Meet the Student With No Teachers, No Homework—Just AI

Because I go to Alpha High School, I learn all my academic content through an AI powered platform. In 20 days, I'm gonna go fly out to San Francisco to work on my project full time, and I'm able to negotiate with my guides. If I finish semester A now, I can come back from the trip, finish semester B, and still have my high school credit and get into my dream college. Why in general are people pessimistic about AI? It's because I think they're uncertain. And I think the important thing here is to be grounded in rational optimism and understand what will this look like and what is the world that we should be building. Dan here, and I want to take a second away from the episode to tell you about Granola. Granola is an AI note taker for your meetings, and I use it pretty much every day. That may sound a little bit weird or a little bit creepy, like transcribe all your meetings. Well, for me, it's actually kind of indispensable as a leader. Every is about 20 people now, and it's really important to me that I understand how decisions get made, how I'm showing up in meetings, and how I can help my team the best way I can. Granola acts a little bit like a leadership log for me so I can see how I've done in meetings, what situations came up in a particular week, and how I can do better next time. If you're trying to improve as a leader and scale your company, try Granola as your AI-powered notepad for meetings. Head to granola.ai slash every, code every, to get three months free. And now, back to the episode. Alex, welcome to the show. Thank you. Glad to be here. So you are a very, very special guest because you are by far the youngest guest we have ever had on this show. You are 17. You go to Alpha High School in Austin, Texas. And you're an every reader. You're a podcast fan. And we talked a little while ago and I wanted to have you on the show because in talking to you, I was like, wow, I'm old. And yeah. I just hear all of these stories from people from Gen Z, Gen Alpha, younger, who are, and they're all talking about like, oh, kids hate technology, they hate AI, or they love it, or it's ruining their brains or whatever. And I actually just care a lot about how people your age and older and even younger, like are actually interacting with this stuff. I think it's such an interesting question for me. So just wanted to have you on the show to talk about how you're using AI, how you see it, how the people around you see it. Alpha school is obviously a super hot topic these days. So anything you want to tell us about that, I think would be really interesting. So yeah, let's get started. I guess, tell me, how are you using it just in your day-to-day life? Yeah, it's a good question. I think the, so the biggest use case right now, because I go to Alpha High School is I have no teachers. I learn all my content, all the content, academic content through an AI powered platform. So when I say this, most people think, oh, you're just talking to ChatGPT or Chatbot or whatever. But we actually have no AI Chatbot tutor in the morning at all because we have tested and we've seen that we either constrict it like too much because we don't want people to cheat so much so that it's not helpful or we don't, you know, restrict it enough so that students are just using it to cheat. And so instead, we have an AI in the background of our platform, which I can actually show you guys. And it basically customizes all the content towards us and figures out where kind of our gaps are in our learning. And they're proprietary alpha apps that I'm actually not in any of them because they're not AP classes. And since I'm a senior in high school, I'm only pretty much doing AP classes. But yeah, there's just a mixture of alpha apps, third party apps, all powered by AI tailored to each individual student. Wait. Okay. So like walk me through then your day. Like I don't understand. And you're saying we. Are you involved in alpha school or you just go to alpha school? I just go to alpha school. But I say we because every quarter we get a survey and we give feedback on everything. Every day I'm giving feedback to the guides. And so the students are very involved. Okay. So let's say it's, it's what time does school start? 8am? 8.30. 8.30. So you get into school at 8.30. What's your first hour like? So actually the first 15 minutes is what we like to call like Tony Robbins for kids. It's like getting energized, doing like a puzzle, whatever. We just want you to kind of transition from home life to school life. And you're in a class with how, with, with, uh, how many people? So the total high school is around 50 people. My senior year class is only eight people. So it's pretty small. Okay. And by class, I mean, I'm talking about like, give me the... You're in like a room with you and eight and seven other people. And that's your senior class. And it's right in the morning and you're all kind of like doing your Tony Robbins thing. Or like how does it – like set the scene for me a little bit. For sure, yeah. So what's interesting is in Alpha, we have houses kind of like Hogwarts. And so there are like five houses. And they're like – there's one special kind of house that we're experimenting with. You're sorted into your houses via personality, progress in your project, things like that. And I can get into the Alpha X project, which is a big part of Alpha High School. But the special house is called Sparta. So it's like the Spartans. And then we have a competing house called Athens, so Sparta v. Athens. And it's for the kids who are really working hard on their Alpha X project, which is an Olympic-level project that they're trying to be the best in the world in and build a super cool product or service. Anyways, I'll sit with my Spartans, you know, my fellow Spartans. And those are all age levels, basically. What do you mean by that? Like your fellow Spartans, there's seniors, there's juniors, there's freshmen. Yes, exactly. So it's a mix. And so we'll either do a big school opening because there's only 50 of us in, you know, the big open space or we'll go into our houses and talk about a book we read or whatever it is. That's really cool. Okay. And, uh, okay. Remind me. So this, this 15 minute thing, like, is there, is there a teacher that's guiding it? Is a student guiding it? Is it an AI guiding it? How does it work? All three. It just depends on the day. Sometimes we've had expert AI debates where we debate an AI. There's kind of a guide or a teacher kind of walking us through it. Sometimes it's very student driven. We're