketing, those kinds of skills that a lot of high schoolers today are already doing. And so, you know, that could be another one. There's plenty around like copywriting and email marketing and automations and building out like retargeting Funnels and things like that that you can kind of teach somebody that doesn't require a huge time investment or years and years of experience to become valuable. And so, you know, we're kind of like working back here where we're saying, okay, if we can bring you all in, we can give you this bootcamp at the beginning of freshman year to get you to a hireable level at a few of these skills. We can match you with apprenticeships, with people who you look up to in domains that you are interested in. And that is going to give you the business experience and awareness to then start to get a better sense of what you might want to go build yourself. And so by the end of freshman year, they don't need to have necessarily found the thing that they are going to work on for all four years as long as they have gotten into the habit of building some of these skills, building those relationships, starting to test these ideas and seeing if they have legs or not quickly, not over the course of a year. And ideally they will have found something. You know, we have a target for the amount of revenue we want our freshmen to hit by the time that year is over. But we'll have a pretty good sense as freshman year goes on of like, are you locked in? Are you doing it? Are you getting through these cycles? And we've been testing bits of this with the current high school students and, and it's pretty amazing how quickly you can get somebody to start going through that process, especially once they get out of the high school bubble and once they realize that they know things that are valuable to other people.
- [52:27]
A
Okay, so freshman year is get some basic skills which y' all are going to. Y' all will have a menu of them. You talked about a few, but I'm sure there's more. Is there any more?
- [52:38]
B
Yeah, I'd have to go look at my document again. We've got like there, you know, there's visual stuff, right? So a lot of like design type things. Students are more interested in that. There's obviously all the engineering, there's the like media and marketing side. There's also some other interesting angles to explore around like video games and gaming because that's an area where again, going back to like Roblox games and stuff, where students are already, or kids are already doing this already, making huge businesses in creating games and experiences for other people. And that's an area that I don't know that much about, but we have a lot of people in our network who know a ton about it. And like I'm super excited to learn about it. Like, I can't teach it, but we can bring in experts to show, like, oh, you can actually build a great business in this area. You don't need a huge game studio anymore if you have a, like, great game, and you can go build it way quicker than you could before. So it's going to be cool to see what other ideas some of those other entrepreneurs bring in, too, because there's areas that, like, I'm not even. I'm not even thinking of right now that other people do see.
- [53:41]
A
How do I get into the program?
- [53:43]
B
Like as a mentor?
- [53:44]
A
Well, no, as a student.
- [53:45]
B
Oh, as a student.
- [53:46]
A
If I was a student.
- [53:47]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [53:47]
A
How would I get it? Do I have to test in? Do I have to apply?
- [53:50]
B
Yeah, we're. So we're opening up applications this week as you and I are talking, so they'll be up when this comes out. And basically for freshman year, we're thinking about 20 students, like 15, 20 students. We want to keep it pretty small to start, really, like, iron out the kinks of the process before we. Before we blow it up, before we scale it. And so the application process is going to be relatively custom. Unless we open it up and we get, like, 2,000 applicants, then, you know, we're going to have to adjust a little bit. But basically, we're less focused on the academics and more focused on what have you done, right? Like, what have you already tried to build on your own? What have you already, like, gone out, experimented with? What have you learned from that? What bottlenecks have you hit? And how receptive are you to feedback and learning during the process, Right. Just as a simple example, if you. If you can't take feedback well, you're just not going to survive in this because it's going to be. It's going to be the hardest thing these students have ever done. It's going to be harder than what most adults have done professionally because the. The opportunity is sky high, and the expectations are going to be sky high, too. And so through the process, it's going to be, you know, normal application to start, like, short answers. And then every person who goes through it is going to get some kind of challenge based on what they tell us in their answers, right? So just as an example, there's one person who's in the process who has built an app that isn't making any money, right? And so their challenge is, okay, you've got one week, like, go try to get somebody to pay for it. And it isn't so important that they succeed at that. What's important is that they go make a serious effort and learn something. That they can come back and tell us about what they learned from that process and can seek out the feedback on how to improve on it from there. More than anything, we're looking for that agency, that desire that you've already tried to do some of this on your own and you're very eager for feedback about how to do it better and faster. Because if you have those and, you know, a baseline level of intelligence and everything and competence, then we can probably get you there. But if you think you already know everything, if you're expecting us to do all of the work for you, then there's kind of, there's kind of no chance, right? Like we're not going to be able to work with you.
