0:00Ultimately, the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs, is to be heretics. And in today's college, it actually the opposite. It kind of beats any outside thought out of them. I just really want to see a world in which it's okay if you want to go on a side [music] quest and go do something that's kind of oddball, but also might end up being super amazing if it works out.
0:22The future of companies is going to change.
0:24The whole industry has changed. It's a complete reset on a technology perspective. I'd want to go to a college that's not prescriptive about what I learn. I'm motivated by what skills can it give me in order to achieve what I want to build.
0:39One of the core tenants of the academy sidesteps this problem entirely. We don't care if you graduate or not. We don't have grades. We don't have tests.
0:48The amount of weight to push against should be a lot less. When you see a 18-year-old that is really inspiring to you that you're like, I got to spend time with this person. What are they doing that is capturing your interest?
1:00I think the first thing is that they as we were talking uh I I remember this uh sci-fi story that I read once uh it's called the city and the stars and it's about this future city that's governed by AGI. We sort of invented AGI. It's now governs all of our lives. It solves all all problems, all human problems. Um there's no wars, there's uh no disease, everyone lives forever and people spend
1:30their time working on like a thousand-year art projects and doing all sorts of random things to fill up their time. But they they found this problem where they accumulate so much knowledge and memory it becomes like harder to keep it all in their heads. So they invented this technology where they go into some kind of laboratory and they compress their memory sort of like context compression that we do with
1:58AI today. They go through all the memories and they compress them and then they go through a boot camp to like retrain them for for uh for for their life. So they invented a new way to be born. Uh but it it is not you're not fundamentally new person. You're still the same person. You're just editing your memory. But there's a glitch that happens in this system in this machine and there's a new person that is
2:26fundamentally born new. And he immediately starts causing problems. Uh in the boot camp he starts doing weird things, new things and everyone's like whoa that's that's crazy. Like you shouldn't be doing that. That's not how we do things. It becomes very disruptive. And then when they go out into into this like city, he starts asking questions like, "What's out there? What's in the stars? What's outside our city borders?" They're like, "We don't talk about outside our city borders. It's sounds like silo a little bit.
2:55It's probably dangerous out there."
2:56Yeah. A little bit like silo. A little bit like Fallout.
2:59Yeah. Um, and and you know, I don't want to get into the spoilers too much, but eventually that's what he has so much drive to change things and go discover the stars. That's why it's called the city and the stars. He in in in the story unfolds in that way and he finds all sorts of interesting things out there. And I'm reminded of this because as we're talking about what is college and what is it what is it for? And I I
3:27think a a related question is like what is the utility of young people in society? And I think ultimately the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs is to be heretics.
3:42And in today's college actually the opposite. It kind of beats any outside thought out of them, right? It it it it tells you you're stupid. We've figured everything out. You need to learn our way and we need to prepare you for the outside world so you can get a job and be a perfect citizen and go get, you know, get married, have kids, and get a house and a car and and live happily ever after. That world doesn't exist anymore. You can do really well in
4:11college and you can still be unemployed with a huge debt. Um, but not only that, I think the the the real civilizational missing opportunity is is that is is that person I in the city of the SARS.
4:29It took a glitch to get someone with a clear mind to be able to question deeply held beliefs. And you know, every one of us, we probably have a blind spots in society. We we have a lot of blind spots in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of ideas that don't come out of Silicon Valley. Uh because there's a monoculture here. There's a certain way of thinking. Every culture is somehow a monoculture.
4:54Even the most radical cultures like Silicon Valley. And so what what do you need from young people? You need them to um to experiment. You need to encourage them to do to try impossible things. And every now and then they're going to have a breakthrough that once we thought was impossible and now it's now it's suddenly possible because the technology changed, something changed. Um so college
5:22ultimately should be about that. Let's get these these people with clear minds, zen mindsets, first principal mindsets and encourage them to go question the deeply held beliefs.
5:36No, I think that's well said. I mean, imagine if you were 18 today and you were had, you know, were able to design your ideal experience in terms of, you know, how much you go to class to what projects you work on to what kind of deep study um you would engage in to what you'd want to study. Um what are some principles or you know that you would add to that in terms of how you wish if you could redo you know 18 to 22 but in 2026 Yeah.
