Transcript: ‘Inside an AI High School, Through the Eyes of a 17-Year-Old Founder’

The transcript of AI & I with Alpha High School student Alex Mathew is below. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps

Introduction: 00:01:30
A typical day inside Alpha High School: 0:04:08
Why Alpha replaced teachers with “guides” focused on motivating students: 00:06:54
Why Mathew doesn’t use AI to cheat, even though he could: 00:12:09
Do ambitious teenagers care about going to college?: 00:19:51
Mathew’s take on how Gen Z thinks about AI: 00:25:12
How Mathew thinks about the effects of social media: 00:27:52
Gen Z’s relationship with books and reading: 00:31:29
Mathew ranks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok: 00:38:57
Why Mathew is building Berry, an AI stuffed animal for teen mental health: 00:47:12

Transcript

(00:00:00)

Dan Shipper

Alex, welcome to the show.

Alex Mathew

Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Dan Shipper

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 I just hear all of these stories from people from Gen Z, Gen Alpha or 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 are actually interacting with this stuff. I think it’s such an interesting question for me. So I 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 like in your day-to-day life?

Alex Mathew

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 academic content through an AI-powered platform. So when I say this, most people think, oh, you’re just talking to ChatGPT or a 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 restrict it too much because we don’t want people to cheat so much that it’s not helpful, or we don’t 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 there are 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.

Dan Shipper

Wait, okay, so like, walk me through then your day. I don’t understand. And you’re saying you are involved in Alpha School or you just go to Alpha School?

Alex Mathew

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 am giving feedback to the guides, and so the students are very involved.

Dan Shipper

Okay, so let’s say it’s — what time does school start? 8:00 a.m.?

Alex Mathew

8:30 a.m.

Dan Shipper

8:30 a.m. So you get into school at 8:30, what’s your first hour like?

Alex Mathew

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.

Dan Shipper

And you’re in a class with how many people?

Alex Mathew

So the total high school is around 50 people. My senior year class is only eight people, so it’s pretty small.

Dan Shipper

Okay. And by class, I mean—I’m talking about like, give me the—you’re in a room with you and seven other people, and that’s your senior class and it’s right in the morning and you’re all kind of doing your Tony Robbins thing? Like how does that, what, like set the scene for me a little bit?

Alex Mathew

For sure. Yeah. So what’s interesting is in Alpha we have houses kind of like Hogwarts, and so there are five houses. And 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 the Spartans and then we have a competing house called Athens. So Sparta vs. Athens. And it’s for the kids who are really working hard on their Alpha X project, which is an Olympic-level project where they’re trying to be the best in the world at something and build a super cool product or service. And so it’s for the people who really want to ramp it up. Anyways, I’ll sit with my fellow Spartans—Summer.

Dan Shipper

And those are all age levels basically.

Alex Mathew

What do you mean by that?

Dan Shipper

Like your fellow Spartans—there’s seniors, there’s juniors, there’s freshmen.

Alex Mathew

Yes, exactly. And so we’ll either do a big school opening because there’s only 50 of us, in the big open space. Or we’ll go into our houses and talk about a book we read or whatever.

Dan Shipper

That’s really cool. Okay. And—remind me, so this 15-minute thing—is there a teacher guiding it? Is a student guiding it? Is it an AI guiding it? How does it work?

Alex Mathew

All three. It just depends on the day. Sometimes we’ve had expert AI debates where we debate in AI, there’s kind of a guide or a teacher 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, so we can talk about that. It just really depends.

Dan Shipper

And how are teachers involved? And you call them guides, not teachers.

Alex Mathew

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.

Dan Shipper

Are they like topic expert guides? So like, is there a French class that’s taught by—guided by a French teacher? Or is there one guide for the house and whatever you’re doing, they’re expected to kind of follow you and help you with emotional support, and the expert is the AI?

Alex Mathew

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 in 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 strengths. And so even though I have one house guide, Cameron—who’s really into entrepreneurship and trying to build out the entrepreneurship program for Alpha School—I’ll go to him specifically for 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 unique special abilities.

Dan Shipper

Okay. So like, let’s get further into the day. So you do the 15-minute thing with your house and then what?