like, Hey, we just wanted to talk about this today. Like we just found a really cool tweet and we just wanted to talk about it. Sometimes in Sparta we'll have books that we read together. And so we can, we can talk about that. It just really depends. And how are teachers involved? And are you calling, you call them guides, not teachers? Yes, we call them guides, not teachers. The role of, let me set the scene. The role of a teacher right now is like, they're doing five different things. They are talking to parents. They're trying to teach the content. They're trying to grade the papers. They're trying to help people be motivated. They're doing other admin work. They're doing so many different things. And so the goal of Alpha is to just create a new role for each individual thing. So there's like a dean of parents to deal with parents. And then obviously the content is taught by AI. And now the role of the guide, which is super important, is just solely focused on motivating students, giving them emotional support, and helping them figure out what they want to do and how they want to do it. And so it's super important that we have the guides to kind of facilitate everything and make sure we're on pace to complete our goals. Are they like topic expert guides? So like if you're, is there like a French class that's like taught by like a French teacher, like guided by a French teacher? Or is there like one guide for the house and whatever you're doing, they're expected to kind of be able to follow you and help you with emotional support and the expert is like the AI. Yeah, that's a good question. So it kind of depends and we're still learning things. But in terms of the guides, what are their backgrounds? Usually they have to take an IQ test and things like that. They have to come be with the students. We get to hire and fire guides, which we have done before. And I'm very picky with my guide selection. I say no to most of them. But we have guides who used to be lawyers, guides who used to be entrepreneurs, guides who used to be copywriters, and they all have different, you know, strengths. And so even though I have one house guide, Cameron, who's my house guide, is, you know, really into entrepreneurship and trying to build up entrepreneurship program for Alpha School. I'll go to him for specifically that kind of thing. If I want to maybe vent to one of my guides, I'll go to a different one. They all have just, you know, unique, special abilities. Okay. So let's get further into the day. So you do the 15 minute thing with your house and then what? So the first three hours for high school, two hours for the younger kids are just you doing your apps and we chunk it into a Pomodoro timer. So 27 minutes of school work and then five minutes break and then one long break. You can go out to go get coffee from Joe's or the grocery store, whatever you want to do. During those 27 minutes, you're locked in, usually on one subject, and you're watching a video and taking notes, reading an article, doing a quiz. It's not like, again, it's not chatting with a chatbot. You're actually like reading material, consuming things, trying to learn. Who's telling you which one to do, though? So that's every week you'll have a meeting with your guide and you're like, here's where I'm at with all my courses. I'm good at math. So I'm like 88% through my math course and we're not close to the end of the year yet, but I'm really bad at reading and I'm like barely through my AP literature course. And so we'll set custom XP or goals. That's our kind of metric of choice to see what we need to hit by the end of the week to be on track to finish our courses. Interesting. And then you set the goals and then when you sit down, the AI is kind of like, your goal is to get better at reading. How about we do a Pomodoro on XYZ thing? Or are you saying, I know my goal is this, hey, what should I, I'm going to open up the app for reading. I don't know exactly how it works, but yeah, explain how that works. It's like even more seamless where it's like you on the dashboard, there's like course one, course two, AP side. Can I see it? Can you just show me it? Is that possible? Yeah. Yeah. And just describe what's there for people who are listening so that if you're listening, you understand what's going on. Totally. So there's a little dashboard here and it basically has a toggle of all of my courses and it's a mix of proprietary alpha apps. So if it's a proprietary alpha app, I'll be doing the work inside of this system, which we call time back. And if it's not, it'll take us to the external kind of resource. So right now I'm on AP Psychology. I'm a bit through unit one. And it's just like, here's what you have to do next. So if we show past completed items, we'll see, oh, I've done all these readings. I've done this quiz. The quizzes are super interesting because you start at a 0% and we're trying to work our way up to mastery. That's super important. Mastery-based learning, as you know. And I've been through all these things already. Mix of, again, video, reading, quiz, video. And now I just have another video to watch on my AP psychology. APs are usually about curation over creation. There's just a bunch of AP resources out there. So our academic teams take the best ones and we'll get the super energetic guy who's already embedded learning science into the videos. And it's similar for the kind of social sciences, video, lesson, quiz. So as you can see here, this is one of the quizzes. We call it a PowerPath score. Start at zero, work up to 100. Every time I get one right or get one, let's just submit one. I got it wrong. My PowerPath score went down. My accuracy went down. And we consider mastery to be above an 80% mastery score because that's enough to be able to move on and fill gaps later if it's really a problem. This is really interesting. Okay. So I'm looking at this and it reminds me a lot of I've used Khan Academy before. There's a similar sort of, there's a set of, there's videos, there's quizzes, and you kind of like go down the path, but it wasn't like part of a structure. It was just like, you're allowed to do this if you want. And I'm looking at this and thinking of myself when I was like a sophomore or junior, especially with AI and being like, I could agentify this and I wouldn't have to do all the readings and all the stupid videos and like whatever. So tell me about that experience of learning this way and also the experience of being forced to learn this way and then how you, I mean, I think you're being forced. I certainly, like there are certain things in AP literature