- [56:35]
A
Are you going to want people to be solo founders or will they be able to team up and be co founders?
- [56:39]
B
Definitely can team up, be co founders. I. One of the things that Joe, the principal of Alpha School has talked about a lot is that a big value of, you know what he did, he went to Stanford for two years and then dropped out. And the big, the two big values of that for him were one, he had, he had this one class where he had to meet these really visionary tech people, like Steve Jobs came and spoke to his class. Then there was another class on programming the next computer because that was like the computer at the time. And so Joe like got hands on. He was one of the first people to be hands on with the next computer. And then he knew these other Stanford students who became his co founders and some of his early employees. And so after two years, he didn't need anything else from Stanford. He could leave. So we can probably, we can do the same thing at the high school level. We can help you find the people you want to co found this with. We can connect you to the people who are going to give you the opportunities and the exposure to be at the edge of tech to go after it. So definitely would love for some of the students to team up as co founders, work on something. Assuming they have developed the like baseline competence, they need to like go after these ideas, right? We're gonna have this boot camp element where you have to prove that you've developed, you know, a certain degree of like sales and communication and being able to build and being able to have like some design sense and product sense. But you get through all of that and one of you is just like wheel and dealing, loves the Sales side of it. Another one of you loves the building side of it. Like cool, team up, go do it together. Great. But you've got to get through like the initial learning phase first.
- [58:14]
A
Does it have to be AI or tech based to be a business model that's viable?
- [58:18]
B
No, definitely not. With the caveat of we don't want. There's a couple things we don't want to encourage the students to go after.
- [58:27]
A
Okay.
- [58:27]
B
Anything really capital intensive. Yeah, right. If one of the students said I really want to start an reit, we'd be like, okay, if you have a way to fund that and get started in the next six months as a 14 year old, we'll hear it.
- [58:41]
A
Yeah.
- [58:42]
B
But we don't want you to spend a year building out like a business model to go after that with with no value. Because it's just like, man, like that's we hard to justify. And I think the deep tech stuff would be pretty hard to justify too. Right. If, if a student has a ton of existing experience with robotics and hardware and they have a way to go after it and they can really pitch it, we're going to be open to it. But things in AI and tech lend themselves to a 16 year old carving out an opportunity and a competitive advantage. There's almost, there's very low startup costs because it's software based and they can hit the ground running way faster. And what we would prefer and what we want to teach them is you don't have to go do the hundred million dollar billion dollar business right away. Right. Prove you can make money, build something that is going to fund your like baseline, that is going to make sure that you are safe and secure. And then once you have that established, you're in a much better position to go do the bigger thing after. If you start with the huge swing and it doesn't work out, you're in a bit more of a fragile position. And so we really want them to like establish something a little bit smaller, safer, more reliable first. It could even be just a skills based thing. Right. Like a marketing agency for me was the perfect way to start in entrepreneurship because you have to learn cash flow management, you have to learn accounting, you have to learn all of these things that you might not have to learn if you go out and raise a $10 million seed round and then blow it because you don't know business fundamentals. Right. We want to make sure they learn some of that stuff first before they go after the huge opportunities, what resources
- [60:25]
A
would you be providing them? And maybe we can talk about the actual capital, but like hosting CRM, are all the tools available, do they have to go raise the money to, to use those tools? How will they be resourced?
- [60:38]
B
We're going to give them a very small software budget.
- [60:42]
A
Okay.
- [60:43]
B
And that's basically going to be it.