Alex Mathew

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 get coffee from Joe’s or the grocery store, whatever you want to do. And during those 27 minutes, you’re locked in usually on one subject—you’re watching a video and taking notes, reading an article, doing a quiz. It’s not like, again, it’s not chatting with the chatbot. You’re actually like reading material, consuming things, trying to learn—

Dan Shipper

Who is telling you which one to do though?

Alex Mathew

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 percent 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 barely through my AP Literature course. And so we will 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.

Dan Shipper

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 X, Y, Z thing? Or are you saying, I know my goal is this, 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.

Alex Mathew

It’s even more seamless where it’s you—on the dashboard, there’s like course one, course two, APs, whatever.

Dan Shipper

And can I see it? Can you just show me it? Is that possible?

Alex Mathew

Let me take it—

Dan Shipper

And just describe what’s there for people who are listening, so that if you’re listening, you understand what’s going on.

Alex Mathew

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 the system, which we call Time Back. And if it’s not, it’ll take us to an external kind of resource. So right now I’m in 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 0 percent 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—a 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.

(00:10:00)

So our academic teams take the best ones, and we’ll get this super energetic guy who’s already embedded learning science into his videos. And it’s similar to the kind of social sciences video lesson quiz. So as you can see here, this is one of the quizzes. We call it a power pass score—start at zero, work up to a hundred. Every time I get one right—or let’s just submit one—I got it wrong. My power pass score went down, my accuracy went down. And we consider mastery to be above an 80 percent mastery score. Because that’s like enough to be able to move on and fill gaps later if it’s really a problem.

Dan Shipper

This is really interesting. Okay. So I’m looking at this and it reminds me a lot of Khan Academy. There’s a similar sort of—there’s videos, there’s quizzes and you kind of 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—hmm, I could agent-y this and I wouldn’t have to do all the readings and all the stupid videos and whatever. So tell me about that experience of learning this way and also the experience of being forced to learn this way. I mean, I think you’re being forced—there are certain things in AP Literature that you’re interested in, there are certain things where it’s just like, I guess I have to just do this to take the test. So yeah, tell me about that.

Alex Mathew

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 academic 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 breeze through it because it is the most interesting thing to me, because it’s related to my project. And they’re like, great, let’s just do that. But I’m like, oh my gosh, 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 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 or food. We do these things called FOMO where we go out—I think last time we were at something like a rooftop Christmas thing and we all got hot chocolate and played games together. And so there are these fun things that we can do to incentivize you. But also on a more technical level—let’s go back here—you can see how long someone is spending on a lesson. If I get out of the lesson, it’ll say the lesson paused. And so they can tell if you’re trying to cheat or something. But yeah, hope that answers it.

Dan Shipper

It does. I’m still like—I don’t know. I could throw this into ChatGPT and have it click around and watch some stuff for me while I’m off doing my thing. You never do that?

Alex Mathew

Yeah. No, not at all. Because they can see that as well. Like on my school laptop, they have a screen share thing and they can see what we’re doing on all of our screens. They have a waste meter. So they’re watching our faces to see if we’re talking with friends or doing something else. And so they’re very precise. 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 90 percent motivation, 10 percent ed tech. Like the learning science here is great—all the interleaving, doing the different subjects, whatever. And we know about it because I understand why it’s optimal for my learning. But the big thing is, in 20 days, I’m going to fly out to San Francisco to work on my project full time, and I’m able to negotiate with my guides—if I submit 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, whatever. So it’s that flexibility.

Also, I will say it is so different for Alpha High School because a lot of us teenagers are 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, they’re just on their two hours doing their apps, doing their reading and writing core skills. And then in the afternoon they’re doing their workshops. So motivation’s a bit more straightforward there.

Dan Shipper

And while you’re doing this, are you sitting in a classroom and everyone’s sort of silent during the Pomodoros, watching their thing, and then there’s like five minutes and all hell breaks loose for five minutes and then you go back? Or are people talking while they’re doing work? What’s the actual environment like?

Alex Mathew

It’s a great question, and this is also flexible. You can sit in your house, which is what most people usually do. So you’re with your good friends in your house, and you’re quiet and you’re just working. And then during the five-minute break, you can talk. Sometimes—I’m in a separate room right now to take this podcast meeting—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 Pomodoros.

Dan Shipper

Okay, so that’s the 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—but do you have free periods? Tell me what happens next.