6:04how you'd think about it. Yeah. I I um I'd want to go to a college that's not uh prescriptive about what I learn.
6:14Uh I want to be I I want to be an environment where there's a lot of different paths like you know there is um there's a a class about um something totally I haven't even thought about it's outside my world.
6:31Right. We're talking about the story with um uh Steve Jobs. One of the most inspiring speeches he gave is the Stanford commencement speech and he talked about connecting things backwards. And so the way Steve Jobs approached college, I think it's the ideal experience of college where he's like he went to read college but he couldn't afford it so he dropped out but kept dropping into different classes. One of them was calligraphy.
6:58Yeah. and in the calligraphy uh class he didn't know why he was interested in it and he just did it and learned it later on when they were inventing the Mac and inventing user u interfaces they're like oh we should have uh proportionally spaced fonts we should have certain f people should be able to select fonts and that was a direct kind of u call back to his college days learning about fonts and calligraphy and things like that and and so this like meandering
7:26that I think you know modern society uh thinks is sort of useless. I think it's actually the most useful in college like can you take a class that would like change the direction of your life because you discover something totally new and outside of your world. So, so that's one I would I would I would like to have enough freedom to select the kind of things I want to study. Um the other thing is if I am engrossed in
7:56building something give me the space and time to do it. One of the things about my college that was really hard is um we had attendance like you they counted attendance and if you if you if you didn't attend for like six classes you're banned. Um and so uh I think if you know I'm I'm going to school I'm doing all these different things. I'm meeting interesting people and then I have an idea and I'm like manically working really hard. Give me the space
8:25to do it. Don't like, you know, expel me from my Yeah. Exactly. For sure.
8:32And finally, the the equality of people.
8:34Like I think if you're around conventionally minded people, eventually you'll be conventionally minded.
8:39If you're in an environment that encourages people to question those deeply held beliefs, I think you will be able to do that.
8:46Yeah. I my I I I went to UC Berkeley um go Bears and I I did enjoy it a lot. Uh but one of the things that I really enjoyed was that there was actually no expectation of attending class for most situations. And so I had many semesters where I had I had like three jobs in one semester. And often the time that I was expected to be at work overlapped with my class. So I just looked at my midterm
9:16schedule the seme you know in advance and I said okay these are my two midterms hey boss can I take those two days off and otherwise I was working but it's like interesting because now I look back and I I I did enjoy that but I feel oftenimes I look at that experience and say well what if the environment was supportive of this like what what would happen if Because
9:43honestly I think today when I talk to students you know it's been 20 years plus like when I talk to students today they all do this. This is like this used to be odd my behavior and now it's come becoming the norm.
10:00And the thing that's weird though is that it's not encouraged yet. It's still not allowed. And so for me personally, I just really want to see a world in which it's okay if you go want to go on a side quest and go do something that's kind of oddball but also might end up being super amazing if it works out.
10:20You should be able to use the college resources. You should be able to use the computer lab, the compute, the bolab, whatever it is.
10:27You shouldn't be going against the grain. It should be like actually actively encouraging you.
10:30Actually, they should be bringing resources to you more if you do it. So, like if if you have a crazy idea that's taking off, like the college, you shouldn't be hiding it from your college. They should be coming like, "Oh my god, like this is amazing. Let's give them more."
10:45Totally. There's this kid, uh, Eric, uh, I think he's richest friend who has to take like, uh, investor calls from the bathroom because he's like hiding in the in the school. Yeah. They should be [laughter] like, you know, coaching them through it or Yeah. enabling it in some way. Bringing in demo day or something. This kind of thing. A couple comments.
11:00One is going back to your thing around like calligraphy. you know people get these interests that that will um you know might seem random and and might be random but in other ways might tie back in other ways and I think there actually ways in which um the school can uh sort of develop like it's hard to um force natural interest and so for example I was obsessed with basketball as a kid but I was also the kid who would ask my math teacher like what's the point of this like help explain it to me and if she could have explained it to me maybe I would have got excited about if she
11:30would say hey you know you're obsessed with basketball you you need to understand the salary cap or you actually basketball is like very analytical now in terms of like people are using stats and data to evaluate players and so if you don't understand this you're not going to be a good student of the game. That would have got me really excited and that's why I'm so excited about Alpha School. Yeah.