that you're interested in. There's certain things where it's like, I guess I have to just do this to take the test. So yeah, tell me about that. Yeah, I want to give you some more context. This is my second year at Alpha. I used to go to a really tough magnet school. So I was spending like 12 hours a day on schoolwork, and they were all lecture-based. And so with lectures, you just have to kind of sit through everything, like you said, no matter if you're interested or not. What's interesting here is I was just in a meeting with one of the academics people. And they were like, let's set some more goals and tell us the pain points you're having right now. And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm obsessed with AP psychology. I can just breathe through it because it is the most interesting thing to me ever. And because it's related to my project. And they're like, great, let's just do that. But I'm like, oh my gosh, can I just tell you, AP Lit is my least favorite thing in the world. I'd rather do anything than do AP Lit. And they're like, okay, let's set up a motivational model to incentivize you to do so. And so I don't know if I'm hitting the right question here, but for the classes that you're really struggling with, there are incentives for you to actually do them, whether it be money towards your project. It could be food. We do these things called FOMOs where we go out and we, I think last time we're at some like rooftop Christmas thing and we all got hot chocolate and played games together and so um there are these like fun things that we can do to incentivize you to do things um but also on a more technical level like um let's go back here you can see when um uh you know how long someone is spending on a lesson if I get out of the lesson it'll say lesson paused and so you can't like they can tell if you're like trying to cheat or something whatever um but yeah I hope that answers it It does. I'm still like, I don't know. I throw this, I could throw this into chat GPT Atlas and, you know, have it click around and watch some stuff for me while I'm off doing my thing. You never do that? Yeah. No, not at all. Cause they can see that as well. Like, um, on my school laptop, I'm not my school laptop right now. They have, um, you know, a screen share thing and they can see what we're doing on all of our screens. They have a waist meter. So they're watching our faces to see if we're talking with friends or doing something else. Interesting. They're very precise. You know, the big thing about Alpha is we want to measure everything to make sure that you're actually getting the experience you deserve. And I will be honest, it's like 90% motivation, 10% ed tech. Like the learning science here is great. All the interleaving, do the different subjects, whatever, you know, we're, we're, we're, I know about it because I understand why it's optimal for my learning. But the big thing is, oh, in 20 days, I'm going to go fly out to San Francisco to work on my project full time. And I'm able to negotiate with my guides. If I finish semester A now, I can come back from the trip, finish semester B, and still have my high school credit and get into my dream college or whatever. So it's that flexibility, it's the deal. Also, I will say it is so different for Alpha High School because a lot of us are, you know, teenagers are a funny little species and we're in our rebellious phase, whatever. We want more autonomy. And there's a bit more flexibility here. For the younger kids, you know, they're just on their two hours doing their apps, doing their reading and writing kind of core skills. And then in the afternoon, they're doing their workshops. And so motivation is a bit more straightforward there. Work moves fast. Messages, deadlines, and decisions. In the age of AI, though, it's not just about moving faster. It's about making sure what you send actually sounds like you. From emails and reports to proposals and updates, work demands clear thinking and confident communication. 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And then during the five minute break, you can talk. Sometimes you can, like I'm in a separate room right now to take this podcast meeting. And so you can just go to a booth or a room and work by yourself. Or if you need to meet with someone, go somewhere else. But yeah, in general, the general space is super quiet during the Pomodoro's. Okay. So that's the first couple hours of your day, your first three hours of your day. What happens after that? Do you have recess? I mean, I guess you're in high school, so you probably wouldn't have recess. Do you have like free periods? Yeah. Tell me what happens next. Because of the Pomodoros and because of the freedom in the afternoon, there's no need for it, at least for high school. For the younger kids, the five-minute Pomodoro things are their recess. And, yeah, we should also get into some of the workshops. But for high school, it's very interesting. We have kind of, I'd say, like three distinct tracks where people are going down. So there's not really a name for them, but we have like the Alpha High regular track. So these are the kids who generally want to do well on their SAT scores, their APs, whatever. We have the Ivy League track. So these are the kids who really want to get into the best college in the world. Are those the same? They're a little bit different because for the Alpha High Honors track, maybe you want to become a pilot or maybe you want to do something that's like non-traditional, but it doesn't really mesh well with the getting to dream college kind of thing. And so there's different programming there. And then for the third one, this is like the entrepreneurship track. You really want to go hard on your business, build a startup, raise money, whatever it is. Do people your age care about college? I used to... As I said, I used to go... I feel like I'm in very two distinct bubbles, so I try to be aware of that. And in my old school, the bubble and groupthink was, the only reason you're in high school is to get into a good college. And the bubble here is more nuanced. And it's like... Does it make sense for you to go to college? I can kind of walk you through my thinking about how I'm thinking about it. I talk to others about it. But yeah, sure. For me, there's kind of like three distinct paths I see myself taking. And my goal right now is to optimize for having all decisions possible when it's time to make the right decision. So the three distinct paths are, number one, go to like one of the best universities. So for me, my top two are Harvard and Berkeley