Alex Mathew

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 breaks are their recess. And we should also get into some of the workshops, but for high school it’s very interesting. We have three distinct tracks where people are going down. There’s not really a name for them, but we have like the Alpha High regular track—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 colleges in the world.

Dan Shipper

Are those the same?

Alex Mathew

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 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 the entrepreneurship track—you really want to go hard on your business, build a startup, raise money, whatever.

Dan Shipper

Do people your age care about college?

Alex Mathew

I used to—as I said, I feel like I’ve been in two very distinct bubbles, so I try to be aware of that. In my old school, the bubble and groupthink was that the only reason you’re in high school is to get into a good college. And the bubble here is more nuanced—it’s like, does it make sense for you to go to college?

I can kind of walk you through my thinking. For me there are 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. Path one is to go to one of the best universities—my top two right now are Harvard and Berkeley. The second path is to go to an alternative university. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Minerva or University of Austin, which is right down the street.

Dan Shipper

I know the University of Austin. I thought that it shut down.

Alex Mathew

No, they kind of revamped it actually. My tuition would be free, whatever, but it’s a bit different from Alpha—there’s like a nice pipeline there. And there are scholarships and things like that to cover living expenses, so basically my university would be free. And then the third path is the Thiel Fellowship—go all in on 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 something I’m doing in school to something 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. Does it make sense for me at the right time?

Dan Shipper

Interesting. Okay. And then what about the people around you?

Alex Mathew

Yeah. So I’m going to give you some case studies. I have a friend who has 2 million followers on TikTok, and she is starting to do brand deals and is making like $10–15,000 per brand deal. She’s really cool—she has a great message with her audience, a lot of resonance, very positive, very mission driven. And so she’s really interested in turning influence into ownership. Her project idea was like Y Combinator but for influencer girls, because distribution is king now. She’s still experimenting with ideas, but she wants to go to Stanford and kind of figure out what the right move is for her.

Dan Shipper

Why does she want to go to Stanford if she already pretty much—I mean, maybe she feels like this is not necessarily her career path, but yeah. What’s the calculus of going to Stanford?

Alex Mathew

From what I understand, she loves being an influencer, but she also really, really wants the college experience—being with your best friends, going to parties, whatever it is. So she just wants to have a lot of fun.

And I think for my other friend, she’s building an AI-powered teen dating coach. She has like 70,000 users. She’s actually doing lots of different projects—she’s working with like MrBeast on an app, some other things. And she’s about to—I don’t know if I can say this—but she’s about to go on a MrBeast video, which is super cool. And she likes doing her own thing, she’s figuring things out. But she also wants to go to Stanford—she wants the college experience, her sister goes to Stanford and loves it. And so you know, they’re going to end up there doing their thing, and we don’t know what will happen a year or two down the line.

(00:20:00)

Dan Shipper

How do you feel about—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 very much, this is the thing you have to do if you want to have any sort of life at all. And now I feel like what I’m hearing from you is, you can do that, and it’s still appealing for people, and there are many more different options depending on what you want. But 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?

Alex Mathew

At times, extremely overwhelming. I think I’ve been trying to be intentional about it, surrounding myself with people who have very diverse perspectives. So for example, my family is very traditional—both my parents are dentists, they all have their path, and my brother is doing the same thing: go to school, get a degree, get a job. Then I have—the best person that comes to mind is Danielle from 1517, whose whole thing is like, we’re bringing back dropouts, and the institution 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, I have to test things out—there are some things in life you just have to do. You can’t just 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.

Dan Shipper

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, whether it’s on social media or whatever. What’s their view of AI?

Alex Mathew

It’s such a hard estimate because algorithms are giving you some random stuff and I just don’t know. But here’s my guess. I think that half of Gen Z is pessimistic about AI, a quarter is just uncertain, and a quarter is pretty optimistic about it. And I think even though half of the people are down on AI, still 75 percent—maybe 70 percent—of people are using AI, have used AI at least once.

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, super tied into my project: 72 percent of teens have used AI for companionship at least once, and 52 percent of teens are using AI for companionship pretty much every single day. And so I totally believe that’s true. It’s just very interesting times.

Dan Shipper

Interesting. Wait, so are you Gen Z or are you Gen Alpha?

Alex Mathew

Gen Z. Gen Z is aged 16 to like 24-ish.