- [60:44]
A
What's like a small software is that 10,000, 5,500amonth.
- [60:48]
B
Okay. And it's very intentional. Right. Because we want them to learn to be really efficient with their resources. And we will most likely. This isn't, you know, don't necessarily quote me on this. The current plan is that we will have forms of startup capital available to them that they can pitch us on providing.
- [61:10]
A
Got it.
- [61:11]
B
So we're not going to write them a blank check.
- [61:14]
A
Yeah.
- [61:14]
B
For 25 grand. But if they put together a pitch for why they would like that as equity or debt investment in what they're doing, that is something that we will definitely like work out with them. Right. Because we don't want them to be overly resource constrained, but we want them to learn to have some responsibility with the money. Right. This is going to be an expensive program. The students coming in, probably we're going to have scholarships and we're going to have financial aid and everything. But a lot of the students coming in are probably coming from extremely wealthy families, at least in the beginning. Right. Before we figure out how to make this, you know, available to a much wider audience. And if you grew up in that environment, you might not have learned some of the like, financial discipline that we want you to have starting these businesses. We don't want these kids to go home and get a check from mom or dad for 100 grand to get started. Right. Right. We really want to have them learn the business fundamentals, even if they don't like, have to. And so we're going to be pretty strict with how much we provide them to get going.
- [62:22]
A
And everybody will come in as a freshman. Nobody will or will anybody start as a sophomore. Junior.
- [62:27]
B
We will take sophomores and juniors. The, the application criteria will obviously be a little bit different, especially coming in as a junior. You need to have already started something. You can't be coming in starting from zero as a junior. And you know, we're going to have this, this guarantee. Right. Of. And there's this caveats to it. Right. Like there, there's, there's things that we have to work out with the lawyers and whatnot. Right. But generally, if you don't hit the million dollars by graduation, the goal is to be able to just refund you your whole tuition.
- [62:58]
A
Yep.
- [62:58]
B
That will only be available to freshmen. Right, Right. Because if you come in with only two or three years, we can't, like, make that same kind of promise. But it'll probably be like, most people come in as freshmen, but if you're established as a sophomore, junior and you want to come in, like, we would love to have you.
- [63:12]
A
And it's net million or gross million of revenue.
- [63:15]
B
Gross profit.
- [63:16]
A
Okay.
- [63:17]
B
So, you know, definitely not revenue.
- [63:19]
A
Yeah.
- [63:19]
B
Because then it's like, you know, I spent 5 million on ads and I made a million. We don't want that. Yeah. But we also don't want to disincentivize or we don't want it. We don't want to create problems with, like, reinvesting in the business or, you know, paying yourself, things like that. So again, like, there's going to be little details we have to work out, but for the. It'll basically be gross profit.
- [63:39]
A
Okay. When before we started, you said, I'm moving to New York in a couple of weeks.
- [63:43]
B
Yeah.
- [63:44]
A
So by the time this launches, you will be live in New York.
- [63:47]
B
Yeah.
- [63:47]
A
Episode. Why are you going to New York?
- [63:50]
B
It just feels like that's where the best market is for this program. You know, it's. It's going to be 150k a year. It's going to be the most expensive high school in the country.
- [63:59]
A
Yeah.
- [64:00]
B
And there's a bigger market for that in New York City than there is in Austin.
- [64:04]
A
Okay.
- [64:04]
B
And we would love. We will bring it to Austin. It's definitely going to be in Austin as well. But for year one getting started, we've been testing out the market in both cities and just far and above for this kind of program. The two best cities to do it in are New York and San Francisco. Alpha is already decently well established in New York, and we've got a ton more families who want to be in the Alpha network in New York. And so that's where it makes the most sense for us to get this off the ground.
- [64:32]
A
And will you let them. I hear New York and I think of financial services. Will you allow them to start financial services businesses? Or does that kind of go back into. If it was like an app catering to it, maybe. But if it requires raising a bunch of capital to start a hedge fund at 14, we're probably not incentivizing stuff like that.