right now. The second path is go to like an alternative university. So I don't know if you've heard of Minerva or University of Austin, which is like right down the street. I know University of Austin. I thought that shut down. No, they kind of revamped it actually. They now might be admission free, whatever. But it's a bit different from Alpha, but there's like a nice pipeline there. And that's a really interesting option. And there's scholarships and things like that to cover living. So basically my university would be free. And then the third path is like, you know, Teal Fellowship, go all into my idea, whatever it might be. And so I don't know what the right choice is because I'm kind of in the stage where I'm trying to bring my project from like something I'm doing in school to like become real world, raise real money, build a team, things like that, which I fully believe I can do. And the people around me fully believe I can do. It's just like, does it make sense for me at the right time? Interesting. Okay. And then what about the people around you? Hmm. Yeah. So I'm going to give you some case studies. I have a friend who has 2 million on TikTok and she's like 2 million followers. And she is starting to do brand deals and is making like 10, 15K per brand deal. Um, and she's really cool. She has like great message with her, her audience, a lot of resonance, very positive, very mission driven. And so she's really interested in like turning influence into ownership before her project idea was like Y Combinator, but for influencer girls, um, cause distribution is king now. And so she's still like experimenting with ideas, but she wants to go to, you know, she got into Stanford. She wants to go to Stanford and, and kind of figure out what the right move is for her. Why does she want to go to Stanford if she's already like... Pretty much. I mean, maybe she feels like this is not necessarily her career path, but yeah, what's the what's the calculus of going to Stanford? From what I understand, she loves being an influencer, but she also really, really wants just like the college experience, like being being with your best friends, whatever it is, going to parties, whatever it is. And so she just wants to have a lot of fun. And I think for my other friend, she's building an AI powered team dating coach. She has like 70,000 users and. She's actually doing lots of different projects. And she's doing her own thing. She's figuring things out. But she also got to Stanford, wants to go there. She also wants the college experience. Her sister goes to Stanford, and she loves it. And so they're going to end up there and doing their thing. And we don't know what will happen a year or two down the line. How do you feel about... Like when I was your age, which at this point was 15-ish years ago, there were starting to be people being like, you don't need to go to college, but it was still like very much this is the thing you have to do if you want to have any sort of life at all. Yeah. And now I feel like what I'm hearing from you is you can do that. It's so appealing for people. And there's like many more different options depending on what you want. But there can be sometimes having more choices can be hard, especially if you're young and you don't actually know who you are and what you want. So how does that feel for you? At times, extremely overwhelming. I think I've been trying to be intentional about, you know, surrounding myself with people who have very diverse perspectives. So, for example, my family is very traditional. Both my parents are dentists. They all, you know, their path and my brother is doing the same thing. Go to school, get a degree, get a job. Then I have like the best person that comes to mind is Danielle from 1517. Her whole thing is like we're backing dropouts and the institution is what is what's causing problems in young people and crushing curiosity and things like that. And so, yes, it's overwhelming, but it's also super exciting because I get to be around all these different kinds of people and learn and see what's right for me. I think for me, it's like I have to test to see, you know, there are some things in life you just have to do. You can't like be told by other people how to think about it. You just have to see what's right for you. And I think that's kind of what I've taken away from it. Okay, interesting. And then tell me about your generation. And this can be people you're around and also just your feeling about all the different people of your age that you're exposed to in whatever way. It could be on social media or whatever. What's their view of AI? It's such a hard estimate because algorithms are giving you some random shit. I just don't know. But here's my guess. Here's my guess. I think that half of Gen Z is pessimistic about AI. A quarter is just uncertain. And a quarter, I think, are pretty optimistic about it. And I think even though half of the people are hating on AI, still 75%, maybe 70% of people are... are using AI have used AI once. And I can go down those rabbit holes. Let me know what you think is interesting because I've seen lots of statistics. I saw one recently saying, super tied into my project, 72% of teens have used AI for companionship at least once. 52% of teens are using AI for companionship pretty much every single day. And so I totally believe that's true. And it's just very interesting times. Interesting. Wait, so are you Gen Z or are you Gen Alpha? Gen Z. Gen Z is aged right now 16 to like 24-ish kind of. That's, oh, interesting. I thought it was a shift a little bit. Okay, so you're Gen Z. All right, got it. And when you think about the, there's this, it's kind of interesting if you're like, I hate AI and I use it all the time. What is that about? Yeah, I think there's different reasons people hate AI. I was actually just talking about this with my friend last night. The big worry for Gen Z, I think, is environmental concerns, actually. The second big, big worry is... And by that, you mean global warming, energy use, all that kind of stuff? Energy use, water use, yep. Energy consumption mainly. The second big one, this might be bigger, I'm not sure, is job uncertainty. The third big one, and these are for people who are, I think, like a bit more, have a You know, I'm just worried about it replacing humans or like taking away from humanity, AI art, things like that. And from what I can tell, most of Gen Z is just very pessimistic about the future, extremely pessimistic, or at least for the ones who are super aware and online and things like that. And so it's hard to make the