11:47Is is the way that they take people's natural interests and uh get them to learn you things they're going to need to know over time out of that. Mhm.
11:55The thing that's so hard is we all know like the education sort of academic the the industry of education if you will or the academic uh cannon of education is completely on board with this like they totally understand that it would be great if every student could have a customized curriculum, you know, and Joe Joe Lemon of Alpha School talks about this all the time. The problem is that practically it seems impossible,
12:23but actually I think now is the moment when it's completely reverted. And it's not just impossible, it's actually impossible to imagine why you wouldn't do that.
12:35Specifically, like for me, if I think about the academy, right? in the academy if you are going to learn coding I don't want you just to take a class on Python no like go build something that you're super excited about in Python you know use it as a tool to learn the language and the great thing about today you know with AI is every single student
13:04can go and do that on their own and they don't need a customized syllabus or exercise given to them. They just need the freedom and confidence to say yes, you're allowed to do this. Yes, absolutely. We're super excited about it.
13:19Yeah. I mean, this um you know, the buzzword for it is like project based learning. There shouldn't be a buzz word for it because that should be the standard. The idea that you're learning something and you don't know the utility of it, I think is a very modern invention. It's very weird thing to have done in society that you would go into a statistic statistics class and you would never learn that you could use it for basketball or you could use it for some of your other interests.
13:46Um and so that there was this inversion for a long time of how we learn things like you would go and you you would learn some of the things and you had no idea what is the utility, how you would you apply it in the real world. Um, and and for someone like me, and I think for a lot of people that are more pragmatically minded, I I'm not motivated at all by by by a pure pursuit of knowledge.
14:14I'm motivated by skills. What what skills can it give me in order to achieve what I want to build and achieve my dreams? And every now and then, you find a teacher that is able to Yeah. tell you that that's able to motivate your learning by telling you what kind of skills you can acquire because of it. Totally. Well, it's interesting because there is you know the critique that we're addressing that you know um we're solving for which is hey there's there's certain schoolings environments where there's very little practical skills gained or they don't
14:43train for the real world afterwards even though they claim to. But then there's this also this opposite critique and I'm curious if you guys how we balance this which is hey some people are sort of professionalizing way too soon and not having childhoods or something or not you're not spending time to cultivate um intellectually or or as a person otherw there's still kind of this sort of uh ineffable quality that some people think you get at a experience like college where you're sort of you know with uh meeting new people getting new friends uh you know sort of going to party I I
15:13don't know what people are describing exactly you studying the great books, etc. What do you think about sort of the this the stuff that's gained beyond just the technical skills of uh of building a company or working at a company?
15:26I I think there's this like huge unfair choice that a lot of young people are provided today. It's either go and get a 4-year go to a four-year school where there's a lot of structure around what you should be doing. You're going to have to attend classes. is you're going to have to do homework and tests and grades and all of that. And then there's another option which is you can go and start a startup and someone will give
15:53you $50,000 tomorrow to start it. And the problem that I see is look, I think there's lots of people who are still going to go to college and love it, you know, and I think there are lots of that there are young people even at 16, 17 who should be starting a startup, but I think there's an amazing massive group of people who I don't know about you guys, but certainly for me, when I was 17 or 18, I knew I wanted to enter
16:21business, but it was so nice to have a couple of years to explore and learn and like no pressure, you know. And so personally, I think the investor track should be way underutilized like like only a very small number of teenagers should be raising money instead. And by the way, grants are great, right? Do something temporary. Make it clear it's temporary. That's fine. But the pressure of making your a 10-year commitment at
16:4918 isn't for most people. And then the the structure of college isn't for everybody either. And so for me, this middle ground of having two years where you can really explore and you can do whatever you want without the pressure and Silicon Valley will come to you and provide you with all the information and the at resources that you need and when you have a cool idea, it's just like more more. That's super exciting to me.
17:17Yeah. I mean um I think you know in in programming we have this concept of uh premature optimization and the idea like I think the saying is premature optimization is the root of all evil.
