Lael Alexander - Alphas Activate Speech
Event: Alphas Activate Summit
Date: June 14, 2025
Speaker: Lael Alexander
Title: "The Bubble, The Pipeline, and the Golden Age We Could Build"
Thank you for having me. How many of you are ready for some brutal honesty today? Because that's what this moment requires.
(Light pause, slight smile)
Now, I'll be honest—I wasn't entirely sure what "Alphas Activate" was when Gary first mentioned it. But here's the thing about Gary Sheng: when he tells me to be somewhere, I show up. The man has a track record of putting together the right people in the right room at the right time. So here I am.
I'm here speaking to you from a very specific perspective. I'm the guy that gets called when bridges are failing, when energy infrastructure is crumbling, when cruise lines have human waste problems they can't solve, when major grocery chains need their refrigeration revolutionized. These aren't hypotheticals—these are my current projects. Right now. Today.
And here's the uncomfortable truth: there aren't enough people who can solve hard problems. Even among very powerful, very connected people, there's a shortage of individuals who can stick with a problem for meaningful duration, think from first principles, and turn ideas into real-world solutions that actually work.
One man can only solve so many problems. And I don't want to be the only option people have.
The Talent Crisis
What are our middle schools, our high schools, our so called institutions of higher education producing? They're not producing people who can solve hard problems. They're producing talkers.
And I'm not just speaking as an engineer looking at this from the outside. I'm speaking as a father of eight children. Several of my kids—the more time they spent in the school systems we have today, the worse their worldview became. They literally became less capable, had less agency, less belief in themselves. They became more obsessed with identity than with what they could actually become as children of God.
That's not education. That's systematic disempowerment.
To solve hard problems, you need people who are deeply curious, who can test their theories against reality, who have experience building things that either solve problems or fail spectacularly—and learn from both. You need people challenged not just by intellectual debates, but by the real world and whether their solutions actually work.
We've optimized for a society of talkers who have outsourced all industrial capacity overseas. Your great-great-grandfathers built the world's leading infrastructure. Now we have poorly designed cities, shoddy architecture, shoddy infrastructure, shoddy construction, shoddy software.
Let's be honest—even the big tech companies are producing buggy, awful software. And thinking that AI will magically fix this when the average AI-coded product is equally terrible? That's not how this works.
The Uncomfortable Reality
Here's my assessment: America is not a great nation anymore. We're great at advertising our greatness. But we need to do a lot more to make it great again.
I met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago a few weeks ago. We're aligned on bringing back America's industrial capacity and taking it to the next level. Whatever you think of his brashness, I'm glad he's put into the cultural conversation that we need to rebuild America, because we do.
We have an infinite supply of people who can talk about things. I will give people like Charlie Kirk credit, someone who has done incredible work exposing how hollow our institutions are—that's valuable. We need a few high quality thought leaders. But we need way more great engineers. Real engineers. The people who created the original Apple computer, who built the nuclear plants in the '70s, who understand the first principles of reality and can build foundations for civilization.
The MIT Problem
Here's a spiky point of view: MIT, Harvard, Stanford—they're good at producing people who can apply to Y Combinator and create B2B SaaS companies. They're not creating society engineers. They're not producing people who can create new cities.
That's a massive problem when our infrastructure is crumbling. It doesn't matter how many tax breaks governors offer for new factories if we don't have brilliant engineers to run those factories. It doesn't matter how many rocket launches NASA wants if we don't have people who can manage them.
Why I'm Here
I helped China elevate everything about its industrial capacity. Now I see this massive talent gap in America. Gary told me there are people here serious about addressing America's education crisis—and that crisis extends far beyond whether a college is "woke" or not.
It's about whether we're willing to invest the money, attention, and priorities toward rearing the next generation of industrialists. Society creators. Society engineers. People who can make America self-sovereign instead of dependent on other countries.
We have a completely broken, corrupt education system that's doing nothing for us.
(Light pause, slight smile)
I mean, when the guy who helped build China's Baidu internet ecosystem feels like he has to step to help fix American education, you know we've got a problem.
The Choice
America is the world's greatest bubble ready to pop if we don't act quickly. But here's the alternative: if we act swiftly to reengineer the talent pipeline, we could experience a golden age that serves all people in America for the first time ever. And we can create templates for golden ages everywhere.
I'm here because I'm open to contributing my talents to help Alpha Schools create not just entrepreneurial schools, but industrialist schools. Engineer schools. Schools that create people who can build software, systems, great cities, great bridges, satellites, and cities on the moon.
And I've heard that MacKenzie and the Alpha team talk about this Olympic-level metaphor—that each student's masterpiece project should be the equivalent of being an Olympian. I think that vision is exactly right. We need to bring that same energy we have when we cheer for our sports teams, that same intensity we feel watching Olympic athletes, and channel it toward academic achievement—academic achievement that paves the path to societal evolution.
We need to become academic athletes again in America. Not people who just finish the race, but people who break the tape across their chest. People who get others on the edge of their seats, even about engineering problems and scientific breakthroughs.
Here's the thing—we've fallen into activist culture, but what we need is actionist culture. Activists talk about problems. Actionists solve them. The Olympic mentality isn't about participation trophies or good intentions—it's about being the best on planet Earth across international lines, not just compared to your neighbors.
The Vision
Here's what we're building toward: a future with so much industrial capacity, so many X-factors—people who can create factories, manufacture, make things happen, turn ideas into livable environments for human flourishing.
(Slight grin)
We want to get to the point where the thing people are protesting is that we're colonizing the moon too fast. That we're sending too many expeditions to Mars. We want calls for diversity in our orbiting space cities. We want to get to the point where we earn the next phase of societal evolution—where our problems are so sophisticated that we actually deserve them.
The Activation
The need could not be more pressing. We face a stark choice between collapse and a golden age.
But here's what's immediately possible if we move now—and I mean now.
Okay, so what is the vision that we're painting here? We're painting a vision of schools on autopilot, right? Excellent schools on autopilot that allow for kids to get top one percent in standardized test scores, but importantly, what are those supposed to measure—and we'll get there as well—is just base preparation of understanding the facts of reality.
So whether we adopt a Common Core standard for the US or any other standard, we will be able to build meta infrastructure that allows for any city, state, country, religion to say, hey, this is the base knowledge that we want our kids to know. AI drill the kids' brains with this knowledge until—way faster than anyone else could drill it. And then what we're doing is we're opening up the kids to be able to dedicate as much time to life skills and their purpose as possible, whether that's sports or fashion or science and technology, engineering.
We are paving the path for that. Part of how we do that is we create smart campuses with sensors in every room, with our dedicated Alpha-branded laptops and tablets and phones, watches—everything just deeply integrated and also siloed, protected, because the data on your child, we will collect a lot of it to support their learning, but we will make sure that is impenetrable from the outside and only the people that need to know the data about your child will know.
This will be a kind of learning experience of the future like no one has ever seen. And this is all possible quite candidly in the next 12 months. So by the fall of 2026, we will see by far the smartest campuses and schools and just really educational process that anyone has ever seen. If we start today. And we'll be able to get many incremental working milestones along the way as well.
I've spent my life building bridges, skyscrapers, factories, fixing infrastructure issues, inventing, discovering new basic science, creating STEM curriculums, creating phones, creating tablets, creating monitors, creating all sorts of devices, creating satellites. But it is this next chapter where I want to help Alpha create the future of education.
I'm ready to activate within the Alphaverse if there's mutual interest. The question is: are you ready to engineer the talent pipeline that makes this vision possible?
So that is what I'm here to deal with.
Thank you.