Dan Shipper

Oh, interesting. I thought the shift was a little bit earlier. Okay, so you’re Gen Z. Alright, got it. And when you think about—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?

Alex Mathew

Yeah, I think there are 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 worry is—

Dan Shipper

And by that you mean like global warming, energy use, all that kind of stuff.

Alex Mathew

Energy use, water use, energy consumption mainly. The second big one—this might actually be bigger, I’m not sure—is job uncertainty. The third big one, and these are for people who have a bit more metacognition, is: I’m just worried about it replacing humans, or taking away from humanity, AI vs. heart, 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 the ones who are super aware and online. 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. And I also think there’s a huge loneliness crisis and people want to use it for companionship—it’s easy and seamless and frictionless. So yeah.

Dan Shipper

Do you think that social media rotted your generation’s brain?

Alex Mathew

Yes, 100 percent. But I want to give social media some credit because I only ever hear social media is bad, blah blah blah. So this past two weeks was winter break and I wanted to run a little experiment—I was training my algorithms to be a bit more educational. I’m also interested in this new emerging field, question mark, around just humanity. Because my hypothesis with the AI pessimism is that there’s going to be a huge humans vs. AI thing. A lot of people are focused on the USA vs. China—I think it’s humans vs. AI. And so I’m curious about this new little bubble of information.

Dan Shipper

Human studies.

Alex Mathew

Human studies, whatever it is. And so I was training my—there are different things for me, I’m on pretty much all social media just to learn. My YouTube is very focused on podcasts and things like that. My Instagram is now very focused on people trying to build brands that are very human, and people being like, sad about AI, or—

Dan Shipper

What do you do? You just like six or seven things in the category that you’re trying to build toward?

Alex Mathew

Even more aggressive—like, click “not interested” on some things. But okay. So social media—first of all, the thing I want to give credit for is the transfer of ideas, or what Matt Ridley calls “idea sex.” The creation of new knowledge. I think that’s really interesting. But the thing you have to be careful of is constant information overload vs. actually processing it. That’s something I caught myself on.

The second big thing is how we talk with each other. My friend who’s building the AI teen dating coach is running a study with a big psychologist, and she’s like, dating now is not just—you go out on a date, whatever. There’s a very clear formula. You meet someone somehow or get referred, you get their Snap, you start snapping, then you start chatting on Snap, then you message them, then you call them, then you FaceTime them, then you see them in person. And so the way we communicate now—some people just send each other Instagram reels and that’s their form of connection. Some people might view it as bad, there’s less oxytocin release, I’ve looked into the studies. But it’s also just the way 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.

Dan Shipper

But you said—I think that’s a very compelling picture. And the reason I asked the question is I think there’s probably some balance to be had. The overwhelming narrative is that it’s negative. When you think about what the negative things are—maybe for you or people your age—what do you think they are?

Alex Mathew

Yeah, the biggest one I’ve seen in my own life is not catching myself in terms of being overstimulated by everything. Overwhelmed. My attention is not great because obviously you’re just a dopamine head forever—it’s so addicting. I find myself scrolling still.

The second big thing, other than the neuroscience stuff where your brain is just becoming more mushy, is that you are comparing yourself to people online. I’ve seen a lot of things—there’s a funny video of nature influencers who are setting up their camera to make it look like they’re walking through nature, or people saying, “my life as a 24-year-old girl in New York City getting coffee,” blah blah blah. So there’s lots of comparison. I think those are the two big ones.

Dan Shipper

Do you read books?

Alex Mathew

I’ve—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. I do have a lot of friends who still read for fun, which is really interesting, but much, much less than it was literally four or five years ago.

The reason I read books is because I want to see people’s interesting thoughts—it’s not for the story, but for the content. And what I’ve now noticed is, there are some books that are good to read. I’m going to read the Bible probably later this summer, and “The Republic,” and classic philosophy books just for fun. But also something like Michael Gibson’s “Paper Belt on Fire”—I just want to hear his thoughts and then ask him questions to deepen that. But now you can find everyone’s takes on Twitter. You can ask ChatGPT to summarize the most important points. You can take a picture of a page and say, expand on this. So it’s like—it’s just not generative and dynamic. It’s a static piece of knowledge. And I think the value I get personally from it is the content itself, not the writing, not the whatever, not trying to increase my attention span—I can do that in other ways. So I’ll at least have Grok voice mode with me while I’m reading or something like that.