17:29That's how bad people think it is where you where you sort of start optimizing a program that is not eventually relevant or consequential. Um and I think a lot of starting startups is premature optimization. And I see in a lot of kids now where they're part of a group and a lot of their friends are raising a lot of money and some of them are becoming unicorns and they get it just becomes the motivation is envy. Um and really negative motivation as opposed to
17:56positive um and then they pre-commit to an idea they're not even interested in and they raise money for it and they are kind of pre-optimizing for some path that um that they haven't really reached yet. Right? And so that's why I always come back to this idea of curiosity like what is actually driving you what is you know once you find that idea that you want to dedicate your life to or dedicate the next 10 years to it's going to have such gravity you're not going to
18:25be able to avoid it you know I mean for me you know you know I I tried not to start Raplet like actively not to start it but it kind of exploded into a startup on its own right and that's that's the feeling you should get. It's almost like I I I guess I have to do it, right? Because it's it's like there's so much momentum.
18:47Behind it. Um and I think there's I think a predatory thing that happens right now where I've heard that uh VCs go to Stanford students and they give them like a million dollars, not even 50K. 50K is like [laughter] a million dollars pre- idea and it's like the moment you start your idea, you know, you already have a cap table. Yeah, I think that's sort of like the music industry. Um, and like, you know, Kanye talked a lot about this where it's like how predatory it is where you you find a
19:16young artist and you kind of lock them into a contract and they don't even understand that contract. Like luckily I think in Silicon Valley we have uh the safes. Yeah. Which are you know great contribution by by by YC and Paul Graham but the uh but it's still somewhat you know somewhat predatory because you're taking this young person you're precommitting them to something they shouldn't have committed to it.
19:40Yeah. It's really interesting because I'm you're an interesting person to bring on this podcast in the academy more broadly because you're both an entrepreneur and a builder and a hacker and a tinkerer and very pragmatic, but you're also an intellectual. You also, you know, very curious, you know, widely read across, you know, history and economics and culture and politics and, you know, you spend a lot of time on memes like, you know, like uh you sort of um pursue your interest there. to going back to this critique. You're neither sort of divorced from the, you
20:09know, economic real real world, but you're neither neither that nor a automaton, you know, like there are some people who are so career focused that really that's just like the only thing they think about is how to make more money or or how to make this thing successful. And so I I think to to your point, Gogan, sometimes people are funneled into these, you know, either of these paths. And I'm curious how you've thought about is that something that you've always been just naturally or how can people both be like very pragmatic in their career, you know, as as young
20:38people and yet also make time or make space or make interest for um following their intellectual curiosity even if it might seem, you know, random or, [snorts] you know, alien from that.
20:50Yeah. Um I I think that uh I I sort of tend to oscillate between having an itch to build something uh and having an itch to like read a lot and explore a lot and see what's what's out there, what's interesting and they feed on each other. It's a sort of a recursive process where I accumulate enough knowledge and ideas from all the things I explored that I really want to go build something with it now, right?
21:17And and so um like you know for example recently I got I got really into chess which is like very late in life to get into chess. Like usually you get into chess when you're 6 years old. Um and my kid actually 6 years old is getting into chess pretty soon is going to be beating me. [laughter] Um but but I I didn't know why I was interested. I got interested and then I started writing programs to like solve chess and then I started training models and I was like why LLMs like chatbt actually sucks uh at chess.
21:46Oh really? Yeah. And I was like, well, you know, we're the ARC AGI score is getting up there. You know, these models are, you know, almost AGI, but why are they bad at chess? They hallucinate moves and and all of that. So, I went into um training NLM to to play chess.
22:01And uh I spent a lot of time uh I've never trained a model before that. I spent a lot of time kind of exploring how to train models. Uh and I realized, you know, some people are now called RSI or cursive improvement. uh so sort of a buzzword for AI being able to do ML. I realized that AI is actually now capable of doing ML. So the moment we were in like 2024 when rapid agent came out
22:28before VIP coding as a term was was was coined suddenly agents were capable of like coding right and uh in and coding fundamentally changed uh since then. Um, I think we're at a similar moment when it comes to machine learning. I think machine learning we're, you know, you could call it vibe research, you could call it auto research. I think that's Karpathy's term. Uh, but um I spent a lot of time in that world and then now
22:57like I uh I'm I'm working on something on Replet to to to bring that to to the world like where anyone can become a machine learning researcher or like any business owner who has data can like fine-tune a model to kind of solve a certain problem. Um, and so when I started playing chess, like what are the hops you need to make to understand that, oh, oh, that's going to lead me to build a new business line for for reflet. It's just impossible. But I just followed something that I was
23:25interested in. It kind of resulted in in in something invariably it does, at least for me. But even memes and culture, I you know, I I get interested in in some random subculture in the internet. Um, and I learned something about the world. I learned something about society. I learned something about markets. I learned something about where the world is headed.
