Well, back with more on Alpha School. A lot has happened in the last 24 hours, and I am very tired (so please forgive the inevitable grammar mistakes).
The main event is this: Yesterday, Alpha School indirectly confirmed the entirety of my reporting, and promoted a microsite for its bootcamp. Let’s dive in.
Recap
Yesterday, at very same day and time that I’d informed Alpha Schools that I would be publishing my story on student life in its boot camp, Alpha School co-founder MacKenzie Price tweeted this:
To my knowledge, this appears to be the first time Price or any administrator at Alpha School has ever publicly addressed the activities of its boot camp.
Price’s tweet linked to a website with an unusual url: https://alpha-high-bootcamp.vercel.app/ It’s my understanding that Vercel is a website developer platform, and not typically something that’s user facing. Further, I asked multiple IT specialists if they could determine when this site was created, but they could not identify the specific date. Notably, however, if this site was live prior to my story being published, Alpha School never pointed me to it, despite my repeated requests for comment. Nor did Price respond to my requests on social media for clarification.
You may draw your own conclusions about the timing of Alpha School pushing this out. But please see update in footnote.1
I now turn to what this microsite contains. Later, I’ll share some student responses to my story.
I find it all so very fascinating.
Life Skills
There is a grid.
The new microsite lists 18 specific “life skills” that students must complete as “prerequisites for the deeper, more advanced work ahead” — more on this later. Importantly, each of the boot camp activities I identified in my special report are included as required skills. Each one includes a brief description of the activity and its metric of success. The header to this post highlights the Critical Thinking square, requiring that students watch a full season of Survivor and have AI grade a document of their observations.
Here are two additional examples:
Other purported life skills include Be an Expert (“Choose a topic and study it deeply enough to become the most knowledgeable person in the room”), Socialization (“Make a list of 50 people you admire and send each a thoughtful, personal message asking to learn from them”), and Storytelling & Public Speaking (“Deliver a filmed keynote…[in] one continuous take…and controlled enough that Speeko’s speech analyzer flags zero exclamation-point moments.”)
I encourage curious readers to examine the full list of life skills on the microsite.
Deep Dives (on the nightmare fuel)
The site also contains something described as “a deep dive on a few of our challenges.”
Here, Alpha School singles out three “life skills” for extended explanation: Build an Audience (the requirement that students create Twitter accounts and gain 100 followers), Receiving Critical Feedback (the biometric monitoring of student heart rates as they watch critical feedback from parents while in front of other students), and Grit & Hard Work (the requirement that students do a physically demanding “Dirty Job” – that’s Alpha School’s term).
The extended descriptions of these tasks make for remarkable albeit somewhat exhausting reading — e.g., the Building an Audience explanation is 1,833 words.2 I analyzed each deep dive using Pangram, which scored them as 61% to 73% AI-generated (for more on this, see footnote).3
Because of the length, here I selected the statements I found most interesting. This is straight quotation, with my bolding for emphasis.
Build an Audience
Our approach to social media is similar to our approach to AI. We do not believe that shielding students from a powerful technology that is essential to success in a modern world is a better choice than preparing students to use it well.
Our ultimate goal is for audience-building to serve as a feedback loop and a means for distribution.
The 100-follower goal is an objective early benchmark for whether a student is beginning to understand how to build an audience. Without an objective outcome, a student could post every day to an account followed only by classmates and then have a teacher subjectively decide that they had done a good job.4
Receiving Critical Feedback (“the heart rate challenge”)
Parents are chosen intentionally. In our receiving feedback workshop, students learn about The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, a book designed to teach founders how to elicit critical feedback from conversations even when the person they are talking to has an incentive to be supportive.
Most teenagers’ default mindset is that criticism is evidence that something is uniquely wrong with them.
If mastery depends on a teacher’s judgment, a student can always wonder whether they truly succeeded. However, an objective metric removes that uncertainty.
Grit & Hard Work (“Dirty Jobs”)
One of the mindsets we aim to instill in our students is that when something becomes difficult, students do not see themselves as victims of that difficulty.
We want students to understand that experiencing something that is difficult does not equate to being powerless, even if it initially feels that way.
The “Dirty Jobs” challenge creates a simple – and fun – environment in which students can practice this mindset.
Additional noteworthy features of the microsite
There are three additional things that I found interesting.
First, the site contains a proviso that states in full: “Both students and parents have responded very favorably to the Alpha Bootcamp tasks, but we're always conscious of the need to personalize the educational experience for students. Some students have been granted individual accommodations to modify some tasks, in consultation with their parents.”