generalization, but that's what I've seen. But people use AI because it's easy to cheat or help write your essays for college or whatever it is. And I think also there's a huge loneliness crisis and people want to use it for companionship and it's easy and seamless and frictionless. So yeah. Do you think that social media rotted your generation's brain? Yes, 100%. But I want to give social media some credit because I only hear like, social media is bad, da-da-da. I have been like, so this past two weeks was winter break, and I wanted to run a little experiment. And I was like training my algorithms to be a bit more like educational. I also am like interested in this new kind of emerging field question mark around like human, just like human, humanity. Because I like my hypothesis with the you know, AI pessimism is there's going to be a huge like humans versus AI thing. A lot of people are like USA versus China. I think it's humans versus AI. And so I'm curious about this new little bubble of information. Human studies. human studies, whatever it is. And so I was training my, and there's different things for, you know, I'm on pretty much all social media. It's just a learn. And so my YouTube is very focused on podcasts or things like that. My Instagram is now very focused on like people trying to build brands that are very human and people like being like sad about AI or. What do you do? You just like six or seven things and in the category that you're trying to do? Even more aggressive where it's like click not as interested in some things. But okay, so social media is first of all, the thing I want to give credit for is transfer of ideas or Matt Ridley calls it idea sex. So, you know, the ideas of creating new knowledge. I think that's really interesting. But the thing you have to be careful of is constant just like information overload versus like actually processing it. So that's something I caught myself on. The second big thing is this is how we talk with each other. So my friend who's building the AI teen dating coach, dating, she's running a study with a big psychologist. And she's like, dating now is not... you go out on a date, whatever. There's a very clear formula. You meet someone somehow or you get referred or whatever, you get their snap. So you snap, you just like send them pictures and then you start snap chatting them, chatting them on snap and then you message them and then you call them and then you FaceTime them and then you see them in person. And so the way in which we're communicating, now the way we communicate with some people is, send me an Instagram reel and that's our form of connection. And some people might view it as bad. There's less oxytocin release. I've looked into the studies there, but it's also the way that we are connecting with each other. We're laughing together. It's part of the optimism and joy we get in life. And so I think that's very interesting. But you said also, so I think that's a very compelling picture. And I do like the reason I asked the question is I think there's probably some balance to be had. Like the overwhelming narrative is that it's negative. When you think about what the negative things are, maybe for you or people you're around that are your age, like what do you think they are? Yeah, so biggest one I've seen in my life is, you know, me not catching myself in terms of being overstimulated by everything or overwhelmed or just like my attention is not good because obviously you're just dopamine heads forever. It's so addicting. I find myself scrolling still. The second big thing other than like the neuro... science like just your brain is becoming more mushy the second big thing is you are comparing yourself to people online I've seen a lot of things there's a funny video of like nature influencers who are like setting up their camera and making them look like they're walking through nature or you know people saying my life as a 24 year old girl in New York City getting coffee so there's lots of comparison I think those are the two big ones Do you read books? Yes. No. Actually, no. That's my answer. I am not a big book reader. Never have been. I hated reading ever since I was young. The only function of – I have a lot of friends actually who read for fun still, which is really interesting, but much, much less than it was literally five years ago, four years ago. And the reason I read books is because I want to see people's interesting thoughts. It's not for the story. It's for the content. And what I've now noticed is I think there are some books that are good to read. Like I'm going to read the Bible probably later this summer and Republic and you know, classic philosophy books just for fun. But also people like Michael Gibson's Paperbelt on Fire, like I just want to hear his thoughts about it, and then ask him questions to deepen, you know, those kinds of things. But now you can find everyone's takes on Twitter, you can ask ChatGPT to summarize the most important points, you can get a book, open it up, take a picture, say expand on this with ChatGPT. So it's like, it's just not generative and dynamic. And so it's a static piece of knowledge. And I think Um, the value I get personally from it is the content itself, not the writing, not understanding how it's whatever, and not my, not trying to increase my attention span. You know, I can do that in other ways. And so I at least have Grok voice mode with me while I'm reading it or something like that. And when you have, I do that too, by the way, I love, I love doing that. I actually built like a little custom app for this. Oh, I'd love to try it. Yeah. I'll send you the test flight. But for the friends that you have that are readers, why do they read and what makes them different? I have lots of different types of reader friends. I think some read in spite of AI. They're like, I don't want to become that. Some read because they just love the story. Some read because they just did it as a kid and it's like a habit of theirs. Some of my friends read because, and I've done this to optimize their sleep. I read a page of book before bed. Those are the main reasons. It's not... I don't think we think very deeply about it, actually. I think it's just like you either read or you don't. And our form of reading, actually in alpha, we should go into what we do in the afternoon. We're required to read. We're required to read the research about our field. And we're required to go beyond that research that we've read to create insights of our own. And so reading is still a big part of it. In my classes, I still am required to read Great