Dan Shipper

And when you have—I do that too, by the way. I love doing that. I actually built a little custom app for this.

(00:30:00)

Alex Mathew

Oh, I’d love to try it.

Dan Shipper

Yeah, I’ll send you the TestFlight. But for the friends that you have that are readers—why do they read and what makes them different?

Alex Mathew

Ooh. I have lots of different types of reader friends. I think some read in spite of AI—like, I don’t want to become that. Some read because they just love the story. Some read because they did it as a kid and it’s a habit. Some of my friends read to optimize their sleep—like, I’ll read a page of a book before bed. Those are the main reasons. I don’t think we think very deeply about it actually. You either read or you don’t.

And our form of reading—actually, in Alpha, we should get into what we do in the afternoon. We’re required to read the research about our field, and we’re required to go beyond that research to create insights of our own. So reading is still a big part of it. In my classes, I’m still required to read The Great Gatsby and things like that. The reason I said no is just because most people, when they think of reading, picture someone sitting under a tree with a book—and that doesn’t really happen anymore.

Dan Shipper

And the difference is you’re just reading with your AI companion.

Alex Mathew

That’s me personally. I think most young people who are reading are just reading because they enjoy it.

Dan Shipper

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 chatting with your AI? Let’s say there are maybe two big categories: one is story, like consuming stories or being part of stories, and another is pursuing stuff you’re interested in, really getting deep into a subject you care about. What are the replacements for reading? I’m just saying this because I love books, so it’s like a dagger to my heart that young people are reading less. I’m also just genuinely interested.

Alex Mathew

Yeah, there’s a lot to go into here. So how are people replacing reading? For the entertainment side, it’s obviously TV shows, usually video games, gossiping with friends. There are some really fun AI entertainment applications. Like the Charlie Kirk song—that’s an AI song that went super viral. I think embracing culture, talking about culture, is a big part of our entertainment, which is due to social media. Most people see that as a bad thing, and there are some bad elements of it, but I think it’s really interesting and cool.

The other thing that’s really interesting is how people are using AI for entertainment. I’ll just cover it quickly. Like, I found Sesame’s model when it first came out, and I showed it to one of my friends—she’s very fun and energetic and funny—and she started gaslighting one of the Sesame AI models, pretending it was Barack Obama, and we were just having a really fun time talking to it. She made a YouTube video and a TikTok about it that did pretty well. And there are so many things like that being done with AI.

But in terms of how people are replacing reading educationally, or trying to learn—from what I’ve seen, you can just go ask one of the AIs. I use deep research pretty much every day to learn stuff. And the way I got introduced to you—I saw your podcast with Dhruv Malhotra and I’ve been obsessed with it, the way I learned, for probably a year or two ever since I joined Alpha. Because it’s so nuanced and complex. I think there are just some very interesting ways people are using AI in the framework of capture or curation—lots of different things there.

Dan Shipper

That’s fascinating. Wait, so you use deep research—because I don’t really use it anymore. I feel like most answers, if you put them into thinking mode, are pretty good. What do you use deep research for?

Alex Mathew

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 and I was like, okay, let me just pull it up and it’ll generate while I’m walking. I just use it every day—there’s a lot of research I’ve done in my space and I want to go super deep on very specific things. So the use case for me is I can just put it on, and then when it’s time for me to do my research for the day, I 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 LLM.

Dan Shipper

Are you using ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini—like what’s your go-to?

Alex Mathew

Literally two days ago I tested all four for deep research—they all have very different strengths and weaknesses. Grok has pretty bad deep research, so I didn’t use that. But Grok has a great voice mode. I just use all of them for different applications. NotebookLM is one of the greatest things I’ve used in a long time, and I think it’s going to see insane adoption in schools because it is crazy powerful.

Dan Shipper

Okay. Actually, this is really interesting to me. Based on your own usage patterns—I know you use them for different use cases—but if you had to rank all of the AI applications: Claude, ChatGPT, let’s put Claude Code in a separate category, NotebookLM, Gemini, Grok—rank all of the AIs.

