is a General Partner at Lifetime Ventures, where he invests in human and planetary health solutions. He also writes the Substack Venture Humanist, where he explores what it means to live a deeply human, intentional life in a post-AI world.

Koshu is a Substack friend I’ve been drawn to because of what he subverts: a VC who is optimizing less in his life, embracing technology while deliberately choosing to live a slower life in Okinawa. He’s an incredibly intentional, meditative person who has managed to find coherence across all these different facets of his life.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• [00:00:00] AI-defensible living in Okinawa

• [00:12:20] “Yuntaku” conversations and creating better social infrastructure

• [00:24:21] What activities pass the Infinity Test?

• [00:32:35] Curating your information diet to find alpha

The world is getting skinnier and more disciplined. The Trump administration is pushing for weight loss drug prices to come down, and Big Food players are preparing for the aftermath of changes GLP-1s will have on consumer behavior. McDonald’s is experimenting with less sugary drinks, more protein; Pepsi is “leaning into portion control.” GLP-1s are only a magic pill insofar as they actively suppress your appetite, but it turns out, many people now on these drugs were simply eating more than they needed. Like many, I’ve maintained a healthy skepticism about the benefits of such a pill. On one hand, I marvel at the scientific feat that we might someday meaningfully reduce obesity. On the other, there are many negative side effects—pancreatitis, low bone density, the list goes on.

But strangely, in our fixation over magic weight loss, there are other side effects that we’re not talking about. Side effects that carry a certain moral fuzziness, enough to make even art gallerists like Ellie Rines skittish:

If someone can turn down a cookie, they can turn down the delicious satisfaction of buying an artwork, too. I’m still in the impulse sector over here.

Her biggest challenge in today’s art market, she says, is “counteracting GLP-1s.”

Ozempic’s impact on the art world seems like a stretch, but I’m not convinced the worry is intentionally provocative, nor does it seem to stop at art. The small-scale studies and personal anecdotes of GLP-1s’ effectiveness at reducing addictive behaviors like gambling and shopping are early rumblings of what kind of society we might find ourselves living in. How we consume, what we feel compelled to want—and, on a more philosophical level—what’s lost when desire is dulled. A flat life might fix vices but starve virtue too.

Glucagon-like peptide-1

Reduced substance use, quitting drinking alcohol entirely, less impulsive shopping and screen time. These are the reported changes in broader wellbeing from a survey of 1,000 GLP-1 users. It’s a small study, but these early signals are rooted in real and ongoing research on GLP-1s effectiveness in treating addiction.

While traditional treatment for addiction has focused on dopamine, there’s growing research to support the often overlooked interplay between the gut-brain axis, including metabolic and hormonal pathways. Scientists suspect GLP-1s may be a promising antidote for addiction, affecting the brain’s reward circuitry and modulating dopamine, glutamate, and GABA involved in craving and reinforcement. In other words, the same biological mechanisms that make us want another slice of cake may also be responsible for wanting another drink, another splurge, or hit of stimulation.

Large-scale human trials are still needed to determine effectiveness. However, compared to other addiction treatments currently in trial, GLP-1s have a clinical advantage having already been FDA approved for diabetes and obesity. The path toward adoption for multi-purpose use cases looks strong and could have a much quicker turnaround time. And while addressing severe addiction is a real and non-trivial pursuit, the already present ease of accessibility (even to children as young as 12) makes this a much broader societal experiment in appetite and impulse regulation.

Nearly one in five adults say at some point they have taken a GLP-1 drug, and rough estimates suggest at least 35 million people are taking them currently across North America. That’s not an insignificant number of the population who are already on GLP-1s and will likely stay on them for the long term. But when the tunnel vision is fixated on weight loss, most are not even considering the other downstream effects of pledging allegiance to this miracle drug.

The cure-all pill

Prediction: We’ll use GLP-1s to treat phone addiction.

I had a dinner party over the weekend with friends across different industries, some in tech, but also a few photographers, a steelworker, a dance studio owner. The conversation that was an instant icebreaker was the group’s unabashed phone addiction confessionals. Everyone gathered around the kitchen talking about the measures they were taking to reduce their screen and social media time, whether it was using a physical barrier like Brick or attending silent meditation retreats.

In case you haven’t noticed, being chronically online is no longer just uncool. There’s a growing recognition that hitting a daily average of 8+ hours on your phone is a sign you’re genuinely addicted.

Surprisingly, AA-equivalent support groups for phone addiction are still few and far between in North America, unlike China who has treated internet and phone addiction as a formal social problem far more aggressively [see internet addiction camps]. Keep in mind, China formally recognized internet addiction (网瘾 wangyin) as a severe disorder in 2008, and their implementation of top-down policies have created a cultural baseline for overuse as a health and discipline problem, not just a lifestyle choice. Phone addiction has become such a pervasive social and public health issue here in North America that I see no reason why it won’t increasingly be taken much more seriously beyond the informal treatment to date with app-blockers and other tech-enabled solutions.

The trend toward being skinnier à la Ozempic tracks with the ongoing desire to lead a healthier lifestyle, including limiting screen time. And I predict GLP-1s will play a significant role both in treating phone addiction as a primary use case, and as a secondary effect of using GLP-1s more generally. For one, there’s a clear and pretty obvious path to adoption, as evidenced by its accessibility. But as early research is already revealing, those already on GLP-1s are effectively rewiring the circuitry of their brains, altering what they desire and consume, and feeling more in control of their consumption behaviors.

Consumer capitalism’s grey swan

Economists call a “grey swan” an event that isn’t unimaginable, but whose consequences are wildly underestimated.

Companies are so fixated on how AI will disrupt their industry, but the grey swan hiding under our noses may actually be a widespread change in how people consume and the second-order effects on modern consumer capitalism. Online shopping and ecommerce behavior, the content people choose to watch, and the marketing tactics that actually sell may all be radically disrupted sooner and for different reasons than we think.

For instance, it’s common knowledge in advertising that capitalizing on human emotions like scarcity and urgency are effective forms of influence. That landscape is already changing, and yet still, I find a plentiful number of emails in my inbox with “last day to get 25% off!” and “only 1 left.” Increasingly, this kind of copy will be ineffective on a population whose strong impulse control does not make them feel wanting of a quick dopamine hit.

Short-form content, and in some cases the sloppification of branding and content, has become a common bet in a savvy consumer marketer’s rolodex. But there’s a world where channels that prioritize long-form and substance (hint: Substack) take the lead and become highly preferred. Seeing as they won’t just accept massive drops in usage, what will major social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram do when the attention economy is thwarted? Will they dig their heels in more aggressively with users who remain, adopting new seductive methods for engaging users who are now neurochemically addicted?

With the caveat that AI will play a non-trivial role in making advertisements hyper-personalized to the user (ads in ChatGPT have already begun), there will always be a place where authentic human-to-human marketing like WOM is valued. Substance will become a non-negotiable. This inevitably bleeds into how we devise human reputation systems, caring more about something based on who you know and trust, and experiential offline activities with more curated groups of friends.

The widest adoption of GLP-1s is in North America, where the US has over 30 million users compared to China’s roughly 2-4 million. Even though China’s market is rapidly developing new patents for weight-loss drugs, their Ozempic sales have actually fallen. In China, GLP-1s are not widely reimbursed, are expensive, and mostly prescribed for diabetes rather than cosmetic weight loss. Like the TikTok drug that has been heavily banned at home, China’s reluctance to dogfood their own GLP-1s at scale should make us think twice.

This experiment will no doubt have adversarial effects on the American political economy where consumer spending will be at worst reduced, at best reallocated. This is already materializing across food spending. Cornell researchers found that within six months of starting a GLP-1, households cut grocery spending by 5.3% on average, with a larger drop for higher-income households, and cut spending at fast food, coffee shops, and other limited-service restaurants by about 8%. Professor Sylvia Hristakeva points out that this decline was not just for the ultra-processed, calorie-dense:

The main pattern is a reduction in overall food purchases. Only a small number of categories show increases, and those increases are modest relative to the overall decline.

One could interpret this more optimistically. For decades, economists and environmentalists have warned that advanced economies may have reached a point of overconsumption. GLP-1s could mark a positive shift that we are approaching peak consumption. If consumer capitalism has been optimized to manufacture desire without meaningfully improving wellbeing, perhaps we are finally approaching the limits of that model.

A bane for compulsion-adjacent categories may become a boon for credit and insurance companies. Fitness tracker data has already become embedded in life insurance to help with underwriting. If GLP-1s become a recognizable signal of impulse-control, it would not be shocking to imagine prescription history being taken into account in credit scores or insurance premiums. It’s somewhat dystopian that we might consider pricing access to capital and insurance coverage based on someone’s “impulse profile.”

But once a behavior or drug becomes embedded in everyday life, it becomes difficult to roll back. There’s good reason to believe GLP-1s could be a net positive for reducing obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, but we’re still operating without full certainty about the broader societal tradeoffs. Unlike the anti-smoking campaigns (which still took nearly fifty years to prove effective), GLP-1s are heavily associated with positives like weight loss and visible status improvement, not visible stigma—yellow teeth, bad breath, black lungs, and an inherently public activity. In other words, how do you encourage a population dependent on GLP-1s, especially for cosmetic purposes, to stop taking the drug when they want to stay skinny?

Capitalism hinges on our continued desire to consume. To constantly be in a state of wanting. GLP-1s won’t wipe that out entirely, but at the very least will disrupt those industries founded on excess consumption and our impulsivity to spend: alcohol, gambling, gaming, fast fashion, fast food, social media.

Modern capitalism optimizes for stimulating desire. GLP-1s may be the first large-scale pharmaceutical that dampens it.

Silicon valley biohacking

The latest rumor of a rumor is that hedge funds are banning GLP-1s from their traders. From Matt Levine:

A few months ago, someone told me that they had heard a rumor that a bank or hedge fund had banned its traders from taking Ozempic, Wegovy and other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. The theory, as I understood it, was something like “traders need to make quick decisions based on gut instinct, and GLP-1s mess with your gut instincts.” You’re not hungry for snacks, you’re not hungry for profits, you lose your edge. I have not confirmed this rumor, or heard it from anyone else, but se non è vero, è ben trovato. (If your job bans you from taking GLP-1s, do let me know!)

In an obsession with optimizing every granular facet of their lives, Silicon Valley biohackers are taking Retatrutide and Tirzepatide to looksmaxx or, for some, use their bodies as an experiment to achieve immortality. To give no indication that there’s an ounce of discipline they don’t possess.

Without disparaging the necessity for those who clinically need it, I can’t help but wonder if GLP-1s in many tech circles are just another optimization trend. In Silicon Valley, the mythology of earned discipline is treated as a personal virtue. The mythos that founders succeed because they possess superhuman levels of self-mastery is expressed through things like 996 culture, fasting and cold plunges, biohacking and productivity optimization. Unlike stimulants, peptides don’t directly increase focus, but pharmacologically reduced impulses can easily be mistaken for exceptional self-control.

Still, maybe there’s a hidden cost to optimization that’s being glossed over. The ultra-disciplined, strong impulse-controlled founder might play their business strategy too safe. The venture capitalist might opt for fewer moonshot investments for a more conservative portfolio. The artist may have fewer bursts of creative focus. There’s some amount of obsessiveness and compulsive drive that makes the world go round. Tinkering at the edges is where we see breakthroughs in progress. Without catastrophizing the drug, there’s a scenario where GLP-1s could actually lead to midcurve.

It may seem trivial to focus on GLP-1s when performance-enhancing drugs have been used recreationally for years. But lifestyle adoption of GLP-1s has already exceeded drugs like Adderall by about 5% in a span of only a few years. This isn’t a small segment of the population occasionally experimenting with drugs, it’s a widespread lifestyle shift.

Low-desire living

This self-reported ennui begs a deeper philosophical reflection of what we might lose. A recent post by Dr. Shin Geon-yeong went viral for his prediction that people on GLP-1s will have difficulty falling in love. No published clinical evidence links GLP-1 agonists to lowered oxytocin—in other words, his claim is likely a stretch—but many commenters on peptides recall being shocked by how much the drugs lowered their libido, as an unintended consequence.

Evidently, this lifestyle drug is already creeping into many aspects of life, and it’s only the beginning.

But on a purely philosophical level, I wonder what short-circuiting impulse control does to someone’s agency. Do you lose the trust in yourself to get through hard things? How much do we value our own self-control as evidence of willpower?

A friend shared an analogy that I keep circling back to. In the wild, plants grow under constant wind. The movement forces them to develop thicker stems and deeper roots. Gardeners sometimes shield backyard plants with barriers like burlap or chicken wire so they grow straighter and more protected.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with either environment. But they produce different kinds of growth.

I can’t help but wonder if GLP-1s are doing something similar to us. By dampening appetite and impulse, they may be removing some of the internal “winds” that have long shaped human behavior—craving, restlessness, excess, obsession.

These forces create plenty of vice. But they also create ambition, art, risk, and love.

If a growing share of society begins chemically smoothing those impulses away, we may become healthier, more disciplined.

But we may grow differently, too.

~

Sam

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Edge City functions as a crucible for high-curiosity people, but it isn’t an outlier. Across tech and culture, IRL gatherings, popup (and permanent) cities, and social-intellectual in-person events are proliferating, to the point that 2026 is already being dubbed the year of analog.

On the surface, the trend toward going offline seems to be an obvious one: social media is no longer social, doomscrolling is rotting our brains, and human interaction is cool again. But in my circles, “touch grass” has become career advice. People aren’t just leaving the internet to recover their attention. They’re doing it to get non-replicable inputs and pressure-test non-obvious outputs. Niche IRL subculture is where you stop performing taste and start producing it, in dialogue with weird people and radical ideas. The kind of conditions where scenius tends to emerge.

It’s no surprise IRL events have taken off amid the AI boom. The tools have levelled the playing field for what any one person can do, but AI-native nerds who’ve spent the most time with the models are all the more deliberate in how they use them. After enough exposure, the sycophancy becomes obvious, and so does the fear of outsourcing too much thinking and deskilling yourself into the permanent underclass.

I’ve even noticed this showing up at the extremes. Catching up recently with a former colleague who’s well regarded as a sharp engineer, I was surprised to learn he hardly uses AI at all, aside from the occasional Cursor aid. It didn’t sound like a principled stand so much as a way to keep certain muscles intact.

As AI collapses earned effort, it seems plausible we’re developing an existential fatigue around the primary modes of thought as famously described by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow, System 1—fast, instinctive—and System 2—slow, deliberative thought. While Kahneman provides a useful framework for individual cognition, there’s a third, dialogic mode we have been overlooking. Perhaps, more than the Great Unplugging, this is a new renaissance for collective intelligence.

Thinking alone

We probably use the word “intelligence” more now than ever in human history. Yet, it’s not obvious we’re getting any clearer about what it means.

Intelligence is often treated as an individual attribute. Something a person possesses, and performs through grades, IQ scores, degrees, and later through work. This framing, however, reflects a particular institutional moment rather than a timeless understanding of intelligence.

In the pre-modern world, thinking predated intelligence as a concept. Thought was understood as relational and dialogic, and was cultivated through participation in Socratic dialogue in the time of Plato, and later through Aristotelian notions of the polis, rhetoric, and apprenticeship. Dialogue was not merely a teaching tool, but a mechanism through which knowledge was approached and revealed between minds. This began to change in the 17th century with the Cartesian split, which redefined knowledge as what could survive radical isolation. With Descartes’ cogito, thinking was severed from culture and dialogue, and relocated inside the private, internal mind:

I think, therefore I am. - Discourse on the Method (1637)

Over time, we moved from thinking as an internal process to a systemic one. Industrialization and mass schooling required thinking to become legible and in turn, prioritized certain modes of thinking over others. In the early 20th century, IQ tests and scientific management emerged to make thinking measurable, comparable, and administrable at scale. Workplaces soon followed suit, organizing around operational efficiency rather than open-ended collaboration. The knowledge worker’s thinking became modular—broken into OKRs, KPIs, and performance reports. Modern work has individualized accountability while systematizing thought, leaving little room for genuine collective intelligence.

Bell Labs remains somewhat of a post-institutional anomaly for this reason. Mervin Kelly famously designed the corridors of Murray Hill to be incredibly long (some over 700 feet, the length of 2 football fields) to force scientists from different disciplines to bump into each other. The environment was designed for serendipitous encounters. Their open door policy and flattened hierarchy encouraged researchers to talk to each other. Importantly, Bell Labs was a space where slow productivity was encouraged, respecting the notion that the creative process could not be forced.

There are countless stories of innovation emerging from impromptu brainstorming sessions and lunchroom debates; casual spaces where dialogue emerged naturally. The invention of the transistor resulted from constant dialogue between theoretical physicists like John Bardeen and experimentalists like Walter Brattain. When AT&T’s patent lawyers were trying to understand what made certain individuals more successful, they stumbled on a common thread: workers with the most patents often shared meals with Harry Nyquist, a Bell Labs electrical engineer. Nyquist was exceptionally good at asking questions that “drew people out” and got them thinking. These collisions across thinkers and builders led to a staggering amount of innovation, including the transistor, the laser, the solar cell, and information theory. Bell Labs resisted legibility, yet has remained a clear outlier as a vanguard of innovation.

This kind of thinking doesn’t fit neatly into Kahneman’s System 1 or System 2 thinking. What Kahneman described as “fast” thinking is linked closely to sense perception and automatic functions; our “slow” mode of thinking is rational, reflective, and what is often associated with the term conscious thought. As functions of the brain, there’s a clear reason why we’d want to understand this phenomenon at an individual level. But these descriptions don’t capture the types of thinking that exist not in the single minds of isolation, but by the messier kind that occurs as socially engaged and interconnected beings.

This is what has conceptualized as System 3 Thinking, a mode of thinking that is neither automatic nor effortful, as Kahneman describes of System 1 and System 2. Rather, it’s a mode of thinking that by definition “involves an engagement with multiplicity.” Put simply, System 3 thinking is collective thinking that happens when people think together. It’s differentiated in that it produces intelligence that doesn’t belong to any individual, and enables ideas that no single person in the room has conceived.

A further hypothesis is that System 3 is not only vital to engaging with complexity, it is itself irreducibly complex.