- [64:49]
B
Yeah, probably not so much that side of it. I mean, if you're creating software that is extremely valuable to a hedge fund and you have a way in Then definitely all years. We have one student in the high school right now who is building private open source AI compute. So he'll actually like stand up the servers for your business so that you have your own compute cluster for doing whatever AI stuff you're doing. And he already has one $20,000 a month contract that he's been able to land for that. And so if there's a student who wants to do that for hedge funds and he's building servers that, you know, let them run these open source models locally and he can go sell them or she can go sell them. Cool. Great. Right? Like that's great. But yeah, like a hedge fund or something. Probably not so much.
- [65:39]
A
Okay, you said there's 20 kids coming in.
- [65:42]
B
That's the number we're targeting for freshman fall.
- [65:45]
A
What will your. So it'll be you and Cameron. What will you have anybody else on the team?
- [65:49]
B
Yes. So the, the two big roles that we're hiring for are what we're calling the eir, the Entrepreneur in Residence. Okay. And so we want to have two of these. We want to have about a 1 to 10 student EIR ratio. And this is somebody who has done it, they've started a business, they've grown it to over a million dollars, they have a few years of experience, they're probably pretty plugged into AI and tech, although that might not necessarily be a hard requirement. But they're maybe in between businesses and they're looking for an opportunity to one, give back. Because every entrepreneur has somebody who kind of took a chance on them early in their career and gave them that opportunity. And it's kind of exciting to have that opportunity to give back to somebody young who's really excited. But again, we don't want it to be like a charity. Right. And so we're trying to make it as valuable as possible for these people as well. And the Alpha Network is insane. It's only getting stronger. We have just incredible entrepreneurs and founders who are already interested in coming through and being part of this program. And then we're going to be able to help connect you to capital people, whatever you need to go do, whatever it is you want to do after your two years, whatever we call it of being an EIR in this program. So we're looking for probably two people to do that. And then we're also going to have an academics coordinator who's in charge of the like actual school part of it. Because we still have to do the school part of it too. Yeah, but is managing that part of it so that they can be fully focused on the academics. And the EIR doesn't have to think about it, but then that person doesn't have to think about the entrepreneurship stuff. So the kids will basically have like their day split where in the morning they're with their academics coordinator, they're doing all this stuff in the apps to stay up on their SAT, their APs, all that. And then the day shifts after lunch. And now they're with us and the eirs working on their business stuff.
- [67:42]
A
So school starts at 8:39, like a typical school. They're going to do two hours on
- [67:47]
B
the computer, three for high school.
- [67:49]
A
Two or three.
- [67:49]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [67:50]
A
And that programming is coming from Alpha. They already have all that in place.
- [67:55]
B
Yes.
- [67:55]
A
That's not, that's not something you have to build for that first.
- [67:58]
B
We'll have to figure that out. That's already established. We have a high school already. That stuff's good to go.
- [68:02]
A
Okay. They go to lunch, they come out. Is their only elective building this company or will they participate paid in other electives maybe that aren't business building?
- [68:11]
B
Probably just the business building because that's
- [68:13]
A
that they're paying the 150 to do this program. So it's one you can. It's lots of electives within the big elective of building a business.
- [68:21]
B
Exactly right. And we're, we're teaching tons of life skills through that. Right.
- [68:25]
A
Y.
- [68:25]
B
You're going to be a very competent speaker. You're going to learn financial management. You're going to, you know, learn how to like interact with adults and like do all of the things that you kind of like hope your kid learns through school but is not very explicitly taught. But there's not going to be a music program, there's not going to be any sports. If you want to do athletics, you can, you can definitely do that after school in your free time on the weekends, but we're not providing any of that. It is. You're just focused on the business building.
- [68:52]
A
How will parents be involved in, you know, in a traditional school, there's the pta, there's. There's lots of events. Like how do you think about parents being involved or lack thereof? Maybe you don't want parents to be hyper involved.
