Ultimately, 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 quest and go do something that's kind of oddball, but also might end up being super amazing if it works out.
The future of companies is going to change. The 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.
One 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. The 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?
I think the first thing is that they, as we were talking, I remember this sci-fi story that I read once. 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 problems, all human problems. There's no wars, there's no disease, everyone lives forever and people spend their time working on like a thousand-year art projects and doing all sorts of random things to fill up their time. But 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 AI today. They go through all the memories and they compress them and then they go through a boot camp to like retrain them for their life. So they invented a new way to be born. But 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 fundamentally born new. And he immediately starts causing problems. In the boot camp he starts doing weird things, new things and everyone's like whoa 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 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.
Sounds like Silo a little bit.
It's probably dangerous out there. Yeah. A little bit like Silo. A little bit like Fallout.
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. 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 for? And I think 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. And in today's college actually the opposite. It kind of beats any outside thought out of them, right? 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 live happily ever after. That world doesn't exist anymore. You can do really well in college and you can still be unemployed with a huge debt. But not only that, I think the real civilizational missing opportunity is that person in The City and the Stars. It 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 blind spots in society. We have a lot of blind spots in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of ideas that don't come out of Silicon Valley. Because there's a monoculture here. There's a certain way of thinking. Every culture is somehow a monoculture. Even the most radical cultures like Silicon Valley. And so what do you need from young people? You need them to experiment. You need to encourage them 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 suddenly possible because the technology changed, something changed. So college ultimately should be about that. Let's get these people with clear minds, zen mindsets, first principal mindsets and encourage them to go question the deeply held beliefs.
No, I think that's well said. I mean, imagine if you were 18 today and you 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 you would engage in to what you'd want to study. What are some principles that you would add to that in terms of how you wish if you could redo 18 to 22 but in 2026 how you'd think about it.
Yeah. I'd want to go to a college that's not prescriptive about what I learn. I want to be in an environment where there's a lot of different paths like you know there is a class about something totally I haven't even thought about it's outside my world. Right. We're talking about the story with 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 went to Reed College but he couldn't afford it so he dropped out but kept dropping into different classes. One of them was calligraphy.
And in the calligraphy 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 interfaces they're like oh we should have proportionally spaced fonts we should have certain fonts people should be able to select fonts and that was a direct kind of callback to his college days learning about fonts and calligraphy and things like that and so this like meandering that I think modern society thinks is sort of useless. I think it's actually the most useful in college like can you take a class that would change the direction of your life because you discover something totally new and outside of your world. So that's one I would like to have enough freedom to select the kind of things I want to study. The other thing is if I am engrossed in building something give me the space and time to do it. One of the things about my college that was really hard is we had attendance like they counted attendance and if you didn't attend for like six classes you're banned. And so I think if 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 manically working really hard. Give me the space to do it. Don't expel me from my.
And finally, the equality of people.
Yeah. Like I think if you're around conventionally minded people, eventually you'll be conventionally minded.
If you're in an environment that encourages people to question those deeply held beliefs, I think you will be able to do that.
Yeah. I went to UC Berkeley, go Bears and I did enjoy it a lot. 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 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 schedule 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 did enjoy that but I feel oftentimes I look at that experience and say well what if the environment was supportive of this like what would happen if Because honestly 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 used to be odd behavior and now it's becoming the norm.
And 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 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.
You should be able to use the college resources. You should be able to use the computer lab, the compute, the bolab, whatever it is.
You shouldn't be going against the grain. It should be like actually actively encouraging you.
Actually, they should be bringing resources to you more if you do it. So, like 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.
Totally. There's this kid, Eric, I think he's richest friend who has to take like investor calls from the bathroom because he's like hiding in the school. Yeah. They should be like, you know, coaching them through it or enabling it in some way. Bringing in demo day or something. This kind of thing.
A couple comments. One is going back to your thing around like calligraphy. You know people get these interests that might seem random and might be random but in other ways might tie back in other ways and I think there actually ways in which the school can sort of develop like it's hard to 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 would say hey you know you're obsessed with basketball 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. Is the way that they take people's natural interests and get them to learn things they're going to need to know over time out of that.