I first encountered this framework when attending Dila’s talk at a Toronto event this past fall. We discussed how conversation is a technology that enables thinking together, and how all conversation involves System 3 thinking. Not all conversation is created equal, though. Intimacy, immersion, and intention are essential. By his definition, face-to-face conversation has higher throughput than digital, and physical presence matters for full-spectrum thinking. There’s an embodied component to dialogue that is difficult to fully replicate online, even over a virtual call. Dila equates the exchange of System 3 to a form of play:

In this respect, the kind of conversation I am talking about here is game-like: both in the sense that there is no point in playing a game whose outcome is already known (that’s the very point of “playing,” after all) and in the sense that participating in a conversation, like playing a game, means being guided by and observing “rules,” but is something far greater than a series of rule-bound exchanges.

But we don’t think about conversation as a disciplined practice like we used to. Somewhere along the way we lost the forums to get past small talk. We lost the symposia, salon culture, and the coffeehouses. These were wrappers that made conversation a serious, ongoing practice; something you keep returning to even when it’s difficult, like going to the gym or practicing yoga. Rarely would we consider discussion to be a form of cognitive fitness, in the way we’ve made working out a legible form of physical fitness.

I think it’s time we do.

The duck who talks back

But then the question becomes, is dialoging with AI a form of System 3 thinking? We’re having conversations with LLMs all the time. ChatGPT users are sending about 2.5 billion prompts per day. Even the UI is meant to feel like a conversation. A very deliberate design choice was made about the interfaces of LLMs—from the response pacing to text streaming—to feel like you’re being responded to.

The response to Claude’s latest update Cowork has mostly been met with resounding praise, as the next wave becomes vibe coding personal software. Utility aside, there’s a nuanced perspective emerging that what’s efficient isn’t always best. And as the cyclical nature of society goes, we return to what works when faced with an existential crisis: you should be friction-maxxing.

Dialogue is a form of friction in a world where you can outsource most of your conversation to an LLM.

If System 3 arises when two or more participants experience emergent cognition that is not contained within any single participant, it’s not clear that LLMs currently activate this type of thinking. In this context, learning—of a durable, personal transformation kind—is asymmetric.

I’ve had conversations with people that leave me on a high for hours, the kind where you completely disassociate from your surroundings and lose track of time. The kind that fuels you with inspiration and creative energy to write a new piece, or obsessively go down niche rabbit holes. Despite how useful they are, I’ve personally never experienced this kind of embodied runner’s high from talking to ChatGPT.

Conversing with LLMs may be more of a one-sided interaction, but it can be useful as a simulated version of System 3 thinking—a practice ground for thinking with others. Dialoging with an LLM can be a form of an extremely sophisticated “rubber ducking,” where you’re continuously explaining your thought-process in order to clarify your thinking. From this view, LLMs might not be entirely replicating System 3 thinking, but there’s clearly some simulated cognitive prosthesis at play and the potential to be a tool within this process.

Reputation

Another reason why outsourcing conversation to AI might not be wise is that human reputation is becoming the new currency. An anti-rule I’ve set for myself this year is that I won’t default to virtual meetings when an in-person option exists. While not always expedient, relationship building is far superior when you’re in the same room as the person you’re talking to.

And a big part of that relationship building is trust. As it becomes trivial to lie about your identity online and claim anything with zero stakes, people would literally rather fly across the country just to establish that who they’re talking to is legit.

Dead Internet is not just about false information. It's a lack of human connection.

The rise of IRL events, popup cities, and dinners is more curated and less transactional than it once was. It’s becoming less about how many people you know, and more about how well you are known to others. Not just anyone, but a small, high-signal group of people with whom you build bidirectional relationships and genuine human connection. Reputation becomes your capital.

Contrary to parasocial reputations—the perceptions people have of you who don’t actually know you—social reputations are built through repeated interactions over time. Your offline reputation is becoming incredibly valuable not only in terms of the groups and opportunities you gain access to, but the unique ideas you’re privy to. Unique because they couldn’t possibly exist without the meeting of minds in your specific milieu.

Judgment, taste, and authenticity get thrown out as the defensible skills in a post-AI world, but qualities like these don’t develop in a vacuum. They sharpen through differentiated inputs and feedback loops you get from sharing work with others. The Cultural Tutor has talked about his reluctance to read books from the last fifty years, primarily because that’s what everyone else is doing:

It’s a simple fact of life that if you consume, if you read what everyone else is reading, then the likelihood that you will write what they are writing, and worst of all, think what they are thinking, is increased.

Like differentiating the books you consume, participating in curated IRL subculture is a way to differentiate inputs. And like books that have stood the test of time, gaining the reputation of a classic, quality matters here too.

Convening IRL contrasts with knowledge-hoarding or building a second brain on Obsidian in one important way: you’re not just vibing with other people and ideas, you’re sharing your own outputs, ideas, lectures, demos, in a live, high-signal forum.

New social forms

Bell Labs didn’t happen because a bunch of nerds decided to get together for coffee.

It happened because Mervin Kelly was highly opinionated in how the organization was architected, from the space to social etiquette and values upheld.

Cultural infrastructure is a necessary part of the equation to a growing offline world.

recently wrote a (really great) piece on social forms, which he defines as “the templates of social life” like dinner parties, book clubs, an all-hands meeting, or a first date. He argues that social forms predate institutions, the social forms that get solidified into law and power. In order to create the cultural conditions for new institutions, we need to radically experiment with social forms.

This is why I’m particularly bullish on groups of people taking these creative risks. Edge City and Edge Esmeralda are building curated multi-generational communities, where the majority of programming is bottom-up. Co-Founder talks about how this design was intentional:

We approached everything with the mindset of emergence, meaning we created the container and intentionally left space for the community to shape the village themselves.

This becomes a breeding ground for emergent thinking.

Beyond the more extreme examples of social forms like Edge, I’m also noticing friends in my circles experiment with reading seminars, weekly “office hours” at a consistent location, attending/lecturing courses through community-run neighbourhood campuses, or creating third spaces in abandoned food courts.

When faced with an existential crisis, it’s society’s cyclical nature to return to what’s always worked. Human connection and dialogue are making a comeback, not for nostalgia’s sake, but as real, viable infrastructure.

If you made it this far, go touch some grass. Strike up a spontaneous conversation with someone you respect, and you might just land somewhere you didn’t expect. Talking is generative.

As always, thanks for taking the time to read and think with me here.

If you’re planning on attending Edge Esmeralda in Healdsburg this May, I’d love to connect there. Feel free to get in touch here or send me a DM.

-Sam

Work-life balance is a lie we were all told before we even knew what a career was.

It hasn’t always been this way though. The concept of partitioning work and life is a relatively new phenomenon. Before the push for the 8-hour workday emerged as a response to the Industrial Revolution, working life was profoundly seasonal and embedded in the home and community. You didn’t “go to work”; the bread made, the fields tended, the cloth woven, all formed a single, integrated fabric of one’s life.

Work-life balance deceives us into thinking that work and life are opposing forces. In practice, you can never quite fully surrender to either. The internet has quarrelled over the work-life balance debate for the past decade. In tech and founder circles, most will at least agree it’s a flawed and outdated way of seeing how we work.

But the harm it inflicts is more insidious than we give it credit for. We lose something inherently valuable when we exist with this false dichotomy of work and life. We lose the opportunity to build a meaningful, wholly integrated life. The careful act of boundary setting will deny you the ability to reach for anything at all. Work simply becomes a mechanical act, as a sole means to an end. At an individual level this manifests as apathy. At a societal level, stunted progress.

A healthier framework to live by is one of integration. Work-life integration corresponds with a deep intention behind the choices you make, and the agency you have in how you choose to spend your time. This may sound utopian to the average working adult. But that’s simply because our relationship to work is not something we develop the second we get our first job. It’s seeded far earlier, in an education system that trains us to see work as something to endure and play as the reward for getting through it.

In the age of autocomplete, we’re forced to confront a reality where industries undergo dramatic transformation and jobs disappear entirely. Montessori’s philosophy teaches us something important about what work is for and how it preserves our humanness.

Montessori’s philosophy on work

I’m convinced my relationship to work has always been positive because of how I was introduced to it at Montessori.

One of the many reasons why I’m Montessori-pilled is because of how it taught me to think about work. I was just four years old when I started at my Montessori school, and the concept of a work cycle was introduced to me. These daily work cycles consisted of three hours of uninterrupted work. And there was no kid-gloving what we were doing—it was very explicitly called work and treated with a similar seriousness. But this seriousness wasn’t a deterrent for enjoyment, nor contrasted with play as the desirable reward for effort. The sustained focus of independent work cycles and ability to choose what we worked on unlocked what I’d later learn was a flow state. And from that point onward, I’ve chased that feeling.

It occurred to me that most young people rarely experience this feeling once they enter school. On the basis of “engagement,” traditional schools train teachers to interrupt students every few minutes, sometimes as often as every four(!), and change activities before any deep focus can take root.

Montessori believed that work isn’t just something we do, it’s how we become. Montessori saw moral character as something built through deliberate, effortful work—an inner discipline that, when cultivated broadly, could raise the level of society as a whole. In The Secret of Childhood she writes:

It is certain that the child’s attitude towards work represents a vital instinct; for without work his personality cannot organize itself and deviates from the normal lines of its construction. Man builds himself through working… using his hands as the instruments of his ego, the organ of his individual mind and will. The child’s instinct confirms the fact that work is an inherent tendency in human nature; it is the characteristic instinct of the human race.

For Montessori, the significance of work goes beyond skill-building. It’s a child’s first experience of moral agency: choosing, persisting, correcting, and contributing. The classroom is not just preparing students for future jobs. It is preparing them to become the kind of people who can act with purpose in the world.

Work in a Montessori classroom is deeply personal and meaningful. It’s how a person continues their self-construction, not only in childhood but throughout adulthood. It’s not about choosing what’s easiest either; we’re naturally wired to choose work that is effortful, and worthy of our abilities. This chosen difficulty is what Montessori believes builds our character. In her view, work is not just economic activity—it’s the primary arena for moral development.

Montessori’s philosophy would reject the concept of work-life balance. Productivity hacking, multitasking, and work purely for external ends prevent us from building the moral development she identifies as critical to individual actualization and collective action.

Work-life integration*

A few months ago, when my husband, , and I exited our last company, we had the opportunity to start from first principles: What do we care about? What do we want to build? What kind of lifestyle do we want to create for our future family?

Renaissance was born out of obsessive intention. We care about building better cultural infrastructure for agency and autonomy, and everything flows from this through line. Our relationships and the conversations we have. Our content diet. The values we orient ourselves to. They’re all harmonious to this central mission. We’ve realized it would be stifling to put up guardrails on when to talk about work and not, because it’s become far too core to who we are. And mostly because we genuinely enjoy it.

When there’s deep alignment between what you care about and what you’re working on, it’s like an infinite well that you can keep pulling from. We describe what we’re building as a modern family business, and naturally, choosing to work with your spouse means that your home, routines, and marriage become a kind of prepared environment for the work you’re trying to do together.

It occurred to me that what we’re doing is an adult expression of Montessori’s moral theory of work. And starting a company as a husband and wife duo, it turns out, is its own extreme version of work-life integration. It isn’t a model everyone can or should replicate, but for us, it has made the alignment between work and life unusually explicit.

But even before Karel and I made this transition, we had rejected any form of work-life balance. We were working all hours of the day in our previous company, where global employees and stakeholders often meant being on calls at 9am and 9pm. From the moment we woke up we were glued to our phones. There was a sense of urgency to always be on; we understood it was necessary and came with the territory of our work. This was likely some pathologized version of work-life integration, where work became our life but lacked deeper purpose. You see this faulty relationship to work manifest in hustle culture, toxic productivity, and trends like 996.

On its own, a period of working intensely isn’t pathological—I actually think most people should have at least one period in their life where they work unreasonably hard on something. And for many people, working to make money is meaningful in its own right. There is nothing trivial about wanting stability, or wanting to earn enough to change your circumstances, or wanting to support the people you love. Financial ambition is not at odds with meaningful work. It becomes a problem only when money becomes the entire frame, instead of one part of a larger arc of becoming.

Most people will have periods in their life where external ends take priority. Sometimes you take a job purely to pay rent, support family, or get a foot in the door. Early analyst roles, first sales jobs, shift work. These chapters are real, and sometimes necessary. The question is whether we treat them as the whole story (work as something to endure), or as part of a longer trajectory toward building skills, agency, and eventually alignment.

Work-life integration is often dismissed as a luxury. But alignment isn’t about wealth or status — it’s about coherence. A baker who takes pride in the quality of his sourdough may experience more harmony between work and life than the executive who spends half the day trying to hit inbox zero.

It’s understandable that most of the discourse around our relationship to work lives in the domain of adult life. Having experienced Montessori firsthand though, I’ve understood it to be a much more formative experience.

Our relationship to work is not something that magically unfolds when we leave college and start applying for our first real job. The problem lies in how we’re taught to think about work when we’re young.

Unlike Montessori, traditional school is a potent source of work-life misalignment. There are rare opportunities to choose your own work, let alone spend more than a few minutes on it without being interrupted. The moral outsourcing through external judgment via grades and teacher approval conditions young people to work for validation, rather than integrity of process. Traditional education hasn’t exactly been touted as the place where agency thrives, and that’s a generous assessment.

When your only exposure to work for years is transactional, resting solely on whether you pass or fail, it’s internalized as something external to yourself. You didn’t choose it. You didn’t connect to it. It doesn’t matter. Effort is merely a proxy for obedience.

The apathy we see in young adults today is downstream of education. When work becomes purely instrumental, we lose the part of work that shapes us. We lose the experiences that build judgment, discipline, and a sense of contribution. There are existing frameworks that can be applied at an individual level to help you cultivate a healthy relationship to work later in life. But ultimately, if we care about changing the cultural infrastructure at large, we need to address how young people are exposed to work in their early institutions.

While reading Slow Productivity recently, it struck me how much crossover Cal Newport’s book has with Montessori’s approach to work, specifically around the necessity of slowing down to accomplish meaningful work.

He talks about three specific ways that this slowing down occurs:

(1) Do fewer things; (2) Work at a natural pace; and (3) Obsess over quality

In an effort to evade pseudo-productivity, Newport proposes relentless pruning of tasks, arguing that in order to produce high-quality work, we must limit daily goals and focus on a few important things. He points out that we’ve inherited a false equivalent of industrial notions to productivity:

As I argued in the first part of this book, when knowledge work emerged as a major economic sector in the twentieth century, we reacted to the shock of all this newness by adapting hurried, industrial notions of productivity.

Working relentlessly to check off items on a list leaves no time to think, and leads inevitably to burnout and aimlessness. Work-life integration embraces the ebb and flow of living necessary to inspire original thought. When we consider the lives of extraordinary people, we see gaps of time, often years or decades before they have a breakthrough.

Newport’s framework is specifically aimed at knowledge workers and creatives, where measurable output is conceptual. It isn’t practically applicable for someone working in a role where output is linear, and has billable hours, like the trades. That said, these principles can be applied indirectly across all facets of work e.g. choosing not to take on too many projects to protect long-term physical health, building a reputation as the top 1% in a particular domain.

At a systems level, there’s promising next-gen education that acknowledges the importance of young people building a healthy relationship to work. Alongside the enduring movement of Montessori, new models like Alpha are guided by their central promise, “kids will love school” while being academically challenged and self-driven. Co-founder Joe Liemandt often says, “We want to build it so the kids want to go to school instead of going on vacation.” However this manifests, I’m optimistic that new and existing models are gaining mainstream attention as alternatives to traditional education.

Work is not autocomplete for life

Whether we view work as something to embrace or dread, there’s no denying the existential fear collectively felt about a world without jobs. The AI discourse has played on our fear of the unknown. If we consider work purely a means to an end, then a world of human work appears superfluous. But this grossly underestimates the value of work as a moral good, and vessel for becoming—or remaining—human.

Montessori would not frame this crisis as a loss of work, but rather a loss of meaning. If anything, she’d see this inflection point as the ultimate test of agency. A machine can autocomplete tasks, but only a human can choose a life. AI might replace jobs, tasks, or productivity, but it can’t replace human work. In this moment in time, we’re presented with an opportunity to be more intentional about the work we choose to do, and find better alignment with the kind of work that forces us off autopilot. AI can predict almost anything, except who we decide to become.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be revealing more about what we’re building at Renaissance. Personally excited to share more about the direction we’re taking and what we’ve been working on with all of you!

If this post resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone in your network who might also be thinking about these ideas.

As always, thanks for reading.

-Sam

We’re worried about the wrong kind of cheating.

Mainstream discourse has reduced the AI conversation to institutional plagiarism and hyper-optimization, in a frenzied rush to not get “left behind.”

But a more insidious threat compounds daily. We have been outsourcing our decision-making to AI and algorithms. This doesn’t just influence what we buy, who we date, or how we spend our time. It increasingly shapes these choices through direct instruction and recommendation.

The Claude Boys started as an online meme mocking AI dependence, yet quickly transformed into a self-professed cohort of hundreds of teenagers who are outsourcing their entire daily lives and personal decisions to large language models. The satire became prophecy— a nod to a bleak future in which we surrender to technological determinism.

, founder of the Cosmos Institute, calls this “autocomplete for life.” And the implications extend far beyond subculture and affect all of us. In its obsession with frictionless design, consumer tech has produced convenient seductive alternatives that often steer us toward the path of least resistance.

And who can blame us? We’re wired for efficiency, but we must be cognizant of what we’re giving up. When we offload that small, formative friction of deliberation, we atrophy the muscle of self-direction. As philosopher L. M. Sacasas has stated, a frictionless life is also a life without traction. Without resistance, we are left drifting, perpetually suggested-to, but never authentically choosing.

The divide between those who cede to passive consumption and those who lead intentional lives is widening. As someone who thinks deeply about how we build environments to cultivate high agency, friction has become the most useful lens for understanding what’s at stake. Originality, taste, discernment.

These capacities don’t just make you interesting. They compound into edge, gradually then irrevocably like water sculpting stone. And most people are outsourcing them away without realizing it.

In a frictionless age, friction itself is power. The few who design it back into their lives will be irreplaceable. The ultimate stake, however, is not competence, but being. To accept the convenient, frictionless path is to trade the arduous, often messy, work of flourishing for the sedative ease of mere existence.