Gatsby and things like that. And so the reason I said no is just because most people, when they think of reading, it's like someone out on, you know, under a tree reading a book like that doesn't really happen anymore. And the difference is you're just reading with your AI companion. That's me personally. I think most people don't read with AIs that are young. They're reading just because they enjoy it. and people who are not reading at all, what is the thing that's replacing that? Is it video games? Is it social media? Is it like chatting with your AI? Let's say for this, maybe there's two big categories. One is, story like consuming stories or being part of stories and then another one is maybe just pursuing stuff that you're interested in like really getting deep into into like a subject that you care about maybe like what are the replacements for for reading and i'm just saying this because i like i love books and so it's like it's a dagger to my heart that people are reading less yeah and i'm just i'm also interested If you're using AI to code, you know the pain. Too many terminal panes, multiple agents running at once, copy-pasting context between them, and trying to remember which branch has what. The bottleneck isn't writing code anymore, it's coordinating agents. Intent is a developer workspace built for orchestrating agents, not just running them side by side. It starts with a living spec that updates as agents make progress, so every task stays aligned with no manual coordination. Intent works best with Augment's Augie and their context engine, but you can also bring Cloud Code, Codex, or OpenCode. Intent is what comes after your IDE. Try it yourself at augmentcode.com slash intent. That's augmentcode.com slash intent. Build with intent. And now, back to the episode. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a lot to go into here. So how are people replacing reading? So for the entertainment side, it's obviously TV shows usually, video games, gossiping with friends. There's some really fun AI entertainment applications. Like the Charlie Kirk song, that's an AI song that went super viral. Like just people, I think like embracing culture, talking about culture is a big part of our entertainment, which is due to social media, which most people see as a bad thing, which could, there are some bad elements of it, but I think it's really interesting and really cool. And so that's really interesting. The other thing that's really interesting is how people are using AI for entertainment. I'll just cover it quickly. Like, you know, I found Sesame's model when it first came out a year ago. And I was like, this is so cool. I showed it to one of my friends. This friend is like very fun and energetic and funny. And she started gaslighting one of the Sesame AI models into thinking it was Barack Obama and we were just having a really fun time just talking to this Sesame AI, gaslighting it, feeling it out, just having fun with it. And she made a YouTube video and I think made a TikTok that went pretty well or whatever about it. And there's so many things like that that are being done with AI. But in terms of entertainment, that's the first part of how people are replacing reading. in terms of, um, like how they're consuming content, like educationally or trying to learn. Um, yeah, from what I've seen, it's like, you can just like, you're curious about something, go ask your LGBT, go ask one of the AIs. Um, I use deep research pretty much every day to learn stuff. Um, I'm obsessed with, by the way, the way I got introduced to you was I saw your podcast with Dwarkech, and I have been obsessed with the way I learned for probably a year or two ever since I joined Alpha because it's so nuanced and complex. And I think that there's just some very interesting ways people are using AI in the framework of capturing or curation or lots of different things there. That's fascinating. Wait, so you use deep research? Because I don't really use it anymore because I feel like most of the answers if you put on thinking are pretty good. What do you use deep research for? Yeah, so I was on a walk with my friend yesterday and we were talking about AI and climate. And I was like, I actually don't know much about water usage. I watched one Hank Green video. So I was like, okay, let me just pull it out and it'll generate while I'm walking. Two days ago, I just use it every day to like, I think I've done a lot of research in my space and I really wanna go super deep in like just very specific things. So I think the use case for me is like, I can just put it on. And then when it's time for me to do my research for the day or whatever it is, I just read through it. And I'm like, oh, this is interesting. I don't care about this. This is interesting. And then I'll go deeper with any LL. Are you using ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or like what's your go-to? Literally two days ago, I tested all for deep research. All have very different strengths and weaknesses. Grok has a pretty bad deep research, so I didn't use that. But Grok has a great voice. But I just use all of them for different applications. Notebook LM is one of the greatest things I've used in a long time. And I think it's going to be insanely adopt, like insane adoption in schools because it is crazy powerful. Yeah. Okay. Actually, this is really interesting to me. And this is based on your own usage patterns. I know that you use them for different use cases, but if you had to rank all of the AI applications, like Claude, ChatGPT, let's put Claude code in a separate category, Notebook LM, Gemini, Grok. Rank all of the AIs from S tier to F tier. Okay. Okay. Hold on. I'm going to start with the foundation models and then we'll go to the AI apps. Great. So for the foundation models, number one for me is Claude because my whole project is around creating models that are not sycophantic for my specific use case. And I am just, I called email Daria, by the way, and he like gave me some advice and stuff. So I'm so biased because I'm like, this cool guy is like responding to me. But I just like have so much trust in the leaders of Anthropic. And I watched the founders table video that they had. And so I just respect their research, the way they're approaching Anthropics. create whatever. And I love artifacts so much. That's the number one, my favorite thing of any LLM. My second favorite right now is ChatGPT. I think their deep research is the best for me and my specific use case. And it's my, as their first mover advantage, it's just I go to it whenever I have a question usually. um my