23:47And I have alpha. You have an itch and you listen to the itch. And sometimes the itches build something. They just learn something and they a lot of kids get the itch beaten out of them because they, you know, they learn they over time to ignore ignore in favor of, you know, going through these hoops.
24:02And it's helpful to learn how to go through hoops, but it's also helpful to learn how to um listen to it. helpful to I mean not not more than people do currently but I think generally it's like in order to lead it's also helpful to know how to follow but I think people spend their entire high school and you know and often college just learning how to follow just learning how to you know someone says something you do it and I think it be yeah my belief is that the future of companies is going to change um like I
24:31think uh you know in Silicon Valley there's been so many experiments to try to change the nature of firms terms of how companies work. M if you remember uh hocray hocriscy medium did that GitHub did the like no managers they all kind of blew up in like spectacular ways but I but I think it was a technology problem like I think now like you can have agents kind of function as the glue within these organization and like have
25:00the bureaucracy be this invisible thing that's happening by machines in the background and then people have true autonomy to work on the things that they find like most interesting and AI can sort of judge your impact.
25:12Um, and I don't have fully formed thoughts about this, but I see it in our company where I've changed how I run the company and we call this idea of like a self-driving company eventually like the company will like run itself.
25:25Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's funny because like I genuinely don't have an opinion about where it's going to go, but I know it's going to change, right? I know that that everything we're doing now is just feels so different.
25:39Um and in starting the academy, I've been spending all this time, you know, I built the pitch deck and replet. Thank you.
25:45And I've, you know, been using Claude and Chachu, like I'm using all of these services as a way to speed up my work and imagining how that changes an entire organization.
25:59And I guess the thing that I know, the thing I feel very certain about is it's all going to change. It's going to change a lot faster than you think. And if you're not like natively understanding of it, it's going to be hard. It's going to be hard to make that shift.
26:15Yeah. Or or or or if you're learning the ways of the past.
26:19Correct. then you're kind of locked into a a way of thinking and way of working that actually will put you at a fundamental disadvantage in the future.
26:29Yeah. Back to that following point. I I I do think learning how to follow is very important.
26:33Let me let me phrase it in a different way which is um you want to be disagreeable enough such that you have interesting ideas. You're contrarian. You're you're not just going through the motions. You're following your own curiosity. But you we both know all know people who are so disagreeable they can't work with anybody. Yeah.
26:47That they're just so alienating to people. So maybe another way of following just following it is more broader is you you need to learn how to work with people. You need to learn how to navigate systems. You need to learn to um you know get what you want [laughter] or or get what what is the optimal outcome.
27:00Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I I think um there is this important thing of respecting the elders in a way, but but also not um not I mean fundamentally truly understanding that they haven't figured everything out.
27:20Um I I do think respect is very important. um like going into a company, you should respect what they've already built, but you should also feel like that a lot of things are inadequate and go change as many things as as you can.
27:37So, at Replet, I um I named [clears throat] all the conference rooms after the uh the great in our industry in computer science and and tech. We have a Mark Andre room, obviously. Uh the inventor of the browser um you might know, of course, but [laughter] We have like Lionus Survald, you know, Robert Noise, all all these people. And what I try to tell people at the company is like we respect the past, but we're unapologetically going to change it. And
28:06people are going to be mad at us. Like I don't know if you remember like 2025, I was like cancelled for for saying you shouldn't learn how to code anymore.
28:15And now I I talked to [laughter] Wow. Yeah. That was only a year ago. this a year ago and now the same people that were like win against me, they're like, "Oh, I don't read code anymore. I just like prompted by code."
28:30Yeah. I mean, it's amazing how many things I've been wrong about or right about that, you know, 5 10 years early.
28:36And I think the thing that I love about Silicon Valley is people just move forward. They're okay with it. They accept the takes. You know what I mean?