Why we need friction to flourish

Before we get to the strategic opportunity friction offers, it’s worth considering its value in principle. Every era produces its own moral infrastructure, and ours is being built around leverage. Choosing friction is, in part, a refusal to accept those defaults unexamined.

Benjamin Franklin understood this principle better than most. He designed his life around practices that forced confrontation with his own gaps and limitations:

• 13 virtues project: Each week Franklin focused on one virtue and tracked his daily progress in a notebook. He cycled through all thirteen for years. The process humbled him. By his own admission he failed often, but the daily tracking forced him to see the gap between his values and his behavior.

• The Spectator method: Franklin taught himself to write by studying The Spectator, a British magazine known for sharp prose. After reading an essay he would attempt to reconstruct it from memory several days later. He compared his version to the original to see where his rhythm, structure, and tone fell short. It was through this taxing process he discovered the mechanics of thought itself.

• Junto: Franklin formed the Junto, a society for mutual improvement. He gathered curious young tradesmen and professionals who wanted to sharpen their thinking on the agreement they abide by specific rules. This included using Socratic questioning, and above all pursuing truth rather than victory. Through the Junto, Franklin designed intellectual friction into his life.

• Public experimentation: Franklin married theory with practice. His experiments carried real physical risk (the kite experiment being the most famous). This made error visible. When experiments failed publicly, they tested his humility and exposed him to criticism.

Through these constraints, Franklin built practical judgment across multiple domains. Beyond achievement, his life showed clear signs of flourishing. He sustained deep friendships and mentorships while inventing, negotiating peace, and writing well into his eighties.

What I’m describing here is not a friction of arbitrary difficulty like shovelling yourself out of a snowstorm when a snowblower is readily available. By friction, I mean a productive resistance that builds capability. Franklin wasn’t born an academic savant nor was he given any handouts from his working class family. It was through sustained effort and repeated confrontation with reality that Franklin built the person he became.

As philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann argues, we must discern between “trouble we reject in principle but accept in practice” and “trouble we accept both in practice and in principle.” The former is difficulty we seek to eliminate through solutions and cures—cancer or car accidents—even if we accept in practice that we must endure them. But the other kind refers to a resistance that constitutes meaning—cooking a meal, hiking a mountain. These are difficult tasks we choose to do and agree that in principle and in practice the resistance is good. Which troubles we accept in principle depends on what we’re trying to build and what we value. Cooking from scratch might be productive friction for someone developing culinary skill or impressing a partner, but pointless hardship for someone whose meaning comes from other domains.

So is friction necessary for human flourishing? Yes, but only the right kind. The capacity to discern which resistance builds you and which merely burdens you is itself a form of judgment. And that judgment, like every other capability worth having, can only be developed through practice. You can’t outsource it to an algorithm or optimize your way around it.

The collapse of earned effort

I can’t stop thinking about this post from :

I worry that AI will make most people intellectually sedentary. When we no longer had to do as much manual labor thanks to new technology, we became more sedentary and baseline fitness declined. At the same time, a minority of people got fitter than ever because they exercised with intention, for status or self-care.

AI could create a world where most people become intellectually slovenly, while the privileged or determined few give themselves mental superpowers.

This was in response to an MIT brain scan study of ChatGPT users that revealed cognitive disparities between users and non-users. A week previously, Mary Harrington’s opinion piece was published in The New York Times, titled “Thinking is Becoming a Luxury Good” in which she argues cognitive fitness is stratifying along class lines just as physical health has.

As the uncertainty about what a post-AI future will look like grows, the consensus on what skills and traits that will shake out to be useful becomes foggier. Those with the most intel and capital are forming their own hypotheses—a movement that’s creating a widening divide between those who outsource their thinking and attention to screens and those who are doubling down on intellectual “exercise.” In other words, those who see orientation toward difficulty as something worth preserving and those who cede to its decline. The elite have been opting out in a variety of ways long before consumer AI made its debut, sending their children to Waldorf and classical schools, and hiring phone-free nannies.

Designing intellectual friction into your life—grappling with the Great Books and messiness of original sources rather than generating a summary, for instance—will determine what side of the divide you’re on. Not only is intellectual exercise becoming a scarce, high-value moat to preserve, but the compounding effects of critical thinking and focus will allow you to develop a non-fungible judgment, a practical wisdom needed to see original problems that AI is blind to. This is a clear edge in the age of cognitive atrophy.

But this divide isn’t just economic. A subset of ambitious Gen Z see the opportunity at stake here and are actually emboldened by the agency AI offers them to work on more purposeful endeavors. interviewed a cohort of college-age students, many of them True Fellows with early access to AI, who shared an optimistic vantage point on the future of work:

They believe we’re entering an economy where technical skills are commoditized, but they’re hedging that self-expression and problem identification will persist as the scarcest resources.

Productive resistance doesn’t just allow you to become intellectually “fitter,” it allows you to become more intentional about where you choose to spend your time. Solving big problems in the world, devoting your time to passion projects, becoming an expert in your craft—all of these things take considerable mental fortitude and real effort. To be blunt, you can’t half-ass it. As AI commoditizes instant content and quick takes, these are the kinds of endeavours that will have strong market value. Friction then becomes a contrarian signal of effort.

On its own, AI is a form of mimesis. The tendency to want what others want, what René Girard called mimetic desire, is algorithmically amplified. In turn, the default consumer becomes homogenous. But bring a strong interior world and deep priors, and AI becomes an avenue to amplify self-authorship. Friction is what builds and protects that interior world. It’s the only way to stay interesting in a world of slop and sycophantic sameness.

Choose your trouble

As Borgmann alludes to, not all “trouble” or friction is worth accepting both in principle and in practice. But discerning which friction to preserve and where to focus your effort depends on what you value.

The clearer your orientation, the stronger your justification for self-imposed friction. And through this process of effort and intention, confrontation with reality will continue to refine what matters.

Here are a few concrete examples, including some of my own self-imposed:

• Becoming a parent → arguably imposes some of the most enduring friction and with it, some of the highest upside for personal transformation. Forces orientation toward the future and stakes your identity on something larger than yourself.

• Committing to a complex long-term project → things like writing a book, building a company, and multi-year research builds tolerance for uncertainty and delayed gratification.

• Engaging with ideas you disagree with in long-form → as the great Paul Graham has said “If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it.” Long form writing sharpens thinking and prevents cognitive atrophy, an antidote to AI sycophancy.

• Participating in live debates / Socratic discussions → form your own Junto club or join salons like Interintellect. Seek out dissenting perspectives and engage in difficult conversations where the answer isn’t obvious. Creates real-time discomfort necessary to challenge/sharpen your own perspectives.

• Reading physical books, joining book clubs → forces you to focus on select texts and creates accountability for deep engagement. Builds taste and expands worldviews beyond what the algorithm serves to you. Difficult texts e.g. the Great Books build foundational knowledge. The Catherine Project and The Great Library of Alexandria are two excellent (free) initiatives to get started.

• Hosting dinners at your home → requires planning and commitment. In turn, accelerates deeper relationships. Can be optimal for connecting people across different groups and inviting people you’re still getting to know.

• Training for something specific → signing up for a competition or performance imposes external accountability and requires you to put in work. Exposes true skill level under pressure and raises the stakes for deep learning.

When your preferences solely come from recommendations and your thoughts from prompts, you erode the capacity for self-direction. In the Decision AI era, friction is what preserves the interior complexity that makes a life feel like yours.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about my own friction and how to lead a more intentional life, from the content I consume to the things I choose to work on, while still embracing technology.

I’d love to hear from others doing the same. How are you designing productive resistance into your life?

And if this post resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone in your network who might also be thinking about these ideas.

As always, thanks for reading.

-Sam

As a corollary to the common “you can just do things,” most people forget that you can also just not do things.

Opting out of school in favor of alternatives like homeschooling is often resisted because people forget this.

You don't need to jump through the same formulaic hoops, spending a year in each grade just to reach college. The arbitrary timelines we treat as sacred aren't gospel, and they vary wildly across states, provinces, and countries anyway. What is consistent across district lines is how outdated most school curriculum is.

Hannah Cairo defies conventional educational pathways entirely. The seventeen-year-old recently made headlines for disproving the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a mathematical achievement that would be remarkable for any researcher, let alone someone who has never set foot in a traditional classroom. Homeschooled throughout her life, Hannah audited courses at UC Berkeley before bypassing college altogether to pursue her PhD. While Hannah is a more extreme wunderkind example, her story reminds people that the rules are only there as a palatable guide, not an absolute.

But even the average person underestimates and often ignores entirely how easy it actually is to opt out of school. Here in Ontario, homeschooling is as simple as submitting a yearly notice of intent, though legally even that step isn’t required. While it may be easy on paper, many families understandably struggle with the social pressures when weighing the decision to do something alternative to the norm. Parents can point blame at the school system when their child is failing, but you personally shoulder the blame if you've chosen to do something different, like homeschool. While that may feel risky, I'd argue the real risk is falling complacent to a system without questioning if there are better ways.

There are many cases of families turning to homeschooling as a last resort, often because of severe instances of bullying or unmet needs in school. Without making sweeping generalizations, I've observed these push-factor homeschoolers often focus on replicating school at home, just without the harmful environment.

For the purpose of this piece, let's call this cohort the school-at-home homeschoolers.

This is where most minds wander when they hear homeschooling. The school-at-home homeschoolers mirror the familiar structures of school through similar schedules, content, and benchmarks. They care deeply about covering all the required school material so their kid doesn't fall behind, possibly because they see homeschooling as a temporary phase. Their approach relies heavily on textbooks, worksheets, and grade-level curriculum as a way to provide continuity and stability.

Sure, there are plenty of homeschoolers who do this, but there's also another group — the intentional homeschoolers.

These are families who are choosing to homeschool because they believe they can design something better than what traditional public school provides. They are deliberate about what is worth keeping from school, but just as importantly, they thoughtfully decide what they eliminate and won’t carry over. This distinction allows them to think outside the box and capture more of homeschooling’s benefits, because they’re not preoccupied with matching pace or checking every school benchmark. As a result, this group often emphasizes personalized and curated learning experiences, weaving in practical learning alongside academics. I hesitate to identify this as unschooling, simply because the intentional homeschooler may still prioritize structure in certain subjects and see value in formal study, with an opinionated lens.

And while I’m drawing an exaggerated line between two distinct cohorts here, this is a false dichotomy in the strict sense. Many families who begin homeschooling with a school-at-home mindset often evolve into a more intentional approach along the way.

If more families approached homeschooling as a better path versus a last resort, it would shift the narrative entirely. You have considerably more freedom to design learning than most people recognize. Yes, you must cover the foundations, but that doesn't require replicating an outdated institution. Real leverage lies in recognizing that education isn't a zero-sum game; time saved by shedding the ineffective can be reinvested into experiences with compounding returns. The continued rise of homeschooling is a direct result of more families discovering the upside of this flexibility.

The best way I can delineate what intentional homeschooling looks like is through the varied examples of exceptional families I’ve spoken with and observed:

Place-based homeschooling

Consider two scenarios. Which would lead to a more immersive and memorable education experience?

1. Learning about the Pyramids from a PowerPoint in a fluorescent-lit classroom

2. Standing inside the Great Pyramid, seeing its scale and craftsmanship for yourself

The latter is clearly superior.

Travel is one of the most enriching ways to experience the world and receive an education. It's hard to consider a scenario where sitting in a classroom beats the opportunity to experience the world, but unlike homeschooling, traditional school doesn't offer the same flexibility.

On the ambitious side of this spectrum you have the Matt Griswolds of the world. Matt sailed the world for four years, visiting eighteen countries, with his wife and three children.

On how he handled schooling during this time:

The boat, the sea, and the places we go are all a classroom so we try to spend even more time teaching the kids on walks and dives. When you realize that school is all around you then you also accept that everyone you encounter is a teacher, and we have enjoyed the hospitality of many strangers that have taught our kids about their culture, food, and history.

As a more common arrangement, my friend Lisa enrolls her children in local schools when they travel. While not exactly formal homeschooling, it offers them plenty of opportunities to be deeply immersed in the culture and language of a new place. She described this process as surprisingly easy to arrange.

But of course, regular travel-based education is not always financially or logistically feasible for most families, and even if it is, it involves a serious lifestyle change not everyone is comfortable making. The principle, however, scales to more accessible applications.

It can be as simple as bringing your child with you to run adult errands. These everyday tasks offer a wealth of opportunities for real-world learning and hands-on experience. You’d be surprised at how willing professionals and small business owners are to share with young people who are curious. As homeschooling advocate has said, “people will do all sorts of things for interested children.”

Lincoln, a thirteen-year-old homeschooler passionate about nuclear engineering, recently toured the Aalo factory after reaching out to the company. They not only responded but gave him a full behind-the-scenes look at their operations.

There are a host of creative ways one can approach homeschooling on the basis of location that don’t need to be extravagant or expensive. Some of the most unlikely but memorable experiences can materialize with a simple ask. As I frequently like to say, “closed mouths don’t get fed.”

Entrepreneurial homeschooling

Intentional homeschooling can also take the form of entrepreneurship and participating in the modern day family business. Many entrepreneurial tech elite in places like Austin are rejecting traditional school and embracing the homeschooling movement, often by immersing their children in their businesses and providing them with access to tech and social capital.

This is far from a new trend but rather a return to natural learning. We evolved from hunter-gatherer tribes where children grew up with a deep understanding of adult work, both through real-life exposure and imitation through play.

In Advice to Entrepreneurial Parents, outlines first and foremost, you must inspire your child:

1. Above all, ensure that your children respect and, ideally, are inspired by your family's business achievements. This consists of:

A. Having great achievements that you are justifiably proud of.

B. Articulating the well founded case for them.

C. Doing your best to ensure that schools, teachers, or peers don't undermine this respect.

Beyond being a role model, this endeavor should progress gradually. It can start with dinner table discussions and job shadowing, move to skill development with manageable tasks, and eventually allow them to take on larger responsibilities and roles within the company.

Michael describes a number of scenarios to illustrate what this looks like in practice (many of these young people are alumni or current students from his virtual school, The Socratic Experience):

Braden Blacker’s dad is a serial entrepreneur, most recently selling Songclip (Audiobyte). He is now a principal for Concordia Capital, which both invests for family offices and provides investment banking advisory services. Braden had been following his dad’s work, reading his pitch decks, listening to calls, sometimes going to meetings, for years. By the time he was in high school, he was selling hoodies online and in a band trying to promote their music. It was then that he realized that the entire challenge in music was distribution.

With experience producing his own music, he began reaching out to influencers and offering to write and produce music for them, thus leveraging their existing fame and audience into pop star status for them. He was able to get a few gigs like this and then got into talent management for influencers. This led to a gig while still 17 at Fixated, a new media company for content creators. After six months there he left to go on his own as a digital marketer and talent manager, now working with his dad on media, content, and advertising deals, with Braden at 18 the lead advisor on the content side and his dad and Concordia as capital partners.

And another:

Emilio Tucker’s dad, Jack Tucker, buys and sells real estate. As a 12 year old, Emilio was given the task of vetting tax delinquent properties based on a set of criteria. Once he mastered the criteria, he hired and managed a team of virtual assistants to find more properties. As AI agents improved and the difficulties of managing human beings became apparent, by the time he was 13 he had let go of the virtual assistants and was vetting properties on government databases using an AI bot that he had developed. Again, his dad had immersed him in his business world for years, engaging in calls, explaining what he was doing, teaching him the basics. Emilio joined The Socratic Experience again for two hours per day to obtain additional conceptual frameworks regarding entrepreneurial activity.

He and his dad are constantly exploring additional potential AI businesses. He is racing through Math Academy for math, covering high school geometry as an 8th grader in three months. But mostly he works with his dad and receives performance-based compensation which is already in the six figures range. He is legitimately leading his branch of the family business.

You don’t need to have a family business to engage in this type of homeschooling either. If you are a creative or entrepreneurial person, there are many ways to immerse a young person in your projects and intellectual life. The most important thing is to collapse the hard line distinction between “kid work” and “adult work,” and embrace a more fluid, inviting approach to your professional life.

Early exposure to entrepreneurship has a lasting impact. The Lost Einsteins study estimates millions of brilliant inventors are never discovered for lack of early exposure to innovation. Researchers found that areas where clusters of innovation form—especially with high concentrations of businesses—had little to do with talent distribution, but a lot to do with the kind of exposure to innovation young people have access to, especially in early childhood. Parents, extended family, and friends all play a role in driving this.

This transmission of human capital can be referred to as Dinner Table Human Capital, and has proven to be valuable to innovative activity, not only in the creation of more businesses but in the creation of more successful ones.

In a large-scale study using detailed Norwegian registry data on 27,000+ startups, economists Hans Hvide (University of Bergen) and Paul Oyer (Stanford GSB) tracked entrepreneurs, their fathers’ industries, and outcomes over more than a decade. They found:

• 72% of entrepreneurs start in the same or closely related industry as their fathers.

• Those who do are more successful - they raise more money, survive longer, hire more, and are up to 2x more likely to build a top 5% company.

• Even when fathers have died, the effect persists, proving it’s not about direct help but knowledge passed down over years at home.

Compare this to traditional college graduates. The average college student accumulates $28,950 in debt and enters the job market with theoretical knowledge but little practical experience. Meanwhile, Emilio Tucker is earning six figures and building real businesses at 13. Even accounting for exceptional cases, early exposure to real work creates advantages that classroom learning can’t match.

Whether you’re fully integrating a child into the family business or involving them more peripherally through dinner table conversations, consider it a valuable gift of industry knowledge with compounding returns across a lifetime.

Project-based homeschooling

Another advantage of throwing out strict adherence to textbooks and timetables is that there are plenty of opportunities for deep, curated learning through projects.

In traditional school, the word “project” is thrown around loosely, but the opportunity for personalization and true depth is scarce.

Projects can range from recording a podcast or creating a comic book to designing and operating a small venture. If there’s a genuine interest to embark on a project, regardless of its scope or how ambitious it may sound, it's likely worth doing. Young people can accomplish remarkable things, and whether you truly believe this will determine the kind of limitations you place on “saying yes.”

Again, I’ll illustrate with one of the most impressive examples I can think of:

who is building a plane (literally!) with his eight-year-old son. After repeated and worrying signs his son was not thriving in school, Latham pulled him without much of a plan. He admits his initial approach to homeschooling using classical education didn’t stick, and it took some ironing out before he and his son found a system that truly worked.