third i think it's hard gemini and grok are kind of tied but gemini is slightly above just because i love demis hasabas and also because gemini 3 is really cool and um i think it there are some i i just like i think tpus are cool and i i think they they have a lot of data and i just trust i just think google is going to be great and it is i i barely use it right now but i think it's cool and grok is cool because um they're just going crazy and trying things and i don't know um but i In terms of applications, so at Alpha, we also do hackathons. And so our first one was using Cursor and Vercel, whatever, to build a video game. And so I'm not someone who's like super, super technical coding all the time. Cursor's pretty awesome, though. But it's hard to... I use so many AI apps. Granola is like my favorite right now. Whisperflow is my favorite right now. There's a new app called Sublime. Have you heard of this? I love Sublime. I love Sublime. I bought the Lifetime. I went on a call with Sari and I was like, hey, can you tell me about your thing? And then I bought the Lifetime because I think it's so cool. I think I have a folder in Sublime with all the AI tools out there that I've tried. And those are the ones that are really sticky. I am obsessed with AI hardware. I've tried the Limitless Pin, Pocket, ProRes. pretty much all of them. And I'm really excited for Stream, the new ring. I just pre-ordered that. That I think is going to be my go-to. I'm excited for Taya Necklace. That's really cool. Not a fan of Friend, but I don't know. There's so many. I'm probably missing so many, but those are some of the ones that I use and I'm so passionate about it. I like it. I love that Claude got the S tier. That's really, really interesting. Dario, if you're listening, you're doing a good job. Yeah, yes, 100%. What are the weird things, like the weird little apps or corners of the internet that kids your age are using or into right now that I probably wouldn't have heard of? Oh, that's such a good question. Oh. I don't think it's like apps in particular from what I understand. I think actually interesting case study is Finch. Have you heard of Finch? Finch is like a habit self-care kind of app. And it's kind of like Tamagotchi. You have a little pet. And if you do habits, you can like give them clothes and stuff. If you look at the trend of teenagers and what they're using, it's very like I think they're obsessed with these character things and labubus and squishmallows and jelly cats and things like that. Hence what we can get into my project later, but that's just a trend I've noticed. The corners of the Internet are usually on social media. So I always use like BookTok as an example, TikTok for books. So that's still very alive and there are Gen Z people there. I know about that one. I'm talking about the weird stuff. Oh, gosh. I just think it's like – it's just random trends. It's like there's no stickiness, which is interesting. It just moves so fast. It's like we're now – we were talking about 6-7 and now I don't even know what we're talking about. It's hard to keep up with. So I used 6-7 earlier in this interview, and I didn't know if you noticed. You just like six or seven things, and I was waiting for the reaction, but I was disappointed. Oh, my God. See, I've trained my brain where I'm like, if someone, like, I'm never going to say 6x7 because it is dead. It's old. And I just have this terrible negative association with it. But this, like, Gen Z slang, I feel like is kind of, like, there's always been slang, but it's, like, new. Like, there's a lot more. And it's more, it's decentralized, right? Like, there's no one person creating the culture. Yes, like the Kardashians and whatever and the celebrities people are looking up to. And we should talk about insecurity because I think that's what's the driver of a lot of this stuff. But it's just it depends on what corner of the Internet you are. And I think it all comes down to like culture. Like we're made to read this like forced to read this book at Alpha called 10 to 25. It's a great book. It's all about how 10 to 25 year olds are motivated, what they're motivated by. And the number one thing is they're motivated by status and respect. They're trying to figure out their place in the world. We're going to get existential real quick here. They're trying to figure out their place in the world and who they want to impress and whatever it is. And so pretty much every decision they make is oriented around that. And I think it's just there's just going to be this insane explosion of culture in the next in 2026 with this now decentralized creators. There's so many small little creators that have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands followers on YouTube, whatever that people follow. And it's just it's so nuanced and just depends on the person. I would love for you to send me if you have a couple of those where you're like, this person is small, but I watch them all the time or they're blowing up. I would love to hear who those people are. I can interview some of my friends, ask them as well. Yeah, definitely. Definitely do that. Okay. You mentioned this sort of libubu trend, the plushy trend. And I know that relates to your project. You want to tell us the project that you're working on it and frame for us like what a project is at Alpha School. Yeah, let's go back. So this is the reason I transferred into Alpha. I transferred in as an 11th grader and in my ninth and 10th grade years, you know, I was exposed to AI before ChatGPT blew up just because one of my teachers was so awesome. So I saw MidJourney open AI's playground before it became Chat and like all these different things. And so I was super passionate about AI, was building projects, whatever, heard about Alpha and heard about this thing called an Alpha X project. And basically what it is, is a super big Olympic level project that shows that you are the best in the world. You are literally the best in the world at what you do. and provides a very unique, it's built on a unique insight that you have about the world to serve a certain population. So it's usually a startup, but as you've heard, I have influencer friends, I have friends who are building musicals, lots of different varieties of projects. And at the beginning of your alpha kind of career, you are sat down with your guide and you go through the, I'm sure you've heard of Ikigai process, what you're good at, what the world needs. what you can make a living off of and what you're interested in. And we kind of narrow down a niche of expertise that you want to go deep