- [69:05]
B
That's something we're kind of going to have to figure out as we go. We're certainly going to have a lot of presentations, pitches, things where the students are showing what they're doing that the parents will be invited to come in for. Right. A big part of the programming that we have thought through right now is like every Friday there's going to be a sort of roundtable where each student is standing up and saying, you know, here are my goals for the week, here's what I did, here's what I learned. And, and in the current high school model, the parents do get to come in for those occasionally and see what their kids are doing. We also have deans of parents who are communicating what's going on back to the parents throughout the school year, keeping them updated. But it's something we're going to have to figure out because on the one hand we obviously want the parents to know what's going on. This can't be a black box, especially, you know, for the investment that we're expecting. But we also can't have them too deeply, you know, like, oh, they should be doing this, they should be doing this. Like obviously we want all that feedback. A lot of these parents are probably going to be experienced, successful entrepreneurs themselves. And we can't have 20 sets of parents also directly controlling what's going on
- [70:11]
A
every day field trips.
- [70:13]
B
Yeah, we actually that's, you know, we in part of the budget planning for this program, obviously we want to go out to sf. We already have a number of like big VC funds that have said they really want the students to come out and pitch them, which is going to be an awesome experience. If you're a freshman and you're getting to go out to SF and do a round of pitches with like the who's who of venture capital, I mean that's going to be really cool. Plus trips to really like Austin and Miami would be the other big ones. Obviously there's a big alpha base here. There's a big one in Miami as well. We want to do that, maybe an international trip as well. We really want to like bring in some of those experiences for the kids, not just be locked in a glass building the whole time.
- [70:57]
A
So the first class will graduate 2031, right? One, yeah. 27.
- [71:05]
B
29. Was that 29? No, you're right. 30. Yeah. Yeah.
- [71:09]
A
So this is kind of your own startup. With it, you're teaching kids a startup and you're building a startup on the fly. Yeah, you've probably thought a lot. So if I just said like if we, what would the graduating class of, we can frame the question however we want of 2040 look different than the graduating class of 2030? Like what will have happened if your 10 year vision for this school has really hit?
- [71:35]
B
There'll be a lot of Them? Yeah, I mean, we're starting with 20 kids, but we, I mean, we want this to be the best high school in the world. You know, if you, and if you go talk to high schoolers, even middle schoolers, and if you tell them like, hey, you can go to a normal high school or you can go to the high school where they're trying to help you become a millionaire, which one do you want to go to? Yeah, a lot of them are going to say the millionaire high school. And especially with how much the software is improving for teaching the academics. I think there is a real world where we're not just providing this incredible entrepreneurship experience, but we're doing it and providing these incredible academics, right, where you could get a better education than you might get at Exeter or tj. And you're getting to spend a lot of your time building a business and the opportunity to grow that and scale that. You can very easily imagine having schools in New York, Miami, SF, LA, maybe Chicago. Right. And each of those having 500, a thousand students is probably, you know, there's going to be demand for it in Dubai, in London, in Tokyo. Right. We can really, if we, if we nail that, when we nail this, when we really like, the demand for it I think is just huge because there's nothing, there's nothing else like this. And Alpha has done such an amazing job of figuring out the AI driven education that we Alpha so far ahead of the other people who are trying to do it and nobody else is trying to offer a high school like this right now. Like, we really have this cool opportunity to get after it. And so 2040, all of our crazy goals get hit maybe across all the campuses in the world. That's. What would that be? If we like, it could be 2,000, 3,000 students graduating, could be more. I mean, that would be crazy. And if you look at how many, how many teenage millionaires there are today or how many kids who aren't in, you know, who don't have ultra rich parents who like set something up for them, or the kids who like go out and start a business and hit that goal by 18. It's not many, right? It's maybe a few dozen per year. Most of them could be coming through this. We could 100x that number by giving these kids the opportunity to do it, by getting out of their way, giving them the resources, mentorship and guidance they need and really kind of showing people that, hey, the teenagers are way more capable than everyone's giving them credit for. You remove these fake games, you Let them go after what they're most passionate about. You kind of like take off the training wheels and I think we're going to be really impressed by just how much these kids are capable of, well,
- [74:29]
A
keeping the older listeners on their toes and like you're going to be seeing it in real time. It used to be you had to mature into making all the wealth.