Alex Mathew

Okay, hold on. I’m going to start with the foundation models and then we’ll go to AI apps. So for the foundation models, number one for me is Claude, because my whole project is around creating models that are not semantic for my specific use case. And I called Dario by the way, and he gave me some advice, so I’m so biased because I’m like, this cool guy is actually talking to me. But I just have so much trust in the leaders of Anthropic—I watched the Founder’s Table video they had, and I just respect their research and the way they’re approaching everything. And I love Artifacts so much. That’s my favorite thing of any LLM.

My second favorite right now is ChatGPT. I think their deep research is the best for my specific use case, and as the first mover, it’s just where I go whenever I have a question usually. My third—it’s hard. Gemini and Grok are kind of tied, but Gemini is slightly above just because I love Gemini 2.0 and also because I think Google’s going to be great. I barely use it right now but I think it’s cool. And then Grok is cool because they’re just going crazy and trying things, but that’s the one I use the least.

In terms of applications—so at Alpha we also do hackathons, and our first one was using Cursor and Vercel to build a video game. I’m not someone who’s super technical and coding all the time, but Cursor is pretty awesome. I use so many AI apps. Granola is my favorite right now. Whisper Flow is my favorite right now. There’s a new app called Sublime—have you heard of this? I love Sublime. I bought the lifetime plan. I went on a call with them and was like, hey, can you tell me about your thing? And then I bought the lifetime because I think it’s so cool. I have a folder in Sublime with all the AI tools I’ve tried, and those are the ones that are really sticky.

I am obsessed with AI hardware. I’ve tried the Limitless Pin, the Pocket, pretty much all of them. And I’m really excited for Stream, the new ring. I just pre-ordered something that I think is going to be my go-to. I’m excited to try a necklace too—that’s really cool. Not a fan of Friends, but there are just so many. I’m probably missing a lot, but those are some of the ones I use and I’m so passionate about it.

Dan Shipper

I like it. I love that Claude got the top spot here. That’s really interesting. Dario, if you’re listening, you’re doing a good job.

Alex Mathew

Yes, 100 percent.

Dan Shipper

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?

Alex Mathew

Oh, that’s such a good question. Hmm. I don’t think it’s apps in particular, from what I understand. I think an actually interesting case study is Finch—have you heard of Finch? Finch is a habit, self-care kind of app. It’s like a Tamagotchi—you have a little pet and if you do your habits, you can give him clothes and stuff. If you look at the trend of teenagers and what they’re using, they’re very into these character things—Labubus, Squishmallows, Jellycats and things like that. Hence my project, which we can get into later. But that’s just a trend I’ve noticed. The corners of the internet are usually on social media—I always use BookTok as an example, TikTok for books. That’s still very alive and there are Gen Z people—

Dan Shipper

I know about that one. I’m talking about the weird stuff.

Alex Mathew

Oh gosh. I just think it’s random trends with no stickiness, which is interesting. It just moves so fast. We were talking about six or seven things, and now I don’t even know what we’re talking about. It’s hard to keep up with.

(00:40:00)

Dan Shipper

So I used “six seven” earlier in this interview and I didn’t know if you noticed. I didn’t, but I was waiting for the reaction and I was disappointed.

Alex Mathew

See, I’ve trained my brain—I’m like, I’m never going to say “six seven” because it is dead, it’s old, and I just have this terrible negative association with it. But Gen Z slang, I feel like—there’s always been slang.

Dan Shipper

And it’s more decentralized now, right? There’s no one person creating the culture.

Alex Mathew

Yes. Like the Kardashians and whatever, the celebrities people used to look up to. And we should talk about insecurity, because I think that’s the driver of a lot of this stuff. But it just depends on what corner of the internet you’re in. And I think it all comes down to culture. We’re made to read this book at Alpha called 10 to 25—it’s a great book, all about how 10 to 25 year olds are motivated, what they’re motivated by. And the number one thing is 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 there’s just going to be this insane explosion of culture in 2026. With these now decentralized creators, there are so many small little creators with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube, whatever, that people follow. And it’s just so nuanced and depends on the person.

Dan Shipper

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.

Alex Mathew

I can interview some of my friends and ask them as well.

Dan Shipper

Yeah, definitely do that. Okay. You mentioned the Labubu trend, the plushy trend, and I know that relates to your project. You want to tell us about the project you’re working on and frame for us what a project is at Alpha School?