Latham met another homeschool dad who had a workshop with a 3D printer and built projects with his kids. This inspired Latham to introduce weekly “project day” to his son. When he suggested they start building something, his son immediately proposed the most ambitious thing he could think of, an airplane. He had already picked out a specific model, which happened to be a half a million dollar plane, and Latham figured he was testing boundaries to see where his limits were. But his son persisted. Latham, seeing the passion his son had for this unusually audacious project, considered if there was any reality in which this could be possible. He wanted to say yes.

He called up a friend who had built an airplane as a kid for advice who likened it to “a bit like doing Legos except you get to fly it afterward.” He convinced him that it would be hard but not impossible, and that his son would absolutely love it. That was all Latham needed to hear.

He proposed an agreement to his son: if he really wanted to do this, then he would need to be all in. They would have to work together, and figure out how they would fund this expensive project.

They’ve since made great progress, flying out to Missouri for a workshop where they built the tail for their Zenith bush plane. They now build regularly, sometimes dedicating entire weeks on this project. Their end goal is to take off from the family’s backyard, fly to a river, go fishing for a few hours, and fly home.

Building a plane has become so much more than just building, though. Aside from the practical skills Latham’s son is acquiring, it’s created opportunities for deep conversations while working with their hands, and has completely altered his son’s attitude toward learning. Not to mention, there’s a clear path to securing an internship if Latham’s son decides to pursue aviation as a career.

These stories vary in their specifics, but they all represent intentional homeschooling at work. Instead of bringing school home and replicating the same tired structures, these families recognized they could create something with far greater impact.

The takeaway here is bigger than just a different way to homeschool. It's a rebuttal to the entrenched assumption that formal school is the only way to get a world-class education. This assumption becomes even more questionable when you consider that many of history's most innovative thinkers never set foot in a traditional classroom.

Traditional college graduates typically emerge with debt and theoretical knowledge, then spend years developing practical skills and professional connections. In contrast, intentional homeschooling creates a different path entirely, one where young people build real expertise and meaningful relationships while developing the confidence that comes from solving actual problems. The result is adults who enter the world not as students transitioning to workers, but as capable individuals already contributing value to society.

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If this post resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone in your network who might also be thinking about these ideas.

As always, thanks for reading.

-Sam

For all the default acceptance of modern education, we forget how much of an experiment the concept of school still is.

Homeschooling is a historical paradox. As much as it feels “fringe” relative to modern schooling, it has existed for far longer than school itself.

The Lindy effect suggests that the longer an idea has survived, the more likely it is to endure. Like the foundational texts of antiquity from Aristotle to Euclid that still shape our thinking today, many traditional methods of learning associated with homeschooling have been around for centuries: apprenticeships, one-on-one mentorship, and Socratic dialogue. By contrast, modern mass schooling is a relatively new enterprise only emerging 150 years ago. School as we know it today is not lindy.

Not unlike many busy, career-minded parents, Karel and I initially dismissed homeschooling for our future kids, theorizing all the common anxieties: Will they be socialized enough? How will we balance it with our demanding careers? Where do we even start or find like-minded groups? But we challenged these assumptions in our earnest desire to learn more, and after speaking with many homeschooling families, realized our initial definition was far too narrow.

From first principles, "homeschooling,” as not one single method of education but an umbrella term for everything outside formal school walls, offers an opportunity to recreate older, more durable forms of learning our current education system often displaces. It’s not that these are just lasting forms of learning worthy of preserving, but that they actually cultivate purposeful, high-agency adults more likely to succeed in today’s world.

Some of history’s greatest thinkers, writers, and inventors never stepped foot in a formal school, but became masters of their craft despite this. Benjamin Franklin, John Stuart Mill, Beatrix Potter, Virginia Woolf and a host of other exceptional individuals were all homeschooled.1 Beatrix Potter would later say that she was grateful her education was "neglected," as a more formal education "would have rubbed off some of the originality.” While these examples represent a privileged few from history, their experiences offer valuable insights into learning methods that have proven remarkably durable, and are now more accessible than ever before.

Most of these homeschooling records are limited to accounts found in autobiographies and diaries; written excerpts that discuss at length their moral and intellectual development and methods of self improvement—the "what" and "how" of their learning, not the detailed day-to-day schedule (with Mill being an outlier here). Books that shaped them, observations of society and nature, and experimentation were woven into the fabric of their daily life. Across all of these remarkable individuals’ homeschool education though, there were timeless ingredients that cultivated their genius.2

A few patterns emerge consistently across their learning:

Early integration of life purpose

It’s too often assumed children must first develop their skills in order to do meaningful work. Maria Montessori proposed a radical inversion of this logic, arguing that the opposite is true:

It is not that man must develop in order to work, but that man must work in order to develop. The work of the hand is the expression of psychic growth.

This core belief reveals perhaps the most profound differences between these historical learners and their modern counterparts—the absence of an arbitrary waiting period.

There was an astonishing lack of separation between a child’s role to learn, and an adult’s role to work. Education and learning had an immediacy and purpose to it. A young Edison was not treated as merely a child who would one day grow up to do great things in the world, but a child who was doing great things in the world.

Benjamin Franklin, who left formal school at age 10 began working an apprenticeship in his brother's print shop. As he later reflected:

I was scarce sixteen when I wrote a piece for my brother's newspaper... it was an anonymous contribution signed 'Silence Dogood'. The letters were so popular that a whole new style of writing was adopted in Boston and the other provinces. The public curiosity was awakened, and my brother was much flattered by the credit given to his paper for so original a turn of writing. For some time, neither he nor anyone else knew that I was the author.

The ability to communicate to a real audience and discover that his own words had the power to “awaken public curiosity” was a formative experience that nurtured his civic leadership and desire to contribute to society. Just one year later Franklin left his brother’s printing shop to seek his fortune as an independent printer in Philadelphia, and shortly after formed the Junto, where his political aspirations continued to manifest.

It’s true Franklin’s autodidactic giftedness and drive were unusually prominent, however what might he have been doing in his twenties had he been forced to sit in a classroom for the first eighteen years of his life resigned to a modern-day classroom of formulaic five-paragraph essays only read by his teacher? In hindsight with all we know about Franklin today, this sounds absurdly stifling.

The same can be said for many others:

Thomas Edison’s home education began in his mother’s cellar and later a train baggage car after a brief, unhappy stint in formal school. His experience revolved around experimentation. By fifteen, he was running a makeshift chemical laboratory and publishing a small newspaper.

Florence Nightingale’s education was so deeply interwoven with her life purpose to reduce human suffering, she reported hearing several humanitarian calls from God as a teen. This was catalyzed by the frequent trips across Europe where she was deliberately exposed to suffering and institutional failure of hospitals and churches, and regular visits to the Nightingale family’s estate in rural England where she would tend to the sick far before receiving any formal training. As a teen, Nightingale studied mathematics and statistics independently, but unlike school math, this was applied and relevant to her interests: population data, hospital records, and health outcomes.

Whether it was through apprenticeship or book publishing, these exceptional minds were not perpetual students, but actually valued, contributing members of society. Homeschooling, in whatever form that took, gave them the flexibility to pursue their passions actively.

Agency is contingent on this kind of deep, immersive exposure. It’s how young people decide who they want to be and how they want to contribute to the world.

In the absence of an early integration of life purpose, we get apathy. Education’s systemic stifling of curiosity and agency—when school is a place to defer real-world contributions—has a cost. It is precisely how millions of potential “Lost Einsteins,” as research by Raj Chetty has shown, are never discovered for lack of early exposure.

Learning through dialogue

Doing and discussion were inextricable in these learning environments. Socratic dialogue, both as a formal and informal practice, was commonly relied upon for the exchange of ideas but also identity formation. These exchanges often unfolded within sustained mentoring relationships, with a parent, sibling, tutor, or family friend, who would not only guide but challenge the child’s thinking over many years.

For John Stuart Mill, who was taught by his father James Mill, Socratic dialogue was a core part of his rigorous education. From early boyhood, he was not just memorizing facts but expected to defend arguments, and interpret meaning. As he recalls in his detailed autobiography:

Anything which could be found out by thinking I was never told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.

Mill credited this constant dialogic pressure for his ability to reason, write, and make sophisticated connections across disciplines from a young age.

Bertrand Russell’s early education, while eclectic, was also steeped in discussion. His older brother Frank taught him mathematics in a way that demanded rigorous logical reasoning. He wasn’t allowed to accept any proposition without first understanding and proving it, a method Russell described as one of the most formative experiences of his life.

Even in solitude, Russell saw thought as a kind of internal dialogue. Mathematics and philosophy, he reflected in his autobiography, gave him something to “talk to himself about.” These early habits of inquiry and exchange laid the foundation for a life devoted to logic, debate, and public reasoning.

George Herbert Mead described thought as “the conversation of the generalized other with the self" and that all thought is a preparation for social interaction. Frequent opportunity and the psychological safety to share and refine these internal thoughts is precisely how these individuals developed their intellect, but also formulated their identity in the world. The absence of new inputs and “challenges” to inner dialogue is upstream from confirmation bias and limited intellectual growth.

In these homeschooling environments, learning through dialogue occurred daily and often in informal settings. Walks in the garden, dinners with family friends, salons and social gatherings. While many had designated time with tutors, the nature of their one-on-one education afforded time and opportunity to discuss ideas deeply without the constraints of a strict schedule.

And beyond these anecdotes of exceptional people, we know today, 200 years after Mill’s primary education, that dialogue has a tremendous impact on learning. Research consistently links Socratic discussion with:

• Better initial learning than traditional teaching

• Greater retention across long periods of time

• Higher scores in domains not already taught

• Higher scores on general intelligence tests

Studies across different educational levels have consistently demonstrated these benefits. A study of elementary school students found that Socratic reflection prompts were effective in developing critical thinking skills, with particular benefits for students' analysis abilities. Research with middle school English Language Learners showed significant improvement over five weeks of Socratic instruction, with an effect size of 0.70 (Cohen's d), indicating a meaningful degree of change in critical thinking skills development.

Despite these far-reaching implications, traditional schools have mostly resisted meaningful adoption of Socratic dialogue and dialogic teaching.

Where efforts have been made, execution has been shallow; instead of adopting discussion as a core and constant instructional method, discussion questions are tacked on as a unit assignment or one-off activity.

Many families and educators still operate on the belief that you need to know facts first in order to have this type of conceptual discussion, or that only some intellectually gifted people can engage in high level reasoning. Beyond these deeply held beliefs, modern education is time-bound and fixed around 45-60 minute subjects, leaving little room for sustained dialogue amid the competing demands of content and testing requirements.

Unstructured time in a prepared environment

Unlike modern education’s monolithic structure, these home educated experiences were full of unstructured time to explore and play.

Beatrix Potter’s childhood was almost entirely free of school’s fixed schedules. She roamed the countryside for hours at a time, sketchbook in hand, drawing every plant, insect, and animal she could find. She wrote in her journal:

It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye… Last time, in the middle of September, I caught myself in the back yard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket, and the laugh it gave me brought me round.

What she lacked in friends as a child, Potter made up for with animals. She and her younger brother Bertram kept a rotating variety of pets in their nursery including snakes, salamanders, rabbits, and frogs, many of which became “muses” for Potter’s characters in her stories. At home, her parents’ library gave her endless reference material. Potter's education was not so much a curriculum as a daily immersion in the living world around her.

Though the environment took a different form, Blaise Pascal’s home education offered similar exploratory freedom. His father deliberately withheld formal mathematics until he was fifteen, convinced that premature instruction might dull his curiosity. Instead, Pascal explored languages, philosophy, and the natural world without pressure or deadlines. He entertained himself with experiments and thought puzzles, what he later called games of the mind. When finally introduced to Euclidean geometry, he absorbed it in weeks, a mastery fueled by years of unstructured intellectual play in a home filled with books, ideas, and conversation.

Many of the great minds of the past did not concern themselves with packed schedules and formal extracurriculars as we expect the modern-day high achiever to do today. Yet, a commonly shared attitude today believes kids need highly-structured and organized activity all hours of the day in order to be adequately socialized, stay out of trouble, and avoid “boredom.” But unstructured learning environments, like Potter’s and Pascal’s, can avoid these traps if they are intentionally curated—books and home libraries, immersion in nature, access to skilled adults and mentors, tools and materials to create and experiment.

Just because school has set a precedent for highly structured, test-driven environments as the “correct” way to learn, does not mean it’s actually what’s best for healthy, well-adjusted children.

Learning through unstructured play is the basis of psychologist ’s research and advocacy. Gray grounds his work in hunter-gatherer societies; play was the foundation of social life and cultural education, and thus a valuable transmitter for skills, values, and shared practice. It also fostered autonomy and egalitarian norms within the band, something he argues in Free to Learn we have completely lost through the traditional education system:

We have forgotten that children are designed by nature to learn through self-directed play and exploration, and so, more and more, we deprive them of the freedom to learn, subjecting them instead to the tedious and painfully slow learning methods devised by those who run the schools.

Gray points to compulsory schooling as a primary driver of anti-play attitudes including the increase in adult control over children’s lives e.g., children start school younger than ever before, the school year has become longer, and the opportunities for free play have diminished. School has extended beyond the six hours of classroom time and intruded into family and home life with homework and assignments. There is a pervasive attitude that adult-directed learning is vastly superior. This is coupled with the belief that what can be measured through performance, regardless of whether deep learning occurs, is what matters most:

But school has taken over children’s lives in an even more insidious way. The school system has directly and indirectly, often unintentionally, fostered an attitude in society that children learn and progress primarily by doing tasks that are directed and evaluated by adults, and that children’s own activities are wasted time.

For many in compulsory schooling, Gray suggests the Internet is the only space left where children can gain independence and agency without intervention from adults.

While we know historically, as evidenced by the homeschooled greats, that unstructured time and play-based learning has clear academic and developmental merit, modern research also supports this thesis: Children with more of it have improved self-directed executive functioning, better cognitive flexibility and working memory, and schools like Montessori where children have more autonomy in how they spend their time (with an intentionally “prepared environment”) routinely outperform children in traditional schools across a variety of standardized measures and divergent thinking.

While traditional schooling continues to tighten the rein on children’s free time, this is one of homeschooling’s most enticing selling points as a medium for education.

A new look at an old idea

While I have no intention of romanticizing homeschooling through the lens of these historical anecdotes, their home education provides a window into many of the enduring forms of learning we know today are optimal practices, despite most being neglected in schools. Rather than dismissing homeschooling as fringe, it deserves to be considered as a real option by more people. My goal with this series of posts is to help demystify homeschooling and dispel common concerns by showing a variety of ways real people have and currently are going about it.

Besides, the sharp line between homeschooling and attending a school is fraying with the countless à la carte options for families to choose from. While homeschooling may have only been an option for the elite in the 18th and 19th centuries, or most strongly associated with conservative Christian families in the late 20th and early 21st century, there are now infinite opportunities at our fingertips to expand the definition of what’s possible. Rather than a retreat from innovation or something reserved for a select ideological or privileged few, I see homeschooling today as an opportunity to advance toward practices that research shows are most effective for learning and that are accessible to all.

Deciding to opt out of school can feel risky, but I’d argue the real risk today is blindly accepting the status quo.

In the next post of this series, I’m featuring contemporary examples of families homeschooling. There are some incredibly creative and intentional ways people are approaching this - if that’s you or someone you know, get in touch!

If this post resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone in your network who might also be thinking about these ideas.

As always, thanks for reading.

-Sam

Most people remember the myth of Icarus for its cautionary tale of hubris. Don’t fly too high or else ambition will melt your wings. But what's often conveniently forgotten is Daedalus's other warning. Don't fly too low, or the ocean mist will soak your wings and weigh you down. This neglected counter-warning captures the true modern paradox of ambition. For all our fear of overreaching, we're far more likely to be dragged down by stagnation and unexamined potential.

Ambition. Despite all its contributions to modern-day progress, we still tiptoe around it like an elusive Pandora’s Box, wary of what we might unleash.

We carry deeply flawed ideas about ambition, often assuming it's an innate gift you're simply born with or not. Or we vilify it as a direct path to burnout and inevitable suffering. Too often, ambition only appears in public discourse as a convenient scapegoat for narcissism or political misdeeds. These beliefs, however widely held, oversimplify and understate one of the most powerful forces driving human behavior.

And this tension plays out in how we raise and educate young people. Parents grapple with the extremes. Do we risk gentle parenting our kids into aimlessness, or tiger parenting them into burnout? Traditional school promotes a narrowly defined view of success, where genuine ambition (not the one tied to standardized testing) isn’t a core outcome. Ambition, then, becomes the elephant in the room, especially when graduation looms and private worries mount about what kids will actually do with their lives.

But we need to get past this idea that ambition is reserved for the brilliant and select few, or that nurturing it is a precursor to burnout. Contrary to the bad rap ambition often gets, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. There’s a healthier third alternative that is much more intentional and personally defined. Cultivating ambition in young people and creating environments where it’s nurtured is a moral imperative. We should care a lot about creating better conditions for more young people to develop this earlier on, if we care about greater prosperity and progress for individuals and humankind as a whole.

The trap of unexamined ambition

For the first fifteen years of life, the typical path to becoming a “high-achieving” young person today is narrowly defined by some combination of 1) getting high grades; 2) balancing a variety of extracurriculars; all typically in pursuit of 3) attending a prestigious university.

The tides are changing as credentialism declines and merit markets increasingly take root. For the record, I don’t think these benchmarks of grades and college admissions are what we should be optimizing for, but traditional school makes it difficult to avoid and has convinced most families and kids this is what being “ambitious” means. For some time this type of shallow ambition might seem relatively acceptable or even impressive—the pipeline-to-university artificially supports this narrowly defined track. But it doesn’t take long for the cracks to surface.

Eric Wei, CEO of Karat, is a model example.

Eric’s story is one you might not be familiar with, and yet it is hardly an outlier.

Eric has been transparent on many podcasts about his journey. He was your high-achieving kid under immense pressure by his immigrant parents to succeed.

And so he did what he was told “success” looked like and collected all the infinity stones: Harvard → Blackstone → McKinsey → Instagram.

Except he was miserable. Getting to each of these milestones felt empty because he actually didn’t care about any of these things.