- [74:39]
B
Yeah.
- [74:39]
A
And what you're kind of framing, especially with these kids that are going to be learning AI at, I mean if you're in alpha school, you're learning it in second, third, fourth. You're basically going to have these equipped kids. You might start seeing billionaires come out of high school in not too long and I don't know what that does to the older generation. But it is a wake up call.
- [75:00]
B
Yeah.
- [75:01]
A
That these kids are going to be more equipped than ever before and not by a little bit by magnitudes of what we've ever experienced kind of while we've been a civilization.
- [75:11]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, I mean just even going back to the Open Claw conversation. Right. And me, me setting him up with a stripe account and a bank account and an email and the ability to deploy a website and make a website that might have been a five, six, seven person company five years ago. Yeah, seven years ago. And now there's like half a person in there. Right. It's just me sending off commands and a lot of it happening autonomously. And that's today. You couldn't do that with AI a year or two ago. So what are you going to be able to do in four years? What are you going to be able to do in 10 years? The idea of a single teenager creating a billion dollar business in the next 10 years, I don't think it's a question of if, it's a question of how many. Right. It's going to happen. And you know, I obviously like we're not going to start making that promise. That would be a whole other thing. But like that's the world that's coming.
- [76:04]
A
Yeah.
- [76:05]
B
And we're just trying to be ready for it. We're trying to give any, any student who wants to try to be that teenager. It's like this is where you come go after it and we're going to help you however we can.
- [76:15]
A
I think you said it on X or it showed up somewhere that you basically just got to watch them. Open Claw was down for like a day.
- [76:21]
B
Yeah.
- [76:22]
A
And you got to watch these students try and do workarounds or like hack to fix it. Can you explain what that day was like and what you saw immediately from them.
- [76:31]
B
Oh, it was so cool. I mean, most of us have been using openclaw with Anthropic's clawed API.
- [76:36]
A
Okay.
- [76:36]
B
And then Anthropic said, nope, we're shutting that off. You can't do that anymore. With, with the like $200 a month subsidized plan, you got to start paying for all your usage, which for me, that would go from like $200 a month to $200 a day.
- [76:51]
A
Okay.
- [76:54]
B
Yeah. And, and I mean, my, my Open Claw is maybe one of the only like public facing ones that can justify that cost for 99% of people using it. That was just the death knell. Yeah. And, and so all of the students, because a bunch of the students have them and been playing around with them, they, they all get into Slack and they start messaging each other about the, you know, the workarounds they're playing with to try to get the old subscription back. And within a few hours somebody had figured something out where you could kind of like reroute the request through a proxy server running on your computer to kind of trick Claude into thinking you weren't using open Claude, but you really were. And then they were all back online for another day and then Claude figured that out and they had to go back to the drawing board. But I mean, a number of them are much better at this than I am. Right. And that's kind of a crazy experience too, because I did the first openclaw workshop at Alpha and I helped get a lot of these students going. But I have other stuff I have to do. Right. I'm working on getting this new high school going, so I can't be as deep in it as I could have two or three months ago. And a few of them have just run and gone crazy with it, and they're even better at it than I am now. And so seeing them play around with it, it's very humbling, right, to realize that. Oh yeah, you know, you, on the one hand, it sounds crazy for a 16 year old to start a business and make a million dollars. On the other hand, plenty of people do it while working full time jobs and having kids and having mortgages and all, you know, all these other things. Whereas you've got a 15 year old who now has 5, 6, 7 hours of their day back, no other responsibilities, basically, no downside, no risk, no fear. It might be easier for them to do this than it is for anybody else, but no one's given them the Time back to go after it. And that's pretty crazy to see they're
- [78:48]
A
a solo founder or a co founder. I'm just thinking, okay, if you're a sophomore, let's say somebody really gets some traction. Are they going to be, I'm assuming over that four year program they're going to learn like how to recruit and the value of recruiting and team and building a team and leading a team. Do you see them being able to actually recruit employees while they're going through the program?