No further explanation is provided as to when or why Alpha School will allow students to “personalize” boot camp in this fashion.
Second, Alpha School lists the daily schedule for boot camp, week by week. Here is Week 7, with apologies it’s tiny on mobile devices:
Notably, this indicates students will be spending two days “lining up” their Dirty Job, and then three days doing said Dirty Job. It also suggests they will spend all five days of Week 7 watching Survivor.
Finally, the microsite at least partially answers the purpose of boot camp and its consequences. It states that because some high school students will have already attended Alpha School elementary schools, but others will be from “very different educational environments,” it is important to bring students “to a shared starting line.” It then states, with my emphasis:
But Bootcamp is about much more than remediation…we want students to leave believing that massive acceleration is possible…We are establishing a shared threshold, rapidly catching students up on foundational skills where needed while showing every student just how quickly they can grow. When students clear that threshold, they enter the rest of Alpha High.
I will have more to say about this in the commentary.
Student Reactions
I found two student responses to my story.
First, shortly after I posted my story on Twitter, a student replied with this:
I immediately responded to ask this student who it was that made them delete their post. Unfortunately, they deleted their tweet without responding.
Second, another student re-tweeted my story and then provided extensive commentary on it. It began with this:
The student then raised a series of concerns that are too voluminous to include in their entirety, but generally questioned the overall posture of the story and contested the accuracy of my reporting. After reviewing them, and I am saying this with kindness toward the student should they read this, I did not find the factual objections to have merit.
There were two tweets however that I took particular note of:
Upon seeing these and the other tweets, I immediately responded with follow-up questions, but the student did not respond. We do follow each other on Twitter.
My commentary
I mean, you have to admit, if we train our attention solely on the curriculum of boot camp — this is pretty f’ing funny.
The students are watching Survivor to learn critical thinking? They are becoming an expert by studying something for one week and then answering 10 questions, developed with help from Google? They will develop financial literacy by learning the core frameworks from $100M Offers, whatever the fuck that is? This is what parents are paying $50,000 a year for? This is the remediation plan? This is future of education? This?
This is a joke! A very funny joke!
I am trying to convince a friend of mine, who is genuinely funny (though maybe not quite as funny as they think they are), that we should co-write a script for a television series using all of this as our source material. You’d watch Beta Camp, you would, the story of 16 teenagers who build nano-robot microducks that develop sentience and build a space rocket that shoots the confused thinkmaxxing teens straight to Mars where they land on Elon Musk and there is great rejoicing. Mountainhead meets the The Breakfast Club meets The Martian. It would be amazing.
With that said, let’s get semi-serious.
My chain of reactions after finding and reviewing the microsite: “Hot damn, Cognitive Resonance gets results,” followed by “hot damn, everything I reported has been confirmed by Alpha School publicly,” before concluding with “whew.” Whew. It was not lost on me that boot camp is only halfway over, and I have been wondering what other fresh hells might be in store for these students, and by extension me. But although the newly revealed “life skill activities” are profoundly stupid, they are not sinister. Alpha School appears to have run out of nightmare fuel. Though, I saw students tweet that there are (or were?) 21 boot camp activities, and the microsite only lists 18.
One does wonder about that gap.
Then there’s the metrics the metrics the metrics. I’ve corresponded with a few people who have some inside perspective on Alpha School and Joe Leimandt, the billionaire software-developer-turned-private equity-whatever-turned-“school principal,” and it’s become clear that for Alpha School, truth and value do not exist absent a Key Performance Indicator. The problem is that not all of life revolves around KPIs (unless they get their way!), so you end up having to concoct the absurd sorts of measures we see here, like strapping a tape recorder to a teenager as they plunge a toilet or whatever. I mean, the contempt for “teacher subjective judgment” is just dripping off the page. Or rather, the microsite on Vercel. (Still funny.)
Slightly less funny, though, are the core academic performance requirements, and in particular the SAT scores, the very first “life skill” listed. Unless they let kids use AI to take the test — and they very well might! — requiring a freshman student who scores a 1000 to jump 200 points within eight weeks...well I have many questions, because that is well-nigh impossible without cooking the books (very possible here!), especially given the lack of genuine academic rigor that permeates throughout everything that is Alpha School. Remember, according to Alpha School, students stay in boot camp until they hit all their objectives, so who knows how many of them will have to go beyond eight weeks. And then what will they do to fill the time when not cramming for their tests?