I think the very first thing I’d tell him is please don’t give a shit and care about any one of the things you’ve listed. Because it’s all these external validators of prestige. Frankly, they’re all things I did because I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I cared so much about what other people thought, so getting into Harvard was my life’s dream. And once I got there I was like ‘oh my gosh what was this all for? I’ve no sense of what I actually care about and immediately latched on to what I saw was the next ladder up.’ — Eric Wei, jayhoovy interview

After a lot of soul-searching he discovered what he actually cared about was being creative and working with other creatives, leading him to start Karat, a leading financial services platform for creators.

Eric’s ambition initially was motivated by external validators and it was narrowly defined. That path led to inevitable burnout. It required taking a step back to consider what he truly cared about so that he could channel his ambition into something more personally motivated.

He’s still audaciously ambitious with Karat. The company is YC-backed, has raised $100M, and has extended over $1.5 billion in credit and advances to creators.

And that’s the point.

Wouldn’t we want more young people to come to these realizations much earlier in life?

Embracing the builder's mindset

This powerful third alternative of ambition is something psychologist has coined the “builder’s mindset” after observing behavior, especially among startup founders in Silicon Valley.

She argues this type of mindset sits on an entirely different plane of what she rejects as a false dichotomy of drill sergeant vs. zen master. The drill sergeant tends to follow conventional paths of success at the expense of their own desires and often mental well-being, and the zen master—often in response to oppressive hustle culture—is more passive about outcomes. People often oscillate between these two, but neither offers real agency. The drill sergeant is driven by what society expects of him and the zen master overcompensates by downsizing their ambition.

But the builder’s mindset is an agentic form of ambition that declares “we are the sole owners of our lives.” The builder’s mindset is a much more reflective approach to ambition. You take real ownership over what you choose to put effort into and ultimately aspire to achieve.

In the case of Eric Wei’s story, it took real reflection to acknowledge how depressed he was from aimlessly climbing the social ladder (drill sergeant) in order to connect with his “why” as an entrepreneur (builder’s mindset).

In a recent interview with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project, this is the type of agentic ambition Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify, was referring to when he described “outcaring” as a superpower that supersedes IQ, EQ, and raw talent. He uses the term “innate” but I think what he’s really referring to here is the presence of a “why” behind individual motivation. One that can be realized early and further cultivated over time.

Ambition’s controversial reputation + how we got here

Developing a healthier, more intentional relationship with ambition sounds relatively straightforward. So, why haven’t we figured this out?

First, we know surprisingly little about ambition even today. Despite its influence on progress, we don’t study it nearly enough. Academia and psychology touch on related concepts like motivation and leadership, but ambition is seldom studied as a standalone concept, often seen as a secondary variable of other traits. William Casey King is one of few who has dedicated a direct, in-depth study of the concept of ambition, and his book, Ambition, a History: From Vice to Virtue (2010), is frequently cited as the definitive scholarly work.

Ambition’s tumultuous, dual-natured past also plays a role in our confusion. And it's a story that has played out over centuries.

Antiquity viewed ambition with ambivalence, a “hidden plague” that fueled Rome’s ascension to greatness but also engendered its demise. But in Christendom, ambition entered a dark age, condemned completely as outright sin. This was a period that fiercely promoted mediocrity that defined generations.

The Renaissance prompted reevaluation. Thinkers like Francis Bacon reframed ambition as a powerful condition to be balanced—"malign and venomous" if stifled, but "noble" if managed. This fueled an era of intellectual and artistic rebirth, paving the way for ambition’s rebrand.

Once condemned, ambition transformed into an instrument of empire during the Age of Exploration, driving unprecedented conquest and global reshaping. This later became the force behind the American Revolution, where ambition was publicly championed as a civic virtue essential for nation-building. Yet, private fears of its corrupting influence persisted.

These shifting historical attitudes we’ve inherited about ambition were far from straightforward. And this extends into contemporary biases and design flaws that continue to take root today.

For instance, advocating for raising psychological ambitiousness is controversial among psychologists. Namely because the idea of becoming more ambitious stirs fear that it will perpetuate harmful perfectionism and judgmental tendencies psychologists work hard to fight against.

A call to “raise your ambitiousness” seems to fly in the face of all those therapeutic efforts, unless of course you disentangle the fake “ambitiousness” of the drill sergeant from the genuine ambitiousness needed to build your own flourishing, fully-lived life. — Dr. Gena Gorlin, Embracing Healthy Ambition

But also because psychology, as a helping profession, is mainly concerned with alleviating suffering and, as a result, frequently neglects “raising the ceiling” for those who are already doing considerably well by modern standards. While it can certainly appear less urgent in the face of a mental health crisis, what might we stand to gain if we dedicated more attention to unlocking new heights of competence and purpose? Could it even build greater mental resilience?

This professional hesitancy is hardly the sole culprit holding us back. Traditional school’s inherent design flaw fosters a much more insidious cultural zeitgeist.

Education’s narrow definition of success, centered on testing and standardization, misguides hundreds of thousands of children and families into believing this is the natural way to measure and acquire ambition. Unfortunately, this is often when young, fervent ambition is squashed and with it, so much potential is lost.

Modern education, in its current form, is not teaching young people to “fly high enough” nor “fly their own way.”

Raising psychological ambitiousness

But this problem is not insurmountable.

There are very practical, concrete ways of raising the ceiling and cultivating a better kind of ambition in young people, much earlier:

• Elevate aspirations: Start by believing in young people's immense potential. Expose them to a broader vision of what's possible, far beyond conventional expectations. Tyler Cowen wrote about this as a “high-return activity” referencing his strategy of encouraging strong candidates who initially applied for Master's programs to pursue PhD admissions instead:

  At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and the broader world, may be enormous. — Tyler Cowen, The high-return activity of raising others’ aspirations

• Exercise the Pygmalion effect: A recent study extending on the research in Pygmalion in the classroom (1968) concluded that high teacher expectations were associated with higher achievement in reading in earlier years. Having high expectations isn’t inherently bad, and in fact influences a young person’s perception of their ability.

• Encourage self-definition of success: Don't prescribe narrow paths; instead, create space for young people to discover and pursue what genuinely excites them. Expose them to a wide range of avenues for success.

• Make it real: Healthy ambition flourishes in optimism and psychological safety. This means creating environments where young people consistently see their effort yield visible, achievable progress like mastering a bike or successfully coding an app. These positive feedback loops help young people discover what they are good at and what they genuinely enjoy.

• Expose them to heroic individuals: To combat apathy and evoke awe in young people, it’s crucial we share the stories of heroic, high-agency individuals who have made remarkable contributions to humankind. After all, you cannot be what you cannot see. I wrote more about this in a recent post.

While traditional school hardly optimizes for any of these strategies, many alternative schools are building intentionally with healthy ambition as a core outcome. And this design feature is particularly attractive for many high-agency families who want their child to discover their “why” sooner.

The Socratic Experience led by , runs a daily Purpose class around Ikigai, a Japanese concept referring to what an individual defines as the meaning of their life ("What do you love? What are you good at? What does the world need? What will it pay for?"). There, he encourages ongoing reflection around what truly matters to his students and what they want to strive for.

Two others that come to mind are Acton Academy microschools, which adopt the hero’s journey as a core philosophy to encourage students to pursue ambitious, real-world projects aligned with their personal mission; and Praxis, which offers an accelerated alternative to college, focused on apprenticeships and direct career launches.

Don’t fly too low, fly your own way

For all its controversy and confusion, ambition remains the most influential human instinct for progress. To stifle it is to suppress human potential in action.

As my own parents liked to say, “We know you have a mind of your own, and whatever you choose to do, work hard and you’ll figure it out.”

This is the very spirit of the builder's mindset, and what we ought to strive for in raising the next generation.

If this post resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone in your network who might also be thinking about these ideas.

As always, thanks for reading.

-Sam

The greatest danger to our future is apathy. ― Jane Goodall

Young people are 50% more likely to have a pessimistic outlook about the future compared to previous generations.

This is not simply teenage angst, but generation-wide disillusionment and defeatism about the future. This pessimism is not an overreaction to the state of the world, but the result of a flawed educational philosophy we have adopted.

Modern education has banned greatness.

The stories of great individuals were swapped for the relentless focus on systemic flaws and historical grievances. The unintended result is a generation taught that the world is a broken system to be critiqued, not a thing to be built.

But young people, more than ever, need something to aspire to. They need to internalize the belief that the world, while flawed, is still full of possibility.

The antidote is a curriculum of ambition, and that starts with a return to heroes.

If we want to raise a generation of ambitious builders and doers, rather than cynical spectators, we must give young people more exposure to the stories of high-agency individuals who made remarkable contributions to the world. This requires a fundamental rethink in how we approach education and even parenting.

the architecture of pessimism

Why has pessimism become so pervasive in young people?

recently drew attention to the critical research on primal world beliefs, the fundamental, often subconscious, beliefs we hold about the world.

Primal world beliefs are the result of a decade-long study led by psychologist Jeremy Clifton that compiled and analyzed thousands of statements beginning with “The world is…” across media and popular culture, to identify three core, psychologically significant themes:

1. Is the world safe or dangerous?

2. Is it enticing or dull?

3. Is it alive or mechanistic?

These beliefs determine how you orient yourself in the world.

For example, if you believe the world is dangerous, this will manifest in hyper-vigilance and anxiousness. Conversely, if you believe the world is safe, you’re more likely to be trusting and calm. If you see the world as enticing, you’ll be curious and optimistic, but if you see it as dull, you’ll withdraw.

At the core of this study is what it counter-intuitively reveals: we don’t first experience the world and then inherit primal world beliefs. Instead, our primal world beliefs actively shape how we interpret our experiences.

It’s not a reaction to a bad world, but a lens that makes the world look bad.

modern education is a breeding ground for apathy

Doom scrolling. Bed rotting. Brain rot. Blackpilled. Chronically online.

Young generations are consuming messages of apathy and meaningless slop every day on social media. It’s practically unavoidable to be online and not feel a sense of dread as a passive spectator at the mercy of the algorithm.

But this malaise isn’t hardwired and it doesn’t have to be. Most kids spend 6 hours a day at school, a meaningful amount of time every day where we’re supposed to be enriching their lives and preparing them to become happy, well-adjusted adults. Instead, education like the media, has become riddled with the same doom-and-gloom messaging packaged under the guise of “critical thinking.”

You can see this shift across the curriculum. School reading lists now favor stories of pathologized teens over tales of perseverance. Climate change education often defaults to a narrative of "doom and gloom" catastrophe contributing to helplessness. Even civic education has been redesigned to teach students that the primary role of a citizen is not to build, but to confront crisis.

In one 2021 study, Clifton and Meindl found that 53 percent of parents preferred dangerous world beliefs for their children. They thought it would better prepare them for life. No similar data exist on teachers, but many features of contemporary education at least tacitly impart to children a view of the world as bad and broken — Robert Pondiscio

And to be clear, I do think it’s important to talk about nuance and not to understate the tragedies and realities of the past. But I fear we’ve overcorrected, meticulously critiquing the sins of the past while writing off achievements. In turn, young people have lost the sense of awe and optimism—what it means to be inspired by a truly remarkable human who achieves greatness in the face of difficult circumstances.

Our educational philosophy has become so risk-averse that it now operates on the unspoken principle: it is better to have no heroes at all than to admire an imperfect one.

If young people are not getting exposure to heroic, high-agency examples of greatness in the classroom or even at home, who are their role models? It’s no wonder most kids turn to YouTubers and influencers and that becoming a YouTuber or TikToker is a top career choice for Gen Alpha.

Before young people even have a chance to become ambitious, we’re telling them the world is a place that is unjust and to be feared. Their inputs become negative primals so it’s hardly surprising this is how they choose to respond to the world around them.

the antidote is a curriculum of ambition

A curriculum of ambition works by directly counteracting the negative primals that breed pessimism, and instead cultivating world beliefs of optimism. You cannot be what you cannot see. This is where heroes provide a powerful case study.

Presenting heroes as high-agency individuals who confronted immense challenges, not as flawless idols, provides students with a powerful antidote to the narrative of helplessness.

Heroic narratives are rarely stories of easy victory. They are stories of struggle, failure, and relentless effort. When kids witness this, they internalize that greatness is forged in grit, not granted by circumstance. These case studies lay the foundation for high-agency and provide the psychological capital needed to become daring and ambitious.

In a 2022 Psychological Science study, young girls playing a tough science game showed low persistence. But when researchers told them to simply pretend to be Marie Curie, their persistence nearly doubled. They adopted her agency.

The stories of human achievement ground young people in the belief that individual action is meaningful and that striving for the remarkable is a valid and worthy pursuit. As Tyler Alterman noted in a recent viral tweet, the primary antidote to our modern ‘dark age’ of defeatism is to once again become students of how great individuals changed the world. This is how we move a generation from being cynical spectators to becoming the ambitious builders and doers the world desperately needs.

the architecture of optimism

I feel strongly about an education rooted in heroes because I’m the product of one. Growing up in a Montessori classroom, I was surrounded by evidence of human greatness and achievements.

One in particular that had a strong impact on my way of seeing the world was Jane Goodall. I have vivid memories of being absolutely mesmerized by her accomplishments after attending a science exhibit (it happened to be this massive 6,000 sq. ft. travelling exhibit that debuted in Sudbury, Ontario!). Because of the nature of Montessori, this interest I developed was encouraged and I spent following weeks obsessing over Jane Goodall’s life and work, propelling me into topics on conservation and the natural world. But more than that, I was in awe of this woman who had quite literally decided to pick up on a shoestring expedition to Gombe, Tanzania to study chimpanzees, with no degree or funding, and in doing so, reshaped our entire scientific worldview of animals. She did all of this in spite of plenty of adversity, skeptics, and the harsh realities of fieldwork.

Jane Goodall became a powerful, early model of high-agency for me. Her determination to pursue her dream, despite adverse societal and academic norms at the time, was a radical act of self-belief. And this, no doubt, played a role in nurturing my own understanding of what was possible.

Montessori’s philosophy is grounded in humanism and a fundamental optimism about people. Jane Goodall was one of many heroic examples of individuals that I was exposed to in my early years and I believe it contributed immensely to my sense of optimism and curiosity about the world.

This legacy of achievement is so powerful it recently inspired me to launch The Montessorians, the largest open-source dataset celebrating remarkable Montessori alumni.

"[Montessori] worried that we’ll fail to appreciate the inventions, achievements, and creations of civilization" — Matt Bateman.

This fundamental belief in human potential is the same principle now powering the resurgence of Classical education and modern models like Acton Academy.

a choice between cynicism and ambition

This, then, is the choice we face in our homes and our schools. We can continue to tell our children the world is a terrible place, or we can give them the stories and heroes they need to become the architects of a better future.

As for me, my own path was set long ago. It’s no accident that a girl raised in a world shaped by Maria Montessori would one day feel compelled to build a better education herself.

If this post resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone in your network who might also be thinking about these ideas.

As always, thanks for reading.

-Sam

P.S. — If you're curious about your own "primal world beliefs," the researchers have a great (and free) set of surveys you can take here.

Subscribe now

It’s been a bit quiet here lately, and for good reason. Life has been a whirlwind as and I gear up to launch our first Renaissance startup. My kitchen has been doubling as a film studio for a new YouTube channel, and as a two-person team we’re constantly learning, working, and living all at once.

I’m excited to share more updates about what we’ve been building soon! But first, a little weekend side-project👇

What do Jeff Bezos, Beyoncé, and the founders of Google all have in common?

If you're in the education world, you probably know the answer: they all went to Montessori. This same handful of high-profile names have been used for marketing materials as evidence of successful Montessori alumni.

But what about the thousands of other incredible entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, and leaders out there today who also benefited from a Montessori education? Their stories are largely untold.

We can anecdotally point to alternative education as a better option, but we’ve never had the comprehensive, long-term data to truly substantiate its impact compared to traditional schooling.

As a Montessori alum myself, I can speak to how much of an impact this education had on the rest of my trajectory and where I am today. But how many others out there like me have a similar story to share?

"Where are they now? What have they done?" These are some questions I've been pondering but getting answers to them hasn't been easy.

This challenge was front and center for me after a fantastic call last week with , Founder of The Socratic Experience. Michael shared that he’s working on a research proposal to study the long-term outcomes of alternative education, focusing on metrics like well-being and mental health. His work highlights a critical gap: the data is scattered, anecdotal, and hard to access.

This conversation inspired Karel and I to work on a mini weekend side-project, to build a small piece of the solution ourselves.

The largest open source dataset of Montessori alumni

The Montessorians aims to celebrate and document the achievements of the many trailblazers who were shaped by a Montessori education. We want to build a resource that goes beyond the same few famous faces and brings it closer to home with extraordinary, everyday people.

Visit the Montessorians

We've made a start, but its real value comes from community contributions. It's fully open source under a Creative Commons CC0 license and our hope is that it becomes a shared public resource.

This is more than just a list of names. It’s the beginning of a movement to build the evidence base for educational models that nurture creativity, independence, and a lifelong love of learning. It’s a small piece of our larger mission at our startup studio, Renaissance, to champion and build the future of education.

And now, we need your help.

Are you a Montessori alum? Do you know someone who is?

• Explore the database: Discover inspiring individuals and see the diversity of paths taken.

• Contribute to the project: Add your own profile or the name of a Montessorian you admire. It only takes a few minutes. If you have questions or need help submitting, feel free to reach out to either of us!

Add a Montessorian to the Database

Thank you for being part of our journey.

-Sam + Karel

“The crowd is untruth.” — Søren Kierkegaard

Being a contrarian isn’t cool, until it is. It’s human nature to conform to the tribe.

And while some of the greatest contributors of our time were contrarians themselves, mainstream society has mostly operated on the handshake-deal understanding: work really hard → follow the rules → win the game.

But this formula no longer guarantees success. As , Co-Founder & CEO of Spellbook, recently framed it, “There used to be ambient alpha available to anyone with above average work ethic and courage. It was vacuumed up by machine leverage and capital leverage.”

The old sources of leverage—hard work, credentials, timing—have been crowded out. A degree doesn’t beget a job. Being a dropout is becoming higher signal to the market in some industries.

Conforming used to feel safe. In a Red Queen world, it’s how you get left behind.