Alex Mathew

Yeah, let’s go back. So this is the reason I transferred into Alpha—I transferred in as an 11th grader. In my ninth and tenth grade years I was exposed to AI before ChatGPT blew up, just because one of my teachers was so awesome. I saw Midjourney, OpenAI’s playground before it became ChatGPT, all these different things. And so I was super passionate about AI, I was building projects, whatever, and I heard about Alpha. I 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 at what you do. It is 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, friends who are building musicals—lots of different varieties of projects.

At the beginning of your Alpha career, you sit down with your guide and you go through the Ikigai process—you know what you’re good at, what the world needs, what you can make a living off of, and what you’re interested in. And you kind of narrow down a niche of expertise that you want to go deep into. You find an insight, maybe a way to solve a problem, and you start trying to build the product, build the service, build your audience, build distribution, and become the world’s greatest expert in your field and create genuine insights.

Dan Shipper

And what’s your project?

Alex Mathew

So I came in being very problem oriented—I want to solve a huge problem, that’s my goal. And 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. There were two big problems I wanted to solve. The first was the education crisis, because that was deeply, deeply intertwined with me—that’s why I transferred, so I could 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 mental health problems. I struggled with my mental health at my old school. A lot of my friends would text me from 2 to 3 a.m. and I was the friend who would text back and help them through things. And so I see this huge gap—teenagers and young people in particular have these insecurities, these day-to-day problems that can compound into real problems later on. And they’re going to friends to solve their problems, which doesn’t really work—they just get validated. Or they go to parents or therapists, which give them good advice, but it doesn’t resonate. And now they’re going to AI companions, and 52 percent, like I said, use them every day. We’ve already seen two suicide cases. I just saw a news segment about an AI toy giving misinformation to eight-year-olds and I was like, this is not what it should be. Someone who is actually ingrained in the culture and the generation needs to be building this.

And so I decided to build Berry—which is an AI stuffed animal for teens’ day-to-day problems. They talk to it for five to ten minutes a day. The goal is to build a muscle of self-awareness, so it’s not that you’re dependent on it—you’re built up to learn about yourself and cope and 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.

Dan Shipper

How do I get one?

Alex Mathew

You can pre-order it. I’ll send you the link.

Dan Shipper

Send me the link and we’ll put it in the show notes for anyone who wants one.

Alex Mathew

Let me know what you want to go into, because I could talk about this for literally days, weeks.

Dan Shipper

Well, we have a few minutes left. So what’s the last burning thing you want to talk about that you feel like we haven’t covered, but you think people should know?

Alex Mathew

So I think the big thing is—why in general are people pessimistic about AI? I think it’s because they’re uncertain. They just don’t know what the future looks like. Will AI replace humanity? Will it replace individual humans? What is it going to look like? And I think the important thing is to be grounded in rational optimism and understand what we should be building toward.

So I was telling you earlier, I’m super obsessed with this idea of humanity studies, human studies—understanding what will be uniquely human in the age of AI. And I think there are a couple things that are super core here. The first is: what is something that AI could never replace, at least in the state it’s at right now? It’s human connection, vulnerability, emotional intelligence, appreciation, gratitude, loving nature—things that are just very near and dear to humanity. And so I wish I could write angel checks, because there are a lot of tools really going deep into these things. 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 taste. And so that’s going to be something uniquely human.

For my product—human connection will never be replaced. Having someone you can talk to, but one that can help you build skills, give you the right information to work on your mental health, 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 we can allow humans to do what humans do best—and replace all the boring jobs so that people can create art or whatever it is.

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 rationality—but I’m just so optimistic about the future and I really hope I can share that with other people too. Because it is just so exciting and I’m so excited to be alive right now.

Dan Shipper

I love this. What a pleasure. You’re making me excited, and that’s good. We’re very lucky to have people like you in the next generation to show us the way. It’s good to see that the kids are going to be all right. Alex, thank you so much for joining. If people want to get in touch or pre-order your product, where can they find you?

Alex Mathew

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—I love talking to people.

Dan Shipper

Awesome. Thanks for joining.

Alex Mathew

Of course. Thanks, Dan.

Thanks to Scott Nover for editorial support.

Dan Shipper is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the Chain of Thought column and hosts the podcast AI & I. You can follow him on X at @danshipper and on LinkedIn.

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