- [79:14]
B
I think so.
- [79:14]
A
Or will the goal be like stay a lean one or two person organization that can still make a couple million and then spread your wings once you get out of here?
- [79:24]
B
No, we would. If they get to the point where they need to start hiring employees, we're going to do everything in our power to help them do that.
- [79:30]
A
Okay.
- [79:31]
B
And obviously you run into challenges again, right. Like can a 16 year old. A 16 year old can't sign an employment agreement.
- [79:40]
A
They need to have a chairman or something.
- [79:41]
B
Exactly. Yeah. We're going to have our lawyers very busy and like, obviously parents are going to have to be involved. The parents have to open the llc. There's all these little things we have to figure out. But the last thing we want to do is say no, you have to go slower.
- [79:54]
A
Yep.
- [79:54]
B
Right. We're going to figure out how to help them do whatever it is they need that you know, we can to help them keep going. And you do already have versions of this that happen. Right. You've got crypto founders who are under 18 who start these crazy businesses and they need to figure out workarounds to like hire and employ people. We have one student right now who he's a senior, but he's out in SF and he's raising money and he's got like a real startup that he's doing. And you know, it's a consideration for him too. And so we definitely would not want to slow them down. We want to figure it out. And maybe it would be weird to work for a 16 year old, but if they are acting like an adult and they're as experienced and as educated and as successful as other adults you've worked with, it might be less weird than we think.
- [80:43]
A
I love what you said about the, your vision of having thousands of these kids graduating every year. And it kind of reminds me our buddy Eric who just wrote the book of Elon.
- [80:54]
B
Yeah.
- [80:55]
A
Like one of the gifts of working at Space X is obviously you've probably gotten wealthy if you own their stock. It's the Amount of people they're putting out into the world that have learned kind of the Space X methodology for work. Yeah, it's just an entirely different level.
- [81:11]
B
We really believe that one of the best ways to have a positive impact on the world is through business and through starting companies that increase the wealth of the world, increase the wealth of people working at these companies that create all these amazing opportunities. And if we can unlock human potential as much as possible as early as possible, that is really one of the best things we could do for the world. And Eric has talked about this, about how he wants the Book of Elon to be like the book to make a million Elon, and particularly giving it to 18 year olds. And we're just saying, no, let's give it to 14 year olds, let's just go even earlier.
- [81:48]
A
Right.
- [81:49]
B
And I think that's kind of the cool thing too about doing this at high school is obviously there's, you know, maturity considerations and whatnot, but you can also adopt ideas a lot faster and run on them a lot faster when you're younger. Right. And if we can give them those, those kinds of tools, those ideas, like Elon's, what's he called the algorithm. Right. Like the five steps. Right. You give that to somebody who's early in their entrepreneur journey and that might just completely change their life. That might just set them up to do something they might not have otherwise been able to do for 5, 10, 15 years.
- [82:21]
A
Will you be taking and building the curriculum, things from Elon, things from Steve Jobs? Like will you, Will a textbook at Alpha High actually be the words straight out of some of the greatest founders that have ever been? Or will it just be, will they know that comes from Elon or will that just be something that you will teach in your own way?
- [82:38]
B
No, they'll know. We actually, we didn't even talk about this. We're going to have like a book club as part of the curriculum and writing component, which I think, you know, some people might say like, oh, why are you making them write essays? But you know, I, I really believe, and Eric would certainly agree with this too, that you do your best thinking by learning how to write and by having them encounter these ideas from these great entrepreneurs, reading the Book of Elon and, you know, reading about Steve Jobs and understanding how they thought and trying to make their own arguments in their own words, they're going to be able to refine their own thinking and bring those ideas into their own. And so we really want to lean on the best texts out there to Incept the most powerful ideas possible to help them go and succeed. And, you know, we're fortunate that we have our own experience from being in these books for, you know, last decades, possibly. Plus people like Eric who are going to come through and do book clubs and like, talk about the ideas and give the extra color to these stories and these entrepreneurs that they might not be able to get anywhere else.