28:46And that's the other thing that I love about the culture of the valley. I think people, you know, so I spend a little bit of time, my free time now, volunteering in local politics in Oakland. [laughter] Yeah, it it's really interesting. It's a side quest for sure, right? It's a side quest like why would it be relevant at all?
29:07Um and actually I think it's it's helped me in so many ways in business. Uh the the skills are extremely transferable in both directions. Um, but one of the most interesting things is appreciating how valuable trust is and if you have a foundation of trust throughout a society, how much it changes the way that you can move forward. You know, in local politics, you know, as a simple
29:36example, let's talk about nonprofits. If you're running a nonprofit and you raise money from someone and you have a conversation with them and they say, "I'll give you $50,000, the percent likelihood that that $50,000 will land in your bank account is somewhere in the 20 to 50% range after after they've committed verbally, right?
29:57So verbal commitments don't have weight in Silicon Valley. Uh, I think it's probably 75 to 100% depending on who you're talking to, who you are.
30:13And the difference in how you operate, like I can confidently continue to move forward on my business if I know that the money's coming. And then by the time you've delivered that check, I've made like six weeks of progress, right? And now all of a sudden your check is more valuable six weeks later, right?
30:36And the reverse is also true. If you do not have trust, then all of a sudden you're like, well, what if this donor is upset about this thing, let me do this thing differently, blah blah, and you're not fulfilling your mission. You're worried. You have anxiety and stress about this thing. And so I think that is something that Silicon Valley offers that can be applied to school.
31:06Trusting students to do what they want to do and follow the threads they want to do is something that I think we can uniquely offer. I think that Silicon Valley is a place where someone who has a unique idea or a different way of doing things can generally be accepted and allowed to do it. Now there are some social rules like you can't just go around being mean to everyone or lying or it's it's not that you know it's not that permissive.
31:33But if we start trusting young kids and stu and and young adults to go and do follow what they want and then we empower them even if we think what they're doing is crazy then they're going to build that future you're talking about. They're going to figure out the next version of holocracy that actually works.
31:51Let me ask you a question. might be tricky, but um what are you going to do with the troublemakers? Like invariably there's going to be people that are going to be like breaking things like you know Zach famously built like face mash which was like really controversial. Um like I hacked into someone might [laughter] Yeah. What do you what do you think of that? Um I mean obviously there are things that really cross some kind of red line on criminality but like
32:20Oh sure. Yeah. Yeah, I mean just to be clear like you have to draw a line somewhere, right? So there's no question like if you do something like violate our sexual harassment policy or you know you are uh super mean to someone in front of every you know like there are going to be rules of course like we have to create a culture of of trust and positive sum right at the same time I think that one of the core tenants of the academy sidesteps this problem entirely. Mhm.
32:50We don't have grades. We don't have tests. The sort of amount of weight to push against should be a lot less. And so therefore, a lot of these challenges, these things that people do, it's like you want to build face smash, go for it. Like I mean, who cares, right? Like I'm willing to defend your right to do that. And I'm also happy if someone asked me on a podcast to say, "Yeah,
33:18that was a weird idea." Like, "Well, I don't know what that kid was thinking. I didn't love it, but you know what? They got to do what they got to do." And that's how that's how people are going to be. And so I'd say the same thing is if you create an environment of trust and if you allow that to happen and you design it so that they don't have a sort of like anti- athoritarianism mindset then I think you open up a lot of creativity and a lot of opportunity.
33:45Yeah. I also think that um there's an opportunity to funnel that drive to test the boundaries in a in a healthy way. Um, I was uh reading the story the other day about about a kid that hacked into some government thing and is like getting like two years in prison and he was on um on an interview talking about how he learned to hack on um uh on Roblox. And apparently there's like like a big trend
34:14where people learn programming and hacking on Roblox. Um I was talking to Dave uh the founder CE of Roblox. It was like be really cool to have uh a some kind of sandbox for these people to play in and then discover talents and then funnel them into cyber security jobs.
34:33Or even the government instead of like sending these kids to jail like take them to work at the NSA or work at like some we need cyber security talent right now. Like why are you like putting them in jail, you know?