More than ever, original thinkers and outsiders hold disproportionate leverage. The ability to see beyond the system, build in niche spaces, and act on conviction is where the alpha lives. That’s how you stand out.

But schools aren’t built for that. They can’t train students to be contrarian when they’re designed to optimize for mass participation.

Opting out is the entry point to alpha. That’s why parallel systems like alternative education are starting to gain traction.

Those closest to the shifts already know this is the new way to get ahead.

Contrarian thinking isn’t natural, but it’s essential

Going against the grain is difficult, and neuroscience confirms this:

An fMRI study found that resisting peer opinion triggers increased activity in the amygdala, the part of our brain associated with fear and emotional salience.

It’s not just emotional friction, it’s cognitive, too. We’ve moved from predictable, “kind” learning environments to messy, fast-moving “wicked” ones.

In the old model, a kind learning environment meant conventional behavior yielded average outcomes both good and bad. Contrarian behavior, on the other hand, had more variance, with higher upside but more downside.

The risk was higher to go against the grain, and so contrarian behavior was a gamble few were incentivized to take.

But that’s flipped. In today’s environment, playing it safe has its own risks. Conventional paths now come with diminishing returns and eroding relevance.

The rules of the New Model are unclear, feedback is delayed or distorted, and the game keeps changing. In other words: systems where consensus thinking fails and outsiders, guided by independent thought and conviction, thrive.

Contrarian thinking, not blind rejection of the status quo, is about seeing something others missed and acting on it. That mindset is deliberately cultivated by those who dominate today’s success narrative: investors, founders, and creators.

Example: Homeschooling as a contrarian bet. While it’s becoming more popular, the decision to homeschool is still not the norm, public school is.

Note: This isn’t a blanket endorsement, just an illustrative example.

Conventional choice: Public school.
Still the default for most families.

• Favorable outcome: Your child performs well and moves through the standard pipeline. But even strong outcomes now yield less. Degrees are oversupplied, and institutional success doesn’t map cleanly to real-world readiness.

• Unfavorable outcome: Your child falls behind or disengages. Because you followed the norm, you’re insulated from scrutiny - misery loves company. But you still face the cost: a young adult who can’t find direction, work, or independence.

Contrarian choice: Homeschooling.
A direct challenge to the system’s value proposition.

• Favorable outcome: More tailored learning. Stronger independence. The potential for a better fit in a world that no longer rewards sameness.

• Unfavorable outcome: Outcomes are more visible. The burden of proof is on you for taking this bet. If it fails, there’s no one to defer to.

Conventional choices now offer limited upside with hidden risk. The contrarian path carries more exposure, but it’s where the real leverage lives. There’s no guaranteed path for success in a wicked environment, including passively accepting the status quo.

The need to think critically and interrogate assumptions will only become more powerful in the age of AI, where mainstream LLMs pander to mass psychology through glazing and overly flattering responses leading to confirmation bias.

As an extension of disinformation in the media, our lives will increasingly depend on LLMs that can distort and deceive through more pernicious manifestations. We need to be equipped to resist passively accepting everything we're told.

Three mental models that fuel contrarian thinking

1. First-principles thinking: question assumptions and break things down to fundamentals instead of copying existing models.

e.g. a parent questioning the 8-hour school day and opting instead to build a flexible learning schedule based on their child’s focus patterns and interests.

2. Inversion: start by imagining what failure would look like, then work backward. It’s easier to avoid known traps than predict the perfect move.

e.g. someone choosing to rent instead of buying a home and taking on a mortgage because they want to live a more volatility-resistant life.

3. Third-order thinking: zoom out to ask what system am I reinforcing by making this decision?

e.g. turning down a promotion, not because it’s bad now, but because it locks you into a system you no longer want to operate in.

Raising the next generation of contrarians

Contrarian thinking is difficult to teach in systems designed for mass participation.

Public schools may encourage critical thinking in principle, but the structure of the system (standardized testing, large class sizes, and age-based conformity) rewards compliance over originality.

That doesn’t mean contrarian thinking can’t be taught. But it’s an uphill battle.

In a school of hundreds, fitting in feels essential. Questioning the “right answer” becomes riskier when that answer is what earns the grade.

By contrast, some alternative models are better predisposed to cultivate contrarian thinking:

Socratic Method

• Uses structured dialogue to develop clarity of thought. Students learn to question ideas, challenge assumptions, and revise their thinking in real time.

• The Socratic Experience founded by , centers Socratic intellectual inquiry as the foundation of learning. Through daily Socratic seminars, students are challenged to question deeply, reason clearly, and develop their own perspectives. It’s one of the few schools where independent thinking is designed from the ground up.

Project-Based Learning

• Centers learning on real-world problems that don’t have clear answers. Students make decisions, test ideas, and learn by doing. Contrarian thinking becomes part of the process.

• High Tech High is one of the most established PBL models, where long-term interdisciplinary projects push students to lead, build, and present their work in public exhibitions.

Montessori

• Encourages students to choose their own work and pace, helping them build confidence in their judgment early. Autonomy is built into the structure of learning. I write more about this here.

Even if you’re not fully embracing these models, the mindset can be brought home.

Two ways to start:

1. Model disagreement well. Let your child overhear thoughtful disagreement between you and a partner, a podcast guest, or a character in a book. Show them that conflict and failure is a normal process in ideating and questioning assumptions.

2. Create stakes for decision-making. Give your child a real responsibility like planning the weekend or budgeting for a project and let them feel the outcomes of their choices. Alexis Ohanian recently shared that his daughter earns her allowance through a chore contract, negotiated with Serena acting as her lawyer. It’s a playful but deliberate way to build ownership and decision-making muscles early.

Raising a contrarian thinker means raising a child who’s comfortable standing alone. In a world of diminishing returns for doing what everyone else does, that’s the best advantage you can give them.

I think about this more now as I prepare myself for kids of my own. What kind of systems will they inherit? What will I subconsciously pass down if I’m not paying attention?

Koshu recently wrote a great piece on the evolution of business models, and entering the age of the Decision AI Era, where AI will offload decision making on our behalf.

"The logic of business is evolving—from serving human wants to anticipating them, then eventually overwriting them.

And so the question then isn't how much AI can do. It's how much we’re willing to delegate before we forget what it means to choose" -

Tech is moving at the speed of light. If we don’t deliberately preserve culture and shape the future ourselves, we risk stagnation and falling victim to algorithmic drift.

A profound reminder that we ought to continue questioning assumptions, and cultivate a bias for action both for ourselves and the future generation.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what it actually takes for someone to feel capable of steering their own life, especially when we talk about kids, or even ourselves.

High agency is something my husband and I talk about often at home but, most importantly, practice. When I think about some of the more challenging moments in my life, it was my own agency—not praise from others, credentials, or otherwise—that got me out of the circumstance or opened a new door.

Leaving teaching after years of working toward that goal was one of them. It wasn’t necessarily the sunk cost, but the identity I had formed around the profession and the people I was surrounded by at the time that made this decision a true test of self-worth. I had to believe that I could chart a new course for myself, find an angle to get through the door, and put in the work to come out ahead on the other side.

And that’s what I did, landing my first role out of teaching in an edtech startup.

The decision to choose and act, and give yourself permission compounds into a strong internal locus of control.

This reminds me of something Naval said recently in an interview:

“Self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself.”

The more you act and take control of your circumstances, the more you can rely on yourself, no matter what curveball gets thrown.

Self-esteem breeds high agency and high agency leads to momentum. This is the moat we should all be optimizing for in the future of learning and work.

The future belongs to those who make it

Two great articles prompted this week’s piece:

An Age of Extinction is Coming by NYT columnist Ross Douthat argues survival of culture and tradition now hinges entirely on deliberate action, while Agency Is Eating The World from Gian Segato, a founding engineer at Replit, claims the future belongs to generalists who move fast, learn quickly, and ship often in an AI-driven era.

(I highly recommend reading both!)

Some key takeaways:

1. Survival now depends on intentionality, not familiarity: Culture, traditions, and meaningful experiences no longer sustain themselves; we must actively choose and deliberately protect what matters, or risk losing it entirely.

2. High-agency individuals are becoming the new archetype: With powerful tools like AI leveling the field, those who confidently act without instruction or validation increasingly shape the future.

3. Breadth sharpens instinct: In a world where specialization is being flattened by AI, those who see how systems interconnect are better equipped to navigate ambiguity and move across domains with smart judgment.

4. Education must train for agency and discernment, not just knowledge: If agency defines future success, schools must become genuine practice grounds where students regularly face real stakes and meaningful decisions.

5. Lived experience cuts through the noise: As credentials and automation create sameness, people who embrace unconventional paths or personal stories will increasingly stand out.

How we foster high agency at an individual level

Developing this internal state of mind does take people believing in you, a teacher, a parent, a spouse.

But more importantly, it requires people around you to trust you. I don't mean giving empty praise about your innate abilities and qualities, but to allow you to try things. Take risks. Make mistakes. And bet on yourself.

It’s why Montessori’s approach to work has always resonated with me, and likely played a role in my own relationship to agency. Montessori education is grounded in the belief that children build confidence not through praise or external validation but through meaningful work and independent action.

Through that process, children get to experience for themselves what it’s like to take control of their learning and, over time, build the confidence to do it entirely on their own and in more ambiguous or unfamiliar contexts. This gradually develops into a sense of high agency and true independence, where they feel that no matter the circumstances or uncertainty, they’ll be able to figure it out.

Optimizing for agency in education outcomes

If agency “is eating the world” like Segato claims, and we know how important this skill can be for longterm success and resilience, education should be prioritizing this as a key learning outcome, not a byproduct.

Measuring whether agency has been acquired or not is less straightforward than say, testing for a static math or literacy skill, since it’s gradual and situational. The last thing we need is for “agency” to be reduced to a checklist.

But what we can control is designing better environments that we know optimize for and can lead to higher agency in students.

Education should prioritize environments that foster agency through:

• More unstructured play-based learning

• Authentic decision-making and entrepreneurial projects

• Embedding opportunities for reflection, risk assessment, and navigating ambiguity

• Realistic career guidance emphasizing non-linear paths and mentorship

My own bias for action to build in education

It’s easy to talk about the problems and pontificate better solutions for education. What's more productive is to go build the solutions.

This topic of high agency has been especially top of mind as my husband and I have recently left our previous roles to do exactly this: build urgently and create better education solutions for the world today’s learners are actually growing up in.

The future belongs to those who take matters into their own hands.

Everyone knows education is overdue for transformation. Discourse is important but it’s time for us to build.

We can’t wait to share more about what we’re working on soon!

Educational choice is not about building a single new system to replace traditional education, but about decentralizing to create many systems.

Systems that address choice at three critical levels:

1. community: can shape learning environments that reflect their values and needs.

2. families: can access schools that align with how they want to raise their children.

3. students: can receive personalized learning that meets them where they are.

Microschools accomplish this.

Studies estimate that there are roughly 95,000 microschools now operating in the United States with no signs of slowing down following the inertia of the pandemic.

Many parents feel like they are caught between two extremes when choosing between a very structured traditional education and the often overwhelming freedom of navigating homeschooling alone.

Microschools offer a third path. A variety of models to choose from and small class sizes that allow for more individualized learning, coupled with childcare and social experiences.

Put together, the microschool model offers a meaningful response to many of the challenges facing education today.

The one-room schoolhouse meets personalized learning

“One-room schoolhouses offered the kind of community intimacy that larger institutions simply cannot replicate. Every child felt seen.”

— Sarah Mondale

Microschools often look and feel much like an updated version of the one-room schoolhouse, like those of rural and farming communities in the late 19th century.

While they vary in delivery, microschools are characterized by intimate learning environments. This is typically accompanied by a small student body, with an average of 15 students, mixed-age learning, and a home-like community environment.

There was a lot to love about one-room schoolhouses of the past, particularly their intimate communities, but they were limited by the physical resources in the classroom—often outdated textbooks and a lack of advanced or specialized subjects.

The traditional system arose to bring the siloed schoolhouses up-to-date and even the scales, but we’ve arrived at a juncture where the modern schoolhouse as a microschool has newfound superpowers.

With the internet and AI, the microschools of today can truly offer personalized learning once attempted but never tenable with its historic predecessor.

A diversified movement, not a singular pedagogy

What’s promising about the microschool model is that they don’t take on a singular, standardized approach to learning. Some of the most innovative and diverse schools are emerging through this movement.

The strength of this movement is its diversity.

This wide variety of schools can be categorized by two common but distinct formats:

1. independent microschools: grassroots, bootstrapped, highly localized schools. Often the most specialized schools emerge from this category across nature and outdoor learning, arts, STEM, gifted and neurodiverse, and other targeted niches.

2. provider networks: microschools that operate as part of a broader network and often incorporate a provider’s curriculum and/or education technology stack. Organizations like KaiPod Learning, Acton, Prenda, or Primer work with educators to launch their own microschools while supporting these new founders and entrepreneurs with funding and administrative help.

Some examples of schools that vary in missions, methods, and student populations:

Embark Education (Denver, CO): a middle school located inside a coffee shop and bike store, where students apply academic concepts through real-world business operations.

The Forest School (Fayetteville, GA): part of the Acton Academy network, which blends outdoor education with Socratic dialogue and self-paced learning.

NuVu (Cambridge, MA): an innovative design-focused microschool for middle and high schoolers, where students engage in full-time, interdisciplinary projects within a studio setting.

Educators as entrepreneurs

In public schools, teachers assume the responsibility many founders face managing 30 impressionable students, but without the ownership or upside potential. Teachers often enter the profession because they deeply enjoy teaching and working with children, but sooner or later face inevitable burnout from the bureaucratic filibuster inherited with the job.

In a 2022 poll by the National Education Association, 55% of teachers responded that they plan to quit their current education roles earlier than they originally intended.

Teachers aren’t leaving their profession per se, they’re leaving the working conditions.

The burnout causing a mass exodus of public school teachers has led to increased demand for alternative teaching opportunities, and microschools are a perfect target.

The microschool model doesn’t just give families and students choice, it also gives teachers choice.

More flexibility and ownership, without the top-down oversight, untenable assessment demands and policies implemented by disconnected stakeholders. Smaller class sizes to do what they do best—work with children and help them learn.

“This is the great thing about having teachers start them—because teachers have a million ideas about how to do things better... so to give them that flexibility, the bones, the structure to innovate within is exactly what’s right for them.” — Amar Kumar, Founder of KaiPod Learning

When some of the best and brightest teachers leave public schools to start their own, the monopoly public schools have long held will continue to come apart at the seams.

This isn't a bad thing. It invites greater competition and encourages free markets to support better learning outcomes. Public schools are not only forced to reconsider how they deliver education to learners, but also how they retain and incentivize teachers.

Why we haven't seen more of this in Canada (yet)

The growth of microschools has been trending in the U.S. post-pandemic with no signs of slowing, yet we haven’t seen this kind of movement make its way north of the border.

Canada’s absence of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) is a key barrier.

In parts of the U.S. where ESAs are prevalent, especially universal ESAs that allow any family to opt out of public school and receive vouchers for their child’s education, there is supply and demand for new school models like microschools.

Here in Canada, families can’t redirect taxpayer money that has been allocated for their child’s education (which averages around $14,000 per student annually in Ontario). As a result, only a subset of more affluent families may be able to justify removing their child from public school or seek alternative options when they must pay out of pocket entirely.

Still, interest in microschools is beginning to emerge across Canada, especially among families seeking more personalized education or flexible alternatives to the traditional system.

While the lack of public funding presents a real challenge, a small but growing number of educators and founders are experimenting with grassroots models that reflect the same values driving the movement in other parts of North America.

A few notable examples of Canadian microschools include:

1. Saplings Nature School (Vancouver, BC): A nature-based program where children learn outdoors through unstructured play and exploration.

2. Summit Micro School (Toronto, ON): A K–8 microschool with mixed-age classrooms and project-based learning. Offers small class sizes (avg. 12 students) with a focus on neurodiverse and outdoor learning.

3. Mont-Libre Agile Learning Centre (Montreal, QC): Quebec’s first Agile Learning Centre, supporting homeschool-registered students in a bilingual, self-directed environment with democratic governance.

Microschools as cultural disruptors

The microschool movement represents a meaningful shift toward decentralized education that offers real choice for families, communities, and educators.

Microschools are cultural disruptors that signal something deeper about the desire for more local and community-driven alternatives to top-down institutions.

This movement toward small, intimate schools elucidates the demand for school pluralism—the ability to choose and access a range of educational options as a core feature of K-12 education.

Where the divide was once limited to public versus elite private schools, microschools are primed to serve a diverse socioeconomic spectrum, with a meaningful concentration of middle- and lower-income families. In the U.S., access to ESAs has played a key role in supporting this trend.

This movement is not without its challenges though.

Barriers for greater microschool adoption

Zoning restrictions, regulatory complexity, and a lack of long-term data around accreditation, quality assurance, and student outcomes continue to stand in the way of broader adoption and growth.

Microschools are still in the early stages of adoption, facing regulatory and funding structures that were designed for the traditional system, not decentralized learning models.

Just as healthcare and financial services had to modernize their systems to support innovation and consumer choice, the long-term growth of microschools will depend on whether outdated education frameworks can evolve to support what these models make possible.

Watching this unfold, I’m less convinced that we need one big answer to education and more convinced that we need space for many. Microschools offer that possibility.

I briefly played the cello when I was young, but had to give it up. I've had this nagging feeling ever since that it would be a shame to never pick it up again.

Learning the cello comes with a big upfront commitment: at minimum you need to rent a cello and bow, and since it's unadvisable to self-teach given the complexity of the instrument and the chance of developing bad habits, you need a teacher.

Two years ago, I decided to go for it.

To make my life even more interesting, I started learning Cantonese a few months after picking up cello. I'd never spoken a word of it before, but my husband's family is Cantonese, and I wanted to learn to speak with them with the hope of eventually sharing the language with our future child.

It's been a journey learning both of these skills over the past two years, juggling them as a busy, working adult. But also incredibly humbling and rewarding in so many ways.

Being an adult beginner in cello and Cantonese has given me insight into what it's like to learn from the ground up.

It's become an introspective experience on what it's like to not know, to struggle, and to reflect on the way I approach learning. These insights might even help us better understand what it's like to learn as a child, especially when we consider the power of personalized learning and less traditional approaches to education.