- [83:41]
A
It's something for that generation. I wouldn't say I put it in the worry category, but like, you can see a world where they never actually learned to write.
- [83:49]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [83:49]
A
Because they could just go prompt something and it can write something for them. Where we're sitting here 10 or 15 years from now and they've never actually written anything.
- [83:58]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's a big fear.
- [83:59]
A
That's a big. That's a big part. Okay. You had this one belief to bring it home that I thought I had never really heard somebody say this. It was teen parent conflict is a product of not getting to be adults.
- [84:12]
B
Yeah.
- [84:12]
A
What does that mean?
- [84:13]
B
I think it kind of goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning where historically 13 year olds went through that rite of passage. They started working as apprenticeships, they started hunting, they got to be adults. And we've started infantilizing them. We started putting them in these games that they know are fake. They know they're not learning anything in a lot of these classes. They know they're not going to use this in the real world. And we're demanding they take it seriously and we're punishing them for not taking it seriously. And so they rebel and lash out and get into whatever. And I certainly felt this way when I was in school. I was like, this is all bullshit. Like, why am I doing. I just want to play video games. Right. And I went to boarding school and they had very strict rules on leaving campus and checking in and checking out. And we would just sneak out on the weekends and take the train from Connecticut to New York City and run around Manhattan. And we were like 16 and definitely not supposed to be doing that. Yeah. But perfectly capable. Right. Like, it was fine. Right. And we knew it was going to be fine. And we had to kind of break, you know, we had to break the rules to exercise our autonomy. And I really do think that a lot of this unlocking human potential in young people comes down to treating them like adults, trusting them. And again, there's like not many schools giving them the opportunity to do that. And I think that if you kind of like let them, then obviously there's always going to be some teen parent angst and whatnot. But. And, you know, my kids are young, so you can come back to me in, like, 10 years and tell me if I say if you lived it out. Exactly, exactly. But I do feel like, yeah, it. That is where a lot of that conflict comes from, is that teens know they can do what adults can do. They would like to have real responsibility and real autonomy, and they have no way to do it. And so they get it the only way they can, which is by lashing out, breaking rules, staying out late, taking the train in New York City. But if instead you say, like, no, you get to. You get to try to make a million dollars, you get to hire people, you get to go, like, be an adult. I mean, I've already seen it really resonate with so many students right through Alpha, and again, just, like, give them that opportunity, I think we're going to be pretty amazed what they do with it.
- [86:28]
A
I mean, I think people forget that the founding fathers of our country, like, were, like, late teens, early 20s, when they wrote the Declaration. Oh, yeah, Pendants.
- [86:38]
B
The average age was, like, 22 or something.
- [86:40]
A
It's crazy.
- [86:40]
B
And that was all just pulled up by Ben Franklin because he was, like, the one person in his 50s.
- [86:44]
A
And I don't know. I mean, along the way, we. We coddled more and we nurtured more. I think that as societies get more wealthy, that that tends to happen. Happen. Because you do travel the world and go to other countries that are more in poverty, and you see the young people doing very capable things at a much earlier stage of life.
- [87:00]
B
Yeah, absolutely.
- [87:02]
A
All right, dude, well, I'm rooting for you.
- [87:04]
B
Thank you.
- [87:05]
A
I read the tweet. I'm a fan. And anything I can do to help you be successful, I'd love to do it.
- [87:10]
B
You'll have to come by New York next year, talk to kids sometime.
- [87:13]
A
Yeah, I'm coming.
- [87:13]
B
Awesome.
- [87:14]
A
All right, thanks.
- [87:15]
B
Thank you.