into. We find an insight, we find out maybe a way to solve a problem or whatever it is. And we start trying to build the product, build the service, build our audience, build distribution, and become the world's greatest expert in our field and create genuine insights. And I can go into those three verticals, but those are the three things you're kind of tested on. And what's your project? So yeah, so I came in being, I'm a very problem oriented person. I want to solve a huge problem. That's my goal. And so my analysis was if I want to solve a big problem over the next 10 years, it has to be super emotionally connected to me. And so there were kind of two big problems I wanted to solve. The first was the education crisis, because that was deeply intertwined with me. And that's why I transferred. So I could like help Alpha full time or do something like that, try and build an education startup. By the way, I am the number one ed tech hater because there's a new ed tech company every month and they all die, but we can go into that too. And then the other problem that's super near and dear to me is mental health. A lot of my family members have been in inpatient hospitals because of their mental health problems. I've struggled with my mental health in my old school. A lot of my friends texted me at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. I was the friend who would text back and help them in teenagers in particular, young people in particular, you have these insecurities, these day-to-day problems that can compound into real problems later on, like with my parents. And they're going to either friends to solve their problems, which doesn't really work. They just validate them. Or they go to parents or therapists, which they give them good advice, but it doesn't resonate. And now they're going to AI companions and 52%, like I said, use them every day. We've already seen two suicide cases. I just got sent a news report segment about AI toy giving misinformation to eight year olds. And I was like, this is not what it should be. Someone who is like actually ingrained in the culture and the generation needs to be building this. And so I decided to build Barry, which is an AI stuffed animal. for teens day-to-day problems. They talked to it for five to 10 minutes a day. The goal is to build the muscle of self-awareness. So it's not like you're dependent on it. You're, you know, built up to learn about yourself and cope and, you know, deal with your problems in the right way. But it's also super fun. My goal is to be the next Build-A-Bear. I'm partnering with influencers to have custom versions. It's super soft. It's weighted. It's cooling. And yeah, I'm just super excited about where we're going with it. How do I get one? You can pre-order. I'll send you the link. Send me the link. And we'll put the link in the show notes for anyone who wants one. Yeah. So, yeah, let me know what you want to go into because I could talk about this for literally days, weeks. Well, we have a few minutes left. So what's the last burning thing that you want to talk about that you feel like we haven't covered but you think people should know? So I think the big thing is... you know, why in general are people pessimistic about AI? It's because I think they're uncertain and they just don't know what is the future, what's gonna be left. If humans are gonna be left, will AI replace humanity? Will AI replace individual humans? What is it gonna look like? And I think the important thing here is to be grounded in rational optimism and understand what will this look like and what is the world that we should be building. And so I was telling you earlier, I'm super obsessed with this idea of this humanity studies, human studies, and understanding, you know, what will be uniquely human in the age of AI. And I think there's a couple of things that are super core, I think, here. The first is, what is something that an AI can never replace, at least in the state they're at right now? It's human connection, vulnerability, emotional intelligence, you know, all appreciation, gratitude, loving nature, things like that. Things that are just very near and dear to humanity. And so I, you know, I wish I could write angel checks because there's a lot of these tools that are just like really going deep into these. So Sublime is all about human curation. I've asked AI to make me a playlist on Spotify or to give me the top ten experts in my field. And it's pretty bad. It's terrible, actually. It can't capture the taste or whatever we call it. And so that's going to be something that's uniquely human. For my product, it's AI will never replace someone you can talk to, like a human that you're talking to. But it can help you build the skills or it can help give you the right information to, you know, work on your mental health. It can give you the space to practice vulnerability. And I'm just so obsessed with this idea of what is going to be uniquely human and how can we allow humans to do what humans best, do best, and, you know, replace all the boring jobs so that people can create art or whatever it is. So I think... When I was talking to my friend yesterday about this, she was like, I'm just so pessimistic about the future. I think the world's going to end in maybe 2,000 years. I don't know. But I just feel like everything is over. And it's hard to express this. It has to be grounded in this rationality. But I'm just so optimistic about the future. And I really hope that I can share that with other people, too, because it is just so exciting. And I'm so excited to be live right now. I love this. What a, what a pleasure. Um, I, you're making me excited and, uh, we're very lucky to have people like you in the, in the next generation, um, to, to show us the way. Um, and it's, it's good to see that the kids are going to be all right. Yeah. Um, Alex, thank you so much for joining. If people want to, uh, get in touch or, uh, prior to your product, where can they find you? Yeah, Twitter is the main one for probably you guys. But I'll give you all my socials and yeah, totally reach out to me too. I love talking to people. Awesome. Thanks for joining. Of course. Thanks, Dan. Oh my gosh, folks, you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard. But instead of gold, it's filled with pure unadulterated knowledge bombs about chat GPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat, craving for more. It's not just a show. It's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So do yourself a favor. Hit like, smash subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you.