Here's what becoming a beginner again taught me.

When learning is your choice, the process becomes your own

I picked up the cello again because I kept thinking the longer I waited, the more I’d regret not trying. Unlike most things, I had no big lofty goal I was striving for. No plans to go to Juilliard and nothing that would pad my resume or get me a promotion.

My decision to pick up cello was one I made for myself. I wanted to let go of the idea that there’s an expiry date on what and when I can learn. Or that there’s anything wrong with learning something purely for the sake of enjoyment.

Cantonese was the same. No one asked me to learn it. In fact, when I first mentioned the idea to my husband he was skeptical it would be a productive use of time.

His experience at Chinese school as a kid had clouded his view on learning the language, soured by memories of mandatory Saturday attendance with no say in the matter.

Conversely, learning on my own terms has allowed me to have agency over the entire process start to finish.

With this agency I have full ownership over my “why”, what I can handle, and when. I’m still hard on myself, but in lieu of any external pressure I can embrace the messy, slow process of motivation and progress.

Why this matters: Self-directed learners don’t just engage more deeply, they take direct ownership over the process, which most traditional systems fail to support.

How we learn matters as much as what we learn

Starting to learn Cantonese with a blank slate was daunting at first. I started with apps, watched my fair share of YouTube videos, and quickly realized learning isolated vocabulary was not sufficient in developing true ability to comprehend or retain the language.

Three things became apparent:

1. The delivery of instruction, and who or what you learn, from matters a lot.

2. Learning in real-life contexts dramatically accelerates learning.

3. There is no shortcut to learning hard things, like a language :)

I went through a number of tutors in the beginning, but didn’t feel like I was retaining much from any of these lessons. After a few months of this I landed on my current teacher who runs group sessions for adults.

His approach to language learning—humour, occasional profanities, and an emphasis on practical words and phrases—was my cup of tea. A few weeks in these group classes, where I also learned through my peers on the same journey, was enough to see immediate progress and a resurgence of motivation to keep going.

Outside of lessons, some of the phrases I’ve retained and use most come from cooking with my father-in-law and listening to him and my husband speak Cantonese.

Ascribing meaning to learning is also motivating—to join in on these conversations, or at the very least understand is fulfilling. Even more fulfilling is strolling down the streets of Chinatown with the newfound ability to understand passing conversations.

With language and music, skills that take years to master especially as an adult, there really is no shortcut or app to bypass these slow, tedious parts of learning.

Over time I’ve come to find that really beautiful about this process.

Why this matters: Learning environments that fail to account for individual fit risk losing learners not because they can’t learn, but because the method isn’t curated for them.

Progress rarely looks the way we expect it to

I’ve always been self-disciplined in how I approach learning. However, I’ve come to see firsthand as a beginner how consistent practice ≠ consistent progress.

There was a period this year where I was stuck on the same cello piece for weeks. I was practicing twice the amount I normally would, but crumbled every time I performed in front of my teacher.

You can’t be tense while playing the cello. Tension affects the sound quality. The more upset I got at myself for messing up, the more tense I became and the worse I played.

Instead of doubling down on practice, I decided to take a few days off and step away from it. I came back with a fresh approach and clear mind, and things magically clicked again.

These moments of plateauing and even regression were initially a sign of frustration, but now I welcome them as a part of the process—processing and consolidating in order to move forward.

Why this matters: Personalized learning allows for the plateaus and breaks that traditional systems treat as failure.

Returning to the beginning

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few
― Shunryu Suzuki

By the time we become adults, we forget what it's really like to be thrown in the deep end and learn something entirely new. The frustration when I get something wrong or hit roadblocks with cello and Cantonese has given me deeper empathy for young learners—especially when we expect them to master complex skills without enough space or support.

My experience as an adult beginner has furthered my conviction in the power of personalized, self-directed learning. When the pace, format, and purpose align with the learner, the entire process becomes more sustainable.

This personal experience has added new meaning to why I advocate for models like Montessori, microschools, and other student-centred approaches. The traditional classroom with its rigid pacing and set curriculum often conflicts with how humans naturally learn.

The future of education depends on expanding access to diverse models that reflect how people actually learn. School choice and personalized learning are central to building systems that treat individual learning needs as fundamental design principles rather than afterthoughts.

“Although ChatGPT has made tasks like creative writing easier and less effortful, our findings support concerns about the potential devaluation and diminished enjoyment of the creative process” (Mei et al., 2025, p. 10).

Confirming what many suspected, a recent study in higher education revealed that while ChatGPT improved the quality and creativity of students’ writing, their perceived enjoyment and sense of creativity in the process declined. The study found that the cognitive offloading that occurs when relying on AI to do the heavy lifting made the process feel less effortful, but also less meaningful. Though unsurprising, the report prompted a brief ludditical unease about the future of writing instruction with the rise of AI and LLMs. After some reflection, I’ve landed on a more optimistic, productive take:

AI isn’t killing writing instruction; it’s exposing the underlying fragility that was already there. For too long, writing has been a performative act in the classroom, often formulaic and void of meaning. Tools like ChatGPT displace the ownership of effort in the writing process, furthering this disconnect even more.

But without downplaying the herculean task ahead, if we teach students to use AI as a collaborative partner rather than a shortcut, we might finally begin to repair what’s long been broken in how we teach writing. Offloading the mechanical parts of writing can actually free students to think more deeply and engage in higher-order thinking, but only if they learn to use these tools with intention and discernment.

Writing skills have been in decline long before LLMs

Writing proficiency has been dismal in the last decade, well before ChatGPT made its debut. The National Assessment of Educational Progress’s (NAEP) comprehensive writing assessment in 2011 found that only 27% of students from grades four through twelve demonstrated proficiency in writing skills. While large-scale data on writing has been limited since, colleges are increasingly adding remedial composition classes for undergraduates who are ill-equipped for college-level writing.

A few reasons for the decline can be chalked up to:

• Rigid structure and reliance on the five-paragraph essay: While easier to grade and scale, it has made writing feel formulaic at the expense of creativity and voice.

• Writing instruction disconnected from the real world: Writing instruction overindexes on essays, rather than practical formats we engage with in real life e.g. email, newsletters, social media, YouTube videos.

• Inauthentic audiences: Rather than conveying a message to a real audience, students submit their writing to a teacher for the sole purpose of assessment (not to be enjoyed or to learn something).

• Not writing enough: Writing is often taught in isolated units and for high-stakes tasks rather than as a regular habit, limiting the ability to experiment with voice and develop the muscle needed to become a good writer.

Students often view writing as a means to an end, rather than a tool for thought. To get the grade they need. To get into college. It’s no wonder proficiency has declined and kids generally grow to dislike it.

ChatGPT exacerbated the “means to an end” mentality

For many students, ChatGPT supercharged the mindset that writing is a means to an end. The implications from the higher education study confirm this tradeoff: ChatGPT makes writing easier (reducing time and effort) with more creative outputs (number of ideas and variety of ideas), but decrease students’ enjoyment and creativity throughout the process. The use of AI led to a diminished sense of intellectual effort and accomplishment, especially among less sophisticated and experienced ChatGPT users.

ChatGPT’s ability to produce acceptable, and in some cases superior outputs leaves students with an even bigger dilemma. What is my role in this process and why am I writing this when AI can do it for me?

Why we should still care about teaching good writing

As Matt Bateman puts it in a recent talk on AI in the classroom, “writing is a power tool for thought.”

Formal schooling didn’t emerge to teach math or science, it was created to teach writing. From the scribal schools of ancient Mesopotamia to the civil service education of imperial China, writing was treated as a sacred and deeply human craft. Somewhere along the way, we lost that reverence.

Writing is hard, and so is teaching it. But the ability to write is central to the ability to think, to produce your own original thoughts and ideas. It may be prudent to offload certain writing tasks to AI, especially those that benefit from clarity over personal voice, but more than ever, authentic voice and experience will be critical to a society inundated by AI-generated content.

Teaching good writing, independent of teaching students how to use AI, is important because it develops their own thought. Thoughts become judgment, and judgment becomes authority—skills students need in order to use AI with sophistication.

AI as a creative partner

A close friend of mine, Kyle, is a seasoned video producer who’s been experimenting with GenAI in genuinely creative ways. With decades of experience producing creative videos, he doesn’t see AI as a threat to his work. Instead, he’s embracing it to explore ideas that would’ve once required far more time and money to bring to life. When I think of AI as a creative partner, Kyle comes to mind. He possesses a strong foundation in film, along with the creative intuition and judgment to engage with GenAI in a strategic, iterative process.

In an ideal world, this is how students approach writing with tools like ChatGPT at their disposal.

But obviously, that’s much easier said than done. Students are still early in their writing journey and don’t possess the same years of experience and maturity to intuitively engage with AI in such a way. They need a recipe of strong guidance on how to use AI critically and with discernment, where AI acts as a thought partner, not a substitute. This, coupled with better foundational writing instruction, and more opportunities to write in real-world contexts.

Some initial ideas on how to approach this:

• Embrace, rather than ban AI. Instead of banning AI tools outright, schools should focus on thoughtful integration. Students are using these tools regardless, so it’s imperative they’re taught how to use it.

• Model AI use openly and critically. Students need to see what thoughtful engagement with AI looks like. Teachers can demo how to prompt AI for feedback, then question its suggestions.

• Give students structured opportunities to co-create with AI. Build assignments where students are encouraged to collaborate with AI e.g., ask it to play devil’s advocate, generate alternate endings, or offer edits that they can accept or reject.

• Make the writing process visible through a changelog. Have students share not just the final draft, but how they got there, including how they used (or didn’t use) AI. This could look like submitting screenshots of AI chats, writing short reflections on what they changed, or walking through their revisions. The more students are asked to reflect on their process, the more they learn to own it.

• Design writing tasks that are rooted in real perspective. Prompts that ask students to write about personal experiences or nuanced opinions are harder for AI to fake and easier for students to feel invested in.

• Treat AI literacy like digital literacy. Understanding how tools like ChatGPT work, and where they pull information from should be part of the writing curriculum. Writing instruction should also include ethical considerations like data privacy and the difference between using AI to enhance thinking versus outsourcing it entirely.

Thoughtful use of AI in the classroom depends on teachers who understand these tools themselves. None of this will matter if teachers aren’t trained and supported first.

Regaining our footing with writing instruction

“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.” —Plato, Phaedrus (circa 370 BCE)

Plato’s warning about writing, spoken through Socrates in Phaedrus, feels eerily familiar in this moment. Where writing once provoked fears of intellectual decline, today’s generative tools stir a similar unease. If AI can generate ideas and language so swiftly, will students still come to value the slower, messier process of writing itself?

And yet, the written word did not erode human thought. It expanded it, not by replacing the mind, but by inviting it into new forms of expression. AI holds that same potential, if students are taught to approach it with intention and a sense of authorship. Shaping and challenging what these tools offer rather than being passive recipients.

To regain our footing in writing instruction is not to retreat from innovation, but to reclaim intention. It means creating space for students to develop discernment, so that what they create in partnership with AI still bears the mark of their own curiosity and judgment.

The technology will continue to evolve. The task is the same: to help students become capable thinkers.

References

Davies, W. V. (1987). Egyptian hieroglyphs. British Museum Press.

Elman, B. A. (2001). From philosophy to philology: Intellectual and social aspects of change in late Imperial China (2nd ed.). Harvard University Asia Center.

Marrou, H.-I. (1956). A history of education in antiquity (G. Lamb, Trans.). University of Wisconsin Press.

Mei, P., Brewis, D. N., Nwaiwu, F., Sumanathilaka, D., Alva-Manchego, F., & Demaree-Cotton, J. (2025). If ChatGPT can do it, where is my creativity? Generative AI boosts performance but diminishes experience in creative writing. Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans, 4, 100140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbah.2025.100140

Michalowski, P. (2004). Writing and literacy in early Mesopotamia. In S. D. Houston (Ed.), The first writing: Script invention as history and process (pp. 49–70). Cambridge University Press.

Oregon State University Ecampus. (n.d.). Bloom’s Taxonomy revisited [Infographic]. Oregon State University. https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/faculty/artificial-intelligence-tools/blooms-taxonomy-revisited/

I’ve been thinking a lot about how education choice gets muddled, not just by a proliferation of categories, but by the language we use to describe those categories. Words like “alternative education” and “homeschooling” trigger immediate, often unconscious judgments. And those judgments shape what feels legitimate, accessible, or even worth exploring.

Look up “alternative education” on Reddit and you’ll find a host of confusion, not to mention zero consensus on what the term actually means. And that tension around language isn’t new. Last week, I came across a popular WIRED article from 2015 about a growing trend of tech professionals choosing to homeschool their kids. One family featured had been doing so for nine years, but deliberately referred to it as “independent learning,” a subtle but telling choice that reflects how many families are quietly distancing themselves from the term “homeschooling” altogether.

Educational choice is affected by language

For the longest time, traditional school was the default. Anything outside of that was considered “alternative”. But as more learning models emerge and families opt out of the traditional path, the language around education becomes more than semantics.

This naming problem matters. It affects how families discover options and contributes to the narratives that shape public perception and legitimacy of non-traditional approaches.

I’d argue that educational choice is not just burdened by policies and funding, but also by the language we use to describe it—often leading to forms of gatekeeping, confusion, and outdated interpretations that don’t match the innovation and nuance that exists within the “alternative ed” categories.

We often treat education as purely instructional, but it also plays a role in how people signal status and identity.

Why "alternative" is loaded and insufficient

When we label something "alternative," we position it as secondary, existing only in relation to the "normal" option. This framing problem is particularly acute in education, where "alternative" has come to be a catch-all term for everything from progressive Montessori schools to behavioral intervention programs for struggling students.

The term "alternative education" falls short in a few ways:

1. It's defined by what it's not. “Alternative education” tells us only that it isn’t traditional. It gives no clarity about what it is.

2. It lumps unlike things together. A Montessori preschool, a tech-driven microschool, and a program for at-risk youth all sit under the same umbrella, despite radically different goals.

3. It carries stigma. Many still associate “alternative education” with underperformance, remediation, or fringe ideologies. This creates a perception hurdle for models that are actually innovative, rigorous, or values-driven.

The naming issue goes beyond “alternative”

The problem isn't limited to one term.

• homeschooling, for example, describes a location not a pedagogy. But it still carries cultural baggage: assumptions about religious affiliation, isolation, or lack of structure. In reality, today’s homeschoolers might attend online schools, participate in project-based pods, or follow modular curricula curated by learning coaches.

• edtech used to signal innovation. But with technology now embedded in nearly every learning environment, it’s become more of a default layer than a distinct category.

I’m not arguing that we need to rename every model. Nor will language alone fix education. But the words we use shape how families navigate options, how policymakers craft regulations, and how legitimacy is formed.

At the very least, we should recognize how outdated terms can obscure the full range of possibilities emerging in modern learning.

A new language for learning

Rather than rebranding legacy models, we might need entirely new language to refer to the next phase of education.

Manisha Snoyer, founder of Modulo, suggests the term “modular learning” to describe how many families are now assembling education like building blocks from a mix of online platforms, in-person tutors, co-ops, and enrichment programs. Adam Peshek, meanwhile, proposes “indie schooling” to capture a rising category of independent, founder-driven schools, often small and intentionally designed outside the traditional public or large private school systems. Much like indie music or film, these schools prioritize personalization and community over scale or standardization.

These terms reflect real shifts. But they also risk becoming new buzzwords if not clearly defined or tied to deeper structural change.

One metaphor I find helpful is to think of education evolving in similar ways to the internet.

If Education 1.0 was top-down through direct instruction, and Education 2.0 introduced more interactivity from a centralized source, Education 3.0 represents the latest phase in education: decentralized, learner-owned, and community-driven. Like web3, it’s less about fixed models and more about fluid networks of participation and ownership. Choice.

Why language matters moving forward

Ultimately, we don’t need one perfect term. What matters is developing language that is both inviting and reflects the full spectrum of learning happening today.

For many families, choosing a model is just the beginning. What they’re really searching for is language that aligns with their values, speaks to their lived experience, and helps them feel seen.

How do you talk about education in your own circles? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Historically, K-12 schools have lagged behind consumer tech adoption by a significant margin of 10 or more years. Case in point: home computers were prevalent in the 1990s, but widespread adoption of 1:1 computers in schools didn’t occur until the early to mid 2010s.

Will we see this same lag happen with AI? While adoption of AI-based tools will move slower than consumers (factor in cost + licensing + approvals + teacher training) adoption cycles are moving faster than ever before especially with momentum from the pandemic and lower barrier of entry to access consumer tech like AI.

In his article “Make America Smart Again,” Andy Kessler highlights how AI is already reshaping K-12 education:

Actually, AI is already being deployed with great success. One example: The Alpha School, launched in Austin, Texas, has a goal of completely reimagining education. Alpha co-founder MacKenzie Price says, “Students get AI-powered, self-paced learning plans and spend only two hours a day on academics. They learn twice as much in half the time. The rest of the school day is devoted to learning life skills like public speaking, financial literacy, socialization and teamwork.” To do this, teachers become guides, she explains, “doing what humans do best: emotional support, motivation and developing a personal connection to students.” It works. How do we scale this nationwide and then globally?

It's clear AI is already changing the landscape of education, so what comes next?

Here are some of my broad predictions for education in an AI-driven world:

• hyper-personalized learning driven by AI tutors will dramatically accelerate learning. Unlike direct instruction where lessons accommodate the average and weakest students, AI can create individualized lessons with feedback loops at a pace virtually impossible for teachers. I predict we’ll start to see more AI tutors designed to target core subjects, like Synthesis Tutor for math, but also entire school models designed with AI in mind. The 2 Hour Learning model piloted by The Alpha School and implemented in schools across the US is built on the promise that “students learn 2x in just 2 hours a day” and can free up 4 hours of their day to develop life skills and personal interests. AI systems that interoperate will be crucial for creating holistic student profiles rather than fragmented insights from disconnected tools.

• human connection through social and IRL experiences will become essential. If kids only need two hours for core subjects, families and educators will seek human-centered, community-oriented experiences. Similar to the increasing demand for co-working spaces and IRL meetups with the virtualization of work, we’ll see more emphasis on soft skills through outdoor learning, co-learning spaces like Moonrise, makerspaces and entrepreneurial programs, and expanded extracurriculars. Families will naturally cultivate human experiences that AI cannot replicate. We could even see digital detoxes mandated by schools to preserve interpersonal skills.