The thing that's so hard is we all know like the education sort of academic the industry of education if you will or the academic canon 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 Lemon of Alpha School talks about this all the time. The problem is that practically it seems impossible, but 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.
Specifically, 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 can 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.
Yeah. I mean, this 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 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. And so there was this inversion for a long time of how we learn things like you would go and you would learn some of the things and you had no idea what is the utility, how you would apply it in the real world. And for someone like me, and I think for a lot of people that are more pragmatically minded, I'm not motivated at all by a pure pursuit of knowledge.
I'm motivated by skills. 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 tell you 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 we're solving for which is hey there's certain schooling environments where there's very little practical skills gained or they don't train 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 spending time to cultivate intellectually or as a person otherwise there's still kind of this sort of ineffable quality that some people think you get at an experience like college where you're sort of you know meeting new people getting new friends you know sort of going to party I don't know what people are describing exactly studying the great books, etc. What do you think about sort of the stuff that's gained beyond just the technical skills of building a company or working at a company?
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. 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 you $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 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 business, 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 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 a 10-year commitment at 18 isn't for most people. And then 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 resources that you need and when you have a cool idea, it's just like more more. That's super exciting to me.
Yeah. I mean I think you know in programming we have this concept of premature optimization and the idea like I think the saying is premature optimization is the root of all evil. That's how bad people think it is where you sort of start optimizing a program that is not eventually relevant or consequential. 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. And really negative motivation as opposed to positive 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 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 be able to avoid it you know I mean for me you know I tried not to start Replit like actively not to start it but it kind of exploded into a startup on its own right.
And that's the feeling you should get. It's almost like I guess I have to do it, right? Because there's so much momentum behind it. And I think there's a predatory thing that happens right now where I've heard that VCs go to Stanford students and they give them like a million dollars, not even 50K. 50K is like 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. And like, you know, Kanye talked a lot about this where it's like how predatory it is where you find a young 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 the SAFEs. Which are you know great contribution by YC and Paul Graham 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.
Yeah. It's really interesting because you're an interesting person to bring on this podcast and 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 you sort of pursue your interest there. Going back to this critique. You're neither sort of divorced from the, you know, economic real world, but you're neither that nor an 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 how to make this thing successful. And so I think 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 young people and yet also make time or make space or make interest for following their intellectual curiosity even if it might seem, you know, random or alien from that.
Yeah. I think that I sort of tend to oscillate between having an itch to build something and having an itch to like read a lot and explore a lot and see 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? And so like you know for example recently 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. And my kid actually 6 years old is getting into chess pretty soon is going to be beating me. But 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 ChatGPT actually sucks at chess.
Yeah. And I was like, well, you know, 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 all of that. So, I went into training an LLM to play chess. And I spent a lot of time I've never trained a model before that. I spent a lot of time kind of exploring how to train models. And I realized, you know, some people are now called RSI or recursive improvement. 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 Replit Agent came out before vibe coding as a term was coined suddenly agents were capable of like coding right and coding fundamentally changed since then. 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. But I spent a lot of time in that world and then now like I'm working on something on Replit to bring that 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. And so when I started playing chess, like what are the hops you need to make to understand that, oh, that's going to lead me to build a new business line for Replit. It's just impossible. But I just followed something that I was interested in. It kind of resulted in something invariably it does, at least for me. But even memes and culture, I you know I get interested in some random subculture on the internet. 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.
And I have alpha. You have an itch and you listen to the itch. And sometimes the itches build something. They just learn something and a lot of kids get the itch beaten out of them because they, you know, they learn over time to ignore it in favor of, you know, going through these hoops.
And it's helpful to learn how to go through hoops, but it's also helpful to learn how to listen to it. I mean 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 like I think you know in Silicon Valley there's been so many experiments to try to change the nature of firms in terms of how companies work.
If you remember Holacracy Medium did that GitHub did the like no managers they all kind of blew up in like spectacular ways.
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 the 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. 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.
Yeah. 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 everything we're doing now is just feels so different.
Yeah. And in starting the academy, I've been spending all this time, you know, I built the pitch deck and Replit. Thank you. And I've, you know, been using Claude and ChatGPT, like I'm using all of these services as a way to speed up my work and imagining how that changes an entire organization. And 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.