34:44Yeah. And there's a line like you know there are kids who are hacking who are probably doing things that I I wouldn't be comfortable with. But there's also kids who are doing it for reasons in ways that are honestly fine like and and if we can just have a little bit more permissiveness. I think we can create a lot more opportunity for them and and repurpose that talent as you mentioned.
35:04Yeah. I mean uh one one site I was really into growing up called hack the site. It was hack the site.org. I don't know if it's still around.
35:11It's like a website that has vulnerabilities built in. [laughter] Uh like it's like capture the flag, right? Yeah.
35:19Um, and so like I mean I I think we're kind of digging deep into one one aspect of it, but like you you can have a bounty program in the RC, right?
35:29Absolutely. Or I can encourage the students to go you do the bounty programs at all the other schools if or all the other companies because most companies have a bounty program.
35:40The um Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think going back to your thing around, you know, when to trust the elders versus when to disrupt. It's kind of there's this general uh trend in terms of like what's really important to gain is discernment because all like you know rules and heristics. It's like it really matters the context and case by and the way to get discernment is by having reps um and and being trusting the students to sort of fail on their own to make decisions to to learn from it. It's you coined uh you know technicism on this podcast. The thing I'll coin is uh meta
36:09maxing. [laughter] when to back versus when to like when to go on pure instinct versus when when to sort of like when that will drive you into into trouble. And I think it relates to like when there's asymmetric upside versus asymmetric downside. You kind of need reps and and I I think that's a lot of what project based learning or just giving people more control over their time is the idea of uh of just giving them more opportunities to choose a path, succeed, fail, learn from it.
36:38Yeah. Here's my last question. There there's some people who would say something like hey you know um you know remember when teal launched his fellowship and a lot of people were mad at they were like college you learn how to be a good person [laughter] like it's it's something beyond this in uh this technical you know skill set but even beyond this intellectual you know people imagine like Robin Williams dead poet society I don't know but there's sort of this like cultivate you know we're 18 you're becoming a person and so I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about how we see sort of in the Bay Area you in this environment that is both you know hyper um career
37:07oriented but also you hyper intellectual, but what is the sort of cultivation of values or morals or ethics or or just like becoming an adult? Um, what do what do you what do we say about that?
37:19Yeah, it's it's it's actually interesting. So, I've traveled all over the world. I I've uh I would like to think, you know, I've been to refugee camps. I've been to, you know, billion billionaire's houses. I have met people from every I've been to [laughter] house. Um, I uh I would say that some of the kindest, most thoughtful, most grounded people I've ever met are here in Silicon
37:46Valley. And it's not everyone. I mean, there are there are some real idiots out there who've made a lot of money. Like, don't get me wrong, I don't have respect for everyone who's made money. That's not the truth. But the positive sum, high trust ecosystem actually, I think, breeds really amazing human beings.
38:03Yeah. Um and interpersonal skills is an absolute pillar of the academy. Like we want we want our uh you know graduates or attendees or fellows or whatever we're going to end up calling them. We want the people who attend the academy to be positive influences on society and the world. And I think that that's like one of the missions of the academy is to
38:32create a positive sum world. So I actually think we absolutely believe in a 2-year, you know, you're going to spend two years and you're going to grow as a human being. You're going to meet other people and we're going to create an environment where you can see the benefits of the culture that I think many people don't pay attention to, but is very much here in in in San Francisco. I I I think having a reputation of being a good person here
39:00actually is is is very valuable and people trust you with their money. People trust you with governing your company and and and and so on so forth.
39:10Uh and I think developing that that sense in university is uh is very important and I think being a welladjusted person is is important. Um I think that um you know for for a while like you know I I I think you know some people play the role of being like this autistic genius person. Um and maybe at some point it paid off. Uh like I
39:38remember the Sequoia blog post about SPF that's like gold. They deleted it. You can find it on archive.org. Um and I don't think I I don't think it works anymore. I think Silicon Valley is no longer this sort of renegade thing. We're kind of it's it's an institution. It's part of the establishment anyways.