• public speaking will be used as a key differentiator and indicator of deep understanding. While good writing instruction shouldn't be offloaded to AI, the ability to verbally communicate ideas spontaneously will increasingly qualify deep understanding. Increasingly TED Talks and public speaking courses are part of curriculums for children as young as 6. The Socratic discussion model is becoming a core tenet of schools like Acton Academy, and edtech tools like Parlay are facilitating meaningful, measurable class discussions. Rather than the traditional five-paragraph essay (where AI might do too much heavy lifting), debate clubs and YouTube presentations could become the new gold standard.

• greater access to hands-on and entrepreneurial opportunities, even for younger grades. Seemingly overnight, AI tools have already democratized the ability to build apps, games, and other cool things through “vibe coding” even for those who are non-technical. We’ll start to see more young people embrace building software similar to how they’ve embraced social media and content creation. There will be increased sense of urgency and access to building real things that actually matter and schools will need to adapt to this. More opportunities to participate in incubator programs and prototype a business idea (similar to micro-economy in Montessori), as well as more access to a variety of internships, partnerships with local businesses, and mentorships earlier on in K-12.

• private and elite schools will invest heavily in advanced AI models as a competitive advantage. While traditional private schools may have the best access to funding and incentive to adopt AI as a value prop, they will also face substantial inertia due to reputational expectations and internal red tape. Ironically, this inertia will likely slow their adoption compared to more innovative, nimble schools. As a result, we're likely to see newer, more agile private schools, especially those built from the ground up with AI, training the most advanced AI models to deliver personalized learning experiences. This has the potential to create further educational inequities in the short to medium term, and will likely lead to an arms race as demand for proprietary models skyrocket.

• parents and families will become more integral to a kid’s education (again). Increased access to real-time feedback from AI dashboards will give parents more frequent and tangible insight into their progress. The modular approach to AI platforms = more choice = more à la carte unbundling of educational services. While we may have not cracked the nut on child care just yet, AI’s increased transparency and personalization will allow families to more actively engage by selecting specific courses and enrichment activities, possibly through hybrid approaches or varied learning environments.

So, where does this all lead?

It’s clear that AI is already here in some capacity and that schools across the globe are experimenting with it at varying degrees. This ranges from basic approaches like district-level licensing of Microsoft Co-Pilot and addressing the growing concerns about AI and cheating, to innovative schools that have built entire curriculums around AI. There are lots of questions and concerns around how we use AI effectively and for the most part we’ve hardly begun to predict AI's long-term impact on education.

Will we use AI to help fix some of the large education issues we face today or will the arms race for advanced models widen the gap further? Another big issue to focus on: implementing AI intentionally so platforms communicate with each other to provide holistic rather than fragmented perspectives on student progress. This interoperability is essential before personalized learning can reach its full potential.

At SXSW EDU 2025, Sinead Bovell outlines 3 core pillars we should consider with AI adoption in education:

1. Safe adoption: Teaching students how to use AI safely and responsibly AKA “AI isn’t your friend.”

2. Curriculum adjustments: Knowing that students are using AI at home, prioritizing higher order thinking in the classroom.

3. System redesign: A complete redesign of the system with AI in mind where it can truly be used effectively and intentionally.

“What seems to be happening in this moment is we are kind of merging all of those pillars in a sense of urgency,” Bovell cautioned. “This leads us to deploy AI in schools for the sake of feeling like we need to meet the moment by bringing AI into the classroom. And there are a lot of technologies that aren’t ready.”

As we navigate this critical transition period, thoughtful implementation will be key.

These are just a few of my predictions on how K-12 will change over time, of which I’ll expand on and add to over time. I’d love to hear your perspective on where you see things headed. 🦢

I recently toured Guidepost Academy, a Montessori middle school in Toronto, to find out. As a former Montessori student myself, I was curious to see how this pedagogy would translate to young teens.

What is Guidepost Montessori?

Guidepost Montessori is the largest network of Montessori schools in the world, spanning four continents with over 150 campuses, along with virtual programs and homeschooling support. Led by Higher Ground Education, their mission is to make Montessori education mainstream and more accessible globally. I’m biased as someone who can talk for hours about why I believe a Montessori education has so much to offer, but on top of being financially inaccessible for many families, Montessori still faces stereotypes like it being “a hippie school”, too permissive or not actually preparing kids for the real world.

I’ve personally been privy to some (slightly humorous) conversations about Montessori being for “indoctrinated weird kids” only to backpedal when they find out I’m a former Montessori kid myself—proudly indoctrinated and weird by the way. Guidepost Montessori’s mission resonates with me because their goal of growing instead of gatekeeping increases public awareness of Montessori education, and in turn challenges some of these surface-level perceptions.

First Impressions: Modern Co-Working for Middle Schoolers

The “Montessori effect” was apparent from entering the Guidepost Academy classroom. Two bright-eyed students immediately took the lead, showing me where to put my things and giving me a tour of the space. Their sense of pride and autonomy was evident, and the interaction felt natural.

Rather than rows of desks facing a teacher's podium, the space itself resembled a modern co-working environment:

• Flexible reading areas for concentration

• Natural light and plants throughout

• Purposefully placed materials without overwhelming stimulation

• A dedicated room for one-on-one mentoring sessions

The classroom felt distinctly professional, reflecting that these students weren’t just older elementary kids, but young adults preparing for real-world participation. It was also clean and well kept—a space I would want to sit down and get some work in too!

Maria Montessori's Vision for Adolescents

Understanding what I observed requires a quick look at Montessori's developmental framework. She viewed development through planes centered around independence:

• Early childhood (0-6): Physical independence (practical life skills)

• Childhood (6-12): Intellectual independence (abstract reasoning)

• Adolescence (12-18): Social and economic independence (identity formation and contributing value)

• Maturity (18-24): Spiritual and moral independence (finding purpose and contributing to society)

Maria Montessori's original vision for adolescent education was a farm school where students would experience being essential members of a community through tangible, practical work. The immediate cause-and-effect relationship (if you don't milk the cow, nobody gets milk) provides natural lessons in responsibility and social contribution.

Of course, most people now wouldn’t agree that sending pre-teens off to farms is the way to educate children. But if we take the practical underpinnings of what she was after to create an environment that promotes social and economic independence, what does that look like today? That’s where Guidepost comes in with their modern expression of Montessori’s vision.

Micro-Economy: Economic Independence in Action

The most interesting component of Guidepost's middle school program is its focus on real-world applications and the “Micro-Economy” program. Students run actual businesses—for this class, a granola-making venture and dog-walking services—that generate revenue and require authentic problem-solving. They have dedicated time to work on these businesses each week and self-organize into mini-startups where each member takes on key responsibilities. Head of School, Laura McCarthy spoke with me about how this has led to very practical discussions with students on how to become better leaders, rally their peers around a vision, and see the value in organization skills.

Students also get frequent job shadowing opportunities to engage with professionals and get early exposure to different types of careers paths. All of this helps mitigate the disconnect between what they are learning in the classroom and the real-world, showing middle schoolers that their contributions are actually valuable now and not in some distant future.

As the Lead Guide shared with me: "Students should always be able to clearly explain why they are working on something and why it matters."

Structured Freedom: Balancing Autonomy with Accountability

While students have considerable freedom, the environment isn't chaotic. They experience:

• Agency in planning their schedules within structured expectations

• Portfolio-based work with clear deadlines but self-directed execution

• Weekly one-on-one mentoring to ensure progress and accountability

During my observation, students were engaged in focused work, some discussing their projects with peers, others working independently on their laptops. The atmosphere was purposeful rather than rigid and refreshingly free from the anxious withdrawal sometimes seen in traditional middle schools.

Instead of formal grading, Guidepost Montessori measures outcomes through mastery-based learning where students play a role in tracking their progress and demonstrating competency at their own pace.

Is Montessori Right for Every Adolescent?

The staff at Guidepost were candid about their approach not being universal. With mixed-age class sizes around fifteen students in a single room, some parents express concerns about limited social opportunities. The counter to that is smaller environments can allow for more personalized extracurricular activities tailored to student interests.

When I asked about technology management, they acknowledge there are occasional reminders about appropriate laptop use and that phones stay in a designated bin for the day. From my time observing, it appears the agency students have and the purposeful work they engage in make distractions manageable, much like an adult work environment. After all, if we’re not working on things we care about at work it’s a normal human behaviour to get bored, overwhelmed, or distracted.

Final Thoughts: Preparation for Modern Life

After spending a morning observing these engaged middle schoolers, I'm convinced that Montessori can indeed extend meaningfully into adolescent education. I’d go so far as to say that the Montessori philosophy may actually prepare students more effectively for adulthood than traditional education models.

Why? We live in a world that is democratizing the ability to create and be entrepreneurial, where knowledge is accessible to everyone and no career path is as linear as it once was. Guidepost Montessori’s approach to real-world application through initiatives like the micro-economy program allow adolescents to prepare to become meaningful participants in society. Instead of feeling anxious about the future, they can start to feel confident about what they’re working on now, knowing it actually matters.

What do you think? Have you experienced or observed Montessori education for older students? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

What we need instead is a system that enables choice at every level: for students pursuing their interests, for families selecting the right educational fit, and for communities creating diverse learning environments.

Children enter the world with innate curiosity and a desire to learn through play, but all too quickly learn that it's conformity and compliance that are rewarded. I witnessed this transformation firsthand as a student, moving from a Montessori environment where learning was self-directed and driven by curiosity, to a public school desk where learning became passive. Moving between these two environments showed me how quickly a child's natural love of learning could be suppressed by rigid systems. Over time I’ve come to understand the difference between education and school. Education, as an instinctual desire to be curious and learn, is innately human. School is a construct. And like any construct that no longer serves us, it deserves to be questioned.

The Legacy of Industrial Education

Despite general consensus about the current model's shortcomings, traditional education has prevailed as the status quo. The standardized K-12 system we know today, inherited from Prussian models of the 1800s, has only been around for 60-70 years. That’s long enough for us to forget what alternatives looked like, like one-room schoolhouses, and mixed-age classes, but short enough to suggest it hasn't been the only and best way to learn in human history.

The cracks in traditional education are becoming impossible to ignore though. As AI transforms every industry and remote work redefines how we spend our time, traditional careers and credentials matter less than adaptability and self-directed learning. Emerging trends like 'vibe coding' are democratizing the ability to prototype and build things regardless of one’s technical ability, emphasizing the new reality where AI tools enable anyone to become a programmer, designer, or startup founder with just a few clicks. We're witnessing the emergence of a world where success depends more on what you can create than where you learned it, where continuous learning is the norm, and where children need to be prepared for jobs that don't yet exist. Companies like Google and IBM have dropped degree requirements for many roles, while innovative co-op programs are creating direct pathways into tech careers without traditional credentials.

The Promise of Choice and Agency

Learning Has Fundamentally Changed in the Digital Age

When we return to first principles and ask fundamental questions about education, a recurring theme emerges: the need for agency and choice at multiple levels.

• Student level: Children need personalized learning pathways that respect their interests, pace, and learning styles.

• Family level: Parents need the freedom and financial ability to select educational environments that match their children's unique needs.

• System level: Communities need the ability to create diverse educational models beyond standardized approaches.

With the internet and AI at our disposal, this multi-level personalization is truly tenable at scale for the first time in history.

While tech is a big part of it, it's also about looking outside standardized models to provide (and embrace) more alternative ways to learn.

Evidence of Change: The Steep Adoption of Alternative Education

The success of longstanding alternative models proves this is possible. Take the Sudbury Valley School (or Alpha Alternative - a Canadian “democratic school” equivalent) which has over 50 years of graduates demonstrating that self-directed education creates capable, successful adults. Their alumni have gone on to diverse careers and life paths without ever receiving traditional grades or following a standard curriculum. Or consider the track record of Montessori education, which has produced innovative thinkers like Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez. The same can be said across a wide spectrum of alternative models, though they are often underrepresented in longterm studies.

We're seeing a significant shift in how families approach education. Homeschooling numbers 7x during COVID from 0.6% to 4.3% in Canada (and 3.3% to 11.1% in the U.S.), and notably, they've stayed high even after schools reopened. Microschools have also exploded across North America, with an estimated 95,000 emerging in the US in 2024. Parents are increasingly questioning whether traditional schooling truly serves their children's needs.

The policy landscape is shifting to support this transformation. In the US, twelve states now offer universal Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), putting the power of choice directly in parents' hands by letting them direct state education funds toward whatever learning environment works best for their kids. These accounts can fund private school tuition, learning materials, or customized educational programs, breaking the government's monopoly on education and giving families real alternatives to the traditional system. Unfortunately for Canadian families, ESAs haven't made it north of the border yet, where most provinces still force parents to pay education taxes while offering little to no financial support for alternatives like homeschooling. Despite valid concerns about ESAs, their introduction creates unprecedented market pressure for public schools to adapt or risk obsolescence.

The Challenges of True Educational Choice

Success stories aside, even though choice technically exists, most private and alternative schools still map back to the same standard expectations and curriculum. Creating innovative brick-and-mortar schools is also plagued by barriers, from restrictive zoning laws to complex health and safety regulations that make the cost for innovation and risk prohibitively high. In the absence of ESAs in Canada, unless you have substantial disposable income, there are few opportunities to choose where to send your child, limiting market demand for options beyond traditional blue-blood private schools Those who do choose unconventional routes like homeschooling and unschooling often cite judgment from family, friends, and strangers as a major challenge. We have most, if not all, the ingredients to provide more agency and choice in education, but still face significant barriers, both regulatory and cultural, to making this a reality.

When Learning Became Schooling

My perspective on education has been shaped by multiple vantage points. As a Montessori student, I discovered the power of self-directed learning. When I became a teacher myself, I saw the limitations of traditional education firsthand. Working in tech has since offered me a fresh perspective and increased urgency for how we might tackle the education crisis.

Attending Montessori in my early educational years, I experienced what true student-led learning looked like with daily uninterrupted work periods directed by my own curiosity. When they call Montessori "student-directed," it's often misconstrued that teachers sit back and let kids do whatever they want. It's much more intentional though, a sort of “structured freedom”. Teachers identify natural points of interest and build on them, while a meticulously designed environment (often called the "third teacher") promotes independence and purposeful activity.

The shift to traditional school was jarring. I, like many, learned to beat the system by memorizing for the test, completing assignments on time, and being a respectful student. Not that any of these behaviours are inherently problematic or bad skills to acquire, but is that the best way to measure real learning? Instead of being rewarded for curiosity and creativity, public school introduced me to a new, single metric of success: grades.

Despite these bumps in the road, my Montessori experience had shown me that learning could be different. Driven by that vision with fresh-faced idealism, I obtained my Masters in Teaching at The University of Toronto, believing that becoming an educator was the most direct path to effecting change.

Breaking Away from Traditional Education

Not long before graduating, I had a lingering feeling of doubt. While the majority of my cohort was gearing up to become public school teachers, I couldn't shake a growing realization that my vision for education was fundamentally incompatible with the traditional system. Even being the best teacher possible wouldn't change the problems I saw.

Students remained confined to standardized lessons and rigid schedules, while the technology shaping their lives outside the classroom was treated as a threat within it. The more recent response to ChatGPT’s launch highlights this stark disconnect. Instead of embracing AI as a powerful learning tool and preparing students to use it effectively, schools across North America rushed to implement bans and restrictions. We’ve thankfully seen many of these bans lifted since then, but the wave of panic spoke volumes.

Career guidance has equally been stuck in the past. The same handful of traditional career paths were being presented to students, completely disconnected from the real world and future of work, where thousands of new jobs that never existed are being created every day.

So, after a brief stint I left.

Finding New Solutions in Tech

After working in edtech and startups, I took a leap of faith to join Treasure, a blockchain network for entertainment. As their first marketing hire and CMO, I now work at the intersection of blockchain and AI. These fields might seem unrelated to education, but they share core principles with my teaching philosophy: building new systems from first principles, embracing technology, and individual agency.

Working in crypto has shown me broken systems cannot be reformed from within; instead, parallel structures must be created that render old constraints irrelevant. Similarly, education doesn't need more bureaucratic patches or standardized metrics. It requires a complete reimagining where choice and community involvement become foundational rather than afterthoughts. Where existing institutions resist change through regulatory capture and institutional inertia, distributed networks create new possibilities outside their reach.

Unlike when I left teaching feeling frustrated and isolated, I now see this same pattern of parallel innovation emerging in education and it fills me with optimism. The future isn't waiting for permission from established systems.

We're already seeing innovative responses through:

• Gamified and AI learning platforms like Synthesis

• Co-learning spaces like Moonrise

• Teacherless schools like Alpha

• Extended Montessori programs through high school with Guidepost Montessori

• The rise of homeschooling and microschools

Building Better Alternatives

I work in an industry that proves we can build entirely new systems when the old ones no longer serve us. I also work in an industry where you can be young and taken seriously if you just start building things—where anonymity is common and you're judged on the merit of your work, not where you came from or what school you attended.

More than building something new, we need to start creating more choices for children. They spend 13-14 years, the first half of their life, in school. Children deserve more agency in receiving an education that works for them, just as we as adults have agency in where and how we decide to spend our time.

Education remains humanity's greatest lever for progress, which is precisely why we can no longer entrust it to a system designed for the industrial revolution.

Fortunately, we don't have to wait for institutional change. Innovation is happening right now in living rooms, community spaces, and on tech platforms across the world. Parents, educators, and communities are already building alternatives that honor both student agency and family choice while creating new educational models that better serve children's futures.

Subscribe to join me as I document these approaches and share insights from my own ongoing exploration, including:

• How emerging technologies can enhance rather than threaten learning

• Real-world examples of successful alternative education models

• Designing learning environments that nurture curiosity instead of compliance

• Practical steps for families considering educational alternatives

As a Canadian 🇨🇦, I'll also be sharing insights around regulations, and ways to advocate for more educational choice.

After leaving the classroom, I kept asking myself what kind of education would I want for my own child someday? That question has driven me down many, many rabbit holes of research and fascinating discussions. With parenthood on my horizon, my quest to seek out alternatives has taken on an even more personal meaning. This newsletter tracks what I'm learning, both for my future kid and perhaps for yours.

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