Maybe they’ll have to start watching Alone?
To the students at Alpha School, including those who now subscribe to this Substack, I am very worried about you, but I also kind of adore you. Specifically, to the student who cracked the joke but then was made to delete it (god please tell me by who), you are alright my [dude/dudette/nonbinaryette], you are behaving exactly as you should, and if I had to bet on the one Alpha student I’d most like to get an alcoholic beverage with in the future — WHEN YOU ARE OF AGE — it’d be you.
Now to all of you, please pay attention to this sage advice:
Yes. Yes! All of this! Stay alive. Break that thing. Be teenagers. Stop posting about “normal school,” be cool, be weird, be funny, be kind, make liberal use of the alleged policy that allows for exemptions from the stupid shit the Alpha School adults have cooked up at their all-staff sticky-note-bonanza “design thinking” sessions, ignore that bullshit about your default mindsets, read Ender’s Game and consider its central theme about children being deprived of their agency and their childhood (skip the movie), read James Baldwin and Audrey Lorde and poetry and fiction for god’s sake as it is where our imagination resides, don’t obsess over money, don’t obsess over status, did I mention be kind?, cultivate empathy and humility, and please recognize that this is one of the few times in your life when you really get to decide who you want to be, to shape your character, and strive to make that person extraordinary, not because of what you accomplish, but rather because of what you nurture within your soul.
And I’d still love to talk with you, so hit me up. In the meantime, stay off the vape!
Is this the last Alpha School posts this week?
This week, probably, but it might be Alpha School Month here at Cognitive Resonance HQ, fair warning. My subscribers shot up yesterday (welcome everyone), including a few Alpha School employeed (hi y’all), but I’m worried some of you might be wondering if human congition and generative AI are still on the agenda around here. Yes! In fact, here’s a teaser for not one but three essays I have in store:
Notes from my field research to a community of technological refusal
Exploration of new research that might hint at resolution to one of the longest-standing problems in cognitive science (and slay a few stochastic parrots while introducing us to the TAPIR)
Interview of two cognitive scientists exploring cultural cognition, with bonus reference to something called the Ape Culture Wars
So please do stick around!
On Twitter, a user has posted what appears to be a screenshot of a comment by MacKenzie Price on Substack dated August 14, 2026 that appears to include a link to the microsite. I am trying to independently confirm its authenticity, but to my eyes it appears genuine — and I’ll admit combing through Substack comments is reaching the end of digital sleuthing skills. It would make sense for this site to have been published in mid August, as that’s when boot camp commenced. What makes no sense whatsoever is Alpha School’s PR rep describing the screenshots I sent as “mischaracterizations” and failing to point me to this site. And the fact remains that MacKenzie Price only tweeted about it on Tuesday.
UPDATE AFTERNOON 9/9/26: The Price comment has been sourced. So, it appears that Alpha Schools had the microsite prior to my story, but refused to share this information with me. And that’s really the most important part, the sharing.
UPDATE ALSO AFTERNOON 9/9/26: We live in information dystopia. Moments ago, another Twitter user found information that may indicate the site deployed a few hours before the story runs. Who knows. The important thing is the cult factory.
JFC UPDATE LATER AFTERNOON 9/9/26: Someone has sent me this screenshot and suggests it indicates this page on Alpha School’s main site was created on September 7. It links to the microsite. So there.
In fairness to Alpha School, my reporting has not exactly been brief here, either. On the other hand, not a word has been generated by AI, either. Try it sometime Alpha School, and remember, brevity is the soul of wit.
Some of you may bristle at my use of Pangram here, and I get it, so let me say a few things. First, I am not – repeat not – endorsing the use of Pangram or any other AI-detection tool in education settings. That’s a complicated issue and one that I’ve been thinking about, and perhaps will one day write about. But here, I’m just using it to review text from a for-profit microsite, not some student’s essay. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Alpha School itself is of course completely AI-pilled in its marketing and general ethos, so they are quite possibly the last company on the planet that could object to my making use of this tool. They love “objective” metrics, and this is one. Pot, meet kettle.
I mean, what the fuck with this.
If Upton Sinclair was alive, I wonder if he would be doing the work Mr. Riley is doing here...not so much because of a driving, underlying economic ideology or any political aspirations, but moreso because this is just good citizen journalism.
To my everlasting relief, this article ends by recommending these students read BOOKS and POETRY! Thank you. THANK YOU.