40:00Um and we also have to interface with with the world, right? Um and people need to understand that we have a responsibility uh that we're not just talking amongst ourselves. Um, and what we're saying, like, you know, Bernie Sanders read Dwark's blog post and I I criticized Maresh for kind of the language and and it's like people who don't understand the
40:29technology are they're they're going to they're not the that blog post in my opinion did not create more understanding in them. it actually it probably if you don't understand it probably could you know you you you learn the long wrong lessons uh from from that that thing and so um so I I think it's important that we create or this academy creates uh welladjusted adults that not can only speak the
40:58inroup language which is important but can you know can eventually be in front of Congress. Um, is there anything I guess lastly you want to say about sort of like cultivation of of of values or like the sort of the idea of be you know being a good person um like is there anything there that you feel school or school environment contributes to or do you think we spoke about we mentioned like the great books it'd be good to like teach some of these things like I spent a lot of time
41:28studying uh ethics and morality on my own.
41:32Yeah. Um, I read, you know, a lot of the, for example, a lot of the utilitarian kind of corpus of and I ended up kind of rejecting that. I don't think that's the the the way of the world. Um but um I sort of like found my moral compass by reading wildly and introspecting um and truly kind of like coming to
42:02certain conclusions about how I want to act in the world. Um and ultimately like the way I would describe myself perhaps is like closest to like virtue ethics uh from Aristotle and then and and the idea is that actually don't like I should act in a way reg that uh that I would be proud of.
42:23Yeah. uh regardless of who's watching or who's not watching or regardless of the of the impact. And I think in a weird way if if you're virtuous uh and if you have certain principles uh the net effect of that is that you are utility maximizing. I think if you have the right principles and you need to also change over time and you need to kind of figure out where the world is headed and and make sure you're fitting in it in the right way.
42:50But all of this to say is that I think there is the there there is value in um in the liberal arts and kind of reading some of this stuff and and trying to understand how you feel about how you want to act and how you want to present yourself.
43:06One thing that just made me more sympathetic to you to to argument in terms of it being like axiomatic is that the world is changing so much um that it's hard to have rigid principles in a in a world that is uh you know or or or a whole philosophy that that is rigid um you know in a world that is changing right um and uh weirdly the opposite is true as well where you can't be a consequentialist orian
43:35when we're entering the singularity and you can't really predict the future because that's based on predicting the future and so it it is a tough time. I think you need to have principles that are evolving over time. I think that's uh have some like ground principle ground truths that you hold um dearly and I and they should be as as aatic as small as possible.
44:02Yeah. In closing, we're grateful for your support of academy. We're excited to have people building on Replet, potentially interning Replet, potentially being being funded by you.
44:10And so maybe as as a last question, when you see a 18-year-old or 20-year-old or 16year-old that is really inspiring to you that you're like, "Oh, I got to you know, spend time with this person or or, you know, be involved with them in some capacity, what are they doing that that is um, you know, capturing your interest or what are you looking for in in young talent?" I I think the first thing is that they dove really deep in something they can teach me something. Yeah.
44:34Um and and I I I'm interested in like I I think I can be interested in anything.
44:41And I think if you're able to tell a story about uh some project you've done and you've gone really really deep in it, I think that's always impressive because that's what most people lack and most people get bored easily. Most people, you know, do the traditional thing. Uh, but did you actually follow a thread all the way through? That's always really impressive. And that shows all sorts of good personality traits.
45:09Persistence, intrinsic motivation. You might be doing something uh that is really uh you're following your curiosity and and maybe doesn't have an immediate reward. Um and um and I I think that uh uh you know like you said I mean being contrarian having really important opinions but
45:38it's it's very easy if you're smart and if young and smart to think everyone is an idiot.
45:45Yeah. uh including me like you know I'll see young people I was like like they'll talk to me like I don't understand anything but uh I think it's important to um respect uh uh respect to the you the person that you're talking having good uh good interpersonal skills I think it's important otherwise people don't want to be around you I think I think that's important totally yeah I think it's it's both not being afraid to spike in something like a lot of people just show up because
46:13they're too you know broad and but not really amazing at anything and and just follow follow that to its conclusion, see how good you can get at it, but and while also um having a baseline of sort of like um you interpersonal skills or just sort of like the right beable.
46:29Yeah. Be be likable and and in a way that's not like contrived or fake or you know uh just like you know it's it's truly authentic because people want to support people who are good people. But the most endearing thing is you can nerd out on something obscure and interesting and totally. Yeah.
46:46Awesome job. Thanks for Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
