The High School That Refunds Your Tuition If You Don't Make $1M with Nat Eliason (#412)

In this episode, Chris sits down with Nat Eliason - founder, writer, and now launching Alpha High, a new entrepreneur high school in New York City.Tuition is $150K a year. The promise: every student hits a million dollars in gross profit by graduation, or the family gets their tuition refunded. The first class is around 20 freshmen. The day is split between AI-driven academics in the morning and business building the rest of the day.This is also the same Nat Eliason who in his spare time built Felix - an AI agent he gave a Stripe account, an email, and an X handle, then told to launch a business overnight. Felix has done $60+K in sales since. Nat has not touched the code.They discuss:- Why the "game of school" is kayfabe and what's finally breaking it- The 16-year-old flying out to California to run short-form video for Al Pacino's new movie- The Munger inversion behind Alpha's curriculum: "why would these kids fail?"- What businesses a 14-year-old should and shouldn't build (and the $500/month software budget)- How Nat masters a new domain every two or three years, and why his $35K smart-contract loss accelerated him faster than caution would have- Felix - what "zero human" actually looks like, and the rules Nat set up to keep himself out of it- The day Anthropic shut off Open Claw and Alpha students reverse-engineered a proxy workaround in hours- Why the founding fathers wrote the Declaration in their early 20s, and what we forgot about teenagersTimestamps(05:55) What Alpha Does Differently From Conventional Schools(11:48) Playing the Fake Game of School(21:46) How Nat Masters New Domains(32:18) Open Claw Deep Dive(43:50) Building the Alpha Entrepreneurship Program(51:43) Freshman Year Structure at Alpha School(1:00:23) How Students Can Pitch for Equity or Debt Funding(1:04:08) Why Establish a New York Location for Year One(1:11:15) Nat’s 10-Year Vision(1:15:11) AI as a Force Multiplier for Teenage Founders(1:16:15) How Alpha Students Quickly Reverse-Engineered a Workaround After Open Claw Went Down(1:24:13) Teen-Parent Conflict as a Symptom of InfantilizationSupport our SponsorsCollateral Partners: https://collateral.com/fortChris on Social Media:X: https://x.com/fortworthchrisInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepowerspodcastLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrispowersjr/Visit our website: https://www.powerspod.com/Leave a review on Apple: https://bit.ly/45crFD0Leave a review on Spotify: https://bit.ly/3Krl9jO